He never loves again. Not as far as I can see.
How can I be angry with him for loving me and wanting me.
When I was five years old and started boarding school, he was able to take on a big job again. He got the job in Limerick University. I came home on the weekends. The teaching job was ideal because he was free in the summers when I was off school so he taught classes from the house or at summer schools. If he had to travel for those then I stayed with Pauline, which I loved because a B&B in the summertime was always so exciting. Different people from different countries travelling through, bikers on cycling tours, or hikers and golfers. Artists, crafts people looking for inspiration in our beautiful landscape. American golfers, Danish artists, French cyclists. Coaches bursting with Japanese tourists blocking narrow cliffside roads, trying to pass coaches filled with Germans. Our little patch welcomed people from all over the world.
I’d help Pauline bake apple tarts and pavlovas for dessert, brown bread, Guinness stew and buttery cabbage for the tourists. We’d eat the fresh fish that Mossie caught. The cockles, mussels and clams. Even better, I used to take off on my own into the back garden, acres of Wild Atlantic Way land that rose and fell, rocky and dangerous enough for my imagination, detective on investigations, while I waited for Pops to return.
I don’t ever remember feeling any more lost or empty than any other child. I had my moments, I was only human, but not because of Carmencita, not because I didn’t have a mother. Not even when I had to explain it at the first week of school or the first time I’d meet someone, which was rare because who ever really cares. My mam’s not around, I’d say most of the time. I never knew her, if I wanted to offer more. My Pops raised me. I loved saying that. I loved the sound of it. If I’m honest, it made me feel special. Different. Anyone can have two boring parents, that’s easy. And I certainly wasn’t the only one at secondary school with a different homelife. There were separations, divorces, deaths, two mams, two dads, all kinds of goings-on. We used to joke about whose parents would be next to split up, some girls actually wanted it to happen, and those with single or separated parents would discuss how gross it would actually be to have parents living in a house together.
Anyway I didn’t get to Barcelona in the end, to find Carmencita. We went to Croatia to the music festival. Marion really wanted to and I hadn’t told her why I wanted to go to Barcelona, so I went along with the change of plans. Maybe felt a bit relieved.
And then the moment passed and I wasn’t really arsed about finding Carmencita Casanova. It had been kind of a romantic idea that appealed to me after school, when I felt free, and before I was to begin my training as a garda that never happened. So I forgot about her and went back to thinking of her as I knew she was. Disturbed. Erratic. Complicated. Troubled. Confused. Bitch. Dramatic. Until one November afternoon when it was too early to be dark, but was, and I was working in the gift shop in the Valentia Skellig Experience, on a day that the centre was empty. Nobody could take trips out anyway, it was so stormy, and driving along the coast to see the two islands was out of the question because the air was so thick with low heavy clouds, mist and rain that you couldn’t see past the end of your nose. Short days, long nights, just waiting for it all to pass when I came across an announcement in a left-behind local newspaper:
Earlier this month, the Malahide Chamber of Commerce elected their new president, Carmencita Casanova. The chain was passed on from Mark Kavanagh, who has presided for the past three years. Carmencita Casanova, a resident of Malahide in north County Dublin for the past ten years, married to Fergal D’Arcy, with two children. I will bring great energy, imagination and commitment to the chamber and I’m honoured to have been elected president of the Malahide Chamber of Commerce, she said, there are many areas I wish to focus on, but I wish to especially continue the work I did in the main committee on specialist areas such as parking in the village which has affected the local businesses.
It was her. Who else would have a name like that. In Ireland anyway.
And I looked at her. And I looked at her. Pretty face. Dark eyes. Glossy black hair. Immaculate make-up, heavy on the eyeliner and smoky eye shadow. A big beautiful gap-toothed smile, looking straight into the camera lens.
Complicated. Disturbed. Confused. Erratic. Non-English speaker. Bitch. Dramatic. She may have been these things to everyone else, but she wasn’t just that any more. When I saw her, something new happened. She was my mother. I decided for the first time in my life that I needed her. Not just because it was her but, I think now, in hindsight, that the idea of her offered me a place to go. And I already wanted to leave.