He leaned his crutches against a tree, gauging the level of cover before unzipping and pissing onto a clump of grass. Between the window and everything else, he forgot to go before he left home. He couldn’t use the toilets in this place. He’d be literally peeing on the work that some younger version of his mother broke her back to clean. Let the security cameras film him all they wanted, it would give them something to look at.
‘Been in the wars?’ the manager asked, gesturing at the crutches.
‘Something like that,’ Richie said.
‘Won’t she be delighted to see you?’ she added, while he signed himself in. ‘She missed you yesterday.’ She made a show of thinking, ‘You might find her in the lounge, I’d say.’
His mam was always in the lounge. Morning and night, the same arses in the same seats. Her back to the window. He asked them once if they could turn her to see outside – she used to love her garden, his old mam did – but they told him it made her agitated. There had been an incident of some kind, the extent of which was never made clear, but the sight of people coming and going in the hall was more calming for her, they said.
The easy-wash tiles of the hallway give way to the easy-hoover carpet of the lounge. It was put down recently and there was only the odd stain here and there. One of them might be his mam’s. All of them, for all he knew of what she did day in and day out, beyond sitting with her hands folded across her lap like some big old mangy cat, with one eye closed and the other watching the door.
‘Hiya, Mam, it’s only me.’
For the first few months, he added his name. ‘It’s me, Richie, your son,’ he used to say, hoping it would jog something in her. It never did and he stopped telling her who he was. If he didn’t tell her, she could be forgiven for not knowing.‘Hello.’ Her smile was as bright and false as the one she used to wear for the neighbours the morning after his dad’s voice was heard the length of the street. She said nothing about the crutches. Around here, he supposed, supports were nothing remarkable.
He looked at her carefully. There had been a period of weight loss when she first came to live here and refused to eat, but that seemed to have settled down. She seemed well, although there was something… he couldn’t put his finger on it.
‘No rain today, thank God.’ He sat in the chair next to hers without kissing her hello. These days, if anything came too close to her face, there was a risk she might rear up and lash out.
‘Thank God,’ she agreed. ‘The summer won’t be long coming in now.’
‘True for you.’ It cost nothing to be kind. She taught him that. ‘Any news?’ he said.
He liked to give her the chance to get her spoke in before he filled the half-hour with harmless chat designed not to upset her. Sometimes, if the weather was fine, he took her out for a turn around the garden. No matter how good an idea it seemed, it was always worse out there. Walking at snail’s pace, her arm looped in his, concentrating on keeping his steps small enough for her. Where did this shuffling creature come from? This old hag that stole his mam’s face and her dressing gown but cast her memories aside like the outgrown carcase of a spider. Oh, but that was life, Richie-boy. It came for everyone.
‘How are you keeping?’ she asked, bringing the words forward with effort.
‘I’m grand, thanks.’
‘And the family? Are they all well in themselves?’ Her manners were always perfect.
He was spared answering by a commotion on the other side of the room. An old woman half-stood, shrieking and slapping at the old man sitting beside her.
‘Help! Help me!’ she shouted in a thin, girlish voice.
The man stood with his two hands held up like he was in a Western and two nurses rushed in.
‘Are you all right, June?’ one of them asked the lady.
‘I’m sorry,’ the man said. ‘I don’t know what I said to set her off.’
‘I know,’ the nurse said. ‘Let’s give her a few minutes to calm down and then you can come back in and visit for another while.’
The man nodded, defeated, and watched them lead June out of the room.
‘Help me!’ she continued to say, but her voice got softer and lower with each telling.
Richie smiled at his mother and moved his eyes quickly down to the carpet before she could read any challenge into them. Was it a full moon, maybe? One of the nurses had told him, cheerfully, that the myth was true. ‘Batten down the hatches, there’s a full moon tonight!’ she warned, with a dramatic roll of the eyes.
His mother’s feet caught his eye and he noticed she was wearing new shoes – trainers – glowing white under her navy slacks. That was the source of his unease. The absence of the flat shoes she wore all his life. Court shoes, she called them. They were as much a part of her as her mother-of-pearl brooch, or the smell of tea and lavender.
She leaned in close to him, grasping his forearm with her papier-mâché hand.
‘Some of these poor women don’t know their arse from their elbow,’ she whispered, loud enough to be heard in the car park.
It shocked him to hear her cursing, after all the times she smacked him around the head for so much as a stray ‘Jesus’ when he was a teenager.
‘Will we turn on the television?’ she asked. It was already on, but he turned it up, grateful to have something to do for her.
‘I’ll go and ask for a cup of tea,’ he said, but her eyes were fixed on the soap opera on the screen.
This was the best place for her, no question. All the medical advice, the doctors and the social workers said so. But that didn’t mean he had to like it. She gave him everything, his mam did, working two and three jobs so he could finish school. What’s more, she did it with grace. She was never one of those Irish women who had children as an extra place to put their grudges against the men in their lives.
She wanted him to join the civil service when he left school, but he couldn’t do what his father had done.
‘Tell her you want to come in with me on the bus training. What can she do? She’ll never kick you out,’ Sully advised him.
A small power, maybe, but it was all he had. She hid her disappointment poorly when he refused to take the exam. But he pretended not to see it, ashamed of himself for denying her that bit of pride, the peace it would have given her.
Back in the lounge, he nearly dropped his cup of tea when his mam pulled at him in excitement, pointing at the television.
‘Look!’ she said. ‘Lookit!’
The news was on and he watched the footage of the bus crash site.
‘Wait now. Wait. Whisht!’ She shushed him, although he hadn’t said anything.
His own face flashed up on the screen and she pointed in triumph. ‘There!’ she said, ‘Look!’
For a moment Richie’s heart lifted. ‘Mam—’
‘I’m sure I know him from somewhere,’ she said, frowning. ‘Did he live on our road, I wonder?’
He kept smiling as if she was joking.
‘I never forget a face, you know,’ she confided, with her old smile.
‘That’s me, Mam,’ he said.
‘Go on out of that,’ she said. ‘Stick out your tongue till I check is it black,’ she cackled. ‘He pulled some woman out of the bus, you know,’ she said. ‘A hero, they were saying.’
He sighed. ‘I heard that too.’ He took a gulp of tea. Everything in this wretched place tasted of disinfectant. On the screen, a reporter talked into the camera. Behind him, Richie’s face appeared again, beside that of Alina.
‘You chancer, trying to let on that you’re him, and you hardly even able to get yourself ready for school if I’m not there to do it for you,’ she said.
‘True for you, Mam. I’d be lost without you.’ She knew who he was in that moment. That was something.
‘But you were always my boy. My Richie,’ she said, her tone fond.
‘I know, Mam.’
They listened to the reporter talk about an investigation in short order. The word hit him li
ke a slap. He would be forced to go over every grunt and groan until he hardly knew his own name. He reminded himself sharply to be grateful. Wasn’t he out when the rest were still trapped underground? It would be a foolish man who’d let a gift like that pass him by. Whatever she might be now, his mam didn’t raise him for a fool.
‘Those poor families, Mam,’ he said. ‘Aren’t we lucky we still have each other, you and me?’
But when she turned around, her face had gone blank again, her eyes like a window she walked away from.
‘Sit up straight,’ she ordered. ‘Your mother would be ashamed of you.’
He managed to sit a while longer, letting the television do the work for him even though he would hate himself for it later.
She hardly noticed him going. ‘The man that was on the telly grew up on our road,’ she said excitedly to her neighbours. ‘I used to know him.’
Who would have thought his dad’s heart attack at barely fifty, there and gone, would be the more merciful way to go?
‘I used to know him,’ she insisted, though nobody had contradicted her. He had an awful feeling nobody even heard her.
He used to know you too, he thought, and let his wave of self-pity carry him down to the front door.
It was too late to turn and pretend he hadn’t seen Sandra getting out of her car, a white plastic box in her hand. That was all he needed, to pick up the fight where they left it earlier. Her smile threw him.
‘Twice in one day, imagine. People will talk.’ She raised her eyebrows and smiled.
‘I was just leaving.’
‘How is she?’
‘Same as ever.’ He couldn’t help himself saying it, ‘I didn’t know you came to see her.’
‘She was always very good to me, your mam,’ Sandra said, simply.
‘Was it you brought her the sneakers?’ Richie asked.
‘She mentioned a couple of weeks ago that her foot was sore and it turned out she had the start of a corn on her toe. The sneakers give her a bit more room.’ She smiled and shrugged as if it was nothing. With the lift of her shoulders, he caught the evening smell of her, her heavy perfume worn down by the day’s work. He knew without looking that she would have a damp patch under each arm despite the cool winter.
‘She never told me,’ he said.
Sandra smiled again. ‘Girl stuff,’ she said.
They got on well from the start, Sandra and his mam. He would come upon them gossiping in the kitchen about this neighbour or that and never think to wonder at his luck. His mother liked the bit of female company. With Sandra in the house, she was happier than she ever was in his dad’s world of bike parts in the garden and matches on the telly. Where, even on the best days, an outing meant going down to the local pub and sitting at a low table by herself while he stood at the bar with the men.
‘She told me my mother would be ashamed of me,’ he said, surprising himself.
Her laugh was wide and warm. ‘You should hear her talking about you when you’re not here. She is forever telling me that she would introduce me to her son, only he’s too good for me.’ She winked companionably. ‘Pure lies, obviously.’
‘Obviously.’ He pulled a laugh out of somewhere.
They fell silent, but neither of them moved to leave.
‘She has it the wrong way around,’ he said.
‘Oh, Richie,’ she said. ‘You know I’m with someone else now.’
No point in asking if she was happy with him. He could see it in her, in the weight she shed so casually at last, as if all those years of struggling into her clothes were nothing at all to leave behind. Why would anyone want to get on this ride again?
He gestured at the Tupperware in her hand. ‘Any chance you’d have a box of that for a sorry old bastard?’
She laughed. ‘I could hardly let our hero waste away.’
Only if it won’t get you in trouble with Lover-boy. He barely resisted saying it. His mam needed her too, he couldn’t forget that.
‘I’ll bring something over to you later on for your tea.’
He dropped his eyes while she talked, not wanting to see the past reflected there. That last Christmas party made for an ugly collage: the free bar proving too much of a temptation, her dancing alone, himself propping up the bar. Then everything went south. He woke up the next morning in a pool of vomit and found her gone. He was no better than the father he swore he would never turn into.
‘Phone me if you need anything,’ she said. ‘If Alan answers—’
‘I can be civil,’ he said. ‘I can manage that much.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short, Richie,’ she said, and patted his arm.
He watched her walk away from him. The sway of her sparked something in him. Nostalgia for the old days. For the old Sandra-and-Richie.
For a moment he wanted to shout into the air after her. ‘I think about you,’ he would say.
But tell the truth, Richie-boy. Tell the truth and shame the devil.
The truth was he only ever thought about her when she wasn’t there.
* * *
The pub was empty when he hobbled in. Only Pitch Flynn was in his usual seat, his back to the wall for fear anyone would creep up on him.
Behind the bar, Fran made a show of giving him a round of applause. ‘Well, if it isn’t the man himself.’
‘Leave it out, Fran,’ Richie said, feeling foolish. He sat down at the opposite end of the bar to Pitch. ‘A pint of your finest, please.’
Fran hummed while he worked the taps.
‘Is that a thing that men do,’ he found himself asking. ‘The humming, I mean. Do all the men hum where you’re from?’
‘Our cosmopolitan friend,’ Pitch said sourly. Legend had it that he had a wife once and she ran off with a foreign fella. A younger man, if the stories were to be believed.
Richie ignored him and whatever fucking point he was trying to make.
‘Everyone hums round our way,’ Fran said, putting the pint down in front of him and waving his money away. ‘This one’s on the house. It’s not often we have a real-life hero in our midst.’
‘I just meant that we’re more of a nation of whistlers,’ Richie said, to cover his embarrassment. ‘You’d go from one end of the year to the next before you’d hear anyone humming.’
Fran shrugged and began to take down the miniature Pringles boxes to dust them off. They had all warned Fran it was a fad that would never take off here, but he didn’t listen. Whenever a stray tourist wandered in by accident and bought one, he left the gap there for a few days, to be sure everyone saw it.
‘He’s a man of the world now, is Richie Murray.’ Pitch finally had his thoughts gathered and ready to share.
Fran rolled his eyes and kept on dusting.
‘He has a little Iraqi friend now, you know. A new Muslim friend, isn’t that it, Richie? They do their TV interviews together and everything.’
He shouldn’t respond. He should know better. Offer it up, as his mam would say. ‘Wrong on both counts, Pitch. She’s Lebanese, not Iraqi. And I’d hardly call her a friend. Sure, I’ve met her for all of five minutes.’
‘If you saved her life and she’s not a friend, that must mean you’d give me a kidney if I asked for one.’
Fran shook his head.
‘You’d have left her to die, Pitch, would you?’ He heard his voice coming out too loud and he took a swallow of beer, sloshing a bit of it onto the counter.
‘I wouldn’t have let our own behind.’
‘There wasn’t much time to look around and pick someone, Pitch. It wasn’t a fucking darts team I was after. Between the broken glass and the petrol, there wasn’t time to ask her to give me a few bars of “Come Out Ye Black and Tans”.’
‘Would she have done it for you if the situation was reversed, that’s the real question.’ Pitch nodded into his pint.
‘Leave the man alone Pitch or I’ll have to refuse you any more.’ Fran placed a coaster under Richie’s glass, the spilled beer
disappearing as if no mess was ever made. ‘Richie here is on the side of the angels.’ He winked at Richie, as if they were in it together.
It was the wink that did it. Richie downed his pint and picked up his crutches, muttering a goodbye over his shoulder.
Co-conspirators in what the fuck, exactly? Did all the angels have dark skin or something?
This time, he made it upstairs to his own bed, but he still couldn’t sleep. Not in the kind of way where he woke up every hour on the hour the way Sandra used to the night before a flight, but more that he couldn’t drift off in the first place. At the slightest hint of a noise outside, his body tensed up as if a shadow had passed below his bedroom door. Telling himself that those little stone-throwing bastards were locked in at home did no good at all. The fear simply wasn’t willing to listen. Was this what it was like to be Alina? If she were a man, he might have asked her. She might laugh at him, or – worse – tell him he knew what it was like to walk in a woman’s shoes and reduce it to a feminism thing. A woman wouldn’t understand the… un-manness he felt. He knew they used a better word on the radio, but he’d be fucked if he could remember it.
He couldn’t meet Alina anyway. They were funny about meeting men in public, weren’t they, and it wasn’t like he could invite her here. If that gang of thugs were to see her coming to his door, well, it wouldn’t be his window they’d be looking to break next.
At 1 a.m. he was sure he wasn’t responsible for the people left in there. Or for the person he pulled out either.
At 2 a.m. he would have sworn he wasn’t racist, but neither did he want his country overrun with Muslims. The Catholic Church might have its problems, but, still and all, it was their own.
At 3 a.m. he knew that although he wasn’t responsible for the bus crash, he was responsible for something. Maybe Emmanuel was right to call him racist the night of the Christmas party. Could he honestly say – hand on heart, like – that he would have swung for Sully or one of the others if they said the same thing?
Where the Edge Is Page 18