The Truth Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be like you,’ she once told me. It was the biggest compliment I’d ever received in my life.
    Aggie was the happiest person at my wedding. She was beaming – glowing, almost. She always wanted me to settle down and start a family. She didn’t have children herself. She married Great-Uncle Joseph in her mid-forties, though she had known him for years – it must have been the longest engagement in history. I’ve never quite understood why they didn’t marry earlier, since she has often said she would have liked to have children, but naturally this isn’t something I mention – especially now, since Joseph is dead, and so are many of the people who attended their wedding. I remember the wedding photos: Joseph and Aggie standing together outside the church with Aggie’s parents. They w ere all beaming, of course; beaming so much it looked like they might burst…
    I remember my wedding to Diarmuid, and sigh. It was on the wedding day that my doubts started. I thought they came later, after the mice, but I suddenly remember that as I was about to walk up the aisle I had this really strong feeling that I still had time to make a run for it. But then I got caught up in all the excitement again. My doubts evaporated. I truly thought they had gone for ever.
    What makes people feel alone, when they so clearly aren’t – when they’re surrounded by friends and relatives and husbands? Maybe there is another kind of alone, the kind that your soul feels when it longs for a kindred spirit – someone who understands. Someone who knows what it feels like. Someone whose eyes meet yours across a crowded room.
    That’s the person I talk about when I tell Aggie about my happy marriage to Diarmuid. I talk about how I sometimes look up to find him watching me, tenderly. How we walk along the beach and make squiggly marks on the sand with our bare feet. I talk about how we sometimes laugh at nothing; how he teases me when I get ‘too serious’; how we munch bowls of corn chips and watch really stupid television programmes. I tell her how, on our honeymoon, we drank too much champagne one night and decided to skinny-dip in the pool at midnight. I describe how warm the water was against our naked skin.
    Only when I talk like this I’m not describing Diarmuid. I wanted Diarmuid to skinny-dip in the pool on our honeymoon, but he wouldn’t. Even though it was in the wee small hours, he was sure that someone from Dublin would see us – probably someone who knew his mother.
    I don’t tell Aggie this, of course. She really likes this other Diarmuid, the one I make up. The one who tenderly traced his fingers over my naked skin by a blossom-scented pool. The one w ho kissed me under the golden, star-filled sky.
    ‘Sally…’
    ‘Yes, Aunt Aggie?’
    ‘Sally, that thing that happened with your parents… It wasn’t your fault.’ Aggie is looking at me like a bird. She is thin-faced; her mouth was once full and soft, but now it’s a sort of crevice. Her wispy grey hair still has its curls. They lie limply on her forehead.
    ‘Sally, I’m talking to you.’
    I look down. That’s the thing I can’t stand about visiting Aggie these days: she says things like this. She reminds me of stuff I don’t want to remember. She seems to have formed opinions about certain things, and they leap out of her suddenly. It’s as if part of her has travelled ahead, seen the big picture. But I don’t want to see the big picture. I don’t want to know what was my fault and what wasn’t. I just want to sit with her and love her while I can.
    ‘Thank you, Aggie.’ I say it because I know she thinks I’ll be pleased to hear her pardon. Her amnesty. Her exoneration.
    ‘It’s true.’ She studies me earnestly. She looks as though she expects me to keep talking. Her scrawny hands clasp the top of the duvet. They look so sweet and sad and lost, somehow, on the bright-orange fabric. Why did she have to mention something I try so hard to forget?
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