Barefoot Over Stones

by Liz Lyons

  Ciara had finished her own crab cakes and had now speared one of Leda’s with her fork and dragged it across the table in full sight of the disapproving waiter. ‘So are you going to tell me what has you looking like such a scrawny bird? No offence, but you look like shite.’

  ‘Gee, thanks, Sis.’

  ‘You know me. I tell it like I see it. So spit it out. Did this Colm guy treat you bad or what? ’Cause I’ll go and beat him up if he has. I have some vengeance of my own that I could take out on him.’

  ‘No, not Colm. He wouldn’t do that. The thing is, I had a baby boy seven weeks ago.’

  Ciara had just downed a huge mouthful of her lunch, and the shock of what she just thought she heard her sister say made her gag. She ditched what was left of the mouthful into her cloth napkin. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘I said I had a baby. Seven weeks ago. It’s a boy.’

  ‘Am I raving here or something? This means you were pregnant when you were in Spain. Why didn’t you tell me? What’s his name? Where is he?’

  Believing that his customer was choking on something in her lunch, the waiter rushed to Ciara’s aid with a tumbler of water. She gulped it down in one go while staring at her younger sister in disbelief.

  ‘Couldn’t get my head around it myself. Came to see you out of shock really when I found out for definite. My periods are always all over the place so I take no notice when I miss one or two. Then you kept going on about how well and healthy I looked, and you and José seemed to have such a perfect thing going. So I pretended it wasn’t happening, which was quite easy because I was a lot happier not thinking about it.’

  ‘I take it this Colm guy is the father and the baby is with him. Why didn’t you bring him over? You should have known I would want to see him, see them both for that matter. Are you living together now?’ Questions tumbled out of Ciara. She had expected her sister to come bearing news of some disaster, some predicament that would be difficult to solve, but she never expected this. How could she have missed the clues in Spain and how could Leda have spent four days with her and never divulge a thing?

  Leda took a generous sip from her wine to steel herself for the next bit. ‘The thing is, I’m not really cut out for motherhood. It’s not as if I planned it. Colm seems really into it, so I have left Tom with him indefinitely, permanently probably.’

  ‘How could you give your own baby away? What has come over you that you think that is an OK thing to do?’

  ‘You know as well as I do that we lived in a house with two people who happened to be our parents but neither were cut out for the job. All I have done is save Tom finding that out about me. Colm is a good person. He takes care of things and he is brilliant in a crisis. He will do everything for Tom and he will never even miss me. I haven’t given him away as such. I’ve just left his father in charge of him.’

  Ciara pushed her plate away from her and downed her wine in one furious gulp. She was stunned, disappointed and incredibly angry. ‘I have never understood you, Leda. Yes, you are right: we had a shit upbringing by two people who couldn’t even look after themselves, but you know what?’

  ‘What?’ Leda asked sharply, ready to dismiss whatever wisdom was to come.

  ‘They might have been useless but we knew their names. We knew which door to knock on if we needed to go home. We knew they would never close the door in our faces. How can you seriously say that you gave your son away because you are not really into motherhood? It’s not a lifestyle, Leda, it’s a responsibility, and I will not let you get away with turning your back on it.’

  Leda’s face flushed. Ciara had never lost her ability to cut somebody down to size.

  ‘I’m too young for this. This is not what I want for my life. Colm is OK but it was just a bit of fun. I never wanted it to last.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you still think you have a future with that ratbag Abernethy. No matter how many times he walks on you, you always come back for more. His wife died but you still weren’t good enough to be anything but a dirty little secret. He has treated you like something he brought in on his shoe, a problem to be disposed of, but you still think he will change.’ Disdain melted from Ciara’s every word. As she berated her sister the thought niggled at her that if Leda was still sleeping with Con there was a chance that this baby was his and not this Colm guy’s at all. ‘Are you sure the baby is Colm’s and not Con’s?’ she asked as calmly and coolly as she could manage.

  ‘The baby’s got nothing to do with Con, OK, so don’t get your knickers in a twist.’ Leda was sorry that she had ever told her sister a thing. A moment of weakness and doubt had brought her here to London to confide in her sister and she was mad at herself for not keeping quiet.

  ‘So you have stopped sleeping with Con Abernethy. Is that what you are telling me?’ Ciara asked stubbornly, holding back the doubts that were making her head swim.

  ‘Yes, Con and I are finished. We have been for a while. Not that it’s any of your business who I sleep with, is it?’

  ‘It becomes my business when I have a nephew in Ireland that you have abandoned because you are such a selfish little git.’

  ‘Who do you think you are to lecture me on the right thing to do?’ Leda barked.

  ‘What do you mean? I’m not the one who has left my baby behind me like a piece of lost luggage. I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘No, but you would try to shag your best friend’s boyfriend the night of his mother’s funeral. You always criticize me for sleeping with Con, when you couldn’t keep your hands off Dan Abernethy even if it meant losing your best friend in the whole world. Go and lecture someone else, Ciara, who doesn’t know the things that you have done.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY - EIGHT

  The offices of Reilly & Maitland quietened down quite suddenly once 5 p.m. came. The phones were switched to the answering service and all of the front-office staff departed immediately, pausing only to grab coats and a handful of groceries bought at lunchtime, the stock baggage of the city-centre worker. Colm waited until a decent amount of time had elapsed before he too legged it to the door and to his new life beyond. He had done his best to answer all his colleagues’ questions about Tom as honestly as he could. They all knew Leda was the mother of his baby and they knew she wasn’t handling motherhood with any degree of ease. Only a handful of people knew that she was on a permanent discharge from her duty authorized by no one but herself.

  He knew opinion in the office was firmly divided about the situation he had found himself in. There were those who made a fuss over the photo he had of Tom on his desk and asked regularly how he was doing and was he sleeping? How was Colm coping and did he need anything at all? They were the ones who pressed brightly coloured packages with vests and rattles and Babygros into his hands along with cards that said: ‘Congratulations, Colm and Leda.’ The others made polite enquiries but after the initial days stayed mostly silent. They made no fuss and if Colm was in any doubt about how they really felt, his best friend in the office, Rory McHugh, had put pictures to their thoughts admirably earlier on that afternoon.

  ‘They think, Colm, that it’s some achievement to be landed with a surprise pregnancy and end up losing the woman but keeping the baby.’

  ‘What do you think? Do you think I am mad?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be my choice, but I will tell you this much: that little lad there in that photo seems to have brought a smile to your face. You look knackered. You look, if you don’t mind me saying, like you have cycled a long distance behind a car with no exhaust, but despite that you look happier than I have ever seen you. So I think young Tom there is an all-round good thing.’

  ‘I think he is, yeah,’ Colm agreed with an appreciative smile, unable to take his eyes off the photo of his infant son.

  ‘Jesus, Lifford, I always knew you were soft in the head but you really have lost it now. And before you ask, no I do not want to check out the range of products at Mothercare after work, OK? Not unless they have started servin
g pints for men like me at sea amid the merchandise.’

  He had given Colm a friendly thump on the shoulder. It was the most physical affection they had ever shown each other but today Colm appreciated it. It was enough to reassure him that he was doing the right thing. As Rory left Colm’s office he shook his head and said quietly to nobody in particular, ‘There but for the grace of God and the reliability of Durex go I.’

  Colm looked at the list of phone numbers that he had jotted on his pad this morning. The first was Leda’s mobile number. What were the chances she was going to answer that all of a sudden when she had failed to do so over the last several weeks? He had the phone number of the last place that he knew Leda had spent time, her friend Siobhan’s house in Glasnevin. He had the contact name and phone number of the employment agency that had matched Leda’s skills with the temporary vacancy at Reilly & Maitland, where they had first met. She had made an attractive addition to the array of bored faces in the front office. The agency, he knew, was duty bound not to release personal details of their clients but Colm thought it would help to find out if her name was still on their books and if she was listed as available for work. Lastly he had trawled the phone directory and come up with a number for the only Clancy family in Leachlara. Ted and Agnes Clancy, Briartullog, Leachlara, Co. Tipperary, most likely Tom’s grandparents and they probably didn’t even know he existed. Leachlara would be the last pit stop and only if he drew a blank everywhere else. He doubted that she would take refuge there, and if they took their family ties more seriously than Leda did where would that leave Tom and himself?

  Ciara hadn’t murdered Leda yet but then a bare twelve hours had passed since she had picked her up at the airport, so anything was possible. They hadn’t spoken all the way home from Georgia Baxter’s. Ciara was fuming that Leda had had the nerve to bring up Dan Abernethy when she herself had abandoned her child with a man whom she would not contemplate staying with herself. Ciara had long ago decided to put the heartbreak of losing Alison’s friendship behind her. She had made the mistake of thinking their friendship could survive anything, even her own desperately bad judgement, but Alison had never allowed her to make amends. Perhaps Dan had insisted she break off contact. Maybe that was the only way that he could assuage his own guilt. If he had, Ciara was disappointed that her friend would have allowed herself to be dictated to in such a manner. She had subconsciously used it as a yardstick in the relationships she had had for the last decade: none had ever been worth jettisoning a friend for. Maybe Ciara had decided she wouldn’t let herself love someone that much.

  Leda had been in the bath for an hour and the chicken stir-fry that Ciara had prepared for dinner was turning into a slow and watery stew on the hob. ‘Damn her anyway, she’ll eat it if she’s hungry,’ she said angrily as she reached into the bottom of the fridge for a mercifully cold bottle of beer. She was cursing her bottle-opener for being the most useless man-made implement in the whole wide and annoying world when Leda’s mobile phone started to ring. Its vibrating motion sent it spinning across the kitchen worktop in Ciara’s direction. The screen displayed its short message: ‘COLM calling’. Ciara didn’t waste any time. She would have to believe Leda when she said she was finished with Con and begin to unravel the complicated situation her sister had left behind her in Ireland.

  ‘Hello, Colm, this is Ciara Clancy, Leda’s sister, and I am very glad you called.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY - NINE

  ‘I thought you didn’t travel Ryanair on principle. Mind you, principles come and go with you, don’t they?’ Leda was picking a fight with Ciara but her sister simply would not take the bait. She was pretty sure that up as far as last night Ciara was an absolute supporter of the right to privacy but all that had been cast aside when the chance to talk to Colm Lifford presented itself. Since that conversation Ciara had been a woman on a mission. When she finished talking to Colm she went on to her work laptop (it was absolutely the best thing about an otherwise boring job she had landed herself in at a language school in Islington) and booked airline tickets for herself and Leda out of Gatwick the next morning. She half expected her laptop to flash a ‘You are joking, Ms Clancy’ message on the screen when she entered her highly abused credit-card details but the booking went through without a hitch. She would worry about her mounting credit-card debt some day soon.

  They would have to be at Victoria Station to get the train at about six thirty, but that shouldn’t be a problem, she decided as she made a mental note to put the louder of the two alarm clocks that she possessed under Leda’s bed. Getting up early in the morning was not a skill native to the Clancy family, but years away from Leachlara had made Ciara an expert in punctuality. Next she composed the most pity-inducing yet plausible email she could manage to her boss at the language school. She outlined a family crisis, not so tragic that it would require too much explanation when she came back from Ireland, but still grave enough that her presence was required at home urgently. She expressed regret at the short notice and disappointment at letting down her Spanish-language students and vowed to make up the lost tuition time when she returned. She ended the email with a promise to ring in the morning from the airport. She pressed the send button, more confident than she had ever been that she was doing the right thing.

  The check-in queue at Gatwick was agonizingly long. When her baiting of Ciara had failed to garner a response Leda switched into her default uncommunicative mode, accompanied by her best surly expression, which came to her with the greatest of ease. She had come to London to escape the suffocation of home. Even her friend Siobhan, whom she had thought she could rely on thoroughly, seemed appalled at her leaving Colm alone to care for Tom. It wouldn’t be fair if he had done it to her, Siobhan had argued, and it wasn’t fair the other way round either. She was her friend but she could not approve of what she had done. Leda had tried to fight her corner with Siobhan and now Ciara also but no one was listening to her – as usual. At the rate the queue was moving it looked as if they would be here for thirty minutes at least before boarding a plane back to a son she didn’t want to see. When she looked at Tom she saw something of her own needy and smaller self and that was what had made her want to run in the first place.

  Finally Ciara was at the head of the queue. It had taken an hour and fifteen minutes, which seemed all the longer for more than half of it having passed with no communication, barbed or otherwise, from Leda. She slammed the reservation-number page that she had printed off the Ryanair website the night before on to the check-in desk. It wasn’t until she turned back to Leda to produce the second piece of luggage for the hold that she realized her sister had gone.

  ‘She must be gone to buy a paper or something. Can I check her in and go after her? I will bring her back here to the desk when I find her.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s totally impossible. You cannot check in for somebody else. It’s just not the way we operate. I suggest you find your travelling companion and rejoin the queue. Has she got a mobile? Maybe you could try that. You really need to move aside now. The gate closes in forty minutes and we need to process all these people,’ the clerk said as she waved her hand at the queue that snaked its way, two to three people wide, all the way back to the opposite bank of check-in desks.

  Ciara gathered her computer printout and her battered trolley case and made her way to the rows of seats in the middle of the departure hall. She couldn’t quite believe what her sister had just done but she knew it was no accident – and if she had been in any doubt there was a text message on her mobile, a beep she had not heard while standing in the queue, confirming that Leda had indeed done a runner.

  I know you mean well but I can’t go back. I need space. Sorry you had to pay for flight but at least it was a cheap one, L

  Ciara dialled the number, but she already knew her sister would not answer. Leda was sipping a coffee while waiting to board the Gatwick Express. She had turned down the ringer on her phone but she still felt its familiar vibrating pulse a
gainst her thigh as it languished unanswered in her coat pocket. She needed a new number. The first thing she would do when she got off the train was to buy a new SIM card. As she had said to Ciara, she needed some space. The platform display announced a train to Victoria leaving in 1 minute 56 seconds. London stretched out wide and promising in front of her. It would do for the moment.

  Posters of the great Irish writers lined the walls of the travelator corridor to baggage reclaim at Dublin airport. All grey, nearly all wearing glasses and mostly men, it had to be said. It reminded Ciara of the poster that she and Alison had hung over the mantelpiece in their Ranelagh flat. They had bought it in one of the tourist shops on Nassau Street. It was a perfect fit because it covered the horrible dark patch of smoke that had lingered when they had taken down Jean McDermott’s choice of artwork, a totally bizarre and lurid pink and orange print of a fish eating a girl. They had hidden it behind the sofa in case dumping it counted against their deposit. To tell the truth, they had become used to its kitsch until Dan started to comment on it every time he came in. ‘Ah now, girls, I know you arts students like to show how multi-talented you all are, but displaying your school art project? Have you no shame?’

  Ciara was in danger of lapsing into a bout of nostalgia. Her memories of college, of first living away from home and of Dublin were absolutely bound up in her friendship with Alison and the effect Dan Abernethy had had on both their lives. She had let a few days elapse before she attempted to ring Alison after the night in Aughasallagh. Dan was due back in Dublin for his final exams on the Monday. She rang the Shepherds’ private phone line several times that morning but there was no answer. As a last resort she rang the surgery number and the phone was answered by Cathy Shepherd, whose tone turned decidedly frosty when she realized she was talking to Ciara. Obviously Alison had filled her mother in on what had happened between her and Dan.