Taken Away (13 page)

There was a dull clunk from our room. It wasn't much of a sound – perhaps he'd bumped into something – but it shot a flare of panic through me that almost made me piss myself. I bolted from the door, stumbled over my tangled feet and slammed into Ma and Dad's room. Dee was sitting in the middle of their bed and she jumped in fright at my wild-eyed entrance.

I grabbed her and spun to go, but she immediately began to squall.

‘You said me a jockey, Pap! You said me a jockey!'

Jesus!
I dropped to one knee, my eyes on the shut door across the hall. She scrambled from my arms and over my shoulder and clung to my back like a little pink monkey.

‘Giddyup, Pap!'

I staggered to my feet and warily carried her into the hall. She was kicking her chubby little legs, knocking her heels into my ribs and bouncing up and down in an attempt to get me to make horsey movements. But my eyes were on my bedroom door and I sidled down the hall, keeping my body between her and it.

‘Giddyup! Giddyup! GiddyUP!'

We were at the head of the stairs now, me half twisted to keep my eye on the door, she bopping up and down like a lunatic on my back.

‘Stay easy, Dee. Stay easy for Pap.'

But she just kept bopping up and down and telling me to giddyup, so that I had to turn and make my way properly on the stairs for fear of her pulling us both over.

At the turn in the staircase I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise up in a stiff ruff, and I felt sure that when I looked around he'd be there: his face white, his eyes black, his hands reaching. But he wasn't, and I managed to get Dee into the kitchen, without somehow dying of fear or breaking both our necks.

She slithered from my back just as Martin and Dad were shepherding Nan in from the garden. The kettle on the hob began its high-pitched whistle, and Ma started fussing over tea. No one noticed my rubber-legged stagger around the kitchen table and my shaky collapse into a chair facing the stairs.

Ma pucked me on the back of the head as she crossed behind me with the tea things. ‘Say hello to your Uncle Martin.'

I pulled my eyes from the stairs and gave what felt like a very pale-lipped greeting to the men. They were helping Nan with her coat; neither of them looked my way. Nan just nodded and smiled in that vague way she had when she hadn't a clue what was going on. Dad swung Dee up into his arms.

I went back to staring at the stairs.

Ma pucked me again on her way back to make the tea.

‘Where's your brother?' she asked, and the horrible joke of that question had me snorting a hysterical little laugh out my nose.
I don't know, Ma. I think I might have lost him.

‘He's having a wash, Ma.'

She put the teapot on the table, giving me the fish-eye. ‘What's up with you?'

Whatever way I looked up at her, Ma stopped dead. ‘What's wrong, Pat?'

I wanted to tell her – I really did. I felt like it was written all over my face anyway. I felt like I was sitting in front of her, the very picture of someone screaming
help me help me help me
at the top of my lungs. But obviously Ma couldn't read me, or I wasn't as transparent as I thought, because she just kept standing there, waiting, that questioning frown on her face, and I just kept looking at her, saying nothing.

I've never felt Dom's absence more keenly than I felt it at that moment. He should have been right there beside me, like always: explaining, involving, assuring. But there was a whistling void that should have been filled with his voice. He was silent. And so was I.

I have a headache,' I muttered. ‘

Ma put the back of her hand to my forehead. ‘You feel hot,' she said. ‘I wouldn't be surprised if you come down with pneumonia, leaping in and out of the sea like eejits. Put a spoon of sugar in your tea, it'll buoy you up.'

She moved off, and I recommenced my vigil of the stairs. A spoon of sugar in my tea. Of course. Problem solved.

I felt the family, as if far away and underwater, gradually gather around the breakfast table. They put Nan opposite me, and she sat nodding and smiling at everyone. Food was doled out, tea was poured. I kept my eyes on the stairs, moving my head if someone got into my line of vision, responding only to pass plates from left to right, hand over the milk, accept the breakfast that remained untouched on my plate.

Dom would come down and it would be a joke. He would come down and he would grin at me and he would mouth
gotcha
and I would kill him and it would all have been a joke.

‘I hadn't realised you came here every year, David,' said Uncle Martin, on the moon somewhere, making polite conversation. ‘It's an amusing coincidence, isn't it?'

‘How do you mean?' asked Dad, his voice equally distant. ‘Pass the butter, will you, Olive love?'

There was no sign of movement upstairs. No sound at all.

‘Well, with Cheryl having grown up here, it's funny that Olive's family would choose Skerries for their holidays.'

I vaguely registered a charged pause in the conversation, but my attention was aimed upwards. I was looking at the painted boards of the ceiling. Listening.

‘You didn't know?' asked Martin.

‘That Mam grew up here? Don't be ridiculous, Martin. Sure, Mam was a Royalette. She was raised in Dublin.'

‘No. Skerries. I'm sure of it. Cheryl only moved to Dublin in her late teens. I thought you knew that. It's no big secret, though she never did speak much of her life before she married Father.'

‘Yeah. Well. I doubt she got much encouragement to.'

I barely had time to register the dryness in Dad's voice before I finally heard what I'd been waiting for. I looked up again. There: a subtle creak on the ceiling. And following on from that, a whole series of quiet movements: footsteps, a soft scraping, a door opening and closing.

My eyes snapped to the stairs.

‘They had their own ways, those two,' said Martin.

‘I suppose so,' huffed Dad. ‘Mam always said she was born on the stage of the Theatre Royal. Dad seemed happy enough for her to leave it at that.'

Dom was standing at the top of the stairs now. I knew it. I could feel it. He was standing and listening, the bedroom doors all closed around him, the bathroom door shut at his back. My brother, standing in the little airless closet that was the upstairs landing, looking down the steps and wondering who lay at the foot of them, listening to the voices of his family and wondering who they were.
No, no. That's wrong. He's grinning. He's imagining me imagining him and he's grinning.

Ma asked, ‘Do you want a hot drop, Martin?'

There was a soft scuffing on the stairs and I was trying not to pant now, gripping the table.

‘Thank you,' said Martin. ‘I would.'

He was at the turn in the stairs now, coming down slowly. I saw his knee, then his leg as he came around the corner. Then Ma leant forward to pour Martin his tea and blocked my view. I stood up suddenly from my chair, leaping to my feet so as not to lose sight of him as he entered the kitchen.

My abrupt movement drew everyone's attention to me, so Dom and I had a moment to make eye contact when he hit the bottom step. He just stood there, one hand on the wall, looking shocky and uncertain.

My voice was dry as chalk when I said, ‘Come here and sit by me.'

Ma and Dad glanced at him and I saw identical frowns crease their foreheads.

‘You look a bit ropey,' said Dad.

‘Only to be expected,' said Martin. He smiled at Dom. ‘You've all been through a rough time.'

‘Have a cuppa, love,' said Ma, pouring Dom a cup and lacing it with the cure-all sugar.

‘Come here,' I said again, ‘and sit by me.'

He lurched across the room in jerky steps and dropped clumsily onto the chair beside me. We sat side by side like two broken robots, stiff and awkward, as the breakfast table slowly regained momentum around us. He laid his hands on either side of his plate. His shoulder was only inches from mine, and I could feel cold rippling off him. It was like sitting beside an open fridge. No one else seemed to notice anything. Were they blind?

Ma was cutting Dee's breakfast into little pieces, her mouth a firm line of concentration. Dad and Martin had gone back to unravelling Nan's past. Dad was fiddling with a piece of toast by his plate, crumbling it slowly and methodically with his free hand. Nan was off with the fairies, humming gently to herself and gazing at the tablecloth.

Only Dee seemed in any way perturbed by Dom. She was sitting on Dad's knee, filching toast and bits of bacon from his plate. When Dom sat down she'd begun to smile but had quickly stopped and stared at him as though he were a puzzle she couldn't quite work out. Slowly her puzzlement turned to concern, and as I watched, she leant closer in to Dad. Her little fist tightened in his shirt. A small frown grew between her sandy eyebrows.

‘Daddy?' she said. ‘Who dat?'

She was staring at Dom, and I wondered what it was she saw that the others couldn't. I looked at him from the corner of my eye. There were waves of cold rising from him that made the hairs on my left arm stand up. The left side of my body was skittering with goose flesh. Dom seemed afraid to raise his eyes and just kept staring, staring, staring at his plate of congealing food. His profile was familiar the way a mask would be familiar: all the planes and hollows in the right place, but none of the spirit. ‘Daddy, who dat?'

At the quiet repetition of her question, Dom seemed to realise what Dee was asking and he snapped his attention to her. She flinched under his startled gaze and tugged Dad's shirt in earnest.

‘
Daddy!
Who dat boy?'

Dad stopped talking and looked down at Dee in exasperation. ‘What
is
it, love?'

At the same time, Ma reached over for her. ‘Dee, come here and eat your own breakfast. Poor Daddy hasn't had a bite of his yet; it's all gone into your tummy!'

Dee was protesting and pointing. ‘But who
dat
boy? Who dat
boy
?' But no one was really paying her any attention.

Dom was so tense that I swear his body was vibrating slightly. His hands had curled to fists on either side of his plate. His eyes were roaming the surface of the table as though there may be a code written there in butter smears and breadcrumbs that would give him some way out of here, an answer to the question of how to escape.

I pushed down a surge of nausea. What was I going to do? No one but Deirdre seemed to see anything wrong. I glanced at Mam, Dad, Martin – quick little flashes of glances. They were perfectly at ease. The cold was rolling off Dom like a fog. His little sister had just asked who he was. And yet they didn't seem to have a clue that there was anything wrong.

Then Nan spoke, her voice warm and clear and connected with life, just as it had been the day before that bloody stroke, before she had been pushed off the edge of the world into the grey nowhere she now inhabited.

‘Francis, you look so cold, dear. Drink your tea. It'll heat your belly.'

We all stopped talking. Oh God. It sounded so like Nan – our proper Nan: The woman who spent three weeks a year travelling with her cronies. The woman who lived for her garden, and read two books a week. The woman who would sing ‘Second Hand Rose' and do the Charleston at the drop of any old hat. I hadn't realised how badly I'd missed her, until I heard her speak in that voice again.

She was smiling at Dom in
that
way: that kind, straightforward, trustworthy way. The way that let you know she'd never bullshit you and she'd never betray you. She gestured at his tea. ‘Drink it up, Francis, it'll do you a power of good.'

Dom stared at her, confusion and hope vying for dominance in his face. He made a funny noise in the back of his throat, and everyone looked at him in sympathy. They assumed he was upset because his nan thought he was someone else. But I knew different. I understood, suddenly and with a jolt, that Nan knew him – I mean she knew
him
, the him
inside Dom
. Nan
knew
him. But he didn't know her. I could see how he
longed
to know her, how he needed to know her, to have one little thing here that he could hang onto, that could anchor him.

But it did him no good. He searched and searched her face for some clue, and I could tell he found nothing. Nan gazed serenely back at him, her eyes filled with the same clarity of recognition she would have given me only nine months earlier.

‘Who do you think he is?' I whispered.

Mam shushed me with a wince. ‘Just play along with her, love,' she said to Dom. ‘She thinks you're someone else.'

He turned and looked at her with Dom's brown eyes, his confusion, his sorrow almost physical.
But I
am
someone else
, that look said. He turned back to Nan, searching her face again, and in a bright flash of understanding I realised he was going to ask her who she was. He opened his mouth to speak, and I reached under the table and pinched him hard on the thigh.
Shut up.

At the same time, Dad leant over and took Nan's hand in his. ‘That's Dom, Mam,' he said gently. ‘It's Dom.'

Nan smiled around at her son, a look of genuinely amused bewilderment on her face.

‘David,' she said, ‘what on earth are you talking about?'

Dad gasped; it was unbelievable to see her like this. It was as though the last terrible nine months had never happened and here she was, Nan, back after a long trip, giving us the dry-eye and laughing along with us under her breath.

‘Mam?' asked Dad, far too much hope in his voice.

Nan's clear-eyed amusement clouded over into confusion. Her face crumpled into the strained, polite smile that had been her permanent expression for so long. Dad's hope faded as his mother searched his face, trying to recall who he was, trying to catch the gist of a conversation already lost.