In the last days of March, they sat in a room full of ghastly china figurines and discussed their daughter with a lemur of a woman – all eyes, and quick little hands – who had been seeing Evie, at great expense, for the previous two months. She looked at them and twitched her head sideways.
‘Now. Let’s talk about you guys, OK?’ Not OK.
And sometime in the next week, Sean Vallely walked out of his house with nothing, not even a jacket, and he drove, in the middle of the night, to my door.
It was a weeknight: some normal night without him. It might have been two in the morning. I woke to the sound of the bell and the rattle of the letter box. Sean was crouched down, saying my name, trying not to wake the neighbours.
I was not quite awake, myself. I thought someone had died. Then I remembered that Joan was already dead: I had no one left, now, except Fiona. So it was my sister, then – though it seemed so unlikely; Fiona was not, somehow, the dying type. I pulled the door open and he was standing outside in the weather. And the first thing I said was, ‘Is she dead?’
‘Let me in, will you?’
‘Oh, sorry.’
He came inside the door – not very far – he crossed the threshold and then he leaned back against the wall. Every bit of his face was wet, and when I kissed him, he tasted of rain.
I said it to Sean once – I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together – and he looked at me as though I had just blasphemed.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.
As far as he is concerned, there is no cause: he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.
In which case, Evie’s room is like something after the tide went out: dirty feathers, scraps of paper, endless bits of cheap, non-specific plastic, and some that are quite expensive:
‘Do you know how much those fucking things cost?’ says Sean, going through the compacted filth of the Hoover bag, looking for a game from her Nintendo.
My stuff, on the other hand, does not matter. A Chanel compact, skittering across the floor, my phone pushed off the arm of the sofa, the battery forever after temperamental.
‘Gawd,’ says Evie.
She does not say ‘sorry’, that would be too personal.
Evie was always a bit of a barreller, a lurcher; her elbows are very close to her unconscious. At one stage they were going to have her checked for dyspraxia, by which they just meant ‘clumsiness’, but I guarantee you I have seen her move with great finesse. In this house, she is only clumsy around things that belong to me.
She eats nothing she is asked to eat, and everything that is forbidden. But she eats. Which I consider a minor miracle. She filches, she sneaks and crams. She waits – a bit like myself, indeed – until her father is not there. The place we meet most often is at the fridge door.
Two months ago, when Sean was at the gym and Evie was complaining I had finished all the mayonnaise, I tossed my bag on the kitchen table and said, ‘Why don’t you go and buy your own fucking food?’
Not pretty, but true.
Evie looked at me, as though noticing me for the first time. Later that day, she said something to me – something that wasn’t just a whine, like, ‘Why don’t you have Sky TV?’
She said, ‘I can’t believe you have so many shoes.’
And I had to leave the room to stuff my knuckles in my mouth, and pretend to bite into them, behind the door.
I look for my hiking boots and find them eventually on a shelf, wrapped up in a paper bag that came all the way from Sydney. I have not worn them since: my life, it seems, took the kind of turn that can only be effected in high heels. I take them out of the bag and the red dust of Australia shakes out on to our kitchen floor. My dreaming boots. I put them on and walk outside.
The afternoon snow has a shining crust that gives underfoot as I cross the garden and open the gate and join all the other tracks on the path into town. The slush has frozen back to ice in the shade and the difficulty pulls my eyes constantly downwards. I take one treacherous step after the next, and for the first while, I can not shake the rant.
It’s hard, taking second place to a child – it was bad enough taking second place to her mother – and I remember what Sean said about me in his report to Rathlin Communications (now deceased – the ironies in that), when I took a sneaky look, and read where he had written – there was much praise there too, of course – that I was ‘most ideally suited to a secondary role’.
That stung.
They underestimate me, I think. They underestimate my tenacity.
On Rathmines Road there is grit under my feet and the paths are walked clear. There aren’t many cars, but the buses are running, and they leave moraines of dirty slush on either side of the road.
I pass the Observatory Lane, a shanty row of shops, BlackBerry Lane; the rugby pitches in front of St Mary’s glutted with snow. The clouds have cleared, the sky is high and blue, the green dome of Rathmines church is still capped with white. The canal cuts a clean line under the bridge, the black water reflects the frozen water on its banks, and I am glad of the fresh air, my dreaming boots walking me into Dublin town. I remember the first Aborigine I saw, after maybe a week in Sydney, how very black he was and how very poor: you travel so far to realise that it’s all true, all of it, like my father in his last days,
But we weren’t wrong to hope, myself and Conor, back in our Australian days. And I am not wrong to hope, now: to hold on to Sean, and love him, and to try to love his daughter.
She is there at the bus stop, as arranged, talking on the phone. I recognise her immediately and then see, afterwards, what she is: a schoolgirl who is not allowed to walk down a city-centre street alone – not even in the snow, when the monsters that wait for schoolgirls surely have other things on their minds. I feel like taking her drinking. I feel like telling her to get out now, while the going is good. Not bother growing up.
She spots me and puts away the phone. I see that she is wearing, on this cold day, almost nothing. A short denim skirt, opaque tights, a little black cotton jacket, a gingham scarf with added bobbles and metallic threads. Her only concessions to the freezing weather are black fingerless gloves and Ugg boots. Maybe her coat is in her backpack. I can only imagine the fight before she left the house.
‘Uggs!’ I say, coming up to her. ‘It comes to us all.’
To which she gives a long-suffering smile.
I am beginning to understand Evie’s silences, which come in many varieties. Her chat, on the other hand, is endlessly the same: hard to listen to and harder still to remember. I don’t know how Sean stays sane. It is mostly comprised of opinions, as she sifts through likes and dislikes of the kind you can choose on MTV: I don’t like this, I really like that. My friend Paddy says she really likes this, and I’m like, ‘How can you like that?’ This is mixed with scenes from movies, some small problems about the future of the planet, and some large problems about the dragon game she used to play online but doesn’t now because no one is
I feel that the world might be better if it was run by girls who are nearly twelve, the ability they have to be fully moral and fully venal at the same time. Capitalism would certainly thrive.
‘Do you want to look around the shops?’ I say, and get a response that is alert, almost animal. ‘OK.’
‘Where do you want to go?’
A look around the shops means, it turns out, for Evie, a look at shops that sell cheap soap; either ecologically aware, or freshly made.
