14
When Olivia tapped lightly on the spare-room door, I went from dead asleep to awake and depressed in under a second, even before any of the context came back to me. I had spent way too many nights in that spare room, back when Liv and I were in the process of discovering that she no longer felt like being married to me. Even the smell of it, emptiness and a dainty spritz of fake jasmine, makes me feel sore and tired and about a hundred, like all my joints are worn down to the quick.
“Frank, it’s half past seven,” Liv said quietly, through the door. “I thought you might want to talk to Holly, before she goes to school.”
I swung my legs out of bed and rubbed my hands over my face. “Thanks, Liv. I’ll be there in a minute.” I wanted to ask if she had any suggestions, but before I could come up with the words I heard her heels going down the stairs. She wouldn’t have come into the spare room anyway, possibly in case I met her in my birthday suit and tried to lure her into a quickie.
I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless: he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in their makeup bags.
I want Holly to be the one in millions. I want her to be everything that bores me stupid in a woman, soft as dandelions and fragile as spun glass. No one is turning my kid to steel. When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing. Instead, I landed her with a family that had already, within a year of first laying eyes on her, taught her to lie and broken her heart.
Holly was cross-legged on her bedroom floor in front of her dollhouse, with her back to me. “Hello, sweetheart,” I said. “How’re you doing?”
Shrug. She had her school uniform on. In the navy-blue blazer her shoulders looked so slight I could have spanned them one-handed.
“Can I come in for a bit?”
Another shrug. I shut the door behind me and sat down on the floor next to her. Holly’s dollhouse is a work of art, a perfect replica of a big Victorian house, complete with tiny overcomplicated furniture and tiny hunting scenes on the walls and tiny servants being socially oppressed. It was a present from Olivia’s parents. Holly had the dining-room table out and was polishing it furiously with a chewed-looking piece of kitchen roll.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “it’s OK that you’re really upset about your uncle Kevin. So am I.”
Her head bent down farther. She had done her own plaits; there were wisps of pale hair sprouting out of them at odd angles.
“Got any questions you want to ask me?”
The polishing slowed down, just a fraction. “Mum said he fell out a window.” Her nose was still stuffed up from all the crying.
“That’s right.”
I could see her picturing it. I wanted to cover her head with my hands and block the image out. “Did it hurt?”
“No, sweetie. It was very fast. He never even knew what was happening.”
“Why did he fall?”
Olivia had probably told her it was an accident, but Holly has a two-home kid’s passion for cross-checking. I have no scruples about lying to most people, but I have a whole separate conscience just for Holly. “Nobody’s sure yet, love.”
Her eyes finally swung up to meet mine, swollen and red-rimmed and intense as a punch. “But you’re going to find out. Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
She stared at me for another second; then she nodded and ducked her head back down over the little table. “Is he in heaven?”
“Yes,” I said. Even my special Holly conscience has its limits. Privately I consider religion to be a load of bollix, but when you have a sobbing five-year-old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face. “Definitely. He’s up there right now, sitting on a beach a million miles long, drinking a Guinness the size of a bathtub and flirting with a beautiful girl.”
She made a noise somewhere between a giggle, a sniffle and a sob. “Daddy, no, I’m not messing!”
“Neither am I. And I bet he’s waving down at you right now, telling you not to cry.”
Her voice wobbled harder. “I don’t want him to be dead.”
“I know, baby. Me neither.”
“Conor Mulvey kept taking my scissors in school, before, and Uncle Kevin told me next time he did it I should say to him, ‘You only did that because you fancy me,’ and he’d go all red and stop annoying me, so I did and it worked.”
“Good for your uncle Kevin. Did you tell him?”
“Yeah. He laughed. Daddy, it’s not fair.”
She was on the verge of another huge dam-burst of tears. I said, “It’s massively unfair, love. I wish there was something I could say to make it better, but there isn’t. Sometimes things are just really, really bad, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“Mum says if I wait a while I’ll be able to think about him and it won’t make me sad any more.”
“Your mammy’s usually right,” I said. “Let’s hope she’s right this time.”
“One time Uncle Kevin said I was his favorite niece because you used to be his favorite brother.”
Oh, God. I reached to put an arm around her shoulders, but she shifted away and rubbed harder at the table, pushing the paper into tiny wooden curlicues with a fingernail. “Are you mad because I went to Nana and Granddad’s?”
“No, chickadee. Not at you.”
“At Mum?”
“Just a little bit. We’ll sort it out.”
Holly’s eyes flicked sideways to me, just for an instant. “Are you going to yell at each other some more?”
I grew up with a mother who has a black belt in guilt-tripping, but her finest work is nothing compared to what Holly can do without even trying. “No yelling,” I said. “Mostly I’m just upset that nobody told me what was going on.”
Silence.
“Remember how we talked about secrets?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember we said it’s fine for you and your friends to have good secrets together, but if anything ever bothers you, that’s the bad kind of secret? The kind you need to talk about to me or your mammy?”
“It wasn’t bad. It’s my grandparents.”
“I know, sweetie. What I’m trying to tell you is that there’s another kind of secret as well. The kind where, even if there’s nothing bad about it, someone else has a right to know it too.” Her head was still down, and her chin was starting to get its stubborn look. “Say your mammy and I decide to move to Australia. Should we tell you we’re going? Or should we just put you on a plane in the middle of the night?”
Shrug. “Tell me.”
“Because that would be your business. You’d have a right to know it.”
“Yeah.”
“When you started hanging out with my family, that was my business. Keeping it secret from me was the wrong thing to do.”
She didn’t look convinced. “If I’d told you, you’d just have got all upset.”
“I’m a whole lot more upset this way than I would’ve been if someone had told me straightaway. Holly, sweetie, it’s always better to tell me things early on. Always. OK? Even if they’re things I don’t like. Keeping them secret is only going to make it worse.”
Holly slid the table carefully back into the dollhouse dining room, adjusted it with a fingertip. I said, “I try to tell you the truth, even when it hurts a little bit. You know that. You need to do the same for me. Is that fair?”
Holly said to the dollhouse, in a small muffled voice, “Sorry, Daddy.”
I said, “I know you are, love. It’s going to be OK. Just remember this, next time you’re thinking about keeping a secret from me, all right?”
Nod. “There you go,” I said. “Now you can tell me how you got on with our family. Did your nana make you trifle for your tea?”
A shaky little sigh of relief. “Yeah. And she says I’ve got lovely hair.”
Holy shit: a compliment. I’d been all geared up to contradict criticisms of everything from Holly’s accent through her attitude through the color of her socks, but apparently my ma was getting soft in her old age. “Which you do. What are your cousins like?”
Holly shrugged and pulled a tiny grand piano out of the dollhouse living room. “Nice.”
“What kind of nice?”
“Darren and Louise don’t talk to me that much because they’re too big, but me and Donna do imitations of our teachers. One time we laughed till Nana told us to shhh or the police would come get us.”