Eggshell Days (15 page)

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When Jonathan closed his eyes, on the leather sofa at midnight, he could still see the blurred glow of the chapel windows projected on his lids. He thought about cement, and suffocation, and rot setting in, and through-drafts, and how good it would be to feel that he could make a difference. He found himself thinking fleetingly about Tamsin Edwards again, too. Then he fell asleep, trying but failing to keep pace with the collective breathing of the female branch of his family, eight feet and a million miles away from him in bed.

8

Cathal sat in front of the picture window of his riverside flat at the desk his father had left him, and tried to stop his thoughts trampling over everything that was good about his world. There wasn't much to trample on. His job, once fulfilling, now bored him. His ex-wife, Christine, who once used to phone him twice a day at work, could now barely be bothered to speak to him. His boys, once footballers, were now into baseball. (It was worse than that, even, but the fact that they were rapidly becoming another man's sons was too painful to cite.) And on top of all that, the second most unthinkable thing was at stake, too. Niall.

He used to be able to see the estate agent's point about it being therapeutic after a hard day's work to look out at all those perfectly restored barges twinkling on the Liffey, but now he wanted to push wide the window and shout at them all to bugger off and twinkle somewhere else.

The view was rewritten history at its worst. The area used to be strictly out of bounds to him as a child; not that he took any notice. But with the wave of a developer's wand, the slums were now a chi-chi enclave for city dwellers on fat salaries, a status symbol to go with the Armani suit and the Ferrari.

“The docks are not a suitable place for a son of mine,” his mother had said when he'd told her where he was buying. And in one way, she was right. They didn't suit him, not now.

He'd bought the flat out of spite, to make Christine angry. She'd put their name down on the show home's Interested list during the death throes of their marriage and tried to use it as an ultimatum: either we buy one or I go. “Who do you think I am?” he'd said in front of her sister. “Bono?”

But now that she couldn't care less how or where he lived, it had lost even that limited appeal. When he looked out on the river, he didn't see the twinkling barges, he saw the generations of families who had been hounded out by the property pioneers. Where were they now? Where did they go when they needed their childhood back? He was so deep into the sentimentality of parenthood that it didn't occur to him most of them were busy trying to forget they had had one.

He didn't usually notice Dublin's incessant seagull chatter but today the birds sounded as if they were laughing at him so he got up and shut the window. Then he sat back down and picked up the photograph of Maya on the stairs at Bodinnick. He didn't know what he expected to see that he hadn't seen any of the countless other times he'd looked at it, but he looked all the same, waiting. Waiting for her face to become Emmy's, or a stranger's. But it didn't. He could still only see his own face staring back. That, and Niall's, blotchy with tears and disbelief, begging him to tell him it wasn't true.

Maybe it wasn't. At times over the last few days, he'd thought he must be going mad, that finally the divorce and the cruel removal of his boys to America had got to him. He wondered if the effort of hanging on to fatherhood by the skin of his teeth had sent him crazy.

“Get a grip,” he said out loud. But there was no point telling himself to get a grip because he couldn't find anything to hold on to.

Why all this now? Why, after ten years of arm's-length contact, did he think he had the right to hold Maya's hand? Because that's what he'd been imagining himself doing, walking with her through the streets of his city, buying her something she pointed out to him in a shop, correcting her driving skills. He'd imagined his mum brushing her hair, and his boys asking him what she looked like, and his mum saying yes, she'd babysit, as long as he was back by ten.

There was one scene that had returned with a vengeance. It might have been the first time he'd seen her, or maybe the second. Eight years ago, he had called Niall from a pub down the road from his firm's Kensington offices and suggested a pint, and he had sat on a stool looking forward to a blokey drink and waiting to see his brother come though the swing doors. Which he had duly done—with a baby in tow.

“Don't tell Emmy,” Niall had said. “She'd kill me. We're supposed to be at playgroup, aren't we, Maya?”

“I don't like playgroup,” Maya had said. “I like pubs.”

She'd been between two and three, although there was something adult about her, too. She had been such compelling company that he had almost ignored Niall and played a game flipping beer mats across the table with her. Even then, there had been an element of competition between them for her affection. More than that. A genetic familiarity. A sense of already knowing her.

“I don't wear nappies when I go to sleep,” she'd announced standing on the chair and pulling up her checked skirt. “I jus' wear this one cos is very dangerous for boys to go in girls' loos an is very dangerous for girls to go in boys' loos, too. You can fall in big loos, and I dun wan a fall in big loos, do you? I just pee in this today. Not amorrow, jus today. Don't tell Mummy.”

“I won't,” he promised.

Another memory had the same element of collusion. Emmy had gone away with a new boyfriend for a few days, somewhere reachable and romantic—Paris, perhaps, or Prague—and Niall had come to Dublin with Maya, having been left holding the baby yet again.

One would expect Niall to be awkward around a child for so long, nervous at the prospect of being left in sole charge of a seven-year-old girl, hopeful of offloading the burden on his mother. But no. Niall had been in his element, taking Maya everywhere he could, showing her off, pretending to his mates she was his, letting her in on the joke. She'd called him Daddy the entire weekend.

Daddy. Cathal could hear her saying it and this time it wasn't so much of a joke. But if nothing had occurred to him then, why should it occur now? The lack of reason made it all the more sinister. Perhaps it was occurring because it was time for it to occur. Perhaps it was life catching up with them all.

The truth careered round the loop of his mind like an electronic rabbit on a dogtrack, always a few seconds faster than his brain. Distractions were like stepping stones to help him reach the other side of the day, but the moment he walked back into his flat on the “luxury” development his firm of architects had so spectacularly lost the contract for, the rabbit was out of its trap, going just slowly enough at first to let him believe it was worth chasing one more time and then
whoosh!

It was going so fast now, it had persuaded him for a split second to give up the chase and take the easy option. To ask Emmy.

One hand rested on the telephone, his address book open in front of him, the other held the battered snap between thumb and forefinger. He felt perilously close to upturning many lives. The photograph had developed dogears since he'd acquired it—okay, nicked it—from his brother's wallet, which was hardly surprising given its movements in the last fortnight. Inside jacket pocket, back jeans pocket, briefcase, in tray, out tray, sittingoom table, kitchen table, bedside table. It had been propped against computer screens, alarm clocks, coffee jars. It had been shoved in cutlery drawers, desk drawers and glove compartments.

Sometimes, the need to look at her had been physical and he kept expecting the knot of hope to undo itself, but so far it had tightened and tightened, like wet rope.

Anger, if he could summon it, was productive, at least in the way a cough can be called productive. The more unpleasant phlegm he could spit out in private, the better he might fare in public. If Maya—he could barely think it without scaring himself half to death—if Maya
was
his child, and that information had been kept from him, then … well, then what?

But he couldn't maintain the anger, not when he thought about the timing. When he and Emmy had slept together that forgettable, pointless, lazy night, Christine had been at home in Ireland practicing her breathing for the birth of their first child. If he was angry at all, it was with himself for being so lethargic about his marriage. He didn't realize in those days that being a good husband allowed you to be a good father. He must have thought it was possible to be one without the other. He never used to think about wives and mothers being different halves of the same equation.

All those perfect moments he'd been allowed with Christopher would have been in jeopardy. That feeling that was slipping so fast from his memory, the knowledge that at last he had done something to be proud of, would have been tainted by knowing that he had also done something to be ashamed of.

The acknowledgment made his anger subside into a rather pathetic gratitude. Gratitude to Emmy for not blowing it all up in his face, gratitude to Niall for being some sort of a father, gratitude to Maya for (presumably) being the kind of child who took what she was offered without question. It was still possible, of course, that Niall had helped to deliver and raise the daughter of a complete stranger—but those eyes. They swallowed him whole every time he looked into them. Now the compulsion, the fixation, the need to know—he didn't know what to call it—had reached danger level. He was at his desk for the purpose of finishing work on an already overdue project but when he looked down at the lackluster plans for another two-story extension over the garage on another semidetached family home, he knew he could do it with his eyes shut, in his sleep, when sleep came maybe.

In the meantime, he thought he would go and see his mother. Fathers are all very well but mothers are something else again, he realized, glimpsing for the first time how his own two boys had made the only decision available to them.

*   *   *

His mother had no compunction about doing what she was doing with the kitchen scissors. Mary O'Connor tried her best to forgive most things, but when it came to messing up innocent lives for the sake of something as selfish as your own desires, well, that was different. Disappointment was not something she dwelt upon, but the fiasco of her eldest son's marriage and the version of family life her grandsons were being offered really hurt. She felt Joseph's hurt, too, even when he'd been the best part of twenty years in his grave.

Trying to eat her lunch while watching a woman apparently enjoy confessing serial infidelity to her reeling husband on live TV had been the last straw. She hadn't been able to eat her chicken and broccoli pie for the distaste she felt for it all. But then her pies never tasted quite the same now they were a shadow of their former selves.

Before she had succumbed to the scissors, she had cleared out her cupboards, and a pile of family-sized pie dishes now sat on the hostess trolley, ready for the church auction. There was no one she could hand them on to. Her daughters had all they needed and more.

Whatever happened to the sanctity of marriage? she wondered as she cut the same slim figure out of each photograph. Whatever happened to trust?

The wedding ones had gone straight in the outside bin, glossy white album with tissue interleaves and all, but there were others which had to stay. She couldn't bear to think of Christopher's or Billy's face staring up out of the rubbish at her, but nor could she bear to think of Christine's doing the same from the bookshelf. She didn't feel bad about her actions. She wasn't a vindictive or bitter person, she was hurt. When Joseph was alive, they'd shared their uglier emotions, taken them to church together, and silently left them there, but now she had to deal with them on her own. It would be easier to cut Christine out altogether, rather than be reminded every time she opened a book. And who would know? It wasn't as if anyone would ever ask to see them again.

Cathal arrived almost too soon.

“Oh, it's not Sunday already, is it?” she teased, bustling gratefully into action with cake tins and loose tea. The photographs were only just back in their places, the snipped remnants in the kitchen bin. She banged the lid shut.

“Sure it is. Have you not been to mass?” he said, bending down to kiss her soft cheek. His face was cold, having frozen half to death standing for the last twenty minutes on the touchline of a football match between two unknown teams of ten-year-olds in the playing field at the back of the house. The field used to be his shortcut home from school, and in those days the back garden gate had always been left unbolted so that his father could come and watch him and Niall play every Saturday afternoon and his mother could come and call them in for their tea. But today, of course, the gate was locked and long overgrown with ivy and he'd had to go the long way round.

“Never mind,” he said. “Senility comes to us all.”

“If we're lucky,” she replied, touching his paunch and giving him a disapproving nod. She knew that curl of his lips well, from his being sent home from school camp for streaking, getting drunk at a funeral, taking his father's car without asking.

He was tempted to spill it all out there and then, among the neat Formica worktops and mug trees but her white hair lacked its Sunday grips and she looked tired.

“Are you okay, Mother?” he asked.

“Not so bad for one so old,” she said. “Was that Isabel catching you on your way in?”

“No, why?”

“Oh, just that Theresa has made her decision. She'll be having the baby after all.”

“She will? You'll be pleased about that.”

“If pleased is the right word,” she said wearily. “Are you going to tell me something cheerful?”

“Well…” He wished he could. “I'm actually after a photograph.”