Instructions for a Heatwave (31 page)

He followed her to the sink and put his arms around her from behind. “Well, then, they’re idiots with no taste buds.” He lifted her hair and started kissing her neck. “Where are you going, anyway? It’s practically the middle of the night.”

Rinsing out her breakfast bowl under the tap, she said, “I’m going to a nudist colony.”

Gabe was momentarily stalled in his exploration of her neckline. “Now, if anyone else said that to me, I’d assume they were joking. But you’re not, are you?”

“Nope. Evelyn’s doing some portraits.”

“I’d kind of guessed that. I didn’t think you’d become a nudist or anything.” His hands parted her blouse from her waistband. “Although, if you had, I’d be all for it.”

“Gabe, I have to go.”

“I know.” But his hands were latched onto her breasts and he had wedged her against the sink.

“I really have to go.” She twisted around within the circle of his arms and faced him. “I’ll be back in three days.”

“Three days? That long?”

“I can’t come back to bed now, Gabe. I honestly can’t.”

Gabe swept the crockery and cutlery from the counter into the sink. “Who said anything about the bed?”

She nearly missed the train to Connecticut. She reapplied her lipstick as she sat opposite Evelyn in the carriage. They went to the nudist colony. They spent their time photographing naked people sitting on deck chairs, standing at a barbecue, playing Ping-Pong. When she got back, she went to the restaurant to find him, and when he’d caught sight of her, through the steam and chaos of the kitchen, his face had shown mostly relief.

On the ferry to Ireland, Aoife peers out into the furious black night. How, in God’s name, had this happened? The first time was the night before she left for Connecticut and there had been numerous times in between but they had used something, she knows they did, every time. Her last period was when? A couple of weeks before Connecticut. Three months, maybe. Could it be that long, could it—

“Are you about to throw up or have you just done so?” Michael Francis, who has appeared from nowhere, asks.

Aoife rears her head, like a frightened horse. Her face is wet, rain-lashed, her hair wild. She stares at him as if she doesn’t recognize him.

“You OK?” he says, patting his pockets. “I have a mint here somewhere, if you want it.”

She shakes her head. “No, thanks.”

“I always thought you were the one with the iron stomach,” he says, putting an arm about her shoulders. “Maybe you lost it out there in New York.”

“Maybe I did,” she says, looking out to sea, still gripping the rail.

“Come on,” he says. “Enough with the King Lear-ing. Let’s go inside.”

She shakes her head again. “I’m going to stay out here.”

“Really? It’s bloody cold.”

“I know. I’m enjoying the novelty.”

“OK. Suit yourself. I’ll see you later.”

Michael Francis staggers back across the slippery deck, forces open the door and steps inside. He gives her a wave from behind it. She removes one of her hands from the railing to wave back. She watches the lit windows of the lounge until she sees him reappear, sees him lope across the room, then wedge himself next to Claire and Hughie, sees him accept the sleeping form of Vita, laying her gently across his lap.

He’d come out to find her. The thought makes her almost smile.

The ferry rises and falls, with an inexorable rhythm, bearing her onwards. Aoife keeps holding on to the railing with both hands. If she stays like this, she tells herself, everything will be OK.

She doesn’t understand. This thought sits, heavy as wet cloth, in her head. She doesn’t understand at all. She’s careful about
this kind of thing, a lot more careful than other people. In some areas of life she knows she is a little lax, a little complacent, but not with contraception, partly because she knows what a useless parent she’d make. What kind of a mother would she be if she couldn’t even read a bedtime story? How the hell did this happen? And how can she have been so stupid as not to notice? She tries for a moment to picture it, the being clinging to her insides, the way that silent-movie actor grips the clock’s hands as he dangles above traffic, but she cannot. She cannot, she cannot, she cannot account for this. She cannot even begin to think what Gabe will say. She cannot do this.

·  ·  ·

By a concentrated feat of human origami, they have managed to fit into Michael Francis’s car, Michael Francis driving, Gretta next to him, Monica, Claire and Aoife on the backseat, taking it in turn to have Vita on their knees, and Hughie in the boot, rolling around on top of the bags.

For the first leg of the journey, coming off the ferry and negotiating their way from the docks, through Cork and onto the road north, Aoife sat in the middle, wedged between Claire and Monica. But just outside the city she’d had to get out to throw up into a patch of dock leaves, then again two miles farther on, after they had been up and over a humpbacked bridge. After that, she had been stationed by the door, with the window rolled right down and the breeze blowing over her. Hughie complained about the wind, said it made his hair feel funny, but Gretta told him, from the front seat, to stop his complaining.

Only Monica noticed the way Claire twisted her head at this, the way she cast an unreadable glance at her son.

After that, for a while, everyone was quiet.

Michael Francis is keeping his thoughts very practical: after Limerick, they head straight up towards Galway, then towards the coast. He is aware of his wife, sitting at his back, with her
arms around their daughter. He is not thinking about her, he is not thinking about the fact that she came, that she gave up going to a tutorial to accompany him to Ireland, he is not thinking about that, and what it might mean for them, not at all. He is also not thinking about his father and his marrying an Irish girl from Sligo and his brother running off with his bride the day after the wedding and the possibility that there might be another Riordan half sibling out there.

Aoife is letting the air blast into her face and, with her eyes shut, is inking a diagram in her head of their positions in the car, with unbroken lines for those who are communicating and dotted lines for those who aren’t. Those in the second category: her and Monica, Monica and Gretta, Michael Francis and Claire, Hughie and Vita (after a brief spat over a packet of Refreshers). She is also picturing her father searching the streets of Dublin for his bride and his brother. Which of them had he wanted to find, most of all? She tries to inhabit this scene: her father asking at boardinghouses, at the docks. The unbearable familiarity of the face you were searching for. Did Frankie look like him? She can feel the flare and crackle of his anger, his heartbreak. How would it feel if your own brother betrayed you like that, stole away the girl you loved? Monica’s thoughts run along one track: she hates this car, she hates this trip, she hates this whole family; she wishes she had never come: she wishes she had not worn her plaid dress, as the car is so cramped that it will look crushed when they finally get out, if they ever get out.

Claire is looking, every now and again, at the back of her husband’s head, at the glimpses of his hands on the wheel, at the section of his brow, just visible in the angled rearview mirror, watching the back of the seat strain as he shifts his weight. She is feeling the strange dichotomy of a long marriage, when a person can seem at once toweringly familiar and curiously alien. She is feeling the hot, dense weight of Vita, the small rounded
heels pressing into her thigh. She turns her head and Hughie instantly raises his eyes, alert; he looks to her still for explanation, for signs, for clues on how to behave, how to react, what to expect from the world. She smiles her most reassuring smile and he lies back among the luggage, satisfied.

And Gretta? Gretta is thinking about serendipity, all the coincidences of the world: how your husband can go off, disappear, you can search all over for him, call the police, rake through his possessions, but really all you need is a call on the telephone from a cousin remarking how someone had told someone that they had seen Robert walking along the driveway of the convent up the road, and wasn’t that a strange thing?

Gretta smiles to herself. She’d told them all, these children of hers, who think they’re so clever with their calls to the police and their insistence on searching the house, that things would work out. And work out they have. The day before, they’d stood on the pavement outside Michael Francis’s house, Monica shouting those awful things at her, Aoife telling Monica to shut her face, Michael Francis trying to keep the peace, as ever, saying they knew where Dad was now, let’s concentrate on that. Gretta and Monica had got back to the house in a terrible, frayed tangle. And then what had happened? They had packed for Ireland.

Gretta moves her handbag from her knee to the floor of the car, then back. She’d always known it would come good, that they’d find him. And here they all are, off the night ferry, going up to Connemara.

Past Limerick, Aoife says, “Stop, please.” Michael Francis swerves to the side of the road and she bursts out of the car.

“Aunt Evie is sick
a lot
,” Hughie observes, with interest, from the boot.

“Don’t watch, sweetheart, it’s not polite,” Claire murmurs. “Look away.”

“She is,” Monica says.

“It’s
Aoife
, Hughie, not
Evie
,” Michael Francis says.
“Ee-fah.”

“Eefie,” Hughie repeats obediently. He pushes his cheeks up, so that his eyes are obscured, then down, so that his lids are stretched wide. It makes Monica feel quite peculiar. “I’m surprised she’s got anything left inside her,” he says.

“Maybe she’ll sick up her own stomach,” Vita, whom they’d assumed to be asleep, pipes up.

Hughie laughs, delighted by this notion. “Maybe she will. And it will spill out all over the road and Daddy will have to pick it up and push it back inside and—”

Gretta releases the catch from the door and steps onto the grass verge. A swallow arrows above her, its wing flashing blue-black as it turns back on itself. She goes up to her daughter, who is still bent over, hands on knees, gulping mouthfuls of air. Gretta gathers the hair hanging in her daughter’s face and holds it back.

“Thanks,” Aoife gets out, and retches again.

Gretta pats her back, which feels clammy through the thin stuff of her blouse. Aoife straightens, eyes closed; Gretta hands her a tissue. She surveys her younger daughter; she sees the grayish pallor of her cheeks; she sees the tremble of her fingers. She hands her another tissue. “Is there something you need to tell me, Aoife?”

Aoife’s eyes snap open; mother and daughter look at each other for a moment. Gretta feels, just for a moment, the presence of those babies, those people who never breathed air, five of them there were, her not-quite-children. They stretch between her and Aoife, now and forever, like a row of paper dolls. The swallow dives near them again, throat red, like a warning.

“No,” Aoife says.

Gretta takes a step closer. “Please tell me you haven’t got yourself in trouble.”

Aoife, despite herself, despite everything, starts to laugh. “What’s so funny? I don’t see anything funny about this.”

Aoife balls up the tissue and shoves it into her pocket. “It’s 1976, Mum.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You don’t say ‘in trouble’ anymore.”

“I’ll say whatever I like. So you are? You admit it?”

“I admit nothing. It’s none of your business.”

“Oh, God.” Gretta holds a hand to her forehead. “You’re a young girl, unmarried—”

“You’re one to talk,” Aoife says, and Gretta draws back, as if Aoife has struck her.

In the car, Monica leans over Claire to get a better view. “What are they talking about?”

“I don’t know,” says Claire, who has caught some of the conversation and who had, anyway, come to her own conclusions about Aoife’s peaky appearance and odd appetite.

“Yes, what are they talking about?” Michael Francis says from the front seat. He leans on the horn, briefly, irritably, shouting, come on, but he hasn’t reckoned for the effect this will have on his children. It is instant: they hurl themselves in one movement into the front of the car and into his lap, shouting, can I do that, can I, can I, it’s my turn, no, it’s my turn, no it’s mine.

“Stop it,” he shouts, in between flailing limbs and the sounding of the horn. “Get back to your seats, I mean it, both of you, stop this minute.” Hughie’s hand catches him on the temple, an elbow—Vita’s, he thinks—is driven into his throat and then a knee is ground, with sickening accuracy, into his groin. The horn drowns his screamed expletive; petals of pain open and blossom in his lower body, fireworks spray across his brain. He is immobilized by agony, by a seat belt, by the weight of his offspring.

“Move over.” Claire is there, opening the door beside him, removing the children from his lap, one by one. “I’ll drive.”

By lunchtime, they have reached the Twelve Bens, great gray mountains that rear up from the line of trees, their elephant-hide sides replicated in the lough water. Even Vita is awed into silence by their shadowed presence. Before they reach the village of Roundstone, Gretta directs Claire to the right, then down a track.

“Drop me here,” she says, as the car rumbles to a place where two tracks cross, under a cluster of oak trees.

“What?” Monica says, jerking forward. “Here? Why here? We can’t leave you here.”

“The convent’s just up there.” Gretta gestures with a hankie. She is rummaging in her bag. She extracts one bottle, seemingly at random, knocks back a pill, then finds another and tosses two into her mouth. She crunches them between her teeth and pulls a face. “I’m going alone.”

Monica remonstrates, objects, argues; Michael Francis tries to say that he thinks they should all stick together; Claire gives Hughie and Vita a biscuit; Aoife steps out of the car.

“Where are you going?” Michael Francis says, just as Hughie asks hopefully, “Is she going to be sick again?”

“Just a wee,” she says, over her shoulder, and disappears into the undergrowth.