Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell

Author:Maggie O'Farrell [O'Farrell, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-385-34941-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

He crouches to look into the crevasse, putting down the cereal bowl. “Six,” he murmurs again. “Mummy said if she did it again she’d lose her sweets on Saturday. Do you think we’ll get them back?”

“The sweets?”

“No, the cars.”

Monica looks down into the jagged black tear. “I don’t know,” she says carefully. “Maybe it’s—”

“I’d say not. Vita said she pushed them down there to see if the devils would drive them out.”

Monica considers this sentence. She takes each idea separately: pushing cars into a crack in the earth, the devils, the driving out again. No, she concludes, it makes no sense at all.

Hughie seems to glean this because he looks up at her. She is struck by the perfection of his skin, its flawless translucence, the meander of veins beneath its surface.

“Granny says that devils live there, inside the earth,” he explains, “so Vita thought that if she put the cars down there, the devils might find them and drive them out. Vita said she wanted to see them.”

Monica blinks away an image of tiny red creatures boiling up out of the crack like ants.

“Do you believe it?” Hughie asks.

“Do I believe what?”

“That devils live down there.”

“I …”

“I don’t,” he says helpfully.

“Neither do I. And I’m not sure that they’d know how to drive.”

He lifts his head and gives her a smile of such charm and trust and brilliance that she feels tears start into her eyes.

“Is Grandpa going to come back?” he says.

“I don’t know,” Monica says, “but I’ll tell you something: if they don’t stop arguing about who’s going where, I’m going to scream.”

Hughie looks impressed and a little bit scared, and Monica goes into the house to find that Claire—who’s recently had a most unfortunate haircut that Monica is hoping she got her money back on—is leaving to fetch Gretta.

It has been decided that Claire appearing on her doorstep will wrong-foot Gretta into compliance. Any of them, and she would throw herself back on her old tricks for avoiding things she doesn’t want to do: the pills, the headaches, the shrieking. But Gretta will be so disconcerted by her well-spoken English daughter-in-law arriving, alone, to take her to a family conference that she will be hoodwinked into agreeing.

They gather on the pavement outside Michael Francis’s house to wave Claire off.

“Don’t tell her it’s a family conference,” Michael Francis says to his wife, through the car window.

“I won’t,” Claire says.

“Don’t even say the words ‘family conference,’ ” says Monica.

“I won’t.”

“Say ‘cup of tea,’ ” Aoife advises. “Tell her you’ve come to bring her over for a cup of tea.”

Claire nods. “I will.”

“Cup of tea,” Michael Francis agrees. “Good thinking.”

“Bye-bye, Mummy!” Vita calls, dancing up and down on the pavement, caught up in the drama of the situation.

As Claire drives off, Hughie runs down the pavement alongside the car in his bare feet, waving and calling, with Michael Francis shouting after him about putting on some shoes, for God’s sake.

By the time Gretta steps through the door, everyone is dressed, more or less.

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