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She swayed, unable to engage with the increasingly urgent voice coming down the phone asking if she was okay, if there was anyone she could call.
No, there wasn’t, Georgie thought absently. She was now, truly, alone.
*
Shalib placed a cup of his strongest coffee before Nola. It was laced with a mixture of spices she knew were meant to calm her down, but she had a feeling that there was no blotting out this pain.
Her father had passed away peacefully at home. The news washed over Nola like a freezing tide, numbing her, so it felt as if she was looking in at everything from somewhere just beyond her own reach. She’d hardly talked to him for years, until he’d reached out a few months earlier. His letters had become something she looked forward to, one a week, a small highlight in the grey vista of her existence here. She hadn’t been home in a decade, not since that awful party when she’d run out and sworn she’d never set foot in the same room as her sisters ever again.
But her father was dead and she couldn’t believe it. Now, so many years later, she could close her eyes and remember exactly what it felt like when he carried her on his shoulders down the beach on sunny afternoons in Ballycove. The memory filled her with intense, bleak loneliness. Nola knew she would have to travel back to Ireland for the funeral. Was it so bad to want to wriggle out of it?
‘What now?’ She had just begun her shift at the café when the call came through. It was the only address her father had to reach her. Somehow, a few months earlier, he’d tracked her down to here. She could imagine how it was – some cousin of a neighbour had probably spotted Ballycove’s once-famous actress clearing tables in a slightly shabby Moroccan coffee house. Yes. She could imagine it; the village news-bags would have had a field day with that nugget of gossip.
‘Of course you will have to go home,’ Shalib said, his voice firm but gentle. ‘Some things are more important than saving face, Nola.’ He smiled, shaking his head sadly.
‘Oh, Shalib, it’s not just that…’ She stopped for a moment. She couldn’t even cry. What on earth did that say about her? ‘I’m not sure I belong there. So much happened and, well, I haven’t been much of a daughter these past few years.’
‘He would want you there.’ Shalib’s voice was low and certain.
‘You don’t know that,’ Nola said, her voice hollow.
‘I know he was proud of you.’
‘After my mother died he hardly noticed any of us for ages and then my sisters left home and I just sort of got on with life as best I could.’ She thought back to that dark time, and shuddered. Everything had gone to pieces and Nola was too young then to know how to put it back together and ever since, even if she’d wanted to, she still wasn’t sure how to go about making things right.
‘Nola. He had lost the love of his life; he was a man drowning in grief. That doesn’t mean he loved you any less.’
‘That’s not the point. He was my father, my only remaining parent, and he was supposed to look after me. Anyway, how do you know he still loved me? You sound so sure…’ Nola looked into his eyes, wanting to believe him more than anything.
‘I know what it is to be a parent. We don’t always get things right, but that doesn’t mean your bond was any less important to him.’
‘Oh, Shalib, we made a terrible mess of things, but I did love him.’ Now, she’d never be able to tell him. That made her gasp – the finality of it taking her breath away for a moment, as if some traitorous part of her was falling into unknown depths of sadness without her permission.
‘Nola, everyone just does their best. We may want to have done better, but we do our best.’
‘I haven’t gone home to see him in ten years.’ She was ashamed to admit it.
‘I’m sure he knew why that was.’ Shalib’s face creased into a thousand lines of kindness. ‘He would want you there now, supporting your sisters and showing the village that he still has a family to be proud of.’
‘It upset him so much that my sisters and I don’t speak to one another. He probably gave up hope long ago that we’d ever support each other the way proper sisters should.’ And then she was crying, great big tears leaking down her cheeks and falling onto the table, overwhelming her too much to even try and figure out whether she was crying for her father or the sisters she missed far more than she’d ever admit. She rubbed her eyes with a force that had less to do with drying her tears and more with heaving herself by sheer force out of this crushing sadness.
Shalib wouldn’t hear of her finishing her shift. As he gently ushered her out, he said, ‘There is no rush to come back to work. You will always have a place here.’ He pressed two weeks’ wages into her hand and she heard the latch pull across when he closed the door behind her.
That night after she booked the cheapest flight to Ireland she could find, sleep evaded her as her mind shuttled between memories of the past and thoughts of what lay waiting for her in Ballycove. Of course, her sisters knew that she wasn’t going to be up for an Oscar anytime soon, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t let them believe she wasn’t a jobbing actress in the West End. She began to cook up a plausible biography of her life in London. After all, thousands of people were employed in theatres all the year through. And she could be doing anything from understudy roles to bit parts to front-of-house – not that she hadn’t tried all these options in reality, but it seemed her meagre fame had worked against her. She was too well-known for some roles, not enough for others. She could even say she was acting as an agent for other actors. Georgie would probably be most impressed with that, even if she wouldn’t admit it.
Nola smiled, in spite of herself. She really could lose herself in this pretend life she was dreaming up for the benefit of her sisters. Although, was it really for their benefit? More likely it was for her own – after all,theyhad managed to get their hearts’ desires. Iris had got her comfortable suburban home and husband who she put up on a pedestal so long ago that she’d never see through him even if she wanted to. Nola shivered when she thought of Myles, even all these years later. The thought of him still made her skin crawl. How was it that she’d done nothing wrong, but she was the one left feeling guilty and somehow soiled by him? And Georgie? Georgie had achieved all that she’d ever wanted; Nola was quite sure of that. By now, she was probably the CEO or managing director or whatever the top job was at her company. She had oodles of cash and her bathroom was probably three times the size of Nola’s whole flat.
No. She deserved this. A little white lie or two couldn’t hurt for just a few days, could it? And already, just thinking of this dreamy make-believe life was lifting her spirits enormously.
*
Georgie rang.Georgie rang.Iris stood by the phone until it almost went into messages because Georgie hadn’t telephoned her in years. And even if the rational part of Iris knew her older sister wasn’t ringing with good news, still she felt her insides fight with each other in an eruption of joy and dread that even if she wanted to contain it, she couldn’t help which came out on top.
‘Hello.’ Iris heard her own voice, as formal as if she was answering the phone at work.
‘Iris?’ Georgie asked, as if she hardly recognised the person she’d just rung.
‘Yes.’
