Then he looked properly shamefaced. ‘I’m so sorry, babe, but the cash left over from Dad’s house will cover it.’
I didn’t think I could feel any more shocked. No more nest egg. ‘When were you thinking of going?’ Did I have weeks or months to change his mind?
‘Maybe in a week or ten days.’
Jesus Christ. ‘Have … you haven’t bought a ticket?’
‘I’ve been looking at flights.’
‘Oh, God, Hugh …’
‘I’m sorry.’ Shockingly, his face crumpled and he began to cry, the first tears I’d seen him shed since his dad’s death.
‘Sweetheart …’ I scooted round and took him in my arms.
‘When I saw Dad lying in that wooden box …’ he shuddered into my shoulder ‘… all the things he’d wanted to do and now he never would, it just hit me …’
I had to wait until he’d cried out his sorrow before my next question. Finally, he swiped the sleeve of his sweatshirt across his wet eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘Hugh?’ I was breathless with anxiety. ‘When you say it’s not simply a sex thing? You mean that it is a sex thing?’
I was still hoping I might have misunderstood even though I knew, right in the marrow of my bones, that I hadn’t.
We exchanged a look and it was as if our entire relationship flashed between us: the promises, the trust, the enmeshed emotions, the rock-solid unity – and now some sort of appalling unravelling where he peeled away on a path of his own.
He shook his head. ‘That’s not what this is about.’
‘But it’s not out of the question?’
He studied his hands for a long time. ‘Amy, I love you. I’ll come back to you. But if it happens … then yes.’
Fuuuuuuuck …
He grabbed his beer, his knuckles white. ‘For the six months, it’d be like …’ He paused, then blurted, ‘Like we wouldn’t be married.’
I was plunged into the horrors. Because this had happened to me before – being left by a husband – and it was the worst thing I had ever gone through. It had been so horrible that, to insure myself against a repeat episode, I’d avoided anything serious with any man for half a decade. And when, five years after Richie had legged it, something lovely sparked between me and Hugh, it had scared the daylights out of me.
It was several months before I could talk myself into giving him a chance, and then only because I’d spent the intervening period of chaste denial observing and checking him, the way a horse-buyer inspects a potential purchase, lifting its hoofs and examining its teeth. And the thing I’d been looking for was staying power. I did NOT want a player. I did not want a man who’d change his mind. I did NOT want a man who might leave me. Because it couldn’t happen again.
And yet, here it was – happening again.
As if he knew what I was thinking, he said, ‘It’s only for six months, Amy. Not for ever.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘I’ll come back. I’ll definitely come back.’
He couldn’t know that. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.
But he could have done this the way men usually do it – sneakily, dishonestly, two-mobiles-y. Telling lies that he had to go to some tedious conference when he was actually off to San Sebastián for a weekend of gastro-riding.
At least he was being honest. Did that make it any better? I didn’t know.
I reached for my wine and tipped it into me, then said, ‘Can you get me a vodka?’
‘Sure.’ He jumped up, guilt and relief adding extra vigour.
This hurt too much. I needed to get drunk.
Sometime in the ominous pre-dawn I came to. I was in bed, with no memory of getting there. Something catastrophic had happened – I had the feelings before I had the facts. Then I remembered: Hugh wanted to go away for six months of conscious uncoupling.
Half a year. It was a long time. People can change a lot in six months – especially if they’re meeting all kinds of new people. A sudden image of Hugh fucking some taut-bodied girl with pretty tattoos and surfy hair made me feel I was awake in a nightmare.
Was this just about sex? He’d said it wasn’t but I was suddenly convinced that this was all my fault – I should have made more of an effort on that front. Generally once I’m actually doing the sexing, I like it, but the shameful truth is that in the last couple of years I wouldn’t have minded if we’d never done it again.
Because I was afraid of being the cliché I was, I stepped up to the plate every four weeks or so and tried to fool myself that Hugh hadn’t noticed my lack of enthusiasm.
However, the very last time it had happened – and it was ages and ages ago – Hugh had said, ‘That’s your duty done for another month.’ A second too late, he’d forced out a laugh. (I’d flailed around searching for the right words as he vamoosed in a passive-aggressive scarper.)
Maybe if we’d had a full-and-frank there and then we might have averted this current situation, but clearly we’d both known there was too much at stake.
In a panic, I nudged his sleeping body. ‘Wake up, Hugh, please. We could have more sex.’ My head was racing through all the ways I could persuade him to stay – I could dress up in saucy rig-outs, send him nudie photos of me, make home videos of us riding … I was suddenly aghast that I hadn’t done the nudie-photos thing – I suspected he’d like it because whenever nudie photos of celebrities were hacked, a charged atmosphere sprang up between us.
No one could say I hadn’t been warned about the perils of stagnation in a long-term relationship – experts were forever writing about it. Recently I’d read a thing by some American couples’ counsellor who said that to keep the spark alive you had to – and I quote – ‘be each other’s whores’. He’d written an entire book on the subject and for half a second I’d contemplated buying it, then thought, No. I won’t be anyone’s whore.
Now I wish I’d bought the fecking thing.
However, alongside these thoughts a loud voice insisted that no woman should have to do anything she didn’t want to do just to hold on to her man. But maybe if I’d tried them I’d have liked them …
‘Wake up!’ I shook him, then fumbled for the switch and light flooded the room.
Oh, why hadn’t I been more adventurous? For the love of God, how hard would it have been to photo my hidey-hole?
But shyness had stopped me. And something else that I was only now seeing properly: an uncomfortable suspicion that our sexual wants were different. In countless ways, Hugh and I were aligned – sometimes it felt as if we actually shared the same brain, and that sense of having an almost-twin was a huge comfort. Except for sex. Buried deep in me was a suspicion that Hugh wanted stuff I didn’t. It had never been vocalized – I was afraid that if it was, he’d become like a stranger.
But, instead, this had happened and it was far worse.
‘Are you awake?’ I asked.
‘Yeah …’ He was blinking and trying to sit up.
‘Is this real?’ I asked. ‘Is this really happening?’
‘I’m sorry.’ He tried to hold me.
I pushed him off. ‘We could have more sex.’ I sounded shrill and desperate.
‘Babe,’ he said gently. ‘This isn’t about sex.’
Hope flared, then I forced myself to check, ‘But you might have sex with other people?’
He nodded.
Despair overtook me, followed swiftly by self-revulsion: I was too old, too round, too crap in bed. ‘Is it because I’m a porker?’ I asked.
He actually laughed – a proper laugh, something that hadn’t happened in a while. ‘No. And you’re not anyway.’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘Well, a bit. It’s just, you know, giving up the cigarettes.’
‘It’s not you, it’s me. And I can’t even believe I said that.’
‘If it’s not about sex, what are you looking for?’ Maybe I could provide it.
He shut his eyes and opened them again. ‘Hope, I think. Something lik
e hope, anyway. Excitement, maybe. Possibility.’
Right. I swallowed. Hope. Excitement. Possibility. I knew about them. ‘Newness?’ I said. ‘Freshness? The chance to be a different person, a better version of yourself?’
He looked a little surprised. ‘Yes. Them.’
Well, newness and freshness were things I couldn’t provide. ‘What about the girls?’ I asked.
‘I can tell them tomorrow.’
It was already tomorrow. ‘No.’ Telling the girls would make it real. For as long as only he and I and Carl knew about this, it left the door open for him to change his mind.
‘Kiara’s barely sixteen,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to mind her when I’m away?’ I stayed overnight in London every Tuesday.
‘She can mind herself,’ Hugh said. ‘She’s more grounded than you or me. Or Neeve can be in charge.’
I tried again. ‘Sixteen’s a tricky age for a girl’s dad to disappear for half a year.’
‘Kiara’s an old soul and the most well-adjusted kid you’ll meet.’
‘The thing is, though …’ I was going to say that Hugh’s disappearance might change all that, then realized it wouldn’t make any difference: Hugh was doing this no matter what I said. A wave of anguish rushed up in me. ‘Please don’t.’ I grasped his hand.
‘I’m sorry, Amy. I have to.’
‘What if I say no?’
He broke eye contact with me and his silence said it all: he’d go anyway.
4
I head for Mum and Pop’s in Shankill – when I was growing up, it was practically in the country, but now the south Dublin suburbs have spread out to swallow it and the Friday-evening traffic is heavy. Although it’s early September, the weather is shiny and bright, so people are probably heading for the coast, for the last few rays of summer.
As I inch along my phone rings. It’s Dominik, Pop’s part-time carer. For a long time Maura wouldn’t even hear of us getting a carer for Pop. But Mum has a very full schedule of hospital appointments with her own many ailments, and when Pop was left alone in the house, he was liable to flood the bathroom or to give away Mum’s jewellery to random callers to the door. One time Mum arrived home to discover three strange men – encouraged loudly by Pop, ‘Go on there, lads, now you have her’ – wrestling her washing-machine out of the house and into a van.
But dragging Pop along on Mum’s hospital visits was no longer working because he’d frequently address the nurse with ‘You’ve the look of a young Rosemary West. How many bodies have you buried in your basement?’
So about five months ago Mum displayed some rare gumption and signed up with Camellia Care.
‘Hi, Dominik.’ I wonder why he’s ringing. Maybe Pop had decided to fling his dinner at the wall again. But that hardly counts as news.
‘Amy, your mum is late home and I have next job to get to.’ Dominik is very in demand – very. In the dementia-carers universe, Dominik is Kate Moss.
The thing is that Pop – carrying on the habit of a lifetime – is a difficult patient and often accuses his carers of being serial killers. Even though these people are used to the bizarre insults of dementia patients, Pop wears them down in no time. In the last five months, we’ve gone through a long list. Dominik, who’d spent over twenty years in the Czech Army, is the only one robust enough to cope and we can’t get on the wrong side of him.
‘I’m sure she’ll be home in a few minutes.’ Mum is very reliable.
‘She is already two hours late.’
‘Two hours! Have you rung her mobile?’
‘Certainly I have rung, but it’s on kitchen dresser.’
‘But where’s she gone?’ Mum never goes out except to hospital appointments. ‘What time did she leave?’ I’ve horrible visions of her lying on a pavement, surrounded by concerned strangers trying to establish her identity, and of her, with so little sense of self, unable to tell them.
‘She go at midday.’
‘Whaaat? But that’s six hours ago!’
‘I can tell time, Amy. And your dad say I am worser than Yorkshire Ripper. Six hours I must listen to him.’
‘But, Dominik, which hospital did she go to? Where –’
‘No hospital today. She go to the fancy lunch –’
‘Wait, what, lunch?’
‘– in the fancy hotel. She say she is going on the piss.’
‘No, Dominik, she’d never say that!’
‘Are you calling me liar? She say to me, “Dominik, I am kicking up my heel and going on the piss.” Those very words.’
This is extremely unlikely, but I need to know more before I draw any conclusions.
‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ It’ll be more like twenty-five. I’m a chronic liar about my ETA – there’s simply never enough time.
‘I must leave now,’ Dominik says.
‘Okay, I’ll get someone else over to you ASAP.’
Who should I ring? In the small likelihood that Dominik has his facts straight, I don’t want Mum getting into trouble, so Maura can’t be involved. Instead Derry gets the call.
‘Any chance you could get round to Mum and Pop’s in the next ten minutes?’ I ask. ‘Mum’s MIA and Dominik needs to leave.’
‘So you ring the unmarried daughter?’ Derry says. ‘Poor Derry the spinster. No man, no life, all she’s good for is taking care of elderly parents. Well, times have changed and –’
‘Can you do it or should I ring Joe?’
‘I’m going to Cape Town tomorrow. Good job I didn’t go today, right? I’ll rescue Dominik now, but don’t start thinking this is who I really am.’ She hangs up.
Half an hour later I turn off the main road to the cold, ramshackle Victorian house I grew up in. Once it had had lots of land, but by the time Dad bought it, it had all been sold off and a council estate built, so our abode loomed like a giant granite gravestone in a sea of three-bed semis.
My childhood had been spent fantasizing about living in a modest, pebble-dashed terrace with an electric cooker, instead of the Aga we had, which engendered untold suspicion from our neighbours.
The trees on either side of the driveway are so heavy that branches bang and slide on the roof of my car – maybe Hugh could come round to do some cutting over the weekend. But no. Hugh has other priorities now. Suddenly I realize that if he goes, all the practical household stuff becomes my responsibility: changing light bulbs, doing the weekly food shop and – yes, it might be a cliché but it’s still real – the bins. Even seeing a bin gives me the shudders.
The thoughts of Hugh’s extra-curricular riding have been so distressing that I haven’t appreciated how his absence is going to impact on my day-to-day life and, actually, I’m almost more upset about the bins.
Is there any handyman who could be commandeered? Neeve and Kiara don’t have boyfriends. Sofie’s beloved Jackson is a total sweetie, but he’s a wispy pixie-boy, who looks too frail to wheel the bins as far as the gate.
I park up tight behind Derry’s car, to leave enough space for whoever else is coming today, and by the time I’ve got a tower of pizzas out of my boot, Derry has opened the front door.
‘Is she home?’ I’m looking over Derry’s shoulder, hoping to see Mum’s small, apologetic figure in the gloomy hallway.
‘No.’
I step into the house and eye Derry over the stack of food. ‘I’m worried. Should we be worried? Listen, was Dominik all right?’ I live in terror of him leaving us because then I’d be roped in to babysit Pop and I’m already stretched way too thin.
‘He’s a narky feck.’ Derry closes the door behind me.
‘Should we ring the cops about Mum?’
‘Seriously, though, I can’t be the one who gets the call any time things go wrong with Mum and Pop,’ Derry says. ‘It’s bullshit the way single women are treated, as if we don’t have obligations.’
‘Derry!’ She’s always at this lark and usually it’s entertaining. Not so much today. I’ll have to tell her about Hugh soon –
it’s weird that I haven’t already.
‘Our society has a pervasive lack of respect for us.’
That might well be true of other single women, but you’d never make that mistake with Derry.
‘Dominik rang me first,’ I say, ‘and I’m married.’ Well, I am. Technically.
‘I could be married too,’ she says.
She probably could. She’s quick-witted, charismatic and successful. Also, scrubs up well. In her natural state she looks like all of us O’Connells with our pale skin, light-coloured eyes and tendency to buttiness. (Urzula says we’re the most Celtic-looking family she’s ever seen.) But via vampire facials, laser resurfacing, silhouette lifts and whatever else you’re having, Derry – a vital four inches taller and ten pounds lighter than me – has turbocharged her natural assets into impressive hotness. (Yes, I’m jealous: my funds have never even run to a jab of Botox.)
‘You could be married,’ I say. ‘Except if you go round dumping men because they say “ice and a slice” or call ketchup “catsup” –’
‘So I should put up with some gobshite who gets on my nerves just so I won’t be treated like a second-class citizen?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, and we both laugh.
‘WHERE’S YOUR MOTHER?’ Pop bellows from the front room. ‘Give me my stick. I’m going out to look for her.’
‘Take these.’ I shove my armload of pizzas at Derry, pick up Pop’s stick from the hallstand, race through the kitchen into the scullery and shove the stick into the chest freezer. He’s not leaving this house. One missing parent is bad enough. I couldn’t cope with two.
I stick my head into the front room and call, ‘She’ll be home soon, Pop, don’t worry.’
‘I know you!’ His angry expression vanishes. ‘Are you my sister?’
‘No, Pop, I’m Amy, your daughter.’
‘Away to feck! I’ve no children!’
Car doors are slamming outside.
‘It’s Joe,’ Derry calls, before I start thinking it’s Mum.