The next morning I was standing in the grand hall at reception waiting to check out when I got a phone call from Ireland on my mobile. It was a major breakthrough and I couldn’t believe my luck.
I was desperate to tell someone. I didn’t want to tell Joe. Things were still frosty between us after our discussion about having kids and I knew the story about Tess’s baby would spark off more arguments. I was going to wait for the right time to tell him. Mary was at a conference in Milan so I couldn’t talk to her. Deep down, the only person I really wanted to tell was Karen. She’d known Tess most of her life. So I swallowed my pride and texted her.
I have big news. Fancy meeting up for lunch tomorrow?
I was surprised when she texted back straight away.
Great. Got something to tell you too.
I suggested the café in Central Library in town. It wasn’t far from her clinic and the library had recently had a spectacular refurbishment. I’d taken some students there recently and I wanted to show her.
A curtain of drizzle was falling from an ashen-coloured sky as I stepped off the tram in St Peter’s Square. Central Library is Manchester’s Pantheon. It has white Corinthian columns, a two-storey portico and a dome façade. It stands out like a flying saucer above the red-brick industrial and gothic architecture that dominates the rest of the city. The recent refurbishment had transformed it. They’d created a new three-hundred-seater reading room, a gaming area with Xboxes and PlayStations and a children’s section in the basement based on The Secret Garden, one of my favourite childhood books. The dark stairwells and gloomy corridors that I remembered from my student days had been replaced by light and airy open spaces. Like a dried-fruit cake with its filling scooped out and replaced with sponge.
I hurried towards the entrance steps past the small homeless camp that had sprung up outside. Tents and anti-austerity banners filled the passageway between the library and the gothic town hall next door. A frazzled woman with henna-pink hair and an Irish accent asked me for money. I immediately examined her face. I’d quickly developed a habit of scrutinising tall gangly types with fair hair who vaguely resembled Mikey or me. Or anyone with an Irish accent born around 1960. I’d even followed a couple of candidates down the street for further inspection before telling myself to cop on.
And yet my sibling could easily be living on the streets. Maybe he or she hadn’t been adopted into a good family as I hoped, instead staying in the home and sent to one of the industrial schools and been scarred by neglect and abuse. The streets were teeming with damaged souls raised in institutions who’d never adjusted to normal life afterwards.
I rummaged in my purse for some change, handed the woman a two-pound coin and made my way up the steps.
Karen was sitting at the far end of the café on a grey retro sofa below a sepia image of marching suffragettes. Elegant in skinny jeans, a teal silk scarf and tan knee-length boots, she was talking intensely into her phone. She didn’t see me approach and, when she did, she ended the conversation abruptly. Looking flustered, she slipped the phone into the pocket of the camel coat beside her. I suspected Simon Whelan was on the end of that line. I felt like shaking her. How could she still be involved with him after everything that had gone on? But I hugged her instead. Our friendship was already strained. The last thing I wanted was to get into an argument about her love life.
We joined the queue at the food counter and picked up trays. I put a Diet Coke and halloumi salad on mine and she opted for a thick green smoothie and goat’s cheese panini.
She looked around. “Love the make-over. So light and spacious.”
She paid for both meals, waving away the tenner I held out to her. “My treat,” she said, unaware of the smooth-skinned Eastern European behind the till giving her the eye.
We sat back down on the sofa where we’d left our coats. It was lunchtime and the café was busy. Behind us a table of Chinese students were giggling and eating Lancashire Hot Pot and opposite an elderly couple in pastel-coloured rain-jackets were looking down at an iPad.
I ripped the plastic off my salad. “How’s my gorgeous goddaughter doing these days?” I asked.
Karen shifted in her seat. “She got an email last week about her place on the Erasmus programme.”
“Really?” I dug my fork into a chunk of halloumi. “Already?”
“She’s off to Rome in September.”
“Rome. Wow.”
Karen rolled her eyes and stirred her coffee. “Her dad’s pissed off because she’s chosen Italy and not Portugal or Brazil. He wanted her to improve her Portuguese.”
“I didn’t realise she saw much of Marco.”
She frowned and raised her goat’s cheese panini to her lips. “She sees more of him since she went to uni. He doesn’t live far from Sheffield now.”
We chatted a bit more about Alexia
