His was shame. The baby of the family, sent to college while his sisters Brenda and Joan worked in a hairdressing salon to supplement his fees. Ted, who had gone to the US on a J–1 visa in the final year of his arts degree and had never gone home.
‘Is this what we educated you for?’ his mother wrote. It was the strangest sensation receiving a letter from his mother – the first time ever. ‘Your sisters scrubbing their fingers to the bone, so that you could hightail off to America? (Amerikay, he could hear her say it, like in some poor-mouth emigrant song.) To work on the buildings?’
He couldn’t tell her that the reason he wouldn’t go home was her. That he couldn’t face the claustrophobic disappointment that was their two-up, two-down house in Main Street, Mellick. Couldn’t face another day with his mother sitting in the good room with the blinds drinking whiskey miniatures from a teacup and melting into grandiose tears. Couldn’t bear his sisters, all hair lacquer and nail polish, dancing attendance on her, trying to make up for the shortcomings of the man of the house. And latterly that meant Ted, not his unlamented father.
His poor da was straight from Irish father central casting. A pigeon fancier, the only time he was at peace with the world was when he was whispering to his cooing birds locked in barracks in the back yard. Otherwise, he was an emotional caveman. He was given to volcanic rages in which he would slice and joust with anything at close quarters. Dinners were upended if the portions weren’t large enough; furniture broken and knick-knacks smashed if he were thwarted. What saved his father from caricature was that he didn’t drink – he wore a pioneer pin – but that made his moods even more unpredictable. Nowadays some underlying mental condition would probably be diagnosed – bipolar disorder, schizophrenia – but what difference did it make having a name for it? His father had made their lives a misery. But at least he’d had the grace to exit early, keeling over in the midst of one of his choleric outbursts when Ted was twelve. For Ted’s mother, though, that was his father’s greatest crime. That he’d had the cheek to die, leaving her with three dependent children. His sisters were promptly apprenticed out, while his mother’s life became a pooled and rancid stillness. The only thing that animated her was her punishing ambition for Ted.
‘You’re going to be a doctor,’ she would say, ‘or an engineer … that’ll show him.’ As if Ted’s whole purpose in life was to spite the memory of his father.
It was his mother who took to drinking. Messily. Alcohol made her cravenly sentimental and affectionate; queasily so. She’d take Ted’s hand and caress it, fingering the lines of his palm like a foolish astrologer.
‘Oh Ted, Ted,’ she would say, ‘what would I do without you?’
Sometimes he wondered whom she was seeing when she planted a sloppy kiss on his fourteen-year-old lips.
‘I never touched a drop until I was thirty,’ his mother used to say, ‘it was your father drove me to it.’
Ted knew what was coming next.
‘Do you know that when I got married to your father, my boss offered us a case of whiskey for the reception and I was disappointed.’ His mother had been a barmaid in The Thirsty Scholar. ‘I had no value for it. I’d have preferred a canteen of cutlery.’
This was what Ted wanted to retrieve in his novel, the girl his mother had been, the one who would have chosen a case of knives.
Ted thought of himself as a social drinker; well, he liked to have other people to drink with. Days would go by and he wouldn’t even think of alcohol, but once he stepped into Skipper’s on a Thursday evening it was the beginning of a roll that would finish up as a dull ache and a thick head on Monday morning. (Luckily, he didn’t teach on Mondays.) He didn’t have blackouts, he didn’t have bruises and scrapes he wasn’t quite sure how he’d acquired, he’d never arrived at school drunk. He cleaned up well, and usually he had prepared his classes. Usually.
One Tuesday in February he was saddled with a giant hangover and a workshop devoted – as he’d decreed the week previously – to the study of character. Snow had started to fall that morning in lazy swirls; by the time workshop was over it would be slick underfoot. Bypassing the present was a favourite trick of his when he wasn’t in the mood for teaching. He turned to face the students sitting in boardroom formation waiting for him to start. Paula was on his mind. She hadn’t shown up at Skipper’s on Thursday; she’d obviously had a better offer. He had camped out at the bar for the rest of the night expecting her to arrive at any moment and feeling both anxious and peeved that she had left him in the lurch. He brooded on her absence over the weekend, drinking steadily as he did. It was still rankling with him as he stood before his workshop. Three hours of unprepared class time yawned ahead of him. He improvised.
‘Take a woman,’ he began.
Someone snickered.
‘Early forties, victim of a violent marriage, who finally leaves her husband and then has her kids taken away from her because she drinks too much. A woman who lives in the vain hope she can get them back …’
Was it vain? He felt the first stab of misgiving.
‘Delusional, in other words.’ That was Valerie Kleber. A professed Christian ( her email tag was JCdiedforme), she was a severe beauty, with long black glossy hair, serious glasses and the kind of mouth which was pert now, and later, Ted suspected, would grow thin and judgemental. Her father was some class of a minister.
‘Let’s not reach for labels, Valerie,’ he said, riled at her diagnostic certainties. ‘This is a study of character, not a case history.’
There was a sharp rustling of papers and searching for pens.
‘What does she do?’ Valerie asked.
‘Does it matter?’ He was playing for time. Already, he felt seedlings of betrayal sprouting.
‘What’s her name?’ Taylor Payne demanded.
‘Let’s call her Paula,’ he said. How pathetic was he that he couldn’t even think up an alias for her? ‘She works in a store, on the register.’
‘This sounds like a total cliché.’ That was Taylor again shaking his shoulder-length blond locks, emanating a glassy boredom. A poet by aspiration, forced to dirty his hands with fiction. When he wrote in class a smirk played on his features as if he were contemptuously amused by his own trifles.
‘Some clichés are true,’ Ted said.
‘You mean this is a real person?’ Sonia Matheson was either incredulous or sceptical; Ted couldn’t work out the difference. He thought of her as large, sweet-natured and dim, but sometimes there was a gleam in her fat eye that could have been sarcasm.
‘What I want you to do is to get inside the biography, so to speak. Find something authentic in the seemingly banal. See beyond the cliché.’
‘But is she real?’ Sonia persisted.
‘Let’s go,’ Ted directed, anxious for the soothing silence that is fifteen students scribbling furiously, one eye on the clock, and would be a blessed balm for his hangover. The next best thing to the hair of the dog. But the class sat there, pens poised, waiting for something else, something more from him. At the corner of his eye, snow danced.
‘Is she?’ Sonia asked again.
‘Okay,’ he relented. ‘She’s a character in my novel.’
Jesus! Ted had a few golden rules, one of which was never to be confessional with his students. Talk about their work, never your own. So why had he just blurted that out? Because he thought it would divert attention from the truth: that he was using his best friend as writing fodder. It was Paula’s biography that had been creeping into his novel, or, as he had taken to calling it euphemistically, his work-in-progress. He’d spent the last couple of months not writing but taking notes. Little nuggets Paula had given him – the way Larry’s voice would go all soft before he struck her, how for months she had spied on him emerging naked from the shower and felt the scalding burn of desire, how once she’d sucked him off with the baby watching. Ted listened avidly. Paula’s experiences were so far removed from his mother’s that they would give his book the burning fr
isson of fiction. And that was okay, he told himself. Divorced from their origins, even the most intimate details could be used, once you disguised them enough.
To the toll of her confessions, he had added his own observations about Paula. His protagonist had developed her hairstyle, her furious way of smoking, her vulnerable optimism. Was that why he didn’t fancy Paula? Because she was more value to him as raw material? No wonder he hadn’t been troubled by inconvenient lust; he’d been trying to get inside Paula’s head, not her knickers. She was the only one who could give the kiss of life to his 40,000 words of false beginnings.
Ted rose and walked to the window of the classroom. He pressed his forehead against the glass, glad of the cool clasp of it on his temples. Outside the snow was having a tantrum. Angry trees made semaphore warnings. He felt like a character in a bad workshop story – overloaded with epiphany. Jesus!
‘This Paula,’ Valerie said, cocking her head quizzically.
He wasn’t in the mood. Two hours of student versions of Paulas – foxy lap dancer, bisexual trucker, Baptist preacher’s wife – had exhausted him more than his thudding head. He felt dispirited – and chastened for using Paula as a quick fix for his class.
‘This Paula,’ Valerie repeated. She looked like a scrubbed virgin but he had seen her at student parties – the girl had a sassy mouth and a taste for dirty martinis. But it was her sexual frankness that intimidated Ted. Though he would never admit it, he was afraid of her voraciousness. Afraid of her.
‘Yes, what about her?’
‘She’s not just a character, is she? She’s a real person.’
Ted raised his hands in surrender.
‘People are more than their biographies, Valerie. That’s what today’s exercise was all about.’
‘She needs help, you realise that, don’t you?’
Valerie laid a polished fingertip on Ted’s arm.
‘She needs an intervention.’
‘A what?’
‘You know,’ she said with a sweet fanged smile. ‘She needs to stop drinking, she needs a twelve-step programme. She needs to be confronted. You know, tough love.’
Ted was in no mood for tough love.
‘Let’s just stick to fiction, Valerie, there’s a good girl.’
‘Don’t patronise me,’ she snapped.
‘Look, Valerie, there’s a difference between writing and real life. The sooner you realise the difference between the two, the better.’
She changed tack.
‘Are you trying to tell me something, Ted? I can call you Ted, can’t I?’ He got a whiff of musky scent as she flicked her hair back over her shoulder.
‘Look, Valerie, if you want to talk about your writing, I’m happy to accommodate you. Otherwise …’
‘You don’t like my work, that’s it, really, isn’t it?’
He was tempted to be honest with her: it’s not your work I don’t like, it’s you.
‘Your character study of Paula was flashy, Valerie, amusing in its way, but there was no depth in it, no pain, no real pain. You failed to imagine her fully.’
She grimaced sourly.
‘It wasn’t a character study, it was caricature. Whereas my Paula …’
‘Your Paula?’ she queried. ‘Who’s confusing fiction and reality now?’
And she turned on her sharp heels and left.
An hour later, Ted was in Skipper’s. He usually didn’t go in on Tuesdays but he was parched and after the encounter with Valerie he felt in need of a stiff drink. He sat at the bar, slung his change on the counter.
‘The usual?’ Skipper, holding a glass aloft, asked.
The beauty of Skipper’s was its monosyllabic honour code.
‘Howdy!’
He looked up to see Paula just arriving. What was she doing here? He associated her with Thursdays and the well-oiled trajectory of the weekend. Somehow, he thought she only came in when he was here. Maybe she had a Ted for every night of the week? Get a grip, he told himself. You sound like a bloody jealous husband.
‘Paula! There you are!’ he said, aiming for hearty, sounding feeble. He felt a twinge of irritation at her for not showing up last week. Then a pang of guilt as he remembered what his students had been doing for the past couple of hours.
‘What brings you in here on a Tuesday night?’
‘I drink here every night, Ted.’
It was his turn to feel betrayed.
‘What happened last Thursday then?’
‘Who are you?’ she snapped. ‘My parole officer?’
‘Steady on, Paula,’ he said. ‘What’ll you have?’
Paula granted him a forgiving smile. What an unlikely couple we are, Ted thought.
‘Got a letter today,’ Paula was saying, ‘from Debra.’
Debra was Paula’s eight-year-old daughter; she was fostered out. She wrote dutiful letters to her mother every so often on notepaper dotted with pink hearts. Usually they were catalogues of her little doings – school, sleepovers, her sister Amy (Paula always bristled at the mention of Amy; foster sister, she would spit) and finished with a flourish of smiley faces and florid endearments. Lots and lots of love, Debra. Big kisses, Debra. I love you, Mommy. Paula always latched on to these.
‘See,’ she would say, ‘she hasn’t forgotten me.’
‘Great,’ Ted said.
He was annoyed suddenly by Paula’s awful faith that everything would work out.
‘What the hell’s bugging you?’ she said.
‘Nothing, nothing. Bad day, that’s all.’
‘Tell me about it!’ Paula started one of her long litanies. ‘Brian, you know the day manager, comes in today, he’s in a foul mood. And I’m stacking, see, in detergents and he says Paula – hey Paula, you gone deaf or something? I’ve been calling you to the register for the last five minutes. We got a line stretching out to the parking lot. Get your fat ass up there! Little shit! He’s not much older than my Mikey. I could put him across my knee and spank him …’
‘Did you?’
‘Did I what?’
‘Did you ever hit Mikey?’
Mikey was her son by Donny, the bricklayer. Being older and more troublesome he was still in care and had refused to have any contact with her.
‘What’s gotten into you?’ Paula’s eyes blazed.
Ted was thinking of when he was a boy. How he’d longed for his mother to strike him. He wanted the badge of a bruise, some physical proof of damage. His father’s anger was aimed at things, not people – small portions of food, lost pigeons, recalcitrant plumbing. Lately, Ted, too, felt like just breaking things. He took a gulp of beer.
‘Nothing,’ he said miserably. ‘Want another?’
On the following Thursday he didn’t go to Skipper’s. He walked as far as the door but something stopped him. He had the sensation that there was someone right behind him, someone about to tap him on his shoulder. But when he looked back there was no one on Gibson Street; just the overhead traffic light turning from red to green. Another weekend in Faithful. He bought a slab of beer in the liquor store and went home to a TV dinner. The weekend felt all askew without the anchor of Thursday with Paula. His self-imposed exile didn’t last. Damn it, he missed her, and his guilt about using her as biography fodder for his students had abated by Monday. Several days without drink had cleared his mind and cured him of the watchful paranoia he had fallen prey to. So it was with a light step that he pushed the swing doors open into Skipper’s after a week’s absence. His heart lifted at the sight of Paula perched at the bar swathed in cigarette smoke. It felt like a homecoming as she hallooed to him and tapped the stool beside her in that welcoming gesture that made him feel unquestioningly accepted.
‘Hi,Ted,’ she said.
He settled into his familiar seat – whoosh of torn leatherette – and gave her a comradely squeeze around the shoulders.
‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘I’ve had a letter from Mikey’s case worker. Wanna see?’
‘Sure,’ he s
aid. He was determined not to yield to scepticism. He wanted to wind back to a time when his motives towards Paula were pure. If they had ever been. Paula rummaged in the large canvas sack that served as her handbag.
‘Here it is,’ she said, fishing out a crumpled-looking piece of paper. ‘Dear Mrs Spears,’ she began, ‘Your son Mikey has been the subject of a special case conference …’ she began haltingly. Paula was quick with her own words, but she stumbled over bureaucratic prose. Ted found his attention wandering despite his best intentions. There was a scuffle at the door. Well, there often was at Skipper’s – usually someone being thrown out. He turned towards the source of commotion. Three faces detached themselves from the blur of the crowd, for there was a crowd. And Ted recognised every single one of them. Eight of his graduate students from workshop, led by a determined, leather-jacketed Valerie. She marched up to the counter and clamped her hand on Paula’s shoulder.
‘Are you Paula?’ she demanded.
‘What the hell?’ Paula started.
Ted swung down off the stool.
‘Now look here, Valerie. I don’t know what you’re doing. But leave Paula out of this,’ he muttered to her.
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