Some Girls Do

by Murphy, Clodagh

  ‘What’s he crying for?’ she heard Michelle hiss further along the pew, as Luca discreetly wiped tears from his eyes. ‘And why is he in the front with Claire? Who does he think he is – chief mourner or something? He’s not even family.’

  None of them had had the energy to dissuade Michelle from speaking, but they had insisted that Jim should be allowed to do the main eulogy so she was cut mercifully short. Jim’s speech was fittingly funny at times, evoking the spirit of the friend he had lost.

  Claire broke down completely as the service ended, sobbing uncontrollably and clinging to Luca, who was practically holding her up as they followed the coffin out of the church. Outside, everyone stood chatting, and when she had recovered, Claire moved around, thanking them for coming and inviting them back to the house after the crematorium.

  ‘Mary, your playing was beautiful,’ she said, as soon as she saw her.

  ‘Ah, I couldn’t let Espie down, today of all days. She was always very forgiving, but I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if I hadn’t done right by her.’

  ‘I hope you’re not in too much pain?’

  ‘Can’t feel a thing. I took an extra dose of morphine and some other stuff, just to be on the safe side. What you might call a cocktail of drugs,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Though I am a bit woozy now. I could do with a sit-down.’

  ‘Why don’t you get into one of the cars? We’ll be going shortly.’

  ‘I’ll look after her,’ Jim said, appearing and leading her away.

  Tom had closed the shop for the morning so he and Yvonne could both be at the funeral. He hugged Claire and told her to take as much time off work as she needed. Yvonne’s eyes kept darting to Luca. She was obviously dying to ask questions, but was aware that now was not the time.

  Catherine was delighted to have finally encountered the infamous Michelle first-hand. ‘I wouldn’t have missed your sister-in-law’s eulogy for the world,’ she told Claire. ‘Comedy gold.’

  ‘I know. I wish Mum could have heard it – it would have given her such a laugh.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard a eulogy before that eulogised the person giving it. Pure genius!’

  Ali hugged her fiercely, while Luca’s parents greeted her with more restraint.

  ‘It was good of you to come,’ she said as she shook their hands.

  ‘I hope we’ll see you at the house again soon,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Yes, get Luca to bring you some Sunday for lunch,’ Jacqueline said, her eyes drifting to Luca, who was chatting with Jim and Michael. ‘We’d love to see you.’

  Claire was glad that only a smaller core group of family and friends came back to the house after the crematorium. Her energy was dwindling after the strain of the past couple of days and she just wanted to be with people who didn’t require her to make any effort. Some people had come a long way, and she was glad to see her mother’s old friends reunited, chatting about old times and remembering Espie, as long as she didn’t have to do anything. She made sure there was plenty of food and drink, and let them get on with it. The party went on late into the evening and, much as she appreciated their support and friendship, Claire was relieved when people started to leave. She felt completely drained and tired to her bones. She wanted to get into bed and sleep for a week.

  ‘I’d love to stay and help you with the clearing up,’ Michelle said, ‘but we need to get the kids to bed. It’s been a very long couple of days for them.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘But you have all the time in the world now anyway. There’s no rush. You should leave it all until tomorrow.’

  Claire nodded, wishing her sister-in-law would go. That was what she really needed right now – advice about tidying up. So helpful.

  When the last guest had left, she surveyed the mess in the living room. While she was glad to be alone again, it also brought home to her how alone she was now. When the house had been full of people, she had had something else to focus on, and the business of the funeral had carried her through for the past few days. There had been so much to plan and so many people around all the time. But now it was over and there was nothing left to do, nothing else to think about. She felt overwhelmed by the emptiness of the room and hugged herself as tears sprang into her eyes.

  Suddenly she felt arms wrap around her from behind and she jumped.

  ‘Hey,’ Luca said softly in her ear, pulling her closer. ‘Sorry, did I give you a fright?’

  ‘I thought everyone had gone.’

  ‘Everyone else has. The caterers are packing up in the kitchen. They, um … they need to be paid.’

  ‘Oh! Of course.’ She wriggled out of his arms and picked up her bag from the floor, pulling out the envelope with the caterers’ money. They wanted to be paid in cash and she had the exact amount ready. She went into the kitchen and found them packing up the last of the glasses.

  ‘Thanks.’ She smiled at Mike, handing him the envelope. ‘You did a great job.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, pocketing the envelope. ‘Okay, we’re all done here.’ He swung up the box of glasses and nodded to his partner. Luca came into the kitchen as they left.

  ‘Thanks for sticking around,’ she said to him. ‘You’re a good friend.’ Her voice broke.

  Luca rushed to her, pulling her into his arms. ‘You’re exhausted,’ he said, brushing her hair off her face as he looked down at her. ‘Why don’t you go to bed and I’ll start clearing up this lot?’

  ‘You don’t have to …’

  He put a finger on her lips, silencing her. ‘I know I don’t have to. Now go on.’ He bent and kissed her forehead, and she turned to go. She was too tired and the thought of her bed was too tempting to resist. ‘I’ll be up shortly,’ he said, as he turned to the sink, rolling up his sleeves.

  ‘You’re staying?’ She turned in the doorway.

  ‘Oh.’ He frowned. ‘Do you want to be alone?’

  ‘No, I really don’t. I’d like you to stay.’

  She left him in the kitchen, slinging things into the sink, and dragged herself up the stairs to bed. She was half asleep already as she undressed and crawled into bed. But she was still just awake later when Luca got in and wrapped his arms around her. She turned into his body and drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Claire felt lost in the days following the funeral. She was beginning to regret taking the week off work, but changing her mind would require a decision that she couldn’t summon the energy to make. She didn’t know what to do with herself, and couldn’t seem to rouse herself to do anything more energetic than lie in the garden, soaking up the sun or slump on the sofa watching boxsets of Friends. She had seen them a million times before, but she found the familiarity comforting. She missed her mother dreadfully, longing to be able to talk to her again, or even watch TV together in companionable silence.

  She felt adrift, the focus of her life snatched away. For so long, everything had revolved around looking after her mother – worrying about her, organising her, spending time with her. Now she constantly felt as if she had forgotten to do something important, and her stomach would lurch with sickening dread of the consequences. Then she would realise once again that there was nothing to be done and no one to worry about – but there was no comfort in that. It left her on edge, unable to concentrate or settle to anything.

  On top of that she was exhausted, feeling the crash that often follows a long period of tension. It wasn’t just the stress of her mother’s death and its aftermath. It was the accumulation of years spent in a perpetual state of suspense. Her mother’s health had been so volatile that Claire had been constantly on tenterhooks for the next crisis – the breathless race to hospital, the hours spent in corridors and waiting rooms, anxiously awaiting test results or the outcome of an operation. She was physically and emotionally drained.

  Everyone was telling her she should take a holiday, now that she had the chance. She hadn’t had a proper one in ages, since her
mother had become too incapacitated to travel. Mark would be back from New York on Friday, and he had invited her to stay with him for the weekend, but she couldn’t face the upheaval of flights or the idea of having to be social and, besides, she wasn’t in the mood for somewhere as busy as London. But the idea of getting away was appealing, and as the week wore on, she increasingly felt the need for a change of scene. The good weather was making her long for the seaside. The heatwave was forecast to continue for the rest of July, and she knew the perfect place where she could go to relax, and spend a restorative couple of days just eating, sleeping and lazing in the sun.

  ‘How’d you like to come to the beach with me for the weekend?’ she asked Luca, on Thursday evening. ‘Unless you have other plans, of course,’ she added, suddenly remembering that he might rather stay in Dublin.

  ‘No, I don’t have any plans. I’m a bit broke, though …’

  ‘It won’t cost anything. I have a place we can stay. Just don’t expect anything fancy.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Brittas Bay. Mum has a mobile home there – had,’ she amended. ‘It’s mine now, I guess.’

  ‘Cool. I’ll dig out my bucket and spade.’

  A weekend away with Claire – Luca wasn’t sure what he’d let himself in for. He hadn’t even had time to assimilate his feelings yet. He’d only discovered he was in love with her when her mother had died, and then he had wanted to step up and be a friend to her. Now he felt completely at sea, clueless about how to be with her, terrified of screwing up and losing her, and just as scared of keeping her in his life but only as a friend.

  He thought how arrogant he’d been when she’d first come to him, warning her not to get attached. Jesus, he should be so lucky! He’d been so sure of himself, so certain that she was the only one in danger of getting emotionally involved. What he hadn’t considered was that he would also be experiencing a kind of intimacy he wasn’t used to.

  Claire had got under his skin – like painting, he thought, as he picked up his brush and got back to work. That had crept up on him, too, when he wasn’t looking. It had started in rehab.

  Art therapy had been part of the programme, and he had resisted it at first, as he had resisted all help. He had refused to be moved, shoring up his defences against anything or, indeed, anyone that might touch him, determined to be cold, aloof and, above all, not to care. But he’d gone through the motions, as he had with the rest of the programme, and art had got in somehow, breaking through his defences, seducing him until he found himself pouring all the emotions he had kept buried for years into his paintings.

  It had scared him at first when he’d seen all that stuff spilling out of him. He’d felt raw and exposed, as if he had no skin. Every shitty thing inside him was there for all to see, in thick, vivid colour – all his cringing fear, his anger, every rotten thing at the core of him made real, given substance; and beyond that, his vulnerability, loneliness and sadness. And yet he didn’t want to stop. It felt cathartic and healing, as if all the poison was being leached out of him and what was left was fresh, clean and healthy.

  He could never regret rehab because it had given him one of the best things in his life. He would never regret knowing Claire either, even if they could only be friends. Maybe it was for the best that they couldn’t have sex any more. He wasn’t very good at forming lasting relationships with the women he slept with. They tended to end up pissed off with him.

  Besides, who was to say this thing with Mark would last? Maybe if he stuck around long enough …

  That night, Claire went online for the first time since her mother had died, catching up with NiceGirl’s Twitter and Facebook friends. When she logged on to Twitter, she found herself mentioned in a tweet from Mark’s friend Emma, aka @Locksie:

  @Locksie @PublisherMark So disappointed in you. I thought you were being true to @NiceGirl.

  It was from the previous Friday, the day Mark had called saying they needed to talk, and she had been too busy arranging the funeral. She knew Emma was just joking – as far as she was concerned, NiceGirl and Mark had nothing more than a light-hearted online flirtation. But what did it mean? Thursday had been Patrick’s birthday party. Had something happened with Sophie? She tried to follow the conversation back, but drew a blank. Some previous tweets appeared to have been deleted. Perplexed, she went into Mark’s feed and scrolled back to Friday, trying to piece together conversations. There had been lots of activity with his friends, and his responses mainly consisted of him telling them nothing had happened. There was a reply to an @Soph, who had to be Sophie, simply saying ‘cease and desist’. Frustratingly, @Soph’s account was locked, so Claire sent her a follow request.

  She thought she would have to wait a day or two for her request to be accepted, if Sophie accepted it at all. So she got ready for bed and tried to forget about it for now. But just as she was about to go to bed, she got a notification that she was now following @Soph. She went straight back onto Twitter, into @Soph’s account and scrolled down to Friday’s tweets. She had been very active that morning, throwing out lots of veiled hints that something had happened the night before:

  @Soph The sweetest hangover. :)

  @Soph Don’t worry re that last tweet, rehab fans. Was high on life last night. Strong stuff, but not on the prohibited list.

  And finally:

  @Soph Hey la, hey la, my boyfriend’s back.

  Claire waited for the appropriate feelings of hurt and betrayal to kick in, but she felt only mild dismay. Of course, Mark was clearly denying that anything had happened, and she had more reason to trust him than Sophie. Maybe that was why all she felt was a strange sort of detached curiosity because, deep down she suspected Sophie was just trying to stir things. Or maybe the general numbness she had been experiencing since her mother’s death was deadening the impact, and it would hit her later when she was more herself.

  But right now all she felt was intrigued, and she wanted to get to the bottom of what had really happened. So she sent a DM to @Locksie:

  @Locksie Soz, have been away from Twitter – family crisis. What’s @PublisherMark been up to? Email me gossip, please!

  Then she turned off her laptop and went to bed.

  The next day was sunny and warm, as promised. Claire was up early, feeling brighter now that she had something positive to focus on. She loaded the car with supplies and went to pick up Luca.

  ‘So, Brittas Bay,’ he said, as he swung in beside her, throwing his bag onto the back seat. ‘I haven’t been there in years. We used to go sometimes when we were kids.’

  How funny, Claire thought, that they could have been there at the same time all those years ago.

  ‘But mostly we went to beaches closer to home,’ he continued.

  ‘We pretty much lived at Brittas Bay during the school break,’ Claire told him.

  They had spent long summer holidays there as children, living a beach-based life no matter what the weather. They had been able to roam freely, making friends with other kids staying in the caravan park, playing in the dunes and swimming in the sea. Every meal seemed to have been eaten outdoors. It had been an idyllic existence for a child.

  In latter years, she had spent the odd weekend there with her mother, but they hadn’t been for some time, first because the weather was never good enough to entice them down, and then because her mother wasn’t well enough for caravan living. Claire had missed it, and she was glad to have the opportunity to use it again, possibly for the last time. She knew her mother had left the mobile home to her, but she wasn’t sure she would be able to keep it on. The site was expensive, and there were service charges on top of that. If she didn’t use it, she didn’t think she could justify the upkeep on purely sentimental grounds. She would have loved her nephews and niece to enjoy it, but her brothers weren’t keen on caravan holidays, and her sisters-in-law even less so.

  She felt herself start to relax and unwind as they breezed along with the windows down, summery music
blaring from the speakers. When she caught her first glimpse of the sea, the water sparkling and shimmering in the sunshine, her heart gave an instinctive leap, just like it always had when she was a child. She turned into a little side road and opened the electronic gates to the caravan park, driving down the soft grass track to their site.

  ‘Home, sweet home,’ she said, pulling up in front of a large caravan, set on a grassy area, with a picnic table beside it. The garden was neat, a pile of inflatable toys and body boards – remnants of Claire’s childhood – piled up in the corner beside a threadbare set of goalposts and a covered barbecue.

  ‘Really?’ Luca looked delighted.

  ‘I told you not to expect anything fancy.’

  ‘It’s perfect!’

  Claire felt better already as they got out of the car and she took a deep lungful of the sea air. She opened the door of the caravan and Luca followed her inside. He stood in the middle of the little living room, then gave a long, luxurious stretch, his T-shirt riding up to reveal the fine black hair of his happy trail against the white skin of his taut stomach. The living area was roomy enough as mobile homes went, but it suddenly felt very small with Luca in it, and Claire felt a moment of apprehension. She hoped it wouldn’t be awkward spending the weekend in such close proximity while keeping their distance physically.

  Luca was studying a corkboard over the little seating area, pinned with photographs and flyers for local businesses and takeaways. ‘Is this you?’ He was pointing to a photo.

  ‘Yes.’ Claire blushed. It featured her in a swimsuit on the beach as a gawky eight-year-old, her hair in pigtails, her legs buried in sand. ‘Aw, you were cute.’ He studied the other photographs. ‘And then you were seriously cute,’ he said, pointing to a photo of her as a teenager, all budding breasts and stick-thin thighs in a halter top and frayed jean shorts. ‘I wish I’d bumped into you then.’