At the bottom of the wardrobe there are some old shoe boxes. He lifts these up and places them on the table. He removes the lid from the first one.
Photographs.
There are hundreds of them, some loose, some in packets. Most of them are of places in Italy: the Pantheon, the Colosseum, Mount Vesuvius, the Grand Canal, churches, palazzos, piazzas, vineyards. Uncle Des and Aunt Lilly feature in a lot of them, separately and together. Mark himself is in some of them, pale and gawpy-looking. The second box is the same. In the third box he finds a plastic bag, folded over and sealed with tape. He peels off the tape and opens the bag. Inside it is a padded brown envelope. Inside the envelope are more loose photos, dozens of them.
Upending the envelope, Mark pours the photos out onto the table and sees at once that these are what he came for. Using his arm, he shoves the keyboard of the computer as well as the three shoe boxes sideways and onto the floor. He spreads the photos out, face up, as many as he can fit on the surface of the table. His hands are shaking. These photos are older than the Italian ones. The colour in a lot of them has faded. Some are in black and white.
Most of them are of his father.
Tony Griffin.
Some of them – colour ones – feature his mother, Marie, and his sister, Lucy. He’s even in some of them himself – as a very small child.
Mark steps back and gazes down at this random collage – at his father, pencil thin in a suit and tie, standing outside the old Adelphi Cinema on Abbey Street; at the whole family on a beach, blue skies in the background, towels and sandcastles in the foreground; at his parents in a gaudy seventies-style living room, holding hands and smiling; at himself and Lucy, both impossibly small, enfolded in their father’s arms… the three of them on a lawn somewhere, in a garden…
A garden? Their garden?
Mark takes another step backwards.
He doesn’t remember any of this, any of these places. Jesus, he doesn’t even really recognise his mother. He knows it’s her, because… it can only be her, it -
He takes in a gulp of air. This becomes a sob, a loud one, and then a series of them…
He puts his hands up to his head.
This is his family. These are people whose very existence he’s been more or less denying for years, out of an irrational and misplaced sense of shame. But now, through a film of tears, he looks at them, goes from the first photo here to the last – and each one, in its own way, is a shock, each one a revelation.
He looks at his sister, a spindly young girl bristling with energy and intelligence; he looks at his mother, a woman who seems to be at just that point in her life when the early flush of having kids has caught up on her, and suddenly she’s weary… but still glamorous, still holding on…
Above all, though, he looks at his father – younger in most of these photos than Mark himself is now, yet somehow older-looking, more grown-up – and it just hits him in the gut… he’s known it for days, but he feels it now… this man was wronged, he was made into a scapegoat. Mark isn’t being naive here, he realises values were different back then, attitudes were different, but at the same time not everyone was reckless and irresponsible, not everyone was capable of putting their family in mortal danger for the sake of a lousy few pints.
This man wasn’t.
Mark is sure of it. But his name was blackened nonetheless… in order to protect someone else’s reputation. And as a result Mark’s own life – slowly, relentlessly – was contaminated as well… polluted with lies, and with toxic silence, and with guilt…
He walks out of the room, crosses the hall and goes into the bathroom.
He lunges at the toilet bowl and throws up.
Gina’s not used to being at home like this on a weekday morning. It feels strange. She’s sitting at the breakfast bar in her kitchen, dressed for work but with no intention of going to work, or even of leaving the apartment. What she’s doing is waiting for the phone to ring, and has been since Monday night – since her conversation with Mark Griffin.
It was her mobile number she gave him, so there’s nothing keeping her in the apartment. But this morning, for some reason, she dreads the thought of going out, of having to negotiate crowded streets, and traffic, and people…
She looks around. Objects in the living room that should be familiar to her seem slightly alien, even a little threatening. The light coming in from outside, a muted, late-autumnal grey, feels uncommonly bleak.
Nothing seems to be in proportion.
Gina thinks she might be on the cusp of a nervous breakdown – or would be, if she weren’t so bloody self-aware. Because she knows exactly what’s going on here. She has deferred the grieving process – parked it, but left the motor running. And in the absence of any conclusive evidence about what actually happened to Noel she’s had to suppress a whole range of emotions, especially anger. Throw a little denial into the mix, about the future of Lucius Software say, and you have the ingredients for a panic attack.
But her heart isn’t racing, she isn’t dizzy, she doesn’t have a dry mouth.
Not yet, anyway.
She reaches across the counter for her phone.
The thing is, either she succumbs to this incipient… whatever it is, breakdown, depression, collapse, or she just keeps pushing and doesn’t give in. She does whatever it takes to move on from this. Because Gina would like to move on. She’d like to grieve. She’d like to come to terms with the loss of her only brother. She’d like to stop having to ask all these questions. She’d like to look in the mirror and recognise the person she sees there.
She’d also like to meet Sophie for lunch and talk about movies, talk about shoes.
But none of that, she knows, is going to happen for some time.
Gina flicks open the phone and calls Mark Griffin’s home number. Once more she gets through to his answering machine. Once more she rings off without leaving a message.
She’ll try again later.
Because if they’re both right about this, then they really need to talk.
Next, she scrolls down through her phone list. She has three numbers entered for Noel – home, mobile and work. She calls the third one.
This has been nagging at her since the other day. It doesn’t really fit in with the Larry Bolger scenario, but the more she thinks about it, the more it needs to be explained. Neurotic behavior is one thing. This was different. This was off the charts.
‘Good morning, BCM, can I help you?’
‘Yes, good morning,’ Gina says, adopting her no-nonsense office voice. ‘Can you put me through to Dermot Flynn, please?’
When Mark has finished throwing up, he staggers over to the washbasin and turns on the cold tap. He rinses his mouth out and splashes water on his face.
When he looks up and meets his reflection in the mirror, something occurs to him.
Why was Uncle Des always so angry? Up to now the working assumption has been that he never forgave himself for something that happened in the days following the crash. It was put about that Tony had been drunk at the wheel, which Des must have known to be highly unlikely, so either he said nothing at all, or he raised objections… but was told to shut up.
And did. For the rest of his life.
Why, though? Was he threatened, intimidated? Did he not have the balls to stand up to them?
Or maybe it was something else.
Again – like the rest of it – this is only speculation. But the more Mark thinks about it, the more it makes sense. Because Uncle Des’s anger wasn’t directed at other people – it was directed at himself. In fact, there was probably quite a thin line, where Des was concerned, between anger and self-reproach, between anger and self-loathing.