I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  PRAISE FOR ROISIN MEANEY

  ‘Repeatedly and deservedly likened to Maeve Binchy, she is a master of her craft and a gifted storyteller’

  Irish Independent

  ‘Highly engaging and heartwarming (…) I truly adored the book and devoured it within a few short hours’

  Melissa Hill

  ‘Like chatting with a friend over a cup of tea … this touching and intricate story will give back as much as you put in’

  Irish Mail on Sunday

  ‘A warm, engaging read’ Woman’s Way

  ‘Meaney weaves wonderful, feel-good tales of a consistently high standard. And that standard rises with each book she writes’

  Irish Examiner

  ‘The plot will draw you in, and there is both laughter and tears along the way. Meaney is an accomplished storyteller’

  Books Ireland

  ‘If you like Maeve Binchy, this will be a treat’ Stellar

  ‘It is always difficult to leave her characters behind’ Go Book Yourself

  ‘(Something in Common) really blew me away … I would highly recommend this one’

  Chicklit Club

  Roisin Meaney was born in Listowel, Co Kerry, She has lived in the US, Canada, Africa and Europe but is now based in Limerick, Ireland. Her bestselling novels include One Summer, Love in the Making and The Last Week of May. She has also written books for children.

  ALSO BY ROISIN MEANEY

  Two Fridays in April

  After the Wedding

  Something in Common

  One Summer

  The Things We Do For Love

  Love in the Making

  Half Seven on a Thursday

  The People Next Door

  The Last Week of May

  Putting Out the Stars

  The Daisy Picker

  Children’s Books

  Don’t Even Think About It

  See If I Care

  Copyright © 2015 Roisin Meaney

  The right of Roisin Meaney to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Ireland in 2015

  by HACHETTE BOOKS IRELAND

  1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 799613

  Hachette Books Ireland

  8 Castlecourt Centre

  Castleknock

  Dublin 15, Ireland

  A division of Hachette UK Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hachette.ie

  Contents

  Praise for Roisin Meaney

  About the Author

  Also by Roisin Meaney

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Tuesday 22 December

  Wednesday 23 December

  Thursday 24 December Christmas Eve

  Friday 25 December Christmas Day

  Saturday 26 December St Stephen’s Day

  Sunday 27 December

  Monday 28 December

  Tuesday 29 December

  Wednesday 30 December

  Acknowledgements

  One Summer

  After the Wedding

  Two Fridays in April

  For Rose and Micheál Meaney, my two favourite parents

  TUESDAY

  22 DECEMBER

  They said it had to be Matilda. They wouldn’t let her use Tilly. Nobody ever calls me Matilda, she said, but it made no difference.

  It must be your official name, the woman with the shiny forehead in the passport office told her. Otherwise you run into all sorts of trouble.

  What kind of trouble? Tilly asked – what was so bad about wanting to use the name everyone knew her by? – but the woman just shrugged and went on fanning herself with one of her leaflets.

  Red tape, she said eventually when Tilly didn’t go away, which made it no clearer. So Matilda Walker was what they put in her very first passport, beneath a small photo of a rather bewildered-looking Tilly.

  Just as well her date of birth was there too: nobody would have believed she was seventeen in that photo. Just be natural, Lien had said, and don’t smile, you’re not allowed to smile, which suited Tilly fine – she couldn’t remember when she’d last felt like smiling. Don’t scowl like that either, Lien had added, you look like a terrorist – and while Tilly was doing her best to appear serene and composed and not at all threatening, the camera flashed and there she was, thirteen going on fourteen. Not nearly old enough to be travelling to Brisbane on her own, let alone Ireland.

  That’s quite a trek, Lien had said when Tilly told her. You’ll be going literally halfway around the world. Lien had got her first passport when she was a few months old. She flew to China with her parents every January to visit the relatives who hadn’t immigrated to Australia with her grandparents in the 1950s. Like Tilly, Lien had been born in Australia, but they could hardly have looked more different.

  Tilly was five foot eight inches tall; in her stockinged feet Lien barely made it to five foot. Tilly’s skin was pale as blancmange, and sprinkled with small butterscotch-coloured freckles; Lien’s was more clotted cream with a hint of hazelnut and not one single freckle, just a solitary dark mole a finger’s width from the left side of her mouth.

  Tilly’s hair, the precise biscuity shade of Ma’s shopping basket, waved and kinked its way down to the middle of her back, resisting every attempt to straighten it; Lien’s glossy shoulder-length bob was the rich brown-black of a coffee bean, and impeccably behaved.

  But it was the eyes that really set them apart. Tilly’s were the bluish-green of an acacia leaf, slightly pink-rimmed along their almost horizontal lower edges and fringed all around with pale lashes; Lien’s were bitter-chocolate lozenges set in dark-lashed creamy ovals, whose outer corners tilted deliciously upwards. Lien was exotic; Tilly was homespun.

  You’re more exotic than me, Lien insisted. Ireland is much further away than China. But Tilly wasn’t talking distances – and even if she was, she didn’t feel remotely Irish.

  Up to six months ago all she’d known about Ireland was that it was famous for Guinness. She knew a lot of people with Irish connections, she had classmates whose parents had both been born there, but the country hadn’t held any particular interest for her – why would it? – until she’d discovered her own connection with it.

  Since June she’d been finding out more, like the fact that it was the third largest island in Europe, and it had a tomb that was older than the Pyramids, and the longest river in the British Isles, and that its currency was the euro. And that some parts of it – the Cliffs of Moher, the Giant’s Causeway, the Killarney lakes – were considered pretty spectacular.

  She also knew that it was going to take her roughly thirty-three hours to get to Ireland from Brisbane, via Singapore and London. Well over a day and a half for her total journey, if you added in the three-hour bus trip from home to Brisbane airport, and however long it took – a couple of hours at least, she reckoned – to get from Kerry airport, her final touch-down, to the island of Roone, which was Ireland’s most westerly point.

  According to Google
Maps, Roone had the wonky diamond shape of a stingray, and was all of seven miles long and four miles wide. Hard to get your head around a whole island being that small, when you lived on a landmass that covered well over three million square miles. Hard to imagine a place so tiny, when Pa’s fifteen-thousand-acre farm wasn’t considered particularly big by Australian standards.

  And yet Roone had a year-round population of approximately three hundred, if the Internet was to be believed. She tried to imagine a whole community of people living in that minuscule place on the very edge of Europe, surrounded by the sea, locked in on all sides by water.

  Tilly had been to the sea once in her life. It had happened seven years ago, when Lien’s mother had piled a group of them into her station wagon and driven them to the coast for Lien’s tenth birthday. The journey had taken forever – over three hours of straight-as-a-pin road, nothing to look at for most of it but miles and miles of flat scrubland, nothing to do but play endless rounds of I Spy and Twenty Questions – but the sight of the Pacific Ocean, when it finally opened up before them, instantly made up for the tedium of the trip.

  The vastness of it, the rumbling music it made, its briny scent and myriad colours left Tilly speechless and spellbound as she stood on the shore stretching her stiff limbs and taking great gulps of the salty air. The wet sand, when she pulled off her sandals and ventured closer to the water’s edge, sucked at her bare feet. The roll of each wave as it sped to the shore hypnotised her: each crashing, shattering climax, flinging spray onto her face, was a new marvel.

  She dipped in a foot: it was cool and wonderful. She looked out over the expanse of water, at the billions, the trillions of gallons that lay between her and the horizon. She thought of the huge ships that had been lost at sea, and the thousands of lives that had literally been swept away by tidal waves, and she felt as insignificant as a tick.

  She imagined crossing the sea, sailing off in a boat and travelling across the miles and miles of water to America’s west coast. She pictured a Californian girl of roughly her age, standing right at that moment on an American beach, looking out at the Pacific just like Tilly. Both of them with their eyes fixed on the same ocean, the same water. She stood ankle-deep in it, feeling the tug as it pulled away from her, waiting for it to come rushing back, swallowing her feet. She remained there until Lien’s mother called her for the picnic.

  Lying in bed that night she licked her arm and tasted salt. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the low, murmuring sound the ocean had made, the wet splash of its spray on her face. In the days that followed she was hungry to see it again. She pestered Ma and Pa to take her and Robbie, but Ma and Pa weren’t the kind of people who drove for three hours to look at a lot of water. Anyway, Robbie was still a baby, not even one yet: the trip would have been wasted on him.

  On a place the size of Roone, you’d be bound to hear the sea wherever you were. The smell of it would be in the air, day and night. It would cling to your clothes, seep into your dreams and flavour them. By day you’d round a bend in the road and there it would be, spread out before you like a carpet.

  Ma and Pa didn’t know she was flying to Ireland. There was an awful lot Ma and Pa didn’t know, and an awful lot more Tilly had been praying they’d never find out. But they had found out. They’d been shocked and bewildered when the truth of what had happened, or a large part of it, had finally dumped itself at their door, and now she had to get away before they discovered the worst bit.

  Bali, she’d told them. Nadia’s folks have a house there, she’d said. They’re spending Christmas in it and they’ve invited me to join them. I think it would do me good to get away from here for a while. After everything, I mean.

  Oh, she’d been despicable, playing on their sympathy. Lying to them again, knowing they still trusted her, despite everything, knowing they wouldn’t check up to make sure her story was true. The blind, stupid faith they still had in her, even after she’d been exposed as a liar, and worse.

  I can pay my own way, she’d told them, which was the only bit of her concoction that wasn’t made up. She’d waitressed at Nadia’s family’s Indonesian restaurant in town all last summer, and when school had started again they’d kept her on for Friday and Saturday nights. She’d saved over two thousand dollars, enough for a return flight to Ireland with a small bit left over for pocket money.

  Nadia was in Tilly’s class at school. The two girls were friendly, but not nearly as friendly as Tilly had made it sound. Nowhere near as friendly as Tilly being invited to join the family for Christmas.

  But it was a safe lie. The family was going to Bali: since the first week in December there had been a sign in the restaurant window telling everyone that it would be closed for ten days over the holiday period. Not that Ma and Pa would see it – they didn’t believe in eating out: they were perfectly happy with Ma’s beef pie or Pa’s barbecued ribs – but on the off-chance that any of the neighbours noticed it, and then got chatting to Ma, Tilly’s story would be backed up.

  Bali was just about close enough, Bali she would get away with, particularly when she was footing the bill. Ireland, not a chance. No way would Ma and Pa be able to get their heads around Tilly travelling all the way to Ireland on her own, no way would they agree if she told them she wanted to go there. A short trip was one thing; halfway around the world was something else entirely.

  But she was going. She’d bought her ticket, opting for the cheapest route she could find, and she’d got her passport and holiday visa. In five hours or thereabouts she would be stepping onto her first plane and travelling more than ten thousand miles, and ten hours back in time.

  And the minute her cab pulled up outside, her journey would begin.

  ‘Send a text message when you arrive. You be sure now.’

  She turned from the window. Ma sat at the table, her face grey with exhaustion.

  ‘You didn’t have to get up,’ Tilly told her. ‘There was no need.’

  It was three o’clock in the morning and pitch black outside, and the heat covered them like a wet blanket. Ma had gone to bed at half past nine like she always did, and presumably slept, and dragged herself awake to see Tilly off.

  ‘I wanted to get up,’ she said. ‘First time for you to leave.’

  Ma had never flown anywhere, or Pa. Never left Queensland, either of them, as far as Tilly knew. She looked at the worn, honest face that was so familiar to her, the faded flowery robe, the tightly coiled rollers in the brown hair sprinkled with white.

  ‘You’ll have a good time,’ Ma went on. ‘It’ll be nice for you, with Nadia and her folks.’

  She was forgiving Tilly. Every word offered absolution.

  ‘No need to call,’ she said, ‘just a text message to say you got there in one piece is all.’

  ‘OK.’

  Strictly speaking, the mobile phone belonged to Pa. It had come as a free gift when he’d invested in the new harvester a few years back, but he’d never once gone near it, so they looked on it as Ma’s. Most of the time it sat on the dresser – the idea of it being mobile seemed to have got overlooked somewhere along the line – but once in a blue moon Ma would use it to send Tilly as brief a text as she could get away with.

  Get sugar, Tilly might read – and more often than not, there would be a half-full bag still in the cupboard when she got home. Ma seemed to think the phone would shrivel up and die if she didn’t give it an airing every now and again. It would come in handy now though.

  ‘My texts mightn’t come through right away,’ Tilly said. ‘Don’t worry if you’re waiting a while. Sometimes that happens.’

  The flight to Singapore took a little over eight hours, two hours longer than the one they thought she was getting to Bali. As soon as they touched down she’d text Landed, all well. She wouldn’t say any more than that. It wouldn’t be a lie if she didn’t say any more than that.

  ‘No need to reply,’ she told Ma. With a ten-hour time difference, the less communication there was between
them, the less chance of Tilly’s deceit being discovered.

  ‘I don’t like you getting that bus in the middle of the night,’ Ma said, not for the first time. ‘Pa woulda drove you to the airport.’

  ‘No need, the bus is fine.’

  She’d told them Nadia’s family had no room for her in their car, that they’d asked her to get the bus to the airport. If Pa drove her there he’d go in with her, and if he went in he’d see no Nadia and family waiting to meet her, and no flight to Bali at eight o’clock.

  ‘Woulda drove you to the bus station, at least.’

  ‘Taxi’s fine, Ma.’

  Just then she heard the double clunk of a car driving over the cattle grid, and seconds later there was her cab, pulling up outside. ‘Well,’ she said, reaching for the handle of her suitcase.

  Ma’s embrace was awkward, and over quickly. She’d never been a comfortable hugger. ‘Look after yourself,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about us.’

  They’d given her two hundred dollars. Pa had handed it over the day before. ’Tain’t much, he’d said, but it’ll help. The tightly folded notes smelt of tobacco, like him. The sight of them had caused a guilty dip in the pit of Tilly’s stomach. They were giving her money, after what she’d done.

  I don’t need it, she’d told him, I have enough, but he pressed it into her palm and that was that. Two hundred dollars was around a hundred and fifty euro. She’d change it when she got to Ireland.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said to Ma.

  ‘We’ll miss you now,’ Ma said – but they wouldn’t miss her, not really. They had their own children, who so far hadn’t caused them anywhere near the trouble Tilly had.

  She walked out to the car. The heat flung itself at her, it leapt in her mouth and caught in her throat. She hefted her case into the boot that the driver had popped open. She slid into the back seat and met his eyes in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘OK,’ she said, slamming the door, waving out at Ma.