It’s warm on the bus and your seat is right over the engine and you keep wanting to doze off, but every time your eyes close you instantly jerk awake again, seized by a terror that he has gone, and you have to stop yourself reaching out and grabbing him to be sure he’s really there. This must be what it’s like being a parent, constantly worrying your kids will be annihilated the moment you look away. That must be why they’re all so insane.
You ran all the way to the bus station. The bus hadn’t boarded yet, but you couldn’t find him in the crowd waiting at the barrier. Anyway you knew he wasn’t there. You ran back down the tracks, back through the streets, up and down, up and down, through the sea of wrong faces, in a panic that was simultaneously curdling into despair. Till you stopped, feeling more alone than you ever had in your life, at a crossroads, took a deep breath, tried to put yourself in his shoes. What would he do, where would he go? That’s when you saw the game shop – appearing to you like a gift, a shimmering holy grail, right across the street. When you went up to him he nearly jumped out of his skin. You grabbed him with both hands, like he was a lucky leprechaun that might disappear.
He didn’t seem especially pleased to see you, which you supposed was fair enough. You yelled at him again, you knew you shouldn’t but you were just so freaked out. You walked him to the bus station to make sure he got on the bus, then you bought a ticket for yourself too to make sure he didn’t get off it again.
Since then he hasn’t spoken much. You asked about Dad hunting the squirrels, but he didn’t want to talk about it. He seemed embarrassed, like he regretted making a fuss. Now he gazes out the window, looking somehow unlike himself – older, sadder, his cheeks hollower, his mouth bunched up, like someone’s just handed him all of his adult worries for the rest of his life.
There’s a house on the way back that has signs posted in the lawn about barcodes and chemtrails and a big one that says UFOs ARE REAL – PROOF WITHIN ADMISSION FREE. Coming home from Dublin you’d always see it and PJ would ask Dad if you could stop and he’d always say, Next time. Now you watch out to see if you can spot it, you’re half-tempted to suggest you get out and take a look. Just to cheer him up a bit? But it’s dark outside so you might already have passed it. Anyway, the proof probably isn’t anything if it’s just sitting in some guy’s back yard.
Your phone bleeps. Elaine has posted another picture from the party. Your feed is full of them – full of Elaine, laughing and smiling, smiling and laughing. In the latest someone has given her a tiara. It makes her look like the winner of one of those beauty competitions you used to look at together in her room, the girls who had overcome adversity to become brand ambassadors, queens of the universe. She hasn’t messaged to ask you where you are. What would she say if she knew you were on your way home? It would confirm everything she thought about you. Maybe you were the adversity all along, and now she has overcome you.
The tiara picture already has fifty likes. You hit Mute. Then, gently, without rancour or regret, you hit Unfollow.
From beside you, but without looking at you, PJ says, are you going to tell Mam?
Tell her what?
That I came to Dublin.
Is that what you think? That I’m coming back to tell on you?
He doesn’t reply to this.
Well, anyway, I’m not going to, you say.
So why are you coming back?
Uh, because you gatecrashed my party then got lost in the city?
No, I mean, what will you tell Mam?
Oh. You hadn’t thought of this. I’ll tell her I had to pick up a book or something, you say. She won’t ask. I bet she won’t even notice. You know what she’s like.
You don’t know what she’s like, he says. She’s different. They both are. And again you see the bunched-up mouth and the haggard grown-up face.
Stop worrying, you say. It’s going to be okay.
Your phone sounds again and a new picture appears. This time it’s not of Elaine. Instead, a blue-haired girl is grinning manically as she climbs out of a dark hole in a low hill, guarded by oblong stones.
Who’s that? PJ says, looking over your shoulder.
No one, you say, and then, Just this girl from college.
Is that the passage grave?
Yeah, she was visiting it today. Merle.
What?
That’s her name.
Along with many pictures, taken from the inside and out of the burial mound, Merle has written a very long text about the astronomical knowledge of the ancients, who have constructed the tomb so that on the darkest day of the year the sun’s rays will fall through a shaft in the roof and strike its heart with their light. This is the very powerful metaphor of rebirth, she says.
She should go to the other one, PJ says. The one where there’s no tourists.
Yeah, you say.
Seriously, he says. That one is way better.
He’s right: and it strikes you now that you could actually bring her there, tomorrow, if you wanted. You could meet up with her and show her the sights, invite her back to the house, even. You picture her at your dinner table, Mam and Dad struggling to reconfigure themselves around her oatmeal cardigans, her Germanic candour. You begin to write to her, Hey guess what! Then you pause, and return your gaze to the window, the dark country fleeting so mysteriously by.
Here’s the thing: ever since you got on the bus, you’ve been feeling weirdly happy.
You know that once you get home everything will go arseways. You will remember how utterly fucked up Mam and Dad’s relationship is, not to mention what they’re like with you. Mam will talk and talk and talk, and you will feel besieged and overshadowed and diminished. You will feel Dad simultaneously judging you and also inviting pity and you won’t know which is worse. Immediately it’ll come back to you why you started hating him: because he taught you to be upright and wholesome and good and you found out you could not be those things; because he wants you, needs you, to be his little girl still, when you have become loathsome, crawling, ugly and perverse. Because you know that if he knew the truth he would love you anyway and somehow that is unbearable to you.
Yes: once you start thinking about it, you can see just what a nightmare this trip is going to be. Still the bus rolls on and the twilight lengthens and you just feel happier and happier.
Your eyelids are drooping again. Heat swarms around you, with beckoning words memorious minge merle … Before you drift off you check your phone. You’re making good time.
We’ll be home by ten, you say.