Jumping in Puddles

by Claire Allan

  “I was sensible, Mum,” Ciara said, sitting down. “Besides, the rest of them were there to help me. They are nice people, Mum. You would like them.”

  “I’ve spoken to Ruth a few times at the doctor’s. She seems a nice woman – a bit quiet maybe.”

  Ciara thought back to the previous night and how Ruth had been twirling around dressed as the Wicked Witch singing to the children and couldn’t think how any one could ever describe her as quiet.

  “She’s lovely when you get to know her,” Ciara said, wondering if this would be the perfect time to invite her mother along to the group. Then again, did she really want her mother cramping her style? Perhaps they would all start treating her like a young cub if her mum was sitting alongside them.

  Sitting forward and tickling Ella’s tummy while she was bounced up and down on her granny’s knee, Ciara decided to keep quiet. But she did tell her mum one important thing.

  “I told them about Ben,” she said.

  Lorraine paused for the shortest of moments and carried on. “And what did they say?”

  “Well, they were shocked too. They thought the sun shone out of him as well, and Ruth is obviously worried now about Eimear but they were lovely, Mum. I can’t believe I ever believed Ben when he said that everyone would think I was some kind of lying tramp.”

  “That young fella deserves a sound talking-to,” Lorraine raged. Looking into Ella’s eyes, she turned to look at Ciara and dropped her voice to a whisper. “How could he deny her? How on earth could he deny this little one?”

  Ciara bit back the response that he could deny his daughter because the only person he ever really cared about was himself.

  “And your friends,” Lorraine continued, “do they think you are right not to confront him now? Or do they think like me that he could do with a swift kick up the ass?”

  “They understand that she is better with no daddy than a daddy who doesn’t want to know,” Ciara said defiantly. Surely her mother would understand that more than most. Ciara’s own father had left when she was a baby and, while he had visited on a very occasional basis during her early years, he had soon left Rathinch for Belfast and she hadn’t heard as much as two words from him since.

  When she was younger she used to dream of him coming back. In her very melodramatic early teenage years she used to sit on her windowsill and sing songs from Annie wondering if he would come back to her.

  She was fifteen, and pregnant, when it dawned on her that he wasn’t coming back and that he was an awful gobshite anyway.

  “I suppose you’re right there,” Lorraine said sadly, cutting through her thoughts. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you the best example in life.”

  “Look, Mum, when you and Dad were together you thought he was a decent man. He only turned out to be a good-for-nothing pig after I was born.” Then she added with a wink, “We’ve got a lot in common.”

  “With God’s grace you’ll grow out of it. Now here, have this wee woman because I’m dying for a smoke and to freshen up this cuppa. Can I get you anything?”

  “I’m grand, Mum. I’ll put madam here in her playpen and then get started on the washing. I’ll have to make sure my uniform is clean for tomorrow’s shift or Mrs Quinn will have a stroke.”

  “Will serve her right if she does, the stupid old cow!”

  Lorraine walked out of the room and Ciara smiled. What she wouldn’t give to let her mother let rip at Mrs Quinn one of these days! If only she didn’t need her job so much and the money it brought in, she would enjoy watching the fallout from that one very much indeed.

  As she sat Ella in her playpen, with some cuddly toys, her phone peeped to life.

  “Did u have a gd nite?” Abby texted.

  “Gr8. Was a laff.”

  “Can I call rnd?”

  “Mt u on the beach 4 a walk?”

  “C u in 10.”

  “Okay, missy. Change of plan,” Ciara told her daughter. “Let’s get you back in your buggy and go for a walk.”

  Calling to Lorraine that she was off to meet Abby for a quick natter, she wrapped her coat around her and headed out with the buggy into the cool evening.

  Rathinch was quiet for a Saturday teatime. The shops – not that there were many of them – were closing. The pubs, corner shop and chippy were the only places that stayed open and even then Mrs Quinn always closed the shop between seven and nine out of season so that she was seen to be holier than thou as she traipsed off to Mass. In season, though, when the town was thronged with tourists, there wasn’t a chance in hell she would close and miss the chance of making a quick buck.

  It was still too early for the teenagers who hung around the play park at the edge of the beach to be out and about and Ciara was grateful for that. Although she felt buoyed up by the experiences of the last few days, she didn’t fancy a full-on confrontation with Ben and his cronies – not until she had made a firm decision what to do about the whole situation anyway.

  Abby was waiting in the park on a swing, kicking her legs out in front of her and throwing her hair back. For just a second, Ciara looked at her and thought she looked young – much younger than her anyway even though there were only five months between them.

  “Hey there!” she called and Ella started wriggling excitedly in her buggy at the sight of Abby who always seemed to have a packet of chocolate buttons secreted somewhere on her person.

  “Hey there, yourself,” Abby answered, jumping off the swing with one smooth movement.

  “How are you? And how’s wee Ella here?” Abby crouched down in front of the buggy and tickled Ella’s tummy. “Can I lift her out? Can she have a go on the baby swing?”

  Ciara nodded and walked over to the swings where she took the one Abby had been on while her friend strapped the baby into the next swing along.

  “So, are you dumping me now entirely for your new mates?” Abby asked as she pushed Ella gently.

  “Don’t be so daft,” Ciara laughed. “But they are nice people.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure the craic is mighty,” Abby said with a raised eyebrow.

  “Hey, don’t knock it! We can’t all be living the high life, you know.”

  “High life?” Abby choked back. “No such thing. I’m lucky to be allowed out the door at the minute. It’s all study and putting my head down and trying to decide what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life.”

  “At least you have choices. I’m stuck in the flipping shop selling baps and firelighters and fecking sausage rolls.”

  “God, I’d love a sausage roll,” Abby said wistfully. “Besides, Missus, you do have choices. There is nothing to say you couldn’t go to college and do the things you want to do.”

  “There is something to say that and you’re pushing her in that swing,” Ciara answered, nodding in the direction of her daughter.

  “And there wouldn’t be any parents who ever went to college then, would there?”

  “Well, maybe they had a mammy who could watch their children or money in the bank?”

  Abby sighed. “Most colleges have crèches now – I’ve been looking at the brochures – for day classes or evening classes. Surely your mum would mind her a couple of nights a week for you to allow you to go to college.”

  Ciara shrugged, despite the bubble of excitement building inside her. Would she dare ask Lorraine to mind Ella so she could go to college? Before she had got pregnant there were so many things she wanted to do. She always fancied her chances at journalism. English was her favourite subject and, while at the moment she wasn’t sure she could string together a written sentence without text-speak or getting baby-sick on her notebook, she was sure with a bit of practice she could manage it.

  It was almost too much to hope for. She could just hear Lorraine telling her to keep living in the real world and leave behind her fancy notions – but then she had misjudged her mother before now.

  “You know Abby, I think I love you.”

  “Of course you do,” her friend ans
wered. “Now, do you fancy walking over to the chippy and we’ll share a bag of chips here on the beach.”

  “Only if we overdose on salt and vinegar?”

  “No other way,” Abby answered, lifting a thrilled Ella from her swing and strapping her back in her buggy. She then proudly took the handles of the buggy and all three set off towards the Main Street.

  32

  Niamh woke at six thirty – amazingly without the aid of a small child jumping on her head. The house was in darkness – the kind of darkness you only get in the country – no haze of street lights, just absolute pitch black.

  She looked at the clock to get her bearings and thought about falling back to sleep but her brain was already ticking over. A list – she needed to make a list, so she switched on her beside light and fumbled in her drawer for a pen and a pad of paper.

  God. Detta would be so proud of her, she thought with a smile as she opened a fresh page and started writing.

  Things to do:

  She was going to write, “Things to do to get my life back on track and forget my cheating dead bastard of a husband” but decided less was more.

  * Convince my mother she will take everything in the black bags to the charity shop and that no, I won’t regret it down the line when I’ve calmed down. I am perfectly calm.

  * Sort out the office. It has great light. Price dark-room equipment and/or good photo-editing computer equipment.

  * Buy myself a damn nice camera and take photos like I’ve always wanted. Do it because “I want to” even though I don’t need to.

  * Book a holiday for the children – somewhere Seán would have considered tacky like Disneyland. Feck him and his gites in France. I think gites should be called shites.

  * Swear more. Like at least once a fucking day. (Not in front of the children, mind.)

  * Fill in the swimming pool. We don’t use it, it’s too cold. Or at least build an extension to cover the damn thing up. Phone Liam for a quote.

  * Confront Caitlin.

  Some things, she conceded, would be easier than others. She imagined she would be able to swan into PC World and Jessops or somewhere of that nature and pick up a decent camera without too much fuss. Picking up the ability to take pictures more complex than snapshots of the twins pulling crazy faces might be more difficult, but she was willing to start learning. There were probably dozens of books on the subject, or night classes or DVDs.

  Similarly, thanks to the power of the internet her holiday would be easy to pull together. She would just need to convince her mother or Robyn to come and help with babysitting duties. She was brave, but not brave enough to take on two toddlers and Mickey Mouse all at the one time.

  Swearing – well, that would be a piece of piss and sorting out the office would be easy. She was unlikely to find anything that would turn her life upside down again. She would actually enjoy the task. She hated the office – its austere feel had been out of keeping with the rest of the house. She had begged Seán to furnish it with light woods and neutral colours but he’d opted for mahogany and bottle green. The room was suffocating and stuffy even on the coldest of days and she would take great pleasure into making it an altogether more welcoming sanctuary for her blossoming hobby.

  The only thing that gave her collywobbles – the major collywobbles – was confronting Caitlin, but she knew that for closure she had to do it. Still she wasn’t sure how. It wasn’t as easy as walking into a shop, or going on online or calling the local builder.

  Niamh wanted to do it, but she didn’t want to make a complete eejit of herself in the process. She was worried she would lose her cool and start to cry, or worse still lose her cool and slap the silly cow square around the face.

  After all, she couldn’t confront Seán – not properly. All she had of him was a gravestone, but Caitlin, she was very much alive and if all reports from Derry were to be believed very much getting on with her life as if she hadn’t been responsible for tearing the heart out of her friend’s life.

  Niamh cringed as she remembered Caitlin’s tearstained face as she arrived at the house in Rathinch the morning after Seán died. She had pulled her into a hug and sobbed while Niamh had held on to her, unable to break through her shock to cry herself.

  “I can’t believe it,” Caitlin had sniffed. “I just can’t believe he is gone. How can he be gone?” she had wailed, pouring herself a large glass of brandy and knocking it back.

  “I don’t know,” Niamh had mumbled, sitting down and holding her head in her hands. “Oh Cait, what am I going to do? I can’t do this on my own. I’m not supposed to do this on my own.”

  “I don’t know, darling. I don’t know what any of us is going to do.”

  * * *

  It was obvious in hindsight – annoyingly, stupidly obvious. When Caitlin had held on to her sobbing that day it was because of her own grief – not any concern for Niamh or Connor or Rachel. She had come to the funeral in black, complete with a too-big hat and a red rose to drop onto the coffin. Niamh hadn’t thought much of it at the time – she had been too busy trying not to throw herself into the grave after Seán – but now she saw Caitlin for what she was – a shameless bitch of a tart who didn’t care who she hurt.

  Now that the rage was coursing through her veins, Niamh got up and jumped in the shower. There was no better time than the present to start on that office. She pulled on her tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt and lifted the roll of bin bags from the top of her dressing table and set to work.

  Opening the door and switching on the light she saw his blasted Post-its flutter with the draft. Some fell to the floor and she simply lifted them and shoved them in the bin. She didn’t bother to read them – feck knows what they might have said.

  She looked at his shelves of law tomes – books he liked to have just to look important. Sure he used some of them but many were there for show. Still, she thought, they were worth a lot of money and some law student somewhere would be grateful for them. Stacking them up at the door she resolved to drop them into the university the next time she was in Derry – she would get Mary to stick a notice up in the library advertising the books as free to a good home.

  The drawers of his desk were anally tidy – a complete opposite to his office life – but then everything had to be just so in Rathinch. Mess was not allowed. Still it made her job easier as she tipped the contents into bags.

  When that was done she walked to the windows – the musty dark-wood blinds gave the room a glum look so she pulled them down and opened the windows wide allowing the biting cold November air to sweep in. The coolness caught her by surprise but she breathed the fresh air deep into her lungs and thought of just how her life had turned around.

  She was still standing there, staring, when Mary walked into the room. Walking up behind her daughter, she put her arms around her.

  “I’m worried about you, darling,” she said.

  “There’s no need,” Niamh replied, closing the window and turning around to face her mother.

  “You’ve had an awful time. You must still be in shock. Darling, you need to take it easy. Doing this,” Mary said, gesturing to the bin bags and the empty desk “might seem like the right thing to do now, but you are grieving. I don’t want you to wake up in two weeks, two months or two years and regret erasing every trace of him.”

  “But ‘him’, Mum, I don’t know who ‘him’ was any more. He wasn’t the man I thought he was and this – all this – was just an act.”

  “You can’t say that! He loved you.” Mary looked stricken. It was as if she believed in Seán more than she believed in Niamh.

  “He might have done, Mum. But he didn’t love me, or this, or anything enough. And while all this stuff is nice – and all of it is a part of him – it’s not what I thought it was and what I want now is reality. I don’t want to live a lie any more.”

  Niamh was impressed with herself. She was impressed that she remained calm while talking. She was impressed she didn’t weep and wail and ge
nerally make a show of herself. She would like to say she felt numb, but it was not numbness that was getting her through this now. It was anger.

  Mary just nodded. “Just think about it,” she said. “Think about what you are doing.”

  “Do you think,” Niamh asked, the calmness remaining, “that I’ve thought of anything else this past week? It’s there wherever I am. When I look at the twins, it’s there. When I look at this blasted house, it’s there. From the white fecking sofa to the marble floors to the poncy claw-footed bath that’s not even long enough to get a good fecking soak in.”

  Mary looked horrified and Niamh could not help but wonder if she was simply shocked that Niamh could dare criticise the house – this thing of absolute beauty.

  She knew her mother loved her, but she sometimes wondered if she loved the fecking claw-footed bath more.

  And it dawned on her that her mother was embarrassed by all this. She was supportive, of course she was, but there had been a certain kudos in being the mother-in-law of a dead highly successful solicitor. That kudos would fade away when everyone found out what a dirty-balled bastard he really was.

  Mary loved her and her intentions were good, but she wanted to keep this under wraps. She wanted this – this perfect everything – to remain perfect.

  She would be in for some shock, Niamh realised , when she realised the holy row her daughter was planning on kicking up when she confronted Caitlin head on.