‘I thought you didn’t travel Ryanair on principle. Mind you, principles come and go with you, don’t they?’ Leda was picking a fight with Ciara but her sister simply would not take the bait. She was pretty sure that up as far as last night Ciara was an absolute supporter of the right to privacy but all that had been cast aside when the chance to talk to Colm Lifford presented itself. Since that conversation Ciara had been a woman on a mission. When she finished talking to Colm she went on to her work laptop (it was absolutely the best thing about an otherwise boring job she had landed herself in at a language school in Islington) and booked airline tickets for herself and Leda out of Gatwick the next morning. She half expected her laptop to flash a ‘You are joking, Ms Clancy’ message on the screen when she entered her highly abused credit-card details but the booking went through without a hitch. She would worry about her mounting credit-card debt some day soon.
They would have to be at Victoria Station to get the train at about six thirty, but that shouldn’t be a problem, she decided as she made a mental note to put the louder of the two alarm clocks that she possessed under Leda’s bed. Getting up early in the morning was not a skill native to the Clancy family, but years away from Leachlara had made Ciara an expert in punctuality. Next she composed the most pity-inducing yet plausible email she could manage to her boss at the language school. She outlined a family crisis, not so tragic that it would require too much explanation when she came back from Ireland, but still grave enough that her presence was required at home urgently. She expressed regret at the short notice and disappointment at letting down her Spanish-language students and vowed to make up the lost tuition time when she returned. She ended the email with a promise to ring in the morning from the airport. She pressed the send button, more confident than she had ever been that she was doing the right thing.
The check-in queue at Gatwick was agonizingly long. When her baiting of Ciara had failed to garner a response Leda switched into her default uncommunicative mode, accompanied by her best surly expression, which came to her with the greatest of ease. She had come to London to escape the suffocation of home. Even her friend Siobhan, whom she had thought she could rely on thoroughly, seemed appalled at her leaving Colm alone to care for Tom. It wouldn’t be fair if he had done it to her, Siobhan had argued, and it wasn’t fair the other way round either. She was her friend but she could not approve of what she had done. Leda had tried to fight her corner with Siobhan and now Ciara also but no one was listening to her – as usual. At the rate the queue was moving it looked as if they would be here for thirty minutes at least before boarding a plane back to a son she didn’t want to see. When she looked at Tom she saw something of her own needy and smaller self and that was what had made her want to run in the first place.
Finally Ciara was at the head of the queue. It had taken an hour and fifteen minutes, which seemed all the longer for more than half of it having passed with no communication, barbed or otherwise, from Leda. She slammed the reservation-number page that she had printed off the Ryanair website the night before on to the check-in desk. It wasn’t until she turned back to Leda to produce the second piece of luggage for the hold that she realized her sister had gone.
‘She must be gone to buy a paper or something. Can I check her in and go after her? I will bring her back here to the desk when I find her.’
‘I’m afraid that’s totally impossible. You cannot check in for somebody else. It’s just not the way we operate. I suggest you find your travelling companion and rejoin the queue. Has she got a mobile? Maybe you could try that. You really need to move aside now. The gate closes in forty minutes and we need to process all these people,’ the clerk said as she waved her hand at the queue that snaked its way, two to three people wide, all the way back to the opposite bank of check-in desks.
Ciara gathered her computer printout and her battered trolley case and made her way to the rows of seats in the middle of the departure hall. She couldn’t quite believe what her sister had just done but she knew it was no accident – and if she had been in any doubt there was a text message on her mobile, a beep she had not heard while standing in the queue, confirming that Leda had indeed done a runner.
I know you mean well but I can’t go back. I need space. Sorry you had to pay for flight but at least it was a cheap one, L
Ciara dialled the number, but she already knew her sister would not answer. Leda was sipping a coffee while waiting to board the Gatwick Express. She had turned down the ringer on her phone but she still felt its familiar vibrating pulse against her thigh as it languished unanswered in her coat pocket. She needed a new number. The first thing she would do when she got off the train was to buy a new SIM card. As she had said to Ciara, she needed some space. The platform display announced a train to Victoria leaving in 1 minute 56 seconds. London stretched out wide and promising in front of her. It would do for the moment.
Posters of the great Irish writers lined the walls of the travelator corridor to baggage reclaim at Dublin airport. All grey, nearly all wearing glasses and mostly men, it had to be said. It reminded Ciara of the poster that she and Alison had hung over the mantelpiece in their Ranelagh flat. They had bought it in one of the tourist shops on Nassau Street. It was a perfect fit because it covered the horrible dark patch of smoke that had lingered when they had taken down Jean McDermott’s choice of artwork, a totally bizarre and lurid pink and orange print of a fish eating a girl. They had hidden it behind the sofa in case dumping it counted against their deposit. To tell the truth, they had become used to its kitsch until Dan started to comment on it every time he came in. ‘Ah now, girls, I know you arts students like to show how multi-talented you all are, but displaying your school art project? Have you no shame?’
Ciara was in danger of lapsing into a bout of nostalgia. Her memories of college, of first living away from home and of Dublin were absolutely bound up in her friendship with Alison and the effect Dan Abernethy had had on both their lives. She had let a few days elapse before she attempted to ring Alison after the night in Aughasallagh. Dan was due back in Dublin for his final exams on the Monday. She rang the Shepherds’ private phone line several times that morning but there was no answer. As a last resort she rang the surgery number and the phone was answered by Cathy Shepherd, whose tone turned decidedly frosty when she realized she was talking to Ciara. Obviously Alison had filled her mother in on what had happened between her and Dan.
‘This is the surgery line, Ciara,’ Cathy said curtly.
‘I know that, Mrs Shepherd, but I have tried the house number and there is no answer. I need to talk to Alison and explain things.’
‘Look, I know Alison is down there but she is very upset and might not want to talk to you. I will tell her you are looking for her but I can’t promise anything. She is very hurt.’
Ciara felt bad enough already and talking to Cathy didn’t make her feel any better. In the following weeks she continued to call the surgery every few days. Cathy insisted she was giving the messages to Alison but none of her calls was returned so Ciara gradually gave up. As a last resort she wrote a letter to Alison, trying to excuse her stupidity and beg her forgiveness, but the letter was returned unopened to the house in Leachlara. Alison had readdressed the letter and the sight of her friend’s handwriting on the envelope was the final act of rejection. Ciara abandoned hope that their friendship could be restored.
She wrestled her thoughts back to the present while she waited for her bag. Delving into the past was too painful. As soon as she had got her trolley case from the carousel she headed out to find a bus or a taxi that would take her to Colm’s apartment to meet her nephew. Despite her mounting credit-card debt she opted for the luxury of a taxi, to avoid scrimping for the exact change for a bus. It used to cost fifty-five pence from Nassau Street to the Northbrook Road stop and she would happily walk the last ten minutes, nipping into Spar for a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk and a sliced pan if she was ravenous for supper. As she waited in the taxi rank she wondered how much it cost now.
The upbeat humour of the taxi driver suited her. She could do with a bit of jovial conversation with somebody before she landed on top of Colm and Tom. She would need to muster any charm and warmth she had left after what had happened with Leda that morning. Colm must already think the worst of her because she would be linked in his head with Leda but at least he had told her she was still welcome when she had phoned him to say that Leda had done a runner. Again. He didn’t seem shocked. Perhaps Leda’s behaviour had already exhausted his capacity for surprise.
She marvelled at how different the roads around the airport looked since the last time she had seen them. It was so much more built up; roads were clogged with traffic and everywhere held the fragile promise of unfinished newness. She had heard of the Celtic Tiger of course. Every Irish person she had met in Spain and England felt duty bound to tell her about the miracle of economics that had swept all before it at home. Thinking she had fled unemployment, they were only too keen to tell her now that they were giving jobs away but that you might need three of them to find a house to call your own. Ciara never admitted that she was fleeing something that a job or the celebrated Tiger couldn’t cure. She had heard the phrase so many times that she thought her head might implode if she heard it once more. As it happened, it didn’t, because the taxi man had used it twice before they had even reached the M50, rolling the ‘r’ of Tiger for dramatic effect.
‘So tell me, love, are you here for business or pleasure?’ he enquired as he cruised down the bus lane towards Drumcondra and the older Dublin she hoped she might yet recognize.
‘A bit of both maybe, but mostly pleasure I hope,’ she answered quietly as she gazed out of the window. She couldn’t match the place she was seeing now with the place she had left years before. Dublin didn’t have this much traffic the last time she was here and there were new apartment blocks everywhere. It seemed as if it had turned into a city of apartment-dwellers, the newest of them her nephew Tom and his father, Colm. ‘Twenty One, The Malt Store, Claddagh Road. It’s off the South Circular,’ she announced to the driver confidently as if she knew exactly where she was going and whom she would find there.