My week does not go to plan. It begins well: Jarrod pores over the completed spreadsheet, determinedly searching every figure, formula and underlying assumption for errors that aren’t there to be found. The proposal is faultless. I’m my father’s daughter in that respect, a perfectionist. Finally, he grudgingly signs his name, I courier the proposal to Derek, and this is where things go off track. Derek does not get back to me. The days pass and it becomes obvious that he intends to leave me hanging over the weekend. Not because he needs to think about anything further, I’m sure, but because he never misses an opportunity to demonstrate the extent of his power. By Friday evening, I’m anxious, frustrated and in an extremely bad mood.
I jump from the tram and cross the road and the manicured gardens to the beach. Yearning for the smell of the sea, I inhale and my nostrils are obligingly filled with salty air and my head immediately feels lighter. The beach is busy with high school kids, still in their uniforms, and office workers stopping for a swim on their way home. There’s no better way to start the weekend, to restore equilibrium: the sea air, the bay and ocean beyond, the lapping water that leaves a line of froth on the pale, silky sand.
The beachfront is more urbane and sophisticated than the beaches outside Belfast, and the water of Port Phillip Bay more refined and polite than the Irish Sea. The waves lap in and gently recede, the motion predictable and soothing and suggesting a pattern if one concentrates for long enough. Normally I would be in the pub at this time on a Friday evening, not searching for patterns in how the water rolls in and out. I had just one drink with the gang from work before slipping away early to catch the tram home. If Derek had phoned, or at least sent an email, I would have been in a better mood and stayed on; I’d probably be on my third or fourth drink by now. Undoubtedly he’ll phone on Monday to quibble about some minor issue, and I’ll have to be nice to him, casual and breezy and not at all like I’ve been on tenterhooks all weekend …
After a while, when I feel that some of my frustration has dissolved into the scene around me, I turn to walk along the promenade towards home. My apartment is on Dalgety Street, a fifteen-minute walk. Thinking about dinner makes me frown again. I don’t enjoy cooking; my appetite is fickle at the best of times, and my imagination is drained of ideas on how to create meals that are both healthy and in some way exciting. Whenever possible I eat out, though I know this is a bad habit, expensive and potentially fattening because you never know for sure what restaurants put into their food.
I unlock the door of my apartment to be greeted with eerie silence. Jeanie, my flatmate and friend, is away on business. Jeanie is loud and noisy and very present when she’s at home. She’s due back sometime next week but with her job the exact day could move either forwards or backwards. Jeanie is a troubleshooter, a problem fixer; sometimes the problems are resolved quicker than expected, other times they take much longer. For the first few days after her frequent departures, I savour the silence. But I always reach a point, like now, when I crave her company and commotion.
Late afternoon sun streams through the balcony doors at the end of the rectangular living area and illuminates the room with hazy light. Two beige sofas with oversized cushions face each other across a low coffee table of dark wood. One of the walls has a plasma TV – Jeanie’s – and the other holds a stretched canvas with abstract splashes of red and orange and yellow – mine. A brimming bookshelf and two lamp tables complete the furnishings. The room is comfortable and informal and nothing like my childhood home, where my father’s unyielding personality was manifest in the high-backed dining chairs, stiff display cabinets and other meticulous furnishings.
I set down my bag on the wooden floor and kick off my heels then pad to the kitchen, the soles of my feet gathering particles of dirt on the way. The place needs a clean: I will do it tomorrow. I open the fridge and assess its contents. I’m down to bare provisions; tomorrow is shopping day as well as cleaning day. There’s a lean rump steak and the makings of a salad; that will do – relatively fast to throw together and with the added benefit of being low in calories.
I’m tearing the lettuce into strips when the phone rings. Wiping one hand with a tea towel, I pick up the handset.
It’s Nicola, her voice loud against a cacophony of music and voices. ‘Hey, Caitlin, you’re missing a great night out!’
‘I am?’
‘Why did you sneak off so early?’
‘I wasn’t in the mood.’
Listening to the buoyancy in Nic’s voice and the drum of the background noise, I instantly regret my hasty departure. The kitchen feels deathly quiet by comparison.
‘Meet me tomorrow night instead,’ Nic says. ‘We’ll go out in St Kilda.’
‘Yeah, let’s do that. I’ll talk to you then.’
I put down the phone and continue to tear the lettuce, albeit more forcefully than before. The steak sizzles away obliviously in the pan. I glance at it and tell myself that I will eat it, even though I’ve lost the little appetite I had. Dinner: steak and salad. But then what? The night stretches out ahead, long and lonely.
The phone rings again early in the morning. Sunshine penetrates the thin curtains and birds twitter outside, adding their chorus to the trill of the phone. I stretch out a heavy arm to pick it up. I know it’s my mother. This is her usual time for calling.
‘Hi, Mum,’ I say over a yawn.
‘I’ve woken you! I’m sorry – I thought you’d be up.’
When I hear her voice, Mum’s face appears in my mind, her hair a bright halo around her attractive though somewhat gaunt face.
‘It’s okay, Mum. I should be up anyway.’
‘Are you going somewhere?’ Paula is thirsty for details: where I’m going, how I’m getting there, who I’m seeing. She struggles to visualise my life and the colour and nuances of Melbourne. Despite my descriptions and the photos I send, she still doesn’t seem to be able to picture what it’s like over here.
In the first few months after arriving in Australia, I called Mum from payphones. Those were painful conversations over bad lines, wails of desolation from her, hushed soothing responses from me as I turned my back to the curious suntanned faces waiting in the queue.
‘How are you doing this week, Mum?’ I’d ask.
She wouldn’t reply. Well, at least not with words. Her sobs broke my heart as I stood in the phone booth, traffic revving on the street behind me, perspiration tingling my skin. My mother needed me and I was thousands of miles away, under a hot blue sky which, in her current state, she couldn’t begin to imagine.
‘It will get better,’ I’d promise.
‘When?’ she’d gasp between sobs. ‘When will it get better?’
I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know. How long did it take to get over a twenty-five-year marriage? What was the ratio of years married to years to recover? Surely it couldn’t be one to one; please God, let Mum recover much sooner than that. Paula, so trusting and faithful and true. How could this have happened? What had she done to deserve this on top of everything else?
I blamed myself for not seeing that it was coming. I should have guessed that my departure was yet another crack in our family, a crack it couldn’t sustain. Maeve had gone too, to university, leaving Mum alone, with more time on her hands than she knew what to do with, more time to think, to remember, to realise that her husband was distant and unreachable and never there, and that her marriage had disintegrated along with everything else and needed drastic action if it were to survive. Bravely, she’d given her husband an ultimatum, said that he had to choose between her and the support group. He’d promptly chosen the group, the cause, said he couldn’t walk away from it, that it was the only thing that kept him going, without understanding at all that he was the only thing that kept her going.
Paula’s hurt ravaged her from the inside out. It spilled down the phone, catching on every word she said. ‘How could he do this to me? Discard me like this?’
But although she was bewildered and heartbroken, she was too loyal to speak badly of him for long. ‘How are you getting on over there?’ she’d ask, trying to gather herself.
‘Good, Mum, really good.’
‘Have you made any friends?’
‘Yes, a few.’
She needed reassurance that I wasn’t alone, that there were people around me, people to talk to and socialise with, like a family away from home. But her questions were perfunctory and her concentration poor. I knew that after she hung up she’d think of a detail she hadn’t thought to ask about and would stay awake at night worrying.
‘Look, Mum, I have to go. There’s a huge queue for the phone.’
‘Okay. Goodbye, Caitlin. Call again soon, if you can.’
She would sound so lonely and lost that tears would sting my eyes. I’d hang up the phone and step aside for the next person in the queue. Walking down the street, blinking to clear my eyes, sadness and fury churned inside me, the latter directed at my father and usually the predominant emotion. I wanted to take him by the shoulders, to shake him. I wanted to stomp my feet, to yell at him, to force him to listen and take responsibility for the further damage he had caused. There he was, pursuing justice to the detriment of everything else – his wife, his marriage, his family. It was a matter of ethics to him, of right and wrong, of someone being brought to account for the terrible crime that had been committed that day in Clonmegan. But what about the ethics of standing by your wife and family when they needed you most? Did my father, in his crusade for justice, ever stop to think of that?
When I moved from the hostel to my first apartment, I called my mother from the balcony. Five floors up, it was small and windy, the view overtaken by another, too-close apartment block. Out there it didn’t matter if I cried after hanging up. It didn’t matter if I swore in anger. I could vent as much as I needed to; the wind obliterated it all.
Mum and I fell into a pattern of calling each other on Saturdays, at the end of her week and the start of my weekend. Slowly, month by month, year by year, she has come to terms with the disintegration of her family and she’s in a good place now, healed, though still a little sad. She has a man in her life – Tony, a retired teacher – and they go to the cinema and for walks together. She says he’s a good companion and she tries to pass off their relationship as platonic, but she doesn’t fool me. Besides, Maeve has informed me that Tony stays over in the house a few nights a week.
In the last few years our conversations have become much easier, more like normal mother–daughter chats you’ll hear anywhere in the world: exchanging trivial anecdotes about work, the week gone past and other members of the family; the weather, national news, the dismal state of the economy; and to round things off, a nice dollop of motherly fussing.
‘When I eventually drag myself out of bed, I’m going to the markets,’ I say in answer to Mum’s question about what I’m planning to do for the day. ‘I need to get some fruit and veg. The cupboards are bare.’
Because she can’t see my life, she often takes my words too literally. ‘Ach, Caitlin, you shouldn’t have empty cupboards, it’s not a healthy way to live.’
‘Mum, I’ve eaten, the food is gone, and now I need to go shopping,’ I reply dryly. ‘It’s just the normal weekly cycle. No different from yours!’
A brief silence follows. I pull myself up in the bed and my head starts to fill with thoughts about the day ahead.
‘Anything else planned for the weekend, love?’ she asks.
‘Going out with Nicola tonight. Just for some drinks.’
‘In the city?’
‘No, we’ll go local I think.’ Another silence threatens and I hurry to fill it. ‘How about you, Mum? Are you doing anything?’
She sounds relieved to be able to answer in the affirmative. ‘Maeve is coming home tomorrow. It’s midterm – she’s going to stay the week …’
Maeve is twenty-seven and still a student. After her bachelor degree at Queen’s, she went on to do a master’s and then a PhD. In a few months she’ll have a doctorate in modern history: Dr Maeve O’Reilly. I fully expect that she will then promptly find another subject in which to academically excel. God forbid that she should use all that knowledge in any practical way, a job for instance.
‘I suppose she’s bringing her washing home with her.’
‘If she does, then I’ll reintroduce her to the washing machine and leave her to it,’ Mum retorts.
I stretch and my stomach remembers it’s there and rumbles. ‘I wish I had one of your roast dinners to look forward to today,’ I say without thinking.
‘I wish you did too! I worry about you so, so much.’
The sadness that simmers beneath the surface has found a way in. It isn’t always so. Sometimes we can have an entire conversation without an opening. But all it needs is a crack, the slightest crack, and we both know it.
She has a catch in her voice. ‘You know why I worry, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Mum, I do.’
‘Keep safe, darling. Keep safe until next week.’