by K T Bowes
Chapter 18
Anka discovered Hana in the student centre and raised an eyebrow at her bare feet. “I brought some typing back for Sheila. I can’t read some of her writing though.” She placed the papers in Sheila’s office and jerked her head towards Hana’s feet. “New trend?”
Hana shook her head. “No, I came in my slippers by accident.”
“Really?” Anka snorted. “I’ve got spares in my office. I’ll get them.” She let herself out and clattered away. Hana smiled to herself, realising she’d missed their easy friendship.
“I can’t wear those thanks,” exclaimed Hana trying not to seem too ungrateful when Anka returned later. “I’ll break my neck. How do you walk in them?”
Anka held out the bright red, pointy-toed stilettos, pressing them into Hana’s hands. “Just try them. They’ll look awesome.”
“No, I’ll fall over.” Hana kept hold of one but the other tumbled to the carpet. Anka retrieved it.
“Come on, Hana. You won’t win Gwynne back in bare feet. His thing is killer heels.”
Hana’s jaw dropped. “I don’t want Gwynne! I never did. Anyway, he’s got an Internet bride.”
Anka laughed, the sound hollow. “Intranet, Hana! It’s the Chinese woman from food technology. They were chatting on the school system. You need to lift your game.”
Hana shook her head. “I don’t have game. How do you know he likes heels?”
Anka shrugged. “He just does. Put them on.”
Hana pressed her foot into the right one and sighed. “They’re a bit too big.”
“They’ll be fine. Put the other one on and practice walking.”
Hana obeyed, shaking her finger at Anka. “I don’t want Gwynne Jeffs thank you. But I do need some shoes to get home.” She wobbled around for a minute. “I can’t walk in them,” she giggled. She teetered round the office tripping over empty boxes and fallen brochures whilst admiring her feet. “They’re very you,” she admitted, grinning at Anka. “Glitzy, debonair and bright. They don’t really fit with the rest of what I’m wearing.”
Dressed in fitted blue slacks and a white blouse, Hana wrinkled her nose. The red shoes glinted from beneath the hem of her slacks, daring her to naughtiness. “You could kill someone with these pointy toes!” she giggled and performed a dainty pirouette, bending her knee to prolong the spin.
Anka shrieked with laughter and Hana repeated the rusty ballet move, adding a high kick to the finale. Too late, she saw the office door open inwards. Peter North blundered towards her, looking behind him as he shouted abuse at a student in the common room. He took the full brunt of the pointed kick right in the crotch. With a roar of agony, he doubled over and fell to the ground, panting to catch his breath. Hana withdrew her foot but discovered the shoe no longer on it. Pete lay on the dirty carpet squirming and making an odd grunting sound.
Anka bolted through the back door like a guilty child, leaving Hana wearing one bright red shoe and palpitating. She balanced on one leg and put her hands on her hips. “It can’t be that bad. I’m not rubbing it.”
As Pete rolled over onto his other side, hands gripping his crotch, the moans grew in volume with a twang of hope resonating in there somewhere. “In your dreams, boy,” Hana muttered. She spotted the shoe beneath him and bent to drag it out. “Oh man! You squashed it!” she complained. Hana grabbed her handbag and hopped around on one foot, pushing her bare toes into the other. “Sorry about this,” she panted. “I have to leave.”
In the common room, the study teacher rose to his feet, shooting alarmed looks at the student centre door. “Pete’s not well,” Hana muttered with as much conviction as she could muster. “Mysterious belly-ache.” She looked back from the stairwell as the teacher strode towards the door and clip-clopped faster down the stairs. Everything wiggled and wobbled as she teetered into the car park, remembering only then she had no car. Clopping out onto Maui Street, she turned left and kept walking.
The journey took longer than usual and Hana arrived at the rest home on the corner of Powell Street with sore toes and a blister starting on her right heel. She nodded to the matron as the older woman sat at the front desk doing her endless paperwork. “Hi, Hana. Father Sinbad’s in his room this afternoon.”
“Thank you.” Hana wobbled her way down a long corridor until she arrived outside Room 28. The space outside the door seemed dark and gloomy with only the light from the overhead bulb. An aroma of cleaning materials and death choked up the air. Hana knocked and opened the door. “Are you decent, Father?” she called.
The light was stronger in the room and the smell of coal tar soap and aftershave masked everything else. Nothing had changed in the past eleven years. The male occupant sat in a corner of the room in a metal-framed wheelchair, facing a window and a sunny garden. His face enjoyed the warmth, but his blind eyes saw nothing. His white clerical collar looked stark and clean against the neat black shirt. “Aye, I’m decent,” his thick Irish voice rumbled.
Hana threw herself on the edge of the hospital bed with a sigh. The clean-shaven, wrinkled face turned towards her with a smile which betrayed the heart of a gentleman. “What ails me girl then?” he asked.
Hana shrugged. He couldn’t see her, but she knew from experience the old man sensed how she felt. His blindness had finely tuned every other sense in his aging body. She could hide nothing from him and didn’t have the energy to try.
Half an hour later, the priest asked, “So what’s the crack wit’ dis young man den? D’ya thinks he likes you as much as you like him?”
Hana turned to look at the old man, her mouth gaping. She had recounted her story from a visitors’ chair next to his wheelchair. Blindness did little to diminish the old priest and a game of draughts was his favourite vice. Hana sat beside him, balancing the board game in her lap, responsible for moving both their counters and giving a running commentary. Fading grid numbers aided the task, written by a fourteen-year-old Bodie in vivid black marker pen. “Black 4 to C6,” she replied, ignoring the question.
“White 3 to A4. Taking two of dem lovely black draughts I do believe,” he chuckled, displaying the crinkly laugh lines round his useless eyes.
“Father Sinbad!” Hana exclaimed.
“That’s me. Priest of de sinful and de bad. How me mammy would have giggled if she could a seen me in dat pulpit wit me collar and me smock. What a name for a man of God. Sinbad. I ask ye.”
Hana smiled, but she’d heard it many times over the years.
“Aye, I know ye never tire of hearing me yarns but not today. Today I want to hear yourn. What’s occurring in ye pretty heart, Hana Johal? Humour me and tell the old confessor what ye feel.”
Hana thought before she spoke. She couldn’t fool a man who’d listened to millions of confessions for the best part of sixty years. His blindness changed nothing in his ability to discern or read human emotion. “I miss Vik. I like Logan. A lot. But when I’m around Logan, I feel unfaithful to Vik and when I think of Vik, I just get angry.” She sighed in confusion. “Anyway, it’s all academic. I think he has a girlfriend but isn’t being on the level. I don’t have the energy for games.”
Sadness enveloped her and loneliness crowded back in. Giving up brought a sense of overwhelming loss, no longer because her husband died, but because she denied herself the comfort of waking in the night and hearing another person breathing next to her. Nobody listened to her recount the mishaps of her day or shared a laugh about it. A familiar grief caused the stray tear to roll down her cheek. She wiped it away with a spark of anger.
“Why won’t ye release yerself?” asked the priest, his voice soothing. “Even Jesus released de widows from their marriages and let dem love again. Why not you, me darlin’? There’s no wrong in what your heart feels. He’s a God of second chances, so he is.”
Hana’s sigh betrayed her to the old man as did her silence as she wrestled with inner misgivings. “Vik’s clothes are in my wardrobe,” she admitted in a small voice. “Not them all,�
� she qualified a little too fast. “But the things he treasured most, his favourite shirt, his best shoes, the tie he wore at Christmas which played Jingle Bells.” Her smile looked sad. “He wore it to annoy the kids.”
Every Christmas she sat in the wardrobe, allowing herself the luxury of squeezing the thing that made the tie play the song and every year she promised herself she’d get rid of it. One year she’d press it and it wouldn’t play, the battery dead. She wasn’t sure if she’d replace the battery or keep the tie even though it no longer played. Every year she dreaded it. It stayed in the wardrobe; her dirty secret.
The old priest went on in his quiet, reassuring way, his gentle but realist views having softened many an angry catholic heart or chastised a guilty one in love and compassion. He embodied the Father-heart of God in a man. “To love, Hana Johal, until death do us part,” he whispered, but she put her hands over her ears, not wanting to hear the rest. Nobody said those words on her wedding day, not in the registry office or at the Sikh ceremony. As she nurtured the fragile life inside her which became Bodie, Hana ran into a marriage nobody else wanted to happen. And it worked, right up until the day after Vik’s funeral; the day her heart died under a crushing weight of grief and anger.
Strong hands pulled her hands from her ears and held them in a vice like grip; firm for such a frail old man and yet so tender. “Till death do us part,” he whispered, the faint scent of coffee and decay on his breath. “Death, Hana and Vik is dead, him and all his promises.”
Hana sobbed under the cruelty of the words. “No,” she sniffed. “I can’t do it again. I gave a hundred percent. There’s nothing left to give.”
Father Sinbad held her hands until she ceased crying, cooing and whispering Latin words over her which she sensed were prayers. His overwhelming care filled her with gratitude and she cried for longer because of it. When she stopped crying, Father Sinbad let go of her hands and touched her forehead, muttering a benediction.
Hana felt embarrassed and made a joke, “Were those my last rites?”
He threw back his head and laughed, “Ye’ll never know, Hana Johal. No, truly, t’was a blessing of peace. Now go home and ring dat young man. Give him a chance my dear, give him a chance. Because dat’s what’s holding ye back and we both know it. Love is a risk my dear and nobody likes pain.” As she kissed his temple and turned to leave, he added a last gem of wisdom. “And while you’re at it, get rid of dat car and dat ole house. Get something your own size and take me somewhere nice in de new car. Something yellow or purple. Your Lord God is purple, ye know.”
Red shoes swinging from her hand, Hana padded through the rest home, Father Sinbad’s jolly laughter ringing in her ears. His words gripped her as an idea. Changing the car seemed a great plan in the light of her recent troubles. Moving house might solve another issue. Hana nodded to the Matron as she passed.
“See ya, Hana,” the woman said and gave a small wave. The calm and stability of the rest home were testament to her iron rule. The matron interviewed a sullen Bodie more than a decade earlier, assigning him to read for Father Sinbad Maloney. In exchange, she stamped his attendance book, wrote nice things about the schoolboy and made sure he got his service award certificate every year for the next four years. It began as a way of Angus forcing an out-of-control teenager to gain a sense of social responsibility and ended in one of those rare friendships some people never experience. Bodie always called to see the priest each time he visited Hamilton and the old man had become an anchor for him. Hana only met Father Sinbad after Vik died, accompanying her distraught child to the sunny room to support him. After an absence during the anger part of Bodie’s grief, Hana visited and began by making excuses for her son’s neglect. The need for apologies proved futile. She discovered for herself a man whose miseries equalled her own, but who learned like the Apostle Paul that whether in abundance or hardship, pain or joy, the grace of Christ was enough. Hana desired what the old priest possessed and in glimpses and snatches over the years, had shared his peace.
When Bodie returned to reading duty, Hana accompanied him and they shared the solace Sinbad offered. Grafted onto their family vine, it seemed as though he always belonged.
Donning the shoes once again and wincing against the blisters, Hana emerged from the manicured gardens and back onto Powell Street. School had emptied and the buses enjoyed a lull before work rush hour began. Hana crossed the main road and waited by the bus stop. A light drizzle attacked her hair and clothes, but Hana pondered the nuances of her life and ignored it. Tapping the heel of her right shoe against the pavement, she ran through her conversation with Father Sinbad, coming to some long overdue resolutions about her life. Beginning with the Jingle Bells tie.
The bus arrived empty but late. Hana got to her house, puffed and flustered, having removed the shoes half a kilometre earlier. She stopped at the sight of a car on her driveway and approached with caution. A man descended the front stairs with a clipboard in his hand. “Mrs Johal?” he asked and she gave a tiny nod. He heaved in an exasperated breath. “I’m meant to be examining a vehicle at this address but I can’t get any answer.”
“Sorry. The bus didn’t come.” Hana apologised and offered tea and biscuits as a consolation prize. The man remained abrupt and business-like, but accepted the tea.
The policeman dusted around the vehicle where Hana recalled the Asian-looking man touching the bodywork. He also examined the door where the other man leaned across her. Hana shuddered at the memory of the blonde man’s taut body forcing her into the metal and the look of malice in his eyes. “You shouldn’t have moved the vehicle,” the cop chastised her. “You’ve got a list of people who touched it after them.”
“Oh,” Hana looked guilty. “My neighbour Paul drove it off the pavement. Logan didn’t touch it.”
The man’s eyebrows narrowed. “Logan who?” He peered at his list.
“Logan Du Rose.” Hana swallowed at the flicker of interest which crossed his face. “Do you know him?” She asked the question and watched his expression shutter.
“No.” He shook his head. “Just the name.” Opening the door and flooding the garage with light, he photographed the cracked bumper and kept working with a fine brush and an array of powders.
Hana glanced around, embarrassed by the volume of detritus. In one corner sat a matching set of adults’ and children’s golf clubs, both dusty and unused. An old school bag hung on a nail beneath some shelving, bulging with something which hadn’t seen the light of day for years. A pink eeling net, a broken tennis racquet, an exercise machine for toning abdominal muscles and drying washing occupied another corner. Hana sighed, remembering Sinbad’s wisdom.
“How long have you lived here?” the cop asked, his pen hovering over a box on a form. Hana watched his gloved fingers twitching.
“Fifteen years,” she answered. “But I’m selling up.”
“Okay. Leave a forwarding address.” He turned away and began packing up his gear.
The thought of telling her kids sent a cold shiver down her spine. Perhaps it wasn’t a viable plan to abandon her marital home and start again. Hana felt her life venture into the great and frightening unknown, where the thoughts and needs of others fenced off her journey and contained her within their comfort zones, instead of letting her walk free.
The policeman finished his tea after taking Hana’s prints on a mobile fingerprinting unit to rule out hers from her attackers. Then he left. Hana abandoned the messy garage, determined to tackle it at the weekend if the mood for change survived. She waved to the policeman and turned to press the switch for the garage door, starting in fright as a motorbike slid onto the driveway.
The rider waved before removing the black, tinted helmet. Logan’s hair looked flat and dark circles underlined his grey eyes. Hana released the breath she held and gave him a feeble wave. Stubble shadowed the lower half of his face, adding to his ruggedness. He dismounted with ease and took the key from the ignition before walking into the gara
ge. “I was just passing,” he began and then stopped. “Na, that’s not true. I came to see how you’re feeling. You seemed off earlier and I wanted to make sure we’re okay.” His brow furrowed and he chewed on his lower lip.
Hana worked her jaw, maintaining the distance between them. “I rang the English department to ask for a lift and Bob said another woman’s called numerous times. He said she’s your girlfriend.” She kept her face blank, feeling her heart speed up in her breast. The silence between them felt endless.
Logan ran slender fingers through his dark hair. His sigh betrayed frustration. “My ex thinks we have unfinished business.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “We don’t.”
Hana shrugged. “I haven’t the energy for messy relationships, Logan. I really don’t.”
Logan’s lips parted in a smile. “Is this what it is, Hana? Are we having a relationship?”