‘We have each other. So stop being a bitch to me. I’ll try not to take my irritation out on you and we can get through this together.’
‘But, Mum, I don’t want to go to my grandmother’s house,’ wailed Poppy. ‘I don’t want to go to Ballygobackwards, to somewhere I can’t remember. I want to stay in our old house, I want Dad back.’
Callie closed her eyes for a minute.
What she wouldn’t have given to get her hands on Jason at that moment and ask him what he was playing at. Jason, who she’d always thought had adored them both and would never have hurt Poppy for the world. For a while, she’d hoped there was some reason he’d gone and that he’d return, magically, to fix it all.
Now, she no longer believed this to be the case. Whatever had made him leave, it would never be excuse enough for the hurt he was putting them through now.
‘You know what, honey,’ she said softly, ‘I want all those things too, but we can’t have them. It’s like a hurricane came and raced through our lives, whirling all the good stuff up and left us just about standing with the clothes on our backs and with each other.That’swhat we’ve got.’
A single tear slid down Poppy’s face.
‘So we’ve got to make the best of it,’ Callie went on. ‘It’s a bit like one of your dystopian movies when people end up with nothing but they have to get on with it. We’re stuck in a dystopian movie and we have to keep moving, sort this out.’
‘’Kay,’ said Poppy, suspiciously snuffly but definitely brightening up.
Wow, thought Callie, thrilled. She should have used that dystopian movie metaphor before.
Poppy flipped down the visor to see the mirror, found that elderly cars often lost their passenger vanity mirrors, so instead adjusted the rear-view one to check her eyeliner hadn’t run.
Callie managed to say nothing about how the rear-view mirror was for the driver and how with a car this old, it might just fall off altogether with any unexpected movement, but she waited until the primping was done, then calmly readjusted it.
Make-up checked, Poppy was satisfied.
‘Let’s do this,’ she said, vigour in her voice.
Poppy was like her father, Callie decided as theentente cordialewhich had begun in the coffee shop continued for the rest of the journey. Once Jason made up his mind to do something, he did it with all his energy. Poppy was the same.
‘Tell me about Ballyglen,’ she said, giving her mother all her attention apart from a little bit of poking around with eyeshadow from one of her beautiful compacts. Callie eyed the compact and thought about how much it had cost in the first place.
Still, there was no point crying over money that was spent. Madness lay in that direction.
‘Well ... It’s pretty different to Dublin.’
‘You were, like, really poor, right?’ Poppy said, as if such a concept was entirely unimaginable. ‘I mean, Dad never talked much about it, but he said he and his brother used to steal coal. Imagine having to steal coal.’
Callie laughed. They had probably stolen a lot more than coal and his older brother, who’d actually done time for hash growing, might well still be at it for all she knew.
Of course, Jason appeared to have no contact with his family, but maybe he did? She didn’t know what to think anymore. Maybe he saw his mother, talked to her. Maybe it was just Callie who’d been forced to leave her family behind. Mam, Freddie, Auntie Phil ...
She shook her head. The thought was disquieting, she wouldn’t dwell on it.
‘We didn’t have much money,’ Callie said, the way she always did, and then she thought she’d better elaborate a little more. If her mother was still living in Sugarloaf Terrace and would let them stay, then Poppy was going to see first-hand exactly how humble those beginnings had been: one small terraced house which had housed an entire family, with just one bathroom that had only been installed inside the house when she’d been ten. She laughed.
‘What? So poor is funny, is it?’ said Poppy, performing a volte-face with speed. ‘They tell us in school that we shouldn’t laugh at people because they have got no money. Ms Higgins tells us that the guy standing on the side of the road begging might have been just like you and me. He could have lost all his money or been on drugs or something, and then he ended up on the side of the road looking for help. We have to, you know, have sympathy and empathy and all that stuff.’ Speech over, Poppy poked around a bit more in her MAC compact, adding another layer of eyeshadow. It was like watching a painter unable to put down the brush.
‘I have sympathy and empathy for the homeless person and the person begging,’ Callie said, not mentioning that she had not noticed such empathy in Poppy for a while. ‘The thing is ...’ She paused. She really had to prepare Poppy for this. ‘Your dad and I really did grow up poor. We weren’t on the streets, but your father’s dad died when he was a teenager so things were tough for his mum. It was a bit different in my house. Ma and Da both worked. My Auntie Phil lived with us – she’s my mum’s older sister and she worked in the bottle factory.’
‘She worked in a factory?’ Poppy said, horrified.
Callie almost laughed.
‘Yes, a factory, the eight-to-four shift, a bit more if she got overtime. It was hard work, tiny pension, no prospects of improvement, but ...’
‘You’re going to say, “but we were happy,” aren’t you?’ said Poppy.
Callie laughed again.
