Part 16 (1/2)

'She's fine,' he said. 'She's just growing. It's fine.'

Then, one Sat.u.r.day after the summer holidays, Evie did not come out of her drama cla.s.s. Sean who was doing the pick-up waited, and checked his watch. He went inside where the teacher was packing up and discovered that Evie, though dropped at the door, had not showed up in cla.s.s that day. They started to ransack the building, the two of them then Sean decided to try outside. He ran into the street and up the hill, past buildings and doors and girls smoking at the bus stop, into the shopping centre, where he went down the first escalator he came to and stood in the middle of the atrium, and he looked up at a changed world, one full of angles, doors and possibilities that he had never seen before.

He wanted to shout her name and then did not shout. He found a security guard, who muttered into his walkie-talkie, then wrote out a phone number and advised him to ring the local police. Which Sean did, standing on the street, watching buses and cars, and old ladies with stand-up trolleys, going about their usual business. The man who answered asked him to hold the line. Then a woman's voice. I must sound bad, he thought, if they are handing me to a girl.

'Can you describe your daughter?'

Just the word 'daughter', the way she said it, made him feel like a liar. He felt like someone who was about to be found out.

'She has big eyes,' he said.

There was a silence at the other end of the line.

'Take your time, sir. Can you tell me the colour of her eyes?' At which point he did that thing; he turned himself into a person who can describe his daughter in words you might hear on the evening news: age, height, hair colour.

'What was she wearing?'

'I'll have to ring her mother,' he said. And as soon as he cut the connection, Aileen was on the line.

For a few moments, he failed to understand, not just the words she was saying, but her voice itself she might have been talking Danish then he somehow figured out that Evie had rung Aileen, or Aileen had rung Evie, and she was in the theatre, where she was supposed to have been all along.

'You spent the cla.s.s in the toilet?' To which Evie replied, 'No!' And then, 'I must have done.'

There was nothing for it, but to go back to the doctors the same round of referrals and endless waiting lists, the same watchfulness and morning anxiety, Aileen on the internet every night, googling 'absences', 'lesions', 'p.u.b.erty'; inviting it all in.

When they finally found themselves back with Dr Prentice it was with difficulty, Aileen said, that she did not 'fall on the woman's neck' Evie had very little to say.

She answered all the questions and gave no clues.

'And what do you think is going on, Evie?' the doctor finally said, to which Evie offered the idea that her brain might be funny.

'In what way funny?'

Evie, who by this time knew more than most children about the human brain, said, 'The two halves the hemispheres, you know? it is like they don't join up properly.'

Dr Prentice pursed her mouth and looked into her lap, then she lifted her head and with great clarity and tactfulness, discussed the anomalies of Evie's case, and suggested strongly suggested that alongside her medical tests and enquiries, they should bring Evie for 'psychiatric a.s.sessment'.

This was what was going on, the Christmas I wandered the deserted city streets. They gave her a computer, and told her not to spend so much time on the computer, and they pulled crackers, and hugged her, taking careful turns.

It is my suspicion that, after this, Aileen finally confronted Sean with all the things she had known but not let herself know for years. I suspect that she kicked him out. Because she realised the lies they told each other were wrecking Evie's head.

Or perhaps he kicked himself out, for much the same reason.

It is hard to pin down. Sean tells the story differently every time, and he believes it differently each time. But the fact seems to be that, at a time when it seemed most important, for Evie's sake, that they should stay together, it was also vital, for Evie's sake, that they should part.

In the last days of March, they sat in a room full of ghastly china figurines and discussed their daughter with a lemur of a woman all eyes, and quick little hands who had been seeing Evie, at great expense, for the previous two months. She looked at them and twitched her head sideways.

'Now. Let's talk about you guys, OK?' Not OK.

And sometime in the next week, Sean Vallely walked out of his house with nothing, not even a jacket, and he drove, in the middle of the night, to my door.

It was a weeknight: some normal night without him. It might have been two in the morning. I woke to the sound of the bell and the rattle of the letter box. Sean was crouched down, saying my name, trying not to wake the neighbours.

I was not quite awake, myself. I thought someone had died. Then I remembered that Joan was already dead: I had no one left, now, except Fiona. So it was my sister, then though it seemed so unlikely; Fiona was not, somehow, the dying type. I pulled the door open and he was standing outside in the weather. And the first thing I said was, 'Is she dead?'

'Let me in, will you?'

'Oh, sorry.'

He came inside the door not very far he crossed the threshold and then he leaned back against the wall. Every bit of his face was wet, and when I kissed him, he tasted of rain.

I said it to Sean once I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together and he looked at me as though I had just blasphemed.

'Don't be silly,' he said.

As far as he is concerned, there is no cause: he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.

In which case, Evie's room is like something after the tide went out: dirty feathers, sc.r.a.ps of paper, endless bits of cheap, non-specific plastic, and some that are quite expensive: 'Do you know how much those f.u.c.king things cost?' says Sean, going through the compacted filth of the Hoover bag, looking for a game from her Nintendo.

My stuff, on the other hand, does not matter. A Chanel compact, skittering across the floor, my phone pushed off the arm of the sofa, the battery forever after temperamental.

'Gawd,' says Evie.

She does not say 'sorry', that would be too personal.

Evie was always a bit of a barreller, a lurcher; her elbows are very close to her unconscious. At one stage they were going to have her checked for dyspraxia, by which they just meant 'clumsiness', but I guarantee you I have seen her move with great finesse. In this house, she is only clumsy around things that belong to me.

She eats nothing she is asked to eat, and everything that is forbidden. But she eats. Which I consider a minor miracle. She filches, she sneaks and crams. She waits a bit like myself, indeed until her father is not there. The place we meet most often is at the fridge door.

Two months ago, when Sean was at the gym and Evie was complaining I had finished all the mayonnaise, I tossed my bag on the kitchen table and said, 'Why don't you go and buy your own f.u.c.king food?'

Not pretty, but true.

Evie looked at me, as though noticing me for the first time. Later that day, she said something to me something that wasn't just a whine, like, 'Why don't you have Sky TV?'

She said, 'I can't believe you have so many shoes.'

And I had to leave the room to stuff my knuckles in my mouth, and pretend to bite into them, behind the door.

I look for my hiking boots and find them eventually on a shelf, wrapped up in a paper bag that came all the way from Sydney. I have not worn them since: my life, it seems, took the kind of turn that can only be effected in high heels. I take them out of the bag and the red dust of Australia shakes out on to our kitchen floor. My dreaming boots. I put them on and walk outside.