Page 51 of All Our Missing Pieces

I remembered what she’d told us – fragments, really, scattered through various conversations over dinner in the kitchen.

‘She’s been all over the place, right?’ I said. ‘Africa, Asia, South America. And now she’s here.’

Luke nodded. ‘I wonder if she would’ve come back. If it hadn’t been for the house, I mean?’

A thought struck me. ‘I wonder if she was running away from something. And the house was like – I don’t know. An excuse to come back.’

‘It was never her home, though. She’s not even from London; she grew up in Ireland.’

‘She did?’ Orla had never told me that, but it would explain the ghost of an accent I’d noticed in her voice, long since overlaid, almost erased, by having spent time in other places with people who spoke differently.

‘That’s what she said. She studied fine art, same as me, only at Trinity College in Dublin.’

There was a note of something almost like reverence in Luke’s voice and I wondered how he felt about having been so passionate about something and then having had to put it aside to paint walls instead of pictures.

‘And now she’s getting to be an artist again,’ I said. ‘Maybe you will, too.’

‘Maybe I will. If I’m any good, I guess I’ll have to find a way.’

I remembered the pictures he’d shown me: the bold, abstract canvases with their sweeps of brilliant colour, the way he could capture the essence of a person with a few strokes of a pen.

‘You are good.’

‘That’s what you told me, like, ten minutes ago.’

I laughed. ‘Not at that. Well, at that too.’

Luke stretched, releasing me from the cradle of his arm. ‘Anyway, you’ll get to meet Rachel, if you want.’

‘What? When?’

‘Her best mate Belinda’s having a Halloween party. It’s her thing – she’s obsessed with it. Does it every year, plans it months in advance. She texted me and asked if I’d come and I said I’d think about it. She and I always got on well. She said Rachel wouldn’t mind and I could bring someone if I wanted.’

‘Wouldn’t that be weird?’ Meeting Luke’s ex-girlfriend certainly felt like it would be weird. But even more than that – I had the sensation I’d had before, when I saw Emily or went to the pub after work, of a life outside of Damask Square that I almost ceased to be aware of when I was here. When I was with Luke.

‘She’ll have to meet you sooner or later. It wasn’t a bad break-up and we’ve got loads of friends in common, and anyway – I mean, you’re part of my life now, right?’

His words gave me such a thrill of pleasure that I forgot all about Orla and her past and even about Rachel – at least for the time being.

THIRTY-TWO

14 AUGUST 2005

Another morning, another sleepless night. I feel hollowed out with tiredness and unable to focus on anything. The words on this page are blurry and coming even more slowly than usual. I cannot paint – when I sit in front of a blank canvas there seems no point in marking it with a brushstroke or line of charcoal. When sweet Luke called me up to the first floor yesterday to show me the newly stripped panelling there, I could barely summon any enthusiasm, even though I could see how wonderful it looks.

Around me, the house is slowly coming back to life, the warmth of summer seeming to bring its blood rushing through its veins. The garden exploding in fruitfulness – the blackberries are ripening and the gnarled old apple tree is laden with fruit. Thanks to the Preservation Trust grant, I paid some electricians to do the rewiring, and I have a man coming next week to quote on repairing the roof.

But inside I am cold as ashes – as lifeless as this place was when I first moved in.

My thoughts return constantly to that contact register. The damn legislation. I don’t even know what the register looks like – I imagine it being a book, a heavy, dusty tome, although in reality it’s probably a database on a server somewhere. Either way, it is a source of torment to me, like a cancer growing inside me. Like how I felt before she was born – as if I had been infected by some parasite.

All I wanted was to be rid of it – this thing that was growing inside me, threatening to destroy me. But I couldn’t wish it away or even purge myself of it through violence – although God knows I tried; in a lifetime of riding horses, I never fell as often or as hard as in those few months.

That was how my grandmother found out – not through the changing shape of my body, which I hid beneath an old-fashioned girdle unearthed from a trunk of my mother’s clothes, but because I appeared to have lost the ability to stick on a horse. And once she knew, it was all over – there was no escaping her and the help she promised me.

No one would know, she said. Only her and the nuns at the clinic. No one would ever find out. Once I had resigned myself to the fact that I would have to go through with it, something changed: I felt a kind of acceptance and then something almost like fascination. What was growing inside me was a person. I would never know her – thanks to the slow circling of my mother’s wedding ring on a string over my belly, I was sure this would be a daughter – but I could see her, just briefly, hold her and then say goodbye.

But it didn’t turn out like that. I tried so hard – I really did. Goaded by the midwives, who told me I was being a silly girl, weak and cowardly as well as sinful, I tried. Truly, I did. If my grandmother hadn’t intervened and insisted a doctor be called, I would have died and so would she. As it was, we were both saved. Saved by the oblivion of a general anaesthetic and a knife through my skin.