After the Silence by O'Neill Louise

Author:O'Neill, Louise [O'Neill, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, thriller, Crime, Contemporary, Adult, feminism
ISBN: 9781784298913
Amazon: B082VWQF7Q
Goodreads: 51179235
Publisher: riverrun
Published: 2020-09-03T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty

Róisín Crowley, Nessa’s sister

Róisín: I dream of her, still. The same dream every time. We’re dancing in a circle, Nessa and Sinéad and me, holding hands. We’re wearing white dresses, and we’ve red flowers in our hair, peonies, I think. They were Nessa’s favourite. Rock-a-bye baby, someone is singing, but it’s not one of us. It’s eerie, that voice is, like a tape stuck in the cassette player, warping. And then we all fall down, and when we get up, it’s only me and Sinéad left. At first I think Nessa is hiding, and it’s a game. Sinéad and I are laughing as we go look for her, but we can never find her. That’s when I wake up, crying. (pause) I must have Kyle driven demented.

Noah: Kyle is your husband?

Róisín: Yeah. I met him six months after I arrived here in Auckland. He’d never even been to Ireland, let alone heard of Inisrún.

Noah: Was that a good thing?

Róisín: You could say that.

Jake: And Cooper – that’s your little boy, isn’t it? He’s a cute-looking kid.

Róisín: Please don’t say that.

Jake: I didn’t mean—

Róisín: I just . . . I don’t want him to grow up hearing that stuff. It didn’t do any of us any good.

Noah: Did Nessa grow up hearing things like that? (silence) OK, Róisín, do you want to tell us about your childhood? A lot of the reports from the Misty Hill story mentioned your relationship with your sisters. The three of you were extraordinarily close, locals said.

Róisín: ‘Extraordinarily close’ – they always make it sound so weird, like we were in a cult or something. What other choice did we have? The boys at school would just stare at us like we were animals in the zoo, and the girls hated us, accusing us of trying to steal their boyfriends if we so much as said hello to them. As if we would have looked at them, Nessa would say. They were pathetic, the lot of them. No ambition, she said. I think that’s why she was drawn to Alex Delaney in the first place, he had plans to study in Dublin. Nessa liked that. (pause) I found it hard enough when she started at college, and then suddenly she was spending every weekend up in the Big House too, leaving me and Sinéad behind. We’d always been the Crowley Girls, the three of us together, and now she was . . .

Noah: What was she doing?

Róisín: It was like she was different to us, for the first time ever. It’s funny – it wasn’t until I came to New Zealand that I started to think about the idea of the ‘Crowley Girls’, and what that had meant for us, for me. It had become a sort of identity, in a way.

Noah: How had it been your identity?

Róisín: I don’t know, like. I’d always been the middle Crowley Girl and then, overnight, I was the eldest. On my twenty-second birthday I remember thinking that for the first time in my life I was older than Nessa, and that broke me.

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