THE LIAR’S DAUGHTER
Claire Allan

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Copyright © Claire Allan 2020

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Rekha Garton / Arcangel Images

Claire Allan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008378356

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008321956

Version: 2019-12-13

Dedication

To my children,

who make me want to be the best person

I can be every single day.

I love you both so much.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Now

Chapter One: Heidi

Chapter Two: Heidi

Chapter Three: Heidi

Chapter Four: Ciara

Chapter Five: Ciara

Chapter Six: Ciara

Chapter Seven: Joe

Chapter Eight: Heidi

Chapter Nine: Heidi

Chapter Ten: Ciara

Chapter Eleven: Heidi

Chapter Twelve: Heidi

Chapter Thirteen: Heidi

Chapter Fourteen: Joe

Chapter Fifteen: Ciara

Chapter Sixteen: Heidi

Chapter Seventeen: Heidi

Chapter Eighteen: Joe

Chapter Nineteen: Heidi

Chapter Twenty: Heidi

Chapter Twenty-One: Ciara

Chapter Twenty-Two: Heidi

Chapter Twenty-Three: Heidi

Chapter Twenty-Four: Heidi

Chapter Twenty-Five: Heidi

Chapter Twenty-Six: Heidi

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Heidi

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Heidi

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Ciara

Chapter Thirty: Heidi

Chapter Thirty-One: Heidi

Chapter Thirty-Two: Heidi

Chapter Thirty-Three: Heidi

Chapter Thirty-Four: Heidi

Chapter Thirty-Five: Ciara

Chapter Thirty-Six: Heidi

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Ciara

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Heidi

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Heidi

Chapter Forty: Heidi

Chapter Forty-One: Heidi

Chapter Forty-Two: Heidi

Chapter Forty-Three: Ciara

Chapter Forty-Four: Heidi

Chapter Forty-Five: Heidi

Chapter Forty-Six: Heidi

Chapter Forty-Seven: Ciara

Chapter Forty-Eight: Heidi

Chapter Forty-Nine: Heidi

Chapter Fifty: Heidi

Chapter Fifty-One: Heidi

Chapter Fifty-Two: Ciara

Chapter Fifty-Three: Ciara

Chapter Fifty-Four: Ciara

Chapter Fifty-Five: Ciara

Chapter Fifty-Six: Ciara

Chapter Fifty-Seven: Heidi

Chapter Fifty-Eight: Ciara

Chapter Fifty-Nine: Heidi

Chapter Sixty: Heidi

Chapter Sixty-One: Ciara

Chapter Sixty-Two: Heidi

Chapter Sixty-Three: Ciara

Chapter Sixty-Four: Heidi

Chapter Sixty-Five: Alex

Chapter Sixty-Six: Ciara

Chapter Sixty-Seven: Heidi

Chapter Sixty-Eight: Ciara

Chapter Sixty-Nine: Ciara

Chapter Seventy: Heidi

Chapter Seventy-One: Ciara

Chapter Seventy-Two: Heidi

Chapter Seventy-Three: Heidi

Epilogue: Kathleen

Keep Reading …

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Claire Allan

About the Publisher

Prologue
Now
Joe

They’ve told me I’m dying. A doctor in a white coat, and a blue shirt with a stripy navy tie that had a coffee stain on it, had perched on the end of my bed and adopted a very serious expression on his face.

A nurse – who I had heard give out to her colleagues about the lack of resources on the ward and how she was getting ‘sick, sore and tired of working her arse off’ for too much responsibility and not enough money – had pulled the clinical blue curtain around my bed to afford me some privacy.

Her sombre expression mirrored that of the doctor, although it was clear it was a front. It was almost the end of her shift. This was a life-changing moment for me – the moment I heard I was condemned to die despite all the chemotherapy and surgery that they had been able to offer. For Katrina the nurse, with her short brown hair and ice-blue eyes, it was just the end of another shift. And she was tired. She had to do this final grim task before she clocked out and went home. She’d get a cup of tea, or coffee, or maybe a glass of wine (she seemed the type). She’d kick off her shoes and watch something mindless on the TV. She might even laugh if it was funny.

I doubted she’d think about me and the fact that I was dying. That no more could be done for me. I was already in the past tense for Katrina.

I was feeling sorry for myself, but that was allowed, wasn’t it?

I wasn’t that old. This shouldn’t have been happening yet.

I didn’t deserve this.

I wanted to scream that I didn’t deserve this.

But it was like there was a tiny voice, or a chorus of voices, whispering in her ear that this is exactly what I did deserve. In fact, I deserved much, much worse.

Chapter One
Heidi
Now

The back seat of my car is full to bursting. Lily is bundled up in her car seat, asleep and blissfully ignorant of the strained atmosphere between her fellow passengers. A weekend bag, filled with pyjamas and underpants to be laundered, a toilet bag containing a razor, toothbrush, soap and shaving foam sits beside her.

A plastic ‘Patient’s Property’ bag sits in the footwell. It’s loaded with boxes of medication, dressings, instructions that I will have to will my postpartum brain into reading and understanding once we are back at Joe’s house.

I won’t call it home. It ceased to be my home the moment my mother died – also from cancer. Unlike Joe McKee, the man who has played the role of my father for the past twenty-one years, she didn’t deserve it.

‘Did you lift my slippers?’ Joe asks as I help him ease his seat belt on. He is still sore – still tender from the operation to try to remove the tumour found in his lung. Except that they found it had company, all through his body. ‘Riddled with it,’ he said, sadly, when he told me.

‘Yes, I lifted your slippers. They’re in your bag, along with your pyjamas and dressing gown.’

‘There was a book in the locker. Did you …’

‘Yes, I lifted it as well. And packed it. Along with your prayer book and your reading glasses.’

He nods. ‘I wonder how many more books I’ll read,’ he says, to himself as much as anything.

‘You know what the doctor said,’ I tell him. ‘Take it one day at a time.’

‘Those days are still numbered, though, aren’t they? I doubt I’ll see the spring.’

He looks out onto the bleak, grey car park of Altnagelvin hospital, on the very outskirts of Derry, Belfast in one direction and the city centre in the other. The sky is almost as dark as the tarmac below us. Heavy and angry-looking. It seems apt.

Joe has always liked spring. More so as he grew older and found comfort in God. ‘A time of renewal,’ he would say as the evenings stretched and the temperatures crept up.

I know as well as he does, there’ll be no renewal for him this year.

‘You never know,’ I say, even though we do know. Odds are he’ll be gone before the seasons change.

He shakes his head slowly, looks ahead. ‘Some things you feel, Heidi.’

I switch on the engine, nudge the car into first gear.

‘It’s not a lot of time, is it?’ he asks. ‘To do all the things I need to do or to make things right.’

Joe McKee could have a whole other lifetime to live and it wouldn’t be long enough for him to make things right. There’s a time in a person’s life, if they are truly, truly wicked, when they move beyond the point of redemption.

I stay quiet. If he’s looking for some sort of absolution, he’s looking in the wrong place.

Ten minutes of a silent drive home later, we pull up outside his house. The house my mother owned, which in turn will belong to me when he is gone. This is where the first almost ten years of my life were blissfully happy. My mother created a loving, warm and magical childhood for me.

Then she died.

Even all these years later, there are times when that realisation hits me like a punch to the gut.

The world has never seemed fair or right since.

‘Will we get you inside?’ I ask Joe.

He nods. ‘I’m tired.’

He looks pale, his eyes red, dark circles around them. The effort of the short journey has worn him out. He looks wretched. It’s almost, but not quite, enough to make me feel sorry for him.

‘Sure, we’ll get you in and to bed then,’ I say. ‘Just let me take Lily in first. I don’t want to leave her here in the car on her own.’

He nods. ‘Of course not.’

I open the door, carry Lily, who is thankfully still sleeping, through to the living room in her car seat and allow myself a few seconds to take some deep breaths. I’m shaking, I realise, but it’s not from the cold. I count my breaths in and out until the shaking lessens. I tuck Lily’s blanket around her, stroke her cheek. Note how she is filling out, changing. Only five months old and already I can see shades of the little girl she will become.

I do not like being here with Joe. Even in his frail condition, I still feel scared to be close to him.

I’ve tried to have as little as possible to do with him, especially after I moved away to university at eighteen. But somehow, and much to my shame and self-hatred, I still find myself unable to cut him from my life entirely.

It will be nigh on impossible now, not without appearing to be cold and uncaring. Not without telling people all the things that happened. The things I’ve tried so hard to bury.

The thought of how much he will rely on me over the coming months make me feel sick to my stomach.

‘It must be nice in a way,’ the nurse at the hospital had said, ‘to care for him now. After all he did for you after your mother died. There aren’t many men who would take on the responsibility of someone else’s child like that.’

Joe had told her he had only done what any decent person would do.

But Joe McKee doesn’t have a decent bone in his cancer-riddled body.

The sweat is lashing off me by the time I have helped Joe upstairs and into bed. I do not like the feel of him leaning his weight on me as I help him up the stairs. I do not like helping him slip off his shoes and socks and lift his feet into bed. He is complaining of the cold, even though the heating is on full and the extra oil-filled radiator in his room is pumping out a dusty, dry heat.

I pull an extra blanket from the airing cupboard and put it over him, offer to make a cup of tea. ‘It might bring you round a bit,’ I say. I feel I’m speaking the words from a script of what a good daughter should say to an ailing parent.

‘It might, aye,’ he replies. ‘That would be nice, Heidi.’

He makes a move as if he is going to pat my hand and I pull it away quickly. The gesture makes him flinch, but I won’t have any physical contact with him that isn’t strictly necessary.

I catch him looking at me, his face sorrowful. I wonder if he’ll say it, now. The words he’s never said in all these years. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Maybe …’ he starts. ‘When I’ve had a rest, maybe you could call Ciara for me? She should know how ill I am. Or maybe you’ve spoken to her already?’

Ciara. Joe’s daughter. His real daughter. The one tied to him by biology. The one he left behind when he moved in with Mum and me all those years ago. She has never forgiven him. Or me, for that matter. We don’t speak. I can’t remember the last time I saw her face-to-face.

‘I’ve not spoken to her yet,’ I tell him. I understand why he thinks it would be easier for her to hear from me first, so I know I’ll have to do it. Regardless of the state of her relationship with her father, she has a right to know he is dying. ‘But I will. When you wake up. You look exhausted.’

‘That’s what dying will do to you,’ he says with a sad smile.

I don’t return it, I just nod and leave the room, head for the kitchen, where I disseminate his various medicines into boxes and baskets for easy access while waiting for his tea to brew.

I’ve long since given up any idea of religion, but while I’m waiting for the kettle to hiss and rattle, I wish there was a godlike figure I could pray to for the strength to get through the next few weeks without wanting to throw myself off a bridge or put a pillow over his face.

Chapter Two
Heidi
Then

I first met Joe when I was seven years old. He was already sitting at the table in Fiorentinis Ice Cream Parlour on the Strand Road, looking around him at the old photos and pictures on the wall, when my mother and I arrived.

‘I’ve someone I’d like you to meet,’ my mother had said.

I remember that she looked happy. That her eyes seemed to sparkle. She’d put on make-up and I could smell she was wearing her favourite perfume – the kind she saved for special occasions. She’d even let me have a little spritz on my wrists. I remember that I was happy for her. Her excitement was contagious and yes, I was a little nervous, too. But that was okay, my mother had told me. It’s okay to feel nervous about meeting new people.

I liked the cocooned world my mother and I shared. Just the two of us, with Granny and Grandad popping in occasionally to check on us. To fuss. To ask if we had everything we needed. My mother’s response was always the same. ‘Sure we have each other and that’s all that we need,’ she’d smile.

My grandmother’s eyes would tighten so that I could see the fine lines of wrinkles spread out across her face. ‘You know I worry,’ she would say.

‘There’s no need to,’ my mother would reply.

And there wasn’t. We were happy. We had what we needed. A small house with a garden big enough to play in. Food in the cupboards. And if I needed new shoes or a new school coat, or sometimes just because Mum thought we deserved a treat, she would reach into the tin tea caddy on the top shelf of the corner cupboard in the kitchen, lift out some money and treat us.

Occasionally, the topic of my father would come up. Usually around Father’s Day, or after we’d watched some schmaltzy family movie. My mother would tell me, as gently as she could, that my father had moved away before I’d been born. ‘He wasn’t ready to be a daddy just yet,’ she’d say, and sometimes there would be a sadness in her eyes about it. ‘But that was everything to do with him and nothing to do with you,’ she’d tell me.

I suppose I knew she was lonely sometimes. She would read romance novels and sigh, and I knew most of my friends had both their parents living together. I suppose it was understandable my mother might want to find a partner too, even if she said that we had all we needed to be happy between the pair of us.

But if I was nervous that day in Fiorentinis, it was nothing compared to how nervous this man, Joe, appeared to be. He was fidgeting in his seat and, as he stood up to say hello, he almost knocked over his teacup.

I was as shy then as I am now. I stayed close to my mother, my hand gripped in hers, my cheek pressed against the soft fabric of her coat.

‘Heidi, this is Joe,’ she said. ‘He’s a friend of mine.’

The man smiled, extended his hand towards mine. Dark hairs crawled from the cuff of his jacket. They looked like spiders. I cuddled in closer to my mother.

‘Heidi, say hello,’ she said, an urgency in her voice.

He withdrew his hand and sat down. ‘She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to. Isn’t that right, Heidi? I’m a little nervous, too.’ His smile was kind.

The tightness in my chest eased as he lifted his teacup and sipped from it. I dared to take a step away from the safety of my mother’s long, green woollen coat.

‘I know it’s cold and rainy outside, but maybe you’d like an ice cream anyway? Since we’re here?’ he asked.

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Heidi?’ My mother’s voice was more relaxed again, too.

I nodded.

‘How about we get them to make you the biggest ice cream they’ve got?’ he asked and my eyes widened at the thought. There was little that seven-year-old me loved more than ice cream.

‘With jelly?’ I asked, because jelly came a close second.

‘Lots of jelly,’ Joe said with a wink, and I smiled at him and then at my mother.

The smile on my face was mirrored on her own. Then I noticed how she looked at him. How her smile was different when she was smiling in his direction. It was how those men and women smiled at each other on the front covers of her romance novels. She was falling in love. I knew it at once.

It was only when he came back from ordering and reached out to hand me the giant ice cream he was carrying that I noticed the glint of a gold ring on his finger.

I may have been only seven, but I knew what that meant. And I also knew he wasn’t married to my mother. He was grinning at me. Telling me he asked for extra sprinkles. I could sense Mum beaming at him from beside me. I knew she wanted me to smile, so I did. I remembered my manners just like I’d always been taught, and I thanked him and ate the ice cream. I pretended it didn’t suddenly taste a little sour.

Chapter Three
Heidi
Now

I wonder what the official protocol is when it comes to saying no to a dying man. Is it an out and out no-go area, or is it okay in some circumstances?

I chew the nail of my left thumb while I try to build up the nerve to call Ciara.

Alex, my husband, tells me getting her involved might be a good thing. She may be able to lessen any burden on me. Which sounds great, but still I’m not so sure. I’m not sure I have enough emotional energy to deal with a second toxic relationship just now.

I sigh as I realise that despite my misgivings, I have to do this. I just have to suck it up.

Alex is at least sitting close to me as I call Ciara’s number. I draw a little strength from him. My hands are shaking, my tummy tight. Even the sound of her voice makes me nervous.

I take a deep breath. Remind myself that she is an adult now. As am I. I’m a wife and mother, for goodness sake. I should be able to speak to another grown woman without losing my nerve.

But the truth is Ciara has always intimidated me. At times she has utterly terrified me, if I’m being honest. She was the loud to my quiet. The tall to my short. The confident to my terrified. The angry to my sad. She was always bigger and badder and more able to dominate a room than I ever had been or ever could be. She’s the kind of person who can shred your self-confidence to ribbons with just one look.

I hear a soft voice say hello in a calming Scottish lilt. ‘Hello, Ciara’s phone.’

I’m momentarily thrown. ‘Hello,’ I stutter, ‘I’m … I’m Heidi Lewis. It’s about Ciara’s father, Joe …’

I hear an intake of breath. An awkward ‘uhm’, which tells me what I suspected. This phone call will not be welcomed.

‘Is she there? I need to speak to her about him.’

‘One moment please, I’ll check,’ the voice answers, efficiently as if she is speaking to a business associate.

Perhaps Ciara is still at work. Maybe this isn’t the best time to call. I think about hanging up. It would be easier and I’d have a good excuse to do so.

I’m just about to take my phone away from my ear and end the call, when I hear the calming Scottish lilt replaced by a brusque Derry hello.

‘Ciara?’ I say, to be sure.

‘Yes. It’s me. Heidi, what can I do for you?’

She sounds as pissed off now as she did as a truculent teenager. I revert to type and feel inadequate. My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. I feel unable to form coherent sentences.

‘Erm, are you still at work? Because maybe, you know, this would be a call better taken later, a conversation … you know … to have when you’re free to talk.’

I sound like an imbecile.

It annoys her.

‘I’m at home,’ she says, her voice terse. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s your father,’ I begin. I wait for an interruption that doesn’t come. ‘He asked me to call you. Look, Ciara, maybe this really is a conversation better had face to face.’ I realise I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want to have to be the one to say those words to her.

‘I’d rather you just spat it out,’ Ciara says. ‘What is it? Does he need money? Has he met someone else?’

I take a deep breath.

The easiest way to do something you really don’t want to is to do it quickly, like tearing off a plaster. That’s what my mother would say, so I say the next sentence quickly. Probably too quickly. The words rattle off my tongue.

‘It’s nothing like that. Ciara, he’s not well. He’s just been in hospital for surgery and well, the news isn’t good. It isn’t good at all, I’m afraid. And he has asked me to call you to let you know he’d like to see you if you’d be willing.’

There’s a pause. ‘Are you telling me he’s dying?’ Ciara asks, as forthright as she always was.

I nod before saying, ‘Yes, Ciara. It’s cancer. He’s been given maybe three to six months, at best.’

The phone line goes quiet. I wonder if she has hung up, take the phone from my ear to see if the call is still connected.

‘Good,’ she says eventually, although I hear a trace of emotion in her voice that wasn’t there before. ‘Good. He’s dying. Good enough for him.’

‘Ciara …’

I start to talk but the line goes dead. She has hung up. I sit staring at my phone, my face blazing, wondering how I tell Joe what has just happened.

Chapter Four
Ciara
Now

‘Dinner’s ready,’ Stella calls from the kitchen.

I don’t answer. I’m staring at my phone, trying to process the conversation I’ve just had with Heidi bloody Lewis. The golden child. It had to be her to tell me, didn’t it? It couldn’t have been anyone else. He couldn’t have spoken to Mum and got her to break the news. No, he was always one to go for maximum impact. Maximum distress.

The bastard.

Anger wells in me and I throw my phone at the sofa, watch as it bounces off the cushion and hits the solid wooden floor with a crack. I’ll have broken the screen, in my anger.

‘Good enough for him,’ I’d said to Heidi. It had been my gut reaction, to feel angry and shocked and think fuck him for getting her to contact me only to tell me he was dying.

He is dying.

My father, for all that word really meant to me, is dying.

‘Ciara,’ I hear Stella, ‘are you still on the phone, only the pasta …’

She walks into the room, glass of white wine in hand, and looks from me to the phone on the floor and back to me again. The glass is put down on the table and she is across the room beside me before I can figure out what to say to her.

‘What is it?’ she asks, her eyes searching my face for information that I’m still trying to process.

‘He’s dying,’ I say, thinking about how the words feel on my tongue. How they sound in my voice. Alien. Weird. Melodramatic.

Her eyes on mine, her blue eyes, deep and dark and able to see the real me. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she says, one hand gently caressing the side of my face. It’s her sympathy, not the news of my father’s terminal illness, which brings tears to my eyes.

‘The bastard has cancer,’ I tell her.

One tear falls and she brushes it away with the pad of her thumb.

Stella knows I have a complicated relationship with my father. Or had. We haven’t had much of a relationship at all in at least ten years. I’ve been more than happy about that.

‘He wants to see me,’ I say as she leads me to the sofa. All thoughts of dinner, or glasses of wine or the movie we had planned to curl up on the sofa to watch, are gone. ‘He asked Heidi to call me. Not enough balls to even call me himself.’

That angers me. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he is now just a frail old man facing a death sentence and I should give him some leeway; but then again, when did he ever give me leeway for anything? He walked in and out of my life, leaving damage in his wake without so much as looking back. So much damage.

‘Do you want to see him?’ Stella asks.

Only she could ask that question and not have me bite back at her. She understands me in a world where it feels like no one else does.

I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’d like to tell him exactly what I think of him.’

‘Or maybe it would help you find your own peace and move on a bit?’ Stella asks. ‘But, you know there’s no right or wrong in this? You do what you want to do. If you want to see him, I’ll come with you. If you want to tell him to go to hell, I’ll hold your hand while you do it.’

I brush away a second pesky tear, take a deep breath. I’ll be damned if he can force me to make a decision like this quickly. Who does he think he is to get his mousey little minion to call me and ask me to come over?

‘Is there much wine left in that bottle?’ I sit back and ask Stella.

‘Not much,’ she says. ‘But there’s a second bottle in the fridge and I’m sure there’s another bottle of something in the rack.’

‘Okay,’ I say, sniffing and sitting up straight. ‘That dinner we spent all of fifteen minutes cooking is going to be absolutely ruined if we don’t eat it now. So, I say we eat. I don’t want to waste any more energy today thinking about that man.’

Chapter Five
Ciara
Then

I was an only child and I was deliriously happy in my only-child status. I was never lonely. I had lots of friends. We lived in a busy street in the Creggan Estate – a proudly working-class area on the west bank of the River Foyle.

There was always someone to play with. Come rain or shine we would be riding up and down the streets on our bikes, or on scooters or roller-skates. We would play ‘padsy’ or ‘tig’ and occasionally a gang of us would disappear en masse into one of our friends’ houses to watch a movie and eat crisps and biscuits.

I’d seen how friends with a houseful of siblings didn’t get the same treats that I did. Or the same attention from their parents, either. I was the apple of both of my parents’ eyes – but at heart I was always a daddy’s girl.

Right up until the day he left.

At thirteen years old, I experienced the worst, most painful, heartbreak of my life.

It didn’t make sense. I thought my daddy loved me. I was his special girl. I trusted him never to hurt me. But then he left – on a Thursday afternoon. I came back from school to find my mother perching on the edge of the sofa, a cigarette in her hand and a tautness to her posture that screamed that something was wrong. Being thirteen, my first thought was that I was in trouble. I braced myself for her to launch into some rant about my messy bedroom or the three pounds I’d nicked from her purse that morning. I expected her to use my full name and though my heart sank at the thought of the rollicking I was about to receive, I was already preparing my best eye-roll and ‘But, Mammy …’ response.

‘Sit down, pet,’ she said.

It was the ‘pet’ that threw me. She was hardly going to give out yards to me if she was using ‘pet’. I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach.

‘Look, there’s no easy way to tell you this, Ciara, so I’m going to come right out and say it. I want you to know that I love you very much. And your daddy loves you, too. You’re not to doubt that, ever. Okay?’

There was a strange buzzing sound in my ear. I could feel something build up inside of me, a burst of adrenaline that made me want to fight or run. I dug my fingernails as hard as I could into the palm of my hand to try to ground myself. I’d seen enough corny movies to guess where this was going.

‘Daddy has moved out,’ she said, the shake in her voice belying her true feelings. ‘It was a mutual decision and it’s just that we don’t make each other happy any more.’

‘Where has he gone?’ I asked. I needed to know where I could see him. When I could see him.

My mother’s face coloured. She sagged momentarily before straightening her back again. ‘He’s gone to live with a friend,’ she said.

Of course it wasn’t long before I found out that friend was another woman, and that woman had a daughter.

My father had left us to go and be with another family. A family he’d known for less than a year. A family with a daughter for him to love.

My teenage heart hurt so much that I cried until I threw up.

Chapter Six
Ciara
Now

It’s two days since Heidi called and I’m now standing, with Stella, outside the front door of my father’s house. It’s less than ten minutes’ walk away from our riverside apartment, but it might as well have been another country for all these years.

I have avoided the shops I know he frequents. Stayed away from the library where he used to work, and where he still liked to spend his mornings drinking strong tea from polystyrene cups and reading over the day’s papers.

He holds court there, talks to everyone who comes in. Shares his stories of old Derry and snippets of local history. It’s laughable for the man who barely looked at a book when he lived at home with my mother and me. Once he left, he transformed himself. Discarded his working-class persona entirely, lost himself in books. Went back to college. The few old friends he still deigned to spend time with gave him the nickname ‘The Professor’ because he was considered so learned. He enjoyed feeling superior to them. He enjoyed revelling in their new-found respect for him.

Learned and respected. It galls me to this day.

I feel Stella give my gloved hand a little reassuring squeeze.

I see lights on through the stained-glass panelling of the front door. It might be the middle of the day but it’s dull and dark, and January has us firmly in its grip. The darkness is as oppressive as this house looming over us. Semi-detached. With a big back garden. There was a wooden swing set there when I first visited all those years ago – a sure sign of wealth, along with a phone in the hall that didn’t have a lock on it to stop anyone from running up a big bill.

I’d felt intimidated then, but that was nothing compared to how I feel now.

‘I’m not sure I can go in,’ I say to Stella.

‘You know you don’t have to, but you’ve come this far. And look, if it feels all wrong, you never have to come back again. Focus on that.’

I squeeze her hand. There’s no way I could be here without her by my side. ‘Okay, then,’ I say. ‘Here goes nothing.’ I reach up and rattle the brass knocker, and it’s not long before I hear footsteps clacking along the tiled floor and see the shadow of a person approach.

I’ve not seen Heidi in as long as I’ve not seen my father. She was only a teenager the last time our paths had crossed, in her second year at university. She’d come home for the Christmas break – wherein my father had made a disastrous attempt to have us all round for drinks. I shudder at the memory.

Looking at Heidi now, she looks as if more than ten years have passed. Her face is pale. Tired-looking. There are dark circles under her eyes, and her hair, which clearly could benefit from a wash, is pulled back in a tight ponytail, which does her no favours. Her roots need touching up, I notice. There’s a lot of grey there for a woman still in her twenties.

She pulls an oversized grey cardigan around her small frame, wrapping her arms tightly around herself as she does. Her body language screams that she is deeply uncomfortable with this situation.

She blinks at me as if it is taking her some time to put a name to a face. I know I look different now – but not that different. And she had been aware that I was coming.

‘Heidi?’ It is Stella who breaks the silence – coming to my rescue as she always does. ‘We spoke on the phone. I’m Stella, Ciara’s partner.’

I watch for any sort of reaction on Heidi’s face at the realisation that I’m gay. It has never been something I’ve advertised. It’s no one’s business but my own, and Stella’s, of course.

Heidi barely blinks. She looks from Stella to me and then takes a step backwards to allow us in. ‘Please, come in, both of you,’ she says, her voice quiet. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Stella,’ she says. ‘And it’s good to see you again, Ciara.’

I smile at her because it is what is expected. We both know that what she has said is a lie. It’s not nice to see each other at all. I think we could have quite happily existed without ever seeing other again and been perfectly happy.

I hear the cry of a baby, look to Heidi.

‘That’s Lily,’ she says. ‘My baby. She’s due a feed. If you’ll excuse me. Joe’s sleeping just now, but I’m sure he would be okay with you waking him.’

‘Maybe we’ll just wait a bit,’ I say.

She nods, looks anxiously towards the living room door where the cry is becoming more persistent. ‘Well, you know where the tea and coffee are, why not make yourselves a cup?’ she says, and with that she scurries, mouse-like, into the living room, closing the door behind her.

I lead Stella to the kitchen.

‘So that’s Heidi,’ Stella says as she sits down and I switch the kettle on to boil.

‘It is indeed. Although she is much more mouse-like than before. And she was pretty mouse-like then.’

‘It must be hard for her, with a new baby to look after and Joe to be minding,’ Stella says as she looks around the room, taking in the slightly dated décor. I bristle. I do not want to be any part of a ‘poor Heidi’ narrative. I saw and heard enough of it over the years to be done with it for good. I’m not so much of a bitch that I don’t accept she had it rough to lose her mother at a young age, but she has led a life of privilege, and him – my father – he chose her over me. Not just once. But time and time again.

I don’t answer Stella. I just make the tea, rattle around the cupboards for sugar. This house is familiar and yet it isn’t. It’s quieter. Darker. Colder. I think briefly of the angry teenager I had once been. I can almost hear echoes of her stomping up the stairs or slamming the front door. My heart aches for her a little. I wish things had been different.

I turn to hand Stella a cup of tea. I see her shudder.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

‘Hmmm, uhm, yes, I think so,’ but she doesn’t look it.

‘You know you’re a terrible liar, don’t you?’

‘Never mind me. It’s nothing. I’m being silly.’ But I notice she is holding on to the mug of tea for dear life.

‘Stella?’ I raise an eyebrow.

‘Honestly,’ she says, ‘it’s nothing. Someone just walked over my grave. If you could find me a biscuit I’d feel much better.’

I look at her for a moment, sure it’s more than that, but I know her well enough to know she won’t be drawn any further, so I start to rummage for biscuits in this house that has never been my home.

This has never been a place where I was made to feel particularly welcome.

As a teenager it had felt as if every time I’d visited here I was reminded of just how much I was no longer the centre of my father’s universe.

I’d asked him once if I could put some posters up in the spare room – the room I slept in every time I visited. He shook his head. It wouldn’t be right, he’d said. He didn’t want Natalie to think he was making assumptions. It was still her house, he said. He was just a guest. I didn’t understand it, not really. Not at the time. Natalie was always so welcoming. Annoyingly so. She was desperate for me to like her, but that was never going to happen. Not when she had taken him away from me.

I’d left my pyjamas there once, about six months after my father moved in. It was shortly after Natalie took sick, I remember that. I remember I felt, momentarily, sorry for her. I wanted to help more. To do more. I folded them and stashed them under the pillow, waiting for me to pick them up and put them back on. When I came back the following week they were folded and neatly placed in a plastic carrier bag on the end of the bed.

‘Now’s not the time to make changes,’ my father had said. I always wondered who decided that. Was it him? Or was it Natalie? Regardless, I felt a renewed hatred towards them both.

I find a pack of Bourbon creams, pass them to Stella and sit down, the only noise around us being the ticking of the big clock in the hall.

‘Do you want me to come up and see him with you?’ Stella asks, splitting the biscuit in two.

I think of all the things I need to say and want to say and shake my head. ‘I need to do this on my own.’

His room smells of dust and stale breath and illness. The curtains are drawn tight and an electric radiator is pumping out heat into a room that feels oppressively warm. I feel myself break into a sweat.

He is small in that bed of his. So small that for the briefest of moments, I question if he is there at all. I look behind me, half expecting to see him come out of the bathroom larger than life, as imposing as he ever was. Tall, sturdy, full of bravado and his own self-importance.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness, his new shape becomes more apparent. Illness has shrivelled him. He’s curled on his left-hand side, his duvet and blankets folded up to his chin. The cancer has carved hollows in his face. His skin sags limply over his bones, grey, thin, wrinkled. His hair is now more salt than pepper.

I step forwards. Slowly. Quietly. As if he might jump up at any moment to shock and surprise me. He doesn’t shift. I contemplate leaving. I could close the door. Lie to Stella that I’ve spoken to him and we have nothing more to say to each other.

But I can’t lie to Stella. I don’t want to. It’s not what we’re about. She knows almost everything about me.

He shifts, just a little, a loud sigh accompanying the movement followed by a small groan of pain. My heart quickens. I should let him know I’m here, but what do I say? Do I say ‘Daddy’, or ‘Joe’, or ‘You bastard’?

I feel tears prick at my eyes. I have to hold in a low groan of pain myself. I’m not sure who I want to cry for most right now. Him, or the little girl I was, who was so hurt all those years ago.

‘Dad,’ I say softly. ‘It’s Ciara.’

He should know, of course. I’m the only person who has ever called him ‘Dad’. Despite their many years together, Heidi has never given him that title. He stirs. I can almost hear his bones creak as he does so. He’s still a relatively young man, only in his early sixties, but the way in which he tries to pull himself to sitting in his bed is more fitting to a man much older. I wince at the sight of him – the thinness of his hands as he reaches out to lift his glasses from the bedside table and put them on.

‘Ciara?’ he mutters. ‘Open those curtains. Let me see you.’

I fall into the role of dutiful daughter quickly, to my annoyance, and pull open the curtains. Not that it makes much difference. The gloom outside is such that the light barely lifts in the bedroom. I reach over and switch on the bedside lamp instead.

Then I sit at the bottom of the bed. Far enough away that he cannot touch me. I have drawn my lines. I have to. Self-preservation is everything.

‘I didn’t know if you would come,’ he says, his hand shaking as he reaches for a glass of water from the bedside table.

I lift it and hand it to him, watching him take a few sips before I take it from him again.

‘I didn’t know if I would come, either,’ I say. There’s a harshness to my voice that makes me feel both proud and ashamed of myself.

‘Well, I’m glad you did. And Heidi told you, did she? My news?’

‘That you’re dying? Yes.’

He winces a little at the word dying, as if my uttering it will summon the Grim Reaper sooner.

‘If I can get over this operation, I might get back on my feet again,’ he says. ‘For a while anyway.’

I nod. I don’t know what he expects me to say.

‘Ciara, I don’t have much time, but I wondered if I might have enough time to make things right with you. We’ve wasted so many years. If there’s any chance at all that we can even start to reconcile … it would mean more to me than I can say.’

I wait for him to say he’s sorry. I will him to say it. I’ve wanted him to say it for twenty years. Surely now, when time is running out, when he says he wants to reconcile – when he wants that more than he can say – surely now he can force those words out.

Maybe, if he does, I can think about a reconciliation. He’s scared now – I can see that in his eyes – in the way he looks at me. I need to know if he is really interested in acknowledging the pain he caused, or if he’s just scared of the judgement he’ll face from his God.

‘Heidi says you have maybe three months. Six at most,’ I say, picking imaginary fluff from the blanket on the bed.

‘I’ll not see six,’ he says. ‘I feel it. I can feel it getting closer. The cancer’s spreading.’

I look at him. There’s so much I want to say that I don’t know where to start. I could quip that the cancer started to spread a long, long time ago. But I don’t.

‘I’m scared, Ciara,’ he says, his voice weak. Pathetic.

I close my eyes. Just once, Dad, I think. Just say sorry once.

I can feel tears prick at my eyes. A well of emotion I know wants a release rises up in me. It’s a mixture of anger and grief and fear. I’m that thirteen-year-old again having her heart broken, asking her daddy to say he loved her enough to stay and that he was sorry that he ever hurt her.

I swallow them down and look him straight in the eyes. He will not see me cry. He will never know how much he hurt me, or how scared I was.

‘I’m not sure what you want me to do about that,’ I say, not caring in that moment about the icy tone in my voice.

Chapter Seven
Joe
Now

I don’t like being in this house alone any more. I used to enjoy the silence. I’d be happy lost among my books, or out in the garden. Now, no amount of books can distract me from the knowledge that my body is giving up on me.

I should have known I wasn’t well. Maybe I did and I was in denial. I’ve felt myself slowing down for the last few months – having less energy, less drive. I was foolish to think, or hope, it was merely my age.

Time is running out and I don’t know what’s ahead of me. Will it be a painful death? Will I just slip away? What will be waiting for me on the other side? I’m a believer, of course. I believe in a God who forgives all sins when the sinner repents, but is there is a cut-off point in His tolerance for wrongdoers? Are some sins unforgivable?

Ciara has been so cold with me. I’m not sure what I expected. A hug? A tearful reunion? It’s been almost ten years or more since we last saw each other. Ten years since she said I was no longer part of her life and never would be again.

I suppose I expected some sign of love. That she cared. She’s not the thirteen-year-old girl I moved out on any more. She’s a grown woman, old enough to know that adult relationships aren’t always straightforward. She should have a bit more savvy by now. Then again, maybe I don’t deserve to be forgiven, by Ciara or by God.

Maybe I’ll ask Heidi to call Father Brennan for me. Get him to come to the house and provide some spiritual counsel. I’m too sore and too tired to get out of this bed save to shuffle to the bathroom and back again. I’m definitely too sore for a trip to chapel.

What will he think, though, if I tell him? Will he stay impartial as priests are supposed to? Will he dole out the penance of a couple of Hail Marys and Our Fathers and all will be forgiven, or will he never think of me the same again?

The clock in the hall is ticking loudly. I used to find it a comfort – a constant companion on quiet afternoons in front of the fire, reading my books with a cup of tea at hand.

Now, though, it’s just reminding me that every second passing is one that I won’t get back, and brings me one second closer to facing the judgement of God.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

Chapter Eight
Heidi
Then

Ciara’s face was incandescent with rage. Her blue eyes narrowed. Her mouth set in a snarl. She was lashing out, swiping at him with her arms while he tried to subdue her.

I was standing in the corner. If I could have pushed myself further into it, disappeared through a crack in the plaster, I would have. I was cradling my favourite doll and trying to understand what was happening. My mother was trying to coax me to come and sit beside her, but I’d never seen such rage before and it scared me.

Ciara was angry and Joe was doing his best to mollify her. Although she was thirteen – tall and lanky with a smattering of teenage acne – she started to cry like a baby. To cry the way I wanted to cry at the sound of their raised voices.

‘You can’t make me be friends with these people!’ she howled. ‘You can’t make me like them. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home. LET ME GO HOME!’

She kicked him square in the shins and he let out a roar of pain, while she darted around him and made for the front door. Quick as a flash he went after her, blocking her escape.

‘Ciara, pet, there’s no need to react like this. Natalie and Heidi just want to spend more time with you.’

‘Heidi! What kind of a stupid name is Heidi? Does she live up in the mountains with her granda or something?’

I shrank into myself. I was all too aware of my literary namesake, but most people had told me how pretty my name was. How unusual. They didn’t mock me – not like Ciara was mocking me.

‘She’s a nice girl,’ I heard Joe soothe.

‘I’m a nice girl, too,’ Ciara yelled, ‘but you’ve left us, me and Mammy, for them. And they let you. Mammy says they’re homewreckers.’

‘That’s enough,’ I heard Joe say. It was probably the first time I’d heard real sternness in his voice. ‘I understand that you’re angry, Ciara, but there’s no excuse for such rudeness. Things aren’t as simple as your mother would have you believe. We’d fallen out of love with each other a long time ago.’

‘That’s crap!’ Ciara blustered. ‘Mammy still loves you. She told me. She cries all the time.’

I glanced at my mother, who was pale. She looked as if she might be sick. I felt as though I might be sick too. I didn’t like that Ciara was calling my mammy names. I didn’t like that my mammy was being painted as a bad person. She wasn’t a bad person. But Ciara looked so sad and scared, and angry.

‘Loving someone and being in love with someone are two different things,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll always love your mother, but I’m in love with Natalie now. And she needs me.’

‘We need you!’ Ciara wailed.

‘Not as much as Natalie does,’ Joe said and I felt my mother stiffen beside me.

‘Joe,’ she said, a warning edge to her voice. ‘Now’s not the time. She’s upset. She has a right to be upset.’ I saw her give a small, reassuring nod to Ciara, but her face was blazing as if she was embarrassed, or ashamed. As if she had done something wrong.

‘Sweetheart, they need to know. They need to know why I have to be here with you,’ Joe said. His voice was thick with emotion. ‘When you’re older, Ciara, you might understand more. I love Natalie, and she’s sick. Very sick. And I need to be – no, I want to be – here for her, and for Heidi, because we don’t know what time we have left.’

I heard my mother sob as Joe crossed the room and took her hand. I saw the shock and hate on Ciara’s face.

Mammy squeezed my hand tight. I heard a small groan, barely perceptible, leave her lips. ‘Joe!’ she said in an angry whisper before nodding her head in my direction.

I felt as if the ground had just shifted under my feet and things were never going to be the same again. My mammy was sick. They didn’t know what time they had left. What did that mean? Did that mean my mammy was dying? No, that was impossible. It was unthinkable. I remember putting my hands to my ears to block out the noise, but it was already too late. The damage had been done. The words had been said and they couldn’t be taken back.

Chapter Nine
Heidi
Now

Alex sits on the edge of our bed, taking off his shoes. They clunk to the floor and he kicks them out of his way before standing up to undress.

‘That wasn’t as bad as it could have been,’ he says.

‘It wasn’t great,’ I say, stroking Lily’s head as I give her one final feed before bedtime. ‘It was awkward.’

He pulls his T-shirt over his head, exposing the fine smattering of hair on his chest, before he pulls back the duvet and climbs in beside me.

‘It was always going to be awkward,’ he says, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek and then to kiss Lily on the top of her head. ‘You haven’t seen her in what, ten years? And when you do, it’s not under the nicest of circumstances.’

‘I suppose,’ I say, unlatching Lily from my breast and putting her on my shoulder to try to get her wind up.

‘She seemed upset after she saw him,’ he says. He’d arrived while Ciara was upstairs and had sat with Stella until I finished breastfeeding. ‘Do you think she’ll get involved in his care?’

I shrug. ‘I hope so, but I don’t know. And that girlfriend of hers wasn’t giving anything away.’

‘Stella? She seems nice,’ he says. ‘They seem to be happy together.’

And they do. I saw how Stella had looked at Ciara when she had come back into the room, how she’d held her hand and mouthed ‘are you okay?’ before I had the chance to ask after her. I saw how Ciara placed her head on Stella’s shoulder as they sat together, letting her usually impenetrable guard down for just a moment or two.

‘Are you okay?’ I had asked as if I hadn’t witnessed the interaction between the two of them.

‘What do you think?’ Ciara had said. Or snapped. It felt like more of a snap.

‘It must be a shock for you, all of this,’ I added, trying to be polite.

‘That’s one way to describe it,’ she sniffed, looking around the room. ‘This house hasn’t changed much over the years.’

Her judgement, even though it wasn’t the house I lived in, and even though I had no say over the decoration of it, made me bristle.

‘Joe’s very set in his ways, you know,’ I said.

‘Actually, I don’t know. The man’s a virtual stranger to me.’

I felt chastised again and with each answer from her I could feel myself shrinking back into the little girl I was all those years ago who was afraid to speak.

‘I’m sorry things have been difficult for you,’ Alex said, and it took me a moment to register that he was talking to Ciara and not me. I realised then, as she looked him up and down, that I hadn’t even introduced them.

‘This is Alex, Heidi’s husband,’ Stella said, getting in ahead of me with the formalities.

‘Oh God, yes, sorry,’ I said. ‘I should’ve said.’

‘I was able to figure it out myself,’ Ciara said, looking at me with something akin to disappointment on her face.

Why was I so useless, so socially inept?

Alex spoke, making up for my tied tongue and awkwardness. ‘Look, we appreciate this isn’t easy. But we want you to know you’re welcome here any time you want. If you want to spend more time with your father. We can get you a key. Heidi is here most days at the moment, helping, but if you’d rather have time alone with him then I’m sure Heidi wouldn’t mind.’

‘Can Heidi not speak for herself?’ Ciara asked.

‘I can,’ I answered, blushing at having my social ineptitude called out so openly. ‘But what Alex has said, it’s true. Whatever you need …’

‘I don’t need any of this,’ Ciara had said, waving her hand around, signifying the house around her and the entire situation. I watched Stella rub her hand, tenderly, soothing her. ‘I need to think about it. I’ll be in touch.’

Now, with Alex beside me in bed, I can’t stop replaying the entire conversation over and over in my head and forensically picking it all apart. Her words. Her tone. The looks she shared with Stella, and Alex, and me.

‘You don’t think Ciara was sharp? Nasty and bitchy?’ I ask him just as Lily produces a momentous burp that rattles her whole body.

‘Not overly, Heidi,’ he says. ‘Given the circumstances. I’m sure she doesn’t know her right from her left at the moment.’

‘You really don’t think she was off with me?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, I don’t. Honestly. I think she’s a person dealing with some pretty major stuff and it’s clearly stressing her out. But I don’t think it’s necessarily aimed at you, personally. Try not to overthink it.’

He takes Lily from me and lays her in her cot before climbing back into bed and switching off the bedside lamp. ‘I’m worn out,’ he yawns, turning onto his side away from me. ‘Try to get some sleep. It will all feel a little more manageable in the morning.’

He drifts off within seconds – I listen to the pattern of his breathing change. I wonder, how can he not have noticed how she was with me? Her resentment dripped from her every word. I’m not overthinking. I’m not always just overthinking.

Chapter Ten
Ciara
Now

Mammy sits wringing her hands together. ‘I knew it. I knew there was something wrong and he wasn’t telling me. I could feel it in my waters.’

My mother has never stopped loving my father. She might say she has, but her feelings are written across her face every time she hears a mention of his name.

‘I didn’t think you saw much of him any more,’ I say.

She blushes, looks down at her hands, where she still wears the plain gold wedding band he put on her finger almost thirty-six years ago. ‘I don’t. Well, not much really, but I stopped mentioning it to you because it only seemed to annoy you. I can’t believe it, Ciara. He’s dying.’ Her voice breaks, but she composes herself quickly, taking a deep breath. ‘And he wanted to see you? That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Mammy, he has always wanted to see me. It’s me who hasn’t wanted to see him and I’m not sure that’s changed.’

She bristles.

‘He’s a dying man, Ciara. I’m sure all he wants is to make things right. You know he adores you. The pair of you were so close when you were little. “Me and my shadow,” he used to say. I’d be jealous of it sometimes, you know. You were my little girl but you much preferred going on long walks out the back roads with your daddy than you did baking with me or playing with all the dolls I bought you.’

‘Well, I never have been a very girly girl,’ I say.

‘No, I suppose you never have been,’ she says, looking me up and down as if she still can’t quite get her head around my gayness.

‘But I’ll tell you this, Ciara McKee, once he’s gone this time, that will be it. There won’t be any more chances to say the things you want to say, or hear the things you need to hear. Not everyone gets the chance to know when their time is coming. It’s hard, but it’s a blessing in its own way. Don’t spend the rest of your life wishing you’d said or done something differently.’

The only thing I wish I’d done differently was not to let him have so much power over me and my happiness. Letting him manipulate me and hurt me. And this? Now? The desires of a dying man, this was a masterstroke in manipulation.

‘I know I raised you well, Ciara,’ my mother continues. ‘I know I raised you to be the caring, loving woman you are now. I can’t tell you what to do …’ Her sentence trails off.

She doesn’t need to finish it. She is right, she can’t tell me what to do, I think. Not that it will stop her.

‘For all his faults, he’s family,’ she says. ‘And goodness knows he doesn’t have much of a family around him what with your auntie Kathleen being over in England. So maybe he needs us, and he needs you most of all.’

‘He has the golden child,’ I say petulantly – and I’m immediately annoyed at my childishness. ‘Did you know she has a baby now?’

My mother nods. ‘I do. And I know as well as you, Ciara, that wee girl doesn’t do well under pressure. It would be cruel to leave her to manage all this on her own.’

‘It’s not as easy as all that, Mammy,’ I tell her. ‘I have my own pressures, too. Do you think work will be okay with me announcing I’m taking reams of time off to care for an estranged parent?’

She sniffs, shakes her head. ‘You practically run the place for them, Ciara. You’re owed time off. Take it.’

‘That’s the problem,’ I tell her. ‘I do practically run the place. They need me there.’

‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ she says, in full flow now. ‘It’s only an art gallery. It’s not like you’re CEO of a major company or a brain surgeon or something.’

I bristle. It may not seem like much to my mother, but running the small, independent gallery is my passion. Has been for years. But now’s not the time to argue with her about the importance of the arts. Nor is it the time to tell her that yes, I may well be owed time off, but I’ve things I’d much rather be doing than spending that precious time off with a man who I can’t stand to be near.

‘All I’m saying is, he’s your father. He needs you. You need to be the bigger person here.’ My mother cuts through my thoughts, neither listening to nor understanding what I’ve been saying.

I carry a tray laden with a bowl of chicken soup from a tin, a slice of wheaten bread, a glass of milk and an apple. Mammy has already expressed her disappointment to me over the phone that I didn’t make the soup from scratch. I’d rolled my eyes so hard I’d given myself a headache. Was it not enough for her that I’d booked a few days off work after all, leaving a nervous assistant to oversee the installation of a new exhibition?

‘He’s lucky he’s getting anything,’ I said down the line to Stella, my phone on speaker as I heated the soup and took a spoon from the drawer.

‘You know your mum. Always a little bit extra,’ Stella said, trying to lift my mood. ‘It’s obvious she’s never tasted your soup before!’

‘I make a lovely soup,’ I told her. ‘Just not for estranged family members.’

‘So I take it you won’t be sharing your lunch with Heidi, then?’

‘She’s out,’ I’d told her.

She’d scarpered out of the door with that baby of hers in a buggy almost as soon as my foot had crossed the threshold.

‘Can’t say that I blame her,’ Stella said, who’d said the previous day there was something about the house that gave her the creeps.

‘It’s a feeling,’ she’d said when I pushed her to explain further. ‘It’s hard to put into words, but that house feels sad. Like bad things happen there.’

‘Bad things do happen there,’ I’d said. ‘It’s never been a happy place for me.’

‘I think it goes deeper than that,’ she’d said, ‘but look, never mind me. I’m probably just away with the fairies again.’

I replay that conversation in my head as I reach the top of the stairs. Stella has always been intuitive. She jokes that in olden times she would most likely have been burned at the stake for being a witch.

She’s right about the creepy feeling under this roof though, especially in this dimly lit hall, the ticking of the clock echoing around the quiet house.

I’ve kept all conversation with my father functional so far today. Did he need anything? Should I freshen his water? Plump his pillows? Did he need anything picking up from the chemist?

He’d asked me to return some library books for him, pick him a few he had reserved behind the desk. I’d jumped at the chance. Of course I didn’t think that in doing so I’d have to listen to the simpering librarian behind the desk wax lyrical on what a wonderful man he was and how he must be a great father. I nodded, made relatively non-committal noises. She’d become misty-eyed.

‘A terrible tragedy. He’s so young still, and such a good man. They say God takes the good ones first,’ she said. ‘You must be beside yourself at the news.’

I’d been so, so tempted to tell her that I wasn’t beside myself at all at the news. That I’d spent more time than I’m proud of wishing he was dead. A wicked voice inside me wanted to scream: ‘The sooner the bastard is in the ground the better.’

I didn’t, of course. And for now I’m doing what my mother wants me to do. I am being there for him. Smoothing waters, even though I know no matter how calm the surface, there is an undercurrent threatening to drag me down at any moment.

I take a deep breath. I won’t let that undercurrent win today. I plaster something akin to a smile on my face and carry the tray into his room, where he’s sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. He needs a shave, but I’ll not be offering to help with that. He looks much brighter than he did when I first saw him three days ago. There is some colour back in his cheeks. He smiles back at me. Or leers. It strikes me that there has always been something about his smile that makes me feel uncomfortable.

‘Here’s your lunch,’ I say, sitting it across his lap and making sure he has everything he needs.

I don’t want to be in this room with him any longer than I need to be, so I turn to leave.

‘Ciara?’ His voice is thin and reedy – thinner and reedier than it probably needs to be. ‘Come and sit with me. Just while I have my lunch. Then you can get back to hiding downstairs again. Or you can go home. But just give me five minutes of your time, please.’

‘Okay,’ I say, instantly wishing I had the guts to say no.

‘Why don’t you sit down, instead of standing there and growing tall? You’re tall enough already.’

‘I’ll go get a chair,’ I say.

It might be a good idea to have one here anyway, for visitors. Not that there have been many, by all accounts. Despite his supposed status in the community, the house has been remarkably quiet according to Heidi. All those people who he holds court with, chats to in the street, in the library. They’re not really his friends, are they? Where are they now?

‘Sure, there’s no need for that,’ he says. ‘You can sit at the bottom of the bed.’

I hesitate. I remind myself that I’m an adult now and I have my own voice.

‘I’d rather just get a chair,’ I say, clenching my fists tightly to try to stop myself from shaking. Without giving him the chance to argue further, I go and get a chair from the spare room, place it just far enough to the right of his bed that he can’t reach it, and sit down. I’ve left the bedroom door open. I can leave at any time I want, I tell myself.

I watch and listen as he slurps spoonfuls of his soup into his mouth while he tries to make small talk. It’s all inconsequential babble that infuriates me. He wants me here, he says, but he doesn’t seem to have any intention of saying the things I need him to say.

As soon as he takes his final mouthful and washes it down with the last of his milk, I lift the tray from him and walk from the room, not looking back.

‘Would you not just stay another few minutes?’ I hear him ask, but this time I find my voice.

‘No. I’ve done what you asked. I have to leave now.’ I don’t wait to listen to any response – I just get down the stairs and out of the house as quickly as I can.

Chapter Eleven
Heidi
Now

Joe’s not getting better. Not the way the doctor’s hoped, anyway. I mean, of course, we know that ultimately he is going to die. But they did expect him to recover from his surgery well enough to enjoy some sort of quality of life, for some amount of time.

He’s still confined to his bed, six days after coming home from hospital. He doesn’t even want to try to manage the stairs, to sit in the living room and maybe watch some TV. He complains he is in pain. He complains he feels sick. He complains he is too tired. He complains he can’t sleep. He complains his cup of tea is too hot. Or too milky. Or he wanted coffee instead. He complains the room is too stuffy. Or it’s too cold.

It’s a constant barrage of complaints, which I feel I have to swallow down. Because he’s sick. Because he’s dying.

I’ve tried – I’m still trying – to rally the troops, so to speak, to get help. I’ve spoken to some of Joe’s friends. Asked them if they could maybe take a shift on, a morning or afternoon, or an hour even of looking after him.

They’ve mostly been too busy. They work. Or they mind their grandkids. Or they have plans but they’ll ‘see what they can do’ and disappear off the radar.

With every ‘Sorry, I’d love to but can’t,’ I feel myself crumble a little.

This house has started to make me itch. I only have to get to the bottom of the drive and I can feel my skin prickle. Everything here is heavy and there are shadows everywhere.

We have, at least, managed to secure a care package for Joe. From next week, carers will visit for fifteen minutes each morning and fifteen minutes each evening to help with personal hygiene and the like. It’s not much, but it’s something, and I cling to it.

So far Alex has been on hand to help Joe shave every second day. We’ve put a stool in the bathroom, where he can sit while he brushes his teeth, and each morning I bring a basin of warm water, soap and fresh towels to Joe’s room and he washes himself as best he can.

He needs a shower. I know that. But he’ll have to wait for that.

Ciara has visited twice. Stayed for a few hours. Seemed to be in the foulest of all moods while she was here. It doesn’t help with the atmosphere, so I tend to avoid her. Use the time she’s here to get outside and breathe in some fresh air. I walk the length of the quay along the river over and over again with Lily in her pram, waiting for the peace and calm to wash over me that’s supposed to come with getting out and about. I’m still waiting.

‘Look,’ Dr Sweeney says as he sips tea from a good china cup, the kind kept for company. ‘He’s feeling a bit down, you know. That could be what’s hindering his recovery in and of itself. I know the prognosis isn’t good, but we need to do what we can to get him to make the most of what time he has left.’

I’d nodded, because it was expected. But ‘we’ all know that ‘we’ means ‘me’.

‘He says he gets panicky at night, in case he’s unwell and there’s no one here to help him,’ Dr Sweeney, who has been our family doctor for as long as I can remember, says.

‘There’s always someone here ’til gone eight,’ I say defensively. ‘And then I’m here before nine in the morning again. He has a phone. He can call if he needs me.’

I want to add that I’m doing as much as I can. I don’t actually want to do any of it. I’d spent the bare minimum of time with him before this illness and I’d very much like it if it was still that way. But of course, I keep quiet.

‘Maybe, but he’s a frail, sick man. I’m not one to tell you all what to do, but it might be worth talking with other family members about a rota for overnight care. Even in the interim, until he rallies a bit.’

I can’t help but roll my eyes. ‘Other family members’ – as if there’s a queue. As if I haven’t been spending the last few days calling everyone I know remotely connected with Joe to try to ease the burden on my shoulders.

‘I’ve a young baby to consider, you know,’ I tell him. ‘But I’ll mention it to Ciara. There aren’t many more options.’

‘You’re a good girl,’ Dr Sweeney says, a master at being patronising. ‘And for what it’s worth, babies are very adaptable at this one’s age. As long as they’ve a bed to sleep in at night they don’t mind too much disruption to their surroundings.’

I resist the urge to tell him to piss off.

Thankfully he leaves a little later, after eating the better part of half a packet of biscuits and dusting the crumbs onto the floor. As I close the door behind him I hear Joe call from the bedroom and I climb the stairs, each step feeling heavier and harder than the last.

‘Yes, Joe?’ I ask, opening the door just slightly and peeking in.

‘Was that Dr Sweeney talking to you about night-times?’ he asks, his face a picture of perfect misery.

‘It was.’

‘I don’t want to cause you girls any more trouble,’ he says, ‘but it’s so hard here being on my own, with only my thoughts to keep me company after you all go home to your happy families.’

‘It must be,’ I tell him.

‘I’ll not be round to be a burden on you all for much longer,’ he says.

‘I’ll talk to Ciara,’ I say.

‘Kathleen said she might come over from England,’ he says. ‘Maybe you could call her for me. Tell her I’d like to see her. She might listen to it better from you. Come sooner, you know?’

‘I’ll do that, Joe,’ I say, putting my hand to the door to leave.

‘Heidi …’ His voice is soft, setting my teeth on edge. ‘Could you pray with me?’

I grip the door handle a little tighter, feel the beginnings of the fight or flight fear set in.

‘I’ve things to do,’ I tell him.

‘Just a wee decade of the Rosary,’ he says. ‘It won’t take long and it would mean the world.’

I glance out of the door, I don’t know why. In the vain hope, perhaps, that someone will come and rescue me. There is no one there, of course, just as there has never been anyone there.

‘Please,’ he says.

I nod, cross the room and sit on the chair close to his bed. He lifts his red rosary beads and starts to pray, stopping only to encourage me to speak up when I’m too quiet.

I parrot the words, the rhythm and familiarity of them providing no comfort at all. Tears are sliding down my face.

‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death …’

Chapter Twelve
Heidi
Now

Thankfully, I don’t have to lay the guilt on too thickly before Kathleen agrees to fly over from England. She’ll be here as soon as she can get it all arranged. Maybe her visit will give Joe a bit of a boost, she says to me.

‘I’ll ask my friend, Pauline, if I can stay with her,’ Kathleen says.

I tell her she’s welcome to stay at the house, not adding that it would be great if she did so that she could take care of the overnight minding that Dr Sweeney seems to think her brother needs so badly.

‘I wouldn’t want to get under anyone’s feet,’ she says, and even though I tell her it would be no imposition, she is firm in her resolution to stay with Pauline.

She stayed here, in this house, back then, when I was a child. For a few months, before she moved to England, if I recall correctly. It was, I think, about a year after my mother died. So I had been maybe ten or eleven. I can’t quite remember. We’d had a strange, strained, relationship. At times she was so loving and caring towards me, I felt as if I never wanted her to leave. I realise now that a part of me was longing for someone to fill the hole my mother had left, but also instinctively knew no one could. I was so lost without my mother, though, I grabbed on to every act of affection tightly.

But then, at other times, Kathleen would look at me as if I was completely incomprehensible to her. An alien child. I’d see no trace of warmth or love. Those times were scary.

I’ve often wondered if she knew what happened under this roof, if she had any suspicions at all. It’s hard to believe she didn’t, but it’s worse to think that she might have and did nothing about it.

Even though she says she will stay with Pauline, I decide to make sure the two spare rooms are ready. Joe is sleeping and Lily is napping in her pram in the living room, so I decide to kill the time productively. One used to be my old bedroom and the other a guest room. At least they’d be in a decent state for anyone unlucky enough to get landed with an overnight shift.

If nothing else, it gives me something to distract me from my own thoughts, which have a tendency to slip towards darkness and despair a little too often for comfort these days. It’s best just to keep busy, I tell myself.

I can’t remember the last time I set foot over the door of my old bedroom. God knows when anyone was last in it. There’s no doubt it will need to be aired and dusted, especially if there’s a chance Lily will have to spend a night here with me.

But even walking to the far end of the landing makes me feel a sense of horrible foreboding and when my foot lands on the squeaky floorboard – the floorboard that used to act as my warning signal – my body tenses.

I take a deep breath and open the door, feeling the cold air hit me. The room has a damp feel to it. A musty smell. I need to air it but it is much too cold to consider opening a window just yet. I shiver and switch on the overhead light, the bulb giving just one pathetic flicker before it pops and dies. I reach for the switch to the bedside lamp instead and thankfully it turns on, although it must be the weakest wattage known to man. A dim, yellow glow lifts the darkest corners of the room but I wouldn’t say it is in any way light. Stubbing my toe on the foot of the bed, I swear as I walk around to plug in the small oil-filled radiator that sits by the desk.

We can probably fit a travel cot in here for Lily if the need arises, but apart from that there is only enough space to walk around the bed, open the chest of drawers or sit at the small school desk. Still scored with my childish graffiti, it sits under the window.

An unpleasant burning smell rises from the radiator and I curse myself for not thinking to dust it off before switching it on. I grab an old towel to give it a wipe while I look in the airing cupboard for any suitable bedding to dress the bed with. I decide I’ll bring my own, buy new stuff if I have to. I don’t want anything he has slept in touching me.

The room doesn’t feel like my room any more, although the echoes of my childhood and teenage years are still here, down to the remnants of Blu-Tack still clinging to the walls, where posters once hung.

Sitting on the bed, I look up and see the dolls, which were once the most important thing in the world to me, on the shelf of the far wall. Four of them. Porcelain, pale-faced, dressed in Victorian-style clothes. Ciara hated them. Said they were ugly and gave her the creeps. But when I was younger they were a vital link between my mother and me. She would buy me one each Christmas. ‘A little girl deserves a very special doll,’ she would say. I’d nod. I loved them. Especially Scarlett, a doll with the darkest black hair and green eyes, in a green velvet gown. She reminded me so of the actress Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, my mother’s favourite movie, so Scarlett seemed the most apt name.

I can hardly believe I’ve left her here. I can’t believe I reached an age when I am embarrassed by her and the others, too embarrassed to bring this vital link between my mother and me to my new home. I’ll get some bubble wrap, I vow. Wrap them up and take them to our house, even though it’s small with not enough storage space. We’ll find somewhere for them. Maybe Lily might want them when she’s older.

I wonder what her granny would have made of her. What she would think of me as a mother. My heart aches for her. Then again, my heart always aches for her.

Chapter Thirteen
Heidi
Then

I was nine and three quarters when time ran out and my mother died.

I remember her death in snapshots. Like looking at old pictures. Moments in time captured forever in my mind, the minutes and hours between just a blur.

It’s as if I hear a click of some imaginary camera and I’m in my bedroom listening to a raised voice from the room two doors away. It’s not an angry voice. It’s something else – something that makes my stomach tighten and my heart hurt. It belongs to my granny, I think, or the smiley nurse who has been visiting each evening. She always gives me lollipops. The taste sours in my mouth.

Click.

‘Mammy’s in heaven now.’ The nurse isn’t smiling any more, but her face is soft, sad. Her mouth downturned.

Granny’s face looks strange. Twisted. Changed. Her eyes are red – so red that the blue of her pupils looks almost too bright, like there are lights shining on them or something. She doesn’t look like herself any more. I don’t think she’ll ever look like herself again.

Joe wanders around the house, lost. He seems to stand a lot. Like he has forgotten how to sit down. He looks so sad. He looks how I feel. As if a part of him has died, too.

Click.

I’m on the stairs and I can’t understand it. They say Mammy is in heaven, but I know she’s in the living room. Lying in that box. I’ve seen her through the door. It’s definitely her. I want to ask how can that be her if she is in heaven, but I’m afraid to. I don’t want to make my granny cry again.

Click.

‘Who’s going to mind me now?’ I ask.

Granny is crying. She pats my hand.

‘Am I coming to live with you and Grandad? You’ll have to get a new house with a bedroom for me.’ I’m momentarily lost, wondering what my new bedroom will look like.

‘Well, here’s the thing,’ she says. ‘You know how Joe has lived here for the last year helping your mammy and you?’

I nod.

‘And he loved your mammy for a year before then?’

I nod again.

‘Well, he loves you so much that he is going to stay here and look after you,’ Granny says with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. ‘Your mammy talked a lot about it, you know. With me and with Joe, and we all thought it would be easier for you if you were able to stay here. In your own house, in your own room with your own toys.’

I don’t want that. He’s not my daddy. I don’t even like him. Not really. I was nice to him for Mammy. He’d moved in a year ago and everything with Mammy had changed. She spent less time with just the two of us. More with him. And then she got sick.

He doesn’t know how to look after me. He doesn’t give me cuddles like Mammy did. He doesn’t bake me cookies like Granny does.

My lip wobbles. I feel tears settle in my eyes and I’m trying so hard not to blink and let them fall.

‘Your grandad and I will always, always be here for you, darling,’ Granny says, her voice cracking a little. ‘But we’re not as young as we used to be. And Grandad doesn’t keep well. I’m sure you’d much rather stay in your own house, among your own things, anyway. All your toys. Sure, Grandad and I don’t have room for toys.’

‘But if you got a new house …’ I say, trying to keep the pleading tone from my voice.

I watch as Granny shakes her head. ‘I’m so sorry, pet. We can’t do that. I wish we could, but you will be fine with Joe and we’ll always be close by. Always. I promise you.’

‘But Joe’s not my daddy,’ I stutter. ‘He wasn’t even married to Mammy. He’s not my family. I can’t stay with him!’

I notice she’s crying and guilt swoops in. I don’t want to make her cry any more, so I stop talking.

‘It will be okay, my angel,’ she says through her tears and I will myself to believe her.

Click.

‘You have to be brave now.’

He’s sitting beside me. My little hand dwarfed in his. His hand is clammy. Sticky. People have been coming and going to the house all day and it’s stuffy in here. There’s a smell of strong tea and cigarette smoke. People keep looking at me with funny expressions on their face. Telling me I’m a great girl. They bring me sweets and treats as if it’s my birthday.

I want to ask them why.

Click.

Granny tucks me into bed. I don’t want to sleep. Not with Mammy downstairs in that box. Who is sleeping in her bed? Is Joe there? Who will be there if I wake up in the night? I lie awake, afraid to close my eyes. Will they put me in a box like Mammy, too? Tell everyone I’ve gone to heaven?

Click.

I’m sitting on my bed and my grandmother is pulling the hairbrush through my hair. She’s distracted. The brush keeps catching on knots. It hasn’t been brushed properly in a few days. Still, I’m a brave girl. I don’t cry out. It seems such a babyish thing to cry about. Especially now.

She has a new dress for me to wear. Black. With ribbon. I hate it. Mammy would never have made me wear something like this. She knew I loved running about in jeans and a T-shirt. Playing in the garden and getting covered in mud.

Click.

A church. It’s cold. Everyone is crying and looking at me as if I’m the one making them sad. I want to tell them I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t hurt Mammy. I swear I didn’t! But Granny has told me to be on my best behaviour.

‘I won’t be able to cope if you don’t behave,’ she said.

I’m angry. I want to tell her I always behave. I’m always good. I always do exactly what I’m told.

Click.

He sits on the edge of my bed. His jumper smells of beer and stale cigarettes again. It makes me feel sick, as if I might throw up. The last people have left the house. Why has it been a party? Cake and sandwiches and the grown-ups drinking. Someone singing and laughter ringing out every now and then. My mammy is dead. I don’t understand.

I pull away from him as he tries to hug me. I don’t want him near me. I’m fed up with grown-ups. His hands are still clammy.

‘You’re not to worry. I’m not leaving you. I’ll make sure you’re okay.’

I hold my tears inside me, give in to his hug. I’ll be a great girl. And a brave girl.

Just like Mammy would want.

Chapter Fourteen
Joe
Now

There’s not a single person in this world who hasn’t made a mistake. Who hasn’t done something they are ashamed of. Anyone who denies this is a liar.

I’ve not always done the right thing. I’ve absolutely done the wrong thing a few times. Some of these things for the right reasons. Or I thought so at the time.

Like when Natalie was sick. She was in so much pain. So wretched. It hadn’t been that hard to get my hands on some extra morphine for her. I suppose things weren’t as rigid then as they are now.

I was trying to help. I still believe I did help. I took her pain away, and then I stayed because even though I knew it was good and humane that her suffering was over, I was still overcome with guilt.

Each and every time I saw Heidi look up at me, her eyes wide, her face pale. Her grief too painful to watch, I wondered if I’d done the right thing. I’d taken a mother from her child.

So I stayed. Did what Natalie had wanted. She’d begged me, you see. ‘Make sure Heidi is okay,’ she’d say, knowing her own parents weren’t fit to look after the child. Natalie was so terrified that Heidi would end up in care. Bad things happened in care, she said.

She’d had faith in me. She was foolish, too. I tried to be good, but I was – I am – only human and I am flawed.

But I’ve fought my demons. That has to count for something, doesn’t it? I rehabilitated myself. Found God. Asked for His forgiveness for what I did to Natalie. What I did for Natalie.

And I lived a good life. I thought it would make a difference, but in the end it seems it doesn’t matter what you do for people, it’s never enough.

No one realises how hard this is. What a burden it is. Temptation is everywhere. Urges don’t just go away, you know. I had to content myself with looking and not touching, but I did that because I wanted to prove I could change.

I was prepared to wait for forgiveness. I’ve been very patient, but time is running out and now I think there’s a cruelty to them that they aren’t prepared to let go of.

How do they not see how hard it was for me, too? How it ate me up inside? Because it did. I hated myself for years. It almost destroyed me, almost drove me to suicide.

I was a victim, too. I didn’t ask to be born this way.

I wasn’t perfect. I did so much for them that they will never bring themselves to acknowledge.

The selfish, spoiled little bitches.

Chapter Fifteen
Ciara
Now

Auntie Kathleen is far changed from the confident, fashion-conscious, funky auntie who I hero-worshipped through my childhood and into my teen years.

Looking at her from across the living room in my father’s house, I feel shocked at her distinctly middle-aged appearance. She can’t be any older than her mid to late forties, but she dresses like someone in their late fifties or sixties. Gone are the short skirts, the big hair, the coloured tights and bright make-up. Instead, a woman with the same salt-and-pepper hair as my father sits in sensible black trousers, a pale pink jumper over a crisp white blouse and black shoes, which owe more to comfort than style, on her feet. The only jewellery she wears is a pair of pearl stud earrings and her plain gold wedding band. She wears no make-up and I can’t help but notice that her eyebrows could use a good reshaping.

She’s smaller, too, than I remember. A remnant of the person she was, or am I just remembering it all wrong? Sometimes I don’t know what I remember any more.

She looked lost when she arrived at the airport. I’d gone to pick her up and had been waiting for her at arrivals, when I saw this rather wretched-looking creature walk through the security doors blinking as she glanced around. She looked pale, tired and old, and she’d promptly burst into tears when she saw me.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she’d said over and over, to the point where I wanted to scream at her to stop talking.

She was quieter in the car, lost in her thoughts for a while. Then she asked about me. About Mum. About Heidi. How she was coping.

‘She is okay, isn’t she?’ Kathleen asked. ‘You know, stable?’

‘She seems to be,’ I said, which was the truth. I don’t think I was ignoring any warning signs just because it suited me to have Heidi doing the lion’s share of looking after Joe.

‘Because we have to be careful,’ Kathleen said. ‘You know she’s fragile.’

Yes, I knew Heidi was fragile. Everyone kept reminding me, not that I needed telling. For a year or so when she was a teenager our entire existence had revolved around ‘poor Heidi’ and her fragility.

‘She’s a different person now,’ I said, as if I knew her well enough to comment authoritatively on her mental wellbeing. ‘Her husband seems to be lovely and she’s focusing on her baby.’

Kathleen made a noise that was at best non-committal. ‘I don’t know,’ she’d said. ‘I wouldn’t want to push her too far.’

I’d tried to draw her further on what she meant, but she clammed up. Refused to say any more. Frustrated, I’d switched on an audiobook through the car’s Bluetooth system and tried my best to lose myself in it as we drove the rest of the way home.

Of course, when Kathleen had finally seen my father, she’d collapsed into a paroxysm of grief. ‘My poor big brother,’ she’d wailed, pulling him into a hug and then apologising as he’d winced from the pain. I’d winced, too. The show of emotion ringing hollow in my ears.

But she’s calmer now as she stands in front of the fireplace, orating on palliative care and family responsibility.

‘Perhaps we could put our heads together and think of things that might encourage him out of that bed and back into the world for another bit. Maybe we could get him to make a bucket list. You know, things he’d really like to do while he can. We could try to make them happen.’

She seems so determined she can make a difference. That taking him on some poorly thought-out adventure might save him that I almost feel sorry for her.

She’s also assuming the rest of us have the same desire to have him around for as long as possible as she does.

‘Do you have any ideas?’ she asks to the silent room.

I see Heidi bow her head like the shy girl in class desperately hoping the teacher will have forgotten she exists and skim past her. I feel a sense of dread build as her gaze falls on me.

‘Ciara?’

‘Dad and I aren’t very close,’ I tell her, which of course is a gross understatement. ‘I’ve no idea what he might want to do.’

To my annoyance, I feel the warm glow of shame rise in my cheeks.

‘He’s still your dad. You must have some ideas.’

I know when I was little he liked books and gardening. He liked being the centre of attention. He liked people thinking he had brains to burn. Country walks. Talking about himself. Wildlife documentaries. Hurting people. Manipulating their feelings. Leaving.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘Maybe a drive to the beach. A visit to the museum,’ I say with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

‘We could try to get him down to the library, to see his old friends,’ Stella suggests and I could kiss her for trying.

‘I was going to take him out for a pint, if he was well enough,’ Alex offers.

Heidi stays silent.

It’s all pretty mundane as far as a bucket list goes, but at least it feels doable, and without too much effort or time spent with him.

‘Those are all great ideas,’ Kathleen says, nodding a little too enthusiastically given the dull nature of our suggestions. ‘I think it’s worth really focusing on the fact that the thing he needs most of all right now is all of us pulling together to support him. I know you girls are young and have enough going on in your lives, but in the great grand scheme of things it really doesn’t amount to an awful lot of time. Then he’ll be gone and you’ll never have to think of him again.’ Her voice cracks as she looks at us all.

Auntie Kathleen induces guilt well, raised as she was in the thrall of Irish Catholicism. But for the same reasons she will be crippled by her own guilt, too. She hasn’t been a frequent visitor over the years, leaving for England some sixteen or seventeen years ago and rarely making the journey back, even when a flight could be bought for less than a bus fare.

‘We should probably help him get his affairs in order,’ a quiet voice from the other side of the room speaks up. ‘I’m sure there are lots of things he needs to tie up. Financial matters. His belongings. If he has a will …’

I stiffen, looking at Heidi, who stares right back at me.

‘I don’t know if we have to worry about that just yet,’ I say, even though a part of me is impressed that little mouse Heidi can squeak, after all.

‘Well, I think we do. We can dance around it all we want,’ Heidi says, ‘but we know there will be upset when he’s gone. I’d rather we’re all prepared for it. I’ll be hoping to get this house on the market as soon as possible.’

I hear Kathleen gasp. Even Alex can’t hide his shock at the manner in which his wife has spoken. I’m shocked myself. Simpering Heidi who has been at his beck and call all these years. It strikes me for a second that this is actually how she has been since I first visited. Restrained. Cold. No hint of personal grief.

‘I don’t think that this is the time or the place for this discussion, sweetheart,’ Alex says, looking at her, a confused expression on his face.

‘This is exactly the time and place for it,’ she says, her voice growing in confidence. ‘I want everyone to be very clear about what will happen after. This is my house, as outlined in my mother’s will, and when Joe is dead, I will be selling it. As soon as possible. I’ll do my bit by him while he is alive, but that’s it.’

I feel Stella reach out and take my hand, but my fist is clenched tight.

‘I’m sorry if anyone finds that upsetting, but that is the way of it. And it’s better to be honest and prepared than to deal with more upset after his death. The lines are very clearly drawn.’

‘Heidi.’ Alex puts his hand on her knee as if to quiet her.

She pushes it away.

‘No, Alex, I’m not being insensitive. I’m being honest. Someone has to be honest about this all. We’re all dancing around, afraid to say what needs to be said. Joe is not a nice man. He’s not a good man. He has been a cuckoo in this nest for too long.’

Kathleen looks as if she has been slapped squarely around the face. I watch as she stands up and walks out of the room. I can hear the sound of her crying just as I hear her climb the stairs.

I can hear Stella asking if I’m okay, but it’s almost as if I can’t quite understand what I’m feeling any more.

Heidi gets up and storms out of the room, Alex following her. I hear the back door open and I just sit and try to process everything that has just been said.

But I can’t escape the truth. I might be shocked at Heidi’s outburst, but she is only speaking the truth. My father is not, and never could be, a good man.

The only person I’m truly angry at is him.

Chapter Sixteen
Heidi
Now

I have stopped, dead in my tracks, at the edge of the lawn in the back garden. I swallow a lungful of the damp night air, shuddering as I exhale. I’ve not realised until now that I am shaking. The sound of heavy footsteps on the gravel behind me makes me jump. I brace for impact. For a clip to the back of the head. For admonishment that I had run away and good girls don’t run away.

Good girls show gratitude.

Good girls behave.

‘Your mother would have wanted you to behave, that’s what would have made her happy.’

My breathing changes, becomes shallow, short gasps at the air that feels moist and heavy and cold. It’s as if I am consuming coldness and it is filling my veins until my shaking becomes more violent.

Maybe Alex is right. Maybe this isn’t the right time or place, but I’m struggling to hold this all in now. I’m struggling with the weight of keeping quiet, of talking about bucket lists and making him happy.

Joe McKee does not deserve to be happy.

He does not deserve to leave this world peacefully, thinking he is absolved of all of his sins.

The steps grow closer. Heavy breathing. I sense anger. I feel it grip me.

‘Heidi.’ Alex’s voice is hard and cold.

I turn to look at him – see disappointment and anger in his eyes.

‘Was there really a need for that?’ he asks.

I blink back at him. My usual reaction is to say no. To apologise. To push down at the feelings and all the memories that weigh heavy on my chest every single day. But it feels different now and I want to tell him. I want to tell him everything – even though it will change our lives. I want to be brave.

‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘There was a need for it. All this, what we’re doing, Alex. It’s all bullshit. While he lies up there, being waited on hand and foot. The people he hurt are running themselves into the ground trying to make his last few months bearable.’

‘You keep saying that,’ Alex says. ‘That he hurt people. That he is a bad man. But why, Heidi? He’s a bore, for sure. He takes advantage of your good nature. He holds political and religious beliefs that I don’t agree with it. But a bad man? He raised you for years. He didn’t have to.’

I open my mouth to tell him. Know it would shut him up. But then, what if it changed how he thinks of me? Would he be angry that I’ve kept it from him? And all those people, Kathleen included, who thought I was mad, that I was a naughty little girl who told lies for attention, would they tell him all about the girl I was? The trouble I caused?

The fire I started. If I close my eyes I can still taste the acrid smoke as it started to choke me. Still remember heavy hands, pulling me away. Still remember kicking out at them. I just wanted it all, myself included, to burn.

How could he look at me the same if he knew it all? At best, he’d see me as a victim. At worst, he would see someone who had been driven to madness. Would he ever be able to trust me to be alone with Lily? I know I had struggled while pregnant with those same fears – fears that were allayed for me the moment she was placed on my chest and I knew I’d do everything to protect her. To protect my family.

I feel a bubble of shame and grief and anxiety rise up. I see Alex search my face for an answer, but it’s not one I can give right now. Not without ruining everything.

‘You’re right,’ I say, and I know my voice sounds funny. Angry. Frustrated. ‘You’re always right.’

And still he searches my face for signs of the truth and I just look at him, not daring myself to talk, until he gives up. He throws his hands in the air, then plunges them deep into his pockets as he turns away. ‘I think I hear Lily,’ he says. ‘I’ll go check on her.’

I know as well as Alex does that Lily isn’t making a noise, he just needs an excuse to leave. I stay in the garden, even though it is starting to rain. Fat drops of ice-cold rain land on my face, stinging me where my skin is rough and sore from the tears I didn’t even realise I had been crying.

They start, as these things do, slowly at first. Little drops. Warning signs leaving me enough time to get inside if I want to. It’s like they’re telling me to go. To run. Take shelter. Now they come in greater numbers, but still I know I can get into the house relatively untouched if I just move. But I can’t move. I’m frozen in the middle of all this and the rain rushes at me, soaking me through to the bone until I am so wet, so icy cold that the hailstones that have started to fall don’t hurt. I am untouchable. I don’t care about the storm. I have always been right in the middle of one.

Chapter Seventeen
Heidi
Now

I offer to make Alex a cup of tea when we get home. He refuses, says he is tired and takes Lily from me and goes upstairs. We barely spoke on the drive home and I can’t shake the feeling that everything is slipping out of my control.

I’m tense and even though my body aches with tiredness, I know I’ve gone past any notion of sleep, so I make myself a cup of very milky tea and curl up in front of our gas fire watching the faux flames flicker and dance. Ironic, really, that I can find flames comforting.

Well, ironic or worrying. One of those.

I think of the chain of events that led to that point – when I ended up in hospital, missing the second semester of my first year at university and having to start all over again come the spring.

Did it all start that day in Fiorentinis? Or the day my mother died? Or was it the first time he came into my room to ‘comfort’ me?

So much is blurry now, you see. After all these years. But some details are crisp and clear in my head and they never leave. The senses of things. Smell. Touch. Pain.

I shake my head, trying to shake all those memories from it. If only it were that easy.

But it’s not, of course. And it’s only going to get harder over the next week and months. I have to find a way to cope, otherwise I’ll not only push Ciara and Kathleen further away, but I’ll also push Alex away. That is truly unthinkable.

I have to stop taking my anger out on other people. Even people such as Ciara and Kathleen. People I’d tried to make like me all those years ago. People I’d wanted to love back then, but who never loved me back. I owe them no loyalty, but they aren’t responsible for what Joe did any more than I am.

Eventually I drift off into something approximating a sleep, only to be woken at 4 a.m. by a hungry baby in need of a feed. When I’ve satisfied her needs, I climb into bed beside my husband and whisper to his sleeping form that I love him, and our daughter, more than he could ever understand.

When morning comes, I apologise to him for being insensitive. I tell him I’m stressed but I love him. He pulls me into a hug, kisses the top of my head and whispers that he loves me and just wants me to be happy. I stop myself from crying. I just plaster on a smile, tell him I am happy and send him on his way to work.

I have the same fake smile plastered on my face when I arrive at Joe’s house and offer an apology to Ciara and Kathleen, which I’m making to try to smooth the waters.

‘I’m sorry if I came across as clinical and cold last night,’ I say, trying my best to maintain eye contact even though it is almost physically painful to do so. ‘This is difficult. For us all. I was feeling stressed and I didn’t mean to upset anyone.’

They nod and we sit in uncomfortable silence until we hear the tinkle of the bell Kathleen gave Joe to summon us when he needs anything.

Ciara is first to her feet. I take the break in the awkwardness as a chance to move myself.

‘I’ll peel some potatoes for dinner. There’s chicken and veg there, too,’ I say, getting up and going to the kitchen, where I pull the bag of spuds from the vegetable rack and look for the peeler.

Kathleen is behind me before I’ve had the chance to shed even one slice of skin from the mud-covered potato in my hand.

‘Can I ask you something, Heidi?’ she says, and I turn to watch her sit down, wincing as she does so, on one of the kitchen chairs. ‘My knees,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘Seems all that road-running has left them in a bad way.’

I mumble something sympathetic and wait for the big ‘something’ she wants to talk to me about.

‘Why do you hate him?’ she says eventually, her eyes sad. ‘You always did. All those years when he just tried to look after you. You made it so hard for him, you know, but he never gave up on you. You never give him credit for that. I know he’s not perfect. Believe me. But does he really deserve to be hated?’

I blink at her. I don’t know what to say. Can she really not know?

I shrug, feeling a tingle of nervousness start at the top of my spine, enough to send little shockwaves through my head.

‘That’s it?’ she says with a strange laugh. ‘A shrug to explain it all.’

I shrug again, scraping at the potato with the peeler, not realising that my finger has moved perilously close to the blade. One strike and I take a layer of skin with it, yelping as I do so.

The sight of blood, which comes before the sting of the cut, makes me feel woozy.

Kathleen, sore knees and all, jumps to her feet, forces my bleeding finger under the running tap, and I watch the water turn pink, mingling with the soil from the potatoes as it hits the steel surface of the sink. I watch it. I feel the pain bite. I’m reminded of a release. Of a coping mechanism. Kathleen pulls my hand from the water, wraps a clean piece of kitchen towel around it, squeezing tight. So tight it’s painful.

‘Hold that for a bit,’ she says. ‘We’ll get a proper look at it in a minute. Does Joe have plasters?’

I nod to the thin cupboard beside the cooker, where Joe stores an old tin first-aid box.

‘I … I’m sure it’s just a scratch,’ I stutter. ‘I was … I was distracted.’ I can see the crisp white kitchen towel start to colour with my blood. I need to sit down.

‘You certainly were,’ Kathleen says, pausing for a moment, looking at me intently.

She hands me some more kitchen paper, then sets about fishing in the first-aid tin for a suitable dressing.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.