by David Park
A small boat is already far out. Perhaps it’s Arnie, eager to catch the fish before they have had a chance to rub the sleep from their eyes, when their stupor summons them to what looks like an easy breakfast. He strains his eyes to recognise the boat but it’s still blurred by the softness of the light. Some day he will take up his invitation and join him, even though he knows nothing of fishing and the only thing he has ever caught were smicks in a jamjar when he was a boy. He draws slowly on the cigarette, feels it balance him and clear his head. Only five a day now and this one is the best so it can’t be rushed or wasted in any way. He has already promised Ramona that when the child is born he will stop altogether, then as he remembers his words he panics a little and wonders how he will be able to do it, but tells himself it’ll be a small price to pay.
Across on the other shore where the big-money houses are, the first lights are starting to appear with housekeepers and cooks stirring things into life, getting things ready. They say some of the owners only come down from up north a couple of months a year and there’s always stories about their identity, so sometimes it’s big-shot businessmen or movie stars, and sometimes there are even whispers about shady money. The closest you can see the houses is from the lake; he had done the boat tour soon after he had arrived and still remembers his sense of wonder at their magnitude. Great baronial palaces with turrets, mock-Tudor and Gothic extravaganzas – he still remembers some of the descriptive words the tour guide had used – and all with their jetties and boathouses, all with their screened pools and perfect lawns stretching elegantly to the water’s edge.
He lets the smoke stream slowly through his lips. No heed to hurry – he has a little longer before it is time to go back up to the house and get the coffee going. Help Ramona waken. Sometimes she will stretch out her arms to him, invite him to join her in the limbo world between wake and sleep, and then he will slip inside the folds of her embrace and she’ll say he feels so cold and pull him tighter so that he smothers his face in the splayed black pillow of her hair and buries himself ever deeper in her sleep-stirred warmth. Then after a long while she will break the silence by saying, ‘What does a girl have to do round here to get a cup of coffee?’ and he will drag himself reluctantly from where he hides and stare into her brown eyes to see if he has dreamed this happiness or if it’s some illusion woven by sleep.
It must be some programmed biological clock, whose hands cannot be stopped, which wakes him every morning at the same time. Some legacy of a different time and place, some throwback that cannot be thrown away. At first he had forced himself back into sleep but each time that was when the dreams had come, so now as soon as he wakes, he gets up and goes outside to the lake, the lake where each morning he watches the light strengthen and shape the coming day. As the water breaks in little spurts of white to lap around the wooden posts of jetty, it looks as if he could scoop it up and hold it in the palms of his hands. Because it’s still early, the water is not coloured or skimmed by a burning shock of sky and as it seeps and slurps through the reeds and grasses, it lulls his senses, reminds him of where he is. In the condominium, on the other side of the coach house where they rent their apartment, yellow light blinks the windows’ eyes awake. Almost all of its inhabitants are old, retirees seeking to warm new or longer life into the tiredness of their limbs. Maybe their biological clocks are still locked in work time because by the time he goes to his own work some of them will have started their early-morning jogs, in their pressed tracksuits and fresh white trainers, their green sun visors shading their eyes but not hiding the serious concentration in their faces. Some will lift a hand in silent salute as they pass him, as if they have no energy to spare for words, and he will say good morning as they pass him with the curious, slow-angled shuffle that they all seem to share.
Gradually the light is beginning to sheen the water, frazzling the sleeping surface into trembling swathes. The cigarette is almost finished and from out on the road there’s the growing sound of cars. Already it feels as if the waking day has begun to claim what is rightfully its own, so he takes one slow final drag, then flicks the butt into the water that laps between the rushes. He stands and stretches, breathes some of the clean coolness of the lake and stares one last time at the fretting stretch of light. Every morning its pattern is different, impossible to predict, and that thought is enough now to make him uneasy, to start his day with a sudden shiver, and when he tells himself it’s only the cold, he knows it is a poor lie. Then he tries to rekindle a spark of comforting heat by telling himself that the longer things endure, the less chance there is of everything he now thinks as his being snatched away from him. The baby is growing. There is his job to go to every day. There is the lake itself which will soon settle into the fixed frieze of an unchanging and cloudless sky. For some reason he raises his hand. Perhaps it is a wave to Arnie far out in his boat, a greeting to the wakening houses on the opposite shore. His way of saying he belongs here. The syrupy swell ripples through the reeds and rushes. A promise to tell the truth? He spits the sudden sourness into the water and turns his back on the wavering seam of light beginning to stitch sky to water.
As he walks back up the lawn towards the white-painted coach house, the stream of his breath is like lazy smoke and the sky’s unfolding itself in a tautening skein of blue. Already he is thinking of Ramona, her eyes still soft with sleep and the possibility of her arms stretched in invitation. It quickens his step and throws the shiver into the shadows of memory. He thinks of the scent of her half-wakened body, the warmth of her honeyed skin that will embrace him and erase afresh whatever it is needs burying. The anticipation warms him and he feels his daily little burst of gratitude to where his life has brought him in the regular, comforting raising of his personal flag, the sincerity of his personal salute. Feels again there’s something in this country that makes each morning hold a newness, an opportunity for something more than just the making of a dollar. He tells himself it must be something to do with the light, the certainty of the slow bake of heat, or maybe it’s just the knowledge that your neighbour is already at his desk, or has jogged the first of many miles. In the kitchen he sets the coffee percolator going, starts to stir some breakfast and tries to flap the smell of smoke from his body before going into the bedroom. The white sheet is thrown back like the crumpled and ripped flap of an envelope and the bed is empty. There’s the second of panic he always feels when someone or something is not where he expected it to be, before he hears her retching in the bathroom. Knocking on the door even though it’s open, he enters to see her kneeling on the floor, her hands holding the sides of the toilet.
‘Bad?’ he asks and when she does not answer he kneels down behind her and strokes the black shock of her hair which always seems a coursing current of electric life. She points to the paper and he tears some sheets which she uses to wipe her mouth, then she spits several times and he helps her to her feet. Quickly she flushes the toilet as if she doesn’t want him to see, then going to the sink splashes her face with cold water. For a few seconds he stands behind her holding the train of her hair before she shakes it loose from his hands.
‘Men have it easy,’ she says, ‘a moment’s pleasure and they walk away. It’s the woman who has to do all the work.’ She holds her face close to the glass and looks at him with her brown eyes momentarily wide. Her face is paler than he has ever seen it, like the lake before the first light touches it. There are beads of water like small tears on her cheeks, on her upper lip and glittering the darkness of her eyebrows.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, as if apologising for all his gender, for all the men he knows have treated her badly in her past. For her father who raised his hand to show his love, for Vicente her ex-husband who abused and humiliated her and cheated on her every chance he got.
She half smiles. ‘I suppose it’s not your fault and I suppose you were only doing what I’d asked.’
He watches her pat her face with the towel, pressing it tightly against her skin and
holding it for a while. He rests his hand lightly on the small of her back, feels the heat of her body through the thinness of her nightdress. ‘Better if a stork brought them,’ he says as she takes the towel away and blinks again.
‘I look like shit,’ she says, stretching the skin below her left eye with the tips of her fingers.
‘You look beautiful,’ he answers, slipping both hands round the still faint swell of her belly. She squirms a little then settles back against him and they look at themselves in the mirror. The edge of her hair fans against his cheek. He breathes in the scent of her, takes pleasure from the heat that seems to come from the core of her being. They stand as if waiting for the mirror to preserve the moment in a photograph.
‘You’re a liar,’ she whispers, angling her head against his cheek and pressing the flow of her hair against his skin.
‘Would I ever lie to you?’ he asks, his face assuming a wide-eyed innocence.
‘I don’t know, Danny, would you ever lie to me?’ she teases and then as she sees his face fall, she presses herself tightly into him and clasps the arms that envelop her.
‘Come back to bed,’ he says, embarrassed to meet her eyes in the mirror. ‘There’s still time.’
‘I think I’ll be sick again if I lie down. I need some fresh air, something cold to drink.’
‘So you don’t want me to cook you some breakfast?’
‘No thanks, just some orange juice and a bit of dry toast maybe.’ She pushes gently free from the corral of his arms and reaches for her toothbrush. ‘Well was the lake still there? It hadn’t evaporated in the night or anything?’
‘Still there,’ he says, reluctant to give her up to the day, watching as she pulls her hair into a temporary ponytail with one hand.
‘And you’ll be a good father to this child?’ she asks, her attention focused only on placing toothpaste on the brush.
And he doesn’t know if she’s still teasing him or if she’s serious so he hesitates before he answers, looking for clues in her face, but all he can see in the mirror is the top of her head as she bends over the basin. She scrunches her shoulders as she brushes and the sound of the running water suddenly becomes loud in his ears and he tells her yes he will be a good father. Always. And the full force of the future is bright in his mind with truth. Always shining true in the transfigured days that lie ahead. It’s of what he can be certain, of what they can both be certain.
He leaves her to prepare the breakfast and set places for them both.
‘Do you want to meet up for lunch?’ she calls from the bathroom.
‘Basketball day, unfortunately,’ he says. ‘Sorry. You know what the guys are like about it.’
‘Yeah, yeah, and the team can’t do without Danny, the Irish Michael Jordan. Danny – you’re too small to be a basketball player,’ she says, standing in the doorway.
‘I’m the playmaker, the guy pulling the strings. Playmakers don’t have to be big. And anyway you’ve seen it; some of the guys who play can’t see their own feet. Lonnegan, the irrigation man, is so fat it takes about a day to run round him.’ She smiles and presses the towel against her face again. ‘Once he got whistled out for travelling – his own team cheered, said it was a miracle to see him moving off the spot.’
It’s what he does best. Making her laugh. Making her brown eyes spark into smiles. She flaps the towel at him, then disappears into the bedroom. By the time she’s dressed he’s everything ready on the table. She’s wearing the short-sleeved white blouse he likes with a pair of black trousers. The white sets off the brownness of her skin, the black fierceness of her hair. Everything about her strikes him as crisp and fresh, the way she seems able to stay all day, and for a moment he envies her the air conditioning of the college library, the coolness of the alcoves and the silent lairs of books and wooden shelves.
‘So you’d rather play basketball than have lunch with the mother of your baby?’ she teases.
‘We’re playing the waste technicians – dirtiest team in the league,’ he says and when she smiles, ‘No, I’m not joking, they really are. Why don’t you come over and watch the game?’
‘What you going to do – call time-outs every five minutes so you can share a bite of my sandwiches? Think I’ll give it a miss.’
‘You could be missing the game of the season,’ he says, ‘but anyway I’ll drop in for a few minutes, mid-afternoon break, soak up the air conditioning. Are you feeling any better?’
She nods her head and sips the orange juice. ‘When are we going to get married, Danny?’ she asks, setting the glass on the table.
‘Soon,’ he says. ‘Soon.’
‘You want to get married? You want me to beg?’
‘I want to get married,’ he says, looking at where her lips have blushed and dampened the glass. ‘There’s no one else I want to marry. There’s things I need to sort out first.’
‘What are these things you always talk about?’
‘Family things, just small things to tidy up.’
‘You haven’t got a wife already back in Ireland?’ she asks, almost smiling.
‘No, I haven’t. You know I haven’t got anything back in Ireland that’s important to me.’
‘I want it soon, Danny. Before it starts to show and I can’t get into anything but maternity wear. They would let us use the college chapel and Father Mulryne would do the ceremony. You could bring your mother over. I’d like to meet her.’
‘She’s getting on, I don’t think she’d be up to the travel,’ he answers, glancing at his watch.
‘Well in that case, after we get married, we can go over to Belfast, have a blessing ceremony there for all your relatives.’
‘You’ve it all worked out,’ he says, his voice neutral and quiet.
‘I guess someone has to take the lead because if I wait for you it looks like it might never happen.’
From the apartment above there is the sound of a radio. He tries to think of the calm of the lake, of how he can go to work now without leaving behind the ashes of an argument that will smoulder through the rest of the day and finally slowly flare into unhappiness for both of them.
‘It was you, Ramona, who always insisted that we go slow. That everything we did, we did slow. Always you were saying that you never wanted to make the same mistakes as you made before. That you had to be sure in your head.’
‘But that’s it, Danny, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’m sure, I am sure. Sure I’ve got one who’s never going to treat me badly, or raise his hand, or any of that shit.’
He reaches his hand across the table and takes hers. ‘I want to marry you, I want to marry you soon. And we will. I’ll talk to Father Mulryne, see how to go about it.’ He squeezes her hand and nods his head at her, and as she smiles quickly back he goes to her, places his hands on her shoulders and kisses her on the top of her head, his lips lingering in the springy tautness of her hair. ‘I’ll talk to him tonight, I promise. Now I got to go to work, make a dollar for this child that’s coming. You be all right?’
She says nothing but pats the back of his right hand with her palm and he tells her he’ll see her during the afternoon break and then lifting his cold flask and his cap he opens the door and steps on to the porch. Hesitating he considers going back but he looks at the stars and stripes Ramona draped over the stoop after September the eleventh, at the rising press of light, and knows there’s nothing more he can say. The silver flask feels cold against his skin and for a second he holds it against his cheek as if it might soothe away some of the stress beginning to burn in his head.
As always he walks to the college along the lakeside path. By now there’s a steady traffic of joggers, some elderly from the condominium, some faculty members and a few serious pursuers of physical perfection. This morning he chooses not to meet any of their eyes and returns any offered greeting with only a nod of his head. On the tennis courts the women’s team is having an early-morning training session and the constant thwack of the bal
l is broken only by the shouted instructions of the white-suited coach, who points with a racket that never seems to hit a ball. Sometimes she does a slow-mo of a particular shot at the same time as her other arm is used to illustrate the angle of the racket head or point to the position of her feet. Through the mesh of the fence it looks as if she is performing a kind of t’ai chi as sometimes the other players copy the rituals of her movements. On a bench a student smokes a cigarette and flicks the pages of a book. He catches the smell of smoke and feels the temptation rising. Just another one, a little before it’s time, to ease away the growing worry, but he thinks of the swathe of day he has to get through and fights it off and anyway he doesn’t want to be late. In nine years he has never been late or missed a day and so he has come to pride himself on it, hooked on the belief that it’s a record worth preserving.
He passes benches where students slump quiet and bleary as if left punch drunk by the early hour, staring miserably at the morning light, their books beside them in slovenly, sliding piles. Outside the canteen a girl on rollerblades is distributing fliers from a yellow bag slung across her shoulder. She is wearing khaki-coloured shorts and her elongated brown legs turn circles of herself like the arms of a compass. Already, knots of students, mostly male, are making their way to the canteen but there’s none of the high spirits or goofing about that usually mark these moments. They all wear a kind of uniform, a nondescript downbeat combo of jeans, trainers, open checked shirts over T-shirts, and baseball caps often worn back to front – a camouflage that’s carefully constructed to hide all signals of the family wealth and privilege that allow them to study in this exclusive, expensive place where the annual fees are more than he earns in a year. He watches them with no resentment because this is a world where envy is not allowed and he has long since ditched the negative, restricting weight of it. He passes along the front of one of the residential halls where contrary to campus rules brightly coloured towels are draped from open windows to dry. As always his eyes linger on the parked cars outside. In this area at least, ostentation is approved, and Japanese sports cars nestle neatly beside smoked-glass four-wheel drives. He cuts down behind the Health Center and the Marsden Graduate School, before following the narrow path that skirts round the back of the administration building. Down by the services entrance a secretary haloed in a fine gauze of blue is having a furtive smoke and for a second he thinks about joining her but remembers what Ramona said about men having it easy, about her being sick, and finds a new determination to stick to his five. But even that’s not enough to assuage his sudden pulse of guilt and he resolves that he will stop completely long before the baby arrives, have his lungs clean and clear before he holds her in his arms, because in his imagination she is always a girl.