The People Next Door Read online

  Roisin Meaney was born in Listowel, County Kerry and has lived in the US, Canada, Africa and Europe. She is the author of three previously published novels The Daisy Picker, Putting Out The Stars and the number one bestseller The Last Week of May, along with a children’s book Don’t Even Think About It. Roisin is currently based in Limerick where she also teaches part-time.

  The People Next Door

  ROISIN MEANEY

  First published in Ireland in 2008 by Hachette Books Ireland

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  Copyright © Roisin Meaney 2008

  The right of Roisin Meaney to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 74390 6

  Hachette Books Ireland

  9 Castlecourt

  Castleknock

  Dublin 15

  Hachette Livre UK Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  24 May

  Number Seven

  Number Eight

  Number Nine

  Three weeks later: 16 June

  Number Seven

  Number Eight

  Number Nine

  Five days later: 21 June

  Number Eight

  Two weeks later: 4 July

  Number Seven

  Number Nine

  Number Eight

  Six days later: 10 July

  Number Seven

  Number Nine

  Number Eight

  One week later: 18 July

  Number Nine

  Number Eight

  Number Seven

  One day later: 19 July

  Number Eight

  Two weeks later: 2 August

  Number Nine

  Three weeks later: 23 August

  Number Eight

  Number Seven

  Number Nine

  Three days later: 26 August

  Number Seven

  A week or so later: beginning of September

  Conversations

  Two weeks later: 19 September

  Number Seven

  Number Eight

  Number Nine

  Three weeks later: 7 October

  Number Seven

  Number Eight

  Number Nine

  One day later: 8 October

  Number Seven

  Six days later: 14 October

  Number Nine

  Number Eight

  One month later: 17 November

  Number Nine

  Number Eight

  Number Seven

  One week later: 24 November

  Number Seven

  Number Nine

  Number Eight

  One Day Later: 25 November

  Number Seven

  Number Eight

  Number Nine

  One week later: 2 December

  Number Eight

  Three weeks later: Christmas Day

  Number Seven

  Number Eight

  Number Nine

  Six days later: New Year’s Eve

  Number Eight

  Number Seven

  Number Nine

  New Year’s Day

  Number Eight

  Three weeks later: 22 January

  Telephone Conversations

  One day later: 23 January

  Number Eight

  Number Seven

  Number Nine

  Three days later: 26 January

  Number Seven, Number Eight, Number Nine

  Six months later: end of June

  Dolores

  Dan

  Yvonne

  Kathryn

  Clara

  Acknowledgements

  For the coffee gang

  When you leave Belford’s main street and turn down Miller’s Lane – the alley that runs between O’Brien’s Quality Meats and Kennedy’s Shoe Repairs and Key Cutting – there isn’t that much to see at first. A couple of smallish, grimy windows set high up in Kennedy’s graffti-covered blue side wall on your right; the steel back door of the butcher’s opposite; a huddle of recycling bins futher on with the usual dishevelment of crumpled boxes propped against them; and the odd skinny cat streaking away from the tap of your shoe on the worn cobbles.

  About twenty-five steps beyond the bins, the path veers to the right, around by the back of Kennedy’s. No more cobbles now, only a raggedy-edged strip of tarmac, frilled with bobbing dandelions in the summer and bordered by a cement wall on one side, high enough to hide whatever’s behind it (as it happens, the long since boarded-up flour mill of Miller’s Lane), and tall green metal railings on the other.

  Beyond the railings there’s a small park. A line of unremarkable trees, clumps of variously coloured bushes, a few randomly scattered dark red wooden benches and splashes of flowers here and there, depending on the season. A scrap of a children’s play area in the far corner – two swings, a slide, a seesaw, a boxed square of grainy sand. Lots of pale green, carelessly mown grass.

  And then, at the end of the path, between a trio of thigh-high metal bollards, Miller’s Lane opens out and becomes Miller’s Avenue. And right across from the bollards stand three tall, narrow redbrick houses.

  Now take the time to look a little more closely at these three joined-together houses, with their small front gardens and black wrought iron gates and railings. You might notice the brass numbers screwed into each of the three differently coloured front doors: seven on the first (deep blue), eight on the second (burgundy) and nine on the third (furze yellow).

  And once you get that far, there really isn’t much to stop you from pushing open the gate of number seven and walking up the short path – three or four steps, no more – and pressing the small brass bell beside the dark blue door.

  24 May

  NUMBER SEVEN

  ‘You don’t have to come with me.’ Yvonne O’Mahony lifted the bundles of milky-yellow freesias from the white basin in the sink and wrapped a paper towel around their dripping stems. The spicy scent of them wafted up to her. ‘If you’re tired, I mean. You’ve had a long day, and I don’t mind going on my own.’

  Her daughter stood, brushing crumbs from the folds of her green top, pushing her dark blonde hair off her forehead. ‘Of course I’ll come. Don’t I always come?’ The heat often made Clara slightly cranky. ‘Here, give me those.’

  She reached for Brian’s flowers and Yvonne, after a second, handed them over. Clara strode ahead of her, out the back door and down the long gravel path. Yvonne pulled the door closed behind her and glanced around the garden. No sign of Magoo – off on his travels again, sniffing around the apartment block, probably, where someone would be sure to throw him a bit of food.

  In the neighbouring garden, a small grey cat sitting on the black bin in a corner of the patio lifted his head and gazed at her.

  ‘Hello, Picasso. Don’t suppose you’ve seen Magoo?’ The cat lowered his head on to his paws again and closed his eyes, and Yvonne followed Cl
ara down the path.

  ‘God, the heat, still.’ Clara stood by the car, flapping her skirt. ‘At this hour.’

  ‘I know.’ Yvonne opened Clara’s door and walked around to the driver’s side. The car was like a furnace. She wound her window all the way down, turned the key in the red Micra’s ignition and reversed crookedly, curving into the corner of the lane.

  As she straightened up and they began to bump gently down the lane to the road, she glanced at Clara – mouth set, shoulders hunched, flowers dangling in front of her knees – before giving in, as she’d been giving in all day, to thoughts of Brian.

  His face when she’d told him she was pregnant all those years ago. Both of them eighteen, Brian nearly a year with the civil service, working behind the counter in the motor tax office. Yvonne about to start college, her place in UCG waiting for her finally, after two Leaving Cert attempts.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’ Her nails digging into her palms, her teeth gritted against whatever was coming. Sitting on the hard bench outside the library.

  His face, turning towards her. The horrified expression that had made her want to smash her fist into it – unfairly, because hadn’t she been just as appalled when she’d found out?

  ‘What?’ The shocked look of him, the way his mouth twisted, as if she’d done something disgusting in front of him.

  She couldn’t answer. Her hands stayed clenched in her lap. She turned away from his face and watched his shoes instead. A half-inch of the left lace was stained with something green.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded, eyes still fixed on his shoes. They were brown nubbly suede and very round at the toes. There was a little dent in the dome of the left one. Yvonne wondered if it would spring out if she pushed it from inside. She bit into her cheek, as hard as she could bear.

  ‘Was it the night of the results?’

  She nodded again. The one night they’d forgotten the condom. The library door swished open behind them and she turned to watch an elderly man coming out.

  ‘Fuck.’

  She felt Brian’s foot kicking against the leg of the bench, the thump of it up through her.

  She’d been so happy, enough points at last to get into the arts course she wanted, worth the extra year in school. They’d gone with a gang to the pub at half three, staggered out of it at nine, back to his room in the house he shared with two other civil servants.

  It was only the fifth time they’d had sex. She didn’t remember it.

  Brian reached over and pulled one of her clenched hands towards him. ‘No, it’s OK, really it is.’ His hand was cold, it offered no comfort. ‘It’s OK, it was just a shock, honest to God.’

  She nodded, still unable to look at him.

  ‘Yvonne … love, it’s OK.’ He pressed her still clenched fingers. ‘We’ll be OK. We’ll manage.’ His other hand reached under her face and pulled her chin up gently. ‘I love you. We’ll be fine.’

  She nodded again, watching his mouth, looking at the words coming out. He was smiling now, an awful forced smile. Worse, far worse, than before.

  ‘Yeah.’ She didn’t smile back. ‘We’ll manage.’

  The ridiculous jacket he’d worn for the wedding, all lapels and unnecessary pockets, that she’d never seen before. The expression on his face as she’d walked up the aisle towards him – God, that walk had taken forever. The flash of an uncle’s camera, the smiles of her friends, some child crying and being immediately shushed, her mother in the front row in her green suit, smiling, wiping her eyes with a fluff of lace Yvonne had never seen before or since.

  Brian’s mother in the opposite pew, looking at her son’s fiancée with a very different expression.

  Yvonne’s second cousin Orla, standing inside the altar rails in a yellow dress and black hat, playing ‘Here Comes the Bride’ on a side flute, because she’d offered and they hadn’t had the heart to say no.

  The expression on Brian’s face, when all Yvonne had wanted to do was turn and run back over the cracked maroon tiles, fly down the aisle through the thick wooden doors, and not stop until she had to.

  His tears when Clara was born four months later, only the second time she’d ever seen him cry. The necklace he’d bought for Yvonne the following day, that she’d killed him for buying – ridiculous, what did she want with jewellery? What about the washing machine? How were they going to afford that now?

  His awful singing, the songs he made up for Clara:

  I’m a kitten from Great Britain,

  I eat cabbages and carrots,

  I eat mustard, I eat custard,

  But my favourite food is parrots …

  The night he drove their twelve-year-old Mini to the hospital, a raincoat over his pyjamas, going the wrong way down a street that he knew was one way, when Clara got a rash that turned out to be nothing.

  The lemon cake he’d baked for Yvonne’s twentieth birthday, the beige gloop that oozed out when she cut into it.

  The sprinkling of his brown shavings in the bathroom sink that she eventually gave up complaining about. His hair gel that smelled of rhubarb. The black scrap of a nail on his left little finger that he’d caught in a car door as a child. The raised mole just behind his right shoulder, the coarse hairs that sprouted from it that he refused to let her pluck. The way he read the newspaper back to front.

  His mother’s face at the funeral, blotchy with angry grief. Yvonne holding Clara’s five-year-old hand, willing herself to feel, trying to push away the unspeakable relief.

  The guilt that brought tears at last, when people told her they were sorry for her troubles, that he was taken from her much too young. All those hands, all that pink and brown and white and cold and warm and smooth and calloused flesh, squeezing hers: Sorry, so sorry for your loss.

  At the cemetery, Yvonne pulled up behind a filthy dark blue van and switched off the engine. She waited until Clara had got out, then wound up both windows, locked the car and followed her daughter through the rusting turnstile and along the neat rows of graves.

  The gold letters on his granite headstone read Brian O’Mahony, beloved only son of Jim and Peggy, husband of Yvonne, father of Clara, and listed the first and last years of his life, twenty-four apart. No sign of moss – Peggy made sure of that.

  Clara bent and laid the freesias on the rectangle of gravel in front of the headstone. Their paper towel wrapping looked too casual now – why hadn’t she got some coloured tissue or a ribbon or something?

  Brian had been just a year older than Clara was now, when the train he was travelling on, eighteen years ago today, had veered off the tracks and down a small embankment, killing him and an older man in the same carriage. Most of the twenty-nine other passengers had walked away; nobody else had been seriously injured. A miracle, the papers had called it.

  A miracle. Yvonne’s navy and white skirt was lifted by a sudden whip of wind and she pushed it back down over her knees. She should pray, but they never did, just stood there for a while and then went home.

  ‘Here’s Gran and Gramps.’ Clara’s hand shielded her eyes from the low, late sun as she watched Brian’s parents walking towards them. Yvonne turned, forcing a smile onto her face.

  Peggy walked ahead of Jim, as usual. She wore a grey coat and cradled a pot of dark yellow flowers. Far more appropriate than a few bunches of already wilting freesias. Of course.

  ‘How are you, Peggy?’

  No handshake, certainly no embrace. Peggy nodded at a place somewhere to the left of Yvonne’s ear. ‘I’m as well as can be expected, I suppose.’ And turning to Clara, she smiled and leaned towards her granddaughter, so Clara could bend and kiss her cheek. ‘How are you, pet?’

  Yvonne had long since learned to ignore the unspoken insults. After Brian’s death, Peggy had distanced herself from Yvonne as much as she could and they’d met mercifully few times since then: here at the graveside every now and again, of course, and at various occasions of Clara’s – communion, confirmation, twenty-first birthday
– and sometimes in town, when it wasn’t possible to pretend they hadn’t seen each other.

  And every Christmas morning – on Jim’s insistence, Yvonne was sure – she spent a tortuous hour or so with Clara in Jim and Peggy’s house, sipping drinks and making small talk with a scattering of their neighbours.

  Brian’s mother looked pretty much the same as ever, apart from the hair that seemed to get blonder each time Yvonne saw it. Same pale blue eyes, the usual powdery lilac shadow above them, same narrow, pointed nose. Same too-dark lipstick bleeding slightly into the deep lines above her top lip.

  She handed the flowerpot to Clara. ‘Will you put these down for me? There’s a good girl.’ They watched as Clara bent and placed the pot beside the freesias, and Yvonne wished again that her offering didn’t look so pathetic in comparison, so washed out against the much stronger yellow in the pot.

  Jim limped slowly up to them. ‘Hello there, you two.’ He wore a navy sleeveless top over a white shirt and pale grey trousers. ‘Everything all right?’

  He leaned heavily on the stick he’d been using since his knee operation. His severely cut white hair barely covered his blue-veined scalp. The round glasses perched, as usual, halfway down his nose. He had Brian’s, and Clara’s, brown eyes – or was it the other way around? A pale pink circle bloomed in the soft greyish folds of each cheek.

  Yvonne bent to touch his cheek with her lips. ‘Hello, Jim. We’re grand – isn’t the weather amazing?’

  Was he eighty yet? He was a few years older than Peggy, and she must be well into her seventies. After Brian’s funeral, back in their house, Jim had taken Clara onto his knee and read her Green Eggs and Ham while Peggy and Yvonne looked after the small crowd of mourners, refilling glasses, pouring tea, passing around sandwiches and trying not to be in the same room together.

  And after Clara had been put to bed, when most of the callers had left, Yvonne had passed the half-open kitchen door and heard a peculiar snuffling noise. She’d peered in to see Jim hunched on a wooden chair, head bent, shoulders shaking under his charcoal jacket. She’d stood for a moment, watching him, and then she’d walked back into the sitting room, feeling completely unable to help.

  Watching Jim now, standing over his only child’s grave, both hands curved tightly around his stick, Yvonne wondered how much longer the dinners could go on. How many more times would Jim be able to battle across town on the second Saturday of every month, simply to make a point of having dinner with his daughter-in-law and grandchild, to show that whatever might have happened in the past was forgotten and forgiven – by him, at least?