A Daughter's Secret (38 page)

‘Are you reading that off the back of the bottle?’ He hands me the first glass and gingerly pours one for himself. ‘Have a beer if you want a beer.’

‘I’m keeping you company,’ he says, chinking his glass against mine, and dropping his long limbs down onto the sofa. ‘You look like a girl who needs company.’

I hook my feet over his lap, lean backwards against a cushion. I feel like I could sleep forever.

‘
Your
company. Not any old rozzer’s.’

‘Think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,’ he says.

‘Don’t say that!’ I bat him with my cushion, and he pulls me close.

‘Are you going to tell me about it?’ Am I? Am I really? I look away, try to work out where I would start. He reaches for my face, turning it gently towards him. ‘You look different, you know.’

‘I look like a crone who hasn’t slept since we last declared war on Germany.’ I put some lipstick on in my rear-view mirror, tried to rescue my mascara: nothing worked. I nearly gave up on this evening and went to take refuge at Mum’s, but I realized in the nick of time I was being ridiculous.

It’s funny the way time concertinas with Patrick. Sometimes I feel like I’ve known him for months, years – light years even – whilst at other moments it feels like the slim sliver of weeks that it really is. Will I sound like damaged goods, remaindered stock that’s been sold off cheap, if I tell him the whole sorry truth?

‘No you don’t. Can’t explain it. But you look different.’

I unconsciously run my fingers over the contours of my face. That was one of the bizarre things about today, remembering the pieces of me that come directly from him. The angular triangles of my cheekbones, the expanse of forehead that I used to hate – a great big spam – my hairline lodged too far back on my head. Now I wonder if the reason I hated it was for the quiet reminder it gave me every time I looked in the mirror.

‘I wasn’t fishing for compliments,’ I tell him. ‘Are you really going to order a pizza?’

‘Just say if you don’t wanna talk about it. I’ll see straight through you if you give me an hour-long defence of pepperoni.’

‘I HATE pepperoni. It’s made from dead dogs, surely?’

Patrick gives me a long look, then unfurls himself from the sofa. Bruises, an almost pretty greenish colour, are still visible on the left side of his face; every time I see them they shock me anew. How could anyone set out to do that to him? I resist the urge to reach out and stroke them, rage at their existence.

‘I’ll go and find my phone. Luigi,’ he says, reaching for it, ‘thirty-four-incher with extra pepperoni and a pepperoni salad.’

‘Ask him if he can make me a pepperoni trilby.’

‘Jaunty!’

Pizza is by no means my death-row dinner. It’s greasy, fattening, all the things I hate, but I don’t want to be a princess. I stack my crusts neatly on the side of my plate, roll off the leathery olives like I’m staging a miniature bowls tournament. Patrick’s watching: I guiltily pick up a crust and nibble on it.

‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘Let’s start at the very beginning,’ he says, sing-song, like Maria.

‘
Now
you tell me you’re a fan of musicals!’

He reaches for my hand, gluing us together with pizza grease. I look at him, too scared, too overwhelmed to start.

‘Edited highlights then.
Match of the Day
style.’ He stares back at me. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . I just want to try and understand, at least a bit.’

‘You
do
.’ It’s funny, I feel like he gets it, the vibration of it, even if he doesn’t know the cold, hard facts. ‘He was everything to me . . .’ I say eventually. ‘He was James Bond and Peter Pan and Mr Benn.’

I lie back, put a cushion in his lap and look at the ceiling, twin streams of tears running down my cheeks as I start to unravel it for him. Of course you can never properly convey the past to a person who wasn’t there. As I’m telling him, his arm wrapped around my body like the warmest scarf in the world, I find myself longing for a parallel universe in which he had been. Why did I make it so hard for myself? It always felt like it was all on me.

I stumble over bits – the Jim bits mainly – not wanting him to feel that he’s competing with my ghosts. Jim and Lorcan: twin spectres. But, as I describe it, I realize how much Jim was a piece of Lorcan broken off and transformed – another man who couldn’t be captured in the butterfly net of my wanting. It takes all my strength to tell him about the baby – the baby that was, but never was – and yet I somehow eke the words out from somewhere deep within myself. I haven’t got much puff after that. I don’t tell him the details of that prison visit, the words still too blistering, too emotionally incendiary, to fling into the atmosphere. Besides, this isn’t an exam. It turns out that life isn’t an exam. I look up at him when I’ve run out of words, shocked by the expression I find on his face.

‘Hey! You don’t need to cry.’

He doesn’t say anything for a second.

‘I’m not. I’m just . . . I’m just taking it in.’ He gives me a half-smile, his eyes dark, almost bruised. ‘Thinking about who I want to hit first.’

‘Let’s not have any more hitting,’ I say, reaching up and touching the sea-green traces of the violence with the softest pads of my fingers. I’m cringing a bit, my insides crumpled and small like holiday washing at the bottom of a suitcase, but I know it’s old shame that I don’t need to lay claim to any more. I never did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says gruffly, but softly, like he doesn’t trust himself to say more.

‘Thank you,’ I say, my heart suddenly racing. ‘I promise it’s not going to be all about me. I want to hear about the dodgy priests and the communion wine and the sixth-form discos . . . and your dad. I want to know everything.’

‘There’s time,’ he says, unexpectedly solemn.

‘There is!’ I say, knowing now why my heart was racing. I can do this. I can. ‘I love you,’ I mutter, my face turned away, my hair a curtain I’m hiding behind. I force myself to look at him: his face is hard to read. ‘I love you,’ I say, declamatory now. Fuck it. ‘I love you. I don’t care if you’re not ready to say it’ – that’s a lie, I care loads – ‘but still . . . I love you.’ He’s grinning now, his face split in two, his eyes shining. ‘I love you, Patrick O’Leary.’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Brendan’s lovely face lights up like it’s Christmas morning when I come through the door.

‘How was the deodorant audition?’ I ask, hugging him almost too hard.

My eyes flick around the waiting room as we pull apart. I can’t risk indulging the sense I have of coming home.

‘I think I fell into that dangerous middle ground of looking neither pongy enough nor squeaky-clean enough to convince real men to sign over their armpits.’

‘Honestly – no imagination!’

‘I know.’ He’s inspecting me from beneath those long eyelashes, looking for signs of trauma. There are no bruises, Christopher never laid a finger on me, but I think that Patrick was right when he said that something in my face has shifted with all of this.

‘Do you know when you’re properly coming back?’

I shake my head, not trusting myself to speak, look to Judith’s firmly closed door. I don’t know if I’m coming back at all, but I don’t tell Brendan that, simply accept the cup of hot pink tea he gives me and settle down to wait on the couch, just like a nervous patient anticipating their first session. Gemma didn’t risk it, made sure I was the one doing the waiting. I give the sofa a useless sort of pat: her presence is so strong for me now that I’m sitting here.

Here’s Judith now, clad in a pair of black-leather trousers which she carries off with aplomb, saying a warm goodbye to a couple I don’t recognize. ‘See you next week,’ she says, and I feel a sharp pang beneath my ribcage. I’d be lying if I pretended I wasn’t aching to come back. I’ve spent far too much of my life trying to outsmart disappointment by not admitting to myself I want things. Judith finally turns to me, giving me a cool smile.

‘Come on through, Mia.’

I perch on the sofa, trying not to feel twelve years old. Judith and I look at each other, neither of us speaking.

‘I’m really nervous,’ I say, immediately feeling better for naming it instead of choking on it.

She finally smiles.

‘Don’t be. How are you?’

I look out of the window at that familiar view of the park, not quite trusting myself to speak.

‘Amazing, terrible, happy, sad. If I had to do a psychometric test they’d definitely mark me down as a sociopath.’

Judith’s smile reaches right through her this time.

‘Not if they came to me for a second opinion. You look well, you know.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Love suits you,’ she says drily.

‘Judith, I’m sorry,’ I say, my hands reaching towards her and landing in my lap. ‘I know I let you down. I know I was dishonest and . . . and arrogant, but it wasn’t because I’d lost respect for you. I just couldn’t get off the train.’

And I’m not sure I’d even want to, if I had the last three months to live again, but I don’t say that. She looks at me, reflective, gives a slow nod.

‘When we banish parts of ourselves, they tend to come back to haunt us. I did try to get you to see that.’

‘I know you did.’ I try not to feel ashamed of how stubborn I was, how sure that I knew the way out of the forest. Scrub that – I was pretending they’d paved over the forest and put up a parking lot, to paraphrase Joni.

‘Annie obviously won’t be pursuing a complaint now.’ She looks at me, serious. ‘It sounds like you were incredibly brave.’

‘I still couldn’t save her—’

‘No, you couldn’t.’

Touché. Her smile is kind though.

‘Seeing her dad die like that, on the tarmac . . .’ I feel cold, shuddery, almost as if we’re still in the dark car park. ‘It was just . . . I can’t even describe it.’

Judith covers my hand with hers, warmth flooding through me at her welcome touch.

‘At least she’s not trapped any more. Her life was utterly impossible. You’re a big part of that. I’m still not entirely clear what his plan was?’

‘Patrick reckons he held on to the papers – well, got Gemma to – so he’d have something over Stephen Wright’s lot. He thought getting out of the way until the trial collapsed would be enough, but it was never going to be. I don’t think it was America he was heading for either. No point running to somewhere with an extradition treaty.’

‘Where would he have taken her?’

‘Somewhere she’d never have come back from. Mexico, maybe . . . He was so determined not to leave her that he screwed the whole thing up, left them with no choice but to get some faceless hit man to wipe him out. They didn’t know the police already had their hands on the documents.’

The rest of the family are back home now, the trial pending. Patrick’s promised me he’ll try to avoid calling Gemma as a witness, let the paper trail she gave him stand in for her, and I know he means it. I’ve kept in regular touch with Annie, but I’m in no position to be Gemma’s therapist. I think about her every single day. I’m comforted by the fact that Annie says that, although Gemma is very quiet, she’s talking to her about her feelings in a way she never did before.

‘Like I said, you were incredibly brave.’

‘It was just instinct in the end.’

Judith smiles.

‘I’ve always wanted that for you, Mia. More heart, less head. You could do that for your patients, never for yourself.’

A tear escapes, despite my best efforts.

‘Heart doesn’t seem like such a problem now.’

‘That’s a good thing.’

I told her about Patrick in the email I sent her last week, deeply grateful for the fact he didn’t let me fatally compromise myself that night in my flat, however much it stung my fragile ego. At least I could honestly say the relationship proper started once I was, at least nominally, off the case.

‘I’d know when to keep it in check!’ I say, my voice rising. I sound like Gemma, that wheedling desperation. ‘I wouldn’t go off piste. I promise you I’d treat supervision with the respect it deserves. Anything you want to impose on me . . .’

‘I’m not here to punish you, Mia.’ She steps back into silence, leaving me to chase my own tail for a minute or so. ‘I think you should come back,’ she says, smiling at me. ‘It’s not appropriate for you to go for the ACA board position, but, now I’ve seen you, I feel even more sure I’d like you back here.’

I almost can’t get a breath into my lungs, the relief winding me.

‘That’s OK, I just want to concentrate on patients for a while. And – I don’t want to take too much on.’ God, those words still sound like Russian to an achievement junkie like me. I run them through my head, check I can claim them. Yes, they’re mine to take home.

‘You’ve got a lot to think about, what with everything that’s happened. Have you seen Lorcan again?’

‘Not yet, but I will. My mum’s cooking him dinner to say thank you!’ Judith giggles, her eyes wide.

‘It all sounds rather marvellous!’ she says, rubbing her hands. She pauses, thoughtful. ‘I do think you should take a couple more weeks though. Personal therapy is also going to be very important.’

‘I know.’

‘I think you do.’ We sit there for a few seconds, this silence the healing kind. ‘The thing is, the ghosts can help us once we’ve made friends with them.’

‘Once they’ve stopped howling and pushing us down the stairs, you mean?’

‘Quite.’

‘The bits where we break and heal are where we’re strongest?’

‘That’s exactly what I mean, Mia.’

I pull my knees up so my feet are beneath me on the sofa, look out of the window at that familiar view of the park. I’m home.

Patrick’s parked at a jaunty angle on a single yellow, his hazards flashing like disco lights. I slide into the passenger seat.

‘I was hoping for a Panda,’ I say, kissing him hello. ‘You know; flashing blue sirens, go-faster stripes, the works.’

‘Jeez, you’re a hard woman to please. Have you not had enough excitement for one lifetime?’

We smile at each other, and I subtly inspect the bruises. Nearly gone, thank God – he’s starting to look like he’s just very, very bad at applying eyeliner.