Letting go of his hand – when there was no trace of warmth left and the hand that used to squeeze mine when I was a child now felt strange and waxy and wrong – I stumbled out of the room, past the doctor who was standing by and the undertakers who were waiting to take his body and prepare it for his final journey and I stumbled out into the yard gasping for air – trying to fill my lungs to still the screaming in my head.
Rocking back and forth, hugging my knees to me as I sat on the porch steps, I took my cell out and dialled Craig’s number and waited for him to answer. His voice, when he did, seemed distorted. The world seemed distorted. “He’s gone,” I managed to whisper before silent, wracking sobs ripped through my body once again. I heard Craig say my name as I dropped my cell to the ground, realising that there was no comfort to be had in his voice.
* * *
Craig, the dutiful if not entirely faithful, boyfriend came over. He stood awkwardly in the doorway as I answered it, telling me he was sorry for my loss and making to hug me – but I couldn’t, in that moment, hug him back. The feeling of my father’s hands was still on me and I didn’t want to touch anyone – to detract in any way from that feeling or that memory even though the cold stillness of him had felt so wrong. I leant towards him slightly, my hands still at my sides and felt his arms around me.
“He’s at peace now,” he said. “It’s the best thing, no more pain.”
And I nodded because that is what you do. You don’t say, ‘No, it’s not the best thing. The best thing is never going to happen. The best thing is him being okay and not in pain and not bloody dead.’ I didn’t and couldn’t get angry, because I wouldn’t make a show of myself as the undertakers did their work, even though I was sure they were more than used to people making scenes.
So I just nodded and then stood straight and walked back to the living room where the doctor was soothing my mother and offering all kinds of pills to help her get over the pain. Stoically she refused.
“I have to feel the pain,” she said. “Because if I don’t it’s like he didn’t mean anything to me. And he did.”
I was a coward then because, when the doctor went to get her a glass of water I wasted no time in asking for a few of those pills myself. He meant everything to me too – but maybe I just wasn’t as strong as my mother.
* * *
We met in a small pub on Waterloo Street, where Niamh waved at us furiously as we walked in, indicating she had kept us a place on the wooden benches. It was still relatively quiet but Sam pointed out it wasn’t even nine yet and by Derry standards this was still the middle of the afternoon. I blinked. By Florida standards this was almost stretching into the wee small hours of the morning.
Outside of her day-to-day self-imposed uniform of a business suit, Niamh was transformed into a colourful explosion of style and fashion. She still had the cocktail rings on her fingers, of course, but in addition she wore a bold patterned 60s minidress which she informed me she had bought at Second Hand Rose. She bought, she said, most of her clothes there . . . “Well, what I wear outside of work anyway. They expect a certain level of decorum in the courtroom!” she laughed. “You see, I’m a family law solicitor.” Under the dress she wore a pair of purple opaque tights which covered her impossibly long and thin legs down to a pair of shoes that might not have looked out of place on a court jester. They were decorated with flowers, bells and ribbons. “Irregular Choice,” she smiled and I nodded that they certainly were. Her hair and make-up matched her ensemble perfectly. Her eye make-up was a splash of sparkly blue with long false lashes accentuating the natural green of her pupils. Her hair was teased, backcombed and spiked. And yet she looked amazing. I knew if I had tried to get away with such an ensemble I would have looked as if a clown had thrown up on me, but she looked almost peacock-like in her magnificence. It was enough to make me glance down to my jeans and sneakers and cringe. I looked so stale – so absolutely all-American boring and plain – that I might as well have ironed a crease directly up the front of my jeans to complete the ‘day release from Fashion Rehab 101’ look.
Niamh oozed confidence and when they were together Sam oozed a certain extra confidence too. Not that I had ever necessarily seen him as lacking in it but with Niamh there was a boisterous side to him that I had never seen before.
“I took the liberty of ordering some drinks,” Niamh said, gesturing to the table in front of her and an array of glasses of varying sizes. “I figured if you were going to have the Irish experience you’d want to try a Guinness,” she said, handing me a pint glass of the thick black stout.
I baulked, realising that part of my Irish heritage must be faulty. I never had the desire to try Guinness but, in the face of the glorious peacock-like Niamh, who was drinking from her pint glass already, and Sam who was grinning and shouting “Sláinte!”, I knew that even at thirty-seven and a grown woman I was about to give in to peer pressure.
Sipping tentatively, I choked and slammed the pint glass down, wiping at my mouth with my sleeve as the tears hit my eyes.
“Sweet God,” Sam laughed, patting my back until the choking fit subsided. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s not that good either,” I spluttered.
“Well,” said Niamh, handing me another glass with a short in it this time, “we’ll just have to find you another drink you do like.”
“I’m partial to a spritzer or just an ordinary glass of wine,” I offered.
Niamh looked at me, amused. “When there is so much choice in the world?”
“I know what I like,” I said softly. “I’ve never been much of a drinker.”
She shrugged her shoulders as if in disbelief. “Well, a glass of wine it is then . . . and more of this for us, eh, Sam?” She laughed, gesturing to the table before lifting her (sparkly) bag and heading off towards the bar. For a moment I feared she would come back with one glass of every variety of wine on offer but she turned back and asked me what kind.
“She’s a bit full on,” I said to Sam when she left.
“There’s no badness in her,” he said. “She’s a nice girl, Annabel. She just likes to let her hair down. Her job can be very intense. I’d say she was just trying to be generous.”
He looked at her then back at me, and I realised I’d had my back up since before we came out. I suppose it had been a full-on day for us all and maybe I could do with letting my hair down too. Suddenly I wished I was wearing the dress from Second Hand Rose that I had worn the day before – that I was dressed a little less conventionally, that I was able to relax with a drink in my hand and wasn’t so stuck in my ways.
Sam must have noticed my sudden introspection. “Cheer up, Annabel. We’re here to relax. Let’s try and put Ray and your mom, and Craig and my lack of a love life, and even, if you can, your daddy, out of your head for a just a little while.”
“I stick out like a sore thumb,” I said glumly.
Sam sat his pint down and rubbed my arm. “My darling cousin. We all stick out like sore thumbs – we all feel it. There’s our beautiful peacock at the bar batting those eyelashes at the barman. Here am I, a gay man whose mammy can’t accept what he is, and there you are in your jeans and perfectly ironed T-shirt wondering what the hell you are doing with your life. And look around the room, everyone here is wondering the same, and dealing with their own issues and feeling, at times, like they don’t belong. All part of the human condition if you ask me.” I glanced around while Sam sat in silence. Then he started laughing. “Dear God, I just realised how completely miserable that sounds! I’ll have you leaping off the Peace Bridge in despair, talking like that. Look, pet, here’s the deal. This is a snapshot. It’s one night. And it’s not forever. And you will feel like you fit again – I’m sure you did before. Life has just spun you around like a mad thing lately – is it any wonder you don’t know which way is up? But we’ll get there. I promise.”
He hugged me as Niamh returned, a large glass of chilled white wine in her hand . . . with a cocktail
umbrella stuck in the top.
“Thought I would jazz it up a bit,” she said with a wink, sidling onto the bench beside Sam.
“I’m all for jazzing things up a bit,” I laughed, lifting the glass and sticking the cocktail umbrella behind my ear. “Cheers to you and to sticking out like sore thumbs!”
Sam and Niamh raised their glasses, clearly more used to sticking out than I ever was or ever would be.
“To good times!” Niamh said.
* * *
Three hours later, things were considerably jazzed up. I now wore four cocktail umbrellas behind my ears and a selection of Niamh’s chunkier rings on my fingers. A feather boa had been donated to my cause by a passing hen party. I had switched to a bottle of Budweiser which I was using as a makeshift microphone while Niamh and I did our best Commitments backing-singer routine to Sam’s Andrew Strong impression (complete with facial contortions). Niamh was almost bent double with laughter as I tried to perfect a Dublin accent to mutter the immortal line “Ride, Sally, Ride” and the live band in the corner of the bar had more or less become our personal jukebox as we bombarded them with requests. We had already made it through ‘Galway Girl’ and ‘Don’t Stop Believing’.
I felt swept up in an atmosphere of goodwill and belonging. The bar was singing and I was too – and it may have been the drink talking or just the reality of the situation, but I felt as if I was home and I was being me and it was bloody great fun. I didn’t have to pretend for anyone or be strong for anyone. The realisation was enough, mid-‘Mustang Sally’, to bring a tear to my eye which I hastily brushed away before completing our performance with aplomb. It was only when it was over, and Niamh and I were wrapped around Sam, our heads thrown back in a song that no one else was singing that I extricated myself from our huddle and went to the restroom where I could stare myself in the face properly.
This was me. This was who I was and who I was going to be. The power to be happy wasn’t in anyone else’s hands but mine. Perhaps I had tried too hard to put that on Craig, or even on my father. Perhaps – no, there was no perhaps about it – I needed to put it on me. I splashed cold water on my face and the back of my neck and stood tall and looked at the thirty-seven-year-old woman looking back at me. If I wanted to be happy it was up to me to be happy. I breathed out, the strains of ‘Like a Virgin’ carrying in through the door as the band reached new levels of cheesy cool.
“You okay?” I heard a voice ask.
Niamh had walked in the door and stopped halfway to the stalls to look at me.
“I will be, thanks,” I said with a half smile.
“You don’t have to keep it all in, you know,” she said and I looked at her quizzically.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean . . .”
“You. You’re a closed book. I can see that, but you don’t have to be.”
I felt myself blush as I nervously pushed a curl behind my ear, dislodging one of the cocktail umbrellas and sending it tumbling into the sink.
“Look, you don’t know me from Adam,” she said, “and I’m just some ballsy Derry girl who wears clothes that are probably a bit too colourful and whose Dublin accent beats seven shades of crap out of yours – but I’ve seen stuff and know stuff and all I’m saying is, you don’t have to hold it in.”
A slightly worse-for-wear woman coming out of the other stall, still adjusting her skirt and looking almost cross-eyed in the mirror, chimed in. “She’s right, love. Let it out. No good holding it in till it drives you mad.”
I looked at Niamh and back to the woman who was now trying to fix her hair while focusing with one eye open and one closed and her tongue stuck out at a funny angle. “Don’t worry about me. I’m going to be okay,” I said.
“Good woman yourself,” the drunken woman said, patting me on the back a little too fiercely.
Niamh took me by the hand and dragged me through to the smoking area.
“I don’t smoke,” I protested.
“Neither do I,” she laughed, “but there are occasionally some hot men out here and I’m just checking out the talent. Oh, Annabel from Florida, you have much to learn! Sam’s a good one,” she said as she glanced around her. “He will keep you right. Such a shame he’s into men, or I’d have him snapped up in a heartbeat.”
“I thought you had the hots for him when we first met,” I said.
“I did. I do as a matter of fact, but Sam and I figured out a long time ago we would just be friends – you know, given my lack of appropriate genitalia and all!” She laughed brightly and I couldn’t help but laugh too.
“But you seemed suspicious of me?”
“I’ll let you into a secret, pet. I’m suspicious of everyone – and protective of my friends. Sam, well, people see he does well for himself. He has a generous nature. They like to take advantage of that. I’ve seen a lot of people hurt him so I suppose I can’t help but feel protective of him. He’s a good guy.”
“He is.”
“But he didn’t tell me he had a cousin coming to visit, so I didn’t know who the hell you were. But you seem okay.”
“If a little closed?”
“If a little closed. But stick around, kid – because, between Sam and me, we will knock that out of you.”
By the end of the night we had made it to a little bar called Bennigans close to the river. In the corner a band was playing its own original songs. I’d removed the remaining cocktail umbrellas and the feather boa and was drinking water, while Niamh and Sam sat in deep conversation. I felt calm and rested and allowed the mellow music of the band to wash over me.
My thoughts were interrupted by the voice of one of the older locals who came to sit down beside me.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asked jovially.
“Yes, thanks,” I replied, sipping from my glass.
“Ah, a Yank,” he said as if it would be news to me and I nodded in response. “I remember the Yanks in Derry,” he said. “Through the war and up the 60s. My sister married a Yank – left in ’62. She came back last year for a visit, couldn’t believe the change in the place. Did you know Derry had a marine base? Did you know the German U-boats surrendered here at the end of World War Two?” He spoke with great pride as if he had witnessed them waving the white flag himself.
I nodded. “I had heard, yes.”
“Mad times,” he said. “I was only a boy but I remember it well. I used to do the odd wee job at the Base. They would give me chocolate. Never tasted chocolate like it before or since. I still remember it even now. But some of the local boys weren’t too happy – the Yanks coming and stealing our girls. The girls, they loved it though. Felt like they were dating real-life movie stars.”
I smiled. “My mother was a Derry girl and she dated a Yank.”
“Ah, did she marry him? Was your daddy stationed in Derry then?”
I shook my head. “It’s a long story,” I said. “No. She didn’t marry him in the end. I suppose life got in the way.”
“Life does that sometimes,” the old man said, setting his pint down. “But sure she must have gone to the States anyway. Didn’t she have you? So I’m sure it all worked out for the best.”
I smiled. “You’re very kind.”
“Ach, it’s easy to be to a lovely girl like yourself. Now, you make sure them two lovebirds beside you get you home safe and sound.”
I smiled again and thanked him for his company while he moved on to the next table to have his bit of banter.
When the band had finished, and we got up to leave, Sam said he had something to show me. He took my hand and walked me to the top of the street where a large monument, two men reaching out to each other, stood. Niamh told me it was called Hands Across the Divide – a symbol of a healing city. Across the street was just the blackness of the night.
“That,” he said, “behind that monument, was Tillie and Henderson. Where your mother worked. It stood here for years – until it burned down, ooh, ten or fifteen years ago. It was a great building in its
day.” He grabbed my hand and spun me around. “And that,” he said, “is Carlisle Road. Somewhere there on that road is their love nest. Can you imagine it?”
I stood for a moment, trying to ground myself, my head still swimming slightly from the wine and beer. I tried to imagine my mother – just twenty – running down this street to her work. I tried to imagine her opening one of these doors and climbing the stairs to see Ray and I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her on that last night.
I couldn’t speak. I could barely think. I just stood there and allowed myself to feel for a bit.
I was conscious of Sam on one side of me and Niamh on the other and, when I had stood for a while and started shivering, we left and went home.
The party was continuing in its own way in the living room but I climbed into bed and lifted my phone. It was a cowardly way to do things, I know. But I didn’t want any drama – not any more. And, I supposed, I didn’t want to hear him reply that it was okay, he didn’t mind either.
I’m sorry, I punched in, but it’s over.
Chapter 22
I have to let go. Not because I want to – but because I can’t make you forgive me.
Derry, January 1960
If Ray had known that he would not see her again, that he would not kiss her again, that he would not feel her skin against his again, he would not have let her leave the flat. He would have begged her to stay. He would have risked the wrath of his superior officers and whatever they could throw at him to get just a few more minutes with the woman who had stolen his heart. But he believed, just as Stella believed, that they would be together again in a number of weeks. It was, he told himself, the only way he could bear to be parted from her. He was angry at himself, as they left Derry and began the long journey home, that he could find no joy whatsoever in returning to his native America. Not even the thought of his mother’s home cooking could comfort him as they travelled away from Derry. He felt as lost as he had ever done and he started to count down until the moment he would see her again.
The First Time I Said Goodbye Page 19