She hung up the phone. Who loves ya, Marjorie?

She polished off the bottle of wine alone. Molly does.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Jack

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Jack

JACK WAS TIRED BUT also wired. Molly sat staring at the TV, unfocused and unable or unwilling to talk. He knew where he wanted to be: up in the attic with his old diaries, back in a world before his youngest daughter was riddled with cancer and died an agonising death. Back to the start, that’s where Jack needed to be. If Molly heard him pull down the attic ladder she didn’t say. He made his way up into the darkness and flicked the small light on. Davey had replaced the beanbag with a spare chair that Molly kept in the hall for the purpose of standing on to change light bulbs. He sat down on it and picked a diary from 1962, the year he met Molly. He smiled to himself.

‘We had it all to look forward to,’ he said to himself, then he looked to the roof. ‘You were only a glint in my eye, Rabbit. Oh but if you saw your mammy back then. She was something else, my girl, something out of this world. I’d never met anyone like her before – or even since, really, except for you and your sister.’

He opened up the diary and settled in. He started reading quietly, transported to a different time and place. He sat in silence, consumed by his own words, reminiscing as he read, then as if he’d just remembered she was there, he looked skywards again. ‘Don’t worry, Rabbit, I’ll only read the good bits aloud,’ he said. That’s what he did. Every once in a while he’d read out a passage about life in 1960s Ireland before following up with an observation or two. ‘Fields as far as the eye could see back then, Rabbit, and right on top of the city centre, too.’

‘Did I ever tell you the deposit I paid for this house? A five-pound note. Five pounds! You wouldn’t buy a packet of cigarettes for double that these days, but back then it was a fortune.’

The old man read and spoke to the ceiling on and off for much of that night, and when his eyes blurred with exhaustion and his back stiffened, and his neck and his legs had turned into jelly, he marked the page and placed it back in the box. He tried to stand up, cupping his knees in his hands. ‘I have to go now, my girl, but I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Night, Da.

Night, love.

He knew she wasn’t really there, but alone in the highest point of the house with his old diaries, he felt close to her.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Davey

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Davey