by Bryce Taylor
But every Thursday the same, two beers each and a packet of crisps. Two precious hours that we talk and talk and talk.
Most weeks we pour happily over her laptop choosing tiles and furnishings and paint colours. A few short months and the main house which was largely gutted is now almost put back together. She had already moved into the small coach house out the back a week or two after buying the house and whilst it had been in far better condition than the house it was hardly liveable. Peeling wallpaper, a mouldy shower, drafts blowing through corners in the windows but Leigh seems happy enough. I suppose it gives her incentive to ensure progress is being made on the house.
Insanely the go-kart track is just about complete out the back and Daniel spends most Thursdays at her house caring for the bright red go-kart she got him and occasionally racing it up and down the driveway. The house is transformed, it is just beautiful, a few short months and the ugly duckling in the woods has turned into a luminescent beacon of light.
Leigh reluctantly doesn't argue when I buy the second round of drinks each week, even though she hates me to do so, knowing that I am poor and that in comparison she is wealthy beyond belief. I realise that I always let her pay for everything in Sydney, unaware that this was unhealthy for both of us, her never learning to receive, me letting someone else take care of me.
I find that Leigh loves being complimented, that she is terribly unsure of most of her personal choices, her clothes, her haircut, her house, all of it. She doesn't quite know how to accept my compliments yet, mostly looking awkwardly to the side when I do. But I can feel how much she likes it, and sometimes she smiles shyly and says thank you. She should be getting better since I compliment her often and about everything, loving telling her so many truths about herself.
Leigh also discovers that she likes handing out compliments, not the nonverbal ones she used to give, but actual real compliments said out loud, telling me with great pleasure that she thinks I look great or that the new pants I'm wearing are very nice and I smile at her and feel far better about myself.
One perfect spring day, close to a year of Diarmuid’s leaving, Leigh is reaching for her beer and I see the edge of a tattoo peeking from under her t-shirt, engraved on the underside of her arm.
I stare at her.
Leigh is not at all the kind of person to get a tattoo. It seems implausible, but there is irrefutable evidence in front of my eyes.
She immediately shifts so that the ink is covered up by both her shirt and her body but it is far too late for that.
I reach across the table and grab her by the wrist, pulling her arm towards me.
Look at her in time to see that Leigh Grenfell is still able to blush, an embarrassed cast to her face. I can see she wants to stop me from looking, to cover it up somehow, but she knows how fruitless that effort is.
I'm moving to the other side of the table, kneeling next to her, pulling her shirtsleeve up, tracing my fingers over the text I find there, black letters, in heavy type, words that I know well.
In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only.
It's something fails us.
First we feel. Then we fall.
And let her rain now if she likes.
I stare at her, only now feeling how close I am to her, my hand on her bare arm, the sensation of old times flooding back to me. My desire to touch her equally matched against her fear that I will.
She isn't saying anything, what can she say in answer to all the obvious questions? Of the reasons she has the words from a book I left her so many years ago permanently stained upon her arm. The one thing I ever gave her.
A book that she detested and is incomprehensible to everyone but especially to her.
That she is as unlikely to allow someone to tattoo her arm, to hold her down and scar her skin irrevocably as, well as Daniel is.
I stare at her because on some level she had to have got this tattoo for me or for us and I don't care which because surely this is confirmation that she cares.
Our lips are inches apart and she isn't moving back, but she isn't moving forward either.
It makes sense, my subconscious mind tells me.
After all, if there were times all those years behind us that I had thought that there was no way Leigh could be into me, that she was too utterly in every way everything to ever really want me the way that I wanted her, that had been back when the gap between us was smallest. Before age and a child had marked me, thickened my waist, creased my brow and fine lines grew around my eyes and by my throat.
Before she had danced through those years without visible alteration, all of her scars being on the inside. Before she had become personable and made friends with half the village.
Where sometime in the intermission of our friendship she had developed an actual dress sense and looks fabulous almost all of the time.
I draw back from her before I am cradling her face in my hands, before I say something I will regret, because now I am the one who cannot think of losing her friendship, this one day a week where I can forget all of this.
I withdraw to my side of the table and for once can find nothing to say, scrabbling in hard dirt for anything, the smallest item.
"You should bring Em here," Leigh says suddenly, her voice sounding rusty. "We could sit outside and she could play in the playground."
I stare at her.
There is a small playground out the back, one that is busy on weekends with rambunctious small people shrieking and yelling all over it but right now it is quiet and Em would probably like it. Especially if she could convince one or both of us to listen to her narrate every last thought that she is having.
It had just never occurred to me to bring her.
I'm smiling at Leigh and I'm afraid of tears.
"I'll do that," I tell her croakily.
Leigh frowns at me for a long moment and then reaches her hand out cautiously and gives my hand one quick reassuring squeeze. It should be enough to make me cry but instead I grin at her.
We talk companionably of the election in Germany and colour theory. She asks my advice of people and situations at the hospital that she doesn't understand. The questions that she is comfortable asking no one but me. I think she would ask me these kinds of questions all day long if she knew how happy it makes me that I'm the person she asks.
Leigh has recently finished Dubliners and is able to reluctantly admit that she liked some of the stories if not all of them.
She is quite unable to agree or disagree or add any points to my lengthy monologue about institutionalised religion and James Joyce and I smile at her thinking how wonderfully happy I am to have loved two completely different people in my life and that I will never have any grounds with which to compare Diarmuid and Leigh.
That I can happily think of Diarmuid wherever his soul is, being beside himself at not being able to both completely agree with me on every major argument of my rambling speech whilst still quibbling every single minor point of it until we are both shouting and laughing at each other. That Diarmuid and Leigh together in a room would be a most uncomfortable experience, but that both of them would likely approve of the other, just for the knowledge that I was happy.
That it isn't a betrayal to be in love with Leigh because I have loved both of them in all honesty and that whilst I was with Diarmuid I still loved Leigh and if Leigh and I ever do end up together somewhere a corner of my heart will still be reserved for Diarmuid.
So, I sit there and watch Leigh, her fair hair lit from behind by the sunshine beaming so unexpectedly through the window and watch her eye me bemusedly as I talk of literature and poetry and steal her crisps that she never seems to finish.
28) Daniel moves in
A few weeks later, Leigh is settling into her house, the final touches on the couch house being done and I can't help wonder what now? As if the last four months have been this frantic renovation project to what end? Leigh now has a six-bedroom manor house and a two-bedroom coa
ch house that both look as if they are off the cover of an architectural magazine but there is only her to fill it. I'd worried that we'd run out of things to talk about, that we'd not send each other the thousands of text messages anymore.
I'd worried now that the excuse of her not having a proper kitchen was gone that she'd never come for dinner again.
If anything, now that it is all done she has been convinced to come to my house for dinner twice weekly rather than the odd night here and there.
There is still a regular river of messages about every other subject. That we are getting closer and Em has an expectation that we will go to the pub every Thursday afternoon to use the playground followed by lasagne at our house.
Leigh is the only adult that Em asks for by name to come to her fourth birthday.
When Leigh phones early one morning, I stare at the phone in surprise, it is such an unexpected event since we have to this point, only communicated by text message when we are apart.
"Hello?" I ask uncertainly.
"Aednat, your mother is on her way to the hospital, she's had a stroke," she says, in the clipped tones that I remember from the one time I was in the operating theatre with her.
"Oh," I say, stupidly, because somehow, even though I've been expecting something like this with all Mam's smoking and the stresses of her life, I am stumped.
"I've called ahead, they are expecting her," she says when I don't say anything else, "but I need to stay here with Daniel."
Oh, shite.
Daniel.
Leigh says she'll call me when there is news, but that she thinks it is a reasonably minor stroke.
I guess it's lucky that she was in the house, god forbid if Daniel and Mam had been alone.
I tell her I'll go to Mam this afternoon, when my shift has finished, when I can pick up Em from crèche. The day passes in a blur, I'm able to talk to Mam briefly on the phone and her nurses and I realise that yes, we are definitely getting preferential treatment.
We get to the hospital and Em uncharacteristically loses it completely, not a tantrum but unhinged, crying and trembling, retreating into herself, her big eyes glassy with fear.
I try to reason with her but there is no name to her fear, she is mute in the way of a more normal three-year-old but is uncharacteristic of Em.
Then, standing there in the carpark I realise that she associates the hospital with the vague memories of her Da slowly dying, wasting away and then finally a day that she doesn't remember anymore he was all the way gone.
I call Leigh because I'm not thinking, because I have almost no one I can call in a situation like this. The thought of this should be enough to make me cry but when Leigh picks up on the first ring all I feel is relief that I have her.
She tells me not to worry, that she knows what to do and I don't, I just sit down on one of the benches outside the hospital doors, open my arms to Em who immediately crawls onto my lap, still sobbing, her small body unable to contain all that she is feeling.
A few minutes later an older woman, close to Mam's age, but far shorter, tiny and plump and wearing a nurse’s uniform approaches me, asks, "Aednat?"
"Yes," I say uncertainly.
"I'm Marla," she tells me with a smile and Em who has started to calm down and peeks at her from around my arm. "Leigh said you might be here."
She sits down beside me. "And who is this?" she asks Em.
Em stares at her, head tilted down, looking up through her eyelashes. As much as a hello from other children.
"You know," she says, "my granddaughter is a little shy too, but you know who she loves?"
Em is still staring down, intently enough that she is clearly listening.
"Dora the Walker," she says with a gentle smile.
"It's Dora the Explorer," says Em, unable to help herself.
"Oh goodness," Marla says, pretending mild surprise. "Do you know anything else about Dora?"
Em nods.
"We have a television just here in the cafeteria," she tells Em, "do you want to watch Dora with me for while your Mam is busy?"
Em thinks about this for a second before slowly nodding.
I mouth a 'thank you' to Marla who takes Em by the hand and I watch them go inside.
I find Mam upstairs, in a room to herself and smile in relief to see that she really is ok, awake and eating her supper. I flip through her chart whilst we talk and she is, if anything, happy to be in hospital, probably not realising that even a minor stroke means serious business. That when she comes home from the hospital in a day or two that there is going to be rehab just to walk competently again.
Save that for tomorrow, I think to myself. I don't raise the topic of Daniel either and think with a sinking heart that I will have to work that out tomorrow. That Leigh has been able to stay tonight but there is no question whose job is more important out of the two of us. I could hardly ask her to stay at Mam's council house anyway, my mind cannot even conceive of this happening.
So, I kiss Mam goodnight, tell her to relax and stop by the nurse’s station to thank them for giving us our privacy to talk. They take down my number and promise to call with updates.
They are all lovely and I feel lighter having spoken to them and just a tiny pang of regret that I miss the camaraderie of working in a hospital.
I go and pick up Em who is happily colouring in, carefully within the lines under the watchful eye of Marla.
Leigh answers again on the first ring as I'm walking back to the car park, Em holding my leg with one small hand and the other clutching her colouring in to finish at home.
"Hey, how's your Mam?" she asks.
"She's in good spirits," I tell her, "I."
I can't go on, the crushing feeling of responsibility breaking me in two.
How can I even get through this?
"So, I've booked in a few weeks off work," Leigh says in the silence. "If it's ok with you I'll stay here with Daniel?"
If it's ok with me?
I'm laughing, no, I'm crying, just a little hysterical.
"Aednat?" Leigh sounds worried.
I swallow.
"Can I come over?" I ask.
"Of course," Leigh says sounding surprised that I have to ask.
Em tells me about her colouring in and Dora and Marla and that Marla says that she is very good and when she comes back next, she would very much like a picture of her own and she is going to practice so that it is just right.
My anxieties quiet somewhat in the drive over to Mam's house but not so much that when I pull up and Leigh comes out I can't stop myself throwing myself into her arms.
I'm crying as her arms wrap protectively around me, gently holding me close to her, her head bending to mine as if she could make it all better.
I don't have the luxury to stay here until I do feel better, Em is still in the car and she needs her sleep.
So I begrudgingly leave Leigh and go home and somehow the next day I wake up and I feel like everything is going to be ok.
It is.
I take Em to crèche, get a call from the hospital, telling me that Mam is doing well. The day goes on just as any other day. Right up until I get another phone call from Leigh.
"Hiya," I answer, smiling, wanting to hear Leigh's voice.
"Can I stay at Sully's?" Daniel asks me, unexpectedly, his voice sounding as if he is holding the phone a foot away from his mouth and he is taking loudly in slightly the wrong direction.
I freeze and there is a sound as if Daniel has put the phone down.
"What did she say?" I can hear Leigh ask him.
There is a long silence.
"Hi," says Leigh sounding mildly amused.
"Why does Daniel want to stay at your house?" I ask.
"He told me he was staying at my house," she says dryly.
"I don't think he liked me staying at his house," she adds.
I smile.
"Do you want him to stay?" I ask her.
"Well, there is plenty of space," she
hedges.
"Leigh," I say warningly.
"Yes," she says.
So, Daniel moves in with Leigh and it make sense that we, all four of us have dinner every night together.
Daniel is deeply interested in Em's projects and in turn she is pleased that he shows her how to carefully seal her picture with clear resin or tie a knot on her macramé.
It's an odd kind of family for a week and I'm unfairly sad the day that Mam is coming home that we'll all be going back to our own three houses tonight. Only when I call Mam that night she asks if I'm coming over, that she is also at Leigh's house, just for a few weeks whilst she recuperates.