Anybody Out There? (Walsh Family)

by Marian Keyes

  I was surprised, too—because it was true! I’d once remarked that I loved porridge and Aidan had asked, “Is porridge the same as oatmeal?” I’d said, “I think it is,” and the following morning I found him standing at our barely used stove, stirring something in a saucepan. “Porridge,” he’d said. “Or oatmeal, if you prefer. Because you can’t eat at the lunches with those scary beauty ladies in case they judge you. So have something now.”

  “I’m right, yeah? He made you breakfast every morning?”

  “Yes.” I was meek.

  “He really loved you, honey.”

  He did. I remembered what I’d forgotten: he used to tell me sixty times a day how much he loved me. He’d hide love notes in my handbags. He’d even tried to persuade me to go to self-defense classes because, as he said, “I can’t be with you every second of every day, and if anything happened to you, I’d shoot myself.”

  “Didn’t he, honey?” Neris prompted.

  “What did he used to make me for breakfast?” If she could answer that, I’d believe in her.

  Confidently she said, “Eggs.”

  “No.”

  Pause. “Granola?”

  “No.”

  “Toasted muffin?”

  “No, forget it. Here’s an easier one. What was his name?”

  After a silence she said, “I’m getting the letter L.”

  “Nope.”

  “R?”

  “Nope.”

  “M?”

  “Nope.”

  “B?”

  “Nope.”

  “A?”

  “Okay. Yes.”

  “Adam?”

  “That’s my sister’s boyfriend’s name.”

  “Yes, of course, it is! He’s here with me and is telling me—”

  “He’s not dead. He’s alive, in London, probably ironing something.”

  “Oh. Okay. Aaron?”

  “Nope.”

  “Andrew?”

  “No. You’ll never get it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “It’s driving me crazy!”

  “Good.” Then I hung up.

  99

  Mitch looked like a different person. Literally, like a different person. He actually appeared taller and so sure of himself he was almost cocky. Even his face was a different color. Six, seven, eight months ago, I hadn’t known that he looked gray and rigid. It was only now that he’d lost that terrible stiffness and had become animated and face-colored that I noticed.

  He spotted me and broke into a massive smile. A real dazzler, the likes of which I’d never seen him do before. “Anna. Hey, you look great!” His voice was louder than it used to be.

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah. You don’t look so much like a stunned seal.”

  “Did I look like a stunned seal?” I hadn’t known.

  He laughed. “I wasn’t too good either, right? Dead man walking.”

  I’d called him after my reading with Neris Hemming; there were a couple of questions I wanted answers to. He’d professed himself delighted to hear from me and suggested we meet for dinner.

  “Right this way.” He led me into the restaurant.

  “For two?” the desk girl asked.

  Mitch smiled and said, “We’d prefer a booth.”

  “So does everybody.”

  “I guess they do,” he acknowledged, with a laugh. “But see what you can do.”

  “I’ll go see,” the girl said grudgingly. “But you might have to wait.”

  “That’s okay.”

  He smiled again. He was flirting with her. And it was working. I thought, I’ve never met this person before.

  I noticed something else. “You don’t have your kit bag! This is the first time I’ve seen you without it.”

  “Really?” He barely seemed to remember. “Oh yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s right. Back then, I just about lived in the gym. Wow, that seems so long ago.”

  “And you’ve spoken more in the last five minutes than in all the months I knew you.”

  “I didn’t talk?”

  “No.”

  “But I love to talk.”

  The girl was back. “Gotcha a booth.”

  “For real? Thank you,” Mitch said sincerely. “Thank you so much.”

  She colored. “My pleasure.”

  So the real Mitch was a charmer. Who knew? My speedy reassessment of him continued apace.

  After we’d ordered I said, “I have to ask you a question.”

  “So ask it.”

  “When you spoke to Neris Hemming did you really believe she was channeling Trish?”

  “Yeah.” He hesitated. He seemed embarrassed. “You know…” He gave a short laugh. “Look. At the time, I was out of my mind. Looking back, I can see I was actually crazy. I needed to believe.” He shrugged. “Maybe she channeled Trish, maybe she didn’t. All I know is, it worked for me at the time, probably stopped me from going totally over the edge.”

  “Do you remember you told me that she guessed your nicknames? Yours and Trish’s for each other. What were they?”

  Another hesitation, another embarrassed little laugh. “Mitchie and Trixie.”

  Mitchie and Trixie? “I could have guessed that for free.”

  “Yeah. Well, like I said, it did what it needed to do at the time.”

  “How do you feel now about everything?”

  He thought about it, staring into the distance. “Some days it’s as bad as it ever was, sometimes it feels like day one all over again. But other days I feel good. That it’s true that her life wasn’t interrupted, but completed. And when I think that, I think I can have a life again someday, without the guilt killing me.”

  “Do you still try to, you know, contact Trish?”

  He shook his head. “I still talk to her and have pictures of her everywhere but I know she’s gone, and for whatever reason, I’m still here. Same goes for you. I don’t know if you’ll ever contact Aidan, but the way I see it is, you’re alive. You’ve got a life to live.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, I’m not going to any more psychics,” I said. “That was just a phase.”

  “Glad to hear it. Hey, are you free Sunday afternoon? I’ve got a billion great places for us to go to. How about the Immigrants in the Garment Industry Museum—that’s got some niche appeal. Or the Planetarium, they do simulated spacecraft rides. Or bingo, we could go to bingo.”

  Bingo. I liked the sound of that.

  100

  Take a look!” Jacqui hiked up her skirt and pulled down her knickers.

  I averted my eyes.

  “No, look, look!” she said. “You’ll love it. I’ve had a Brazilian and something a little bit special. Can you see?”

  She angled herself so that I could see beneath her massive bump; she’d had a dinky diamante rose appliquéd to her naked pubic bone. “So we’ll have something pretty to look at while I’m in labor.”

  Every time she said the word labor I felt dizzy. Please, God, don’t let it be too terrible. She was due on April 23, less than two weeks away, and I was staying with her, in case it all kicked off in the middle of the night.

  “And let’s face it, it’s bound to,” she said. “No one ever seems to go into labor at a nice convenient time, like a quarter to eleven on a Saturday morning. It’s always some godforsaken hour in the dead of the night.”

  Her beloved LV wheelie bag stood by the door, packed with a Lulu Guinness wash bag, two Jo Malone scented candles, an iPod, several Marimekko nightdresses, a camera, a lavender eye mask, Ipo nail polish in case her mani-pedi got chipped “while I’m pushing,” a teeth-whitening treatment to fill the time because “I could be doing a lot of hanging around,” three Versace baby outfits, and her most recent scan.

  The other scans were stuck up on the wall. And that reminded me of something…

  Before the accident, I used to be a right hypochondriac. Not that I faked being sick, but when it happened, I was very interested
in it and tried to involve Aidan in the drama. If I had, say, a toothache, I’d give him regular bulletins on my symptoms. “It’s a different kind of pain now,” I’d say. “Remember when I said it was a kind of hummy ache—well, it’s changed. More darty.” Aidan was used to me and my drama, and he’d say, “Darty, hey? That’s new.”

  I’d even broken a bone about a year and a half ago; I’d been rummaging through cupboards looking for something and I turned around too quickly, cracked my finger against a drawer, and started bellyaching, “Ooh, Christ, oh God. Oh, my finger, that’s awful.”

  “Sit down,” Aidan said. “Show me. Which one?”

  He took my finger and—I know this sounds a little weird—he held it in his mouth. His mom used to do it for him and Kevin when they were little and now he did it for me whenever I injured a body part. (I seemed to have a very accident-prone crotch.) I shut my eyes and waited for the heat of his mouth to effect the merciful ebbing away of pain.

  “Better?”

  “Actually, no.” Surprising—it usually worked.

  “That’s bad, it’ll have to come off.” Before our eyes, my finger swelled and fattened, like a speeded-up video of bread rising. At the same time the color changed from red to gray to almost black.

  “Christ,” Aidan said, “that is bad, maybe it will have to come off. Better get you to the ER.” We jumped in a taxi, my hand laid across our laps, like a sick little rabbit. At the hospital they took me off for an X-ray and I was thrilled—yes, I admit it, thrilled—when the doc clipped an X-ray to a light box and said, “Yep, there we are, hairline fracture across the second knuckle.”

  Even though I didn’t get put in proper plaster, just a splinty-type thing, it felt nice not to be dismissed as a malingerer. I had “a Fracture.” Not just a bruise, not even a strain (or sprain, I’m never sure if they’re the same thing, and if they’re not, which is more impressive) but a Fracture.

  In the following days, when everyone looked at my splint and asked, “What happened?” Aidan always answered on my behalf. “Downhill skiing slalom, she clipped one of the poles.” Or “Mountaineering, small rockfall, hit her hand.”

  “Well,” as he said to me, “it’s got to be better than saying ‘looking for my blue shoes.’”

  The hospital had given me my two X-rays to bring home, and hypochondriac that I am, I used to study them; I held them up against the light and marveled at how long and slender my fingers really were beneath all that pesky muscle and skin and stuff, while Aidan watched indulgently.

  “See that tiny line on my knuckle,” I said, holding an X-ray right up close to my face. “It just looks like a hair, but it causes so much pain.”

  Suddenly anxious, I said, “Don’t tell anyone I do this.”

  A few days later, he was home from work before me—an unusual occurrence—and there was an air of suppressed excitement about him. “Notice anything?” he asked.

  “You combed your hair?”

  Then I saw it. Them. My X-rays. Hanging on the wall. In frames. Beautiful distressed-gold frames, like they were holding old masters instead of ghostly black-and-whites of my spindly fingers.

  My arms wrapped themselves across my stomach and I sank onto the couch. I hadn’t even the strength to stand. It was so funny that for ages I couldn’t even laugh. Finally the noise fought its way up through my convulsed stomach and heaving chest and emerged as a ceiling-ward shriek. I looked at Aidan, who was clutching the wall; tears of laughter were leaking from the sides of his eyes.

  “You mad bastard,” I finally managed.

  “But there’s more,” he gasped. “Anna, Anna, there’s more. Watch; no, wait, watch.”

  He doubled over again with hilarity, then straightened up, wiped his face, and said, “Look!”

  He pressed a switch and suddenly my two X-rays lit up, blazing into glory, just like they were on a hospital light box.

  “I got lights,” Aidan sobbed. “The guy in the frame place said I could get lights, so…so…so…I got lights.”

  He turned them off, then on again. “See? Lights.”

  “Stop,” I begged, wondering if it was possible to actually die from laughing. “Oh, please, stop.”

  When I was able, I said, “Do the lights again.”

  He flicked them on and off several times, while further waves of mirth seized me, and when we were eventually exhausted from laughing, and curled up on the couch, Aidan asked, “You like?”

  “I love. It’s the best present I ever got.”

  101

  Jacqui? Jacqui?”

  “I’m down here,” she called.

  “Where?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  I followed her voice and found her on her hands and knees with a basin of soapy water. “What on earth…?”

  “I’m scrubbing the kitchen floor.” With the bathroom cleaner, I noticed.

  “But you’re forty weeks’ pregnant, you’re due to have a baby any minute. And you have a cleaning lady.”

  “I just got the urge,” she said brightly.

  I watched her doubtfully. They hadn’t said anything about scrubbing the kitchen floor in the Perfect Birth classes.

  “Other than the fact that you seem to have lost your mind, how are you?” I asked.

  “Funny you should ask, I’ve been having twinges all day.”

  “Twinges?”

  “Pains, I suppose you could call them,” she said, almost sheepishly. “In my back and up my jacksie.”

  “Braxton Hicks,” I said firmly.

  “Not Braxton Hicks,” she said. “Braxton Hicks go away when you do something physical.”

  “I bet they’re Braxton Hicks,” I insisted.

  “And I bet they’re not. And I’m the one who’s getting them, I’ve a better chance of knowing.”

  It was her hand that I noticed first: it began to close in on itself, until it was clenched so tightly that the skin over the bones went white. Then I saw that her face was contorted and her body was arching and twisting.

  In horror, I ran to her. “Twinges like that?”

  “No.” She shook her head, her face bright red. “Nothing like as bad as this.”

  She looked like she was dying. I was about to call 911 when the spasm started to ease.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped, lying on the floor. “I think I’ve just had a contraction.”

  “How do you know? Describe it.”

  “It hurt!”

  I grabbed one of the helpful leaflets we’d been given and read. “Did it ‘begin in the back and move forward in a wavelike motion’?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh shit, that sounds like a contraction all right.” Suddenly I was terrified. “You’re going to have a baby!”

  Something caught my eye: a pool of water was spreading across the clean kitchen floor. Had she knocked over the basin of soapy water?

  “Anna,” Jacqui whispered. “Did my waters just break?”

  I thought I was going to faint. The water was coming from under Jacqui’s skirt. In a burst of agitation, I accused, “What were you thinking of, washing that bloody floor? Now look at what’s happened.”

  “But this is meant to happen,” she said. “My waters have to break.”

  She was right. Oh my God, her waters had broken, she really was going to have a baby. All the preparation we’d done suddenly counted for nothing.

  I focused enough to ring the hospital. “I’m Jacqui Staniforth’s birthing partner, although we’re not Jolly Girls; her waters have just broken and she’s in labor.”

  “How far apart are the contractions?”

  “I don’t know. She’s only had one. But it was terrible.”

  From the other end of the phone I heard something that sounded suspiciously like a snigger. “Time the contractions, and when they’re five minutes apart, come in.”

  I hung up. “We’ve to time them. The stopwatch! Where’s the stopwatch?”

  “With all the other labor stuff.”

>   I wished we didn’t have to keep saying the word labor. I found the stopwatch, rejoined her on the kitchen floor, and said, “Right. Anytime you like. Go on, give us a contraction.”

  We collapsed into nervous giggles.

  “At least I didn’t have a comedy waters-breaking moment,” she said.

  “How d’you mean?”

  “You know in films how the waters always break on someone’s really expensive rug or new suede shoes. Hugh Grant is usually in them. Oh gosh! Oh, I say! Gosh! You know the sort of thing. Just out of curiosity, is there any particular reason we’re sitting on the wet floor?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  We got up and Jacqui changed her clothes and had two more contractions. Ten minutes apart, we established. I rang the hospital back. “They’re ten minutes apart.”

  “Keep timing them and come in when they’re five minutes apart.”

  “But what should we do until then? She’s in terrible pain!”

  “Rub her back, use your TENS machine, have her take a hot bath, walk around.” I’d known all that already, it was just in the panic of the labor actually starting that I’d forgotten.

  So I rubbed Jacqui’s back and we watched Moonstruck and said all the words and paused it during every contraction so that Jacqui wouldn’t miss anything.

  “Visualize,” I urged each time her body spasmed and she ground the bones of my hands to smithereens. “The pain is your friend. It’s a great big golden ball of energy. Come on, Jacqui. Great big golden ball of energy. Say it with me.”

  “‘Say it with me’? What are we, in Dora the Explorer?”

  “Come on,” I urged, and we yelled it together. “Great big golden ball of energy. Great big golden ball of energy.”

  After Moonstruck finished we watched Gone With the Wind, and when Melanie went into labor—that word again—Jacqui asked, “Why do people always boil water and tear up sheets when they’re birthing babies?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe to take their mind off things, before they had DVDs. We could try it ourselves if you liked? No? Okay. Oh God, here we go again. Great big golden ball of energy! Great big golden ball of energy!”