All That I Leave Behind (33 page)

I looked up at Mary-Pat and I could see she was waiting. That she wanted me to tell her, but when I just said, ‘I’m sure it won’t be for much longer,’ she gave me a look of bitter disappointment. I’m sorry, I thought. I truly am sorry.

‘Oh, all right.’ Her shoulders slumped in her school uniform, and she turned and trudged slowly down the stairs. She knows, I thought. She knows.

***

Sometimes these days, I feel so desperate that I go to the phone box in the village and I park that huge pram just outside and pick up the phone and hold it to my ear. I hear the silence, and I put a 50p coin in the slot and am rewarded with the long, low dial tone. I even dial the number, and then she answers. ‘Hello?’ That slight hesitation, the sense that she’s wondering who can have interrupted her flower arranging or
Mastermind
. If I just press button ‘A’, the coin will drop in the slot and I can talk to her. I can tell her everything. I can tell her about my plan and ask if she’ll help me. My hand hovers over the button, and then I hear her say, ‘Who is this?’ a note of alarm in her voice and I know I can’t. I replace the receiver in its cradle and I want to howl out loud for my mummy, like a child. I push the pram back along the canal, the rushes hissing in the wind, the kingfisher bouncing along the edge of the canal, and I wonder how it’s come to this, that this little piece of paradise can have turned into my prison.

I hope that when I get back John-Joe won’t be home. I hope he’ll have gone into Prendergast’s or will have thought of some urgent task in Mullingar. I can’t have John-Joe near me, I can’t. If he walks into the room, I have to leave. Just the sense of him beside me makes me want to vomit and that bloody look on his face; as if he can’t say how sorry he is, as if he can’t find the words. He tried once, when he told me what he’d done to her, that girl. He said he was sorry then, but too late. ‘I don’t know what to do, Michelle. The nuns will probably take the baby …’ He knew, of course – he’d chosen his words carefully – that the very mention of the word ‘nun’ would be enough. Bridie had told me about what they did to unmarried mothers in her day, the poor young girls from the village who disappeared for the best part of a year only to reappear, grey-faced, shoulders hunched, on Main Street trying to ignore the glances, the pointed fingers, trying to bear the shame, while their babies were spirited away. I also know that nothing much has changed.

‘You can leave her here,’ I found myself saying.

‘Thanks, Michelle,’ he said, barely looking me in the eye. ‘You don’t know—’ but I cut him off.

‘Please. No gratitude, for God’s sake. You’ll only make things worse.’

‘I thought they couldn’t get any worse,’ he said, a small smile flickering on his lips.

I almost wanted to smile then too, to make a little joke about just how terrible things are, but instead I say, ‘Just tell me one thing.’

He looked like a guilty schoolboy.

‘Why?’

He sighed. ‘Because no matter what I do, Michelle, I’m not good enough for you. I just don’t measure up. And so I figured, “why not”. It can’t make her think any more badly of me than she does already.’

‘“Why not,”’ I said blankly.

‘That’s right,’ he said bluntly. ‘And let’s face it, it’s true. You already think I’m a piece of shit, Michelle, so now you can add this to the long list of my sins, can’t you?’ he said bitterly. I said nothing for a moment, frozen, and I thought of that first day in Macari’s all those years ago. Did I know then and just chose to ignore it? Did I fall in love with him simply to annoy my parents? Was all this hardship just the result of a teenage rebellion, because John-Joe was as far away from being Daddy as a man could possibly be? But then I remembered how much I loved him, how much I looked up to him. He was my hero.

‘Do you love her?’ I asked him.

He looked at me then, an expression of distaste on his face. ‘For Christ’s sake, Michelle.’

I see it now, that he feels contempt for me, for the woman who accepted his child, who looked at the mess he’d made of his life and agreed to tidy it up, to make it respectable, who bore the humiliation he’d dished out to her, him and that girl – who even paraded it around the town, for everyone to see. When every decent, self-respecting woman would have kicked him out, would have told him and his knacker girlfriend to take a hike. Maybe it’s my revenge. I make him suffer by sticking nobly by him. But I know it’s not that; it’s that I just can’t see any other way. The children need us, the baby needs us, I tell myself. Yes, that must be it. But I know, deep down, that I just can’t think how to end it.

R
osie
slipped out without Pius noticing. As she passed the kitchen door, she heard the murmur of the radio, the received pronunciation of some Radio 4 presenter. She opened the front door as quietly as she could, in case she woke Jessie, then pulled it shut, grimacing as it squeaked on its hinges. If the dog started barking, Pius would be out in a flash, asking her where she thought she was going at eleven o’clock at night.

The moon had risen, huge and yellow over the flat fields and the ribbon of water at the end of the garden. Pius’s planting was taking shape, even if he’d had to stop for a bit now that it was winter. Rosie stood there for a while, looking at the familiar shapes of the henhouse and the red robin hedge at the back of the house, at the tall grasses silhouetted against the night sky, at the dark shadow of the much-hated leylandii in Sean O’Reilly’s – all the elements of her childhood home. Nothing had changed, not even one little bit, she could see that. The outline of Sean’s huge chicken shed, the weathervane on top of the summer house, they were all still there, and yet they didn’t look right somehow.

I wanted to know the truth, she thought. I said I had to know and now I do and all I can think is that I feel like myself and yet not like myself. I’m still me. I still breathe and eat and walk with flat feet and my hair is still red and I still have freckles. I’m sure if I ate a packet of Jelly Tots or listened to Miles Davis, I’d still like them both. I’m sure I still hate eggs and love the smell of lilies. When I look in the mirror, that woman is still me, and yet, I can’t quite work out who she might be, as if the person I am inside is no one in particular. Maybe I’ve never known, she thought, pulling the racing bike out from behind Pius’s grow-house and hopping on.

She remembered the first time she’d gone with Craig to visit his mother. Margaret was her name, a short, squat woman with a tight perm and a bright smile, who was only delighted to discover that her son was marrying ‘such a nice girl. You Irish girls are so charming,’ and then, slyly, ‘You must be a Catholic, honey?’ That had been the clincher for Margaret, a devout Catholic, and Rosie hadn’t had the heart to contradict her, to tell her that her Catholicism stretched as far as her First Holy Communion and no further. Besides, she’d thought, helping herself to one of the cupcakes Margaret had made for her – iced a luminous green – what did it matter? She could be whoever Margaret wanted her to be. She’d become very good at it, even while she’d known that this life wasn’t for her, that she’d felt like a cuckoo in Craig’s neat little nest. She’d loved belonging to him, though, and she’d clung to that, through endless boring hikes in the mountains, full of compasses and backpacks and water bottles, through baseball games and spreadsheets and plans for the future; it wasn’t fair to him, she understood, to have hijacked his life like that, it really wasn’t. He’d been right all along: she wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was.

Mary-Pat used to say it to her all the time, that she was like Daddy, ‘a real chip off the old block’, her face alive with sarcasm. Everything she’d done as a teenager, every mistake – little and big – was down to Daddy, down to his bad influence. ‘The apple never falls far from the tree,’ had been another of Mary-Pat’s dark pronouncements. It was the one thing she’d remembered when Daddy had told all and sundry she wasn’t his at her wedding. That at least Mary-Pat wouldn’t be able to throw that at her any more. But now, it turned out that she was a chip off another block, a block she didn’t know even one tiny bit. She thought of Frances O’Brien, of her angry eyes and helmet of hairsprayed hair, and she rolled the words around in her head: ‘You are my mother.’ No, they didn’t sound right at all.

She was quicker on the bike now, having got used to dropping low over the handlebars of the racer and to keeping up a good speed so that she didn’t wobble and fall off. She pushed hard over the bridge, past the pub and onto the main street, which was entirely deserted, the bitter November wind having driven people inside, and with no one to see her she rode along the middle of the street, her legs going faster and faster as she pushed the pedals around, her breath coming in ragged puffs, the cold making her eyes water. She needed to get there quick, she thought as she sped around the corner into a little laneway behind the church, along which was a row of cottages, each painted a different ice-cream colour. His was the eye-searing blue one; she knew that because she’d spotted him going in there one day after work. He hadn’t seen her, but she’d stopped dead halfway across the little street, watching as he unloaded two catering trays out of the back of his van and carried them into the house. She’d almost called out his name, thought of asking if they could just talk, before telling herself of course not, of course they couldn’t.

Now, she pulled up and parked the bike beside the ornate wrought-iron railings in front of his place. She didn’t lock it, just left it there as she walked up the path and knocked on the door and waited. There was no movement inside, and her heart plummeted. He must be there, she thought. He has to be. She knocked again, and just as she was turning to leave, the door opened. Rosie blurted. ‘Hi. I’m sorry to burst in on you, but I had to see you. I had to talk to you,’ she began. ‘You see it’s—’

‘Rosie,’ he said sleepily. He was wearing nothing but a pair of red boxer shorts with black cats on them and his hair stood in tufts on his head. His eyes were bleary and he rubbed them for a few seconds before saying a sleepy, ‘Come on in,’ turning his back and shuffling along the hall, disappearing into a room at the end. Rosie hesitated for a second before following him, closing the front door quietly behind her.

The hallway was dark and narrow, and she followed the dim glow from the open door until she found herself in a small kitchen–living room. It was a little Aladdin’s cave of lovely things: an armchair covered in buttercup yellow, a set of Chinese coffee tables with intricately carved legs, a comfy leather sofa with a bright orange throw slung over it. On it perched a huge grey cat, who peered at her with enormous marmalade eyes.

‘Sit down.’ Mark had reappeared at the door in a dressing gown, a blue-and-red striped number with a green belt. Rosie couldn’t help it – she felt disappointed. He indicated the sofa, pushing the cat gently over, ignoring her mewls of protest.

‘Thanks,’ Rosie said, perching on the edge of the sofa, the cat having moved about six inches to the left, where it glared at her, those eyes blinking malevolently. Rosie suppressed a shiver. ‘Your cat doesn’t like me.’

‘That’s Sophie and she doesn’t like anyone – don’t take it personally,’ Mark said. ‘Anyway, you hate cats, so she probably senses it.’

‘You remembered,’ Rosie said.

‘Yup,’ he agreed, slumping onto the sofa the other side of Sophie, who blinked, tail flicking. ‘But I’m sure you didn’t come here to talk about your aversion to cats.’

Rosie shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t.’

There was a long silence, and then Mark jumped up. ‘Coffee,’ he said to himself, then shuffled into what must be the kitchen – Rosie could hear him clattering around, opening and closing cupboards, and after a little while, he reappeared, with a coffee pot and two mugs in his hands. Mark poured coffee into his mug and then into hers, along with a lump of sugar, giving it a stir. ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Just the way you like it.’

‘Thanks,’ Rosie said, taking a sip. It was hot and strong and lovely, after weeks of Pius’s weak cappuccinos. ‘Remember our French phase?’ She smiled as she put the cup down. ‘When we watched
À Bout de Souffle
a hundred times on the video recorder and tried to smoke Gauloises?’

‘Yeah.’ He gave a small smile. ‘That’s where I got my liking for this stuff.’ He nodded at the black coffee. ‘I’ve never been able to shake it off …’ There was a pause while he registered that what he was saying might not exactly be tactful. ‘So you didn’t come here at midnight to discuss cats or French things …’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Rosie agreed.

‘And you didn’t come to tell me to shove my pity up my ass?’

‘No,’ Rosie said quietly. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘That’s OK,’ he said gently. ‘Rosie, what is it?’

‘It’s … you see … oh, I don’t know where to start,’ Rosie said, her eyes filling with those stupid, useless tears again, which she dashed away with the back of her hand. For fuck’s sake, can you just not cry, she said to herself. Crying achieves nothing.

He was beside her in a second, pushing Sophie off the sofa in spite of her howl of protest. Rosie wiped her tears away with a tissue that he’d pulled from a box which he kept by the sofa, shushing and soothing her, smoothing down her hair. ‘C’mon, it’s OK, it’ll be OK,’ he murmured.

‘Trust you to have posh tissues,’ she said, blowing her nose into a soft mass of scented hankie.

He smiled briefly. ‘I prefer them to ragged toilet roll. I find it cheers me up.’ And then he paused. ‘What is it, Rosie? What’s the matter?’

‘You mean, apart from the obvious?’ Rosie looked at him and sniffed, the damp tissue clutched in her hand. ‘The botched wedding and the missing husband?’

‘Well, yes, but that’s not it either. Why did you come to see me?’ His voice was soft and she found herself leaning against his firm shoulder, his arm snaking around her back, giving her a little squeeze. His hand was warm and strong, and she turned her head to tell him why she’d come and then his mouth was close to hers and then they were kissing, soft kisses, as he kissed her eyes, her nose and then her mouth, pushing it open, his tongue darting inside.