by Alex Coleman
Melissa took a long time to answer my ring at the door. When she finally did emerge, she nodded sharply at me and turned on her heels.
“You’re back,” she said quietly as she went down the hall to the kitchen.
No missed calls from her either, I thought.
Niall poked his head out of the living room as I stepped inside.
“Hello,” he said. “I missed you because you were GONE.”
With that, he disappeared inside again, slamming the door behind him.
“I missed you too!” I called out.
I found Melissa furiously scrubbing a casserole dish in the sink.
“Niall seems to be in good form,” I said. “Gave up on the singing, did he?”
“Yup,” she said, to the casserole dish more than me. “No more episodes?”
Her shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry I ever used that word. And the answer’s no. He’s been fine.”
I sat on a stool. “And how are you?” “Fine.” More scrubbing.
“So … I met Robert yesterday.” No response.
“Melissa?”
She half-turned. “What?”
“I said, I met Robert yesterday.” She turned back. “And?”
“It wasn’t good. The Sun had it more or less right. And he blames Gerry for him getting into trouble. He’s talking like Chrissy now, never speaking to his dad again, that kind of thing. And, on top of it all, he’s back to his old self with me. He was so rude. I was very upset.”
“You were probably nagging him again.”
I decided to play nice. “Even if I had been, and I wasn’t, it’s no excuse. He should –”
“And what did Nancy have to say about it all?”
Even though I couldn’t see her face, I could tell by her voice that she had screwed it up on the word “Nancy”.
“Are you all right, Melissa?” I said. “You seem to be annoyed about something.”
She stopped scrubbing and turned around fully, then folded her arms and leaned back against the sink. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I am annoyed as a matter of fact. Do you want to take a guess why?”
I felt my teeth grinding together. “How about we skip that part and you just tell me why?”
“OK. I will. We’ve been very good to you, I think, over the past few days.”
“Of course you have.”
“And when you left here yesterday lunch-time, all agitated and flustered about Robert, I was all agitated and flustered too. But you didn’t even bother to call me and tell me how it went. I got a bloody text saying you were off to Nancy’s and you’d call later.”
“But –”
“Let me finish. Then, when I was just starting to seriously worry, I get another text saying, oh, you’ve decided to stay with Nancy now.”
“Do you have to do that every time you say her name?” “Do what?”
I pulled a face – and a voice. “Nancy.”
Melissa shook her head sadly. “Unbelievable. I’m saying her name wrong now …”
“I could do without the tone, that’s all,” I said.
“Well, hard luck. It’s quite obvious to me that you only came to us in the first place because the wonderful Nancy – did I say it right that time? – the wonderful Nancy wasn’t around. And as soon as she was available again, you dropped us like a hot spud. After, what is it, nearly a week, you didn’t even think to call me and let me know what was going on. Texts, Jackie. Fucking texts.”
“You’re being very dramatic,” I countered. “It wasn’t supposed to be a snub, Jesus. Nancy’s my best friend. Of course I’m going to want to see her at a time like this. What, do you expect me to apologise for that?”
“No. I expect you to apologise for treating my house like a hotel where you –”
“A hotel! Oh, for –”
“– where you can come and stay when it suits and just bugger off with barely a backward glance when it doesn’t.”
“Melissa, I don’t particularly feel the need to explain myself to you, but the fact is, I didn’t mean to stay over in Nancy’s last night. But we got talking –”
“Oh, did you now?”
I pulled my lips tight over my teeth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Talking. If I was anything more than a B&B to you –” “Sorry, I thought it was a hotel.”
“Don’t try to be a smart-arse, Jackie, it doesn’t suit you. If I was anything more than a hotel to you, then surely to God you’d have had a talk with me by now. But no. You’ve had no interest in talking to me about Gerry and what the hell you’re going to do about it. It’s been downright weird, frankly. Colm thinks so too. I’m good enough for putting a roof over your head, obviously, but not good enough for actual conversation. You need a Nancy for that kind of thing, don’t you?”
In the sink behind her, the casserole dish suddenly fell over from its side, causing me but not Melissa, to jump.
“What I was about to say, before you interrupted me, was that I didn’t intend to stay with Nancy, but we got talking and opened a bottle of wine, so before I knew what was what, I couldn’t drive.” As soon as I said this, I realised it was bad on two scores. Firstly, it wasn’t strictly true. And secondly, it gave a serious poke to a sleeping dog. I held my breath, hoping Melissa would resist the obvious come-back. She didn’t.
“That doesn’t usually stop you,” she said.
I closed my eyes for a couple of seconds. When I opened them again, Melissa had turned back to her scrubbing. I didn’t know if she had done so with a sense of shame or triumph, and I didn’t really care. For a moment, I considered telling her that it was the first time I’d been drunk in almost three years. But that, I decided, was hardly the point.
“Maybe it would be best if I just left,” I said and slid off my stool.
Melissa didn’t reply. The sound of her assault on the casserole dish filled the air. I waited for a few seconds, then walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. It didn’t take me long to pack.
Niall met me in the hall when I came back down. “Where are you going?” he said quietly.
“I have to go away for a while,” I said. “But I’ll see you soon.”
I waited for his tears and hug.
“GoodBYE!” he said and ran off down the hall to his mother.
I slipped away.
CHAPTER 21
I was no more than twenty metres away from Melissa’s when the tears started to flow. By the time I’d made it around the corner and into the next street, they were coming so thick and fast that I could no longer see where I was going. I pulled in, switched off the engine, and waited for order to be restored. It turned out to be a long wait, twenty minutes at least. Just when I was beginning to get myself under control, an old lady came along. She wasn’t the first person to see me sitting there in a complete state, but she was the first who didn’t pick up her pace, staring straight ahead. Instead, she stopped and leaned on someone’s front wall, squinting at me through Coke-bottle glasses. Her face was a picture of puzzlement. I guessed that she no longer trusted her vision and wasn’t sure if this was what it looked like. After a few seconds she let go of the wall and started towards me. I wiped my nose on the ancient tissue I’d found in the glove compartment and tried to stop my shoulders from heaving. When she was a few feet away from the car, she raised her right hand and waved it vigorously from side to side at the wrist. I waved back, with much less enthusiasm. Then she was at my window, tapping with all five fingers.
“Hello in there,” she said through the glass.
I wound the window down. “Hello.” My voice sounded goopily nasal.
“Are you all right, love?” “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
I made myself smile. “Bad day. I’m grand, honestly. Thank you.”
She pushed her glasses up her nose. “Nothing I can do for you, love? A wee chat, maybe?”
For a moment, I considered telling her the whole story. It would be nice to
hear a stranger’s perspective, I thought.
“Nothing. Honestly. But thanks again. You’re very kind.” “All right, love. Take care.”
She shuffled off. I burst into tears again. This time they lasted half an hour.
* * *
It was just after two p.m. when I pulled up outside Gerry’s studio-cum-shop. He was in there, I knew, because the battered jeep was parked two spaces behind me. I lit a cigarette and smoked it manically, all the while keeping an eye on the front window. Stephanie, Gerry’s sole employee, was dealing with a customer who seemed to be having a great deal of trouble choosing a frame for something. I could tell that she was running out of patience with the guy; her occasional smiles formed too quickly and disappeared too suddenly to be genuine. By the time the customer finally pulled out his wallet, I was on cigarette number three. I waited for him to leave, finished the fag, and climbed out of the car.
Stephanie didn’t look up as her front door tinkled open. When she did, she gave me a smile that was the polar opposite of the one she’d used on her customer. We’d always rubbed along well together, possibly because she greatly enjoyed telling tales behind Gerry’s back and I greatly enjoyed hearing them.
“Well, stranger,” she said. “Haven’t see you in a while. Where have you been hiding?”
“Around and about,” I said. Ordinarily I would have stopped for a chat, or at least enquired after her mother (who had been dying any day now for the past two years). But not this time. “He’s in there, is he?”
“Yeah, he is. But he’s got someone with him, family portrait. Should be done any minute. Take a seat and I’ll make us a cup of tea.”
“No thanks. I’ll just go on back and hurry him up.”
Stephanie was clearly surprised by this. I’d never before entered the studio while Gerry was working, never. “He won’t be long, honestly,” she said. “I thought they’d be done by now, actually.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said and marched on through the Staff Only door. I found Gerry smiling and shaking hands with a woman of about my age. In the background, the woman’s husband was scolding their two small boys for what I could only presume had been poor modelling. All four were in their best gear; the boys looked deeply uncomfortable and faintly ridiculous in their little suits and ties. They reminded me of ventriloquist’s dummies. Gerry turned in my direction when I closed the door behind me. He stared at me for a second and then returned his attention to his client. I could tell that he had lost the thread of what he was saying.
“This is my wife, Jackie,” he said uncertainly as I stepped into the studio.
The couple nodded hello. I’d seen them around town but didn’t know their names. Gerry was too flustered to complete the introductions. I nodded back at them and walked across to the desk in the far corner. While they finished their goodbyes and thank-yous I kept my back to them all, pretending I was looking for something in a ledger. “Okay then,” Gerry said after a few seconds. He was speaking unnecessarily loudly now – for my benefit, I supposed, to signal that he was almost done. “Stephanie will sort you out, if you … uh …”
I heard footsteps then, followed by more goodbyes and thank-yous. The door opened and closed. I turned and saw that we were alone. Gerry put his hands on his hips, then wrung them together in front of him, then returned them to his hips. “Jackie,” he said and moved towards me. I started walking too. We met right in the middle of the floor, beside his tripod. “It’s great to see you,” he said, and then he wrinkled his nose. “Have you been smoking?”
I drew my right hand back and to the side, then smacked him as hard as I could across the face. It was like hitting a lump of solid wood. My palm tingled with pain. I rubbed it against my thigh, not caring how that looked.
Gerry barely reacted to the blow itself. But a second later, he staggered back and raised his hand to his cheek. I guessed that this was the result of shock, rather than injury.
“Jackie –” he began.
“Don’t you fucking ‘Jackie’ me!” I snarled. “You stupid shit. You’ve ruined our family. Ruined it! For some slut who doesn’t care whether you live or die. I hope you’re fucking happy!”
“What brought this on?” he said.
Now it was my turn to stagger back. “What brought … What?”
“I mean, you seemed fairly … I thought you were … y’know … Why are you freaking out now all of a sudden?”
I tried not to let it show that this was a good question. “I can freak out whenever I fucking want to!” I roared.
“Shhh!” he said. “Stephanie will hear you.” “I don’t care who fucking hears me!”
“Come on,” he said. “At least let’s sit down and talk about this in –”
I pointed my finger in his face. “Shut up, Gerry. Just shut up. I don’t want to talk to you.”
He spread his arms wide, angry now himself. “Then what are you doing here? Why did you come at all?”
I didn’t really have an answer to that one, so I said the first thing that came into my head. “In the front room! Behind a big fucking window! What were you thinking? Did you want to get caught, was that it?”
“I thought you didn’t want to talk.”
“Just answer the bloody question, Gerry!”
He dropped his head and looked at his feet. “Of course I didn’t want to get caught.”
“Explain it then.” “What, here?”
“Yes. Here.”
“Wouldn’t you rather –”
“Start talking, Gerry, or I swear to God . . .”
“All right, all right. Look … she took me by surprise. It all happened very quickly. She was at her front door when I arrived home and we got chatting, just … chatting.” He paused and took a deep breath. “We really should go somewhere else for this con–”
“Keep going,” I said.
Another deep breath. “She started telling me about her boyfriend. Michael. She said she wouldn’t be around for much longer because she was moving in with him.”
“Oh, I get it. So if you wanted to have sex with her, you’d have to do it sooner rather than later.”
He winced, then carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. “She invited herself in for coffee. I swear to God, Jackie. She invited herself in.”
“Why wasn’t she at work? What does she do anyway?” These were deeply unimportant questions, but I really wanted to hear the answers. I braced myself for “She’s a model”.
“She’s a medical sales rep. She had come home for her laptop charger.”
I heard the beginnings of a stinging comeback in my head, something to do with lap-dancing. Nothing came of it, so I nodded for him to continue.
“Jackie, are you sure you want to hear this? I don’t feel comfortable talking ab–”
“I don’t care about your comfort, Gerry. Get on with it.” “We went into the kitchen,” he said softly, “and I made the coffee. She asked a lot of questions about my job and then she said she’d like to see some of my pictures.”
“And you showed her the Cross-eyed Busker, I suppose.” This was the name we’d given to a shot Gerry had taken on weekend away in Donegal. The subject was a fiddle player we’d spotted on a street corner. When he noticed that someone was pointing a camera at him, he’d struck a pose, a sort of parody, in a way, all eyebrows and elbows. It would have been a decent photograph in any event – “an accident of the light”, Gerry called it – but what made it really special was the expression on the busker’s face. He’d smiled with the sort of pure and true delight that you normally only see in small children. The dramatic turn in his left eye made the smile seem even sweeter, somehow. Gerry blew the picture up when we got home and gave it pride of place on the living-room wall. It was far and away his favourite of his own photos. And it had been mine too, up until this moment. “Yeah,” he said. “I showed her the Cross-eyed Busker.” “Did she like it?”
“Jackie …”
“Did she?”
“She
said she did, yes.”
“So much that she just had to –”
“All right, I think that’s as far as we should go with this. You can guess the rest.”
“I want to hear you saying it.”
There was a tentative knock, the door opened and Stephanie stuck her head in. Gerry turned to face her. I turned away.
Stephanie’s voice was shaky. She’d obviously heard us raising ours.
“Eh, sorry to … Sorry. Gerry, Mrs Gogan’s on the phone about –”
“Tell her I’ll call her back.”
“I already tried that, but she’s called three times and she’s really angry, she said she’s getting a sol–”
“Stephanie, please.”
“Okay. Okay.” She retreated, closing the door as if she expected it to explode halfway through the manoeuvre.
I faced Gerry again. “You were saying?”
He put his hands on his forehead and let them slide down his face, dragging his lower eyelids.
“I don’t know how to describe it, other than to say … it just happened. We were talking about the picture and next thing I knew, she had her … hands … on my waist. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to say. And then she kissed me. And that’s all I’m saying about it.”
“I think you’re leaving a bit out.”
“Of course I am! What do you want, details?”
I tried to swallow but found that I couldn’t. “Did this happen because I’m going to be turning forty soon?” In truth, I’d never thought that it had anything to do with my age. I just wanted to make him feel even worse.
“What? Jackie! No. No.”
“She’s always fancied you. Obviously. Did she tell you that?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“And had you always fancied her?” “No!”
“Liar.”
“Jackie, what do you want me to say? I can’t pretend I hadn’t noticed the way she looks. But I wasn’t … after her.”