The Way Home

The hall was done up lovely for Eileen’s wedding: white ribbon looped along the tables, a three-tier cake on its own stand by the top table, and the band working through their second set while half the room danced and the other half stood about with drinks, red-faced and delighted. Margaret had danced twice already, once with her father and once with a cousin of the groom’s who had two left feet and apologised for every one of them.

“You’ll ruin your dress, standing so close to the buffet,” her mother said, passing with a tray of sandwiches, and Margaret laughed and stepped back obligingly.

Eileen looked well. Radiant, everyone kept saying, and it was true: she’d done her own hair that morning, set it the night before in rollers, and it had held perfectly through the ceremony and the photographs after. Their father had cried a little at the church, which he denied afterwards, blaming the heat and the crush of people.

Margaret slipped her cigarettes from her small bag and caught her mother’s eye across the room; her mother gave her the look that meant not in here, so she made her way toward the side door instead, past a knot of aunts comparing the sandwiches to the ones at somebody else’s wedding the year before, and out into the yard.

It was a soft evening, cool after the heat of the hall, and she lit up gratefully and leaned against the wall.

A young fella came out a moment later for the same reason, nodded to her politely, and stood a little way off. His shoes were an odd sort, white, with no laces to speak of, more like gutties than anything a young man would wear out, but Margaret thought nothing of it beyond a faint, passing how odd, and went back to her cigarette.

He finished before her and went back inside, and she stayed on a minute longer, listening to the band start up something slower through the wall.

When she was done she went to find the door back in, and it was exactly where she’d left it (she laughed at herself for a moment’s foolishness, thinking it might have moved) and stepped back into the noise and the warmth and her mother’s raised eyebrow at the smell of smoke on her.

“Dance with your Uncle Frank,” her mother said. “He’s asking for you.”

She did. Uncle Frank told the same joke he told at every wedding, about the priest and the racehorse, and Margaret laughed at the right places because she loved him and because it was, in its way, still funny the fifth time. For a moment, between numbers, the band paused and the room quieted, and in that gap Margaret caught a low, steady hum from somewhere beyond the walls: a sound like distant traffic, though there was rarely traffic enough near the hall to explain it. It was gone as soon as the band started up again, and she didn’t think of it twice.

Later, when the cake had been cut and the good plates cleared, she went out again for another smoke, this time with her cousin Rosaleen, and they stood in the yard comparing notes on which of the groomsmen might be worth dancing with before the night was out.

Margaret glanced up at the guttering as they talked. They must have done something to it since she’d last been out here; it looked wrong somehow, too smooth and too pale against the brick. She nearly mentioned it to Rosaleen, then laughed at herself for noticing guttering at all on a night like this, and the moment passed.

They went back in together, arm in arm.

It was near midnight when Margaret slipped out on her own for one last cigarette before they went for the last trolleybus home, and this time the yard was quiet, the band’s sound muffled through the wall, just her and the cool air and the smell of her own smoke curling up into the dark.

The cigarette had barely burned halfway down when she realised she couldn’t quite place which wall she was leaning against.

She’d been out here twice already that night and knew its shape by heart. The low wall along the back, the bin store, the gate that led round to the front. But the gate seemed further off now than it should have, and the bin store had become, somehow, a row of great wheeled bins she didn’t recognise at all, and beyond the gate, where the street ought to have been, there was only a long grey stretch of tarmac, wider than any road near the hall, marked down its centre with a broken white line she was almost certain hadn’t been there an hour before.

She finished the cigarette anyway, telling herself it was only the dark playing tricks, and went to find the door back in.

It wasn’t where she’d left it.

She walked the length of the wall twice, hand trailing along the brick, and found only more wall, and then a corner that shouldn’t have been there, and then she was standing on the edge of that wide grey road with the hall nowhere behind her at all.

“Excuse me,” she said to a man walking past. “I’m looking for Kilbride Hall. My sister’s wedding’s on tonight, and I’ve only stepped out for a smoke.”

He slowed, looked at her properly, and something crossed his face that she didn’t care for. “You alright there? You lost?”

“I’m not lost,” Margaret said, a little tartly. “I’ve stepped out the side door and I can’t find my way back in, that’s all. If you’d just point me toward Farrow Road I’ll manage from there.”

He glanced behind him, the way people do when deciding whether to get involved in something. “Might be best you stay put a minute, love,” he said, and carried on without pointing at anything at all.

It went on like that. She stopped a woman with a pram and asked the same question, and got the same soft, careful voice back (are you alright, are you lost) and no directions whatsoever. A group of young ones passed by, one of them talking quietly to no one that Margaret could see, a thin wire running from her ear down into her coat, and none of them so much as broke stride to help.

She began to find the whole thing very rude. She was not a child, and she was not, whatever they seemed to think, lost, only turned around, and in need of simple directions.

An older man was sitting on a low wall further along, watching her with the look of someone who half-recognised her.

“I’m trying to get back to my sister’s wedding,” she said. “Or failing that, home. Cullen Street. Could you point me the right way?”

He looked at her a long while, longer than seemed necessary, and something in his face was almost kind, almost sorry.

“Straight on,” he said, and lifted his hand to point. “Keep on down there. It’ll come to you.”

It did come to her, and that was the strange relief of it. The further she walked, the more the road began to settle into something she knew. There was the corner where the Hartley boys used to play marbles. There was the lamppost, though the light at the top of it hummed rather than buzzed, a colour she couldn’t quite name. Her own front step, with the blistered paint, not thirty yards on now, and she felt the tightness in her chest ease at the sight of it.

She was aware, in a vague way, of people stopping to watch her go by. A woman standing stock-still on the far pavement, hand over her mouth. Someone speaking low into one of those small glowing things, eyes on her the whole time. A car (sleek and low and nothing like any car she knew) slowing beside her and keeping pace for a stretch before moving on.

She thought: let them look.

She was not lost. She knew exactly where she was going, and she had had more than enough of strangers gawking and asking silly questions instead of simply answering hers. She held her chin up and kept walking, and did not so much as glance at any of them again.

She was almost at her own door (her hand nearly at the gate) when the blue light came sweeping across the road, turning the wet tarmac a deep, bruised blue, and a car pulled in at the kerb ahead of her with no siren, only that slow patient turning light.

Two police officers got out, faces careful and kind in that same soft way as everyone else that evening, and Margaret felt the first flicker of impatience at being stopped now, of all times, when she was nearly home.

“Margaret,” one of them said, gentle, the way you’d speak to something breakable. “There you are. We’ve been looking for you a good while.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” she said. “I’ve come from my sister’s wedding. I’m nearly at my own front door.”

It was only as he took her elbow, careful, the way you’d guide someone across ice, that she looked down and saw she was still in her nightgown. Thin cotton, small faded flowers, wet through at the hem from rain she hadn’t noticed falling. Her feet bare on the cold pavement. Her cigarette, her sister’s wedding, the band still playing somewhere behind her: the young fella’s odd white shoes, the low hum beyond the walls, the guttering that had looked wrong, the broken white line down the centre of the road. None of it anywhere she could find it now, and all of it, suddenly, exactly where it had always been.

She looked up at the street around her (wider than she remembered, brighter, full of houses she didn’t quite know under a sky gone the wrong colour for evening or morning either) and for just a moment the thread pulled taut enough that she nearly, nearly understood.

Then it slackened, and let her go.

“Shove the lot of you,” she muttered, mostly to herself, as they walked her gently to the car. “I know my own way home.”

The door closed softly behind her.