Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden Read Free Book Online Page B

together for an hour and more. It was a happy afternoon, and when I was leaving I told him to have a good time at the party. I hope he did. Although neither of us knew it at the time he needed a little bulwark of pleasure in his life to set against what was about to befall him two days later.
    I slept in for my nine-o’clock lecture on Monday and was bumbling around the kitchen, still in my dressing gown, when the phone rang. As soon as Andrew spoke I knew by the sound of his voice that something was seriously wrong. He asked me if I had heard the news headlines that morning and I said that I had. ‘That man,’ he said, ‘the man who was shot, the body they found on the mountain – that was Billy.’
    I’m ashamed to say that this murder had barely registered with me when I’d heard it on the radio, for such events were a commonplace in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s. One became numb to them and only became aware of the full creeping horror when, as now, there was a personal connection. Andrew told me that Billy’s name would be released later that day and that he was ringing his friends so that they wouldn’t learn of it first through the media. He rightly scoffed at my suggestion that I might go to Belfast for the funeral. Two days later I saw a report of it on the television news. I glimpsed Andrew emerging from a tiny redbrick house, supporting his mother, with his head bowed. Billy had been murdered as part of a Loyalist paramilitary feud. He had been abducted on the Saturday night and shot, his bodydumped on the mountains above the city, where it was found late on the Sunday night.
    What shocked me most when Andrew returned to college the following week was not his sorrow but his anger. He was full of a rage he could just about keep under control and he brushed aside my condolences with a sardonic laugh. I wasn’t hurt, for I understood how complex and poisoned his grief must be for his only brother who had also been his rival, his enemy; and whose murder had made his own situation within his family even more painful than it already was. He didn’t speak of it, how could he? He became more absorbed in his studies than ever before.
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    All this came back to me as I sat in Molly’s garden on the morning of her birthday over the ruins of breakfast; over the broken eggshell in its cheery little egg-cup, a thing such as a child might like, made of thick pottery with the name Molly painted on it in primary colours. The speckled light came down through the leaves of the trees and trembled on the table top. The morning was moving along but I wasn’t moving with it. I would have been happy to sit there for at least another hour just thinking about the past, but I knew that if I let more time slip away, I would regret it later. I carried the breakfast tray into the house and started to tidy up. As I did the dishes I glanced from time to time out into the garden, at the raspberry canes and the shaded table, at that ridiculous fake cow. Being in the house was the next best thing to being with Molly herself. She loves her home with an extraordinary kind of psychic intensity, and her whole sense of self, her identity, is intimately bound up with it in a way I had thought only possible when a house had been in a familyfor generations. That sense of gratitude to the dead who had planted those trees, those roses, who had chosen those possessions, simple perhaps – the floral plates that have been in the back of the cupboard time out of mind, those plain white candlesticks – gratitude and a sense of obligation to the future: there is none of that here. All of this is Molly’s choice and her creation, and she inhabits this space so fully that as I stood there with my hands in the hot suds I suddenly felt that she was there with me, even though I knew that this was impossible, that she was in New York. I sensed Molly’s spiritual presence as