“I’ve never regretted it for a second,” I said. “Have you?”
It took her a moment, either to decide what I meant or to decide on the answer. Then she said, “No. Neither have I.”
I put out a hand and covered hers, where it lay on her lap. The cashmere jumper was soft and worn and I still knew the shape of her hand like I knew my own. After a while I went back into the sitting room, got a throw off the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Olivia said, without looking at me, “She wanted to know about them so badly. And they’re her family, Frank. Family matters. She had a right.”
“And I had a right to have a say about it. I’m still her father.”
“I know. I should have told you. Or respected what you wanted. But . . .” She shook her head, against the back of the sofa; her eyes were closed, and the semidarkness rubbed shadows like great bruises underneath them. “I knew if I brought it up it would turn into an enormous argument. And I didn’t have the energy. So . . .”
“My family is terminally fucked up, Liv,” I said. “In far too many ways to go into. I don’t want Holly to turn out like them.”
“Holly’s a happy, well-adjusted, healthy little girl. You know she is. It wasn’t doing her any harm; she loved seeing them. This is . . . Nobody could have predicted this.”
I wondered, wearily, if that was even true. Personally, I would in fact have bet on at least one member of my family coming to a sticky and complicated end, although my money wouldn’t have been on Kevin. I said, “I keep thinking about all those times I asked what she’d been up to, and she went on about going Rollerblading with Sarah or making a volcano in science class. Chirpy as a little chickadee, not a bother on her. I never once suspected she was hiding anything. It kills me, Liv. It just kills me.”
Olivia’s head turned towards me. “It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, Frank. Truly. She didn’t think of it as lying to you. I told her that we might have to wait a while before we talked to you about it, because you’d had a big argument with your family, and she said, ‘Like that time I had that fight with Chloe, and all week I didn’t even want to think about her or I cried.’ She understands more than you think.”
“I don’t want her protecting me. Ever. I want it to be the other way round.”
Something moved across Olivia’s face, something a little wry and a little sad. She said, “She’s growing up, you know. In a few years she’ll be a teenager. Things change.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.” I thought about Holly sprawled in her bed upstairs, tearstained and dreaming, and about the night we made her: the low triumphant laugh in Liv’s throat, her hair wrapped round my fingers, the taste of clean summer sweat on her shoulder.
After a few minutes Olivia said, “She’ll need to talk about all this, in the morning. It would help her if we were both there. If you want to stay in the spare room . . .”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be good.”
She stood up, shook out the throw and folded it over her arm. “The bed’s made up.”
I tilted my glass. “I’ll finish this first. Thanks for the drink.”
“Several drinks.” Her voice had the sad ghost of a smile in it.
“Those too.”
Behind the sofa she stopped and her fingertips came down, so tentatively I barely felt them, on my shoulder. She said, “I’m so sorry about Kevin.”
I said, and I heard the rough edge on my voice, “That was my baby brother. It doesn’t matter how he went out that window, I should have caught him.”
Liv caught her breath like she was about to say something urgent, but after a moment she let it out in a sigh. She said very softly, maybe to herself, “Oh, Frank.” Her fingers slipped off my shoulder, leaving small cold spots where they had been warm, and I heard the door click quietly behind her.
14
When Olivia tapped lightly on the spare-room door, I went from dead asleep to awake and depressed in under a second, even before any of the context came back to me. I had spent way too many nights in that spare room, back when Liv and I were in the process of discovering that she no longer felt like being married to me. Even the smell of it, emptiness and a dainty spritz of fake jasmine, makes me feel sore and tired and about a hundred, like all my joints are worn down to the quick.
“Frank, it’s half past seven,” Liv said quietly, through the door. “I thought you might want to talk to Holly, before she goes to school.”
I swung my legs out of bed and rubbed my hands over my face. “Thanks, Liv. I’ll be there in a minute.” I wanted to ask if she had any suggestions, but before I could come up with the words I heard her heels going down the stairs. She wouldn’t have come into the spare room anyway, possibly in case I met her in my birthday suit and tried to lure her into a quickie.
I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless: he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in their makeup bags.
I want Holly to be the one in millions. I want her to be everything that bores me stupid in a woman, soft as dandelions and fragile as spun glass. No one is turning my kid to steel. When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing. Instead, I landed her with a family that had already, within a year of first laying eyes on her, taught her to lie and broken her heart.
Holly was cross-legged on her bedroom floor in front of her dollhouse, with her back to me. “Hello, sweetheart,” I said. “How’re you doing?”
Shrug. She had her school uniform on. In the navy-blue blazer her shoulders looked so slight I could have spanned them one-handed.
“Can I come in for a bit?”
Another shrug. I shut the door behind me and sat down on the floor next to her. Holly’s dollhouse is a work of art, a perfect replica of a big Victorian house, complete with tiny overcomplicated furniture and tiny hunting scenes on the walls and tiny servants being socially oppressed. It was a present from Olivia’s parents. Holly had the dining-room table out and was polishing it furiously with a chewed-looking piece of kitchen roll.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “it’s OK that you’re really upset about your uncle Kevin. So am I.”
Her head bent down farther. She had done her own plaits; there were wisps of pale hair sprouting out of them at odd angles.
“Got any questions you want to ask me?”
The polishing slowed down, just a fraction. “Mum said he fell out a window.” Her nose was still stuffed up from all the crying.
“That’s right.”
I could see her picturing it. I wanted to cover her head with my hands and block the image out. “Did it hurt?”
“No, sweetie. It was very fast. He never even knew what was happening.”
“Why did he fall?”
Olivia had probably told her it was an accident, but Holly has a two-home kid’s passion for cross-checking. I have no scruples about lying to most people, but I have a whole separate conscience just for Holly. “Nobody’s sure yet, love.”
Her eyes finally swung up to meet mine, swollen and red-rimmed and intense as a punch. “But you’re going to find out. Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
She stared at me for another second; then she nodded and ducked her head back down over the little table. “Is he in heaven?”
“Yes,” I said. Even my special Holly conscience has its limits. Privately I consider religion to be a load of bollix, but when you have a sobbing five-year-old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face. “Definitely. He’s up there right now
, sitting on a beach a million miles long, drinking a Guinness the size of a bathtub and flirting with a beautiful girl.”
She made a noise somewhere between a giggle, a sniffle and a sob. “Daddy, no, I’m not messing!”
“Neither am I. And I bet he’s waving down at you right now, telling you not to cry.”
Her voice wobbled harder. “I don’t want him to be dead.”
“I know, baby. Me neither.”
“Conor Mulvey kept taking my scissors in school, before, and Uncle Kevin told me next time he did it I should say to him, ‘You only did that because you fancy me,’ and he’d go all red and stop annoying me, so I did and it worked.”
“Good for your uncle Kevin. Did you tell him?”
“Yeah. He laughed. Daddy, it’s not fair.”
She was on the verge of another huge dam-burst of tears. I said, “It’s massively unfair, love. I wish there was something I could say to make it better, but there isn’t. Sometimes things are just really, really bad, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“Mum says if I wait a while I’ll be able to think about him and it won’t make me sad any more.”
“Your mammy’s usually right,” I said. “Let’s hope she’s right this time.”
“One time Uncle Kevin said I was his favorite niece because you used to be his favorite brother.”
Oh, God. I reached to put an arm around her shoulders, but she shifted away and rubbed harder at the table, pushing the paper into tiny wooden curlicues with a fingernail. “Are you mad because I went to Nana and Granddad’s?”
“No, chickadee. Not at you.”
“At Mum?”
“Just a little bit. We’ll sort it out.”
Holly’s eyes flicked sideways to me, just for an instant. “Are you going to yell at each other some more?”
I grew up with a mother who has a black belt in guilt-tripping, but her finest work is nothing compared to what Holly can do without even trying. “No yelling,” I said. “Mostly I’m just upset that nobody told me what was going on.”
Silence.
“Remember how we talked about secrets?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember we said it’s fine for you and your friends to have good secrets together, but if anything ever bothers you, that’s the bad kind of secret? The kind you need to talk about to me or your mammy?”
“It wasn’t bad. It’s my grandparents.”
“I know, sweetie. What I’m trying to tell you is that there’s another kind of secret as well. The kind where, even if there’s nothing bad about it, someone else has a right to know it too.” Her head was still down, and her chin was starting to get its stubborn look. “Say your mammy and I decide to move to Australia. Should we tell you we’re going? Or should we just put you on a plane in the middle of the night?”
Shrug. “Tell me.”
“Because that would be your business. You’d have a right to know it.”
“Yeah.”
“When you started hanging out with my family, that was my business. Keeping it secret from me was the wrong thing to do.”
She didn’t look convinced. “If I’d told you, you’d just have got all upset.”
“I’m a whole lot more upset this way than I would’ve been if someone had told me straightaway. Holly, sweetie, it’s always better to tell me things early on. Always. OK? Even if they’re things I don’t like. Keeping them secret is only going to make it worse.”
Holly slid the table carefully back into the dollhouse dining room, adjusted it with a fingertip. I said, “I try to tell you the truth, even when it hurts a little bit. You know that. You need to do the same for me. Is that fair?”
Holly said to the dollhouse, in a small muffled voice, “Sorry, Daddy.”
I said, “I know you are, love. It’s going to be OK. Just remember this, next time you’re thinking about keeping a secret from me, all right?”
Nod. “There you go,” I said. “Now you can tell me how you got on with our family. Did your nana make you trifle for your tea?”
A shaky little sigh of relief. “Yeah. And she says I’ve got lovely hair.”
Holy shit: a compliment. I’d been all geared up to contradict criticisms of everything from Holly’s accent through her attitude through the color of her socks, but apparently my ma was getting soft in her old age. “Which you do. What are your cousins like?”
Holly shrugged and pulled a tiny grand piano out of the dollhouse living room. “Nice.”
“What kind of nice?”
“Darren and Louise don’t talk to me that much because they’re too big, but me and Donna do imitations of our teachers. One time we laughed till Nana told us to shhh or the police would come get us.”
Which sounded a little more like the Ma I knew and avoided. “How about your aunt Carmel and uncle Shay?”
“They’re OK. Aunt Carmel’s sort of boring, but when Uncle Shay’s home he helps me with my maths homework, because I told him Mrs. O’Donnell yells if you get stuff wrong.”
And here I had been delighted that she was finally getting a handle on division. “That’s nice of him,” I said.
“Why don’t you go see them?”
“That’s a long story, chicken. Too long for one morning.”
“Can I still go even if you don’t?”
I said, “We’ll see.” It all sounded perfectly idyllic, but Holly still wasn’t looking at me. Something was bugging her, apart from the obvious. If she had seen my da in his preferred state of mind, there was going to be holy war and possibly a brand-new custody hearing. I asked, “So what’s on your mind? Did one of them annoy you?”
Holly ran a fingernail up and down the piano keyboard. After a moment she said, “Nana and Granddad don’t have a car.”
This wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “Nope.”
“Why?”
“They don’t need one.”
Blank look. It struck me that Holly had never before in her life met anyone who didn’t have a car, whether they needed one or not. “How do they get places?”
“They walk, or they take buses. Most of their friends live just a minute or two away, and the shops are right round the corner. What would they do with a car?”
She thought about that for a minute. “Why don’t they live in a whole house?”
“They’ve always lived where they do. Your nana was born in that flat. I pity anyone who tries to get her to move.”
“How come they don’t have a computer, or a dishwasher even?”
“Not everyone does.”
“Everyone has a computer.”
I loathed admitting this even to myself, but somewhere at the back of my mind I was gradually getting an inkling of why Olivia and Jackie might have wanted Holly to see where I come from. “Nope,” I said. “Most people in the world don’t have the money for that kind of stuff. Even a lot of people right here in Dublin.”
“Daddy. Are Nana and Granddad poor?”
There was a faint pink stain on her cheeks, like she had said a bad word. “Well,” I said. “It depends who you ask. They’d say no. They’re a lot better off than they were when I was little.”
“Then were they poor?”
“Yeah, sweetie. We weren’t starving or anything, but we were pretty poor.”
“Like what?”
“Like we didn’t go on holidays, and we had to save up if we wanted to go to the cinema. Like I wore your uncle Shay’s old clothes and your uncle Kevin wore mine, instead of getting new ones. Like your nana and granddad had to sleep in the sitting room because we didn’t have enough bedrooms.”
She was wide-eyed, like it was a fairy tale. “Seriously?”
“Yep. Plenty of people lived like that. It wasn’t the end of the world.”
Holly said, “But.” The pink stain had turned into a full-on blush. “Chloe says poor people are skangers.”
This came as absolutely no surprise. Chloe is a simpering, bitchy, humorless little object wi
th an anorexic, bitchy, humorless mother who talks to me loudly and slowly, using small words, because her family crawled out of the gutter a generation before mine and because her fat, bitchy, humorless husband drives a Tahoe. I always thought we should ban the whole vile bunch of them from the house; Liv said Holly would outgrow Chloe in her own good time. This lovely moment, as far as I was concerned, settled the argument once and for all.
“Right,” I said. “What does Chloe mean by that, exactly?”
I kept my voice level, but Holly is good at me and her eyes slid sideways quickly, checking my face. “It’s not a swear word.”
“It’s definitely not a nice word. What do you think it means?”
Wriggly shrug. “You know.”
“If you’re going to use a word, chick, you’ve got to have some idea what you’re saying. Come on.”
“Like stupid people. People who wear tracksuits and they don’t have jobs because they’re lazy, and they can’t even talk properly. Poor people.”
I said, “What about me? Do you think I’m stupid and lazy?”
“Not you!”
“Even though my whole family was poor as dirt.”
She was getting flustered. “That’s different.”
“Exactly. You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.”
“Chloe says her mum says it’s superimportant to make sure people know straightaway you’ve got plenty of money. Otherwise you don’t get any respect in this world.”