by Jonathan Lee
Freya said, “I mean, seriously. I just went home, forgot my sandwich, totally soaked, and there’s like a—like a landslide in the hall.” She looked at him. Wet hair was hanging over her face in threads. The drying room was dark and soupy, full of ambushing damp. Her perfume cut through it cleanly. “Like, twenty of them!”
Several thoughts occurred. The first was: good that she’s making her own sandwiches, because those baguettes from Amadeo’s add up. The second was: annoyed or simply pretending to be annoyed? Third: get an umbrella. Fourth and finally, he didn’t know what she was talking about—not at all. “Twenty,” he said, buying himself a little time. He tried to picture things in multiples of twenty but managed to think only of canapés—canapés on a platter presented to Margaret Thatcher, who in this particular vision was for some reason wearing a peach-coloured spacesuit.
“Those huge prospectuses.”
“Ah, those.”
“Twenty!”
“Right.”
She was wearing a skirt much shorter than was ideal, or even acceptable, but probably it wasn’t a good time to mention it. It was hot down here. Water fell from her clothes. He sneezed and said, “There were three yesterday too. I put them in the kitchen for you. The process for next year starts soon, Mr. Easemouth—”
“Easemoth—”
“—said. You’re still thinking History, right? Or is it English now? If you don’t apply in time, Frey, it gets tricky.”
“Mental,” she said, shaking her head. He waited for more, but nothing came; the word was a free-standing judgement.
“Lots of exciting choices. That’s all I’m doing. I’m giving you choices that I—”
“Wasn’t given, yeah.” She shook her head again. “God.”
“Don’t bring Him into it,” Moose said. “You think He’d be running this shit show so badly if He’d got a proper education? Look,” he said, “you’ve seen the pictures on TV. It’s crazy. If you want to have a comfortable life these days, you’ve got to get an education.”
“You’re that guy. That mental dad. You actually are.” He thought he saw an earring on the floor. “You’ve been in disguise for a while, but it’s you. It was like a sorting office or something had exploded. I told you—” was she going to cry? Really? To cry at this?—“I told you I don’t even know if I want to go.”
“Then you should apply,” he said softly, “and keep your options open.” It wasn’t an earring after all. It was a small pebble or a little piece of cheese. He nudged it with his foot. “No wonder there are rodents.”
“What?”
“If you don’t know yet, then keep your—”
“University,” she said. “University university university university. University. University. Obsessed!”
He tried to calm things down, began to succeed, began to think less intensely about the question of how cheese had found its way onto the floor, but then he slipped on a well-meant phrase about the future and that one slip sent him free-falling into an argument. He never let her make her own decisions, he was always trying to interfere, he thought university was amazing because he hadn’t been, so what did he actually know, he always thought stuff he hadn’t done was amazing, he was always nagging, nagging nagging nagging, and couldn’t he see that she wanted a bit of time to think, that she’d just stopped doing exams and exams and exams, all that structure and no time to live, to live, and why was a degree so important, and couldn’t he just be pleased with her results, and had it done him any harm not having a degree, had it really?
“Well, actually—”
“No,” she said.
He tried to stick to questions, because—a useful customer service principle—there was a limit to how aggressive a statement could seem with a question mark at its end. Did she really want to work behind the desk in this hotel for another summer and the summer after that? Did her good exam results at a mediocre state school like Blatchington Mill not show that she had great potential at degree level? Was her pessimistic view of higher education something to do with her mother being a lecturer? Because that’s the last thing Vivienne—yes, why not, let’s bring Viv into it—because that’s the last thing Vivienne, wherever she was now, would have wanted. Defining yourself in opposition to other people was really no way to live.
This last line was the most provocative of all his statements, liable on another day to cause him serious injury, but her eyes relaxed and he watched as her thin arms crossed underneath the V of her sweater. “You just want to make me—this is it—into the person you want me to be.”
Which was unfair. Utterly unfair. Because what he really wanted was for her to want to make herself into the person he wanted her to be. Such was the great hope of fatherhood.
The wine-cellar hatch went up and Jorge climbed out, closely followed by Sasha, the latter pink of cheek and laughing, a rare occurrence indeed. “Was there a problem down there?” Moose said. “A problem requiring both of you?”
“Que?” Jorge said. He was fond of feigning incompetence with English when caught fucking summer staff.
“Jorge,” Sasha said, tugging at his sleeve, “we’ve fixed the problem now, so let’s go.”
Freya said, “If you’re so keen to get rid of me, I’ll be buying a ticket somewhere soon, like I said to Roy—to Marbella—so whatever.”
She left. Jorge left. Sasha stood for a moment staring at Moose as if she had a question in mind. She was a changeable girl, Sasha. She could be warm and she could be cold and it could all be within one sentence or glance. She would smile at him but be unable to keep the smile going. She sometimes squeezed his arm. She knew too well the effect she had on most men. He had concluded she had no soul. In the moments when her worked-up warmth faded and her other self was exposed, Sasha was like a house slowly losing electricity, emptying, the TV flickering, the lights fading, the radio’s song dimming, the fridge humming thinly into silence, and this again made him think of his ex-wife.
Sasha said she’d found out that Jorge’s hourly wages were a little bit higher than hers.
“Not now please, Sasha,” he said.
She sighed and disappeared up the stairs. The tumble dryers rumbled on and on. The earring was nowhere to be found and neither was the reported rodent.
His daughter so frequently misunderstood his intentions. His allotment of life was pleasant but undeniably narrow. She was better than he was, a more talented person, and he wanted her to have a whole blazing field of sunflowers. He wanted to tell her that unfulfilled ambitions pile up like unopened post and can clutter a person’s life. He also wanted, at a more bitter and seldom acknowledged level, to explain to her how fatherhood had destroyed his solitude. Explain to her that he used to think—really believe—that he would win an Olympic medal on the diving board. That Viv had in fact been the one pushing for a child. That if one of them was ever going to end up as a single parent he never expected it to be him. That motherhood had finally seemed to kill Viv’s already-slender sexual appetite and that, if it wasn’t for the feeling of aloneness this abandonment had left him with, he might never have poured quite so much love into his daughter, into their early-morning routines with Lego and milk, into the intimacy that left him feeling needed again and brought an almost-pleasure to the hot Sunday task of ironing all her school clothes.
When Freya moved away, who exactly was going to take her place? Was it selfish to think of the gap she’d leave in his life? Needy? Hospitality, fatherhood: service industries. Eighteen years in which everything he did was worked around her. More than four of those with just the two of them, no Viv. At least if she was at university they’d be in the same country. He could visit for lunch on his days off. Maybe on all his days off. He’d take her and some grinning boyfriend out for drinks, torture the guy in inventive ways. And was it inevitable that he’d become his mother, moaning at the lack of phone calls from one’s child, and that Freya would become him, moaning about the moaning? When she went away for weekends he always felt at fi
rst a rich sense of possibility. He told himself he would succumb to the advances of one of the lonelier women in the hotel and that he would roll around with this woman on the sofa, cook her eggs for breakfast, drink lunchtime wine. But slowly and surely that sense of possibility would always flatten and sink—there was no rolling around and he drank the wine alone and often the wine was beer—and he’d get up for a bleary, wheaty midnight wee and see that his daughter’s bedroom door was open, no one inside. He’d think, Soon it’ll be empty forever.
He rubbed his arm and caught a glimpse of Barbara. She was scowling but nonetheless permitted him to stroke her. After a while she rolled onto her back, legs akimbo, so he brought her a fresh bowl of Whiskas.
—
A little after four Moose was coming down the hotel’s sweeping spiral staircase, down and down, 123 steps over which a rich dark carpet flowed, when he started to feel very tired. He noticed also that his jacket was listing to the left. He paused on the first-floor landing and began redistributing coins between flap pockets, aiming for equilibrium, picking out from palmfuls of ten- and twenty-pence pieces those thin squiggles of cigarette-packet cellophane. He caught sight of his reflection in the banisters. Even allowing for distortions, he looked pretty bad. The lobby below seemed gloomy, sleepy. His mouth felt full of putty. Sticky. Odd. He sat down without deciding to sit down.
There was a vase on a console table and it wasn’t centrally placed. Little things like the central placing of vases created a sense of symmetry, perfection. Overall design. He would recentre it. Another centimetre to the left. You can make an imperfect dive seem perfect if you focus on position and posture. Posture at the edge of the tower. Hips forward. A straight lower back. Posture as you’re about to leave the board, as all the energy in your dive is applied. Posture as you tuck: show the judges just one leg, knee close to shoulder and heel close to body. From overhead it would be clear that the tuck was split. A judge up high would see that your knees were apart. There was no judge up high. The judges always sat side-on. Fuck. He was not feeling well.
He needed to stand up. The Grand’s staircase appeared curiously soggy. He tried to make sense of the grandfather clock on the landing, but grandfather clock sounded like the wrong name for what the grandfather clock was. This was stupid. He got up.
A bolt of pain in his chest. His first thought was the Wo of Wow. His tongue in the roof of his mouth. The carpet. He fell. He was on his back staring up at the ceiling.
Sandra the Maid nearby. He wanted to signal to her. There was no power left in his body. What was this? Pain insisted on its pre-eminence. Everything else was play. Footsteps. Her upside-down mouth. Hideously it opened. The new bitter clove of pain in his chest started to expand and to involve his shoulders and his soul. All in all, this was far from ideal. Sandra was running down the stairs shouting, “Someone!”
Others. People flocking. The next ten minutes seemed to happen underwater. A busy green blur coming through the crowd. A paramedic ripping open his shirt, sending a button spinning.
“How old are you?”
“Forty-five.”
His shirt open. They tilted his head. The carpet rough and warm under his ear. On days when he might be required to help out behind the bar he kept the belt buckled slightly to the side, so the metal wouldn’t scratch the joinery while he was serving. Save the wood. Avoid that grating sound. They undid his belt buckle and loosened his trousers; a friendly comment about his boxers. They were comedy boxers, strawberries in sunglasses designed to be amusing, but he had given no one permission to see them or speak of them. The pain was cooling, was it? Thinning. He was just so tired. Something very cold or very hot against his hip. A metal canister. A tube. At the end of it a mask. They strapped it to his face. It seemed like a toy, the elastic so thin, and that brought fresh hope that this was all a strange game.
“Breathe,” they said.
He thought he heard Freya’s voice, someone trying to fob her off, and he wanted to explain that she was smarter than all of them put together, that if anyone could help him it was her.
“How old are you?” the paramedic said. Kindness. Hair. A big blurry nose into which all her other features fell. He adored her for speaking so softly.
“Forty-five,” he tried to say, but the number was muffled by the mask. He said it again and the pain in his veins was amazing. Everyone standing around looked huge. He was scared of all the ways they might hurt him.
Lying here undressed in the hotel with five or six people managing his movements, every illusion of power and privacy vanished. He was a dust mote among them. A zero, a speck. They made comments he couldn’t respond to. They moved the canister and it knocked his knee.
Tongue-tied. He never knew what the phrase meant until now. All bets were off. All hands to the pump. Took the clichés right out of my mouth.
“How old are you?”
Four, five.
“We need to know that you know.”
His eyes started to close. Shut out the world. Thin dreams through which his father’s voice rippled along with his Uncle John’s. A little to-and-fro joke the two of them liked to do in their unexplained mock-American accents.
What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy, Tom?
I don’t know, John, and I sure as hell don’t care.
Someone slapped his face. He heard a voice much like his own mumbling the word “Promotion.”
“What did he say?” they said.
The pretty paramedic asked what he’d had for breakfast. Did she mean his first breakfast or his second? She asked him who the Prime Minister was. Margaret Thatcher! She’s coming to stay! She asked him what year it was. ’84! ’84! She asked if he had any pets. No. She said she owned a small brown dog. Her dog was called Potato.
As the light withdrew from the room he thought: I wish I’d had another child, a son, what would the son I never had be doing now? And then he thought: I could love a woman with a dog called Potato. A woman with a dog called Potato could be exactly what I need.
TWO
The Flight of a Dive
1979–1984
1
Dan’s first op for the Provos was in darkness, an alley off the Falls Road, half a decade before Dawson McCartland would ask him to become Roy Walsh. He was crouched with his back against a rough brick wall and a man called Colum Allen was beside him. Colum was sometimes called Hallion or Hallinan or the Welsh Saint, the last of these nicknames persisting despite his energetic claims to have no Welsh in him at all. He was tall and thin with a great vein forking up the left side of his neck. Even in the dim you could see it flickering. It moved whenever he spoke, which was always. His leg jerked up and down. Punching his palm was a frequent hobby too. Nodding his head. Biting his fingernails. Humming. Singing. Some of the many daily ways Colum relieved the pressure of being Colum.
“Predetermined is what it is.” Colum’s voice was a quick whisper. “Last time was unlucky, isn’t it? Whole season unlucky. Fuckers this season are on the ropes. Inevitable. Fuckers home in an ambulance. Been lucky. Got a destiny that’s not what they think, to be sure.”
Chance and fate, Dan had started to see, were a great pre-occupation of guys engaged in reckless deeds. He didn’t trust Colum to do a good job. Didn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut after. It was exhausting to think of all the ways he didn’t trust him and why had they been paired together? Dawson kept telling Dan he’d be able to work soon with Patrick. Kept telling him Patrick was too well known to the authorities now—couldn’t be the face of operations, only the brains, needed help. Dawson kept saying Dan and Patrick would make a great team one day, but here he was, teamed with Colum Allen, talking football.
“Agree with sacking Steiny? How could a man. How could. But a man gets no silverwear for the Celtic, his history is history, isn’t it? Fuckers got short memories is what they’ve got. Anyway—” he coughed—“this your debut, is it?”
Dan stood for a moment to grant some relief to his l
egs, then went back to crouching and squinting. Occasional shapes animated the gloom at the end of the alley. Occasional voices too. There was advance word of RUC raids happening here tonight. The idea was for Dan and Colum to disrupt the raids as much as possible. They had gear on the ground in two zipped bags.
Nerves. When Dan was nervous he didn’t gibber or fiddle with his hands like Colum. Instead, basic questions surfaced. Such as: What am I doing here? Or: Will I end up with a bullet in my brain? Another cool wind was picking up grit. They waited.
“Paddy’s your man, is he?”
Dan was silent. Disconcerting to think a guy as simple as Colum could have a read on your thoughts.
“Internment, was he?”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “I think so.”
“Whole year?”
“No idea.”
“Two?”
“Dunno.”
“Fuckers keep their secrets.”
He knew exactly how long Patrick had been interned by the Brits without trial. But he’d also learned that it was unwise to give your facts away for free. Sharing less—sometimes less than was decent—made the other person uncomfortable. In an uncomfortable silence, people gave you more of themselves. The RUC had apparently come at dawn to pick Patrick up. The whine of the Saracens, bulky six-wheeled monsters, being slipped into a low gear. A dimmed stage, dark vehicles, blackened faces, not unlike the expected scene tonight; the occasional white blotch from a Catholic paint bomb. The whole of your life in Belfast was organised around light and dark, visibility and invisibility, silence and sound, information and secrecy, the private rubbing up against the public and making you feel tired. None of this Dan said to Colum.