Come a Little Closer

by Karen Perry

  ‘It could just be temporary,’ Greg is saying. ‘You know – some sort of parole. Day release or something.’

  ‘But how do we know? How do we find out?’

  A gnawing feeling is growing deep in her gut. She’d skipped lunch – her appetite diminished by the heat – and now regrets it.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I could go over there, talk to him –’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’

  ‘It’s not that I have any desire to talk to the man but –’

  ‘I mean it.’

  They have stopped at the traffic lights and she watches the tram trundle past in front of them, wonders how she will get through this event, making small-talk with strangers, while carrying this news inside her. Anton is out. Then she feels the weight and pressure of Greg’s hand upon her knee.

  ‘Hil,’ he says again, in a soft voice that makes her suddenly tearful. She can feel his concerned gaze on her face, but can’t bring herself to look at him.

  Instead, she glances at her reflection in the sun-visor mirror. Eyelashes sticky with mascara, beneath them her pale, pale eyes.

  She flips the sun-visor closed, slots the mascara wand back into its tube. ‘You can drive home later,’ she tells him, in a flat voice. ‘I need a drink.’

  They walk into a storm of noise.

  The launch, held on the first floor of the bookshop, is already heaving, guests spilling down the staircase and squeezed into the narrow aisles between the shelves and the display tables. Hilary pushes single-mindedly through the throng until she reaches the catering table and helps herself to a glass of white wine. It tastes acidic but she doesn’t care – in fact, she welcomes the bite.

  She feels a little giddy – a slug of cheap booze on top of the adrenalin rush of Greg’s news swirls around inside her, loosening her emotions. She can cope with the news. Hilary is one of life’s great copers. Robust. Determinedly optimistic.

  So Anton is out. So what?

  She surveys the room, the clusters of people she knows or half knows – always the same faces mingling at these events. ‘Cliques’, Greg calls them, with disdain. ‘The literary scene is too cliquey,’ he complains. Whereas Hilary wishes to God he would just find himself a clique and join in. Socialize. Even now at this party, where he must know at least half a dozen people – she can see his editor standing right there in Health & Living, for pity’s sake – Greg is standing off to one side, alone, leafing through a book.

  I wonder what Anton looks like now.

  The thought sneaks up on her from nowhere. Hilary blinks and swallows, then thrusts her glass out for a passing member of staff to refill.

  She should mingle. Or go and rescue Greg. She owes him that much. After all, it’s Hilary’s fault they’re here. Her fault, because it was her idea – her actions – that had turned Greg into a writer when he might have been perfectly happy sticking to his day job teaching geography to the teenage sons of south-east Dublin’s middle classes. But he hadn’t been happy – in fact, he had been depressed. At least they had his teacher’s salary and hers, she used to tell him, the long holidays, the summers off. While friends and neighbours were losing their jobs, their businesses, during the recession, Hilary and Greg were permanent and pensionable. They were lucky, she used to tell him. It became a refrain of hers, a bulwark against the black tide of his depression.

  But it wasn’t enough, and when Evelyn at work suggested he should try something creative to draw him out of his mood, Hilary had gone out and signed him up for an evening course at the Irish Writers’ Centre. An outlet to release his pent-up frustrations – that was all she’d intended it to be. Something to get him over the hump of his depression until they could return to the normality of their ordinary lives. It had never been part of the plan for him to write a novel and for it to be published. That was a boon, she’d told him – a serendipitous side-effect. What Hilary hadn’t anticipated was how writing would, in itself, become a source of anxiety for Greg. He worried when the book met a tepid reception. He fretted over the modest sales. Entering a bookshop, once a source of such pleasure to him, now involved an agonized, and frequently disappointing, search for the presence of his own work. He dreaded people asking him about the next.

  Greg hadn’t wanted to come to the launch this evening, but Hilary had coerced him. And now she feels a dash of fierce regret, watching her husband as he stands on the outer rim of the throng encircling the celebrated author, the latest sure-fire bestseller pressed to Greg’s chest as he waits to get close enough for a signature. There is something so craven about him. The man is hopeless. He will always be hopeless. Hilary’s anger flares in her chest.

  What is wrong with me? she wonders, as she knocks back the rest of her wine. Her husband is a good man – loyal, kind, faithful. And yet the anger seeps through her brain, like some bitter herb infusing her thoughts with vitriol. But of course she knows what’s wrong with her. She has enough self-awareness to realize that the news of Anton’s return is at the root of her turmoil. Depositing her empty glass on a stack of books piled high on a table, she pushes through the crowd, recalling another time, another party. Another summer evening, the sway of her hips, and the cruelty of Charlotte Woodbury’s amused smile looking her up and down, saying, ‘My God, Hilary, whatever are you wearing?’

  ‘Everything all right?’ Greg asks, as she takes hold of his elbow.

  ‘Can we go home?’

  His eyes flicker over her, confused. He’s usually the one nagging her to leave.

  ‘A sudden headache,’ she explains.

  He doesn’t question her further, merely pats her hand and follows her out of the shop.

  They don’t speak in the car. Hilary keeps her eyes closed, her head leaning back against the rest. Hot air gusts through the open window and swirls around them, reminding her of another time – another summer – but it’s so long in the past now she can hardly believe that the memories she has are hers. That she actually was that person – younger, less burdened by respectability, less concerned by what people thought. And now it’s about to begin – the second act she has been waiting for. The fact that it’s upon her is almost overwhelming. She is impatient to be home, to be sitting in her garden with a G-and-T and a cigarette, her feet stretched out and bare, away from people, where she can think things through properly. She needs to make a plan.

  A van is double-parked in the street, blocking access to their house, and Greg pulls the car to a halt behind it.

  ‘Oh, for the love of God,’ Hilary mutters, as beyond the windscreen two people struggle to lift out what looks like a piano through the vehicle’s open doors. A man and a woman. Young.

  ‘New neighbours,’ Greg remarks.

  The woman pauses and lets go of her end of the piano – an upright in dark wood, battered and worn – while she climbs down from the van. Small and slight, dark hair and pale skin, a slightly anaemic look about her. She is wearing a smock-like dress in charcoal grey, black ballet flats on her feet. Hardly suitable clothing for carrying furniture, Hilary thinks. It’s the kind of garb that architects favour, she has noticed, or graphic designers.

  ‘We should give them a hand,’ Greg says.

  ‘No, don’t –’ But he is already out of the car, the door shutting behind him. Hilary watches, silently furious, as he approaches the van and the woman turns to him, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  Greg shakes her other hand, then that of the man emerging from the van. Hilary watches him coming into view. A boyish face, though she guesses he must be thirty or more, wire-rimmed glasses lending him an intellectual look, despite the garish zippered jacket he wears, some sort of sports clothing. From where she’s sitting, she can’t make out what the three of them are saying, but when Greg gestures towards the car and the couple turn in her direction, she shifts in her seat with discomfort. Both strangers wave to her, the man turning it into a little comedy routine by ducking down and peering myopically at the windscreen. The others laugh, and Hilary kno
ws she should get out of the car. It would be rude otherwise. But something holds her back. She can’t explain her hesitation. A cold instinct that keeps her sitting there, clenched in her seat.

  She watches as Greg picks up one end of the piano and between the two men, they carry it down into the house. Number 14. Anton’s house.

  The woman stands back so they can pass, tucking a lock of stray hair behind her ear. There is a sort of dreamy self-absorption about her – a distracted quality – that makes Hilary rethink her initial architect/graphic designer conclusion. And something else – a familiarity, as if she’s someone Hilary might already have met. But before she can figure it out, the young woman picks up a chair from the pavement and disappears down to the basement, and Hilary is left alone.

  The street is empty. No one there to witness the deep, cold stillness that has come over her.

  It’s just a house, she tells herself, forcing her eyes to gaze up at it.

  Concrete paving slabs, long given over to moss and weeds, lead to the stone steps. The front garden, which had once been carefully clipped and manicured, is choked with bindweed and briars, any semblance of order lost in the mists of time. The lower part of the house is being consumed by Virginia creeper. The upstairs windows appear fastened, the shutters open, curtains half drawn. Hilary’s mind travels to the rooms beyond, wonders at the cool, airy spaces inside, all that heavy furniture now shrouded in dust. The rooms crowd her memory, making her head ache, and then a voice whispers in her ear, ‘I just came to say I’m sorry,’ so close and so real, it raises goosebumps on her skin.

  When the car door opens, she jumps with fright.

  ‘You all right?’ Greg asks, sitting in the driver’s seat, the car rocking a little beneath his weight. ‘I thought you’d come in to say hello.’ She feels him watching her expectantly. But she keeps her eyes fixed on their own house a little further up the road on the opposite side. A more recent addition to this otherwise Victorian street, in the lengthening shadows of evening, it looks small and squat next to its more imposing neighbours.

  ‘Another time,’ she says wearily. ‘Please, love. Let’s just go home.’

  ‘Jake and Leah,’ Greg tells her, as she puts together a salad, salmon fillets baking in the oven.

  ‘Are they married?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I get the impression they’re not together very long,’ he remarks, unscrewing the Riesling and pouring her a glass.

  ‘D0 you indeed?’ Hilary says drily, teasing him. ‘And how did you reach that conclusion?’

  ‘The way they looked at each other. The excitement between them. Remember that? The excitement at being together?’ He comes to stand behind her and she feels his chin rest upon her shoulder as she checks the boiling potatoes with a fork. He feels too close, and she turns her face, pecks him quickly on the cheek. ‘Here, help me with these plates,’ she instructs.

  Over dinner, Hilary is mostly silent. The headache she had faked has sprung to life, as if she had tempted it into existence. The heat has killed her appetite, and she is aware of how quickly she is getting through the wine. Greg talks while they eat, filling her in on his observations. ‘The flat hadn’t changed much. Still the same old magnolia walls, the same little kitchen with the peeling linoleum. But it felt different.’ He spears a potato and pokes it into his mouth, his eyes on his plate the whole time he speaks.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I don’t know. The passage of time, I expect. And it’s clear no one’s been living there for ages. You’d think he’d have given it a lick of paint or something, cheered the place up a bit for them. You should have come in. You’d have been interested to see the place now.’

  ‘I had a headache, remember?’ She glances up at Greg then, checking to see if he’ll remark on the slight tremor in her voice.

  But he just forks spinach into his mouth, keeping his eyes on the food in front of him as he goes on: ‘I think Jake is a friend of Mark’s. You know – the son. Thought I saw him around a bit lately. That’s how they got the flat. Still, I’m sure they’ll spruce it up themselves, make it nice with all their own things. Looks like they had plenty to fill the place with. That piano, for a start. Boxes and boxes of stuff lying around the place. Even a kid’s trampoline.’

  On and on he continues with his monologue until finally his cutlery clatters on his emptied plate, the sound reverberating painfully in her head. It is only then that he looks across at her almost untouched dinner and says: ‘Are you not eating?’

  She considers her response; feels herself drawing a breath. Tentatively, she broaches the subject, the real heart of her discomfort: ‘You don’t think we should tell them, do you?’

  His gaze sharpens.

  ‘About what happened in that house?’ she continues. ‘About Charlotte?’

  Her name hangs between them. The silence surrounding it seems to tighten. She sees her husband’s eyes flicker over her face, a look that bristles with unspoken questions. Such an eloquent look – twenty-five years of marriage distilled and poured into that one expression.

  ‘No,’ he answers, getting to his feet.

  ‘But they’re bound to find out eventually.’

  ‘Just leave it, Hil.’ He speaks softly but she hears the warning there all the same.

  Unhurriedly, he opens the dishwasher and puts in his plate. He flips its door closed, then pauses to pick up his book – the new one that has just been launched – from the countertop. Hilary watches while he scans the dust-jacket, then clutches it to his chest with one hand, the other slipping casually into his pocket.

  ‘Better give this a try, then,’ he says, and smiles at her, as if nothing has passed between them in this room. Nothing at all.

  She listens to his step on the stairs, then the creaking floorboards overhead, the sigh of his office chair as he drops his weight on to it.

  The saucepans need to be scoured, but instead she takes out her cigarettes, sits at the kitchen table exhaling smoke towards the windows, open on to the garden. Shadows draw across the lawn, shrubs and bushes squatting darkly beyond it as light drains from the sky. And as she sits there, she thinks of all the times they might have left here. Sold this house and moved away. All the times she’d tried to persuade Greg that they should move, but always he’d held firm, adamant in his refusal. And now it is too late.

  A feeling of unease comes over her, like the cool surface of still water being broken, unearthing something murky in the depths.

  4

  Leah

  She wakes with a jolt, her heart still racing from the dream. As her breathing steadies, Leah takes in the room around her – the walls and furnishings, the stacks of books on the floor, the green glow of the alarm clock through the early-morning gloom. For a moment, the old panic comes tumbling up inside. It’s the unfamiliarity of her surroundings coupled with the streaked memory of her dream. But then Jake’s arm snakes around her and she remembers.

  This is home now.

  ‘Tell me we have a few more minutes,’ he mumbles against her neck. She feels the warmth of him, the heaviness of his arm against her ribs, and realizes that she will wake next to him like this each morning now, possibly for the rest of her life.

  The thought rises and threatens to overwhelm her, a giddy feeling starting in her chest. After all these years of being alone, after resigning herself to the fact and inevitability of her aloneness, now to feel the warm bustle of possibilities in this life they’re sharing – this love – it feels green and new and invigorating, like the sap rising in spring. No more sneaking around, no more withstanding the irritated sighs of her flatmates at his presence, no more eking out their weekends away in B-and-Bs from Wexford to Cork to Belfast. Their own place. Their own home, with no one to bother them. She turns over and folds herself into him, savouring the sweetly stale smell of his early-morning skin, the tickle of his chest hair against her nose. He begins to wake, desire stirring, and she feels him reaching for her thigh, drawing her leg up over his hip
. When he moves inside her, it feels natural and intimate and right. She clasps her legs about him, pushing him deeper, needing him to touch her very core. The bed creaks beneath them, and overhead she thinks she hears a floorboard groan.

  Afterwards, they sit at the new kitchen table, and sip coffee with the French windows open on to the patio, breathing in the morning air. The room is littered with cardboard boxes, some still waiting to be opened. They’d gone a little mad in Ikea. ‘Everyone does,’ Jake had assured her, after they’d returned home and her buyer’s remorse had set in.

  Her salary is due on Friday, and when Jake’s shoot ends, there will be more money. Leah knows from experience how fragile her optimism can be. But she is determined not to let their new life together be spoilt by worrying over their finances. She has her position at the patents firm, and Jake’s getting work. There is always the option for him to pick up the odd courier job. They will be fine. We’re lucky, she tells herself. And then, because she has committed to being more open with him, she says it aloud: ‘We’re so lucky.’

  Jake’s putting their cups on the draining-board, and wipes his hands quickly on his jeans. ‘Don’t I know it,’ he tells her, and grabs his bag from the sofa, looping the strap over his head and fixing it on his shoulder. ‘I’d better get going.’

  He kisses her quickly, with a promise to call her later. He wheels his bike outside and she hears the front door closing behind him and knows she is alone.

  There’s a sort of relief to the silence in his wake. Not that she doesn’t welcome the warmth and noise of Jake’s presence, but somehow Leah, so used to living a solitary life, feels more authentic – more at peace – when she’s alone. In the bathroom, she stands in the bath, and listens to the pipes gurgling as the shower above her splutters to life. She washes her hair, then combs it, and dresses for work. She is small-framed – like a bird, Jake says – and her work wardrobe consists of an assortment of plain dresses in muted colours. A light dusting of face powder and a dab of lip-gloss, before she slips on her shoes and checks her bag.