Her dad brought her home and the house was now full of people. Some of them she knew like her aunties and uncles and neighbours but most of the people in the room she didn’t know.
Then Auntie Carole came running out from the kitchen and said, “Oh thank God – thank God you’re okay. Where did you go to, Isla? You had me worried sick!” Her Scottish accent was stronger than her mum’s but it was even stronger then and Isla knew by her voice that Carole was really mad at her but was trying to hide it.
Her mother came into the room then and stood just inside the door. Isla remembered her make-up was all smudged and she wondered why she didn’t try to clean it. Her eyes looked around the room and then they stopped on her. Isla knew she was going to say something but no sound could be heard. It felt like forever until they waited for her to speak.
Then it came: “Of all days, Isla . . .” She paused. “Of all the days you could pick to do this!” Her voice choked. “Just for one day could you not behave yourself? Would that be too much to ask? We put your baby brother in a wooden box in the cold ground today and you decide that this is the day to just disappear! Why does everything have to be a drama with you?”
It felt like everyone in the whole room was staring at her through narrowed eyes. She felt their eyes burning into her, like everyone in the room hated her just like her mum did. She turned, ran out of the room, up the stairs and into the bedroom that she shared with Jo. She closed the door behind her and it was only then that she noticed Jo was lying back on her bed with two red eyes.
“Where did you go to, Isla? Everyone was looking for you.”
“I went into Mr Taylor’s house but it’s okay because I didn’t see any cages.”
“You have to promise me, Isla, that you’ll never go there again, do you hear me? Gareth Waldron said that Mr Taylor used to talk to the little girl that lived in our house before us and that’s why her family had to move away.”
Her name was Mandy, the girl who used to talk to Mr Taylor. Isla knew that because her name was scribbled on the Holly Hobbie wallpaper on the inside of her bed in purple crayon. When they first moved in, her mum had wanted to change the wallpaper but Isla had begged her not to, so she had left it there. She lay back onto the bed and traced her fingers over the loops and curves of her writing.
“You stepped on a crack coming home from school on Wednesday,” she said.
Jo would always go to great lengths to avoid the cracks – she said you’d get seven years bad luck if you stood on one. She was really careful, almost to the point that it looked like she was playing hopscotch going down the street with her pigtails swinging out as she jumped. Isla tried to avoid them too but sometimes she would land on one or else she would clear one but then accidently land on another with the side of her foot or heel. David had died on Wednesday.
Isla was disturbed by how quickly a good memory could always be tainted by a bad one in her head. That photograph was a metaphor for her whole childhood really: for every good memory there was an ugly one waiting to push it out again.
Greg came over then and looked at the photograph over her shoulder. “That’s a cute one, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I think I was about six or seven when it was taken.”
“Here, this is for you –” He handed her an envelope and then he fished a small box wrapped in purple tissue paper out of his pocket. “Happy birthday.”
“Oh Greg – you really shouldn’t have –” Her hands flew up towards her mouth.
“I just saw it and thought you might like it . . .” His eyes flicked down towards the ground.
Isla untied the silver ribbon that the parcel was tied with and lifted back the lid of the box. Inside was a bracelet with alternating pearls and green stones.
“I chose pearls because they’re your birthstone – I kept the receipt so you can take it back if you don’t like it.”
“No, it’s beautiful! Thank you, Greg.” She was almost speechless by how kind he was.
“Where are your manners by the way – did no one ever teach you to open the card first?” he said with a laugh.
“Oh sorry, Greg.” She opened the envelope and felt the familiar thud of her heart. She took out the card and pretended to read it. It was joined writing. There was no chance of her being able to pick out any words. It was all a mess of loops and scrolls. They were all jumbled together, running into one another on the white card.
He was looking at her expectantly.
“Sorry, Greg, I left my glasses at home.”
“You can’t read, can you?”
She felt everything stop. Her ears filled with blood until they rang. “Yes, I can!” she said indignantly.
“Why don’t you get help?” he was saying in the softest voice.
“I don’t know what you’re even talking about, Greg!”
“Why are you so damned stubborn?”
“I’m not.”
“Why can’t you let yourself be happy?”
“I am happy.”
“Well, maybe you are but you could be happier. You deserve more, Isla,” he said softly.
“Look, Greg, if this is because of us then I’m sorry but I can’t change how I feel.”
“It’s not just that – look at you – I’ve seen your paintings – you have such a talent and you work here with me. You don’t value yourself, you won’t push yourself out of your comfort zone.” He positioned himself in front of her and took her hand firmly in his. “Let me help you, Isla, please.” A dark curl fell over his eyes and he pushed it back out of the way.
“I can’t, Greg, I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He let go of her hand. “Well, the way I see it is that you have had your finger on the self-destruct button for your whole life. If you don’t want to help yourself, there isn’t much more I can do for you.” He walked past her into the kitchen.
That evening Jo moved around the kitchen getting the dinner ready. Ryan hadn’t yet come home. He was late. She decided to go upstairs to Réiltín and see if she wanted to join her downstairs for a while. She longed for her daughter’s company. A parenting book that she had read recently had said that if you felt your teenager was growing distant, it was important to keep the lines of communication open so she climbed the stairs and knocked softly on her daughter’s bedroom door. She took a deep breath and entered.
“The dinner is almost ready so I thought you might like to take a break for a little while and come downstairs until it’s ready?”
“No, Mum, I can’t. I’ve too much to do.” Réiltín didn’t raise her head from her laptop.
“Oh . . . okay then . . . well, it’ll be ready in another ten minutes.”
She went back downstairs. She wished Réiltín wouldn’t keep pushing her away like that. She tried phoning Ryan to see where he was but he didn’t pick up. She began to grow worried; he always rang if he was going to be late home.
When the dinner was ready she called up to Réiltín but, when she didn’t appear, she was forced to climb the stairs again to tell her.
Réiltín followed her down and sat at the table.
“Where’s Dad?” she asked, grabbing a slice of garlic bread from the dish Jo had put in the centre of the table.
“I’m not sure,” Jo said, serving up the pasta bake. “I’m sure he’ll be home soon.”
Jo made conversation with her daughter, asking about her homework, her hockey training, how her friends were doing. Réiltín just replied with one-word answers. Finally she heard Ryan’s key in the door and relief flooded through her.
“I was worried about you,” she said when he appeared in the doorway of their kitchen.
“Worried? Jo, I was working late,” he said tersely, putting his laptop bag down on the floor.
“I know, I know, I was being ridiculous – I was imagining all sorts. So maybe you could ring me next time, yeah? Just so I don’t worry?”
“Jesus, Jo, I’m an hour later than usual! Why don’t you put a GPS tracking device on me or
something!” He sighed heavily.
“Sorry, my mind was running away with itself,” she mumbled, feeling embarrassed.
He sat down at the table and he and Réiltín exchanged a look. Jo knew that look and she hated it. Like they were a team and she was the outsider.
“Would anyone like to go the movies at the weekend?” she asked, trying to change the subject.
Nobody answered her and she felt silly then.
“Right, I’ll take that as a no then, shall I?” she said, helping herself to another small wedge of the bake.
They ate the rest of the meal in silence.
Chapter 17
Sticks and Stones
Isla let herself in the door and climbed up the stairs with a heaviness that she didn’t usually feel. Once inside the flat, she stared around the small living area, the narrow kitchenette and the well-worn sofa with the throws she had knitted for it. This was it, she thought, this was all she had managed to do with her life by the age of thirty-nine. She didn’t have a partner, she didn’t have a child and now it was too late for that. And she couldn’t read. She kept thinking about what Greg had said to her. She felt so embarrassed that he had been able to see through her charade. What if he told the others? What if she went in to work tomorrow and everyone knew that she couldn’t read? Her stomach churned at the thought of facing everyone in the morning but something deep down told her that he wouldn’t do that. What had surprised her the most was that he hadn’t laughed or joked like she had always expected people would do if they ever found out. In fact, he had seemed concerned about her which nearly made her feel worse about it all.
Isla was supposed to wear glasses but she usually never wore them because she needed to have an excuse to cover up the fact that she couldn’t read properly. Whenever anyone asked her to read something, she told them that she had forgotten her glasses or had left them at home or that she couldn’t find them. She had an array of carefully prepared excuses for every scenario. That was the reason she did a job where you didn’t really need to be able to read; once you were able to talk to people you could get around almost everything. Not even Jo knew. She wasn’t sure how she had managed to hide it from her over the years. Sometimes she saw ads on TV for help lines for people with reading difficulties and she thought about ringing the number but then she chickened out again. She had been managing fine as she was, or so she had thought.
In school, Isla had never had a brilliant relationship with her teachers but her teacher in fourth class, Mrs Wallace, seemed to hate her particularly. She would hiss at her and the spittle would fly from her mouth in every direction as Isla squirmed in front of her. She moved her onto a table on her own then because she said that Isla was holding the rest of her table back with her stupidity. Isla had had to sit alone at a table facing sideways so that on her right was the blackboard and on her left were the rest of the thirty-eight girls in her class. The other girls took to calling her ‘Isla the Island’. Isla would sit at her own table island and when her teacher would ask her to read the words on the blackboard she would scrunch up her eyes and try really hard but she could only see a blurry jumble of letters. ‘O’ would bounce before her and ‘a’ would turn into ‘e’, sixes grew into eights and back again. The letters and numbers would become so shaky that she was unsure about which one it was. Inside her head she would be praying for them to stop moving. She would try to make out the shape of the letter but by the time she would figure one out and try to do the next one, she would have forgotten the first letter and her teacher would get mad and roar ‘You stupid girl! Don’t you dare insult me by scrunching up your face like that in my class! If you can’t be bothered learning then I can’t be bothered to teach you!” Then she would fire all the coloured chalk pieces that usually rested in the dusty pit at the bottom of the blackboard at Isla. They would come raining down around her like bullets. One after the other they would come, some hitting her on the head, some missing her and landing on the floor, others crashing off the desk.
It was a routine eye test that revealed she had very bad eyesight and that was why she would squint. Her mother had taken her to the optician’s and she had to pick from a range of terrible glasses that were in bright colours “specially for children”, as the optician had told her mum. Isla wanted a purple pair but her mother said they would clash with her hair and instead picked out a bottle-green pair for her. Isla had hated them. “Oh, don’t you look lovely, chicken!” the assistant in the optician’s had said. “Doesn’t she look as cute as a button in them?” Isla knew by her forced niceness that she looked hideous. She was ten years old – she didn’t want to look “as cute as a button”.
She went into school the next day and as soon as she walked into her classroom they started saying: “What’s on your face, Isla the Island?”
She had said nothing and kept walking over to her solitary table.
“Oh look, Isla the Island is now Isla the Alien!”
“Specky-four-eyes!”
Then someone started singing the ‘Star Trekkin’’ song and they all joined in.
With the chorus of thirty-eight girls singing, Isla had kept looking down at the floor. The pressure of tears was building up in her eyes until she couldn’t hold them back any more and they came spilling out and rolling down along her face until she couldn’t see through the glasses anyway.
The next day, as soon as Jo said goodbye to her in the schoolyard, she had taken the glasses off. She didn’t dare let Jo see her doing it because she knew she would tell their mum if she didn’t wear them. She would put them on again for the walk home, as soon as they were beyond the schoolyard. She wouldn’t wear them in class even though Mrs Wallace would scream at her for squinting at the board.
“Where are your glasses, Isla Forde?” she would roar at her.
“I forgot to bring them this morning,” Isla would lie.
“You see, didn’t I tell you she was a stupid girl?” the teacher would announce to the rest of the class.
Not wearing her glasses probably isolated her even more than she realised. She fell behind the rest of the class because she could never read what was on the blackboard. She retreated into her own world and started sketching in the margins around the text.
She took a pizza out of the freezer and put it in the oven and then she poured herself a glass of wine.
“Happy birthday, Isla,” she said out loud so her words filled the small room. “Haven’t you done well for yourself?”
Chapter 18
La Vita è Bella
When Isla woke up the next morning she could feel her head thumping before she had even attempted to open her eyes. Her mouth was dry and it tasted awful. She delicately manoeuvred herself into a sitting position, while at the same time trying to minimise the pain that was thumping through her head. She finally dared to peel her eyes open. The room seemed to be spinning. She put her feet over the side of the bed and stumbled onto the floor but had to sit back down again because she thought that she was going to fall over. She had drunk the whole bottle of wine herself and she was paying for it now.
She tried to get up again and managed to pull herself up slowly. She made her way into the kitchen and pulled out the drawer to see if she had any Paracetamol. She rooted around amongst spools of thread, keys that she didn’t know where their locks were and a box that had opened spilling coloured paperclips all over the drawer. Eventually she had found the white blister pack and popped two tablets, swallowing them down with a drink of water. She felt a nauseous hunger growing inside her stomach and she needed something to settle it fast so she opened the press to find some bread. There was only the heel left so she pushed it down into the toaster.
As she sat on the sofa eating her buttered toast she heard the doorbell go. Groaning, she dragged herself up and went down the stairs to answer it.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, pulling open the door to see Réiltín standing there.
“I was trying to ring you! Want to hang out? Dad i
s playing golf and Mum is working from home so she said I could come over to you for a few hours.”
“Oh sorry, I didn’t turn my phone on yet. Come on up.” Isla climbed back up the stairs with Réiltín following behind her. Her head thumped with every step.
They sank into the sofa beside each other. The curtains were still drawn on the grey day beyond the window.
“Want to watch a movie?” Isla asked.
“Can I choose?” Réiltín said, jumping up and going over to Isla’s DVD tower.
“Go on then.”
“What’s this like?” Réiltín asked, holding up the cover of Pulp Fiction.
“Your mum would kill me.”
“Maybe this one?”
It was No Country for Old Men. Isla shook her head. “Try again.”
“How about this one?” She was holding up the cover of Life is Beautiful.
“Good choice,” Isla said, taking it from her and putting into the player.
Isla dragged the duvet from her bed and put a bag of popcorn in the microwave and then they both settled down to watch the movie. She had lost track of the number of times that she had watched it but it was Réiltín’s first time to see it and Isla was enjoying seeing her emotions unfold as the film played.
She looked over at Réiltín as the film was ending and saw she had tears streaming down her face.
“That’s just so sad,” Réiltín cried as Guido, who was being led off by the Nazi soldier to be executed, passed by his son Joshua one last time, still keeping up the charade that it was all just a game.
“Hey,” Isla said, taking her in her arms, “I know – I was like that the first time I saw it too. That’s why I love it so much.”
She wiped away her niece’s tears and stroked her auburn hair with its shades of gold and electric blue streaks. As she allowed herself to look at her face, she studied its familiar outline. She didn’t usually allow herself to dwell on it but now she couldn’t help thinking back to how she came to be. It seemed ironic considering the situation she now found herself in, and lately she couldn’t help thinking back to that time in their lives.
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