Lifesaving for Beginners

by Ciara Geraghty

  Damo’s been to Benny-dorm. He said it was too hot and nobody spoke any English.

  I shake my head. I say, ‘I’m going to Ireland.’

  ‘You don’t wanna be doin’ that, mate. Too bloody cold over there. And the beer is black. Suspect, mate.’

  ‘I’m going with my sister. She’s twenty-four. I’m meeting her. At the airport. The one in London.’

  He takes another drag, looks at his watch and, for a moment, I think my Plan B is working, but then he shakes his head and looks at me. ‘It’s a bit late to be going to London, mate. Why don’t I take you home? Your mother’s probably wondering where you’ve got to.’

  I step back from the car and give it one last go. I say, ‘I have to go tonight. I have money.’ I take out Mam’s purse and show him the three fifty-pound notes, the three pound coins, the two twenty-pence pieces, the penny.

  ‘Let’s see that.’ When the taximan smiles, I see his teeth. They’re crooked and yellow. They look like they haven’t been brushed all day. Or yesterday either. I put the money back into the purse. Stuff the purse into my bag. But now the man is struggling with the seatbelt. Trying to get out of the car. It’s not easy, on account of how fat he is. The bottom of the steering wheel sticks into his belly. He takes another drag of his cigarette. Throws it out of the window, even though the butt will take twelve years to decompose. He opens the door. Puts one hand on the roof and uses it to hoist himself out. The streetlamp throws a light across his face. His face is huge and red and sweaty. If he was in a film on the telly, he’d be a baddie, I reckon.

  He says, ‘Come ’ere, my son. Let’s have another look at that money. Make sure it’s all there.’

  That’s when I run. I’m not as good at running as I am at swimming but I still came second in the hundred metres at school last year. Only Carla beat me and her mam did the London marathon two years in a row and Carla says she’s going to do it too, when she’s old.

  Stranger danger. We learned about that in school. You’re supposed to run away. And scream to attract attention.

  I don’t scream. I don’t want to attract attention. I just run. I don’t look back till I’m at the top of the road. I can’t see him. But I see his car moving towards me, making hardly a sound.

  Damo’s house is round the block. I jump over the gate and run to the side entrance. The door is locked but easy enough to climb over. I run down the narrow passage to the tree at the end of the garden, where the tree house is. It’s really just a big slab of wood with sheets on either side, pretending to be walls. I climb past the middle bit, which is usually where I stop. But this time I go all the way to the very top of the tree. Damo probably won’t believe me when I tell him.

  There are no leaves, on account of it being winter, but it’s dark so I don’t think he’ll see me unless he’s got a torch with batteries in it.

  I hear the car coming down the road. Dead slow. When it reaches Damo’s house, it slows down even more. The lights are off but I can see the tip of a cigarette, glowing red in the dark. And I can see the man. He looks like he’s staring right at me.

  I’m thinking about screaming now. Opening my mouth as wide as it will go and screaming my head off. Loud enough to wake Damo’s mam and Imelda. Sully’s at the war and I probably wouldn’t wake Damo. His mam says if a bomb exploded right beside him, he still wouldn’t wake up.

  I open my mouth.

  And then I think about all the trouble I’ll be in if I scream loud enough to wake Damo’s mam and she goes and wakes Faith and Faith finds out about me going to the post office on my own instead of going to the library with Damo. I bet I’d be grounded for about a month. Maybe even longer. And I probably wouldn’t be allowed to go to lifesaving or buy a PlayStation 3, even if I had the money for one.

  My breathing sounds funny. Really loud, for starters. I press my hand across my mouth but the breath comes out through my nose instead, just as loud. The taximan is still there, still sitting in his car with the lights off and the window down. Still smoking, even though I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in taxicabs.

  Just when I’m so cold that I think I can’t hold onto the branch anymore, the lights of the car turn on and the engine starts and the car disappears up the road. I make myself wait ten minutes after the man drives away. To make sure. Then I climb down to the tree house, and it’s a good job I’m pretty good at tree-climbing now, because, if I wasn’t, I’d definitely fall out on account of my hands and feet being so numb with the cold.

  It’s hard to think about a Plan C. I drink the orange juice in my flask and wish I’d made hot chocolate instead. I look up at Damo’s window and try not to think about him snoring his head off in his warm, cosy bed. I pretend he’s here too and I have a conversation with him. Not out loud or anything stupid like that. Just in my head. Just to pass the time. When I’m finished, I’ll get cracking on a Plan C.

  Not much happens.

  I think about ringing Thomas.

  I don’t ring Thomas.

  This might be how smokers feel when they think about cigarettes but don’t light up.

  It gives me a twitchy feeling.

  I smoke a lot.

  Brona rings. I tell her I can’t talk. I’m in the middle of a chapter.

  I don’t write anything.

  I examine my face in the mirror. My almost-forty-year-old face. Every day I look a bit older. The lines lengthen and deepen. If I watch long enough, I can almost see it happen.

  Minnie rings to tell me she has stopped vomiting in the afternoon, evening and night. She says, ‘It’s just the morning sickness now. Proper morning sickness.’ She sounds delighted.

  I don’t tell her. Even though Minnie is the only one in the world who knows everything, I don’t tell her. About the letters. The three letters.

  I pick up the phone and put it down and pick it up again. Then I put it down.

  I don’t ring. I don’t ring Thomas.

  So when he does find out, it’s quite by accident.

  He comes to Ed’s swimming gala.

  He remembers.

  Of course he remembers.

  I arrive late so he’s already there, in the best seat in the house. He turns his head, looks behind him, smiles when he sees me. A benign sort of a smile. As if nothing had ever happened between us. Nothing good. Nothing bad. I don’t smile back. All of a sudden, I am seething with resentment. We were so close. He’s the one who said that, not me. That day on the farm. Only a couple of weeks before the accident. The bloody miracle. I was wearing a pair of one of his sisters’ wellington boots. Three sizes too big. They all have massive feet, the Cunninghams. Massive hands too. Even the tiny one, God help her.

  I was in a field. We were making hay. Thomas said it would be ‘fun’. Later, he said, ‘Do you fancy a roll in the hay?’ And I said, ‘All right.’ So we rolled in the hay and I made sure that I was on top because hay turns out to be prickly and not as pliable as you might think, and afterwards I sat on Thomas’s jacket and leaned against a stack of hay – a hayrick, he calls it – and smoked a cigarette. Thomas said, ‘You shouldn’t smoke around the hay,’ and I said, ‘Shut your mouth,’ and he said, ‘I love this time of the year when everything’s at full tilt,’ and I slapped at a mosquito and said, ‘I fucking well hate it,’ and he took my hand and held it and I pulled it away and then I put it back into his hand and we sat there like that for a while and then he kissed my mouth, even though I tasted like cigarettes and he hates cigarettes, and I kissed him back and my eyes were closed and I could feel the heat of the day in my bones and the softness of his mouth on mine and, for a moment, I was so happy I thought I might cry. So I stopped kissing him and I looked away, and that’s when he said, ‘You’ll get used to it eventually,’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Us. Being all coupled up, like Minnie and Maurice.’

  ‘We are nothing like Minnie and Maurice.’ The very idea.

  He said, ‘We are. We’re close. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is.’ He sp
read his hands in front of him and shook his head as if he were sorry, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  I punched him in the arm. I said, ‘You dirty-looking eejit.’ And we sat there, with our backs against the hayrick, and we watched the sun spill her gold into his five stony fields in Monaghan and we didn’t say much. We didn’t say anything. There was no need.

  Now Thomas smiles a benign sort of a smile, as if we are two people who might have known each other a long time ago.

  He stands up and people in the rows behind click their tongues and crane their necks. He shuffles along the row saying, ‘Sorryexcusemesorryexcuseme . . .’ as he goes. He is careful not to stand on anyone’s toe. The last time he did that, it cost him three hundred and twenty-four euro in surgeon’s fees and a four-and-a-half-hour wait with a peevish woman in A&E.

  He looks . . . the same as always. Casual. Smiley. Easy. There’s something so easy about Thomas Cunningham. If he were a sum, he’d be two plus two. I’m more like algebra.

  His clothes are terrible, but that’s to be expected. And there’s a bit of a dog smell on him. Or goat, maybe. And his hair could do with a cut. But apart from that, he looks . . . well. Healthy. He looks like someone who never smoked but would just say, ‘No, thanks,’ when you offered him a cigarette and never ‘I don’t smoke,’ in that smug way that non-smokers have. Or reformed smokers. Thank Christ, I’m never going to be one of those. They’d do your head in with the smugness.

  The hair is the same; the grey curls are more knots now where the weather has twisted and tossed them. I always told him his eyes were the colour of the mud in his five fields in Monaghan. But that’s not true. They are grey from a distance but they change to green the closer you get. Or blue sometimes, depending on the light.

  Today, they are grey.

  He says, ‘Hello, Kat.’

  I say, ‘Hello.’

  He says, ‘Ed’s on in five minutes, I think.’ He looks at the pool. Ed sees him and waves. Thomas smiles and waves back. When he turns to me, his smile has faded, like wallpaper in a house where nobody lives anymore.

  The thing is, I never said sorry. I wanted to. Lots of times. But I just couldn’t say it. And time rolled on, the way it does, and now, if I say anything, it’ll come under the category of ‘picking the scab off an old wound’. I’m pretty sure there is such a category, although it might be called something different.

  It was just one of those things, I suppose. What happened to us. After the accident. The bloody miracle. Things were fine before that. But Thomas wanted to change everything. All the talk of marriage. And children. Although he didn’t say ‘children’. He referred to ‘a child’, as if this child already existed and it was just a question of us going somewhere to pick it up.

  It’s true what I said. It was Thomas who ended the relationship. But he said he had no choice. That I left him with no choice. After the lies I told. How I avoided him. And the Nicolas incident. Thomas, standing in the doorway, looking at me. Never even glancing at Nicolas. Throwing his keys on the table. ‘This is what you want, Kat? Fine! I’m done here.’

  The silence after he left. The hollow depth of it.

  I’d say sorry now. If I could go back. I’d make Nicolas from number thirteen leave. No, I’d never invite him in, in the first place.

  I’d say sorry.

  If it hadn’t been for the accident – the stupid, bloody miracle – we’d be fine, me and Thomas. Thomas and me. I believe that. There’s no reason not to. Everything just got out of hand in the end.

  And I never said sorry. I should have. But it’s like Mum calling Dad Kenneth. It’s too late now.

  The heat from the pool rises and collects between us. I pull at the neck of my jumper.

  I say, ‘I didn’t realise you’d be here.’ It sounds like an accusation, the way I say it. I try to smile, to show that it is not.

  He says, ‘I promised Ed, remember?’

  I nod. Thomas happens to be one of those people who mean the things they say.

  ‘Would you like to . . .’ He points towards his empty seat in the middle of the row.

  ‘Oh. No. Thank you, I’ll just . . .’ I nod and smile and point towards the pool.

  He nods and then contorts himself into a sort of squat and shuffles back along the row to his seat, with the ‘sorryexcusemesorryexcuseme’ and the sound of tutting and shifting all around as he goes.

  I think Ed comes second. I’m nearly sure he does. I cheer as if he does. I hurry from the balcony when it’s over. I don’t catch Thomas’s eye. Don’t want him to think that I expect him to stay and congratulate Ed, like he would have done, before.

  In the car park, Ed spots him immediately. Inconspicuousness is not something that Thomas is good at.

  It takes a while for him and Thomas to dispense with their formalities, which include a long and complicated system of hand slaps and shakes.

  I am freezing. Thomas does not take my fingers and put the tips of them into his mouth, like he used to when they went a bloodless yellow in the cold. I told him not to do that. ‘That’s disgusting,’ I said. ‘Do you have any idea how many germs are in that cake-hole of yours?’ I never told him that I liked it. The warm wet of his mouth on my skin. The pleasure of the pain, as he coaxed the blood back into my fingers.

  I make fists out of my hands and shove them inside the pockets of my coat.

  ‘Did Kat tell you?’ Ed smiles at Thomas.

  Thomas looks at Ed and smiles because Ed’s smile is contagious and that’s just a fact. Even John Banville’s face would crack if Ed smiled at him.

  Just as it dawns on me what Ed is about to say – the cold has given me brain-freeze, in much the same way a bowl of Chunky Monkey would – Ed comes right out and says it.

  He says, ‘I’m going to be an uncle. Uncle Ed. I’m going to be Uncle Ed. Did Kat tell you? Is that what Kat was telling you? When I was doing my swimming race?’

  And, just like that, it’s out there, and for the first time since I opened the envelopes, it seems real.

  Ed will be an uncle. He is an uncle. Uncle Ed.

  And I am a mother.

  The baby was a girl. Her name is Faith and she’s twenty-four years old and she wants to meet me because I’m her mother.

  Realisation grabs me from behind like a mugger. I feel like I might fall with the force of it, but I don’t. Of course I don’t. I stand there and concentrate on Ed. He is smiling at Thomas, waiting for Thomas to say something. The world seems strangely quiet, as if we are not standing in the middle of a car park with engines revving all around us.

  Ed nudges Thomas. ‘Did you hear me? I’m going to be an uncle, I said. Uncle Ed. Her name is Faith and when she comes to Dublin I’m going to meet her. She’s going to sleep in the bottom bunk and I’m going to bring her to Arch club and everything. Isn’t that right, Kat?’

  Ed taps my arm with the tip of his index finger. He is smiling but there is confusion around the edges. I nod. ‘That’s right, Ed.’

  ‘Ed!’ I recognise Sophie’s voice and look up. She’s standing on the back seat of her father’s car, her head and shoulders poking through the sunroof. She waves at Ed with one hand and holds her medal with the other. Ed picks up the medal round his neck and holds it up as he runs towards her. Thomas and I watch his progress across the car park. Ed opens the back door of Sophie’s car and crawls in, pushing himself up through the sunroof until he is standing beside her. They both look at us – Thomas and I – holding their medals and waving at us. We wave back. It’s a relief to have something to do. When we have to stop waving, I fumble in my bag for my cigarettes.

  Thomas lifts the cuff of his jacket until he can see the wristwatch I bought him for his forty-fourth birthday. I went into nearly every jeweller’s shop in the city before I settled on that one. Thomas is not the sort of man you could buy just any old watch for. It has to be particular. It has to be waterproof and manure proof and goat-droppings proof and silage proof and all sorts. Durable, I supp
ose. But aesthetic too, you know? Thomas has lovely forearms, I’ll give him that. They’re pretty tanned. From being outside so much, probably. Strong enough too, what with all the pulling and hauling around the farm. You couldn’t just buy him any old watch.

  He pulls the cuff back down. ‘I’d better go.’

  I inhale and nod. He is not going to refer to Ed’s news. The relief feels strange. It feels like disappointment.

  I say, ‘Yes, you’d better. Get back to – Sandra, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sarah.’

  I can’t make out any expression on Thomas’s face. You could call it impassive. Or indifferent. I blow smoke towards him until I can’t see the indifference anymore.

  He turns away as if he is about to leave, then seems to change his mind and turns back. ‘And you’d better get back to your daughter,’ he says. ‘Faith? Isn’t that what Ed said?’ This time when he turns away, he doesn’t turn back. He walks towards his car.

  ‘Thomas.’ I check to see that Ed is still standing on the back seat of Sophie’s car before I run after Thomas. I’m not sure what I’m going to say. I reach for his arm. The warmth of it through the sleeve of his jacket is shocking in the rawness of the day.

  He pulls his arm away from me, as if he has been stung. ‘Don’t,’ he says, and there is something like contempt in his voice and it doesn’t seem possible because I’m sure he is speaking to me and he has never spoken to me like that before. Not ever. Not even when he let himself into the apartment. That day with Nicolas.

  ‘Thomas, I . . .’

  Now he is opening the door of his car, shrugging off his jacket despite the icy temperatures. I find myself thinking about the heat of him. How can one person be that warm?

  ‘Thomas, please . . .’

  He gets into the car and throws his jacket on the passenger seat. He puts his hand on the door handle as if he is about to slam the door, but then he looks at me. ‘What is it?’

  I hadn’t thought of what I might say after that. I just presumed he’d drive away. I take a drag from my cigarette, buying some time. ‘I just . . . I didn’t want you to find out like this. I . . . I should have told you.’