Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
I t’s like I don’t trust my own eyes. I can stare at something and see that it is off or closed or level or woodlice-free, but still question if it is. I still have to go back and check it over and over again.
When I lock a door, for example, and hear the lock click shut, I will pull and tug and unlock and lock that door until my hand hurts. Most of the handles in my house are loose. The irony is that I am the one that makes them less secure. That is why I count. It’s a form of control, a way to keep myself focused and calm.
I’ve often thought about what I must look like to other people. I remember the first time Una caught me at it. I was fifteen; I’d kept it a secret from her for a whole year.
She’d stayed over and walked in on me flicking my bedroom light switch on and off, while I counted repetitively to number ten. When she’d asked me why, I told her it was my safe number. And although I could tell she thought I was totally crazy, she never pushed me on it, and instead accepted me as me and I loved her for it.
Most people in the village know I have some quirks. They don’t know exactly what – I think my parents liked to keep it private when I was growing up – but they make life easy for me in ways that I will always love them for. Like Mr Dutson, who would always come out to fill my car for me when I was learning to drive with my dad (I still don’t have my licence) because he knew I hated holding the pump.
It began when he saw me trying to grip it with tissue and then completely freak out when I’d realised I’d left my antibacterial wipes at home and the shop was shut.
Ellie from the bakery is just as lovely. She always drops my change into my wallet so that I don’t have to touch it myself. It fell to the floor once and she actually came around from the side of the till and picked it up for me. Sally, the farmer’s wife up the lane, leaves a small bottle of sanitiser in her egg box because she knows I like to get them on my way home from the shop.
O’Callaghan’s sells eggs but I prefer them fresh from the chicken’s bottom , as my grandmother used to say. And I loved eating them until Una told me that eggs were actually chickens’ periods and that they came out of the same hole as their poo. It took me a whole year to start eating them again after that.
Sally has a cow in her field called Girl. She named her that because her and her husband bought it from Galway so Girl just seemed to fit. She is tame (I can rub her nose and between her ears for a few seconds before she runs off).
I used to take a shortcut through her field to the lane on my walk to school and hide my wellies in the hedge for the way back because the grass was so long my feet would get soaked. My mum would walk with me and we’d name all the different cars along the way depending on how fast they drove. For example, diarrhoea was for the boy racers (believe it or not, the odd one did pass through). I never did think about how that must have sounded, with me and my mum shouting diarrhoea as loud as we could.
But I enjoyed following the line of the hedge, sniffing at the wild honeysuckle that stuck out in random places, and daydreaming about what my life would have been like outside of Drangan.
When I was younger, I was convinced the white stripe around Girl’s belly glowed in the dark; at least that’s what my dad used to tell me and I was happy to believe him. Imagination was key, especially because I lived in the middle of nowhere, with only cows and honeysuckle for company.
My memory of the night before was hazy, although I was glad I’d woken up on my own and fully clothed. Una had texted me so much I had to put my phone on silent. I’d had five missed calls from her since the early hours and one voicemail. I daren’t listen to it in case Jack heard it – Una had a habit of shouting when she was excited.
Besides, I didn’t have time to speak to Una. I had to figure out what the hell I was going to offer Jack for breakfast. I’d completely forgotten to buy any food and the only thing I had to offer was one of Sally’s period eggs that was still covered in chicken shite.
* * *
It turned out Jack didn’t eat eggs (he was allergic to them, thank God) so the only thing I could offer him was porridge and peanut butter.
I couldn’t take him into town because I wasn’t prepared enough for that. How would I open the shop doors for example without him noticing it wasn’t with my hands (I used my elbows), and what if he used a public toilet? What if he needed a shit? He’d have to sit on the seat and then what? How would I get him to wash himself before he came home and sat on mine? What if his trousers or belt touched the basin? What then? How would I wash his clothes without him knowing? How would I get him to have a shower? It was too much to think about. And I’d exhausted myself doing all of that the first time he’d gone into Clonmel; I didn’t have the energy to do it all again.
I scurried around my kitchen in a desperate attempt to find something, anything, I could offer him when it hit me – he was a tourist in Ireland, he’d be happy with anything Irish.
I got to work straight away. It was still early. I had time. I chucked the butter, flour, sugar and baking soda into a bowl, with a pinch of salt, and poured in the milk. I used my fingers – strangely, I had no issues getting them mucky – to knead the dough and I wondered if my grandmother had ever made Irish bread for her lover (not that Jack was my lover). My grandmother had been in love with another man, she’d told me before she died, and I’d often wondered what her life would have been like if she’d followed her heart and not her head.
My grandfather was a good man, a stable man. He’d worked hard all his life and provided for her the way a man of his generation did. He’d loved my grandmother in his own way and she’d loved him back in hers, but I don’t think she was ever in love with him. Not in the way she had wanted to be. How could she have been when she was in love with someone else?
When it was ready, I took the bread out of the oven, then poured us both a cup of tea and waited. I waited until the tea went cold and the bread went hard. But he didn’t come down, and in the end, after I’d sent Una a message telling her what was happening, she convinced me to go up to check on him, so I did.
Only when I got to the spare room, Jack wasn’t in it and neither was his stuff.