My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. by Annette Sills (epub e reader .TXT) 📗

had started cursing and was about to kick the coffee table when I finally located it under a sofa cushion. As I picked it up, I felt something hard and metallic against my fingers. I pulled it out. It was a bracelet, slim and gold with the two ends shaped in the form of a snake’s head with tiny emeralds for eyes. Karen’s bracelet, the one I’d admired that day at her house after the fundraiser, the one I’d suspected was a gift from Simon Whelan. I sat down, frowning and trying to remember. I was sure she’d told me that day it was new. To my knowledge she’d never been here to the house since then. I sat down. My chest tightened and my thoughts quickened. We’d texted days before when I invited her to come along and meet up with Claire. She knew I wouldn’t be at home tonight. I stared down at the bracelet for some time, clenching my fist around it and turning it over in my hand.

I paced up and down the kitchen and glugged my wine.

“No,” I said aloud. “It can’t be true.”

Rain fired down on the windowpane and I waved my free hand in the air like I was warding off an invisible threat.

Karen definitely knew I wouldn’t be home. The clean kitchen, the figure in the passenger seat of the car. I suddenly felt nauseous at the whiff of lemon disinfectant, a smell that would trigger memories of this day for years afterwards.

I stopped pacing and stared at the upturned coffee cups on the draining-board. I went over, picking them up one by one and inspected them for lipstick smudges. Then I yanked opened the dishwasher looking for wineglasses or plates, for some sign or evidence she’d been there. After that it was the bin’s turn. I upturned it on to the shining floor then got on my knees and rummaged through the rubbish with my bare hands. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. He was hardly likely to leave a used condom or the packaging from an M&S meal for two behind, but I was compelled to look just the same.

When I’d done I raced upstairs, pulled back the duvet cover in every bedroom, frantically running my hands along the sheets. On the landing I heard my phone buzz in the hall and almost fell down the stairs in my rush to get to it. My hand shaking, I yanked it out of my bag. It was a WhatsApp message.

Stuck drinking with clients after work. Back late. Enjoy your evening. X

I texted him back immediately.

What was Karen doing here today?

I sat on the stairs, trembling and waiting for him to text back. Nothing, but I knew he’d seen the message. I texted again.

Where the fuck are you? What’s going on?

Again nothing, except the blue ticks at the side of my message telling me he’d seen it. I put my head in my hands and felt myself start to crumble. His silence told me it was true. I took a deep breath and sat up. I’d run away from difficult situations all my life but I couldn’t run away from this one. I needed to know the truth and I needed to know now. If Joe wasn’t going to tell me, Karen was. Summoning every sinew of strength I could find, I put on my jacket, grabbed my bag and headed out of the door.

It was almost ten. The sky was murderous and steely grey and a fierce wind had wrapped itself around the streets. I’d drunk too much to drive so I’d have to walk. Emboldened and enraged by the wine, I pulled my hood up and headed off towards High Lane. As I emerged onto Edge Lane, I decided to take a shortcut through Longford Park so I crossed over and headed up through the gates by the parkkeeper’s lodge. I started to regret my decision immediately. I loved the park and had spent a lot of my life in it but recently it was getting a reputation for gang-related crime at night. There’d been a shooting not long ago and a man had hanged himself by the tennis courts a few weeks previously. Yet I ploughed on, quickening my pace and keeping to the wide treelined path as the wind roared around me. Willow branches hung overhead like widow’s veils and tar-like puddles shone in the fields either side. I hurried past the playground and Pets Corner where Karen and I had spent so many happy mornings with Alexia when she was little. Then up by the Scout hut where the pair of us had smoked our first spliff with Kevin Cave and his cousin when we were fourteen. Then over the football field where we’d cheered on Alexia in her green-and-white club strip on Sunday mornings. Ahead of me the zip wire dangled like a noose against the night sky and I jumped at the hiss of a bat. I finally exited onto Kings Road not far from Morrissey’s childhood home where we’d once entwined gladioli around the gate for his birthday.

I made my way over the Quadrant roundabout towards Old Trafford, exhausted and slightly delirious. My thoughts ran on ahead of me. How long had it been going on? Where? When? So that’s why she’d distanced herself and excluded me from her plans to move to Italy. I knew she was seeing someone but I’d assumed it was Simon Whelan. She’d been overly emotional that day when we’d met in Central Library. I gasped as I recalled her parting words. “Sorry for everything,” she’d said. Then there was Joe’s recent “he loves me he loves me not” behaviour. But why was she going to live in Italy if they were in the middle of an affair? Unless he was planning on going with her?

I stopped for a moment, leant against a wall and bashed my fist against my forehead.

Betrayal. It was