Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (76 page)

‘No, it was a misunderstanding about rent,’ she lied. How could she tell him the landlord had asked her to leave after the last crazy party? She’d have found another place if only he had given her the deposit back, but of course he hadn’t.

‘You crazy or something?’ he’d shouted at her, gesticulating with his hands. ‘You want your deposit back after all the trouble you’ve caused me? I’ve had the police round and next it’ll be the taxman. Get out of here and don’t come back.’

With no money and nowhere else to go–she’d asked some of the girls if she could bunk with them, but they’d all said no–Dara was left with no option but to go home to Snowdrop Park.

She’d thought she’d never fit all her possessions back into her own bedroom, but strangely she seemed to have less stuff than she’d thought. She’d unpacked one of the bin liners and had begun to put things away into the dusty wardrobe, but she’d felt too dispirited to finish it. Instead, she’d shoved the bin liners into one corner and gone downstairs.

‘Want a drink?’ Her father pointed to a bottle on the floor.

There were no glasses, only a couple of dirty cups on the mantelpiece.

‘Hospitality the Murphy way,’ she said cynically.

He gave her the thousand-yard stare she’d grown up with, the dangerous stare.

At a certain stage of drunkenness, the stare would go from angry to pure rage in a millisecond, and he’d move across the room to slam his hand into her face. Incredible how a man so unfit could move at speed when he really wanted to.

Other times, he’d just glare at her coolly and tell her to fuck off.

Once, Dara had known the precise difference between those two stares. She’d worked it out, as if it were a mathematical
formula studied at CERN:
x
+
y
= disaster/mild indifference, with a variant of
k.

But she couldn’t be bothered to analyse his mood today.

Let him hit her.

He couldn’t touch her on the inside any more, nobody could. What was another fist in the face from her father? She was used to it. After the first ten years, you became nicely numb. Dara had never hit back before. She didn’t know why. Your dad was supposed to protect you. Was that it? Was it some race memory of what was expected of a relationship between parent and child that had rendered her too shocked to respond?

Either way, she’d always let him hit her.

But that wouldn’t happen any more. Her old room in the house might be the same, but Dara had changed. She would fight back, and with the animal instinct he’d always had, he knew it.

‘Suits me,’ he said, shrugging. ‘More for me if you don’t drink.’

The mention of the word made her thirsty in a flash. Thirsty for the cosy warmth inside her, the warmth that nobody could take away.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she snarled.

She grabbed the bottle from the floor, unscrewed the top and drank from it. It was good stuff, all right: soft and sweet, like mellow Japanese rice wine only cold.

‘Jesus, I didn’t say take it all,’ he said, watching the bottle upend further.

The poteen hit the spot, many times. Dara was so tired, she sat on the armchair staring blankly at the television as her father watched a football match, and thought about getting the energy to climb the stairs to bed.

‘I’ll help you,’ he said abruptly when she got up and swayed on her way to the door.

Somehow, they made it up the narrow stairs. In her
bedroom, her father hauled her over to the bed and Dara slumped on to it, toppling black plastic sacks to the floor.

‘I’ll sort you out,’ he was murmuring, putting her feet on the bed and pulling off her boots. He shoved the covers back and nudged her further into the single bed, so there was more room. ‘There’s my girl,’ he said.

Dara’s eyes sprang open. She felt a blast of sobriety come with fear. He was drunker than she was, she could tell. He drank so much that it happened faster now. From nought to sixty in a few glasses. That was what forty years of heavy drinking did to you.

‘That’s my girl.’

He had his hand on her neck, curled around it and the fingers sliding down to the curve of her breast in the cheap acrylic polo-neck she wore.

The memories crashed back.

‘Get off me!’ she roared. ‘Get off me!’

‘Jeez, I was only–’ he muttered.

Dara kicked him as hard as she could and he fell off the bed.

‘Out!!’

He scrambled off the floor and lurched out of the door.

The shaking began and Dara slid off the bed, searching frantically in her possessions for the bottle of vodka. She could remember it all and she hated remembering.

‘Let’s have a bath and get you nice and clean.’

‘OK, Daddy.’

The bath was too hot for her, but he pulled her in anyway. ‘You’re a great little girl, d’ya know that?’

There were no bubbles, just water, so she could see his spindly legs and the boniness of his body. Only his belly, soft from beer, was fat, a white mass resting on the flaccid penis.

Boys in school made jokes about willies. Padraig, who was nearly ten and therefore older than the rest of them in third
class, had drawn one and the teacher had thrown him out of the class. Dara had said nothing. She could have drawn one too.

‘It’s dirty, so Daddy can’t touch it. Wash it for Daddy, there’s a good girl.’

She’d done it before. She’d done worse. What happened in her bed when he was really drunk was worse, wasn’t it? Although he said it was their special time. Special time hurt Dara. She used to close her eyes for it, go into that place in her head where nobody could reach her. That was a safe place.

Dara found the vodka bottle hiding in her box of albums. She drank half of it, not even feeling it touching the side of her throat as it rushed, fiery, down. It would take a while to work. It always did now. The instant-hit days were over. It took more and more vodka to send her into the warm, safe place. But she had to get out of here now. She couldn’t stay. She stuffed some clothes back into one of the black plastic sacks, got her handbag and rucksack, and went downstairs. The keys to his crappy car were thrown at the bottom of the stairs. She scooped them up. She didn’t know where she was going, but she had to get away, out of town.

By the time the city had disappeared, Dara was lost. She’d found herself on an old road in the middle of nowhere, with a grass bit in the middle of the road and the sea ahead of her. The car was making a strange noise. There was a problem with the clutch, she knew. Piece of crap. Typical of anything her father owned. She swerved and the car launched itself at the grass-covered ditch, and made a jarring crunching noise.

‘Fuuck,’ she hissed, banging the steering wheel. It took ages to open the door because she couldn’t find the lever. When she did, she half-fell on to the roadway. Eventually, she got herself the right way up. Planes had the same problem, didn’t they? Working out where the horizon was and which way
was up. Being a plane hadn’t worked for her, though. Oops. No flying for Dara.

She focused on her surroundings. She’d almost got to the headland that jutted out over the sea. Another bit of a drive maybe, and she’d be there. The road narrowed to a sliver and it ended abruptly, with a few metres of scrub grass and then nothing but the sea and the rocks below. There was a wooden fence at the point, she remembered, and if you picked your way carefully past that, you could walk a little further along the scrubby grass until you came to the absolute edge where you could stare down at the frothing water and imagine yourself landing there, impaled on the jutting rocks, homes of a million barnacles.

There must be a house near her, because there was a sign with a postbox that said
Bluestone
in script writing.

Was that a name or a description? Dara wondered, and then stumbled and fell against the hedge opposite her car. The hedge was surprisingly soft, with fragrant moss damp from the rain earlier that day. She let herself sink into it. She’d close her eyes and have a little rest.

When she woke, she was stiff and cold. Daylight had leached from the sky and an evening mist was rising from the ground. Dara moved her head and groaned. The buzz had worn off and she was in that place she hated most: where she loathed herself in every way. There was almost no point in moving because why would she move? Where had she to go? Nobody wanted her, and besides, she wanted nobody.

Eventually, she had to move because she needed to have a pee, but when she hauled herself to her feet, she could feel the leg of her jeans was wetter than the rest of her damp clothes. Her head thumping, she reached down to check and smell. Urine. She’d peed on herself already. Revulsion swept over her, another headier dose this time.

She crouched beside the car to relieve herself and grimaced
as she pulled up her wet jeans. She was disgusting, nobody had to tell her that.

The car disgusted her too. She’d taken
his
car. How could she do that? How could she have moved back in with him after everything?

After what he’d done to her.

And James, she’d never forget what he’d done. Dara had told nobody; after all, who’d believe her? Who would take her side or have sympathy for her? She had none for herself.

She began to cry, a soundless sobbing that hefted great lumps out of her soul. And eventually, she stumbled in the direction of the ditch again and lay there on the moss, lost and alone in her misery.

She didn’t hear footsteps coming from the driveway of the house labelled Bluestone and it was a moment before she became aware that somebody was watching her. It was a woman, tall and slender, with a long woollen cardigan whipping against her in the wind. She had long skeins of silvery blonde hair flying about her face, and her expression was strangely concerned. Why was that? Dara wondered. There was only her around, and who could worry about her, when she’d done it all to herself? There could be no sympathy for someone who’d brought all their misfortune on themselves.

‘Can I help you,’ the woman said. Not a question exactly. An offer of help.

Dara shook her head and felt more water fill her eyes.

The woman crouched down and edged nearer, the way a person might approach a feral cat injured on the road.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘I want to die,’ said Dara. And she did. Right now. She might as well be dead, it would be easier, less painful. There was nobody who would really miss her. All right, Greg would, and she loved him so much, but they’d been there for each other as children and he was an adult now, he’d found someone else to love him–Ruth. He’d be safe. He wasn’t like her.

‘You could get better,’ the woman said. Again, it was an odd thing to say, Dara realised.

‘Could I?’ Dara asked, wondering.

The woman tilted her silvery blonde head to one side, like a bird, and Dara saw that she had the most unusual eyes: long rather than round, and slanting up at the edges as if her ancestry held a hint of Asia. And they were the most amazing shade of green: not a smudgy colour but the true green of peridots with a strong dark line around the irises that defined them.

The woman took Dara’s hand almost before Dara realised. Two things happened: the woman closed her eyes and sighed, and Dara felt a surge of heat through her palm as if her hand was lying on a stove. Heat burned through her, up her arm and into–and here, it was getting very strange–her heart. That’s what it felt like. Still holding on, she struggled to sit up and touch her chest with her other hand. Yes, there was this feeling of heat where her heart was supposed to be. Normally, she felt nothing there, just deadness. Or sometimes, dull pain. But now there was this warmth and it was lifting her–

‘You’ve been hurt so much, you poor child, but you could get better,’ the woman said, letting go.

Dara gasped but the beautiful, comforting heat inside her remained. She stared down at her hand but it looked the same as ever.

‘I’m Star Bluestone,’ the woman said. ‘I was making supper. Would you like to come in and have some with me?’

Two years later

Sofie, Lorelei and Dara walked out of the meeting, calling goodbye to all the smokers who’d lingered to light up.

‘We’re going to my place for coffee,’ Lorelei said to the smokers.

‘We’ll be there in a mo,’ one of them replied.

The three women walked down the lane from the community hall and came upon a bunch of young fellas kicking a ball against a wall.

‘What’s going on in there?’ roared one of the lads. ‘Youse are always there on a Monday night. What’s it about?’

Dara eyeballed him. ‘We’re a right-wing Christian group,’ she said. ‘Ordinary People Against the Devil. Look…’ she poked around in her handbag. ‘I have leaflets. You could have some. You only have to do ninety prayers a night, and promise not to lose your virginity until you’re twenty-one, it’s really easy.’

The young fellas were looking at her with horror.

‘But you have to give up smoking, drinking and girls. Oh–’ she gestured to the ball which had now stopped–‘and football. Football is particularly the work of the devil. I mean, come on–Arsenal? It’s obvious.’

She produced some papers from her bag–really brochures on aerobics classes from the new gym that had opened up down the road. ‘Here are the leaflets. You’d love it.’

‘Bunch of weirdoes,’ muttered the lads, running off with their ball.

The three women burst into laughter.

‘We could show them work of the devil,’ Lorelei laughed.

‘And then some,’ sighed Sofie, who was three years sober and still shivered when she thought of what she’d been like out there. ‘If only they knew.’

Lorelei’s home was a five-minute walk away, a two-up, two-down she lived in alone. Dara had spent many evenings there since she started going to the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Inchicore.

It was all thanks to Star Bluestone, she knew. If Star hadn’t taken her in, comforted her during the hellish alcohol withdrawal phase, and driven her to AA meetings, she wouldn’t be here at all. Dara could never thank Star enough.

‘You did it yourself,’ Star replied every time Dara said this.