The Leaving by Gabriella West

Author:Gabriella West [Gabriella West]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781458133779
Google: Jh5WDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Gabriella West
Published: 2011-05-30T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Jeanette and I were side by side on a Bus Eireann coach taking us into County Meath. She was looking out the window; I was pretending to read. Around us the crowded busload of mostly older people smoked, chattered. The driver’s radio was playing oldies—“Wild Thing.” I liked it.

Wild thing, I think I love you

But I wanna know for sure

So come on and hold me tight...

“What did you say your uncle’s wife was called?” Jeanette asked idly.

“Patricia.”

She nodded. She was being very quiet. I did not feel like talking either. I was beginning to feel a little nervous: would this holiday bore her? Or me? And did my uncle and aunt really want us there?

It was early August. My grandmother had died about three months before. Stevie and I were quite willing to go to the funeral, but my mother discouraged us. Instead she had taken my father. They had left together one Friday night, she tense and fidgety, he scowling and silent. They returned two days later, quite changed: cheerful, relaxed. For the past three months, then, everything had been calm in our house.

The weekend that they were away, though, Stevie brought Ron home. It was literally the first opportunity he had ever had to do it. I was given no prior warning, and still felt jittery when I remembered coming into the kitchen after school (I had walked home with Jeanette and we had delayed, talking, until the evening began to grow chilly) and seeing my brother with his arms around another man. The light wasn’t on, so the figure was hard to make out. I was not sure it was Ron; I did not remember him being so tall. But as they slowly disengaged I saw that it was indeed he, self-possessed as ever.

“Hi, Cathy,” he said, with infuriating jauntiness.

“Hi,” I said, hoarsely. My heart was beating so hard I could hardly speak. Stevie, always in control, murmured: “He’s staying over tonight.”

“Oh, fine,” I said nodding, backing out of the kitchen. I had never felt such an intruder, so out of place. That entire weekend I’d crept about the house like a miserable ghost.

* * *

Jeanette was sleeping, though it was only four in the afternoon. She could drop off at any time, she told me once. I envied her that. I was far too nervous to sleep. “Hello, uncle John,” I said to myself. I had never even seen a picture of him, nor had I asked my mother what he looked like. Ah well, at least I wasn’t alone.

But I couldn’t concentrate on my uncle and aunt for too long. There was something different about Jeanette and me ... a new, unwelcome development. Something I found hard to get out of my mind as I looked at her face, remote and sad in sleep. (She’d told me not long before that she’d fallen asleep during a long bus journey home. Shaken awake by the young bus conductor, she’d leapt up and cried “Daddy! Oh,

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