My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. Annette Sills (free e books to read online txt) 📖

everywhere I looked. Though I could understand why she’d done it, Tess had betrayed me by keeping Donal’s existence from me. She in turn had been betrayed by everyone, her family, the Irish State, the Church and all the others who worked the adoption machine. And now Joe and Karen had betrayed me.

My mother, my husband and my best friend. The people I loved and trusted most in the world had kept secrets from me for God knows how long. My whole life was starting to feel like one long extended lie. I finally made it to Karen’s road. As I walked up the empty street, I’d never felt so lonely in all my life.

Chapter 24

I knew she’d already gone when I saw the front lawn. Old IKEA chairs, Alexia’s battered desk and Springer Bell’s tartan dog bed were scattered among black binbags. A framed poster stuck out of one. Last year’s Liverpool Fleadh. We’d had the best time. Stoned and drunk, the pair of us had danced front of stage to Van the Man singing “Brown Eyed Girl” like we were eighteen again.

The rain had turned to a light drizzle as I knocked on the door. A middle-aged man with a ruddy face in a crumpled linen suit answered.

I shrugged off my hood. “I’m looking for Karen,” I said.

He stroked his goatee. “Ah, I’m afraid you’ve just missed her. They left for Rome a couple of hours ago.”

I stiffened.

“Sorry. By ‘they’ do you mean Karen and her daughter?”

He shook his head.

“No. Her daughter’s already there. She was with a friend. Joe, I think he said his name was.” He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and jangled them like a prize. “I’m the new owner. She left me a forwarding email address if you need it.”

“I’ve got it but thanks anyway.”

He gestured skywards as I turned to go.

“Lucky woman, escaping this weather, eh?” he said.

I gave him a weak smile then walked down the path and out into the street in a daze.

Lucky woman. Oh yes. That’s exactly what Karen Obassi was. She’d got away with it yet again.

Once, I was babysitting Alexia. She was about eight or nine and I was teaching her to play badminton in the garden. At one point she got frustrated, whacked the ground with her racket and broke it. I gave her a lukewarm telling-off and we stopped the game.

“You should have followed through with a punishment,” Karen said afterwards when I told her what had happened. “It’s so important for children to face up to the consequences of their actions. It’s how they learn not to repeat bad behaviour. At the end of the day it’s what makes them decent adults.”

Her words had stayed with me and, as I walked down her street in the drizzle, I thought about them again.

Karen the therapist sat in her chair every day telling vulnerable people to face up to their demons. Karen the tough parent insisted on following through with punishments and consequences. But when it came her own life and relationships, things were very different. When had she ever once faced up to the ramifications of any of the emotional car-crashes she had caused? And there were many. I shook my head as I remembered the time Simon Whelan’s teenage twins arrived on her doorstep looking for their father. She hid upstairs until they were gone. Then there was the episode in Julia’s village when she’d absconded with Luke O’Connell to the festival. After she returned, Karen refused to enter Julia’s house for fear of rebuke and she made me meet her down the road with all her belongings instead. And when the wives of the numerous married men she’d fucked over the years landed at her front door, she escaped out the back. Karen was a hit-and-run driver, pure and simple. She never stayed around to face the consequences of her actions. She lived her life with impunity.

Why oh why was I so naive? Why had I never thought she would do it to me too? But she had. I knew it. And now she’d escaped like a thief in the night with a chunk of my heart.

Ash-coloured clouds floated in a smouldering orange sky above the Manchester skyline as I walked away from the house. Then I heard the sound of a car pulling up on the other side of the road. I turned, narrowed my eyes and looked. I could just about make out Joe in his black BMW leaning over the passenger seat and opening the door. I clenched my fists. I wanted to carry on walking and never stop. But I did stop, a pathetic dripping statue on an Old Trafford pavement. I had too many questions that needed answers and my head would burst if I didn’t get them. So I crossed the road.

Chapter 25

I got into the car.

Joe said nothing.

“I found her bracelet in the front room.”

I closed my eyes, imagining I was driving at a hundred miles an hour and he was flying through the windscreen.

He stared out of the car window at the puddles of polished silver in the road ahead.

“How long has it been going on?”

He swallowed. In the dim streetlight his face looked pale and sunken, his neck blotchy.

“Once. It happened once.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true.”

“When?”

“In April when you were at the Spa in Cheshire for the night. I was out drinking on Beech Road and I bumped into her in one of the bars. We were having a laugh, we were both very drunk and I asked her back to the house and it happened.”

“In April?” My voice sounded small. “That recently?”

In the silence that followed a car swished past, spraying the pavement in front like a wave. Joe put his hands on the steering wheel then lowered his head onto his hands.

“I’m so very sorry, Carmel.”

“So you fucked her one night out of the blue? Just like that? I