The Year I Met You (7 page)

You disappear around the back of the house and then I hear you before I see you. You reappear pulling a six-seater wooden table across the grass. The legs of the table destroy the grass, digging up the soil, leaving deep tracks as though you’ve been ploughing. You heave the table from the grass and on to the concrete. The wood drags across the ground, across the driveway behind the car, making an awful screeching sound which goes on for almost a minute. Sixty seconds of screeching and I see the Murphys’ lights go on down the street. Once you have dragged the wooden table on to the grass in the front garden, you disappear into the back garden again and take three trips to carry the six matching chairs. On the last trip you return with the sun umbrella and struggle to position it in the centre hole. You fire it across the garden with frustration and as it flies through the air, it opens like a parachute, takes flight and then lands, open, in a tree. Out of breath, you retrieve a carrier bag from the jeep. I recognise it as being from the local off-licence. You empty the bag, line up the cans on the table and then you sit down. You put your boots up on the wooden table, making yourself at home, and settle down as though you couldn’t be more comfortable and you couldn’t be more at home. You invade my head with your voice and now you are an eyesore, right in front of my house.

I watch you for a while but I eventually lose interest because you’re not doing anything other than drinking and blowing smoke rings into the still night sky.

I watch you watching the stars, which are so clear tonight that Jupiter can be seen next to the moon, and I wonder what you’re thinking about. What to do about Fionn. What to do about your job. Are we not so different after all?

6

It is 8.30 a.m. and I am standing in the garden with a builder named Johnny, a large red-cheeked man who acts like he detests me. Nobody is saying anything; he and his colleague, Eddie, leaning on the jackhammer, are just looking at me. Johnny peers over at you in the front garden, asleep in your garden chair with your boots up on the table, and then back at me.

‘So what do you want us to do? Wait until he wakes up?’

‘No! I—’

‘Well, that’s what you said.’

It is exactly what I said.

‘That’s not what I said,’ I say, firmly. ‘Isn’t eight thirty too early to start making so much noise? I thought the official start time for building works was nine a.m.’

He looks around. ‘Most people are at work.’

‘Not on this street,’ I reply. ‘No one works on this street.’ Not any more.

It is an unusual thing to say, but it is entirely true. He looks at me, confused, then back at the guy with the jackhammer like I’m crazy.

‘Look, love, you said you needed this done immediately. I have two days to finish this job and then I’m on to something else, so I either start now or—’

‘Fine, fine. Start now.’

‘I’ll be back at six to take a look.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Another job. Eddie can handle it.’

Without a word, Eddie, who looks about seventeen, puts on his headphones. I hurry inside. I stand at the window in the TV room that faces your garden and I watch you at the table, head back, in a peaceful sleep after your drunken stupor. You have a blanket draped over you. I wonder if your wife did this or if you got it from the car during the night after you woke up, freezing. Common sense ought to have told you to stay in the car and put the heater on, but you’re not one for listening to sense.

Something most definitely seems off this morning. Aside from the fact you are sleeping in the middle of your destroyed garden on lopsided, badly placed garden furniture for everybody to see, your house would usually be busy at this hour. The kids are back at school, your wife should be coming and going as she drops them off and goes about her errands, but there’s nothing happening this morning. There have been no signs of life from the house, the curtains are exactly as they were yesterday morning. Your wife’s car is gone. The umbrella is still stuck in the tree. There are no visible signs of your family at home.

Suddenly the jackhammer starts up and even from inside the house the noise is so loud that I feel the vibrations in my chest. I think for the first time that I should have alerted the neighbours to the disruption that will be occurring over the next few days as they dig up my perfectly fine paving to make way for some grass. They would have done that for me, I’m sure.

You leap up from the chair, arms and legs flying everywhere, and look around as if you’ve come under attack. It takes you a moment to assess where you are, what’s happening, what you have done. And then you take in the builder in my garden. You immediately charge over to my house. My heart pounds and I don’t know exactly why. We have never spoken before, not so much as a hello or a wave in passing. Apart from when you caught me watching you from my bedroom window on New Year’s Eve, you have never even acknowledged my existence, nor I yours, because I detest you and everything you stand for, because you couldn’t understand how any mother, even a dying mother, could be sad about leaving her child with Down syndrome in the world without her. I relive the comments I heard you and your callers say on that night that I fell in hate with you and by the time you reach my garden I am ready for the fight.

I can see you shouting at Eddie. Eddie cannot possibly hear you over the noise and the headphones, but he can see the man standing in front of him, mouth opening and closing angrily, hand on one hip, the other arm pointing to a house, demanding to be heard. Eddie ignores you and continues digging up my expensive paving. I make my way to the hall and I pace before the door, waiting for you to call. I jump when the doorbell rings. Just once. Nothing rude about it at all. A single push, a bright briiing, nothing at all like the routine with your wife.

I open the door and you and I are face to face for the first time ever. This is for my sister, this is for you, Heather, this is for my mother, for the unfairness in her having to leave the daughter she never wanted to leave. I say this to myself over and over, opening and closing my hands, ready to fight.

‘Yes?’ I say, and already it’s confrontational.

You seem taken aback by my tone.

‘Good morning,’ you say patronisingly, as if to tell me, that’s how to begin a conversation, as if you know the tiniest, minutest thing about polite conversation. You hold out your hand. ‘I’m Matt, I live across the road.’

This is very difficult for me. I am not a rude person, but I look at your hand and back at your unshaven face, your bloodshot eyes, the smell of alcohol emanating from every pore, your mouth that I dislike so much because of the words that come out of it, and I move my hands to the back pockets of my jeans. My heart drums maniacally as I do this. For you, Heather, for you, Mum.

You look at me, incredulous. You take your hand back, shove it into your coat pocket.

‘Have I missed something? It’s eight thirty a.m. and you’re digging up the ground! Is there something we should all know about? Some oil reserves, perhaps, that we can all share?’

You are still drunk, I can tell. Despite your feet being planted firmly on the ground, your body is moving in a circular motion like Michael Jackson’s leaning dance move.

‘If it’s disturbing you so much, maybe you’d find it easier to camp in your
back
garden for the next few days.’

You look at me like I’m the biggest, craziest bitch and then you walk away.

There are many things that I could have said. Many many ways I could have conveyed my disappointment in the way you discussed Down syndrome. A letter. An invitation to coffee, perhaps. An adult conversation. Instead I said that, on our first meeting. I am immediately sorry, not because I may have hurt you, but because I think I may have wasted an opportunity to actually do something important in the right way. And then it occurs to me for the first time that you probably don’t even remember that particular show. You have done so many, they probably mean nothing to you. I’m just an obnoxious neighbour who didn’t tell you about her building works.

I watch you cross the road to your house. Eddie is still ignoring the world and digging up the ground, the sound of it drumming in my head. You walk up and down the front and back of your house, staring in the windows, trying to figure out how to get in. You stagger a little, still drunk. Then you go to the table and I think you’re going to sit down but instead you pick up a garden chair and carry it to the front door. You swing it back with all your might and then slam it once, twice, three times against the window beside your front door, smashing the glass. None of this can be heard over the sound of the drill. You turn your body sideways, your stocky build making it difficult for you to slide in through the narrow space you’ve created, but eventually you gain entry to your house.

Despite the fact I have witnessed you do this, you once again have made me feel like the irrational one.

7

Eddie works solidly for two hours, then disappears for three hours. During this time the machine is sitting in my front garden, which now resembles the scene of an earthquake. He has wreaked mayhem and I hate looking at it, but I can’t help it because I am watching out the window, not for you – I know you won’t surface for hours – but for Eddie who wandered off down the road still wearing his hard hat and never came back. I call Johnny, who doesn’t answer and his phone has no messaging service. This is not a good sign. He was recommended to me by the landscaper I’ve hired for my garden, which is also not a good sign.

My mobile rings and it’s a private number so I don’t answer. My aunt Jennifer has told me, drunkenly on Christmas Day, that my cousin Kevin is coming home in the New Year and wants to get in touch. This is the New Year and I have been fielding my calls like the CIA. Kevin left Ireland when he was twenty-two, at first travelling the world, and then eventually settling in Australia, though I don’t think Kevin ever
settled.
He went off to find himself after a flurry of family drama and never came back, not even for Christmas, birthdays or my mum’s funeral. This is the same Kevin who told me I’d die when I was five – and who told me he was in love with me when I was seventeen.

My aunt was away with my mum for the weekend on one of their retreats to help Mum and, as I always did then, I was sleeping over in their house. My uncle Billy was watching TV and Kevin and I were sitting in the back garden on the swing set, spilling our hearts out to one another. I was telling him about Mum being sick, and he was listening. He was doing a really good job of listening. And then he told me his secret: that he’d just discovered he was adopted. He said he felt betrayed, after all this time, but it suddenly made sense to him, all the feelings he’d been having. About me. He was in love with me. Next thing I knew, he was on me, hands everywhere, hot breath and slippery tongue in my mouth. Whenever I thought about him after that I’d wash my mouth out for as long as I could. He may not have been my cousin in blood, but he was my
cousin.
We’d played Lord of the Flies in the trees at the back of his garden, we’d tied his brother Michael up and roasted him on the spit, we’d played dress-up and put on shows standing on windowsills. We’d done
family
things together. Every memory of him I had was tied up in him being my
cousin
. I felt disgusted by him.

We didn’t speak after that. I never told my aunt, but I knew that she knew. I assumed my mum had told her, but she never discussed it with me. After that first year she went from being nervously apologetic about what had happened to being irritated by me. I think she felt that my forgiving him would be the one thing that would bring him back to her. He hadn’t left the country at that stage, but Kevin had never wanted to be a part of anything or anyone, not least his family, he’d always been troubled, he’d always been unsure of himself and everyone around him. I’d had enough to deal with at that time; his issues were too much for me. Maybe that’s cruel, but at seventeen there was no understanding of his problems; he was my gross adopted cousin with problems who’d kissed me, and I wanted him the hell away from me. But now he is back and one of these days I will have to face him. I don’t have an issue with him any more, I no longer have the need to wash my mouth out when I think of him. Nevertheless, even though I have nothing of importance to do, I can think of better ways to spend my days than engaging in an awkward conversation with a cousin who tried to French kiss me on a garden swing sixteen years ago.

It is while I’m watching out the window and waiting for Eddie to return that the house phone rings. Nobody has the number apart from Dad and Heather, and it is usually only Heather who calls, so I answer it.

‘Could I speak with Jasmine Butler, please?’

I pause, trying to place the voice. I don’t think it’s Kevin. I’m imagining he would have an Australian accent now, but maybe not. Either way, I don’t think it’s him. Aunt Jennifer would have to be incredibly cruel to give him the number. There’s an accent that I can’t quite place hiding behind a Dublin accent, somewhere outside of Dublin but inside Ireland. A gentle country lilt.

‘Who is speaking?’

‘Am I speaking to Jasmine Butler?’ he asks.

I smile and try to hide my amusement. ‘Could you tell me who’s speaking, please? I’m Ms Butler’s housekeeper.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry,’ he says, perfectly happy and charming. ‘And what is your name?’

Who is this?
He
called
me
and now he is trying to take control, but not in a rude way, he is utterly polite and has a lovely tone. I can’t place the accent. Not Dublin. Not Northern. Not Southern either. Midlands? No. Charming, though. Probably a salesman. And now I have to think of a name and get him off the phone. I look at the hall table beside me and see the pen beside the charging base for the phone.

‘Pen,’ I say, and try not to laugh. ‘Pen-ny. Penelope, but people call me Penny.’

‘And sometimes Pen?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’ I smile.