The Secret Place

Dad wiggles the fingers of one hand at her, beckoning. Holly rolls her eyes and holds up her key ring. Her personal alarm is a pretty little teardrop, black with white flowers. Dad spent a long time searching for one that looks like a normal key ring, so she won’t get embarrassed and take it off, but he still checks every single week.

‘That’s what I like to see,’ says Dad, going back to the potatoes. ‘I heart my paranoia.’

‘Nobody else has to have one.’

‘So you’re the only one who’ll escape the mass alien abduction. Congratulations. Need a snack?’

‘I’m OK.’ On Fridays they use up their leftover pocket money on chocolate and eat it sitting on the wall at the bus stop.

‘Perfect. Then you can give me a hand here.’

Mum always makes dinner. ‘Where’s Mum?’ Holly asks. She pretends to focus on hanging up her coat straight, and watches Dad sideways. When Holly was little her parents split up. Dad moved back in when she was eleven, but she still keeps an eye on things, especially unusual things.

‘Meeting some friend from back in school. Catch.’ Dad throws Holly a head of garlic. ‘Three cloves, finely minced. Whatever that means.’

‘What friend?’

‘Some woman called Deirdre.’ Holly can’t tell whether he knows she was looking for that, some woman. With Dad you can never tell what he knows. ‘Mince finely.’

Holly finds a knife and pulls herself onto a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘Is she coming home?’

‘Course she is. I wouldn’t bet on what time, though. I said we’d make a start on dinner. If she gets back for it, great; if she’s still off having girl time, we won’t starve.’

‘Let’s get pizza,’ Holly says, giving Dad the corner of a grin. When she used to go to his depressing apartment for weekends, they would order pizza and eat it on the tiny balcony, looking out over the Liffey and dangling their legs through the railings – there wasn’t enough room for chairs. She can tell by the way Dad’s eyes warm that he remembers too.

‘Here’s me giving my mad chef skills a workout, and you want pizza? Ungrateful little wagon. Anyway, your mammy said the chicken needed using.’

‘What are we making?’

‘Chicken casserole. Your mammy wrote down her recipe, give or take.’ He nods at a piece of paper tucked under the chopping board. ‘How was your week?’

‘OK. Sister Ignatius gave us this big speech about how we need to decide what we want to do in college and our whole entire lives depend on making the right decision. By the end she got so hyper about the whole thing, she made us all go down to the chapel and pray to our confirmation saints for guidance.’

That gets the laugh she was looking for. ‘And what did your confirmation saint have to say?’

‘She said I should be sure and not fail my exams, or I’m stuck with Sister Ignatius for another year and aaahhh.’

‘Smart lady.’ Dad tips the peelings into the compost bin and starts chopping the potatoes. ‘Are you getting a little too much nun in your life? Because you can quit boarding any time you want. You know that. Just say the word.’

‘I don’t want to,’ Holly says, quickly. She still doesn’t know why Dad is letting her be a boarder, especially after Chris, and she always feels like he might change his mind any minute. ‘Sister Ignatius is fine. We just laugh about her. Julia does her voice; once she actually did it all the way through Guidance, and Sister Ignatius didn’t even realise. She couldn’t work out why we were all cracking up.’

‘Little smart-arse,’ Dad says, grinning. He likes Julia. ‘The Sister’s got a point in there, though. Been doing any thinking about what comes after school?’

It feels to Holly like the last couple of months that’s all any adult ever talks about. She says, ‘Maybe sociology – we had a sociologist come in to talk to us in Careers Week last year, and it sounded OK. Or maybe law.’

She’s focusing on the garlic, but she can hear that the rhythm of her dad’s chopping doesn’t change, not that it would anyway. Mum is a barrister. Dad is a detective. Holly doesn’t have a brother or a sister to go Dad’s way.

When she makes herself look across, he’s showing nothing but impressed and interested. ‘Yeah? Solicitor, barrister, what?’

‘Barrister. Maybe. I don’t know; I’m only thinking about it.’

‘You’ve got the arguing skills for it, anyway. Prosecution or defence?’

‘I thought maybe defence.’

‘How come?’

Still all pleasant and intrigued, but Holly can feel the tiny chill: he doesn’t like that. She shrugs. ‘Just sounds interesting. Is this minced enough?’

Holly’s been trying to think of a time when her dad decided she shouldn’t do something and she ended up doing it anyway, or the other way around. Boarding is the only one she could come up with. Sometimes he says no flat out; more often, it just ends up not happening. Sometimes Holly even winds up, she’s not sure how, thinking he’s right. She wasn’t actually planning to tell him about the law thing, but unless you concentrate you end up telling Dad stuff.