One Bad Turn Page 11

  Maybe he’d just forgotten the time. That happened, didn’t it? It was the sort of thing you heard teenage boys did, they forgot the time, let their phones run out of charge. He’d be home any minute, smelling of beer and mortified that she’d stayed up to wait for him. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Alan couldn’t come ‘home’ because he didn’t have one.

  He was only seventeen. When Eileen herself was seventeen she had felt completely grown-up, saddened by her mother’s death but, in a strange way, almost completed by it. Ready, she felt, for whatever the world would throw at her because the worst had already happened. But Alan seemed far, far younger than she had been. That was partly because he was still in fifth year, a year away from doing his final exams. The new school system, with its later start and transition year, meant that young men of his age stayed stuck in the world of grey uniform trousers and pushbikes until they were almost out of their teens. But part of it simply lay with Alan himself. There had always been something childish about him, childlike. Eileen sometimes wondered if that was her fault, if she had kept him babyish because there had been just the two of them for all these years. He had no siblings to knock the edges off him, no father to fight with, to toughen him up. Wasn’t that what fathers were supposed to do?

  Her thoughts were going down another route she didn’t want them to. Eileen sighed, then raised herself slowly off the bed, walked across the room and switched on the kettle. Tea was what she needed, not wine, and certainly not coffee, which would make her even more jumpy. At least, in his absence, she could boil the kettle without Alan complaining she was blocking his view of the TV. Who the hell designed hotel rooms anyway? There were only three sockets in the room, two on the floor near the beds and one beside the television that they had to use for everything else, including phone-charging and tea-making. All of them totally impractical. It was the same with the light switches. It had taken her a week, when they’d first moved in, to figure out which one operated which bulb. Wasn’t that always the way in hotels? The switch near the door was always attached to a random lamp near the window and there never seemed to be an option for a full overhead light. She’d said as much to Alan when they’d first moved in, tried to make a joke of it, even, hoping her use of the teenage word ‘random’ would at least raise a smile. But he hadn’t smiled and she had stopped joking. Besides, she knew where all the light switches were now. Six months in a room made you very familiar with its quirks, she had found.

  Six months. Six months they’d been living here, Eileen and her son, her beautiful lanky, handsome son, who had grown more and more angry as the weeks went by. And now it was half past one on Sunday morning and she didn’t know where he was. Earlier in the day he’d referred to the room as ‘a shithole’. It wasn’t a shithole, she had told him, foolishly trying to argue him out of his low mood, but her attempts at appeasement had only thrown petrol on the flames of Alan’s rage so she’d retreated into the bathroom to give him space and time to calm down. The next thing she’d heard had been the door to the room closing. It hadn’t banged – its heavy hinge was designed to keep other guests from being disturbed, not to allow angry teenagers to vent their feelings. But he’d left, all right, and she had no clue where he’d gone.

  As the water rose to the boil in the small plastic kettle, Eileen turned and walked over to the window, then sagged against it, resting her forehead on the glass. Saturday night in Dublin city stretched out in front of her. A small gang of girls spilled out from the nightclub across the road, two relatively sober ones supporting a tottering mite in heels. A middle-aged man, dressed incongruously in a business suit, cycled sedately past them on one of the city’s free bicycles, looking as if he were either very early or very late for another working day. Directly beneath her, a cab pulled into the pavement and, as Eileen angled her gaze down towards it, a couple stumbled out. The woman was laughing as the man fumbled in his wallet for the fare.

  ‘They’re all scumbags, the crowd that hang out in that place,’ Alan had snarled the previous week, while watching a similar scene. Eileen had been afraid to answer him, more alarmed by the venom in his words than by their content. Anger. There was so much anger in her beautiful boy now. What a waste of his life these past months had been. He woke up every morning wrapped in a blanket of bleakness, which grew progressively darker as the day went on. His teachers had noticed too. Several had mentioned at the last school meeting that his grades were slipping, but one, more perceptive than the rest, had commented that he seemed to have detached himself from his friends, from the school life around him.

  ‘If there is something going on at home . . .’ she had said tentatively, genuine concern in her voice.

  ‘No, no problem at home,’ Eileen had told her, then muttered a platitude about ‘age’ and how Alan was ‘going through a phase.’ The school didn’t know they were homeless. Alan told her he’d rather die than admit to anyone what they were going through.

  Ten to two. The city was buzzing. It was no place now for a child, no matter how tall he was or how mature he looked. Eileen pressed her head further into the glass, staring at the streetlamps until they blurred in front of her eyes. The reflection of the room behind her was blurry too, but that didn’t matter, she could have drawn it from memory if she needed to. Two beds, advertised as double, big singles, really. White sheets that were changed every second day and a brown velvet cover on each that was never changed at all. The room divider she’d bought in IKEA was folded against one wall, taking up space, doing exactly the opposite to what it had been designed to do. Eileen had bought it on a whim and presented it to Alan as a solution. Look, the amount of privacy it would give him! People probably shared spaces like this in Sweden all the time.

  It had only taken a look, one filthy look, for her bright, funny, articulate son to convey to her just how pathetic he thought that idea was. She’d folded the screen away, placed it against the wall and hadn’t referred to it again. Besides, she didn’t even know if the hotel would allow them to use such a thing. They had rules, far more rules for the council tenants than for the paying guests. Eileen and Alan weren’t allowed to use the communal lounge downstairs, and weren’t allowed to visit other people in their rooms or invite them back to theirs, even if they’d wanted to. The manager had suggested they enter and leave the place by the back door, rather than through the front with the rest of the guests. A look from her had silenced him that time, but she knew it wouldn’t be long before he made the suggestion again and that next time, with her self-confidence further eroded, she’d agree. There was a kitchen, but she had to queue up with the other long-term residents to use it, and often it seemed easier just to bring home a takeaway. She’d put on a stone since moving in. Alan seemed to have lost almost the same amount.

  Half past two. Eileen peeled herself away from the window, decided against tea and, moving as calmly as she could, slipped between the bed covers, fully clothed. She usually slept in a tracksuit now anyway. It didn’t feel right wearing night clothes with her teenage son just a few feet away. She paused for a moment, then reached for her phone. To hell with his feelings, she needed to hear his voice. But his phone, when she dialled it, went straight to voicemail. Eileen opened a blank text message and let her fingers hover over the screen. What could she say?

  Come home son seemed too needy, too nagging. If he was out somewhere, in a sulk, that would be the last thing he’d want to hear.

  Where are you? That sounded as if she were invading his privacy and would only drive him further away.

  Thinking of you? No, that was just stupid, the last thing a teenage boy would want to hear.

  Hope you’re having a good time – that was hypocritical or, worse, could make him think she was being sarcastic and was furious with him.

  Instead she settled on facts and banged off a quick message before she could change her mind.

  Heading to bed, love you.

  Then she put the
phone on the locker and slid further down into the bed, the pillow uncomfortably soft under her cheek. It would be fantastic, she thought, to be able to fall asleep right now, to disappear from this stuffy room for an hour or two, to wake up nearer some sort of resolution. At best there would be a text from Alan, telling her he was on his way. At worst, it would be closer to a time when she could start phoning around his friends, calling the guards, letting someone else in on her panic. But although Eileen closed her eyes her brain continued to whirr. Where in Christ’s name was he? There weren’t many options. His usual haunt, the computer café across the road, closed at eleven. He had slept in his friend Michael’s house a few times in the past year – the cause of another row, of course, because the favour could never be returned – but he had never stayed there without prior notice and Michael’s mother, a solid countrywoman in her late forties, was not the type to harbour kids without checking in with their parents.

  His behaviour had been odd all day, even before the final row. He had spent ages in the shower, which he never usually did, never losing the opportunity to remind her how much he hated using a bathroom that didn’t have a lock on the door and that opened straight on to the space where his mother would be sitting, watching TV. It didn’t matter how often Eileen told him she’d respect his privacy, he still took the shortest showers imaginable and emerged, hair still wet, in clothes damp from being thrown on the floor.

  But earlier this evening he’d spent ages in there and had left behind him the unfamiliar smell of aftershave, along with a glob of hair gel in the sink. She was dependent on such clues to let her know what toiletries he used because Alan never left his belongings out on display, preferring to pack them every night into a bag he kept under his bed. Like a commercial traveller, she thought, and then checked herself. No, like a prisoner.

  ‘Jesus, Alan, come back. Come back to me,’ she hissed into the darkness. The words hung in the dusty air, as she wriggled further into the bed until her toes knocked against the wooden board at the bottom. The length of the bed was one of the many things Alan hated about this place. She hoped wherever he was tonight he was sleeping comfortably. If he was sleeping at all. Stop, stop. She turned over and mashed her forehead into the pillow, but there was no stopping the thoughts now. Was he in a doorway somewhere? With all the other homeless people?

  Homeless. Officially she and Alan had been ‘homeless’ now for six months, but in reality it felt like much longer. She hadn’t felt rooted anywhere since they’d sold number eighty-four. Oh, the first apartment they’d rented had been in a decent area and they had managed to live there for three years, long enough for her to find a favourite café in the area and not to have to think twice when she was asked to fill in her address on a form. But then the landlord himself had wanted to move back in and there was no arguing with that: it was one of the conditions of the lease she’d signed.

  After that they had moved to a smaller place, on the far side of town. It had meant that Alan had had to get up at six and catch two buses to and from school. He’d grown from boy to man in that flat, and it hadn’t been an easy transition. He mitched from school, thinking she wouldn’t notice. It was only when Eileen came home early from work one day and found him strumming the guitar on the sofa that she realized, with a thud, how like his father he had become. Tall, slender, a scattering of stubble on a suddenly broadened chin, eyes that seemed bluer than ever now under suddenly bushy eyebrows. He looked so handsome and so serious that she took a picture of him on her phone even as he scowled up at her. ‘Portrait of an artist,’ she’d told him, trying to make him smile. But he wasn’t in the humour for laughter.

  His jaw line had grown squarer, his face longer. His hairline shifted back and he grew a small straggly beard. Every month another piece of Eileen was eroded from Alan’s face as his father’s looks claimed it. Alan didn’t ask about his father any more – he had done, a couple of times when he was younger but she had told him the bare minimum and he had lost interest. Besides, they had more urgent things on their minds now. Their new landlord put the rent up twice, to a sum far beyond Eileen’s means. She begged him to reconsider, inviting him to the apartment for tea, showing him how beautifully they were keeping the place. ‘You wouldn’t know who you’d get in after us,’ she’d told him pleadingly, and pointed to the curtains she’d bought out of her own money. But he’d found a young couple who were willing to pay four hundred a month extra. They were both working, he told her, slopping his tea and leaving a dribble of it on the cheap laminated table. So, if she could be out by the end of the month he’d appreciate it.

  That night on the news there was yet another report about the financial crisis, and Eileen caught a brief glimpse of Marc Gilmore, head bent, hurrying away from the camera and the questions that were being flung at him. Mr Gilmore, as the reporter called him, was due to appear before a Dáil inquiry the next day, one of many called to answer questions about failed business affairs. But although many people had lost thousands of euro through his investments, there was no question of him having done anything illegal. Eileen knew that was true even before the man on the news confirmed it. She’d gone over the paperwork again and again. She had gambled and she had lost. There was nothing more to say.

  They had moved into another flat, a one-bedroom this time. Eileen slept on a pull-out bed in the living room and told herself it would force her to keep the place tidy. But, after just six months, another letter arrived:

  We’d like to thank you for your custom. Unfortunately, the apartment is being sold. Under the terms of your agreement . . .

  She yelled down the phone to the girl in the estate agent’s office, who was sympathetic but useless. Eileen had forty-two days to find somewhere else to live. She didn’t get her deposit back this time either, because Alan, when he heard the news, had flung a football into the air and fractured a light fitting. This time, when Eileen checked her bank balance, she found she had run out of options. Her savings bought them four months in an extortionately expensive short-term rental. After that they had nowhere else to go. Eileen had assumed that the worst part would be queuing in the council offices to tell them she needed help. She was wrong. The worst part was when the man behind the desk told her there was nothing he could do. She told them she was a single mother and needed a home. And they looked at her and her fine, tall, lanky son, with the look of his father about him, and told her she wasn’t a priority. But then again, when had she ever been?

  She was lucky, they’d told her, a couple of weeks later. The hotel was a short distance from Alan’s school and near enough to her job for her to commute without too much hassle. Part-time, was she? That was a shame. But, anyway, she had a roof over her head now, that was the main thing, and hopefully she wouldn’t be waiting too long for something better to come along. Their first night in the shared room was the first time Eileen had been drunk in front of her son. She ordered his favourite Chinese takeaway and bought herself a bottle of wine to go with it, told herself it was just a treat to help her settle in. Make the latest move. But the wine, her first alcohol in months, made her head spin. And after they’d picked at the meal and decided the movie they’d hired was useless, she had talked to him, for the first time, about how they had ended up here. Told him about why she had mortgaged, then sold number eighty-four and how bitterly she regretted it. Told him all about the promises Marc and Heather Gilmore had made. It had all been – what was the phrase? – too much information for the boy. Eileen had passed out fully clothed on the bed and when she woke several hours later, with a heavy head and a dry mouth, she found Alan had taken the duvet from the other bed and wedged himself into the bath to sleep. The room stank of stale chow mein for days. They never spoke about what had happened. They hadn’t really spoken about anything constructive ever again.

  A quarter past three. Surely now it was okay to be worried. There was something almost comforting in the fact that she had now reached a legitimate time t
o be concerned. She rang his phone again. It was still switched off. Sent a more direct text message this time: Call me, please.

  It was time to try his friend, Michael. His mother’s number was still in her phone, left over from the days when they used to text each other about play dates and school cake sales. Eileen checked the clock one more time before making the call. Twenty-five past three. There was no way to sugar-coat this, no way to make the call without sounding frantic. But Reena Taft was a parent too. She’d understand. And, indeed, once she’d identified herself the foggy voice at the other end of the phone moved from irritation to concern.

  ‘Hello, yes? Eileen who? Oh – okay. No, I’m sorry, love. Mick has been here all evening, he and a few of the lads were playing computer games until after twelve. No, I’m sorry, your Alan wasn’t with them. I haven’t seen him in days.’

  Her voice fuzzed as she moved in the bed and Eileen heard bedclothes being rearranged, a muttered aside to someone else to go to sleep, she’d only be a minute, and then the click of a door opening.

  ‘I’ll get him for you, hold on.’

  Another click, more muttering and then a much sleepier croak.

  ‘Mrs Delaney? Is Alan okay?’

  All of Alan’s friends called her Mrs Delaney, even though Eileen had never asked them to. It had started when he was a kid, when all mothers were automatically called missus and they never got out of the habit of it, even when they found out there wasn’t a mister and never would be.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Delaney. We weren’t due to meet up tonight. I’m sorry. I don’t know where he is.’

  Michael passed the phone back to his mother and Eileen switched gear then, not wanting to ruin the other woman’s night as well as her own.