The Forgotten Waltz

‘No, I don’t actually. Do you?’

Evie is always correcting herself. This is because everything she says comes out in the wrong order.

‘When my Dad was little and they had a dog. Somebody had a dog and they locked it in the boot of a car. And on the first day they passed the boot and the dog barked and on the second day they tapped on the boot and the dog went crazy and on maybe the fourth day-’

‘Four days?’ I say.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘On the fourth day the dog was completely silent and they opened the boot.’

Then she starts again.

‘No, the new owner of the dog. If you want the dog to change owners. Because a guard dog is trained to protect just one person and attack anyone else. So they give the new owner a piece of meat and he has to go up and open the boot.’

‘Jesus.’

‘And the dog can hardly see or anything because he’s been in the dark, and he just takes the meat, and he licks your hand, and then the dog loves you for the rest of his life.’

‘He told you this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your father?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Did your father do this to a dog?’

‘When he was growing up.’

‘Who locked the dog in the boot?’

‘I don’t know who did it,’ she says.

I look at this child and think about the days and weeks, the months of my life I have spent waiting for her father to call me. Is this something she should know?

I want to tell her that I sat outside her house in the dark one night, hanging on to the steering wheel, while she slept sixty feet away. I imagined her father behind those stone walls, I could not move for the intensity of my imagining: Sean in one place or another, doing something, or another thing, that was hard to sense or describe. I spent hours willing myself into him. And, you know, he might not even have been there.

‘So, give me some more dogs,’ I say.

‘My Dad?’

‘Yeah. Why not?’

‘His Mum had a springer spaniel and he ran out under a car and she said she was too sad ever to get another one ever again.’

‘Your Gran?’

‘My Nana.’

‘Right. Do you like your Nana?’

‘What?’

Sean would kill me, if he heard me ask her this. It is a great violation and I really quite enjoy it. I don’t know what I am stealing, but it is candy from a baby, I know that.

‘I mean what is she like, your Nana?’

‘My Nana?’

‘Is she a bit mean?’

‘What?’

And I want to lean across the little table and say, ‘Your father is not the man you think he is.’

I don’t of course, I say, ‘How’s the hot chocolate?’

‘Mmmn.’

There is no need to tell Evie about her father. She knows him better than anyone, because she loves him better than anyone. The facts about him – his kisses and his lies, his charm and his misdeeds – what are they to Evie?

What are they to me?

I say, ‘I remember you when you were just a little thing.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Long before your father and me. I mean long before anything. You were just.’

‘What was I like?’

I look at her. Sean’s pupils are ringed with a gold so pale it is nearly white. In Evie’s, the grey gives way to a burst of amber, quite intense.

‘You were very like yourself, actually.’

‘What age was I?’

‘Four or five.’

She looks out the window.

‘There’s videos,’ she says. ‘But we have the wrong charger.’

‘You were super-cute.’

‘Was I? I think the videos were for the doctor mostly.’

‘Well, everyone was very worried about you, sweetie.’

I have an urge to kiss her, just where her black hair gives way, and the skin of her ear shades into the skin of her cheek.

I ask her does she remember being sick and she says that she does, though I don’t know if this can be true – she was, after all, only four. She says, ‘I had this horrible feeling in my stomach, like I had done something wrong, and then, Bam. I used to think a giant stomped on my head. But just before, just a second before, it was really nice. It was like, “Here it comes. Here comes the foot.” ’

‘You must have got it from “fit”. Here comes the “fit”.’

She is silent.

‘We don’t say “fit”,’ she says. ‘We say “seizure”.’

‘Yes of course,’ I say (because you have to be so polite with children). ‘I’m sorry.’

‘But I didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘No of course you didn’t.’

‘I mean it made me so cross. I wet my pants and everything.’ ‘Finish up your drink, there. We’ll go.’

She holds the paper cup in two mittened hands and drinks, leaving a shallow V of chocolate flaring from her upper lip. She watches me, over the edge of the cup. She says, ‘What’s “Gina” short for?’

‘Nothing. My mother just liked it.’

‘It’s nice.’

‘Thank you.’

Evie will be all right, I think. Despite everything. Despite all our best efforts, you might say, the child has come good.

We go out on to the street and look up at a dark sky, sifting snow.

‘Will we take a cab?’ I say. ‘For the hell of it.’ But Evie says, ‘My Dad isn’t back at the house yet.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Well, I don’t know.’

‘Let’s walk for a while. You want to walk?’

I take her backpack and we head up to Stephen’s Green. We go in a side gate and start to cross the park, aiming for the bus stop on Earlsfort Terrace. We don’t talk much. Evie slides along on the soles of her boots in a way that would annoy me, if I were her mother, but it does not annoy me much.

I go through the darkening town with Sean’s beautiful mistake. Because it really was a mistake for Sean to have a child, and it was a particular mistake for him to have this child; a girl who looks out on the world with his grey eyes, from a mind that is entirely her own. Lovers can be replaced, I think – a little bitterly – but not children. Whoever she turns out to be, he is forever stuck with loving Evie.

I think I love her myself, a little.

Her phone beeps and I know it is him, landed at last. It takes her an age to set her bag down and unpack it to find the phone, and read his text. (I wait for my phone to jump but it does not.)