The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  She pushed Jess away and took Ro in her arms. She’d do anything for Sophie’s children, she said, she really would. All she wanted was to protect them and make them happy. She just didn’t know how.

  Right then, Jess decided that Ro had seen something on the beach. She also decided that she didn’t want to know what it was, that it was better not to know, that she would never ask him again what he had seen.

  On the night of the beach, in the hours after their parents disappeared, everything had moved in slow motion. At first, there was no one who could speak English and, while people offered them pieces of fruit and sips of water, nobody seemed to be taking responsibility for them. By the time Eddie arrived, with his familiar accent, they were pathetically grateful. But even Eddie, acting as translator for the anxious-faced policemen, asked the same thing over and over again, until the question turned into a statement.

  ‘You must remember something.’

  But Jess hadn’t been in the habit of remembering, not then. She hadn’t realised that barely noticed details could attain a dark significance, that remembering might be important one day. But she has learned to remember.

  6

  Ro has been back at the café for a while now, watching Nefertiti over a single bottle of beer. The mother-and-baby, dog-walker shift is long gone and the atmosphere is mellowing.

  He scans the competition clustered around her as she doles out beers to men who have taken their ties off, backslapping and bantering, cruising along on London Pride. He guesses they’re from the insurance company up the road. One of them asks her to turn the footy on. And she does, but she keeps the volume low. Nefertiti concentrates hard, he notices, asks the right kinds of questions. For a man who needs a bed for the night, she is promising.

  She will focus on a detail of his story, like they always do – the temperature, the time of day, the distance to the nearest town. The mango. Everyone loves that mango. And that’s just as well, because the only things Ro has are details. He has lost the big picture. And so the contours of his story stretch and sag until he’s never really sure which version he will use – with Aussies who are only passing through, Irish girls with bluish skin, Brazilians in the Portobello Gold. He tends to pick the girl out early on, and then just bide his time. He doesn’t do the obvious. No cradling of whiskies at the bar. He doesn’t ever get drunk. He likes to focus when he slips his story in.

  ‘Quiet in here tonight,’ he says, but she doesn’t answer, just looks at him neutrally, and on the screen the final whistle sounds. The players drift across the pitch and there’s a close-up of the goalie, shoving his face into the camera, roaring. Right now, Ro could roar. Right now, Ro could stand at that bar, throw his head back and roar his story out.

  ‘Football and beer,’ she says, half to herself. ‘Paradise.’ And then she does a double-take, and it seems she remembers him.

  He smiles at her. ‘Ever been there? Paradise?’

  She looks at him like he’s a Scientologist, so he laughs to show he isn’t serious, or might not be. She clinks his glass with a spoon. She licks her lips. He thinks she likes him.

  He starts by describing what it was like at the water’s edge under the hot sun, a child with a bucket and spade. She turns to look at him, and there it is – the moment when the story takes or fails. Many times, in many different places, the story hasn’t taken. Once, in a Young’s pub, he chose badly, a brunette with an overbite. Who did he think he was? she had said. ‘Coming round here talking shite. Jesus. If that’s what you need to do to get a shag.’

  He has a sudden flashback to the laneway afterwards, the blood and broken glass, and fights it off.

  Nefertiti is swiping a damp cloth across the bar. Where Pia jingles, Nefertiti’s sound is a more sonorous one, with all those hollow bangles. And she has feelings too. ‘That’s awful,’ she says. ‘That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.’

  He gives her his modest look. She takes the order of a couple of girls – two large glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. The girls are regulars, it seems, and the three of them start to discuss a scheme to close off a road to traffic. And she’s interested in that, for some odd reason, and the mad thing is that he could lose Nefertiti to a traffic consultation. But no, when she turns back to him, she is arranging herself, settling in for more. And he knows then that he’s done enough. She is deep in his story. And it is a true story, that’s the beauty of it. The best stories come from the heart. As for the telling, there are certain rules he always follows – never seem destitute or ruined or desolate. Keep the self-pity out of your voice. Don’t beg.

  ‘What a terrible thing,’ she says. ‘You couldn’t make it up.’

  But he hasn’t. That’s the power of it. OK, the trees might not be right – he wings it when it comes to the trees.

  ‘Don’t you remember anything else, though?’

  Here we go again. He bristles at the hint of accusation, the whiff of doubt.

  When he doesn’t answer, Nefertiti does it for him. ‘But your mum, she can’t have just left, can she? I mean, who does that? Something happened, that’s for sure.’

  He doesn’t like to have to talk about his mother. He doesn’t like the stale words he’s always forced to use. Free spirit. New Age traveller. Hippie chick. He has no idea whether they fit the bill or not. Those words belong to other people; they make him feel disloyal.

  He remembers a guitar, a long blonde plait, the coloured scarves she folded around him when he slept outside. He thinks she smelled of peaches, or maybe that was just the fruit he used to pick out from the palm of her hand. Gentle, he thinks. But who can tell? Afterwards, they called her selfish, irresponsible, rash.

  Nefertiti is cling-filming the cannoli, the little cakes. She is cleaning out the filters. And when it hits him that the café is about to close, he realises that he needs to crank things up.

  ‘Actually – there is something else …’

  She doesn’t seem to hear him at first, but he keeps on going, throwing it all in her direction in the hope that some of it will stick.

  ‘Sitting in the wet sand, by the water’s edge, I turned—’

  ‘And she was gone.’ The girl is biting her lip. She comes and sits next to him, crosses her legs.

  He doesn’t like his sentences being finished for him, but she talks as if she knows about this kind of thing. He keeps on going, so as not to give her room to interrupt again or just to keep her with him, he isn’t sure. ‘And all that time, the sea just kept advancing until our tunnel was flooded with water. She’ll come back, my sister said.’

  ‘There was a sister?’ she asks, as if he’s been keeping something from her. She homes in on a splodge of something on the table next to him and rubs hard.

  But then he sees a change in her. She is putting herself on that beach, imagining how it might have been to be that sister.

  It always seems to Ro that some day he might tell a version that unexpectedly reveals the truth. Some day, he might hear the rustle in the questionable trees, or spot the person who wasn’t there before, or simply see his mother walk away. Some day, he might solve the puzzle.

  ‘After a while, I was so thirsty that I tried to drink the sea. My sister took me to the other end of the beach where there was a lady with a huge bottle of squash. She was reading a book. For ages, she just kept on reading, like she hoped we’d go away.’

  The girl’s mouth is moving soundlessly. She is looking for a way back in, but Ro doesn’t want to stop.

  ‘In the end, she put her book down and offered us slippery chunks of pineapple from a Tupperware box. Soon there were other people there, too. And when we’d finished the pineapple, they gave us little spicy pies. Samosas, I suppose they were, but we didn’t have a name for them then.’

  The girl puts her hand up, like she’s holding up the traffic. ‘I’m not being funny,’ she says, ‘but you probably need to see someone, yeah?’ Her teeth are raking at her bottom lip, and
she tightens her crossed legs, jiggling her foot.

  Excuse me, Ro thinks, but you have some cheek to tell me what I need.

  She runs her finger through a little pool of spillage on the bar, and the shape that she is making might be a flower or a cloud or just a scribble.

  She needs to watch that lip or else she’ll end up drawing blood. The white-wine girls are leaving now, the man with the beer too. He looks up past her at the dark outside, the top deck of the 137 just visible above the wooden shutter. He wonders if she lives nearby or if they’ll need to take a bus.

  He turns back to find she has set another bottle of beer on the table in front of him.

  ‘That’s not enough,’ he says, so softly he isn’t sure she’ll hear him. He struggles to contain himself, but the memory of the laneway shames him and he manages to keep himself in check. She cocks her head to show she hasn’t understood.

  It’s not as though he needs to spend all night with her. A quick one up against a tree would do. But she does need to give him something worth his while, after all she’s had from him.

  ‘You’d rather have a pint?’

  She sits down again and her foot is going mad now. At least she’s got the right idea. Every story has its price. One woman wanted to make a documentary. She rummaged in her pocket for a card, then scribbled down her home number on the back. And Ro considered that to be a compliment, and proper payment made, even though he never called the number. Plenty of women have wanted to feed him or give him poems. Occasionally there is a consolation fuck. Nefertiti is disconcerted. He can tell by that foot of hers. He watches her fingers tighten at the hem of the floral dress she is wearing over a pair of leggings. She sits up a little straighter. There’s something she needs to say. He understands that need, can smell it miles off.

  And then she stretches out her hand. ‘Amanda,’ she says.

  The name gives him a start. It’s a blonde-streaks-and-bare-legs kind of name – rich man’s wife or teen starlet. She is not Amanda, not to him.

  ‘Got one yourself?’ Nefertiti asks.

  He tells her his own name, though he doesn’t go the full bird.

  ‘As in “Row Your Boat”? Or as in some French thing?’

  He has no idea where she got the French from. ‘As in row of houses,’ he says.

  ‘Bit weird. But I guess your parents—’ She doesn’t continue. Maybe just as well.

  ‘Something happened to me, too,’ she says.

  He is tempted to say that something happens to everyone. It’s called Life.

  ‘It’s a long time since I’ve told anyone,’ she starts, then glances at the clock. She moves to the door, flips the sign from Open to Closed, and locks the door.

  ‘It’s just … I know you’d understand.’

  He approves of her technique – suspense, flattery – she’s good. And he’s intrigued to hear what story she imagines could possibly come close.

  She is stacking chairs, whipping away half-finished glasses. When she’s finished her work, she shrugs on her coat and he knows that the night is finely balanced. He might be walking her to the Tube, or he might be coming home with her. He’s banking on the latter. From the look on Nefertiti’s face, he can tell she’s struggling. He knows that one well. Desire to hide versus need to tell.

  ‘Something happened to me, round here in fact. You coming? I never walk across the Common on my own. Will you walk with me?’ she says. There’s no one else. She’d been banking on him all night. He didn’t see that one coming.

  Outside, it has grown surprisingly dark. Overhead, a helicopter with a search beam is stirring up a racket while a 137 blunders on. The Common is vast, and scuffling with life. Night creatures have come out – the streaking fox, the tangled lovers, the homeless people huddled in a circle by the drinking fountain. Further in, lamp posts blast down energy-efficient light. In the distance, he can hear the muffled engines of a plane that is winking its final descent towards Heathrow. She walks a little bit ahead of him. He’d have been happy with her bright kitchen, her warm bed. But the way she’s leading him – this uncharted territory, her unexpected confidence. She glances over her shoulder. Stops a moment to allow him to catch up (almost, but not quite). And then she’s off again, confident of her direction. It’s like she’s done this kind of thing before.

  She avoids the well-lit paths, draws him towards the shadows. Silently they walk, circling the copse of trees beside the pond. At the water’s edge, a lone angler crouches in his tent and, overhead, bats switch and flit.

  She waits for him to catch up. And then she starts to speak.

  ‘I was just a kid. Back then, I didn’t realise there are places on the Common you shouldn’t go.’ Ro is already guessing where this story leads. He hardly needs to listen any more. And so her story doesn’t mark him quite as deeply as his own, with all its fluctuations and uncertainties, its black holes. But he does feel something – the tang of complicity, perhaps, a twinge of loss. As they approach the clearing at the centre of the Common, it occurs to him that he has never had a woman on a bandstand before.

  For a moment, he loses track of her. It’s hard to concentrate on what she’s trying to say. It’s all too breathless, too tentative and indirect. There is something about a lift home, a van parked on the cut-through. Something about feeling herself to blame. He has lost the thread, and he can’t ask her to unspool it for him again, that would be a fatal insult. Besides, stories like hers are two a penny. He can guess the ending.

  Somewhere on the A3, there is a siren, and through the trees he spots a streak of blue that ruins the particularity of this. This story – hers, theirs, whatever – is spoiled. He is suddenly aware of all the other stories bursting to be heard. So many stories that must find their endings somewhere – in a helicopter overhead or in the clack of late-night skateboards at the half-pipe, in the meeting of two people at a bar.

  They are almost at the bandstand now, and the girl is waiting for his reaction. He realises suddenly that she has finished whatever it was she had to say.

  ‘What now?’ she says.

  And then it strikes him – perhaps her story didn’t end the way he thought it would. Every story has its price. And because he hasn’t listened, Ro has no idea what she’s expecting him to pay.

  The helicopter is closer now, clattering in the air above them, a searchlight stuttering its way among the trees. It’s impossible to compete with it, so they both stand and watch. While it moves off, he starts to say that you can check these days what those helicopters are up to. That they put it all on Twitter now – suspect apprehended in alley, vulnerable misper talked down from roof. She looks at him blankly. And he knows for certain now that, whatever she was telling him, he missed the most important bit.

  The helicopter is making the treetops shudder. The girl looks up at it, transfixed. And under the energy-efficient light, she does look strangely beautiful. As the beam staggers away, she stretches out her hand and steps towards him. And in that moment he sees that he has lost control of this encounter. And maybe he has also lost his bed for the night because he didn’t listen to what she had to say about being young and ruined and lost. But it’s not over yet. They walk together in silence, side by side, almost touching. They pass along the over-lit path, then into the dark section of open ground between the bandstand and the road.

  They are just leaving the Common when he notices a couple, old yet spry, crossing the main road towards them. They are tall, thin people with a stiffish gait who look like they’ve hiked through life together and share a single thumping heart. The man has a small grey ponytail. The woman, a greyish plait worn over her shoulder. Something seems familiar, and when the man glances over, it clicks. Instinctively, he ducks away, off the lit pavement and back into the shadows. He is not ready yet for Eddie Jacques.

  Nefertiti grips his sleeve. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Just let him pass,’ he says.

  And then she realises who he’s talking about. ‘I know hi
m,’ she says.

  He hasn’t seen Eddie since the row about the baby. He’d been staying with Jess at the time, after Flora threw him out, and she was still on maternity leave and oversensitive about Ruby to a ridiculous degree. She’d said she was popping out for a moment, a loaf of bread perhaps. He’d said that he would watch the child, but he hadn’t realised that Jess expected him to watch her like she was a television. It was a lovely summer evening, so he’d cracked open a beer and gone to sit in the garden.

  Somehow, upstairs in her cot, Ruby had found a tiny plastic monster that had hatched from inside the Kinder Egg he’d bought her the day before. Kinder Eggs were not allowed, apparently. And when Jess returned to the sound of spluttering on the baby monitor she raced up the stairs, two at a time, and found Ruby with a purple dinosaur in her throat.

  She was still screaming at him when Charlie got home, and then Eddie arrived and they all ganged up on him on the back of a purely theoretical disaster.

  ‘I get it,’ he’d said. ‘No more Kinder Eggs.’

  But on they went, on and on about his utter irresponsibility, his criminal negligence. My God, she’s not a lawyer for nothing. Eventually, they seemed to have talked themselves out and someone went to make tea. Meanwhile, Eddie began performing his brotherhood-of-man act, and lit some disgusting herb ‘to clear the atmosphere’, which pissed everyone off, especially Jess, who hates any kind of smoke in the house.

  ‘You’re a troubled soul, Sparrow,’ Eddie told him.

  ‘And you know what you are, Eddie?’ he shot right back. ‘You’re a cunt.’

  Charlie, who has no time for Eddie, at least not usually, was suddenly his staunchest ally. He leaped up on his high horse, and rode it hard. ‘Guest in my house … old friend … will not tolerate.’

  And that was when Ro snapped. He bent down to the open dishwasher and began flinging plates against the wall. It felt good, and soon he had found his stride and was spinning them like Frisbees until Charlie and Eddie, all boys together now, threw him out. He waited outside the house for a while, but no one came to ask him back in, not even Jess.