It took a minute or two for the crying to register. Irene lowered her magazine and scanned the crowded playground, but didn’t see her daughter. She got to her feet, frowning—and just then Emily appeared from behind the slide, still wailing, holding the hand of a skinny teenage girl who was leading her towards Irene’s bench. A little towheaded boy trotted behind them, his eyes fixed on Emily.
Irene sat down again. When the trio got closer, she saw the blood on her daughter’s knee. She laid her magazine on the bench and opened her bag and pulled out a travel pack of wipes, regretting her choice of cream jeans for the trip to the park.
When she reached her mother, Emily set up a fresh burst of sobbing. Irene hoisted her onto the bench. “Silly old thing—what have you done?”
“She fell off the ladder,” the teenager said. “Her foot slipped.” Her voice was flat, no inflection in the words. Her face was pale, her black top rumpled. A good wash wouldn’t go astray. Close up, she also looked older than Irene’s original estimate. Twenty, or thereabouts.
Irene pulled a wipe from the pack and dabbed at the cut, keeping the bloody knee and the cream jeans as far apart as possible. She was conscious of the woman’s eyes on her, and of her handbag sitting on the bench within easy reach.
“Thanks for bringing her over,” Irene said. “She’ll be fine now.”
They remained standing there, both of them watching the proceedings mutely. Irene wondered if one of them was going to make a lunge for the handbag. Maybe the boy was being trained, like one of Fagin’s pickpockets.
Emily winced as her mother worked. “Ow, you’re hurting me.”
“Keep still then,” Irene said, gripping the leg firmly by the ankle. “You need to be brave, I have to clean it.”
She felt irritated by the continued presence of the others. Maybe they weren’t thieves, maybe they were waiting instead for some kind of reward.
“I could look after her,” the woman said suddenly. “If you wanted someone, I mean. I’m lookin’ for a job, and I have my own child.” Indicating the boy, who promptly stuck his thumb in his mouth and pressed closer to her side. “They were playin’ together when it happened,” she said.
Emily, playing with that ragamuffin. Irene would have to keep a closer eye on her in future. She pulled another wipe from the pack and dabbed at the cut again. “Thanks,” she repeated, “but I already have someone.”
When the woman still didn’t move away, Irene reached for her bag and rummaged in it until she found a fiver. “Here,” she said, “I appreciate your help.” Tucking the bag casually between her feet as she smiled brightly at them.
For a second she thought the money wasn’t going to be accepted. A beat passed before the woman put out her hand.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, slipping the note quickly into the pocket of her jeans. She turned, grabbing the boy’s hand. When they had gone about ten paces he looked back at Emily, but the woman immediately pulled him around again.
Talk about optimistic. Irene would want to be pretty desperate to employ someone like her to look after Emily. Much as Pilar irritated her, with her sloppy timekeeping and careless cleaning—deliberately misunderstanding the instructions half the time, no doubt—Irene had to concede that Emily was in safe hands when she was with the au pair. And Pilar was always fairly well turned out, even if she could use a bit more deodorant at times.
But this woman had definitely been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, in her grubby clothes and those dead eyes. Imagine the accent Emily would have after a week with her. Irene wouldn’t be surprised if she was on drugs, she looked the type. And the boy, with that blank, half-witted stare—for all Irene knew he could have pushed Emily off the ladder, just so they could claim some reward.
Compared with them, Pilar was practically a saint.
“Right,” Irene said, packing away the wipes, “let’s go home and put you into the bath.”
“I want Smarties,” Emily said, sniffing.
“Well, you certainly won’t get them if you ask like that.”
She’d never pretended, she’d always been honest about not wanting children. Martin had known where she stood before he’d married her; she’d never lied to him. He’d probably been convinced that he’d change her mind somewhere along the way, but Irene had known it would never happen. She hadn’t a maternal bone in her body.
It had been nobody’s fault when the contraceptive hadn’t worked. Her first instinct had been to have an abortion, but she hadn’t bargained for Martin’s persistence: He’d worn her down with his pleading and his promises of full-time nannies, and because Irene loved him, she’d finally given in. She’d been sick all the way through her pregnancy, as if her body was confirming what her mind had always insisted—she wasn’t designed for motherhood.
She’d endured twenty hours of labor, sixteen without an epidural, despite her screams. And the baby, when it was finally placed in her arms, looked exactly like an aunt Irene had never gotten on with. She’d regarded her new daughter and felt precisely nothing, apart from an overwhelming urge to sleep.
It had taken months of crunches and lettuce leaves for her abs to recover fully. The nanny that Martin had promised had turned into six different nannies by the time Emily was three—for reasons Irene couldn’t fathom none had stayed longer than a few months, and one had walked out after three days.
In between nannies, Martin was the one who stayed at home while Irene went to work. It made perfect sense: He was the boss, he could easily delegate, whereas Irene would have gone mad stuck in the house with a small child all day.
And now they had Pilar, who’d been with them for just three weeks, and who was already irritating the hell out of Irene.
“My knee hurts,” Emily whimpered as she slid off the bench.
“It’ll get better,” Irene replied, slinging her bag onto her shoulder.
—————
Michael didn’t often visit the park. The manicured lawns and ordered flower beds held little attraction for him—he preferred his nature wild—and the ubiquitous evidence of dogs whose owners couldn’t be bothered to clean up after them, despite prominently posted reminders, was profoundly depressing. Further proof, not that he needed it, of the innate selfishness of the human race.
But walking home from the graveyard earlier he’d felt an uncharacteristic reluctance to return to his empty, silent house, so on impulse he’d turned in the park gates and claimed a bench that was far enough away from the play area for the shrieks of children not to irritate. He determined to sit and enjoy the sunshine, and banish the gloomy thoughts that had dogged him lately.
Easier said than done. Every woman who passed with a small child—and who’d have guessed how many of them were in Carrickbawn?—reminded him of the girl’s departure in tears from the shop four days previously. And try as he might, he hadn’t been able to get them out of his head since then, hadn’t been able to stop the doubts from tormenting him.
Had he done the right thing, sending them packing? What if she’d been telling the truth, and the boy was indeed Ethan’s? Had Michael turned his back on his own grandson?
Oh, he had all the arguments to justify his actions. She was a drug dealer, she’d admitted that. How could he trust anything she said? He’d seen what drugs did to people, how they wiped away decency and left cunning and dishonesty in its place. He’d done what he felt to be the right thing: Why couldn’t he leave it at that?
His throat was dry. He was too hot, his clothes all wrong for this unseasonable weather. The last day of September and everyone wilting in the heat. The climate had certainly gone haywire. He thought longingly of a glass of ice-cold beer, or even ice-cold water. He became aware of a repeated yapping somewhere to his left, and he turned, frowning, to see what animal was responsible.
She sat two benches away, the little dog attached to her wrist by a red leather leash, and she ate an ice cream cone. Michael couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a cone. He watched her lips closing over the soft whiteness of it, and he imagined the cold, creamy taste in his own mouth, slipping down his throat, cooling deliciously as it went.
He watched her licking the drips from her fingers as the little dog pawed at her skirt and attempted to scramble, still yapping, onto her lap. Yes, a handful, by the looks of it. Hardly surprising that she’d come back to the shop asking for his advice.
He’d been a bit short with her, he acknowledged it. She’d caught him at a bad time, arriving just as he was throwing the other two out. Probably had him pegged as a cranky old so-and-so—which of course he was.
She seemed oblivious to the dog’s demands for attention. She was totally taken up with the ice cream, and clearly enjoying it. There was something oddly appealing in her complete abandonment to the sensory pleasure the food was affording her. She ate with the greedy preoccupation of a small child, everything else forgotten.
The sweat trickled down Michael’s back. The sun blazed on his face, but he was mesmerized by the scene in front of him. He watched her tipping back her head to bite off the end of the cone, and he remembered doing the same as a boy, sucking out the soft ice cream that was lodged inside, pulling it down into his mouth.
When the cone was gone, she licked the ends of each of her fingers again before rummaging in the red canvas bag that sat beside her on the bench. She pulled out a tissue and wiped her hands and dabbed at her mouth. She wore a white skirt that was splashed with giant blobs of scarlet and purple and bright blue, and a loose, flowing yellow top whose sleeves ended at her elbows.
Her face, what he could see of it, was pink with warmth. He liked to see naturally rosy cheeks, far nicer than some paint that had come out of a pot. When would women learn to leave their faces alone?
She bent and murmured something to the little dog, whose yaps increased in volume and whose tail immediately began to wag vigorously. As she got to her feet Michael ducked his head and pretended to be tying a shoelace, but when he heard no sound of their approach he glanced up and saw her walking off in the opposite direction, the little dog straining at the leash as she attempted to cross the grass towards a flower bed. Michael heard her owner say a sharp “No.”
When they were no longer in sight he rose from his bench and made his way to the little kiosk by the park’s main gate, and he bought an ice cream cone for the first time in years.
It tasted wonderful.
—————
Pilar reached across the table for the bowl of Parmesan cheese, her sleeve narrowly avoiding contact with Anton’s plate of food. “My boss is crazy woman,” she said.
Zarek twirled spaghetti around his fork and thought of the small boy who’d come into the café a few days before with a girl who looked too young to be his mother, but who probably was. Such a pinched little face he’d had, so pale and lost looking, not responding in the least to the smile Zarek had given him.
“You know what she say me?” Pilar demanded, sprinkling cheese liberally over her Bolognese sauce. “She say I must clean toilets every day—pah!”
And the girl had been pathetic too, in her shabby clothes and with eyes too old for her face. Zarek had known, handing her the job application form, that there was little chance of someone with her appearance being taken on by Sylvia.
“Cleaning toilets every day is waste,” Pilar declared crossly. “We clean one time in week, and our toilet is okay, yes? One clean on Saturday, we are okay, yes?”
The two of them had still been sitting there when Zarek’s shift had ended at seven, their single portion of chips long since eaten, the girl’s newly washed hair drying slowly. He wondered how much longer they’d stayed, and where they’d gone afterwards. If she had to wash her hair in a café toilet, what kind of accommodation could they possibly have?
“I not understand,” Pilar said, “how stupid woman is mama to beautiful little girl. But she is not good mama, she is very bad mama. The papa, he look after Emily, not the mama.”
Zarek thought the girl in the café cared about the little boy. He’d seen the way she’d watched him as he’d eaten the chips she’d bought, how she’d hardly taken any herself, although she’d looked hungry enough to Zarek. He hoped the cardboard box of chips hadn’t been their only meal of the day.
“Zarek.”
He pulled himself back to the present. Pilar was frowning at him.
“I ask if you want bathroom later,” she said. “I need bath for one hour.”
“Please,” Zarek said, “remain in bath as long you like. Two hour if you want.”
“Is good for skin,” Anton added, “to remain in bath for two hour.”