‘And you’ll think about going back to work? Maybe next week?’
‘Yes.’
But the prospect of going back to work seemed marginally more challenging than climbing Mount Everest on her knees. She eased her hand from his and slid back down, pulling the blankets around her.
‘I’d like to sleep now,’ she said, closing her eyes. She felt the mattress lifting as he stood, heard the soft clink of cutlery on crockery as he took away the tray. She listened to the sound of his footsteps, muffled by the carpet. The gentle click of the door closing, the low thud of his feet on the stairs.
She would get up tomorrow because he wanted her to. She would have a bath and wash her hair and put on clean clothes. And some time in the afternoon she would phone the nursing home and tell Matron she’d be back on Monday. Life would go on. That was what it did.
Life went on, no matter what happened. Princess Grace dead, all that beauty wiped out in seconds when her car had smashed into a mountain last year. No holiday home in Mayo after all.
John Lennon gunned down outside his home, the IRA blowing up bandsmen and horses, wars and floods and famines all over the world, and still the sun came up each day and people carried on.
But not everyone carried on, did they? She remembered the woman she’d met on the bridge the day she’d done the interview for St Sebastian’s, eight years ago now. She remembered the horror she’d felt when she’d realised what the woman wanted to do, what so many people did, year after year. Throwing themselves into rivers or over cliffs, climbing onto chairs to hang themselves from rafters, swallowing bottles of pills.
The bridge was
still there. Sarah cycled over it anytime she went to visit her father. In eight years the only change had been a fresh coat of paint to the railings every now and again. There was vague talk of a reconstruction, but so far nothing had been done.
The bridge wasn’t far from their house, about twenty minutes on a bike. She could wait until Neil had gone back to work, she could be there by mid-afternoon. She could prop the bike against the railing and climb—
She shook her head sharply, cutting off the thought. No, never, no matter how sad and bleak everything became. There was always hope – wasn’t there always hope? There was always the possibility that tomorrow things would be better. But right now it was so hard to go on remembering that, so hard to keep the darkness from taking over.
She propped herself
up on an elbow and reached again for Helen’s letter. She read it for the umpteenth time, her lips forming the words silently. She clung to them; she wrapped them around her like a much-loved, tatty old dressing-gown.
O
n the morning of her forty-first birthday Helen O’Dowd observed herself without joy in the bathroom mirror. A web of lines splaying from the outer corners of her eyes: permanent residents now, whether she laughed or not. More lines, an accordion of them, scored into the skin above and below her lips. Nearly a quarter of a century’s worth of smoking to thank for those, begun behind the bicycle sheds in school with Maura Curran and Frances Lynch when they were all seventeen, and not stopped since.
Long before she met Cormac she’d been on twenty a day, blackening her insides with the poison from thousands of cigarettes. And yet it had been Cormac, smoker of just the occasional joint, whose lungs had been withered away by cancer, years before his forty-first birthday.
She tamped down the flare of pain his memory still caused and patted the loose skin beneath her chin – when had that happened? And look how crêpey the skin of her neck had become, and the ugly criss-cross of creases meandering down her chest. Some sight, at ten past eight in the morning.
Her appearance
wasn’t helped in any way, of course, by the night she’d just had. Too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, not nearly enough food: repeated often enough – and she was still repeating it as often as she got the chance – it was bound to put years on anyone.
Forty-one admitting to thirty-six, the only thing she didn’t tell the truth about. Forty-one, on the verge of sliding disgracefully into middle age.
Sarah was one of the few people who knew her real age. Sarah, in fact, probably knew more about Helen than anyone, including Helen’s parents. Especially Helen’s parents. She wasn’t sure exactly how it had happened, but over the course of the last few years she and Sarah had become friends.
Never meeting up, maybe that was how they’d managed it. If Sarah spent ten minutes with Helen she’d probably want to run for the hills – and Helen might well feel the same. Chalk and cheese, that’s what they were.
But however opposing their personalities, the truth was that on some level they clicked. Sarah was impossibly romantic, always believing the best of people, always ready to trust the stranger. But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe people like her balanced out cynics like Helen.
So they’d continued to write after the last of the recipes had been sent, they’d fallen into a correspondence that seemed agreeable to both, and with each letter that passed between them they connected a little more. And while Helen often shook her head at what she regarded as Sarah’s hopeless naïveté, she found herself looking forward to the letters with the Kildare postmark.
Scanning the paragraphs of the first few letters, the overriding feeling they conveyed to her was happiness. Here was a happy person, in love with her husband, fulfilled in her job. The kind of person you’d love to hate – but hating Sarah, with her enormous capacity to see goodness everywhere, was impossible.
When she’d lost
the first baby, only a few weeks after she and Helen had been corresponding, she’d been upset, of course, but also philosophical.
These things happen to so many
, she’d written.
Please God next time I’ll be luckier.
But two years later it had happened again, and it was heartbreaking to witness her struggle to stay positive then.
Reading about the miscarriages, sensing the raw grief within the lines, Helen had felt real sympathy. You didn’t need to meet Sarah to know that she was a mother waiting to happen. What rotten Fate had decreed that she should be denied the chance, over and over, while the likes of Helen, who would never win a parenting prize, could have got pregnant so easily?
She’d conceived without trying, coming off the Pill just a few months before Cormac’s sperm had done the business – and there was Sarah, desperate for a baby, but only able, it appeared, to miscarry them.
Helen felt helpless in the face of her friend’s anguish. What could she offer, other than useless jars of cream and equally useless words? But maybe Sarah was glad to have someone to write to; maybe that helped in some tiny way. And surely, eventually, she’d manage to hang on to a foetus for nine months. Time enough, she was still only thirty-two.
Helen left the bathroom and crossed the landing to Alice’s room. She opened the door and stepped over the trail of crumpled garments to pull the curtains apart and push the window open.
‘Time for school.’
A muffled groan from the humped shape in the single bed.
‘Five minutes, and bring those clothes down.’
A week away from twelve years old: on the cusp of her teens but already fully qualified. Sulky, monosyllabic, doing as little to help around the house as she could get away with. Helen ignored as much as she could, insisting only that Alice kept her room moderately tidy and did the washing-up after dinner. It wasn’t as if housework came top of her own agenda, so she could hardly blame her daughter’s lack of interest.
But school was
another story.
Alice isn’t trying
was the continuing mantra at the parent-teacher meetings,
Alice can be disruptive
was the variation. Alice’s dog-eared copies were littered with doodles and deletions and the red biro marks of her teachers, and comments like
disappointing
and
could do better.
Alice’s test marks hovered in the bottom quarter of the class.
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Helen would demand, after another teacher had taken her through the catalogue of Alice’s failings. ‘You could be top of the class – you have brains to burn. Why don’t you use them, for Christ’s sake?’
And Alice would shrug and twirl her hair around a finger and wait for her mother to finish ranting, and Helen would use all the self-control she could muster not to grab her daughter’s skinny arms and shake some sense into her. Eleven going on teenage nightmare, eyelashes catching in the muddy blonde fringe she refused to cut, frayed ends of her jeans trailing the ground, soaking water up to her knees when it rained. Nails bitten to the quick, just like her mother’s.
Helen walked downstairs and lifted the newspaper from the floor in the hall. One of her few luxuries since becoming a journalist, having it delivered five days a week. She pushed open the door that led into the poky kitchen; unchanged, like the rest of the house, since Cormac’s time. Helen couldn’t care less about the brown Formica worktop, the gas cooker in the corner, the rickety steel-legged table pushed up against the geometric-patterned yellow and cream wallpaper, the narrow cheap presses whose doors had hung crookedly for as long as she’d known them, the cracked brown lino that Cormac’s grandmother had chosen. Décor had never interested Helen – what difference did the colour of a wall make?
The toaster popped as Alice slouched in. Without a word she took the slice and brought it to the table and began to butter it.
‘Plate,’ Helen said, not lifting her eyes from the newspaper. Alice sighed loudly and took one from the stack that sat on the worktop.
‘Did you bring down those clothes?’
‘Forgot.’
She crunched the toast, drinking nothing. Helen had long since given up trying to coax juice or milk or any liquid into her.
Duran Duran sang
on the radio. Upstairs a toilet flushed. Alice looked accusingly at her mother. ‘He’s here again.’
Helen went on reading.
‘Isn’t he?’
‘If you mean Oliver, yes, he is.’
Alice bit into her toast. ‘Fuck,’ she said, mouth full.
Helen looked up sharply. ‘Watch your tongue.’
‘You say it all the time.’
‘And if I stepped off a cliff you’d do it too?’
Alice mumbled something that Helen didn’t catch: probably wishing her mother would do just that: disappear out of her life, tumble over the edge of a cliff, never to be seen again. Helen wondered what reaction she’d get if she lowered her newspaper and said
I nearly jumped off a bridge into a river once. You were three, your father had just died and I was a mess.
That might wipe the sulk off Madam’s face for a few minutes.
Helen thought of it, on the rare occasions that it crossed her mind, as the turning point: the day she’d gone out to kill herself and come home alive. She remembered taking the kitchen scissors and cutting off her hair that evening – her first step forward, she’d realised later. Her first attempt to claw herself out of Hell, to leave the nightmare behind.
Of course, it had been several more months before she’d found the strength and inspiration to begin writing about the experiences of a shopgirl, but she believed her recovery had begun that night, after the blackest day of her life.
And it had been writing that ultimately saved her. Discovering something she was good at, and that paid the bills, had been her redemption. With each subsequent article she’d begun to inch her way further out of the darkness. It had taken her till her mid-thirties to find her vocation, and now, nearly eight years on, she couldn’t imagine making her living in any other way.
Where did the
years go? Cormac, dead eight years last month, his daughter growing up so fast. Time galloping on, stopping for nothing, and today Helen was forty-one, like it or not. No doubt her mother would be around later with the usual little birthday remembrance, and they’d drink coffee and pretend that even one of them wanted to be there.
Her father had retired from the bench four years earlier, working right up to his seventy-second birthday, and since then her parents had been on a Caribbean cruise and two extended holidays to the south of France. Making the most of their free time, plenty of money to spend on whatever they chose. In fairness, they’d offered to finance a holiday for Helen and Alice, and Helen had thanked them for the offer and said sometime, maybe.
She and Alice still called once a week, still made conversation for an hour in her mother’s immaculate kitchen, still exchanged gifts at Christmas and birthdays. And still Helen felt a gulf between them, a distance that she could never imagine closing.
The kitchen door opened again and Oliver walked in. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and his feet were bare. ‘Morning,’ he said to Alice, who pushed back her chair and walked past him out of the room, leaving her half-eaten toast behind.
‘I’m still flavour of the month then,’ he said, taking up the toast and biting into it, cocking his head at Alice’s angry stomps up the stairs. ‘Good to know.’
Helen sipped her coffee, watching him fill a mug from the percolator. ‘I thought you were going to stay in bed until we left.’
‘Oh, come on, she’s eleven years old.’ He put his coffee on the table beside hers and dropped onto his haunches beside her chair. ‘You can’t let her dictate what you do,’ he said, opening the top buttons of her shirt to slide his hands inside and cup her breasts. ‘You’re the adult, she’s the kid,’ he said, squeezing gently.
Helen ignored the desire that flared into life at his touch. He only had to look at her, damn it. ‘I’d rather keep my private life private, that’s all,’ she said lightly, drawing out of his reach and gathering plates and cups. ‘Help yourself to breakfast. There might be eggs.’
‘Coffee’s fine.’ He leant against the table and crossed his arms. ‘You are one sexy lady, you know that?’
Helen put the crockery
into the sink and did up her buttons. ‘So they keep telling me.’
She hadn’t mentioned her birthday. They’d met three months earlier, at the welcome reception of a press convention to which Helen, out of curiosity, had wangled an invite.