Her name – and you have to admire her parents for this – is Paddy.
They are doing a project together on lice in horses. Paddy is supplying the horses. I did not ask if Evie was supplying the lice.
And sometimes, too, they are perfect: sitting on the sofa watching ‘Father Ted’, or out in the open air, or the way they talk in the car, because talking is what Seán is good at, and with his daughter there is no charm and no blame, there is just Seán. I listen to the ease of his tone with her and I think, He does not speak that way to me.
He does not hold me by the hand. He does not tickle me, quickly, to get me out of his way. He does not tango me down the hall, and arch me over, backwards. He does not wake in the night, thinking of me.
I have saved his life.
From what?
‘You have saved my life,’ he said.
But if you ask me, it’s not one woman or another that is the saving of Seán. It is the woman he loves but can never desire. It is Evie.
‘Take those earphones off, Evie.’
Evie absent or dreaming in front of a screen or a book. Evie failing to focus up, to move along, to snap to.
Evie stalled in front of the mirror for hours at a time, sprouting hair and neuroses, moody as all get out. And it seems so unfair, to be jumping with hormones when you’re still in Hello Kitty pyjamas; it is like no one is telling the truth, or no one knows what truth to tell.
I walked in on her one evening. Evie always leaves the door open when she is in the bath – You still alive in there, Evie: you haven’t gone down the plughole? Usually, she chats away – just the feel of the warm water seems to set her rattling on – and her father leaves her to it; listening, or pretending to listen, stretched out on our bed across the landing.
But this one evening, she had fallen silent and, between one sentence and the next, I walked in the door.
Evie pulled the sponge up to cover her little budding chest and looked at me with huge grey eyes.
‘Don’t mind me!’ I said, as I dodged across the room to get the thing I needed, whatever it was, from out of the bathroom cabinet.
In the autumn, Evie seemed to get rounder and rounder, fatter and fatter, after which came the amazing stretch and boi-oi-oinngg of this extra flesh into a waist and hips and breasts – though, as I recall, breasts don’t feel like fat, at that age, they feel like tenderised gristle. But they look, from what I saw in the bath, heartbreaking and simple.
There is nothing worse than being nearly twelve.
Evie is at that moment. Her body is at that moment when it is wrong to look at her, wrong to think about her nakedness, when it would be criminal to take a photograph. Her body is becoming her own. Her body is becoming lonely. Her father, who used to bathe and dry her, now stretched out staring at the ceiling, across the hall.
‘Have you rinsed, Evie? Rinse till you hear it squeak.’
He was off the bed and standing in the doorway when I came out of the bathroom. I lifted my hands in a mock shrug – because all this was normal too – and he nodded and turned away.
And I am suddenly passionate about Evie. I want to take him by the shoulders and explain that my jealousy is a kind of loving, too. Because, when I was her age, my father was sitting up in his hospice bed enjoying the fact that all women were equally nameless to him now.
‘Hello my darlings, to what do I owe the pleasure?’
I want to tell him that Evie is lucky to have him, that he, Seán, is where all her luck resides. Because after Miles died nothing went right, unless we made it right; all blessings and bounty, all unexpected joys, came from his love – pathetic as it sometimes was and sometimes huge. After Miles died, everything was hard work – marrying Conor, marrying Shay – and nothing came to either of his daughters gratis and undeserved.
I cried that night. I don’t know if Evie heard me; the strange woman weeping beside her father in this strange house. I smothered most of it in the pillow; Seán’s hand stroking my back. Me saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’ll be all right. I’m sorry.’
There she was at breakfast, an overgrown child again; her white arse hanging out of her pink pyjamas. She picked the nuts out of her muesli, and left them on the table in a little heap beside the bowl.
Seán said, ‘Eat your breakfast, Evie.’
I said, ‘Would you like some eggs?’
And Evie said, ‘I hate eggs.’
And yet, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be here. That’s what I think.
I kissed her father, upstairs in his own house, and Evie lifted her flapping hands from her sides and she ran over to us saying, ‘Happy New Year, Daddy!’ and he bent to kiss her too.
As far as Seán was concerned, nothing happened that day. Keep it simple and you will win, or if you don’t win – as he liked to say – at least it will be simple. But, sometime after that kiss, between one hotel afternoon and the next hotel afternoon, Evie started to disappear.
How such a constantly tended child could do such a thing, is hard to say. For the first long while, they did not even notice; it crept up on them. Evie was just not where she was supposed to be. She seemed to get lost on her way up the stairs. She didn’t show up for meals, only to be found in her bedroom, or the au pair’s room, or out in the garden with no coat. One day, around the time my mother died, she failed to arrive back from Megan’s house. This was a journey of some three hundred yards down a country road that even Evie was allowed to take by herself.
‘When did she leave?’ said Aileen to Fiona on the phone: two families streaming out of their separate houses, climbing into four different cars, reversing out of their driveways at a clip. They found her almost immediately. She was standing on the side of the road, as though at an imaginary bus stop, with no sense that her journey had been interrupted, or had taken too long.
‘What are you doing Evie?’
‘I was just looking.’
It was, up to a point, just the way she was. Stop dawdling, Evie. From the time she was three years old, Evie could never get out of a car without pausing endlessly before the jump. Thresholds made her stall. All journeys were difficult, not for her, but for the people around her, who could never quite figure out just how she managed to slow everything down.
Come along, Evie. So this was nothing more than another failure, on her part, to grow up. Then, one day, she wandered from her mother in the Dundrum Shopping Centre and when Aileen, frantic, found her outside by the fountains, she could not say where she had been.
‘I was just,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’
Seán was in no position to believe that there was a problem. His life with me had taken on some importance, by then; he was a man trying to keep his balance. He was, besides, ‘Just not going to do it, this time round.’ And though he discussed Evie with me over the phone in those long drifting days after Joan died, he didn’t – he just couldn’t – listen to Aileen, when the panic machine ground into gear again.
‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She’s just growing. It’s fine.’
Then, one Saturday after the summer holidays, Evie did not come out of her drama class. Seán who was doing the pick-up waited, and checked his watch. He went inside where the teacher was packing up and discovered that Evie, though dropped at the door, had not showed up in class that day. They started to ransack the building, the two of them – then Seán decided to try outside. He ran into the street and up the hill, past buildings and doors and girls smoking at the bus stop, into the shopping centre, where he went down the first escalator he came to and stood in the middle of the atrium, and he looked up at a changed world, one full of angles, doors and possibilities that he had never seen before.