We aren’t going to a normal cinema, where you sit among a crowd of texting teenage boys chomping their way through giant hot-dogs. This is a cinema club, held in our local theatre at five o’clock every Sunday during the school term. It started up again last week after the summer break. The movies are (you may have suspected this) foreign and, between the craft beers and Basque-inspired tapas, the whole business is mortifyingly middle-class.
But the girls like it. In fact, honesty compels me to admit that I like it. The films themselves are a mixed bag: some are charming and some – particularly the Iranian ones – downright baffling. But the best thing is that Neeve often comes along and observes a ceasefire. After the film, more often than not with Sofie’s Jackson also in tow, we go to Wagamama and discuss how mental the film was (if it had been and, happily, it usually had).
In its ordinary way, the whole ritual makes me grateful for everything, and one short week ago, it had summed up my life. Now it’s horrifying that I hadn’t savoured every wonderful second of it. Like everyone, my focus had been on my worries – Neeve carrying on with ‘My Real Dad is the Best Man Ever’, poor Sofie and her struggles with food, and my perpetual anxieties about money. Instead I should have been full of gratitude.
‘Come on!’ Hugh shouts from downstairs. ‘The car park will be full!’
You know, I’m even nostalgic about his perpetual irritation from living with a household of tardy women.
‘Is Sofie coming today?’ I ask Kiara.
‘I don’t know. She’s not answering Dad’s texts.’
She was ignoring mine too, and I’m suddenly furious with Hugh all over again because he’s not just leaving me he’s leaving all of us. I’ve always found it easier to be angry on someone else’s behalf. Poor Sofie, poor little Sofie …
14
Fourteen years ago
Hugh, Neeve, Kiara and I were lurching on with our new life in Dublin, perpetually exhausted and focused on some far-off day in the future when everything would be under control. Then, just after Kiara’s second birthday, three-year-old Sofie arrived in Ireland.
Joe had left Urzula when Sofie was only a few weeks old. Urzula had done her best to support herself and Sofie in Latvia, but it had proved impossible. After three years of hardship, she’d got a job waitressing on a cruise ship (this was before she’d discovered her true calling as a fatso-botherer). She’d make money but she couldn’t take her daughter with her.
So Sofie was despatched to Joe, who had moved back to Dublin.
She arrived semi-feral – she hadn’t been potty-trained, she barely spoke, wouldn’t make eye contact, and if she ate at all, it was with her hands. It was appalling and shameful: this was my niece. I should have known about this and done something to help.
Super-quickly, Joe discovered that he couldn’t hold down a full-time job and take care of his little girl. Which was utter bullshit because if he’d been a woman he’d have been expected to make it work. Lots of women did. Lots of men too, in fairness. But not Joe.
He took to foisting Sofie on Maura, Derry or me. Even though we all made fun of Maura, she had a heart of gold – but being in charge of young children distressed her. ‘It re-triggers my traumatic childhood. It’s why I’ve had no children of my own.’ (Maura has had a lot of therapy. For all the good it has done her. Well, at least she understands her rages. That must count for something.)
As for Derry, she correctly intuited that, as a single woman with no dependants, she was the likeliest candidate to pick up most of the slack – and no way was she having it. Derry’s most prized asset was her independence.
Which left me. And Hugh, of course. And from the word go, the only person Sofie seemed to trust was Hugh.
There are some people who have that quality – dogs can usually sense them. Like, if I was with Hugh in a roomful of people and a dog walked in, you’d almost see Champ thinking, Hey, I like this one, and heading straight for Hugh.
So, when Joe dropped Sofie off at our house, she’d stand in the corner, staring at the floor and slowly, on stealthy little feet, she’d move closer to Hugh. She’d climb on to the couch and lean against him and, after a while, he’d lift his arm and she’d press her tiny bones against his T-shirted belly. Hugh was the only one who could persuade her to eat, and no one but Hugh was permitted to comb her tangled white-blonde hair.
When Joe returned to pick her up – always late and often very late – she’d put her little hands on Hugh’s beardy face and cover it with kisses, then, weeping silent, alarmingly grown-up tears, let herself be led away.
‘How is Hugh so good with kids?’ Steevie asked me.
‘Haven’t a notion. He’s the second youngest in his family, so it’s not like he’s learnt by taking care of littlies.’
‘Maybe he’s just kind.’ Steevie sounded doubtful.
‘Maybe he is …’
A solution for Sofie was a constant worry. She spent so much time in our house that the notion of her officially becoming part of the family was looking inevitable. But Hugh had already ‘taken on’ another man’s child – not that he ever made it seem that way. From the word go, he’d approached Neeve with an open heart (which was far from reciprocated, let me tell you).
But Hugh and I seemed to share the same brain, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when, early one Saturday morning, he gently shook me awake. ‘Let’s go now before it gets too busy,’ he said. ‘We’re buying Sofie a bed. She needs to live with us.’
I thought my heart would burst with love for him.
We decided she could share Kiara’s room until we had the cash to convert the attic, then bought a little white bed, which we painted pink because Sofie was very, very girly. A suitable duvet cover was harder to come by: nothing was pretty enough.
‘Could you do your Amy magic?’ Hugh asked. ‘Could you make one with the shiny, sparkly stuff in your sewing box?’
I hoarded offcuts of lustrous fabric and items that could only be called ‘haberdashery’ – spangly flowers, glittery ribbons and crispy tulle. They’d been gathered at car-boot sales and school fêtes in the hope that they’d come in handy one day. As I created a Wonderland of a duvet cover, it felt good that I’d been finally proved right.
When Sofie saw her winking, twinkling pink bed she stared at it, then stared at us, and whispered, ‘Mine?’
‘Yours,’ we said.
She approached it as if it might bite, then slowly climbed up and started to take in the details of the duvet, cooing and exclaiming as she discovered butterflies, ladybirds and roses. ‘Fairy magic!’ she announced, with a wide smile.
Hugh’s hold on my shoulder tightened so much that it hurt. Both of us were trying not to cry.
So, Sofie moved in and became potty-trained almost overnight. She began speaking fully formed sentences in English. She slept through the night, stopped the incessant sucking of her two middle fingers, started calling Hugh ‘Dad’ (I was still ‘Amy’), never asked about her mum, which was just as well, because phone calls from her were infrequent, and treated Joe with benign indifference.
Unlike poor Neeve, who remained obsessed with her ‘bio-dad’ (grim phrase) and his new wife and daughters, Sofie blossomed in our care.
15
‘If we’re going,’ Hugh shouts from the kitchen, ‘we need to go RIGHT NOW!’
I hurry down the stairs, and he is standing with Neeve, rummaging through the pile of stuff by the draining board. ‘Is it this one?’ He holds up a lip-glaze.
‘No,’ she says.
‘Is it this one?’ Another lip colour.
‘No.’
‘Is it this one?’
‘Yaaaaassss.’ She snatches a liquid lipstick from him.
‘Put it on in the car! We haven’t time.’
And, thank God, here’s Sofie, coming up the path. But to my enormous shock, she’s shaved her hair off.
In a way, she looks adorable, like a duckling, with her white-blonde stubble and huge blue eyes. But you could also say she looks like a medieval penitent, atoning for some obscure sin. She walks straight into Hugh’s arms and sobs against him. He holds her tight and lets her cry it out. Eventually she pulls away, pats his arm, gives him a watery smile and they’re friends again.
‘What d’you do to your hair, you mad yoke?’ Neeve asks.
Thank God someone addressed it head on.
‘Got extensions,’ Sofie says.
We all have a laugh.