Fragile Lies

by Elliot, Laura

  The following morning Razor has the exhausted look of someone who has run a long race and crashed through the pain barrier.

  “We’re going to have a baby.” Virginia’s laughter tinkles like delicate glass smashed against stone.

  * * *

  Lorraine’s summer in London is over. The train sways through tunnels, hurtles towards Heathrow. Beside her, not speaking, keeping an eye on her luggage, Adrian sits with his feet on the seat in front. A word, a nod, a whisper, a hint and she will go anywhere with him, the two of them together, forever. He laughs defiantly when an elderly lady with rose-powdered cheeks, tells him to remove his feet. She waits to see if he will obey her and, when he ignores her order, she threatens to call the guard. Her threat is not carried out. He keeps his feet in the same position until the tube shudders to a halt at the terminus. He carries Lorraine’s luggage to the check-in desk. He hugs her, promises to be in touch, a vague promise she knows he will not keep. Last night he announced his intention of moving to California to work in advertising.

  It has been a year of conflict and famine. Argentina invaded the Falklands. The Brits took it back. Beirut is in rubble, besieged by Israel – while Iran and Iraq are slugging it out along the Gulf. The IRA continue to etch their message of freedom into the charred remains of bomb victims while Charles and Diana hold a temporary cease-fire to celebrate the birth of their first born. The world is spinning on its usual axis of war and famine and terror but for Lorraine Cheevers, as her flight is announced, 1982 will always be remembered as the year her heart was broken.

  Twenty-one

  Ferryman (an extract from Michael Carmody’s memoir)

  Regards from Aunt Anna, my first screenplay, was written shortly after Jean and Terence married. Forget about pure streams of consciousness. Regards from Aunt Anna – based on the adventures of my roaming aunt and developed into a weekly half-hour sitcom which brought me a moderate success and my first realistic pay cheque as a screen writer – was written on a pure stream of fury. But there was money in the bank, which enabled me to make regular maintenance payments into a trust account for Killian.

  I struggled for recognition as a television dramatist. Some screenplays are worth remembering, others best forgotten. I moved into a larger flat where we spent rainy Saturday afternoons watching old movies, playing Snap and Snakes and Ladders, and eating his favourite meal of sausages and chips, food that was never allowed on the Devine-O’Malley menu. Meg Golden lived in the flat above mine and always dropped in over the weekend with her collection of classical records. Killian was never too young to appreciate real music, she insisted. Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, U2, Bruce Springsteen were dismissed with a snap of her fingers, my taste consigned to the scrap heap of popular culture. Killian adored her bossy ways and listened with equal absorption to Chopin and Puccini as to Dylan or Morrison. One morning, finding her in my bed, he crawled between us, tickled her under her chin until she awoke and read him The Cat in the Hat. It was his favourite book, tattered, stuck together with tape on tape.

  They had hats in common. Meg wore them like a badge of identity and could instantly change her image with the tilt of a brim. She was Killian’s golden girl.

  “Why can’t she be my Saturday mammy,” he demanded time and time again. “Why don’t you love her best of all?”

  The question was valid but unanswerable. I imagined our lives together, her hats tilted rakishly, mysteriously, sensuously, and the temptation to sink into the future she envisaged was difficult to resist. But I did resist and she eventually moved on to marry a musician who shared her fascination with Chopin. We remained friends – a painful transition, but one we worked hard to achieve. I was godfather to Aoife, their first child. Meg brought her to visit us one Saturday afternoon when she was three years old. Killian read her The Cat in the Hat. What goes around comes around.

  After Meg, there were other women. They came and went, bestowing on Killian a casual affection. I met Roz O’Hara around that time. She was an assistant script editor who worked on one of my plays. We had a brief emotional relationship which we ended with mutual agreement after a month and settled down to a working relationship which lasts to the present day. As my script editor she cajoles and bullies the best from me. Nowhere Lodge is our most successful series. But I was never able to reach a compromise based on friendship or business with Jean Devine-O’Malley.

  Killian was delighted when his mother gave birth to Laura. He was an inquisitive child, always asking questions. If I made a baby with Meg or Jackie or Roz or anyone – would it be his real sister or brother? Would the baby belong to Laura as well? Could he live with my new baby some of the time in Laurel Heights – or would the baby always have to live in my flat? He must have asked Jean the same artless questions. She rang after one of his Saturday visits and accused me of corrupting his innocence. He must not be encouraged to form attachments to the women he found in my bed. Their presence in his life would be fleeting. She had first-hand experience of my definition of “commitment”. If I continued to confuse my sex life with his welfare she would stop his visits.

  The war of nerves we fought was carried out far from the front line, or so we liked to believe. But when Killian began to cry one Saturday afternoon and pressed his fingers nervously into his mouth, his face suddenly pinched and nervous, I realised we’d placed him in the centre of the fray. He was six years old and Jean had ordered him to call me “Michael”. The word sounded foreign on his tongue, especially when he uttered it in front of me. He looked thinner that day, an unhealthy pallor, the skin around his eyes shadowed, puffy.

  I tried to draw him out but he sobbed, “Mammy says you’re not my proper daddy and I must never tell bold lies to Lorcan.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned Lorcan, his new school friend, who lived in the house opposite him.

  “A castle,” said Killian. “It’s a really huge castle with flags.”

  Jean was adamant when I rang and accused her of using Killian as a weapon between us.

  “You can talk.” Her voice rose. “You keep asking him questions that have nothing to do with you. My life and how I live it is none of your business. Killian needs a strong sense of his own identity, not to be torn between two fathers. Terence is bringing him up as his son. He’s willing to send him to a private school and pay for his education. He deserves the respect of a proper title.”

  “But I am his father. Nothing will change that fact. I’ll drag you through every court in the land to prove my point.” I parroted the same familiar clichés and she replied in kind, reminding me that I was a struggling writer with no visible means of educating her son.

  The school Killian attended was select and private. It had an avenue of beech and a statue of the Sacred Heart, arms outstretched, above the entrance. The school principal was well known for her views on the sanctity of family life, which she enshrined in the three R’s – Reverence, Respect, Rectitude. The fact that Sr Maria was never likely to endure the slings and arrows of the marital state made no difference to her belief that the family who dined together should whine together. Jean had been appointed treasurer of the school fund-raising committee, which was presided over by Andrea Sheraton. When it came to status and wealth, the Sheratons were in the premier league and Jean Devine-O’Malley, successful businesswoman, mother and wife of a managing director with a nose for fine wines, had an image to maintain. Reminders of a heedless weekend on the slopes of Slane did not feature on her social agenda.

  The following Monday morning I rang Sr Maria. She spoke with crisp authority but her voice grew warm, almost human, when I introduced myself as Killian’s father. She thanked me for the wine I’d contributed for the school’s fund-raising auction. For a short while we discussed the distinguishing qualities of wines from the old and new worlds. When we had exhausted such pleasantries I told her my son had a dental appointment. I would collect him from her office at twelve that afternoon.

  I timed my watch for Jean’s phon
e call. Twenty minutes after midday she rang, demanding to know what game I was playing. She’d been in the middle of a business meeting when Sr Maria rang her office, wanting to know why Killian hadn’t been collected by his father. I’ve no idea what Jean said in reply – but adding two and two and getting four must have been easy for a graduate of business studies. I imagined her sitting tall and straight, those chestnut lights in her hair, tapping her finger furiously against her desk as she struggled to bring me into line.

  “This is blackmail,” she said. “You’ll be dealing with my solicitor if you dare contact Killian’s school again.”

  Did she intend signing a barring order to prevent me attending the next fund-raising event, I asked. As Killian’s father, it was time I met his principal and the parents of his friends. When I reminded her that my story was already in the public domain, albeit anonymously, I felt the satisfaction of a worm turning and striking back. This time I’d have no hesitation in going public. My friend, the journalist, was not one to avoid tabloid ink on his fingers. His editor could be guaranteed to provide an appropriate headline and a photographer outside the school gates where I would be waiting, hoping to catch a glimpse of my son. She fought back valiantly but I’d touched her Achilles heel. By the end of our conversation she’d bought my silence in exchange for a full weekend with Killian once a month and a week’s holiday during the summer.

  The following Saturday we were sitting together in McDonald’s when Killian asked what an abortion meant. He lowered his voice, as if he instinctively understood the question should not be asked amidst the clamour of birthday parties and family gatherings. Was it a big gun with bullets – or a dagger? He’d overheard Jean and Greta arguing. Greta may have been fighting on my behalf, demanding more time with him, perhaps. He did not know the details, just the essence.

  “Mammy said you wanted to kill me when I was in her tummy.” He pulled apart a Big Mac and squinted at the contents then, noticing my expression, laid it uneaten on his plate.

  Greta, whose bungalow was our neutral territory, was working in her kitchen when I collected him the following weekend.

  “How could you tell Killian that Terence doesn’t love him as much as he loves Laura because he isn’t his real father?” She scrubbed a counter top hard and determinedly, her face tight with an anger I’d noticed only once before – when she’d slammed the door in my face. “Jean said he cried for hours after he returned home.”

  I defended myself, made excuses. Self-justification is always an easier option than admitting shame. I always hoped Killian would forget that conversation. But I know now that such fractured incidents were stored in his head as carefully as a squirrel’s hoard. He absorbed our anger through his pores, breathed it deep into his nervous system, heard it in our voices when we questioned him about the life he spent apart from us.

  On the morning of his First Communion I sat at the back of the church. I watched Jean and Terence escort him to the altar. After the ceremony I was presented to the Sheratons as a family friend. Greta took photographs. Now, when I look at them, I see the tension that frightened our son so much. It’s set like aspic in our fixed smiles, the strain in our eyes, the nervous clutch of our fingers on his shoulders.

  I heard him acquire Terence’s accent, repeat his jokes. I watched him imitate his confident stride, his skill on the rugby pitch. My son had a Saturday father who didn’t exist, an invisible presence who walked beside him during school concerts, birthday parties, rugby matches. He no longer prattled heedlessly about family activities, aware that a careless remark could rouse Jean or myself to instant fury and retaliation. Tit for tat – tat for tit. I write with honesty, not with pride, and if there is a punishment for those who injure with words rather than knives then we, his parents, have served our sentence overlong.

  * * *

  He first asked about my mother, the grandmother he never knew, when he was eight years old. I spread photos across the floor.

  “She looked like you,” I said.

  He spotted the resemblance immediately and swallowed her with his eyes. His smile was her smile. The way he tossed his head when he laughed brought her instantly to mind.

  He said, “That’s a weird name,” when I called her “Shady”.

  “Her name was Sadie,” I explained. “But her friends always called her Shady.”

  “Shady lady.” He grinned and tried it again. “Shady lady … Shady lady.”

  He asked what age I was when she died.

  “Seven years old,” I replied. His eyelids flickered as he tried but failed to imagine a world without a mother.

  Shady died in a head-on collision with a wall. It was an accident that should never have happened. The police found alcohol in her bloodstream and traces of LSD. Such carelessness when life was so fragile. No wonder I carry anger. I remember a coffin borne on shoulders and a graveyard with rain; muck piled high as a mountain. A woman in a headscarf stood close to me. She had a mole on her cheek. It reminded me of a beetle. I expected it to crawl across her broad face and down her chin, drop silently on the muck where it would burrow deep. But only her lips moved.

  “That Sadie Carmody was a wild one,” she said to the woman beside her. “Drugs, if you wouldn’t mind. Who ever thought we’d see the day?”

  They nodded vigorously, their mouths slanting, as if opinions must be cautiously released in the presence of death. Who knows but the wild one could be listening from that distant sphere.

  “Poor little lad. Never a mention of a father and now this.” They turned their eyes in my direction. I think they were surprised to see me standing so close. But they didn’t see me, not really. Just a shadow child, hollowed out inside.

  The coffin was lowered by a rope. Harriet threw clay into the hole. She held my hand with her left hand, the one with only three fingers and a thumb.

  “Frostbite,” she said when I asked. “I lost it in Alaska. It’s my wedding-ring finger. Fate, I suppose. Like Shady, I was never meant to marry.”

  She held my hand so tight it hurt and I held her just as fiercely. I felt the space where her finger used to be and wondered if she had searched for it in Alaska. Did she miss it and, if she did, was it the same as missing my mother? My poor lost little boy, she cried. Lost like her finger. Shady was lost under the clay. Her eyes were brown as a bruise.

  Harriet hung up her walking boots and we moved to Mayo. The cottage had a window overlooking Clew Bay. She tried her best to be a mother. I tried my best to be a son. We ended up being friends.

  Killian stared at my mother’s photograph, a blurred image, taken, I suspect, at a family party. Her lips looked black and thin against her white teeth. It did not reflect the beauty I remembered. He asked if she had been a drug addict. His face was troubled, as if he was forcing the words from a disturbed place within himself.

  “Mammy says that’s why you can’t love anybody but yourself.”

  Jean was righteous when I rang. She reminded me of Slane, the anger I’d expressed over my mother’s death. As if I needed reminding. The memory of the pleasure we’d experienced throughout that passionate weekend when we opened our hearts and minds to each other had long withered – but the knowledge we carried away with us had become a poisoned arsenal.

  * * *

  Granny Greta takes tablets for heart scald … leave the child alone … shame on you both … carrying on like that over a little boy … tug love … tug of war love … tough love …

  Stop standing up for him, mother. Killian could have been an abortion. A lump in a bucket. Why are you always hanging around, Killian? This is a private conversation. Go and play in the garden … bucket baby … rock-a-bye baby … bang bang bullet baby …

  Twenty-two

  Virginia and Razor run through a shower of rice. Dressed in cream chambray with freesias in her hair, Virginia carries her stomach as if it is an awkward but precious possession. A scan has revealed the gender of the baby. They are going to have a son whom they will call Jake. Lo
rraine has flown to London to attend the registry-office ceremony. On the night before the wedding she rests her cheek against Virginia’s stomach and feels the pattering feet.

  “Have you forgiven me for telling Razor?” She is awed by the momentous event soon to take place and is relieved that the decision she made was the correct one.

  Virginia smiles enigmatically, rests her hands on her stomach. “Time will tell.”

  “Marry in haste, repent in hell,” intones Aunt Josephine who wears a lavender hat with a feather. Des Cheevers arrives with a frail blonde woman. Sonya does not look like a vamp in red stilettos – and Josephine is heard to say, “Those who sleep with dogs will rise with fleas.”

  No one is sure whether she is referring to her son-in-law or her ex-husband.

  At home, Lorraine waits for the phone call that will announce the baby’s arrival. It comes in the small hours of the morning. At first, she is unable to recognise Razor’s voice. It rasps down the line, as if something is lodged in his windpipe. Tears, she realises, feeling her heart plunge in shock when he tells her that their baby died during delivery. A distressed heart. By the time a caesarean operation was performed, it was too late to save him. He talks for over an hour, endlessly repeating his story as if repetition will bring understanding, some form of acceptance.

  Lorraine returns to London and is waiting to greet Virginia when she arrives home from hospital. She has tidied the apartment, removed the baby clothes. Her heart ached as she folded vests and baby shoes, removed the carry-cot and pram. Virginia lies in bed and gives vent to a low keening wail that reminds Lorraine of banshees, old Celia stirring the shadows with her ghostly tales. Her scalp prickles as the hours pass and Virginia continues to cry, dredges her past, lacerates herself for the carefree, dangerous life she led throughout her pregnancy. Razor is reticent in his grief, as if her overwhelming sorrow drains him of any energy or expression. Her outburst, its very intensity, cannot last and by the time Lorraine returns to Ireland Virginia is calm again. She will return to work and develop some really wild promotional ideas.