LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

by Ronan Hession

  The starters arrived, brought by a waitress who didn’t stare into anyone’s eyes, not even Peter’s when he asked for some salt.

  Grace’s phone buzzed on the table.

  ‘I’ll leave that,’ she said, making a point of not dividing her attention, but still leaving the phone where it was.

  ‘So, have you guys any plans for any trips? You should make the most of having some time off together after all these years,’ said Grace. She was forever encouraging them to go on a few city breaks or take a sun holiday so that they could be together without Hungry Paul, something which she felt would do them and him the world of good.

  ‘Nothing organised,’ said Helen, ‘We’re all just looking forward to the wedding now. But we were thinking of doing something in September. July and August are too warm and your dad doesn’t take to the sun.’

  ‘All the same, I would like to get my skin tone up from its current shade of Art Gallery White to at least magnolia,’ said Peter through a spoonful of unsalted soup.

  ‘Have you thought about giving your brother something to do at the service? Nothing too central or anything, just, you know, to include him a bit,’ said Helen.

  ‘Yeah, of course. I’d love him to be involved, but I’d like to find something he’d be enthusiastic about. You know what he’s like when he’s going through the motions. He just drags himself around without meaning to. And I don’t want him to spend the whole morning worrying about not messing up. I’m not being a perfectionist: I’m just happy we’re all going to be together on the day.’

  ‘What about getting him to do some prayers?’ suggested Peter, his soup finished by the time the salt arrived.

  ‘The problem is, he’s not really a churchgoer—nor am I, if I’m honest—so he might be worried about when to bow or where to walk or when it’s his time to come up. What if I asked him to bring up the offertory gifts? Slight risk of a spill or something, but he should be okay.’ Grace was yet to eat the first piece of asparagus she had loaded onto her fork.

  ‘It’s usually the two mothers who do that. What about a reading?’ suggested Helen.

  ‘Same problem as the prayers with all the faffing about. Also, sometimes he just freezes when he’s in front of a crowd, although I don’t think it scares him one bit. He just gets a little mesmerised. It’s like he realises how seldom you get to stand before a crowd so he just waits there and takes it in until someone ushers him off. I saw him do it at school once when he won a science prize. He just stood there like a waxwork. Maybe I’ll get him to hand out the missalettes, you know, asking people if they’re with the bride or groom, that sort of thing, like they do on TV weddings.’

  ‘Maybe. It’s not a bit social for him is it?’ said Peter, looking at Grace’s fork.

  ‘How about if he does it with Leonard? A bit of moral support for him. They are plus ones after all. That has to count for something. Eat up love,’ said Helen.

  ‘So long as it’s not too peripheral for him. I mean he’s part of the inner circle with us three, so I want him to feel included,’ said Grace, speaking with her mouth full, finally.

  ‘Oh, I’d say he’ll be happy with that,’ said Helen, ‘The whole day will be big for him, so I think we have that sorted. I’ll tell him and I’ll remind him again about the suit. Peter gave him some money for it which is still in his drawer, so he’s no excuse to keep delaying. I’ll get on to him about it when I get home. Any particular colour you’d prefer him to wear or not wear?’

  ‘Just whatever he likes,’ said Grace, ‘I have certain colours I like to wear when I need confidence for an interview or presentation, so maybe he’s the same. I’ll leave it to him.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that. He’s not good with decisions unless it’s something he cares about. Maybe I should ask him to pick the same colour as the bridesmaids’ dresses, or would that make him look like the best man?’ asked Helen.

  The three of them often talked like this about Hungry Paul. They had always seen themselves as the bumpers along the bowling lane for him to bounce between, saving him from mundane dangers and guiding him towards his achievements, modest though they were. It was sincere, well-meant and maybe even necessary. And yet, when you love somebody it can be hard to know where the boundary of solicitude ends and interference begins. It was testament to their sincerity that each of them—quite separately and without discussing it—had begun to entertain their own private doubts on this question. How do you know whether you are a force for good? How do you ever know if the world would not in fact be lost without you? At what stage does a hand become a hold? The fact that Hungry Paul offered no resistance to their efforts was not necessarily proof that they were helping him. It could equally be supposed that his lack of independence was not the justification for their intervention, but the result of it. Helping someone can so easily become a habit for both parties and people are often more comfortable being the helper than the helped.

  Peter had always said that Hungry Paul was Helen’s ‘sunfish.’ Years ago, before they had kids, Helen and Peter visited the aquarium in Monterey, California. A preference for aquariums over zoos was one of the early examples of how the Venn diagram of their personal tastes often overlapped in idiosyncratic ways. Among the lithe coral reef sharks, alien jellyfish, and camouflaged rays, was what looked like a floating, severed head: a large, lopsided, sideways swimming fish, with reflective skin and a slightly lost expression on its face. It was a sunfish and Helen said it was her favourite. Peter looked at her when she said this. He looked at the concentrated sincerity on her face. Usually he would tease her about being wilfully alternative in her choices, but even he knew that this was a very personal moment. Though she didn’t say so, he realised that she had picked the sunfish as her favourite because she knew nobody else would pick it. It would have pained her beautiful heart to think that there was a living thing that would go through life unloved and she was compensating for that with a special, deliberate effort to love it. In the same way, when her son was born after two miscarriages and almost didn’t make it, she had promised that if he survived she would not expect or ask any more from him for his whole life than that. And that is why she had accepted Hungry Paul as he was and let him follow his natural, meandering course through life as her sunfish.

  Peter’s own father had died when he was only nine and he had grown up without really knowing how boys and men were supposed to act, so he had always held back and looked inwards rather than trying to project his own unsure version of himself on to the world. When Helen was pregnant with Grace, they didn’t find out the sex of the baby before the birth and Peter carried an uneasiness throughout that time that it might be a boy. He had barely enough maleness to get him through his own life, never mind imparting it to a son. When Grace was born he felt relieved that he would at least get some practice as a parent before having to face raising a boy. When Hungry Paul was born, there was little time for abstract problems, as the first few weeks were full of worry and sleeplessness. Later, at school, Hungry Paul always seemed a vulnerable child, who was small for his age and had few friends. Peter continually worried that his son would be bullied. This vicarious vulnerability made Peter feel guilty—was he worried about Hungry Paul or just worried about himself, that he wouldn’t know how to handle it if his child was being victimised? When Hungry Paul left school, perhaps Peter could have done more to help him find a job he was good at—he had an aptitude for science and could think well, but he just had no ideas when it came to a career. But Peter had let Hungry Paul find his own way or, to be accurate, find no particular way at all. As his father, Peter had a nagging sense that through some paternal means unknown to him—man-to-man chats or fishing trips maybe—he should have prepared Hungry Paul for the world a little better.

  When Hungry Paul was brought home from the hospital, Helen and Peter made a big fuss of Grace, about how she was a big sister and what an important job that was. A few y
ears later, when Hungry Paul started school, Helen had a formal chat with Grace about the duties and responsibilities that fall to the older sister of someone like her brother. Grace had taken these conversations seriously: she was just as keen to be a model daughter as she was to be a model sister. Without anything further being said, and without her ever deliberately deciding anything, Grace had seamlessly continued to act as Hungry Paul’s guardian angel through to secondary school and on into both their adulthoods. In fact, she had never even considered whether the duties assigned to her as a young girl had ever been lifted. As she planned her wedding and looked ahead to her marriage, she began to question whether she could move on to a new life without letting go of her old one. She found herself encouraging her parents to make Hungry Paul more independent, and to become more independent themselves. Somewhere at the back of her busy mind, she wondered who would look after Hungry Paul when they were gone if he couldn’t look after himself. The thought of that role falling to her—she was the only realistic candidate for it—panicked her. She didn’t want to become frozen in time with the boy she first met at the age of three, so she set about making other plans, committing herself to Andrew as a way of relinquishing her duty towards Hungry Paul.

  And so, with such deep undercurrents causing undetected ripples at the surface, three people who loved each other very much, and who loved Hungry Paul very much, chatted over an Italian meal about the details of their lives. It was a long conversation, as Grace ate ponderously but with the approval of her parents, for whom every moment in her company was suspended in time. Over coffee they got to talking about married life, and Grace lobbed in the speculative question about what made Peter and Helen have such a happy marriage, a question that would be awkward for any couple who had had their fair share of private arguments over the years.

  ‘There is one thing,’ ventured Peter, fluttering his eyelids at Helen ostentatiously.

  ‘Dad, I’m serious. I’d like to know. How come your marriage has lasted so long, when so many others haven’t? Some couples split up after their kids leave home, or when they both retire and have to share their lives again after years of running a household, so you’re never out of the woods I guess.’

  ‘Well, if you only want serious answers,’ began Helen, ‘I think you have to put your relationship first. I mean really first, not just say that it’s No.1 in Valentine’s cards and things like that. I mean, you even have to put it ahead of your kids. Otherwise, you get sucked into being a parent and forget to prioritise your husband or wife and before you know it, you find yourself in the worst situation of all: married with children, but deeply lonely. As you both change, you will periodically lose each other. You need to find each other again and—here’s the trick—instead of trying to rekindle what you had, you need to reinvent yourselves and your relationship. You have to keep starting new relationships with the same person. This won’t make any sense to you now, but at some stage in your marriage to Andrew this may become very important.’ Helen explained all this carefully, like someone who had learned it the hard way. Peter didn’t even try and take the edge off the heavier tone it had brought to the table, realising that his darling wife was speaking very much from the heart.

  ‘Thanks Mam. It sounds difficult. Sounds like something that’s really easy to get wrong.’ Grace was leaning forward with two hands on her glass of water as she spoke.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry ahead of time, love. Just trust your instincts even if they get buried by busyness. Anyway, this has all got serious all of a sudden. Why don’t we go for a walk? I’m going to regret that cheesecake when I weigh myself at Silver Slimmers next week—at my age you pay for every dessert twice.’

  Helen made the writing-a-cheque sign to the good-looking waiter and they began gathering their things before the inevitable fuss over who would pay, Grace pushing her dad’s hand away from the bill.

  Outside, the March weather had yet to make up its mind. After such a long, lingering winter, the sun—in the places where it fell—seemed brighter than it really was. They linked elbows, feeling overfull and squinting into the wind, as Grace’s phone buzzed in the bottom of her bag.

  Chapter 7: Casual Monday

  Hungry Paul woke up just before the alarm at 6am, as he did most Mondays. Roughly three Mondays out of four he got a call from the Post Office to work a shift as a casual postman, covering for some malingering lush at the depot, and so he liked to be up early to answer the landline promptly in case it disturbed his folks. Helen and Peter usually liked to talk and joke in bed for ages after lights out, like two kids on a camping trip, so they tended to sleep in most mornings.

  His first thought was to review what he had written the night before, to check that it had not curdled overnight. Though he was pleased with how it looked, he barely felt ownership of it. It had come to him as if from elsewhere, with no preceding stream of ideas and no trace of it in his thoughts afterwards.

  He went to the bathroom to spit out the morning goo and gave himself a standing wash with a facecloth, the oxters and ‘Adam and Eve’ areas being the priority. It always felt strange to look at himself in the mirror, his reflection reminding him of how little of the world he took up. He was generally tidy in his appearance, especially in his postman’s uniform, which was the closest thing that he had to a suit. If he didn’t get his act together he might end up wearing it to Grace’s wedding.

  Downstairs, he took a moment to sit in stillness, listening to the silence and the gentle high frequency tingling in his ears that was barely audible except at quiet times like this. It was unclear whether this was a mild form of tinnitus from years of listening to headphones in his room or whether it was just the sound of nothing happening. The ambient music of air itself. He supposed that the world was full of people who have never heard that sound. People with busy lives and even busier minds.

  The bird feeders swinging in the garden were empty, so he took the fat balls and seed mix out of the corner cupboard, knowing that he would find it impossible to relax over his own food until the birds were taken care of. They were ravenous at this time of the year, their bodies bursting with reproductive urges. Chaffinches, great tits, starlings, collared doves, magpies and hooded crows all took turns at the feeder, quite literally in a pecking order. The larger birds looked like bullies at first until he realised the service they provided to the smaller birds in making sure that the area was safe and free from predators, small creatures being innately paranoid and with good reason. Hungry Paul was not a bird watcher as such. Though he loved looking at them and identifying them and being part of their lives, he never liked the collector mentality of birdwatching: all that ticking off lists and valuing the obscure over the everyday. He saw birds as part of nature, just like himself, and appreciated them with kindred interest.

  Hungry Paul was a fan of routine and the way it had of bringing familiarity to one’s life when so much else was new, changing or doubtful. As each day seemed to be fresh in its own way, he didn’t feel the need to season life’s innate variety with variety of his own. His breakfast was the same every morning: three Weetabix with banana chopped into the bowl using the side of the spoon, and a cup of strong, sugared coffee. Whereas people generally try to vary their lunch and dinner habits, at breakfast it is accepted the world over that it is better to find a system and stick to it. Hungry Paul felt that way about most things.

  With the morning all to himself, he moved to the living room and sat by the phone. Above all things, Hungry Paul was a patient person. He saw patience as a way of allowing things to happen by themselves, trusting that things would turn out as they were meant to, not by design but because of the innate orderliness of things. Just as he started filing the side of his thumbnail with a matchbox, the phone rang and, after a very brief, very male, exchange of the barest information, he cycled to the Post Office, the wind blowing through his helmet. While it wasn’t a career as such, he liked being a casual postman and was
proud of the fact that he wasn’t taking up a whole job, depriving someone else of a living. Like a small denomination stamp used to make up the balance due on a larger package, he simply covered the parts that needed covering.

  When he entered the sorting area where his post bag was waiting for him, the large room was practically empty, the early rising full-timers keen to get their day started—or more specifically finished—as soon as possible. This was a busy place in a state of desertion, with a lingering atmosphere of bachelorhood and strong opinions. Hungry Paul started organising the post into pigeonholes, one for each street on the route, before ordering it by house number. Throwing up and setting in, as it was called. If you didn’t know a street you didn’t know how to order the letters. Some streets were best done in odds and evens, others in numerical order. In semi-rural areas, where houses had names but no numbers, it was all a question of local knowledge, which was unavailable to the casual postman. In most cases it would have made more sense just to leave the post until the next day when the regular man would be back, as hardly anything urgent went by post anymore, but they never did that. It was said that a clean bench was a clean conscience.

  It had turned into a nice spring morning: bright and warm on the sunny side of the street, but in the shade there was a head cold waiting for anyone who thought it was an early summer and went out hatless. He passed kids going to school and vans running late with deliveries. It was enjoyable just watching the general distracted activity of that part of the morning, but once he got into the estates things were quieter. Postal workers weren’t supposed to cross dividing walls, though many did, so he had to walk up and down the driveways, with each front gate having its own knack.

  One heavy bloke—‘stout’ Helen would have called him—was leaning over his gate, his waist a testament to the sturdy stitch work of the sports jersey he wore. ‘If they’re bills, I don’t want them.’ There was an old couch in his front garden, and a Staffordshire bull terrier that was attacking a tyre hanging from a small birch tree.