“Oh, you should go to Saint Peter’s if you can. It has this fabulous sculptured granite façade.”
“You’ve been?” She nodded. She didn’t tell him it was on a school trip six years ago.
“We could go together?” he suggested tentatively.
“Sure.”
“That would be great. It’s so good, finally meeting someone who’s interested in the same things as I am.”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
And the way she said it, he really should have realized that she meant it.
* * *
“What about clapshot?” Sita said.
“No, I’ve never had that. Is it treatable?” Emmy asked, fishing carrots and the green parts of the leek out of the ham pot.
Sita laughed. “It’s something you can make from rutabagas and potatoes. Look.” She pointed at a recipe in a book called Hearty Vegetable Dishes.
“Good grief! Who the hell would eat anything called clapshot?”
“Somebody who had a surfeit of rutabagas and potatoes?”
“Oh yeah!”
They were both a little drunk and Emmy had been tutoring Sita in the newly discovered techniques of phone sex.
“I think you should do it today,” said Emmy. “Strike while the iron’s hot.”
“Wouldn’t that burn?”
Their loud cackles were more or less unconscious now, but if they still traveled upstairs that was a bonus. If he heard them, Niall might wish he were downstairs instead.
“God knows we could do with a touch of originality,” said Sita.
“Oh, you don’t touch, and it’s not very original. This is the age of the mobile, remember.”
“It would be original for us.”
“From what you’ve just told me, any sex would be original for you.”
“This is true. Shall I phone him now?”
“He might have lime putty on his hands. Very caustic, I’ve heard. It can cause blindness. And don’t you think that would be biting off more than you can chew?”
“I’ve never been able to do that, either. What do you do with your teeth?”
“Take ’em out, leave ’em in a glass of water on the side.”
“It’ll come to that sooner than we think.”
“I know. My gums have already started bleeding when I clean my teeth.”
“Stop,” Sita said, making a disgusted face. “That’s too much information, even for a doctor. Anyway, that’s not caused by old age, that’s down to careless brushing. Let’s go back to phone sex a minute. Give me an opening line.”
“You don’t need me to tell you what to say.”
“Oh but I do.”
“Well, it can be anything, can’t it? Just make sure you choose your words carefully—some words don’t work.”
“Like what? I need an example.”
“Okay. ‘Probing.’”
“Uuugh!”
“Or the ‘c’ word.”
“I wouldn’t say that anyway.”
“And men don’t like ‘prick.’”
“I don’t suppose they do!”
“So why do they like ‘dick?’”
“Do they?”
“Don’t they? I thought they did.”
“I don’t know, do I?”
Emmy filled their glasses with the last of the champagne. “Can you remember what—”
“Don’t! I know what you’re going to say and just don’t!”
“Fingerbob!”
“I said don’t! I’d forgotten him!”
They were dribbling helplessly, with tears streaming down their faces, and neither of them noticed when Niall walked in, barefoot. He checked the empty champagne bottle and decided not to mention how much it cost. It was worth every penny, anyway.
“Get on with sorting the clapshot, you old tart,” Emmy snorted to Sita, rolling the rutabaga at her.
It was too good a line for Niall to ignore. “I thought you weren’t on duty today, Sita.”
“Oh, God! How long have you been there?” shrieked Emmy, spinning round. Her face was flushed with alcohol.
“Ages. I heard the whole lot.” It was a fair bet. He knew what they were like.
“You liar.”
“I did. And you’re both filthy. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“We are. Deeply.”
“Well,” said Sita, scraping her chair across the slate floor and picking up her mobile from the dresser. “Will you excuse me? I’ve got a phone call to make.”
“You aren’t, are you?” Emmy asked her.
“I am.”
“Is nothing sacred?” said Niall, not really minding that he had clearly been discussed, and pointing to Emmy’s shoulder to try and tell her about the pen.
* * *
“You all need to leave room for my delicious pudding,” Kat reminded everyone. But fingers kept creeping back to the platter to have one more go at picking up the last few chunky flakes of rich pink meat, or to the chipped floral serving dish for some of the burned onions left from the clapshot.
She had spent the late afternoon spoiling Emmy and Sita’s fun with her presence, and creating a complicated chocolate orange soufflé with ingredients from a selection of cappuccino-colored paper bags tied with gold ribbons. The bags still sat by the organic vegetable cardboard box next to the kitchen sink, making a statement similar to the one being made under the table by her high snakeskin-effect mules and Emmy’s flat clogs.
“I’m not sure I could eat another thing,” Emmy said, the ballpoint message still on her shoulder blade but hidden by a lime-green velvet wrap with a fringe of purple beads she had made for the occasion.
“Oh, you must.”
Maya dipped her spoon in and licked it. “It’s actually really yum!”
“There’s loads of alcohol in it.”
“How much?” Jonathan asked nervously.
Kat shrugged helplessly. “Oh, loads. I didn’t think about the children.”
“I’ll have some,” Jay shouted from the far end. He and Scott had already seen off two cans of beer each and he liked the Dutch courage it gave him. What’s more, his banner had worked. He and Scott had hung it from the Welsh dresser, weighted down at the top by the contents of the larder. Everyone had cheered when he finally allowed them into the kitchen. He’d even let his mother kiss him.
“Arm-wrestle me, Dad.”
“No. You’ll beat me.”
“Arm-wrestle me, Niall.”
“No. I’ll break your finger bones.”
“A game of snooker, then?”
“We haven’t got enough balls.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jay shouted bravely, basking in Scott’s adoring admiration. “C’mon Scottie, let’s go.”
Sita and Jonathan smiled at each other side by side on the settle.
“Did you get my message at lunchtime?” she asked him under her breath.
“Yes. I didn’t get back because I was already on my way.”
“Pity.”
“Why? What did you need me for?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Why not?”
“You just wouldn’t.”
“Try me.” He wasn’t sure but he thought he caught something in her eye he hadn’t seen for a very long time.
“Phone sex,” she whispered.
He looked around to see who was in on the joke. No one seemed to be. “Yeah, right. Don’t tell me, Lila had run out of nappies and you wanted me to stop off at the shop.”
“No, really.”
“Really?” he asked. He was also whispering now.
“Yes, really.”
“Bloody good soufflé,” Niall said, scraping the last of it up.
“Not bad for a first attempt,” Kat purred, pulling his arm round her neck.
“I think I need to lie down,” said Emmy.
“Not before you tell us about your business,” Kat said. “I took a look in your sewing room today. You’ve g
ot a load of material in there.”
“Oh, that reminds me, was there any post today?” Emmy asked quickly. “I’ve been waiting a whole week for some patterns I ordered.”
“The post here is verging on bloody carrier pigeon, isn’t it?” said Niall. “I saw the plumber, Roy Mundy, at the pub earlier and he said he sent his bill to us days ago. I’m sure we haven’t had it. I reckon that chirpy little postie nicks stuff and hides it in the bushes somewhere. He’s not right, is he? If he asks me to put a feckin’ letterbox in the back door one more time I’ll—”
“Language!” Asha shouted from the end of the table.
And then Jonathan remembered.
“Oh God, it’s my fault,” he said, the blood draining from his face. “I bet it’s all over at the chapel. I intercepted the post the other day when I had Lila with me. I shoved it in her bucket seat. I was so keen to get away from him that I just took it and … I’ll go and get it.”
“Don’t worry about it now, Jon. It can wait another day,” said Emmy. “Anyway, it’s pouring down out there.”
“No, no, I’ll go and get it now, while I remember. It’s no problem. It won’t take me two minutes.”
“Don’t be daft, Jonathan,” Sita said, but he was already doing up his boots. She put her hand to her ear to mime a phone but he missed it.
“You’re mad,” Emmy told him.
“Completely bloody barking,” said Niall.
“Probably,” he said, and on the walk over there, he realized there was no probably about it.
* * *
The rain was coming right at him, but if he kept his head down he couldn’t see where he was going, because the lights of the farmhouse were his only pointer. The driving wetness found its way inside the collar of his coat and through the stitching of his boots within seconds, and the warmth from the kitchen flew out the top of his thinning hair and left him chilled to the bone. He would probably be cold all night now.
Not that he cared. The chapel door gave him its familiar greeting as he pushed it open and flicked on the light. A single unshaded lightbulb hung from a central beam and he made two mental notes. One, to have a proper think about the ultimate necessity for electricity over here; two, to get a doorstop.
The mail was still on the floor by the radio. It was covered in a film of grit, and the top envelope had a coffee ring on it. Two dirty cups were next to it. A slender bone-china mug that was far too good to be out here had marks of lipstick round its rim. In slow motion, he brought it up to his mouth and pressed it against his lips. Then he rolled it against his cheek and held it there. It wasn’t the chapel he wanted to see again tonight, it was Tamsin.
When he got back to the house, a game of Chinese whispers was under way. What had started out as “Peas in a pod are good for the bod” had ended up as “Piss in a pot is good for Herbert,” and he walked into the kitchen to hear his nine-year-old daughter deliver the final sentence with all the finesse of a navvy. Sita had gone to bed.
“Tenpence for the swear box, Asha,” Niall shouted.
“Pot calling, I think,” Jonathan told him, letting two envelopes fall into Emmy’s lap. He put the mugs on the table but the lipstick mark was gone, wiped off on the inside of his pocket.
“Are you making a patchwork quilt or something?” Niall asked as Emmy undid the parcel and pulled out five different-colored squares of satin. He tilted a bottle toward her empty glass but missed—a splash of red wine hit the newly revealed slate floor with a wet slap. His attention had been caught by something else. The second letter she picked up had a familiar green stamp with a harp on it—the equivalent of a flashing neon arrow to an Irishman.
“Who’s writing to you from Ireland?”
“I’ve no idea,” Emmy said looking at the printed address, but her brain had finished sifting through the possibilities before the words came out of her mouth.
“Can I have the stamp?” Maya asked.
But her mother didn’t hear. She had already started to pull the contents out and it was too late to stop. There was nothing to do but read it.
Emmy, I would very much like to talk to you. My work, home and mobile numbers are below. Please call me if you can. Cathal.
Her world receded like the shrinking crisp packet Jay had just set alight with a candle in the ashtray.
11
Maya did sometimes ask about her father, but only in private on good days. She had learned to choose the right time from the experience of once choosing the wrong time, when Emmy had unwittingly made her feel, with just one look, as if she were the most ungrateful, insensitive selfish child in the whole world.
She knew the warning signs. Cigarettes in the house again, long telephone conversations in her bedroom with the door shut, canceled babysitters. Cigarettes were probably the most reliable pointer. Most of the time, Emmy only smoked Niall’s. If she bought a packet herself, Maya knew things were bad. Mum had bought a packet a day for weeks and weeks after Niall met Kat.
On the other hand, the more obvious clues like crying didn’t mean much at all. Mum cried over silly things like bumping her head on the door frame, or the car not starting, or being hopelessly late for school. As far as Maya knew, she hadn’t cried once since they’d moved to Cornwall, but Maya suspected that was just because the doors were higher, there was always another car available, and here no one minded if you were late for school. Also, obviously, Niall was always around.
When Maya did want a sense of her own genetic provenance, it was easier to ask about Iona, her dead grandmother, even though she had heard it all before. Everyone was always happy to talk about Iona—about her being caught sitting on Grandpa’s bed at Ledbury when they weren’t even engaged, about her dressing up as a man to get in to a club in London, about her letting Emmy light one of her cocktail cigarettes and not minding when Emmy burned a hole in the curtain with it.
Because Iona had been dead for centuries, she didn’t have the family taboo that Maya’s father had. No one ever ever spoke about her father. They all behaved as if she had popped out of nowhere, like the product of a virgin birth or something.
At times, Maya thought she would prefer never to meet her dad, just invent him. That way, he could be whoever she chose him to be. He could be Niall, or he could be someone even better than Niall. He could be someone who was prepared to live with her mum, for example. Live as in live, involving beds and baths and things. And then at other times, she thought she probably would like to meet him, to see what he looked like and if she liked him.
She couldn’t help being eternally intrigued by the fact that she was made up of bits of people she didn’t know. Asha’s mouth was exactly the same as Jonathan’s—the lips went up in the middle under the nose like a little skateboard ramp—but Jay’s was thinner, more like Sita’s. She had to stop herself staring sometimes, because little details like that could change your entire face. If you blocked off their mouths, Jay and Asha were actually quite alike.
Maya knew she didn’t have Mum’s mouth. Mum’s lips were full and bouncy and she could suck in her cheeks and do a really good fish impression, but her own lips weren’t big enough for that. When she sucked in her cheeks, she looked more like an old woman with no teeth. So whose mouth was it?
“Can you do a fish?” she would ask her mother’s boyfriends. And they’d have a go, thinking it was some sort of bonding ritual.
Often, when she was having her shoulder-length hair dried by Emmy in front of the mirror, she would try and surreptitiously work out which bits of them matched. On a really good day, she could persuade Emmy to put her face right next to hers and they would stare at their reflections together.
“Okay, how about chin?” asked Emmy once.
“Mine looks like a little bottom.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Yours doesn’t.”
“Eyes?”
“No. Mine go like that and yours go like this.”
“They’re the same color, though.”
&n
bsp; “Do you think we look like each other at all?”
“People are always telling me we do,” Emmy lied. But she didn’t think so at all. She knew who she thought Maya looked like.
“Just describe him,” Maya said.
“Oh, well, he had three heads, and eyes on stalks.”
“Yeah yeah, and he was covered in purple fur.”
“Pink, darling, get it right.”
Emmy didn’t understand that Maya needed it to be purple, even if it was a joke, so she could imagine she had inherited at least something.
“Pink, then. But…”
“Hey, look, our chins are the same shape.”
“Why didn’t you marry him?”
“Would you marry someone with three heads?”
“No, Mum, seriously.”
“He didn’t ask me.”
“Would you have married him if he had?”
“Oh, Maya, you know I’m not up for all this.”
Emmy’s resistance didn’t matter to Maya as much as the textbooks Emmy tried to avoid but couldn’t help reading said it should.
Anyway, Maya had a distant plan which she told no one. She was going to find out about her father when she was older, when Emmy was less dependent on her, when she could meet him without anyone knowing, perhaps without even her father knowing. Out of curiosity, that was all. Just to check he didn’t have three heads.
“What do I call him?”
“Why don’t we just call him ‘your dad?’” her mum had suggested once.
“No,” Maya had replied, repulsed at the idea. “I don’t want to.”
So they called him nothing. He had been nothing for ten years and now it was three o’clock in the morning and Emmy was lying in her bed during the longest night of her life, trying to accept that life as they all knew it was about to change.
Would he still be Cathal? Or would he, God forbid, become Dad? She was seething with an ill-defined anger, not just against Cathal but against Niall, too. How could he be so bloody thick? Why had he never worked out the identity of Maya’s father? Why had he always been so patient, so stupidly content to accept her refusal to discuss it? He should have pushed her, as he pushed her on other stuff.
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