Chapter 3
The next day I burst into the kitchen where Mam was cooking dinner after Ella’s dad, Michael, had dropped me off.
Since we were basically neighbours, it was normal for us to keep our sleepover traditions alive, staying up whispering into the early hours of the morning after nights out.
We were only a month into the first semester of fourth year at the University of Limerick, and I was already missing daily doses of Mam’s cooking.
“Jesus love, no need to take the door off the hinges, we’re excited you’re home too,” Mam deadpanned, not even looking up from the pan as she sprinkled feta over her masterpiece.
“Sorry! I was just making sure ye hadn’t already sat down without me,” I said, heading over to give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
I’d been living away from home for three years outside of the summer months, and as much as I adored my independence, nothing beat coming home to a hug from Mam and Dad, a dead arm from my brothers, and our weekly dinner and game night.
Mam and Dad had started the tradition when we were tweens, hoping that as we got older with lives of our own, we would always still come back to the nest one night a week to spend time together as a family.
Mam was an incredible cook and always made something to my tastes rather than appeasing the boys, who were more steak-and-spuds men.
“Where is everyone?” I asked as I swiped some asparagus from a serving dish while she swatted me away.
“Dad and Shea are pucking around down the lawn while Fionn critiques their form,” she answered with an eye roll.
I grabbed a can of Bulmer’s out of the fridge as I headed out to join them in the darkening garden. September was slipping by quickly with the days getting shorter, but any time we had a mild weekend, we always brought out the hurleys and made the most of the long, wide garden.
I found Fionn lounging in his chair on the decking.
“Your grip is all wrong, old man; it must be arthritis setting in,” he shouted out to Dad at one end of the garden while Shea hit him a long ball from the other end.
“Shut up, you little shitbag. I’d still wipe the floor with you,” he yelled back as he jumped and caught the high ball Shea pucked to him.
To be fair, he had a point; he probably still could have wiped the floor with all of us.
He had stayed extremely fit and was always pucking around out back with the hurley, reliving his glory days as a county all-star for the Cork Senior hurling team of 1992.
Sara and Sinéad had revelled in calling Daddy Tierney a DILF after their first stay in West Cork.
“Ah love, you’re home! Come over here and swap out while I hydrate,” he said as he walked towards his can of Coors on the table. I gave him a hug as I took the hurley off him, and pucked the sliotar around with Shea until Mam called us in for dinner.
I hoovered down the food, just enjoying the rambunctious chaos that surrouonded my family.
Shea had moved in with his girlfriend Sorcha and was living in the city and working as an engineer, but he still came home every week without fail for game night, working around Sorcha’s hectic schedule as she went back and forth to Dublin for work.
Fionn was doing an apprenticeship as a carpenter and living at home until he was qualified.
“Right, so what is it for tonight?” I asked as the boys and I cleared the table and washed up once we were all finished.
Dad side-eyed me. “It was Fionn's pick, so..."
“Not Buckaroo again! Jesus, Fionn, the game is for five-year-olds,” I exclaimed, whirling to face him while elbow deep in suds at the sink.
“It’s for all ages, and it’s my pick - so suck it up, buttercup” he grinned back.
God, he could be such a menace at times.
As much as I loved coming back to see my family at the weekends, there was something about all of us being together that made my brothers and I regress into kids again, mainly caused by Fionn's baiting and ridiculous pranks. But I had a slightly unhinged competitive streak that tended to bring out Shea’s slightly unhinged competitive streak, and ever since he threw a bottle at my head two years ago (after I throat-punched him), Monopoly had been banned from our game night options.
After numerous rounds of Buckaroo, which did turn out to be a hilarious game night option, we all turned in for the night.
I made my way to my room at the end of the hall to get into my PJs and give Sara a quick ring before bed to check how Freya had been doing that weekend.
Sara was one of the stars on the UL ladies Gaelic football team and in her final year of her Physical Education degree, so she would be at training tomorrow evening when we all crashed out on the couch for Monday reruns of Grey’s Anatomy.
It was a relief to see her relax and have fun with us Tuesday night, but I wasn’t sure she was coping all that well with Freya’s news. Something more seemed off with her, like she was hiding something, so I wanted to keep an extra close eye on her.
While it was an unseasonably warm September, the chill was really setting in at night and as I slipped under the covers with my phone in hand for some mindless scrolling, I nuzzled into the warmth of the hot water bottle Dad had slipped in here earlier for me.
He’d probably done the same for the boys too, but I doubted they appreciated the gesture the same way I did.
I was just flicking open Instagram when I rolled over to face my desk and noticed something felt different…
I kept looking around trying to pick what it was when I gasped.
I had photos lining my desk and walls of all the girls, and Fionn's head was now superimposed over a different person in each photo.
“FIONN!” I shouted, throwing the covers off me and jumping out of the bed.
I heard him snorting out in the hallway before his door slammed shut and I heaved a defeated sigh as I climbed back into bed.
I’d have an early start in the morning to make it back to college for my 9 a.m. meeting with the professor overseeing my thesis, so I was tired enough to let him have this round.
********
The next couple of weeks went by in a blur. Professor Walsh, who was guiding me through my thesis, had covered a few of the modules in my Law course over the past three years, and she was notoriously intimidating.
Dad had been buzzing when I got my place to study Law at UL, excited by the thought of me following in his footsteps.
The summers I had spent working at the office for his solicitor’s practice had certainly influenced my decision when I was choosing what course I wanted to pursue, but over the past few months, the life of a solicitor just seemed less and less appealing and more and more boring.
I hadn’t told anyone that the career path that made my heart thump with excitement was journalism, but after a terrifying first meeting with Professor Walsh, where I confided my deepest desire was to sack off my law degree and pursue journalism as a career, it finally felt like a possibility instead of a pipedream.
She’d had a lot to say about my writing style after reading my first draft for a thesis idea, but given my electives were politics and psychology, she’d filled me with all the advice and confidence I’d need to dominate my thesis.
Wanting to head in a different direction had always felt like those fanciful dreams we all succumb to when we’re younger, like when you asked a child what they wanted to be when they grew up and they answered a superhero or an astronaut.
The adults smiled adoringly at the little ones, their na?veté that they’d ever be anything interesting or deviate outside that perfect little box of normal.
In Ireland as a woman, you were typically put you into the buckets of a nurse or a teacher and that deemed you a success – and within the box deemed normal.
But why the hell couldn’t that kid be an astronaut? Okay, the superhero might have been a stretch, but who said any random kid couldn’t go into space?
When I was younger, my answer changed depending on which part of the world I felt was against me at the time.
At five years old, I wanted to be president of the United States.
A tad unrealistic, what with me being Irish and all, but it was peak timing of my brothers kicking the shit out of me, and my innocent subconscious obviously picked up enough to associate that title with power, and so I coveted it if only to be superior to my brothers.
At eight, I wanted to be a doctor; my Nana Biddy had just passed and I’d figured if I was a doctor I could have saved her and stopped Mam from crying.
There had been a general air of indulgence when this was my answer.
I was by no means a dunce in school, but I wasn’t top of the class either (apparently I talked too much), which I guessed at the age of eight meant I’d already been written off as not quite smart enough to be a doctor.
From twelve through to sixteen, my answer was always a member of An Garda Síochána, a soldier, a firefighter, or anything remotely connected to masculine stereotypes.
Didn’t take too much reflection to see that at this age I was very attuned to all the things people were telling me I couldn’t be, and it resulted in me carrying a chip the size of an asteroid on my shoulder.
The answer that had started to form to the age-old question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was changing, and at about sixteen, I had an answer I never gave a voice to in front of anyone except myself.