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

The lovely home I’d spent hours cleaning and decorating was abandoned to dirt and dust. Filthy plates, mugs and glasses piled up in every room, bins overflowed and the post piled up. After two weeks I started ordering all my groceries online, I’d put in an order at the local dairy to deliver milk and online banking meant I didn’t have to go out anywhere to pay the bills. I soon didn’t feel well enough to leave the house and thanks to the internet I didn’t have to.

Joe sent a few emails and Julia rang a number of times but I didn’t answer the phone. A flurry of texts arrived from Mary. I’d agreed to attend a series of literary events and performances with her at the Manchester Festival the following week. I ignored her. The thought of an evening in a crowded theatre in town terrified me. I couldn’t do it. I was terrified of having another panic attack like the one I’d had in Deansgate. It was becoming a Catch 22 situation. The fear of having an attack, not the actual attack, kept me at home.

When I didn’t reply Mary sent more concerned texts, then one morning she turned up on the doorstep.

“Come out with your hands above your head, I know you’re in there!” she hollered through the letterbox. She waited for a while then she left, after slipping a note through the letterbox begging me to call her.

I stared at it and thought about calling her but then the darkness had a word in my ear.

“She isn’t really a friend. She doesn’t enjoy your company. She’s only doing it out of pity.”

One morning I opened the drawer of my bedside table, took out the make-up mirror I kept there and held it up to the light. I looked at my face, something I hadn’t done in days. Dark crescent moons hung under my red-rimmed eyes, my cheeks were hollow and my hair stood on end like I’d been plugged in. I was jaundiced and weak. I looked into my eyes. Nobody was at home. I averted my gaze. I’d seen that look before. When I looked again Tess was staring back at me.

Chapter 29

I sat up bolt upright when I saw him standing at the end of the bed. He looked tanned and relaxed in a linen shirt, loafers and well-ironed jeans. Our time apart seemed to be serving Joe well.

“Shit,” I said, shielding my eyes from the brutal rays of late morning sun that interrogated my face. I glanced over at the alarm clock. Eleven am. I’d overslept. I was supposed to get up at nine, clean the house then disappear while he came to collect his stuff. He was back from Madrid for a couple of days and staying with his friend at the other side of Chorlton.

I slumped back onto the pillows. From the corner of my eye I could see him surveying the room: the huge coffee stain on the beige carpet, the empty packets of Nytol, chocolate wrappers, wineglasses, the half-open drawers and array of dirty clothes scattered everywhere. Tracey Emin’s bed looked neat by comparison.

“Mary Duffy got my number from work and rang me in Madrid,” he said. “She’s very worried about you. She asked if you’d been kidnapped.”

I sniffed. “I’ve had a virus and I didn’t feel like seeing anyone but I’m fine now.”

He stepped towards the bed as if he was about to sit down. I flinched and he moved towards the window instead, leaning back against the sill. On the wall beside him was the sepia poster we bought on our honeymoon in Venice. Couples wearing masks were dancing at a carnival ball. We bought it in a small shop in an alleyway away from the crowds. We’d walked for hours in the sizzling heat that day and afterwards we sat outside the tiny bar next door and held hands over pool-sized gin and tonics. On the walk home the heavens opened in a tropical downpour and we got drenched. We were so much in love we didn’t care one bit. I’d been looking at the poster and thinking of that day a lot. It reminded me of him and our marriage, the mask part anyway.

“You don’t look well,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look it. You’re so skinny and pale.” He gestured around the room at the chaos. “Look at this. It’s not like you at all.” He cocked his head to one side. “You’ve been through a lot, Carmel. Maybe you need to get some help.”

I pulled myself up onto a pillow.

“So you’re giving me fucking mental-health advice after what you did? Don’t you think that’s a bit like beating someone to a pulp then handing them a box of plasters?”

He said nothing and lowered his head.

Out of the window behind him a white ribbon of plane trail soared between two clouds. Was life really going on as normal when mine had come to a standstill? Were people taking holidays? Were they having lunch in the cafés on Beech Road and going to work on trams, buses and cars?

I closed my eyes. I wanted to hurt him, to tell him about that night four years before, how I’d  been blown away by another man at the teaching conference. Billy O’Hagan he was called. He was from Galway, a widower, and he lived in Chorlton. He was witty and rugged and we drank late-night tequila shots huddled together in the cold on the hotel terrace bar. Then we ended up in his room where we kissed.

“I still fucking love you,” Joe said.

When I opened my eyes he was still standing by the window and I could see he was crying.

“I made the biggest mistake of my life. I don’t want us to split up.”

I buried my head in my pillow, remembering the look of dismay on Billy O’Hagan’s face when I put my