Girl Unknown (16 page)

Some time before midnight, I heard her voice, words muffled by their passage through floor and ceiling. She was alone up there and I pictured her sitting on the bed, knees drawn up to her chin, talking on her phone to a friend or a boyfriend, filling them in on the new turn her life had taken. I thought of the room surrounding her – the pitched ceiling under the eaves, the paint still fresh and gleaming from the attic conversion completed in the last year. I thought of the striped bedding, the lamp
plugged in on the floor, the wall of plastic storage boxes containing some of the children’s old toys and clothes that I couldn’t bring myself to throw out. Boxes of nostalgia, things that were precious to me, now a part of her domain. I tried to tell myself that this was just a temporary arrangement, a fleeting stay until she had recovered. But as I listened to her voice, the high, light note of her laughter coming from up there under the roof, I felt a trickle of doubt. She didn’t sound to me like a girl who wanted to end it all. She sounded relaxed, as if she were settling in. ‘Make yourself at home,’ I had told her, when really I meant nothing of the sort.

I woke up early on the first morning of the new term, and was out of bed, showered and dressed before anyone else had stirred. David came down some time afterwards, his eyes still puffy, wordlessly fixing a pot of coffee while I sat at the counter, eating toast and making a list on my iPhone.

‘Are the kids getting up?’ I asked, after he had taken his first sip.

‘There’s movement. Robbie’s in the bathroom. Zoë’s not going into college so I don’t expect we’ll see her until this evening.’

It was disconcerting – already he was including her in the collective ‘kids’.

Holly came downstairs, followed by her brother, the volume of noise in the kitchen rising with their presence – the clatter of spoons and bowls, the low-key grumbling – and soon enough it was half past eight and we were gathering in the hall, packing lunches into school bags and pulling on coats.

‘Should we check on her?’ I asked David, as he came downstairs with his bag, taking his cycling helmet from the coat-stand.

‘She needs to rest, Caroline, after what she’s been through.’

The kids were piling out of the door now, getting into the car, and David was wheeling his bike down the path. I stood there, looking up the stairs, feeling uneasy. I didn’t like the thought of her being alone in my house. I imagined her tiptoeing down from the attic as soon as we’d driven off, nosing around our bedroom, picking over my things.

I ran up the stairs, making sure my footfall was audible. Knocking sharply on the door, I heard her call, ‘Come in,’ and pushed the door open.

She was lying on her side, propped on one elbow, her head resting on her hand, reading
Madame Bovary
.

‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Yep.’

‘Well,’ I said, as she glanced up from her book, a hazy look on her face as if her attention was still with the novel, ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going now.’

‘Right.’

She appeared pale and slight, the long sleeves of her nightdress pulled down over her wrists. I hesitated a moment, my eye caught by the coverlet over the bed. It took me a moment to recognize it – a patchwork bedspread, triangles of blue and grey cotton stitched together into geometrical patterns. I had bought it in Thailand years before when I was not long out of college. Zoë must have found it among the storage boxes up there, which meant she had been snooping through our things. It
wasn’t as if there was anything secret or valuable hidden away, but I still felt angry and disheartened. It was another incursion by her into our lives, another presumption on her part that she was entitled to take possession of whatever she found. I considered saying something, but instinct told me it wasn’t worth it.

‘How’re you feeling?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer, just shrugged, her attention on the book again.

‘You know, if ever you want to talk,’ I began, ‘about what happened … about what led you to …’

She looked up sharply.

‘… I’d be happy to listen,’ I finished.

‘Right,’ she said, bemused, before she returned to her novel and lazily turned a page.

I backed out, stung by her dismissal of me. It wasn’t that I expected her to accept my offer, but a small show of appreciation would have been nice. It occurred to me that, by attempting suicide, she had got exactly what she wanted – her foot in the door – which made me doubt whether she had ever intended killing herself at all. By the time I got downstairs, David was already gone, so I left a key on the hall table, took one last look back up the stairs, and closed the door behind me.

The rain started that morning and continued all week – heavy, blistering downpours, monsoon-like in their unrelenting ferocity. The air in the hallway was heavy with the odour of damp clothes. Condensation on windows, heavy traffic, leaves clogged in drains pooling with water.

Every day, when we left the house, she was up there in
her room. When I came home in the evening, I’d find her curled up on the sofa with her book, eating a carrot, or watching TV with the others. She’d look up briefly when I came through the door, greet me with a wan smile, then return her attention to whatever she was absorbed in at the time. She wasn’t hostile, or even cold, but there was a mildness to her, a lack of engagement, that I found maddening. From what I could tell, she had reasonably recovered from her blip at Christmas. There was no evidence of lingering depression, no black moods. She seemed so docile, so willing to fade into the background, that it made me wonder had she any desire or intention to find an alternative place to live. Not that I mentioned it. Even after she had returned to college, David made it clear that she remained too fragile to live alone.

The month passed in a flurry of storms interspersed with unseasonably warm weather. It was as if the meteorological elements were somehow mirroring the uncertain climate within our home. As the weeks progressed, I felt Zoë’s position solidifying in the house, growing unquestionable. She was making more of an effort to help out and was, I suppose, largely unobtrusive. Tidy, hers was a quiet presence, but a presence nonetheless. And when the others were not around – when it was just me and her – she allowed the mask to slip, her polite charm vanishing, replaced by cool remoteness.

The precariousness of our situation was made clear to me one weekday evening – the occasion of our first serious argument about her. We were clearing away the dishes after dinner, David scraping plates into the bin and handing them to Holly, when Zoë stood up and, without a
word to any of us, left the room. In her wake, I heard the dull thud of the salad bowl being brought down hard on the counter. ‘Why is she allowed to get out of the dishes?’ Holly demanded.

‘Until she’s well –’ David began, but Holly cut him off.

‘There’s nothing wrong with her! Why do you keep tiptoeing around her?’

David put down the plate he was holding.

From upstairs came the jagged strains of Robbie’s cello. He, too, had been excused household chores but Holly wasn’t interested in that. ‘How much longer is she going to be here?’ she asked, her whole body stiff with tension. I could see how frustrated she was.

‘Sweetheart –’ I began, trying to calm her.

‘I’m sick of her!’ she declared, her voice rising to a screech.

‘Holly!’ David said sharply, but she was already turning from him. Seconds later we heard feet thundering up the stairs, the slam of her bedroom door. We looked at each other.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘She has a point.’

He turned from me, picked up another plate and continued scraping, but with a more committed air.

‘Can’t we talk about this?’ I asked. ‘Holly’s not happy.’

‘Holly’s behaving like a spoilt brat.’

‘I think you’re being unfair, David. This is her home and she’s feeling marginalized.’

‘I’m not saying Zoë should stay here indefinitely,’ he said, putting the plate and knife down, ‘but it’s only a few
weeks since she tried to kill herself. I’m not comfortable at the thought of her taking care of herself yet.’

‘Have you talked to Zoë about it? About how she’s feeling now, within herself?’

‘A little. I mean, she’s doing better but she’s still vulnerable. I think she needs our support.’

‘Shouldn’t she be getting professional help?’

‘How is she supposed to afford that?’

‘What about the university? Haven’t they got counsellors?’

‘I don’t think that’s the answer, Caroline.’

I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere. Turning back to the worktop I began scraping leftovers into a Tupperware box.

‘I’ll do something with Holly,’ he said, to appease me. ‘Something to make her feel special.’

‘Fine.’ I put the box into the fridge. Still I could feel him watching me. When I glanced at him, it was obvious there was something else on his mind. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been giving some thought to Zoë’s college fees,’ he began. Instantly my defences rose. ‘She hasn’t said it outright, but it’s clear that she hasn’t got much money. Gary isn’t exactly supportive and the part-time jobs barely pay her rent. I have the impression it might have been a contributing factor to what she did on Christmas Day.’

‘Where are you going with this?’ I asked, unable to keep the coldness from my voice.

He was standing opposite me, looking at me squarely. ‘I want to pay her college fees.’

A laugh escaped me, and I could see it startled him. ‘With what?’ I asked. ‘A big chunk of your salary goes to
pay the mortgage. Have you forgotten the loan we took out to do all this?’ I gestured with one hand to take in the new kitchen, the extension, with its wall of windows, revealing the garden beyond. Despite the bequest from my parents, our house renovation – the renovation of our marriage – had put pressure on our finances.

‘We’ll manage,’ he said, standing his ground.

‘What about all the other outgoings? Car payments, school fees, health insurance, not to mention cello lessons, piano lessons and the other after-school activities? It all adds up, David. How are you going to make your salary cover all that as well as college fees?’

He began to look shifty.

‘Can’t you pay for some of that stuff?’

I didn’t say anything, just stared.

‘Now that you’re working, you could cover the kids’ activities and the school fees. Maybe the health insurance, too.’

I could hardly believe what he was suggesting. ‘You want me to pay for Zoë’s college fees?’

‘I didn’t say –’

‘That’s what it amounts to, though.’

‘For God’s sake, Caroline. Is it so much to ask that you contribute a little? All these years, I’ve been shouldering the entire financial burden. Is it unreasonable to ask you to share the load now?’

Anger shot through every muscle and fibre. It was outrageous. All those years I had worked in our home, raising our children, keeping things running smoothly on the domestic front, leaving him free to pursue his career, all that time it had felt like there had been a pact between us,
a mutual appreciation of the other’s endeavours. Now, with the sweep of his words, he was devaluing all the years I had put into our family, our home, as if there were some kind of debt I needed to repay him. His suggestion that I should pay for Zoë’s education – and that was what it was, no matter how he tried to dress it up – was like a slap in the face.

‘I am not paying for that girl’s education,’ I said emphatically.

‘Hang on –’

‘No, David.’

I stepped past him quickly, unwilling to spend another second discussing it, and as I went into the hall, I felt it. The slightest movement of air coming from the top of the stairs, the faintest creak of a floorboard overhead. I moved into the middle and looked up, hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever had been listening.

Perhaps I had imagined it. All the bedroom doors were closed. Robbie’s cello was silent. I thought I heard laughter drifting down from his room. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else had overheard our entire conversation in the kitchen.

A little later in the week, I was in the office when out of the blue I got a call from Robbie’s school asking me to come at once. There had been an incident.

‘What happened? Is Robbie all right?’

‘He’s fine,’ the school secretary told me. ‘He’s in Mrs Campbell’s office at the moment.’

I had not seen Mrs Campbell, the headmistress, since the business with Aidan, and even hearing her name now
brought a prickling to my skin, like thousands of nerve-endings sitting up in fright.

‘I’m at work,’ I said, flustered. ‘I mean, is he hurt?’

‘Oh, no.
He
’s not hurt,’ she said, and my heart sank as she went on: ‘If it’s difficult for you, perhaps Robbie’s father could come. Either way, Mrs Campbell wants this sorted out immediately.’

There was no way I could ask David. He’d made it clear after the parent-teacher meeting in September that I needed to get over my humiliation.

‘I’ll be there in half an hour,’ I told her.

A short time later, when I parked my car outside the school and climbed the granite steps, I was filled with dread at going back there. Dread mingled with a niggling sense of annoyance. Why hadn’t I stood my ground at the time, insisted on moving Robbie to a different school? The whole staff knew what I had done. Did David get some kind of satisfaction from that? His petty revenge meted out piecemeal with every parent-teacher meeting for the next three years? Every school play, every sports day, every end-of-year Mass: did he quietly enjoy my humiliation at every occasion?

‘I’ll be brief,’ Mrs Campbell told me.

Ever the professional, she sat behind her desk and filled me in on the campaign of aggression that my son had been waging against his French teacher, Miss Murphy. It had been going on for some time, apparently, but Miss Murphy – in her twenties, this her first teaching job – had kept quiet on the matter, hoping it would resolve itself without her having to involve anyone else.

At first it was small, silly stuff: using the face of his
watch, he would reflect sunlight from the window into Miss Murphy’s eyes as she faced the class; he made a popping noise every time she finished a sentence; he would hum constantly, then deny it was him. Stupid stuff, the kind of petty misdemeanours that drive every teacher mad but not enough to warrant serious disciplinary steps. Lately, however, things had escalated. He had started throwing pens at her whenever her back was turned. When she came into the classroom, someone had drawn her likeness, breasts bared, on the whiteboard, with the caption ‘Come get it, boys!’ in a speech bubble from her mouth. She couldn’t prove it had been Robbie, but her suspicions leaned in his direction.