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Did they know what he was like behind closed doors? Did they approve? The thought made her stomach move. He’d put a rough hand on her shoulder, held her to him and she’d been embarrassed in a way that a girl of twelve would be, this half-stranger that the town adored. An uncle had taken her inside and the fug of smoke and sound hadn’t frightened her, there was something in the way the packed pub orbited him that made her oddly proud.
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The journeys back had thinned, the last time he had been given a hero’s welcome, men slapped him on the back in the pub, she hadn’t recognised him, not at first. She thought of the last time she had seen him. The wind had buffeted the bus, she’d felt it strain to stay in the inside lane, pressed her head against the windowpane, as the rain bled sideways along it. She’d walked the city like a tourist, killing time before the bus out to Dun Laoghaire for the slowboat over. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ she’d said, and she’d gone back to drying the dishes, though when she’d looked up again the forced smile was teary. She’d thought of her mother, how she’d taken the news that she was moving to Dublin, the look on her face, something trapped between betrayal and pride.
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A group of women had staggered by, laughing in the rain, tottering on heels. A landline, he changed his number so often it was the only one guaranteed to work. What was she trying to prove? She’d pushed open the phone box door, putting the scrap of paper back into her pocket. Why did she want to go? If anyone had an excuse not to it was her. When she’d hung up, she’d felt suddenly afraid. ‘I want to come,’ Ciara had said with neither defiance nor pleading. She had her mother’s eyes, her strong jaw, the upturned mouth, and the last thing they would want was those eyes at the funeral. Was there sympathy there too? Maybe it would have been easier if she looked like him, but she didn’t. Last thing she wanted was his daughter turning up, the bad penny, the troubled Irish girl with her sourness, with her history, shattering the illusion that he’d spent years building, the proud family man, the grafter, the rags to riches climber from West coast turfer to construction giant. And there was a genuine shift in the voice then, she had felt it. Nobody would.’ Another pause and the crackle in the line had made her wonder if the sheet of rain that was lashing down there in Dublin stretched all the way to Liverpool. ‘I mean, he wouldn’t want – have expected you to. ‘You don’t have to come, you know.’ The voice had been loaded, clogged with history. She looked down at her rain-soaked trainers, the hole in her jeans at the knee, picked at the fabric like a scab. A flash of lightning out at sea brought her to. That’s why the visits stopped, the letters slowed, the phone calls died. He’d been ill when all that had happened, a different man. Sure, he had his family around him, devoted, but nobody could compete with her. It wasn’t that, but what? Did she think there would be a warm welcome? A sudden rush of love for the girl that had been left behind? Half-brothers with open arms and stories of the man who’d always held a flame for her, a candle at the window of his memory for her, a photograph perhaps in his wallet, a sad song in the embers of a long night on the whiskey, all for her. It was Sheila who’d encouraged him to keep contact and given her the landline number, had invited her over once, suddenly, in a tipsy call on Christmas day. She wanted to hate Sheila but she knew that she didn’t. Was that it? Did she want to go and ruin things, make things as awkward as possible? Walk into the funeral, head held high, her mother’s face searing, watch them squirm through half-strangled introductions, the priest not knowing where to look. She hated him, hated her more, Sheila the homewrecker. What was she doing here? Heaving across a dark, wild sea in the middle of the night to attend the funeral of a man she didn’t know, who had walked out on her, leaving her mother to sink into the shrinking world of the fields, the house, the tiny kitchen, the bottle. She tried to light a cigarette and gave up, found a bench to huddle into, pulled her knees up to her chin. A baby was crying and she forced her way out onto a sheltered part of the deck. The weather seemed to have followed her from Dublin, lashing the deck, the windows, the roof.