Good Eggs

by Rebecca Hardiman

  “With Aideen?”

  “No, Mr. Gogarty, not with Aideen. With Miss Bleekland.” He sees, in her ability to make clear her immense revulsion with a simple combination of caustic tone and blistering stare, why she’s such an effective headmistress: the woman is terrifying. “There’s a chance that during the gastric lavage, some particles might have entered the lungs. It’s called aspiration pneumonia. It’s treatable, but we don’t know anything else at the moment.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Ms. Murphy glares. “It means we don’t know anything else at the moment.”

  Kevin drops his head. “But how did this happen? I don’t understand. How did Aideen—how do you know Aideen did this? She’s not a cruel person. She’s…”

  “Mr. Gogarty, we understand that your daughter and another student stole a number of fish eyeballs from the chemistry lab sometime in the last few days and got hold of Miss Bleekland’s container of breath mints and, yes, I know it’s difficult to believe. I’ve been here twenty-seven years and this is…”

  Kevin feels dreadfully ill.

  “Miss Bleekland mistook the eyeballs for mints and ate them,” she continues. “As clearly was the point. Please compose yourself, Mr. Gogarty.”

  “I don’t understand. How do you know it was her?”

  “She confessed it to Nurse Flynn. She thought it would help the medics.”

  “Oh Jesus,” he says. “I need to see Aideen.”

  40

  Meanwhile in Dún Laoghaire, Millie stands in her back garden studying her windows. Weeks ago, she’d been evacuated from her sooty kitchen by her son, her scorched arm loosely wrapped in a kitchen towel (the wound has healed, though it’s left, in its wake, a sizable scar, an inch or so of itchy pale pink tissue that stretches across the width of her paltry arm like a sports watch). Now, the spare key missing, she finds she must breach Margate’s perimeter in a similarly unconventional fashion, by climbing through Kevin’s old bedroom window.

  Millie tests an old crate with her foot and it doesn’t give way. She lines it flush against the back wall and steps up on it and manages, with some effort, to achieve a toehold with her right foot in a sizable gap between crumbling bricks.

  She really has let the place go.

  It takes her three tries until she’s able to swing her other leg up, quite scrappily, and heft herself to the window frame and slide the thing open. With her luck, she’ll probably fall backward, smash her skull, and be found, concussed and amnesiac, and taken back to Rossdale, doomed to repeat this hellish cycle forever. Millie iron-grips the frame and climbs into the room, but she pitches forward and ends up splayed out on the carpet.

  She has a worm’s-eye view of Kevin’s childhood walls covered in dog-eared paper—a sky-blue toile featuring the same pattern of faded sleigh-riding boys waving to one another from snowy drifts. Massive and intricate cobwebs have usurped the ceiling corners. She closes her eyes for a little rest and awakes, sometime later, shivering. Was the room always this chilly?

  The house is silent. Millie goes into the sitting room and flicks on the lamp and hunts for the remote, a kneejerk act that makes her feel more at home than nearly anything. She finds it beneath a sofa cushion, but when she clicks on the TV, she realizes there is no TV.

  Her TV is gone.

  Millie’s first thought is that it’s in the repair shop. But no, Kevin had fixed it. Which leads Millie to her final, inevitable conclusion: her TV’s been stolen.

  Ergo, her house has been robbed.

  She casts her eye about the flawed, beloved chamber she knows better than any in the world with freshly suspicious eyes. Someone has definitely been here; things are awry. The CD player her son had gifted her long ago, a sleek, baffling device, has been ripped from its long-standing place on the bookshelf, leaving behind an impressively thick rectangle of dust. Her secretaire is open, the hinged desktop covered in a fantastic mess of papers and pamphlets, family photos, receipts, Christmas cards, lists. Some of this has rained onto her knockoff Persian rug.

  Millie gets down on hands and knees with mounting anxiety, for she knows her desk is the most likely location of Sylvia’s IOU. She comes across other official paperwork. Here is Peter’s will, obsolete, but every few years she rereads it; it’s a sort of proof of his erstwhile love for her, his silent devotion. The longer Millie can’t find that piece of paper, the more her memory of signing it dims, until she thinks, Did I make it up? But no: just before Sylvia had bid her a teary goodbye, before the fire, she and Sylvia had stood signing it in the kitchen.

  En route, she nearly trips over a pile of post at the front door. She’d quite forgotten about all the mail she’s missed. There’s little of interest here, just a handful of bills and two envelopes from the Bank of Ireland. She seizes upon the first of these only to discover that her checking account is overdrawn by €200. Which can’t be right. She has a good €3,000 in it. Millie rips open the second envelope—it’s her monthly statement—and makes quick sense of the first: seventeen withdrawals, all in sums of between €40 and €80, taken in the previous two months, some twice a day at different cash points in the village and beyond. The last withdrawal was made at Dublin Airport.

  Millie cries out.

  She can see Sylvia Phenning standing in the lounge with her thick sheet of hair and loud fingernails clicking on tabletops. She sees Sylvia—oh, treacherous traitor!—hovering tenderly nearby with a blanket and what, in retrospect, is so obviously mock concern, scorn even, snapping her smelly, sugary grape gum and asking slyly if Millie needs cash from the bank since Sylvia’s on her way into the shops anyway, it’s no bother.

  She has been the victim of an elaborate and devious con—not only seventeen unauthorized cash withdrawals, but a whopper of a loan in the name of a dying child! Kevin, it seems, has been right all along: Millie can’t cope. She’s an incomp. And a fool. An old incompetent, nearly broke fool.

  A dozen vignettes starring herself and her “friend” flood Millie’s mind, each recast through this new, nefarious filter, allowing now for her companion’s dark motives, the criminal designs spoiling every fond memory, as far back as the earliest days. No wonder Sylvia had been so willing, for instance, to protect Millie after the little accident at the supermarket, trying to get in with her charge, promising not to tell Kevin about the car.

  The car.

  Millie opens the front door, noting, as she passes through it, no sign of forced entry. Of course there isn’t. Sylvia Phenning just waltzed in, didn’t she, at any hour she pleased, with the key from beneath the fourth tile. She’s no eejit. Millie’s the eejit. She raises the garage door enough to crouch down and peek up. But the car is still there.

  Then again, if Sylvia were scampering off to America, she wouldn’t need a car. Still. Wicked, ghastly girl! How stupid is Millie Gogarty? Lapping it all up, the attention and the American treats and the cheap flattery, while the woman pranced around fetching tea and rubbing Millie’s sore feet and bringing her little bouquets and pastries, probably paid for with her own money, always volunteering to take on the extra chore. Like the time Sylvia decided to reorganize all the cupboards. Probably to case the joint, discover more treasure.

  Millie stops cold.

  She rushes back to her desk, the fact of its disorder now stunningly obvious—Sylvia had probably ransacked it to retrieve that IOU. In one of the secretaire’s many cubbies, Millie finds the cassette tape entitled 50 Classics for Relaxation. With decidedly unrelaxed hands, she opens it, and here’s the key to Peter’s safe, a tiny copper thing, like a dollhouse key, just where she’s kept it for years.

  “Yes,” Millie murmurs, relieved there’s one thing of import, her most valuable possession, Sylvia didn’t get her grubby mitts on.

  She brings it down to Peter’s room, for she has a powerful need to hold her ring in her hands. Given her current financial situation, she’ll probably need to bring it into town right away, have it appraised though the idea of pawning her dead h
usband’s ring, given at the start of their life together, causes her great distress.

  Moments later, standing in Peter’s closet gawping at the empty spot beside her shoes, Millie cops on as to why Sylvia hadn’t taken the key. She hadn’t needed it; she’s after running off with the whole bloody safe.

  41

  “Aideen?”

  Kevin raps gently on the door, a rap that would, in words, translate to, Let’s have a gentle chat, love, since his plan is to be a gentle and loving father and to gently and lovingly coax Aideen out of the storage closet. Others have tried and failed, including the headmistress standing curtly beside him, she whose patience with this morning’s fiasco—a poisoned staff member prostrate in a hospital bed, a hysterical adolescent confession followed by mute self-exile—appears to be waning. To pile on the absurdity, Rose Byrd is also present, having clipped her way most arousingly across campus in patent leather pumps and a feathery white angora jumper, which, despite his having recklessly detonated his marriage, Kevin has the urge to pet.

  His gambit is met with silence. He would like to rip the fucking door down and drag his ungovernable daughter from the storage closet and home to Dalkey to be thereafter grounded in perpetuity. But Kevin Gogarty plans to handle this in a calm and adult fashion; he will harness his connection with his daughter; he will be the one to lure her away from the mops and pails and disinfectants, whether by carrot or stick.

  He clears his throat and delivers a second, equally restrained knock, but to no avail. He drops his voice and turns to the matronly head of the school.

  “I wonder if I might have more success speaking with Aideen if it’s just the two of us?”

  Kevin considers the irony of his choice of words, given the epic parental failure his current predicament so blatantly conveys. After glowering at him, the old matron turns and shuffles off, her sensible shoes whispering like hostages gasping to be rescued with every step.

  “Mr. Gogarty,” she says as she’s about to cross the threshold into the corridor, “you realize this situation is untenable.”

  “Absolutely.” He nods and smiles confidently, as if they’ve just met at a cocktail gathering and parted as new friends.

  “I’ll give you a few minutes, but then I’m going to have to take further measures.”

  “Understood. Thank you.”

  As the headmistress steps away, Kevin dares not so much as glance at her assistant, whose presence adds greatly to a sort of unpleasant, off-kilter buzz he’s experiencing, as if he’s downed a few flutes of daytime bubbly on an empty stomach.

  “Miss Byrd,” says Murphy, beckoning the woman.

  Kevin’s not ready for Rose to be gone, not before he says something, though he’s not quite sure exactly what. He needs to offer some gesture to signify that no harm’s been done (untrue) and that all between them will, moving forth, be civil, if not cordial.

  “Miss Byrd?” he says.

  Rose turns to him with a face that’s priceless: there is yearning, maybe, but also sorrow and solidarity and friendship at least, the eyes squinting in kindness.

  “Don’t you tell a fucking soul about us,” she whispers. “Or I swear to God I’ll destroy you.”

  Kevin recoils.

  The squinting, he realizes, was probably more like a villainous narrowing of the eyes, the yearning more akin to hatred. Later, he will revisit this moment, freshly stunned, and wonder at the meaning, and the timing! Later still, about his gross lapse in judgment.

  Rose steps away, the rapid-fire clicks of her heels comically punctuated by her boss’s long-suffering footfalls. What a pair. Kevin turns from these terrifying women to his little girl and issues a more urgent succession of knocks on the door, six in all, hard enough that he can feel their vibrations.

  “Aideen,” he hisses. “Open up this door right now. Right this instant. This is absolutely—Jesus, this is—this is a very poor choice, Aideen!”

  He tries to picture what she’s doing in there. If she’s crying, it’s silently; if she’s moving, it’s stealthily. Maybe she’s wiping the shelves with a rag and just taking the piss, enjoying the attention? Lord knows, between the shitstorm of home and having moved in with Maeve and Mick, he hasn’t given her much lately.

  “You’re making this much worse on yourself with every single minute you stay in that room. If you don’t come out, you’re going to be in even hotter water and you’re in enough already. Tell me what happened. Right now!”

  Throughout this futile soliloquy during which he feels the power between them decisively shift, Kevin’s daughter remains mute. Christ, he used to be good at negotiating with the emotionally unpredictable. In the short time since he stopped producing glossies and persuading celebrity toadies to grant him access to their clients, this has sort of become his thing: the unsung parental mishmash of listening and redirecting, the ability to distract, to garner a laugh, tell a tale, provide support yet gently nudge, to feel his children’s pain as he guides them to the right moral and practical choices, and generally, with crossed fingers, hope they don’t turn out full-grown cretins.

  “Look, I’m sure you didn’t mean for any of this to happen because I know you wouldn’t hurt anyone. This is just not something you would do. I mean, it’s one thing if you and your sister have a go at each other, that’s normal, but this is…”

  The mobile in his pocket chimes. He pulls it out and “Wife” lights up the screen. Oh, now she’s available? Now she’s interested? Never mind his torrent of calls, his being here on-scene and she being, decidedly, there. He taps “Ignore.”

  “I’m guessing this was your friend’s idea? What’s her name? Was she the one who put the—” He can’t even. “Or was it you? Look, if you don’t tell me your side of this, then I’ll have to ask her. I’ll have to ring up her parents.”

  He sighs. “You did the right thing telling them what Miss Bleekland… digested. But you need to tell me what exactly happened, Aideen. You have to come out and face the music. And, look, I’ll face it with you.”

  He checks his watch, wonders if the headmistress has made it back to command central where she will soon summon the handyman to resolve this escalating problem.

  “But one thing you can’t do is stay in there forever. Firstly, you’re going to have to use the toilet at some stage, right? And then you’re going to get hungry. You’re going to get thirsty. Tired. Your nails are going to need to get trimmed or you’ll end up like that weird woman in the Guinness Book, you remember? Albanian I think, with the curved nails, the world’s longest nails, like two meters long, hideous talons. You realize she can’t do a thing with those? She can’t shake someone’s hand without slashing them to ribbons. She can’t send a text message. The horror! In fact, all she can do is sit at her kitchen table and wait for the Guinness photo crew to arrive every year. Do you really want to be that woman?”

  More silence. He knocks on the door.

  “Right then. Well.” Think, he commands himself. He wants simply to pierce her impenetrable soul—is that so much to ask? Kevin mines his own past for some knot of connection, some lowest common denominator to bridge them. He thinks back on his own teenaged transgressions—underage drinking, smoking fags, sneaking out, sneaking in, sneaking girls out and in, unlicensed driving. None relatable in this context. He tries to call up some moment of desperation in his life. He remembers at one of his London stand-up gigs, he’d been riffing about men in pubs and then, hopping from the stool, he imitated an old man coming home from the market, hands fumbling in his front pockets. Feigning dismay, he’d said, “Plums? I don’t remember buying any plums.”

  Look, it wasn’t his greatest work, but the total silence seemed like overkill. He recalls staring out at the black room, the terror of that. With the spotlight glaring at him, Kevin could see only outlines of humans, a roomful of dark lumps. His impulse was to leg it offstage posthaste and he stood trying to decipher whether the exit was left or right when he heard, from somewhere toward the back, a ripple
of familiar laughter. It was Grace. She was there. She didn’t hate the plums.

  “I’m here, Aideen, OK, can we not just talk this through?”

  She snorts.

  “Oh, we can’t talk?” Kevin says. “We’re not friends now?”

  “Friends! Please. You didn’t want to talk when you sent me to this place.”

  He hears a shifting, like she’s switched positions.

  “I never wanted to come here,” Aideen says with strong feeling. “But you didn’t want to hear that. You take Nuala’s side every fight, every time, and you have no idea, you have no clue. You won’t even listen.”

  Nuala? What daft nonsense is this?

  “You never listen.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Is that true? “OK, maybe that’s partially true. I’ve been—” He pauses to reflect and then says, “Yes, you might be right. I’m sorry. And look, I know you may be stressed with what’s happening with your mum and me. But that’s temporary. That’s not anything you need to worry about.”

  From behind the door, Kevin hears a quiet sniffling and then a gasp of breathy release, like crying.

  “Ah, Aideen.”

  She emits a sort of choked sob. “I didn’t know that was gonna happen, Dad! It was just a joke, a stupid joke. I didn’t even want to do it. I just got the mints from her bag. I didn’t put the—I had no idea it would make her sick.”

  “You didn’t mean to hurt her,” he says, powerfully relieved.

  “I didn’t! Is she going to be OK?”

  He sighs. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  His phone bleats. “Wife” again.

  He needs to tell Grace so much: “Aideen has abetted in the poisoning of the housemother. I miss you. My new roommate is an elderly, chain-smoking nag but, funnily enough, not such a bad egg who follows me round her house launching disapproving missiles in your defense (she seems to think you’re the bee’s knees). Aideen’s fuckup was a terrible fuckup, but her intentions weren’t cruel. I wish you were here. I need your wisdom. You are the bee’s knees.”