Best of Friends (54 page)

“Hello,” said the woman in a friendly tone, remarkably sanguine about finding a total stranger in her home.

“I’m sorry but the door was open,” Erin began, and then felt angry with herself. What was she apologising for? It was Shannon who should be apologising. “You’re Shannon Flynn?”

“Yeah.” The woman smiled.

Erin delivered her bombshell. “I’m your daughter, Erin.”

The smile widened. “Wow, like, oh wow! Really?”

Whatever Erin had expected, it wasn’t this.

“Aren’t you surprised?” she asked.

“I figured you’d come some day,” Shannon said, unconcerned. “Tea? I was about to make some peppermint for myself and ordinary for Ciara across the hall.”

“Tea would be nice,” Erin said weakly.

“I don’t drink dairy, you see,” Shannon said, moving into the kitchenette.

She hadn’t told Erin to take a seat or hugged her or anything, but then it didn’t take a genius to figure out that convention played a minor role in Shannon’s life. Erin sat down anyway.

“Do you drink dairy?” enquired Shannon as airily as if they’d met at a bus stop and were chatting to pass the time of day. “It’s damaging, really. Soya’s the way to go.”

Erin watched Shannon as she worked. Mum was the perfect example of how a woman could make tea, check the dinner in the oven, iron a shirt and keep a wary eye on the stock pot, all at once. Shannon, on the other hand, made a pot of tea like she was taking part in a complicated ceremony: utterly concentrating on the task in hand.

“Dairy gives you cancer,” Shannon rattled on. “I’ve read about it. I’ve been on soya for years now.”

A flicker of anger ignited in Erin’s brain. “Kerry had cancer. Did you know that?”

Shannon kept concentrating on her tea bags. “Yeah,” she said absently. “She’s OK now, though, right?”

“You didn’t go and see her when she was ill, did you?” Erin felt guilty that she hadn’t been there for her sister, but at least she had the excuse that she hadn’t known. Shannon had. “Why didn’t you go to visit her?” Erin asked. What she really wanted to ask was why the hell had Shannon left her when she was a baby.

“Oh, you know, I’m not into all that family stuff,” Shannon said easily. “I left it all behind years ago. You should make your own family, like in a commune.” At this, her eyes lit up. “I lived in a commune for a couple of years when I was on an anti-globalisation protest. It was amazing.” Misreading the look on Erin’s face, she said, “Haven’t you ever tried a commune? Oh, you’d love it.”

“How do you know what I’d love or not?” Erin said, her tone conversational. But Greg would have recognised the steel in her words.

“No, really, you can be yourself without all the boring structures of the settled, normal, semi-detached life.” Shannon said the words with distaste.

“Is that why you left home when you were young?” asked Erin, somehow managing not to add, “when I was a baby.”

“I left to be free,” Shannon said, flicking back her long hair in a manner that Erin realised was her trademark. “I knew I couldn’t bear to be tied down, I’d have gone mad in that sort of life. Nobody has any principles in that world, you know? They just want to make money in some dull job and go home at night. They don’t believe in anything.”

She brought two mugs to the table. One was chipped. Erin wanted to ask what sort of life Shannon had got in exchange for giving up her family: a shabby flat, chipped mugs and the memory of communal living once upon a time didn’t seem like much of a bargain.

“I’ll put on some music,” Shannon said, apparently oblivious to the tense atmosphere.

“Hiya,” said a voice at the door.

A tall, anorexically thin woman with coal-black dreadlocks arrived.

“Hiya, Ciara, the kettle’s boiled,” said Shannon. “This is Erin.”

“Hi, Erin,” said Ciara shyly, winding her thin body into the kitchenette to make her own tea.

“Oh, I love this music,” Shannon said, as the sound of Simon and Garfunkel drifted out of her record player. She did a little swirling dance by herself as though to prove the point.

“I’m Shannon’s daughter,” Erin said to Ciara, determined to provoke some sort of response.

“Wow.” Ciara was jerked out of her shyness. “You never told me you had a daughter, Shannon.”

Erin had been about to take a sip of her tea but, at that, she put the mug down. Shannon had never even told people about her. But what else did she expect?

“I have to go,” she said coldly.

“Ah, don’t,” said Shannon. “We have to catch up.”

Erin glared at her. To Shannon, she was just another person who’d dropped into her peripatetic life. They’d “catch up” for half an hour, try to cram Erin’s whole life into a single conversation, and then it would be over.

Shannon was lost in the world of hippie-dom, always ready to climb aboard the bus to an anti-war demo or a save-the-trees project. She didn’t have many things, just posters she could roll up, her portable record player and whatever garments she could fit in her rucksack. Erin admired people who stood up for their principles, but in Shannon she wondered if the principle or the lifestyle surrounding it was the lure. And what about the principle of mother love? Where had Shannon’s much-vaunted principles been when her daughter needed her? Were the trees more important than Erin?

Erin hadn’t meant to get angry but, somehow, the rage boiled up in her like milk bubbling over in a pan.

“I think we’ve too much to catch up on,” she said bitterly. “Twenty-seven years to be exact. You see, Ciara, I’m the part of Shannon’s life that she wanted to run away from. The part she didn’t think was worth fighting for. Not like anti-globalisation or the trees.” She glanced around at Shannon’s posters advertising demos from all over the world. “Save the Snails!” read one. “Yes, my mother was more interested in saving endangered snails than in me. If I’d had a shell or if I’d had ‘Property of the U.S. Defense Forces’ stamped on me, would she have been more interested?”

Ciara looked anxious, as if she’d witnessed many bitter family rows and had hoped that living by herself was the way to escape them.

“It wasn’t like that,” said Shannon mildly.

“What was it like?” demanded Erin.

Shannon shrugged helplessly. “I was a kid, I wanted to feel free—”

“Free from what?” interrupted her daughter.

“You know, the structures of life.” It was all so obvious to Shannon. “I didn’t want to be tied down.”

“But what about me?” Erin rapped out.

Shannon shrugged. “Mum looked after you. She loved you. When you were small, I knew it was the right thing to do.”

“But how could you just leave and never come back?” demanded Erin. “Didn’t you ever want to meet me?”

“Mum said she’d say that you were her child. They moved house and everything so nobody would know and it would be easier for you. Sure, why would I ruin all that? People would have been asking questions and the usual. God, I hate that stuff. The parochial mind wanting to know who was the father and all that … That’s what I wanted to escape from.”

“Responsibility, in other words.” Erin was harsh.

“You don’t understand,” Shannon said easily.

“I understand how a teenager might want to walk out on her child because she was scared but I don’t understand how a grown woman would never come home to see that same child, not ever.” Her voice shook. “Even if you didn’t want to bring me up, why didn’t you ever want to see me, say hello, act the part of the big sister you were pretending to be? And coming back when I was a small child doesn’t count. Where were you when I was growing up?”

“Oh, you’re just like Kerry,” said Shannon, exasperated. “Always harping on about the past. That was a long time ago.”

Erin stared out of the window, furiously blinking back tears. She hadn’t meant this to happen but somehow all the years of wondering had exploded inside her. Shannon needed to hear how Erin felt. She was Erin’s mother, for God’s sake. Hadn’t that meant anything?

“You gave birth to me,” she added harshly. “I’m your child, you and whatever anonymous man you slept with. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

For the first time, Shannon looked at a loss. She bit her lip, and Erin could remember seeing Kerry do just the same thing. Kerry had been right all along: she’d warned Erin that meeting Shannon was not a wise move. What had she said? “You won’t find what you’re looking for, Erin. Not with Shannon. She was always different from us.”

Erin got up, not caring that she’d knocked against the table and spilled her tea.

“Goodbye,” she said, and left Shannon and Ciara behind with their mouths open.

As she hurried down the stairs, she felt nothing but anger, which was a relief. It would have been terrible to have cried over someone like Shannon. She never wanted to see her again. What was the point?

Greg wasn’t the only person to have figured out where Erin had disappeared to for an hour and a half. He, Mum and Kerry were all waiting in the lobby of the hotel when Erin returned.

“Never mind,” said Mum when Erin saw them all and her face crumpled. “She doesn’t mean to be hurtful, it’s just the way she is.”

“Don’t stand up for Shannon,” said Kerry crossly. “Who knows what the bitch said?”

Greg hugged Erin tightly. “I was so worried when you didn’t come back. Kerry said she figured you’d gone to see Shannon. I’ll kill her if she hurt you by what she said.”

“She didn’t say anything,” Erin said wearily. “She wasn’t interested.”

“How could she not be interested?” asked Greg quietly.

“Shannon’s only interested in herself,” Kerry retorted. “I told you not to go on your own,” she said to her sister.

“I had to see her,” Erin said. “I had to talk to her.” Not that it had done her much good. Kerry had been right—Shannon was only interested in herself. Everyone else was only a bit player in the drama that was Shannon’s life.

A sudden squirming inside her made Erin reach down and touch her belly. The baby’s movements fascinated her every time. Imagine, inside her, snuggled up safe and warm, lay her baby. The flailing arms and legs were signs that the baby was healthy and Erin couldn’t wait to have her child in her arms, with those arms and legs wriggling in the outside world.

I’ll never leave you, she told her baby silently. Never.

twenty-seven

B
y the second week of August, it seemed as if everyone in Dunmore was on holiday. Except for the Barton family, of course. Given everything that had been happening over the last few months, Abby couldn’t begin to consider going away. It seemed ridiculous to be thinking of sun, sangria and flip-flops when she and Tom had split up, Jess was barely talking to her and her career looked like it might be over. But eventually the lure of the brochures in the travel agents’ windows was too much. Every time Abby ran past O’Callaghan’s Travel on her way to the supermarket, she noticed special offers detailing trips to the Canaries, amazing fly-drive holidays to the States and long-haul flights to the exotic Far East.

Newspapers and magazines were just as bad. She couldn’t pick up a paper or magazine without seeing another “Diet yourself into a bikini” article or one of those “Have you got your travel insurance sorted out?” features describing travel disasters where somebody had spent thousands in a foreign hospital getting their broken leg fixed all because they wouldn’t shell out a few pounds on insurance.

While part of Abby longed to lie on a beach, feeling the sun baking her skin as she read novels and sipped boozy cocktails with impossible names, her heart just wasn’t in it. Every holiday destination she could imagine would be redolent with the memories of other trips the family had taken.

France was out, for instance. They’d had an incredible camping trip to France when Jess had been a baby. Abby could remember it so well, even though it had been fifteen years ago. She and Tom had been thrilled with their new life, their new baby and the heady feeling of responsibility as new parents. Who cared that every insect in the Rhone decided to dive-bomb Tom, or that the camp showers left a lot to be desired? It had been a memorable time purely because of where they were in their lives.

That was the sort of trip that every new holiday would be measured against, and this holiday, this single-life holiday, would be so very different. There would be just her and Jess, two people rattling around in a holiday made for three. Tom would undoubtedly make his own plans and Abby had no idea what those would be. She and Tom spoke now only to discuss arrangements about Jess.

For Jess’s sixteenth birthday in early August, Tom had coldly said he wanted to take her out to the cinema and to dinner and Abby, who knew he was doing this to punish her because there was no reason the three of them couldn’t share this treat, had had to agree. That was the longest conversation they’d had in ages.

Since the day she’d pleaded with Tom to try again, they hadn’t talked about the split at all. Which was easier in one way from Abby’s point of view because she didn’t have to face the naked anger in Tom’s eyes when he looked at her, but harder in another way, because she knew that unless Tom changed his mind there was no hope of ever getting back together. The only plus was that at least nobody in Dunmore seemed to have cottoned on to the fact that they had split up. She and Tom had obviously lived such separate lives that nobody commented when they saw Abby on her own. But it couldn’t last. One day, somebody would work it out. And if the split became public, Abby knew that her profile as a TV presenter meant the gossip writers would become interested. That thought filled her with dread.

Driving out of Cork one day after a meeting at Beech to review some early footage of the series, Abby decided to bite the holiday bullet. She parked outside O’Callaghan’s Travel, ran in and grabbed a handful of brochures. She needed a break. In fact, after today’s meeting, anybody would need a break.

Abby had gone into the office expecting a bit of back-slapping while the team looked at the video clip of the first show. What she’d got was the sensation of having the carpet pulled from under her feet.