Read The Fall Girl for Free Online Page B

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    ‘What’s wrong with you?’ my mother asks.
    ‘Nothing.’
    My father seems baffled by my dourness. Although I don’t look at him, I sometimes sense him staring at me after I give him a snappy one-word reply to a question.
    ‘Did ye two have a row, Rita?’ he asks my mother one evening when he arrives home from work and I don’t bother responding to his greeting.
    ‘No, indeed we did not,’ she says. ‘But if she doesn’t buck up her ideas sharpish, we just might have one.’
    Oh, fuck off and leave me alone. Stop talking about me. Quit sizing me up. Drop dead.
    I wish I had a friend, a real one. Like Lesley was.
    I lie on my bed, stare at the ceiling, touch my body – the private bits. That’s the devil at work. Dirty pleasure. I feel guilty afterwards, but I do it again. Then I pray for myself. You can’t hide from God, my mother reckons. Fat chance of that, when I’m down on bended knee beseeching Him everynight at seven. Another Joyful Mystery. I feel no joy, just misery.
    My father takes his summer leave, rents a house in Mullaghmore for a fortnight. Powerful weather.
    ‘Aren’t we fierce lucky?’ he says each morning as we walk down the steep hill towards the beach, rugs, towels and bathing suits tucked under our oxters. ‘Look at that – not a cloud in the sky.’
    We haven’t been to a beach for several years, so my mother has bought me a new bathing suit. It has the cups of a bra inside it and I don’t like it. We spread out the rugs, peel off our clothes underneath our towels, slip into our bathing suits and rub suncream on ourselves and on each other. It’s the most naked we’ve ever seen each other and I’m mortified by the fact that my father can see the shape of my breasts. As soon as my mother finishes suncreaming my back, I slip on my T-shirt over my bathing suit before doing hers. I hate the gritty texture of her skin and the folds of flesh that sag from underneath her armpits down to her waist, like two puckered hems. The thought of leaving a patch unprotected and exposed to the burning rays crosses my vicious mind. In the shape of a cross. Suffer, suffer.
    I hurry when I do my father’s back because it makes me uncomfortable to touch his bare flesh.
    My mother and I share one rug; my father stretches out on the other. He relaxes and sighs with pleasure, despite the moodiness of his wife and daughter. Sunhat on her head and wearing the sunglasses she’s borrowed from her friend Nancy, my mother flicks absent-mindedly through the newspaper, raising her head every so often to stare out at the sea. Gathering handfuls of sand and letting it slip through my slack fingers, I pass the time watching people. I feel sad, lost, disconnected. I don’t know how to be one of them.
    When my father suggests a stroll along the beach, my mother reluctantly agrees. I volunteer to stay and keep an eye on our stuff. I watch them wading through the shallow water, my mother always a deliberate step behind, chin up defiantly. I can’t understand why she doesn’t love him any more. Ever since Aunty Lily’s death, she’s been really mean to him. No matter how hard he tries, she won’t let him get close to her. He said once that the loss of her sister drove her to distraction. But I reckon there’s more to it than that. After Aunty Lily’s funeral, Xavier had a row with my parents, a row that seemed to suck the compassion out of my mother and leave her cold. Whatever the argument was about, you’d think after all these years she’d have got over it. Looking behind him, my father holds out his hand to her, but she refuses to take it and I wonder how he can still love her. I think to myself that she’s a bitch and I’d love to tell him that I’m on his side, but there’s no point, because he’s on hers.
    By noon, the beach is bustling with little ones tottering to the water’s edge with their buckets, parents calling them back when they wander too far, and teenagers chatting out loud to