by Nick Laird
On the last night, with the last wall painted, the last socket fitted, the paving laid and the lawn cut, she offered him a cup of tea and he accepted, and she felt unexpectedly glad, and he sat down at the kitchen table. He sat straight in his seat, a little stiffly, and there was a kind of tender nervousness in his demeanor. She found herself wanting to know more about him, felt that there was something here that she could not define but wanted to see. He was partly in shade. Now that she knew he was finished, that he wasn’t returning, she felt free to be friendly.
She was talking about teaching, and about a favorite teacher of her own, Mrs. McElhone, who’d become a missionary in the Gambia and had been recently kidnapped, tied up, and finally shot in the leg in her own home in . . . in whatever the town in the Gambia it was, she couldn’t remember. And as she was talking she found something strange occurring. All the time the children made her feel like her single role in life was as a mother, and she found her life moving happily and unhappily along that road. But Stephen, his back to the sun coming in low through the kitchen window, nodding and asking questions, spoke to some other potential in her, of being an adult, of being a woman, equivalent and opposite to this man sitting at her table. How could you be lonely with two kids? It wasn’t loneliness exactly. It was emptiness, a whole part of her life was so empty.
It was with some surprise that she realized that she liked having him around the house.
“She’s in Belgium now, in a hospital, recovering, but she devoted forty years to that country and now . . .”
Stephen shook his head.
“Shocking.”
“I mean why would someone do that?”
He shook his head again and then said, “Money, I suppose.”
“It’s evil.”
“You ever been to Africa?” Stephen asked.
“No, I’ve been to Egypt once.”
“That’s in Africa.”
“Of course it is. Well yes, then, I have. Against my knowledge!”
She laughed a little hoarsely and Stephen smiled again, took a dainty sip of tea.
“Actually, Bill, the kids’ dad, is out there somewhere, God knows where, in Afghanistan.”
There was no response from Stephen, no little glimmer of a private pain. He simply nodded, widened his eyes sympathetically.
“The forces?”
“Private security.”
“Good money, I’d bet.”
“We’re not together.”
“Sorry to hear that . . .”
His eyes met hers and there was a wee flicker of irony in them. Not sorry at all. Alison felt the kitchen drop slightly like an elevator. Lovely, kind eyes he had with those long lashes that made him almost handsome.
—
The first time they went out it was to the Dragon Bowl, and she found herself delighted by the fact that he made a single bottle of Heineken last the entire evening.
When they pulled into the space outside the house, he’d stared for a while through the windshield. Anxious of the silence, she put her hand on the door handle to get out, but he said, quietly, “I have to tell you something.”
“You’re not married, are you?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Well, what is it? You’re scaring me now—”
“Look, I’ve done things in the past, things I’m ashamed of. Things I shouldn’t have done.”
Alison said nothing. If she didn’t move, if she kept staring out the side window, maybe this would stop. Finally she said, “We’ve all done things—”
“Not like that. I don’t mean some wee thing. I mean I was involved. I’ve done things no one should ever do.”
He stopped. Alison was motionless. All the hope, all the pleasure, all the desire turned slack and rancid. Couldn’t he have waited a month, a year—forever?
“What—what did you do?”
He was silent.
“Tell me.”
“The worst things you can do.”
Her mouth felt very dry suddenly. She swallowed and said, “What’s in the past . . . ,” but stopped.
Stephen spoke quickly, “I paid for them things, I paid for them and I regret them. I do. I regret them. But I thought you should know from the start.”
She realized he was crying. She couldn’t bear it when men cried.
She turned to him and said, “Don’t get upset. . . . Stephen!”
She barked his name at him, as if he were one of her pupils, and he looked at her surprised. He laid a hand on hers and said, “I need to tell you . . .”
“You don’t. You don’t need to tell me. I don’t want to know. I don’t want anything to do with this.”
She realized she was making a decision. He was nice and all, he was great really, but no. She didn’t need this. Whatever it was, she didn’t need it, and Isobel didn’t need it, and Michael didn’t.
She couldn’t remember getting out of the car or into the house. She lay in bed and heard her phone buzz with one, two, three texts but didn’t pick it up to read them.
—
She tried his name in Google, and found an ophthalmologist in Arkansas, a schoolboy footballer in Glasgow, a professional magician in Lancashire. She added “Northern Ireland,” and found a quality control officer in Oakdale Meats in Dungannon. She added “murder” and hit return. Nothing. “Bomb.” Nothing. “Terrorist.” Nothing. Whatever it was he’d done, she told herself, it couldn’t be that serious.
—
Over the following weeks the texts kept coming. Dinner again? Just lunch. What about a drink? She said no and said no and then said not now, not yet. She was too nice, as she explained to Trisha as they sat and drank their Cup-a-Soups. She didn’t tell Trisha about the shadows in his past. She said that it was too soon after Bill, that she had a baby, that she wasn’t ready to see anyone, that she was flattered, of course, but it was madness, wasn’t it? Though he was such a sweet guy. Trisha told her to go for it. “He’s one of the good ones,” Trisha said, standing up and washing her mug out in the sink, “and the good ones don’t come along too often.”
When she did finally answer a call of his, he sounded so pleased that the next thing she knew she’d agreed to meet him for lunch.
—
They kissed all the time.
They sat in his Focus outside her house, the car switched off, after an evening out and kissed until her lips hurt, and his hand would still be on the outside of her blouse.
Well, that was like starting a fire inside her.
She wanted to drive him so wild he couldn’t control himself.
She found herself looking at the phone waiting for him to text or call.
If he came in for a coffee after they’d been out, they’d stand in her hallway, kissing goodbye for ten minutes.
She felt like she was seventeen again scobing Grant McCartney by the bins outside Eastwood’s pool hall.
—
After three months they had still not made love—not for religious reasons really, though Alison did allow herself some smugness at the virtue of the action—but because Stephen hadn’t ever taken it to that stage. Plus, there was always Isobel and Michael. Isobel came down a few times when they were on the sofa, and only the fact that she’d the gait of a baby elephant meant they heard her on the stairs and separated in time.
One Saturday Judith and Ken kept the kids and Stephen took her to the Tall Trees Garden Centre and then back home, where he swiftly planted everything up, fixing trellises to the back wall with nails and garden wire, rolling the plants out carefully from their plastic pots. Afterwards they stood in the kitchen washing their hands together—and standing beside him, sharing the tap’s single twisting ribbon of water, she felt very close to him, closer than she’d felt to anyone for years. She thought how the tattoos on his forearms were really quite faded
. As he dried his hands on the towel he observed, “We’ll need to water them in,” and she’d said, “Well, you do that and then meet me upstairs.” He said, “You’re on.”
They lived in a terrible country. What sort of chance . . . What start in life . . . She heard him down beneath the window, unwinding the hose. People aren’t monsters. What good can come from dwelling on it? You only had to look at him. A good man. A take-you-to-the-garden-center type of man. She took off her tracksuit bottoms and pants and T-shirt, and put on her black silk nightgown. She got into bed and then got back out again and put on her dressing gown and sat on the edge of the mattress. Then she got back into bed with the gown still on. She picked up the Tyrone Courier and turned the pages, not seeing it. She heard the hose stop. Could you be good and do bad things? The country made everyone mad. She felt overwhelmed and heard his tread on the stairs and the next thing she was kissing him and he was warm and naked and they were under the covers.
He was careful, even a little timid. Also tender, shy, and incredibly quick, as she knew somehow he would be. They lay in the bed and self-consciously, like lovers in a movie, shared one of his Mayfair cigarettes—her first in five years. He dropped the dying fag in a glass with an inch of water left in it, and turned to her. They both slid down the bed together and faced each other on the pillow, their noses an inch apart.
“Where’d you get those eyes?” she said.
“I dunno. My da. He looked like Charlie Chaplin.”
But that hadn’t been quite what she meant. She didn’t know what she meant exactly. Only eyes like those weren’t given out at birth. So much brown, so much despair. She felt out of her depth suddenly. It was almost five o’clock and her mum would be dropping the kids back soon.
“We should get up.”
“He used to tell people he was Charlie Chaplin. He was a desperate one for fibbing.”
“You take after him there too?”
“I do not.”
“We should get up.”
“Aye.” He pushed his forehead against hers, and his hand fitted onto her face. “Or maybe not.”
She slid backwards off the bed and stepped into the shower without looking at him. When she came out he was fully dressed again, even wearing his shoes, and sitting in the corner on the chair reading her Grazia magazine.
“You look like you’re waiting for the dentist,” she said, wrapping her hair in a blue towel.
And the next time she turned round he was on his knees, in her bedroom, asking her to marry him.
(iv) Janine McFadden, 32
Janine had that new pain in her stomach. It was everything stretching, everything making room, but definitely her body was older and more worn than it had been with Bobby.
She would cancel the evening with her mum and dad, only they’d be disappointed. And she had said she’d drive: This time she was determined that David would have a beer with her dad. There had been that bother over the silly toy rifle her dad had given to Bobby—to, as he said, “his own grandson”—and which David had insisted they secretly put in the bin. Hadn’t he a right to decide if his son should be encouraged to pretend to shoot people? Especially nowadays? What with everything. I mean Jesus, what was your father thinking . . .
But then Bobby told his granddad that Daddy had taken his shooter away, and it was all a bit awkward. And now Bobby was obsessed with guns—which David blamed on her father. He’d take a branch from the apple trees, or a tennis racket, and shout bang bang bang and hide behind the oil tank. And anyway Vanessa from next door was booked to watch him, and she always got so shirty if they canceled. And it might well be her last time to go out before the bump emerged.
When they arrived at the house Mum was still upstairs and her dad started coughing as he answered the front door. He beckoned them in and hacked and hacked, and hurried off to the bathroom. When she went in after him she saw him spit a lump of brown phlegm flecked with blood on the toilet bowl.
“Did you make an appointment yet?”
“I said I will, and I will.”
“You’re worrying me. Can’t you go and get it checked?”
Martin looked at his daughter with a hooded, angry stare: “I said I will.”
Mum’s footsteps on the stairs.
“Well, make sure you do.”
The pub was busy and there in the corner was her friend Niamh with her boyfriend. She’d kept them seats. Dad went to get the drinks, and she sent David to help him. Her mother was wearing the new perfume by Armani that she’d got her for their fortieth anniversary last month. She took her mother’s hand as they crossed the dance floor. The band was starting up and there was a wee note of jollity in both of them suddenly, unforced and easy and lovely. Niamh raised that eyebrow at her again as she tried to fit herself around the table. It was so loud, the music. The singer of the Cotton Mountain Boys was good, a big raw voice, all feeling. For six long years I’ve been in trouble. Janine wondered if the baby could feel the music. Maybe this would be the first song the baby would hear. Some idiot was shouting “Trick or treat” behind her. Then she felt her mother’s arms around her, gripping so tightly, just full of love.
CHAPTER 12
Since Stephen rarely talked about himself, it made it easy to live always in the present. He’d arrived on Alison’s doorstep without a past. Once, on the sofa, watching a program about endangered white rhinos, a diminishing box of Maltesers between them, he said, “That’s like my family. Getting themselves extinct.” But the fact he had no kin to speak of made wedding planning easier. Everything seemed smoother than the last time, especially her relations with Reverend Gifford—she could still feel the humiliation of Bill being drunk throughout their meeting concerning “spiritual preparations for marriage.”
This time he led Stephen and her down the book-lined hallway to his little cluttered study, and they followed, meek as lambs. A row of tight white curls round his baldness like a hedge circling a hillock. He motioned to the sofa, though several commentaries on the New Testament were stacked on it. His ancient computer was on and a page filled with words open on the screen. Beside it on the desk a chipped side plate with a half-eaten buttered slice of barmbrack sat by an empty mug. There were papers everywhere. Alison lifted the books from the sofa and set them in a pile on the carpet.
“Just putting the final touches to the sermon.”
“Do you have to write a new one each week?” Alison asked, because it seemed like she should.
“Well, I don’t have to, but I find it focuses the mind.”
The sofa was too soft and she and Stephen squashed against each other, separated. It was odd to see the Reverend in his home and his ordinary, rather shabby clothes. He had a wee piece of barmbrack on his beard and Alison must have been staring at it because he reached up now and found it, then looked at it for a second as if unsure whether or not to eat it. He dropped it on the plate.
For the next ten minutes Gifford reminded them of their marital duties and responsibilities, the ancient nature of the commitment. He talked about the nuclear family, and Adam and Eve, and the fundamentals of human need, companionship and support, the legitimacy of sexual urges. Alison examined the large swirling galaxies in the carpet and coughed.
“Well, as you know, Reverend, this isn’t my first time at the rodeo, as it were.”
“Of course, yes, Bill.” The glasses came off. “How is he getting on?”
“Ah, we’ve no contact. He’s in Afghanistan, far as I know.”
“He had a problem with the drink,” Stephen offered, and Alison threw him a quick reproachful glance.
“And you have the two? From the first marriage?”
“Mickey and Isobel.”
He turned to Stephen.
“And are you committed to raising them as your own?”
“I love the children very much.”
“And they get on w
ith you, do they?”
“Well, they’re children, you know. So some days they’re a handful, let’s say.”
“Of course—”
“He’s great with them,” Alison said.
“And we should discuss—the past. I’m assuming you’ve talked about it?”
“You mean Stephen’s past?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve discussed it,” Alison said. Kind of, she thought.
“We have,” Stephen confirmed.
“And you have made your peace with it?”
“We’re putting it behind us.” Alison took Stephen’s hand in hers. He squeezed her fingers to reassure her and said in a steady voice, “I’m living a Christian life now.”
“I know you are. I know you are, Stephen.”
Gifford put his glasses back on. They gave him an owlish aspect. He cocked his head to one side and sighed and Alison realized she passionately disliked him, always had. He made a slight humming sound and touched his fingertips together and said, “Have you forgiven Stephen?”