The next morning I got up early. I put on my purple skinny jeans and Led Zeppelin T-shirt, ran my fingers through my hair and swept some black mascara on to my eyelashes. I slipped a couple of bracelets on my wrist and checked my reflection in the mirror before heading outside. Work on the site had stopped as the builders were having their morning tea break. Mum was standing beside the empty cement mixer talking to Des, our electrician. She was nearly forty but could easily have passed for younger in her cream top and denims, and with straight blonde hair like mine that rested just above her shoulders. I had a feeling from the way he’d been hanging around lately that Des fancied my mum, but there was no way that was going to happen. She hadn’t so much as looked at another man since my dad died. The sooner Des realized that and stopped trying to flirt with her the better. As I walked towards them, avoiding the muddy areas and the builders’ mess, I caught some of their conversation.
‘Did you get your hair done, Rachel?’ said Des.
‘Just a trim,’ said Mum. ‘Can’t believe you noticed.’
How creepy, I thought. Poor Mum, she was way too polite for her own good.
‘It’s very nice… very… shiny,’ said Des with an elaborate hand movement that I presumed was supposed to convey shine. Then he went slightly red and started to mumble something under his breath. Unable to watch his cringeworthy antics any longer, I turned and headed for the road, saying I was just going to get something from the shop. We were running low on bread, but I was really just hoping to see Nick again.
As I wandered towards the village, I thought about how it can take seconds to create an obsession, and years to get over it. Within minutes of meeting Nick I’d allowed myself to slip into that familiarly dangerous territory. That place where you think about a person constantly, where you rehearse future conversations in your head, where you plan your day around the blissful possibility of bumping into them. I’d only been in love once before. It had ended when I’d discovered my now ex-boyfriend, Cian, wrapped round my former best friend.
I still wasn’t used to walking on the country roads but I loved picking the tall grass and the wildflowers along the way. Mum had told me to walk facing the oncoming traffic so I could be seen, but sometimes it felt like I was staring straight into certain death. I nearly stepped right into the ditch whenever I heard a car coming.
I plucked the petals off a yellow flower as I walked along, thinking about how you put everything into your first love, because you really believe it’s going to last forever. That is its triumph and its tragedy, the reason you will never forget it, and the reason it is so difficult to let go. I’d spent my first couple of weeks in Avarna missing Cian in spite of everything that had happened. But then along came Nick. He was handsome and charming and loved music. Basically, he was perfect.
When I arrived at the shop I caught a glimpse of Nick through the window and felt a flutter of excitement. He was wearing a white T-shirt and was talking to a customer. The door made a little ding as I pushed it open. A girl was standing in front of the counter talking to him, her long black hair scraped back from her pretty face.
‘Hi, Nick,’ I said, trying to sound as casual as possible.
‘Hi, Jacki.’ He turned back to the girl and smiled. ‘Sarah, this is Jacki, the girl I was telling you about.’
My heart almost stopped beating. He’d been talking about me?
‘Jacki, this is my girlfriend, Sarah.’
This time my heart almost stopped beating again, but for an entirely different reason. My girlfriend. It’s amazing how a mere two words can change the mood of an entire day. How could I not have presumed it anyway? He’s such a good-looking guy… of course he would be taken. And he seemed so proud as he said it: my girlfriend. He was clearly happy with her. Sarah appeared friendly, although her eager smile seemed a little fake. As we made polite conversation I got the impression she would rather I wasn’t there. My new life went crashing back to boring. I quickly bought some bread and made my escape.
Head down, ego deflated, I reached the bottom of our lane.
‘Jacki! Will you check if there’s any post?’ Mum called from the caravan door. I struggled to find the rusty red postbox hidden among the overgrown bushes. There was no key for it, so I got a stick to prise the letters out. At first I thought it was empty, but then I felt the stick touch some paper at the very bottom. I couldn’t get it out: it was firmly stuck inside. I was going to just leave it there, but that little voice in your head that speaks to you when you least expect it told me to try harder. I forced my hand in through the opening, and gripped the letter with my fingers. For one horrible moment I thought my arm might be stuck. I yanked it out, managing to scrape some skin off the back of my hand. But I soon forgot about my stinging skin when I saw the letter.
It was addressed in neat writing to a Mr Alf Meehan. The ink was faded and the stamp foreign and it was dated about six months earlier. I should have given it to someone to forward to him, but that persuasive inner voice suggested that I open it. Before I knew what I was doing the envelope was open in my hands. I pulled out a slip of cream notepaper. Unfolding it, I felt a shiver run through me as I read the bold black letters:
KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT
I spent most of the afternoon lounging in the caravan. I didn’t really feel up to doing anything else.
‘What’s wrong with you, Jacki?’ Mum asked.
‘What do you mean?’ I said, looking away from the window.
Mum was sitting cross-legged on her bed, flicking through a home-decorating magazine.
‘You’ve been moping around all afternoon,’ she said.
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Yes, you have.’
‘Well, sorry.’ I’d gone for a short walk after lunch just to try to clear my head and cheer myself up, but obviously that hadn’t worked very well. I’d come back feeling more down than ever. Ever since I’d opened the envelope I’d felt very sick. The threatening note had freaked me out slightly. I needed to forget about it: it had nothing to do with me.
I grabbed my phone off the ledge beside the bed and sighed when I saw that I still had no coverage. I hated that it was nearly impossible to get even one bar of coverage up here. Not to mention the fact that we didn’t have any Internet. I hadn’t been online in days. There was broadband available in the café in the village, but it had been closed for the past week. My life was a total mess. All my friends were in Dublin. I couldn’t even ring them, for heaven’s sake. I missed them and I missed my computer, I missed playing music, I missed everything. And the first guy I’d fancied in months, and who I’d got my hopes stupidly high about, had a girlfriend. A gorgeous girlfriend called Sarah.
A few minutes later I glanced at my phone again, and could hardly believe it when I saw one teeny bar. Yay! Contact with the real world. Afraid to move the phone, I lay down on the bed and dialled my friend Hannah’s number. It rang and rang.
I decided to text Ross rather than ring him, because I knew he’d be in work. I wrote a text that spanned three messages, ranting about how boring Avarna was and how much I missed Dublin. In his signature goofy tone he replied, ‘Keep calm and rock on.’ Great. Thanks, Ross.
I called Sophie too, but it also rang without answer and I got a text from her a few minutes later saying that she was jamming with her brother’s band and that she’d call me afterwards. I got a horrible sinking feeling. I hadn’t talked to her in days – she could at least have spoken to me for two minutes. I tried not to get mad though. It wasn’t her fault Mum had made me move to the middle of nowhere.
I picked up a marker and started to doodle on my hand. I liked drawing little sketches on my skin – plans for the tattoo I was going to get once Mum finally gave in and let me. Earlier I’d drawn a heart, broken down the middle, on the inside of my right wrist, where I hoped to eventually get a treble clef tattooed. Mum sat down beside me and gave me a gentle squeeze.
‘Your heart’s not broken. It’s still in one piece,’ she said, pulling my hair back from my neck and prodding the little heart-shaped freckle below my left ear. I couldn’t resist smiling too. It was in the perfect shape of a heart, tiny but distinct. My gran had been the first one to notice it, and had always insisted that I’d been kissed by an angel.
I smiled at Mum. No matter how much I hated it that she’d dragged me here, I still couldn’t help loving her more than anyone else in the world. Since it had been just us we’d grown closer than any other mother and daughter I knew. We screamed and shouted and fought and bickered, but we adored each other all the same.
Apart from hating the thought of a treble-clef tattoo, Mum had always been supportive of my love for music. She’d spent her entire childhood dreaming of being a movie star. She’d had half a dozen posters of Marilyn Monroe taped to her wall and had watched Some Like It Hot hundreds of times. But my grandparents insisted that acting was just a hobby, and that she couldn’t possibly expect to pursue it as a career. So from the time I was four and had said I wanted to be a rock star, Mum had been driving me to guitar lessons, saving up for music equipment and listening to me singing much too loudly around the house. Her only request was that if I became famous I would dedicate one of my songs to her. I decided that was a fair trade.
I waited until she’d left the caravan, then took Alf Meehan’s letter out from my back pocket. I knelt down on the floor beside my bed and pulled out my suitcase. Mum had allowed me to bring just one suitcase of stuff to the caravan, as there wasn’t room for any more. It was packed full of clothes and a Converse shoebox that held my most prized possessions including a little silver bracelet given to me by my dad, my purple hardback notebook that I wrote my lyrics in, a couple of photographs of my friends and me and a battered paperback copy of The Commitments. I carefully hid the letter in the shoebox and placed it back in the suitcase. I knew Mum wouldn’t be impressed that I’d opened someone else’s post. I didn’t even know why I had, so there was no way I’d be able to explain it to her. But something was stopping me from throwing it away.
When I stepped out of the caravan Des was talking to Mum again. I decided to go over and rescue her. But the closer I got to them the more freaked out I became. Mum was standing close to Des and twirling a strand of her hair. Then I heard her giggle. This was actually making me queasy. I wanted to turn round and go back but Des had spotted me.
‘Jacki, we were just talking about you…’
I faked a smile and walked towards them.
‘Hi,’ I said to Des. A hi that said If you lay one finger on my mother, I will most certainly strangle you. He didn’t seem to notice.
‘So,’ he said, ‘your mum was telling me you like to play guitar? And that you’re in a band?’
‘Was in a band,’ I corrected him. ‘I had to leave it because we were moving here.’ Myself, Sophie and Ross had played together, but we’d all agreed that there was no way we could keep it up now that I was living so far away. I’d also done a stint in my cousin Steve’s heavy metal band. I wasn’t majorly into heavy metal, but they were all eighteen and I got to play in Whelan’s a few times. The bouncers got to know me, and so Hannah and I had managed to get into a couple of other gigs there on Saturday nights. It’s amazing where a fake ID, a push-up bra and a familiar face can get you.
‘And you like Thin Lizzy?’ said Des.
‘Love them,’ I said.
‘I went to see them in Slane in eighty-one,’ he said. ‘Best gig of my life.’
‘Wow, legend,’ I said limply.
OK, so Des was going up in my estimation. But only slightly.
‘Oh, by the way, Jacki,’ said Mum. ‘You and I are going to the Smyths’ house for dinner in half an hour.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘The Smyths. They own the guesthouse on the main street. I met Brigid in the shop and she invited us down. It was so thoughtful of her – she said I must be tired of trying to cook in the caravan.’
I’d never met any of the Smyths but I’d seen the guesthouse where they lived. It was across from Mary’s shop and painted an insanely bright yellow.
‘Do you know the Smyths well, Des?’ said Mum.
‘Ah yeah, Brigid and Pa are lovely people. They have a son your age, Jacki. And I’m good friends with Brigid’s sister, Lydia. She lives there with them too. She’s a dressmaker.’
So they had a son my age, did they? My mood lifted a little bit. I looked down at my jeans and T-shirt and made an excuse to get back to the caravan. Now that it seemed Cian and Nick were in the past, maybe I needed to dress for the future.