Something in Common (21 page)

Was he dead? Was he lying in a heap with a broken neck at the bottom of the stairs, or slumped across the kitchen table with a fishbone in his throat? She should have investigated before now, even if he was a gnarly old goat. If he’d died before the first dandelion had shown up, he’d be mouldy by now.

Nearly a month,
Jesus
, and she’d done bugger all about it.

‘Helen.’

She looked up.

‘I asked,’ her father said, ‘if you’d read any good books lately.’

Books, the last resort of the desperate conversationalist. Maybe she should tell him about his granddaughter’s recent brush with criminality: that would kick-start a lively exchange.

‘Only a few I had to review, nothing worth mentioning,’ she said, pushing back her chair. ‘Well, we’d better get going, Alice has revising to do. Thanks for the coffee.’

They stood side by side at the front door as Helen drove off, waving at the little Fiat until it was out of sight. As relieved, no doubt, to be rid of them as Helen and Alice were to be making their escape. The tyranny of family ties, condemning them to maintain some form of contact as long as they all should live.

Helen turned onto the main road. ‘Do you want to be dropped in town? Are you meeting Karen?’

The grounding period had ended the day before: peace of sorts had been restored to the household.

‘She’s gone to Kilkenny to stay with her dad.’

‘So you’re coming home, then?’

‘Yeah.’

Helen approached a
roundabout and signalled right. ‘Have you seen Mr Malone lately?’

‘No. Why?’

‘No reason. He doesn’t seem to be around.’

Silence. Helen entered the roundabout, wondering again what had prompted Sarah to send a second letter to Alice.

It had arrived the day before. Helen, seeing the familiar writing, the purple ink, had almost opened it before she’d realised it wasn’t addressed to her. Not another package, just an envelope this time. Nothing in it but a page or two, by the feel of it. She’d held it up to the light and hadn’t been made any wiser. She’d have to wait until Alice got home.

But Alice had taken it without comment and brought it upstairs, and no mention of it had been made for the rest of the evening. Helen vowed not to ask: Alice was sixteen, and entitled to her privacy. Still, she wondered what Sarah had had to say. She turned onto the road that ran along by the canal.

‘Have you any photos of me?’ Alice asked suddenly.

It was unexpected. ‘Photos? You mean your school ones?’

‘No, when I was a baby. Did you take any?’

A scatter of raindrops hit the windscreen. Helen flicked a switch and the wipers scraped against the glass. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘We took lots of photos – well, your father took them mostly, he was much better than me. He took piles of them.’

The camera had never been far from Cormac’s hands, those first few hectic months. Alice asleep, nestled against Helen’s chest. Alice yawning, her whole face getting involved. Alice crying, Alice feeding, Alice lying on her back, looking solemnly at the line of plastic animals that dangled on a line of elastic above her.

And later, Alice sitting on the kitchen floor, propped up by cushions. Alice crawling, Alice pulling herself up to standing, Alice dragging a doll around the garden by the hair, Alice in a high chair, clapping podgy hands at a cake with two lighted candles that sat on the tray in front of her.

There must be
dozens, more than a hundred maybe. Helen had forgotten all about them, hadn’t looked at them in years. Hadn’t laid eyes on the camera in years either, hadn’t a clue where it was. She wondered why Alice was asking about photos out of the blue.

‘Can I see them?’

‘Of course you can. They’re in my room. I’ll bring them down when we get home.’

After Cormac’s death the photos had stopped. No, they’d stopped before that, when he became too weak to hold the camera, and by then the last thing on Helen’s mind had been taking photographs. In fact, she was pretty sure she hadn’t taken a single photo of Alice since then – which was probably, now that she thought about it, a bit shameful. One more reminder of her pathetic parenting skills.

There were half a dozen albums, covered with fake white leather and pushed to the back of the wardrobe shelf, behind a tumble of tights and scarves, and a scatter of discarded paperbacks. Helen brought them downstairs and laid them on the kitchen table.

‘Here you go.’

She lit a cigarette and leant against the windowsill, studying her daughter’s profile. Alice turned the pages slowly, head bent, looking intently at the snaps. Her pale hair was cut high on her forehead – she’d butchered her long fringe without warning one day – and short as a small boy’s at the back. As she examined the photos, she scratched absently at a scab on her left wrist.

Her nails were bitten, a Fitzpatrick family trait. Alice had a small dark freckle, or a mole, at the point where the side of her neck met her right shoulder. Shoved up on her arm, almost to the elbow, was the thin, gold-plated bangle Cormac’s mother had sent her for her last birthday.

‘I remember that doll,’ she said, ‘but I forget what I called her.’

‘Juju.’ The name
came to Helen without thinking. ‘She was Julie, but you couldn’t manage it. You wouldn’t go to bed without her. We left her on Sandycove Beach once. You screamed the place down till we drove all the way back. She was sitting on the sea wall: someone had wrapped her in a plastic bag.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

Juju had been a present for her first birthday from Rick, the lead guitarist in the band, and his wife Jenni. After Cormac’s death they’d drifted away, like everyone else. Better things to do than keep in contact with the piano player’s widow and little girl. Bookings to fulfil, parties to go to.

Alice turned another page. ‘Oh my
God.
’

‘What?’

‘My face is
covered
in ice-cream, or yogurt, or something.’

Helen smiled. ‘You were a baby. That’s what they do.’

Look at them, having a normal conversation. Nobody scowling, nobody giving out. When had that ever happened? Helen felt the top of the sill against the back of her thighs as she watched her daughter turning the pages slowly. She remembered Cormac coming home from town with each wallet of photos, spreading them out on the table. The look on his face as he’d gazed at them.

‘He’s not in any of them,’ Alice said suddenly, on the last album. ‘My dad.’

The brushing-up against Helen’s thoughts was disconcerting. ‘That’s because he took most of them,’ she said. ‘But he’s in some, isn’t he?’

Alice turned pages. ‘Oh,’ she said, stopping and staring down at a photo. Helen resisted the impulse to cross the floor. Alice turned another page, slowly, and studied it with the same intensity. For several minutes she was silent, looking at pictures of the man she didn’t remember.

Finally she closed the album. ‘Can I keep this one in my room?’

Helen stubbed out her cigarette. ‘If you want.’

The phone rang in the hall. Alice got to her feet. ‘I’ll go.’

Karen probably, or one of the other girls who asked for her when Helen answered – nine times out of ten the voice at the other end looked for Alice. No male callers, not yet.

At sixteen, Helen
had French-kissed three boys and let one of them under her top. Brazen behaviour in 1958, when nice girls didn’t allow boys much more than a chaste goodnight peck on the cheek after a red lemonade and a swing around the local dancehall. Helen had always pushed further, curious to see what was waiting behind the next taboo.

She took eggs from the fridge, broke them into a bowl and beat them with a fork. As she grated cheese, Alice reappeared.

‘I’m making omelettes,’ Helen told her.

‘Karen’s dad has a new girlfriend,’ Alice replied.

‘Does he?’

Jonathan Nugent had made a pass at Helen once. She’d called to the house to collect Alice from a birthday party, and he’d answered the door. Must have been around three years ago, when he and Karen’s mother were still together, and supposedly happy, and Oliver was an intermittent visitor to Helen’s bed.

Jonathan had stood back to let her in. His blond hair needed a cut and his belly pushed at his shirt buttons, but he wasn’t bad-looking, in a sort of Robert-Redford-gone-to-seed kind of way.

‘Helen,’ he’d said, ‘good to see you. Drinks in the kitchen, away from the birthday madness.’

Presumably his wife was holding the fort inside, poor woman, while he got sloshed with the other parents in the kitchen. Helen, only too pleased to avoid the clutch of over-excited girls she could hear on the other side of the sitting-room door, had followed him down the hall. To her surprise, the kitchen was empty.

‘You’re the first,’ he’d told her, lifting an open wine bottle from the table and waving it at her. ‘A little Piat D’Or for the lady?’

From his too-loose grin she’d realised that he’d already had a few. ‘Any whiskey?’ As long as it was free, might as well go for it.

He’d bashed ice from a tray into a glass – a few cubes skittering away from him across the worktop – and added a decent amount of Paddy. ‘Bottoms up,’ he’d said, handing her the glass.

‘Cheers.’ She’d
raised it to her lips, aware of his gaze sliding down to her cleavage as she drank. Let him look, didn’t bother her.

He topped up an almost-empty wine glass that sat beside the sink. ‘So,’ he said, moving back to stand close to her, ‘here we are.’

His eyes were watery blue. She could have reached out and pulled his head down, she could have shoved her tongue into his mouth, and he wouldn’t have complained; he’d have loved it. She took another sip, enjoying the burn of the whiskey. Enjoying, to be perfectly honest, his eyes on her.

‘You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?’ she’d asked, and he’d drawn a packet of Major from his pocket. For the laugh she’d held eye contact with him as she’d leant towards the lighter he’d offered.

‘You don’t look old enough,’ he’d said then, ‘to have a daughter Alice’s age. You must have been a child yourself when you had her.’

She’d laughed: he was ridiculous. She’d been twenty-nine when Alice was born – any fool would know, looking at her, that she was well over that now. But it was harmless, a bit of flirtation in a suburban kitchen – and the knowledge that his wife could walk in at any minute had only added to the fun.

‘God,’ he’d said then, his eyes openly on her breasts, his smile still in place. ‘I’m so attracted to you. I want to fuck you right now on that table.’

She’d kept her eyes on his face, waited until he’d looked up. ‘What’s stopping you?’ she asked. Call his bluff, dirty old man.

And before he could react, the kitchen door had burst open and there was Karen in her blue party dress, cheeks aflame, holding an empty jug and demanding more MiWadi. And as her father was refilling the jug the doorbell sounded, and Helen had grabbed Alice and slipped away in the ensuing flurry of more parental arrivals.

Lying in bed alone
later that night – no sign of Oliver – she’d imagined starting an affair with the married father of her daughter’s best friend. Arranging for him to collect Karen when she was visiting Alice so they could snatch a quickie while the girls were still upstairs, or sneaking him into the house at night after Alice was asleep. Meeting his wife at the school gates in the afternoons, meeting both of them at the end-of-term concert in a couple of months’ time.

She’d waited to see if he made contact – let him come to her, she wasn’t that desperate – but he never did; and before the term ended he’d walked out on his wife, and Helen hadn’t laid eyes on him since. No loss.

‘By the way,’ Alice said, taking cutlery from the drawer, ‘there’s an ambulance outside Mr Malone’s house.’

***