Holy shit: a compliment. I’d been all geared up to contradict criticisms of everything from Holly’s accent through her attitude through the color of her socks, but apparently my ma was getting soft in her old age. “Which you do. What are your cousins like?”
Holly shrugged and pulled a tiny grand piano out of the dollhouse living room. “Nice.”
“What kind of nice?”
“Darren and Louise don’t talk to me that much because they’re too big, but me and Donna do imitations of our teachers. One time we laughed till Nana told us to shhh or the police would come get us.”
Which sounded a little more like the Ma I knew and avoided. “How about your aunt Carmel and uncle Shay?”
“They’re OK. Aunt Carmel’s sort of boring, but when Uncle Shay’s home he helps me with my maths homework, because I told him Mrs. O’Donnell yells if you get stuff wrong.”
And here I had been delighted that she was finally getting a handle on division. “That’s nice of him,” I said.
“Why don’t you go see them?”
“That’s a long story, chicken. Too long for one morning.”
“Can I still go even if you don’t?”
I said, “We’ll see.” It all sounded perfectly idyllic, but Holly still wasn’t looking at me. Something was bugging her, apart from the obvious. If she had seen my da in his preferred state of mind, there was going to be holy war and possibly a brand-new custody hearing. I asked, “So what’s on your mind? Did one of them annoy you?”
Holly ran a fingernail up and down the piano keyboard. After a moment she said, “Nana and Granddad don’t have a car.”
This wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “Nope.”
“Why?”
“They don’t need one.”
Blank look. It struck me that Holly had never before in her life met anyone who didn’t have a car, whether they needed one or not. “How do they get places?”
“They walk, or they take buses. Most of their friends live just a minute or two away, and the shops are right round the corner. What would they do with a car?”
She thought about that for a minute. “Why don’t they live in a whole house?”
“They’ve always lived where they do. Your nana was born in that flat. I pity anyone who tries to get her to move.”
“How come they don’t have a computer, or a dishwasher even?”
“Not everyone does.”
“Everyone has a computer.”
I loathed admitting this even to myself, but somewhere at the back of my mind I was gradually getting an inkling of why Olivia and Jackie might have wanted Holly to see where I come from. “Nope,” I said. “Most people in the world don’t have the money for that kind of stuff. Even a lot of people right here in Dublin.”
“Daddy. Are Nana and Granddad poor?”
There was a faint pink stain on her cheeks, like she had said a bad word. “Well,” I said. “It depends who you ask. They’d say no. They’re a lot better off than they were when I was little.”
“Then were they poor?”
“Yeah, sweetie. We weren’t starving or anything, but we were pretty poor.”
“Like what?”
“Like we didn’t go on holidays, and we had to save up if we wanted to go to the cinema. Like I wore your uncle Shay’s old clothes and your uncle Kevin wore mine, instead of getting new ones. Like your nana and granddad had to sleep in the sitting room because we didn’t have enough bedrooms.”
She was wide-eyed, like it was a fairy tale. “Seriously?”
“Yep. Plenty of people lived like that. It wasn’t the end of the world.”
Holly said, “But.” The pink stain had turned into a full-on blush. “Chloe says poor people are skangers.”
This came as absolutely no surprise. Chloe is a simpering, bitchy, humorless little object with an anorexic, bitchy, humorless mother who talks to me loudly and slowly, using small words, because her family crawled out of the gutter a generation before mine and because her fat, bitchy, humorless husband drives a Tahoe. I always thought we should ban the whole vile bunch of them from the house; Liv said Holly would outgrow Chloe in her own good time. This lovely moment, as far as I was concerned, settled the argument once and for all.
“Right,” I said. “What does Chloe mean by that, exactly?”
I kept my voice level, but Holly is good at me and her eyes slid sideways quickly, checking my face. “It’s not a swear word.”
“It’s definitely not a nice word. What do you think it means?”
Wriggly shrug. “You know.”
“If you’re going to use a word, chick, you’ve got to have some idea what you’re saying. Come on.”
“Like stupid people. People who wear tracksuits and they don’t have jobs because they’re lazy, and they can’t even talk properly. Poor people.”
I said, “What about me? Do you think I’m stupid and lazy?”
“Not you!”
“Even though my whole family was poor as dirt.”
She was getting flustered. “That’s different.”
“Exactly. You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.”
“Chloe says her mum says it’s superimportant to make sure people know straightaway you’ve got plenty of money. Otherwise you don’t get any respect in this world.”
