NINE

      BUT ACTUALLY IT WASN’T the first time I’d ever been in Dublin. I remember, one night, watching a programme about the miracle of migration, how the tiniest of birds can instinctively plot a flight path across oceans and continents back to the nondescript cluster of trees where they had pecked their shells asunder. A camera hidden above the nest had shown the chicks with their beaks open, awaiting their mother’s return. Their luminous eyes had never ceased gazing up, scanning the constellations and logging the precise configuration of the Plough and Orion and Seven Sisters at that fixed point of their birth, so that no matter how far they scattered, they could perpetually track a course back home.

      There had been no stars on the ceiling of that hotel near Dublin’s bus station when I was eleven years of age. Instead there had been tributaries and deltas of cracks, pencil-thin veins that clenched themselves up into shapes of staring eyes and demonic heads. I had lain alone beneath them, both longing for and dreading my mother’s return. There were footsteps on the ceiling above me, the creaking of a bed gathering meaning and pace. Part of the adjoining room jutted out into ours, a plywood alcove where water sporadically gushed from a tap to cloak the hiss of some man’s piss seeping into the sink. The muffled thump of a rock band echoed from the bowels of the shabby building. I had known that my mother was down there, in the dreary lounge overlooking the dangerous street which filled up with shouts, stampeding boots and the shrieks of girls every night at closing time. I was frightened she would meet someone; that perhaps, even now, the creaking bed above me contained her sweating body. I was frightened she would open the hotel door and disappear down those steps into the Dublin night. Most of all, I was scared our money would run out and there would be a scene with other guests staring at us and whispering.

      The hotel room made me feel as poor as white trash. An ambulance hustled past with a flicker of blue light. My mother would have finished the three drinks she always allowed herself. I could see her sitting alone among the young couples, nursing the melted ice in her glass as she fretted against the nightly temptation to splash out on a fourth vodka. Soon she would be up. I closed my eyes but the motif of hair-line cracks kept watch above me, staring eyes waiting to catch mine. My stomach was sour with greasy food and anxiety because, after five days, this secret holiday had ceased to be an adventure.

      It had seemed exciting when we planned it first, in whispered conversations in the back garden where Grandad Pete had lain down an ornate pond. Fish darted in and out between the perilously balanced rocks, red tails flitting for cover whenever I rippled the surface with my finger. I had never been allowed pets. Now I had spent each June twilight rocking back and forth on a tyre swing suspended from the cherry blossom tree beside the pond, watching in case our neighbour’s cat sprang down from the fence where he perched in uncanny stillness.

      Mammy had been off work again since the start of May. ‘Resting’ was the term which Granny taught me to repeat to anyone who asked. For the first fortnight we had visited her in a nursing home with tropical plants and bright windows where people sat like statues. But she was home now. She was better, perpetually smiling and with buoyant words gushing from her. Every evening she began to come out into the garden to push me. I loved to hear her talk like that, after months of withdrawn silence, bubbling away about things I couldn’t follow and then breaking easily into laughter at some joke I told her from school. She had a new pet phrase which I heard repeated a dozen times every evening – ‘wouldn’t it be nice’. At first I think that, even for herself, those words were little more than vague aspirations, but gradually I had sensed a difference in her voice as she homed in on them again and again. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was just you and me for a change? Wouldn’t it be nice if the pair of us visited Ireland?’

      Every evening as she laughed and leaned against my shoulder to push me further into the blue air, I felt she was inserting a pause for me to fill in after the words. Even at eleven I knew she would never have the strength to decide any course of action by herself. ‘Why don’t we just go then?’ I said one twilight. She pushed me higher, almost as if buying herself time. I had looked behind as the tyre swung back. Her face was child-like, unable to conceal her delight. I felt suddenly older and protective of her. I kicked the ground and swung the tyre round to stare clandestinely at her, sister to sister. ‘Alright then, this is what we do,’ she had whispered confidentially, swinging the tyre back round to push me again, as though afraid we were being watched.

      In the week that followed we never discussed our plans in the house, even when we were alone there. These secrets were confined to outside with the fish lurking beneath the stones, the branch creaking under the swaying tyre and early summer light succumbing to dark. We were conspirators. Our plans were real and yet, even up to the morning we left, they still had the feel of a child’s game. I had packed spare clothes into my school bag, cycled off as usual and even chained my bicycle in the school yard. It was my final week in Northwick Primary school. Class-mates chattered on their way to assembly. I walked back out of the school gates, resisting the urge to run to where my mother was waiting. It felt like being in a film as we hugged each other at the ticket desk and then raced along the platform at Harrow on the Hill station.