‘Yeah I’m fine,’ he fibbed. ‘Didn’t sleep great last night.’
‘You’re not finishing your brekkie?’ she asked, fork poised.
He laughed and shook his head. ‘I’m leaving room for a Mammy Dinner! She’s cooking a roast for me so she can “feed me up”, so she said, so help yourself.’
Orla speared a sausage and hash brown. ‘I love hash browns!’ she raved, eating with relish. Do you want another cup of coffee?’
‘No thanks. I think I’ll head, if that’s OK with you. I want to get on the road.’ Jonathan tried to keep his tone light. His stomach was knotted, he felt faintly queasy.
‘No prob,’ his friend said distractedly. Orla’s topknot had just come askew and she was tucking her long auburn hair back into the tortoiseshell comb that kept it in place. She didn’t realize just how agitated he really was, he thought. He had never told her about his past. He hadn’t told any of his friends about his childhood secret. He just wanted to be normal with them and not have them feel sorry for him. Dublin was his future, he’d reasoned. He never wanted to look back.
But sometimes, in spite of your best intentions, you had to, he thought morosely, folding up his paper neatly and taking a last slug of coffee. ‘Are you going to stay the night at home and come back early in the morning or will you drive back tonight?’ Hair sorted, Orla tucked into the cream cake she had treated herself to.
‘I’m going to come back tonight. It’s bad enough having to get up on Monday mornings to go to work without having to get up at the crack of dawn and drive for an hour and a half from Rosslara to Dublin, in bumper-to-bumper traffic.’ Jonathan grimaced. He stood up and leaned over and kissed her. ‘Be good!’
‘Don’t be a spoilsport,’ Orla grinned. ‘I’ll be as bad as I get the chance to be. Ciao, baby, drive carefully.’
‘I will,’ he assured her before making his way in between the tables in the crowded restaurant to the exit. Eating breakfast in a café had become the new fad in Dublin, a sure sign that the grinding recession that had banjaxed the country in the last decade was over, he reflected. It was all so . . . nineties . . . so cosmopolitan. It was far from hash browns he’d been reared, but now a fry-up wasn’t considered a fry-up without them.
Sunday was the only day they had had a cooked breakfast when he was growing up. It was such a treat to come home from Mass, dressed in his Sunday best, and have his mother put the rashers and sausages on the pan and to listen to them sizzling and spitting while she fried bread on another pan. How they would all tuck into this once-a-week treat with gusto, and then, because it was Sunday, have a chocolate gold-grain biscuit afterwards, to dunk into the second cup of tea. Now every day was a fry-up day, it seemed.
The weather had changed, and it was spitting rain as he hurried through the car park wishing he could just go home and flop and not have to face the ordeal ahead. He was committed to attending the removal now, he thought ruefully, having phoned his mother the previous evening to assure her that he would be coming and would give her a lift to the church, much to her delight.
He was veering from being bullish and determined to apprehensive and subdued. He had tossed and turned all night, his thoughts whirling, trying to keep his anger at bay and his disgust with himself that he had never confronted his abuser.
Higgins would look him in the eye as brazen as you like and greet him as though nothing had ever happened in the past. ‘You’re looking well, laddie, the big smoke is suiting ya, isn’t it, Nancy?’ he’d said the last time Jonathan had been home, and he and Nancy were walking up their garden path and Higgins had been coming down his, clomping along breathlessly, leaning on his cane. Jonathan, as usual, had been furious at his nerve but because his mother was with him he had forced himself to say hello.
‘Wimp!’ he’d chastised himself privately, wondering if Nancy hadn’t been with him would he have confronted Gus Higgins or told him to fuck off. Now it was too late. His pervert neighbour was going to his grave and Jonathan would never have the satisfaction of seeing fear in his eyes, or apprehension, at the anticipated knock on the door from the guards. His chance was gone because he hadn’t had the guts to deal with the perpetrator of his abuse, Jonathan castigated himself, loathing himself for his failings.
Right now he felt very sick and fluttery in his stomach. He got into the car just as the drizzle turned into a sudden downpour. He and Orla had driven to Omni in their own cars so that he could head off after their breakfast. He was sitting at the traffic lights at McDonald’s when a thought struck him and he cursed loudly. The bloody curtain material – he’d forgotten to bring it. His mother had assured him she had cleared the decks and was all ready to commence making them. What an idiot he was; now he’d have to drive back to Drumcondra. ‘Prat!’ he cursed himself, heading right towards town instead of left as he’d intended. The traffic was heavy even though it was Sunday as he sat opposite the Skylon, idling in neutral, and he realized irritably as he saw people streaming along the wet footpaths, decked in their county’s colours, and cars with flags fluttering out of their windows that there
