The Doll's House

‘You’ll get them by courier. I’ve a full squad briefing at midday.’


‘I don’t have to tell you, O’Connor, our victim’s celebrity status means this will spread wide and, as you say, in plenty of different directions. Right now, the late Keith Jenkins has to be my starting point. I’ll need whatever information you can get me on him, sooner rather than later.’

‘You’ll have it, Kate, I promise you that.’





Clodagh


Arranging to meet Gerard Hayden has somehow cemented my focus. I’ve begun and that’s important. If I’ve learned nothing else from rehab, it’s that you can’t move forward without looking back.

I check the time again, conscious that I need to get Martin’s call out of the way before I leave. He’s late, and that’s not like him. When he does call, his form is damn awful but, thankfully, for once, he’s brief.

It’s shortly after midday when I reach the strand. I have the keys for Seacrest, our old house in Sandymount, in my bag. I had them last night too. Martin was furious with me for wanting to go out again, especially as we had only just come home from dinner. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said. ‘It’s only a house.’ Maybe he’s right about that. Either way, I didn’t go inside, deciding to wait until daylight.

Inside, the house feels cold and empty. I think of years ago when it was filled with noise. When Dominic and I chased each other, or fought over which television programme we wanted to watch. I stare at the empty coat hooks where we hung our coats. The place is like an empty shell. For an instant, the oblong mirror in the hallway catches my eye. The last witness to my mother’s face before she went out, checking her makeup, her ginger hair neat in a low bun.

She had changed the interior after Dominic and I left. ‘A whole new look,’ she had said, one that was more reflective of her modern taste. The house changed purpose for her, became something different. It was no longer a family home. Not any more.

For a split second I see the rooms as they used to be, when there was flowery carpet on the stairs and the kitchen had a large wooden table, the one Dominic and I did our homework on, not the high-gloss counter with its tall high-gloss red-backed chairs.

I had offered to help her with the redesign. I hadn’t done a bad job on our house, the one Martin and I brought back from near collapse. That feels like a lifetime ago, Martin and I happily married. He was a different person when I married him, before all his new-found charm slipped away.

‘I like to be independent, Clodagh,’ she had said. ‘There’s no point relying on others when you can do things yourself.’ She was giving me the cold shoulder again.

Walking upstairs, the wood below the new taupe-coloured carpet creaks. My hand glides along the mahogany rail, the one Dominic and I wrapped the Christmas garland around every December, and I held tightly when loud voices from downstairs scared me. I touch the walls. They’re cold, smooth – flawless. Standing on the landing, it’s as if every corner, nook and cranny holds layers of my past.

Of the three bedrooms upstairs, it’s my mother’s I enter first. Dad is so long gone now that when I think of him in this room it’s like a different life, one belonged to the little girl I used to be.

Since her funeral, I’ve thought about him a lot. How he always seemed in a hurry to leave the house. I remember his navy pinstripe suit, and him kissing my forehead before grabbing his briefcase and rushing out of the door. It was a time when the little girl in the photographs smiled. It was a time when Dominic smiled too, when he was less serious, warmer. At least, that’s how I remember it.

Dominic doesn’t understand me wanting to keep the house either. He and Martin have been so eager to get rid of it. Crossing the landing, walking across the floorboards where the two of us once ran, I think about him again, wondering how both of us had come from the same mother, the same womb.

Most things in the house have been removed. A clear-out done when we knew the cancer wouldn’t let her home. Dominic had looked after that. All I’d asked of him was that he should leave the contents of her bedroom and mine as they were. None of the other stuff mattered.

There is very little daylight. I switch on the centre ceiling light.

Her bedroom, like downstairs, looks like something out of a design magazine, but seems larger without her in it. I feel like an intruder. My mobile vibrates inside my pocket. I pull it out. ‘Hi, Dominic,’ I say, in my upbeat voice.

‘Where are you? I called to the house and didn’t get an answer.’ His tone is sharp.

‘I’m not a prisoner.’ My voice immediately matches his.

‘I didn’t say you were.’

‘What do you want?’

‘That’s a lovely way to greet your brother. I just wanted to talk.’

‘I’m in Mum’s bedroom.’

‘I see,’ he says. Like I’ve told him someone has died.

‘Dominic?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you think she was lonely here?’