‘Oh, my holy jeez, it’s half ten! My life is going to be hell if I’m not asleep by eleven.’ To Cassie’s dismay, the others immediately agreed and started waving and calling for the bill.
‘Pete’s outside, he says he’ll give everyone a lift, since we’re all on a loop. Oh, wait, there’s only four seats.’
Bryony looked guiltily at Cassie, who was actually feeling a rush of relief.
‘Don’t even think about it, I can get the Luas back to Mam’s.’
‘Are you sure? You’re so good,’ said Louise.
Everyone hugged her under the canopy outside the door of Casey’s Irish Cuisine (reimagined) and said it’d been ‘such a blast’, before piling into Pete’s silver Lexus which pulled out into the dazzling lights of the rain-soaked traffic.
Cassie mooched back down the road, the thick bushes alongside the path shielding her from the worst of the rain. Thankfully, a tram was on its way as she arrived on the platform. Diving into the sparsely populated carriage, she huddled into a window seat. There were about six stops to go, so she allowed her gaze to soften and follow the movement of raindrops trailing down the window as they crossed the M50 bridge, over the big roundabout and down towards the busier stations, heading in the direction of town. She hadn’t ever expected to be single and back in Dublin at her age. It wasn’t that she’d planned to marry Gavin, exactly, it wasn’t like that. She just thought they’d keep going as they were. Why wouldn’t they? A life where she was a jobbing actress, temping between gigs, and Gav came home between tours. Until one day, he didn’t. Thirty-seven last Sunday but she didn’t feel it, whatever this was supposed to feel like. She let her mind drift back over the evening and how her friends had regarded her septum piercing with scepticism.
‘Oh yes, my niece got that done to annoy her mother but she takes it out for school,’ Norah had commented. They’d also expressed surprise at her boots, which wouldn’t have elicited a second glance in cosmopolitan Camden. The girls had serious jobs: Celine was a solicitor, Louise was a speech and language therapist, Bryony ran her own lucrative little business from home importing baby and early-years equipment, and Norah was surreptitiously working towards taking over the country in the near future. When they’d asked about her job, she’d fudged, describing herself as ‘temping in offices, admin sort of thing’. She didn’t add that her colleagues consisted of a mixture of directionless youths and non-specific freelancers like herself, who recognised each other: actors, writers, dreamers. Miscellaneous, marginalised individuals whose lives were characterised by ‘staying available’, which was code for avoiding any sort of commitment that could compromise their ‘dreams’ or ‘the big break’, no matter how vanishingly unlikely that outcome might have become.
Oh hell, this was her stop. She leaped up and managed to squeeze out just before the doors slammed. Out into the early January night, with the tired Christmas lights sagging in the windows of apartment blocks. A whole chessboard of different lives stacked one on top of the other and each a little world onto itself. In London, everyone was from somewhere else, and once you’d arrived, you were as much part of it as anyone else. Here in Dublin there were private lives, family ties, with roots that ran deep into the earth. Although she’d been born here and grown up here, in that moment Cassie felt like a stranger.
Chapter 2
Cassie noticed a warm light coming from the sitting room as she closed the front door behind her. Mam didn’t have much time for keeping up with the polished wooden-floor idea. Fads came and went, and you could be sure that one of these days the wall-to-wall carpet and fluffy rugs style would be making a comeback. Especially with the price of heating, as she was wont to declare on occasion.
‘Let’s see how long your minimalist fad lasts! The whole bloody house open from foundation to rafters, and the wind free to whistle from one end to the other, like your auntie Patricia’s house. Let’s just see. And I’ll be sitting here, cosy, with my pouffe and my nicely lined curtains, thank you very much.’
Cassie froze in indecision. One part of her wanted to creep upstairs to the peace of the childhood bedroom she’d moved back into since her homecoming a week before Christmas. The other yearned to trudge through the door and slump down onto the big cushiony sofa that threatened to swallow anyone smaller than Giant Haystacks.
‘Is that you, Cassie?’ Mam called. Without waiting for a reply, she went on, ‘Well, did you have a nice time?’
For Mam, time had stood still – Cassie’s unmarried, childless state probably contributed to that. She pushed open the door to the glow of the figurine table lamps and gas flame set into the wall, Mam’s one concession to modernity.
‘The kettle’s boiled, would you ever refill the pot there, love? I’ve just been watching the most boring film God ever made. I dozed off a bit in the middle, but I don’t think I missed anything.Room.?.?. You know the one. Where they end up in the shed?’
‘God, Mam, that’s a very harrowing film, did it not upset you?’
Mam pondered for a moment. ‘Do you know what struck me about it? Just how much you can make out of a small space with a bit of ingenuity.’
‘Seriously?’
Cassie could feel her irritation levels beginning to rise; undeterred, Mam ploughed on.
‘But d’you see what I’m saying? This isn’t a big room by any standards, at least not in comparison to your auntie Patricia’s, don’t get me started .?.?. but people always comment when they come in here how big it looks.’
Everything that occurred in Mam’s world was ultimately a reflection of her.
‘So, did you think it was good?’
‘Ah, well .?.?. sure, they all got out in the end, didn’t they?’
Cassie was about to declare that she really didn’t think that was the point of the film, when she felt her shoulders sag.
‘Grand, give me the teapot.’
Out in the kitchen, she rummaged through the pine cabinets.
‘Would you like a piece of Christmas cake, Mam?’
‘Ah no, it’ll only keep me awake.’
What was this powerful mixture of frustration and comfort that filled her as she surveyed the kitchen, with its flowery mugs and fake marble counter. The whole space seemed to exert a gravitational pull on her, back to the warm, familiar world from which she couldn’t wait to escape all those years ago.
