said than done.
For the first week there was a buzz in my brain, a low-grade headache. I put it down to poor sleep. I tried to kill it with paracetamol so I could focus on my job but still it persisted. Going back to work for a company I had once been a part of was not the triumphant return I had secretly hoped it would be. It was disconcerting how far things had moved on in the past fifteen years, making the landscape almost entirely unrecognizable to me. I willed myself to become absorbed in the challenge, however difficult I found it. All the while, in the back of my head, there was this hum: Zoë.
I don’t think I even recognized her as a person then. Instead I saw her as a problem I didn’t know how to solve. Work allowed me to drown out the hum in my brain. It was in the evenings, after dinner, the kids occupied with homework or friends or TV, when David and I were alone together, that the sound was amplified.
‘What does she look like?’ I asked him.
It was night, and we were lying awake in the dark. Somewhere down our street, a car alarm was going off.
His gaze moved from the window to the ceiling, and I felt him smoothing the duvet around him. ‘Much like any other first-year student,’ he said, his voice flat.
‘Come on, David. They can’t all look the same. She must have some distinguishing features.’
‘Her hair,’ he said then, and I found myself grow tense. ‘She has this shock of blonde hair. Long springy curls – almost white, it’s so blonde.’
‘She doesn’t sound like you.’
‘Linda’s hair.’
Linda. Her name spoken in the darkness of our bedroom. I thought of her, all those years ago, and imagined David running his hands over those blonde curls, knitting his fingers up in them, marvelling at them, loving them. I had conjured up the image and now wished I hadn’t.
‘And boots,’ he said then.
‘Boots?’
‘She wears these boots – military-looking. Doc Martens, I suppose. Oxblood in colour. They look enormous at the end of her skinny legs. She’s such a little slip of a thing. Shy.’
The way he said it, I couldn’t help thinking he felt affection towards her.
He lay there for a moment, staring into the dark. Outside, the car alarm had stopped, and silence came into the room, like a sudden intrusion. He turned over, flattening himself in preparation for sleep.
But I didn’t sleep. It was as though each of us – in separate and distinct ways – had been plunged back into the past. Fragments of old memories were coming back atunexpected moments. I wondered, as David’s breathing slowed, if his last waking thoughts that night were of Linda. As for me, I found myself going back further to another time, another meeting. A decision made. The weight of its seriousness pressing on my young shoulders. You don’t have to come with me , I had told him. I can go on my own. Trying to sound brave while inside I was dying. Did he remember that conversation, my sleeping husband? Was any of this coming back to him, too? Old ghosts awoken, stirred angrily into life by this new girl, like a wasp’s nest struck with a stick.
It was a flare in my brain – her golden hair. Everywhere I looked there were girls with blonde hair, hanging loose down backs and over shoulders, swinging in ponytails, with flicked fringes. I found myself staring at teenage girls, calculating their age, anxiously assessing their likeness to David, to Holly. She could have been any one of them.
I didn’t intend to seek her out. But one morning when I was driving along Morehampton Road, running an errand for Peter, it occurred to me that if I kept on driving I would reach the UCD campus.
I rang the History Department office while driving, saying my niece was a first-year student of history; she had been visiting me last night but had left her phone in my house. I had no way of getting in touch with her, I said, and wanted to drop it into the university.
All I wanted was to get a look at her. I had no
For the first week there was a buzz in my brain, a low-grade headache. I put it down to poor sleep. I tried to kill it with paracetamol so I could focus on my job but still it persisted. Going back to work for a company I had once been a part of was not the triumphant return I had secretly hoped it would be. It was disconcerting how far things had moved on in the past fifteen years, making the landscape almost entirely unrecognizable to me. I willed myself to become absorbed in the challenge, however difficult I found it. All the while, in the back of my head, there was this hum: Zoë.
I don’t think I even recognized her as a person then. Instead I saw her as a problem I didn’t know how to solve. Work allowed me to drown out the hum in my brain. It was in the evenings, after dinner, the kids occupied with homework or friends or TV, when David and I were alone together, that the sound was amplified.
‘What does she look like?’ I asked him.
It was night, and we were lying awake in the dark. Somewhere down our street, a car alarm was going off.
His gaze moved from the window to the ceiling, and I felt him smoothing the duvet around him. ‘Much like any other first-year student,’ he said, his voice flat.
‘Come on, David. They can’t all look the same. She must have some distinguishing features.’
‘Her hair,’ he said then, and I found myself grow tense. ‘She has this shock of blonde hair. Long springy curls – almost white, it’s so blonde.’
‘She doesn’t sound like you.’
‘Linda’s hair.’
Linda. Her name spoken in the darkness of our bedroom. I thought of her, all those years ago, and imagined David running his hands over those blonde curls, knitting his fingers up in them, marvelling at them, loving them. I had conjured up the image and now wished I hadn’t.
‘And boots,’ he said then.
‘Boots?’
‘She wears these boots – military-looking. Doc Martens, I suppose. Oxblood in colour. They look enormous at the end of her skinny legs. She’s such a little slip of a thing. Shy.’
The way he said it, I couldn’t help thinking he felt affection towards her.
He lay there for a moment, staring into the dark. Outside, the car alarm had stopped, and silence came into the room, like a sudden intrusion. He turned over, flattening himself in preparation for sleep.
But I didn’t sleep. It was as though each of us – in separate and distinct ways – had been plunged back into the past. Fragments of old memories were coming back atunexpected moments. I wondered, as David’s breathing slowed, if his last waking thoughts that night were of Linda. As for me, I found myself going back further to another time, another meeting. A decision made. The weight of its seriousness pressing on my young shoulders. You don’t have to come with me , I had told him. I can go on my own. Trying to sound brave while inside I was dying. Did he remember that conversation, my sleeping husband? Was any of this coming back to him, too? Old ghosts awoken, stirred angrily into life by this new girl, like a wasp’s nest struck with a stick.
It was a flare in my brain – her golden hair. Everywhere I looked there were girls with blonde hair, hanging loose down backs and over shoulders, swinging in ponytails, with flicked fringes. I found myself staring at teenage girls, calculating their age, anxiously assessing their likeness to David, to Holly. She could have been any one of them.
I didn’t intend to seek her out. But one morning when I was driving along Morehampton Road, running an errand for Peter, it occurred to me that if I kept on driving I would reach the UCD campus.
I rang the History Department office while driving, saying my niece was a first-year student of history; she had been visiting me last night but had left her phone in my house. I had no way of getting in touch with her, I said, and wanted to drop it into the university.
All I wanted was to get a look at her. I had no
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