by Susan Stairs
The Story of Before
Born in London, Susan Stairs has lived in Ireland since early childhood. Involved in the art business for many years, she has written extensively about Irish art and artists. She received an MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in the same year. She lives in Dublin with her family. The Story of Before is her first novel.
Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2013 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Susan Stairs, 2013
The moral right of Susan Stairs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 907 1
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 909 5
Printed in Great Britain.
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For my family
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves ...
Do not search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
ONE
The others used to say I was psychic. They said I could sense stuff before it happened. But I’m not sure there was anything special about me at all. I was just a bit more observant than they were. They never paid proper attention to what was going on around them, whereas I was always on the lookout for clues.
I remember the first time they noticed. We were watching The Waltons and John Boy had gone up the mountain with his daddy to shoot a turkey for dinner. I just knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. When I said as much to the others, they started shouting at the telly, egging him on, wanting to prove me wrong. But I don’t think they understood that the turkey posed no threat, and that John Boy Walton would never hurt a creature unless he, or one of his family, was in danger.
‘You’ll get your blood soon,’ I told them. I knew the way these things worked; the programme makers wouldn’t want us to think that John Boy was a complete chicken. So, later in the episode, when his daddy was in danger of being mauled to death by a wounded bear, it was obvious to me that John Boy would pull the trigger.
‘Told you so,’ I said, trying to sound all knowledgeable and wise after the deed was done and the others were left wondering how I ‘knew’.
Of course, I didn’t always get it right. But if you asked the others today, they’d tell you about the times I did. Times when I predicted what we each would get for Christmas, or which one of his collection of ties Dad would wear on a Sunday, or what we’d be having for dessert after dinner.
So I wonder today how no one else could see the bad thing coming. Not that I knew back then what the bad thing was. And if I had – if I’d known one of us was going to die – would there have been anything I could’ve done to prevent it? I play it all back in my mind, over and over. The clues were all there. But maybe they’re a lot easier to spot when you know the answer.
The snow was really deep that January. Almost as soon as we heard Big Ben ringing out from the telly downstairs, and a recorded studio audience rumbling through a tuneless version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, a blizzard began. Not soft – like in romantic films when it ‘snows’ to make everything seem so pretty and pure – but wild and relentless and hard. Snow with no remorse. It was instantly obvious to all of us that this was snow like we’d never seen it before.
We watched from the front bedroom, our faces buffed with the freezing air that seeped through the panes of the huge picture window. Our knees were shoved up against the tepid ridges of the radiator and our teeth left bite-marks on the white metal slats of the Venetian blinds that none of us ever owned up to. The snow fell so fast that it covered our garden in minutes. We watched it blanket our neighbours’ slated roofs and tarmacked driveways. It shrouded the concrete road of our keyhole-shaped cul-de-sac, secreting the cement pathways, circular manhole covers and grass verges. Billions of feather-light flakes fused to form a glistening coverlet that turned the whole of Hillcourt Rise into a vast, crystalline wonderland. Our estate had been virginized. It was hard to believe how quickly it transformed; how its grey, pebbledash, territorial markings disappeared and it looked like we lived on one enormous, open-plan plot. We could hardly distinguish one house from the other.
Earlier that evening, Mam had said we could stay up for the countdown. Kev was asleep upstairs in his cot. At one and a half, he hadn’t a clue what night of the year it was. We lay on the sunburst rug in front of the fire – my brother Mel, just thirteen, sister Sandra, twelve, and me, Ruth, eleven – with a crate of mandarin oranges and a newly opened box of Black Magic to keep us going. By half past nine, we’d already grown bored, but none of us would allow ourselves to admit it.
There was nothing on the telly. At least nothing we found even mildly entertaining. On one channel, a troupe of thick-thighed dancers wearing way too much make-up pranced across a glittery stage, and on another, a huddle of tartan-and-tweed-clad diddley-eyes plucked and wheezed their way through one whingey ballad after another. There might’ve been a Western on too; back then there seemed to be cowboys and Indians galloping across cactus-dotted deserts every time we turned on the telly. I only ever watched them if I found one of the chiefs attractive.
The Black Magic kept us going for a while, but after all the soft ones were gone and only the hard toffees were left, things began to disintegrate. I was accused of taking more than my share, but it was only that I’d saved mine up in a little pile, instead of wolfing each one down as soon as I picked. And the others were miffed right from the start because they didn’t even like dark chocolate in the first place. They still ate it – it was chocolate after all – but without any real pleasure. I preferred dark chocolate to milk, and liked to savour it; I could make a bar of Bourneville last a whole week. And I didn’t see why I should gorge just to make the others feel less greedy.
To ease the tension, Dad suggested a game of Scrabble at about half past ten, forgetting that we rarely got beyond the first triple word score. That
night was no different. We hadn’t been playing long when the board mysteriously toppled over. Because no one owned up, we were collectively punished.
‘I don’t care what night it is,’ Mam said, stage-managing the hunt for the plastic letters that were sprinkled all over the shag-pile, and waving the glass of sherry she’d been sipping since teatime. ‘That’s the end of it.’
Our pleas were ignored. Gathering my stash of chocolates and a couple of mandarins into the folds of my nightdress, I followed the others out of the room. Stopping at the door, I looked Dad square in the eye.
‘Happy New Year,’ I said, trying my best to sound sincere. He looked sort of uneasy. Things had been tense between Dad and me since Christmas night. ‘It’s OK if we stay up for the bells, isn’t it?’ I asked in a low voice. It wasn’t really a question; I knew he wouldn’t say no.
‘Well . . . I . . .’ he mumbled, glancing at Mam as she nodded along with the music on the telly. ‘I . . . suppose so . . . As long as you don’t wake your brother.’
The others were waiting on the stairs, dangling limbs through the serpentine curves of the wrought iron banisters.
‘Well?’ they both asked.
I gave them a frown; I didn’t want them to think it’d been easy.
‘It’s OK,’ I told them, as sternly as I could manage. ‘We can stay up till next year.’
We spent the next hour in Mel’s room, playing I-spy and hangman and X’s and O’s without incident. Then Sandra finally accused Mel of cheating when he overtook her lead on the scoresheet I was keeping and we waited in a sort of sulky silence till we could hear the midnight bells. We gathered on the landing to listen and I crept into Mam and Dad’s room to sneak a look at Kev as he slept. That’s when I noticed the snow. I whispered to the others to follow me in and we sat on the bed together to watch the blizzard thicken. We wrapped the candlewick bedspread tight around our shivering bodies and tried to count the soft flakes that stuck silently to the glass, soundproofing us in to our cotton-wool cocoon. The houses of the estate turned into glittering ice palaces and the huge oval-shaped emerald of the green disappeared under a cover of crystal-white. Though the novelty of ringing in the new year wore off five minutes into January, our attention was held fast by the snow. If I could hold back time, that’s where I’d stop it. I wouldn’t allow that year to begin at all.
I sometimes think about the inhabitants of Hillcourt Rise, going about their normal business that night with no clue everything was about to change. And the ones whose actions that coming year would matter are the ones who stand out in my mind.
Shayne Lawless. I can see him now. Balancing on a battered tea-chest, pissing a stream of snow-melting urine through the slanted open window of his tiny attic room. Pissing in controlled spurts to the rhythm of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as it blasted from the teak-veneered hulk of his radiogram. Shayne, whose shoulder-length hair looked and smelled like dried tobacco leaves, and whose close-set eyes never seemed to focus on anything in particular. Shayne pissed out his window almost every night; there was a five- or six-foot long stripe on the slates where the moss never grew.
Of course, I didn’t really see Shayne that night; his roof wasn’t visible from our front bedroom. But I like to think the snow would’ve made no difference to his nightly ritual. And I’m sure the fact that it was New Year’s Eve hardly even registered. The only thing that would’ve been important to him at that moment was lifting the needle when the gong sounded at the end so he could listen to the song once more from the top. I think his radiogram was probably the best friend Shayne ever had. It was almost an antique, but it served its purpose loyally. He’d thumped it up the narrow staircase to his lair the afternoon a brand-new, cherry-red Sanyo portable record player was delivered to his house by a starry-eyed, balding man, sporting a stomach that spilled out over the waistband of his slacks. Yet another man Liz Lawless insisted her son call ‘Uncle’.
And Bridie Goggin. What would it please me to believe she was up to that New Year’s Eve? Stripping clean, white sheets from the un-slept-in spare beds she’d made up in anticipation weeks before Christmas; re-wrapping pink tissue paper round the bone china teacups she’d taken out for the festivities and never used; or maybe clutching the jade-green telephone receiver to her huge chest, podgy tears dredging paths through her pan-sticked cheeks, so thankful for the two-minute Happy New Year phone call from one of her grown-up children.
Tracey Farrell and Valerie Vaughan: in Valerie’s bedroom, swapping fantasies about pin-up pop stars. Trading exaggerated secrets about boys they pretended they couldn’t stand and grouping girls into pink-paged, biro-ed lists of ‘Friends’ and ‘Enemies’. In their brushed nylon nightdresses, rolling on the super-soft wool carpet, or lolling on the lavender satin eiderdown of Valerie’s luxurious double bed, blithely exposing inches of their flesh, imagining that this was how it felt to be grown up. These were the things that made them happy, that enabled them to exist within the confines of the world their circumstances had created.
And I mustn’t forget David O’Dea, with his slender, smooth-skinned fingers sliding across the keys of his piano. Yes, even at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Eyes half-closed, head tilted to the left, shoulders faltering over his instrument like waves, unsure of when to crash. His parents probably stood behind him that night, perhaps having popped the champagne Mr O’Dea won in the local golf club four-ball. It’s likely their gaze fixed on the back of his head, and they reminded themselves of their leniency in allowing his fair hair to curl a whole inch over his collar. While upstairs their high-achieving twin daughters wrote spiteful entries about each other in their lockable diaries, Mr and Mrs O’Dea wore satisfied smiles on their faces and sipped their champagne, secure in the knowledge that this would be another good year because they’d always done right by their children.
I can still hear the snow; the absolute, all-concealing silence of it. It rings in my ears and spreads like a virus through my body. Like it did that night. I felt it first in my feet, creeping up through my veins and capillaries and arteries, making me shiver in a way I never had before.
‘Something bad’s going to happen this year,’ I announced to the others, closing my eyes, afraid I might go snow-blind. They bunched themselves in around me, waiting for me to elaborate, but that was all I had. It was no more than a feeling, but one I felt I had to share.
The snow continued for days, piling high in six-foot drifts. While our parents moaned and shovelled, we made proper snowmen that survived for almost three weeks. Some dads walked to work, but most didn’t make it in at all. All over the estate, abandoned Cortinas and Hillmans hibernated, their metal mounds sugared over and decorated with the filigree, fork-like footprints of starving birds. On the news we watched aerial shots of city traffic chaos, stranded commuters, and helicopter milk-and-bread drops all over our albino country. And it was announced – to our delirious delight – that the school holidays would be extended by one whole week.
We were snowed-in.
And while those old enough to understand the hardship the snow brought wore worried frowns on their faces when they looked out their windows, we wore hats and gloves and wellies without complaining, and repeatedly slid our backsides down the sloping entrance to Hillcourt Rise.
And when eventually the blanket melted, and everything went back to the way it had been, we were astonished at how patchy and grubby it looked underneath.
We never saw snow like that again.
TWO
The Big Freeze saw us into our final few months in Hillcourt Rise. Mam thought we’d be living there forever. I suppose when we first moved in we all did; the house was her dream come true. Before that, we’d been living on South Circular Road, a busy stretch of seven hundred houses and shops that ran from Portobello – a stone’s throw from Dublin city – through Dolphin’s Barn, Rialto and Kilmainham, all the way to the Phoenix Park.
Our house stood on the curving stretch between Griffith Barracks – a former prison b
uilding hidden behind thick, grey-stone walls – and the Player Wills cigarette factory. It had been Gran’s house, the place where our dad had grown up. Gran never got to see me; she went downhill very quickly in the end and died a month before I was born. I often studied photos of her: plump and rosy and twinkly-eyed with Dad as a baby in her arms; and one with Mel and Sandra on her lap, her withered hands circling their chubby baby bodies, her false-teeth smile stretching the papery skin of her hollow-cheeked face. And although they hardly remembered her, I still felt a certain pang of jealousy that she’d known them, and I wished she’d hung on long enough to meet me. She was the last of our grandparents; both sets were dead before I came into the world.
To Mel and Sandra and me, the house was our home. To Mam it was cold, draughty and old-fashioned. In the seventies, to be old-fashioned was a sin. Some of the houses on our road had been modernized over the years: chequerboard quarry tiles buried under patterned lino; ornate skirtings prised off and replaced with smaller, plainer versions; period fireplaces ripped out to make way for cement monsters covered in beige and brown tiles. Our house had undergone no such transformation, much to Mam’s disappointment. She dreamed lustfully of semi-detached streamlined living: double-glazing, a fitted kitchen, crazy-paving patio, built-in wardrobes with louvre doors. Instead, she received the penance of living in the century-old birthplace of the man she married. She found much to complain about: the sash windows she couldn’t open without Dad’s help; the lack of a ‘proper’ kitchen (it seemed fine to us – she went in and meals came out); the ten-foot-high ceilings that made the place impossible to heat.
Although Dad was a painter and decorator, he rarely did any painting or decorating in our house. ‘The cobbler’s children always go barefoot,’ Mam would sigh, eyeing the half-used paint tins stacked in a corner of the backyard. The same faded flock wallpaper that covered the sitting room walls in Dad’s boyhood photos was still hiding damp patches in the plaster, thirty years later. Mam regularly washed down the woodwork with vinegar, tut-tutting as she went along, but it made little difference to the yellowed gloss. Dad would come whistling through the door in the evenings in a draught of tobacco and turpentine, his thick black hair, moustache and sideburns salted with paint flecks. He’d take the stairs two at a time, wriggling out of his petrol blue, button-through overalls on the landing. Twenty minutes later, he’d emerge from the bathroom smelling of Old Spice and he’d flop down in his favourite flowery armchair, ready to scan the small ads in the Evening Press. Once Dad crossed the threshold, he was no longer: Michael P Lamb, Painter & Decorator – ‘No Job Too Small’; he was: Mick Lamb, Husband & Father – ‘No Jobs At All’.