The Christmas Party

by Karen Swan

  ‘Knock knock,’ Willow said, walking into the flat.

  ‘There’s no point in knock-knocking after you’ve frightened the life out of me!’ Pip cried. ‘I nearly die—’

  The word faded on her lips.

  ‘I thought you’d have heard the car,’ Willow said after a beat. She set down a box of teabags on the worktop. ‘Mrs Mac said you were nearly out.’

  Pip looked over at them in surprise. Mrs Mac had been in here, looking after her? ‘Well, you know what a stealth machine that car is,’ Pip said instead, referring to the lumbering airforce-blue 1958 II Series Landy their father had bought their mother for their tenth wedding anniversary – Tin.

  ‘Wine?’ she asked, holding up the bottle of cheap red and watching as her little sister sloped across the tiny flat and collapsed heavily into the armchair opposite, dropping her head back and letting her arms and legs go scarecrow-limp.

  ‘No. Too tired.’

  ‘Just as well. It tastes like soap,’ Pip said with a grimace as she took a sip. She began tucking in to her dinner. ‘So, you look like hell.’

  ‘Thanks. You too.’

  ‘I’ve got a good reason,’ Pip said with her mouth full, stabbing at the air with her fork. ‘I’ve just spent the day trekking frickin’ miles in the pissin’ rain with a family that should never have left the mall.’ Willow gave a wry half smile, her eyes still closed, head still tipped back. ‘What’s your excuse?’

  ‘Oh, you know, just the small matter of deciding what to do with a seven-hundred-year-old castle that needs half a million spending on it just to make it watertight when we’ve fifty-eight cents in the bank.’

  ‘Hmm, fun,’ Pip said brusquely as she forked a piece of chicken. If it was sympathy her sister wanted, she wouldn’t find it here. She felt irrationally angry at her baby sister, even though she knew Willow’s inheritance was a golden bullet, one she’d been very glad to dodge. But it was Ottie and their mother she felt sorry for. It was the two of them that had been robbed. ‘How’s Mam?’

  Willow was quiet for a moment. ‘. . . Avoiding me, I think.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pip swallowed, instantly feeling bad. The rational part of her knew this wasn’t Willow’s fault. ‘Well, give her time,’ she mumbled. ‘She’ll come round. It’s just the shock.’

  ‘Yeah. There’s been a lot of that about lately.’

  Pip glanced up at her. ‘Any idea what you’re going to do?’

  Willow shrugged carelessly. ‘Sell it, of course.’

  Pip’s fork froze mid-air. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘No. Not just “like that”,’ Willow said defensively. ‘But what other course of action is there? Dad exhausted every angle: we can’t make the place work without a massive cash injection, which we don’t have; we can’t give it away without a bloody dowry. The place is falling into disrepair. Maybe you don’t see it because you’re here all the time, but it’s shocking how run-down it’s become.’ She gave another shrug. ‘If we can’t afford to look after it, then the most responsible thing to do is sell it to someone who can.’

  ‘Well, when you put it like that . . . It’s so pragmatic of you, Will. So rational,’ Pip said with her utmost sarcasm. ‘Alternatively, you could at least try to think of some ideas for making it work before you cash in! You only got the bloody deeds yesterday!’

  ‘Well, what would you suggest? The luxury B & B didn’t work –’ Willow said, holding up her fingers and beginning to count.

  ‘Only cos of the recession, though. Things were going great before that.’

  ‘Dad got a two hundred thousand loan for trying to update the place for that and he never recouped it.’ She held up another finger. ‘The partridge shoot didn’t work.’

  ‘Only cos the foxes got the chicks cos some towny idiot left the hatches open.’

  ‘The food festival didn’t work.’

  ‘That jam was bloody overpriced! I said that at the time.’

  Willow shot her sister a look. ‘You know as well as I do they tried a hundred other different ventures and nothing worked – not on the scale that’s needed. We’re on the Wild Atlantic Way but the clue’s in the location: we’re too remote, too rural. Camping? Great. Pony trekking? Great. Small-scale, inexpensive ventures work, but there’s not enough money in them to keep the castle itself going. If people want to stay in a castle, they want the ‘Cinderella at the ball’ experience, not the girl sweeping ashes in rags.’

  Pip tutted as hard as she could but, actually, she couldn’t refute the truth in her little sister’s words. What was it O’Leary had said yesterday? They were getting by at a ‘subsistence’ level?

  Willow sank back into the cushions again, closing her eyes. ‘I’ve contacted my friend Hels –Helena Talbot. She’s a client liaison at Christie’s in Dublin. We’ve got a lot of mutual friends. She went to school with my flatmate.’

  ‘Shaz.’

  ‘Caz.’

  ‘Ooh,’ Pip said, in her snootiest voice, unimpressed.

  Willow sighed, looking exasperated. ‘I’ve asked her to come down and look over everything. Mam’s inherited all the castle contents but there’s far too much to take down to the Dower House, so she should probably look into having an estate sale.’

  ‘Don’t you think she should arrange that then, seeing as that’s just about all Dad left her?’ The accusation rang out in her voice again.

  Willow’s eyes narrowed, reading her position on this clearly. ‘I’d suggest that if there’s anything you particularly want from the castle, you get it sooner rather than later.’

  ‘Jeesht,’ Pip muttered, feeling more bad-tempered by the minute. ‘It’s not enough to lose the house but we have to lose all the things that made it a home too? Don’t let the grass grow under your feet now, will you?’ she quipped angrily.

  Willow looked away and said nothing – her default position now, it seemed – as Pip continued to eat. The silence between them lengthened and Pip felt the walls come down around her sister again. There was an edge between them these days that she didn’t understand. They’d been so close growing up, Willow always looking up to her as the naughty big sister, giggling behind her hand as Pip dared to do what she did not. But then Willow had upped sticks for Dublin and everything had changed. What happened to you? It was the question that was always on the tip of her tongue now, the only answer she wanted to get. It wasn’t so much her sister’s departure itself which had been so hurtful – Willow had never had the same physical ties to this place as her and Ottie, she didn’t need the land like they did – but the way she had almost deliberately dropped contact with them, not returning calls or texts, forgetting birthdays, not even coming back for Christmas because she was always on some retreat in Goa or Acapulco or Tulum. The family had taken it in turns going up to see her in Dublin every few months – although it was hardest for Pip to get away on account of leaving the horses – but none had come back feeling reconnected to her and the distance between her and them had just seemed to grow and grow.

  Several times over the years, she’d tried bringing up the subject – she wasn’t slow to speak her mind, everyone knew that – but something in Willow’s eyes always stopped her, a warning that there were landmines beneath her feet if she tried to cover that ground.

  ‘Well, you’ll have a bastard of a time selling it, I’ll tell you that now,’ Pip muttered, taking another sip of her wine with a mouthful. ‘You heard what O’Leary said about that shyster who tried to pull the fast one. And Mam told me that before that they’d been looking for a buyer for most of last year. No interest.’

  ‘Well, who had he put it on with? McGinty’s in Cork is hardly going to have the international reach Lorne needs.’ Willow’s lip curled and Pip knew her sister’s head had been turned by Dublin’s bigger, flashier scene. No doubt Lorne was just a provincial backwater to her now.

  Pip hoped her gaze was shooting arrows. ‘You’ll see. It’s dead out there.’

  ‘I don’t believe there was no interes
t in the place,’ Willow snipped back.

  Pip shrugged. ‘Only the gazunder fella and that was always doomed to fail.’

  ‘Why? They couldn’t have known he’d try to slash the price.’

  ‘Not that.’

  ‘What then?’

  Pip furrowed her eyebrows, as she always did when she wanted to look her most imposing. ‘Mam told me he was English.’

  ‘So? What’s that got . . .?’ Willow’s eyes widened. ‘Oh my god, are you joking?’

  ‘Are you?’ Pip almost choked on her dinner. ‘How could Dad sell his castle to an Englishman? You’ve got to be kidding me! Don’t you care anything about our history? It was built in the first place as a reward for defeating the English!’

  ‘Yes. Seven hundred years ago!’ Willow scoffed. ‘Time to let go of that particular grudge, don’t you think?’

  Pip shook her head firmly. ‘Nup. Never gonna happen. Mam said Dad accepted he may not be able to keep the knighthood going, nor even keep us living there, but selling it to a double-crossing Englishman would be over his dead body!’

  Willow didn’t reply, a look of horror crossing her features at her big sister’s clumsy choice of words. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said tersely, getting up from the sofa, tears shining in her eyes.

  ‘Will . . .’ Pip stared at her, feeing at a loss. Why did every conversation seem to end in an argument now? What had happened to them? They couldn’t be fighting at a time like this – even if it was their father who had set them at odds with each other. ‘Look, wait up.’

  ‘What is it?’ Willow snapped from the doorway. She looked pinched and hollow-cheeked.

  Pip racked her brain looking for neutral ground. ‘. . . D’you want to come to a party?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘No, not now, jeesht, what do you take me for?’ Pip tutted. ‘Actually, don’t answer that . . .’ she muttered. ‘It’s at the weekend. Terry Mullane’s place in Wickling. His horse Midnight Feast won—’

  ‘The Grand National. I remember,’ she said flatly. Horses didn’t quicken Willow’s pulse.

  ‘Right. Well, they’re having a belated party to celebrate – they’ve spent most of the season in Dubai. It should be big. Vintage champagne, dancing all night, I reckon. Your kind of scene.’

  Willow stared down at her, looking unwittingly statuesque and lean in her leggings and baggy jumper, and Pip thought for the hundredth time how much her little sister had changed – grown up, she supposed. Still she could never quite get used it – sleek muscles where there’d once been teenage podge, green elixirs in the fridge instead of Coke, sports leggings and trainers replacing jeans and wellies; tight boxer braids replacing her dark swinging ponytail. It felt not so much like an evolution as a revolution, a rejection of the naive country girl she’d once been for something entirely new: slicker, sleeker, better. ‘. . . I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem like the right time for a party.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, you’re right. I was thinking the same,’ Pip sighed, her shoulders slumping. Everything felt against them.

  There was a pause and Willow shifted her weight, getting ready to go again. ‘. . . Then again,’ Pip murmured to her back, ‘I suppose if the past fortnight’s proved anything, it’s that the only time is now.’ She bit her lip and waited as her sister turned back to her again.’ Don’t you think?’

  Chapter Seven

  Friday, 6 December

  Ottie pulled her anorak tighter around her as she walked forlornly around the tent pitches, her clipboard pressed flat against her chest. It was blowing a hoolie today, a storm barrelling its way across the Atlantic straight towards them, and her wet hair kept pinging against her cheeks like a violin’s plucked bow.

  ‘Hello, everything okay for you?’ she asked a couple of women coming out of the toilet and shower blocks, towels flung over their shoulders. They were dressed much the same as everyone else who had descended here over the past day and a half – tracksuits, polar fleeces, windcheaters and industrial-looking trainers. Most of them were spending the time resting in their tents and cooking up pasta on their camping stoves, a lot of pasta. Bertie’s now-famous Kilmally Ultra event was kicking off at daybreak tomorrow, with pre-race briefings in the Gallaloe village hall tonight, and a sense of anticipation already hung in the air.

  ‘One of the cubicles is out of loo roll,’ one of them said as she walked past.

  Ottie nodded, sensing the boundless energy and stamina of the woman; she was going to run for miles and through nights, willingly, while it was all Ottie could do to get around this field; her father’s absence was glaring everywhere she turned. She understood suddenly that they were living, she was merely alive. ‘Okay, I’ll see to that, thanks.’

  She watched the women walk away, the two of them falling straight back into conversation, arms almost brushing as they walked, and she felt another stab of jealousy. She’d never had a best friend like that; she’d never needed one. She and Pip and Willow had always been as tight as a fist – as children anyway; but growing up seemed to have meant growing apart: Willow had moved away, of course, but although Pip was still close by, although they could still predict what the other was going to say, or insult each other as merrily as drunken pirates, it wasn’t the same now, because always in the background was her big fat secret. It sat over her like a shadow at all times, whether she was in the pub or at the kitchen table, and there wasn’t a soul she could tell: not her sisters, certainly not her parents, not even Mrs Mac. She was a woman in love but no one could ever know it.

  She walked into the wash block. As these things went, it was an attractive building, a converted black house – old stone walls, thatched roof – with the packed earth floor latterly flagged with local slate. Keeping its eco-credentials up had been important to her and her dad when they’d decided to develop the campsite behind the beach, so they’d installed a water storage and recycling system in which the loos flushed with grey water and the showers ran off captured rainwater (of which, this being Ireland, there was plenty).

  She unlocked the cleaners’ supplies cupboard and restocked the loo rolls in the cubicles, checking everything was clean and running clear, that all the showers had been turned off properly. She found a towel still hanging on one of the shower hooks, a Columbia microfibre muffler on the floor behind a door and an Adidas plastic slide under the sink units. She put them all in the Lost Property wicker basket in the corner – the owners would have until next Saturday to reclaim them before they were either binned or sent to the charity shop in Agmor. With one final look-see, she signed the inspection chart and hung it back on the wall for the day. The cleaners would be in again first thing in the morning.

  Heading back out into the elements, she dipped her head and braced herself against the wind and sleet. Though it was only mid-afternoon it was already growing dark, and the temperatures felt raw thanks to the bitter wind as she did a final walk around the site, checking the condition of the pitches and that no litter was being left. In the space of a few hours, the site had filled up almost to capacity, and she moved past the countless orange, sky-blue, olive-green tents, keeping an eye out for stray pitch lines. In some, she could hear people chatting, someone else snoring, music being played quietly, the rustle of books or maps, and as she headed back to the wind-proofed warmth of her office, she wondered for the umpteenth time what it was that made camping out in these conditions so attractive to these people. Why would anyone willingly choose to sleep on a hard floor, shivering with cold and with nylon sheets flapping over their heads all night? Then again, that was feather-filled luxury compared to what they put themselves through actually competing in the Ultra course: running for hours and hours and hours through the days and nights, barely stopping to eat or drink or sleep or even go to the toilet.

  As a steward for the race – it was manned entirely by volunteers – she saw what it did to the body, with runners collapsing, vomiting, suffering hypothermia and injury. What drove someone to put themselves through
that? Modern-day asceticism? A greater pain? A spiritual calling?

  Then again, Bertie not only belonged to this tribe – he was their pack leader. She saw at first hand his drive, his need to push harder, be more than most humans . . . It was entrepreneurial and dynamic, an engaged consciousness, a more visibly focused and directed way of being alive. It was one of the reasons why she loved him, his energy directly feeding hers. He made her feel luminescent and tingling with life. Who wouldn’t feel special – safe – around a man like that?

  She got back to her office, closing the door on the wind with relief, and went straight to put the kettle on. She shrugged off the wet coat and hung it on the hook behind the door, rubbing her hands and blowing on them in front of the small electric heater.

  The space was tiny, converted and built up from an old sheep pen, and only big enough for a desk and chair. But the drystone walls were double-skinned and on bitter, windswept days like these, the meagre proportions at least meant it warmed up quickly. It had two windows, one to the east overlooking the entrance to the camping field and to which people came for booking in, the other diametrically opposite, looking west towards her cottage and, immediately beyond it, the Lorne estate private beach, open only to family and campers. She stood there now, waiting for the kettle to boil and watching a pair of buffeted terns wheeling through the sky, riding the wind like surfers. The tide was going out, leaving long ropes of kelp on the golden sand, a few bright-blue twists of old fishing nets and half a yellow bucket visible all the way back here. She gave a sigh at the sad familiarity of it. She’d already done her daily clean-up, picking out the plastic bottles, odd shoes, carrier bags and such, but with every tide came fresh debris.

  The water boiled and she poured herself an instant coffee, looking out with some satisfaction at the sight of the fully booked field; her father had always called this event their ‘Glastonbury’. It was a gaudy patchwork of colours, noisy too, the way the tents were battered by the wind, and she knew it would take her and the grass at least a week to recover when they’d all gone again. But it was the last booking of the year; come Tuesday, she’d be closed until the end of February and she wasn’t sure if she was excited about it or dreading it. Was time on her hands really what she needed right now?