“I know I cause trouble but I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about the fight and all your broken bones and all the blood on your clothes and all the books that fell off the shelves and everything.”
Conor is stunned. “I appreciate that, Jack, but you should go now.”
“I don’t like fighting even though all the boys in school love it. There was one time when Seán Brady beat the head off Kev Higgins and everyone thought it was great and they were roaring ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ but I didn’t because poor Kev Higgins was lying on the ground with his two hands over his face and Seán kept on kicking him even though Kev wasn’t even fighting back. Then when Seán stopped, Kev got up and ran home crying because Seán hurted him really bad and everyone started laughing at him and telling him to ‘run home to his mammy for a cuddle’ but I didn’t.”
“I don’t like fighting myself, never have. But what happened to me wasn’t your fault, okay? You know that I don’t blame you, don’t you?”
Jack nods. “Okay, well, I’m going to go now and, don’t worry, I won’t come back here again even though I like you, and your sandwiches, and your books.”
“I think it’s probably for the best, Jack.”
Jack walks to the door with his shoulders dropped and Conor feels bad.
“How’s everything at home?” he calls after him.
“It’s all right. Libby did the shopping yesterday and she bought all the wrong things. She bought the spaghetti that I don’t like – I only like the hoops not the ones that look like snakes. Ma said that I hadta eat it and stop being such a fusspot but it was all slimy and gross and I nearly got sick.”
“You’re a hard man to please, Jack White.”
“That’s what Ma says too. Well, I better go now in case Da comes back and tries to beat you up again.”
“I think that would be a good move.”
“Okay, bye.”
“Bye.”
He watches Jack as his small, skinny body makes his way along the road until soon he is out of sight.
Chapter 63
It is the morning of Celeste’s birthday party and Ella has set her alarm for six, but she is already awake before it goes off. She throws on her tracksuit bottoms and Dan’s hoody and goes up to the kitchen. She looks out the window and sees daylight is just starting to break across the bay. Making herself a black coffee, she takes her mug outside where the heat of the mug meets the cool air in rising steam. She sits up onto her usual rock. She likes this one because it is flat for the most part with a groove beneath where she can tuck in her feet. There is an intense pinky-orange sun rising on the horizon. A ferry is gliding majestically out of Dublin Port, leaving a silvery trail of backwashed water behind it as it traverses the Irish Sea. When she sits out here in the morning stillness on the very edge of Ireland with its sheer cliff faces behind her, it reminds her that her and her problems are only a minute dot in this whole universe. There is no one standing between her and the horizon. No one shouting abuse or crying for her attention. In days gone past, she has stood on this headland and imagined stepping off it and plunging straight down into the deep water lapping at its edge. She has lain in bed and thought about how the water would feel as it washed over her and brought her down as she sank into its darkness. She knows she would never do it though – the kids stop her from doing something like that.
She thinks back to how this time nine years ago, a screaming, angry Celeste had just been placed into her arms and how bruised and battered and exhausted she had felt after forty-eight hours of labour which ended in an emergency Caesarean section. Celeste has never come easily to her. Nothing about her relationship with her eldest daughter has ever been easy. She wavers on the balance of an almost primeval, smothering love for her and yet sadness and guilt at why she can never seem to get close to her. That is why she wants today to be perfect. She wants Celeste to look back on this day when she is older and remember the party with fondness. This will be the day she remembers when she is backpacking around Asia and is feeling homesick or when she has a bad day in whatever her chosen path is and longs to be back in childhood again. She wants this to be the memory that she goes to in her mind. A kind of synthetic, go-to memory.
She brings the mug to her lips and drinks back the last of her coffee. She has a lot to do. She had always been too busy before to have a proper party, but today she is determined to make up for it. Although she has had the cake professionally made and the caterers are taking care of the food, she wants to add her own touches. There are decorations to be hung, cocktails to be prepped for the parents and she wants to bake some buns herself. As well as Celeste’s classmates, she has invited both her and Dan’s families. It’s a Saturday so Conor has to work. She gets off the rock and picks her path back up to the stone steps of the tower.
She rolls the icing, watching the white mass spread larger, then she lifts it up with the rolling-pin, just like the book told her to do, but it breaks. So she brings it all back together again into a ball and spreads yet more icing sugar onto the table and rolls . . . but the same thing happens again.
“Damn it, I can’t get this to work at all. I think I’ve used too much icing sugar!”
“But I don’t understand why you need to do that when we already have a cake?” Dan says, coming into the kitchen and pointing over to the mermaid-shaped cake lying along the crest of an azure-blue wave, which sits in pride of place on the table.
“I told you – I want to add my own touches – I want Celeste to be able to say that her mum baked her something for once in her life even if it tastes disgusting.”
“You put too much pressure on yourself.” He lifts a marshmallow-and-strawberry kebab and brings it up to his lips.
“Will you please stop eating them, Dan – we’ll have none left for the kids!”
“No one is coming, Mummy!” Celeste comes up into the kitchen with her arms folded.
“They will, don’t worry.”
“But it’s nearly two o’clock and no one is here yet.”
“We’re going to have a great party, Celeste,” she says determinedly, trying again to pick up the icing but it falls apart. “Oh here, I give up!” she says, throwing it back down on the table.
“She has a point,” Dan says, looking at the clock.
“Look, I keep telling you, it’s going to be great.”
“So you keep saying.”
Ella has made bunting out of old dresses and tops that she doesn’t wear any more and it hangs from wall to wall, criss-crossing the ceiling. Balloons tied with long tails of ribbons are weighted down around the walls. Shells she picked up along the cove decorate every surface, as do cardboard anchors. She has ordered gold glittery mermaid tails from eBay with elasticated waistbands for the children to wear. The pamper girls are setting up in the sitting room and the caterers are already working away doing the finishing touches. Everything is ready to go.
Dan comes over and puts his arms around her. “You’ve gone all Cath Kidson and I like it,” he says, fingering a piece of bunting hanging on the wall near them. “Where’s your floral apron?”
“Very funny! I just want to get it right, y’know – give Celeste a birthday party that she will remember instead of the last-minute Tesco job like I usually do.”
“You’ve done a great job. I’m really proud of you.”
“Well, let’s wait and see if people turn up first,” she says, nervously looking up at the clock again.
Her phone vibrates in her pocket. She takes it out and answers it.
“Hi, Ella, it’s Katie’s mother Wendy here.”
Katie had only started in Celeste’s class last month after moving to the area from New York after her dad was transferred to Ireland with his company. She is probably the only person who isn’t aware of Ella’s scandal and gladly accepted the invitation and even offered to come over early to help her out.
“Oh hi, Wendy, I hope you’re not lost?” She’d had directions to the house printed on the bac
k of the invitations.
“No, but my little guy Tyler, Katie’s brother, has just woken up covered in chicken-pox welts.”
“Oh no, poor little guy!” Ella’s heart sinks.
“I know, talk about bad timing! He’s scratching like mad and really cranky. And Ed is working so I have no one to mind him . . . we won’t be able to make it unfortunately. Katie is so upset – she’s so mad with her little brother and I keep trying to explain to her that it’s not his fault. It’s at times like this I sure miss having my family around, I can tell you.”
“That is such a pity.” Ella tries to mask the disappointment in her voice. At least she knows for definite that at least one of the children in Celeste’s class will come because she goes to everything. Her mother has eight children and is only too glad to off-load one of them for three hours – she isn’t fussy about who the hosts are.
“Mum, there’s still no one here and it’s after two o’clock.”
“Look, here’s someone now,” she says, looking out the kitchen window to the car coming over the headland.
Celeste rolls her eyes. “That’s Granddad.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure they’ll all be here soon.”
She hurries downstairs. “Hi, Dad,” she says as she opens the door to him.
“Hello, my love.”
Celeste hurtles down the stairs and runs straight into his arms.
“And how’s my favourite birthday girl?”
Her sister Andrea arrives with her kids soon after so that keeps Celeste occupied and she stops reminding Ella of the lack of guests. Celeste, Dot and Andrea’s two daughters sit up on high stools and the pamper girls start transforming them into mermaids and they giggle as they put hair bands around their heads and start applying lots of sparkly eye shadow.
Finally a car belonging to a non-family member pulls up outside.
“Louisa is here, Mum!” Celeste squeals, pulling open the heavy door and running down the steps to her. The two girls run back inside past Ella.
Then more cars arrive and soon there are seventeen girls from Celeste’s class running around inside the tower. The pamper ladies are working hard on making over the girls.
“They’re having a great time. Celeste is having a ball. You’ve done a great job,” Dan says, putting his arm around her as they watch her father, who is pretending to be a pirate, chasing a group of squealing girls around the kitchen.
Ella is starting to wonder if the mermaid tails were a good idea after all. “Slow down, girls – we don’t want anyone to trip now!” she chides gently.
They cut the cake and sing happy birthday to a beaming Celeste. Ella feels a huge surge of pride looking at her daughter’s excited face. She wraps her into a big hug, kissing her forehead over and over again and for once Celeste doesn’t push her away.
After a while one of the pamper girls comes up the stairs. “The kids are all done. We’re going to head on now, if that’s okay?”
“Sure, of course.” She takes the envelope with the money to pay them out of the drawer where she had left it earlier. “Thanks for all your hard work.”
She sees them down the stairs. Andrea’s bag is sitting on the hall table where she left it when she came in the door. Ella closes the door after them and walks over and opens the bag. Andrea’s Orla Kiely wallet is sticking out and inside there are sheets of paper folded in half, the lid of a lipstick, a box of raisins, a few loose coins. She lifts up the wallet and moves the zip back across the teeth with difficulty. When she opens it, she sees there is a twenty-euro note, bank cards and loyalty cards for supermarkets and coffee shops. She lifts the twenty out and holds it between her thumb and forefinger. It is so tempting, it is almost unbearable the rush that calls to her. She folds the note in two and is about to slip it inside the pocket of her jeans. She is wrestling the feeling, the need to do this. If she does it now then she has crossed a line and gone back to that dark place again and she is afraid of what lies in wait for her over that line. For the first time in her life she is going to say no to it, she isn’t going to let it control her life any more. She finally feels strong enough to resist the urge. She puts the money back in the wallet and the wallet back down inside the bag and goes back upstairs.
Chapter 64
“Conor?” a woman’s voice says at the other end of the phone.
“Yes?”
“It’s Rachel here – Rachel McLoughlin – I’m the social worker working with Jack White?”
“Oh hi, Rachel.”
“I wanted to let you know that Jack’s mother passed away this morning –”
“Jesus . . . so soon . . . how is he . . . is he okay?”
“It’s hard to say, to be honest – he’s a bit stunned – it’s like he keeps forgetting and then he asks for her and remembers. He hasn’t cried yet though, which is worrying. Libby and her family are all here but the reason I’m calling you is because he’s been asking for you.”
“Really?”
“I thought maybe you might come over to him? Don’t worry, John-Paul isn’t here – he is still in Garda custody.”
“Sure, of course, if it’s okay with everyone else?”
“Yes, it is. The address is 9 St Dominic’s Terrace.”
“Okay, well then, I’ll be right over.”
Conor gets a taxi to the address Rachel has given him.
He walks down the hallway and enters the kitchen. He sees Jack sitting beside a woman with similar features to him. He presumes this is Libby. From looking at the photos of Jack and Tina on the wall, she looks like her but Tina’s face was more weathered. There are three boys sitting in a row on stools and he guesses these must be Libby’s sons, the cousins that Jack is always talking about. There is a pot of tea on the table and he instantly feels awkward, like he is intruding. He stands in the doorway, waiting for someone to notice him. Jack looks up, jumps up and runs towards him. He wraps his arms around him tightly and Conor, feeling all eyes on him, does the same.
“Ma die-ded.”
“I’m sorry, Jack . . . I’m so, so sorry.”
“I don’t like the people being here. They keep looking at me.” He is trembling. “They tell me to go in and see Ma but I don’t want to see her. She doesn’t look like me ma.”
“It’s okay, love,” Libby says, coming up beside him, “it’s all right – everyone just wants to help you, pet.”
“It’s going to be okay, Jack,” says Conor, “do you hear me?”
Jack nods. “I miss her, Conor, it’s all weird.”
“I’m not going to lie to you, Jack – you’re going to miss her a lot and it’s going to be weird for a long time but you’ve got to remember what we said happens when people die.”
“They’re still with us but we can’t see them?”
“That’s it.”
“Do you think ma is watching me now?”
“Oh, I think so, in fact I’m sure she is.”
Libby brings Conor over and introduces him to her family. He offers his condolences and then sits down beside Mrs Morton while Jack and his cousins play on the X-box in the corner of the room.
“I’m tired,” Jack says after a while.
“I bet you are – you’ve had a tough day,” Conor says.
“Maybe I should take you up to bed, buddy?” Libby says, stroking his hair.
“Can Conor take me?”
“I don’t know – I –” He hesitates, looking around him.
Libby looks at Conor. “Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks, Conor.”
He takes Jack up to bed and sits on the chair at the side of the bed as Jack starts pulling off his tracksuit bottoms and hoody and putting his legs into his pyjama bottoms.
“Do you not want to wear a top?” Conor asks.
“I don’t like wearing tops because I always get too hot.” He jumps in under the duvet. “I don’t like all these people being in my house. I want them all to go home. I miss Ma, Conor.”
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“I know, Jack, but they just want to help you.”
“Libby says she’s gone to a better place but she’s wrong because there is no better place than with us. She always said you can give her fancy holidays but her favourite place in the world was with me.” He looks pale and exhausted.
“Remember what we said about her being still with you?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, your ma is with you right now and she wouldn’t like to see you sad, would she?”
“I guess not. She’d say ‘Take that puss off you, sure you haven’t got a care in the world’.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m so sleepy.”
“Why don’t you close your eyes?” He remembers that after Leni died the exhaustion from the emotional grief was incredible but he couldn’t sleep. Jack is probably feeling the same.
“Promise you’ll stay with me?”
“I’ll be right here.”
Into the Night Sky Page 30