Two Fridays in April

by Roisin Meaney

  It all feels removed from Isobel, or her from it. The whole evening has taken on a surreal quality. What are they doing, driving around in the dark? What hope do they have of finding Una, who in all likelihood doesn’t want to be found? But what else can they do, other than sit uselessly at home?

  A small breathy sound to her left makes her glance over. Daphne’s face is shiny with tears. Isobel reaches across instinctively to place a hand on her arm – but at her mother’s touch Daphne pulls away to lean against the window.

  Isobel withdraws, stung. They drive on, Daphne continuing to weep quietly. After a minute or so Isobel pulls into the kerb, switches off the engine. Now, she thinks, with no rehearsal, no prior plan. Now, because she’s had about all that she can take today.

  Daphne turns, runs the back of a hand across her eyes. ‘Why are we stopped?’ Her voice is clogged with misery.

  Isobel turns to face her squarely. ‘Are you ever going to forgive me, Daphne?’ she asks, as calmly as she can manage.

  Dead silence for a second, two seconds. Then Daphne shakes her head impatiently. ‘This isn’t about you – this isn’t the time—’

  ‘It’ll never be the time,’ Isobel says. ‘Will it?’

  ‘We have to find Una—’

  ‘Yes, we do. And we also have to sort things out between us. Or at least stop avoiding them. We have to talk about them.’

  Daphne draws a ragged breath, then scrubs her eyes again, this time with a sleeve. Isobel finds a pack of tissues in the door pocket and hands it over. Daphne accepts it silently, pulls one out.

  ‘You left me,’ she says, dabbing her eyes. ‘You just left me. You didn’t even say you were going.’

  Isobel sighs. ‘You think I don’t know that I behaved abominably? I thought it was for the best. I thought you’d be better off with your—’

  ‘You didn’t want me tagging along. You knew I’d be in the way.’

  Isobel opens her mouth – and closes it again. What can she say to that? A car whooshes by, another. What can she say to that?

  She looks into her daughter’s blotchy, beautiful face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m very sorry for what I did. I deserted you, and I regretted it almost immediately, and I missed you unbearably. But it’s years ago, it’s decades ago. Just tell me how long you’re going to go on punishing me.’

  ‘I can’t think about—’

  ‘Or tell me what I can do to make amends, because I am really, really tired of being punished, Daphne. I’m so tired of it.’

  Silence. Story of their lives, silence. Unspoken words, unvoiced sentiments. Not any more.

  Isobel studies her hands, realises with a jolt that she’s still wearing her wedding ring. How could she have forgotten it? She slides it off, lays it soundlessly in the little nook by the steering wheel.

  ‘I’ve left Alex,’ she says then. Why wait until Monday?

  Daphne raises her head slowly. ‘What?’

  ‘I left him, just a few hours ago,’ Isobel says. ‘Our marriage was a mistake, and now it’s over.’

  A trio of young people saunter past the car, two females hanging on to the man between them. ‘You never!’ one says – and for an instant Isobel thinks she’s been overheard but they walk on, paying no heed to the car or its occupants.

  ‘I was in a hotel,’ Isobel says, ‘when your father rang. I booked in for the night. I came from there.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Her voice so low that Isobel barely hears the words.

  ‘I’ll find a place, I’ll rent somewhere probably. I’ll get by.’

  In the ensuing silence Isobel watches a runner coming towards them on the opposite path, striding along effortlessly, arms swinging easily. He could be George – same build, same hair – except that George isn’t a runner.

  Daphne’s phone rings suddenly, causing Isobel’s heart to jump. Daphne jabs at the answer key.

  ‘Is she back?’ Tersely.

  Silence, during which Isobel can hear the faint quacking of the other voice, which she assumes to be Mo’s. The subject is closed between them for now – but at least she’s opened it. At least that has happened.

  ‘What? You what?’ Pause. ‘Where?’

  Another silence, after which Daphne hangs up abruptly. ‘We have to go to the charity shop,’ she says.

  ‘Which charity shop?’

  ‘Where she works, where Mo works. Turn around.’

  Isobel waits for a car to pass before executing her second three-point turn of the evening. She won’t ask, she’ll wait.

  ‘She saw her.’ Daphne is nibbling at a nail, something Isobel has never seen her do. ‘Mo saw her this morning. Go left at the end. She thinks it was Una. We have to check.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t she say so before?’

  ‘Right at the lights. She didn’t remember till now.’ Daphne leans forward in her seat. ‘Next right. Can’t you go any faster?’

  They negotiate the streets, Daphne issuing directions, still hunched forward as if this will propel them sooner to their destination. Isobel has never set foot inside a charity shop, has no idea which of them Mo volunteers in – and by the look of her, where she picks up most of her wardrobe.

  ‘Here,’ Daphne says suddenly, and Isobel spots the shop, its window filled with mannequins. She brakes and pulls in – and has barely stopped before Daphne leaps from the car and strides off, turning into what appears to be some kind of alley a little way up the street.

  Isobel shoves her bag under her seat and climbs out. She locks the car and glances around at the deserted street, gloomy between its occasional pools of light. Not the most auspicious part of town, not a place she’d choose to be after dark. She walks to where the alley begins, its tarred surface, what she can see of it, pockmarked with holes. ‘Daphne?’ she calls, peering into the darkness.

  ‘Here.’

  Already quite a bit ahead. Isobel advances cautiously, pulling her coat around her as she skirts dustbins, a heap of bricks, tattered scraps of what looks like clothing. Where on earth are they headed?

  ‘There was a dog.’

  Daphne’s disembodied voice startles her. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Here.’ Isobel makes out a sharp turn ahead where the alley becomes parallel with the street they just left. Daphne stands waiting around the bend.

  ‘There was a dog,’ she repeats. ‘Mo saw her going into one of the houses, about halfway down’ – a row of them tied together, about a dozen, Isobel guesses, backing onto the far side of the lane. Windows lit here and there.

  A dog doesn’t seem like much to go on. They walk slowly along, picking their steps in the near darkness.

  ‘We should knock on a door,’ Daphne says, but her voice holds little hope. What are they to say to whoever responds? They’re looking for a teenage girl who may have visited one of the houses this morning – it seems a pitifully inadequate reason for disturbing a stranger at this hour.

  Suddenly they hear barking up ahead. Isobel instinctively reaches out to clutch Daphne’s arm. ‘Hold on—’

  But Daphne isn’t there, she’s moving swiftly towards the noise. And as Isobel follows reluctantly – what if it’s a guard dog, trained to attack? – Daphne’s phone rings again.

  ‘Una!’ More of a gasp than a word. ‘What? Slow down – where?’ And then, after just a few seconds, ‘We’re coming.’ In a new voice. ‘Hang on, we’re coming.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Isobel asks – but Daphne has already turned back.

  ‘At the bicycle shop,’ she says, rushing off through the darkness, heedless of the barking that follows her back down the lane.

  UNA AND DAPHNE

  She sits on the floor in the dark next to his bike, her back against the wall. Her legs are drawn up, arms wrapped tightly around them, head resting on her knees. Daphne is coming, she tells herself. Daphne is coming. It’s nearly over.

  Her feet ache. When she breathes in, her chest hurts. Every bit of her is heavy with weariness but she dreads
sleep for fear of what it might bring. And she’s cold: in the unheated shop she’s frozen, she’s shaking with it.

  She’s wrapped Judy’s shawl around her feet, which are filthy and probably cut but she hasn’t investigated them properly. She should have asked Daphne to bring socks and shoes, but she forgot.

  Getting here took forever. Terrified all the time that he’d follow her, she zigzagged her way back into the city through unfamiliar streets, pressing herself into doorways or crouching behind rubbish bins when any car approached.

  The few pedestrians she encountered, when she finally reached civilisation again, gave her funny looks. Of course they did – walking barefoot in this weather in the dark, her wrap knotted around her waist to keep her ripped jeans closed – but she ignored them. They could have helped her, but she was still too shocked to think clearly. All she could hold in her head, all that concerned her, was getting to the bicycle shop.

  And when she finally got here, she nearly set off the alarm. For a few seconds her stupefied mind refused to supply the code. She stood, frozen with panic, as the insistent beeping continued – and at the last minute the numbers she needed flew into her head.

  What will happen now? Will Daphne be angry? Of course she will. So much explaining to be done, so many new lies to be concocted. So many missed calls from Daphne and Mo when she finally checked the phone she had silenced hours ago. She must think, she must be ready when the questions come.

  She’ll tell Daphne she came here this morning; she’ll say she spent the day here, she’ll admit that she made up the bit about having dinner in Ciara’s. She’ll make no mention of the Quirks, or of the wedding. She’ll say nothing about what happened afterwards.

  But how can she explain the loss of her shoes and socks, and the state of her feet? What can she possibly say that Daphne will believe?

  And then she hears a car pulling up in the yard outside. She undoes the wrap around her feet and struggles to a standing position as hurrying steps approach the rear shop door that she’s left ajar.

  ‘Una?’ Daphne’s voice.

  She says, ‘Here,’ but it comes out as a whisper. ‘Here,’ she repeats, ‘I’m here’ – and suddenly there’s a snap, and the shop is flooded with light. And there’s Daphne, hand still on the switch.

  Their eyes meet. ‘I’m sorry—’ Una begins, but by the time the words are out Daphne has reached her, and she’s enveloped in Daphne’s arms – she nearly topples backwards with the surprise of it – and she almost can’t breathe, she’s being clasped so tightly.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Daphne wails, ‘I was so worried, why did you just disappear like that? How could you do that to me? How could you just go off like that? I thought you were – I didn’t know what to think, I just, I was so frightened that you might have – I just thought something awful must have happened to you – and I understood, I really did, when you sent a text to say you weren’t coming home for dinner, but when I rang Ciara and she said you hadn’t been to school I got such a shock, I couldn’t understand it because I’d driven you there, it made no sense, and then for you to be gone for the whole day, where did you go, you shouldn’t have worried me like that, it wasn’t fair to do that today, and I know you’re upset, I understand that, and I know it’s your birthday and it’s horrible too, and we’re all upset about it, but still, to just disappear like that – and why are you not wearing shoes, what’s that all about, but I’m just so relieved to have you back safe, you must never do that to me again—’

  And all the time she’s sobbing and her words are coming out in ragged jumps, and Una has to wriggle a bit to breathe, and Daphne is taking no notice whatsoever of her mother, who’s appeared in the doorway and looks like she doesn’t know where to put her eyes while Daphne is having hysterics. Where has she come from?

  And the weirdest part of it all, the one thing that is clear to Una as she’s held so tightly, as Daphne cries real tears into her hair and keeps telling her how worried and frightened she was, and keeps demanding to know how Una could have done such a thing – all Una can really understand on this day, which has been filled with so much emotion, so much confusion, all she can marvel at is how totally and completely wrong she was about Daphne.

  ‘You can stay here,’ Daphne says, ‘until you find a place to live, I mean.’

  She sees how the words change her mother’s face.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she warns. There’s been more than enough crying today. ‘It’s no big deal. I’m just offering you a room while you get sorted.’

  Isobel nods. ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ she says. ‘If that’s all right.’

  ‘That’s fine. Any time after eleven.’

  Are you ever going to forgive me? The question had angered her, coming as it did in the middle of her desperate anxiety about Una. But now, with Una home, safe and well, all she wants to do is give thanks – and this gesture, this reaching out, feels like the right way to go about it.

  She’d never thought of it as punishment. Until tonight, until Isobel used the word, Daphne would have called it keeping her distance; she would have said they had a strained relationship because of their past. Was it punishment, though? Had she really been that bitter, that unforgiving, for nearly thirty years?

  She can’t think about it tonight. All she can do is offer her mother a place to sleep, and take it from there. Tonight needs to be about Una.

  They stand on the doorstep. Mo has already gone home with Jack, who was alerted on their way back from the bicycle shop. Daphne had sent him and Mo packing as soon as he’d shown up, well aware that Mo was none too pleased at being dispatched. It was clear she wanted to hang around to hear what Una had to say for herself, but Daphne was having none of it. I’ll fill you in tomorrow, she said, giving Mo no choice but to do as she was told.

  Isobel stayed – somehow she’d earned the right, as the one who’d brought Daphne to the bicycle shop. She filled a basin with warm water for Una’s feet and waited around until the guards arrived, the same two who’d called before. She tidied the kitchen while Una and Daphne spoke with them in the sitting room and now, just after they’ve left, she’s leaving too.

  ‘See you tomorrow then,’ she says. Thankfully she doesn’t attempt to embrace her daughter. They have a long road to travel before that.

  Daphne closes the front door and returns to the kitchen, where Una sits wrapped in a quilt with her feet in a fresh basin of water and a cup of coffee before her on the table, next to a slice of the pink-iced cake.

  ‘Sure you don’t want a bath?’ Daphne asks, and again Una shakes her head, so Daphne pulls a chair up close and cradles one of Una’s hands in hers. No more hiding for them, no more avoiding what needs to be said. Tonight has been a night for speaking out, and it’s not over yet.

  ‘Now,’ she says gently, ‘I know you told the guards, but I want to ask you again. Did that man hurt you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re positive? Promise?’

  A ghost of a smile passes over Una’s white face. ‘Promise.’

  ‘Is your coffee gone cold? Will I make more?’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’ But she makes no move to drink it.

  So pale, still so pale. Daphne hangs on to her hand, presses it between her own. ‘So,’ she says, ‘we need to talk.’

  Una says nothing, drops her gaze to the bundle their hands are making.

  ‘We need to sort a few things out,’ Daphne says. ‘Don’t we?’

  ‘I suppose …’ The smile has vanished, an expression of wariness on her face now.

  Daphne pauses, hunting for the right words, trying to find a way through the barrier that still exists between them, in spite of all that’s happened tonight.

  ‘It’s just,’ Una says faintly, glancing up, ‘there are things … You might not want to hear them.’

  ‘I do want to hear them,’ Daphne assures her. ‘Whatever they are, I really do want to hear them.’ And even as she speaks, she’s aware that she’s bracing herself f
or what may come, for what must come now.

  The seconds tick by. Una eases her hand from Daphne’s, finally sips coffee. ‘OK,’ she says, continuing to cradle the cup. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  And there, in the silent kitchen, she begins to talk.

  First, she tells Daphne about the bike shop. ‘I go there after school every day. I do my homework in the little room at the back, where I used to do it. I found his keys a few weeks after he died, I got copies made for the back door … I’m not sure why I go, because I hate to see it all empty and dark and dusty, that makes me really sad, and it’s cold all the time, so I have to leave my jacket on, but I think I go because it’s where I remember him best, where I can picture him clearly.’

  And that’s only the start of it.

  ‘I’ve met him, the man who was driving the bin lorry. His name is Kevin Quirk – but you know that. His son went to the comp, he was two years ahead of me. He … asked if I’d meet his dad, a few weeks after it happened. He told me how sorry he was about the accident. I didn’t want to meet him – I hated the thought of it, I said no – but … then I thought Dad would want me to, so I changed my mind. I met him in the park near the station – his son was there too – and he … wasn’t a bit like I’d thought he’d be, the father I mean, and I went back to the house with them, it wasn’t far, and I met his wife. They gave me scones, they were really friendly, they kept thanking me for going to see them, and asked me to come back, and I said yes, I’m not sure why … I visit them a lot. They’re the ones I have dinner with, not Ciara or the others. I didn’t tell you because I thought you might be angry, because of who they are and everything.’

  And there’s more, oh yes.

  ‘I was with them today. I went to their daughter’s wedding. I wasn’t in the shop all day like I told the guards. I did call in there first, I left my school things there, but then I left. I went to a florist shop and bought flowers for Dad – with the tenner you gave me this morning – and I brought them to the cemetery, and after that I went to their house, the Quirks. I got a green dress for the wedding in a charity shop – it was silk, it was lovely – and shoes. And the wedding was good—’