Читать книгу Once Lost - Ber Carroll - Страница 9

Chapter 4

Emma

Eddie does most of the cooking, and I can smell the sausages as soon as I open the front door. Slamming the door shut on the damp cold evening outside, I unfurl my scarf. Isla barges out from the kitchen and launches herself at my legs before I can get my coat off.

‘Mammyyyyy …’ she squeals.

Every evening I come home to this movie-star reception, and it never fails to lift my heart. No matter how bad my day has been, how innately bored or disheartened or unappreciated I feel, hearing the excitement in her voice, seeing the sheer delight on her face, is like a magic tonic.

I drink her in: pigtails crooked after a day at school, tracksuit pants that are a little too small on her, a smear of food — jam? — on her milky-white face. She’s bloody beautiful, my daughter, and it never ceases to amaze me that she came from me, that I’m capable of making something, someone, so exquisite.

Bending down to kiss her, I ask, ‘What didya learn at school today?’

‘Red Robot. He used to be Robber Red, but he got sent to jail …’

‘Interesting … And what sound does he make again?’

‘Rrrrr …’ Isla snarls.

‘Good girl.’

Hand in hand, we proceed to the kitchen. Eddie is in his work gear: navy blue overalls, steel-capped boots and a fluoro yellow vest. Dinner is sausages, mashed potato and beans, and he’s in the process of serving it up. Time is of the essence. We have half an hour before he leaves for his shift, so not a minute can be wasted.

I sit down, a steaming plate of food in front of me. The food warms me, as does the heat from the stove and the closeness between the three of us. This is what matters, I tell myself. At the end of the day, if you can’t come home to this, you have nothing. Even though it’s only for thirty minutes, it sustains me for much, much longer than that.

‘How was work?’ Eddie enquires between mouthfuls.

He generally waits a while before asking this question, allowing me the opportunity to talk about it first. It’s important, he maintains. It’s what I do all day long, and if he doesn’t know about it, then he doesn’t know me. So if I don’t start talking of my own accord, he asks.

‘The same,’ I reply, my tone noncommittal though I know Eddie will coax until I’ve told him everything.

‘The graduate, she’s settling in alright?’

‘Katie? Yeah, suppose so, even though she’s so fu—’ I swallow the swearword from the tip of my tongue. ‘So … indecisive … I have this crazy urge to shake her.’

‘What is inde … inde …’ Isla struggles to repeat the word.

‘Indecisive is someone who can’t make decisions, who can’t seem to make up their mind and get on with the job.’ I direct my next comment to Eddie, rolling my eyes in the process. ‘What do they teach them at bl—’ Another swearword down the hatch. ‘At university? To ask questions all day long?’ Immediately, I realise that this may be giving the wrong message to Isla and quickly qualify what I have just said. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with asking questions, love. You just have to make sure they are sensible questions, and that you don’t already know the answers. Alright?’

She nods, and then enquires gravely, ‘Do you really want to shake her?’

‘No. Of course not. That was just a joke.’

I need to watch what I say in front of her these days. Not just the swearing; everything else too.

Another time, maybe at the weekend when we have a moment alone and Isla’s not hanging on my every word, I’ll tell Eddie how I overheard Brendan talking to Katie today, and how he had a note of respect in his voice that’s never there when he speaks to me. I’ll tell Eddie how irrationally hurt I felt. Come to think of it, I was genuinely at risk of shaking him, Brendan, taking him firmly by the shoulders, shaking until his hair was ruffled and his tie askew and he finally noticed, really noticed, my existence.

We continue to eat, our conversation wandering round everything from work, to school, to a TV program that Eddie wants me to record tonight.

Then, suddenly, our time is almost up. Eddie wolfs the last of his dinner, rinses his plate under the tap, his stubble grizzling my skin as he kisses me farewell.

‘I’m off.’

‘Alright. See ya.’

Eddie is thirty-two, eight years older than me. He’s had two other significant relationships, and as a result he knows what he wants from life: a family and home. Mum says I’ve struck gold with Eddie, and this is one of those few occasions when she’s actually right. Inside his rough-and-ready exterior there’s something shiny and good and lasting. He came at the right time in my life, and apparently I came at the right time in his. He says he wouldn’t have been ready if I’d met him earlier, just ask his exes. As if I would!

Eddie is lingering, a twinkle in his eye.

‘Are you going to do it tonight?’ Isla asks breathlessly.

He cocks an eyebrow. ‘D’you think I should?’

‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ Her voice ascends with each affirmation, the last a shriek.

‘Alright.’

He steps towards the window, slides it back fully, and then pauses for dramatic effect. As the cold air rushes into the kitchen, he puts one hand on the sill and swings himself over to the other side. And with that he’s gone, into the dark, and we’re left with the open window and the startling draught. We’re laughing so hard you’d swear he’d never done it before.

Isla closes the window and I start to clear up. I begin a game, trying to come up with as many Red Robot words as I can.

‘Rock … Rabbit … Right … Rap … Rich … Rag …’

Isla sings each one after me.

When we run out of words, her little face puckers. ‘What day is it, again?’

‘Wednesday.’

She counts on her fingers. ‘Two days until the weekend.’

‘Yes,’ I say with false cheeriness.

We both hate the weekends. Well, every second one anyway. Like her, I count down on my fingers, my dread increasing as it gets closer and closer.

‘Rightio, Miss Red Robot … Time to rub you clean, and read you a story, and put you to sleep in your room …’

Her laugh is restrained, and I know I haven’t succeeded in distracting her.

Suddenly, Jamie looms between us, as menacing as he is invisible.

‘Time for bed,’ I chirp, as though the mere movement from one room to another is enough to make him disappear from our lives.

The weekend foists itself upon us, and once again the flat is hollow without Isla. Gone is her sing-song voice, musical laughter and frequent crescendos of ‘Mammy’. Her absence creates a pause. The tempo of our lives won’t resume until her return.

Every second weekend, two days and two infinitely long nights, she is in his care. I use the term ‘care’ loosely, because keeping a child up past her bedtime is not caring for her. Feeding her greasy junk food isn’t caring either, and neither is having your drunk, drug-using friends in the flat when she’s there. I know that the sheets she will sleep in have not been changed in weeks. I know that when she wakes in the morning she will have to switch on the TV and wait for hours until he remembers her and stumbles out of bed. I know all this for a fact because she has told me so. When she was younger and without the language skills to recount what her weekend had been like, I had to draw my own conclusions from her bloodshot eyes and clinginess and tantrums when she got home to me. That was harder. At least now we can speak about it and I can assure her that it isn’t normal, and that most people — most fathers — don’t live like that.

‘I hope he dumps her at his mother’s house again,’ I mutter to Eddie, who’s trying to talk me out of this dark mood I’m in.

‘Maybe he will. Look, Emma, try to distract yourself, otherwise you’ll go crazy.’

‘Don’t ask me to switch off. I can’t. I know Jamie. I can’t fuckin’ trust him. Not for one single moment. That’s what’s so fuckin’ hard.’

‘I know it’s not easy,’ Eddie says calmly, ‘but you need to find something to do other than worrying yourself sick. You need to find some other way of occupying yourself on these weekends.’

My helplessness bubbles into misdirected anger. No, Eddie, it is not easy. It’s downright heartbreaking, that’s what it is. Bloody hell, the most difficult part of being a parent is not childbirth — though at the tender age of eighteen, it was a horrendous shock — nor the sleepless nights that go on for years afterwards, nor the constant demands, negotiation and complaints that seem to come hand-in-hand with children of any age. The hardest part, for me, has been giving my child over to someone I don’t trust. A minute is too long. Two days and nights? No parent in the world should be asked to do that.

Eddie squeezes my shoulder. ‘Do something nice. Go and have a look around the shops. Or get your nails done.’

He’s anxious to get going. Saturday is a working day for him, even better than weekdays because he gets paid double time. We’re saving for a house of our own, and every extra euro that goes into our bank account brings him inordinate satisfaction, happiness even. As he sets off for work, he holds his cheerfulness in check, because he understands the depth of my misery.

After the door shuts — he saves the window exits for Isla — I spend some time staring at my fingernails. They’re uneven and dry. It’s been a long time since I had a manicure: my birthday last year. Isla came too and we sat in the salon like spoiled princesses, acting as if we did extravagant things like this all the time, when in fact it was our first time ever. Afterwards we went for a milkshake, cupping the tall pale-pink tumblers with our freshly painted hot-pink nails.

Instead of taking Eddie’s advice and slipping on my jacket to go out, I use my jagged-ended, dry fingers to tap out my mother’s number on the phone.

‘Emma!’ she exclaims. ‘I was just this minute thinking of you. How are you, love?’

My mother can drive me crazy more rapidly and profoundly than anyone else in the universe, yet — other than Louise — she’s always the one I go to when I’m down, or in trouble. I can’t lie to her. I can’t pretend to be happy when I’m not, and neither can she. If we were each able to gloss over our feelings, hide what we really thought, perhaps we would bicker less than we do.

‘Depressed.’

I don’t need to explain any further. Mum knows how painful these weekends are for me. In an ironic shift of time and responsibility, she herself used to feel similar pain and worry when I was with Jamie.

‘Please, Emma, he’s bad news,’ she would plead as I was headed out the door to meet him. ‘You can do so much better.’

Did I listen? No, of course not. I knew he was no good, but I craved the danger of being with him in the same way he craved the danger of alcohol and drugs. I felt so alive, buzzing with the excitement of living on the edge, not for one minute imagining I would fall over that edge and get pregnant, or that one day my own daughter — thanks to me — would be exposed to the very same Jamie-brand danger.

‘God love us,’ Mum says now. ‘If he were living with you, Family Services would be trying to protect her from him, but because you’re apart they don’t seem to care. It’s completely backward, that’s what it is.’

She’s right. It is backward, and it is wrong, so fuckin’ wrong. Jamie was oblivious to Isla for the first year of her life, barely aware of her existence. Then some stupid bloody counsellor suggested that he should see his daughter more regularly, forge a proper relationship with her. She was treating Isla like a pawn, like some sort of step in his recovery program instead of an incredibly vulnerable toddler. Of course I fought the weekend custody hard, but Jamie’s mum, Sue, weighed in, so respectable and full of guarantees, and the counsellor, unfortunately, seemed to have a lot of influence with the court.

‘It’s a terrible system,’ Mum laments again, ‘and I know you’ve tried as hard as you can to make them see sense. All we can do is pray, love, that’s all we can do.’

Three years ago, after Dad died from a sudden heart attack, my mother became religious. Amidst the dank stairwells and hallways of her block of flats, the perpetual smell and litter and dirt, and the drug deals happening virtually outside her front door, she found the pure, shining presence of God. Before she started quoting from the bible, my mother used to have a wicked turn of phrase. Before she started praying, she used to figure things out for herself, and yeah, she made many mistakes, but at least she wasn’t forever abdicating responsibility to a higher being. Even though we disagreed more violently back then, I prefer that sharper, less-devout version of my mother. But in a completely contradictory fashion, I do like the way she fosters Isla’s spirituality, and that she sometimes takes her to Mass and has instilled in her the ritual of praying before she sleeps at night. At times like this, when she’s with her father, Isla needs someone to watch over her and keep her safe. She needs God, no bloody doubt about it.

I talk to Mum for another ten minutes or so, chit-chatting about Isla and Eddie, the dismal weather and a morning tea she’s hosting after tomorrow morning’s Mass. We get through the conversation without snapping at each other. This in itself is testament to how utterly despondent and helpless I feel, and perhaps testament to Mum’s empathy, too.

Later on, I decide to do my nails after all, rubbing oil into the cuticles, pushing back the frayed skin, filing and shaping, buffing until they look shiny and healthy. Two coats of pale pink gloss later and they’re finished. Then I busy myself making a cup of tea, after which I send Louise a text: Home alone. Call me if you’re at a loose end. Need cheering up.

A mindless TV show later, I decide to call it a night. Though I take my time checking the door and windows, washing my face and brushing my teeth, Louise hasn’t replied by the time I turn out the light.

In the darkness, I do exactly what my mother and my daughter do before they fall asleep at night: I pray. My mother prays for world peace and the safety and health of her family. Isla’s prayers are recitals from her prayer book. My prayers are the brutal kind.

Please, God, just make him go away. Let him fall out with one of his shady friends and have to go on the run. Or have him meet some woman from another city, preferably another country, and move away permanently. Or — forgive me for this — let him die. An overdose, car accident, serious illness, I don’t care. Anything to get him out of our lives forever. Amen.