I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  She checked the time: just after nine. Her eyes felt gritty. She hadn’t slept much, jet-lag catching up with her maybe. The thin mattress on her bed hadn’t helped, or the little room that was too stuffy with the fan heater turned on and too cold without it.

  But she didn’t care: it didn’t matter in the least. She was here, she’d made it this far – and today, or tomorrow, she would finally get to Roone.

  She might sleep on Roone tonight. The thought brought a surge, half-fear, half-excitement, that made her throw off the blankets. She grabbed her toilet bag and the clothes she planned to wear, and pattered barefoot down the narrow steps and along the corridor past Colette’s room to the bathroom.

  It was as arctic as the bedroom – hadn’t they heard of central heating? There was a single white towel, hard and thin, hanging on the rail. The shower was above the bath and disappointingly feeble, but the water at least was hot. She washed quickly and dressed before she was fully dry, teeth chattering.

  On her way back, Colette’s door was ajar. ‘Tilly, is that you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come in.’

  She was zipping her case closed, dressed in the same grey trouser suit she’d worn the evening before. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said. ‘Looks like a nice day out there.’

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ Tilly echoed. ‘The light is amazing.’

  ‘Yes, it’s always good here – makes up for our mediocre weather.’ She set her case by the door. ‘I have a feeling we’ll get to Roone today,’ she said.

  Tilly was unable suddenly to speak.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Colette said. ‘It’ll be fine, I’m sure it will.’

  ‘… Hope so.’

  ‘Will we go down? Are you ready?’

  ‘Just give me a minute.’

  In her room she rummaged in her suitcase and found the package Ma had given her the day before the trip. Save it for Christmas, she’d ordered. Beneath the wrapping Tilly found the linen tunic she’d admired a few weeks ago in the mall with Lien: Ma must have asked her advice.

  She held it up. Sky blue, sleeveless, cute little pleats at the hips. Perfect for the sunshine in Bali, or in Queensland: out of the question in the middle of an Irish winter. She folded it carefully and replaced it in the case.

  Early evening at home now. The presents long since opened, the dinner eaten, Ma watching TV in the front room, spared the washing-up because of Christmas. Pa doing it on his own this year, no Tilly to lend a hand. At eight, Robbie was plenty old enough to help, but he was Ma’s golden boy, and not generally called on for chores.

  She opened a new text box. Happy Christmas, she typed, love my present, thank you. Miss you all. She pressed send – but nothing happened. She’d forgotten about the phones being out. No way to contact Ma until they came back, whenever that would be. They’d wonder why she wasn’t getting in touch on Christmas Day – or maybe they’d think she was having too much fun to bother with them.

  Downstairs the dining room was deserted and chilly. They looked into the bar, which was exactly as they’d left it the night before. Tilly glanced at the fireplace, remembering someone saying that the fire hadn’t gone out in ninety years. Looked well and truly out now.

  ‘I think we need to find the kitchen,’ Colette said, ‘and make our own breakfast,’ so they poked around until they found it to the rear of the bar. Tilly ran upstairs for her fan heater, and by the time they’d scrambled eggs and toasted bread a yawning Bernard had appeared, so they fed him too.

  ‘I’ll give Kieran McHugh a shout in a while,’ he said, holding out his coffee cup for a refill. ‘He has a little boat, he’d run ye over, I’d say. He’s the newsagent, ye met him last night.’

  Tilly had a vague recollection of someone telling them he owned the newsagent’s in the village, but they’d spoken to so many, she couldn’t recall a face for him.

  ‘Could I leave my car at the pier?’ Colette asked. ‘I could collect it tomorrow when the ferry is running again.’

  ‘You could, to be sure – or someone from here would bring it over for you, no problem.’

  No problem, nothing a problem here.

  After breakfast they loaded the dishwasher while Bernard tried to ring Kieran before remembering that the phones were down. ‘I’ll walk up the street to him,’ he said, pulling on his jacket: another obstacle brushed away.

  There was no sign of Cormac or Ursula. Maybe Christmas Day was the only lie-in they got in the year. Tilly went upstairs to brush her teeth, and by the time she came down Bernard had returned.

  ‘Kieran is bringing his mother to eleven Mass,’ he reported. ‘He’ll run ye over after that, around half twelve-ish.’

  ‘Wonderful, thanks so much.’ Colette turned to Tilly. ‘I’d like to get to Mass myself – what about you?’

  Tilly was Presbyterian. She’d never set foot inside a Catholic church. She wondered what Reverend Johnson would have to say. On the other hand it was Christmas, and she couldn’t see Jesus objecting to her paying a visit to any of His churches.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll go.’

  They decided to use up the half-hour before Mass with a walk around the village. They piled on layers – Colette lent Tilly a green scarf – and set off. Despite the sun, the day was bitterly cold: Tilly’s fingers soon stung. She shoved them into her pockets, thinking of the stifling heat of Queensland. On balance, she decided she preferred this sharp air that didn’t suffocate you – but a pair of fur-lined gloves sure wouldn’t go amiss.

  The village was tiny and charming, one side of its single street comprising a neat row of white cottages whose front doors and windowsills were painted in bright blues and pinks and greens and reds.

  Across the road from them, on the sea side, was the bar they’d spent the night in, the café that closed for the winter, a small supermarket with a post office sign hanging overhead and a green-painted slot for letters set into its wall, a pharmacy with a big poster for flu medication in the window, and Kieran McHugh’s newsagent’s with its two petrol pumps outside.

  At the far end of the street, beyond the cottages, was the church – set back off the road and approached by a short paved drive – and directly next door to it a small school with a single basketball post in its front yard.

  No bank, no ATM, no boutique or shoe shop, no library, no music store or mobile-phone outlet. Dingle, presumably, their nearest port of call for all that. As they walked, they encountered little children on brand new bicycles, and older people who smiled and wished them a happy Christmas, and hoped they’d slept well at Bernard and Cormac’s, and wondered if they’d managed to get someone to take them across to Roone. Everyone seemed to remember them from the night before – had the entire adult population been in the bar?

  Tilly was enchanted by it all. This was where her mother had grown up, this small country of singers and wild storms and simple, instinctive kindnesses. This was where her sister had grown up, and where she still lived.

  Tilly herself might have been born and raised in Ireland, if her parents had remained together for a few more months, if her mother had realised that she was pregnant before deciding to leave him. She might have waited then; she might have had the baby in Ireland. The thought was intriguing. With a small change in timing, Tilly might have been Irish by birth instead of by descent.

  ‘So,’ Colette said, as they walked slowly towards the church, ‘how are you feeling about meeting your sister?’

  ‘A bit nervous,’ Tilly admitted. ‘I’ll be a shock for her.’

  ‘A surprise, I’m sure – and when it sinks in, a very pleasant one.’ She paused. ‘If you like, I could go with you when you meet her. If you thought it might make it easier.’

  Tilly considered this. Better to have someone there, or better for her to go alone? Either way, she felt, it would be momentous.

  ‘Of course, it’s entirely up to you. Think about it, you have plenty of time.’

  ‘I will, thank you.’

  In
bed the night before, when sleep wouldn’t come, she had tried to imagine it. She’d pictured herself standing before her sister and announcing who she was – and there it had ended, her mind unwilling, or unable, to predict what might happen after that.

  And in the dead of night, as the storm continued to rattle the little attic window in its frame, it had suddenly occurred to her that her sister might not even be there. Wasn’t it possible that she had gone to Dublin to spend Christmas with their father, the man Tilly’s mother had told her wouldn’t want to know of his second daughter’s existence? And then she’d thought: how did he feel about his first daughter – were they close? So little she knew about them, so ignorant she was.

  She should have written. She should have written a letter, given her sister advance warning. She shouldn’t have embarked on this crazy journey without some kind of preparation. But she hadn’t thought, she’d acted impulsively, out of fear and heartbreak – and now she’d have only herself to blame if it all went wrong.

  Just then bells began to peal, their notes as pure as the air. People emerged from the houses and made their way towards the church. Cars were arriving too, parking willy-nilly on the street. People clambered out of them, calling to others, wishing them happy Christmas, voices carrying clearly.

  Mercifully, the church was fairly warm. They found seats halfway up the aisle, between a scarlet-cheeked woman in a tangerine coat with an enormously fat baby on her lap, and a pair of teenage boys in identical black leather jackets and blue jeans, their hair completely hidden under woolly hats – one maroon, one brown – their hands red and raw-looking with the cold.

  A bell pinged. Everyone stood. The priest walked out to the altar and the Mass began. There was singing, of course – but strangely, not from the congregation. At home, everyone joined in the hymns when Tilly attended a service, but here they stood silently and listened to a small choir of a dozen or so elderly females, who were accompanied on an organ by a slightly younger man. Not at all what she would have expected, given the enthusiastic singing of the night before.

  Ten minutes into the proceedings, the baby beside her began to whimper. The woman reached into a shopping bag at her feet and drew out a bottle whose rubber teat was covered with a twist of aluminium foil. She removed the foil and offered the bottle to the child, and peace was restored.

  Tilly found herself covertly examining the little face, what she could see of it, the chubby fingers that encircled the bottle, the fat legs that periodically kicked out at nothing. She heard the little noises it produced, the wet smacks of its sucking, the swallows of the milk going down. She studied it all like it was knowledge for an exam she was soon to take.

  Which it was, in a way.

  ‘Now Nelly will do the readings,’ the priest announced, and a woman from the top seat in a bright yellow coat walked to the altar and read from the Bible. People coughed and shuffled feet. Offspring fidgeted and were hushed.

  A toddler escaped from a seat and made a chuckling race up the aisle before being hastily retrieved by his grinning father. Tilly’s infant neighbour released its grip on the rubber teat to belch solemnly, prompting an eruption of delighted titters from the younger members of the congregation who were within earshot.

  ‘Now we’ll have our Christmas pageant,’ the priest said, and a group of small children emerged scarlet-faced from various seats – six or seven years old, Tilly thought, slightly younger than Robbie – and enacted an abridged version of the Nativity at the top of the church.

  The production was overseen by a woman who crouched at the side of the action, and whom Tilly presumed to be their teacher. ‘Shepherds!’ she hissed audibly, when the actors in question missed their cue and failed to appear. On they darted, looking remarkably like the innkeepers who had denied shelter a few minutes before to Mary and Joseph. They arranged themselves in a jostling huddle beside the happy couple and their swaddled doll baby, one or two waving at members of the congregation.

  As the performance drew to a close, one of the shepherds proclaimed loudly that he needed to do a wee, causing general merriment as he was ushered rapidly down the aisle by his mother, shaking her head in mock shame.

  The pageant was roundly applauded, the grinning actors hopping back to their various seats. As the Mass proceeded, Tilly stood and sat and knelt along with the others, her gaze wandering up to the stained-glass windows, the softly glowing red light that hung on a long chain above the altar, the priest in his colourful robes, who raised a silver cup high as a bell tinkled and everyone bowed.

  Among the people in the seats around her she recognised a few faces from yesterday. She saw the small thin man who’d sung for her in the bar, whose name she had now forgotten. He was in a navy coat today, sitting next to a dark-haired woman in purple and an assortment of children, every one of them wearing spectacles.

  Across the aisle she spotted Sheila Corbett, who’d cooked dinner for them the night before, sitting with Joseph and their three girls, the smallest perched on her father’s lap.

  Glancing behind her, Tilly glimpsed Bernard standing with a huddle of men just inside the door of the church. She wondered why, with a couple of unoccupied rows of seats at the rear.

  She remained where she was as people shuffled up to communion, Colette among them, the choir singing carol after carol until all seats had been resumed. At the end of the Mass the priest wished everyone a happy Christmas, and warned of a fallen tree on the way to Dingle, a few miles beyond the village. ‘It made a big hole in the road,’ he told them. ‘The guards are looking into it’ – and the smile that followed this announcement caused the whole place to erupt. Laughter in a church!

  By the time Tilly and Colette were leaving their seat to join the slow shuffle down the aisle, Bernard and his companions had vanished. As they emerged from the church Tilly felt a hand on her arm. She turned to see a man whose face she recalled from the previous day.

  ‘You’re all set,’ he said, ‘for the trip across. ’Tis a fine day for it’ – and she realised it was Kieran McHugh, who owned the newsagent’s, and who had agreed to take them to Roone.

  ‘My mother,’ he said, and Tilly and Colette shook hands with the small bundled-up woman by his side, and agreed that it was bitterly cold, but a lot better than yesterday. The four of them walked slowly down the street as people climbed into cars and drove off.

  ‘I’ll see ye down at the pier so,’ Kieran said when they reached the newsagent’s. ‘About half an hour.’

  ‘But would ye not come in for a cup of tea first?’ his mother enquired as he turned the key in the door next to the shop.

  ‘I think we should keep moving,’ Colette told her. ‘We’re anxious to get to Roone as soon as we can,’ and Tilly was aware of a small and steady internal fluttering that had started up inside her.

  About half an hour.

  Back at the bar Cormac materialised to bring down their cases and load them into Colette’s car. They went in search of Bernard and found him peeling potatoes in the kitchen, a striped apron tied around his waist.

  ‘Ursula is gone to visit her sister,’ he told them. ‘She lives three miles out the road. We’re under strict orders to have the vegetables done before she gets back. I’m leaving the sprouts to Cormac – can’t be doing with the little feckers.’ He shot a grin at Tilly as he swept potato skins into a bin. ‘Excuse my language, ladies – we’re not used to civilised company around here. I’d say ye’ll have tea before ye go.’

  So they had tea, and prepared the sprouts between them as the kettle boiled. Afterwards, as Tilly waited by the bar door, she couldn’t help overhearing the brief argument between Colette and Bernard, the gist of which was that the amount suggested by Bernard for payment was considered by Colette to be far too low.

  ‘Yerra, not at all,’ he insisted. ‘Isn’t it Christmas, the season of goodwill to all men? Ye can come and stay again in the summer, and I’ll charge ye full price, I promise,’ and that was that.

  ‘Safe t
rip now,’ he said as they got into the car. ‘I hope ye can swim,’ he said, laughing through the big bush of his beard. He and his brother stood waving as they left, and Tilly waved back until they disappeared from view.

  Colette shook her head. ‘He hardly covered the cost of the breakfast with that bill. Then again, it wasn’t exactly the Ritz.’

  She didn’t say how much, or how little, he’d charged: by the sound of it Tilly thought she could probably have footed her own bill after all, but she felt awkward about offering money now, which would surely, anyway, be refused.

  ‘I still appreciate your paying,’ she said instead, and was told it was nothing, nothing at all.

  They met no car on the short drive to the pier, which was deserted. They parked by the side of the cabin and sat looking out at the sea while they waited.

  ‘Look how still it is this morning,’ Colette said. ‘So different from yesterday. I hope there was no damage on Roone. It’s very exposed, being so tiny, and having the sea all around it.’

  ‘Does it get many storms?’

  ‘Quite a few in the winter, I believe – but I imagine last night’s was far worse than normal.’

  A beat passed. ‘They’ll be glad to see you,’ Tilly said. ‘It’ll be a nice surprise.’

  Colette laughed. ‘Let’s hope so.’ She seemed about to say something else, but just then they heard the sound of a motor, and a small blue and white boat came into view. They got out and unloaded their cases, and Tilly caught the end of the fat rope that Kieran threw out to them and wound it on his instruction several times around a low stone pillar.

  He helped them to climb on board. The sensation felt most peculiar to Tilly – like being on a trampoline, solid ground gone from under her feet. She grabbed at the rail to steady herself, making Kieran laugh.

  ‘I’ve never been on a boat before,’ she told him.

  ‘Is that a fact? Not to worry, you’ll find your sea legs in a minute. It’s nice and calm, we’ll have no bother going across. Head into the cabin,’ he added, ‘it’ll be chillier out to sea’ – and they stepped into the tiny cabin, where there was just enough standing room for them.