like steam. And there she was, this cuckoo, sitting in my kitchen; the price I had to pay for love.
The absurdity of it was lost on Sean, who was – who continues to be – completely helpless when it comes to Evie. He can see nothing but her.
So I did not ask his permission the next weekend, but walked in at two o’clock to find the two of them sitting down to lunch.
‘Hi!’ I said, brightly.
Evie ignored me, but it is possible she ignores everyone for the first while.
Her father said, ‘Evie,’ and she looked up with hurt eyes. ‘You remember Gina.’
‘Hm,’ she said.
And I moved quietly about as she picked through the home-made burger; removing lettuce and cucumber, complaining there was no ketchup, piling on the mayonnaise.
Since then, she comes quite often. We meet in passing. I dodge her rage. I am always brief. I am always nice. I sleep with her father, while she sleeps across the landing. All the doors are open in case she dies in her sleep, even though she is not going to die in her sleep. But I do not think we would make love if they were closed, not even silently.
I come out in the morning, to find her already occupying the bathroom, or she barges past, in some tatty flannelette of infant pink. Every time I see her, she has grown – but massively. It is like a different stranger to bump into every week.
At night, I hear them moving about the spare room, the curtains pulled, the quiet chat as she arranges fluffy toys and night lights and who knows what, until her father – Evie is nearly twelve, remember – lies down beside her and murmurs her to sleep. As often as not he falls asleep too, and I can not tap on the door, or put my head round it to rouse him: I can not risk it. So they lie, cocooned and hopeless and completely contented, while I sit and watch crap TV.
She started coming in September and they ran out of trips and excursions by the middle of October, so they linger in the house and fail to make decisions; Evie whining,
For a man who is crazy about his daughter, Sean spends a lot of time telling her to go away. Maybe all parents do this.
‘Go and do something,’ he says, as she peers over his shoulder at his laptop screen, eating an apple beside his ear.
‘What are you standing there for?’ He sends her down to the shops for sweets, and then tells her she can’t have sweets. He sends her down to the shops for a smoothie, instead. He says, ‘Go and play,’ when there is no one for her to play with. He tells her to go and read a book, though he never reads books, himself; I have never seen him with a book in his hand. So she plays Nintendo, and then he tells her not to play so much Nintendo.
‘Stop touching things, Evie.’
There is no stilling her hands, always on the mooch.
I noticed this the first time we went outside the house together, and walked down to Bushy Park with Evie’s new dog (the dog is another story: let me not begin to discuss the dog). She followed each wall with the tips of her fingers, smooth or rough; let them drift through hedges and drag the leaves off bushes.
It was as though she was testing the edges of her world; finding the point where objects began and space stopped.
‘There is no need to touch the wall, Evie.’
Sean seemed worried she would shred the pads on her fingers – and there was something else there too, some idea of contamination; whether she would dirty things or be made dirty by them – Sean is, as we know, a clean sort and Evie plays with his disgust in the smallest ways. She doesn’t do anything truly taboo, she wouldn’t get away with it; she is, besides, at a modest age. Delicate to a fault about her galloping physicality, she never discusses sex and thinks adults are completely gross when they try.
‘Oh pull-ease.’
But she scratches her scalp into the fold of a book. She leaves sticky smears on the keyboards and remotes and phones. She twirls her hair, or sucks her hair, she is hugely uncomfortable in her bra – for which she has my sympathy, it’s a life sentence – and her underwear is constantly prised out and readjusted. She also – and this gets to me too – hoiks the phlegm up her nose instead of using a hanky.
It is all, in its way, fantastic for being so effective. Although she seems to be helpless to it, and maybe she is, it is also the best and quickest way to drive her father around the bend.
‘Evie, please!’
‘What?’
She also knows, as though by the fruit of long contemplation, the exact and simplest way to his heart. Not just by looking at him with her grey eyes, which should be enough for anyone, which is almost enough for me. Not just by doing well in school and being ostentatiously averse to boys. No, Evie has made friends with the richest girl in the class. Which in Evie’s class, out in County Wicklow, is pretty damn rich. In fact, the father of Evie’s best friend (blonde, like her mother, with beautiful slim knees) owns houses and hotels, owns whole apartment blocks, from Tralee to Riga.
Her name – and you have to admire her parents for this – is Paddy.
They are doing a project together on lice in horses. Paddy is supplying the horses. I did not ask if Evie was supplying the lice.
And sometimes, too, they are perfect: sitting on the sofa watching ‘Father Ted’, or out in the open air, or the way they talk in the car, because talking is what Sean is good at, and with his daughter there is no charm and no blame, there is just Sean. I listen to the ease of his tone with her and I think,
He does not hold me by the hand. He does not tickle me, quickly, to get me out of his way. He does not tango me down the hall, and arch me over, backwards. He does not wake in the night, thinking of me.
I have saved his life.
‘You have saved my life,’ he said.
But if you ask me, it’s not one woman or another that is the saving of Sean. It is the woman he loves but can never desire. It is Evie.
‘Take those earphones off, Evie.’
Evie absent or dreaming in front of a screen or a book. Evie failing to focus up, to move along, to snap to.
Evie stalled in front of the mirror for hours at a time, sprouting hair and neuroses, moody as all get out. And it seems so unfair, to be jumping with hormones when you’re still in Hello Kitty pyjamas; it is like no one is telling the truth, or no one knows what truth to tell.
I walked in on her one evening. Evie always leaves the door open when she is in the bath –
But this one evening, she had fallen silent and, between one sentence and the next, I walked in the door.
Evie pulled the sponge up to cover her little budding chest and looked at me with huge grey eyes.
‘Don’t mind me!’ I said, as I dodged across the room to get the thing I needed, whatever it was, from out of the bathroom cabinet.
In the autumn, Evie seemed to get rounder and rounder, fatter and fatter, after which came the amazing stretch and boi-oi-oinngg of this extra flesh into a waist and hips and breasts – though, as I recall, breasts don’t feel like fat, at that age, they feel like tenderised gristle. But they look, from what I saw in the bath, heartbreaking and simple.
There is nothing worse than being nearly twelve.
Evie is at that moment. Her body is at that moment when it is wrong to look at her, wrong to think about her nakedness, when it would be criminal to take a photograph. Her body is becoming her own. Her body is becoming lonely. Her father, who used to bathe and dry her, now stretched out staring at the ceiling, across the hall.
‘Have you rinsed, Evie? Rinse till you hear it squeak.’
He was off the bed and standing in the doorway when I came out of the bathroom. I lifted my hands in a mock
