The Last Goodbye

by Caroline Finnerty

  “Em . . . okay,” I said, looking around at the high gallery walls, wondering what I had let myself in for.

  “Listen, Kate, there’s no need to look so scared – I’m not going to bite you, love.” Then her face broke into a big grin and I started to relax.

  I knew then that we were going to get along just fine together.

  It was such an eye-opener for an Irish girl from Ballyrobin coming to London. It was so depressing at home – both in my house and in the country in general. All I seem to remember when I think back on those years is grey. Grey weather. Grey classrooms. Grey people. There was a whole generation of people who left Ireland for London in the eighties and I was a decade late. Just as I was leaving, the economy was starting to pick up. People were buying new cars and they weren’t ashamed of it. There were jobs to be had now and for the first time in decades expats were starting to return home to work. But I went in the opposite direction. My dad couldn’t understand why I wanted to emigrate at a time when things were finally starting to go Ireland’s way. In the eighties he had spent a lot of time worrying if his kids would have to leave the country like almost all young people had to at that time. So when it looked like things were on the up, he was relieved. For the first time since the eighties there were jobs to be had and not just in Dublin. But it wasn’t about the work – it was never about the work. I know Ireland is a different place now of course – I can see it’s changed whenever I meet other Irish people or watch the news. But London was like the place that I belonged in as soon as I arrived. Within days of coming over here, I had felt more at home than I had in my seventeen years in Ireland. The anonymity was a revelation. People wore what they wanted to wear. People didn’t whisper wherever you walked – they didn’t talk in scandalised tones because the Gardaí had brought you home last night because they caught you necking back some snakebite up in the playground.

  Nat turned out to be the best friend that I could have asked for. When she heard I was staying in a hostel to save money, she invited me to sleep on her mum’s sofa until I found somewhere to live. She introduced me to all her friends so they quickly became my circle too. After a week in her mum’s house, I found a poky two-roomed flat in Clapham. Although there was only one bedroom, Nat decided to move in with me. We shared a room with two single beds and not much space for anything else. The paint was peeling off the walls and there were black mildew spots in the corners of the ceiling. The seventies’ furniture looked as though it was taken from the landlord’s family home and he was just looking for somewhere to get rid of it. There was too much of it to be functional. A huge sideboard was squashed into the hallway so that you had to turn sideways to walk past it and, even though it was only a one-bedroomed flat, the long rectangular table in the kitchen could sit eight people around it comfortably.

  Yes, the flat was tiny, but we had so much fun there. I could go out when I wanted to and come home at whatever hour I chose. There was no one banging on my door calling me for Mass on a Sunday morning. We would go home from work in the gallery and then we would usually head straight out to a party or a club or have friends over to ours. We were out almost every night of the week. For the first time in my life I had freedom. I didn’t have the weight of home dragging me down. Leaving was without doubt the best decision I ever made.

  London was where I belonged now.

  Chapter 2

  At six o’clock we turned out the lights in the gallery to head home. We said bye to one another and Nat put her bag into the basket on the front of her bike and cycled off while I walked in the other direction to the Tube. It was a warm summer’s evening and people spilled out of the pubs and onto the streets, keen to make the most of the evening sun. I weaved my way around where they stood on the path, beer bottles in one hand and taking long drags on cigarettes with the other. Their laughter carried on the summer air. Joggers overtook me on the pavement before cutting into the park.

  I arrived in the door to the smell of curry. Even though I had bought the ingredients for it myself the day before, now the smell of the coconut milk just made me want to hurl. I stopped at the door into the kitchen, where Ben’s broad back was towards me as he stood in front of the cooker. He was angling the chopping board and tossing green peppers into the frying pan. Our kitchen was so poky: a few small grey-painted presses, a sink, washing machine, cooker, fridge and a small table and chairs was it. We had a few pots of herbs growing on the windowsill – they were Ben’s babies, not mine.

  “Euuuggggh!”

  He turned around and smiled at me from where he was stirring the pan.

  “Don’t tell me – the smell is making you sick?”

  I pinched my nose and nodded my head. He left the pan and came over and wrapped me in a hug. This was without doubt my favourite part of the day – when I would come in wrecked from work and Ben would put his strong arms around me and all my worries and stresses would just fade away.

  Ben was a primary school teacher so he was always the first one home. I was spoiled rotten because he usually had dinner ready and waiting for me when I got in every evening. He loved his job. I knew most of the children in his class by name myself, just from listening to him talking about them.

  “How’s Baby Pip doing?” he asked, nuzzling at my neck.

  “I think I started to feel kicks today – it’s so faint though, it’s hard to know.”

  We called her Pip because when I had first found out that I was pregnant the book said that at five weeks she was the size of a pip, and somehow it had stuck even though we both thought that it was a bit cheesy.

  He placed his hand on my tummy. “I can’t feel anything.”

  “Well, duh – the movements are only tiny at this stage plus she –”

  “Or he,” Ben interjected.

  “Or he – isn’t moving at the moment. It’s a girl anyway.”

  “How do you know?” He started to laugh.

  “I just do.”

  “Please can we find out the sex at our next scan?”

  “No! I told you already, I don’t want to find out – but I know I’m right.”

  He held me at arm’s length and stared at my tummy.

  “You’re getting a bump.”

  “Yeah, I know – I haven’t got long left in these trousers. I had to open the top button this afternoon when I was sitting down behind the desk.”

  “Well, I’d say that looked good! Although you could pretend it’s some new form of artistic expression. So did you think any more about going home for a weekend?”

  “Not now, Ben!” I pulled away from him. “I’m exhausted. I think I’m going to go and have a soak in the bath.”

  Later that evening, as I lay in bed reading on my own, I could hear Ben laughing away on his own at the TV in the living room. The sounds were muffled as they travelled through the walls to our bedroom. We lived in part of what was all originally one house but in the eighties the owners had decided to convert their upstairs bedrooms into an apartment and rent it out. It was a red-bricked terraced Victorian house. We had two bedrooms, a galley-kitchen, a living room and a small bathroom. The rent was typical of London – big money, small place. We were saving up to buy our own place but then I had found out that I was pregnant so we decided to put our plans on hold for a while until after Baby Pip arrived.

  There must have been something particularly funny on the TV because Ben was howling with laughter.

  Ben was definitely the smiley one in our relationship. He was always in good form – he had what you might describe as a ‘sunny disposition’. It wasn’t that I was a grumpy person but I just wasn’t constantly in good form like he was – nothing ever seemed to get him down or to send him into a rage like me. Everyone loved him as soon as they met him – he was just one of those people. And he always knew how to pull me out of a mood. I was fascinated whenever we were out together, watching how everyone automatically migrated towards him. I would hover somewhere on the periphery, staring, taking it all in. Ben saw
the good in everyone whereas I was a lot more cynical. I tried not to be but I couldn’t help it. I think that was why he wouldn’t let the whole trip to Ireland go – he wanted to make everyone happy just like him and he thought that a trip home would do that for me too. It was like the baby had put a deadline on it – he wanted it resolved before Pip came along. But it was never going to be that simple: twenty years of anger and hurt can’t be just reset with a quick visit home. I knew he meant well though.

  I put my book down and placed my two hands flat on my bare, swollen stomach. I could definitely feel Pip moving. I knew I wasn’t just imagining it. It was such a surreal feeling to think that there was actually a baby in there, growing away, doing its thing, doing everything that it needed to do and knowing when to do it. The pregnancy was going well – except for the nausea, which still wasn’t showing any signs of abating even though I was nearly at the halfway mark. I had been assured by all in the know that once I entered the second trimester the morning sickness would go and I’d get a new burst of energy but they were all liars because I still felt like shit.

  The whole thing was making me think a lot though. I wasn’t prepared for that side of it – it had brought a lot of old memories back to the surface. And Ben wasn’t helping by constantly banging on about it. I had known this was what would happen and that was why it had taken me a while to come round to the idea of having a baby with him. Ben had been broody for a long time – he was the one who would stop a mother on the footpath to coo over her infant whereas I just saw sticky hands and a runny nose. While I had always wanted children, it was more a case of ‘one day’ so it came as a bit of a shock when I found out that I was pregnant. But when I had seen the two pink lines on the test stick, I’d got really excited – the time was right, Ben loved me and I loved him.

  Ben came up to bed soon after and spooned me from behind. He pushed up my pyjama top to put his two hands on the skin of my stomach and Baby Pip started up again just like she knew that her daddy was there. I turned over to face him and smiled.

  “She knows you’re here.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, she’s started kicking again.”

  “When will I be able to feel them?”

  “Not for a few more weeks according to the books.”

  He propped his head up on his elbow. “So when are we going to Ireland?”

  “Will you just leave it out, Ben?” I said testily.

  “Come on, Kate! When are you going to tell your dad?”

  “Soon.”

  “You’re nearly five months pregnant – your family don’t even know. You need to tell them – I’ve never even met them for Christ’s sake!”

  “I will tell them.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll ring Dad.”

  “You can’t keep on carrying this baggage with you. It’s not good for you or the baby.”

  “Will you stop going on about it?”

  “You can’t keep running away from it.”

  “I’m not running away from anything!”

  “Oh Kate – you’re infuriating!”

  “Please, can we leave it for tonight? I feel like crap – I’m exhausted.”

  “All right, all right, but you need to face up to your demons sooner or later.” He sighed.

  Blah, blah, blah. I turned away so my back was towards him and he did the same on the other side.

  Chapter 3

  Ben and I had met at the zoo of all places. I’d had a day off so I’d gone for a stroll around Regent’s Park. When I got there I decided to go into the zoo because it had been a while since I’d been in. I’d been watching the meerkats and I was just turning around to go on to the next enclosure when I saw a small boy standing in the middle of the path on his own, crying. He was wearing a navy raincoat, jeans tucked inside wellington boots and he had a small backpack on his back. I guessed he was probably about five or six. He was obviously lost. I looked around to see if his parents were anywhere nearby but there was no-one near us that looked like they had lost a child.

  I can still remember getting lost in a department store at Christmas time when I was small. I had been playing with my brothers Patrick and Seán, hiding under rails of clothes, but when I came out again my family had all gone. Even though we were only separated for a few minutes, I’ll never forget that fear. It had felt like hours. It was as though my world had ended and I was going to be the resident orphan of Dunnes Stores. Of course I was too young to realise that a lost child is not the same as a lost glove and that Mam and Dad were in an equally right state looking for me too.

  I bent down to the boy and asked him his name. Through snotty tears he told me he was called James. I reached down and held his hand and he had clung on tight. We walked over to a nearby security guard but no-one had reported a missing child. At that stage they probably hadn’t even realised he was missing. The guard escorted us to the coffee shop. While he put a call out over the radio to the other guards, I rooted in my purse for change and bought James a gingerbread man with eyes and a smile made from icing and three Smarties down the front for buttons. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and quickly began to open the cellophane wrapper on the gingerbread man.

  Suddenly a man came blustering through the door.

  “Oh thank God!” He rushed over and bent down to the little boy. “Where did you go to?”

  “I just wanted to see the meerkats’ house.”

  “I told you already, you can’t keep wandering off like that, James,” he scolded him gently. He turned to me then. “Thank you, thank you, so much!”

  “Don’t mention it. I was at the meerkats and I turned around and just saw him there on his own, crying.”

  I had to admit that James’ dad was very good-looking. He was tall and muscular and, judging by the tan on his face and hands, I guessed that he loved the outdoors. He was dressed casually in a pair of Converse trainers, jeans and hoody, with a backpack slung over his back.

  I supposed he must have got an awful fright.

  “We were doing so well,” he said. “We’d managed to round up the twenty-four of them every time but he must have slipped away between the meerkats and the next enclosure. It was only when we did our head count just there that we realised that we’d lost him.”

  “You have twenty-four children?” I said, shocked.

  “Not me!” he grinned. “We’re on a school tour – the other teacher is waiting with the rest of the class.”

  “Oh, I see . . . of course.” I laughed, feeling a bit stupid then. “Well, it must be hard keeping track of that many.”

  “You can’t take your eyes off them for a second! We’re lucky you were right there.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  James was happily munching on his gingerbread man – he had devoured both his legs and his right arm. His distress of the last few minutes seemed to be forgotten.

  The man and I looked at each other for a fraction too long.

  “Well . . . I’d better go,” I said quickly.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me then.

  “It’s Kate.”

  “Kate – I’m Ben.” He stuck his hand out to shake mine. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  His handshake was strong around mine. I liked that in a man – there was nothing worse than a watery handshake. By this stage the gingerbread man was decapitated.

  “Okay, well, thanks again, Kate.”

  I watched him walk off with James – the two of them threw their heads back then and started laughing at something. There was definitely something attractive about a man who was good with kids, I thought.

  I decided to grab a take-away coffee while I was there and continue on my way around the zoo. I walked along the path admiring the elegance of the giraffes as they stretched their long necks to reach up to the higher branches. I watched them as they munched on mouthfuls of leaves. Their fawn-coloured markings were like a beautiful mosaic covering their skin. It was just starting to drizzle and
as I was taking my umbrella out of my bag I heard a little voice behind me interrupting my thoughts.

  “Hi, Kate.”

  I turned around to find James standing there, looking up at me. He had his hood pulled up over his head. He was beyond cute with his chubby cheeks.

  “Hiya, James.” I looked over and saw Ben, a woman and the rest of the class a short distance away.

  “Did you know that giraffes and humans have the same number of bones in their neck?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said, laughing.

  “Do you know how many bones –”

  Ben rushed up beside him then. “James, I told you, you can’t keep on running off on us like that.” He sounded exasperated. “Hi again, Kate.”

  “He’s a real handful.”

  “You don’t know the half of it!”

  “Mr Chamberlain likes you!” James blurted out.

  “Sorry?” I wondered if I had heard him right.

  “James!” Ben said, looking mortified.

  “You do! You said she was a very nice lady!” he protested, his eyes wide with innocence.

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “And pretty – you said she was very pretty too.” He went on.

  Ben looked at him in horror. Redness crept up along his face.

  I have to say I felt sorry for him. “Hey, don’t worry – you know what kids are like.” I laughed nervously. I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. Or James preferably. Either one of us would be fine.

  We both stood there awkwardly for a few moments. James was pulling out of Ben’s hand. I could see the other teacher and the rest of the class looking over, wondering what was going on.

  “Look, I’d better –”

  “God, Kate, this whole thing is well . . . so embarrassing . . . I don’t usually do this, believe me . . . but, well . . . would you like to go for dinner with me?”

  James was staring up at me expectantly, waiting for my answer.

  “Sure, I’d like that.”