That had to be the reason why no one else seemed as worried about this as he was. The challenge then would be pretending that he knew these instructions too until he found them out, before he got found out himself.
For the first time in his life he wished he had an older brother.
There was a gang of teenagers always hanging around the village, looking bored. He watched them as they came off their special school bus that deposited them in the church car park at half-past four each day, hours after Andrew had trudged up the lane to his house with his schoolbag hitting the small of his back in a rhythmic smack-smack-smack. He couldn’t believe they were only a few years older than him, that he’d look like them soon. They seemed like another species, sauntering around in little packs with untucked shirts and hair on their upper lips and sometimes even things drawn in blue biro on their forearms like DIY tattoos. Their faces always seemed to be communicating some silent threat or challenge.
Andrew feared that secondary school would be filled with people like them and no one like him.
He was right to.
When the time came, no one shoved him up against a wall or pulled down his trousers in the yard or stuffed his head in a toilet. That, at least, would have been something. Some acknowledgement. But there was, it turned out, a worse fate: everyone ignored him. He was able to move around the school like a ghost. Sometimes he would go up to a girl (unlikely to retaliate) or a teacher (unlikely to get mad) and touch their arm or face, just to see if they reacted. Could they see him? It seemed they could, but they didn’t want to be around them. Even the teachers, after chastising him, would turn and walk away.
But it was the worst in the classroom where he was forced to stay put.
First Years remained in place while their various teachers came to them. On the first day of term, their year-head told them their seats had been pre-assigned. Forced new-friend-making. Chair-legs screeched on linoleum floors as the teacher read names from a printed list.
Andrew got a seat in the front row, by the window. But the seat to his right remained empty.
He watched helplessly as, all around him, newly matched pairs traded old schools, home addresses and favourite video games. He could only sit there, working to keep an expression on his face that hid his upset, and wait for the teacher to notice she had an odd number. The buzz of chatter grew louder and louder until it started to feel like it might be a weapon, one that was gearing up to attack, to try to break him.
He slid out of his chair and approached the teacher.
Some boy called Barry O’Connell was supposed to be there, she said, but he was missing.
That day and all the days that followed.
Andrew did, in a moment of desperation, try to fix it. On that first Friday, after the last bell, he stalled at his desk, packing away his things particularly slowly, and then especially fast, almost panicked, when he saw that at the top of the room the teacher, Mrs O’Mahony, had started to walk out.
‘Miss,’ he called out, hurrying towards her. ‘The chair next to me is still empty.’
‘Yes, yes, Andrew,’ she’d said, ‘I am aware. I think we may have a phantom boy who’s gone off to another school. But moving someone else would just leave someone else on their own, and I can’t have threes. There’d be too much messing.’ She’d smiled and put a hand lightly on his back, steering him out of the classroom. ‘Aren’t you lucky to have all that space to yourself?’
When it was clear that he couldn’t fix it, Andrew tried to make up for it. He found reasons to talk to the other students in the breaks between classes, pretending he needed a pencil or a protractor or a reminder of what they were supposed to have read in preparation. But these never turned into actual conversations. It was stunted, stilted small talk, and its failure rate drained him.
Lunchtime was too much of a minefield even to try. He ate his sandwiches in the toilets and then walked the corridors in a loop, trying to look like he was heading somewhere with a purpose so that anyone who saw him would assume that he was.
The relief of that first Christmas break made him so joyous he felt like he might burst. Almost three weeks of no school! His presents were small and Dad wasn’t very well so it was, his mother kept saying on the phone, a quiet one this year, but Andrew basked in every minute and every hour of not having to sit in that classroom, alone; of every morning he didn’t have to get out of bed while it was still dark; of every day he didn’t have to board the school bus feeling like it was transporting him to a punishment.
Then, the first day back to school in January, everything changed.
Because of her.
Caroline.
_________
The first time he saw her she was standing next to Mrs O’Mahony at the top of the class, looking uncertain. She was tall and skinny with spindly legs and knees that seemed like they were the largest part of her. She had her white knee socks pulled all the way up, which even in Andrew’s limited experience was a serious, maybe even fatal social infraction. Her eyes were bright blue and her skin was bronzed by some foreign, mixed-up sun that apparently shone in the wintertime, and her hair was the colour of haystacks, poker-straight and so long that it could fall over her shoulders and on to her chest and then down her sides, as if it was flowing out from under her arms. A thick red hairband was holding it back off her face. The most striking thing of all was that she didn’t carry a schoolbag like everyone else, but a large, flat cloth-thing made of multi-coloured stripes that hung from her shoulder.
Andrew had never seen anything like her. What was she?
But that first moment wasn’t the one that changed everything. It was the one after that, when she looked up to Mrs O’Mahony for instruction and said, ‘Where should I …?’ and Andrew’s stomach burned with the knowledge that there was only one empty seat in the room.
‘My name is Andrew,’ he said as soon as she’d sat down beside him, immediately regretting his haste, his overt display of enthusiasm. But he couldn’t waste a chance like this. He figured he had the length of two lessons plus the five-minute break in between before she’d get swept away from him on a tide of louder voices, before the others would get to her and maybe even whisper that he was a loner, a loser, and say she should stay away from him, and nothing was more dangerous to him than the truth.
‘Mine’s Caroline,’ she said.
She reached out her hand and Andrew realised, after a beat, that she intended to shake his with it. He’d never shaken the hand of anyone his own age before. He gripped hers lightly, just for a moment, feeling the warm dryness of her fingers. His were cold.
When she let go she smiled at him and asked him where he lived.
‘Shanamore,’ he said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Ballycotton.’
Her face lit up. ‘That’s where we live now.’
Her family had just moved from Dubai to her granddad’s house, although she also said her granddad had died so Andrew wasn’t sure why. Her life sounded like science-fiction to him: she’d lived in Denmark before that, and for a short time, some place near Amsterdam. He couldn’t picture those places; they had names he’d heard but he couldn’t imagine a reality to go with them. She might as well have told him she’d lived on Saturn’s rings. Caroline didn’t have to take Irish classes and she was really happy about that. She liked watching Friends and had one brother, who was younger, and she was counting down the days until the next Harry Potter book came out.
That weekend, she came bounding up the drive on her bike. His drive. She said she’d figured out which house was his by asking in the shop. She’d cycled all the way to Shanamore from Ballycotton, which Andrew knew to be a long, long road. He got his bike and together they cycled to Front Strand and messed around there for the day, throwing stones in the sea, talking about everything and anything.
Afterwards they came back to Shanamore and Caroline strode right into Murphy’s, beckoning him to follow, and when he did he saw she’d mar
ched up to the bar and asked Peggy for two Cokes. He barely tasted it, truth be told, so uncomfortable was he being in that adult place without his own adults, and also because he hadn’t thought to check if the few coins he had in his pocket added up to the price of a drink. But when they were done Caroline produced a brand-new five-pound note from a shiny wallet and hopped up from her seat before he could even react.
It was dizzying, being with her.
When he got home no one asked Andrew where he’d been and he was glad because how could he even begin to explain it? He went up to his room and closed the door and then the blinds too and he sat there in the dark and just breathed in and out for a while, letting the quiet wash over him again, welcoming it.
All day Sunday, he had a headache.
By Monday morning, the whole thing had started to feel like a strange, impossible dream, the sharp edges of it already blurring and dissipating, like mist, like something he wouldn’t be able to hold on to, but when Andrew turned into Class 2H there she was, sitting in the chair beside his, waving at him and then talking at him about some film she’d watched on TV.
That was the beginning.
_________
In the twelve months after he first met Caroline, Andrew came to realise that he’d never actually had a friend. Not a real one. Not a true one. Not someone he would always choose to be with over not, no matter the circumstances. His classmates back in primary school, the summer kids, Johnny Quirk who’d lived in the house that had been in the field where the American guy was building a new, huge house that supposedly had a pool … He’d always felt, around them, like he was clock-watching, waiting for a polite amount of time to pass before he could make his excuses and go back home, into his room, where he could breathe and unclench and relax. The room was always the better option. When Caroline came along, it was the last place he wanted to be because it was the only place she couldn’t be.
At school, their shared desk became a kind of cocoon of sorts, where their friendship could grow without outside interference, without Andrew worrying about whether he’d said or done the wrong thing, or without the ringleaders coming and tempting her away. He knew it would happen eventually and saw the end of the school term rushing towards them like a freight train on tracks they were both tied to. She was pretty and nice and something new and exotic; it was only a matter of time.
The surprise was that when, inevitably, a couple of ringleaders did come to entice her away – an invite to a cinema trip over Easter, that was the first test – she accepted on the condition, on the assumption, that Andrew could come along too.
When summer came around again, the first post-Caroline, it didn’t feel like the sudden drive off a cliff-edge, wheels spinning helplessly, that Andrew had been dreading. Instead, it was a smooth, gentle path down to the sea.
In the summer sun, something fundamental, tectonic, began to shift beneath his feet.
It started the night a bunch of city kids built a bonfire on the beach. Someone had brought beer, little watery cans of it, a supermarket’s own brand. Andrew accepted one. Although he couldn’t fathom the attraction, he made sure to agree that it tasted good and then, halfway down the can, realised he was making the same satisfied gasping sounds he’d seen people do on TV.
And then he started to feel the warm, wispy feeling of mild drunkenness, of being protected from all sharp angles, and thinking there could be no consequences, not when the world felt like this. He took Caroline’s hand and pulled her towards him, and she put that arm around her shoulders and shifted until she was pressed up against him and then … Well, he couldn’t quite remember the exact sequence of events, but then their lips were pressed together and he thought that maybe they were kissing. If that was this? The actual act was wet and weird and made sour by the beer, and kind of mechanical, but the idea was transformative.
That night, when Andrew looked at Caroline in the glow of the setting sun, her hair soft and wavy from the sea, her smiling mouth just inches from his own, close enough to feel the warmth of her breath, he felt a heat growing in his chest until it had nowhere to go, until it started to strain against the skin and bone, pushing, until it hurt. And the world that had been black and white broke open in explosions of colour and Andrew felt really, truly alive.
He saw the point of it all now, even while, back at home, a darkness was closing in on his dad.
To everyone else, it must have seemed like he’d been recast, a series regular now played by a different actor without any explanation for the change. Physically he was taller and broader, yes, the stretchmarks on his thighs and arms proving what the awkward length of his school trousers and blazer could have done all by themselves. But the real difference was emanating from somewhere deep inside of him, a confidence he’d never have had if it wasn’t for the fact that wrapped around his right hand was Caroline’s left.
Better yet, there was a gang of them now, forged in the liquid laziness of the summer months, and the question was never if they’d go somewhere together but what they’d do when they did. Movie nights in each other’s houses, never Andrew’s, most frequently Caroline’s. The beach at the weekends. Cinema trips into Midleton with pizza afterwards. The odd school disco, steeped in anticipation for weeks and weeks and then deflating like a loosely tied balloon on the night of.
Andrew had no reason to believe that any of it would ever change.
_________
Almost a year to the day after they’d first kissed, Caroline casually told him that her father was getting transferred again and that she’d be starting her third year of secondary school in Frankfurt.
Blood rushed in his ears at the news.
Outwardly, Andrew took his cues from her. She seemed disappointed but not sad, she didn’t seem to think this was that big a deal, she hadn’t heard the ripping sound as Andrew’s emotional life came apart at the seams.
‘But it’ll be a really nice summer,’ she said, as if that was a sufficient consolation prize.
He said nothing. He barely reacted. He did nothing as, with each day that past, his connection with Caroline crumbled and fell away, both of them in a steady but determined retreat. What was the point in maintaining it now? By the time she left the country they were barely speaking and Andrew had begun to grieve the girl he loved because she had, for all intents and purposes, died, ceased to exist.
And he realised then that it had all been a mere sheen, a temporary finish covering up the truth beneath, which was that he hadn’t changed at all, not really. He was still that same scared, awkward, uncomfortable boy who’d walked into Class 2H with his shoulders slumped and his eyes down.
And then everything really did fall apart.
His father’s health deteriorated. No one had ever actually told him his father was going to die, but now he knew it to be true. It was obvious there could be no coming back from the skeletal figure barely disturbing the hospice bed, the alien thing with sunken eyes and sore, spotted skin that looked nothing at all like the man he knew. The waiting hung over the house like a spectre until it finally happened, two weeks before the Junior Cert exams. Every single person in the village attended the funeral and then, for weeks afterwards, made a point of stopping Andrew and his mother everywhere they went to say to them, ‘I suppose it was a relief, in the end, wasn’t it?’
School became something Andrew wanted to be done with as soon as possible. His reports started to come home covered in red messages. Needs to apply himself. It’s time for focus now. We all agree Andrew needs more support. By then, his mother wasn’t fit to support anyone. His father’s death had tipped her into a drowning depth of grief that had, over time, hardened into a depression. Most days she didn’t even leave her room.
Andrew didn’t know what to do.
He didn’t know how to be. Comprehending the act of living, which seemed to come so naturally to almost everyone around him, felt beyond his reach. Time stretched out ahead of him like an endless, dead field, flat and featureless to the hor
izon.
He was broken and only Caroline could fix him.
But she wasn’t there and she wouldn’t come.
The picture was a shot swiped from Natalie’s Instagram account, hanging on the wall inside the door of The Kiln in a plain white frame.
She’d taken it – or got Mike to take it – in their old apartment a couple of years ago. Natalie was leaning against a kitchen countertop, wearing a delicate silk robe that had a spray of cherry blossoms embroidered on to one shoulder, drinking coffee from a large mug with a matching design. Behind her, next to a top-of-the-line coffee machine, a clutch of cherry blossoms sat in a tall glass vase. She looked fresh-faced and her hair was gently tousled. It appeared to be like a candid, off-the-cuff shot, but of course it was anything but. The few feet of kitchen visible had had to be cleared and cleaned in preparation. It had taken Natalie a half-hour to put on enough make-up to make it look as though she wasn’t wearing any and her I-woke-uplike-this hairstyle had been carefully created with straighteners and sea-salt spray. She didn’t even use that coffee machine. She’d been sent the cup she was holding.
There was a neat, handwritten note at the bottom of the frame. Natalie O’Connor (editor of lifestyle blog And Breathe) loves Cara Homewares! It was hanging in the middle of a display of similar pictures, all from the online accounts of various Irish models, minor celebrities and influencers, showcasing artfully arranged shots of table settings, wall art and jewellery.
Featuring brands they must sell here, Natalie guessed. Good for selling stuff. Bad for someone who didn’t want anyone to know she was here.
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