E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten
Shortall It Could Never Happen Here
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ISBN: 978-1-83895-186-3
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A perfect read for fans of Motherland and Catastrophe
E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-83895-186-3
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Eithne Shortall is an author, journalist and occasional broadcaster. Her debut novel, Love in Row 27, was a major Irish bestseller, and the follow-up, Grace After Henry, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards and won Best Page Turner at the UK's Big Book Awards. Her third novel, Three Little Truths, was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick.
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2
••••••
FIFTEEN DAYS EARLIER
The front door opened, and Christine Maguire leapt from the sitting room into the hallway, knitting needles and almost-completed teddy bear left languishing on the sofa.
She held her index finger to her lips and gestured up the stairs.
‘Well?’ she whispered. ‘Did you find him?’
Her husband removed the thick thermal gloves the kids had bought him for his birthday. ‘I’ve got four pieces of news,’ he said. ‘Three pieces of good news and one piece of bad news.’
‘Jesus, Conor. Did you find the cat or not?’
Christine was the only member of the family who hadn’t wanted a cat. Hers was the one vote, out of the five of them, for a dog. (Brian wrote ‘porcupine’ on his piece of paper, but given the options were ‘dog’ or ‘cat’, her son’s ballot had been registered as spoiled.) The animal had sensed Christine’s outlier position from day one and returned the disdain ten-fold. And yet here she was, unable to go to bed until she knew the damn creature was safe.
‘I found him,’ said her husband, undoing his jacket. ‘Porcupine is alive and well.’ (Such was Brian’s aggrievement at being excluded from the democratic process that they’d allowed the seven-year-old to choose the pet’s name.)
‘Thank God.’ Christine leaned back against the wall and glanced up the stairs. ‘Maybe now Maeve will go to sleep.’
‘They’re the first two pieces of good news.’
She watched him jostle with the coat rack. ‘What’s the third?’
‘He’s being very well cared for in Mrs Rodgers’ house.’
‘Mrs Rodgers, of course! Why didn’t we think of that?’
Rita Rodgers was an older lady who lived at the end of their street and spent a lot of time tending to her rose bushes – a real jewel in Cooney’s Tidy Towns crown. The local pets were known to stop by and keep her company while their owners were out. She’d lived a fascinating life – literally ran away with the circus – and she exuded a worldly calm. Christine often said they were lucky to have Mrs Rodgers on their street; she was a reminder to stop and smell the (prize-winning) roses.
‘Good old Mrs Rodgers, ay?’ she said. ‘We should drop her down a box of chocolates, to say thank you. I can pick something up tomorrow. I’ll go tell Maeve that all is well.’
Their middle child had added Porcupine’s disappearance to her ever-expanding list of things to lose sleep over. Other items included the teddy bear she was supposed to have finished knitting for school tomorrow (hence Christine currently committing late-night forgery) and a sudden, strong fear that she would not be involved in the Glass Lake musical.
Maeve didn’t want to act in the production, which was a pity; she was the only one of Christine’s children with the looks for stardom. (She wasn’t a bad mother for thinking that. Maeve was her prettiest child, but Caroline was the most intelligent, and Brian the most likeable. Everyone went home with a prize.) Maeve wanted to work on costumes, but some other girl was already signed up to do that. Christine didn’t see the problem. It was a school show staged by a bunch of pre-teens. Surely the attitude should be: the more the merrier.
‘Hang on,’ she said, as Conor continued to mess around with the coat rack. It did not take that long to hang up a jacket, even if you approached things with as much precision as her husband. ‘What’s the bad news?’
‘Hmm? Oh.’ Conor frowned at the woollen collar as he attached it to a hook. ‘She doesn’t want to give him back.’
‘’
‘Mrs Rodgers, yes. I was surprised too. But she was quite firm about it. I always thought she was dithery, but I guess that was ageism. She’s actually impressively sharp. She knows we’re gone from the house for at least seven hours every day and that Porcupine is left on his own. She did this bit where she opened the front door wide and told Porcupine that he was free to go. , she said. And Porcupine looked up at her and meowed. Now I know he meows all the time, especially when he’s hungry or when it’s early and—’
‘Yes, Conor, I’m familiar with the cat’s meow.’
‘Right. But this was different. This meow sounded like a word.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘A human word, I mean.’
Christine squinted at her husband, who was supposed to be the brains of the family. He raised his hands in a wait-for-it gesture.
She waited.
‘And it sounded … like, “No”.’
Christine smacked her lips.
Conor nodded.
‘’
‘I know,’ he said, still nodding. ‘Crazy. Porcupine did not budge. I took off my hat, so he’d recognise me, but nothing. He just stood at her feet, loyal as you like. I have to say, it was very impressive.’
‘What did you do?’
‘What could I do? She was very nice about it. She explained that we were very busy – which is true, you said the same thing when we first talked about getting a cat – and probably didn’t have a lot of time. But she has plenty of time and lots of space. She’s an animal person, and she’d really cherish the company. I could almost hear her rattling around in the place, the poor woman. You know her husband died?’
‘Yes, forty years ago, Conor! And they were separated. She left the man for a tightrope walker!’
‘If we were separated and you died, I’d still be sad.’
‘What? Conor, no! She stole our cat!’
Now it was her husband’s turn to put his finger to his lips and gesture towards the stairs. ‘Porcupine looked happy. I know it’s only been a couple of days, but he looked fatter.’
‘That cat couldn’t get any fatter.’
‘I don’t know why you’re so annoyed, Christine. You never liked him anyway.’
‘She our cat! She cannot just steal our cat!’ Christine caught her voice before it escalated to a full-on roar. That woman, their nice, old, butter-wouldn’t-melt neighbour, had abducted their pet. How many times had Mrs Rodgers called out ‘Busy today?’ as Christine hurried past her house? When Christine called back ‘Up to my eyes, Mrs Rodgers’, she’d assumed she was making polite chitchat, not fashioning the noose for her own hanging. ‘I should have known,’ she raged. ‘I should have known she wasn’t the person she said she was. The Tidy Towns committee asked everyone on the street to leave some grass and dandelions in their gardens, but she just eviscerated it all. Animal person, my foot! She doesn’t give a damn about the bees!’
‘To be fair now, Christine, we’re not too worried about the bees ourselves. I just haven’t got around to fixing the lawnmower.’
‘And how, exactly, could Porcupine look happy? That animal has one expression and it is smug.’
‘Well,’ Conor conceded, ‘he looked sort of smugly happy.’
‘Doesn’t she already have a cat? A white and ginger thing?’
‘I have a memory of seeing her with a brown one,’ said Conor, ‘but maybe not. That was a while ago.’
To think how many times Christine had stopped to compliment Mrs Rodgers on her ‘organic’ roses, knowing full well the charlatan was using chemical fertilisers. The Maguires lived on the same street, they had the same soil, and they could barely grow grass. But Christine never said a word. And when Mrs Rodgers won the intercounty garden prize, she’d written an article about it – she’d even pushed to get a picture of the old bat and her performance-enhanced bushes on to the front page.
‘So, what? We leave him there? And then what? What are we going to tell the kids? What are going to tell Maeve?’
‘We’ll just explain that Porcupine is an individual,’ said Conor. ‘He was a kitten but now he’s a cat and he’s decided to move out, like the three of them will one day …’
Christine threw her head back and hooted.
She prided herself on being able to see her children for who they were. In Maeve’s case, that was an anxious, conscientious little oddball. Dr Flynn had diagnosed her constant worries as ‘intrusive thoughts’ and said some children found comfort in prayer. But Conor was resolutely atheist – except when it came to ensuring their children got into Glass Lake Primary: then he was all for standing beside a baptismal fountain and shouting ‘Get behind me, Satan’ – so he bought her a set of worry dolls instead. Christine could have sworn their sewn-on smiles were already starting to droop.
Then, right on cue, their eleven-year-old daughter appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘Why aren’t you asleep, Maevey?’ Conor called up.
‘I was saying prayers for Porcupine. Did they work? Has he come home?’
‘I’ve found Porcupine,’ said Conor, ignoring the first portion of...
