Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  And he cried until the tears wouldn’t come.

  ***

  Smmmm-chluck.

  “What’s this?” he said, holding a piece of paper in his hand as if it were a timer fuse.

  Smmmm-chluck.

  Ellie looked up at him with eyes so full of tiredness that it was a wonder her cheeks weren’t charging her excess baggage allowance. Her eyes flitted to the piece of paper he was extending out to her, and she exhaled lightly, seemingly lacking even the energy to properly sigh.

  Smmmm-chluck.

  “Mmmmmsssssaaa,” Luke moaned in his sleep.

  “I was gonna say to you.”

  “Were ye? When was this?” he said, trying not to let the paper crumple up in his hand as he held it. “When I checked the fuckin’ balance and seen it? Is that when?”

  Smmmm-chluck. Ellie was wincing.

  “I told ye,” he carried on. “I told ye to get it paid. And now look. Look at this. Fuckin’ £30 late payment charge. Fuckin’ thirty quid that pushed us over-fuckin’-drawn, so we got a fuckin’ charge for that an all - daily charge - and now we’re poorer to the tune of fuckin’ sixty-eight notes. SIXTY-EIGHT.”

  Smmmm-chluck.

  She didn’t reply, except to glance at Luke and make sure he was still asleep in the Moses basket. He was three weeks old and Danny was starting to think all he did was sleep and eat and shit, rinse and repeat. He was also starting to think that all he’d ever do was wake up knackered, fuck off to work knackered, listen to a menagerie of mentally-challenged morons moaning about their upstream speed knackered, come home to a baby and a merry-go-round of chores knackered, and go to bed knackered.

  All done while watching Officially The World’s Greatest CoupleTM parade themselves around. Steve, in his official capacity as one-half of the dynamic duo, kept inviting him on nights out. Bring Ellie along! Get the wee fella minded! It was all so easy, wasn’t it! His Ma would have probably offered to mind the wee man now and again, but unless the city centre’s drinking establishments had started an IOU system, what exactly were they going to spend?

  They were skint. They were more skint than Danny had ever thought it possible to be. His Ma hadn’t exactly been rollin’ in it when he was growing up - especially compared to her ones, he added darkly - but he’d never really sensed they were living hand-to-mouth; bills had been paid, his Ma had held down a wee job here and there working in shoe shops and bars, they’d been alright.

  Smmmm-chluck.

  Even if they hadn’t been skint, what exactly were he and Ellie supposed to do on a night out that included Steve and Maggie, anyway?

  To give him credit, Steve had been almost hilariously nervous about confessing to Danny that he and Maggie had “a thing”. He’d offered to stop it immediately if Danny had the slightest objection to it and Danny had sensed his friend had meant it, but he’d also sensed that Steve was growing to like Maggie at a rate of knots.

  So he’d waved it away, said no, don’t be silly. All ancient history. Besides, ha ha ha, it was me told you to go to her that time and check she was alright, wasn’t it? Can’t remember telling you to check her THAT thoroughly, mind…

  Smmmm-chluck.

  The household expenses he didn’t mind. Christ knew they had to eat, and the wee man had to have nappies, even if Luke did seem determined to break some sort of Guinness World Record on that score. But this, this sixty-eight quid he was waving in front of her nose right now - this was avoidable. This was downright fuckin’ stupidity, and he burned to think of each and every portion of that sixty-eight pound. That was over a day’s wages for him, well over. Poured down the fuckin’ toilet because she’d been too dozy to make a phone-call.

  So he told her. He told her it was stupid and she was stupid and she needed to wake up and be more alert for this shit, wanting her to rant right back at him, needing some way to vent all of the crap that was bouncing around inside of him.

  She didn’t. She simply reached down and removed the breast-pump from her right breast, and she began to cry, and it was then that he noticed that the bottle attached to it had only the thinnest skin of whiteness across the bottom, despite the fact that the fuckin’ thing had been Smmmm-chlucking for the best part of the last hour. He saw her nipple, distended and red and looking more like a open wound than something whose merest glimpse had once been enough to send him into a happy little tizzy.

  “I’m supposed to feed him,” she sobbed. “I’m supposed to be able to, and I can’t. And I’m so…so…tired. He was up five times last night,” and he blinked at that, having only been semi-awake for one of those feeds.

  He stood, dumbfounded. Responses came and went and were rejected, because some part of him was still angry despite all that she was saying. And then she spoke again.

  “I want,” she said, in almost a whisper, “to call my Daddy and ask him to get me out of here.”

  It hit him like a hammer blow. Not just the thought of that cunt coming into his house and taking his daughter and grandson away to a big ole house and lifting and laying them, not just the look of triumph he’d give Danny as he did so.

  What hit him was that the feelings he was experiencing right now because of visualising Michael Quinn’s rescue mission, the fear that he was inadequate as a parent, as a provider, were probably the exact same feelings Ellie was going through right now.

  He knelt by her and pulled her head to his and she didn’t resist, didn’t pull back. They didn’t kiss; it wasn’t the right moment for that and they both knew it. He simply held her and she held him and Luke slept on, oblivious to it all.

  Danny found himself wishing, not for the first time, not for the last, that things didn’t have to be like this.

  ***

  Night fell on Regent Street once more. The lights began to wink out in front rooms one by one as their inhabitants got their fix of police procedurals or reality TV (or in the case of no47, some distinctly odd pornography). It was another gloriously clear night, quite warm for the time of year.

  The faint swwwooosh of cars on the main road going into the city centre was the only noise to disturb, if you discounted the incessant barking of no 12’s dog in its back garden, which anyone who had lived in Regent Street had long since learned to do, since the alternative was simply obtaining a shotgun and becoming proactive about the problem.

  Lights at one house remained lit. Danny sat in his living room. He was watching a DVD he had found in the bookshelf in the room. He was doing so rather blankly, which was entirely because the DVD was an utter impossibility.

  Ellie and he cavorted on screen, larking around, as Maggie filmed them on their first day proper in the new house. When he’d first started dating Ellie, Danny had been set the task early on of ensuring that he impressed Maggie sufficiently to earn the girl’s approval of his relationship with “her” Ellie, lest he suffer her stamp of disapproval and, it seemed, the requisite jacking-in that accompanied it.

  He’d done it. He and Ellie had been together. Then, after a while, they hadn’t. It didn’t end with some blazing argument or something like that, or one of them cheating; it just…ended. Danny had been a bit nonplussed by it, but at that stage in his life, going through uni, he quite liked the prospect of drifting along, finding attachments here and there. Nothing serious. Nothing too heavy. He had gotten the impression this was fine with Ellie too. Certainly she had made no effort to stop whatever they had dissolving without fuss into nothingness. One thing ends, move onto the next.

  As life would have it, “the next” had been Maggie…

  When he’d gotten that text from Ellie, the one telling him she was pregnant, he’d gone to see her. She’d told him she couldn’t have an abortion. She just couldn’t. He’d thought about it for a day or two, and then asked her did she want to give it another go. She’d said yes. Just like that, they were back together.

  Too cowardly to break the news to Maggie, he’d asked Steve to do it for him. Less than a month later, she and Steve were a couple. L
ife was so strange sometimes.

  Yet on this video footage, here she was, on a day she hadn’t been here, filming he and Ellie exploring their new domain. Danny watched himself talking to cam, saying things that weren’t true and that hadn’t happened.

  In the course of a lifetime of voracious reading he had of course come across Sherlock Holmes’ famous mantra that when studying a problem, if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  He remembered having a son. The rest of the world did not remember this, and the rest of the world wasn’t afraid to bring in ample evidence to back up its stance on the matter. So either the rest of the world had decided that a human life should be wiped from existence, and had rewritten reality to accomplish this, including falsifying memories, faking DVDs, erasing records, or…

  …or there was something wrong with him?

  Because, you know, generally people who saw monsters in dark alleys and had panic attacks in houses upon hearing footsteps down a staircase weren’t generally exalted as prime specimens of sanity.

  Okay. He could do this logically. Posit it for a moment. He had imagined Luke keep thinking the name keep remembering it into existence within the last twenty-four hours, after the shock of Ellie’s disappearance. Presumably he had also imagined the happenings in the alley and at Dermot Scully’s house, or at least exaggerated them into the realms of the supernatural.

  Why?

  Father Mackle had suggested it was because he felt guilty for allowing Ellie to be abducted. He could see a certain logic in that, admittedly. It would explain why every time a memory of his former life with Ellie and Luke surfaced, it wasn’t exactly an idyllic scene of domestic bliss; he was inventing more ways to punish himself.

  Except…three things kept circling high in his thoughts, three vultures of scepticism hovering above the carrion of truth, refusing to give in to the insistent door-knocking of logic.

  …what about the phone message? How had it knocked he and Steve and Doc to the floor so effortlessly? Why was it in ancient Irish?

  …why had Dermot Scully told him he knew what was going on? Why was Dermot fucking Scully the sole person in the last twenty-four hours that hadn’t said who? when he’d mentioned his son?

  …who kept rebuilding that mound in his front garden?

  When the DVD finished - actually, that was a lie; he had pressed the power off button long before its running time had elapsed fully - he was up and at the window and looking out at his tiny little insignificant garden, all twelve foot by eight foot of it upon this enormous Earth, and the defiant raised hump in its centre which put him in mind of Scully’s stoop…

  A face at the window, wrinkled and hideous.

  He jerked back, almost toppling over the coffee table, arms pin wheeling desperately to keep his balance in check. He steadied himself and looked again, trying to prepare for what he might see there.

  Dear God. Cast against the harsh light of the lamp, lit by streetlight from the back, it was even more grotesque.

  “Can I come in, love?” Bee asked brightly.

  He walked to the front door and opened it. She was standing on the doorstep. He’d been so engrossed staring at that fuckin’ thing in his garden he hadn’t even noticed an elderly woman limp up his path. His cheeks flushed. “Bee?” he said, checking his watch. “Bee, it’s near midnight.”

  “I was invited,” she replied mildly. “I had an appointment to come and do some tea leaves. I fell a wee sleep earlier or I’d have come round then.”

  Danny paused, replaying his last statement back in his head. No, he really said what he’d thought he’d said. Politeness reigned in his next comment’s tone somewhat. “Bee, that was Ellie wanted you to do her tea leaves. And she’s missin’, remember? Plus, um…it’s near midnight?” he repeated, putting extra stress on the words this time in the hopes they would sink in.

  Sink in, fat chance. Bee was like that fuckin’ apple pie she‘d sent round as a housewarming present - impossible to penetrate with anything short of a nuke. “Son,” she said in a kindly tone, “I’m an oul woman and I’m standing here freezin’ my arse off on your doorstep. Let me in or I’ll start tellin’ everyone in the street I caught you sniffing a pair of my knickers when you came in to put up that shelf for me.”

  And it happened.

  Danny laughed. He laughed ‘til his sides were sore, and by the time he was done wiping his tears away he had already long since waved Bee inside and was just putting the finishing touches to their cups of tea. She winked at him as he handed hers to her - on their least distressed china, no less - and he sat on the other side of the room. The last of the chuckling left him and he mourned a little at its passing. Since the impossibilities had began stacking up he’d wondered when he’d reach the point of laughter. It seemed he just had. Where was he to go from there? Madness?

  Bee sipped her tea and made a face.

  “Somethin’ wrong with the tea?”

  “Ach no son, I’m just a creature of habit, ignore me. The only person who can make my tea right is me. Don’t feel bad about it.”

  “I’ll try not to let it keep me up nights.”

  For a few moments they simply sat at opposing ends of the room sipping their respective beverages. Danny reflected that were a fellow resident to walk past his front window at this time of the night - unlikely, yes - the sight of him sitting drinking tea with oul crazy Bee from up the street would cause them severe neck trauma from the violent double-take.

  “What’s ticklin’ ye,” Bee asked. He told her. She grinned gummily. “I don’t doubt it. Never thought you had much time for the oul fogeys, Danny.”

  “Ach I wouldn’t-”

  She held up a hand. “Please, son. I like ye. I do. So don’t be spoilin’ that with wee lies now. Anyway, it’s only right in my book - I am an oul fogey. Not denyin’ it. And you were always respectful,” and he bit his lip at this, recalling a bedtime conversation featuring terms such as Davros and the Fat Controller, “and that’s what matters. I always thought to myself seein’ you and that wee girl pushing the wee fella up the street - them three are a lovely wee family.”

  She said this just as he was raising the cup to his lips.

  He let the remains of the cup lie where they had shattered on the floor, and ignored the burning sensation of the hot tea settling on his T-shirt.

  “Family?” he managed.

  “Family,” she repeated, and she didn’t seem to think it odd, that his fingers had lost motor control, that he’d spilled the tea, or the way he was looking at her now. He slid from the chair on which he’d been sitting, lacking the ability to stand for the moment, and moved toward her on his hands and knees, in supplication.

  “Please tell me,” he begged her. “Please tell me I’m not crazy.”

  She sat her tea down on the little table beside the sofa and looked at him with such kindness and pity that for a moment he flashed to Thomas telling him he was a liability at Lircom. But unlike then, coming from Bee he felt no surge of humiliation or anger at receiving such a look.

  “Son,” she said softly. “There’s so much you have to learn…”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She sighed. “Don’t be so sure,” she told him, but before he could ask what she meant by that, she went on, “indulge me for a minute or two first. Let me tell you about my wee brother, Colm. Fifty-eight years ago it was, out in the ‘sticks’ as you’d call it, my Da worked as a foreman of a team of labourers. He and a team of his men were sent out to clear a path for a new motorway the government wanted to construct.”

  The tea was lifted to her mouth. Danny saw her hand was shaking, but couldn’t decide if it was age, or the memories she was relating, or both. Though every part of him burned to know more about Ellie and Luke, to know whatever it was she knew, he found himself waiting for her to resume without comment, sitting at her feet like a child at story time.