by Cathy Kelly
‘What? So poor is funny, is it?’ said Poppy, performing a volte-face with speed. ‘They tell us in school that we shouldn’t laugh at people because they have got no money. Ms Higgins tells us that the guy standing on the side of the road begging might have been just like you and me. He could have lost all his money or been on drugs or something, and then he ended up on the side of the road looking for help. We have to, you know, have sympathy and empathy and all that stuff.’ Speech over, Poppy poked around a bit more in her MAC compact, adding another layer of eyeshadow. It was like watching a painter unable to put down the brush.
‘I have sympathy and empathy for the homeless person and the person begging,’ Callie said, not mentioning that she had not noticed such empathy in Poppy for a while. ‘The thing is . . .’ She paused. She really had to prepare Poppy for this. ‘Your dad and I really did grow up poor. We weren’t on the streets, but your father’s dad died when he was a teenager so things were tough for his mum. It was a bit different in my house. Ma and Da both worked. My Auntie Phil lived with us – she’s my mum’s older sister and she worked in the bottle factory.’
‘She worked in a factory?’ Poppy said, horrified.
Callie almost laughed.
‘Yes, a factory, the eight-to-four shift, a bit more if she got overtime. It was hard work, tiny pension, no prospects of improvement, but . . .’
‘You’re going to say, “but we were happy,” aren’t you?’ said Poppy.
Callie laughed again.
‘We were poor and we were happy,’ she said. ‘We lived in a real community. We knew there was more out there but we didn’t have it. That didn’t mean we were unhappy. I loved my family and I guess I had hopes and dreams.’
‘Because you were beautiful and everything and you were going to be a model,’ said Poppy as if her mother’s career path had been written down in a great manuscript, something to be fulfilled no matter what.
‘Mam helped me, she sent me to dance classes, ballet classes,’ Callie remembered and the flush of guilt washed over her again. They hadn’t had much money but her mother had insisted that Callie have her ballet classes in Madame Celine’s in the posher part of the town, so Callie could make something of herself.
‘So why don’t you see her anymore?’ said Poppy, getting straight to the nub of it.
She had her father’s ability to ignore things that didn’t immediately interest her, Callie thought. Now, her mother’s family was interesting, but not before.
‘It was on my birthday many years ago. Ma came to the house and had a fight with Dad.’
‘But she saw me, didn’t she?’ said Poppy.
‘She saw you, she loved you, everyone loves you.’ she said brightly, the guilt searing through her again.
‘So the house, Granny’s house – oh, what will I call her? Grandma?’
‘You’ll have to ask her.’
‘What’s the house like?’
‘It’s not what you’re used to,’ her mother explained. ‘It’s small and was always pretty, homey . . .’
That warmth was what Callie had tried to recreate in her own kitchen. The community feel of Ballyglen was something she’d never managed to find again in the upper echelons of Dublin society.
‘Will I have my own bedroom?’
‘I don’t know if you’ll have your own bedroom, lovie. You might be sharing with me.’
‘Yuck,’ said Poppy, horrified. ‘That’s sick. I can’t share with you. Why can’t we go back to Brenda’s – at least there I had my own room.’
‘We can’t stay with Brenda, we have to get away somewhere nobody knows us until this all dies down and Dad sorts it all out.’
‘He will sort it all out, won’t he?’ said Poppy in a small voice. And for just a moment she didn’t sound at all like the cool teenager who knew everything.
‘Let’s hope he sorts it out,’ Callie said gently. She didn’t think now that Jason was going to be sorting anything out anytime soon, but her daughter was still only fourteen, still a child. She couldn’t let her child know the truth just yet. She dare not think of social media and how girls from her school could have already told her. But if Callie kept up the facade, then surely Poppy would believe it.
Let them settle somewhere, hopefully in Ballyglen. Let them find some routine and normality to life and then, if Callie could get a job and had enough money to pay for counselling for Poppy, she’d tell her the unvarnished truth. Slowly, gently. Not all in one fell swoop. For a girl who idolised her father, it would be like hearing of his death.
Whatever had to be said had to be said gently. But social media was still the problem. Poppy was glued to her phone. Who knew what she’d see if she looked up her father’s name.
As they drove, Callie could feel her nerves really straining now. Poppy had taken off her headphones and had the radio blasting loudly. She’d grumbled about not being able to get her favourite Dublin city station and about there not being a system where she could plug her phone into the car and let the sound system pick up her music via Bluetooth.
‘Useless car,’ she’d muttered, before finding a cool local station she could turn up too loud, which was her preferred volume.
Callie said nothing but felt the coffee she’d had earlier churning in her stomach.
As they neared her home town, Callie could see the bottle factory that had given work to so much of Ballyglen was gone, but it was still a big farming town with fertile land to raise dairy cows. Just before the town, the road rose lazily into a gentle slope and then they were suddenly on a curve on the sweep of the hill, with the whole town laid out before them. Rich green fields filled with cattle and sheep straddled the roads.
Below lay Ballyglen, home to some twenty thousand souls, one large church, not to mention a large hotel and country club, with golf course and riding attached. A small river ran through the town and divided it perfectly.
From a distance, it looked like a town on a chocolate box: pretty stone walls around it, shops and houses painted soft colours as if a watercolour artist had had a hand in the whole thing. Old trees growing in the centre of the town and a bridge with elegant old curved lamplights giving an air of timelessness to it all.
‘It’s pretty,’ said Poppy in surprise.
‘It is,’ said her mother, smiling. ‘What did you think? Something from a Tim Burton nightmare?’
‘Well . . .’ Poppy made the single syllable drag out. ‘Dad said it was awful.’
‘It’s just a country town and we lived in the poorer bit. He never got over that,’ Callie said, and then realised she’d been very honest with her daughter.
‘Why didn’t he get over it? You did.’ Poppy was interested.
‘Our area was once considered the bad area of the town and it’s not nice growing up in a place where everyone thinks the worst of you because some of the neighbours aren’t model citizens. My family, my whole road in fact, was lovely, but it wasn’t all like that. Blackheights was the name of the place. Comes from the Irish – Aird Dubh. A history teacher once said it was probably a site of ancient Celtic ritual, but in Ballyglen when we grew up, it was where the poorer people lived, people who worked in the bottle factory when it was still open.’
They drove down the winding hill, passing the imposing entrance to the elegant golf resort hotel Callie had often longed to visit so she could see her mother. Had Jason stayed there to see his mother? Who knew? Anything was possible in this topsy-turvy world.
Finally, they were in the town itself and Poppy exclaimed once again at its prettiness, and then said she could see no nice clothes shops, which was bad.
Callie drove carefully, watching the streets as she got nearer to home, seeing the old bakery where she and her friends used to buy jam doughnuts. They drove past Cathedral Square, source of much rage in the Archbishop’s house, and around the picturesque houses which Call
ie used to fantasise about the whole family living in as a child. Fat old trees sat outside the houses, apple trees with big trunks now and summer flowers in planters.
Then, they were driving higher up the hill on the other side where they arrived at the warren of streets that was Blackheights, a cluster of small terraced houses, built many years ago to house a workforce for whom there turned out to be no work.
There was the sliver of park that Callie could remember was where the rebel kids smoked when she’d been young. Smoked and drunk naggins of gin and vodka, whatever they could get. There had been drugs, but it hadn’t been as all-pervasive as it was for Poppy’s generation. Callie had tried hash when she’d been with Ricky but she’d hated it: it made her feel paranoid, out of place. Poor Ricky, he’d gone down that path for a long time. And Freddie – she stopped. It hurt to think of her brother.
She’d left Ricky then, long before he hooked up with the manager who finally helped him clean up his act and come off drugs. That was when Tanner had gone from being a hot band to being mega, worldwide superstars with Ricky as the rock god.
His parents still lived in Ballyglen, she thought, although she assumed his father and mother no longer worked in the local hospital – they must be retired now.
She flicked on the left indicator and drove down a road she’d walked down so many times on her way to school. Not long now till home.
Poppy turned the radio down.
‘I didn’t expect it would be like this,’ said Poppy quietly.
‘Like what?’
‘Er . . . you know . . . with these small houses? It’s pretty and everything, but small.’
‘Our house in Dublin isn’t normal, Poppy,’ said Callie. She corrected herself. ‘Wasn’t normal. Most people don’t have six bedrooms, giant reception rooms, a catering kitchen and a garage with a Ferrari in it.’
And neither did they – anymore.
‘I know but . . .’
Callie kept her eyes straight ahead. The roads were narrow here with only room for one car because people didn’t have driveways and parked on the road. Drivers had to zigzag from one side of the road to the other. Callie reached a T-junction and took a right. Now the houses were mainly grey or white. Small, terraced, well-painted because it was a long time since they’d belonged to the council and the owners had kept them beautifully.
Some had the frames around the windows painted bright colours; others had lovely trellises around the porches where flowers, roses or wisteria grew, giving the whole road a welcoming look that Callie couldn’t remember from her youth. It was comforting, home.
For so long, listening to Jason’s poison about their time growing up in Ballyglen, she’d remembered their home town only as a place she’d wanted to escape from. Now she could see the streets around Sugarloaf Terrace as they really were: a place where neighbours drove other neighbours to hospital appointments, where someone would walk your dog if you were sick, where people cared. A sense of community – that was it. Jason had never seen it and, to be honest, she wasn’t sure she had either, until now, when it all came flooding back.
‘So this is where you grew up?’ said Poppy. ‘I mean, the houses are small and all that, but it’s OK.’
‘This is it,’ said Callie. ‘I used to walk along this road in my horrible grey school uniform and meet up with my friend, Bianca, just at the corner back there and we would cut through the lane and go to school.’
‘Sort of hard to imagine you in a school uniform,’ said Poppy, a smile in her voice.
‘It was a horrible school uniform,’ said her mother.
‘But I bet you still looked amazing in it,’ said Poppy, a hint of envy in her voice.
‘You look wonderful in your school uniform, honey,’ said Callie, the old familiar refrain. And then she stopped because Poppy wasn’t going to that school anymore. In fact, she probably never would go back because St Tilda’s was a private exclusive school and cost an absolute fortune. Unless Jason came back in a time machine and sorted everything out, Poppy wasn’t going to school there ever again. The very thought made her want to vomit and she had to inhale deeply and force herself not to be sick. She would not pull over and throw up on the side of the road.
She would not think about possible futures or the past or things that had gone wrong, she would just concentrate on this moment, the way Brenda had told her.
‘Just get through every day as it comes,’ Brenda had said the morning they’d left, holding Callie by the shoulders.
‘You sound like you’re telling me to stay off the drink or something,’ said Callie, trying to lighten the mood.
‘It’s a bit like that,’ agreed Brenda, ‘although even though you and I have got through a couple of bottles of wine, I don’t think we qualify for rehab just yet. But what I mean is stop obsessing over the past and stop worrying about Jason. You have to take care of yourself and Poppy. If you think too far into the future, you’ll crumble. Be strong and think about today.’
Be strong. Callie said the words silently in her head now. She had to be strong for Poppy because who knew what was awaiting her. Her mother might not forgive her. Her mother might send them packing and then . . . Callie wasn’t really sure what the next option was.
She turned the last corner into a tiny cul-de-sac. Sugarloaf Terrace. Ten houses, five on each side. This street had always been beautifully cared for even when she was growing up, even when many of the other houses in the area had been run-down because nobody had any money to paint them up. The council hadn’t cared and the people living in them were too broke, too concerned with survival, to worry about whether the paint on their front doors flaked or not. But the Terrace had been different. Home to many strong women who wanted their homes to look as if they were surviving, because if you looked as though you were, you just might be.
‘Here we are,’ she said, trying to sound bright to hide her nerves.
‘Here?’ said Poppy anxiously.
‘This is it.’
She parked the car in front of the house. It looked different now: her mum’s garden had been transformed with lots of plants and containers and with paving stones so that a small car could be parked there, which was something nobody had ever done when Callie was growing up. The car which stood there now was a smart new little runaround. Silver-grey, one year old, and Callie wondered if her mother had moved. When she’d been young, her mother had never driven and where had she got the money for a car?
‘Do you want to stay here for a minute while I go in and just check if your grandmother is in?’ she said to Poppy.
Poppy, looking strangely subdued, nodded. She pulled out a compact to examine her lipstick again. When Poppy was stressed, she went to her face, examining it and worrying over it as if lipstick application and perfect eyeshadow would make everything all right. Suddenly Callie saw all that primping for what it really was: anxiousness, worry. What would the long-term damage be to her daughter from all of this? She put her arm around Poppy’s shoulder.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ she said. ‘We’ll get through this, everything is going to be fine.’
She got out of the car, thinking that she’d lied again. She didn’t know if it was going to be fine. That was motherhood for you: going from lying about the existence of Santa Claus to lying about how things would be ‘fine’.
A curtain in the house next door twitched, but Callie pretended not to notice as she walked up the path.
Her mother’s door was painted a lovely sky blue.
Callie knocked and could feel her heart beat a tattoo in her chest. Please let her mother still be living there, please let her mother allow her to apologise, explain and beg. She’d beg if she had to. She would go down on her knees, because she and Poppy needed somewhere to stay. Whatever about herself, she couldn’t put Poppy through what they had been through in the last few days.
At th
at, the door swung open and her mother stood there, still small, her hair no longer platinum blonde but totally white and long, trailing back into a little plait. She’d aged. There were lines all over her face now, carved in by life, and she had, Callie realised, become an old woman. But her eyes were the same translucent blue as Callie’s and they lit up when she realised who it was.
‘Oh Claire, lovie: you’ve come home.’
Callie fell into her mother’s arms and let the tears come.
‘I wasn’t sure if I could come or if you’d see me or have us or anything, but I’m sorry, Mam,’ she blurted out, ‘I’m so so sorry. How can you forgive me . . .?’
‘Shush, Claire, lovie, it’s all right.’ Her mother held her the way she used to years ago.
Callie had been taller than her mum since she had been about fourteen, but her mother appeared to have shrunk. Still, it felt so good being able to rest her head on her mother’s shoulders, to smell that familiar smell of perfume. She didn’t know what it was anymore, something with lilies, she thought. It was not one of the expensive perfumes of Callie’s that Brenda had scooped up that dreadful night.
‘I was hoping you’d come,’ her mother said, ‘really hoping, but I didn’t know if you would. When I saw that that bastard had run away on you, I just hoped you’d come back to me.’
‘He’s not—’ Callie began to say and then she stopped. She remembered the row all those years ago when her mother had called Jason a bastard and accused him of all sorts of stuff and Callie had stood up for him. And it seemed as if her mother had been right all along.
‘Is that, is that Poppy in the car?’
Callie nodded. At this point, she could barely trust herself to speak.
‘Oh the Good Lord, get her in here.’
‘Just don’t say anything bad about her father to her – we haven’t gone down that road yet.’
Her mother let go of her and flew down the path, wrenching open the door on the old Renault where Poppy sat, eyes wide open, watching this small vibrant little woman racing towards her.