Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  ‘Ever heard of the Geneva Convention, you little horror!’ she screamed at the boy, one of the locker-room jocks.

  ‘Y-you threw a rotten egg at me.’ His bottom lip actually wobbled as egg yolk dripped into his ear.

  ‘Ah, diddums. But then again, how typical. Like all cowards and bullies, you’re a chicken-hearted, worthless piece of scum, aren’t you?’ She grabbed him by his singlet and shook him. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ll get my parents on to you,’ he gasped. ‘That’s assault.’

  ‘You do that sunshine. And I’ll raise enough of a stink to get you expelled from this school, barred from every other one and thrown into borstal for a short, sharp shock. Comprendez? Now get the hell out of my sight and don’t you ever lay a finger on another kid again, unless you reckon your vital organs would look better as accessories dangling from a charm bracelet. Scram!’

  He took off, boggle-eyed.

  Shane mumbled into the sand.

  ‘Eh?’ Angela hauled him upright, none too gently.

  ‘I said, thanks for nothing. I have to go to this school.’

  ‘Can it, kiddo. I did the suffering-in-silence bit at school, when I’d have given anything for a tattooed parent wielding a bike chain to sort out the bullies for me. No point in fighting your own battles when the odds are stacked against you. I reckon that homicidal shithead got the message.’

  She stood back triumphantly, folding her arms. God, it felt good to be alive.

  Shane raised himself up on skinny elbows. ‘I suppose you think we’ll bond for life now. I’ll see you in a new light and become all respectful, like, until the day we all go and live on Waltons’ mountain.’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Angela cheekily.

  ‘Dream on. You’ve just stood on my glasses.’

  Later that evening, Conor rang to apologise. ‘Something came up I couldn’t get out of.’ He paused. ‘I hope you’ll overlook my rudeness.’

  ‘No problem,’ murmured Angela, gripping her mobile tightly, as if she could draw him closer, rekindle that spark of intimacy on the sofa, find out where the hell he’d been.

  ‘How’s Sadie?’

  ‘Oh, fine, thanks. Went back to work yesterday.’

  ‘I hear you took part in the egg-and-spoon race. I wish I’d seen that.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t.’ What else had Shane told him?

  ‘Shane managed to break his glasses during the long jump. He’s a bear with a sore head because he can’t watch telly.’

  ‘Poor kid. He did well in the event.’

  ‘I know. He didn’t come last. I don’t give a stuff about having a sporty son, frankly. I’d rather he was a short-sighted bookworm with train-spotting tendencies. At least until he’s got some paper qualifications.’

  ‘I agree.’

  He was silent, very silent, down the line. She tried to summon up his green eyes looking deeply into hers, the way he’d said ‘Please relax’ as he touched her hands, even the grunting bluffness that masked his shyness as he shoved freesias under her nose. But without seeing his face and gauging his mood, she felt him slipping away from her.

  ‘Goodnight then, Angela. Speak to you soon.’

  Her heart sank. ‘Goodnight, Conor.’

  Chapter Seven

  The airport cafeteria was empty, except for the couple at the corner table.

  Their hands lay side by side on the small table, careful not to touch, matching luggage stacked to one side.

  Kate glanced at Conor as she sipped her herbal tea. He was still nice-looking, in an earthy sort of way. She’d give him that.

  Conor was doing his own surreptitious assessment of his table companion. Still a stunner, all that red hair tumbling over her shoulders. Her chin was tilted at a defiant angle, though. He wondered if that presaged a few rattled saucers, tears before boarding. Well, he wasn’t giving ground the minute she chucked a wobbly. Those days were gone.

  ‘Feeling better?’ she murmured, as he drained his second coffee.

  ‘You might have given me more notice! I’ve had to run out on Shane and his sports day and tear across London to get here, in answer to the royal summons.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. But it was worth hearing, wasn’t it? I’m deadly serious, Conor. In two months, my contract will be up at work. And I want to come back. I want to be near Shane, make it up to him. You may not have noticed, but he’s starting to go off the rails a bit.’

  ‘And you would notice, three thousand miles away!’ Conor flared up.

  ‘Look,’ conceded Kate, pushing her cup away. ‘You’re the on-the-spot parent, doing a fantastic job. When I say he’s going off the rails, it’s nothing as dramatic as that. But each time he visits me in New York, he’s a little less his old, sunny self. He’s watchful and sulky. I think he’s desperately unhappy, and it’s our fault. I want to try and put things right.’

  Conor fiddled with a teaspoon. ‘For Shane’s sake, right?’

  ‘And for my own, I suppose. Making it up to Shane will chase away a few night-time demons.’ She wiped her mouth delicately on a triangle of serviette. A muscle quivered on her cheek. Conor’s gaze narrowed. He knew that twitch so well. ‘There’s no sinister third party, Conor. I haven’t met anyone in New York. My therapist reckons it’ll be some time before I trust men again. Perhaps never.’

  Conor’s face hardened.

  ‘But Shane was telling me on the phone, you have a new ‒ lady friend.’

  Conor grunted, annoyed at his irrational guilt. He was divorced from this beautiful, brittle woman with the tremor in her hands and the unnatural lustre in her hazel eyes. She had summoned him to Heathrow on a stopover flight from New York to Helsinki, where her sister lived, teaching English. And he’d come running like an eager puppy. A summons from Kate? It had to be momentous. He’d been way off beam, expecting an announcement of remarriage. To hell with that. She actually wanted to return to the family fold ‒ strictly on her own terms, of course.

  Playing for time, he told her, ‘Shane is not going off the rails. His grades are good, he doesn’t do drugs or smoke behind the bike shed. And just because he’s a slow starter with girls ‒ for which, personally, I’m grateful ‒ it doesn’t mean he’s gay, or an anorak. I was a late developer, too.’

  ‘We both were. We helped each other develop, remember?’

  Conor looked into his cup. He didn’t want a common point of reference, a litany of shared memories beginning ‘Do you remember the time …?’ If love was a hard habit to break, infatuation had been harder. In the weeks following Kate’s departure from 23 Pacelli Road, he’d cold-turkeyed on the empty mattress in their bedroom, living on toasted sandwiches and wishing he smoked, growing a beard behind closed curtains, while Mrs Turner fed, placated and lied to Shane.

  ‘So who is your lady friend?’ persisted Kate placidly. ‘An improvement on the awful-sounding Rosie, one hopes. Are you planning to move her in, marry her?’

  ‘It’s in the early stages.’ Possibly about to be strangled at birth.

  ‘I’ve never wanted anything off you, Conor. No alimony, no settlements. I was pleased to earn my own way. It saved my sanity. But I am asking for this ‒ to come back and live in my own home. Who helped you make it a home?’

  ‘You helped me pick out curtains for the spare room,’ nit-picked Conor.

  ‘I’m warning you, Conor!’ Her voice rose an octave and wobbled on the point of dissolution. ‘All right, so the mortgage was in your name, and you always paid it, even when I worked full-time before Shane came along. That was a mistake on my part. But I put years of my life into that rotten house, fortress McGinlay!’

  She lowered her voice as the woman wiping the coffee machine looked over with interest. ‘I’ve no desire for us to live as man and wife, Conor. That part is over. But I want to do right by Shane, and Shane wants me to come back ‒’

  Conor jumped. ‘My God, you’ve told him the idea has the green light? Before you even met me to discuss it!’r />
  ‘I could hardly moot the idea before I’d tested Shane’s reaction to it. We spoke on the phone last week, and I threw it out as a theoretical situation. He was receptive, as it happens. He didn’t stop loving me just because you did.’

  Her voice quivering on a sigh, she looked away, offering a perfect profile. But it wasn’t as perfect as she thought. Her complexion and chin had begun to thicken and redden, in a slight but discernible coarseness.

  Conor felt unbearably sad. He also felt big and rough and peasanty, insensitive to her finely tuned emotions. Just as she wanted him to feel. He clutched his chin, rasping the shave-resistant stubble. ‘How could it ever work, Kate? You and me under the same roof again.’

  She said quickly, ‘It could. We can give Shane the stability of two parents, without expecting too much ‒ anything, really ‒ of each other. You’d still have your life and I’d have mine. I’ll tell you how.’

  As she told him how, Conor’s inner thermostat went from simmer to boil. He could hardly wait until she’d finished.

  ‘You’re not bloody serious?’ he thundered, then met her eye. ‘You are! You seriously think I’d desecrate my ‒ my …’

  ‘Your real mistress?’ said Kate with precise coolness. ‘The only love of your life? Yes, that’s what I’m asking for, because I’m entitled. Does your new woman know all about your bricks-and-mortar and hardwood-floors fixation?’

  Conor’s eyes bulged. His eyebrows did a demented caterpillar dance.

  Kate laughed delicately. ‘Only consider my proposal,’ she wound up. ‘You’ve got two months to wrestle with the pros and cons. Will you at least do that? Consider it, hmm? You’ll soon realise how sensible it is. Just think of Shane.’

  Blood pounded behind his temples. He longed to hurt and reject her. He longed to ignore his much-vaunted ‘responsibility’ to Shane. And he longed to take that beautiful neck between his hands and squeeze tightly ‒ or rain down hungry, bruising kisses on its creamy hollow, branding her soap-advert downiness with welts of angry lust.

  But he had to hand it to Kate ‒ she knew him so well! She knew his baser impulses were supremely self-controlled. That he trusted himself much more than he’d ever trusted her.

  Glancing at her watch, she stood up to signal that the meeting was over.

  Conor rose slowly, as if backing off from a guard dog.

  ‘Everything hinges on you now, Conor. On whether you can find it in your heart to let bygones be bygones.’

  He grinned mirthlessly. Slick, very slick! Pass him the sole responsibility as a test of his magnanimity. And leave just a suggestion in the air of how Shane would react, come the inevitable day when he learnt of Conor’s choice.

  ‘What happens if I won’t play ball?’ he asked. ‘Will you still come back to England when your contract’s up?’

  She ruffled her hair wearily. ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead, because that would involve solicitors, and I’m keen to avoid upsetting Shane. I’ve every faith in you ‒ in us. Goodbye, Conor.’ She leant forward on tiptoe to brush his stubble with her lips. ‘You can contact me back in New York, but don’t leave it too long, hmm?’

  ‘See ya Kate.’ He caught her on the corner of her mouth as it slid away. He tasted peppermint lip balm.

  She picked up her luggage. ‘I’ll get you a trolley,’ he grunted.

  ‘No need.’

  ‘Beats me how they let you on with that lot as hand luggage in the first place.’

  ‘It’s called an allowance. People make them, you know.’

  He merely raised an eyebrow at that, and took her at her word, striding from the caff without adding more of his own.

  Conor took the Tube back into London, shaken and perturbed. If he didn’t play ball, Kate would probably make his life hell, perhaps even sue him for custody as an unfit father, citing his frequent absences and twisting his petty liaison with Rosie into a sordid affair. God, she’d been so careful to avoid other relationships! The sainted mother, driven away in pursuit of her sanity, pining for the son she’d had to leave as a lesser of two evils. Planning, always, to return as soon as she could, once the trauma of her mental collapse had passed.

  Conor stood up to let a pregnant woman have his seat. When she sat down, he realised that she was just fat. Jamming his hands in his pockets, he leant against the carriage door, reflecting that he always got the wrong end of the stick when it came to women. Starting most spectacularly with Kate, the ex-love of his life. A sensitive, gentle woman who’d survived a tyrannical bully of a father with quiet courage. Or so it had seemed.

  Conor had been in danger of leaving university a virgin when he met Kate. By that time, well into the third year of his engineering course at City University in London, he and his two mates, Iggy and Tommo, were united in a frustrated quest to lose their cherries. Conor had blamed their continuing innocence on membership of the Catholic Society, otherwise known as CathSoc.

  All three had joined up at freshers’ fair. Conor was a native Dubliner, while Iggy and Tommo were second-generation Irish. They’d all reckoned it’d be easier to bond with girls from a similar background.

  Plus, if Conor was honest, he’d expected to lose his cherry more or less immediately in the fervid immorality of university life, and preferred to lose it to a girl with some point of moral reference.

  Most CathSoc members were second-generation Irish. The blokes wore their badge of Irishness by drinking Beamish and cheering on England’s opponents in Euro and World Cup qualifiers. The girls had sad, mellifluous names from Celtic mythology, long Titian hair and cuttings from The Irish Post featuring their Irish dancing triumphs.

  Conor was scared of these girls for the same reasons he’d sought cultural safety in their numbers. Nice Catholic girls did not go in for one-night stands. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get it up with one who did. The only boy and the youngest in a family of four girls who’d petted and spoilt him, he was, at twenty, still dogged by the madonna/whore analogy. It would take Kate to impress upon him that women were not two-dimensional beings, neither shadows cast by a religious icon, nor the passive non-beings in porn.

  He, Iggy and Tommo analysed their virginity relentlessly and crudely. One evening, after a piss-weak beer too far in the student union bar, they made a musketeer pact to boldly go where no man of them had gone before, that very night.

  Infused more with the pioneering spirit of conquistadors than romantic sensibility, they’d set off for the student union golden oldies night, held in an unprepossessing Portakabin half a mile away.

  Their dreams were not to be fulfilled. Iggy passed out while resting his head on the shelf-like embonpoint of a bored, big-breasted girl who’d agreed to a slow dance. Conor, deciding to leave within half an hour of arriving, had felt his arm clutched as he swayed towards the body-choked doorway. ‘Walk out of this place with me!’ hissed a female voice in his ear. ‘Just to shake off that dickhead behind us!’

  Conor glanced round to see Tommo bearing down with a glassy but determined smile. He didn’t have time to make up his mind. His arm was wrenched and he half-fell out of the Portakabin, blinking in the sudden darkness.

  Beside him, female breath exhaled harshly. ‘Think that did it,’ she hissed. ‘Thanks.’

  His eyes adjusting to the light, he caught a glint of red hair, like the flash of a tropical bird’s underwing. She struck a match and soft, incandescent light illuminated the waxy perfection of her skin, the dark brows lowered in concentration as she lit her cigarette. She reminded him of a church statue of Mary, purity of expression dancing in the light of candles clustered round her feet. Only this vision was Madonna and ciggy. ‘Bloody hell, you’re beautiful,’ said Conor with both spur-of-the-moment admiration, and a hint of reverent awe.

  She laughed and looked at him properly for the first time. ‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ she said.

  After all those months spent working out chat-up lines and gleaning ‘how to pull’ tips from nudge-nudge-wink-wink men’
s mags, it seemed that girls responded to that over-rated quality of ‘being yourself’. He’d made a mental note to tell Tommo and Iggy.

  That night, they just had coffee and talked, back at her place. Kate, an art student, shared a dingy flat with a chain-smoking medical student. The place was a proper student den with peeling posters of poncy modern artists he’d never heard of, and cushions, bean bags and empty bottles covering every inch of carpet. Kate explained that her flatmate liked to recreate chaos out of any order that Kate herself imposed. She didn’t mind too much, as long as the bathroom stayed clean. Conor felt embarrassed that he lived in a hall of residence, sharing a fridge and a bathroom with five other blokes who labelled their milk cartons and left damp socks to mildew over communal radiators.

  Sex never entered his head that night, or successive nights. Just to touch Kate seemed an honour and a violation. When he pulled away from a goodnight kiss that night, he expected to see his fingerprints bruising her perfect skin.

  Two weeks later, Tommo bounced into his room at four a.m., eating a post-coital cream cracker with Marmite. He’d done the deed.

  ‘Julia Flynn!’ he revealed. ‘She’d have gone for you, Conor, if you’d stuck at it. She loves a bit of Irish inside her, ho ho. Got your leg over that posh tart yet?’

  He hadn’t. For all his reputation as a hard man (at least among other blokes who thought he must play rugby), he was shy and Kate was scared. Her father had made her scared of men, she apologised. He was a bully, a racist and a born-again Christian, pastor to a small bunch of rabid torch-bearers for true, Papist-free Christianity. She’d defied him by going to university in London. He’d wanted her to stay up in Northumberland, where he could keep an eye on her.

  Besides, Conor and Kate were friends first, putative lovers second. Conor had never been friends with a girl before ‒ unless he counted collecting frog spawn in jam jars one summer with Jeanie, the friend of his sister, Grainne. At the time, Jeanie had been the same as any male friend because she hung upside-down from the monkey-bars at school with her skirt tucked into her pants, laughed loudly at her own jokes, ridiculed his frogspawn-catching technique compared to her own. She hadn’t behaved like a girl. She had behaved, Conor realised during his first months with Kate, like herself.