Fumbling for her keys in her bag, she realised she felt strange about simply letting herself into the house where she had grown up but no longer lived. She was about to ring the bell when the door flew open.
‘Stephanie!’ said her mother. ‘Come in out of the cold.’
‘Hi, Mum.’ Stevie gave her mother a hug.
‘Oh, you’re frozen. I wish this snow would melt. I’m sick of it now, so I am.’
‘I know,’ said Stevie as she shrugged off her coat. ‘It kind of makes getting around fairly difficult.’
‘Well, you’re home now. You don’t have to go anywhere for the next few days. I’ve the fire set and I’ll light it later.’
‘Oh, lovely.’
‘You’re looking well, love. Very healthy,’ said her mother as Stevie hung up her coat on the coat stand. Stevie’s father appeared from the kitchen. ‘Hello stranger,’ he smiled, opening his arms wide for a hug.
Stevie sat at the kitchen table with her father. She wasn’t hungry but accepted her mother’s offer to make her a toasted sandwich to avoid any looks of concern passing between her parents. She knew that on some level they still blamed themselves for not noticing her illness earlier all those years ago. They had brought her up well, protected her from harm, not realising that the real danger was not something external, but would come from within her. They didn’t expect this specific threat, so when it did arrive they couldn’t recognise it.
After her stay in hospital, the counselling sessions and the slow recovery back to what seemed like normality, they still couldn’t figure out the why of it. She grew up like everybody else. She was not the victim of trauma or bad parenting or neglect. This was just something that had happened: some mysterious thing that had entered her life, and as a result, their lives.
It was always there. She could see the worry in her parents’ eyes, the glances they exchanged, no matter how many years had passed. She could see it in friends, the way they appraised her figure. A voice in her head had told her not to eat and she had listened to that voice. That voice was her friend, her confidante. That voice knew exactly what to do, or not to do. That voice could see into the depths of her soul. She had hushed that voice to a whisper and then quieted the voice altogether, but she knew it was still there, like a faint electrical hum, waiting to rise to a pitch.
‘I never use this feckin’ yoke.’ Her mother pulled a George Foreman grill out of the press and gave it a wipe with a cloth. ‘Great news. Your brother has managed to get a flight tomorrow morning.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Stevie. ‘I was worried he wouldn’t get home for Christmas.’
‘Did you see the news with all the poor people stuck at the airport?’
‘No, I don’t have a TV. I was reading about it though.’
‘There were no flights at all the last few days,’ said her father. ‘The runway was closed. It’s funny to think that a little bit of snow could cause such chaos. They ran out of grit and everything, so they can only do the main roads.’
‘Will we have a little nightcap for ourselves?’ asked her mother.
‘Seriously?’ said Stevie. Growing up, there had never been alcohol in their house. She knew that her paternal grandfather had been ‘a bit too fond of the drink’ and that her father had always avoided it, perhaps out of fear that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. He never talked about it much, and as far as Stevie could see, her mother had no interest in it either.
‘Well, it is Christmas.’ Her mother rooted in the press and produced a bottle of Baileys. ‘Now, do you have ice with this?’
‘Yes,’ said Stevie.
‘No,’ said her father at the same time.
Her mother looked at them both in confusion. ‘I have a measure glass here somewhere.’ She opened another cupboard. Stevie watched as her mother poured a shot of Baileys with great care into the tiny glass. If Stevie were pouring it she would have foregone the measure glass altogether and poured about twice as much.
‘How’s your course going, Stevie?’
‘Good, Dad, thanks. Although it’s not exactly a course. I’m doing research.’
‘But you can always do the H.Dip. afterwards, can’t you?’ said her mother. ‘That’s what Rita’s daughter did and now she has a great job. There’s always jobs in teaching.’
‘Not so much these days. The new teachers have it hard now with the pay cuts,’ said her father.
‘Your cousin James was let go from his job, did I tell you that?’
‘No, I didn’t hear that.’
‘Yeah, the company closed down. I.T. or something I think he was in. Now I’m sure he’ll get some sort of redundancy package, but you’d wonder will he get another job, and poor Fiona with one on the way.’
‘That’s awful,’ said Stevie.
‘That’s their other baby now.’ Her mother pointed at a photo that was stuck to the fridge. ‘Mason, they called him. Where do they get these names at all? He’s 2 now, would you believe? It seems like his christening was only yesterday.’
The fridge was covered in photographs of other people’s babies. They were her cousins’ children and the children of the sons and daughters of her parents’ friends. To Stevie, they all looked the same. Every time she came home there were more photographs.
‘Whose is this baby?’ Stevie pointed to what looked like a new addition from the last time she was home, a Thank You card with a picture of a scowling baby on its cover.
‘Oh, that’s Marian’s daughter’s baby. You remember Marian, my friend from work?’
‘Oh yeah.’ Stevie didn’t remember Marian, but it was easier to pretend she did to spare the lengthy explanation.
‘So you’ll be seeing your friends now over the Christmas?’ said her mother.
‘Yeah, I’ll probably go to the pub on Stephen’s Night if the weather clears.’
‘And will Donal be there?’
‘Probably, yeah.’
‘He was a lovely fella.’
‘I’m sure he still is, Mum. He didn’t die.’
‘But we never see him any more, do we, Peter?’
Stevie’s dad shrugged. ‘That fella had worms. He’d eat you out of house and home.’
‘Yeah, Mum, you only liked him because he ate your food.’
‘And why wouldn’t he? You think I’m a good cook, don’t you, Peter?’
‘Stevie knows what’s best for her.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘So, is there anyone new on the horizon?’ asked her father. ‘A Galway man maybe? Not as good as a Wicklow man, of course, but better than a Dub at any rate.’
‘The bloody cheek of you!’ said her mother.
Stevie laughed. ‘How many Baileys have you two had? No, sure I’ve no time for a love life these days.’
‘Am I ever going to get any grandchildren at all?’ said her mother.
‘Well, you might. Maybe from Tom.’
‘Sure Tom is only a baby!’
‘Mum, he’s 27’
‘Poor Tom, all on his own over in London.’
‘Ah, break out the tiny violins!’ said her father.
‘When I was your age, your father and I were married and we were even considered old, weren’t we?’
‘Sure you were an old maid.’
‘I was not!’ She slapped him on the shoulder and let out a girlish laugh.
‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I have no immediate plans to marry or start a family.’
‘Sure you never know, sometimes you don’t plan these things,’ said her mother. ‘They just happen.’
‘So you don’t think a person should be married first before they start having children?’ said Stevie, thinking of all those teenage warnings about single motherhood and lives being ruined.
‘Ah, sure it’s all backwards now. They’re living together and having babies and then getting married. You don’t want to leave it too late either. You don’t want to be an auld one like me.’
‘With age comes great wisdom,’ said Stevie, for want of anything else to say.
‘With age comes great arthritis,’ said her father with a wry laugh.
Both of her parents were retired now. They seemed different to Stevie, more relaxed without the pressure of the daily nine-to-five, but they also seemed older, more fragile. She saw that her father’s hands were cold-looking, his knuckles swollen. He reached for his glass in a way that was stilted and almost mechanical. It reminded Stevie of one of those arcade games where the mechanical claw lurches and judders as it attempts to clasp its prize.
Chapter 18
Kavanagh listened to the satisfying crunch of snow underfoot as he made his way to Alex’s flat on Christmas Day. The church bells chimed and the streets were empty apart from the odd car that crawled past on the sludgy roads. Kavanagh’s clothes were unsuitable for the weather. His feet had turned to lumps of ice in his Converse, and he could feel the wet creeping into his socks. The heavy snow had arrived two days ago, and with grit in short supply the country had all but come to a standstill.
Kavanagh had called his mother on Christmas Eve. ‘Ah, the roads,’ he said. ‘You know yourself …’ and let his voice trail off. ‘I’ll be down in the New Year.’
Since his father’s death four years ago, the house had been haunted by his absence. It was too much reality for Kavanagh to take. Over the course of the previous three Christmases his mother had made frequent references to his absent father throughout the day.
‘God but your father loved pulling the crackers, do you remember?’ she said as Kavanagh and his brother Colum tried to get into the spirit of things by putting paper crowns on their heads.
‘Ah, but your father was some man for the sprouts,’ she said as she stared wistfully at the Brussells sprout on the end of her fork.
Last Christmas Kavanagh had gotten nicely stoned to get through the day, but then he had to put up with Colum’s disapproving looks and he had become paranoid. Sitting on the toilet he felt his heart thumping in his chest and he became convinced he was having a heart attack, just like his father. His father had died on the toilet. ‘Just like Elvis,’ his aunt shook her head and said to Kavanagh and Colum at the funeral with something that sounded close to awe. The paramedics had to break down the door. Now, when Kavanagh thought of his father, sometimes an unwelcome image materialised of the man lying on the bathroom floor with a quiff, massive sideburns and a white sequinned jumpsuit bunched around blue lifeless ankles.
When he was growing up, it wasn’t so much that Kavanagh’s father disapproved of his son’s love of art, it was more that he lacked any kind of interest in it. ‘That’s nice,’ he would mumble absently when Kavanagh’s mother showed him her son’s latest painting, his eyes taking on the familiar glassy quality they displayed when his wife would talk about her bridge game with Sheila Brennan or how so-and-so’s daughter was marrying so-and-so’s son from the village, but hadn’t invited Mrs what’s-her-name to the wedding.
The young Kavanagh spent hours sketching his surroundings: the long eyelashes of cows, the rusted iron roof of the shed, the light and shade of hay bales biding their time in the fields. His older brother was his father’s son. Colum’s art was in practicalities: feeding the cows, stocking the shed, saving the hay. He had the same interest in Irish history and even traversed the land with the same slight limp in his left leg.
*
Alex’s house had the familiar earthy smell of his plants, but there was a waft of brandy that gave the place a Christmassy feeling. The warm blast of air was welcoming after being outside in the sleety cold. Kavanagh shrugged off his damp coat and stamped the cold from his feet. Alex had taken one of the larger cannabis plants from the other room and placed it on the table. It was decorated with a single threadbare string of red tinsel.
‘Nice to see you getting into the Christmas spirit, Alex.’
Alex picked up the plant and handed it to Kavanagh. ‘That’s your Christmas present. It was either that or some socks.’
‘Brilliant, thanks. Hopefully I won’t kill it.’
Kavanagh opened his rucksack and took out a small canvas. ‘I, eh, got you something as well.’ He handed him the painting. ‘Merry Christmas, Alex.’
Alex looked at it intently. ‘Wow, you painted this, man?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Seriously? For me?’
‘Yeah. It’s just something … you know. Your walls are a bit bare, in fairness.’
It was a small oil painting in various shades of blue, a night scene of the Claddagh with a shadowy boat docked in the bay and the dark outline of the houses on the Long Walk. He had painted it a couple of years earlier, but only found it under his bed the other day when he was tidying up.
‘Fucking hell. That’s class.’ Alex placed the painting on the mantelpiece with great care before turning to face Kavanagh. ‘Here, do you want some eggnog?’
‘Eggnog? Seriously?’
‘Yeah. It’s pure Christmassy, like. I had an American girlfriend once, Barbara, she used to make it.’
Kavanagh wrinkled his nose. ‘Jesus, I dunno. Has it got eggs in it?’
‘Yeah. It’s fucking eggnog. Course it’s got eggs in it.’
‘Raw egg, like?’
‘Yeah. Here, I’ll get you a glass.’
‘Jesus, I don’t know about this. Did you make it yourself?’
‘Of course,’ called Alex from the kitchen.
‘I suppose I’ll have to try it so since you went to all the trouble.’
Alex handed Kavanagh the glass and he sniffed it gingerly. ‘Ah, brandy. You should have said.’ He knocked it back. ‘Here, whatever happened to her?’
‘Who?’
‘Barbara.’
‘Barbara. Ah, it’s a long time ago.’ Alex bit his lip. ‘Myself and Barbara … she was …’. He looked out the window and said nothing for what seemed like an eternity. Kavanagh went to say something to break the silence and then thought better of it. He took another sip of eggnog and looked at the rim of the glass.
‘Sure what does it matter now anyway?’ said Alex finally in a small voice. ‘It’s a long time ago, Kav.’
‘Yeah, of course. Fair enough.’ He was suddenly aware of how very little they really knew about each other. ‘So, what are we watching?’ Kavanagh asked, steering the conversation back to familiar territory.
‘A selection of Christmas treats. I thought we could kick things off with It’s a Wonderful Life.’
‘Oh right,’ said Kavanagh.
‘Ah no, only messing, I’ve got Evil Dead One, Two and Three.’
*
By three o’clock the ashtray was full, the eggnog was long gone, and Alex was in the kitchen searching through presses.
‘There must be food in here somewhere.’
‘No, nothing. Sorry. We could order a pizza?’
‘It’s Christmas Day, Alex. Everything’s closed.’
‘Oh yeah.’
Then Kavanagh remembered the set of keys to the restaurant. Simon had given them to him in case of problems with the pipes over Christmas. Last year a couple of businesses on Quay Street had burst pipes due to the cold snap, and Simon was worried something similar might happen this year. Everyone else was going home for Christmas, and Kavanagh was the only one who was staying in Galway city, so he had been entrusted with the keys.
‘How about a steak?’ Kavanagh said. ‘I never did get my Christmas bonus.’
‘I’ll get my coat,’ said Alex.
They trudged along the footpaths. Kavanagh, so unused to seeing Alex outside the con
fines of his flat, felt like he was chaperoning an anaemic child on a rare day-trip. He almost stuck out his hand for Alex to hold as they went to cross the road. It wasn’t until Alex, walking slightly ahead of Kavanagh, grabbed the branch from a low-hanging tree, causing snow to fall on Kavanagh’s head, that he retaliated by pelting a snowball at his head and they both ran through the quiet streets, giddy like schoolchildren, pushing and shoving each other. The tourist Mecca of Quay Street was quiet, the blinds drawn over the shopfronts.
Inside, Kavanagh grabbed an apron and threw it on. When he first saw the kitchen, it wasn’t at all like he had expected it to be from seeing cooking programmes on television. For the most part, everything came from packets. Not even the soup was home-made: there were large white buckets of the stuff in the storeroom. Kavanagh looked in the fridge. ‘No steaks,’ he said. He checked the freezer and found sausages and a bag of chips.
Alex came in holding two cocktail glasses. ‘My own invention. The Evil Dead Two.’
Kavanagh took a tentative sip. ‘That’s actually nice. What did you put in there?’
‘Vodka, rum, cranberry and …’ Alex waved his hand in the direction of the bar, ‘you know, the green one and some other stuff.’
Kavanagh fired up the deep-fat fryer and threw in the chips. They crackled and spat up hot oil. ‘Is it meant to do that?’
‘Ah yeah, that just means it’s hot,’ said Alex.
He fried the sausages in a frying pan and opened the industrial-sized tin of baked beans. ‘I hope you like beans,’ he said, as he turned the tin upside down and a mountain of them plopped into the saucepan. He hit the bottom of the tin and the slimy stragglers slithered in.
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