501

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Then they’d be off like…Well, like me and Jerry.

  Only it was much worse for Mum because Jim was quick with his fists.

  Next morning – I’m on day five and counting – I phone Jerry early and tell him I want to meet Laura.

  ‘I’ll have to ask her.’

  ‘Ask her? She’s my daughter.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask her.’

  I’m angry then. He’s being obstructive, deliberately making it bloody difficult. I conveniently forget she doesn’t answer her phone to me.

  ‘I’ll be there when she comes home from school, Jerry,’ I hiss.

  ‘Look, you’re the one who fucked about. You’re the one who left us. You’re the one who…’

  He doesn’t finish because I don’t let him. I hang up on him wishing I was hanging him up by his scrawny neck.

  I let myself into our house – my name’s still on the rent book – and make a cup of tea. Now there’s milk in the fridge and sugar in the bowl, and the larder is full. I check the living-room carpet. Clean. I check the beds. All made. I check the airing cupboard. All ironed – yes, ironed – and clothes stacked neatly on the shelves. The only room that’s still up for slum clearance is my daughter’s.

  I’m downstairs again when the door rattles open and Laura comes in.

  ‘Mum.’ She says it just like she’s saying hi to someone she doesn’t particularly like.

  ‘I wanted to see you, Laura; to explain things.’

  ‘Dad said that, but there’s no need. I know what you did.’

  What I did? Probably half the town knows what I did by now. But only I know why I did it.

  And while all of this is going on in my head Laura, my fifteen soon-to-be-sixteen year old daughter, puts on my apron and goes under the sink for a bowl of potatoes.

  Then she starts to peel them with the knife I always use.

  ‘Laura, what are you doing?’

  ‘Dad’s tea. He’ll be home in half an hour.’

  She says it matter of factly, this younger version of me. This girl who wouldn’t even lift her legs when I was vacuuming. This girl who wouldn’t wash a cup, who stayed in her room night after night playing the same CD over and over again.

  And then she says, ‘I’m thinking of giving up school to look after Dad.’

  ‘You can’t, Laura.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  She looks at me coolly, like she’s a woman. Like she’s my equal.

  ‘You did. You left school.’

  I suppose my mouth is open in amazement and I’m popping like a goldfish out of water. I want to tell her it was so different then but she carries on.

  ‘Dad’ll be back soon. I think you’d better go.’

  I’ve cried a lot in the last few days but I’m fucked if I’m going to let her see me cry now. I never thought that she would be so remote, so unreachable. So cruel.

  My own flesh and blood throwing me out – well, ordering me to leave my own house.

  I start to mumble something about coming round again in a day or two but Laura cuts me off abruptly.

  ‘Bye, Mother.’

  Dressed in my apron she holds the back door open and tells me goodbye. I light a fag and make sure I leave in a cloud of smoke like the wicked witch of the west. Or is it the east?

  I’m so pissed off. So misunderstood. So misjudged, and now all I’ve got to look forward to is a flat, boring weekend and darts on Monday.

  Saturday night in the George.

  Still Katy.

  Saturday evening, miserable and moping, I’m stuck at Mum’s watching TV and criticising her favourite programmes. I’m really getting on her nerves.

  ‘For God’s sake, Katy,’ she says, ‘can’t you phone one of your friends, get out from under my feet?’

  It’s almost as if I were the teenage girl again.

  I walk on down to the George, my home from home from home, and the Motley Crew are there. Been there all day going by the look of them. They’re crowded around a halfhearted fire and, above the mantelpiece, the mirror on the wall reflects misspent youth, red-veined middle age and blue-nosed addiction.

  But they’re so happy, this alcoholic family. So nice. They might be a bit unsteady on their feet, they might laugh at ridiculous situations, but they embrace me in welcome.

  ‘It’s the Lovely Katy,’ says Jilted John, who got his nickname because he was dumped twice at the altar.

  ‘The best-looking girl in here,’ says Old Bob.

  I’m the only female in the pub but I like the girl bit.

  At the bar, Danny’s poured my drink without being asked.

  ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Not too bad, Danny.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘All right, they’re shit. I’m living at Mum’s, my daughter won’t talk to me, my money’s running out fast and everyone thinks I’m a tart.’

  ‘Could be worse then.’

  I have to laugh; nothing seems to faze Danny. All those years behind the bar, I suppose.

  Lena comes in a bit later with a gaggle of look-alikes, all boobs and bums and bare flesh under mountains of hair. All giggles, lipstick, eyeshadow and strong perfume.

  ‘We’re off to the club,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you come with us?’

  I look at them and their colour and youth and then I imagine me, overweight, with a hairstyle five years out of date and a dress sense stuck in the last decade. Me go with them? I’d look like a retard on a day out.

  ‘Another time, Lena.’

  ‘Sure. Anyway, see you on Monday.’

  As quickly as they arrive they leave, drinks knocked back and quick visits to the loo over. They take their freshness and colour with them and leave me with just my envy for company.

  I sit at the bar, chat to Danny, while people drift in and out. Most of them I know; as I said before, it’s a small town. Some speak, some nod, and some – Jerry’s workmates – pretend not to see me. About half nine I pop out for a fag and Johnny James is sitting at the smokers’ table.

  ‘I knew you’d have to come out sometime, Katy.’ He says this with a laugh in his throat.

  He’s smartly dressed tonight. He wears an open shirt with a light jacket over it and it reminds me of how young he is, and that’s another reminder of dowdy old me.

  ‘I’ll come in, buy you a drink.’

  ‘Johnny,’ I say, ‘there’s enough trouble going on without making it worse.’

  ‘I expect we’re being watched now.’ He looks to where the red button of light blinks in nosy surveillance at us.

  I’m finishing my fag as he says slowly, deliberately, ‘If you won’t let me buy you a drink here, will you come back to mine later?’

  I want to tell him that he’s too young, too tempting, too good-looking, too dangerous for faded jaded me. I don’t want him to break my heart.

  I say, ‘I can’t, Johnny. I can’t.’

  He stands up, moves close enough to touch. Close enough for me to want to touch him.

  ‘Katy,’ he says, ‘the other night. It wasn’t a one off, you know. Not for me.’

  I can’t answer. I shouldn’t answer. I can only shake my head as I brush past him.

  So what do I do? I go back in the pub, throw a few more voddies down my neck ’til I’m past caring, and then make my way to Mum’s.

  I’m nearly there, nearly to my new home, when Johnny James glides up in his big BMW and lets down the window down.

  ‘Do you want a lift, Katy?’

  I tell him I’ve only got a few yards to go and he says for me to jump in anyway because it’s no trouble and the streets aren’t safe for a good-looking woman this late at night. I don’t know if it’s him and his smart car, or me and my need of being held, or maybe all of that. But I get in and I don’t get to Mum’s until the next morning, and then I’ve done everything that Jerry thought we had. For the second time.

  So fucking there.


  Monday night’s darts in late October.

  The George versus the Phoenix away from home.

  Irish.

  Gobshite says, ‘You won’t be too late tonight?’

  His thick Belfast accent that used to chant for Ireland’s Thirty Two hasn’t altered a shade in the thirty odd years I’ve known him. Loved him.

  Gobshite is lounging on our bed, smoking. His dark wet hair is palmed back from his forehead and he’s watching me get dressed. His tongue is flicking across his lips like a snake.

  ‘I’ll be as late as it takes, Michael.’ I silently add on Gobshite.

  He slips off the bed while I’m still in my bra and stockings and makes a grab for me. I slap his hands away.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Michael, not now.’

  ‘So when you come back; when you’re a bit tipsy?’

  ‘Depends if we’ve won or not.’

  I’m saying this but the burning’s starting inside of me and he knows this. He knows me so well.

  ‘Irish,’ he says – even he calls me Irish – ‘you’ll show me when you get home?’

  ‘Michael, I’ll show you.’

  I’m affected now, really affected, and I have to leave or else I won’t be able to.

  ‘Think of me,’ he says as I’m closing the bedroom door behind me.

  He knows what’ll be in my head all night; he’s a bastard, is Gobshite.

  Now in the ritual of every time I leave the house, even if it’s just a visit to the shops, I kiss the tip of my finger. Then I touch the cheek of my child who laughs at me from his fading image on the hallway wall.

  ‘Goodnight, Davey,’ I say. ‘Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.’

  But there won’t be any bedbugs, not where Davey lies.

  At the George, I’m the last to arrive. Katy has pulled the drinks in and she looks tired, a bit detached.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not too good, Irish. Not too good.’

  ‘Take it out on the darts,’ I say.

  I join Pegs, Maggie, Scottie Dog and Lena having a few throws for practice before our game at the Phoenix, before our taxi, Danny (‘Hurry up, I’ve got a pub to run’) herds us out to cram into his 4x4.

  The Phoenix is a modern pub: one big open bar, a jukebox that vibrates the glass in the windows with enough noise to drown any attempt at conversation. By the way I judge it, I think I must be getting old.

  And age reminds me of sleepy country pubs, the slow tick of the clock, and halves of Guinness on hot afternoons. It reminds me of wet evenings and the bus to Dublin to the darkness of the cinema.

  It reminds me of Michael and his visits from the north when we were young.

  So we’re not keen on playing here in this shiny new Phoenix. Well, except for Pegs, who’s no age. And Lena, who actually likes it here. And Katy, who looks like she couldn’t care where she was. Maggie’s tapping her foot to a rap song about stabbing a policeman, or something like that, and even Scottie Dog is laughing with the barman.

  All right, so it’s me who’s not keen on playing here.

  Our opponents, the Phoenix Vixens, can only pull in four players so that gives two of us a free outing. We look at Captain Katy and she says, ‘I’ll stand down.’

  I say, ‘And me,’ before anyone else can get a word in.

  I keep Katy company when she goes for a fag and outside it’s already dark. There’s a bunch of smokers forming a circle of exiles in the doorway, drawing ravenously on their glowing cigarettes, standing in their halfway-house, torn between a wanting for beer and a craving for tobacco.

  Katy and I sit down, and I say, ‘So are you going back then?’

  ‘I don’t want to go back.’

  ‘Johnny James?’

  ‘Best not go there, Irish.’

  She’s miserable. It’s as though the world is settling onto her shoulders.

  ‘The thing is, Irish, I’m not even sure what I want.’

  I start, ‘Laura…’

  She snaps, ‘The whole fucking world doesn’t revolve around Laura.’

  ‘Sorry, Katy.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, Irish. Sorry for this whole fucking mess.’

  Then her mobile beeps a text message, and she stares at the screen.

  ‘Irish,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘What about the darts?’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  And she walks away, just like that.

  Inside, Lena’s won her game and Scottie Dog is down to a double.

  Maggie says, ‘Where’s Katy?’

  I say, ‘Bad week. Wrong week,’ and they all nod in the understanding of sisterhood.

  The match is over without the loss of a leg and I’m glad to be heading for home. I want to be out in the air, away from the continual throb of loud music and the shouted conversation. It’s still early, well before ten, and I don’t join the girls for a trip back to the George.

  I say, yawning, ‘I’m due an early night.’

  I walk home in the evening of this English town. I walk past the street pubs, the crowded centre pubs, the alley pubs where the old boys click down their dominoes. It’s become an almost familiar comfort: the roads, the buildings; but how I miss the green of County Meath.

  How I miss that time of innocence when I first met Michael.

  He’s strange, is Michael; he stays with his uncle on a lonely farm miles from town. I meet him on the lanes sometimes and his ‘Good day to yer’ is in the harsh accent of Belfast. Sometimes he comes to the bar of the Fountain Hotel and takes the Guinness steadily for a couple of hours: Guinness and cigarettes in equal measures. No one bothers him much except to ask after the health of his uncle.

  ‘Sure, he’s fine and why wouldn’t he be?’ is all they’ll get in answer and question.

  But he’ll catch me with a look on his way out, hold it and then nod. ‘A goodnight to you, young lady.’

  And I’m thinking he’s a cheeky sod because he must only be three or four years older than me, anyway. Then one night he’s waiting for me outside the hotel bar and he says, ‘I’ll walk you home, Mary.’

  He takes my arm.

  We talk and it’s not the monosyllabic young man of before. He tells me of the life of the city, of vibrancy, of the sights, of the clubs. He talks quickly; he makes me feel like a country bumpkin, a bog trotter.

  When I ask about the Troubles, ‘Is it like in the newspapers?’ he thinks for a minute.

  ‘Sometimes it’s bad,’ he says abruptly and I don’t ask again.

  We stop at the corner to my house and he turns me to him, slips his arms around my waist, tells me I’m the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. Then he kisses me long and hard. I’m telling myself that I should struggle, that I should protest, that he shouldn’t think I’m easy. But the night is dark and his body fits the length of mine. And although I hardly know him, I want more.

  I’ve been kissed before, gone further even – though that never comes out at Confession – but this is something different.

  ‘Saturday,’ he whispers, ‘I’ll borrow the old fella’s car and take you out.’

  Then Dad’s dogs start to bark and the porch light comes on and Michael melts away.

  And as he melts away the yearning starts.

  But Michael doesn’t come for me on Saturday. His uncle says to me, after Sunday church, ‘He had to go. Urgent job came up.’

  He passes me an envelope.

  Michael has written, ‘Mary, I’ll be back next weekend, then we’ll have our day out.’

  He signs off with a single x.

  And that’s how it is with Michael; he comes and he goes. He works on his uncle’s farm for a few weeks at a time. ‘Got to help the old fella out,’ he says. Then he’s up to the north for a building project. But there’s never a number to phone or an address to write to.

  ‘I’m always moving about, Mary,’ he says.

  So it’s him who contacts me, him who rings in the dead of
the night, and me who answers in our cold, tiled hallway, with the nosy moon peeping through the window.

  Dad calls through the thin bedroom wall to me, ‘Why can’t he be after phoning at a decent hour, Mary?’

  I catch Mam’s muffled something about being young once.

  And I whisper my yeses to Michael as he tells me what he’s going to do, what we’re going to do, when we meet up.

  ‘Just hurry back,’ I say to him and I’m sure he’ll hear the tremor in my voice.

  Then Dad bangs on the wall. ‘For Christ’s sake, Mary, I’ve got to be up at six,’ and Michael signs off with a promise.

  And it’s that promise that’s on his mouth when I meet him at the station a week later. Oh, the drug of himself. I live for the times he’s back, for our love in the secret places. But sometimes there’s no waiting, there can’t be. Sometimes I’ll meet him off the train and in the back of the Patrick O’Rourke’s grubby old taxi we’ll start.

  And that’s how it is with Michael. That’s how it always is with Gobshite.

  The house is dark when I let myself in and I call out, ‘Michael, are you there?’

  There’s no noise. No sound. I don’t click the lights on as I feel my way from entrance hall, up each step of the stairs to the inky blackness of the bedroom, where the heavy curtains are drawn tight to block out the light from the street. He’s in here; I’m sure I can hear him breathing.

  ‘Michael, answer me. I’m scared.’

  My voice is barely more than a whisper and I’m already trembling with excitement.

  The next morning Michael’s gone before I’m even up, before I’ve brushed the bitter taste of last night’s drink from my mouth. I vaguely remember him slipping from our sleepy warm bed, vaguely remember the front door closing behind him, vaguely remember the car starting in the drive. Michael’s off to do his business of what I don’t ask, never ask, because the Cause never dies. It might be hidden behind the curtains, it might slumber in a warm bedroom, it might be behind the façade of a respectable job, but it’s always there.

  So this Tuesday morning finds me down the stairs at eight o’clock. I boil an egg, turn a bit of toast, sit in my drudgery and read yesterday’s news. And I envy.

  I envy Katy her affair.

  I envy Lena her youth.