‘I don’t think he even told her, you know?’
‘No?’
So I really did mean it, when I said I did not want to see him again – not ever. Sean was three hundred yards down the road, playing the family man, my sister was in her kitchen, playing the perfect wife and I was the perfect fool. There would be penalties, I knew that. Because I really felt, just then, that I had lost the game.
‘I don’t know what you saw in him,’ said Fiona.
‘Little fucker,’ I said.
‘It’s just something he does, you know. You’re not supposed to take it seriously.’
‘Well I did.’
‘He sat there,’ she said, and she was angry now – whether she was angry with me, or on my behalf, it was hard to tell.
‘He sat there,’ pointing at a leather tub chair. ‘And he told me how lonely he was. No. He told me how lonely his wife was. How worried he was about his wife.’
‘When was that?’ I said.
Fiona looked at the sheet of glass between the kitchen and the garden, where her reflection was emerging from the dusk. She checked her face, its degree of sadness, and the state of her hair.
‘Little fucker,’ she said. ‘I was fond of him.’
And she leaned over the black granite of her kitchen island, making claws of her upturned hands, the way Sean does, when he is in persuasive mode.
But you know, everyone makes a pass at Fiona, it is the burden she carries through life. Even the postman fancies my sister, she is a martyr to it, she can’t even open her own front door.
‘When was that?’ I said again.
‘Oh I don’t know,’ she said.
And then I remembered something else about my sister. It’s not that everyone fancies her, that is not her problem. Her problem is the way they love her. Men. They don’t want to shag her so much as pine for her. That is the thing that makes her sad.
‘Years ago,’ she said. ‘I was about two minutes’ pregnant with Jack. I remember, I was really stupid with it. I couldn’t figure out what he was saying to me.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Oh I don’t know.’ She moves to the double-door fridge that seems to occupy half her kitchen wall. ‘What do they ever say?’
She opens it and the plastic seal gives way with a slight sucking sound. She says, ‘Gina. You know there’s no work for Shay. You know he hasn’t worked since October last.’
III
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
WHEN EVIE WAS four years old, she fell off the swing and Aileen slapped the au pair, and Sean, when he arrived home, put his little finger into his daughter’s mouth to find where she had bitten the inside of her cheek. He checked her pupils.
‘Look at me, Evie. Now look up at the light.’
‘I lost my shoe,’ she said.
So he went out into the dusk and found the little glittering ballet flat beside the swing. The back of it was smeared with clay, and there was a little divot of turf still attached to the heel.
There was a time, after Fiona’s ruthless little anecdote in her kitchen, that I questioned everything that had happened between myself and Sean, down to our choice of bed. I had missed key details, I thought: I had misread the signs. If love is a story we tell ourselves then I had the story wrong. Or maybe passion is just, and always, a wrong-headed thing.
Now, I feel if I can figure out what happened to Evie, I can tell the story properly. If I can think about it and understand it, then I will be able to understand Sean, and ease his pain.
The evening she fell off the swing, they sat with the drained and smiling child in the GP’s waiting room, and she turned to her father and said, ‘Did I die?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘Look at you, you’re all alive!’
The doctor, who had a marked English accent, introduced himself as ‘Malachy O’Boyle’ – a name so makey- uppey and Irish that, Aileen said later, ‘it was definitely fake’. He sat Evie up on his examining couch and laid her down. He felt the back of her head, checked her pupils and all her signs, while listening to, and ignoring, Aileen’s clear and agitated description of events that afternoon.
‘Did she have a temperature?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’ At which Aileen fell silent, because of course, she had not been there.
‘So Evie,’ he said – now he had dealt with her mother. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I fell off the swing,’ she said.
‘Anything else?’
‘Nope.’
‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Did anything happen before you fell? What were you looking at?’
She gave him a keen and suspicious glance and said, ‘The clouds.’
‘Were they nice clouds?’
Evie did not answer. But she did not take her eyes off him, either then or subsequently, and when, at the end of the consultation, he offered her a lollipop she said, ‘No thank you,’ which, from her, was a very great insult indeed.
Malachy O’Boyle sat back in his swivel chair and, in his easy, adenoidal way, told them Evie had bumped her head, and that she would be fine. It was also possible, he thought, that she had suffered an event, a convulsion or seizure, what people used to call a fit. He was by no means sure of this, and even if she had, most children who do never have a second one. But just so they were aware of it. Just so they could keep an eye.
They left his room and they paid the receptionist fifty-five euros. Then they went out to the car. Aileen said, ‘We are going to casualty.’ She was white and trembling in the passenger seat beside him. Sean said, ‘It’s Friday evening.’
But they went to casualty, and they sat in casualty for four-and-a-half hours, in order to be seen by a tired girl in a white coat who repeated pretty much what the fake-Irish GP had said. The girl, who looked about sixteen, resisted all talk of seizures and MRI scans, allowed that she could keep Evie in for observation but it would have to be on a trolley. And so they sat, or paced, or stood beside the trolley where Evie slept the delicious, heartbreaking sleep of a child, while, all around them, Friday-night Dublin wept, bled and cursed (and that was just the porters, as Aileen tartly said). They had one plastic chair between them. From time to time, Sean bent over the end of his daughter’s mattress, and set his head on his folded arms, where he lurched asleep for thirty seconds at a time.
They stayed, itching with tiredness, until, at ten o’clock in the morning, a more important-looking doctor swept past, checked the metal clipboard, pulled Evie’s eyelids open, one at a time, and with a breezy bit of banter, gave them all permission to go home. They had no idea who he was – as Aileen pointed out later, he might have been a cleaner in drag – but they were, by this stage, pliable, grateful, almost animal. All their normal human competency was gone. The rules had changed.
Aileen swung, in the next while, from efficiency to uselessness. She bullied or she froze; there was nothing in- between. She became convinced, after many late nights on various websites, that there was something seriously wrong. Evie had been crying out in her sleep for months – perhaps a year – before she fell off the swing, and
