The Real Liddy James (25 page)

“Huh,”
muttered Matty. “Hashtag first-world problems.”

She stared over the lake to the horizon and contemplated running into the water and swimming away. She did not. She looked at him. “And while a lovely vacation in your ancestral homeland is certainly not a punishment, you, son, do need some time to reflect on your behavior and
change it
! Inside.
Now!
”

He looked back at her, his nose wrinkled as if sniffing the piousness with which he reeked. “You ever thought about anger management, Mom?”

Liddy stuck the rough, rusting key into the lock, pushed her right shoulder against it, and fell into the house, Cal on top of her.

“Epic fail,” sneered Matty.

Liddy pushed herself up, relieved to discover that the floor tiles were clean. She retrieved Sebastian's instructions, which she had slipped into a handy plastic cover, from her pocket. Matty stepped over her and headed for the small bedroom at the far end of the living room.

There was a pause, and then the inevitable
slam!

“This is fun,” said Liddy bravely. She leaned down to Cal, wiped his eyes, and kissed him on the forehead. Then she gave him a packet of pretzels she had stuffed into her bag on the plane, and they made their way hand in hand through the galley kitchen, into an adjoining utility room behind. After following a complicated series of instructions typed on the sheet taped to the door
(Sebastian had helpfully scribbled
Do not touch this or you
will blow yourself up
on a Post-it note and stuck it on a red button at her feet), she switched the heating on, causing an alarming rattle from the boiler. Then she returned to the living area and unpacked. This did not take long, as she had only brought essentials: a few clothes, walking boots, freshly laundered white sheets, white towels—two bottles of red wine with twist-off tops wrapped within them—and the clothbound notebook Rose had given her, which she had grabbed as she headed out the apartment door.

She had also packed something called a “hitachi wand,” apparently of vital importance to solitary ladies, which Lloyd had sent her in a gift-wrapped box after she had told him she would sell him her apartment when she came back from Ireland. He had tucked a handwritten note inside it with the message “Hope you're not missing me too much.” Liddy walked into the master bedroom, pleasingly bare with faded blue wallpaper, empty shelves, a large double bed, and nothing else, and stuffed the wand under a pillow. She decided to lie down. The bedroom reminded her of her own apartment. She wondered if Sebastian had been waiting for a life to fill this place too. She closed her eyes—

—only to judder awake five minutes later to find Cal staring into her face. He was holding the half-finished packet of pretzels above his head and they showered over him onto her bed. Liddy stopped herself from snapping at him in protest but had absolutely no idea what to do about this. Disciplining him had always been someone else's job.

“I'm hungry,” he said.

It was then she realized that she had not thought about food, for the feeding of Cal was also someone else's job. Over the past weeks, in fact, it had become her habit to eat less and less. The diet app on her Jawbone had confirmed her recent weight loss, although she had stopped telling it the truth, as on the day she had recorded dinner as three spiced pear martinis, a plate of edamame, and a Snickers bar, it had reported that she had a disorder. Her cheekbones were hollow and there was a reverse triangular-shaped gap between her thighs.

(In fact, before the funny turn, Sydney had assumed she was taking a secret admirer on a romantic desert island break and had asked her if she was getting “bikini ready.”)

“Okay,” she replied, walking to the kitchen and opening the two cupboards and the refrigerator that hissed. But they contained only something in a jar called marmite and another called swarfega, both of which looked similarly disgusting. She would have to drive back past the foot dip sign and hunt for a restaurant.

“Put on your shoes,” she said to Cal, and he stood up, bits of pretzel crunching beneath his feet, kicking the shards across the floor as he walked. Almost physically appalled by the mess, she retrieved what was almost certainly a vacuum cleaner from the utility room. She plugged it into the electric socket and switched it on with a flourish. Nothing happened. She picked up the plastic nozzle and moved it around a bit.
Nothing.
She ineffectually stabbed at a couple of buttons on the handle and then gave up. Liddy had worked her whole life so she would never have to fix a domestic appliance. She did not intend to start now.

She piled the boys back into the car and headed to
Roundwood, stopping at the small supermarket to buy milk, coffee, tea, bread, butter, canned tuna, and cereal. Then she found a pub with an outdoor garden where they sat at a wooden table in the sunshine and ate chicken strips and fries and ice cream.

“I like it here,” she said, looking around.

“Yeah, it's okay,” said Matty unexpectedly. “What d'you think, short stack?” he continued, turning to Cal.

Cal took an enormous scoop of ice cream and grinned. Liddy relaxed. On the table behind them a couple of seagulls, greedy for food, turned their black eyes on the abandoned plates of the previous diners and swooped down to grab half-eaten fish cakes.

“Hey, Mom,” said Matty. “Is Dad coming to visit?”

“I invited him, but he can't because of the baby,” said Liddy quickly. It was too late. Cal was looking at her over the top of his sundae with the same expression she had seen at his birthday party before he had asked her where
his
dad was.

Oh, no
, she thought,
not now.

Matty saw her desperation and started laughing. This made her angry.

“Why did you take that stuff from Josh's bag if you didn't know what it was?” she said. She instantly regretted it, but it was too late to stop, so she continued. “Why did you give it to those other boys in the summer camp?”

“It's none of your business,” he fired back. “I made a mistake, okay? You ever made one of those, Mom? Remember?”

And he raised his finger very slowly and pointed at Cal.

“Don't ever say that again!”
she said, exploding.

He laughed again, cruelly this time, and imitated the
contorted shape of her furious face. Then the biggest and boldest bird came to a precarious halt on the bench beside them and, before Liddy could protect Cal's food, grabbed an enormous beakful of chicken strip. Cal's mouth fell open in outrage and fear and he began to wail.

“Bet you wish a cat had murdered that one,” said Matty, and Cal wailed louder. Liddy scooped him up, although he struggled and beat his fists against her back, and hauled him to the car. Matty trailed behind, shuffling and occasionally kicking the curb for no apparent reason. Liddy worried people might stare, but in fact no one did. She was unremarkable, just another exhausted forty-something mother dealing with her exhausted and recalcitrant children. As she closed the car doors, she caught sight of herself in the side mirror; there, staring back at her, was a frazzled woman in dirty sweatpants.

Once in the driver's seat, she switched on the phone app to navigate back to the house. But it did not register the tiny roads and dead-end junctions and instead sent her in a circuitous route that, even in her wooziness, she could tell was wrong. There came a moment where she rounded a narrow corner and saw the house nestling in the distance. She headed onward but the device kept insisting “You have taken the wrong direction. Stop and turn back.”

She did not. She pulled the car to a halt by a rough stone wall bordering the lake. She wound down the window. She threw the phone out.

It landed in the water with a satisfying splash.

Matty opened his mouth to speak.

“Don't say anything!” she hissed.

He shrugged and closed his eyes.

Back at the gate lodge, she sat Cal and Matty in front of the aged television to watch
SpongeBob SquarePants
dubbed into Irish, and wandered around the house to see what had been left behind that might teach her something about its owner. There was little: three copies of
Atlantic
magazine from 2010, a dog-eared paperback of
Eat, Pray, Love,
and two CDs left on top of the stereo—Keith Jarrett's
The Melody at Night, with You
and
The Art of the Song
by Charlie Haden. But there was something about the atmosphere of the house, whether it was the smell of wood and turf or the old-fashioned solidity of the furniture, which Liddy could only describe as kind. Sebastian was a kind man, however much he might pretend not to be, and when Liddy remembered the image of him here with Chloe, two ghosts of Google Earth, and his dream of walking this land with his children, she felt sad for him.

In the wardrobe hung a few of his shirts, which, if she were the leading actress in the movie about her life, she would have clutched to herself and sniffed. This struck Liddy only as unhygienic, particularly the armpit area, from which she concluded that her feelings for Sebastian were confused—or simply realistic.

Liddy knew that he would soon find a Chloe 2.0, this time one with functioning ovaries, and in the future Liddy would once again only meet him in court.

She turned to see the two boys wilting into the sofa, and as it was now late afternoon, she said they could go to bed, and they didn't argue. She carried Cal into her room, Matty disappeared into his, and she emerged with what was now a medicinal need of alcohol. She grabbed one of the bottles of merlot, untwisted the cap with her teeth, and swigged it straight from the bottle, reveling in the feeling of taboo. Then she filled a tumbler.

She picked up the CD of
The Art of the Song
and saw a version of a traditional hymn she had often heard Peter talk about. She put it in the stereo, pressed play, and the room filled with the melancholy beauty of the simple song.

I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger

I'm traveling through this world of woe

Yet there's no sickness, toil nor danger

In that bright land to which I go

I'm going there to see my father

I'm going there no more to roam

I'm just a-going over Jordan

I'm just a-going over home

I know dark clouds will gather 'round me

I know my way is rough and steep

Yet golden fields lie just before me

Where the redeemed shall ever sleep

I'm going there to see my mother

She said she'd meet me when I come

I'm only going over Jordan

I'm only going over home.

Liddy leaned against the wall. She tried to close her eyes and listen, but, without warning, a shivering more violent than that of exhaustion engulfed her, and because she was in the long-lost country of her birth, her mind writhed in the grip of the kind of intense introspection about the past she had designed her city life to avoid.

For more than half her years, Liddy had been emotionally estranged from her parents. She did not relinquish her responsibilities toward them, she assisted them financially, she called them on occasion, and she visited once a year. But she saw herself as a person effectively orphaned, not by death but by self-betterment. And they made it easy for her. When she spent a day in the condo in Orlando, Patrick sat glued to the TV, and Breda began washing the dishes the moment food had been put on the table. It seemed that her parents did not
like
her very much. Certainly, they had nothing in common. Liddy always felt that they were punishing her for that.

She remembered with a shudder how her mother had urged her toward a sensible life: a pensionable job, an appropriate marriage to a nice boy, a ranch house no more than thirty minutes' drive away, and, above all, no disturbing desire to be different. (After all, Breda used to say, look what happened to Janice McCrea, who went to Los Angeles to be an actress and got pregnant and took drugs and Mrs. Mulvey from church says is now a hooker.) Then how, having ignored all this, when her father lost his job and told her she could no longer continue her undergraduate studies at Yale, she had howled with rage and run outside to a phone booth and called her grandmother, who had been
sitting in the tiny kitchen of that house in Blackrock, and asked for ten thousand dollars. And how her grandmother had said yes and not asked why. (When Liddy had got the job at Rosedale and Seldon, she had paid the loan back with interest, and also bought her grandmother a car.) On Sundays, Liddy had worked an unpleasant but highly paid shift in a plastics factory with three ex-convicts and a former US marine. They swore all the time and the marine leered at her. She cleaned houses and waitressed and tutored rich kids all the way through college. She never took a penny from her parents ever again.

When Peter first met her, he had found her history entirely understandable, even charming. He had pointed out that literature has always needed orphans, from Becky Sharp to Harry Potter, and that it was far harder to create forward momentum for protagonists if they have to get past their parents. But the moment Matty was born Peter's attitude began to change. It became important to him that his child have a sense of his wider family.