I got up when I heard the voices of children playing across the road. I stood under the shower and turned it on to hot and then freezing cold. I flicked through the inanity on all the television stations before turning it off again. Then for some strange reason, I decided to say a prayer for my mother. I didn’t believe in God, or at least not fully, but it seemed the correct thing to do that morning.
I had no idea where the nearest church was. I thought that if I went out I could follow older people who looked like worshippers but there was a worshipper deficit in Islington. Finally I found a church but couldn’t decipher which religion it was. A woman was going in but it seemed a crazy question to ask. I followed her into the porch. An organ was playing. She opened the door and I could see people inside, standing up and confidently singing. Even the children seemed to know the words. I would have felt such an impostor venturing in. I took my time walking home, counting Christmas trees in windows and the plastic signs in gardens saying Santa, please stop here. I reached the corner of my street. The children were playing outside the house opposite. I waited until their mother called them. I understood pride and couldn’t have borne it if she had asked me in.
I flicked through the afternoon films, trying to blank my mind out. I had scored some dope yesterday after coming home from Wandsworth. I rolled myself a strong number but it only soured my stomach. The television was turned off and I was sitting in a ball when the doorbell rang. I didn’t jump or raise my head, although I felt the weight of that monkey spring on to my neck. My dawn thoughts were correct, Luke had the audacity to come. He could smell vulnerability and wouldn’t go away. The doorbell rang repeatedly. He knew I was in here, curled like a badger in her set listening to dogs and spades. I took the bread knife from under the mattress, although I knew I hadn’t the courage to use it. He would know it too. The only person I had ever cut was myself and that was done in secret timidity. I put the knife down and stepped into the hallway. The bell rang again, loud and insistent. He wouldn’t even have brought flowers. I opened the front door and found Garth on the step.
‘I knew you were in there, sister,’ he said. ‘You look like death warmed up. Did I never tell you men aren’t worth it? I should know ‘cause I’m one of them.’
I threw my arms around him. Garth laughed as the embrace continued.
‘Try all you like,’ he joked, ‘but even you will never turn me.’
‘Garth,’ I told him, ‘you’re the big sister I never had.’
‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said,’ he replied. ‘For that I’m even going to let you cheat when we pull our Christmas cracker.’
He would listen to no excuses. A place was already set for me at the table. For years his mother had been praying he’d bring a nice girl home and I couldn’t let her down now. He bustled me inside to get my coat. I protested that I had no presents for his parents and wasn’t dressed to go anywhere but Garth would brook no arguments. I didn’t want him to. I might be in no condition for company but I couldn’t bear to sit alone any more. We walked the half-mile to his parents’ flat.
‘It’s that Irishman, isn’t it?’ Garth said. ‘They always scurry back to their wives, you know.’
‘Is that the voice of personal experience?’
‘In my case it’s worse,’ Garth replied. ‘They run back to their mothers.’
‘Liam isn’t still on the go?’
Garth nodded. ‘It’s tough work though. When I used to dream about long-distance love I had a burly truck driver in mind. But I said to Liam, this Christmas you’re coming out of the country-and-western-closet. Go back to Drogheda and tell your mother straight out, “Mammy, I’m a punky-fucky-techno-head and I can’t live without singing that sun-kissed dubby vibe”.’
It felt strange hearing myself laugh again. Garth kept it up, forcing me out of myself. The lifts were broken. Garth claimed that Animal Rights activists had turned the power off to stymie Santa Claus as a protest against his treatment of reindeer. It was a mystery how Santa has survived this long. He even picked his reindeer on the basis of blatant gender discrimination. There was no role whatsoever for does in his herd except to head off into the town nearest the North Pole on Christmas Eve and blow a few bucks.
We reached the third floor and Garth opened the door. Roxy had called over or still hadn’t gone home from the night before. Honor and she were miming along to Boney M’s Mary’s Boy Child, which Garth’s mother kept insisting on playing. They both screamed and threw their arms around me, demanding to know where I had been hiding. They knew it had to be because of a man and kept trying to coax details from me. Garth fended them off, nicknaming them the hyena twins. Garth’s father, Mr Adebayo, insisted I sit in his armchair and poured me a vodka and coke without asking. This is how life should be lived, I told myself, not with deceit and men arriving covered with blood. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal for so long I had almost forgotten to be hungry, but after three vodkas I became ravenous. The most beautiful smells wafted from the kitchen. I didn’t ask Garth at what time he had decided to call, but I remembered trying to find a church this morning and I sensed that somehow my mother had sent him.
After dinner Honor ran downstairs to visit Roxy’s flat. Mr Adebayo shooed me away from the dishes and Garth and I stood out on the balcony, looking at the lights of North London. I told him as much as I felt able to about my trip to Dublin, but he seemed to suspect there was more I was holding back.
‘It’s the nature of families to squabble,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean they’re not a good thing. Friends can try our best but we’re no substitute really. Whatever quarrel you have with your grandparents you should make it up, for Boxing Day at least.’
‘They suffocate me,’ I said. ‘They won’t treat me as an adult. Even now they spy on me and follow me around.’
Garth laughed and said I was being paranoid so I told him about Grandad Pete being spotted in the Irish Centre.
‘It’s a free country. Maybe the man likes drinking there.’
‘He has his routine,’ I replied, ‘he’s gone out at the same time to the same pub year after year. Gran wouldn’t let him take off somewhere else. That woman has him in her fist and she squeezed all the fight out of him years ago. They won’t let me go.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’ Garth asked.
‘I’m going to change address.’
‘Then you are still a child,’ he said. ‘Why are you running away? This isn’t how an adult leaves home. Your Grandad isn’t some heavy breather, the dude is worried for you. Go up to him and say, “I’m a grown woman and I’m doing okay. This is how I want to live my life, so now you’ve done your bit, you ain’t responsible no more and leave me alone please.”’
Garth was right. I had grown up thinking life was something you lived in secret. My mother’s life had been a pattern of flight. Even Grandad’s visits to Wandsworth always had an air of illegality. We seemed to be a family where nothing could be openly discussed. Our problems just festered and broke out as hidden wounds. I remembered as a girl dreaming that blood was seeping like damp through my bedroom wallpaper. Perhaps it had always been like this, even before my mother’s secret marriage. I knew nothing of Gran’s life before she moved to Harrow. If my father was Proinsías Mac Suibhne then I wondered what he had made of us in that spick-and-span house.
Was it any wonder that I had kept the shame of the laneway locked inside me, when I was reared to keep my mouth shut? This conditioning had made me Luke’s perfect mistress. The thought of confronting Grandad Pete frightened me, but Garth was correct. Even if he knew about Luke it was not his concern. I sipped my vodka and watched the cars below us. The cold air felt good. It was time to start rebuilding my life. If I didn’t face Grandad Pete I would spend my life running away. If Luke called I would find the strength to confront him too. I was finished hiding in flats and waiting for snatches of life in cheap hotels. Yet venturing into the Irish Centre alone worried me and I told Garth so.
‘Let’s switch roles,’ he said. ‘Liam is playing there this Sunday. I’ll accompany you. They’ll think we’re quite an item.’
I laughed, savouring the irony. Roxy and Honor emerged into the forecourt and waved for me to come down.
‘How are you really getting on with Liam?’ I asked.
‘We’re getting there slowly,’ he said. ‘The last time Liam went home he went for a long walk on the beach and came straight out, no holds barred, to tell the family dog he was gay. From small acorns, you know. Go down to the hyenas and God help any reindeers who haven’t made it home yet.’
It was one in the morning when I finally left them. Roxy and Honor insisted on walking me to the corner of my street. There was music from the basement of the house across the road. The curtains were open and I could see the children still up, bouncing around the room happily. There was a tiny package lying in my hallway, badly wrapped in Christmas paper which had been used before. It had been dropped through the letter box. I knew it was from the family across the road. I shook it. There was obviously a cassette inside the paper. I remembered seeing the mother buy one in the supermaket: cheap instrumental versions of Beatles’ songs played by some orchestra in Mongolia or whatever country dodged paying royalties. The family hadn’t known my name to write on the wrapping paper, but the fact of finding it there, as a gift from strangers, made it seem like the nicest Christmas present I’d ever been given.
I opened my flat door, went inside and pulled the wrapping paper off. The cassette was home-made. A hand-written label read: ‘Field recording of fiddle playing and singing by Proinsías Mac Suibhne in a kitchen in Gortahork, made by Seamus Ennis, for the “I Roved Out” programme, BBC Radio Archives, 1957. Contents: The Lark on the Strand; The Rights of Man; The Black Fanad Mare (Nine Points of Roguery); The Knight on the Road (an unaccompanied song); George the Fourth/The Ewe with the Crooked Horn/Highland Jenny; Last Night’s Joy.’
There was nothing else written on the package. My hands trembled as I took the tape from its plastic case and walked to the mantelpiece to pick up my walkman and lower the earphones over my head. I closed my eyes, remembering Luke’s hands doing the same in that hotel. But Luke hadn’t come here tonight looking for sex. It must have been virtually impossible to locate this tape within the BBC on Christmas Eve and have it copied. Strokes had been pulled and favours called in. Cheap tarts were fobbed off with jewellery. This was Luke’s way of admitting he had been wrong. But it was also as if he was trying to give me something else, an identity and recogition that I was more than someone’s mistress.
I suspected he hadn’t rung my bell when delivering this and he wouldn’t ring that bell again. It would be left to me to make contact when and if I wished to forgive him. I didn’t want to see him again, but the thought behind his present made me feel good. I closed my eyes and pressed the button for play. There was a hiss of static and then a bow slowly started out over fiddle strings like the brow of a tiny boat voyaging across uncharted waves. Those waves grew as the music swelled, but the boat held steady, crashing through them, propelled by a master’s hand. Except that it wasn’t waves I saw any more, nor some kitchen long ago in Gortahork. I could see Luke quietly driving away after he had dropped the tape into the hall, that most contradictory and dangerous of men hoping that I might stumble upon it and stand like this, listening to my father play music and his singing voice, before Christmas night was out.
SEVENTEEN
IT WAS HARD TO BELIEVE I had only been inside the Irish Centre once before. Maybe it felt so familiar because of all the Sundays I had slipped past its door, worried in case someone might recognise me or notice Luke disappearing into the hotel. On my way in with Garth I stopped to look across at the hotel. It seemed far longer than two weeks since I had told Luke there that Christy was dead. I wondered if Luke might be there now, hoping that I would still come. That man frightened me. Even when he stood over Al with clenched fists I had sensed an alertness behind his apparent display of rage. Yet part of me felt sorry for him, marooned inside a life where nothing gave him contentment. I shivered, making Garth promise that no matter what happened he would see me into a taxi to bring me straight home.
I stood for a moment after we entered the Irish Centre, convinced that eyes were registering the appearance of Luke Duggan’s mistress. I knew it was ridiculous, there were thousands of London Irish. Very few knew Luke and fewer still would know his business. Yet I still felt the guilty flush of embarrassment I always experienced when returning to somewhere I had been totally drunk in.
There was no sign of Grandad Pete. The ceiling was festooned with decorations and streamers, yet every drinker seemed sick of the mention of Christmas. Posters advertised the New Year’s Eve party on the following night. The crowd who had turned up for Liam was smaller than the first occasion I had been there, though some of the older women had still brought along small Christmas cakes and puddings they wanted to give him. I joked about it with Garth who explained that, according to Liam, a singer called Daniel O’Donnell started the craze. Before him, young girls burnt their fingers holding up cigarette lighters and screamed at singers, demanding to have their babies. Older women would shower the stage with unworn Marks & Spencer’s bras. But now Irish country fans seemed determined to poison off singers with white sugar and self-raising flour.
Garth had phoned Liam to tell him we were coming. Normally he wasn’t allowed near Liam’s gigs but, given cast-iron guarantees of my presence, Liam had grudgingly consented. Garth said that Liam had sounded worried. Lately his manager wasn’t around as much. Liam had thought this was because of an additional hotel he had bought in Dublin and was busy refurbishing with period Edwardian furniture. But, while home over Christmas, Liam had discovered that two new singers, just out of their teens, were signed to do precisely the same material as him.
There were fewer bookings in January than at any time over the previous two years. His manager passed it off as the usual post-Christmas dip, but Garth said that Liam could sense the Irish rumour factory starting up. It wasn’t in anything people actually said or any negative publicity. Ironically, it came from the worryingly favourable comments printed by columnists who normally ridiculed his records. On Christmas Eve Liam’s manager had thrown a newspaper on the desk in front of him. ‘Liam Darcy has brought a new interpretation to Country & Ireland music, reversing tired clichés and gleaning new levels of meaning from jaded lyrical formulae.’ ‘What do you make of that claptrap,’ he had demanded, ‘I know these feckers are high on drugs half the time but if they throw enough of this shite some of it is bound to stick.’ What exactly he meant by ‘this shite’ was something Liam’s manager had left unsaid.
Taped music played before the gig began. Liam appeared and walked around the tables chatting to people. Off stage he was an everyday wonder. Mostly people gave a friendly nod or shared a joke with him, while some others wanted a kiss or their photograph taken. But, watching him tonight, Liam seemed a lonely and uncomfortable figure. He kept away from us, even when a middle-aged woman at the counter beside Garth produced a card and tried to call him over. Liam kept pretending he hadn’t seen her, until eventually a man at a table had to point her out. Liam came across, but by now the woman was hurt and her husband belligerent. Liam thanked her for the card and promised to sing her request, yet his anxiety to get safely away to another part of the bar was palpable. The woman mistook it as a reflection on herself. I muttered that we shouldn’t have come, but Garth shook his head as if to say that it wasn’t us Liam was having problems coping with but himself.
Every time someone entered I glanced anxiously at the door. I wasn’t sure which I was dreading more, Luke’s possible appearance or my grandfather’s. Tonight I determined to face both of them if necessary. The calendar on my wall ended in two days’ time. There would be no more mornings to mark off as I waited for my period that should have come on Thursday. It was too early to give in to fear, I told myself. I was simply late. Prec
autions had been taken and there was no way it could happen. Liam disappeared back stage. The band finished setting up and now the drummer asked people to put their hands together for Ireland’s latest singing sensation.
Liam reappeared and took the microphone. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t drinking as much or because I knew something about him, but – although Liam sounded shaky at first – I found I enjoyed listening to him. There was something different from last time, a depth of feeling which Liam himself almost seemed frightened of. The audience could sense it too, as if the singing had slipped free from the shackles of three-four time. I remembered how, one Christmas Eve, Edward Manners, after a large Scotch, had started singing I’m just a Lark in a Gilded Cage, and, even as a young girl, I had caught a glimpse into a life of intense, constrained loneliness.
There was an orange juice near Liam’s feet which he sipped between songs. I’m not sure when I became aware that it was strongly laced with alcohol. It might have been from the way the band glanced at each other. I noticed that Liam didn’t communicate with them any more. They each had their playlist and got on with their job. When Liam sang A True Heart These Days is Hard to Find he looked towards Garth, smiling blatantly. The woman beside us glanced around. I was concerned, then realised that her curiosity was mistakenly directed towards me.
By ten o’clock there was still no sign of Grandad Pete. I had brought along an old picture which Garth showed to the barman. The barman laughed and showed it to the girl working with him behind the counter.
‘Are you the police?’ the barman said.
‘Why?’ Garth asked.
‘We don’t get many blacks in here.’
‘Do I look like the police?’
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