[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  I had to bite back the obscenities that rose to my lips in response to the vultures’ insistence. I had enough respect for Leon’s memory not to drag myself down to their level, hard and all as it was to resist flying off the handle at them.

  Not everyone approached things in the same way, though. It might have taken a lot to make Liam speak, but this was one situation that could certainly be classed as a lot.

  “Have you no pride in who you are, that you won’t let a man go to his final resting place in peace? You should be all ashamed of yourselves. You’re disgusting, every last one of you!”

  Murmurs of “Yeah” and “Disgraceful” rippled along the crowd of mourners. I was tempted to join in, but I had a feeling that me opening my mouth for any reason at all would not be a good thing, and would only serve to encourage the baying mob. Liam’s words seemed to have the desired effect, however. The reporters remained silent as Leon’s coffin was carried into the hearse.

  Bridget and Liam inched their way reluctantly into Leon’s uncle’s car, which was parked directly behind the hearse. This was it – Leon’s final journey. Bridget and Liam were clearly not ready for it, and yet, they knew they had to do it. Nothing could ever possibly make them feel ready for this awful moment. And now, my presence had made everything feel a hundred times worse. I cursed myself, cursed the reporters and cursed God as I walked on to my own hired car. All in my head, of course – it would have been pretty pointless holding back at the reporters and then turning into a Tourette’s sufferer at this juncture.

  “Where are you going, Andie? Come with us,” Bridget said to my back.

  I frowned. “I can’t – I – surely you don’t want me around, not after what’s just happened?”

  “Will you get in and don’t be daft, like a good girl,” Liam said.

  As I got in, Iceberg Bridget held out her arms and pulled me to her. I bit my tongue so hard to stop myself from crying that my top teeth were practically grinding off the bottom ones somewhere in the centre of my tongue. It wouldn’t be fair to fall apart on Bridget now, not when she was trying so hard to keep up the hard-woman act.

  “I just can’t believe they’d sink so low as to do that at a funeral,” I said.

  “I can. Human life means nothing to those people. Leon’s not a person to them – he’s just a story. As are you, as I’m sure you’re starting to realise.” She stroked my hair to take the sting out of her words. “Stick with us. We’ll protect you from them.”

  Liam reached over and squeezed my hand. I couldn’t believe how charitable they were both being to me. These were good, good people.

  I was starting to realise a lot of things other than how I was just a story. The truth was, I was being hung by my own petard. I was employed by a paper that did exactly the same thing on a day-by-day basis. The name of the paper said it all, really. Isolde was vicious, albeit a little bit less so since her bout of compassion, but her fundamentals weren’t going to change. The paper was vicious. Would I become vicariously vicious if I stayed working there? Was I vicariously vicious already? Isolde would wear me down sooner or later. She’d said she wanted me to start working on some more hard-hitting stuff. It’d start out with articles that named and shamed the local people who’d been caught without a TV licence in the previous year, but before I knew it I’d be invading some poor family’s most private moment, just like what was happening right now. And, while I’d always had a problem with Isolde’s ferociousness, what had I actually done about it? I’d given up confronting her, tamed by the failure of my previous attempts to wear her down.

  These thoughts whirled around in my head as the funeral procession came to a halt outside the graveyard. I felt Bridget’s entire body tremble against mine as Leon’s uncle parked the car and turned off the engine. I wanted to run a million miles away from here, but there was nowhere to go, no option other than seeing the funeral through.

  I took up my stance behind Bridget and Liam again before we trudged into the graveyard. I didn’t once look behind to see if the reporters were lurking. I didn’t need to – I knew they were – but I couldn’t bear to see them.

  When I think back on the burial now, I can barely recall a thing about it. I was too lost in thoughts of that night in Vegas, sifting through a lifetime of what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. I think it was some sort of twisted survival mechanism that my brain switched on to get me through the burial – while these thoughts made no sense when I knew that Colm was the one I was in love with, they were easier to manage than to focus on the reality of putting Leon in the ground forever. There was no logic to my thought process except to move from one second to the next, and to do whatever it took to make the agony of the burial pass. I know there was a lot of wailing done by Leon’s extended family, but I couldn’t fully hear the sound in my head. I know that Bridget and Liam remained completely immobile throughout the ceremony, but that Bridget fainted as soon as the ceremony ended. I know that I helped Liam to pick Bridget up, and that we carried her back to Leon’s uncle’s car, but I can only remember snippets of it. But I also know that every second of that ceremony is etched onto my brain forever, and right now I’m just blocking it out. One day, I’ll unlock it, and make myself relive every horrible moment in an attempt to get over it. But that day was not the day to do it.

  Of course, the blasted photographers captured the moment of Bridget’s faint, and although Leon’s family formed a protective barrier around her as Liam and I carried her back to the car, pictures of us still ended up in the papers the next day. I never felt such intense anger in my life as I did when I saw a zoom of Bridget’s crumpled face on the cover of a newspaper. Of course, I knew some of my anger was directed at myself for being the catalyst of these innocent people’s involvement in a world that had nothing to do with them. But it was too late to change that now.

  Leon’s uncle drove us back to Leon’s home, while one of the FFI brought my car back. Liam and I helped Bridget into the house. By this stage, Bridget had adopted her own coping mechanism of retreating inside herself to block out what was happening. She wouldn’t speak, she wouldn’t look at us when we were talking – it was as if her soul had left her body. Her stillness was far more terrifying to see than any hysterics could ever have been.

  Bridget and Liam had invited the mourners back to the house for some food and tea after the burial, and cars began to pack up the driveway. I was glad of an opportunity to make myself useful.

  “Bridget, I’m going to get started on the sandwiches and tea now. You stay there. It’s all under control.”

  “Good girl, good girl,” Liam answered for Bridget and nodded his approval.

  “Make the tay nice and strong now, none of that watery shite,” one of the cousins piped up. “That lot will go to town on you if you don’t make a good cup of tay.”

  “In other words, it’s you that wants strong tay,” a cousin of the cousin said.

  “You know and I know that strong tay would be good right about now.”

  “Tay’s on the way,” I said, running to the kitchen to escape the madness. Displacement was a wonderful thing in times of crisis. The anticipation of tay, the talking about tay and the drinking of tay could always be relied upon to see the Irish through the worst of times.

  At least half of the mourners at the church had made their way back to the house. Thankfully, but not surprisingly, there wasn’t a photographer amongst them. They might as well have been there, though, with all the talking that was done about them. My mortification increased with every new mention of “Disgraceful”, “Parasites”, and my own personal favourite on the morto scale: “shaming the memory of a good man.” After a while – and it wasn’t a long while, I’m not that slow – I realised that although Bridget and Liam weren’t holding what happened against me, there were plenty of other people who were – and, not only that, but they were enjoying doing so. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t really fault them for it.

  As soon as I had buttered my last san
dwich and filled every cup, bowl, saucepan and flower-pot in the house with tay, I sought out Bridget and Liam to say my goodbyes. I didn’t have to do much seeking – Bridget was still on the couch, exactly where Liam had put her, and Liam was still hovering over her, exactly as he’d been doing an hour before.

  “Liam, I’m going to drive back to Vegas now, and leave you all in peace.”

  “Ah, no. Sure stay around here for a while . . . you don’t want to be on your own at a time like this . . .”

  “No, honestly. It’s time I went. But thank you.”

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .” I could see relief pass over his face. Although I knew he wasn’t holding any grudges over what had happened, my presence, and the whispers it was producing, wasn’t making things any easier.

  I twined my fingers around Bridget’s. She continued to stare off into space.

  “I’m leaving now, Bridget. Thank you for finding me, and for bringing me to Leon.”

  As soon as I mentioned Leon’s name, Bridget came alive again. Her hands were the first bit of her to react – she squeezed my fingers so tight that I had to stop myself from crying out in a mixture of surprise and pain – then she turned her face to mine and smiled.

  “Thank you, Andie, for making Leon happy. Goodbye.”

  Then she dropped my hand and resumed her space-staring, thinking, no doubt, about her boy.

  I shook Liam’s hand, thanked him, and left as discreetly as possible. It was entirely probable that FFI would be asking me about the next batch of tay if they spotted me. Besides, I really didn’t want to hear the rasp of a “Good riddance” echoing in my wake.

  The relief that flooded through me as I got into my rented car and drove out of the driveway was like nothing I had ever experienced before. It only lasted a few minutes, though. Without the distraction of Bridget and sandwiches and tay, the reality of everything that had happened crashed on top of me, and I had to pull into the hard shoulder before a crash of another kind happened. Leon’s disdain for me and my lack of action was justified. He’d given me good advice that I hadn’t acted on. And then, to make a bad day worse, Colm somehow managed to find his way inside my head. Colm had met me halfway and had been honest with me, and yet I’d just continued hiding myself. Before long, I was so guilt-ridden about the whole thing that I had to turn the key in the ignition and drive again to focus my thoughts on something else.

  One thing was for sure – I had a long journey ahead of me, and it wasn’t just the drive to Vegas that I was talking about.

  The papers the next day were every bit as bad as I thought they would be. Pictures of Bridget, Liam and me were plastered all over every publication I picked up. I knew I shouldn’t even look at them, but it was impossible not to. It would have cost me a month’s wages to buy every newspaper that I was in, so I hunched down in a corner of a bookstore with a handful of them and sifted my way through the articles. They were painful to read, but it was better to get it over and done with . . . even if I was reading the same old thing over and over again. A few papers in, though, something new caught my eye.

  Directly after the burial, a scuffle took place between a photographer from the Mail and an as yet unidentified man, believed to be Irish. The photographer, Bill Bayside, was allegedly hit by the Irishman when Bayside tried to take pictures of Andie Appleton leaving the church with Bridget and Liam O’Reilly, Leon’s parents. Both men are currently being questioned in relation to the incident.

  Oh, God . . . it had to have been someone from the FFI . . . I tried to sweep the cobwebs off my brain to try to remember if everyone from the contingent from Ireland had come directly back to the house after the funeral, but it was impossible to say with that lot – they were no sooner in the front door than they were out the back one, smoking fags and what have you. Still, it was nice to think that someone had tried to defend my honour, especially when they hadn’t seemed to be too happy with me back at Bridget and Liam’s house. I just hoped whoever it was wouldn’t get into too much trouble for it.

  I finished my review of the papers and left the bookstore. I was thrilled to get back to the refuge of the MGM. The previous day I had thought about going straight to the airport after Leon’s funeral and just getting the hell out of that city, especially now that I had absolutely no reason left to stay, but I was too mentally and physically exhausted to face the prospect of a flight home until I’d recovered a bit. Oh, and there was the other small issue of needing to see if Colm was still around Vegas . . .

  Colm still hadn’t made any contact. I was desperate to do something constructive, so when I got back to the hotel, I rang several airlines to see if a Colm Cannon had taken flights home with them over the last few days. I was told very little, and put down the phone none the wiser as to his whereabouts.

  I thought about ringing Éire TV to ask to speak to Martin until I remembered the Martin/Maud debacle, so that bright idea was going nowhere.

  I went to my laptop and logged into my email, hoping that there’d be a message sitting there waiting for me from Colm, and knowing there probably wouldn’t. Sure enough, none of the new emails that awaited me were from him.

  I decided to work my way through the rest of my emails to keep me occupied. And, just as I was replying to the first of the new ones, a box popped up at the bottom right of the screen notifying me that there was a new message in the LookingForLeon mailbox. I clicked on the link to direct me to the new email. What I saw who it was from I nearly had a heart attack. It couldn’t be . . . this just wasn’t possible . . .

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  I rolled my chair back from the table, the laptop and most of all, the offending email. Someone was playing a sick joke on me – the sickest joke imaginable. Why would anybody be so cruel as to do this?

  I was afraid to open it. If someone was willing to do something like this, then God only knew what the message would contain. And yet, how could I not open it? It felt like I was going through the whole GoHomeAndie saga again. But, just like those emails, not opening this one was not an option.

  I took a deep, scratchy breath, and sat back at the desk. I opened it quickly before I lost my nerve.

  From: Leon.OReilly@hotmail.com

  To: LookingforLeon@hotmail.com

  Subject: Things we need to talk about . . .

  Dear Andie,

  One of the things we never got around to talking about was how much of a computer geek I am. My geek-rating stood to my advantage when I was thinking about the best way to explain everything to you after I’d gone off to this better place everyone talks about (hopefully, somewhere that has a room full of PCs for dead computer geeks). You see, there’s a lot I need to tell you, but I need to make sure I’m dead when you read this. Otherwise, I’ll just present you with the dilemma of whether or not you should contact me again, and I really think you have enough on your plate to sort out at the moment. Or maybe you have it all sorted out by now, who knows. I knew I needed to tell you so much stuff, but couldn’t do it while I was alive – and the whole thing of being impossible to be on the computer writing emails after you’re dead was a bit of an issue for me, so I’ve set my email to send this mail on a date that I’m projected to definitely be dead by, according to my trusty doctors. Cool, eh? Of course, you don’t need to be a computer geek to know about that – anyone who’s ever used an email application knows it, but I was rather proud of my idea and wanted to show off a little bit. Actually, now I feel like a bit of a fool, as it really isn’t all that clever when you see it written down – but it took ages to type all that, so I’m not going to delete it all now.

  You may, at this stage, be slightly curious as to what exactly I need to talk to you about. Only natural – I’d be the same. I’m tempted to draw this out just to tease you, but with the way my health is right now, I could well kick the bucket in the middle of writing this email, so I really should get my skids on. Besides, no offence, but writing an email isn’t exactly how I’ve planned to go, even if it is a
n email to you. I’m hoping for a rather picturesque death in my wheelchair watching the wind blowing through the cherry-blossom trees while I watch rabbits jumping around the garden (rather like Molly’s death in Home And Away – except she had children frolicking around the garden instead of rabbits) until my internal screen fades to black (just like Molly’s screen did).

  So . . . here’s the thing. I was kinda, just a little bit, a smidgen, besotted with you. Just a tad totally head over heels. Phew, it’s a relief to finally be able to say that to you, after all of these weeks of holding myself back from contacting you and telling you this. And as for when you came to visit . . . well, you might not have gathered that from the way I treated you that day, but I can explain. I’ll probably lose every bit of dignity I have in the process, but thankfully, I’m dead now, so I won’t have to worry about it. (It has its advantages.)

  When I saw you walking into my hall, my first instinct was to run away as fast as I could so that you wouldn’t see me. I couldn’t run, of course – I couldn’t even frigging-well wheel myself away. And that should tell you everything you need to know. Would anyone really want the woman of their dreams to see them as diminished as I was on that day? I wasn’t the guy you fell for in Vegas. It’s amazing the effect a few weeks can have on a body that’s determined to let you down – even I am shocked by how fast this thing has eaten me alive, so I can only imagine the impact it had on you, seeing me so shrunken and dependent in that wheelchair. All I needed was the colostomy bag for the full effect. Can you imagine how demoralising, how frigging soul-destroying, that was? Not to mention mortifying. I was afraid to look into your eyes in case I saw disappointment, disgust, disdain. It was bad enough to lose you first time around and this time I knew I’d lose you again as soon as you clapped eyes on me. There was only one way to make it easier on both of us, and that was to do nothing.