The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  In the end, Ro takes a taxi. The driver bores on about how there hasn’t been a shop there for years. Health inspection. Mouse droppings. Blahblahblah. When they reach the house, it looks different, smaller. Even in the dark it seems desolate, its windows half curtained in grimy nets. The name remains above the door, though. Six letters, M A D D E N, spelled out in little plastic blocks – upper case, sans serif. If he strains hard enough, he can place Mags Madden behind the counter of the shop, dinging at the cash register, giving off. He can picture the puce lipstick sunk into the cracks in her upper lip, the downward drip of her eyes and, ear to ear, the drapery of skin. Auntie Rae took them over for a last visit when he was no more than eight or so, but Mags wasn’t exactly welcoming and he hasn’t been back since.

  ‘I don’t know who you’d be looking for here,’ the driver says. ‘I’d say it’s just been left, like.’

  But Ro says it’s OK. In fact, he says it’s grand, and he’s pleased with that. The front door has been replaced in white moulded plastic with an eyebrow fanlight. He squints through the peephole, but there’s nothing. He walks around the side and peers through the back windows, but there’s nothing there either. Empty, like France. Empty, like Durham.

  As he rounds the corner of the building, a security light flashes on and he notices a metal plate still screwed into the wall – Player’s Please. Rushing back, a memory of this place when it was still a shop that smelled of tea and yellow-crumbed ham. That big chest freezer with HB on the side, a treasure trove of ice cream. And just as cold, Mags Madden, who had been his mother’s friend once.

  At the centre of his memory of this place is a caravan in a thick green field and a scrum of Irish cousins with hedge hair. And, sure enough, there is still a caravan out back, shucked up on breeze blocks. He feels in his pocket for the mini Maglite and whips the beam around him like a blade. It’s no longer possible to say what colour the caravan once was, but it’s green now, merged with the fields that stretch off towards the mountains. Nature has crept through its skin, spawning and withering, season on season, so that now it resembles a giant carbuncle, sappy and swollen to bursting.

  Behind him, the house is no longer dark; there is a light on upstairs, but no movement, no shadow. Downstairs left, another light snaps on, but he knows how easy it is to simulate a presence with timers and the like. Out here, in the sticks, you might be wise to take precautions. And so he doesn’t let the lights bother him. Even if there are people in there, they won’t notice the small beam of his torch flickering like a will-o’-the-wisp. He looks for traces of a car, a dark estate, for pallets or boxes or jars, some sign of Sophie’s Kitchen. And then he checks out the caravan. Even partially stripped out, it looks tiny. It’s hard to imagine how they fitted in, the children they were then, the mother. His father never used to come to Curramona. He would take himself up to Yorkshire to go shooting with his brothers, which suited Sophie, Rae used to say, because she couldn’t stand the smell of blood off him. That sounds like something Sophie might have said, all right, but you never know.

  Suddenly, he is faced with the futility of his existence, and all the barren years of search and disappointment. Who would miss him if he disappeared? He, who has left hardly a trace on the world. Not like Jess, whose days are wound tight into the lives of other people: her kid, her pompous husband, that leech Eddie Jacques.

  He is just concluding that there’s nothing here for him when the security light is activated. Footsteps on the concrete path around the house, a key scribbling at a lock. For one wild moment, he imagines that he is about to encounter his mother as she is immortalised in family videos – still blonde and young and sceptical, still cradling her guitar. As for the gesture she makes to the camera – peace or victory? He’s never been quite sure.

  He steps down out of the caravan and there, about to enter the house, is a woman in a yellow top and a pair of black jeans who could never, not in a hundred years, be his mother. This woman is old. She is skin and bone, drunk and teetering, and the moment of elation is gone.

  She squints at him, as if struggling for perspective. And then she goes on the attack.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ she says. She nudges the door open with her hip, then glances back at him. ‘What happened to your tongue?’

  ‘I’m Ro,’ he says. ‘Sparrow. They christened me William, but everyone used to call me Sparrow.’

  And even he is thinking – way too complicated, way too many names.

  ‘I was Sophie’s boy. Remember?’

  She doesn’t say she does and she doesn’t say she doesn’t. When he folds himself in through the door behind her, he allows her a moment to think about the fact that she’s let him into her house, a moment to reflect. And then he has a question of his own.

  ‘Anyone else here, Mags? Any company?’

  She laughs at that – a great wheezy laugh.

  ‘Not unless you count the altar boys I keep up in the attic next to the leprechaun.’

  He’d expected to recognise the kitchen, but he doesn’t. It has an overhead light in a basketwork shade, a white table and four matching high-backed chairs. The chairs look like a recent acquisition, a job lot from a bargain centre maybe, but even the ancient Formica cupboards, edged with stainless steel, ring no bells. He glances back at the window, the little bunched curtains printed with sprigs of tiny flowers. He’s sure he remembers those curtains, and his heart shrinks.

  Mags Madden winces up at the overhead light. She scrapes back her chair and makes for the switch, and there is a moment of darkness before the neon strips above the counter pop into life. That seems to suit her better. She reaches into a cupboard for an unmarked bottle, splashes some clear liquid at a glass.

  ‘Have you got any of that to spare?’ he asks, shrugging at the bottle, not that he wants any. He watches himself rise in her estimation, and already he hates her for it.

  ‘You’d like a taste?’

  And there is something in that word and the flattish way she pronounces it – a taste, a sip, a little something – that conjures up the last slick of batter in the bowl, a rap on the knuckles with a wooden spoon.

  She opens her eyes comically wide, like they might eat him.

  ‘I remember you right enough. Now that I think of it. Is your sister with you?’ She hands him a glass, and nods at him to help himself. ‘I suppose she’s more sense.’

  ‘I came as soon as I could,’ he says. ‘When I got word.’

  ‘When you got word.’ She repeats his phrase without applying a question mark, and in her mouth it sounds ridiculous, pompous even. Now that Mags Madden is a presence and not just a name, he is remembering her true flavour. Mags was always mean as grapefruit, her freezer crammed with jewel-coloured ice pops that no one was allowed to touch.

  ‘Don’t tell me this is the first word you’ve had?’ she says.

  He has a sudden urge to justify himself, so he starts to tell her about the run of bad luck he’s had this past while – France and Durham and all the woeful litany of sightings that, no matter how unlikely, couldn’t be ignored.

  But she cuts him short.

  ‘I could have saved you the bother. If you’d only asked.’

  ‘She’s alive?’

  ‘I’d say she is, yeah. She was alive, that’s for sure. She didn’t die on that beach anyway. Is she still alive?’ and her hands spread.

  He thinks his ears have failed him, because all he can hear is the hum that is always there at the base of things, like the motor of the world churning away whether you like it or not. At times like this, your senses fail you but your blood beats on.

  ‘A word of advice about your mother, Sparrow.’

  He wishes she wouldn’t call him that. He is sorry he mentioned it now, when he dropped it years ago.

  ‘Your mother’s the kind who stays somewhere for a while, then moves on. She’s the type who’d go to ground if she needed to, then surface when the notion took her.’

  She doesn’t care, that
’s what he notices first. She doesn’t give a damn about his feelings, and she couldn’t care less about Sophie.

  ‘What are you saying to me?’

  ‘What am I saying to you?’ And she is imitating him again, affecting a kind of baby talk.

  ‘I mean, she was your friend, right?’

  She screws up her face at that, and her hand makes a rocky road. ‘We didn’t always click,’ she says.

  When he takes her by the arm, she feels frail, revoltingly so. She smells sweet as bubblegum and sharp as urine.

  ‘You’ve come to the wrong place, Sparrow,’ she says, ‘and way too late.’ When she throws her head back, she’s like some TV-drama drunk. ‘Your mum won’t be calling on me, kiddo. I’d give her too many home truths. Sophie never liked to be told anything. That was her problem.’

  ‘When was she last here?’

  She juts out her chin at that. ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Maybe you would, though.’

  ‘If you’re after the woman at the market, you’re wasting your time. There’s no way Sophie’s spending her days making hummus. That wasn’t part of the plan.’

  ‘There was a plan?’

  He gets the feeling that she’s winging it now. And then he realises that, even through the fug of booze, she is relishing this. It dawns on him then that the only thing he knows for sure about Mags Madden is that she hates his mother. For whatever reason, Mags would sooner see his mother dead than have her reappear and find her son still loves her. That shocks him, and intrigues him too. But mostly it angers him.

  ‘Ah, don’t mind me, love.’ She plants her hand on his arm and gives it a squeeze. ‘Give your Auntie Mags a cuddle.’ She puts her head on his chest, her arms around his waist. ‘I know all about Sophie,’ she murmurs. ‘And I hate to tell you, Sparrow, she was no fucking good.’

  All he can hear is was. Ro isn’t interested in was.

  ‘None of us knew the whole Sophie. None of us.’

  He pushes her away. ‘You don’t know the first thing about her.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about my mammy?’ She puts on that simpering idiot voice again, but, though her lips move and her eyebrows arrow, her volume is fading. The hum is in his ears again, messing with his blood.

  And then she stops. He can’t interpret her expression. It might be pity or it might be fear. For a moment, she seems almost sober.

  ‘You don’t believe me, Sparrow? Come and see.’

  She stretches her hand out to him as if he’s still Sparrow Considine, motherless boy. When he doesn’t take it, she makes for the door ahead of him, ricocheting between the table and the counter, then slumping against the trembling fridge. While he waits for her to move, he concentrates hard on those little bunched curtains with their sprigs of blue flowers. Forget-me-nots. Of course. What else would they be?

  His mother’s voice is in his head, and Mags Madden is blundering out across the long grass with a torch in her hand, slashing at the night like a Dementor. As he watches her struggle through thick clumps of field grass and bracken, he is already deciding not to believe a word she says. When he joins her at the caravan, she turns and reaches out to him in a non-committal kind of way. Have a little taste.

  She stumbles, and when instinctively he stops her fall, it’s remarkable just how light she is. A dried-out old husk of nothing. She scrabbles away from him into the caravan, and when she drops the torch it dies and he is dowsed in darkness. The world doesn’t get much darker than a night at the home place. Her voice hovers somewhere over to his right, and he knows that, whatever else he does, he mustn’t let it get inside him.

  ‘You were a lovely little boy, Sparrow. You didn’t deserve what you got. And poor old Will, sure he wasn’t half the villain she made him out to be. Oh, there were drugs, all right, and other women. I had a moment there, myself. But you think she didn’t have other men? You think she didn’t take whatever pleased her?’ Her voice is hard now, and she’s no longer able to hide the spite in it.

  But Ro is focusing on that voice in his head, his mother’s voice, all silk and soft flesh.

  And he is on that beach, too, and straining to look behind the light to see what might be happening in those trees.

  ‘She used people, you know? Used him, tried to use me. She was a heap of shit.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Here. Let me show you something.’

  He doesn’t want to see, and yet he wants to know. It’s hard to drag himself away from that bright beach from long ago, the moment before disaster. But Mags Madden won’t let him stay there. He should leave now, he knows that. He should leave before her poison gets to him. But he needs to find out if he’s ever come close.

  ‘Is she in France, or Durham, or—’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘I thought I saw her once in a McDonald’s in Newcastle.’

  ‘A McDonald’s? Jesus, you don’t know much about Sophie, do you?’

  It infuriates him that she could tell him anything at all about his mother and he wouldn’t have a clue whether it was true or not. He barely knew his mother, after all. A kid like that, what could he know?

  Maybe Mags senses that she’s losing him, because her voice is hardening now.

  ‘She’ll be with Jess,’ she says quietly. ‘That’s where she’ll be. With perfect little Jess. Just you see – she’ll have tagged herself on to Jess’s life, one way or another. Taking the pleasure of it, without any responsibility. That was her, all over. That was your mother.’

  He is desperate to ask her why she thinks his mother wouldn’t want to be with him. But she gets there before he does.

  ‘I don’t think she’d have wanted the trouble of the likes of you. She’d not have had the time to mop you up. Normally, I wouldn’t say that, but …’ And the way she is speaking now, the consonants sound drenched in whatever it is she’s been drinking so that the sense of it is fading, melting.

  He can hear the scrape of cardboard pulled along a gritty surface. ‘Since you’ve come a distance, Sparrow, it’s only fair you go away with—’

  But it’s too late. Something has gone off in his head, and he knows for certain now that all she has to offer him is humiliation. He needs to get back to that town where a mother sits eating chips while her kid prods at his own cheek with a knife.

  ‘You’ve been chasing the wrong rainbow, kiddo. No point looking for Sophie Considine. She’s long gone. Little Mary Callan whose mother couldn’t keep her, the girl the Considines took in.’ She touches his arm. ‘That’s who your ma was. God only knows what she’s calling herself now, with the notions she had. Come here,’ she says, and before he knows what’s happening she has clamped her hand to his crotch.

  ‘Get off me!’ He kicks out at her, and in that moment there is hate enough in him to want to catch her chin or nose or the back of her befuddled head. His kick connects to something with give in it, and he hears it yelp and sigh. He kicks again and again and again before stumbling his way out of there, out into the wet grass, knee-deep in root-twisted earth packed tight with bracken.

  And there is still no light. Nothing but the faint glimmer of stars hazed with cloud. My God, where is the moon when you need it? He howls at the dark to rip the moon from it, but there is nothing. And so he stumbles on in darkness for an hour or more until he gets to the town, where he sits at the Civil War memorial and waits for the first bus out. He doesn’t feel much, really. Just cold, and something squirrelling away inside him.

  Then the night slides into a new phase. It reaches the point when the birds shut up and the engines take over and the struggling day emerges. He takes the first bus that arrives, which, as it happens, is heading for Dublin. He slings his backpack up into the rack and takes a pair of seats for himself. And as the bus pulls away he feels OK, fine, though there’s still a tug tug tug of something at him, like a small child at his mother’s sleeve. Half an hour into the journey, he realises what’s bugging him. She might have had the answer.
He might have heard it had he stayed.

  2

  London, present day

  At the firm’s Summer Party, waiters bearing shiny palettes of pre-poured drinks flank the Physic Garden lawn. The marquee has been planted well away from the specialist displays; here the borders are stuffed with summer mainstays – foxgloves and lupins, temples of astilbe, clusters of agapanthus bursting blue. Were it not for the dirty tide of traffic, the planes roaring towards Heathrow, they might be deep in the Oxfordshire countryside where Jess’s in-laws live. Over to the left, where the gravel paths converge, concentric circles of potted offerings surround the statue of the garden’s bewigged founder, tributes from hopeful amateurs, perhaps. Jess has a garden of her own now, but she is no enthusiast. She favours gravel over lawn, obedient specimens in zinc planters over the unpredictable sprawl of the herbaceous border.

  Inside the marquee, a string quartet is playing blanched-out jazz standards. Most of the female lawyers, bare-legged and wearing florals, have regressed to girlhood. Most of the men have removed their suit jackets and ties. Jess left the office with Sarah and Max at six, and they have been here ever since – gossiping, laughing, drinking. It is almost ten, and she has eaten nothing but tiny bundles of asparagus and balls of salmon and black rice. Her stomach is raw, and she is beginning to dream of fish and chips from that place near the station. This is the longest she has ever left Ruby – over fourteen hours, and counting.

  ‘You’re not fading on me now, Jess,’ says Sarah, taking her cloudy glass away from her. ‘You need another Bellini.’

  ‘Fine for you to say, on soft drinks all night.’

  Sarah sidles through the logjam at the bar with her neat bump. Elbows out, drinks held high, she bends to a double-cheeked kiss from Delia, who is mentor to them both, pristine in taupe Armani. Jess shunts their laptop bags under the table. As she stands back up again, she becomes aware of someone behind her, too close.

  ‘What are you worried about?’ he says. ‘It’s a room full of lawyers.’