Something in Common by Meaney Roisin

Author:Meaney, Roisin [Meaney, Roisin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC044000
ISBN: 9781444743555
Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland
Published: 2013-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Helen

She sat in front of the television and watched as Nelson Mandela walked to freedom after being locked up for twenty-seven years. She looked at the beaming face of his wife Winnie, walking hand in hand with him. She listened to the loud cheers from the crowds of South Africans, black and white, who had gathered to witness history, and she could feel the hope that here, at last, was the beginning of the end of their struggle.

When the newsreader moved on to another item she got up, leaving the television on. She left the room and climbed the stairs. She opened the door to Alice’s empty bedroom and stood on the threshold.

The single bed was unmade, the covers carelessly thrown back: in all her eighteen years, had Alice once made her bed? The art books, always piled higgledy-piggledy on the floor by the radiator, were gone. The top of the dressing-table was bare, except for a single lidless lipstick wand and the tiny curl of a silver earring back.

Alice’s records were gone too, her Smiths and her Bruce Springsteens and her Pet Shop Boys, all vanished from the wooden crate under the window that she’d stacked them in.

Helen crossed the floor to the narrow wardrobe, on whose top sat Nelly, the blue elephant that Breen had sent to heal a long-ago broken wrist. She opened the door and saw a clutch of wire hangers. Was there anything as dismal as the clatter of empty hangers? Nothing, not even a shoe, not even a goddamn insole.

She opened drawers in the dressing-table and found a used postage stamp, still attached to a raggedy piece of envelope, a paperclip and one green ankle sock, balled in on itself.

She slipped off her shoes and got into the bed and pulled the rumpled blankets up around her. She closed her eyes and pressed them to her face. She breathed them in.

Alice.

Her torment, her scourge. The battles that had been fought between them, the doors that had been slammed. Alice, the cause of countless sleepless nights, grounded for half her life. Stubborn, sulky Alice, her precious rebel child.

‘Don’t forget to feed the cat,’ she’d said to Helen the day before, looking unbearably young in her red plastic raincoat, the last bag slung over her shoulder as she’d stood waiting to pack it into the back of Jackie’s battered van. ‘His bowl is under the hedge.’

‘I know where it is.’ Helen, with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, biting the inside of her cheek to stop her mouth trembling. ‘Ring when you get there, OK? Doesn’t matter what time. Find a phone. Reverse the charges if you can’t get change.’

Off with two other art-college dropouts, the three of them having decided, after a single term, that working for nothing in an eco-something-or-other outfit in the middle of Wales was preferable to getting a proper qualification. Nineteen in a few weeks: what could Helen do except give her enough money to ensure she didn’t starve and wave

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