Instructions for a Heatwave (17 page)

“What are you two whispering about down there?”

“Fuck.” Michael Francis snatches the cigarette from his mouth. He shoves the pack out of sight, and the matches, and turns to look up.

“Jesus,” Aoife whispers, “what are you? Twelve years old?”

“Shut up,” he hisses.

“You shut up.”

“No, you shut up.”

Aoife leans against him and the press of his sister into his arm is remarkable—the only good thing about the day so far.

“What’s so funny?” Gretta’s head and shoulders demand.

“Nothing.”

“I’m coming down,” she announces.

Aoife turns back to the garden. She raises both arms above her head and, with her eyes closed, stretches her neck one way then another.

“What is that? Some kind of yoga shit?”

“So what if it is?” she returns, her eyes still closed. Then she opens them and looks at him. “How’s Claire?”

“Fine.” He brushes something off his trouser leg. “How’s things in New York?”

“Fine.”

Gretta appears in the dark oblong of the back door, holding something in her hands, a long flex trailing after her like a tail.

“Do either of you want a hair dryer that once went on fire?”

·  ·  ·

The Irish are good in a crisis, Michael Francis thinks, as he eases back the clingfilm on a tray of sandwiches his aunt Bridie has left in the kitchen. They know what to do, what traditions
must be observed; they bring food, casseroles, pies, they dole out tea. They know how to discuss bad news: in murmurs, with shakes of the head, their accents wrapping themselves around the syllables of misfortune.

A slight mist has gathered on the underside of the clingfilm. The sandwiches are warm, their edges curling apart. But he’s not complaining. He eats one, two, then three. The first is some kind of meat spread, the third has a disquieting fishy flavor. The fourth he takes to eliminate the aftertaste of its predecessor. But then he is seized by a frantic hunger. He cannot stop eating. He has never, it seems, encountered anything more appetizing than his aunt’s warm meat-paste sandwiches.

Just when his mouth is as full as it can physically be, Aoife appears in the doorway. She has pinned back all that hair of hers. The sight of her neck, her jawbone exposed, touching in their fragility, takes him by surprise. She looks at him, looks at the ravaged plate of sandwiches beside him. She withdraws again without speaking.

The sitting room is full, suddenly, briefly, of cousins and relatives and people he recognizes but can’t quite place. He doesn’t want to speak with them, doesn’t want to meet their gazes, to receive their commiserations. He feels at a disadvantage in the midst of his mother’s crowd: they all know who he is, know more about him than he’d like, he suspects, but he can never remember who any of them are. Neighbors? People from the chapel? Possibly both. Word has spread and here they all are, to offer their ruminating, murmuring support. He wishes they’d all get lost, go back to their damn houses, leave them to get on with it. He wants to talk to Aoife, to his mother, wants to sort out this disaster. He doesn’t know where he’d start but he knows that the first step is to get rid of these bloody people, that nothing can be done with a houseful of strangers cluttering up the chairs and needing hot drinks. How does his mother stand it?

He approaches the doorway and peers into the sitting room. Not as many as he’d thought. Bridie and her husband; one of Bridie’s daughters with her baby on her knee. A few random old geezers, shaking their heads. How is it they all know to come at the same time? Is there an unwritten code that you visit the wife of a disappeared man at exactly ten-thirty in the morning?

Bridie goes from person to person, offering another plate of sandwiches—meat paste, he wonders, or something else?—a word here and a nod there, her expression pleasant yet solemn, as befits the occasion. Yes, he hears her murmur, it is a terrible business; no, she’s not getting any sleep at all, poor thing, who would; no word at all, just upped and offed; the police have been no help; will you have another sandwich?

It would be hard to find a more different woman from Gretta, he thinks, as he watches Bridie exclaim how good it is to see Aoife, and how gorgeous she’s looking. You’d never know they were sisters, at first sight. Bridie is small, like Gretta, but slight and more youthful, somehow, despite being three years older. “Trim” is the word, he thinks, well groomed. He bets Bridie watches what she eats; her hair has never been permitted to go gray but is, these days, the color of ripe wheat, and stiff, brushed up and away from the forehead. Her house is neat, with a few glass ornaments along the windowsills. Tea is served in cups with matching saucers. He remembers wishing he could live there instead of here.

He returns to the plate, just for a small top-up. One or two more should do the job, then he’ll leave them alone. He tosses one into his mouth but somehow misses: the sandwich drops to the floor, glancing first off the toe of his shoe before disappearing somewhere near the bin.

It seems only fitting that this should happen; it seems entirely in keeping with his current situation in life—a man with a wife who seems to loathe him, a man whose family is fragmented, in crisis, a man beleaguered by heat, by drought, by water shortages, a man whose father has run off to Godknowswhere.

He lowers himself, sighing, to all fours and peers into the slice of gloom under the cupboard. He spies what is possibly a sausage, moldering, rigid with decay, the ring-pull of a can, a reel of cotton, what appears to be a desiccated baked bean. How can his parents live like this, in such squalor? It’s a wonder neither of them has contracted dysentery. Cholera, even. He sees the pale side of the sandwich, and even though he has now lost his appetite, he reaches in and pulls it towards him. When it comes out into the light, something has adhered to its buttery opening. A scrap of paper. He separates the paper from the sandwich and holds it close to his face.

It is folded in the middle, its edges torn, and it still has a corner of envelope around it. Just visible is the edge of a stamp depicting the stretched strings of a harp. Michael extracts the paper and written on it are the words
and they say the end is coming
in blue ink, a fountain pen, an unfamiliar hand. He lets the sandwich fall into the bin, allows the lid to clang shut, and reads it again:
they say the end is—

Someone touches him and he jumps.

“Now, Michael Francis, is there any news?” Bridie is next to him, a hand on his arm, in accordance with her decree that any serious questions must be addressed to the male of the household. Another thing that marks her out as different from Gretta.

“No,” he says, and stuffs the slip of paper and the corner of the envelope into his pocket. He reaches blindly for a sandwich off the plate she’s holding, cramming the whole crustless triangle into his mouth, discovering too late that it’s egg, his least favorite filling.

“None at all?” Bridie leans forward, whispering.

“Nuh-uh,” he gets out, around the odious mouthful.

“I always knew that good-for-nothing—” Bridie lets fly but is interrupted.

“An awful business,” says an elderly man in possession of an astonishingly large pair of ears, who has appeared beside them,
and Bridie leaps in with a Yes, isn’t it, before they all hear the front door slam and footsteps in the hallway. The clip-clip of high heels and Michael Francis thinks, The end is coming, and also, How come Monica still has a key?

Aoife is rubbing her mother’s back, saying, No, no, to a woman on the next chair, we haven’t heard from him yet but we’re hoping to, anytime now, when she realizes something.

Monica is here. Behind her, in the hallway. She can feel it: she’s aware of her sister’s presence near her, and Aoife’s pulse is thick in her ears. She cannot turn around, she cannot, and then she does and her first thought, when she sees Monica standing there, is: oh, it’s only you. It’s only you after all.

A wave of affection rises in her—instinctive, reactive—and she feels her face break into a smile. She can see that her sister has taken care with her appearance. She has done her hair in a way Aoife hasn’t seen before, longer, in loose curls, swept up off her neck, and although it doesn’t quite suit her, doesn’t quite come off, Aoife is imagining her sitting at her dressing table with her kirby-grips and hairbrush, her fingers anxious as they tease the hair into shape, and the idea of Monica doing this is oddly touching. It’s only Monica, after all, is what Aoife thinks. Just Monica. The Monica she has known all her life, her sister, not the terrible specter of doom Aoife has built her up to be, all that time in New York. It’s just Monica, and Aoife is rising from her seat, because that is what you do, isn’t it, when you see your sister after a period of years? You embrace her, and whatever problems have arisen between you in that time can be wiped clean, you’ll be able to start again, and Aoife is thinking that maybe she could forget what happened that time in Michael Francis’s house, that maybe nothing needs to be said.

She has almost reached Monica when she realizes that her sister hasn’t even looked at her. Isn’t even looking at her. Monica’s
gaze slips past her and away, as if Aoife isn’t there, as if Aoife is an inexplicable, person-shaped hole in the atmosphere. Aoife is an arm’s length from her when Monica does a neat sidestep into the hall, saying something about hanging up her jacket because it’s a pain to press and she doesn’t want to be spending an evening slaving over the ironing-board in this heat.

Aoife stands facing the empty doorway. Her pulse is still thudding in her ear, spurring her on to something, giving her the means to act. But what, exactly, should she do? Her mother is beside her, a vacant smile on her face; the people in the room are getting to their feet, saying it is time they were off. Bridie is clearing plates suddenly. Gretta heads after Monica, saying, Will I find you a coat-hanger?

Aoife goes back to her chair, she sits down. She registers the urge to lay her head against the familiar knots and grain of the chair’s arm. When did she last sleep? Not last night, on the plane, and hardly the night before. She feels as though she’s made of nothing but paper: insubstantial, frail, infinitely tearable.

She looks down at the plate on the side table next to her, the hailstorm of crumbs around it, the oxbow-lake rings of tea, finding that jet lag gives her a feeling split exactly halfway between hunger and nausea. She registers an urge to account for everyone, to map out their whereabouts, to keep tabs on them. In case anyone else decides to disappear. She ticks them off in her head. Michael Francis still lurking in the kitchen; her mother and Monica in the hall. Gabe far away, across the Atlantic.

Michael comes into the living room. It is blissfully empty, everyone having left at the same time. There is obviously an unwritten code about what time you leave as well. Aoife is slumped in an armchair, brushing crumbs into two piles on the table next to her. One, she begins to sculpt into a long, snaking line. He hears Gretta coming back in from the hallway, the sound of her shoes scuffing over the lino.

“Hi, Mon,” he says, and hears that his voice has come out slightly strangled.

Monica doesn’t break off her conversation with Gretta but crosses the carpet towards him and presses her cheek to his, her fingers gripping his shoulders with ten neat dents. The figure in the armchair behind them doesn’t move.

Monica and Gretta are talking about the bus, about how difficult Monica’s journey has been, about whether there has been any news, any phone calls, about the water ban in Gloucestershire and how it’s worse there than anywhere else (of course it would have to be, Michael thinks), about whether Monica would like tea, should Gretta make a fresh pot, is what’s in the pot already too old, perhaps a fresh one would be best, Monica will make it, no, Gretta says she will, no, Monica insists, because Gretta looks dead on her feet, she should sit down, but tell her first which tea is it she wants. Michael takes a scone off the plate, because he doesn’t know what else to do, and he is thinking that if one of them doesn’t give in and go to the kitchen and put the kettle on he is going to lose his temper. If they don’t stop this goddamn double act of talking about anything apart from the real and urgent issues of the day—namely, their father’s disappearance and the fact that Aoife and Monica are pretending that the other isn’t there—he may throw something at their heads, then leave and never come back. Feck the lot of them.

Aoife tries not to look at their feet, in front of her on the carpet. Michael Francis’s bare, her mother’s in slippers, Monica’s in burgundy sandals, red patches blooming under the straps. She looks instead at her hands and sees that they are still covered with words, in fading black ink, letters flowing forwards and backwards.

Gabe came to the airport with her. They ate waffles at a stand in the departure lounge, or at least Gabe did; Aoife watched him, smoked a cigarette and fingered the softened edges of her passport.

“It’s going to be OK,” he said, taking her hand. “You know that, right? You’ll find him. People can’t just disappear.”

Aoife tapped the ash off her cigarette and looked him straight in the eye. “Can’t they?” she said.

He looked away. He wiped his mouth with a napkin. He seemed to glance around him, as he often did, as if to check they weren’t being watched. “That’s different,” he murmured.

She cleared her throat, turned her hand inside his so that they were palm to palm. “Listen, Gabe …”

“Yeah?”

“I have a favor to ask.”

There was a pause. “Oh,” he nodded, “sure. What is it?”

She saw that he’d thought she was about to say something else, something about them moving in together. It would have been so appropriate, so expansive a gesture, to say yes, to agree to it here, at the airport, as they said goodbye. She found herself, just for a moment, picturing the place where they would live together. It would have plants along the windowsills and photographs tacked to the backs of doors, and they would eat off plates in bright, ceramic colors. There was no better time to say, Let’s move in together, than now: she saw that but she tried to blot it from her mind, tried to press on.