by Jonathan Lee
A year, perhaps, since he’d slept with a woman. Everything these days seemed to flow into his work. Armies built up certain aspects of your character and folded others flat. It seemed to him that, of all the challenges his commitment to the Provos posed, it was the element of chance that really gnawed. The difference between life and death was as slight as walking home after the fourth drink instead of the fifth, rounding one corner instead of the next, forgetting to check under a car.
He sat back in his chair and resolved to get drunk. “Lena’s not a common name round here, is it?”
“No,” she said. “Are you disappointed?”
7
In the living room the fire was burning for the first time since February. Lying on the sofa she drew her legs into her chest. Her father was in his armchair, snoring. Between each slurping effort at breath was a long interval of silence, his lungs always late in knowing they needed air. These silences contained a moment of thinking he was fine, a moment of thinking he was probably fine, a moment of thinking he was going to die, a moment of realising he was fine, a moment of waiting to be afraid all over again—and then she’d think about her own breathing, and that sounded wrong too, like a word you turn over in your head too long.
A blanket pulled over his knees. An old-man nap before the big reception. The MPs. Mrs. T. Logs were glowing blue. There was the waggle of thinner flames up front. A sway of fatter flames behind. The wood was singing, crackling. Light touched the carpet, streamed across photo frames. She’d told John things, given him little parts of herself. He’d judged these things inessential.
“Make sure I’m awake by five, Frey.” That’s what her dad had said. Now it was 5:05.
She picked it up from the floor, the most recent postcard from her mother. She stared at the fireplace and blinked bright colours. A big flame puffed its chest and took in air. It rolled forward. A hissing sound loudened. The dots of colour bleached out behind her eyelids. Shouts from the slouchy boys next door. The brrrrrr of determined traffic. The scuffle and structure of a new school term, the criss-cross glances and one-liners, the depressing double periods, the arguments, the dipshit flared-up rumours, the constant pranks and inventive bitching—and it was possible to miss all this, all of it. On the windowsill her herbs were dropping leaves. Mint. Basil. Coriander.
Her mother’s opener was “I hope this postcard finds you well,” the closing line was “Hope your dad is enjoying his work,” and in between these words the card contained only one sentence: “We’re not up to much, but everything is fine.” That was the sandwiching of it: hope—fine—hope. The word “everything” was crammed desperate against the edge, as grimly appealing as the we. Sometime during the last year her mother had lost a personal pronoun. Had the famous Bob been reinstated, or was this someone new? Did her dad read these postcards when they arrived on the doormat? She felt sure that he was meant to.
Sometimes when she was younger she’d wondered if she was adopted. Probably lots of kids did. She’d wondered in truth every time her parents were lame. You thought maybe they’re not mine, maybe they don’t belong to me; I’m from elsewhere, because I do seem a bit more special than them. Not a genius or anything, not even all that interesting, just more full of feelings, more three-dimensional. They are just parents, which is not the same as people, and I cannot see the world through their eyes.
She was a little shit, was she?
She’d knocked on her mother’s door to demand that her school skirt be taken up, because no one wore it this long, because really was she trying to humiliate her or what? And she saw from all the smudged mascara that her mother had already been crying, and wow she cried often, wow she didn’t stop; you’d think a normal human being would have dried up by now. “Give me some privacy,” Vivienne had said, or something like that, and from such small beginnings insults escalated. She hadn’t realised parents wanted privacy. It did not seem reasonable that they should want it or get it, and she hadn’t thought that her mother might have bigger things on her mind than the length of her daughter’s skirt. “Self-absorbed.” “Selfish.” “You can be a perfect little shit, can’t you?” “Like father like daughter, the world revolves around you!” So Freya wiped away her own tears, fresh-sprung, hot, and she nuked her. “At least I’m not a miserable worthless slutbag. At least I don’t go around fucking ugly old men just because they have stackloads of money.” Quite good. Nice rhythm. And after the tantrum there was silence, many hours of silence, and then her mother asked her how she had known, so she told her: I saw you kissing that man in that bar on New Year’s Day. I saw you through the window. That guy Bob or Rob and the two of you drinking champagne. I was so ashamed. I wish most days you weren’t my mother.
“To be cynical is a sin.” That’s what the priest said at church that one time she went, and she’d only gone because she thought God, on the off chance He existed, might see fit to make her mother visit her, actually care. She never meant to push her away forever. Always meant those words to be a nudge rather than a shove. A little nudge, a form of contact, intimacy inviting a response. And her father could have actually gone and got her mother if he wanted. He could have taken control at any number of moments. He could have done the grown-up thing. He could have actually tracked her down and shaken her and said listen, what are you doing, spend some time with your daughter and don’t let the gap grow, or he could have shaken Freya and said the same. But he didn’t like confrontation, did he?
Sarah lost her mum to cancer six years ago. People saw how bad that was and granted a special privilege of grief. But if your mum runs off with someone with a three-letter name—a name that happens to be the most stupid palindrome ever—she’s a slut and your life’s a Carry On film. People want to hear your gripes for a week at most, a quick summary of the dirtier details. After that, something changes in their voices and you realise you’re being a burden. You’ve lost her but people don’t treat it as a loss. On a scale stretching from everyday annoyance right up to Death, it lands closer to mislaid house keys than cancer. And time passes and Friday is Saturday, and Saturday is Sunday, and Sunday night is the need to make your sandwich for school. And you just have to look at your tiny allotment of trouble, so small compared to that owned by others, and you have to say, “All right, no worries, I’ll take it, it’s mine.” You have to acknowledge it’s nowhere near a death even though she is gone, fully gone. And you remember the things she used to say to you when you were small and she thought you were asleep, the room pitch black and she would begin talking and talking, her breath against your hair and she would go on and on, softly chattering for minutes and minutes, and you loved it, you felt all the life in her running into you, the sugar rush of her feelings and thoughts. She existed to whisper into your ear.
At Columbia she’d watched the cheerleaders at the football games and thought how shiny they were, how gloriously unreal. Cheering and cheered. Leading and led. Sexy and giving off the air of having, all the time, sex. Throwing each other up into the air in huge flirtatious twirls and arcing back down with a reckless grace. The furrows of their skirts, the pleats and tucks. The silence between her father’s snores. The gap between the whistle-breaths and the great inward slurps. Was he, did he, if. A daughter never responding to these lonely little postcards.
“You can reach me on this number if you want.” A line sometimes included and always ignored. Because how could a conversation like that happen? Like you’d say Hello, what did you have for breakfast today, Mum? How’s the last half-decade been? The question on her mind more and more these last few weeks was how to know when she was choosing a thing as opposed to it being chosen for her.
The fire crackled and wheezed and her father’s head moved forward. He rubbed his face as he looked at his watch and with great feeling he said, “Fuck.” She pretended to be asleep.
8
He asked Lena what she thought the barman did in his spare time.
The reply came quickly: “Child killer, probably.”
He blinked.
“Or,” Lena added, “a collector of model aircraft. Tiny B-52s, let’s say. Or maybe, if you really want to know, a Harrier Jump Jet. All laid out on his dining table, next to his sticky stamp collection.”
“All stamps are sticky, I’d chance.”
“His in particular,” she said.
“Well. Jump Jets.” He found he was looking at the blue frill of her bra strap. Felt his face gathering heat as he glanced away. After a pause she adjusted the shoulder of her dress and said her father had been with the armed forces. A vicar for a while in the British Army. The family had lived in north Devon.
“Man of the Church,” Dan said, though the word on his mind was Anglican.
“I think he probably would have preferred the RAF. The passion was planes but his eyes weren’t good enough, see. He died last year. Don’t ask if we were close.”
“I won’t.”
“Everyone asks, that’s all. It’s the idea that it hurts more if you were close.”
“Not true?”
She shrugged. “It hurts just the same either way. It hurts the same as it’s worth.” She looked to the wall and drank a good amount of wine. “By the way, I’ve strong views on nothing.”
“Is your ma alive?”
“Oh,” Lena said. “Always there with an answer. Though like a deaf woman it’s rarely an answer to what you’ve asked.”
He laughed. “I know the feeling.”
“Originally from Poland. She was my father’s cleaner, the vicar’s cleaner.”
“A scandal.”
“Not a big one, though, by the standards of the Church.”
“True,” he said.
They drank and looked around.
“You know,” he said. “I had that Latin waiter down as a tango dancer rather than a child killer.”
“Did you?”
“I had him down as a tango dancer whose father had a stake in a—a hair gel factory. That’s how he got the ticket to Ireland. His father cashed in some of those…”
“Dividends?”
“Know your finances, do you?”
“And you probably know your knitting,” she said. “It’s almost like we live in the twentieth century.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Fuck off.”
“Fuck you too, Lena.”
She smiled and drank.
The conversations that went on around them were impossibly banal to his ears. A feature of most nice parts of town was that people spent a lot of time discussing the fact that the nice parts of town weren’t as nice as they once were. The other drinkers gave off an air of negativity, snobbery, paid-down mortgages. While he couldn’t say any of them looked exactly unkind, Lena was the only one who was alive to him.
Which aspect of her life to probe? They looked at each other. He imagined her past. It contained a year or two of trailing wildly through Europe, modelling for mail-order catalogues, being cornered by a prick in a well-lit Paris attic, sleeping on the streets of Rome and then building a new hard shell for herself here. It seemed a shame in a way to discover what was true.
“A gypsy king gets to be king by calling himself one.”
“What?” she said.
“Sorry. Random thought for the night. Passed some travellers earlier. The gypsy king in a given group, he gets to be king by announcing it, I read.”
“And then proving himself?”
“Maybe. But mainly it’s a matter of confidence, is the point.” His dick was hard against his inner thigh. “I used to swim,” he said. “Do you swim at all?”
She shook her head and he tried not to let his disappointment show.
“You’re a thoughtful one, aren’t you?” she said.
“I can shut up any time you want. My friends are always telling me: Jack, why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
“Are they?”
“No. Not really. My friends never say that.”
“Because you’re so fascinating?”
“Because my name’s not Jack.”
She laughed and touched her hair, took a slow slip of wine. Be bold, he thought. Do what’s bold.
“I’ve money for a room,” he said. “I’m guessing you’ll not be staying here otherwise. Would you join me for a drink, in a good room? I doubt at these prices it’s full.”
A pause. “And why would I do that?”
“For a nice drink.”
“I have a drink here. It happens to be nice.”
“How nice, though?”
“Any other reasons?”
“For what?”
“Why you’d want me in a room?”
“I’m outraged,” he said. “I’m offended is what I am.”
“I’m lacking a boatload of the pre-sex information, you know.”
“There’s pre-sex information? That’s a thing?”
“To be sure it is,” she said. “Name, birthday, origin of that accent.”
“My accent is pure Falls, as you’ll know. Once we’re upstairs we can do our bit to broker peace.”
“Weakest line yet,” she said. “I think I even heard some English.”
“Bollocks you did. It’s you that has the English.”
“Maybe you don’t notice it in yourself.”
“Aye, bollocks.”
“Saying ‘aye’ now, are we? Certain way you say a thing. Your language lets you down.”
“You should hand out a wee form when you first meet a guy,” he said. “Client info.”
She narrowed her eyes. He wasn’t sure why he’d said it. A feeling he had in his gut.
“The thing is,” she said, “I don’t go in for racists.”
“Oh?”
“Picking on my handsome Argentinian. The one who brought us our drinks. Nasty.”
“I seem to recall you called him a child killer.”
“Nothing nationality-specific in that, is there? Whereas all that stuff about greasy hair, stereotypes…”
They looked at each other for a long moment. She was quicker than he was. She was still smiling. He thought of it as a smile. At a neighbouring table a man was supporting his wife in conversation, murmuring affirmative words and corroborating facts. He wished he could swap his Tullamore for a vodka and water. He was sick of the bite the whiskey left in his nose. A platter of fruit travelled by and something about its molecular complexity, its sheer decorative excess, made his stomach do a flinch. He was drunk, for sure. Drunk.
“If you think I’m racist you’ve got it totally wrong. You don’t know me from Adam.”
“Who’s Adam?”
“Adam and Eve. Any bells?”
“Ding dong,” she said.
“It’s an expression, Lena.”
“Oh”—she bit her delicious bottom lip—“I thought he might be a friend of Jack.”
“Jack?”
“Jack who gets told by his friends to shut up.”
“Oh…Jack.”
He tried to smile but couldn’t quite do it. Knew he was being teased but couldn’t quite accept it. Felt a trace of the old embarrassment he’d experienced at school, knowing something he’d said wasn’t right, or that he’d sniggered at the wrong bit of a naughty story. He looked at his face in mirrors these days and thought he could see the emotional muscle tone slowly going soft, replaced by little twists and twitches, and when he smiled the smile glowed with engineered cheer—the McCluskeys’ flashing Santa. And now, sitting here looking at this beautiful woman—she was beautiful now; she’d been promoted from pretty to beautiful on account of being tricky to access—he was thinking of Dawson again and he could hear a dog barking and a new anger was rising up in him. He didn’t know what to do with it.
“I couldn’t be less racist,” he said. “Not least with the Argies. The Falklands? You know about the Falklands? I’m hoping you don’t subscribe to the standard propaganda.”
“Boring,” she said, tipping a last drop of wine through her lips.
His face fe
lt stiff, warm. “No, it’s not boring. They had no right to be there.”
“We, you mean.”
“The Brits. No right.”
Her eyes shone as new wine arrived. A white cloth was draped over the waiter’s sleeve. He filled Lena’s glass and proceeded to pour an unrequested one for Dan.
“Everyone’s a right to take back what’s theirs,” she said. “Do you disagree? Don’t you, as a rule, like to take what you deserve?”
If there was a sexual connotation to this, an invitation to steer things back towards the personal, he didn’t have the wherewithal to grab at it. “That’s what the Argies did. They’re the ones who took back what was theirs.”
“In the night,” Lena said. “Sneaking.”
“You’d have preferred walking or charging.”
“Seized the airfield and barracks, did they not? Overnight with no notice, my brother says.”
So then, a brother. He drank some wine and tried to act empty. “You mention advance notice, ultimatums. But why do you think Thatcher offered no ultimatum to Buenos Aires? Why do you think she gave orders to sink the Belgrano, no warning? Sailing west, it was, withdrawn from action.”
“Presumably there aren’t always warnings.”
“With terrorists?”
“With war.”
He mentioned the UN. She blinked. She didn’t know. Her ignorance filled him with new fuel. “Discussions were going on in the United Nations in New York about—whatever—the leasing or whatever of the islands. Did you not read that, Lena? No? That’s a huge thing, the main thing. There were discussions of the Argies having them back. So, what happens? Thatcher makes calls to get these discussions to collapse, I believe, many people believe. That’s why the junta, as a last resort, revived their dormant old invasion plan. Because that’s the context. Responsibility, you know? Here’s more context: Thatcher’s tough time at home, humiliated, mocked for being weak. Laughed at in the Commons, right? So what does she do? The fair thing, the reasonable thing? Or the thing that will play well with the public, at the expense of lives? Fights aren’t all about the fight, that’s all I’m saying. They’re always about something else. They’re about—it’s the past. Egos and…and weaknesses. About people silencing other accounts, pretending there’s a single story.”