White Lies

by Mark O'Sullivan

  For some reason, Seanie hadn’t called up to see me on his way back from training on the Tuesday evening. I wondered if he was having second thoughts about helping me. But next day, he was all apologies and said he’d be ringing Father O’Brien at seven. At five past seven I was waiting beside the phone at home and hoping Tom or May wouldn’t find me hovering there or hear what was going on. I had to wait five minutes but it seemed like five hours. I picked up the phone before the second ring.

  ‘Seanie?’

  ‘Well, I got him, all right,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was a bit confused. He seemed to think Tom was married to Heather Kelly,’ Seanie explained. ‘Maybe I mixed him up at the start. When I mentioned May he remembered.’

  ‘Does he know where Heather is?’

  ‘No, but he’s sure her father had a chemist shop in Limerick. In the city, he thought.’

  I was getting shaky now. I couldn’t think what to say. It seemed, for a moment, that it was going to be easy. Too easy.

  ‘The thing is, I looked up the phone book,’ Seanie said, ‘and there’s no Kelly’s Chemists in Limerick.’

  I was plunging down again after the small, fearful high.

  ‘Unless,’ he suggested, ‘they sold up. We could go over to Limerick on Saturday morning and ask around. Some of the other chemists might remember.’

  I couldn’t release Seanie just yet. How could I get to Limerick except in his green Morris Minor? So early on Saturday morning we were on our way. Seanie had to be back for a cup match at half past two.

  That morning he really opened up to me about his future. He was having doubts about doing accountancy and he talked passionately about how he’d always wanted to do medicine. Unfortunately, I was totally tensed up, though I did try to encourage him.

  When he got more specific about why he wanted to be a doctor, I blew a fuse.

  ‘What I’d like to do is work in the Third World,’ he said. ‘I want to help –’

  ‘The little niggers,’ I snapped, angry that Seanie was turning out to be another of those interfering do-gooders and suspecting that his helping me, this lost black soul, was a kind of try-out for the real thing.

  ‘Nance, it has nothing to do with their … their colour.’

  ‘I’m just nervous,’ I told him. I wished he’d change the subject but he needed to put the record straight.

  ‘Dad says that famines and all that, they’re a natural way of controlling the population,’ he explained. ‘But I can’t understand how you can be happy when other people are starving and dying for want of clean water and simple medicines. It doesn’t make sense to me.’

  The strange tag, the ‘Third World’ – so weird, so science fiction-like – only served to deepen the sense that, somehow, I didn’t belong. My life here was the same as everyone else’s: same school, same hang-outs, same day-to-day routine. But in the end, had I more in common with the people of that other world? Would life be better there for me? Simpler, maybe more harsh, but the life I was meant to live? There were no easy answers to these questions. No black and white answers, I thought, and couldn’t even raise a smile at my own joke.

  We’d reached the outskirts of Limerick by now. In the silence filled only by the low hum of an Oasis tape, I looked for the name ‘Kelly’ over shop doors and tried to forget what I’d said.

  Finally, he said, almost in a whisper, ‘Maybe you’re right, maybe I should stick to accountancy.’

  ‘Do what you want to do, Seanie,’ I said. ‘Forget about your father – and me.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  I didn’t ask whether he meant he couldn’t forget his father or me.

  Seanie had a list of chemist shops and we decided to split up. I took the ones around the city centre and he drove away to cover the ones further out. It proved to be a long, frustrating morning. I’d more or less given up hope when, at ten to one, I found myself in one of those few chemist shops that hadn’t been modernised.

  The old floor tiles, with their emblem of a snake twined around a pestle, were faded from years of use. Behind the high, dark-timbered counter were banks of small, narrow drawers; each one had its ceramic label inscribed with a Latin name in slender black Gothic lettering. Among the garish boxes of headache tablets and sticky plasters stood an array of ancient medicine bottles of all sizes, colours and peculiar but somehow beautiful shapes.

  The tinkling of a little bell over the door still filled the air as a tall, grey-haired old man with a slight stoop emerged from behind a timber partition at the counter.

  When he asked if he could help me, I had a feeling straight off that I’d come to the right place. I felt like I needed some kind of explanation for wanting to find Heather, and a story came into my head right there on the spot. I was organising a 21st-wedding-anniversary party for my parents and I wanted to get all their old friends together for it. The man – Mr Carroll, ‘but call me Michael’ – leaned on the counter and listened as I dressed up my lie with truths and half-truths. He must have wondered why I was talking so much. I was wondering the same thing myself.

  ‘We were great old friends, John Kelly and I,’ he said when I finally paused for breath. ‘Isn’t it terrible how people lose touch with each other?’

  ‘So you wouldn’t know where he is now?’ I asked despondently. ‘Or Heather?’

  Whether he was trying to remember where the Kellys had moved to, or just recollecting the good old days when he and Heather’s father were young men, I didn’t know, but he took his time about answering.

  ‘It must be, what, a good twenty years since John left Limerick. You see, his wife, Nora – a lovely, lovely woman – well, she died and he was never the same after. He sold the business and went to live in Dublin and three years ago, or was it four, he moved to England, to Nottingham. His daughter lives there, you see.’

  ‘Heather?’

  ‘No, no, I’m confusing you now, I’m sorry.’ Michael smiled. ‘There were two daughters. Celia was the older one and she married over there. As for Heather, the last I heard of her was that she was teaching somewhere outside Galway. That would have been after she came back from Africa in the early eighties, I think.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t know exactly where?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, but I could find out. Sure, I’d have to, it’s such a nice thing you’re doing for your mother and father.’

  I squirmed to think of how I’d lied to this decent man.

  ‘Would you leave a phone number?’ he said. ‘I’ll ring you if I come up with anything.’

  I did. I thanked him and left with a sour taste in my mouth, but as I hurried back to meet Seanie at the car park, the self-disgust turned to anticipation. I was getting somewhere at last.

  Over the next ten days we drew up another list, this time of schools in County Galway, and started to ring around. Lunch hour most days was spent dialling number after number. Then on the Friday of the week after Limerick, lightning struck – twice.

  I’d tried two schools and punched in the number for another in the draughty, evil-smelling phone booth. This one was a national school in a place called Sherrivy. The line was very bad and to make things worse there were the screaming echoes of children’s voices in the background.

  ‘Heather Kelly,’ I repeated. The man’s voice which answered sounded like it came from the bottom of a barrel.

  ‘Miss Kelly? I’ll get her for you.’

  I slammed down the phone, shaking with terror, and stupidly said ‘No!’ when it was back in its cradle.

  Seanie could see something was up from fifty yards away when I went in by the school gate. He tried not to run as he hurried towards me through the crowd returning to classes.

  ‘Sherrivy,’ I said. ‘She’s in a place called Sherrivy. I forgot to ask where exactly it is.’

  ‘We’ll find it,’ he said.

  At eight o’clock that evening, Michael Carroll rang. He hadn’t located Heather, he said, but he gave me he
r sister’s phone number in Nottingham. I wrote it down, though it didn’t seem to matter now. I thanked him again for taking the trouble.

  ‘I hope you find her for your parents’ sake,’ he said. ‘It would be a grand surprise for them.’

  I said it would. When he rang off I went back up to my maths problems and lost myself in them. I didn’t tell Seanie about the call.

  On the following Wednesday we headed for Galway. He’d insisted, against all my protests, on taking a day off. We could have waited till the next week when we had a three-day break, but he wouldn’t hear of it. As we pulled out of town, he said mysteriously, ‘I told him.’

  For some reason, OD’s name leapt into my mind.

  ‘Told who what?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘Dad. I told him I was doing medicine,’ he said. ‘And I told him … some other things … about myself.’

  I was really happy for him, and I felt I’d done something to repay his concern for me.

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘I don’t think he likes me very much any more.’

  He went quiet for a while. Then he pushed a tape into the deck. The car exploded into a cacophony of unmistakably African music. A driving rhythm, big drum beats with a bass line that sent shivers through me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s from Kenya,’ he explained. ‘I bought it last year in Dublin.’

  I lost myself in the hypnotic beat, wondering why it had never occurred to me to seek out the music of my native country. We listened to it over and over and Seanie drummed on the steering wheel, enthusiastically familiar with every turn of the rhythm.

  The school in Sherrivy, fifteen miles outside Galway city, was one of those old grey stone-built ones; it had long windows and a little stone plaque with the year ‘1908’ chiselled into it. My stomach was suddenly unspeakably empty. That’s how I imagine real starvation: an emptiness that is so hopeless it no longer wants to be filled.

  ‘I can’t go in,’ I said. I didn’t even pull away when Seanie took my hand.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he said.

  He was in and out of the school in less than five minutes. He slumped into the driver’s seat. I panicked.

  ‘She doesn’t want to see me!’ I cried.

  ‘Nance, there’s a Miss Kelly in there but it’s not Heather, it’s Helen.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered in desolation. ‘It was a terrible line, I …’

  ‘The thing is, though, she knew Heather about ten years ago.’

  I was coasting upwards again.

  ‘Heather left teaching,’ he told me. ‘She’s a librarian now. Somewhere in the Midlands.’

  If this was a search for a needle in a haystack, the haystack was getting bigger. But again, Seanie reassured me. Helen Kelly was going to ring around and ask about Heather. She had his number.

  ‘This is crazy, Seanie,’ I said. ‘You have more important things on your mind. Let’s just leave it.’

  ‘I’d do anything for you, Nance,’ he said. ‘You’re … you’re a good friend.’ He spoke as if he’d never had a friend before, good or bad. But I wasn’t a good friend. I was still holding back. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell him about Michael Carroll’s call. I had to have that secret, any secret, to prove there was an impassable distance between us.

  All the way home, we played the Kenyan music. Most of the time I was trying to figure out what I’d say to him when we reached town. I was very close to telling him I didn’t want to see him any more but, in the end, I wasn’t able to. All I said was, ‘You shouldn’t bother with me. I’m not worth it.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. He pulled out the tape, put it in its case and handed it to me.

  ‘I can’t take it,’ I said.

  ‘Please, Nance.’

  I couldn’t refuse. I leaned towards him and kissed him on the cheek. He looked at me – as if he knew it was the wrong kind of kiss – the way Christ looked at Judas, I suppose.

  I’d told Tom and May we were going up to the university in Galway, that Seanie was meeting someone in the medical faculty there. Tom thought it would be a good break for me now that I’d started studying again. May had said nothing. We really were miles apart by then. When I got home they’d both gone out. I rang Celia Kelly – my aunt.

  It soon became clear to me that Celia didn’t like her sister very much. Her tone was dismissive, and she didn’t even bother to ask who I was.

  ‘I haven’t seen or heard from Heather,’ she declared in a grand accent, ‘since she came back from Africa.’

  The words, ‘Heather’ and ‘Africa’, she spoke with equal distaste. Then she hung up – just like that. I was stunned. Heather, she seemed to imply, had gone astray in Africa. I was the result of that going astray, and to be thought of like that enraged me. I wanted to ring that woman back and tell her what I thought of her, but Tom came back and, without knowing it, saved me from myself. I even managed to swap some small talk with him. For all his faults, he didn’t look on me in that sickening way.

  Right through the next week, Seanie was on for ringing Helen Kelly in Sherrivy to see if she’d come up with anything. I argued against it, inventing all kinds of reasons, but the real reason was obvious even to him, I suppose. Pain. The pain of drawing nearer to Heather was like flying into the sun; it was blinding me, burning me up.

  And every night of that week, that dream came back to haunt me. The dark hideaway, the raised voices, the big bang that left me writhing in sweat and afraid to go back to sleep.

  Then, on the Friday, the big farce ended. Helen Kelly rang Seanie. Seanie rang me.

  ‘She’s in Waterford!’ he exclaimed. ‘In the City Library. I told you we’d find her!’ He’d already rung the library and asked if she’d be working next morning. She would be.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at nine,’ he said. ‘Nance, are you still there?’

  We spend weeks running and ringing around the country and all the time she’s less than an hour’s drive away.

  ‘Nance?’

  ‘Yeah, nine is grand,’ I said. ‘And thanks, Seanie … for everything.’

  ‘You too.’

  I put down the phone and I thought, OD, why can’t you be like Seanie?

  OD

  Things were going from bad to worse. It was like a poem of Yeats’s we’d done in school once. ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.’ And it wasn’t only me and the Nance situation. It was Jimmy and Beano and my crocked-up knee and even the park, which shouldn’t have mattered to me but did. More than I could have imagined.

  With Jimmy, the falling apart was slow; but I was watching him more closely than ever before, so I noticed more. When the flights of fancy had come to him in the past, his mood would swing about all over the place. One minute he’d be on a high, next minute he’d be shouting and then he’d be mooching in a corner, his eyes spinning with beer.

  These days there was no beer, no shouting, no highs. He just got lower and slower. Every movement was an effort. Sometimes, when he started to stir from his chair to make tea or something, it was like watching a trapeze-artist getting ready to jump; I was holding my breath waiting for him to fall or sink back. Slow as he got, he never did sink back. It might take him five minutes to get to his feet but he’d always succeed. Once in a while, I asked him what it was he wanted because the torture of watching him was too much.

  When I saw the blood-stained tissues start to show up again, I couldn’t take any more.

  ‘Take the shaggin’ teeth out, will you,’ I raged, ‘or go to the dentist.’

  The look he gave me cut me in two. I don’t think he meant it to. It was a look that said ‘Nothing can touch me any more’, and it was very like a smile.

  A few days later, I came in from work and found him standing in the middle of the floor like he hadn’t a clue where he was. He swayed a bit, but there was no smell of alcohol – only that fake lavender I could smell even when I was
n’t in the house. For the first time, I started to be afraid for him.

  ‘I’m a bit dizzy,’ he tried to explain. ‘When you’re sitting down a long time and you stand up it can happen. Did you know that?’

  I sat him down and made him his lunch from the bread and corned beef I’d bought, but when I got home that evening he wasn’t in the kitchen as he usually was. I went upstairs.

  His door was closed but I knew he was in there. I was just about to drift back down to the kitchen with my Dylan Thomas book when I heard a kind of gasp from him. His bed was over by the window. On the windowsill, the sombrero quivered like a thing in pain, buffeted by the breeze coming in by the crack in the window pane. He was lying on the bed, bent double, with his arms clasped to his stomach.

  I could barely get the words out.

  ‘What’s wrong, Jimmy?’

  ‘The corned beef,’ he moaned. ‘I think it was the corned beef.’

  ‘I had the same thing as you,’ I protested, ‘and I’m OK.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to blame you, OD. But that stuff never agreed with me. I should’ve said.’

  ‘Did you take anything for it?’

  ‘I’ll be grand,’ he muttered. ‘It passes.’

  I went downstairs and tried to read my Dylan Thomas book. The words on the page weren’t making any sense to me. Then I remembered what he’d just said: ‘It passes.’ Which could only mean it had happened before.

  Some instinct brought me out to the back of the house, where the black plastic rubbish bag was. Right there on the top were the two sandwiches I’d made him at lunchtime – not a nibble taken out of either one.

  That sent my mind away on another of those mad, self-obsessed loops. Instead of confronting him, I got thick and started thinking that if that was all I got for worrying about him – he throws my sambos in the bin – I wasn’t going to bother. Maybe I thought it was the withdrawal symptoms from packing in the drink or that his gums were acting up. Or maybe I never got beyond the point of feeling I was wasting my time trying to treat him right. One way or the other, I let it pass. Of all the mistakes I made in those days, that was probably the worst.