Iris returned with tea and Tim Tams and took her seat next to Peggy on the couch. The birds came back, more of them now, a couple jumping up the front steps.
‘Bugger off!’ Iris stamped her foot and the birds flew away. ‘They’d waltz into the kitchen if I let ’em.’
Peggy took the bowl of biscuits. ‘None for you, Aunty. I saw the pack next to your bed.’
‘Oh hell, Peg, lay off.’
Peg didn’t lay off because the biscuits would mess with the old woman’s sugars and someone needed to tell her. ‘Kids, come and get a cookie!’ And to Maggie: ‘Any left over and she’ll sneak some for herself, you watch.’
‘You just keep smoking them fags there, Peg, and you’ll cark it ’fore I do,’ Iris said as the children started running for the porch. ‘Here, kids . . . Hey, ya greedy mugs—one apiece is plenty.’
Each face was a different shade of brown, each smudged with garden dirt. The younger ones flashed smiles of white teeth and darted off to play while the older girl lingered, eyed Maggie with uncertainty.
‘Off you go now, love,’ Iris said to her, and when she was gone, continued, ‘Maggie here is wanting to catch up with Tyson. You remember, Peg, I told you about that judge who drove in here and had the accident? Well, Maggie is Mrs Judge. She wants to buy Tyson another dog.’
Peggy laughed. ‘Last thing Tyson needs is a friggin’ dog.’
‘That’s just what I said.’
‘There’s a list a mile long of things he needs before he gets a dog.’ Though Iris raised a hand in protest, Peggy rode over the top of her. ‘He could do with some new Nikes for a start, that’d get him off all our backs. Forget the dog, I say, and get him some decent bloody shoes.’
As Maggie started to say she’d be happy to get the boy shoes, Iris stamped her foot on the wooden porch. ‘I am telling you now she’s not buying him nothing! You listen to me, Maggie—’ Iris held her gaze ‘—Tyson had plenty more to cry about that day. The dog getting hit was a blow, but it just broke the back of it. The truth of it is, those tears were a long time coming.’
Peggy reached a hand over to Iris’s shoulder. She wasn’t going to argue with that. ‘He’s a good boy, Tyson,’ was all she said, and then to Maggie: ‘Just so I get this straight in my head: you really came up here to say sorry and get him a dog? You came here to do that?’
Maggie nodded.
‘Why don’t you just leave some money?’
‘Peggy! Shut the fuck up . . .’
‘Yeah, right, okay,’ Peggy said, putting her hands up in surrender and turning back to Maggie. ‘You wanna say you’re sorry? He should hear that. He doesn’t hear it enough.’
The children in the garden had all climbed up to different branches of a tree. The littlest one called out that he was stuck.
‘Lana, you help Billy down right now,’ Peggy shrieked.
‘No, Mum, you, you . . .’ Billy shouted back. ‘Lana gonna let me fall.’
And Lana: ‘He won’t let me touch him!’
Peggy jumped up from the couch, storming over like she was going to pull the tree out by the roots with her bare hands.
‘How many are hers?’ Maggie asked.
‘None, technically,’ Iris said. ‘Peg’s more an aunt, but two of them call her Mum.’
‘She doesn’t have her own?’
‘Nah, but kin give her plenty.’
The little one had jumped onto her shoulders and Peggy was running around chasing the rest of them like a two-headed monster.
‘You got kids?’ Iris asked.
‘A son.’
‘Grandkids?’
‘Yes, just one, a boy too.’
‘I bet you spoil him like crazy.’
Maggie shrugged. ‘And then, like they say, at the end of the day you hand them back.’
Iris shook her head, laughed. ‘Not round here you don’t . . .’
Before she finished the sentence a woman entered through the front gate. Her short red hair was a bolt of colour against her grey suit. ‘Hello, Iris,’ she said with a smile. ‘You remember our appointment?’
‘Well, I’m here,’ came the reply, Iris’s spine visibly arching in the woman’s presence.
‘And Tilly?’
‘Asleep inside. You go on in and check yourself.’
With a sigh of frustration the woman looked at Maggie, clearly assuming that by virtue of the colour of their skin they were somehow on the same side. ‘Iris, I’m just here to see how it’s working out.’
Iris nodded, gave nothing more.
‘And Tyson? Where’ll I find him?’
‘Visiting his mother.’
The woman’s lips pursed a moment then her jaw moved from side to side like she was loosening it for a fight. ‘He stayed here last night?’
‘Sure did.’
‘He can’t stay down there, Iris.’
‘And I just told you he stayed here.’
‘We had an appointment today.’
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’
‘With Tyson too.’
‘I can’t keep up with who you want and when you want them.’
‘He wasn’t at school yesterday, Iris.’
‘I know that. He got a sore belly. What you doing, anyway? He went every other day this week. You checking every day now?’
‘No, I am not checking every day. I receive a report from the school. He is doing so well, Iris; he’s a bright boy.’
‘Don’t I know it.’
‘But he’s been in Redfern again, with Kayla. You know as well as I do what that means.’
‘He’s looking after her, that’s all he’s doing,’ Iris said, and hearing the words leave her mouth, raised a hand. ‘I know, I know it ain’t a job for a twelve-year-old boy.’
‘You’re right about that,’ the woman said. ‘Just get him back here, Iris. That’s what you need to do.’
The words were spoken more as a plea than a directive, but still with the authority of an arbiter, implicit in them the threat that inaction would have consequences—all of which Iris bore in her ancient leaden eyes the way a packhorse bears extra weight: unflinching, more of the same, the same old load, the same road ahead.
‘I’m going to have to sight Tilly,’ the woman said—like the child was a set of accounts, Maggie thought, and this was some sort of audit.
‘You know where the room is,’ Iris told her. ‘Don’t wake her up like you done last time. You don’t need to shake ’em to tell if they’re still breathing.’
‘I know that, Iris. I just need to see if she’s alright.’
With the last words there was a shift in Iris’s face, a hardening. ‘You ever seen a child under this roof that’s not alright?’
‘I’m only doing my job.’
‘You go and do it then. Wake a sleeping child. Poke around my house. Then bugger off. Go on, Debbie, write that down . . .’
‘Delvine,’ the woman corrected her, and went inside.
‘Whatever the fuck your name is,’ Iris muttered when the woman was out of earshot. And then to Maggie: ‘They’re more worried about their paperwork than anything, that’s what it’s all about. You read about that boy that starved, the one they tied to the cot? That child was on their books, while they’re ferreting around inside my place and waking up Tilly here . . . They had it all ticked off, of course, so no one was to blame.’ Iris’s voice trailed into a whisper as she stared at the ground, shaking her head. ‘A child died in its own bed while they’re ticking their boxes, but it’s no one’s damn fault.’
A minute later the woman returned. ‘Sound asleep,’ she said and smiled. And before she could finish the words came the sound of the child screaming out to her nan.
Iris pushed herself up off the couch.
‘You done?’ she asked.
Iris waited until the woman was out the gate before going to get Tilly from her cot.
‘This is light on for Iris,’ Peggy said to Maggie. ‘Sometimes she’s got three or four at one time
. Lord knows how many she’s had here over the years.’ And in a low voice: ‘She don’t put up with questions like that about how the kids are looked after. She lost a baby daughter, Iris did, when they were still in the hospital. There ain’t anyone that takes better care of these kids.’ And as Iris returned with the little girl: ‘How many you reckon, Iris? How many kids you had?’
‘Tilly makes it eleven. Here you go, bubby . . .’ Iris peeled a banana halfway down and broke it off. Tilly swiped it and mashed it into her mouth in three bites. Iris gave her the rest. ‘That a girl . . . You still hungry? She got an appetite, this one.’
‘What about you, Maggie?’ Peggy asked. ‘What do you do? For work, I mean.’
‘I’m a painter.’
‘What do you paint?’ The question came from Iris.
‘People mostly. Portraits.’
‘And people buy them?’ Peggy asked.
‘Yes. Most of the time.’
‘How much they buy them for?’
‘Peg, shut up, would ya!’
‘I’m just asking. I’m interested . . .’
‘I don’t mind,’ Maggie said. ‘It varies. Sometimes not so much . . .’
‘What’s the most you sold one for?’
Maggie hesitated. ‘Well, one year I won a prize, so that one sold for quite a lot.’
‘Like more than ten thousand?’
‘A bit more.’
‘So you’re good then . . . Aunty won a prize for her boxes, you know that?’
‘No, I did not!’ Maggie answered. ‘You said no one wants them anymore.’
‘That’s crap, Aunty. The galleries want ’em. Truth is she can’t make ’em quick enough.’ As she spoke, Peggy looked from Maggie to Iris and back again, and even before she asked the question, Maggie could see what was on her mind. ‘You could paint Iris!’
‘Oh, bloody hell, Peg, would ya shut up?! What the hell anyone want a painting of me for?’
‘They make ones look exactly like you, just like a photo . . . Like that one they done of Uncle Gerry! You loved that, Aunty.’
Maggie interrupted to explain that hers were different, not so lifelike. ‘I do brush painting, with ink. Mainly ink, and watercolours.’
Iris sat back in her chair. ‘I bet they’re real good.’
‘Well, if she won a prize and she sells them for a bucketload, I bet they are too.’ Peggy went quiet then, leant back on the couch with Iris as Maggie sipped the last of her cold tea.
‘I’d love to paint you, Iris,’ she said. ‘If you’d like me to.’ In a way, she realised, she had already started; ever since meeting her she had been sketching Iris’s face in her mind.
Iris shook her head and cawed. The words came in a high pitch, as though she were mid-conversation. ‘Here you gonna put some picture of my craggy old head up on a wall, people think I’m a loon . . .’
For a while the three women sat in silence, until finally Iris spoke. ‘So how long’d I have to sit still for?’
Peggy clapped. And Tilly too.
As she was leaving Maggie had just one question for Iris, and it wasn’t about painting her portrait.
‘Your son,’ she said. ‘What is his name?’
Iris looked at her sideways.
‘I want to ask Martin about him,’ Maggie explained. ‘To see if he can remember him.’
Iris looked at her a moment as though the offer contained a threat to her or to her son. Then she shook it off. ‘I suppose there’d be no harm,’ she said. ‘My boy is Rodney. Rodney Keith Matthews.’
Chapter 18
Cross-legged on the floor with his pictures: low tide, a small girl in striped swimmers squatting in the sand. The woman smiled but kept watch: old men don’t take photos of little children, they shouldn’t do. He knew, but yesterday he forgot.
Low tide was morning, snaked ripples in the sand. The girl poked them with a stick.
In the afternoon there were bluebottles, their tails wrapped up in seaweed.
The sting was there, all wrapped up.
Hiding.
Maggie had hung corkboards on the wall so he could pin up the pictures. Stick them with pins . . . Good thing Dave wasn’t here to scribble horns or stab holes in the eyes. Once it was on the wall it was communal property, that was what Dave had said. Even the books on the shelves; Dave loved those books, then one day he put them in a box along with jars of Linda’s beads and gave it all to the kids’ art project in the Bronx. So Martin didn’t make a thing of it when Dave drew on his photos. What were a few photos?
But it wasn’t just the photos, was it? It wasn’t just what hung on the walls—it was everything inside them. Dave wore other people’s clothes and ate other people’s food. He refused to pass judgment on art because that meant ascribing value and with value came yield and the need to control. ‘It is what it is what it is what it is,’ with a wave of the hand. And there was the rub: Linda so quick to laud or disparage. It played out in the end, the argument between them: Linda climbed her way to the Upper East Side as art buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue; Dave shared his life and his work. Dave shared a disease in a needle, shared the fate of so many others . . . They were both right, Dave and Linda, they always were. The art existed both inside and outside the mind; it was both real and unreal. It could all be abandoned, and yet nothing could.
There was an email from John, a courtesy. The judgment had been handed down in the people smuggler matter; because of the delay, it had been given priority. The court had allowed the fresh evidence but dismissed the appeal. The sentence would stand: prison and then deportation. That was that.
Martin turned away from the computer and looked back to the images in the prints on the floor: across at the pool, on the beach, inside this house and on the street. These were the days’ events. Some were familiar, some were not. Sometimes the shutter had a mind all its own. He could not determine how long it would take for the light to pass, whether the image would be dim or exposed. Sometimes, more and more, the lag between scenes was unexplained, as though he was an actor in an avant-garde film, the narrative obscure, senseless: a man sitting on the floor with his prints, and now, next, the same man standing at a bus stop . . .
In a blink, there he was, in the glare of the street without glasses or a hat and next to him an empty bench and a yellow sign with a picture of a bus and a list of numbers and times.
Ask yourself, Martin. Ask yourself the questions.
How did you come to this bus stop?
When did you get here?
What are you doing here?
These were the questions he had to ask himself when a scene sneaked up on him unexplained, out of the blue, out of the terrible dark.
And then Maggie beside him: ‘Stay here, Martin. Sit here and don’t move, do you understand me? I will just be a minute.’ She was cranky because he’d gone and bought tickets for Morocco (‘We are not going to Morocco!’). She disappeared into the shop and he was sitting on a bench next to a woman with a lovely, scoop-necked T-shirt. The way she was sitting with her elbows on her knees, he could see her blue-striped bra and her bulging, honey-brown breasts: good enough to bury his face in, he thought, like big Barbara Lowry from chambers. When the bus came and the woman got on it, he followed her up the steps to the driver, but when Martin tried to give him money the driver wouldn’t take it because they didn’t sell tickets on buses anymore, only in the newsagents.
‘Where are you going, mate?’ the driver said and then, when Martin didn’t answer, shook his head. ‘Maybe you should just wait here at the bus stop. Are you with anyone?’
Martin smiled at his buxom young beauty, who stared back at him now with a strange defiance before she spoke: ‘Bloody pervert.’ To which Martin swung around suddenly and stumbled off the bus onto the footpath as Maggie came running. When she stopped, she looked up into the bus and saw the way the beauty was staring down at him.
‘They won’t sell you a ticket anymore,’ he told her, but she wasn’t listening because he w
as in trouble again.
Back in the car she was cross because the seats were hot, and even though he opened the window to let in the cool air, still her eyes glazed over like marbles and he knew he was making her tired and sad and he wished she wasn’t, wished he didn’t. He wished he hadn’t pissed in the fireplace. ‘I need someone to help me, Martin,’ she said. ‘Someone to be there for you when you don’t remember, when you get confused.’
He didn’t say anything to that. More and more he was uncertain when he was meant to speak and when he was meant to stay silent.
Sometimes, though, it was clear; it was clear that he was not there to observe or to be managed, but that he still had a part in it. It was as clear as the line between the cliffs and the sky.
He was fishing on the beach and Finnegan came running down.
‘Grandie! Have you got a rod for me?’
He handed Finnegan his own rod to hold. It was heavier than the one the boy was used to, but it was all he had, and Finn was strong enough for it. He would make a good fisherman because he wasn’t in a hurry and he listened to instructions. Martin watched him lift the line at the first tug, just gently, to trick the fish into thinking it was a prawn trying to wriggle away. The day Finnegan caught his first fish they were on the rocks and the boy slipped down into the water and scraped his leg but he didn’t care; he strained his neck to see the graze—bubbles of blood, red raw skin—then nodded in recognition of the pain, determined to ignore it. They measured the fish and took a photograph, and before they threw it back Finn christened it Kevin. Martin put the photo in a frame and gave it to Finnegan on his birthday.
‘I don’t mind fishing off the beach if that’s what we have to do,’ the boy said now.
Martin smiled. ‘We’ll catch some squid. And look at this . . .’ When the wave washed back he pointed to the holes in the sand then dug his hand under it and pulled out a pipi. ‘They make good eating. You ever try a pipi?’
Martin took the rod back and Finnegan found four more. No fish today, but five pipis. Next time they’d make it worthwhile and fill up his hat. For now Finnegan put them back in the sand.
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