All That I Leave Behind (13 page)

Rosie had shrunk back against the door. ‘But, Craig, I didn’t know this would happen.’ As she tried to explain, the thought flitted across her mind: nobody said anything to
you:
they – he – said it to me. My father told me that I wasn’t his. That my mother was a knacker. Daddy said it to me. His favourite.

‘What did I say? Do. Not. Open. Your. Mouth.’ His face was a livid red and spit flecked the corners of his mouth so that he looked as if he was having a seizure. He yanked the bow tie off and threw it on the ground. ‘Jesus Christ.’ He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair, those pale Midwestern eyes blazing. ‘Why didn’t you warn me about them? To pull that shit on us, on our wedding day.’ He shook his head, bewildered. ‘I mighta known. Since you came back to this dump, you—’

‘I what?’ She tried to overlook the word ‘dump’, even though she wanted to say that she’d told him so: that there were no castles or fairies in Monasterard.

He tutted and swore under his breath. Craig never swore. ‘You’ve become someone else. Someone I don’t really know.’

She didn’t even try to answer. There was no point – and besides, he was probably right. Instead, she’d said, ‘I need to go out for a second,’ and turned and closed the bedroom door behind her. She’d slipped quietly down the stairs, stopping only to pull her platform wedges off her feet. Mary-Pat was right about them – they were totally, stupidly impractical and they’d cost a fortune. She’d quietly placed them next to Pius’s wellies and opened the door as silently as she could. And now, she was cycling under the huge copper beech, the darkness under the branches, with their thick covering of purple leaves, swallowing her. For a second, she panicked, unable to see the path in front of her, but then she steadied herself, looking to one side to where she knew she would see the remains of the bright blue rope hanging from the lowest branch. Pius had put it up for her one day, when she was ten, after she’d spent an entire afternoon whining at him about how bored she was.

She’d spent the rest of the summer on that swing, back and forth, back and forth, watching the others as their lives played out before her, from her safe vantage point. Pius’s regular departures in Daddy’s old Volkswagen, the distinctive rattle of the engine as it drove along the gravel road by the canal, on his way to meet the girlfriend he had at the time. Katy, the one who was always laughing and didn’t mind playing Monopoly with her even though Rosie had to win all the time. Then there were Mary-Pat’s trips to the clothesline and back, to the hen-run and back, to the vegetable patch and back, the clatter of the screen door as it bashed against the wall, the huff and puff as she bustled across the garden, the brisk tutting to herself, the tight snap of the clothes as she took them off the line and folded them. When Mary-Pat came out, Rosie would stop swinging, afraid she’d draw attention to herself and be asked to help.

June never appeared at all. She was always in her room, the record player on, singing ‘Waterloo’ at the top of her voice. Rosie had been able to hear her at the other side of the canal, warbling away, out of tune. If Rosie managed to sneak into her sisters’ bedroom, she’d find June lying on the bed, a homemade facemask on, two teabags on her eyes, a discarded copy of
Jackie
on the bed beside her. If she was lucky, June would have nodded off and wouldn’t hear her as she lifted the magazine from the bed and sneaked it off, to take it back to her lair and peruse the mystifying articles about meeting boys with funny names at the school disco and things like periods and spots and a world she didn’t know existed. Not here, anyway. She was sure people didn’t have periods and spots in Monasterard.

Of course, there was another reason for the swinging. Before that, she’d stood at the stile, watching. Once Pius had built the swing, she could scramble up onto the chunk of wood and see the path across the field all the way to the town. She could watch to see if anyone came down the track, the head visible first, then the shoulders and finally the whole shape: of Sean O’Reilly, the farmer, or Daddy, or June if she’d gone to the chipper. No one else. Never anyone else.

But she never gave up looking, she thought now. She never gave up. How foolish it seemed, that childlike belief that if you wanted something badly enough, it would happen. That the birthday wish made before you blew out the candles would actually come true. That one day, she’d look up from her swing and see her mother’s blonde head, then her shoulders, then her whole self, arms outstretched, inviting Rosie to run towards her, enfolding her in a tight hug, the way she’d seen other mothers do.

She was at the edge of the cornfield at the back of the town now. Her foot slipped on the pedal and she stubbed her toe off the hard earth, sending a jolt of pain up her leg. She had to stop then, tilting sideways so that she could place a foot on the ground, then sliding off the bike, which she had to heave over the narrow stile into the cornfield, grunting as she pulled the back wheel off the ground, then trying to hold on as she slid the bike back down the steps and onto the ground.

She was standing at the top of the stile, looking down at the bike when it hit her. He’d loved her the best – she knew that. He’d told her often enough.

So, how can it be true, she thought as she looked down at her feet, blue in the moonlight, at her wonky knees, at the way her hips jutted out in the dress, at her tiny, flat chest. How can it be true when I’m still the same me?

Rosie blinked and nearly lost her balance. She put out a hand to steady herself, then slid down the steps of the stile onto the ground, landing with a thump. She suddenly felt tired, sitting there at the edge of the field, the stalks of the golden corn now a silvery blue in the moonlight, swaying above her head. I’ll just stay here, she thought, feeling the ground warm through the fabric of her wedding dress. If I stay here, nothing else will happen.

But then she remembered her purpose and managed to pull herself up after a while, to walk the bike over to the road, where she clambered up on it and wobbled off again towards Main Street, passing a huddle of people outside the chipper. The cream lace of the wedding dress was now smeared with dark soil, a large rip at the hem from where she’d stood on it, trying to get back up on the bicycle. Half of it was still tucked up into her knickers, which, when she looked down, she saw resembled a Victorian lady’s bloomers. Her feet were filthy and her toe, where she’d bumped it, was now bleeding. She kept going, past the neat Protestant church with the lovely manicured lawn, the clean tombstones in the graveyard at the side, so organised, somehow, so tidy. She’d spent more or less her entire adolescence in the place, long summer evenings, puffing away on a joint that she’d nicked from Pius, letting the smoke drift into the damp night air, and then the brown plastic bottles of cider, guzzling the stuff, enjoying the fuzzy feeling that would sweep over her, the numbness on her tongue that would make her slur her words. And all because she’d wanted to fit in with the girls in the Protestant graveyard. She’d wanted their approval so badly, those bitchy girls without a brain cell between them – badly enough to flunk her final year of school and end up in a secretarial school at the bottom of South Great George’s Street in Dublin, bashing out the letters AFCD over and over again on a huge manual typewriter, thinking that she’d never been so bored in her entire life. Badly enough to trash the one person in her life of any value. The one person who really mattered.

Rosie could still remember the first day she’d seen him. ‘Vuong’s here to give a hand with the housework,’ Daddy had said when the two of them had just appeared at the gate, looking like birds of paradise in the grey, watery mist. ‘It’s getting too much for Mary-Pat.’ And even aged nine, Rosie had wondered where Daddy was going to get the money to pay this tiny lady, in her black trousers and pink jacket that had funny ties across the front and a little collar, and her son, in his yellow shorts and a T-shirt with a faded Coca-Cola logo on it. She had never seen anyone like them before, with that colour hair, so black it had a blue sheen to it, and their faces a deep nut brown. The boy looked at her with black eyes that folded at the outer edges, that looked like splashes of ink on his face. The boy’s mother had nudged him with her elbow and said something in a nasal, sing-song tone and he’d nodded and then looked at Rosie expectantly.

‘Do you want to see Morecambe and Wise?’ she’d asked him, thinking that he’d probably like to see the goats.

He’d followed her out into the garden then and they’d done a tour of the place in complete silence. Rosie had pointed out the things she’d thought he’d like: the henhouse and Colleen, the sheepdog, and the goats nibbling the grass behind the vegetable patch, which contained only a few scraggy onions and a few potatoes. The boy had looked at it all but had said nothing, not one word, and she’d wondered if he had something wrong with him, if he was a deaf-mute or something like that. One of the saints she’d studied in school was deaf-mute.

‘He doesn’t speak English,’ Daddy had told her later after tea. ‘He comes from a place that’s thousands of miles away, love, where they speak another language altogether. Like Chinese.’ And he’d ruffled her hair and she’d wondered what kind of a language Chinese was.

‘They’re like those refugees,’ Mary-Pat had thrown over her shoulder. ‘Boat people.’

At the mention of the word ‘boat people’, Pius had looked up from his work of tying a fly in the hope of catching a rare sea trout on the river, and Rosie remembered that he’d said he’d take her after tea. She’d caught two perch the last time. ‘For God’s sake, MP, they’re not boat people – they’ve just come in search of a better life. The boat people were refugees from the war. And the poxy government only took in a hundred and fifty of them. Left the rest of them to float around the South China Sea until they drowned or starved, whichever came sooner, and all that after being napalmed by the Yanks in the first place.’

‘Pi, take it easy.’ Daddy had looked up from the
Evening Press
then and had shot his son a look over his reading glasses, with the big lump of Sellotape on the bridge because he’d fallen over one night and broken them. ‘The child doesn’t need that level of detail.’ Rosie had been surprised then, that Daddy would talk to Pius like that, because he normally didn’t say much to him at all.

‘Oh, and you’d know about detail, wouldn’t you,’ Pius had muttered then, putting the fly down and taking a long pull on his cigarette, shooting Daddy a glare. ‘A grand man for detail, aren’t you, Daddy? Well, you know what, I think you’ve forgotten a couple of things over the years.’

Daddy had looked up from the paper, but his eyes hadn’t met Pius’s. Then he’d just shrugged and continued to read the paper and Pius had taken another furious pull on his cigarette, exhaling with a frustrated hiss.

She still wasn’t sure what a refugee was, but anyway, he couldn’t speak English so when his mother came, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, they had to climb trees instead or
build shelters on the towpath out of branches, Rosie miming instructions and the little boy, who she had learned was called Mark, dutifully obeying.

And then one day, a few months after he’d arrived, he’d dragged a heavy bag onto the old sofa in the attic, the one that was filled with dusty horsehair, and had pulled out a big, black leather-bound book. Rosie had been fascinated because it had looked like a book of spells, but when she’d looked over his shoulder, she’d seen row after row of black, spidery letters. She couldn’t work out what they were – maybe it was a secret code – but then he’d pointed to them and then to himself and said in English, ‘My language.’

Rosie hadn’t been able to understand why his language looked like hers, but didn’t spell anything, and why the letters had little hats on them, but then he’d pointed to one word and spoken in that musical, twanging way, and she’d tried to copy him, and he’d laughed so hard he hadn’t been able to speak for a whole five minutes. Laughing until the tears streamed down his cheeks. She didn’t care. That’s where they’d become real friends, when she’d started to speak his language, enjoying the nasal sounds the words made, and he’d started to speak hers, pointing to Morecambe and Wise and saying ‘goat’, only it had come out ‘goash’, because of her accent and it had been her turn to laugh at him.

She pulled up to The Great Wall with a squeak of brakes, only just putting out a foot to stop herself crashing to the ground. The place was quiet, Rosie thought as she opened the door of the restaurant, a wall of steam hitting her as she did so. A knot of local boys were hanging around the high counter, the way they always had done, hair stiff with gel above their ruddy faces, the air filled with the smell of cheap aftershave. They all hunched over, hands in their pockets, muttering to each other, a sudden burst of laughter indicating that someone had cracked a joke. The kind of boys she’d used to hang out with when she was a teenager. The kind of boys who’d still be here in twenty years’ time, grown men.

Behind the lads, she could just see the top of his head, a thatch of inky black, bent low over the wok. She fought the urge to run. She could hear the pans hissing and spitting fat on the gas, the deep-fat fryer sizzling in the corner. He was probably making short work of a few bean sprouts, throwing them into a pan along with a chunk of ginger and garlic paste, then tossing in a big handful of prawns, swishing them around the pan, then a sprinkling of spring onions, sliced long and thin, the way Vuong liked them. His mother had been very precise about that. She liked things to be just right. In that sense, he took after her.

He looked up then, to ask one of the lads if he wanted extra chilli, and then he saw her. His eyes opened wide in surprise and a smile touched the corner of his lips. He’s pleased to see me, Rosie thought for a second, before the smile was replaced by a hard stare from those black eyes, the lids folded down at the sides, the smooth wide face unchanged apart from a frown line that ran from his forehead to the bridge of his nose. He still had the cleft in his chin. She used to tease him about it, running her finger along the fissure. ‘Do you know what they say? “Cleft in the chin, devil within.”’