This Is Now

by Ciara Geraghty

  ‘You said nobody would get hurt.’ Roman looked right into Jimmy’s face. ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘What did you call me?’ Jimmy stepped closer, close enough for Roman to feel the fetid heat of the man’s breath against his face.

  ‘You shot that old man. In the bank.’ The fear Roman felt had been blunted by the resignation.

  Jimmy shook his head. ‘Roman, Roman, Roman,’ he said, like he was humouring a child. ‘I wasn’t at the bank today. I was in my solicitor’s office, wasn’t I? That’s what we call in the business an alibi, son. My brief is a very ... accommodating young man.’

  He looked at Lenny and Tommy. Grinned at them. ‘All of us have watertight alibis, don’t we, lads?’

  Jimmy tossed the book of matches to Tommy, who struck one and threw it into the jeep. The fire got a grip on the seats first, sending great tongues of orange flame out through the windows and across the roof. The noise was furious, the heat like a wall of sound.

  ‘We should get moving,’ said Lenny, opening the door of a navy BMW with tinted windows parked behind the burning jeep. His voice was barely audible over the sound of the fire.

  Jimmy glanced at Tommy. ‘We’ll wait in the car for you.’

  Tommy nodded, drew his gun from the inside pocket of his jacket, moved towards Roman, jerked his head towards the body of water that might be a lake or might be a reservoir.

  ‘No,’ said Roman. Tommy, who spoke only when it was absolutely necessary, put his hand around the back of Roman’s neck, pushed him forward.

  Roman stumbled on, Tommy’s gun boring into the small of his back. Behind him, the roar of the fire, the clunk of car doors, opening, closing. The engine starting up, like a crowd murmuring approval.

  Despite all the ways that Roman had worried about this day, he had not imagined this. He supposed some things were too big to imagine. Too ... unimaginable. If he had imagined a scene like this, he would have assumed that he would scream. Shake. Cry. Beg for his life.

  Another twenty steps and they’d be at the water and his mother would never know what had happened to him. She would never know that he had done it for her. It’s you and me against the world, Roman. She always whispered it. Like it was their secret.

  Behind him, he could hear Tommy’s laboured breath. He was a heavy-set man with a purple face and swollen fingers. Roman had never seen him walk so far before.

  Ten steps to the water.

  Roman looked at the sky. Although it was darkening around the edges, overhead it was still a bright blue, untroubled by cloud.

  Roman walked faster.

  ‘Slow down.’ When Tommy spoke, Roman could hear the wheeze of his chest. The boy kept walking, faster now. Behind him, the crack of the joints in Tommy’s legs as he tried to keep up. ‘I said, slow the fuck down.’ Tommy was panting now.

  Roman spun around, his left arm connecting with Tommy’s right hand, the way Adam had shown him when Adam had been practising for his red belt in tae kwan do. He heard Tommy grunt in surprise. The gun was still in the man’s right hand but was pointing somewhere else now. Somewhere to the right of Roman’s head. The boy brought his knee up, drove it into Tommy’s groin, put every kilo he had into that action. Now Tommy was doubled over and the gun was still in his hand but it wasn’t pointing at Roman and Roman knew he had only a moment.

  A moment to do something.

  Or do nothing.

  Later, he told himself that he should have gone for the gun. Should have bitten into the fleshy skin of Tommy’s hand holding the gun. Maybe got it off him that way. Instead, he left the gun where it was, in Tommy’s hand, and ran.

  He ran towards the lake. Or the reservoir. Across the field, zigzagging as he ran to make it as difficult as he could for Tommy to take aim, to hit him. Up ahead, maybe two hundred metres away, a line of trees signalled the boundary of the field that held Roman. He ran for the trees. In his ears, the wind, rushing past him. When he heard the shot, it sounded far away and he didn’t think it had hit him.

  He kept running.

  He never stopped.

  Three

  The first thing Martha thought about when she got home was a drink.

  A whiskey sour. Her father’s favourite drink. And Martha’s too, for a time. A long time. The amber liquid. Three ice cubes bobbing, clinking. In a cut-crystal glass. Heavy to lift. Heavy to hold. In her mind, Martha lifted it, held it, steered it towards her mouth.

  She sat on the couch that was too big for the living room and worried at the corner of her mouth with her tongue. A metallic taste. Blood, she supposed.

  The clearest image of the day was that of the old man’s shoes. She’d glanced inside the room where he lay and looked at him. She never trusted second-hand information. She had to see things for herself. She looked inside and saw the man but when she closed her eyes now, bore down on the image, it was his shoes she saw.

  Black patent shoes, tied with a double knot, polished to a sharp shine. Martha imagined him bent over the chore earlier in the day, dawn perhaps. He had the look of an early riser, she felt. She saw him working a brush along the toes, down the sides towards the heels, not stopping until he could make out his ancient face in the leather.

  Martha swung her legs onto the couch, surprised by the quality of pain the action produced. She reached for a cushion, jammed it behind her head, closed her eyes. Her ankle was swollen but she couldn’t remember why. She should probably prop it on something. Elevate it. The pain in her side was a dull ache now, not the sickening throb of earlier when the guards had arrived at the bank. Swarms of them. The static from their radios was deafening and useless.

  When the ambulance staff had arrived, the bank was as thronged as the National Concert Hall during a Hilary Hahn recital. Tara sat on a chair that Katherine had dragged from behind one of the counters, shaking as if she were cold. Her teeth clattered together, her lips in narrow blue lines. She had to be helped into the ambulance. When it drove away in a blare of siren and flashing lights, Martha was overtaken by the urge to be where people were not. She wanted to go home.

  She also wanted a drink, which sharpened her desire to be at home. In her flat. Where there were no drinks. She’d be safer in there.

  Martha looked around, spotted a uniformed young garda on his own. He carried a notebook in which he was writing something in pencil with great concentration, the tip of his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth.

  Martha approached him. ‘I want to make a statement,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll bring you down to the station in a while, OK?’ The guard glanced at her before returning to his notebook.

  ‘No. I’m making a statement now and then I’m going home.’

  The guard looked at her. Properly this time. ‘You’ll have to go to hospital. Your face looks nasty.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you’re no fucken oil painting yourself.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Look, I’m not sitting in A&E for eight hours to be told I have a fractured rib and a cut on my face. I’m either making a statement now or I’m going home. You choose.’

  He took her statement, vaguely aware that the balance of power he usually enjoyed in these situations was not in evidence.

  His pen was a blur as he tried to keep up with the details of Martha’s recollections. Times. Actions. Descriptions. The guard could have drawn the boy’s face afterwards, if he could draw. She had only seen the boy’s face, not those of the two men, but she described their accents, their physiques, their clothes, the shapes of their faces beneath the balaclavas.

  Afterwards, he insisted on driving her to her flat in Applewood.

  ‘My car’s parked in the Castle Shopping Centre.’

  ‘I’ll drop you home.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s just ... I don’t think you should be driving in your, eh, condition. You could be concussed.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘It’s not something you can be certain of.’

>   ‘I am certain.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘OK, fine.’ Martha was as surprised as the guard when she folded. She put it down to the unexpected turn the day had taken. The pain in her ribs. Her ankle, for some reason. Her face. That, and a deep-seated tiredness that made her feel heavy and dim-witted.

  ‘Do you want me to come up?’ the guard asked, when he pulled up outside her apartment block.

  ‘I’m not really in the mood, to be honest.’

  He flushed furiously, making himself seem even younger than before. ‘No, I didn’t mean ...’ he said.

  Martha closed the passenger door without hearing what it was he didn’t mean. The lift wasn’t working and she pulled herself to the third floor by gripping the handrail and naming every note on the score for Beethoven’s Finale, which she was learning on her violin. By the time she got to her door, the pain was a drumbeat, loud and throbbing. The sharp sting at the side of her head. A burning sensation in her ribs, although it only hurt when she breathed so she concentrated on taking slow, shallow breaths and doing so as seldom as possible.

  She thought about whisky. Neat, this time. No messing with ice and lemon. Scotch single malt. She had been a mostly discerning drinker. None of your Royal Dutch. Despite the time that had somehow passed since the last drink, she remembered with great clarity the peaty taste of it, the smooth track of it down her throat and the warmth of it; the way it spread itself around her body like a blanket tucked under the chin of a child. She tried to remember what her last drink had been and found that she could not. She could remember the anticipation of it, the sensation of her mouth against the glass. But not the drink itself. She supposed it was because, at the time, she hadn’t known it would be her last drink. If she had, she might have afforded it more ceremony.

  Her mouth watered like she was hungry. She wasn’t hungry. She was thirsty. The kind of thirst water couldn’t quench. She distracted herself by breathing deeply, focused on the scream of her ribs, pulled the pain around her like one of those bothy bags that Cillian used to bring with him when they went hiking. To shelter them in case a storm blew up. The weight of the pain might shelter her from her desire for a drink. She breathed, in and out, taking forever about it, in for five, hold for five, out for five. The pain was like something alive and furious.

  When she closed her eyes, she saw the front door of the Pound pub, swinging open.

  She forced herself to stay where she was, stay on the couch, not move her feet towards the floor, not fumble for her bag, not grab her keys, not reach for the handle of the door.

  It was almost physical, the struggle.

  In the morning, she would have to go to a meeting.

  She never went into the meetings. She parked outside. She had been doing this for about a year now, although it had been longer than that since she’d had a drink.

  Over a year.

  One year, four months, two weeks and three days. Martha wondered if the accuracy of this calculation might dim in time.

  ‘My name is Martha Wilder and I have an uneasy relationship with alcohol.’ She never said alcoholic. She associated that word with fumbling, bloated men with wispy hair and bulbous noses and red faces and unfortunate wives.

  She said the sentence – out loud – sitting in her car outside various parish halls and community centres. The often neglected appearance of these buildings from the outside – fading paintwork, cobwebbed windows, rusting door hinges, roofs with missing slates like rows of unfortunate teeth – reinforced her intention never to step inside.

  She parked far enough away so no one could mistake her for a dithering, will-I-won’t-I first-timer, but near enough so she could see them going in.

  She parked the car, then she said what she had to say – My name is Martha Wilder and I have an uneasy relationship with alcohol – and she held her mobile against her ear when she said it, so that if anyone glanced into the car, they would presume she was having a normal conversation with a normal person on a normal mobile phone.

  Just like a normal woman.

  She imagined the people inside, sitting in a circle of hard plastic chairs, the soles of their shoes worrying at the floor, perhaps nodding after her little introduction, some of them mumbling, ‘Hello, Martha,’ the way they did in the movies.

  ‘I haven’t had a drink in one year, four months, two weeks and three days.’ Would she get a round of applause for that? A shuffle of approval? Probably not.

  People often peered into her car as she sat outside the meetings. She was not one of those women who blended into the background. It was her height, she supposed. When she reached five feet nine at the age of fifteen she had hoped that she might be overlooked for any further elongation but, in spite of the fervour of her hope, she had continued to stretch until she was finally spared, just below the six-foot mark. And she was big-boned. Sturdy, her father used to call her. That, coupled with her mane of long red hair – which ran riot if she didn’t apply buckets of product – made it difficult for her to sit in her car outside an AA meeting unnoticed.

  She opened her notebook where she had written her six reasons, at the end. Or perhaps it was better to think about it as a beginning. That’s what Tara had said.

  A new beginning, she’d called it. Martha had told her to cop onto herself and Tara apologised and said she was premenstrual and hungover and wasn’t thinking straight. Then she apologised for saying hungover and Martha said, Fuck sake, and Tara said it was going to take her time to adjust to the changes and Martha said, I feel for you, I really do, and Tara said, Let’s eat mushroom risotto and watch Countdown, and that’s what they did – except Martha ate Pot Noodles instead of risotto and they watched The Muppet Show instead of Countdown, and the day passed and then another and another, and that’s how Martha managed in the end. Or the beginning, she supposed.

  Her routine outside the meetings never changed. Her brief introduction in the car, while pretending to be on the phone. The reading aloud of the six reasons. Although two of them were the same reason. Both one word. A name. The first reason and the last reason. She read them slowly and with intent, so that the part of her that scorned her attempts at sobriety would hear her and know that she meant it and back off.

  Martha was not a woman given to superstition but that part of her – the part that scorned her attempts – made her feel nervous and she was not supposed to be a person who felt nervous, so she doused it with her six reasons that were really five reasons. Every time. And most times, the front door of the Pound pub stayed closed.

  Except now it was wide open. She put this yearning down to the day. Not your usual put-out-the-bins-don’t-drink-a-drink kind of day, with the situation at the bank and the fact that she hadn’t filed the article that she’d undertaken to file by four o’clock that afternoon.

  From the couch, she couldn’t see the kitchen clock. Couldn’t remember where her mobile was.

  Not yet closing time, that was for sure. She could see right inside the pub now, the dark interior, the long legs of the bar stools, even the hooks under the counter where she had hung her coat, her bag and, once, the strap of a complicated camera belonging to a work colleague. She had left it behind, that camera, and when she eventually remembered, she went back but the camera was gone and she’d bought another one, hoping her colleague wouldn’t notice but she did notice, of course she did, and Martha had felt the familiar sting of humiliation and dread and uselessness that she had felt on so many mornings when she managed to drag herself out of bed and wonder what she had done the day before, what she had said, what she had lost.

  Martha opened her eyes, concentrated on what she could see: her violin stand with the sheet music in messy piles on the floor around its base; the arm of the couch, its velvet covering baggier now and not as deeply red as it had once been; one of her boots lying on its side near the door, a soft leather ankle boot, a dull olive green colour. She focused on the boot, thought about its comrade, where it might be; in her head, she retraced
her steps and thought it might be in her bedroom. She remembered easing the boot off her foot with the toe of the other boot because she didn’t think she could bend down. She didn’t know why she had taken the other boot off in the living room. She must have gotten distracted. Now she looked at the bookshelf and tried to remember where she had bought each of the books. She began at the top shelf.

  This was how she managed on days like this. This was how she closed the door of the pub. She knew it was pitiful. She felt like shouting it’s not fair like some melodramatic teenager who has received a response from her parents that was not in keeping with her expectations.

  She didn’t shout. She waited. She knew this was the only way to douse the yearning that was all around her now. Maybe it had something to do with muscle memory. One traumatic experience and the brain reaches for the age-old solution, as if the last one year, four months, two weeks and three days meant nothing. As if they hadn’t happened at all.

  She must have lain on the couch for a long time because when darkness fell – suddenly, the way it did in winter, like a heavy curtain across the stage of the sky – she was still there. Still on the couch. Perhaps she had fallen asleep? Although she doubted it, with the pain and the trying not to breathe too much or too often and the memory of the black polished patent shoes, tied with a double knot, and the yearning and the open door of the pub and the worrying about Tara.

  She checked her phone again. A missed call from Katherine. Had her phone even rung?

  ‘They think she’s in shock,’ Katherine said when Martha rang back. Katherine sounded shocked herself. Martha understood. Tara didn’t shock easily. Not even when she was ten and the chip pan went on fire in the kitchen when her mother was outside, flagging down the bread van and chatting with Mrs O’Reilly from number fifty-two with whom she competed on a daily basis on matters of front-window cleaning, door-knocker polishing, net-curtain whiteness and the progress – social and intellectual – of their offspring. Tara had climbed out her bedroom window and sat on the roof of the extension, reading her book as she waited for the fire brigade to arrive following her brief call to the emergency services.