Eithne Shortall studied journalism at Dublin City University and has lived in London, France and America. Now based in Dublin, she is chief arts writer for the Sunday Times Ireland. Her debut novel, Love in Row 27, published in 2017, was a major Irish bestseller, and her second novel, Grace After Henry, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards and won Best Page Turner at the UK’s Big Book Awards.
Also by Eithne Shortall
Grace After Henry
Love in Row 27
First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2019 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Eithne Shortall, 2019
The moral right of Eithne Shortall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 619 5
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78 649 621 8
Printed in Great Britain
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For Fidelma Curran, who is my mother –
and for that, I’ll forever be grateful.
‘Blood is thicker than water, but neither’s as thick as mortar.’
Shay Morrissey, long-time Pine Road resident
*** Pine Road Poker ***
Bernie:
Hi, all. Number 6 found a hole in their back garden this morning.
That makes *three* in one week. I hope we can all take this seriously now? I have spoken to Island Stores and they’ve ordered in extra rat poison. Remember to say ‘Pine Road Discount’ to get ten per cent off. Regards, Bernie Watters-Reilly
Ellen:
So well said, Bernie – as always. We’ve already put down two doses.
Edie:
Will buy ours asap. Thanks for organising, Bernie! X
Ruby:
I wonder where the little buggers are coming from?
Ellen:
From Number 8, no doubt. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but for the lack of attention Mrs Ryan paid to her garden she should have been taken out and shot before the pneumonia had a chance to get her. Yes, she was 97, but how much upper body strength do you need to pull a few weeds? I just hope the new people sort it out.
Any sign of the woman yet?
Ruby:
Saw the husband and daughters leaving again this morning. No sign of the wife, though.
Carmel:
I’ve got Robin on window watch.
Fiona:
She’s definitely in there, Ellen hun! I can hear the radio. XXXX
Rita Ann:
Did anyone take the Irish Times from my doorstep this morning? I need yesterday’s Sudoku results. The paper of ‘record’ would appear to have made a mistake.
Ruby:
Are you asking if we stole your newspaper?
Rita Ann:
I’m wondering if someone took it by accident.
Ruby:
Maybe the rats took it.
Fiona:
Do you think so??
Ruby:
No.
Fiona:
Do you think the rats might affect house prices?
Ellen:
I didn’t know Robin was still staying with you, Carmel. Everything okay with her at home?
Fiona:
We already have poor aspect. I wouldn’t like a rodent rumour to depreciate our value any further ...
Rita Ann:
Who cares about a few mice when there’s a thief in our midst??
If my paper is returned by dinnertime, all supplements intact, I’m willing, on this one occasion, to turn a blind eye.
Ruby:
Rita Ann and the Case of the Missing Broadsheet.
Bernie:
Poison, ladies! Do not forget the poison!
ONE
Martha Rigby had been sitting at the kitchen table since Robert left for work. The girls, who had taken to their new school with such ease it almost seemed pointed, had set off before either parent was awake.
There were boxes everywhere, furniture still stacked in corners, gas and electricity readings jotted down on a pad in front of her waiting to be registered, a to-do list lying unticked beside it.
She knew she should stand up, make a start on things.
The radio played on and the light through the grubby windows grew brighter.
She looked around the room and felt a profound sense of detachment. The idea of doing anything was so exhausting that the only reason she could think to stand was to go back to bed. Oscar snored by the back door. She’d have to get up eventually, if only to let him out to do his business.
Her distorted reflection glinted in the oven door. The old her, the real her, would never have let it get to this.
Maybe she should take the tablets Dr Morten had prescribed. There was no shame in it. Most people who’d been through what she’d been through would have been knocking them back well before now. Dr Morten had made that very clear. But Martha took pride in her will-power. She’d had her wisdom teeth out last June without so much as a painkiller. In fact, the last time she took paracetamol was four years ago, and she’d only allowed herself that indulgence because it was the morning after her blow-out fortieth birthday party.
Martha didn’t take drugs unless entirely necessary. If her body had something to tell her, she wanted to be able to hear it.
But then, this wasn’t a toothache or a hangover she was dealing with. To put it mildly.
The radio jingle went for the eleven o’clock news. She could have sworn the ten o’clock bulletin had just ended. She’d hear the headlines, see if anything had happened beyond these walls in the past hour, and then she’d stand up.
Hospital bed shortage . . . No-deal Brexit a possibility . . . Calls for improved sex education . . . Irish accent voted sexiest in the world.
The male Irish accent, she noted. No mention of its female counterpart. Presumably this was what Sinead meant when she said the patriarchy was always at work. ‘And we’re working for it, Mum,’ she’d insisted the previous evening before Robert told her pubic hair was not a suitable topic for dinner-table conversation. That just set her off again. Her father’s views were ‘a domestic iteration of the institutionalised subjugation of women’s bodies’. Robert gave up then and went back to his microwaved lasagne.
Martha hoped this new school would be as good as the last. Both her girls had loved their old place. Sinead had been chair of the debating team and had just been made editor of the paper, despite only being in fifth year, when she was yanked out of her old life and shoved into this one. And with that, Martha’s mind was off, rushing down the M7, fleeing their new life, heading back to their old one, but she caught herself just before the Limerick exit.
She redirected her attention to the radio.
Was that really news, though? About the Irish accent? An international poll conducted by some travel company you’d never heard of and verified by nobody
?
Martha thought of all the terrible things that happened in the world and never made the news. She wouldn’t have wanted their ordeal broadcast on national airwaves – the local papers picking up on it was bad enough; though Robert hadn’t minded at all – yet it was amazing how there’d never been a question of it. Nobody had considered such an event worthy of twenty seconds of radio coverage, not when matters as important as ‘orgasmic accents’ needed the nation’s attention. What had been on the news the day it happened? She thought and thought but she couldn’t remember.
Perhaps she was doing a better job of blocking it out than she realised.
She’d leave the tablets for another while so.
The bulletin ended, the weather was reported and Martha continued to stare out the kitchen window into a garden so overgrown the weeds were practically coming in to get her. The old woman who’d lived here before had gone into hospital with pneumonia and never come out. The place had smelled faintly, but persistently, of fermented cat urine when they arrived. Robert insisted he couldn’t smell anything, of course. It had lessened now, or maybe she’d just gotten used to it.
Martha hated her new kitchen. She hated the whole house. She knew these red-brick homes were highly sought after, but she couldn’t stand how old they were. No matter what she might do – and admittedly she hadn’t done much yet – everything felt dirty. She hated how the floorboards creaked even when she wasn’t standing on them and how there always seemed to be a draught coming from somewhere. She missed their home; the nice, modern country pile about 12 miles outside Limerick city, with its high energy rating and underfloor heating. She and Robert had it built right after they were married, with the plan of never moving.
Number eight Pine Road had cost almost twice as much as their forever home. It was an obscene amount of money for a place that wasn’t half as cosy. But the worst bit, the bit that made her want to twist a tea towel into a ball and stuff it into her mouth to muffle her red-hot rage, was that they could only afford this money pit because Robert had gotten a promotion – and he’d only gotten a promotion because of what had happened to them, because of what had caused them to move in the first place.
Martha knew her family blamed her for the move. She was the one who could no longer sleep in their house; it was her who’d uprooted everyone, moved the girls away from their friends, made them change schools. Robert, meanwhile, had swooped in and saved the day, yet again. He had made an alternative possible. Three months on and he was still the hero.
The thoughts boiled up and Martha wondered if she’d have to get up and grab the towel from the draining board. She couldn’t even scream freely in her own, empty home. A terrace was supposed to be safer, that had been the idea, but all Martha felt was suffocated.
Anyway, no. She was fine. A few deep breaths and it passed. She stayed put.
Inane theme tunes and canned laughter reverberated faintly through the walls. It wasn’t fair, she knew, but she instantly presumed her new neighbours were stupid, lazy. Martha had never been tempted to turn on her own television before dark. There’d be no coming back from that. Besides, before, she wouldn’t have had the time.
There had been car-pool rosters to draw up for school runs; club meetings and soccer practices to supervise; Meals on Wheels to deliver; evening walks with Helen and Audrey; morning yoga; afternoon coffee. She’d been so busy she usually didn’t have time to read the monthly book club selection and resorted to stealing opinions from GoodReads right before the meeting. The idea of sitting down to watch an afternoon rerun of some sitcom was inconceivable.
The weather report ended and the current affairs show returned, straight into a more detailed report on the hospital bed shortage. Still, Martha sat and stared out into the weeds. Still, she did not budge.
‘Muh-ummm!’
‘We’re home!’
The door slammed and several kilos of books hit the barely varnished floor. Martha, who’d been carrying bathroom wares upstairs, put down the toothbrush holder and bolstered herself.
‘I’m starving!’
‘No you’re not!’
‘Yes I am!’
‘Starvation is a serious state endured by millions of people worldwide every day, Orla. It’s when you haven’t eaten for, like, ten days. You had a Chomp on the way home.’
‘Muh-ummm! Tell Sinead to shut up!’
Martha hurried down the stairs. ‘Girls! Keep it down! The neighbours will think a pack of wolves has moved in.’ She picked up the backpacks dumped in the hallway. Had they been this heavy at their old school? ‘Don’t leave these lying around.’
‘There’s nowhere to put them.’
‘How about under the stairs?’
Orla looked at her mother like she’d been personally wounded. ‘We never used to put them under the stairs.’
‘She’s right, Mum,’ said Sinead, who only ever agreed with her sister when it enabled her to more robustly disagree with Martha. ‘We used to put them below the coat stand in the hall. But this house doesn’t even have a coat stand.’
Martha observed her daughters: Sinead giving her a look that said ‘tell me I’m wrong, go on, I dare you’, and Orla watching from behind a curtain of lank hair and massive glasses. They were so entirely fine. It was as if nothing had ever happened to them.
The sound of another key in the lock made Martha jump. She had a hundred mini heart attacks every day; this had occurred to her upstairs earlier, in the bathroom, when the hot tap had unexpectedly creaked. There was a thud from the other side of the front door as it jammed in its frame. Her husband’s voice floated through: ‘Will you just – bloody – work!’
The girls shrugged and sauntered down towards the kitchen. When the front door finally opened and Robert appeared in the hallway, Martha let the schoolbags slump to the ground.
‘Hello, darling,’ said Robert, reaching around awkwardly to kiss her cheek. ‘I managed to finish up early today. At least someone’s here to greet me.’ His daughters were disappearing down the couple of steps and through to the kitchen without so much as a backwards glance. ‘I remember the days when they used to come running to greet me.’ He shook his head and smiled ruefully. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’ Martha moved away from him to shut the front door, which he’d left ajar. She could feel his eyes on her.
‘I was going to close that.’
‘We need to get it fixed,’ she said, doing her best to make it lock.
‘It’s grand. It’s just a little stiff.’
‘It doesn’t’ – Martha pushed it again – ‘close’ – Robert came to help and she gave it a final, massive shove – ‘properly!’ The thing slammed into place just as he went to touch it and, for a moment, they both just looked at it.
Martha lifted the schoolbags again and carried them over to the storage area under the stairs. The estate agent had told them a lot of the neighbours had turned this into a downstairs bathroom. Martha found that hard to believe. It was so small. She pulled the door open and went to toss the bags in but was confronted by more boxes. So this was where the movers had put the contents of their old utility room. ‘Is there no space anywhere?’ she muttered, closing the door again and sliding the bags back to where the girls had originally thrown them just inside the front door. ‘We need to get a coat stand.’
‘We need to get a lot of things,’ Robert agreed, offering his wife a sympathetic smile. Her expression didn’t change so he dropped it. ‘Don’t worry, darling, we’ll get to it.’
Martha welded her mouth shut. She’d get to it, he meant. He’d keep saying everything was grand and eventually she’d fix it. As soon as their old house went on the market, Robert had acted like the nitty-gritty of the move had nothing to do with him. He was just here for the grand gestures.
She hated him.
The thought was so strong, and so unexpected, that it frightened her. She felt guilty, then angry again. She wanted to grab a sleeping bag from under the stairs and scream.
>
‘Get up to anything today?’
Martha watched as Robert shrugged off his jacket and looked around helplessly for somewhere to hang it and his briefcase.
‘Nothing very interesting, no.’
‘Did you get a start on the unpacking?’
‘Yes, Robert, of course I did. Do you think I’ve been lounging around drinking cocktails all day? I mean, maybe when I find the cocktail shaker, but I haven’t gotten to that box yet.’
‘Of course not. I was just asking. Did you . . .’ He hesitated. He was trying to annoy her now, looking at her like she was going to bite his head off.
She let out a heavy sigh. ‘What?’
‘Did you see about joining some classes at the community centre? Not that I mind if you don’t, of course. It’s just that you said you might . . .’
‘Not yet.’
‘Okay, well, no rush. Knowing you, you won’t be able to stay cooped up here much longer. You’ll probably be running the classes by the end of the month.’
Martha doubted that very much. ‘I might go tomorrow.’
‘Absolutely. Great. And did you see about registering with the local doctor? Just for a quick chat?’
She shot him a look. ‘Don’t patronise me, Robert.’
‘I wasn’t. I just thought—’
‘Well, maybe don’t. Maybe next time you have a thought, just keep it to yourself.’ Martha turned from her husband and followed her daughters into the kitchen.
Orla was hunting through the boxes and Sinead was on her phone ignoring Oscar, who was trying desperately to offer her the paw.
Martha watched them going about their new lives like it was all they’d ever known. Orla pulled a bowl from a box and hugged it like a long-lost friend.
‘Old bluey! I forgot about you!’
Sinead was staring out the window into the weed jungle now, preoccupied by the transient concerns of teenage girls.
Martha wanted to grab them. She wanted to shake her daughters by the shoulders and demand to know how they dared to be so fine.
Why aren’t you waking, sweating, in the middle of the night? Why don’t you jump every time a book falls from the table, or look around for me whenever a floorboard creaks?
Three Little Truths Page 1