The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  Eddie opens his mouth to say something, but it’s Jess who greets Ro first. She has a dark crust along her bottom lip, and he remembers then that the only wine she ever drinks is red. Her speech seems slurred, which is not like Jess. All she says is his name, the whole bird. ‘Spaaaaa-rohhhh.’

  He toys with the idea of blowing it all open – the husband by the potting shed, the return of the prodigal mother. But it’s early days for that.

  And then she starts again, better this time. ‘Hello, Ro,’ she manages. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  She must have more than that to say, but nothing else comes out. She presents Eddie and the woman silently, with an open palm. Eddie doesn’t react right away. And then he jumps to his feet. Well, he gets perfectly efficiently to his feet for a man of sixty plus. Eddie and Jess exchange a glance. It’s a phrase he has never really understood, but now he gets it perfectly. It is collaborative and destined to exclude him.

  He makes the casual shift from maybe to definite. Just a flick of the mind does it, and when he looks back again at the woman on the sofa, he is examining the side of his mother’s head. Her greyish-blondish hair is worked into a bun that, while not quite elderly, is not glossy enough to belong to a younger woman. She looks up at Ro and, just as they are about to exchange a glance of their own, Eddie puts a stop to it.

  ‘This is Maya,’ he says. ‘My partner.’ Mine.

  But the woman on the sofa, who moments ago belonged to Eddie, she’s not ready to pull away from Ro. Not yet. She raises the bottle on the table next to her, as if offering to fill his glass. And in that moment he feels something that isn’t just an exchange of glances. He feels a surge of recognition, something that might even be love. In all the years since that beach in Goa he has never experienced this before. As she stretches her hand out to pour for him, she displays the inside of her wrist. And there it is, a pinkish scarring. In the delicately veined skin where perfume is applied and cuts are made. There it is.

  When she looks into his eyes, he imagines a long tough cord strung up between them, and pulls it tight. She tries to yank it away from him but he isn’t letting go, until at last he weakens and lets her have her rope. Her eyes leave him, and she doesn’t stay long after that. But as she leaves her daughter’s kitchen, she kisses him goodbye. One cheek, then the other. As she moves towards him, he can smell the sweetness of her flesh like a memory of toddlerhood. And for tonight, that will do. But this is not the way things will be left. This is not the way it’s going to be.

  Jess sees Eddie and Maya to the minicab, placing a stack of empty Tupperware in the boot. Returning to the house, she is already attempting to work out what happens next. Ro is not in the hallway, nor in the kitchen either. The guests have almost all gone. A small cohort attached to the teen barmen are sitting at the low wall of the terrace and making short work of the pale ales, while further down the garden knots of people she can’t identify from this distance are talking quietly. The music is over now, and there is an air of hushed content. She has always found that Ro’s reappearance betokens crisis. The episode with the blood on his shirt, for instance, when he refused to explain what had happened. And the last time, of course, the ugly row, the insults.

  ‘I know he’s your brother,’ Charlie had said, ‘but I don’t want him anywhere near Ruby.’

  On the other side of the terrace, the glowing tip of a cigarette pulses brightly then dims. Whoever is smoking it is facing her, looking straight at her perhaps. She faces the little disc of red, fixes her eyes on it. As he walks towards her, Sparrow tosses the cigarette away in a skimmed orange arc and steps into the light. Later, much later, she might ask how he got in, whether the gate was open. Later still, she might even ask why he doesn’t stay in touch, why he couldn’t just have walked up to the front door like a normal person. Right now, though, his return seems supernatural. A single magpie defying gates and walls. She loves her brother, or at least that’s what she tells herself. But that love is tinged with cooler colours, with apprehension and distaste.

  ‘Funny time to have a party,’ he says. When he crosses in front of the pale blue wall, the projected bubbles dapple him so that for a second or two he is the main feature, top of the bill.

  She stretches out her hand to him. His grasp is soft and weak and slightly clammy, as it always has been. He performs the clench and raise manoeuvre he favours over a handshake or a hug. It used to feel conspiratorial, but tonight it just feels weird. She is shocked at herself, because already she is wishing he would leave. As she turns to walk back with him into the house, she spots the three women friends she loves most – Sarah, sitting in a chair nestling her bump, Martha and Alice, all laughing together, though they won’t have met before tonight. She realises then that she doesn’t want to introduce them to Ro, that she doesn’t want the old things to reoccur – the oversensitive ego, the endless retelling of the story of the beach as if it is his story alone, as if he deserves something in return, the inevitable embarrassing scene. And so she moves him back, deeper into the garden, while she tries to think what to do next.

  She needs to manage the meeting between Charlie and Ro after the last, disastrous visit. From the start, though, the history between them has been fraught. Even at her wedding, Ro was frail and overwrought, snatching glass after glass from the trays of passing waiters, then tumbling down the feature staircase at her in-laws’ house before the speeches had begun, like a child fed booze too young. Charlie was furious with embarrassment, and on a day already clouded by Eddie, this had seemed like another omen.

  Ro didn’t turn up again after that for another six months or so. Then, one day, he appeared at the office, dressed as if he’d just come from an ashram. She took him for coffee in the Prêt on the corner where he berated her for her career, for Charlie, for her navy suit, her bob, her pearl and gold drops, for the life she had chosen, all that. She sat there and took it, for the sake of harmony. And she was glad she did, because the rant seemed to soothe him. And what did it matter to her? She was stronger, more capable. But it did matter, because it made her sadder, a little less able to cope with Charlie and the tiny acts of undermining that had started even then.

  The hold Ro has on her is something she will never be able to shift. From the moment on the beach when he tugged at her hand and tried to pull her over towards the trees, she has failed him. If she had only coaxed him into speaking instead of trying to shake the memories from him, if she had refused to abandon him to the insistence of her father’s family that he attend the prescribed schools, if she’d had a heart, then maybe things might have been different.

  ‘Too late for the food, I suppose?’ he says.

  That’s one thing she can provide, and she jumps to it. ‘You must be joking. The fridge is heaving with the stuff.’

  She takes him inside and shows him to the table where Hana has cling-filmed two platters of leftover canapés. ‘Eddie’s partner made some little veggie tarts, too. There should be plenty of those.’

  The only things he seems to want are the tarts that Maya made. He piles three or four of them onto a plate and sits at the breakfast bar to eat. She watches him as if he were a child who might choke on a pine nut.

  ‘No sign of Charlie, then?’ he asks. His eyes display a scorn she wishes he had the grace to hide, at least for now.

  ‘He’s around here somewhere,’ she says. ‘Look, Ro, I’ve been trying to contact you. I wish to hell you’d get yourself a phone. But maybe you’re the one who should have been trying to contact me.’

  As soon as she says it she realises it’s too early for any of this.

  ‘Well I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘We need to talk about—’

  ‘The passport? It proves I was right. What more do we need to say?’

  She is surprised, but she doesn’t show it. ‘It doesn’t prove anything. Not a single thing.’

  ‘Easy for you to say, when you see her every day.’

  His eyes are hard, the pupils pinprick
-small. She remembers then that Ro doesn’t think like other people. ‘What are you talking about?’

  His mouth is working away at one of Maya’s tarts as he leans back, his hands behind his head. ‘Can I stay, Jess? Just a few weeks, that’s all. I need to sort myself out.’

  There is no room for him here. None. But she doesn’t know how to say that, when there is so much room here for anyone but Ro.

  ‘I’ll have a chat with Charlie,’ she says.

  ‘You need to ask your husband if your own brother can stay?’

  ‘Of course not, Ro. It’s manners, that’s all.’

  ‘Manners? God, Jess, you are boring.’

  The old jabs are the sharpest. She feels it. ‘But you still want to stay, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  She catches sight of Charlie, further down the dark garden, where the only light comes from a pair of flaring candles that smell of verbena. He is standing in the shadows, talking intently to someone who barely reaches his shoulder. She blinks and strains until she sees a white-blonde head tilted up to him. Hana and her husband are lingering by the shed, just where Jess planted the amaryllis the year before. Instinct tells her to keep away, and when she sees the open gate, her heart whizzes. On the Common side of the wall, the trees are blacker than the sky, tossed by a wind that hasn’t yet managed to invade her sheltered garden. As she stands there, she feels a bewilderment of breached defences but she hasn’t the courage to shore them up, not yet. And so she retreats.

  She is keeping Ro topped up with wine in the too-bright kitchen, when Charlie appears on the terrace and starts regaling the teen barmen with stories of beer-hall escapades in Munich a decade or more ago. It hurts to see Hana standing barefoot next to him, her little glinting mules fallen rakishly together on the floor.

  Noticing Ro for the first time, Charlie makes a face. ‘You really know how to choose your moment, Sparrow.’

  Hana puts her hand up to hide her smirk, and Jess feels the blood rush to her face. She glances between the two men. Charlie, so filled out with confidence and food. Ro, so very lean and pale and washed away. And that’s when she decides to take him in and keep him, her own blood for better or for worse.

  ‘He’s here because of Mum,’ she says. And then Hana looks away, as if unsure how to react. ‘I’ll put him in the spare room.’

  Ro still hasn’t said anything. And then he approaches Charlie and does the same touch, clench thing he did with her. And though Charlie is flinching even more than she did herself, he lets it pass.

  Carrying a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses, she ushers Ro into the empty drawing room with its gleaming floor. They must have under-ordered on the red, which has run out. She rarely drinks white, and it tastes like a pear drop, both tart and sweet at once. Already, it is beginning to gnaw at her stomach.

  There is no baggage, just a grubby backpack. There is little enough chat.

  ‘You’ve been away a while,’ she says.

  She’s aware that she uses simpler language than usual with Sparrow. It’s not that she thinks he’s stupid. She knows he isn’t. It’s that when she is talking to him she seems to be straining for a past that’s almost out of reach – a time when she was the leader, and he was lost.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asks.

  It comes out a bigger question than she’d intended, a more visceral one, and he recoils a little in response. All she is hoping to ascertain is whether he has been to Ireland, though she isn’t sure she wants to know the answer. Ro looks as if he’s not sure either what she means, and then he answers anyway.

  ‘I come and go.’

  ‘You never used to tell me where you went,’ she says because, after all, she should have known better.

  She is thinking of the time just after they returned from Goa and went to live with Auntie Rae, when they were two skinny, blond kids grown tough in the hot sun and accustomed to foraging for themselves. Ro would be in the garden one moment, and the next he would have disappeared, and she would get the blame for not having kept an eye on him.

  He catches on right away. ‘Oh then? Yeah. There was a place behind the café on the Common, a kind of gap between two walls. I used to squeeze between them and just sit there, looking up at the streak of sky above. Sometimes I’d scribble on the walls and pretend I was writing hieroglyphics on a mummy’s tomb, but mostly it was Batman’s cave. It was nice. And no one would ever find me there.’

  He doesn’t say the place is still there, that he walked past it only yesterday. Meanwhile, Jess is thinking about the times when he came home from school and would take himself to the Common and hide away from all of them.

  ‘At school, did something happen to you? Something bad?’

  ‘Nothing has ever been as bad as that day.’

  And of course he is talking about the beach. But she doesn’t want to go over all that again, the fact that neither of them remembers anything at all. She looks down at the distressed table that is showing its wounds while she is hiding hers. She decides to tackle the subject head-on.

  ‘The passport means nothing.’

  ‘Who says? Eddie, I suppose.’

  She is taken aback that Eddie is the first person he thinks of.

  In the hallway outside, she can hear people leaving. She doesn’t want to have to talk to anyone, not right now, and so she goes and turns the key very quietly in the door.

  For the first time tonight Ro smiles, and she can feel something of the power that smile still has for the women who let him tell his story.

  ‘We’ll find her, Jess. I know we will.’

  She is suddenly overwhelmed by the huge effort it seems to take to keep your loved ones safe and warm. By work and care. By not knowing and needing to find out.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t protect you, Ro.’

  ‘That was her job,’ he says.

  Upstairs, Charlie is drunk.

  ‘How the fuck did he get in?’

  He is cleaning his teeth, spitting into the basin.

  ‘You hadn’t checked the gate was locked, Jess? Really? You’re obsessed with that bloody gate.’

  She doesn’t tell him what she saw. Doesn’t say he must have known about the gate being open, had probably opened it himself. She needs to think first. Decide what she wants to do about whatever she thinks she half perceived, down by the potting shed.

  In the meantime, she has put Ro in the room at the back, the bedroom looking out over the garden, the one that is painted yellow in case there is another baby. When she gets into bed, Charlie has already turned away from her, deep in sleep. She lies on her back and listens to the sounds outside – ragged laughter from the bus stop, a cry from somewhere in the middle of the Common. She is sure that Charlie is frightened of Ro – his frailty, but maybe also his unpredictability. Because there is no doubt that Ro can be unpredictable.

  The idea of Ro under her roof makes her anxious too, and she feels guilty about that. The truth is, she is afraid that he will swamp everyone with his preoccupations. Or rather, his preoccupation. There has only ever been the one.

  9

  Jess is up at five, way before the rest of the house, and right away she can smell the aftermath of the party. Charlie looks like he hasn’t shifted position all night long. She goes to the en suite to pour herself a glass of water, and then another, until the sour taste in her mouth is almost washed away. She likes to watch the Common come to life, and the dog walkers heading in the direction of the bandstand, where they will congregate for coffee. It makes her safe to witness these rituals, to survey the Common stretched out in front of her like a calm green lake. But there isn’t time for that today.

  Downstairs, the kitchen is a mess. The agency cleaners are booked for seven, and she hopes they arrive before Hana comes down. Wrestling sleepily with the coffee machine, she is berating herself for having agreed to a party on a Sunday night, birthday or no birthday, when Ro appears. She’s never known him rise before ten, but he looks full of energy, his eye
s shining.

  ‘Well?’ he says. ‘Did you see the tattoo?’

  For a moment she is confused, and then she realises that this is something he must have been thinking about all night long. There is an agenda here, and he is right in the middle of it. She should stop him now, but she doesn’t.

  ‘What tattoo is that, Ro?’

  She is managing to keep her voice steady, but Ruby will be awake any minute now and she is impatient to get a move on.

  ‘You’re not telling me you missed it? She has a tattoo, just in the right place.’

  She knows that Ro has drawn up an inventory of characteristics that, even now, might identify their mother. Among other things, Auntie Rae had told him that their mother’s habit of wearing heavy earrings had stretched her piercings low down the lobes. And she confirmed the tattoo, of course. Sophie had no scars, but inside her left wrist there was a big blowsy purplish rose she’d had done one Saturday when they were both still at school, back in the days when a tattoo was the ultimate act of rebellion.

  Ro is poking in among the cookery books. Next thing, he has found a pad of paper. Pulling out a page, he starts to draw, working with too much detail as he always does. She turns away and busies herself with warming Ruby’s milk. By the time she has turned back again it’s clear that he is drawing a rose.

  ‘You don’t remember?’ He is pointing to the tender part of his wrist, the place he might cut, if he were that way inclined. He traces a circle there with his fingernail. ‘Just here,’ he says.

  She is tempted to nod because perhaps she does remember. She thinks she might remember, but she knows too that memories are treacherous, that they can implant themselves and feel authentic without the reality having been anything like that at all.

  ‘Are you talking about Eddie’s partner?’ she says cautiously. ‘About Maya? I don’t remember seeing a tattoo.’

  His face falls. ‘Well, you’re simply not trying hard enough. She’s had it removed. It’s obvious. I’ve seen that kind of scar before – you can tell exactly where it was. That pale patch on her wrist. It’s a ghost.’