The Worst Thing You Ever Did, page 2
‘Look at this!’ she cries, waving the glass in her hand in a sweep of the room.
‘It’s a great turnout,’ I remark.
Conversation is at a roar, and we have to lean in towards each other, shouting to be heard, but the arrival of my parents-in-law heralds a temporary hush. Regina – small and stout with a permanent expression of merriment on her face that belies a steely resolve – leads the way, Desmond’s hand tucked under her elbow. By far the taller of the pair, even with the stoop that has entered his frame this last year, Desmond looks distinguished, urbane, his thinning hair blazing white beneath the overhead lights.
‘The great man himself,’ Jess says, observing the customary awe his presence generates.
‘I can’t believe Desmond Sharpe is your father-in-law!’ Kelly exclaims. ‘I’ve read nearly everything he’s ever written!’
This is no surprise to me. Kelly, our receptionist, always has a book on the go. Her literary tastes are pretty catholic, judging by the various paperbacks she keeps discreetly tucked away behind the front desk: from potboilers to science fiction to the latest Booker Prize winner, her reading matter seems indiscriminate. She’s already purchased Ed’s book and examines the cover now.
‘Look at it. Just gorgeous,’ she remarks, and it’s true, the cover image of verdant green foliage with the title tooled in gold is a thing of beauty. ‘You must be so proud of him!’
From across the room, I see Ed being drawn towards the lectern. Dan, Ed’s publisher, is clearing his throat and testing the microphone, before casting his gaze around the crowd expectantly. Ed catches my eye and flashes me a nervous look, and I raise my hands to mime hands on a steering-wheel and mouth the words: ‘Drive it like you stole it,’ and his mouth widens into a smile that catches at my heart, a smile charged with the warmth and charisma that first floored me all those years ago.
Later, I will look back on this moment – the clarity of light falling through the window, the cheery cacophony of voices, the swelling tide of goodwill – and recognize it as my last moment of pure happiness. My heart full and unfettered, joyful at the sudden and profound realization that this is my life. This man, this family. All of these people are gathered here together because of us. Yes, it’s Ed’s night, but I am intimately part of it. And it feels, somehow, miraculous. Barely any time at all, it seems, has passed since I was a student, working four nights a week in a bar on Leeson Street, struggling to pay my rent on a shared room in digs to the west of the city. But, now, here I am surrounded by all these people imbibing wine on a warm spring evening and swapping book chat, while my husband holds court at the centre of it all. And he and I have started something. A secret that lies deep within the fibres of my body, where cells divide and multiply, threading together to create a new piece in the jigsaw of our life together.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Dan begins, pausing to allow the crowd to hush, and it is at that moment that Kelly whispers: ‘Oh, Faye. I almost forgot! This came for you.’ She slides a blue envelope from her handbag. ‘It was dropped into the office just after you left. I’d have waited until Monday to give it to you, only it looked personal.’
I take it from her and glance down. There’s a floral motif in one corner of the envelope, and my name is written in a shaky scrawl – Faye Sadlier.
‘That is you, isn’t it?’ Kelly asks. ‘I wasn’t sure because of Sadlier –’
‘It’s my maiden name,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t use it much any more.’
It starts then, the rumble at the edge of my thoughts. A feeling of familiarity, like déjà vu. As if I’ve seen this someplace before.
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ she asks.
The noise around is suddenly too loud, voices like a swarm of bees.
‘Christ, it’s hot in here,’ Jess says, fanning herself with a copy of Ed’s book as she looks around the room.
With my index finger, I slit open the envelope. Inside there’s a single sheet of paper, and I see at once that it is a newspaper cutting, an old one, judging by the yellowed paper, the smudged print, the creases along the folds worn away to tearing point. I unfold it quickly, and stare at it, cold pooling in the pit of my stomach. The headline reads:
IRISH FLIGHTS GROUNDED AS ICELANDIC ASH SHUTS AIRSPACE
I don’t read the article underneath. I don’t need to. Instead, my eyes pass quickly over the word that has been scrawled over the text in red marker, the ink bleeding through the page.
‘Why do they always overheat these rooms?’ Jess demands.
The cold moves upwards from my stomach. It wraps around my heart. I stuff the clipping back in the envelope quickly before either Jess or Kelly can snatch a glimpse.
At that moment, my husband steps towards the podium, and the audience begin to applaud. The sound of it echoes loudly in my head. I feel the long reach of the past, and all the assurances I’d given myself – that it was behind me, that nobody would ever find out – evaporate. The envelope in my hand throbs with its own imagined pulse, the poisonous word flashing across my mind’s eye:
Murderer.
2
Faye
It does something to you, this kind of fear. Outwardly, you can appear normal. You can smile and clap and even laugh in the right places throughout your husband’s speech whenever he cracks a joke. But, on the inside, there’s paralysis. Not the inward jangling of nerves but a total stillness, almost like calm, in which you become hyper-vigilant, alive to everything around you.
He could be in the room. Now, at this very moment. He could be here, watching me. The thought is shocking to me. It makes me want to crane my neck, to swing around and survey the gathered faces, but I’m positioned awkwardly near the front of the crowd; curious glances steal in my direction – me, the wife Ed lovingly credits with being his support and his inspiration.
‘When the pandemic hit, and my work in theatre dried up overnight,’ he says, ‘it was Faye who encouraged me to write. Thankfully, I was on furlough at the time, so I suppose you could say that I have not just Faye to thank but also Rishi Sunak.’
The crowd laughs, and I have to force my face into an expression of mirth, but my skin prickles, nerves communicating from my hairline all the way to the base of my spine. I keep still and absorb the soft timbre of my husband’s reading voice as he shares a passage of his novel, sentences that he has painstakingly crafted, phrases he has agonized over, loved. But as soon as it is over and a ripple of applause moves through the crowd, I turn around, my eyes searching the faces assembled there, combing the room for a glimpse of a tall thin youth, floppy blond hair, a pale blue gaze.
‘Didn’t he read well?’ Kelly says, snapping my attention back. ‘And an amazing turnout.’
Jess agrees. ‘Hard to believe that this wouldn’t have been possible a year or two ago, right?’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Umm, Kelly? That letter you gave me – you didn’t happen to see who delivered it, did you?’
She thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. ‘Sorry, Faye. It was so busy this afternoon. Why? Is everything okay?’
‘Yes, fine. It doesn’t matter,’ I tell her, a sweep of embarrassment coming over me at having drawn her attention to it.
I’m grateful when the PR girl interrupts us. ‘Do you mind if I steal you away for just a sec?’ she asks.
There’s a photographer waiting with his Nikon; he groups us together amid the shelves, Ed holding his book in front of his chest, flanked by me and his parents, his sister, Martha, on my other side. Martha has brought along both of her children; the youngest, at five months old, is strapped to her chest. I look down at his bare pudgy feet, his little kicking heels, and think of the tiny being sprouting deep inside me, the size of a blueberry according to what I’ve gleaned from the Internet. There is something growing inside me that already has tooth-buds and kidneys. It’s a vertiginous sensation, and, in the light of the letter burning a hole in my bag, it makes me feel a jolt of panic.
‘Perhaps we could get one of father and son together?’ the photographer suggests.
Martha turns to me and murmurs: ‘We know when we’re not wanted.’ Then she smiles to show no harm is meant, and Regina adds with a tinkle of knowing laughter: ‘Oh, you’ll get used to it, Faye! Trust me.’
I have always liked Regina – her easy warmth, her tremendous ability to set people at their ease, a contrast with her husband, whose military bearing and gruff manner has earned him the family nickname of The Major.
‘How’re you holding up?’ she enquires. ‘Not always easy, being the one in the background. Acting as the scaffold to these creative types.’
Her warmth calms my anxiety, helps me to push down on the fear that has risen out of the blue.
‘I’m just glad that the book is out there now,’ I tell her. ‘Despite all reassurances, Ed’s been nervous.’
‘I can imagine. He’s always been a bit of a worrier. A wee bit insecure. He’s like his father in that way.’
I cannot imagine the gruff imperious Major being anything other than solidly confident and say as much.
She laughs. ‘Age and success have abraded much of his insecurity, of course, and I’m sure the same will be true of my son.’
We talk some more about the book, the launch, the people who are there.
‘I didn’t see Maggie and Leonard,’ she remarks delicately, referring to my mother and her boyfriend. ‘They couldn’t make it?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ I lie. I didn’t invite them.
It’s hard to explain, even to someone as empathetic and understanding as Regina, how difficult I find it to be in the same room as my mother. How nervous she makes me. I know that if I had invited her, she would have come this evening, shown up wearing something festive and glittering, her confidence bolstered beforehand with a glass of wine or two. She would have showered Ed with praise and me with affection; she would have been delightful and charming to those around her. And, all the while, I would have been watching her. Watching her accept another glass of wine when it was offered, her stories getting a little more adventurous, a bit more risqué. I’d have been tense, waiting for the strain to appear in her face, the tell-tale pull of muscles in her neck as she looked around for whatever young man or woman was carrying the bottle, refilling the drinks. And soon enough it would have happened. Someone around her would have laughed too loudly, or said something stupid, and she would have snapped like an elastic band, mimicking the person’s laughter, or openly deriding the silly thing that had been said.
I’ve lost count of the ugly scenes over the years, the humiliations, the tempers lost, the offences given. Even at my own wedding, when she’d drunk too much and openly derided my new in-laws.
‘Oh, Faye,’ she’d sighed with a growl of exasperation. ‘Those people – how can you bear them?’
‘Stop it. They’ll hear you.’
‘God forbid!’ she’d laughed. ‘That Regina – holier-than-thou and so judgy. I can almost hear her saying: “Look, there she is, the woman who abandoned her daughter.”’
Regina was standing nearby, pretending not to listen, but I could tell from the way her neck stiffened that she could hear every cruel word.
‘And as for him, The Major,’ Maggie drawled in mockery. ‘The way we all have to bow down and kiss his ring. Disgusting!’
‘They’re nice people.’
‘They’re nice people!’ She’d turned on me then, making an ugly parody of my politeness to Ed’s parents, deriding my respect for them as sycophancy, demanding to know how any daughter of hers could demean herself by bowing down to the patriarchy in that way, going on and on until I burst into tears and Ed intervened with a few home truths about how Maggie was hardly a paragon of parenting, having practically abandoned me once I hit my teens, throwing her own words back at her, words that she had spat at me on a particularly low point in my childhood: ‘God, I wish I’d never had you!’
The words hit their mark. She’d recoiled, wounded, and, despite the miasma of drink that engulfed her, I saw the sharp pain in her eyes. The worst thing she had ever said to me, and I had told him. I had snitched. To her, there was no lower sin. Loyalty was everything.
She had drawn herself in, tilted her chin a little higher with defiance. ‘It wasn’t easy, being a single mother. I made mistakes, but God knows I did my best.’
There was no point in fighting; our positions were too entrenched, and the argument always spiralled off in the same direction. She railed at what she saw as my refusal to accept the difficulties involved in single-parenting, whereas I maintained that she didn’t raise me at all, dumping me on my grandparents at every available opportunity.
The day after the wedding she was all apologies. But a new distance had come between us – a coldness. It’s been there ever since.
Perhaps it would have been different if there had been a father on the scene, if she hadn’t had to do it alone. A voice shimmers up from the darkness: ‘Poor fatherless child.’ Michael’s soft voice, blue eyes glinting with humour, but there was tenderness too. More than anyone, he had understood what it was like to feel the keen absence of a father. He too had had a difficult relationship with his mother.
‘Well, we’d best be getting on,’ Regina says, breaking my train of thought.
She glances across at Desmond, who looks tired and cross, and then reaches out to hug me. I inhale her scent, floral and powdery, and feel the firmness of her embrace and it calms me. During the course of our conversation, I have given no thought to the letter in my bag and this, somehow, lessens its power. If I were to show it to Regina now, she would dismiss it as rubbish. ‘Just some idiot with too much time on their hands,’ she would reassure me before urging me to get rid of it.
And, as we leave the bookshop and spill out on to the street, I take the envelope from my bag, crumple it in my hand and drop it in the nearest bin.
We head to Grand Canal Square, where Dan, the publisher, has arranged some post-launch celebratory drinks. My heels click on the paving stones, the red lighting poles of the square sizzling against a turquoise sky as people move in groups towards the theatre and restaurants, a distinctive end-of-week vibe in the air. I’ve regained my optimism, having shaken off my earlier fright, and I squeeze my husband’s hand, as the chequerboard frontage of the Marker Hotel rises up before us. He pulls open the door for me.
‘Shall we?’ he grins.
Inside, it is a storm of noise. Styled like the underground lair of a Bond villain, the vaulted ceiling is all geometric shapes and gold up-lighting, a Modernist cavern where the denizens of the surrounding offices congregate on a Friday evening. A few grey-haired theatre-goers are digging into their pre-show plates of chicken masala, their cod and chips, but in reality this is the realm of the young executive type – well dressed, well groomed, with money to spend.
Dan’s fiancée has arranged to meet us there, and, across the sea of people, a woman with a black angular haircut and a slash of purple lipstick rises and waves us over. She greets Ed with a kiss on the cheek, congratulating him on his book, and, as she turns to me for an introduction, I notice her smile slip, a frown of confusion clouding her face.
‘Faye? Faye Sadlier?’ she asks in a low voice, and a jolt of alarm goes through me. The second time this evening my maiden name has been used. ‘Oh my God, is it really you?’ she says, her voice rising. ‘Don’t you remember me? It’s Suzi. Suzi Moore.’
Memory comes in a rush: the Spiegeltent, a brass band playing jazz, the sticky taste of sambuca in my mouth, Michael’s hand in mine, and a skinny girl in a crop-top that showed off her pierced navel, her eyes widening with wicked delight, saying: ‘Michael, you dark horse. You never told us you were bringing a girl!’
She’s reaching for me now, and I’m surprised at the strength of feeling in her hug, the rush of familiarity that comes over me as her sharp bony frame crushes against mine. When we draw back from each other, she’s still holding my arms, shaking her head and smiling with amazement. ‘Faye Sadlier. Jesus, I can’t believe it.’
‘I haven’t been called by that name in a long time,’ I tell her, laughing with the surprise. It’s so strange being back in her company again – the force of her attention, the familiar fruity strains in her voice.
‘Old friends?’ Ed guesses.
‘We knew each other at university,’ I explain.
‘God, UCD seems like a million years ago now,’ Suzi says. ‘I almost didn’t recognize you. And your hair! It used to be so long and thick! You look so sleek and put-together now. Whatever happened to the Doc Martens and baggy jumpers?’
‘Wait. Let’s get some drinks,’ Dan says. ‘Then let’s hear all about Faye’s fashion crimes.’
We laugh and a waiter comes to take our order, Suzi’s amazement still evident, her eyes passing over my clothes, my hair, my figure. Nothing unfriendly in her gaze, but I can see her absorbing all the changes that I have carefully and meticulously applied to myself. She shakes her head in amazement. ‘I always wondered what happened to you. After you and Michael broke up, it was as if each of you vanished into thin air.’
‘Who’s this?’ Ed asks.
‘No one. Just a guy I went out with for a while.’
Suzi shakes her head in disbelief, and says to Ed: ‘I can’t believe you’ve never heard about him.’
