by Maeve Binchy
Ger was out in the back. He seemed pleased to see Parny, asked him was he a betting man, and Parny said he was sure he would be when he was old enough to know what to bet on and to have some money to bet with. Ger accepted this as a reasonable answer and didn’t apologise for having assumed that Parny was rarely out of a bookie’s office. Ger was an all right guy, Parny thought to himself.
They showed him the loft, they explained the rules. Man to man, the three of them discussed the singularly poor record of Ger and Mick’s pigeons compared to other pigeons they knew and envied. They were homing pigeons certainly, the backyard was full of them, but would they go back into the box? Would they hell? Race after race could have been won if these birds could only have followed the rules. But no. Instead they came and sat and cooed in the yard delighted to be back to Ger and Mick. Some of them were definitely not the full shilling, Parny was told, though it was a view that would not be expressed beyond these four walls. Parny had to admit that he didn’t know whether there was any pigeon fancying in the States, but he would enquire when he got back: he would write and tell Ger and Mick all about it.
‘A young fellow like you won’t think of writing,’ Ger said philosophically as the pigeons swooped down on Parny and perched on his shoulders, glad to have a new playmate in this friendly place, a playmate that didn’t seem obsessed with their timings.
‘I’m very good at writing letters,’ Parny protested. ‘I’ve written to everyone I said I would . . .’ He paused. ‘Well, except Esther.’
‘I think you’d better tell us about Esther,’ Mick Quinn said.
In the small backyard with the big, soft birds landing and taking off, with the comforting warbling sound of their cooing as Muzak in the background, Parny Quinn told Ger and Mick about Esther. He could never have asked for a better audience, it was like telling a film they said to each other as they demanded details of her appearance at each festivity. Would you credit that? The family had to cross the Atlantic to escape her.
‘And why would she want you to write to her?’ Mick asked eventually.
‘The day before we left, she said she knew we were going somewhere, and would I write her just one letter, to let her know if we had found happiness wherever it was we had gone. But I couldn’t write. I couldn’t tell Esther than Mom and Dad look sort of happy with all this awful holding hands. She’d flip completely if she knew that.’
He stood there as the pigeons came and went, he stroked their feathers and they didn’t seem frightened, he held one in his hand and felt its heart beat under its plump chest. He closed his eyes as they swirled around. There wasn’t much to beat this, the company of birds and men. Undemanding, satisfying. He had a feeling that he might never be as happy as this again.
‘You could send the poor woman a card,’ Mick said.
‘Not committing yourself to anything,’ said Ger, who had always travelled alone in life and thought it was the best way to be.
‘It’s too late now. We’re going back on Friday, it won’t get there.’
‘We could ring her from the hotel,’ Mick said.
‘Call Esther? Mom would turn blue and die,’ Parny said.
‘Without telling your Ma.’
‘I wouldn’t be able to afford it, calling the States is very expensive.’
Ger and Mick nodded at each other. It could be done they said. If he had anything to say to the poor, tortured woman, then at Christmas time, the season of goodwill, he should say it.
Parny wondered had he explained how crazy Esther was, and how she wanted to run away with his father. But still, Mick and Ger were so kind it would be very bad-mannered to go against them.
The afternoon passed in a welter of feathers and timings and soft sounds. Then it was back on the bus to the hotel. It was six o’clock so it would be Esther’s lunchtime. From the phone box in the hall Parny talked to the international operator, they found directory enquiries and they found Esther. Parny also enquired how much it would cost and had to hold on to the door of the box for support. He told Mick it was out of the question. Mick was back in his uniform again, he worked in a split shift some days, he had only the afternoon free. He looked up and down the hall.
‘Get back in the box,’ he said, and like lightning he dialled the number written on a piece of paper from the desk. Parny heard the phone ringing, he swallowed. Esther’s voice was surprisingly thin, not like the excited roar he had come to know and fear.
‘It’s Parny Quinn,’ he said.
Esther began to cry, softly, but it was definitely crying.
‘Did your father ask you to call me?’ she sniffled.
‘He doesn’t know I’m calling you. Listen Esther, the mail is very bad here, and you asked me to let you know about happiness and everything . . .’
‘What’s happiness?’ Esther said.
Parny was impatient. Why do people always say that? He was calling her long distance to answer her damn fool questions now she just asks them back.
‘Yeah sure, it’s hard to know but you did ask me to let you know if I’d found it, so I thought I’d call you and say it has a lot to do with birds.’
‘Birds?’
‘Yes birds, pigeons, you could go to the library and get a book on them. I think you’d enjoy that, honestly, Esther.’
‘Has your father taken up the bird business too?’
‘No, Esther, just me, you wanted to know what I thought and if I had found happiness; I did, so I thought I’d call you.’ He was annoyed that she was ungrateful.
‘Who cares what you think, kid?’ Esther said. ‘Put me on to your father.’
‘He’s not here,’ Parny said, tears of rage stinging the back of his eyes. After all his kindness, and Mick risking his job connecting him on the hotel phone. ‘Dad and Mom are at the Dublin Casino, they’re not back yet.’
‘You’re in Dublin,’ Esther screamed triumphantly. ‘What hotel, speak to me Parnell, you dumb child. Speak. What hotel?’
Parny hung up. Mick was waiting outside.
‘You did your best lad, you kept faith with her. And there’s always the pigeons as consolation, remember that.’
Esther got a list of hotels in Dublin and she had found Kate and Shane Quinn by 7 p.m.
‘I guess she must have traced us through the airlines or travel agent,’ Parny’s pop said.
‘They really will have to put her away this time,’ said Parny’s mom with a grim little smile. ‘Fancy saying that Parny called her.’
‘She seemed very definite about that,’ Parny’s dad sighed. ‘Said he’d called her up to tell her that he had taken up ornithology. It’s sad, really sad.’
‘I wonder why she fixed on Parny this time. She’s always steered clear of talking about you, she knows how upset it makes us.’
Parny sat there thinking about the events of the day. It could have been worse. Esther couldn’t get a flight what with it being Christmas; she was just going to haunt them by telephone. Dad had to ask the switchboard to say we had left the hotel.
Parny had said nothing about his part in it all. He had thought it through very carefully. If they thought she was making it all up about his having called her that would be further proof of her madness. It might speed up the day they put her away. Anyway, he hadn’t been going to say anything about Ger and Mick’s part-share in the pigeons. He remembered that Mick never spoke of the pigeons in the hotel; they were too precious. Parny felt that too.
Anyway Esther had called him a dumb kid and said nobody cared what he thought about anything. Why should he bail her out? Why should he? He would keep his interest in pigeons a secret, just like Mick did, and one day when Esther was safely locked up he would pretend to have read a book about them, and he’d have his own loft. And he would have no truck with women. Ever. You could see that Ger in his free and easy house was like a king compared to people like his father and Mick who were heart scalded.
Parny sighed happily and read the movie listings. He liked the sound of Compa
ny of Wolves but you had to be eighteen-years-old to get in. He wondered could he tell the people at the cinema that he was from the States and more mature than other kids of his age.
The Best Inn in Town
THEY SHOULD HAVE LIKED EACH OTHER, THE TWO MOTHERS. They were birds of the same showy kinds of feather, after all. Full of notions, full of what they each liked to think of as style. But they hated each other the very moment they met eighteen long years ago—in 1970, when their respective son and daughter got engaged to each other. Noel’s mother, who became Granny Dunne a year later, had a lip that curled all on its own without being given any instructions, and Avril’s mother, who had become Granny Byrne, had a line in tinkling laughs that would freeze the blood. They had both had husbands back at the wedding, mild men who managed to put the children’s happiness before their own territorial struggles, but not even the shared experience of widowhood had brought the two women together. They met one day a year, and that was Christmas Day. They met to terrorise and destroy what might have been a fairly reasonable family Christmas.
Noel was called Noel because he was a Christmas baby. Granny Dunne never tired of telling that. How the pains had come during Christmas lunch. How there had been mistletoe and holly and paper streamers all around the maternity ward. Oh, they knew how to celebrate Christmas in those days, she would say accusingly to Avril, as if a labour ward in 1950 was somehow like the Versailles Ball in comparison with the kind of entertainment she was being offered these times.
Granny Byrne never failed to explain that Avril had been given her name because she was born in April. A lovely month, full of sunshine and fresh flowers, and little lambs and everything full of hope. In those days. There would be a sad, chilling tinkle of a laugh and a glower at Noel. The implication was easy to read. Life had lost its Spring freshness since her daughter had married at the age of nineteen and thrown away all that hope forever.
Noel and Avril had triumphed over their mothers’ great mutual dislike. In fact it had cemented them further together over the years. They were lucky, they said, in that the scales were fairly evenly balanced. For every one of Granny Dunne’s clangers there was a reciprocal salvo from Granny Byrne. And they were careful to treat each mother equally so that no comparisons could be made. On the first Sunday of each month they visited one or the other parent alternately. The three children liked Granny Dunne’s house because she had an aquarium and Granny Byrne’s house because she had a Manx cat and a book about Manx cats which they would read six times a year with total fascination.
No, it was no trouble for the children going to either granny’s house. For Noel and Avril it was always a trial. Granny Dunne had a very strong line about cats spreading diseases, and that if you had to have a cat wasn’t it perverse getting a poor dumb animal that was bred deformed, and had its nether regions on display. Granny Byrne always managed to bring up what she thought of people who had warm tanks of stale water and poor, crazed orange fish in them swimming despairingly around for the sole purpose of being soothing for neurotic humans.
Granny Byrne usually said it was wonderful that Avril managed so well without all the newest, modern appliances which most husbands bought for their wives. Avril just gritted her teeth and squeezed Noel’s hand to show him that her mother was not mouthing her own discontent. Then Granny Dunne would say with a lip curl that might have remained permanent if the wind had changed that she really admired young women like her daughter-in-law who didn’t bother with make-up and dressing properly just to please their man and do him credit. Noel’s turn for hand-squeezing would come then. They agreed they were forced into a great deal of reassurance and positive stating that they loved each other, just to counteract the effects of both mothers. And that this might be no bad thing.
They had called their children Ann, Mary and John as a reaction against their own fancy, tricksy names. Both mothers thought these names sadly unimaginative and each blamed the child of the other for the lack of vision and style.
Ann was seventeen and had been put in charge of the entertainment program for Christmas Day. Ann was good at computer studies at school, which was a help because it was becoming more and more difficult to organise the grannies’ entertainment. The problem was the increase in television channels and the availability of videos. This Christmas there was far too much choice. Ann explained seriously to her parents that it had been much simpler in the days when it was only The Sound of Music and then the usual row about the Pope and the Queen. Avril’s mother, Granny Byrne, thought that anyone with a bit of class watched the Queen’s Message; it was nothing to do with being pro-English or West Brit or anything, it was just what one did. Noel’s mother said it had never been part of their culture to watch the Royal Family. But then she did remember that a long time ago the maids in the house had indeed been very interested in reading little titbits about royalty, so perhaps some people did find it all very fascinating. For her own part, even though she didn’t go along with every single thing about Pope John Paul, she did think it would be a poor sort of a Catholic who couldn’t find it in her heart to kneel for a Papal blessing just one day out of the 365.
Noel and Avril had stayed sane by incorporating both dignitaries into their Christmas Day. There were other ingredients too, like a good healthy walk after the Pope and before the mince pies and presents. They had agreed it would be straitjackets for supper if they had to remain cooped up all day. Even in the rain or the snow they got the show on the road and down to the strand. They used to walk past other families and Noel and Avril often wondered if they were really happy or whether each family group was like their own: a powder keg, a volcano, a collection of disasters waiting to happen.
And then, after the heavy cocktails which went with the Queen there was the Christmas lunch, and serious viewing combined with snoozing, until the ‘Good-Lord-is-that-the-time? What about a nice cup of tea and Christmas cake before we drive you both home?’
Since they had got the video, life had been easier. It wasn’t a question of zapping from channel to channel, nor of trying to decide on the spot. For the past couple of years, the family had studied the advance Christmas schedules with the intensity that had been given to the Normandy landings. Pop shows were out because of the torrent of abuse they would unleash. Comedy shows were doubtful. They wouldn’t be worth all the side looks and wondering if Granny Byrne had got the point of if Granny Dunne was about to say that for the life of her she couldn’t understand people who took offence over nothing. It was always impossible to program the grannies. One year one would have a high moral tone and the other have become bawdy, but you never knew which would be which. It was like the Christmas presents, a feast or a famine. Indulge them while they’re young, or give them a sense of proportion.
Ann felt very important to be allowed to choose the entertainment, but she admitted that there were a lot of problems. If they recorded Back to the Future on one channel during lunch then it would be ready to watch at 5 o’clock, but could the grannies take a time machine on board?
The children would like to see The Empire Strikes Back, Ann reported. They had been hoping that she would be able to fit it into the recording plan. But it went on from 4 till 6 p.m. and probably they’d need to be watching something then, and most likely something already on a video, so that meant they wouldn’t be able to record at the same time.
Ann wondered if they might record Storm Boy earlier; it sounded more suitable family viewing than Falling in Love. They didn’t know what Falling in Love was going to be about, but if it had Meryl Streep and Robert de Niro there could be a lot of groping involved, and nobody knew how the grannies might respond to screen fondling.
Noel and Avril watched their daughter’s serious face as she juggled the schedules. The ‘Jo Maxi Show’ that Mary and John loved had to be out; the grannies couldn’t take anything like that. Something called ‘Play the Game’ was described as a Christmas frolic, and it was always unwise to think that a frolic might please either Mrs Du
nne or Mrs Byrne. ‘Glenroe’, obviously, at 8 o’clock, but not necessarily the ‘Non-Stop Christmas Show’—it was too varied for the grannies. They might love the Dublin Boy Singers but would it be worth it for the tirades that might erupt at Johnny Logan or the Dingbats.
Ann said she’d consult again with the younger ones: there had to be a way. All families must have the same problems at this time of year, she said sagely, it was just that the youngsters kept bleating about ‘Top of the Pops’ and other things that were out of the question. It wasn’t as if Christmas was meant to be for children.
Avril and Noel’s hearts were filled with sadness. Their daughter was not being even remotely ironic. All her life she had thought that Christmas Day had to do with the grannies and keeping them as contented as either would allow herself to be.
Avril bit her lip at the memory at what seemed like a thousand Christmas Days when Granny Dunne had looked her up and down and asked when she was going to change, and then with a lip curl apologised and said of course, of course, she had changed, and how sensible she was not to get dressed up in anything smart.
She remembered another thousand festive seasons when Granny Byrne had examined the label on the supermarket wine bottle and asked Noel who his wine merchant was, and had they chosen something special this year. A thousand times Noel had patted her hand under the table. It didn’t matter, he had told her. We have all our lives.
True, but their children were not having the Christmas Days they should have been having. If there were no grannies, think what it would be like. Think.