Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
MARTHA
‘I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with it.’
It was a letter from the mortgage company. My mother had forwarded it. I was back in Dublin, cleaning out the kitchen cupboards while Madame Bowden watched me from a high stool, sipping an herbal tea that made her face wince every time she tasted it.
‘But it’s your home.’
‘This is my home!’ I hadn’t meant to shout. ‘I mean, as long as you’re happy to have me.’
She smiled knowingly. What did she know? I read her face. She believed I would be here for the rest of my life. Well, I wasn’t so sure about that.
‘I don’t care what happens to that apartment. The bank can keep it. Burn it down for all I care. I could never live there again.’
‘My dear, the bank has quite enough wealth as it is. Why don’t you sell it?’
I didn’t want to have this conversation. I didn’t want to think about Shane or what had happened.
‘I don’t know, maybe.’
‘You might not think it matters now, but trust me, in time you’ll wish you had taken what is rightfully yours. Think of it as compensation.’ She said the final part as though it were a matter of fact.
It made my skin crawl. Nothing could ever compensate for what he did and nothing could erase the blame I carried for his death. But, right or wrong, whenever I thought of my mother’s words – the first words I had ever heard her speak, I’m glad he’s dead – I didn’t feel so bad. I was finally free and Madame Bowden was right, I couldn’t waste this chance.
* * *
Evenings were the hardest. The need to speak to Henry was such a strong physical urge, I had to leave the house and just keep walking until it stopped. Despite everything else that was going on, my thoughts still went back to him and how he had just left. Maybe it was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, blocking his number, but it was self-preservation too. I didn’t want to hear his reasons or have to listen while he let me down gently. I could no longer read him and that frightened me to death. It felt like walking a high wire with no safety net. I had fallen in love with him and no one knew better than I what a risk that was. I couldn’t – wouldn’t – let that happen again.
It didn’t help that my feet took me past all of the places we had been together. I found myself standing outside Pen Corner and thought of his crooked smile, the sound of his voice when he spoke French, his warm breath on my neck. It was late and the shop was closed. I let my forehead touch the window as I looked at the display of pens and notebooks.
That was when it happened: in the golden glow of the window, all of the words came rushing to me. I could see them in my mind’s eye – the smallest handwriting, neat like stitching in dark thread. All of the words, lines and lines of a strangely dark story pouring into my mind. I could hardly catch my breath. I was so excited I ran as fast as I could in the direction of the tattoo parlour.
* * *
‘Look, best I can do is Tuesday,’ she said.
A young guy with half a tiger blazing on his arm was sitting in the chair.
‘I just, I feel like I need to do it now, as soon as possible.’
‘I get it,’ tiger man said. ‘Sometimes you just gotta strike while the iron’s hot.’
‘Exactly,’ I said, slightly out of breath. ‘He gets it.’
‘Okay, I could make a start when I’m finished here, but I won’t be able to do the whole thing.’
I told her that was fine and grabbed a pen and paper while I waited, in case I forgot the words. But it didn’t seem possible to forget this time. They were emblazoned on my brain. The sound of the needle carried on until it was my turn. I lifted my jumper to show her where the lines would go. She needed a magnifying glass – I wanted to keep the writing as small as it had appeared to me.
‘Um, hang on, what did you say the final line was again?’
‘“ Cold as marble. She was dead. ”’
‘It’s already here.’
‘What? It can’t be.’
She brought me to a full-length mirror and gave me another smaller one to hold in my hand. My back was covered. The entire story was already inked on my skin.
‘That’s weird,’ she said.
It wasn’t weird. It was impossible. And yet there it was.
‘It’s a cool story.’ She was trying to make the situation a little less weird by completely ignoring the look of shock on my face and focusing on what was real. I tried to do the same.
‘Yeah.’ That was all I could manage.
‘Kind of gothic.’
She gently reminded me that she wanted to close up now and apparently I didn’t need a tattoo after all.
* * *
I couldn’t even remember walking home. I let myself in as quietly as possible. Madame Bowden was watching the TV she said she wouldn’t use, at a volume that would wake the dead. Walking into my basement flat, I saw it with new eyes. Everything was brighter, clearer. As I took my jacket off and hung it on the hook, my body felt different. I felt physically stronger and freer, as though my muscles had been released from some invisible restraints. I looked at my neat little bed and the branches of the tree growing in an arch over it, the kitchenette with its pretty wall tiles, which I had thought were plain blue but were now patterned with little flowers. I realised that I loved living here and weirdly, just as I had read in Madame Bowden’s face, I suddenly felt like I never wanted to leave. Like I belonged here. But why?
I put a saucepan of milk on the little stove and made myself a hot chocolate with two spoons of Nutella, an old trick my mother used to do for me when I was a child. I laid my quilt and pillows on the floor and tried to quieten my mind. Not an easy task after discovering the completed tattoo. Where had the story come from and what did it mean? It was very old, that was clear. The language was old-fashioned. And why had it come to me? These thoughts were interrupted by another question that I’d refused to address since I got back. Could my mother always speak? If so, why had she kept silent? I couldn’t make sense of it. When I was young, she used to tell me that it was a special gift because she could hear things better.
I drank my hot chocolate and let the rich hazelnut flavours take me back in time. Again, I tried to quieten my thoughts and just listen. By now, I was used to the creaking and cracking of the branches stretching across the walls of my room. But there was another sound now, a kind of soft breathing … in and out. Maybe it was my own breath. Maybe not. There was something about this place. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I picked up my book, A Place Called Lost. The story continued with the man who had taken the old library all the way from Italy to Ireland. He had very little money, but he began building his shop with his bare hands on a small patch of forgotten land down a cobbled laneway. He was a man who believed that the imagination was the greatest tool of all. His clever wife believed that love trumped all, and together they built a shop of memories and dreams from the mysterious Italian library. In no time at all and in the way that often happens, the very things they had hoped to fill the shop with found their way to them. Treasures from all over the world began to fill the shelves that had once buckled under the weight of books. The building was pleased with its new surroundings, although it had not lost its innate desire to point visitors in the direction of their true north. Items would tumble off the shelves (a particular hazard in wintertime when Mr Fitzpatrick liked to stock an array of snowglobes).
Soon the couple welcomed their first child, a son. Mr Fitzpatrick imagined the day when he would take over the shop, but it was not to be. A woman with an English accent who wore trousers and a man’s haircut was to become the unlikely custodian. She had no idea that she was joining a long line of specially chosen people to guard this portal of discovery. Fortunately, she loved books and soon she and Mr Fitzpatrick’s Nostalgia Shop got along extremely well indeed.
An Englishwoman with a love of books? The book was about this place, about Opaline. Henry had been right all along. What had drawn him to this place, to this story? I thought about the missing manuscript and the woman he had said owned a bookshop next door. Opaline. Like following a knitting pattern, I could see that everything was linked, but I had no idea how or why or what the end result would be.