He hung up. The lads on the other side of the aisle were talking too loudly, trying to give him the pretence of privacy even if they all knew everyone nearby had listened to every word. He texted Deirdre, told her where he was. Then he switched off the phone, closed his eyes and sat there wishing there was a button he could press to switch off his mind too. At this stage, he’d take the risk of it never coming on again, of the battery running down to beyond empty.
It was almost dark when he arrived, stomping through molten grey puddles under a granite sky of pregnant clouds, the air salty on his lips. The sky and sea formed a symphony of greys, reminding him of a few lines from one of the only Yeats poems he’d taken to or, to be honest, even half-understood: “Imagining a man, and his sun-freckled face, and grey Connemara cloth, climbing up to a place, where stone is dark under froth.” The lines were fresh in his mind because one of the last podcasts he’d listened to had been about Yeats. Was it just a few weeks ago? It’d been before his life veered off its tracks again anyway. There were too many damn ‘befores’ now. His ‘afters’ had no staying power.
He paused at the top of the hill and looked down at the blue bungalow, too big now for one man, with its green-grey roof tiles weathered by the spray and the grasping winds that smashed onto this shore after weeks frolicking across the white-tipped Atlantic. The house seemed to be crouching on the soft ground, poised to strike. It radiated tension. Or maybe he just thought that because of what Deirdre had told him about her father. It didn’t matter. He was cold and tired and there was nowhere else to go.
He paused at the rusty gate set in the wall. Twisted branches splotched with red berries rose above the stones and a light in the front room cast a weak glow onto the patch of grass out front. A shadow passed across the net curtains. The silhouette paused, the head turned. For a second, they looked at each other – a faceless shadow, a shadowy man, white eyes shining in black faces, two men with no connection at the end of the world.
The shadow disappeared and the light above the door with its peeling grey paint came on. Theo opened the gate. Behind him, the wind and the sea wrestled. He could hear the waves sucking pebbles down the shore. The dull grind of stone on stone set his teeth on edge. The door opened.
“Shema!” The name jumped from his lips like a forgotten prayer. What the hell was going on in his head today? It was as though the walls he had built between his worlds were crumbling, sending shredded memories hurtling into each other, a Big Bang of the brain. Of course, it wasn’t Shema. It couldn’t be Shema. Shema belonged to the ‘there’ with all the other dead. He started to stammer an apology, cursing his unreliable memory and treacherous eyes. The old man cut him short.
“Don’t fecking stand there all night. Get inside. Look at the state of ye. C’mon now.”
The voice was harsh, impatient. Theo hesitated but where else was he to go? By now, everyone in Merrickstown would know what he’d done. In the end, Dublin was not much different from the village outside Kibungo where Shema would hear from raisin-faced old ladies how Theo had stolen roasted corn from their yards even before the yellow beans had begun to digest in his guilty belly. If he didn’t want to end up chopped into bits and spread across the Wicklow mountains, he’d better stay away and stay quiet. Maybe this was the penance he deserved. Crimes of the father, crimes of the son. The mark of his people. The mark of Cain.
“Jesus, are you thick as well as violent? I said get inside!”
Deirdre’s father was tall and thin and wore old-man tartan slippers. As he edged past him, Theo chanced a quick glance. Hooded eyes chiselled into a broad face, white stubble around his chin and mouth, thin lips sucked clean of smiles, wispy grey hair rising like a halo in the door’s light. Was this his saviour? He looked like a witchdoctor, a man more used to cursing than curing.
“Take those mucky shoes off, then down the hall to the kitchen. I’ll make us some tea. Then you can tell me yerself what this is all about. Deirdre’s called but she’s in a right state and I can’t make head-nor-tail out of her blathering. So you’ll have to tell me exactly what happened.”
Theo bent to unlace his trainers. What happened? Good question, he thought. The furniture shop closed, that’s what happened, and that’s why he ended up working at The Deep, and that’s where he met Deirdre, and Cara, and that was the start of it all.
CHAPTER TWO
He noticed her eyes first, or rather he noticed the lurid, purple lids and thick eyeliner that made it look like she was peering at him from behind a carnival mask. Her cheeks were Barbie-pink and her whole face was pancaked with flaky, slightly too-orange powder that ended in an obvious line below her ears. A tideline of desperation. He thought of the ads he had seen some time after arriving in Ireland: You’ve been Tango’d! He’d assumed the sketch had something to do with him. The guy was a different colour and disrupted everything, just like him. Everything was so confusing in those first years. He didn’t have the tools, in any language, to describe what had happened to him or to reason his survival. No surprise there. His own people had had to make up a word to describe the killing. It went beyond language.
She had to be around forty, he thought, taking in the fine wrinkles cradling her brown eyes and bracketing well-defined if slightly thin lips. Her gaudy, over-painted face sat uneasily with the rest of her body, which was hunched over the enormous sink. Her dark hair was scraped carelessly into a low bun. She wore a shapeless grey cardigan under her blue apron but her jeans were tight, moulding a trim arse and shapely calves. She wore black-and-white hi-tops, too cool for the rest of her outfit.
“Théoneste, this is Deirdre Walsh. Deirdre, Théoneste – sorry, I just can’t manage your last name – what’s it again?” asked Desmond Fahy, The Deep’s manic owner.
“Mukansonera.” Theo said the word slowly. He always did.
He could’ve taken Jim and Sheila’s last name after he moved in with them. Clifton. A solid, rounded word, no worries there. But in a rare display of stubbornness and pride, as inexplicable to little Theo as it was to his foster parents, he’d insisted on keeping Mukansonera. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to betray his dead family, or at least not add any new betrayals to that ultimate sell-out: his survival. He took the decision before his memories started reforming – fragments coming together in agonising slow motion after the explosion that was April 1994 – and before he knew the truth of that name. He’d stuck with it though, reasoning that he could always change it later if shame overwhelmed his conflicted sense of loyalty to the ghosts of the time before.
“That’s it, ah yes, good lad. Anyway, Dee, Théoneste is starting today. He’ll help you on the wash-up for now but we’re planning to eventually put him on the veg with Jason.”
Deirdre wiped her hands on her apron and extended the right one, red and hot from the water.
“Hello, Théoneste. Welcome to Merrickstown’s finest.”
For once, Theo experienced the aural double-take that his thick Dublin accent usually inflicted on others: he’d expected a high-pitched voice sharpened on Dublin’s tough grindstone. Instead, her voice was deep and husky, the words soft and elongated. She should have been working on one of those sex hotlines that used to be advertised on pink and green flyers in phone boxes. When he was younger, he collected the flyers and drew pictures on the backs: huts, trees, monkeys, bicycles and stick-men farmers. At the time, he didn’t understand what the flyers were going on about. He knew the skimpily clad women were somehow up to no good; he could read the words but couldn’t seem to put it all together. He knew about sex, of course. He had learnt the basics at home, watching the goats and the sheep in the fields around the village. Shema had filled in the blanks, barking out the details with a loud cackle after each sentence. Theo collected the flyers because he liked the bright colours. He couldn’t recall ever seeing paper like that in Kibungo but the brassy greens reminded him of the hills rising above the village, eternal sentinels with their heads in the clouds, whispering to the gods who must’ve b
een dozing in 1994. During his first year with the Cliftons, his year of living dangerously, of almost sinking out of himself, he papered his wardrobe with these crude pictures so that his confused eyes would have somewhere to rest. Later, he took the drawings down, replacing them with posters of his favourite Man United players: Cole, Giggs, Beckham and Scholes. By then, he was desperate to hide his difference, insofar as that was possible. Which of course it wasn’t.
When he first arrived in Ireland, the counsellor he’d been assigned, a bearded man with lavender socks and a lavender disposition, encouraged him to put what was in his head on paper but he didn’t want to trivialise those events. How could he ‘draw what happened’? What if someone found those pictures? What if an Irish child found them? Their head would explode.
“Howya?” he said, grabbing Deirdre’s hand in his own big one. She started, eyes widening, and he grinned even wider. Even now, people did not expect a big, black guy to speak with such a heavy Dublin accent. He was still something of an anomaly, although Dublin was more ‘United Colours of Benetton’ now than ten years ago, for sure.
“So, Deirdre, could you show young Theo – d’you mind if I call you Theo? No? Good stuff – show him the ropes today, will you?” Desmond said, his grey eyes bouncing between the two of them. He was a man of constant movement. His hands fluttered and darted like fish in a tank, his eyes flickered, always seeking out hidden enemies poised to destroy him and his restaurant. Theo liked Desmond. He looked like Jim, but on steroids. They’d the same 1970s haircuts, unkempt sideburns defying changing times, paunches telling of kebabs drowned in beers, squat bodies that might have proved deadly on the rugby pitch but were never tested. But Jim was of average height, while Desmond was six-foot-two, a restless giant. Theo felt he’d be a fair boss and that was the best kind when you didn’t really want a boss at all.
Three weeks before, Theo had lost his job when the furniture store out on the N4 shut down, another victim of a recession that Theo was beginning to take personally. He’d gone to college in 2006 and by the time he came out of Dublin’s Institute of Technology with an electrical engineering degree three years later, everything had changed. There was bugger-all chance of a job. Turned out the Celtic Tiger was a shyster, conning people into maxing out their credit cards and piling up the loans with his tall tales of boom, boom, boom, only to haul tail when the wheels came off the world in 2008. Theo thought the damn Celtic Tiger was a bit like the Cat in the Hat: he came in, said ‘let’s party’, and then wrecked the place. But unlike the Cat, he didn’t stay and tidy up before mother came home.
So Theo ended up in the furniture shop, but then when the economy hit the bottom below the bottom, people didn’t want big sofas for the big houses they could no longer afford, or fancy garden furniture to sit rotting in the rain. At least the coke business had held up. It was one addiction the country couldn’t seem to shake. There’d always be money for drugs, and booze, and fags, thank God.
He was already earning a fair bit nixing – and that’s how he saw his drug dealing, just a little nixing, nothing serious – but when the furniture store closed, he needed another source of income, not so much for the money but for Big Brother. He didn’t want too many questions asked about how he made ends meet. Precious would definitely disapprove so she needed to believe he was working somewhere legit. He also needed an answer for when Jim called asking, “What are you at these days, lad?”
“So, I’ll leave you to it,” Desmond said now, stumbling over the words. Even his voice was in a hurry. “I’m expecting a supplier any minute now. In fact, he’s probably out back already, creaming off a tin here and a packet there. Jeez, you’d need eyes in the back of yer head with that lot.”
He flashed a glance at the cheap watch flattening the ginger hairs on his wrist.
“I’ll pop back in a while.”
The ‘pop’ exploded like a magician’s puff of smoke as he raced off through the red doors to the back. They clattered together noisily.
“So, Théoneste, do you live around here?” Deirdre had turned back to the sink and was scrubbing a blackened pot with a scraggly Brillo pad. She was left-handed and married. She caught her tongue between her lips as she scrubbed.
“Yeah, I live just around the corner from the Methodist Church. With my girlfriend. And, Theo is fine.”
“Right, sorry. Ah yeah, I know it. How did you end up in Dublin then?”
Theo watched Deirdre’s hands in the suds. She rubbed fiercely as she talked but now she switched the Brillo pad to her right hand. It looked awkward and just below the elbow of her left arm, half-hidden by the sleeve of her cardigan, Theo noticed a red mark, shiny, silent and sore. None of his business. There was plenty of that around.
Deirdre turned to face him, her face flushed.
“Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything. Sure, maybe you’ve been here all your life. Why not? I’m being old-fashioned and stupid. My daughter, Grace, she’s eighteen, she’d kill me. Tell me to move with the times.”
Theo realised his silence had made her think he was offended. No harm in that. In his fifteen plus years here, he’d learned never to look a gift act of mild racism or stereotyping in the mouth, especially not the inadvertent ones. You never knew when you might need that guilt in a country that thrived on equal measures of xenophobia and an ages-old, finely tuned sense of culpability. No smoke without fire, he often thought.
“S’alright,” he muttered. “I’m from Rwanda. Came here when I was a child. Grew up in Clontarf. My foster parents used to live out by the GAA club. They’ve moved to Donegal now though. I came to Merrickstown after college. For a job but that didn’t last.”
There was silence. He was used to that as well. Too many questions, so people usually didn’t ask any.
“So you must be, what, twenty-one?” Deirdre asked, rinsing the saucepan one final time and clanging it onto the draining board. She kept her head down now. “Bit older than my three. Grace is doing her Leaving next week, God help us. She’s at the Mercy College, I’ve one boy in Mount Temple secondary, and Kevin, my youngest, he’s in St Joseph’s.”
“Tough time for Grace then,” Theo said. “I’m twenty-two, so that was a while ago for me. Did an engineering course at the DIT afterwards but haven’t been able to get a proper job since then. Looks like the Celtic Tiger’s lost some of its roar.”
“Isn’t it desperate?” Deirdre said, pausing to look up at him. “Fergal, that’s my husband, and funnily enough he’s an electrician too, he says the work is falling off a cliff. All those new houses that were built, sure no one has the money now to put lights up in them. Never mind live in them. Thank God, he’s still got a job though. His company, well it’s not his but it’s where he works, they’ve got a couple of good industrial clients, so… that’s something. We haven’t had to pawn the flat screen yet anyway.”
She laughed and grabbed another massive pot from the floor beside the sink. Theo leapt to help her although she could certainly manage. She had that sharpness that defined a lot of women in this part of town. Gimlet-eyed, good-looking in a brash way, hard-living and hard-working, but sometimes you’d see them sipping takeaway coffees and crying quietly on benches in Stephen’s Green, or at discreet corner tables in Bewleys, or down by the canal. Sheila wasn’t like that. She and Jim had always had enough, they were what people here called comfortable. That’s why they could afford to take him in after Sheila’s sister Cath, who worked for Trócaire, found him sitting on an upturned red bucket like a mud-encrusted statue in a smoke-filled, stinking camp in Tanzania and resolved to save him, and maybe a bit of herself, from that end-of-times. But to say they fostered him because they could afford it was not fair, or at least it was not the whole truth. Theo knew that but the disloyal thought slid through his brain anyway. Sometimes the monologue in his head was crueller than he wanted it to be. He guessed it was the same for everyone.
“That’s some pot,” he said now, stepping back again.
“Yeah, not as bad as the ones we use to cook the lobsters. Now, there’s a dirty job,” Deirdre said. She turned to look at him. “Good job the lads paying twenty euro out there for their thermidors don’t see behind the scenes. You know what I mean? Like you should never see what goes into black pudding.”
She laughed again and dried her hands on her apron.
“I’ll show you around before the rest of them come in. You’ve been into the restaurant before?”
He shook his head.
“I’m more a Supermac man, to be honest,” he said, smiling despite himself.
He didn’t usually warm to strangers. Warming led to talking and that always led back to the what-happened-to-ye question, and he was buggered if he was going to tell that sorry saga to every Tom, Dick and Harry. He knew he often came across as a standoffish black bastard but he didn’t care. He’d enough friends, and besides, it was good to have a little man-of-mystery thing going, especially in his real line of work. But there was something about Deirdre, something about that mix of tough and vulnerable. He liked it and it stirred a memory, warm and soft. He let the sensation flit through his brain, happy to let it be, knowing he might never capture it or label it. It would land if it wanted to but then he didn’t always want these butterflies to stop flying.
“Alright, we’ll start in there and work back,” said Deirdre. “The way customers never do. Then you can help me finish this lot. Best way to learn where everything lives is to put it away.”
“Spose so,” he muttered.
His mood darkened as he realised he would actually be washing dishes in a restaurant. Fair enough, he might not have been destined for much growing up in a village of mostly mud huts in the heart of Africa, but surely he didn’t survive for this?
“Where are you from? You don’t sound like you’re from Dublin,” he said as they headed for the short corridor that led out to the restaurant.
Rain Falls on Everyone Page 2