Life Drawing for Beginners

“Hi there,” she said. “My name is Meg, and I’m delighted to meet you.”

  He pushed himself closer into Carmel’s side, his thumb stuck in his mouth. “Sorry,” Carmel said, “he’s a bit shy.”

  “That’s fine, that’s no problem,” the teacher said, straightening up. “Can you stay awhile with him? Are you rushing away?”

  Carmel shook her head. “I can stay as long as you like,” she said. “I don’t have no job.” Maybe she shouldn’t have said that, maybe it sounded bad to say that.

  “Perfect,” the teacher said, pointing to one of the tables where two of the other children were sitting. “We’ll put Barry over here, with Ciaran and Emily. Ciaran never stops talking,” she added under her breath to Carmel as they walked across. “He’ll be perfect for Barry.”

  She pulled out a small chair and Barry was persuaded to sit, as long as Carmel crouched beside him. The little girl with the blonde curly hair looked familiar.

  “This is Barry,” the teacher said to her and the little boy. “He’s just arrived and he doesn’t know anyone yet, so I’m hoping you’ll be really nice to him, okay? And this is Barry’s mammy, who’s staying for a little while.”

  “I saw him in the park,” the little girl said, looking at Barry, “when I hurted my knee from the ladder.”

  “You met Barry?”

  “Yeah, an’ his mammy too.”

  The teacher looked inquiringly at Carmel, who nodded, remembering the mother in her white jeans who’d given Carmel a fiver to go away.

  “Maybe you and Barry would do a jigsaw together,” the teacher was saying, and Carmel watched as the little girl began to assemble the jigsaw, picking up pieces and slotting them into place. Barry watched her too, but clung tightly to Carmel’s arm and made no attempt to join in.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” the teacher whispered, disappearing to another group. Carmel reached for a book that lay on the table. She opened it and saw a picture of an apple with a word underneath.

  “Apple,” she murmured, looking at the shape the word made.

  —————

  Michael pressed the bell beside V BROWNE and waited. After a few seconds the intercom crackled.

  “Yes?” A man’s voice, which threw him for a couple of seconds.

  “I’m looking for Valerie,” he said. “I’m her father.”

  “Please come up,” the man said, after the tiniest of pauses.

  The door buzzed and Michael pushed it open and ascended the stairs to the second floor. Valerie was waiting for him in the doorway, wearing her nurse’s uniform.

  “I haven’t much time,” she said. “I’m due at work.”

  No hello, no how are you.

  “This won’t take long,” he said, following her into the apartment’s cramped hallway. She led him through to the sitting room, where a man was standing by the window. As soon as they walked in the man crossed the room, holding out his hand.

  “Tom McFadden,” he said, gripping Michael’s fingers tightly. “Good to finally meet you.”

  Good to finally meet you? Michael had no idea who the man was, or what he was doing in Valerie’s apartment, appearing very much at home. Older than Valerie, a good dozen years older, maybe more. Receding slightly above his temples, well-cut suit, shiny shoes. He smelled of some aromatic wood.

  “Can I make you tea or coffee?” he asked.

  “There isn’t time,” Valerie put in, before Michael had a chance to respond. She made no attempt to explain who Tom McFadden was. “What was it you wanted?” she asked Michael.

  Not even inviting him to sit, for God’s sake. Michael decided to ignore the other man’s presence. “It’s about the boy in the shop,” he told her. “The paternity test results have come back, and it turns out that he is Ethan’s child. Your nephew,” he added.

  Her blank expression didn’t change. The man stood off to the side, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. Michael hoped he felt uncomfortable.

  Valerie gave a tiny nod. “Okay.”

  Okay? Was that it, was that all she had to say about the fact that her brother had fathered a child before he died? Michael stood his ground, watching her face, willing her to add something, to ask him something.

  She turned abruptly. “I won’t keep you,” she said. “Thank you for letting me know.”

  “That’s it?” The words were out before he could stop them. “That’s all you have to say?”

  She opened the door. “That’s it.”

  “You don’t want to meet them?”

  But she’d vanished into the hall. Michael followed her.

  “Valerie,” he said, lowering his voice, “I’m trying to make amends here. Don’t you see that? I’m trying to do good by Ethan.”

  She held the front door open. “You’re a bit late,” she said, looking past him.

  Michael shook his head. “You don’t mean that,” he said. “You’re not cruel like that.”

  No response, her gaze steadfastly refusing to meet his.

  “You know where I am,” he said, “if you change your mind.”

  He walked out and turned towards the stairs, and the door clicked shut before he’d taken half a dozen steps.

  —————

  There was an unfamiliar yellow car parked outside Pauline’s when Audrey got home from work. It had a Cork registration number. Audrey wondered if it belonged to Pauline’s sister. She knew the sister’s daughter had split from her husband not so long ago: Hopefully there wasn’t another family crisis. And where was Pauline’s red Escort?

  She walked up her driveway and let herself in, and hung her blue jacket on the banister post, on top of the two others. She really must invest in some kind of a hall stand.

  She opened the kitchen door and as usual, Dolly leapt at her ecstatically. Did she think, every morning when Audrey went to work, that she was being abandoned forever? The joyous reunion every afternoon seemed to suggest it.

  Audrey bundled the newspaper sheets from the kitchen floor and stuffed them in the bin, and let Dolly out to the garden. The weather had definitely turned chillier, but as yet there was no sign of rain. She inspected the lawn and decided that a final cut would be needed at the weekend.

  Back in the kitchen she switched on the local radio station and heard “…late last night. The man’s name has not yet been released.”

  That didn’t sound good. She’d have to wait for the next news to hear the full story. She filled the kettle and plugged it in. She took coffee from the press and milk from the fridge. She lifted down the biscuit jar that sat on an open shelf and chose a Kit Kat from the selection inside.

  When the kettle boiled she made coffee. She was taking the Kit Kat out of its wrapper when her doorbell rang. She went out to the hall and opened the door, and smiled inquiringly at the woman with the very pale face and pink-rimmed eyes who stood on the step. She looked like a diluted version of Pauline.

  “You must be Sue.”

  “Audrey,” the other said quietly—and Audrey’s smile faded at the hollow sound of her voice.

  —————

  Pilar was not happy. Nine days of unemployment had taken their toll. “When?” she demanded. “When I get job?”

  “Soon,” Zarek assured her. “Few more days, you find job.”

  “I have forty-seven euros,” Pilar announced, pulling an onion from its net bag. “When it is gone, I have nothing. I hate this bugger country.”

  Zarek considered suggesting a move back to Lithuania, and decided against it. “You find job soon,” he repeated. “I am sure.”

  “How you sure?” she asked, pulling a knife from the block. “How you know? You have big ball that say what happen in future?”

  “Er—”

  “Why your boss not phone? Why she not want me?” Pilar sliced off the ends of the onion and yanked away the skin. She’d taken to frying onions at odd hours of the day. The apartment smelled constantly of them. “You tell her about me? You say I am honest, and work hard?” />
  “Yes, I tell, but many other peoples also looking for work,” Zarek told her. “Very little job in Ireland now.” Keeping his eyes on the knife, just in case.

  “You say I your flat mate, you tell this?”

  “Yes, yes, I tell everything.”

  She sliced the onion furiously, sending slivers flying. “Pah!” She flung the onion slices onto the pan and they began to sizzle loudly. “I am fed up bored from the waiting, I am sick from the waiting.”

  “One more day, maybe,” Zarek said. “I go for walk now. You like something from shop—some chocolate?”

  Pilar shook the pan, making the onions jump. “No chocolate,” she cried, “I want job, not chocolate.”

  “Okay, I go, I see you later.” He made his escape and approached the front door just as Anton walked in, sniffing the air.

  “Pilar is frying ze onion?” he asked.

  Zarek nodded. “I go for walk.”

  Anton dropped his bag of groceries. “I come too,” he said.

  —————

  “Well? Did you like your new school?”

  Barry nodded. Michael looked at Carmel.

  “He got on okay,” she said, taking off her jacket before bending to remove Barry’s. “But I had to stay all the time.”

  “Did he mix with the others?”

  “A bit. An’ he made a snake out of plasticine, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “An’ he drew a picture, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will we show—” a pause “—your granddad?”

  Granddad. The first time the word had been said aloud. Michael thought it best not to react.

  She took a folded page from her plastic bag and held it out to him. Michael unfolded it and saw a very wobbly blue circle with a few wavy lines radiating from it.

  “It’s the sun,” Carmel said.

  “It’s very good,” Michael said. He looked at Barry. “Will we put it on the fridge?”

  Barry nodded.

  Granddad.

  Michael turned to Carmel. “I have something for you.” He took a ring with two keys on it from his pocket and held it out.

  She looked at the keys but made no attempt to take them.

  “Go on,” Michael said. “Just make sure you don’t lose them.”

  She looked up at him. “I never had no key to no place, never.”

  “Well, you have them now,” he told her. “It’s just to make things easier, that’s all. Take them, it’s no big deal.”

  She took the keys from him. She held them in her palm and studied them.

  “It is a big deal for me,” she said, still looking down at them. “It’s a huge deal.”

  —————

  “No, it’s better this way,” Pauline said, her fingers pleating and releasing the hem of her skirt, over and over as she’d been doing since Audrey’s arrival half an hour earlier. “It’s the best way, it is really.”

  Not a tear, not a tremble to her lip, her face a greyish white. Her hands working ceaselessly on the blue cotton hem, her voice hardly there, barely above a whisper. And a terrible calmness, an awful acceptance of the fact that she’d just lost her only child.

  “What would he have done, when I was gone?” she asked them. “He’d never have managed, never.” Pleating, releasing, frowning at the hem as if that was the only thing she had to concern herself with.

  “I left him alone, you see,” she told Audrey, “while I went to the toilet. And when I got back to the rug there was no sign of him. He’d left everything very tidy, all the leftovers back in the box. And his clothes in a lovely neat bundle. He was always such a tidy boy, right from the start, never a mess.”

  Listening to the broken words, Audrey felt so helpless. What could you say, what on earth could possibly be of any use to Pauline now? Better to listen maybe, just to let her go on talking about him, and listen.

  “But it’s for the best, it really is,” Pauline said, ignoring the cooling tea on the table in front of her. “He’d have had to go into a home, you see, after I was gone. He’d have hated that, it would have killed him.”

  “I’d have looked after him,” her sister Sue put in, weeping, a sodden piece of kitchen roll clutched in her hand. “You know I’d have done that, Pauline.”

  But Pauline shook her head in a way that suggested she wasn’t even considering it, that she’d never considered it. “Ah no,” she said softly. “No, you couldn’t have done that, not at all. You’ve enough on your plate, dear.”

  Kevin’s body hadn’t been found for eight hours. Pauline had refused to leave the lakeside, refused anything to eat or drink, had stood with a blanket around her shoulders until two police divers had brought him back to her.

  A doctor had been summoned by the policewomen who had brought Pauline home. He’d given her some Valium, which Pauline had refused to take, and a prescription for more. Kevin’s body had been transported to the hospital mortuary, where a postmortem was being carried out.

  All this had been conveyed tearfully by Sue on the way back to Pauline’s house. “We got a phone call at one in the morning,” she’d told Audrey, blotting her eyes with the end of her sleeve. “We couldn’t believe it. It was a nightmare.”

  “He’s better off now,” Pauline repeated, smoothing her skirt over her knees before starting to pleat it all over again. “He’s happy now, nothing can happen to him.”

  Audrey had cried too, the tears coming in waves with each fresh memory of him. Standing on his side of the hedge, telling her in great detail about a program he’d seen on television, or a pizza he’d eaten the night before. Reaching out warily to pat Dolly, snatching his hand back when the little dog had lunged at it.

  Handing Audrey a blue plastic mug that spelled out her name on its side. Walking to the shop with his mother each day for milk and bread and the paper, and a packet of Jelly Tots.

  The idea that he was gone forever, that Audrey would never see him or talk to him again, was too sad to take in. But for Pauline’s sake she had to pull herself together. She pulled a fresh sheet from the kitchen roll on the table and blotted her eyes and blew her nose.

  “Dear,” she said, putting a hand on her neighbor’s shoulder, “would you take a small brandy maybe?” She had no idea if there was brandy in Pauline’s house, but she’d had a bottle in her own house for years. She couldn’t recall the circumstances that had led to its purchase—or maybe she’d gotten it as a present—but it lay on its side in the drawer under the DVD player, barely touched.

  “Ah no,” Pauline replied, pleating and pleating. “I couldn’t look at it, dear.”

  Outside the window the rotary clothesline whirled lazily in the gathering breeze. Audrey recognized three or four of Kevin’s T-shirts among the towels and socks and underwear. The colors blurred together as she looked out. Her eyes felt swollen and stinging, her face tight with dried salt.

  She pushed back her chair and stood. “I’ll get the clothes in from the line,” she said, not waiting for an answer before opening the back door.

  The sharp air felt wonderful on her hot face. As she unpegged the bone-dry clothes—out since yesterday morning, they must have been—and bundled them into one of the towels, she felt a spattering of drops.

  She hurried back inside, where Pauline sat in exactly the same position. Sue was pouring water into the teapot, making more tea that nobody wanted. Audrey stood by the worktop and folded everything into a wobbly pile, shielding the clothes from Pauline with her body. What might the sight of Kevin’s T-shirts do to his mother now?

  The rain fell steadily and the kitchen darkened slowly as the three of them sat on. Biscuits were produced and left untouched. Tea cooled once again in cups. Now and again Sue and Audrey would conduct a short back-and-forth of murmured conversation—​the weather, Sue’s family, the life drawing classes—​but mostly they sat in silence, the only sound the steady patter of drops on the window and the sudden rattle, every several minutes,
of the fridge.

  Pauline went on pleating, and said once, apropos of nothing, “His birthday is coming up, I was knitting him a jumper.” And neither of them knew how to respond to this heartbreaking item of information, so it drifted away into the silence.

  At eight o’clock the doctor phoned, and Sue held a short conversation with him in the hall, the kitchen door closed so the words were inaudible to Audrey. At half past eight the doorbell rang. Sue went to answer it and returned with her husband and daughter, just up from Cork. In the ensuing flurry of tearful embraces Audrey whispered to Sue that she’d be back after school the following day, and slipped out quietly.

  In her own kitchen she poured away her cold coffee and returned her chocolate biscuit jar to its home on the shelf. She toasted bread and opened a can of beans, and then found she couldn’t manage more than a mouthful. She went into the sitting room and took the brandy from its drawer and raised the bottle to her lips and took a large gulp, and spluttered and coughed for several minutes afterwards.

  Later in bed, Kevin’s face was there when she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. He stood at the other side of the hedge and regarded her as calmly and unblinkingly as he always had.

  She thought of Pauline’s life, changed utterly in the space of a few hours. She couldn’t imagine the nightmare of losing a child. How did anyone survive it, how could each new day be endured without that part of yourself? How would Pauline find the strength to go on, now that her beautiful, damaged son was gone?

  At two o’clock Audrey gave up trying to sleep and went back downstairs with Dolly trotting at her heels. She heated milk and added a dessert spoon of brandy and a pinch of nutmeg, and drank it curled on the sitting room couch, wrapped in a red-and-green-tartan mohair blanket she’d brought home from a short break in Scotland a few years before. She began watching a black-and-white Hitchcock film and fell asleep before the first ad break.

  She woke at eight, stiff and chilled and headachy, and when she turned off the television all she heard was the continuing rain.

  Thursday

  Well? Which is it?” She held her hair on the top of her head and twirled in front of the dressing room mirror in one of the two dresses she’d selected from the bargain rail. “Hair up or down?” Letting it tumble over her shoulders, then gathering it back together again. “Up, I think.”