‘You can’t be too careful, I suppose.’
‘Ah yeah. Well, I was upset about what happened to my last … em, garden, but I’ve managed to procure some new plants and I’ve signed up for a horticulture course.’
‘Wait, is this code?’
‘No, like I’m actually going back to college and training to become a horticulturist. That thing that happened, I don’t know. It was a bit of a wake-up call.’
‘Wow, so me ruining your life and causing you to be attacked was actually a positive thing. I’m the greatest friend ever.’
‘You are,’ said Alex, his voice lacking the irony to match Kavanagh’s. Kavanagh felt a lump in his throat. He coughed.
‘Great, so you won’t mind me asking you another favour? When you go to Stevie’s, I need you to tell her what happened, why I left.’
‘When you say everything, do you mean … everything?’
Kavanagh nodded. ‘She needs to know.’
‘Okay. I can do that.’
Chapter 45
There was something familiar about him, this stranger who knocked on Stevie’s door, that put her at ease immediately. She invited Alex inside.
‘Kav asked me to come here. There’s something you need to know. Have you seen this?’ He handed her the Galway Advertiser. It was open on an article with the headline ‘Tributes To Popular Local Man Following Funeral’. She saw a face she knew from somewhere as she scanned the article about a man who had fallen into the river and been swept away the night of the storm. Pajo … why was the name familiar? Suddenly she remembered him from a long-ago party, the night she first met Kavanagh.
‘The guy from the party. I remember him. He seemed …’. She stopped short, not wanting to speak ill of the dead.
‘Like a nasty piece of work? Yeah, he was. Kavanagh was there that night. They were fighting and Pajo fell in. It was an accident, but maybe some people wouldn’t see it that way. Maybe some people would relish the chance to have someone to blame.’
Suddenly it all made sense. The helicopter searching the river, Kavanagh’s sudden disappearance, his reluctance to say why he had left.
‘How is he? Have you been speaking to him?’
‘He’s terrified,’ said Alex. ‘And he wants you to know that he’s sorry about the way things happened. He wanted you to have this.’
He handed her the painting.
Chapter 46
That night Stevie dreamed of the ocean, an expanse of blue. She dreamed of the sun warming her pale body. She dreamed of Kavanagh. She looked around the empty flat. It looked and felt different now that the walls were bare. Kavanagh’s painting was the only sheela-na-gig left. It didn’t feel oppressive like the others. There was a glint of mischief in her eye, a kindness even, a warmth, despite being surrounded by all that blue. She was her own island in a vast ocean.
Stevie realised that everything had been about a closing off, a narrowing. What if she allowed herself to stop, to breathe, to say, what is it that I want? What would it feel like to relinquish control, to live and love without fear? She had clung to this idea of Stevie the Historian because without it what was she, who was she? And she had pushed Kavanagh away as a result.
And now he was gone and she had done nothing to stop it. She hadn’t wanted him to go away, not really, and now it was too late. She couldn’t tell him about her fear. She would set herself apart again as less-than, as weak. She didn’t want to be that person. She had had enough of being vulnerable. She had been on the receiving end of enough sympathetic looks to last a lifetime. She wanted to explain to him that she had been that way because she had to be.
She started to write an email to Kavanagh. Her fingers tapped out the words, trying to make sense of everything. She told him about her fears; about the psychiatric unit and Pam; how she was waking up now from a strange dream and trying to make sense of things; and on and on. Reading it back, she shook her head. She hit delete and watched her words disappear. In their place she typed I know I wasn’t there for you and I’m sorry, but I want to be now if you’ll let me.
*
Stevie clutched her boarding card and passport in her hand. The anxiety tablets were in her bag. She fished them out and held them in her hand. She didn’t need them. She felt clear-headed, determined. The last thing she wanted to do was dull her senses. All she wanted now was to feel everything. She threw them in a nearby bin and made her way to the boarding gate.
Stevie felt her heart surge as she boarded the plane. How easy it was then, after all. She looked out the window as the plane rose higher and higher until Dublin was a patchwork quilt of green below. She would soon land where he was. They would be together and they would figure things out from there. She smiled to herself, thinking about how he said he loved surprises. Stevie was heading towards her future, soaring above it all, over the fields and the churches and the many mysteries of the past. Curled up inside her, the tiny life soared too, biding and patient. Not one heartbeat, but two.
Also in the New Island Fiction Firsts Series
Forsaken
Gerard Lee
‘When I was ten, my father went up a tree and never came down.’
So begins the frantic and compelling journey into the inner universe of JJ, a child who we come to realise sees the world in a very different way. Forsaken develops as a journey through the psychological spiral of a ten-year-old boy’s struggle, not merely to survive, but to fulfil a primal instinct – to reunite with his family. In spite of JJ’s deteriorating circumstances, he never wavers from this mission; if anything, the rapidly unravelling exterior world steels his determination to achieve his goal.
Inspired by the author’s personal experience of the lives of the children who lived in the Residential Homes where he worked for several years, who persisted with extraordinary resilience and passionate longing to somehow fix their broken world.
‘One of the best things I’ve read this year.’ – Rick O’Shea
My Buried Life
Doreen Finn
What happens when you no longer recognise the person you have become?
Eva has managed to spend her twenties successfully hiding from herself in an alcohol-fuelled life in New York. Attempting to write, but really only writing her epitaph, she returns to Ireland to confront the pas that has made her what she is. In prose that is hauntingly beautiful and delicate, Doreen Finn explores a truly complex and fascinating character with deft style and unflinching honesty.
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‘Doreen Finn has created a loaded pistol in Eva Perry, an embittered poet whose creative voice has been silenced … Finn’s language showers sparks as Eva confronts her own difficult nature and her family’s clouded past.’
– Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander
Skin Paper Stone Page 22
