by Helen Walsh
Sheila finds her curled up on her bedroom floor, shedding torrents of tears tinged with the mess of her rainbow make-up. She goes to her, powerless to resist the soft embrace of her pipe cleaner arms, as they reach up and hook and fasten around her neck. She tries to stave off the slow wave of nostalgia and tenderness pushing through her as she remembers what she’s here for. But it’s hopeless. She’s hopeless.
‘I hate it when we fall out,’ her gorgeous woman-child sobs, annihilating every fibre of her anger.
As she moulds herself to the hot, wet contours of her daughter’s cheek, Sheila’s soul gives out to a little gallop of joy. Ellie is telling the truth. There’s not a whiff of drink on her breath. What there is – in abundance – is the sour paste of nicotine. Ellie hums like an ashtray, and for that Sheila is ecstatically relieved. It accounts for everything then – the dreamy eyes, the giddy cadence, the heavy-limbed gestures. Her naughty thirteen-year-old has tried her first cigarette and she’s reeling from it. The bawdy stench, offset by the sweet, damp scent of her Ellieness, is curiously comforting as it floods and fills the fissures of the last half-hour. Sheila takes a deep draught, wanting to soak up and savour the moment for ever, the moment her little girl became a teenager. But then she pulls back, looks sternly into her tired eyes. ‘Ellie, I know your brother makes no secret of his smoking, but for what it’s worth, it hurts me very much. I’ll spare you the lecture because I trust that you’ll make your own decisions, but … every day I visit people dying of cancer. Some of them not much older than me. It’s such an easy, simple trap to fall into, Ellie – a cigarette in breaktime, one after school. I was a teenager too, you know.’
Ellie accepts the gentle harangue, contrite and complicit in her mum’s white lie. She knows full well her mother never tried smoking when she was an adolescent, if you could even call it an adolescence at all. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I just wanted to try it …’
Sheila can’t help but be amused by the naughty innocence this confession conjures and it’s a struggle to suppress the smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. She kisses Ellie softly on the crown of her head and leaves her to undress for bed. She’s at the top of the stairs when Ellie calls her back.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, honey?’
‘I just wanted to say thanks. That’s all. For not going off on one like other parents do.’
Sheila takes the compliment at face value, doesn’t prod it or peek behind it. She takes it because she needs it and it makes her feel good. ‘Know what, Ellie?’ Sheila comes back into the room. ‘Your granddad Jim used to have a saying.’ She registers the flicker of anguish in her little girl’s eyes at the mention of the Fitzgeralds, but she pushes on. She’ll love the punchline. It will be worth it. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child. You know the one?’ Ellie nods. ‘Well, see, I always took it literally. I thought it was an instruction.’
It takes her a while, but once Ellie figures it out she’s guffawing passionately, raking her tender green eyes over Sheila with so much love and hope. She throws her arms around her mum and holds her close, still shuddering with hiccups of laughter. Sheila is taken aback, blissfully overwhelmed. But as she rests her chin on Ellie’s shoulder, she can’t suppress the vague sense of an opportunity missed. Another crack papered over. What was happening, here? Was it just normal? Inevitable? Was it all bound up with Ellie’s impossible, head-turning beauty? It was only Halloween that the two of them were out there in the yard, scrubbing her favourite Levis with pumice stones until they looked vintage. That was them; her and her little girl, distressing her denims and fixing Grolsch bottle stoppers to her shoelaces in deference to her pop idols, Bros. Where did all that go?
Sheila heads downstairs to clear away the dishes. She’s barely reached the kitchen when a fat bass cranks up and rends the floorboards, setting her on edge all over again. She sees the empty place she’s set for Vincent and her heart snags. She hopes he’ll come home soon. Vincent will know what to do. He always does.
Ten o’clock and still no sign of him. Sheila kicks the neon yellow video box under the couch. She always wants what’s best for Vincent. She hopes he’s out having fun, having a tipple with his clever friends – a lady friend even – but God, she misses her little big man. She’s not quite ready to wave him goodbye yet, and she loves these meals they plan together. Ellie she adores, but Vincent is the only man in her life, and he’s stood her up.
She turns off the lights, and once she’s in bed, she finally succumbs to the tide of loneliness that’s descended from nowhere, spewing up its flotsam of familiar aches and pains she thought were long buried. She drifts into a shallow sleep.
The maudlin old song drags her back: ‘The last time I saw you, you looked so much older. Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder …’
Fleetingly, she’s happy: relieved that Vincent is home, safe, and so immersed in his own little world that he’s carried it all on in his bedroom, long into the night. But the thought of her boy next door – so close, a plasterboard’s width from her touch, but no longer needy of that touch – plunges her deeper into despair. Soon will come the moment of her absolute desertion. Vincent will leave for university, and hard on his heels Ellie will follow – and then she will be utterly alone. The thought burns a hole in her chest. She tosses and turns and, long, long after Vincent’s record plays itself out and he’s snoring gently, her soul is still unwilling to rest. She wonders if it might snow.
Eleven
Saturday morning. Vinnie has not moved since confirming his worst fears. Dad! What was he doing here?
He’d been lying in bed, holding off, just daydreaming about tonight, the biggest, most deliciously significant night of his life. Tonight! And then he heard a car, right outside the house, parking up on the kerb. It’s what his father used to do. Whatever the motivation – anxiety not to offend, anxiety to avoid bumps and scratches from passing vehicles, maybe some weird proprietorial spasm that this was still his house, after all – he’d always park with two wheels on the road, two on the kerb. Surely not – it couldn’t be! Not him. Not now. Desperately wishing it not to be so, Vinnie had edged over to the window to face the truth. To his abject dismay, crunching shut the rusty door of some creaking old banger was his father. Vinnie looked down on his vulnerable pink-freckled scalp, and ducked away as Robbie looked up at the house and wrinkled his nose – the house he’d never wanted. The household he’d terrorised. Vinnie turned his back on his father and lay back down on his bed, stunned, brutalised, the very concept disgusting him. Father? Him? What did he want from them now?
Those first few months after he’d left, Robbie had driven back from Blackpool every Sunday morning, without fail. These were tense, emotional affairs and Robbie’s weekly devotionals gradually refined themselves to birthday and Christmas visits up until last year when he never came at all over the festive period. Christmas Day he used to turn up late, always, dragging two plastic binbags full of rubbish presents. The plastic ponies for Ellie – not even My Little Pony, but some nasty derivative he’d picked up in the pub – and the jumble-sale chemistry set for Vincent bore testimony to the chasm his absence had dug between him and his kids. Ellie would make a big show of being ultra-delighted with everything he bought her, but Vinnie made no such pretence. His dad would sit there, brazenly trying to sell his boy some crap microscope he’d picked up. ‘Top o’ the range that, lad. Can’t get them in your Woolies, you know. Have to go abroad.’
Heart throbbing with hatred, Vinnie would force a dimple-smile and, citing homework, he’d quickly disappear to his room, staying there until he heard the grating splutter of the ignition, the reluctant lurch of the gears and the first, then second tyre flop from pavement to street.
Vinnie sighs hard, waiting for the knock on the door. How will he be? Bold? Humble? He could scarcely forget the last time he saw him. Not because it was Ellie’s twelfth birthday; not because his father spent the afternoon slumped over the bar of the near empty village
hall they’d hired out in an unapproachable fug of his own self-pity. He remembers his dad’s last appearance with indelible clarity because of Lord Morrissey. As soon as was humanly decent – as soon as his father was too drunk to notice, or to care – Vinnie had slipped away into town and bought Strangeways Here We Come at HMV. He’d lain back on his bed and let himself be washed away by it, soothed by Morrissey’s pointed barbs, heightened by an understanding that, in his anger, in his misery and in his supreme solitude, he was not alone.
As he wipes away the kohl smudges that sleep has softened into bruises, he wonders what his father will make of the new life they’ve carved out for themselves. It’s only just under a year since he last stepped foot in the house but they’ve all moved on so much. What will he make of their home these days – their home? Back then his presence still haunted the house in sentimental whispers. His old pine stereogram was still there, hogging up the hallway, his battered banjo still in its place, propped up against the settee, dusted down each morning as though it were part of the furniture itself. And, of course, there was the totemic wedding photo that mocked them all, the smiling, moonstruck teenagers – a cutting symbol of hope extinguished.
Sheila still kept these ghosts for company. But slowly, strategically Vinnie had supplanted the old with the new, evicting his father wherever he could. He’d shunted the ugly stereogram out into the garage and, after a short period of observance, out to the garden for bonfire wood. Vinnie, ever a stranger to physical toil, had experienced a primal, transcendental joy from smashing the stereo to pieces with his dad’s blunt old axe.
Now he can hear him crunching his way down the path. He’s going to have to get up. He thinks of Kenny, tonight, and it gives him strength. Suddenly things aren’t so bad at all. He’ll go through with this as best he’s able, for his mother, if this is what she wants. Slow and self-confident, he descends the stairs. But the first thing he sees is his mother, standing there agape. Robbie is, clearly, the last person she expected to ring the bell this morning. His father doesn’t even try to jest with her. He bows his head slightly, waiting to be asked in. There’s something in his father’s eyes that says that, if she turned him away, Robbie would go quickly. His mother steps back to let him in – not a word between them – and now here he is, in the hall below him. Vinnie makes every effort not to stare, not to recoil from the splintering shock of horror that zips through him.
It’s been eleven months, and in that time his father has aged. His brawny shoulders have wasted and slumped. There’s none of that overconfident Robbie Fitzgerald vim and swagger in him now, and he’s smaller, somehow. His head hangs low, his eyes pale lamps buried beneath the craggy folds of his skin. Vinnie steps towards him, dwarfing him, taking in the full extent of his decline as he gets close up – the vile aftershock of his late-night cabaret breath, the burst capillaries that thread his nose, the smoky swatches of jaded orange hair, almost stuck on in clumps, clown-like.
Vinnie looks him flush in the eye, and his father can’t help but break out into the biggest smile.
‘Hello, son,’ he says.
Vinnie steps forward but, before he can respond, a whirlwind of red hair and caramel limbs hurtles down the stairs, barges past him and flings herself onto him. ‘Daaaaaaad!’ she shrieks. ‘I knew you’d come!’ Ellie clings to him with her knees, her eyes grinning and dancing with outlandish happiness. ‘Cool wheels, Dad! Is it a Jag?’
He darts Vinnie and Sheila a nervous glance, and ruffles Ellie’s head. ‘It is, love, yeah.’
‘Wow! You’ve done it, Dad! You’ve got the Jag you always wanted!’
Vinnie notices his father’s eyes moistening up. He knows that his father knows the car’s a wreck, but to his little girl it’s the magical chariot of the stories he used to ream her. He watches his father stand back to appraise her, eyes like two waning moons. It’s only last year that she went to stay with him but Robbie is seeing her for the first time as a woman. His sister is a beautiful young woman. Vinnie feels his head drop reflexively as he’s cut out of the picture all over again, but only for a second. He comes up again, smiling. With Ellie there, he’d never get a look in with his father. And that’s OK with him. That’s just fine.
Vinnie watches his father tucking into the platter of meats Ellie has conjured up, and he feels only mild disgust. A year ago, a week ago and he’d have thrown a strop, stormed out, let them know all about his thoughts on meat, and eating. But the more he looks at this hollow man, the more he can’t hate him. He, Vincent, Vinnie, the writer, has a life. He has a future – an immediate, nerve-jangling, intoxicating future. He has Kenny. This man here – how can he despise him? He’s nothing. This evening, Vinnie will be seeing his love. Nothing his father did back then has knocked him off the path that’s brought him here, to Kenny. Nothing can bring him down. His father, the man who tried to break him, the man who would have scoured his very heart until he had no soul – is sitting right here, chewing meat. And for his mother, for his sister, and for Kenny he can live with that – he can see this through.
‘So, Dad, come on – what’s been happening? What you been up to?’
For a moment, Robbie forgets and swoons, lost in the wonder of his beautiful girl. She even talks like him, favouring the hard brogue of his Orford to the soft, suburban accent of her brother. ‘You still doing loads of gigs?’
‘Well, you know …’
‘Dad! What about the Palace?’
She’s willing the conversation forward but Robbie is starting to struggle. He can feel his son’s eyes drilling him from across the table. He can’t bluff here – the virile young singer is gone for ever. But equally, he can’t let her down. ‘Palace? Yeah. That one’s done, now. Not doin’ that no more …’ He shoots her an uneasy grin, sensing her dismay like a stone in his guts. He keeps his eyes on his plate, tries to think up something. And then it comes to him. All his performer’s instincts, everything he’s learnt from the stage tells him his audience will roll with this one. ‘But hey!’
Ellie’s all eyes again. She’s desperate for this to be good news. ‘What?’
‘I did get summat out of it.’ He plays it out. Even Vinnie has softened his gaze now and is appraising him from across the table. ‘I can read. Howbout that?’
It takes a while for this to sink in. Sheila, who has kept herself busy ferrying plates and cups and saucers to and from the table and sink, stops dead in her tracks. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Come off it, She. You knew!’
‘Knew what?’
‘Me … and the words, like …’
‘I knew you had a bit of difficulty with the longer words.’
‘Well. There you go, then. Now I don’t, see? All that time when I had that residency at the Palace? Got meself an education, didn’t I? Adult learning and all of that.’ He shoots Vinnie a bold look. ‘Just like you now, Vin. College boy!’
Vinnie forces a wan smile and Robbie feels his heart sink a fraction. Sheila stands there, tea towel in hand, stunned. ‘Well. Good for you, Robbie. Better late than never.’
‘And that’s not all you got out of it, hey?’ Ellie seizes the upturn in atmosphere. ‘You got the car, didn’t you, Dad? You got your Jag!’
Far from plumping his spirits, the reminder of that cruel, fateful day at the car showroom brings Robbie crashing back down again. Ellie’s forgotten all about it, if she ever absorbed the detail of their humiliation at all. Dragging himself out from self-pity for his girl, he claps his hands together and beams at her. ‘Yeah. I got the car, Els Bells. Anyway. What about yourselves?’ He looks to Vinnie. ‘When am I gonna be reading your masterpiece then, son?’
Again, Vinnie swallows a sad smile. He gets up from the table and, for an invisible moment, rests a hand on Robbie’s shoulder. ‘Soon,’ he says.
Robbie feels a surge of elation and then a deep sadness at the rare shock of his son’s touch. He flounders for a minute, unable to speak or think or breathe and when he comes to Vinnie has left the r
oom. Sheila is smiling at him from the end of the table but it’s a troubled smile, and it’s all she can do not to radiate pity for the man who walked out on them. He’s anxious to leave now, let them get back to it. He fixes Ellie with his sad green burn. But thankfully, it doesn’t seem to register. She’s oblivious to his sorrow. She’s just made up to have her old man back.
‘I best be off now.’ He barely sips at his tea.
Ellie chases him all the way to the end of the road, grinning and waving through the car window. Robbie keeps his eyes on the road. As he starts to pull away she stops for breath and finger-waves goodbye as his creaking old Jag groans left and disappears in a puff of smoke. He’s promised her he’ll surprise her one Sunday, soon, turn up at the crack of dawn with a bag of scalding chestnuts. But she knows he doesn’t mean it. Well, maybe he does – he thinks he’ll do it – but Ellie knows they’ll never go gambolling in the country again, she and her daddy. None of that matters, anyway. She sent that postcard on a whim, and she’s so glad she did. She perches on the low wall at the corner of the drive and she can’t help succumbing to a wave of self-regard. The simple fact is, she realises, that her animal intuition is of the most acute. Sometimes – she may as well just admit it here and now – she just knows what to do. With the deftest sleight of hand she’s sutured her family back together again if only just for a few hours, and for now, for this bone-cold, delicious, early March afternoon, Ellie Fitzgerald is the happiest girl in the universe.
