Eggshell Days (13 page)

There was another small silence.

“The thing is, Kat isn't really the problem. I mean, she is in one way, but in a much bigger way she's not. I don't … it's not like … Oh, I think I might just be the most useless bollocks in…”

“So what
is
the problem?”

“I don't know.”

“Is it good old Catholic guilt? Because I can't help you there.”

“No, it's more complicated than that.”

“Jaysus, more complicated than Catholic guilt?”

“It's got something to do with Maya, Emmy's daughter.”

“Niall, I know who Maya is, for God's sake.”

“Well, you didn't know who Kat is.”

“Oh, and she's been at the center of your life for years, has she? Of course I know who Maya is. Not only have I actually met her on several occasions, but are you aware you talk about her as if she were your own kid, my niece?”

“Well, she's not, I can assure you of that. But she's important to me, really really important. She trusts me. And being involved with her mother is, y'know, probably not helpful.”

“Helpful to what?”

“I don't know.”

“Did she see?”

“No, of course she didn't.”

“So? Does it matter?”

“What if we can't redraw that line?”

“Draw it in another place.” Cathal shrugged. “Look, you and Emmy, maybe—”

“No. It's too complicated. We've done all that. We work fine as friends.”

“You expect me to buy that?”

“Yeah, you should.”

“So just tell me again. Maya isn't my niece?” Cathal was teasing his brother, trying to catch him out in a lie. At least, that's what he thought he was doing. Later, he'd wonder if he was digging for something else.

“Maya's not your niece,” Niall said slowly.

“Thank you.”

“It's a pleasure.”

“Okay, so let's talk about Emmy. Does she want to redraw the line?”

“We didn't talk about it. I had to get the plane.”

“God, Niall, you're a dog.”

“No, we did sort of talk about it. It'll be fine. I've just got to stop jumping the gun.”

“It sounds to me as if you've already discharged the feckin' thing. Why don't you think these things through before you do the deed, not after?”

“I know. It just happened.”

“D'ye love her?”

“It's not that easy, y'know. She and Maya come as a package. It's not just about whether I—”

“You love her.”

“I don't know. Yeah, of course I do, but…”

“You love her, and you're attracted to her. What's the problem?”

Niall shrugged this time. “History. She's hard work sometimes. I'm not always the best person to deal with her.”

“Do you want it to happen again, to go farther?”

“I don't know.”

“Okay, how would you feel if she met someone else? Brought him back to the house? If you had to watch them go up to bed together?”

“I don't know. I think I'd be okay. I mean, that's what I do, isn't it?”

“Jaysus Christ, Niall, will you tell me something you do know?”

“Okay. Kat wants a kid.”

“Wait wait wait wait wait.” Cathal poured the rest of his second Coors Lite into his glass and downed it as if he hadn't had a drink for a fortnight. “What are you? Bus Atha Cliath? Nothing for ages and then the whole fleet comes at once. A
baby
?”

“Well, I don't mean a goat, do I?”

“Is it that serious? You've only just met her.”

“At our age everything's serious, isn't it?”

Cathal ignored him. It hurt too much to think of how unserious his liaisons were lately.

“Do
you
want one?”

“No, probably not.”

“Would that be because ye've already got one?”

“What d'you mean?”

Cathal looked at his brother suspiciously out of the corner of his eye.

“She's not mine,” Niall told him forcefully. He took a photograph out of his wallet and handed it over. “I wouldn't mind if she was, but she's not.”

Cathal held it with both hands and studied it carefully. Maya had a Gallic hint about her for sure. Her long auburn hair reminded him of his sisters; she was sitting on a dark wooden staircase in a T-shirt and wellies. She was all leg.

“Is this Bodinnick?”

“Last week.”

“Looks woodwormy.”

“I'll get it treated. What d'you think?”

“Well, she's grown a lot since I last saw her. Still looks like you, though, don't you think? She's got your … your … your something.”

“But that's the whole point. She hasn't. She hasn't got my anything.”

“Is that right?”

A dire but distant possibility floated obliviously from Niall's mouth and as Cathal breathed in, he took it with him, down his own throat and into his stomach where it sloshed and sploshed around with the American beer, making him feel unusually sick. In danger of becoming instantly sober, he called for the familiar velvety comfort of his favorite drink.

“Another two pints of Guinness, please,” he said sharply to the barman. “Ordinary, this time.” Then he turned to face Niall instead of looking at him in profile. “So are you saying you really aren't Maya's father?”

“Yeah, that's what I really am saying. What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” said Cathal, swallowing and sniffing. “Nothing. I've just spent ten years being absolutely sure you were, that's all.”

They took the Guinness to their lips and sucked it in, then Cathal raised his eyes to the starry ceiling.

“Here's to life, the universe, Kieran bloody Kennedy and everything,” he said, thankful for the mask of drunkenness.

7

“Look up,” Jonathan said to his son in the pitch black as he closed the chapel door. He was wise to the latch now, and he knew to wait for the creak, which came just before you had to lift the whole thing up and yank it. Each time, on opening or closing, it scraped deeper into the light-gray arc on the slate floor. The more scrapes he made, the better he liked the floor.

“Wow!”

A small explosion happened somewhere in Jonathan's heart. Jay, the boy who had stopped using superlatives years ago, had just said, “Wow!”

“I never knew it was this big.” Jay's neck was at right angles to his body as he let the night sky fall into his face.

“That's because you've never really seen it before.”

“Yes I have, I've seen it loads of times.”

“Ah, but in London, you didn't see it
properly
. There's too much light pollution. All those street lamps and buildings get in the way. You just get a tiny section of it.”

Jonathan didn't want to make too much of the chapel's magical properties but there was a lot to be said for the visual impact of a few days' manual labor. In London, he had spent his life dealing with intangible money used to insure against indistinguishable events, and in the end he felt he had become invisible himself.

These days, as he picked out clumsy gray lumps of cement with a pointing trowel or cleaned out the grit with a stiff bristled brush, he felt he was shading himself in again, becoming more noticeable for taking the opportunity to make even the smallest visible contribution. I did that, he could say now. I stopped that bit of wall from falling down. I made Jay say, “Wow!”

His trousers were white with the dusty crystals that had been seeping out of the chapel's granite walls since he had started work on it. The dustier they got, the better he liked them. He also liked imagining the building's relief at being able to let it out, and it reminded him of all those meetings, all those stifled coughs, all those breathing exercises against closed lavatory doors. It was as if something was at last able to seep out of him, too.

When Emmy first showed him the chapel, he'd really believed for a moment that he'd smelled God, or at least a presence bigger than himself. Ever since, he'd half been expecting the wagon roof to open up and a great shaft of light to beam down, and God's voice to say “Yes, you, Jonathan Taylor. It's
you
I want,” but the only disembodied voice he'd heard in there so far belonged to the mid-morning presenter on Radio Two.

Not that God was what he wanted anymore, not now that he had the enticing Tamsin Edwards to look forward to. He thought about the morning's events again, meeting her, the way she spoke, the things she said, the frequency of her laugh. It was a surprise even to him that Historic Buildings Advisers could be so young and so interesting.

Jay put his thumbs together and made a frame with his hands, like a photographer sizing up his shot.

“How many stars can you see now?” Jonathan asked.

“Nowhere near as many.” Jay put his hands back in his coat pockets.

“See? They've got nothing to compete with here, have they? You get the whole thing all at once.”

Jay suddenly realized he had nothing to compete with anymore, either. The boys at his new school were like him. Their skateboards were just as knackered, their Game Boys just as old, their parents just as cautious.

“I like it in Cornwall, Dad.”

“Good. I like it, too.”

“Do you think we'll stay?”

“It's not just about us, unfortunately. Everyone has to want it.”

“But if you had to put money on it?”

“If I had to put money on it, I'd say … I don't gamble.”

Jay went back to the stars and Jonathan felt that familiar twinge of regret that he was who he was, that he always, for one reason or another, stopped short. One day, he wanted to go the whole distance.

“It's just like that planetarium I had,” Jay said. “That was so wicked. I should have brought it with me.”

“You don't need it anymore. You've got this.”

Jonathan suddenly had an urge to talk to his son about insignificance. If his own father had told him about insignificance at thirteen, too, he might just have seen it coming and been able to jump out of its way. But his own father hadn't spoken to him about much at all. He could barely remember one single interesting thing the man had said. But perhaps insignificance came anyway, whether you resisted it or not.

He was so tired he could have fallen asleep there and then, against the damp granite wall with Jay leaning against him like a human hot-water bottle, but at least it was a different tiredness from the one he had felt in London.

In London, tiredness had come from a permanent proximity to people, a knowledge that you should never take your eye off the ball, a ceaseless traffic noise in your head. In Cornwall, the tiredness came from realizing that, at last, it had all stopped. Well, that and the fact that he was still sleeping on a leather sofa which needed urgent reupholstery.

His back hurt, his neck was stiff and he couldn't remember the last time he had woken up and felt physically refreshed. Sita kept telling him his aches and pains were to do with spending so long on his knees in a damp environment, but then she had a different agenda. She wanted him inside, with the paintbrush and the sander where he could be put to good use.

He knew she looked on the chapel as a selfish frivolity, and to a certain extent she was right, but why shouldn't he be selfish for once? Could she not hear the distant hope flickering or see the little flame that had started to burn again, the tiniest bubble of excitement in his voice?

No, of course she couldn't, no more than he could see her gritted determination to get things done at last, so that she could fan her own flame, too. Which was? He realized he didn't know anymore.

Whatever. Such worries had just for now ceased to matter. Jay—the boy who used to shy from fresh air even at the height of a summer noon—had actually been the one to suggest walking back out to light the candles so they could see the shape of the windows against the night sky. Such times were not to be sniffed at.

He tucked his son's neck into the crook of his right arm, resting his right hand on the boy's slight shoulder and holding Jay's arm with his other hand. A month ago, their physical connection had been the occasional friendly punch.

“Can you see the Milky Way?” he asked, drawing his finger across the cloudy banner that streaked the sky. “It starts there. Keep watching it. The longer you look, the more you see.”

They stood, watching without talking, until the galaxy turned itself inside out and became a million holes in a huge black cloth, backlit by the fiery white heart of another universe.

“What's beyond them, do you think?”

“The future, I suppose.”

“Not ours, though,” Jay said pragmatically. “We'll be dead before anyone gets that far.”

Jonathan didn't know how to answer that one. When anyone had died in the leafy suburban street he'd been brought up in, his parents drew the curtains of every front-facing room, out of respect. Death was never mentioned, but you could tell when it had happened because of the hushed tones, his mother furtively sniveling into handkerchiefs in the kitchen, the head-shaking and clicking of tongues. He was going to add silent mealtimes, but it hadn't taken a death to make a silent mealtime with his parents. That was one of the great joys of Bodinnick, the noise level round the table. Noisier, he sometimes wanted to shout, noisier.

“I wonder what it's like being dead,” Jay carried on.

“You'll find out one day.”

“Yeah, but you'll find out before me.”

Hope so, Jonathan thought.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“It makes me feel really small.”

“We are really small.”

In one way, Jonathan wanted to say, that's what this chapel thing is all about. It's about having had enough of feeling small and pointless, and wanting to explore the possibility that it needn't be like that, about giving yourself enough scope and space to see if there is something else out there that you have missed, about seeing what you can achieve without anyone else's help, about not always doing what other people want you to. Do you see, Jay? Do you get it? But he knew how hard it would be to put that across to a thirteen-year-old boy, especially in terms of chiseling out cement, so he stayed silent. It was best not to draw up sides, while Sita was reacting.