We present an extract from Confessions, the debut novel by Catherine Airey - read below.
Confessions follows three generations of women from New York to rural Ireland and back again. It is late September in 2001 and the walls of New York are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady's father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. Her mother died long ago and now, orphaned on the cusp of adulthood, Cora is adrift and alone. Soon, a letter will arrive with the offer of a new life: far out on the ragged edge of Ireland, in the town where her parents were young, an estranged aunt can provide a home and fulfil a long-forgotten promise. There the story of her family is hidden, and in her presence will begin to unspool...
Cora Brady, New York 2001
Two days after she disappeared, most of my mother's body washed up in Flushing Creek. The morgue had comfy armchairs in the lobby, and I can remember being annoyed that it didn’t take longer for my father to identify the body. I was reading Little Women and would have quite happily sat there all day. I was eight.
Almost exactly eight years later, my father jumped from the 104th floor of the World Trade Center, North Tower. I don’t know that he jumped for sure, but it’s the story I’ve told myself.
I saw the photo of the Falling Man the next morning in the New York Times, along with everyone else left in the world. As well as that famous one, the photographer captured eleven others of the same man falling. Years later, when it became possible for a person to do such a thing, I inspected each photo, then pieced them together like a kineograph to see the man in motion, tumbling over and over.
For a while it was accepted that the man had been a pastry chef working in the Windows on the World restaurant. Later they said he was a sound engineer, brother to a singer who had been in Village People. They never said it was my father. I never told anyone that I thought it could be him – not just because the chances of it being true were next to none, but because I knew I wouldn’t have been able to handle being proved wrong.
If someone were to somehow not know what had happened that day, and simply seen that photo, they’d be forgiven for thinking it must be showing some kind of stunt.
In 1974, a man had walked between the tops of the two towers on a wire tightrope. The following year, a different man dressed up as a construction worker made his way to the roof of the North Tower and jumped off, attached to a parachute. Two years after that, a third man scaled the side of the South Tower. It took him less than four hours to reach the top. None of these men were harmed.
I knew all about these stunts because I’d done a home-room presentation on the towers once in elementary school. I remember asking my parents (my mother was still alive at the time) if they remembered any of this happening, but they told me that they weren’t even living in New York at that point. The main thing they seemed to recall about coming to the city was the garbage strikes – piles of trash, eight feet high along the sidewalks. But what did I care about trash?
When the first plane hit, I was waiting for Kyle to come over. We’d spent the summer taking drugs and having sex in my apartment while my father was at work. I was supposed to be going into Junior Year, but in the week since Labor Day I’d stayed at home deleting voicemails left by the school.
Mr Brady, this is Principal Green calling from Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Cora wasn’t in roll call today, again. Could you please call back.
By the time I got up, my father had already left for work. I showered, brushed my teeth and put on a dress I didn’t think Kyle had seen yet. It was navy with little lady-bug dots on it. The weather was perfect, the sky such a fearless blue. I was going to try to persuade Kyle to walk as far as Coney Island. But I could already imagine him calling it 'Phoney Island’. I liked it there – the playground of the world. My favourite film at the time was Annie Hall and they’d recently taken down the roller coaster that had been featured in it. I wanted to see what kind of presence its absence had created. I liked the fact that Coney Island was always changing and yet somehow felt the same. I wanted to walk along Surf Avenue and for Kyle to see me sparkling in the sunlight. I wanted summer to never end. I wanted to pretend.
Confessions is published by Penguin
