Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  “I saw you kissing that . . . tinker this morning,” he finally said, not looking at me.

  “Get outta here with that.”

  He smiled without mirth; he was dead serious. At first, I couldn’t believe it. “You even leaned your bike up against my window first,” he continued, flicking open his watch one more time. “My place of business. And then you strode across the street, bent down, and kissed him. The guy in the leather jacket. I saw you.” He wasn’t waiting for an explanation. Finbar was like that. He preferred his own eyes and ears to a good excuse any time.

  I rummaged around in my bag for one of Róisín’s ciggies and found none. Now the shadow from the cross had shifted so that only Finbar’s left eye was still lit up by the sunset. A Cyclops, I thought, fabulous. My boyfriend is prehistoric and mythological, not to mention so fucking irritating—precisely because he’s pointing out something I’m just beginning to feel myself.

  “He was telling me—”

  I stopped. For what had Jim really been telling me? Nothing I didn’t know already. What he had done was reel me in until I didn’t know why I had gone near him.

  “Telling you what?” asked Finbar, whose pearl-blue Ermenegildo Zegna tie had flopped into his tea like a thirsty eel while he wasn’t looking.

  I decided to lie. Not to be mean, but because nothing else would have made sense. I hope you agree. Because, honestly, would you have believed that Jim was telling me how he had made a bollixy bodybuilder type fold his tent and fuck off just by whispering a story? Exactly.

  “That he was totally lost, dead broke, and needed money,” I said. “I had to bend down to hear him for the engine noise. Give me one of your smokes, willya?”

  “No. You quit.” His face scrutinized mine the way it did when he wasn’t sure what to believe, his ears or his sixth sense. He hadn’t made up his mind.

  “Don’t be a pain, Finbar, give us a cigarette. He asked, and I answered.”

  “So what’d ya say back to him?”

  I grabbed for his Marlboros and snagged one before he could stop me. I lit it first, blew smoke into the still air, and answered. “I told him to go play with his little red machine somewhere else. Okay?”

  “Really?”

  “Will you ever listen? What interest would I have in kissing some Dublin homeless person on a red motorcycle fucked out by Father Christmas the last time his reindeer went on strike? Are you off your head?” I took another drag and glanced at him to see how well my act was going over. Because underneath my loyal girlfriend bit, I knew I deserved Finbar’s jealousy, you see. I had earned it because I could feel Jim nagging me like a stone in my shoe. Even right then, under the glare of suspicion, I had to wonder where that 1950 Vincent had gone off to.

  “Grand, so,” he said, reaching for his coat. Apparently, that was the end of it. He even smiled and grabbed his car keys. He’d believed me. For a while, I’d believed it myself, but as I rose to follow him out the door, I was angry that I was lying for a man I didn’t even know. Before it was all over, of course, I’d do far worse. But we’ll get to that.

  “See you tomorrow?” I asked, as I stepped out into the narrow street and listened to the well-fed seagulls dive-bombing a filled trawler crawling into its berth.

  “You don’t want me to drive you?” asked the lie detector in the nice suit.

  “I need to pick up a few things for Auntie Moira,” I said, happy at least to be back among truths once more. “She’s cooking. I won’t survive unless I minimize the damage with some purchases of my own. Like food bought before its expiration date, for one.”

  “God bless Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering.” Finbar crossed himself and gave me a genuine smile.

  “You blasphemer, you,” I said, kissing him good night. “Dinner tomorrow?”

  “Only if you come alone and don’t bring your Hell’s Angel, or whatever he was.”

  “You’re not getting any, you keep that up, Finbar Christopher Mini-hane,” I said, but I laughed because the tension was broken. He trusted me again. I’ve often thought what would have happened if my lie hadn’t worked that day. Perhaps I’d be standing behind you right now in your nicely heated home, alive and well, peering over your shoulder as you read some other poor wench’s diary. But here we are, the two of us. And we have to make do.

  As I saw Finbar walking back toward his silvery car, I wanted to tell him the truth. How dizzy I had really felt when I saw my feet moving across the street that morning, eager for a story that made no sense yet. That Jim really frightened me as much as I was drawn by his offhand charm and the hidden promise of violence. But I did nothing. More than anything, I was afraid of feeling stupid if I told anybody.

  I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in a shopwindow as I stopped by SuperValu to pick up fresh vegetables.

  The woman staring back already had someone else’s eyes.

  They’d seen something I knew she’d never try to explain to anybody.

  DAYLIGHT STILL HUNG on by its fingernails when I came back outside and put my bags in the bicycle basket. Out across the water, Bear Island lay resting like a dark blue whale sated from a long day of feeding. Spring was about to sprout into the kind of summer that ballooned my town from eight-hundred-odd souls to over a thousand more outsiders come June. I rode past the new gourmet restaurant that only ever had two people in it, zigzagged between some of my own students playing football, and stopped near the top of the hill.

  I hadn’t meant to go this way, because I’d nearly forgotten how it always made me feel to see the old house. Like I was lower than whale shite, to tell you the truth.

  But there it was, in all its former glory. An off-license had been crammed into what used to be my father’s news agency, and never mind the ghosts. It had been a humble two-story gray pebble-dash house where I grew up with my sisters in relative comfort. Father would rise early to cut the red nylon cord on the newspaper bundles; we all loved helping him do that. The place really was the center of town there, for a while. We got the lotto players, the drunks, the moneyed Eurotrash, and all the rest. Dad worked and kept his own counsel, most days. Mother taught us about the world. She had bought me a map of ancient Egypt, with a watery blue line running right through it from south to north. I drew temples next to it myself, and hung it on the wall over my bed. I never dreamed about Amenhotep and Rameses, even when I tried to, but that’s probably because I couldn’t spell their names back then.

  Then Dad forgot to secure the propane bottles downstairs one night. A simple mistake to forget unhooking them from the spigot, I’ve always felt.

  We girls were upstairs, asleep. Our parents had been downstairs cleaning up the shop for tomorrow. After it was all over, and the neighbors had pulled us out in time, the gardaí and the fire brigade said it was probably an electrical fire that started over by the back of the cooler—which happened to be where the propane had been put to bed. But whatever it was, the explosion was powerful enough to blow out all the windows downstairs and singe the insides so that only the freezer we used for ice cream was spared. We buried what was left of our parents when I was thirteen and moved up the hill to Aunt Moira’s house. It was all right, I suppose. In time, living there became normal, until each of us grew up and found our own place.

  I still hated taking this route to anybody’s house, if I could help it. My old room on the second floor had become a storage unit for empty crates; I could see them through the salt-caked window. From the street, I couldn’t tell if my Egypt map still hung up there. I was sure it didn’t. Black smudges on the brick façade still tracked the flames’ path. I haven’t tasted ice cream since. Sticks in my throat.

  I turned back around, took one long look at the majestic trawlers coming in, each with a bellyful of herring, glanced down at the quaint town square, and hated every inch of the sight.

  I’m sorry, but I didn’t have much of that hometown nostalgia you read about in tourist guides. Still don’t. You know, the Irish Spring bullshit with red-hai
red Colleens on horseback, leaning down to receive a long wet one from rugged George Clooney–looking fellas in tweed caps and vests, while some invisible orchestra in the background plays fiddle-de-dee music until you want to throttle somebody. But that fantasy was the reason Finbar is probably still selling waterfront properties the rest of us wouldn’t be caught dead in. From Portugal and Holland they’ve come, changing a quiet boring town into a slightly louder and richer boring town. I may have red hair, fine, but you try feeding that kind of romantic image on a teacher’s starting salary and see how well you do.

  I was aching to leave. To see the pyramids for real, not just in my mind’s eye. But older sisters don’t get to leave, really; they stand their ground and wipe everyone else’s arse.

  And speaking of that, I was biking over to Tallon Road to pick up my baby sister Róisín for dinner at Aunt Moira’s house. I could have met her there, I suppose, but in those days Rosie had a close personal relationship with rapidly changing glasses of stout, to be consumed in the darkest corners with the worst possible men who would never get to see her with her knickers off, no matter how hard they tried. I felt my legs boiling with dutiful fatigue as I pumped the iron horse the last few feet to her flat.

  Inside, it smelled like a camel had crawled underneath her bed and promptly died. That meant Rosie was home. Her black locks moved somewhere in the mess of down comforters, a raspy voice snarling and groaning and clearly just waking up for the day at half seven in the evening.

  “Mneed a ciggie,” she mumbled, and I tossed her an extra one I’d swiped from Finbar. I swept through my sister’s layers of black goth clothes and uncovered the coffeemaker. Then I noticed that her most cherished possession, her closest friend in the universe, was still up from last night and hadn’t been properly tucked into bed.

  The voices still chattered. Like the saints in heaven comparing their favorite sinners below and not caring a whit if we could all hear.

  A brand-spanking-new ICOM IC-910H shortwave transceiver ham radio glowed green on a cluttered desk next to the ironing board. It was black and boxy and top-of-the-line. The sound was still on, and low garbled transmissions competed for space on the crowded UHF band. To me, it always sounded like one of those TV programs about moon rockets, where men with buzz cuts and earpieces smiled when they heard the fellas in the tin can up there somewhere saying, “We read you loud and clear, Houston.” But to Rosie, it was heaven on a slice of buttered toast. I walked over gently to turn off the knob, and the green light dimmed.

  I could bore you with my sister’s obsession with faraway voices she’d never even meet, but suffice it to say she and I both dreamt of distant shores, each in our own way. Where I was content to hang a map or a picture, however, she needed to connect. My parents bought her first transistor radio when she was seven. She listened to it so often the plastic backing melted right off within a year. Soon, she spent her money on two things: mascara that made her look like a punk raccoon and ham radios. She detested e-mail, which she called “a playpen for children who can’t be bothered to speak,” and I suppose she was right, at that. Her voice was always prettier than anybody’s.

  This particular monster had been given to her by an admirer, and I mean that seriously. She had them by the dozen. Men would hang on her like tree sap in summer, and not just because she treated them like absolute shite, which you can never do often enough, if you want them to stay. No, they were drawn by the rumor, which happened to be absolutely true, that she’d never slept with a man. The fact that she could debate all of them under the table, even when dead drunk, just added to the mystique. And she was gorgeous, as well. I kicked one of her feet.

  Another grunt. “Ow! Come to torture me, you schoolmarm dominatrix, you.”

  “Giddup. If you think I’m having boiled meat and shite potatoes by myself, you’re dreaming.”

  Slowly, two legs swung out and Rosie sat up carefully. She looked like a Japanese porcelain doll who’d got herself mugged by a gang of makeup artists. Her eyes were pink and swollen, and she had little drunk flowers on her cheeks, where some of the mascara had ground itself in with the foundation. Her lips curled up in that guilty smile that every boy, man, and grandfather from here to Skibbereen told their friends about, even if she’d never dignify their grins with so much as a look. It was the kind of smile that could lay waste to empires, if only Róisín had any clue what that meant.

  For the time being, she was content to remain on the dole and be the last customer at McSorley’s Bar most nights, outdrinking the gobshites who paid for her pints without breaking a sweat. Easily the smartest by a mile in our entire family, Róisín had been accepted to University College Cork the previous year and had been well on her way to an honors degree in physics without straining her active social life.

  That is, right until a teacher’s aide in her Thermal and Statistical Physics class grabbed her in the girls’ bathroom one fine day and tried to force her to suck on his little pecker. It took three grown men to drag Rosie off him. She’d broken his clavicle and the bone around an eye socket and destroyed one testicle in less than a minute, all using only the cleaning woman’s mop. They didn’t want to expel her, but they also didn’t fire that sad little man who’d tried to doink her, so Rosie just told them goodbye and thanks very much all the same, took the bus back home, and returned to her unseen voices on the airwaves. It had been that way for over six months.

  “Didja forget my breakfast?” the creature in the tiny tiger-striped panties wanted to know. I tossed her two pieces of bread with honey that I’d just made on the cluttered windowsill and watched her devour them, legs dangling over the edge of the bed like the girl she still was. While she finally rose and rummaged through a press to find some clean clothes that weren’t black, I held all thoughts of that motorcycle charmer at bay. Almost. Rosie finally screwed herself into the tiniest jeans in creation, topping off the ensemble with spiky red heels and a full-length white patent-leather coat. Demon-dark eyeliner made her look like Dracula’s favorite relative, and she was already tugging impatiently at the door while I was lost in thought about someone I was trying hard to forget.

  “Oi! Whatcha thinking about—Martians?” Rosie wanted to know, as she cracked that deadly smile for me again and stuck a fresh ciggie in it the same way a longshoreman grabs his gaffing hook.

  “No,” I said, and wanted to mean it.

  I ALMOST DIDN’T notice the tiny article about the unexplained death.

  We were just about to leave, but Rosie hadn’t used her bicycle for so long the tires were flat. So while she emptied her mudroom looking for a pump, I tried to make sense of the mess of overcoats she’d strewn all over the floor. I hung fake leopard coats and paint-stained black leather jackets back up on hooks, and found four days’ worth of newspapers underneath. Of course. My sister stubbornly refused to acknowledge the free subscription I’d got her to the Southern Star through one of Finbar’s clients. She preferred the company of disembodied voices to the ongoing facts of regular life.

  “Will you ever put something into your head but that fucking shortwave,” I asked, leafing through the most recent issue, “and rejoin the rest of us out here in physical reality?” Because it wasn’t her baby sister protest that galled me, but my dead certainty that all her superior brain power would be turning to digital mush before long. My little genius didn’t answer but dragged her bike outside and started pedaling away. Typical. I folded the newspaper and was about to throw it into the mudroom before locking up.

  And that’s when I saw it.

  It was a hundred words, if that, and similar to other tragic stories I’d often read before. Because when the tourist stream increases each summer, so do the highway deaths. Simple as that. But what held my attention now was the way this one seemed—well, wrong somehow. I had to read it twice to realize what it was. There was something hidden, something unsaid, that spoke more clearly than what was on the page.

  LOCAL WOMAN FOUND DEAD

  BY D
EIRDRE HOULIHAN

  BANTRY, 19 May—Julie Ann Holland, 34, of Drimoleague, was found yesterday by neighbors in her bed, where she had apparently been dead “for some time,” according to gardaí. Mrs. Holland, a widow, had not been seen since attending a céilí near Clonakilty last Saturday night. Nobody was noticed entering her house, and there are no signs of a struggle. Even so, whoever may have seen Mrs. Holland that night in anybody’s company should contact Macroom Garda District Head Quarters at 026-20590 and ask for Sergeant David Callaghan. Neighbors describe observing a motorcycle parked near her house the last time she was seen alive.

  Mrs. Holland leaves behind a young son, Daniel, 6, who was away with his gran on the night in question.

  “Are you comin’ or what?” My brain princess was getting impatient with me, and had stopped halfway down the street. I folded the paper into my bag and locked the door. While I joined my sister and half listened to her needling me for being so absentminded, I wondered how Mrs. Holland had died. She hadn’t died in her sleep, because the article would have been worded differently, wouldn’t it? Anybody’s company didn’t sound peaceful at all. Why would readers be encouraged to ring the guards if they didn’t already suspect out-and-out murder? Then there was the motorcycle. It could have been any color, I suppose. But in my heart, there was only candy-apple red, wasn’t there? I shivered, pretending to laugh at my sister’s jokes as we rounded the bend and saw Aunt Moira’s pink bed-and-breakfast.

  Like I told you before, the clichés about happy maidens dancing with leprechauns and fairies on the green meadows of our peaceful emerald island are a load of shite.