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THREE
I was six when my mother and I moved to London from Newton, a sleepy suburb on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. She’d met my father in college, married him in her first year, dropped out in her second, given birth to me in what would have been her third.
By the time I was two, he was gone. My grandparents, fish on Friday Catholics, weren’t happy.
What did you do, Amelia-Rose? He just disappeared?
Divorce wasn’t something they or their neighbours approved of. In our town, there was a church on practically every street corner. Someone who knew you on every street corner too.
‘Why would he just leave?’ Nanna G asked for the umpteenth time, the pair of them forming a makeshift factory line at the kitchen sink. Nanna soaping the dishes, my mother drying them. ‘A man doesn’t just walk out on his wife and daughter.’
‘Well, this one did.’
My grandfather folded the Globe, set it on the coffee table, WOMAN’S BODY RECOVERED FROM THE CHARLES cut in half by the crease.
‘Your ma’s just trying to understand, sweetheart.’
He’d come over to the States when he was a boy. Over time he’d lost his hair but managed to keep his soft Dublin lilt. Nanna said she’d fallen in love with the accent then the man. In that order. His kindness is what would have drawn me, but his accent was beautiful, especially the jig of it when he sang.
My mother said my father had an accent too.
I don’t remember that.
Well, no, you wouldn’t.
It had been a lifetime since I’d heard his voice.
She put down the dishcloth, tucked her hair behind her ears.
‘Scooch over, Soph. Look at the funnies, shall we?’
I snuggled up to her, leaning my head against her shoulder as she read aloud. She could never get Jon Arbuckle sounding quite male enough but she did a great Garfield.
Nanna G tutted.
‘I’m trying to have a conversation with you, Amelia-Rose.’
That’s my abiding memory of her. Tuts and eye rolls and the face powder she applied so thickly it looked as if her skin were made of dust.
We lived with them after my father left, my mother and I sharing a bedroom in their clapboard house on Goddard Street, with the raccoons that woke me every night rifling through the garbage cans.
Fed up of the racket, I threw a cup of water out of the window one time, thinking to scare them off. The cup smashed into about fifty pieces leaving china splinters all over the driveway that ‘anyone could step on.’
‘You need to learn to think before you act,’ Nanna G scolded, sending me out with a dustpan and brush the following morning. ‘You’re too rash, missy. It’s going to land you in serious trouble one of these days.’
This was about Tommy Sinclair, not just my attack on the raccoons. My grandmother didn’t seem to care that the snotnose deserved the bashing I gave him. Or that he fought like a girl.
‘The behaviour has got to stop, do you hear? I can’t have you ending up like—’
Grandad shot her a warning look, gave his head a little shake.
‘Georgia. . .’
Sensing an ally, I stood my ground.
‘He said he didn’t blame my daddy for leaving us. I gave him a chance to take it back. What else was I supposed to do?’
Nanna waggled a finger in my face.
