There's Been a Little Incident, page 21
‘What the hell did you mean in your letter – that we don’t have to find you anymore?’
Molly considered the question, answering quietly.
‘I thought that maybe I needed to go off the grid, disappear. I guess I had gotten kind of desperate, but then I heard about this Eco Garden—’
B cut her off.
‘Why do you have to be on the other side of the world to find yourself? Are there no gardens you can weed in England? Or Scotland or Wales? For god’s sake, the whole of Ireland is ONE BIG WEED.’
Molly stood silently while B’s voice reached its highest octave and suddenly it hit Danny. On the outside, B had it together and Molly was a mess. On the outside, B saved Molly and B never needed Molly. But suddenly Danny saw that it wasn’t that simple.
‘I love you, B. You’re my best friend in the world, but I have to work through some stuff, and I have to do it on my own.’
Molly reached out to hug B but he didn’t grip her back, he only stood limply in her arms. As she began walking away, B turned to say something after her but decided against it. Instead, his whole frame curled over and tears rolled down his face.
Danny wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing in the water, but the tide must have come in because it was almost up to his knees. B looked hopelessly out towards the sea like he’d known Danny was there all along. Danny made his way towards B unsure how to save him from feeling so much when Danny himself was only learning to feel again. And he wasn’t at all sure if he could handle it.
47. ANNE
Dublin, April 23rd 2019
She wasn’t not telling Alastair about the baby. And she wasn’t in denial either – although she could see how you might be – the whole thing was nuts, totally unbelievable except for the clear scientific proof that this was how it happened, and that it had in fact happened to Anne.
She had thought that she’d get a taxi straight to his house and blurt it out immediately, but when they landed she was exhausted, so she decided she’d shower first. Then she wasn’t altogether sure that Alistair would answer her calls after what had happened on the N11, so she decided she’d leave it until she was back in the office. But when they returned to work the Tuesday after the bank holiday everything was different.
Alastair was part of a gang now. The audit team had gone out over the Easter weekend and Alastair had emerged as some sort of mascot. He’d surprised them with his drinking stamina and impressed them with historical quips. It turned out the plague was a big hit. Greg and Tonia were the ringleaders of the gang, but it wasn’t them she was worried about. Alastair seemed to have formed a special friendship with Rowena Powell.
Little Rowena Powell with her skinny ankles and her petite pumps with the bow on them. The girl couldn’t be older than twenty-four. She giggled mercilessly at absolutely everything and made a big point of not drinking caffeine. What was she trying to prove? It’s not heroin. ‘Can I have decaf?’ she would ask in her annoyingly quiet voice. At the end of every day on that job in Ennis, she had looked sympathetically at the four empty Coke cans that lined Anne’s desk like she understood that addiction was a disease not a choice.
Worse than ignoring Anne, worse than acting hurt and betrayed, Alastair was perfectly friendly. He came straight over to her to ask her how she was, whether they’d found Molly, how she was coping with the jet lag and whether she’d like a cup of tea. He interacted with her in a formal, mature way as if to show her up for throwing a tantrum on the N11. Anne was struck mute. While he spewed nonsense, her brain went into overdrive about how she could possibly broach the subject. Would she ask him to step outside? But that might give him the satisfaction of thinking she wanted to apologize. Should she write it down on a post-it and pass it to him? Suddenly a wave of nausea rose up through her and she reached around the desk for the dry crackers that seemed to help.
‘Oi, Stairs, you on a tea run or what, mate?’
Greg, who was from Leitrim, was attempting some sort of Cockney lad impression. Alastair responded in a thick midlands accent.
‘Hold your horses, boss!’
This seemed to be a ‘bit’ they did, and the office erupted around them. Anne suspected that the escalation of her nausea had nothing to do with the pregnancy but rather this mortifying social interaction.
‘Excuse me, Anne!’
Between leaving her desk and getting to the kitchen, Alastair was stopped several times like a celebrity on a red carpet. Rowena Powell called after him to remind him that hers would be decaf in a voice like she was doing an impression of a mouse. Anne was sure Rowena was an imposter. She was probably a lout outside of work and had assumed this meek caffeine-free persona to lure poor Alastair in. The girl probably mainlined Lucozade late into the night and smoked actual cigarettes. Anne flinched as Rowena turned towards her and gave her a nervous smile. Anne had been burning a hole in the back of her head and didn’t have the energy to pretend she wasn’t.
Alastair emerged from the kitchen with a tray of mugs. No one had even known his name two weeks ago and now he was dropping by people’s desks making individualized jokes, smiling like a complete eejit. He would probably be the life and soul of the picnic this Friday.
The company picnic happened every year in the Iveagh Gardens and every year Anne dreaded it like a hole in the head but now it would be unbearable. Alastair and his new pals would probably share a rug. He’d wear something mortifying like shorts and they’d all gather around him like he was some sort of comic genius and Anne would probably be spewing in a bush. It was pure spite, but she could not tell him at all. People did that. She could go the whole nine months and just sit quietly getting on with actual work while he performed like a monkey for these mindless idiots.
‘He’s been arrested.’
Anne looked up to see a crowd forming by the TV. People were getting up from their desks. Someone turned up the volume. The doctor’s bright red hair was visible in between the white shirts of policemen. He was short so the police towered over him but still you could see him move towards the squad car. Anne gravitated towards the screen. She couldn’t make out exactly what was happening, but someone was saying that they couldn’t arrest him; they’d no evidence he was there that night, they could only bring him in for questioning. Someone else wondered why a stunning girl like her would have been seen dead with a guy like him. The word creep echoed around the group. The crowd surrounding the screen were all in agreement: the doctor was dodgy. Anne’s heart began to race. Did that mean they had found Molly? Had she known something after all? Anne checked her phone, but the screen was blank, the family thread quiet for once.
Anne pictured Molly’s wide smile. Her relaxed nature, the fact that nothing seemed to irritate her. The way she sang ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ out of key while driving. Or how she counted in fives under her breath when she was stressed. How when she was home you ended up eating egg yolk after egg yolk for breakfast because Molly loved the white of the egg. Maybe Molly wasn’t attractive because she was magnetic. Maybe she was attractive because she was herself.
After witnessing her parents’ marriage implode, Anne had decided that her life would be insulated from mess. Even if it meant living life on the side-lines, shut out from others, then fine, Anne knew there were far worse things. Molly did the exact opposite – she threw herself into the world, she let herself get battered. And up until now Anne had thought that Molly brought chaos on herself, that that’s what you got for all the adventures: hurt.
But maybe it wasn’t just Molly; maybe it was impossible to keep life out. Anne had been careful all her life not to get too close to anyone, not to form attachments or court chaos, but she’d opened the door a crack and now an entire world of mess had fallen in. She was pregnant and she barely knew the father. Worse than that, it seemed she couldn’t even bring herself to tell him.
It had been creeping up on her like she knew it would; the reality of the situation. Its tentacles had formed during the half sleep on the flight and cleaning the flat had only kept the panic at bay; now it engulfed her. Where would the baby live? Would she and Alastair take turns ferrying him or her between them? Christ, would Alastair move in? Would she have to tell Joel the lodger to move out? At least she wouldn’t find pieces of sweetcorn in tiny crevices around the kitchen anymore, or would she? Maybe Alastair was an absolute fiend for corn. Because, in case she forgot, she didn’t know the father of her out-of-wedlock child FROM ADAM. And if that wasn’t frightening enough, she’d have her mother to deal with. She’d have to hear about Jesus Christ our lord and saviour and all his thoughts on what women should and shouldn’t do and what Matthew and Paul and all the apostles thought. It may as well be speaking in tongues, but she’d have to sit there and listen because she was a good girl and Killian was a million miles away and her dad was worse than dead. Her heart began racing now and her face became flushed.
Suddenly her heart ached with longing for Molly. If she knew that Anne was pregnant, she would go around in a bluster doing impractical things like buying gross tea and suggesting cloth nappies, but it would be a comforting bluster. She wouldn’t even pick up on Anne’s minor snipes, she’d just take them as a given like she had since they were small. For all the ways Anne found Molly annoying, she realized that Molly was the only person who actually never seemed annoyed by Anne.
Anne had spent years keeping a mental tab of how different she and Molly were. Molly was fun. Molly was spontaneous. Molly ate anything, did anything, went anywhere with anyone. Anne was none of those things. Anne kept a virtual ruler with her at all times to measure herself against her cousin. She thought that was how everyone saw them – like they only existed in contrast to each other. But Molly had never compared them.
Anne had looked forward to being grown up so she could choose to unlink herself from her cousin. And that’s what she’d done, but now she realized that of all the people in all the world she wanted right now, it was Molly. And it seemed like Molly was finally, fully gone. Anne’s stomach wound in a knot so tight she knew it wasn’t morning sickness. It wasn’t jet lag or exhaustion, it was the pain of missing Molly and realizing too late.
‘That poor girl. Maybe we could do a whip around to help with the search?’
Fucking Rowena Powell.
‘That is such a great idea, Ro-Ro.’
Alastair jumped like a flash to get a giant envelope. Anne went to the bathroom to vomit.
48. LADY V
Phuket, April 23rd 2019
V set out early for the Eco Garden. She knew the others would follow, that they’d attempt an intervention, that they’d plead with Molly to come back so V had to get there first. She’d finally understood why Molly was in that godawful place and knew now that yanking her out of the lotus position wasn’t going to solve anything.
Molly had to work through her grief or else it would chase her forever. The others didn’t want to hear that; they wanted to wrap her in a blanket and force feed her lasagne, but V knew that her niece was right. There were some hells you had to go through by yourself, and nobody could save you from them. She gripped the tattered red diary. She wondered if it would be comforting to know how loved you were or unbearably painful to understand just how much you’d lost. She hoped it was the former.
She hopped awkwardly along a silt outcrop of land next to water. You couldn’t call it a beach. Grey clay barely covered plastic bottles and shopping bags. From where she walked, she could see the real beach, the one the authorities invested in. By the real beach there was a walkway lined with restaurants and beauticians where Australians ate Pad Thai and got massages. But here on the silty edge of the water, there were no Australians, just a delivery boy waiting on a moped at the back of a grocer.
She stopped on her crutches for a minute and pulled her hair out of its ponytail. Swathes of wet black hair cooled her back. This morning for the first time in years, she had noticed streaks of grey running through it. Her Friday morning appointment at the hairdresser was so set in stone that she had entirely forgotten that without it she would have a head of silver. V rarely thought about her mother and never once thought them alike. But this morning, there was a glimpse of her in the mirror and for only the second time in her life, V had had a pang of longing for the stoic calmness she’d emitted, for the sense of safety that had been innate in her mother’s presence.
When V had moved to Dublin at eighteen, she may as well have gone to the moon as far as her family were concerned. And when she’d become a model, she had leapt into a different universe altogether. There was such a big gap between herself and her mother that when she’d died, V hadn’t longed for the conversations they’d had but mildly missed those that had never happened. There was no indication that that would ever change. She had no idea that a time would come when the loss of her mother would envelop her, dragging her down into a darkness she didn’t know possible.
The nurses kept saying it was baby blues, that the hormones were at her, but if anything, that had made it worse. It downplayed what was happening to her as some general concept that other people took in their stride. Whatever was happening to V was terrifying and completely paralysing.
It started out with tears. Night, noon and morning, but that she could handle. It was the fear that crippled her. A deep dread that encompassed her. Dread at the sound of their cries, dread at the exhaustion that there seemed no end to. It was only then that she realized all her mother had gone through, how little V had understood and how much she wanted her mum to be there deep in her bones. Her quiet, decent mother had done this six times. The first time she would have faced the debilitating fear alone. Five more times she would have faced the exhaustion, the colic, the reflux and the relentlessness of breastfeeding. V had no idea. All those years in Dublin, she thought she had outgrown her mother, surpassed her in some fundamental way. She had met important people, eaten in expensive restaurants, appeared on TV. She thought that her mother’s world was small, her accomplishments minimal. But all this time, it was the opposite. Her mother was a quiet superhero who must have had an inner strength that V had started to suspect she didn’t have.
After the birth of the twins, all she’d wanted in the entire world was her mother to walk into their over-the-top house with its pillars and colonnades and jeeps in the driveway. She wanted to ask her practical things that would have been second nature to her mother, like how to wind Liam whose burps were like gold dust, or how to stop Damon’s reflux, which was making him throw up in the night. But more than that, she desperately wanted her mother to take her into her arms and tell her that she would get through it. That she would emerge from this black cloud. That she was able for it. That there wasn’t something fundamentally wrong with her.
Instead, the person who told her all these things was Annabelle. It was Annabelle who organized a rota of help, tagging Helen, Angela and Frances in to take the boys at alternating hours. It was Annabelle who got into the bed beside her. Annabelle who held her despite her leaking breasts and unwashed hair. How had V forgotten this?
She hadn’t forgotten it of course. She had blocked it out. Even now, on a pot-holed road in Thailand nearly twenty years later, the pure fear of that time still sent shivers through her. Even though her boys were six feet tall, healthy and well, all the ways in which things could have gone wrong still seized her physically. By blocking it out she had been able to keep a safe distance from it, to not fall apart. But blocking it out also involved recasting Annabelle. If Annabelle was a flighty, foolish artsy type then V wouldn’t feel her absence so much. But the truth was that Annabelle had saved her. The least she could do now was give her daughter a small part of her mum. And hope that it might just be enough.
V arrived at the gates to the garden. The seed hut was empty, so she wandered in. Laughter took her by surprise, and she saw a group huddled around a long-haired guy in a bright yellow vest. He was holding a stick in one hand and a shrub in the other and saying something about plant propagation. Beyond him, people in hippy gear were piling into an open topped flatbed, some of them wearing floppy gardening hats, others holding hoes. V hobbled into what looked like a nursery, ramshackle wooden frames marking out various plots of overgrown leaves. She slumped onto a bench. It was only then that she realized that the annoying ache she’d been feeling in her cast was in fact an agonizing pain. She tried to get at her foot to dislodge a stone but couldn’t reach. Her exposed foot was covered in dust and the rest of her body ached from carrying the dead weight of her leg. She caught a whiff of herself and laughed out loud. She absolutely stank.
‘V, is that you?’
Molly peeked out of a row marked ‘Microbes’.
Molly had none of Annabelle’s features. She was a golden-streaked brunette where Annabelle’s dark red locks were legendary. But she’d always reminded V of Annabelle. It wasn’t physical. It wasn’t her eyes or her bone structure, it was just the feeling you got when you saw her; an inexplicable warmth. But for the first time since V had known her niece, Molly didn’t exude warmth. She stood stock still in the dust, and she was tense. She was wary and V was filled with sadness.
V was reminded of when Molly was a child, how she was a strange mix of outgoing and shy. It was like she wasn’t sure if her natural inclination for pure unfettered enjoyment was OK. V had often watched her in John and Helen’s back garden playing alone, talking softly into the silence. Not to herself but to a world that was so clearly there. To people and things in her head which seemed to bring her endless joy. Had she lost that? Is that what grief did to you? Was her inner world too sad to go to now?
Molly sidled tentatively towards the bench and sat down beside V. She was wearing those wide pants that girls her age wore. She looked like an extra in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
