Eutopia (First version)

Chapter 21

Theresa O’Malley was smaller than Eutopia remembered, petite and pixie-like with shining copper hair streaked through with silver at the front that showed where she’d swept it all up into a neat bun at the nape of her neck. Her warm grey eyes, so like Mike’s and crinkled at the edges from a life of bestowing easy smiles, widened in surprise when she opened the front door of their two bed terraced townhouse later that morning.

‘Jaysus, Mary ‘un Joseph save me soul if it isn’t Topi!’ Her hand rested on her chest for a moment as she caught a breath, before she stepped back, widening the gap in the doorway to allow them through. ‘Come inside and have a drink, so you will. Michael, Michael!’ Theresa closed the door swiftly, squeezing past the almost impossibly large form of Jinn, who took up most of the hallway, to shout up the staircase. ‘Michael Thomas O’Malley would you get down these stairs this instant!?’ She whirled, a sudden blur of pale blue wool and bright copper hair and the musical lilt of her faded Irish accent, as she caught Eutopia up in a hug. ‘Oh my goodness me, it’s so good to see you, little one! Michael said he’d spoken to you. We’ve watched all those reports on the television, so we have, but we don’t believe one bit of it. Where’ve you been these past few years?’ Her small, cool hands caught up Eutopia’s face, gently cupping it as she smiled deep into the girls eyes. ‘I often wondered what happened to you. Come, come, and don’t let me keep you from a cuppa.’

Theresa whirled again, a constant blur of delicate motion like a hummingbird’s wing as she led the way down the narrow hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house leaving Eutopia and Jinn, almost knocked sideways in the onslaught of her unexpected enthusiastic greeting, helpless but to follow her.

‘How are you, Theresa?’ Eutopia asked, pulling out one of spindly metal-framed chairs at the table that the small woman gestured to as she flitted about the bright but faded kitchen, filling up the kettle with water at the sink. Jinn squeezed himself into a chair beside Eutopia, which strained loudly beneath his heavy frame, as he looked around with quiet interest.

‘I’m very well, thank you dear. Thomas passed away from us almost three years this November, God rest his soul,’ she lifted a fragile gold chain from around her neck and lightly kissed the tiny crucifix that hung from it in a swift and unconscious gesture before letting it fall back into the folds of her woollen jumper. ‘But I have my Michael back; he’s been my rock these past few years.’ She beamed at Eutopia, dropping teabags into four mugs she’d set on the counter top before her grey eyes found Jinn’s. ‘D’yer take sugar in yer tea, dear?’ she asked him, without batting an eyelid.

Eutopia had always warmed to Mike’s mum, Theresa. It was impossible to spend more than a minute with her without being totally overcome by her tenderness and she had never been one to ask too many questions either, she accepted everything in her stride as it fell at her feet. Eutopia had visited the three storey townhouse on occasion whilst she’d been hanging around with Mike and Kayla and had successfully navigated Jinn to the right street almost straight away, though it had taken at least twenty minutes of deliberation outside in the car before she would let Jinn knock on the door. She hadn’t been one hundred per cent sure of the number and didn’t think it was a good idea to go knocking here there and everywhere in the hope of finding the right house. It wasn’t until she saw Nala, the pretty tortoiseshell cat that belonged to the O’Malleys, perched on the wall of the small front garden cleaning her whiskers in the grey morning light that she dared climb out of the car. Jinn, silent up until then, shook his head with a smile.

‘No thank you, Mrs O’Malley.’ His ethereal beauty seemed somehow at home in the outdated but clean and homely surroundings of the kitchen, emphasising the comforting normality of the room rather than detracting from it, despite the fact he almost occupied the entire kitchen alone. Eutopia noted that nothing seemed to have changed since her last visit, from the chipped and hard brown tiles of the floor to the mock-granite worktops of Formica that stretched the length of one wall of the narrow kitchen.