Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Anna
“For feck’s sake!”
She probably shouldn’t have been swearing so openly in the family home.
Scratch that, she definitely shouldn’t have been. Not least when the impressionable, bordering towards teenage years Anna was in residence and gluttonously exhibited a penchant for following her older sister’s lead when it suited. More worryingly that streak extended to those close to her older sister, most prominently and concerningly the unyielding and coarse chastisements of a certain Michelle Mallon.
Even so, with a torrent of frustration that was continuing to mount and in desperate need of some form of release, liberties could be taken as the only responsible adult in the house. However dubious the title of responsible could be, given the litany of antics that littered even the recent past, not to mention her own adolescent adventures that chronologically may have dimmed down over the horizon yet could still be found lurking perilously close to the tip of the tongue when probed for recollection.
“Only I could have to write an article about snow and ice in the middle of a feckin’ heatwave!”
Chuntering odiously to herself, her free hand wafted aggressively at her side, the dreary, blearing rotations of the battered old fan humming in her ears. After yet another day of unbearable heat, the contraption existed to simply blow a humid sticky current around the room rather than offer any hint of wanton cooling. A full on proper heatwave, not just Derry hot. Which in truth was plausibly mild and perhaps borderline nippy anywhere else. Europe was in both the frying pan and the fire, an unkempt mixture that hardly facilitated a rousing of her pyroclastic flow of creativity.
Pouring over the documents laid out across the dining room table around her notepad and pen, her laptop was long discarded. The dramatic spooling of its overworked rotors part way through the afternoon saw her old friends pen and paper coming in from the ironic cold. Council headed communiques blended in with hastily penned letters signed by disgruntled locals, the editor having allowed the later to be removed from the office’s for the weekend to enable the article’s completion. There’d been outrage the prior winter when the local gritters were ground to a halt as a snowy campaign gained an unchallenged footing and unleashed pandemonium upon the local economy, the jaded, time worn edges of the letters narrowly holding in the seasonally tagged memorandums.
A pen that had been alternating between teeth and fingers returned to the latter, just as the floorboards above her began to signal the first movement they’d seen in some time. How long it had actually been since Anna retreated to the sanctuary of her room escaped her older sister, as did truly acknowledging the sound to its extent, too wrapped up in a suitably amusing letter of complaint that at least brought a smile to her face amongst the otherwise uninteresting garble.
The ancient creaking beams across the landing were soon activating their own shouts of discontent, the patter of feet moving ever more rapidly, stairs soon finding themselves carrying a newly descending passenger. Still barely noticing the noise, an idea finally began to formulate in her mind, the heat induced block that had derailed any momentum over the afternoon cast aside. Immediately slashing her hand across the page as her brainwave took visual form, it was the birth of another article that would by its conclusion reach the pages of the Derry Journal, perhaps even the front page if no other story became worthy of the mantle.
Such familiarity was becoming stunningly repetitive even after four years or so out of the education system and into the hectic world of journalism. Albeit writing for the Derry Journal didn’t come with quite the anxious constraints and dangerous precipices of writing for one of the nationals.
Been there, done that… it was why she was back at home.
Well, partly…
Caught in the flight of her momentous breakthrough, the noise of creaking floorboards she’d passively dismissed had grown into the full embodiment of her sister not half a minute later. Trundling into the kitchen humming an indescribable tune beneath her breath, Anna Quinn’s disarming grin could undo even the darkest of souls. Born into the winds of hope and change, peace and progression, she’d basked in the glow of the prosperous future that was drummed into every lesson and every assembly at school. She hadn’t ignored the past, lessons inside and outside of the educational system never far away nor were the lasting reminders of conflicts that couldn’t be forgotten. Yet she wore her smile regardless, an indelible mark upon those around her who regularly were entertained by the dreams of a future they could scarcely have believed possible not ten or fifteen years prior.
“What’chya doin’?”
Enquiring in a light hearted drawl, she’d finally came to a stop by the kitchen cupboards in search of a glass, floating behind her sister’s eyeline.
“I’m workin’…”. Mildly irritated in her response, Erin’s focus barely lifted from her notepad. “Finally got somethin’ I’m happy with”.
“Yer happy with somethin’?” Anna teased, the glass finding its way under the far from raging stream of the cold water tap.
“Oi!”
Marginally falling for her sister’s goading, she still hadn’t taken her eyes off the notepad nor her mind off of her work. It wouldn’t be the complete article that would be written tonight, that would be a job for early in the morning before Sunday Mass, but the foundations of it wouldn’t escape her even with her sister circling.
“When are ye goin’ to be finished?”
Sipping at her newly acquired drink, Anna peered over the top of the glass to her seated sister and the bobbing ponytail that extended down between her shoulder blades.
“Soon Anna… ye can’t rush these things, ye know”. Momentarily breaking her concentration, she tilted her head sidewards, her tone pitching to the flamboyant. “The creative process is not something that can be engineered to a time schedule. Us artists can’t be held to a day or a time-”.
“I thought ye had to send it to yer boss by tomorrow afternoon?”
Slicing through the bluster like the most boiling of knives through unsuspecting butter, she shunted her sister’s whimsical narrative aside with consummate ease and undeniable factuality. Erin’s semantics couldn’t hold a flickering torch not least a candle to her sister’s direct rigidity. For all she might have wished to carry an air of edginess and literate wisdom, much more matter-of-factly the deadline of Sunday afternoon was in place and would have to be adhered to.
Outmanoeuvred by the younger sister, she shook her head, murmuring with disdain.
“The cheek on ye’…”.
Smugly accepted the conceding, Anna’s cheerful grin that tugged into curvatures up around the sides of her lips could no longer claim to be a beacon of hopeful innocence.
“I learned from the best”. Nonchalantly, she pulled back the chair opposite to her refocusing sister, gently perching herself at its forward edge. “Auntie Michelle’s always said I’ve got a gift for it”.
“Auntie Michelle’s always been a mouth…”. Erin snorted, unamused.
“I’ll tell her that, next time I see her!”
The idle threat pungently consuming the air around them, the older of the two sisters’ scoffed in dismay. Michelle wouldn’t have been faced with her first accusation of the description anyway, far from the first time she would even be guilty as the accuser. Best friend or not, some truths were incomprehensibly difficult to escape from. Within their circle of friends it was certainly one of the most challenging.
Silence seemed favoured to overtake the pair of them as Erin’s scribbling began to top up its intensity levels once again while Anna chose to lap up further sips of the drink she’d made for herself. The clock above them soon chimed in though to wash away such a timeline, the striking of seven o’clock marked with the briefest of chimes. On the hour, every hour they’d been chirped to for the last few months. When the old big clock fell off the wall and cracked, leaving Sarah and Orla to choose the replacement should have been a red flag for disaster. Only that day it must have flown at half-mast and the consequences soon left an entire household ruing a mistake.
Victims of their own fate, although Erin could at least cling to the modest excuse of not having fully moved back in at home then.
Slim compensation that was when the hour came up… every hour… every day…
“They’ll be halfway to Vienna now, ye know”. Glass clinking back down onto the kitchen table, Anna lightly commented, picking at her nails.
“Aye I’m sure they will be...”.
Uninterested, or rather remaining focused on riding out the crest of her thought process, Erin’s reply lacked any conviction or substance to swindle interest with her sister.
“It must be nice for Granda gettin’ to go overseas again. Some of the craic he’s told me from the past was dead bangin’, so it was”.
“Dead ban-…”. Picking her head up for half a second, Erin opted not to challenge her sister’s vocabulary any further at the risk of sounding… old. “Aye… but it’d be nice if he could have paid for the two of us to join them as well. I know Orla’s always been his favourite…”.
“Here we go…”
Sass reverberating through the eleven year old’s veins, she muttered under her breath as her older sister cogitated on another of her favoured theories. The upper ranges of her times table practice sheet could barely provide sizeable answers to cover the amount of times she’d heard it in a few short years.
“But invitin’ the rest of the family and her fella but not the two of us. Well… I can’t help but feel a wee dram of injustice there, so I can’t”.
“I don’t have a passport and Granda didn’t know what you’d be doin’ when he booked it”. Sticking up for Joe in his absence, she offered little more than a conciliatory shrug of the shoulders. “I’m not that sure I’d like a cruise anyway. Daddy told me ye can’t play football on the wee boat and I can’t go a whole week just… sittin’ there”.
“I should curse James for introducin’ ye to that feckin’ stupid game!”
Whilst she hadn’t lifted her eyes any further than the lid of her pen, Erin’s found ample guttural reserves to chastise the Englishman.
Anna’s returning smirk laid unchallenged.
She couldn’t exactly time the moment he first started indoctrinating her sister with what he described as the beautiful game. The ugly nightmare was how she’d come to see it as the months went by and the names of footballers were rolling off her tongue ahead of pop stars or actors. Owing to the amount of time he spent with her, with all of the family, the process took shape and hold before any of them could cease its existence. Typically unassuming James nimbly working away at her sister with Orla’s unknowing aid on cool autumn weekends in the park, where she’d be left propping up a hungover, sometimes boking, Michelle as the night before’s concoctions escaped the pits of her stomach.
Successful he was in his ministrations however, the World Cup having dominated the Quinn household’s television through the early summer. A World Cup she shouldn’t have cared about when neither side of the Irish border made the final tournament.
Feckin’ James…
“I bet he was dead gutted when England lost the other week, ye know”.
As if telepathic, Anna latched onto the exact memory her sister could look back on with some fondness to alleviate her anger. One which would have been far better had James been in the room with them as opposed to wherever he was supposedly working.
She’d lost track of which fancy, artsy, potentially non-existent European sovereignty filming too him to. Every time he was at home, he was almost always back on the road within a few days. Michelle’s particularly colourful commentary about the hours of his travels having narrated many a quiet evening in Dublin when she found ten minutes to pick up the phone.
“Ye, well, he deserves that for makin’ ye football mad!”
Huffing, Erin entertained exercising her own teeth bearing smile but rescinding revelling in English pity as the final dramatic period clamped down onto her notepad. One hastily written but far from sloppily conceived draft extrapolated from her mind and onto paper, to be turned into her latest masterpiece. Or a singular page spread in the local fish wrapper.
Not everyone could be Van Gogh.
“There, I’m all done like ye wanted me to be”.
Puffing out her cheeks, shoulders rolling away the tense pains from her hunched over writing position, at last she could disengage her brain from work. Work that invariably seeped into weekends; journalism didn’t have a break between Friday and Monday like a standard nine to five. Sunday would be the day she required though, the marginally quieter one early morning aside after a week spent mostly on the road in the day and in front of a laptop by night. For the local paper quantity was just as important as quality, consistently forcing her to call upon the innovative thoughts that dwelt stealthily around her mental peripheries.
“Ye look stressed”.
Perceptive as she’d always been since the first words began to spill from her mouth, Anna eyed the baggy undergrowth’s beneath her sister’s eyes just as keenly as the strain juddering gruffly through her vocal cords.
Getting the chance to see her sister over the past few years was tough. Working away in Dublin with few home visits throughout the year limited their chances to converse at length, yet that was unable to stop her from realising Erin’s pressures. If it wasn’t her job then it was her boyfriend or her apparently never endingly increasing rent. Paying rental fees being something she thought she understood the basic principles of until discovering her older sister’s bills appearing to increase with every instalment.
The less said about the job and the boyfriend the better.
“Stressed? I’m not stressed just…”. Taking breath for a moment, an extravagant sigh slipped out of her. “Busy. That’s just how a job is Anna… and ye have all this to look forward to”.
“Ye don’t make it sound very appealin’. I thought you’d said ye love work and I should always follow me dreams. Isn’t that what ye wrote in me Christmas card the one year, the one that Uncle Colm boked on when Granda mixed up the vodka and the terps, and Mammy broke her finger trippin’ over the wee foot stool when we were waitin’ for the ambulance?”
“How can I forget?” Erin’s voice trailed, though her eyes flipped a barrel over a waterfall in tandem. “The Altnagelvin’s never been the same since from what I’ve heard. It’s the only time where I can say I was glad I was in Dublin so I didn’t have to deal with the aftermath!”
“Maybe ye should have stayed, ye never know when it might happen again”. Replying with a minor huff, Anna shuddered with the thought.
“The thought has crossed me mind..”.
Dramatic family poisoning and bone breaking avoidance apart, she couldn’t have stayed in Dublin any longer. Home might have been perceived a backwards step in her career but it was a non-negotiable for her own wellbeing.
Her sister was none the wiser to that though when she was still young enough to remain unburdened by the sufferance of adulthood. That was what the following five years of Secondary School were designed for, the slow burn towards the promised land of where juvenile dreams died under the flag of reality. Anna couldn’t have a better guide to such an existence than Our Lady Immaculate and the dry, stoic musings of Sister Michael. Still very much in place despite the plans of those in higher office who sought to move her onto much more problematic educational establishments within their domain.
The younger Quinn sister wouldn’t have to worry about that for another four weeks or more yet and fiddling with the hem of her mildly creased grey t-shirt, she offered up a pleased expression towards her calming older sibling.
“Anyway, are ye done like proper done, or? Like, we can actually do something and not just me sit here watchin’ ye work, done”.
“Aye, done, done…”. Pausing to yawn, Erin rubbed the index and middle fingers of both hands roughly at her temples. “Christ, I’m wrecked so I am. This heat’s done nothin’ for me sleepin’ patterns, and they’re bad enough as it is”.
“Maybe ye should try goin’ to bed at a sensible time”. Chiding her, Anna shrugged when an offended glare was sent back. “What, Mammy always makes me go to bed for half past eight and I never have a bother gettin’ me winks in”.
“Pft, that’s easy when yer eleven years old! I could have slept through a hurricane when I was yer age, so I could! And ye’ve never had to experience sharin’ a bed with Orla, and trust me when I say this that yer lucky ye were born when we were already teenagers”.
“Was it that bad?”
Certain of her sister’s typically exaggerated yarns of terror and hardship, Anna rolled her eyes, lapping up at the remains of the rapidly disappearing water as the glass came up to her lips. Indignant at her sister’s facetious insinuation of disbelief, the irregular lined glabellar parapets across her forehead surged.
“If you ever have the misfortune of being on the end of Orla’s spoonin’…”. Laughing, dryly to the outer lying edges of demonically, she shook her head. “You’ll know”.
Anna paused, eyes widened, when Erin’s theatrics and amplification hit a rather severe and unsettling note.
Operating a stare so deep it could have sliced a hole through to the earth’s molten core, the memories of many a year could almost be downloaded out of her globes.
“Trust me… you’ll know”.
There were but a few things that instilled genuine fear into Anna Quinn. Clowns, the one teacher in primary school with the wart on the side of her nose (the subject of her nightmares for at least a year), the Wooden Spoon… and those scarce times when her older sister’s dramatic façade would become chillingly serious and taut. So used after only eleven years of life to having to wade through her frankly ridiculous and bratty performances, it was usually of note to worry when neither jest nor overstatement could be discovered from her rhetoric.
Only the growl of her stomach could set both her mind to rest and reset Erin’s glare into a whipped tilt of the head towards the clock, where the lengthy toil of her work finally began to sink into her consciousness.
If moments earlier her act was convincing, her horror was now genuine.
“Jesus, is that the time!?”
Astounded, she quickly bolted upright and looked back at an unfazed, relaxed Anna. Her glass now returned to the table, she sat with one leg lifted up and settled on the chair bent at the knee to offer a perfect resting place for her chin as she leant forward. Two or three renegade locks of hair hung limply across her lightly perspiring forehead, casualties of the unusually arid summer.
“Didn’t ye hear that awful noise…”. Groaning at the clock’s chimes, Anna pouted.
“’Course I did, but I thought it was more like five than seven”. Remaining disparaged in tone and appearance, she ran a hand loosely through the upper reaches of her crown. “Ye must be absolutely famished, so ye must, why didn’t ye say anythin’ to me!?”
“I didn’t want to stop ye from workin’”.
Casually lifting her shoulders and highlighting her innocence, she shuffled her chin across her kneecap, deciding to keep the rest of the truth of the matter to herself. It would pay much less handsomely to reveal she didn’t want to stop her sister from working because she’d seen previously how feral she could become when disturbed. The argument between her and their Ma on that occasion made the Battle of the Boyne look like the annoyed murmurs of two enflamed drivers tussling over the last spot in the Woolies car park on a Saturday lunchtime.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m workin’, if yer hungry ye need to say somethin’!”
Beginning to lecture her younger sibling, Erin pushed back on the dining chair, it’s legs scraping erratically across the tiled floor with a screech that left them both sporting agonised winces.
“I’m supposed to be lookin’ after ye, Anna. Mammy would tan me arse if she found out ye weren’t eatin’ cos’ of me!”
“Mammy’s not here…”.
“Catch yourself on, its Mammy, she-”.
The rumbustious gargling of her own stomach thwarted any further exploration of Mary Quinn’s apparent omniscience. Peering down at her midriff, she grazed a hand across it.
“Oh… looks like I’m hungry too”.
At little more than a whisper, she ripped a conspicuous chuckle from her sister. Bravely holding the line since lunchtime, the Heinz and Hovis connection could no longer stave off the opening salvos of starvation that their bodies were beginning to flare up with. Hours on and with an afternoon of work freshly ceased but draining her of near enough every drop of her energy, the need for her own nutrition began to rake just as much as Anna’s.
Padding over to the fridge-freezer, she’d decided it would have to be a ready meal without her sister’s opinion called upon. Unimaginative yet frightfully easy. So simplistic in fact that Orla’d prepared a ready meal for the family on more than one occasion without so much as a whiff of food poisoning following on from it. As much as she might have enjoyed the freedom to expand their palate on another night, the call of the quick and easy microwavable service was far too difficult to ignore.
“What’ll it be then? Lasagne, cottage pie… I best get some peas out as well, Mammy was very specific about ye havin’ yer greens…”.
“I’ve handled it”.
The cocksure reply that drifted out of the back of her sister’s throat froze her, an achievement in itself when her nose was practically in the freezer.
“You what now?”
Lifting her out from near kissing the ice cream tub, Erin shot an inquisitive glance just as her younger sister gently sidled off of the dining chair and up onto her bare feet. Caught with the look of the local crackhead locked in a vat full of Charlie, the bedevilment that ran through her pricked underlying fears out of their bunkers.
If scheming and disaster ran genetically through the family, Erin knew all too well how disastrous whatever Anna had done could be. She’d been the bearer of the same expression too many times to not recognise it.
“Anna…”
She challenged again, conjuring a ham-fisted stern authority to her tone. One that paid off with no tangible reward when the subject of its threat began to walk conspiringly out of the kitchen and into the living room.
“Anna!”
“I said I’ve handled it!” Answering back in a manner she wouldn’t dream of to her mother, Anna cheekily chirped. “I was hungry… so I sorted it meself before I came down”.
Sorted it herself, how could she…
Internally stumbling across the culprit responsible for the execution of such a plot, her eyes accelerated out onto stalks as a sweeping gust of horror blew across her face.
“Anna ye… my mobile… ye didn’t… ye haven’t…”.
“I had to use it so, I did. How else was I goin’ to get fed without botherin’ ye?”
With Anna stopping short of the door and beaming back with a grin that would have made Cheshire Cats question whether their smiles were broad enough, Erin’s mind began to race faster than the one time she got in a car with Michelle behind the wheel. If the reported speed they’d been clocked at by a speed camera was correct then in comparison years on, the sound barrier looked under threat from the cogs of her mind.
She should never have left the mobile phone in her old.. in her room unguarded although mischief did not often form part of her wee sister’s armoury. Far more well behaved than her older sibling had been at the same age, her heist of the mobile and the proceeding use of it ranked out of place.
However regardless of how unexpected it was, she was now faced with a situation that could not be justifiably argued in front of her mother when she returned from her cruise.
I won’t have ye spendin’ any money on takeaways barrin’ a Friday, ye hear me. There’s plenty of food in the house and ye’ll have plenty of time to cook it.
When Mary subsequently enquired as to whether her words were understood, she hadn’t even given a serious response the pleasure of an afterthought. Unwarranted sustenance expenditure outside of a Friday night chippy; Mary could sit back on the Danube without even having to dedicate the briefest of second of worry.
On Saturday night with a chippy behind them and Anna ruling roost over the outgoing calls, all of the concern was left to her eldest. Who, still emblazoned with panic, began to elicit signs of a cack attack more historically associated with a fellow blonde of her age.
“Who… who did ye phone? When was it… we can still stop them… tell them it was mistake!”
The phone call might well have been but the smirk Anna flattened her sister’s flailing conscience with once more certainly was not.
“Was it Fionnula? Oh God… we’ve only just got back in there as well after all these years, how the hell can I smooth this one over…”.
“Erin, rel-”.
“Don’t you dare tell me to relax, Anna Quinn!”
Jutting a finger out in front of her, her voice pitched up into a shout. For all of her positive and well-mannered behaviour, she couldn’t be indulged and forgiven so easily the one time that it strayed outside of the limits. Well out of the limits in this case.
“When I’ve sorted this, ye’ll be on yer way to bed without so much as a crumb and if ye think ye’ll be goin’ round wee Ciara’s house tomorrow then ye’ve another thing comin’, so ye have!”
With the tirade and its dire consequences laid bare, Erin’s confidence pooled behind her snarl, only to reverberate in shock when the blow didn’t seem to scratch the surface. Absorbing the threat without so much as a flinch, her vitriol contracted into yet further goading simpers.
So much for being in charge of the house.
“Trust me, it’s sorted”.
“Trust ye!? Trust ye!?” Peeking out on a cloud of fractious terror, Erin’s fists balled. “Ye won’t even tell me who it is ye’ve rang the takeaway for!”
Her left hand caressed her thumping head as her right reached out for the stability of the dining chair in front of her. With a deep breath staggering out, her interrogations continued.
“Is it Ocean City… the Bengal Star… wait no, they don’t do takeout anymore after that poor girl from Donemara choked on a naan in the bath. Some funeral that was as well, flowers were absolutely top so they were. Her own fault mind, those naans are absolutely massive an-… hang on is it that new place on Pump Street, ach what’s the name-”.
“Erin, it’s doesn’t matter”. Interrupting softly, Anna slowly began to open the door out into the hallway, still facing her combusting sister across the other side of the room. “It’s too late…”.
Coy until the end, Erin soon realised why her warnings of repercussions went unheeded. The call must have been made a long time prior and a timed delivery set. If she knew anything about some of their local takeaways though, that came with yet more costs added onto whatever on earth she’d ordered. The disaster was only becoming more disastrous, her blonde curls becoming enveloped with jittering fingers where nerves began to evaporate through perspiring skin.
Words failed to find her as her face began to burn from a deadly mixture of the prolonged heat and Anna’s betrayal of trust.
Anna, by contrast, couldn’t help but revel in her ministrations.
“Our delivery should be here right about…”.
Pausing, she only was left to wait a half second before the chime of the door bell sounded from a couple of metres behind her.
“Now”.
“Anna!”
Slipping out of the living room with her sister’s final plea finding deaf ears, her disappearing figure slinked towards the front door and the acceptance of a debt that the responsible adult of the house hadn’t agreed to but would have to shoulder the burden of.
One which she couldn’t accept.
With her Mammy’s reminders burning her eardrums out from the inside, Erin shook off her grounding worries and stormed out of the kitchen. Intent on intercepting the delivery before it could be paid for with…
How’s she found my money!?
Acutely aware that the funds of Anna’s money box would struggle to cover the cost of a takeout for one let alone the presumably larger order for two, funds could have only been acquired from either her purse that lay abandoned hidden in her room (Another casualty of her cousin) or from the family emergency fund that she shouldn’t have known the location of. Few eleven years old could have been brave and resourceful enough to have pulled off such an audacious manoeuvre and no amount of naïve innocence could explain away the evening’s actions.
Down the years she’d ended up having to talk her way out of a lot of situations but since leaving her teenage years and not spending most of the week stirring up bother in the capable trouble making company of Michelle Mallon and co, she’d thought the worst of it was behind her.
The only hope was that the driver would be somewhat understanding and reasonable given Anna was only a minor and-
Onrushing thoughts died with so little as an undignified gasp.
“See Erin, I told ye I’d sorted it”.
When she’d picked her head up hearing the door open, this wasn’t what she expected at all.
Neither of them.
Her little sister’s eloquent braggadocio became very apparent, the lack of fear wholly understandable when there wasn’t a fella with an off brand t-shirt and a rough looking pair of shorts stood in the doorway. Their wasn’t even a fella sharing the space with Anna in their entranceway, just a bony leading hand on the leash before him that extended down to his canine companion upon it.
Coco was absolutely no stranger to the Quinn household, nor to Anna who immediately showered affections upon the fluffy Bernese Mountain Dog.
If Coco was in the doorway with a fella behind her though, it could only mean…
“James…”.