“Wait.” Millie scrambles to her feet. “I do need to see that file, please.”
O’Connor, who’s not far from the exit, looks with longing toward it.
“Please,” says Millie.
“Let me ask you something, Mrs. Gogarty,” he says. “What do you think you’d do with that information?”
She knows, at least vaguely, what she would do. She would make Sylvia look her in the eye. She would get back what’s hers.
“Please, it’s very important. She stole the only possession I give a fig about and it happens to be very valuable. It was a ring. From my husband.”
“Sit down a moment.” He joins her back at the table and pats her hand and says, “I have to tell you something, Mrs. Gogarty, and I’d like you to brace yourself, can you do that?”
She nods.
“There is no file.”
“What do you mean?”
O’Connor sighs. “Look. I don’t know whether you’re misremembering or whether you’ve been misinformed. But there was no agreement made here with anyone. We just don’t do that. That sort of thing—banning trips abroad and home care aides—we don’t have that kind of authority. It’s not something that could have happened.”
“There was no paperwork? With the courts?”
“No paperwork,” he replies. “No deal.”
Millie gawks at him as the truth of the situation presents itself.
“I’m guessing it was your son who explained all that to you?”
* * *
Millie pedals in a light drizzle back to her ransacked home. She paces her shabby rooms with a restless energy. Tricked again, this time by her own bloody son. All of this is his fault. He’d unwittingly invited a criminal into Margate. And she can’t even locate the woman since the whole setup was bollocks to begin with. Millie’ll be destitute. She’ll have to start shoplifting for survival, stealing bottles of milk from the neighbors’ steps (metaphorically speaking, though she still longs for the days of dairy delivery), pushing jars of jam up her sleeve. Come to think of it, she might as well march to the main road, stick out her thumb and get a lift back to Rossdale, and give up.
She pours a whiskey—her Peter’s salve for stress—and slugs it down, but it does nothing to soothe her. Maybe a bath. And another nip. She strips out of her clothes, brings the glass decadently in with her and within minutes is immersed and feeling slightly calmer, thinking America. Sylvia must be in America.
When the tub is near to full, Millie turns the water off and hears a creak, distant but real. She sits up and clutches the sides of the tub, for now footsteps sound from the back of the house and they are coming toward her. There’s a squatter in Margate. A gypsy or a drug addict or maybe it’s Sylvia, returning to pillage the rest of her worldly goods. The steps seem to halt and hover just outside her very door. Millie climbs out of the bath gingerly; this is no time for a fall. She snaps a stiff towel from the rack and wraps it round herself. There is no exit other than the door; a house cat could barely fit through the only window and, anyway, she’s done enough window clambering for one old lady for one day. She grabs the ancient toilet scrub brush in one hand and a can of hair spray in the other. She must look a fright—pink shower cap atop her head, scant green towel barely covering her.
Millie tiptoes to the door. She envisions a massive burly man in a black balaclava or a skinny junkie with acne. The door handle shifts down slowly and Millie screams.
“Gran?”
“Aideen?”
“It’s me.”
Millie drops her weapons as the door swings open and, for some reason, her granddaughter is standing before her with a suitcase.
“What are you doing here? Why are you not in Millburn?”
“Why are you not in Rossdale?”
Millie squints at the girl and then the case in total befuddlement. A memory seizes her, a glorious memory.
Aideen says, “Something terrible has happened.”
“Luggage tag!” Millie cries, pushing past her granddaughter and down the hall.
44
As a kid, Kevin had done a few runners, brief and banal, so his concern with Aideen’s disappearance, initially, is low-grade. From the storage closet, she would have had to either pass him (she didn’t) or head directly outside. He walks the perimeter of Fair House under a doomsday sky at a calm enough pace, calling her name and scanning the great lawn and picnic tables and courtyard and hockey pitch where two girls are very obviously smoking. At least, he thinks, Aideen’s not thus inclined.
He rings her phone three times to no avail. He does a quick check of her dorm room—bereft of students at this hour—and a pass at each of the other rooms, first through sixth year. Then the dining hall. School foyer. Gym. Lockers. Toilets, where a small child with militarily precise plaits gives him the stink-eye.
“Girls only!” she scolds.
Story of my life, thinks Kevin.
His anxiety begins to build, not because he’s afraid he won’t find her—he will—but because he needs to do so quickly. The last thing they need is for the school to learn of Aideen’s little disappearing trick. She’s fucked as it is and he won’t be able to assuage the powers that be this time round.
Kevin’s finishing up his sweep through the Millburn halls when “Rossdale” flashes up on his phone. What now? Has Mum propositioned an elderly gent in a dark corner? Or trapped some aging lady in a wheelchair in order to deliver a monologue on the inherent injustice of paying for parking in the village? Kevin does as he always does, which is to send the call to voice mail posthaste.
Now Ms. Murphy is suddenly bustling toward him, but he doesn’t panic since her bifocals are like two wedges of bulletproof glass—she appears to see nothing until it’s upon her. He slips easily through the front school doors. Aideen’s little game of hide-and-seek is decidedly not fun, and getting less so with every search zone he clears. Kevin stops to block out all noise and distraction, but cannot think where his daughter has gone, and, with growing unease, retraces his steps, beginning with her dorm room.
His daughter’s bed is predictably unruly, the only one of eight whose duvet is knotted up and dangling mid-cliff from its standard-issue mattress. Her sheet looks to have been yanked off each corner, as if Aideen wrestles rather than sleeps here. Kevin opens her cubby: spray deodorant, an enormous palette of metallic eye shadows, a sample size of Eternity Eau De Parfum. It’s a curiously girly collection for a girl like Aideen. He stretches the sheet back onto the bed and then punches her flattened pillow in frustration, only to hit a hard shape, a rectangle, through the pillowcase.
It’s a spiral-bound notebook, marked, redundantly, “PRIVATE” and “CONFIDENTIAL.” He is mildly comforted that at least his daughter has a place to deposit whatever it is that goes on inside her head. As he’s replacing it in the pillowcase, a number of loose sheets flutter from it onto the bed. Which he takes to be a sign.
There once was a mother called Grace
With a warm and a beautiful face
I watch her leave
It’s like I grieve
No wonder my life’s a disgrace.
Kevin puzzles over her verse. In one sense, it reads like classic, histrionic schoolgirl angst, yet he can’t help but feel upset at how mature and cynical it is, with its whiff of irreversible doom. And sad.
Aideen is sad?
He reaches for the second scrap.
If I had a dinghy
I’d put it in the sea
I’d want it plain, not blingy
The boat would be for me.
My sister’d stay onshore
While I undid the ties
I’d push off with my oar
And then I’d scream GOODBYE!
Kevin feels almost giddy by what is so clear: his daughter, his kooky, clever, stubborn Aideen, is a writer, or trying to be, and a good one, too. She’s gunning toward truth, as he himself once was. So enamored of this realization is Kevin that he fails to sense the energy shift i
n the room. In it, now, is a girl in an unkempt school uniform, her blond waves streaked through with stripy hot pink chunks, like wads of taffy, which frame a bone-sharp face smattered in a surplus of freckles.
The girl does not acknowledge Kevin, though she approaches the bunk area he currently occupies, moving to the bed directly beside his daughter’s. Kevin shoves his disturbing discoveries back into the notebook and puts the lot away.
He faux-coughs. “I’m looking for Aideen Gogarty. You haven’t seen her, have you?”
The girl shakes her dyed splotches and pulls open the drawer beneath her bed.
“Are you a friend of hers?”
A pause, and then she says, “Kind of” and begins gathering a pile of tops, one by one, with a sort of mournful torpor. “Are you her dad?”
“Yes and I really need to find her. If I don’t, she’s going to be in an even worse pickle than she already is.”
The girl shrugs.
“Are you not supposed to be in class right now?”
She says nothing, and Kevin turns away. He needs to get back on the trail, but he is at a serious loss; at this point, he’s swept every student-permissible nook of Millburn School.
Despite the young lady’s frosty mien, manners compel him to say goodbye. She is intently regarding herself in a mirror affixed to the interior of her cupboard door, dabbing beneath her eyes with nude liquid goop from a tube. At the top of the mirror, he notices, is a sticker: “BRIGID” is spelled out in rainbow bubble lettering.
“Brigid Crowe?”
She nods, nonplussed, and darts a series of compacts and lip gloss sticks into a bag.
“Ah,” says Kevin, studying her more closely, the freckles taking on a more subversive air. “You’re in your own pickle.”
Brigid snorts.
A message flashes up on his phone, from Mick, and Kevin involuntarily reads it.
Mum swears yr mum was cycling by the house this am??
Gone daft.
Immediately a second message follows.
My mum daft I mean. Beers tonight?
Kevin pockets his phone. “Looks as if you’re going somewhere?”
“Yeah, on to the next shithole.”
But her voice, for all its defiance, wavers and Kevin understands why his daughter is drawn to her. What was her story again? Aideen had thrown her name around quite a bit in those first weekends home, but he can’t recall a single detail beyond her father having some sort of glamorous profession.
“Have you been expelled?”
“No.”
Which means, reasons Kevin, his daughter may also be in the clear. Just. “But you’re leaving?”
“They phoned my dad. He thinks this place is crap, not strict enough. Not that he would have a clue.”
“We’re not all so clueless as you girls might think, you know. There is usually a reason for our madness.”
“He’s never even been here.”
“To the school?”
“Never.”
“Not the first day?”
“And not the last one either.” She zips up her bag and walks to the door.
“Well,” he says, with a stab of empathy for Brigid Crowe despite her hideous and undue influence on his own child. “Listen, best of luck then.”
She reaches the door and turns back. “Try the river.”
“Sorry?”
“Across the road, under the bridge. We sometimes go there after school.”
45
Ripping down the M-50 with Gran at the helm after a close call with the wing mirror of a passing taxi, Aideen is keenly reminded of Dad’s growing belief that Millie Gogarty ought to be relieved of her car keys. With one hand, Aideen clutches the door handle; with the other, she swipes away the frequent evidence of her parents’ rising panic as they try and fail to locate her. This just in, from Dad:
PHONE ME ASAP WHERE R U
The fact that his text messages are all in caps doesn’t concern Aideen as much as their glaring absence of punctuation. Under no circumstances does Dad fuck with grammar. Meaning, these circumstances are off the charts.
Back at Margate, Aideen had finally succumbed to her grandmother’s multiple rationales. Mum and Dad, began Gran, don’t let Aideen make any of her own decisions, do they? Sure they don’t. In fact, they treat her as if she’s a child, do they not? And she’s sixteen years of age. Gran herself knew girls practically married at that age. It’s all unacceptably patronizing, and she would know since that’s exactly how they treat Gran as well, lying to her about a fake deal with the police, checking her into that house of horrors where “clients” are always croaking and if they’re not, they’re spewing nonsense or collecting all sorts of rubbishy ornaments. Maybe it’s time Aideen makes up her own mind about some things, and a more than capable mind has she, Gran might add.
None of this was persuasive. Gran proceeded to point out that there was an off chance they might even bump into Sean though, she’d added, he might have been in on the scam.
“I don’t think so,” Aideen had said. “No way. But anyway, he doesn’t want to see me.”
“You don’t know that.”
Finally Gran had stared at her, wounded-eyed, and, in a deliberately small voice, which had its effect, she’d said, “I don’t think I can do this alone.”
The room had grown quiet while Aideen, compelled by Gran’s need, began to envision fleeing Dublin, temporarily, where trouble was closing in on her on every front, and boarding an airplane, going to America. She’s never been to America.
“We’ll hardly be gone a few days,” Gran went on, “just enough to pay a visit to the police, ya see, and look, I’ll tell your mum and dad it was my idea.”
“But we don’t even know where they are. It’s ludicrous! For all we know, they are in New York.”
“Why would they be? That was just part of her lie, wasn’t it, because all the big hospitals are there.” Gran had stood in the lounge waggling the brown luggage tag she’d filched from Sylvia all those weeks ago. “She’s gone home, Aideen, I’m certain of it. She’s probably tucking into a three-Michelin-star meal in…” She squints at the tag. “What does it say?”
“Clearwater.”
“Clearwater this very moment, compliments of yours truly.”
“I don’t know…” Aideen had said. “It’s too crazy. It’s insane. And I’m in so much trouble already.”
“Exactly,” Gran had said, patting her hands like the debate was over. “It’ll give everyone a little time to cool down. And, really, at the end of the day, what have you got to lose?”
* * *
Together, their first task had been to locate Gran’s car keys, which Aideen found on the very hook designated for them. Already Aideen was proving her indispensability. There followed a scramble of packing and gathering of Gran’s scraps of cash from cracked bowls and lint-lined trouser pockets and coin purses and two twenties stashed in the freezer. They counted up nearly €300 in total and a Visa card Gran had once used to buy a Hoover.
But now that she’s airport-bound for an unauthorized international jaunt, Aideen has time to reflect. What she can’t deny is the profound and unprecedented piles of shite she’s going to be in, even given Gran’s willingness to fall on her sword.
WHERE DID U GO
PHONE ME
A call from Mum pops up, third and counting. Aideen hesitates—she’d definitely score points for not going through with this. She glances over at her father’s mother, hands fisted tightly round the steering wheel, eyes on the road ahead. Aideen is shitting herself, but Gran looks fearless.
They ditch the Renault in long-term parking. How long, worries Aideen, will they be? Gran tosses the parking ticket stub in the bin as they sweep through the automatic doors. Aideen can’t decide—and is too scared to ask—whether there’s any meaning behind it.
“The fastest way round here is with a wheelchair,” Gran announces as if she does this sort of thing all the time. After they procure a c
hair, Aideen wheels Gran straight past epic lines to the Aer Lingus ticket counter. Gran tries to apply the unused credit from her canceled trip toward their tickets, but it’s too complicated to work out, and they haven’t the time. She retrieves her Visa card from the depths of her décolletage, the ruddy skin at her chest bunched vertically like a bellows. They luck onto the next flight, the last flight, to Florida—astronomically priced—which is boarding shortly.
Aideen steers Gran past great hordes of loud, bickering families already in the throes of nightmare travel fatigue. Boarding passes in hand, they are beckoned through a VIP line at security, where an officer frisks Gran, who laps up the attention with nonstop commentary despite the obvious discomfort of her humorless molester. All of this, needless to say, is severely embarrassing.
Aideen forgot that Gran is totally embarrassing.
Yet it’s almost… fun—moving through the terminal, checking and rechecking the monitors to confirm their boarding time and gate number (despite her wheelchair bluster, Gran seems pretty clueless about air travel protocol), being in charge of their documents (Gran would surely have dropped them somewhere between customer service and the ladies’ toilets) and their grubby money fold with its alarmingly meager quantity of cash. Even a teenager knows €300 won’t last long.
Still. Every turn they make, Gran waving to small children, every moving walkway they roll onto, people in their path part biblically. There’s a way Gran interacts with the world, even as it plainly dismisses her, that Aideen’s beginning to absorb. She thinks: fantastic.
THE MINUTE YOU GET THIS CALL ME PLS AM WORRIED
Now they’re at the immense, newly renovated duty-free shopping area, where their fellow travelers purchase, with unchecked frenzy, all manner of products, to Gran’s vociferous disapproval: scented body lotion, Waterford crystal vases, family packs of Ferrero Rocher, Chevron-striped cell phone covers, sheep-patterned coin purses, Belleek china overrun with shamrocks. Gran sniffs at it all and points toward the refrigerated cases in Wrights of Howth.
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