‘We’ll decide
When I get outside, I feel physically ill. There’s a sour taste in my mouth, my skin is hot and my cheeks must be blooms of crimson. I don’t even know what I said back there, only that I mumbled something about having to go before I pushed past Sophie and fled down her hall.
All I want, despite everything, is to be back inside my house.
But when I turn, I find two uniformed Gardaí standing in front of it.
‘Hi there,’ the woman says, taking a step towards me. Her male colleague is leaning against my wall, looking bored. She points at the door. ‘This you?’
I have the key in my hand. I’ve stopped dead on the path, startled by the sight of them. My chance to pretend it isn’t, to just keep walking down the lane and disappear on to Main Street and act like this can’t have anything to do with me, has already passed.
Plan B: don’t panic. Act like a normal person. React like one.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’
Their uniforms – navy utility trousers and stiff neon jackets – make them look like electricians from the waist down and food-delivery from the waist up. He seems impossibly young, a teenager in a stolen uniform, while her too-tight ponytail and harsh eye make-up are ageing her.
I didn’t think they were allowed to wear make-up, but maybe things have changed since my last encounter with An Garda Síochána.
‘I’m Garda Murphy and this is Garda Grennan,’ she says. ‘We’re following up on a call to the station last night, reporting a break-in?’
‘Oh – no. Sorry.’ I try to look embarrassed. ‘We called back. It was a false alarm.’
‘What happened?’ Murphy asks.
‘I thought I heard something … I’ve just moved in, and there’s nothing in there yet, and it’s been vacant …
So it’s a bit, you know, cold and creepy.
My imagination got the better of me and I sent my next-door neighbour a very dramatic text.
’ I try to look more embarrassed. ‘He called you before he came round – but when he did, there was no one there. I’m so sorry for wasting your time, I—’
‘We’ll decide what’s a waste of our time,’ Grennan says, cutting me off.
He’s straightened up and is studying me. Murphy has taken out a notebook and is scanning one of its pages.
‘The man who called,’ she says. ‘Your neighbour? He said this was the second break-in in less than twenty-four hours.’ She looks up at me. ‘That true?’
I fold my arms, then unfold them in case I appear defensive.
‘I’ve already called a locksmith,’ I say. ‘And they didn’t take anything.’
Murphy raises an eyebrow that has been pencilled in with a too-dark shade of brown and too much pressure. ‘I thought you said there was no one there, that it was just your imagination.’
‘I mean the first time. Yesterday. A guy tried to come in the patio door, but my neighbour ran him off. The listing is still online and the FOR SALE sign was still up then too. It was just a house-hunter with bad manners. No big deal.’
I realize that, at some point while I was saying that, I folded my arms again.
Movement then, in my peripheral vision.
I turn to see someone hovering in the doorway of number three, watching us.
An elderly woman, painfully thin, with a nest of wiry white hair piled on top of her head.
This must be Annalise, who hoped my house was happy at long last and doesn’t know how to edit WhatsApp messages.
She has a phone in her hand right now – and the way she’s holding it sets an air-raid siren wailing inside my head.
Upright, with both hands, close to her stomach.
Like she’s trying to take a sneaky picture.
Of me.
I whip around to turn my back to her far too fast for it to look natural. Grennan’s attention slips over my shoulder on to Annalise, and he frowns.
‘Do you mind if we come in?’ Murphy asks.
‘What for?’
The guards exchange a glance.
‘It’s Ellie, right?’ Murphy flips to a fresh page of her notebook and produces a pen. ‘Ellie what?’ When I don’t answer immediately, she clarifies, ‘Your last name,’ as if the issue here is my comprehension.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m not trying to be difficult. But is this really a Garda matter?’
Murphy gives me a long look, then starts to scrawl something illegible. ‘Just because a house is vacant,’ she says, keeping her eyes on the page, ‘doesn’t mean it’s open to the public in the middle of the night.’
‘How did they get in?’ Grennan asks me.
I realize, on a delay, I should’ve corrected Murphy, since I’m apparently pretending that no one was actually here last night.
‘I’d left the patio door unlocked,’ I say.
‘And you need a locksmith to, what?’ Grennan is smirking now. ‘Remind you not to do that?’
Murphy flips her notebook closed.
‘All right, look,’ she says, throwing a warning glance at her colleague.
‘We’ll put this address on our patrol for the next couple of nights.
’ From a pocket, she produces a little card; when she hands it to me, I take it.
‘I’d recommend you put the number for the station into your phone, too, so you can call us direct if you need to.
We’re just around the corner and we’re open twenty-four hours. ’
‘Great,’ I say.
And I mean that, because it means they’re leaving.
But then Murphy asks, ‘Where are you from, Ellie? I feel like we’ve met somewhere before.’
‘Here,’ I say. ‘And no, we haven’t.’
‘You seem very sure about that.’
‘I don’t often speak to guards. I’d remember.’
Murphy gives me another long look. Grennan clears his throat, as if to signal that he’s bored of this now, and moves to go.
‘Call us,’ she says then. ‘If you need us.’
I nod and say I will and step up to my front door.
I unlock it with trembling fingers. I push inside, letting the door swing shut behind me, and stride down the hall without looking back.
I go into the kitchen, step to the right and slam my back against the wall just as my body finally gives up, gives in, spent and emptied by all the pretending.
I let my legs bend, sliding awkwardly towards the floor, then falling to it, and stop trying to mask the ragged breaths, ignore the rapid heartbeat, contain the spill of tears.
I don’t understand how everything has gone so wrong here, so quickly.
It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.
But then I see, through the glass of the patio door, the Harrington Properties FOR SALE sign leaning against my side of the dividing wall, and I think that maybe, actually, I do.
The two oily, muscular young men in shiny suits sitting behind the desks in Harrington Properties look up in confusion as I stride past, holding one of their FOR SALE boards across my chest like an axe.
‘Can I help—?’ one of them starts to say, rising from his seat, but I’m already within reach of the door at the back that leads to their boss’s office. I ignore him and push it open.
Deirdre Harrington is sitting behind a large computer screen, dressed in what I’ve come to recognize as her uniform: tailored trousers, button-down shirt, silk scarf spread across her shoulders and tied in an artful knot beneath her chin.
Glossy red nails. Black glasses with thick, angular frames, which she’s taking off now as she turns to look at me.
The pattern on the scarf is the only thing that changes. Even the expression on her face stays the same: mild annoyance, braced for escalation. It’s a look that says, You again? What now? What new way are you going to fuck up my day?
But then, that might just be reserved for me.
‘People are letting themselves into my house,’ I announce as I half drop, half throw the board on to the floor with one hand and slam the door closed behind me with the other.
‘In the middle of the day and in the middle of the night. Because they think no one lives there.’ My voice is rising and I let it.
‘Because you still have listings for it up all over the place that you can’t be bothered to take down.
Like your sign, which I had to take down for you.
I just had the guards at my door because of it.
’ But I can’t sustain this. My voice is getting shaky now, losing power, my emotions getting the better of me. ‘Because of you.’
I hear the door open again.
‘Coffee?’ a timid voice asks. ‘Water?’
Deirdre says, ‘Fuck off, Simon,’ and waves him away.
The door clicks shut.
That’s how long it takes for the last of my anger to leak out of me. I feel tears threatening and I think Deirdre sees them. She sighs in resignation and gestures for me to sit down.
Deflated and defeated, I obey.
‘Always lovely to see you,’ she says wryly.
‘First of all, we did take down the sign. Friday morning. You’re welcome.
We took down the one people could actually see, on the corner of the dentist’s on Main Street.
No one could see that’ – her eyes flick to the board I’ve left on the floor – ‘unless they walked up the lane, which is probably why whoever went out to remove them missed it.’
‘The listings are the real problem,’ I protest.
‘Yeah, well, it cost us money to put them up. To take the photos. To show the house. To print the materials. And after what happened, I doubt we’ll ever get paid.
I thought, considering the circumstances, you wouldn’t begrudge us leaving everything up for a while.
At least get some advertising for the company out of them.
’ She sighs. ‘But fine. They’ll be gone by the end of the day.
’ She picks up a pen and scribbles something on a legal pad by her elbow. ‘How are people getting in?’
‘Someone else must have a key.’
‘I doubt that. There was only one set, according to the solicitor. No spare. I remember him warning us about it. And we gave them to you.’
‘But nothing was broken or damaged.’
‘What did the guards say?’
I hesitate. ‘I told them I was going to change the locks.’
Not a lie, although not quite an answer to her question.
‘And have you?’ she asks.
‘I will.’
‘Well, then, problem solved.’ Deirdre moves to push her chair away from the desk. ‘If there isn’t anything else, I have a viewing in Stillorgan to get to, so …’