The Words That Fly Between Us

by Sarah Carroll

  ‘What’s going on with my ten million?’ someone says. Who was that?

  Through a gap in the racks I see Oly and the arm of another man.

  ‘Your money is coming,’ Dad says. ‘As soon as The Old Mill—’

  The other man moves. It’s Mr Reynolds. ‘What . . . has The Old Mill . . . got to do . . . with me?’ Mr Reynolds asks.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ Dad says.

  ‘Exactly,’ Mr Reynolds says. He smiles. But it’s a smile like a scorpion’s tail. ‘You think I don’t know what this little party is really about? You need investors. You’re in too deep, Declan. And every day that the development of The Old Mill is delayed, you are sinking further and further.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Dad says. ‘Actually, I’m very confident—’

  Mr Reynolds holds up his finger and jabs Dad’s words with a full stop. ‘I don’t care about your little problems.’ His finger is so close, Dad’s going cross-eyed looking at it. ‘But if I don’t get my money back in one week, Declan, you will find every door to every bank nailed so tightly shut, you won’t be able to get so much as a car loan in this city. Do you understand?’

  When Dad doesn’t reply, Mr Reynolds’s voice goes from grey to black. ‘Do you understand, Declan?’

  ‘Yes. Seven days,’ Dad says.

  Mr Reynolds nods. Then he reaches out. His fingers curl around the bottle in Dad’s hand. His Domaine de la Romanée. He takes it from him, shakes it in front of Dad’s face and says, ‘Seven days, Declan.’

  He walks away. With Dad’s bottle. And Dad doesn’t stop him. The slow footsteps reach the top of the stairs. The music gets louder as the door opens. Then it’s quiet.

  Dad kicks the wine rack and a thousand reds rattle. I have to force myself not to jump, to stay dead still.

  ‘How much am I down?’

  ‘Twenty-one . . . nearly twenty-two million,’ Oly says. ‘That’s not counting what you might lose with these new delays.’

  Dad owes twenty-two million? Twenty-two million?

  Dad curses. ‘We have got to flip this thing.’

  Oly looks like he wants to hide under a table. But then Dad points furiously like he’s made up his mind about something.

  ‘I’ll get five off that idiot Sean, he’s itching for a piece of it. I’ll find another five off . . . someone. That’ll do for paying back Reynolds. Then, we’ll get this development moving, flip it, and everyone will get their money back. No one will ever know.’

  Oly is nodding the way people always do to Dad. To keep him happy. ‘Yep. That’s right. Nothing to worry about.’

  It’s quiet. Dad’s pacing. I only catch glimpses of him. Oly is watching him. ‘It’s just . . .’ Oly says and his words trail after Dad.

  ‘What?’ Dad says.

  ‘It’s just . . . the legality of taking Sean’s money to pay Reynolds is . . . questionable,’ Oly says.

  Dad spins around. ‘Oh, don’t pussyfoot around.’ Oly ducks and Dad’s words hit the wall behind him. ‘It’s not questionable, Oly. It’s illegal. And if you have a better solution, by all means, be my guest!’

  Oly keeps his head down. Then Dad seems to remember that he needs to wrap his words in cotton wool for people that aren’t me or Mum because he says, ‘Look, if I temporarily redirect some funds, someone would have to examine the books with a fine tooth comb to figure it out. And unless that someone knows what they’re looking for, specifically looking for, they are not going to notice.’ He comes closer to Oly. ‘It’ll be fine.’ Dad waits until Oly looks up and then offers him a smile as big as a hug. ‘And if it does come out, I’ll just have to skip the country. Worse places than Brazil to hole up for a while!’

  This weird look runs over Oly’s face, like he doesn’t believe Dad’s saying those words. But like a breeze through grass, it’s gone just as quickly. ‘Yeah,’ Oly says. ‘Yeah, okay.’

  The music from upstairs suddenly gets loud. Someone opened the cellar door. A voice shouts, ‘Declan, Oly? Don’t tell me you are getting into that Romanée without me!’

  ‘It’s Bob,’ Oly whispers to Dad.

  ‘Don’t worry, Bob,’ Dad shouts. ‘You’ll be nowhere near this house the day that’s popped!’ Then Dad and Oly run up the stairs, the cellar door slams and . . .

  Silence.

  I stand straight.

  The air is thick with the echo of their words. They drift through the room before burrowing into the stone wall.

  ‘Questionable,’ I whisper. The word slides along the bottle of wine in front of me and when it pops out the other side, it has changed. It’s not Questionable any more. It’s Illegal.

  CHAPTER 4

  I’m sitting on the bottom of the stairs in the front hall waiting for the guests to leave. One by one, they step outside and the hot air from the hallway leaves with them, and all the words that were said tonight, all the jokes and opinions and stories that don’t matter any more, slide out of the open door and dissolve into the breeze. Only the heavy ones stay. I imagine them clinging to the carpets and sticking to the lip-stained rims of glasses.

  Below us, though, the words that were spoken in the cellar stay where they burrowed and don’t budge an inch.

  Illegal. Dad said he would take money from Sean to pay off Mr Reynolds and that it would be illegal. Then he smiled like it was no big deal. Like he was talking about ten euro. Not ten million.

  ‘What’s more important, Dad?’ I whisper too quietly for anyone to hear. ‘Practical or legal?’

  Mr Reynolds is kissing Mum goodbye.

  ‘You’ll be okay walking all the way back on your own?’ she says.

  ‘As long as Ms Cusack’s not out husband hunting,’ he says and Mum laughs.

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Knew,’ he corrects her. ‘We are the only two left that grew up on this street.’

  ‘She never married?’ Mum asks.

  He laughs like it’s a silly question. ‘No, she’s a spinster through and through.’ He buttons his jacket closed. ‘She’s not so bad herself. But the people she surrounded herself with? Wasters. Once the money ran out, so did her friends.’

  Mr Reynolds is the last to shuffle out of the front door. Dad waves after him like they are the best of friends and it’s really hard to tell that the smile he’s wearing is fake. But he slams the door on it and when he turns for the sitting room, his forehead is creasing into frown lines.

  I stay on the stairs. Mum goes straight into the living room and collects glasses from behind curtains and under chairs. At the mantelpiece, Dad picks up his whiskey.

  ‘Well, that was a success,’ Mum says. When every finger is clutching the rim of a glass, she walks towards the kitchen. That’s when he says it.

  ‘You certainly seemed to have fun.’

  I jump up and go to the living-room door. And I realize why I’ve been sitting here. I wasn’t waiting for the guests to leave. I was waiting for this.

  Mum flinches. Just for a fraction of a second. But she knows what’s coming too. It’s like waiting for a polaroid to develop. The picture has been taken. And the world moves in slow motion as the picture crystallizes.

  Mum goes to the sink. ‘Yeah, it was nice. Julia is great fun.’ She’s looking for just the right words to stop the picture from developing. But there are none.

  She starts loading the dishwasher.

  Dad looks like Mr Reynolds in the cellar earlier. His smile is a scorpion’s tail. ‘These parties aren’t games for your amusement, Alice.’ He stands straight again. ‘Going on and on to Mr Reynolds about the two years you spent at a financial firm? Honestly, the poor man.’

  ‘He asked me!’ Mum says.

  ‘He was being polite! You think the head of one of the largest private investment banks in the country cares about the two years you spent as a junior accounts manager?’ Dad grabs his glass and marches towards the kitchen. Mum stumbles backwards when he reaches the sink.

  He chucks the rest of his drink into the basin
and turns for the dishwasher. He’s right in front of her and she’s not moving, and he reaches out and grabs her arm hard. ‘Alice, get out of my way!’

  He doesn’t mean the dishwasher. Not really. I take a few steps towards them. I want to yell, ‘Let her go,’ but I can’t. The words are stuck inside.

  Mum yanks her arm free but the force of it makes her stumble backwards again and in the next second she trips and falls. She reaches out to stop herself but her head knocks against the countertop.

  ‘Mum!’

  But he already has her, his arms lifting her until she’s standing upright. ‘Are you okay?’

  She’s holding her head where she bumped it and he’s shaking his, like this is all her fault. She steps back and she doesn’t look at him. Now he’s taking ice from the wine bucket and wrapping it in a tea towel. He’s holding it out for her.

  For a second no one moves and the tea towel hangs between them.

  Say something, Mum.

  But she takes it. She holds the ice to her head and he talks like his words are a blanket over a fire. ‘You always overdo it at parties . . . I could see it coming all night.’

  I want to say, She was fine! I want to say, She didn’t overdo it, it was you! You grabbed her, that’s why she stumbled.

  I take a step forward. Mum sees me.

  ‘Lucy,’ she says, and I stop. ‘You should be in bed.’

  Dad turns. Sees me. Smiles. ‘We all should be in bed,’ he says.

  Now he’s closing the dishwasher door and she’s taking off her heels and he’s locking up and she’s turning off the lights and they are coming towards me. Because it’s all over. Time for bed.

  ‘Mum?’ I say.

  She gives me a little smile. There’s a red mark on her forehead.

  Dad’s right behind her. ‘We’ll clean up this mess in the morning,’ he says. He holds my eye.

  And then they both wait for me to move. To lead the way upstairs. To go to bed.

  Because it’s all fine. Nothing really happened.

  Really.

  Nothing happened.

  CHAPTER 5

  Count the steps. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, and on up to the second floor.

  I breathe faster. And faster. I’m at the door to my room on the third floor. My chest is tight. My brain spins.

  Why does he do it?

  I lower myself onto the chair.

  He twists everything. It was his fault. Not hers. His. If he hadn’t started the argument . . . if he hadn’t grabbed her . . .

  Keep breathing. It’s okay.

  But it’s not okay. And it’s not fair. He trips everyone in the room with his words, and the words he doesn’t say are worse. Because you still hear them but you can’t reply. It’s your fault, Alice . . . Drawing is not a real talent, Lucy.

  All night, deep down, I knew a fight was coming. And the worst part is, there’s nothing I could do to stop it.

  I tilt my head back and count the ceiling panels. Four times six equals twenty-four. Twenty-four ceiling panels.

  It wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t. Even when we first moved onto Millionaire Square three years ago, it wasn’t this bad.

  Like the day, almost a year ago, when I moved up here from my room on the second floor, and Mum said, I just don’t get it, those pokey old servant’s rooms are practically in the attic. But it was Dad, not Mum, who stood up for me. He said, Ah, leave her to it, Alice. She’s old enough to make up her own mind.

  My main wardrobe wouldn’t fit up here because the ceiling is too low. So Dad took me to buy a new one. He didn’t even look at the price, he just said, You’ll need a new bed to match that, and he went to the mattress section.

  Before I knew it, he’d jumped up on a bed and started bouncing on it. He made me do it too. But just as the manager came over, he jumped down. So I’m the one who got in trouble, while Dad wandered around the shop complaining loudly that parents are to blame for the behaviour of their kids. Which made me laugh. Which made the manager angry. Which got me kicked out. Which made Dad laugh until he cried.

  And when he finally joined me in the car park, he had bought a desk and chair, and a full-length mirror too.

  I mean, things have never been perfect between Mum and Dad. They fight. But all parents do. It’s only gotten really bad since he bought The Old Mill eight months ago.

  I’m looking directly above me now. Staring at the only ceiling panel that matters. Because this room has something my massive room on the second floor didn’t have. Something Mum and Dad don’t know about. A place that’s mine where their words can’t reach.

  I stand, slide the ceiling panel back and then lift myself up into the attic. I flick a switch, and the attic inhales the glow of the lamp.

  Portraits are pinned to every rafter. Faces stare back at me. Mainly of Mum and Dad, but there are other people too. Megan, her parents, Ms Cusack, people I see outside of the window. Even myself.

  It’s not the eyes or the smiles or the worry lines that I’m trying to draw, but what’s underneath.

  There’s a slight draught. It’s coming from the other end of the attic. From Mr Reynolds’s house. These houses are old and our road is actually one long terrace, which means we share a roof with Mr Reynolds. Dad loves that. But what he doesn’t know is that we share an attic too. Up here, it’s just one open tunnel that runs above every house.

  Some of our neighbours use their space for storage. Ms Cusack stores books and clothes and paintings. Hazel’s family has boxes of baby clothes, a high chair and old Christmas decorations. But mostly, the attics are covered in a layer of dust so thick that creeping through them is like crawling over the surface of the moon.

  And for every house, there’s a panel that can be lifted and tossed aside. If I wanted to, I could sneak into Mr Reynolds’s house in the dead of the night. I could drop down into Ms Cusack’s and find out what she does in there all day. If I wanted to.

  And Dad has no idea. Because he has never come up here. He doesn’t know to look for it.

  He has his secret. I have mine. Except I know about his.

  ‘Questionable,’ I whisper. The word flows through the cobwebbed stillness until it gets absorbed by the darkness further down where the dim lamplight can’t reach. I love how sound gets soaked up in the attic, the same as in a forest. Everything is softer.

  ‘Illegal,’ I whisper. The word drowns in the space and it’s quiet again.

  ‘Practical,’ I say. But the word doesn’t hang on the air like it did in the cellar. Here, it dissolves and disappears.

  That’s the thing Mum doesn’t understand. Even if there was no attic, I’d have moved up here. Because our house is filling up with words. But it will take them a long time to reach my room. Up here, it’s quiet. And it’s all mine.

  SUNDAY

  CHAPTER 6

  I wake up to Mum getting into my bed like she always does in the morning and my first thought is, is Dad angry this morning?

  She pulls the duvet up to her chin, her face inches from mine. She doesn’t usually wear make-up at home. But she is now. It almost covers the red spot above her eyebrow.

  ‘Morning, monkey,’ she says. ‘Thought I’d wake you while it’s still summer.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I say.

  ‘Downstairs,’ she says. ‘I’m making a pavlova today.’

  It takes a second to figure out what she means. ‘The dessert?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Oh, no. ‘I wonder . . . will you burn it,’ I say.

  ‘And a salad,’ she says.

  ‘I wonder will you burn that too.’

  Mum flicks me on the nose. ‘I wonder will you regret mocking my glorious cooking when you see the feast I prepare.’

  Mum made up the I wonder game because I hate getting out of bed. She crawls into my bed and wonders about all the great things that will happen during the day until I laugh.

  But I don’t feel like laughing. Because today I wonder what mood he’s in. If he
’s said sorry. If they’ve made up. I look at the bump on Mum’s forehead. ‘Does it hurt?’

  Mum scrunches up her eyebrows like she doesn’t know what I mean. So I touch the bruise with my finger, but not hard.

  She pulls back before catching herself and turning her grimace into a smile. ‘Oh, that?’ She runs her fingertips over it. ‘Not really. But I wonder if I’ll ever learn that high heels and champagne do not mix.’

  I don’t laugh. It’s not funny. Because that’s not what happened.

  Where’s Dad?

  But she’s staring at me, waiting, so I think of something funny to say. ‘I wonder will Mr Reynolds clip his nose hair today.’

  Mum laughs. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? I wonder if he has a hedge trimmer big enough. And a truck to carry it away after.’

  I laugh because that’s what she wants me to do. ‘I’m starving,’ I say. Jumping up, I run out of the room.

  Downstairs, it’s a new house. The windows are open and the tabletops gleam and the shelves are filled with freshly washed crystal glasses, and the smell of detergent has bullied any rising thoughts of last night back into hiding.

  Dad’s sitting on a stool in the kitchen. He doesn’t see me. There’s a full cup of coffee in front of him. He’s leaning on his elbow with the bridge of his nose pinched between his thumb and finger. Cursing softly, he shakes his head, sighs, and then sits straight and lifts his coffee.

  ‘Dad?’

  He jerks a bit in surprise but then he smiles. ‘Lucy!’ He holds out his arm. ‘Come here and give your old man a hug.’ He’s in a good mood, so they’re probably not fighting any more. He holds his arm higher. His smile widens. So I go up and he hugs me, resting his head on mine. ‘What’s your plan for today?’

  I’ll probably draw. ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  He’s quiet for a second. Then, ‘That sounds perfect. I’d do the same if I could. Enjoy your freedom while you can.’

  I have a feeling he’s talking about himself, not me. ‘Work?’ I say. ‘It’s Sunday.’

  Dad takes his arm back and lifts his mug again. ‘It sure is. And I get the pleasure of spending it on the golf course with a guy so lacking in ability that he’ll probably have his shoes on the wrong feet.’