Thirteen Stops

by Sandra Harris

  “I haven’t told him,” Tara said quietly. She bit her lip and lowered her eyes.

  Carl stared at her. “Why not?” he said, and then added: “Tara, why were you buying a suitcase?” Silence. “Tara, are you running away?”

  No answer at first, then she whispered: “Yes. Yes, Carl, I am.”

  “But why?” Carl was bemused. “You and Ritchie make a lovely couple, and now you’ve got all this money. You can both do whatever you want in the world now.”

  “Don’t you get it, Carl? It’s Ritchie I’m running away from!”

  “But why? He’s not . . . he’s not abusive to you, is he?”

  Tara shook her head vehemently. “Christ, no! If anything, I’m abusive to him. Oh, not physically or anything. I’m just a real bitch to him sometimes. I’ve often wondered how he puts up with me. He must really love me.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Oh Carl!” she burst out suddenly. “I’m bored sick of him! He’s just so bloody boring. He goes to work, comes home, goes to bed, gets up, goes to work again and that’s it.”

  “I don’t know whether you’re aware of this or not, Tara,” Carl said in mock-confidential tones, “but that’s what everyone does. It’s actually called life.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a smart-arse.” Tara elbowed him in the side. “You know what I mean. He never wants to go anywhere, have any fun. His idea of a good night in is watching Winning Streak with his bedtime cocoa, and his idea of a good night out is to come home early from wherever we’ve been and watch Winning Streak with his bedtime cocoa.”

  Carl said nothing. Since going back home to live with his parents, he’d watched Winning Streak and drunk cocoa going to bed more nights than he cared to count. It was all older people like his parents seemed to want to do. That was the thing about growing older in general, though, he’d noticed. You genuinely didn’t want to go out raving all night any more. You were tired from working your arse off all day and you fancied early nights more or quiet nights in. Now that he was in his mid-thirties and freewheeling terrifyingly quickly down towards middle age, he fancied the idea of staying in more than he did the idea of going out. Did that make him boring too, he wondered, boring like old Ritchie?

  “He never wants to take risks, do anything adventurous, have an adventure!” Tara moaned. “Haven’t you ever wanted to have an adventure, Carl?”

  “Every time I go into work and sit down at my bloody desk,” he said wryly.

  “Well, there you are then.” Her tone was triumphant. “Ritchie doesn’t care a jot about adventures. All he wants to do is work in his dad’s stupid cutlery factory, then come home to me and the kids. Which we don’t have yet, by the way,” she added gloomily, “but he wants them. Loads of them. A whole army of them, he’s actually said so. He probably wants to raise them to work in their granddad’s cutlery factory like little robots, churning out knives, forks and spoons till they die and hand over the reins to their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children.”

  “I have to say, Tara, that doesn’t sound too bad to me.” Carl took a long swill of his pint and wiped his mouth. “I mean, that’s the kind of thing that everyone wants deep down. A bit of continuity and the knowledge that their name and their family will carry on after them.”

  “I’m too young for all that,” said Tara stubbornly. “I haven’t had any real fun yet. I was denied this” – again she waggled the foot that had cost her her Olympic dream at him – “and I haven’t had any proper fun yet to compensate me.”

  Privately thinking that life usually felt under no obligation whatsoever to compensate you for what you considered to be its rank unfairness, Carl said, “Tara, what exactly were you planning to do when I met you today?”

  “I told you, I was running away.” She sounded sulky now as she ran her fingers through her short, slicked-back dark hair.

  Carl thought again that it really suited her this short. She certainly had the face for it, with the sharp sculpted cheekbones and everything.

  “I was going to go home with the suitcase and pack it, then I would have gone online and booked a cheap flight somewhere. Well, it doesn’t have to be cheap now I’m a millionaire,” she added with a laugh. “But I don’t have the money yet, not until I go to the Lotto building, which I was going to do tomorrow. Which I am going to do tomorrow. I’ll tell you what, Carl,” she went on, her eyes shining, “why don’t you come with me?”

  “What, to the Lotto building?” he said, thinking of all the work he had to do the next day before he could bugger off home for the weekend and watch telly and drink cocoa with the folks. Christ, he was really going to have to watch how boring he was becoming. He’d be an old man, in slippers and an old-man cardigan, in no time at all at this rate.

  “No, silly! Although of course you can come with me there if you want to. I meant, come with me abroad somewhere for a few weeks. Have a real adventure for once in your life.”

  Her hand was on his thigh now. Carl was beginning to feel rather hot under the collar as he contemplated Tara’s offer. Could he really just drop everything, jack it all in, walk away from all his many commitments to go and lie on a beach somewhere with a beautiful woman for a month or two? On the one hand, he’d be nuts not to go with Tara. She was gorgeous and stylish and her hand on his thigh was beginning to make him feel very horny indeed. If it strayed any higher, she might get her answer sooner than she’d bargained for.

  “Same again,” he indicated to the barman, who’d already supplied them with three or four refills so far.

  Carl was starting to feel pleasantly tipsy, but he still had to consider the downside of his sexy companion’s offer. Karen would never forgive him if he just swanned off to Tahiti or wherever else with Tara, and not only would she not forgive him but she’d make sure that the kids didn’t either, and the thought of that was something he didn’t even want to contemplate. Then there was Graeme, the Great Autismo. Carl loved his brother as much as he loved his kids and there was no way he was going to leave him to the tender mercies of Mawoon-Vicky Who Used To Be a Pwozzy-Tute, even if she did seem kind-hearted and genuine, and even if Graeme was a fully grown man of nearly thirty-one, who just wanted to be left alone to make his own decisions and his own mistakes like so-called ‘normal’ people.

  He looked at Tara curiously. “Are you really going to run off somewhere without telling Ritchie?”

  She nodded, starting on her fourth or fifth pint. She was bright red in the face now from the drink, as he knew he was himself, and slurring her words. “That’s not all I’m not telling him.” She giggled.

  “What? What else aren’t you telling him? Are you pregnant or something?”

  “Christ, no!” Then she started laughing. She laughed until the tears began to stream down her face. “The ticket’s half his!” she spluttered eventually.

  “What do you mean, the ticket’s half his?” Carl’s brain was starting to feel fuzzy.

  “I mean, he paid half and I paid half,” she said, still laughing. “That’s how we do it every week. We share a ticket. So that means that half the winnings are his by rights.”

  She wiped the tears from her face with the sleeve of her black top and looked expectantly at Carl, who wasn’t really sure what he was expected to say. Well done, Tara, for pulling the wool over the poor bastard’s eyes so thoroughly and diddling him out of his rightful half of two point four million quid which, unless he was completely blotto which he didn’t think he was, was one point two million buckaroos, which was still a tidy stash of cash in anyone’s language? He didn’t think he could manage this long speech in his current state of inebriation, so instead he just said: “You’re a mad bitch, Tara, that’s what you are.” He air-jabbed at her with his forefinger for emphasis.

  Still laughing, she said: “Shall we see if we can get a room here? And a nice bottle of wine to take up with us?”

  He was about to say that maybe he ought to be t
hinking about getting home – the Nine O’Clock News was already well under way and the weather girl had been wearing some really cheeky little outfits lately – when she began to kiss him on the mouth like they were already lovers. He was about to say that he had some work to do at home and that he was supposed to call his kids before they went to bed or else they wouldn’t sleep, when her hand moved higher on his thigh and then a little bit higher and then . . .

  “Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  The sex was a disaster. Tara fell about the room laughing after pulling repeatedly on his willy, which was reacting poorly to her untender ministrations and all the booze. Every time he tried to put it in her, it went soft and she’d scream with laughter again until he’d get annoyed and tell her to put a cork in it. Either it was the booze, he decided, or the guilt he felt that she wasn’t Karen. (He hadn’t slept with anyone else since the separation and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He liked being in bed with Karen, chatting softly about the kids before they fell asleep, exhausted from the day. He liked the way she spooned up against him when his back was to her, and he liked the way the sound of her even breathing was the last thing he heard as he drifted off to sleep every night.)

  Eventually, Carl and Tara both just passed out on the big bed and slept the sleep of the really, really drunk. When they finally woke up, with dry mouths and banging headaches, it was morning. Carl sat up and rubbed the back of his head gingerly. He thought he might have banged it off the bedpost while in the throes of the-passion-that-never-was. It was no fun, crawling around hungover on a strange and possibly dirty floor, looking for bits of your brain.

  Tara was beside him, clad in her underwear and clutching her head, groaning.

  “You should never have let me drink so much,” she said.

  “Let you?” He was annoyed and showed it. “I’m not your mum.”

  “Sorry.” She leaned over the bed to find her clothes. Both their clothes were everywhere. “I just have this rotten hangover headache.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Carl said grimly, and as they dressed he told her: “Tara, um, I’m not going abroad with you and your winnings.”

  “That’s okay.” She pulled her top down over her head and covered up her breasts, which were every bit as lush as Carl remembered from their schooldays. “I shouldn’t have put you on the spot like that. It was unfair of me. None of this is your problem. I shouldn’t have dragged you into it. It was just – just seeing you like that on the Luas. I got sort of carried away. Heat of the moment and all that.”

  “That’s okay.” Carl grinned. “It was brilliant while it lasted, thinking I could just jack everything in to go and live on a tropical island somewhere with a beautiful woman from my distant past.”

  “The offer still stands if you want.” She looked at him shyly.

  He stared at her, wondering if she was serious. “I can’t,” he said eventually. “I’d miss my kids too much and that’s the God’s honest truth. I think I might try again with Karen, if only for their sake. I think she’d agree to a reconciliation if it helped the kids. And, to be honest, I miss her too.”

  It was funny, he thought, how it had taken a night of nearly-passion with another woman to make him realise that.

  “It’s your loss,” Tara said, pulling on her boots.

  She sounded miffed now but miffed was okay. Miffed he could handle. He’d had plenty of practice with Karen of handling miffed.

  “You’re not still thinking of going through with it, are you? Running away from Ritchie, taking the money that’s half his, starting again somewhere else without telling him a dickybird about anything, like he’s some selfish asshole who’s knocked you about or mistreated you in some way?”

  Carl was surprised to find as he spoke whose side he was on.

  She continued lacing up her boots and didn’t look at him. “I don’t know, Carl,” she said after a silence. “I genuinely don’t know.”

  STOP 8: COWPER

  Liz, Gerry and Jean

  Liz Grimes only barely made the Luas. It was practically pulling out of the Cowper stop when she came running up, huffing and puffing like an old pair of bellows. Damn and blast Gerry, she thought irritably as she found herself a lovely window seat about halfway down the tram. It was his fault she’d been running late and was now all out of breath, him with his endless demands and stupid questions about petty little things. Have you seen my glasses? Why have you moved the tea caddy? Where’s my newspaper? Have you moved it? Why are you for ever bloody moving everything? What time will you be back? Where’s my pen – the one I do the crossword with? No, not that one, the crossword one! He’d try the patience of St. Peter himself.

  Liz was sick and tired of his moaning. Why could he never get up off his arse and look for these supposedly missing items himself? They weren’t even really missing anyway. It was nothing that a few seconds of using your God-given eyes wouldn’t put right in a jiffy. Liz sighed. That was the great mystery about all husbands, wasn’t it? They were big men to the outside world but, once that front door closed on them, they were as helpless as babies. If Liz hadn’t given up her own career as a schoolteacher to support Gerry and his slow climb towards becoming a partner in the accountancy firm where he’d worked all his adult life, he’d probably never even have achieved that.

  Liz shook herself mentally, trying to banish all thoughts of Gerry for the time being. These monthly shopping trips and long leisurely lunches with Jean Dennehy were the absolute highlight of her month, the twelve highlights of her endlessly long year. She wasn’t having this one ruined just because Gerry had been a pain in the arse as usual this morning. She took several deep breaths, ignoring the funny looks she was getting from the two giggling schoolgirls in the seats opposite. It was the middle of the bloody morning, Liz thought crossly. Either they were very late for school or very early going home, and Liz, frankly, didn’t approve of either. She recognised their school uniforms. She had a good mind to ring up their school and complain. No, no, she thought hurriedly. That was the kind of petty thing that Gerry (known privately to his wife as the twin brother of Victor Meldrew from One Foot in the Grave) would do. Now that he was retired – they were both in their mid-sixties – and under her feet all day every day, he had nothing better to do with his time than make piddling little complaints to various state bodies about real or imagined grievances. His greatest pleasure these days, seemingly, was to write endlessly to Dublin City Council about potholes in the road, faulty street lights, the illegal dumping of rubbish, and graffiti emblazoned across walls and all over those bloody electricity boxes, or whatever those boxes were that had the mini-murals drawn on them. She’d seen a few quite decent ones but some of the designs were positively baffling. Still, that was modern art for you, she supposed.

  She wouldn’t mind but Gerry got the same fobbing-off letter back from the council every time without fail.

  Dear Mr. Grimes,

  We have registered your concerns re whatever it was and please be assured that steps will be taken to rectify same at the earliest possible opportunity. In the meantime, do please try to get yourself a life, you sad pathetic old git, and stop bothering people who actually have lives with your pettifogging little complaints.

  Yours sincerely,

  Someone Considerably More Important Than You

  Liz opened her newspaper, deciding that she had time for a quick read before the tram got to St. Stephen’s Green. That attractive young couple were on the front page, the couple who’d been on the television news the night before with the story about their big Lotto win. Such a lovely story it was too. They apparently always bought a Lotto ticket together every week, this couple, and finally their patience and perseverance had paid off and they’d won the two point four million, a tidy little sum by anyone’s standards. Liz stared at their smiling faces for a long time. Their names were Tara Robinson and Ritchie Devore. The girl Tara was a very striking-looking young woman, and that was an unusual enough name,
Devore, thought Liz. She wondered if the young fellow had any connection with the Cork Devores, a family she’d known in her youth. They were engaged, and of course they’d be starting off their married lives on a high now with the two point four million in the bank. Liz wondered if having that amount of cash in the bank at the start of their married life would have prevented her and Gerry from drifting apart the way they had. Sadly, she acknowledged that it probably wouldn’t have. Personality would always out in the end.

  Liz had loved him so much when she’d first known him. She was a country girl up in Dublin in the late seventies to do her teacher-training, and Gerry was a native Dubliner, a trainee accountant in a firm that foresaw good things for the sensible, level-headed young fella. Funny how all the things she’d loved about him at first, like his sensible level-headedness, had ended up being the things she hated about him now. Sensible level-headedness had somehow transmuted over the years into boring, Scrooge-like penny-pinching and a level of caution that probably only very few people possessed. It was a level of caution that stopped him from doing anything that resembled fun and games and kept him at home in his armchair with his newspaper, criticising everything and anything about the world today.

  Gerry had nearly had an apoplectic fit when their daughter and only child, Leah, had decided to defer her own teacher-training college for a year and go travelling, something that not many people had been doing in the early 2000s. Afterwards, of course, it had become tremendously popular and then almost the norm, but back then Gerry had completely failed to comprehend why Leah would want to do such an unorthodox, irresponsible thing.

  “Travelling?” he’d said as if he’d never heard the word before. “What do you mean, you want to go travelling?”

  Leah, a beautiful girl with long light-brown hair and a free-spirited personality that Liz was convinced she couldn’t possibly have inherited from her soulless father, had stared back at him in surprise and said: “Travelling, Dad. As in, back-packing through Europe and maybe parts of Asia as well, you know? I’ll never get another chance to see a bit of the world, not once I’ve done my teacher-training and found a job in a school somewhere. A holiday here and there isn’t exactly the same thing.”