‘How could you!’
Isabel had freed herself from Conor’s grasp and was launching her thin body through the horde of lawyers gathered in a corner outside the court. ‘I’m talking to you!’ The Luas whizzed by and a few junkies looked up but kept walking. Histrionics from well-heeled women mustn’t be uncommon outside this building.
‘Why won’t you say sorry?! I’m not going to sue, I swear on my own life, it’s the only life I have to swear on now. We told your employers we have no interest in a civil action. I just want an apology. Please!’
‘Isabel!’ Conor was marching after his wife and I followed, although neither of us managed to infiltrate the suits as well as she had. She was standing in the middle of the lawyers, opposite the driver who glanced from her to the outer-ring. He looked terrible, like he wouldn’t mind being hit by a truck himself. ‘Mrs Walsh,’ he said in heavily accented English, ‘I am—’
A hand went to his chest. ‘Mrs Walsh,’ said the suit who owned the hand, ‘we appreciate what a difficult time this must be for you . . .’
The fire fell from Isabel as the lawyer stood in front of the driver and he got sucked back into the throng. She wouldn’t be getting her apology, neither in court nor outside it. Her face turned wan and grey.
‘I just wanted . . . A single kindness . . .’
She shook her head as she whispered the words, and Conor led her gently by the arm. I’m not sure she could have stood on her own.
‘We should go home. Thank you for coming, Sarah, Arthur,’ said Conor as my parents appeared at my side.
‘Of course.’
‘And take care of yourself, Grace.’
‘I’ll call you during the week,’ I said hurriedly, as Isabel winced at some internal pain.
‘If you like.’ His arm outstretched, a taxi stopped. Conor bundled his wife into the back of the cab and climbed into the front seat.
‘Would he not get in beside her?’ My mother shook her head as the car drove off. ‘The poor creature.’
‘I’ll just be a minute,’ I said, leaving my parents on the footpath and hurrying back into the building. I was light-headed but kept it together. I marched down the corridor, avoiding anyone semi-official-looking who might tell me the premises needed to be vacated. There were still people leaving the courtroom. I saw one older man with a flask, but no sign of Andy. Of course I had imagined it. All this had brought me back to the weeks after Henry’s death when I willed him into being in every crowd and around every corner. I must have—
‘Are they gone?’
I jumped as he emerged from the bathroom.
‘What are you doing here?’ I hissed, pulling Andy into a corridor recess. ‘Are you completely insane? They could have seen you! What were you thinking?’
‘He’s my brother.’
‘For all of a few months!’
‘I want to see his parents, Grace. I tried to find an address for them but couldn’t. You keep saying you’re going to introduce us but you don’t.’
‘Well, did you see them? Did you? Did you see his mother – the tall, thin woman who looks like she’s heading for her own grave? How could I tell them? They’re barely functioning as it is.’
‘I might be able to help.’
I guffawed at that. ‘You’re wearing trousers,’ I said, only noticing then. ‘I’ve never seen you out of shorts.’
‘They belong to my landlady’s husband. Are his parents still here?’
‘They’re gone. Isabel was in a state. Jesus.’ I put my hand to my forehead and walked in a circle. This was another one of those tropes learnt from movies: how to behave in a legal corridor. ‘Were you in there? Where were you?’
‘Right at the back, with the journalists.’
‘Jesus! My parents are still here, they’re right outside, unless they’ve come looking for me. What if they see you? You’ll give them a heart attack!’
‘I’d like to see—’
‘No. No shagging way. You have to get out of here.’
‘I’m not leaving without . . .’
‘What, Andy?’ I realised how rarely I said his name. I had too many secrets and I was struggling to contain them. The corridor began to spin. ‘I’ll come with you, just . . . give me five minutes to get rid of my parents. Although what am I going to say? If I say I’m not feeling well they’ll insist on bringing me home . . .’ I concentrated on a spot on the wall and the spinning slowly stopped. ‘I’ll tell them I have to go to work. An emergency. Just’ – I checked the corridor in both directions – ‘wait in the bathroom for another ten minutes, then come outside. All right? Okay?’
After a silent stand-off in which I half expected him to refuse, Andy turned and walked back through the door of the public toilets.
Andy
FORTY-THREE
In the beginning, it was all about information. I wanted names and dates and facts. I’d always had a linear brain. I did well at maths and science and anything that involved hands, no matter how much school I missed. Of course, the problem came when I didn’t make it in on the days of tests; then all that natural ability was like a tree falling in the woods with nobody around to hear it.
Tracing my way back was like a sprawling jigsaw puzzle, where one right piece led to another and then another. Frances’s name led to her grave, which gave me her parents’ names, which led to parish records and the location of the village in the west of Ireland where she’d grown up. ‘Your home place,’ the woman at the archives office had said, although she was probably just thankful to have found an answer that would allow me to stop badgering her.
I took to the research with no problem. It was addictive and infuriating. I kept thinking, though I knew it was a pointless thought, how good I would have been at this sort of thing, if I’d had a chance. Every answer led to five more questions and you never knew which ones were dead ends until you’d travelled down them. I constantly thought I was getting closer to whatever it was I was searching for, but I never actually got there. I visited the village where Frances was born, the house where she’d had me, and the building where I was given up for adoption. And I never felt anything. I had slipped off my shoes and stood on the overgrown patch of land in the west of Ireland that had once housed my birth mother, the place my blood ancestors came from – my ‘home place’ – and still I felt nothing. I was as lost there, barefooted in a field on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, as I had been my entire life on the other side of the world.
And then, on a day I was cranky because I thought I was being pulled away from a serious lead, I met Grace. Every time I stepped through that front door, I got a glimpse at what could have been. I stood in the void left by Henry, looked around at his life and it made sense. I almost recognised it. That was when the question changed. It was no longer: ‘Where did I come from?’ Now it was: ‘Who could I have been?’
Grace took me on tours of the park and though it was impossible to say I remembered it, none of it felt unknown. Henry’s favourite places could have been my favourite places. She told me stories and it was like my memory was being jogged. I looked at that photograph of them sitting on the wall by the sea in Portugal and I could taste the salt in the air. I could smell the fish from the small waterfront restaurants just out of shot and I almost remembered how Grace had looked at me on the walk home. I know it’s crazy. Trust me, I know. But we sat together on the sofa and it was like we’d always been there. I’d spent my life wandering the wrong hemisphere looking for a place that felt like that. Sitting in that room, beside her; it felt like home.
I’d been telling myself I was going to fix the top step for Mrs O’Farrell for days but it was always dark by the time I got back to the guesthouse. Monday morning, I had no jobs on and Grace was at work, so I sat down to see if I could stop the squeak. Mrs O’Farrell brought me out fruitcake, even though it was twenty minutes after breakfast, and told me there’d been a few messages that week. She’d tried to catch me but she was always in bed by the time I got bac
k.
‘I hope you’re not working too much,’ she said. ‘Those files in your room are multiplying; they’re getting difficult to clean around.’
‘I haven’t added to them in weeks,’ I told her.
‘Well, good.’ She put the plate of fruitcake on the step beside me. ‘There were three calls. Your grandmother phoned twice, nothing important, just thought she’d try you since she got the time difference right. She reckons you’re developing a bit of an Irish twang, but I don’t hear it myself. And then a Rose Banville called on Thursday, from Tusla – is that how you pronounce it? She said to phone her back when you got a chance.’
I picked up the house phone, dialled the social services number from memory and asked for Rose. Six months ago the only phone number I knew was my grandma’s. But I was different these days; I barely knew myself.
‘Well well well,’ said Rose by way of greeting. ‘A few weeks ago I couldn’t arrive into work without seeing you skulking around the lobby. Now I phone you and it takes four days to call me back? What has happened to the Andy Cunningham we all came to know and loathe?’
‘I’m taking a different tack.’
‘Oh yeah? Not pestering underpaid civil servants and elderly clergy members anymore?’
‘My focus has switched from information to experience.’
‘I hope that’s not a euphemism for necking Guinness in Temple Bar.’
‘Why are you phoning?’
‘Your brother.’ The sound of her shuffling pages at the other end of the line. ‘Henry Walsh’s inquest is being held today in the coroner’s court on Store Street.’
‘An inquest?’ I repeated, jogging my memory on what an inquest was. ‘I didn’t know there was an inquest.’
‘Yeah, sorry. You know this place, I know nothing until I’m told and even then I’m lucky if it’s not too late. I just got news of it on Thursday. I did phone you . . . It starts at noon.’
I looked down at my shorts and the grey T-shirt I’d worn at least one day too many. ‘That’s soon.’
‘It’s fine, these things never start when they’re supposed to.’
‘And anyone can attend?’
‘Anyone can sit in,’ Rose hesitated. ‘I’d tell you to give it a bit of thought, consider if you really want to go or not, but I know I’d be wasting my breath. So just . . . be careful. Okay? From what you’ve told me, you look a lot like the dead man they’ll all be there to hear about.’
I considered phoning Grace but she rarely answered when she was at work. You think they’d have told her about an inquest, but then I guess she wasn’t family, technically. And technically, I was. Anyway, I was tight on time. I tidied up the tools from the front step, borrowed a pair of Mrs O’Farrell’s husband’s trousers, took a taxi as far as Trinity College and walked the rest of the way.
I hurried through the city, over the River Liffey and down towards the bus depot. I pulled out the map again. I’d been here. This was near where the accident happened. I brushed more hair into my face, pulled on the woollen cap I’d bought from a street vendor and lifted my collar. The more time I spent on these streets, the less my face felt like my own. In this city, it belonged to someone else. And I felt it too, the longer I was here the more I was morphing into a different person: a halfway point between Andy and Henry.
My grandma wanted me to come home. She thought I’d had enough. The Irish lilt she heard in my accent worried her, like I was no longer happy to be myself. ‘You’re loved,’ she said. ‘Come back to the people who love you.’ But ‘the people’ was two, and my aunt lived in Perth now and rarely visited. And even though sometimes the more I found out the worse I felt, I couldn’t stop. The longer I was here, the more distant my family felt. That old life was slipping away.
It was quarter past twelve when I got to the courthouse. The place was rammed with people waiting for something to happen. I pushed my way through the crowds, careful to keep my head down, until I reached the back wall where I wedged myself into a corner. The man beside me had a bag of mint humbugs and the woman beside him was sucking pear drops.
‘You come here often?’ she asked, leaning over her companion to offer me a sweet.
‘I’m good, thanks. And no, never been here before. Why . . .?’ I looked at them. ‘Do you?’
‘About twice a week,’ she said, and the man nodded.
‘There are journalists here today,’ he whispered, nodding to the row in front of us. ‘Must be a good one.’
‘That’ll be the family now,’ said the pear-drops woman, and I followed their gaze to the group coming through the door. And there, at the rear, was Grace, glancing once to the side before taking a seat in a bench near the front. I presumed the pair to her right were her parents, and the others were Henry’s. I watched closely but I didn’t get a good look at them before they sat and the clerk was calling us to attention. And though I felt a stab of betrayal, my body tensed with protective loyalty.
I listened intently as Henry’s father talked about his son and I watched the back of his mother’s head, bent towards the floor for most of the proceedings. I had a right to meet these people who could so easily have been my parents.
The inquest dragged on. Some people left. A couple of journalists skipped out early and the man with the humbugs took to scrolling through Facebook on his phone. I half-listened to the testimony, but my attention was on Grace and on Henry’s parents. I felt a responsibility towards them. Because I was responsible for their loss, in a way. If I’d been there and Henry had been where I was, it never would have happened. Henry had this perfect life and he’d just thrown it away. I got angry when I thought about how easily he’d taken it for granted. It was left to me to make amends.
Frances Clinch’s choice had resounded through the core of the earth and out the other side. And I kept thinking, I couldn’t get this thought out of my head: How Henry had been in the wrong place for one moment, and I’d been in the wrong place for thirty-three years.
FORTY-FOUR
Despite the evenings I had spent googling B&Bs in Harold’s Cross, I didn’t recognise this place. It was an imposing dark-brick structure with stairs up to the front door and a large ‘Vacancies’ sign on a picket in the front yard.
‘It’s stuck,’ said Andy. ‘Even when the place is full, it’s like that. I’ve offered to fix it but the landlady likes it, for some reason.’
He led me up the path and steps, talking more than usual. He stopped on the porch to search for his key. He was, I thought, a little embarrassed.
‘It’s nice,’ I said, him still searching. ‘I love these old houses.’
‘She’d answer if I knocked but no need to disturb her, I have it somewhere . . .’
‘Won’t the landlady mind you having a guest in?’
‘She never minds about that,’ he said, putting the key in the lock.
‘Oh. Right,’ I said, missing a beat, doing a poor job at hiding my surprise.
‘Or she doesn’t seem to anyway,’ he added hastily. ‘With the others. Mind that step, it creaks.’
I nodded at his too-late qualifier and tried to put the image from my mind. When I was a kid, if I couldn’t see someone I thought they didn’t exist. Where did I think Andy was when he wasn’t with me? Set to ‘Sleep’ in a storage unit somewhere, waiting for an appointment with me to power him back on?
‘Up here. I’m on the first floor.’
The room did a better job of covering his tracks. There was zero trace of the female touch. He kicked some clothes under the bed and hastily pulled back the half-drawn curtains. There was a musk I recognised as Andy’s and almost Henry’s – grit and soap and prevailing maleness – only amplified. It was stale and invigorating all at once. He opened the window.
The bed was carelessly made and a couple of creased T-shirts lay half consumed by a sheet at the end of it. Belongings were sparse but the dark furniture was too bulky for the room and, combined with several teetering towers of paper, it gave the impression
of clutter. There were a few books on the desk: Maps of Ireland, the collected poems of W. B. Yeats, Tracing Your Irish Ancestors. But mainly it was paper: loose pages, bulky files, Post-it notes, cardboard dividers, several notebooks. If this was a spy novel, the case would be cracked in this room. His toolbox sat in the opposite corner to the door with a pair of overalls folded beside them. In this whole place, those dusty garments were the only items stored neatly. A couple of photocopied newspaper articles lay on the large dresser facing the bed but I couldn’t make out what they said.
‘That’s my file, from the social worker,’ said Andy, following my line of sight to a blue folder beside the printouts. He stood behind me, leaning against the wall by the door, and though the side of my left calf was pushed against the cold wood of the bed frame, there were only inches between us. If you removed the furniture this bedroom would be as big as my own but, with everything twice the size it needed to be, there was barely room to bend down and stroke a cat never mind swing one.
The sunshine showed up the dirt on one window pane but not the other. Andy gazed at the dresser. The intimacy of the situation made us both uncomfortable. The door to the en suite was ajar, the light left on from earlier. I spied his toothbrush, yellow and chunky, perched gingerly on the side of the sink. For some reason, this made me blush.
‘Why didn’t you tell me the inquest was today?’
My face reddened further. ‘Should I have?’
‘He’s my brother.’
I let my annoyance at this statement pass. ‘I don’t know how to get hold of you,’ I said. ‘I have no phone number for you. I didn’t know where you were staying until now. You call me from some borrowed mobile or landline—’
Grace After Henry Page 21
