And at the end of their fortnight on Roone Laura had returned to Dublin and met Gavin, and James ended up married to Nell, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Until now.
‘You all set for Christmas?’ He was back, holding another glass under the tap.
‘Not a bit of it – still a thousand and one things to do, but hopefully they’ll get done. Your mother is coming, isn’t she?’
‘She is, tomorrow. She has a thing in Dublin tonight.’
Laura had met Colette Baker a few times. At Nell and James’s wedding, at Tommy’s christening, on various other occasions. Widowed quite a while, well turned-out, younger-looking than her age, which Nell had confided to be late sixties. A full social life in Dublin, by all accounts. Book club, bridge club, you-name-it club.
Laura shook Tabasco into her glass and sipped. Tomato juice and green tea would never have been her beverages of choice, but these days she was all about the antioxidants, so she drank them by the gallon. The things she’d learned since getting cancer, the myriad ways it had changed her.
‘No sign of the storm.’
She turned to see Willie Buckley, lobster fisherman, taking up his position on the neighbouring stool. ‘What storm would that be, Willie?’
He caught James’s eye and nodded for his usual. ‘Big one coming, according to Annie Byrnes. Been telling everyone.’
‘First I heard of it.’
No sign of any storm on the way today: cold enough for scarf and gloves, the grass white and stiff with frost this morning but calm and dry, not a puff of wind out there. Maybe Willie had called into Murray’s pub up the street on his way to Fitz’s. Wouldn’t be the first time.
‘How’re the lobsters?’ she asked him, and he grinned and told her they were nice and fat. Fifteen pots he put down each time he went out in the bay, sixteen waiting for him every now and again when he collected them – or so he claimed. With Willie, you could never be sure if it was true. On the other hand, this was Roone.
‘You’re well in yourself?’ he asked, and she gave him the same response that James had got.
‘Would you ever give us a bar of a song?’ he enquired then. ‘Something Christmassy?’ So to keep him happy she obliged him with a softly sung ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ as the chat continued around them.
Willie had been here the night she’d come in with her guitar, during that same first fortnight, and entertained the whole place for a couple of hours. Nell’s idea, after Laura had told her that she sang in her local pub in Dublin once a week.
Happy days. She couldn’t remember the last occasion she’d picked up the guitar. Hard to find the time when you were raising five children and battling cancer. Hard to summon the enthusiasm when your marriage was imploding. Maybe she should dust it down for Christmas though, get the kids singing a few carols.
‘You’ll have another of those,’ Willie said, nodding at her empty glass, but she shook her head.
‘They’ll have the guards out for me,’ she told him, sliding off the stool, the familiar weariness coming to claim her as her feet met the floor. Lovely if there was a chauffeur waiting outside in a warm car to whisk her home, but all she had to cover the mile or so of coast road between here and Walter’s Place Bed and Breakfast was a ten-year-old bicycle.
These days she rarely drove, although her car still sat at the side of the house, taken out every now and again by Gavin just to keep it running. After her operation she’d found driving a challenge – shifting the gear stick caused a dart of pain on her affected left side – and now she was out of the habit.
She lifted a hand in farewell to James, but he was busy with more orders and didn’t see her. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said to Willie. ‘Make sure you get home before the storm.’
He winked at her. ‘Happy Christmas to you, Laura – mind yourself now.’
Outside her breath fogged, the cold catching in her throat. Frost for sure again this evening, but at least it was dry. She pulled her gloves from her pockets and approached the bike, propped where she’d left it against the railing outside the pub. She was reaching for the handlebars when a car drew up beside her.
‘Laura – sit in. I’ll throw the bike in the back.’
Jim Barnes in his ancient dog-smelling Jeep, pulling behind him the battered trailer that carried sheep to and from the Dingle mart. She thanked him and climbed in while he deposited the bike in the trailer.
A far cry from a uniformed chauffeur behind the wheel of a nice fancy car, but every bit as welcome.
They hadn’t stopped singing since take-off. Every Christmas song Tilly had ever heard of, and quite a few she hadn’t.
‘What’s that one?’ she asked Siobhan, who sat beside her.
‘It’s called “The Fields of Athenry”. It’s got nothing to do with Christmas, but sooner or later every Irish singsong in the world features it. They sing it at rugby matches too – well, any game, really.’
‘I like it.’
‘Do you? Think it’s a bit of a dirge myself.’
Siobhan was a primary teacher who’d failed to get a job in Ireland when she’d qualified two years earlier. ‘Nobody I know got work,’ she told Tilly. ‘Teaching jobs are like gold dust in Ireland right now. So five of us went to London, and before the week was out we’d all got sorted. We’re not teaching, though – Claire and I are in an Irish bar, Maria is a typist in a Japanese trading company, Denise is in a clothes shop and Caroline’s a cocktail waitress.’
The friends were all sharing a two-bedroom flat in Kilburn. ‘Our landlord thinks there’s only three of us in it. We sleep on the couch in rotation, one week in five so it’s not too bad. Only time it gets a bit awkward is when someone brings home a man, and then we have to adjust the arrangements a bit. But we all get on – we’ve been pals since school – and so far we’ve coped.’
Siobhan was heading home to Dublin for Christmas, and she was alone on the flight. ‘Maria and Denise got away yesterday, and Caroline and Claire are working this evening so they have to wait till the morning. We’re all meeting up tomorrow night for a session in town. It’ll be great crack.’
In the half an hour or so since they’d met, Siobhan had hardly drawn a breath. ‘Ireland is a nation of talkers,’ she told Tilly. ‘We love the sound of our own voices.’ Tilly had heard all about her family, living in a part of Dublin that sounded Italian, but that Siobhan assured her had no connection with the Mediterranean country. ‘Rialto is as Dublin as it gets – although we do love our pizzas!’
Her laugh was rich and infectious, her way of talking as musical as the voices that sang song after song on the crowded plane. There were quite a few words that Tilly didn’t recognise – presumably crack didn’t mean the same here as it did in Australia – and some phrases sounded oddly constructed, but thankfully Siobhan’s accent was less indecipherable than some of those Tilly had encountered at Heathrow.
Everyone around them was talking or singing or laughing. Tilly wondered if the high spirits were down to the imminent arrival of Christmas, or if it had more to do with the drinks that were being dispensed by smiling hostesses from the trolley that seemed to have been making its non-stop way up and down the plane’s aisle since the seatbelt sign had been switched off. Just past two o’clock in the afternoon, and the alcohol was flowing freely.
‘Down the hatch,’ Siobhan said, draining her second vodka and orange. ‘We’re a disgrace the way we love our booze – but it’s nearly Christmas, and where’s the harm?’
Tilly was only half listening, her mind on the challenge of the next few hours. Her coach-ticket money had been refunded, bringing her grand total to forty-six pounds and fifty pence – but shouldn’t she hang on to the price of the coach ticket, in case she needed to buy another? Or maybe she’d live dangerously, convert the lot to euro when she landed in Dublin.
According to the Internet, the bus to the pier from Kerry airport was eleven euro with her student card, and the ferry to Roone was seven
– eighteen euro to be taken from her precious stash. She resolved to spend nothing more on her journey and hope for the best. Maybe she could hitchhike to the pier and save on the bus fare: was it safe to get into a stranger’s car in Ireland? She might take the chance.
Of course, that was assuming she made it to the pier in time for the ferry. She mightn’t even make it to Kerry, might have to spend the night in Dublin airport, waiting on her last flight. This journey was becoming endless.
She’d waited as long as she could before using Amanda’s food voucher in Heathrow. Eventually she’d spent it on a cheeseburger and fries, washed down with a soda – but she’d barely boarded the plane before she was struck with a raging thirst. She had to sit tight until after take-off, and the second the seatbelt sign was switched off she raced for the toilet – but she saw no signs about the water being safe to drink, so she suffered on until the trolley reached her, and then she broke her no-spend resolution and asked for a bottle of water. It cost one pound fifty, scandalously high when she converted it to Australian dollars – about three fifty! – but she simply had to have it.
She tried not to think about the fact that once she reached Roone, whenever that would be, there was no guarantee, none at all, that a sister she’d never laid eyes on, a sister who didn’t even know of Tilly’s existence, would want to have anything at all to do with her. What if she didn’t? Or what if she simply wasn’t there, what if she’d gone someplace else for Christmas? What then?
Tilly would have to find the Australian embassy, which was bound to be in Dublin. She’d have to somehow make her way back there and throw herself on their mercy – and of course all they would do was send her home.
But her sister, though. Her real true blood sister, same mother and same father. She wouldn’t turn her away, she couldn’t – even when Tilly confessed everything, even when she revealed the real reason for her arrival. She wouldn’t turn her back on Tilly – would she?
As the singing continued around her, as Siobhan ordered another drink and talked about London’s flea markets, Tilly felt overcome by a wave of fatigue.
So long since she’d slept, afraid to close her eyes in Heathrow after what had happened, moving like a zombie in and out of the airport shops, all the clocks seeming to have slowed to a crawl, until it was time to board this flight. How long had she been travelling now? She had no idea: her exhausted brain refused to come up with the answer.
‘Want another?’
She stifled a yawn, dragged herself back. Siobhan was pointing to Tilly’s empty water bottle. ‘Or something else,’ she said. ‘Something stronger, for Christmas.’
‘No thanks … Actually, I’m really tired. I think I’d better get some sleep.’
‘Fire away, if you can sleep with this racket. I’ll wake you when we land.’
She closed her eyes – but sleep didn’t come. Instead she found herself wandering back to where all of this had begun, and reliving the circumstances that had led to her tracking down the woman who’d given birth to two daughters and abandoned them both.
It was the end of May, and Tilly’s seventeenth birthday was still more than six months off, when she’d finally found the courage to broach the subject with Ma again, the one that had been occupying a small but definite space in her head for the previous four years.
I’d like to try to find her, she’d said. My mother, my birth mother.
It was a Saturday morning, and she was helping Ma with the washing-up, and Robbie was pushing Jemima around the yard on his old tricycle, and Pa was off checking on some of the livestock. And Tilly’s heart was pattering scared inside her, for fear of how Ma might take it.
But Ma just nodded, lifting a cup from the water. Thought you might, was all she said. Let’s have a sit-down.
So they sat down, the two of them, and Ma told her what they hadn’t told her first time round. She told her about Diane Potter.
She’s Irish, Ma said. Moved to Australia when she was carrying you. Rented an apartment next door to your pa’s cousin, Austin. She and Jenny got friendly.
Jenny was Austin’s wife. They lived in a small town north of Brisbane. Tilly had met the couple a few times over the years, not often enough to be able to recall either of them with any clarity. But she wasn’t interested in Austin and Jenny now.
Told Jenny she was going to give up her baby, Ma continued. Told her she was going to find an agency. Jenny said she knew folks who might take the child. Knew me and Pa wanted one. Said she could do it direct, forget about an agency. So that’s what happened.
Again Tilly felt everything shifting, everything taking on a new shape. Ma and Pa had got her direct from her mother. Why didn’t you tell me, last time I asked?
Thought you were too young, Ma replied. We were going to tell you, honest we were, when we figured you were old enough – and Tilly had had to be content with that.
So it wasn’t a proper adoption, she said – but Ma shook the question away with her hand.
It was as proper as it needed to be. We got your birth cert, just didn’t fill in lots of fancy forms, that’s all.
But my birth cert wouldn’t have said Walker.
Naw, you were Potter on the cert – but we got that changed, soon as we could. Jenny’s sister knew someone who could do it for us, all official. We didn’t break any law, just took in a child that needed a home. You did alright with us, didn’t you? Ma asked, a queer expression on her face, one Tilly hadn’t seen on it before. It felt like she was daring Tilly to say no, so Tilly said yes, of course she’d done alright.
But it sounded complicated, and still not entirely credible. She decided to focus on the most important bit. Tell me about my mother, she said. You met her?
Ma shook her head. Never came face to face, just talked on the phone. Jenny brung you to us, when the time came. Your mother didn’t want any more contact, we didn’t hear from her again. At this point Ma hesitated. I could gather she wasn’t all that strong, she said slowly, picking through her words. I could gather from Jenny she was … kinda frail.
Tilly didn’t know which frail she meant. Frail could mean weak in body or in mind, two very different things. She turned over what Ma was telling her; she tried to see it from every side.
Jenny and Austin had met her mother, lots of times it sounded like. Jenny had been friendly with her. Tilly could have asked them about her when they’d visited, if she’d known. She felt a curl of anger against Ma and Pa. So much they could have told her, so much they’d kept from her.
You were too young when you asked last time, Ma said again, you were only a child. Tilly must have been wearing her thoughts on her face. We felt we should wait, Ma said, till you were a bit older. We did what was best, Tilly, what we thought was best for you. It was hard to know what to do, we had nobody to ask.
She might have been Matilda Potter. She might have grown up north of Brisbane. She might never have known Ma or Pa, never held Robbie or Jemima in her arms, never gone to the seaside with a girl called Lien. The life she had lived up to this would never have happened if Diane Potter had kept her.
What about my father? she asked. Hadn’t he wanted her either?
Again Ma shook her head. I heard no talk of any man. Jenny didn’t mention one, and we didn’t ask. Seem to remember Jenny saying some woman lived with your mother, but I don’t recall ever hearing a name.
Is there no father on my birth cert?
Here, Ma said, I’ll show you – and she got the cert and there it was: Diane Potter in the mother’s space and unknown in the father’s. Tilly went through the possible reasons for not naming a father on a birth cert, and came up with nothing good.
Clipped to a corner of the cert was another form, with Change of Name written in thick black letters on the top and an awful lot of small writing underneath. Tilly skimmed it: Potter and Walker jumped out at her. It certainly looked boring enough to be official.
Is she still living in the same place – my mother, I mean?
&nb
sp; Ma lifted a shoulder. Couldn’t say. Jenny doesn’t talk of her.
So she could have gone back to Ireland.
She may have, couldn’t say.
Tilly sat back, her head spinning with this new information. Her mother had lived three hours away, right next door to Jenny and Austin. She might still be living there, after sixteen years.
Will you find out? she asked Ma. Will you ring Jenny and ask if she’s still there?
For a minute Ma said nothing.
Please Ma, will you? Will you ring her?
Tilly, Ma said, are you sure you want to do this? Picking over her words again, like she was looking for diamonds in a jar of broken glass. Because even if she’s still there …
She trailed off, and Tilly finished the sentence in her head: even if she’s still there she might not want to see you. It was a chance she was willing to take. A chance she had to take.
You’re still young, Ma said. You’re only sixteen, you still got—
I’m sure, she said. I am sure. I want to find her. Will you ring Jenny?
Ma looked defeated. Tilly didn’t care. They hadn’t told her, and now it might be too late. Her mother might be dead. She’d never forgive them if her mother was dead.
The call was made that evening, after the two young ones had been put to bed. Tilly waited in the kitchen, passing the iron back and forth across Pa’s Sunday shirt and trying not to feel too scared as she listened to the muffle of Ma’s side of the conversation.
Don’t get your hopes up, she told herself, going over the collar for the third time. At least you’ll know, one way or the other.
The kitchen door opened, making her start. She’d missed the call ending.
Well, Ma said, she moved into Brisbane, few years back, but she left Jenny her address so they could send on her mail. Jenny’s going to drop her a line, ask if she’ll meet with you. That’s the best she can do, since she’s got no number for her.
So there was nothing for it but to wait until Jenny came back to them. In the days and weeks that followed, Tilly thought of little else. What did she look like, this woman who’d travelled all the way from Ireland while Tilly was forming inside her? Did Tilly have her eyes, her skin, her hair, her height? And why had she left her home in Ireland? What had driven her so far away, pregnant and alone?
I’ll be home for Christmas Page 7