chest, and after a long and horrible pause said, ‘No.’
He sat with her in his arms during the wrangle that followed, which ended with Megan and Jack banished to the other side of the mobile home to eat their half-promised ice-pops, out of sight. He is a small enough man, Sean. He rocked her, this large child, through distant and imagined slurps and suckings – I wanted a damn ice-pop myself by this stage – while Fiona talked to Aileen about minders and creche fees, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be better just to hit the child? Wouldn’t it be quicker and more humane?
I exaggerate. Of course.
Evie was a normal enough eight-year-old girl, Aileen was not a monster of calm, Sean was a businessman with too sharp a crease in his summer pants. It was a boring, nice day. After lunch, Conor pulled his hat down over his face and pulled his T-shirt up to warm his brown and hairy belly in the sun. I folded a sheet of paper, the way we used to at school, so you could open and shut it like a little bird’s beak with fingers and thumbs, first forward, then out to the side, and myself and Megan played fortunes: Go Figure, You Smell, Easy Peasy, with True Love hidden under the last flap. After lengthy negotiations, Evie and Jack went inside to watch a DVD. They did not have the resources, it seemed, to do anything else.
In the middle of the afternoon, my brother-in-law Shay turned up. He stopped on the grass, held his phone up high and, with a cartoonish finger, turned it off. Then he came on to the deck, kissed Fiona and said hello all round. Then he walked inside and switched off the television, and told everyone to get down to the beach, with much shouting for togs and towels and inflatable toys while Fiona found – or couldn’t find – missing sandals and keys to the front door and the hundred mysterious objects her children need: water, suncream, a green golfing visor that Megan liked, Jack’s yellow plastic rake; because, as far as I can see, kids will do anything to stay in a place where they are happy enough, up to and including making their mother weep.
‘Have you ever heard of a Loon A Tic asylum?’ I said to Megan, who regarded me with wise, monkey eyes. Meanwhile Sean’s wife, Aileen, just read the paper until everyone was ready, then she walked back to their car and lifted a single bag from the boot.
‘Right!’ she said. ‘Onward!’
Conor laughed all the way home.
‘The ice-pop!’ he said. ‘The fucking ice-pop!’
And I intoned, ‘Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops, do you Evie?’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Apparently she has some kind of thing. The child,’ I said, because that was what Fiona muttered to me by the sink, as we washed up.
‘Like what?’
‘You know, something wrong. Fiona didn’t say.’
Evie was a funny, disturbed little article, there was no doubt about it. She didn’t seem the same age or stage as Megan, though they were both around eight years old – or maybe I was biased, my niece being such a little sprite. If I had known more about these things I might have put her on a spectrum, or tried to. Except that Evie was all there – alert, trembling with it – she just found things very difficult. And whether this was, as I suspected, her mother’s fault, I couldn’t say for sure. I did find her slightly unbearable, though. It might have been something to do with the fat; those plump, kissable baby wrists; but with the wrong sort of face above them, the wrong kind of eyes. I didn’t say this to Conor, of course. I mean, I might have said, ‘She is quite an object,’ but I am pretty sure I didn’t say the fat made her unpleasant to me; I did not share my ‘failure to love’, as Megan’s teacher calls a sin these days. Besides, whatever slight annoyance ran through me when I looked at Evie left, as a residue, something both calm and keen.
Pity.
‘Poor child,’ I said. ‘It’s all her, you know,’ meaning the mother. And Conor said, ‘They should both be shot.’
He seemed to like them well enough at the time. He chatted to Sean as we all trekked over to the cold Irish Sea and Fiona chased and cajoled her children into their togs and creams, while Shay opened a bottle of red, sat on the rug and shut down, massively and at speed – it was frightening to watch – like a power cut running through Manhattan.
‘I thought he looked terrible,’ I said to Conor in the car.
‘Who?’
‘My brother-in-law,’ I said. ‘I thought he looked like shite.’
‘Shay’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about Shay.’
Conor was being a bit obtuse, these days. He was recently finding the whole contraception thing a bit ‘unconducive’, for example. To what? He did not say.
We did not talk about Sean, as far as I recall. Perhaps there was no need to. It is possible that we held an uncomplicated silence, the rest of the way home.
Certainly, in his togs, Sean – my downfall, my destiny – cut a less than imposing figure. I suppose you could say that of us all. In the bare sunshine we looked a bit peeled. Fiona, being, in her day, the most beautiful girl in Terenure, didn’t bare an inch, of course. She had some way with sarong and towel that made Brittas look like Cannes, and when we toyed with the idea of a swim, said, ‘Oh, I was in this morning,’ because whatever effort she puts into it all (and I suspect it is considerable) she never lets on.
So it was just the four of us, Conor and me, Sean and Aileen, playing Houdini with bra straps and towels, then pretending not to look at each other’s bodies on the beach. Truth be told, I didn’t really bother with Sean that day, I was too busy checking out his wife; so dull when dressed, so elegant and boyish in the nip, never mind her age. Her odd little breasts screamed ‘breasts’ at you, though – they looked so tender on her little bony ribs, like they had been grown there specially.
Sean gave me the full flat of his face, as if to ask if I had some problem with the body of his wife. But I had no problem with it, why should I? I had problems enough of my own. I had to keep Conor in front of me, for a start, until the other pair were safely wet, or, at least, looking the other way.
‘What is it?’ said Conor. ‘What do you want?’
While I hung on to him, bickering and talking rubbish, managing the towel.
Sean headed down to the surf, hugging himself, with high shoulders and picking, bouncy feet. Aileen gave the sea a cold look, snapped her suit down under her bum and started to walk. Then, at the last moment, Evie flung herself in the sand and caught her mother’s leg, hugging her thigh in terrible supplication.
‘Evie, please stop that.’
While my sister checked round her with vague eyes and loudly said, ‘Megan, what did you do to Evie?’
And I walked away from them in silence, and kept walking until the water covered my thighs.
Then I screamed.
‘Whuu! Freezing!’
But it pulled all the uncertainty out of my bones – the surprise of lifting your feet and finding there was no need for sand. I made my way through the wave’s sharp swell, towards the flat line of the horizon. By the time I turned back to the shore, pushed and loved by all that weight of water, I was happy.
I watched from the sea as Aileen straggled up the beach to tend to Evie, and I realised that her thin body wasn’t fit, it was just busy. You could see it in the hunch of her shoulders; how she might walk at speed, but she took no pleasure in it.
Conor would stay in the water for another twenty minutes, his windsurf board forgotten on the roof of the car. Shay, meanwhile, had fallen backwards on the lime-green, polka-dot rug, belly to the sky. Which left Sean, and Sean’s lacklustre desiring – because we all wanted him to want us. At least I think we did, disporting ourselves (isn’t that the word?) about the place where he sat, our bodies shocked into delight by the cold sea. There we were: Fiona, who was a sort of dream, and his wife who did not matter, and me, who was – for these few moments at least – the bouncing girl. As I came up the short slope of the beach, and bent for my towel, and flung my hair back and said, ‘Hooo-eeee!’ I was the girl who liked it. The fat one.
I was the nightmare.
Or I felt like the nightmare. It must have been the way he looked at me.
This tiny drama happened and then disappeared immediately, as if by arrangement, and we sat around on a spoiled patchwork of towels, as though used to pretending that everyone was fully dressed. We talked about the year we realised you could have more than one bathing suit – which, in my case, was the year in question, when I
