Little Black Everything

by Alex Coleman

  “That’s so sad,” Eleanor said, staring into the middle of the table. “Not to get along with your parents like that.”

  James was quick to correct her. “No, no. They get on great. It’s just the music thing. And it’s not just them. He doesn’t want anybody to know. And I can see his point. Wouldn’t it be odd if I’d showed up today saying, ‘My name’s James Bond and the big thing about me is, I’m really into James Bond’?”

  “Yeah,” Larry agreed. “That’d be like Holly Christmas saying she was feeling jolly. It’d be all wrong. You’d think the world had gone mad.”

  There was a ripple of muted giggling. Holly’s right foot started to tap on the floor.

  “Tell me, James,” Eleanor said, somewhat over-formally. “What do you think of the movies? Or the books? Have you read the books?”

  “I read one, ages ago,” he said. “Diamonds are Forever. Didn’t care for it. Really racist and sexist. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff he comes out with – Fleming. I do like the movies, though.”

  “Who’s your f –”

  “The new guy. Sorry, Eleanor. I should have let you finish your question.”

  “That’s all right,” she smiled. “You guessed correctly.”

  “Yeah, Daniel Craig is my favourite. He seems closest to the original character who is, let’s face it, a sociopath. Next is Sean Connery. Pierce Brosnan was pretty good, I thought, but the films themselves were terrible. That one with the media mogul, what was it called, Tomorrow Never Dies? Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Roger Moore started out OK, but he did it for far too long. He was getting really creaky by the end there. Plus, he got the worst scripts of any of them. People always have a go at him for playing the thing for laughs, but he’s just an actor. He can only read the lines they give him. And they gave him some awful toss.”

  Holly looked around the table. He wasn’t saying anything particularly clever or insightful, but they were hanging on his every word.

  “I thought Timothy Dalton was the best of all,” Mike Hennessy said then, in a small, uncertain voice. He sounded like a man declaring a fondness for crystal meth. Sure enough, he was immediately set upon. As the slurs and counter-slurs were traded, Holly pushed back her chair and went to get some more water. James followed her immediately.

  “Listen,” he said. “I hope you weren’t too hacked off with all the name talk.”

  “Nah,” she said. “And it was hardly your fault anyway.”

  “If you’re sure.” He put the back of his wrist to his forehead and bent his knees. “I know your pain.”

  “Liar.”

  He was surprised by this; so was she.

  “Well –”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that in a nasty way. I just meant that you seem so cool.” She gulped. And then smiled, too quickly. “About the name thing, I mean. You’ll have to let me in on your secret.”

  “I don’t think I have one. But if anything comes to me, I’ll let you know.”

  His half-smile turned into a whole smile. He had a pretty good one, Holly found herself thinking.

  “OK then,” she replied. “You know what, I think I’ll go and get some air.”

  “Okay.”

  She nodded. He nodded. She left.

  Chapter 6

  Mrs Christmas poured herself another cup of tea and snapped the edge off a Rich Tea biscuit. She popped the nibble into her mouth and shook her head almost imperceptibly. These moves were entirely typical, Holly thought. Her mother was not a showy person. She loved Rich Tea biscuits with a deep, persistent passion, but she ate them slowly and deliberately, as if each one was the last she would be getting her hands on for a long while. Not for her the frantic dunking and slurping that her daughter, for example, employed when dealing with Chocolate HobNobs. By the same token, when Mrs Christmas was upset or annoyed, she eschewed flailing about and roaring in favour of occasional sighs and tiny head shakes. On this occasion, there had already been several sighs. Now, here was the head shake.

  “It’s no big deal,” Holly said. “He was a gobshite anyway.”

  “You seem to be surrounded by them,” her mother replied. “And morons. And cretins. They all seem to be different in your head, but I’ve never worked out how.”

  “Believe me,” Holly said, “you wouldn’t have liked him.” She paused briefly, then decided to push it. “That was one of the reasons why I got rid of him, actually. I asked myself, Would Mum like this guy? And I decided that no, you wouldn’t.”

  Holly had given her break-up with Kevin a lot of thought in advance of this visit home. If she told the truth she would certainly receive a lot of sympathy, but she would also see a certain look on her mother’s face, a look that said, What did you do to annoy this one? There would be nothing nasty behind it, but still. It would get on her nerves. Pretending that she was the one who had broken it off would make her seem proactive, at least.

  Nothing else was said for a while. Mrs Christmas traced a finger around on the table while Holly pretended to be suddenly fascinated by the arrangement of her cup and saucer (her mother was a cup and saucer woman, always; her oft-stated position on mugs was that they were “impolite”). As the seconds ticked by, Holly began to get nervous. She knew that her failure to acquire a boyfriend whose tenure could be measured in months was a source of constant worry to her mum and that, once in a while, even though it went against her nature, she would feel the need to “say something”. It had happened no more than a handful of times, but it was always unpleasant for both parties. One of those conversations – it was a couple of years ago now – had featured the word “spinster”. It had been hastily retracted but still. The longer the silence went on, the more certain Holly became that she was in for another gentle, circuitous but nonetheless infuriating grilling. She probably shouldn’t have said anything, she thought; her mother had already seemed preoccupied when she arrived.

  “I went to see Lillian the other day.”

  “Oh? How is she?” Holly asked.

  She was delighted by the appearance of this fresh topic and tried not to read too much into her mother’s expression, which had suddenly made the small leap from preoccupied to troubled. Lillian was an elderly lady who lived two doors up. She had no family apart from a greasy nephew who showed up once in a while to check if she had died yet. In Holly’s mind, she had always been old but, weirdly, never seemed to get any older. It was if she had reached a certain age and decided that it suited her. Mrs Christmas had been calling in on her, doing odd jobs, and generally making sure that she didn’t die for as long as Holly could remember.

  “She’s fine. Much better now that the new hip has settled in. She’s still very slow, God love her, but she’s not in as much pain.”

  “Good, I’m glad,” Holly said and drank some tea. She held the cup to her mouth for much longer than was necessary. The truth was she wanted something to hide behind. She hadn’t known that Lillian was having an operation – she hadn’t even known she had a dodgy hip – and she was afraid that her expression might give the game away.

  “I went over at lunchtime,” her mother continued. “I don’t stay long, usually. I just tidy up a bit and make sure she’s got all the essentials, you know, maybe run to the chemist or the post office for her. But the other day I stayed for ages. We got talking. I mean, we talk all the time, but it’s just chit-chat, you know, complaining about the racket the bin men make or going over what happened in Coronation Street, you know?”

  “Yeah. Small talk.”

  “I don’t know how it got started or who . . . No, that’s not true. I do know how it got started. I started it.” She looked up as if asking for permission to proceed.

  “Started what?” Holly asked nervously.

  Mrs Christmas drew in a long, slow breath. “Talking about . . . partners.”

  “Partners,” Holly repeated. The word didn’t sound quite right coming from her mum. “You mean, like, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends . . . ”
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  “Yes. They call them partners now, don’t they?”

  “Sometimes, yes. What about them?”

  “Well . . . Lillian lost her husband at an early age, like me. She wasn’t anything like as young as I was, mind you, but still. She was only about fifty, I think. You wouldn’t remember him, of course – you weren’t even born. Barney he was called. Big, tall, strong-looking man. Very quiet. Very shy. One morning, he just didn’t wake up. Heart attack in his sleep. We hadn’t been living here very long, so we didn’t get too involved, but I remember it well. All the people coming and going, everyone saying she was going to wind up in a mental hospital, she was that devastated. I remember thinking how terrible it would be to be left on your own like that, just out of the blue. One minute, he’s there by your side and the next, boom. Your whole world’s upside down and inside out. If I’d known then that I was going to be in the same boat inside a couple of years, I’d have lost my mind.”

  “Right,” Holly said. It was all she could come up with.

  Her mother talked about her husband all the time, of course, but almost always in an attempt to give Holly a sense of what he had been like. Despite everything, those conversations tended to be light-hearted. They usually centred around three different types of anecdotes. In the first kind, her father was a Frank Spencer-ish sort of figure, enduring appalling physical calamities but emerging on the other side with his sense of humour still very much intact. In the second, he was frankly Christ-like, forever turning the other cheek and forgiving those who knew not what they did. In the third, he was more like Dirty Harry, steely in his resolve and admirably unbound by petty regulations. As far as Holly could recall, the number of occasions on which her mother had spoken of him in terms of something she personally had lost could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

  “Anyway,” Mrs Christmas went on. “We got talking about how years ago, in your grandparents’ time, say, when a woman was widowed, or a man for that matter, well, that was that. Not all the time, but usually. The idea that you should go off looking for someone else wouldn’t have entered their heads. Not in a million years. It just wasn’t done.”

  Holly gulped. “Suppose not.”

  “But by the time Barney died and your father died, things had already changed a lot. And sure these days, people would think you were weird if you didn’t try to find someone else. Isn’t that right?”

  An awkward moment passed before Holly realised that this was not a rhetorical question. “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said cautiously. “But yeah, lots of widowed people find new . . . partners.” She gulped again. “Mum, what are you try–”

  “So I kind of lost the run of myself and I asked Lillian why she’d never done it. Not recently, obviously – when she was younger. And she said it was never an option to her, and it was nothing to do with the times. Nineteen-seventies, nineteen-eighties, nineteen-forties, it made no odds. No way, no how, absolutely not. She was Barney’s wife and that was the end of it. Didn’t matter if he was alive or dead, she was still his wife. What do you make of that, Holly? Never mind what’s normal now and what wasn’t normal years ago, what do you think?”

  “I think . . .” Holly began and then realised that she couldn’t answer without knowing all the facts. “Mum, what’s going on here?” she asked. “Are we just talking in general or are you . . . I mean . . . are you thinking of joining some dating agency or something?”

  She thought there was a good chance that her mother would explode into laughter at this ridiculous misunderstanding. But she didn’t. Instead, she kept her gaze fixed on Holly and said, “No. I’m not thinking of joining a dating agency. I would just like to hear your opinion.”

  There didn’t seem to be any alternative but to provide a straight answer. “I think that if a person is single, whether it’s because they’re divorced or widowed or were never married in the first place, and that person meets another person who is also single, and the two of them are interested in each other, then there’s no good reason why they shouldn’t pursue it.” She frowned. Her response had sounded cold and mildly legalistic.

  “OK,” Mrs Christmas said. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

  “Mum, what is this –”

  She stopped short because her mother had raised her hand, palm outward, like a traffic cop. Holly’s temperature rose. The game-playing was becoming tiresome. But then something told her to hold off on the huffing and puffing that she’d been preparing to do. It was more like an atmospheric change than anything else. She held her breath, waiting for something to happen. It took a while. Mrs Christmas poured herself a third cup of tea and stared at it for a few seconds before taking the tiniest of sips. Then she did some more staring, took another sip and finally brought her hands together on the table as if she was about to launch into a prayer.

  “About a month ago,” she said, “I came back from the shops and I saw this man at the front gate, looking up at the house. Just standing there with his arms folded, looking all over, as if he was thinking of buying it or something. I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to ask him what he was at or was I supposed to just brush past him? In the end, I kind of split the difference. I walked past him, but I gave him a good look as I was doing it, you know?”

  Holly nodded. “Go on.”

  “Well, I caught his eye and I soon as I did, this big grin came over his face and he started staring at me the way he’d been staring at the house. I swear to God, Holly, I was about to run. I thought he was some sort of a nut-job. And then he said, ‘You don’t recognise me.’ Even at that stage, I was half-thinking of running. Because, I don’t know, maybe that’s the sort of trick nut-jobs use to get your defences down. They say, ‘You don’t remember me’ and you step closer to get a better look and they hit you over the head with a blunt whatchamacallit. Instrument.”

  “Right,” Holly said.

  “Tell you the truth, I think I took a step back. And maybe the light changed or maybe his voice just sank in or maybe it was something else, but I suddenly had him. It was Charlie Fallon.”

  She bit her bottom lip and looked to Holly for a response.

  But Holly had nothing to say. She’d never heard of Charlie Fallon. “You’ve lost me,” she said. “Who’s he?”

  Her mum raised her chin a fraction. “Hm. I was wondering if I’d ever mentioned him. Obviously not. Charlie was my first proper boyfriend. We were an item for a good few months, almost a year, in fact. This was long before I met your father. I was twenty, twenty-one, he was a bit older. He had a bit of a reputation, early on. You know. A bad boy.”

  She smiled weakly and Holly tried to smile back. But it wasn’t easy. Her heart was going wild and her stomach seemed to be slowly rotating. There was no doubt about where this was going. Her mother – her mother! – had a new boyfriend. A new old boyfriend, at that.

  “You know what you’re like at that age. I thought the sun shone out of him. Granny wasn’t too chuffed about it but she was sure it would blow over. Your Granda nearly lost his life, though. All he knew about Charlie was that he used to break a lot of windows. I tried telling him that he’d changed, but he wouldn’t listen. There were rows, slammed doors. And he didn’t calm down as time went on, Daddy, he got worse and worse. By the time it all ended, me and him were hardly speaking.”

  “And how did it end?” Holly asked.

  “Suddenly, that’s how it ended. I was thinking marriage, Holly, I don’t mind admitting it. Looking back now, I don’t know if that was just youth talking or what, but that’s where we were heading, to me anyway. Then one day, Charlie asked me to go for a walk and just like that, he told me he was off. New York. He had relations in Brooklyn and there was nothing around here for him, work-wise. So he was going. And did I want to go with him?”

  This detail startled Holly more than anything that had gone before. The idea that her mother had once been a teenager with a dodgy boyfriend whom her father despised seemed faintly absurd, but it was graspab
le. Somehow, it was much harder to picture her contemplating emigration. Delia Christmas, or Delia Byrne, rather, on the streets of New York . . . Try as she might, Holly couldn’t make the image stick.

  “You said no, obviously.”

  “I thought about it. I thought hard about it, for days and days. You know why I didn’t go?”

  Holly shook her head. “Tell me.”

  “Well, for one thing, I plain old didn’t want to. Some people heard ‘New York’ and got all excited – I got scared. All those strange, angry people. Skyscrapers and endless traffic. Guns and drugs and God knows what else. But that wasn’t the main reason. The main reason was that he didn’t try to talk me into it. It took me a couple of days to notice that. He just asked the question and then left it hanging. And it’s not like we didn’t see each other. We met up as often as ever and I’d squirm and fidget and worry and Charlie’d carry on as if nothing was up. His attitude was he was definitely going and he had no real objection if I tagged along. It wasn’t exactly romantic.”

  “No. Suppose not. So you split up.”

  “So we split up. My father was delighted. So was my mother, but she tried not to let it show. I cried for a month.”