‘What’s happened?’ Dana said without a pre-greeting. ‘Is it Erin? She hasn’t tried to pierce her ear again, has she? I’ve told her she’s not to get a nook or a rook or whatever it’s called. And when did the world start naming bits of the ear anyway? In myday you just had the lobe you got pierced and the rest of it was just called your ear.’
‘Erin’s fine,’ Orla said, getting to her feet. ‘She’s still asleep.’
‘Of course she is,’ her mum replied. ‘Because she will have been up until all hours doing a thumb workout with that foreign boy. Is she sending him photos? Because I told her if she sends him photos of her in her underwear she will see them come back to haunt her on one of those sites some of Prince Andrew’s friends were into.’
‘Mum, I spoke to Dad.’ She walked to the window, taking in the view.
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘I did,’ Orla said. ‘He was on a bus. With a dog.’
‘Ah, so that’s what the code words for the pub are now.’
Orla shook her head. ‘No, Mum, he wasn’t at the pub and… what he said has got me worried.’
‘Talking nonsense was he? Three sheets to the wind already?’
‘No, he didn’t sound like he’d been drinking.’
‘Well, he’s well-practised at pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, isn’t he?’
‘Mum, stop,’ Orla ordered. ‘Dad’s worried aboutyou.’
‘Like feck he is! That man worries about one person and one person only and that’s himself. Always has. Always will.’
‘Mum, he told me that you’re pushing away your friends and that you’ve stopped going out. And he said he didn’t do anything with the jewellery.’
‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’
‘Why would he say that?’
‘To throw the spotlight on someone else. To distract attention from what he’s up to with whoever he’s up to it with.’
‘Mum, tell me the truth! Please,’ Orla pleaded.
‘No one wants the truth, Orla. You should know that with your writing. What people actually want is aversionof the truththat’s a little bit more palatable. Because if you hit people with out of the ordinary, they back away faster than a Tyson Fury opponent.’
‘I want the truth, Mum. I wantyourtruth.’
She looked out at the bright, white snow clinging to the pine trees and listened to the silence down the line to the UK. Until…
‘You want the truth, do you? Well, here it is. Some days I want to kill him and that isn’t right, is it?’ Dana asked, her voice full of emotion. ‘I mean, how can you be married to someone for this long and be constantly thinking about the best way to implement his demise?’
‘I… don’t know.’ She swallowed. Her mum couldn’t be serious, could she? Suddenly Orla was overwhelmed with an acute sense of fear and her usually methodical mind was battling to look for a logical explanation.
‘See! You didn’t really want to hear that, did you?’
‘No, Mum, I did want to hear it.’ No matter how unsettling this situation was she didn’t want her mum to shut down letting this emotion out now it was unlocked. ‘Keep going. Talk to me.’
Dana sighed. ‘The doctor says it might be the menopause.Might be. How can you get up every day and function on a “might be” I ask you!’
‘You’ve told the doctor about all this?’
‘First time after I really considered putting slug pellets in your Dad’s cottage pie.’ There were tears now. More tears from the person who rarely cried. ‘How could I be thinking these things? Wanting to do these things?’
‘Mum, I don’t think it’s uncommon to have those feelings during the menopause.’
‘How would you know?’
