Poppy installed herself in the front seat with the distaste of someone sitting in the back of the bin lorry. She held her precious handbag up on her lap, not wanting to put it into the footwell which was definitely not valeted like the cars she was used to.
‘Don’t look at it like you’re going to get a disease from it,’ said Brenda, leaning in to give her a last embrace. ‘It’s a grand vehicle, it will get you to where you need to go.’
‘And where’s that?’ said Poppy, ‘some shithole somewhere?’
Callie didn’t even remonstrate with her, there was no point. Poppy had been in a foul mood all the previous evening and it was as if the sweet teenager of the previous night, when Callie had removed her make-up, had gone.
‘Thank you, Brenda,’ Callie said, ‘I’d have been lost without you.’
Brenda and Tommy had helped her sell her diamonds to a second-hand jeweller the previous afternoon to pay Fiona McPharland’s fee, and after that, she had 3,854 euros in cash in her wallet. The earrings alone were worth four times that much, but beggars could not be choosers. Apart from the rest of her haul – the watch, a few bits and bobs – it was all the money she had to her name.
‘I’m your friend, you know that,’ said Brenda, ‘so keep in touch and tell me how you’re getting on. I think what you are doing now is the right thing.’
Callie had needed just one more night before she left Dublin, just in case Jason tried to get in touch. So here they were, having spent the night in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the city. Reporters had indeed got hold of her phone number and kept on calling, theSunday Newsmaking her most upset as she could remember when she’d appeared in their fashion pages years ago, and later, in their society pages.
But Jason had changed all that.
She would have to take out the SIM card soon and replace it with the pay-as-you-go one that would ensure nobody could get hold of her.
She had hung up on every reporter and the one person she wanted to phone her, Jason, hadn’t.
They were out of options.
‘I don’t know how we’re going to cope,’she’d emailed to Mary Butler, who’d heard the news from Evelyn.
‘I will do anything, Cal,’wrote Mary, in a heart-warming email where she promised that Poppy and Callie could come to Canada for a holiday and spend months there.‘We’ve got the granny flat. You could have it, and you’d love it.’
‘I can’t go anywhere until this is sorted out,’Callie had written back sadly.
She was a prisoner in all but name. Not able to leave the country and not safe from the rampaging journalists keen to find some person connected with the story.
‘But soon, when it’s over,’Mary urged.
‘We’d love that,’said Callie, thinking that it all felt as if it would never be over.
She and Poppy checked out of the hotel after much grumbling from Poppy about why she couldn’t lie in bed seeing as she wasn’t in school.
‘Because we have to check out!’ shrieked Callie, finally losing it. ‘We are going to visit your grandmother.’ She was putting on a bold front because her mother could turn them away from the door; she could have moved. They might be homeless in Ballyglen that night.
‘She won’t want us,’ said Poppy furiously. ‘I don’t want to go there. Dad always said that it was a tip, that you guys came from nothing, from some crappy housing estate in the middle of nowhere.’
Callie bit her tongue. She would not respond, not say that it was a pity bloody Jason had forgotten his working-class background. He’d managed to make their daughter forget it too and if she ever got her hands on him ...
Stop, she whispered to herself.
Somehow, they managed to get out of the hotel without killing each other and got back into the old car, which smelled even more than it had the previous day.
Pigs and sheep, Callie decided: the car had been used to transport them both. It was the only answer for that foul smell, and no tree-shaped air-freshener was going to fix it.
As she drove out of the hotel car park, Callie realised she was gripping the old steering wheel so tightly that she could see the veins in her hands. She breathed in and out deeply.
Breathe. She was going to be calm and get through the day.
‘Did you find something on the radio?’ she said to Poppy, attempting a normal voice.
‘Find a radio station on this heap of shit?’ said Poppy, glaring at her mother. ‘I’m going to listen to my phone instead,’ and she stuck her headphones into her ears.
Fine, thought Callie, deep breathing. A lot more deep breathing.
