Three Little Truths

by Eithne Shortall

  When Martha had left the Carmody–Rice residence the previous Saturday, she had fully intended to walk straight up to the two police officers standing in the middle of Pine Road and point a finger back in the direction she’d come. At the bottom of the garden path, however, she’d hesitated. She’d looked back at the house and through the window to see Edie sitting at the desk. She’d thought of all the things that would happen as soon as she talked to those guards. The whole event would be reopened; there would be an arrest and maybe a charge, then a year or two in limbo while they waited for a trial; then the trial, and would it only be Daniel charged? He was the only one she could identify and yet he wasn’t who she wanted to see punished. She’d thought of Edie’s conviction that he was good. She could imagine it. She’d made her way out on to Pine Road and thought of Edie pregnant, her biggest dream come true. She’d thought of all this and she’d felt tired. She’d felt like she did back when it was only starting, when they first moved here, when the only thing she had the strength to do was go to bed. She did not want to go back to that. She wanted to let it go.

  Martha had walked towards the guards, and when she got to them, she kept going. Behind her, Bernie Watters-Reilly was making a beeline for them. Her neighbour was shouting and pointing but Martha didn’t wait to hear what she was saying. She walked quickly into her own garden and met Robert on his way out.

  ‘They’re here,’ he’d said, all bluster. ‘They took their time about it but they’re here.’

  Standing in her bathroom a week later, Martha twisted the tap off and reached for the hand towel. Then she went out to her husband on the landing and told him the same thing she had told him the previous Saturday standing in their front garden.

  ‘I was wrong.’ She wrapped an arm around his waist. ‘You were right and I was wrong, Robert. I didn’t see him at all.’ Second time around and she was still surprised by how little it cost her to swallow her pride and lie.

  It helped, perhaps, that Robert didn’t look vindicated. He regarded her warily, like maybe this was a test or some version of reverse psychology. He could tell, she presumed, that something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t penetrate the details of it. She had wrong-footed him.

  ‘What are you doing this evening?’ she asked, heading for the stairs.

  He followed her down. ‘I don’t know. Will we watch something? We could catch up on Tin Star? We have the whole second season to watch.’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t. I’m meeting a friend.’

  ‘Are you?’ he said, not exactly put out, but definitely surprised. ‘That’s good.’ Was he remembering when all he wanted was for her to re-establish a social life? ‘Who?’

  ‘A neighbour. We’re going for a walk.’

  ‘Right. Well, I guess I could . . .’ He looked around the kitchen, as if an evening activity might just present itself.

  ‘I was going to mop the floor, actually, but I might not have enough time before I go . . .’

  ‘Right, well . . .’ He looked around the room. ‘I could do that . . . I suppose . . .’ he said hesitantly, so it sounded as much like a question. She smiled benevolently. Keeping her own secrets had dislodged their power balance ever so slightly.

  ‘That would be great, darling.’ She kissed him gently on the cheek and turned from the kitchen, leaving him glancing around at the mop she’d propped up by the counter and wondering how exactly one washes a floor.

  This was one of the reasons Martha would be the one to stay. She could have moved the family back to Limerick and reintegrated herself into her old social circle and old life and old way of being without much difficulty. But when she weighed them up, she wasn’t so sure the old her was better than the new version. Yes, her marriage had been through the mill and she no longer regarded Robert with the unquestioning approval she once had. But, equally, this no longer seemed like a bad thing. Their relationship had never been so equal. She had less faith in him, maybe, but she had more faith in herself. She was more robust, she trusted her own instincts. She respected herself.

  She had called to Edie the Monday after the party and told her that she would not be contacting the police but she would also be staying put. She told Edie she forgave Daniel and she would let the matter lie, but living on the same street was too great an ask. She hadn’t moved to Dublin to be reminded of what had happened every time she stepped out her front door. Edie hadn’t faltered.

  ‘We’ll move,’ she’d told Martha, eyes wide, chin trembling ever so slightly. ‘Thank you.’

  Ellis thought she should press charges, but she told him her mind was made up. He hadn’t mentioned it since, though she could tell he wanted to. It was enough to know she hadn’t imagined Daniel, that she had really seen what she saw. If she shared this with Robert, he would have been far more persistent than her son. He’d have phoned the police himself because in a black-and-white world, this was the right thing to do.

  But Martha’s world was not black and white; it was coloured entirely by her family. Seeing this particular man punished was not a worthwhile trade for the toll it would take on their lives. Sinead was getting on well at school and with her counsellor and Trish hadn’t pursued the list business any further. Orla, too, was settled. So was Martha.

  She was letting it go.

  She pulled out her phone and sent Edie a message.

  We’ve at least a dozen moving crates. They’ll be all yours from about 2 p.m. tomorrow.

  She would notice the absence of Edie, who had slipped in as an unlikely friend. But there were other people here. Pine Road would be home yet.

  She glanced at her phone again. It was after seven. ‘Robert?’ she called down to the kitchen as she took her rain mac from the coat stand. ‘I’m off!’

  The kitchen door opened and her husband appeared, mop in hand. ‘What time will you be back?’

  ‘Not sure. But I doubt it’ll be long.’ She grabbed a hat from a cubbyhole. ‘A walk-and-talk was how I put it to Carmel, but she strikes me as keener on the latter bit.’

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Edie watched as her husband painted. He delicately dipped the roller in its tray, careful to cover all sides equally, and, with a flick of the wrist, brought it to the hall wall without creating any discernible start lines. Deep in concentration, he covered the grubby hand prints that had accumulated in the fourteen months they’d been living here.

  She could have punished him. She wasn’t one for vindictive thoughts and she would surely never have had the steel for malice, but she could have, if she’d wanted to, and Daniel would have let her.

  ‘You okay, bae?’ Daniel stopped mid-stroke, and Edie realised that she had ceased boxing away photo frames and ornaments. The first open viewing was Tuesday evening and the estate agent wanted all personal possessions removed from sight. Prospective buyers wanted to picture this as their own home; photos of Daniel and Edie would only put them off. That’s why the walls should be freshly white. It made the space looked bigger, and it represented a fresh start.

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  He smiled at her and went back to work; up and down, white over white.

  The estate agent had been delighted when Edie phoned, especially when she made it clear they wanted a fast sale. ‘Between myself, yourself and these valuable walls, we’re expecting the market to take a drastic turn,’ he’d said, walking from room to room, his excitement growing with each original ceiling feature. ‘You sell now, and I think we might get a record price for this road.’

  She had forgiven Daniel almost immediately. She did it without much difficulty. Daniel was her husband, the father of her soon-to-be child. She loved him and she knew him. She was more puzzled by herself than she ever was by him. Daniel kept saying she was well within her rights to be angry, that he would take any punishment she doled out. But the only time she felt like taking him up on this was when she thought about leaving Pine Road.

  When Martha came to her with the offer, her body had flooded with relief. It
was maybe twenty-four hours later, after she’d phoned the estate agent, that the injustice of having to move hit her. She had cried the whole way through packing up the bathroom. She couldn’t blame her neighbour – Edie could no more have lived across the road from that family now, than they could from her – so she supposed she could only blame her husband.

  ‘I’m not sure if these are even,’ said Daniel, taking a step back and casting his critical eye over the wall. He dipped the roller again and carefully retraced the line he had just done. ‘I really don’t think they are.’

  But she didn’t want to blame her husband. Edie felt about Martha as Daniel did about her: their neighbour would have been well within her rights to go to the police and tell them exactly what she knew. But she hadn’t. So, Edie wouldn’t punish him either. She fought against the desire to blame him. He had, she acknowledged, been punishing himself for months.

  ‘The walls look great, bae. They hardly look like ours any more.’

  She was better now. She’d had time to accept it and weigh things up. ‘Home is where the heart is,’ was her moving mantra. Every time she felt the waterworks building, she brought herself back to this. Daniel and their baby – that was her heart. Wherever they were, that was her home.

  She reached for the Waterford Crystal bowl and slid it down the side of the tightly packed frames.

  Presuming they made as much money from the sale as the estate agent thought they would, the plan was to buy a house in a new development on the other side of the city. Daniel was selling the garage too. Maybe that was the biggest self-flagellation of all. He’d contacted an estate agent and agreed the sale before informing his father. Mr Carmody had hit the roof. He’d worked himself into such a state that Daniel’s mother had sent them home before he had a heart attack. By the time they got back to their own house, he had left nine voicemails on Daniel’s phone calling him everything from a ‘cunt’ to ‘no longer my son’. A couple of the messages went into explicit detail about all the things that were wrong with Edie. These messages, at least, helped to move Daniel from extremely hurt to extremely angry, which was an easier place for him to be.

  He had taken it better than Edie expected. He told her that if they were going to start again, which was what he wanted, then they should do it properly. He’d talk his mother around, he said, and the others would eventually follow. Edie wouldn’t mind if that took a while.

  ‘I’m out of storage,’ she declared, taping up the box as Daniel continued to coat the wall. ‘I’m going to call down to Martha and get those moving crates.’

  It helped that she no longer recognised these walls as her own. Her attachment to the building was loosening. Devoid of their possessions, it wasn’t their home any more, it was just another house. But she would miss Pine Road.

  ‘Okay? Daniel?’

  He nodded, continuing to draw exact lines of smooth white paint, each as wide and even as the last. Edie took her coat and favourite scarf from the small mound inside the door and reached for the bolt.

  Daniel’s roller paused at the end of a stroke. ‘Sorry, Edie.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Tell her “thank you”, okay?’

  *** Pine Road Poker ***

  Fiona:

  It’s Edie! The ‘for sale’ sign just went up outside Edie and Daniel’s house!

  Edie, hun – why the move so soon??

  I’m going to miss you.

  We’ll always have the treasure hunt!

  XXX

  Ruby:

  Edie, you sly dog!

  Please don’t tell us it was because of the neighbours. Unless of course it was Bernie. I could entirely understand if it was Bernie.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Robin stared up at her childhood ceiling for what she presumed would be the last time. She felt the weight of Cormac’s arm on her stomach and marvelled at the difference between feeling trapped and feeling anchored.

  ‘Won’t Martha be wondering where you got to?’

  ‘I told her I was coming over here to drop off one of the moving crates.’

  ‘Yeah, twenty minutes ago.’

  The arm slipped from her stomach as Cormac turned on to his side and propped himself up on her pillows. ‘And when I go back, I’ll tell her I was helping you fill it.’

  Robin glanced over at the plastic crate, abandoned on top of several cardboard boxes and draped now with their discarded clothes.

  He bowed his head and kissed her shoulder. ‘I like you.’

  ‘I like you,’ she replied. This is what they did now, over and over. Often, the messages they sent each other said nothing else. I like you, I like you, all day long. It was their sickening little routine and she loved it. Because Robin really did like him, and every time he said it, she liked herself more too.

  Cormac lay back on the pillow, taking Robin’s hand and pulling it into the cold air above the sheets. He interlaced his fingers with hers, studying the variation in shade and texture of their skin. ‘Your mum will miss you when you’re gone.’

  Robin hooted. ‘She says all she has to do now is get Johnny to bugger off and then her and Dad are changing the locks.’ She bent her fingers down so they closed over his. ‘She might miss Jack, I suppose, although I plan to milk her childminding offer to such an extent that she doesn’t get a chance.’

  Carmel, who had always warned Robin and Johnny that she didn’t have her children young just so she could get her life back in time to spend it looking after grandchildren, had offered to mind Jack two days a week. He’d be in day care two other days and Eddy, who didn’t have a nine-to-five to worry about, was taking him on the fifth. But if Jack was brought anywhere near anything illegal, she would deny all access. Eddy had agreed. He had nothing to use as leverage any more; there was no way he could implicate her in his dodgy dealings without implicating himself.

  ‘Okay, come on.’ Robin pushed herself up and reached towards the crate for her top.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘My parents will be home with Jack any second. And you’re driving us over to the apartment at five, right? I still have stuff to pack.’

  Cormac shut his eyes in mock anguish.

  ‘And,’ Robin added, ‘you’re supposed to be helping your mother this afternoon, not hanging out with me.’

  ‘But I like you,’ he groaned.

  She grinned. ‘Yeah, and hopefully you’ll still like me tonight. When I have my own apartment.’

  ‘Do you know that place you’re renting is really near my flat?’

  ‘Is it?’ Robin stuffed her head inside her sweatshirt and took her time pulling it through. ‘Huh. I guess it is. I hadn’t realised.’ She pulled down the material and released her hair. Then she stood from the bed, in her underwear and sweatshirt, and searched for the rest of her clothes. ‘Where did my jeans go?’

  ‘You look good.’

  ‘Without trousers on? What a surprise.’

  But when she looked over at him, lying lazily across her bed, idly scratching his chest, she couldn’t help laughing. ‘Are you aware that when you look at me like that, you’re shaking your head?’

  Another two twists of the neck, then he stopped. ‘Oh yeah.’ His earnest, joyful smile cracked wider. ‘You’re a babe, Robin Dwyer. There’s no denying it.’

  She pushed her face into her open hands. ‘How are you never embarrassed?’

  ‘What would I have to be—’

  ‘Robin!’ The sound of the front door opening and her mother’s voice followed by Jack’s feet hammering up the stairs.

  She reached across for one of Cormac’s pale arms and yanked him from the bed. ‘Up! Now! Dressed!’

  ‘There’s another five or so in the attic,’ said Martha, re-angling the tower of crates slightly so it stood in line with the porch wall. ‘Ellis was in the middle of getting them down but he appears to have disappeared . . .’

  ‘Oh, this is loads, Martha,’ gushed Edie. ‘Thank you so much. You don’t realise how much stuff y
ou’ve accumulated until you’re moving house, do you? I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say I have nothing to wear again.’

  She pulled nervously at that multicoloured woolly scarf she loved so much. Her left foot was tapping, not loud enough to make a sound but fast enough to catch Martha’s eye.

  ‘How is the packing going?’

  ‘Oh, good. Great. It takes longer than I thought but, yeah, very good. It looks like we’re going to get one of the first houses in this new development in Rathfarnham. A four-bed semi-detached. So bigger than our house here and a side-entrance, so we don’t have to bring the bins through the house. I mean, I never realised how handy that would be until Robin pointed it out to me a while ago, so that’ll be good.’ She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and yanked at the scarf again.

  ‘That’s great,’ smiled Martha.

  ‘We’ll be one of the first to move in, as well, which is nice. Nobody will have time to make friends without me.’ Edie’s foot abruptly stopped tapping and she blushed. The two women smiled at each other until the sound of Ellis jogging across the road and up the garden path broke the silence.

  ‘Where have you been? Why are you out of breath?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, stopping between the two women. ‘Got distracted. Hi, Edie. How’s everything going with the baby?’

  The woman’s face went from awkward to euphoric in the time it took to say that one word. ‘Great. Really great. Thanks for asking. This week I find the smell of all meat repulsive and only seem capable of eating white bread with no crusts or cream crackers.’ Her eyes widened. ‘It’s all very exciting.’

  Ellis smiled at her, then leaned a hand on Martha’s shoulder. ‘Mum, Carmel Dwyer said I was to convince you to join the WhatsApp group. She said someone got thrown out this morning, so you should take her place.’

  ‘Bernie,’ supplied Edie. ‘The newspaper bumped her from writing about parenting, but then they gave her a new column on neighbours. The first one was out today and it had a lot about how she’d been betrayed and abandoned.’ She grimaced. ‘Let’s just say it was less than complimentary.’