‘You can shut up, too,’ yelled Lou.
Obligingly, the satnav lady shut up.
Ignoring the fact that they were on a main road with no hard shoulder, Toni pulled in. The satnav lady objected to this behaviour and Toni, fearing another explosion from her previously calm sister, quickly turned Ms Satnav down.
Searching in her pocket, she found the piece of paper with the address of the Mulraney family home and Margo’s directions to it.
Lou ignored her and stared out the window, her shoulders shaking.
At home, the sea on Whitehaven Beach could be wild but here, not too far in the distance, it looked as if a storm was raging. The same Atlantic plunged against both coasts but the Western seaboard did not have any of the sense of shelter of the southeast coast. Here, with the next stop being three thousand miles away and nothing but plunging waves between the two land masses, the small stone houses and cottages of Easkey seemed to lean away from the ferocity of both the sea and the wind.
Toni ignored her sister. She’d seen people behave like this before: suddenly realise they were allowed to get angry and then come down from the rage rush feeling shaky.
‘We’re going the right way,’ said Toni, looking at satellite navigation details and her written ones. She flicked a switch to keep the directions silent. No point having another blowout.
‘OK,’ said Lou. ‘Let’s go, then. And sorry – I’m a bit fragile. I’m really sorry about Oliver and your job. It’s awful. But I hate feeling that you’re distracting yourself from that with looking for my supposed father.’
Ouch, thought Toni.
‘I’m not distracting myself,’ she said tautly, which wasn’t entirely true.
‘I can’t believe a random guy can ruin your career. And you don’t know all the financial details yet, do you? There’s got to be a way out of it.’
‘Of course,’ said Toni automatically.
There was a way out of it – she just hadn’t worked it out yet. But she would, she always did.
Lou stared out the car window as her sister drove. Something about the wildness of the landscape made her protests about not wanting to see the house seem oddly insignificant. Here, human beings had struggled to survive in spite of living off fields dotted with rocks where nothing but sheep could graze and where the harsh climate flattened all but the toughest of plants.
Margo had talked about people picking tiny shellfish like winkles for a living, trudging on the shore to fill huge bags for which they were paid a pittance. The very wildness of the west made Lou feel as if she had no right to stamp her feet like a pampered lady and refuse to look at the house where her father had been born.
Strong women had been raising children on this land for centuries, battling famine and social injustice, determined to rise above it all. Nobody had taught them how to breathe to get over anxiety. What must it have been like then? Lou couldn’t imagine. Your children starving and you had to keep it together without any help, any medication. If this was the place where her birth father had come from, then Lou decided she owed it to her newly-fifty-year-old self to find where he’d come from.
You’d absolutely want to visit his home, she said silently to Mim, wherever Mim was in the sky. On a unicorn, probably, with pink sparkles in the long blonde hair she’d have to replace the tufty baldness at the end of her life. Mim had hated losing her hair. She’d definitely have long blonde rippling hair now.You’d find the place – and you’d find him.
Mim was indomitable. Had been indomitable. Rounds of chemotherapy and watching her hair fall out in clumps and feeling the pain rip through her body had not stopped Mim’s determination to keep living as long as she could. Mim would not let the mere fact that this information about a new father was a shock stop her.
Lou imagined the conversation with her best friend: ‘So what if it was a surprise? Go find where he was from. Find him. It’ll be an adventure, Lou!’
I can’t find him because he lives in another country, Lou told Mim, who was probably sitting happily on her unicorn, head tilted.But I suppose that Toni and I can visit his house. Is that good enough for you? But what then, Mim? What do I do with this information? I want Bob to be my father because it’s what I’ve known all my life and he was a safe harbour. But this new person, how can he replace Bob? What is my family now?
Mim, busy with plaiting the unicorn’s tail or her own sparkly hair, didn’t answer.
She never answered when Lou talked to her, but it was comforting to have the one-sided conversation all the same. Mim had never let her down. Not once.
Mim had gone with her to the doctor when the world had felt too much for Lou.
‘You’re depressed, lovie. I think you need some professional help. Can I do something?’ Mim had said, something nobody else had said.
Not Toni, who probably wouldn’t have recognised depression if it had hit her with her straightening irons. Not Ned, who, for all his brilliance, had a slight fear of anything ‘mental’, induced no doubt by a mother who believed a reliance on God was all a human being needed and ‘Hadn’t He put us on earth to suffer?’
The antidepressants were in the small bag Emily had packed. Emily and Ned both knew about them, but if he’d been asked to pack a bag for her, he would never have remembered them.
Not Lillian, who only noticed her own ailments. Her mother had no idea that Lou was on any antidepressant medication. Why had she never told Lillian?
Why indeed.
And as for Toni, Lou had failed to tell her sister that far from just taking the tablets for a few months after Mim died, when she felt shattered with grief, she was still on them. Possibly always would be. She’d been scared that Toni would judge her. Toni would never need any pharmaceutical help to get up in the morning, Toni would not need to gently up the dose until it was working, or deal with the side effects. Toni might work on a TV show where she talked about mental health with somebody, but as to discussing it with her sister ... that had never happened. Was it Toni’s fault? Or Lou’s for making her own needs so minuscule that nobody remembered them?
