‘God almighty, Emerald. All this lip!’
I’ve never heard Grandma raise her voice like this. As I turn slowly around she gives a soft, steady sigh. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, taking off her glasses and squeezing the bridge of her nose. She rubs at her temples in tiny circles. Her breath is heavy as she clears her throat. ‘I’m just finding it hard to believe you stole off into the night, and with him,’ she says, shaking her head now, as though trying to let the reality of it all fall out from her brain. ‘You’ve no idea who he is.’
‘Yes, I do,’ I say, stepping closer. She continues flicking through the papers, without really looking at any of them. ‘I know him better than I’ve known anyone,’ I add.
‘Trust me,’ she says, with her tiny eyes peering at me over the top of her glasses, ‘you don’t.’
I hate the assurance with which she says this. Like she knows something I don’t.
She places her balled-up fist over her mouth and motions towards the chair opposite her with her other hand. I sit down, feeling very much like a child about to be scolded.
‘Emerald, you need to talk to your father. D’you hear me?’
‘You haven’t spoken to him?’
‘No.’ She whispers it. I’d assumed she’d already done it. In fact, I’m surprised she called the police before calling Dad.
‘I’m sorry, Grandma. Really I am. I know you must have been so worried. It was a stupid thing to do, and –’
‘Yes, it was,’ she interrupts. ‘It was stupid and irresponsible. I was up the walls imagining what might have happened to you. And now … well, I hope you haven’t got yourself into any trouble with that –’
‘Liam. His name is Liam.’ I feel a fat tear well up and I open my eyes wide to let it sink back in. ‘And it’s all even more dreadful because … I love him –’
‘Oh, Emerald, please,’ she butts in, her face and hand gestures freezing for a second.
‘It’s true, Grandma, I do.’
She braces her shoulders and tilts her face towards the fridge and away from me. Her body judders at the impossibility of it.
‘I know you’re terrified … about upsetting Dad, what with everything –’ Something in the way her bottom lip quivers stops me from finishing this sentence and I change tack. I’m shaking now and I see she is too. I take a deep breath. ‘Yes, he’ll be mad at me for sneaking out but he won’t be as shocked as you think about me having a boyfriend. I think he’ll really like Liam. They’ve got a lot in common. Even music –’
Her two hands cover her face. ‘You need to speak to him,’ she says it again, really slowly this time.
‘OK! I will.’ I want Dad to be happy for me. I want him to like Liam, but now I don’t know what’s gone on and I can’t help thinking of every other phone call I’ve had with Dad since I’ve been here, and how impossible it’s been to get his attention. I pace the room. ‘Might it be better face to face?’ I suggest, hoping this might buy me some time to speak to Liam first. ‘He’ll be at the family session on Sunday. He’s meeting me at the airport – can’t I tell him when I get to Bristol?’
She bites lightly on the tip of her glasses, considering. ‘All right,’ she says, pressing her palms on the table and rising up out of her chair. ‘Maybe this would be better in person, but you’re not to see that Liam again before talking to him.’
I immediately stand. I can’t agree to this. ‘But Grandma –’
‘It’s all I ask, Emerald. And you need to tell your father everything,’ she says, dusting the leaf of a Busy Lizzie on the window ledge.
Everything: the single, simple word reverberates in my ears and I feel off balance. I crumple back into the chair. Looking around the room I catch Dad’s eye, peering out from the photo beside the fridge. I blink a few times, trying to sharpen the blurred images that are now rearranging themselves behind my eyes. At first it’s just patches flashing into place before evaporating again.
I close my eyes and suddenly I’m eleven again, back to the Boxing Day, where everything changed. There she is, my mother, in the corner of this kitchen by the oven. She’s younger of course. She hadn’t cut her hair into that bob yet and her long, golden-red curls fall loose down her back. She’s wearing a tight, blue woollen dress with lots of pretty bracelets jangling at the end of her wrists. There’s a smell of mince pies and through the open door I can hear logs spitting in the fireplace. Dad is singing along to the TV in the other room, but then all of a sudden he’s not. He’s behind me in the kitchen, shouting at Mum. She’s telling him I deserved it.
I let my forehead fall into my palms. The memory is coming in waves now, like a familiar nausea. The unravelling is imminent, but I don’t like it. In fact, I want to tie it up into the messy knot it was and kick it out of my head and out of the kitchen window, but I can’t stop it rising up from my insides. My hand cups my face and underneath my fingertips I feel the heat of my stinging flesh.
‘Why did she hit me, Grandma?’
LIAM
Everything to do with everything
‘Liam!’ Laura yells it up the stairs for what I sense is not the first time. Thin Lizzy’s ‘Still in Love with You’ is on repeat behind my head and I can just about hear her above the music. How is it Phil Lynott knows exactly what I’m feeling since last Wednesday morning? I look down at the text that I’ve been trying to write to Em. I’ve rewritten it at least ten times. I’ve spent less time writing an entire song.
Actually, it’s not a text; it’s a bloody essay and I still can’t send it. Suddenly the hall door slams and the whole house rattles from the aftershock.
Footsteps hammer on the floorboards outside my bedroom and I stash the phone under the rug just as Kenny’s ginger mug pokes around the door.
‘All right, man,’ he says. Taking the tiny motion of my neck as an invitation, he saunters on in. He stops in the middle of the room and starts doing woeful air guitar all out of time. He’s no Gary Moore.
‘Wanna write a little song about it?’ he says, grinning at me. I aim one of my little Velcro darts at him. ‘Ah, I’m only slagging, moody girl. Here,’ he says, tossing a Double Decker into my lap. ‘Comfort food, for your period pains.’ He laughs. I catch the chocolate bar and fling it up on to the bed.
‘At the risk of stating the obvious,’ he begins, ‘you were missed last night.’ He crouches on his skinny legs and budges up to sit beside me on the floor.
I fire another dart at the felt board above the waste-paper bin. It hits the little bull’s-eye, dead centre, before slumping straight into the metal bin, which just about sums up everything I feel right now.
‘You gonna say something, Flynn, or are we having a one-way dialogue here?’
‘Monologue.’
‘Wha–?’
‘That’d be a monologue.’
‘Whatever, at least yer talking. So you don’t show up to my party last night, which was only THE party-to-end-all-parties, the one we’ve been planning for ten bleeding years, the one where we toast the ultimate end of our school life together, just that one. And …’ he says, with his palms out open like some phoney politician, ‘you haven’t returned any of my calls or even tried to explain what in the name of Jaysus is going on?’
I fire another dart at the wall and watch it plummet limply to the floor.
‘You know your game?’ I say, turning to him. ‘The one where you ask me to make a choice?’
‘Yeah?’ he says, rubbing his hands together with irritating enthusiasm.
‘I have to choose. This time it’s for real.’
He’s excited. He thinks we’re playing now. ‘Between what?’
‘Between who.’
‘All right, so who do you have to choose between?’
‘Emerald and Da.’
His legs stop bouncing and he holds them, uncomfortably mid-position. ‘What?’ His face twists in confusion. ‘Why?’
‘The Garda, O’Flaherty, yer man who came to the shelters that night –’
> ‘What about him?’
‘Said he’ll tell Da everything, unless I stop seeing her immediately.’
‘Tell him what? What’s she got to do with anything?’
I fire the last dart at the board and turn to face him. ‘She’s Jim Byrne’s daughter, Kenny. Only the prick that bankrupted generations of my family’s business.’
His jaw drops loose. He goes to say something, but stops. Finally he just blows air from his mouth for a very long time.
‘She’s got everything to do with everything.’ I say it slowly having spent the best part of three days digesting this rancid fact. I hear him sigh again, when suddenly he starts digging me in the ribs, hard.
‘What?’
He’s pointing under the door.
I swivel around. ‘What?’
He keeps pointing, urgently, his brow creased into some kind of alarm. I crawl over to the doorway on my knees, following his finger and slanting my head on the ground to peer into the gap underneath it. The white rubber toes of Laura’s Converse come into focus. I reach up for the handle, flinging the door wide open, but she’s off down the stairs like a bullet.
‘Laura!’ I shout, scrambling to the top of the stairs, but the hall door slams shut and the whole house trembles once more.
Kenny is scratching his head when I walk back in the room. ‘Whatcha gonna do, man?’ he says.
‘About Laura?’
He waves his hand dismissively. ‘Nah. About Emerald.’
‘Dunno.’ We sit like this on the floor; Kenny’s sighing and I’m just staring ahead, sure of only one thing – that I’m a damned man either way. ‘What’s mad is I had this sense, you know. Last Saturday night outside Moloney’s, something she said about her dad didn’t feel right.’ Kenny is still slowly shaking his head. ‘But I couldn’t go there. It was like a piece from a different jigsaw, one I didn’t want to see at all.’
Kenny nods softly and I know he gets it. I’m even starting to feel grateful when he begins to noisily unwrap a Twix from inside his pocket. He takes a massive bite. ‘And it was insane, by the way, the party. Thanks for asking.’
I’m too depressed to respond. I can’t bear the sight of him munching away. It’s too normal; eating a Twix is something you’d do if the world weren’t falling apart.
‘Your aul fella must be peppering about you heading off to Dundalk, excited like,’ he says, masticating loudly.
‘I don’t wanna go.’
He’s gawking at me, mouth full of slobbery, brown goo. ‘What’s that?’
‘You heard me.’
He swallows hard, as though all the gunk in his mouth is now concrete. ‘Any more bombshells for me today?’
Results in four days. How do I begin to tell Da? I’m standing by the hall door, watching Kenny hurdle the hedges all the way to the end of the street. Then, gritting my teeth, I walk into the living room. He’s sitting there, watching telly.
‘Thought you’d be doing an island run today?’ I say.
‘Gerry’s away,’ he shouts over his shoulder. ‘Asked me to come over on Monday instead this week, which means I get to watch the game. Happy days,’ he says, rubbing his hands.
I’m suddenly remembering the horrible image of Gerry the wallaby slayer. I’ve wanted to tell Dad about what he did, but how can I? Besides, I’ve other bombshells to worry about. Every fibre of my being is quaking, as though the words I’m about to drop will make the walls cave in.
‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘just the man. Sit down. Sit down.’ He taps the seat cushion next to him, all keen, but he’s still staring at the football on the box. I watch his furrowed face in profile. ‘Amn’t I only off the phone to the Credit Union,’ he says. ‘They’ve agreed your loan.’ He steals a happy side-glance at me before turning back to the game. I clear my throat. Da sits up, roused by something happening onscreen. He thumps the side of my leg, playfully. ‘We’ll go and see John-Joe when I get back Monday afternoon and we’ll take a couple of his motors out for a spin. What d’you say?’
John-Joe’s got a second-hand car garage up by the airport now. Da’s been dying to take me there. Kenny was right; he’s peppering with the excitement all right. The way he sees it this September life-plan of mine is actually coming together.
‘I need to talk to you, Da.’
His head drops and he takes a deep breath, staring at the ground. Then he picks up the remote and mutes the TV. ‘Go on,’ he says, settling back into the seat. Da has a look of perpetual concern; it’s his beady, blue, cowboy eyes. Grandda had the same, but with even more of a Clint Eastwood squint. Da generally reserves direct eye contact for when it’s absolutely necessary, like he somehow understands the power of his stare. Most of the time when he’s talking to you, he looks past, or around you, but I can feel the full weight of those eyes now.
The house is completely silent apart from the faint thud of bass coming from Laura’s room upstairs. There’s not a sound from outside: no car pulling out of its drive, no screechy kids playing, no ice cream van in the distance. All of which gets me wondering how it’s anything less than a lifetime ago that we all piled out on to the street queuing for Tangle Twisters and Icebergers.
Da’s breath is heavy and I watch his nostrils widening with each exhale. His eyes focus again, piercing mine. It’s impossible not to break under this stare; it’s the weight of glorious expectation in his eyes. Wish I didn’t know him so well. I wish to God I couldn’t see all the life-giving hope that’s filling his poor head.
‘Liamo?’ he says, digging my leg.
‘Nothing. I’ll need to change my shift Monday, that’s all.’
EMERALD
Sometimes it takes a little fight
I’ve decided WH Smith is the best place to kill time in Arrivals at Bristol Airport. Another coffee might tip me over the anxiety cliff and I need some distraction from the daunting task of telling Dad ‘everything’. I didn’t expect to be this jittery. Liam still hasn’t been in touch, so I’m not sure how much point there is working myself up to tell Dad I’m in love someone who won’t even return my calls. But I need to do it. I also need to ask him about that Christmas with Mum before we get to the clinic. Grandma said Mum’s the one to give me some answers but I’m really hoping Dad can shed some light on it first.
I’m scanning Elle magazine with one hand and hitting redial with the other. I’m only slightly aware of my foot drumming away involuntarily at the end of my leg as Dad’s phone goes straight to voicemail again.
I’ve moved on to Glamour when my pocket starts to vibrate. Thank God!
‘You’re now officially …’ I take the phone from my ear to check the time, ‘twenty-nine minutes late!’ I don’t hear anything. ‘Dad?’
‘Emerald, it’s Magda.’
I picture her immediately: all silk-blouse and Slavic efficiency. I drop the magazine and it slinks heavily back into the rack.
‘Em?’ she says again, louder.
I think she’s driving. I can see her with that prehistoric Bluetooth thing in her ear. I hear Ed Sheeran playing in the background. I struggle to compose myself. ‘Uh huh.’ I can’t bring myself to be friendly.
‘Your father asked me to call you. He’s sorry but he’s locked in a meeting and it’s running over.’
My bag slips from my shoulder on to the floor. ‘But it’s Saturday!’
‘He had hoped it would be finish –’
‘He’s supposed to be here now. He’s supposed to be driving me there.’ I’m practically snarling so I force myself to breathe deeply. ‘We’re supposed to be –’
‘I know,’ she says, cutting me off. No you don’t know, I want to say, but I clamp my mouth shut. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve called a car to take you there. It will be outside Arrivals now. The driver will have a board with your name on it. It’s on account.’
Magda’s Polish accented ‘don’t worry’ is about the least reassuring thing I could hear right now. Slinging my bag back on, I stomp through the crowded terminal, wea
ving through happy families hugging loved ones over mountains of outsized luggage. ‘Is he even coming later?’
‘He said he’d call you.’
‘When?’ I ask, picking out the familiar soft tick of an indicator. Ed Sheeran is louder now and I can make out the words; she must have stopped at some lights.
‘As soon as he can. Call me back on this phone if there’re any problems.’
‘OK, fine,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’ I tag it on lamely and hang up, thumping my way through the stiff revolving door and out into the air, which feels anything but fresh.
True to Magda’s faultless organisation, the driver is already here. I hop into the back of the car and rest my face against the cool glass. The car meanders to the exit, rocking over speed bumps and jolting to a stop at the zebra crossing to let a trickle of suitcase-draggers pass by.
I open my eyes and stare out at the roads sliding past. Being here and driving through this familiar landscape is like peeling back a dirty old plaster. I wanted to believe the wound underneath might have healed, but no, it’s still there: raw flesh and dried blood covered up with a tatty Band Aid that’s lost its stick. I feel dizzy. And cross. I hate being here. I hate being alone. I hate being late. I don’t want this reality.
When I finally arrive at Foxford Park, a lady with a barely audible voice explains that the family group is already in session. I don’t even know what I’m doing here without Dad. The whole trip feels terrifying now. The silent lady starts to physically guide me where to go. I let her but I’m actually calculating whether I have enough cash for a taxi back to the airport when she pushes an enormous, white door wide-open.
A line of faces spins in my direction. It’s a much bigger room than the one we were in last time. A woman is talking; Scottish I think. I freeze, unsure of what to do, until I see Nick motioning to me from over by the window. I want to turn around and run really fast in any other direction, but somehow I don’t. Instead I follow his hand hypnotically as it gestures for me to take a seat.
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