Maya did sometimes ask about her father, but only in private on good days. She had learned to choose the right time from the experience of once choosing the wrong time, when Emmy had unwittingly made her feel, with just one look, as if she were the most ungrateful, insensitive selfish child in the whole world.
She knew the warning signs. Cigarettes in the house again, long telephone conversations in her bedroom with the door shut, canceled babysitters. Cigarettes were probably the most reliable pointer. Most of the time, Emmy only smoked Niall’s. If she bought a packet herself, Maya knew things were bad. Mum had bought a packet a day for weeks and weeks after Niall met Kat.
On the other hand, the more obvious clues like crying didn’t mean much at all. Mum cried over silly things like bumping her head on the door frame, or the car not starting, or being hopelessly late for school. As far as Maya knew, she hadn’t cried once since they’d moved to Cornwall, but Maya suspected that was just because the doors were higher, there was always another car available, and here no one minded if you were late for school. Also, obviously, Niall was always around.
When Maya did want a sense of her own genetic provenance, it was easier to ask about Iona, her dead grandmother, even though she had heard it all before. Everyone was always happy to talk about Iona—about her being caught sitting on Grandpa’s bed at Ledbury when they weren’t even engaged, about her dressing up as a man to get in to a club in London, about her letting Emmy light one of her cocktail cigarettes and not minding when Emmy burned a hole in the curtain with it.
Because Iona had been dead for centuries, she didn’t have the family taboo that Maya’s father had. No one ever ever spoke about her father. They all behaved as if she had popped out of nowhere, like the product of a virgin birth or something.
At times, Maya thought she would prefer never to meet her dad, just invent him. That way, he could be whoever she chose him to be. He could be Niall, or he could be someone even better than Niall. He could be someone who was prepared to live with her mum, for example. Live as in live, involving beds and baths and things. And then at other times, she thought she probably would like to meet him, to see what he looked like and if she liked him.
She couldn’t help being eternally intrigued by the fact that she was made up of bits of people she didn’t know. Asha’s mouth was exactly the same as Jonathan’s—the lips went up in the middle under the nose like a little skateboard ramp—but Jay’s was thinner, more like Sita’s. She had to stop herself staring sometimes, because little details like that could change your entire face. If you blocked off their mouths, Jay and Asha were actually quite alike.
Maya knew she didn’t have Mum’s mouth. Mum’s lips were full and bouncy and she could suck in her cheeks and do a really good fish impression, but her own lips weren’t big enough for that. When she sucked in her cheeks, she looked more like an old woman with no teeth. So whose mouth was it?
“Can you do a fish?” she would ask her mother’s boyfriends. And they’d have a go, thinking it was some sort of bonding ritual.
Often, when she was having her shoulder-length hair dried by Emmy in front of the mirror, she would try and surreptitiously work out which bits of them matched. On a really good day, she could persuade Emmy to put her face right next to hers and they would stare at their reflections together.
“Okay, how about chin?” asked Emmy once.
“Mine looks like a little bottom.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Yours doesn’t.”
“Eyes?”
“No. Mine go like that and yours go like this.”
“They’re the same color, though.”
“Do you think we look like each other at all?”
“People are always telling me we do,” Emmy lied. But she didn’t think so at all. She knew who she thought Maya looked like.
“Just describe him,” Maya said.
“Oh, well, he had three heads, and eyes on stalks.”
“Yeah yeah, and he was covered in purple fur.”
“Pink, darling, get it right.”
Emmy didn’t understand that Maya needed it to be purple, even if it was a joke, so she could imagine she had inherited at least something.
“Pink, then. But…”
“Hey, look, our chins are the same shape.”
“Why didn’t you marry him?”
“Would you marry someone with three heads?”
“No, Mum, seriously.”
“He didn’t ask me.”
“Would you have married him if he had?”
“Oh, Maya, you know I’m not up for all this.”
Emmy’s resistance didn’t matter to Maya as much as the textbooks Emmy tried to avoid but couldn’t help reading said it should.
Anyway, Maya had a distant plan which she told no one. She was going to find out about her father when she was older, when Emmy was less dependent on her, when she could meet him without anyone knowing, perhaps without even her father knowing. Out of curiosity, that was all. Just to check he didn’t have three heads.
“What do I call him?”
“Why don’t we just call him ‘your dad?’” her mum had suggested once.
“No,” Maya had replied, repulsed at the idea. “I don’t want to.”
So they called him nothing. He had been nothing for ten years and now it was three o’clock in the morning and Emmy was lying in her bed during the longest night of her life, trying to accept that life as they all knew it was about to change.
Would he still be Cathal? Or would he, God forbid, become Dad? She was seething with an ill-defined anger, not just against Cathal but against Niall, too. How could he be so bloody thick? Why had he never worked out the identity of Maya’s father? Why had he always been so patient, so stupidly content to accept her refusal to discuss it? He should have pushed her, as he pushed her on other stuff.
“Who’s it from?” Niall had asked when he spotted the green stamp. “Come on, what business have you got with my homeland? I demand to know.”
“It’s a fabric wholesaler,” she’d said pathetically. “They’ve written to tell me they can’t help me.”
“Is that right?” he’d said. There was no suspicion in his voice. He genuinely hadn’t got the foggiest.
The letter was in the drawer next to her bed, emanating a sort of evil. She knew its every detail already. The date of the postmark, the color of Cathal’s ink, the number of lines. It was too frightening even to imagine it in there, and yet she kept checking, hoping to find it gone, or somehow rewritten as something harmless.
Her head ached with the effort of trying to believe that Jonathan had in fact not brought it back to the house but lost it forever somewhere en route from the chapel, that it had been taken by the wind, impaled on a high twig, made sodden and illegible by the rain. The fantasy kept madness at bay for a few precious intermittent minutes, until she imagined Niall climbing the tree and plucking it off. “Look,” he’d say to Maya. “This is what your mother has refused to tell you all these years. This is what she has kept from me.”
Emmy contemplated taking the letter downstairs and setting fire to it, sending it in black flakes up the chimney, but she knew that to destroy it would be to make the same mistake Toby had. Tidying his papers in the walnut bureau only a few days ago, she had found out that a Plymouth hospital had started calling him for X rays for a whole year before he kept the appointment. Tumor or truth, denial just made things bigger.
The option of sleep was no longer available. She stared at the ceiling, waiting for the answers to fall in her face, for something to guide her through the moral maze. Did Cathal have a right to do this? Did he really have a right? What would a reasonable, intelligent stranger think? Who was in the wrong here? Should she ring him now and get it over with?
She sat up and ran her hands through her hair, grabbing a bunch in her fist and pulling it gently as she thought. She was dehydrated, nauseous, dizzy. She must have drunk at least another bottle of red once they had moved into the sitting room. Her mouth felt sticky and her head was beginning to grow the mother of all headaches.
Now’s not the time to make any plans, she told herself. I’m in shock. I must let it sink in. I must do and say nothing. I’m in shock. I’m in shock. I’m in shock. But Niall’s voice came to taunt her, pulling her up as he so often did, forcing her to be more truthful.
“That’s not right, though, Em, is it?”
“It is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Why?”
“Well, for a start, we both know you must have been expecting this to happen for years. Don’t tell me you haven’t. Be rational. Be honest.”
But she had never been rational in her life. Even when a train she hadn’t set foot on had crashed. She and Maya had escaped death. Not broken bones, not whiplash, not posttraumatic stress disorder, but death. Life was a drama. It was the way she was.
She crossed to her bathroom and stuck her mouth under the tap, taking great gulps of water. No one else would drink straight from the tap. They all messed around with filters and kettles, so terrified were they by the novelty of a private supply. But Emmy had been weaned on it, and the way she felt now she would have been pleased to catch some vile bug and nearly die. No one would dare to challenge a dying woman. Except she couldn’t die, could she? She had responsibilities.
The house was quiet and dark, full of sleeping people. Untroubled people with uncomplicated lives. Why was that never her natural state? She walked barefoot past the door to Niall and Kat’s room, imagining their naked bodies wrapped round each other. How dare he carry on as if nothing was wrong? He had used her. Played with her like a cat with a half-dead mouse, tossed her around with his paw just because he knew he could.
No, that wasn’t true, she mustn’t do that to herself. Or him. Cathal can’t take everything away.
The cold water splashed against the lining of her stomach. A stab of intense loneliness stung the back of her eyes and she had to close them, for a moment.
Across the corridor, she could hear Lila beginning to cry, and the soft movements of one of her parents shifting in the bed to comfort her. I wish I was a baby, she thought. I wish someone always came to me when I started crying.
It occurred to her that if she was still in London, she wouldn’t think twice about phoning one of them now. Even at three in the morning. The equivalent of barging into their rooms with a handbell shouting, “Talk to me!” What else did she think was reasonable from one angle but, from another, clearly wasn’t?
With each stair, she saw herself in a different light. A trooper. A cow. Misunderstood. Frightened. Sorry for herself. Protective. Hopeless. Selfish. A liar. How did other people see her? How would the courts see her? What would Maya think? She so wanted to do the right thing, and yet how could she, when she had already done the wrong?
Cathal, Cathal, Cathal. Her mind was rusty when it came to thinking about their sexual history. From the moment of the pregnancy test, possibly even before that, she had blocked him out. It wasn’t that the memory was bad particularly; it was simply irrelevant.
By the time Maya had been born, the conception was verging on the immaculate. So it was easy, on the occasions she had bumped into him since, to treat him as just Niall’s brother, or like the friend of a friend. It was impossible to pencil the other details back in, because they had been rubbed out so long ago that there wasn’t even the slightest pressure mark on the page. There was simply no trace.
Even Sita didn’t know the circumstances. That’s how big and distant a secret Maya’s father was. She and Sita had been remote during that awful time. It was a mix of things—different universities, Jonathan, a parting of interests, a silly standoff which friendships sometimes go through. Sita seemed to have found it all so quickly, so easily. And it all coincided with the time that Niall had been lost to her, too.
Emmy had been all at sea on her solitary raft and she had slept with Cathal out of a basic need for companionship. In his compliance, he had unwittingly thrown her a lifeline, given her a seed. “Given” was the correct word. You don’t lend these things, do you? And he wouldn’t have cared about it so much if his sperm had perished in the condom as he intended it to. Maya was hers. Cathal clearly had no claim on her.
True, he was the only possible father, with a year’s margin of error either side. But he didn’t know that, did he? No one did. He’d have to go all the way to prove it.
In the quiet night-time coldness of the hall, she tried to hold on to the bigger picture, to imagine them all there with her, embracing the inevitable. Maya darling, I’ve got something to tell you. Niall, don’t hate me, please. Cathal, bring her back at six. Then she tried to find a way of how she could continue to deny it, but neither scenario had any basis in reality. The only reality was what used to be.
“You’re so good at feeling sorry for yourself,” Niall sometimes told her, and she knew he was right. She was pitiful, pathetic, worse than bloody useless. But was it her fault?
Her family had always tried to make her believe that there was shame in admitting that Maya had not been conceived within the framework of a relationship, and so, as a compromise, she had chosen to remain silent about it. People believed what they wanted. They had done that for ten easy years. What they wanted to believe, of course, was that the child was Niall’s. Nearly right. So nearly right that it hadn’t mattered. Until now.
“Please don’t, Cathal,” she whispered. “Please.”
She walked into the kitchen and saw a dent in the chair cushion where Maya had fallen asleep. She blinked away the image of Niall carrying her up to bed, her heart as ice-cold as the stone she was standing on.
A pile of clean T-shirts were ironing themselves on the Aga lid, insulating the handle and making it too hot to lift.
“Shit!” Emmy dropped the lid back onto the plate with a clang. “Shit, shit, shit!” She waited for someone to come racing down the stairs to find out what the noise was all about, but no one did. And why should they? If they were sleeping next to the person they cared most about, what was a crash downstairs to do with them?
She dragged a chair out and collapsed in it, her head on her arms, at the top of the table. She hated her capacity for self-indulgence. It almost made her sicker than the letter itself.
Roy Mundy’s plumbing bill sat on a clean plate, her patterns and swatches underneath. Asha’s place names were scattered around the empty glasses like clues in a ghostly treasure trail. “Daddy,” she had written on Jonathan’s, surrounded by love hearts.
What was this father—daughter thing? It was hype peddled by armchair child psychologists, who would have a field day with her own case. She didn’t feel anything much for her father, even though he had been her sole parent for most of her life.
She forced herself to think of the possibility of Anthony Hart’s death, which as he was eighty-nine was inevitably hovering, but all she could see was the stoic, capable and grieving face of her eldest brother. Her father existed only in relation to her brothers. She couldn’t remember even calling him Dad.
Then she thought of her mother, Iona, with her cigarette holder and the long zips down the back of her sleeveless dresses; and the tap at the back of her tired eyes finally turned itself on. She didn’t know how long she cried, nor what exactly she was crying about, but it was one of those cries which, she could tell even without a mirror, would leave its telltale evidence across her face the next morning.
She splashed her swollen face with cold water from the kitchen tap, dried it on a new striped tea towel and tried to drink her camomile tea. The drink had soothed her through many a troubled night, but this cup tasted slimy and sickly. The bag felt as if she had dragged it up from the bottom of a forgotten pond.
As she tipped it down the sink, she felt as if the last ten years were going down the plughole with it. Life was no longer at all the same. Cathal’s letter had killed all things familiar.
Without the mug to concentrate on, she began to feel dizzy and feverish, as if she might suddenly throw up or faint. She held onto the back of each chair until she reached the old oak settle, where she began to dig around in the gritty contents of her sheepskin backpack for the little brown bottle. Her comforter, her fix, her prop. The longer it took to find it, the more fevered she felt.
Then her fingers grasped the cold glass with its soft rubber pipette and some of her anxiety subsided. Not bothering with the usual dosage, she unscrewed the whole lid and tipped a slug of Bach’s Rescue Remedy straight into her mouth. The herbal curative washed around her gums and she held it there for a few seconds, its alcohol base numbing her thoughts. People always assumed she carried it for Maya. To Comfort And Reassure, it said on the label. But Maya knew how to do those things for herself. Emmy had never known. Maybe it was time to learn.
She drew measured air through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. Once, twice, three times. She would be okay. She would try and sleep.
“Maya, darling?” she whispered a minute later, bending over her daughter’s bed. “Come with me, come and snuggle.”
Maya half opened her eyes and moved obediently into a sleeping standing position. She knew the score. Emmy put her arm round the child’s narrow, warm shoulders and let her lean against her until they reached the double bed.
“There you are,” she said. “In you get. You’re okay now,” and, already feeling marginally more able to cope, she walked round the other side to crawl in beside her.
* * *
Maya recognized the signs as soon as she opened her eyes and saw her mother lying next to her in the fetal position. Emmy’s hair was tangled, which meant she hadn’t gone through her usual routine before bed. On good nights, Mum went to bed with her hair tied in a little bun, and when she undid it in the morning it fell, like a glossy curtain, into a long straight bob. On those days, her skin had a glow to it, too, as if she’d just been for a walk. That was the night cream, apparently. Not today, though. Maya could see a triangle of cheek through the hair which looked pale and blotchy, black flakes of yesterday’s mascara settled in the bluey creases under her eyes and she smelled of smoke. If Maya needed farther confirmation, there was a packet of Nytol pills next to the bed.
It was an eggshell day, no doubt about it. Emmy called them that, although never at the time, only when it was over, when she had entered the apologizing stage. At the time, you didn’t call them anything, but afterward, when it was all safely in the past, she would say, “That was a bit of an eggshell day, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, my beautiful girl, I’m such a pain. I must be awful to live with.” And Maya always said, “No you’re not, you’re lovely.” And that was true. Her mum was lovely. She got a lot of stuff wrong, but she got loads and loads of things right, too, things that other people never noticed, like smiles across a table at just the right time, and private chats about confusing things that never became embarrassing. She was really good at those.
There was a technique, a recognized procedure, which Maya went through on eggshell days. It was best to give her mother at least an extra hour in bed, although it wasn’t a good idea to creep away without saying anything. That made Emmy wake in a panic, which made things worse. She would feel remiss and she wasn’t good with guilt. What Maya had learned to do was to whisper her intention to get up, and then come back an hour later with a cup of tea. She was a good tea maker, her mum said.
The same rules didn’t apply when they slept in their own beds. Those days were easy peasy, and, since easy-peasy days happened almost all the time, eggshell days weren’t such a big deal. This was the first one Emmy had had at Bodinnick and Maya was still trying to hold on to the idea that it could be a straight hangover.
“I’m getting up now,” Maya whispered. “You stay there.” But instead of her mother doing that familiar grateful half-smile and rolling back into sleep, she opened her eyes and spoke. She even put her arm out and tried to pull Maya back down.
“Don’t go. Stay here for a little bit longer.”
“But I’m not tired anymore.”
“I’ll get up too, then.”
“No, I don’t need you to. I’ll bring you a cup of tea in a minute.”
“We’ll do something together today, just the two of us. I promise.”
Which one was the mother here? The one with the eyelids that looked as if they’d been stung by twin bees, or the one who made sure the daylight wasn’t glinting through the curtains?
Maya pulled on her jeans, which still had yesterday’s pants inside, and a fleece and T-shirt, also still in one piece. Her trainers went on without socks. It wasn’t a straight hangover, she knew that now. Straight hangovers could be identified by the grumpy groaning that passed for conversation.
“I don’t want you going outside before I come down,” Emmy said sharply. Her voice was wide awake even if her face wasn’t.
“I won’t,” Maya replied, not bothering to ask why. On eggshell days, rules just popped up out of nowhere.
She ran down the stairs as if her life depended on it. A warm teapot was already on the table and she poured some into a nearby mug as fast as she could. There was only full-cream milk, and Emmy didn’t like that but she’d have to put up with it today. She’d find her mum one of those cloth eye masks, and the Body Shop elderflower eye gel with the sunglasses for later. Maya was confident such “essentials” would have come with them. Walking shoes and waterproof coats might not have, but eye masks—they were a definite.