“Look, as you pointed out, I’m working. Tell Maya to stop jumping to ridiculous conclusions, will you? Why she has to get you to talk to me instead of coming in here herself, I’ve no idea.”
“Oh, really? Stop being such a bitch, Emmy. She’s worried and I am, too.”
“Well don’t. I don’t need you to worry and I don’t need to be called a bitch.”
“Thank you for your time,” Niall said with a sarcastic nod but he didn’t feel sarcastic. He felt gutted.
Emmy pushed her door to again, almost in his face, and went back to stand by the machine. She clenched her fist and held it against her mouth, listening to him walk down the stairs. What he was thinking? Did he really have no idea? Was he not in any way suspicious of his brother just turning up like this? There was something terrible about his apparent ignorance.
The floor was covered in piles of red satin, and remnants of the same fabric in orange were strewn around. It looked like a furnace in there, and why not? She was surely in hell.
It was a double-edged sword, hiding away like this. She sat on the satin on the floor, pulled her legs up and held them tight to her body with her arms. A tissue-paper pattern for a devil’s outfit was partly unfolded next to her. She could see the outline for a pronged fork. She knew a devil transformed into an angel, but how in God’s name was she expected to be able to create anything like that when she no longer believed in heaven? A discarded tabard of mock chainmail hung over the back of the chair. She felt as if her guts had been skewered on a lance and the dragon’s flames had burned every cell of her skin.
There was another knock on the door.
“Look, unless you are Maya, I’m not in,” she shouted.
The last person she expected to walk in was Cathal.
* * *
He went straight to the window.
“Come in why don’t you?” Emmy snapped, jumping to her feet, but when she forced herself to look at him—the way his shoulders were slumped and his head hung from all the thinking—she almost felt sorry for him. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be hostile.”
She had meant to be, a few seconds ago. A few seconds ago it was her only defense. Now he’d even taken that away.
He didn’t speak, but blew out, fogging a little damp circle on the inside of the window.
Emmy reminded herself of her carefully chosen catalog of facts. The last time they had been alone together, Maya hadn’t even technically been a fusion of egg and sperm. That miraculous little explosion had happened only once Cathal was on his way back to Ireland to join his heavily pregnant wife. Maya had happened all on her own.
“I’m sorry, too,” he said. “I know you don’t want me here, but I gave up hoping you would reply to my letters.”
“I sent you a text message,” she said defensively.
“I was already on my way by then.”
They were both looking out of the narrow window, knowing there was no point in clarifying what was blindingly obvious. Out in the garden, through the spotless panes of glass in the narrow sash window, they were looking at their daughter. Emmy had cleaned the glass herself that morning for something to do, and now she wished she hadn’t. By doing so, she had put Maya into perfect focus. It was impossible not to want to claim some of her for yourself.
Their daughter was pushing Asha around in a wheelbarrow, trying not to let it tip. She knew she was being watched. She just wasn’t sure where from, or why.
“I told her not to go outside without asking me.”
“I know. Niall told her he didn’t think you would mind.”
Emmy bit her lip. “A mind reader, is he?”
“No, you’re just transparent. While I’m here with you, there’s no chance of her being outside with me, is there?” he said. “You’re making me feel like a pedophile.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
There was a silence while they tried to rein in their anger, and then he said it. It came out in a rush as he turned to look straight into Emmy’s eyes, his muscles twitching, his lips taut.
“She is mine, isn’t she?”
He hadn’t meant it to be one of the first questions, but there Maya was, the living, breathing version of the photograph he had been staring at for the past few weeks, and it was all too much.
Emmy felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. “No,” she said, bracing herself for the next hit.
“Is that true?”
She looked away from the window, trying to control the fog that had closed in over her head. She tried to remember the things she had thought of to say. “Anyone who knows anything about Maya will tell you she doesn’t belong to anyone,” she hissed.
“I’m not interested in that kind of ownership. You know what I mean.”
“If she is anyone’s, she’s mine. Any court in the land will tell you.”
“God, Emmy, please slow down.”
“I can’t,” she said quickly. “You shouldn’t be here. Look, I don’t want to disappoint you, but she really isn’t interested.”
“That’s because she doesn’t know,” Cathal replied quietly. His voice was so like his brother’s, it was confusing. He was like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“How do you know she doesn’t know?”
“I can tell by the way she is with me.”
A silence fell between them. The tiniest, tiniest part of Emmy wanted to stand at the window with him and bask in shared parental pride. The words “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” wanted to form on her lips. It was so minuscule a part that she knew she didn’t have to acknowledge it.
“I wish you hadn’t ignored my letters,” he said. “I feel like a bastard for turning up like this, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I didn’t ignore them. I didn’t get the first one straight away—Jonathan left it over at the chapel—and, well, it hardly matters.”
“No.”
“No.”
“Which is why I was forced to come here instead.”
“What do you mean, ‘forced’? Who forced you?” She felt as if she were on the end of a seesaw. One minute she felt safe, the next she had vertigo.
“You did.”
“Don’t make me hate you, Cathal.”
“Oh, I think you already do that, don’t you?”
He watched Maya tip Asha out of the barrow. She stopped laughing and helped her up. Good girl, he felt like shouting down.
“I don’t hate you, I hate what you’re doing.”
“I can’t help what I’m doing.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” she repeated. “We can’t talk here.”
“Then meet me somewhere. We don’t have to make an evening of it. A layby would do. Anywhere. You know we’re going to have to do it some time.”
“Someone would see us. You don’t know what it’s like round here.”
“Please.”
“No. For the first time in my life, I feel I’m where I should be, with the people I should be with. And you’re threatening that. You’re invading it.”
“I’m not invading it. I’m trying to make the best decision I can without hurting everyone. I haven’t just got on a boat and come over here to shoot my mouth off and give you a hard time because I feel like it. I’m here because this isn’t the kind of stuff you can ignore. It needs sorting.”
“If you take this to its logical conclusion, you’ll wreck all of it.”
“How will I?”
She wasn’t sure. She said the first thing that came into her head. “Niall will leave.”
Cathal made a noise of disbelief and started almost to shout. “This isn’t about Niall, Emmy. This is the one thing in your life that isn’t about Niall. I know everything else is. I even know that sleeping with me was about Niall, but it isn’t about him anymore. It’s about Maya.”
“And you. It’s about you. The one thing it isn’t about is me.”
“You’ve had ten years to prepare for this. You should have worked all this out.”
“Please don’t cry, Emmy.”
“It’s too late for that,” she choked.
“Let’s not do this now.”
“Let’s never do it.”
“Never isn’t an option, though, is it? Never isn’t fair.”
Fair? she wanted to scream. Since when has my life ever been fair?
“I don’t want to ruin anything, anything at all, I just want—”
“What? What do you want?” she spat. Soon she was spraying her venom without caution all over the room, because once she had started she couldn’t stop. “If it’s Maya you want, you can forget it. You can’t pick and choose the right times to be a father—either you are or you’re not, and you are clearly not. Did you hear that? You are clearly not a father, Cathal, so don’t try and be one. You’re not even a father to your boys anymore. Where have you been all these years? I know where you’ve been, you’ve been at home with your wife and kids, bringing them up, and now they’ve gone. Well, bad luck, but there is nothing here you can replace them with. Life isn’t like that. You say I’ve had ten years to prepare for this, well so have you—don’t you dare try and tell me it has never occurred to you before, because—”
Cathal interrupted. “No. You’re wrong. It hasn’t ever occurred to me, I swear. Really. It was just as much a bolt from the blue for me as it was for you. I saw her picture and I saw me lookin’ back. That was it.”
“Is that all you have to go on?”
“No.” He looked ashamed.
“Then what?”
“I’ve got dates. I’ve checked.”
Emmy made a noise somewhere between contempt and assent.
“I can’t ignore it. It wouldn’t be right.” He was facing her now.
“Right for who?” she shouted as loudly as she dared. It was too loud as it happened, because downstairs, doing nothing very much, Niall stopped in his tracks and looked at the ceiling. Was that Cathal’s voice?
“I’m thinking about no one else, I assure you.”
“Liar!”
“Okay, we’ll leave it there before someone hears. But I’m not going back until we talk about this properly, like civil adults, until we have some kind of view of the future.”
“We?”
“I, then.”
“You keep saying you want this and you want that, but you never actually come out with it, do you? What do you want?” It was a terrible risk. He might say he wanted Maya.
“I want it all to be out in the open.”
“Don’t be so…” Emmy grabbed her cigarettes and pulled open the door.
Cathal was on her heels. “Come for a drive. We need to talk.”
“No. You need to talk, so get a fucking therapist. I’m fine if we never speak again.”
As they went down the stairs, Niall came up. He stood to one side, looking at them rush by, not knowing what he was seeing.
16
Mog looked at Jonathan’s tidy jeans sticking out from under the bus and, as the baby in her womb shifted, she wondered if it was true what people said about parental adrenaline being so strong it could lift juggernauts off trapped children.
Jonathan slid out and stood up. He’d never been under anything bigger than a car, but he could tell a broken sump pump when he saw one.
Black grease had smeared itself all over his bottom and up the arms of his all-weather fleece. It was in the back of his hair, under his nails, down the side of his cheeks. Mog forgave herself for thinking he’d daubed himself on purpose under there, like he was in the mechanics division of the Territorial Army or something. She recognized his overwhelmingly middle-class neatness, but what she didn’t know was just how neat he used to be.
“There’s not just a crack, there’s a hole in the aluminium big enough to fit your finger through,” he said.
Dean tugged at a tuft of his beard and Jonathan smoothed his cleanly shaven jaw.
“Well, we need either a brand new bus or a scrapyard, then,” Mog said. “What’ll it be?”
“Do you know where one is?” Jonathan asked.
“Yeah, it’s about half an hour from here.”
“I don’t mind taking you there.”
“That’s all right, mate. I could take the blat,” Dean said.
“If it had petrol in it you could,” Mog said. “We never got any, did we?”
“The what?” Jonathan asked.
Mog held her hands in a hammock under her pregnant belly. “That thing.” She nodded at a motorbike fixed to the side of the bus. “I don’t know why he calls it a blat. Why do you, Dean?”
“It’s what everyone called them at the camp.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. A blat is anyfin’ you use to get around, like a pushbike or a car or a bike, like. Saves you usin’ your big vehicle, although some tossers would take a bus like this downtown just to pick up some fags, wouldn’t they, Mog?”
“You used to live in a camp?”
“Yeah, until about six weeks ago.”
“Why did you leave?”
Jonathan had accepted the offer of tea this time. It was the first time Mog and Dean had invited him past the water tanks and the gas bottles and the pipes that led in and out of the holes crudely cut into the pressed steel.
“It was the brew crew,” said Mog. “They started outnumbering us, and it got a bit pointless in the end, being with people that were so pissed all day they had nothing better to do than shoot at empty beer cans.”
“Special Brew. Carlsberg.” Dean nodded knowingly, his dreadlocks flicking with the movement. “A quick way to get shit-faced.”
Jonathan had seen cans of it on the beach.
“I started feeling embarrassed when we went into town together,” Mog said. “We all got painted with the same brush.”
“Do you think I’ve done the engine in, then?” Dean asked, offering Jonathan a worn green plastic tobacco pouch.
“It depends how far you drove without oil. No, thanks.” Being taken, even for a moment, for someone who might be able to roll their own made him think briefly again of something that often kept him awake at night, about first impressions and other people’s perceptions of you. About how wrong you could be.
“I dunno. Ten miles?”
“Let’s think about fitting a secondhand sump first, then we’ll worry about the engine later.”
Dean hopped up into the driver’s cab and started to unclip a carpeted hump. Jonathan remembered how the girls on his school bus used to take turns to sit on it and how the bus driver used to put his hand on their bare legs and no one thought it was odd, and he was back with other people’s perceptions again.
“How do you get to the rest of it?”
“By taking the grille off the front.”
Dean climbed across a couple of old water drums and turned the engine over, but Jonathan was none the wiser. He shrugged helplessly as Dean put his hand down the neck of his filthy knitted striped sweater to put his tobacco back.
Mog put her face to the slight breeze that was coming in through the door, and the wispy bits of hair around her cheeks that were once a fringe revealed her tiny studded ears. Miniature pieces of blue glass glinted in the sun. For a split second, she looked far too young to be a girlfriend, let alone an expectant mother.
He could smell the food that they had either just eaten or were still in the process of cooking, bringing to his tastebuds a vision of an earthy casserole of curried root vegetables, or chickpea soup. In fact, it was Dean’s second Pot Noodle of the day.
Mog saw his eyes wander away from the engine and try to see round the door that cut off the driver’s cabin from the rest of the bus.
“Would you like to see inside?”
“No, no, I’m sorry,” he apologized, reddening. “I’m just curious. It looks intriguing.”
“Please, I’d like to show you.” He
could see that she meant it. It was her home, and she was proud of it.
“Well, if you’re sure I wouldn’t be intruding…”
“I’m sure. Come and have a look.”
She took her boots off, leaving them this side of the door, and he did the same.
“Thanks,” she said. “It’s just that if mud or sand gets in there, it’s impossible to get it out.”
He followed her into the main body of the coach, and even though he’d known that the rows of seats and the metal aisle and the mesh luggage racks and the notices about not smoking or opening the windows would be long gone, it was a surprise to find himself in a small but perfectly formed sitting room.
“Can you flick the lights on, Dean?” Mog called.
He turned them on from the dashboard and a mini-runway of half-shell lamps illuminated a faded red carpeted ceiling, broken up by two huge skylights. The metal trim where the bell would once have been was still there, too.
From the wood-paneled wall to the long, narrow window, it was no more than seven feet wide. There was a rug on the floor, cushions, photos in frames, books on shelves—The Continuum Concept, The Magus. He saw a row of orange-spined Penguin Classics and imagined her embryonic schoolgirl signature inside.
“Mog, this is amazing.”
She smiled shyly. “It’s not really. There’s plenty of horribleness here. It’s just all covered up.” She lifted the edge of an embroidered indigo throw and revealed the arm of a tacky gold velour sofa with its back to the cab. “We got that from the trash. They didn’t charge us for it because they knew no one else would be stupid enough to take it, but it’s fine. It’s quite comfy, actually. That one’s even worse,” she said, pointing to a second sofa beneath the long window. “It’s just beat-up old foam mainly. I made the cover from a pair of curtains we bought at a jumble sale.”
Jonathan thought about the number of rooms they had at Bodinnick. He thought of the number of rolls of fabric Emmy kept buying and doing nothing with, and he thought of the number of books they had left behind in London which no one had got around to reading.
Mog slid back a narrow half-light that ran along the top and let in a couple of inches of sunshine, knocking her shin on a fire extinguisher which had been converted into a crude wood burner. Its top had been cut off, and a length of flexible steel pipe from it led up through the roof. It stood on a sheet of metal on two bricks, and a little door had been cut into the wider part of its base. Inside, a wedge of mesh provided the grate.
Eggshell Days Page 22