Chapter 2

Between groups, he keeps to the edge of the room because he has learned not to take up the whole space. When the speaker squawks, he smiles the little apology adults make to children for the limitations of the world. He does not touch me, stand too close, or steal breath. He is learning. Or he is reminding me he can. “Excuse me,” the girl wearing it says, voice pitched to teacher volume. “Do we do fewer cones when we are tired or more cones?” “Fewer,” I say without thinking. “Fewer,” Eoin says at the same time, and our voices make a chord that knows another chord very well. That isn’t it. That’s not the reveal. That’s only time being interested in us for a breath. The child with the bracelet is not my child; my child is watching from the threshold like a union representative who will intervene only if the process is unsafe. After the third class, the headteacher brings a plate with biscuits cut in triangles because rectangles feel aggressive in a school setting. Una arrives five minutes into the break like weather in a cardigan. She is Eoin’s cousin by blood and mine by selection; she stood on my left at eight years old and kept finding new reasons to hold ground. When we were fifteen and I came out of a corner where my life had turned, she looked at Eoin and said one syllable—don’t—and he understood the grammar. “Will you look at the pair of you,” she says now, not in accusation, just the way a person remarks on two trees that grew either side of a fence and decided not to topple it. She kisses my cheek, cuffs Eoin’s shoulder, steals two biscuits for the road. “Headteacher says I’m to behave. Well. That’s a first.” “She’s my enforcer,” I tell the head. “You can send her home with a note.” “You’ll get one too,” Una says. “Do your stretches, Daly.” He obeys with an exaggerated care that earns him a half-classroom of affection; even the headteacher concedes a smile. When the fourth class files in, a boy asks if he can do the drill “like the television,” and Eoin says no without shame in it and then shows him a better way that belongs to now, not the TV. Somewhere between heel taps and the way laughter ricochets off varnish, I stop organising my face and just use it. “Questions,” I say at the end, when the bell is too near and attention will be forfeit. “We’ve five minutes. If you want to ask about bones or tape or cones, now is the time.” “Have you known each other long?” she says, and the room discovers quiet like a new toy. Eoin looks at me with the briefest question. I answer with a tilt that means yes, we will not lie to children to save our own dignity. “We have,” I say. “We grew up together.” “How long is long?” a boy says, because the difference between a day and a year is only context. “Since we were the size of that cone,” Una calls from a seat near the door, unhelpful and perfect. She flips the cone upside down so it looks like a party hat. “He annoyed me at family parties. I annoyed him by existing. Aoife annoyed us both by telling us we were wrong about everything.” “It’s true,” I say, because refusing the bit would mean letting down a setup. I point without thinking. “And this one annoyed us all by never remembering where he left his boots.” “Sometimes they were on my feet,” he says, scrupulous in the way children love. The room is pleased. The questions scatter and reform: Have you always liked sport? Did you practice kissing on your hands first? Did you have a favourite teacher? Which one of you is better at maths? Una is laughing silently, shoulders shaking, because children aim for the centre with a wicked accuracy you can only respect. “Do you ever think about what if?” asks a boy with a bruise like a galaxy on his knee, and there it is—more adult than the room knows, and piercingly not. He means what if you chose another sport, what if you weren’t from here, what if jam sandwiches had not been invented. He means other things too because he’s listened to adults choose their words around him for years. Eoin doesn’t look at me this time. He keeps his eyes on the child who asked and lets the rest of the hall eavesdrop on something true. “All the time,” he says. “But then I remember there’s only one direction time goes. So I try to make good choices now and then do the same again tomorrow.” The girl with the blazer lowers her hand slowly like landing a plane. The headteacher looks like she’s going to ask for that line in an email for the school website. Una mimes wiping a tear with the back of her hand and then makes a face like get over yourself, which is her way of being kind. Between sessions, while the speaker recovers from a high-pitched adventure with “Eye of the Tiger,” I fetch the tote to replenish tape. The tote is chaos you can wear on your shoulder. I put my hand in it and touch something that is not clinic: a small tin with a hinge I have not opened outside of my kitchen for a decade. I don’t know why it’s here; I didn’t pack it. I don’t know how it got from a drawer that lies to me into a bag that lies to no one. When I open it, the plaited bracelet looks up at me as if I owe it a conversation. I could close the tin and bury it under tape like a bad instinct. But I am trying to be the kind of person who shows up for what’s in front of me. I carry it towards the storage cupboard where light is softer and children need permission to enter. He is there, kneeling because cupboards do not respect the tall. He is fighting the lid of a plastic crate like it insulted his mother. He glances up and stills, not because I am a surprise but because my face has admitted something and he is a person who reads faces like in-flight safety cards. “I’ve got it,” he says, gently, about the crate lid. Then: “What is it?” I can place the tin down on the edge of a mop bucket like a chess piece and decide that we will not play. Or I can step closer into the small cool air of shelves and cleaning fluid, press my palm to the tin as if weighing it, and say the sentence. “Do you remember these?” He looks from my hand to my mouth because he’s not a fool. He nods once, slow, like a man trying not to frighten a wild thing. “Mine’s in a drawer that moves house with me.” “Mine too,” I say, and flip the lid. The colours are ours and not ours—faded to their own version of truth, the way you tell a story when you’re tired. His mouth shifts—not widening, not breaking, just letting the edges go. He doesn’t reach. He knows better than to reach. “Róisín made one for herself yesterday,” I say, because this is the piece that means the room’s weather changes. “Not this one. One that looks like this one.” He is careful. He keeps his gaze on my face. “Aoife,” he says, everything inside my name. “Yes,” I say, and the school becomes a chapel where vows are not the loud thing but the structure that holds the soft thing up. “She’s nine.” He nods as if I’ve told him the expected weight of a stone. Emotion has made messy work of him plenty; he refuses to make work of it messy now. He breathes once like he’s under floodlights in weather. “Does she—” “Not yet,” I say, because the child who will hear this first has earned it by existing with her spine straight through the world. “But she will. Today. Here if there’s a quiet room. With you if you want. Not with a reporter. Not with your knee screaming. Not as a surprise.” He closes his eyes for a second and opens them back to me. I have seen people pray when they weren’t sure they believed. This is in that family. “I would like… to do this well.” “Then show up,” I say, and the sentence feels like a handhold. “Sit on her level. Don’t apologise for not knowing. Tell her what you want and then ask what she wants. Listen properly. Don’t promise what you can’t keep. Promise what you can.” “If I ask nothing,” he says, “it will not be because I don’t want everything.” “I know,” I say, which is both of us grown. He doesn’t move towards me. He doesn’t put his hand on my shoulder or reach for the tin or make anything cinematic out of what we’re doing next. He does the thing he’s learned to do the hard way: asks. “Here?” “Headteacher’s office,” I say. “Softer chairs. Tissues if we make a mess of makeup like women in adverts.” “We,” he echoes, thinking about pronouns. “I,” I correct, wry. “I wear mascara like a woman trying to look awake in terrible lighting. She will not cry until bedtime when she thinks no one is looking, and even then it will be the sound of checking. You will cry either now or on the bus or tomorrow in the cereal aisle. You will be very dignified about making a small puddle.” “Sounds accurate,” he says faintly, and manages a smile, ridiculous man. We find the headteacher with the apology already loaded, and she turns into an avenging angel of safeguarding: vacating her office, producing a Do Not Disturb sign from behind a motivational poster, corralling Una into the hall with the sort of look that suggests shared memory of being eight and breaking rules. “Ten minutes,” she says softly. “Or thirty. We will hold the rest.” I go to the threshold where Róisín stands, leaning like a lecturer intent on being halfway to a joke. Her eyes cut to my face and stay, quick as a bird’s. I have told her every true thing I could at the age she was when each became true. This one is late in the way that makes my hands hum. I tap my heart twice: come. She slips into step beside me, registers him, and doesn’t ask for permission to experience a face. “Office,” I say. “Soft chairs. No spelling test.” “That is suspicious,” she says. She has the courage to look at the adult she does not yet have a category for and then look away as if she might give him a bruise. “Hi.” “Hi,” he says, and goes the precise amount of small you go to talk to a child without becoming a parody of your own body. We sit in a room with a plant that has resigned itself to being indoors. The blinds make weather out of light. There is a box of tissues with daisies printed on it, aggressive in their optimism. I have rehearsed every wrong sentence and burned through them to the right ones. “There’s something we should tell you,” I say, and this is where it can become a before or an after for all of us. She looks at him again, then me, then engages her chin with two fingers as if aligning it with the rest of her. “Okay,” she says. “Is it bad?” “No,” I say. “It is… big.” She checks me for fidgeting, checks him for posture, rewards us both with a tiny nod for meeting standards. “Go on then.” “We knew each other when we were your age,” I say. “We grew up in the same streets. We were very fond.” “Fond means what people say when they don’t want to say love,” she says, not looking away, in case I cheat. “It means exactly that,” I say, laughing without water. “We loved each other. We still do, but not the same way because time makes new shapes. When we were twenty-one, he moved to England for sport. Before he left, we—” I back out of the sentence like a person correctly reading the room. “—we were very close and then you happened, and he didn’t know.” She watches the inside of the story like she found a theatre she didn’t know she’d built. She looks at him as if the earth might tilt and she would prefer advance warning. He doesn’t speak. He waits the way I told him to wait, letting a child be the gravity. “Are you my dad?” she asks in a voice like lighting a candle rather than shouting for a lighthouse. “Yes,” he says, because the right thing is clean. He doesn’t say I think so, or might, or let’s wait for a test. The truth has walked into the room; he stands up to let it sit. “I didn’t know until just now. I’m sorry I didn’t know. I would have… I would have wanted to be here.” “Wanting is not the same as being,” she says—Una’s echo with my mouth. But her face has not closed. She breathes the way children do when the body chooses it for you. “Do you want to be my dad now?” “Yes,” he says, and then looks guilty like he’s promised a pony because the word is bigger than a week. “If you want. If it’s all right with your mother. If we do it... properly.” “What does properly mean?” “I show up,” he says, voice steadier than the man. “I ask what you need and then do my best to do it. I do my homework. I don’t take your picture without asking. I fail sometimes and then I try again without sulking. I learn your schedule. I make sure my knee doesn’t get in the way. I don’t disappear because the calendar got loud. I bake biscuits even if they’re terrible. I—” He stops, because he has reached the edge of what making a list can save. “—I be your dad.” She mulls, which is a verb that suits her. “Can you plait?” she asks. “Badly,” he says. “But I can learn.” “I can teach,” she says, and looks to me with a tiny lift at the end like a question mark that is mostly a statement: this is the bit where adults make plans. “We’ll make a plan,” I say. The tissue sits untouched because nothing has broken, only reassembled. The air feels like the moment before rain. “We’ll talk about school and Saturdays and who’s at which thing. We’ll write it down and then we’ll change it and write it down again. We won’t make promises we can’t keep.” “Will people put it in the papers?” she asks, practical and acutely nine. “Some might try,” I say. “But we will do this quietly. The people who get to know are the ones who need to. Your teacher if you want her to. Una because she would kill me if I didn’t tell her. Nanny because she will bake too much. Not strangers.” “If someone takes my picture, can I throw a cone at them?” “No,” I say. “You can stand behind me and pull a face so funny the camera breaks.” “She could throw a cone if I’m in front,” he offers, deadpan, earning himself a smile that rearranges the furniture in the room. She looks at his knee like it might be the weather vane for our family’s future. “Does it hurt?” “Sometimes,” he says. “Less when I do what I’m told.” “Then I will tell you,” she says, perfectly satisfied. “Mummy tells people. I tell people. Una tells people. You can be a people who is told.” The headteacher knocks softly—the universal code for I am here and nowhere near your business. We wave away her apology. When we stand, we are taller than we were. The office plant looks less resigned or I am projecting. In the hall, Una is doing an impression of a PE teacher whose whistle is welded to her lip; she breaks off to look into faces and finds what she was hoping to find. She puts two fingers under her eyes like she’s catching tears, then shakes them onto the floor like salt. “Right,” she says briskly, so nobody falls to pieces. “Under-tens, gather. And under-twenties,” to us, “breathe.” The last session of the morning runs on the kind of energy that makes children put both feet into a correcting step. Róisín takes up her position as general, more measured than before, as if the planet got bigger and she is recalculating gravity. Eoin is a fraction looser—as if some part of him has unclenched around a what-if he’s been orbited by for years. He does not look at me for reassurance and yet I am reassured by where he looks: at the children who are his audience and not his alibi. “We’re at the academy this afternoon,” I say to him in the doorway, the world arriving on legs around us. “Under-thirteens. They are savagely perceptive and will ask questions with no brakes.” “Meet us there,” I say. “And—” He waits because I’ve left a hook for a clause. “Thank you,” I say, and we both pretend not to notice the word hitch. The academy pitch sits amber in late-day light, grass cut to a barber’s standard, the smell of earth and old victories making even reasonable people nostalgic. The under-thirteens are already there, in that between-height where a child looks like his father in one line and his mother in another, where a girl whose legs have outpaced her arms chooses not to be self-conscious because there’s no point. Their coach, a man who started volunteering to get out the house and never left, wants structure and will take joy as a substitute. Eoin jogs out, the knee holding because he made it a condition of being allowed to keep going. He claps once, gets attention without the clap really being the trick. “Right,” he says. “Show me your warm-up. You’ve got two minutes to convince me you want to keep your ankles attached.” They laugh, but they do it. The warm-up is a catalogue of bad habits. He edits without humiliation, gives reasons like he’s teaching a recipe. Una and I set up our tape station and pretend we are just physios and not people whose lives have discovered a new route. The children clock us and make a decision: we are part of today’s story. A boy with a thick accent and a passionate relationship with his shoelaces points between me and Una and Eoin. “Is this… like a band? Are yis a band?” “Trio,” Una says, not missing her beat. “Post-punk. We only play in school halls. He’s lead vocals, obviously. Aoife plays tape. I do percussion with cones.” “You’re related,” a girl says, eyebrows an essay. “You’ve the same nose. And the same way of telling people no without making it a row.” “She’s my cousin,” Eoin says, gesture towards Una. “She was born a menace.” “And she’s my best friend,” I add, because the long work of our lives deserves a line, “which is how I’ve survived this long.” “And you two,” a different boy says, chin-jerk at me and Eoin, “you look like yis are trying not to laugh at the same time.” “Observant,” I say, considering handing him a PhD application. “How long have yis known each other?” The same question, older by two years, honed by mischief. “Since we were lying about our age to get into swimming on Friday nights,” Una says. “Do not lie about your age to get into anywhere. The lifeguard will know. He always knows.” “They’re all right,” the shoelace boy declares, like he’s a casting director. “They’ve the same… style.” “Style,” a coach repeats. “Explain yourself, philosopher.” “They watch,” the boy says, shrugging. “Coach Daly watched when he played. Didn’t go mad. Let the ball come near him like it decided it loved him and then he did the thing. She—” he juts chin at me “—she watches as if the tape can hear. She waits until it’s ready to be tape. And she—” Una “—she’s like if a whistle was a person. You know what I mean. She’s what keeps the air on time.” I should deny the poetry of it because encouraging lyricism in teenage boys is how you end up with songwriters. But he’s not wrong, and liking that he’s not wrong is a small sweetness I can keep. “Do your stretches,” I say, because joy can be yoked to discipline; it doesn’t sulk. And then the question that has velocity in it even before it’s air: “Did yis… were yis together?” The boy who asks looks fascinated by sex in the way a child is—curious, unafraid, vastly uninterested in detail. He wants to know where to put people on his mental pitch. “We were,” Eoin says, choosing simple rather than coy. He could lie for ease and lose me. He doesn’t. “We were very young. We were very sure. Life asked for other things for a while.” “And do you ever think about what if?” the girl beside him says with the deliberate enunciation of someone trying out adulthood. He looks at me, not for permission but for witness. He is not asking for a script; he is asking to be seen saying what has to be said. “Every day,” he answers, speaking to a semicircle and a single person. “But you can’t play a match that’s already happened. You can only make the next one mean something.” “That’s a terrible metaphor,” Una says, and they laugh exactly the right amount. “Do you love her?” a tiny boy pipes up, because we are not getting out of here with any dignity left. “I will always love Aoife,” he says, steady like laying a stepping-stone. “We were children together and grew up in the same songs. It doesn’t have to look like a movie to be true.” The group murmurs, satisfied in the way of people who wanted a line to hold and were given it. They turn practical as easily as breathing: what snack before training, how to tape fingers, whether it’s all right to cry in front of your team if your dog dies. He answers like a man who has cried in unfamiliar rooms and decided to survive it in public. I handle small wrist bones like they are treasure and not responsibility. Una invents a game to get heart rates down so nobody goes home as a bowstring. When they scatter, the floodlights are testing themselves against the sky, waiting for evening, showing off. We collect cones with a ritual that is partly control and partly affection. He and I walk the line of the pitch where the ground dips a centimetre, a memory in earth. “Do you ever,” he says, because he’s the sort of person who cannot leave a door ajar if he knows a child is behind it, “think about what if?” “Of course,” I say, because I have grown used to telling truths that do not demand solutions. “I think what if you hadn’t left. I think what if I’d told you before you went. I think what if we’d been older and therefore stupider in different ways. I think what if we’d had no money and that made us better parents and worse at everything else. I think what if until I decide to make tea and stop thinking.” He laughs into his hand as if he doesn’t trust himself with the sound. “We were fifteen,” he says, half to himself, “the first time we said love out loud.” “And Una told us to put it in a drawer until we could be trusted with the lid,” I say, warmth faulty and immediate. He tucks his chin, and the school hall’s smell pulls a memory out by its wrist. “I was so certain I’d invented the feeling,” he says, as if marvelling at his old arrogance. “We were on the wall at the pitches, the one with the spray paint nobody ever washed off because it was rude but also a bit of art. You had crisps that had gone soft because you’d left the packet open in your bag and refused to admit it. I said it like a secret that would break if I used too much air. You said ‘oh,’” he adds, helplessly delighted and still mildly wounded.