by Jonathan Lee
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“I told you at the wedding,” she said, and the moment was lost.
“I know, Mum. This is old ground.”
“Old ground is the only ground there is,” she said. “Your problem is you married an independent woman.”
“What sort of woman should I have married?”
She seemed to give this careful consideration. “A dependent one.”
“I wouldn’t say you were dependent. When it came to Dad, I mean.”
He knew his own compliment was false to the core, but nonetheless she nodded. “True,” she said. “That’s true. But your father’s terrible habit was—”
He closed his eyes. It worked. She stopped talking. When he opened them again she was rocking gently in her chair and he feared she was having some minor fit. But then he saw what she was doing. She was trying to get closer to him without making a big thing of it. The chair moved. She leaned forward and put her little rough hand on his. She left it there for a while.
“I’ve bought one of those new word processors,” she said.
“Really? We’re rolling more of them out here, but there’s the potential for error. Wiped memory, and so on.”
“Man from Curry’s came to install it. Had a chin like a bum.”
“Ha. What about your typewriter, then? You’ll get rid of it?”
“Embracing technology,” she said. “I want to do more newsletters.”
“For what?” he asked, but she didn’t seem to hear.
—
Going between the dozen vacant rooms. Smiling at every guest he passed. Housekeeper after housekeeper kneeling in far corners, faces flushed, scrubbing. Vinegar on the mirrors. Hairdryer cords wound into neat coils. Vacuuming. Dusting. Steaming the curtains clean. All the things we call “cleaning,” though there’s a specific art to every task.
The bed-skirt check.
The pillow karate chop.
Knocking on the door to room 122, Thatcher’s suite, using the heavy wooden block on the key ring.
There were two maids inside the suite. A houseman dragging dirty sheets from the bed. Moose muttered his thanks, pointed out that the windows should be opened to let in some fresh air, reminded them to get extra pillows (four extra anti-allergy; four extra duck feather), and made a mental note to ask Marina to arrange more fresh-cut flowers. He went into the bathroom, scent of fake lemon. He rearranged the Q-tips, the cotton balls, the two sealed nail files and the silver-handled lint roller. Everything was close to perfection, a 9 or a 9.5.
4
He walked across kerbstones painted red and white and blue. Overhead, flags were slapping in the wind. Curtains twitched in the windows of homes, glass soft with the last of the afternoon light, and men stared out from the drifting comfort of their cars after eight empty hours in the office. Dan wanted to know now what people saw when they saw him, what assumptions or judgements they made.
The morning news had predicted that Thatcher, in her Brighton speech, would present Labour as the enemy within. Supporting strikers. Letting the economy grind down. Traitors with no eye for the bigger picture. Kate Adie smouldering behind the camera, a woman whose burnished sophistication turned every word on her lips into prime-time truth, the BBC version of events. And if the device didn’t work, what would it say about him? These last few nights his nerves had itched. His brain today felt overfull.
Sleeplessness. It seemed such a conventional response in the aftermath of an operation, and he wasn’t even in the aftermath. The device hadn’t yet entered the public phase of its life. Headlines, consequences. Normal rules didn’t apply. The Larne–Stranraer ferry project had been long in the planning but quick in its own enactment. The pub attack on UDR officers had been over in less than an hour. The timer for the Hyde Park bombing was set short, simple engineering. Would it be found? Would it be damaged? Had he fucked it up? Had Patrick fucked it up? No contact from Dawson. Threat letters still coming. Last night he’d woken from thin, uneasy dreams featuring fishermen dragged into dark water, radios playing birdsong backwards, an animal hidden in his bedside cabinet tap-tap-tapping to get out. Sleeplessness led to fatigue. Fatigue to mistakes. A very simple equation. He’d increased his intake of spirits to smooth the edges off his thoughts, but the desired soft-warm haze rarely descended. The side effects, the headache, the dry mouth, the ruined concentration—all of this worked very well. It was just the drunkenness that wasn’t happening.
As he walked past a stray dog peeing on a lamp post now he briefly imagined himself back into the Grand Hotel, looking out the window, thinking there was something bland about the English sea and sky most of the time, something huge and dramatic but disappointing, blank and grey and everyday. The prow of a ship unmoving, September’s clouds falling into water, September’s water rippling into clouds, grimy foam flickering on the tops of waves. The word “seaside,” with its colourful sing-song, seemed to him to be a kind of false advertising. What he loved was grassland, shrubs. A sentimental preference for green. The dog limped away from the lamp post, looking only slightly ashamed.
The afternoon he sat on the bathroom floor with Patrick. The shine of the lino. Fluorescence riding the curves of the bath. With the timer device prepared you began to peel the wax paper from the slab of Semtex. You got lost in its specks and dents, its deep orange hue. Made him think of a particular cheese his uncle used to buy from Lowry’s.
The wrapper had been halfway off when Patrick said, “No.”
“No?”
“An alternative.”
Went into the bedroom, came back with an open bag.
“Gelignite?”
Patrick nodded.
“Why?”
“Options. Play the percentages.”
He said it was fresh from Enfield, County Meath. Twenty pounds. Top drawer. Mines and quarries. Mr. Nobel’s invention. A refinement on dynamite, it was. Did you know that, Dan? A nice touch, no? We’ll get the peace prize, with this. Or some fucker will, anyway. Some Labour Party grinner who gets in after Thatcher, sealing a suitable deal.
The memories were fine most of the time. You let them linger at the outer edges of your senses. What was unendurable were the doubts, the effort involved in not listening to them.
Some of the Union Jacks further up the road were wired to guttering or pipes. Others were more crudely secured, taped to window ledges or fencing. He passed a row of four or five homes that held other flags: the red-and-white Ulster banner, its central red hand steady under a crown. The banners had been up since July. Normally they would have been taken down by now. A sign from the Loyalists, clear and simple—danger for Republicans passing through. Someone ought to climb up and burn them, burn all of them, including the flag he passed under now which bore, for some reason he wasn’t able to fathom, a left hand, thumb open. If he ever moved away it would be his last act: he’d burn them. He glanced sideways at the house with the Land Rover. Behind the latticework of wire across the Rover’s windscreen he could make out the sea-green of a bulletproof bib.
He should have taken the dogs on this walk. He tried to walk them twice a day but lately it was once.
The post office was boarded up. Finally, on his advice, they were replacing the window grille with proper bulletproof panes. The place had been done over twice in ’83 and twice again this year, easy money because the owners were elderly. IRA Youth were involved. He knew this to be true. Dawson had never got back to him.
Faster, faster, past the police station with its pillared entrance and barred windows, a huge shadow-casting mass. The size of a concert hall, it was. A hundred mysterious performances going on inside. The library came into view and he slowed down to study new graffiti. The Loyalists were crude in their artistic efforts: jagged lines and shaky brushwork. No comparison with the detailed portraits of Republican legends, vast works on walls that flanked the Shankill Road. These murals were always at risk of redaction, black paint erasing Bobby Sands until a new portrait was formed, but
with each revision the dead heroes had their appearance upgraded, a Chinese whisper of improving jawlines and eyes.
He remembered walking on Brighton Beach that first evening, the night they’d said he shouldn’t leave his room. The walk had been uneventful but it had returned to him a sense of power in reserve, something bone-deep saved up for later. It had created, briefly, a double illusion of choice: the choice of the walk itself and the choice of whether ever to speak of it.
Before reaching the library, before finding a book that contained a lean chapter on knotweed, before punching wood-panelling in the dusty stacks for no good reason at all—before all of this he saw a man of Dawson’s height and build in the street, wrapped in a mouse-coloured coat. He briefly believed it was him.
Japanese knotweed is a frequent coloniser of temperate riparian ecosystems, dirt tracks, roadsides and waste places.
He sat in the library. He was reluctant to accept that his garden was a waste place. Maybe it was a temperate riparian ecosystem? He wasn’t sure. The author, Jeremy P. Humphreys, didn’t linger on definitions. How could someone write a book like this and come out of it alive?
As he flicked through pages in the library book he felt increasingly lost, a person lacking in traction. This was not a place that welcomed men like him. Would it go off? Did he want it to go off? His mother’s haggard face. The blotchy wooden spatula that made everything taste of onion. The unfixed tap in the bathroom, the leak of unwanted thoughts. His mind seemed intent on dealing with every single thing except the text in front of him.
Everything in the library was brown. The curtains, the carpets, the desk, the library cards. The trousers of the old men who refused to speak in whispers. Everything except the librarian. He was grateful for her freckles, for her shiny apple face, for her green sweater and frizzy burnt-orange hair lifting just a little joy from the dog-eared drabness of the place. The ceiling was high but there was a lack of natural light. The largest window was behind her, the size of the road atlas he kept in the van, and the putty around the frame had cracked. Her nose was dotted with tiny pinhole pores. They made him think of sand and creatures burrowing. Day trips too. Trips to the Belfast Lough, his father and him, his mother back home cooking. The cold weight of Dad’s binoculars on the bridge of the nose, the swirl of mudflats, the gleam of lagoons. The outer lough was rocky shore flecked with sandy bay. Long, wide, deep, calm; our gateway to the Irish Sea. The tides there were weak but noticeable. The moon pulls the water towards it.
He didn’t talk to the librarian much. That, he would later think, was a shame. It might have been useful, maybe even instructive, to understand how she came to be here.
5
On the night before the big drinks event, Surfer John finally called.
“Freya Finch,” he said in a squeaky voice. “This is Barry from school.”
“Hi, Barry,” she said.
Would she like to go for a swim tomorrow?
“No, Barry. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is arriving.”
“The United Kingdom,” Barry squeaked. “Does that include Worthing?”
She told him that it did.
“I love what she does with her hair!”
They met early again. She searched her purse for 10p coins. Even now the smell of chlorine made her nervous, a full-body anticipation of some oncoming competition.
When she arrived poolside in her swimming costume she found, as always, that John had already started his lengths. His muscular back. His swiftness and ease. She slipped into the pool and swam behind him for a while, struggling to judge distances, to keep close but not too close. After twelve lengths they paused at the deep end, breathing.
“Everything all right?” she said.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“You just seem a bit off today.”
Possibly this wasn’t true. Possibly she was making it true by saying it.
“It’s part of your over-thinking, Freya Finch.”
He explained that they’d talked about this problem before. His eyes moved briefly to a pretty girl with short red hair. At some point in the last two weeks, without ever really acknowledging that she was doing it, she’d learned to follow John’s stares, to look at the girls he looked at. She wanted the women he wanted, or rather to be the women he wanted, ideally while being herself.
“Not preoccupied, then?” she said.
He was looking only at droplets on the tiles. Smoothly he leaned in and kissed her. “You look nice today,” he said.
She hated the tone in which he’d delivered these words. She let the silence shrink her discomfort down. Her fingers hurt from clinging to the edge and she said, “A holiday, maybe.”
“What?”
“We could go.”
“Come on. I wish. Where are we going to get the cash, Freya Finch? I owe my parents…” He shook his head, blinked, a confusion of calculations. “Money,” he said.
Various awkward observations passed between them. Eventually she said, “That old guy over there. His bald patch—it’s the exact shape of Africa.”
John smiled a fake smile. The eyes didn’t light up at all. “That one over there,” he said, pointing. “He’s really tired.”
She stared at him.
“What? Isn’t that the game?”
The space between words was unswimmable. Her stomach was jumpy. Her guts were a string of Christmas lights fizzling out one by one, and the image wasn’t even seasonal.
He turned away and carried on swimming.
In her previous life she’d thought the worst thing in the world was to sound needy. Let a note of desperation enter your voice when you’re with a boy? Unthinkable. But now neediness seemed like a condition rather than a decision. Needy? Yes, I’m needy. Give me needy drugs. Relieve my neediness! She was in need and he was being a dick. Or she was being a dick. Both, probably, which was worse—the kind of equality you didn’t want.
After more lengths she swam up to him and said, “If you don’t want to see me again, that’s fine.” Hated the tremble her voice held. Hated that the words had gone wavy in her throat. Why had she even said it?
A pause. A pause! She wanted to die. To call someone’s bluff and then discover they weren’t bluffing—was there anything worse in the world? She was succumbing to a shameful sinking feeling, a sense that everything with a beginning had an ending.
“Look,” John said, “I wasn’t, probably, totally straight with you the other day.”
“Forget it,” she said. “I was being stupid. Let’s swim.”
“Frey.”
“Don’t call me Frey. You always call me Freya Finch. It’s funny.”
“It’s about Sasha,” he said. “The truth is I really like you, and stuff, but this thing with—”
“How about I show you a dive?”
“What? Look, Freya, the point—”
“The point is I’m going to try the ten-metre board. Have fun.” She was out of the water and walking.
Self-consciousness came. It always did. One of the pleasures of being in the water was that you never thought about how you looked. The pool swallowed you up, insecurities and all. Your little-girl body took on a mature purity, your mind developed a sense of direction. The liquid connected you to everyone else. You knew exactly what you had to do. More speed. Less splash. Focus on the legs. Walking along the edge of the pool, the corrugated tiles that stopped you slipping, you felt none of this joy. You were close but you just couldn’t reach it. There was a new heaviness in her legs. The water at her side, the elusive warmth of it, the impression of the whole safe thing.
She sensed her swimsuit was clinging to her bottom in embarrassing ways. She tucked a finger under the elastic rim. Sasha. Sasha. Think of the more important things. Like her father—he really was getting better, wasn’t he? Like the doctors would look out for him. Like Anthony Haswell. Like Mr. Marshall. They knew about hearts. Good! Someone should know about hearts! “A lot of heart attacks are vicious but not
malicious.” This is what Dr. Haswell had said last week. Vicious but not malicious. Freya had tried to picture this combination of traits. All she’d managed to come up with was Abby Stephens from sixth form, cuttingly witty but fond of baking birthday flapjacks.
Fuck. He was fucking Sasha. It was so desperately predictable. It was the clichés that hurt the most. She’d always hated greeting cards with text printed inside, stock condolences or congratulations that preceded the event they addressed. Now whoever wrote those was writing her.
Anyone who cared to look up now as she climbed the metal ladder would see how her hips, in the tight black nylon suit, looked narrow as a fourteen-year-old girl’s. Until recently this was a good thing, but these days you wanted to be Dara Torres or one of the even curvier swimmers. It was so hard to keep yourself pretty because prettiness was always changing, always shifting, which was what her mother had once said about truth—that a true thing in 1974 could be a false thing ten years later, and then true again when a new decade came. “Things change, Freya, I’m sorry.” A way of saying “sorry” that drained away every drop of authenticity.
Probably John was comparing her goosebumps to the lovely constellation of water crystals on the nut-brown back of the girl in front. Three rungs higher, bum swaying smoothly, the girl’s dark hair hung down the line of her spine and from behind she was so pretty, so perfect, that you wanted to reach up in one seamless motion and wring out her hair like a soaked rope just to touch her, be part of her, to connect with something pristine and confident and sustained so fully by itself. The ladder’s bars were cold and her feet were squeaking on the steps and why was she heading up here anyway?
Diving like Moose taught her to do. But that wasn’t from a ten-metre platform. And would he be OK? And had she ever even liked John, really? Wasn’t she just distracting herself? That hurt all the more, though. The idea she’d only been playing at happiness, a stupid little-girl game.
She’d heard from someone who knew someone who knew someone that Sarah had found out about the thing she’d done ages ago with the trainee teacher on the golf course, which wasn’t even a thing anyway because he couldn’t keep it up, and it was ages ago now, back when she was a different person. Supposedly they were annoyed, Sarah and Co. were annoyed, annoyed at the fact she hadn’t told them direct, or else they thought that she was easy, which was crazy because she’d only properly slept with two people ever and they’d slept with loads, and that’s why they hadn’t phoned, and thinking about all of this made her nauseous. Sarah and Tracy weren’t nice people. The knowledge cut through her: they were not nice. And yet they were her friends, weren’t they, so that was evidence that she wasn’t nice either. What else could you draw from the facts? Why else did John not want her? Why, when it was finally all working well, did they look you in the eye and dismiss you? Why was she letting herself be dismissed? Why did she care?