‘Well, there’s another room in there if you want it,’ he said, gesturing across the hall. ‘I guess,’ and he paused and looked to the door, ‘which ever one you prefer. You can have my room, or you can have Ellen’s.’
‘This one is lovely, Bill,’ Alice said, but as she spoke she felt Joe touching her on the arm. Not touching her, prodding her. She looked at him. His eyebrows were almost comically high. His eyes were saying something to her. They were going down to her case and sideways to Bill and back to her. They were telling her something urgent. In a moment or two, Alice knew, she would see that urgent thing and understand precisely what it was. She would act on it. She felt herself twitch, even, with the beginnings of that movement, with the first firings of that thing she would do. But she didn’t have it yet. She was waiting for it to slide itself, the perfect, compact clarity of itself, into her mind. She stared at Joe, raising her eyebrows in imitation of his. Joe raised his own eyebrows still higher. Hers couldn’t go that far.
‘What?’ she mouthed to him.
‘I think Bill means, if you’d like to have the room across the hall,’ Joe said.
She stared at him. ‘If I’d like … ?’ She looked to Bill, who shrugged again. ‘Whatever you’d like, whichever suits you best,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ Alice said in a voice that sounded to her like the voice of someone who was trapped under a fallen piece of furniture and who was trying to be sportsmanly about it, trying not, just yet, to give them any cause for undue concern.
‘I’ll take the other room, Bill,’ said Joe.
Alice understood. In a panic, she looked at Joe, and Joe touched her on the arm as he passed, but he was already moving with his bag to the other room, and Bill was nodding and leading the way. How did she repair this? How did she come back from walking up to her eighty-three-year-old grand-uncle and practically slapping her case out of his grip as he tried to put her in a separate bedroom to her boyfriend? Obviously they would be sleeping separately. It didn’t matter that they had been living together in Brooklyn for almost three years. They knew the score. They were unmarried, and they were staying with elderly relations – very, very Catholic elderly relations – and so they would be sleeping in separate rooms. It was fine. It was simple. And now the memory of the way Bill’s gaze had slid sideways at her and away from her in that instant when she took the case from him was pulsing flushes up and down her entire skin.
‘Jesus,’ she said, and sat down on the bed. ‘Jesus, Jesus, fuck.’
‘We’ll be in the kitchen,’ Bill said, from where he was standing in the hall. He had shown Joe into the other bedroom. Maybe he hadn’t heard her. Maybe she hadn’t said it so loud. He gave her a wave, the same wave he had given her at the airport. A salute. The arm raised, frozen in the air a second, then dropped to the side with a half laugh. A shake of the head. ‘See you in a while.’
‘See you, Uncle Bill,’ Alice said. She had never called him Uncle before. Now seemed like the right sort of time to start.
*
‘You’re overreacting,’ Joe said, when she called in to him in the other bedroom. She had made a big thing of this, that she was calling in to him; she had knocked loudly on his door, hoping they could hear her from the sitting room, and she had called something like, ‘All right for me to come in?’ Shouted it, really. Joe had given her a look of weary bafflement when he opened the door.
‘You’re getting worked up over nothing, as usual,’ he said, as he folded the clothes he had taken from his bag and laid them on a chair. The chair was white, and carved, and cushioned, like many other things in the room; it was a room swimming with soft surfaces, with pillows and shams and ottomans and lace-edged quilts and doilies hanging over dressing-table shelves. This was the room she had been meant to sleep in, no doubt about that. Joe looked like a burglar standing in the middle of it, nicely dressed though he might have been; he was too tall, and his hair was too wild, and he hadn’t shaved in the airport bathroom after all. He looked as though he would move his hand any second and break the bedroom in half.
‘He’ll think I’m an assertive little bitch,’ Alice said.
‘No he won’t. And you are assertive, anyway. And there’s nothing wrong with being assertive.’
‘Aggressive, then. He’ll think I’m aggressive.’
Joe put his arms around her where she liked it – right where her arms became her shoulders, right where, according to every magazine she looked at, she was supposed to be hard and toned.
‘You’re second-guessing, like you always do,’ he said. ‘You can’t go second-guessing your way through your whole life.’
This phrase came up often. Alice was growing to like it. It made what she was always doing – getting herself into a welter of paranoia about what other people thought of her – sound somehow cerebral, somehow considered. Somehow more than the narcissistic pity party it simply was. Still, she couldn’t just let him get away with that.
‘You didn’t shave that time, did you?’ she said.
He got that look in his eye, which was the one she had been intending him to get, but which made her feel guilty, all the same. He was trying, the look said, he was doing a lot, but there was always something he would turn out not to have done, and Alice would always make damn certain to remind him. And it was always something small and stupid and utterly irrelevant in the larger scheme of things, the look also said, but Alice would still pounce on it like a cat chasing after every piece of crap that trails or floats or falls, and, in spite of everything, that was a disappointment, wasn’t it, when it came to her, and, in spite of everything, wasn’t it a pity that she had to be a nag like all the rest of them.
‘We should go down to the sitting room,’ he said.
*
In the sitting room, Bill and Ellen sat close together on the sofa. There was room beside them for one other person, and Alice intuited that she should be that person, being the actual relative, and Joe sat across from them in a leather armchair with a footrest that came up with the pull of a handle. He pulled the handle; Bill insisted on it. He might as well be as comfortable as he could, Ellen said by way of agreement. Alice looked at him, with his legs hoisted up, and his body thrust back, and thought, for some reason, of the hurricane.
They watched television – a lot of television. In Brooklyn, they had no television. They watched Will & Grace, Ballykissangel and a film on the Hallmark channel about the widow of a young firefighter who died saving the life of a child. It seemed likely she would marry again, but she was having a hard time giving herself the permission to be happy.
‘He’s meant to be gay,’ said Ellen, when she switched over and found a documentary about a Hollywood actor. Bill clasped Alice’s wrist again, as if to apologise.
‘All these programmes,’ he said. ‘Do you want to watch anything?’
‘We’re happy,’ said Alice. ‘Don’t worry about us.’
But they worried. Every time Ellen changed the channel, she looked for a moment afterwards at Alice, and then at Joe, seeming to want to gauge from their reaction whether this was the kind of thing they liked watching, whether this was the way you made people of their age feel at home these days.
‘The grandchildren have their things they like to watch when they come here,’ she said after they had been watching the Hallmark film for another while. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know if you’d like to do anything.’ She looked to Bill. He nodded.
‘We’ll go down to Mac’s place for dinner soon,’ he said.
*
And Bill worried; he had worried all afternoon. When Joe had told him the names of some of the men that his father knew in Sligo, Bill had realised that one of the men had a brother living nearby, a brother who had come to Chicago in the forties, too, and he had picked up the phone and called him, and after a few awkward words of greeting and of explanation, he had put him onto Joe. Joe, Alice could tell, was thinking of as many things to say as he possibly could. She felt bad about the shaving
remark. He looked good with the stubble. And it was hardly true what she had thought, that Bill and Ellen would think him rough if he was unshaven. Bill and Ellen had had a son. They knew things weren’t straightforward.
‘That was a coincidence,’ said Bill, when Joe handed him back the phone. ‘I haven’t talked to that man in maybe ten years.’
‘Nine,’ said Ellen. ‘We talked to him nine years ago.’ Her mouth drew in on itself, and she shook her head quickly, as if trying to remember something she had been about to say.
Bill stared at her, startled. ‘That’s right,’ he said after a moment. ‘Nine years.’
*
Alice remembered the day the call had come about their son. She had taken it. She had been on a weekend home from college, helping her mother to take the groceries from the boot of the car. Get that, will you, said her mother, when they heard the sound of the phone ringing in the hall, and Alice had run. And so, probably, she had been out of breath when she picked it up, probably, she had panted, gasped all down the phone. Bill’s voice had been unmistakable, and what was in his voice had been unmistakable, too. His son had been sick for three months. Alice knew why he was calling, knew why there was that stillness in his voice when he asked for Alice’s mother, but still she had to talk on at him and say, this is Alice, and say, how are you, and say – though she knew what the answer would be, why did she have to ask it? – how is Jack, and when the answer came back as the news, delivered with such dignity by Bill, explained to her with such beautiful calm, she knew that she was only, still, a child. Because she could not think of the right thing to say back to him. She could not get into her voice the right kind of tenderness, the right kind of love. She said something, and Bill thanked her, and then she turned with the phone to her mother who was framed with her box of groceries in the doorway and who was staring at Alice as though she had been the one to create this news, to thrust it, in all its cruelty, onto this side of the ocean, into this springtime Saturday.
*
After the film about the firefighter had ended with a wedding in a shrub-filled summer garden, Alice took out her laptop and showed them some of the photographs from her last trip back to Ireland. Bill sat on one side of her, and Ellen on the other, and in the armchair Joe put his head to one side and fell asleep.
The photographs were just right, but there were too many of them. She had a digital camera which allowed her to take five hundred, six hundred photographs before she had to erase some, to make room for more, and it meant that she had no discipline when she took photographs, which she liked to do; it meant, for example, that she pointed a camera at her grand-uncle, Bill’s brother, the one who lived in Sligo, and she held the shutter down for ten, twenty, thirty photographs, that she followed him around taking photographs until she noticed him looking at her strangely, looking at her with a little flint of irritation in his eye, and she stopped. These were photographs from the agricultural show in Gurteen. She had gone, out of boredom, with her parents, and had spent the day trying to take arty photographs of bullocks and pullets and prize-winning bales of straw, and of her grand-uncle, who had come in his good clothes to walk the fields and study the animals being paraded inside each ring.
‘He looks good,’ Ellen said, leaning in to the computer screen. ‘He looks strong.’
‘That’s him again,’ said Bill, very quietly, as Alice clicked onto the next, identical photograph, of Bill’s brother standing with his back to the camera, standing with his hands in his pockets by an open horsebox.
They had dinner in an Irish bar. One of the daughters came along, and afterwards they posed for Alice’s camera in the lobby of the bar, where there were hung wooden shields with the name of every county and a famine monument depicting a man in shirtsleeves and with a moustache standing over his exhausted, drooping family, a ship with several sails and a thatched cottage etched into the background. For the photographs, everyone smiled in front of the monument, but what else could they do; they had to have something interesting to stand up against, as Ellen said.
‘We have no horseboxes,’ Bill said, and he was laughing.
‘Wait, wait, don’t take it yet,’ Ellen said, and she reached up and took the baseball cap off Bill’s head.
‘What does it matter?’ Bill said.
‘Appearances,’ said Ellen, glancing down at the buttons of her cardigan.
*
That night, long after they had all said goodnight and made their way to their separate beds, Alice got up to go downstairs for a glass of water. She stepped as quietly as she could; there were only two bedrooms upstairs, which meant that Bill and Ellen were sleeping in a room somewhere on the ground floor, and she did not want to wake them.
But as soon as she reached the bottom of the stairs she could see them clearly. The glow from the streetlights came through the sitting-room window, touching them – almost, you could deceive yourself, warming them. Bill lay on the armchair with the pop-up footrest, his head to one side just as Joe’s had been earlier, his hands clasped, over a blanket, on his lap. The shape on the couch, under another blanket, was Ellen. They were sleeping. One of them breathed in slow, and the other exhaled quickly; one of them took in a breath like a gasp, and the other one sighed. Something seemed to shudder at the window, and Alice saw it, falling idly, falling in the yellow light. It would not accumulate, she told herself. It would not chill them, it would not reach them; it would not creep towards them across the sitting-room floor. The next night, she and Joe would take the couch and the chair, they would not take no for an answer, would not take their beds from them for another minute. They would insist on it.
Back in the bedroom, she could not bring herself to put out the light. The boy smiled up at her from somewhere, and she forced herself, for a moment, to look him in the eye.
Handmade Wings
Eoin McNamee
ALL THROUGH AUGUST CHERYL HAD SEEN THE LIGHT outside the hangar buildings at night. Cheryl lived in a mobile home in the caravan park at the edge of the aerodrome and could see across the empty aprons and deserted runways. Some Russians were running a coach-works from the hangar buildings. The runways were used by autoclubs for racing and rallys and there was a need for custom auto parts. The aerodrome had been built during the war and used as a staging post for the D-Day landings. It had closed in 1949 when the last Americans went home.
The Russians had come in 2003 to work in the fish factories in the town. They had been drawn to the aerodrome from the start.
‘They have dreams of America,’ Dieter said, ‘here is closest they will ever get to it. There are cities in Russia that were left off the map during the Cold War,’ he said, ‘whole cities with millions of people hidden from the outside world. What sort of country is that, do you think?’
Dieter came from Latvia. He cut his hair in jagged futurist shapes. He wore studded belts and leather jackets embossed with runic symbols and read manga comics. Cheryl was tall and thin with straight blonde hair to her waist, and Dieter said she had the pallid beauty of the women who inhabit future cities, citizens of the mutant outworlds.
Cheryl shopped at a discount clothing outlet in the town. The Russian men brought their women there on Saturday morning. They followed their wives and girlfriends into the changing cubicles. They would hold negligees and other complex undergarments at arm’s-length and comment on them. They issued curt instructions. They held dialogues on the fit of a basque.
‘What kind of man is that?’ Dieter said. ‘I show them what a man is.’ He said he had learned karate at a dank gymnasium in Latvia.
There was a seriousness to the way the underwear fittings were conducted that she had not noticed in couples before, or imagined necessary. She had no idea what was at stake in these transactions.
Cheryl worked in the aircraft factory, manufacturing cabin interiors for Boeing. She worked with epoxies and resins, strung wiring looms through ducting. One night she fell asleep on the sofa. When she woke up Dieter was crouched over her
with his eyes closed. He said the door had been open. He said he was breathing in her work smells, inhaling the scent of advanced aero lubricants.
In winter Cheryl would drive home to the mobile home at dusk in November, crossing the empty runways. Sand blown up from the shore would blow across the apron. It was as if the place had its own weather system. You could see the lights of container ships coming up the lough.
Cheryl went to the gym in the town. One day she saw one of the Russians watching her through the glass that separated the gym from the rest of the complex. She was on a running machine which made her move in a lopsided, gangling way. The Russian was in his mid-thirties. A large man with hair sprouting from the cuffs of his boilersuit. He told her that his name was Sasha and that he owned the coachworks. He smelt of blood feuds. Of wolf-prowled outlands. Cheryl thought of a fabled man-beast from an old book of hours, a folkloric terror.
‘You work late,’ she said, ‘I see your light.’
‘That’s not work,’ Sasha said, ‘come and see.’
She looked at him carefully. She wasn’t afraid of him but there were complex nostalgias at work out on the aerodrome, and not everyone was capable of grasping them.
She drove to the coachworks that night. As she did she thought about a photograph of her grandfather at home. He was sitting among other men who had worked on the construction of the runways in the early years of the war. They were looking across the aerodrome with troubled expressions as though the building of it had uncovered a desolation in the landscape that no one had been aware of up until then.
Sasha had set up a video projector outside and was showing films against the wall of the coachworks. A group of older Russian men made up the audience. They were watching Nascar races from Daytona beach. It was old footage and driver fatalities were not uncommon. The Russians watched the drivers as they were hoisted shoulder high, placed onto podiums where they stood looking out over the crowd, sombre garlanded figures.
New Irish Short Stories Page 17