The Honey Queen (17 page)

‘But you were talking about visiting your mother’s childhood home on the Beara Peninsula,’ Frankie reminded her. ‘I don’t want you tired out.’

She couldn’t tell Lillie what was really worrying her. Having Lillie about the house had cheered Seth up no end, but if Madeleine got hold of her, that would be that. Lillie would be dragged off to Kinsale and they’d never see her again.

Frankie’s parents, Madeleine and Seamus, were first to arrive, along with their dog, Mr Chow, a Pekingese who left trails of fur after him wherever he waddled.

‘Mother.’ Frankie went to hug her but Madeleine had already shot past her into the flat like a heat-seeking missile locked on target.

‘She’s dying to see Lillie,’ said Seamus apologetically, giving his daughter a hug. ‘She’s been like a cat on a hot tin roof all week waiting for this.’

‘How are you, Dad?’ asked Frankie, feeling strangely emotional in the embrace of her father.

‘I’m grand,’ he said. ‘Here.’ He produced a canvas supermarket bag. ‘A bottle of wine and some crab cakes. I have them in an insulated bag to keep them cool, so give me that back, love.’

Frankie knew that this little something extra would have been her father’s idea. Madeleine only brought wine to dinner parties.

They went on through to the kitchen-cum-living-room, where Madeleine was happily perched beside Lillie on the sofa, talking at ninety miles an hour.

‘Melbourne sounds wonderful. We never did get that far on our travels, did we, Seamus? And talking of travelling, Seth tells me you haven’t strayed much out of Redstone since you came.’

‘We went to my old home,’ Seth piped up.

He was in the kitchen part of the room, shaking up the salad dressing Lillie had made. He loved the Thai-infused concoctions she’d been introducing him to. For years, he and Frankie had been using salad dressings out of bottles, but now he was whisking them up himself or watching Lillie do her magic with lemongrass and ginger or honey and mustard.

‘Have you taken her out of the city yet to show her County Cork?’ demanded Madeleine. She turned back to Lillie: ‘I’d be delighted to show you around – there’s so much to see.’

Lillie could see where Frankie got her energy from. Her mother was a human dynamo, racing along at full tilt. But having noticed the way Frankie and Seth both tensed up at Madeleine’s suggestion, she shook her head and said, ‘That’s very kind of you, but I’m taking things at a slow pace for the moment. Seth’s running the show and looking after me.’

Beside her, Frankie smiled.

‘Right,’ said the irrepressible Madeleine. ‘We’ll talk about it again. Now,’ she cast an eye at her son-in-law, ‘have you opened that bottle of wine yet?’

Freya Byrne basked in the early March sunshine, swinging her legs as she sat on the wall behind the school. She waited while Kaz took three puffs on the cigarette then reached over to take it from her.

‘Wish they still sold them to us in the off-licence,’ said Kaz.

‘Fags are bad for you,’ said Freya, inhaling deeply. She could get by without cigarettes if truth be told, which was just as well because she couldn’t really afford them.

She’d negotiated two precious cigarettes that morning in exchange for doing one of the sixth year’s art homework.

‘It’s supposed to be a still life,’ said the girl, Mona, who couldn’t draw for toffee but had chosen art because she’d been dating an arty sort of guy at the start of fifth year, when she’d had to choose her subjects.

Freya thought it was a good thing Mona hadn’t been dating a physics dude.

Mona’s interpretation of a bottle and two bananas looked like something an absinthe-addicted painter might have done in full hallucination mode: two yellow sausages and the Eiffel tower.

‘Bananas are difficult,’ Freya muttered, taking the sketchbook and the conte crayon from Mona and beginning to sketch in the lines. ‘Never arrange them facing you: it’s too hard to get the sense of perspective.’

Mona watched Freya. ‘Yeah,’ she said. The finer points of perspective were lost on her. When Freya was done, she proffered three cigarettes.

‘Two’s fine,’ said Freya, feeling guilty for accepting anything from Mona, who really was so guileless that it felt like taking sweets from a first year.

‘You should have got three,’ said Kaz, taking the cigarette back and inhaling one last time before lighting the precious second cigarette from the dregs of the last.

Kaz had fewer scruples than Freya. She lived with four older sisters, all of whom teased her unmercifully. The five of them had a bartering system for cigarettes, make-up, money and clothes that would rival that of the New York Stock Exchange. At least Kaz had sisters. Freya had felt very lonely before she moved in with Opal and Ned.

‘What’s wrong?’ Kaz asked, seeing Freya’s glum expression.

‘It’s my weekend with my mother.’

Freya didn’t have to say more. She and Kaz had been friends ever since they both turned twelve and had started secondary school together. That was the same year Freya had finally left her mother’s care.

Leaving primary school for the big school meant a putting away of childish things for most of the first-year students, but it had signalled a return to a proper childhood for Freya. Aunt Opal cooked dinners, washed Freya’s clothes and fussed over her lovingly. Her own mother hadn’t done these things for a long time. Freya sometimes wondered if her mother had ever done them, or if Dad had done it all? She couldn’t remember. It was strange how that part of her childhood felt as if it all happened a long, long time ago. Everything had changed when her father had died. She should have remembered better – she’d been nine, after all, but so much of the past was a haze. While certain things stood out the rest seemed to just recede into the distance.

That evening as she walked home from school, Freya tried to recall that line from Shakespeare about the unwilling schoolboy creeping like a snail. How did it go? She was woolly about lots of the stuff she’d learned. Huge tracts of school work had been gobbled up by her brain, but she doubted she’d ever be able to pull them out for an exam.

In her case, she was creeping
away
from school, sluggish and unwilling because it was her weekend with Gemma. Back when Dad was alive, life had been wonderful. Nobody had parents like hers. So in love, so much fun. So open to everything.

Sure, Mum was often nervous, but Dad had the knack of soothing her. He was a lot younger than Uncle Ned; in fact you’d hardly know they were brothers. Dad was a lot more outgoing, with a wide circle of friends who came from all walks of life. He’d do impulsive things like bringing home some busker off the street to have dinner with them, offering him a bed for the night. And if Mum had fussed – because even in those days she did fuss – Dad would calm her down.

‘It’ll be all right, Gemma,’ he’d say. ‘We’ve got so much, let’s just give a little bit.’

‘But what if he robs us in the night or something?’

‘He won’t,’ Dad would say firmly.

Freya could picture him saying it, those beautiful clear grey eyes full of wisdom and kindness for the human race. She wished her own eyes were like her dad’s, but she took after her mother in looks. Skinny, long crazy dark hair, dark eyes. Even in those wonderful days when there had been so much joy in life, Freya had known that it was her dad she wanted to take after. She loved when they were alone in the car going somewhere and he talked to her, teaching her all that he knew about the world: about goodness and decency and how to look beyond the outer trappings of a person to see what was hiding inside.

He was impetuous but at the same time steady. The boom of thunder, a bit of the roof falling in, an enormous tax bill, next-door’s dog coming in and chasing the three cats around and around until the whole place was destroyed: he’d respond to it all with the same calm equanimity. ‘It’ll be fine,’ Dad would say. ‘Nobody died, did they?’

And then
he’d
died. A car accident. He’d been killed instantly, people kept telling her, as if that should be a comfort to her. But at the age of nine, all that mattered was that he was dead.

‘You’ll get through it. You’re a clever, strong girl and you have to be there for your mum,’ one of her mother’s friends had told her. Someone who hadn’t understood that parents actually had responsibility for their children, Freya thought with pure rage.

What about me? Who is going to be there for me?
Freya had wanted to screech back at this stupid woman.

With her father gone, Freya realized he’d been telling the truth about all the ‘catastrophes’ her mother would get so agitated about. They hadn’t been catastrophes at all. The house could be sorted out after next-door’s dog had run through it, something could be done about the tax bill and the roof. Everything was fixable but death.

And it turned out that her mother wasn’t fixable either. Daniel Byrne had been her anchor to the world. Without him she had begun to drift away, like a helium balloon spiralling beyond reach, carried off on the slightest breeze.

Once a month Freya went to her mother’s for a weekend. It was a duty.

Kaz could never understand why she didn’t wriggle out of it. ‘Why do you go if it drives you so mad? After a weekend with her you come in and you’re all stressed, you’re not normal. You’re wired.’

Freya had given up trying to explain. Kaz didn’t get it when she said that she felt guilty for abandoning her mother for the calmness of Aunt Opal and Uncle Ned’s house. One weekend a month felt like a small sacrifice for what she had with her aunt and uncle. Life was wonderful now. Not as wonderful as it would have been if her father was still alive, but at least she was loved, happy and secure.

As for her mother – depending on Gemma’s state of mind, the house on Waldron Avenue was either super tidy in an obsessive compulsive way or else looked as if a travelling circus had recently vacated the premises and a rapscallion army of monkeys had run amok. Freya never knew quite what to expect when she rounded the corner by the overgrown hedge and turned up the drive. It wasn’t the most beautiful of bungalows, but her father had done his best to prettify it. He’d erected a verandah around it in an effort to lend a faint air of Southern charm, like the houses in Georgia – a place he and Gemma had visited before they had Freya.

‘I’d love peach trees,’ Dad would say wistfully, ‘but it’s too cool to grow them here.’

Instead, he’d planted damask and bourbon roses, and honeysuckle. Once carefully pruned by her father, these days the plants just ran riot. Now, as she walked up the short drive to where her mother’s car was parked askew, Freya noticed that some frenzied cutting back of the climbing plants had been going on. The handkerchief of a lawn had been cut too, but in a haphazard fashion, with all the cut grass left on the weed-filled lawn to rot. Unusually, the edges were trimmed neatly. Freya knew her mother was as likely to have trimmed the verges with scissors as the proper clippers. ‘I can’t find things,’ Gemma would say. ‘I don’t know where your dad put anything.’

‘They’re in the shed with all the other gardening tools,’ Freya would say calmly. She’d found that saying things calmly was the only way to go. There was no point recriminating or touching on difficult subjects, and certainly no point in arguing. Her mother operated best if she was allowed to make wild statements unchallenged.

Two big sea-green planters sat outside the front door, each spilling over with recently-planted garden centre shrubs and flowers. Freya wondered where the money for those had come from. Her mother’s income did not leave room for such frivolities. The front door had been painted too, with another coat of bright white paint, but her mother wouldn’t have done any of the sanding down and priming stuff that Dad always did, which explained why the flaky navy blue it had been before was visible underneath. Freya took a deep breath, stuck her key in the lock and went in.

‘Hey, Mum, it’s Freya, I’m home,’ she called into the echoing hallway.

‘Hello, darling. I’d forgotten you were coming, but how lovely to see you.’ Gemma appeared from the kitchen wearing one of her husband’s old shirts, which was splattered with paint. Her hair was tied up into a crazy bun, also paint spattered, and in one hand she held a paint roller.

It was difficult to judge dispassionately how one’s own mother looked but Freya had once overheard her cousin Steve say that Aunt Gemma was sexy for an older woman. Freya thought he was probably right.

Her mother was small and slim with dark hair, like Freya’s, but her eyes glittered in a dangerous way that men might find alluring, and she favoured silky T-shirts worn over skinny jeans and quite often went out bra-less.

Today, the skimpy look had given precedence to keeping her clothes clean, although the shirt was open to her breastbone and Freya was pretty sure there was nothing beneath it. ‘I’m decorating. The place hasn’t been painted for ages and I can’t afford to have anyone in, so I’m doing it myself.’ Gemma’s face shone with delight. Her eyes sparkled. ‘Come on, you can help. I thought purple for the kitchen. I fell in love with that very expensive paint with all the interesting names, only I can’t afford that,
obviously
,’ Gemma said with the grimace she invariably used when discussing financial matters. ‘So I mixed my own. You can get the shop to do it, but what’s the fun in that? So I got this dark purple – two pots, actually – and a smaller pot of pink. It’s nice, don’t you think? There’s a warmth to it.’

Freya wished, as she so often did, that she was not quite so analytical. Nobody else would make the mental leap from her mother spending too much (plants for outside, tubs of purple paint) to reach the conclusion that Aunt Opal would have to find extra money from somewhere to buy food for Gemma.

Uncle Ned never really knew what went on.

‘It upsets him to see your mother this way,’ Opal had explained once when Freya caught her purchasing a full week’s shopping for Gemma, who’d splurged all her own money on hair extensions ‘to cheer myself up’. ‘Ned cares about your mum and wishes there were something he could do to help.’