The Daisy Picker

by Roisin Meaney

  ‘Sure did, thanks to Lizzie, my chauffeur. Lizzie, this is Brett.’

  His pal gives her a ‘Hey’ and lifts his hand. Lizzie says, ‘Hi there,’ and waves back as she starts the engine.

  Pete leans in the car window. ‘Hey, you’ve got no place you gotta be – why don’t you take a few days here in Rockford?’ He turns to Brett. ‘OK if Lizzie stays a while?’

  Brett smiles the same slow, lazy smile as Pete. ‘No problem.’ He’d probably take in the Irish soccer team if they turned up looking for a few beds for the night.

  Lizzie can imagine the inside of Brett the potter’s house: blankets on the floor, everyone grouped round the fire, looking up at the stars through the hole in the roof. A six-month supply of pot somewhere handy. Probably all the mice Jones could catch, if he were in any state to run after them.

  For a second she hesitates – Pete strumming his guitar in the firelight is pretty tempting – but then forty-one years of four walls and a bed at night kick in. Too much; and much too soon.

  She smiles at them. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll keep going.’

  Pete leans in and hauls Jones back into the front seat. ‘Hey, big guy, you’d like to stay, wouldn’t you?’ Jones blinks out at him from behind his wire. Pete looks back at Lizzie.

  ‘You sure we can’t tempt you?’

  No. Not a bit sure. Not at all convinced that I’m doing the right thing. One thing I am sure of, though – that old Kentucky woman would stay in a minute. She’d be out of this car before you could say ‘thermal vest’. She wonders if Pete ever came across that woman in the States. How far is Kentucky from Tennessee?

  She puts the car in gear – she’s really not ready. ‘I’m sure, Pete, but thanks again. Look me up when you get to the ocean.’

  Pete stretches over and takes her hand; his is surprisingly warm for the day that’s in it. ‘I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Thanks a lot, hon. Have a good adventure.’ He rubs Jones’s head. ‘Bye, buddy.’

  A smile, a wave, and he’s gone, striding with his friend towards the ruined house. No glass in most of the crumbling window-frames, roof open to the skies, front door practically collapsed, but a fire in the fireplace. Unbelievable.

  She’d love to see where they sleep. Or maybe she wouldn’t.

  She liked the way Pete called her ‘hon’, even if it meant nothing. Tony called her ‘love’ or ‘pet’. Somehow ‘hon’, in an American drawl, sounds a lot more romantic.

  As Lizzie turns the car around and drives back into Rockford, a thought hits her. Through all the years she was living her standing-still life in the house where she grew up, through all the nights she spent doing crosswords with Mammy and Daddy, or having a glass of wine in the local with Tony, or poring over her bakery books, other lives were whirling by, full of doings and happenings and experiences. Hearts were breaking, mountains were being conquered, barriers were being torn down, love and hate and everything in between were being flung around willy-nilly. People were tightroping between laughter and tears, without a safety net in sight. Pete and his friends were smoking pot in ruins of houses, with nothing between them and the stars.

  She’s reminded of something – what? Then it comes to her: Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. The bit where she’s sitting on her bed, looking at the hurdy-gurdy madness outside her window – cows and wicked women on bicycles and rocking chairs, all spinning crazily past. She’s been like Dorothy, looking on all these years while life hurtled by outside.

  She shakes her head – it’s useless to dwell on the time that’s gone by; from now on, she’s thinking of the future. I’m only forty-one, for God’s sake – if I’m lucky, maybe just halfway through life. Who knows what’s around all the corners I haven’t turned yet?

  Plenty of daisies left to be picked.

  Suddenly she feels a surge of exhilaration, and she beeps the horn twice in Rockford’s bit of a main street. A woman talking on a mobile phone looks over at her; Lizzie smiles and waves cheerily as she passes, and the woman smiles vaguely back at her, turning to look after the car. Probably wondering who the heck that was.

  As she leaves Rockford, Lizzie O’Grady wonders how long it’ll take her to find the perfect place. She’ll know it when she comes to it; she’s sure of that.

  And when she gets there, she’ll walk out of the house and into the tornado.

  Chapter Five

  A few minutes after six o’clock, Lizzie pulls up outside a whitewashed restaurant. The sign over the door says ‘The Kitchen’. She’s been wandering around all day; the perfect destination hasn’t shown up the way it was supposed to, and now it’s really too dark to go on looking. She’ll have to put off the search until tomorrow.

  She’s lost count of the villages and towns she’s driven through, keeping close to the coast all the time. She stopped the car in a few of them, to walk around and smell the sea and get a feel for the place. Once she thought she might have found what she was looking for, but after an hour of exploring and pottering around the shops she decided against it; nothing jumped out and grabbed her.

  She stopped at lay-bys a couple of times and fed Jones, and let him wander round sniffing at the grass for a few minutes while she sat half-in and half-out of the car and looked at the map and wondered if she’d ever find what she wanted. Once, an old man out walking came over to see if she needed directions. When Lizzie explained that she was just exploring the coast, and asked about the most scenic route to the next village, he warned her not to keep to the coast road – ‘It’s a fierce rigmarole of a road altogether’ – and advised her to stay inland for a few miles. She thanked him, waited until he’d rounded the next bend, counted to a hundred in case he turned back, and then spent the next ten miles trying to strike a happy medium between admiring the stunning views of the Atlantic and keeping herself and Jones and all her belongings from careening off one of the hairpin bends.

  Now she wonders what she was expecting – what exactly is she looking for, anyway? Maybe she’s been a bit naïve – flinging a few things into the back of the car and assuming that everything will fall into place and that she’ll live happily ever after in the land of her dreams. Maybe Mammy and Daddy were right, and this was a cock-eyed idea.

  She looks in the mirror; her grey eyes look black in the streetlight. She puts out a hand and strokes Jones’s head through his wire, and he stirs sleepily and snuffles. The day cooped up in his carrier doesn’t seem to have bothered him.

  She’s in a smallish town, or a biggish village, called Merway, about eighty miles from home – although, with all her meandering, she must have driven well over two hundred miles altogether. The street she’s on runs more or less parallel with the coast, opening out into a little dinky square in the middle. There’s the usual assortment of shops and businesses, and a scattering of private houses here and there; nothing special, nothing to make it stand out from all the other places she’s been through today. Of course, it’s dark now – it probably looks very different in daylight.

  Her stomach rumbles; she’s eaten nothing but an apple and a banana since her porridge-and-prunes-and-brown-bread breakfast at nine. Porridge and prunes and brown bread in the winter, Bran Flakes and prunes and brown bread in the summer . . . Lizzie is as regular as clockwork.

  She’s also starting to freeze as the car cools. Time to eat – and find a place for the night. She wonders if she’ll have to smuggle Jones in. He’ll be getting hungry again too; it’s a while since she fed him. She’d better not delay.

  As she opens the door she gets a whiff of garlic. God, I’m ravenous. ‘Mind the car, Jones; won’t be too long.’ Will he be warm enough with the heat off? She takes her coat from the back seat and wraps it around the bottom of his cat-carrier. He’s got his tatty brown cushion under him, too – he should be fine. She grabs her scarf and her bag, then steps out and breathes in the sharp evening air. It smells fresh, and salty.

  The whitewashed restaurant is on the coast side of the road. The window-frames are
painted red, and there are glass lanterns with fat cream candles sitting in the windows on either side of the front door. Peering through one of them, Lizzie can make out a blazing fire in the far corner; great. She opens the door and a bell tinkles, like in the sweet shops she remembers from childhood. Two gobstoppers and a pack of sherbet, please.

  The room is small and cosy, with uneven-looking white walls, old floorboards and half a dozen tables covered in red cloths and scattered higgledy-piggledy around the room. There’s a red candle in a wine bottle on every table, and they’re all lit, even on the unoccupied ones. Apart from the lanterns in the windows, the only other light in the room comes from a pair of wall-lamps on either side of the fireplace, and from the fire itself. There are a couple of seascapes hanging on the white walls.

  Behind the front door is an old hallstand, nearly identical to the one at home – she almost expects to see Daddy’s old tweed hanging lopsidedly near the top. A giant basket of logs and briquettes and a coal-scuttle sit beside the fireplace. Louis Armstrong is singing about someone who goes to his head, under the bits of conversation floating gently about. There’s a door at the far corner, near the fireplace, that Lizzie assumes leads to the kitchen.

  She could hardly have chosen somewhere more different from O’Gorman’s formica-topped tables and flowery carpet and local radio. Good start.

  Three of the six tables are occupied. A man with a grey beard sits alone at a small one, six people – probably three couples – who don’t look Irish at another, and two women with a small child in a high chair at the third.

  Lizzie closes the door behind her and stands uncertainly – should she sit down, or wait to be seated? It’s a long time since she’s eaten out; Tony wasn’t keen on helping to keep his competition in business. And Mammy and Daddy had to be dragged out whenever the occasion called for any kind of a celebration – they were really more comfortable with the tried and trusted O’Grady mealtime routine. Lizzie can’t remember the last time she had a restaurant meal – Mammy and Daddy’s fortieth anniversary? – and she’s never eaten out alone, ever. This is certainly turning out to be a day of firsts. Mrs Kentucky would be proud of her.

  She nods at the few diners who turned at the sound of the bell, and starts to unwind her scarf, to give her something to do while she thinks about grabbing a table. The little child – not much more than a baby – has stopped mashing his dinner against his face to stare open-mouthed at her, a dribble of something mushy on his chin. Then he drops his spoon with a clang, and one of the women – his mother? – bends to pick it up, and the slight tension is broken.

  Lizzie has just decided to go and sit somewhere when a smiling young girl of fourteen or fifteen comes out from the back, holding a menu.

  ‘Hello. Are you on your own?’

  No, my husband and six children are on the way; just give me a minute to conjure them up. She smiles back at the girl. ‘Yes, just me.’

  ‘Come over near the fire.’ The girl leads Lizzie towards an empty table to the left of the fireplace. On the way Lizzie catches the eye of the elderly bearded man, who smiles up at her. There’s a little pottery eggcup, with a sprig of holly perched in it, beside the candle on her table.

  ‘I’ll hang up your scarf if you like.’ She’s probably wondering why I don’t have a coat. Better not tell her it’s wrapped around the cat. The girl holds the scarf while Lizzie gets settled. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’

  You certainly can; a big dollop of Dutch courage, please. ‘Yes, I’d love a glass of red wine.’ Lizzie feels a twinge of rebellion – they never have wine with meals at home, except on Christmas Day.

  The girl points to the wine list on the back page. ‘The house wine is the only one we sell by the glass; would that do?’

  It’s French, and not a name Lizzie has come across, but she wouldn’t exactly describe herself as a connoisseur. O’Gorman’s only got the wine licence a couple of years ago, and Tony or Julia looked after all that; Lizzie was only the head waitress, after all. She nods – ‘That sounds great, thanks’ – and the girl takes her scarf and walks away.

  She looks into the fire, rubbing her hands together, feeling her toes come slowly to life. There’s something on the mantelpiece – she leans over to make it out. It’s a little wooden clown, sitting with his legs dangling over the edge. There are real yellow laces, tied in giant bows, in his long shoes; they’re the only part of him not made from wood. He’s leaning back on his hands, grinning hugely, with his head cocked to one side. The detail is amazing – Lizzie can see the pores in his tongue and the ridges in his big, slightly sticking-out teeth. A comically oversized hat perches crookedly on his head. He’s utterly charming, and she wonders who was talented enough to carve him. Probably he was brought back from some holiday somewhere.

  Louis Armstrong is telling her what a wonderful world it is, and she has to agree. Look at her: free as a bird, with enough money in the bank to keep her going for quite a while if she’s careful – not that she intends to twiddle her thumbs for too long.

  Pity she hasn’t got someone to share all this freedom with, though.

  She thinks of Tony, setting the tables in O’Gorman’s for the night. Just over two weeks ago she was setting them too – imagine . . . and then she went to the dentist.

  She hopes Tony doesn’t hate her for escaping.

  She pushes him out of her head and turns to the menu. Food, before I die of hunger.

  It’s a folded cardboard page, handwritten. No starters, just three main courses – lamb shepherd’s pie, chicken-and-bacon hotpot and vegetarian lasagne. Good home cooking, hopefully. Two desserts, apple tart and fruity bread pudding, both served with custard or ice-cream. A real comfort-food menu – perfect for the middle of an Irish winter.

  Lizzie’s mouth waters as she reads. She’d eat an elephant this minute if one appeared. Her waitress comes back with her glass of wine and a jug of iced water, and Lizzie tells her she’d love the shepherd’s pie, please. Monday dinner at home is lamb chops; she thinks of Mammy putting two less under the grill tonight.

  She picks up the glass and takes a sip, rolling it around on her tongue. The taste is woody and velvety and blackcurranty. She swallows and feels the wine meandering slowly down into her empty stomach, leaving a tiny warm explosion after it; lovely. She takes another sip and swirls it around in her mouth, tilting the glass slightly and watching the little trails the wine leaves behind when it falls away from the sides – didn’t she read somewhere that that’s the sign of a good wine?

  She swallows again, and a pleasant buzz starts up somewhere in her head. God, her empty stomach – she’d better watch it, just in case she has to drive any further this evening. Surely, though, she’ll find a bed and breakfast here, even if she has to go the length and breadth of Merway; that should take her about five minutes.

  She glances around the room. Nobody is looking at her except the child, who says, ‘Gah,’ and bangs his spoon against his tray. Lizzie beams back and waggles her fingers at him, catching the eye of one of the women, who smiles over at her. People seem friendly here.

  She picks up her glass again and settles more comfortably into her chair. The fire is warm, the music is mellow, the wine is going down very well indeed. This was really a lucky stop – as long as the food is good; and, if the smell is anything to go by, it will be.

  She’s not disappointed. A generous helping of what is clearly freshly made shepherd’s pie sits on a blue plate. It smells wonderful. Lizzie picks up her fork and dives in. It tastes as good as it looks – succulent, herby, with lots of onions and carrots mixed in, topped with a mountain of buttery mash, browned and just crispy enough. A bonus of golden roasted parsnips – Lizzie’s very favourite way to cook them – sits on the side. Divine.

  She tucks in happily, stopping only to take the odd sip of wine or water until her plate has been completely cleared. She comes from a family of plate-clearers; Mammy takes it personally if anything is left, pressing the last spo
on of mashed turnip on you, looking martyred as she clears away any remains. And Lizzie needs no coaxing to finish every bit of the tastiest meal she’s had in a long time. Of course, it helped that she was ravenous to begin with, but still.

  As she finishes, wishing she had a hunk of bread to mop up the last of the sauce – it’s the only thing that’s missing – the same young girl appears with the menu.

  ‘Would you like dessert?’

  Lizzie imagines a slice of cinnamony apple tart, smothered in thick, creamy homemade custard, baked by the same competent pair of hands that produced the shepherd’s pie. She knows it would be delicious, and it takes a huge effort to shake her head. She’s giving up desserts – one of her fresh starts. But does the waitress know where she’d find a B&B?

  ‘Actually, we have one here. Hang on a minute and I’ll call my mother.’

  They have one here. Lizzie’s first night away from home is turning out just fine. She sits back again and imagines waking to – what? A glass of just-squeezed juice, freshly baked crusty brown bread, a perfectly poached egg sitting on buttery toast, or a couple of fat meaty sausages – or maybe a feathery, herby omelette dripping with cheese . . . Bliss.

  Everyone else has left except for the elderly man, who’s reading a paper over his coffee, tilting it in the direction of the wall-lights. And walking towards Lizzie is a woman her own age or thereabouts, with short blonde hair and perfect skin and a striped apron and an anxious smile.

  ‘Hello. Dee tells me you’re looking for a bed for the night.’

  ‘Yes, she said you do B&B here.’

  The woman pulls out a chair and sits opposite Lizzie. ‘We do, yes, and normally you’d have no bother at this time of the year; but, would you believe, just this afternoon I got a call – I didn’t get a chance to mention it to Dee. A group of Americans – they were in here a while ago; you probably saw them.’ The three couples. ‘They’ve taken all my rooms; I’m really sorry.’