A book signing. Tomorrow night. In town.
Jim’s tongue felt swollen, too big for his mouth. His throat was itchy and dry. He wasn’t sure words were going to come out but he opened his mouth anyway and said, ‘What’s the book?’ They sounded strangled, like he was speaking and choking at the same time.
‘The Nothing Man.’
It wasn’t Katie who’d answered him but Noreen. She was approaching the table with two steaming plates of food. She set them down just as Katie reached behind her, into the backpack that was hanging off her chair, and pulled out a hardcover book.
Yellow letters on a glossy black background.
‘I wouldn’t have bought it if I’d known she was about to do a signing in Cork,’ Katie said, ‘but I presume I can just bring in this one and she’ll sign it for me? I mean, I’ve never actually gone to a book signing but it seems …’
Jim didn’t hear the end of the sentence. The rest of the world was falling away, disappearing into the dark, as if his vision was being reduced to a single pinprick of light like a dying television set.
It left only one thing illuminated in front of him.
Something was stuck inside the book, about a third of the way in. Something blue. It could’ve been a postcard or a folded letter or a piece torn from a cereal box, but it didn’t matter what it was. All that mattered was the purpose it was serving.
It was a bookmark.
Katie was reading Eve Black’s book.
His own daughter. Reading about the other him.
Jim looked for Katie’s face. He found it looking back at him with an odd expression. Expectant, moving towards concerned. Had she asked him something? Her lips were moving. Was she saying something to him right now? He couldn’t hear the words. He couldn’t hear anything—
A sharp pinch on his shoulder brought him back.
‘Here.’ Noreen was beside him, leaning over to set a glass of something fizzy beside his plate. She said to Katie, ‘Let your father eat his dinner. He’s after doing a full day today.’ Noreen went to the opposite side of the table to take her own seat. ‘Getting up at all hours and then doing extra hours … You need to get a proper night’s sleep tonight, Jim. You’re not forty any more. Sometimes I think you forget that.’
‘Well?’ Katie said to him. ‘Will you bring her?’
He took a sip of his drink to buy time. Its fizziness made his eyes water.
‘Why are you reading that?’ he asked Katie. ‘That book. Why would you want to?’
‘I don’t know why I bother,’ Noreen muttered. ‘The food will be stone cold.’
‘I heard about it on the radio and I …’ Katie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s interesting. Isn’t it? Like, who is this guy? Why did he do these things? How come he was never caught? Is he still alive? It’s fascinating. And the book’s got good reviews. And she’s from here. And it all happened here, while you were— Did you work on it, Dad? That case?’
‘Katie,’ Noreen said warningly. ‘This isn’t dinner-table talk.’
‘I didn’t work the case,’ Jim said, ‘but I was there when it was going on. It wasn’t entertainment to us, Katie. People died. And so I have to say, I’m a bit concerned that this is your choice of reading material. Concerned and disappointed.’
‘But everyone’s reading it.’
‘Katie,’ Noreen warned again.
‘But—’
‘That’s enough,’ Jim said.
He looked down at the gloopy mess of stew and mashed potatoes in front of him with determination. When he put a forkful of the food in his mouth, he found he couldn’t taste it.
There was a prolonged silence, interrupted only by the scrape of cutlery against ceramic. Then Noreen said something to Katie about exams coming up and Katie started talking about a presentation she had to make and Jim retreated, tuning out just enough to let the voices blend into one humming sound but not so much that he wouldn’t notice if they stopped.
Jim wanted to go to the book signing. He had planned to. It was part of his preparation for the next steps. But now so too did his daughter. This was shocking to him, but only because it was Katie. Logically, her wanting to go was unsurprising. He thought back to the first time he’d seen the book, at work, and then later in the bookshop in town. Numerous copies. Big displays. An entire window of the big bookshop in town devoted to it. And since then it’d been in the paper, and Eve Black had been interviewed on TV, and had Katie said something about hearing her on the radio too? The book was everywhere. And it was true crime. Better yet, local true crime. Of course people were interested in it. It was unfortunate that one of them happened to be his own daughter, but why should she be immune?
The problem was her wanting to go to this signing, and not being able to go, and asking her mother to go in her stead. So now Noreen knew what was happening at that time tomorrow evening. That in itself was more of an annoyance than a problem, but what if Jim went and then, at the last minute, Katie’s schedule changed and she arrived at the shop? Or what if Noreen decided to go? What if they both walked in there together and saw him?
‘We’ll go,’ he said.
Both women looked at him.
Noreen said, ‘Go where?’
‘To the bookshop.’
Katie brightened. ‘Really?’
‘I can just call them in the morning,’ Noreen said. ‘They can hold a signed copy for her. They do that. I’ll go in and collect it Friday morning—’
‘But I want my copy signed,’ Katie said. ‘This one.’
‘It’s fine,’ Jim said. ‘We’ll go.’
‘It’s Patrick Street, Dad. It starts at seven. You should just be able to pull up outside. There’s a loading bay, I think, and at that time—’
‘I’ll park somewhere. Don’t worry.’ He looked to Noreen. ‘We’ll both go in.’
He would have a legitimate reason to be there. Noreen would be by his side, helping to make him look like any other customer. Katie wouldn’t be able to pick up her copy until Friday at least, so he could come home afterwards and read it openly. And he liked the idea of it, of all three of them being in the same room less than twenty-four hours from now.
Him.
Noreen.
Eve.
It was poetic really. He was about to walk up to the woman who’d made it her mission to find him and failed at it. Instead, he was coming to her. But she’d have no clue who she was looking at and Noreen would be utterly oblivious to it all.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ Katie said, beaming.
Noreen looked down at her food and said nothing at all.
– II –
AMONG THE SHADOWS
– 6 –
Aftermath
I’m obsessed with descriptions of grief. I collect them, literally. I copy them down into a notebook. My motto: no poem, personal essay or misery memoir left behind. ‘As if you have been dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body.’ That’s from Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life. ‘It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes.’ Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. ‘Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.’ The poet Edna St Vincent Millay, from Letters. ‘Grief is like wandering through a minefield … however carefully you tread, a sudden detonation can happen out of nowhere.’ Owen Jones, quoting his mother in the Guardian. ‘That five stages of grief thing is total bullshit because that was ACTUALLY a study into the reaction of people who are given terminal diagnoses, NOT people who’ve lost loved ones. Grief doesn’t follow any pattern. In reality it’s MESSY and CONFUSING.’ An anonymous commenter on a website happily named TellUsYourGrief.com.