‘I can’t, in any case. I’m heading back to Dublin on the ferry tonight.’
The old Carrie would have freaked out, begged me not to go. The new Carrie barely reacts.
‘You don’t seem all that bothered by that,’ I accuse her.
She gives a gentle shrug. ‘The only person that needs to be bothered or unbothered by it is you, my love.’
The ferry home to Dublin feels a bit different this time. Where once it was like returning to double maths in school, I see the green expanse of land ahead of me as welcoming, more nourishing somehow than the last time around.
My mother is waiting with the car idling in the car park, fingers drumming on the steering wheel, Neil Diamond’s voice escaping through a barely open window. It’s a miracle she’s come out to the ferry terminal at all. As I open the boot to throw in my suitcase, she stays motionless. I knew we were not exactly going to fall into each other’s arms. I’d settle for civility and help with a way forward at this point.
As she drives, she has the posture of someone who has found herself sitting next to a grenade. She is afraid to move a muscle.
‘Am I allowed to even ask what was going on in Toronto?’ she says. She sounds like a woman who has held a breath in for almost a year and finally been allowed to exhale. ‘Some manner of affair, was it?’
‘Jesus, it wasn’t an affair,’ I say decisively.
‘Well, that’s what Johnny thinks it was.’
I don’t have the words, the bandwidth, to explain it, even to myself. ‘I just needed to get away for a bit,’ I start.
‘Oh, right, “get away” for a bit,’ she spits. ‘Most people take a weekend off. They go an hour or two away fromhome, to a spa, and read a couple of novels, and then they come back and get on with their lives. But this. Leaving us all stupid with worry for months and months on end. The most selfish and insane fucking thing I’ve ever heard.’
We carry on in silence, even though I can hear the constant whirring in both our brains.
‘Is this thing out of your system, then? You are going to get back on with your life now, aren’t you? Back to London, to Johnny.’
‘I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, Mum.’
Her foot goes heavier on the accelerator pedal. ‘Have you had any idea at all what it’s been like for Johnny, for me…’
‘Well, if you have been talking with Johnny, you will know full well by now that we’ve had a conversation and realized that we’re not right for each other.’
She cannot countenance the very idea. ‘Whatever happened to working on these things? Talking it through? You tookvows.’
‘Coming back here was clearly a huge mistake.’ And yet here I am, fresh out of options.
‘You’re going to go back there and sort this out,’ she says, side-eyeing me. ‘I didn’t raise someone to walk away from a perfectly decent marriage for no good reason.’ Mum talks in a way that suggests that is that.
But that isn’t that. That is so fucking far from that, it needs its own postcode.
Up until this point, I was clean out of fight, but like a wasp in the dying days of summer, a last gasp of rageful energy surfaces out of nowhere.
‘If I took marriage advice from the likes of you, I’d be married to some prick who wouldn’t be happy until my guts were all over the sitting-room walls!’ I shout.
Mum’s mouth drops open slightly, her eyes fixed on the road.
‘“Stay in your lane!” “Be happy with what you’ve got!” Fuck me, Mother, it isn’t exactly like this has served you well down the years. There’s no one less qualified in this life to give me advice than you.’ It’s all coming out now, tumbling out, and I half expect her to skid into the hard shoulder, lean over me and push me out on to the road. Instead, her mouth closes again, tightly. Mum blinks, struggling to comprehend the last few moments, and this tiny gesture is enough to break me. I sit and weep and it feels glorious.
I’ve worked my way up to racking sobs by the time we reach the driveway. Wordlessly, Mum stops the car, walks around to my side, opens the door and pulls me up out of the seat to standing, and into a hug. She’s a good head smaller than me, but it feels as though I’m being held by something great. Something massive.
Walking back into Hiroshima feels strange. Everything is much the same, from the farmhouse-style kitchen to the orange shag carpet. The broken front-door pane that Patrick casually took a golf club to, many years ago, before eventually leaving to go back to his first wife. Normally when I come home to Ireland, I head straight to the fridge for a chug of the kind of milk you simply can’t get in London. Instead, I hover in the doorway of the kitchen, uncertainly.
I walk upstairs into my teenage bedroom, the one that I left as soon as humanly and logistically possible. The Britpop and Keanu Reeves posters are still intact on the wall, as though fifteen-year-old me still lives here; the only difference now is that Mum has installed an exercise bikeand clothes horse. Mum leaves me alone for the rest of the night. ‘You know where the fridge is, I believe,’ she says.
I look in the mirror and see traces of fifteen-year-old me for the first time in a long time. Have I let her down? Have I backed the pair of us into a corner? Have I fucked things up massively? Or have I, in some ways, done right by us? At least I won’t ever die wondering, I think to myself. At least I tried. I threw my heart out in front of me and I ran for it.
In the morning, the kicked-up dust has settled. Mum makes me a cup of tea: probably the only way that she knows to show simple, unalloyed affection.
