Anybody Out There? Read online

  After several career changes, Helen—and I’m not making this up, I wish I was—is a private investigator. Mind you, it sounds far more dangerous and exciting than it is; she mostly does white-collar crime and “domestics”—where she has to get proof of men having affairs. I would find it terribly depressing but she says it doesn’t bother her because she’s always known that men were total scumbags.

  She spends a lot of time sitting in wet hedges with a long-range lens, trying to get photographic evidence of the adulterers leaving their love nest. She could stay in her nice, warm, dry car but then she tends to fall asleep and miss her mark.

  “Mum, I’m very stressed,” she said, “Any chance of a Valium?”

  “No.”

  “My throat is killing me. War-crime sore. I’m going to bed.”

  Helen, on account of all the time she spends in damp hedges, gets a lot of sore throats.

  “I’ll bring you up some ice cream in a minute, pet,” Mum said. “Tell me, I’m dying to know, did you get your mark?”

  Mum loves Helen’s job, nearly more than she loves mine, and that’s saying a lot. (Apparently, I have the Best Job in the World™.) Occasionally, when Helen is very bored or scared, Mum even goes to work with her; the Case of the Missing Woman comes to mind. Helen had to go to the woman’s apartment, looking for clues (air tickets to Rio, etc. As if…) and Mum went along because she loves seeing inside other people’s houses. She says it’s amazing how dirty people’s homes are when they’re not expecting visitors. This gives her great relief, making it easier to live in her own less-than-pristine crib. However, because her life had begun to resemble, however briefly, a crime drama, Mum got carried away and tried to break down the locked apartment door by running at it with her shoulder—even though, and I can’t stress this enough, Helen had a key. And Mum knew she had it. It had been given to her by the missing woman’s sister and all Mum got for her trouble was a badly mashed shoulder.

  “It’s not like on the telly,” she complained afterward, kneading the top of her arm.

  Then, earlier this year, someone tried to kill Helen. The general consensus was not so much shock that such a dreadful thing would happen as amazement that it hadn’t come to pass much sooner. Of course, it wasn’t really an attempt on her life. Someone threw a stone through the television-room window during an episode of EastEnders—probably just one of the local teenagers expressing his feelings of youthful alienation, but the next thing Mum was on the phone to everyone, saying that someone was trying to “put the frighteners” on Helen, that they “wanted her off the case.” As “the case” was a small office fraud inquiry where an employer had Helen install a hidden camera to see if his employees were nicking printer cartridges, this seemed a little unlikely. But who was I to rain on their parade—and that’s what I would have been doing: they’re such drama queens they actually thought this was exciting. Except for Dad and only because he was the one who had to sweep up all the broken glass and sellotape a plastic bag over the hole until the glazier arrived, approximately six months later. (I suspect Mum and Helen live in a fantasy world where they think someone’s going to come along and turn their lives into a massively successful TV series. In which they will, it goes without saying, play themselves.)

  “Yes, I got him. Ding-dong! Right, I’m off to bed.” Instead she stretched out on one of the many couches. “The man spotted me in the hedge, taking his picture.”

  Mum’s hand went to her mouth, the way a person would on telly if they wanted to indicate anxiety.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Helen said. “We had a little chat. He asked for my phone number. Cack-head,” she added with blistering scorn.

  That’s the thing about Helen: she’s very beautiful. Men, even those she’s spying on for their wives, fall for her. Despite me being three years older than her, she and I look extremely similar: we’re short with long dark hair and almost identical faces. Mum sometimes confuses us with each other, especially when she’s not wearing her glasses. But, unlike me, Helen’s got some magic pull. She operates on an entirely unique frequency, which mesmerizes men; perhaps on the same principle of the whistle that only dogs can hear. When men meet the two of us, you can see their confusion. You can actually see them thinking, They look the same, but this Helen has bewitched me like a drug, whereas that Anna is just so what…

  Not that it does the men in question any good. Helen boasts that she’s never been in love and I believe her. She’s unbothered by sentimentality and has contempt for everyone and everything.

  Even Luke, Rachel’s boyfriend—well, fiancé now. Luke is so dark and sexy and testosteroney that I dread being alone with him. I mean, he’s a lovely person, really really lovely, but just, you know…all man. I both fancy him and am repelled by him, if that makes any sense, and everyone—even Mum; I’d say even Dad—is sexually attracted to him. Not Helen, though.

  All of a sudden Mum seized my arm—luckily, my unbroken one—and hissed, in a voice throbbing with excitement, “Look! It’s Jolly Girl, Angela Kilfeather. With her Jolly Girl girlfriend! She must be home visiting!”

  Angela Kilfeather was the most exotic creature that ever came out of our road. Well, that’s not really true, my family is far more dramatic, what with broken marriages and suicide attempts and drug addiction and Helen, but Mum uses Angela Kilfeather as the gold standard: bad and all as her daughers are, at least they’re not lesbians who French-kiss their girlfriends beside suburban leylandii.

  (Helen once worked with an Indian man who mistranslated gays as “Jolly Boys.” It caught on so much that nearly everyone I knew—including all my gay friends—now referred to gay men as Jolly Boys. And always said in an Indian accent. The logical conclusion was that lesbians were “Jolly Girls,” also said in an Indian accent.)

  Mum placed one eye up against the gap between the wall and the net curtain. “I can’t see, give me your binoculars,” she ordered Helen, who produced them from her rucksack with alacrity—but only for her own personal use. A small but fierce struggle ensued. “She’ll be GONE,” Mum begged. “Let me see.”

  “Promise you’ll give me a Valium and the gift of long vision is yours.”

  It was a dilemma for Mum but she did the right thing.

  “You know I can’t do that,” she said primly. “I’m your mother and it would be irresponsible.”

  “Please yourself,” Helen said, then gazed through the binoculars and murmured, “Good Christ, would you look at that!” Then: “Buh-loody hell! Ding-dong! What are they trying to do? A Jolly Girl tonsilectomy?”

  Then Mum had sprung off the couch and was trying to grab the binoculars from Helen and they wrestled like children, only stopping when they bumped against my hand, the one with the missing fingernails, and my shriek of pain restored them to decorum.

  2

  After she’d washed me, Mum took the bandages off my face, like she did every day, then bundled me up in a blanket. I sat in the matchbox of a back garden, watching the grass grow—the painkillers made me superdopey and serene—and airing my cuts.

  But the doctor had said that exposure to direct sunlight was strictly verboten, so even though there was scant chance of that in Ireland in April, I wore a stupid-looking wide-brimmed hat that Mum had worn to my sister Claire’s wedding; luckily there was no one there to see me.

  The sky was blue, the day was quite warm, and all was pleasant. I listened to Helen coughing intermittently in an upstairs bedroom and dreamily watched the pretty flowers sway to the left in the light breeze, then back to the right, then to the left again…There were late daffodils and tulips and other pinkish ones whose name I didn’t know. Funny, I remembered floatily, we used to have a horrible garden, the worst on the whole road, perhaps in the whole of Blackrock. For years it was just a dumping ground for rusty bicycles (ours) and empty Johnnie Walker bottles (also ours) and that was because, unlike other, more decent, hardworking families, we had a gardener: Michael, a bad-tempered, gnarled old man who used to do no
thing except make Mum stand in the freezing cold while he explained why he couldn’t cut the grass (“The germs get in through the cut bits, then it just ups and dies on you”). Or why he couldn’t trim the hedge (“The wall needs it for support, missus”). Instead of telling him to get lost, Mum used to buy him top-of-the-range biscuits, then Dad used to cut the grass in the middle of the night rather than confront him. But when Dad retired they finally had the perfect excuse to get rid of Michael. Not that he took it graciously. Amid much mutterings about amateurs who’d have the place destroyed within minutes, he left in high dudgeon and found employment with the O’Mahoneys, where he rained shame down on our entire family by telling Mrs. O’Mahoney that he’d once seen Mum drying lettuce with a dirty tea towel.

  Never mind, he’s gone and the flowers, courtesy of Dad, are far nicer now. My only complaint is that the caliber of biscuits in the house has dropped dramatically since Michael’s departure. But you can’t have things every way, and that realization set me off on an entirely different train of thought, and it was only when the salt water of my tears ran into my cuts and made them sting that I discovered I was crying.

  I wanted to go back to New York. For the last few days I’d been thinking about it. Not just considering it, but gripped by a powerful compulsion and unable to understand why I hadn’t gone before now. The problem was, though, that Mum and the rest of them would go mad when I told them. I could already hear their arguments—I must stay in Dublin, where my roots were, where I was loved, where they could “take care of me.”

  But my family’s version of “caretaking” isn’t like other, more normal families’. They think the solution to everything lies in chocolate.

  At the thought of how long and loud they’d protest, I was grabbed by another panicky seizure: I had to return to New York. I had to get back to my job. I had to get back to my friends. And although there was no way I could tell anyone this, because they would have sent for the men in the white coats, I had to get back to Aidan.

  I closed my eyes and started to drift, but suddenly, like a grinding of gears in my head, I was plunged into a memory of noise and pain and darkness. I snapped my eyes open: the flowers were still pretty, the grass was still green, but my heart was pounding and I was struggling for breath.

  This had started over the past few days: the painkillers weren’t working as nicely as they had in the beginning. They were wearing off faster and ragged little chinks were appearing in the blanket of mellowness they dropped on me and the horror would rush in, like water from a burst dam.

  I struggled to my feet and went inside, where I watched Home and Away and had lunch (half a cheese scone, five satsuma segments, two Maltesers, eight pills), then Mum dressed my bandages again before my walk.

  She loved this bit, busying about with her surgical scissors, briskly cutting lengths of cotton wool and white sticky tape, like the doctor had shown her. Nurse Walsh tending to the sick. Matron Walsh, even.

  I closed my eyes. The touch of her fingertips on my face was soothing.

  “The smaller ones on my forehead have started to itch; that’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s see.” She moved my fringe aside to take a closer look. “These really are healing well,” she said, like she knew what she was talking about. “I think we can probably leave the bandages off these. And maybe the one on your chin.” (A perfect circle of flesh had been removed from the very center of my chin. It will come in handy when I want to do Kirk Douglas impersonations.) “But no scratching, missy! Of course, facial wounds are handled so well these days,” she said knowledgeably, parroting what the doctor had told us. “These sutures are far better than stitches. It’s only this one, really,” she said, gently stroking antiseptic gel onto the deep, puckered gash that ran the length of my right cheek, then pausing to let me flinch with pain. This wound wasn’t held together with sutures; instead it had dramatic Frankenstein-style stitches that looked like they’d been done with a darning needle. Of all the marks on the face this was the only one which wouldn’t eventually disappear.

  “But that’s what plastic surgeons are for,” I said, also parroting what the doctor had told us.

  “That’s right,” Mum agreed. But her voice sounded faraway and strangled. Quickly I opened my eyes. She was hunched in on herself and muttered something that might have been, “Your poor little face.”

  “Mum, don’t cry!”

  “I’m not.”

  “Good.”

  “Anyway, I think I hear Margaret.” Roughly, she rubbed her face with a tissue and went outside to laugh at Maggie’s new car.

  Maggie had arrived for our daily walk. Maggie, the second eldest of the five of us, was the maverick of the Walsh family, our dirty secret, our white sheep. The others (even Mum, in unguarded moments) called her a “lickarse,” a word I wasn’t comfortable with because it was so mean, but admittedly did the job well. Maggie had “rebelled” by living a quiet, well-ordered life with a quiet, well-ordered man called Garv, whom, for years, my family hated. They objected to his reliability, his decency, and most of all his jumpers. (Too similar to Dad’s, was the consensus.) However, relations have softened in recent years, especially since the children came along: JJ is now three and Holly is five months.

  I will admit to having entertained some jumper-based prejudice myself, of which I’m now ashamed, because about four years ago Garv helped me to change my life. I’d reached a nasty little crossroads (more details later) and Garv had been endlessly, unfathomably kind. He’d even got me a job in the actuarial firm where he worked—initially in the post room, then I got promoted to the front desk. Then he encouraged me to get a qualification, so I got a diploma in public relations. I know it’s not as impressive as a master’s degree in astrophysics and that it sounds more like a diploma in Watching Telly or Eating Sweets, but if I hadn’t got it, I would never have ended up in my current job—the Most Fabulous Job in the World™. And I would never have met Aidan.

  I hobbled to the front door. Maggie was unloading children from her new car, a wide-bodied people carrier that Mum was insisting looked like it had elephantiasis.

  Dad was also out there, trying to provide a foil against Mum’s contempt; he was demonstrating what a fine car it was by walking around it and kicking all four tires.

  “Look at the quality on it,” he declared, and kicked a tire again to underscore his point.

  “Look at the little piggy eyes on it!”

  “They’re not eyes, Mum, they’re lights,” Maggie said, unbuckling something and emerging with baby Holly under her arm.

  “Could you not have got a Porsche?” Mum asked.

  “Too eighties.”

  “A Maserati?”

  “Not fast enough.”

  Mum—I worried that she might have been suffering from boredom—had developed a sudden, late-in-life longing for a fast, sexy car. She watched Top Gear and she knew (a little) about Lamborghinis and Aston Martins.

  Maggie’s torso disappeared into the car again, and after more unbuckling, she emerged with three-year-old JJ under her other arm.

  Maggie, like Claire (the sister older than her) and Rachel (the sister younger than her) was tall and strong. The three of them come from a gene pool identical to Mum’s. Helen and I, a pair of shortarses, look astonishingly different from them and I don’t know where we get it from. Dad isn’t terribly small; it’s just the meekness that makes him seem that way.

  Maggie had embraced motherhood with a passion—not just the actual mothering, but the look. One of the best things about having children, she said, was not having the time to worry about what she looked like and she boasted that she had totally given up on shopping. The previous week she’d told me that at the start of every spring and autumn she goes to Marks & Spencer and buys six identical skirts, two pairs of shoes—one high, one flat—and a selection of tops. “In and out in forty minutes,” she said, gloating, totally missing the point. Other than her hair, which was shoulder length and
a lovely chestnut color (artificial—clearly she hadn’t given up completely), she looked more mumsy than Mum.

  “Look at that hickey oul’ skirt on her,” Mum murmured. “People will think we’re sisters.”

  “I heard that,” Maggie called, “And I don’t care.”

  “Your car looks like a rhino,” was Mum’s parting shot.

  “A minute ago it was an elephant. Dad, can you open out the buggy, please.”

  Then JJ spotted me and became incoherent with delight. Maybe it was just the novelty value, but I was currently his favorite auntie. He squirmed out of Maggie’s grip and rushed up the drive, like a cannonball. He was always flinging himself at me, and even though three days earlier he had accidentally head-butted my dislocated knee, which was just out of plaster, and the pain had made me vomit, I still forgave him.

  I would have forgiven him anything: he was an absolute scream. Being around him definitely lifted my mood, but I tried not to show it too much because the rest of them might have worried about me getting too fond of him, and they had enough to worry about with me. They might even have started with the well-meaning platitudes—that I was young, that I would eventually have a child of my own, etc., etc., and I was pretty sure I wasn’t ready to hear them.

  I took JJ into the house to collect his “walk hat.” When Mum had been searching out a wide-brimmed, sun-deflecting hat for me, she’d come across an entire cache of dreadful hats she’d worn to weddings over the years. It was almost as shocking as uncovering a mass grave. There were loads, each one more overblown than the next, and for some reason JJ had fallen in love with a flat, glazed straw hat with a cluster of cherries dangling from the brim. JJ insisted it was “a cowboy hat” but really, nothing could have been further from the truth. Already, at the age of three, he was displaying a pleasing strain of eccentricity—which must have been from some recessive gene because he definitely didn’t get it from either of his parents.