I tried to integrate her as much as possible into my life, but it never worked out. One night, I brought Liuda with me to meet Kevin and Helen, but that was a bit of a disaster. Nobody knew what to say except Kevin. He couldn’t take his eyes off Liuda all night. Kept talking only to her as though myself and Helen were not even present.
Liuda was very shy in his presence and hardly said a word. Helen was even more silent, almost aloof. The only thing she said all night was to mention Dursey Island.
‘I believe the cable car is down,’ she said, and Kevin looked up with great surprise, wondering where this thought had slipped out from. ‘They have a new one ordered from Germany,’ she added. ‘So I read in the paper.’
We had more fun on our own, Liuda and myself. At least we had love and sex, like living on our own island. We could also talk about our observations as outsiders, without offending anyone. We spoke about some of the funny things, the contradictions we experienced here. I loved listening to her talking about her clients and how envious they were of her complexion. She told me how Irish women often hated their own skin. They wanted the make-up lashed on thick. ‘Does my face look like a plate of chips?’ they sometimes joked. And how could you answer that? Beauty therapy was not about being honest but about making the customers feel good.
We agreed that people here didn’t want the straight answer all the time. They needed lots of praise. They loved exaggeration. They used compliments like mind-altering substances. She was on commission for skin-care products, so she got used to telling people that they looked gorgeous, cool, brilliant, absolutely amazing – out of this world.
She told me the story of how she came here. She met an Irish businessman who was in Moldova sourcing timber. She ran into him in a bar and he offered to get her a job. Paid for her flight over and put her up. She was nervous because she had heard about girls getting their passports taken off them when they arrived. But her passport didn’t matter as much as her visa, which put her at the mercy of her employer. She could not work for anyone else. So she lived with him and slept with him and cooked for him and worked in the office of his joinery firm.
Once he got tired of her, he allowed the permit to lapse. When he came back from another business trip with a new woman from São Paulo and a consignment of hardwoods that he swore were not from the rainforest, Liuda had to move out and find herself a new employer who would apply for a new visa. Asshole, she called him, and it made me laugh to hear her putting the emphasis in the wrong place. Ass-HOLE.
Inevitably, she was taken out of my hands, as the saying goes.
We were in a bar together one night and this guy came up to me in the jacks, talking about her. He was staggering around the place, pissing dangerously beside me in his urinal, chasing the green, pine-smelling dice around in circles with the force of his flush.
‘Come here,’ he said, zipping up. ‘Is that your girlfriend?’
‘What?’
Out in the corridor, he held my arm and smiled with great sincerity. He had something important to tell me.
‘I just want to let you know that your girlfriend has the most beautiful arse I’ve ever seen. I’m not joking you. I’ve never seen such a beautiful arse before in my whole life.’
What was I meant to say? Thanks?
‘No offence, like. I’m just saying, in case you haven’t noticed.’
He had me cornered.
‘Come ‘ere. Is she a model or something?’
I smiled and tried my best to walk away, but he insisted on shaking my hand to congratulate me.
‘Look, I hope you don’t think I’m coming on to her or anything like that. I’m just telling you the truth, that’s all. Her arse is only fucking amazing. You should be proud of yourself.’
He was right of course. Liuda was wearing incredibly tight jeans with zips across the back pockets like long, silver eyelashes, fast asleep. And knee-high boots. I could never really understand the boots, or the jeans for that matter, but that was the whole idea, wasn’t it, attracting lots of attention to herself.
‘Only messing,’ he said, putting his arm around me. ‘I’m just having the craic, that’s all.’
He leaned on me all the way back towards the bar. I could hardly interpret this as a form of aggression, because he was being so friendly.
‘I was just remarking to your man here,’ he continued, nodding to me but speaking directly to Liuda this time. ‘You have the most perfect arse that ever came into this country.’
He waited for her to smile.
‘There’s no woman anywhere around here to match you.’
I thought she might have been offended, for my sake. But this was really her opportunity to land on her feet at last, so I could not allow myself to stand in the way.
I became a has-been. I felt like shit. All my inadequacies like a tray of cakes on display in front of the world. I tried telling myself that she was the traditional sort of woman, expressing her femininity, enjoying the attention she got, not only from men but also from the jealous eyes of women who wanted to tear their false nails across her face. I told myself that I was the more progressive type, adjusted to the give and take of love, while she was still nostalgic for the time when men were men and women were women. I think she expected me to be more of a man than I appeared to be. Protective. Knowing what to do in case of emergency.
Look, I’m a lover, I wanted to say to her, not a fire-fighter. I didn’t know how to stand up for her in a row.
‘He’s only messing,’ I tried to warn her.
‘Look, Vid,’ she smiled, ‘we both know this is going nowhere, you and me. We’re in the wrong place.’
It didn’t help that I was working in a restaurant at the time, in the kitchens, coming back home every night with a heavy film of grease on my face and the stink of chicken breasts in my clothes. Early bird all night. No matter how much I showered, it would not remove the toxic residue of cooking. Each plate with criss-crossed potato wedges built up like sleepers in a railway yard. And the amount of salt they piled on to make it taste better. Then one night the manager, who must have been only nineteen years of age and looked more like fifteen, came up to me and said it was my duty to clean the toilets. They were covered in vomit. You could read the menu in small print all over the floor and the walls. I told him I wouldn’t do it. He said he understood my position. But then he told me that refusal was not an option and threatened dismissal. He informed me that everyone took their turn cleaning the toilets, so I told him he could have my turn and left.
I walked out along the pier at Dún Laoghaire harbour. I had a small apartment out there, not far from where Kevin’s mother lived. It was handy, because he was giving me more and more work at the house, so I could walk there from my place.
The wind was quite strong that night. The sailing boats were being tossed around and the guy ropes made a ringing melody against the masts. All kinds of things banging and squeaking and set loose. I was wondering if Liuda had already deleted the photos on her phone, taken at the bandstand by the accordion player from Sighişoara. The sea was churned up and as I walked around by the elbow of the pier, the wind was like a hand on my chest. A big bouncer preventing me from walking any further, pushing the words back into my mouth.
9
As the date of the trial began to come closer, Kevin called me over to his mother’s house to discuss a bigger job. Something quite substantial. His mother had been complaining for years that the floorboards in the front room were running in the wrong direction. She wanted them turned around so they would run lengthways, towards the front window rather than laterally across the room towards the fireplace. The original builder had made a right mess of things. It made the house feel small and claustrophobic.
I was the first to agree with them for aesthetic reasons, but I knew immediately that it was not worth correcting at this point, purely on financial grounds. I told them so, but the cost was not really seen as a barrier any more. Apparently she had inherited money lat
ely from a relative in the USA, so they felt it was the right time to get it done.
I was thrilled to get back into serious carpentry again, especially a big job like this where I could really prove myself. But I was not sure it made sense. The thought crossed my mind that I was possibly being re-employed each time because of the imminent court proceedings. He was utterly calm about the outcome, but he needed my absolute allegiance to the family. He knew the Garda would never come after him at this point, unless I lost faith and brought the whole story out into the open in the witness stand. He needed me to be completely on his side, and maybe this was a kind of payment in advance for the favour I was doing him.
He reminded me from time to time not to say a word to anyone. And maybe he needed to isolate me a little from the threat of new friends who might start asking questions. He explained things to me about this country, how friendship often masqueraded as curiosity. He tried to teach me the art of answering a question with another question. He told me there was a secret language here, not the old, Irish language or the English language, but something in between the lines, like a code.
‘This is an island,’ he pointed out to me once. ‘You can never completely trust what you hear. You have to forecast what’s behind the words. You have to be able to read people’s inner thoughts. You have to be able to think on your feet and keep ahead of them.’
Perhaps he was speaking as much to himself as he was counselling me. I listened to his advice eagerly. But you can’t learn all that street-wise acumen like a faculty. You can’t pick it up like chess or tennis. So he felt it was his duty to protect me and look out for me.
His mother must have known nothing about the case, otherwise she would not have wanted me in the house. She had her arms folded as we stood in the front room looking around. Kevin half sitting on one of the radiators, allowing the full force of her tenacity to work on me.
‘It’s a shocking waste of money,’ I repeated, but then I heard her big sigh gathering once more, like a gale coming.
I tried to put her off with a rough estimate. I told her it would take months to get finished. All the floorboards taken up. All the joists underneath would have to be turned around. There would be a lot of wastage, new joists, broken floorboards to be replaced. All the noise. Sawdust all over the house.
I was doing myself out of a job, but my instinct was to tell her straight out how insane this was. I didn’t have the nerve to say it so bluntly. That was something else I hadn’t learned yet. How to say no. How to prevaricate. How to play the long finger. How to make people think you said YES when you’re actually saying NO WAY, out of the question. It’s impossible to learn that stuff because it usually sounded so false coming from me. You must be out of your mind, Mrs Concannon. Turning the floorboards around. Are you serious? I searched hard and came up with a borrowed phrase which I had heard on one of the building sites.
‘Ah, go easy on me, Mrs Concannon.’
But that didn’t scare her off either. She only stared at me with great disappointment in her eyes.
‘I would prefer you to be honest with me,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine.’
‘You’ll be well looked after,’ Kevin added.
How could I refuse? She had her heart set on it and there was no turning back. She asked me to name the price. I told her I would have to come back and measure up first. I tried to backtrack. I tried to tell her that I was not really qualified to take on such a big job. But that only made them both smile. The wardrobes and the back door and various other small jobs I had carried out in the meantime had already given them more than enough proof of my qualifications. I reminded her how long the project would take.
‘You’ll never get rid of me,’ I said, as a joke.
‘That’s fine. We’re not in a hurry.’
There were thousands of carpenters around who would love to take on the job. With her kind of money, she could pick the best in the country. But they had singled me out, because I had become a loyal and trusting friend.
‘You’re like part of the family now,’ Kevin said. She nodded and I was so overwhelmed by the welcome that I even imagined myself receiving a certificate, rolled up with a ribbon, stating that I belonged here.
And that’s how I took up semi-permanent employment with the Concannons. I became self-employed and even began to pay my own taxes to keep everything straight. I was getting on like a house on fire, as they would say, given a key and told to come and go as I pleased.
I began by removing the furniture from the two living rooms, front and back. I was very glad to be able to call on Darius to come and help me clear the rooms, lifting out sideboards and book cases and sofas, storing them around the house with sheets draped over them. The dining-room table was placed away into the conservatory. I made sure to carry all the porcelain service and other precious objects myself.
Darius had been here in this country a lot longer than myself. He was married to an Irish girl and had one child, though they were separated. He saw the boy once a week, but that was the height of his participation. You could see that he was upset about it, but he always remained cheerful, always suppressing his sadness and making jokes while working, using Irish phrases that didn’t make any sense to me.
‘Game ball,’ he kept repeating for no reason.
Like everyone else, Darius wanted to know my biography, pre-arrival. He asked what my father did and I told him he worked in import–export of some sort, before he died.
‘Import–export,’ he said, looking at me. ‘You mean he was in the secret police?’
There was nothing I could say to deny that. He laughed and said his own family were also in with the secret police.
‘My mother turned out to be the village informer,’ he said.
We left it there. We had plenty of other things to talk about. I would need Darius later on for some of the tricky parts, but in the meantime he went back to his work while I began the job on the floor in earnest, on my own.
I got to know Kevin’s two younger sisters, Jane and Ellis. Ellis was not getting on so well with her mother, I could not help noticing. She was meant to be preparing for her final exams in school, but she was doing nothing. They were constantly fighting and I tried to avoid overhearing some of the shouting between them. Ellis had a large diagram of male genitalia on her wall. I had seen that while I was working on the wardrobes. Now I could feel the intensity of her gaze whenever she saw me in the house. I could also smell the distinct scent of weed, or whatever, coming down the stairs from her room whenever her mother was out. The older sister Jane had a masculine appearance in her face, but she was far more studious, more balanced and normal, maybe.
In the afternoons, it was back to cups of tea and chats with Mrs Concannon, after she came home from school. It even got to the point where she asked me to call her by her first name, Rita. But I had difficulty with that much familiarity, since I was still, basically, an employee.
One afternoon, while I was in the kitchen, I came across a number of personal items belonging to her, lying on a chair. Since the discovery of the unopened letters in her bedroom, I was sometimes afraid of what I might find around the place. Things which I might not be able to conceal once they entered into my head. Folded on the chair were some items of underwear, a pair of her stockings and a brassiere. I could not help noticing that one of the cups in the bra had been filled with silicone. A false breast.
I got on with the work and later that afternoon, when she made a cup of coffee, the items were gone. She stared at me and brought the matter up.
‘I’m sorry that you had to see those things,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘What I left on the chair,’ she said. ‘I must apologise.’
I tried out the rules of silence which I had learned from Kevin. I pretended not to know what she was talking about and I think she got impatient with my stupidity.
‘The bra, for God’s sake.’
‘Oh that,’ I said.
‘You see, I had cancer.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ I said.
‘My friends from school brought me on a pilgrimage to Lough Derg.’
She told me that she had gone to boarding school in Dublin, a convent school. Her friends from class still met for a book club each month. She was kept in the loop with emails informing her of deaths and marriages. Every week, somebody’s mother or some former nun was dying. She received messages about girls in her class who were ill or in difficulty. Then it was herself who was diagnosed with cancer and became the subject of the emails. They brought her to Lough Derg for a day. Not that many of them were very religious any more, but it was a nice way of keeping in touch and doing things for each other in times of need.
It was all the cigarettes she smoked in her early life, all the ‘fags’, as she put it, which her husband had forced on her while they lived in London. It was the first time she mentioned her husband, and then only in the past tense. She said he was a great smoker and a great singer, which was not really intended as a compliment. A man whose life evaporated with smoke and songs.
I had noticed a packet of Marlboro cigarettes in a glass case in the living room while I measured up for the floorboards. It was there, she said, more as a symbol. A deterrent. The last, un-smoked packet of cigarettes in her life, perhaps also keeping him away.
‘Are you going to be fine?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t got the all-clear yet,’ she said. ‘But the prognosis looks good.’
She said the worst part of it was the initial tests and all the worry it caused in the family. She was afraid not so much of dying but of leaving her children, who still needed her. Once the diagnosis had been made, it was easier to fight it and be strong. And once she had fought this off, she could fight off anything that came her way.
Hand in the Fire Page 6