I looked out the window. The man in the car was gone. His disappearance was a relief, like the rain stopping. I took the opportunity to go for a walk. I walked through the grounds of a girl’s secondary school with the hockey pitch lit up, where the students had written up – Miss Foley has a dick. All the way as far as the golf course, they had a problem with rabbits, the clubhouse had a view of the mountains, some people standing at the bar, it was full of warmth.
On my way back, I came along a street with no walls or fences around the front gardens. They had no gates, each with an open driveway for double cars. The houses were single storey, with unusual designs, wooden features alongside the brickwork, front doors to the side, windows with no curtains. You could look right into the living rooms uncluttered, lamps on, people not bothered being seen from outside.
It gave me the feeling of being in Canada. As I passed by these houses and saw the warm interiors, I felt safe. I was in the town by Lake Huron where Helen’s family lived. All I needed to do was continue down to the salt mine where the giant salt ship was being loaded, it was daytime there, the sun would be going down twice. The red glow across the water would turn the unpainted hull of the ship bright copper red, the columns of the grain elevator pink. Over the railway tracks to the wooden bridge and the mouth of the river, you could be alive a thousand years ago.
Walking back by the cluster of shops, I came around the corner and saw the lights on in our house. It looked warm and cosy, but then I discovered the man was back. He jumped out in front of me. He must have parked his car out of sight and waited for me, hiding in a hedge. When I came to the gate he stood in front of me and called out my name. He asked me to confirm that it was me. He handed me an envelope with a writ. He apologised for startling me. He said he was obliged to give it to me in person.
I got to know a lot of creditors.
Some of them were courteous, understanding, but unyielding. Some were cold and uncaring. They could see it was a waste of time, there was no money in us. Because Helen was so busy teaching and running the café, I took the job of debt management, she referred them on to me. It gave me an insight into what people were like, money brought out the true character. Some had to be avoided, some wanted only to be listened to. Normally, I offered them coffee and cake. Some were quick to raise their voices, it was embarrassing for Helen, so I dealt with them in the office. In the space of a morning, I could go from being let off the hook to being hunted and empty. More often it was not the severity of the debt that mattered but the human interaction, a look in the eyes, the hand movements, the wording – don’t give me the run-around.
It told me a lot about the ground I stood on.
The coffee machine was the first big crisis. Two brothers sat in the café one day, they gave me until close of business, if I didn’t pay them in cash they would take away the machine. They were absolutely within their rights, though I had no idea how to come up with the money. The wholesale coffee brothers. It was hard to tell which of them was the elder. I explained that we would soon have the finance in place, we were going for another loan, but they were not interested. They kept looking at each other, either one of them on his own might have given in, together they were unrelenting.
All I could think of doing was to sell the car. I spent an hour hoovering the back seats, got some air spray to make the interior smell like new. I drove around from garage to garage trying to get a good price. They could see that I was a bit desperate, so they didn’t offer a lot – you’re taking a terrible tumble, one of them said. It was a good Italian car, white, chrome frames, full of comfort, green tinted windows. We had done some great trips down to West Clare, the rocks turned blue, the seabirds were silver, turquoise foam along the shore, everything was enhanced by the tinted glass, our country looked so cinematic, more like Italy.
What option did I have? I agreed on a half-decent price and made the handover. It was the strangest thing, trading down. I exchanged our respectable car for a small, lime green Japanese car.
How easy it was to lose your standing in the world. People saw me pulling into the car park in a heap of shit, the windows were steamed up, the seals were perished, a line of green moss, the heating was no longer working. They wanted to know what happened our nice Italian car. I joked about it, saying it was nothing but a status symbol, we were scaling down, the replacement car was more ecological, low on consumption. Rosie and Essie found a rust hole in the floor, they could see the road speeding by underneath. The car left a black stain of oil on the driveway. What I hadn’t noticed at first was that the front passenger door could not be opened from the inside, I had to go around each time to let Helen in and out.
At least we still had the coffee machine.
We discussed the future of the business with the investor, there was a further meeting in the office with his solicitor. The bank repayments had fallen behind. The rent on the premises was in arrears. For Helen, the most important thing was to make sure that staff were getting paid. I made a poor impression at those meetings. Too eager, too prescient, like the whole enterprise was a novel. I dreamed up the most fantastic plot, more loans, more capital investment.
Most of the time I felt disintegrated. I wanted to sleep and not wake up. I was happy staring at the lighthouse every night from the bedroom window, it was the only respite I got from my own imagination.
Helen remained upbeat.
Nothing mattered more than the coming baby. We still had to live. She had to buy a loose dress. The girls ran around the department store, hiding among racks of women’s clothing. Essie spun a carousel around until the jewellery began to fly off in various directions, the shop assistant came to pick them up, asking if they were my children or was I just watching them. We had to eat. Scampi and chips. They smiled at the food when it arrived, the food smiled back. It was the meal Helen had each time before being sent to boarding school, she could never finish it, still dreaming of what was left behind on the plate, the scampi uneaten.
The doorbell rang one evening. A woman stood in the porch under the light with an expression of deep concern. I thought she had an accident on the street. She gave me her name, Marie Delaney. The investor’s wife. It came as a complete surprise to me that he was married, it had never even occurred to me that he had a family life.
The girls were asleep. Helen was out working. I was reading a book about a man somewhere in America sitting in the car with his family, he finds the beauty of the red sunset a bit suspicious, it might be pollution, then he goes home and thinks about Hitler.
I asked her to come inside. I offered her tea. She would not sit down. In the hallway, she put her hand on the newel and stared at me in silence for a moment. It was clear from her accent that she was from Belfast.
You knew, she said.
That’s what people said to their parents after the war, I thought. She was referring to her husband, Maurice. He had been seen coming out of a hotel in Paris with another woman, Irish eyes everywhere, the news was reported back directly by a neighbour. She wanted to know what was going on, her questions revealed how little she knew.
Where does she live?
Who?
You know who I’m talking about, don’t be an asshole.
Martina, I said.
What’s her address?
I was only there once, I explained, it’s near the hospital, an apartment block.
Give me her phone number?
I don’t have it, I said.
What does she look like?
All I had to say about Martina were good things. She was a great singer, she had a lovely way of talking to children – you don’t want to put on that itchy old woolly jumper, it feels like a sheep around your neck. She had the same way of talking to adults – I don’t believe it, they want you to work day and night. She turned everyone into a child. She was very loyal, she gave great encouragement to Helen.
I said none of
this. Anything I might have said was evidence, everything I didn’t say was more evidence.
Look, I said, this has nothing to do with me.
I want the truth, she said.
I’m the wrong person, I said.
Her eyes were on the verge of tears. She asked me what Martina’s place was like, I told her it was not a bad apartment, adequate was the only word I could find.
Why is everybody lying?
Denial is not one of my skills. I wanted to proclaim my innocence, tell her I knew absolutely nothing about her husband or his private life. She reached into my thoughts to extract a full confession. I found myself telling her that Martina’s apartment overlooked the back of the hospital, you could see the church from the kitchen window.
Her arms were folded.
I tried to make the place look worse than it was. My unwilling imagination refused to go into the main bedroom. I deflected into the hallway, into the living room, the guitar, the easel with a painting half finished, stuff all over the place, a long leather sofa, quite bashed up and covered with a rug. The small room where Martina’s son slept, his name was José, his door was covered with the names of his school friends, like graffiti, our names were there as well.
José has hundreds of soldiers on the windowsill, I said, his mother is a declared pacifist.
Was this an attempted joke?
Marie could not help a smile of disdain, instantly withdrawn, she wanted more.
The bathroom had no bath, only a shower. The shower head kept falling off, Martina asked me to fix it the day we went to visit, she sat with Helen in the living room chatting. Rosie and Essie were in the bedroom, playing on the floor with José. There was a crack in the bathroom tiles, obviously caused by the door handle swinging back against the wall, the shower head was easily repaired.
We didn’t know he was married, I said.
At this point, she got sick.
She cried and wretched at the same time. Her arm held on to the bannister rail, her hand over her mouth.
I’m sorry, I said.
My instinct was to run for the sick bowl. She had not eaten a thing in the last seven days apart from one or two croissants, a lot of coffee. It was nothing more than a sweet colourless liquid staining the front of her red jacket, her crying had more volume, she made no attempt to stop the tears across her face. I unrolled the kitchen paper, tried to place it into her hand, I started wiping her jacket.
Why did nobody tell me?
Her knees began to give way. I rushed forward to catch her. I got the scent of perfume, mixed up with vomit and sweat, like a photocopier, I thought. Her jacket was buttoned up wrong, I noticed. Her hair was an urgent ponytail. She was not wearing any make-up. I got her sitting down at the foot of the stairs. There were things I wanted to ask her, where she was from, her family, how long she had been married, did they have children, but that all seemed too personal. One of the neighbours stood at the door, her car was left at a dangerous angle on the road, no handbrake, headlights draining the battery.
In Irish, to be short of money is to be naked. It is the lender who has money on the borrower, the person without funds is left stripped. To owe a debt in my mother’s language is to be guilty of it, in German you are pronounced guilty of the amount owed. Being indebted in English is to be obliged, bound, beholden, liable, embarrassed, encumbered, accountable, in hock, shy. In the language of the street, we were thousands shy.
We were naked and guilty and embarrassed.
I had to deal with each one of the creditors in a practical way. Explain the situation to them. Come up with some proposal. When there was no financial solution, I went home and put down a brief description of the day in my journal, their names, what they said, their clothes, the expression on their faces. It was the only way of removing myself from this condition of being naked. I wrote them off my back. The following day, they returned with no let up.
A man came to take away the water dispensers. It was one of those things the women loved after yoga sessions, some of the courses were full on aerobics and jazz dancing, they produced a lot of heat and human steam, they could not be running into the café asking for water. There was a basket full of used white cups beside each dispenser, some marked with lipstick.
I tried to persuade the water man to give us more time, I would send something in the post. He seemed friendly, his accent belonged to the same part of the country as Martina. It occurred to me to ask him if he knew her, but that didn’t sound promising. He threw out his hands and said – sorry, I’ve been told to remove them. I offered him coffee, he didn’t have time. I stood back to let him get on with it.
For some reason, I reverted to the native language under my breath – take the bloody things so, I said, and may your mickey remain curly.
I didn’t expect him to understand or even care what I said, but he laughed out loud. He was not in the least insulted. We ended up getting into a conversation, two shadow people standing by the water dispenser, he said he played the accordion. Women came out in their leggings to get water, their necks were shining with sweat, we were talking about the best accordion player that ever walked the earth, gone to live in America.
He decided to leave the water coolers alone. He asked me to come out to the car park. He opened the back of the van, it was full of water dispensers and hosepipes and other equipment. He jumped in and brought out a case, opened it up and took out his accordion. Sitting on the back step of the van, he began to play for me. He wanted me to hear a tune he had picked up recently. He traced the origins of the reel to a shadow place on the Cork and Kerry border.
The plumber was more difficult. He was a burly man, he could have picked me up like a bar of soap. He had carried out major repair works on the showers. So far, he had only been paid for materials, his labour was not something he could take away again. He stood in the bathroom area and accused me of reckless trading. I told him I was sorry, it wasn’t like that, I thanked him for doing a great job, the reason I had no money to give him was that I had to pay another contractor for an emergency job on the back door, people had broken in, nothing much stolen, only the mess they made of the place.
Two women came out of the sauna wrapped in white towels. They hardly took any notice, they continued talking as they disappeared into the shower cubicles. His eyes were only on the tiling, the grout, the silicone finishing, he seemed happy to hear water flowing. Gripped by the pleasure of his own work. More women came in, I had the feeling that being in the presence of the plumber made me invisible to them. He finally realised they wanted to get changed, he took one more agonising look at his work, then he turned his back on it. I paid him as much as I could give him, he went away happy.
One day, a woman came to collect payment for the cake and pastry deliveries. I could only give her half the amount she expected, but she said that was fine. She must have known things were not easy, people were talking about us. She accepted the money and asked if I wanted to order any extra deliveries, she could recommend a cake with a new set of ingredients, banana and toffee. We had such a perfect business combination, she said, yoga and cakes. She had a lovely name in the native language, but it sounded in my mother’s language like the word for being in a hurry, when I thanked her and said her name it sounded like I was rushing her.
I felt sorry for people who came a long distance, looking all around for parking, then to be told they could have parked around the back, and for what? A cup of coffee. Some of them were disappointed. Upset. Down-hearted. Maybe they saw the sadness in me spreading to them and didn’t want to stay, it was bad business making money off bad business. Often, they threw up their hands and left, saying they would be back. The representative from the glazing company that installed the full-length mirrors, for example, said he would come again when things picked up.
Some of them laughed while they were taking the world from under my feet. Some of them sympa
thised with me and blamed the country we were living in. It became an opportunity for them to lay into the government, the economic conditions, the history we were tied into, the schools, the island, the weather. Some of them deflected by saying it was nothing personal. Others tried to make me feel better with a kind of glorious melancholy, a companionship to be found in the collective failures of the world. If only I didn’t owe them money, I could have offered to buy them a drink. I felt unequal, my smile was a lie, I had no right to be generous. No right to join them in conversation or have an opinion while this imbalance existed. I was unable to look them in the eye.
It seemed to me that this was not so much a financial reckoning but some inevitable human accountability I was facing. They had come to recoup the happiness I had taken from life. What we owed the world. Our dreams were in default. How naked and shy and guilty we had become. I could not escape the images of paradise and expulsion I grew up with. My extravagance, my billowing white shirt, the squandering rush of love with which I hurled myself into this family enterprise was being called out. They were coming to cash in. Every smile, every laugh, every word of affection had to be repaid.
The man who installed the neon sign asked me to call in one day. His office was in the city. On the same square as my former school, near the Garden of Remembrance, overlooking the maternity hospital where Essie was born. Parking the car around that area gave me a range of contorted feelings, from terror to extreme joy.
I was surprised to find him so welcoming. He asked me to sit down, his secretary made tea, with chocolate fingers on a plate. He briefly mentioned the outstanding bill and I kept apologising, then he didn’t want to hear any more.
The world is full of apologisers, he said.
It was hard for me to understand why he had asked me to come all this way to let me off so lightly.
I was shrugging a lot.
He was Jewish. His mother was from Lithuania, he had grown up in Toronto. He married an Irish woman from Limerick and came to live in Dublin, she was a barrister, there was a picture of her and three children on his desk. He was an athletic-looking man, a runner. Helen had met him running up the pier one day, pushing his eldest son in a buggy, the boy had severe disabilities from birth, he suffered terrible seizures. They often had to clutch him until the episode passed over. I was told by somebody else that he was often seen running through the city at night with the buggy, along the quays, all the way up to the Phoenix Park.
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