Instructions for a Heatwave (36 page)

There is a silence on the line, a great ocean of silence that rolls and surges and heaves between them.

“Glasses,” he repeats flatly.

“I want to be with you,” she says again. “Please believe me. The thing is …” She screws up her face so that the lights of Claddaghduff blur and distort before her. It is taking considerable physical effort for her even to contemplate saying this. She is raising herself onto her toes, she is tensing her shoulders, as if readying herself for a blow. “The thing is … I have a problem … I have a problem with reading.”

For a moment, she cannot believe what she has said. It seems
astonishing for those words to be out in the air. They fly around in the hot, narrow space of the phone box, circling her head. She wants to ease open the door a crack, to let them out, like bees from a hive, into the outside world.
I have a problem with reading
. Then she is worried that she might have to say them again because time is ticking on, her change is being swallowed by the phone, and Gabe hasn’t replied. Is it possible that he didn’t hear her?

“Huh,” Gabe says eventually. “A problem with reading. Right. OK … You know something?” Each of his words comes out as if he is enunciating with care. “My grandfather had this strange trouble with the written word.”

Aoife breathes in and breathes out. She cannot believe what he is saying. She cannot believe that he said “written” in front of “word.” She loves him for that; she loves him for that distinction because, of course, there are so many forms of words, so many guises, and it is only the goddamn written kind that won’t work for her, that trips her up, that makes a mess and a tangle, like string, inside her head. All the others, she can do.

“Really?” Aoife gets out.

“Yeah. He went his whole life pretending everything was fine. He had this stock of excuses to get him through. He used to say he could only read in Russian. Or that he’d lost his glasses. Or that he had a headache and would I read the paper aloud to him? But it wasn’t true. We all knew he just couldn’t read.”

In Gabe’s tone of studied casualness, in what he is saying, Aoife is suddenly aware of a buoyant, lifting sensation, as if flexed, feathered wings have unfolded from the muscle and bone of her back.

“When are you coming back?” Gabe says, after a while. “I miss you. We all miss you—me, the rats, the cockroaches, those spooky things that scratch from inside the walls at night.”

“Soon,” Aoife says, as she looks out to Omey Island. “I’m coming back very soon.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise,” she says, the words spreading in steam across the glass. “But you know what?”

“What?”

“I think we should come here for a while.”

“Here?”

“Where I am right now, Omey Island. I wish you could see it. It’s so beautiful. My family has a house here. We can live in it, you and me, and we can just sit things out.”

She hears him swallow, shift his fingers on the receiver. “Uh, maybe. Would I like it there? I mean, I’m guessing it’s kind of different from Manhattan.”

She laughs. “It couldn’t be more different from Manhattan, I can tell you that. It’s an island but that’s about the only similarity.”

“Aoife—”

“Just think about it.”

“OK,” he says. “Bring me back a photo and I’ll think about it.”

·  ·  ·

Monica leans on a stone wall and waits. It is past midnight, close to one o’clock. A moon hangs above the island, so impossibly round and bright that it looks like a fake moon, a Hollywood moon, one made from paper and trickery and electric lights.

She feels sleep approach her, again and again, like a draft from under a door. Her eyelids droop, her head starts to fall, but she jerks herself awake.

When Aoife didn’t come back after dark, not after Michael Francis and Claire came in, Gretta was up and down from her chair, to the window and back, wringing her hands, saying, Where’s she gone, did she fall in the sea, do you think, why is it people keep disappearing? Monica had sent her to bed, saying she would go out, she’d find her. Everyone was tired from last
night on the ferry. You’d have thought Aoife wanted her sleep, too, what with all the jet lag, but then Aoife had never been much of a one for sleep.

Monica went out into the dark. She walked to the north of the island, around to the westerly tip, back to the south. Calling and calling Aoife’s name, searching everywhere she could think of. It reminded her of those times Aoife sleepwalked as a child. They would come in waves, Aoife’s nighttime wanderings. Weeks could go past without a single incident but then Monica would wake and the bed next to hers would be empty, sheets pulled back, and she’d know that Aoife had been propelled to her feet by some unknown urge. Monica used to search the house—the bathroom, the stairs, the living room, the kitchen. She had found her, crouched by the dying fire once. Sometimes she’d be sitting on Michael Francis’s bed. Another time, she found her out in the back garden, trying and trying to open the shed door, her eyes half open and dazed, in the grip of some somnolent drama. Their father had screwed bolts into the doors, high up so that Aoife couldn’t reach them, to keep her from wandering into the street.

So here was Monica again, out in the night, searching for the wandering Aoife, ready to lead her gently back to bed.

She saw her from up on the sandy bluff: a tiny figure walking back along the causeway, which shone slick in the moonlight. Monica picked her way down—she has her Wellingtons on, under her nightdress—and is waiting here, at the wall.

As Aoife reaches the rise of the track, Monica calls her name. “Aoife!”

The figure of her sister jumps, puts a hand to her heart. “Who’s there?” she says, and Monica is surprised by the fear in her voice.

“It’s me.”

“Oh. You scared the shit out of me. What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you. Where’ve you been?”

“Out,” Aoife replies, without stopping, moving past her along the track.

“Out where?”

She flings her arm behind her, towards Claddaghduff. “There.”

The dark is soft around them but she can see that Aoife’s face is set, her mouth the slightly downturned line that Monica remembers so well from her childhood. Monica scales the wall, carefully, inexpertly, her Wellies catching on the stone edges, and runs to catch up with Aoife. “Were you phoning your boyfriend?”

Aoife makes a noise that means neither yes nor no and, without intending to, Monica stops. She says, “Aoife, listen.”

Aoife stops, too, a few steps farther on, her back towards her.

Monica has surprised herself. She doesn’t know what she wants to say, doesn’t know what she wants Aoife to listen to.

“I …” she begins. “… about Joe …” She comes to a halt. “I was just so … Everything was in such a … after what happened, you know …” She takes a breath, then manages to say, “After what I did … I … well …”

“Just say it,” Aoife says, still with her back turned.

“Say what?”

Aoife sighs. “For fuck’s sake.”

Monica flinches at the phrase. An ugly thing to say, a horrible thing. Joe had said it to her when—

“It’s a word that everybody knows,” Aoife says. “Except you, it would seem. It begins with
s
.”

There is a pause. They listen to the high chirrup of a bird, the tussling flap of the breeze catching in Monica’s hem, the distant pulse of the waves.

“I’m sorry,” Monica says, on the track over Omey Island, to her sister’s rigid back.

“For what?”

“For everything. For thinking you would ever have told Joe. Of course you never would have done that. I don’t know why I forgot that about you. And …” Monica pauses, tugs at the cuffs of her nightdress. “… I said some terrible things to you, that day in the kitchen. Awful things. I’ve regretted them ever since.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. I should never have lashed out at you like that and I shouldn’t have said them and they’re not true and—”

“Ah, now I know you’re lying.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they are true, aren’t they, those things you said about Mum and me as a baby? I know they are.”

“Well.” Monica opens her hands and shuts them again. “I should never have said them, either way. The last three years have been horrible without you.” Monica sighs, and as she does so she realizes that this is true and that she isn’t going back to Gloucestershire: all that is over for her. She will not return to the farmhouse, she will not live there again. Jenny and the children will come back to live at the house that was never, after all, hers. She regards this notion with an odd calm. It is a fact, stolid and uncomplicated by indecision: she is not going back there. “Horrible,” she says again.

Aoife turns now, to face her. “Really?”

“I … I don’t seem to make the right decisions when you’re not around,” Monica says. “Like the dress I wore for my wedding. I bought it the week before, in a panic. I knew the skirt was too short and it made my knees look awful and it just didn’t suit me. The woman in the shop told me it looked lovely and so did Mum, and I wanted to believe them. But when I saw the photos, I kept thinking, If Aoife had been around, she would have said, Don’t wear that, not that, it looks terrible. You would have sorted it out.”

“I would.”

“It was a bad dress.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Turquoise watered silk, netted skirt, puffed sleeves.”

They are walking now, together, back to the cottage, their steps in rhythm. Monica had forgotten that she and Aoife could do this, could walk in perfect unison; she’s never found this exact, metronomic motion with anyone else. It must come from all those years of walking together, to school and back, to the shops and back, to the bus stop, the tube, the library.

“It sounds vile.”

“It was.”

Aoife stops at the cottage gate. “So you got married dressed as Little Bo Peep?”

Monica laughs. She wants to say to Aoife: That’s it, I’m not going back to him, it’s over. She knows Aoife will understand, won’t ask too much. But there will be time for that later. “I did.”

“Without me.”

“Without you.”

“Ah well.” Aoife shrugs. “We all make mistakes.”

Monica sighs. She puts a hand out and touches Aoife’s arm and Aoife doesn’t pull away. “We do,” she says. “We do. And speaking of which …”

“What?”

Monica bites her lip. “Well, Mammy says she thinks …”

Aoife pulls away now, doing the old classic flounce. “I know what she thinks.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“It it true? Are you …” Monica finds she is having trouble with the word “pregnant.” The air around them is stirring in a most distracting way, rippling its fingers through the leaves, and she knows that they are both thinking the same thing, that their
minds are picturing the same image of a hospital bed, of two people bent together in a cubicle.

“I am,” Aoife says, not meeting her eye.

“Oh, Aoife.”

“What does ‘Oh, Aoife’ mean?”

“I don’t know. Just that … well …” Her voice is high and strained. She pulls her sister to her, surprised as always by how slight Aoife feels, how small her skeleton is, still, even though she’s an adult, how it would be so easy for someone to hurt her. “… I … just that …”

“Just that what?”

Monica throws her hands up in the air. She is annoyed by the stinging of her eyes, by the compressed sensation in her throat. “There’ll be another baby!” she exclaims.

Aoife nods. She opens the gate and heads up the path.

“What about the father?” Monica is asking, as she follows her up the path. “He’s … involved, I take it? He’s a lawyer, isn’t he? Well, that’s something. A steady job, a good income. But I think you should come back to London. You can’t have it in New York, away from all of us. You could live at Gillerton Road for a while, have the baby there, and then—”

“Are you out of your mind?” Aoife hisses, as she opens the front door. “I would die. I would literally expire.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’d rather have it in a ditch.”

Monica giggles as they jostle about in the hall, removing Wellingtons and cardigans. “Aoife—”

“I would. I’d rather have it in a chicken coop, a cat box, anywhere.”

Monica heaves at her left, recalcitrant Wellington, always her larger foot. “I can’t get this one off,” she whispers.

“A railway carriage,” Aoife is muttering, “a toolshed, a coal scuttle. Give it to me.” She tugs at the Wellington. “Come on,
you fecker.” She gives a great heave and the Wellington flies off with a sucking noise, sending Aoife reeling backwards, her head crashing into a lantern on a hook. “Bollocks,” she says, rubbing her head.

Their mother’s voice booms out of the darkness: “Will you two keep it down? Some of us are trying to sleep.”

Monica and Aoife make their way along the passage and into the room they are sharing. Aoife collapses onto her side of the bed.

“Do you think it’s possible to die from tiredness?” she says, her eyes already closed.

“I don’t know,” Monica says, and climbs between the sheets, “but I’m sure you must have given it a try.”

·  ·  ·

In the morning, Gretta and Monica make bread. They eat it in the front garden, spread with butter they bought yesterday from the place where they’d stopped to get petrol. They bring the kitchen chairs out into the sun and Claire spreads a blanket on the grass for the children. But they don’t sit on it. Hughie balances himself like a bird on the wall and Vita rolls herself up in the blanket like, Gretta thinks, that kitten in the storybook.

“Are you not terribly hot in there?” Gretta asks her, from her perch on the chair.

Vita squints up at her, cheeks flushed pink. “Nope,” she says.

Gretta shrugs and sips her second cup of tea of the day. She likes it scalding hot, properly steeped, black, without the slightest hint of milk. Always has.

The sun beats down on them all. When will this weather break? It can’t last much longer.

Michael Francis and Claire sit together on the grass, his arm around her shoulders. Hughie, looking out towards the mainland, asks, Where are all the people, why is Ireland so empty?
And Michael Francis starts to tell him about the famine, about blighted potatoes, about the thousands and thousands of people who left, got on boats and sailed away and never came back. Hughie listens, a slice of bread in each hand. Vita chants the word “diaspora” to herself, over and over, as she rolls about in her blanket.