Instructions for a Heatwave (26 page)

“I don’t think so,” Michael Francis says. “Doesn’t ring any bells with me—although wasn’t there a cousin of Mum’s?”

“Assumpta,” Aoife mutters in the background. “Sounds like a nun, if you ask me.”

They ignore her.

“Who?” Monica demands.

“You remember. In that farmhouse up a valley somewhere in Galway. Full of dogs and rotting machinery. Dogs everywhere.”

“I remember,” Monica says.

“I don’t,” Aoife says.

“Wasn’t she Assumpta?”

“Assumpta? Assumpta,” Monica intones to herself. “Was she Assumpta?” She closes her eyes, pictures the kitchen of the cousin, the dogs thrashing about their legs, dogs careening up and down the stairs, in and out of the doorways, on and off the furniture. “No, she was Ailish. And, anyway, she was about a hundred then—she can’t even still be alive.”

“Fucking hell,” Michael Francis, still flicking through the stubs, says, first quietly, then more loudly: “Fucking hell! There are loads of them—”

“I know.”

“Every month. Do you think this means—”

From the room below, Gretta can be heard to shout, like the ghost in
Hamlet
, “MICHAEL FRANCIS, I WILL NOT HAVE LANGUAGE IN THIS HOUSE!”

“Well, what else could it mean?” Monica says.

“You think he’s gone off with this Assumpta, whoever she is?” Aoife says. “Would he do that?”

“DO YOU HEAR ME?” Gretta booms.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But it doesn’t look good, does it? YES, WE HEAR YOU.”

The three of them take a breath, look around at each other.

“We’re going to have to tell her, aren’t we?” Aoife says.

“Not yet,” Monica says quickly.

“Let’s wait,” Michael Francis says, “until—”

“Until we have more evidence.”

“How are we going to get that?” Aoife asks.

Monica smooths her skirt over her knees. “The same way I got these.” She points at the stubs. “We’re going to search the house,” she says, in her best bossiest sibling voice. She fishes a piece of paper out of her pocket. “I’ve made this list.”

“What list?”

Monica, as he’d expected, ignores his interjection. “Now. I’ve already been through the desk. I was going to do the wardrobe next. Michael Francis, perhaps you could take the attic and Aoife can do the metal shelves in the shed.”

He scratches at his day-old stubble. A treat he always allows himself at the start of the summer holidays: not having to shave. “In what sense ‘take the attic’?”

“It’ll be tricky,” Monica continues, “without Mum seeing. But I’m sure you’ll manage.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “What exactly are we looking for?”

“Everything. Anything,” Monica says, walking over to the cupboard and pulling it open. “Anything at all.” She extracts a cardboard box from a shelf and lifts out of it a wooden chicken, then a Christmas bauble and an owl made from a pine-cone.

Michael looks on. He glances at his watch. Aoife gets off the bed and leaves the room. Outside, on the landing, she listens, while biting at a ragged edge to her fingernail. Stupid idea, she thinks. The stupidest idea she’s ever heard. What the hell good is that going to do? And: Monica needn’t think that everything is
just going to be all right now. And: my God, how monumentally tired I am.

She takes a few steps and finds herself in the doorway of her parents’ room. There is a bed, she thinks. How good it would be to be horizontal on it. She lays herself down on it sideways so that her head juts towards the bay windows. Just for a moment. She might sleep. Just for a moment. She inhales the smell of her parents: talcum powder, cough drops, naphthalene, hair oil, shoe leather. She stares at the faded lilac candlewick tufts of their bedspread, enormous, geographic at this proximity, shifting in and out of focus.

·  ·  ·

Aoife wakes, confused by the lacy curtains, the electric light spilling in from a door in the wrong place. She jerks up, onto her elbows, and is astonished to find herself in her parents’ bedroom, in Gillerton Road.

She feels indescribably terrible. Parched, sickened, light-headed, hot, unbearably so. She kicks her legs, struggling out of whatever she is wrapped in—some kind of itchy covering.

Someone has been in here, while she slept, and tucked a blanket around her. A woolen blanket. Who in their right mind would put a woolen blanket on someone in the middle of a heatwave?

As if in answer to this question, the porcine stutter of her mother’s snoring comes through the wall.

Aoife kicks crossly at the blanket until it lies like a shed skin on the carpet. She finds herself riding waves of nausea, as if the bed is coasting up and down on the sea, up and down, up and down. There is a moment in which she is gripped by the certainty that she is about to throw up, right there, and she is assessing the etiquette of vomiting on your parents’ bed. But the moment passes. She lowers her head to the bed again, to the disturbingly familiar lilac candlewick, which, she finds, summons many
Christmas-stocking openings, her disemboweling the lumpy sock on this bed—a net bag of chocolate coins, a yo-yo, a peg doll, an orange in the toe—her father feigning sleep, her mother saying, Ooh, and, Ah, and, Now, look at that.

She has no idea what time it is. From the silvering light beyond the net curtains and the nervy arpeggios of the birds outside, it must be dawn, but Aoife refuses to believe it. It’s as though she’s slept for only ten minutes. She cannot possibly have slept through the evening and some of the night as well.

The split green hands of her father’s alarm clock tell her it’s twenty past four. Twenty past eleven in New York, where it’s still yesterday. Will Gabe be awake?

Aoife drags herself upright. Another moment of near-vomiting presents itself but, again, it passes. She looks under where she was lying for her shoes. She kicks the blanket aside to see if they are there. She lifts the Christmas-morning bedspread, she crawls around the perimeter of the bed, she looks under both her parents’ bedside tables. Nothing. Aoife sits down on the bed, pressing her hands into her skull. Not being able to find her shoes suddenly seems like the worst thing that’s ever happened to her. Where, in God’s name, can they be? They are quite ordinary sandals of red leather but their very absence has imbued them with talismanic value.

She knows, of course, what will have happened. She can see it, as if she’d been awake during its execution. Her mother coming in here with that goddamn blanket will have seen them, picked them up and decided to tidy them away somewhere. It’s a habit of hers that drives Aoife to the very brink of insanity: the overzealous tidying. Anything left lying around in Gretta’s presence can be tidied away at any moment. Leave your keys out at your peril. Never put down your purse. Don’t for a moment think that the cardigan left draped over your chair for convenience will be there when you get back.

Suddenly, magically, she spies them. Pushed almost entirely out of sight under her father’s chest of drawers. Aoife leaps from the bed, grabs at them and straps them on quickly, as if fearing they might be dragged from her grasp at any moment.

She ventures out onto the landing. Her mother’s snores sound from behind Michael Francis’s door. She must have gone to sleep in there. Does that, Aoife wonders, mean that Monica is asleep in their room? She steps nearer the door, presses her ear to its grain. Is she in there? Aoife would like her book, she would like to lay her hands again on Evelyn’s work. But she can’t risk waking her. Monica has never been one who takes kindly to being woken up.

Aoife makes her way slowly down the stairs. She isn’t sure what to do. It’s just before dawn. Everyone is asleep. Her book is locked in with her sister. She feels peculiarly awake, as if her body has woken her to say, Time you were at work, off you go to the club.

In the front room she is confronted by the shocking sight of her father’s desk, its lid gaping open, its contents scattered all over the floor. She’s never seen it open before, let alone disemboweled like this. Did Monica leave it like that? she wonders. And what did Gretta say when she saw it? That would have been an interesting conversation to witness, although, thinking about it, Gretta probably said nothing at all to Monica. Probably said: Whatever you think is best, darling, yes, throw your father’s things around, I’ll clear up after you, don’t you worry.

Aoife sits down heavily in her father’s desk chair and pushes her hair out of her eyes. It’s so hot. How can it be this hot? It seems hotter down here than upstairs, which can’t be right because everyone knows that heat rises.

She eyes things strewn around the desk: sheets of paper, old passports with their corners clipped, receipts, letters. The sight of an insignia on one bit of paper makes Aoife shudder but she isn’t sure why. She snatches it up and realizes it’s the school crest.
Our duty to God
, the swirling script underneath it reads; she knows
this because they were reminded of it, daily, in those interminable assemblies. She glances down it and sees line upon line of typescript before she tosses it away from her.

She is contemplating making coffee or maybe tidying this stuff up or perhaps going out into the garden when she puts her head down on her father’s desk. The leather is warm under her cheek, smooth, the smell of polish, paper, ink soothing. She eyes the room, tilted sideways, and thinks she’s never seen it from this angle before, which is odd, and then the next thing she is thinking is how loud her mother’s voice is, talking like that behind her.

Aoife sits up, lifting her head from the desk, and finds that the room is filled with plinths of light, placed lengthways along the carpet. Is it possible that she fell asleep again?

“You don’t say …” her mother is saying. “Well now … and what did he say to … never …”

Gretta is talking to Ireland: Aoife can tell by the extra lean in her voice, the slightly more sibillant
s
, the softer
t
. It’ll be one of her many relatives; they always seem to call at strange hours. A phone call at six in the morning is nothing to them.

Aoife staggers upright, across the room and into the kitchen, where she looks about her. What to eat? There is a box of cereal standing on the table, her mother’s bowl, with a spoon disappearing into milk. The loaf of bread on the counter looks dry, concave across its incision. Aoife leans into the sink and, turning on the tap, drinks from its flow. She is just sitting down at the table with an apple from the fruit bowl when she realizes her mother is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, hands in her dressing-gown pockets.

“What?” Aoife says.

Gretta looks at her, unfocused.

“What’s the matter?”

Aoife gets up, goes to her mother, takes her hands in hers and steers her to a chair. “Who was that on the phone?”

“Mary,” Gretta whispers.

Mary. A friend, a neighbor, a relative, Our Lady?

“Dermot’s wife,” Gretta whispers again.

Aoife, still none the wiser, says, “Ah.”

Gretta covers her face with her hands. “Get me my pills, would you, Aoife? I’ve a terrible head on me.”

Aoife goes to her mother’s pharmacopoeia, kept in a kitchen cupboard. There are about twenty-five bottles, all of differing sizes. Aoife picks up two at random, glares at the labels, puts them down, picks up two more. “Jesus, Mum, what are all these for?”

“Never you mind. Just give us the … the pink ones.”

“Seriously, what are they? You shouldn’t be taking all these. Who prescribes them?”

“Aoife.”
Gretta is holding a hand to her head. “Just give them to me.”

Aoife is getting all the bottles out of the cupboard and lining them up. “Does the doctor know you’ve got all these? Mum, you’ve enough Valium here to fell a horse and you really shouldn’t—”

“Monica says—”

“Oh, Monica says.” Aoife slams a bottle of something beginning with
P
onto the counter. “Monica would benefit from a bit of Valium herself,” she mutters. “Give us all a break.”

Gretta barges across the kitchen, snatches up a bottle, tips two into her palm and swallows them dry. She turns to Aoife. “They,” she says, “have seen him.”

Aoife turns away from the bottles towards her mother. “Seen who?”

“Your father.”

Aoife examines her mother. Gretta looks odd, her eyes wild, her skin white as parchment. “Who’s seen him?” she asks warily, thinking, Please don’t say anything like
the little folk
or
the spirits
. Gretta could sometimes go off on superstitious rambles and it could be hard to bring her back.

Gretta sighs. “Didn’t I just say? Dermot and Mary.”

Aoife is about to snap, Who the hell are Dermot and Mary, but stops herself. “Where?”

Gretta glares at her, as if Aoife is being particularly stupid. “On the Roundstone road.”

“What’s the Roundstone road?”

“What’s the Roundstone—Are you out of your mind?”

“No,” Aoife shouts. She has had enough. “I’m very much in my mind. Now will you stop talking in bloody riddles and tell me what’s happened?”

“Roundstone,” Gretta shouts back, “is a place in Connemara, which you would know if you’d ever listened to a word I said, if you behaved as if you were part of this family, instead of going off and—”

“And what?” Aoife demands. “What were you going to say?”

“Ach.” Gretta waves a hand at her. She opens the back door and disappears out of it.

Aoife stands in the kitchen, eyes shut, fists balled. She registers a desire to see Gabe, to stand with him. She would give almost anything, she thinks, to be able to lay her hand on his shoulder at this precise moment, to have him here in this kitchen with her, his face clear of judgment.

After a moment, she goes out of the door, down the steps and towards her mother. Gretta is sniffing into a hankie by the dried-up laburnum. She can tell, as she gets nearer, that their mutual anger has blown away, like clouds off a landscape. She puts her arms around her mother and says, “Tell me.”

·  ·  ·

Aoife rings Michael Francis’s bell again, then lifts the knocker. It’s just before eight. She has walked from Gillerton Road, all the way to Stoke Newington. She has seen postmen, bin lorries, milk vans. She has seen empty buses plowing along empty roads.
She has seen the sun insinuate itself into the lightening sky, the streets rise into illumination. Not such an anti-social hour to come calling. And don’t people with children always get up early?