The Words That Fly Between Us

by Sarah Carroll

  Megan pushes me off the path.

  Megan doesn’t talk about things that upset her. Not really. It’s like the way you can sometimes see stars when you don’t look directly at them. To get Megan to talk, it’s better not to ask her straight out. But right now, I can’t think of another way.

  We walk slowly.

  ‘Really, though, is she always like that?’ I ask.

  Megan looks at me and shrugs. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The way she talks to you.’

  But Megan makes a face and I can’t tell if she really doesn’t know what I mean or if she’d rather pretend Hazel’s doing nothing.

  ‘I mean the way she . . .’ But I don’t finish because how do I explain? Do I say, ‘Hazel was calling you flat-chested?’ Because she didn’t. She never actually said the words.

  Megan is watching me, waiting.

  ‘She just seems to make fun of you, or put you down, or something,’ I say.

  She lifts her eyebrows like she’s considering it. ‘Sometimes she tries to act more grown up when Lisette is around, that’s all.’

  But that’s not it because she was doing it before Lisette arrived.

  Megan starts walking again like it’s all cleared up. But I don’t move.

  Maybe it’s better that Megan doesn’t get what Hazel is doing. Because I know how it feels when you hear the words people don’t say. The words that hang around long after the ones that were spoken disappear.

  She turns and looks surprised that I’m still standing here.

  Or maybe she knows what Hazel is really saying, but finds it easier to pretend.

  ‘Lucy, what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  She makes a come on gesture with her hand.

  ‘I think I’ll go home,’ I say.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Will I come with you?’

  I shake my head.

  Megan frowns. She looks over my shoulder at the park, then back to me, like she’s saying, So why did you make me leave?

  I open my mouth, but again I’ve no reply. So I turn away, and I know she’s watching me, wondering what’s going on, but I keep going.

  I turn back onto my street. Ours is the first house, the one on the corner. The front door is unlocked. I lean my forehead against the frame and take a few breaths. Slowly, I count to ten.

  I wonder what Mum is doing. Should I try to talk to her about what happened last night?

  When I step inside, it’s calm. Until I hear rapid footsteps going through Dad’s office. A door slams. Fast feet on the stairs. He appears above me.

  ‘Lucy. Where have you been?’ Dad asks.

  I feel like I’ve been caught doing something wrong.

  He takes the steps two at a time. ‘You,’ he says. He grabs my arm. Holds something up. It’s a Scrabble board. ‘I was about to ring you. Golf got cancelled. Oly’s here. I bet him a hundred quid you could beat him at Scrabble.’

  He wraps an arm around my shoulder and escorts me down the hall. ‘You’re on my team.’

  CHAPTER 8

  It’s roasting in the back garden. The branches of the bushes from Ms Cusack’s house droop over the backyard wall and tickle Dad’s head. He blows at them like he’s blowing hair out of his eyes but they don’t really move.

  We’ve put up the umbrella for shade but it’s still so hot that it’s sticky.

  Dad pushes aside the remains of Mum’s salad and half-burned pavlova, and swigs his beer. It’s me and Dad against Mum and Oly. Dad sinks his chin into his hands and stares at our letters. ‘Vowels. Bloody vowels.’

  A black cat slinks along the wall, dodging leaves. He must belong to Ms Cusack. He looks down at me with this expression like even he thinks we’ve no chance of winning. Then he drops into Ms Cusack’s garden.

  ‘Only one bloody consonant,’ Dad says.

  The game’s nearly over and we’re losing. And, unfortunately, we have three A’s, two U’s, one I and an N. Fortunately, however, we’re not playing the usual rules.

  ‘I’ve got a word,’ I say. I lift the three A’s and place them after another A on the board. Then I add the two U’s. So my word is Aaaauu.

  Dad sticks his chin out like Popeye and squints. ‘Aaaauu?’

  Oly lifts his eyebrows in doubt. ‘Go on, explain.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘It’s like the sound an ambulance makes when it roars past, the way the tone changes? Except this is the sound a person makes when they are screaming because they are running away from lava.’

  Dad sits back, swigs his beer. ‘Yeah, that works.’

  ‘Not worth a lot, though,’ I say.

  Dad makes his I beg to differ face. ‘I beg to differ,’ he says. ‘You got rid of our vowels. You hit a double word score. And you made up a fabulous new word that doubles our score again. I’d say that was a success.’ Then he stares at Mum and Oly, like he’s daring them to disagree.

  These are the rules me and Dad invented when I was little. It’s the same as normal Scrabble except you can make up words. They can’t just be gibberish, though, they have to resemble real words. And this one is pushing it. Mum and Oly now both have their eyebrows raised and they are just waiting for the other to object. I better give them something more.

  ‘I know all the two-letter words, right?’ I say.

  Mum nods. So does Dad. ‘Because she’s a genius,’ Dad says, tapping the table. ‘Sorry, go on.’ He gestures for me to continue.

  ‘Well, Aa is the name of a lava that flows fast.’

  Oly doesn’t look convinced.

  ‘Check it,’ Dad says.

  Oly grabs the Scrabble dictionary from the middle of the table to look it up. And I’m correct.

  ‘So, if Aa is a real word,’ I say, ‘then I think the sound you make when you are running away from it should contain the word.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Dad says. ‘And it’s onomato-thingy.’

  ‘I think we better allow it,’ Oly says.

  ‘Damn right you better,’ Dad says, but he’s messing. Well, kind of. In this house we play to win.

  Mum nods. The red mark on her forehead is turning purple. I try not to look at it.

  ‘Twenty-four points,’ Dad says and high-fives me. Then he picks out our letters as Mum and Oly mumble to each other about their next word. There’s no time limit, so Scrabble can take hours in our house. Which is okay by me on a day like today when the sun is shining and Dad’s happy.

  ‘Oh, for the love of . . .’ Dad says as he places our new letters on the tile rack. ‘What are we supposed to do with four Ns? And that’s the last of the letters.’

  He swats at the branch, which swings high and then falls back to tickle Dad again. He hates Ms Cusack’s bushes spilling into our garden. One day last summer, he hopped over the wall and chopped them all back. By evening her garden looked like a bad haircut, with shaved patches between the clumps. In the morning there was a letter in our post box telling Dad never to enter her property again. Dad declared that that was the last time we did her any favours.

  He was only trying to help. But maybe she got scared or something. I know I would if I was living alone and a strange man came into my garden.

  ‘Has anyone ever been into Ms Cusack’s house?’ I ask.

  Dad barks a laugh and Mum looks up at him from under her eyebrows, and her smile says she knows something about Ms Cusack, but it also says that Mum and Dad have made up.

  Mum nods at Dad to tell him to explain. Dad sits back and plays with the label of his beer as he thinks. ‘I went in there, all nice, when we first arrived. Thought I’d make friends, so I brought a hundred euro bottle of tawny port with me. The second I stepped in, though, I wanted to turn and run. I felt like a kid entering a witch’s house.’ He leans forward and whispers like he’s scared she’ll hear. ‘There are these masks on the walls, I swear to God, the eyes follow you around, like some voodoo thing.’

  Mum’s smiling and shaking her head. Oly’s drinking up his words.

  ‘There
were ancient newspapers everywhere and they were soaked in . . .’ His eyes dart to the wall. ‘Let’s just say she has a lot of cats.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ Oly says. ‘I hate cats.’

  ‘And the furniture? It’s like the little shop of horrors. I doubt anything has ever been washed. I was afraid to sit down. Not that I got the chance.’ Dad wears his scared face and he starts shaking his whole body. ‘I’m standing in her hall, stammering like a school boy, Myself and my family have moved in next door, I wanted to say hello, when she just goes crazy!’ Now Dad waves his arms in the air. ‘She starts shrieking about us suits taking over her street. Next thing, she grabs the bottle of port from my hands, opens it, takes a swig, and pushes me out the door!’

  ‘She did not!’ Oly says.

  ‘She most certainly did. Crazy,’ Dad says, relaxing back into his chair again. ‘Think there’s a few screws loose there. And not just from old age.’

  ‘Loose screws is right,’ Oly says. ‘I’ve heard a story or two.’

  ‘Oly!’ Mum says like she’s scolding him.

  ‘I asked around because we were interested in that house,’ Oly says.

  Dad nods to back up the story, and Oly goes on. ‘Apparently she used to live in Paris.’ Then he leans in. ‘Burlesque dancer, I heard. And seems she brought her love of dance and a good party back with her.’ Oly winks, which always gives me the creeps. ‘Wild lady,’ he mouths.

  ‘But I’ve never seen anyone go in there,’ I say.

  Oly shakes his head like he doesn’t care; he’s not changing his story.

  ‘Does she ever go out?’ I ask. ‘How does she get food?’

  Oly looks at Dad. Dad shrugs. And Mum is busy studying her Scrabble pieces.

  ‘Does she have any money, Dad?’ I say.

  ‘I doubt it. But that would be her own fault,’ Dad says. ‘She’s sitting on a property worth over two million and she probably only uses the bottom floor. The upper floors are rotten, no doubt.’ Dad wags a finger at me. ‘I’d give her one point five million in the morning. She could spend her remaining years splashing out on a luxury cruise liner if she wanted to, rather than wasting them as a penniless artist, watching that dilapidated shack fall down around her.’ He shakes his head.

  I blink. ‘An artist?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s a painter or some nonsense like that. Probably never done a decent day’s work in her life. I just don’t understand the choices people make. Imagine, no husband, no money, just a crumbling house full of useless paintings that no one’s ever going to buy. Hobbies are one thing. But choices that impact your whole life? And your neighbours’ lives? There are mistakes and there are mistakes.’ He swigs his beer.

  ‘Wait, got one,’ Mum says and Dad’s eyes jump to the board.

  Ms Cusack’s a painter?

  Mum puts down the word Jetty, with the J on the triple letter.

  ‘Thirty-eight points,’ Oly says. ‘Great score this late in the game. Any luck with those four N’s, Declan?’ And Oly smiles like they’ve won.

  I try to shake Ms Cusack from my head. Instead, I look at our letters. NNNNGUI. I count up the scores. We’re forty-two points behind and they’ve only two letters left. I can do this. I’ll show him I can.

  ‘There’s nowhere left to go,’ Dad says. ‘Unless we play off that O.’ He runs his tongue over his teeth.

  I look at the letters again. Then the board.

  And I have it.

  ‘Nunning,’ I say. ‘It’s what you do all day when you are a nun. That’s eight points. Doubled because it’s made up. And an extra fifty because we used up all our letters. And the two points for No.’

  Dad sits back and looks at me with eyes as wide as the sky. ‘Genius. Bloody genius.’ He holds up his hand for a high-five and I slap it as hard as I can. Then he grabs me in a headlock and rubs his knuckles into my head. It hurts but I’m laughing. ‘That’s what I’m talking about. Winner!’ Then he lets go and turns to Oly. ‘Do not even pretend you can do anything with those two vowels you’ve left, Oly. Looks like you owe me a hundred.’

  Oly takes out his wallet. He doesn’t hand the money to Dad, though. He hands it to me. ‘She earned it,’ he says.

  Dad laughs. ‘Tell you what, take these leftovers inside and you can have my half of the money, love.’

  I smile. And pocket the money.

  I clear the food and when I’m standing in the kitchen, I whisper the word Nunning. It flies through the air and explodes like a firework and a thousand little nunnings drift lazily to the ground. It’s a real word now.

  The fridge is brimming over with food. I have to push everything around to make room for the leftovers. Uneaten salmon platters and just-in-case salami trays and buy-one-throw-one-out meals. Half the food we buy gets chucked in the bin. No one would even notice if it went missing.

  And I imagine an old-fashioned fridge, empty and smelling of sour milk in this heat.

  She’s a painter.

  Before I know it, I’m taking out one of the three packets of bacon on the shelf. A block of butter. Two yoghurts, a bunch of bananas, a tub of tomato soup, a box of eggs.

  I go to the cabinet. Tins of beans and peas and tomato sauces. I pile them on the counter. From the next, I grab pasta, rice and instant noodles. And from the fruit bowl, I pick apples, oranges and a mango.

  When the pile is so tall that it’s spilling over, I run to the cellar and grab an empty wine box and come back and fill it with all the food. Then I take it down the hall and out the front. Down my steps. Over to next door. Up the steps. I drop it in front of the door. I look around. No one’s watching. Her curtains are closed.

  But she’s at home. She has to be. She’s always home.

  Last time we do her any favours. But I want to. Just in case she needs it.

  I lean forward, ring the bell, and then turn and run back home. And as I step inside, the breeze that comes with me carries a rush of happiness with it. But then Dad appears in the doorway to the kitchen and the breeze scurries away.

  He saw me. He knows what I did.

  Everything was going so well. He was happy. He was having fun. I was a bloody genius.

  ‘Lucy,’ he says. ‘We’re on a winning streak. Grab the Monopoly board.’ Then he’s gone, back to Mum and Oly.

  I have to hold the banisters for a few seconds before I push myself upstairs to get the board.

  MONDAY

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘Here, shove over,’ Mum says the next morning. She lifts my duvet and the mattress sinks as she gets in beside me. ‘I wonder if it’ll stay sunny all week,’ she says.

  I groan.

  ‘Come on,’ she says and nudges me.

  ‘What time is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Time to get up,’ she says.

  ‘That’s not a time.’

  Mum sighs. ‘It’s almost eleven.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I wonder . . .’

  He made us play every board game in the house last night. We ended with Monopoly again, double or quits. But I was on Dad’s team so we won. In the end, we made three hundred and fifty euro, and I got about seventeen high-fives from Dad. And he let me keep the money.

  ‘I wonder . . .’ I say again. I wonder how I convinced myself that the fights are all his fault. They’re not. People argue. And anyway, it’s not him, it’s the stress. Once he sells The Old Mill, everything will be fine.

  ‘I wonder will I find the smart-yet-funky suit I really want to buy today,’ Mum says. ‘I wonder will it make me look smart-yet-ten-years-younger.’

  ‘Why do you want a suit?’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, what if I needed one? Summer sales are on, so I thought, why not?’

  I wonder does Dad really mean it, that Ms Cusack deserves to be alone and poor. And I wonder if she brought the box in. She hadn’t by the time I went to bed.

  ‘Nothing?’ Mum says.

  ‘I wonder what Ms Cusack does in there all day.’


  ‘Ooh, good one,’ she says. ‘I wonder does she have a painting worth millions just lying around.’

  ‘I wonder is she sad.’

  Mum chews this over. ‘Yeah, I wonder that too.’

  The drawing I made of her, the one that won the competition, was of an old woman sitting on a threadbare couch, twirling her thumbs like she was spinning time.

  ‘I wonder does she regret becoming an artist,’ I say.

  Mum turns to me. ‘I wonder is it the best thing she ever did?’ Her face is so close to mine, I feel the stir of her eyelashes as she blinks. She waits for me to respond.

  ‘Even if it was a mistake?’ I ask.

  She takes her time responding. ‘If we avoided mistakes, we’d never try anything, would we?’

  I don’t have to wonder if Dad agrees. I know the answer. Some things shouldn’t be tried. But I don’t want to think about it any more, so I say, ‘I wonder what we’ll eat today.’

  Mum looks at the ceiling. She sighs again. ‘A burrito.’

  ‘I wonder what you have against Pablito’s Burritos,’ I say.

  ‘I wonder what they have against wiping down tables,’ Mum says. Then she rolls out of my bed. ‘Fifteen minutes, then we’re out the door. You can bring Megan if you want.’ She goes out of the room.

  Megan. I forgot about Megan. Grabbing my phone from beside my bed, I text her.

  Me

  Hey. Sorry about running off yesterday.

  I tap my phone with my thumb as I wait. Megan doesn’t reply instantly, and Megan always replies instantly.

  I try another tack.

  Me

  Want to come shopping with me and Mum?

  I should have texted her last night. Or called. Said sorry. But I kind of forgot all about it. Between board games, I kept sneaking out to check the box of food. I wanted Ms Cusack to take it in, so she’d have it. But I also didn’t want Dad to see it out there if he went to the Local or something.

  The Local is the private members’ club where he and Oly and Mr Reynolds and everyone else involved in development in the country go to make deals. It’s next door to Mr Reynolds and it’s another reason why Dad wanted to live on this street.