Girl Unknown(91)

He sat down on the bed opposite her. ‘Promise you won’t tell?’

Her eyes became alert. He liked the way she was watching him, concentrating while he told her about his mum’s affair, how it was with the father of this other kid in his class and how the whole school knew about it. That the teacher he’d bullied was the one who’d spilled the beans.

‘That’s awful!’ she said, when he’d finished. ‘It must have been so shit for you in school.’

He had lain back and looked up at the ceiling. He wasn’t thinking about the stuff the other kids had said – the taunting and the abuse. He was thinking about the moment he’d stepped towards Miss Murphy, the shot of pure adrenalin rushing through his bloodstream as he put his hands up to her chest, knowing he was going to push her. ‘The other kid – Jack – he changed schools. But Mum and Dad left me where I was.’

‘Why?’ She shook her head, not understanding.

Robbie had never told anyone why but he believed, privately, that it was his father’s way of punishing his mother. It was the way he did things, Robbie’s dad, conducting long, slow, patient campaigns. His mother liked to get things out in the open, have the row, clear the air and move on. But there was a quality of patience in his dad, stubbornness. He wasn’t going to let her sweep it under the carpet, what she had done. He’d make her pay for it with three more years of parent-teacher meetings, school plays, sports days, prize-giving ceremonies, end-of-year Masses. He’d make her go to them all. A three-year sentence was her punishment. Robbie knew that his dad loved him. But he also knew that his dad had blind spots and this was one of them. He couldn’t see how much it hurt Robbie, using him as a pawn just to get at his mother.

He didn’t say so to Zo?, though. He was beginning to regret how much he had already told her. ‘They thought it would blow over,’ he said instead.

Something in his voice must have sounded forlorn, even though he didn’t mean it to, because she reached over and took his wrist, giving it a squeeze.

Steadily, they grew closer. In the weeks after she moved in, his life had seemed to rearrange itself around her, points in the day shifting around the axis of her presence, her company. His mother took him aside and told him that she was concerned about how much time he was spending with Zo? – she worried it was interfering with his studying. He had his Junior Certificate coming up and it was a Big Deal. How to explain to her that the exact opposite was true? His happiness made him not only diligent but benevolent too, prepared to think better of everyone. He believed then, as he does now, that those weeks were the happiest of his whole life.

He would have forgiven her anything. Even the lies she had told them about Linda. So what if she had been adopted? He couldn’t see why his mum and dad got so worked up about it and after Zo? had disappeared with that dipshit, Chris, Robbie had lain awake in the dark, worrying that they had frightened Zo? away for good.

Some time after midnight, her step had come on the stairs. The softest rap on his door and he sat bolt upright. ‘Come in,’ he whispered.

He didn’t dare turn on a light. His curtains were open anyway and light thrown by the halogen street lamp cast the room in an orange glow.

‘Do you hate me?’ she had asked.

He was out of bed by then, on his feet, standing within touching distance of her. Between them, a metre or so of charged air. Every cell in his body had seemed alive to her, to this, whatever this was.

‘I don’t care,’ he’d told her, his voice clear, not bothering to whisper. ‘I don’t care about any of it.’ He’d realized he was trembling.

‘Really?’

‘I just don’t ever want you to run out on us again.’

He’d said it, and he meant it.

Quickly, she stepped towards him, her arms around his neck, his brain about to explode. Slowly, cautiously, he hardly dared to do it, he brought his hands up, put them to her back and clasped her to him. Her hair was hanging loose and his hands sank into it. He lowered his head and felt her hair brush against his nose – the ticklish softness of it. In the back of his mind, a niggling voice whispering: What does this mean? The same DNA ran through their bodies. These conflicting sensations – he was at once excited, and also at peace.

The atmosphere in the house grew heavy. Not everyone was as easy about Zo?’s presence as he was. His mother, for one, seemed increasingly stressed, although he thought that might have something to do with work. There was tension between his parents: they were spending less and less time in each other’s company. As for Holly, there was no love lost between her and Zo?. That much was obvious.

‘She has it in for me,’ Zo? told him, well before the incident with Holly at the quarry – his mother’s hysterical overreaction.

He tried to tell her not to worry, but his mum remained cool and Zo? began to spend more and more time out with her friends, and the creep of doubt came back to him, the feeling she was pulling away. He’d wondered had she a boyfriend but any time he asked she became coy and evasive. Some nights she didn’t come home and his mind went reeling in all directions. In school the following day he could hardly concentrate on anything. She’s my sister, he repeated in his head, like a mantra.

His parents didn’t seem to know anything. They were so wrapped up in their own problems. They were fighting more and more, these days – not outright fights, but sniping and sulking. He felt the thinness of his family around him, like at any moment it might snap.