‘She was right,’ the doctor agreed. ‘Last year I saw a boy die. His parents left it too late, not wanting to waste hospital time.’ He looked closely at Chris. ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘I drove us here,’ Alison said quickly. The doctor ruffled Sheila’s hair and moved off as a nurse brought the painkiller and antibiotic. Sheila was cranky, her throat sore. It took so long to persuade her to swallow the medicine that it was ten minutes before Alison noticed Chris was missing.
She left Sheila with the nurse. There was no sign of him in casualty or at the van. It was on the way back in that she saw him outside on a bench. He held his head in his hands and she knew that he was crying. She sat beside him, awkwardly, unsure what to do.
‘It’s okay,’ she said.
‘It’s not okay. It will never be okay.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘I’ll drive you back. Tomorrow I’ll be gone.’
‘You don’t have to go.’ Alison was trembling now, almost giddy with relief that Sheila was okay.
‘I do.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because you’re the last bloody person I want to meet just now.’
He lifted his head, looking straight at her. It happened because she wanted to comfort him or because she was drunk with relief or from some impulse she didn’t understand. She didn’t even know who moved their head first, just that suddenly the temptation was there. For the shock of one single moment she had her arms around his neck and they kissed. Just like that previous kiss had occurred in Dalkey, the steep road, high stone walls, blossoms hanging down. Except this wasn’t the same. It was twenty years later. She drew her head back, alarmed and confused.
‘Can’t you see?’ Chris said. ‘You complicate everything, Ali. You’re about the only living person I still care for.’
Sheila was like a different child after the Ponston, sitting up and playing with toys the nurses had found, when Alison went back in. The girl was almost light–headed in the van, savouring her adventure but, by the time they reached the roundabout, she had fallen asleep again. The silence in the van was awkward, with neither of them seeming to know what to say.
‘Chris … I …’ Alison hesitated.
‘I know. Forget it happened. It was my fault.’
Alison stared ahead, sensing the tension between them.
‘Does anyone know you’re down here?’
‘Who’s left to know?’
‘Family. Friends. You do have friends, don’t you?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Chris said. ‘I didn’t become some mad loner. I had a life of stunning ordinariness. So many friends it took hours after the funeral to get rid of everyone. Plates of food, women washing up, men pouring drinks. Some poor neighbour asking me, “Where does Jane keep her wine glasses?” then going white with embarrassment.
‘It was one a.m. before I saw off my partner who looked like he wanted to remove my shoelaces or anything else I might hang myself with. That only left me and the blasted dog. I’d never liked him anyway, I only got him for the girls who ignored him once the novelty wore off. There he was whining, staring up at his lead. He didn’t care who was dead, he just wanted his walk. Big beseeching eyes. I wanted to throw him into the river but out I went and walked the blasted legs off him.’
The rain had stopped now, a crescent moon lighting the empty road. Chris seemed unable to stop talking, frightened of what silence might bring.
‘The poor dog didn’t know what was happening. He strained at his lead for the first mile, then started looking up, waiting to turn for home. But I kept going, through the toughest parts of Ballybough and down the seafront at Clontarf. Rain bucketing down, no one around, just two stray lovers in a concrete shelter and some winos in another. The dog’s tail was down, his breath in pants. I wanted to get soaked, I wanted phenomena. I wanted to fling myself onto the rocks below. Hardly a car passing except for taxis ploughing through the puddles. Pubs in darkness, shops bolted up. We reached the wooden bridge onto Bull Island. I took his lead off, shoving him on ahead with my foot when he refused to budge.’
Chris shook his head, as though amused by the memory.
‘I swear to Christ, Ali, even the dog was trying to mind me. He only stopped short of putting a paw out to hail a passing taxi. I walked through the dark towards the bridge. He stayed at the traffic lights, whining. They say dogs can sense danger. I could hear night birds call across the mudflats. Then I heard his paws on the wooden sleepers at my heel. That crazy dog. God knows who might be out there, sleeping rough, shooting up. I’d be a soft touch with a wad of notes in my wallet. They were welcome to try and rob it, but I’d fight to the end. That was the point. I wanted an end to everything. I’d have welcomed some joyrider crossing that bridge, not seeing me till I stepped into his headlights and got killed.’
‘You didn’t really want that,’ Alison said, uneasily. The van had picked up speed. He was doing sixty–five now, seventy. His hands were trembling, his eyes slightly glazed. Just how many drinks did he have back in the hotel? She looked down at Sheila, knowing how irresponsible she had been in forcing him to drive.
‘I don’t know what I wanted,’ he replied. ‘Maybe just to feel something again. I wanted their ghosts to haunt me. A hundred times we’d walked across that bridge, the girls taking turns to hold the dog’s lead. I wanted to feel close to them, but it didn’t work. The dead are dead and that’s it. I reached the Bull Wall, built right out into the sea. No one around. The bloody dog had miles of sand dunes to his left. Do you think he’d run off? He stuck to my heels with his tail down. I walked across the crumbling stones, out and out with the sea wild on both sides of me.
‘There were some old concrete bathing shelters. I stepped into each one, looking for my killer. I virtually waved my wallet in the air. The bloody dog circling my heels. I fell over him twice. The second time I picked him up. I couldn’t bear the thought of him day after day, wanting to be walked, fed and minded. That was the cruellest joke, he was all I’d left of my family. Years of working for our future and the only responsibility I had left was a dog I’d never even liked.’
‘You didn’t kill him.’ The van’s speed frightened her, the way Chris stared out at the road.
‘I hadn’t got it in me. Three times I went to throw him onto the rocks.’ Chris slowed the van and looked over. ‘I was always a coward, remember.’
‘I remember you as gentle.’
‘Gentleness never got me far.’ There was enough regret in his tone for her to experience an unanticipated sensation of goosebumps. ‘If I’d killed him that night I’d have killed myself too. Nothing to stop me, no messy loose ends. Stupid bloody dog. I found a bar of Sara’s favourite chocolate in my pocket. I fed it to him, then blacked out in a shelter with him curled at my feet. I woke at dawn. I’ve never known such coldness. A tramp stood over me, his face blue. “Get away to hell,” he said. “You don’t belong.” The dog was shivering, that beseeching look. I got a taxi on the coast road and stopped to buy food for him.’
The left turn came for Rosslare. It was half–one, the road here still flooded. She wondered how much she should pay the babysitter or whether Danny might have woken. She worried about every kind of mundane thing to try and block other thoughts out. She was a happily married woman. Chris was a widower. It didn’t matter what her body told her. She crushed the nerve ends of her fingers so tightly together that her nails turned white. Tomorrow she would resume her normal life and he would be gone. It was Peadar’s fault for leaving her stranded here without a car. The child slept on her knee, her flesh less hot. She blocked out the feel of Chris’s skin, the memory of the warmth of his hand.
‘Did you love her?’ Alison shocked herself with the remark.
‘What type of question is that?’
‘You don’t have to answer.’
‘Do you love Peadar? Still?’
The isolated garage where they got petrol every year was closed. Chris passed i
t, turning left.
‘Yes. But I’ve loved him differently at different times.’
‘Of course I loved Jane,’ Chris said. ‘You don’t share what we shared unless you love someone. But it’s …’
He turned right, the van slowing. She thought he was going to stop. The back was rigged out, with a bed, a stove. Surely he knew she didn’t want that. She couldn’t afford to want anything. Her life was fixed, set out. He drove carefully, searching for words.
‘It’s not as simple as when you’re young,’ he went on. ‘I shared things with Jane. We were equals, no pedestals. What are you asking? Did she consume me like a knot in my throat? Was she the first thing I thought of when I woke? The last thing I saw at night? A flame burning me even when out of reach?’
‘Chris …?’ His intensity frightened her.
‘First love is different. It’s not tested by tedium or middle age.’
‘I shouldn’t have asked the question.’
‘I asked it myself often enough these last months,’ he said. ‘I bought her a car for Christmas, a Honda Accord, two years old, eleven thousand on the clock. Jane didn’t want so big a car, but I saw a hand–written ad with a local phone number in a shop window. Three thousand quid less than a garage would charge. A bargain, you understand?’
They crossed the hump–backed bridge, with the sea dark before them.
‘You’d think I’d understand greed in my trade. The guy who answered the phone baaed like a sheep. Except the car belonged to his cousin, a Sam Burns in Leitrim. The Kerry numberplates gave me the first hint something was wrong, that and Burns’ Belfast accent when he drove it up. A Belfastman based in Leitrim, selling a Kerry registered car in Dublin. The bodywork was pristine bodywork, the engine a dream. It was his wife’s, he said, but she was leaving her job because she was pregnant. Burns didn’t look a man to give something away cheap. Only one owner on the logbook and it wasn’t him. He hadn’t entered his name so as not to bring the value down. I wanted to ask if he was a dealer, had it been crashed, but if Jane heard such talk she’d have never touched the car. And it was a bargain. My mechanic could find nothing wrong, but at that price he said he wouldn’t touch it. Burns kept calling, saying other buyers were interested. Jane got suspicious when I couldn’t make up my mind. But three grand saved was three grand and there was nothing wrong with the bloody car.’
‘So what was the problem?’ Alison asked.
‘With first love there’s no balancing the books.’ Chris looked at her with neither guile nor shyness. ‘I’d never have taken the risk with you. I’d have spent every penny on the latest model.’
He drove into the car park and switched the engine off. They sat in silence.
‘Peadar would have bought me the car you got Jane,’ she said quietly.
‘They died in that car. The police say it was the other driver’s fault. He skidded across the road.’
‘If that’s what the police say …’
‘Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe the brakes or the steering … maybe something snapped when she tried to swerve out of his way.’
‘You can’t blame yourself.’
His voice was harsh. ‘Is there somebody else left to blame?’
‘Chris …’ She wanted to touch his hand that still gripped the wheel. ‘Back at the hospital … I was just so happy Sheila was safe.’
‘I know.’
‘But finish your holiday. Don’t disappear.’
‘You don’t understand, Ali.’
‘I understand it won’t happen again. Thank you for driving us.’
Jack Fitzgerald was waiting in reception. He had phoned the hospital and got the news already. One minute Chris was behind her, the next he had vanished.
They spoke in whispers so as not to wake the child, Jack accompanying her up the corridor. The babysitter looked so relieved she was almost in tears. She refused to take extra money and disappeared, leaving Alison alone.
She should phone Peadar now, keeping her voice low, but she felt drained, unable to talk. Alison undressed, pulled back the sheets and then stopped. She put a dressing gown on and crossed to the window, pulling the drapes closed behind her. She stood, concealed between the drapes and long net curtains. Parts of the gardens were lit by lamps concealed in trees, but whole sections lay in darkness. The sky had grown black with more rain clouds, the roar of waves almost lost behind the double–glazing.
Her child was safe, life went on. She needed sleep to face tomorrow. But she wanted to see if Chris would surreptitiously cross the gravel again, inches from her but not knowing she was there. Alison waited till she couldn’t stand up any more with tiredness, confused and disturbed by this need to watch over him if he passed in the tight vice–grip of his pain.
WEDNESDAY
In her dream Alison was thirty–eight, yet somehow also eighteen again. Lying in her old bedroom in Waterford, forced to study for exams she thought she had completed years ago. She didn’t know what made her call out, just that she suddenly woke. The room in Fitzgerald’s was dark and Danny stood over her bed.
‘You cried out,’ he whispered. ‘You cried for Daddy.’ Danny walked back to his bed. She lay awake, confused and disorientated, then rose to check that Sheila was okay. She knew she had cried out, not for Peadar but for her own father, as if she herself were a child again.
Peadar phoned at eight–thirty, just when Alison was finished giving Sheila her antibiotic. Once she’d been given Calpol for her throat, Sheila was in high spirits, boasting to the disbelieving boys about her trip into Wexford. Danny and Shane already had the door open to march down to breakfast. Alison called the boys back, forcing them to sit on the bed, but they were hungry and impatient. They had been up since half–seven, playing around while she took Sheila into her bed and tried to snatch a few extra moments of sleep. She knew they could not be corralled for much longer.
Besides, she didn’t know what to say to Peadar about last night. The scare with Sheila seemed almost secondary now. But there was nothing illicit in taking a lift from Chris. He had helped out when Peadar was off God knows where. Their kiss was one of relief that the child was well.
Yet her face was hot and she cursed herself for blushing like she hadn’t blushed in years. Danny watched her with an echo of the look Peadar sometimes had. She turned away from the child.
‘If I can get this liquidator officially appointed I could leave the rest to McCann and get back down,’ Peadar was saying. ‘As it is, there are so many suppliers swarming over the site that it’s like a car boot sale.’
Peadar was Sheila’s father, she had to tell him about the hospital visit. But she didn’t want him rushing back just for his daughter. Alison wanted him here for her sake, to know that she counted for something too.
She knew Sheila was dying to tell her father about it, but she waved the child away. There were daggers in Danny’s eyes as he pulled impatient faces.
‘I need you to be here with me,’ she said.
‘I want to be there too. I miss you.’ His voice sounded plaintive, then changed in the way it did when McCann or someone entered his office. Yet until then she had presumed he was phoning from home. Why was he at the school so early? ‘I’ll phone later,’ he said, more business–like.
‘Where are you calling from?’ she asked.
‘Dublin.’ He laughed. ‘You silly goose.’
Danny wrenched the phone from her hands. ‘We love you, we miss you, we’re absolutely starving. Goodbye,’ he said in a rush, while the youngest two laughed. ‘That’s nice.’ He hung on long enough to listen to something Peadar said. ‘I made it especially shiny.’ He replaced the receiver and turned to her. ‘Now breakfast.’
‘That’s not clever, it’s rude,’ she hissed. ‘I hadn’t finished what I wanted to tell Daddy.’
The boy threw his eyes to heaven. ‘You’re never finished anything,’ he shouted back. ‘I’m parched. I need a drink of milk or I’ll go crazy. I wish Daddy was here. He’d have been up
hours ago. He’d have us in the pool by now.’
Alison knew that behind his toughness he was seconds away from tears. She put an arm around him and steered him out the door, resisting the urge to brush his hair that was sticking up again.
‘Breakfast in a flash,’ she said, ‘and I’ll have you in the pool in no time.’
The others ran ahead but he stayed beside her. She looked down, knowing him too well.
‘When’s Daddy coming back?’ he asked.
‘As soon as he possibly can.’
‘You go swimming. I’ll play around the garden.’
Alison was shocked. Even at six months old he had loved the water. Normally he would spend all day in the pool if allowed to.
‘Of course you want to go swimming.’
‘I’ll play with the twins,’ he replied stubbornly. ‘We have our own club.’
‘To hell with your bloody club,’ she hissed angrily, as they entered the sunlit foyer. ‘Your family are more important than some bloody club. Just because you make a few friends doesn’t mean you suddenly forget the rest of us.’
Tears appeared below the surface of his eyes. She was annoyed with herself for snapping and being so rattled this morning. Children grow up and away from you. It was just that on this holiday she seemed to keep losing bits of her family. Sheila and Shane waited impatiently at the dining room door.
‘Is that really why you don’t want to go swimming?’ she asked, more softly.
‘Why can’t I get undressed by myself?’
‘You’re too old for the ladies’ changing room and too young to be in the gents’ by yourself.’
‘Why? I can walk around here alone.’
‘That’s different. Not all men are good. I’ve warned you about that.’ Something about his open face made her feel sickened by the world. How long could his innocence last and was she right to destroy it by saying more? ‘Is the attendant not nice?’ she asked.
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