The First Time I Said Goodbye (9 page)

When Elise kindly, and with a great deal of bravery, took me aside and told me my grief was not conducive to the cake-selling business and she would be only too happy to offer some support to me, I sagged with relief. I hung up my apron, probably not a minute too soon, and I stopped pretending. I gave in to the grief – at least in my private moments. And I would visit my father every day and bring him just one cupcake – whatever flavour he wanted. He would make his very best effort to eat it and to start with he managed well. As he grew weaker he left more and more but we kept up the pretence. We kept up my baking this cupcake every night and bringing it to him. He would smile and tell me I was the best baker in town. And I would smile and tell him he was the best daddy in the world and he would pick at a few crumbs and promise to eat more later. We never let on to each other that we knew he wouldn’t, or couldn’t eat it. That we knew it would go in the bin or my mother would have a small piece with her evening tea. We knew that, but we learned to live with the charade.

Craig had tried, gently and perhaps not so gently at times, to tell me that what I was doing was futile and maybe I should just forget about the cupcake tradition. But I couldn’t do that. You can’t do that. You have to keep living even when you feel as if every ounce inside of you is dying. You have to do something to keep up the pretence that it is just normal and that life isn’t cruel. You have to find your ways of coping.

Sometimes, you just learn to live with things.

* * *

Sunday lunch involved an impossibly small table with eight chairs crammed around it. Elbows speared ribs, hands brushed together while reaching for the salt and pepper shakers and shoulders were hunched forward to make us as small as possible.

My mother, despite her late night, looked radiant at the top of the table. She sipped from a wineglass (I was on water – water was a decent enough drink for me after the night before) and revelled in the conversation. My head, still fuzzy, drifted in and out of the patter, occasionally glancing towards Sam to check that he was okay. He seemed fine. He dipped in and out of the conversation seamlessly while his mother smiled, almost beatific at the sight of her only son. He was talking old movies and doing manly Humphrey Bogart impressions while his mother laughed and jostled those beside her.

“He’s a star,” she muttered, over and over again. “My boy. Such a talent. Such a catch.”

I glanced at Sam and he looked at me, eyebrows raised just a little as if to say ‘I told you so’.

“You must have some lovely single friends, Annabel?” she asked.

And of course I did. I had Simon and William, either of whom would make a perfect partner for Sam, I would bet, but I figured that was not what she would want to hear.

“I do, but it would be a bit of a commute for a date,” I offered, spearing a green bean with my fork and making great yummy noises so that hopefully she would change the topic of conversation.

“I suppose,” Dolores huffed. “And one member of the family running off to America in search of the love of their life was tough enough to deal with.”

My mother looked down at her plate.

“I still can’t believe you did that,” Uncle Hugh said to her. “My God, girl, it took some guts heading over the water on your own. Still, it all worked out in the end.”

I looked at my mother again. Her head was still down, a slight blush on her cheeks. The conversation we’d had the day before played in my mind. The belief that I always had that she went to America because she was in love with my father had been rocked to its foundations. The version of events they had told me – or maybe they hadn’t told me, maybe it was something I conjured up in my own mind – was that they had become pen pals through a mutual friend and had eventually fallen in love. My mother had moved from Ireland to be with him and the rest was history. And yesterday she had told me she hadn’t even met him until “some years” after she reached the States.

“Yes,” my mother said, interrupting my thoughts, “it all worked out in the end. Sure didn’t I have all those happy years with Bob? Didn’t we get our Annabel out of it?”

“Oh I know,” Hugh said jovially, sipping from a glass of beer that Dolores had poured for him. By the redness in his cheeks I deduced it wasn’t his first or perhaps he was still slightly drunk from the night before. “And besides, I never could warm to Ray anyway. Coming from the Base all that time – sitting at your mother’s table and never so much as bringing a tin of Spam with him. Never could.”

There was an audible intake of breath. I’m not sure if it was my mother, Dolores, Sam, myself or all of us. My mother put her knife and fork down; Dolores glared at Hugh. I tried to run through every Ray I ever knew in my life to see if the name meant anything. Sam looked at me – a look similar to the one I had given him when his mother had asked if I had any single friends. Hugh drank on oblivious.

“And you like a mad one, heading off out of the country. Fair play to you, Stella. Fair play.”

“Hugh!” Dolores stage-whispered and I heard a thump as, I could only assume, her foot collided with his shin.

“For the love of God, woman!” he yelped as my mother lifted her plate, dinner still half eaten and walked to the kitchen.

“You eejit!” Dolores staged-whispered again before turning to me. “He’s had a few, pet. Never you listen to him.”

I nodded and then kind of shook my head, unsure of what my reaction should or could be at this stage.

Dolores stood up and, leaving her own dinner half eaten, followed my mother to the kitchen.

“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Hugh said, tucking in heartily to the meal in front of him. “It’s not like it’s any big deal. It’s not any big secret.”

I looked at him, not sure how to tell him it was a big deal and it was a big secret. I wasn’t hungry any more, so I put my own knife and fork down and sat back in my chair.

“I didn’t know any of this,” I said softly. “I didn’t know it at all.”

“But there’s no harm,” Hugh said. “So your mammy was once in love with a marine? It was your dad she married. I just don’t understand why anyone is getting so het up over a bit of ancient history.”

“Dad,” Sam said, gently, “maybe it’s best we just change the subject.”

“Women!” Uncle Hugh muttered and went back to his dinner. Over the sound of him clattering his knife and fork I could hear hints of Dolores’ off-stage whisper to my mother. The house around me, with its whispers and my tipsy uncle and the whole pretending Sam was not gay thing suddenly got to me.

“I think I’ll go for a short walk.” I stood up, pushing my chair back.

Sam pushed his back too. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

“There’s no need,” I replied but I quickly realised there was a kind of need as I didn’t know one street in Derry from the next and there was every chance I would get very lost and get myself into a whole panic.

“There might not be a need as such but I’d like to go with you anyway.”

I nodded and slipped my jacket on, leaving the whisperers in the kitchen and Uncle Hugh polishing off what was left on Dolores’ plate.

Stepping out in the sunshine, Sam steered me towards the bottom of the street. “There’s a park down here. Not much of one, but it makes for a decent enough walk when you want to clear your head before you hit someone.”

“I don’t want to hit anyone,” I said. “I-I j-just . . .” I stumbled over my words because the truth was that I didn’t really know just what I wanted or how I felt. My relationship with Craig was all but in tatters. I was hung-over and in the horrors from the after-effects of the alcohol. I had just discovered the great love of my mother’s life had not been my father as I had believed – or maybe it had been. Maybe this Ray, whoever he was, really was ancient history? But then as I thought of my mother on the beach – the snippets of her conversation with Dolores which I had overheard – I wondered if the past really was in the past.

“You just don’t know your arse from your elbow, as we would say around these parts?”

“I think that sums it up perfectly,” I said.

We walked on through the tall iron gates of the park, up a hill and through the dappled paths. Sitting on a bench, with Sam beside me, I breathed in and felt some of the tension release from my body.

“I always thought I would come to Ireland one day,” I said. “That perhaps Craig and I would come here on honeymoon, or that I would bring Mom and Dad here for their golden wedding anniversary or the like. I had great dreams about it. I would plan a long trip, I figured. You know, see the
whole
country. Dublin, the Blarney stone, the sun go down on Galway Bay . . .”

“
On Galway Bay
!” Sam sang, making me smile.

“And we would come here, of course, and we would have the big family get-together, but it just didn’t work out that way.”

“Life can be a bitch like that,” Sam said. “I know this is a strange holiday for you – not even a real holiday as such.”

“I came here because my mother asked me to come with her. I couldn’t say no. Not after what she had been through with Dad. And if I’m honest I was scared to leave her on her own, which was silly because of course she is with family. But in my mind we were her family, Dad and I. There was no one outside of us. Such a contrast to the big extended family here . . . I’m just not used to it . . .”

“I can understand why you feel that way. This family of ours, we can be hard to take in one big dose. And you were thrown in at the deep end – dropped into enemy territory so to speak – not even the breathing space of a hotel room.”

I blushed. “Your house is nice,” I offered. “Really nice.”

Sam laughed – a big, deep hearty laugh. “Oh, I know that. I may not have got the flamboyant-queen gene when they were handing
out the gay points but I did get the interior-decorator genes.”

“I’m glad to have you now. You’ve been very good to me.”

“That’s what family are for, kid,” he said. “Now, let’s walk around a little more until we can feel the sun warm our bones and then we will head back. We’ll take this one day at a time. I’ll leave the girls to run the shop for a few days – show you Northern Ireland and all it has to offer. Take your mother if she wants to go. Or leave her to deal with her own demons. When you’re ready, we’ll find out what we can about Ray – if you want to. And as for your man back in the States – maybe a little distance is just what the doctor ordered.”

He put his arm around my waist as we walked on and I felt my head lean in towards his shoulder. The warmth of his body was comforting, but it was the warmth of his friendship which moved me to tears. I couldn’t remember the last time I had hugged someone without over-thinking the very act of physical contact. With my father, every hug for the last few months had felt like a countdown. I hadn’t wanted to let go and every time I did a part of me died because I knew we were on borrowed time. As I hugged my mother and felt her get frailer, her hugs a little colder, I felt her slip away from me too. In a different way of course. It was always my mother’s way to put on her best practical face and get done what needed to be done. She didn’t have time for hugs. Not because she was a bad person but because she didn’t want to let even one chink of emotion in her armour. She had to stay strong.

With Craig, it had been almost worst of all. He hugged me and I wanted to hug him back but, well, I suppose I had a bit of my mother in me. I didn’t want to let my emotions out. I probably was a cold fish to him, I admit it. As the weeks went on and every ounce of my emotional energy was focused on my father, I didn’t have it to give elsewhere. The more I pushed Craig away the closer he wanted to be, until every hug felt like a precursor to some greater need of his that I couldn’t meet.

When my father died, of course people hugged me, in that perfunctory, pat-on-the-back, sorry-for-your-loss kind of way. But not a real hug. Not one where I actually felt an ounce of warmth.

“You don’t need to do that,” I sniffed.

“What? Take time off work? Look, Annabel, I’d have offered before you even got here but I wasn’t sure you weren’t going to be a complete pain in the ass. I’ve sized you up a bit now and I think I could tolerate a little more of your company. Besides, I can’t have you going back to the States remembering this as the worst holiday of your life, ever. I think there is a law against letting people leave this country with anything less than a good impression of it. You stick with me, kid. It’ll all come good.”

Chapter 9

You’re going to think I’m mad, and I probably am. But I can’t be apart from you one moment longer.

* * *

Hugh was snoring in an armchair when we got back. Dolores and my mother were back at the table, all dishes and traces of the dinner cleaned away. They were sipping from china cups and still talking in hushed tones when we arrived.

My mother looked at me, her faced filled with concern. “Anna, are you okay, pet? We weren’t sure where you had gone.”

“Sam here looked after me,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry about that – about you hearing about Ray like that.”

“Mom,” I said, “I didn’t hear anything except that you once loved a man called Ray and he didn’t bring Spam around to your house. As far as I’m concerned that’s in the past.” I really didn’t need to hear the details – I didn’t need to think of my mother as anything less than perfectly happy with my father.