Jumping in Puddles

by Claire Allan

  Detta looked at them pleadingly. “Just give it a go, please,” she said, before walking to the corner of the room and putting some god-awful panpipe music on the small CD player she had brought with her and lighting an incense stick. The smell mingled with the scent of the musty floors and the damp coats, and Liam wondered if Detta had taken her share of drugs while in Dublin.

  But damn it, there must have been something in the incense because despite his reservations Liam soon found himself pouring his feelings out on to paper. Seems that once he stopped doodling and started writing, it was hard to stop.

  It wasn’t hard for him to lose himself in imagining where he wanted to be this time next year. It was the same place he had been for the last twelve years until James Byrne had stolen his wife out from under his very nose.

  He resisted making the letter a list of his own shortcomings – all the things he knew he had done which had pushed Laura away. Instead he wrote a love letter – one he knew he should have written for Laura last year, or every year, or every day for that matter so that she never, even for one second, felt undervalued.

  “So what do we do when we’re done then?” he asked. “Is this something else for us to tear up?”

  “No,” Detta said. “No, we’re keeping these. Or at least I’m keeping these.”

  Liam felt sick. He was happy to pour his heart out when he thought no one else – except perhaps for Laura – would read it, but Jesus here was Detta O’Neill saying she was going to take his innermost thoughts and keep them. She would probably read them before she went to sleep, give herself a damn good laugh at how sad he was.

  He realised he must have been looking as outwardly horrified as he felt inside as Detta quickly reassured him that his letter would be held in the strictest confidence.

  “Don’t worry. I have four envelopes here. I want you all to put yout letter in an envelope and then address it to yourself. I’m going to lodge them in a safety-deposit box in a bank in Letterkenny and then in one year’s time we are going to get the letters out and have a read. It’s my sincere hope that when we look at the letters you will have the happiness you want, even if it won’t be what you think it is right now.”

  Liam snorted, and shifted in his seat. How could Detta, or anyone in this room, know what he wanted? He knew full well that she could put those bloody letters in the safe-deposit box for a week, a year or ten years – but how he felt about Laura, what he wanted to make him happy was never, ever going to change.

  And as he looked around the room he wondered would any of them get the things they wanted to make them happy. Ciara – she was so young and yet had such responsibility on her shoulders while Ruth looked much older than her age. He wondered how she managed with her three kids. As for Niamh, how would she ever get over her loss?

  * * *

  All in all, it had been a shit day. He felt bereft as he left the community centre that evening – an emptiness so deep that he just wanted to pack it away and never feel anything again if it meant that he wouldn’t feel as bad as he did right now.

  The rain was still falling, lashing down, and he saw Ciara, her denim coat wrapped tight around her body, make a dash up the street. Rolling down the window of his car, he pulled up alongside her, not sure if his actions would earn him the reputation in Rathinch of being a pervy old man.

  “I’ll give you a lift if you want,” he offered.

  Blinking rain from her eyes, Ciara nodded gratefully and got into the car.

  “Thanks, Mr Dougherty,” she said, pulling the seatbelt around her.

  “Liam. Please call me Liam. I know I’m old enough to be your father, but there’s no need to stand on formality. Jesus, sure we are all crackpots together, aren’t we?”

  Ciara nodded, pulling her dark hair back from her face. “It’s a strange set-up all right. I’m not sure I enjoyed that letter-writing thing. I mean, God, what chance do I have of getting all the things I need to make me happy in a year? Unless I win the fecking Lotto.”

  Liam nodded, unsure what to say.

  He drove Ciara home and let her off outside her house. A woman he recognised as Lorraine Boyle, Ciara’s mother, was hovering by the door, a look of thunder on her face.

  As he drove off, he wondered was anyone in this godforsaken shite-hole of a village in danger of being happy any time soon.

  12

  “What time of the evening do you call this? And what the feck are you doing getting out of some old man’s car? Is he the father? Jesus, Ciara, tell me he isn’t the father! Is that why his marriage broke down? Oh God, we’ll be a laughing stock. Oh Ciara, love, what have you done?”

  Lorraine’s face looked ashen as she put her hand to her forehead in a “woe is me” pose and sat down on the sofa. Ciara was used to these over-dramatics and in some ways she wished she could tell her mum who Ella’s daddy was, but as he refused to accept it, she didn’t think there was much of a point.

  The truth was, all she had to do was so much as breathe in the same air as any male inhabitant of Rathinch and Lorraine would start secretly planning how to pluck a hair from his head for a sneaky DNA test.

  “Mum, Liam – Mr Dougherty – is at the support group too. He just gave me a lift because it was raining. I’m sorry I’m late back, but we all got chatting a little more than we thought and no,” she said with a sigh, “he is not Ella’s daddy. Has she settled okay?”

  Lorraine looked up with an expression Ciara couldn’t quite determine. It might have been relief. It might have been resignation. It might just have been boredom. There were only so many times you could have the same conversation, or so Ciara thought.

  Lorraine took a deep breath. “Ella is asleep. She took a full bottle and I changed her nappy. She got her wind up no problem. Was a little gurny going off to sleep but there hasn’t been a peep since.”

  Ciara looked at the baby monitor in the corner for some sort of reassurance that what her mother had said was true and then she offered to go and put the kettle on.

  “No, pet, I’m going out, remember? I have to meet one of the girls from work. I shouldn’t be too late but could you make sure not to wake me in the morning? I’m planning on letting my hair down and I don’t want to be disturbed.”

  Ciara nodded and Lorraine gave her a peck on the cheek before heading off down the path, looking more than ready for a drink or two. Ciara made a hot chocolate and a couple of slices of toast which she ate while watching a re-run of Father Ted.

  “This place makes Craggy Island look like fecking Las Vegas,” she said aloud before climbing the stairs to her bedroom where Ella was sleeping in her cot, her hair damp with sweat and her cheeks rosy red.

  As she got undressed for bed her phone beeped to life.

  It was a text from Abby from school – the only one of her old friends to talk to her as if she still had a brain in her head.

  “How was the Mad Mammies’ meeting?” she wrote.

  Ciara smiled and texted back, “Gr8. Not quite lk da clubs, but craic was gd.”

  “Will I come ovr?” Abby replied.

  Ciara thought about it for a moment. It would be nice to have some company, but given that it was now close to nine thirty and Ella would be waking during the night at some stage, all she really wanted to do was fall into bed, watch a bit of telly and drift off.

  And although she knew it was unlikely her mum would be home this side of one o’clock, she really didn’t want to subject Abby to Lorraine after a few vodkas and Cokes. Her mum was fine most of the time, but with a few drinks in her she would only launch into her unholy ranting about how Ciara had ruined her life by having a baby so young.

  “Trd,” she replied. “Txt u 2morro. Mayb go 2 Lttrknny on Sat?”

  Ciara was due to be paid on Friday. She would have just enough left over after paying for the crèche to treat herself to a new top in Letterkenny – and she would need to go there anyway to buy some new babygros for Ella who seemed to be going through the world’s fastest growth spurt.


  As she climbed under her duvet she thought of how, just two years ago, she was at school, still relying on her mum for money and able to nip over to Abby’s in the evenings and not worry about being too tired for work the next day.

  Back then she thought that Ella’s dad genuinely cared about her as well. She thought she was in love, and that he too was in love with her. Sighing at the memory she switched off the bedside light, put the telly on low volume and snuggled down to relax.

  * * *

  She had done her pregnancy test in the toilets in the shopping centre. She had almost died of mortification buying the damn thing – certain that the old biddy behind the counter was thinking all sorts of nasty thoughts about her. She hadn’t told anyone that she was going to do a test, not even Abby who knew she’d had sex. She had got the bus to Letterkenny first thing on that Saturday morning on the pretext of picking up a book for the school reading list.

  She was grateful that there were no longer any plastic, see-through bags to be had in the shops. The brown, heavy paper bag had hid its contents well, especially when also thrust to the bottom of her handbag. Until, that is she locked herself in the toilet cubicle and began to undo the wrapping.

  The noise had seemed magnified and she had wondered whether to just do it fast – like ripping off a plaster and to hell with who heard – or slowly peel the plastic wrapping off. Instead she waited until she heard toilets flushing around her and opened the wrapping bit by bit each time it got noisy.

  Inside the box there was a useful, and hilarious, diagram of a girl holding a stick between her legs with a “stream of urine” passing over it. Ciara would have laughed, phoned the girls to tell them about it, even – if it hadn’t been so serious and so scary.

  I would have to be the unluckiest fecker in Rathinch to be pregnant, she thought to herself as she tried to position herself so that some pee actually went on the stick and not, as she feared, all over her hands.

  “It’s probably just stress,” she uttered under her breath.

  She had read that stress could make your period late. Maybe not a full week late, but late all the same.

  She peed, getting only the tips of her fingers wet, and then sat staring at the stick and willing it to let her know that she wasn’t pregnant.

  As one line appeared, followed by another, she realised she didn’t know what that meant. With all her faffing about, and smiling at the peeing lady on the box, she hadn’t actually read to the end – the crucial pregnant-or-not-pregnant bit.

  Two lines she thought that could well be two words: Not Pregnant. Surely one line would mean one word: Pregnant.

  It was simple, easy logic. And she breathed a tentative sigh of relief as she reached for the test box and looked at the instructions to confirm what she knew – or at least hoped – in her heart.

  * * *

  For once she was on time for work. Ella had behaved and allowed Ciara to dress her without screaming blue murder and she had been calm when they reached the crèche, not squealing after her mammy like she so often did. Ciara had therefore arrived in work, in full uniform, a full two minutes early.

  “Will wonders never cease?” her craggy-faced boss declared as she set to work pricing a delivery of eggs and milk.

  “I’m not that bad. Not all the time,” Ciara chided, kneeling down by the fridge.

  “No, not all the time. Just most of it,” Mrs Quinn said, from her high stool behind the counter – where she would sit all day, doing little but chatting far too much, passing comment on everyone and everything that went on in Rathinch.

  “That Detta O’Neill was in earlier. She was asking after you. Wanted to know if you had got home okay last night? Are you going to that wee group she has set up? Lord, I don’t know, in my day we just got on with things. We didn’t need to sit around and have a group hug if times were tough. Then again, in my day,” she said with a sniff “there weren’t that many of us running around with babbies at the age of seventeen either.”

  Ciara took a deep breath, although she feared if she counted as high as necessary to resist the urge to slap the stupid cow, she might just pass out.

  Mrs Quinn would have Ciara and the rest of the lone parents burned at the stake on the village green if she could get away with it. She would be only too happy to sit on her high stool while her fellow old biddies gathered round and discussed it for weeks in advance. She might even be tempted to get her old Singer sewing machine out and make some bunting especially for the occasion.

  Fecking witch, Ciara thought, is your coven meeting tonight?

  It was this inner dialogue which got Ciara through the day. Occasionally she would dream that she had the nerve to actually say out loud what she was thinking, but she knew she would have to bide her time. She needed her job – and she really wanted that shopping trip with Abby to Letterkenny at the weekend so there was no way she was going to let rip just yet.

  Besides, if Mrs Quinn knew everything – exactly who was also a parent but just didn’t admit it yet – she would probably choke on the brandy balls she spent her days sucking.

  13

  Niamh’s mother had agreed to take care of the twins on Saturday while her daughter sorted through the reams of paperwork she had collected from Seán’s office. She had offered to help, of course, but Niamh had told her it would be more use to her to have the twins out from under her feet.

  “Just take them to Wains’ World and let them run around until they are knackered. At least they will go to bed for me nice and early, because I’m sure I’ll need a glass of wine when I’m done.”

  “Are you sure, sweetie?” Mary had asked gently. “I can get your dad to take them and then I’ll help you with it all.”

  “No, Mum, it’s fine, honest. Robyn is here. But you can stay for dinner if you want. You can help me drink that wine. Stay over if you want.”

  “Sounds good – especially the part about the wine,” Mary replied.

  “And you’re sure Daddy won’t mind?”

  “After helping me with the twins all day, he’ll be wrecked. He’ll enjoy the peace and quiet. A couple of Buds and he’ll have an early night.”

  Niamh smiled, her dad was nothing if not a creature of habit.

  Niamh thought back to her childhood, when she would creep down the stairs long after bedtime and hear the strains of his favourite ballads filter through the heavy wooden door. She would sit there for a while, the crack of light taking away any fear she had of the dark and then she would open the door, creep in and sit on her daddy’s knee. He never told her to go back to bed. He would just wrap her in his arms, his breath warm and scented with beer, and sing to her gently until her eyes became heavy. She would wake up again in her own bed, blankets curled up on her chin, cosy and warm, and she would feel so very secure and loved.

  As Niamh replayed this memory in her head a sob caught in her throat. Rachel would never – could never – experience such a thing with her daddy. It was yet another thing that she had been robbed of – that they all had been robbed of.

  The pain of that realisation winded Niamh and she could not even speak to tell her mother how she felt.

  “Niamh, darling, are you still there?” Mary asked.

  Her daughter fell to the ground sobbing.

  Robyn, who had been in the living room, poked her head around the door, saw her friend crying and came and took the phone from her.

  “It’s going to be a tough day, Mary,” she said, her voice breaking, and then she hung up, sat down by Niamh and rocked her gently in her arms until the tears subsided.

  * * *

  Niamh and Robyn were sitting on the floor of the home office, drinking green tea while they decided which box to open first.

  “I know, I know – I’m a stupid oul’ bitch sometimes. God, I can’t believe I had a meltdown like that.”

  “It’s going to happen, you know,” Robyn said. “It’s going to hit you at times when you least expect it. I read that it takes a year and a
day to accept a loss – you have a lot of first experiences to go through without him, the whole ‘this time last year’ nonsense.”

  “If it only was a year and a day,” said Niamh, filling up again. “I can’t help but think that everything in our lives will be tough – will be a reminder of what we could have had. When the twins start school, when they graduate, when they get married. It’s all things they should be doing with a daddy by their side and which I should be doing with Seán there holding my hand.”

  Robyn set her teacup on the floor and rubbed her friend’s hand. “I know, darling. It’s just not fair, is it?”

  “No, it berluddy well isn’t!” Niamh huffed, blowing her fringe from her face. Wiping her tears on the sleeve of her jumper, she steadied herself. “Well, it’s not fair and it’s completely shite but no amount of crying is going to bring him back, so we might as well just get on with sorting this lot out.”

  “Atta girl,” Robyn soothed and took the lid off the first box.

  To be honest it felt strange going through this stuff. Almost irreverent – as if they were doing something they shouldn’t.

  “Seán would hate it if he knew I was snooping through his things,” Niamh said, sorting letters into different piles for filing, shredding and dumping. “He always hated snooping.”