by Colm Toibin
‘And what would I do then, Ned, where would I live?’
He handed her back the letters.
‘So what do you want me to do?’ he asked her.
‘Tell them to back off.’
‘Who?’
‘Tell the planning man and the health man to leave me alone, and tell the merchants in the square, as you call them, the truth. Ask them if they would like to have me on the street, because that’s where I’ll be. Instead of the litter, it’ll be me.’
‘It’s a lot to ask, Nancy,’ he said.
She was on the point of telling him that it had been done before, but she knew to say nothing now, play poor and humble.
‘Well, I’m out on the side of the road with three children,’ she said sadly.
‘Give me a few days,’ he said, ‘but I can promise nothing. You should have consulted us before you opened.’
She could not contain herself.
‘Sure I know what you would have said.’
She stood up.
When he opened the door for her, he hesitated in the hall for a moment.
‘Still, despite all the troubles,’ he said, ‘the country’s come far, haven’t we, Nancy, I mean we’ve come a long way.’
This stayed in her mind for days as his way of saying that he would help her. The implication, she thought, was that Ned and she both had been born in houses which knew nothing about banks or solicitors or planning permissions, and now they were freely discussing these matters. This had to be progress, especially, she thought, if something could be arranged.
A WEEK LATER, he came to tell her that he could help her, but it would have to be done carefully and quietly. She was to apply for planning permission and, if it was refused, she was to appeal. It would take a long time, he said, but she would not be closed down. In return, she was to comply with all the health regulations. Again, she could move gradually, promising more each time. She must write immediately, he said, to the health officer announcing that she would comply with each and every one of his instructions. It would be a while before he came back, and bit by bit she could satisfy his demands. He was a difficult man, the health officer, Ned said.
That day she made a promise to herself that she would go and see Betty Farrell and apologize or explain. Several times Betty had passed the shop but not given her customary wave. Nancy did not need cheques cashed now, since, with the chip shop, she had plenty of cash, too much indeed for safety. She therefore made an appointment with the bank manager and, later that week, took with her in cash, when she went to see him, one month’s payment on the loan, promising to pay the same each month until the debt was cleared. On the way across the square she had prepared a speech for Mr Wallace, planning to end by telling him that he could take it or leave it. Instead, his friendliness prevented her from making any speech at all, instead merely handing him the money, which included dirty and crumpled notes, watching him counting it, taking the receipt, shaking his hand and leaving.
SLOWLY, SHE LEARNED which opening hours were the most profitable, discovering that she could do business at lunchtime between twelve and two and then close until eight in the evening and stay open until the pubs shut, and later at the weekend. She wondered why no one knew how much money could be made from a chip shop, but she told no one, not even Birdseye, how high the profits were.
When she told him, instead, that the supermarket was a liability and she was going to close it, he asked her to wait. He had another idea, he said, and he would come back to her when he had the detail worked out.
‘You listened to me the last time,’ he said, ‘and if you have any sense you will listen to me again.’
When he came back the following week, he told her that she should close the supermarket and open a shop selling spirits, wine, beer, cigarettes and nothing else.
‘I have wine here,’ she said. ‘No one ever looks at it, most of it is rancid it’s been there so long. There’s no trade in that at all.’
‘That’s the coming thing,’ he said. ‘People are going to start drinking wine and they’re going to drink beer at home. You can take it from me.’
He sent her a friend of his, also from Waterford, who showed her the results of market research.
‘Be the first in the town,’ he said. ‘Fill the window with wine and beer, with special offers, and they’ll be in like flies. It’ll beat selling corned beef and washing-up liquid. The profit margins are high if you get the right wholesaler. And it’s a good clean business. And you don’t have to open until eleven in the morning.’
Once more, she told no one except Nicole, Mags O’Connor’s niece, whom she discovered was home for good. When she met her on the street, she said that she was closing the shop.
‘Oh God, she’s going to miss you now. She loves Friday, because that’s the day you come.’
‘Tell her I’ll come out and see her,’ she said. But she knew, as with her promise to herself to go and see Betty Farrell, that it was unlikely. By now, Betty and Jim Farrell had walked by her several times on the street without speaking to her.
Some of her suppliers had stopped delivering to her because she owed them too much money. She waited until a few days before she closed to tell the others. None of them would accept returns, so she arranged for Birdseye’s friend to take the non-perishable goods for a knock-down price. And a week later, with some new shelving and brighter lights, installed by another friend of Birdseye’s, she opened Sheridan’s Off-Licence and filled the window with signs for special offers. Even in the first week, her turnover was higher. Catherine seemed to prefer her new merchandise. She had never tasted wine before, she said, but she liked the taste of it. The wholesaler had given her some free samples. One day when Nancy spoke to her, she almost smiled.
‘Christmas,’ Birdseye told them when he dropped in to see them, ‘Christmas is when you’ll clean up.’
BY THE END OF the summer Gerard realized how much money she was making. For most of his holidays he had run the lunchtime trade in the chip shop on his own, and he had come to understand, better than she did, what supplies were needed, how early to order them and how much they cost. While she kept all the figures in her head, and knew by the mounting cash in her chest of drawers how much money she was making, Gerard set about writing it all down, the daily income in seven neat vertical lines, and the weekly outgoings in wages, supplies and other costs. He continued this even after he went back to school.
‘Do you pay tax on it all?’ he asked. She told him that she did, although she had put no thought into paying tax. He frowned. The following day he came back to her and said, in the voice of his father, that he had made enquiries and she should get an accountant. He had been told, he said, that Frank Wadding was the man. He would do her taxes for her.
‘Who did you make enquiries from?’ she asked. ‘I hope you’re not telling anyone our business.’
‘I asked questions, that’s all. I told no one anything.’
‘Who did you ask?’
‘Someone who might know.’
Since he had begun to deal with the cash, he quickly noticed that when she had paid the bank and the Credit Union their monthly payments, a large amount of money was missing. That day when he came to her, his tone almost accusing, she regretted having given him so much responsibility. She had no choice now but to tell him that the building in which they lived and did business was re-mortgaged and that they were, despite the money they were making now, heavily in debt. When he asked her for precise figures, she realized that he had completely ignored the story of what she had been through, and the effort she had made. He was busy counting.
THE ACCOUNTANT’S desk was too big for him; he wrote down every figure on a notepad, and then considered it all in silence, nodding like an old man.
‘Some things are clear anyway,’ he said eventually. ‘The loans will have to be restructured so that the interest can be offset against tax, and you’ll have to set up a limited company and pay yourself a salary. And you’d b
etter get that cash out of the house as fast as possible.’
He wrote these points down as soon as he mentioned them.
‘And we’ll need to keep in close touch, say once a week, for the next few months so that all your accounting procedures can be put in order. You have, on the face of it here, a very valuable business.’
THE GIRLS TOOK no interest in either the off-licence or the chip shop; Gerard’s interest in both was so intense that Nancy had to ban him working in the chip shop, except on Saturdays, during term time. But since his grasp of the figures was better than hers, his weekly accounts meticulously kept, she let him prepare the figures for the accountant and deal with the bank, much to Mr Wallace’s delight.
‘That Gerard of yours,’ he said to her one day when he met her in the square, ‘will be a millionaire before he is twenty-one.’
When she asked him for a chequebook at their next meeting he immediately agreed.
Her main business was on weekend nights. When the pubs and the disco closed they were three or four deep waiting for fish and chips and burgers. She worked as hard herself as the two girls she employed, and no matter how drunk or impatient her customers were, she remained polite and friendly. She loved taking money from them, loving handling the coins and notes, and this was something she had never once felt in the supermarket, the zeal surrounding the cash register. Some of them were rowdy, and others so drunk that they were either going to abandon the fish and chips on some window ledge or vomit in the Monument Square. She took their money and smiled at them.
When the complaints persisted about the litter and the vomit, she made a point of cleaning up the Monument Square herself once the chip shop had been closed, moving around with a box for the litter and later with a bucket of soapy water and a brush for the vomit. Even though she did this quietly at three in the morning, everyone on the square got to know about it, and she learned that some of them were sorry that they had said anything.
Slowly, people in the square, those who owned shops, began to understand how well she was doing. And word got around too, with the help of Ned Doyle she believed, how much debt she had inherited. They stopped complaining about the litter. Ned Doyle called by one day and told her that she had everyone’s admiration for keeping the business going for Gerard.
When she watched Gerard working in the chip shop on a Saturday, or keeping the accounts, she realized that he presumed he would be taking over the business in time, just as his own father had taken over the business from his grandmother. This explained, she thought, why his Christmas report had a complaint about him from each teacher. He believed that he did not have to bother paying attention in anyone’s class.
She was sorry now that she had not told Gerard from the very beginning what her plan was, what came to the front of her mind every time she tapped the cash register in the chip shop or banked the takings from the off-licence. All her life she had been on display like this; from the time of her mother’s small shop people had been able to gawk at her as much as they liked, or look past her. She dreamed now of Dublin, the long roads with trees on the sides and house after house almost hidden. In Goatstown and Stillorgan and Booterstown, there were people who lived in houses and no one greeted them with a mixture of familiarity and curiosity every time they went outside their own door. No one knew all about them, no one felt free to waylay them to stop and talk. They were just normal people who lived in houses. And that was what she wanted, that was why she was working, to become like them. To pay off her debts and save enough money and then sell up, and go to Dublin where no one would know anything about her, where she and Gerard and the girls would be just people in a house. She dreamed of a life in the future in which no one could stand in front of her with money in their hand and command her attention.
When, after Christmas, she travelled to Dublin with the girls so they could take advantage of the sales and spend the day wandering between Switzer’s and Brown Thomas, she noticed that they had both grown taller and needed bigger sizes in everything. She was surprised by the suddenness of this, as though it had happened on the way to the city in the car. As they appeared from the fitting room wearing new clothes and she complimented them and made them turn and examined the prices and the reductions, she realized that she had not looked at her daughters in six months. She wondered if, when she went home, she would find that Gerard too had grown without her noticing.
Gerard remained steadfast in his determination not to study, despite the curfew she placed on him and the banning of him from even appearing in the chip shop. He had not grown, but had developed a walk of his own, a sloping, confident walk performed best when he had his hands in his pockets. He began to speak to people, including people three times his age, in an almost cheeky and quite familiar way. She felt a great tenderness for him as she watched him trying to become a figure about the town.
She tried to have a normal dinner ready for the children when they came home at one o’clock, leaving the girls she employed to work in the chip shop, making an appearance there only when the children had gone back to school. The problem was what to do after three o’clock. She was never needed in the off-licence, where Catherine was slowly getting to know some of the wines; she was often to be found smelling the wines and rolling a small amount around in the bottom of a glass. With the wholesalers, Catherine organized a wine-tasting course in the hotel which had become very popular. With Nancy, she only wanted to talk about a new variety of French wine which had arrived, or the inferiority, in her opinion, of Blue Nun. Nancy grew weary of her, but increased her salary as sales went up.
Thus she went to bed in the afternoon. And her sleep, she thought, must be as deep as the sleep of the dead, heavy and dreamless. When she heard the children coming in from school, she made a promise to herself that she would sleep for half an hour more, but not any longer. Even as spring came, however, she found that she was in bed until six o’clock and still found it hard to shed the sheer pleasurable heaviness of the few hours of oblivion she had just experienced. She hated opening the chip shop again at eight, and found the weekends almost unbearable. The thought of the money, however, kept her going.
Frank Wadding the accountant continued to advise her, noting a rise in profits in the off-licence and a steady income from the chip shop, enough, he said, for her to have her debts cleared in two years, enough also, he added, for both businesses to be very valuable were she ever to sell them or borrow on the strength of them. When she asked him precisely how much they were worth, he hesitated and said he could not put an exact figure on them, but when she pressed him, he gave her a rough estimate. She realized that, were she to sell the business, she would be able to pay the bank and the Credit Union off and buy a house in Dublin without having to work another day.
AT THE END OF the next summer holidays, which Gerard had spent in the off-licence when Catherine was away, and then in the chip shop when the girls who were working there took holidays, Gerard had, with Frank Wadding, worked out a more elaborate accounting system to avoid tax and a more efficient way of dealing with cash. As he was going back to school, Nancy suggested to him that he should aim towards accountancy. He shrugged and said he knew as much about accountancy as he ever wanted to.
It was strange, she thought, how little George ever entered their conversation now. Just over a year ago she knew that every single person who saw her pitied her, sometimes avoiding her so they would not have to sympathize with her one more time, or sometimes crossing the street to shake her hand and ask her meaningfully how she was. Now, she was the woman with the chip shop and the off-licence and the new car and the smart clothes. Her two daughters could have anything they wanted, and her son, even though he was only sixteen, had begun to wear suits.
But despite the money, nothing could be done about the smell of cooking oil all over the house, right up to the bedrooms. She did everything, she put in new fans, she put a new door at the bottom of the stairs, she had the whole house repainted. When she complained to Birds
eye, who took a continued interest in her welfare, he told her it was a small price to pay. But when the girls began to smell their clothes before they went to school and would only wear freshly dry-cleaned clothes when going out with their friends, it became a serious matter.
It was Gerard who alerted her, almost proudly, to the news that the girls were called Chips by their colleagues in school, and by the boys in his school. When she asked them about it, the girls blushed and said nothing, blaming Gerard for telling her. They said it was hard to smell the cooking oil themselves, but everyone else could. When Nancy asked them if they minded this, they shrugged. It was clear to her that they were mortified by it.
In her mind, she had already sold both businesses and the house above them. She had paid off her debts and bought a house in Booterstown where no one knew them and where no cooking oil would ever be used. She would have a garden with roses and lavender, she thought. All she was doing now was saving money; every penny made would be put in the bank and would get them through a year or two or maybe more until she found a job.
In November, Gerard arrived home one mid-morning as Nancy was dealing with supplies on the telephone. He was wearing a suit and looked much older than his years. He put his school-bag down.
‘I won’t be needing that anymore. I told Mooney to fuck off and then they called Brother Delaney and I told him to fuck off. I told them all to fuck off. You can expect a visit from them, but I’m not going back, that’s the end of it.’
She saw that he was close to tears.
‘Gerard, you are going back to school,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to hear any more bad language in this house.’
‘Sure, isn’t that all we hear every night of the week?’
‘Yes, and it’s paying for your education, but I still don’t want any coarse language in this house.’
‘Some education!’ he said.
‘Well, if you want to go to boarding school, you can do that, but you’re going somewhere.’