Читать книгу Rules of the Road - Ciara Geraghty - Страница 10

The ferry takes three hours to get to Wales, and to be honest, I could not say much about the journey other than it passed.

I can say that Wales smells different. And it sounds different. Mostly fumes and the blaring of car horns as I release the handbrake and now we’re on the ramp again, but this time I’m driving down the ramp, onto foreign soil.

I have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Iris does.

She tells me that I am going to buy two ferry tickets back to Dublin for Dad and myself.

I nod and don’t say anything because I need to think.

THINK.

On the way into the car park, I have a panicky thought about what side of the road English people drive on. And Welsh people. It’s the same side as us, isn’t it? Of course it is. It’s just … I hate driving in unfamiliar places. Or in the dark. Or in bad weather. I have never driven in another country. The routes I drive are well-worn and familiar. The school run, back in the day. Over to Santry where the Alzheimer’s Society holds a few events during the week; singsongs and tea and buns and round-the-table conversations like what’s your favourite food and who’s your favourite singer and whatnot. Frank Sinatra always gets a mention, and not just from Dad. Semolina is a hit when puddings are discussed. I made it for the girls once. They wouldn’t believe me when I told them it was dessert. I ended up eating theirs as well as mine. They were right, it was lumpy.

Inside the car, nobody talks. I glance in the rear-view mirror. Dad is asleep, his head resting against the window. The collar of his shirt gapes around his narrow neck. Every day it seems there is less of him. Iris, in the passenger seat, looks out her window. There is nothing to see but lines and lines of cars parked beneath harsh fluorescent lighting. These places remind me of scenes in films where something frightening happens. Something shocking. Iris loves horrors. I like period dramas. When we go to the cinema, we compromise with comedies or biopics.

I reverse into a torturously narrow space in jerking stops and starts, which shakes Dad awake. He straightens and shouts, ‘Hard down on the left,’ and I stiffen, my neck snapping as I twist my head every which way until the car has been parked without incident.

I look at Iris. ‘We’re here,’ I say, unnecessarily.

‘How are you going to get out?’ she says, nodding towards the massive Land Rover inches away from my car door.

‘I’ll climb out your side.’ There is no question of me attempting to park in a more equitable manner. This is as good as it gets. Iris opens her door, hooks her hands behind her knees, and lifts her legs out of the car. Then she places her hands on the headrest and the door handle and uses them as levers to pull herself into a standing position. I hand her the crutches, and she leans on them, her knuckles white with effort. She has a wheelchair in her house. ‘In case of emergencies,’ she told me, when I spotted it, folded, behind the clothes horse in her utility room. I don’t think she’s ever sat in it. I stretch into the back seat and open Dad’s door. ‘What are we doing now?’ he wants to know, and his face is pinched with the kind of worry that the nursing staff talk about avoiding at all costs. He needs his routine, they tell me, when I arrive to take him out for one of our adventures as I call them. Feeding the ducks in Saint Anne’s Park. He still likes doing that. Even though he’s started to eat the bread himself.

Or to that nice café in Kinsealy where the staff are kind and don’t mind if Dad tears his napkin into a hundred tiny bits and scatters them around his plate. Or takes the sugar sachets out of the bowl and lines them along the edge of the table. Or spreads jam on his ham sandwich, or ketchup on his apple tart. They don’t mention any of that, and they remember his name and smile at him when they’re taking his order as if he is making perfect sense and not getting his words all jumbled up.

‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ I say. I smile and put my hand on his arm, rub gently. He looks frozen as well as worried.

‘Should I get out?’ He nods towards the door I have opened.

Iris bends towards him. ‘Yes, Mr Keogh, you can get out now,’ she tells him. ‘I’m going to take you for a cup of tea while Terry is organising your ferry tickets back to Dublin.’ She looks at me then, and I say nothing, and she nods as if I haven’t said nothing. As if I have agreed with her, because, let’s face it, that’s what most people do.

‘And a bun?’ Dad asks.

‘Of course,’ says Iris.

He negotiates himself out of the car. The sluggishness of the endeavour suits me, as I need time to think.

THINK.

I lift Iris’s bag out of the back seat. She’s travelling light. I’d say three days’ worth of clothes inside.

Which means I have maybe three days.

Three days.

During which Brendan will worry himself sick about the Canadians. There are young people in his department. Two of them with brand-new mortgages and one with a brand-new baby.

Last in, first out. Isn’t that what they say?

And Anna. Conscientious, hardworking Anna, who, despite all her conscientiousness and hard work, is always convinced that she will fail every exam she has ever sat. And these are her finals. Not a weekly spelling test. Although it is true to say that she worried about those too.

And then there’s Kate’s play, debuting in Galway next week. Which is a marvellous thing, of course it is. But she’ll be stressed about it and pretending she’s not stressed at all, which, in my experience, makes the thing you’re stressed about even more stressful.

I am needed at home.

What will happen if I’m not there?

I can’t imagine not being there. I’ve always been there.

But I’m already not there, and, so far, nothing has happened. Nothing bad at any rate. But it’s only been – I check my watch – seven hours since I left the house this morning. How can it only be seven hours? They don’t even know I’m gone yet. Brendan will assume I didn’t get on the boat, I know he will.

Because I am needed at home.

Apart from all that, am I really thinking about dragging my father behind me for three days? And apart from all that, Iris will go berserk if she even suspects that I am considering doing anything other than what she has told me to do.

THINK.

In the terminal building, Iris shows me where the ticket sales office is. ‘We’ll be in here, okay?’ she says, nodding towards a café that smells like the oil in the deep-fat fryer needs changing as a matter of urgency.

Iris smiles her full-on, no-holds-barred smile at me. ‘Thanks Terry,’ she says.

‘For what?’

‘Just … for being so understanding.’

I nod.

I understand nothing.

I stop outside the ticket sales office. Iris turns just before she and Dad enter the café and I make a great show of rummaging in my bag for something. My purse, perhaps. Yes, my purse. I find it easily. I make a great show of finding it. Kate will not be casting me in one of her plays any time soon. In my peripheral vision, Iris waits. My father looks around in his confused, vexed way as if he has no idea what he is doing here but he is certain it is nothing good.

I walk into the ticket sales office, my purse held aloft like a prize.

Once I am out of Iris’s line of vision, I take out my mobile. There’s a missed call from Brendan. I dial his number. The girls are always at me to programme people’s numbers into my phone, but I prefer doing it this way. It gives me time to gather my thoughts. Work out what I’m going to say.

Brendan answers the phone immediately, as if he’s been sitting beside it, waiting for it to ring.

‘Terry?’ he says. ‘Where are you?’

The small speech I had prepared deserts me. It wasn’t a speech exactly, just, you know, a collection of words. Sentences. An explanation. I had the words ‘unforeseen circumstances’ in there somewhere. I’m pretty sure I did. Now there’s nothing. Just a blank space in my head where the small speech had been.

‘I’m in Holyhead,’ I say.

‘Holyhead?’ As if he’s never heard of it.

‘Yes. The ferry port in Wales.’

‘What the hell are you doing there?’ His use of the word ‘hell’ jolts me. We don’t use words like that. And I can’t remember the last time he raised his voice. Not even at the telly when Dublin played in the final. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we argued, me and Brendan. It’s been ages. Years, I’d say.

‘Well, Iris is talking about going to a concert.’ This seems so … preposterous all of a sudden.

‘A concert?’ Brendan’s tone is halting, as though he’s positive he’s misheard.

‘Jason Donovan,’ I offer, just to get it out of the way. ‘He was in that soap opera, remember? Neighbours.’

‘What in the name of God does Jason Donovan have to do with anything?’

‘Well, nothing really. Only, Iris wants to go to his concert. It’s on in the Hippodrome tonight. That’s in London. You probably already know that.’

Down the line, I hear Brendan’s breath, being sucked into his lungs, held there, released in a long thin line through the small circle that he will have made of his mouth. The phone feels hot and slippery in my hands. When he speaks, his voice is conversational. ‘I thought Iris was anxious to do away with herself?’

I say nothing. I’m afraid to say anything because of how angry I suddenly am. I am boiling with rage. Seething. I feel like, if I breathed out through my nose, plumes of smoke would issue from my nostrils, that’s how angry I feel. It’s a strange sensation. It is huge. Bigger than me.

‘Terry? Are you there?’ Brendan says.

‘Yes,’ I say. The word sounds strangled, as if someone is pressing their hands around my neck.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘When are you coming home, for starters?’

‘I’m not sure.’

I hear Brendan shift the receiver from one hand to the other. ‘Listen Terry, you need to get back here. ASAP.’

‘Why? Has something happened? Are the girls okay?’

‘Of course they’re okay. Why the hell wouldn’t they be okay?’

There is that word again. And his voice still raised. Maybe his blood pressure too. The doctor said it wasn’t high exactly, just … that he needed to keep an eye on it. Watch what he eats and maybe do a bit more exercise. I glance around and a woman behind me snatches her head away, now apparently engrossed in the clock on the wall, which is, by my reckoning, five minutes slow. I lower my voice. ‘Brendan, listen, just calm down and …’

‘Don’t tell me to calm down. I’ve been researching this. You could face gaol time if you continue on this ridiculous odyssey. And dragging your poor father along as well. That is so … so …’ He struggles to find the appropriate word. ‘Irresponsible’. That’s the word he’s looking for. I feel the sting of it before he locates it and throws it at me like a punch. I see Iris and Dad in the café now, sitting by the window. Iris is pouring tea from a stainless-steel pot into two cups. Dad is cutting a Bakewell tart into a hundred pieces with a spoon while his eyes scan the people hurrying past the window. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t eaten even one of his five-a-day today.

Brendan is right. I am being irresponsible.

‘… and if the girls knew what you were—’

‘Have you spoken to them?’

Brendan sighs. ‘Anna rang me from the house earlier.’

‘Did she pick up the laundered clothes I left on her bed? I washed them with that new organic detergent I ordered. The pharmacist reckons it’s the best detergent on the market for people with eczema.’

‘For God’s sake, Terry, I don’t know. Just … come home. Stop this. Now.’

‘Did she?’

‘What?’

‘Get the clothes? I told her I’d have them ready for her. She’s been really anxious about the exams, and I—’

‘She wanted to know where you were.’

‘What did you say?’ I hold my breath.

‘I said … I just said you were out. With Iris.’

‘And she didn’t ask anything else?’

‘No. She’s too preoccupied.’

I am struck by what must be maternal guilt. The working mothers used to talk about it when I’d meet them sometimes at the school gate or the supermarket. I’d nod and say, ‘Oh yes’, and, ‘Isn’t it desperate’, and, ‘It comes with the territory’, but the truth was, I never felt it. I never left the girls. I was there. I was always there.

‘And Kate rang.’

‘Kate?’ Kate never rings. I ring her. Every Sunday night ten minutes before the news, which usually hasn’t started by the time I hang up. Yes, of course she’d ring me if I didn’t make the effort, but she’s so busy. Especially now, with the play so close. Anyway, she prefers texting to talking. I’m sure lots of young people do.

‘Why did she ring?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Brendan. ‘Something about our hotel accommodation in Galway. She said she couldn’t get through to you.’ He lapses into silence.

‘Is there a problem with the hotel?’ I ask.

‘I think so. I’m not sure. Look, you should really talk to Kate yourself,’ says Brendan.

‘But you were on the phone to her. Why didn’t you talk to her?’

‘I don’t do phones, Terry. You know that.’

‘Well then, I’d better not keep you.’

‘Terry, wait, I—’

I hang up.

That’s the second time in one day I’ve hung up on him.

The second time in twenty-six years.