The Secret Life of Maeve Lee Kwong

by Kirsty Murray

  Steph and Bianca were beside themselves when they found out that Maeve had arranged to meet up with her father and that she’d talked McCabe into taking her there. They couldn’t believe that they were going to have to spend a day in school joining in on classes and watching another broom-dancing demonstration while Maeve and McCabe went to meet Maeve’s father.

  McCabe and Deirdre took a table at the back of Foxy John’s beside a workbench piled high with leather scraps and old boots. They each ordered a shandy while Maeve sat on a stool near the door of the shop, watching the street.

  A short, wiry, bald man stared in through the window at her. Was that him? Was that her dad? She felt like the little bird from the Beginner Books chirping ‘Are you my mother?’ at everyone, pathetically searching for a parent that she couldn’t even recognise. She stared hard at every man who entered the shop but most of them were only dropping off something for repair or stopping by for a quick midday pint to slake their thirst.

  Maeve pressed her hands against her face, and then rubbed her eyes until they stung. She didn’t feel like crying. It wasn’t tears that were swelling inside her but an explosion of emotion. When she looked up again, a man was standing at the window, staring in at her. His dark hair was cropped close to his scalp but his pale eyes were unmistakable. The high cheekbones, the wide crooked mouth, all the features of her own face that she used to feel were mismatched, that made her different from her mother, here they were in this stranger’s face. She folded her hands in her lap and stared back, watching calmly as he walked through the narrow double doors. The bell above the door tinkled and then he was beside her. He towered over her. She hadn’t imagined him being so tall. She stared up into a face so familiar and yet so strange it made her catch her breath.

  ‘Maeve?’

  She kept staring at him, mute. Should she call him Dad? Or Diarmait or Mr Lee? She nodded, suddenly terrified that he was going to embarrass her in front of the entire café by hugging her. But he didn’t touch her. He simply sat down on the bar stool beside her. Every now and then they glanced across at each other and smiled shyly. Then he reached along the bar and folded his big, strong hands over hers.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For waiting. I’ve been walking up and down the street for these past ten minutes, trying to get the courage to come and face you. Thank you for having the courage to find me.’

  ‘It wasn’t so brave.’

  He smiled at her and the silence between them stretched out like a great abyss that she knew one of them would have to leap across.

  ‘We’ve been studying this play,’ she said. ‘We had to read out bits of it in this drama workshop in Dublin. It’s called Waiting for Godot, but you know, he never comes. I didn’t want to wait for ever to find you. I’m not very good at waiting.’

  ‘Like your mother. She was always one for chasing fate with a stick.’

  Maeve frowned, not sure if that was a good thing. As if he read her thoughts he said, ‘It was her great strength, the way she took hold of what she wanted. Not like me. I was a drifter. When things got too hard, I’d move on. I never stayed long enough in one place to catch hold of a dream. It all slipped through my fingers.’

  Maeve had thought she’d want to ask him everything – why he left, if he’d guessed that Sue was pregnant, if he would have stayed if he’d known – but all she could do was gaze at him, as if he might vanish if she looked away.

  He ordered two pints of Guinness, and when they arrived he set one down in front of Maeve.

  ‘I’m only fourteen,’ she said, staring at the thick, dark brew with the creamy, foaming head.

  ‘Are you not allowed to be drinking Guinness? I’m sorry, darlin’. I should have made to meet you somewhere grander than this. I don’t know why I said Foxy John’s. There’s some swanky cafés down by the harbour and here I’ve dragged you into my old haunt instead.’

  Maeve took a sip of the bitter, dark Guinness. ‘No, I like it. I mean the place, not the beer. Maybe you finish the Guinness and I’ll order a Coke.’

  She was a little startled when he emptied both pints before she’d even started her drink.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, into the air where we can talk.’

  ‘I’d like it, but could I bring my teacher?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘He drove me from Tralee,’ she reminded him. ‘I told you he would.’

  She led her father to the table at the back of the pub.

  ‘Diarmait Lee, this is my music teacher, Mr Colm McCabe, and his mum Deirdre,’ she said.

  ‘No, call me Davy. I sign my work Diarmait but my friends call me Davy.’

  ‘Mr McCabe is Australian but Deirdre’s from Dublin. They’re a bit like us. They’ve only just found each other, too,’ said Maeve.

  ‘Sure, if everyone doesn’t come back to Ireland to find their roots,’ said Davy.

  As they left Foxy John’s, a wind swept down the street, rich with the smell of the sea, brisk and clean.

  ‘Do you fancy a walk and I’ll show you a bit of the town?’ said Davy.

  Maeve was glad to have an excuse to be moving. It was good to be outside, to be stretching her legs and buying time to think.

  McCabe and Davy started talking about the town, its history and its future while Maeve walked behind with Deirdre. She was glad that she didn’t have to do all the talking, that she could simply spend time watching her father, the way he moved, the way he laughed, the way he talked with such animation when McCabe asked him a question.

  ‘Can you manage a walk, Deirdre?’ asked Maeve.

  ‘It’s a fine thing to be walking in the open air. Colm and I can walk the streets of Dingle, the streets of Dublin, we can walk together anywhere in the world and no shame to it. No one to tell us otherwise, is there?’ The old woman laughed, as if she’d just told the funniest joke. She looked different to when she’d first walked onto St Stephen’s Green – taller and even younger, as if a weight had been sloughed away.

  Davy led them up a twisting track behind the town that quickly grew narrow and tussocky. He and McCabe stopped and sat on a stone wall, waiting for the others to catch up.

  ‘Why did we come up here?’ asked Maeve, helping Deirdre to sit beside them.

  ‘Colm said he was interested in the history. This is a favourite place of mine. I come up here sometimes to think about the luck of the Irish. Behind us, this field, this is a famine cemetery.’

  Everyone turned to gaze at the small paddock. It looked like nothing more than lumpy ground surrounded by a low stone wall.

  ‘Why aren’t there any crosses? Why isn’t there anything to mark the graves?’ asked Maeve, bewildered.

  ‘At the height of the hunger, they buried their dead without ceremony. They laid them in trenches. Maybe five thousand lie here. It’s a sad, secret place, but Ireland’s full of secrets.’

  ‘Was I a secret? Did you know about me? Mum said she wrote to you but she never knew if you got her letters.’

  ‘No, darlin’, you would have heard from me before now if I’d known. I spent ten years travelling after I left Australia. I only settled back in Ireland after your sister was born.’

  ‘My sister?’

  ‘Yes, and if it’s all right with Colm and Deirdre, I’d like you all to come back to my house and meet her.’

  It was such a weird idea. She had a sister, just like she had Ned. And she supposed she had a stepmother too. Which was an even weirder idea. An instant family. She’d thought she’d be the only one, his only daughter.

  ‘Do you feel up to it?’ he asked, almost shyly.

  35

  Third burren

  As they walked down from the famine cemetery, Davy dusted off his hands.

  ‘Maria will be wondering what’s become of us.’

  ‘Maria?’ said Maeve.

  ‘That’s the wife.’

  He pulled out his mobile phone and made a quick call. Then he turned to the three of
them.

  ‘Will you follow me?’ he said to McCabe. ‘You have to turn down a right muddy bothereen, but it’s only a short drive.’

  Maeve rode up front with her father in a rattling green Renault while McCabe and his mother followed behind in the slick hire car. There was a pile of canvases in the back seat of the Renault and a box full of rags that were sharp with the tang of turpentine and paint. Maeve tried to make out what the images on the canvases were, but could only see swirling dark colours and the limb of a man merging with a wing.

  She was glad to get out and open the old gate, leaping over muddy puddles and then waiting for the two cars to pass. She expected the farmhouse to be a whitewashed cottage tucked in the folds of green hills like Hannah’s house, and was surprised to find that only a corner of it was a cottage. The rest was a bright, clean modern extension built of glass and stone.

  They kicked off their muddy shoes at the door and Davy called out ‘Hello’ as he crossed over the threshold. A small girl with white-blonde hair pounced on him, shouting ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

  Maeve stared at her, trying to see how they might resemble each other. But the girl was like an Irish pixie with thick, curling hair and bright blue eyes.

  A tall blonde woman came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a cloth, and tousled the little girl’s hair before kissing Davy on the cheek.

  ‘You must be Maeve,’ she said, taking Maeve’s hands in her own.

  ‘Maeve, this is my wife, Maria,’ said Davy. ‘And your little sister, Bella.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Maeve. ‘I hope it’s okay, turning up like this.’

  ‘We’re delighted, Maeve. Bella’s been dying for you to get here.’

  Maeve touched Bella lightly on the tip of her turned-up nose.

  ‘We both have freckles,’ she said.

  ‘Are you my big sister, then?’ asked the little girl. She stepped up close to Maeve and took hold of her hand. ‘C’mon, you have to see my room. You can sleep in my room, if you like. You can sleep with me in my bed and be my friend and my sister.’

  She dragged Maeve over to a narrow flight of stairs built into the old stone wall.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ called Maria. ‘I’ve baked a cake. Bella, you bring Maeve downstairs again as soon as you’ve shown her your treasures.’

  Bella talked without stopping all the way up the stairs. Maeve loved the sound of her voice, the lilt of her Irish accent and her cheeky laugh. The bedroom at the top of the stairs had sloping ceilings and a small paned window. Bella started pulling dolls out from under the rumpled bedcover.

  ‘And this is Betty, and this one’s Belinda and this one is Berfa,’ she said.

  ‘Why do they all have names that start with B?’

  ‘Because B is best, silly,’ said Bella. She giggled.

  Maeve knelt on the little girl’s bed and peered out through the paned window. Across the fields lay Ventry harbour, a darkening blue in the late afternoon sun.

  ‘That’s where Daddy lives,’ said Bella, pointing to the distant beach.

  ‘No, your daddy lives here,’ said Maeve. Though she wanted to say ‘our dad’, she couldn’t make herself say it out loud.

  ‘No, he doesn’t. Only sometimes. Daddy, he lives there,’ said the little girl, jabbing her finger against the window pane and pointing to the beach.

  It took Maeve ten minutes to convince Bella to come downstairs again. She was as stubborn as Ned and much better at arguing the point. At the bottom of the stairs, Maeve stopped before a huge landscape painting of fields and sea.

  ‘See the girl up in the sky?’ said Bella, pointing at the picture. ‘That’s me.’

  Maeve looked closely at the swirling clouds that covered the top half of the canvas. A woman’s face was subtly embedded in the paint, her long hair woven into the texture of the clouds. Maeve caught her breath. The face looked nothing like Bella. The almond-shaped eyes of the cloud woman definitely belonged to Sue. Maeve smiled and led Bella into the sunny living room.

  The adults chatted quietly as they sat around a scrubbed wooden table. Thick slices of fruitcake lay on a platter and everyone sipped cups of steaming hot tea. Maeve sat opposite Davy and tried not to stare. It was so hard to act normally, to strike a balance between ignoring him and swallowing him up with her eyes.

  ‘Bella says you don’t live here,’ she said.

  Maria looked across the table and raised her eyebrows archly. Davy laughed and swooped on Bella, wrestling her onto his knee. Maeve felt a stab of envy. It was too late for her. There were so many things that she would never share with her father.

  ‘Well, there’s truth and not in Bella’s story,’ said Davy. ‘I’ve never been good at staying in one place. There are two types of Irishmen, the ones that are bound to the land, with the good earth in their souls, and then there are the rest of us, the kind you find all over the world, children of the wind. I’m the wind-blown kind, Maeve.

  ‘When I was a young man, in the 1980s, there was a recession here in Ireland. Not like now, with Ireland in the EU and the Celtic Tiger roaring like we’re all going to be rich as Midas. That’s why I was in Australia and how I came to meet your mother. The street people of London, so many of them are the lost Irish of the 1980s. See, we’re good at losing our way. Maria, she knows what I’m like and she puts up with me.’

  ‘So you don’t live here? You’re not a proper family?’ asked Maeve. As soon as the words were out she wished she’d bitten her tongue. What was a proper family anyway? But no one seemed to take offence.

  ‘I have a truck,’ said Davy, ‘down at the caravan park near Ventry. I keep it parked above the dunes. I can get up in the mornings and be painting at first light.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Maeve. ‘You have this great house and you live in a campervan?’

  ‘Why don’t you take Maeve down to Ventry and show her?’ said Maria.

  ‘We’ll have to be heading back to Tralee soon,’ said McCabe, glancing at his watch.

  ‘Please, sir,’ said Maeve. ‘My dad and me need to be alone for a bit.’

  The adults all looked at each other. Then Davy slapped his knee and stood up.

  ‘I want to come. I want to come!’ shouted Bella, throwing her arms around Davy’s legs. But Maria peeled her off and held the wriggling girl firmly on her knee. ‘No you don’t.’

  The salt and sand stung Maeve’s cheeks until they tingled as she and Davy walked along the beach.

  ‘When you come back, I’ll take you out in my corrach,’ said Davy. ‘There’s a dolphin in the bay, and sure if he doesn’t love to say hello.’

  ‘Come back?’ asked Maeve.

  ‘You can always come back, Maeve. And you will, everyone comes back to Ireland. You have roots here.’

  ‘I don’t know – there weren’t many people in Dingle who looked anything like me.’

  ‘Sure, they’re not half as lovely as you, with their pasty skin and mousy hair. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a place for yourself here. Your mam told me a Chinese saying once that I’ve always remembered. She said, “The cunning hare has three burrows.”’

  ‘Did Mum really say that?’

  ‘Sure, that girl could recite Chinese proverbs all day.’

  ‘Get out. She said you were the one who was always reciting poetry – Irish poetry.’

  Davy laughed. ‘She told you that, did she? What else did she tell you about me?’

  Maeve thrust her hands deep into her pockets. ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘Good. Then we can start fresh,’ said Davy. Maeve looked at him and noticed a long, narrow blue scar running from above his eye all the way to his chin. In profile you could almost mistake him for a pirate. Was there something her mother should have told her?

  Davy’s truck was parked on a crest of dunes among long, pale grey-green grass. It was painted dark red and a smoking, blackened stove-pipe poked out of the roof. Inside, it was not at all what Maeve expected. A double bed with a carved surround wa
s built into one end of the truck and a beautiful carved table and chairs were set into the wall. There were sketches and small paintings scattered everywhere – strange, swirling pictures of creatures that were neither human nor beast. Some had wings, others had fins coming out of the side of their faces and still others had black knives plunged into their chests.

  ‘We can sit on the beach, if you’d rather,’ said Davy.

  ‘No, it’s like a hobbit’s house,’ said Maeve. ‘I love it.’

  Davy shut the door against the wind and stoked the small Aga stove. From a cupboard set in the wall, he pulled out a bottle of whiskey and poured himself a glass.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be drinking the whiskey,’ said Davy. He reached back into the cupboard and pulled out a handful of small bottles of Italian sodas.

  ‘Bella’s favourites,’ he said, pushing the bottles across the table toward Maeve. As he did so, Maeve saw more scars, blue lines like a strange pattern of lightning bolts running the length of his forearm.

  Davy followed her gaze. ‘Your mother didn’t tell you about these?’ he said, stroking the scars. Maeve shook her head.

  ‘It happened in Sydney. Sue had arranged for me to meet her parents. I wasn’t ready. I knew they didn’t like the idea of me. She threw one of those proverbs at me. “If you do not brave the tiger’s lair, how can you capture the cub?” Sure, if that wasn’t guaranteed to drive me crazy.’ Davy looked out the window at the sea, remembering.

  ‘You met Goong Goong and Por Por? My grandparents?’

  Davy poured another shot of whiskey into his glass. ‘I met them. But before I did, I got completely smashed, utterly legless. I was thinking how they probably wished I wasn’t a white man and that their beautiful daughter should be loving a Chinaman and not a no-good Irishman. So I painted myself blue all over. Sure it was a great joke but then I walked through a set of plate-glass doors at the entrance of the bleedin’ Chinese restaurant. Right at the last, just before the glass shattered, I covered my face with my arms. You can see the way the shards sliced up my arms. When Sue and your grandfather took me to Emergency, the blue paint was stitched into the cuts. Instant tattoos.’