The Forgotten Waltz (18 page)

After months of this fretfulness and concern, and many hundreds of hours on the internet, Aileen decided to take Evie off her medication.

‘I want my little girl back,’ she said.

Aileen’s worry had become impossible. She had worried so hard and for so long, it had transcended itself and turned into a rapture of care.

‘It’s not her anymore,’ she said. ‘It’s not Evie.’

Seán argued that the child was only four: ‘She’s changing every minute,’ he said. ‘She’s never the same.’

To which Aileen answered, ‘
How can you not know?’

So Evie was weaned off her tablets and the seizure, when it happened, was almost a relief, after so many days of waiting for it to come. Days and weeks of being present and mindful, waiting for the crackle in her brain, fearful of the shadows, as the sun was cut to flitters by the roadside trees. Do you smell something, Evie? Do you see something? What are you thinking, Evie?

It happened in the crèche where Evie now spent her days. The woman in charge didn’t seem to bat an eyelid. It was an event. She had managed it.

‘I just held her in my arms,’ she said. ‘Poor little mite.’

Not that they liked her for it.

‘What a cow,’ said Aileen, because reality had shifted for them, one more time. They were now looking at a world in which an absent, juddering child was a normal thing. Their child. Their beautiful, ever-present Evie.

There is no doubt that Aileen, who was above all things rational, was not behaving rationally when she decided to put an end to this nonsense, once and for all. She put Evie on a diet. It was a medical diet. The hospital they attended did not supervise it, but some hospitals did, she said, though it was usually for children much worse off than Evie. It was a ketogenic regime – like Atkins but weirder and stricter – it seemed to involve endless but very exact amounts of whipped cream. No carbohydrates were allowed. None whatsoever. Not an apple, not the stain of sauce on a baked bean. One crisp and the child would be foaming at the mouth and falling under the nearest bus, no question.

Seán should have argued it out, he said. Or he should have talked to her more – Aileen that is – made her feel less lonely in it. But it was all unstoppably itself, he thought. And there was nothing so terribly wrong with whipped cream. So he just let her at it.

The diet never worked. At least, Evie never stuck to it – Seán suspected, besides, that the crèche woman was feeding her Hula Hoops, out of sympathy. They started fresh every Monday, by Thursday Evie would be discovered with sugar on her breath. Aileen would go into the next room in order to compose herself, then she would come back to discuss things with Evie.

‘Remember, Mrs Mooch, how we talked about your brain?’

One evening, after finding a nest of peach stones stuffed down the back of the sofa, Aileen stood and wept. They were turning their daughter into a failure, she said; their fabulous daughter, who was now a constant disappointment to them; also, when it came to food, an accomplished thief and liar. And though Aileen saw all this happening, she did not know how to fix it, and there was nothing Seán could do except stand outside the circle and tell her that everything was going to be all right when it was not all right. It was all impossible. And it was all her fault.

It was during this phase of their lives, the ketogenic phase, that I saw Seán for the first time, standing at the bottom of my sister’s garden in Enniskerry. I do not know what he was thinking about. He might have been thinking about Evie, or about work, or about a woman at work. He might have been admiring the view, or wondering how much the houses were worth, between here and the sea. Perhaps he was pining for my sister Fiona, who is so pretty and sad. Or he might have been thinking about nothing. The way men often claim to do.

‘What are you thinking about?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing much.’

It is fairly clear, however, that he was not thinking about Evie in any practical way, because, when she came up behind him there was a stolen smear of something sticky and very purple on her little face.

He said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, Evie,’ and he sighed. He watched Aileen scrub at the gunk with a paper napkin, then he looked over to me.

Of course, I know Evie’s story mostly from Seán’s point of view, and I know that Seán does not always tell the truth. Or he does not remember the truth. The way he tells it, he met Fiona’s sister (as he used to think of me) for the first time, walking in Knocksink woods, with the kids up to their knees in muck. He has no recollection of me at the party, standing by the fence.

But whatever way he remembers it, there is something in Evie’s story that Seán is constantly trying to understand. Something about himself, perhaps.

And then there is Aileen.

Evie marched into Terenure – quite early on – and handed me a battered-looking envelope, then she rolled her eyes, and clumped off to switch on Joan’s crap little TV. Inside was an information sheet, headed ‘What to Do When Someone has an Epileptic Seizure’. This was clipped to a pathetic note from Aileen – typed, unsigned – that began, ‘When Evie was four years old, she was diagnosed as suffering from benign rolandic epilepsy of childhood (BREC). Recently that diagnosis has been under review.’ I read it all. I didn’t understand a word of it. I said to Seán, ‘So what exactly is wrong with her?’

‘Actually nothing,’ he said. ‘She’s fine.’

Evie, still off the medication, went to school the autumn after the party in Enniskerry, and Aileen had a whole new reality check. The very nice and very young teacher listened to her tale and blinked twice. She said, ‘Could you run that by me again?’ Seán and Aileen then spoke to the headmistress who was completely reassuring. She also reminded them, on their way out the door, that there were twenty-nine other children in Evie’s class.

In October, Evie had a seizure in the line before the bell went, and everyone made a great fuss of her. But there was one little girl who was mean and really, as Evie said to her mother, with all the wisdom a five-year-old can muster, ‘It’s just not me, you know?’

They laughed when she said it, but they were ashamed too. Evie was saying that this might happen inside her, but she was outside it. It was not for her a question of poetry, or personality. It was just a bad thing that happened to her and she wanted it to stop.

They had to admire the person she was, at five years old, and hope she never lost it. Aileen relented. They put her on a different drug which slowly made her fat and, perhaps – again it was hard to tell – a bit incontinent. The seizures stopped. All her loopiness faded away. If anything, she seemed a little dull, though that might have been an illusion of her new girth – and besides, she was growing up. Also out. By the time I saw her in Brittas she was a different person. This time it was Seán who had put the child on a diet – for looking, I suspect,
less than middle class
. He saw it as a simple balance to her medication, but it is possible that Evie irritated him more, the larger she grew. Because the forbidden ice-pop that day in Brittas had a kind of despair built into it – the way they clung together – both of them hanging on to Evie’s disappearing childhood, there on Fiona’s deck.

That autumn, at Dr Prentice’s suggestion, they tapered the dose, and then, finally, gave it up. Nothing happened.

Evie was absolutely herself – body and mind. She was a little private, perhaps; watchful and solitary. There was, when I met her upstairs on New Year’s Day, a stilled and expectant look, like a child who has known danger, or one who is slightly deaf. She continued free of seizures: her childhood illness was now finished. In a way, it had never been very terrible. She had suffered, the summer of the whipped cream diet, four or five major seizures. Her last was the one in the yard, the year she started school. She did not have another problem until she was ten years old.

And that, so far as I can tell it, is what happened to Evie. But it is not the whole truth. It is just the truth in a concentrated form.

Because, let’s face it – from the day the child was born, Aileen acted as though Evie could die at any moment. What she discovered, when she looked into the baby’s muddy blue eyes, was fear in a form she had never known before. And weaning Evie off her medication was easy compared to weaning her off the breast, for example, which was a major production only slightly less fraught than the three-act opera of getting her on the tit in the first instance.

But though you might think Aileen pushed him away, it is also true, if you do the dates (which I have), if you work the connections and listen to the silences, that Seán had knocked out at least one affair before Evie fell off the swing and battered her little heels on the ground. This is the real way it happens, isn’t it? I mean in the real world there is no one moment when a relationship changes, no clear cause and effect.

Or the effect might be clear, the cause is harder to trace.

The effect walks up, many years later, when you are out to dinner with your new partner and she says, ‘My goodness. Would you look who it is.’

I think his first affair was with the Global Tax woman, the one on the conference in Switzerland. Going by the dates, she was, at a guess, a series of horrible, hot little encounters when Evie was in nappies. The little window in his heart, that opened in Fiona’s kitchen, when she was just pregnant with Jack – that was when Evie was three. So if he talked to Fiona about the sadness of his wife, that day, then maybe his wife had good reason to be sad. Unless she wasn’t sad, of course, and he was just looking for something to say.

Bubblegum girl, as I like to think of her, the one with the nail varnish and the B in Honours Maths, was drinking like a twenty-two-year-old and hanging out of railings around the time I met him in Brittas Bay. I think about his body on the beach, and it seems different to me now. His strong legs and neat back standing at the edge of the sea, while his wife disentangled herself from Evie on the strand: the tufty nipples he covered up with a black T-shirt, while we sat and talked, it all seems, now, differently naked; shadowed by another girl’s touch, wrapped in her secret arms. Cocky little bastard. No wonder he leaned back on his elbows like that and lifted his face to the sky.

I don’t know why I should worry about his infidelities to Aileen especially considering that I was one of them. I should take it as proof that he never loved her, though I think he really did love her once. Did he love my sister that day in Brittas? Or all of these women, all of the time? I don’t care.

He loves me now. Or he loves me too.

Or.

I love him. And that is as much as any of us can know

The Things We Do for Love

THE FIRST THING
I hear in the morning is the phone.

‘Are you going into work?’ It is Seán.

‘I think so.’

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’

‘Where are you?’ I say, but he is gone.

Neither is he, as I discover when I let the phone fall back on the duvet, in the bed beside me. It is half past eight. There is something too blank about the light outside. I get up into the murk of the room, and pull the curtains of grey linen, and find the world flattened by monochrome.

I do the winter sprint around the freezing room, shower and dress, pick the phone up to find a text:

‘Can you pick Ev up from Foxrock?’

To which I reply, ‘Hve meeting. Walking into town.’

I can’t imagine how Evie is supposed to get out of Enniskerry, which must be snowed in. The schools are closed. I don’t see any cars on the road, and the television, when I turn it on, has pictures of frozen confusion, quiet chaos. Nothing is moving, except makeshift toboggans and snowballs.

You would think that on this day of all days, she would just stay at home. But I know nothing about these things – the reason Evie stays, or the reasons she goes – there are deep forces at work, great imperatives. We must inch forward massively, like rock along a fault line, for fear of the quake.

At ten thirty, another, somewhat redundant, text from Seán, ‘Hang on …’

‘Bated breath,’ I write – and then delete.

Since his daughter came into my house, life is one long wrangle about arrangements: times, places, pick-ups, drop-offs, handovers. And everything has to be done in person. For some reason, you can’t just ask someone – friend’s mother, drama teacher or whoever – to put the child in a taxi. I mean, how much is my time worth? How much is Seán’s time worth? Surely more than the tenner for the fare. But you can’t put daughters in taxis. Putting a daughter in a taxi is like asking a foreigner to molest her,
on the meter
.

‘Meet Ev 3.30ish Dawson St??’

‘ok. When home?’

‘145 bus stop.’

‘whn home?’

‘trying!!!!’

‘How Buda?’

He does not reply.

I have saved this man’s life, but there are things I am not allowed to – that I do not need to – know. The money thing, for example. I don’t know whether he can break even in Budapest, or what is happening to his house by the beach, which is now up for sale too. I think, to be fair, he doesn’t know either. I mean, it’s fine. Everything is fine, just so long as no one blinks, no one moves. Meanwhile, it is there on the web for everyone to click over and ignore – the shells on the windowsills in Ballymoney, and whether Clonskeagh has gone Sale Agreed. Myself and Seán have loved a whole litter of For Sale signs into being. And no one is about to buy anything. Not in this snow.

At eleven my meeting calls to cancel, as I knew she would. I hold my phone and look at it, wondering who to text about what. Then I just put it away.

The craziest thing, I think, is the way I can’t speak to them in person, to Aileen or to Evie. I am a grown woman with a job and a salary, and I am not allowed talk to the people who, at a whim, make or ruin my Saturdays. I can not even lift the phone.

As I say to Fiachra, it’s like I get all the stupid stuff and none of the cuddles. Not that I want the cuddles: Evie (am I the only one who notices this?) is no longer a child.

She is nearly twelve. Evie had a growth spurt last autumn and, though she measured herself against her father – chin! earlobe! forehead! – to her preening delight and his seeming pride, it has not yet translated into actual cubic centimetres: this of girl and this of air. She has not yet learned the extent of herself.

So she sits on her father’s knee, or rather plonks herself on to his lap, just as she always used to, ‘Oh God. Evie,’ while he pulls back to guard the family jewels and ducks to the side to keep her skull from breaking his nose. You can’t actually see him behind her large and white and radiant flesh. She is dressed like a girl you see throwing up into a litter bin on a Saturday night, in black ripped tights under denim shorts (Aileen looks in the cheap shops to see what she will wear and tries to match it in something a little more expensive), and she really is sitting
on
him as opposed to perching on his knee, and the two of them are entirely happy and natural with this, until they aren’t.

‘Off now, Evie.’

‘Aw-ww.’

‘Off!’

Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes, he lets her stay. Her face in front of his is rounder, the lips softer, and her eyes, though the same shape and colour, are spookily not the same: there is an entirely different human being in there. She swings a leg and looks airily about, claiming her father against all comers, while I sit and smile.

The first time she stayed over I kept away, walking the streets of Galway in the rain, only driving home when I was sure she would be gone. It was September. The house had been on the market exactly a year. If you listened to the car radio, all the money in the country had just evaporated, you could almost see it, rising off the rooftops like steam. And there she was, this cuckoo, sitting in my kitchen; the price I had to pay for love.

The absurdity of it was lost on Seán, who was – who continues to be – completely helpless when it comes to Evie. He can see nothing but her.

So I did not ask his permission the next weekend, but walked in at two o’clock to find the two of them sitting down to lunch.

‘Hi!’ I said, brightly.

Evie ignored me, but it is possible she ignores everyone for the first while.

Her father said, ‘Evie,’ and she looked up with hurt eyes. ‘You remember Gina.’

‘Hm,’ she said.

And I moved quietly about as she picked through the home-made burger; removing lettuce and cucumber, complaining there was no ketchup, piling on the mayonnaise.

Since then, she comes quite often. We meet in passing. I dodge her rage. I am always brief. I am always nice. I sleep with her father, while she sleeps across the landing. All the doors are open in case she dies in her sleep, even though she is not going to die in her sleep. But I do not think we would make love if they were closed, not even silently.

I come out in the morning, to find her already occupying the bathroom, or she barges past, in some tatty flannelette of infant pink. Every time I see her, she has grown – but massively. It is like a different stranger to bump into every week.

At night, I hear them moving about the spare room, the curtains pulled, the quiet chat as she arranges fluffy toys and night lights and who knows what, until her father – Evie is nearly twelve, remember – lies down beside her and murmurs her to sleep. As often as not he falls asleep too, and I can not tap on the door, or put my head round it to rouse him: I can not risk it. So they lie, cocooned and hopeless and completely contented, while I sit and watch crap TV.

She started coming in September and they ran out of trips and excursions by the middle of October, so they linger in the house and fail to make decisions; Evie whining,
I just want to hang out with my frie-ends
.

For a man who is crazy about his daughter, Seán spends a lot of time telling her to go away. Maybe all parents do this.

‘Go and do something,’ he says, as she peers over his shoulder at his laptop screen, eating an apple beside his ear.

‘What are you standing there for?’ He sends her down to the shops for sweets, and then tells her she can’t have sweets. He sends her down to the shops for a smoothie, instead. He says, ‘Go and play,’ when there is no one for her to play with. He tells her to go and read a book, though he never reads books, himself; I have never seen him with a book in his hand. So she plays Nintendo, and then he tells her not to play so much Nintendo.

‘Stop touching things, Evie.’

There is no stilling her hands, always on the mooch.

I noticed this the first time we went outside the house together, and walked down to Bushy Park with Evie’s new dog (the dog is another story: let me not begin to discuss the dog). She followed each wall with the tips of her fingers, smooth or rough; let them drift through hedges and drag the leaves off bushes.

It was as though she was testing the edges of her world; finding the point where objects began and space stopped.

‘There is no need to touch the wall, Evie.’

Seán seemed worried she would shred the pads on her fingers – and there was something else there too, some idea of contamination; whether she would dirty things or be made dirty by them – Seán is, as we know, a clean sort and Evie plays with his disgust in the smallest ways. She doesn’t do anything truly taboo, she wouldn’t get away with it; she is, besides, at a modest age. Delicate to a fault about her galloping physicality, she never discusses sex and thinks adults are completely gross when they try.

‘Oh pull-ease.’

But she scratches her scalp into the fold of a book. She leaves sticky smears on the keyboards and remotes and phones. She twirls her hair, or sucks her hair, she is hugely uncomfortable in her bra – for which she has my sympathy, it’s a life sentence – and her underwear is constantly prised out and readjusted. She also – and this gets to me too – hoiks the phlegm up her nose instead of using a hanky.

It is all, in its way, fantastic for being so effective. Although she seems to be helpless to it, and maybe she is, it is also the best and quickest way to drive her father around the bend.

‘Evie, please!’

‘What?’

She also knows, as though by the fruit of long contemplation, the exact and simplest way to his heart. Not just by looking at him with her grey eyes, which should be enough for anyone, which is almost enough for me. Not just by doing well in school and being ostentatiously averse to boys. No, Evie has made friends with the richest girl in the class. Which in Evie’s class, out in County Wicklow, is pretty damn rich. In fact, the father of Evie’s best friend (blonde, like her mother, with beautiful slim knees) owns houses and hotels, owns whole apartment blocks, from Tralee to Riga.

Her name – and you have to admire her parents for this – is Paddy.

They are doing a project together on lice in horses. Paddy is supplying the horses. I did not ask if Evie was supplying the lice.

And sometimes, too, they are perfect: sitting on the sofa watching ‘Father Ted’, or out in the open air, or the way they talk in the car, because talking is what Seán is good at, and with his daughter there is no charm and no blame, there is just Seán. I listen to the ease of his tone with her and I think,
He does not speak that way to me
.

He does not hold me by the hand. He does not tickle me, quickly, to get me out of his way. He does not tango me down the hall, and arch me over, backwards. He does not wake in the night, thinking of me.

I have saved his life.

From what?

‘You have saved my life,’ he said.

But if you ask me, it’s not one woman or another that is the saving of Seán. It is the woman he loves but can never desire. It is Evie.

‘Take those earphones off, Evie.’

Evie absent or dreaming in front of a screen or a book. Evie failing to focus up, to move along, to snap to.

Evie stalled in front of the mirror for hours at a time, sprouting hair and neuroses, moody as all get out. And it seems so unfair, to be jumping with hormones when you’re still in Hello Kitty pyjamas; it is like no one is telling the truth, or no one knows what truth to tell.

I walked in on her one evening. Evie always leaves the door open when she is in the bath –
You still alive in there, Evie: you haven’t gone down the plughole?
Usually, she chats away – just the feel of the warm water seems to set her rattling on – and her father leaves her to it; listening, or pretending to listen, stretched out on our bed across the landing.

But this one evening, she had fallen silent and, between one sentence and the next, I walked in the door.

Evie pulled the sponge up to cover her little budding chest and looked at me with huge grey eyes.

‘Don’t mind me!’ I said, as I dodged across the room to get the thing I needed, whatever it was, from out of the bathroom cabinet.

In the autumn, Evie seemed to get rounder and rounder, fatter and fatter, after which came the amazing stretch and boi-oi-oinngg of this extra flesh into a waist and hips and breasts – though, as I recall, breasts don’t feel like fat, at that age, they feel like tenderised gristle. But they look, from what I saw in the bath, heartbreaking and simple.

There is nothing worse than being nearly twelve.

Evie is at that moment. Her body is at that moment when it is wrong to look at her, wrong to think about her nakedness, when it would be criminal to take a photograph. Her body is becoming her own. Her body is becoming lonely. Her father, who used to bathe and dry her, now stretched out staring at the ceiling, across the hall.

‘Have you rinsed, Evie? Rinse till you hear it squeak.’

He was off the bed and standing in the doorway when I came out of the bathroom. I lifted my hands in a mock shrug – because all this was normal too – and he nodded and turned away.

And I am suddenly passionate about Evie. I want to take him by the shoulders and explain that my jealousy is a kind of loving, too. Because, when I was her age, my father was sitting up in his hospice bed enjoying the fact that all women were equally nameless to him now.

‘Hello my darlings, to what do I owe the pleasure?’

I want to tell him that Evie is lucky to have him, that he, Seán, is where all her luck resides. Because after Miles died nothing went right, unless we made it right; all blessings and bounty, all unexpected joys, came from his love – pathetic as it sometimes was and sometimes huge. After Miles died, everything was hard work – marrying Conor, marrying Shay – and nothing came to either of his daughters gratis and undeserved.

I cried that night. I don’t know if Evie heard me; the strange woman weeping beside her father in this strange house. I smothered most of it in the pillow; Seán’s hand stroking my back. Me saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’ll be all right. I’m sorry.’