was there. Earlier than he’d been the evening before, earlier than he should have been, standing in the same place, staring off into the distance. I went suddenly cold. I tried to get a good look at him, but it made me feel kind of dizzy, like I might faint. And the rain. And again we were too far apart for me to make out any detail.
He didn’t seem to notice me. I kept walking uphill, fingers tearing at old bits of tissue and chewing-gum wrapper inside the pockets of Dad’s coat. I could hear Blue panting behind me, which worried me for a moment – he might hear her too – but the noise from the rain on the trees would have drowned out any small sound. Blue ran ahead of me.
I felt so exposed up there – not just to the rain and the wind, but to him. I’m sure he’d seen me there before – he must have – but before it hadn’t bothered me. I hadn’t thought how unbearable it could be for his eyes to be on me, though it’s what I wanted more than anything. I pulled the mac down below my backside, held it taut, and sat on the edge of the slimy slate beneath the stone cross, praying he wouldn’t notice. Blue was sniffing around the headstones, sticking her nose into plastic wreathes, trying to bite blades of grass. She could smell herself on things. She chomped the air and sneezed. She was moving further and further away from me, down the path. Towards him.
Then he stood up and held his hand out to her, and I could just make out his voice calling to her, and him whistling. And my hearing seemed to go: there was a sudden hush in my ears like hailstones. I was burning hot, though my skin was stinging cold. The boy was down on his haunches then, and Blue clawing his knees. She only did that with people she knew.
I didn’t dare look straight down at them. Instead I looked the other way, pretended to myself I was looking at something in the trees, resting my head in my blue hands in an effort to shield my face from him and cool my cheeks. I was sure my thoughts were there, clear as day, to be read. I couldn’t just up and leave. I was stuck.
I don’t know how long I was there but my hair was sopping, and I could feel the wet soak into my skirt, and I thought, all of a sudden, if I stayed a moment longer it would be too late. Too late for what, I didn’t know. I drew myself up slowly, hands still in pockets, and sauntered back down the way I’d come, beneath the yew trees. I didn’t once look over at him. My legs nearly went from under me a couple of times as I walked down the laneway and on to the road. And I didn’t look back once to see if Blue would follow, though I heard her a few minutes later, just as I could see home.
The kitchen was warm with smells from the oven, and I felt ravenous with hunger. Mam was back to her cheery self, fanning the smoke from pork chops under the grill with a tea towel. There were spuds on the boil, and steam rising from other pots of vegetables. She smiled at me as I walked in.
‘Look at you. You’re soaked.’
She told me dinner would be five minutes, and didn’t I have good timing, and would I call Dad. No word about where I’d been or what I’d been up to. The table was already set. Gran’s beanbag tray was laid with cutlery and salt and pepper sachets. For some reason, since she’d come out of hospital, Gran preferred those sachets, even though they were obviously much more difficult for her to use. I went to the hall door and called Dad, listening for my own voice echoing.
‘I think he might be outside still, love.’
‘But it’s dark outside. What’s he doing?’
I was uncomfortable in my wet clothes, and irritated all of a sudden by Mam. And here was Blue, who’d just nearly given me heart failure, acting as if nothing had happened, the stupid dog.
I could just make out a tiny blotch of red where Dad’s fire had been as I stood at the back door, and the smell of damp burned wood, but no sign of him. I shouted into the darkness. His voice ghosted out from the shed, and a dull beam of light from his torch fell on the gravel. Blue ran out through my legs towards the shed, barking at him, then back at me, lingering halfway between us, unsure of what to do next. Dad appeared, patted her roughly on the head, and she dashed into the house ahead of him. His face was ruddy with the cold and his hands smeared with green and black mould and sap from the wood.
‘You’re to wash your hands before you come anywhere near the table,’ Mam told him.
There was small talk over dinner that evening – about the Christmas holidays, and the new gravel the Reillys had bought for their driveway. Gran ate, as usual, in front of the television in the front room. I cleared the table afterwards and put the kettle on. Mam told me to get the chocolate Hobnobs out of the cupboard, like a good girl. We only ever had them when we had visitors.
‘Now sit down, love,’ she said, and told me, in a bit of a roundabout way, that she was going to have a baby.
I said nothing.
Mam was forty-four. That was way too old to be having babies as far as I was concerned. I suddenly felt a terrible itch at the back of the knees from the damp tights I had on me.
Dad said nothing.
The first thing I asked was ‘How long?’ I might as well have asked them right out when they’d last done it. It made me feel sick, talking about this here in our kitchen. After dinner. On a school night. They were still at it. At their age. Under this roof. While I lay innocently tucked up in bed. All the filthy details rushed into my head then: they mustn’t have used a condom, or, worse than that, they had used one and it had come off or broken. My mind’s eye was forced to zoom in to the moment of its removal from the penis. (I couldn’t think of it as anything other than a ‘penis’. The names the girls at school used seemed inappropriate.) I thought about gobbing on her.
‘Baby’s due tenth of May,’ Mam said.
‘Tenth of May, love,’ Dad said.
He was turning one of Gran’s sachets of salt over and over between his thumb and forefinger. It made a tiny swishing noise like surf.
I fucking heard you, I wanted to say. Shut your fucking mouth.
Then, to make things worse, they suggested that I move to the big room downstairs so that they could use my room as a nursery. I’d been in that room since I could remember. But that didn’t seem to concern either one of them.
The whole time Mam was stroking my shoulder with one hand while her other lay protectively on her belly. It was too much. I tore out of the room and bolted myself into my bedroom for the rest of the night. They didn’t follow me. They knew better than to do that.
That night I dreamed all the little orphan girls were living with us. Only there wasn’t enough room in the house so I had to sleep outside in the shed. And I watched them through the kitchen window, all bawling and clawing at my mother for milk. And then I was watching myself watching them through the window and I woke up in a cold sweat.
Mar was warming herself on the classroom radiator, her skirt hoiked up just under her buttocks, her long skinny legs resting on the back of one of the plastic chairs.
‘You look like shit.’
‘Thanks.’
I couldn’t tell her. I don’t know why. I told her I hadn’t slept.
‘Thinking about your man again?’ She wiggled her hips. ‘Disco is on the twen-tee-fourth. I heard on the bus this morning.’
I
