stay there.
The three children woke her at seven–thirty as usual that Sunday morning by climbing into bed to demand a cuddle. The two boys were barely in before they wriggled free, asking to be allowed to watch children’s television. Their hot, bony limbs clambered off the mattress and she heard doors bang downstairs and the television being plugged in. Five–year–old Sheila snuggled on, spooning into her as Peadar slowly stirred. He turned to kiss Alison and stroke Sheila’s hair, then swung his legs from the bed. Mr Action Man, ready to organise them. Alison lay on, enjoying her daughter’s soft skin as Sheila played with the ragdoll she had decided to bring to Fitzgerald’s. But something lingered, the fragment of a dream that perturbed Alison without her being able to fully recall its details. Just eyes under water, shredded flesh.
She shuddered briefly in the warm morning light, hugged Sheila tight and pushed the image away. Sheila was walking the ragdoll up along the quilt, until it perched on Alison’s nose, staring down at her eyes.
‘Get up, lazybones, we’re going on holidays,’ a squeaky voice demanded.
Peadar moved about downstairs, doing his drill master sergeant impersonation. This was the first year when loading the car wouldn’t prove a near impossible logistical feat. Previously he would spend an eternity in the driveway, getting increasingly flustered as he rearranged their bags, shouting at the boys if they wandered out, half dressed and wanting the adventure to start. This year – with Sheila sleeping in a bed and the battered travel cot and buggy no longer required – their luggage would fit first time. But Alison knew, as she heard the rattle of her breakfast tray being carried upstairs, that Peadar would take the bags down as soon as he’d laid the tray on the bed. Loading the car first thing seemed as much a part of Peadar’s holiday ritual as her surprise breakfast in bed, his way of trying to leave the frantic pace of his everyday world behind.
She called out for him to leave the boys’ bag alone as she had more clothes to pack. He put it down reluctantly, like a child denied a final piece of jigsaw. They wouldn’t leave for another hour, yet she knew he wouldn’t be happy until the boot was shut for a final time.
Sheila slid out of bed and padded down after Peadar, saying that she wanted him to get her dressed. Alison was pleased, knowing this would buy her more time. Why did he always have to make their departure to Fitzgerald’s so rushed? Normally she was so wound up by the time they reached there that they had an argument on the first night.
This year was the first time they had ever seriously considered cancelling. Their fitted kitchen was already antiquated when they had moved into the house ten years ago and was now completely falling apart. Over Christmas Alison had argued that they should get a new kitchen instead of taking a holiday. Finances were tight since she’d given up nursing, even on Peadar’s salary as a school principal. But although, in the end, she had claimed to have chosen Fitzgerald’s so as not to disappoint the children, in reality it was the prospect of this holiday which had sustained her during the secrecy of these last months.
She ate quickly now, going over endless lists in her head. Danny still got sick when he travelled and needed Phenergan medicine before they started. Tapes had to be organised in advance: songs and rhymes that Sheila would enjoy, over the others’ protests, until she fell asleep, and then a cassette of stories for seven–year–olds, carefully pitched in age between Danny and Shane. In previous years they would all fall asleep, leaving Peadar and her free to drive in silence past Enniscorthy, feeling the road widen as she silently crossed off the miles. Now their voices would fill the car all the way to Fitzgerald’s.
Shouts rose from downstairs – Danny teasing Shane, Shane being hypersensitive. Tears and blows were only moments away. She abandoned the remains of her breakfast and made for the stairs, pitching her tone somewhere between that of a UN peacemaker and a wounded benign dictator.
The children always started counting down the miles before they’d even left Dublin. One hundred and one exactly from their driveway to the hotel car park. Peadar drove. In the early years she had shared the driving, just to show that she was not dependent. Peadar had known better than to complain but she had sensed his eyes checking the speed gauge, humouring her for the time they were losing. Peadar didn’t think of himself as a fast driver, but claimed that the NII was a road you needed to know. There were stretches where you drove slowly and others where you clawed back the lost time. Perhaps it was the pressures of his job, the endless timetables, crises and fundraising targets, which made him live his life against some invisible clock. But this year Alison planned to let him get on with driving, knowing that he hated the purposelessness of being a passenger. Peadar’s idea of a holiday, she often thought, would be two weeks in old jeans being useful with a Black and Decker drill. That, plus afternoon sex, kicking a football with Danny and Shane, sketching out a few projects for the future and the occasional round of golf thrown in.
He simply had to drive by the school, of course, even though it wasn’t on their way. Peadar half glanced across at her, wondering if he dared to stop. Beyond the boundary wall, scaffolding rose around what would soon be the finished extension. One night, after Peadar came in at two a.m. from doing budgets with McCann, his vice–principal, he had promised to let Alison smash a bottle of champagne against the finished extension to open it. She was only half joking when she’d threatened to smash himself and McCann on a rope against it instead.
He slowed the car, almost imperceptibly, his eyes following the contractor’s workmen who were earning double time for a Sunday. She could sense him gauging, almost to the brick, how far behind schedule they were with the school due to reopen in eight days.
Four years of his life were ground up in the mortar of that extension, four years of lost evenings and weekends. Nobody else could have done it on such a tiny grant, wheedling money here and there, organising bag–packing at local supermarkets, sponsored walks, Christmas vigil fasts, read–athons, cultivating politicians and local clergy who still harboured suspicions about multi–denominational schools. In bed at night Alison used to tease him about strategies he hadn’t tried yet: sponsored hand–jobs outside pubs at closing time from the female teachers, kidnapping, extortion, strip poker sessions during the Parents Association nights, a declaration of war against the United States followed by a Marshall Plan appeal for rebuilding. But mostly she felt proud of him, even if she occasionally allowed herself to acknowledge a silent, mutinous resentment. This was generally followed by guilt, as she could never decide if her pique stemmed from the intrusion of his plans into their everyday world or because he made her own life, by contrast, seem lacking in purpose or direction.
The car slowed to a halt as if Peadar was reluctant to tear his eyes from the workmen.
‘Only seven have bothered showing up,’ he said. ‘There should be a crew of eight working this morning.’
Danny leaned forward, making such a threatening noise that Peadar pulled away. Alison smiled, glad she had said nothing. It was hard to know what Danny would be in later life, but Alison wouldn’t be surprised if he became a contract killer specialising in architects.
After the Shankill by–pass the stop–start prevarication of traffic lights ended. It was open road from here to the outskirts of Ashford. Not that the route was easy – it still narrowed to one lane passing Kilmacanoge and through the Glen of the Downs, with huge container trucks straining to get past to reach the ferry to France at Rosslare.
Her Aunt Catherine had grown up in a cottage perched above this road, cycling to school in Bray during the war, fetching water from a green pump a half mile away. Alison still found herself watching out for the cottage, refurbished now and almost unrecognisable as the insignificant building pointed out to her as a child, since it had gained a conservatory and electronic gates. During their early years of driving to Fitzgerald’s she would show it to Peadar until she had grown tired of retelling the story. Now it was Peadar who drew her attention to it,
