The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  Charlie joins Hana in the garden, and together they use the garden gate to bring the glasses in from the car. As he slips past Hana he places his hand at the base of her spine. Jess notes that, but she doesn’t pursue the thought. She finds herself assessing Eddie instead. She likes to evaluate things, to gauge their extent, the likelihood there is that they might spring an unpleasant surprise. Eddie is wound up today. His movements are staccato, almost clockwork. She realises then that she hasn’t seen him without Maya for a year, maybe more. He seems restless without her.

  Eddie gets up to go. ‘I’d better be getting on,’ he says. ‘Maya’s class will be finished soon. Anyway, we’ll see you later, yeah? And if you really want to know what I think? The best thing you can do is just ignore that passport.’

  She doesn’t say anything to that, and it’s as if Eddie interprets her silence as a challenge. One way or another, he seems to feel he has to state his case.

  ‘She might well have applied for a second passport. She was planning on travelling, wasn’t she? A second passport can come in useful. Maybe it was a form of insurance for her. If the worst came to the worst, a passport in another name could be currency, her little nest egg, something she could sell if she got desperate and needed to get out. Perhaps she took out a passport in Mary Callan’s name with that possibility in mind. Perhaps she’d already sold it on by the time she disappeared. Maybe the sale of the passport was what financed her disappearance. Who’s to say she was the one to use it to fly to Paris? And why would she be flying to Paris anyway? There were no French people in the Yellow House. There are much more convenient places she could have gone. You know what the local police are like about carrying ID if you’re a foreigner. Well, you probably don’t, but take it from me, it made things simpler if you did. Just supposing she still had Mary Callan’s Irish passport, it’s quite conceivable that on that day, on the beach, she was carrying it with her because that was the one she felt she could afford to lose. If they were attacked by someone on that beach, or if your father was attacked and she went to see where he’d gone, the passport would definitely have been sold on by whoever got their hands on it. Passport like that, it’s worth a lot of money. So, we have no idea who used that passport. None.’

  ‘And yet somehow it found its way back to Curramona. At the very least, that’s an extraordinary coincidence, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’d need to be able to ask the dead woman in the caravan, wouldn’t we? Pity.’

  There is no answer to that, and he knows it. She is on the cusp of mentioning Ro and then she stops herself. She doesn’t want to spread around the news the policeman told her over the phone. She doesn’t want to cast any more suspicion onto Ro. And she doesn’t want to conjure him up either. Not until she’s feeling stronger, more able to withstand the onslaught of his enthusiasm.

  ‘Try and enjoy the party, Jess. You give such great parties.’

  Around five, she realises there are no cocktail sticks and that they’re short of paper napkins. She could ask Hana to go, but she feels like getting out of the house to try and clear her head. She walks over to the Tesco Metro on the edge of the Common. When she finds they don’t have any cocktail sticks and that their only napkins are translucent scraps of two-ply, she proceeds to the Waitrose a little further down the hill. After the rain, the grass already seems greener than it was last week. It is the kind of expanse you rarely find in the city. It makes her breathe deeply, as if she’s on a perfectly manicured piste, at the start of a ski slope she knows is well within her abilities.

  When she returns to the house, Charlie and Hana are sitting together on the kitchen sofa, Ruby cooing happily between them. Jess enters the room and Ruby looks up and then flings a little plastic bus at the door, at her mother, at whatever has interrupted all this. The child looks back at Hana and Charlie and they all laugh, and Jess’s heart clenches because in that moment it feels like she could lose everything, that nobody would mind if she vanished, right now, and never came back. She opens her mouth to say something.

  But it’s Charlie who breaks the silence. ‘Don’t be silly, Roobs, come and cuddle Mummy.’

  And even though Ruby doesn’t resist or turn away, Jess feels shamed. She buries her face in the back of Ruby’s neck, in those silky blonde curls, that baby skin. The child pulls her tight, and for a moment that is all that is necessary, to stay there, skin to skin.

  There will be a mix of people at the party. Work and school and nursery. Charlie’s old rugby friends and their willowy wives. A neighbour or two invited for reasons of politics. Another few for kindness. There will be two long trestle tables, and a barbeque she borrowed from Martha. And there will be light: tea lights on the terrace, a magic ball trained on the newly painted blue wall, and those thick plastic ropes of LEDs that never look quite right, coiled around the cherry tree.

  There is a rush of early arrivals, and the teenage sons of a neighbour, hired to do the waitering, seem to be doing OK. As for Jess, an early glass of Prosecco takes the edge off. While Charlie is at ease from the start, Jess doesn’t feel relaxed with the small knot of neighbours who know one another better than she knows any of them. There is Reg from across the road – or Real Reg, as Charlie calls him – who has never hidden his yearning for a golden age when Riverton Street was home to Real People. Jess glances at the brace of intimidatingly black-clad blondes who waft in with their respective broods of wispy girl children in Docs and fairy dresses. Oh Reg, she feels like telling him. I know what you mean. She is looking forward to the arrival of Sarah from work. Although Sarah, being pregnant, might come primarily out of curiosity, it will be a relief to have one foot in that other life where she still feels competent and worthwhile. She hopes the house doesn’t look too forbiddingly perfect. She wants it to look perfect, of course. That’s the trouble. She just doesn’t want to chase people away.

  The evening darkens, and the Common recedes. As the day goes down the volume goes up and there are lights glancing off that pale blue wall. In the gazebo the wan light emitted by bunches of LED balloons falls short of the promise on the pack. The air is thick with the smell of meat and booze and sharp-sweet wafts of Jo Malone.

  Once she has seen people in, and they have formed little groups, and it all seems to be going fine, she feels the need to be with Ruby. When she reaches Ruby’s room, she finds that Hana is already up there, Ruby on her hip, walking back and forth attempting to soothe her. ‘That music is too loud for baby ears.’

  ‘Oh it’s fine, Hana. You can hardly hear it up here.’

  ‘No? You don’t think what it sounds like to baby ears? Torture, that is what.’

  How is it possible to be so sanctimonious when you are still only twenty-four? There is a fight to be had, but she doesn’t have it. Instead, she tells Hana that she’s a star. Even Hana seems to find that a bit of a stretch, but she takes it.

  ‘Don’t worry. Just go downstairs now and have a drink.’

  Once Hana has gone, Jess draws the shutters and the curtains, and the nursery becomes a little padded cell. The music is muffled now, and she suddenly feels exhausted. She eases herself on to the floor, where the carpet smells a little sour, and closes her eyes. Gradually, Ruby asleep in her cot is all there is. Jess starts to match her own breath to her daughter’s. This harmony, this unison, she could stay like this all night. Downstairs, someone has turned the music up, but Ruby doesn’t stir. And there, into the space Jess has made for her, comes Sophie Considine, who was Mary really, and who, it seems, will never go away but linger uselessly at the margins – a reminder of the traps life lays for the unwary, and of the numerous ways a mother can fall short.

  Would she be frail by now, osteopenic? Would she have run to fat? Would she have loved her grandchild, been bored by her, both? Jess tries to hold on to an idea of her mother, but it’s a brittle thing. There is little to admire, still less to emulate. In an attempt to conjure up some substance, she resorts to the game she used to play with Ro.

  If you h
ad Mama for a day, what would you ask her?

  If you had Mama for a week, where would you want her to take you?

  Jess’s answers were simple ones. She would ask Mama to stay, and she would want her to take her home.

  The game had lots of other questions, of course, and the answers have changed over the years. She used to write them down each year, on her birthday, in a special book that must have got thrown out when she went to university. Presents she would give her mother, presents she might be given in return.

  Ruby, for the first one. And a grandmother for Ruby who isn’t Renée, for the second.

  She would ask her mother to teach her how to play the guitar, whether she has a recipe for apple tart, what it was like to have a husband she couldn’t control. She would ask her to stay in the guest room, and never to go away again. She would ask her whether she loved Dejan with the big moustache, whether she loved Papa, whether her life has been a happy one.

  She wonders who has the home movies, now that Rae is gone. Poor Rae, so different from Sophie and yet so careful of her memory – she deserved more than just the three months of retirement her cancer allowed her. Out of nowhere, Jess has a longing for Rae, for the reassuring smell of her chicken casseroles, for her clean plain pine and cream house. But the stronger longing is for Sophie. What she wouldn’t give to see Sophie move across a screen, flicking her long plait over her shoulder, turning back to the camera and then looking away.

  The music has taken over now, some stadium anthem she half remembers. Even up here the rhythm buzzes deep in the floorboards. She wishes she could stay here all night, but she can’t. Before she leaves, she eases the blanket up over the round of Ruby’s back, folding it down across her small shoulders, and closes the door behind her. One storey down, the house still feels familiar, safe. But when she reaches the ground floor, the skin of things is broken. There are half-finished plates of food, a battery of glasses stained with this and that, handbags tucked in under chairs like sleeping pets. In the kitchen, one of the hired teens is tying up the cords on a clinking bin bag. He has worn black for the occasion and looks startled to see her. Now that the weather has cleared, everyone is in the garden, where the rain has enhanced the smell of the flowers.

  ‘Hey, Jess.’

  Sarah. ‘God, am I glad to see you!’

  Sarah draws back a little, as if surprised at the strength of her reaction. ‘Why? What’s the matter, Jess?’

  And then she remembers that she hasn’t told Sarah about the passport, that she is trying to pretend it’s not important.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just hassle. You know, stressful.’ She gestures to the garden.

  ‘Yes well, Charlie is having fun anyway.’ Sarah raises her glass of orange juice in his direction.

  Charlie is trying to encourage a conga line. Jess wonders idly who’s manning the barbeque. Maybe she should be doing that, or is it supposed to be Hana? She can’t remember what they agreed.

  ‘Hey, Hana?’

  Hana is talking to one of the black-clad mothers, a woman with a long neck and a thick flood of hair. ‘Well, if you change your mind,’ the woman is saying.

  ‘Thank you. I will think about it.’ Hana turns and smiles brightly, falsely at Jess.

  ‘Where’s that guy from the butcher’s, Hana? I thought we were paying him to serve up some of those herby burger things he charges through the nose for.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is.’ Her look is challenging. I dare you, she is saying. Make a scene, have a row, bring things to a head. This is your party after all. That is your husband over there. Get him to help you with the barbeque. Jess hasn’t got the strength to fight. There are bowls and bowls of salad and cold cuts and all the rest of it. There are piles of booze. It will do.

  8

  It’s after eleven when Ro turns into Riverton Street. He can hear the music from the end of the block and follows it until he reaches the laneway that leads onto the Common and the path along the back of the houses. Most of the other gardens are dark, but Jess’s is lit up like Christmas. As he follows the path, the occasional motion-sensitive light clicks on, but not outside Jess’s place. Jess trusts in the height of her wall, the sturdiness of her gate, and she is right. They are good enough. He stands outside by a line of wheelie bins, new for the party, and waits.

  Listening to the laughter, the uncontroversial retro music – some Beatles, some Brazilian bossa nova elevator shit – he feels a twist of jealousy. It’s not that he envies her the big house. He wouldn’t know what to do with one of those. He doesn’t envy her the idiot husband either, or the baby in the pram. At least, he doesn’t think he does. But he does feel something. His blood feels harsh, acidic. Nefertiti is wearing off already.

  He’s not outside for very long when the gate opens. He ducks out of sight like a pantomime villain behind a sturdy tree trunk and watches as the ice-blonde comes out, opens the lid of a recycling bin and drops in a clanking bin bag. And then Charlie appears. He looks a little drunk. He is not exactly swaying, but his gait is loose. If a passing stranger were to venture along the path with malice in his heart, he might easily prod Charlie with a finger and topple him over like a skittle.

  Ro stays in the shadows for the moment while something small and feral runs across his foot. Charlie is waiting for the blonde, and when she heads back towards the gate, he catches her by the bottom. The blonde shrugs him off, but then she stretches out her hand and leads him back inside. It’s a kind of tribute to how well he understands his sister’s husband that Ro is not in the least surprised. He is so very predictable, is Charlie.

  Equally predictably, Charlie forgets to close the gate. Ro can hardly believe his luck. And yes, Charlie could be waiting to trap the unwary in among the lavender pots and the gravel and the murky-coloured door. But he doubts it. And that’s when he edges himself in. And there is Charlie, one hand on the potting shed and the other on the blonde.

  If Charlie is down at the shed, transgressing blithely, then where is Jess? Out on the Common, there is movement in the sky, the trees, but the back of Jess’s garden is matte, motionless. Once he moves past the larchlap fence that conceals both the compost heap and his rutting brother-in-law, the garden is full of people. The music has been turned down now, and it seems like someone edgier has taken charge. The garden has been transformed. Trestle tables have been pushed up against the old walls, their feet sinking into the soft ground of the flower beds. There is enough food to feed an army, and he suddenly realises that he’s starving. It’s refreshing to feel the nip, to know there could be privations he hasn’t even dreamed of yet.

  Lying in wait has taught him that tentative movements are the ones to catch the eye. If you move with a sense of purpose, you look like you belong. He heads for a table laden with insubstantial morsels, stuffs some circlets of salty fish two-handed into his mouth, then pours himself a glass of tart white and downs it in one. He picks up a disposable camera from a nearby table and pockets it. In the kitchen, whose doors are folded right back so that the terrace forms part of the house, people are talking quietly now and the music is just a low pulse in the background. A couple of young guys in black shirts are sitting outside looking dazed. And there, just inside the kitchen, is his sister with an older couple. The older couple. He sees Eddie first, because the woman’s back is turned, an embroidered scarf draped around her shoulders. And before he’s even seen her face he knows who that woman is.

  She turns towards him, and her expression alters. Oh so slight, that change – a kind of mist in her eyes. But he isn’t ready. His heart has grown hooves, racing up against the wall of his chest. Eddie hasn’t recognised him yet, and Jess is deep in conversation. As for the woman, she is concentrating on her sleeve now, flicking something from it. He busies himself with another glass of lemony wine while, over on the other side of the room, two guys are larking about with plastic cameras just like the one he has in his pocket, clicking at the kitchen cupboards, the ceiling, anything. Eddie and the w
oman on the sofa glance towards them, then look away. Kids, they are thinking. Idiots.

  There is a moment when he has the perfect view of her face, tilted up into the light to speak to someone, and he can’t resist. He reaches into his pocket and feels for the camera’s smooth carapace. He itches to capture her so as to examine each angle of her later. Right now, his head is too full of jagged wishing to be objective. He needs to click and click until he has made a record of each aspect of this woman, until he can match her to his meagre recollections of his mother. Before he knows it, he has taken her profile, the top of her head and the sweep of her nose. He curses when a couple in mid-step barge into him and knock him off his stride. She glances up, and this time the charge of recognition in her eyes is unmistakable. She knows now, he can see that. And she knows that Ro does too. But then, somehow, Eddie is shouldering in between them. Eddie has interrupted things. Just as he interrupted things back in Goa too.

  His memory of Eddie back then is of a man who wore wide cotton trousers in bright, clownish colours. The memory brings with it the blurred sensation of sunburn, an itching on his forearms, a belly swollen from too much spicy food. He and Jess were in a large, clanging place with hard surfaces and bad smells, and then they weren’t. And they weren’t because Eddie had taken them out of there and was trying to be Pa. Soon, maybe only a couple of days later, Auntie Rae turned up and there were tears and more tears, and then there was a plane. All too soon. All too eager to be gone. Ro has often wondered whether, if they’d hung around in Goa a little longer, they might have found out something that would have spared him this life of endless wandering. Back then he felt that he was abandoning his own mother, who would never have abandoned him if she’d had any choice in the matter.