by Jo Baker
“Yes,” she said, and blushing, she tried to find something that might do, might move some way towards him.
“How are you?” she said eventually. “How’s work?”
Which was, Alan thought, a final kick in the head. How the fuck did she think work was? How could it be? With already too many students to teach, and hassle from faculty that there weren’t enough students applying, with the tidal floods of marking, the endless admin, and the increasing, ear-popping pressure to publish. And the conferences. He shivered, pressed his hands against his thighs. The conferences. Why did he always let himself down in a crisis? When that wee git from Trinity had suggested that Alan’s paper said nothing that had not been said twenty years ago and better, Alan should have—he should’ve told him—he should’ve told him to—Alan still wasn’t quite sure what he should have said, but it definitely wasn’t “Where?” because that had just meant the wee git from Trinity could reel off a list of sources and preen himself and look smug.
“Fine,” he squinted at her. “What about you?”
“Few days off,” she said, still weighted with her bags. “Getting myself sorted out. I got promoted.”
Ah. Alan almost said it out loud. So that was it. She’d come round here to brag. To show off about her crappy little promotion in her crappy little job.
“What to?” he said, his smile reinstating itself. For once he wasn’t lost for a witticism. “Bouncer?”
She smiled.
“Barperson. Pulled my first pint of Guinness the other day. Perfect, it was.”
“Whoopee doo,” Alan said, and felt unexpectedly foolish. He blushed, looked down at her feet. Her shoes looked worn and old.
“I’m thinking about going back to college,” she said brightly. “Art College, this time.”
He found himself bristling, but wasn’t sure why.
“You can’t draw. You always said you were crap.”
She shrugged. “I know.” She shifted the bagstrap, settling it more comfortably on her shoulder. “Listen,” she said. “I just wanted to say thank you.”
Alan looked up, opened his mouth, but couldn’t work out what to say.
“No worries,” he said.
“I only just found out,” she said.
“Ah.”
“Grainne never told me.”
“Oh.”
“That’s why I never said before. I would’ve.” She looked, he realised, a little uncomfortable. She looked slightly tearful. Grateful, even. Actually grateful. He felt himself expand. It was familiar, he could remember it from somewhere, this sense of warmth now spreading out across his chest. It was a long time since he’d felt like that.
“Right,” he said, and rolled back on his heels, enjoying the sensation diffusing through his body. “Well. Don’t mention it.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets, smiled proudly. “Think nothing of it.” Whatever it was.
It was only after she had left, and he had returned to his computer, and shuffled the mouse around to get rid of the screensaver, and reread his final paragraph, that it occurred to him he should have offered to help her with her bags.
Through the open sash of her window, Claire could hear the music of the pipe bands. They had been marching past the end of the street for half an hour now, one after the other, but she hadn’t recognised a single tune. Until this one. Played by boys in blue braided uniforms and peaked caps. It seemed to want to be the theme from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, but it couldn’t be, surely. The tune had, in any case, brought to mind a memory of childhood evenings, of soft cotton pyjamas and the smell of soap, and the drowsy warmth of her father’s encircling arm, the awareness of him there, watching TV over her head.
The house still smelt faintly of smoke and alcohol. Two days ago now, after shutting up Conroys for the Twelfth, they had come back there, the whole staff. Cracked into the beer, passed round a couple of spliffs. Later on, slumped into the sofa beside her, whiskey glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, feet on the coffee table, Gareth had asked blurredly:
“You going to be okay all on your own here?”
Claire, caught with a mouthful of beer, had not been able to answer.
“I don’t just mean the marching, now, you know.”
She swallowed.
“I’ll be fine.”
He had looked at her a moment longer, then nodded.
“That’s all I wanted to hear.”
Blinking, he had dragged on his cigarette, blown the smoke away, smiled. “If you get bored while we’re away, you know, feel free to get on with landscaping the garden.” He grinned at her. “I think there’s a trowel out there somewhere, rusting away on the back lawn.”
The next day, he and Dermot had driven off to the airport together, looking pale and sickly, Gareth’s hands shaking slightly on the steering wheel.
Claire shifted, felt the sun warm on the back of her neck. They would be on the beach. Baking under the dark sky. Baring their pale bellies to the sun. Blistering slightly, pinking; rubbing in lotion and wincing. Or, shirts flapping open, they would be wandering along the promenade, glancing into souvenir shops, on the unacknowledged sniff for English-language newspapers. Silently eyeing the turned-down TV in the corner of a cool dim bar, sipping cold beer as they waited for the sight of dark familiar streets, fire, and the metal hulk of armoured vehicles. Along with everyone else. The whole vast migratory crowd. Crowding around hotel lounge TVs, passing round a copy of yesterday’s useless Mail, dismissing gossip but passing it on anyway. And in Malone mansions and riverside apartments and damp flats and back-to-backs the stayers-on held their breath and waited. Because no one, really, knew what was going to happen. No more than she did.
Claire shifted again. The cushion wasn’t really comfortable and the windowsill was digging into her back, but from where she sat she could see all the way up the street, all the way down. The warmth of the sun was pleasant, the breeze was stirring her hair. She took a swig of coffee. It was cold. She spat it back. She glanced into the half-full cup, wondered how many times she had done that already this morning. She pushed the cup away, picked up the A3 sheet again. Unpacking, she had found it zipped up in the side pocket of her rucksack. It had been sitting there, unnoticed, since Oxford; she had been carrying it around all this time.
Folded into halves, quarters, eighths, it was frail along its creases. The image was dirty, smudged and unclear. The whole thing looked much older than she knew it could be; it seemed, despite everything, to have no connection with her at all. The perspective was terrible. No one’s legs could lie like that, unbroken. The black scrawl in the centre of the belly looked more like a gunshot wound than a navel. And those were not her breasts. Not remotely. Hers weren’t nearly that big. And hard or soft, no nipples could have looked like those nipples. Not without needing medical attention. And the arms were different lengths, they buckled at the elbow, tapered into spikes instead of hands. And the face, roughly ovoid, blank, featureless, didn’t stare back at her: it couldn’t.
She folded the picture up along its creases, weighed it in her hand, then skimmed the fattish square out across the floor. It landed near the wastepaper basket. Alan had tried. He had really tried. He had sat and scraped away at his A3 sheet with energy and determination. It was just a shame he couldn’t draw. The picture was terrible, empty. It said nothing.
There was a large rectangular mirror on the landing wall, she knew, just one flight down. And Gareth had told her to help herself to anything, to make herself at home. She heaved herself up from the floor, headed for the door. Passing the wastepaper basket, she paused to pick up the folded paper, and dropped it in.
The mirror was heavy, thickly framed in wood. She took its weight carefully in her arms, lifted it from the wall. As she turned to carry it back up to her room, she found herself imagining that her father was there, climbing the stairs beside her. He would have put a hand to the burden; he would have steadied her.
“I’d do that for you,” she could almost hear him say.
>
“That’s okay,” she thought. “I’ll manage.”
“You be careful. Don’t hurt yourself.”
“I won’t.”
She set the mirror down on the floor, angled it against the end of the mattress, then squatted back down on her cushion. She felt as though he was settling down near her, perching on the windowsill, looking at their twin reflections. She picked up her new-bought sketchpad, her old ink pen. She unscrewed the cap. She could almost feel the brush of his faded cords against her shoulder, his breathing in the concentrating silence.
“I haven’t done this in ages.”
He would have smiled at her.
“I know.”
She smoothed out the paper with a hand.
“D’you remember?”
“Of course. I always hoped you’d get started again. You get it from your mother, you know.”
“No …”
“You got the pen from her, didn’t you?”
She lifted the pen to look at it, then squinted at the nib. She picked off a strand of fluff, staining her thumbnail black with ink.
“Yeah, but …”
“All that stuff. You get it all from her.” His fingers moving, a ripple in the air.
“Like what?”
“Finding the right lines, putting the patterns together. Linking things. It’s like her mapmaking, back at college. It is a cartography pen, after all.”
Claire saw seamonsters and spouting whales blossom in the margins of her blank page, here be dragons calligraph itself neatly across the bottom. She paused, smiling, looking down, pen against her lips.
“And one more thing: once you’ve finished, send it to your mother. Show her what you’re up to.”
“I don’t know …” Claire said.
“It matters to her. She needs to know that you’re okay.”
“I am okay.”
“And Jen. Give Jen a call.”
“Yes.”
She looked up at her reflection. The sketchpad protruded above her knees. The mirror caught its edge, the narrow black pen in her right hand, the upturned palm and curling fingers of her left. It caught the soft pink bunch of her toes, spreading slightly on the carpet, the smooth slope of her shins and the curve of her knees. It showed the rounds of her shoulders, the dips and hollows of her collarbone and the way the light seemed to curl around her throat. There wasn’t a black line limiting her, marking out the space she took up in the world, telling her where she stopped and everything else began. There couldn’t be. Her body curved away beyond its horizon.
Her hand descended, rested on the paper. She began again to draw.