‘Did she put you up to it?’
‘No!’ I can tell he wants me to say yes. At least it might go some way to explain things for him.
‘Who is this Emerald anyway?’
How do I answer this? I desperately want to come clean, to tell him how I’m trying to do the right thing by giving her up, but how I can’t bring myself to, and how I’m being physically torn apart because of who she is. There’s no way I can tell him, he’ll explode, for sure, but I can’t lie to him either. Never could. I’m stuck.
‘She’s Jim Byrne’s daughter.’
I spin around to where Laura is swaying on the door handle, looking revoltingly pleased with herself. Da’s staring at her too. I’m still scowling, trying to work out why in the name of God she’d do this, when I feel Da’s eyes shift over to me. I know this because his eyes are literally corroding the side of my head somewhere around my temple, but I can’t drag my eyes away from Laura.
She gives me this look, as if to say ‘what’s the big deal?’ but then her eyes ping back to Da and her face alters. The brazen pout falls away. She knows she’s got this wrong.
Out of nowhere, the doorbell goes. The ordinariness of its cheery ring is like a brief pardon from the unfolding nightmare, but nobody speaks; nobody even moves. It rings again: longer now.
BRRRRIIINNNGGG!
‘Get the Jaysus door, Laura!’ Da shouts and she swings back out of the room. Da’s pacing starts again, his jaws and fists clenched even tighter now. He squints his already closed eyes at me. ‘OK,’ he says slowly, eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me –’
‘It’s her!’ Laura hollers from the hallway.
My eyes dart to his, immediately feeling the draught of the open hall door. Neither of us can believe this is happening. He slams his hand to his chest like he’s trying to keep it from bursting through his shirt, but still it rises, slowly, fully, like at any second his buttons might pop. Then he exhales, without breaking his stare.
‘I’ve never asked anything of you, son,’ he says, stepping closer to me. ‘But I’m asking this of you now. In fact, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. For me, for your grandda, for this whole family, you’ve got to end it. End it!’ he grunts, without opening his teeth.
I gulp down a mouthful of acid and brush past him, out of the room. Laura’s still standing by the open hall door, blocking all but the top of Emerald’s head.
‘I’m sorry, Liam. I’m so sorry,’ Laura says, her long arms reaching out for me.
‘Go!’ I snap at her but she stops and waits there looking terrified until I get closer. Then she swipes off to the side and slinks back up the hall.
I can feel Emerald flinch from the front step, those wide metallic eyes desperately trying to read what’s going on. ‘Lorcan at the Metro told me where you live. I hope you don’t –’
I steal only the briefest glance at her because I can’t look into her face knowing what I’ve got to say. ‘You have to leave.’
She shakes her head slowly. ‘Liam?’
‘You need to go,’ I plead, but those beautiful eyes bore into me and I cower behind the closing door. I have to; I am completely helpless to that look.
Em steps forward. There’s no armour for the missiles her eyes fire as they scan my face, hunting for clues. ‘Aren’t you even going to tell me why?’
‘End it!’ Da hollers from the bottom of the stairs.
‘Now!’ I beg.
She steps back off the porch, leaning into Da’s dirty old van. My body slumps forward and I smack my forehead against the closing door, thumping my fist on the glass as my heart breaks in a line of painful cracks.
EMERALD
Like vultures, they were
I fell back against the van, stunned. Shouts continued from inside the house but still my feet wouldn’t move. It was only when I heard a small, soft voice call my name that I came round.
‘You didn’t choose your da.’ Liam’s sister, Laura, was leaning perilously from an open upstairs window.
‘My dad?’ I called back.
‘Neither of you did. I’m sorry,’ she whispered, before disappearing behind a net curtain. The window shut and she was gone.
My dad? Dad? As I squeezed past the beat-up van in the driveway, I saw the words barely concealed under a thin layer of paint.
FLYNN CONSTRUCTION
BUILDING QUALITY HOMES
I burst into the house.
‘Grandma!’ I shout out, stomping up both flights of stairs. ‘Grandma!’ I scream, snatching my laptop off the bed before marching back down to the kitchen. I slam my computer on to the kitchen table and flip it open.
JIM BYRNE, FLYNN CONSTRUCTION, I punch the names into Google.
457,000 results in 0.54 seconds
The page is awash with words wrestling for my attention. I hit the first headline and it expands to an article from the Irish Business Post, fourth of July; just days after I arrived in Portstrand! There’s a photo of Dad, walking alongside another man on a Dublin street.
Irish taxpayer fronts €35 million bill for Byrne’s failed developments.
Pictured outside his Irish solicitor’s office today, Jim Byrne, declared bankrupt in the Republic after his bankruptcy attempts in the UK were thrown out of court, is now being charged by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) with concealing substantial rents from his Irish portfolio that should go towards his debts in the UK. It’s understood that Byrne had been trying to raise funds to restart his building empire in the UK. Along with a substantial UK bank debt, Byrne owes the Irish Revenue Commissioners €1.9 million and his various companies owe debts of €6 million to the National Asset Management Agency.
My head is spinning. I close my eyes but it’s chaos. I force my eyes back to the screen, back to the results, and hit another link from the Irish Times three years earlier.
Portstrand company, Flynn Construction, goes under with €1.1 million debt.
There’s a photo of a dark-haired man in a hard hat and high visibility jacket, standing in front of huge scaffolding. I immediately know it’s him. Liam practically bursts through the cracks of his lined face.
ONE of the country’s largest property developers, Horizon Holdings, has gone into receivership – putting a number of major construction projects around the country on hold and threatening the future of several significant building businesses. Byrne Developments, which wholly owns the Horizon company, had been liaising with NAMA over a business plan, which was rejected. It is understood the receiver was put in place last night following the collapse of the plan.
Donal Flynn of the North County Dublin family business, Flynn Construction, had been providing the building contract for Jim Byrne’s Horizon Holdings at the luxury Bay Road Apartment Complex in Portstrand. Flynn was due to receive €200,000 yesterday out of a total €900,000 owed.
It goes on but I can’t. I shove my chair out from the table and pace up and down the kitchen. I can’t take it in. Dad? My dad? How could I not know all this? And so many lies!
That’s why we haven’t come back here. It wasn’t just the fight with Mum that changed everything. I shift back towards the table to continue reading but suddenly Grandma is by the back door. Her hair is stuck to her forehead with sweat and her cheeks are flushed.
‘There you are, Em,’ she says. ‘Your dad called earlier, but I couldn’t find you. Your mobile was ringing out.’
I shake my head at her. ‘How could you not tell me?’
She looks around the room, her eyes darting between me, my laptop and the door. I can see her brain try to put it all together.
‘Why did he not tell me?’ I’m shouting now.
She drops a little trug on to the countertop and several baby potatoes rattle out on to the floor. She closes her eyes. ‘Oh, pet,’ she sighs. ‘I wanted to –’
‘How could you even let me be here?’
‘With what happened with your mum … It was so last minute, there wasn’t much choice, for anyone.’ She drifts off.
/> I slump back into the chair and drive the laptop further into the bowl of apples in the centre of the table. ‘So that’s why Liam hates me now? He’s discovered I’m the daughter of Jim Byrne – destroyer of entire communities – and only the bloke who bankrupted his father. Jesus!’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I don’t think your father knows the extent of the hurt he’s caused.’
I can tell from a side glance that her clouded eyes are full of tears. She’s not talking about Donal Flynn’s hurt, she’s not even talking about me. This is about her; this is about her own pain.
She sits in a chair opposite me, straightening herself into its back and lets out a long, deep breath, like she’s arrived at a decision. ‘I’ve stopped reading all that stuff,’ she says, tapping at my laptop screen. ‘When the Bay Road development first collapsed, Father Martin asked everyone at Sunday mass to pray for those families suffering. He didn’t mention Jim’s name of course, but I could feel the disgust rising from all those bowed heads. I haven’t been back since.’ Her eyes close and she gently shakes her head. ‘God forgive me, but I just can’t.’
I reach across the table and take her silky hand in mine. It must have been dreadful for her. I squeeze her hand and her wedding ring feels like a huge, impossible clump amongst her bony fingers.
‘You’ve every right to feel angry, Em,’ she says.
I release her frail hand. ‘I’m suddenly … numb.’
‘It’ll come,’ she says, undoing the back of the little gardening belt from around her waist and draping it on the chair next to her. ‘And when it does, let it, but don’t hold on to the anger – it’s poison.’ She goes to pick up the potatoes that have rolled under the table. I watch her crouch down but it’s a struggle so I bend down to help. ‘He never meant any of this … you should know that,’ she says to me between the table legs.
‘And Mum?’
‘It’s been hard on her too. Obviously, it has.’
‘I always thought it was her, Grandma. I thought she did the lying. I never, ever, expected this from Dad.’
‘He was trying to spare you, love.’
‘Did he honestly not expect me to find out?’ I ask, rearranging the pile of potatoes. ‘Liam’s about to throw away his future, so that he can make the business right for his dad – the business my dad ruined. You should hear the way he talks. What it did to his father, and what it did to him and his family. It’s no wonder he won’t speak to me.’
Grandma pats a small circle into my back before making for the kettle. ‘I’ll make some tea. You’ve had a terrible shock.’
‘I’ve just been there. I’ve just come from his father’s house!’
She covers her mouth and I follow her eyes over the bank of geraniums on the window sill and out into the back garden. ‘Oh, Emerald,’ she says, shaking her head again. ‘Of all the families in this town –’ She stops and shakes her head. The boiling kettle finally clicks, startling her. She looks so delicate.
‘You shouldn’t have had to go through it alone, Grandma. You should have come to live with us in England, years ago.’
We both watch the boiling water slosh into the pot from a height. ‘It wouldn’t have been right, love. Eliza, and me, we’d had our differences,’ she says, setting two cups down on the table. ‘We never really recovered from … that incident. It was only a year or so after that Horizon started to collapse. It’s taken a long time for me to forgive Eliza for what she …’
‘I feel better about that now.’ Grandma looks up. ‘I mean, I always knew something serious happened that Christmas. I had a horrible sense that something was lost, but I didn’t remember what I said to Mum. Isn’t that strange?’
Grandma nods gently, her eyes glued to me now.
‘I thought Mum … stopped loving me. I realise that now. I think I’ve been afraid to really open my mouth since in case someone else stopped loving me too. Turns out Mum was scared. Ashamed, I suppose.’ Grandma takes my hand. ‘I had no idea my words had that kind of power.’
Grandma does a sort of upside-down smile without opening her mouth.
I take a sip of the syrup-like tea. ‘How did you face it here, all on your own?’
‘Oh goodness, love, I’m all right. It was all over the papers at the time, but sure it’s over three years ago now that it all hit the press. Thankfully this recent case is happening in England, so the interest here, if that’s what you’d call it, is not as … intense.’
This is a relief.
‘Except of course the night you arrived,’ she adds. ‘Didn’t they snap him coming out of that airport hotel the next morning. Cover of the Irish Times. Like vultures they were,’ she says, with another little shake of her head.
The cup sort of slides out of my fingers and plunks back into its saucer. I’m out of my seat now. ‘Do you still have it? The paper?’
‘Let me see,’ she says, getting up and delving in one of the dresser drawers. ‘Yes, here it is,’ she says, passing me the folded newspaper, which is now a little crispy. ‘I’m sorry for not being truthful with you, Emerald. Your dad wanted to get through this round of meetings here, he’d promised to tell you after that, but then everything happened with your mum …’
‘So after he dropped me off here, he didn’t go straight back to England?’ I cut her off.
‘No, love, he didn’t.’ She looks as relieved as I am to be telling the truth after all this time.
She’s going on now about lawyers and all sorts of stresses Dad’s been under, but I fade her out as I open the paper out flat on the table. There he is coming through the hotel’s revolving door, walking towards the silver hire car I immediately recognise. Then I see the blonde plait and the tight skirt of the figure, several feet in front of him, carrying his leather overnight bag. ‘Magda!’
‘What’s that?’
‘Up to his eyes with meetings –’
‘What’s that, love?’
I hear her voice but I’m underwater again.
LIAM
Wish I could say she was, but she wasn’t
I’m standing in my hutch lashing coleslaw into a baguette, trying not to think about the CAO offer that arrived from Dundalk earlier, when I see old Whiskers ambling in through the automatic doors. I stack my pyramid of rolls, pretending to prepare for the lunchtime rush when he hauls himself up on to the very stool where Emerald sat only weeks earlier. His face is normally a reassuring sight, but I can’t take him sitting there; not today, not with the dicey state of my insides. Waves of pain, like actual grief, have lapped inside me for days now and seeing him there my stomach begins to hurt again, properly.
It takes some effort under the circumstances, but I bow my head by way of salutation and he gives one of his deep nods back. I can almost hear the bones in his neck creak.
‘The usual?’ I ask, waiting for the rusty neck to jack itself up again, but no, he’s squinting at the list of coffees on the wall beside my head.
His eyes dip up and down as he studies each item individually. I return to my heavy thoughts until the clink of coins on the countertop snaps me back. I turn around to see his hand smooth over an impressive stack of change. Almost a tenner piled up between his stubby grey fingers.
‘Out busking?’ I ask, but I can’t raise a smile from him today. He’s focused, or distracted maybe. I can’t tell.
‘What are the blended ones like?’ he says suddenly. ‘Them icy ones, with the syrups.’
I quickly scan the shop floor on Lorcan-watch; he’s been on a feverish tip today, buzzing around, ticking boxes, making sure we’re all slaving away, but I can’t see him, so I lean into the counter and summon Whiskers in closer. ‘Wanna try one? For free, like,’ I whisper. ‘Vanilla is nice – a bit sweet, mind you. You might prefer the almond?’
His glassy eyes shut for a second. ‘Ah, it’s not for me,’ he says.
‘Of course you’re the tea. Here,’ I say, grabbing one of the tiny espresso cups, ‘take a little taste out to her i
f you like. She in the car?’
He shakes his head. ‘She’s beyond in Mount Pleasant, son. Been buried four years now.’ His lips purse, holding in a lifetime of something I can’t determine. It’s taking a few seconds for his words to sink in. ‘Sure, g’wan,’ he says. ‘We’ll try an icy almond so. ’Tis fierce warm out there today.’
I spin around and busily scoop a load of ice into the blender. It’s only once the machine fires into life that I allow the quivering breath out of my mouth.
I can’t turn back to Whiskers, not yet. I’m afraid to look into his eyes, afraid that I’ll start to weep over my freshly baked rolls. What kind of love drives a man to take a daily cappuccino with four sugars and no dust up to his wife’s grave? I’m thinking of Da now, of him and Mam. All sorts of thoughts are swirling around in my head as I try to gather myself to face Whiskers again. I have to count to ten silently.
‘It all happened so quick,’ he says, seemingly about nothing, but clearly about everything. My fingers drop the straw into the drink and our eyes latch.
So if ya had to choose … It’s Kenny’s voice now playing between my ears. My best friend might be proud but it’s not a decision. It never was. Like Da said, when love pounces on you, there’s no real choice involved at all.
The drive is empty when I get home but I still sneak in around the back, buying time to rehearse all I need to say. I’ve only just started pacing the kitchen when Mum walks in holding Evie on her hip.
I sit down. ‘Howrya, Mam?’ I say, trying to sound normal.
She smiles at me briskly. ‘Hiya, love.’
Evie is in her high chair now, shouting about life, as Mum starts setting the table around me. Mum’s moving at a pace I recognise; too fast, in hyper-efficient mode. One, two, three, four glasses crash against the table and cutlery is clattering down all around me. I shift around so she can set the place under my arms. I slide a spoon on to Evie’s tray so she can bang that. She babbles at me gratefully, all thrilled with her new toy. I blow some raspberries on her arm. I need to hear her laugh.
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