The Leaving

by Gabriella West

  Another pause. Then my mother said something I couldn’t make out.

  “Well, I damn well have a right to know why you left.”

  Again, I strained to hear.

  “Look, I know it was some lover you had. It’s not a big deal, but you might as well tell me now. Since everyone else has been let in on the secret except me and your children.”

  Another pause. My mother said something in a sad murmur.

  “Yes, it matters. It matters to me. You’re my wife.”

  Then I heard her say, “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

  A cynical tone had crept into my father’s voice. “I just don’t want something going on behind my back. You still know this man, don’t you?”

  I thought my mother would never answer. To my astonishment, I heard her say, very faintly, “Yes.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You saw him today.”

  “Your own brother??”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Uncle John? It was surreal. I felt I needed to pinch myself. What was going on? I was so unprepared for what I was hearing that I couldn’t really make sense of it.

  “He’s really my cousin.... He was adopted.”

  Now their voices were soft, muted, as if they were whispering to each other, or as if she was crying and he was trying to calm her down.

  That was the last thing I could hear. The murmuring went on, it seemed as if for a long time. But time, in a way, was standing still for me. I trembled. What had I just been witness to? It was so strange to be suddenly privy to my mother’s secrets, and feel as if I had stumbled upon them by accident. Of course, I thought, it would explain the silence, the bad blood within the family, and my mother’s position as outcast. I rubbed my face. Christ. It would explain so much, her religiousness. Her unhappiness. My sense that she didn’t really want to be here. As if she had come upon my father by default and found herself married with kids before she realized it. And she’d accepted it but not chosen it.

  I’ll go to bed, I decided, and think about it in the morning. Too much had happened tonight. I couldn’t take it all in. At least this wasn’t my problem. It was my mother’s, and it hadn’t ever affected me very much. Still, all of a sudden I saw that she had been running away from her family all her life. And her children had carried on that pattern.

  I won’t confront her, I told myself, because it’s none of my business. But as I crept up to bed those words rang hollow to me. If it wasn’t within my rights to ask her about it then maybe we weren’t a family at all, just a collection of strangers living under one roof, each with their own secrets and hidden desires. If that was the case, and maybe it was, then I should feel no love or loyalty to her, or my father, or Stevie. But in fact there must be something that bound us. Something subtle.

  My parents’ bedroom door was shut and no light showed beneath it. I shed my clothes, put on a nightgown and crawled into bed. The far-off hum of traffic was oddly comforting. I heard the distant roar of a bus. Suddenly there was a vague murmuring noise: Mum and Dad talking quietly. It went on for a while. I buried my face in the pillow. No more school. I was on my own now.

  * * *

  “Did you have fun last night?” my mother asked brightly. She stood at the cooker with a spatula in her hand. She was frying rashers.

  I glanced at her. I had stumbled out of bed at 11 am, roused by her knocking on my door. As I’d gone downstairs I noticed the house was bathed in sunshine. It was one of those lovely early summer mornings in Dublin, exam weather we called it.

  “You were out quite late,” she continued. “We didn’t hear you come in.”

  I sat down at the table and poured myself a cup of tea. I felt unable to say anything about the evening at all. In retrospect it was more and more nightmarish, first the scene with Joe and then hearing my parents’ conversation. My mother seemed to think that I had been out at a party, having a brilliant time. Well, let her assume that if she pleased.

  She cracked an egg into the pan. She had not made breakfast for me in ages and I wondered dully why she was doing it now.

  “You must be glad to be out of school,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I forced myself to say. “That’s one thing over with, anyway.”

  “Oh, you mean the exams? You’ll do fine.”

  She said it so easily. I stared at her. What did she know? She hadn’t asked me a question about any of my subjects in years.

  “You did well in the Mock,” she remarked, surprising me again. It was true; I had done well in the preliminary school exams that were supposed to prepare us for the real thing.

  I shrugged, and began to eat what she put in front of me. When the silence became too long drawn out, I muttered, “Thanks for making breakfast,” hoping that I sounded grateful rather than indifferent. She was leaning against the sink, very relaxed, unusually so, I thought. Perhaps last night had been a dream. Then, her face glowing slightly, she announced:

  “Your brother’s coming back soon.”

  “What?”

  Enjoying my shock, she continued, “For a brief visit. He phoned us up last night. He’s coming over for about a week. He gets a paid holiday, isn’t that nice?”

  “I thought everyone did,” I said coldly. Then, without much conviction, I added, “Oh, well, that’s good.”

  But she didn’t seem to notice my lack of enthusiasm. Rubbing her arms, she said, “It’ll be great to see him, won’t it? Even your father’s looking forward to it!”

  I raised my eyebrows. I had no idea what Stevie was up to. I hadn’t had a letter from him for a long while. Perhaps, I thought, he was coming over to lay the foundations for my going to England; to ask my parents in person, to reconcile with them to some degree. It didn’t seem impossible now, for my mother’s girlish eagerness to see him had been matched by my father’s gradual thawing. He’d been delighted by the fact that Stevie had got a job in a bank. They both had. From that time on their references to him had been a lot kinder. He’d written them a few rather banal letters, which my mother especially set great store by. It was strange. They knew so little about his life, but he was now someone they could tell their friends and neighbors about. They had claimed him again.

  But as their feelings toward him had become warmer, it seemed that mine had got more negative. I worried about this. It wasn’t his fault; he had really done nothing wrong. I just felt, for the first time, perhaps, a lack of interest in the life he was leading. His successes alienated me. He had a career, he was pursuing money, and I didn’t know if I would ever be able to do the same. It was just something else he had done so well that I would never be able to catch up.

  The sun shone in the kitchen window, tinting my mother’s pale hair as she scrubbed the dishes, singing under her breath. She reached over and turned the radio on to a popular morning chat show. It was as if I were not there.

  “So when’s he coming?” I asked.

  “In about five days. That’ll give you enough time to get a fair bit of studying done, won’t it? We don’t want to disrupt your routine. I suppose you’ll be spending a lot of time with him.”

  “Whatever he wants,” I said stiffly, getting up from the table. “It’s up to him.”

  * * *

  And so, five days later, I found myself sitting on the DART train in rush hour, going to meet my brother at the boat. For some reason I had expected him to fly over, and had been shocked to learn that he wanted to be met at Dun Laoghaire. In earlier times, of course, this would have seemed like a pleasant little outing.

  I stared out the window as the sea flashed past, wondering if Ron would also be there on the dock. Maybe it would have been better for Ron to go, I thought. More fitting. Probably it’s Ron he’s here to see anyway. Couldn’t he wait? Ron would be going over in about a month, I assumed, like me. No doubt he would make sure to get there first.

  The train stopped with a jolt and people began to pile out. I joined them. Glancing at my watch I saw that the boat was a
lready in, so Stevie would be somewhere about. I began walking along the sea wall. I had the strange, sickly feeling I often got after being cooped up in the house all day, reading.

  I noticed the ferry docked in the distance. Suddenly it came to me why I was so puzzled and disturbed by this visit of Stevie’s: it made no sense to want to come back, to return of your own free will for no particular reason.

  And then there he was, a blurry figure waving at me, then a definable shape, then a smiling face. He looked good, as always, though thinner, too thin, I thought, his hair darker, back to its natural color. He now had three rings in his ear instead of one.

  “Hi ... do they let you go to the bank like that?” I asked. We both laughed self-consciously. He handed me a duty-free plastic bag with a bottle of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes in it.

  “For the parents,” he said.

  “Oh, nothing for me, I suppose.” But what would he have got me anyway? “Dad will appreciate the peace offering.” We traipsed back to the DART; he bought the tickets. We waited on the platform in silence.

  “So, why are you here?” I said in indifferent tones. “I’ve been wondering.”

  “I’m sure you have,” he said. “Oh, it’s a mixture of things. I got homesick for Dublin. I know that’s surprising. But I did. Just the size of it. You get so tired of the vast scale of London, having to navigate your way every day through these throngs of people.” He paused. “But it’s more than that. I actually felt it was time to bury the hatchet. You know. There’s a lot of things I won’t forgive, but the time away has helped. I see it all in perspective now, I think.”

  “Well, good for you,” I muttered, as the train approached. He glanced at me as if surprised. I got on and stayed standing, holding on to a pole. Stevie shed his rucksack and did the same.

  “Yeah, I know it sounds weak,” he said reflectively. “I just want to tell them the truth. I think it’s time.”

  I clutched the pole. “What? You can’t be serious.”

  He shrugged, smiling. “Got to do it sometime.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” I said. “You’ve just forgotten how bad they are. Dad’s not going to take it very well. And then you expect them to let me stay with you? Why are you doing this now? I’m just about to start my Leaving, you know that!”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but I think it’ll be different to what we both expect. It’s the best time to do it, in a way. Because I want to. And frankly, Ron plans to stay on with me. I want to be very clear about who’s with me, and what that means. I moved to London so I could do that.”

  “Do his parents know?” I enquired, staring at the floor. We spoke in low tones, but the hushed quality of the silence in the train suggested a few people were listening in.

  “They know he’s going to stay with a friend. I’m meeting them this time. And I think they’ve guessed, they’re not stupid.”

  “Unlike ours, who have to have it rammed down their throats.”

  He looked slightly horrified at my image. “Well ... if they kick me out of the house I’ll go stay with Ron. The stakes just aren’t that high anymore.”

  I said nothing. Perhaps that was the problem between us. The stakes weren’t that high now, and I simply didn’t feel as protective as I once had. The sides weren’t as clearly drawn any more, and I couldn’t place myself as easily in anybody’s camp. Oh well, I thought, all the years of worrying about Stevie, keeping his secret, being the only one in the family who knew, who cared ... oh well, that was over. I could stop feeling now, and the worst thing was, I had.

  “So how are you?” Stevie asked briskly.

  I hung my head. The silence grew uncomfortable between us. A few seats down a baby began to wail. The mother hurriedly tried to shush it, stuffing a soother into its mouth. The child spat it out indignantly. I watched out of the corner of my eye. People were looking away.

  “Poor kid,” I said with a sigh.

  There was nothing to tell him. And then I thought of something. As I met his concerned gaze, flushing slightly, I blurted out, “I overheard Mum and Dad having a strange conversation a few days ago. It was about her and Uncle John.”

  The baby had stopped crying; the train once again seemed deathly still. Stevie was looking vaguely interested, a little puzzled. He obviously hadn’t a clue what was coming next. Who would?

  “I wish you could have been there, because it sounds so ridiculous—as if I made it up!”

  He still said nothing. I had forgotten how difficult it was to talk to him. He had never had much curiosity, or perhaps just that: superficial curiosity. He wasn’t obsessive. He couldn’t understand how things linked together in my mind sometimes.

  “It seems as if they had once been involved,” I said as calmly as I could. The words came out in a rush. My voice sounded raw. He appeared to be pondering this, then looked directly at me.

  “It could be true.”

  “I know.” I said. My heartbeat slowed a little. “And it would explain ... a few things. You never met him, but he seemed quite odd. The thing is, apparently he’s not her brother, he’s her cousin. They adopted him. I couldn’t hear the rest.”

  Stevie smiled at me, absolving me it seemed of any shame for being the carrier of this news. “So, no actual incest?”

  For some reason, the words made me blush and I couldn’t speak. The train stopped. Stevie shouldered his rucksack. “This is our stop, right?” he said. His voice was kind. I followed him out of the train in a daze. As we handed our tickets to the guard at the station exit, he said as if thinking aloud, “It was a long time ago and maybe she’s come to terms with it. I’ll talk to her.”

  I walked along beside him, my mind in a whirl. Mainly I was thinking about how we used to walk home together from school, through the fallen leaves. I remembered that especially, because more than once we had played rough games, stuffing leaves down each other’s shirts, tripping each other up. But what amazed me when I looked back was how strong I had felt. I was his equal in those days. And we’d been protective of each other, and loyal, and close, really close. So I could understand Mum and Uncle John. I could understand, I thought, how that closeness might cross over into something else. Maybe Stevie could too. Maybe we had just escaped it. Of course, he liked men, and I ....

  He was used to my silences. It was strange to walk with him in the city. People looking at us now wouldn’t think we were brother and sister, I thought. He was so graceful, so at ease in his body. I felt large and clumsy beside him. I always had. What would they assume? That had never happened yet, somebody saying to him, “Is she your girlfriend?” What would I feel then?

  Stevie stopped to light a cigarette, cupping his hands around the match. I paused beside him. “I’m a bit nervous now,” he said suddenly. “God, what’s walking in the door going to be like?”

  “They want to see you, as I’m sure you know,” I told him, this time not bitterly, not even feeling it.

  “I’m not sure I want to see them!” He laughed, but his face was pale. “OK, let’s get the bus.”

  * * *

  In the days that followed, I noticed how calm and relaxed Stevie seemed, how he engaged in good-humored banter with my father and listened respectfully to my mother. After the first dinner together on the evening of his arrival, I realized that they weren’t going to ask him any awkward questions. He would have to tell them. I kept waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t. I had been tense before he arrived, and soon realized that his presence was making it far, far worse. So I avoided everyone, staying in my room except at mealtimes. Sometimes I played the radio quietly, sometimes I watched television. I read sporadically. Except for my English texts, Keats, Hamlet, Lord Jim, things didn’t seem to stick in my mind. Now and then I thought wildly that I would get through it OK nonetheless, that on the day of each exam, at the point at which I put pen to paper, it would all come rushing back.

  I had done well in the Mock, I brooded. Why was it called the Mock, anyway? The wor
d was bizarre. Of course, it would be just my style to perform fantastically in the Mock and badly in the real thing. It seemed I could never extend myself as far as other people. I knew I was faltering, floundering, and it threw me into a low-level panic. I kept hoping that Jeanette would ring. She still didn’t have a phone. There was no way I could go over to her place again; I wouldn’t dare to now. And besides, we really had nothing to say to each other. So my thoughts circled around again.

  On one of these terrible mornings, as I was lying on my bed with my head in my arms, I heard a faint knock on the door. “Come in,” I said hoarsely. Stevie poked his head in.

  “Look at you! You need to get out.”

  “I can’t. I really shouldn’t.”

  “Yes, you should. Get up, we’re going to the Zoo.”

  He closed the door. I stood up, rubbing my eyes. I picked up my bag. All right. I’d go out. But I won’t be very good company, I thought, and the realization made me smile. Even if everyone else blindly adored Stevie, I couldn’t anymore. Did he care one way or the other? I wasn’t sure. I sensed perhaps that he did, that he was looking around for ways to please me. If so, he would find out that he had taken on an impossible task.

  As we walked along the road to the bus stop he placed his hand on my shoulder for a moment. I looked up at him, startled.

  “Good news,” he said. “I talked to them at breakfast this morning. They like the idea of your coming to England. I made sure they understood you’d be looking for a job. That pleased them.”

  “What if I don’t get a job?” I asked, my eyes on the road.

  “Dad said he’d give you some money anyway—so you wouldn’t be a financial drain on me.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Practical, too.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that to sound ... not that you’d ever be that much of a burden, of course.”

  “I don’t want to be a burden, to you or anyone,” I said coldly.

  We hopped on the bus. Stevie headed upstairs and I followed. We sat in what were our favorite seats as children, in the very front row of the top deck. As a kid I remembered thinking that we towered over everything from that vantage point, but there was a scariness to it as well, for we hung over the traffic and the bus seemed likely to mow down everything in its path.