I get back in the car and drive with no lights straight to Ada’s house. I park in the first vacant spot, and I sit there for fifteen, twenty minutes, doing lots of urgent, awful remembering, before I realise that I am on the wrong street, though the number on the door is the same.
Tom meets me at the door. His nose flares at the fresh air on my coat and then he turns away.
I say, ‘Where are the girls?’
He says, ‘Where were you?’
I start to laugh. ‘Ha ha,’ I chuckle as I put my bag down on the counter, as I take off my coat, as I hang my coat under the stairs. He has dropped the girls to school and doubled back to confront me. From the bunched-up look of him I think he might give me a thump.
‘Are you missing work, for this?’ I say.
‘Where were you?’ he says, and I’d love to say I was out, like he is out all the time. Doing, making, being-or even shagging. I’d love to say, ‘I was just out shagging,’ in a debonair sort of voice, but I don’t want to think about how wan my body has become since I have taken to the darkness. I put my hand gently against his shirt front and the gesture is so graceful, even as I watch it, that it leads me, quite easily, to the buckle of the belt, which I tug with my other hand, and so, by softly pushing him away while pulling him forward, I contrive to blow my husband, in our own kitchen. On a school day.
This is real, I think. This is real.
Though I am not sure that it is, actually. When we are done, Tom plants a dry, thoughtful kiss in the middle of my forehead. He can not claim that he has been fobbed off-not after his official, all-time favourite thing-but he knows that he has been fobbed off, all the same. And it makes him angry.
‘I just don’t know where you’re coming from,’ he says. A corporate phrase from my corporate boy.
When he is gone, I go upstairs and lie down on Emily’s bed. Then I get up and pull the duvet back and lie down again. I do not know what she smells like, she is like a perfume you have been wearing too long, she is still too close to the inside of me. So I can not smell her, quite, but I know that her smell is there as I lie down with the thought of her beside me. I want to run my hand down her exquisite back, and over her lovely little bum. I want to check that it is all still there, and nicely packed, and happy, that my daughter’s muscles agree with her bones. I want to find the person that I built from my body’s own stuff, and grew on ten thousand plates of organic sausages and sugar-free beans, and I want to squeeze every part of her tight, until she is moulded and compact. I want to finish the job of making her, because when she is fully made she will be strong.
24
I TAKE THE train back from Brighton, and I meet Kitty in a pub in the ‘Gatwick Village’, for the flight home. The place is unnerving, all the usual slop of pint glasses and ashtrays, but on miniature tables to allow room for the trolleys and backpacks and bags; men falling asleep over their beers, unshaven and sad. The pub itself just a pretence of a pub, a painted corner of the concourse, a differently coloured floor. There are no doors. I pick my way through the filth of baggage and delayed lives to find Kitty-a woman weirdly like my little sister, though much too old.
When I reach the table, I look down at the empty glasses in front of her and I ask, ‘Are they all yours?’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ she says.
‘Just asking.’
‘Two of them are mine, the rest aren’t mine. OK?’
‘Do you want another one?’
‘Yes thank you, I would love another one.’
I turn to wade back towards the bar, and hear her say, ‘Bunny,’ which is the name she had for me when she was a child. I turn back to embrace her, my back twisted, my torso held away, as she half-rises to receive the hug, her thighs trapped under the little table of wood. Her hair feels fake, like a wig, but I think it is just crisping up under the dye and Frizz-Ease. From a distance, it was just as curly and beautiful and black as it ever was, though when I check her face I see that it has collapsed, quite fundamentally, and all the distraction of blue eyes, and mischievous cheeks, and winning smile-the whole Celtic chipmunk-has melted as easy as wax, leaving the flesh hanging on to bones, bones, bones.
‘How are you?’ I say.
‘How am I?’
‘Yes. How are you?’
‘Fine. I’m fine.’
‘What is it, anyway?’ I say.
‘It’s a G and T, thanks.’
‘Yes, I thought it was.’
‘Yes.’
It is many years, I think, since I have ordered a drink at a bar. The barman ignores me for the longest time. I feel like shouting at him that I am quite grown up and want to give him some money now. I want to say, ‘My brother is dead! Serve me immediately!’ but then, so what? Some people haven’t seen their brothers in twenty years.
I get Kitty’s gin and one for myself.
‘English measures,’ she says, holding the glass up and waggling it, like I am such a fool.
Kitty always goes on about being hit as a child, though the fact is that she was a complete brat: she always came back for more, and she often got it; not just from me and Liam, who actually liked her, but also from Mossie-the-psychotic, who taunted and enraged her into a total Shirley Temple. There was something transcendental about her rage at six or seven, her body rigid and her temper whizzing around the room, until she caught it, somehow, and stuffed it back into herself. After which, she exploded into a fire-breathing fluff-pot, a cartoon little sister; fists yammering against Mossie’s chest. Which was just asking for trouble, because you shouldn’t take things too far with Mossie. At least with myself and Liam, we only did it to tease.
And of course I feel guilty, when I think of it now, and I don’t believe in hitting anybody, at all, ever, but I still find a twitch of something more than amusement when she is being a prissy little bitch like this. The toss of the head, some small superiority, it makes me wish she was six all over again.
I lift my glass to her, ever so slightly, and say, ‘Cheers.’
She starts to cry as soon as we are on the plane; she weeps the whole way home. Pints of it. She moves from quiet leakage to sighs, heaves and judders, and then back again. It sounds to me like she is practising crying as much as actually doing it. I look out the window, while the air hostess kindly offers a brandy in her coffee and then charges five pounds sterling for it.
‘Are you all right? Are you sure now?’
The man on the other side of her knows that someone has died. He wonders am I a social worker, or perhaps even a prison officer, and why am I not holding her hand. And I too wonder why I am not holding her hand, as I look down on the distant skin of the Irish sea. ‘We slept in the same room for twenty years,’ I want to tell him. ‘Isn’t that enough for you, isn’t it already above and beyond?’
Liam, meanwhile, is sitting one row up across the aisle. There is a slumbrous menace about his ghost that makes me realise how indifferent he was when he finally walked away from us all into the sea. I can feel his gaze on the skin of my cheek as he turns to look at me, uncanny and dead. I know what it is saying.
The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.
I look up too quickly, and he is gone.
There is a big white house on Lambay Island-Georgian, at a guess, and worth gazillions. I saw it first, it must have been, from the beach, the day we went with Ada to visit our mad Uncle Brendan. And it suddenly kicks into me, this fact of Ada’s son lost to Largactyl and squalor. How many years of it? He probably died wondering who he actually was.
I search up the coastline for a beach, a bridge, an estuary, back again to a headland-and there it is: a pencil of a round tower, a fat vase of a water tower and, beside that again, a group of buildings surrounded by trees. I have just caught sight of it when I have lost it again, the plane banks and grabs a view of sky.