My father blamed no one but himself for his ability to be blackmailed. He accepted his predicament as a punishment just and sound, though gradually he recognised his need for at least a temporary reprieve. He couldn’t, however, reconcile himself to abandoning Harry without legitimate cause; a job, he decided, would be a good excuse to get away. Moreover, he needed the money: he’d bought food on credit and an anorak for Harry, and he owed money to the local electrician who had hot-wired the house for us before we moved in. All those bills still had to be paid. When he heard that the Wimpy’s near the City Hall was hiring, he inquired in person and was amazed when he was offered a job.
The franchise preferred its product to be sold by attractive young women, so only they got jobs behind the registers. Those less fortunate were assigned to folding boxes lined with grease-proof paper in the back recesses of the kitchen. The more intelligent of the young male applicant pool were placed on the fryolators and grills, while those with acne, unusual hairstyles, or unseemly tattoos were hired to wrap the burgers and arrange them on the warming shelves behind the counter. My father, a bit of an embarrassment in his undersized overall and red-and-white striped cap, was relegated to sweeping the floor.
He was given the night shift on Mondays and Wednesdays, the two slowest evenings of the week, and his wages were paid in cash. It was his request that we stay away from the Wimpy’s on the evenings he was working, although once, against his wishes, I did go to see him there. I knew what it was that made him find it so demeaning, and I had wanted to tell him that he had no reason to be ashamed. My mother had always objected to uniforms of any kind, and had discouraged us from professions in which all employees were required to look the same. While clothes, she warned me, could not make the man, they could sometimes tell him what kind of man he was.
And yet my father did not mind his job, I think; so I left before he saw me, and without speaking to him as I’d planned. Protected by the invisibility too often accorded those engaged in menial tasks, he had no need to speak to anyone, and no one spoke to him. The noise of scolding parents and of orders placed and altered did not disturb him. The restaurant had two levels, both of which were partitioned into smaller areas by the artful arrangement of large, white troughs of plastic vegetation. From four o’clock until midnight my father moved his mop from one end of the place to the other, taking a ten-minute break every so often to wait for the floor to grow littered with cartons and cold chips before he started the process over again. At the end of eight hours he changed his clothes and went home, through the silent town with its derelict arcades and grim police patrols, up the empty, unlit Road to the house.
In so small a city as Belfast, it was inevitable that Geordie would discover that my father had a job, and when he did he could barely contain his glee. As far as he knew, the government offered no reward for turning in squatters, but informing on those who were working while claiming to be unemployed paid fifty pounds per head. The first night he came to our house to gloat, he lingered on the doorstep for a full twenty minutes while our dinners cooled and the dust from the street blew into the hall, leaning against the doorjamb and smoking through his teeth and chatting about times getting tough, making ends meet, doing whatever necessary in order to get by. Every so often afterwards he’d drop by unannounced to comment on the few additions my father’s wages bought and which Geordie’s keen, intrusive eye invariably managed to spot. When he was gone my father would sit as if physically drained. In the end, unnerved and anxious, he turned to his brother for advice.
My uncle’s response was typical. In the days before experience had honed his business sense, he had accepted a brown and yellow, five-berth caravan as partial payment for property he’d bought, then sold; this he now proffered for our use.
His voice cheery, unwilling to accept the problem as real, he suggested we get away for a while, have a holiday, forget about the whole thing. He’d run us down himself if we wanted, and we could give him a ring when we wanted to leave.
Caught up in the spontaneity of the notion my father agreed, though he made sure to look in on Harry before we left. The caravan was just outside of Newcastle, usually a popular seaside resort. But in early March it was still dark and sparsely populated; few people cared to spend their wages in a town with little else to offer than a few enshrouded amusement halls and a fitful, troubled sea. Even at peak season my mother had always preferred Portrush. She liked to walk the path beside the bed-and-breakfasts where the wind was strongest and the smell of salt water was sharpest on the air. There was a set of swings at the far end of the most distant pier, and it was there we could always find them, once we’d eaten our fill of candy and ice cream, had gambled our pennies on the miniature horses, and had no more money left to spend. I stayed with them once when I was too sick in the stomach for food or for rides and watched them play. With hair unpinned she shook her head at him—Don’t go so high!—and he stood behind her, just out of her reach, sometimes pushing gently, sometimes catching hold of the swing as it came back to him and clasping her tight around the waist so that she sat suspended for a moment with her feet unable to touch the ground before he let her go and she swung out again towards the sea. Don’t push so high, she’d tell him, and then she’d pump her legs madly and make herself go higher still.
There were swings at Newcastle, too, but only the frame remained, the seats and chains having long ago disappeared in that mysterious way to which most public facilities seem prone. While my father waited at the bottom of the slide with outstretched arms, I held Nicola’s hand as she slid down to meet him and told Stephen when he asked me that the swings were inside for the winter and if we came again in spring he could play on them then. It was warm for the season and we stayed late, loathe to ring my uncle and get ready to leave. When we got into Belfast on Sunday night it was after ten, though the light in Harry’s parlour was still on. My father could see him seated at his desk and decided to leave him be. By half past the hour we were all in bed.
When my father found him the next morning Harry was already three days dead, blue-skinned and as stiff and straight as the chair he’d died in. His expression in death was neither peaceful nor disturbed; he’d had a heart attack while replying to his daughter, yet neither of their letters revealed anything that would have brought it on. While Stephen fetched the doctor, who rang the hospital and the police, my father gathered the pages and put them away with Harry’s other papers before the officials arrived. When they got there, the constables took my father’s statement and the doctor took his pulse, checked us all for signs of shock, and sent someone down to find George. Then the medics took Harry away.
I remember the funeral and the viewing before it as a pathetic affair, dimly lit and poorly attended. Geordie had not bothered to ring his cousin in Australia, having decided, under the circumstances, that the funeral should take place as soon as possible and with the minimum of fuss. Harry had no family left in Belfast to make recriminations or to raise the issue of Eleanor’s will, but Geordie knew the accusations were sure to come as soon as Melanie heard the news, and he had no intention of being taken unprepared. Even before he’d seen the undertaker he’d paid a visit to his solicitor to discover if his share of Harry’s savings had been compromised by the death.
In a room with mustard walls, plush russet carpeting, ornamental brass fixtures, and casual, sling-back chairs, Harry’s coffin was incidental, its lid propped up behind it against the wall. The four of us arrived in the same black frocks and trousers we had worn when my mother died and had not put on since. Following my father’s example, we each peered briefly into the coffin and moved our lips like his before going on to clasp the cold hands of Harry’s nephew, who sat alone in the front row and accepted our offers of sympathy without a word. In the hallway where we waited while they nailed the coffin shut, I watched my father turn to Geordie and begin to speak, but Geordie cut him short and turned away. The solicitor stepped in then, a tall man in an iridescent suit. Something m
ade me leave Stephen with Nicola and cross over, imbued with a sense of purpose I’d seen once on my mother’s face when she’d defended my father against a man who’d pushed him outside a restaurant in Shaftsbury Square. We’d gone out for supper on a wet night when I was still the only child, and after the meal we called a taxi to take us home. The man came out from a bar across the street and stood for a moment swaying in the rain before he came over to us. Orange bastard, the man said gratuitously, and then he’d pushed my father and knocked his glasses and his hat to the ground. My mother raised her umbrella with both fists around the handle and swung it down from behind her head as a blacksmith smites an anvil, and the man fell down in front of her on his knees. During the ride home she sat between us, holding a handkerchief to my father’s bleeding temple, one arm around his shoulders, the other around mine. The tears were bright against her cheeks yet I could see no trace of anger in her eyes. I stood in the doorway of their room as she put my father to bed; then we went downstairs and she made us both a cup of tea.
“That’s not the way, you know,” she said. Her hands at last were trembling, and she did not look at me as she spoke. “Your father’ll be sure to tell you so tomorrow, so I might as well say it first.”
Geordie’s solicitor was just leaving as I touched my father’s sleeve. “My advice to you, mister,” he said in parting, “is to stay out of the way. You’ve dealt my client here a serious blow, a very serious blow indeed. Let’s hope for your sake it’s not more serious than it seems.”
“What’s he talking about?” I demanded, and even called after him, “What’ve we done?” but neither of them answered. Within a week the authorities had found us and had begun proceedings against my father for the money they said he’d stolen while claiming to be unemployed.
At the burial my father stood apart from the small assembly—the grave digger, the minister, a few from the Road still able to walk, and Geordie—and we stood by his side. Just as he had said, “This is it,” five months before when at last he’d introduced us to our home, so he now turned round to us as they lowered Harry’s coffin and said simply, “This is death.” I think he believed that, for all my mother’s funeral had been a grand affair. There had been music and laughter at the reception, platters of food and a great deal of drink, a final triumph of one tradition over another. Everybody who had ever known her came, and the rooms were filled with the aura of reunion, not of loss. I could feel my mother’s presence there as clearly as I had when I was a child and she had held me and spoken to me as she gently stroked my hair. I imagined I could see her, leaning against a bookcase, a glass of wine in her hand, looking on with satisfaction and distaste as we sang and drank in front of her. I tried to tell my father that, for the sight of him, bent and lonely in a chair by the door, surrounded by colour, by texture and sound, made me throb with sorrow and the wish to give comfort. But I was young and inarticulate; when I told him I could see her he grasped me by the arms as I stood before him and shook me, asking where, where.
Stigmata
The complex consisted of twin towers, each fifteen stories tall, each equipped with a single pay phone in the lobby and a set of four washer/dryers in the basement beside the lift shaft. There were eight units on every floor, each designed for a single tenant with little time to spare; the rooms were small, and with only two to choose from, time spent in the flat could pass slowly. Each unit on the ground floor had its own tiny, self-contained garden, the false appearance of the semidetached.
It was the garden that had attracted Eileen to the flat in the first place, that and the convenience of the complex to a depot from which she could catch the bus into town. She’d seen its potential when she first viewed the property, had pictured the look of the blossoms and hedges as she gazed out the window, her mind moving on to the cost of the necessary implements even as she agreed to the terms of the lease. Yet in the end she’d found little time for gardening. She’d dug the hard ground with the shovel she’d purchased and spread it with grass seed as the packet instructed one Saturday just after she’d moved in, but though she’d been there a year and a half already, still nothing had taken root.
It was the third evening she’d worked late that week, and close to eleven when she turned from the footpath towards the first block of flats, digging for her keys. Though she was proud of her reputation as a reliable worker and considered the last-minute requests of employers less imposition than a sign of respect, she’d been finding it difficult lately to maintain the pace. Fatigue made her stupid; she dropped things in public, ordered coffee when she meant to say tea, in the evenings discovered stains on her person which must have caused comment during the day. . . . And she mislaid things. She was still rooting around in search of her keys as she scraped the bolt back across the low, wooden gate at the foot of the garden and turned around to face her front door. It was only then that she saw the man.
He was slumped across her doorstep just inside the alcove, his arms tightly crossed against his chest, his chin buried in the folds of a thin, grey scarf, his face half-hidden by the hood of his anorak. When she saw him she started violently and cried out, more from surprise than from fear. But then panic did grip her and she stumbled frantically back to the gate, struggled again with the rusty bolt, and scrambled round to the other side, slamming and bolting it behind her, deafened momentarily by the sound of her own breathing.
Despite the disturbance, the figure in the doorway had not stirred. Gradually his inaction bolstered her courage; if he’d meant to attack her, she decided, he would have done so by now. After all, she’d been standing practically on top of him just a moment before—even now she wasn’t much more than a few feet away—and he looked to be a big man, one who could easily have grabbed her before she’d had the chance to scream.
From the far side of the fence she called out to him.
“Hey,” she said softly, straining to distinguish his features in the uneven, amber light. She called again, louder this time, but still he did not move.
Cautiously, and with as little noise as possible, she slid the bolt across and stepped slowly around the gate, closing it softly behind her. Even so slight a reduction in the distance between them brought him more sharply into focus. From the little she could make out he might have been an attractive man once, even imposing. A small knot of tension throbbed suddenly at the back of her neck. She took a step closer and leaned towards him.
“Hey, are you alright?” The figure rolled slightly at the sound, like a moored ship against a wave. Eileen stepped back quickly, but the movement hadn’t wakened him. A sudden thought struck her—Perhaps he’s dead. Inexplicably the thought made her giggle. There would be an inquest, of course, and then the funeral, which she would pay for and which only she would attend. She thought of the fistful of earth in her hand, the touch of the veil against her cheek, of the questions that’d be asked of her when she returned to the office, a black ribbon round her arm, of the office girls clucking and fussing and making her endless cups of tea. . . .
She shook the images away, suddenly annoyed. She strode the two steps over to where he lay, knelt down, and gingerly prodded his arm with her bag.
“Hey. Hey, listen. You can’t stay here.”
The figure did not respond. Eileen released an exasperated sigh, uncertain how to proceed. She was clearly conscious only of the cold, of a loss of sensation in her toes and fingers, but she was nevertheless impressed by the absence of the expected. Puzzled, she put her bag down beside her and gently laid her hand on his sleeve. She was inches from his face, and the soft sound of his breathing now mingled with her own, yet there was no smell of alcohol, no stench of perspiration or of filth accumulated over time. She could see now that he was roughly her own age, somewhere between thirty and forty. His hair was an unremarkable brown, of varying length and irreversibly thin, the scalp of an invalid in rapid decline. Despite his bulk, his limbs appeared fragile, too slender to sustain their own weight. And yet his cheeks were not sunke
n, his face not as gaunt as she’d first imagined. She’d seen faces like it in hospital beds; both her parents had worn it briefly towards the end. It was an in-between face, potentially, from under which familiar features could resurface or be replaced altogether. She saw herself suddenly, laden with fruit juice and flowers, the night nurses whispering at the far end of the ward, the matron’s gentle touch on her shoulder pressing her back into her seat by his bed, the sound of the curtain drawn close around them, the doctor responding without hesitation, I understand; of course you can stay.
The path and overhanging vegetation to her left was lit momentarily by a haze of white light, and Eileen heard the sound of tyres twisting up the driveway to the block. At the same time she sensed a sluggish movement in her direction; the man was leaning like a tree about to fall. She stared at him for a moment, watching his gathering momentum and wondering how it could possibly fail to disturb his sleep. When his shoulder touched hers she panicked; she dropped her briefcase beside her bag and pushed against him with all her strength, but he was the heavier and hers the more awkward position. She lost her grip and slumped onto the path, legs splayed, skirt hitched up above her knees, supporting his head uncomfortably in the crook of her arm. From the car park came the sounds of footsteps on the gravel, a car door slamming, the exchange of cheery farewells. Light swung away in an arc from the path as the car reversed, turned, and drove back the way it had come, and Eileen heard laughter and the sharp, military click of stiletto heels as whoever had been the passengers now headed towards the back of the block.
Departures Page 5