Sue looked uncomfortable. Caroline glared at her.
‘I see you’ve latched on to another one.’ Caroline spat the words at me. The smiling waitress was no longer smiling. She appeared behind Caroline. ‘Caroline,’ she said, ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave. We don’t tolerate abusive behaviour here.’
‘Oh right, but you’ll serve that one?’ she said, pointing at Sue.
Mark jumped up, but the unsmiling waitress put her hand on his shoulder and spoke calmly. ‘Get out of here, Caroline, you’re barred.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she screeched, ‘I’m going to move out of this village anyway. I’m not staying with all of you freaks. I’m sick of this place. I’ll go back to Knocktoom. And by the way, Valerie,’ she said as she got to the door, ‘your quiche is shite.’ There was a silence after she slammed the door, and all eyes were either on Caroline as she stomped off down the hill or on the three of us. Then, they all looked towards Valerie and began to clap, including Mark and Sue, and then me. The mood turned festive in an instant. There was laughter. A number of people came to our table and assured Sue that she was most welcome in Carricksheedy. An old man said that we needed to mix up the gene pool as the complexion of Carricksheeders was pale blue. As he left a few moments later, he shouted, ‘Best quiche in Ireland!’ and there were cheers and laughter from the remaining customers.
Mark asked Sue, ‘Are you okay?’ and she wiped tears from her eyes.
‘I guess I hoped it wouldn’t happen here.’ She was upset.
The waitress, whose name was clearly Valerie, approached us. ‘I’m sorry that happened in my cafe. Your meals are on the house.’
Mark and Sue protested and insisted that none of it was Valerie’s fault. She was awfully kind. We thanked her and paid the bill, splitting it three ways （like Tina had suggested）。 Mark and Sue had to get back to work and left in a hurry.
As I exited, I thanked Valerie.
Mark hadn’t answered my question.
Aunt Christine rang and told me that Uncle Donald was seriously ill.
‘Is he going to die?’ I asked.
‘I think so,’ she replied and broke into tears.
I thought about the right thing to say. ‘I’m sorry. I hope he isn’t suffering.’ I tried to feel sad about Uncle Donald. It didn’t work. But I did feel sad for Aunt Christine.
‘They are keeping him comfortable for the moment but he’s going downhill fast.’
I judged that this would not be the right time to tell her about my anger issues. ‘I hope he dies peacefully in his sleep like my dad.’
‘I think that’s the best we can hope for.’
‘How long have you been married?’
‘Almost forty years.’
‘That’s a long time.’
I wanted to ask her how often they had sex, if she enjoyed it, if she was going to have him cremated, if I was expected to go to the funeral, but I didn’t.
‘I can’t imagine life without him. It’s stomach cancer, with secondaries in the lungs and liver. There’s no hope. I thought we’d have more time together.’
‘That is sad.’ Privately, I thought forty years was plenty of time.
‘Thank you, my dear. I’d better get back into his room now. Time is precious. I’ll call you if there’s any news, okay?’
I knew she meant news of his death. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, again.
‘Thank you, you are a good girl. Bye now.’ Her voice trembled before she hung up.
I had handled that conversation well. Even though I am a woman and not a girl. I felt a little moment of triumph that I could tell Tina about next month. Empathy! I had felt it and expressed it.
30
Peter, 1982
On 2nd April 1980, Dad and I left England. We were able to sail from Dover to Calais as foot passengers and then to Genoa in Italy, but then there came the horrific, months-long voyage from there to Port Said in Egypt, through the Suez Canal to Colombo and then to Singapore, and to Sydney, and finally to Auckland, sometimes hidden away on freighter or cargo ships thanks to generous bribes and sometimes as regular foot passengers. Dad seemed to enjoy the expedition, ‘seeing the world’ he said, but I was scared and/or sick all the time. I hid in whatever cabin we were allocated, and rarely went on deck.
By the time we arrived in New Zealand, Dad had a full moustache and beard. He never shaved again, though he kept his beard neatly trimmed, ‘like Sigmund Freud’ he said. He also wore thick-rimmed glasses thereafter with clear lenses. Only people who knew him well would recognize him as Conor Geary, and I was the only person who knew him well.
We stayed in a small, rented house in Auckland for two months. Dad had changed the name on his dental certificates to James Armstrong and had registered with the New Zealand Dental Association under that name with some letter he had been able to forge from the Irish Dental Board. He had to take some kind of exam too, but he passed it easily.
Then we moved to Wellington and Dad got locum dentist work. He picked up the local accent quickly and urged me to do the same. It was harder for me, though, as I didn’t see too many people.
The biggest change was that I was no longer a secret. Dad was proud to introduce me to people we met. Although he sometimes had to explain my disease, he played it down, later telling me that he didn’t want people pitying me. But I began to talk with other people for the first time. It was very difficult. I never knew what to say.
Dad told our sob story about the poor dead mum and wife. This elicited sympathy and congratulations to my father for raising me alone.
We were invited to another dentist’s family home for lunch. I wore the hat and gloves, and Dad did the usual explanation of my rare condition, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Dad’s colleague’s wife and daughters. Girls a little older than me, who behaved completely normally. Their mum was normal too. She had baked a cake and roasted a chicken and she made her daughters show off their hand-knitted sweaters. I said little. Dad explained that I was shy as I’d had to be homeschooled in Ireland.
Afterwards, at home, I expressed my admiration for the mother and daughters. Dad looked at me strangely and then said that it was time to move on, to set up his own practice.
We moved to Rotorua, a cheap place to buy property. It was 1982 and I was fourteen years old. The whole place smelled of rotten eggs because of the hydrogen sulphide that hovered above the thermal water. Our house was on a back road three miles outside town. There was a small, ramshackle house next door, but apart from that, our nearest neighbour was miles away. Logging trucks passed our house fairly regularly, but there was almost no other traffic.
There were two bedrooms, a functional kitchen and a long dark sitting room, with a separate barn ten yards back from the house. The house was made of wood, and nothing like as grand as our house back in Ireland with its cultivated garden, wide driveway and stone pillars. Dad said it was an adventure, starting again. Neither of us believed it. He drove in and out to his new office every day. He had bought it from the widow of a recently deceased dentist. He had a young receptionist called Danny. I met him infrequently. I think he thought there was something wrong with me mentally, because I was unable to chat with him. I was desperate to socialize, but my inarticulation made it hard. When I said it to Dad, he warned me off interacting with other people. They could kill me without even meaning to, he said.