Then she gave me the list of prenatal vitamins and stood from her chair as I gathered my belongings and thanked her.
‘Best of luck,’ she said, putting a hand on my shoulder as I left the room.
‘What about Assumpta?’
‘You’re just trying to piss me off now, Henry.’
‘What? Assumpta is a lovely name.’
‘Assumpta is the name of a deeply pious and unhappy woman.’
‘Assumpta is my aunt’s name!’
‘And no doubt she has swollen knees from all the praying.’
‘You’ve never even met her, Grace.’
‘Of course I haven’t. Assumpta is not the name of a people person. Assumpta is more of a cat person. Cats and nuns. That’s Assumpta’s social circle.’
‘All right. Forget Assumpta. Elizabeth. What about Elizabeth?’
‘Are you having an actual stroke?’
‘What could possibly be wrong with Elizabeth??’
‘It’s already taken.’
‘By who?’
‘Mmm, by the queen? Of England? Grace and Henry are regal enough without adding Elizabeth to the mix. We might as well hang a Union Jack over the door and be done with it. They’d burn us out of our home. We’d have to leave the country on St Patrick’s Day, Henry. And I’m one of the few Irish people who actually like St Patrick’s Day.’
‘We’re going to have to start putting a forty-minute time limit on these conversations because that seems to be the point at which you stop making any sense.’
‘All right. I’ve got one: what about Aoife?’
‘Too many vowels.’
‘Eimear?’
‘Can I get a consonant please, Carol? Oh. What about Carol, Grace? Or Caroline? Actually, no. Now that I say them out loud, I’m not so into Cs.’
‘No vowels, no Cs. You might give me a list of pre-approved letters when you get a minute?’
‘This is fun, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘All of this, Grace. Plotting. Making plans for our future.’
‘Yeah, it is. It really is, actually. Our whole lives ahead of us, as they say. I can hardly wait.’
I was in the pharmacy beside the doctor’s surgery buying vitamins before I considered what I was doing. What was the point in having a healthy foetus if I wasn’t going to keep it? The woman behind the counter did a little shimmy as she ticked the supplements off the list and handed me the bag. ‘Is it your first?’ she asked in a low voice.
I nodded, taking the bag and stuffing it into my jacket pocket.
‘I hope it all goes well for you, love,’ she beamed. ‘You’ll do great.’
I bought a small carton of microwaveable soup in the supermarket next door and headed home.
THIRTY-FIVE
Not having siblings meant I had very little experience of babies. I didn’t hold one until I was twenty-one and hanging out at Aoife’s house while she reluctantly babysat a gaggle of nieces and nephews and one of them started to cry.
‘Pick it up,’ she said, already busy with a howling toddler.
I stared into the basket at the pudgy pink creature, flailing its arms and legs about like it was a woodlouse that had gotten caught on its back. ‘How?’
‘Just . . .’ Aoife made a cradling motion.
‘I don’t know what to do. I’ve never done it before.’
‘Pick it up and hold it like it’s the bottle of wine you get from the off-licence just as it’s shutting. Lie the back along your arm, support the neck, cradle it snugly and whatever you do don’t let it fall because it’s past ten o’clock and it’s too late to go back for another one.’
I managed it in the end, and the child did stop crying. Still, I thought, lying in bed on Aberdeen Street staring at the ceiling, it probably wasn’t great that my maternal instincts were so closely aligned to the protection of alcohol.
The alarm clock said 7 a.m. I’d been awake since five. Suddenly I had permission to sleep my life away and I couldn’t do it. I kept going over my ever-expanding bank of new realities: the non-existence of Henry, the new existence of Andy, the potential existence of a baby. If money got really tight, I could always book a slot on Ricki Lake or Jeremy Kyle or whichever of those chat shows where people got up out of their chairs and pointed fingers at family members was still on the go. He’s No Baby Daddy . . .. He’s My Baby Uncle.
I missed Andy more today than I had yesterday, and more yesterday than the day before that. Or maybe it was Henry I missed. Or maybe the baby was making me feel things that weren’t actually there at all. My emotions, according to multiple internet searches, were no longer my own. What I did know for sure was that every time I heard footsteps on the street outside, I froze, listening, as they inevitably faded away again. The house felt lonelier than it had before.
I must have dozed off because suddenly the doorbell was ringing and the clock radio said 9.03. I freed my body from the sheets and dragged it into standing. I felt bad getting Aoife up so early. My crisis pregnancy would still be a crisis in a couple of hours.
Ding-dong!
‘Coming,’ I shouted, doubting if she could hear me through the open window. ‘Coming, coming!’ I threw Henry’s hoodie on over the mini-marathon T-shirt I had slept in and pulled on leggings, both legs getting caught on my ankles. I was too hot before I’d even left the bedroom.
‘Coming, coming, coming!’
I quick-stepped down the stairs, leaping over the beauty products still sitting there. The shampoo and moisturiser were halfway out of the box. Perhaps they’d given up on me and were making their own way to the bathroom. Henry, I thought as I landed on the bottom step, would have found that funny.
‘Coming, com—’
As I reached for the latch I heard Betty’s voice, but it wasn’t her standing on my doorstep. It wasn’t Aoife either. The fractured silhouette was too tall. My heart pounded. I pulled the door open.
‘. . . could take a look at my drain so. It makes this awful sound whenever I’m doing the washing-up. It’s a sort of gurr-gurr, like the noise my late husband Patrick, God have mercy on his soul, his stomach used to make whenever he had more than two pints. Smithwick’s. Insisted on drinking the stuff but couldn’t digest it at all. Here she is now. Nice of you to join us. Sure at this rate, you might be dressed by dinnertime.’
Andy was standing directly in front of me. I stared up at him, my heart racing. He had come back. I hadn’t ruined everything, not entirely. My smile got wider and wider. I was so glad to see that face. Betty leaned over her fence.
‘Morning,’ I said.
‘Morning, afternoon . . . What’s the differ . . .’
‘How’re you going, Grace?’
My stormy stomach lay calm. ‘Hello,’ I said, and then again for good measure: ‘Morning.’
He was wearing the same cargo shorts he always wore and a T-shirt so white it deepened his tan. His stubble had grown out, a day or two off a beard. It suited him.
‘New T-shirt?’ I studied his face, trying to work out if we were okay.
‘I was running out of clothes,’ he said, holding my gaze. ‘Do you like it?’
I nodded.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s nice.’
I kept my eyes on his. Forget the kiss, I tried to convey. Let’s forget it ever happened.
He moved his head up and down slowly until we were nodding in unison. I grinned and he grinned back.
When I finally glanced away Betty was studying Andy’s plain T-shirt. She looked from him to me and back to the white cotton again. Then she leaned further across the fence and poked him on his bare arm.
‘I’m out tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘It’ll have to be today.’
‘What’s that?’
‘My drain. You were going to sort my drain. Jesus Christ!’
‘Most people just call me Andy, but all right . . .’
‘Listen, buster, do not get smart with me. The lack of respect that emanates from this garden on
a good day is enough to knock a body out. Sweet mother divine. It does not need your help.’
‘Betty, you can’t just demand people do things—’
‘It’s cool.’ Andy rested a hand on my shoulder and turned back to my neighbour. ‘I’ll call in and have a look now, all right?’
Betty shrugged, like he was the one putting her out. ‘I hope you’re going to bring some tools. I don’t just want you staring at the yoke and stroking your chin.’
‘I have them in the car.’
Andy rotated back to me: ‘I’ll have a look at the drains and be in to you in half an hour.’
‘Hasn’t even looked at the thing and already knows how long it’s going to take,’ Betty muttered as she disappeared into her hallway. ‘Sure is there anything the lad can’t do? Mind reader, plumber, expert T-shirt buyer . . .’
Andy raised a hand to me and smiled as he rounded my garden into Betty’s and followed her inside.
‘I hope you’re going to pay him,’ I shouted in after them.
‘I think you’ve paid him enough for the whole street!’ And she slammed the door shut before I had a chance to respond.
I closed my own door, pulling off the hoodie and wandering into the kitchen for a glass of water. Sitting on a worktop in the direct path of the morning sun, I phoned Aoife.
‘How are you feeling today?’ she said, the sound of yelling in the distance behind her.
‘Good, yeah. It’s sunny.’ And Andy is only a few metres away. ‘I think I’ll go to the park,’ I added, enjoying the warmth of the rays through the patio windows. ‘The sun is out and I have a whole Tuesday where I’m not working. Might have a picnic. It’d be nice to be outside.’
‘That’s great, Grace, but I wasn’t enquiring about your sunbathing roster. I more meant how do you feel about having another life growing inside you?’
I squinted as the sun grew stronger, and turned my head to the side.
‘What are you going to do about that?’ she probed.
‘I’m going to not think about it.’
‘Wonderful plan.’
‘Just for one more week. The inquest is next Monday and that’s enough. I want a bit of time before that. Just a few days of blissful ignorance.’
Aoife said nothing.
‘I’ve been avoiding Isabel’s calls for weeks,’ I said, only half changing the subject. ‘Then last week she sent me a curt, formal letter with the details of the hearing. I think I’m in her bad books.’
‘Why are you avoiding her? I thought you got on well?’
‘We do,’ I said, picturing Andy next door, gripping tools with hands identical to Henry’s. ‘I just—’
‘Hang on,’ she said. A door slammed behind her. I could hear muffled shouting then the sound of her hand moving off the receiver as she came back on the line. ‘One of Lorcan’s offspring ate Sharon’s diamanté ring. The offspring shat it back out this morning but Sharon’s still demanding a new one. Lorcan offered to sterilise it but she’s not budging. She’s calling his child – honestly haven’t a clue which one it is, boy or girl I could not tell you – anyway, she’s currently calling it an emotional eater.’
‘Okay . . .’
‘To its face.’ Aoife sighed. ‘I really need to move out. Hang on . . . What? WHAT!? No! DETTOL! It’s under the sink! NO— Give me patience! I better go, Grace. Enjoy your week of delusion. Call me if you need me, or else I’ll talk to you when you’re back in the real world.’
I hung up the phone and went through the house opening curtains and windows. I climbed the stairs, threw off my pyjamas and pulled on a loose dress. I sprayed dry shampoo at the roots and pulled my hair into a ponytail, then I rooted the tartan rug out from the hot press and found a basket and flask under the stairs. Six days of delusion, then I’d face up to it.
I was boiling the kettle for a second time when Andy rang the doorbell again.
‘Did she pay you?’
‘It depends,’ he said, following me into the hallway and through the house. ‘Is criticism a currency?’
The loud creak from the floorboard as he stepped from the living room to the kitchen was the best thing I’d heard in days.
THIRTY-SIX
For two days we did everything together – roaming the park, all our meals, watching TV – and for the two after that, we met back at my house every evening after work. Andy would stay until one of us, usually me, started to fall asleep. He always talked about leaving earlier, about going back to the guesthouse to do some research or go through files, things to do with Frances and the adoption, though he never said exactly what they were and it didn’t matter anyway because he always stayed. He didn’t mention the kiss and I kept schtum about the life form developing inside me and in our agreed silence the bubble quickly reformed around us.
Andy was the only person I wanted to be around. He was a bridge between the life I had chosen and the one fate had given me. He was the gentlest reminder of Henry and also that Henry was gone. I told him how Henry and I used to read together at night and that we’d been halfway through A Christmas Carol when he died. I let Andy read, up to the bookmark. I listened as his Australian inflections retraced Henry’s steps, looping the same tongue around the same letters. I smiled as Scrooge’s nephew arrived at the shop, and mouthed along for the first ‘Bah!’ said Scrooge. ‘Humbug!’ Andy was great at accents, dropping his own brogue for an English twang every time a character spoke. My heart ached for Henry and this talent that had skipped him and gone to his younger brother.
We watched late-night news and cooked. I taught Andy how to make a proper cup of tea and the best way to sauté peppers and he showed me how to bleed radiators. I found Henry’s old slippers in a box and Andy took to wearing them around the house, and when we watched television he automatically took my feet in his hands and stretched out my toes. Even though Andy was the strangest thing to have happened in the past few months, which was saying a lot, these were the times I felt most normal.
But for everything that was discussed, something else went unsaid. He brought up Henry’s parents a few times and I managed to brush it aside. I didn’t tell him about the inquest. Andy stopped talking about his plans in terms of staying or leaving Ireland and I didn’t ask because I wasn’t sure what answer I wanted.
Larry called in once. He thought he’d seen Aoife’s car on the road, which sent me into a minor panic, but it turned out it belonged to Betty’s home-help woman. He was mildly taken aback to see Andy doing the washing-up in my kitchen. But it was more ‘you sly dog’ than ‘oh look, the second coming’. My life was divided into those who’d known Henry and those who knew Andy and I did my best to keep the groups apart. When Larry went into the study to inspect the finished paint job I slid the cracked photo of me and Henry sitting on a wall in Lisbon into a drawer, and I left it there.
I loved how at ease Andy was in quietness. He was the kind of person who’d leave a party without you noticing, but once you did you’d be sorry he was gone. All my life I had felt responsible for the gaps in conversations. I tried to emulate what Andy did, forcing myself to drop the habit of a lifetime and embrace the voids. It was like discovering a superpower.
‘Are you nearly finished?’ I asked, after a good twenty minutes in which both of us had been too absorbed in the task at hand to speak.
Andy pulled the piece of sketch paper and the book on which he was leaning it towards his chest. ‘No peeking.’
‘I’m not peeking!’ I protested, squinting dubiously at my own portrait. ‘Are you at all sensitive about your chin?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been trying to shade a bit off, but I appear to be adding depth.’
It had been my idea to draw and, having done fruit and our own hands, we had moved on to each other. But looking from the real life Andy to the Popeye portrait resting against my knees, which were bent into me on the couch, I was regretting my choice of recreational activity.
‘You should be good at this,’ said Andy, as he continued to switch from
pencil to pen and back again, never taking his eyes off the page.
‘Are you trying to intimidate me?’ I demanded. ‘All that, “Oh look, I need so many different textures to express myself.” Pen, pencil; pencil, pen. It’s like the art world equivalent of the haka going on over there.’
I kicked him gently but he lifted the book from his lap so his secret portrait would not be disturbed.
‘The haka is New Zealand, Grace. Not Australia.’
‘Yes, and it’s intimidating wherever it’s done.’ I tried rubbing at the chin with the side of my thumb. This caused the stubble to expand into a beard. There was, I thought, a touch of the Arab about the man I was drawing.
‘What do you mean I should be good at this?’ I said. ‘I haven’t an artistic bone in my body.’
‘I mean it should be easier for you. You’re more familiar with the subject.’
Andy kept on shading and I looked down at the page again. I was about to ask him what he meant, and then I realised. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be drawing Henry. I had studied the details of Andy’s face and tried, in vain, to replicate them on the page; the faint sun blotches, the ever-so-slightly crooked nose. These were all new to me. I wasn’t drawing a dead person. When I looked at Andy I didn’t see Henry, not anymore. I was thinking only of the man in front of me.
‘I’m drawing you,’ I said, still studying the page. ‘And I’ve known you as long as you’ve known me.’
I felt him look up then, but I kept my eyes on the drawing.
‘Grace?’
‘Mmm?’ Still not moving my gaze.
‘Look up.’
‘No. Why?’
‘I need to see your eyes. For the picture.’
I stared up at him slowly, steadily, worrying about how long he spent sizing them up and how much he might see.
‘All right?’ I said, and he nodded slowly.
‘I think I have you now.’
Grace After Henry Page 17