Bad Day in Blackrock by Kevin Power

Author:Kevin Power [Power, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847399403
Publisher: Pocket

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When Laura hadn’t eaten, her breath would smell like sour milk, and Conor would try to avoid her kisses. She had explained about her problems with food, which to Conor’s family was like having problems with furniture or air. You don’t question the elements, his mother would say from behind the clattering turret of her sewing machine. And Conor agreed with her, although he was in love, and positive that Laura’s problems didn’t matter.

There was something weary about his mother’s wisdom, Conor thought, as though it had come to her too late. He listened to her, fascinated, wary of showing how much her sayings meant to him. Boys were supposed to shock their mothers, to turn their warmth and kindness upside down, but Conor was always made tender by his mother’s vulnerability. He was childishly interested in what she had to say.

Since retiring from the hands-on side of the family’s restaurant business, Eileen Harris worked desultorily from home, selling patchwork quilts of her own design and, occasionally, cushions and throws that wound up in the unused living rooms of her wealthy friends and neighbours. Their neighbourhood in Donnybrook was like that: full of people who could afford to have a room they never used. Laura came from such a house, which she once described to Conor as ‘an ordinary six-bedroom family house’, and which always astonished him with its pristine permanence whenever he entered it. Every surface in that house would gleam and glitter. The rooms contained a silken hush, as though they expected you to be as neat and calm as they were. The kitchen was full of marble and stainless steel, and appeared never to have been used for anything so mundane as the preparation of food.

Certainly Laura would never have used it for such a task. She hardly touched food if she could help it. She greeted the suggestion of lunch with wan indifference. Conor never saw it as a problem. After his death I forgot about Laura’s eating disorder, and when I remembered it, sitting down to write this account, it had somehow become lapidary, inevitable, a part of the past. Perhaps more strangely, it had become something to do with Conor. It had become just one more fact about the dead.

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