Instructions for a Heatwave (30 page)

Michael Francis, in the throes of a debate with Vita about why cheese should not be inserted in your ears, lifts his head to say, we’re off. Aoife, having a cigarette on deck, feels it and leans over the railing to see the massive churning of the waters from the rudders and she, too, feels a thrill of excitement. Gretta, rustling through boxes of sausage rolls and griddle cakes and chicken legs, straightens and looks speculatively at the darkening sky through the window. And Monica, who is somewhere in the hinterland between feigning sleep and actually being asleep, her head leaning back against the prickling fabric of the seat, opens her eyes a crack, contemplates the portion of her family opposite her and closes them again.

The night ferry to Cork. The Riordans have done this many times, in their many incarnations: first Gretta, alone, pregnant, then alone with baby Michael Francis, then Gretta with toddler Michael Francis and baby Monica, then Gretta with two children, then finally with Aoife in a carry-cot and the other
two running up and down the aisles all night. Gretta went every summer for a month, to visit her mother; Robert joined them for the final week. He always hated leaving the bank, he said, but Gretta thinks it was because he felt uncomfortable in Ireland—belonging yet not belonging, Irish by name and birth but English by upbringing, embarrassed by his confused accent, his soft Irish consonants mixed up with elongated Liverpudlian vowels. They had one last summer at the farmhouse after Aoife was born. Her mother was able to strap Aoife to her back, as she had done with all the other children, to wade into the lough to fetch the eggs from the henhouse, built on a tiny island to keep it safe from foxes. Gretta can see it as if it happened yesterday: her mother with her skirts held clear of the water, Aoife’s blue bonnet bobbing above the woolen blanket, the hens chit-chitting and hustling at her approach, her white feet dipping in and out of the lough’s brackish waters.

Gretta extracts a sausage roll from its plastic container and chews it. Something to line her stomach. She offers the box to Michael Francis, who takes two, to Claire, who shakes her head.

Gretta’s mother passed away four months after that, dropping dead outside the farmhouse door. She didn’t suffer, the cousin told her when he telephoned. A clot on the brain. Gretta has pictured this clot, many times, a dark, ferric gathering of blood like a snarl in a skein of yarn, inching its way around her mother’s skull, until the moment she reached the step of the farmhouse. Was she going in or coming out? Gretta has wondered. Was she looking up at the sky, her fists on her hips? Was she off to fetch the eggs? The cousin couldn’t tell her. Just that she was found on the step by the man who collected the milk.

Then, of course, the farm had gone to Gretta’s eldest brother and he had sold it before heading off to Australia. Gretta will never forgive him for that. Never, ever. After that, they visited less, until the old uncle who had lived alone on the island left
his cottage to Gretta. As a young girl, she used to walk out across the strand, once or twice a week, sometimes more, if it was cold, with eggs for him, milk, bread and cake. She never forgot, not even when a storm whipped in off the Atlantic. She didn’t like to think of him out there, alone in his cottage. There she is now, he would say, when he saw her, putting down his spade. Which was almost all he ever said to her. She would hand over the basket, he would pat her once on the shoulder. She would sit with him, tidy his kitchen, straighten his books and papers, make him a cup of tea, a fried egg. Tide’s turning, he would say, after a while, and she would know it was time to go.

When she got the letter from the solicitor in Clifden, she could not have been more surprised. Why had the uncle chosen her, over all her brothers and sisters, over her cousins and her cousins’ cousins? It had caused some bad feeling, especially among those who still lived in Galway. But Gretta didn’t care. The uncle had given her his house on Omey Island—he had picked her. They could go to Ireland again, whenever they liked. Gretta rented out the cottage for most of the year, making a tidy sum, too, but she always kept August free. August was for them, for the Riordans, for her and her brood, and no one else. Aoife was three, Monica thirteen, Michael Francis fourteen when they had their first month on the island; Gretta would come out of the cottage door at the end of the day and call for them and they would return to her, down the bluff, back from fishing in the lough or collecting shells on the beach or talking to the tethered donkey up the road. Monica only came a couple more times because after that she started walking out with Joe and didn’t want to leave him. But Aoife came with her for years, just the two of them, in the cottage together. They were always more harmonious there than in London, not fighting so much.

Gretta sits up now and swivels her head around, surreptitiously levering sausage meat out of her molars with a fingertip.
Where has Aoife gone? She went outside for a smoke ages ago, just as they left Swansea. She should be back by now.

“Where’s your sister?” She nudges Monica, who is pretending to be asleep. She is, Gretta knows, not speaking to her but Gretta has decided to act as though she hasn’t realized. It usually works with Monica.

“No idea,” Monica returns, too fast for someone who was really asleep, and Gretta nods with satisfaction. She knew she wasn’t really sleeping.

Monica rearranges the cardigan she has folded under her head and steals a glance at Gretta. Since their screaming match in Michael Francis’s house, they have not communicated. Monica still seethes and smarts with it; she will not speak to her mother, she will not, not until she gets an apology or an explanation. The hypocrisy of her, the web of lies she has spun. When she thinks of the time her mother found out she had slept with Joe before the wedding—calling her all those terrible names, telling her she would burn in Hell. She’d been so terrified, so sorry, when all the time her mother, her own mother, was living in extended mortal sin. It turns Monica’s mind inside out with disbelief.

But her mother is doing that thing she does when she knows she has annoyed someone: acting all blithe and innocent, pretending not to notice the frost in the atmosphere. She does it every time, and if Monica were to say, Why aren’t we speaking, Gretta would turn to her with wide, injured eyes and say, But I would never not speak to you, never, ever. She is fanning herself with a ferry timetable, her polyester dress with its patterns of ferns tight and damp across her back, and she is humming. Monica knows that the humming signifies Gretta mending her mood, much as a roofer might repair a faulty roof. Gretta hums and smooths things over in her head: the ex-offender brother-in-law, gone; the absconding husband, gone; the jaw-dropping fact of her unmarried state, gone. Everything lovely and normal again.

Gretta’s head is swiveling about. Monica knows that look, too, that expectant, gimlet gaze. Gretta is looking around for someone to engage in conversation. It makes Monica want to commit violence. How dare her mother be looking around for companions with whom to chat instead of doing what she should be doing, which is getting down on her knees and begging their forgiveness for lying to them their entire lives?

Spotting an elderly couple across the aisle, Gretta hails them with a booming, “Hot enough for you?” The couple raise their heads, like startled sheep, but Gretta is in. She shunts herself along a couple of seats. “Are you on holiday?” she asks. Within seconds, Monica knows, Gretta will have extracted a complete family history from the couple and a comprehensive travel itinerary and will be well on the way to returning the favor.

·  ·  ·

It’s midnight or thereabouts; Aoife can’t be sure. B-deck lounge is ablaze with light, and on every available surface people are sleeping. The corridors and aisles are filled with people stretched out under blankets and sleeping bags. Bodies are curled up in doorways, on tables, on windowsills. Over by the shuttered-up cafeteria, someone at floor level is emitting a throaty, drawn-out snore. The engines grind on and the boat rises and falls, rises and falls. Aoife, lying over two seats, tries not to see the tilting of the floor, the swinging of the overhead lamps, the way the door flings itself open, then pulls itself shut. She tries to think of other things, of the river delta of cracks on her apartment ceiling, of film-developing times, the way Gabe pushes his glasses back up his nose with the second joint of his index finger, the correct procedure with an enlarger and a filter. She tries to tell herself that the passage of the ship is moving her west, closer to Gabe and New York and her real life: it won’t be long now until she can go back, until she can try to fix things with him. But the waves keep
coming; the boat rolls on; that man keeps snoring; the grille over the cafeteria rattles in its frame.

Aoife sits suddenly. She stands. She steps over the limbs and bags of her family. Gretta murmurs something but doesn’t fully wake.

Aoife makes it through the lounge into the corridor. Her mind is focused, her vision clear: she concentrates on this one task. She releases the handle to the toilets, she steps up and over the high metal threshold. She has her sights set on one of the cubicles and would have made it, were it not for the stench of vomit that hits her in the face like a fine mist. She is very clear in her movements. She knows she doesn’t have long. She won’t make the cubicle, she sees this, so takes a detour for the sink. She is just in time. She holds back her hair, she shuts her eyes, she braces herself. She is bent double by the force of it. She retches into the sink, once, twice and a painful third. She has never, she is thinking, been so sick before. She has never felt so terrible in her life. Her throat is rasped and sore, her stomach clenched like a fist, and those jittering flashes of light that have haunted her all her life are puncturing her vision again. She may never make Ireland: she may expire here, in these puke-washed toilets, and never see dry land. She turns the tap on before opening her eyes. She rinses her mouth, she sluices water over her face, she reaches for the roller towel, sees its grimy, gray, limp length, changes her mind, ducks into the cubicle for some toilet roll, presses it to her face and, as she does so, she is thinking about the oscillating pinprick lights, those familiar, minuscule, airborne ghosts. How they mean a migraine might arrive, like a train at a station, one of those grinding, three-day fogs that can descend upon her. How they flicker and flutter like fireflies. How they come if she’s had too much coffee, or looks into bright light, or at the start of her period. How the last time she had them was on a cold day in April when New York was assailed by wind, blowing off the Hudson,
whirling paper and trash up off the sidewalk, driving smuts into her eyes, her hair, the seams of her clothes. How she cannot, at this moment, recall having had a period since then.

Aoife stands for a moment in the toilet, with the loo paper pressed over her face. Then she slowly peels it off. She regards herself in the mirror. Her face has a waxen, yellowish look, her eyes are sunken, wide and disbelieving. It is as if it was another person who stepped in here a minute ago. This person, in the mirror, this Aoife, is someone else entirely.

She lurches along the corridor, gripping first the left-hand rail and then, as the prow of the boat dips, the right. She forces open the salt-spattered door and steps out onto the deck.

If there is a heatwave, this particular stretch of the Irish Sea is unaware of it. The wind immediately seizes her hair, her clothes and tries to tear them from her. She bends her head into the force and makes it to the barrier, where she clings on. She can see the rusted side of the vessel, dropping down to the boiling, iron-black waters. Great furls of spume fan out from the boat’s path. Yards out to sea, they are flattened, obliterated, then claimed by the waves. Sea spray or rain, she can’t tell which, is being hurled at her in great gouts. She is filled with an urge to shout something, anything, into this wind, into the sea, just to feel the feebleness of her voice, its ineffectuality against these Zeus-like, clashing elements.

“Christ!” she bawls. “Shit!”

She can’t hear herself. She only knows that she is making the sound because her brain and tongue and mouth are forming the words. She clings to the cold railing with both hands; she lays her head on them, feeling the humming vibration of the boat, the surging of the sea.

The first time she and Gabe slept together was—when? She opens her eyes briefly, sees her wet fingers, patches of rust, thick white paint, the consistency of hardened toffee. Her mind is free-wheeling,
unable to gain purchase, but she finds the answer, she knows it.

April. The morning before she left for Connecticut.

Her travel alarm clock had shrilled out at six a.m., hoicking her from a dream about cycling through Clissold Park to a room that seemed suddenly changed overnight. She was always alone in that room but not that morning. She flailed at the alarm clock and knocked it to the floor. It closed in on itself, its ringing muted, obliging, apologetic.

Next to her Gabe grunted, rolled over and clamped her into a one-armed embrace. “You’d better,” he mumbled into her hair, “have a watertight excuse for waking me up this early.”

“Hmm,” she managed, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She did not share Gabe’s talent for morning eloquence. She put one foot out of the bed. She put out the other and stood up. She fished around on the floor for something—anything—to put on, finding a pair of trousers, hers, Gabe’s sweatshirt and some socks that neither fitted nor matched.

By the time Gabe emerged from the sheets, she was properly dressed, hair tied back, finishing her coffee and putting on lipstick.

“How can you do that without a mirror?” Gabe said, from the doorway, watching her as she shut her lipstick with a click. They grinned at each other, then looked away. He reached across the table for her coffee cup and took a swig.

“Jesus,” he said, wincing. “Has anyone ever told you you make terrible coffee?”

She stood. “No. Other people who have stolen my coffee have been very complimentary.”