I thought your name was Rooster.
No, Rooster’s my YouTube name.
Why do you have a YouTube name.
Because … how do you know I’m Rooster if you didn’t know I was a YouTuber.
Your secretary told me. I gave her the envelope that you have in your hand, I say, confused. He must be a bit mental if he’s forgotten what brought him here to me in the first place.
He’s frowning, looking at the envelope.
I found this on the floor by the door, he says, I thought you’d put it through the letterbox.
No. Your posse said you were in a meeting.
Yeah. I was.
Which do you prefer, I say, Rooster or Tristan.
Who do I prefer to be, he asks, or the name.
I hadn’t thought of that really but I tell him both.
I prefer being Rooster. But you can call me Tristan. What about you, which do you prefer, Allegra or Freckles.
I look at him. And he’s done it again. Another trigger.
Pops calls me Allegra. I have freckles because of Pops. But I don’t say either of those things. I just shrug and we part, both needing to get back to work.
Ten
I’m going home for Easter and I couldn’t be happier. It’s good Friday morning and I sit on the 06.20 train from Dublin to Killarney, watching the country racing by. The village was quiet for the week with the kids off school, and the difference no school made to the traffic. Most people cleared out for the two weeks. The streets were relatively empty, lots of parking spaces, there wasn’t a whole lot for me to do, no one to argue with every morning. I amused myself on Ash Wednesday by counting the amount of grey splodges on foreheads. Singed brains. As a little girl I’d thought somebody’s head had been on fire, was relieved for them they’d managed to put it out.
I’m not religious. Neither is Pops, though he’s technically Church of Ireland. Despite going to a Catholic boarding school I didn’t have to take part in any religious studies. I wasn’t the only one. A few Protestants, three Hindus and a Muslim. And a girl who’d moved over from Malaysia to study in Ireland while her parents stayed behind in Malaysia. She said she was an atheist and I had no religion so whenever religious things were happening we were always put together and given other work to do. Essays, worksheets, pointless errands, that kind of thing. Once we were brought outside on a sunny day to tie-dye our T-shirts while the others were stuck inside learning about transubstantiation. People were jealous of our non-religious cult.
I still liked Sister Lettuce even though I wasn’t into her religion. She was young, in her thirties and really believed in her cause. I think she thought she had to single-handedly make up for all the hateful things the decrepit nuns did in the past. She tried with all of us, to hear our problems, to show us she cared, to fix them.
I take my gold notepad out of my bag and place it on the table and start working on my list. From the age of five to eleven my five people were my best friend from Valentia, Marion, Cara, Marie, Laura and Pops. In secondary school it was Marion, Sister Lettuce, Bobby my boyfriend for a year but obsessed over for longer than that so much so that he shaped my dreams and thoughts, Viv who was my closest school friend, and Pops. After school when I didn’t get into the Gardaí and all the way up to now, it was Marion, my boyfriend Jamie, Cyclops, my aunt Pauline, and Pops. Always Pops.
It’s been months since I’ve been home and I’m looking forward to catching up with them. With most of them anyway.
It’s 10.20 when I step off the train at Killarney station. The drivetime to Valentia Island is an hour and twenty minutes, or one hour if Pops is driving. It’s not easy to get back home, my part of the world is badly serviced by public transport. Valentia Island is a small island, eleven kilometres in length and three kilometres in width and it’s not that far away but accessibility-wise I sometimes feel like I’m trying to get to Australia.
Even if I were to hitch a ride to Portmagee, I’d still need a car to get over the Maurice O’Neill Memorial Bridge, which links the mainland to Valentia Island, and then to Knightstown, which is the town at the furthest point from the bridge entrance. There’s a car ferry from Reenard’s Point that runs directly to Knightstown, a five-minute journey. But it only operates from April to October during the busier season and if you’re not at Reenard’s Point by 10 p.m., then you’ve missed the last ferry. I worked on the car ferry after school, it was the job I left to become a parking warden. From April to October anyway, the rest of the months I worked in the gift shop of Skellig Experience, a museum showcasing the story of the island. Thanks to a sixth-century monastic site, the place has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site offshore. They needed more staff when Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was released.