‘Sorry,’ she said, when DJ made a face. She knew the noise irritated him. But this quirk had been embedded in her for as long as she had a memory. It proved hard to say goodbye to.
‘Why are you looking all weird at the cases?’ DJ asked. He gave the one nearest to him a kick.
‘I feel sorry for them,’ Ruth said, pushing them away from DJ’s feet, which were hell-bent on causing damage right now.
‘That’s weird. You do know that, right?’ DJ asked.
‘Yes.’
You used to like my weirdness. Please do not stop.
‘Is that it, then? We’re really leaving now?’ DJ said.
‘Yes.’ Her culpability crippled her. She had promised him that they were done moving around when they had found this flat four years previously. But she made that promise without the knowledge that eviction lay in their future.
‘I never liked it here anyway. It’s a dump,’ DJ lied.
‘I liked it,’ Ruth answered softly. ‘And while it was not much, it was our dump.’
‘So what next?’ His voice made a lie of his earlier bravado, the tremor showing his truth. He was a scared kid who didn’t want to leave his house, his bedroom, his life.
‘Right now you need to go back to school. We have talked about this. I will collect you later on. After my meeting with the council in Parkgate Hall. I will come and get you. You have my word,’ Ruth said.
‘I’m not going to school today.’ DJ was matter-of-fact, and when she didn’t answer him he turned to her. ‘You can’t make me go in.’
‘Yes I can,’ Ruth replied.
‘Well, maybe, but you need me with you, Mam. You know how you get when you’re stressed. Let me help. Let me go with you to the council.’
‘I will not say the wrong thing.’
DJ had heard his mother rehearse possible scenarios for this day dozens of times. He’d watched her struggle to stay calm, with the sound of her pops cracking in the air, as her knuckle-cracking habit exacerbated. The fear that the council would not have somewhere safe for them danced around them both. But DJ could not give in to that. He was no longer a baby. He had to be strong for his mam. She needed him.
‘It’s not fair to expect me to sit through double maths when all I’m thinking about is you and where we will sleep tonight,’ DJ whispered.
Ruth nodded in agreement. ‘None of this is fair.’
Her reasoning that it was better for him to miss all of this was perhaps misguided. She took in every part of him, from the frown on his face to the hunch of his shoulders, and felt her love for him overtake everything else. ‘Do you need a hug?’ Ruth asked, taking a step backwards.
If he said yes, she would pull him into her embrace and whilst she did so, she would count to ten, before letting him go. That’s just the way it was for them, and on a normal day that didn’t bother him. But today was not normal. For once, just once, DJ wished she would hug him without question. Without a raffle ticket.
‘It’s OK.’ DJ turned away from the look of relief on her face.
‘You can stay with me. I will write a letter for your teacher tomorrow morning,’ Ruth said.
‘Thanks.’ He felt some of his irritation slip away.
Their Uber arrived and the driver jumped out of the car, looking at their luggage with dismay. ‘This all yours, love?’
‘Correct.’
‘We’ll be doing well to fit this in the boot,’ he complained, picking up the black sacks. ‘You should have ordered a people carrier.’
‘Put the suitcases in first and you will have adequate space,’ Ruth pointed out what seemed startlingly obvious to her.
‘Listen to my mam. She’s good with stuff like this,’ DJ said, when the driver ignored her. DJ helped him do as Ruth suggested. With one last shove, the boot closed with a loud bang.
‘Told you,’ DJ said. He liked proving his mother right. Had she even noticed? He didn’t think so.
Ruth and DJ turned to look one last time at the home they had lived in for the past four years. Anger flashed over DJ’s face once more and Ruth shuddered as his features changed. Cold. Angry. Disappointed.
‘Stop staring at me,’ he complained.
Ruth ignored him and only looked away when his face returned to normal.
That’s better. He looked just like his father again. They got into the car and she turned her head to look out the window. Had things been different, if she had never met DJ’s father, his namesake, they might not be in this situation. But then she would have no DJ – arguably a fate much worse, because without her son, she had nothing.
As the car moved away from their old life, she said, ‘I am so sorry.’
‘You keep saying that,’ DJ said.
‘Because it is true.’
DJ sighed, something that Ruth noted he did with increasing regularity. The stress of the past month had made sighing part of his new normal. It was funny how sounds could bring you back to another time. Back to her childhood home where life had been full of sighs. The thing was, despite their regularity, they had the power to cut her each and every time.
The first sigh she could remember was at her four-years-old developmental check-up in the local health centre in Castlebridge, Wexford. Her mother had dressed Ruth in her best dress, a burnt-orange tweed pinafore. She had thick black tights on underneath, which scratched her legs and made her cry. Her mother had sighed and asked, ‘Why must you always be so difficult?’
Ruth did not like seeing her mother upset so she pinched herself hard and tried to make the tears stop. She wanted her mother to look at her with different eyes. With love.
On the way to the health centre, her parents coached her. They were second-guessing what the nurse would ask Ruth. She had tried to listen to her parents’ instructions, determined to succeed, to win, to not be a loser again. But with every question they threw at her and every answer Ruth offered up, she saw her parents throw furtive glances at each other. She could sense that something was not quite right. She wanted to be at home again in her bedroom, wearing her soft pyjamas that were made of pink fleece. She liked how they felt on her skin. They did not itch or scratch like her tights and dress, and they made her feel safe. She wanted to go back to her picture book and read about Angelina Ballerina. Instead she had to sit in a cold waiting room with hard plastic chairs and dirty floors while her parents told her to act like a normal child.
‘I want to go home,’ Ruth decided, and she felt her arms begin to fly. She wished she was a bird so she could disappear into the blue sky. Back home. Back to safety. Back to her normal.
Her mother’s exasperated sigh filled the air with tension. ‘Oh, Ruth, stop that right now. People will stare! Why must you always be so difficult?’
Ruth had sat on her hands, shamed, scared and tearful.
A lifetime of sighs and sorrys. Now her son was in on the act, too.
‘DJ,’ she whispered, and her hand hovered in the centre of the car, in the space between them. Only a few inches away from each other yet it felt like an unbridgeable gulf. She let her hand drop into her lap and she looked back out through the window.
3
RUTH
‘It’s not your fault,’ DJ said, finally, in a voice that was older and more knowing than it had any business to be. ‘It’s Seamus Kearns. I hate him. The … the … fucker.’
Ruth looked at her young son in shock. Had he just said that? DJ’s honest, innocent face jarred with his foul language. She was not naïve enough to believe that he had never used bad language before, but this … this really was out of character. One of the rules of their family was that they had a swear-free home. As much for her as him because, in truth, she enjoyed a good expletive.
Ruth wanted so much for DJ: an education, friends, social acceptance, a life without offence. Because offending people had been, and still was, a regular occurrence for her.
‘Hate is a strong word, DJ,’ Ruth said. Had it been any other day, she would have been cross with him
. But she had to concede that on a day that involved losing your home, a few concessions had to be made.
‘You hate him, too,’ DJ said.
‘That is incorrect. I would say I abhor his actions. But hate is a negative, angry and all-encompassing emotion. He is not worthy of taking up that much space in my head. Or yours.’
DJ’s resentment filled the air between them, contaminating their close unit. She felt at a loss, knowing that she must, as the adult, find a way for them both to get through this. She turned to face him, then moved her hand an inch closer to his, letting her fingertips brush the top of his. He looked down and she saw a ghost of a smile inch its way back onto his face. He squeezed her hand for a moment then released it back to her lap.
It was a start. She would find a way to do better.
DJ turned his attention back to the blur of Dublin as they drove through the city. Their taxi came to a halt at a pedestrian crossing. Ruth looked up and watched an old man, unshaven and dirty, wearing a long grey overcoat, begin to cross the road. By his side was a dog with a long and silky strawberry-blonde coat. The man raised his hand in small salute to the taxi driver, thanking him for waiting. He walked slowly, with a slight limp on his right leg. He had a rucksack on his back and something about him – his clothes, his hair, the collar of his coat turned up to protect him from the chill in the air – brought a lump to Ruth’s throat.
Where is he going? Does he have a home?
Then a car behind them blasted its horn, impatient to get on with its journey. They all jumped in unison, including the dog, who stopped suddenly, causing the old man to crash into it. Like a deck of cards, he tripped and fell to the ground, his rucksack spilling its contents onto the road.
‘Probably pissed,’ the Uber driver said, looking with annoyance in his rear-view window at the car behind, whose driver continued to blast the horn.
‘His dog tripped him up,’ Ruth said, feeling the need to defend the old man. She watched a red-and-white flask escape his rucksack and roll towards their car.
‘Where you going?’ DJ asked in surprise when Ruth opened her door.
‘To help.’ She ran over to the flask and picked it up before it disappeared under their car.
‘That’s mine!’ the old man shouted at her, back on his feet again.
Ruth shook the flask gently to see if it had broken, relieved to hear only the swoosh of liquid inside, not broken shards.
‘It is unharmed,’ she said, handing it over to him. His boots were brown. Scuffed and worn. Like him.
He stuffed the flask back into his rucksack, looking at her curiously. Was she imagining it or did he look surprised? Without any further comment, Ruth counted the steps back to their Uber.
‘I don’t know why you bothered, love. His kind would stab you as soon as look at you,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Only last week I saw one of his lot robbing a handbag from a woman. Witnessed it from this very car.’
Ruth glanced towards the man still standing on the side of the road, watching her intently, his head tilted to one side. For a split second their eyes met and he raised his hand and saluted her. And in that gesture, Ruth had the strangest feeling she knew him. She had seen that salute before, she was sure. The memory teased her but refused to show itself. It was gone. And so was he when he turned away and walked in the opposite direction, his dog by his side. Her imagination was playing tricks on her.
‘Why did you do that?’ DJ asked.
‘Because it was the right thing to do,’ Ruth replied. She nodded towards the back of the Uber driver’s head. ‘Do not write off people based on how they present themselves to the world. You should know that better than anyone. Everyone has a story, if you take the time to listen.’
As their car moved on, the old man disappeared from her view but not from Ruth’s mind. She supposed he could have a home. But something about the way he retrieved his fallen items and put them back into his rucksack made her think that his home was in that bag. His face looked weathered in a way that suggested it had been exposed to the outside elements twenty-four-seven. Had life changed as quickly for this man as it had for her and DJ? In only four weeks, they had gone from home to homeless. Four short weeks that had been the longest of her life. When their landlord, Mr Kearns, gave them notice to leave their two-bedroomed flat, he set their life into a tailspin. Ruth was never late paying the rent, even by a day, which meant some months were leaner than others. But Mr Kearns did not care about that.
He had walked into her kitchen and opened up a cupboard above the sink, two months previously. Then pulled out a mug, laughing as he said, ‘It’s a mug’s game, this landlord malarkey. I’m getting out. Selling up.’ His eyes narrowed as he turned to look at Ruth. ‘Make me an offer if you like. Can’t say fairer than that.’
Ruth knew when someone was making fun of her. She recognised the tone, one that she had heard many times in her life.
‘I can’t maintain the rent. Not at the levels they are at,’ Mr Kearns said, in a manner that implied he was talking about the weather, not their eviction.
‘You raised the rent by twenty per cent only a year ago,’ Ruth interjected.
‘You can blame our government for the mess they’ve landed us all in. I can’t raise the rent for another two years, because of these new laws they’ve made,’ Seamus replied, picking up cushions on their sofa and examining them, before tossing them back.
Ruth had been relieved when she’d read about the changes to the Irish rent laws. Naïvely, she believed it meant that she would not have to worry about a further increase until 2020. By then she would have a council house. Only she realised now that although they were on the housing waiting list with Fingal County Council, they were as likely to win the lottery as they were to get a house. Ruth had heard the phrase ‘You are only two pay cheques away from the streets.’ As it happened, for them, the number was one.
Ruth felt panic begin to mount inside her once again, as she sat in the back of the car. Then Odd Thomas’s voice whispered to her, as it had done for over a decade whenever she needed help, calming her, supporting her:
Perseverance is impossible if we don’t permit ourselves to hope.
It was his name, ‘Odd’, that made her choose the book in the first place at her local library in Wexford. She had been called that on more than one occasion in her life. For different reasons from his, she found out soon enough. Odd could see and talk to dead people, and used this skill to help the Chief of Police in Pico Mundo to solve murders. Odd’s world in the USA became as real to her as the one she herself lived in in Ireland. She read the book in one glorious sitting the first time, then picked it up to read again the following day. Then something extraordinary happened on a damp, grey morning in spring. She watched her classmates playing basketball in the school yard, chatting in groups of twos and threes, happy cliques. A thought crept into her head, insidious and mean. If she disappeared, faded to nothing, who would miss her?
And that was when Odd Thomas spoke to her for the first time. Be happy. Persevere.
That very line was one of her favourites from the book. And she knew immediately what it meant. Ruth would have to work extra hard to be happy. But if she never gave up hope, she could find happiness. Thank you, Odd.
And so their friendship began: she trying her best to be happy; he reminding her that perseverance was necessary to achieve that end. Of course, Ruth knew that Odd was not real. She was neither stupid nor delusional. Just alone.
She looked across the seat to her son. For him, she would fight. She would find them a home again. He would never feel alone.
4
TOM
Bette Davis nuzzled Tom’s hand again, her apology for knocking him off his feet earlier. ‘It’s OK, girl,’ he said to his dog, ruffling her coat behind her ears, the way she liked. He leaned back into the curve of his park bench. His home now, he supposed, as it was where he spent most of his nights. Bette rested her head on his feet. Tom closed his eyes. His breathing s
lowed down and his lids flickered, heavy, until every sense lost its place in the now and went back in time to his dreams, to his happy place, to his home …
Tom stretched his aching muscles upwards, knowing that a locum was a priority. He couldn’t keep this pace up for much longer. His bones ached, older than his forty years. His small general practice had grown to the point that Tom had to turn new patients away. And patients were beginning to complain that the usual twenty-minute waiting time for their appointment was stretching towards an hour. That didn’t sit well with him.
His receptionist, Breda, poked her head through his door. The sound of the Spice Girls singing their Christmas hit ‘Too Much’ drifted in towards him. He stood up and heard his knees click in protest. He needed to get out for a run. He’d been saying that to himself for the past two months. But somehow or other, another day would go by and he’d find himself falling onto his couch, tired and hungry, exercising his fingers with the TV remote.
‘What’s the plan for the weekend?’ Breda asked.
‘Not listening to the Spice Girls. That’s for starters,’ Tom said.
‘Would suit you well to find a Spice Girl for yourself.’
‘Would be a lucky lady to get me,’ Tom said, smiling. ‘But if she’s out there tonight she’ll have to wait. Because my only plan is to head to Tesco. I need to replenish my poor cupboards, then it’s home to catch up on some sleep.’
‘It’s no life you have,’ Breda said. ‘Good-looking man like you.’
‘Stop flirting with me,’ Tom joked.
Breda waved her hands at him and grinned, ‘Oh, you, you’re such a messer.’
‘What are you up to this weekend, Breda?’ He watched her tidy her reception desk, switching off the computer. She looked as tired as he felt. Was he expecting too much from her? Probably.
‘I’m going dancing. Don’t laugh. I told you not to laugh!’ Breda said when Tom’s face broke into a grin. ‘Himself has it in his head that we should learn how to ballroom dance. I’m not sure I’ll ever be Ginger to his Fred, though.’
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