roads with your daddy than you did baking with me or playing with all the dolls I bought you.’
‘Well, I never have been a very girly girl,’ I say.
‘No, I suppose you never have been,’ she says, looking me up and down as if she still can’t quite get her head around my gayness.
‘But I’ll tell you this, Ciara McKee, once he’s gone this time, that will be it. There won’t be any more chances to say the things you want to say, or hear the things you need to hear. Not everyone gets the chance to know when their time is coming. It’s hard, but it’s a blessing in its own way. Don’t spend the rest of your life wishing you’d said or done something differently.’
The only thing I wish I’d done differently was not to let him have so much power over me and my happiness. Letting him manipulate me and hurt me. And this? Now? The desires of a dying man, this was a masterstroke in manipulation.
‘I know I raised you well, Ciara,’ my mother continues. ‘I know I raised you to be the caring, loving woman you are now. I can’t tell you what to do …’ Her sentence trails off.
She doesn’t need to finish it. She is right, she can’t tell me what to do, I think. Not that it will stop her.
‘For all his faults, he’s family,’ she says. ‘And goodness knows he doesn’t have much of a family around him what with your auntie Kathleen being over in England. So maybe he needs us, and he needs you most of all.’
‘He has the golden child,’ I say petulantly – and I’m immediately annoyed at my childishness. ‘Did you know she has a baby now?’
My mother nods. ‘I do. And I know as well as you, Ciara, that wee girl doesn’t do well under pressure. It would be cruel to leave her to manage all this on her own.’
‘It’s not as easy as all that, Mammy,’ I tell her. ‘I have my own pressures, too. Do you think work will be okay with me announcing I’m taking reams of time off to care for an estranged parent?’
She sniffs, shakes her head. ‘You practically run the place for them, Ciara. You’re owed time off. Take it.’
‘That’s the problem,’ I tell her. ‘I do practically run the place. They need me there.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ she says, in full flow now. ‘It’s only an art gallery. It’s not like you’re CEO of a major company or a brain surgeon or something.’
I bristle. It may not seem like much to my mother, but running the small, independent gallery is my passion. Has been for years. But now’s not the time to argue with her about the importance of the arts. Nor is it the time to tell her that yes, I may well be owed time off, but I’ve things I’d much rather be doing than spending that precious time off with a man who I can’t stand to be near.
‘All I’m saying is, he’s your father. He needs you. You need to be the bigger person here.’ My mother cuts through my thoughts, neither listening to nor understanding what I’ve been saying.
I carry a tray laden with a bowl of chicken soup from a tin, a slice of wheaten bread, a glass of milk and an apple. Mammy has already expressed her disappointment to me over the phone that I didn’t make the soup from scratch. I’d rolled my eyes so hard I’d given myself a headache. Was it not enough for her that I’d booked a few days off work after all, leaving a nervous assistant to oversee the installation of a new exhibition?
‘He’s lucky he’s getting anything,’ I said down the line to Stella, my phone on speaker as I heated the soup and took a spoon from the drawer.
‘You know your mum. Always a little bit extra,’ Stella said, trying to lift my mood. ‘It’s obvious she’s never tasted your soup before!’
‘I make a lovely soup,’ I told her. ‘Just not for estranged family members.’
‘So I take it you won’t be sharing your lunch with Heidi, then?’
‘She’s out,’ I’d told her.
She’d scarpered out of the door with that baby of hers in a buggy almost as soon as my foot had crossed the threshold.
‘Can’t say that I blame her,’ Stella said, who’d said the previous day there was something about the house that gave her the creeps.
‘It’s a feeling,’ she’d said when I pushed her to explain further. ‘It’s hard to put into words, but that house feels sad. Like bad things happen there.’
‘Bad things do happen there,’ I’d said. ‘It’s never been a happy place for me.’
‘I think it goes deeper than that,’ she’d said, ‘but look, never mind me. I’m probably just away with the fairies again.’
I replay that conversation in my head as I reach the top of the stairs. Stella has always been intuitive. She jokes that in olden times she would most likely have been burned at the stake for being a witch.
She’s right about the creepy feeling under this roof though, especially in this dimly lit hall, the ticking of the clock echoing around the quiet house.
I’ve kept all conversation with my father functional so far today. Did he need anything? Should I freshen his water? Plump his pillows? Did he need anything picking up from the chemist?
He’d asked me to return some library books for him, pick him a few he had reserved behind the desk. I’d jumped at the chance. Of course I didn’t think that in doing so I’d have to listen to the simpering librarian behind the desk wax lyrical on what a wonderful man he was and how he must be a great father. I nodded, made relatively non-committal noises. She’d become misty-eyed.
‘A terrible tragedy. He’s so young still, and such a good man. They say God takes the good ones first,’ she said. ‘You must be beside yourself at the news.’
I’d been so, so tempted to tell her that I wasn’t beside myself at all at the news. That I’d spent more time than I’m proud of wishing he was dead. A wicked voice inside me wanted to scream: ‘The sooner the bastard is in the ground the better.’
I didn’t, of course. And for now I’m doing what my mother wants me to do. I am being there for him. Smoothing waters, even though I know no matter how calm the surface, there is an undercurrent threatening to drag me down at any moment.
I take a deep breath. I won’t let that undercurrent win today. I plaster something akin to a smile on my face and carry the tray into his room, where he’s sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. He needs a shave, but I’ll not be offering to help with that. He looks much brighter than he did when I first saw him three days ago. There is some colour back in his cheeks. He smiles back at me. Or leers. It strikes me that there has always been something about his smile that makes me feel uncomfortable.
‘Here’s your lunch,’ I say, sitting it across his lap and making sure he has everything he needs.
I don’t want to be in this room with him any longer than I need to be, so I turn to leave.
‘Ciara?’ His voice is thin and reedy – thinner and reedier than it probably needs to be. ‘Come and sit with me. Just while I have my lunch. Then you can get back to hiding downstairs again. Or you can go home. But just give me five minutes of your time, please.’
‘Okay,’ I say, instantly wishing I had the guts to say no.
‘Why don’t you sit down, instead of standing there and growing tall? You’re tall enough already.’
‘I’ll go get a chair,’ I say.
It might be a good idea to have one here anyway, for visitors. Not that there have been many, by all accounts. Despite his supposed status in the community, the house has been remarkably quiet according to Heidi. All those people who he holds court with, chats to in the street, in the library. They’re not really his friends, are they? Where are they now?