Collected Stories

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘I hate their guts, every last one of them.’

  ‘Do you fancy doing this one?’ asked Agnes.

  ‘No. You know I’m no good at it.’

  ‘Chrissake, Sadie, you can breathe. I never get a rest. Why’s it always me?’

  ‘Because I told you. You are the creative one. I just look after the books. The business end. Would you know how to go about putting an ad in? Or wording it properly? Or getting a box number? You stick to the bit you’re good at. You’re really great, you know. I don’t know how you think the half of them up.’

  Agnes smiled. She wiggled her stubby toes on the pouffe. She said,

  ‘Do you know what I’d like? With the money.’

  ‘What? Remember that we’re still paying off that carpet in the bedroom – and the suite. Don’t forget the phone bills either.’

  ‘A jewelled cigarette holder. Like the one Audrey Hepburn had in that picture – what was it called?’

  ‘The Nun’s Story?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’

  ‘Yes, one like that. I could use it on the phone. It’d make me feel good.’

  As Agnes dialled another number Sadie said,

  ‘You’re mad in the skull.’

  ‘We can afford it. Whisht now.’

  When the phone was answered at the other end she said,

  ‘Hello, Samantha here,’ and began to breathe loudly into the receiver. She quickened her pace gradually until she was panting, then said,

  ‘He’s hung up. Must have been expecting me. We should get a pair of bellows for fellas like him. Save my puff.’

  ‘I’ll go up and turn the blanket on, then we’ll have a cup of tea,’ said Sadie. Agnes turned another letter towards herself and dialled a number.

  Upstairs Sadie looked round the bedroom with admiration. She still hadn’t got used to it. The plush almost ankle-deepness of the mushroom-coloured carpet and the brown flock wallpaper, the brown duvet with the matching brown sheets. The curtains were of heavy velvet and were the most luxurious stuff she had ever touched. She switched on the blanket and while on her hands and knees she allowed her fingers to sink into the pile of the carpet. All her life she had wanted a bedroom like this. Some of the places she had lain down, she wouldn’t have kept chickens in. She heard Agnes’s voice coming blurred from downstairs. She owed a lot to her. Everything, in fact. From the first time they met, the night they were both arrested and ended up in the back of the same paddy-wagon, she had thought there was something awful good about her, something awful kind. She had been so good-looking in her day too, tall and stately and well-built. They had stayed together after that night – all through the hard times. As Agnes said, once you quit the streets it didn’t qualify you for much afterwards. Until lately, when she had shown this amazing talent for talking on the phone. It had all started one night when a man got the wrong number and Agnes had chatted him up until he was doing his nut at the other end. They had both crouched over the phone wheezing and laughing their heads off at the puffs and pants of him. Then it was Sadie’s idea to put the whole thing on a commercial basis and form the Phonefun company. She dug her fingers into the carpet and brushed her cheek against the crisp sheet.

  ‘Agnes,’ she said and went downstairs to make the tea.

  She stood waiting for the kettle to boil, then transferred the tea-bag from one cup of boiling water to the other. Agnes laughed loudly at something in the living room. Sadie heard her say,

  ‘But if I put the phone there you’ll not hear me.’

  She put some custard creams on a plate and brought the tea in.

  ‘Here you are, love,’ she said, setting the plate beside the egg-timer. ‘He’s over his time.’ Agnes covered the mouth-piece and said,

  ‘I forgot to start it.’ Then back to the phone. ‘I can get some rubber ones if you want me to . . . But you’ll have to pay for them. Will you send the money through? . . . Gooood boy. Now I really must go . . . Yes, I’m listening.’ She made a face, half laughing, half in disgust, to Sadie. ‘Well done, love . . . Bye-eee, sweetheart.’ She puckered her mouth and did a kiss noise into the mouthpiece, then put the phone down.

  ‘Have your tea now, Agnes, you can do the others later.’

  ‘There’s only two more I can do tonight. The rest have special dates.’

  ‘You can do those. Then we’ll go to bed. Eh?’

  ‘O.K.,’ said Agnes. ‘Ahm plumb tuckered out.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Plumb tuckered out. It’s what my Yankee Doodle Dandy used to say afterwards.’

  ‘What started you on him tonight?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just remembered, that’s all. He used to bring me nylons and put them on for me.’

  She fiddled with the egg-timer and allowed the pink sand to run through it. She raised her legs off the pouffe and turned her feet outwards, looking at them.

  ‘I don’t like tights,’ she said, ‘I read somewhere they’re unhygienic.’

  ‘Do you want to hear the news before we go up? Just in case?’

  ‘Just in case what?’

  ‘They could be rioting all over the city and we wouldn’t know a thing.’

  ‘You’re better not to know, even if they are. That tea’s cold.’

  ‘That’s because you didn’t drink it. You talk far too much.’

  Agnes drank her tea and snapped a custard cream in half with her front teeth.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll bother with these next two.’

  ‘That’s the way you lose customers. If you phone them once they’ll come back for more – and for a longer time. Give them a short time. Keep them interested.’ She lifted the crumbed plate and the cups and took them out to the kitchen. Agnes lit another cigarette and sat staring vacantly at the egg-timer. She said without raising her eyes,

  ‘Make someone happy with a phone call.’

  ‘I’m away on up,’ said Sadie. ‘I’ll keep a place warm for you.’

  Sadie was in bed when Agnes came up.

  ‘Take your rollers out,’ she said.

  Agnes undressed, grunting and tugging hard at her roll-on. When she got it off she gave a long sigh and rubbed the puckered flesh that had just been released.

  ‘That’s like taking three Valium, to get out of that,’ she said. She sat down on the side of the bed and began taking her rollers out, clinking the hairpins into a saucer on the dressing table. Sadie spoke from the bed,

  ‘Were you really in love with that Yank?’

  ‘Yes, as near as possible.’

  Agnes shook her hair loose and rolled back into bed. She turned out the light and Sadie notched into her back. She began to stroke Agnes’s soft upper arm, then moved to her haunch.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache, love,’ said Agnes.

  Sadie turned to the wall and Agnes felt her harsh skin touch her own.

  ‘My God, Sadie,’ she said, ‘you’ve got heels on you like pumice stones.’

  THE DAILY WOMAN

  SHE WOKE LIKE a coiled spring, her head pressed on to the mattress, the knot of muscle at the side of her jaw taut, holding her teeth together. The texture of her cheeks felt tight and shiny from the tears she had cried as she had determined herself to sleep the night before. She lay for a moment trying to sense whether he was behind her or not, but knowing he wasn’t. The baby was still asleep. She could tell by the slight squeaking movement of the pram springs from the foot of the bed whether it was asleep or not. The house was silent. She was a good baby. When she woke in the mornings she kicked her legs for hours. Only once in a while she cried.

  Liz got up and went to the bathroom. In the mirror she saw where he had snapped the shoulder strap of her slip. It looked like a cheap off-the-shoulder evening dress. She examined her face, touching it with her fingertips. It had not bruised. He must be losing his touch. Her mouth still tasted of blood and she tested the looseness of her teeth with her index finger and thumb.

  When
she heard Paul thumping the sides of his cot she quickly finished her washing and went in to him. She tested if he was dry.

  ‘Good for you,’ she said. He was coming three and a half but she couldn’t trust him a single night without a nappy. She gave him his handful of Ricicles on the pillow and he lay down beside them with a smile, looking at them, picking them up with concentration and eating them one by one like sweets. She went back to the kitchen and began heating the baby’s bottle. The cold of the lino made her walk on tip-toe and she stood on the small mat, holding her bare elbows and shivering while the water came to the boil. She hated waiting – especially for a short time. Waiting a long time, you could be lazy or do something if you felt like it. She saw last night’s dishes congealed in the sink, the fag-ends, but had no time or desire to do anything about it. In short waits she was aware of the rubbish of her life.

  After the milk heated and while the bottle was cooling in a pot of cold water, she looked into the front room. Light came through the gap in the curtains. Eamonn lay on his back on the sofa, his shoes kicked off, breathing heavily through his slack open mouth. When she came back after feeding and changing the baby, he was still in the same position. She whacked the curtains open loudly. His eyes cringed and wavered and he turned his face into the sofa. He closed and opened his mouth and from where she stood she could hear the tacky dryness of it.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said.

  He lay there as she tidied around him. On the cream tiled hearth a complete cigarette had become a worm of white ash on brown sweat.

  In the kitchen she began to wash up and make a cup of tea. They had run out of bread except for a heel of pan. She opened a packet of biscuits.

  ‘Liz,’ Eamonn called her. ‘Liz.’

  But she didn’t feel like answering. She went and picked Paul out of his cot and let him run into the front room to annoy his Daddy. When she was sitting at her tea Eamonn came in, his shirt-tail out, and drank several cups of water. He looked wretched.

  ‘There’s a sliding brick in my head,’ he said. ‘Every time I move it wallops.’

  Still she said nothing. He shuffled towards her and she looked out of the window at the corrugated-iron coal-house and the other pre-fabs stretching up the hill.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said and turned her face with the back of his hand. ‘You’re all right.’

  ‘No thanks to you,’ she said. The ridiculous thing was that she felt sorry for him. How could anyone do that to her? How could anyone knock her to the floor and kick her, then take off his shoes and fall asleep? Why did she feel pity for him and not for herself? He sat down on a stool and held on to his head.

  ‘I suppose you don’t remember anything,’ she said.

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘I’ll not stand much more of it, Eamonn.’

  ‘Don’t talk shit.’ He wasn’t angry. It was just his way. Sober she could handle him. The next day he never apologised – not once, and she had learned not to expect it. Last night he had got it into his head that the baby wasn’t his. This was new and she had been frightened that in drink he might do something to it, so she had let him work out his anger on her.

  Only she knew it was a possibility. Those nights had been long, sitting on her own minding her child, bored to tears with television, so that when Barney started to call – she had known him since her days in primary school – it had been a gradual and easy fall. He worked in a garage and was a folk singer of sorts. He made her feel relaxed in his company and she laughed, which was unusual for her. Even while they were at it behind the snibbed door of their small bathroom he could make her laugh – his head almost touching one wall while he got movement on her by levering his sock soles off the other.

  Then he just stopped calling, saying that he was getting more and more engagements for his folk group. But that was nearly two years ago and she was disturbed that she should start being hit for it now. She wondered who had put it into his mind. Was it a rumour in that Provos club where he spent the most of his time drinking? God knows what else he got up to there. Once he had brought home an armful of something wrapped in sacking and hid it in the roof-space. When she pestered him as to what it was he refused to tell her.

  ‘It’s only for a couple of nights,’ was all he would say. Those two days she fretted herself sick waiting for an Army-pig to pull up at the door.

  Liz threw her tea down the sink.

  ‘I suppose there’s no money left,’ she said, looking out the window. He made a kind of snort laugh. ‘What am I going to use for the messages?’

  ‘Henderson pays you today, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Jesus, you drink your dole money and I work to pay the messages. That’s lovely. Smashin’.’

  Paul had wandered in from the other room, shredding the cork tip of a cigarette butt, and Eamonn began to talk to him, ignoring her.

  ‘Mucky pup,’ he said taking it from between the child’s fingers and roughly brushing them clean with his own hand.

  ‘That’s right, just throw it on the floor at your arse. I’m here to clean it up,’ shouted Liz. She began thumpingly to wash the dishes. Eamonn went to the bathroom.

  The hill to Ardview House was so steep that the pram handle pressed against the chest muscles just beneath her small breasts. Liz angled herself, pushing with her chest rather than her arms. It was a hot autumn day and the lack of wind made her feel breathless. Half way up she stopped and put the brake on with her foot.

  ‘Paul,’ she said, panting, ‘get off, son, before I have a coronary.’

  The child girned that he didn’t want to but she was firm with him, lifting him under the armpits and setting him on the ground.

  ‘You can hold on to the handle.’

  In the pram, sheltered by its black hood, the baby was a pink knitted bonnet, its face almost obscured by a bobbing dummy. She continued up the hill.

  She seemed to be doing this journey all the time, day in day out, up and down this hill. She knew where the puddles were in the worn tarmac of the footpath and could avoid them even though she was unsighted by the pram. A police car bounced over the crest of the hill, its lights flashing and its siren screaming. It passed her with a whumph of speed and gradually faded into the distance, spreading ripples of nervousness as far as the ear could hear.

  When she turned off the road into the gravelled driveway she noticed that there was jam or marmalade on the black pram-hood. She wiped it with a tissue, but the smear still glistened. She wet her finger and rubbed it, but only succeeded in making her fingers tacky. The pram was impossible to push on the gravel and she pulled it the rest of the way to the house. Paul was running ahead, hurrying to get to the playroom. The Henderson children had left a legacy of broken but expensive toys and usually Paul disappeared and gave her little trouble until she had her work finished.

  She wondered if Mr Henderson would be in. She was nervous of him, not just because he was her boss, but because of the way he looked at her. Of late he seemed to wait around in the mornings until she came. And then there was the money business.

  Henderson was a big-wig who had made his money in paints, and on rare occasions when there were more than six guests his wife would invite Liz to dress up a bit and come and help serve dinner. Although a Unionist through and through, Henderson liked to be able to say that he employed Catholics.

  ‘It’s the only way forward. We must begin to build bridges. Isn’t that right, Mrs O’Prey?’ he’d say over his shoulder as she cleared the soup plates.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Liz.

  In his house the other guests nodded.

  ‘I make no secret of it. It’s my ambition to become Lord Mayor of this town. Get others to put into practice what I preach.’

  As she washed the dishes in her best dress she heard them laugh and guffaw in the other room.

  The baby was sleeping, so Liz left her at the front door in the warm sunlight and went down to the pantry where she kept her cleaning things. She heard a door close upstairs and a momen
t later Mr Henderson came into the kitchen. He looked as if he had just had a shower and his hair, which was normally bushy, lay slick and black against the skin of his head. He wore a sage-green towelling dressing-gown knotted at the waist. His legs were pallid and hairy and he wore a pair of backless clog slippers. Standing with his back to her his heels were raw red.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs O’Prey.’

  She nodded at his back, Vim in one hand, J-cloths in the other, and excused herself. But he put himself between her and the door.

  ‘That’s a pleasant morning,’ he said. ‘Hot, even.’

  She agreed. He bent to the refrigerator, blocking her way. He poured himself a glass of orange juice and leaned his back against the breakfast bar. He was tall and thin, in the region of fifty, but she found it hard to tell age. He wasn’t ugly but she wouldn’t have called him good-looking. His face had the grey colour of someone not long awake and his eyes behind dark-rimmed spectacles had the same look.

  ‘How are things?’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘Have you thought about my proposition?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Did you think about my offer?’

  ‘No,’ she said and edged past him to the door to go upstairs. She began by cleaning the bathroom, hoping that Mr Henderson would leave for work before she would make the beds. She put his denture powder back in the cabinet and returned his toothbrush to the rack. She hosed round the shower with the sprinkler and with finger and thumb lifted a small scribbled clot of his black hairs which refused to go down the rose grating and dropped them into the toilet bowl. The noise of the flush must have camouflaged his footsteps on the stairs because Liz, squatting to clean some talc which had spilled down the outside of the bath, did not notice him standing in the doorway until he spoke.

  ‘How remarkably thin you keep,’ he said. She did not look round but was aware of a large gap between her jumper at the back and her jeans tight on her hips.

  ‘It’s hard work that does it.’ She tried to tug her jumper down. He probably saw right into her pants. Let him. She turned round, her elbow resting on the lavatory seat. ‘And not eating too much.’