‘Um, hang on, what did you say the final line was again?’
‘“Cold as marble. She was dead.”’
‘It’s already here.’
‘What? It can’t be.’
She brought me to a full-length mirror and gave me another smaller one to hold in my hand. My back was covered. The entire story was already inked on my skin.
‘That’s weird,’ she said.
It wasn’t weird. It was impossible. And yet there it was.
‘It’s a cool story.’ She was trying to make the situation a little less weird by completely ignoring the look of shock on my face and focusing on what was real. I tried to do the same.
‘Yeah.’ That was all I could manage.
‘Kind of gothic.’
She gently reminded me that she wanted to close up now and apparently I didn’t need a tattoo after all.
I couldn’t even remember walking home. I let myself in as quietly as possible. Madame Bowden was watching the TV she said she wouldn’t use, at a volume that would wake the dead. Walking into my basement flat, I saw it with new eyes. Everything was brighter, clearer. As I took my jacket off and hung it on the hook, my body felt different. I felt physically stronger and freer, as though my muscles had been released from some invisible restraints. I looked at my neat little bed and the branches of the tree growing in an arch over it, the kitchenette with its pretty wall tiles, which I had thought were plain blue but were now patterned with little flowers. I realised that I loved living here and weirdly, just as I had read in Madame Bowden’s face, I suddenly felt like I never wanted to leave. Like I belonged here. But why?
I put a saucepan of milk on the little stove and made myself a hot chocolate with two spoons of Nutella, an old trick my mother used to do for me when I was a child. I laid my quilt and pillows on the floor and tried to quieten my mind. Not an easy task after discovering the completed tattoo. Where had the story come from and what did it mean? It was very old, that was clear. The language was old-fashioned. And why had it come to me? These thoughts were interrupted by another question that I’d refused to address since I got back. Could my mother always speak? If so, why had she kept silent? I couldn’t make sense of it. When I was young, she used to tell me that it was a special gift because she could hear things better.
I drank my hot chocolate and let the rich hazelnut flavours take me back in time. Again, I tried to quieten my thoughts and just listen. By now, I was used to the creaking and cracking of the branches stretching across the walls of my room. But there was another sound now, a kind of soft breathing … in and out. Maybe it was my own breath. Maybe not. There was something about this place. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I picked up my book, A Place Called Lost. The story continued with the man who had taken the old library all the way from Italy to Ireland. He had very little money, but he began building his shop with his bare hands on a small patch of forgotten land down a cobbled laneway. He was a man who believed that the imagination was the greatest tool of all. His clever wife believed that love trumped all, and together they built a shop of memories and dreams from the mysterious Italian library. In no time at all and in the way that often happens, the very things they had hoped to fill the shop with found their way to them. Treasures from all over the world began to fill the shelves that had once buckled under the weight of books. The building was pleased with its new surroundings, although it had not lost its innate desire to point visitors in the direction of their true north. Items would tumble off the shelves （a particular hazard in wintertime when Mr Fitzpatrick liked to stock an array of snowglobes）。
Soon the couple welcomed their first child, a son. Mr Fitzpatrick imagined the day when he would take over the shop, but it was not to be. A woman with an English accent who wore trousers and a man’s haircut was to become the unlikely custodian. She had no idea that she was joining a long line of specially chosen people to guard this portal of discovery. Fortunately, she loved books and soon she and Mr Fitzpatrick’s Nostalgia Shop got along extremely well indeed.
An Englishwoman with a love of books? The book was about this place, about Opaline. Henry had been right all along. What had drawn him to this place, to this story? I thought about the missing manuscript and the woman he had said owned a bookshop next door. Opaline. Like following a knitting pattern, I could see that everything was linked, but I had no idea how or why or what the end result would be.
Chapter Thirty
HENRY
He was living in Wales and had found a community of sorts. Seeing my father at the hospital was so unexpected, but I should have known he would want to see his grandchild. Even I couldn’t deny him that. Yet Lucinda wouldn’t let it go. She kept telling me how much he had changed, that he was really sticking to the programme this time because he was doing it for himself. He had already hit his rock bottom when my mother finally left him.
‘It might do you good, you know?’ she said, her index finger gripped tightly by Felicity while she rocked her gently in her arms.
‘You look like you’ve been doing this your whole life.’
‘I think I’m on some kind of hormonal high. At one with Mother Earth and all that. Don’t worry, I’ll be back to my bossy self soon enough.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
We were sitting on my mother’s couch, trying to get our heads around the fact that one minute we were kids building forts out of blankets and now here we were, grown-ups. The only thing was, I still felt like a kid. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing with my life.
‘I just don’t think I can forgive him,’ I said, taking advantage of this rare moment of openness between us.
‘You don’t have to forgive him, Henry. It’s not even about him. This is for you, to help you move on.’
‘What, are you saying I’m stuck in the past? Because I’m not. I hardly ever think about him.’
‘Look. It’s your choice, but I’m just saying that it’s helped me to see him as he is now. It’s the start of a process, or something. Acceptance, that’s what my therapist calls it.’
‘You’re seeing a therapist?’ I hadn’t meant my voice to sound so shocked.
‘So is Mum.’
‘Oh.’
‘I suppose we don’t have that macho idea that we can handle everything ourselves.’
‘Noted. Although I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been referred to as macho.’
She rolled her eyes. She was a convincing little bugger. I had to give her that.
‘What happened with Isabelle?’
‘Oh, that.’
‘I never thought you were right for each other.’
‘Easy to say that now, isn’t it?’
‘Look,’ she continued, switching the baby to her other arm, ‘the woman you’ve met in Ireland, if you want it to work out, you’ve got to lose some of this baggage.’
‘God, you make me sound like a real catch! I think this caring and sharing session has come to its natural conclusion.’
So I went to visit him and found myself in the middle of the Welsh countryside. My mother had given me the address of an old dilapidated manor, converted by some charitable organisation as a centre for recovering addicts. It was idyllic, vegetables growing in an allotment, a notice board with activities ranging from meditation to ceramics. It was not the kind of place I expected to find my father and perhaps that was why, when he trotted down the old stone stairs and into the front lawn to meet me, he looked so well. The bloated features and ruddy skin had mellowed into a healthier man, with a tan and the beginnings of a goatee.