“Why are you taking so much stuff with you if you’re coming back?” Maya persevered accusingly. She was leaning against Niall’s bedroom door frame, noting every item he put into the three open cases on his bed. Books and music. An ashtray. A halogen desk light. He had already unplugged his computer in the library.
“To make room for Mog and Dean and baby Nathan.”
“Baby Nathan?” she repeated. Niall was not himself. She looked at him as if to say, Do you think I’m stupid?
“They take up ten times more space than an adult, you know,” he said.
“No, they don’t.”
“Go and take a look in Jonathan and Sita’s room if you don’t believe me. You can’t move in there for nappies and powder, and vests and—”
“That’s just them,” she interrupted impatiently. “You know what they’re like. They all have their own shampoos. And toothpaste. Asha’s even got a different toothpaste from Jay.”
“Whereas you clean your teeth with a stick and some salt.”
“Yeah, and I wash my hair with my own spit.”
Niall remembered the times he had taken her out with nothing more than a spare nappy and a packet of baby wipes in his coat pocket. She ate anything, slept anywhere, still did. Just thinking about her made the hole inside him even bigger.
“And my, how it shines.”
Maya frowned at him. He could see that now was not an optimum time for joking, but he was doing his best to sound normal, to hide the fact that his heart had been wrenched from its casing and was hanging out on wires, like the light switch on the stairs the electrician was working on.
Twice, Emmy had tried to touch him, to see if she could ground him somehow, but twice she had got a shock. The first time was hardly surprising. It had been too soon after the whole ghastly showdown for there to be a safe connection. He had walked back into the house from the pond like a zombie, and she had leaped out at him from the shadows of the hall, mortified at her own behavior, desperate to talk, pleading with him to trust her, to speak to her. But he hadn’t been able even to look at her. His worlds had collided, and the wreckage was still burning.
Niall couldn’t shake off the memory of the way his brother’s naked body had juddered in time with his voice.
“You need to know something,” Cathal had stammered, dripping onto his clothes.
“I do, don’t I? What’s going on?”
“Nothing. It’s not…”
“You and Emmy? I don’t have a problem…”
“Not now, not for years. Just once.”
“Once?” Niall had begun to laugh. “Jaysus, ye bastard, I thought you were going to tell me—”
“No, wait. Once, once is all it takes.”
“You want to tell me you’re in love with her?”
“No, I’m trying to tell you, I’m trying to tell you Emmy got pregnant.”
“I know that.”
“Not that time, another.”
“What other time? How long ago?”
“Well, you know how long.”
“W’d ye feck off?” Niall had laughed hopefully, but then he suddenly knew he had to accept it. “No. Not Maya.” It wasn’t even a question.
“I’m sorry. I would have told you years ago, except I didn’t know. It’s just come to a head in the last few weeks and…”
But coherent thought had stopped there for both of them.
“You must go,” Niall had told him. “You must go. Just go. You can’t be here. We can’t do this. Go on. Go.”
Cathal had put his dry clothes back on over his wet body and driven away, sodden and still trembling, because that was the only thing he could do to make it better.
It had been no easier to help Niall after Cathal had left. “I don’t want you near me,” he kept saying to Emmy, as if she was about to rip off her face mask and reveal an alien. “You feel like a stranger. Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.”
“I’m sorry,” she kept saying. She wasn’t crying, so he knew she meant it.
Maya hadn’t become a stranger, though. She was still his girl, his lovely girl, and she wasn’t prepared to take his exit lying down.
“Mog and Dean have got their own home. It’s parked outside the door. Or haven’t you noticed?” she persisted, coming in at last and sitting on the bed.
“But it’s a bus, Maya. A knackered old bus. And this is a bedroom, in a house, with running water and electricity.”
“The bus has got those things.”
“Come on, stop being difficult.”
“I don’t want them here. I want them to go.”
“How? Their bus has broken down. It was towed here, remember? Or are you going to push it for them?”
I would if it meant you would stay, she wanted to tell him.
“Well, how long are they staying, exactly?” What she meant was, How long will you be gone?
“They’re going as soon as it’s fixed.”
“Can’t you sleep in the bus till then? Stay. Please?”
The understanding was only just out of her mind’s reach. Her mum seemed less stressed and yet Niall was leaving Bodinnick, Mog and Dean were taking his place and their baby both did and didn’t have something to do with it. But to make sense of it, Maya needed the missing links, the other babies, the aborted baby, the baby she used to be. Only Emmy and Niall had those. Only they really knew the nature of the thin-skinned beast that stalked the house. Everyone else was left guessing at its curious footprints and unfamiliar cry.
“Well, I would, if this other problem hadn’t come up.”
“What other problem? Grown-ups are always saying they have to go because of something ‘coming up.’ I think it’s just an excuse they use when they don’t want to stay somewhere. They should be more truthful.” She stared at him unforgivingly.
Niall didn’t know how to answer. There was no point in fobbing her off, but he could hardly tell her the truth. I am going because I feel betrayed, because your mother has deceived me and my brother has defrauded me and I don’t know who anyone is anymore.
He picked up a silver photo frame, a black and white picture he’d taken of her when she was two. All you could see was a chubby cheek, a strand of hair and one runny nostril.
“You’re not taking that as well, are you? If you take that, I’ll know you’re not coming back,” she said. She felt like crying. When she’d heard about his row with Kat and that Kat had gone back to London in a huff, she’d thought, Yippee, that’s what we want. It hadn’t occurred to her for a second that he might follow her.
“I was just looking at it,” he said, changing his mind and putting it back on the tall chest of drawers.
“Are you going to live with Kat?”
“No.”
“I mean, stay with Kat?”
“No, I’m not going to live with her or stay with her, not least because I wouldn’t be welcome. You were right. Kat and I have split up. I’ll be at my old flat.”
“What about Chris? You said he could have it for at least three months, and it’s only been two so far.”
“I’ll stay in the spare room.”
“Stay in the spare room here.”
“I can’t, my darling.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
His hand faltered over his Roberts Radio with the duck-egg-blue leather finish Kat had given him for his birthday. It had cost her a hundred ridiculous quid. “Do you want this in your room?”
“It’s okay, thanks. Leave it here for the baby.”
“Good idea. It’s the right color, anyway.”
He carried on packing and she carried on watching him.
Eventually, she spoke. “Niall?”
“Maya.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can always ask me anything,” he told her, feeling a shit for knowing he wouldn’t always answer her honestly.
“If they wanted to name the baby after Jonathan, don’t you think they should have called him Jo instead?”
Shit, he thought, winded by how much he loved her. I think I can live without Cathal and Emmy and Kat, but how the hell am I going to live without her?
* * *
Downstairs, Emmy held Nathan against her shoulder and walked rhythmically round and round the kitchen. She was singing a song, making it up as she went along, about sleeping and hope and riding life’s storms. In a literary sense, it was rubbish.
But Nathan’s birth had come to them all like a very small drop of extra-virgin oil on deeply troubled water, and that made no sense, either. The arrival of a new baby should wreak havoc in an already turbulent house, but somehow it had simplified it. He cried when he was hungry, and he slept when he was tired. He was showing them the secret of truly simple living. Perhaps Toby had sent him. Perhaps Toby had sent them all here, to burst her bubble, to set her free.
Emmy’s bubble had finally burst, at the pond side. It had been such a precarious one, way too big for its own health, and it had wobbled and shaken and come so perilously close to so many sharp edges so often before that she’d always known it was going to burst one day. And now that it had, she felt released. As if it had been her prison rather than her sanctuary.
She had been bad. Worse than useless. Her breakdown—because that’s what it felt like—had stretched the elasticity of friendship to the limit. It hadn’t snapped it, but that was no thanks to her. That was down to Sita and Jonathan, Niall and Maya. It wouldn’t happen again. She would make it her life’s work not to let it.
Her free hand picked up one of the half-full packets of cigarettes that she had scattered around the house and her foot pressed the pedal on the trash can. As she threw it in, she took a lungful of the new air blowing through the kitchen and it tasted of reconciliation and acceptance. She could actually taste the calm after the storm.
Cathal’s exit had been terrible, but at least it had brought a form of closure with it. The last she had seen of him was when she had picked the blanket weed off his arm, but that simple gesture and his simple question—“Is that okay with you?”—were a resolution of sorts, a good enough beginning and a fair enough end. She knew he had given control back to her. On her phone was one text message she had yet to delete which just said, THANK YOU.
Niall’s departure was going to be even worse but, in the wake of everything that had already passed, it was nothing she couldn’t cope with. They would sort it, somehow, sometime. It was a new experience to feel wrung out but not devastated. Eleven years of keeping a secret had come to an end, and she felt overwhelming relief peeping through the sadness.
It was good, too, being left with the baby. She felt endorsed by being considered suitable, by being viewed as the hands of experience, by enjoying the bestowal of someone’s confidence.
Mog had wanted to wake Nathan and take him with her to go and get some cloth nappies and a feeding bra, but the only baby seat was in Sita’s car and Sita was at work. Besides, it had been raining.
“He’ll stay asleep till you get back,” Emmy had promised. “He’s just had a bucketful of milk. You’ll be with him again in twenty minutes. It won’t matter, I promise.”
She’d made Nathan’s tiny paw wave at Mog through the window as Jonathan’s car pulled off. Don’t worry, she’d mouthed.
Six days old. Warm and soft. Breathing and helpless. His own complete little independent soul. When she’d held Maya like this, she’d felt almost swamped by responsibility. She used to believe that every ounce of Maya’s happiness, her character, her safety, her success, all of it depended on her own maternal strength. She used to think that Maya would become whatever she, Emmy, made her. It was a belief that both terrified and empowered her, but now, holding Nathan, she could see that she had been wrong. Maya was herself, the sum of nobody’s parts. In the long run, it wouldn’t matter too much who her parents had or hadn’t been.
“As long as you all find a loving connection,” she said to the white hump breathing into her neck, thinking it felt as if most of the last ten years had happened in the last ten days. Thank God that the choices she had made for Maya seemed to have had such little overall effect. There was no consistency, and yet Maya was entirely constant.
But it wasn’t Maya who needed help, it was Niall. She kept seeing his ashen face, his body pole-axed in the hall. He had been motionless, as if someone had filled his boots with concrete, trapped him in a force field that she couldn’t penetrate, one that he couldn’t escape from, either.
The baby lurched in sleep, his tiny hands flying open, as if to catch a passing branch as he fell.
“Ch, ch, ch, ch,” Emmy whispered but his eyes were already closed again.
Here was Nathan, dragged into the big wide world by naïveté and carelessness, already managing to be himself. His own sweet, pink-faced postnatal mother was somewhere else, letting out the invisible umbilical cord to an unimaginable length, painfully aware that every minute that passed was another minute away from her baby. But Nathan slept and dribbled against the ribbed cotton of an unfamiliar sweater, oblivious. The dark shriveled stump of his cord would soon fall off and reveal a perfect knot. He fed himself now.
“No one owns you, do they?” Emmy said to the crown of dark hair. “You own yourself.” Her palm practically covered the baby’s back, and she kept it firmly against the white ribbon-edged fleece of his tiny jacket, pressing him to her.
From behind, Niall could only see a rumpled forehead and two confused eyes peeping above the parapet of Emmy’s shoulder. She had lost weight. Her checked drawstring trousers fell over her bottom more loosely than they had two months ago. Her hair was longer, tied in a simple ponytail. From the back, she looked twenty-one again.
He’d thought he was ready to leave, but seeing her like that, imagining she was holding their long-gone baby, he realized he wasn’t. He realized he probably never would be. But he also knew he had no choice.
Supposing their own little fusion had made it farther than an embryo after all, supposing it hadn’t been pulled away from its life-support system, picked like a flower still in bud, and chucked on the ground to die. Supposing they had got it right as Mog and Dean had, allowed it to stay in place, attached to the placenta, feeding and sucking and growing all its bits in the right places until it was ready to come out. And supposing it had come out in its own time, when it was ready, and no one in a green coat and a mask had dragged it out with sterile implements, or left it in a steel tray to wither and cease. What then?
He wanted to believe that the little ghost that floated somewhere at the back of their lives was not after all a ghost, but a human child that had once worn nappies and screamed and kept them both awake at night and was now a teenager, stropping around, putting its big feet all over the furniture, nicking beers from the fridge.
He also wanted to believe that Maya wasn’t the product of a lazy shag between his ex-girlfriend and his greedy brother, that she was his, that she had been planned and wanted and conceived in excitement and anticipation and lust and love while their three-year-old, the little knitted slug that he had just seen in flashback on his mother’s shoulder, slept in his cot.
Niall wondered if he was going stark raving mad.
“Hi,” Emmy said softly. She’d sensed him behind her a while ago.
He raised his eyebrows in reply. His teeth were clenched behind his tight lips. He wanted to hold her, just once more, to feel a newborn baby between them.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
“I wish you wouldn’t go.” She started to move toward him and felt a shot of pain as he backed off.
“I have to.”
“Why don’t you stay for Mog and Dean’s send-off? They’ll be gone soon. They really want you to.”
“I can’t.”
“Please?”
He was silent.
“We should talk about it,” Emmy said. “It could be a beginning.”
“It’s an end, Emmy.”
Her hand left Nathan’s sleep-suited feet and reached for his arm. He could smell the baby on it.
“Please don’t say that.”
“I will. I’m not going to say what I think you want to hear anymore. It’s not good for anyone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Will you say good-bye to Maya for me? I can’t.”
“I know you can’t. Niall, listen to me.”
“No, I can’t listen to anyone.”
And he walked back out again, placing one foot in front of the other, forcing himself not to look back but in no state to see very far ahead, either.
* * *
Jay found Maya crying in her bedroom.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.”
“I didn’t know you were crying.”
“Well, you do now.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
He had picked up a few useful hints about female behavior lately, so he stood there for a while, deliberating whether or not to admit something. Eventually, he found the courage. “I cried last night, too.”
“Did you?” Maya was a little bit interested. Jay usually pretended he had something in his eye.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to go back to London.”
“Who says we’re going back to London?” Maya sniffed.
“What else do you think we’re going to do if the house is sold?” It was the first time he’d said it out loud, and it made him feel even angrier than when he said it to himself.
Maya shrugged. She didn’t care where they lived, as long as it was with Niall.
“We will, you know.”
Maya still didn’t talk.
“So I was thinking it might be time for some ‘direct action,’” Jay said cautiously. He needed her with him on this.
She wiped her face, leaving dirty streaks across her freckled cheeks. “What’s that?”
“It’s when you take matters into your own hands.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want to tell me what you’re crying about?”
She thought about it. Six weeks ago she wouldn’t have told him, but then six weeks ago he wouldn’t have asked. “I don’t want Niall to go,” she said.
“Well, the bad news is, he’s already gone.”
Her blotchy face crumpled again and he went to sit next to her, uninvited, on her purple appliqué quilt with the big pink stars.
“But he’s coming back.” Jay didn’t believe it himself.
“Why did he go, then?” she snapped, as if it was Jay’s fault.
“He had his reasons,” he said darkly.
Actually he had no idea, nor did he understand why his parents had started to behave like themselves again, or why Emmy was up and about, leaving her sewing room, being normal. Or why there were travelers in a bus outside. Nothing that any of the adults had done ever since they got here made sense. Just as things were settling down, just as summer was really here, they were selling out. Most people came to Cornwall for the summer, not left.
“Do you want to go back to London?” he asked Maya.
She shrugged.
“Do you want to stay here, then?”
She shrugged again.
“Okay, do you want to be here more than you want to be in London?”
“Maybe.” She didn’t want to tell him that she wanted to be wherever Emmy and Niall were most likely to make friends again.
“Look, the grown-ups are crap. They don’t really know what they’re doing.” Jay spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. He picked at a sticker she had put on her white wooden bedhead. “They should listen to us for a change, let us make some decisions.”
“Oh, like they’d let us.”
“Well, I think we should at least try. I’ve got no intention of going back, not after all this. We can’t go back to our old houses. Other people live in them now.”
“We can go back after three months, stupid. And another few weeks isn’t going to kill anyone.”
Jay ignored her. “Do you want to know a secret?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I heard them say they were definitely going to have another house meeting after supper, once we’re in bed. I think it’s the big one. We’ve got to try and listen. Once we know what the plan is, we’ll have our own house meeting. We’ll beat them at their own game. Come with me. Don’t you dare say anything about this, right?”
The spy hole he’d found was perfect. It was down a medieval stone staircase which led from a closed door on the landing down to the kitchen. It was never used, because the door leading from the kitchen was permanently locked, besides being blocked by an oak church pew in front of it, and the key had been lost years ago. Anyway, in the winter, it would have been too cold to leave the doors open, either at the top or the bottom, because the staircase was a funnel for the wind. It was also a funnel for sound.
The back rest of the pew in the kitchen was a little lower than the keyhole, and the gap between the door and the wooden frame was just wide enough for you to press your ear against it and hear what people were saying. The most useful thing was that the pew ran along one side of the table, and Sita usually sat at the door end.
“If we’re lucky, we should be able to get every word,” Jay said.
“Not if the music is on.”
“Nick the machine, then. Say you can’t get to sleep without a tape.”
“No,” Maya said. “You say that. You’re the one with sleeping difficulties.”
He couldn’t dispute it. “Anyway, the way Mum and Dad were talking, it’s not going to be a music sort of evening,” he told her grimly.
* * *
Niall’s swollen face looked as if he had been in a fight, but he didn’t care. He wanted to prolong the agony of his departure with one last pint in the Cott. He was still in that force field, not knowing how to break out, unable to remove himself from the place where he so wanted to be.
He knew he needed to leave Cornwall, but for the moment he couldn’t. Beer usually helped, and he thought he had timed his drink carefully to avoid the regulars. Not carefully enough, though. As he walked out the back door from the public bar and up the slope that led to the car park, he bumped into Roy Mundy.
“Hello, boy. Why have you got a motorbike in the back of your van? I don’t miss a trick, I don’t.”
“Yes, you’ve told me that before,” Niall said joylessly.
“Well, I’m old. I repeat myself.”
“I’ve got to go back to London. I’ve had to hire the van just to take my stuff back.”
“Coming down again, are you?”
“No. It didn’t work out.”
“You’ve only just bleddy arrived. You can’t tell me it’s all over already.”
“Yep.” Niall kicked a few stones around to give him a reason for looking at the ground.
“You all right, boy?”
“I’ll live.”
“That’s a shame.” Roy tried a chuckle, but it got no response. “We’ll miss you.”
“Yeah. The others aren’t leaving, though. They’ll still be needing you.”
“I wasn’t thinking about work, boy. I was thinking about my lunchtime pint.”
“You’ve got Jim. You’ll be all right.”
Roy thought he’d have one last crack. “Women troubles, is it?”
“You got it.”
“That’s all right, then. You’ll be back,” Roy said cheerfully. “I’ll put a drink in d’rectly.”
“I appreciate it,” Niall said. “Cheers, Roy. Say good-bye to Jim for me.”
“See you, boy.” He limped into the pub, his hand up. “Go careful, mind.”
The fat old plumber with the dodgy shoes and long line in acrylic school jumpers shouldn’t have said that. It meant that Niall missed the opportunity to say good-bye to Jim Best in person, because when the electrician pulled in for his lunchtime pint Niall was too busy dealing with something in his eye to be able to look up and acknowledge him.
* * *
Darkness fell.
“It’s a lot of money,” Jonathan said.
“A million pounds,” Asha whispered too loudly outside the door behind the pew.
“I’ve told you,” Jay whispered back crossly. “You’re only allowed here if you keep quiet.”
Maya watched her mother twist a curl of burgundy foil from the neck of the wine bottle round and round her index finger. Her nails were bitten to the quick.
“You might be better off with it in your bank account,” Jonathan said.
“Money aside, I feel I ought to say sorry to you two properly,” Emmy said. “I know I’ve made a complete mess of it.”
“We’ve all done that,” said Sita.
Maya looked at Jay. He grimaced and put his finger to his lips. Things were not looking good. He was right. This meeting did sound like the big one.
“So,” asked Jonathan, “do we use Niall’s departure as an incentive to regroup, or do we all pack up now and go with him?”
Maya’s heart leaped. Jay’s sank.
“We can’t go anywhere until Bodinnick is sold,” Sita said firmly.
“Why not?” Emmy said.
“Money?” said Sita.
“We can live without savings,” said Jonathan.
“But we can’t make a clean break if—”
“Don’t. You know I can’t do it without you,” Emmy said feebly. “It’s not just your money. I don’t want to be here on my own.”
“It’s not only about you needing us, Em. We need you too.”
“Why?”
“Well, for a start, we can’t afford to buy Bodinnick off you.”
“Have it.”
“Don’t be silly.”
On the stairs, Jay put his head in his hands.
Emmy pulled the coil foil off her finger and stretched it. “You could always stay here and I could go back,” she said. “Now that they’re happy at school and everything.”
Behind the door, Jay crossed his fingers.
“How?”
“You can live here as long as you want, for free. I mean it.”
“No, we can’t.”
“Yes, you can. What’s stopping you?”
“It’s not right. That wasn’t the vision.”
“Well, visions change.”
The children held their breath.
The adults shifted in their chairs. There was silence.
“Anyone want a beer?” Jonathan said.
“Bloody good idea,” Emmy said. “God, I can’t bear this.” She got up from the table and wandered off, out of earshot.
“Damn,” Jay shouted when all three parents had gone. “Why do they never stick at anything?”
* * *
An hour and a half later, Maya sat down on the stone stairs again, grateful for her slipper socks. It was funny to think they had all learned to deal with the little things like getting cold feet at night just when it looked as if they’d have to leave. Well, not funny, stupid.
She peeped through the gap. Her mum and Sita were back at the table, sitting opposite each other. They were talking in low voices, but she couldn’t see or hear Jonathan. The wine bottle was empty and another one was next to it. Her mum was smoking, and Maya couldn’t be sure but it looked as if Sita had a cigarette too. They looked like they had looked at the very beginning, when they’d first come here, before the eggshell days, before Sita started work, when Niall was here. More together again.
She wondered if she ought to go and wake Jay, but he was fast asleep in bed, having talked himself into a coma about Plan A and Plan B, real estate agents and sit-down protests.
She had drifted off next to Asha for a while but something had kept her from real sleep. She had intended to go straight back to her own room and fall asleep under her own duvet but the lure of the spyhole was too strong and she had crept down to find out if she could hear anymore.
The first question she heard almost made her laugh out loud. It sounded like the kind of thing she heard in the playground.
“Who do you think Niall hates most?” Sita was asking. Out of who? thought Maya. It might be the man who first invented Irish theme pubs. He was always going on about them. He’d once said he’d like to bomb them all.
“Both of us,” Emmy said. Both of who? Sita and her mum? They were talking rubbish. Niall didn’t hate anyone, apart from the pub man. Oh, and the Corrs.
“He won’t feel like that for long.”
“I don’t know. It was so terrible, seeing him when he came back in. I’ve never seen anyone look like that, you know, as if his whole world had just completely collapsed.”
“I have,” Sita said. “I’ve seen you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I was seriously worried, you know.”
Maya didn’t understand. She was getting pins and needles and she shifted her position as carefully as she could. It took her a while to catch the words again after that.
Sita was talking. “… didn’t occur to me that it was something to do with Cathal. I thought you were having trouble dealing with Niall and Kat. I can’t believe you held it together as well as you did then, I really can’t.”
Maya saw her mother spray a mouthful of wine over the table as she laughed, but it wasn’t the sort of laugh that other people joined in.
“C’mon.”
“Have you told Maya?”
Maya jumped a little at her name and pressed her ear more tightly to the gap.
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“I don’t know. My instincts tell me to trust the situation to work itself out.”
“What if she asks?”
“I don’t think she will.”
“Cathal will stick with that, will he?”
Cathal? thought Maya, feeling the cold through her socks all of a sudden. What’s he got to do with it?
“I’ve got to trust him, too. We both know it’s got to be right. And what’s he going to do? He’s her father, for God’s sake. He’s going to want to get it right, isn’t he?”
Father? Maya thought. Father? What father? Whose father? Then she remembered Cathal’s fish face and how it had made him look like an old man.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to hear anymore. She picked herself up and got herself back to her room as fast as she could, terrified that someone might catch her.
Her head spun for the briefest of moments. Cathal was her father. Was he? Was he really? Was that the question everyone was waiting to hear her ask? Was it? Well, it could wait. She didn’t want to know. She was too tired. She was too disappointed. She wanted Niall. She wanted things to be like they were.
As she got into bed and turned to switch off the bedside light, she noticed Niall’s black-and-white picture of her in its silver frame next to her bed. It had been put there to make her think he was coming back, but she knew now it was a good-bye present.
No. He wasn’t allowed to say good-bye. If he wasn’t going to come back on his own, she would go and get him. And if he had gone because of something to do with the question she was supposed to be asking, even if that question had something to do with Cathal, he could stop behaving like Emmy and grow up, as she had had to do, years ago.
* * *
Sleeping in the back of a transit van next to a motorbike in an unknown rest area because you were too pissed to drive was not very grown up at all, but Niall didn’t feel like being mature. He had already made the most adult decision of his life by leaving Bodinnick. He wasn’t ready to move on just yet.
The fat old plumber with the dodgy shoes felt like his only friend tonight, although what Roy would make of him chain-smoking, drinking Special Brew and listening to Elvis Costello in a van at midnight, Niall wasn’t sure. But then he wasn’t at all sure himself.