The Hideaway Page 3

  But even though I was exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned and finally reached for my phone again. This time accessed my voice messages. It was the only one he’d ever left for me.

  I wish I was there with you. His voice was clear and strong. I wish I had my arms around you right now.

  I wished he had too.

  Chapter 2

  The last time I’d had a decent night’s sleep was the last time I’d slept with Brad, a week before he’d gone on holiday. He’d stayed with me at the apartment I shared with Saoirse. She was in Galway for the weekend and I had the place to myself. Even though Saoirse is a brilliant flatmate, I enjoyed the times she went home to visit her family. Whenever she was away I’d imagine what it would be like to be the owner of the apartment, able to do whatever I wanted with it. I’d paint the walls prettier colours than magnolia, that was for sure. And there’d be no ceramic frogs anywhere. Saoirse collected them and kept them in her room so they really shouldn’t have bothered me, but they freaked me out with their bug eyes and green faces. If I owned the apartment the walls would be colourful, the frogs would go and, of course, Brad would stay over as much as possible. He might even move in. I realised that would mean I’d no longer be living on my own, but living with Brad would be wonderful because I loved him. And I was glad, back then, that Sean had broken off our engagement – because if he hadn’t, I would never have known a love like this.

  That night, as Brad joined me in my double bed, I was wondering if I could introduce the topic of living together into the conversation. It would be complicated in a whole heap of ways. We lived and worked in different cities, for starters. Our relationship was still in the early stages. It was a big step and I wasn’t sure he was ready to take it, though I certainly was. Even with Sean, whom I’d been so sure I loved and who’d hurt me so deeply, the thought of moving in together so quickly hadn’t crossed my mind. Yet when I was with Brad I felt complete, as though we’d always been destined for each other. And I didn’t ever want to lose that feeling. I didn’t want to let him go.

  I met him exactly one year and five days after Sean and I had split up, and six months after our scheduled wedding day. I hadn’t been out with anyone since. I’d felt too bruised and too broken to make the effort. I hadn’t entirely accepted that I was still Juno Ryan not Juno Harris. That none of the things I’d expected to be true about my life by now had actually happened. That I didn’t wake up every morning with the man I loved beside me. That I’d had to move out of the Malahide town house we’d shared together – the one whose walls I had painted in shades of saffron and amber. That instead of sharing everything about my day with him at night, I was sleeping on my own again.

  Sean had said, when he delivered his crushing blow, that he wasn’t ready for the commitment. It was ten days before his thirty-second birthday. (I’d bought him tickets for a track day at Mondello Park to celebrate. In the end, I gave them to Saoirse’s brother.) It took me a while to think of anything to say in reply to his statement, but when I did, I reminded him that my dad had been married with children at thirty-two. He’d said times were different back then. That if you weren’t married you were talked about, and not in a good way. He was right, of course. I knew that, despite their bohemian lifestyle by the standards of their day, my parents would have no more dreamed of living together without getting married than flying to the moon. Yet Mum had actively encouraged me to move in with Sean before marrying him.

  ‘You have to find out if you work together in every department,’ she’d told me. ‘In bed, out of bed, day to day – everything.’

  I’d shuddered when she’d said that. She was right, of course, but I get very uncomfortable when she starts to talk to me as though I’m her friend and not her daughter. That’s most of the time, to be honest. Yet I prefer it when she’s more of a mum, not that she would ever have been one in the more traditional sense. Mum is all for equality between parents and children, and everyone being open with everyone else. Which just doesn’t work for me.

  I remember her sitting me down when I was thirteen or so and giving me the talk about sex. It was excruciating.

  ‘I know it already,’ I said as I squirmed in the high-backed chair. ‘You told me when I asked you where babies came from.’

  ‘I gave you the factual information, yes,’ said Mum. ‘But I didn’t tell you that sex is actually something very wonderful for a man and a woman, and when you’re older it’s important you enjoy it. Like Dad and I enjoy it.’

  I winced.

  ‘It’s important that he satisfies you, Juno,’ she told me. ‘It won’t work if your needs are different.’

  She was giving me way too much information. I wanted to throw up.

  Of course she was right about the sex. (Are mothers really always right? Even mothers like Thea?) After some initial disappointments, I got the hang of it and realised that some men were better than others. Sean and I had been pretty good together. Even though it had all gone so horribly wrong in the end, it had been great at the start.

  We’d met at a wedding and bonded over the fact that neither of us particularly wanted to be there. He was a cousin of the bride. I’d gone to college with the groom. Both of us agreed that extravagant weddings, like this, were a waste of money.

  ‘My plan is to nip into a registry office in my lunchtime,’ I said. ‘No fuss.’

  ‘I like that in a woman,’ said Sean. ‘I like you.’

  I liked him too. I was happy to spend the rest of the evening with him, and that night too. The wedding had been in a castle in Donegal. Everyone had stayed over. Some of them even in their own rooms. I felt comfortable with Sean and I couldn’t help thinking that maybe, this time, I’d found the right man for me. I wanted to make it work with him. I wanted to be hopelessly in love, to be carried away on an emotional tide of passion. Perhaps that was because I wanted to fit in with everyone else in my family.

  Because there was no doubt that when it came to emotional stuff, I was very definitely the odd one out. The practical one among people who lived by feelings, not reason. The one who needed scientific proof before I could believe anything I was told. The one for whom my mother’s airy ‘just because’ was never enough. I put this perceived flaw in my character down to the fact that I was a drunken mistake. The drunken mistake is factually accurate, as Mum confirmed during our sex education talk. I’d been conceived in her dressing room after a post-show celebration fuelled by champagne. She told me that it was a mistake I should take every effort to avoid myself, although in her case she’d been fooled by thinking she was menopausal. She did add, during our conversation, that being a mistake didn’t mean I was unwanted or unloved. Just unexpected. I knew I wasn’t unloved – the Ryans are a huggy, kissy, tactile bunch, and Mum frequently declares her undying devotion to all of us. But a mistake is still a mistake, and I’d arrived long after she’d imagined her family was complete. And even though she loved me, I knew I exasperated the hell out of her because I refused to believe a word she told me without proof. I needed to know the reason for everything around me.

  ‘Oh my God, Juno!’ she exclaimed theatrically after a day at the beach when I’d asked about the timings of high and low tides, and how they were affected by the phases of the moon. ‘Why don’t you ever stop with the questions? Can’t you simply look at the sea and think how beautiful it is and how lucky we are to be alive?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I have to know why—’

  ‘You don’t!’ Dad was the playwright to Mum’s actress. ‘You need to feel it.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, and looked up tidal forces in the school library.

  My parents, Desmond and Thea Ryan, are an institution on the Irish theatrical scene. Even when I was a child Mum was already being referred to as a National Treasure, while Dad was usually referred to as One of Ireland’s Greatest Living Playwrights. Both of them had won multiple awards for their work. Mum and Dad are all-or-nothing sort of people, either at the pinnacle of e
xcitement or in the depths of despair. When I lived at home, their peaks and troughs of emotion exhausted me and drove me to my books. Unfortunately for my credibility within the family, they weren’t poetry books or great works of literature. They were books about physics and science. I might as well have brought Satan’s manual for Hell into the house. Which, now that I think about it, would probably have been welcomed a lot more than A Brief History of Time. I was as much of a mystery to my mother and father as they were to me and – leaving aside the long gap before my arrival – that was also why they were closer to my brother and sister. They’d been a secure, stable unit before I arrived. I’d messed that up.

  Butler, my brother, works as a secondary school teacher to pay the bills, but is a published poet of note. ‘Intimate and intelligent’ according to the review of his last collection, Pause for Paternity, which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. I was the only one in the family who wondered how a writer like Kavanagh (whose poems generally rhymed) would feel about Butler’s win, because as far as I could see my brother’s poetry was basically just paragraphs of prose with line breaks in the middle of sentences that didn’t actually finish properly. (I only ever read poetry that rhymes. At least that way I understand the system.)

  I mentioned this one evening to Gonne, who was horrified.

  ‘Can’t you see how clever he is?’ my sister demanded. ‘Can’t you hear the music in the way he uses the words?’

  I shrugged. Gonne plays the harp and her husband the fiddle in a traditional Irish band. She hears music in everything.

  I like music. But I don’t hear it in everything. I like beauty. But I like form and function more. There’s nothing wrong with that – at least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

  That’s why I was so sure Sean was the one for me. He’s a digital designer, which I suppose brings form and function together. He understood my work. I understood his. There were loads of reasons why we made a great couple and loads of reasons why I wanted him to be the love of my life. And although I didn’t stalk him on social media or anything like that after our split, I couldn’t help seeing photos of him on friends’ timelines. About six weeks later there was a picture of him with another girl. Her name was Suki. He was sitting at a table and she was standing behind him, her hands resting on his shoulders in a very possessive way.

  Despite not being a deranged stalker, I had to find out about her. She was a make-up artist. I saw the Facebook post about their engagement the day Brad went on holiday. I was more shocked than I’d expected. After all, Sean had said he wasn’t ready for commitment with me, and here he was, committing to someone else. It hurt.

  Saoirse said that Sean was a serial fiancé and that there was no guarantee he’d last the pace with Suki either. She had a point. It was his third attempt, after all. He’d been engaged before he proposed to me. I felt sorry for Suki then. Because I thought I was the luckier one.

  I thought I had Brad.

  Eventually, as always happened over the last few weeks, I drifted into an uneasy doze. My dreams were scrappy, fragments of people and places that disappeared like smoke each time I woke up. With the shutters tightly closed, the bedroom was in complete darkness and it was impossible to know what time it was.

  But when finally my eyes snapped open and I was totally alert, I knew something had definitely jolted me out of my fretful sleep. I looked around the unfamiliar room with rising panic, but eventually remembered where I was and my heart rate slowed down. I remained sitting on the bed, listening for the sounds of someone in the house. But everything was silent and it seemed like nobody had broken in to murder me. So I got up and began to open the shutters. They creaked alarmingly and tilted on their hinges but I managed to secure them against the wall.

  To my astonishment, because I’d been sure it was still night-time, the sky outside was periwinkle blue and dotted with high fluffy clouds. The warm air carried the scent of orange blossom. A nearby jacaranda tree rustled gently in the breeze.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost eight o’clock. I hadn’t stayed in bed much after six for weeks, so even if my sleep had been as restless as always, it had still been longer than usual. I told myself that this was a positive sign.

  I looked around the room. All my things were where I’d left them – suitcase against the wall, handbag on the dressing table, jeans slung across the faded pink tub chair. It was already too warm for jeans. I hauled the suitcase on to the bed and unpacked. I left a white cotton top and a pair of denim shorts on the bed. Then I put my dozen T-shirts and three additional pairs of shorts into a drawer in the dressing table, hung up the jeans that were probably going to spend the next three months in the wardrobe anyway, and finally slid my summer dresses on to hangers beside them.

  I grabbed a towel from the linen cupboard on my way to the bathroom at the end of the house. To my surprise, it had a clear window with a view towards the mountains. From it I could see a cluster of houses in the distance that I assumed was the town of Beniflor. Unless somebody there was using binoculars to look into the bathroom, it was private enough despite the clear glass. And there was something exhilarating about standing under the surprisingly powerful rain shower, soaping myself while looking out at the spectacular view.

  Twenty minutes later, wearing the cotton top and shorts, my dark hair still damp, I walked downstairs. I’d forgotten to switch off the standard lamp and it glowed in the corner of the kitchen/dining room. I hit the switch, then looked around. I hadn’t noticed the previous night, but the kitchen windows had roll-up bamboo curtains behind the grilles. I rolled each one up, then went into the living room to open the shutters there.

  When the sunlight streamed through, I stopped and stared.

  The empty glass that had been on the coffee table was now on the floor. It was chipped but not broken. But it must have been the sound of it falling that had woken me earlier.

  I inhaled sharply. What had made it fall? Had I picked it up when I was looking at the magazines and left it precariously placed at the edge of the table? I didn’t think so, but I supposed it was possible. I’d been so exhausted the previous night that I’d hardly known what I was doing. But even if it had been unsteady on the table, what had tipped it on to the floor? It was another spooky thing about the Villa Naranja, I thought, as I picked it up and brought it into the kitchen. No matter what Pilar had said, and no matter how little I believed in ghosts, perhaps her grandmother was around after all. Maybe the older woman didn’t want anyone living in her house. Maybe she wanted to scare me away. Or perhaps it was someone else. Someone who wanted to get my attention. Perhaps here, away from the noise and the bustle of my other life, I was the sort of person who could believe in another plane of existence. Who would allow the possibility, however slight, of some kind of other-worldly communication. But if I did . . . if I did . . . was it possible that—

  ‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Juno.’ I spoke out loud and my words echoed around the room.

  It was pointless telling myself not to be a fool.

  Anyone who knew anything about me already knew I was the biggest fool in the world.

  I unlocked the door and went outside. The sun was pleasantly warm as I sauntered a little way down the flagstone path before turning to look back at the house.

  In the daylight, the flaking paint and sun-bleached shutters were more obvious, but so was the vividness of the purple-and-pink bougainvillea and the multicoloured hibiscus plants, which I hadn’t noticed in the darkness. The house might have needed maintenance, but it seemed perfectly happy in its neglect. It was a settled part of the landscape, not trying too hard to be lovely. And it was lovely, despite its faded glory. Set among the orange trees and a garden that was part tiled and part gravelled, there was a stately look about it. That stateliness extended to the outside, where there was a small fountain (not working) and – to my enormous surprise – a decent-sized swimming pool. The water was slightly cloudy but not green or slimy, so I reckoned someone must come in on
a regular basis to maintain it.

  I continued on my walk around the garden and the orange groves, where many of the trees were heavy with fruit. It hadn’t simply been blossom I’d scented earlier, but the zesty tang of the oranges themselves. I wondered if it would be OK to pick some and make fresh juice in the mornings. I would have to ask Pilar.

  Closer to the house and away from the orange grove was a spreading jacaranda tree, smothered in a cloud of purple flowers. Beneath it was a large flat stone which, from its faded markings, looked like it might have been a sundial.

  They’d been right, I thought. Cleo and Saoirse and Pilar, who’d all persuaded me to come away. They’d been absolutely right. Even though my heart was still smashed into a million pieces, the heat of the sun and the beauty of the orange groves was balm to my soul.

  I suddenly remembered that I’d promised Pilar I’d let her know that I’d arrived and that everything at the villa was OK. I hurried indoors again and found my mobile, which had a mere ten per cent of battery remaining. I plugged it into one of the adaptors I’d brought and shoved it into a wall socket. Straight away, the power cut out.

  I swore softly under my breath. I went to the fuse box, pushed up the trip switch, and then chose a different socket for the phone. This time it began to charge and almost immediately pinged with a message. It was from Pilar.

  Everything all right? she asked. I’m guessing you found it OK as I didn’t get any panicked phone calls in the middle of the night.

  All well, I texted in reply. The house is lovely. So is the weather.

  Damp and grey today, came her instant response. Glad you’re well. Don’t forget there is Wi-Fi in the house. It’s the one subscription Mama didn’t cancel – she needs it herself when she stays there. Keep in touch. Have a great time. Px. PS: If the oranges are out, feel free to pick them.

  I smiled at her last comment and then felt a lump rise in my throat. So many people wanted me to have a good time. So many people wanted me to be better. Yet even though time is supposed to be a great healer, and even though months had passed, I knew I wasn’t healed at all. Nowhere near it. And it would be a long time, if ever, before I was. No matter where I went and what I did.