The People Next Door: From the Number One Bestselling Author

by Roisin Meaney

Genres: Friendship; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

'Roisin Meaney is a skilful storyteller' Sheila O'Flanagan A warm, spell-binding tale of friendship, love and second chances from this Number One bestselling author. Behind the brightly coloured doors of Miller's Avenue live people with very complicated lives... When Yvonne in number 7 joins an online dating website, she's looking for something more than friendship but after a series of disastrous encounters, decides to shut down her account. Is she shutting out her only chance of finding love? While next door Dan, still reeling from his wife's desertion, signs up for a cookery course. As his lemon souffle rises, so does his interest in someone close to home ... Further along, Kathryn is struggling to keep her marriage together despite the best efforts of her interfering mother-in-law. As tension grows between the two women, Kathryn wonders if Grainne will finally succeed, as she realises that she may never give her husband Justin what he wants. As the drama unfolds along Millers Avenue, the inhabitants learn that the things you most yearn for can often be found on your own doorstep.

Release date: August 6, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 336

Sample

When you leave Belford’s main street and turn down Miller’s Lane – the alley that runs between O’Brien’s Quality Meats and Kennedy’s Shoe Repairs and Key Cutting – there isn’t that much to see at first. A couple of smallish, grimy windows set high up in Kennedy’s graffti-covered blue side wall on your right; the steel back door of the butcher’s opposite; a huddle of recycling bins futher on with the usual dishevelment of crumpled boxes propped against them; and the odd skinny cat streaking away from the tap of your shoe on the worn cobbles.

About twenty-five steps beyond the bins, the path veers to the right, around by the back of Kennedy’s. No more cobbles now, only a raggedy-edged strip of tarmac, frilled with bobbing dandelions in the summer and bordered by a cement wall on one side, high enough to hide whatever’s behind it (as it happens, the long since boarded-up flour mill of Miller’s Lane), and tall green metal railings on the other.

Beyond the railings there’s a small park. A line of unremarkable trees, clumps of variously coloured bushes, a few randomly scattered dark red wooden benches and splashes of flowers here and there, depending on the season. A scrap of a children’s play area in the far corner – two swings, a slide, a seesaw, a boxed square of grainy sand. Lots of pale green, carelessly mown grass.

And then, at the end of the path, between a trio of thigh-high metal bollards, Miller’s Lane opens out and becomes Miller’s Avenue. And right across from the bollards stand three tall, narrow red-brick houses.

Now take the time to look a little more closely at these three joined-together houses, with their small front gardens and black wrought iron gates and railings. You might notice the brass numbers screwed into each of the three differently coloured front doors: seven on the first (deep blue), eight on the second (burgundy) and nine on the third (furze yellow).

And once you get that far, there really isn’t much to stop you from pushing open the gate of number seven and walking up the short path – three or four steps, no more – and pressing the small brass bell beside the dark blue door.

‘You don’t have to come with me.’ Yvonne O’Mahony lifted the bundles of milky-yellow freesias from the white basin in the sink and wrapped a paper towel around their dripping stems. The spicy scent of them wafted up to her. ‘If you’re tired, I mean. You’ve had a long day, and I don’t mind going on my own.’

Her daughter stood, brushing crumbs from the folds of her green top, pushing her dark blonde hair off her forehead. ‘Of course I’ll come. Don’t I always come?’ The heat often made Clara slightly cranky. ‘Here, give me those.’

She reached for Brian’s flowers and Yvonne, after a second, handed them over. Clara strode ahead of her, out the back door and down the long gravel path. Yvonne pulled the door closed behind her and glanced around the garden. No sign of Magoo – off on his travels again, sniffing around the apartment block, probably, where someone would be sure to throw him a bit of food.

In the neighbouring garden, a small grey cat sitting on the black bin in a corner of the patio lifted his head and gazed at her.

‘Hello, Picasso. Don’t suppose you’ve seen Magoo?’ The cat lowered his head on to his paws again and closed his eyes, and Yvonne followed Clara down the path.

‘God, the heat, still.’ Clara stood by the car, flapping her skirt. ‘At this hour.’

‘I know.’ Yvonne opened Clara’s door and walked around to the driver’s side. The car was like a furnace. She wound her window all the way down, turned the key in the red Micra’s ignition and reversed crookedly, curving into the corner of the lane.

As she straightened up and they began to bump gently down the lane to the road, she glanced at Clara – mouth set, shoulders hunched, flowers dangling in front of her knees – before giving in, as she’d been giving in all day, to thoughts of Brian.

His face when she’d told him she was pregnant all those years ago. Both of them eighteen, Brian nearly a year with the civil service, working behind the counter in the motor tax office. Yvonne about to start college, her place in UCG waiting for her finally, after two Leaving Cert attempts.

‘I’m pregnant.’ Her nails digging into her palms, her teeth gritted against whatever was coming. Sitting on the hard bench outside the library.

His face, turning towards her. The horrified expression that had made her want to smash her fist into it – unfairly, because hadn’t she been just as appalled when she’d found out?

‘What?’ The shocked look of him, the way his mouth twisted, as if she’d done something disgusting in front of him.

She couldn’t answer. Her hands stayed clenched in her lap. She turned away from his face and watched his shoes instead. A half-inch of the left lace was stained with something green.

‘Are you sure?’

She nodded, eyes still fixed on his shoes. They were brown nubbly suede and very round at the toes. There was a little dent in the dome of the left one. Yvonne wondered if it would spring out if she pushed it from inside. She bit into her cheek, as hard as she could bear.

‘Was it the night of the results?’

She nodded again. The one night they’d forgotten the condom. The library door swished open behind them and she turned to watch an elderly man coming out.

‘Fuck.’

She felt Brian’s foot kicking against the leg of the bench, the thump of it up through her.

She’d been so happy, enough points at last to get into the arts course she wanted, worth the extra year in school. They’d gone with a gang to the pub at half three, staggered out of it at nine, back to his room in the house he shared with two other civil servants.

It was only the fifth time they’d had sex. She didn’t remember it.

Brian reached over and pulled one of her clenched hands towards him. ‘No, it’s OK, really it is.’ His hand was cold, it offered no comfort. ‘It’s OK, it was just a shock, honest to God.’

She nodded, still unable to look at him.

‘Yvonne … love, it’s OK.’ He pressed her still clenched fingers. ‘We’ll be OK. We’ll manage.’ His other hand reached under her face and pulled her chin up gently. ‘I love you. We’ll be fine.’

She nodded again, watching his mouth, looking at the words coming out. He was smiling now, an awful forced smile. Worse, far worse, than before.

‘Yeah.’ She didn’t smile back. ‘We’ll manage.’

The ridiculous jacket he’d worn for the wedding, all lapels and unnecessary pockets, that she’d never seen before. The expression on his face as she’d walked up the aisle towards him – God, that walk had taken forever. The flash of an uncle’s camera, the smiles of her friends, some child crying and being immediately shushed, her mother in the front row in her green suit, smiling, wiping her eyes with a fluff of lace Yvonne had never seen before or since.

Brian’s mother in the opposite pew, looking at her son’s fiancée with a very different expression.

Yvonne’s second cousin Orla, standing inside the altar rails in a yellow dress and black hat, playing ‘Here Comes the Bride’ on a side flute, because she’d offered and they hadn’t had the heart to say no.

The expression on Brian’s face, when all Yvonne had wanted to do was turn and run back over the cracked maroon tiles, fly down the aisle through the thick wooden doors, and not stop until she had to.

His tears when Clara was born four months later, only the second time she’d ever seen him cry. The necklace he’d bought for Yvonne the following day, that she’d killed him for buying – ridiculous, what did she want with jewellery? What about the washing machine? How were they going to afford that now?

His awful singing, the songs he made up for Clara:

I’m a kitten from Great Britain,

I eat cabbages and carrots,

I eat mustard, I eat custard,

But my favourite food is parrots …

The night he drove their twelve-year-old Mini to the hospital, a raincoat over his pyjamas, going the wrong way down a street that he knew was one way, when Clara got a rash that turned out to be nothing.

The lemon cake he’d baked for Yvonne’s twentieth birthday, the beige gloop that oozed out when she cut into it.

The sprinkling of his brown shavings in the bathroom sink that she eventually gave up complaining about. His hair gel that smelled of rhubarb. The black scrap of a nail on his left little finger that he’d caught in a car door as a child. The raised mole just behind his right shoulder, the coarse hairs that sprouted from it that he refused to let her pluck. The way he read the newspaper back to front.

His mother’s face at the funeral, blotchy with angry grief. Yvonne holding Clara’s five-year-old hand, willing herself to feel, trying to push away the unspeakable relief.

The guilt that brought tears at last, when people told her they were sorry for her troubles, that he was taken from her much too young. All those hands, all that pink and brown and white and cold and warm and smooth and calloused flesh, squeezing hers: Sorry, so sorry for your loss.

At the cemetery, Yvonne pulled up behind a filthy dark blue van and switched off the engine. She waited until Clara had got out, then wound up both windows, locked the car and followed her daughter through the rusting turnstile and along the neat rows of graves.

The gold letters on his granite headstone read Brian O’Mahony, beloved only son of Jim and Peggy, husband of Yvonne, father of Clara, and listed the first and last years of his life, twenty-four apart. No sign of moss – Peggy made sure of that.

Clara bent and laid the freesias on the rectangle of gravel in front of the headstone. Their paper towel wrapping looked too casual now – why hadn’t she got some coloured tissue or a ribbon or something?

Brian had been just a year older than Clara was now, when the train he was travelling on, eighteen years ago today, had veered off the tracks and down a small embankment, killing him and an older man in the same carriage. Most of the twenty-nine other passengers had walked away; nobody else had been seriously injured. A miracle, the papers had called it.

A miracle. Yvonne’s navy and white skirt was lifted by a sudden whip of wind and she pushed it back down over her knees. She should pray, but they never did, just stood there for a while and then went home.

‘Here’s Gran and Gramps.’ Clara’s hand shielded her eyes from the low, late sun as she watched Brian’s parents walking towards them. Yvonne turned, forcing a smile onto her face.

Peggy walked ahead of Jim, as usual. She wore a grey coat and cradled a pot of dark yellow flowers. Far more appropriate than a few bunches of already wilting freesias. Of course.

‘How are you, Peggy?’

No handshake, certainly no embrace. Peggy nodded at a place somewhere to the left of Yvonne’s ear. ‘I’m as well as can be expected, I suppose.’ And turning to Clara, she smiled and leaned towards her granddaughter, so Clara could bend and kiss her cheek. ‘How are you, pet?’

Yvonne had long since learned to ignore the unspoken insults. After Brian’s death, Peggy had distanced herself from Yvonne as much as she could and they’d met mercifully few times since then: here at the graveside every now and again, of course, and at various occasions of Clara’s – communion, confirmation, twenty-first birthday – and sometimes in town, when it wasn’t possible to pretend they hadn’t seen each other.

And every Christmas morning – on Jim’s insistence, Yvonne was sure – she spent a tortuous hour or so with Clara in Jim and Peggy’s house, sipping drinks and making small talk with a scattering of their neighbours.

Brian’s mother looked pretty much the same as ever, apart from the hair that seemed to get blonder each time Yvonne saw it. Same pale blue eyes, the usual powdery lilac shadow above them, same narrow, pointed nose. Same too-dark lipstick bleeding slightly into the deep lines above her top lip.

She handed the flowerpot to Clara. ‘Will you put these down for me? There’s a good girl.’ They watched as Clara bent and placed the pot beside the freesias, and Yvonne wished again that her offering didn’t look so pathetic in comparison, so washed out against the much stronger yellow in the pot.

Jim limped slowly up to them. ‘Hello there, you two.’ He wore a navy sleeveless top over a white shirt and pale grey trousers. ‘Everything all right?’

He leaned heavily on the stick he’d been using since his knee operation. His severely cut white hair barely covered his blue-veined scalp. The round glasses perched, as usual, halfway down his nose. He had Brian’s, and Clara’s, brown eyes – or was it the other way around? A pale pink circle bloomed in the soft greyish folds of each cheek.

Yvonne bent to touch his cheek with her lips. ‘Hello, Jim. We’re grand – isn’t the weather amazing?’

Was he eighty yet? He was a few years older than Peggy, and she must be well into her seventies. After Brian’s funeral, back in their house, Jim had taken Clara onto his knee and read her Green Eggs and Ham while Peggy and Yvonne looked after the small crowd of mourners, refilling glasses, pouring tea, passing around sandwiches and trying not to be in the same room together.

And after Clara had been put to bed, when most of the callers had left, Yvonne had passed the half-open kitchen door and heard a peculiar snuffling noise. She’d peered in to see Jim hunched on a wooden chair, head bent, shoulders shaking under his charcoal jacket. She’d stood for a moment, watching him, and then she’d walked back into the sitting room, feeling completely unable to help.

Watching Jim now, standing over his only child’s grave, both hands curved tightly around his stick, Yvonne wondered how much longer the dinners could go on. How many more times would Jim be able to battle across town on the second Saturday of every month, simply to make a point of having dinner with his daughter-in-law and grandchild, to show that whatever might have happened in the past was forgotten and forgiven – by him, at least?

Jim bowed his head then and blessed himself, and the four of them stood in a silent semi-circle for a few minutes. Yvonne could feel the heat of the sun on the back of her neck. Imagine – almost eight o’clock and still so hot. The best May they’d had in years. A bead of sweat ran down her back and settled into the waistband of her skirt. Under her arms, her blouse felt unpleasantly damp; she couldn’t wait to peel it off when they got home. She thought longingly of a cool shower and hoped Clara wasn’t planning one of her extended sessions in the bathroom.

Eventually Peggy made the sign of the cross and turned to her husband. ‘Ready?’ She nodded once in the general direction of Yvonne’s shoulder – ‘We’ll be off then’ – and smiled again at Clara. ‘Come and see us soon, pet.’

She may as well have looked directly at Yvonne and said, ‘Not you. Don’t you come near my house.’

Jim blessed himself and put his free hand on Clara’s arm – ‘Take care, my dear’ – and smiled at Yvonne. ‘Bye now.’

‘Mind yourself, Jim.’

Of course they didn’t mention the next dinner, in just over two weeks’ time. Yvonne occasionally wondered if Jim was punished for those dinners. Did he get the silent treatment when he got home? Did Peggy rant at him before he went? Or did she just ignore the fact that her husband made regular visits to the enemy? Somehow that didn’t seem very likely, knowing Peggy.

Clara watched them walk away. ‘She’s such a cow.’

Yvonne frowned at the pot of flowers. They were the dark orangey-yellow of duck egg yolks. ‘Ah, don’t, love.’

‘Well, she is – you know she is. I hate the way she makes a point of treating you like dirt. Does she think I don’t notice?’ Clara’s pretty face twisted as she scowled in Peggy’s direction. ‘And Gramps is such a pet. I can’t understand how he puts up with her.’

Yvonne smiled. ‘For better or worse, I suppose.’ She bent and unwrapped the freesias, pulling away the damp paper. She tried to prop the little flowers against the headstone, but as soon as she let go, they tumbled apart in a green and pale yellow spatter.

No point in saying, again, that Peggy couldn’t help it, that she needed someone to blame for Brian’s death – and Yvonne, who, as far as Peggy was concerned, had already ruined his life by trapping him at eighteen, was the obvious choice. No point in trotting out those awful half-truths again – Clara had been fed them often enough.

She didn’t remember her father at all. She hadn’t a single memory of the made-up songs she’d refused to go to bed without, correcting him sternly if he got a line wrong, or the endless games of snakes and ladders or the sock-puppet shows he put on when she had measles and, later, chicken pox. Clara had no idea what a wonderful father she’d had for the first five years of her life.

And, naturally, she hadn’t a clue about how her mother had been planning to leave him, in the weeks and days before he died. And that was the problem, of course – Yvonne had no idea if Brian had said anything to his parents, if he’d confided in them about the awful little scene in the kitchen, late one night after Clara was in bed …

‘Peace at last – she’s gone off.’ He’d poured his can of Bulmers into the glass Yvonne insisted on and walked towards the television.

‘Hang on.’ Her mouth was painfully dry. She could still taste the sardines they’d had for dinner. ‘Don’t turn it on a minute.’

‘Match of the Day is—’

‘I know, but just a minute.’ She’d forgotten Match of the Day, the one programme he couldn’t live without. No matter – she’d started now. ‘I – need to talk to you.’

He perched on the arm of the sofa. ‘Go on so, if you’re quick. You have three minutes.’

She watched his throat move as the cider went down, heard the wet glugs of his swallows. What made a man’s Adam’s apple look so heartbreakingly vulnerable?

She waited until he’d lowered the drink, pushing her nails into the couch. She said, ‘It’s about us.’ Now. No going back now.

‘Us?’ He looked at her. His lips were wet. ‘What about us?’ He started to smile. ‘Is this one of those talks where you tell me I don’t spend enough time with you?’ He glanced towards the clock on the mantelpiece, a lightning movement she didn’t miss.

‘Brian …’ There was a small, almost perfectly round bruise on the back of his left hand. It was yellow and dark blue. ‘We … I think …’ All her practising, and she couldn’t think how to say it.

He looked more carefully at her and said, ‘What’s up? Tell me. Did I forget our anniversary or something?’

She’d had no idea it would be so hard. She hadn’t planned on crying – that hadn’t been part of it at all – yet her eyes filled suddenly with tears. ‘I – I— This isn’t working.’ She dipped her head and brushed away the tears before they had a chance to roll down her face. ‘We – us. We’re not working.’ There was salt at the back of her throat. She kept her eyes down, not daring to look at his face.

He laughed. The sound startled her into lifting her head. He was grinning at her. ‘You’re having me on, aren’t you? This is April fool or something.’ He slid down in to the sofa, reached for his glass again. ‘Jesus, you nearly had—’

‘Stop.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘Brian, I mean it. I’m not joking.’ His skin felt cool against her fingers. ‘We’ve made a mistake. We should never have … We made a mistake, that’s all. Clara was coming and – we couldn’t see beyond that.’

His smile began to fade. ‘What are you talking about?’ He looked from her face to the hand that was still on his arm, and back to her face. He stared at her. ‘What are you saying?’

She struggled for the words again. ‘I’m trying – I don’t want …’ Tiny bubbles floated to the top of the cider and burst there. She imagined them hitting her skin with minuscule damp pops. ‘I don’t—’ She couldn’t say it. She waited for him.

‘Do you not love me any more?’

He’d whispered it. She could hardly hear him. Do you not love me any more? Because of course she’d loved him once. Hadn’t she?

She shook her head, scattering fresh tears. ‘I’m sorry.’ She started to reach for his hand and he pulled it away from her.

He lunged for his glass and drained it, gulping it down as if he’d die of thirst otherwise. Then he belched, deliberately loudly.

She closed her eyes, whispered ‘I’m sorry’ again. Her head began to ache.

‘Look.’ His voice was stronger. She heard the creak of the sofa as he turned towards her. She kept her eyes closed. ‘Look, you’re tired. You’re worn out with that job – I told you not to …’ He grabbed her hand, held onto it tightly. ‘You don’t know what—’

‘No.’ She shook her head again, forced herself to open her eyes and look at him. ‘I do. Please believe me. I mean what I say. It’s not tiredness, I’m not tired.’ A pulse of pain thumped gently in her head.

He searched her face, still holding tightly to her hand. ‘So what are you saying? What are you really saying?

‘It’s over.’ She had to push the words out. They felt too big to get past her lips. ‘We can’t stay together.’

His face crumpled. ‘No.’ He leaned towards her and pushed his face into her neck. ‘No, don’t say that. No, no, please—’ She felt the hot wetness of his tears, smelled the hair gel he’d refused to change, even for her. Smelled the apple tang of cider. ‘I love you, you know how much I—’ He slid his arms around her and pressed her against him. ‘I love you.’ He lowered his head until it nestled between her breasts. ‘Please.’ He pressed his lips to her skin, just above the V of her T-shirt. ‘I love you so much.’

She wanted to push him away, but his body shuddered with sobs and she couldn’t. She sat trapped in his arms, damp with his tears, until he lifted his head and ran a hand under his nose and said rapidly, ‘Look, just hang on – don’t rush into anything. I can take a few days off – I can do it next week, we can go someplace. I don’t know, we can get a B and B, my parents will mind Clara, or yours – and we can just talk about it.’ He pushed the heel of his hand into each of his eye sockets in turn. ‘Will you just do that, will you just … please? Will you?’

Yvonne looked at his wet eyelashes and his red, swollen eyes and his stupid, hopeful face and she knew that no amount of talk would change a thing, not if they talked until they were old. But she nodded and said ‘OK’ because he had a bruise on the back of his hand, and because she’d made him cry, and because she didn’t know how to say no.

And then, just two days later, he’d taken the train to Dublin for a meeting, and the next time she’d seen him had been in the hospital mortuary in Athlone.

His face was unfamiliar, they’d hidden the worst of the injuries under a thick layer of some tan-coloured cream, and his brown hair was parted on the wrong side. She had reached under the sheet, lifted his icy cold hand and turned the palm over. The bruise had almost completely faded. She could barely make it out.

When they got home from the cemetery, Magoo was waiting at the back gate. As soon as the car rounded the corner of the lane he stood, stretching each leg in turn. He darted between them while they were getting out, barking happily, then trotted ahead of them up the path and stood hopefully by his empty bowl, black tail swinging in a wide arc, wet tongue lolling from his panting mouth.

Yvonne picked up the bowl and refilled it from the outside tap. Magoo ducked his head and began to slurp loudly.

The phone began to ring as Clara was turning her key in the back-door lock. ‘I’ll get it.’

Yvonne stood in the fading light, reluctant now to leave this glorious day behind. The air was wonderfully heavy with the scent of someone’s freshly mown lawn. She listened to the slop-slop of Magoo’s eager lapping as her gaze drifted around the garden.

Clara reappeared. ‘Mum, it’s Greg. I’m off for a bath.’

Greg – she should have guessed. He never forgot Brian’s anniversary. Yvonne lifted the receiver, smelled the citrus body spray Clara had taken to using lately. ‘Hi.’

‘Hello there.’ Greg’s deep, slow voice. ‘Just thought I’d give a shout, see how you’re doing.’

‘We’re fine, Greg. You’re good to ring.’

Brian’s first cousin, and now one of Yvonne’s oldest friends. Like her, he’d been born in Belford and had lived there until he’d gone to a seminary in the midlands straight after school. He’d lasted just two years, before leaving for a sister of one of the other seminarians. When that relationship had ended, after little more than a year, Greg had moved to Dublin. He was still there, teaching music in a private – Yvonne assumed terribly exclusive – secondary school on the south side. As far as she knew, he’d never met anyone else in the years since the seminarian’s sister.

Greg was tall, fair and short-sighted, with delicate, almost feminine features and a surprisingly deep voice. He played a variety of instruments and his knowledge of classical music was encyclo. . .