Something in Common

by Meaney, Roisin

  Alice turned pages. ‘Oh,’ she said, stopping and staring down at a photo. Helen resisted the impulse to cross the floor. Alice turned another page, slowly, and studied it with the same intensity. For several minutes she was silent, looking at pictures of the man she didn’t remember.

  Finally she closed the album. ‘Can I keep this one in my room?’

  Helen stubbed out her cigarette. ‘If you want.’

  The phone rang in the hall. Alice got to her feet. ‘I’ll go.’

  Karen probably, or one of the other girls who asked for her when Helen answered – nine times out of ten the voice at the other end looked for Alice. No male callers, not yet.

  At sixteen, Helen had French-kissed three boys and let one of them under her top. Brazen behaviour in 1958, when nice girls didn’t allow boys much more than a chaste goodnight peck on the cheek after a red lemonade and a swing around the local dancehall. Helen had always pushed further, curious to see what was waiting behind the next taboo.

  She took eggs from the fridge, broke them into a bowl and beat them with a fork. As she grated cheese, Alice reappeared.

  ‘I’m making omelettes,’ Helen told her.

  ‘Karen’s dad has a new girlfriend,’ Alice replied.

  ‘Does he?’

  Jonathan Nugent had made a pass at Helen once. She’d called to the house to collect Alice from a birthday party, and he’d answered the door. Must have been around three years ago, when he and Karen’s mother were still together, and supposedly happy, and Oliver was an intermittent visitor to Helen’s bed.

  Jonathan had stood back to let her in. His blond hair needed a cut and his belly pushed at his shirt buttons, but he wasn’t bad-looking, in a sort of Robert-Redford-gone-to-seed kind of way.

  ‘Helen,’ he’d said, ‘good to see you. Drinks in the kitchen, away from the birthday madness.’

  Presumably his wife was holding the fort inside, poor woman, while he got sloshed with the other parents in the kitchen. Helen, only too pleased to avoid the clutch of over-excited girls she could hear on the other side of the sitting-room door, had followed him down the hall. To her surprise, the kitchen was empty.

  ‘You’re the first,’ he’d told her, lifting an open wine bottle from the table and waving it at her. ‘A little Piat D’Or for the lady?’

  From his too-loose grin she’d realised that he’d already had a few. ‘Any whiskey?’ As long as it was free, might as well go for it.

  He’d bashed ice from a tray into a glass – a few cubes skittering away from him across the worktop – and added a decent amount of Paddy. ‘Bottoms up,’ he’d said, handing her the glass.

  ‘Cheers.’ She’d raised it to her lips, aware of his gaze sliding down to her cleavage as she drank. Let him look, didn’t bother her.

  He topped up an almost-empty wine glass that sat beside the sink. ‘So,’ he said, moving back to stand close to her, ‘here we are.’

  His eyes were watery blue. She could have reached out and pulled his head down, she could have shoved her tongue into his mouth, and he wouldn’t have complained; he’d have loved it. She took another sip, enjoying the burn of the whiskey. Enjoying, to be perfectly honest, his eyes on her.

  ‘You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?’ she’d asked, and he’d drawn a packet of Major from his pocket. For the laugh she’d held eye contact with him as she’d leant towards the lighter he’d offered.

  ‘You don’t look old enough,’ he’d said then, ‘to have a daughter Alice’s age. You must have been a child yourself when you had her.’

  She’d laughed: he was ridiculous. She’d been twenty-nine when Alice was born – any fool would know, looking at her, that she was well over that now. But it was harmless, a bit of flirtation in a suburban kitchen – and the knowledge that his wife could walk in at any minute had only added to the fun.

  ‘God,’ he’d said then, his eyes openly on her breasts, his smile still in place. ‘I’m so attracted to you. I want to fuck you right now on that table.’

  She’d kept her eyes on his face, waited until he’d looked up. ‘What’s stopping you?’ she asked. Call his bluff, dirty old man.

  And before he could react, the kitchen door had burst open and there was Karen in her blue party dress, cheeks aflame, holding an empty jug and demanding more MiWadi. And as her father was refilling the jug the doorbell sounded, and Helen had grabbed Alice and slipped away in the ensuing flurry of more parental arrivals.

  Lying in bed alone later that night – no sign of Oliver – she’d imagined starting an affair with the married father of her daughter’s best friend. Arranging for him to collect Karen when she was visiting Alice so they could snatch a quickie while the girls were still upstairs, or sneaking him into the house at night after Alice was asleep. Meeting his wife at the school gates in the afternoons, meeting both of them at the end-of-term concert in a couple of months’ time.

  She’d waited to see if he made contact – let him come to her, she wasn’t that desperate – but he never did; and before the term ended he’d walked out on his wife, and Helen hadn’t laid eyes on him since. No loss.

  ‘By the way,’ Alice said, taking cutlery from the drawer, ‘there’s an ambulance outside Mr Malone’s house.’

  ***

  Dear Helen

  I hope you didn’t mind that I wrote to Alice last week. I just felt a bit sorry for her being grounded, even though of course you had good reason – and you needn’t worry, I didn’t mention the lipstick business. I probably bored her to tears going on about how wonderful Martha is! I sent her a photo of the second birthday party – she probably showed it to you, not that you need to see any more!

  You must have loads of baby photos, and older ones as well, of course. It’s fascinating to watch the changes as Martha grows – although I must confess I feel a little sad when I look at our first few photos of her, when she was so tiny and helpless. Just over a week old, not a hair on her head – remember how bald she was when we got her? – but the biggest, bluest eyes, and I remember how frightened I was at the thought of her being dependent on us for every single thing. It seems now that she’s becoming more her own person every day, learning to do so many things for herself, which of course is wonderful, but it makes me lonely for that little helpless creature.

  So – brace yourself – I’ve decided I want another one! And in fact I can reveal that we’ve already applied to the adoption agency!! The good news is that they’ve said we shouldn’t have as long to wait this time round. Fingers crossed, and I’ll let you know as soon as there’s any development. I have constant butterflies these days. I can hardly eat, I’m so keyed up at the thought that I might be a mother of two in just a few months!

  Other than that, there’s not a lot of news. Work is the same as ever, can’t believe I’ve been at the nursing home for over twelve years! Neil is well, and still managing to work his hours around my schedule so we can look after Martha ourselves, which is wonderful. We don’t see a lot of each other at weekends – he works most of them to make up for missed time during the week – but it’s a price we’re willing to pay, for the moment anyway.

  There’s a possibility of a big commission coming up for him though – a new golf course in the offing just a few miles away, and he’s put in a tender to maintain it. If he gets that he’ll be a lot busier, which of course would be great in one way, but it would mean we’d have to think about a childminder, especially if we get a second baby. I suppose it doesn’t help that I can’t drive – I really should learn, but I love the bike.

  Don’t be too hard on Alice. I know it’s easy for me to say, and I should probably mind my own business, but I’m sure she’s sorry for what happened. Maybe it was just a bit of bravado in front of the pals. And I know you’re raising your eyes to Heaven now at me being so soft, but one of us has to be!

  All the best,

  Sarah x

  Dear Mrs Flanery

  Thank you for your letter. I like your little girl, s
he’s cute in her red dress. I asked my mum if she had photos of me and she brought out a stack of them. There were some of my dad, who died when I was three, so I don’t remember him, but it was wierd seeing him with me.

  I’m sending you one of me, just to give you a laugh. Look how messy I am.

  Yours sincerly

  Alice Fitzpatrick

  Sarah

  It was happening again, and she was terrified.

  She lay in the bath, door ajar, listening to the up and down swing of Neil’s voice as he read Martha’s bedtime story in the next room. This week she was demanding ‘Winnie the Poor’ every night. Sarah could picture her curled up in bed, Baba tucked firmly under her chin. Baba was a soft black sheep with creamy-coloured ears, a present from Helen that had arrived in the post two days after they’d brought Martha home.

  The miracle of her daughter, their daughter, had overwhelmed Sarah. The months of waiting, once they’d started down the adoption route, had seemed endless. No, not months, years. Almost two years after she’d agreed to put in an application for someone else’s baby, still not at all certain that it was what she wanted.

  But Martha, with her shiny little head and enormous blue eyes, Martha, with her miniature fingernails and tiny, perfect ears – Martha, whose gaze had fastened on Sarah’s face as she’d sucked determinedly at her very first bottle in her new home – Martha had won her over without even trying, had found the empty place inside her and settled right in.

  And now, just when everything was going so brilliantly, when they were planning to do it all over again, this.

  ‘Congratulations,’ her doctor had said that afternoon – because he was programmed to look on a pregnancy as a good thing, even if you’d tried and failed three times, even if the thought of another failure was unbearably frightening.

  ‘We’ll take very good care of you,’ he’d assured Sarah, no doubt guessing exactly what she thought of the news. ‘There’s no reason why you won’t carry this one to term.’ Sarah didn’t remind him that he’d told her that three times before. He meant well.

  She lay in the bath and wondered when to tell Neil that she didn’t have a tummy bug after all, that her nausea and indigestion of the past few weeks had a very different cause. She’d suspected the truth, naturally, and refused to consider it, doomed to failure as it most likely was. But now it had been confirmed, and there was nothing to do but let nature take its cruel course for the fourth time.

  Maybe she’d say nothing to Neil. Maybe it was best to keep it to herself this time. What was the point in setting him up for more heartbreak?

  They had Martha, and they were in line for another baby: let that be enough for them. Let this seedling inside her go the way of all the others. She’d tell nobody – although it would be hard, with Christine and the boys due tomorrow for lunch, and her father coming on Sunday to spend the day with them, which he did most Sundays now.

  Presently she heard Neil sneaking from Martha’s room. Seconds later his head poked around the bathroom door. ‘Will I put on the kettle?’ he whispered.

  ‘Do. I’ll be down in a minute.’

  And maybe after it was over she would talk to the doctor about going on the Pill, although the thought of that brought hot tears that ran down her face and dripped almost silently into the cooling water.

  Helen

  The house was definitely empty. No lights, no sound for more than a week, not since Alice had reported seeing the ambulance. Helen had gone straight out, but there had been no sign of it. She’d looked about for anyone to ask, anyone who might have witnessed the scene, but nobody was around.

  She should have called to his door. She should have enquired, even if he’d told her to get lost, even if he’d run her off the premises. At least her conscience would be clear now: she wouldn’t feel like the worst kind of person. It was perfectly clear that he had nobody: it wouldn’t have killed her to ring his doorbell.

  The dandelions had taken over his front lawn. Every one a reproach, a reminder of how Helen had ignored his absence until he’d been carted away in an ambulance. Jesus, it wouldn’t have killed her to show some neighbourliness.

  She checked the death notices each day and saw no sign of his name, which didn’t mean he wasn’t dead. But with nobody to ask, she had no way of knowing. The postman still walked up his garden path every few days – junk mail probably, building up on the mat inside – but no other person appeared; no one came to cut the grass or open the curtains or feed the cat.

  The cat: she’d forgotten the cat. Was it still in the house, slowly starving to death with its owner gone? And then she remembered flinging the dustpan at it one night when it had sat mewing outside her back door. Not trapped inside then, which was something. But that had been ages ago.

  She opened the fridge and saw eggs, butter, a block of Cheddar cheese, two carrots, a parsnip and a bowl of jelly. The only food that seemed remotely suitable was the cheese. Cats did dairy, didn’t they? She cut a wedge into small cubes and left them on a saucer outside the door. If it was still around, and hungry enough, it would eat it.

  The next time she looked out, an hour or so later, the saucer was empty. The cheese could, of course, have been eaten by any number of creatures – not all of them cats – but she decided to assume it was Malone’s pet that had found it.

  She wrote cat food on her shopping list. It wouldn’t make up for her shameful neglect of its owner, but it might go some small way towards making her feel less despicable.

  Sarah

  He broke her heart.

  A scarecrow, skin and bone, grey trousers bunched with a belt at the waist, shirt collar badly frayed, stubble on his scrawny chin as pure white as the wisps of hair that trailed across his head. Shuffling in slippers from his bedroom each day to pick at the dinner that was put in front of him. Not making any effort to talk to the people around him, leaving the dining room as soon as he’d finished.

  ‘He lived alone,’ one of the nurses had told Sarah when she’d enquired. ‘He’d been ill, pneumonia I think they said. He couldn’t get out and about, he ran out of food – not that I’d say he ate much in the first place. Practically starving by the time anyone realised he was there. He was a month in hospital.’

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘No idea. Some neighbour, I suppose.’

  Charlie had lived in Dublin all his life, but a shortage of beds in the capital’s nursing homes had resulted in his being sent to St Sebastian’s, forty miles away, to convalesce. In the two weeks he’d been there Sarah had seen no visitor, and as far as she knew, nobody had phoned the home to enquire after him. Nobody at all seemed to care what happened to him.

  On mild afternoons he’d make his way to the garden and sit on one of the wooden benches, wrapped in the tartan rug that was folded at the bottom of his bed. Sarah would see him from the kitchen window, his balding head poking from the rug that dwarfed him as he sat there alone, and her heart would contract with sympathy.

  And because she was trying not to spend all her spare time keeping count of how long it had been since her last period – seventy-four days – she’d taken to wandering into the garden when she had a few spare minutes to sit on the bench beside him.

  At first there wasn’t much talk. She’d remark on the weather, or wonder if he was warm enough, and he’d respond with as few words as he could get away with. He wasn’t unfriendly, just detached, as if he’d had nobody to talk to for a long time, and had got out of the habit of conversation. She asked him once what his favourite food was.

  He considered the question, his head to one side, his gaze fixed on a twiggy furze bush. ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve never been that bothered about food.’

  Sarah imagined him lying in bed, too weak to leave the house, barely able to make his way downstairs and find whatever meagre offerings his fridge had yielded. Wouldn’t have taken him long to run out, by the sound of it. Hard to imagine a man living in the middle of the city, surrounded by o
thers, almost dying of malnutrition.

  He had the appetite of a small bird, ate practically nothing, but he needed food now to build him up. She’d try chicken soup with a soft bread roll, that might tempt him, and a finger of apple tart with custard afterwards. Surely he’d manage that.

  Towards the end of his third week at St Sebastian’s (eighty-three days since her period), while they sat in silence on the garden bench, he turned to Sarah, out of the blue, and said, ‘I had a cat’ – and to her dismay she saw his eyes were brimming with tears.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, putting a tentative hand on his arm, her own eyes filling at the sight of his distress, ‘oh, please don’t cry.’ She couldn’t bear it if he cried.

  His face collapsed. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ he said, pulling a crumpled grey handkerchief from his trouser pocket. ‘He went missing while I was sick. I couldn’t feed him. I didn’t have anything to give him—’ Oh, the heartbreak of having to watch the tears spilling from his eyes, stuttering past the crevices in his face. ‘I don’t know how to find him. I asked in the hospital, I asked them to send someone to look for him, but they said they couldn’t do that, but I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ Sarah cried impulsively, swiping her own tears away. ‘What can I do? Is there anyone I could phone? You must have a neighbour who’d go and have a look.’

  She wanted to ask who’d found him in the house – surely that person would oblige by hunting around a bit – but the question sounded insensitive. Besides, it had been … how long now? Almost two months since he’d left the house? The cat could be anywhere – did cats hang around houses, waiting for their owners to return? Did they die of loneliness if no one came back, or did they simply find someone else to feed them?

  Charlie blew his nose noisily, dabbed at his eyes again. ‘Well, there’s George,’ he said doubtfully, ‘but he doesn’t live near. I went on the bus …’