All That I Leave Behind (23 page)

He just shrugs then, his eyes full of misery. ‘I’m trying to be someone I’m not, Michelle. I don’t belong here, in this life.’ And then he turns on his side and I wonder how, one minute, we are making love as if our lives depended on it, and now this. This sense that there’s something between us: something we can’t name, that’s pushing us apart.

Later, I have to change Pi’s pyjamas where he’s wet them and quietly wipe away his tears, while I give him a little bath, filling the basin and letting him sit in it. His sobs have subsided into hiccups and when I give him a squeezy bottle and a sponge, he’s content to fill it and empty it over and over again, humming to himself. And I thank God that he’s too young to have understood what his parents were doing. I allow myself a minute of self-loathing, that I put John-Joe before my son, but I had to. I needed to. Without John-Joe I’m not fully myself. And I want him back. I want him to be mine and mine only.

J
ohn-Patrick
had said he’d drive her and wait around outside for a bit. ‘Shag-all else to do,’ he’d said, but Rosie knew he was trying to help. He was supposed to be helping PJ in the shop at the weekends, but ‘All those kids wreck my head,’ he said, about the nine-year-olds on bikes who’d pitch up in search of free bait. He preferred to be outdoors, helping Pius in the garden.

They were on their way to see Frances O’Brien, even though Rosie had no idea if she’d know anything. ‘It’s total crap, the whole thing,’ Pius had said to her. ‘But if it’ll put your mind at rest, go ahead.’ But keep me out of it, had been the unspoken words. Fair enough, Rosie had thought. Put your head in the sand as usual.

‘John-Patrick,’ she said now. ‘Ehm, would you do me a favour?’

‘Sure,’ he said doubtfully.

‘Would you mind not telling Mary-Pat about this … this visit? It’d only upset her. I mean, she’d only worry about it and she has enough on her plate.’ Not to mention the fact that she has barely spoken to me in the six weeks since the wedding. She has barely passed the house and if Pi wants to see her he has to call up. She’s avoiding me. I know she is.

He didn’t say anything, just nodded, eyes fixed on the road, but his cheeks flushed a bit. He was a good kid, John-Patrick. Mary-Pat was worried about him because he preferred manga and Japanese cartoons to Gaelic football, and had thus marked himself out as an oddball in Monasterard. Rosie thought he had guts to stand out in this place.

John-Patrick pressed hard on the brake and screeched into the verge with a spray of gravel. He drove like a Formula 1 racing driver, all handbrakes and roaring engines – it took a bit of getting used to.

‘I think this is the place,’ he said.

Rosie sat there for a few moments, looking out the window at the pristine little bungalow. It looked as if it had recently been scrubbed with a toothbrush, the render a blinding white, the slate roof an immaculate shiny black, a neat pebble path leading up to the front door, with its stained glass window that gleamed as if it had been blasted with Windolene. Pi had said she was ‘an old hippy’. Could a hippy really live here?

She tried to compose herself. ‘I have no idea why, but I feel nervous.’

John-Patrick nodded, clearly out of his depth with this information. Eventually, he cleared his throat. ‘I suppose it’s better to know, like. Better than not to know … ah, shit.’ He shook his head and banged the steering wheel.

Rosie stretched across and squeezed his arm. ‘I know exactly what you mean. Thanks. Look, would you mind if I walked back? It might clear my head.’

She could see his solicitous expression clear, to be replaced by one of relief that he’d be spared any emotional fallout from the visit, and she almost smiled. Men. They were all the same.

‘Grand so.’ He nodded, trying to look regretful, and as she got out on wobbly legs and nervously opened the little wrought-iron gate to Frances O’Brien’s cottage, he screeched off back up the road, more gravel spraying behind him.

Rosie was distracted for a moment by the doorbell. When she pressed, it played the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, a tinny whine, and when she looked in through the porch window, she could see a sticker with the American flag on it and the slogan ‘
Is Féidir Linn
!’ – Yes, We Can. The hall door opened and a trim middle-aged woman in a red business suit with big gold buttons was squinting at her from behind the porch door. Rosie gave a little wave. The woman didn’t wave back, and her face was expressionless as she opened the door just enough to stick her head out. ‘Ms O’Brien? I’m sorry to bother you, I’m Rosie O’Connor.’

‘I know who you are.’ The woman opened the door a fraction more, but not to invite Rosie in. Instead, she stood there, arms folded across her chest, as if she were barring Rosie from entering. She looked like an angry Sarah Palin, a helmet of red-gold hair sprayed onto her head, a pair of reading glasses around her neck on a long gold chain. The idea that this woman could once have been a hippy seemed utterly ridiculous.

Rosie pinned a smile onto her face. ‘You do? That’s great. You see, I’ve come to ask you a few questions if I could. It’s about—’

‘I don’t know anything.’ The line was delivered with such force, like bullets from a machine gun, that Rosie hesitated for a second, wondering if Pius had been confused and there was some other Frances O’Brien and she’d got the wrong one. ‘I’m sorry, I thought … Do you remember my parents, John-Joe and Michelle?’

Suddenly Frances was all movement, bustling forward towards Rosie, her arms outstretched as if she wanted to push her away. Instinctively, Rosie took a step back onto the garden path. Frances rushed past her to the front gate, opening it and then closing it, as if to check if anyone was outside lurking on the canal bank. Then she turned to Rosie. ‘Who sent you?’

Rosie didn’t understand the question for a second. ‘No one,’ she answered. ‘I came myself. You were at my christening.’

The woman was hovering by the gate, her hand on the metal handle, and Rosie noticed that her hand was shaking, trembling. And then she shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Oh. It’s just … I saw your name, on the parish records. Father Naul showed them to me. And you’re on my baptismal cert – your name is beside my name and my parents’ names in the register. It said you were my godmother.’

The woman turned to her now and pinned a smile on her face, revealing a set of shiny white dentures, like tombstones in her mouth. It made Rosie feel uneasy. She suddenly wanted to push past the woman out onto the canal, but the woman was blocking her way. ‘Rosie,’ she began. ‘Is that your name?’

Rosie nodded. I just told you what my name is, she thought.

‘Look, pet, I’m sorry, it’s just … I think you’ve made a mistake. I don’t know anybody by that name. Those names.’

‘Oh.’ Rosie knew that she sounded like a child, but she couldn’t help it. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. How it
was supposed to turn out. ‘My father’s ill, you see, and, well—’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. But I can’t help you. I don’t know who they are. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a cumann meeting. The
bainisteoir
will kill me if I’m late.’ Frances O’Brien pushed out the gate and trotted onto the towpath, where she eased herself into an immaculately clean red Nissan Micra with a clutch of holy medals swinging from the rear-view mirror, then drove off.

Rosie stood by the gate of the bungalow for a few moments. She felt as if she’d been buffeted by something, by some huge wave, and had been left on the shore, a mouth full of sea water, that feeling of nausea at the back of her throat. She’d had it all written in her head, the script, the two of them sitting side by side on an immaculate sofa, reminiscing, munching biscuits and drinking tea. She would tell Rosie all about her parents, what they’d been like. Maybe she’d tell her what Mammy was like, so that Rosie could get to know her. Could hang onto more than just sensations, smells, feelings. Things she couldn’t get a grip on, no matter how hard she tried.

Maybe Frances hadn’t liked them. Maybe that was it – she wouldn’t be alone there, at least with Daddy anyway. He hadn’t bothered much about whether people liked him or not. ‘I couldn’t give a flying fuck,’ he’d said once, when Mary-Pat had asked him not to hang around Prendergast’s after closing time, shouting at anyone who happened to be passing. ‘I had to hear about your carry-on in the minimarket,’ she’d scolded him. ‘Do you not know you’re making a holy show of us?’

‘Caring what people think about you is the road to ruination, Mary-Pat. It’s what’s made this country an effin’ Valley of the Squinting Windows, do you get me?’ he’d said, waving his cigarette while his daughter rolled her eyes to heaven, rambling on about how the only judgement he’d accept would be God’s in heaven.

‘You’re an atheist,’ Mary-Pat had barked. ‘Now, eat your dinner.’

She walked back, trying to compose some kind of an explanation to Pius while she had the time. The towpath was straight here, a long line of grassy track stretching away into the horizon. Rosie trudged along, head down, watching her feet, in their muddy trainers, slice through the thick grass, the purple knobs of the clover flowers disappearing under her feet. She could hear the warble of the moorhen as she shuffled in the rushes, the little ‘peep’ of anxiety as she became aware that someone was approaching. Rosie had always loved this season – the stillness of the water, the murky sheen over the September trees, but now she found it hard to enjoy it, because her mind was filled with random thoughts, with Frances O’Brien, with Craig, with Pi and Daphne and Mary-Pat and Daddy up in St Benildus’s, unaware, as usual, of the havoc he’d wreaked – they were all jumbled in her head, talking to her, and she wanted to yell at them all to shut up.

Craig had gone home, two weeks after the wedding. ‘It’s best, in the circumstances, to let you sort everything out,’ he’d said. He hadn’t even looked at her as he’d folded the expensive waterproofs he’d insisted on buying ‘for the terrain’, even though she’d tried to explain that there wasn’t much terrain in Monasterard. He hadn’t needed them even once.

You have no idea what a relief that is, she’d thought, sitting there on the bed, the suitcase open beside her. She’d felt light-headed about it, almost gleeful. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, it was the relief that she didn’t have to keep it up for much longer, the pretence. She felt she had to protest, though, putting a hand on his, which he’d hastily removed. ‘I haven’t changed. It’s just Daddy …’

He’d shaken his head and only then had he looked at her, his blue eyes sorrowful. ‘You’re not the woman I thought you were, Rosie. That’s what it is,’ and then he’d nodded, as if he’d finally understood something he’d been wrestling with for a while.

You’re probably right, Rosie had thought. I could keep it up in the States. I could be anyone you wanted me to be, that nice sensible girl with the neat hair and the job helping others and not one, but two, pairs of walking shoes. We matched, and I was careful to keep it that way, to make sure I didn’t express too many opinions but just echoed yours instead, intercepting things that might annoy you, tuning in to your responses to make sure I didn’t overdo it. It was exhausting, she now realised. And now that I’m back here, well, I just can’t.

‘I’m sorry, Craig,’ she’d said then. ‘I really am. I’m just very tired.’

He’d looked at her, and she understood that he meant it when he’d reached out and took her hand in his, wiggling her wedding ring gently on her finger, as if he were deciding whether or not to take it off. ‘I think we both need a bit of time,’ he’d said helpfully.

She was so preoccupied that she didn’t hear or see him until he was practically on top of her, a sudden rustle of branches and a thud, followed by a ‘Christ’. And he was standing in front of her, panting with exertion, hands on his hips.

‘I nearly tripped over you there.’ Mark didn’t look at her as he spoke, instead looking just beyond her, at the horizon.

‘Jesus, you gave me a fright.’ Rosie clutched her throat. ‘You might have said something.’

‘You were busy ranting and raving to yourself.’

‘I was?’ She looked at him and saw the ghost of a smile on his face. She used to talk to herself all the time, gesticulating and muttering, until she’d trained herself out of it because Craig said it made her look unhinged. ‘I was thinking about something,’ was the best she could offer by way of explanation.

‘I gathered,’ he said, and they both looked out over the canal for a while, the choppy silver water, the reeds bent double in the wind. ‘What are you doing all the way down here?’

Rosie thought of Frances O’Brien. Of her helmet of hair, her big teeth. She’d been terrifying, that’s what it was. That was the word. ‘Oh, just going for a walk.’

‘Right.’ He looked doubtful. His breathing was slower now, but his T-shirt was stained with sweat and drops of it clung to his hair.

Rosie felt her heart beating rapidly in her chest as the thoughts flitted around in her head. There was so much she wanted to say to him. She wanted to tell him about her life without him, about how it had been, what that other place had been like, how she’d fucked it all up, what it was like being back here … about Frances O’Brien … She wanted to tell him everything, the way she’d used to when they were twelve years old, but the words just wouldn’t come.

‘We used to go swimming here. Do you remember?’ He turned to look at the grey water, now covered with a mass of green lily pads, turning slightly now that it was autumn. Soon, there would be nothing but silvery water and the fish would retreat to the shelter of the reeds, to slink around the muddy edges of the bank until the weather grew warmer.

‘God, yes,’ she said. ‘Once I thought the pike had got me.’

He grinned briefly. ‘You were pathetic. Fancy being scared of a tiny little old pike.’

‘Ha ha. It was huge. And deadly. I thought it’d take my leg off.’

He snorted with laughter, and then there was another silence as they both looked at the water for a while longer, and Rosie played that film in her head of the last time they’d gone swimming together, when she’d been wearing June’s bikini because she wanted him to think differently about her, wanted him to see that she wasn’t his childhood friend any more. Her breasts were ridiculously small in it, as if she were a girl trying to pretend she was a woman. She
was
a girl trying to pretend she was a woman, she thought now, reddening at the memory. She remembered the way his eyes had flicked over her, just for a second, but she’d seen him look.