She found a classical station and let soothing ballet music drift all over her as they drove out of Dublin towards Ballyglen.
It was a long time since she had been on this road heading home. When she was younger, the big modern roads hadn’t existed, and when she used to drive up and down to see her mam, she’d had her first car, an old Mini. Its suspension had been dreadful and she’d felt every bump in the road. She could recall getting stuck in a line of cars as everyone trundled along slowly behind some giant tractor dragging hay bales from one field to another. Yet the journeys had been hopeful. She’d loved going home then, loved seeing her family. Mam had never put a guilt trip on her, never said ‘why don’t you settle down around here, after all Jason is from here’.
No, there’d been none of that.
Mam had given her roots and wings, had let her fly, and what had she repaid her mother with? Callie thought bitterly. Ostracisation – just because Jason had fought with her mother and made Callie take sides.
Except, a little voice said in her head,nobody made you take sides: you took his side, nobody can make us do what we don’t want to do.
Oh shut up, she said to the little voice and she turned the radio up louder to drown out her own thoughts.
‘It’s too loud, I can’t hear my music,’ snapped Poppy.
Callie looked at her daughter who was wearing expensive Beats headphones and said: ‘Turn the sound up, then.’
Poppy’s eyes widened marginally. Normally, Callie talked about being careful of her hearing and not turning her headphones’ volume too high.
But not today, Callie thought, and kept on driving.
Crone was in charge now.
She stopped when she came to a small petrol station with a tiny coffee shop.
‘You’re stopping here?’ said Poppy in scandalised tones, as ifherewas a pigsty in the middle of nowhere.
‘Yes, here,’ said Callie, a hint of madness in her voice. Everyone had a limit, she thought, and she had just reached hers. Shattered mother had gone and Old Crone With No Filter was definitely in her place.
‘Let’s hear it for Old Crone who is able to deal with irritating teenagers,’Crone whooped.
‘Well, I’m not getting out.’
Poppy stared around her as if savages armed with spears and covered with cow shit were going to ram the car at any moment.
‘Fine,’ said Callie, just as decisively. ‘You stay in the car. I’m going to have a pee, get a nice cup of coffee and maybe a bun. Buy sweets for the rest of the journey, but you’re fine sitting in the car. You can mind it. Make sure nobody steals it.’
‘As if anyone would want to steal this heap of junk,’ snapped Poppy.
‘Whatever.’
Two could play at that game.
Callie took the keys out of the ignition and climbed out, stretching to ease her aching bones.
After a moment, Poppy got out too. ‘Thought I might visit the bathroom and I want a drink too,’ she grumbled.
‘Fine,’ said Callie in a saccharine voice that sounded marginally better than the sarcastic one she really wanted to let out. She might get a job as a TV presenter yet: there was always time. Surely TV channels were always looking for the abandoned wives of fraudulent businessmen to front children’s TV shows? On that basis, she’d get a job right away.
Callie’s face had been on every daily paper in the country both in her glamorous incarnation and as she looked these days. Since being ambushed by the photographers, she’d worn her hair pulled back, had borrowed a pair of Brenda’s old black-rimmed reading glasses and had a baseball hat on so that she looked different, hopefully unrecognisable from the woman with the long blonde hair who’d been caught with an anguished face going into Brenda’s.
But all she needed was for someone to recognise them. Whatever get-up-and-go she had left would depart if she was confronted.
They needed petrol too, so she drove over to the pumps, put some gas in the car, paid in the shop with her head down, and then came out.
She drove off the forecourt to an almost empty part of the parking area and stopped the car. Reaching over, she pulled the headphones from her daughter’s head.
‘Now listen,’ Callie said firmly. ‘Big talk time. We are in this together, Poppy. I don’t like it any more than you like it. I know it’s frightening, terrifying, horrible – our lives have been ripped apart and we don’t know what’s happening, but we have one thing.’
Poppy stared mutinously ahead.
