I want to know her. That’s what I’m asking her, I say. Is it stupid, I ask.
He has to think about it.
If you have to think about that, then it is.
No, no, it’s not that at all, it’s—
What.
It’s—
Stupid, I say.
It really shouldn’t matter what I think but I don’t know what’s in your letter.
I told her about the five people theory, I say. I told her I’d like her to be one of my five. I look away, feeling embarrassed.
Four people in front of me now. A woman clears the desk. Only three now.
Who else have you written to, he asks.
I feel panicky now. So close to the desk. I feel like telling him everything just so I can decide whether to do it or not. I flick through my pile. Katie Taylor, Ruth Brasil. He raises his eyebrows and I stop.
Katie Taylor the boxer, he asks.
Yeah.
Ruth Brasil, the politician.
Yeah. Minister for Justice and Equality. She’s my favourite one. The only one I really know, to be honest.
And what about the other letter.
Which other letter.
You said you’d written four, he says.
He reaches out and pinches the envelope at the back, closest to my chest and pulls.
My heart beats like crazy and I hold on tight to it. I drop all the others, and as they scatter to the floor I tug the remaining envelope from his grip and rip it up frantically. Wildly. Like a crazy person. Everyone in the line is looking at me. So are the postal workers, now both available and staring at us.
Next, she says.
Tristan bends down to pick up the envelopes I dropped, while I cling to the ripped one in my hands. I stuff the torn pieces in my pocket, feeling mortified by my outburst.
Tristan hands me the letters. I think, he says gently, that’s the one you should definitely have mailed.
I walk to the desk and with shaking hands ask for stamps, he goes to the desk beside me. His business is more complicated than mine. His packages are travelling internationally, they need to be weighed and registered, sent in all kinds of complicated ways, forms to be filled out. Trembling from my outburst I pay for my stamps and when she offers to take them for me to put in the postal bag in the back, I say no and leave. I hear Tristan call me but I hurry before he has a chance to catch up with me.
I remember what the ripped letter said, word for word. I remember it because I had written it out over and over dozens of times in my notebook until I considered it word-perfect, though it could never be. After Garda Laura Murphy and her partner left, I stayed awake until 4 a.m. reading it, re-reading it, and then when I couldn’t find any more words to add, change or subtract, I rewrote it over and over, neater and neater in cursive, each time. As if the perfect curl of my f or the dramatic swirl of my s would make a difference to how the reader would perceive me.
Though I’ve been writing it in my head for years.
It was a letter to Carmencita Casanova. My mother.
Seventeen
I moved here to meet my mother. I left everything and everyone I loved – all my five – to move to Dublin to meet one person. I suppose I didn’t think it would take me so long to actually introduce myself to her but, looking back, I certainly knew it would be a long game or else why would I train for the parking warden job, and seek out employment in the village she lives in. I wanted to immerse myself in her life, get comfortable. I was never going to walk up, knock on her door or tap her on the shoulder and say, Howya, Carmencita, it’s me, the daughter you abandoned. I don’t think I ever thought it would be this long on the side of never meeting her, definitely wanted the time to be on the side of us spending time together and getting to know each other. The trip home to Valentia tells me that, judging by the words of the one I kept and the four I’ve lost or thrown away, they all thought there’d be quicker results. Did you see her, did you talk to her, have you done what you went there to do. No one mentions her name. No one uses the exact words.
Have you introduced yourself to your mother yet, Allegra.
I’d tried to find Carmencita once before when I finished school. While everyone else went to Croatia to a music festival during the summer before we received our exam results, I booked my flights to Barcelona. Marion was coming with me. Pops knew nothing about Carmencita or had heard nothing from her since the day she handed me over to him. All he knew, and all I knew, was that her name was Carmencita Casanova from Catalonia. But I do know what happened twenty-four years ago. She’d panicked when she’d found out she was pregnant, at twenty-one years old. I don’t blame her for that. A baby fathered by a music professor at university no less, in a drunken stupor, in a moment of vulnerability, possibly desperation. I don’t blame her for that either. I don’t exactly have the best track record. She’d dropped out of university for the last semester and then went back after having me and continued on like nothing had happened. Pops had helped her. She’d wanted to get away, out of Dublin, in case she met anyone who noticed her growing bump, and so for the last three months of her pregnancy she moved to my aunt Pauline’s B&B in Kinsale. Carmencita had stayed there for only two months, because I was born one month premature.