9.25 pm

LEESON STREET (PEMBROKE STREET)

LEESON STREET BRIDGE

46A, top deck, front seat.

SUSSEX ROAD

MOREHAMPTON ROAD (MARLBOROUGH ROAD)

BUS GARAGE

DONNYBROOK CHURCH

The bus makes its usual noise, the engine loud when the road goes up a hill, the window-rattle, the kids on the back seats laughing, the indicator blinking because they’re stopping, the doors swish-bang, the voice saying the fare, you can’t hear where, the beep of their travel card, the noise on the stairs as they come up, holding on when the bus pulls out, accelerates, the squeak and squish of them sitting down, and then it’s just the engine again. Whine, whirr, whoosh.

WELLINGTON PLACE. Wellie Boot Place more like, saying that is one of the ways Pen can make Soraya laugh, that’s a good feeling. And thinking this makes Pen care less that she’d had to leave the concert early, that she’d had to push past people whose faces didn’t look very pleased, that she’d had to walk through the lobby hearing the music still going on behind her. But perhaps Pen had got what she needed anyway because she feels like her body is still vibrating which means she is carrying the music in her.

STILLORGAN ROAD. NUTLEY LANE. Flyover to the university where her mum works, Green Apple garage, all those apartment blocks, still with the hoarding telling you about elegant-living-in-south-Dublin, ‘What do they think is so “elegant”?’ her mum says every time. ‘They’re just apartments overlooking a dual carriageway.’ Cars on the road, going where? All the houses, every house, every car is lives, all their lives, every person believing in the specialness of their own life. WOODBINE ROAD. SEAFIELD ROAD. WOODLANDS AVENUE. Feel them, name them, know them. Keep them in your body with the music.

STILLORGAN BYPASS, whose syllables clang. The Stillorgan Bowl. Where Pen had had a meltdown and someone had filmed it and Claire had complained and the manager had said, ‘Look, lady, no one makes you bring your weird kid here.’ More apartments. ‘Uninspiring,’ her dad says in her head, and it makes Pen feel funny-strange to think of her parents who-are-not-together-any-more saying things that sound the same. And it feels even funnier, even stranger, to realise that they are both wrong. Because the lives inside, they are elegant, they are inspiring. MERVILLE ROAD, GALLOPING GREEN.

Foxrock Church where the little girl’s funeral was. All the people had had empty faces and afterwards Claire had said, ‘That’s what shock looks like, Pen,’ and her voice had been really tired. They’d seen Pen’s woman-therapist at the church so she must have known the family too. You weren’t meant to talk to your therapist outside of sessions, it was a privacy thing, which was good because the church was really crowded and Pen was happier outside in the car park, but she thinks about this every time the bus turns at Foxrock Church, of all the people who came that day to be sad together. She knows Claire thinks it too, because sometimes, when they drive past, she will say the girl’s name under her breath, and blink a lot, and Pen thinks she is trying to keep her alive somehow, because people vibrate too. At their next session, Pen had said she was sorry-for-your-loss, and the woman-therapist had thanked her and then said it was good to cry, good to let yourself mourn. She wasn’t talking about herself, Pen knew. Sometimes the woman-therapist uses outside examples and Pen knows that really it’s about her. Happy can be hard to show, but being sad is even harder, it’s like a weight on your chest. It’s what Alice calls ‘a big blue’. Pen looked that one up and told Alice, who said she liked it better in Latin. Magnum caeruleum. Maybe Pen needs to stop saying ‘the woman’ bit before ‘therapist’, lots of people, it turns out, see therapists.

‘Do you ever stand in the shower and let the hot water just fall on you?’ she’d asked Alice once. Alice had nodded and said, ‘I turn the nozzle thing on the shower and it’s good for putting on your neck and if you close your eyes it’s like you can’t tell where the water starts and your body ends,’ and Pen had nodded back. She had been so close to Alice then that she had nearly told her about how sometimes when she was standing under the water like that, she touched the scars of the cuts on her thighs. How it made her heart go faster, but also made her feel empty. That was the point of cutting, it made all the bad stuff empty out of you, but then it made the good stuff go too. That was what the therapist told her.

The cutting had started after Lauren’s house and Pen hadn’t even done it much, but Soraya saw her one day, saw the dried blood on her thighs, when she came into their bedroom and Pen wasn’t dressed. ‘Mum,’ Soraya had yelled, and Pen had been really angry with her, and screamed and cried, but now she can see that her baby sister did the right thing.

Claire had talked to them both one night soon after that. Had told them that Sandy was going to be staying with John-at-work till he got his own place, and that they would get their own place too. Soraya had cried then, but Pen had just nodded and said okay. When Soraya had gone to bed, Claire had asked Pen to stay and talk a little longer. Then she’d said, ‘Pen, let’s make a deal.’ She had told Pen that she was a wise soul, and that with her dad not there any more, though she was only fifteen, it was like she was the other adult. So Claire needed her to take some responsibility, not just household chores, she meant for the family, for being in the family. Claire had spoken slowly and softly, looking at the window, not Pen. All the time Claire was talking, Pen had wanted to ask what had gone wrong, why was her dad moving out, was it her? But she didn’t, because she knew that Claire would say, no, love, it wasn’t you, sometimes two adults and on and on. Even though the answer probably was her. So she said okay to the deal, which was that they would all do their best by each other, and they would not keep secrets from each other, because their family came first. And Claire had been right, it did get better. Maybe Pen was calmer without her dad around, without the fighting. Maybe the therapy helped, the sense that she was not wrong, that she was just herself. Maybe Claire was right about another thing too, that you could only really be yourself when you let people in, when you let people see you.

DEAN’S GRANGE CROSS, and Pen in her high seat looks out over the scene and they used to live near here, before the new house, but Pen prefers living closer to the sea, and when she said it to Claire recently, that now they could walk by the sea every day so it didn’t matter that they didn’t have a garden any more, Claire’s face had smoothed out and Pen thought that had been a good thing to say.

BAKER’S CORNER, KILL AVENUE FIRE STATION, CARRIGLEA COURT and the art college that Soraya would always point to when they go past because she wants to make things, and Claire would say, ‘Where do I get these wonderful daughters from?’ Pen used to think that wasn’t true, that Claire didn’t really think that about her. She had said something about it to her therapist once. ‘Do you really believe that?’ the therapist had asked. Pen had shaken her head. ‘Can you say it?’ she asked. ‘No,’ Pen said and then, when the therapist kept looking at her with her gentle face, Pen said, ‘My mum thinks I’m wonderful.’

Ring the bell. Go down the steps. Stand near the driver. The bus will go on without her, down York Road, Crofton Road, to the station where Pen was this morning when everything seemed possible.

TIVOLI ROAD. Where did the name Tivoli come from? ‘Oh, good question, Pen,’ Claire had said, and talked about Copenhagen and Paris and Rome, and Pen loves this about her mother, all the things she knows, all the ways of telling them the world is made for them.

Pen turns into her street, sees the locksmith’s and the mechanic’s. Sandy always says they were lucky to buy when they did, but he doesn’t say it in a nice way, and when Soraya reported it back, Pen said maybe it meant he was jealous, and then Claire said, ‘Hard cheese.’ Pen thinks of how Claire grates up cheese that’s been around too long and puts it on bread under the grill and it softens up again and how maybe her dad is like that, he needs something to make him softer, though it is not Pen, or Soraya, or Claire.

The light is shining over their front door and Pen’s key fits into the lock and her mum is in the hall.

‘You’re home.’

Pen looks at her mother, at the narrow stairs, at the pile of shoes by the skirting. And it is too much.

Pen walks towards Claire and lowers her face and butts the top of her head against her mother’s collarbone and she is really home. They stand touching like this, they are breathing together again, being again, and being in silence, which Pen is good at, and her mother bad at. Pen lifts her head and sees Soraya a few stairs from the top, leaning on the old handrail that wobbles, not saying anything, standing in her pink pyjamas and sighing slightly before walking back to her room.

‘Mum,’ Pen whispers into the shoulder, and she does not know what to say but just ‘Mum’ might be enough.