Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  What was wrong with everyone?

  But this was the question of his life.

  The cafe was filling up now, gearing for the lunchtime rush; the assistants were bringing out the hefty fare of this place: dishes of bronze sausage rolls, shining with grease, and trays of yellow chips, orange fillets of breaded fish and green, plump marrowfat peas. Their table, their comfortable banquettes would soon be needed; hungry shoppers were arriving in their turn in the doorway, sweeping the cafe with narrowed eyes, fixing on their emptying, cooling coffee cups. And yet they sat on, the three of them. It must, thought Patrick, have looked like fellowship, like family felicity – but it was not. It certainly was not. For his mother was behaving so strangely; and Margaret was silent. No, more than this: she had absented herself completely. It was her time-honoured coping mechanism: and he couldn’t blame her for that.

  *

  I can’t stand this, Margaret said.

  To herself, she said it. She was scarcely capable – no, that wasn’t it; she was actually incapable, of saying a word aloud. At this point, anyway. She needed to pull herself together.

  What was her mother doing here? What was she doing here? – of all places, here, appearing like that in the doorway?

  ‘The coffee’s fine,’ she said. ‘No, nothing for me.’

  Patrick slipped off to the counter. She looked at her mother, seated there opposite, her arms tightly folded across the front of a long, warm-looking cardigan. She geared herself up to speak at last. She said, ‘What brings you to town?’

  Sarah said again that she just fancied a change.

  ‘And how’s Daddy?’

  Her mother shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. Their father, she seemed to say, hardly deserved a two-shouldered one, did he? ‘I left him in bed.’

  Silence settled, then, until Patrick returned with coffee and a scone. Sarah stirred a little sugar into her coffee, she buttered her scone, she looked up.

  ‘You didn’t hear the news about that woman,’ she said. ‘The mother of that girl who went missing.’

  There was a moment, and Margaret shook her head. No. That woman, who had walked into Lough Foyle and drowned herself at twilight. Their mother talked on for a little while, her voice fading in and out. She talked about the woman. She talked about her little girl: who could forget it? ‘That was the night of your birthday,’ she said.

  I can’t stand it, Margaret thought.

  The cafe was filling. Margaret thought about making a move, about bundling herself into her coat, braving the October chill. But now her mother was off on a new tack: so strange a tack that Margaret was almost distracted, for a moment, from her own concerns. Almost.

  These would have to remain unsaid, if only for a few more minutes. Her windpipe felt constricted, with – grief, of course, and a creeping sense of horror and fear. Her life, surely, was over.

  *

  It had to happen just there, on that part of the coast, Sarah thought. She almost laughed: it just had to. She could picture it, of course: she knew it from childhood; she had gone paddling there, just there beside the pier where the best rock pools were to be found, poking in the deepest, coldest pools for crabs. ‘Mind yourself,’ her mother called, ‘go carefully.’ And her father pushed a stick into the water and – right there! a crab emerged from the deep and took hold of the stick with its pincered claws. ‘There now! But we’ll just let it go, Sarah, will we? No point taking it home,’ he said and she shook her head and her father shook the stick and the crab scuttled away, back into the seaweed and shadows.

  And later, at the beginning of the war, she and Cassie had gone down to the end of the pier, to watch the grey warships sailing by – so close you could almost touch them – easing through the narrow mouth of Lough Foyle, and then sailing south to the docks at Derry. Sometimes the sailors waved. Sometimes the little pilot boat puttered out from the pier with apples and pears, with green stuff. ‘Sure, we’ll make a bit of money out of them, Cassie,’ the pilot said to them. ‘We have too many apples, and they don’t have enough. No harm.’ He threw a green apple at Cassie, gently. ‘Catch!’ and she caught, deftly, and smiled. ‘No harm,’ the pilot said again.

  No harm.

  Contaminated now, for her. That place, that town and its past, over and over again, contaminated.

  And now here was this woman, choosing a shore that was already pregnant with death.

  At least she hadn’t walked out to Shell Beach. Not to the beach itself: it seemed instead that she had clambered through those rocks that bristled, jagged and pitted with pools and oily with seaweed, just to the left of the pier. The tide was in, though, and that must have helped: in spite of the rocks, it probably hadn’t been all that difficult. Sarah imagined her setting out, in failing light, moving along purposefully.

  And yes: it was a relief, a blessing that the poor woman hadn’t trotted out to Shell Beach, which after all was not a half-mile further along the coast; and much easier to access.

  She had done Sarah a favour, there.

  So she told herself. How sick I sound, she thought. Making it all about me. But she was wound up by this: of course with good reason; of course she disliked that coastline, disliked any mention of it; kept her distance from it; had never taken her children there; Kinnagoe was as close as they had ever come, and that was too close. She hated the remembrances, the dreadful reminder.

  She sipped her coffee.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Patrick asked here – but impossible to put into words: what? That she had felt her past snapping at her heels? That she felt the walls closing in on her at home? That she needed to move, she needed some movement, to escape the past that was snapping, snapping? Explosions and deaths. And so she had left Martin in bed and jumped into the car and into town – only to find, not space, but her children. But she could not form these thoughts into words: there were embargoes on every avenue, every sentence. She could hardly imagine the words; and speaking them was out of the question.

  ‘I just felt like a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘Just a notion.’

  Just a notion – and looked at the two of them across the expanse of plastic table. Which was of course not broad enough, for any of them.

  Then she spoke again: said something that surprised her just as much as it surprised her children.

  ‘Sometimes I think I have the evil eye,’ said Sarah, and in instant discomfiture she picked up her coffee cup and swirled around the dense, sugary remnant of coffee inside, first in one direction and then in the other.

  They looked at her. ‘What?’ said Patrick – and indeed, it was almost as if another person had spoken, an invisible fourth person seated there at the table, putting in their spoke with dreadful unexpectedness. And yes, Sarah was as startled, almost, as everyone else.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing.’ Forget that. She was holding onto the edge of the white plastic table with her fingertips. There were rings marking the table surface, indelible marks, ancient cups of coffee. That was the trouble with such surfaces: they seemed to be wipe-clean and low-maintenance and all the rest of it; but they were in fact fairly unforgiving. She could have told them. Those rings would still be there come Doomsday.

  ‘No,’ Margaret said now. She leaned forward. ‘What did you mean, the evil eye?’

  Sarah said abruptly, ‘I see a shop, I look in the window, and –’ And yes, it had been this that propelled her out of the house this morning: a need to escape her surroundings, at least, even if she was unable to escape herself. And perhaps it was this propelling her words forward now. She was aware that she was behaving in a way that was – unexpected, to say the least; she was aware that they were staring at her.

  She had been drowsing off last night, safe and warm and snug in bed, when another bomb had exploded, its sound wave travelling down the river and colliding with the walls and windows of the house. As it had done countless times before. Well, not countless: countless was an exaggeration; but a great many times. It was abnormal and it was norma
l, all at the same time. Martin woke momentarily and then slid off again into sleep. She might have done the same: these blasts were routine; there was no need to break one’s stride in the face of them. They were nothing remarkable.

  But not this time: and not simply because of the memory that the sound invariably brought: the coastal footpath at home, the gust of noise, the gulls that she watched being forced straight upwards by the force of the explosion: straight into the air before turning and wheeling north and south in the freezing winter air. No: she had had a premonition, this time: she sensed which building, which business, which shop had just been pulverised.

  So: the evil eye?

  Was that the explanation for all these events over the years?

  What nonsense: of course not.

  And yet.

  ‘I knew which shop it was, as soon as I heard the explosion last night.’ She gestured out of the window and down Shipquay Street, where the white cordon lines flapped in the cold breeze and police Landrovers squatted nervously and half of what had once been a building lay spread across the road. She almost expected to glimpse a mannequin, its blonde wig all askew, lying on the ground in a provocative pose, legs spread – but no, no mannequins. Just rubble and bricks and shattered glass.

  Her children looked. Until this moment, they had tried to ignore the whole scene.

  Margaret said, ‘The evil eye?’

  ‘It was Toner’s shop,’ Sarah said, ‘and I passed it yesterday afternoon and looked in the window and I remember thinking how nice the displays looked. They’d really made an effort, I thought. And now today,’ and she stopped and took a yet tighter hold of her coffee cup, ‘it’s blown to kingdom come. And that isn’t the first time that something like this has happened.’ The second, the third time, she thought: I could name each shop. Is it any wonder, then, that I’m thinking along these lines?

  ‘So I’m wondering if I’m carrying some kind of curse around with me. I see the shop this morning, bombed out, and I wasn’t a bit surprised.’

  Did this explain Anthony, too? Of course not. What nonsense, she thought again.

  Patrick said coolly, ‘But you don’t have the evil eye. There isn’t any such thing.’

  Now Sarah drew herself up a little. ‘I said that it makes me feel as though I have. As though I have the evil eye.’ She was being misunderstood deliberately. Margaret made as though to speak, but Sarah went on, speaking rapidly now as though she absolutely could not bear another interruption. ‘It isn’t the first time a thing like this has happened. That’s all I’m saying.’ She paused for a breath; Patrick was gazing out of the window. ‘It makes me think.’

  ‘Think what?’

  Sarah paused again. ‘That maybe bad luck follows me.’

  Her son and daughter looked at her now. Neither said anything, and after a moment she watched Patrick resume his study of the window, the view of cordon tape and leaves and bomb damage.

  Sarah knew that the tenor of this conversation was utterly new. And again now, a moment came – and again it went; a branch in the road was noted, ignored. ‘Your father,’ Sarah said now, ‘he’ll be wondering where I am.’ But she stayed where she was as other instincts took over: to fend people off, to keep them at the end of a cattle prod. To probe their weaknesses, the better to protect herself – and to protect them from her.

  She had said too much.

  ‘And what about Robert?’ she said – and was duly rewarded, for Margaret flinched. It was all too easy to make the girl flinch; Patrick, really, was a much tougher nut to crack.

  Well, and he took after her, didn’t he? – her own shell was like a Brazil nut. You’d have to get right in there with heavy-duty metal, with muscle and force of will; and even then, there were no guarantees that the shell would crack even a little. The metal might break first. The only person who had managed to get inside had been Cassie; and Cassie was gone now. Long gone: and even Cassie hadn’t always been successful. Sarah remembered now that evening, long ago now, when she tapped on Margaret’s bedroom door and sat on Margaret’s bed – eager, desperate to unburden herself, to shed a burden that in her rational mind she knew she ought not even to be carrying.

  And instead, had asked Margaret about her upcoming exams.

  I don’t like Physics, but even that’s going along, you know, well enough too.

  Cowardice. She remembered the misty rain and the streetlamp and the sound of the television drifting the length of the house. There were moments when it was possible, when the option was given to you to turn off onto another road, to begin another journey. I suppose that these possibilities become fewer and fewer, she thought, the older you get; eventually, they stop coming; they stop completely. She would put it down to God shrugging in irritation and impatience – if she believed in God.

  As it was, she put it down to nothing, or to herself. I’m too set in my ways, she thought, now. Set fast.

  *

  Margaret and Patrick were on foot. ‘Will I give you a lift?’ their mother said – but no: Margaret scotched that idea immediately. There was no need for a lift, for the weather, though chilly, was still dry; they would walk. ‘Are you sure?’ Sarah said, already poised to go. They were sure. They parted on the corner of the Diamond: Sarah glanced once more along Shipquay Street at the cordon, the Landrovers, the scattered remains of the building. ‘See you, then,’ Sarah said and they nodded – the Jacksons knew they did not kiss – and she was off, trotting away briskly along Ferryquay Street, eddied and spun by passing shoppers on the narrow pavement, giving as good as she got, passing out of sight.

  Now, a brief silence. To Patrick, a moment of consideration: it seemed to him that he should take a moment to brace.

  Later, he would imagine that a presentiment came out of the crowds of shoppers: squeezing out of the gap, perhaps, that his mother had left as she had retreated. A shadow, bearing down on them. Though even this was hardly the case: had he not felt this premonition earlier, early this morning, with the sound of the ringing phone? He had. They were coming thick and fast now, these shadows slipping out of corners. And now, standing there on the street corner, he was aware of taking a deep breath, and holding it in his lungs for a second. Bracing himself, and then turning and seeing Margaret’s face, chalk-white and turned up towards him.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere to talk,’ she said.

  ‘What did you want to talk about?’ he said, still braced; and she took his arm and they set off walking.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Margaret said.

  He was aware of her clutching arm: their family did not hold or embrace, any more than they kissed. This clutch was uncomfortable; again, he felt a shadow behind him, shadows at either side.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. They were walking south now, along Bishop Street, away from the cordon and the flashing lights, the rifles and bullet-proof vests that dredged up unwanted, ugly memories – but aimlessly just the same. There was no end in sight – but now, he was aware of her taking a deep breath too, and holding it; and now she pointed along narrow, shadowed Palace Street. ‘Shall we go down there and onto the city walls?’ she said. ‘Let’s do that.’ He nodded and they crossed the road and turned onto Palace Street and here, with neat terraced houses on one side and a high brick wall on the other and already bare branches overhead, she seemed to breathe normally again. They turned the corner and the lane widened: they passed the churchyard now and stepped up onto the ramparts. Margaret’s face was paler than ever. ‘I need to sit down,’ she said.

  It was dramatic up here, for the whole city opened up: the cathedral on its hill and the long terraces of houses, and spires and the sweep of the river; and then the distant hills like blue whales, with cloud shadows moving smoothly and silently along their dark slopes. Closer at hand, late roses were still blooming in the pretty churchyard behind them; and the avenue of sycamores, that had been planted perhaps a century ago on the walls themselves, were shedding yellow leaves. But the views were closed off by high metal sec
urity fences: ahead and to left and right; they could walk only a hundred yards or so along the ramparts before being turned back; and the wide views were obscured and barred. Yes, it was dramatic – but maybe not in the best way, he thought; and it was not really a place to go walking.

  Again he said, ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  Margaret glanced: there were benches placed at intervals along the avenue of sycamores; and she gestured at one. ‘I need to sit down,’ she said, and made her way over, and sat.

  ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  She replied, ‘My head is light.’ Well, he could understand that, he thought: their mother’s sudden strange appearance, strange mood and strange language – it had all been enough to turn anyone’s head light.

  ‘Adrenalin, and caffeine,’ Margaret said, as though beginning to compose a shopping list. ‘And the cafe.’ For a moment, she said nothing: he began to think that whatever this news was, he was not going to hear it – not today; and quite possibly not ever. But then she said, ‘You know those cop shows. Those American cop shows. Kojak and all.’

  He nodded.

  ‘They go, like, “Zip it!”’ She sat forward on the bench. ‘“Zip it, man! or I’ll zip it for you!” And “Or I’ll zip you!” And next thing they’re lying dead.’

  Patrick nodded again.

  ‘Robert,’ she said. ‘He told me to zip it. Last night. He told me to keep my mouth shut, or I’d wreck everything.’

  Another pause, this one hanging on. He watched Margaret’s profile as she looked out through the metal bars of the security fence at the distant hills, her eyes moving in time with the silent shadows of the clouds moving across blue slopes.

  ‘Mouth shut about what?’

  Margaret shook her head – but then she began to tell him.

  ‘The child who went missing – Christine Casey, the night of my birthday dinner.’ She took a breath. ‘And then, last night, I told Robert I was leaving him.’ And a short, snorting, desperate laugh. ‘And he said I can’t, and then he told me why.’