Eggshell Days (35 page)

“Oh, like they'd let us.”

“Well, I think we should at least try. I've got no intention of going back, not after all this. We can't go back to our old houses. Other people live in them now.”

“We can go back after three months, stupid. And another few weeks isn't going to kill anyone.”

Jay ignored her. “Do you want to know a secret?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I heard them say they were definitely going to have another house meeting after supper, once we're in bed. I think it's the big one. We've got to try and listen. Once we know what the plan is, we'll have our own house meeting. We'll beat them at their own game. Come with me. Don't you dare say anything about this, right?”

The spy hole he'd found was perfect. It was down a medieval stone staircase which led from a closed door on the landing down to the kitchen. It was never used, because the door leading from the kitchen was permanently locked, besides being blocked by an oak church pew in front of it, and the key had been lost years ago. Anyway, in the winter, it would have been too cold to leave the doors open, either at the top or the bottom, because the staircase was a funnel for the wind. It was also a funnel for sound.

The back rest of the pew in the kitchen was a little lower than the keyhole, and the gap between the door and the wooden frame was just wide enough for you to press your ear against it and hear what people were saying. The most useful thing was that the pew ran along one side of the table, and Sita usually sat at the door end.

“If we're lucky, we should be able to get every word,” Jay said.

“Not if the music is on.”

“Nick the machine, then. Say you can't get to sleep without a tape.”

“No,” Maya said. “You say that. You're the one with sleeping difficulties.”

He couldn't dispute it. “Anyway, the way Mum and Dad were talking, it's not going to be a music sort of evening,” he told her grimly.

*   *   *

Niall's swollen face looked as if he had been in a fight, but he didn't care. He wanted to prolong the agony of his departure with one last pint in the Cott. He was still in that force field, not knowing how to break out, unable to remove himself from the place where he so wanted to be.

He knew he needed to leave Cornwall, but for the moment he couldn't. Beer usually helped, and he thought he had timed his drink carefully to avoid the regulars. Not carefully enough, though. As he walked out the back door from the public bar and up the slope that led to the car park, he bumped into Roy Mundy.

“Hello, boy. Why have you got a motorbike in the back of your van? I don't miss a trick, I don't.”

“Yes, you've told me that before,” Niall said joylessly.

“Well, I'm old. I repeat myself.”

“I've got to go back to London. I've had to hire the van just to take my stuff back.”

“Coming down again, are you?”

“No. It didn't work out.”

“You've only just bleddy arrived. You can't tell me it's all over already.”

“Yep.” Niall kicked a few stones around to give him a reason for looking at the ground.

“You all right, boy?”

“I'll live.”

“That's a shame.” Roy tried a chuckle, but it got no response. “We'll miss you.”

“Yeah. The others aren't leaving, though. They'll still be needing you.”

“I wasn't thinking about work, boy. I was thinking about my lunchtime pint.”

“You've got Jim. You'll be all right.”

Roy thought he'd have one last crack. “Women troubles, is it?”

“You got it.”

“That's all right, then. You'll be back,” Roy said cheerfully. “I'll put a drink in d'rectly.”

“I appreciate it,” Niall said. “Cheers, Roy. Say good-bye to Jim for me.”

“See you, boy.” He limped into the pub, his hand up. “Go careful, mind.”

The fat old plumber with the dodgy shoes and long line in acrylic school jumpers shouldn't have said that. It meant that Niall missed the opportunity to say good-bye to Jim Best in person, because when the electrician pulled in for his lunchtime pint Niall was too busy dealing with something in his eye to be able to look up and acknowledge him.

*   *   *

Darkness fell.

“It's a lot of money,” Jonathan said.

“A million pounds,” Asha whispered too loudly outside the door behind the pew.

“I've told you,” Jay whispered back crossly. “You're only allowed here if you keep quiet.”

Maya watched her mother twist a curl of burgundy foil from the neck of the wine bottle round and round her index finger. Her nails were bitten to the quick.

“You might be better off with it in your bank account,” Jonathan said.

“Money aside, I feel I ought to say sorry to you two properly,” Emmy said. “I know I've made a complete mess of it.”

“We've all done that,” said Sita.

Maya looked at Jay. He grimaced and put his finger to his lips. Things were not looking good. He was right. This meeting did sound like the big one.

“So,” asked Jonathan, “do we use Niall's departure as an incentive to regroup, or do we all pack up now and go with him?”

Maya's heart leaped. Jay's sank.

“We can't go anywhere until Bodinnick is sold,” Sita said firmly.

“Why not?” Emmy said.

“Money?” said Sita.

“We can live without savings,” said Jonathan.

“But we can't make a clean break if—”

“Don't. You know I can't do it without you,” Emmy said feebly. “It's not just your money. I don't want to be here on my own.”

“It's not only about you needing us, Em. We need you too.”

“Why?”

“Well, for a start, we can't afford to buy Bodinnick off you.”

“Have it.”

“Don't be silly.”

On the stairs, Jay put his head in his hands.

Emmy pulled the coil foil off her finger and stretched it. “You could always stay here and I could go back,” she said. “Now that they're happy at school and everything.”

Behind the door, Jay crossed his fingers.

“How?”

“You can live here as long as you want, for free. I mean it.”

“No, we can't.”

“Yes, you can. What's stopping you?”

“It's not right. That wasn't the vision.”

“Well, visions change.”

The children held their breath.

The adults shifted in their chairs. There was silence.

“Anyone want a beer?” Jonathan said.

“Bloody good idea,” Emmy said. “God, I can't bear this.” She got up from the table and wandered off, out of earshot.

“Damn,” Jay shouted when all three parents had gone. “Why do they
never
stick at anything?”

*   *   *

An hour and a half later, Maya sat down on the stone stairs again, grateful for her slipper socks. It was funny to think they had all learned to deal with the little things like getting cold feet at night just when it looked as if they'd have to leave. Well, not funny, stupid.

She peeped through the gap. Her mum and Sita were back at the table, sitting opposite each other. They were talking in low voices, but she couldn't see or hear Jonathan. The wine bottle was empty and another one was next to it. Her mum was smoking, and Maya couldn't be sure but it looked as if Sita had a cigarette too. They looked like they had looked at the very beginning, when they'd first come here, before the eggshell days, before Sita started work, when Niall was here. More together again.

She wondered if she ought to go and wake Jay, but he was fast asleep in bed, having talked himself into a coma about Plan A and Plan B, real estate agents and sit-down protests.

She had drifted off next to Asha for a while but something had kept her from real sleep. She had intended to go straight back to her own room and fall asleep under her own duvet but the lure of the spyhole was too strong and she had crept down to find out if she could hear anymore.

The first question she heard almost made her laugh out loud. It sounded like the kind of thing she heard in the playground.

“Who do you think Niall hates most?” Sita was asking. Out of who? thought Maya. It might be the man who first invented Irish theme pubs. He was always going on about them. He'd once said he'd like to bomb them all.

“Both of us,” Emmy said. Both of who? Sita and her mum? They were talking rubbish. Niall didn't hate anyone, apart from the pub man. Oh, and the Corrs.

“He won't feel like that for long.”

“I don't know. It was so terrible, seeing him when he came back in. I've never seen anyone look like that, you know, as if his whole world had just completely collapsed.”

“I have,” Sita said. “I've seen you.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“I was seriously worried, you know.”

Maya didn't understand. She was getting pins and needles and she shifted her position as carefully as she could. It took her a while to catch the words again after that.

Sita was talking. “… didn't occur to me that it was something to do with Cathal. I thought you were having trouble dealing with Niall and Kat. I can't believe you held it together as well as you did then, I really can't.”

Maya saw her mother spray a mouthful of wine over the table as she laughed, but it wasn't the sort of laugh that other people joined in.

“C'mon.”

“Have you told Maya?”

Maya jumped a little at her name and pressed her ear more tightly to the gap.

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don't know. My instincts tell me to trust the situation to work itself out.”

“What if she asks?”

“I don't think she will.”

“Cathal will stick with that, will he?”

Cathal? thought Maya, feeling the cold through her socks all of a sudden. What's he got to do with it?

“I've got to trust him, too. We both know it's got to be right. And what's he going to do? He's her father, for God's sake. He's going to want to get it right, isn't he?”

Father? Maya thought. Father? What father? Whose father? Then she remembered Cathal's fish face and how it had made him look like an old man.

Suddenly, she didn't want to hear anymore. She picked herself up and got herself back to her room as fast as she could, terrified that someone might catch her.

Her head spun for the briefest of moments. Cathal was her father. Was he? Was he really? Was that the question everyone was waiting to hear her ask? Was it? Well, it could wait. She didn't want to know. She was too tired. She was too disappointed. She wanted Niall. She wanted things to be like they were.

As she got into bed and turned to switch off the bedside light, she noticed Niall's black-and-white picture of her in its silver frame next to her bed. It had been put there to make her think he was coming back, but she knew now it was a good-bye present.

No. He wasn't allowed to say good-bye. If he wasn't going to come back on his own, she would go and get him. And if he had gone because of something to do with the question she was supposed to be asking, even if that question had something to do with Cathal, he could stop behaving like Emmy and grow up, as she had had to do, years ago.

*   *   *

Sleeping in the back of a transit van next to a motorbike in an unknown rest area because you were too pissed to drive was not very grown up at all, but Niall didn't feel like being mature. He had already made the most adult decision of his life by leaving Bodinnick. He wasn't ready to move on just yet.

The fat old plumber with the dodgy shoes felt like his only friend tonight, although what Roy would make of him chain-smoking, drinking Special Brew and listening to Elvis Costello in a van at midnight, Niall wasn't sure. But then he wasn't at all sure himself.

19

Maya didn't eat much breakfast.

“I'm saving myself for Mog and Dean's send-off,” she said, but the truth was she had no appetite. Her tummy was empty. It was making weird growling noises. But she couldn't think of one single thing she wanted to put inside it. Not even the smell of pasties in the Aga worked.

It was useful having everyone so preoccupied with Mog and Dean's departure. It meant she could do her own thing, which was turning out to be a strange, restless wandering through the house, going from room to room without purpose, unless it was to see if things looked different, now that she knew. They didn't. They looked exactly the same.

The sewing room door had been so firmly shut for so long that when Maya noticed that it was slightly open, she couldn't help herself. She kicked it open a little more, in anger. She was sick of secrecy. Her mum always used to say, “No secrets, eh?” and Maya had always truly believed that with all her heart. Now, of course, she knew differently. When grown-ups said they didn't want there to be any secrets, what they meant was they didn't want
you
to have any secrets from
them
. The other way round was fine. Apparently.

Her father wasn't a purple furry monster with three heads and eyes on stalks after all. He was Cathal, an ordinary man with a beer gut. Spot the anticlimax. She kicked the door again.

She felt as if she had lost something, but she was too young to realize that what she thought she had lost had never existed. Finding her dad had been a distant dream, and in it he had been whatever she wanted him to be. Now, though, he had to be Cathal. She couldn't pretend differently. It wasn't bad, exactly, it just wasn't the ending she would have written. If she had to have an O'Connor, she wanted Niall, but she had lost the choice, or, rather, her mum had taken it away from her.

If Emmy hadn't told Sita, Maya wouldn't have overheard, and then she wouldn't know—and if she didn't know, she could still dream. Her mum was a big mouth.