Instructions for a Heatwave (18 page)

“There’s …” She attempted to think her way quickly around the various perils in her path, to weigh up the different risks she was incurring, while all around her people arrived and left, ate waffles, lifted suitcases, as if nothing unusual was happening at all. “… a file. At Evelyn’s. A blue file. There are some things in it I should have … things I’ve got a bit behind with. I was wondering if … if you might go over there and get it. Maybe … you could take a look at it for me. Tell me what’s in it.”

He frowned. “You want me to go to Evelyn’s and get a file for you?”

“It’ll be OK. She won’t mind. I’ll ring and tell her you’re coming. Here are the keys. Would you mind?”

“No. I can go tonight.”

Aoife pressed his hand, relief surging through her. It might all be all right. She might be delivered, saved, once more. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I just don’t want her to find it while I’m away and I couldn’t … I didn’t know what else to do. I … Thanks. You sure you don’t mind?”

“Of course not. It’s fine.”

“Take this, too.” She pushed the key to her apartment across the table but he shook his head.

“No, you keep it, it can be—”

She leaned forward, over the table between them, and dropped the key into the pocket of his shirt just as he finished his sentence:

“—a guarantee that you’re coming back.”

There was an awkward, silent moment, while he gazed at her, as if trying to memorize her features, and she bit her lip, gabbling that of course she was coming back, there was no question about it.

Gabe lowered his eyes, put his hand over the key, over his heart. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Might come in handy.” He glanced at his watch. “You should get going.”

They walked to the departure lounge, she clasped her arms around him until the last second, until she walked through the door. She found she wanted to close her eyes, as if to hold in the sight of him, scared that, if she filled her eyes with too many other things, she might forget what he looked like, might lose something of him.

When she’d stepped through to the other side, she turned and found that he was watching her from behind a glass wall. She went right up to it and pressed her face to it, near to his, so near that her eyelashes fluttered on the cold screen between them. He breathed on the glass and a nimbus of condensation billowed between them, and suddenly a fingertip was etching lines, curves, shapes into the mist. Letters. She watched as Gabe wrote
something on the glass, a final message. Four words. Or possibly three. It was hard to tell as the gaps between them seemed to compress and expand, like the air in an accordion. It began with
TH
, she could see that, which might mean
THIS
or
THAT
or
THING
or
THE
and it ended with the curved coat-hanger hook of a question mark. But what was the question, that was the question.

Aoife looked at the string of letters, which undulated and swayed, like bunting in wind, and felt tears gathering in her eyes, bitter and alkaline. She looked at Gabe. That old, familiar knocking had started up inside her head, that feeling of not being able to get quite enough breath into her body, as if somebody were grasping the top of her windpipe with a merciless, unremitting grip.

There was nothing else to do. She gave him her half-smile, head tilted, and a small shrug.

It was the wrong thing, she saw that straightaway. Gabe took a step back from the glass, where the letters were being eroded by transparency. His face was hurt, dismayed, and she had to resist the urge to bang her forehead into the glass, to shout, Please, it’s not my fault. I just can’t.

At the gate, which was filled with people crunching peanuts or napping or sifting through their bags, Aoife took a pen from her bag and crouched to write on her left hand, fast, before switching the pen over to write on her right. She wrote what she could remember of the words she had seen. She had the mad idea that she could show it to someone, ask someone on the flight perhaps. The
TH
, the long string of letters at the end, the?, the word that might have been
PART
or was it
APART
? She wrote with concentrated urgency, as if the act would rewind the moment of him standing behind the glass, his face falling, as if inking these things on her skin might undo the whole thing.

They emerged from under her nib like the words of bad spells. Then she climbed the steps to her plane, carrying the words with her.

·  ·  ·

Gretta seizes her daughter’s wrist. “What’s that?”

All over Aoife’s hand are words and letters, scrawled in black. Some are worn away and some are written backwards, Gretta notices, and a dart of exasperation arrows through her, seeking out its old pathway.

“Nothing.” Aoife twists out of her grasp, sprawls back in her chair, looking for all the world like the sullen-faced teenager she once was. Gretta can’t get her mind straight, can’t order her thoughts. She can’t be the person she needs to be, with her children all here for the first time in years. Robert gone. Aoife sitting with a face like that. And Monica over by the sideboard, doing that tossing thing with her head and fiddling with a basket of laundry. The pair of them not looking at each other. As if they were strangers. She can’t for the life of her work out how this happened, and in her own family, too.

“We need,” Monica says, apparently to the wall, “to all sit down and make a plan.”

“You shouldn’t be writing on your skin like that,” Gretta says, but doesn’t know why because what she really wants to say is, Whatever happened between you and your sister, no one had ever told her, do you need a nap; please don’t look so pale and sad. “You’ll give yourself the septicemia. A little boy I used to know—”

“Died of septicemia after writing on his skin,” Aoife finishes. “I know. You’ve told me. A thousand times. But it’s bullshit.”

“Aoife, I will not have language in my house.”

“A plan of action,” Monica says.

Gretta is sick to her back teeth of this. Your father is gone, she wants to shout. Why are the pair of you behaving like this, pretending the other isn’t there? Aren’t there more important things for us all to be dealing with?

“Any language at all?” says Michael Francis then, over his shoulder. “There’s nothing we can do. Just wait. That’s what the police said.”

“You can’t get septicemia from ink. It’s a ridiculous idea.”

Aoife stands up, so abruptly that the chair leaps back, making a high-pitched squeal on the linoleum. Michael Francis, always the sensitive one, flinches and covers his ears.

“I don’t agree.” Monica cracks a pillowcase in the air. “Nothing we can do. What nonsense. There’s plenty we can do. People we can call, leads to follow, things to investigate. I made a list this morning.”

Aoife stands there. Gretta watches her, eyes narrowed. She glances down at her hands, at the unreadable words written there.

“I’m going out to make a phone call,” she says, and flounces away, just like she used to when she was a child. Gretta is almost pleased to see it again, the Aoife flounce. Nice to know some things don’t change.

“Use the phone in the hall,” Gretta says. “That’s what it’s there for.”

“I need to call New York. I’ll use the phone box.” Aoife gets as far as the door before she turns. “Will … the library be open?”

The three of them stare at her: Gretta, Michael Francis and Monica.

“The library? For the love of God,” Gretta cries, “what are you wanting to go to the library for?”

“To find a book.”

“Well, I didn’t think you were after a pound of potatoes. What book?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just a book.”

“And who are you off to phone?”

Aoife’s face is set in an expression they all know well: Don’t mess with me, my mind is made up. “Doesn’t matter,” she says, again.

“Go on,” Gretta says. “Tell us. Is there a fella in New York?” She winks at Michael Francis, who frowns back, the miserable so-and-so. “Are you off to phone him?”

Aoife doesn’t answer, just glances unhappily towards the tablecloth that Monica is folding.

“Is that it?” Gretta persists. “Won’t the man be sleeping at this hour?”

“No,” Aoife mutters. “It’ll be …” She glances at the clock over the window. “I don’t know … eight in the morning.”

“Well, won’t he be off to work?”

“Nmm,” she mumbles, making a show of searching her pockets, backing out through the sitting room now. Gretta gets up from the table and follows her.

“Does he have a job?” Gretta says.

“Mum,” Michael Francis murmurs behind her, “if Aoife wants to make a phone call, then—”

“Or is he an
artist
as well?”

Aoife turns at the front door, pushes her hair out of her eyes—how Gretta is itching to give it a good going-over with a hairbrush—and snaps, “No. He’s a lawyer, OK? Or soon will be.” She yanks open the door, just like she used to. “Back soon.” And slams it behind her. Just like she used to.

“Well,” Monica says, lowering herself into the chair Aoife has just vacated, “I can see a few years in New York haven’t improved a certain person’s temper.”

Michael Francis sighs and is about to speak but Gretta bustles back into the kitchen.

“Did you hear that?” she is saying. “
A lawyer
. She’s keeping company with a lawyer.”

“Really?” Michael Francis asks. “When did she tell you that?”

“Just now. At the door. Who’d have thought it?” Gretta seizes all the linen Monica has just folded and starts to stuff it haphazardly into a drawer. “Aoife and a lawyer.” She stops stuffing and turns to them. “Do you think he’s Catholic?”

·  ·  ·

Aoife stands on the pavement, just outside the gate, turning to look one way up the street and then the other, as if she’s forgotten where she’s going.

Oddly weighty the British money feels in her hand, her purse bursting open, holding too many currencies: dimes and two-pences, nickels and ten-pence pieces.

Monica, her own sister, sidestepped her, looked through her or past her, as if she weren’t there. It was an act that denied everything, that said: we never shared a room, I never once took your hand to cross the road, it wasn’t me who bound your head when you cut it open on a railing, you did not grow up wearing my cast-off clothes, you never spooned tea into my mouth as I lay ill with glandular fever, you did not sleep beside me in a matching bed for years, it was not me who showed you how to pluck your eyebrows or buckle your shoes or how to hand wash a sweater. The unreason of it, the pain of it, baffles Aoife. The recollection of Monica swerving away from her like that, after all this time, seems to throb and ache, like a newly inflicted bruise.

The whole thing, she thinks, as she sets off down the street, clutching her bulging purse, was caused by a horrible chain of coincidences. If she hadn’t gone to Monica’s that day. Why had she gone? What was it now? She’d been in the area and hadn’t seen Monica for a while, not since the month before at Gillerton Road, when Joe had announced that Monica was pregnant. Aoife had looked over at Monica when he’d said it because Monica had always said she’d never have children. Never, never, she’d said. Monica had sat very upright on the sofa, her hand in Joe’s, her face expressionless, as their parents went into an uproar of congratulations.

So Aoife had gone to the flat to see Monica but she’d found her sister white-faced, hunched over, her skirt heavy and dark. Aoife had run downstairs to the landlord to call an ambulance.
She’d gone with Monica to the hospital, she’d stood by the bed, she’d held her sister’s shoulder when the pain got bad, she’d said, I’m so sorry, Mon, I’m so sorry, and she’d wiped away her sister’s tears with her handkerchief, and when that was too wet, she’d used the end of her scarf. When Joe had arrived, sprinting down the ward, Aoife left and she’d sat on the bus, with London passing the windows, but all she could see was the brightness of it, the way it was the essence of life but also of death. Monica had said, Don’t look, don’t, it’s bad luck. But how could Aoife not look? How could she let the nurse take it away, as if it were nothing, instead of a person who never quite was? Aoife thought that someone had to look at it and say, Yes, you were here, I saw you, you did exist. Just not for long.

When Aoife returned to the hospital the next day, these thoughts were still churning in her head and she wanted to tell Monica what it had looked like. The fragile curve of its back, the unbearable perfection of its clasped fingers. But the scene with which she was met was entirely different. Her mother was parked on the bed, handbag, scarf, gloves and various parcels strewn around her, in the middle of saying, “… nobody knows this but he wore it on a chain around his neck for the rest of his life, under his clothes.”

Her father stood by the window, looking out, apparently transfixed by the rotating silver air vents of the hospital roof. Joe was in a chair next to the bed, leaning forward, his hand locked in Monica’s.

Monica herself was reclining on several pillows. She was wearing a bed jacket with drooping satin bows and lace-edged sleeves. Her hair had been what she called “done”; Aoife wondered who had brought in her rollers and dryer. Somebody must have, she reflected, because hospitals don’t keep those things on hand. Or maybe they do.

Gretta was feeding soup to Monica, spoonful by spoonful. “Good girl,” she said between mouthfuls, before carrying on with
her story. She didn’t offer Aoife any kind of greeting but turned and exclaimed, “Look at your sister! Isn’t she doing well?”

Her father said, to the window, “We’re leaving in nine minutes.”

Monica, waving away the spoon Gretta was proffering, winced slightly and lay back on her pillows. Gretta leaned forward and touched her fingers to her brow, asked Monica if she was in any pain and would she go and find a nurse?

Aoife remembers what happened next so clearly it is as if she watches it on some small interior screen. She looked away from her mother and sister, forever excluded from their tight pairing, and her eye fell on Monica’s coat, draped over a chair. It was Monica’s smart coat, her Sunday coat, navy, with an Astrakhan trim and frogged loops over the buttons. She herself had lifted it from the peg in the hall as the ambulance men carried Monica down the stairs. It had been in her mind that Monica might be cold, might need it. Joe was stroking Monica’s hand, Gretta was licking the back of the spoon, Robert was still looking out of the window and Aoife was thinking: Astrakhan … hadn’t someone once told her it was made from the skins of lambs, aborted before their time? The pockets of the coat, she noticed, were also trimmed with squiggling, intricate, impossibly soft knots.