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There are things that creep up on you when you’re not looking. Getting taller, for instance. Acquiring breasts. Both had taken me by surprise in the last year. I was now nearly five foot one and wearing a training bra.
‘Growing up,’ Matty said.
I told him to sod off, which he claimed just proved his point.
My mother’s drinking crept up on us too. A glass of wine when she came in from work. That glass becoming two. Graduating to gin. With ice, then not bothering with the ice at all. Slowly, slowly, so I didn’t realise that what had started off as a habit was becoming a problem, topped off of course by the pills.
‘They said the guy from Ireland had light hair,’ I said another day. ‘Matty’s got dark hair now.’
She stared into her glass. Mumbled, ‘Mm’. I wasn’t sure if she was responding to what I’d said or passing comment on her drink. Either way, it wasn’t terribly satisfying.
Later, I went to phone Bea. I was hungry for details about what had happened in Ireland, thought she might know something I didn’t, given her father’s job. Already I was falling down the rabbit hole, grasping at straws.
An uneasiness was seeping into my veins, although I didn’t acknowledge what was causing it, that my mother’s doubts were changing the colour of me, like the celery experiment we did at school. The cells drinking up dyed water, morphing the stick from green to red.
She was on the line when I picked up the phone in my room. It sounded as though she’d been crying.
‘I just can’t shake the feeling he’s involved.’
Chrissake. Not again.
I was replacing the receiver in the cradle when Nanna G’s voice on the other end stilled my hand.
‘Maybe it’s time you called the police. . .’ she said.
The beginning of the end. For all of us.
