‘The driver swerved to avoid the dog,’ he said.
And then, ‘He didn’t see her until it was too late.’
Marianne remembered her mother’s face, the features frozen in place, her hands held in front of her as if she was warding the policeman off, her head shaking from side to side like she was saying, ‘No.’ Like she was shouting it. Over and over again.
She remembered being in the back of a car. Her face pressed against the window as they drove away, watching Bruno do his best to follow them, straining at his leash held in the hands of some glamorous man Marianne never saw again.
She never saw Bruno again either. And she never asked where he’d gone.
The hospital. Long corridors lit by tubes of fluorescent lights, doors swinging open, doors swinging shut, walking, walking, down those endless corridors that were all the same shade of porridge grey with the same swinging doors.
Marianne remembered a blue uniform. A nurse. Kind. Narrow wrists. A smell of antiseptic. Her mother wailing. Her father standing behind her, his hands covering his ears so he couldn’t hear what it was the nurse was telling them.
She remembered the nurse’s voice. Low and gentle. The voice of a woman who has to say things that nobody wants to hear.
Marianne heard her. She remembered what she said.
‘She wouldn’t have felt a thing.’
Chapter 28
The room at the back of the police station wasn’t exactly a cell. More of a waiting room, although not one that had been designed with any notion of comfort. The only furniture it contained was a table that wobbled any time Marianne leaned on it, and a hard wooden chair that had already leached any feeling Marianne’s buttocks might have previously enjoyed. A small window was set too high in the wall to offer much in the way of natural light. Overhead, a bright fluorescent tube, flickering in a perverse, methodical way. Marianne felt positive that, had she a baseball bat to hand, she would smash it to bits.
She was appalled at the strength of her feelings towards it.
Marianne had no idea how long she’d been in the room. She had answered all the questions the short, stocky, mildly exasperated policeman had asked her, signed the brief statement she had made, flushed as he read out the items she had attempted to steal, neatly typed on an adjoining page, in a bold, oversized font, then refused the offer of tea in a haughty, decisive manner. The guard shrugged, gathered his paperwork and left, the door banging behind him, the key turning in the lock with a deadening thunk, and then the sound of his shoes against the floor, a smart tap-tap-tapping, fading away to nothing. And then silence. Just the sound of Marianne’s breath, harsh and hot and abundant. She wanted to shout. To roar. To expel all the breath that was inside her, keep shouting, keep roaring, until it was all spent. Until she was spent.
She thought about pacing. To use up some of the ferocious energy she was burdened with. But the room would allow only two of her long strides before she encountered the wall, another two to the other side of the room, two more to reach the back of the room, two to the door. And then what?
In the end, she neither shouted nor paced. She merely sat where she was and breathed her harsh, hot breaths.
When the door finally opened, Marianne came to with a start, banging the jutting bone of her ankle against the leg of the table. The pain was sudden and shrill and dragged her mind from wherever it had been to the present moment in a way that was both effective and vivid.
Rita stood in the doorway, framed by the architrave, so that she seemed, for a moment, like one of her self-portraits. Her face was freshly made up and her turban – a violent shade of purple – clashed with the bright green of her cocktail dress in a way that Marianne was certain Rita would describe as ‘magnificent’.
‘What are you doing here?’ said Marianne. Despite the abundance of breath that rampaged about her body, her voice sounded high and reed-thin.
‘I’ve come to bail you out, darling,’ said Rita, glancing around the room, her nose wrinkling in distaste. ‘You’d think they could put a few home comforts into the place, wouldn’t you? An armchair, at least. With a bright, soft wool throw. That would make all the difference, wouldn’t it?’
‘I don’t need you to bail me out,’ said Marianne. She was sure that, if she looked down, her fists would be clenched. She felt coiled, like she was about to spring.
‘Nonsense, Marnie,’ said Rita, rummaging in her bag for her vape pen. ‘Everybody needs to be bailed out, now and again. Goodness knows, I have.’
‘I’m nothing like you,’ said Marianne, her voice louder now. Rita stopped rummaging and looked up. ‘I can sort out my own affairs. I don’t need someone like you – a do-gooder like you – to bail me out. I’m not one of your Get-Well-Soon adoring fans.’
‘Come on,’ said Rita, zipping up her bag. ‘Let’s get you out of here, Marnie.’
‘Stop calling me that,’ snapped Marianne.
‘Sorry, darling, old habits and all that.’
‘There’s nothing habitual about our relationship,’ said Marianne. ‘We never had a relationship. It didn’t suit you, remember? It cramped your style.’
‘Well, it’s been lovely having you home this past while,’ said Rita brightly.
‘Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?’ said Marianne, cutting across her mother. ‘Since you’re dying?’ The last word – dying – spurted from her mouth, lava from a volcano.
Rita smiled her jaunty smile. ‘We’re all dying, Marnie.’
‘Yes, but you’re dying soon,’ said Marianne. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. She was both appalled and curious at the extent of her viciousness. She didn’t know she could feel so vicious. ‘Three months. Isn’t that what the doctors reckon?’
Rita found her vape pen and hoisted herself onto the table, her legs swinging girlishly. ‘You know what those doctors are like, Marnie, they abhor a vacuum. They’d rather say something than nothing.’
‘Why aren’t you having chemotherapy?’
‘It’ll just make me feel sick. And it won’t change anything, it’ll just prolong the inevitable. I don’t want to be a burden. On anyone. Especially not you.’
‘That never stopped you before,’ said Marianne. That hit a nerve. She didn’t care. She rushed on. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Rita recovered herself, wrinkled her nose and brushed at the air with her fingers as if there was a nasty smell in the room. ‘It’s such a tedious subject. I didn’t want to bore you with it.’
‘So you thought you’d do your usual and act like nothing’s happened? Just reinvent yourself again? Now, you’re a person who’s not sick. Now you’re a person who doesn’t have a terminal illness. Now you’re a person whose daughter never died?’ Marianne’s voice was a crescendo, rising and rising, louder and louder, so that it seemed like a chorus of voices, dissonant and shrill. Rita stopped swinging her legs. She put her vape pen on the skirt of her dress, placed her hands on the table on either side of her body, palms spread as though to steady herself. She took a deep breath in, released it slowly through the bright orange lipsticked O of her mouth. ‘My daughter did die,’ she said, not looking at Marianne, her voice low and deliberate.
‘It’s like she never existed,’ spat Marianne. ‘There’s nothing of her at Ancaire. Her wardrobe is cleared out. There’s not even a photograph. It’s like she was never there.’
‘I think about her every day,’ said Rita.
‘But what good is that now?’ stormed Marianne. ‘She’s dead now. And instead of blaming yourself, you just reinvented yourself, didn’t you?’ Marianne was filled with a sort of savagery. Her hands shook with it. Her whole body. She was afraid of what she was capable of, but also energised by the possibilities. What she could do, with this savage fury. ‘You thought, oh, I’ll just stop drinking. That will make everything all right. That will wipe the slate clean. That will absolve me of any blame. Well, it doesn’t.’
Rita shook her head. ‘Marianne, I’m sorry, I know you—’<
br />
‘Don’t you dare,’ shouted Marianne. ‘Don’t you dare apologise. Don’t think for a moment that I’ll forgive you just because you’re dying. I don’t care that you’re dying.’
Rita looked at her. ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘You have no idea what I mean and what I don’t mean. You know nothing about me.’
‘I know that I love you.’
‘No you don’t. You just feel guilty that your daughter – the one who somehow managed to survive you – turned out to be a petty thief.’
‘That’s not tr—’
‘Look at me, for Christ’s sake. I’m in a police station. I steal things. I keep stealing things.’
‘You’re stressed, you just need—’
‘I need you to leave,’ said Marianne. Her voice was hoarse. Her throat hurt. She felt wrung out, like an old, stained dishcloth.
Now the room was silent but it was a pounding sort of silence, like the sound of a headache forming at the base of your skull. Rita used her hands to lower herself to the floor, then brushed the fabric of her dress as if for crumbs. Or creases. She hooked her handbag onto her wrist and dropped her vape pen inside. ‘Your bail’s paid so you are free to go whenever you like,’ she said, concentrating on the clasp of her bag, not looking at Marianne.
Marianne bent down, put her hands on her knees, closed her eyes. Her breath was coming in fast bursts.
At the door, Rita paused.
‘Marianne?’
‘Don’t,’ said Marianne, straightening. ‘I’m not one of your clients that you can just talk at and fix.’
‘I know that, I …’
‘Thank you for paying my bail. I’ll pay you back as soon as I can. And I’m grateful. You didn’t have to let me stay at Ancaire.’
‘Ancaire is your home,’ said Rita. ‘You’re always welcome there.’
‘I hate being there,’ Marianne said, and it was like there was a full stop after each word and each word had been dipped in bitterness and the bitterness hardening like a crust around them. Marianne’s jaw ached with the effort of spitting them from her mouth. ‘I’m only there because I have to be. Because there’s nowhere else for me. I’ve lost my job. And I’ve lost my husband. And I’ve lost my home. And I should have known that I was going to lose all those things. I deserve to lose all of those things.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘And so do you. You deserve awful things. Because of Flo.’
Rita looked at Marianne. ‘I know.’ She whispered it.
When she left, the room seemed smaller, too small to contain Marianne and her furious savagery. She wanted to place her hands on the walls, to push and push, expand it, make it big enough to contain her and the furious savagery stampeding about her body. She sat down – she hadn’t remembered standing up – and pushed her head between her knees. Held it there. She didn’t think she was going to faint. Instead she felt keenly conscious of every single thing. The static of electricity in the air, the hairs along her arms, lifting and stiffening, the breath erupting from her body, hot and humid and strained, like she’d run the length of the beach against a gale-force wind. She hadn’t been running. There was nowhere to run to.
It was more accurate to say that she had been running away.
She was too old for running away. Too tired. But what was the alternative? In the static silence of the room that seemed much too small to contain her, she could find no answer.
Chapter 29
Outside the police station, rain came at Marianne in slanting lines, water streaming down her face, hanging off the end of her nose, the hard line of her jaw, collecting along the scoop of her eyelashes, reducing her hair to a thick pulp against her head. She didn’t put her hood up. Instead, she stood in the middle of the path. People tutted when they encountered her, changed their course, circled around her and still she did not move. Her pale grey tracksuit bottoms were black with rain, clinging to her legs, making her aware of the cold now, made colder with the sharp edge of an easterly wind whipping around her.
Still, she stood there. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.
‘If you don’t get in, pigeons are going to start nesting on you.’
Marianne looked towards the road and there was Hugh, illegally parked with his hazard lights on, leaning out of the window.
Marianne glanced towards the back seat but it was impossible to see through the windows with the deluge. Hugh shook his head. ‘Rita’s already gone. I called one of the other drivers. She asked me to wait for you.’
‘There was no need,’ said Marianne. Her voice sounded flat and worn.
‘Come on,’ said Hugh, reaching across the passenger seat and opening the door. ‘Get in.’
‘I’ll get your seats all wet,’ said Marianne.
‘They’ll dry,’ said Hugh, shrugging. ‘Now hurry up, I haven’t got all day.’
‘Don’t bother putting yourself out, on my account,’ said Marianne, folding her arms stiffly across her chest.
‘Don’t bother getting sniffy,’ said Hugh, checking his rear-view mirror for traffic. ‘Just get in.’
‘I’m not sniffy, I’m merely saying …’
‘I’ve driving away in five seconds,’ said Hugh.
‘I was only …’
‘Four … three …’
‘Okay, fine,’ said Marianne, getting into the car and banging the door shut. An articulated lorry tore past them, leaning on his horn as he swerved around Hugh’s illegally parked car.
‘You really shouldn’t be parked here,’ said Marianne primly, pulling the seat belt across her body.
‘And you really shouldn’t nick stuff,’ said Hugh, scorching down the road, pasting Marianne to the back of the seat with the force of the acceleration.
‘Slow down, you’ll get arrested,’ said Marianne. She rolled her eyes. ‘I suppose you’re going to make a quip about me getting arrested now.’
Hugh shook his head and kept driving.
‘I presume it was Rita who told you about me shoplifting,’ said Marianne.
‘She didn’t say a word, actually,’ said Hugh, slowing to let a car out from a side road.
‘How did you know then?’
‘Well, I picked you – a seasoned shoplifter – up from outside a cop shop. I’m not just a pretty face, you know?’
‘Do you mind if we don’t talk?’ said Marianne.
‘Not in the least,’ said Hugh, turning on the radio.
Marianne was torn between offence and relief. Hugh fiddled with the buttons until he found a country and western song. Some man singing about his woman who went off and left him, his voice forlorn as a foghorn and only slightly less grating. ‘Mind if I turn it up?’ said Hugh, already twisting the volume button so that Marianne’s tart ‘Yes’ was lost in a cacophony of mournful harmonica, against a wail of minor chords.
It was only when they were nearing the turn-off for Loughshinny that Hugh spoke again. He turned down the radio – a woman this time, droning on about her no-good, two-timin’ man – and glanced at Marianne. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Ha!’ said Marianne. ‘That’s a good question.’
‘I don’t mean philosophically,’ said Hugh.
‘I can tell you where I don’t want to go,’ said Marianne.
‘I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you’re a fairly infrequent user of taxis,’ said Hugh.
‘I don’t want to go to Ancaire,’ Marianne went on, ignoring him.
‘Okay, well, that narrows it down,’ said Hugh, nodding encouragement. ‘What else?’
‘I want to go home,’ said Marianne all of a sudden, her shoulders slumping. She knew she sounded like a child. An overtired child. But she had such a yearning just then, for her house. Her home on Carling Road. The neat square of garden at the front with the artificial grass that she never had to tend. The paved patio at the back. The gleaming, tidy rooms where there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. The smell of it.
If she closed her eyes and imagined herself there, in the hallway, just inside the door, she could smell it still. Wood and polish and the dried lavender hanging on a hook beside the coat stand.
The coat stand itself. A beautiful piece of wood, heavy and curved with four hooks: two for her (winter anorak/summer mackintosh) and two for Brian (his all-year-round tweed jacket and a navy overcoat for when the weather was inclement).
Hugh stopped at a junction, looked at Marianne. ‘I need an address,’ he said gently.
‘I don’t have one.’
Hugh scanned the road for cars and, when the way was clear, he pulled away.
Marianne didn’t ask him where they were going. She didn’t care, so long as they weren’t going anywhere near Ancaire. Or Rita.
When Hugh stopped the car, pulled on the handbrake, Marianne looked up. They were parked outside his cottage in Rush.
‘What are we doing here?’ asked Marianne.
‘I made tomato soup earlier,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s a cure-all.’
‘Did you know about Rita?’
The question produced the type of silence that told Marianne everything she needed to know. Of course Hugh knew. And Patrick and Pearl. Shirley, Ethel, Freddy, Bartholomew. All of them. Sheldon and Harrison probably knew, too.
Everybody except Marianne. She was in her usual position, on the outside looking in. She was hot all of a sudden, like the anger inside her was on fire, raging through her blood and her bones, scorching everything.
‘I’m sorry, Marianne,’ said Hugh. He got out, walked round the car and opened the door. ‘Come on inside,’ he said.
‘I’m too angry. I’ll damage something.’
‘I have insurance,’ he said.
She got out of the car. The rain had stopped but she felt the weight of it in her hair, her clothes. Hugh opened the front door, ushered her inside.
‘I’ll make tea,’ he said.
‘I don’t want tea,’ said Marianne.
‘I’ll make some anyway.’ He disappeared into the kitchen.
Make Yourself at Home Page 23
