The Undivided (8 page)

Hayley glared back at him. ‘Don’t let me stop you.’

‘This is the men’s room,’ the lad pointed out.

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘Hayley … please …’ Ren said, taking another painful deep breath. He straightened slowly, wincing. Then he closed his jacket, zipping it up far enough to cover the bloodstain on his T-shirt. ‘We’re leaving.’

Hayley looked at Ren with concern. ‘Do you need a hand?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ll be okay. Do you think Neil will believe he just bruised my ribs when he elbowed me?’

Hayley shrugged, holding the door open for him. ‘It’s probably better than telling him the truth,’ she said.

Normally, Trása loved to fly. Or rather, she loved to fly when she was the one doing the flying.

Climbing into a human-built metal tube that relied on some obscure scientific principle to do with lift and power ratios, driven by a machine constructed by flawed and easily distracted humans that could, she reasoned, fail at any time, was quite another story.

Trása hated airplanes with a passion and every moment she spent trapped inside one was a special sort of claustrophobic hell.

She had no choice, however.

In this realm she was more human than Faerie.

In this realm, she could only fly to Dublin from London with the assistance of an international airline.

The flight attendants sensed her unease. After she refused breakfast, determined to sit still, white knuckles gripping the armrest, one of them approached her, smiling sympathetically.

‘Don’t like to fly?’ the perfectly groomed, redheaded woman asked, sounding genuinely concerned, which surprised Trása a little. Her nametag said ‘Anthea’. She looked more like a Kathleen or a Mary.

‘Not like this,’ Trása said. ‘How much longer?’

‘We should begin our descent into Dublin in the next ten minutes or so.’

Trása nodded, not the least reassured. Most plane crashes, they claimed on
Air Crash Investigation
, happened when a plane was either taking off or landing.

‘Can I get you anything?’

Trása shook her head mutely.
Just go away and leave me alone.

‘You’ll have to stow the
Leipreachán
,’ Anthea added with an even wider smile.

‘What?’

The flight attendant pointed to the seat beside Trása where Plunkett was slumped. He’d cast a glamour over himself to give his skin the texture of woven cloth. By remaining inert and letting Trása carry him around like a stuffed toy, he was able to travel with her openly, a very useful thing for someone who didn’t have a proper passport.

‘Your doll,’ Anthea said. ‘You’ll have to stow him under the seat. Or I could put him in the overhead locker for you, if you like.’

Oh, that’s a grand idea. Lock the little devil in a small dark place and expect him to lie there quietly …

‘No … it’s okay,’ Trása said, snatching him up. ‘I’ll stow him under the seat.’

‘He’s quite fabulous, isn’t he?’ the woman said. ‘Can I have a closer look?’

Trása wasn’t sure if she could reasonably refuse such a politely worded request. She nodded and, with some trepidation, handed over the
Leipreachán
.

‘The workmanship is amazing,’ Anthea said, as she admired the little man, turning him back and forth and upside down, even peeking under his waistcoat. ‘He looks so real.’

‘How could he be real?’ Trása asked with a nervous laugh. ‘He’s a
Leipreachán
.’

‘That’s true,’ Anthea laughed. ‘Still, he’s beautifully made. Where did you get him?’

‘From my uncle,’ Trása replied, quite truthfully. It was Marcroy Tarth, after all, who’d assigned Plunkett to aid her.

‘You’re a very lucky young lady,’ Anthea said, handing him back to Trása. ‘Is your uncle meeting you in Dublin?’

Trása shook her head. ‘No. He lives … quite a way from Dublin. I’m going to visit … the brother of a friend.’

‘Well, I’m sure you’ll have a grand time,’ Anthea said. ‘You’ve still got a few weeks before school goes back, haven’t you?’

‘Can’t wait,’ Trása agreed, wishing the woman would go away.

‘Do you go to school in —’ Anthea stopped abruptly at the sound of a call button further down the aisle. ‘Sorry … duty calls. Don’t forget to stow your little friend when the seatbelt light comes on.’

The flight attendant moved off to see to her other passengers. Trása sat Plunkett’s limp form on her lap and stared at him. There was no sign of life coming from the
Leipreachán
although she knew he could see and hear everything that was going on about him.

‘Did you make the call button go off?’ she whispered.

The inanimate Plunkett, of course, did nothing but sit there, staring at her blankly through his shiny, apparently glass eyes.

‘Good job,’ she added with a conspiratorial smile.

Just then, Trása became aware that someone was watching her. She glanced sideways to find a small boy in the seat on the other side of the aisle staring intently at her and Plunkett. Hastily, she shoved the
Leipreachán
under the seat in front of her, ignoring his grunt as she kicked him firmly into place.

Then she checked her seatbelt, leaned back, gripped the armrests again and closed her eyes. She hoped the pilot knew what he was doing, and that she was not about to plummet
to a fiery death when he tried to land this unwieldy beast and discovered it was more than he could handle.

The man at the passport counter must have been having a bad day. Given the number of people jostling for a place in the lines at the passport control booths, Trása didn’t blame him. Dublin Airport was one of the busiest in the world.

It took nearly half an hour of shuffling along the roped-off lines before it was Trása’s turn. Finally, she stepped forward and smiled brightly at the grumpy official. She handed over the passport Plunkett had stolen for her when she first arrived in this realm. Then she set her
Leipreachán
doll on the counter, so he was facing the Customs man.

‘Mr Luigi Mario Berekia?’

‘Yes.’

The man studied her for a long moment and then shook his head as if he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. He hesitated … and then shook his head again. Anybody watching closely might have noticed her toy
Leipreachán
was sitting a little straighter than a rag doll ought to. Had there been any of the
Daoine sídhe
nearby, they would have felt the magic he was working.

‘Are you here for business or pleasure?’

‘Business.’

‘How long will you be staying in the Republic of Ireland?’

‘Only until I’ve found the person I’m looking for.’

The man closed the passport and handed it back to her. ‘
Fáilte
. Welcome to Dublin, Mr Berekia. Nice
Leipreachán
.’

‘Thank you,’ Trása replied brightly. ‘He likes you too.’

With a cheerful smile, Trása picked Plunkett off the counter, slipped her stolen passport back into her bag and headed out toward the carousels to collect her luggage.

When she finally cleared Customs, using the same trick — or rather, Plunkett’s trick — of glamouring the officials, it was almost midday. Trása waited in line outside the terminal, shivering in the afternoon breeze that threatened to bring summer to an early close. After ten minutes or so, she was at the head of the queue. She climbed into the next cab and ordered the driver to take her to a nice hotel. She had quickly learnt that ‘nice’ hotels had cable TV. On the downside, nice hotels usually wanted credit cards and identification details. Still, she had a stash of those in her backpack, and she supposed Plunkett would have no more trouble acquiring credit cards here in Dublin than he had in London.

As they drove toward the city along the M1, past car parks on one side of the road and green fields bordered by hedgerows on the other, Trása pondered the dilemma of finding Rónán, now she was here in his home city.

Although the film premiere on TV last night had taken place in London, the same programs that delighted in repeating Rónán’s obscenity every hour or so were also quick to report he’d flown home to Dublin with his mother after the event where, they said, it was unlikely he would see the light of day again until he was thirty. Parents in this reality, Trása had gleaned, had a unique punishment for disrespectful children, known as ‘grounding’. Trása had no idea what it entailed, imagining it meant confining their children in some sort of dark, dank underground cavern until they learned the error of their ways.

If he’s buried underground
, Trása lamented,
that will make him rather more difficult to locate.

A check of the Dublin phone directory at the airport had proved fruitless. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of Kavanaughs listed, but there was no way of telling which one was the actress who had adopted Rónán. Trása would have to do this another way. She needed to find someone who knew where the famous actress Kiva Kavanaugh lived.

‘Have you lived in Dublin long?’ she asked the taxi driver, wondering if he might know.

‘All me life,’ the cabbie said, glancing at her in the rear-view mirror.

‘Do you know everybody, then?’ It was a reasonable question, Trása thought. She knew everyone in
Sí an Bhrú
.

‘Jayzus!’ the cabbie chuckled. ‘There’s near two million people in the greater Dublin area. I’d be stretched claiming to know more’n a score of them.’

‘What about someone famous, then?’ she asked, a little annoyed he seemed to be laughing at her. ‘Like people you see on TV. Do you know any of them?’

The cabbie wrenched the wheel, dodging across into the adjacent lane though a break in the traffic only someone with a great imagination could have spotted. It was a constant source of amazement to Trása that the roads of this reality weren’t lined with wrecked cars and corpses. It didn’t seem possible that so many dangerous vehicles in the hands of so many dangerous people were allowed to occupy the same roads at the same time, and it not result in multiple deaths and bloody chaos.

‘Had Bono in me cab once,’ the cabbie told her, scanning the traffic for another imaginary gap.

Trása was unimpressed, mostly because she had no idea who or what a bone-oh was.

‘What about Kiva Kavanaugh?’ she asked, growing impatient with her driver and more than a little fearful that she may not survive this trip. ‘Do you know her?’

‘I gotta tell you … I wouldn’t mind if I did,’ the cabbie said with a wink in the rear-view mirror. ‘Know what I mean?’

‘I need to find out where she lives.’

‘You’re not some crazy stalker, are you?’ This time he looked over his shoulder.

Keep your eyes on the road, you maniac!

‘I’m … a friend of her son’s.’

‘Well, you might as well turn around and go home then, girlie,’ the cabbie said. ‘If what I heard on the news is right, that foul-mouthed little bugger won’t be entertaining company until hell freezes over. Least, he wouldn’t if he was my pup.’

Trása was tiring of the cabbie’s banter. So was Plunkett, she suspected. She didn’t want the
Leipreachán
getting any ideas about glamouring their driver into a stupor while he was wending his way through the streets of Dublin in this sort of traffic. ‘Do you know where Kiva Kavanaugh lives, or not?’

The driver reached forward, grabbing a brochure from the dash, which he handed back to her.

‘What’s this?’

‘Dublin Guided Limousine Tours,’ the cabbie explained. ‘Tell ’em Dennis sent you. They’ll take you around, show you all the sights … you know, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin Castle and the Guinness Storehouse … although I suppose you’re a bit young for that to be of much interest to you.’

‘Will these Dublin Guided Limousine Tours people know where Kiva Kavanaugh lives?’

The cabbie shrugged. ‘Maybe. I suppose.’

‘Good,’ she said leaning back in the seat, pulling her jacket a little tighter against the air-conditioned chill of the cab. She glanced at Plunkett, who was staring into space with a blank expression, and added, ‘Then it won’t be long, now, before we can escape this crazy place and go home.’

To avoid the paparazzi waiting outside the main gate, Ren, Neil and Hayley took a cab home from Frascati Road and had it drop them outside Jack’s place. His porch was out of sight of the Kavanaugh front gates, so they were able to slip into the grounds of Ren’s house through the adjoining wall without the vultures out on the street catching sight of them.

The disadvantage of Ren’s clever plan was that he failed to notice the grey BMW parked outside the front of his house, which meant he was unprepared for the surprise awaiting him when he stepped into the kitchen. Fortunately, Ren’s pain had abated somewhat by then, and the wound had stopped bleeding, but he still needed to get upstairs and change his shirt before anybody spotted the bloodstain. That Hayley knew about his injury was bad enough, but at least he trusted her not to say anything.

His plans were foiled, however, by the visitor at the kitchen bench sipping a mug of fragrant coffee, waiting for them.

‘Dr Symes!’

The man fixed his gaze on Ren and smiled as they filed into the kitchen. He smiled a lot at his patients, in that patronising, know-it-all way he had, that made parents feel they were getting their money’s worth, and Ren feel like slamming his fist into that
smug, pompous face. No amount of argument on Ren’s part had ever convinced Kiva that — if she was going to hire a shrink to deal with his ‘behavioural issues’ — she ought to start by hiring a doctor Ren didn’t frequently fantasise about murdering after ten minutes in one of his sessions.

Murray Symes was a tall, elegant man, with a slightly receding hairline going grey in all the right places. He looked the part of the understanding and compassionate child psychiatrist, which is why Kiva trusted him, Ren supposed. He was sure it wasn’t because he was a brilliant shrink, despite his hourly rate.

‘Ah, Ren,’ Murray said, taking a sip of his coffee. ‘I thought you might try to sneak past me through the back door.’

‘I wasn’t sneaking anywhere,’ Ren said, scowling.

He knew why Murray Symes was here. Dropping the F-word on national television definitely came under the heading of ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’, which is what Symes had diagnosed Ren as suffering from.

…
With low self-esteem manifested by frequent episodes of self-harm
, Murray’s notes said,
which the patient vehemently denies, claiming he has no knowledge of the origin of his injuries, which range from minor cuts to near lethal doses of homeopathic poisons.

Ren had sneaked a peek at his file once, when Murray left him alone in his office to deal with some ranting parent in the waiting room. Murray Symes was Europe’s leading expert on Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
All
his patients suffered from it.

As far as Ren was concerned, the whole ODD diagnosis was a load of complete horseshit. Since when had a seventeen-year-old arguing with his mother become a disease?

‘Hello, Neil, Hayley,’ Murray said, smiling at them too. Not that it did him any good. The Boyle children were even less impressed by Dr Symes’s efforts to befriend them than Ren was.

‘Do you know where Mum is?’ Neil asked, backing up slightly
to stay closer to Ren and his sister, almost as if he felt the need for their protection.

‘I believe Kerry is doing the laundry, Neil,’ Symes said, placing his coffee on the granite countertop. ‘Why don’t you and your sister run along and show her what you bought, while Ren and I talk?’

There was no need to ask Neil twice. He fled the kitchen in the direction of the utility room without any further encouragement. Hayley hesitated, spared Ren a sympathetic glance, and then followed her brother out of the kitchen.

‘Have a seat, Ren.’

There wasn’t much point in refusing. Ren’s main job now was to ensure Symes didn’t realise he had an eight-inch-long cut on his left side, another injury certain to be attributed to his low self-esteem. He walked over to the island bench, pulled out a stool, and sat down opposite the psychiatrist.

‘I think we need to have a little chat, Ren,’ Murray said, watching Ren closely. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Not particularly. Is Kiva up yet?’

‘She’s been up for hours.’

‘Ah,’ Ren concluded. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

Murray smiled. Ren unconsciously clenched his fists under the counter.

‘I’m here, Ren, because you did something very disruptive at your mother’s film premiere last night.’

Disruptive was code for naughty. Murray Symes would never dream of telling a child he was naughty. That might have a negative effect on his self-esteem.

‘I didn’t mean to embarrass Kiva by saying fuck on TV,’ Ren lied. ‘It just slipped out.’

‘Why do you call her Kiva?’ Murray asked, using his favourite tactic of abruptly changing the subject to keep his patient unbalanced. ‘You hardly ever refer to her as “mum” or “mother”.’

‘Well, technically, Kiva’s not my mother,’ Ren said.

Murray smiled even wider, as if provoking Ren was the aim of the discussion, rather than finding out what might have caused this latest embarrassing manifestation of Ren’s ODD. ‘Do you resent the fact that Kiva is not your birth mother?’

‘Only when she tries to drag me down the red carpet to increase her award chances, by reminding everyone what a fucking great humanitarian she is because she adopted the poor kid who washed up on her film set.’

The doctor nodded, not reacting to Ren’s obscenity. ‘I see. So you set out to undermine her chances at professional success because …?’ Murray let the sentence hang.

Ren was too wily to fall into the trap of completing it.

‘Kiva can have all the professional success she wants,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Just don’t try to make me a part of it. Are we done? I want a shower before dinner.’ Actually, he wanted to get up to his room and clean the bloodstain from the light switch before Kerry spotted it and reported it to Kiva. With Patrick’s offer to smuggle them out the front gate in the Bentley this morning, he never got a chance to get rid of it before they left.

‘Not quite. Take off your jacket.’

‘What?’

‘This house is air-conditioned and climate-controlled, Ren. Winter or summer, it’s shirt-sleeve temperature in here and yet there you sit, sweating in a tracksuit jacket.’

‘I like my jacket.’

‘And a very nice jacket it is, too. Now take it off.’

It occurred to Ren that Kerry may have already found the blood on the light switch, and Murray knew he was hiding something. That, and not last night’s
faux pas
on national television, may even be the reason Kiva had called him. If Kerry decided to do the laundry today, she would have checked every hamper in the house. Ren had ditched the bloodstained T-shirt
at Jack’s place, but his clothes hamper was in his bathroom and Kerry was meticulous, with a nose like a bloodhound for the minutest speck of dirt. A blood-smeared light switch had no hope of escaping her attention.

Still, there was a remote chance Ren could bluff his way out of this.

‘Christ,’ he said, standing up and taking a step back from the counter. ‘You’re a fucking pervert.’

Murray was not impressed. ‘Don’t try that on with me, Ren.’

‘Is that how you get your kicks, you sick bastard?’ he asked, feigning disgust. ‘By molesting the poor defenceless kids in your care?’

‘Ren,’ Murray warned. ‘Stop it.’

‘Stop what? Exposing you for what you really are, you dirty old man?’

Murray maintained an admirable air of serenity in the face of Ren’s ludicrous accusation. ‘This is just your way of acting out. Calm down.’

‘Calm down!’ Ren yelled, getting right into the moment. After all, his mother was an award-winning actress. A lifetime spent on film sets surrounded by the greatest directors of this generation had taught Ren a thing or two about being dramatic. He raised his voice even louder. ‘I will not calm down! You’re disgusting. And I’m not taking my clothes off for you! I don’t care what you threaten me with!’

As he’d hoped it would, his yelling brought Kiva running into the kitchen. She wasn’t looking nearly so immaculate this afternoon. She was barefoot, wearing a roughly tied blue silk bathrobe over her nightdress. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was mussed and stiff and pointing in several odd directions.

‘Ren? What’s the matter?’ she asked, looking back and forth between him and the psychiatrist. ‘What are you yelling about?’

‘You gotta save me, Mum!’ he cried. He hurried around the bench to put Kiva between him and Murray, as if he feared for his safety, even though he stood a head taller than Kiva and had done since he was fourteen. ‘This depraved bastard is trying to make me take my clothes off.’

‘Murray?’ Kiva asked, looking more perplexed than worried.

‘Pay no attention to Ren’s histrionics, Kiva,’ Murray said calmly. ‘He’s simply trying to divert attention from the fact that he’s cut himself again.’

Bollocks
, Ren thought.
He knows.

‘All I did was ask Ren to remove his jacket,’ the shrink added, ‘so I could check his arms for injury.’

Kiva turned to Ren, looking mortified. ‘Is that true, Ren? Did you cut yourself again?’

‘No,’ Ren replied adamantly — and quite honestly. Whatever wounds he was carrying, he hadn’t inflicted them on himself. He pushed his sleeves up and held out his bare forearms for examination. ‘There! You see! Not a mark.’

‘Kerry found blood on the light switch in your bathroom.’

‘I cut myself shaving,’ he said. ‘It happens. Even to people without low self-esteem.’

Murray studied him closely for a moment from across the counter and then shook his head. ‘You don’t appear to have shaved this morning.’

‘How the fuck would you know?’

‘Ren! Stop this!’ Kiva exclaimed, her eyes welling up with tears. ‘Dear God, I don’t know where I went wrong with you!’

‘How about the day you pulled me out of that lake,’ Ren said, a little regretful that the comment would cut Kiva to the core. Deep down, he did love Kiva, and he knew that she, in her somewhat quirky way, loved him too. She didn’t deserve such cruel words, but he needed a legitimate reason to flee the kitchen
before Murray decided he really must take off his jacket, and Ren’s greater lie was exposed.

‘He doesn’t mean that, Kiva,’ Murray said, calm as a frozen lake. ‘He’s just trying to hurt you to mask his own pain, isn’t that right, Ren?’

‘If it meant I didn’t have to deal with this sort of bullshit,’ Ren said, mostly to Murray Symes, who was the true focus of his immediate problem. ‘I reckon I might have been better off if Patrick had left me there to drown!’

With that, Ren turned and stormed out of the room before Murray or Kiva could order him to stay, confident the discussion would no longer be about him. Murray Symes was going to have to spend the next hour or so consoling Kiva, and perhaps reassuring her that twenty thousand US dollars would be a small price to pay for a Utah Brat Camp if it meant Ren could be saved from himself.

Ren took the stairs two at a time, locked the door to his room and headed for his bathroom where the light switch was now free of blood smears. He poured a glass of water from the tap then took out of his pocket the two codeine tables Jack had given him earlier. He swallowed them with a grimace and went back into his room, kicked off his shoes and lay on his bed, wondering how long it would be before the pain in his side abated enough for him to keep up the pretence that nothing was wrong.