She took a deep breath as she fitted her key in the lock. The sound of the door scraping along the carpet protector was the only noise in the house, and the throbbing silence buzzed in her ears. She wanted to call a hello but was worried that it might sound nonchalant. When she hung up her coat in the hall cupboard she noticed that a lot of coats were missing. She took off her shoes and put on her slippers, all the time hoping for a call or a greeting of any kind.
It was eight o’clock but the living room was eerily tidy, no empty cups of tea or folded newspapers on the arms of the chairs. Paddy stopped in the kitchen doorway. Trisha was busy attending to something in the sink and kept her back to the room. Paddy saw Trisha’s face reflected in the window, noticed the tension on her neck and the tightness of her jaw. She didn’t look up.
“Hello, Mum.” She could see herself, nervous, reflected over Trisha’s left shoulder.
Trisha stood up straight, keeping her gaze down. She moved over to the cooker, lifted a warmed bowl out of the oven, and carelessly ladled carrot soup into it from a pot. She slammed it onto the kitchen table, flicking her finger at Paddy before turning back to the cooker. Paddy sat down and started to eat.
“That’s lovely soup,” she said, as she had been saying every teatime since she was twelve.
Without a word, Trisha bent down and opened the oven, took out a plate from a stack of five, and filled it with boiled potatoes from a pot, a portion of wet peas, and lamb stew. She dropped the plate to the table. The potatoes had been boiled too long and were dry and cracked, yellow inside and powdery white on the outside.
Paddy put her spoon down carefully in the soup. “I didn’t do it, Mum.”
Trisha took a glass from the draining board and ran the cold tap, touching the water to test the temperature.
Paddy started to cry. “Please don’t, Mum, don’t shun me, please?”
Trisha filled the glass and tipped a drop of orange squash into it, just enough to cloud the water. She put the glass onto the table.
“Mum, I saw the picture of Callum Ogilvy at work and told a girl, and she said I should write the story and I said no.” Paddy’s nose was blocked and oily tears dripped into the thick orange soup, taking a minute to sit on the surface before dispersing. She struggled to catch her breath. “Then this morning I was on the way to work and I saw the story in the paper. It wasn’t me, Mum, I swear it wasn’t me.”
Trisha stood and looked at the floor, so angry she almost broke the habit of a lifetime and asked why. She turned and left the room. Paddy heard her out in the hall, opening the coat cupboard, tinkling metal hangers. Trisha shucked off her slippers one at a time, stamped on some outdoor ones, and then she was gone, the front door slamming shut behind her.
Paddy ate her soup. Marty had been shunned once when he split up with Martine Holland, a very holy girlfriend. Paddy came home one day and found the girl crying in the living room with Trisha listening and Con running back and forth with cups of tea and wee bits of toast. She never found out exactly what Marty had done, but the family had conferences about him when he was out of the house. He had done a terrible, venal thing to the girl. It was up to them as a family to teach him the difference between right and wrong, to guide him with love and patience onto the right path. They would ignore him, behave as if he weren’t there, and they would do it for a full three days. Paddy remembered sitting at the table in the kitchen when Marty came in that evening. They all fell silent. He started to make himself a sandwich, dropped the knife, and walked out of the kitchen, leaving the bread half buttered on the plate. When Trisha gave them permission to start talking to him again, Paddy saw him tearful with relief. He didn’t get back with Martine, and it was a year before he went out with a girl. He never brought them home now and had never recovered his place in the family. What Paddy remembered most about the shunning was the cozy sanctimosity of being on the inside.
Paddy ate her stew and the powdery potatoes. Then she had some ice cream, and then went back for some more even though she was very full. She sat in front of the television for a while, until Gerald came in at half nine. He called hello through the house but dropped his voice when he saw the back of Paddy’s head in the good armchair. He took off his coat in silence. She turned on him as he came through the living room heading for the kitchen.
“You shit, Gerald,” she said. “You don’t even know what happened.”
He kept his eyes down and nodded at her sorrowfully, implying that she had brought this on herself.
“Are you not speaking to me? It wasn’t even me.”
Gerald shrugged again, averting his eyes.
“You fucking arsehole,” she said, standing up.
“I’m gonnae tell Mum you said that.”
“I’m gonnae tell Mum you spoke to me,” she said, storming off upstairs.
IV
Paddy had been lying in bed for three hours, listening as each member of the family came home, found she was in bed, and relaxed. She heard the television go on, listened to the formless sound of chat in the kitchen, heard them moving into the living room when they realized she wasn’t coming down. Marty spoke especially loudly, laughing heartily a couple of times, and she couldn’t but feel he was getting his own back. Her dad, she noticed, said hardly a word. He would be terribly hurt. She wondered if Trisha would whisper to him when they went to bed, as they heard her do sometimes, and tell him that Paddy had said it wasn’t her. Con had never been the same with Marty after his shunning. He contradicted him in everything and never joked with him anymore.
Someone shut the living room door and the noises downstairs became muted and indistinguishable. They were having a conference about her behavior and the article. She could only imagine how bad it sounded.
She comforted herself by following Sean around his bedtime routine: setting out his clothes for the morning on a chair, brushing his teeth, getting into bed, pushing the pillows onto the floor so that he could lie flat on his stomach. She smelled his hair and touched the mole on his high cheekbone. He wrapped his arms around her and told her it would be okay and not to worry. A week on Saturday was Valentine’s Day. They always went to the pictures together on Valentine’s and shared a chicken supper on the way home. She ran through their past three Valentine’s dates: the rainy one; the one when she was on an herb diet and could only smell the deep-fried meat and lick a chip; and the last one, when he proposed for the first time and she said no.
Her dark room was cold, and the wind outside shook the lone tree far away at the bottom of the garden. She heard the radiator tick, tick as the heating was turned off and the metal contracted.
She waited until she was bursting for a pee so that she wouldn’t have to go twice before she fell asleep. At the head of the stairs she turned on the light, pausing outside the bathroom door, giving the silverfish a head start. Downstairs, the lonely voice of a news reader murmured. The family was listening to her move.
Paddy used the loo and washed her hands and face. She was drying them on the hand towel when she heard the living room door open and a soft footfall on the stairs. She froze, watching him through the mottled glass. Marty stopped outside, running a hand through his curly black hair, head dipped as if he was going to whisper to her through the door. She listened carefully. He didn’t speak, but his cheeks bunched as if he was smiling. He straightened his arm, reached out to the door frame, and snapped off the light.