by Alison Walsh
‘Oh, and you’d know about detail, wouldn’t you,’ Pius had muttered then, putting the fly down and taking a long pull on his cigarette, shooting Daddy a glare. ‘A grand man for detail, aren’t you, Daddy? Well, you know what, I think you’ve forgotten a couple of things over the years.’
Daddy had looked up from the paper, but his eyes hadn’t met Pius’s. Then he’d just shrugged and continued to read the paper and Pius had taken another furious pull on his cigarette, exhaling with a frustrated hiss.
She still wasn’t sure what a refugee was, but anyway, he couldn’t speak English so when his mother came, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, they had to climb trees instead or build shelters on the towpath out of branches, Rosie miming instructions and the little boy, who she had learned was called Mark, dutifully obeying.
And then one day, a few months after he’d arrived, he’d dragged a heavy bag onto the old sofa in the attic, the one that was filled with dusty horsehair, and had pulled out a big, black leather-bound book. Rosie had been fascinated because it had looked like a book of spells, but when she’d looked over his shoulder, she’d seen row after row of black, spidery letters. She couldn’t work out what they were – maybe it was a secret code – but then he’d pointed to them and then to himself and said in English, ‘My language.’
Rosie hadn’t been able to understand why his language looked like hers, but didn’t spell anything, and why the letters had little hats on them, but then he’d pointed to one word and spoken in that musical, twanging way, and she’d tried to copy him, and he’d laughed so hard he hadn’t been able to speak for a whole five minutes. Laughing until the tears streamed down his cheeks. She didn’t care. That’s where they’d become real friends, when she’d started to speak his language, enjoying the nasal sounds the words made, and he’d started to speak hers, pointing to Morecambe and Wise and saying ‘goat’, only it had come out ‘goash’, because of her accent and it had been her turn to laugh at him.
She pulled up to The Great Wall with a squeak of brakes, only just putting out a foot to stop herself crashing to the ground. The place was quiet, Rosie thought as she opened the door of the restaurant, a wall of steam hitting her as she did so. A knot of local boys were hanging around the high counter, the way they always had done, hair stiff with gel above their ruddy faces, the air filled with the smell of cheap aftershave. They all hunched over, hands in their pockets, muttering to each other, a sudden burst of laughter indicating that someone had cracked a joke. The kind of boys she’d used to hang out with when she was a teenager. The kind of boys who’d still be here in twenty years’ time, grown men.
Behind the lads, she could just see the top of his head, a thatch of inky black, bent low over the wok. She fought the urge to run. She could hear the pans hissing and spitting fat on the gas, the deep-fat fryer sizzling in the corner. He was probably making short work of a few bean sprouts, throwing them into a pan along with a chunk of ginger and garlic paste, then tossing in a big handful of prawns, swishing them around the pan, then a sprinkling of spring onions, sliced long and thin, the way Vuong liked them. His mother had been very precise about that. She liked things to be just right. In that sense, he took after her.
He looked up then, to ask one of the lads if he wanted extra chilli, and then he saw her. His eyes opened wide in surprise and a smile touched the corner of his lips. He’s pleased to see me, Rosie thought for a second, before the smile was replaced by a hard stare from those black eyes, the lids folded down at the sides, the smooth wide face unchanged apart from a frown line that ran from his forehead to the bridge of his nose. He still had the cleft in his chin. She used to tease him about it, running her finger along the fissure. ‘Do you know what they say? “Cleft in the chin, devil within.”’
‘Oh, I’m not the devil,’ he’d used to laugh. ‘We both know who the devil is,’ and he’d reach out and grab her then, tickling her until she had to scream at him to stop, then kissing her the way he knew she liked, long and hard and slow, so that when he’d finished, she’d feel she needed to come up for air.
The boys left, clutching brown paper bags, all guffaws of laughter and slaps on the back, one of them giving her a curious look as he headed out the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said into the silence that followed. She wasn’t sure what for, just at that moment, but she knew that she had so much to be sorry about, it seemed appropriate. It might cover all of the bases.
Mark didn’t respond, instead lifting the hatch and shuffling around the few tables in front of the counter, tidying up the discarded chopsticks and any leftover cans. She didn’t remember there being tables, just two plastic benches either side of the high counter. He had a tea towel thrown over his shoulder and his white T-shirt was pristine. She wondered what his chest was like under the T-shirt, if it was still as smooth and flat, the shoulders a little too broad for his narrow waist and small hips, before she told herself to stop it. What his chest looked like was no longer any of her business.
Now, he wiped and tidied for a while, piling up sideplates and chopsticks and putting them onto the counter, then wiping down the tables with a damp cloth. He said nothing and neither did she. She just waited. After a while, he looked up at her, taking in her torn dress, her bare feet, the tangle of daisies and knotted hair on her shoulders. ‘Sorry about what?’
She shrugged and cleared her throat. ‘About turning up like this. I should have come to see you earlier.’ Ask me why I’m here, she thought. Ask.
‘I heard about the wedding. That there was trouble.’
‘Jesus Christ, already?’
He shrugged. ‘News travels fast. There were a few of them in here … after.’
She bit her lip. ‘I suppose you consider it well deserved. Justice being meted out at last.’ She couldn’t help the bitter tone in her voice.
He shook his head and looked down at his food-spattered clogs. ‘No, that’s not true.’
‘Oh, no? I’m not so sure. You’ve been waiting for a long time for this, Mark.’
He gave a tut of impatience, flicking the tea towel up over his shoulder. ‘Don’t blame me for whatever happened, Rosie. Don’t take it out on me.’
‘It was Daddy …’
He stopped dead, dirty wine glass in his hands, before putting it down carefully on the table. He didn’t look at her when she added, ‘He said something at the wedding. He said—’
He put up his hands in a ‘stop’ motion. ‘No, Rosie. No Daddy. Please.’
‘Look, I need to tell you.’
He shook his head, his face impassive. ‘I can’t help you.’
‘How do you know? I haven’t told you yet.’
He sighed. ‘Look, nothing your father says would surprise me, Rosie.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, please. The whole of this place knows what kind of a man he is.’ He spat the word ‘man’ out.
First Daddy and now Mark. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but not this. ‘I made a mistake coming here. I’m sorry I bothered you.’
She turned to leave, but she didn’t hear him come up behind her, reaching out and grabbing the upper bit of her arm. The grip was so sudden it made her take in a sharp breath. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she hissed.
He looked nearly as shocked as her. ‘I’m sorry, I just wanted to stop you. I didn’t mean—’
‘Oh, fuck off.’ The anger took her now, great fat tears rolling down her face. ‘Where were you when I needed you? Oh, I know, holding the high moral ground, I’d quite forgotten. Well, do you know what, I hope you’re fucking well happy now.’ And with that, she swivelled on her heel and made to grab the handle of the door, to pull it open.
She felt his hand on her shoulder then, gently now, the other one cupping her elbow. ‘C’mon, Rosie. I’ll make some tea. We can talk then. It’s OK, Rosie.’ His voice was a low, soft whisper and she allowed herself to be turned gently around; she let him wipe her face with his tea towel. He was so close tha
t she could smell him, the clean scent of soap, the sharp tang of ginger, the medicinal smell of the cleaner he used to wipe down the surfaces. She closed her eyes for a second and when she opened them, his face was just inches from hers. His expression was soft now and his hands were on her shoulders, warm and heavy, and she nearly gave in to it then, the feeling that she wanted to lean against him, to press her head into his shoulder, to feel the warmth of it, the solidity.
But she wouldn’t give in to it. She wouldn’t. She pulled back abruptly. ‘You feel sorry for me,’ she said, her voice a near-whisper.
He was rubbing his hand up and down her arm now, and she could feel the callouses on his fingers. ‘No, Rosie, that’s not true.’
She shook her head. ‘You do. And do you know what?’
‘What?’ His expression was hopeful now.
‘You can take your pity and shove it up your ass.’ And then she turned and wiped the dust off the hem of her dress, where it had been trailing on the floor. ‘I’m going home now. I should never have come.’ And she opened the door and slammed it shut behind her, so hard that the bell jangled against the glass, grabbing the bike and hobbling up Main Street, cursing and muttering under her breath.
How quickly it had happened, that turning into her old self again, she thought. Maybe that’s what happens when you go home – the clock is rewound and, next thing, you find you’re the person you were all those years before. Maybe it had been wasted, all that work on herself – it had all come to nothing. And then she felt it, that familiar tightening, that sense that her chest was being pressed in a vice. She didn’t have her inhaler and just the thought of it made her panic more, her breath coming in short gasps. A sweat broke out on her forehead and she had to bend forward as a wave of nausea overcame her. But she wouldn’t go back to The Great Wall, she just wouldn’t – she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, even if it killed her. And so she limped home, wheezing, a short, tight cough tearing at her throat, and as she ransacked the bathroom for any sign of her inhaler, her face grey in the bathroom mirror, she thought, I should never have come back. Never.
October 1970
Michelle
I’m wobbling around on John-Joe’s knee, the two of us crammed into the back of the smelly old Volkswagen Beetle that Bob is driving at speed down the narrow country roads. John-Joe’s got his hand up my long suede skirt, his chilly fingers pushing under the elastic of my knickers and I have to slap it away. ‘For God’s sake, John-Joe,’ I say, irritated.
‘What’s the matter?’ he murmurs, nuzzling his head into my breasts, hidden under a voluminous cape, a black-and-white Navajo Indian affair which looks and smells like a dog blanket but which I wear because Bob makes them by hand and it would seem rude not to. ‘We are married after all,’ he says slyly.
I have to laugh at that and return his kiss, feeling the sandpaper stubble on his chin, because, in the end, our ‘wedding’ was a simple affair, attended by no one but ourselves. I finally accepted the ring he’d offered me on that winter’s afternoon, and I was his. And now, we are married, not in a church but in the only way that matters.
The air in the car is stale, and the plasticky smell of the seats, mixed with Bob’s sweat and the smell of Melody’s patchouli, is making me feel ill. They’re friends of John-Joe’s and they’re part of one of these new communes in Tipperary, where they live off the land. Bob’s nice – he doesn’t say much, but I know he’s a good man by the way his eyes crinkle at the corners and by the way he always includes me in the conversation. ‘What do you think, Michelle?’ It feels new, and nice, someone asking me what I think about things. John-Joe, for all his pretence, doesn’t much care – he’s too busy talking – and so I have to push my way into the conversation with him, to insist that he hear me. I need him to understand that he can’t push me around.
Melody is a complete twit – all she does is giggle or say the first thing that comes into her head – even if she is very pretty, with her huge brown eyes and that lovely dark hair of hers. How I wish mine wasn’t such a dry frizz! I put a hand through it now and it’s like sandpaper, all coarse and wiry; it’s the water here – it’s so hard and I’ve given up on heating it every time I want to wash my hair, because it takes so long to warm on the old range, so I sluice it in cold water, and voilà, a horrible Brillo Pad on my head.
I have a terrible cramp in my leg, but I can’t budge because there’s a big placard wedged in the seat beside me … ‘No to Nixon, No to Vietnam’. ‘Make Peace, Not War’, ‘US Foreign Policy Kills!’ We spent all night painting them in thick, black emulsion on the white board Bob brought down, then pinning them onto wooden batons – it took all night because we drank so much of the German wine Bob and Melody brought along with them.
I drank plenty and now my head aches, a low throb just above my eyes, but I’m glad I didn’t touch the hash Bob produced, a sly grin on his face. ‘Amazing what you can get in Morocco these days.’ He smiled. ‘It’ll blow your mind. Try it.’ Amazing indeed. If only we could afford to go to Morocco: for Bob, the kind of life we’re leading, close to the land, asking nothing of anyone but ourselves, is just a hobby, something to do to annoy his rich parents, but for John-Joe and me, well, we have to live it, even if sometimes it’s almost unbearably hard.
When we first moved to the cottage, John-Joe had great plans to fix the place up, but it’s hard when the chill seeps into your bones and when the ancient electricity meter has switched off again because you can’t find one of those new 50p pieces to shove into the slot. We didn’t have too many of them, 50p pieces. I only had a few pounds which I’d managed to scrape together by emptying my post office account, and the little wad of cash John-Joe brought with him, the proceeds of a summer’s labouring on a building site in Chapelizod, is getting smaller by the day. And it’s hard to grow your own food in winter, even if I spent most of the autumn clearing the front garden. It’s better now, though. I have a couple of rows of potatoes and a row of dark cabbages, as well as lettuces and peas. This summer, I even managed to grow tomatoes in the shelter of the gable wall. They’re a bit green and pebbly, but not bad for a beginner. When I look at my little garden, I feel a dart of confidence in myself; that I can do this, I can live the life I want. It’s hard, but it is possible.
And besides, it’s easy to moan and see the dark side of things here. The truth is, John-Joe and I are happy, strange as that might seem, in our little hovel, just the two of us. Sometimes, we feel as if we are the only two people left on earth, waking up every morning in the big double bed, our breath streaming out into the icy air of the bedroom, daring each other to be the first to get out of bed to go downstairs and get the range going. Whoever draws the short straw has to bring the other a cup of tea in bed, to which we’d both then retreat for the rest of the morning, holding each other to keep warm, laughing and making love, then talking about our hopes and dreams. ‘I can just see it,’ John-Joe will say, ‘we’ll tidy this place up and grow all our own food to sell in the village and then, with the money, we can invest in a bit of livestock. Nothing too elaborate, just a few hens and a couple of goats. Once we have eggs and goat’s milk and veg, sure we’re laughing. We’ll hardly need to buy anything.’
I’ll nod eagerly back. ‘And then we could fix the fruit trees out the back and grow our own plums and pears and make jam and bottle the rest to see us through the winter.’ Of course, the reality is much, much harder than that, but there are small victories that make it all seem worthwhile. And even if, sometimes, John-Joe seems to prefer spending the morning in bed to working outside, I don’t mind. I like being outside and I like having the time to myself, working alone, watching the silvery light through the bare branches of the trees, the scrawny little robin that comes to watch me work. That is the only good thing about the cottage: the soil is good, thick and rich, but not too clay-ey; Mummy would declare it just perfect for her roses.
It’s not easy to be true to yourself, to live by your own lights. It requires so m
uch more of you than just to trudge along the same way as everyone else. It’s exhausting. Sometimes I find myself wondering if it wouldn’t have been easier to have just gone along with Mummy’s wishes and married Ivan with his awful sleeveless pullovers and resigned myself to a life of deathly boredom. An easy life, a life of comfort and polite wealth. But then I remind myself that it’s a life that would suck the soul out of me.
‘Happy?’ he says now.
I bite my lip, nodding.
‘It’ll be OK,’ he insists. ‘We’ll be OK.’ And he nuzzles against me then, his hot tongue darting into my ear, making me squeal.
‘Oh, you’re disgusting!’
‘But you like it,’ he says slyly, and I have to agree that I do. Not the tongue – that is disgusting – but having John-Joe by my side. I feel braver like that, as if I can withstand anything. And if I feel homesick sometimes, I remind myself why I’m doing this, so that John-Joe and I can be together. And it makes it all seem worthwhile, even if the cost is losing Mummy and Pa for ever. Losing home and the boiled egg on the table every morning, the milky coffee. The sound of O’Brien pushing the roller over the lawn; the noise of the fat wood pigeons on the tree outside my window; lovely JB and throwing the ball for him on our walks by the river. Sometimes when I get melancholy like this, I wonder if Mummy was right. That maybe I’m more conventional than I think. ‘It’s a simple choice,’ Pa said to me on the day I left. ‘Him or us.’ A choice which I know he thought I’d make in his favour. But he was wrong, and even though my throat constricts with the pain of it, I know that I made the right decision. It was wrong of Pa to make me choose.
Maeve was the only one who asked me how I really felt. We were standing on the steps of the church in Bird Avenue, a big Catholic barn of a place, and she was getting married to lovely Alan, in a gorgeous broderie anglaise dress which she and her mum had toiled over for months, and she just glowed. ‘I’m so happy, Michelle. I didn’t know it was possible to be this happy.’ And then she frowned. ‘Are you happy, Michelle?’