The Story of Before E-Book

Susan Stairs

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 479

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

I wonder today how no one else could see the bad thing coming. Not that I knew back then what the bad thing was; and if I had - if I'd known one of us was going to die - would there have been anything I could have done to prevent it? I play it all back in my mind, over and over. The clues were all there. On New Year's Eve, eleven-year-old Ruth and her brother and sister sit at a bedroom window, watching the garden of their new Dublin home being covered in a thick blanket of snow. Ruth declares that a bad thing will happen in the coming year - she's sure of it. But she cannot see the outline of that thing. She cannot know that it will change their lives utterly, that the shape of their future will be carved into two parts; the before and the after. Or that it will break her heart and her family. This is Ruth's story. It is the story of before.

Leseprobe

The Story of Before

Born in London, Susan Stairs has lived in Ireland since early childhood. Involved in the art business for many years, she has written extensively about Irish art and artists. She received an MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in the same year. She lives in Dublin with her family. The Story of Before is her first novel.

Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2013 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Susan Stairs, 2013

The moral right of Susan Stairs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 907 1 E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 909 5

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For my family

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart

and try to love the questions themselves ...

Do not search for the answers,

which could not be given to you now,

because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps then, someday far in the future,

you will gradually, without even noticing it,

live your way into the answer.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

ONE

The others used to say I was psychic. They said I could sense stuff before it happened. But I’m not sure there was anything special about me at all. I was just a bit more observant than they were. They never paid proper attention to what was going on around them, whereas I was always on the lookout for clues.

I remember the first time they noticed. We were watching The Waltons and John Boy had gone up the mountain with his daddy to shoot a turkey for dinner. I just knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. When I said as much to the others, they started shouting at the telly, egging him on, wanting to prove me wrong. But I don’t think they understood that the turkey posed no threat, and that John Boy Walton would never hurt a creature unless he, or one of his family, was in danger.

‘You’ll get your blood soon,’ I told them. I knew the way these things worked; the programme makers wouldn’t want us to think that John Boy was a complete chicken. So, later in the episode, when his daddy was in danger of being mauled to death by a wounded bear, it was obvious to me that John Boy would pull the trigger.

‘Told you so,’ I said, trying to sound all knowledgeable and wise after the deed was done and the others were left wondering how I ‘knew’.

Of course, I didn’t always get it right. But if you asked the others today, they’d tell you about the times I did. Times when I predicted what we each would get for Christmas, or which one of his collection of ties Dad would wear on a Sunday, or what we’d be having for dessert after dinner.

So I wonder today how no one else could see the bad thing coming. Not that I knew back then what the bad thing was. And if I had – if I’d known one of us was going to die – would there have been anything I could’ve done to prevent it? I play it all back in my mind, over and over. The clues were all there. But maybe they’re a lot easier to spot when you know the answer.

The snow was really deep that January. Almost as soon as we heard Big Ben ringing out from the telly downstairs, and a recorded studio audience rumbling through a tuneless version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, a blizzard began. Not soft – like in romantic films when it ‘snows’ to make everything seem so pretty and pure – but wild and relentless and hard. Snow with no remorse. It was instantly obvious to all of us that this was snow like we’d never seen it before.

We watched from the front bedroom, our faces buffed with the freezing air that seeped through the panes of the huge picture window. Our knees were shoved up against the tepid ridges of the radiator and our teeth left bite-marks on the white metal slats of the Venetian blinds that none of us ever owned up to. The snow fell so fast that it covered our garden in minutes. We watched it blanket our neighbours’ slated roofs and tarmacked driveways. It shrouded the concrete road of our keyhole-shaped cul-de-sac, secreting the cement pathways, circular manhole covers and grass verges. Billions of feather-light flakes fused to form a glistening coverlet that turned the whole of Hillcourt Rise into a vast, crystalline wonderland. Our estate had been virginized. It was hard to believe how quickly it transformed; how its grey, pebbledash, territorial markings disappeared and it looked like we lived on one enormous, open-plan plot. We could hardly distinguish one house from the other.

Earlier that evening, Mam had said we could stay up for the countdown. Kev was asleep upstairs in his cot. At one and a half, he hadn’t a clue what night of the year it was. We lay on the sunburst rug in front of the fire – my brother Mel, just thirteen, sister Sandra, twelve, and me, Ruth, eleven – with a crate of mandarin oranges and a newly opened box of Black Magic to keep us going. By half past nine, we’d already grown bored, but none of us would allow ourselves to admit it.

There was nothing on the telly. At least nothing we found even mildly entertaining. On one channel, a troupe of thick-thighed dancers wearing way too much make-up pranced across a glittery stage, and on another, a huddle of tartan-and-tweed-clad diddley-eyes plucked and wheezed their way through one whingey ballad after another. There might’ve been a Western on too; back then there seemed to be cowboys and Indians galloping across cactus-dotted deserts every time we turned on the telly. I only ever watched them if I found one of the chiefs attractive.

The Black Magic kept us going for a while, but after all the soft ones were gone and only the hard toffees were left, things began to disintegrate. I was accused of taking more than my share, but it was only that I’d saved mine up in a little pile, instead of wolfing each one down as soon as I picked. And the others were miffed right from the start because they didn’t even like dark chocolate in the first place. They still ate it – it was chocolate after all – but without any real pleasure. I preferred dark chocolate to milk, and liked to savour it; I could make a bar of Bourneville last a whole week. And I didn’t see why I should gorge just to make the others feel less greedy.

To ease the tension, Dad suggested a game of Scrabble at about half past ten, forgetting that we rarely got beyond the first triple word score. That night was no different. We hadn’t been playing long when the board mysteriously toppled over. Because no one owned up, we were collectively punished.

‘I don’t care what night it is,’ Mam said, stage-managing the hunt for the plastic letters that were sprinkled all over the shag-pile, and waving the glass of sherry she’d been sipping since teatime. ‘That’s the end of it.’

Our pleas were ignored. Gathering my stash of chocolates and a couple of mandarins into the folds of my nightdress, I followed the others out of the room. Stopping at the door, I looked Dad square in the eye.

‘Happy New Year,’ I said, trying my best to sound sincere. He looked sort of uneasy. Things had been tense between Dad and me since Christmas night. ‘It’s OK if we stay up for the bells, isn’t it?’ I asked in a low voice. It wasn’t really a question; I knew he wouldn’t say no.

‘Well . . . I . . .’ he mumbled, glancing at Mam as she nodded along with the music on the telly. ‘I . . . suppose so . . . As long as you don’t wake your brother.’

The others were waiting on the stairs, dangling limbs through the serpentine curves of the wrought iron banisters.

‘Well?’ they both asked.

I gave them a frown; I didn’t want them to think it’d been easy.

‘It’s OK,’ I told them, as sternly as I could manage. ‘We can stay up till next year.’

We spent the next hour in Mel’s room, playing I-spy and hangman and X’s and O’s without incident. Then Sandra finally accused Mel of cheating when he overtook her lead on the scoresheet I was keeping and we waited in a sort of sulky silence till we could hear the midnight bells. We gathered on the landing to listen and I crept into Mam and Dad’s room to sneak a look at Kev as he slept. That’s when I noticed the snow. I whispered to the others to follow me in and we sat on the bed together to watch the blizzard thicken. We wrapped the candlewick bedspread tight around our shivering bodies and tried to count the soft flakes that stuck silently to the glass, soundproofing us in to our cotton-wool cocoon. The houses of the estate turned into glittering ice palaces and the huge oval-shaped emerald of the green disappeared under a cover of crystal-white. Though the novelty of ringing in the new year wore off five minutes into January, our attention was held fast by the snow. If I could hold back time, that’s where I’d stop it. I wouldn’t allow that year to begin at all.

I sometimes think about the inhabitants of Hillcourt Rise, going about their normal business that night with no clue everything was about to change. And the ones whose actions that coming year would matter are the ones who stand out in my mind.

Shayne Lawless. I can see him now. Balancing on a battered tea-chest, pissing a stream of snow-melting urine through the slanted open window of his tiny attic room. Pissing in controlled spurts to the rhythm of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as it blasted from the teak-veneered hulk of his radiogram. Shayne, whose shoulder-length hair looked and smelled like dried tobacco leaves, and whose close-set eyes never seemed to focus on anything in particular. Shayne pissed out his window almost every night; there was a five- or six-foot long stripe on the slates where the moss never grew.

Of course, I didn’t really see Shayne that night; his roof wasn’t visible from our front bedroom. But I like to think the snow would’ve made no difference to his nightly ritual. And I’m sure the fact that it was New Year’s Eve hardly even registered. The only thing that would’ve been important to him at that moment was lifting the needle when the gong sounded at the end so he could listen to the song once more from the top. I think his radiogram was probably the best friend Shayne ever had. It was almost an antique, but it served its purpose loyally. He’d thumped it up the narrow staircase to his lair the afternoon a brand-new, cherry-red Sanyo portable record player was delivered to his house by a starry-eyed, balding man, sporting a stomach that spilled out over the waistband of his slacks. Yet another man Liz Lawless insisted her son call ‘Uncle’.

And Bridie Goggin. What would it please me to believe she was up to that New Year’s Eve? Stripping clean, white sheets from the un-slept-in spare beds she’d made up in anticipation weeks before Christmas; re-wrapping pink tissue paper round the bone china teacups she’d taken out for the festivities and never used; or maybe clutching the jade-green telephone receiver to her huge chest, podgy tears dredging paths through her pan-sticked cheeks, so thankful for the two-minute Happy New Year phone call from one of her grown-up children.

Tracey Farrell and Valerie Vaughan: in Valerie’s bedroom, swapping fantasies about pin-up pop stars. Trading exaggerated secrets about boys they pretended they couldn’t stand and grouping girls into pink-paged, biro-ed lists of ‘Friends’ and ‘Enemies’. In their brushed nylon nightdresses, rolling on the super-soft wool carpet, or lolling on the lavender satin eiderdown of Valerie’s luxurious double bed, blithely exposing inches of their flesh, imagining that this was how it felt to be grown up. These were the things that made them happy, that enabled them to exist within the confines of the world their circumstances had created.

And I mustn’t forget David O’Dea, with his slender, smooth-skinned fingers sliding across the keys of his piano. Yes, even at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Eyes half-closed, head tilted to the left, shoulders faltering over his instrument like waves, unsure of when to crash. His parents probably stood behind him that night, perhaps having popped the champagne Mr O’Dea won in the local golf club four-ball. It’s likely their gaze fixed on the back of his head, and they reminded themselves of their leniency in allowing his fair hair to curl a whole inch over his collar. While upstairs their high-achieving twin daughters wrote spiteful entries about each other in their lockable diaries, Mr and Mrs O’Dea wore satisfied smiles on their faces and sipped their champagne, secure in the knowledge that this would be another good year because they’d always done right by their children.

I can still hear the snow; the absolute, all-concealing silence of it. It rings in my ears and spreads like a virus through my body. Like it did that night. I felt it first in my feet, creeping up through my veins and capillaries and arteries, making me shiver in a way I never had before.

‘Something bad’s going to happen this year,’ I announced to the others, closing my eyes, afraid I might go snow-blind. They bunched themselves in around me, waiting for me to elaborate, but that was all I had. It was no more than a feeling, but one I felt I had to share.

The snow continued for days, piling high in six-foot drifts. While our parents moaned and shovelled, we made proper snowmen that survived for almost three weeks. Some dads walked to work, but most didn’t make it in at all. All over the estate, abandoned Cortinas and Hillmans hibernated, their metal mounds sugared over and decorated with the filigree, fork-like footprints of starving birds. On the news we watched aerial shots of city traffic chaos, stranded commuters, and helicopter milk-and-bread drops all over our albino country. And it was announced – to our delirious delight – that the school holidays would be extended by one whole week.

We were snowed-in.

And while those old enough to understand the hardship the snow brought wore worried frowns on their faces when they looked out their windows, we wore hats and gloves and wellies without complaining, and repeatedly slid our backsides down the sloping entrance to Hillcourt Rise.

And when eventually the blanket melted, and everything went back to the way it had been, we were astonished at how patchy and grubby it looked underneath.

We never saw snow like that again.

TWO

The Big Freeze saw us into our final few months in Hillcourt Rise. Mam thought we’d be living there forever. I suppose when we first moved in we all did; the house was her dream come true. Before that, we’d been living on South Circular Road, a busy stretch of seven hundred houses and shops that ran from Portobello – a stone’s throw from Dublin city – through Dolphin’s Barn, Rialto and Kilmainham, all the way to the Phoenix Park.

Our house stood on the curving stretch between Griffith Barracks – a former prison building hidden behind thick, grey-stone walls – and the Player Wills cigarette factory. It had been Gran’s house, the place where our dad had grown up. Gran never got to see me; she went downhill very quickly in the end and died a month before I was born. I often studied photos of her: plump and rosy and twinkly-eyed with Dad as a baby in her arms; and one with Mel and Sandra on her lap, her withered hands circling their chubby baby bodies, her false-teeth smile stretching the papery skin of her hollow-cheeked face. And although they hardly remembered her, I still felt a certain pang of jealousy that she’d known them, and I wished she’d hung on long enough to meet me. She was the last of our grandparents; both sets were dead before I came into the world.

To Mel and Sandra and me, the house was our home. To Mam it was cold, draughty and old-fashioned. In the seventies, to be old-fashioned was a sin. Some of the houses on our road had been modernized over the years: chequerboard quarry tiles buried under patterned lino; ornate skirtings prised off and replaced with smaller, plainer versions; period fireplaces ripped out to make way for cement monsters covered in beige and brown tiles. Our house had undergone no such transformation, much to Mam’s disappointment. She dreamed lustfully of semi-detached streamlined living: double-glazing, a fitted kitchen, crazy-paving patio, built-in wardrobes with louvre doors. Instead, she received the penance of living in the century-old birthplace of the man she married. She found much to complain about: the sash windows she couldn’t open without Dad’s help; the lack of a ‘proper’ kitchen (it seemed fine to us – she went in and meals came out); the ten-foot-high ceilings that made the place impossible to heat.

Although Dad was a painter and decorator, he rarely did any painting or decorating in our house. ‘The cobbler’s children always go barefoot,’ Mam would sigh, eyeing the half-used paint tins stacked in a corner of the backyard. The same faded flock wallpaper that covered the sitting room walls in Dad’s boyhood photos was still hiding damp patches in the plaster, thirty years later. Mam regularly washed down the woodwork with vinegar, tut-tutting as she went along, but it made little difference to the yellowed gloss. Dad would come whistling through the door in the evenings in a draught of tobacco and turpentine, his thick black hair, moustache and sideburns salted with paint flecks. He’d take the stairs two at a time, wriggling out of his petrol blue, button-through overalls on the landing. Twenty minutes later, he’d emerge from the bathroom smelling of Old Spice and he’d flop down in his favourite flowery armchair, ready to scan the small ads in the Evening Press. Once Dad crossed the threshold, he was no longer: Michael P Lamb, Painter & Decorator – ‘No Job Too Small’; he was: Mick Lamb, Husband & Father – ‘No Jobs At All’.

Mam was a country girl, born in Wicklow in a cottage somewhere out past the Sugarloaf Mountain. She’d spent her childhood roaming fields and meadows, and what she hated most about where we lived was the fact that we had nowhere to play. Out the back was a tiny concrete yard, completely out of proportion to the size of the house. Gran had sold off more than half the original garden to a mechanic who’d built an eyesore of a shed on it years before we were born. At the front of the house we did have some outdoor space, but it was only a tiny railed-in patch of grass, bordered with purple and yellow crocuses in spring, and plump, dark pink roses in summer.

Traffic hummed up and down South Circular Road at all times of the day: dusty, navy double-decker buses; enormous, clanking lorries; and cars in dull shades of grey or brown. Mam often wiped black carbon dust from the silver-painted railings in the morning, only to find they were filthy again by late afternoon. Not that she was worried about us inhaling it; nobody knew the dangers of leaded petrol back then. What annoyed her was the dirt, the way it grubbied our fingers so that we left black streaks all along the dado rail in the hall, contributing to her never-ending housework.

So it came about that Mam’s constant but good-natured nagging won out – the day arrived when we learned we were moving to the suburbs. To a house in an estate called Hillcourt Rise. Mam’s trump card came in the form of our baby brother, Kevin. At thirty-nine, I guess she’d presumed her child-bearing days were over. But when she discovered she was pregnant with something we heard her describe as ‘an afterthought’, she decided it was quite definitely time to go. It was going to be hard enough getting used to night feeds and nappies after ten years, without worrying about keeping an eye on us three.

‘They need somewhere safe to play, Mick,’ I’d strained to hear her saying to Dad one evening after dinner. We were used to hearing whispers between the two of them while they were washing and drying at the kitchen sink and we were supposed to be doing our homework at the table. I used to imagine they’d won the sweeps, and were desperately trying to keep it from us for fear we’d demand new bicycles, roller skates, and holidays to Disneyland. Or that one of us was terminally ill (it was always me) and they couldn’t bring themselves to break the news.

‘And some kids to play with,’ she said, her yellow rubber-gloved hands smoothing over her rounding belly. ‘What do you think?’ It was a question she’d asked him many times before, and one he usually ignored.

Dad looked out the window, stroking his moustache and breathing hard up his nose. I could tell he was thinking about it this time. And so could Mam. She held her head to one side with her eyebrows raised and her mouth ready to curve into a smile. Then finally Dad let out a sort of false sigh as he turned and put his arm around her.

‘I think you’ve finally won, Rose,’ he said, pulling her close. Mam let out a little shriek and kissed him noisily on the cheek. Then he whispered something into her ear, and she hugged him tight around his waist.

I didn’t let on to the others for a while, but the next Friday evening when I saw Dad sorting through tins of paint and brushes out the back, I knew the preparations had begun and we were in for a weekend of chores. I said as much to the others and, as usual, they were suitably impressed when, the following morning, Dad handed us three brushes and a bucket of magnolia and told us to get to work brightening up the back wall of the shed.

‘I think we’re moving house,’ I said, as we sloshed paint over the grey concrete.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Mel. He stood back to look at our progress, scrunching up his face. ‘Wish Dad had given us bigger brushes. We’ll be ages. And get a move on, you two,’ he ordered, mimicking Mam. ‘I’ve done most of it.’

‘Why would we be moving house?’ asked Sandra, absently wiping her brush over and back across the same square foot of wall. ‘Where would we go?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, reaching up as far as I could. ‘Maybe to a house that isn’t so old. With a big back garden.’

‘Hope you’re wrong,’ said Mel from behind us. ‘All that grass to cut. And I’d be the one made to do it.’ He shouldered his way between us, anxious to prove he could stretch up further towards the top of the wall than Sandra. Mel was finding it hard to accept that his younger sister was the same height as him and he raised himself up on his toes whenever she stood near. In some seaside photos, his face had a manic, glacial expression as he tried to puff himself up for the duration of the pose while Sandra smiled sweetly, completely unaware of his desperation. With their similar fair skin and hair, blue eyes and gangly limbs, they were often mistaken for twins. By contrast, my small, slightly chubby build and dark colouring brought about expressions of surprise that I could even be distantly related to them, let alone be part of the same family.

THREE

We nearly killed Shayne Lawless the day we moved into Hillcourt Rise. He ran in front of our car and Dad had to jam on the brakes. He looked in at us – the newcomers – with his giddy eyes and grinning mouth just inches from the bonnet. Dad cursed under his breath, holding his hairy hands up as if to say sorry, even though it wasn’t his fault. A tiny stream of sweat ran down his neck, under the loosened collar of his white shirt, and his washed-out eyes in the rear-view mirror implored us not to tell Mam. She wasn’t with us for the actual move; we’d had to leave her in the hospital with our new baby brother.

It was a sweltering July day in the hottest summer for years. I was ten years old. Mam and Dad had signed the contract for the house that morning in a solicitor’s office on Merrion Square, leaving me, Mel and Sandra to wait in the car. We were on our summer holidays from school, and for some reason there was no one able – or perhaps willing – to look after us. As soon as they’d been handed the keys to forty-two Hillcourt Rise, Mam told Dad it was time, and they’d walked quickly along the east side of the square to Holles Street Maternity Hospital, where, fifteen minutes later, Kevin shot out like a bullet. Well, he was number four. They thought they’d timed it all to perfection and that we’d be nicely settled into our new house before he arrived. But Kev was impatient to get out into the world and didn’t want to wait any longer. So Dad could be forgiven for being a bit distracted that evening as he drove behind the removal lorry into the estate.

The events of that day are obviously memorable: new brother, new house, new neighbours. But another thing took place that morning in Merrion Square Park that was to mark the day out in my mind. Something a lot more strange and frightening. I kept quiet about it at the time; it wasn’t something I wanted to share. The day would come when I’d think maybe what happened had been some kind of warning. But by then, it was already too late.

Dad had pulled in under the shadowy, dark green tangle of trees that dipped over the park railings, rushing around to help Mam as she tried to heave herself and her ballooning stomach out of the car. She was making a huge effort to breathe regularly, taking long streams of warm air up through her nose, waiting a few seconds, then pushing them out steadily through the ‘O’ of her pursed lips. In the last few weeks, her movements had slowed. She tired easily. Often, she went to bed in the afternoons and we had to wait longer for our dinner. Occasionally, Dad even had to make it and bring it up to her on a tray. When Mel grumbled once that the mashed potato had black bits in it, he was made to do the washing up and the drying.

Dad pushed his head through the open window, his chin showing the marks of a rushed shave. ‘Won’t be long. Just have to sign for the new house and get the keys.’ Then, leaning in further, he whispered, ‘And for God’s sake, behave yourselves. Your mother doesn’t need any of your carry on today.’ He looked at me. ‘You’ll let me know if there’s been any trouble, Ruth?’

I nodded my head with a mixture of pride and apprehension; while I was used to the role of informer, I was mindful that both Mel and Sandra were bigger and stronger than me, and were expert at giving Chinese burns.

‘I’m so thirsty,’ Mel complained. ‘I’ll die if I don’t get a drink.’

‘Pity about you,’ Dad said. ‘But don’t worry. We’ll all go to the funeral.’

I watched the way they crossed the road, Mam using Dad like a crutch and keeping one hand on the underside of her huge belly. The beige smock she wore was one she’d made herself, using a pattern that came free with Woman’s Way. The heat of her body against the even hotter PVC of the car seat had caused a dark stain to emerge on her back. Against the sandy fabric, it reminded me of an oasis in the middle of a desert. Without thinking, I said as much to Sandra. She frowned at me, her eyebrows straight golden lines above her sea-blue eyes.

‘It’s just sweat, Ruth,’ she said. ‘It’s hot, or haven’t you noticed?’

Her nose was sunburned, a new, pink layer peeping through the curls of peeling skin. She bit at her bottom lip with her front tooth, the one she’d chipped at my last birthday party, when, in the rush to get the Rice Krispie cakes, someone (we never discovered who, but I always suspected Brainbox – our cousin, Trevor) pulled her chair from under her as she was about to sit down, and she walloped her chin off the edge of the kitchen table. She blamed me because it was my party. Mam said she was lucky she didn’t break her jaw. Her lip biting had since become a habit, the sharp edge of the tooth often drawing blood. She’d scraped her red-gold hair into an untidy ponytail that morning, tying it with a purple bobble to match the bib-front shorts with the heart-shaped buttons she’d begged Mam to make for her. It hadn’t taken much persuasion; Mam loved to sew. Most evenings she sat in front of the telly in the wickerwork armchair, eyes darting from needle to Kojak or Columbo or whoever, and back again, as she hemmed or cross-stitched as perfectly as any machine. She always got it spot on with Sandra; everything she made for her seemed to fit exactly right. I was more hit and miss, perhaps because I was small, and not as graceful or perfectly proportioned. So I was thankful that the last few months had limited her output to cute romper suits for the new baby and huge tent-like dresses for herself.

The second Mam and Dad had left to get the keys, Mel started. He began by ficking toast crusts into Sandra’s hair. Because we’d been late leaving, we were allowed to eat our breakfast in the car, and Mel had saved up his crusts for ammunition. Being the eldest, he had that air of supreme authority that he thought the eleven months he spent as an only child entitled him to for life. I don’t think he ever forgave our parents for diluting his one hundred per cent share of their attention and he used up huge amounts of energy trying to get it back. He always got the best reaction from Sandra. He’d given up on me, but my big sister was easily provoked. I saw the relationship she enjoyed with Mel as like a sort of earthquake graph: long periods of inactivity combined with spells of minor movement that progressed towards massive eruptions. I saw myself as something of a dormant volcano: one whose silence was effectively guaranteed, but should never really be taken for granted.

Mel and Sandra’s squabble soon reached Wimbledon proportions. Back and forth between the two of them the ball of accusations flew. Mel jumped into the driver’s seat, twisting the knob that made it recline.

‘Ouch! You’re leaning on my knees,’ Sandra whined.

‘Move over then,’ Mel told her.

‘No, I don’t want to. Lift the seat.’

‘Make me.’

I felt the warmth of the glass against my cheek and wished I’d brought a book. I’d wanted to, but Dad had said we were late already and there was no time to be rummaging around in tea-chests for stuff that was already packed. Thirty seconds would hardly have made a difference, but I’d said nothing. Dad wasn’t much of a reader – except for newspapers – and didn’t understand my compulsive need to escape into an imaginary world. I felt he should have though; he knew what Mel and Sandra were like. I thought it unfair that he expected me to put up with them when I didn’t have the necessary distractions.

Soon, the stuffy atmosphere of the car became too much. Sandra opened a door and jumped out. Mel was next. In seconds, my face was cutting through the morning air as I ran behind them, through the gates, and into the park. I had on my new Clark’s sandals and a pair of white knee socks, the toes of which quickly became sodden and green from the dewy grass. The sky was clear of clouds and sort of hazy, with that early-morning promise of all-day blue. It seemed higher than usual, as if it needed to raise itself up to avoid the treetops and the roofs of the four-storey Georgian terraces lining the square. I knew we wouldn’t get in trouble for leaving the car. I think it was a sense that things were shifting, changing; and punishments were always difficult to give out when normal routines weren’t being followed.

Mel found a red plastic ball and tried to involve me in a game, but I wasn’t interested. Besides, my open-toed sandals were hardly suitable for playing football. Sandra was willing, despite their earlier bickering. So I left them to it and wandered off in among the trees and bushes to explore, hoping I might be lucky this time. I regularly dreamed of discovering a hoard of gold coins hidden in undergrowth, or some priceless ancient treasure stuffed inside a hole in a tree. I climbed in under a holly bush, its waxy, spiked leaves pricking my back through the thin cotton of my dress. The sound of Mel and Sandra grew faint, drowned out by the thick, green growth on one side and the low rumble of traffic from around Merrion Square on the other.

It was much darker in there. Sunlight barely found its way through. High above, the trees had twined and twisted their branches together and only tiny flashes of blue showed through. It smelled old and damp and sort of rotten. A crumpled newspaper, a few crushed cans and a broken bottle lay at the base of a tree, and in the middle of a small clearing, hundreds of matches lay scattered around a circle of blackened stones. I listened. The place was silent. I trudged through last years’ autumn leaves, still crisp in deep, rusty piles under my feet, and was glad when I reached the railings. I could see out to the square from there. I found a gap in the hedge, squatted down and nestled myself into its cover where I could watch the people passing by.

I felt safe there. I was in a place of my own. Unseen and unheard. The best place. At home, I was used to finding some seemingly inaccessible spot to hide myself away for a while: in the cupboard under the stairs; on the bottom shelf of my wardrobe; in the space between the back of the couch and the radiator. I think I sometimes needed to find a place away from the constant tug-of-war of family couplings. Mam and Dad formed one pair, Mel and Sandra the other. In truth, I understood there was no way to break through the intertwining links that had been created well before I’d been born.

I began counting shoes and legs. Brown shoes, black shoes, bare legs, trouser legs. It was easy enough for a while. But it grew complicated when a group of chattering office girls breezed past in a criss-cross of rubber platforms, straw wedges, flapping blue jeans and orange nylons. After a while, my legs grew stiff from squatting, so I stretched out each one in turn for a few seconds, before realizing that I really needed to wee. I was well used to going behind bushes; on Sunday drives, Dad regularly had to pull over someplace for one or other of us. And although I was quite good at holding it, I didn’t want to take the chance this time. I’d no way of knowing how much longer Mam and Dad might be. And anyway, this was the perfect place to go. I stood up and moved backwards, away from the gap and further behind the hedge. Then I reached up under my dress, pulled down my pants and bent my knees again.

Just then, a blackbird few down beside me. Even in the murky light, his feathers had a kind of sheen and I could clearly see the bright orange-yellow of his beak and eyes. He cocked his head left and right then he fluttered up, settled on a low branch about ten feet away, and started to sing. My wee rushed onto the mess of old leaves and undisturbed black earth in a steady, hot flow. Although there was no one else to hear, the splashing made me feel embarrassed and I was glad the birdsong drowned most of it out. A slight wind swished through the leaves and the screech of an ambulance siren came and went from somewhere out beyond the square. When I was nearly done, I fixed my eyes on the blackbird, willing him to keep singing for the last few seconds. As my wee slowed to a trickle, the cold air found its way under my dress, creeping up my legs and around my middle. I shivered. At the very last drop, like somehow he knew, the blackbird stopped and the place fell silent.

I didn’t move. I was suddenly scared. I was still staring at the blackbird but I couldn’t see him any more; he was just a dark, blurry blob. My gaze had shifted. My eyes were focused on something behind him now and what I realized I was looking at made my skin start to prickle and crawl. There was movement in the tree. A faint swaying in the branches behind the blackbird.

I wasn’t alone at all.

What I saw was a foot. A large foot. In a muddy black boot that had a strap and a silver buckle. And close beside it, another one, kicking lamely against the tree trunk. Above them was a pair of mucky, brown corduroy trousers, then, further up, a dark red shirt and around it, a grubby black coat.

The prickle on my skin turned to a burning flood that seeped through my body and thump-thumped in my head. Hard as I tried to convince myself that someone might’ve put together a sort of scarecrow for a joke, I knew this collection of limbs and clothes had to belong to a person.

A man.

A stranger.

I couldn’t bring myself to look into his face but I knew if I did he’d be looking straight at me. I thought I’d been all alone. Hidden away. But he must have been there the whole time. Watching. He’d seen me pulling down my pants. And now he had a full view of me pissing in the undergrowth. I shouldn’t have gone off on my own. I shouldn’t have followed the others out of the car in the first place. I had to get back to them. My wee had stopped but my pants were around my ankles; I’d have to pull them up before I could run. But if I stood to do that, I’d expose my thighs and maybe my bum and I didn’t want him to see any more than he already had. I’d have to be careful. And quick.

Keeping my eyes down, I reached in under the folds of my dress. I hooked my fingers around one leg of my pants and deftly stepped out of them, leaving them behind, cherry pink against the dark earth. I was running before I even stood up. Galloping over tangled roots and kicking sprays of crispy leaves in the air, I didn’t look back. I leaped over the circle of black stones but one of my knees buckled when I landed and I stumbled and part crawled the last few feet. I dragged myself under the holly bush and back out onto the grass. My breath wheezed in and out of my throat and goosepimples raced up my legs and arms. I felt dizzy and my chest hurt. The sunlight was blinding and I squinted against it as I looked around.

The park was deserted. There was no sign of Sandra or Mel.

The red ball lay in the middle of the grass and I ran towards it, expecting them both to materialize. I tapped it with my foot, but it was burst and bumped only a couple of inches over the ground.

I spun around. Selfish as Mel was, I didn’t think he’d have left without me. They had to be hiding. I didn’t know what frightened me more: the fact that I was all alone, or the fact that they might be watching me from some secret viewing point, like that man in the tree. I began looking around trunks, even thin ones they couldn’t possibly be behind, my feet clumping awkwardly across the grass as if they weren’t properly connected to my body.

Then I remembered the reason we were there, and wondered if Mam and Dad were finished getting the keys. What if they’d all gone off to the new house without me? If, in their panic to get everything done on time, they hadn’t noticed I’d been left behind. I ran along the path, trying to remember the way we’d come in. Then I started to pray. I’d been lost before when I was five, on a Sunday trip to Brittas Bay. I still hate the feel of sand between my toes.

When I eventually found the car, it was empty. I stood beside it for as long as it took me to say the Our Father, then ran back into the park. I thought how much I hated Mel and Sandra for leaving me on my own. Back again where I’d left them, I sank to the ground and started to cry. It was all their fault; if they hadn’t left the car, I’d never have followed.

I lay down on the grass. The damp soaked up through my dress, and my bum felt really cold without my pants. Above me, a lone cloud hung in the blue sky, ragged and forlorn. The shape of it reminded me of the stain on the back of Mam’s smock and the horrible way Sandra had sneered at how I’d described it. Then I remembered something.

I jumped to my feet.

This was a park we’d come to before. When Mam was having her check-up at the baby hospital.

I knew what had happened. I was sure of it. I began walking across the park, pretty certain where the entrance nearest the hospital was. And as I got closer to it, I saw them. Dad, Mel and Sandra. Holding hands. Swinging into the park with smiles across their faces. When there was no sign of Mam, I knew I’d been right.

‘Guess what?’ Sandra asked when I reached them. She was sort of breathless and her face was all flushed. And her feet danced about, as if she badly needed to go to the toilet. She was trying not to smile.

‘Mam’s had the baby,’ I said quietly.

Her face crumpled into a frown and she stopped moving. ‘How did you know?’

‘I just guessed,’ I said. ‘I knew the hospital was near here.’ My breath caught in my throat. ‘Why . . . why did you leave me in there on my own?’

‘It was only for a few minutes. We couldn’t find you anywhere.’ She squinted her eyes at me. ‘You weren’t crying, were you?’

I shook my head. ‘No, why would I be?’

‘We haven’t seen it yet or anything,’ she said. ‘So don’t think you’ve been left out.’ She started walking. Then she looked back with a smirk. ‘We just found out first, that’s all.’ I stuck my tongue out and made a face but she just laughed and skipped off down the path.

‘It’s a boy,’ Mel announced blankly. I could tell he was put out; his authority was threatened.

‘It was all a bit sudden, love,’ Dad said, taking my hand. ‘But Mam’s fine, baby’s fine. The nurses’ll look after them. We’ve a lot more to get through today.’ He let out a big sigh, as if he’d had more than enough already.

As I’d suspected, we didn’t get in trouble for leaving the car. On another day, our disobedience would’ve been the priority, and we’d have been punished. That day, it wasn’t even noticed. Dad’s eyes were fixed on the distance, in a sort of vacant, unseeing way, like he wasn’t sure who he was. He’d just witnessed his fourth child coming into the world, and was shortly to leave the place of his own birth for ever. That night, he’d be sleeping in a strange room.

As we walked through the park back to the car, I was angry. Dad could’ve waited until he’d found me. He didn’t have to go and tell the others about the baby first. Was it any wonder I tried to predict things when everything seemed to happen without me? And the fact that I had a new brother didn’t make me feel any less alone; I knew there was far too much of an age gap for us to become an inseparable pair.

‘Where were you, anyway?’ Sandra asked as we got back into the car.

‘Nowhere. Just looking around.’ I couldn’t tell. I was too afraid. If I kept it to myself, I could pretend it hadn’t happened. The others would be sure to make a meal of it if I told them. They’d rub it in my face in front of Dad, seeing as I’d been the one supposed to be keeping an eye on them.

The removal men were waiting for us when we got back and Dad made us stay in the car while he supervised the stacking of our belongings into the big green truck. It didn’t take long for trouble to start. Mel invented a game which involved each of them pinching the other’s arm and seeing who could last the longest without screaming. When Sandra got tired of it, she began waving out at the removal men and collapsing into giggles whenever they waved back. I wished Mam was with us. And part of me wished our baby brother hadn’t been born. Not yet. Not today. Not at the exact time I was being watched by that man in the park. What would Mam say if she knew? I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. And though I hadn’t seen the stranger’s face, I couldn’t help imagining what it might look like.

The others grew even more giddy on the drive to our new house. They wondered out loud what lay in store for us in Hillcourt Rise and asked Dad questions he couldn’t possibly answer. How many families lived there? How many children? What were they like? What sort of games did they play? They jumped about in their seats, rolled the windows up and down and found the most ridiculous things amusing. Sandra thumped me on the shoulder each time she made what she thought was a funny joke, hoping to make me laugh. After a while, she succeeded. We forgot to dislike each other and I found myself caught up in the excitement. But when Dad said we were nearly there, I told her to leave me alone. I didn’t want to be distracted by her silly games. She might have thought moving was something to laugh about but I didn’t. I wasn’t as sure as she and Mel were about making friends and becoming part of a whole new neighbourhood. And I still felt more than a bit uneasy after the episode in the park. I thought about Mam. She’d been the one who’d wanted to move more than any of us and now she was missing our first day.

We drove up a hill lined with low stone walls, topped with spiky black railings. On either side, thin, leafy trees supported by tall stakes had been planted every few feet. At the top, a white metal sign attached to a wall said Hillcourt Rise in big, black curly letters. Dad turned left and slowed down. Mel and Sandra could barely contain themselves. A huge green opened out in front of us, dotted with bushes and cherry trees . . . and kids. A big gang of them. As we drove along, I could see some of them turning their heads to follow us while others lay on the grass or continued with their games of chasing and football.

It was just then that Dad nearly knocked Shayne Lawless down. I don’t know if he ran out in front of us deliberately or not, but either way, he made sure he got our attention.

Some of the houses in the estate faced directly onto the green, but others, like number forty-two, were set further away, in small cul-de-sacs. As soon as we’d pulled into the driveway, Mel and Sandra asked if they could go and play. They took the relief on Dad’s face as a ‘yes’ and didn’t wait for him to answer. I watched them trying to outrun each other, Sandra’s hair flying and Mel’s hands slapping against his thighs. When they got to the green, they ran across the grass like a pair of racehorses.

‘Off you go, Ruth,’ Dad said. ‘Grand big green space for you all to play on.’

I stood and looked over at the gathering. Some boy stripped off his T-shirt and threw it in the air. I could tell he was showing off because of us. And I knew Sandra would get involved. I watched her pick up the T-shirt and run, disappearing into a small group of bushes. I turned away and left them to it, walking into our new house for the first time to try and find some underwear. I’d had enough of green spaces for one day.

FOUR

Hillcourt Rise sat on an incline just outside the village of Kilgessin, only five miles south west of Dublin city, but a world and a half away from South Circular Road. The estate was about ten years old when we moved in, so most of the families living there were already well established. Solidly built, red brick and pebbledash with three bedrooms and long back gardens, the houses were regarded as a home for life; most people who moved in never expected to leave. Number forty-two, we learned, was the first to come up for sale since the estate was built. The father of the family who lived there had been offered a too-good-to-turn-down job someplace in America called Conneddy Cut. I heard Dad complaining about them to our Auntie Cissy on the phone: ‘Took the carpets and curtains! Would you believe it! What would they be doing with the carpets and curtains from this place in shaggin’ Conneddy Cut?’

We were all sorry they hadn’t taken the kitchen wallpaper to shaggin’ Conneddy Cut too. Apparently Mam had told Dad it was a dirt-catcher and had to go. It had a sort of dimply texture with a pattern of loops and triangles in dark purple, yellow and green. The kitchen cupboards were the colour of Fanta, and I don’t think even Dad could have lived with that level of mismatching. He said walking into the room gave him a shaggin’ headache. It was one job that couldn’t be avoided. So, after breakfast on the first morning, he handed us a bucket of warm water, two sponges and a scraper. He told Sandra and me to soak the walls, and Mel to scrape off the paper.

‘Shouldn’t he be doing this?’ Mel asked, exhausted after five minutes. ‘It’s not fair. I want to go out on the green.’

‘Me too,’ Sandra agreed. ‘I told Tracey and Valerie I’d be out after breakfast.’ She said their names as if they’d been best friends forever. Although she was my sister, I saw Sandra as more like a friend I might invite over from school, someone I connected with occasionally for a couple of hours, then happily forgot about for weeks. I think Mam and Dad were disappointed that she and I hadn’t formed a strong sisterly bond, especially as there was only a year between us, and it had been assumed we’d be close. But we were different in many ways. Sandra was more physical than I was. She preferred football and rounders to reading and drawing, and saw things like cycling and skipping as competitive sports, whereas I regarded them as enjoyable pastimes.

For all her boyishness, though, Sandra was a bit of a girly-girl underneath. She often experimented with the bits and bobs the Avon lady persuaded Mam to buy. Once I’d caught her at the mirror in our bedroom, trying to glue a pair of false eyelashes to her lids with a tube of Bostik. She begged me not to tell – and I didn’t – but she still blamed me when Mam found out. I tried telling her it was fairly obvious she’d been up to something, as her eyes were all red and sticky, but she never believed me.

And if Mel ever brought a friend home from school, Sandra would badger them for ages, sitting with them to watch telly and insisting on joining in whatever game they were playing. Then she’d get changed into a different outfit and parade around, flicking her hair over her shoulders.

Mel picked a fight with Sandra about who should soak and who should scrape and ended up chasing her out to the back garden. While they screamed and shouted at each other, I carried on with the job of removing the wallpaper. Soon I found that if I picked carefully at a loose corner, a whole strip would come away in one piece, exposing a clean, light pink surface. I liked doodling, but my efforts were usually confined to copybook pages. The huge expanse I’d just revealed was calling out to be drawn on. So, while the others continued their fight in the garden, I ran upstairs to get the set of markers I’d hidden under my pillow as soon as we’d arrived. I’d had to keep them away from Sandra; she was always taking the red one to colour in her nails.

When I came back down I could hear muffled screams from outside and guessed Mel was sitting on top of Sandra. I stared at the bare wall. I didn’t think about what to draw. I just found myself taking the brown marker and running it up then down, in two long, straight lines about six inches apart and filling the space between with whirls and spirals. I topped it off with shorter, criss-crossing brown lines and little green oval shapes dotted here and there. I’d drawn a tree. The trunk, the branches, the leaves.

Then I climbed up on a chair and drew another branch, longer than the others, and on it I began to draw the man. I did the outline of his body, then his dark red shirt, his mucky brown trousers, his buckled shoes. After that, I drew the blackbird and I put little notes around him so you could tell he was singing. Then, before I even knew it, I was drawing the man’s face. I gave him dark, staring eyes, thick black eyebrows and a half-open, twisted mouth.

I jumped down and looked up at what I’d done. I hadn’t wanted anyone to know about the man and yet here he was now, almost life-size on our kitchen wall. I hadn’t planned to draw him. It was like something had taken over me and made me do it. And now I wished I hadn’t.