Eggshell Days (21 page)

Cathal, Cathal, Cathal. Her mind was rusty when it came to thinking about their sexual history. From the moment of the pregnancy test, possibly even before that, she had blocked him out. It wasn't that the memory was bad particularly; it was simply irrelevant.

By the time Maya had been born, the conception was verging on the immaculate. So it was easy, on the occasions she had bumped into him since, to treat him as just Niall's brother, or like the friend of a friend. It was impossible to pencil the other details back in, because they had been rubbed out so long ago that there wasn't even the slightest pressure mark on the page. There was simply no trace.

Even Sita didn't know the circumstances. That's how big and distant a secret Maya's father was. She and Sita had been remote during that awful time. It was a mix of things—different universities, Jonathan, a parting of interests, a silly standoff which friendships sometimes go through. Sita seemed to have found it all so quickly, so easily. And it all coincided with the time that Niall had been lost to her, too.

Emmy had been all at sea on her solitary raft and she had slept with Cathal out of a basic need for companionship. In his compliance, he had unwittingly thrown her a lifeline, given her a seed. “Given” was the correct word. You don't lend these things, do you? And he wouldn't have cared about it so much if his sperm had perished in the condom as he intended it to. Maya was hers. Cathal clearly had no claim on her.

True, he was the only possible father, with a year's margin of error either side. But he didn't know that, did he? No one did. He'd have to go all the way to prove it.

In the quiet night-time coldness of the hall, she tried to hold on to the bigger picture, to imagine them all there with her, embracing the inevitable. Maya darling, I've got something to tell you. Niall, don't hate me, please. Cathal, bring her back at six. Then she tried to find a way of how she could continue to deny it, but neither scenario had any basis in reality. The only reality was what used to be.

“You're so good at feeling sorry for yourself,” Niall sometimes told her, and she knew he was right. She was pitiful, pathetic, worse than bloody useless. But was it her fault?

Her family had always tried to make her believe that there was shame in admitting that Maya had not been conceived within the framework of a relationship, and so, as a compromise, she had chosen to remain silent about it. People believed what they wanted. They had done that for ten easy years. What they wanted to believe, of course, was that the child was Niall's. Nearly right. So nearly right that it hadn't mattered. Until now.

“Please don't, Cathal,” she whispered. “Please.”

She walked into the kitchen and saw a dent in the chair cushion where Maya had fallen asleep. She blinked away the image of Niall carrying her up to bed, her heart as ice-cold as the stone she was standing on.

A pile of clean T-shirts were ironing themselves on the Aga lid, insulating the handle and making it too hot to lift.

“Shit!” Emmy dropped the lid back onto the plate with a clang. “Shit, shit, shit!” She waited for someone to come racing down the stairs to find out what the noise was all about, but no one did. And why should they? If they were sleeping next to the person they cared most about, what was a crash downstairs to do with them?

She dragged a chair out and collapsed in it, her head on her arms, at the top of the table. She hated her capacity for self-indulgence. It almost made her sicker than the letter itself.

Roy Mundy's plumbing bill sat on a clean plate, her patterns and swatches underneath. Asha's place names were scattered around the empty glasses like clues in a ghostly treasure trail. “
Daddy
,” she had written on Jonathan's, surrounded by love hearts.

What was this father—daughter thing? It was hype peddled by armchair child psychologists, who would have a field day with her own case. She didn't feel anything much for her father, even though he had been her sole parent for most of her life.

She forced herself to think of the possibility of Anthony Hart's death, which as he was eighty-nine was inevitably hovering, but all she could see was the stoic, capable and grieving face of her eldest brother. Her father existed only in relation to her brothers. She couldn't remember even calling him Dad.

Then she thought of her mother, Iona, with her cigarette holder and the long zips down the back of her sleeveless dresses; and the tap at the back of her tired eyes finally turned itself on. She didn't know how long she cried, nor what exactly she was crying about, but it was one of those cries which, she could tell even without a mirror, would leave its telltale evidence across her face the next morning.

She splashed her swollen face with cold water from the kitchen tap, dried it on a new striped tea towel and tried to drink her camomile tea. The drink had soothed her through many a troubled night, but this cup tasted slimy and sickly. The bag felt as if she had dragged it up from the bottom of a forgotten pond.

As she tipped it down the sink, she felt as if the last ten years were going down the plughole with it. Life was no longer at all the same. Cathal's letter had killed all things familiar.

Without the mug to concentrate on, she began to feel dizzy and feverish, as if she might suddenly throw up or faint. She held onto the back of each chair until she reached the old oak settle, where she began to dig around in the gritty contents of her sheepskin backpack for the little brown bottle. Her comforter, her fix, her prop. The longer it took to find it, the more fevered she felt.

Then her fingers grasped the cold glass with its soft rubber pipette and some of her anxiety subsided. Not bothering with the usual dosage, she unscrewed the whole lid and tipped a slug of Bach's Rescue Remedy straight into her mouth. The herbal curative washed around her gums and she held it there for a few seconds, its alcohol base numbing her thoughts. People always assumed she carried it for Maya.
To Comfort And Reassure
, it said on the label. But Maya knew how to do those things for herself. Emmy had never known. Maybe it was time to learn.

She drew measured air through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. Once, twice, three times. She would be okay. She would try and sleep.

“Maya, darling?” she whispered a minute later, bending over her daughter's bed. “Come with me, come and snuggle.”

Maya half opened her eyes and moved obediently into a sleeping standing position. She knew the score. Emmy put her arm round the child's narrow, warm shoulders and let her lean against her until they reached the double bed.

“There you are,” she said. “In you get. You're okay now,” and, already feeling marginally more able to cope, she walked round the other side to crawl in beside her.

*   *   *

Maya recognized the signs as soon as she opened her eyes and saw her mother lying next to her in the fetal position. Emmy's hair was tangled, which meant she hadn't gone through her usual routine before bed. On good nights, Mum went to bed with her hair tied in a little bun, and when she undid it in the morning it fell, like a glossy curtain, into a long straight bob. On those days, her skin had a glow to it, too, as if she'd just been for a walk. That was the night cream, apparently. Not today, though. Maya could see a triangle of cheek through the hair which looked pale and blotchy, black flakes of yesterday's mascara settled in the bluey creases under her eyes and she smelled of smoke. If Maya needed farther confirmation, there was a packet of Nytol pills next to the bed.

It was an eggshell day, no doubt about it. Emmy called them that, although never at the time, only when it was over, when she had entered the apologizing stage. At the time, you didn't call them anything, but afterward, when it was all safely in the past, she would say, “That was a bit of an eggshell day, wasn't it? I'm sorry, my beautiful girl, I'm such a pain. I must be awful to live with.” And Maya always said, “No you're not, you're lovely.” And that was true. Her mum
was
lovely. She got a lot of stuff wrong, but she got loads and loads of things right, too, things that other people never noticed, like smiles across a table at just the right time, and private chats about confusing things that never became embarrassing. She was really good at those.

There was a technique, a recognized procedure, which Maya went through on eggshell days. It was best to give her mother at least an extra hour in bed, although it wasn't a good idea to creep away without saying anything. That made Emmy wake in a panic, which made things worse. She would feel remiss and she wasn't good with guilt. What Maya had learned to do was to whisper her intention to get up, and then come back an hour later with a cup of tea. She was a good tea maker, her mum said.

The same rules didn't apply when they slept in their own beds. Those days were easy peasy, and, since easy-peasy days happened almost all the time, eggshell days weren't such a big deal. This was the first one Emmy had had at Bodinnick and Maya was still trying to hold on to the idea that it could be a straight hangover.

“I'm getting up now,” Maya whispered. “You stay there.” But instead of her mother doing that familiar grateful half-smile and rolling back into sleep, she opened her eyes and spoke. She even put her arm out and tried to pull Maya back down.

“Don't go. Stay here for a little bit longer.”

“But I'm not tired anymore.”

“I'll get up too, then.”

“No, I don't need you to. I'll bring you a cup of tea in a minute.”

“We'll do something together today, just the two of us. I promise.”

Which one was the mother here? The one with the eyelids that looked as if they'd been stung by twin bees, or the one who made sure the daylight wasn't glinting through the curtains?

Maya pulled on her jeans, which still had yesterday's pants inside, and a fleece and T-shirt, also still in one piece. Her trainers went on without socks. It wasn't a straight hangover, she knew that now. Straight hangovers could be identified by the grumpy groaning that passed for conversation.

“I don't want you going outside before I come down,” Emmy said sharply. Her voice was wide awake even if her face wasn't.

“I won't,” Maya replied, not bothering to ask why. On eggshell days, rules just popped up out of nowhere.

She ran down the stairs as if her life depended on it. A warm teapot was already on the table and she poured some into a nearby mug as fast as she could. There was only full-cream milk, and Emmy didn't like that but she'd have to put up with it today. She'd find her mum one of those cloth eye masks, and the Body Shop elderflower eye gel with the sunglasses for later. Maya was confident such “essentials” would have come with them. Walking shoes and waterproof coats might not have, but eye masks—they were a definite.

12

Jonathan was wondering if his eyes could possibly look worse than Emmy's, and whether he stood any chance of looking better by the time Sita came home. At least the burning had stopped, although, when he checked in the mold-specked mirror on the chapel wall, they were still bloodshot and puffy. Was it too early in the year to hide behind the excuse of hay fever?

For a split second with the first splash of lime, the pain had been so intense that he thought about seeking urgent medical help, but thanks to the water straight from the outside tap it was now just a sting, as if he had been swimming in strong chlorine.

“It's your fault,” he told Lila, who was giggling in her bucket seat. “Now, are you going to let me have them back?”

He felt happy, despite his eyes. Or happier, anyway. Asha and Jay were just outside the chapel door, which was propped open with a skateboard, practicing their trigger action with two large garden sprays, preparing to help him damp down the walls. They were still in their school uniforms and he knew he'd get shot for that, too, but he didn't care. It was refreshing to be in charge of all three of his children, and only his three children, for once, especially over at the chapel. He had offered to take Maya, too, but Emmy had said no, she wanted her in the house where she could keep an eye on her.

“What have I done wrong?” Maya asked. Interesting that Maya should see time with her mother as a form of punishment, Jonathan thought unfairly.

He was using Emmy's peculiar behavior since the party to dilute his own badness, although he was hardly having to exaggerate it. She had gone, for a reason she was not prepared to discuss, into complete retreat. Admittedly, withdrawal wasn't an unknown reaction for Emmy, but this time there seemed to have been no trigger, unless she was taking Kat's return harder than any sane woman should. But was Emmy sane? It had always been a moot point.

Every friendly effort to help—and they had all tried more than once yesterday—had been rebuffed with a “Just leave me alone, okay?” Already, the men of the household had reached the stage where they were taking her at her word. Maybe Sita would be able to have another crack at it once she got back.

Anyway, it did lessen the strength of his own deviance. He wanted to believe his interest in Tamsin was just curiosity brought on by lack of sex, that it wasn't affecting anybody or hurting anybody, not in the way that Emmy was. He wanted to believe he was finally just doing what most men did. Joining the club, sort of thing.

He put three more dollops of lime putty from the bag into the bucket and added the water.

“You told Mummy you would wear goggles,” Asha said, coming in.

“If you can get them off Lila, I will.” He added more water.

“You might get splashed again.”

“I'll try not to.”

“Are they still hurting?”

“No, I'm fine, darling. Stop worrying.”

“I'm not. Is it true it can blind you?”

“Not this stuff. Now, would you say that was a thin cream? Bit too thick? What do you think?”