Collected Stories

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Oh, Mrs Henderson asked me to pay you this week.’ He slippered off to his bedroom and came back a moment later with a wallet. He sat on the edge of the bath. If Liz was to sit the only place was the lavatory, so she stood while he drew clean notes from the wallet.

  ‘She was in a rush this morning going out. How much is it?’

  Liz told him and he counted out the twelve pounds. He set the money on the Vanitory unit, then went on taking out notes. Blue ones, slightly hinged from the bend of the wallet. Five – ten – fifteen she saw him mouth. He stopped at seventy-five. A strand of his damp hair detached itself from the rest and hung like a black sickle in his eye. He looked at her.

  ‘I can afford it,’ he said. ‘It’s yours if you want it.’

  She could see herself reflected from neck to knees in a rectangular mirror that ran the length of the bath. Would he never give up? This was a rise of twenty-five from the last time. She remembered once up an entry doing a pee standing up for thruppence and the boys had whooped and jeered as she splashed her good shoes and had run off and never paid her. Afterwards she had cried.

  ‘I can afford better but I want you,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave it on the desk in my room.’ His voice was hoarse and slightly trembling because she had not said no. He moved towards his room, saying over his shoulder, ‘I’m not going in to the office this morning.’

  Liz heard the one-stair-at-a-time stomp of Paul and went to the door to meet him.

  ‘Muh,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, love.’ She could feel the shake in her knees as she carried him down the stairs.

  She began to scrape and put the accumulated dishes into the dishwasher. The bin yawned with bad breath when Paul pushed the foot-pedal with his hand so she emptied it and cleaned it with bleach. Her pelvis touched the stainless steel of the sink and she winced. She must have bruised. Eamonn would probably have gone back to bed now that he had it all to himself. He would get up about mid-day and go to either the pub or the bookies. Probably both. They were next door, the one feeding off the other. She had noticed a horseshoe of wear in the pavement from one door to the other. At night he would go to the Provos club. The drink was cheaper there because most of it was hi-jacked. He would not be home until midnight at the earliest and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t have another boxing match. She breathed out and heard it as a shuddering sigh.

  ‘Muh,’ Paul said.

  ‘Yes, love, whatever you say.’

  What could she do with that kind of money? Eamonn would know immediately – he could smell pound notes – and want to know how she got it. If she got a new rig-out it would be the same. He would kill her. Before or after she had spent the money didn’t matter. Her mother had always harped on that Liz had married beneath her.

  She wiped down the white Formica and began to load the washing machine from the laundry basket. Or toys or kids. She could think of no way of spending where questions wouldn’t be asked. At eleven she made a coffee. She opened a window and smoked a cigarette, sharpening its ash on a flowered saucer.

  ‘Buh?’ Paul asked, reaching her a pot lid.

  ‘Thanks, son.’ She took it off him and set it on the table.

  When Liz reached three-quarters’ way down her cigarette she stubbed it out with determination, bending it almost double. She got up and brought Paul with a biscuit and milk in his baby cup into the playroom.

  ‘There’s a good boy,’ she said. ‘Mammy will be cross if you come out.’

  She had walloped him round the legs before for keeping her back with her work, so he knew what was in store for him if he wandered. She went outside and checked the baby in the pram. She was still asleep, so she closed the front door quietly and climbed the stairs.

  In his room Mr Henderson sat at a small desk strewn with papers. At her knock he raised his glasses to his hairline and turned.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘All right,’ she said. Her voice caught in her throat as if she had been crying for a long time. ‘Just so long as you don’t kiss me.’

  ‘That will not be necessary.’ His face broke into a frightened smile of disbelief. He was still in his dressing-gown, a furry thigh sticking out. He came to her, his arm extended – fatherly almost.

  ‘You’re sure? I would get very angry if you were to change your mind once we had started.’

  She nodded. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want you to lie down.’ That was a favourite song of Barney’s – ‘Croppies Lie Down’ – but now in her tension she couldn’t remember the words.

  ‘In fact I want you to do nothing. That’s the way I like it.’

  ‘Could I have the money?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He was impatient now and fumbled with the wallet, then saw the money on the desk. The roll of notes made a comfortable bulge in the hip pocket of her jeans. He locked the door as she lay on the bed. It was like being asked to lie on a doctor’s couch. Mr Henderson knelt and patted and prodded her to his liking. No sooner was she settled than he said,

  ‘Perhaps you’d better take your clothes off.’

  She had to get up again. There was a hole in her pants stretched to an egg shape just below her navel. She turned her back on him then, when undressed, lay down, her body all knuckles.

  His eyes widened and went heavy. He couldn’t decide whether to take off his glasses or leave them on. He began to talk baby-talk, to speak to her as if she wasn’t there. He told her how he had ached after her slim undernourished body for months, how he had watched her from between the banisters, how he loved to see her on her hands and knees and the triangle of light that he could always see between her thighs when she wore her jeans. He was fascinated by her bruises and kissed each one of them lightly. Spoke to her bruises. She was sweating a nervous sweat from her armpits. Praised her thinness, her each rib, the tent bones of her hips and her tuft of hair between. He smelt all over her as she had seen dogs do, but by now she had closed her eyes and could only feel the touch of his breath, his nosings. It went on for ages. Her fists were clenched. She tried to remember her shopping list. A pan loaf, maybe some small bread – sodas. Sugar – she needed sugar and potatoes and tea-bags and mince and cornflakes. Mr Henderson climbed on to the bed, having opened her legs, but succeeded only in delivering himself somewhere in the coverlet with a groan. She looked down at him. His hair was still damp and moistening her belly. His face was hidden from her. The back of his neck was red and criss-crossed with wrinkles. Beneath the window she could hear her baby crying and farther away the sound of a blackbird.

  When he got his breath back he went to the bathroom. Liz dressed in a hurry and went downstairs, trying to master the shudders that went through her like nausea. She inserted the dummy in the baby’s mouth, grabbed Paul from the playroom and fled the house, drawing the pram after her against the gravel.

  The kiosk outside the Co-op smelt of piss, would have smelt worse if it had not been for the ventilation of the broken panes. A taxi arrived within minutes and she coaxed the driver to collapse the pram and put it in the boot.

  ‘In the name of God, Missus, how does this thing operate?’

  In a traffic jam – there must have been a bomb scare somewhere – she fed the baby milk from a cold bottle.

  Her mother lived at the other side of town and was surprised to see her drawing up in such style. Liz told the driver to wait and hurried her mother into accepting the story that a friend’s husband had run off with another woman and the girl was in a terrible state and she, Liz, was going to spend the night with her, and Mammy would you mind the kids? Her mother was old but not yet helpless and had raised six of her own. At twenty-two Liz was the last and felt she could call on her for special favours. She gave her a fiver to get herself some wee thing. A tenner, she thought, would have brought questions in its wake.

  ‘You’re a pet,’ she called to her, rushing from the door.

  Coming from Marks and Spencer’s,
she walked past the Methodist Church in Donegal Place. An old man was changing the black notice-board which kept up with the death toll of the Troubles. She hesitated and watched him. He had removed a 5 from 1875 and was fumbling and clacking with the wooden squares which slotted in like a hymn board. He was exasperatingly slow and she walked on but could not resist looking back over her shoulder.

  Going through security, the woman stirred her jeans and jumper tentatively at the bottom of her carrier bag. The hotel lobby was crowded with newsmen with bandoliers of cameras, talking in groups. She asked the price of bed and breakfast and found that she had more than enough. Would she be having dinner? Liz leaned forward to the clerk.

  ‘How much?’

  The clerk smiled and said anything from five to fifty pounds. Liz thought a moment and said yes. She wanted to pay there and then but the clerk insisted that she could settle her bill in the morning.

  ‘Elizabeth O’Prey’ she signed the register card, taking great care to make it neat. At school she had never been much good but everybody praised her handwriting; teachers said she had a gift for it. She had been Elizabeth Wilson and one of the few advantages of her marriage, she thought, had been the opportunity of a flourishing Y at the end of O’Prey. As she had signed for her family allowance and sickness benefit she had perfected it.

  She tried not to stare at the magnificence of the place, the plush maroon carpet, the glittering lights, the immaculately uniformed staff. She felt nervous about doing or saying the wrong thing. She didn’t have a posh accent like those around her and rather than put it on she said as few words as possible. She was conscious of people looking at her and was glad that she had changed in the shop. As the desk clerk answered the phone she saw herself in a mirrored alcove, new shoes, hair done, new peach-coloured summer dress, and was happily surprised. For a second she didn’t look like herself. Her Marks and Spencer’s polythene bag was the only thing that jarred. She should have bought a real bag.

  ‘Excuse me, madam,’ said the clerk, clamping the ear-piece against her shoulder, ‘would you mind if security checked you out again?’

  ‘They already searched me.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  A woman in uniform came out and showed Liz to a small room. She was stout with blonde curly hair bursting from beneath her peaked cap, chewing-gum in a mouth heavy with lip-gloss. Her body seemed pumped into the uniform. She searched Liz’s carrier bag thoroughly.

  ‘Why are you searching me twice?’

  ‘You have a Belfast address, you have no luggage.’ She came towards Liz, who raised her arms obediently. ‘Why are you staying here?’ Her heavy hands moved over Liz’s small breasts, beneath her arms to her waist, down her buttocks and thighs. She had never been searched as thoroughly as this before – a series of light touches was all she’d had. This woman was groping her as if she expected to find something beneath her skin.

  ‘My husband put me out,’ said Liz. A forefinger scored up the track between her buttocks and she jumped.

  ‘That’s all right, love. We have to be sure.’ She smiled, handing her back her carrier bag. ‘I hope you and your man get it sorted out.’

  A bell-boy who was twice her age turned his back to her in the quiet of the lift before he showed her to her room. He made no attempt to carry her polythene bag.

  When she closed and locked the door she felt for the first time in years that she was alone. She could not believe it. She stood with her back to the door, her hands behind her resting on the handle. The room took her breath away. Matching curtains and bedspread of tangerine flowers with one corner of the sheets folded back to show that they too matched. She walked around the room touching things lightly. From her window she could see a wedge of red-brick Belfast vibrating in the heat. This height above the street she could hear no sound. She lay on the bed, trying it for size and comfort, and to her disappointment it creaked slightly. The bathroom was done in rust shades with carpet going up the outside of the bath.

  The first thing she had decided to do was to have a shower. Her new dress did nothing to remove the crawling sensation on her skin when she thought of Mr Henderson. Before undressing she turned on the test card on the television just for a bit of sound. She had never had a shower before and it took her ages to get it to work, then even longer to get the temperature right, but when she did get in she felt like a film star. Her instinct was to save the hot water but she remembered where she was and how much she was paying. She must have stayed in the shower for twenty minutes soaping and resoaping herself, watching the drapes of suds sliding down her body and away. The bruises remained.

  She put on the new underwear and felt luxuriant to be padding about free in her bra and pants. Although the shower was good she decided that before she went to bed she would have a bath so hot the steam would mist the mirrors. She would buy some magazines and smoke and read, propped up by all those pillows. Watch television from bed, maybe.

  In the bar she felt good, for the first time in years felt herself. She sat at a stool at the counter and sipped a vodka and orange. The bar was loud with groups of people talking. She caught herself staring in the bar mirror as she looked around. A man came in and sat next to her on a free stool. She wondered if he was waiting for someone. He ordered a drink, asked her to pass the water jug for his whisky. She smiled. He slowly tilted the jug until it was upright and obviously empty and then they both laughed. He asked the barmaid for water.

  ‘Are you American?’ Liz asked. He nodded. He looked a good deal older than her, in his mid-thirties or forty, she guessed, with a plain face and a blond moustache. He had bad skin, pock-marked, but it gave him a rugged look. She imagined him on horseback.

  ‘Yeah, and you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m from here.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise.’ He laughed and poured water into his whisky slowly. She watched it mix in wreaths with the spirit. He tasted the drink and seemed satisfied. She became alone again as she bought herself cigarettes and matches. They drank separately in the noise. She crumpled the silver paper, dropped it in the ash-tray and offered him one. He refused with a spread hand. He asked the barmaid for a menu, which he studied.

  ‘Are you gonna eat?’ he asked. She nodded, with her mouth full of vodka and orange. ‘It’s quite good here. I can recommend their coq au vin.’

  ‘Are you staying here?’ He nodded. She asked him if he was on holiday and he said that he was working, a journalist of sorts.

  ‘Oh, how interesting.’ When she had said it she could have bitten her tongue out, it sounded so phoney. She heard Eamonn mimicking and repeating her tones, but this man did not seem to notice. She asked,

  ‘What paper?’

  The piece he would do would be syndicated. She nodded and took another sip of her drink. There was a pause as he studied the menu.

  ‘Excuse my iggerence,’ said Liz, ‘but what does that mean – sin . . . sin . . .?’

  ‘Sorry. It just means that the same story goes in lots of papers – and I get more money.’

  Liz tap-tapped her cigarette with her index finger over the ash-tray but it was not smoked enough for any of it to fall.

  ‘You say you’re from here,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, which side are you on?’

  ‘I’m sort of in the middle.’

  ‘That can’t help.’

  ‘Well I was born nothing – but a Protestant nothing and I married a Catholic nothing and so I’m now a mixture of nothing. I hate the whole thing. I couldn’t give a damn.’

  ‘One of the silent minority.’ He smiled. ‘Boy, have you got problems.’ Liz thought he was talking about her.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Not you – the country.’

  They talked for a while and went separately in to dinner. When he saw that she too was eating at a table on her own he came over and suggested that they eat together. She agreed, grateful for someone to help her with choosing from the menu. Rather than attempt to say the dishes,
she pointed and he ordered. The array of knives and forks frightened her but she did what he did, American style, cutting up and eating with the fork alone. He told her that he had been a Catholic priest and that he had left when he had had a crisis of conscience, Vietnam, contraception, the nature of authority all contributing. As a priest he had written a weekly column for a Catholic paper in Boston, and when he left the Church to continue working in journalism was natural. He admitted to being married shortly after being laicised. She said she too was married.

  He made her feel good, relaxed. In his company she felt she could say anything. After telling of himself he asked her questions about her life. The questions he asked no one had ever asked her before and she had to think hard to answer them. In her replies she got mixed up, found she was contradicting herself, but got out of it by laughing.

  ‘This is like an interview on the T.V.,’ she said and he apologised but went on asking her questions, about her life, about the way she felt and thought. His eyes were blue and gentle, widening at some of the things she said. Except for his pitted skin she found him attractive. He listened with the slightest inclination of the head, looking up at her almost. Being from America he probably didn’t know about her accent. Maybe she looked high-class in her peach rig-out. Liz spoke until she realised she was speaking, then she became self-conscious.

  ‘I hope you’re not taking all this down,’ she said laughing.

  ‘No, but it sure helps to talk to someone like you – a nothing as you so nicely put it. It helps the balance.’

  Hesitatingly she told him something of her relationship, or lack of it, with Eamonn. ‘You have your troubles,’ was all he would say.

  When they had finished eating he suggested that they go through to the bar to have a liqueur. He was behind her, easing her seat away from the table before she realised it and he was equally attentive and concerned holding the bar door open for her.

  ‘You’re a gentleman,’ she said.

  ‘My old man used to say that a gentleman was someone who made a woman feel like a lady.’