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

hung overhead on the gallery roof spelling out the words “Gathering of Strangers”. Hunched forwards, elbows on his knees, Dan was holding his head in his hands. Then, as if suddenly remembering he was late for something, he jumped up and hurried towards the exit and out into the street.

Chapter 40

Two weeks after I met Dan at the Whitworth, Joe rang me at home. It was a Friday evening and he wanted to know if a letter had arrived for him from the hospital. Though he’d moved into the Salford Quays flat three months previously, a lot of his mail was still being delivered to the house. He was waiting to hear about an appointment for a cycling injury. He sounded croaky on the phone and said he’d been off work for a couple of days with a bad dose of something. I offered to drive round with the letter. Why wouldn’t I? He’d looked after me when I was unwell the previous summer and we were getting on OK. I didn’t hesitate to return the favour. I put some salad in a Tupperware box, wrapped up the dish of lasagne I’d just taken out of the oven and got in the car.

I shivered as I waited outside the entrance of Joe’s waterfront building for him to buzz me in. It was an icy evening with a thin layer of February frost on the ground. Once former dockyards, Salford Quays was one of the country’s first major examples of urban regeneration. As far back as I could remember the entire area had been one vast building site. Then one by one, the Lowry Theatre and Hotel, the Imperial War Museum and the shopping centre had opened up. More recently the BBC and Media City arrived, bringing jobs for locals, reluctant southerners forced to transfer up from London and celebrity sightings. Nowadays the Quays bustled with young hipsters living in glitzy high-rise residential buildings with names like Grain Wharf, Merchants Quay and Imperial Point.

“Why the Quays?” I asked Joe when he first told me he was moving there. “It’s full of youngsters.”

“Steady on,” he replied, open-mouthed. “I’m only forty-two.”

“Why not stay in Chorlton where your friends are?”

He stared down at his hands. “Too many memories.”

It was my first visit to the flat. My heart dipped as I entered. Joe’s bike took up most of the narrow hallway and the living room was depressingly pokey. Though he’d been there for months, he still hadn’t unpacked properly. Unopened cardboard boxes, plastic storage containers and holdalls were piled high everywhere. Dirty dishes and plates filled the sink and cans and takeaway cartons lined the worktop in the tiny galley kitchen to the side. Despite the ridiculous rent he was paying, the furniture and fittings looked flimsy and cheap.

He was curled up on the sofa in his tartan dressing gown under a blanket. Used tissues, pill packets and medicine bottles covered a glass coffee table next to him. He didn’t look well at all. His face, slightly jaundiced and hollow, lit up when he saw me.

“It’s very cosy,” I said awkwardly.

He threw me a wry smile and sniffed into a tissue. “I got the short straw when it came to houses.”

The fact that I’d been living in the dream house that Paddy and Peggy had paid for wasn’t lost on me. Joe hadn’t objected so far. But then how could he? He’d slept with my best friend.

“You look shit, by the way,” I said, going into the kitchen and moving his laptop off the worktop to make way for my dishes. “You need to eat something.”

I heated up the lasagne in the microwave, put the salad on plates and poured two glasses from the half bottle of Viognier I found in the fridge. We ate on the sofa with our food on our knees, listening to Radio XFM on the digital radio on the table. Joe asked how my meeting with Dan had gone. I told him I’d been disappointed, that I’d built my long-lost brother up too much in my imagination.

I scooped up my lasagne. “He’s finding it all a bit too much. I’m not sure we even get on. I thought meeting him was going to be this amazing happy ending. I suppose subconsciously I thought he’d replace Mikey. But he’s much more complex. They’re very different people.”

“He seemed nice enough at the fundraiser.” Joe cocked his head to one side and grinned. “Not that you'd remember much about that night.”

“Stop it.” I felt myself redden and slapped his knee playfully.

Joe wolfed down the last of his food, placed his empty plate on the coffee table and sat back on the sofa.

“Mikey was unique,” he said. “He and I had our differences but even I could see what a lovable scoundrel he was. Nobody could ever replace him in your eyes, Carmel.”

“I know,” I said, sighing and putting down my fork. “He was far from perfect though. I’ve been thinking a lot about something you said outside Karen’s house that time.”

Joe winced.

“Something about me enabling Mikey and Tess.”

He held up a hand.

“I didn’t mean –”

“No. Let me finish. I think you had a point. Well, maybe not Tess so much, but Mikey, yes. I bailed him out a lot of times when it would have been better to let him deal with the consequences of his actions. But I always had this idea it was my duty to step in and protect my naughty kid brother all the time because we didn’t have functioning parents. Even when he was a grown man.” I looked Joe in the eye “And you were also right about the day of your dad’s funeral. I should never have left you to go and see Mikey in court. That was very wrong of me.”

He sighed then slowly slid his hand along the sofa cushions and put it over mine. It was febrile to the touch and I left it there for a