Lifesaving for Beginners (43 page)

Dad does as he’s told.
He pulls into an empty driveway and performs a pretty dramatic emergency stop.
We wait.
Nobody says a word.
Minnie hisses, ‘Get down, everyone,’ and this time I do as I’m told and so does everyone else.
It doesn’t take long to become ‘media savvy’, it seems.

After a while, Mum says, ‘This is ridiculous.’

I say, ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

Ed says, ‘How come the television trucks don’t chase you, Mum?’

Once we start laughing, we can’t stop.
If someone passes by, they would see an ancient green Lexus shaking, with what looks like nobody inside.

Dad waits a full twenty minutes before he drives away.
He takes the back roads to Raheny, through Donaghmede and Kilbarrack.
The rest of the journey passes without incident.
It’s only when we turn onto the Howth Road that I realise I have more to learn about media savvy-ness.

There are more trucks.
Television trucks.
Outside my parents’ house.
Only two of them but enough to give me a jolt, nonetheless.

Ed yells, ‘Holy smoke!’
when he sees them.
He’s enjoying all the cloak and dagger.

Dad says, ‘I can’t drive around for much longer.
We’re nearly out of juice.’
He never says ‘juice’.
He says ‘petrol’.

Minnie says, ‘If we go in there, we’re trapped.
We’ll be like fish in a barrel.’

That’s when Mum says, in a quiet voice so we have to strain to hear her, ‘I want to go home.’

Dad says, ‘OK.’

And that’s how we end up barricaded inside the house where I grew up, with the media, swelling in numbers by the hour, camped outside the door and up and down the street.

We pull down the blinds.
Put on the kettle.
Ed says he’s starving but when I check the fridge there are a few stalks of celery, a tub of natural yoghurt, a hard triangle of Edam and a withered bunch of thyme.
Looking in this fridge it’s hard to believe it will be Christmas Eve tomorrow.

Dad says, ‘I’m sorry.
I haven’t had the chance to go shopping.’

Ed says, ‘But I’m hungry.’

I say, ‘I’ll ring Domino’s.’

Minnie says, ‘How’s that going to look on the news?
World famous author stuffs face with Domino’s Mighty Meaty?’

In the end, I find potato waffles and fish fingers in the freezer, possibly left over from the days when I used to live in the house.
I steam the celery to make it a bit more healthy-heart-ish for Ed but he refuses to eat it because I forgot to chop the stalks into chunks and I tell him I’ll do it now but he says, ‘It’s too late, Kat.’

Sky News have the story running on a loop.

The revelation today, of the author of the hugely successful Declan Darker series of novels, has sent shock waves through the publishing world, the reading world and the world at large.
Katherine Kavanagh – known affectionately to her friends and family as Kat – revealed today, at a press conference, that she has been writing under the pseudonym Killian Kobain for almost twenty years.
Following a short statement from Kavanagh, the writer left the press conference, refusing to answer any questions.
The media-shy Kat is hiding out at her parents’ house in Dublin, where her brother, Edward, who is autistic, is said to be recovering from the recent removal of a brain tumour.

There’s no point screaming at the television screen but I do it anyway.
With each report comes a fresh inaccuracy.

Kat Kavanagh received a six-figure advance in the spring of 1992 when she submitted a mere three chapters of
Dirty Little Secret
,
which she had written longhand into several shorthand notebooks, to publishers Hodder & Stoughton.

That’s rubbish.
Minnie sent the entire manuscript.
And I used legal pads.
And it was July.
That’s bloody well summer, the last time I checked.

Brona Best – Kat Kavanagh’s editor for the past twenty years – spoke today of the lengths that she had to go to, to protect her top writer’s identity.
Describing Kavanagh as deeply paranoid and unpredictable, Best said that, with Kavanagh’s murky past, the writer’s behaviour is understandable.

Brona rings almost immediately.
She is weeping.
‘I .
.
.
I .
.
.
I ne .
.
.
nev .
.
.
never .
.
.
told them that .
.
.
Kat .
.
.
I swear .
.
.
I di .
.
.
I di .
.
.
I didn’t t-t-tell them anything.’

It takes me ages to get her to stop crying.
Eventually I have to yell, ‘Stop crying,’ which works a treat.

Brona says, ‘They’re camped outside on the street.
The phones won’t stop ringing.
One of the camera crews has rented a scissor lift.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.
We’re on the sixteenth floor, for Christ’s sake.’

Brona never blasphemes.
Things are serious.

‘Look, Brona.
Don’t worry.
It’ll blow over.
Just keep your head down and your mouth shut.’

Brona starts crying again.
Quietly this time.

She says, ‘You were right.’

‘About what?’

‘The leak.
It came from our office.’

‘WHAT?
HOW?’

‘Bloody Harold.’

‘Harold?
Jeremy’s boyfriend?’

‘Ex-boyfriend, remember?
Apparently, he was up to his neck in debt.
He was an addict.’

‘A drug addict?’

‘Cosmetic surgery.
He’s had everything done.
He looked like Joan Rivers in the end, Jeremy said.
Anyway, he must have been poking around Jeremy’s home office and he found something about you.
Jeremy is distraught.
He’s in the disabled toilet, crying his eyes out.’

‘Why is he in the disabled toilet?’

‘Privacy.’
It seems like a strange word now, in the circumstances.

For a while, neither of us says anything.
It’s nice, actually.
A fleeting moment of peace.

Then Brona says, ‘Is it true?
What you said?
About having a baby?’

I say, ‘Yes,’ and Brona begins to cry again.
A soft little cry.
It makes a terrible sound.

Eventually she says, ‘That’s s-s-s-so saaaaaaaaad.’

It was only a matter of time before they uncovered Thomas, I suppose.
They find him in one of his five stony fields, putting up a fence.
He’s wearing a long sheepskin over a suit, the trousers of which are tucked inside the wellingtons.
The bright pink ones.
With the yellow buttercups.
The camera has to pan up for a good while before it reaches his face.

Seeing him on the television is a terribly strange sensation.
His face is so familiar.
I know it so well, like the way to somewhere you’ve been going to for years.
You just go.
You don’t have to think about it.

And yet, there is something strange about it too and I think it’s because Thomas is on the television and I’ve never seen him on the television.
I’ve seen him in my home.
In my bed.
All over my life.
And I miss it.
I miss seeing him.
This much I am certain of.
To be honest, it feels good.
To know something for certain.

The newsreader – Dawn Handel – is in the middle of a story about me getting a D for my English paper in the Leaving Certificate, which is the first thing they’ve said that is one hundred per cent true (Mum took it as a personal affront and didn’t speak to me for weeks after the results came out).
Dawn stops in the middle of a sentence about Sister Rafferty, who was my English teacher back then, and who surely must be festering in the grave by now.
She cocks her head and touches her ear with her fingers.
She says, ‘Breaking news now.
We are going straight over to a farm in County Monaghan’ – she pronounces it ‘Monag-Han’, which I don’t think the locals are going to like – ‘where our reporter has caught up with Thomas Cunningham [Cunning-Ham], Kat’s partner.’

I cover my face with my hands.
Then I splay my fingers so I can see through the gaps and I watch his face on the screen.
That familiar face.
The face that I know off by heart.

Ed shouts, ‘It’s Thomas.
There’s Thomas.
Thomas is on the television!’
This brings Mum, Dad and Minnie running in from the kitchen, where they have been talking in low, urgent voices.
On the screen now is a reporter with a microphone.
He’s a small, skinny little fellow with huge, black glasses.
The microphone covers most of his face.
He looks like he’s getting smaller until I realise he’s sinking.
Every so often, he pulls one foot out of the black mud and it comes away with a guttural sucking sound that is picked up, clear as a bell, by the microphone.
The persistent rain over the past few days has turned Thomas’s five stony fields into a mud bath.

He says, ‘I’m here in County Monag-Han at a farm that is owned by Thomas Cunning-Ham who, we understand, is engaged to be married to Katherine Kavanagh AKA Killian Kobain.’
He pauses to let the import of the sentence sink in.
His feet sink a little deeper into the mud.

Behind him, the camera picks up Thomas, who has put down the hammer – thank Christ – and is walking towards the reporter.

Thomas says, ‘Can I help you?’
His tone is about as helpful as a hearing aid for a blind man.

The journalist says, ‘Is it true that you are engaged to be married to Katherine Kavanagh?’

Thomas says, ‘No.’

The journalist says, ‘But you were romantically involved with Kat Kavanagh, were you not?’

Thomas steps forward and the journalist steps back.
Thomas says, ‘Get off my land.’

The journalist says, ‘Did you know?
That she wrote the Declan Darker books?’

Thomas says, ‘I know a lot of things.
And one of those things is that you’re trespassing on my property.’

The journalist says, ‘Do you know who fathered the child that Kat Kavanagh gave away when she was just fifteen years old?’

Thomas says no more.
Instead, he picks up the journalist with both hands.
It takes him longer than it should because he has to pull him out of the mud, which is now up to the journalist’s shins.
He walks to the bit of the fence he’s built so far, and deposits the journalist on a haystack on the other side.
Then he wipes his hands on the trousers of one of his two good suits and looks right at the camera, and that’s when the screen shudders as if whoever is holding the camera is running backwards – and why wouldn’t they?
– before it goes dark and then switches back to the studio, where Dawn Handel is there to pick up the pieces.

She says, ‘More from Mark Simms in Monag-Han a little later on.
And now, over to the sports desk.’

Minnie finds the remote and switches off the telly.
She goes to the kitchen and switches off the radio.
I hear her put on the kettle.
She returns with her iPad.
She says, ‘You’re trending on Twitter.’

I say, ‘So?’
because I don’t see what difference that makes, in the general scheme of things.