by Dave Duggan
I knew that. Not the exact date, more the season. The blood blemish on the hawthorn told me. Ruby continued.
‘I could pick you up and we …’
‘Ah, no, Ruby, I don’t think I …’
‘You haven’t the excuse of work anymore. Filing clerks don’t work on a Saturday, especially on a Bank Holiday weekend.’
‘No, Ruby. You and Maisie go.’
‘Right. Me, Maisie and Bill’ll go. Fair play to him. And I’ve booked a table for four at Turmeric, for six o’clock.’
‘Maisie eats Indian food?’
‘It’s the jazz weekend. It was the only half-decent place I could get us in. They’ll have chips and she can pick off our plates.’
‘Bill is on for all this? He’s even more of a catch than I thought.’
‘He’s my husband. It’d be good if you and Auntie Maisie met him.’
Auntie Maisie had chips and wedges. The rest of us had a range of curries. Maisie tried each one, dipping her chips cautiously, then pronouncing on their qualities.
‘There’s too much cream in that. You’d get heartburn, if you ate all that. Chicken, is it? Nice white flesh anyway.’
‘Spinach? You wouldn’t get me eating that. I didn’t know you were vegetarian, Ruby. You’re not. Then tell me why are ye ateing the spinach then. Here, just a wee dip. I must be mad.’
‘There’s gunpowder in that one. Or coal. Something black anyway. You’d have to have that one, Edmund. Look at the colour of the bowl. There, let me just mop up that last bit. Lamb, is it? No, no meat, just the juice.’
Ruby defended me from Maisie’s abuse for not visiting the grave.
‘God knows, Edmund, it wouldn’t have killed you to go to see your mother’s grave and it the anniversary and all. Bill was up there, fair play to him. And the lovely stone Ruby put on it.’
‘Edmund gave me money for it, Maisie,’ said Ruby. ‘He done his bit. Would you like the Black Forest Gateaux?’
‘Is it Indian? Long as there’s no rice with it.’
‘No, Maisie. Or the Banoffee, maybe? Shur, we’ll get the two and we can share them.’
‘Banoffee, yeh. And the Black Forest. Trem ...? What’s that? Get it anyway. Three, aye.’
We shared the desserts, Bill and Maisie enjoying the lion’s shares. I took to Bill the moment I met him. He managed to look like an eccentric jazz musician, while exuding the steadiness of an actuary, his clothes riffing on swing trousers, spats and Hawaiian shirts.
I knew the evening was orchestrated by Ruby and I enjoyed it. I didn’t object when she announced that I would accompany Auntie Maisie home, as she and Bill had to dash for an eight o’clock spot they had at The City Hotel, as warm-up for the big band coming on at half nine.
‘Unless you want to come with us, Maisie?’
‘On these feet? Ye must be joking. No, I’ll head back. I’ll get a taxi. I’ll be no bother. You know me.’
Ruby raised her eyebrows at me and I said,
‘Shur, I’ll go with you, Maisie. We might call into Docs for one on the way home.’
‘Docs! If they saw me coming in there now, they’d send for an exorcist. No ghosts allowed.’
Bill returned to the table, nodding at Ruby, as he sat down. I realised he’d paid the bill and I felt a sharp surge of resentment rise through me. The phrase ‘not his place’ trailed across my brain, until I realised that, contrary to my first reaction, this was ‘his place’. He was part of my family now. I looked around the table. My sister and her husband dressed and made up in show clothes, musician-clowns decades out-of and right-bang-up-to date; my aunt, in a fine cotton long-sleeved summer dress, navy blue with white blossoms, tinged with red, dappled across them. She could have passed for a singer in a nostalgia outfit, a special guest for the festival; me, in a new corduroy jacket, summer chinos and deck shoes, no socks. I could be a musicians’ manager and part-time jazz academic. This is my family, I thought and the depth of the notion pleased me, so I smiled hard and Ruby asked ‘You alright, Edmund?’ in a voice that echoed out of days past. I was a boy, sitting on the wall of the factory opposite where we lived, my aunt crossing to me, her arms folded across her small breasts, asking me the same question.
‘You alright, Edmund?’
Would I have cried if Bill Peoples, my new brother-in-law, who made our family fuller, had not been there?
‘I’ll get us a hack, Maisie,’ I said.
‘Aye, one of the perks of being a cop, I suppose,’ Maisie said. ‘Town’s mad today with all the jazz.’
On our way out, Maisie stopped by a table and spoke to a woman her own age, on the edge of a large group.
‘I never thought Indians could do chips right, but they were lovely, right enough. Aye, the Tramashooee was tasty.’
Outside, the evening was clear and warm. Late blueness, dotted with fluffy, white clouds slowly migrating to night, swept above the rooftops. Bill left to get the van.
‘He’s a grand fella, Ruby. I see he paid up.’
Ruby nipped whatever resentment that lingered very firmly in the bud.
‘We all did. ‘Cept Maisie. You can send me something. I’m glad you joined us. It meant a lot to Maisie. We’re all she has.’
‘What does she think of Bill?’
‘She’s grand with him. She never gave much thought to men. “Long as you’re happy” is all she says to me.’
‘And you are. Jesus, Ruby, you’re radiant.’
‘Curry and hot-flushes. You set for the new job?’
‘Yes and no. I’m worried it’ll be a back-water. It will be a back-water, what am I saying?’
‘You heard Maisie, inside, when you told us about it. She reckons you’d be better off back at the books.’
‘She might be right. I have a few things to finalise. Then, we’ll see.’
‘Don’t wait around, Eddie. Christ, where’s Maisie? She didn’t want to go out, now we can’t get her home.’
Bill pulled up in the van, keeping the engine running.
‘Go on, will ye,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell Maisie ye had to dive, to get set up and all. Go on, on.’
Ruby danced on the balls of her feet, then settled. The patient look never left Bill’s face, gazing at us from behind the front-windscreen of the van.
‘Look, when you get her fixed up, why don’t you come and join us? We’ll have a drink. You and Bill can do a bit of bonding and all that.’
‘Yeh, right. The cop and the jazz musician. Not a common combo.’
‘Wise up, Eddie. You need to get over yourself. It’d do you good to get drunk.’
She kissed me on the cheek, a benediction that warmed me. She climbed into the van and Bill waved as he pulled off. I waved after them and felt tears well up in my eyes.
‘They away?’ Maisie asked, when she came out. ‘That Ruby never has a minute now she has her Bugler Bill. No stopping her now. What are you crying for, you big wean?’
She pulled a handkerchief out of her bag and passed it to me.
‘Christ, you’d better come back with me, so. Get yourself settled. Was there something in your curry? Too hot, was it? Imagine, Josie Donnelly out eating curry with a gang. It’s her book club, she says. You never know, do you. She was a right dunce and we at school. Still, she did capture Fisher Sweeney and held on to him for forty years, ‘til the smoking and the drinking caught up with him.’
The taxi came and we headed to Maisie’s house. The plan had been for me to look after her. The roles reversed, as smoothly as two tango dancers move round each other.
I composed myself in the taxi. Maisie made tea, less formally than usual. Two plain mugs, two tea bags, milk from a carton. No scones, biscuits or treats. We sat upright in straight-backed chairs, my aunt opposite me, lifting the tea-bag out of her mug and tossing it from the spoon over her shoulder, directly
on to the stainless steel draining board. I’d prepared myself for a dressing down, a pep talk, an evaluation, a heart-to-heart, an exhortation, a captain’s half-time speech, whatever Maisie planned to deliver. None of the above came. She gave me a bollocking. Both barrels.
‘Look at the state of you. Give me back me hankie there. Time you got hankies of your own. Look at your sister. Finally making a life for herself, though I hope he’s not a go-boy. Some kind of showbiz fly-by-night. Plenty a’ them out there, you don’t have to tell me.’
‘Was Fisher Sweeney one a’ yours?’
Maisie didn’t bite.
‘You going to let that tay bag stew in your mug? Go on, then. Poison yourself.’
‘It’s grand,’ I managed.
‘That’s right. It’s grand. Let me tell you, young fella. “Grand” will not do it, not at your age. You had a good job.’
‘Thought you didn’t like me being in the cops?’
‘What’s it to you if I like it or not? It’s a job, isn’t it?’
‘I still have a job. Same money. Same grade.’
‘How long do you think they’ll pay detective wages to a filing clerk?’
‘I’m not a filing clerk. I’m investigating historical cases, for a research team in the legacy unit.’
‘The past. You spent a pile a’ time going into your own past and all it got you was grief. Standing outside the restaurant there, like the boy didn’t get the ice-cream. Can you not be a bit happy for your sister, not to be always pulling her down and holding her back?’
‘Jesus, Maisie, I never did that.’
I was shocked that Maisie had that view of how I got on with my sister.
‘Well, what is it, then? Stress at work? Christ, you’re lucky to have work.’
I sat there, stunned and took it all in. Strangely, I enjoyed it as much as I hated it. Who else could cut me with such love? Maisie continued.
‘Don’t give me that aul “stress at work” stuff. Boy like you could have any job he wants.’
‘Maisie, with my record?’
‘I’d say there’s TV programmes would love to have you presenting them. Universities mad to get a gunman working for them. I’d say the Yanks’d love you. You’d be a novelty, God pity them. And you’re smart too.’
Her slagging washed over me like a balm. I was now fully under her wing, safe and secure, as she castigated, cajoled, berated and encouraged me at one and the same time.
‘How many a’ dem fools in the cops can you call “doctor”? I know what I used to call them, but I suppose like everything else, even the cops got smarter, or else they think they have, because they have all them computers. You can do the computers, can’t you? Isn’t there loads a’ jobs wi’ computers these days?’
‘Maisie, hold up. I have a job. There’s been a bit of a reshuffle is all.’
‘A reshuffle? A wholesale kick-over-the-bed, if you ask me. You’ll go off your head stuck behind a desk, up to your oxters in books and folders and computers blinking nonsense at you.’
‘Maisie. Wait. Didn’t I do that for years and I studying for the degree and the doctorate you’re so fond of?’
‘So you did. So you did. But only because they had you locked up and you couldn’t go anywhere. Some pair, I had. Ruby never left the house. She was like a fledgling never fledged. And you were never in the house. I shoulda locked you up then.’
A memory rose in me, bright as a whin-bush.
‘Mind the day the seagull fell in to the yard? Mind?’
‘A seagull? When …’
‘I was only wee. Well, not wee. Like a teenager. I came back over the wall.’
‘Aye. Your scamp days. Running and telling no one. You and that boyo Dessie Crossan and yeer pals, the cops.’
‘Yeh, I was about twelve, maybe. Running, right enough. And over the wall I came. I musta been hungry. There it was. A right thing. Grey, black, mottled as a brindle cow and half as big.’
‘It was big, right enough. More of a small dog, only with wings and black pearls for eyes.’
‘It fell off the roof. Mind, up by the chimney.’
‘Fell? Pushed. The Ma got fed up of it hanging around and said ‘shove off’ and gave it the elbow, the wing, like, and it plonked down by the coal bunker. Next to the monbretia, coming out of the cracks in the concrete, just starting to get a bit a’ colour.’
‘I nearly stepped on it. That was my way back. Over the wall, onto the bunker, into the yard in two clean jumps. I never trampled the monbretia.’
‘So you never.’
Maisie was right. Fell or pushed? At least the seagull survived, as far as we knew.
‘What did you do with it?’ I asked.
‘Me? Nothing. I was knackered them days. On me own, with you and Ruby. She was useless. You were worse. You’d have battered it. Or ate it.’
‘Ah. Jesus, Maisie, I wouldna.’
‘You et everything else. Then vanished again, until some scowling cop tossed you at the front door, rang the bell and sped off as fast as he could. She flew, the seagull. In her own time. She just flew off. The other ones cajoled her, swooping down and squawking, coaxing her and threatening her, ‘til she flew.’
‘And now Ruby’s after flying too. No need to worry about her. She looked great tonight.’
‘Aye, she did. Leading Joe the Blow along with his horn, God forgive me. You look good too, on the face of it. Only you never fully fledged. One scratch and you peel away blubbing like an infant. My sister got the best of you.’
A film crossed Maisie’s face, as if an invisible hand had covered her with a veil. Her features darkened and sharpened, as if clipped and shaped into a wooden face-mask worn by an actor on an ancient Greek stage. Her eyes hallowed out and her mouth rounded and formed a wide portal of her vivid lips. The instant this transformation took sufficed to relocate me to a between-time, when my mother left and my Auntie Maisie emerged as the most important person in my life.
And with that her face clamped contemporary again, her features loosened and wrinkles repossessed her visage. She became my aunt, who dipped her chips in our curries; who worked all the hours of the day to put food on the table her sister cooked for Ruby and me; who took us on, when her sister fled this world for watery oblivion.
‘Look here,’ she said brusquely, charging on once more. She got up and went to the dresser, where she lifted down two display dinner plates of her fine, parian china. She placed them side-by-side on the dresser shelf, then retrieved a small package, brown as the tea we were drinking and tied parcel-wise with a slim green ribbon. She placed it on the table between us, and when she nodded permission, I opened the ribbon and folded out the paper to reveal an old photograph. The colours were almost as dun as the wrapping paper, but I could make out four people: a boy, a girl and two women.
‘There’s your mother,’ said Maisie, not pointing or being clear, so I wasn’t sure who she meant, the woman I could see as the younger Maisie or the woman at the farther end of Ruby and me, separated from me by a strip of sellotape, yellowed as fly-trap sticky paper.
‘The one at the end got ripped off,’ I said.
‘My sister, aye. I was going to give it to you, but I didn’t know … anyway. I’m going to give it to you now.’
‘Who tore it up, Maisie?’
‘You did, Eddie. You did. Just … well, not long after. You know. It was a bad time. You were young.’
‘And you stuck her on again?’
‘I found it. After. Yeh. Torn, like. One piece, up in the room above. The other piece, the small piece, out in the yard. You must a’ thrown it out the window. I stuck ‘em together.’
‘You just got on with it, Maisie.’
And she laughed, relieved to have shown me the photo, to have presented our severed foursome: her sister, me, Ruby; blood relatives, bonded by myst
eries not even my detective training could resolve. I knew the people to ask, but I didn’t have the questions.
‘Go you on,’ said Maisie, ‘I’m grand now. Do you not have a girl or anything? Jesus, maybe you’re gay, though I’d probably’ve known that. Do you have a fella?’
‘Maisie, I have you. And I have Ruby.’
‘And she has Bill. God love her. He’s another boy never grew up. Thinks he’s going to win a talent show on the telly. Did you see the suit on him tonight? The lapels were as broad as Shipquay Street and twice as steep.’
‘I’d say he’s not as gormless as you think. I might meet them, after. If you’re okay?’
‘When was I never okay?’
‘Keep you the photo, Maisie. If I want to see it again, I know where it is.’
‘If you’re sure. I do take it down sometimes, for a wee look, just, I don’t know, to prove it all happened.’
‘What happened, Maisie?’
‘You know something, Edmund, I haven’t really got a clue. There was me and me sister, Alice, and our parents died and then ye came, gifts and a turmoil, all in a storm of winters. There was work and Alice and she heart-broken so hard she went into the river and I had no choice, with ye to look after. Until ye got big enough to go yeer own mad ways, ‘til now. Jesus, I’m so glad Ruby’s finally off me hands. I said it to Alice, up in the cemetery, before the dinner. “Alice,” I said, “Isn’t it great to see Ruby settled. Now I only have the one to sort out.”’
‘Meaning me. Listen, Maisie, I can sort meself out. What did she say back to you? Alice?’
‘Feck off you. She didn’t talk to me and we up at the grave.’
Alice. She talks to me. In my dreams. Alice. Saying her name unsettled me.
‘Ruby done alright with the stone,’ Maisie continued. ‘You, too. It’s fitting. I said to Ruby, I’ll go down with her. There’s no sense in buying another plot. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not. Jesus, she’s your sister, isn’t she?’
‘Only well …’
‘Listen, Maisie. Some day, maybe, we’ll have another chat, like tonight. You, me, Ruby. Bill even.’