I didn't do a runner! I did graduate, and add another job to the mix, and lose the best of my computer access, but I am hell-bent on finishing this thing within a year of starting it (August). Now I've said that "out loud," I have to follow through. Guilt works every time!
A bit of dreamcasting, since I'm bringing back Kate Clifford: in my mind, she looks a bit like Tamsin Greig did around this time period.
BALLYKISSANGEL
Barney's aimless meandering about the grounds of the National School called to Peter's mind the very meaning of the term dog days.
The schoolyard, too, seemed charged with a restless sort of idleness, as if the playing field could somehow anticipate the return of a student body in just under a week. The sight of play equipment seemed to take Kieran by surprise, Peter noticed. If it knocked loose the boy's obvious trepidation, Peter would call it a win.
"You see, it won't be so different to your nursery school, back in England."
Kieran made the mistake of looking at the enormous building, then gave Peter a dubious pout.
Something pale and round caught the corner of Peter's eye in the twilight.
"Would you like to learn to dribble a football?"
Siobhan lowered a worn-out Aisling into her junior bed. It had been a tense afternoon, keeping the girl occupied and out of trouble, checking every ring of the mobile with equal hope and fear that it might be either of two capricious, middle-aged men - first initial B.
It never would, as it turned out. Only a call from Avril about The Cat's sports medicine regimen; then later, another from a mountainy man about scheduling artificial insemination.
It was for his sows, he finally clarified. All the same, it was a discussion with more dumbing-down than Siobhan might have liked about the uterine upsuck theory.
Still, it was the sexiest call of the day. No Brendan. No Benny. Silence only, from the pair of them.
On a bit more reflection, she counted other similarities between her men. First of all, neither one was truly hers. Both were glad of their educations, enamored of their lines of work; proud to care for innocents, but also desperate to be the wisest creature in the room. Conflicted so deeply about their bachelorhood; insecure about their waistlines; overconfident in their respective kitchens, if not as much so in bedrooms.
Was she imagining it now, or did they share a birthday?
She shuddered, kissing the brow of her daughter and remembering just what a difficult worry this easy one was masking. How brutally had everyone judged Niamh for dallying with a potato-faced bore, when the whole town knew the depth of her heartache?
This was no apparent death of a best friend, no grave injury in search of a little palliative dopamine. This was a flesh wound, merely a toddler who simply didn't speak. Wasn't it a model behaviour, really, in a town where gossip ran so rampant?
"G'night," she whispered.
Aisling smiled back, but that was all.
Kieran's motor skills were miles from effective dribbling, but he was having a fine old time of the effort. The dog seemed reasonably entertained as well. Peter noticed the sky had darkened, and marvelled at the clarity of Canis Major away from the light pollution of the city. He had feared his heart would do this, even before learning Assumpta was still alive: he had feared that in returning, he might discover the town was still under his skin.
It was, now - though less so in her indefinite absence, still more so than in her apparent death.
When he looked down again, Niamh's two charges were panting and weary at his side.
"Are you going back to England?" Kieran managed between gasps.
Peter nodded. "I have to."
"Why?"
"Well, I've a job to do. A house to look after."
"Oh." Kieran kicked the ball back where he'd found it. "So you just came to see your friends, and now it's over?"
Peter swallowed. "Well, I did come to see my friends, and that might be over." He tried to stay composed. "But you know, and your family all know, that we can still talk anytime you need to. Okay?"
Kieran gave a slow nod.
"C'mon. Let's go see your mother."
Niamh closed her mobile phone and slinked inside the pub once more. The solicitor had been adamant, after a careful review of circumstances: annulment wasn't just an option, it was the only option. "You're legally still Niamh Egan," she had said, then carefully added, "assuming you want to be."
For his part, Sean had been predictably sullen about being erased from a family, and about the whole village's dirty habit of running away. His surprise at Ambrose's turning up alive had seemed more like an afterthought.
His guess about Ambrose's taking off once more had felt like a poison dart.
Niamh now plunked down on a stool next to Father Vincent, the words out of her mouth before she could refine them. "Will we all forever be wiping our own eyes in this town?"
The curate squinted.
Niamh tried again. "Did we fall for the hoaxes on purpose at all? Are we happier with a bunch of untimely deaths than with a little marital or financial inconvenience? Is all we care about the approval of gossips and snobs?"
Oonagh set a heady pint of Smithwicks before her, unprompted.
"Right," Niamh said, her voice brittle and relentless as a spiderweb. "Lots of fun at Fitz and Egan's wake."
MANCHESTER
Kate Clifford trudged around the old terraced house with an easy familiarity. It had not belonged to her mother, officially, for three years, but in her brother's care very little had changed. It was more a museum of how Mary Margaret had left it at the time of her death: framed photographs still in their places on same wall along the staircase; the same books in the same order on the shelves, with a few minor disruptions to the Carlo Martini and Dorothy Day titles; same houseplants near the windows, in the same touch-and-go condition, for her to water until her brother came back from Ireland, or the plants finally died.
Whichever came first.
Her brother had not said a word about the need for a return trip to the infamous Ballykea - indeed, he had not said anything beyond the request to check in on the place every day and bring in the post, save for an invitation to help herself to anything in the fridge. She did so now, finding the same magnets in the same spots, holding up the same notes that had become obsolete relics of a delicate penmanship that was lost now forever.
Inside the fridge door was perhaps the only real evidence that this house now belonged to Father Peter Clifford: only the dull staples of his joyless diet, only the frozen ready meals and instant breakfasts of a man resigned by sacred duty to his own bachelorhood. She clucked her tongue and delivered a chicken and vegetable pie to its fate in the microwave.
The electronic humming might have masked the sound of keys in the front door, or perhaps it was the five shrill beeps alerting her that the pie was ready to be stabbed with a fork, rotated a quarter turn, and nuked for another four minutes. When Kate herself rotated a quarter turn, she was face to face with her middle brother.
He gave a weary half-smile and let the rucksack slide down his arm.
"Welcome home?" she guessed.
He shrugged, letting his bag hit the floor.
Forty minutes later she was still stretched across the sofa, making no move to go.
"Plants look...viable," her brother tried feebly. "Thanks."
"Still think they ought to be let die with dignity," Kate yawned, pulling an old chenille throw over her legs.
"Anything important in the post?"
"Three awful women's magazines in Mum's name, coupla bills."
"Oh."
"Y'ever going to tell me what you were doing back in Ireland?"
He shifted a few times, then rose from his seat to sort through the stack of envelopes on the sideboard.
Kate screwed up her face. "I hear Jenny and her husband are moving cities," she tried. "Portsmouth, God help 'em."
"Should be nice," Peter said, rolling his eyes.
"Really was a lovely ceremony. It was right of you to make Father Randall celebrate it, of course. Would've been altogether too strange with you at the altar."
"I'm glad you agree." He binned a few garbage items. He uncapped a black marker to obliterate the addresses on the magazines; he'd been donating them lately to doctors' waiting rooms.
"Did it happen over there as well?" she asked.
Peter capped the marker. "Kate," he warned.
Her voice had begun to soften. "Because you came back such a bloody mess after Mum died...and you wouldn't tell me anything. Ever since you were ordained you never tell me anything. I worry, Peter."
It dawned on him now. "You spoke to Father Randall?"
"No," she muttered. "I found Mum's last letter for you."
BELFAST
It had been a rough first readthrough, no denying it.
The new male lead - a thicker, balder version of Enda Sullivan - had gnawed on every line as if trying desperately to seduce poor young Caitlin. As for the ingenue herself, she'd seemed a bit off-kilter, a little green about the gills, a bit weary around the eyes.
It didn't entirely escape Assumpta's notice, though too many other things had: "Maire Mellon" had let her mind wander too much in the three scenes before her character was killed off, forcing the others in the cast to prompt three of her five lines. Assumpta didn't much relish the thought of another premature onstage death followed by a whole lot of backstage silence until curtain call - where, for that matter, she would bear the indignity of bowing first, to the faintest applause.
She supposed it was only fair, given how she'd made her exit from Ballykea - this time as guilty and cowardly as the last. Still every bit a fake early death. All her life, a parade of fake early deaths.
Now she stretched out on her sofa-bed, the last of another strong drink hitting her bloodstream, Fionn curled at her feet. It was dark out, and rising to put on the table lamp would disturb his sleep. Instead, she surrendered to the same.
She did not hear the window creaking open in the bathroom.