LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

by Ronan Hession

  The next morning he felt rested and lighter. He got up to a new sense of clarity and equilibrium. He went through the house opening all the windows, like Yoko Ono in the Imagine video, only wearing paisley pyjamas and orange Crocs.

  For weeks, the house he had lived in his whole life had unsettled him. He had felt homesick, its emptiness betraying him. But now, walking through each of its rooms, he felt ready to make friends with his own home again. Its space felt comfortable. All throughout there was an ambient sense of familiarity.

  Leonard wore a new feeling of peace. He had always associated peace with the idea of happiness, as if it were some sort of steady state that happiness turned into when it was for real. But now he realised that peace is independent of any one feeling. The deep peace that he now felt was in a minor key. It was not blissful, but melancholy. It was a profound acceptance of things as they were, devoid of superficial preferences. The weight of effort that it took to be happy was lifted from his bones.

  Before preparing his own breakfast, he stepped out to his neglected back garden where the bird feeders had been swinging for weeks, all empty and cobwebbed, and stained with the birds’ dirty leavings. Leonard scrubbed the feeders in scalding water to disinfect them, and dug out the tub of birdseed from the cupboard. He filled the seed feeder up to the brim and put out some fat balls for the bigger birds who couldn’t balance on the seed feeder’s small perches. Feeling generous, he also scattered some seed on the ground in open space, so that the less pushy birds could have something to peck at. As he stood filling the kettle at the sink, he could see through the back window that two blue tits were already getting stuck in.

  Heading into his living room with his breakfast on a tea tray, Leonard had a look at his bookshelves for some of the paperbacks he had bought recently, which had been stacked in the horizontal unread pile ever since, vertical alignment being reserved for those he had already finished and enjoyed. He found the copy of The Mill on the Floss that he had bought months before and forgotten about. He knew it would be a test to read it without flinching from whatever traces of Shelley he found there.

  Upstairs, he pushed open the door to his mother’s old room and sat on the bed, as he had often done to keep her company over a bedtime cuppa. The room was tidy and unfussy. It had already lost the characteristic freshness she had always brought to it, as much by her personality as her scent. In its place was the generic smell of dust undisturbed. On the bedside table stood the photo of his father that she had kissed with her fingers each night before going to sleep. Leonard hadn’t yet gone through her personal effects but there would be plenty of time for all the organising and charity shop donations. She really was gone. There would be no more chats or shared little routines. The never-again-ness of that thought played through him and chimed with the sad inner harmony he had awoken to.

  His loneliness now had a different quality to it. Before, it had been a panicked loneliness, desperately churning his mind to find something to cling to, just to take him away. He had sought comfort in distraction: Hungry Paul, the Roman book, and most of all, Shelley. He could see now how scared he had been. How utterly terrified that life itself was going to swallow him up. And yet he had turned and faced himself. He had sat late into the night with his book and in the end he had broken through. The fear had been nothing more than the deep love for his mother that he had not been ready to admit to himself, lest it drown him in grief.

  He patted her pillow gently and made his way back downstairs through the house, which was really too big for one person anyway. Over the next few months he would have some choices to make, but there was no rush. He sat on the living room couch, his coffee beside him in his New Scientist mug, and opened The Mill on the Floss with every intention of reading it all weekend until he finished it, which is what he did.

  Chapter 23: Easter Sunday

  Grace seemed to wake up on Easter Sunday with a dopey smile already on her face. Andrew had arranged a surprise date for them the night before, to mark their last Saturday together before they got married. Knowing that Grace liked classical music—it would have been truer to say that she liked only the good bits of the good composers—he had booked tickets to see André Rieu, thinking that he was paying for the best of the best. Grace burst out laughing when he told her, but quickly apologised and reassured him through giggling kisses that it was very sweet of him and that she was sorry for being a music snob, even if she had no intention of ever not being one. Andrew, who was not a music lover himself, felt a little wounded to have misjudged his nearly-wife’s taste so badly, but nevertheless nudged Grace’s elbow throughout the concert whenever he spotted her enjoying herself.

  Andrew had also booked a late supper for after the concert, where they ate their second dinner of the day, having already shared yet another pizza on the couch earlier in the afternoon. They got a little tipsy and giddy at the meal and celebrated with a liqueur coffee afterwards, with Andrew pretending to play André Rieu’s waltzes on the array of half-full glasses on the table.

  Though they had kissed in the taxi home, by the time they got to bed they were both too tired for anything other than sleep. When Grace woke up the next morning, Andrew was snoring on his stomach in his usual position, his limbs at ninety degree angles, like the chalk drawing of a body at a crime scene. She smiled to herself when she remembered Andrew haggling with the shop assistant in the late night newsagent to buy her an Easter egg that came with its own mug. The shop assistant wouldn’t drop his price, but Andrew bought the egg anyhow, saying that was what André Rieu would have done. When Grace’s body clock, with its usual inflexibility, prevented her from going back to sleep on that Easter morning, she resisted her habit of getting up early and alone, and instead spooned in behind Andrew, hoping to either wake him up or hold his warmth against her until he did.

  Even though she was notoriously awkward about respecting tradition for the sake of it, Grace had conceded that she and Andrew ought to spend the eve of the wedding apart. It would be strange leaving him later on to head over to her parents’ house, where she would stay the night, but then, she thought, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to miss your husband a little bit on the day before you marry him.

  Over at Parley View, Helen and Hungry Paul had already made an early start, as they wanted to visit the hospital to bring some Easter eggs to the nurses and patients before organising all the last minute bits and pieces at home ahead of Grace’s visit. They arrived at the hospital a little late, having been delayed when Hungry Paul insisted on checking the best before dates on all the eggs his mother had bought, ignoring her protest that chocolate doesn’t go off. As Helen stood chatting to the nurses, Hungry Paul entered the ward by himself. He could see that Barbara was on the phone to someone, presumably one of her emigrant children, and that the middle bed was empty. The curtain was pulled around Mrs Hawthorn’s bed. Hungry Paul paused outside the curtain and listened for a bit until he could figure out what he would be intruding on if he were to pop his head around. He wanted to give Mrs Hawthorn the egg he had bought for her specially. It was a moment of self-doubt where he wished for a door knocker or doorbell, just to signal his intention and avoid the embarrassment of walking in on a medical examination.

  ‘Hello,’ he called unclearly, his voice being a little phlegmy having not spoken in a while.

  ‘Hello,’ he tried again after a few moments.

  ‘Hello,’ came a male voice. ‘Who’s that?’

  Hungry Paul leaned his head inside the curtain to see a well-dressed man—about his own age—sitting in the chair beside Mrs Hawthorn, who was sleeping.

  ‘Hello,’ said Hungry Paul for a third time, ‘we’re just doing the rounds visiting patients to see if they want a chat. Are you a relative?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s my mum,’ he said pointing to her with his thumb. ‘She’s asleep though—been snoozing since I got here about ten minutes ago. I’ll give her five more minutes. No po
int staying here if she’s not even awake. So I’d say you’re okay for today. Thanks though,’ he said returning to scrolling through his phone.

  ‘I’ll just leave this here then, will I?’ asked Hungry Paul with the Easter egg.

  ‘I’ll take it. She won’t eat it. I’ll bring it home to the kids,’ the man said, putting it on the floor.

  Hungry Paul paused a moment. ‘If you’re under time pressure, I don’t mind sitting with your mother for a little while. I mean, I’m here for the next hour one way or another.’

  The man lifted his eyes from the phone and weighed it up briefly before accepting. ‘Actually, that would be great. Doesn’t look like she’ll be awake soon and it’s a bit of a trek to get over here, so it would be good to beat the traffic.’

  ‘It’s no trouble. Don’t forget the Easter egg,’ said Hungry Paul as the man got his bag and coat.

  ‘Oh yeah, great. When she wakes up just tell her Daniel was here. Tell her that I waited as long as I could but that I had to go. I’ll try and get back over next weekend if I can,’ he said, slipping through the curtain. ‘Don’t feel you have to stay too long.’

  Hungry Paul waited until he had left and then drew back the curtain, which let in a little more of the limited light that the north-facing ward attracted. He took his usual seat and waited beside Mrs Hawthorn, who was pale and had lost weight. He stayed there for the rest of the hour, with Mrs Hawthorn asleep the whole time.

  Helen spent her time with Barbara, who had been busy on the phone all morning as her grandkids rang her to wish her a happy Easter and tell her how many eggs they had got. Barbara had finally got word that she was to leave on Tuesday.

  ‘I got good and bad news, though I actually got the bad news first. Turns out I have diabetes, though they have to give me final confirmation tomorrow when the last set of tests comes back. Maybe I should eat that Easter egg before they confirm it. So that’s the bad news, though it could have been worse, and it was nowhere near as bad as the news I thought I was going to get. The good news, or less bad news, is that they can deal with it using tablets so I won’t have to inject myself or do any of that awful stuff. So, not too bad overall. When you get to this stage you’re always bargaining, settling for things you would have been worried about previously. To tell the truth, it’s my own fault. I got in trouble for not exercising and for eating the wrong things, although when I asked the doctor if it could be genetic he admitted that it was possible. He wasn’t pleased when I threw that back at him—I could see that!’

  Helen and Barbara filled their hour easily as they always did, with talk of the wedding and Barbara’s updates on her family and the goings-on in the ward. Apparently the woman in the middle bed just disappeared one day while Barbara was doing tests. She was sent home, although they weren’t told whether it was because she had recovered or whether it was to allow her to be looked after by her family, maybe even with palliative care for all Barbara knew. Ward neighbours had no rights in these things, she said.

  Hungry Paul came over for a quick hello before they went home, so Barbara gave him a hug and a kiss to wish him well for Grace’s wedding day, saying that he would be next and for Helen to keep an eye on him. It was the kind of comment that Hungry Paul didn’t usually enjoy, but which he was getting better at dealing with.

  The rest of the day was spent on the minor details. Peter and Hungry Paul did a dry run in the car to the church to judge how long the wedding journey would take, and erected the coloured direction signs along the route so that guests wouldn’t get lost, even if the signs looked disappointingly small and illegible once they were in place. Helen got the house ready, as a parade of well-wishing neighbours called over to see Grace, who spent the evening being genial and walking around the house in flip flops, with tissues between her painted toes. There were still some small jobs to be done at the church, which had been off-limits all week because of the Holy Week embargo on wedding activity, but otherwise Grace’s organisational nous meant that everything was attended to, checked and double-checked. Even the flowers arrived on time and were stored in the kitchen, where the radiator was left off so as not to wilt them; a minor panic about the lack of vases to hold them in was resolved with a quick knock on the doors of neighbours who were happy to help.

  After a week of take-aways, restaurants and snacking, Grace was happy to relax on the couch with a simple home-cooked meal made by Peter: chicken with fluffy mash and marrowfat peas. It was the kind of food Grace loved but never made herself, she being of the cook book generation that tended to overcomplicate things. Inevitably, Hungry Paul made the suggestion of taking out the Scrabble board, in response to which Grace gave the air a tired punch and said ‘bring it on!’

  The game was cagey, with each of them trying to maximise their scores, giving the board a congested look with few two-letter possibilities. This led to long pauses between goes, which were naturally filled by conversation.

  ‘We’re going to miss all this buzz when it’s all over,’ said Helen, ‘it’s been nice to have something to look forward to.’

  ‘I’m afraid that if you’re looking at me,’ said Hungry Paul, ‘it will be a while before you get to wear your outfit again.’

  ‘Maybe we should renew our vows, love?’ suggested Peter.

  ‘I’d rather amend them. There are a few new requirements I want to put in the small print,’ said Helen, playing ‘fa’ and explaining it was ‘fa’ as in do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.

  ‘You’d better not—they might revoke our marriage licence,’ answered Peter.

  ‘I’ve already revoked your marriage licence—too many penalty points,’ said Helen, slapping Peter’s hand as he tried to put down his word out of turn. ‘Hold on, it’s Grace next.’

  ‘That’s why I keep saying you need to do something for yourselves,’ pushed Grace. ‘Do a nice break away. Get out of your routine and do something you always wanted to do. Seriously, you just need to book something and make it happen.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ll see how we’re fixed after the wedding,’ said Helen.

  ‘And you should try and do something special too,’ said Grace, turning her attention to Hungry Paul. ‘Maybe go away with Leonard. You have your prize money now, so you could try and do a trip of your own—or maybe do a course, you know, train in something. I don’t know, computer skills or learn to drive, or something like that.’ Grace played ZEN which Hungry Paul knew wasn’t allowable because it is a proper noun, but he didn’t feel like challenging her when it was the eve of the wedding and she was already in the middle of hassling him.

  ‘Maybe—we’ll see. I’ve already got a lot on my plate with judo and the post office and the hospital visits.’ Hungry Paul had not yet told his family about the National Mime Association job. ‘And anyway, Leonard has woman trouble. He was supposed to be here tonight, but he said he wanted to take it easy and save himself for the long day tomorrow. I suspect he’s still upset about Shelley.’

  ‘Who’s Shelley?’ the other three asked in unison.

  ‘His girlfriend, or I think ex-girlfriend. She has a kid, but I think she and Leonard are still broken up. Some sort of misunderstanding.’

  ‘Really? Good man Leonard,’ said Helen, ‘At least he’s out there trying. I thought he was going to be a bachelor for life, but there you go.’

  ‘I suppose it’s a lot of change at once, what with his poor mother and everything,’ said Peter.

  ‘Poor Leonard,’ said Grace, ‘Maybe he needed the plus one after all. I must remember to say it to him tomorrow. It can be hard being single at a wedding when you’re going through a break-up. I remember doing it once and I ended up all drunk and weepy in the toilets.’

  The other three said nothing at this slightly disturbing episode of oversharing from their perfect family member.

  Peter laid down ISCHORD onto Grace’s D and gave a triumphant yelp at using all seven letters,
only to be corrected that there was no ‘h’ in ‘discord’ and besides, it wasn’t his go.

  The evening unwound once everyone’s good intentions for an early night got the better of them. Peter and Helen headed out for a late evening walk together, during which they promised to discuss holiday plans. Just as Hungry Paul was getting set up to brush his teeth, Grace knocked and came in. As in most houses, their family bathroom was a busy concourse where privacy was but an aspiration. As Hungry Paul brushed away, Grace sat on the side of the bath, wearing what looked like a set of pyjamas from the second division, depicting Minnie Mouse eating a hot dog, with little hot dogs all over the trouser section.

  ‘I’m sorry to be a nag about stuff by the way,’ offered Grace.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know, about getting your act together. I don’t mean to be on your case.’

  ‘It’s okay. I ignore it.’

  ‘Well, I was hoping you wouldn’t do that either. I don’t like to have to be the sergeant major in the family, telling people to shape up. I want to be the laid-back, popular one.’

  Hungry Paul continued to brush with extraordinary thoroughness, leaving a silence that Grace found hard not to fill.

  ‘What’s going to happen, do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I mean, are you just going to stay here forever? Are Mam and Dad going to look after you for as long as they’re around? What happens when they’re older?’

  Hungry Paul gave a swirl and a spit.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about these things, or plan for them?’

  ‘I know that things will take their course. I don’t dwell on them.’

  ‘I know you don’t. Maybe that’s why I worry about them so much. I’m doing all the family worrying.’

  ‘Grace, it’s the night before your wedding. Why bring this up now? You should just be looking forward to tomorrow, thinking about seeing Andrew, getting excited about your honeymoon, being married, your future, all that stuff. What’s up? Why be so heavy, tonight of all nights?’