This Is Now

by Ciara Geraghty

  Roman nodded. ‘How much will you—?’

  ‘We’ll get to that, son. All in good time. A trial run first. Then we can talk turkey.’

  Upstairs, Roman told his mother that she wasn’t to worry about anything. That Jimmy had agreed to cut them some slack. ‘You can just concentrate on getting better, Mama, OK?’

  Rosa struggled out of her covers, sat on the edge of her bed. Her face was grey and pinched. He could tell she was in pain, just from looking at her face. She had painkillers but she didn’t like to take them. There was a woman who worked in the nursing home who was addicted to painkillers. She didn’t want to take any chances. She didn’t mention Lech in that conversation but Roman knew she worried about drugs. Addiction. Running in the family like eye colour or height.

  ‘I don’t want you working for Jimmy.’

  ‘I’m not working for him. Maybe just a few odd-jobs. Only until you’re better.’

  ‘No, Roman,’ said Rosa, quieter now.

  ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be OK. You’ll see.’

  Rosa shook her head. ‘Things were supposed to be different here. In Ireland.’

  ‘Things are different.’

  ‘Better, I mean. I wanted things to be better for you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Jimmy will get you into trouble.’

  ‘I can handle myself.’

  ‘You’re just a boy.’ But there was resignation in her words. She knew too. Their options were limited.

  Roman handed her a cup of coffee, told her to get back into bed. She was exhausted. After the hospital. And working all the hours before she fell.

  Roman sat at the small, rickety table in their room, finished his homework, thought about being a man. A delivery man.

  It would only be for a little while. Until Mama’s cast came off. Until they got back on their feet. Again.

  One clean break, the doctor said.

  Sometimes that’s all it took.

  Cillian sat in his chair, waiting, like Roman was going to tell him everything.

  Roman said nothing.

  He wondered how long he’d been sitting in the chair. Despite the stuffiness of the room, he felt cold.

  He wished things were different. It was like wishing on a star. Or throwing money down a wishing well. Pointless.

  Cillian pulled his hand down one side of his face. The dark shadow of his bristles crackled against the skin of his fingers.

  When Cillian stood up, the room seemed smaller, the ceiling lower. He crammed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, leaned his back against a wall. ‘If you don’t talk to me, Roman, I can’t help you. It’s your choice.’

  ‘What’s going to happen now?’ Roman asked. Cillian picked the papers from the desk, shuffled them, gathered them with a paperclip.

  ‘We’re going to have to keep you in custody,’ he said. ‘This is a very serious crime and you’re not cooperating so we don’t have any choice. There’ll be a hearing. Maybe tomorrow. You’ll more than likely be remanded in custody unless ... well, unless anything changes.’ Cillian paused there, waited. But Roman didn’t say anything. Kept his head down, concentrated on the ink spot on the table.

  He wouldn’t be going home tonight. He had known that, of course he had. But it was different now that it was happening. Everything was different now.

  ‘Interview ended at ...’ The other policeman consulted his watch. ‘Twenty-three forty-five on Friday the twenty-first of February, 2014.’ He stood up, indicated that Roman should do the same.

  The boy’s fear was liquid now, roaring through his veins like blood, pulsing against his temples, the narrow frame of his chest. Cillian was wrong. He didn’t have choices.

  Choices were for other people. People like Meadhbh and Adam. They’d be walking home from school tomorrow. Laughing at something stupid Adam said, sharing a bag of chips or a Pot Noodle and never thinking about all the choices they had.

  Babcia said self-pity was a terrible waste of time.

  Still, he felt it now.

  He put one foot in front of the other, moved towards the door. This is how he would manage, he thought. One step at a time. He wouldn’t have to make any decisions or decide where to run to next because there were no decisions left to be made, no more running to be run. In a way, it was a relief. Not to have to decide. Not to have to run.

  But Roman didn’t feel relief. There was only the fear.

  Twelve

  It still irked her when she woke up the following morning.

  Fuck sake.

  Want some coffee, baby?

  The voice, while distant, had had a distinct northern twang. Cillian had probably met her in Donegal. She must be staying with him. Or maybe she’d moved in? Into that wreck of a cottage in the middle of nowhere, God help her.

  She distracted herself by examining her collection of injuries in the bathroom mirror. The bruises around her ribcage were particularly impressive. She ran her fingers along the palette of colours. In some places, her skin was so dark it seemed unlikely it would ever return to normal.

  She applied her make-up carefully but, even so, it would be impossible to avoid her family’s questions. Her mother was insisting on taking them to lunch after the memorial service.

  ‘Try not to be late, Martha,’ her mother had said on the phone earlier. Her tone was filled with low expectation.

  And Martha wouldn’t have been late if she hadn’t stopped at the hospital before the service.

  On the surface, Tara seemed improved. No longer under the covers, pretending to be asleep. But still in bed, her hand clamped around the oxygen mask beside her. Mrs Bolton offered to leave when Martha arrived but Tara insisted that she stay. ‘You won’t be here long, will you, Martha?’ Tara had said. ‘You’re going to Sunshine House today, aren’t you?’

  Surely a person with proper, honest-to-goodness PTSD would not remember that kind of detail? Although it was Tara, so perhaps it wasn’t out of the question.

  When Mrs Bolton left the room to freshen the water in the vase where the stinking lilies still bloomed, Martha took her chance.

  ‘Have you spoken to Mathilde?’ she asked.

  Tara shook her head. ‘She told me not to contact her.’

  ‘Only if you weren’t going to tell your family about the two of you.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t. And I’m not going to.’

  ‘Jesus, Tara, this is ridiculous.’ Martha wanted to shake her. She knew she probably shouldn’t.

  ‘Can you please stop haranguing me?’

  ‘Haranguing? Seriously? Who says that?’

  ‘The doctor said I have to avoid stress.’ There was the hand, reaching for the mask again.

  Still, Martha persisted. ‘Discarding a perfectly good relationship sounds pretty stressful to me.’

  ‘Well, you did it,’ Tara said, glaring at Martha.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Martha scorched out of the hospital car-park. She should slow down. Two more penalty points and she’d lose her licence. Again. Although the first time had not been an innocent accumulation of forgotten speeding fines and illegal parking. ‘Driving under the influence.’ It seemed like the judge had shouted it from his bench. It had made an arresting headline in the next day’s newspapers.

  She drove five kilometres shy of the speed limit and tried not to worry about Tara. She was made of stern stuff, wasn’t she? She’d snap out of it soon.

  Martha’s family took up most of a pew in the little chapel on the grounds of Sunshine House. If her father or Amelia were there, they might have filled two, because no doubt Amelia would have married, produced grandchildren for their mother, like Mark had done. Martha always imagined Amelia as the good girl. Perhaps because she had only been four when she died. She would have been the type of daughter who never forgot Mother’s Day, who gave thoughtful, beautifully wrapped birthday gifts. She would have named her first-born daughter Miriam, for their mother, and it would have been Amelia who insisted on exten
ding her happy and comfortable family home to include a granny flat where their mother could live, in her dotage.

  Martha wondered if her mother imagined these things too.

  She crept up the side aisle of the chapel into the small space at the end of the pew beside Mark, whose eyes were closed, although Martha suspected exhaustion rather than devotion; fatherhood had taken him by storm. She lowered herself into the seat beside him and would have gotten away with her late arrival had it not been for one of Mark’s twins – Amelia – waving at her and pulling at her grandmother’s sleeve. ‘There she is, see? Over there. There’s Martha.’ As if there had been a discussion earlier about the possibility of Martha not arriving on time. Or at all.

  Afterwards, her mother said, ‘That was lovely, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The memorial service.’ Her mother’s voice was strained with barely contained impatience.

  ‘Yes. Sorry. I wasn’t sure ... Yes, it was.’

  ‘I did tell you what time it started, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, sorry ... I had to—’

  ‘Are you coming to the restaurant for lunch? I included you in the booking.’

  ‘Of course. I’m looking forward to it.’ This wasn’t, strictly speaking, true but Martha felt she owed her mother on these occasions. Perhaps making up for the times she hadn’t bothered going. Or worse, the times when she had, when she’d been drinking.

  They drove in convoy to the restaurant. Martha used the time to come up with a valid excuse as to why she had to leave in an hour.

  It wasn’t that she wasn’t fond of her family. She was just uneasy in places where alcohol could be obtained with a raised finger.

  Her brothers and their wives – Helen and Anna – and Mark’s two little girls – four-year-old twins, Amelia and Alice – were already sitting around a large table when Martha arrived.

  The passing years had done little to diminish how identical James and Mark were. They had aged in exactly the same way: the beginnings of soft craft-beer paunches around their middles, matching widow’s peaks that appeared to be retreating at the same pace, the same patch of coarse grey hair springing like heather through the triangle of white open-necked shirts. Their features were cherubic: round, open faces, pale blue eyes, small, shallow dimples and deep – matching – clefts in the centre of their chins. Everyone agreed they took after their mother while Martha and her father had been the tall, angular ones who looked like they might upset a table laden with crockery in their attempts to negotiate their place.

  Helen was pregnant. James had announced it at the last family dinner that Martha had attended. ‘We’re pregnant,’ he had said, beaming at the head of the table where their father used to sit.

  ‘Is it twins?’ asked Mark, always competing.

  ‘I think this family has been plagued by enough twins, don’t you?’ said James, nodding towards Mark and Martha.

  The thing was, Martha had never felt like a twin. She felt a little ... separate.

  ‘I’ll need to go at three.’ Martha leaned towards her mother during a heated debate between Mark and James about the ending of the director’s cut of Blade Runner.

  ‘Could you at least wait until we’ve ordered before you start talking about when you want to leave?’

  ‘No, it’s just ...’ Martha found it difficult to make herself understood when she was amongst her family. Like she was on one end of a transatlantic call, they on the other, with nobody taking account of the time delay.

  There was a very definite, very loud chorus of nos when the waiter asked if they would like to see the wine list.

  I’m driving.

  A little early for me, I’m afraid.

  I’m on antibiotics – this from Mark. Nobody asked him what for. He was a longstanding, devout hypochondriac.

  The waiter nodded when they finished, glanced at Martha, as if waiting for her reason, then left with the wine list, undisturbed, under his arm.

  The silence that followed was a little awkward. James – a keen keeper of the peace – whipped his wallet out of his pocket from which he plucked a colour 3D photograph of their baby, accompanied by much detail of the technology involved. Everybody said that the baby was the image of Helen – which would have been ideal – when in fact he was a ringer for James (and Mark, obviously), right down to the snub nose (which was cute on the baby) and fivehead (which is what they called James’s – and Mark’s – enormous forehead).

  ‘Why are you wearing your sunglasses inside?’ Amelia – the inquisitive one – asked. Alice – the resigned one – studied Martha before returning her attention to her pasta.

  ‘Because your smile is so bright, I need to shield my eyes from it,’ Martha said.

  ‘I’m not smiling now,’ said Amelia, fixing Martha with her best sombre face.

  ‘Eat up, Amelia,’ Anna said.

  Martha felt a sort of expectancy around the table. Conversation lulled, loaded forks paused halfway to mouths, water glasses were returned to the table. An explanation was required, Martha felt. She took off her sunglasses. ‘You should see the other guy,’ she said, grinning, even though grinning hurt.

  There was a synchronised intake of breath.

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘That looks painful.’

  ‘Fudging hell,’ said Mark; Anna didn’t permit cursing in front of the children.

  ‘What did you do?’ her mother asked.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ said Martha.

  ‘You weren’t ...?’

  ‘No!’

  This came out loud enough to attract the scrutiny of other diners. Martha put her glasses back on and looked at her mother and brothers, in whose faces she could detect the familiar trace of doubt. This was the thing about families, Martha thought. They had you pegged, no matter what you did. She had never made any sort of declaration. There had been no announcement about her decision not to drink. No confidences shared about her realisation that she was someone who had an uneasy relationship with alcohol. For a long time, they hadn’t even mentioned it although, of course, they’d noticed. It was like they were holding their breath. Like they couldn’t quite believe what was right there, in front of their faces.

  She supposed she couldn’t blame them. She had thought about it the other day. Thought about gathering her sobriety in her arms, throwing it onto the counter of the Pound pub. Exchanging it for one drink. Then another. And another.

  ‘No,’ she said again, quieter this time. ‘I was at that ... bank situation in Swords the other day.’

  ‘Goodness, the one that got held up?’ said Helen, one hand cupping her mouth, the other laid protectively across the tiny swell of her belly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Leave it to our Martha to be in the thick of the drama, eh?’ said James, swilling his water around his glass as if he were aerating a fine wine. He smiled when he said it but there was a hint of accusation. Martha supposed she only had herself to blame. She had form.

  ‘What does “held up” mean?’ enquired Amelia through a mouthful of penne.

  ‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ said Anna, tucking a linen napkin into the collar of Amelia’s dress. Martha winked at the little girl, who winked back, albeit with two eyes rather than the traditional one.

  ‘Anyway, I just happened to be in there with Tara and—’

  ‘Tara’s home?’ said Mark, who had always harboured – unfulfilled – notions about Tara.

  ‘Will you let her finish?’ said James, who had harboured similar notions.

  Martha picked up her glass of water. ‘Maybe we should change the subject?’ she said, nodding towards Amelia, whose eyes were full of questions she was getting ready to ask.

  ‘Is Tara alright?’ Mark persisted.

  ‘Well, she ... she’s in hospital actually.’

  ‘Oh my gosh!’ said Mark.

  ‘What happened to her?’ asked James.

  ‘No, it’s ... it’s nothing that bad.
Nothing serious I mean, I mean, she’s fine. Really. Just a bit ... shaken, I suppose.’

  Now Mark was Googling the bank raid and James was talking about the inefficiency of the guards and Anna was picking a tube of pasta off the floor and Helen was nodding and pretending to listen to James, and Mark told them the name of the man who had been shot and her mother shook her head and said how lucky Tara was that she hadn’t been badly injured.

  But she had been injured, Martha realised, sitting there. And it was bad. Because Tara wasn’t herself. Some part of her – an important part – had been removed, as surgically as an appendix.

  A waiter bearing a tray full of martinis passed close enough for Martha to reach out, lift one. One martini. Just the one.

  ‘Are you alright, Martha? You’re very pale all of a sudden,’ Helen said.

  Martha reached for her water, drank it in one gulp. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘But the bank robbery happened three days ago,’ her mother said. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ said Martha. Her mother nodded, allowing the observation. She was a champion worrier. A persistent headache could be a brain tumour. Forgetting the name of a substitute teacher you had for three months in primary school was symptomatic of early onset dementia. Any type of blemish on your person was, more than likely, the beginnings of a rash that would lead to bacterial meningitis. Or viral. Whichever the fatal one was. Even her tendency to worry was fraught with worry, stress being such a significant factor now in so many cancers – malignant ones, obviously.

  ‘Amelia used to come up in bruises like that,’ her mother said now, nodding towards Martha’s face. ‘When she’d get her injections. Her arms would be covered in them, the poor child. Not that she ever complained. There was one time when she ...’

  Dessert arrived eventually. Martha finished her tiramisu before everyone else, eating the same way she had drank, which is to say that she only stopped when there was nothing left.

  Now, the little girls were discussing their ballet class.

  ‘Mum said I’m the goodest in the class,’ said Amelia.

  ‘And me,’ chimed Alice. Amelia sighed a long-suffering sigh which made them laugh.