Instructions for a Heatwave (27 page)

Before she can let the lion-faced knocker fall, the door is wrenched open and there is Monica, a dressing gown held closed at her throat.

Aoife is so astonished she almost steps back to look up at the house. She is sure, so sure, that she’s walked to her brother’s house. But perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps Monica moved here and no one told her.

“It’s you,” she says instead.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same question.” Monica sighs. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Just before eight.”

Monica thrusts her arm out of her dressing-gown sleeve. “Seven,” she says. “Quarter to seven.”

“Oh.” Aoife looks down at her own watch, which says, unmistakably, eight. “Maybe I didn’t … set it right.”

Monica swivels on her bare foot and disappears into Michael Francis’s house. After a moment, Aoife follows.

Monica is in the kitchen, snapping the lid down on the kettle. “Where’s Mum?” she says, without turning around.

Aoife slides into a seat at her brother’s table, moving aside a cricket bat, a cat collar, a comic and a doll’s teacup. “Asleep,” Aoife answers, employing the same clipped tone as her sister. Two can play at that game, she thinks. And: You damn well owe me an apology, several, in fact, and I’m not going to let you forget it. In irritation, she snatches up a small, unidentifiable piece of orange plastic and turns it in her hand.

Michael Francis slumps into the kitchen, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of underpants. “Jesus,” he says, yawning in Aoife’s direction, “was that you ringing the bell?”

Aoife nods. “Sorry.”

“What time do you call this?”

“My watch was wrong.”

Monica lifts the kettle from the hob. “She’d set it wrong,” she says.

In her sister’s tone, Aoife hears it all, the entire script of her upbringing: Aoife the dunce, Aoife the idiot, Aoife the girl who can’t tell left from right, who can’t read or write, who can’t manage a knife and fork together, who can’t tie her own shoelaces.

“It was a mistake!” she shrieks, gripping the orange-plastic thing (she thinks it may be part of a larger toy or some kind of vehicle). “I’d just got off a transatlantic flight! I set my watch wrong. That’s all. It doesn’t make me an idiot. I’ve apologized. What else do you want me to do?”

Her brother and sister are staring at her, as if they know they have seen her somewhere before but can’t quite place her. They turn away from her in unison, Monica to the kettle, Michael Francis to get down some mugs, leaving her alone with her ire.

Aoife has to resist the urge to grind her teeth, to throw something at the wall. Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?

“Look,” she says, trying to level her voice, “I wanted to tell you both. Someone’s seen Dad. In Ireland.”

“Someone?” Monica says, turning around. “Who?”

“Mary. And Declan. Whoever the hell they are.”

“Mary and Declan?” Michael Francis tries out the names as he sits at the table, a cereal box tucked under one arm.

“Mary’s married to
Dermot
,” Monica says, “not Declan. He’s Mum’s cousin on her father’s side. Lives out beyond Derrylea.”

Aoife and Michael Francis look at each other.

“Anyway,” Aoife says, breaking eye contact with her brother, “they phoned this morning at some ungodly hour to say that someone had seen Dad near a place called Roundstone. He was
coming out of a convent, of all bloody things. The last place you’d think to look. It was some cousin of a cousin and apparently Dad stopped and had a chat, then went on his way.”

“That makes no sense.” Monica’s face is unreadable, fierce. “None at all,” she says, and her hand darts to her neckline. “What would he be doing there? And at a convent? And why would he go without telling any of us?”

“Where’s Mum?” Michael Francis asks.

“She’s”—Aoife waves a hand in the air—“at home. She had one of her turns. She went all weird, anyway. Took some pill or other, then went and shut herself in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out. By the way, have either of you seen the number of pills she’s got?”

They ignore her. “Did she say anything else?” Monica demands. “Anything at all?”

Aoife wrinkles her forehead, trying to remember. She had helped her mother into the house and up the stairs; at the bedroom door, Gretta had shaken her off and disappeared into the room alone. She’d said she needed a lie-down, but Aoife could hear her moving about in there.

“No,” Aoife says, “but something’s up. She knows something but isn’t letting on. She had a whole bad-head drama—”

“Ah,” says Michael Francis, “the eternal smoke screen.”

“Not at all!” says Monica, putting down her teacup. “What a thing to say. She has high blood pressure, you know that, and to suggest that she’s faking her bad heads is just—”

“Do either of you know who Frankie is?” Aoife says, over Monica. “She said, ‘Why didn’t I think of Frankie?’ but then wouldn’t tell me any more, so I was wondering—”

“Frankie,” her brother says, “was Dad’s brother.”

Aoife looks at him. She looks at her sister. She looks back at her brother. “What?” she says.

“His brother.”

“He doesn’t have a brother.”

“Yes, he does. Or did, rather. He died. In the Troubles. Years ago, before we were born. You knew that, didn’t you?”

Aoife cannot speak. She has to hold in her breath, not let any of it escape. She feels herself filling with rage, from the bottom up. Rage, not at her father for disappearing, for walking out of their lives without a backward glance, for leaving their mother in the lurch, for apparently having had a brother. It is rage at her siblings. At all of them. For keeping this from her. Their father had a brother? The idea is outlandish, unheard-of, ridiculous. But why has no one ever told her? Why has she, yet again, been left out?

Her siblings are looking at her with that mixture of superiority and pity. She is again a pygmy, a Lilliputian in the shadow of their implacable knowledge. She is again five, asking her mother one night how the kittens got in the cat’s tummy and wondering, in the blistering gale of their laughter, what Monica and Michael Francis found so funny and why she couldn’t join in. She can recall asking them whether it was morning or afternoon and whether she’d had lunch yet and the look they gave her was the same as this one: a pitying glance, cast down from a Mount Olympus of experience. She has no chance of ever catching up; even to try would be futile.

“You knew that,” Monica says, sliding into the seat next to Michael Francis.

“I didn’t.”

“You must have done.” Monica slips a diet sweetener into her tea.

“You must have done,” Michael Francis echoes, but he’s looking doubtful now. “She didn’t know.” He’s speaking to Monica again. “How can she not have known?”

They turn to look at her with curiosity, and Aoife feels their gazes start to prickle her skin, as if she is near something to which she is allergic, like pollen or wool. Monica is murmuring how it
wasn’t ever talked about, hardly ever mentioned, maybe Aoife just missed it, maybe it had ceased to be something spoken about by the time she had come along, hadn’t he died years ago—

A child appears in the doorway and they all fall silent. She is naked, apart from a pair of rainbow Wellies, worn, Aoife notices, on the wrong feet. She holds, by its tail, a one-eyed tiger. “Who are you?” she says, pointing at Aoife.

“Aoife Magdalena Riordan,” Aoife says, pointing back. “Who are you?”

“Vita Clarissa Riordan.”

They regard each other for a moment. The tiger does a slow, aerial turn, his single eye trained on the floor.

“Why have we got the same name?” Vita says.

“Because we’re related. I’m your daddy’s sister.”

Vita frowns. “That’s Daddy’s sister.” She stabs a finger in Monica’s direction.

“I’m the other one.”

Vita sidles across the kitchen and comes to stand at the table’s edge. She places the tiger squarely in front of her so that it is looking straight at Aoife.

“What happened to your tiger’s eye?”

“Pulled it off.”

“Oh.”

“With my teeth.”

“How come?”

“Did not like it, not one little bit.”

“Fair enough.”

Vita puts her head on one side. “What is it like off the rails?”

Aoife leans forward. “What was that?”

“Granny says—”

Michael Francis looks up from his cereal. “Vita—”

“Granny says what?”

“Granny says you’ve gone off the rails.”

“Does she now? That’s very interesting. What else does Granny say about me?”

“She says you’ve thrown it all away, that you had chances she never—”

“Vita,” Michael Francis says. “That’s enough.”

“Shall I tell you something, Vita?”

“What?”

“You know what it’s like off the rails? It’s great. It’s grand. It’s—”

“Aoife,” Michael Francis says. “That’s enough.” He puts his hands over his eyes. “Jesus Christ,” he says, through his fingers.

Vita and Aoife look at him.

“Jesus Christ!” Vita moans with glee, covering her own eyes.

“Don’t let Granny hear you say that,” Aoife says.

Monica says, “Michael Francis, do you still have that bit of paper?”

Aoife says, “What bit of paper?”

Michael Francis says, “Yes,” and digs in his pocket.

Aoife says, “What bit of paper? Why haven’t you told me about a bit of paper? Why am I the last to know?”

Michael Francis hands it to her, saying,
“… and they say the end is coming.”

Aoife says, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Vita, laying a hand on Aoife’s arm, says, “He didn’t tell me either.”

·  ·  ·

Aoife and Michael Francis argue for a long time over whether they should bring Gretta here or whether they should all go over to Gillerton Road. Michael Francis keeps saying that they have to confront Gretta, that they need a family conference. He uses that phrase over and over again: a family conference. Maybe, Monica thinks, it’s something he got from school. If they all go over to
Gillerton Road, how should they travel? Tube or bus or car? If they do go over there, should they all go? Is there enough room in the car? Is it wise to wake Gretta or should they let her sleep? Maybe they should leave it until after lunch.

Monica stands in her brother’s back garden. She can hear them batting the subject back and forth, with occasional interjections from Claire and Vita. She stands with her toes curled into the lip of a crevasse that has opened up across the lawn, a fork of dark lightning through the yellowed grass.

“We’ve lost seven cars down there,” says a voice to her right.

She turns to see her nephew. He is wearing a pair of pajama bottoms, his hair sleep-rumpled, his chest bare, his rib cage delicate, branchlike under his thin white skin. He eats from a bowl of cornflakes with a motion as regular as the ticking of a clock.

“I put one down,” he continues, through a mouthful of cornflakes, “by mistake, but Vita drove six down there
deliberately
.”

“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

He crouches to look into the crevasse, putting down the cereal bowl. “Six,” he murmurs again. “Mummy said if she did it again she’d lose her sweets on Saturday. Do you think we’ll get them back?”

“The sweets?”

“No, the cars.”

Monica looks down into the jagged black tear. “I don’t know,” she says carefully. “Maybe it’s—”

“I’d say not. Vita said she pushed them down there to see if the devils would drive them out.”

Monica considers this sentence. She takes each idea separately: pushing cars into a crack in the earth, the devils, the driving out again. No, she concludes, it makes no sense at all.

Hughie seems to glean this because he looks up at her. She is struck by the perfection of his skin, its flawless translucence, the meander of veins beneath its surface.

“Granny says that devils live there, inside the earth,” he explains, “so Vita thought that if she put the cars down there, the devils might find them and drive them out. Vita said she wanted to see them.”

Monica blinks away an image of tiny red creatures boiling up out of the crack like ants.

“Do you believe it?” Hughie asks.

“Do I believe what?”

“That devils live down there.”

“I …”

“I don’t,” he says helpfully.

“Neither do I. And I’m not sure that they’d know how to drive.”

He lifts his head and gives her a smile of such charm and trust and brilliance that she feels tears start into her eyes.

“Is Grandpa going to come back?” he says.

“I don’t know,” Monica says, “but I’ll tell you something: if they don’t stop arguing about who’s going where, I’m going to scream.”

Hughie looks impressed and a little bit scared, and Monica goes into the house to find that Claire—who’s recently had a most unfortunate haircut that Monica is hoping she got her money back on—is leaving to fetch Gretta.

It has been decided that Claire appearing on her doorstep will wrong-foot Gretta into compliance. Any of them, and she would throw herself back on her old tricks for avoiding things she doesn’t want to do: the pills, the headaches, the shrieking. But Gretta will be so disconcerted by her well-spoken English daughter-in-law arriving, alone, to take her to a family conference that she will be hoodwinked into agreeing.

They gather on the pavement outside Michael Francis’s house to wave Claire off.

“Don’t tell her it’s a family conference,” Michael Francis says to his wife, through the car window.

“I won’t,” Claire says.

“Don’t even say the words ‘family conference,’ ” says Monica.

“I won’t.”

“Say ‘cup of tea,’ ” Aoife advises. “Tell her you’ve come to bring her over for a cup of tea.”

Claire nods. “I will.”

“Cup of tea,” Michael Francis agrees. “Good thinking.”

“Bye-bye, Mummy!” Vita calls, dancing up and down on the pavement, caught up in the drama of the situation.

As Claire drives off, Hughie runs down the pavement alongside the car in his bare feet, waving and calling, with Michael Francis shouting after him about putting on some shoes, for God’s sake.