Thirteen Stops

by Sandra Harris

  “She’s right, Gerry,” Liz had put in from the sink where she’d been drying up the breakfast dishes. “Why not let her go now and get it out of her system once and for all? She’ll be much more inclined to settle down once she comes back, won’t you, lovey?”

  Leah could always rely on her mother’s support, although Liz had never told her daughter that she’d always regretted giving up her job as a primary schoolteacher to support Gerry’s much more important career as an accountant. He’d needed a good, faithful wife in the background to cook lovely dinners for his colleagues so they’d think what a great family man Gerry was, just the kind of man they wanted as a partner in the firm. It had taken years, though, and a great many such dinners, for Gerry to achieve his dream of full partnership. By that time, Liz had long grown disenchanted with the whole concept of marriage, and with sacrificing one’s own dreams for the sake of your spouse’s. The notion had grown decidedly stale and dull over time.

  Together, Liz and Leah had worked on Gerry until eventually – and very reluctantly – he’d agreed to let Leah defer her teacher-training college place for a year to go backpacking on the Continent and across Asia for a year with a friend from school, a girl called Susan. It wouldn’t be so bad if their daughter and only child was going with a friend they knew and trusted from Leah’s schooldays. What had happened next was something for which Gerry had never forgiven Liz, even though of course it had no more been Liz’s fault than the Man in the Moon’s. Whilst travelling through Bulgaria, Leah had met and fallen head-over-heels in love with an impoverished artist called Gorka, a handsome fella with an artistic soul and sheer magic in his paintbrush. Leah had actually married this young man within a few weeks of knowing him, and the first her parents had heard of it was when Leah telephoned from a payphone in Sofia to say that she wasn’t coming home. She was staying in Bulgaria with this Gorka fella, while her friend Susan was joining up with some people she knew who were touring through Greece.

  Gerry had nearly had a heart attack, he’d been so angry and upset. Nothing that Liz could say or do was able to reassure him that it was just a whim of Leah’s and she’d be home just as soon as ever she’d tired of the whole marriage lark, for which she was still much too young and immature, surely. It hadn’t been a whim, however. Leah really loved this man and, seemingly, he loved her too. Twin boys had been born to them barely ten months after the wedding and that was that. Leah was ‘stuck’ in Bulgaria with her ‘new family,’ as Gerry kept putting it. Liz had a strong feeling, though, that Leah was genuinely happy with her new home, her new husband and her beautiful new twin boys, but there was no telling Gerry that.

  “This would never have happened if you hadn’t pushed her to take that so-called ‘gap year’, Lizzie,” he raged day and night until Liz could recite his complaints by heart. “It’s your fault she was out there in the first place, where this Gorka fella could take advantage of her. I hope you’re happy, are you, now that she’s stuck in that backward feckin’ country, tied down with a husband and two kids who don’t even speak English. I hope you’re happy, Liz, now that you’ve got what you wanted. Our daughter, our only child, gone from us for ever because of you, because you could never say ‘no’ to her.”

  There had been no reasoning with him. It had been a very hard cross for Liz to bear, knowing that her husband blamed her for their daughter never going to teacher training college and never even coming back to live in the country of her birth. They came home for holidays once a year, Leah, Gorka and the two boys, Jack and John, two gorgeous brown-eyed, dark-haired little lads who were the spitting image of their father. Liz and Gerry had to pay for all their airfares and other expenses because Gorka’s parents, with whom the young couple lived, were old and dirt-poor and Gorka was making little or no money yet from his painting. He had to work as a waiter in a local restaurant to pay the bills, but only during busy periods in the summer months when the restaurant was short of staff. The job therefore couldn’t be relied on as a steady source of income. Liz had been worried sick at the way that Leah had looked thinner, her blue eyes huge in her tanned face. Were they all eating enough, she wondered? Did they actually have enough to live on out there? She lived for their visits and wished they could afford to bring the four of them over to Ireland more than just once a year.

  She and Gerry had gone over to Bulgaria themselves just once. The visit had not been a success. Leah and Gorka had both been overjoyed to see them but Gerry had made the visit a nightmare, making his displeasure and disgust at everything patently obvious to everyone. Gorka’s parents had no English. The twins were allowed to run wild and weren’t learning to read or write yet, even though they were four years old. Gorka never sold any paintings. What the feck were they living on, and anyway a man couldn’t support his family by drawing pictures, however pretty or interesting they were, could he? The climate was a bloody disaster. There were bugs everywhere. Leah was too thin. (Even Gerry could see that.) She’d given up her teacher training for this, a marriage in a strange country with a husband who didn’t have two pennies, or whatever they called them out here, to rub together? Are you happy now, Liz? Are you happy now that you’ve finally seen what all this ‘travelling’ and ‘gap-year’ nonsense has led us all to?

  The sarcasm and bitterness in his voice could have stripped the paint off the walls. Liz could have murdered him for his rudeness and discourtesy, which he never bothered to hide from either his daughter, his son-in-law or Gorka’s parents. They may not have spoken English but they could tell when someone was slagging them off. Liz had barely spoken to him for weeks after they’d returned to Ireland. They never again went over to Bulgaria themselves – it wasn’t worth all the Gerry-aggro, much as Liz would have loved to see them all – but simply paid for Leah and her little family to come over to them in Dublin. Until Leah got sick, that was.

  When the twins were twelve, Liz had received a phone call from a distraught Gorka to say that Leah had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. She’d been opened up and the prognosis wasn’t good. She wasn’t expected to live beyond a few more days. A frantic Liz and Gerry arrived in Bulgaria to find that their beloved daughter had passed away the night before their plane had landed. The funeral had been a nightmare. Gerry had stood on the opposite side of the coffin to Liz, doggedly refusing to address a word to Liz or Gorka or either of Gorka’s – and Leah’s – two handsome young sons, each of whom was crying quietly to himself. Gorka’s parents were both dead by now. They were buried in the ancient churchyard a few gravestones over from Leah’s. The sun had blazed down on the little funeral party, to add a macabre touch, and none of it had even seemed real to Liz. She honestly felt like it was one of those horrible surreal dreams that would fade as soon as you opened your eyes in the morning. But it wasn’t a dream and going back home to Cowper in Dublin had been even worse. She knew Gerry blamed her for what had happened. He’d made no secret of the fact that he thought Leah would still be alive if she’d lived in Ireland and been treated for her cancer in an Irish hospital instead of in a ‘Mickey Mouse First Aid station in the back of beyond’, as he so caustically put it.

  “I’m only going to say this once so make sure you listen well,” Gerry had said when they’d arrived home, in a tone of voice she’d never heard from him before. “I never want to hear any of their names mentioned in this house ever again, and that includes hers. Is that clear?”

  He’d gone round the whole house then and put all the photo albums and framed photographs of Leah, Gorka and the children into a box. He put the box in Leah’s bedroom and fitted a heavy padlock on the bedroom door. Liz couldn’t even go in and sit in her daughter’s old room to think about her quietly and mourn. After he’d locked the room, Gerry had been as good as his word and never mentioned any of them again. He said nothing when the odd letter arrived from Bulgaria with photos of the boys inside for Liz and he never forbade her from writing back, but neither did he look at the photos and marvel at how quickly the twins were growing
and how there was a distinct look of Leah about them now that they were older. When they’d been babies, they’d looked like chubby little clones of their father but, as they grew, they became so like Leah that it broke Liz’s heart to see it. Liz hadn’t seen Gorka or her grandsons since Leah died. Gerry had made himself clear on the subject. There would be no money forthcoming for plane tickets for Gorka and the boys to come over to Ireland. Once, Liz had broached the subject of herself going to Bulgaria alone to see them. It was the biggest and most frightening row they’d ever had, and the closest Gerry had ever come to hitting her, as far as she was aware. She had never mentioned the subject again. Years had passed. The boys would be nearly men now. Gorka had remarried a few years after Leah’s death, a Bulgarian woman with whom he had a daughter now. It was understandable that Gorka would write to Liz a lot less frequently these days, but she missed his letters and, more than anything else, she missed the photos of the boys. Her grandsons, and Leah’s precious sons.

  “Please move down the tram,” said the automated female voice that everyone ignored.

  Liz sighed now as she came back to the present with a gentle jolt. The tram was nearly at the St. Stephen’s Green stop and she’d have to start gathering her bits-and-bobs together. She took a last long look at the lovely smiley photo of the Lotto couple, before folding up her newspaper and slipping it into her bag to finish reading on the return journey. They looked so happy together, this Tara Robinson and Ritchie Devore. Liz hoped their happiness would last and, if they ever had children, that they’d make decisions together and each would allow the other person the chance to have his or her say. Couples today were different and so modern, Liz reflected as she zipped her return ticket for the Luas safely into her purse, which went into a secret pocket in her handbag. She’d been holding the ticket in her hand as usual, in readiness for the man (or woman) who checked them. She only used the Luas the odd time when she needed to go into town, but the ticket collectors were a lovely friendly bunch of lads (and ladies!) and Liz enjoyed meeting them. It was a bit of human contact, after all, and human warmth, something she didn’t get much of from Gerry.

  What was I just thinking about? she asked herself as she disembarked. She’d had a lot of headaches lately and sometimes had difficulty gathering her thoughts because she felt so woolly-headed at times. She hadn’t dared mention this to Gerry in case he decided she’d gone senile and needed to be packed off post-haste to an old folks’ home. She wouldn’t put it past him. He would have the house to himself then, and he could put down his spectacle case and his precious crossword pen anywhere he liked and no one would move them. He was becoming almost fanatical about his possessions being moved or touched in his old age.

  Oh yes, couples today, that’s what I was thinking about, Liz thought as she crossed the street and made her way to the foyer of the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, where she and Jean always waited for each other. Couples today were different, and marriage today was different too. No longer did you marry a man for life and allow him to dictate to you what you did, what you wore and how you behaved until the day you died. Hers was probably the last generation that would have that kind of marriage. Women today could divorce a man if he was violent, aggressive or miserly, and the man was made to pay child support by law, whether he wanted to or not, for the children he’d helped bring into the world. Women could bring up children on their own or with the help of friends and family, or they could choose not to have kids at all, if they didn’t feel the need to, or if they wanted to concentrate on their careers. It was all so different now.

  Even Leah’s marriage, the little Liz had seen of it anyway, had seemed happier and stronger than Liz and Gerry’s. Gorka had looked at Leah in a way that Gerry had never looked at Liz, even when they’d first started going out together. Gerry had been much too sensible and level-headed for all that romantic nonsense. Gorka, on the other hand, had looked at Leah as if he adored her, like she was the best thing that had ever happened to him and he was the luckiest man alive to have her. What a love they must have had together! Liz had both envied her daughter that and yet wanted it for her too. And, of course, Leah and Gorka had married because they’d wanted to, and not because they had to, or, like Liz and Gerry, because it was expected of them. Liz and Gerry’s generation had been expected to grow up, get a trade or a college education, followed by a job-for-life, and none of this chopping-and-changing-jobs-every-five-minutes thing that the kids today seemed to do. Then they were expected to get married, have children and stay together until they died, because this was good holy Catholic Ireland and divorce hadn’t yet been introduced. Liz had been awarded her teacher-training degree but she’d been expected to abandon all thoughts of a career of her own when she got married. Gerry’s career had been the important one, the one that really mattered. Things were different today, and Liz was thankful they were different. Nowadays, women at least stood a chance in life.

  “Yoo-hoo, Lizzie dear!” trilled Jean Dennehy’s familiar lively tones, breaking into Liz’s reverie as she stood in the lobby of the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, lost in thought. “I’m not late, am I?”

  Good old Jean. She said the same thing every time they met. She was always flustered, always running a few minutes late, always red in the face from rushing around madly trying to catch up with herself. She and Liz had been friends for years and they loved each other dearly.

  Now, when the initial flurry of greetings was finished, Jean looked at her friend curiously and said in hushed tones containing more than a hint of shock: “Lizzie dear, you haven’t put your eyebrows on!”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Liz, whipping her little compact mirror out of her handbag and checking for herself. Then she said, in the same shocked whisper: “Shit, Jean, I’ve never done that before, come out without putting them on. That’s Gerry’s fault now, that is. He held me up over breakfast, demanding this and that and saying he couldn’t find his bloody reading glasses. He had the two of us searching high and low for them for ages this morning and he kept getting more and more panicky, like it was the end of the bloody world or something. You know what he’s like. Then, of course, it turns out that they were down the back of the cushions on his bloody crossword armchair like they always are. If only one of us had thought to check there in the first place, I mightn’t have been so hot and bothered as to forget to put on my bloody eyebrows! I blame Gerry entirely. He got me all worked up, and over nothing as usual.”

  She was starting to sound dangerously close to tears, so Jean, putting a hand on her friend’s arm and leading her towards the escalator, said soothingly, “Never mind about that for now, dear. We’ll go on up to the bathrooms and you can put them on there. I need a quick wee anyway, shure.”

  On the way up to the bathrooms, Liz felt like everyone was staring at the crazy lady who’d forgotten to put her eyebrows on. She’d come all the way from Cowper to the Green (Oh God, had everyone been looking askance at her for the entire journey? Was that what those two silly schoolgirls had been giggling about non-stop, her missing eyebrows?) none the wiser as to the status of her eyebrows, but now she was painfully aware of their absence, as was the way of it. She half-expected to hear an announcement on the public address system drawing everyone’s attention to the fact that her eyebrows were missing.

  “Attention, shoppers, there is a Crazy Lady currently ascending the escalator to the top floor who has clearly forgotten to put her eyebrows on. Apparently, she was distracted by her fussy, annoying husband who thought his reading glasses were missing when, in fact, they were under his big fat arse the whole time like they always are. Please direct pitying glances towards this Crazy Lady as she is obviously in need of our sympathetic yet disparaging looks in order that she learns her lesson and such an outrage never happens again. Forcing shoppers to look at women who have not applied their make-up properly is cruel and abusive towards the members of the public who may unwittingly come into contact with such female persons and is now a
prosecutable offence. It is particularly undesirable in ladies of the older generation, etc.” And so on.

  Liz didn’t breathe easily until she’d pencilled in both eyebrows as steadily as she could manage it in the women’s bathroom. She ran a brush through her short, still-dark curly hair and slicked some of her favourite dark-pink lipstick on her mouth for good measure. Jean made the same lame joke she always made when they used the toilets in the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, the one about its costing twenty cent to spend a penny. When they emerged from the loos, the Centre was already crowded with lady shoppers, even though it wasn’t yet noon.

  Liz said: “Oh look, there’s an exhibition down the way there about the Irish Famine, will we have a look?”

  Jean took her friend by the arm and determinedly steered her in the opposite direction. “You must be feckin’ joking!” she said with a laugh. “I’ve come into town to spend Clive’s hard-earned cash and get blotto on wine at lunch, not to peer at blurry pictures of feckin’ skeletons from over a hundred years ago.”

  Liz had to laugh. Jean, not always tactful, was as good as a tonic sometimes. “All right.” She grinned. “Shops first, then the boozy lunch?”

  “Is there any other way?” Jean said.

  Jean was a tireless shopper. Sometimes even Liz, a champion shopper herself, had trouble keeping up with her friend. Jean thought nothing of scouring every clothes shop and shoe shop on or near Grafton Street, and that included all the shops in the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre itself, for hours on end until she found the perfect top/belt/scarf/shoes/handbag to go with an outfit she’d bought, and if she sometimes ended up at the end of the day buying something she’d seen in the very first shop she’d been to, well, that was just the way it went sometimes, wasn’t it? She drove her husband demented with how long she could deliberate over a certain pair of shoes or a handbag.