Departures by Jennifer Cornell Read Free Book Online

property as a holiday home only once or twice a year; my mother was sure they wouldn’t object to our parking the car and laying our picnics in the fields behind the barn. We would chase rabbits and my mother would read, holding the book at arm’s length above her to block out the sun, while my father wandered off on his own. Occasionally, when he was a long time returning, my motherwould set off to retrieve him, and once, after they both had been gone for over an hour and the colours and sounds of evening were well under way, I left Stephen and Nicola in the backseat of the car and headed out after them myself. They were pulling dry burs and grass seed from each other’s clothing, and I nearly missed them, because the grass had grown tall by the stream where they lay and their voices were so soft at first I could hear only water. But I told you that story already, he was saying. I know, she’d answered. So tell me again.
    As he could offer no more convincing a reason than my mother had for his sudden request for a transfer, the people at the Housing Executive were civil, but unsympathetic, and they soon wearied of his forlorn presence in their waiting rooms; it was because they refused to rehouse him that my father decided to squat. On Saturdays and Sundays after our dinner we would wander the broken streets of the lower Shankill until my father found a site which struck his fancy. There were many to choose from, for all the old estates in the area were scheduled for demolition, and most of the inhabitants had already been farmed out to new and improved dwellings further up the Road. One forgotten house looked very much like another from the outside, but inside the remnants of identity still littered their floors and clung to their plaster. In some the carpet remained, soaked through with rain from above and damp from below; in all, the shadows of past furnishings could be seen in vivid silhouette against the faded wallpaper that had surrounded them. As we went around the rooms we would point these lonely patches of colour out to one another, vying to see how many each of us could name. A mirror, a picture, perhaps a wall clock—the simple geometry of circles and squares could have indicated any one. The larger outlines of wardrobes,headboards, and bookcases were easier to distinguish, as were the few whole walls still brightly patterned, protected behind units in which the china, silver, and trophies of a lifetime had once been displayed.
    The site upon which my father finally settled was the first house in Park View Terrace, just off the Woodvale Road; it had belonged to a policeman before they burned him out. Unlike the houses of the lower Shankill, it had not been stripped of wood for the bonfires in July. Its doors and window frames were still intact; the rafters did not stretch like naked ribs between the roof space and the open air. No animals, furred or feathered, had settled in before us. Though for nearly a year it had lain empty, only a few splashes of graffiti adorned the iron sheet the authorities had used to block the door. While the parlour was uninhabitable because of the smell of petrol and charred upholstery, the fire had not gone beyond that room, and the rest of the house was practically new.
    Squatting was a concept that would have appealed to my mother. She had always enjoyed defying authority, and though she would never have imposed her rights over those of others, she was prone to take a creative interpretation of what those rights entailed. Her convictions ranged from the fantastic—she believed it was everyone’s right to drive, with or without a license—to the enigmatic—she abused expense accounts on the grounds that, had she not been working, she would not have been making the purchases she did—to the ideological. Once, in the midst of some school project and flummoxed by flow charts and graphs, I came to her to ask about taxes. She shrugged apologetically