Galway, 1987
I feel lost when I wake up. I don’t know where I am.
It’s dark and cold. I have a tummyache and feel a bit sick, just like I do when my brother takes me out on Daddy’s fishing boat. I reach out into the darkness, my fingers expecting to meet my bedroom wall, or the little side table made out of driftwood from the bay, but my fingers don’t feel that. Instead they touch something cold, like metal, all around me. I start to panic, but I’m very tired, so tired I realize that I must be dreaming. I close my eyes and decide that if I still don’t know where I am when I’ve counted to fifty inside my head, then I’ll let myself cry. The last number I remember counting is forty-eight.
The next time I open my eyes, I’m in the back of a car. It’s not my father’s car, I know that without having to think about it too much because we don’t have one anymore. He sold it to pay the electricity bill when the lights went out. The seats of the car I’m in are made of red-colored leather, and my face and arms seem to be stuck to it when I first wake up—I have to peel them off.
I stare at the back of the head of the person driving, before remembering the nice lady called Maggie. Then I sit up properly and look out the window, but I still don’t know where I am.
“Where are we going?” I rub the sleep from my eyes, gifts the sandman left behind scratching my cheeks.
“Just a little drive,” says Maggie, smiling at me in the small mirror, which shows a rectangle of her face, even though she is facing the other way.
“Are you taking me back to my daddy’s house?”
“You’re staying with me for a wee while, do you remember? There isn’t enough food for you at your house just now.”
I do remember her saying that; I’m just so tired I forgot.
“Why don’t you have another little sleep, not far to go now. I’ll wake you when we get where we’re going. I have a lovely surprise for you when we get there.”
I lie back down on the red leather seat and close my eyes, but I don’t sleep. Even though I do like surprises, I’m scared and excited all at once. Maggie seems nice, but everything I just saw out the window looked so strange: the houses, the walls, even the signs on the side of the road.
I might be wrong, but it feels like I am a long way from home.