Best of Friends

But as she sat there, dumbfounded, she realised that by far the most disturbing part was the fact that Mum had lied to her. Mum was the most trustworthy person in Erin’s world. The first time Erin’s heart had been broken by a boy from her class, Mum had held her close and promised that it would feel better soon. And Erin had believed her, even though her heart was breaking, because her mother had never lied to her. Until now. Her spoon clattered onto the linoleum but Erin didn’t bother to pick it up. No, she’d been lying before now. Mum had been lying to her for all Erin’s life.

She ran upstairs and found the suitcase on the top of her parents’ big 1930s wardrobe. It was heavy, and dust bunnies danced off the top as she hauled it down. Inside were old clothes, including a huge brown coat she remembered her father wearing for years, and a couple of old shirt boxes, their former bright blue faded with age. The first contained cards and mementoes belonging to Mum. Erin couldn’t bring herself to look through them in case she found her own childish home-made cards, painstakingly painted and glittered in school.

The second box held a few documents of the sort that were usually kept in the big accordion file. There was the original of the birth certificate Erin had just been sent, much-folded, and a few letters with photos lying in between the pages. Shannon, who’d been so absent in the family album, was the star here. Now Erin could see the resemblance between her and her mother. Both had the same sheet of coppery hair and the same smile, although Shannon’s eyes looked blue like Kerry’s and Mum’s. Erin must have got her eyes from her father, whoever he was. The sense of outrage at not knowing her mother or her father hit her forcibly. How could Mum have never told her the truth about her birth? Did Kerry know too? Erin sat among the photos and letters from her real mother and brooded on lies and deceit. Then she gathered together her papers and her newly acquired cheque book and left the house.

By the late afternoon, when Erin returned, Kerry was home from work and Mum was in the kitchen mashing potatoes for shepherd’s pie.

‘Hello, love. Where have you been all day?’ called Mum when she heard Erin’s familiar tread on the stairs.

Erin didn’t answer. She didn’t trust herself to speak. In her room, she threw down the papers she’d picked up from the au pair agency, along with the plane ticket to Amsterdam. The flight was in three days but Erin didn’t plan on waiting at 78 Carnsfort Terrace until then. She’d pick up her passport at the passport office the following day, a privilege that came from having pleaded an emergency situation and showing the official her plane ticket, and she’d asked her friend Mo, who’d just moved into a cramped flat in Smithfield with two other girls, if she could bunk down with her until it was time to leave the country. Packing wouldn’t take long. All she had to do now was confront her mother and Kerry about why they’d never told her the truth.

The kitchen smelled familiar: the scent of good food mixed with the comforting tang of the lemon cleaner Mum used diligently. Kerry was sitting at the kitchen table, shoes off and her feet up on a chair as she read the evening paper. Mum had laid the table for dinner and was now relaxing in her chair with a cup of tea, sorting out the receipts in her purse.

‘Hello, lazy bones. What did you do today while I was working my fingers to the bone?’ asked Kerry, not raising her eyes from an article about celebrity diets.

In reply, Erin dropped her passport office receipt onto the table.

‘What’s that?’ asked Kerry, scanning the document. ‘You applied for your passport?’

She didn’t get it, Erin realised. But Mum did. Her mother’s eyes locked with Erin’s and anxiety was written all over her face.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Erin asked quietly.

‘Tell you what?’ demanded Kerry, finally looking up.

‘Tell me that Shannon was my mother.’

‘Oh.’ Kerry swung her feet to the floor. So she did know, Erin realised, and that realisation made her even angrier. Kerry knew but she, the person it most affected, didn’t.

‘I had to send away for my birth certificate.’ Erin was caustic. ‘You said it was lost,’ she said accusingly to her mother. ‘You knew I’d find out, so why couldn’t you tell me the truth?’

‘Erin, stop making it such a big deal,’ said Kerry, going to the fridge and peering in to see if there was anything there to stave off the hunger pangs until dinner.

‘Stop making it such a big deal?’ said Erin incredulously. ‘It’s not big, it’s huge. It’s the biggest secret of my life and you all knew. Have you nothing to say about it?’ she asked Mum, who’d stayed silent.

Mum shook her head wordlessly.

‘It’s not her fault,’ snapped Kerry, temper rising. ‘Your bloody mother created all the hassle in the first place by screwing around and getting pregnant –’

‘Don’t blame her!’ shrieked Erin. ‘Don’t you bloody dare. You could have told me and I’d have found her. I was her child and you all kept if from me. How fucking dare you? What gave you all the right to act as God and only tell me what you wanted?’

Her grandmother sat quietly at the table, holding her head in her hands as if to fend off the hurtful words.

‘Talk to me, Mum,’ yelled Erin. ‘Why won’t you talk to me?’

Her grandmother looked up at Erin’s fiery, hurt face. ‘I don’t know what to say, love. I’m so sorry we hurt you but there never seemed to be a right time to tell you when you were small, and then you grew up so fast and the chance had passed.’ She reached out a tired, work-worn hand and beckoned for Erin to take it. But Erin stared stonily at her, refusing the gesture of reconciliation.

‘That’s rubbish. You knew I’d find out one day.’

Her grandmother’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I knew you would but I hoped you’d be able to understand…’

‘Understand what? That you lied to me about the most important thing in my life?’

Her grandmother had started crying then and Kerry had lost her temper, yelling that everyone assumed Erin knew, and how the hell could she blame anyone else for her stupidity. Still Mum cried and Erin couldn’t bear her tears but couldn’t comfort her either. She felt so betrayed that she had no comfort left in her for anyone else.

She’d packed up and left, taking only her clothes and a few photos. Everything else – her gold bracelet she’d been given by Mum and Dad for her Confirmation, the precious earrings Kerry had given her years before when her sister got her first full-time job – she left on the dusty dressing table.

For three days, she stayed with Mo, half hoping someone from the family would find her, half hoping they wouldn’t. Then she got on a plane. After six months travelling the world, working her way through bars and restaurants, she ended up working as an au pair to an American family in Greece when their own au pair left suddenly. When they went home to Boston, she went too.

A gentle knocking at the door woke Greg. ‘What the…?’ He sat up, his eyes sleep-filled, his cropped dark hair flattened against his skull from where his head had lain on the pillow.

The door opened a fraction and a pair of blue eyes peeked in. ‘Do you want your bed turned down?’ said a voice.

‘No, thanks,’ said Greg. He couldn’t see anything except the light coming in through the slightly opened door. ‘What time is it?’

‘Ten to seven.’ The door shut quietly and Greg fumbled for the bedside light.

‘We’ve booked a table for seven,’ he said, climbing out of bed. ‘We should get ready.’

Erin sat up in the bed, her hair in the same through-a-bush-backwards condition as Greg’s. She felt tired now and had no inclination to get up and dress for dinner. She lay down again and felt the old familiar misery envelop her. She and Greg should have stayed in Chicago. When she was there, she didn’t think about her family in the same way. Well, she thought about them, but she could deal with the pain because of the distance. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe the difference was in her – because she certainly felt unlike her usual self here. She didn’t want to be here any more. She wanted to be home. But then, where was home?

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_29460d66-3d41-585c-af96-39d3d7d81391)

Home was a decidedly miserable place for the Barton family. By the end of the first week in April, with the Easter holidays in sight, Abby decided she must put the arguments of the past weeks behind her and do her best to raise everyone’s spirits. Unfortunately, the emotional barometer in Lyonnais still sat firmly at ‘mostly cloudy/storms expected’.

Jess was monosyllabic, despite Abby’s attempts to start mother-daughter chats.

‘I know you’re stressed about school, Jess, love,’ Abby said carefully, afraid she’d say the wrong thing, ‘but the exams will pass. Your dad and I don’t want you to feel under any huge pressure, right? We want you to do well for your sake but we don’t want you to crack up over it.’

Jess had looked at her mother with an expression that said ‘you don’t understand a thing’. Abby hated that expression.

At Tom’s school, the headmaster came down with a bad dose of flu, leaving Tom to deal with both the crisis over the physics teacher, who didn’t want to work out her notice, and the faulty alarm system, which was still going off at odd intervals, to the pupils’ delight.

All he could talk about every evening was the difficulty of getting a substitute teacher at short notice and the endless but vain attempts by the alarm repair people to find the fault in their sophisticated system.

Abby began to wonder whether, if she got a robot to sit at her place in the kitchen every night and programmed it to mutter, ‘That’s terrible,’ at intervals, he would even notice.

To cheer herself up, she went to Sally’s beauty salon for what Sally called ‘the works’. Since she’d moved to Dunmore, Abby went to The Beauty Spot once a month, a luxury unheard of in the pre-Declutter days, when a trip to a salon like Sally’s happened a couple of times a year.

The works included a manicure, an anti-ageing facial, possibly an eyelash tint and sometimes leg waxing, all the while chatting with Sally and letting the relaxing gossipy atmosphere drift round her. Other posher beauticians were now keen to get Abby to patronise their establishments but Abby stayed loyal to Sally and her jewel of a salon. Their friendship actually went back ten years to when Sally was working in Cork as a junior teacher with Tom. When Tom had raved about this new recruit and spoke of how she was a breath of fresh air in St Fintan’s, Abby had half expected an earnest do-gooder with mousy hair, jam jar spectacles, bitten-down fingernails and a crush on Tom.

Sally turned out to be nothing like Abby’s imaginings, of course, and far from being keen on Tom, she was wildly in love with Steve Richardson, the dashing Zhivago to Sally’s Lara. Sally had left teaching long ago to follow her dream of setting up a beauty salon. She and Steve had been idealists and when he’d left the corporate world to teach art, Sally had taken the plunge and given up teaching to do a beauty course. The Beauty Spot was the result. With its fifties-inspired décor, complete with raspberry-pink gingham curtains, the salon was certainly different from the normal temples to beauty. The women of Dunmore loved it and, from its humble beginnings, the business went from strength to strength.

‘What colour would you like?’

Sally’s pixie face stared expectantly up at Abby’s from behind the manicure trolley. Her fingers hovered over the creamy beige Abby usually favoured, because she insisted that her fingers were too short to take rich shades of polish.

But Abby was in a wild mood. ‘That one,’ she said, pointing out a juicy cherry colour.