The kitty would never stretch to the amount of HobNobs that Leda Clancy was putting away on a daily basis. Alison thought she’d have been able to handle it if the constant mugs of tea and biscuits improved her appearance or her mood in the slightest bit. But no. Leda still looked like the perished kitten that had lurked on Jean McDermott’s landing the previous Sunday night.
Alison had nipped down to the corner shop at the end of their road for supplies at around nine o’clock when she expected Ciara to be home. She had planned that they would catch up over mugs of tea and biscuits. Ciara would have hated Ghost, the film that Alison had gone to see the evening before. She would have judged it way too soppy and not worthy of her money or her time. When Alison had admitted that Dirty Dancing was her favourite film of all time Ciara had started to gag so she knew she was in for a slagging but she was relishing the thought of her friend’s company. She had really missed her.
Ciara was dragging her bags up the stairs when Alison arrived back from the shop.
‘Hi there, welcome back. It was quiet without you.’
‘It is good to be back, I can tell you that. Such crap that I have had to listen to over the past few days.’
‘Is everything all right at home? Is Leda OK?’
‘Nothing is right at home, Alison. In fact we would get the bloody Oscar for nothing ever being right. Maybe there is a grant from Europe for being the biggest fuck-up of a family ever to exist. Free therapy maybe for the rest of our natural lives. As for my darling sister Leda, well, you can ask her yourself.’ She nodded upwards to where Leda stood on the landing. She was much taller than her sister but they shared the same slender silhouette. Her big blue eyes seemed bloodshot from tears or lack of sleep or both. Long, dark, wavy hair framed a heart-shaped face. She looked as if she was there against her will but there was no denying her incredible beauty, even if she seemed to do her best to conceal it with a surly expression.
‘Hi, Leda,’ Alison chirped, making a real effort to be friendly. ‘Go on in to the kitchen there and stick on the kettle.’ Leda didn’t move.
‘Move it, Leda!’ Ciara said with vehemence and Leda disappeared into the kitchen at her sister’s sudden command. Alison dropped the groceries in the hallway to give Ciara a hand with the heaviest of the bags.
‘Ciara, have you lifted the contents of your folks’ place or what? This bag weighs a bloody ton.’
‘I’ll tell you all in a minute. I just don’t want Jean McDermott to spot me bringing in Leda or her stuff.’ She nodded at their landlady’s door but they need not have worried about being caught. Jean had bought the Sunday newspapers, chiefly to camouflage a litre bottle of gin that she had also purchased and since consumed. She had passed out at about teatime, her spittle pooling a lonesome dribble on the Times review pages. Going on previous form, she was unlikely to wake before the oil-thirsty brakes of morning buses began their relentless chorus outside her door.
Leda ate the first packet of biscuits from where she had perched them on her lap. Mindlessly, laconically, she munched away, unwilling or unable to make the slightest effort at conversation. She was barely conscious, it seemed, but incredibly hungry for all that.
It was a tight fit but Ciara managed to squeeze a makeshift bed for Leda between her own bed and the wall. Alison and herself took the cushions from the mottled brown couch in the living room. Alison donated a pillow and spare blankets to the cause. Ciara barely had enough for her own bed while Cathy Shepherd had sent Alison to Dublin with a bedding bale that would furnish an entire dormitory. It was a relief to see some of the surplus getting used. Leda sat on the only remaining cushion on the couch while the effort to accommodate her proceeded at efficient pace. She didn’t look particularly upset, Alison thought, and because there was little chance that Leda would exert herself to overhear their conversation she decided to tackle Ciara.
‘When are you going to tell me what’s going on and why you’ve dragged your sixteen-year-old sister to Dublin with you?’
‘Seventeen actually.’
‘What?’
‘Leda is seventeen. Her birthday was last month.’
‘There is not much difference, Ciara, she’s still too young. Are your parents not going to be out of their brains with worry? Mine would.’
‘Your folks, Alison, sound like they are a bit different to my crew, to say the very least of it. They weren’t that bothered when I suggested it, to be honest, but then Mam is on happy pills just to get through the day and Dad is mostly getting over the last drink or thirsting for the next one.’
‘I don’t believe what you’re saying. Look, I know something pretty crap must have happened but how do you think we are going to look after Leda? We are at college all day; at least we’re supposed to be. She should be at home with your parents. She should be in school, for God’s sake.’
‘Look, I haven’t thought it through. I just knew I had to get her out of there before she got in deeper with this slimeball that’s sniffing around her. Home is just about the last place she should be. I mean my stupid father probably thinks it’s all right because your man is rich and stands him reams of drink in the pub. Thinks it’s some sort of privilege that an upstart politician would be interested in bedding his teenage daughter. Never mind the fact that he is fifty-bloody-seven and married with a son older than us. That is why I went home. Leda is telling me she is in love with him and my folks can see no harm. It’s sick, Alison, it’s absolutely sick and I don’t fucking know what to do!’
Alison was dumbfounded. Ciara was on the verge of tears and her features were etched with a vitriolic temper that she hadn’t known her friend possessed. Alison had thought of a few possible reasons for Leda’s sudden appearance. Maybe she had been dossing school, had fallen in with the wrong crowd or she was sneaking drink at the bar where she was lounge girl. These were all plausible: similar small dramas had played out in the school in Caharoe every week. Things like these were commonplace among teenagers. Leda’s predicament was anything but. Alison thought of Ciara’s mother. Even before tonight Ciara had made no secret of her mother’s battle with depression, but Alison was sure that she would still want to keep her daughter safe from harm.
‘What about your mam, Ciara. Would she not step in even if your father won’t and sort this mess out? Warn your man off or tell his wife if she had to?’
‘My mam is on Valium, antidepressants and sleeping tablets and probably a lot more besides. It started after Leda was born. I think she had postnatal depression and it just didn’t get diagnosed. Come to think of it, post-marital depression might be more apt after discovering that she married an absolute dickhead.’
Ciara collapsed on the bed, exhausted by the physical effort of dragging her sister halfway up the country and now not having the first clue what to do with her. ‘The story is that Mam’s been on serious medication for the guts of sixteen years. So, no, she wouldn’t be able to sort this out. She barely sorts getting out of bed in the morning. I love her to bits, Alison, but she is useless when it comes to life in general, not to mind a crisis, and by God she has had plenty of practice watching them unfold being married to my dad.’
Alison nodded towards the sitting room. ‘And Leda, what does Leda think about your man? She seems to be awful calm. She looks like this whole thing is going over her head – or is she just too upset to talk? She hasn’t said one word to me, not even hello.’
‘Oh, she threw the head when I told her I was bringing her back with me. I got the whole angst bit that nobody understands her. That she is in love and I am too bitter to understand. The whole nine yards. Sure he gave her a gold watch for her birthday so she is taking that as proof that he really cares. So I bribed her with a pint of Heineken in Shanahan’s while we were waiting for the bus and I crumbled three of Mammy’s Valium into it while she was in the loo. Haven’t heard a peep since but I bet you she will register on the Richter scale tomorrow morning when it wears off. I have the box of pills with me by the way, so don’t be short!’ Ciara’s attempt at a joke did nothing to placate Alison who thought she might pass out.
‘Jesus! You can’t do that. What about your mam? Won’t she need the pills? Dad always says how dangerous it is to suddenly stop taking drugs like that if your system is dependent on them. You have to tell her you have taken them. Ring her now.’
‘Listen, Alison, I’m sure your dad is a fantastic doctor and never repeats prescriptions without seeing the patient first but Mam could power the whole of Leachlara with the amount of pills and prescriptions she has in that bathroom cabinet. She could rival the national grid. Anyway, I had to get Leda away from that house, the pub and that sleazeball. I admit it was a bit drastic but I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. I’ll flush the pills, I promise. To tell you the truth, the guy owned the place on Leeson Street that I had the flat in. That’s why I wanted to move. It wasn’t so much the vermin within as having that dirty rat Abernethy as a landlord. I could not have anything to do with him. Calling around on a Thursday looking for his rent and God knows what else he thought might be on offer.’
The familiarity of the surname jolted Alison out of her concerned-citizen reverie. A coincidence, she convinced herself firmly, listening from her room as Ciara directed a lacklustre Leda to her bed. The crease of light under the doorway blackened when Ciara put out the lights in the living room. Only the orange glow of the street lamp through the curtains lit the room. Alison lay awake in the utterly quiet house. No banging from Jean McDermott. No mysterious thuds to punctuate the hours to daylight. The street outside was almost at rest. The lovely fantasy that she had been building in the past few weeks with the exotic-sounding Dan Abernethy was inexplicably ruined by the presence of his slimy namesake in Leachlara, over a hundred miles away.
Ciara lay awake in the quiet blackness of her room, alongside a peacefully sleeping Leda. Alison was right, of course. Bringing Leda to Dublin with her was a totally daft and reckless move and she knew that her sister would probably be back in Leachlara before the end of the week. A few days in Dublin and a precious couple of days off school and Leda would want to go back home. Ciara knew she could not and would not stop her. She had adopted the role of parent but lacked all the necessary skills. Mind you, that had been no deterrent to Ted or Aggie Clancy. As she lay now, willing her body to warm the cold sheets, she allowed her mind to wander back to nights spent rigid with fear in her bedroom in Leachlara. Her mother normally knew enough to be out of the way when Ted Clancy came home from the pub but sometimes sleep failed her and she would come to the kitchen to make tea or to sit staring at the TV. From her bed Ciara would hear the tirade of abuse that would start when her father returned with a belly full of drink. If he had suffered a slight, real or imagined, from any of his drinking buddies he had a perfect target in his defenceless wife. He would criticize her shabby appearance, telling her that it was a good job she never left the house because she was a disgrace to herself and to him. Aggie’s vacant expression, her old dressing gown and her greasy hair that tended to mat did little to refute her husband’s worst insults. He would start making himself something to eat, complaining that she was a useless excuse for a wife. The sound of banging pans and the smell of burning fat would fill the night air, creeping under doors and stealing any chance of sleep.
Being the eldest, Ciara felt responsible for making sure that her brother and sister were not frightened by their parents’ quarrelling. If she found either of them awake she would climb into the bed with them, pulling the blankets snugly around. The presence of their sister brought them much-needed security and, soothed, they would fall asleep again. Ted always stopped short of hitting his wife and though Ciara felt she should have been grateful for that she had long since realized that words and fear brought their own bruises, not visible to the eye but slow to heal, nonetheless. Eventually her mother would go to bed and her father, having lost his easy target, would put his voice away for the night. Alone again he would feel comfortable going to the cupboard and to the whiskey that might yet numb the hour before exhaustion would overtake him.
The few months Ciara had lived in Dublin had made her less and less tolerant of the situation at home. When she was in school she dreamed that college and city life would whisk her away from the dysfunction of her family. She would do her best to help her siblings but the best she could hope for was that they too would walk away just as she herself had done.
By Wednesday Leda was restless and by Thursday she was gone, together with the contents of the kitty and one of her sister’s favourite skirts. She was due to work a shift in Shanahan’s and didn’t intend to miss the opportunity to meet Con Abernethy, who would be home from another week in the Dáil. There was no explanatory note when Ciara came back to the flat to find her sister’s things gone but she knew before she even rang home that it was there she would find her.
The skirt she had stolen from Ciara fitted Leda like a glove and as she swung her neat hips around to get a good view of herself in the mirror of her bedroom she decided that it looked better on her than it ever had on her sister. She didn’t usually get dressed up that much for her work at Shanahan’s – God knew she got plenty of attention from the crew that drank there without so much as a smear of lipstick or a hint of jewellery – but she had hatched a plan while she was in Dublin for the previous few days. It involved some fast-tracking of an idea that she had been brewing for a while without much success. In the midst of all the men that fancied their chances with Paddy Shanahan’s new lounge girl was Con Abernethy the TD, but much as she had encouraged his attention something was holding him back. She couldn’t work out what. He was unwilling to cross the line despite Leda’s none-too-subtle invitations to do so. True, he had given her a watch but that was only because her birthday had coincided with the school trip to the Dáil a few weeks before. Leda had got her friends to mention it during the lunch he had bought for them so he had been cornered into that purchase. She had even seen Columbo Connors ducking inside a crappy little jewellery shop near Busáras and emerging with the bag that Con presented to her before the class boarded the bus home. She knew it was done to impress the school group and the teachers but she made a big deal of it to Ciara anyway. Gold, she had told her, but it was the type that cost thirty pounds as she saw from the receipt that Columbo had neglected to remove from the bag. Her sister was easy to wind up, she discovered, and the mention of Con Abernethy’s name was a sure bet to set her off on one. One phone call had Ciara rushing home to save her honour.
Leda had decided to up her efforts a little. She wasn’t averse to the idea of sleeping with him if that’s what it took for him to start parting with some money. He wasn’t bad looking for a man in his late fifties and no matter how much he drank he still looked good in a suit. He smelt rich when a lot of other men around Leachlara seemed to smell of fags or cow dung or old sweat. Worse still, they were spotty and poor like lads of her age. Sex with him would be fine, she concluded, and maybe he wouldn’t take her seriously for anything less. Everyone knew his wife was a total bitch so he must be gagging for it, she reasoned to herself. She fancied a job up in Dublin with him, well paid, and maybe a nice apartment. These were the things that she wanted and Con Abernethy was, as far as she could see, her only means of getting them.
Being in the company of Ciara and her dreary flatmate for the past few days had made up her mind. Her big sister had always dreamed of getting away from Leachlara and college was her chosen method. All very well if you had the brains for school or the patience and Leda realized that she had rather limited stocks of both. The principal never tired of comparing Leda’s average exam results with those of her sister. It seemed a stunning Leaving Cert. results sheet had divinely erased all of Ciara’s transgressions in secondary school. Leda knew it would take a miracle for her to emulate her sister’s achievements. Besides, after watching Ciara and Alison slog at essays and seeing the dismal place they lived in she was fairly certain that it wasn’t worth the effort. It took some skill for Ciara to flee the house where her alcoholic father held court only to end up paying money to stay in a horrible flat with an alcoholic landlady into the bargain. There was an easier way. She would just have to flesh out the bones of her plan and get Con Abernethy to make a move. If anyone from her class enquired where she had been and why she had been absent from school for the past week she planned on telling them that Con had taken her to Dublin for a few days. No harm in a few white lies to get the ball rolling.
Aggie Clancy was fixing dinner when Leda came into the kitchen dressed up and ready for her shift at Shanahan’s.
‘I thought you would stay a bit longer with Ciara. She rang a while ago to check if you had made it back home all right.’
‘Well, I thought I had missed too much school already, Mammy, and besides I have work tonight, remember?’ Leda was happy to play the good daughter, conscientious about her schoolwork, as long as it kept her mother on an even keel.
‘Ciara has done so well and she is happy in Dublin. Lovely flatmate. Alice, I think Ciara said her name was, but of course you met her,’ her mother added vaguely, stirring the dinner that smelt as if it was slowly but surely sticking to the bottom of the pan.
‘Yeah, she’s a dote, Mammy. Ciara and herself are like two peas in a pod . . . Boring as fucking hell too,’ she added more quietly but not bothering to disguise the sarcasm. It was over Aggie Clancy’s head. Most things were.
‘Call in your brother there, Leda. He must be starving, because he never takes a lunch to school as far as I can see.’
Leda pushed open the back door, which led into a filthy concrete yard littered with broken bits of farm machinery and household rubbish. The hum of the milking machine and their father roaring and cursing at the cows in his charge filled the evening air. Her brother was kicking a ball incessantly at the back wall of the house, which was littered with marks: the legacy of his past target practice.
‘Mammy has dinner ready, Michael. Come in.’
‘In a while. I’m not hungry.’
‘Look, none of us are hungry for Mammy’s food but at the rate he is roaring at those poor cows’ – she nodded at the cow shed – ‘he will let half of them out without milking them at all. So it depends if you want to get the dinner thing over before he comes in like a bear. I know I do.’
Michael took one more pop at the wall with a resounding kick that missed his bedroom window by a hair’s breadth. Inside they pushed the stew around the plate. It wasn’t their mother’s worst offering but they had both learned that a packet of crisps and a bar of chocolate from the tuck shop at lunchtime would best serve as the main meal of the day. Aggie rarely ate dinners at the family table. She preferred to munch on crackers or raisins at an open cupboard, leaning on the kitchen counter for support. Michael and Leda heard the milking machine stop and they got immediately to their feet and cleared their plates into the bin. Aggie was already filling the sink with hot soapy water to do the washing-up.
‘I’ve homework to finish, Ma,’ Michael murmured before he left for his room.
‘And I’m off to Shanahan’s. I told Paddy I would get in early to help him,’ Leda lied with the greatest of ease.
In his room Michael found a plastic bag filled with chocolate and crisps and a bottle of Coke that Leda had deemed was his share of the stolen kitty money. He managed his first smile of the day.
Con made Shanahan’s for last orders as he habitually did on a Thursday night. Leda made sure that she was out from behind the counter so he could get a good look at what he had hitherto resisted. Fair play to Ciara’s skirt, it seemed to be doing the trick. By the time the pub closed Con was making no secret of the fact that he couldn’t keep his eyes off her and when she asked him for a lift home she was sure he was about to oblige until Columbo, his sidekick, put his spoke in and said he would make the trip to save Con the trouble.
‘Another time,’ Con said to a disappointed Leda.
‘I hope you are the type of man to keep your promises,’ she said, loosening her dark curls from where she had pinned them back for work.
‘You can count on that,’ Con said, drinking in one last look at her as she walked out of the door behind Columbo.