A Small Part of Me

by Noelle Harrison

  ‘That’s good.’ He finishes his pie, sits back and, raising his mug to his lips, looks at her.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she asks suddenly, then quickly laughs. ‘But that’s ridiculous, of course I don’t.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Ireland. I’ve never been in America before.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She looks straight back at him now, for the first time. Her eyes are the same colour as the sky outside. ‘I like it. It’s not as flashy or fast as I thought it might be. It’s not so different from home.’

  She plays with her spoon and he looks at her fingers. She has a wedding band. She catches him looking and glances at his hand.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asks.

  ‘Separated.’

  ‘Right, sorry.’ Again she blushes. He plays with his shades, pushing them further back on his head.

  ‘It’s okay. And you?’

  ‘Same,’ she whispers shakily.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She laughs. ‘Yes, absolutely. It’s just…’ she glances at Cian.

  ‘Mammy, can I go and look at the books?’ Cian has clearly finished his pie. He groans slightly and holds his tummy with sticky hands.

  ‘Yes, but we can’t buy anything, okay Cian?’ She wipes his fingers with her napkin, wets it with her mouth and cleans his face.

  ‘Okay,’ he says dolefully.

  ‘So, do you live around here?’ she asks Luke, putting the damp napkin aside.

  ‘Nope, Seattle. I was visiting people too.’

  ‘Right. And are you going back to Seattle now?’

  ‘No.’

  Again their eyes lock. He feels like he knows what she’s about to say.

  ‘I wonder…’ she swallows nervously. ‘I wonder would you know the best way of getting to Vancouver Island from here?’

  ‘Sure I do.’

  She looks at him expectantly. This is strange, he thinks, this woman. Who is she?

  ‘You can drive to the next town up, Anacortes, and take a ferry to Vancouver Island. It only takes a few hours and it’s very scenic,’ he adds, grinning.

  ‘Right.’ She looks crestfallen.

  ‘You got a car?’

  She shakes her head, picks up her coffee and sips it again. He watches her detach from the conversation, dip her chin down to her chest and finger the broken edge of the table. He could take her and the little boy to Canada. But that would mean he couldn’t go and see Bill – he had wanted to go on his own. He looks out the door of the bookstore at the stores opposite, the legions of tourists gliding by, the white heat of the day glancing off the sidewalks.

  ‘I can give you a ride,’ he says quietly.

  GRETA

  She gazes east towards Ahous. The landscape is washed in a soft pink glow, the water lapping up onto the beach and gently folded further out. There’s a slight breeze; it refreshes her.

  Henry takes the pot of rice out from the sand where he buried it to keep it warm an hour before. They’re back from the other side of the island and a swim by the rocks. Her skin still prickles from the excitement of the chilly water, and although her fingers are cold, she feels warm inside.

  They hunker down by the fire and begin to eat. Henry has put avocados, red onions and olives in the rice. It’s delicious, though she’s so hungry anything would taste good.

  ‘We should get an early night,’ Henry says. ‘We need to conserve our strength – we’ve got two long stretches of open water to cross tomorrow and they could be difficult. It depends on the weather.’

  She nods, watching him as he eats. He looks the part – lean, hardy, a pioneer.

  It was physical attraction that brought them together. That, and the fact that Bill drove her away.

  She remembers the first time she laid eyes on Henry. It was impossible to miss him – he looked like he had walked straight out of a spaghetti western, he looked like Clint Eastwood. And he had the same silent presence about him. No need to say anything, he just exuded a quality that had every woman in the bookstore where she worked turning around.

  At the time all she wanted to do was escape La Conner and Bill’s probing. It had been fine when she had first married Bill. She had been attracted to his art and their romantic bohemian lifestyle and his wild ways, dancing naked in the moonlight, taking acid, planning trips to Tibet. It was so divorced from her previous life that it was easy to forget all that.

  When Greta left Ireland, she headed straight for Boston and her sister Maureen. She’d been in an awful state.

  Now when she looks back, Greta realises that Maureen was only trying to help her, but at the time she had felt that she was judging her. All those drugs they had pumped Greta with had her off balance. She began to hear voices. When Greta confided this to her sister, Maureen was keen for her to go to the doctor, but of course Greta was terrified of doing that. So one morning she just left, walked out of her sister’s apartment without so much as a good-bye and caught a bus to New York. They hadn’t seen each other since, though they had spoken occasionally by phone. Their relationship was still distant and stilted.

  The day Greta arrived in New York, with no money and nowhere to stay, she ran into Bill. She was sitting on a bench in Central Park wondering what to do, and he had sat down next to her. He picked her up.

  Bill took Greta to a three-day party, a hazy blur of nothingness, just what she needed at the time. They became a couple overnight, Greta immediately moving into his studio apartment in Brooklyn. It suited her to get lost in Bill’s life, to focus with him on his obsession with his art. His career became the most important thing in their lives, which were hectic, chaotic days with little structure. Everything was part of the strive towards Bill’s success.

  After a couple of months Bill announced that he thought they should head west. He had heard of a place – La Conner – where lots of artists lived, inspired by nature and native mysticism. He needed to get out of the city and back to his roots. Apart from anything else, they owed back rent. So off they went on the longest bus journey of Greta’s life.

  It was when they got to La Conner that Bill started asking about her past. Said they should sober up and sort themselves out. She hadn’t been able to handle that - Bill trying to get inside her head - so it had been easy falling for Henry.

  He never asked questions.

  They got together the first day she saw him. She had been walking home from the bookstore and Henry had driven past in an old pick-up truck and asked her if she wanted a ride. She had directed him the long way home and asked if he wanted to see a beautiful old cedar tree inside the woods. It was hard to remember who made the first move because they fused under the tree. They were kissing, just kissing, for more than an hour, until it got dark. Nothing else happened, but Greta knew that she could no longer stay with Bill. This tall stranger had mesmerised her. She had packed her things that night and left early the next day. She didn’t even have the courage to tell Bill, she had just left him a note.

  It was hard to believe she was still with Henry – over twenty years now. She’d never expected that.

  They were growing old together.

  ‘Do you remember when we met?’ she says, using her fingers to eat some of the sticky rice.

  ‘Sure,’ he says, smiling. ‘You were working in that bookstore, serving coffee. I went in to buy a book, but when I saw you behind the counter I just had to get a coffee.’ He smirks, filling a small pot with water and placing it on the fire.

  ‘What was it about me that you liked the most?’

  ‘Your hair. No,’ he says, ‘it was your eyes, and the fact that you didn’t smile.’

  ‘Most people like it if you smile.’

  ‘You just looked like a bit of an angel to me.’

  ‘Henry, you old softy.’ She goes over to his side of the fire and cuddles in next to him. He puts his arm around her.

  ‘You couldn’t wait to get away from crazy old Bill.’

  ‘Poor
Bill. I wonder if he ever made it as an artist.’

  ‘I’d say so,’ Henry says. ‘He sure was serious about it.’

  ‘It’s odd to think that he’s not that far away, really. All these years, we could have bumped into him. I still feel guilty about it all.’ She takes Henry’s hand and draws a circle in his hard palm with her finger.

  ‘Well, Greta, I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She stops playing with his hand and looks up at him.

  ‘For a start, if he’d really loved you he should have come after you.’

  ‘Is that what you would have done?’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t just up and leave me, would you?’ he grins.

  ‘Don’t be so sure of yourself.’ She kisses his cheek.

  ‘Anyway, I heard from a pal a few months after we left that Bill had already shacked up with someone else, that Martha woman who ran the bookstore where you worked.’

  Greta pulled back from Henry. ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘Yep. Didn’t take him long to find someone to console him and she was pregnant as well, so it could have been going on while you were still there. You see, Greta, there’s always two sides to every story. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t the innocent party.’

  ‘Why have you never told me this before, Henry?’

  ‘Didn’t seem to be much point. I know the way you hate talking about the past. Any time I ask you about your childhood or Ireland you clam up, but I can understand why you don’t want to talk about it, the way your parents died like that…no wonder you left.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Henry.’

  ‘It’s not important who you were then, I know who you are now. I know exactly what you like and what you don’t like. I know your moods and when you want to be alone and when you want to make love. I know your scent and the little sounds you make when you sleep. You’re my life partner now. We don’t need to delve into what happened before.’

  ‘But that’s only a small part of me,’ Greta says quietly. ‘I’ve always felt that I haven’t been completely honest with you.’

  It’s nearly dark now. Henry turns and looks into her face. She can see the whites of his eyes, bright in the darkness, and the outline of his long chin, like a chisel.

  ‘Okay, tell me then,’ he says. ‘It won’t make any difference. Tell me what you’ve been hiding all these years. It won’t change who you are, Greta.’

  Greta hesitates. Where can she start? How can she tell him without him despising her? She pushes her fingers under the sand, then brings them up so that the sand trickles off the back of her hand. A small spider scurries up her wrist. She blows it away.

  ‘I was married before, in Ireland,’ she says.

  He smiles benignly at her. ‘I’d guessed as much,’ he says. ‘I knew you were on the run.’

  ‘Why did you never ask me more?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I reckoned you were going to tell me when you were good and ready. Though I never thought it was going to take this long.’ He laughs and gets out his tobacco pouch and papers and begins to roll up.

  ‘What about you? What are your secrets?’ Greta asks.

  ‘I don’t have anything to hide, Greta. You know I grew up in Vancouver, in the suburbs. I just had a regular childhood – a mother and a father, two sisters, one brother. You know all this, how I dropped out of college and drifted for a while, until I met you. It wasn’t until I met someone more rootless than myself that I felt the need to put down roots!’

  He slides his tongue along the edge of the paper, twists the end and lights up, immediately passing it to Greta. She inhales deeply and closes her eyes, letting her nostrils fill with the aroma of grass. They sit in silence for a while, smoking.

  Henry leans over and pushes the hair out of Greta’s eyes. ‘You okay, honey?’ he says.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me who he was? Don’t you want to know?’

  ‘If you want to tell me,’ he says, getting up and tying the food up in a bag. ‘I’ll just hang the food up,’ he says and disappears in the dark.

  Greta collects together the dirty pot and plates and goes down to the edge of the ocean. As she cleans them, by touch rather than sight, she decides not to say any more. Everything is so simple here, why complicate things?

  Maybe that’s the best way to live, she thinks. Maybe it’s better to keep your secrets close to your chest and not tell anyone. But there were things that had never been explained.

  Like why Greta had never wanted children. She’d been so adamant about it that the subject became a no-go area. Then there was the time Henry had picked up a second-hand sewing machine and brought it home for her, only to find it in the trash the next day. There were the days when Greta hardly spoke, just sat out front staring at the sea, questioning her own sanity. There would be no food on the table for dinner, no conversation, but Henry had learned never to interfere. Only once did he suggest she go to the doctor because she seemed a little depressed. Greta had exploded, storming out of the house, and at the time she had wondered whether she would actually return. But when she did he never asked her why she had got so angry, and now too many years had passed.

  She goes back up to the camp and Henry is already inside the tent. She climbs inside.

  ‘Okay?’ he asks.

  ‘Yep.’ She snuggles in next to him. ‘I love you, Henry Kittle.’

  He chuckles and pulls her close to him. ‘You do, do you?’

  She shimmies down the sleeping bag and kisses around his belly button. Then she strokes him with her hand. Her tongue finds its target and she gently licks each ridge of skin before she opens her mouth. Henry moans and touches her hair, pulling it back from her face and gripping it with one hand in a tight ponytail.

  ‘I love you too, Greta Kittle,’ he sighs.

  CHRISTINA

  This is okay, she thinks. I’m not so unlucky. Luke has the window wound down on both sides of the truck. The air blows through, making it hard to speak. It’s easier just to look out at the landscape and feel her hair lift up from her face. For the first time in days she has a moment to relax. Cian sits between them with Walter placed firmly on his lap. He’s quiet too. Out of the corner of her eye she can see his eyelids droop and his head nod forward. She looks over at Luke.

  Why does she think she knows him?

  She smiles to herself. Declan would go spare if he saw them now, riding along in a truck with a complete stranger, heading off into the unknown. Declan had been so busy wrapping them all up in cotton wool that he hadn’t realised he was suffocating her.

  She can think about that time now. Here, where she’s dislocated, where there’s nothing to remind her of that pain. It had been summer then too, last year, and she remembered her sense of desolation as she wandered through the little laneways and boreens behind her house. All that activity around her, the flies buzzing, wood-pigeons cooing, the leaves whispering and people driving by, waving cheerily. Life went on around her and she couldn’t find the will to be in it. She would walk for hours and when she finally got home it would be lunchtime and she’d tell herself that it would be okay to have a drink then – a glass of white wine sitting in the garden, that always made her feel better.

  It was the boys who suffered. Cian spent the long, lonely summer all on his own, spending each day talking to his teddies, making up elaborate play games that she chose to ignore. She would leave him on his own in his room for hours, running around, talking to himself. She convinced herself he was happy enough, that it was good to learn to play on your own.

  And Johnny – his shame, aware that she was drinking, embarrassed to bring friends home. He would disappear for days on end in the summer, hanging out at his pals’ houses so that he seemed to have better relationships with their mothers than her.

  It wasn’t until she crashed the car outside Johnny’s school that Declan had finally taken notice of her. It was only then, just a few months ago, that he had asked her what was wrong.

&nbs
p; With Angeline’s help she had tried to fix it. She stopped drinking, she stopped seeing Paddy and she went to the doctor and got some anti-depressants. Angeline would remind her, call her up.

  But the pills didn’t make her feel any better. Her soul was in pain, and all the Prozac did was get her moving on the outside but not inside herself. Angeline told her to hang on, that she needn’t take it forever, it was just to get her back on an equilibrium, she said, and then she could get some therapy.

  What for?

  She had no idea what was wrong with her. What could she say? She would just look a fool, like always.

  So Christina kept taking the pills. It looked like she was better. The house was immaculate, the clothes washed, she went shopping and cooked food. It was all a veneer, because at the times when she wasn’t busy she would catch herself looking into that black hole, and it still terrified her.

  Christina looks out of the truck at the broad, flat road and the cars weaving in and out of the traffic. She looks over at Luke and he glances at her and smiles.

  ‘We’ve got a couple of hours before the next ferry. Do you want to stop somewhere, go for a walk maybe?’

  ‘Okay, but Cian’s asleep.’

  ‘All righty, I’ll take you somewhere there’s a nice view.’

  He turns off the highway and heads down a smaller road framed by pine trees. They drive for a while, twisting and turning until they reach a bridge. Christina looks at the ocean as they drive over it. The water looks so clean and pure. Luke turns off the road and drives into a small car park. There are cedar trees all around them and camper vans and tents sprinkled about. At the edge of the car park is a view down to a stony beach and the ocean. A few children run up and down it. There’s a chilly breeze.

  ‘It’s nice to be by the sea,’ Christina says.

  ‘What’s it like, Ireland?’

  ‘Wet. Cold.’

  ‘Like Seattle then,’ he grins. ‘What kind of place do you live in?’

  ‘In the countryside. It’s rural.’

  ‘That must be nice.’ When he smiles she can see that one of his front teeth is chipped.