Instructions for a Heatwave (20 page)

“Ask me what?” he’d said jovially, putting an arm around Monica.

Monica tilted her head up towards him, her eyes bright with anger, with triumph. “Isn’t it true that Aoife was a nightmare baby and it’s because of her that Mammy takes all those pills?”

His face slid from his birthday-party smile into an expression of horror. His arm fell, slack, from Monica’s shoulders.

“Why would you say that?” he said quietly. “What a thing to tell her.”

There was no denial, no refutation. Aoife stood with the corner of the table pressing into her legs and let this fact wash through her: Michael Francis hadn’t said, That’s not true; he’d said, Why would you say that. And there was, she realized as she stood there, something about it all that made peculiar sense, as if she had been handed the final piece of a jigsaw she’d spent years puzzling over. Monica’s words fitted into a space inside her with sickening, exacting precision.

So she left without saying goodbye to anyone. She walked through the sitting room, where Hughie was bouncing up and down on the sofa, his face smeared with chocolate icing, where her father sat, holding on to the tail of Hughie’s shirt, so the child didn’t pitch off the sofa, where Claire was stacking cake plates, one on top of the other, where her mother was slicing herself another wedge of cake and saying something about the birthday boy, but Aoife couldn’t look at her, not at all.

Joe was the only one who raised his head as she moved through them all. In Michael Francis’s hallway, she stopped, like a toy whose batteries had run down. She stared at the coats and bags on the hooks behind the front door: a tweed coat with unraveling
leather buttons, a mackintosh with a buckled belt, a navy donkey jacket with glove-stuffed pockets, an impossibly small duffel coat with a tartan-lined hood, a snaking raspberry-wool scarf. She stared and stared at them, mesmerized, trying to work out which was hers and where her coat was, and when somebody touched her elbow, she jumped as if hit with a cattle prod.

Joe was standing next to her, putting a cigarette into his mouth. “Where are you going?” he said.

Aoife snatched up her coat from where it had fallen on the floor. “Nowhere,” she said, stuffing her arms into the sleeves.

He struck his lighter and lifted the flame to the end of his cigarette, all without taking his eyes off her face. “What’s going on, Aoife?” he said, and the lit end of his cigarette wobbled dangerously.

“Nothing,” she said, putting her head down to button her coat. “I don’t know what you mean. Nothing’s going on.”

“Between you and your sister.” He followed her through the door and down the path. “Aoife? I asked you a question.”

“I have to go,” she said, and clanged the gate shut behind her, walking as fast as she was able to without breaking into a run. At the end of the road, she turned. Joe was still standing on Michael Francis’s path, cigarette smoke unfurling behind him, watching her.

Aoife hesitates at the bottom of the library steps but then, with a surge of decisiveness, because she’s here, because she might as well, she goes up them, slinging her bag higher on her shoulder, through the double doors, and is enveloped in the merciful cool of the library.

·  ·  ·

Minutes later, she is followed by her brother and sister.

Monica stops in the vestibule. The gloom is a relief after the glare of the street and she would like to take a moment to rest
her eyes. Michael Francis, not paying attention as usual, barrels into the back of her, pushing her forwards so that she catches her elbow on a leaflet stand.

“Oh,” he says mildly, “sorry.”

Monica doesn’t answer, just rubs her elbow without looking at her brother. “I don’t think it’s significant,” she says, in a low voice. One should always whisper in libraries: she knows that.

“God, this place hasn’t changed much, has it?” Michael Francis is looking at the curving dark-wood staircase that goes up to the children’s library, the strange metal cagelike structure that contains a lift they were never allowed to use. His voice is louder than she is comfortable with. For all his education, he hasn’t learned the whispering rule. “Why not?” he says finally, leaning closer to look into the cage lift-shaft thing.

“Why not what?”

“Why don’t you think it’s significant?”

“It’s just a bit of paper,” she says, looking down again at the scrap Michael Francis had shown to her as they walked here. “Torn from somewhere. A letter. There’s no reason for it to mean anything.”

“But Mum said she didn’t recognize the handwriting. Didn’t know where it was from. And look at what it says. It’s so … apocalyptic.”

Monica feeds the syllables of this word through her mind, once and then twice.

Her brother glances at her. “Doom-laden,” he says quickly. “You know, as in—”

“I know what apoc—what it means, thank you very much.”

“Fine. I was just—”

“What are we doing here anyway?”

“We’re here to find Aoife.” He moves towards the doors into the main library and peers through the glass. “I thought we should talk about things. Without Mum hearing.”

Monica frowns. “Why?”

“Because we need some kind of a plan. You said so yourself.”

“I meant why can’t Mum hear?”

“Because she’s …” Michael Francis trails away, still peering through into the library, where people are moving, slow as fish in a pond.

Monica sighs, dabs at her forehead with her hankie. “Aoife’s probably not even here anyway.”

“She said she was coming.”

“But that doesn’t mean she did. You know Aoife.”

“Well, you’re wrong,” Michael Francis says, tapping the door. “Here she is now.”

Monica steps up to the glass. For a moment, she can view the woman crossing the room beyond the door as a stranger might. Aoife is attractive, Monica sees, as if for the first time, her narrow, zipped trousers, the color of hyacinths, fitted snug around her hips, the hectically patterned top loose about her clavicle. Hair pulled up and carelessly secured at the back of her head. Who would have thought she’d turn out like that, when she’d been such an odd-looking, graceless child, her face always so screwed up and cross, forever stumbling over her own feet? Monica remembers being made to accompany Aoife here, to this library, after school. “Walk her along, would you?” Gretta would beg Monica. “I just need a bit of peace.” Because Aoife was a terrible one for questions. Why does the Earth only go one way around the sun? Does it ever go backwards? What’s behind the sky? How do you know? Who says so? What’s the biggest city in the world? What’s the smallest? Gretta used to say it gave her brain-ache, ten minutes in the company of Aoife. She had liked the library, though, despite having refused to learn to read for years. It used to make her go quiet and still. She treated books as the basis for her own imaginings. She would glide along the aisles, up and down the stacks: “Here’s one I haven’t read,” she’d whisper to herself, and tilt it out of its place on the shelf. Then
she would take it to a chair, sit down and turn the pages, looking through the pictures, muttering her own made-up version of the story. Monica would wait for her on the chairs, saying, “Hurry up, Aoife, let’s go home.”

Monica watches now as grown-up Aoife makes her way through the shelves, her top thing billowing and then deflating with the forward momentum of each step. Not something Monica would ever wear but she can see the appeal of it on Aoife. Aoife is holding a big, thick book in her hands, the size of an encyclopedia. And, as Monica and Michael Francis watch, Aoife does something truly shocking. Monica wouldn’t have believed it, unless she’d seen it with her own eyes. Aoife, quite clearly, slides the book into her bag.
American Photography
, Monica reads, as it disappears into the canvas. She has put the book, this
American Photography
, into her bag. Without taking it to the desk. Without a backward glance. She zips the bag shut and keeps walking towards them, her head down.

“Did she just …?”

“Yes,” Monica breathes.

Aoife appears through the doors. On seeing her brother and sister standing in the lobby, she stops in her tracks. “What are you two doing here?” she has the gall to say.

“Looking for you,” Michael Francis says.

“Did you just steal that book?” Monica raps out, and realizes those are the first words she has spoken to her sister in three years. “You take it right back in there this minute.”

Aoife snorts, turns on her heel and walks out of the library.

“I can’t believe she did that,” Michael Francis says, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.

“I can.”

Monica goes after her. Outside, they pursue her along the pavement. Michael Francis is the first to catch up with her and he says, “You can’t steal from a library, Aoife.”

Aoife, marching along, says, “It’s not stealing.”

Monica says, “It certainly looked like stealing.”

Michael Francis says, “Monica’s right, Aoife.”

Aoife says, “Relax. I’m only borrowing it. I don’t have a library card. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”

Michael Francis says, “What do you want it for anyway?”

Monica says, “Of all the selfish, thoughtless—” She doesn’t finish because Aoife suddenly grips her arm.

“Oh, God,” she says, “isn’t that Joe?”

It is Joe. Walking along Blackstock Road, his hand deep in the jeans pocket of a woman next to him. The woman is pushing a pram; his head is bent towards her to catch something she is saying and he is smiling and he looks carefree and untroubled, as if he had never cried and cried in a first-floor flat very near here, the noise of it terrifying and animal-like, head held in his hands as if it hurt him more than anything else ever had, as if he’d never pushed his face up close to that of a woman and said, You disgust me, you’re inhuman, you make me sick, as if he’d never stood opposite that same woman in a church and vowed before God that he would love and honor her for better and for worse, as if he’d never held her hand as they stood in the cone of light from a streetlamp and said she was everything to him, he couldn’t live without her. Here he was, living without her, walking along in the sunshine with that same hand tucked into the back pocket of a different woman’s trousers. Here he was, still with that old checked shirt but with a new wife, who seemed to have a pram, inside which, Monica supposed, there must be a baby.

Michael Francis is thinking, Oh, shit. Aoife is thinking that it’s the same woman she saw earlier, with the pram, and wasn’t she a few years above her at school? Belinda something. Greenwell, was it? And Monica is thinking almost nothing at all. Her mind is a sheer drop of panic, of noiseless incomprehension. She cannot see how this has happened, how this is allowed to happen.
She wants to say to someone or something: No, you can’t do this, not now, not after everything, please, no.

Aoife takes charge. She steps back, opens the door of the nearest shop, pushes Monica through it and shuts it. Suddenly, all three of them are standing in the window of a florist, looking out. Always, afterwards, the scent of compost, mixed with jasmine blossom, will bring to Monica’s mind the recollection of watching her first husband walking within a foot of her, unaware that she’s there, his arm wrapped around another woman’s shoulders, the blanketed chrysalis form inside a navy pram borne along the pavement before them, like a prize. Monica cringes behind a spray of carnations, unable to look away, until the window is blank again, until the three of them have gone.

“Well.” Michael Francis exhales sharply. “That was a near miss.”

“I didn’t know he’d got married again,” Aoife murmured, standing on tiptoe to catch a last glance.

Monica closes her eyes. She pulls her elbow away from Aoife because her sister is still gripping it, as if she’s afraid Monica might stumble, as if she’s forgotten everything that happened.

“Didn’t you?” Monica snaps. “I always thought you and he were
so close
.”

·  ·  ·

Gretta is walking through her house. She ought to be clearing up. Those plates, the teacups, the serviettes and crumbs—all over the sitting room. She should be collecting them and piling them into the sink. She needs to tidy the cushions, draw the curtains in the front room, keep the sun off the three-piece suite. She saved the dishwater from breakfast for the dishes: she’s no water-waster, never will be.

She ought to be doing all these things. But for now she is moving about her house, passing through the doorways, rooms
and corridors, running her hand along the varnished top of the banister, placing her palms on the back of the chairs, feeling the brush of the curtains, touching the raised, dry edges of the wallpaper.

It’s not often the house is empty like this. Ever since Robert retired, she rarely gets the place to herself: he’s always there, shaking his newspaper from the armchair or trailing her from room to room. It’s this kind of emptiness she likes—signs of people around, their discarded possessions left as a reassurance of their return. Monica’s jacket on a hanger, Michael Francis’s car key on the hall table, that scarf of Aoife’s draped over a peg.

Being alone is not something she’s used to, growing up in a farmhouse with six siblings, parents, grandparents, an aunt and uncle or two all under the same roof. She doesn’t think she ever knew that house empty.

This house has gone through phases, of course, Gretta thinks as she goes into the upstairs back room—the girls’ room, as she still thinks of it. She straightens the eiderdown on Aoife’s bed, plumps up the pillow on Monica’s. Will Monica be staying here tonight? Hard to say, harder even to ask, as Monica never gives a straight answer to anything. She’ll think of a way to put it to her later. When would have been the last time they slept together in here? The night before Monica’s wedding, she supposes, Aoife only eight at the time, the age Hughie is now. She wonders, for the first time, whether Aoife found it hard to sleep in here alone after that, whether she missed her sister at night.

If Gretta closes her eyes, she can picture the room as it was in those days, the walls around Monica’s bed covered with pictures of film stars, of wedding dresses, those around Aoife’s decorated with her illegible lists, her drawings of wolves and foxes and staircases that went off into thin air.