Where Are We Now?

by Glenn Patterson

  From there it was a long and many-side-streeted walk home. Due to the slight curve in his own street, and the direction from which, on this occasion, he approached it, he didn’t see until he was quite some way down Louise standing before his front door, dressed in her work jerkin. He was another ten yards closer before she – turning away – caught sight of him. ‘Have they got you on home deliveries now?’ was all he could think to say.

  She shook her head, her eyes closing, as though the shake was directed inward. Don’t be deflected.

  ‘Will you come in a minute?’

  Eyes open, a nod.

  He had to squeeze past her on his way to open the door, talking the while, inanely, he knew, though he was completely incapable of stopping, about the stiffness of the lock, about the new mat he had had to buy after the people-two-up’s cat sprayed against the door seal…

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as soon as they were inside, ‘I should have phoned you before now,’ which was the easier of the two apologies she had come there to make.

  She sank down on to the edge of the sofa. ‘It’s just, I don’t really know how to explain this. I went out on New Year’s Eve…’

  And there was a guy, he thought, whatever the fifty-something equivalent was of a beat-up guitar slung across his back (unless it was, in fact, a beat-up guitar slung across his back). ‘And it occurred to me,’ she said, ‘as I was standing, off by myself, watching this big firework display they had on, I didn’t miss you the way I thought I was going to, the way I was hoping I would, and I like you, Herbie, I really, really do, but…’ She opened her hands. ‘Does that make sense?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, meaning yes, ‘of course, entirely.’

  She stood up, deeper-than-sighed, closer to exorcism than exhalation. ‘I hope this isn’t going to make things awkward between us.’

  ‘We’ll not let it.’

  He walked her to the door again, pulled it open.

  And there was Beth, just about to put her key in the lock.

  ‘Oh, hello, you must be Louise,’ she said. ‘How lovely to meet you properly at last.’

  So not the best start to a future free from awkwardness.

  ‘If it’s any comfort,’ Beth started to say when Louise had gone and he had explained what had just happened, but Herbie stopped her short.

  ‘At the minute, I don’t think, whatever it is, it’s going to be.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Thank you all the same.’

  ‘Right.’

  *

  It went on for days, the hurting.

  He worked through it, going into the Records Office each morning, whether or (more often) not he had anything in particular of his own to do, trading the un-contracted four fifths of himself for the simple distraction of other people’s lives, unfolding in the moment, or already played out, awaiting the handwritten request or emailed enquiry to pull them up out of the archive and set them running again.

  He got to know Lidl a whole lot better too.

  It was as though he was in fact constructing a bypass, not just in his routine but in his mind. There would still be roads into that bypassed-Herbie and the months (though funny already to think it was only months) he had spent with Louise, but he wouldn’t take them any more, or when at last he did – by some unexpected detour – it would be to stand disoriented, struggling for connection or even recognition.

  Like Dr Ross said: Toome.

  Mind you, he kept the volume on his phone set to high any time he wasn’t in the Records Office. Just in case.

  Gradually, he let his hours slip back to their pre-Louise levels. Mid-afternoon would find him again as often as not sitting in the window of Sam’s, the table under the capital S, contemplating his first and last coffee of the day.

  Once or twice, seeing as he drew close that the table wasn’t free, he had carried on by, as he would have the afternoon the three schoolgirls in bright blue blazers got to it before him, if Derek hadn’t at that moment been setting their tray in front of them and seen him (the girls were too preoccupied with their phones to pay Derek any heed) through the glass.

  Derek beckoned him in.

  By the time Herbie arrived he was behind the counter, hand spread on the iPad. ‘I see they are at it again,’ he said. ‘The dumpers: two hundred and fifty tyres in the Slievenacloy Nature Reserve.’

  Not on the scale of a Portakabin on a mountain roadside, but the image that Derek turned towards him was still enough to make the heart sink.

  ‘Unless, maybe, do you think they’re starting early for the Eleventh Night?’

  Not all that likely, to judge by the little map inserted in the bottom corner of the tyres image, locating the reserve in an area more Green, in Belfast electoral headcount speak, than Orange, though equally not all that early either. Herbie or the boy who shared his name had built his fair share of July bonfires. Window-shopping for hatchets began as soon as the boxes with the Christmas decorations in them were shouldered up through the black hole into the roof space. If you hadn’t hacked the branches off a couple of saplings by the end of February you were lagging way behind. By Easter you would want to have constructed your hut out of the bits and pieces that you had scavenged or that the people roundabout had turfed out for you, there to sit and guard your ever-growing pile – containing, if you were lucky, a baldy tyre or two, or five at most, for the smoke effect – until the Eleventh Night.

  Derek started humming – unknown quite possibly to himself – ‘A Day in the Life’. Two-fifty tyres in Slieve-na-cloy-Re-serve.

  (Now they know how many tyres it takes to burn the Albert Hall…)

  ‘Comments from the councillors?’ Herbie asked. If he’d had a waistcoat he’d have hooked his thumbs in it.

  Derek swallowed the hum, stroked the screen. ‘Let’s see – ah! here it’s here. Surprise, surprise: calling for a crackdown.’ He frowned. ‘No, wait… there was a crackdown, last year. Since when…’ reading a bit more in silence, ‘you’ll not believe this’ – meeting Herbie’s eye then – ‘the fly-tipping has gone up.’

  It was like a game: the more you tell us we can’t, the more we will.

  ‘Death held no terror for them,’ said Derek, hamming, ‘or at least the eighty-pound fixed penalty notice held none. Eighty pound! You’d nearly pay that yourself not to have to sit and go through your recycling once in a while.’ He turned so quickly to the coffee machine that he had it on before Herbie could say not to bother.

  Herbie had been aware of the schoolgirls on the edge of his hearing all the time he was talking to Derek, getting themselves worked up about whatever it was they were looking at on their phones. Or on one of their phones, over which they were all leaning, two of them half out of their seats, pointing. Turned out – he caught sight as he passed with his coffee – not to be a phone at all but a calculator, an equation on its display that seemed to be the result of someone falling asleep headfirst on the keyboard.

  ‘No, no, no,’ one of the girls grabbed a copybook from the table in front of her friend and started to write. ‘Like this… See… It’s a continuity equation.’

  Herbie sat, two tables along, putting off the moment of that first sip, which inevitably hastened the last. It had not simply been a fit of pique at missing out on his favourite table that caused him to pass by – or at least attempt to – just now. That had only helped push to the forefront of his mind the things at home that needed doing. But now that he was sitting down, coffee before him, the urgency of those and all other things receded. And then – with a Ryanair-style fanfare – an SMS message found its way by means far beyond his comprehension into his trouser pocket, from… where? Who? – he fumbled to pull it out. Tanya.

  He stuffed the phone away again. (That was pure pique.) A few moments later, more horns; one of the schoolgirls looked over her shoulder at him: seriously? And a few moments after that still more, and – even as he was retrieving it from his pocket a second time (all three of the girls turned his way by
now) – even more. Tanya, Tanya, Tanya. She was writing a flipping essay.

  Don’t be alarmed, were the first words he read. The next word that jumped out was chemo.

  The polyp on the lining of her womb, if he remembered? Turned out it was not quite so benign as the doctors had at first thought, although – again, don’t be alarmed – they were still confident it was treatable, as was she. ‘Well, you have to be, don’t you?’

  He looked at his cup as he closed the final text. Empty. He couldn’t remember having lifted it once.

  He rang the moment he was out the door.

  ‘Oh, listen, you didn’t have to,’ Tanya said. Did her voice sound different? He thought of the cassette tapes he had grown up with, how with use and repeated taping over they would sometimes get stretched, and how no amount of tightening – fingertip jammed in the spool – could ever quite put them right.

  She told him in her new stretched voice that she had known before Christmas, but that she hadn’t wanted to say to anyone, not even Martin. What was the point of making everybody else’s Christmas miserable? Besides, it had cost them an absolute fortune, the place they had booked in Bali. She was damned if she was just going to wave goodbye to that. She told him too all about the consultant. They had league tables for this kind of thing, survival-to-diagnosis ratios, and his were the highest – or was it the lowest? whichever was the best – in the whole of Ireland.

  She had to stop after getting that all out to catch her breath.

  ‘Oh, I’m not saying it’s a picnic, any of it, but you know what they say, what doesn’t kill you…’ The words hung in the air a moment. ‘That means it’s not going to kill me, you know that, don’t you. I just won’t let it.’

  He had been pacing up and down all this time outside the cafe. He saw the schoolgirls looking at him through the window, conscious maybe that they were in the presence of a problem that not even continuity equations perfectly executed could solve.

  ‘But here,’ Tanya said, ‘I haven’t said anything to Beth yet. You’re there with her every day, I’ll let you be the judge of when’s the best time.’

  He thought for all of two minutes before he decided there was no way in the message-saturated world he could keep the news from Beth now that Tanya had begun to let it out, even supposing there was a case to be made for should.

  He walked from Sam’s to the former lemonade bottling plant, by way of tree-lined avenue and tight-terraced street, strung-out ribbon development and nucleated cluster (any given mile of any given city was a potted history of ideas about what that city ought to be), coaching himself all the while in what to say and how to say it. There was a lot of shoulder work involved, twitches, shrugs, rolls.

  He came out eventually on to a wide road on the far side of which he walked through an archway into a yard full of facilities vans and catering vans and dressing-room trailers and four-wheel-drives with privacy windows and, the runt of this motley litter, a claret-coloured Smart car with the New Eyes NI name in china blue.

  A security guard watched from behind a sliding door as he turned about in the middle of the yard trying to get his bearings, then just as the guard took a step towards his door, Beth came out of another on the far side of the yard, chatting to a girl in a boiler suit and bowler hat, who seemed to intuit – before Beth had even clocked him – a connection between her and Herbie, and nothing but ill from his being there. Beth, alerted by her friend’s hesitation, turned towards him. Her face at the sight of him lit up, and the second after darkened. ‘Has Louise…?’

  He shook his head: nothing to do with her.

  ‘It’s not Paul again, is it?’

  ‘I just had a long chat with your mum,’ he managed at last, and she said, ‘Oh, crap.’

  The girl with the bowler hat laid a hand lightly on Beth’s shoulder before withdrawing again into the building.

  The security guard sat at his counter again and took out his phone.

  ‘She’s dying, isn’t she?’ Beth said.

  ‘Not if she has anything to do with it.’

  He filled her in as they walked, her arm in his. The consultant was saying six to eight sessions of chemo ought to do the job. Very matter of fact. People went through this every day. He couldn’t walk down a street in all of Munster without bumping into someone who had had exactly the same treatment she was going to have, and you would never know to look at them they had ever had a thing wrong with them. She had already had her first session and was feeling predictably shit, but she was staying positive.

  ‘I’m going to go down there,’ Beth said when he had finished.

  ‘Don’t you have to stay in the UK?’

  ‘Where did you hear that? Anyway, it’s not as if I have to apply for a visa, I’m just jumping on the bus.’

  He wanted to tell her some of the stories he had heard the last while, of immigration spot checks along the main road south of the border, of passengers being taken off and driven to the Garda station in Dundalk for questioning, but stories for now was all they were, passed on always by the friend of a friend of the person who had witnessed them. And with the news she had had this afternoon she didn’t need anything else to worry her.

  He on the other hand did need, while it was fresh in his mind again, to call into the Post Office and pick up an Irish passport renewal form.

  They had arrived at the traffic lights just down from M&S.

  ‘How are we off for stuff for dinner?’ she said. ‘I don’t mind taking a run in.’

  ‘No,’ he said and pressed her arm to his side, ‘we’ll be fine.’

  Beth rang Roza first thing next morning and explained she was going to have to take a couple of weeks off. Roza said if she remembered to look out the bus window now and then they could mark part of it down as a work trip. Meantime Beth wasn’t to worry about Micky and her, they would get on to one of the agencies straight away.

  ‘I suggested she give Paul a ring,’ Beth told Herbie, as they sat on the bus together into town.

  ‘Do you think he’d do it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I texted him last night to give him a heads-up. He told me he was waiting on something else coming through. I’ll call and see him when I get back.’

  He accompanied her as far as the Air Coach stop up the side of the Opera House. She phoned him eleven hours later to say she had arrived. It really was the other end of the island. She sounded as though she was in the middle of a hurricane. ‘I had to walk down the garden,’ she said. ‘The signal’s all over the place indoors. And also’ – hand cupped over her mouth for added effect – ‘it’s all too weird in there. I mean Martin’s a lovely guy, dotes on Mum, but he’s like a child. She’s worried his anxiety over her is making him sick – she actually said that – so she’s running around doing things for him and her hair is coming out in clumps…’ She paused. ‘Ah, come on,’ she said then, at the very end of patience.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He’s playing his guitar again. Must be the tenth time since I got here. Mum says it’s his way of relieving stress – passing it on, more like. Listen…’ All Herbie could hear at first was wind – all the winds of the world it might have been – but then he caught something at the back of it. Stray notes from far down the neck. He wanted to say ‘Whiskey in the Jar’. Beth came back on. ‘Desperate, isn’t it?’ He actually didn’t think it sounded too bad. ‘I’d better go back in,’ she said, but whatever way she did it she didn’t hang up properly and for the next half a minute he was treated to her exaggeratedly heavy footfall, the wild west Cork wind and his ex-wife’s lover’s painstaking guitar solo. For the first time since he got Tanya’s text – in longer, in fact, than he could remember – he cried, actual sobs that caught in his throat.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Beth asked, as though it was his doing. And without waiting for an answer banished him completely.

  *

  It took a couple of days, but she came round to Martin by and by. Despite the repeated ambition-trumping-
ability guitar stylings. And the conspiracy theories. Theory. The Big They. Out to get you one way or another and to thwart or take down anything that held out the promise of a Martin-ordered world, which as best as Beth could sum it up was Socialism Without Tinkers – he would not be dissuaded from describing Travellers as such nor see their exclusion as incompatible with his professed egalitarianism.

  ‘I will not take lectures from anyone. I have lived at close quarters with these people and believe me I know what I am talking about.’

  ‘His mother had a very bad experience,’ Tanya said as though that settled the matter. Martin often backed up his opinions (and Tanya endorsed them) with examples of things that had befallen or, occasionally, benefited members of his family, of which there appeared to be a good many. Like saints, nearly, or ancient gods, each with their own area of special interest, from sewers to oceans and even (Cousin Janice) bi-fold aluminium patio doors.

  Tanya looked on him, Beth thought, with a mixture of bemusement and barely contained desire. ‘I honestly think she could eat him if she thought she’d have as much left when she finished as she had when she began.’

  Just don’t try talking to him about illness. ‘He has too good a heart,’ was Tanya’s explanation. ‘The thought of anyone suffering is nearly too much for him.’

  He didn’t need asking twice then when Beth offered to go with Tanya to an appointment with the consultant in Cork. Beth had to go outside and be by herself for a while, the night before, after she saw Tanya’s carefully chosen outfit for the day on a hanger in the utility room: navy double-breasted blazer, white-and-lemon-striped blouse, white culottes, new knickers and bra.

  Tanya herself did the driving, one of those black sport utility vehicles that Beth had always found ridiculous (Belfast at rush hour she said looked like one big presidential motorcade), but that did, she had to acknowledge, have a kind of logic in the rocky roads around Schull.

  Beth saw them reflected in the occasional glances of passing motorists (a good half of them in SUVs too, so on their eye level). A mother and daughter, chatting and laughing, on their way up to the city for nothing more pressing than lunch or maybe a spot of shopping. Even when they arrived at the hospital you would have been hard put, she thought, to tell that Tanya was a patient, not a visitor or even a benefactor. She wanted to show Beth everything, as though she had paid for it all. (‘She’s paying for more of it than she would be up here,’ said Herbie.)