‘Hello my darlings, to what do I owe the pleasure?’
I want to tell him that Evie is lucky to have him, that he, Seán, is where all her luck resides. Because after Miles died nothing went right, unless we made it right; all blessings and bounty, all unexpected joys, came from his love – pathetic as it sometimes was and sometimes huge. After Miles died, everything was hard work – marrying Conor, marrying Shay – and nothing came to either of his daughters gratis and undeserved.
I cried that night. I don’t know if Evie heard me; the strange woman weeping beside her father in this strange house. I smothered most of it in the pillow; Seán’s hand stroking my back. Me saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’ll be all right. I’m sorry.’
There she was at breakfast, an overgrown child again; her white arse hanging out of her pink pyjamas. She picked the nuts out of her muesli, and left them on the table in a little heap beside the bowl.
Seán said, ‘Eat your breakfast, Evie.’
I said, ‘Would you like some eggs?’
And Evie said, ‘I hate eggs.’
And yet, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be here. That’s what I think.
I kissed her father, upstairs in his own house, and Evie lifted her flapping hands from her sides and she ran over to us saying, ‘Happy New Year, Daddy!’ and he bent to kiss her too.
As far as Seán was concerned, nothing happened that day. Keep it simple and you will win, or if you don’t win – as he liked to say – at least it will be simple. But, sometime after that kiss, between one hotel afternoon and the next hotel afternoon, Evie started to disappear.
How such a constantly tended child could do such a thing, is hard to say. For the first long while, they did not even notice; it crept up on them. Evie was just not where she was supposed to be. She seemed to get lost on her way up the stairs. She didn’t show up for meals, only to be found in her bedroom, or the au pair’s room, or out in the garden with no coat. One day, around the time my mother died, she failed to arrive back from Megan’s house. This was a journey of some three hundred yards down a country road that even Evie was allowed to take by herself.
‘When did she leave?’ said Aileen to Fiona on the phone: two families streaming out of their separate houses, climbing into four different cars, reversing out of their driveways at a clip. They found her almost immediately. She was standing on the side of the road, as though at an imaginary bus stop, with no sense that her journey had been interrupted, or had taken too long.
‘What are you doing Evie?’
‘I was just looking.’
It was, up to a point, just the way she was. Stop dawdling, Evie. From the time she was three years old, Evie could never get out of a car without pausing endlessly before the jump. Thresholds made her stall. All journeys were difficult, not for her, but for the people around her, who could never quite figure out just how she managed to slow everything down.
Come along, Evie. So this was nothing more than another failure, on her part, to grow up. Then, one day, she wandered from her mother in the Dundrum Shopping Centre and when Aileen, frantic, found her outside by the fountains, she could not say where she had been.
‘I was just,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’
Seán was in no position to believe that there was a problem. His life with me had taken on some importance, by then; he was a man trying to keep his balance. He was, besides, ‘Just not going to do it, this time round.’ And though he discussed Evie with me over the phone in those long drifting days after Joan died, he didn’t – he just couldn’t – listen to Aileen, when the panic machine ground into gear again.
‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She’s just growing. It’s fine.’
Then, one Saturday after the summer holidays, Evie did not come out of her drama class. Seán who was doing the pick-up waited, and checked his watch. He went inside where the teacher was packing up and discovered that Evie, though dropped at the door, had not showed up in class that day. They started to ransack the building, the two of them – then Seán decided to try outside. He ran into the street and up the hill, past buildings and doors and girls smoking at the bus stop, into the shopping centre, where he went down the first escalator he came to and stood in the middle of the atrium, and he looked up at a changed world, one full of angles, doors and possibilities that he had never seen before.
He wanted to shout her name and then did not shout. He found a security guard, who muttered into his walkie-talkie, then wrote out a phone number and advised him to ring the local police. Which Seán did, standing on the street, watching buses and cars, and old ladies with stand-up trolleys, going about their usual business. The man who answered asked him to hold the line. Then a woman’s voice. I must sound bad, he thought, if they are handing me to a girl.
‘Can you describe your daughter?’
Just the word ‘daughter’, the way she said it, made him feel like a liar. He felt like someone who was about to be found out.
‘She has big eyes,’ he said.
There was a silence at the other end of the line.
‘Take your time, sir. Can you tell me the colour of her eyes?’ At which point he did that thing; he turned himself into a person who can describe his daughter in words you might hear on the evening news: age, height, hair colour.
‘What was she wearing?’
‘I’ll have to ring her mother,’ he said. And as soon as he cut the connection, Aileen was on the line.
For a few moments, he failed to understand, not just the words she was saying, but her voice itself – she might have been talking Danish – then he somehow figured out that Evie had rung Aileen, or Aileen had rung Evie, and she was in the theatre, where she was supposed to have been all along.
‘You spent the class in the toilet?’ To which Evie replied, ‘No!’ And then, ‘I must have done.’
There was nothing for it, but to go back to the doctors – the same round of referrals and endless waiting lists, the same watchfulness and morning anxiety, Aileen on the internet every night, googling ‘absences’, ‘lesions’, ‘puberty’; inviting it all in.
When they finally found themselves back with Dr Prentice – it was with difficulty, Aileen said, that she did not ‘fall on the woman’s neck’ – Evie had very little to say.
She answered all the questions and gave no clues.
‘And what do you think is going on, Evie?’ the doctor finally said, to which Evie offered the idea that her brain might be funny.
‘In what way funny?’
Evie, who by this time knew more than most children about the human brain, said, ‘The two halves – the hemispheres, you know? – it is like they don’t join up properly.’
Dr Prentice pursed her mouth and looked into her lap, then she lifted her head and with great clarity and tactfulness, discussed the anomalies of Evie’s case, and suggested – strongly suggested – that alongside her medical tests and enquiries, they should bring Evie for ‘psychiatric assessment’.
This was what was going on, the Christmas I wandered the deserted city streets. They gave her a computer, and told her not to spend so much time on the computer, and they pulled crackers, and hugged her, taking careful turns.
It is my suspicion that, after this, Aileen finally confronted Seán with all the things she had known – but not let herself know – for years. I suspect that she kicked him out. Because she realised the lies they told each other were wrecking Evie’s head.
Or perhaps he kicked himself out, for much the same reason.
It is hard to pin down. Seán tells the story differently every time, and he believes it differently each time. But the fact seems to be that, at a time when it seemed most important, for Evie’s sake, that they should stay together, it was also vital, for Evie’s sake, that they should part.
In the last days of March, they sat in a room full of ghastly china figurines and discussed their daughter with a lemur of a woman – all eyes, and quick little hands – who had been seeing Evie, at great e
xpense, for the previous two months. She looked at them and twitched her head sideways.
‘Now. Let’s talk about you guys, OK?’
Not OK.
And sometime in the next week, Seán Vallely walked out of his house with nothing, not even a jacket, and he drove, in the middle of the night, to my door.
It was a weeknight: some normal night without him. It might have been two in the morning. I woke to the sound of the bell and the rattle of the letter box. Seán was crouched down, saying my name, trying not to wake the neighbours.
I was not quite awake, myself. I thought someone had died. Then I remembered that Joan was already dead: I had no one left, now, except Fiona. So it was my sister, then – though it seemed so unlikely; Fiona was not, somehow, the dying type. I pulled the door open and he was standing outside in the weather. And the first thing I said was, ‘Is she dead?’
‘Let me in, will you?’
‘Oh, sorry.’
He came inside the door – not very far – he crossed the threshold and then he leaned back against the wall. Every bit of his face was wet, and when I kissed him, he tasted of rain.
I said it to Seán once – I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together – and he looked at me as though I had just blasphemed.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.
As far as he is concerned, there is no cause: he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.
In which case, Evie’s room is like something after the tide went out: dirty feathers, scraps of paper, endless bits of cheap, non-specific plastic, and some that are quite expensive:
‘Do you know how much those fucking things cost?’ says Seán, going through the compacted filth of the Hoover bag, looking for a game from her Nintendo.
My stuff, on the other hand, does not matter. A Chanel compact, skittering across the floor, my phone pushed off the arm of the sofa, the battery forever after temperamental.
‘Gawd,’ says Evie.
She does not say ‘sorry’, that would be too personal.
Evie was always a bit of a barreller, a lurcher; her elbows are very close to her unconscious. At one stage they were going to have her checked for dyspraxia, by which they just meant ‘clumsiness’, but I guarantee you I have seen her move with great finesse. In this house, she is only clumsy around things that belong to me.
She eats nothing she is asked to eat, and everything that is forbidden. But she eats. Which I consider a minor miracle. She filches, she sneaks and crams. She waits – a bit like myself, indeed – until her father is not there. The place we meet most often is at the fridge door.
Two months ago, when Seán was at the gym and Evie was complaining I had finished all the mayonnaise, I tossed my bag on the kitchen table and said, ‘Why don’t you go and buy your own fucking food?’
Not pretty, but true.
Evie looked at me, as though noticing me for the first time. Later that day, she said something to me – something that wasn’t just a whine, like, ‘Why don’t you have Sky TV?’
She said, ‘I can’t believe you have so many shoes.’
And I had to leave the room to stuff my knuckles in my mouth, and pretend to bite into them, behind the door.
* * *
I look for my hiking boots and find them eventually on a shelf, wrapped up in a paper bag that came all the way from Sydney. I have not worn them since: my life, it seems, took the kind of turn that can only be effected in high heels. I take them out of the bag and the red dust of Australia shakes out on to our kitchen floor. My dreaming boots. I put them on and walk outside.
The afternoon snow has a shining crust that gives underfoot as I cross the garden and open the gate and join all the other tracks on the path into town. The slush has frozen back to ice in the shade and the difficulty pulls my eyes constantly downwards. I take one treacherous step after the next, and for the first while, I can not shake the rant.
It’s hard, taking second place to a child – it was bad enough taking second place to her mother – and I remember what Seán said about me in his report to Rathlin Communications (now deceased – the ironies in that), when I took a sneaky look, and read where he had written – there was much praise there too, of course – that I was ‘most ideally suited to a secondary role’.
That stung.
They underestimate me, I think. They underestimate my tenacity.
On Rathmines Road there is grit under my feet and the paths are walked clear. There aren’t many cars, but the buses are running, and they leave moraines of dirty slush on either side of the road.
I pass the Observatory Lane, a shanty row of shops, BlackBerry Lane; the rugby pitches in front of St Mary’s glutted with snow. The clouds have cleared, the sky is high and blue, the green dome of Rathmines church is still capped with white. The canal cuts a clean line under the bridge, the black water reflects the frozen water on its banks, and I am glad of the fresh air, my dreaming boots walking me into Dublin town. I remember the first Aborigine I saw, after maybe a week in Sydney, how very black he was and how very poor: you travel so far to realise that it’s all true, all of it, like my father in his last days, It is just as you always suspected.
But we weren’t wrong to hope, myself and Conor, back in our Australian days. And I am not wrong to hope, now: to hold on to Seán, and love him, and to try to love his daughter.
She is there at the bus stop, as arranged, talking on the phone. I recognise her immediately and then see, afterwards, what she is: a schoolgirl who is not allowed to walk down a city-centre street alone – not even in the snow, when the monsters that wait for schoolgirls surely have other things on their minds. I feel like taking her drinking. I feel like telling her to get out now, while the going is good. Not bother growing up.
Turn back! It’s a trap!
She spots me and puts away the phone. I see that she is wearing, on this cold day, almost nothing. A short denim skirt, opaque tights, a little black cotton jacket, a gingham scarf with added bobbles and metallic threads. Her only concessions to the freezing weather are black fingerless gloves and Ugg boots. Maybe her coat is in her backpack. I can only imagine the fight before she left the house.
‘Uggs!’ I say, coming up to her. ‘It comes to us all.’
To which she gives a long-suffering smile.
I am beginning to understand Evie’s silences, which come in many varieties. Her chat, on the other hand, is endlessly the same: hard to listen to and harder still to remember. I don’t know how Seán stays sane. It is mostly comprised of opinions, as she sifts through likes and dislikes of the kind you can choose on MTV: I don’t like this, I really like that. My friend Paddy says she really likes this, and I’m like, ‘How can you like that?’ This is mixed with scenes from movies, some small problems about the future of the planet, and some large problems about the dragon game she used to play online but doesn’t now because no one is into that anymore. She is into being into things. She is majorly into unfairness – an ardent egalitarian, anti-designer label, anti-bullying – her friend Paddy, she says, agrees with her about all of this (her friend Paddy, she says, in pretty much the same breath, always travels business class).
I feel that the world might be better if it was run by girls who are nearly twelve, the ability they have to be fully moral and fully venal at the same time. Capitalism would certainly thrive.
‘Do you want to look around the shops?’ I say, and get a response that is alert, almost animal.
‘OK.’
‘Where do you want to go?’
A look around the shops means, it turns out, for Evie, a look at shops that sell cheap soap; either ecologically aware, or freshly made.
We walk across to Grafton Street in silence.
‘You got the bus OK?’
Until we pass a baby in a little pram.
‘Ngaaawww,’ she says.
Evie’s interest in babies is so keen, it might be cause for concern, except for the fact that she is twic
e as interested in dogs.
She can not pass a baby without living a moment in their skin: ‘He doesn’t like the cold,’ she says, or, ‘Her hat is over her eyes,’ or just, ‘Ngawww!’ I think she is unusual in this, and I don’t know where it will all end.
‘Did you hear from your Dad?’
‘Em.’
‘Did he say when he was going to be home?’
‘I think he said he was on the plane.’
I leave her to the rows of smelly bottles; the untwiddling of caps, the sniffings and little rubbings that the shop requires. Moisturisers, toners, exfoliators: she is out of her depth, I realise, and a little disappointed by it all.
‘I think it’s time,’ I say. ‘To up your game.’ And I bring her down the street and into one of the posh shops, and a rack of perfume that she studies with quiet intent. The one she chooses finally is called Sycomore, which is so much the one my mother would have chosen, it makes me feel misplaced and odd.
‘My mother liked that,’ I say.
And she gives me a sidelong glance, as if to say that people my age should not have mothers. As, indeed, I do not.
‘My mother,’ I continue, because I am trying to push my way through something here, ‘wouldn’t buy it, of course. She would just try it – like every time she came into town – and then decide it wasn’t, you know, right.’
‘Cool,’ says Evie.
A fabulously tall sales girl rounds on us, walking past.
‘Yes? You would like to refresh yourself?’
Evie waves the bottle in vague apology, saying, ‘I’m just having a free go.’
And we move on; me pushing the small of her back, both of us trying not to laugh.
I bring her to the MAC counters, and she looks at me like this could not possibly be allowed. But I don’t care. She is tall enough now to pass for any age, if she wanted to – if, that is, she could just get the expression right, on her big, honest face.
It is Friday afternoon and, despite the weather, the place is stuffed. We are in a ruck of girls moving in slow motion towards and away from a maze of upright mirrors, turning their uncertainty into a stroke of this, a dab of that. They switch to the next brush and potion, then lean slowly in again: predatory, rapt.
Forgotten Waltz, The Page 19
