Callie was exhausted.
At five the previous morning, when the pre-dawn light was shimmering in the sky, she had woken, dressed, roused Poppy and together with Brenda, they’d slipped out the back of the house, through four other people’s back gardens via side gates and into the lane where a friend of Brenda’s named Tommy waited with a car. It was a beat-up old Renault, circa 1994. Callie had looked at the car, once a pale blue, now a combination of rust, dents and dirt, and thought of the glamorous Ferrari sitting in her garage at home. But it would get them where they needed to go.
‘I know she looks a bit bashed-up, Mrs Reynolds, but my uncle has had her for years and she’s a grand aul car. Lots of miles on the clock, but she won’t let you down. I gave her a quick service and she’s running fine. The tyres are good, the tank is full.’
Callie had felt like crying because he was being so kind, but no tears came: it was like they were all gone.
‘I don’t know how to thank you, Tommy,’ said Callie, and she handed over the money for the car: five hundred euros, which seemed ridiculously low for a car and yet barely the price of a wheel on her Range Rover, she recalled.
Callie had turned and hugged Brenda tightly.
Poppy installed herself in the front seat with the distaste of someone sitting in the back of the bin lorry. She held her precious handbag up on her lap, not wanting to put it into the footwell which was definitely not valeted like the cars she was used to.
‘Don’t look at it like you’re going to get a disease from it,’ said Brenda, leaning in to give her a last embrace. ‘It’s a grand vehicle, it will get you to where you need to go.’
‘And where’s that?’ said Poppy, ‘some shithole somewhere?’
Callie didn’t even remonstrate with her, there was no point. Poppy had been in a foul mood all the previous evening and it was as if the sweet teenager of the previous night, when Callie had removed her make-up, had gone.
‘Thank you, Brenda,’ Callie said, ‘I’d have been lost without you.’
Brenda and Tommy had helped her sell her diamonds to a second-hand jeweller the previous afternoon to pay Fiona McPharland’s fee, and after that, she had 3,854 euros in cash in her wallet. The earrings alone were worth four times that much, but beggars could not be choosers. Apart from the rest of her haul – the watch, a few bits and bobs – it was all the money she had to her name.
‘I’m your friend, you know that,’ said Brenda, ‘so keep in touch and tell me how you’re getting on. I think what you are doing now is the right thing.’
Callie had needed just one more night before she left Dublin, just in case Jason tried to get in touch. So here they were, having spent the night in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the city. Reporters had indeed got hold of her phone number and kept on calling, the Sunday News making her most upset as she could remember when she’d appeared in their fashion pages years ago, and later, in their society pages.
But Jason had changed all that.
She would have to take out the SIM card soon and replace it with the pay-as-you-go one that would ensure nobody could get hold of her.
She had hung up on every reporter and the one person she wanted to phone her, Jason, hadn’t.
They were out of options.
‘I don’t know how we’re going to cope,’ she’d emailed to Mary Butler, who’d heard the news from Evelyn.
‘I will do anything, Cal,’ wrote Mary, in a heart-warming email where she promised that Poppy and Callie could come to Canada for a holiday and spend months there. ‘We’ve got the granny flat. You could have it, and you’d love it.’
‘I can’t go anywhere until this is sorted out,’ Callie had written back sadly.
She was a prisoner in all but name. Not able to leave the country and not safe from the rampaging journalists keen to find some person connected with the story.
‘But soon, when it’s over,’ Mary urged.
‘We’d love that,’ said Callie, thinking that it all felt as if it would never be over.
She and Poppy checked out of the hotel after much grumbling from Poppy about why she couldn’t lie in bed seeing as she wasn’t in school.
‘Because we have to check out!’ shrieked Callie, finally losing it. ‘We are going to visit your grandmother.’ She was putting on a bold front because her mother could turn them away from the door; she could have moved. They might be homeless in Ballyglen that night.
‘She won’t want us,’ said Poppy furiously. ‘I don’t want to go there. Dad always said that it was a tip, that you guys came from nothing, from some crappy housing estate in the middle of nowhere.’
Callie bit her tongue. She would not respond, not say that it was a pity bloody Jason had forgotten his working-class background. He’d managed to make their daughter forget it too and if she ever got her hands on him . . .
Stop, she whispered to herself.
Somehow, they managed to get out of the hotel without killing each other and got back into the old car, which smelled even more than it had the previous day.
Pigs and sheep, Callie decided: the car had been used to transport them both. It was the only answer for that foul smell, and no tree-shaped air-freshener was going to fix it.
As she drove out of the hotel car park, Callie realised she was gripping the old steering wheel so tightly that she could see the veins in her hands. She breathed in and out deeply.
Breathe. She was going to be calm and get through the day.
‘Did you find something on the radio?’ she said to Poppy, attempting a normal voice.
‘Find a radio station on this heap of shit?’ said Poppy, glaring at her mother. ‘I’m going to listen to my phone instead,’ and she stuck her headphones into her ears.
Fine, thought Callie, deep breathing. A lot more deep breathing.
She found a classical station and let soothing ballet music drift all over her as they drove out of Dublin towards Ballyglen.
It was a long time since she had been on this road heading home. When she was younger, the big modern roads hadn’t existed, and when she used to drive up and down to see her mam, she’d had her first car, an old Mini. Its suspension had been dreadful and she’d felt every bump in the road. She could recall getting stuck in a line of cars as everyone trundled along slowly behind some giant tractor dragging hay bales from one field to another. Yet the journeys had been hopeful. She’d loved going home then, loved seeing her family. Mam had never put a guilt trip on her, never said ‘why don’t you settle down around here, after all Jason is from here’.
No, there’d been none of that.
Mam had given her roots and wings, had let her fly, and what had she repaid her mother with? Callie thought bitterly. Ostracisation – just because Jason had fought with her mother and made Callie take sides.
Except, a little voice said in her head, nobody made you take sides: you took his side, nobody can make us do what we don’t want to do.
Oh shut up, she said to the little voice and she turned the radio up louder to drown out her own thoughts.
‘It’s too loud, I can’t hear my music,’ snapped Poppy.
Callie looked at her daughter who was wearing expensive Beats headphones and said: ‘Turn the sound up, then.’
Poppy’s eyes widened marginally. Normally, Callie talked about being careful of her hearing and not turning her headphones’ volume too high.
But not today, Callie thought, and kept on driving.
Crone was in charge now.
She stopped when she came to a small petrol station with a tiny coffee shop.
‘You’re stopping here?’ said Poppy in scandalised tones, as if here was a pigsty in the middle of nowhere.
‘Yes, here,’ said Callie, a hint of madness in her voice. Everyone had a limit, she thought, and she had just reached hers. Shattered mother had gone and Old Crone With No Filter was definitely in her place.
‘Let’s hear it for Old Crone who is able to deal with irritating teenagers,’ Crone whooped.
‘Well, I’m not getting out.’
Poppy stared around her as if savages armed with spears and covered with cow shit were going to ram the car at any moment.
‘Fine,’ said Callie, just as decisively. ‘You stay in the car. I’m going to have a pee, get a nice cup of coffee and maybe a bun. Buy sweets for the rest of the journey, but you’re fine sitting in the car. You can mind it. Make sure nobody steals it.’
‘As if anyone would want to steal this heap of junk,’ snapped Poppy.
‘Whatever.’
Two could play at that game.
Callie took the keys out of the ignition and climbed out, stretching to ease her aching bones.
After a moment, Poppy got out too. ‘Thought I might visit the bathroom and I want a drink too,’ she grumbled.
‘Fine,’ said Callie in a saccharine voice that sounded marginally better than the sarcastic one she really wanted to let out. She might get a job as a TV presenter yet: there was always time. Surely TV channels were always looking for the abandoned wives of fraudulent businessmen to front children’s TV shows? On that basis, she’d get a job right away.
Callie’s face had been on every daily paper in the country both in her glamorous incarnation and as she looked these days. Since being ambushed by the photographers, she’d worn her hair pulled back, had borrowed a pair of Brenda’s old black-rimmed reading glasses and had a baseball hat on so that she looked different, hopefully unrecognisable from the woman with the long blonde hair who’d been caught with an anguished face going into Brenda’s.
But all she needed was for someone to recognise them. Whatever get-up-and-go she had left would depart if she was confronted.
They needed petrol too, so she drove over to the pumps, put some gas in the car, paid in the shop with her head down, and then came out.
She drove off the forecourt to an almost empty part of the parking area and stopped the car. Reaching over, she pulled the headphones from her daughter’s head.
‘Now listen,’ Callie said firmly. ‘Big talk time. We are in this together, Poppy. I don’t like it any more than you like it. I know it’s frightening, terrifying, horrible – our lives have been ripped apart and we don’t know what’s happening, but we have one thing.’
Poppy stared mutinously ahead.
‘We have each other. So stop being a bitch to me. I’ll try not to take my irritation out on you and we can get through this together.’
‘But, Mum, I don’t want to go to my grandmother’s house,’ wailed Poppy. ‘I don’t want to go to Ballygobackwards, to somewhere I can’t remember. I want to stay in our old house, I want Dad back.’
Callie closed her eyes for a minute.
What she wouldn’t have given to get her hands on Jason at that moment and ask him what he was playing at. Jason, who she’d always thought had adored them both and would never have hurt Poppy for the world. For a while, she’d hoped there was some reason he’d gone and that he’d return, magically, to fix it all.
Now, she no longer believed this to be the case. Whatever had made him leave, it would never be excuse enough for the hurt he was putting them through now.
‘You know what, honey,’ she said softly, ‘I want all those things too, but we can’t have them. It’s like a hurricane came and raced through our lives, whirling all the good stuff up and left us just about standing with the clothes on our backs and with each other. That’s what we’ve got.’
A single tear slid down Poppy’s face.
‘So we’ve got to make the best of it,’ Callie went on. ‘It’s a bit like one of your dystopian movies when people end up with nothing but they have to get on with it. We’re stuck in a dystopian movie and we have to keep moving, sort this out.’
‘’Kay,’ said Poppy, suspiciously snuffly but definitely brightening up.
Wow, thought Callie, thrilled. She should have used that dystopian movie metaphor before.
Poppy flipped down the visor to see the mirror, found that elderly cars often lost their passenger vanity mirrors, so instead adjusted the rear-view one to check her eyeliner hadn’t run.
Callie managed to say nothing about how the rear-view mirror was for the driver and how with a car this old, it might just fall off altogether with any unexpected movement, but she waited until the primping was done, then calmly readjusted it.
Make-up checked, Poppy was satisfied.
‘Let’s do this,’ she said, vigour in her voice.
Poppy was like her father, Callie decided as the entente cordiale which had begun in the coffee shop continued for the rest of the journey. Once Jason made up his mind to do something, he did it with all his energy. Poppy was the same.
‘Tell me about Ballyglen,’ she said, giving her mother all her attention apart from a little bit of poking around with eyeshadow from one of her beautiful compacts. Callie eyed the compact and thought about how much it had cost in the first place.
Still, there was no point crying over money that was spent. Madness lay in that direction.
‘Well . . . It’s pretty different to Dublin.’
‘You were, like, really poor, right?’ Poppy said, as if such a concept was entirely unimaginable. ‘I mean, Dad never talked much about it, but he said he and his brother used to steal coal. Imagine having to steal coal.’
Callie laughed. They had probably stolen a lot more than coal and his older brother, who’d actually done time for hash growing, might well still be at it for all she knew.
Of course, Jason appeared to have no contact with his family, but maybe he did? She didn’t know what to think anymore. Maybe he saw his mother, talked to her. Maybe it was just Callie who’d been forced to leave her family behind. Mam, Freddie, Auntie Phil . . .
She shook her head. The thought was disquieting, she wouldn’t dwell on it.
‘We didn’t have much money,’ Callie said, the way she always did, and then she thought she’d better elaborate a little more. If her mother was still living in Sugarloaf Terrace and would let them stay, then Poppy was going to see first-hand exactly how humble those beginnings had been: one small terraced house which had housed an entire family, with just one bathroom that had only been installed inside the house when she’d been ten. She laughed.
‘What? So poor is funny, is it?’ said Poppy, performing a volte-face with speed. ‘They tell us in school that we shouldn’t laugh at people because they have got no money. Ms Higgins tells us that the guy standing on the side of the road begging might have been just like you and me. He could have lost all his money or been on drugs or something, and then he ended up on the side of the road looking for help. We have to, you know, have sympathy and empathy and all that stuff.’ Speech over, Poppy poked around a bit more in her MAC compact, adding another layer of eyeshadow. It was like watching a painter unable to put down the brush.
‘I have sympathy and empathy for the homeless person and the person begging,’ Callie said, not mentioning that she had not noticed such empathy in Poppy for a while. ‘The thing is . . .’ She paused. She really had to prepare Poppy for this. ‘Your dad and I really did grow up poor. We weren’t on the streets, but your father’s dad died when he was a teenager so things were tough for his mum. It was a bit different in my house. Ma and Da both worked. My Auntie Phil lived with us – she’s my mum’s older sister and she worked in the bottle factory.’
‘She worked in a factory?’ Poppy said, horrified.
Callie almost laughed.
‘Yes, a factory, the eight-to-four shift, a bit more if she got overtime. It was hard work, tiny pension, no prospects of improvement, but . . .’
‘You’re going to say, “but we were happy,” aren’t you?’ said Poppy.
Callie laughed again.
‘We were poor and we were happy,’ she said. ‘We lived in a real community. We knew there was more out there but we didn’t have it. That didn’t mean we were unhappy. I loved my family and I guess I had hopes and dreams.’
‘Because you were beautiful and everything and you were going to be a model,’ said Poppy as if her mother’s career path had been written down in a great manuscript, something to be fulfilled no matter what.
‘Mam helped me, she sent me to dance classes, ballet classes,’ Callie remembered and the flush of guilt washed over her again. They hadn’t had much money but her mother had insisted that Callie have her ballet classes in Madame Celine’s in the posher part of the town, so Callie could make something of herself.
‘So why don’t you see her anymore?’ said Poppy, getting straight to the nub of it.
She had her father’s ability to ignore things that didn’t immediately interest her, Callie thought. Now, her mother’s family was interesting, but not before.
‘It was on my birthday many years ago. Ma came to the house and had a fight with Dad.’
‘But she saw me, didn’t she?’ said Poppy.
‘She saw you, she loved you, everyone loves you.’ she said brightly, the guilt searing through her again.
‘So the house, Granny’s house – oh, what will I call her? Grandma?’
‘You’ll have to ask her.’
‘What’s the house like?’
‘It’s not what you’re used to,’ her mother explained. ‘It’s small and was always pretty, homey . . .’
That warmth was what Callie had tried to recreate in her own kitchen. The community feel of Ballyglen was something she’d never managed to find again in the upper echelons of Dublin society.
‘Will I have my own bedroom?’
‘I don’t know if you’ll have your own bedroom, lovie. You might be sharing with me.’
‘Yuck,’ said Poppy, horrified. ‘That’s sick. I can’t share with you. Why can’t we go back to Brenda’s – at least there I had my own room.’
‘We can’t stay with Brenda, we have to get away somewhere nobody knows us until this all dies down and Dad sorts it all out.’
‘He will sort it all out, won’t he?’ said Poppy in a small voice. And for just a moment she didn’t sound at all like the cool teenager who knew everything.
‘Let’s hope he sorts it out,’ Callie said gently. She didn’t think now that Jason was going to be sorting anything out anytime soon, but her daughter was still only fourteen, still a child. She couldn’t let her child know the truth just yet. She dare not think of social media and how girls from her school could have already told her. But if Callie kept up the facade, then surely Poppy would believe it.
Let them settle somewhere, hopefully in Ballyglen. Let them find some routine and normality to life and then, if Callie could get a job and had enough money to pay for counselling for Poppy, she’d tell her the unvarnished truth. Slowly, gently. Not all in one fell swoop. For a girl who idolised her father, it would be like hearing of his death.
Whatever had to be said had to be said gently. But social media was still the problem. Poppy was glued to her phone. Who knew what she’d see if she looked up her father’s name.
As they drove, Callie could feel her nerves really straining now. Poppy had taken off her headphones and had the radio blasting loudly. She’d grumbled about not being able to get her favourite Dublin city station and about there not being a system where she could plug her phone into the car and let the sound system pick up her music via Bluetooth.
‘Useless car,’ she’d muttered, before finding a cool local station she could turn up too loud, which was her preferred volume.
Callie said nothing but felt the coffee she’d had earlier churning in her stomach.
As they neared her home town, Callie could see the bottle factory that had given work to so much of Ballyglen was gone, but it was still a big farming town with fertile land to raise dairy cows. Just before the town, the road rose lazily into a gentle slope and then they were suddenly on a curve on the sweep of the hill, with the whole town laid out before them. Rich green fields filled with cattle and sheep straddled the roads.
Below lay Ballyglen, home to some twenty thousand souls, one large church, not to mention a large hotel and country club, with golf course and riding attached. A small river ran through the town and divided it perfectly.
From a distance, it looked like a town on a chocolate box: pretty stone walls around it, shops and houses painted soft colours as if a watercolour artist had had a hand in the whole thing. Old trees growing in the centre of the town and a bridge with elegant old curved lamplights giving an air of timelessness to it all.
‘It’s pretty,’ said Poppy in surprise.
‘It is,’ said her mother, smiling. ‘What did you think? Something from a Tim Burton nightmare?’
‘Well . . .’ Poppy made the single syllable drag out. ‘Dad said it was awful.’
‘It’s just a country town and we lived in the poorer bit. He never got over that,’ Callie said, and then realised she’d been very honest with her daughter.
‘Why didn’t he get over it? You did.’ Poppy was interested.
‘Our area was once considered the bad area of the town and it’s not nice growing up in a place where everyone thinks the worst of you because some of the neighbours aren’t model citizens. My family, my whole road in fact, was lovely, but it wasn’t all like that. Blackheights was the name of the place. Comes from the Irish – Aird Dubh. A history teacher once said it was probably a site of ancient Celtic ritual, but in Ballyglen when we grew up, it was where the poorer people lived, people who worked in the bottle factory when it was still open.’
They drove down the winding hill, passing the imposing entrance to the elegant golf resort hotel Callie had often longed to visit so she could see her mother. Had Jason stayed there to see his mother? Who knew? Anything was possible in this topsy-turvy world.
Finally, they were in the town itself and Poppy exclaimed once again at its prettiness, and then said she could see no nice clothes shops, which was bad.
Callie drove carefully, watching the streets as she got nearer to home, seeing the old bakery where she and her friends used to buy jam doughnuts. They drove past Cathedral Square, source of much rage in the Archbishop’s house, and around the picturesque houses which Callie used to fantasise about the whole family living in as a child. Fat old trees sat outside the houses, apple trees with big trunks now and summer flowers in planters.
Then, they were driving higher up the hill on the other side where they arrived at the warren of streets that was Blackheights, a cluster of small terraced houses, built many years ago to house a workforce for whom there turned out to be no work.
There was the sliver of park that Callie could remember was where the rebel kids smoked when she’d been young. Smoked and drunk naggins of gin and vodka, whatever they could get. There had been drugs, but it hadn’t been as all-pervasive as it was for Poppy’s generation. Callie had tried hash when she’d been with Ricky but she’d hated it: it made her feel paranoid, out of place. Poor Ricky, he’d gone down that path for a long time. And Freddie – she stopped. It hurt to think of her brother.
She’d left Ricky then, long before he hooked up with the manager who finally helped him clean up his act and come off drugs. That was when Tanner had gone from being a hot band to being mega, worldwide superstars with Ricky as the rock god.
His parents still lived in Ballyglen, she thought, although she assumed his father and mother no longer worked in the local hospital – they must be retired now.
She flicked on the left indicator and drove down a road she’d walked down so many times on her way to school. Not long now till home.
Poppy turned the radio down.
‘I didn’t expect it would be like this,’ said Poppy quietly.
‘Like what?’
‘Er . . . you know . . . with these small houses? It’s pretty and everything, but small.’
‘Our house in Dublin isn’t normal, Poppy,’ said Callie. She corrected herself. ‘Wasn’t normal. Most people don’t have six bedrooms, giant reception rooms, a catering kitchen and a garage with a Ferrari in it.’
And neither did they – anymore.
‘I know but . . .’
Callie kept her eyes straight ahead. The roads were narrow here with only room for one car because people didn’t have driveways and parked on the road. Drivers had to zigzag from one side of the road to the other. Callie reached a T-junction and took a right. Now the houses were mainly grey or white. Small, terraced, well-painted because it was a long time since they’d belonged to the council and the owners had kept them beautifully.
Some had the frames around the windows painted bright colours; others had lovely trellises around the porches where flowers, roses or wisteria grew, giving the whole road a welcoming look that Callie couldn’t remember from her youth. It was comforting, home.
For so long, listening to Jason’s poison about their time growing up in Ballyglen, she’d remembered their home town only as a place she’d wanted to escape from. Now she could see the streets around Sugarloaf Terrace as they really were: a place where neighbours drove other neighbours to hospital appointments, where someone would walk your dog if you were sick, where people cared. A sense of community – that was it. Jason had never seen it and, to be honest, she wasn’t sure she had either, until now, when it all came flooding back.
‘So this is where you grew up?’ said Poppy. ‘I mean, the houses are small and all that, but it’s OK.’
‘This is it,’ said Callie. ‘I used to walk along this road in my horrible grey school uniform and meet up with my friend, Bianca, just at the corner back there and we would cut through the lane and go to school.’
‘Sort of hard to imagine you in a school uniform,’ said Poppy, a smile in her voice.
‘It was a horrible school uniform,’ said her mother.
‘But I bet you still looked amazing in it,’ said Poppy, a hint of envy in her voice.
‘You look wonderful in your school uniform, honey,’ said Callie, the old familiar refrain. And then she stopped because Poppy wasn’t going to that school anymore. In fact, she probably never would go back because St Tilda’s was a private exclusive school and cost an absolute fortune. Unless Jason came back in a time machine and sorted everything out, Poppy wasn’t going to school there ever again. The very thought made her want to vomit and she had to inhale deeply and force herself not to be sick. She would not pull over and throw up on the side of the road.
She would not think about possible futures or the past or things that had gone wrong, she would just concentrate on this moment, the way Brenda had told her.
‘Just get through every day as it comes,’ Brenda had said the morning they’d left, holding Callie by the shoulders.
‘You sound like you’re telling me to stay off the drink or something,’ said Callie, trying to lighten the mood.
‘It’s a bit like that,’ agreed Brenda, ‘although even though you and I have got through a couple of bottles of wine, I don’t think we qualify for rehab just yet. But what I mean is stop obsessing over the past and stop worrying about Jason. You have to take care of yourself and Poppy. If you think too far into the future, you’ll crumble. Be strong and think about today.’
Be strong. Callie said the words silently in her head now. She had to be strong for Poppy because who knew what was awaiting her. Her mother might not forgive her. Her mother might send them packing and then . . . Callie wasn’t really sure what the next option was.
She turned the last corner into a tiny cul-de-sac. Sugarloaf Terrace. Ten houses, five on each side. This street had always been beautifully cared for even when she was growing up, even when many of the other houses in the area had been run-down because nobody had any money to paint them up. The council hadn’t cared and the people living in them were too broke, too concerned with survival, to worry about whether the paint on their front doors flaked or not. But the Terrace had been different. Home to many strong women who wanted their homes to look as if they were surviving, because if you looked as though you were, you just might be.
‘Here we are,’ she said, trying to sound bright to hide her nerves.
‘Here?’ said Poppy anxiously.
‘This is it.’
She parked the car in front of the house. It looked different now: her mum’s garden had been transformed with lots of plants and containers and with paving stones so that a small car could be parked there, which was something nobody had ever done when Callie was growing up. The car which stood there now was a smart new little runaround. Silver-grey, one year old, and Callie wondered if her mother had moved. When she’d been young, her mother had never driven and where had she got the money for a car?
‘Do you want to stay here for a minute while I go in and just check if your grandmother is in?’ she said to Poppy.
Poppy, looking strangely subdued, nodded. She pulled out a compact to examine her lipstick again. When Poppy was stressed, she went to her face, examining it and worrying over it as if lipstick application and perfect eyeshadow would make everything all right. Suddenly Callie saw all that primping for what it really was: anxiousness, worry. What would the long-term damage be to her daughter from all of this? She put her arm around Poppy’s shoulder.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ she said. ‘We’ll get through this, everything is going to be fine.’
She got out of the car, thinking that she’d lied again. She didn’t know if it was going to be fine. That was motherhood for you: going from lying about the existence of Santa Claus to lying about how things would be ‘fine’.
A curtain in the house next door twitched, but Callie pretended not to notice as she walked up the path.
Her mother’s door was painted a lovely sky blue.
Callie knocked and could feel her heart beat a tattoo in her chest. Please let her mother still be living there, please let her mother allow her to apologise, explain and beg. She’d beg if she had to. She would go down on her knees, because she and Poppy needed somewhere to stay. Whatever about herself, she couldn’t put Poppy through what they had been through in the last few days.
At that, the door swung open and her mother stood there, still small, her hair no longer platinum blonde but totally white and long, trailing back into a little plait. She’d aged. There were lines all over her face now, carved in by life, and she had, Callie realised, become an old woman. But her eyes were the same translucent blue as Callie’s and they lit up when she realised who it was.
‘Oh Claire, lovie: you’ve come home.’
Callie fell into her mother’s arms and let the tears come.
‘I wasn’t sure if I could come or if you’d see me or have us or anything, but I’m sorry, Mam,’ she blurted out, ‘I’m so so sorry. How can you forgive me . . .?’
‘Shush, Claire, lovie, it’s all right.’ Her mother held her the way she used to years ago.
Callie had been taller than her mum since she had been about fourteen, but her mother appeared to have shrunk. Still, it felt so good being able to rest her head on her mother’s shoulders, to smell that familiar smell of perfume. She didn’t know what it was anymore, something with lilies, she thought. It was not one of the expensive perfumes of Callie’s that Brenda had scooped up that dreadful night.
‘I was hoping you’d come,’ her mother said, ‘really hoping, but I didn’t know if you would. When I saw that that bastard had run away on you, I just hoped you’d come back to me.’
‘He’s not—’ Callie began to say and then she stopped. She remembered the row all those years ago when her mother had called Jason a bastard and accused him of all sorts of stuff and Callie had stood up for him. And it seemed as if her mother had been right all along.
‘Is that, is that Poppy in the car?’
Callie nodded. At this point, she could barely trust herself to speak.
‘Oh the Good Lord, get her in here.’
‘Just don’t say anything bad about her father to her – we haven’t gone down that road yet.’
Her mother let go of her and flew down the path, wrenching open the door on the old Renault where Poppy sat, eyes wide open, watching this small vibrant little woman racing towards her.
‘Poppy, love, will you get out of the car and into the house. Look at you! You’re so grown-up, you’re a young woman! I’ve waited for this for so long.’
Callie watched as Poppy was enveloped in the same tight grasp and Callie had to lean against the wallpapered wall in the hall, beside the holy Sacred Heart picture with the red light burning underneath, so she could breathe with relief.
Home. She was home. And welcomed.
It didn’t take long to get all the suitcases and bags in.
Poppy and Callie did it.
‘No, Mam, you’re not touching any of it,’ said Callie.
Despite the speed with which her mother had run down the path to get Poppy out of the car, it was obvious that she was suffering now with severe arthritis: her movements were stiff, her hands misshapen, fingers covered with little arthritic nodules on the knuckles.
‘I’m fine, sure, aren’t I well able to carry a few things in,’ said her mother.
‘No,’ said Callie. ‘You make the tea, we’ll drag it all in.’
Poppy looked like she might object, but Callie shot her a fierce glare.
‘Where will I put it all, Granny?’ said Poppy as she came in with the first load.
‘We’ll worry about that later,’ said Callie, wondering who was still living in the house, what was going to happen. She thought of the phone calls she’d had from Freddie: furious, drugged-induced, raging phone calls where he’d accused her of being a turncoat, of abandoning their family for that bastard Jason Reynolds. If Freddie was around, Callie wasn’t sure they’d be allowed to stay. She’d given up on poor Freddie too.
‘It’s just me here now,’ said her mother as if she could read Callie’s mind. ‘Your Uncle Freddie’s in Kerry, doing well,’ she said, with a nod to Callie. ‘Very well. Very health-conscious, your Uncle Freddie.’
Callie let out a breath she didn’t realise she’d been holding in.
Health-conscious – code for ‘off the drugs’.
‘Your Auntie Phil is still living in the big house near the golf club. Wait till you see it, Poppy. I’d never seen the like of it. Phil fell on her feet, ah but sure he was a good man, Seamus, a good man, a lot older than her now and I won’t say she hasn’t been through trouble with him through sickness, but they had such love.’
‘Had?’ said Callie anxiously. She’d loved Auntie Phil.
Auntie Phil was the glamorous one in the family, while Callie’s mother, Pat, never went in much for any more than a slash of a bright lipstick, which was always flattened down to the tube end before she thought about replacing it.
‘Lord almighty, Phil, you look fabulous. I wish I could do that,’ Callie’s mother would say as Phil emerged from the attic bedroom, face painted, platinum hair set and ready to go. ‘New perfume?’
‘It’s Dinner in Paris,’ Phil would explain. ‘Or is it Lunch in Paris . . .?’
‘Late Night Chipper in Paris?’ Callie’s mother would tease and the two sisters would bend over laughing, delighted with their humour.
They looked so similar, even with Phil all beautified: both a lot shorter than tall, lean Callie; both with hair dyed, home-dye jobs because who in Sugarloaf Terrace could afford the hairdresser. And both with the same hoarse laugh that sounded as if they’d spent years singing torch songs in nightclubs, although the hoarseness was part genetic, part too many cigarettes.
The teenage Callie had loved the sisters when they were like that: laughing and joking with each other, Phil all glittery and done up, with her nails – kept short for the factory – expertly painted bright red. Nobody made her mother laugh the way Phil did.
Pat Sheridan, manageress of the dry-cleaners on Florence Road, could have a sharp tongue on her, but it was softer for her younger sister and softest of all for her beloved daughter, Claire.
She patted Callie’s hand. ‘Seamus isn’t well, but I’ll tell you all about it later, lovie. Phil will be dying to see you both.’
She led the way into the kitchen, which had changed totally. Extended and with lovely wooden cupboards, it was all amazingly different from the mad mustard cupboards that had been there in Callie’s time. The whole place had been extended till it was a lovely family room with a lantern ceiling window that allowed glorious light to shine in. The old kitchen table they’d all done their homework on was gone and in its place was a pale ash table that went with the wood of the floor. A soft couch and a TV in one corner filled it out.
‘It’s fantastic,’ said Callie, looking around.
‘Freddie’s company did it, he’s got a great business now in the building trade,’ said her mother, ‘went into partnership with Seanie down the road. Managed through the crash and I tell everyone they’re the finest builders in Ireland. Been in some of the magazines as well. They work a lot with this architect fella, decent lad. Younger brother of – ah, you wouldn’t know him. They live and work in Kerry mainly. Freddie likes the quiet.’
Quick as a flash, Pat Sheridan changed the subject.
‘He did this up for me, for my seventy-fifth.’
‘You’re seventy-five, Granny?’ said Poppy, always fascinated with people’s ages.
‘Seventy-six now,’ said her grandmother, ‘and still no sense because I’m still going to the bingo. Not that I win very much. Your Aunt Phil’s much better than me. Luckier. Your father always said she had the luck.’
‘And Freddie?’ said Callie. ‘Did you tell him you thought I’d be coming?’
‘I didn’t share it with him but I’m sure he’s thinking of it,’ said her mother slowly, ‘I mean, he rang me when he saw it in the papers. I don’t know, Callie, don’t know what to say to you, love. I’m not going to say anything now in front of the child.’
‘I’m not a child,’ said Poppy, outraged.
‘As it happens, I’m not going to say anything in front of you, anyway,’ said her grandmother firmly. ‘What’s happened has happened but we have to move on and make a new life for yourselves . . .’
‘We are not making a new life ourselves,’ said Poppy firmly. ‘We’re here for a visit. Dad’s going to be back, everything is going to be fine, it’s all a misunderstanding. We just needed somewhere because we were staying with Brenda and then, you know, the newspapers came and were taking pictures and we had to get out.’
Callie looked at her mother and saw the deep pity in her eyes.
‘Quite right too,’ said her mother cheerily. ‘I’m glad you came here for a little break. I’ll show you the room. Not that your mother needs any showing, she can bring you up. You can take the attic. You wouldn’t want to be tall to be in it, so it was fine for your aunt because she was a bit of a short one like myself, and it will be grand for you. Not for your mother though. Not with those long legs. You could have Freddie’s old room, Claire. It’s all done up nice now, pinks and greys and Freddie kept saying they weren’t the colours now, but you know I like them. And you could meet the dog. Ketchup. He’s out the back doing his business. Let’s get him in.’
Ketchup was a funny breed of dog.
‘Ah sure he’s a bit of everything,’ Callie’s mother said. ‘Fifty-seven varieties and all that, that’s why we called him Ketchup.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Poppy, who’d always wanted a dog. She sat on the floor and let herself be loved and adored by the off-white little creature with the tufty hair, the short tail, the brown eyes and a little face that said uncertain parentage was definitely part of the picture.
‘We don’t know how old he is,’ Callie’s mum said, as the two grown-ups watched Poppy turn into a kid with an animal. ‘Some young lads had him one Halloween. Luckily, your brother Freddie got there in time and he said it would be good for me, you know, after the operation.’
‘What operation?’ said Callie, hating the feeling that here was yet another thing that she had missed.
‘Ah, you know,’ her mother began, then stopped, which was very unlike Pat Sheridan. ‘Women’s things. Ages ago, it doesn’t matter.’
Poppy decided she didn’t want to sleep alone and that since Ketchup had taken such a shine to her he would share her room.
‘I’m just telling you he makes terrible wind in the middle of the night,’ said her grandmother.
‘That’s fine, Nana,’ said Poppy. ‘I don’t mind, I love dogs.’ She was walking round holding Ketchup in her arms as if he was a pampered chihuahua or some other handbag dog instead of an adorably scruffy little mongrel with the most bewitching black eyes that shone with happiness. Every few seconds, his pink tongue reached out to lick whatever bit of Poppy he could reach.
‘She’s a lovely child,’ said Pat when Poppy went up to the attic with Ketchup to show him his new sleeping quarters before dinner.
They could hear her talking to him on the way up.
‘Now you can have your bed on the floor, but if you really want, you can get into the bed with me and we can snuggle, but no smelly wind,’ Poppy was saying. ‘Although I don’t mind, honestly, I still love you.’
‘Yes, she’s a great girl,’ said Callie, sitting down on one ancient kitchen chair that had been there since she had been a kid. Even though the kitchen was changed, her mother had kept those parts along with some of the old family pictures still on the walls. There were lots of new pictures now, new pictures of a life of which Callie was no longer a part. How could she have been so stupid as to let Jason do that to her? Even thinking about the insults flung and how it had broken up the family made Callie want to cry.
‘That’s in the past, love,’ said her mother, watching Callie’s gaze on the photos that were stuck up haphazardly all over the walls. This was no beautifully created gallery wall – this was family life, the pictures stuck in every which way in all sorts of frames. ‘No point looking back, got to keep looking forward.’
‘Oh, Mam,’ cried Callie. ‘But I do keep looking back. I keep looking back wondering what’s happening, what has he done? And now you’re welcoming me in with a kindness I don’t deserve. Why wasn’t I here when you had that operation? Why did I abandon you? I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry. You must be thinking I’m getting my just deserts now.’
Her mother began stirring the soup she had made from scratch which was going to be their dinner, soup and home-made bread. It was so simple and yet it felt like such a long time since Callie had eaten a good, simple home-cooked meal.
‘You’re my child and I love the very bones of you, Claire Sheridan,’ said her mother firmly. ‘I love you and I have always prayed for this day. Jason had you under his thumb from the first moment he met you. We could all see it, your aunt and I, we used to talk about it. He was controlling, very controlling. But you couldn’t see any bad in him.’
‘There wasn’t any bad in him,’ Callie protested, and then stopped. He’d kept her from her family. He’d run off and left her with fraud hanging over her and no money. It was hardly a résumé a man would be proud of.
‘He wanted to take you away from us and have nothing to do with us,’ said her mother, the first time a hint of anger had shown in her voice since they had turned up on her doorstep earlier. ‘That’s badness: wanting to take you away from everything and everyone you love. That’s a sign of control as much as if he was hitting you, Claire. I don’t like that in a man and I never liked it in him. But I wouldn’t say it. And I worried about how he made his money. I knew it couldn’t be real, only gangsters make that sort of money. The time I did say that, well, he ran me out of the place, didn’t he?’
‘Brenda said a long time ago I should make it up with you, but I just—’ Callie paused.
Telling the truth, she’d only recently admitted to herself, would hurt and yet she had to say it openly and honestly.
‘I was always aware that if I tried to get in touch with you that Jason would disapprove and make me pick. He’d already made me pick and I picked him. I am so sorry, Mam.’
Saying the words out loud made her aware of how controlled she sounded, how stupid she’d been, not getting in contact with her family because her husband had stopped her. So what, there were plenty of things about Jason she didn’t like, but she put up with them, because she loved him. And yet she’d let him walk all over her.
She’d lost ten whole years of her family’s life for a man who had upped and left her and their daughter. What sort of a fool was she?
‘What made you think he wanted to control me?’ she asked her mother.
‘Ah, just small things: the way he used to have a hand on top of you every time you were here. You had to sit beside him, he insisted. He’d have to have his hand on your knee or around your neck. Like he was showing off, that you were his.’
‘It wasn’t like that, Mam,’ Callie said, shaken. ‘That makes it sound weird.’ Though she was starting to wonder whether there was something in what her mother was saying. Up to now, she’d been wondering how she hadn’t seen what Jason and Rob’s business really was. Now she began to wonder what else she’d blindly ignored because she was in love.
‘Making your wife pick between you and her mother isn’t what a good man would do, Claire.’
‘Neither is leaving your wife and child to the mercy of the police and the media,’ Callie said, and began to cry.
Her mam sighed. ‘Lovie, you know I call a spade a spade. Too blunt, your Aunt Phil calls me. Whatever else he was, Jason was clever. If he knew the cops were after him, then he had a plan to get out and that plan didn’t include you, Claire. So you have to think about that long and hard now. It’s time to start making other plans, plans that don’t include Jason Reynolds.’
Pat Sheridan gave the soup another stir. There was silence in the room and then they heard the footsteps of Poppy belting down the stairs with the little bouncing steps of Ketchup along beside her.
‘Ketchup loves it upstairs,’ she said delightedly. ‘He didn’t make any smells, Nana. Honestly.’
Pat and Callie both smiled tightly, smiles that said, let’s pretend everything is absolutely fine even when it wasn’t.
Neither of them knew how to break all these revelations to poor fourteen-year-old Poppy.