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Forcing myself to concentrate on the road in front of me and not the girl sitting beside me, I flicked on my indicator and pulled onto the slip road for the city.
“Cinema, it is,” I replied in as breezy a tone as I could muster while on the inside I was burning the hell up.
28Substitute Parents
SHANNON
I spent all of Saturday babysitting my youngest brother, Sean, which was the norm whenever Mam was working and Nanny decided to take a trip to Beara to visit Aunty Alice and her family.
The difference this weekend was that our father was gone, and our mother was missing.
I knew a storm had been brewing. My gut was always right.
After Johnny dropped me home last night, there was a blazing row that resulted in my father beating the living shit out of me, mostly over that stupid newspaper clipping that he still wouldn’t let drop. Mam dragged him off me, earning herself a slap in the face for her troubles. She ordered him to leave and never come back.
Dad proceeded to fill the family car with everything he owned, called both me and Mam a pack of whores, and sped off steaming drunk.
Mam had hurried out of the house an hour later with an overnight bag, climbed into a taxi, and hadn’t been seen since.
It wasn’t uncommon for our mother to storm off after an argument. However, it was rare for her to not come back.
I knew she would come back. It was just a matter of when.
I also knew my father would be back. It gave me no comfort watching him leave last night. That wasn’t the first time he had been told to go. And it wasn’t the first time he had beaten me to a pulp. Sooner or later, he would be back, promising heaven and delivering hell.
Nothing would change. It never did.
Tadhg, Ollie, and Sean might believe he was gone for good, but Joey and I knew better.
Without our parents’ presence, it was down to Joey and me to fend for our younger siblings.
When there was no sign of either of our parents this morning, Joey sacrificed his own training session with the Cork team so he could take Tadhg and Ollie to a football blitz they were both playing in. I was left with Sean, who had spent the best part of the day screaming for Mam.
It was a disaster.
Countless phone calls to our mother had gone unanswered, so I had given up trying to get ahold of her.
Setting to work on the bottomless list of jobs allocated to me on a weekly basis, I cleaned the house from top to bottom, washing down skirting boards and changing all the bedsheets as I went. By eight o’clock Saturday evening, I had gone through four loads of laundry, cooked both lunch and dinner for my brothers, bathed and dressed Sean for bed, and cleaned the house to within an inch of my life.
It hadn’t lasted, of course. As soon as the boys stomped through the front door, the chaos and mess had resumed.
Balancing a bowl of Coco Pops in one hand and a cup of milk in the other, I used my hip to push the sitting room door open and stepped inside.
“Here you go, Sean.”
Setting the bowl and sippy cup down on the coffee table in front of my baby brother, I ruffled his curly blond locks, then stood up and stretched my back.
“Eat it all up before bed,” I added, groaning in relief when I felt the muscles in my back click back into place.
I was in so much pain it was hard to walk a straight line.
“I want Mammy,” Sean replied, pouting at his cereal. “Mammy’s gone.”
“Mammy’s at work, Sean,” I repeated the same sentence I’d told him fifty times today. Striving for patience, I added, “She’ll be home soon,” and then hurried out of the room before he had a chance to ask when.
I didn’t have an answer for him and I hated lying to him.
The truth was, I didn’t know when Mam would be back.
