The Real Liddy James (24 page)

Matty, though pretending not to listen, surreptitiously turned down the volume on his iPod.

“And here is Blackrock,” said Liddy. “
An Charraig Dhubh
,” and although she considered herself a resolutely unsentimental person, she typed a street name into the route map on her phone. Following insistent high-pitched instructions, she turned off the main road, away from the large Victorian houses painted white, into a winding maze of clustered housing estates. Finally she found what she had been looking for: a modest, terraced street first built in the 1950s, apparently unmauled by the rise and fall of the Celtic tiger, where washing still hung on lines in the back gardens and young children played soccer between the parked cars.

“This is where my granny used to live,” she said.

“Which house?” said Matty, which surprised her, as she had become used to talking to herself.

Liddy thought for a moment of the black-and-white photograph pinned on the corkboard in the apartment, her parents standing proudly on either side of a large, old-fashioned stroller on the sidewalk outside one of these doors.

“I'm not sure exactly,” she said. “I think it's on the right down the end. I know the street name, but I've forgotten the number.”

“They all look the same anyway,” said Matty dismissively, his eyelids fluttering shut as the sudden, disorienting dizziness of jet lag hit him. Liddy got out of the car and looked around, curious to see what memories might be evoked. But she found it impossible to distinguish anything authentic from the incidents she had reimagined out of photographs. Yet she had indeed been a young girl in this place—running around the puddles with a hula hoop, visiting her grandmother's neighbors next door, arriving for tea in her white dress and veil after her first Holy Communion.

She turned to see an elderly woman in a floral overall and thick support stockings staring at her from across the street.

“Are you looking for someone?” called the woman.

Liddy shook her head and approached her.

“No,” she said. “But my grandmother lived here. Mary Murphy.”

“The Murphys lived at number fifteen.”

She pointed to the house that Liddy now recognized well enough to know it had a newly painted red door. The woman's leathery hand trembled slightly as she did so.

“And who do you be?” she asked.

“I'm . . . Lydia Mary. Patrick Junior's daughter.”

“Ah. All the way from America. I should have known.” She stared into Liddy's face. “You look like a film star.”

Liddy laughed, but the woman did not. Liddy hastily took off her sunglasses.

“Will you be going to the graves?” the woman asked.

“Not today,” said Liddy, and she waved and headed back to the car, where Matty was snoring softly with a high-pitched splutter that harmonized with Cal's unconscious exhales.

She sat still for a moment. She was glad Matty had not asked where her parents' house had been. For the answer was “a mile or so away” but ten years ago it had been flattened so a multistory parking lot could be built on top, and the symbolic implications of this disappearance without a trace were such that Liddy resolved there and then not to turn the trip to Ireland into some self-indulgent back-to-my-roots nostalgia fest. But still—

When she finally drove away, she tuned the radio to an eighties classics channel and turned it up loud to keep herself awake. She swigged cola from a can and sang along to songs that Matty and Cal, who both jerked awake too, had never heard before, like “The Way It Is,” “Walking on Sunshine,” or “Born to Run” (at this one Matty glanced sideways to see his mother acting out some intense lyric involving heroes on a last drive somewhere).

They headed along the coast to Dún Laoghaire, through the stage-set prettiness of Dalkey, and along the Sorrento Road, with its breathtaking views over Killiney Bay. The hazy sunshine glittered on the sea, the music played, and because of the daze she was in, the journey took on the quality of a dream. Liddy allowed herself to soar with a series of rising chords and felt that she was
in the opening scene of a movie
.
Yes, an inspirational movie for the female audience about how a highly paid divorce attorney at the height of her professional powers might respond to the disintegration of that life by returning to the place of her birth to
find herself
or possibly
spend quality time
with things that matter (like the fractious six-year-old child who keeps a photo of Lucia under his pillow, or the morose teenager who has said little since being expelled from summer camp, apart from announcing in sarcastic tones how many more strangers have logged on to YouTube to watch the video of his mother's breakdown live on national television) with a reassuring conclusion of familial reconciliation, self-empowerment, and perfect hair.

Liddy was speculating on which film star might do her justice in this role when Matty moved his attention from iPod to iPhone.

“Thirty-nine thousand two hundred and twenty-five hits so far!” he shouted as they drove through Shankill.

“Oh, stop going on about it,” said Liddy. “It wasn't that bad.”

“Have you actually seen it?” said Matty. “It's
mortifying
for me.”

“Good word. Have you managed to read a book recently?”

“No. That's what Dad said when you were lying in bed.”

“What else did Dad say when I was lying in bed?”

“He didn't talk much because he was crying.”

Matty spoke defiantly, but he had clearly been rattled by the scene. Liddy noticed the mustache on his upper lip, which grew darker by the day. She felt a primal pulse of intense love for him.

“Your dad's a good man,” she said, more than a little rattled herself. She knew then that self-dramatization would be no use to
her whatsoever, and, anyway, Liddy did not believe in Hollywood endings. She was well aware that the fantasy lives of women are not the same as the real lives of women, and too often involve surrender or subjugation or sadomasochism. Which was why she always preferred to watch action films, films where male heroes are trapped in space, or are captured by pirates, or have to cut their arms off with penknives to survive.

She switched off the radio as she turned toward Wicklow.

As a small child, Liddy had driven this road many times with her parents, and while it had been resurfaced and widened, the route remained the same. Once they had visited the Powerscourt Waterfall in Enniskerry, where they had parked next to a ramshackle caravan with a picture and a slogan painted on its side:
HEAVEN WASN'T BIG ENOUGH, SO GOD CREATED IRELAND
.
Liddy's father had been delighted with this and repeated it many times, frequently when they were back in Silver Lake and he got a little drunk and maudlin late at night. Back then she had found it embarrassing and mawkish, but this day, as she drove slowly through Kilmacanogue and onto the winding road toward Roundwood, with the moors and fens stretching into infinity on either side and the green Sugar Loaf mountain rising behind her, she saw its beauty and she understood. In the rearview mirror she caught sight of Cal, his cheek squished against the glass of the window, entranced by the real-life animals he saw roaming the unmanicured fields around him. She smiled. She had never thought of the countryside as her
thing
, but as she stared into the wide horizon, she felt the freedom in the space here. She understood why city
people reminded themselves of the earth by lovingly reclaiming small, secret gardens in the wells between tenement blocks, or nurturing their window boxes and tiny pots of herbs on windowsills, despite the showers of black soot that frequently rained down upon them.

She thought fondly of her fig tree in Carroll Gardens.

The iPhone beeped and told her she had reached her destination, a tiny shop called O'Toole's that nestled beside an enormous rusty red barn that was the spectator stand for the local Gaelic football club. Then, as Sebastian had said, she looked for a small blue sign saying
PLEASE USE FOOT DIP PROVIDED
and turned down the rutted road beside it. The car wove through a patchwork of stone walls and fields until she rounded a corner and the landscape changed to woodland and water. From there Liddy crawled along in sputtering second gear until she reached a small waterfall trickling down a bank into a gully; then she saw the tall, black wrought-iron gates with the name
STACKALLAN DEMESNE
carved into one of the stone pillars beside them. She drove through, clattering over the cattle grid, and headed up the driveway.

Sebastian's gate lodge was built of stone and slate and sat on a small but perfect plot of land beside the lake. When Liddy pulled up outside, she knew from its unadorned exterior, masculine metal shutters, and the rickety wooden jetty that it was not designed for children or visitors, and that Sebastian most often stayed there on his own. The couple of photos he had sent her had shown only two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a small, dust-covered television straight out of
The Flintstones
. Although the living area was
flooded with light from the windows and skylights, and looked large enough for the boys to run up and down, the galley kitchen was tiny, with an aged stove and no dining table. A wooden sign with lettering burned into it was propped up by the locked garage; the house was simply called
THE GATE LODGE
, with no indication of any mythical powers or imaginative space within.

She got out of the stale air of the rental car, her clothes reeking of pine air freshener and cheap upholstery shampoo, and stood in the cool breeze that came off the water. She stretched her arms above her head and then stopped, quite still, to watch a young deer that had come up from the road and was picking its way through the hazelnut trees, stretching its neck forward to sniff the leaves that carpeted an unkempt flowerbed. Without making a sound, Liddy turned and reached her hand back, tapping ever so gently on the car window. Matty looked up and nudged Cal. They all stared in absolute quiet until a large crow rose squawking from the hedgerow. The startled deer leapt down the driveway that continued through the ancient wood toward the big house, whose chimneys could distantly be seen above the trees.

Liddy looked around. A row of dark brown gnarly rosebushes lined the flower bed, each with a single brave bloom upon it. She walked over and smelled every single one. She knelt down on the ground and took a handful of earth in her hands and then let it fall through her fingers. She listened to the rhythmic lapping of the water, the insistent song of the lake tide. She felt the absence of the cacophony of noises that had become the sound track to her life. She became aware that the absence of these sounds was a presence; it was peace.

Liddy understood why Sebastian would never have given this place up.

She pulled open the passenger door to be greeted by an ear-splitting yelp from Matty.

“My phone's not working!”

He ran out of the car and clambered up onto a rock, waving the phone in the air.

“Yes, the owner told me the reception can be patchy,” said Liddy, reaching back to help Cal out, and feeling nothing but relief that they could no longer witness her ongoing excoriation on the worldwide web. “There's a landline for emergencies.”

“What good is that?” said Matty in horror. He finally took notice of his surroundings.

“
What the . . . !
There's nothing here. This is worse than I thought. What am I gonna do all day? Watch the freaking grass grow?”

Liddy walked away and started pulling bags out of the trunk and left them on the gravel.

“Why did we come here?”

As Liddy did not have an answer to that question beyond
So I could get a grip
, she turned to Cal in her best camp counselor tone.

“Shall we explore?”

“Where's the pool?” Cal said, for he too enjoyed his five-star childhood.

Liddy explained that there wasn't one and they would swim in the lake, to which Cal shouted, “Yuk!” and looked like he might cry. Matty came over, hugged him, and turned to Liddy.

“I get why you want to punish me for what I did at camp, Mom. I know it wouldn't be enough to take away all my electronic devices and ground me, and that's why I'm with you in this shithole for the summer.
But how could you do it to Cal?
”

At this, Cal did cry, so in the spirit of picking your battles, Liddy ignored Matty and chased after a tiny white feather that the breeze had lifted and blown toward her face.

“What's this, Cal?” she said to distract him.

“Look!” he said, pointing up ahead where a pile of tiny white feathers was strewn across the gravel as if two fairies had had a pillow fight. He ran ahead to investigate as Liddy looked for the rusty bucket Sebastian had described, under which the key was always left. She heard Matty's heavy footfall crunching toward Cal. She heard Matty start to laugh.

“What's funny?” asked Liddy, immediately worried.

“There's some bald bird running around here.”

Oh, no
, thought Liddy, but it was too late. Cal screamed; she hurried over to him and he leapt into her arms. Matty was peering at a young seagull's half-chewed carcass, the brown and red guts spilling out like worms. He picked up a stick and prodded it.

“A cat got it, I hope. Or else it's some other wild beast.”

“Stop it!”
shouted Liddy as Cal screamed again.

“What a good idea this was!” said Matty in his best camp counselor tone. “Isn't nature great?”

“I wanna leave!”
cried Cal.

“So do I,” said Matty.

“We are
not
leaving. I need a break.”

The boys stared at her resentfully.

Liddy exhaled wearily. She could not deny it was an inauspicious start to their great adventure. “I need a break from my job, from the city, from the stress. From everything apart from you two.”