Beautiful Child

by Menon, David

  There was a knock on his door and Matt’s practice partner and best mate, Charlie Baxter, popped his head round. They’d been best mates since the day they met when they’d started medical school together.

  ‘Hi! Got a minute?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Matt, ‘so when do you want me to have the kids?’

  ‘How did you know I was going to ask you that?’

  One of the things Matt liked about Charlie was that he was always easy to read. He was a poor little upper class rich boy from the very right side of the Scottish tracks. He’d never had much in the way of bother from his career diplomat father and housewife mother. They’d sent him to boarding school whilst his father’s career took him all over the world leading to his final posting as British ambassador to Norway. He’d recently retired and now Charlie’s parents were living in what amounted to a mini castle up in the Border area near Berwick-upon-Tweed. Girls had always fallen at Charlie’s feet. He had all the charm along with the sandy brown hair and green eyes and he just had one of those faces that would make him look about thirty all the way through to his fifties. It wasn’t fair. Matt hated him really. He couldn’t stand the sight of the bastard.

  ‘Call it an educated guess,’ said Matt.

  Charlie ran a nervous finger along the inside of his short collar. ‘The thing is, mate, Natasha has got this champagne lunch organised with some of her flying friends and some of the Cheshire set she knows from Wilmslow. She says the boys wouldn’t enjoy it and that, quite frankly, they’d get in the way.’

  ‘Charlie, this weekend is your time to have your boys as per your divorce agreement with Wendy.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that mate, but I’ve got to make a go of things with Natasha. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

  Matt looked up at his old friend. ‘Ever happened to you?’

  Charlie blushed. ‘Alright, after Wendy she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me but that’s only for your ears.’

  Charlie’s ex-wife Wendy was still one of Matt’s best friends and Matt felt a tremendous sense of loyalty towards her but that wasn’t why he couldn’t stand Natasha, Charlie’s new girlfriend. She was an air hostess who served tea and coffee but she thought she was Cheryl Cole and it was her pretentiousness that Matt couldn’t stand. She was serious when she said she couldn’t possibly fly economy class or on any of the ‘no-frills’ airlines because they were full of what she called ‘poor people.’ It had to be at least Club class or nothing. She lived in what she called a ‘cottage’ in Wilmslow that was really a very nice looking two-up, two-down terraced house. She’d finally cooked all her chips with Matt when she referred to her parents as ‘Mummy and Daddy.’ He absolutely detested that in a grown woman and it really beat him why Charlie was so attracted to someone who was so obvious a fraud.

  ‘You know the boys love their Uncle Matt.’

  ‘Oh please, don’t try that one on me.’

  ‘Well do you have plans for Saturday?’

  ‘No, but … ‘

  ‘…well then. You’re so good with them. You’re better with them than I am.’

  ‘Well that’s not difficult is it because they see more of me than they do of you.’

  ‘Ouch. I suppose I deserved that one.’

  ‘You can’t keep doing this to me, Charlie.’

  Charlie winked at his best mate. ‘You’ll get your reward in Heaven.’

  ‘I’ve told you before, Charlie, just like I’ve told my mother too, I don’t want pie in the sky when I die I want meat on my plate while I wait.’

  ‘And how is your mother?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Matt, ‘getting onto me every five minutes about not going to Mass but apart from that, she’s the adorable nag she’s always been.’

  ‘You exaggerate.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘So you’ll have the boys for me on Saturday?’

  ‘You knew the answer to that before you asked me.’

  ‘Good man!’

  ‘But I want you to collect them by seven on Saturday evening,’ Matt warned, ‘I want to go out on Saturday night.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Charlie!’

  ‘Well I can’t promise, mate.’ said Charlie, his face full of appeasing gestures, ‘It depends on how long this lunch thing goes on for and on what Natasha has got planned afterwards.’

  Matt closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I don’t believe this.’

  ‘Come on, mate, it’s what goes on between men and women.’

  ‘Oh and I suppose I wouldn’t know anything about that’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Matt.’

  ‘No, I know you didn’t.’ said Matt, ‘Alright, bring their pyjamas and overnight kit. I’ll think of what to do with them between now and then. You just have yourself a good time.’

  ‘She has silk sheets on her bed. I mean, how horny is that? She gets them cheap when she goes on trips to India.’

  ‘Yes, and some ten-year old kid has probably gone blind stitching them in some sweat shop factory where he gets beaten if he doesn’t work hard enough. Think about that lover boy the next time you’re trying to avoid sleeping on the damp patch.’

  ‘We don’t do damp patches,’ Charlie sneered, ‘she gets up and changes the sheets after we’ve … you know.’

  ‘Oh I’ve heard it all now. What happened to spontaneous passion?’

  ‘Oh there’s plenty of that,’ said Charlie, ‘it’s just that it has to be cleaned up afterwards or else she can’t sleep. Absolutely nothing is out of place in her house. She’s the Queen of the tidy girls.’

  ‘Is she still calling you Charles when everybody else, including your own parents, call you Charlie?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘I rest my case.’

  ‘She’s very pretty.’

  ‘That’s only skin deep.’

  ‘She’s great in the sack.’

  ‘Well that’ll only last until you’re married.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Charlie, nodding his head, ‘Good point.’

  ‘Anyway, you’ve got patients waiting and so have I.’

  ‘The pub after surgery?’

  ‘Where’s the lady Natasha?’

  Charlie smiled. ‘On her way to Chicago.’

  ‘ Then I’ll be there,’ said Matt, ‘and I do believe it’s your round.’

  *

  Joe Alexander got out of bed and put his boxer shorts back on. He was still hard from sex and had to negotiate his cock back under cover. Then he put his jeans back on and zipped them up carefully before pulling his light blue cotton t-shirt back over his head. He picked up Carol’s watch from the bedside table and handed it to her as she came in from the bathroom.

  ‘Thanks’ said Carol, putting it on and fastening it.

  Joe reached out and pulled her to him. She wrapped her arms round his waist and kissed him. Then Joe began to finger her hair away from her face.

  ‘Have you got time to stay for a drink?’ Joe asked.

  ‘I’d better not,’ said Carol, ‘Richard will be expecting me and I’m already late.’

  ‘That’s a shame. I hate it when you have to rush off just after… you know?’

  ‘Well it’s your fault, tiger,’ said Carol, lightly, ‘I wasn’t expecting it twice.’

  ‘You bring out the stud in me.’

  ‘I think I must do.’

  ‘Carol, about the bruise underneath your arm … ‘

  ‘…don’t Joe,’ said Carol as she pulled away from him.

  ‘You didn’t fall over, did you?’

  She looked at him helplessly and then she sat down on the end of his bed. ‘ What am I doing, Joe? I stay married to one man when I’ve got another who’s a hundred times better.’

  ‘So he did hit you?’

  Carol looked up at him and nodded her head. Then he sat down beside her. She’d confirmed what Joe had suspected about her husband for a while.

  ‘I
t all started after his accident,’ Carol began, ‘he’s always been a proud man and not being able to go out to work just really gets to him, you know?’

  ‘And that’s an excuse to use you as a punch bag?’

  ‘No, but… it doesn’t happen every day. Just when he gets really down about everything and Joe, he was a fit, active man who ended up in a wheelchair at the age of thirty-seven. I can understand how frustrated he gets at not being able to do the things he used to and provide for his family.’

  ‘Carol, I understand all of that but there’s absolutely no excuse,’ said Joe, ‘and I’ll never put any pressure on you, you know that. But if you lived here I’d cherish you, look after you, treat you like the lady that you are. The kids would have a good home here.’

  ‘But how can I leave him when he’s like he is?’ she pleaded, desperately. ‘He’d have nothing if he didn’t have me and the kids.’

  ‘Well I know how that feels.’

  ‘Joe, don’t say that.’

  ‘Why not? It’s the truth.’

  ‘You deserve much better than me.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ smiled Joe, ‘and I’m going to hold on until you come to your senses.’

  Carol kissed him passionately.

  ‘I can’t ask you to do that.’

  ‘You’re not asking me,’ said Joe who’d realised lately just how much he was in love with Carol and how much he depended on her coming round. ‘I’m saying that I will.’

  Carol looked into Joe’s blue-grey eyes. ‘I don’t want you to waste your time. You ought to be out there finding someone.’

  ‘I have found someone.’

  ‘Oh Joe,’ she said. Then she kissed him again and picked up her handbag. ‘I’ll go out the back way as usual’

  ‘Okay.’ said Joe, ‘Saturday afternoon?’

  ‘I’ll be here about one,’ said Carol who could’ve just burst into tears but she had to stay composed. It only took half a minute to walk from Joe’s house at the top of the hill down to her own house further down. A difference of about ten houses. She touched his face. ‘I’ll be thinking of you.’

  ‘And I’ll be thinking of you,’ said Joe.

  ‘Stay safe on those streets,’ said Carol.

  ‘I will for you’ said Joe.

  She gave him her biggest smile and then she was gone.

  *

  Ann had prepared dinner and left it for Brendan and Phillip. All they had to do was heat it up but because there was so much of it Phillip was having to use every available means of heat source to do it. She’d done them a chicken pie made with short crust pastry just how Brendan liked it and there were so many different kinds of vegetables that Phillip got bored counting at five.

  ‘Irish women are such big feeders,’ muttered Brendan as they were finally able to sit down at the table and serve themselves up. ‘It’s in their DNA.’

  ‘It would seem that way, Brendan,’ said Phillip as he looked out across the table at the feast before them. He hadn’t opened any wine because he knew that Brendan didn’t partake and anyway, he had work to do himself later that evening. So instead he just poured them each a glass of orange juice.

  ‘The English put the kettle on at the first sign of trouble while the Irish peel some more spuds.’ chuckled Brendan, ‘They think that if they pile a plate high with overcooked meat and vegetables then the boy they serve up this mothers meal to will forget he’s being shagged to hell by some paedophile priest.’

  Phillip almost choked on his piece of cauliflower. ‘Jesus, Brendan, will you warn me before saying such things.’

  ‘They’d think that would be enough for him not to say anymore about it. Then by the time his plate is clean the priest will have been moved to a parish on the other side of the country and no more would be said about that.’

  ‘We can’t be proud of the way we deal with such things, Brendan.’

  ‘No, we can’t,’ said Brendan, ‘now don’t get me wrong. This is a marvellous meal and Ann Schofield is a fantastic cook who simply wanted to show us her kindness. All I’m saying is that it is firmly in the Irish female tradition to use food as an avoidance tactic.’

  ‘Comfort food.’

  ‘In it’s most basic sense, yes.’ said Brendan.

  ‘And is this really how you see the average Irish woman, Brendan?’

  ‘It’s how I see the average Irish anything, Phillip.’ said Brendan, ‘Still wrapped up in the values of a church that can do no wrong. It was my blinding faith in God that led me to the priesthood but it was also the recognition that I could use my status as a Priest to right some wrongs. What a bloody fool I was! What an idiot! And so bloody naïve. I couldn’t change anything. You see, when I first became a priest back in Ireland we used to send young girls who got themselves into trouble to laundries where they were slave labour for sadistic nuns who used to beat the hell out of them if they didn’t do as they were told. The church would decide when these girls would be set free but in the meantime none of the boys involved were ever sanctioned in any way. It was as if the girls had done it all to themselves and the injustice of it all made me so angry.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘We were a young democratic nation, we were the Irish Republic, we’d broken away from the yoke of British colonialism and yet we were imprisoning young girls just for being unable to stand up to boys who were determined to get inside their knickers.’

  ‘That’s not too far away from stoning women in Iran for adultery whilst letting their lovers get away with it.’

  ‘It’s no distance at all, Phillip!’ Brendan replied, ‘And at least in Iran there’s some kind of a trial. Our girls didn’t go before any court, we just sent them away. We didn’t stone them but we committed them to a living death inside those blasted laundries. It was wrong, Phillip. It was very, very wrong. But it was part of the church being so entangled with the new Irish state. I was warned not to rock the boat and that if I wanted to get anywhere as a young priest I’d keep my mouth shut. I’ll forever be ashamed for taking the advice and putting my career before justice for those girls. The laundries closed down eventually but not until after many more souls had suffered in them.’

  ‘You’re a rebel, Brendan,’ said Phillip, ‘but in the right way.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting old.’

  ‘They warned me you were a character, Brendan.’

  Brendan smiled between mouthfuls of roast potato. ‘Did they now?.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Phillip, ‘and they were right.’

  ‘Well I’m not always proud of the ways of the church, Phillip.’

  ‘So between the laundries and the issue of paedophile priests, nothing much went on?’ said Phillip, his tongue very firmly in his cheek. ‘It was all a breeze, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well not exactly.’ said Brendan as they both laughed. ‘There was the little detail of the whole world blaming us for not helping the issue of poverty in developing countries by being opposed to contraception. Then there was the issue of the forced migration of children to Australia. That was a shameful business too, Phillip. It was an evil, shameful business.’

  ‘Wasn’t this very parish involved in all that, Brendan? ‘

  ‘It was indeed, Philip.’

  Phillip pointed out the kitchen window with his knife. ‘Wasn’t the children’s home out the back there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brendan, ‘before we sold the land and they built those lovely flats you see now. Scores of them went from here, Phillip, and again it’s a shameful part of our history for which we should be on our knees every night praying for the Lord’s forgiveness. We lied to them, Phillip. We lied to little children whose hearts were already shattered into pieces. We sent them into some horrible situations and some of them weren’t even orphans. There was a trade gong on with hard cash involved. It was nothing less than people trafficking, Phillip. Thank the Lord it was stopped eventually but long after it was too late for many.’

/>   ‘Too late?’

  ‘They’d already gone,’ said Brendan, ‘and there was no getting them back.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Well now,’ said Angela as she sat down once again across the plastic table from Paddy, ‘two weeks ago you ended up telling me you didn’t want to talk about it. Then I got your message yesterday saying otherwise. What’s changed your mind?’

  ‘Well you look like the kind of Sheila who doesn’t give up and I’m not in the mood for being pestered,’ quipped the inmate, ‘and I’ve nowhere to bloody run!’

  Angela laughed. ‘Oh Paddy, I’m so flattered. So what’s the real reason?’

  Paddy rubbed his stubble covered chin and looked thoughtfully at this good-looking woman with a kind heart and a ferocious brain who’d been sent to help him understand himself. He silently wished her the very best of luck. ‘I think it’s time, doc,’ he said, ‘what you said before made a lot of sense but I’m not used to it.’

  ‘Not used to what, Paddy?’

  ‘People making sense to me.’

  ‘Alright.’ said Angela, keen to hold the momentum, ‘So where do you want to start?’

  Paddy lifted up a carrier bag that had been lying at his feet and handed it to Angela.

  ‘There must be half a dozen folders in here,’ said Angela as she pulled one of them out. They were full of pages and pages of hand written notes. ‘What’s in them?’

  ‘The story, doc,’ said Paddy, ‘the whole story, everything that’s happened to me since that day in 1962.’

  ‘I can read it all?’

  ‘That’s why I’ve given it to you,’ said Paddy.

  ‘I never knew you’d have something like this, Paddy’ said Angela who was overwhelmed by Paddy’s meticulousness. She had a quick look through the files and they were all in incredible order, detailing year on year every bit of Paddy’s painful story. Except that they weren’t written like a diary.