Three Little Truths Read online

  But it was just a passing anger. One of those flashes that came on her now and retreated just as quickly.

  She cracked the bones of her face up into a smile and tapped her hand on the counter until the two girls looked up. ‘Who wants a snack?’

  TWO

  ‘Someone stole the wheels off Fiona Quinn’s car.’

  Robin Dwyer stopped staring out the sitting-room window and twisted her body around to see her mother, sitting on the opposite armchair, staring down at her phone. The lines on her face were more pronounced. Maybe it was having her twenty-sixyear-old daughter back living with her. Or maybe it was just the glow from the screen.

  ‘Can you believe that?’ her mother continued, shaking her head at the phone. ‘Poor Fiona. She only got the thing a few weeks ago. Bit flashy for a family vehicle but still, no call for swiping the wheels.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Carmel, her mother, looked up from the screen and peered over the rim of her glasses. ‘Fiona Quinn. Across the road at number ten. Works part time in an insurance company out by the airport, obsessed with property prices, calls everyone “hun”. You know her, you do. Two kids; twin girls. The husband works in London half the week.’

  ‘Vaguely . . .’

  It was hard to distinguish the neighbours from one another. Half of them hadn’t been here when Robin left home eight years ago. She said hello to some of them, when calling Jack in for dinner or bedtime, but generally went for a middling level of familiarity – unsure if she was supposed to recognise them or not.

  Her mother’s phone beeped again and she guffawed. ‘Would you – the cheeky scuts! Four of them. Trish Walsh says they came up at five this morning and had the whole thing done in less than ten minutes. Trish caught it on her CCTV camera. On a cul-de-sac, can you believe that? No way out. As brazen as you like.’

  ‘The Walshes have their own CCTV camera?’ Robin did remember the Walshes. She used to be friendly with their daughter, Laura. She couldn’t remember exactly why they’d drifted apart but no doubt it was her fault. Last she’d heard Laura had married the son of a property developer and was living on some leafy square in London.

  ‘They had it installed after all that trouble between Ted Walsh and the Morrissey daughters. Remember? I told you about that. You don’t listen, Robin, that’s your problem. I might as well be talking to the wall.’ Carmel sighed, lifting her glasses on to her head. ‘There was a big fight over parking – what’s new? says you – and Shay Morrissey’s two girls – of course, they’re women now – came out of their dad’s one night and threw paint stripper all over Ted Walsh’s car. They said they didn’t but they did; sure, we all know they did. You know what the Morrisseys are like, rough as a New Year’s Day hangover. So anyway, after that the Walshes got the security camera installed.’

  ‘Right . . .’ Robin’s own phone beeped. The Facebook Messenger icon flashed. Eleven unread messages. When would he quit? She switched it to silent and threw it across the room on to the beanbag. ‘And sorry – they stole the wheels? Why not the car? How do you steal wheels from a car?’

  ‘Trish says . . .’ Carmel frowned as she scrolled rapidly back through the seemingly never-ending conversation between the women of Pine Road. The WhatsApp group had been set up to coordinate their monthly poker game, but its real function was the circulation of gossip. ‘Bernie Watters-Reilly is still going on about this rat hole she found in her garden. How she can tell a rat hole from any other kind of hole, I don’t know, but she has everyone convinced the whole road is infested now. She’s organised a discount for residents on rat poison at Island Stores and is monitoring who’s availed of it. Where the feck is it . . .? Here! Now. They . . . They put the thing up on blocks! Had the four wheels whipped off in a matter of minutes. Can you imagine?’ Her mother shook her head. ‘And nobody heard a thing. Porsche wheels are very in demand – or at least that’s what Edie is saying here now. Edie’s up in the corner house, a young one. Her husband’s a mechanic, so she would know.’ Carmel tutted. ‘Dreadful altogether.’

  Robin twisted back around on the sofa. It was hard to imagine a gang of thieves sneaking past their house in the dead of night, while she slept in her childhood bedroom, Jack on the camp bed beside her, and her parents snoring softly down the hall. That kind of thing didn’t happen on Pine Road. She gave an involuntary shudder and told herself it was an expression of horror and not a thrill of excitement.

  Two girls wearing the school uniform Robin had once sported pounded up Pine Road, shoving each other as they went. They turned into the garden of the house directly across the street; the one her mother was keeping tabs on.

  ‘We have movement.’

  ‘Hmm? Oh!’ Carmel heaved herself out of the armchair and scurried across the living room. She stood over Robin, peering out the window. ‘That’s the two daughters. They started in Saint Ornatín’s at the beginning of term even though the family hadn’t moved here yet. They were enrolled at the last minute, despite Saint Ornatín’s already being full. Apparently – and Bernie Watters-Reilly told me this now, so it’s between you, me and the four walls – there was an emergency order . . . from the Department of Education.’ There was nobody else in the room, so her mother dropping her voice was for absolutely no reason but effect.

  ‘What’s an emergency order?’ asked Robin, watching as the sisters squabbled over who got to put their brand-new key into their rather rickety-looking door.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ admitted Carmel, returning to her seat as the girls disappeared inside their new home. ‘But Bernie says it’s serious. And she’d know. She’s chair of the Parents’ Association. Now you definitely know Bernie Watters-Reilly – she’s always in the papers or on the telly, going on about what a brilliant parent she is and how everyone else is raising future Hitlers.’

  Robin had a hazy memory of her mother shouting at some woman on the radio the other morning that she’d be better off spending her time learning how to park.

  ‘Bernie has been known to exaggerate,’ continued Carmel. ‘Always going on about her bloody daughter. Sylvie. How a woman called Bernie gets away with calling her daughter Sylvie, I don’t know. The only thing French about Bernie is her Merlot habit. And the husband’s not much better. I feel sorry for her son – I can’t even remember his name, that’s how little attention he gets. But no, on this Bernie’s probably telling some version of the truth. As Parents’ Association chair, she’s on the school board, and she told us in the strictest confidence at the last poker game that the Department had made an emergency order on behalf of the new neighbours. Of course, Bernie only said all this because Trish wasn’t at the game.’

  ‘Who’s Trish again?’

  Carmel opened her mouth, agog. ‘Trish bloody Walsh! With the CCTV camera. At the top of the road. The principal of Saint Ornatín’s. You used to be friendly with her daughter, Laura. Jesus Christ, Robin. Do you need me to get it tattooed on my forehead?’

  Robin’s head was spinning. She had enough concerns of her own without trying to find the mental space to process Pine Road gossip. A man in a navy wax jacket was striding up the road now, briefcase in hand. Robin glanced back to the new neighbours’ place and changed the subject.

  ‘Isn’t number eight Mrs Ryan’s old place? The woman with the cats?’

  ‘Ah-ha,’ said Carmel. ‘Let’s just hope the smell died with her, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘Oh, hang on.’ The man in the navy jacket had stopped at number eight. ‘I think I have another one.’

  ‘Is it the mother?’ Carmel yelped, scurrying back over. ‘Ah no. That must be the husband. What age would you say he is? Hard to tell from the back. Fiona and Ruby have already seen him. It’s the wife we want, Robin. Nobody’s spotted her yet.’ Carmel moved her head from side to side, as if some better angle might allow her to see through the brickwork. ‘Is he just going to stand there or what? Maybe it’s not his house at all.’ She gasped slightly. ‘Maybe he’s casing the place. Tha
t’d be a great disguise if he was; a suit and a briefcase. It could be the same people who stole the wheels from – ah no. Never mind. In he goes.’

  The man struggled with the key until he fell against the door and it finally opened.

  ‘Right,’ said Carmel. ‘Dinner. Come and give me a hand.’ She held out her hands to Robin. ‘I’m not charging you rent on your bedroom, but I didn’t say anything about that couch.’

  It had been two and a half months since Robin and Jack turned up unannounced, and unexplained, on her parents’ doorstep. It wasn’t the first time it’d happened, but it was the first time they’d brought all their stuff. Robin had been grateful not to be asked any questions, but she feared that grace period was about to expire. Already this morning her mother had shown her a job she’d found online.

  ‘Telephone sales,’ Carmel had said, passing her the iPad. ‘Isn’t that what you were doing before?’

  ‘Sort of . . . I’m actually thinking about getting into something new . . .’

  ‘And won’t this do in the meantime? Send them in a CV and a reference and you should be grand. You’ll have to do something if you’re going to support yourself and Jack.’

  And Robin had dutifully scrolled through the notice, not wanting to explain to her mother that the job she’d been doing before didn’t exactly come with a reference, and not entirely ready to admit to herself that she was the breadwinner now.

  She grabbed her mother’s hands and pulled herself up from off the sofa.

  ‘Hallelujah! She walks!’

  A light shone from the folds of the beanbag and her phone shifted slightly as it vibrated against the coarse material, but the two women ignored it. With one last glance towards the window, they headed down to the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s that grandson of mine?’ asked Carmel, her head already in the larder cupboard. ‘He likes to whisk the eggs.’

  ‘Upstairs.’ Robin raised her head to the ceiling, listening for the sound of Jack playing on her bedroom floor. ‘He’s settling a dispute between his farmers. One of them stole the other’s cows.’

  ‘Oh. Farm business. Better not disturb him, so. Maybe you’ll do it for me?’ She slid the carton of eggs across the counter to her daughter.

  Robin hadn’t been particularly close to her mother growing up, and they’d drifted further when she moved in with Eddy all of two months after they started going out. When Robin told Carmel she was pregnant, her mother pleaded with her to come home and Robin said she wasn’t about to let Eddy abdicate his responsibilities that easily. She was also in love with him – besotted, even – but she hadn’t said that. She only ever said it to Eddy when she was being dramatic, over the top, and often drunk. She meant it, but she never said it like she did. ‘I’m besotted with you,’ she’d announce, mordantly, before swooning histrionically into his arms. And Carmel could never stand him. But after Jack was born, they stopped fighting about Eddy. They met on neutral ground and quickly grew closer.

  ‘Is it broccoli or leek Jack doesn’t eat? I can put either in this quiche, so whatever our little man wants.’

  Her mother pulled vegetable after vegetable from the drawers at the bottom of the fridge. This was what a good mother looked like: selfless, kind, always putting her children, and grandchildren, first.

  Carmel held a head of broccoli in one hand and a leek in the other.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Broccoli,’ said Robin, clearing her throat and cracking the last egg into the bowl. ‘He hates broccoli.’

  Carmel placed the vegetables on the counter, walked around the peninsula and wrapped Robin in a hug. She squeezed her tight.

  ‘I’m grand, Mam.’ She wasn’t going to cry. Carmel knew well her daughter never cried.

  ‘Shut up now, Robin, like a good girl.’

  Her mother’s perfume filled Robin’s nostrils. This she remembered. She’d smelled the same since Robin was a child.

  ‘You know I love that son of yours,’ said Carmel, ‘and your brother and your father, but you’re my only girl. So you’re my favourite. It’s terribly sexist, I know, but there you have it. And if you tell the others I said that, I’ll bury you alive in the back garden and say I haven’t a notion where you’ve got to.’

  Robin gave a half-laugh that came out like a snort.

  The sound of a key in the front door and the wheels of a bike being ridden in.

  ‘Yo!’ Johnny, Robin’s brother, had finally moved out of home for the first time last summer, only to move right back in two weeks after Robin and Jack had turned up on the doorstep. His first long-term relationship couldn’t stand the pressure of cohabiting, much to his relief. Johnny felt no need to prove his independence; he loved living at home.

  Carmel gave her daughter one last squeeze and separated, shaking the leek at her. ‘Not a word.’

  Johnny came into the kitchen, his face red and slightly shiny from the cycle. ‘Did you hear about the Quinns’ car?’ he said, not even trying to keep the excitement from his voice.

  ‘How did you hear that?’ asked Carmel indignantly.

  ‘Met Ted Walsh at the end of the road just there.’ Johnny shook his head. ‘Mad stuff.’

  ‘Ah,’ declared Carmel, brandishing the leek once again. ‘I knew it an hour ago.’

  Johnny and Robin grinned at each other. Their mother prided herself on being the first port of call for all local gossip in the Dwyer household.

  ‘The women’s poker group, wha’?’ Johnny came around the peninsula and nudged his helmet against his mother’s arm. ‘Better than any communication system the guards have come up with, anyway. I’m surprised one of you wasn’t out to apprehend them.’

  Carmel shoved her youngest child away. ‘Don’t be getting lippy with me, mister. You left this place in a state this morning. Rasher fat drippings across the floor, the chopping board covered in crumbs. What did I tell you? What did I say to you when you moved back in here? Clean up . . .’

  ‘. . . or clear out,’ Johnny and Robin sang in unison.

  ‘Yes,’ said Carmel, hand on her hip. ‘Exactly.’ She played up to this, the role of the put-upon mother; in reality she had little interest in domesticity. ‘Now get ten potatoes out of the sack behind the door and chop them into chips like the good son that you are.’

  Johnny threw his helmet on the table and went over and started pulling potatoes from the bag. ‘Watch it!’ The door opened again.

  Jack sauntered in, carrying a small plastic cow in each pudgy fist. Carmel peered over her glasses. ‘How are negotiations going?’

  Jack placed the animals on the counter and rested his chin against the cool marble. ‘I don’t like them trees, Granny,’ he said, and tried to headbutt the broccoli but it was just out of reach.

  ‘Those trees,’ corrected Robin, ruffling his tangled, clammy hair.

  He pushed her hand away. ‘I like the other trees. The big trees!’ He wandered over to his grandmother. ‘Them trees!’ He pointed up at the leek.

  ‘Those trees, Jack.’

  Carmel hit herself on the forehead. ‘Silly Granny.’ She shook her head. ‘I forgot.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Jack climbed up on to the stool beside her and patted her arm benevolently. ‘Old people forget things sometimes.’

  ‘That’s very true,’ said Carmel, bowing slightly at his absolution. ‘How did you get to be such a clever boy?’

  ‘Daddy told me,’ said Jack, leaning over to the fruit bowl and plucking a grape from the stalk before anyone could tell him not to. ‘Granddad forgot his keys and Daddy said it was okay because old people forget things sometimes.’

  The room fell quiet as everyone’s movements slowed – everyone except Jack, who had realised nobody was telling him off and so was rapidly shoving grapes into his mouth.

  Carmel cleared her throat. ‘When did Granddad forget his keys?’

  ‘Yes-ter-day!’ Jack threw his head back, half laughing, half gurgling, and brought his hand to his forehead just as Carmel had done.
‘You forget everything, Granny.’

  A small piece of grape skin stuck to Jack’s lower lip. Johnny and Carmel looked at Robin. She shook her head. She hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

  ‘Mick did forget his keys yesterday,’ said Carmel, quietly and without intonation as Jack continued to make light work of the grape punnet. ‘He had to ring the bell when they came back from the park.’ Then, loading her voice with serenity, she almost sang: ‘When were you talking to your daddy, Jack?’ But Carmel’s eyes were on Robin.

  ‘At the swing! Daddy can make it go much higher than Granddad. Granddad gets too scared.’

  ‘In the park?’ said Robin, finally finding her voice. ‘When you went to the park with Granddad?’

  Jack nodded, his mouth now too full of grapes to speak.

  Maybe Jack was getting his days mixed up. He wasn’t great with time yet. Surely her dad wouldn’t have let Eddy talk to Jack. Or at the very least he would have told her about it. And what was Eddy doing in the park? Had he followed them? Had he been waiting to get Jack alone?

  ‘What did he say?’ demanded Robin, her mind suddenly racing. Had Eddy been watching them? Was he still watching them? ‘What did your daddy say, Jack?’

  Jack pointed to his mouth and bobbed his head from side to side. He reached for the fruit bowl again but Robin caught his hand mid-grab. ‘Stop messing now. Swallow that.’

  She sounded crosser than she’d intended and Jack’s eyes grew wide and worried.

  ‘Spit it out,’ she said, opening her palm and spreading it below his mouth. ‘Come on. Just spit it out.’

  ‘Robin,’ her mother warned, and Robin saw that her son was on the verge of tears. She withdrew her hand and waited for him to swallow. When he did, he was panting, his fat little tongue stained purple.

  She tried again. ‘What did Daddy say?’

  ‘He said he loved me and he loved Mammy.’ Jack’s lip quivered. He looked around at the adults. He knew something had changed. He didn’t like the way they were looking at him – but he did like that they were looking at him. He rallied under the attention. ‘Daddy said when we go home after our holiday with Granny and Granddad, he’s going to get me a tractor. Not like the one I got from Granddad, Mammy. A big one! Like on the television.’