Eve

Eve began to search for the plastic blow-up bed as a loud whoop burst through the floorboards and circled the landing. It was followed by the rupture of laughter, the scraping of chairs across the kitchen tiles.

‘Get out ta fuck,’ her dad said, fun brimming at the edge of each word. Eve could picture his wide toothy grin, his head of grey curls thrown back laughing at something Julie Broderick had said.

It was her brother Conor’s ninth birthday. All afternoon the house had been filled with the high-pitched play of his classmates, their footsteps running through the hall downstairs.

Now, close to midnight, Eve could hear the stragglers in the kitchen: the estate kids, whose parents, like her own Dad, were drawing the nine-year old’s birthday party into an all- night drinking session.

Eve gripped the edge of the blow-up bed and began to pull. The bed, still folded like a gigantic plastic sheet, came sliding towards her carrying a six pack of beer and the mouldy crust of a half-eaten cheese sandwich tucked into its top fold. Eve nudged the beer back into the airing-press and ignored the rotten sandwich. As Dads go, Eve’s wasn’t bad at cleaning, but Conor’s discarded lunches could turn up anywhere. And it seemed to Eve, as she shut the door tight with the sole of her Nike Air Max, that the airing-press was as good a place as any for Conor’s sandwich to finish decomposing into a cloud of dust.

‘Eve! What the hell? I need a bed for Joey,’ her dad said, his boots rounding the top of the stairs, his wiry frame towering over her.

Eve looked down at the plastic blow-up bed. She had successfully unfolded it, tried to manoeuvre its large limp form between Conor’s bed and his wardrobe, making room for Joey, the intended occupant of the bed, and Julie Broderick’s youngest son from her second marriage which ended in an ugly row one day as Eve, Conor and Joey returned home from school.

Eve still remembers the clothes strewn across Julie’s driveway, the sound of sobbing from inside her front door. ‘How was I to know?’ Eve heard her whisper over and over to Eve’s dad later that night. ‘He was so good with Joey. So attentive...’ Now, five years on, Julie had moved up north but made the occasional visit back to Sycamore Grove where she and Eve’s Dad continued drinking, and Joey ran wild and free to torment Conor, Eve’s little brother.

‘Come on now, we’ll set up the beds. Then we can relax,’ her dad said, his voice softening. He rested his can of Heineken on Conor’s bedside locker and bent over the plastic monstrosity at his feet.

Eve continued to hold one corner of the bed, thinking as she did that when her dad said we can relax, he meant we can drink. But Eve’s Dad had standards too, she would give him that.

When someone came to stay - Julie Broderick, or Eve’s aunt Bernie - they always got a bed with clean sheets for the night. There was no slipping in beside Conor or Eve, no robbing other people’s pillows. And Eve’s Dad always cleaned the house before a party: scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen with bleach; hoovering the stairs and bedrooms. This was before the

cooking began and he prepared a tray of lasagne and garlic bread for the adults and set the kitchen table with colourful paper plates and large bowls of sweets for the kids.

It was there, amongst the home cooking, when the sweets had been exhausted and the cake passed round, her dad’s drinking started, and when it did, Eve thought it was like pulling a thread on a careful knit sweater and watching the stitches unravel at the seams, until the whole creation her father had tenderly put together fell asunder.