Erin hadn’t crossed my mind. Now, I thought she might kill me if she found out. That’s what I told Mom. That the truthwould cause further damage to our family, our careers, the people who cared about us, the people we loved.
‘It can’t stay a secret forever,’ she said as I drove her home. It was the most chilling thing she had ever said to me.
We stayed away from each other for the next few weeks, and then gradually we started talking again. We needed each other and Lucy needed both of us. There was a tacit agreement that we would not discuss it again.
35
I had always known that I was a bad person, ever since Kenny Carter paid me for my virginity, but now the thoughts that oozed around my mind became uglier than ever. If Milo had cancer, then he might die, and it would be over. Then there would be nobody but Mom left who knew the truth.
If Erin saw him, what could he realistically do? Repeat the same story he’d told in court? The DNA overruled everything he could possibly say. I think she was going out of curiosity. She didn’t even know what kind of cancer he had. Poor Milo. Life had dealt him a particularly rough hand. And even though I had played a large part, perhaps he was always destined to die young. It’s not like he caught cancer in prison. It was the luck of the draw. But then I remembered how kind he was, how sweet even after my misguided seduction attempt. His first instinct was to reassure me that I wouldn’t have to worry. Little did he know then that my actions in the aftermath meant he would have to worry for the rest of his probably short life. I told Erin it was okay for her to go see him but that I didn’t want to hear anything about it, and she was not to tell him or Margie anything about me. I was curious but I reckoned I was better off not knowing. She totally believed me. I didn’t have to worry about Milo trying to persuade her that I was the liar.
Lucy was thriving, hitting all her developmental markers early. She had walked at ten months, and by the age of two she hadan extensive vocabulary. I was working part-time at Jack’s Academy, doing admin or teaching an improv class. I enjoyed it and refused the money when he tried to pay me. I couldn’t help noting the look of relief on his face when I told him I didn’t need the money.
Jack ran his private drama school on a shoestring, but I was aware that students were dropping out, or parents weren’t paying their bills. He was having difficulty paying the rent on that building, and he had scrapped the plan to install air conditioning to keep it comfortable in the summer. He didn’t have the money. The financial crash had arrived almost overnight. Nearly all acting work dried up. Voice-overs for radio ads were probably the most lucrative work you could get but fewer ads were being made.
Jack had had to let one teacher go already. It wasn’t as if he had a huge staff. He never volunteered this information, but every time we talked around the summer of 2008, his brow was increasingly furrowed, and I worked at him until eventually he spilled the beans.
‘I’m going to have to try and find a cheaper place,’ he said. I was surprised. The Academy was in a mixed area, derelict buildings on one side of the street and a Georgian terrace on the other. Tacked on to the end of the terrace was the former cinema that Jack had turned into a drama school.
‘It will be hard to find somewhere else with a stage and a rehearsal room.’
‘I’m talking about my house,’ he said. ‘I’m in a mess. I haven’t paid my rent for a while. I can’t put the letting agency off forever.’
‘I didn’t realize things were that bad. Didn’t you inherit anything from your parents?’
He looked at me. ‘Like what?’
I had always assumed that Jack had a family home somewhere or at least a savings account. ‘What about relatives?’
‘My dad has a brother that I haven’t seen since my sister’s funeral.’
On the radio and in the newspapers, there was talk of imminent financial collapse, but I hadn’t bothered listening too closely. I wasn’t worried about my own finances. Strictly speaking, Mom and her brother owned Grandma’s house that I was living in rent free, and Dad had never discontinued my allowance when I left college. He increased it after Lucy was born and had already mentioned the necessity of me having a permanent home.
As the weeks went on, the recession hit Ireland in waves. Every day there was news of another factory closing, young people emigrating and long lines at social welfare offices. Jack was talking of trying his luck as an actor in the UK. He went over a few times but his agent, Svetlana, did not have the contacts there that he needed. The big ad agencies in Dublin were resorting to animation or images instead of using actors because they were cutting costs as well. There were fewer films and TV dramas being commissioned or green lit.
In July of that year, I invited Jack for lunch. ‘I got a notice to quit from my landlord and I’m thinking of emigrating,’ he said, bouncing Lucy on his knee while she built a castle of Lego on the table in front of her.
‘No.’ I was vehement. Jack was probably my closest friend.
‘No, Jack, that’s naughty,’ said Lucy, who could now throw full sentences together. We laughed and she looked up, surprised and pleased to have caught our attention.
‘Move in here.’ I didn’t think about it before I said it, but although this was a small house compared to what I’d had in Boston, it still had three bedrooms.
‘Move in here,’ parroted Lucy absent-mindedly.
‘As a housemate,’ I said hurriedly. ‘The box room is full of old junk that should be thrown out or moved up into the attic. You could live here.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Why not? Think about it before you say no. My grandparents raised two children in this house, and that was before the extension.’
He looked me in the eye in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. ‘Aren’t we better off as friends?’ he asked.
I was confused for a second and then I said, ‘I’m not offering you a relationship.’ I decided to bypass his embarrassment. ‘If you can put up with living with me and a highly verbal toddler who now answers back, you’d be more than welcome.’
He coughed to clear his throat. ‘I don’t know, what if we don’t get on? No offence, but you’re a tricky character.’
‘Jack, we only lived together once, for ten days, in rehab. I’m a different person now. We’ll get on fine.’
