‘You don’t need to worry about school. It’s your grandmother’s gift to you.’
I almost drop the phone. ‘Grandma?’ I’m sitting bolt upright now, my back stiff against the hard headboard. The bed sways like I’m back on the boat, which makes my head spin and my heart race even faster. I’m picturing her, doing her sums at the kitchen table a couple of weeks ago. Totting up numbers into her ancient calculator, for me. And all I could think about was my broken heart.
‘She’s agreed to cover you as a boarder for the next two years, if needs be. We’ve a lot to talk about, but it can wait. You don’t need to worry.’
The ground beneath me fixes. I close my eyes as I lower myself back into the pillow and my neck sinks deep into the soft feathers. Mum’s waiting for me to say something, but I’m all out of words. My head and heart are full. I can’t take any more in.
‘I’ll let you rest, but I’ll see you in Arrivals. I’ll be the one with the sign, waving like a madwoman who’s just been let out.’
I allow myself a laugh.
‘It’s gonna be OK, Em.’
Without thinking, I answer. ‘I know, Mum. I know, it will.’
LIAM
Say what, Yoda?
The hall door swings open before I even ring the bell.
‘Howrya, Mrs Byrne.’ I’m trying to play it cool, but it’s hard to forget what happened the last time I actually set foot in this house. I slide my sweaty palms back into my pockets, not sure what else to do with them.
‘C’mon in,’ she says, ushering me inside the old hallway, which without O’Flaherty, Fidget and Emerald to fill it feels even more enormous. Only the giant grandfather clock feels to scale. In fact, I’d say Da’d get another room out of the wasted space on either side; a downstairs loo under those stairs at least. She studies me for way longer than is necessary. The whole staring thing must run in the family.
Her hand taps lightly on my arm. ‘G’wan up and give her a hand down with the bag.’
‘Sure, Mrs Byrne.’
‘Annie,’ she says, not overfriendly but there’s no edge either. I plod up the long, double flight of stairs with no idea where I’m going, except up. Soon I spot Emerald through an open door. She’s kneeling on a huge bag, struggling to get the zip the whole way round.
‘Aghh!’ she groans. ‘It’s like stuff reproduces while you’re away.’
I’m not sure how to read this lack of ‘hello’. She was in good form when we said goodbye last night. ‘If only travel broadened the bags as well as the mind, eh?’ I say, adding my knee to hers.
With a united shove we get the two zips to meet, but she doesn’t answer. She buckles back down on the bed, surveying the large, old-fashioned room as though committing every small detail to memory. ‘It seems so different now,’ she says, sitting up and our eyes meet properly for the first time.
Her shoulders hunch forward. Looking unreliable in her denim shorts, she stands like a newborn calf. Just staring at her is making me feel wobbly. I’m sure it’ll be better once I’m out of this house. I steal a look at my phone from inside my pocket. ‘Nearly time to go.’
I’m holding the door open, watching her gather the last of her things when she stops in front of me. ‘I thought “lump in your throat” was just an expression, something people said. I didn’t think it actually happened,’ she says, closing the bedroom door softly behind us.
I undo her fingers from around the suitcase handle and we shunt down the stairs without another word. Annie appears at the hall table like a ghost.
‘I’ll be outside,’ I say, sliding the backpack off Em’s shoulder and drawing up the handle of the wheelie case and dragging it towards the hall door.
Out on the drive, the warm wind blows hard. I lean against the car and stare over the tops of the tall trees at the unbroken view of the sea. I tell myself it’s the angle of the strong, morning sun stopping me from looking straight ahead and keeping my eyes veered south, down towards Howth. But I drag my eyes back and force myself to stare at the hunk of green rock jutting out of the sea, unashamed. The island: it’s not sorry about nothing.
Eventually Emerald appears at the door, her hair gusting around her face as she plants a kiss on Annie’s forehead. I know it’s going to be my goodbye next. I don’t want to look.
She takes Annie’s hand. ‘I won’t waste a day of it, Grandma. I promise,’ she says, lowering her head on to Annie’s shoulder now. ‘From the bottom of my heart, thank you.’
Mercifully the rest of her words are muffled. I wish they’d finished this stuff inside; it’s making me uneasy. I hear Emerald’s footsteps and then I catch Annie’s face in the slice of closing door.
‘G’wan, you’ll be late,’ Annie shouts, shooing Emerald off the front step, before putting her tiny hand to her mouth.
We hop into either side of the car. I flick the key in the ignition. ‘You know, I’ve a good mind to get woefully lost and take you to Belfast.’
Em says nothing so I continue my attempt at a three-point-turn on the ungenerous stretch of tarmac between the wall and the rose bushes. It’s some scabby driveway for such a big gaff.
‘Please, just go,’ she says, still holding her hand up to the window at the closing door. You couldn’t exactly call it a wave.
Five turns later, I face her, a whole lot sweatier. ‘You OK?’
Her hand falls limply back into her lap. ‘He’s going to jail.’
I heard what she’s said, of course I did. It was only four words and I heard them all. I bring the car to a slow stop by the front gates at the junction with the main road. For so long I’ve wanted Jim Byrne to get his comeuppance, for him to experience the pain and humiliation he’s put my family through, but after witnessing him on our step only days ago and looking at Em’s face now, I don’t know what to feel. My legs turn to jelly and the word jail clangs around inside my skull like a rusty key.
‘Contempt of court, twelve weeks.’ she continues, staring right through the pram-pushing mother who crosses the footpath in front of us. ‘Seems I wasn’t the only one to be strung along. Mum said it’ll hit all the papers today.’
I pull up the handbrake and drape my arms over the steering wheel. I don’t know what to say; nothing seems right. This is not a situation life prepares you for. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, taking her hand.
‘Thanks,’ she says, squeezing mine. ‘But it’s Grandma I’m worried about. It’ll be a long time before I can get back.’
I hate hearing this. ‘If you think it would help, I could always, you know … call in and check she’s OK?’
Her lips give way to a slow, wide smile. ‘Those pink marshmallow biscuits, the ones with the jam?’
‘Mikados?’
She nods. ‘Bring her some of those, from me?’
‘Consider it done.’
Neither of us speaks as I pull out on to the main road. It’s a beautiful late-August morning but it’s too early for the crowds. We pass the kiosk, but there’s no line of greasy beach goers sticky with suncream yet. We drive along the coast road, past the golf club and a family of mallard ducks waddle across by the roundabout, holding up adoring traffic in both directions.
‘It’s weird,’ she says, as our small tailback of cars begins to move again. ‘The last two months feel like a dream now, only the opposite.’
The last of the ducklings mosey past. ‘Like a nightmare, is that what you’re saying?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘OK, I’ll try not to take that personally,’ I add, flicking the indicator up roughly.
She reaches over and shoves my shoulder. ‘No!’ She laughs. ‘You don’t understand – just the reverse. It’s like, instead of falling down the rabbit hole, I seem to have crawled back up it and found some kind of life that’s even more …’ She stops there and looks out across the marshland. Her eyes are a thousand miles away.
I think about bounding in, insisting she finish, but I decide to leave her sentence hanging there while I imagine how I’d like it
to end.
We exit the car-park building and head towards the terminal. I’ve to cover my eyes from the blinding sun. Crowds of trolley pushers and hassled parents drag luggage and kids in every direction. Like one of the Portstrand ducks, Em stops in the middle of the road unannounced, like she’s about the say something but then doesn’t. A taxi screeches to a halt, only inches from us. The driver throws his hands in the air. I wave back at him, putting my other arm around Em and pushing her gently towards the kerb.
We hit the first set of sliding doors. I watch her set off towards a bank of departure screens and all I can think is how much I don’t want her to go.
‘I’m late,’ she calls back.
I have to chase after her now, pushing through the summer holiday crowds. We’ve reached the security gate by the time we turn to face one another again. ‘Wait, Em …’ She stops and stares right at me. ‘I’ve been thinking …’
She folds her arms now and her mouth twists into a grin. ‘Thinking is always a good idea, Watson … go on.’
‘I’m serious,’ I say, sucking in a breath to slow the rising gallop inside me. I take both of her hands in mine to steady myself. ‘Please tell me this wasn’t all just … summer?’ I can’t meet her eyes now. I’m suddenly incapable of looking up from my shoes.
She pulls on my hand and when I glance up she’s staring back at me with an entirely new look: the quick grey eyes, that think faster than I’ll ever talk, are flecked now with tiny streaks of green, which after my weeks of staring at them, I’m pretty sure are new. ‘Liam,’ she whispers, ‘this wasn’t just … anything!’
‘Good,’ I say, ‘’cause I’d hate that,’ I say, shaking my fringe back over my eyes before they give me away.
‘Stop!’ she says, tugging my hand back and turning my face to hers. ‘I mean it, Liam!’ she says, digging my ribs. ‘I needed to meet you this summer. I was ready, and … when the pupil is ready the teacher will come.’
God knows why, but I laugh; it’s nerves, it’s everything. ‘Say what, Yoda?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ she says, waving her hand away. ‘It’s just … there’s a whole new voice playing inside my head now.’
I move to let a couple of pristine-looking businessmen file past. ‘So will you miss me or this loving new narrator?’ I slide my hands into my back pockets and look away across the crowded concourse.
She tugs my arms loose. ‘You!’ she says and I feel her step closer.
‘Really?’
‘Liam, when I arrived here eight weeks ago, I made my life look perfect when it was really a mess. Now my life looks a mess, what with Dad going to jail, Mum fresh out of rehab and the fact that I’ve barely spoken to any of my actual friends in weeks.’ She rolls her eyes here like she’s catching herself saying all of this aloud. ‘But you know what? I feel OK. I feel better. I might even feel pretty good.’ She smiles, revealing every pearly tooth in the beautiful moon of her mouth.
I wrap my arms around her waist. Our legs are slotted together with our foreheads touching.
‘And when I think of you, of us, I actually feel great.’ Her warm breath on my skin feels unbearably good and I close my eyes to make it last. ‘Truth is,’ she whispers, ‘I get you, Liam Flynn, and in some crazy way you seem to get me. I could make it more complicated than that, but I won’t.’
Suddenly I feel her trembling lips on mine. I want to absorb as much of her as I have left but she quickly pulls away, glancing at the fancy Swiss clock above our heads. ‘I’ve really got to go,’ she says and with a firm squeeze of my hand she hoists her backpack strap on to her shoulder and bounds up to the gate. I watch her hand over her boarding pass.
She doesn’t look back.
I stare through the airport official’s enormous chest, convincing myself that if it weren’t for some small security details and the fact that yer man’s a total unit, I’d run after her. I wouldn’t hold back. I’d tell her she wasn’t the only one ready. Hell, I’d open my mouth and I’d sing it.
EMERALD
Almost four months later …
Apart from the wind whistling through gaps in the clapped-out windows and distant, excited cries from the corridor, the dorm is strangely quiet. I glance at the clock; we’re twenty-one minutes into the Christmas holidays. Everyone is packing up but I’m lying on my bed, daydreaming of months gone by. The longing for summer twists inside me like the vines of bindweed on Grandma’s raspberry bushes. At times I think it might choke me from the inside out. I scrunch the duvet up around my chin like it’s Liam’s sleeping bag and I can’t stop myself imagining we’re together again, outside our little tent, with his warm, heavy arms wrapped around me. Except he’s miles away over the Irish Sea, finishing up his college exams and I’m left with a stack of my own Christmas revision and a particularly ferocious bout of period pain.
It’s hard to complain about boarding school when you know your grandma has used her life-savings to pay for it and your dad is spending the same term in an actual prison.
In a classic McKenzie move, I arrived back to Hollyfield last September to find myself sharing a room with none other than Ignatia Darcy. As Iggy and I sat in silence opposite each other in the dining room that first night back, I thought about what McKenzie had said to me months earlier about courage being a muscle. Then I thought of Dad’s hand, extending into the lonely space between him and Donal Flynn.
I wrote a long letter to Iggy attempting to explain the hold certain friendships once held over me. I went to great lengths to describe the workings of our hierarchical squad dynamics, but mostly I said sorry quite a lot. Iggy corrected my grammar in sparkly green pen and hung the letter on the wall above her desk. She was surprisingly forgiving, but most revelatory of all was how little she seemed to care for the people I thought might have mattered so much to her.
Iggy Darcy, for resolutely giving zero f**ks, I salute you!
Meanwhile, in another genius McKenzie move, Bryony was put in charge of the new school initiative to promote online etiquette and combat cyber bullying.
Iggy shoves into our room bringing a blast of winter, West Country air in with her. Everything is ninety degrees off. My head is horizontal, gazing up at the picture of Liam and me on the sand dunes after Fiona’s party. The photo sits in a silver frame on my bedside locker in front of Grandma’s little clock. It took some creative editing but you can actually see our faces now, smiling out from the blackness. I reach up and brush my thumb over his cheekbone and up to his fringe, like I’ve done a thousand times.
‘Eh, what’s all this?’ Iggy says, taking in my sorry state. With a formidable back-kick she slams the door shut behind her. ‘If I don’t see a smile soon, I’m going to drop all this crap and come over there and hug you,’ she says, dramatically tossing her fencing kit and a mountain of books on to her bed before loping goofily towards me.
In my long history at Hollyfield, I don’t remember a term passing this quickly, ever. I thought as a boarder the weeks would drag, but the past four months have whipped by in a not entirely unpleasant haze of school routine, hockey fixtures and the various dorkish activities I’ve somehow allowed Iggy to enlist me in.
‘You will cope without me for the next three weeks,’ she says, taking in my mournful expression while smoothing her newly short hair off her face. I pick up a tennis ball from beside my bed and fling it at her. She ducks it skilfully before bouncing heavily on to my bed. ‘OK, spit it out.’
‘I just miss him.’
She leans in closer, elbows on her knees, listening.
‘Miss who?’ Bryony bursts in; a blizzard of bags and clashing neon accessories. ‘Ohmygod, Em! Are you like, crying?’
Actually, I’m not. ‘No.’
While it turns out stealth-bitch Bryony can actually think beyond 140 characters and is a moderately good friend when she wants to be, compassion is still not a strong point.
Bryony plonks down on Iggy’s bed. ‘Don’t tell me … it’s that Irish guy, right?’ I look away
. ‘Seriously, Em, he’s like espadrilles, or the rosé my dad buys in France that tastes like vinegar when you get home. Summer stuff doesn’t travel – it’s a well known fact. You’ve got to let it go.’ She follows my eyes to the photo beside my bed and studies Liam’s face for a few seconds, then very slowly she turns it towards the wall. ‘So,’ she says, leaping back up and rifling dresses out of the wardrobe, ‘what’s everybody wearing tonight?’
I fling my blankets off like my legs have caught fire and pace the room, consumed with an urgent need to counter every word I’ve just heard. It happens lately. I look across the room at the two girls staring back at me.
‘D’you know what, Bryony? Liam is not some pink wine.’ I sit into the chair by the desk and scratch it along the floor, closer to her. ‘In fact, I’ve been thinking about it and if he’s anything, he’s that vintage dress – the one in, what did you call it … Virgin-of-Mary blue.’
Her mouths gapes open. Iggy’s does too.
‘The one I didn’t buy for the Fifth Form Ball.’
Bryony screws up her face. I know she knows. ‘The one I said no one would shag you in?’ she says almost sheepishly.
‘That’s the one! It fitted me perfectly. I even liked me in it. But it seemed too easy. I listened to you when I should have trusted myself, and I left it behind, but I never forgot that dress. Not your fault, really. But I won’t let it happen again.’
Bryony rolls her eyes, ‘You’re such a drama queen lately, Em.’
‘Look, Liam’s not a bloody dress, but there’s no one like him anywhere. He wasn’t just a chapter is what I’m saying. He was the book.’
Bryony opens her mouth, then clearly thinks better of it and closes it again. I watch as she goes for a second attempt. ‘For what it’s worth, I really liked that yellow dress.’
I’m almost relieved she’s changed the subject. ‘It wasn’t me though.’
I sigh. I glide past her on my way to the wardrobe and pull the dress out and hand it to her. ‘You could totally pull it off.’
She takes the hanger and stands, holding the dress up against her. ‘You sure, Em?’ she asks, turning from side to side, examining herself in the mirror.
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