Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
N iall’s house was set back off the road, but you could still see it from the pavement if you peered through the trees along the wall. If it were mine, I’d have cut them back. I’d want to be able to see if anyone was walking by, especially at night where someone could hide and not be seen.
Drangan wasn’t a hotspot for burglaries, for obvious reasons, but I do remember when O’Callaghan’s was broken into when they were asleep upstairs. The whole shop was a tip and Mrs O’Callaghan wouldn’t sleep there for a week. In fact, she went off to some retreat in Kilkenny because she was so shaken up by it all.
The burglars took some food, a whole heap of alcohol, and Mr O’Callaghan’s video camera that he’d left downstairs. It was the talk of the village for months afterwards because an inmate at Co Laois prison had escaped the week before. He’d been involved in some kind of government hacking and blackmailing scam, and everyone thought it must have been him.
I couldn’t work out what a high-end criminal would want with Mr O’Callaghan’s video camera. Una was convinced Mr O’Callaghan must have been a secret agent for MI5, but either way, it made the National newspapers and I was pretty sure there was talk of it being added to the Visit Drangan noticeboard (that nobody outside of the village actually read because nobody ever visited).
There was a little green wooden gate at the bottom of Niall’s overgrown garden. It was so rotten it barely opened so I had to lift it up to get through. Niall had said he wouldn’t replace it until it had fallen down because it was food for the beetles.
Niall opened his porch door in a pair of ivy-green shorts that matched the gate and windows and I stared at them for longer than I meant to because I’d never seen his legs before. He had on a T-shirt that looked slightly too small for him and I was surprised at how muscly his arms were because he didn’t strike me as the sort of person who worked out.
‘I just came to give you these.’ I reached out my hand with the shop keys dangling from my fingers.
‘Thanks,’ he said as he took them from me. ‘You’re really going then?’
‘Yep.’
‘When’s your flight?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘How are you getting to the airport?’
‘Una is taking me.’
He nodded.
‘You’ll have to serve Maggie Ryan while I’m away,’ I laughed.
‘We’ll be hiring someone else to cover you,’ Niall said bluntly.
‘You can’t do that, they might take my job,’ I said jokingly, but I meant it really.
‘You might not come back,’ Niall said just as cryptically.
‘Of course I’ll come back,’ I said defensively.
‘You might decide to stay out there if things go well.’
‘It’s only a couple of weeks, Niall.’
‘You never know.’
‘It’s just a holiday.’ I said it casually, like it was no big deal, but it was the biggest deal of my life.
‘A lot can change in a couple of weeks.’
‘Like these windows?’ I looked up at the peeling green. ‘You really need to paint them.’
‘I like them green.’
‘They’re so dull and dark.’
‘Like me, you mean?’
‘Paint them ocean blue and I might change my mind,’ I said as I turned to walk away.
‘Pearl?’ Niall called me back.
I turned to face him.
‘Yep?’
‘Do you ever think about when we were younger?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Our childhood, walking home together, stuff like that…’
‘I guess, why?’ I said confused.
‘Do you remember when we’d sneak downstairs to the shop and steal biscuits?’
‘Hah, I’d forgotten about that.’ I laughed.
‘Really?’ Niall sounded surprised and slightly taken aback.
‘It was a long time ago. Besides, I don’t tend to dwell too much on the past and what biscuits we stole.’
‘But what if it helps you move forward?’ Niall looked at me intensely.
‘What do you mean?’ I studied him back.
‘I just mean it’s good to look back sometimes,’ Niall concluded.
‘I’m too excited about my future to be thinking about my past.’
‘So you’re happy then?’ Niall held my stare.
‘That’s a weird thing to ask me, of course I’m happy,’ I said, even more confused. Although I’d never actually asked myself that question – if I was happy? ‘Why are you asking me this stuff?’ I narrowed my eyes in the hope that Niall might talk some sense instead of in riddles, because I hated riddles.
‘Hold on,’ Niall said as he disappeared out of sight and then reappeared with a small, wrapped parcel in his hand, no bigger than the length of my thumb. ‘Something for your travels.’ He passed it to me.
‘What is it?’
‘Open it at the airport,’ he said and before I could thank him he shut his ivy-green door.
* * *
It was a short walk to my parents’ house from Niall’s. They live in a bungalow around the corner from Ellie’s bakery, which was a sin in itself because my father used to stop in and buy pasties on his way home from the office and my mother would get mad when he was too full to eat his supper.
My dad worked in the centre of Drangan. When I say centre, I mean his office was between the shop and Una’s salon. It wasn’t a big office, just him and his receptionist, Mona, who worked for him until he retired, even though she was long past retirement age herself. Mona died two months after that and everyone said it was the boredom that killed her. She left behind two sausage dogs (Enid and Blyton) that Ellie from the bakery adopted because nobody could bear to see them taken away and re-homed.
Like Niall’s, my parent’s house is set back from the road, but the garden is pristine and the house can be seen clearly from all angles. Growing up, I likened it to a goldfish bowl. There was no privacy, not really, which wasn’t great for someone like me, who needed her privacy.
My parents spend most of their time in the garden since my dad retired, which sounds like a cliché but it is true. My mum has developed an obsession with feeding the birds. In the winter she’ll be out there twice a day, topping them up with tubs of breadcrumbs, seeds, and sultanas soaked in milk. In the summer, she’ll do it once a day. The birds eat better than my mum and dad do.
During the autumn months, she’ll wait for hours to see a breeze of swallows (that’s what they’re called when they fly together in large numbers) leave for Africa. She’ll sit with a blanket and a cup of tea in the summerhouse my dad bought for her, just to get a glimpse of them passing.
My dad has a different obsession. He will spend the entire time trying to find the mole that digs up the garden. He’s spent more money on traps than on the garden itself and none of them actually work. I think he secretly enjoys the mole humps popping up in different spots every morning. I think he would miss them if they disappeared.
My parents were in the garden when I arrived. Neither of them noticed me at first and I watched them for a moment, in their own little worlds, happy. And then the thought of leaving hit me like a thump in the night. What the hell was I doing? How the hell was I going to get on a plane and fly to the other side of the world when I couldn’t even get to the other side of the village without going back and starting all over again?
I hadn’t opened Niall’s gift, it was on my passenger seat next to my wipes. I’d already wiped it down and made the paper it was wrapped in soggy. But if I couldn’t even take a package from someone I knew, how would I manage the airport?
‘Hello, love.’ My mum looked up from her birdseed tray. ‘Everything OK?’ She always knew when something was wrong.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye as I’ll be leaving early in the morning,’ I said, even though I had already begun to talk myself out of it.
‘Isn’t your flight in the afternoon?’
‘I want to get there nice and early.’
‘Your father and I think you’re being very brave.’ She smiled, half-heartedly. ‘But we are worried about you going, love,’ she added.
‘Why?’ I said even though I knew why. But I felt defensive all of a sudden. I was twenty-seven not seventeen.
‘Does this Jock even know you’re coming?’ my dad quipped up.
‘It’s Jack, Dad.’
‘We’re just a bit concerned, love,’ my mother interrupted. ‘It’s a huge thing to do when you don’t really know him.’
‘I’m not moving out there, Mum,’ I said defiantly.
‘We just want you to be careful. Could you not invite him back over sometime or just keep in touch for a while?’
‘You’re the one always saying I should go on holiday.’
‘I meant with Una.’
‘This will be one of those once-in-a-lifetime trips that I can finally say I’ve done.’
‘But it’s such a leap.’
‘Mairéad says leaps are good.’
‘To the other side of the world?’
I shrugged. I knew what my mum was getting at. The thing was, I was committed now. More committed than my mum with the birds or my dad with the moles, and I couldn’t just turn that off. I had to see it through, whatever seeing it through actually meant.
Whilst I hadn’t been diagnosed with ADHD, I knew I had that too. I ticked every box: socially awkward, daydreamer, easily overwhelmed at the smallest of things, I could never unwind, I talked over people when I was nervous but could feel crushingly shy at the same time, and I could become fixated on someone without even knowing them, like Jack. The problem was combined with my OCD and there was no stopping me. And my mum knew that.
So while I could easily have talked myself out of it, I also knew that I could have just as easily talked myself into it.
And so that was exactly what I did.