The fear was constantly with her. It sat in her head and tormented her. It polluted her dreams, waiting to ambush her the minute she woke.
Her marriage suffered. Maybe it was inevitable: maybe cancer challenged everyone’s marriage. Her patience wore thin so quickly these days with Gavin: the characteristics she’d regarded as quirks – his DIY ineptitude, his financial cluelessness, his inability to say no to the children – irritated her now to the point of wanting to scream at him. She did scream, a few times, when the children were safely in bed.
She’d screamed at him only yesterday.
You’re having an affair with Bernie Flannery, aren’t you? I see you, I saw how you looked at her – and as ever, Gavin remained calm and refused to scream back, which only made her want to yank his head off his shoulders.
But she knew he wasn’t having an affair, with pretty twenty-something Bernie Flannery or with anyone else. He wasn’t the type to have an affair – he wouldn’t know how. He’d be as hopeless at that as he was at everything else he attempted, except growing vegetables and looking after animals, and letting his precious mother make a fool of him.
Their sex life was a thing of the past. Laura hadn’t let him near her since the surgery. She couldn’t bear the thought of being touched in that way now. She turned her back on him in bed, and he made no attempt to initiate anything. Probably wasn’t interested either – who’d want her the way she was now?
If Susan had noticed anything while she was around, she’d said nothing. It was a bad patch, Laura told herself. All marriages had them. People married for better or worse, and this was part of the worse. They got through the days, they went to bed at night. They were weathering the storm and presumably, like all storms, it would eventually pass.
Her parents’ marriage hadn’t weathered the storm it had gone through – but Laura wasn’t her mother, and Gavin was nothing like her father. They’d do better: with five children, several animals and two businesses depending on them, they had to.
The main business had taken a back seat. The B&B had stayed closed, no guests at all this year. Their only sources of income had been what Gavin made on his side of things, and the donkey rides that went ahead as usual in the field beside the house from May to September. Money was tight – but this was Roone, and people were wonderful.
In the bedroom Laura laid Poppy on the bed. ‘I’m still here,’ she told her, pulling apart the fasteners of the miniature tangerine fleecy cardigan. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said – she wasn’t, she wasn’t – easing off the navy T-shirt and sky-blue trousers, bending to press her face into the irresistible bowl of her daughter’s stomach, planting kisses on the tiny chest, squeezing the pudgy knees.
‘You’re stuck with me,’ she said, lifting each foot in turn to nuzzle the velvet-soft soles, inhaling the gorgeous scent of her, marvelling at the glorious babiness of the squirming little creature laid out before her.
She changed Poppy’s nappy and got her into the pale blue pyjamas sprinkled with white butterflies that Nell Baker had given her last week. Nell showered the child with gifts, bringing something new practically every time she appeared from next door.
Over and above your duties, Laura protested. Godparents are supposed to make sure she says her prayers and makes her first communion, stuff like that – but the presents kept coming.
I’ll be taking them all back when I have my girl, Nell promised. One boy so far for her, Tommy heading for his second birthday in February – and Nell making no secret of her desire to give him at least one sibling.
Laura settled Poppy in her cot with Rabbity, who’d begun life ten years earlier as a cradle companion for Ben and Seamus, cherished equally by both. She remembered them asleep side by side, each of them holding tight to a paw.
When her daughters had come along eight years later, they were flooded with toys from Roone residents, the only twins to be born on the island in years, and Rabbity had stayed put in the box of keepsakes that Laura had stored in the attic – but with Poppy’s arrival something had made her produce him again, and he’d become her youngest child’s furry companion of choice.
More than a little ragged around the edges by now – so many hugs and kisses and squeezes over the years, not to mention hundreds of visits to the washing machine – but cherished none the less by Poppy, who latched onto a long floppy ear now and stroked it dreamily with her thumb as she sucked on her soother and looked up unblinkingly at her mother.
‘You have a new dolly,’ Laura told her. ‘Daddy found her on the beach.’ A raggedy old thing: he should have left it alone, but with the children there to witness its arrival, Laura had felt duty bound to say nothing. ‘We’ll give her a bath and she’ll be lovely. She can be Rabbity’s friend.’
Parents didn’t have favourites. Laura treasured each of her children, felt the same fierce, blind love for them all. She would unhesitatingly throw herself in front of a double-decker bus to save any one of them, would kill without thinking to defend them.
But Poppy. Ah, Poppy. Poppy was special.
It was because she’d had to compete with chemotherapy, even before she was born. It was because Laura had lived in terror that her baby would be harmed by it, despite her oncologist’s assurance that she’d be protected. It was because Poppy wasn’t a twin: she didn’t have another half, like the other four did. Poppy had come to them all alone, unpaired, unmatched. Ben had Seamus, Evie had Marian, Poppy had nobody.
For whatever reason, Poppy had manoeuvred her way into prime position in Laura’s heart. You’re mine, she’d told her mother the first time they’d come face to face, and I’m yours – and there wasn’t a thing Laura could do about it.
She stepped away from the cot and got out of her clothes, avoiding the mirror. No more undressing anywhere near a mirror, not any more. We can do a reconstruction, her oncologist had said. In a few months we can talk about it, when you feel ready – but however they patched her up, Laura didn’t think she’d ever be able to look properly at her naked self again.
She’d lost weight. She was a size ten now, after years of struggling to fit into a fourteen. For the first time in her life she had the slender frame she’d envied on others, and all she wanted to do was swaddle it in baggy clothing so she could forget about what lay beneath. The irony of that.
It doesn’t change how I feel about you, Gavin had said in the days after the surgery, before she’d driven him away. You’re still beautiful, I love you, I always will – but Laura couldn’t listen to it, she didn’t want to hear it, and eventually he stopped saying it.
She pulled on the grey tracksuit that was waiting on her pillow, and it enfolded her like a mother’s embrace. She slid into bed, her tired muscles surrendering gratefully. She tucked the duvet around her, relishing the feathery softness of it.
Within minutes, mother and daughter were asleep.
‘Pardon?’ she said, for what felt like the hundredth time since she’d landed, everything needing to be repeated in this alien place called England, where English made no sense at all.
‘Fancy anyfink wi’ va’?’ the woman behind the counter repeated. ‘Piestry?’
Not a clue. It had to be English, in London’s biggest airport, but it sounded as foreign to Tilly as Japanese. A fellow passenger had said something that sounded like a question as they’d stood next to one another at the baggage carousel, and even though she knew it was English – she recognised the occasional word – all Tilly could do was shake her head apologetically.
‘Somefink else,’ the saleslady said – did Tilly imagine the hint of impatience? ‘A piestry, or anyfink?’ Indicating finally the glass-topped display unit to her left, behind which various confections were displayed – slices of cake, round glazed buns studded with raisins, pinwheel Danish pastries.
Pastries. Piestries.
‘Oh … no thanks, just the juice.’
She handed over a ten-pound note, the fifty sterling pounds she’d bought in a bank in town la
st week already broken into with her purchase of a coach ticket to Stansted airport. A one-way coach ticket: no point in buying a return she might not use.
Everything was so uncertain, everything about this trip so tentative and faltering. She wished she could see what lay ahead, just far enough to know that it was going to be alright. But she had no crystal ball, no way of knowing the reception that awaited her on Roone.
She shoved her change into her jeans pocket and pulled her case behind her to the row of hard plastic seating that was set at right angles to the big plate-glass window overlooking the coach park. People sat or lay across the chairs, their luggage close by. She selected a seat at the end of the row and sank down, placing her bottle of apple juice on the low table that was welded to the floor in front of her and shoving her suitcase underneath. She drew her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees. She took stock.
Here she was in Europe. Here she was in London, England. Home to Sherlock Holmes, and Jack the Ripper – and hadn’t Harry Potter got his train to Hogwarts from a London station? She tried to remember anything else she knew about the city, but apart from Prince William’s wedding, which she and Lien had stayed up to watch on TV, her fatigued mind refused to yield any more.
Heathrow was thronged this evening, everyone presumably going home for Christmas, wherever home was. Every nationality was here: she watched them tiredly as they swarmed past her. Men in turbans and skullcaps and cowboy hats, women in veils and burkas and saris and kimonos. Every colour skin, from whitest pale to golden to deepest blue-black. Long dark beards and ginger curls and burgundy streaks, earrings and nose rings, tattoos and orange robes. All human life seemed to be passing through, filling the air with countless different tongues.
But it wasn’t just the languages that were foreign. Everything was an unknown quantity here, from the quality of the air to the poster ads for products she’d never heard of to the mostly unfamiliar shops she’d passed as she’d made her way through the terminal building, following signs for the coach park.
Good that the bulk of her journey was behind her now. She hadn’t imagined that travelling, simply sitting on a plane or in an airport, could be so exhausting. It felt like an eternity since she’d climbed into the taxi outside her house, since she’d watched Ma’s face in the window getting smaller as they’d pulled away.
She ran through what was left of her journey. A two-hour trip to Stansted, a ninety-minute flight to Kerry, a bus from the airport to the coast, and finally a ferry to Roone. With waiting times included, another ten or twelve hours.
She checked her watch, adjusted for the second time on landing at Heathrow. Just gone eleven o’clock in the evening here, which meant that she should be arriving on Roone, assuming there were no hitches, by noon tomorrow at the latest.
Nine o’clock the next morning in Queensland right now. Pa already out in the fields, Ma feeding the kids. Both of them expecting her home on New Year’s Day.
She couldn’t think about that now.
She took her phone from her bag and texted Ma for the second time. All well, hope everything good at home. It took a while to send. She watched the screen anxiously – what if it failed? What if she’d made a mistake with her roaming package, and it didn’t apply in Europe? – but eventually it went off. Next text, with any luck, would be sent from Roone. Another vague message, telling them nothing. Telling them no lies.
She thought about sending a text to Lien, but they’d agreed not to, to save money. Store it all up, Lien had said, until you get back, and take loads of snaps – and Tilly had said nothing about the fact that she more than likely wouldn’t be back, because not even Lien knew that. Not even Lien knew the worst bit. How would she ever explain it to her best friend? How could their friendship ever survive this?
She rubbed her face, yawning. She must look a mess, colourless and drawn, hair uncombed, teeth not brushed in what felt like a century. Her toothbrush was sitting in her toilet bag: she had only to open her case, but she hadn’t the energy yet to find a bathroom. Grubby from no shower, crumpled clothes. Awful.
She hadn’t slept at all on the second flight, hadn’t managed to drift off in the eternity it had taken – thirteen hours, something like that – to get from Singapore to London. She’d watched three films, two of which she’d seen before and hadn’t much liked first time round.
Despite not feeling in the least hungry she’d attempted to eat at least some of whatever was placed in front of her: chicken that sat in a pool of greyish sauce, along with overcooked chunks of carrot and a scoop of mashed potato; a plastic tub of watery pink yogurt; slices of rubbery bacon and a rock-hard fried egg, and something that she thought was probably supposed to be a sausage link but tasted a lot different.
The salad that had accompanied the chicken dish was probably the highlight: hard to go wrong with slices of tomato and cucumber, a scatter of olives and a few loops of onion.
Her seat companions on her second flight had been an extremely thin Asian woman who looked to be in her thirties, and two small silent children, no older than five or six, who were definitely siblings and possibly twins.
Hello, Tilly said to the little boy as he’d taken his seat beside her – and he immediately stuck his thumb into his mouth and looked straight ahead. His sister, seated next to him, stared accusingly at Tilly until the mother bent and whispered something, at which stage the child turned her attention to the doll she held in her lap, shooting occasional furtive glances in Tilly’s direction until she eventually fell asleep.
The doll reminded Tilly of Betsy. What was it about childhood toys that wedged them in the mind, or in the heart, and made them so hard to forget? Must be nearly a decade since she’d laid eyes on Betsy, but she could still remember every detail of that doll – how she smelt, how she felt, the rough wool of the red dress Ma had knitted for her. She recalled how she’d search for Betsy if she woke in the dark after a bad dream, heart thudding – and how the simple act of pulling the soft little body close could comfort and reassure her.
She remembered all too well the real grief Betsy’s loss had caused, the tears she’d shed over her. Ma had been sympathetic at first but had quickly lost patience. It’s just a doll, she’d said – but of course it wasn’t just a doll, it was Betsy. Left behind in a shopping-mall toilet, no sign of her when they’d returned half an hour later. Some other girl taking her to bed after that, Tilly’s childhood friend gone forever. They’d replaced her – Ma had even knitted an identical dress – but it wasn’t the same. It was nothing like the same.
She was so tired now, her body clock all mixed up, waves of weariness causing her eyelids to sink, making her limbs feel heavy as wet sand. She regarded the prone figures around her with envy, but she couldn’t risk falling asleep. Her luggage might be stolen; she might miss her coach to Stansted.
She tried to read her book, but the lines kept blurring together on the page. And exhausted as she was, the mess she was in refused to go away. It sat stubbornly inside her, threatening to engulf her anytime she relaxed enough to allow it. She’d been so stupid, so innocent and gullible, so easily deceived. She’d trusted him completely – and now she was paying for her stupidity, and would go on paying indefinitely.
She shied away from thinking about the months ahead, each one sealing her fate a little more tightly. She tried not to dwell on the changes she would face, the utterly unknown territory into which she had already been thrown. How was she to cope?
She closed her book and packed it away, and turned her thoughts to more immediate matters. The next coach to Stansted was at half past twelve: hopefully she’d get a bit of sleep on that journey, and once she was landed she might manage to find a quiet spot – it had to be less busy than Heathrow – and relax there till her flight was called at five in the morning.
She opened her handbag again and did another check, constantly fearful that she’d mislay something vital. Passport, coach ticket, boarding pass, all there. Pu
rse with Pa’s two hundred dollars still folded up tightly, behind the euro she’d got in exchange for the last of her savings, in a bank where Pa didn’t do his business, where nobody knew her.
You shouldn’t bring all that cash with you, Lien had said. Use your ATM card as you go, it’ll be safer – but Tilly hadn’t listened, curious to see the foreign cash, physical evidence of her upcoming trip. The sterling notes were bigger than Australian dollars, and they bore the familiar face of the Queen with her tiara. There was no face on the euro notes, just bits of presumably famous European buildings.
She kept the bag tucked close to her side while she drank the apple juice, which seemed sweeter than at home. She wondered if her taste for coffee would come back. She used to love it, the stronger the better. Now she couldn’t even bear the smell, particularly first thing in the morning.
It was raining now; she could see drops spattering the glass windows. Cold too, she was sure, judging by the muffled look of the people who scurried about the coach park outside, most of them pulling cases or wheeling loaded trolleys.
She had yet to experience the elements on this side of the world: they’d walked through a tunnel from the plane straight into the terminal building, which was pleasantly warm. But she’d checked the temperature in Ireland and the UK before she left, and found it to be currently hovering a few degrees above freezing: it rarely dipped anywhere near that in Queensland, even in the middle of winter.
She’d swapped her thongs for socks and boots as soon as she’d reclaimed her case, and put a sweater over her T-shirt. Might need another one beneath her jacket when it was time to move outside.
She’d often seen English winters depicted in films. She recalled snow-covered fields, thatch-roofed cottages with immaculate gardens, quaint little villages. No snow here, nothing remotely quaint about Heathrow airport this evening.
I’ll be home for Christmas Page 4