Free All That I Leave Behind by Alison Walsh Page B

you?’
    ‘I’ll try,’ Mary-Pat said, pushing the door of the shop open with an exaggerated sigh.
    ‘Ta-dah!’ Melissa was standing beside Rosie, a huge grin on her face, and when Mary-Pat and June were silent for a second, she squealed, ‘Doesn’t she look amazing?’
    June was rooted to the spot. Rosie was standing in a shaft of sunlight, which caught her lovely golden-red hair and lit up her pale, freckled skin. And she just looked a vision in antique cream lace, with a dropped waist, that suited her boyish figure, a large damask rose pinned to her hip, her lovely hair piled in a loose bun on her head. She looked like one of those women in the pre-Raphaelite paintings that Mammy loved so much. Oh, she was lovely, just lovely, June thought. How did you grow up so suddenly, Rosie? she thought. How did that happen? And, not for the first time, she felt that guilt that she’d had so little to do with it. That she’d left it all to Mary-Pat.
    She could still remember it, the day she’d run away. Not that she’d admitted that to anyone, even to herself. June was nineteen, nearly twenty, and she knew it was her last chance to get out, even though she told herself that she was simply going up to visit Susie at the nurses’ home in St Vincent’s where she was doing her training, and where she would host illicit parties, her tiny room stuffed full of student nurses and doctors. It was fun, and June wanted that more than anything else. Fun and life and excitement.
    It had been part of her Grand Plan. She’d actually called it that, had written it into the pink furry diary she kept under the bed and which June had loved because it had had a little padlock on it. She’d written the heading in block capitals, with a row of bullet points below it. First, she’d learn to talk properly, not like some ‘bogger’ as they called it in Dublin. Then she’d have lots of acquaintances. Everyone in Dublin had them, to go to the theatre with, to the kind of expensive restaurants June couldn’t afford. Nobody in Monasterard had them – they had sisters, brothers, friends, cousins, not acquaintances. It sounded much more sophisticated. And June wanted to be sophisticated more than anything else.
    And so she’d told no one, sneaking out the door that Saturday afternoon, everything she’d need stuffed into a little duffle bag that she’d found under Pi’s bed. But Rosie had followed her. ‘Where are you going, Junie?’ She’d bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, her little freckled hands grimy from hours spent on the towpath, messing around the way she loved to do.
    ‘Oh, nowhere special, Rosie-boo, just off to Timbuktu.’
    ‘You are not going to Timbuktu,’ Rosie said, her face crumpling and June thought how tactless she’d been. Rosie had a thing about people leaving. It made her anxious and they normally had to explain to her exactly where they were going and for how long. It was funny, really, because she’d had no memory at all of Mammy leaving, not like the rest of them, but somehow she seemed to have absorbed the anxiety about it.
    And so, June had lied. ‘You’re right, I’m not. I’m just going to Dublin to a party. I’ll be back in the next day or two.’ And Rosie had seemed to accept what she’d said, but it didn’t stop her watching June as she walked all the way up the towpath to the village. June could feel Rosie’s eyes on her back, and it made her feel awful, because she knew that she was never coming back. Oh, of course, she had – she’d come back the following Tuesday to pick up the rest of her stuff, but she’d never stayed at home again. Not properly. And she’d never thought to wonder how her sisters felt about it. She was gone, leaving Monasterard, and everything else, behind her. And she’d come to Dublin and she’d made a go of things, gathering together a circle of friends-who-weren’t-really-friends for cocktails, the theatre, the gallery openings that she attended