Eggshell Days (16 page)

“Are you now?” She waited for more, checking the floor for evidence and thinking of the lacerated remains of his marriage sitting damply underneath the teabags.

“Would you help me find one for Billy?”

“A photograph for Billy?”

“One of me. He, er, he needs one for, er, I don't know.”

If anyone wanted to lay their hands quickly on an image from the O'Connor archives, there was only one place to go. The collection took up a whole shelf in the vast reproduction mahogany-veneered wall display unit, red album after blue, chronologically ordered, every insert dated and captioned. His mother was the undisputed chief librarian, able to put her hands on any event, any year, within a minute of inquiry.

They walked into the sitting room and she watched him run his finger along the spines of her famous albums and pull out a red one. She put the tray down on the coffee table in front of the fire and turned on the shelving lighting. Glass cabinets flashed into life, highlighting junior boxing trophies, graduation portraits, vases so familiar they had lost their ability to shock with their frightfulness.

If it was a wedding photograph he wanted, he'd have to ask Christine now, although Mary doubted she had any left, either. She saw him swallow.

“Er, he needs a picture of me at ten years old for a project. Don't ask me why. I'm just doing what I'm told.”

“Do you not mean Christopher?”

“No, Billy.”

“It's Christopher who is ten, Cathal, not Billy.”

“I know that, Mother. Jaysus, I know the ages of my own kids, for God's sake. I don't know what he wants it for and I don't get many opportunities to ask, do I?”

“You apologize now,” Mrs. O'Connor told him quietly, moving back to her teapot.

“Sorry.”

“I should think so, too, but you know, we've both made a mistake. Christopher turned eleven last September.”

“So he did.” Cathal felt as if he knew every single detail of that year.

“Ah, it's lovely that the boy's in touch, Cathal. Lovely that he asks his daddy to help him. All's not lost when a boy turns to his father like that.”

Cathal nodded. “I'm sorry. I don't want to be angry.”

“I know you don't. Bring a few books over here and let's see what we can find. You'll be wanting 1970.”

They sat together on the horsehair sofa that had seen three separate upholsterer shops since 1950, and let their lives wash over them. There was something recuperative for Cathal in seeing his birthday cakes displayed religiously each year, plate gently propped on the very same table that his mother had just put a tin of homemade shortbread on. Five children, a cake a year for eighteen years. That made ninety cakes his mother must have baked and iced, and he'd bet he could find photographs of half of them. Food featured heavily in the O'Connor albums, and with every flick of a page he saw himself take shape. Fat baby, chubby kid, paunchy man.

“You fed me too much,” he said. “No wonder I've got this.” He patted his tummy through his blue cotton work shirt.

“Since when did I feed you pints of porter? It'll be the drink that's giving you that, not your mother's baking. But you take after me rather than your father, and there's nothing wrong with being cuddly.”

“Not that anyone is putting that to the test at the moment.”

“No?”

“No.”

“You miss your boys, don't you?”

“Don't worry. We'll all get together soon, I'm sure.”

“The trouble is,” she said a bit wistfully, “that we all think we have time.”

She patted his leg and he picked up the album he'd taken out first. Then she placed her hand lightly on his cuff.

“Don't go too fast, Cathal.”

“You turn the pages then.”

“That's Bessie's wedding. Would you look at me! What ever made me think I looked all right wearing something so short?”

“That dress was all right. Very soft, as I recall.”

“There's quite a bit of it in the quilt in Maeve's room. Billy used to stroke it as a baby, do ye remember?”

Cathal nodded. He wanted, for a split second, to cry.

“That's our Limerick holiday,” Mary said quickly. “That wee girl wouldn't leave you alone, said she was going to marry you.”

“Did you keep her address?”

But the joke disappeared into thin air. A loose cardboard frame fell onto his lap, face down. As he turned it over, his stomach went with it.

It was Maya. There she was. Not sitting on the stairs at Bodinnick, but upright on a plain chair with a blue cloth background. In a striped tie. With his own face. Wearing his own school sweater.

“Would you look at you,” his mother said fondly, but Cathal had momentarily lost the power of speech. The snap of Maya in his wallet started to burn a hole through the cotton of his shirt and the wool of his sweater, the mix of his suit.

“… hated them, you did.”

“What? Did I?” He recovered himself.

Mary was smiling.

“Did I really have that many freckles?” he asked.

“No, I drew them on afterward. Of course you had that many freckles, you eejit.”

“Definitely ten?”

“A darn sight more than ten. You were pickled. They were even on your earlobes!”

“No, not ten
freckles
, you mad old woman. Was I definitely ten years old there?”

“About that.”

“No, not ‘about that.' I need to be sure.”

“Does it matter so much?”

“Well, it does if I'm to do the right thing by Billy.”

“Let's see, is there a date?” She turned it over. “Yes, look, you were definitely ten.”

“Sure?” He was studying its every detail. “I'll take it then.”

“As long as Billy promises to keep it safe. I've not got another.”

Cathal shook his head. His mother was barely visible under the pile of albums, but she meant it. It was the only print of that photograph she had. If you didn't count the four smaller versions.

“You know, Cathal, some children grow up not even knowing their daddy. And there's Billy, asking you for a photo. All's not lost, ye know.”

It might not all be found yet, he thought, giving her hand a squeeze. It was hopeless. His visit had made him feel worse. He had allowed his confusion to spill into ordinary life. Actually, it was worse than that. He had experimented with the idea that it
was
ordinary life. Involving his mother gave the wild chance a legitimacy.

“Will ye stay for a bite to eat?”

“Another bite?”

“A proper bite.”

“Oh, go on, then.”

*   *   *

The two photographs were hidden under a sheet of paper—the 8" × 5" portrait of him in his school uniform, and the 6" × 4" of Maya in T-shirt and wellies. More than thirty years separated them, but to him they were identical.

The opening sentence of his letter to Emmy was eluding him. Their union had been so brief that he'd all but forgotten it. He was about to attempt an intimate dialogue with a virtual stranger.

Eleven and a half years ago, he had been commuting between London and Dublin, setting up the firm's Kensington office and reluctantly staying with Niall at his shared house with a bath in the kitchen and an oven in the garden. One day Niall hadn't bothered to turn up—he'd obviously come across a better bed for the night—so Cathal, locked out and hungry, had phoned the only other person in London he knew.

Emmy had seemed keen enough to see him—even gone out of her way to do so. They'd met at a strange pancake place in Holburn which was vegetarian or Mexican or probably just cheap. It'd had a lot of green paint everywhere. And plants. A straggly little spider thing in particular, yellowing, hanging from a windowsill.

She'd been with a load of mainly female workmates, celebrating someone's birthday or sending someone off round the world or something. There had been cards and flowers and stupid little presents like chocolate willies, and as a man he had felt surplus to requirements. Eventually, she had tossed him the keys to her flat and said he could go back if he wanted to. And he had wanted to.

Sex had been the last thing on his mind when he heard the front door open and shut two hours later.

“You don't have to sleep on that thing if you don't want to,” she'd said, looking at his feet hanging over the arm of the sofa. “My bed is big enough.”

Emmy had worn a cloak of such unhappiness back then that he had hesitated. It had been a struggle to desire her. Not impossible, clearly, but he'd spent most of the night trying to avoid touching the starved hollows between her shoulder and neck and the wafer thinness of the skin round her ribs. He wasn't sure how much contact she could take without snapping. And even at the time, he'd known she'd slept with him because it was the nearest she could get to Niall.

Her fridge the next morning had been completely empty apart from someone's contact-lens fluid and a bottle of white wine, he could remember that. That and the condom.

Being married, he wasn't in the custom of carrying them around, and he was sure he could recall her reaching over him in bed and opening a drawer. She'd tossed it on the bed—“You'd better use one of these”—and he'd struggled to hang on to his erection while he put it on, with her lying there motionless next to him. Not watching or touching or helping, but waiting. Resignedly. Like, hurry up, then, let's get this over with. And what had she been wearing? Some impossible leotard that only she knew the way into and out of.

The condom thing worried him. His sexual promiscuity had been in the days when men supplied, or more usually didn't supply, the condoms, and he'd been a little shocked, even put off, by her taking control there. As if she did it all the time. His memory wouldn't play that kind of trick, surely. Then again, they weren't fail-safe.

Now, though, when that bloody little electronic rabbit shot out of its stall again and ran rings round the dogtrack of his mind, it got him wondering whether the condom girl had in fact been Emmy, or perhaps one of his other indiscretions that year. God knows, there had been a few. And he didn't know whether or not he wanted to be right about being wrong.

The table was covered with discarded scribbling. Searching through his old work diaries, he had already identified his trips between Dublin and London but he had always remembered the Emmy thing as happening on his first trip back, which was why, when Niall had told him about Maya's birth, he had secretly thought, Bloody hell, she doesn't hang around, does she? But it had never occurred to him that it might have happened on the second. Or even the third. Both dates fitted his research.

A heap of crumpled rejects buried the newspaper. Maybe a phone call, then, to Niall, to find out Maya's birthday. Cathal picked up his mobile. If he rang while his mother was here, he could use her as a smokescreen. He stared at the numbers for a moment, urging himself to press one.

“Bloody Mary, mother of J!”

The phone sprang into life in his hand.

“Hello? Oh, did I say today? No, not busy, just, er, no, no. Give me half an hour. I'll be there. Forgive me.”

Saved. He put the phone back in his pocket, let his head fall into his hands for a brief moment, then pushed his chair back and stood up. There was a convincing argument to let sleeping dogs lie. Or at least take the day off.

*   *   *

Maya treasured her “I'm me” moments. Sometimes she went through a phase of them happening every day, and then they would stop and she wouldn't get one for months. It was nothing to do with mood or place. It was all and everything to do with her own secret self, and that was the only way she could explain it.

The first time she'd tried to verbalize the experience was nearly five years ago, in a Peckham park on her sixth birthday. Puddles of spilt orange fizz had formed in the dips of the waterproof tablecloth, crisp crumbs and half-eaten sausage rolls stuck to the abandoned crumpled paper plates. Her friends had gone home, the late May sunshine had turned to a milky haze and her loathed Little Mermaid swimming costume had finally broken its Lycra promise.

“I'm me,” she'd suddenly told Emmy as she decorated their grubby toes with tiny padded stickers.

“Yep, you are.”

“No one else is me, are they? Just me. Only me.”

“'Fraid so,” Emmy replied. As a child, she'd often frightened herself with the recurrent and profound realization that no one else can share the world with you. It loomed, like a storm cloud approaching, or the swell of nausea. You knew it was going to get worse before it got better.

“Think of that,” Maya carried on. “Just me. No one else knows what it's like to be me. Not even you.”

“Just shake it away,” Emmy said. “It'll go in a minute.”

“Why?” Maya asked. “I like it.”

Emmy hadn't been organized enough to remember to take anything as sensible as a camera, of course, but as a result of the “I'm me” moment, she could still see the day as clearly as any carefully captioned snapshot. It was the point at which she realized her daughter possessed the inherent security she herself lacked. It might also have been the first time she saw Maya as a crutch, a stronger, better version of herself, but that was now so ingrained a view that she couldn't recall ever seeing it otherwise.

Sometimes Sita and Niall warned her about her tendency to lean on Maya. “She's only a child,” they'd say. “You don't need to be quite so truthful with her.” But she knew Maya better than they did, and she knew, too, that her daughter didn't get the whole truth. She only got the half of it.

Maya was having an “I'm me” moment that very minute, kneeling in the music room at Bodinnick, laying out on newspaper the materials to construct a medieval dwelling as part of Jonathan's brilliant idea for their first rainy Saturday. So far, she had a bucket of mud, some clay, and a pile of carefully selected willow twigs for timber supports. She knew what she was going to build. A single-cell wattle-and-daub cottage, like the one in the book Jonathan had got from the library.