‘That was nice of you.’
‘Not really. You should have seen the state of it. And Rosaleen didn’t know I was there so I had to go back to collect the tray, which I was totally expecting to be full. But it was on the wall outside of the house, and all the dishes were clean and all the food was eaten and everything. And this was sitting on the plate.’ I took it back from her and examined it again. ‘Sweet of her, wasn’t it?’
‘Tamara…’ Sister Ignatius reached her arm out and held on to the easel, which was so light it offered her no support.
‘Are you okay? You look a little…’ I didn’t get to finish as Sister Ignatius looked so weak, I immediately wrapped my arms around her and remembered that despite her youthful aura and her childish giggles, she was in her seventies.
‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she said, attempting to laugh. ‘Stop fussing. Tamara, I need you to slow down when you speak, and go back over what you said. You found that on the tray when you went to collect it?’
‘Yes, on the front garden wall,’ I said slowly.
‘But that’s impossible. Did you see her put it there?’
‘No, I just saw the tray from my bedroom window. She must have done it when I was elsewhere in the house. Why are you asking so many questions? Are you mad at me for going over? I know I probably shouldn’t have, but Rosaleen was being so secretive.’
‘Tamara,’ Sister Ignatius closed her eyes and she looked more tired when she opened them, ‘Rosaleen’s mother, Helen, has multiple sclerosis, which has unfortunately been getting worse with the years. She’s wheelchair-bound, which is why Rosaleen has become her full-time carer. So you see, she couldn’t have wheeled herself out to the front garden with this tray.’ She shook her head. ‘Impossible.’
‘She could have,’ I replied. ‘If she just put the tray on her lap, then she’d have her hands free to wheel herself—’
‘No, Tamara, there are steps in the front garden.’
I looked in the direction of the bungalow and even though I couldn’t see it from where we were, I visualised the steps. ‘Oh, yeah. That’s odd. So who else lives in the bungalow?’ I asked.
Sister Ignatius was quiet, her eyes moving around as she thought hard. ‘No one, Tamara,’ she whispered. ‘No one.’
‘But I saw someone. Think, Sister,’ I barked, panicking. ‘Who did I see in the workshed? A woman all hunched over with goggles, work goggles, and long hair. There were these glass things all over the place. Who could she be?’
Sister Ignatius shook her head over and over.
‘Rosaleen has a sister—she told me about her. She lives in Cork. She’s a teacher. Maybe she came to visit. What do you think?’
Sister Ignatius continued to shake her head. ‘No. No. It couldn’t be.’
Shivers ran down my spine and my body was covered in goose bumps. The look on Sister Ignatius’ usually calm face didn’t do much to calm me either. She looked as though she’d seen a ghost.
I stopped interrogating Sister Ignatius. She had become grey in the face and had lost all of her colour.
‘Sit down, Sister. Come on, sit here on the stool. You’re okay, it’s just hot out today.’ I tried to remain calm as I helped her to the wooden stool. I moved it nearer to the tree trunk so that she was completely shaded. ‘Let’s just rest here for a minute and then we’ll go back to the house.’
She didn’t respond, she just let me guide her, one hand around her waist, the other holding her hand. Once seated, I pushed back some loose strands of hair from her face. She didn’t feel hot.
I heard my name being called in the distance and saw Weseley running. I waved my hands wildly to let him know I could see him. By the time he reached me he was breathless and had to hunch over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath.
‘Hi, Sister,’ he finally said, giving her a goofy wave even though he was right beside her. ‘Tamara,’ he turned to me, alert, ‘I heard it all.’
‘Heard what?’ I asked impatiently, while he tried to catch his breath.
‘Rosaleen.’ Pant. ‘In the kitchen.’ Pant. ‘With my dad.’ Pant. ‘You were right. About it all. About the sugar and the salt and,’ pant, ‘her coming home early. How did you know?’
‘I told you,’ I quickly looked at Sister Ignatius but she was staring distantly into space, looking as though she was going to faint at any moment. ‘It was written in the diary.’
He shook his head disbelievingly and I became angry. ‘Look, I don’t care if you don’t believe me, just tell me what—’
‘I believe
you
, Tamara, I just don’t believe
it
. You know?’
‘Yeah, I know. I’m the same.’
‘Okay, I broke away from Arthur at ten o’clock this morning. We separated so that I’d take care of the walnut trees on the south of the grounds. We’re having a problem with walnut blight,’ he looked to Sister Ignatius, ‘so we’ve to try to maintain the soil pH above 6.0, cut out all the affected shoots—’
‘Weseley, shut up,’ I interrupted.
‘Right, sorry. I couldn’t stop thinking about what you’d said and so I went to the gatehouse and I hid outside the kitchen window in the back garden. I heard it all. Rosaleen started talking about her mum first of all, saying her health had deteriorated. She has MS. She asked him a few questions about her, some advice that kind of thing. I think she was just delaying him.’
I nodded. This matched Sister Ignatius’ story so at least I knew Rosaleen hadn’t lied to me about her mother.
‘My dad really annoyed me. I felt like yelling at him and telling him to go upstairs. But just as he said he was going up to your mam, Rosaleen started talking about her. My dad was keen to get upstairs to see her, but Rosaleen was insistent. She said that…’ He paused.
‘Come on, Weseley tell me.’
‘Just promise to be calm when I tell you, till we work something out.’
‘Okay, okay,’ I hurried him.
‘Right.’ He spoke slower now, studying me as he spoke. ‘She said that this had happened before. That your mum was prone to depression and that she regularly goes into states like this where she withdraws from everybody—’
‘That’s bullshit!’
‘Tamara, listen. And she said that your dad and your mum kept it from you all of your life and so you weren’t to know about it. She said your mum was on antidepressants and that the best thing to do was to leave her alone in her room until the depression passed. She said that’s what they always did.’
‘Bullshit!’ I interrupted again. ‘That’s a lie! That’s a fucking lie! My mother has never been like this before. She’s, she’s—uughh, she’s a lying bitch! How dare she say that Dad never told me? I would know. I was home with them every day. She was never like this. Never!’
I was pacing, I was shouting, my blood was boiling. I felt so angry I wanted to tear the sky down. I felt so out of control, like there was nothing I could do to make everything okay again. I questioned myself. Was there some way that I could have missed Mum’s behaviour? Had she been like this before and I couldn’t remember? Was I such a terrible daughter that I could so easily be put off? I thought about the weekends away—were they somewhere else? I thought about her faint smiles to Dad, the fact that she was never overenthusiastic like other mums, the fact she never gave anything away. No, that meant nothing. She just wasn’t emotional, she never cried, she wasn’t sentimental, but it didn’t make her
depressed
. No, no, no, how dare Rosaleen say that my father had lied when he could do nothing to defend himself. It was wrong. It was all wrong.
Weseley tried to take hold of me and calm me down but I was screaming, that much I can remember. And then I
remember Sister Ignatius finally coming to, standing and coming towards me with open arms and that sweet, sad, but older, so much older face than a few minutes ago, that was now so sad and pitying that I could hardly look at her.
‘Tamara, you have to listen to me now…’ she was saying, but I didn’t want to hear. I thrashed and squirmed away from them. And then I remember running, running so fast while I heard them shouting my name. I fell a few times, felt Weseley behind me, then grabbing me. I screamed and kept running, faster and faster thinking he was on my heel. I don’t know when he stopped running, when he decided to let me go, but I kept on going despite feeling an ache in my chest and finding it hard to breathe. Hot tears ran from the corner of my eyes and straight back to my ears, my speed not giving them opportunity to fall down properly. I ran out of the woods and straight onto the road, and the roar of an engine and a screech of tyres and a long car horn sounded in my ear and I froze. I absolutely froze. I waited to be hit, for the bumper to crash into my side and for me to go flying up over the windscreen, but it didn’t happen. Instead I felt the heat of the grid beside my leg, so close, too close, and the dark part of me in the shadows felt it wasn’t close enough. Then the vehicle door opened and there was shouting. A man. My hands were over my ears, I was crying over and over, unable to catch my breath and I could hear my name being yelled over and over. Angry, aggressive, accusing. Like it was my fault.
Finally it got softer and arms were around me and then I was being rocked gently, the noises died down, and I realised I was in Marcus’s arms, the travelling library was beside us and I was sobbing uncontrollably onto his shirt.
I finally looked up at him. His face was concerned, afraid.
‘So where should we go now? Paris? Australia?’ he asked softly, smiling.
‘No,’ I sobbed. ‘I want to go home. I just want to go home.’
I was silent in the bus on the way to Killiney. Marcus had tried to ask questions but gave up after a while. I finally stopped crying, my body stopped shaking and now only trembled a little. I felt weak from the emotion, tired from it all. I finally wiped my eyes with my snotty tissue one last time, and took a deep breath and exhaled.
‘That sounds better,’ Marcus said, looking at me as we stopped at red lights. ‘So, are you going to talk to me now?’
I cleared my throat and smiled at him. ‘Hello, Marcus. I want to get really drunk.’
‘You know what, that’s exactly what I was thinking.’ He smiled mischievously and pulled the bus over outside the off-licence as soon as the lights were green. ‘You’re a woman after my own heart,’ he said before closing the door and running into the shop.
I should have told him then. Again. My age that is. I could have saved a lot of heartache. Less than three weeks to go till my seventeenth birthday and that was probably still too young for him. I’m not quite sure what I was thinking, if I was really able to think at all. I felt numb, and wanted to be more numb. I didn’t want to feel, I didn’t want to have to think. My life felt so out of control that I wanted to lose control of me too. Just for a little while, at least.
We were only an hour away from Killiney. An hour was nothing, but it was a world away for me. I’d been ripped away from my home, my place; I felt like my identity had been taken away with it. I don’t think some people know what it’s like to be taken away from their home. Sure, you can be homesick, or you can move away and miss an area. But we were forced to move. Some bank, some place that had
nothing to do with warmth, with memories, with families, had chased my father, had tormented him so much he’d taken his own life. Then, after they’d done that, they’d taken our building of memories, our sense of place, the foundations of our family. And while we were cast out, forced to live with family members we barely knew, it just sat here, huge and empty, with a For Sale sign nailed to the boundary wall like two fingers being held up to us, while we had to sit outside and watch it like strangers, without being able to return.
‘Do you still have the keys to this place?’ Marcus asked as we weaved through the windy roads that led through the area.
I nodded. Another lie.
‘Hey, slow down there, Tamara.’ He looked at me knocking back my third can of beer. ‘Leave some for me,’ he laughed.
I finished it and burped loudly.
‘Sexy,’ he laughed, keeping an eye on the road.
If you ask me now, I’ll honestly say that’s the first moment that I consciously decided what I wanted to do. Of course I can blame him for putting it in my head, but really it was me. Perhaps I’d known from the second I ran out onto the road and he put his arms around me that we’d end up at the house and I’d end up on the floor with him in my bedroom. Maybe I’d decided it the first day I met him. Maybe I did have it all planned. Maybe I was more in control than I thought. Or maybe, the third beer had played havoc with me in my emotional state. I pointed out places to Marcus as we drove, telling him stories, telling him the names of people who lived there. I didn’t wait for responses. It wasn’t really relevant if he answered or not. I was saying them for me. My voice felt like it was coming from elsewhere. I didn’t feel like me. I didn’t really care who I was any more. I had given up pretending to be the person I’d kept trying to be, the same as Zoey and Laura, the same as everybody else around us, as
though by being that way we’d get along in life so much better. Well, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working for Laura, it hadn’t worked for Zoey and it most certainly hadn’t worked for me.
We pulled up outside the house. I told Marcus to park the bus down a nearby laneway so that it wouldn’t be seen from the road. The last thing we wanted was for the neighbours to come looking for books. The house wasn’t visible from the road. The large black gates, with cameras, locked between the tenfoot walls were enough to dissuade any burglar. Dad had put so much time and effort into those gates: drawn plans up over and over again, asked me and Mum what we thought, so proudly walked me to the entrance to ask my opinion and I had never answered; told him I never cared. I hurt him all the time.
I think I was telling Marcus this as we walked along, but I wasn’t sure.
‘I don’t have the zapper for the gate on my keys,’ I heard myself say. ‘I’ll have to climb over and open the gates from the house.’
I’d a system. I’d done this so many times. Mum and Dad had taken my keys most evenings after school so that I wouldn’t escape, but despite its height I’d navigated the gate safely on many an occasion. I could hear Marcus warning me, pointing out which way to go, but I didn’t follow him. On autopilot I just scaled the gate and landed safely on the other side. I heard him applauding as I walked the long driveway to our house. He may have thought he was there with me, but I was nowhere near him.
Our house—glass, stone, wood, bright, light, modern, airy. It was like something from a catalogue. Stone to camouflage parts of the house to match the rock it was built into, wood to blend into the woodlands surrounding it, glass to give us
views of the sea that stretched on for ever. Dad had tried to create the most perfect place that neither of us would ever want to leave. He did that right. I knew the front door would be locked, and still on autopilot I made my way round the back of the house.
I saw the tennis ball in the back garden that was always there, lying soggy and wet. It had flown over from our nearby tennis court into the garden and I’d been too lazy to collect it. I’d been playing with Dad that day. Spring had arrived, we’d started using the outdoor court again, but I was playing horrendously. After a winter of having not picked up a racket, I was rusty. I kept missing the ball, kept hitting it over the fence and had grown tired of the times I’d had to search for the ball in the garden. Dad had been patient, he hadn’t yelled, he hadn’t said anything. He’d even gone searching for the ball when it wasn’t his fault. He even purposely fluffed a few shots, and that had angered me even more. I remember him in his little white tennis shorts, his white collared T-shirt, his sport socks that he pulled up too high, which embarrassed me even though I was the only one who could see. My lovely Dad…
In the back there were the same garden statues—an old chubby couple with gardening tools in their hands, the man revealing the crack of his behind—that my granddad, my dad’s dad, always used to talk to before he died. He called the woman Mildred and the man Tristan, for no particular reason, but it had made me laugh since I was a child and Mildred and Tristan had become part of the family. But Mum obviously hadn’t arranged for them to be moved and so Mildred and Tristan remained the only inhabitants of the house. Near the washing line there was a red plastic peg in the grass, dropped there from the last wash.
I climbed up onto the swimming pool roof, where the old
weather-beaten wooden ladder was still lying. I’d stored it there for my midnight escapes. In the newest addition to the house, the pool was covered over by a blue canvas, our six pool loungers lay diagonally by the window, still with their pink cushions waiting for me and my morning swim. A deflated swimming ring sat on one of the sun loungers. I’d brought it back from Marbella. It was a pink flamingo. Manuel, a boy I’d kissed last year, had given it to me and I was intent on bringing it home. It lay there now with nobody to use it. A discarded kiss.
Once on the roof, I climbed the ladder to my bedroom balcony. Nobody ever locked my bedroom balcony door. It was supposedly too high up, too inaccessible for any burglar to reach. My head was spinning as I finally pulled myself up onto the balcony. The weather had cooled now as we had driven towards the coast. The sea air was cold, the wind took away the July heat and brought the scent of seaweed and salt. I looked out to the beach and took in the view, remembered sixteen years of summers with Mum and Dad, and nights out with friends. I don’t know how long I’d been standing there watching the imaginary family writing their names in the sand and the little girl burying her daddy in the sand, when I remembered Marcus at the gates.