Home Stretch

by Graham Norton

  On Fire Island, in early spring, sitting next to each other, Tim felt confident enough to say, ‘I’m going to miss you’ without the fear of it being misconstrued.

  Connor smiled. ‘Well, I’ll miss this.’ He indicated the house and pool with its ocean view.

  An arched eyebrow from Tim.

  ‘And you.’

  Connor was trying not to think about his trip too much. In a couple of hours, he would catch the ferry and then make his way to JFK.

  Tim had been able to persuade Connor to email Finbarr. Connor had sat down and composed a short note. He felt like a time traveller sending a letter to the future. Finbarr had replied quickly, explaining his sudden departure from New York and filling Connor in on Martin’s disappearance. He had ended his email with Ellen’s mobile phone number. Connor told himself that it was too late to call, then the next day worried that it was lunchtime. Later he wondered if it might be easier to text his sister after all this time, but then finally, after his first glass of wine, he took out his phone and stabbed in the number, quickly pressing the small green symbol before he changed his mind.

  It rang. A click and a rustle, followed by ‘Hello’.

  The voice sounded so Irish to Connor, as if an actress was playing the part of his sister.

  ‘Hi, Ellen. It’s Connor … Your brother,’ he added half-heartedly as if he thought she might have forgotten.

  ‘Oh Connor!’ Ellen sounded delighted and in truth, she was. Happier than even she had thought she’d be. This was a call from beyond the grave. ‘I’m so glad you called. Oh Connor, we’ve all missed you so much.’ And then emotion overtook her and she was wiping away tears while still laughing down the line.

  ‘You OK there, sis?’ Connor was also laughing. ‘I’ve missed you all too.’ He found his throat squeezed shut as the truth of what he was saying struck him. The years, so many years, the hiding, the running, the love for these people he hadn’t allowed himself to feel, all came clattering down on him, leaving him crushed. He covered his head with his free hand and sobbed.

  ‘Connor? Connor, don’t cry!’ Ellen urged her brother, even though it was obvious that she was still weeping herself. ‘We all love you. We all want to see you. Are you coming home? Can you?’

  She could hear Connor trying to speak. It sounded like he was saying yes.

  ‘That’s great. Great. Just let us know when.’

  Connor had managed to control his sobs.

  ‘I’ll sort out flights and … are you sure? Mammy and Daddy are fine with it? Do they know everything?’ As he spoke, he realised that Ellen wasn’t in possession of all the facts.

  ‘Are you kidding? They’ll be beside themselves. I haven’t said anything to them yet. I wanted to be sure you were coming home before I told them. They’ll be ecstatic.’

  ‘What do you think about keeping it a secret? Making it a surprise?’

  And just like that, they were brother and sister again, plotting together, as they had all those years before: getting up early to make breakfast on Mother’s Day or pranking their father with cling film on the beer taps.

  ‘That’s a great idea. I’ll say nothing.’

  ‘They won’t have a heart attack or anything, will they?’

  Ellen laughed. ‘No. I don’t think so. They’re both well. You’ll see a big change but they’re both in working order.’

  Connor suddenly remembered the big family drama.

  ‘What about Martin? Finbarr told me he’s missing.’

  A beat.

  ‘No. Not missing. He’s back.’

  Ellen wondered how much of the story to tell her brother. Not much.

  ‘But gone again. He’s not here. You won’t have to see him.’

  Connor didn’t speak for a moment, wondering what his sister was trying to say.

  ‘Right,’ he said slowly.

  ‘I know, Connor. I know what Martin did.’

  II.

  In the end, he had been missing for nine days. It had seemed far longer, but on the ninth night when Ellen came home from checking on her parents, she saw a light on in the kitchen and the dark angle of a man’s shoulder at the kitchen table. She knew it couldn’t be Finbarr. He had run back to his life in Dublin as fast as he could once he’d realised that there was nothing to be done in Mullinmore apart from keep his mother company, and that had not been part of his big ‘save the day’ plan.

  The shoulder didn’t move. Ellen walked down the hall, her heels clicking across the tiles. Still the figure didn’t stir.

  ‘Martin?’ she whispered. Was it a ghost? But no, as she pushed open the door, she saw that it was her husband sitting at the kitchen table wearing large headphones. They looked new. She thought of the debit card in Dublin. She felt her jaw tense. If this was to be a battle, she was ready for it.

  Ellen walked past the table to the sink and turned around. Martin saw her but with no discernible reaction. He slipped off his headphones. They stared at each other across the room like two exhausted boxers heading into the final round.

  ‘You’re back.’

  ‘I am.’ He spoke quietly.

  ‘For good?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see.’

  Ellen picked up a crumpled tea towel from the counter and folded it. Martin was just staring into the distance.

  ‘Anything you think I should know?’ Ellen asked, unsure of how aggressive she should be. It felt so strange to see her husband like this. Cowed and uncertain.

  ‘I didn’t want to come back.’

  Ellen waited for more. ‘OK.’

  Martin glanced at the ceiling and then down again, never looking at his wife. He might have been speaking to himself.

  ‘I thought I could just disappear. I wasn’t in my right mind. I wanted to vanish, escape everything. It turns out that isn’t so easy.’ His lips curled to form a bitter smile. ‘Money. God, it’s so mundane and dull, but I want to work, need to work. It turns out a doctor can’t just start again. Questions. Lots of questions. They want to know who you are, where you’ve been.’ He stopped and looked at Ellen as if only just noticing that he had an audience of one. ‘So, I need a divorce.’ His tone had changed. He became matter-of-fact, brittle.

  Ellen felt like an employee being informed by management that they were going to be let go.

  ‘A divorce?’ Why was it him releasing them from their prison cell? Why hadn’t it been her at the kitchen table asking for a divorce years before?

  ‘I hope it won’t turn into a fight.’

  ‘No,’ she replied quickly. ‘No, I … we’ve no need for that.’ Was that true? Why didn’t she want to fight him, destroy him? This cold, petty tyrant, who had chipped away at her for years with his snide comments and eye-rolling, never crossing the line but relentless, didn’t he deserve to suffer her revenge?

  Ellen was surprised by the sense of calm that had overcome her. All those years of her inner voice screaming at him, ranting silently at every cruel injustice he had meted out to her, but now, when it seemed it was her time to speak, she found she had no words. It was over. He was leaving. There was nothing left to rail against. She felt as if she had spent her adult life pushing against a door that actually opened towards her. It was disorientating, but also a relief. She gripped the counter, unsure if she would fall or float away.

  Martin bowed his head, placing his hand over his mouth. When had he got so old, Ellen wondered? She remembered him standing in the pub the night of the Rugby Club dance. His smile when he saw her. The kiss when he brought her home. It seemed impossible that those two people were now in this kitchen, trying to walk away from each other, worn away by the endless stream of unhappiness that had been their lives for so many years.

  ‘Why did you marry me, Martin?’

  He looked up at her as if she had interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘Seriously,’ she persisted, ‘I’d like to know, now it’s over. Why marry me?’

  A deep sigh. ‘Guilt? I don’t know. I was yo
ung and stupid. I thought I could fix things.’

  ‘Fix things?’

  ‘Connor leaving. I … none of us are just the worst thing we ever did. We’re more than that. Yes, I did what I thought I needed to, but then, then I wanted to make things … oh God, I don’t know … better, I suppose. Right.’

  Ellen pulled a chair away from the table and sat down.

  ‘But you could have. You could have confessed, brought Connor back.’

  Martin twisted his body in the chair.

  ‘He’d gone. We were together. I thought I had mended everything. Trying to unpick what had happened would have just made everything worse.’ He turned his head away from Ellen and she noticed the veins straining in his neck.

  ‘And when did you realise that you hadn’t fixed a thing, that you couldn’t?’

  Martin looked into her eyes. ‘What’s the point, Ellen? Do we need to do this? This is where we are. Who’s happy? What does that look like? We’ve got two great kids. Is that so awful?’

  Ellen thought for a moment, about Martin’s question, but also about Finbarr and Aisling. ‘Do you ever wonder how we managed to raise two children who both think they deserve better parents than us?’

  Martin smiled. ‘Aisling is a bit much all right.’

  Ellen bent closer and in a stage whisper declared, ‘I don’t like her!’

  They both laughed, but briefly. It was a hollow bubble of guilty good humour that each of them understood would not last for long. The burst of laughter faded away into the hush of the night and a silence fell.

  Martin cleared his throat. Ellen looked up, expecting him to speak, but no, he continued to twist his fingers together and gaze at the floor. It seemed as if he had said all he was going to. If Ellen wanted answers, it was up to her to pose the questions. It had only been nine days, scarcely more than a week since she’d been forced to take charge, but it had changed her. Martin leaving had been like when the motor on the fridge cut out late at night, an unexpected peace. She wondered what she had ever been afraid of. Now that he had announced he was willing to get a divorce, all her curiosity about the past began to slip away. The only questions she wanted answered at that moment were practical ones. She began.

  After the days of not knowing, suddenly there was a great deal to do. Martin and Ellen agreed to tell as few people as possible about the divorce. Ellen was relieved. She’d had quite enough of her private life being made public. It seemed that Martin had spent much of his time away planning. He had considered trying to sell his practice but decided that it would be quicker and more practical to just close it down and put it up for sale along with the house. He would split the proceeds with Ellen. She in turn asked if she could have his parents’ bungalow. She expected him to ask her to pay for it with her share of the sale of the house, but no. Martin simply agreed. It all gave Ellen a mild but constant anxiety. Where was the Martin who took pleasure in humiliating her? When would he re-emerge to punish her for her unspecified sins?

  Chrissie and Dan were the first to be told. A separation. Her father reacted as if she’d just told him they were getting double glazing. A nod to indicate he felt it was a good and practical step. Chrissie did manage to produce some tears but after all these years Ellen knew that she wasn’t really that upset. Chrissie was probably more worried about the social embarrassment and the practicalities of her daughter’s future. When Ellen explained about the bungalow, her mother dried her tears and returned to one of her favourite subjects: her dislike of stairs, and her own in particular.

  Aisling, true to form, made it about Aisling. How would this affect her? Her bedroom? Her stuff? What was going to happen to everything? Apart from that, Ellen got the impression that hearing about the end of her parents’ marriage was just mildly embarrassing because it reminded Aisling that they had once had a relationship.

  Finbarr was surprisingly sweet. He made a special trip to Mullinmore to see her and make sure that she was coping as well as she had assured him she was. Ellen wondered what had happened to him in New York. He seemed changed. Rougher around the edges, but softer too. Was thoughtful the right word? She noticed that his approach to his studies had changed and he now spoke often about applying for jobs with design studios and agencies. Perhaps New York had taught him that working in bars wasn’t as easy or as lucrative as he’d imagined? Ellen had worried that his time in the city might have fanned the flames of his vanity and self-interest, whereas he seemed to have lost that arch, slightly superior quality he used to have. When he gave Ellen a hug, she felt loved rather than judged.

  When Connor had called, she had felt joy, true joy. It seemed like an actual miracle, and more than that she felt as if she had made it happen, even though, when she really thought about it, it had had very little to do with her. The only awkwardness came when Martin’s name was mentioned. It seemed too much to talk about, especially so soon. The joy of the reunion immediately marred by talk of the past. She still didn’t really know why Connor had agreed to take the blame for the accident. She had believed Martin when he explained about their marriage. Connor hadn’t made a deal. He was just a weak young boy in the wrong place and Martin was a bully. Still, she knew there must be more to the story. Connor had asked, ‘Do you know everything?’ and she doubted that she did. She moved the conversation on. She reassured him that Martin no longer lived in Mullinmore and that seemed to be enough for him. She imagined that after the hullabaloo and excitement of his reunion with Dan and Chrissie, she would sit with her brother late into the night and he would tell her everything, and whatever it was, she would forgive him. Ellen liked this version of herself. Calm and generous. There wouldn’t be any scenes or confrontations, just the Hayes family back together at last.

  Initially the plan was that Connor would come around Christmas time, but then Dan was ill with gallstones and Chrissie had been going up and down to Cork to see him in the hospital. It didn’t seem the right time for the reappearance of a long-lost son. Ellen prayed that she had made the right decision. What if their father didn’t make it? What if he caught some sort of superbug in hospital and never got to see his son again? But Dan had bounced back. He’d lost weight and had become obsessed with walking. He looked ten years younger.

  After Christmas, the house and surgery was sold to a firm of solicitors, so Ellen had been busy trying to get her mother-in-law into a home and arrange the sale of the house contents, as well as move into her own new home.

  She and Connor decided to wait until early April. The weather would be better. Ellen and Connor laughed about how quickly the thrill of being reunited with his parents would wear off and he’d be glad to get out of the house.

  Ellen had only been in her new bungalow for a few weeks, but already she had discovered something about herself. It transpired that she wasn’t a bad housekeeper after all. She had just been an unhappy one. She took enormous pride in her new rooms. Having Connor’s impending visit kept her motivated. She had got supplies from the farm centre where she had once worked. A sniffing Deirdre, now with glasses and hair a deep shade of plum, was still behind the counter. Ellen had touched up the woodwork and Finbarr, with only a little prompting, had come back one weekend to help her repaint the bathroom a bold daffodil yellow. ‘It’s like walking into sunshine,’ she had declared proudly when the two of them had stood back to survey their work. The garden was still a mess, but that could wait. The house was clean, and everything was neat and in its place. She felt as if a weight had been lifted off her, unburdened as she was of all that dark heavy furniture and three storeys of another family’s clutter. Doubtless it also helped that Martin was gone.

  He had retreated to Dublin. Ellen had tried to press him on where he had been during his aborted attempt to run away, and after various evasive non-committal replies, he finally volunteered that he had been staying with an old university pal and his wife. Ellen had never heard him speak of them before, but she supposed it might be true. She felt oddly disengaged from her former husband. Wh
ere was her anger, her mother wanted to know? Ellen had no idea. Perhaps it would arrive later, after the dust had settled. For now, it seemed as if Chrissie was housing enough fury towards Martin for the both of them.

  ‘Just walking out on his family. That’s not a man. He is not the man I thought he was.’

  Ellen thought about the crash and who had been responsible for those deaths. No, Martin was not the man her mother thought he was.

  III.

  The accents made him anxious. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been around so many Irish people. All the faces lining up to board the plane looked familiar in a half-forgotten way, like actors appearing in a film he didn’t know they were in. Connor instinctively looked away, examining the tag on his holdall or glancing at his phone, fearful that they would recognise him. He knew that was ludicrous. Even someone who had known Connor Hayes in 1987 would scarcely recognise the well-built man, with cropped greying hair, queuing for a night flight to Shannon.

  After all the reassurances from Tim and from Ellen, he still questioned the wisdom of this trip. Connor did finally believe that his parents wanted to see him, and he knew that he longed to see them, but he also knew that he couldn’t fix the past and it seemed to him that was precisely what everyone expected his reappearance to do.

  Thanks to Tim’s air miles, Connor found himself in business class. The matronly stewardess appeared to think it was her personal duty to ensure that the plane landed with only empty bottles, such was her enthusiasm for topping up glasses. Connor was already on his third glass of champagne before the plane had even taken off.

  ‘My name’s Karen. If there’s anything you need now, just let us know. You’re OK for champagne?’

  ‘Thank you. I’m grand. Are you trying to make sure we all sleep for the duration?’

  Karen gave a small yelp of laughter.

  ‘That’s right. That’s right. I’m only after hearing the accent now. I had you down for a tourist, not one of our own.’