2003
When she spoke with adults who didn’t know her, they usually asked Lissa what she did. And how about you? They’d turn to her, and in that small moment where the question hung in the air, she would feel the rush of panic, as though some lie she hadn’t actually told them was about to be revealed. The tightly wound spool of her persona unravelled around her ankles like a length of ribbon. People often wore these looks on their faces when in conversation with her, like they expected answers to impress them.
And she could go the route of honesty—say she was still in secondary school, and only worked her hotel job on the side. She could brag on about how she ran the restaurant floor like a military operation, and knew everything there was to know. Adults twice her age listened when she spoke, and she had become confident enough since turning seventeen to ignore the resentment on her colleagues’ faces, which, at that point in her life was still easier for her to mistake for mere jealousy than admit something more unsavory about herself.
But she wanted to impress strangers. Shame of herself and her age and maturity, left her falling back on a default response. “Hospitality,” she’d say, in a voice she hoped was adult and mysterious. People heard a word like that and nodded without asking questions, which she liked. Liked to picture herself through the lens of other people.
On the patio on a bright midsummer’s day, her stepmother’s arty mates heard the word. Nodded. Shuffled their feet, pretended to be distracted by a passing plate of hors d’oeuvres, and a sharp laugh from another conversation. One that had not been poisoned by such a boring thing. Hospitality. Lissa burned with embarrassment. “In a restaurant, like,” she clarified. “management, sometimes. Sort of.” Which made things worse. There was no duller job than floor manager in a hotel restaurant. The most thrilling event that had happened that year was when a marmalade cake split in two, and all the staff were allowed to take a slice home each.
She employed great effort to hold her pleasant expression in place. Someone asked her a halfhearted question for the sake of politeness, then moved on to talking about something else. A magazine article she hadn’t read, which wasn’t surprising. She didn’t see value in that type of literature—celebrities, where they were going on holidays, wearing to the beach, et cetera. She understood too late who she was talking to. Trendy people. The fact she was delusional enough to believe would like her was astounding now, and as she glanced around for an exit route, she spotted one. Her brother, stalking through a crowd toward her with a scowl that might have turned a person to stone.
“They want me to be in the pictures,” Alexander muttered. He was fourteen and mid growth-spurt, all ankles and wrists, with the tailored trousers that fitted him last month hovering absurdly over his shoes. “And I’ve said I don’t want to, but they’re all like, ‘You have to.’ I don’t have to, do I? Like, they can’t force me.”
He absolutely had to. Family photographs and family weddings went together. “You’ll stand for one,” she said in a clipped voice. “For mum. Then you can go.”
“She wouldn’t want a picture.”
Lissa knew that. “Just one.”
He kicked some loose stones about and grumbled, but didn’t argue. Lissa wasn’t worth arguing with. Their mum had left a space behind her that Lissa had naturally filled. If there were no parent with authority in the house, she would become a surrogate—to make plans, keep things in order, give permission and take it away. Alexander would stand for a photograph, and it would go on the wall in the hallway, where it belonged.
By the willow trees in the garden, beneath a tangle of bulb lights, her father and Jade stood together as a white cage sprung open, and doves burst into the sky, flat and blue like silk, their wings flashing in the sunlight. A press photographer rushed forward as Jade laughed, throwing her head back and fluffing her dress around her with the intention of a woman who knew she’d be in a tabloid special in a week, looking like a confection on Jarlath’s arm.
Lissa’s father wore his linen jacket open, and the first few buttons of his shirt undone just enough to display his thatch of chest hair. It was a shame, the chest hair, but she couldn’t disparage him for it when he looked so happy. He was happy in a way that was strikingly unguarded. Loose, real, and not solely for the photographs. As much as Lissa privately resented him for, despite her best efforts, going through with this wedding, she felt that old familiar tug of loyalty towards him. His daughter, whether she liked it or not, and no matter the viciousness of the thoughts she had about him inside her head, she lacked the fortitude to actually hate him.
“Oh, wow. I love an understated wedding,” a voice said beside her.
She startled. Turned. He was her age. Tall and narrow, with a sharpness to his features that tugged her memory. Cheekbones, a narrow nose, shiny from the heat. Her brain ticked for moments, deciding whether they had met before.
“That’s funny,” she said, eyeing his smart little suit. “Rumour has it Bono is stopping by later.”
“Oh, Christ, Bono again. How unexpected. They always cart him out at these fancy bloody weddings to make themselves look relevant, don’t they? I’m floored.”
Lissa bristled, but tried to cover it up with what she hoped was bracing wit. “Here's a suggestion. Maybe you should be aware of who you’re talking to. It’s my father’s wedding.”
“Ah,” a shrug, unbothered. She thought he was going in for a handshake, but he reached behind her to the table of glasses. He glanced dismissively at her outstretched palm. “So you’re the Mansfield’s daughter.”
“Bouchard-Mansfield,” she said. “Lissa.”
He seemed to enjoy that she said this. A private joke with himself. “A double-barreler.” He sipped his champagne, and his face twitched. “Why not just choose one name? You’ll have to eventually.”
“I won’t,” she said. “And I suppose even if I did, I’d choose my mother’s. Bouchard.”
“Surely Mansfield is the name that matters,” he said, and she ignored him. On the surface of her champagne, her face frowned back at her. She had been developing a line on her forehead that made her look stricken in repose. She forced herself to relax, satisfied when her brow smoothed.
“And your name, by the way?”
“Nick Lynott.”
She was, absurdly, disappointed by its mundanity.
“Our dads know each other,” he went on. He had a smooth, charismatic voice. “Mine’s Ben Lynott. A TV exec.”
“Right.” Yes, of course he was. She remembered now. Actually, Lissa was sure this boy had visited the house at least a decade prior, in the days when people visited constantly. She’d become an expert host at about seven years old, giving the tour of the snooker table, the garden, showing off all the toys she had. But he’d refused to play with her. He sat around saying deliberately cute things for the adults to coo at, while she studded the garage door with the tennis balls she’d hauled out. Renewed bitterness swelled toward him, both for rejecting her in childhood, and then forgetting all about it. Here he was again, Nick Lynott, with his smug face and a hand inside his pocket, already looking over her head for someone more interesting to speak to.
“So,” Nick said. “Where are you living at the moment?”
“Dublin.”
A snort. “Well, yes. I hardly thought you lived in the country.” He peered at the pastoral fantasy of rural Ireland around the manor, the tracks from a haybine running up and down fields in braids of spun gold, and wrinkled his nose like it was an offense to him. “Could you be more specific?”
“Right. Sandymount.”
“Ah, I walk there with my parents. I assume you’re on the seafront or something, are you?”
“No,” she said. “Further in. Close to the station. It’s…” She broke off with a sigh. “You’d know it if you saw it. It’s a Georgian place with a very… noticeable extension.”
Lissa resented the extension so much she got hot and agitated when she thought about it. A gleaming modern rectangular block, all reinforced concrete and floor-to-ceiling windows, had followed her stepmother, Jade Nolan, and all her interior design aspirations. Jade was not a talented person, Lissa thought, just a lucky one, now with access to enough money to fund her delusion.
It’d been four months since workmen had broken ground in the garden, flattened the beds of pampas grass and torn down the games room and the orangery where she and her brother used to languish with their mother, breakfasts that stretched into the afternoon. Track marks ripped over her winter garden, and the tennis court she played matches with the neighbour ladies, in one afternoon, was reduced to chunks of fractured tarmac and twisted metal in a skip
“Oh, I know it. Fantastic,” Nick said, and went on this voice that begged to sound like an authority on property, parroting the adults who actually knew what they were saying. “You’d be mad not to build in this economy though, wouldn’t you? And it’s much better to be somewhere modern, where at least the heat isn’t flying out through cracks in the window frames. I just don’t care about ‘charm’ or whatever people say. Clean and functional is always better.”
She wondered whether she shared her sense that the conversation was not going well. Considered agreeing with him to be polite, but couldn’t bring herself to. “Some people prefer to live somewhere comfortable and traditional. Nothing wrong at all with that. Maybe to some, all that glass and steel is cold and uncomfortable. Do you really want the entire world looking in your windows as you lie on the couch?”
“Well, I say move on, dinosaurs. Reject tradition. Embrace the new millennium, already.” What a worldly thing to say. He spoke with complete authority, as though there was no point even coming up with a retort. To conclude, he tilted his head back and drained his glass.
Lissa intended to respond anyway. The captain of her debating team at school, she was no stranger to annoying, arrogant boys, but before she could respond, Alexander was hauled towards them by Angela, a family friend wielding a digital camera. She’d forgotten about her brother—evidently having wandered off in hopes he could hide from the lens.
“Come on,” Angela said. “Just one. For your mum. Lissa, tell him.”
Lissa said nothing, just stood there with him while he scowled. She smiled until her face ached.
“Oh, you look smashing, the both of you,” Angela cooed. “Diane is going to love these.”
Lissa was not convinced. She’d gone through an intense period of questioning while preparing for the wedding—the way she’d done her hair, whether the colour of dress complimented her skin, her makeup, which, the more she caught sight of herself, the more clownish it seemed. The makeup artist had done it at some ungodly hour that morning and kept saying it looked so natural, while glueing strip lashes around her eyes. Lissa had been too tired to protest. It was fine. Who was going to care?
But now, staring into the lens that would immortalise this look, she realised her mother would. She was so good at dressing them both. Choosing things from little French boutiques that had things nobody at home could get, and then they’d put them on and spin around the living room while she applauded and told them they were the most elegant children in town.
Looking bad was a new and terrifying possibility for Lissa. Those pastel striped boutique bags from Diane, tied up with satin ribbon, had disappeared with her, replaced within the year with new things from Jade. Things with cut-outs and zips, snakeskin bags and sequined tops. Sure, Jade said she looked good, but what Jade thought was good was meaningless, and often, in Lissa’s opinion, blatantly wrong.
“And where’s mum today?” Nick said, and Lissa was surprised he was still standing there.
“Oh,” she said. “France.”
“Ah, yeah, I remember hearing something about her moving.”
“Yes, Provence.”
“And I suppose her being here would be awkward, would it? It was an acrimonious divorce, right?”
Lissa frowned. “Do you always go around asking highly personal questions to strangers?”
And he shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t really asking. I was just repeating what I heard around the place. Whatever. It’s a pity she’s not here to see you do…” he waved his hand at her. “Whatever you were doing. Were you a flower girl? No, not flower girl. That sort of thing.”
She felt a prickle. “No, I think it’s obvious I was not the flower girl. I’m too old for that.”
“Oh, well,” He flattened his mouth and pulled this silly, careless face that pissed her off. “Dunno.”
“We’re the same age.”
He squinted at something in the distance. The fact he wasn’t even bothering to look at her was making her angrier. Already one foot out of the conversation, while casually annihilating her confidence. “Oh, that’s funny,” he said. “I thought you were maybe fifteen, sixteen at a push.”
She couldn’t think of what to say, or focus on anything but her boiling face, surely turning a ferocious shade of puce. “Right, well, um, good for you.” She wished she’d come up with something better, that she were quick, clever enough to handle such situations, but it hardly mattered, because she was already walking away from him, mumbling about a photographer waiting for her.
It didn’t matter what Nick Lynott’s opinion was, she reminded herself. After today, she would surely never see him again. And if she did, it wasn’t as though he’d remember.
Still, she could feel exactly where his words had landed, like a thumb pressed into a bruise she hadn’t known was there. As she moved back toward the noise of the party, she kept her shoulders stiff and high, as if he might be watching, though she never once looked back to check.
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