“If that’s what it takes to make her feel safe, what’s a bit of MDF?” Jonathan replied equally tersely. “We all have our props.”
He was defensive about Asha’s lack of confidence. He knew it came from him. But Sita wasn’t feeling confident either, and she went over to Jonathan with the intention of apologizing by way of a hug. The old shirt he had on smelled of the City, something to do with the over-ironing and stress that had resigned it to the dump bin in the first place, and because he only returned her insecure squeeze with a dutiful pat, she said, “Ugh, that shirt smells.”
“Well, we all lean on something from time to time, don’t we?” Emmy said, levering off a lid with a screwdriver.
“What do you lean on?” Jonathan asked. He was pouring a watered-down creamy glue from a two-liter plastic container into his tin of emulsion, and even that made his wife cross. Why couldn’t he just slap up some straightforward matte like the rest of them? Why did he have to pay so much attention to detail all the time?
“Can I lie?” Emmy asked.
“No. Rule 465. No lying.”
“Well, okay, Maya. I lean on Maya.”
Jonathan looked embarrassed. He hadn’t expected an honest answer, and he hadn’t wanted one, either. He added water from a kitchen jug with more concentration than necessary.
“Serves you right for asking,” Sita said, putting the lid on her lipstick and throwing it in her bag. “I’ll take the girls. Oh, and Emmy, don’t lean on Jonathan in my absence, will you? You’ll end up on the floor.” The door slammed.
Emmy said, “Are you two all right?”
“Of course,” Jonathan said, as if she were mad to even ask. “What do you want, a brush or a roller?”
* * *
“That was my mum and my sister,” Jay told Scott at the bus stop, as Sita gave him a hoot from Emmy’s rusty old car. “It’s her first day at work.”
“Up the abattoir?” his new friend asked, as if it went without saying.
“The what?”
“The abattoir. There’s loads of jobs going up there at the moment. My dad’s thinking about going for one but my mum don’t want him to.”
“Why not?”
“Her boyfriend works there.”
“Oh, right,” said Jay, sliding off the curb. “No, not there.”
“Where, then?”
Jay kicked the toes of his new school shoes against the granite shelter. “In the village, I think. She’s a doctor.”
“Nurse, you mean, you div!” Scott told him.
“She’s not a nurse, she’s a doctor.” Jay looked at the ground, hoping Scott wouldn’t mind. He liked him, and not just because it meant he wasn’t the smallest in his class anymore.
“Oh. I never knew you could have lady doctors. I thought they had to be nurses.”
“So who’s the div now?”
“I am.” Scott laughed, stamping on his friend’s feet with his filthy trainers.
“Cor-rect. You are the weakest link. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
They barged each other with their backpacks and Jay felt his flask leaking through the nylon.
“Is your dad a doctor, too?” Scott asked.
“No.”
“What’s his job, then?”
“He hasn’t got one,” Jay said proudly.
“You should tell him to go up the abattoir.”
“I will.”
“Do you want to come fishing later?”
“I haven’t got a rod.”
“Nor have I.”
“What do you fish with, then?”
“A stick.”
“A stick? Do you ever catch anything?”
“No.”
They fell against each other, laughing so loudly that the bus driver had to sound his horn to tell them he was waiting.
* * *
Sita sat in her blue swivel chair looking at the framed studio shots of some other doctor’s chubby blond children on the mock-leather surface of her new pine desk. Above the desk was a blown-up photograph of a sailing boat called Kontiki, with the same two children in matching life jackets waving from her deck. Under it was a pair of smart black leather court shoes two sizes smaller than Sita’s, and hanging on the back of the door was an equally small stone-colored mac which she recognized as from the Gap because she had nearly bought one herself. She felt replicated but different. The same model in a different finish.
“I bet you’ll be the first Asian doctor Cott has seen,” Niall had said at breakfast, at which she had been the sole topic of conversation. “Make sure you give them the full works.”
She wished he hadn’t said that. She felt like a fish out of water as it was. The practice manager had popped in with a truly terrible cup of filter coffee which tasted as if it had been sitting on its hotplate for days, and just as she was tipping it down the small steel sink the woman had appeared from nowhere again, saying, “Just leave it if you don’t want it.” It wasn’t a good start.
In the drawers she had found three packets of eucalyptus chewing gum, a tube of honey-and-lemon hand cream and a nautical-clothing mail-order catalog. There was a box of toddler-friendly toys on the floor, full of the kind of discarded bits and pieces that could be picked up at school fêtes all over the country. It was every doctor’s surgery everywhere, and yet it was all utterly foreign. She felt like phoning Asha and telling her it was okay to be homesick.
Her first patient was a woman with short dark hair and glasses. She was wearing floral jeans, a denim jacket and flip-flops and she made Sita feel ridiculously overdressed.
“Oh!” the woman said, failing to disguise a double take.
Sita’s hackles were up before she could stop them. Yes, an Asian doctor, she felt like saying. What are you going to do now?
“I, er…” the woman said. She neither moved forward nor backward.
Sita stayed sitting and smiling. Inside she began to burn.
“I … I thought…”
The woman clearly didn’t know where to look. How about in my face? Sita thought.
“Is there something wrong?” Sita asked eventually. “Apart from whatever it is you have come to see me about?”
“Er … I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were…”
Sita looked down at the woman’s notes but couldn’t focus on a single thing. She was already back in the kitchen at Bodinnick, telling Emmy.
“This is … I think, um,” the woman began, “I…”
“Sorry, were you expecting someone else? I’m Dr. Dhanda, covering for Dr. Bryant for three weeks.”
“Yes, yes, I know. They told me that. Perhaps I should…”
The woman was clearly flustered. Her face was pink and behind the lenses of her spectacles, her eyes darted everywhere but in Sita’s direction.
“Do you want to sit down?” Sita asked. She’d been expecting a certain rural suspicion, but not this. The fish out of the water was in its last dying spasms. London seemed more attractive than ever.
“I … well…”
“Would you prefer to see someone else? Dr. Hall is back from his holidays today, I think.”
“No. I asked to see a female doctor. It’s just that you…”
“Are Asian?” Sita heard herself say.
“No!” the woman cried. “Oh, no, not that, not at all.” She was even redder in the face now, but Sita stayed sitting, her head tilted slightly to one side. She tried not to look as nervous as she felt. In fact, she thought she might have cricked her neck.
“Oh good, because there’s not much I can do about that.”
They both gave small uneasy laughs.
“It’s just that, well, your daughter has just started at Cott school, hasn’t she? She’s in my son’s class. I’ve seen you in the car park.”
“That’s right, she has.”
“Miss Davey’s lovely with the kids.”
“It seems like a nice school.”
“Not that she stands much nonsense, mind.”
“
Good.”
They stopped. The woman looked as if she wanted the floor to swallow her up. “My problem is a bit delicate,” she murmured.
“Don’t worry,” Sita said, feeling her neck ease. “Doctors are used to delicate problems.”
“What about seeing you in the playground? Won’t we feel…?”
“Not in the slightest. What is said in these four walls—”
“No, it’s not that, I just … well, I came here because I promised my husband I’d talk to someone about … my … my, er…”
Sita waited. Her neck felt normal again. Slowly, she tried to right it. “Take your time.” She had never said that in London.
“My, er, my lack of interest,” the woman said. She stared at the floor. “I don’t really know why I’m here, except I promised him I’d try. I don’t know what you can do to help. I don’t know what anyone can do. I’ve just gone off it, that’s all. It’s not him, it’s me.”
There was a brief mutual sigh.
“I understand,” Sita said.
“Do you? Do you really?”
“Yes,” said Sita again, “yes, I really do.”
* * *
Jonathan didn’t understand much of what was going on, even though he could hear every word from his bedroom.
“It’s not purple, it’s Real Indigo. Jaysus, it even says so on the side of the can.”
“Oh, and I suppose you’re painting your shelves Memory, and not just gray, are you?”
“That was yesterday. Would ye keep up!”
“Anyway, who said you could look at my paint charts?”
“Kat did.”
“Well, she’s not here, so she doesn’t count.”
“It is purple.”
“It’s Real Indigo. Anyway, where’s the dog?”
Niall was at the foot of a ladder in Maya’s bedroom, looking up at Emmy’s dripping brush. He waved a paint-slopped copy of the Manifesto.
“What?” Emmy barked down at him.
“It says here, ‘To have a purple bedroom and a dog.’ And this is a Real Indigo bedroom with no dog. On the other hand, not a morsel of sushi have I let pass my lips in the last month, therefore I win and I claim my prize.”
His hand ran quickly up the inside of her leg and she flicked the brush just as quickly toward his hair. Real Indigo mingled with the Natural Aubergine he had been painting his own walls with before Kat changed her mind. She kept e-mailing him with instructions and links to paint-company Web sites.
“You clash,” Emmy told him. “Now bugger off. You’ve got work to do before you go to Ireland.”
“You don’t really mean that.”
She climbed two steps down the ladder and put herself in a dangerous position. Hips level with lips. Niall gave a small groan.
“Yes I do, and you need to sort out the lid on your box,” she said, bending her head to his ear. “It keeps flying open.”
“That’s because you keep prying it open.”
They meant the box they had always kept their relationship in, shut away and labeled, where it couldn’t cause any trouble.
“I don’t.”
“Ye do.”
“I don’t.”
“Niall?” Jonathan shouted from the corridor, having skinned his knuckles for the second time trying to take off the gloss on the skirting board with a rusty paint scraper. “Have you got the blowtorch?”
The explosion of laughter was almost the last straw. “I’m sorry? Why is that so funny?” he asked, putting his head round the door. “And what are you doing in here anyway, Niall? Kat will kill you if she comes back and you haven’t finished.”
“I’m not in here. I took an earlier plane to Dublin, remember?”
* * *
That evening, Sita and Emmy sat against the wall of the house, drinking beer, catching the last of the sun and watching Maya and Asha try to get Lila to sit up without falling over. Each time, she rolled over, first sideways, then backward, then to the other side. The older girls shrieked with amusement, using the baby like a heavy-bottomed toy.
“She should really be sitting by now,” Sita said. “The other two were.”
“She’s fine,” Emmy told her. “All babies develop at their own rate. You should know that, of all people.”
“But—”
“No buts. You want her to run before she can walk, you do.”
“No, I just want her to sit up, that’s all.”
The girls stuffed Lila back into her car seat and started to practice cartwheels on the lawn. Jay was fishing in the pond with his strange little friend, Jonathan was inside on the computer, looking up limewashing on the Internet and Niall was on his quad in the field, pretending to tidy up the remnants of the bonfire but really seeing how fast he could corner without tipping.
“This is how it should be,” Emmy said hazily, but in the silence that followed she felt obliged to add, “Isn’t it?”
“Kind of,” Sita said.
“Hard day?”
“Pretty much. They all are when you’ve got kids, aren’t they?”
“Why don’t you go and have a bath? Go and have a lie down with Jonathan.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can.”
“No,” said Sita emphatically. “No, I mean it. I really can’t.”
6
Cathal O’Connor was always slightly alarmed when he saw his younger brother again after a break. Greeting Niall at Dublin airport that afternoon was like advancing on one of those fairground mirrors in which characteristics you didn’t know you had are distorted for comic effect. You aren’t supposed to take the deformation seriously, but you can’t help but think there is some truth in it, that the lines under your eyes really are that dark or your hair really is that wild.
Niall always looked unwashed and hung over, but at least he usually managed to dress without putting his sweater on inside out. Cathal, on the other hand, spent his nowadays in a suit which lulled him into a false belief that he had left the Men Behaving Badly look behind. But as soon as he saw the shambolic figure of his brother walking out of the arrivals gate, he knew without being told that his own shirt was hanging out at the back, his tie’s innards were unraveling and his jacket pockets gaped from all the junk he carried around in them. As an architect, he was immaculate. It was his own personal spacial design that needed attention.
“You look like a bag o’ shite,” he told his brother as they made their way down Temple Bar. The gentrification of their old haunts annoyed them both intensely, but they still went there, if only to moan and scowl at the English stag-nighters.
“That’s because I am one,” he replied.
“Look at yer.” Cathal flicked the label sticking out below Niall’s unshaven neck.
“So I got dressed in a hurry.”
“Her husband came back, did he?”
The line of mutual attack was normal. It always went on for the initial hour of their reunions, a nod to their teenage years when a public display of disrespect was the thing that shaped them. Playing the same game on the cusp of their forties helped them feel buoyant, although occasionally it also made them feel hopelessly depressed. Only when they looked at it through the bottom of their fifteenth pint glass, mind you.
Their one hundred relatives still held extensive post mortems about the O’Connor brothers’ discourtesy. Such a shame when you came from such an innately courteous family, they’d say, but there it was. Never mind that the brothers were now only mildly irreverent, the mud had stuck. Their three sisters more than made up for it, though, securing sensible husbands and fifteen children between them before their younger brothers had even left university. Thank God for girls, the one hundred relatives agreed.
You could hardly put Cathal and Niall’s uselessness down to the male genes. Joseph O’Connor, their father, had always been the very model of civility and safety. He didn’t drink, he didn’t swear, he kissed his children and adored his wife. When he’d died in their early twenties and they
had sat next to his peaceful body in his satin-lined coffin, not knowing how to cry, both of them had realized with a weird pride that they were somehow less than him, even though they’d set out to be more. Outclassed by quiet averageness. The problem by then was that their personalities were set in stone—or pickled in alcohol, as their mother said—and they found that, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t be another Joe. So what did they do? Panicked, some would say. Cathal married a woman he’d known for only five minutes, and Niall went traveling.
Niall’s trip to France hadn’t been exactly planned. One minute he was maneuvering his bike through Richmond on his way to work as a restaurant manager at a mediocre hotel, and the next he turned right instead of left and ended up in Bordeaux, with the clothes he stood up in, his wallet and his Marlboro cigarettes. When he came back to England a year later, he knew so much about wine that he would have been a fool not to use the advantage. The other life change was that he now smoked Camels.
It was the age-old mistake of spending more time in the pub than he did at home that scotched Cathal’s marriage, which was why his children now only got silent kisses down the phone. He missed his two boys even more than he missed his father, but they didn’t seem to miss him. Not enough to take him up on his frequent invitations to stay, anyway.
“Oh, you come here, Dad,” eleven-year-old Christopher said in response. “That’ll be only the one flight, and anyway it’s easier for you.”
But it wasn’t that easy to cross the Atlantic, and it made life difficult for them when he arrived. Their mother’s American boyfriend was a little jumpy. A little jumpy and a bit big, but that was what steroids did for you, Cathal tried to joke, but it was hard to find the funny side when his youngest, Billy, was already picking up a Boston accent.
So not for the O’Connor brothers the semidetached family home in a suburb on Dublin’s more affluent south side. Not for them the extension over the garage for the fifth bedroom to accommodate the results of Catholic contraception. And not for them the lifestyle the brothers had been weaned on, the kids coming home for lunch on their bikes, their father on foot from the factory, the whole family round the table for grace before chicken salad. Their adult worlds could not have turned out more differently if they had tried. In other words, in O’Connor family terms, they were long gone.
Eggshell Days Page 8