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Authors: Laura Elliot

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Chapter Four

I
n the mornings
Lorraine awoke to the crowing of a rooster and the barking of a dog. Rooster and dog seemed determined to outdo each other in verbal energy, and even the birds created a shriller chorus than their city cousins, as if driven by a need to fill the vast empty spaces with their song. Apart from the two bedrooms where she and Emily slept, the long L-shaped kitchen with its stone-flagged floor and smoke-varnished ceiling beams was the only other room in use. Occasionally, driven by a desire to restore some order to her life, she opened crates and stared at the contents, shifted furniture, pushed armchairs under the window then moved them back again against the far wall. This busyness never lasted long, although there was much to occupy her time, and soon she would stop arranging things. She would sit on a chair or a window ledge and stare through the window at the distant hills. She watched the diminutive figure of Noeleen Donaldson strolling the fields with her dog and heard the growl of Frank Donaldson’s tractor as he drove past her gate.

When necessary, she drove to the shopping centre that had been built on the old carnival site and stocked up on food and wine. Donna Cheevers was right when she reminded her daughter that Trabawn belonged to idyllic summer days. The years since those annual holidays had wrought much change and little remained of the one-time quaint seaside resort. A large housing estate and an apartment complex marked the approach to the main street and the road, recently widened and lined with go-slow warning signs, had acquired a roundabout with a floral arrangement spelling “Trabawn” in a mix of pink and white petunias. Bed and Breakfast signs beckoned from the front of split-level bungalows and O’Callaghan’s pub, with its half-door and low, smoky ceiling, was now a luxurious hotel and restaurant. The old fish-and-chip shop – from where salivating smells had once wafted through the evening air and a portion of chips was the reward for good behaviour – had been turned into a busy video rental shop. But when Lorraine drove beyond the village and its environs, when she indicated left and followed the narrow, sharply twisting road along the coast, everything was as she remembered. Another left-hand turn brought her to Stiles Lane. As rugged as she remembered, tunnelled with overreaching branches, it shook the foundations of her car if she drove too fast. Branches whipped the wing mirrors and pebbles slapped dangerously against the windscreen. Donaldson’s farmhouse created a cul-de-sac and, apart from her house, it was the only other building in the lane. On the opposite side of the farm an old-fashioned stile, almost obscured by high ferns, gave her access to the beach.

A fortnight after her arrival, she received a letter with a New York postmark. She recognised Meg Ruane’s handwriting and laid it to one side until after Emily left for school. Her daughter’s determination to hate everything about her new home was unrelenting. Trabawn was depressing, dismal, disagreeable, desolate, deserted, dead. She had adjusted to her surroundings with a fondness for alliteration and a tendency to shriek with disgust whenever cattle swayed past the gate or the smell of silage drifted on the wind. She made gagging noises when Lorraine tried to explain the workings of the septic tank and had, on three occasions, declared her intentions of ringing Childline. The school bus – which she approached with the reluctance of a death row prisoner facing an electric chair – picked her up at the top of the lane in the mornings. In the evenings she entered the house and flung her school satchel into the farthest corner of the kitchen. Desperate, despairing, dull, diabolical days. Lorraine was the only buttress for her anger and Emily, being young and energetic, never lost an opportunity to butt.

“Why was it necessary to bury me alive when, like, you know, there was the rest of the world to choose from?” The question had become rhetorical by this stage and was uttered on the slightest whim. “Why am I being forced to endure this hellhole when I should be getting on with my real life?”

“This is real life, Emily. It’s different, that’s all. I spent the happiest days of my childhood in Trabawn.” Lorraine tried without success to convince her daughter of the yet-to-be-discovered delights of the small Kerry village. “It’s a wonderful place when you get to know it. Just give it a chance and you’ll love it as much as I did.”

Emily ordered her mother to stop projecting. “Just because you loved living in this dump when you were a kid means nothing – except that you were easily pleased. I hate living here and I hate the way you keep pretending it’s all a great big adventure when it’s the most traumatic experience of our lives. A broken marriage is
not
an adventure, it’s a tragic failure and I’m the victim. Can’t you make it up with him …
just
this once? For my sake?
Please
do it for my sake.”

Her pleas seemed to echo from the mildewed walls. But there was no fairy godmother, not even a sprinkling of fairy dust, to disguise the truth. Reconciliation was not an option and Emily, realising the hopelessness of her request, was growing into a changeling, a defiant, hurting stranger whose world had been kicked apart by the folly of adults.

Meg Ruane had taken a more sympathetic view in her letter, which Lorraine read sitting by the window with a cup of coffee cooling on the ledge.

D
ear Lorraine
,

I simply had to write and tell you how shocked we were to hear about you and Adrian. Eoin’s mother rang us with the news and passed on your new address. At first I thought she was joking. You seemed so content when we met in New York. I’d no idea anything was wrong. I don’t want to pry – and I’m sure you don’t feel like talking about it right now – so this letter is just to let you know that we’re thinking of you and wishing you the very best for the future.

We’re all keeping well – although the dreadful happenings of 9/11 have cast a terrifying shadow over everyone. New Yorkers are giving the finger to terrorism and there’s a jaunty image out there that we’re all defiantly getting on with life, but, believe me, it’s grim and it will get worse. I’m really looking forward to coming home when Eoin’s sabbatical ends in October. His schedule of lectures and performances takes its toll on our time together. The two younger ones have settled down but Aoife remains determinedly home-sick. She spends her time texting and e-mailing her friends in case they’re allowed forget her existence for an instant.

How’s Emily coping? She and Adrian were so close. We must meet up as soon as I return. If, by chance, you’re back again in New York for another of those crazy workshops, I insist you stay with us. Do keep your chin up, darling. It’s a new beginning and you’re very brave to take that first step. Drop me a line – or an e-mail, if you’re on-line. Aoife is not the only one to pine for home and friends.

Love

Meg

S
he would write back immediately
. Her mind raced with sentences that would sound strong, ruefully brave, even witty, and Meg, in her new York apartment, would marvel at her courage. She stared at the unpacked crates. Somewhere in one of them she would find a writing pad. Tomorrow she would search for it. There was a computer dumped under the stairs. She would set it up, go on-line. Altavista … Google … go, go, go. She folded the letter and placed it on a shelf. She sat by the window and watched the day away.

Noeleen Donaldson had welcomed her to the lane with home-made gingerbread and two jars of crab-apple jam. Her eyes had darted around the cluttered hall and kitchen, summing up the general air of desolation. They were dark eyes, shrewd and knowing as she offered to help. Politely but firmly Lorraine shook her head and guided the bird-like woman with her chirpy voice to the front door. The thought of a stranger’s hands efficiently unwrapping the contents of her life and assessing them was more than she could tolerate. The older woman had taken the hint and had not visited since. Before she left she pressed a business card into Lorraine’s hand. Her two sons had trades, plumbing and carpentry, they were dab hands at bricklaying and painting too – not to mention the contacts they had in the construction industry. Who could blame them for turning their back on farming, she sighed, what with the backache and documentation and the EU regulations that would strain the tolerance of a saint. If Lorraine wanted anything done to the house – her voice trailed discreetly away as she closed the gate behind her.

Her sons, Con and Brendan, came and cast experienced eyes over the rooms. An expensive job, they agreed, nodding ominously. Dampness had disfigured the walls with mottled purple blotches. Lorraine smelled the mustiness in the air, felt it seeping into her lungs. An expert on damp was coming soon. He would banish the mould and the brothers would paint the walls in vibrant defiant colours: Radical Red, Outrageous Orange, Bravado Blue, Yodelling Yellow, Give-Me-a-New-Life Green. Yes, colours could talk and dampness could be vanquished – but the echo, now there was a problem. The rooms were filled with furniture, even if haphazardly arranged and unused, yet still the echo dogged her footsteps, ricocheted around her, reverberated in the chilling aftermath of shock.

On the beach there were no echoes, only memories. Waves pounded against the rocks, arched towards her like beckoning fingers. At every turn on her path, every bank and hollow, in the humped rock and brooding sand dunes, they waited to leap upon her, clutch her throat, laugh in her ears. They would destroy her, those memories, yet she had fled towards them, battling against her parents’ disapproval, her daughter’s rebellion, her friends’ advice; and, now, alone with the past, she felt herself sinking under their weight. She wondered what it would be like to walk through the sea until there was no sand beneath her feet, only bubbles, light as champagne, floating above her as the drift of the tide filled her senses and dragged her deeper … deeper … into a gentle green oblivion. On such occasions, she held Emily tightly in her mind and concentrated on the tasks that needed doing: a school skirt to be altered, jeans that Emily had dumped on the table with the request, no, the curt demand, that they be washed, the unpacking of the groceries she had bought earlier; trivial but essential tasks that forced her footsteps across the strand and back to the house.

Evening time and the settling dusk brought the bats flitting silently from a cleft in Donaldsons’ barn. They swooped fleetly under the wind-break trees, skimmed around the walls of the old house. At first, she had been frightened by their arrival, imagining their frail fluttering bodies tangled in her hair, their invincible antennae searching for a chink, a tiny crevice in the fortress she had created. But they marked the close of another day and she had grown used to their sudden appearance. When they disappeared into the gloom she knew it was time to heap logs on the fire, light candles, open another bottle of wine. She listened to the clock ticking down the hours towards bedtime. There had to be an easier way to pass the time but she had yet to discover it.

The promise of spending a weekend in Dublin with her grandparents silenced Emily’s complaints for a short while. She was their only grandchild and they treasured the close relationship they had with her. Lorraine debated going to Dublin with her but she was still unable to endure the transparent attempts by her parents to tip-toe around her grief. For this reason she had refused to invite them to Trabawn. The house was still uninhabitable, she insisted every time Donna rang, refusing to hear the hurt in her mother’s voice, salving her conscience by looking at the chaos she was accumulating around her.

On Saturday morning she drove Emily to the railway station in Tralee and waved her off. The town was busy, the streets congested with traffic and shoppers. When she was a child, on holidays in Trabawn, a night at the Rose of Tralee Festival had been the highlight of the fortnight, providing the adults and children with an opportunity to dress up and become part of the boisterous crowd that attended the annual beauty contest. Swimsuits and shorts were abandoned for the “Rose” dresses that she and Virginia donned for the occasion. Holding hands, they paraded up and down the thronged streets, admiring themselves in shop windows, imagining themselves on stage, surrounded by envious Roses as they received their crowns and the audience rapturously sang “The Rose of Tralee”
.
For that night and the days that followed she would refer to Virginia as “London Rose”, while she gloried in the title “Dublin Rose”.

Shrugging aside this dip into childhood, Lorraine drove into a shopping-centre car-park and hurried towards the supermarket. She filled her trolley with basic items, impervious to demonstrators tempting her with cheeses and sauces. On leaving the town, she drove past Blennerville where the sails of the historic windmill whirred busily over Tralee Bay. She should spend a day in Tralee with Emily. They could tour the windmill, ride on the old steam railway line, visit the aqua dome, buy new clothes, have a meal together. By the time she reached Trabawn, she had sunk once again into the familiar lethargy.

Emily rang later in the evening to announce her safe arrival in Dublin. A music gig in Temple Bar with her friends was planned and they were eating afterwards in Thunder Road Café. Lorraine was relieved to hear the lightness in her daughter’s voice, even if it was only a short respite from the resolute air of martyrdom Emily carried on her shoulders. Later, the telephone rang again as Lorraine was uncorking a bottle of wine. Only one person would ring her at this hour of the night. She tensed her arms and waited for the answering machine to switch on.

“Lorraine, pick up the phone. I know you can hear me.” Her husband’s voice faded into background noise. He was ringing from a pub. She could almost smell the perfume in the crowded bar, the vigorous crush of bodies around the counter, the exhaled smoke spiralling as high as the laughter. The noise faded as he moved to a quieter place. “Please talk to me, Lorraine. Emily called to the apartment this evening and created quite a scene. She’s very distressed.”

BOOK: Fragile Lies
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