Page 26 of To Hell With It
‘You’ve been in the porch all night?’
‘Since about one o’clock this morning.’
‘What were you doing up so late?’ he asked, and I think he must have heard the pause through the phone. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Wait there.’
‘I can’t exactly go anywhere else,’ I said, but Niall had already put the phone down.
A short while later, Niall was stood outside my porch looking as awkward as I felt. His eyes dropped to my bare legs and I pulled my grandmother’s coat tight around me.
He handed me my spare key.
‘Here you go,’ he said but he kept his eyes from mine.
‘Thanks, Niall, I really appreciate it.’
We both stood there in silence for a moment because what do you say to someone when you’re half naked?
‘Did you move them all OK?’ Niall asked and it threw me.
‘Move what?’
‘The woodlice.’
‘Oh, yes, thank you, I did.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Yes.’
There was a beat.
‘Thanks again.’
‘It’s no problem,’ he said.
‘I best get inside.’
‘Best get some clothes on,’ he added, and it caught me by surprise.
I watched as Niall made his way across the drive to the gate, then he carefully checked the latch before he closed it gently behind him.
ChapterSixteen
There is a crow that comes to see me every morning. It sits in my hedge and stares at me, and I am convinced it is my grandmother. She used to say she’d come back as a big fat crow just to annoy Peggy Carey.
Peggy hated crows – she had a fear of them because one pecked her once when she was little, and my grandmother would throw big wedges of bread into her garden just so the crows would come and scare her (remember the crows that turned up every morning without being fed? Yep, that was my grandmother feeding them).
As I watched my grandmother watching me, I wondered if she knew what I’d done. That I’d had oral sex with a man I didn’t know in her kitchen.
My grandmother was a devout catholic for most of her life and used to tell me that anyone who had sex before marriage would go to hell –even bits and bobs in betweenas she’d put it, and I’d believed her, right up until she stopped believing it herself. I think as she deteriorated, so did her beliefs and in the end, just before she died, she told me to make sure I did everything I wanted to do and not to leave a thing unturned, including any man I wanted.
Jack appeared behind me the same time the crow flew off and I wondered if that was another sign from my grandmother, although I wasn’t sure it was a good one – wouldn’t she have stuck around and pecked on the window with a forget-me-not in her beak or something? He squeezed my waist and nuzzled my neck like they did in the movies, and I leant back into him the way I had always wanted to.
‘Time to get going,’ he said and I stayed in the moment for a little longer before I pictured him driving off to Dublin and then flying back to New Zealand where I would never see him again.
‘I’ll miss you,’ he added and it felt genuine, it didn’t feel like he said it to fill a silence.
‘I’ll miss you too,’ I said back. And I meant it. I meant it so much my chest ached. This was the way I always wanted to feel about someone: excited, suffocated by my own emotions. But I wanted it to be the beginning not the end.
