by Sarah Harte
‘We shared with two other families.’
‘Shared a bog?’ said Dylan, clearly disgusted.
‘Yeah – with the Collins family and the Keoghs. Poor Mrs Keogh,’ I said, smiling.
‘Poor Mrs Keogh’ was a refrain of our childhood that was guaranteed to reduce Karen and me to gales of laughter. When-ever her name had come up Ma would heave a sigh and say, ‘Poor Mrs Keogh.’ Mrs Keogh was perpetually convalescent. She suffered from every complaint known to the medical profession and a few that hadn’t been discovered, which wasn’t exactly a major fecking surprise when you thought of her twelve freckle-faced, adenoidal kids and her lazy-arse husband who, with his permanent squint, wouldn’t get out of the bed except to drink or to go down the bookie’s or to the labour.
‘Your grandmother May was from Creighton Street on the quays. There were nine girls and three boys in her family. They were very poor. When the boats would come into the quays, as they did back then, my uncle Billy would take whatever he could get off them – bales of material, whatever. Ma used to say about her brother Billy, “He was a robber.” Ma’s house backed onto the Tedcastle yard. They’d remove bricks from the wall and take coal in. One time your grand-uncle Billy got up a ladder and fell over when he was taking some coal. He lost his card for the labour so he had to root through the coal to find it.’
‘What’s the labour?’ Ella asked.
‘Signing on.’
She still looked confused.
‘Social welfare – the dole,’ I said, again struck by their utter unfamiliarity with the world I had grown up in.
‘It all sounds very Dickensian,’ Ella remarked.
‘Whatever that means,’ said Dylan.
‘It means like out of a Charles Dickens novel, dum-dum,’ she told him. He mock-punched her.
‘Your great-grandmother, my grandmother, used to wash clothes in a washhouse on Townsend Street.’
‘Why?’ Dylan asked.
‘Because she loved washing clothes,’ Ella deadpanned. ‘To make money, Dylan!’ she added, rolling her eyes.
I nodded. ‘When Ma was a small girl she used to bring my nana down a flask of tea. And Nana would take off Ma’s clothes while she was there and wash them. Ma only had two sets of clothes. One for school and the other for Sundays.’ My children’s eyes were wide. ‘My grandfather used to pawn his suit on a Monday morning and hope that he would be able to make it back by Friday for Mass on Sunday. If he didn’t, he’d go to Mass in another parish.’
Dylan blinked. ‘God, that sounds rough.’
‘They actually did all right by the standards of the time. At least they had fires in every room.’ I thought of the pretty girl with the long eyelashes. Her name was Janice. Animal had asked me to take her on for extra maths. ‘Janice needs encouragement, girleen, just like you.’ He’d smiled. And before I could argue with him about how I was too busy, about how I wasn’t capable, I found myself saying yes. And I felt better than I had in years.
14
Shannon’s eyes moistened when she saw me. She gave me a hug. ‘It’s so nice of you to stop by,’ she said, brushing dry lips across my cheek. ‘I know that Frank’s planning decision is out today.’
It was D-Day for Frank. I’d been up since early morning – jittery. The kids were anxious too. Ella had come into my bedroom before she left for college and set down her backpack. ‘What are the odds of Dad getting it?’ she’d asked, standing at the end of the bed, her teeth sunk into her bottom lip.
Dylan had played it cooler. He’d hung around the kitchen rubbing his eyes and yawning theatrically, apparently half reading Rolling Stone, a cup of coffee by his bare feet – I’d noticed his toenails needed cutting. The very fact he’d surfaced before noon was singular in itself. ‘To what do we owe this honour?’ I’d asked, shooting him a sideways look. He’d gazed at me blankly so I’d explained: ‘You’re up so early.’
Half smiling, half scowling, Dylan had gone back to his magazine. Then, as I was on the cusp of leaving, I heard him say, ‘Do you think he’ll get it?’
I trailed Shannon into her kitchen. It dwarfed mine, which was some achievement. It was in the main part of Shannon’s new house, which was a floating glass and steel box surrounded by interconnected satellites, accessed via thin glass corridors. The house, which was all about ‘spatial innovation’, had won countless architectural awards and had been featured in magazines all over the world, as had been predicted.
It was impressive certainly, striking, with its tensile steel and polished concrete, but there was something a bit anodyne and anonymous about it. When you sat in it you felt over-exposed, as if you were in the middle of a public space or somewhere sort of institutional.
‘It’s like being on the Starship Enterprise,’ Frank had hissed, the first time we’d visited. ‘I keep expecting a voice to say, “Beam me up, Scotty.”’
‘I miss the cleaner,’ Shannon said wryly, as I attempted to quell the sound of the light sabre I had stepped on. The polished concrete floor was strewn with the accoutrements of boyhood – balls and trainers and electronic things that pulsated and flashed. When I trod on the sabre there was a loud burst of light and a syncopated harsh sound.
We were seated at a high wooden breakfast counter with bar stools, which opened onto a wooden deck and pool area that was still under construction. The kitchen was bounded by two enormous walls of glass. Through one I could see Jimmy’s Aston Martin sitting outside, hunched on the gravel, bird shit on its window, as if it had been abandoned. On the other side, near the foundations for the pool, I saw a small digger perched forlornly on a mound of earth.
‘I can’t believe you’re teaching,’ she said, with a watery smile.
‘I can’t either.’
‘You don’t get paid, right?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It’s a shame,’ she said.
‘I’m not qualified. I’m just helping out.’
‘That’s real good of you.’
It wasn’t philanthropic. I was gaining from it most. At first when a student had come to me for a lesson my voice had sounded thin and reedy. And sometimes there was a tremor in it. Or it was too loud. It took me a while to modulate it to a point at which I felt comfortable. My legs had throbbed like a pneumatic drill. I’d had to stop my hand shaking. I’d felt dry-mouthed and light-headed.
Sure I still had bouts of nerves when I stared at a page and the figures swam in front of my eyes, but being mathematical didn’t really leave you. I read maths books that Animal had given me and familiarized myself with the Junior and Leaving Cert courses. I had been very rusty obviously but the cogs in my mind had started to work again. It would be hard to describe the pleasure and optimism I took from those lessons without sounding like a mawkish git.
It was the gradual return of my confidence that was the most extraordinary thing. It was like Shannon had said: you could run a home, boss your family around, be this all-powerful Supreme Being, particularly when your children were small, but in some ways you lost your place in the big bad world.
Now Shannon gnawed her bottom lip. She had got so thin she looked like her own initial.
‘Listen to me going on about your job in terms of money. It’s just …’ She trailed off.
‘I understand,’ I said, noticing her chewed fingernails.
Jimmy had been let go from his stockbroking job.
‘I don’t know what to do. And Jimmy isn’t coming up with any constructive solutions. He just sits there in that goddam chair of his, channel-jumping like a couch potato – as you saw.’
On my arrival Shannon had ushered me down the thin glass corridor connecting the kitchen to the den. The centre of the room was sunken, like something from the 1970s. Jimmy was dwarfed by the giant television screen he sat in front of, in the half-dark on a chesterfield sofa that jarred with the modernity of the room. He had insisted on bringing it from his old hou
se, much to Shannon’s chagrin. The air smelt stale. Jimmy was unshaven and grungy, his hair standing on end, his face creased from sleep. And for Jimmy – who was a short, robust, thick-bodied man – he looked thin.
He blinked at the football match, turning only when we called him.
‘Hey, Jimmy,’ I had said, injecting warmth and life into my voice.
He had rewarded me with the ghost of a smile that didn’t reach his blue-ringed heavy-lidded eyes and a half-wave. There was no lift in his voice, no sign of the breezy, ruddy, affable alpha Jimmy, with the easy smile and the exuberant manner. No banter and no hug or bullish Jimmy behaviour. I tried hard to mask my shock.
Shannon and Jimmy’s youngest son, Evan, whooshed into the room and plucked at her arm. His nose was running and he looked cold. Shannon swiped at his face with a piece of kitchen paper. ‘You look frozen, Evan,’ she scolded him. ‘Where’s your sweatshirt?’
It was a little chilly, actually. The under-floor heating wasn’t working properly, Shannon had said. ‘The contractor has gone bust. I couldn’t afford to sue the son of a bitch anyway,’ she had said, with a dazed, unhappy smile. ‘Oh and the architect on the project is in Chapter Eleven – you know, administration or examinership or whatever the hell you call it. If only we owed the bank way more money we wouldn’t be in this hole. We owe too much but not enough for the bank to have to play ball with us,’ she said. ‘We’re expendable.’
We could hear thumping sounds from another room, followed by a chorus of shouts.
‘Mom, Charlie won’t stop hitting me. And Noah took my ball,’ Evan said, ‘and they won’t stop wrestling.’
Shannon looked harried. She watched her son clamber up on a stool and nab a biscuit. He was a lovely child, plain like his father but with Jimmy’s zestful charm. Or Jimmy’s former charm.
Shannon sighed. ‘With three boys, it never stops.’
The strains of Jimmy’s match wafted down the corridor.
‘Jimmy won’t even do the school run,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want to be seen at the school gates. He thinks there’s a stigma. He feels like a social leper.’
‘He could go down to Coffee Society in Ranelagh, maybe,’ I said. ‘Frank says it’s HQ for property developers who have nothing to do. I’m sure a stockbroker would be welcome.’
She gave a small smile.
‘Actually, I’m not joking,’ I told her. ‘Frank goes in there himself. I’m sure he’d be delighted to see Jimmy.’
‘If I could only get him out of that chair … All those years I was complaining and bitching that he was never here. And now he’s here I want him gone. There’s irony in that, I guess.’ The tip of her nose had gone red. A loud thumping noise filtered through to the kitchen. ‘I’ll be back in a second,’ she told me. Evan followed her, trailing crumbs.
I walked over to one giant wall of glass. Shannon and Jimmy had bulldozed the original ivy-clad period house. Its old-fashioned garden had also been torn up. The lupins and sweet peas, lavender and poppies were being replaced by a multi-level garden with a giant rockery of cartoon proportions – ‘still under construction’.
Beyond the rockery would lie what one magazine had referred to ‘as a series of structures that from a design perspective’ would ‘give the impression that they could be taken away at any time’. What their function would be was unclear. But for the moment these structures were like giant empty husks staring accusingly at the house.
Shannon returned holding a plate with Jimmy’s half-eaten sandwich. ‘He just picks at anything I put in front of him. Jimmy who once vacuumed up whatever you put in front of him. He’s stopped playing golf. He won’t go for a pint. He won’t come out with me. It’s like he’s stopped living.’ Shannon’s mouth twitched. ‘I read that suicide rates are going up with the downturn. I’m afraid he’s going to do something crazy, like swallow a handful of pills.’ She put her hand over her mouth.
I could see her eyes welling and thought she was going to cry. ‘Ssh,’ I said to her. ‘That’s crazy talk.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, when she had composed herself.
‘Jimmy would never do anything like that,’ I said firmly. I put my hand over hers.
‘I think he just feels utterly helpless. He thinks he let his firm down. Before he left, he had to cold-call people, hunting for work that didn’t exist. He feels he was let go because he didn’t keep it together but they closed his section because the private client work just dried up. Worse still, he feels he let down his clients. So many clients lost money, in many cases their life savings, and Jimmy thinks he ruined their lives. I tell him that’s crazy.’
Her expression hardened. ‘In the end he just couldn’t get the work so he got canned. They didn’t care that Jimmy had worked his butt off for years and made the firm so much money.’ She sounded bitter now. ‘Jimmy helped found that firm. It was all about the bottom line so Jimmy had to go.’ Her face contorted. ‘I met one of his former colleagues with his wife. He and Jimmy were so tight. She asked me how things were. I just stared at her. And then she started telling me about the vacation they were planning, how much it cost. I wanted to say to her, “You’re kidding, right? You’re telling me about your fancy upscale vacation and I’m worrying how we’re gonna pay the basic bills?” The husband, the son of a bitch, only tried to rein her in when he realized how bummed I was. I swear to Christ I was like an inch away from telling her what I really thought. We used to go for dinner with them. They came to our kids’ christenings. Jimmy founded the firm with him and that guy, the husband, just turfed him out, discarded him like an old shoe.’
Dropping her voice a couple of octaves she said, looking stricken, ‘He’ll never get another job in stockbroking. He’s too old. He dropped the ball. That’s it. Finito. We have three kids under the age of fourteen. And a giant mortgage.’ She looked around her. ‘This house was the pinnacle of our achievements. And now it’s like an albatross around our necks. We may lose it. And sometimes I want to scream at Jimmy, “Get out there – pump gas, if that’s what it takes. Be a man.”’
I saw another flicker of anger in her.
‘Sometimes I feel like he’s turned into a sort of loser. That’s awful, I know,’ she said, visibly struggling not to cry. ‘“For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer – right?”’
I leant forward to touch her shoulder.
‘And it’s not like he didn’t support me for years. I know he’s depressed. The doctor said to give it time. I just think that a man sees his worth as bound up in his job and when he doesn’t have one …’
‘It’s the pressure,’ I said, feeling a lump in my own throat. ‘The strain of financial worries is so hard.’
‘You can say that again,’ Shannon said. She exhaled noisily. ‘People tell me, “It’s only money – at least you have your health.” Well, I guess they generally have some dough.’
‘If I could help you I would,’ I said.
When Frank and I had talked about money he had finally come clean. There were bristles on his chin so he’d looked like Desperate Dan, uncared-for, and I was quite glad about that: she clearly wasn’t making a good fist of it. But then his face had caved in and I’d felt sorry for him.
‘I’m breaking my backside to keep all the balls in the air, Anita, but I’m afraid I’m starting to drop them one by one,’ he had said. ‘I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul.’
I had seen his hands shake a little. And he had gone a really bad colour.
‘I’m trying to service the interest on the loans. That bollocks Ultan Mohally is chasing me down, looking for more dosh to refinance the shite we all bought into with MM at his fucking suggestion.’
I had felt dizzy then and a little sick. I was forced to run through, as I did at regular intervals, the list of reasons I had for not hitting the bottle. ‘I’ve stopped spending, Frank,’ I’d said, ‘but I’ll find ways to rein it in more. And I’ll talk to
the kids.’
‘We’ll be grand. Don’t worry. Just it’ll be a bit tight for a while, like.’
Our home was fine, thank God. He’d been telling the truth about that. He had transferred it to my name years previously. ‘Neither God nor man can touch it,’ he explained, ‘not the bank or any creditors. They can’t even register judgments against it.’ Other stuff might be taken, he said, the house in Spain, paintings, the boat we’d barely used, which had been sitting up on a pier collecting rust since Frank had ripped its propeller out driving over rocks. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered my hole calling the Coast Guard,’ he said. ‘I should have let it sink so I could collect the insurance money.’
The helicopter was gone. Frank had often worried it was on the small side anyway, insisting on parking it away from the likes of Ultan’s, hiding it behind trees. All those things that were supposed to give pleasure – the pile of toys we’d accumulated to keep the Frank and Anita roadshow on the go – would be no more. It was fair to say that I didn’t give a fiddler’s.
‘I do my own hair now,’ I said to Shannon, touching my head in an attempt to make her laugh, ‘as I’m sure you can see.’
She gave a bleak smile.
‘If it’s any comfort, I’ve gone right through the household expenses and slashed and burnt. I tried to sell my Range Rover but I was getting peanuts for it. Nobody wants those gas guzzlers now.’
Shannon said nothing for a while. When she spoke she said, ‘It’s the shopping in Lidl I hate most. Please don’t tell anyone that I’m shopping there.’
I smiled. ‘I’ve been shopping in Lidl too.’
Karen had been scathing about my first trip there. ‘You’d swear to Jesus, Anita, that you were like some sort of pioneer setting out into the great unknown.’
I’d worn dark sunglasses although it was winter.
‘Why don’t you go the whole hog,’ Karen had said, ‘and wear a false moustache too?’
‘It’s a change, that’s all,’ I had told her, avoiding Karen’s bald eye.