Past Secrets

‘You’re both wrong,’ said Christie amiably, reaching out to clasp her brother-in-law Rick’s hand. ‘I’m going to bury James right here, under the flagstones, then Rick and I are going to run off into the sunset together.’

‘As long as I get this house,’ Ana said, getting to her feet, ‘the pair of you can do what you want.’

It was a beautiful house, Christie knew. One of the loveliest on Summer Street. Christie’s artistic talent had made it just as beautiful inside as outside.

‘If Mum and Dad could see this place,’ Ana said wistfully as the sisters hugged goodbye in the hall where Christie had black-and-white photos of the family hung alongside six watercolour paintings of irises of the kind that she used to sell to make money during the early days of paying the Summer Street house mortgage.

‘Dad would hate it,’ laughed Christie easily. ‘Too arty farty, he’d say.’

‘Ah, he wouldn’t,’ protested Ana, who at fifty-four was the younger by six years. ‘He’d love it, for all that it’s nothing like the house in Kilshandra.’

Kilshandra was where they’d grown up, a small town on the east coast that was never a destination, always a place cars drove past en route to somewhere else.

‘No, it’s not like Kilshandra,’ Christie murmured and the fact that it was nothing like her old home was one of the best things about it.

Thinking of the past made the anxiety tweak again. She didn’t want to think about the past, Christie thought with irritation. Get out of my head. She’d spoken out loud, she realised, as the dogs looked up at her in alarm.

The dishes done, she poured a cup of coffee to take into the garden while she went through her list for the day. She had groceries to buy, bills to pay, some letters to post, a whole page of the by-the-phone notepad filled with calls to return…and then she felt the strange yet familiar ripple of unease move through her. Like a thundercloud shimmering in a blue sky, threatening a noisy downpour. This time it wasn’t a mild flicker of anxiety: it was a full-scale alert.

Christie dropped her china cup on the flagstones. Both Rocket and Tilly yelped in distress, whisking around their mistress’s feet, their matching brown eyes anxious. We didn’t do it, we didn’t do it.

Automatically, Christie shepherded them away from the broken china.

‘You’ll cut your paws,’ she said gently, and shooed them safely into the kitchen. Dustpan in hand, she went outside again and began to sweep up.

Her whole life, Christie had been able to see things that other people couldn’t. It was a strange, dreamy gift: never available on demand and never there for Christie to sort out her own problems. But when she least expected it, the truth came to her, a little tremor of knowing that told her what was in another person’s heart.

As a child, she’d thought everyone could do it. But there was no one in her deeply religious home whom she could ask. Something warned her that people might not like it. Her father prayed to centuries-dead saints when things went wrong, ignoring them when all was well, but he disapproved of the local girls having their fortunes told and hated the Gypsies’ gift of sight with a vengeance. Her mother never ventured any opinion without first consulting her husband. Opinions that Father didn’t approve of meant his black rage engulfed the house. So Christie had learned to be a quiet, watchful child. Her six elder brothers and her baby sister made enough noise for nobody to notice her, anyhow. And as she grew older and realised that her gift wasn’t run of the mill, she was glad she’d kept it quiet.

How could she tell people she’d known the McGoverns’ barn was going to burn down, or that Mr McGovern himself had set fire to it for the insurance money?

The first time she even hinted at her gift was when she was nineteen and her best friend, Sarah, had thought Ted, handsome with smiling eyes and a blankly chiselled face like Steve McQueen, was the man for her.

‘He loves me, he wants to marry me,’ said Sarah with the passion of being nineteen and in love.

‘I just have this feeling that he’s not being entirely honest with you. There’s something a bit two-faced about him,’ Christie had said. It was a flash of knowing that Ted didn’t love Sarah and that there was someone else Ted made promises to.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sarah angrily.

Christie noted the anger: there was a lot of truth in the cliché about shooting the messenger.

It transpired that Ted had indeed been seeing another girl, one whose family had money, not like Sarah or Christie, who came from a world of hand-me-down clothes and making do.

‘How did you know?’ asked Sarah when her heart was broken.

‘It sort of came to me,’ Christie said, which was the only way she could explain it.

The closer the person was to her, the fuzzier it became. For herself, she could never see anything. Which was probably as it should be. Except that today, for the first time ever, she’d had a horrible feeling that the premonition of gloom was for herself.

In the pretty kitchen with its bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling, a place where Christie always felt perfectly happy, panic now filled her. Her family. Something awful must be about to happen to them and she had to stop it. Yet, the feeling had never been like this before. She’d never, ever seen any harm coming to her sons or James.

There was the day thirteen-year-old Shane had broken his collarbone falling from a tree, and Christie had been on a school trip to a gallery, explaining the gift of Jack B. Yeats to twenty schoolgirls.

When the frantic St Ursula’s secretary had finally reached Christie, she’d cursed her own inability to see what mattered. How could she not have seen her own son in pain? What use was her gift if it only worked for other people?

This morning, within ten minutes, Christie had phoned her two sons to say a cheery hello, she was thinking about them and her horoscope had said she was going to have an unfortunate day, and she thought it might extend to them, so not to walk under any ladders.

Finally, Christie phoned James, whom she’d only said goodbye to two hours before as he headed off to the train station for a meeting in Cork.

‘Is everything all right, Christie?’ he asked carefully.

‘Fine,’ she said, not wanting to transmit the intensity of her fear to him. ‘I felt a bit spooked, that’s all. It’s thundery here.’ Which wasn’t true. The sky was as blue and clear as the single oval sapphire in her antique engagement ring. ‘I love you, James,’ she added, which was entirely true. And then the signal on his mobile phone went, the connection was severed and Christie was left with her feeling of terror still beating a tattoo in her chest.

She left a message on her husband’s mobile phone: ‘I’m fine. Off shopping now, phone me later and tell me if you’re able to get the earlier train. I love you. Bye.’

James worked for a government environmental agency and had worked his way up the ranks so he now held a senior position. He travelled round the country a lot, and Christie worried that the endless trips were getting too much for him. But James, still fired up wanting to be busy and to make sure that everything was done properly, loved it.

By ten, Christie was on her way along Summer Street with her shopping bags in her hand, trying to put the fear out of her mind. On the three days a week when she worked at St Ursula’s, she turned left when she walked out of her garden gate. Today, she’d turned right in the direction of the Summer Street Café.

It was a pleasant time of day, with not much traffic. The stressed morning drivers were at their offices and Summer Street belonged to the locals again. Many of Christie’s original neighbours were gone, but there were some who’d lived on the street nearly as long as the Devlin family.

Like the Maguires, Dennis and Una, possessors of a series of clapped-out cars and gloriously oblivious to the outrage of their current next-door neighbour who clearly felt that a car with that many dents in its paintwork should not be parked beside her gleaming BMW. The Maguires had one daughter, Maggie: a good kid, Christie recalled. Tall, shy, always polite, hiding her prettiness behind a heavy veil of carroty red curls as if she needed a retreat from the world. She’d never been in Christie’s art classes but, like many of the girls on Summer Street, she’d had a crush on Shane. Lots of girls had. It was that combination of tousled blond hair and a slightly cheeky smile. He was a few months older than Maggie – extraordinary that they could both be thirty now – and indifferent to her pubescent longing.

‘Just say hello to her,’ Christie said, exasperated that Shane couldn’t see that even a few words from her idol would make a difference to this shy girl.

‘Ah, Mum, she’ll only think I like her. Get real, would you?’

‘What does that mean?’ demanded his mother. ‘Get real? I am being real. I’m saying show a bit of kindness, Shane. It doesn’t cost you anything, does it?’ Her voice had risen up the scale.

‘OK,’ he muttered, realising his mother was off on her high horse about how goodness and kindness filled your soul with happiness. It was a sweet idea and all, but it didn’t work with girls, did it? ‘I’ll say hi, right?’

‘And be nice.’

‘Should I propose as well?’

Maggie lived in Galway now and Christie hadn’t seen her for ages.

But the adult Maggie had lived up to the early promise Christie had seen in her. She was truly stunning-looking, her hair darkened to glossy auburn, her face a perfect oval with silvery cobalt-blue eyes, wide expressive lips and the translucent skin of the pure redhead. Yet she didn’t appear to be aware of her beauty. Rather the opposite, in fact. Christie sensed that Maggie Maguire was still hiding her real self.

‘She’s doing so well,’ Una Maguire said every time Christie asked. All those years ago, Una had been red-haired, too, but now the red was a faded strawberry with fine threads of grey. She was still beautiful, though, with the fine-boned face her daughter had inherited. ‘Maggie’s going out with this fabulous man. He’s a lecturer in the college and she’s in the library research department now. They’re made for each other. Living together for three years and they have a beautiful apartment off Eyre Square. No sign of them getting married, but young people don’t bother with that these days.’

‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Christie easily, who understood quite plainly that Una longed with all her heart for her only child to be settled down with a husband and children.

They’d gone on their separate ways, Christie sure that Una had no notion of what she’d really seen in Una’s heart.

Along with learning about her odd gift, Christie had learned that mostly people didn’t want you to know their deepest, darkest secrets. So she kept her insights to herself unless she was asked.

Ten yards ahead of her, Amber Reid shot out of her gate at number 18, long tawny-gold hair bouncing in the telltale manner of the newly washed. Amber was seventeen, in her final year at St Ursula’s and undoubtedly one of the stars of Christie’s class.