‘Wasted.’
Isobel turns. A man leans against the counter a few feet away. Forties, average height, average weight. Average everything.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Youth: wasted on the young,’ he says, one side of his mouth turning up, forming a crease in his cheek.
Isobel smiles back. ‘I suppose it is.’
He lifts his glass. Dark amber liquid, half an inch left. Has he been there all the time, or did he move closer when he spotted her?
‘I had a wasted youth,’ he says. ‘Don’t remember half of it.’
‘Maybe that’s just as well.’
He drains the glass – she’s reminded of Alex tipping back his head in exactly the same way earlier – and sets it down gently on the counter. ‘Maybe so,’ he says. ‘Maybe so.’
Her room key sits by her saucer – he can’t have missed it. He’ll offer to buy her a drink, and she’ll say yes. Where’s the harm in it? They’re both adults, and he seems normal. Might go some way towards redeeming an otherwise disastrous day.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘have a nice evening.’ He raises a hand in farewell and walks off. She watches him go, home to a wife probably. Not looking for company, or anything else, after all.
She sits on her stool and sips coffee. Alex will be home by now, watching something worthy on television, or poring over whatever case he’s working on. George might be home too, his show surely over at the school – but maybe he was heading out for an end-of-term drink afterwards with the rest of the staff.
At some point, tonight or tomorrow, he will ask his father where she is. She wonders what Alex will tell him, how much of the truth he’ll choose to reveal. She hopes George won’t turn against her, won’t think badly of her. She wonders about ringing him in a few days; she wouldn’t want to put him in an awkward position.
Nobody else approaches her, she talks to nobody. As she finishes her coffee the barman approaches her with the pot but she shakes her head and slides off the stool: more than enough to keep her awake tonight without an overdose of caffeine. She makes her way through the thinning crowd back to the lift, back to her room on the fourth floor.
She’s brushing her teeth when her phone rings. Alex, she thinks. She drops the brush, spits into the sink, crosses to where the phone sits charging by the bed.
It’s Jack. She looks at his name in surprise. She checks her watch: nearly ten.
What could he want at this hour? She feels a slither of anxiety as she picks up the phone, remembering his call to tell her of Finn’s death.
She sits on the bed, presses the answer key. ‘Jack,’ she says.
‘It’s Una,’ he says, without preamble. ‘She’s missing. She’s been gone all day but we didn’t realise till a little while ago. I thought we should let you know. I’m at Daphne’s. I’m just going out to look for her.’
‘Have you called the guards?’
‘Daphne’s doing it now.’
‘I’m coming over,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘Tell Daphne I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell her I’m coming.’
Her child needs her. She takes her car key from the dressing table, energy flooding back into her.
UNA DARLING
‘Thanks,’ she says, getting out, slinging her rucksack across a shoulder. ‘See you later.’
She doesn’t look back. She never looks back. She hears Daphne’s car idling at the kerb as she walks off – why does she always hang around, why doesn’t she just go? Una can feel her watching, pretending to everyone that she can’t bear to part with her precious stepdaughter.
She works her way through the knots of chattering, jostling, flirting people in the yard, hoping not to be spotted by anyone, praying for her name not to be shouted. Better if she escapes notice this morning, better that way.
She reaches the side of the building and keeps going around to the back, making for the sports field. If anyone meets her now she’s looking for her glasses, or maybe her locker key, which she lost there yesterday.
Behind the equipment shed she kicks off her shoes, pulls off her jacket and jumper and unbuttons her shirt, shivering as the chilly air hits her skin. She opens her rucksack and rummages around until she finds the top that Daphne got her. She shakes the creases out of it.
It’s the blue of the lapis lazuli bracelet Ciara gave her last Christmas. She recognises the brand – it wasn’t cheap. Three green buttons at the neck, three-quarter-length sleeves that end with a thin green band. She has to admit she likes it. She pulls it over her head, feels its softness as it slides down.
She upends the rucksack. Books and more clothes topple onto the grass. She hurriedly gets into her sweatshirt and jeans, slips her feet back into her school shoes. She gathers the books together and packs them up again, stuffs her uniform in on top.
She transfers Daphne’s tenner from her jacket to her wallet. Get an ice-cream, she said, as if Una was a child. She’ll buy him flowers with it. She’ll spend every bit of it on flowers. She pats her other pocket to make sure her phone is still there.
She hoists the rucksack over a shoulder again and begins making her way along the sports field, half walking, half running along the grass, keeping well in to the edge but still feeling horribly conspicuous, with so many windows overlooking the field. She’s alert for the sound of a whistle or a shout – not that she’d respond, she’d just speed up – but she hears neither. Looks like she’s getting away with it.
She reaches the far end of the field and stands panting before the old stone wall that borders it. She hitches her rucksack over both shoulders and regards the wall. It’s nearly twice her height, she reckons about ten feet, but she’s often seen boys clambering over it. Can’t be that hard.
She grips a jutting rock, searches for another to grab onto. Her fingers are frozen – why didn’t she bring gloves? She clambers up a few feet before losing her hold and slithering back down, grazing the heel of one hand painfully. She swears and rubs her hand hard until the stinging lessens, and then she tries again.
Her second attempt is better. She gets almost to the top before her foot slips, and again she plummets to the ground, banging her chin on the way and landing on her back with a thump that knocks the breath out of her.
She sits on the ground and waits till her heart has stopped slapping like a fish inside her. She feels her chin gingerly: it’s sore, but there’s no blood. She doesn’t think any real damage is done.
She’d be better able to climb without the rucksack – but flinging it over the wall is easier said than done. After four failed attempts she opens it, takes out the books and flings them over, one by one. The lighter rucksack finally follows: she hears it land with a distant thud on the other side of the wall. She hasn’t a clue what’s there – hopefully not someone’s back garden with a big dog in it.
She brushes grit from her hands and launches another assault on the wall – and this time she gets to the top, despite a heart-stopping moment halfway up when a foot slithers and she almost loses her grip. She straddles the wall to catch her breath, looking down at the laneway where her splayed books and rucksack are lying. Good job it’s not raining. At the other side of the lane is another wall, a couple of feet lower than the one she’s on, and beyond that the back gardens of a row of semi-detached houses.
A woman is hanging clothes on a line, no more than twenty feet away: Una would be clearly visible to her if she were to turn her head a few inches to the right. Una leans forward slowly until her upper body is resting on the top of the wall, her face turned towards the garden, and waits.
The woman bends to take a shirt from the laundry basket and shakes it out: the damp cotton snaps loudly. A spider darts across the top of the wall, inches from Una’s face: she squeezes her eyes closed, trying not to imagine it crawling into her ear.
Eventually – three minutes? Ten? – the woman lifts the empty laundry basket and goes back inside. As soon as she hears the door close, Una sits up. She eases her other le
g over the top of the wall and, grabbing onto what she can along the way, she slithers to the ground, bringing dust, grit and a few woodlice with her.
She brushes herself down rapidly, flings the books back into her rucksack and flies down the lane, her injured hand and chin still smarting, the chill of the day forgotten with the adrenalin that’s galloping around inside her.
When she reaches the end she stops, out of breath again. She’s on familiar territory now, the school to the right and her destination the other way.
She hears the drone of an engine in the sky and looks up. It’s a small plane trailing a banner that reads Congratulations Charlotte and Brian. She hadn’t known they were planning to do that. She wonders whose idea it was, and how much it cost.
She tucks her hair into the hood of her sweatshirt and walks on. A few people pass by, nobody taking any notice of her. After a few minutes she increases her pace, the cold biting at her face now. She checks the time: Daphne will have got to work.
Her phone beeps. She takes it from her pocket and sees a message from Ciara: Where r u?
She types back: Sick, tummy bug
The lie causes a worm of discomfort in her gut but she can’t tell, not even Ciara. Not until it’s over.
Aw, happy bday. U OK? xx
OK, c u 2moro xx
She carries on, rubbing her hands together. She knows this route so well, could do it blindfold. Cycled it every weekday afternoon for years.
Come to the shop after school, Dad had told her when she started at the comp. You can do your homework in the back room and leave with me when I close. And that was what she’d done, delighted to be finished with the primary-school routine of being collected each afternoon by Mo and brought to her house on the bus, waiting there until Dad came to pick her up on his bike. Homework done at Mo’s little kitchen table, trying to ignore the smell of cabbage that she always got there. Now she was allowed to cycle to school on her own bike and come home with Dad.
Things didn’t change towards the end of first year, when Dad married Daphne and she moved in with them. I could run you to school in the mornings, she’d told Una. It’s on my way to work. We could take your bike in the boot, and you could still go to the shop after school – but Una opted to keep the old arrangement. Cycling to school woke her up, and rainy days didn’t bother her: she had all the wet gear.
Of course, eventually she grew out of going to the shop in the afternoons – she still cycled to school, but went downtown with Ciara and the others after. Her and Dad’s Sunday cycles didn’t stop, though, it was still the thing she shared with him. It was their time together, with no Daphne to come between them. Daphne wasn’t interested in cycling.
But now it’s completely different. Una hasn’t got onto a bike in the past year; she just can’t. Daphne drives her to school now, and her bike sits gathering dust and rust in the garage, just like his blue one is doing in the shop. Useless now, both of them – and yet she can’t let hers go.
And his death brought about another change, one that nobody knows about. Daphne assumes she still hangs around with Ciara and the others after school; they think she goes straight home. They’re all wrong.
A couple of weeks after he died, still broken in bits with loneliness and hungering for what she’d lost, Una hunted down the shop keys. She went through the house one day when Daphne was still at work and eventually found them pushed to the back of the wardrobe in what had been his and Daphne’s bedroom. She had copies made and replaced the originals exactly where she’d found them.
She lets herself in the back way every day after school, keeping an eye out in case Sean from next door is around. She turns off the alarm and makes her way to the little room at the rear of the shop where she does her homework. It’s always cold: she leaves her jacket on.
As she works she pretends Dad is there on the other side of the door, selling bicycles and helmets and pumps and puncture-repair kits like he always did. She tells herself he’ll appear in a minute to tell her it’s closing time. He’ll lock up and they’ll cycle home together, maybe stopping first for a quick chat with Sean, who would always stand at his door when he had no customers.
It sort of works. She fools herself for a while, as she bends over her books in the silent room. It’s the only small comfort she can find, the only way to feel close to him again. Of course it stops the minute she packs up her things and walks out into the shop and finds it dark and empty, and without him.
She hates the way it is now: a layer of thick dust settled over everything, over the counter top he kept so shiny, over the rows of new bicycles, over the silent cash register. Cobwebs dangling from shelves, spiders spinning their houses uninterrupted. The place permanently gloomy because of the shutters she can’t open.
Horrible to have it like that, like something out of Dickens, like a place where creepy Miss Havisham might sit in her falling-apart wedding dress, or Scrooge might crouch to eat his gruel. Horrible that Daphne and Mo don’t seem to care about it any more – it feels like they don’t care about him.
On the other hand, she can’t bear the thought of it being sold, of strangers coming in and changing it all. It would be like wiping the last of him out, scrubbing him away like chalk from a blackboard.
She reaches the street where the shop is located and turns down the lane that leads around to the back. Outside the shop’s rear entrance she lifts the red brick where she stashes the keys. She opens the door and presses the familiar code on the alarm box inside to silence its beeping. She stands in the dusty gloom for a few seconds, sniffing the oily, metallic smell she knows so well. She puts out a hand and finds his ancient blue bike, leaning against the wall where he’d left it a year ago. She runs her fingers along the bar where she’d sat so often as a child, before she was old enough to have her own bike.
No time to hang around today: she drops her rucksack on the floor, sets the alarm again and leaves, replacing the keys under their brick before scurrying back down the lane to the street, keeping her hood up, her face averted from the butcher’s shop as she crosses to the other side.
The scent, so rich and gorgeous you can almost taste it, stops her for a few seconds on the threshold. She breathes it in, fills her lungs with it. Must be wonderful to work here, to be surrounded by that scent all day – although you might get so used to it you wouldn’t notice it after a while.
‘Can I help you?’ a woman behind the counter calls, and Una lets the door swing closed behind her as she steps forward.
The woman is overweight with a round, pretty face. Her peach blouse is tied with a bow at the throat. Her wedding ring, embedded deep in the flesh of her finger, looks like it will never again come off.
‘That looks sore,’ she says, nodding in the direction of Una’s chin, which is still smarting.
‘It’s fine,’ Una tells her. ‘I just bumped it – it looks worse than it is.’ She wonders what it looks like. ‘I want to buy some roses,’ she goes on. ‘Yellow, if you have them.’ He liked yellow roses.
‘I certainly have.’ The saleswoman indicates a bucket of opening blooms in a glorious shade of bright lemon. ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’
‘How many can I get for a tenner?’ Una asks.
The woman smiles. ‘Let’s call it ten,’ she says, and wraps them in pale green tissue paper. ‘Whoever they’re for will love them.’
‘They’re for my dad,’ Una tells her.
‘Ah – isn’t that nice? Fathers don’t often get flowers. He’ll be delighted with them, I’m sure. Would you like a card?’
‘No, thank you.’ Far too sad, writing him a message he’ll never read. She considers revealing the flowers’ true purpose, but decides against it: talking about death makes people awkward, and saying the words out loud might just bring on her own tears again.
She pays and leaves the shop, the bouquet cradled against her chest. In the doorway she takes out her phone and checks her email: no message. The cold is sharp, she’s glad the cemetery isn’t f
ar. She dips her head into the roses, but to her disappointment they smell of nothing.
Ten minutes later she walks through the iron gates. The place is quiet, just a few people standing in front of headstones, a few more strolling along the paths. She makes her way to Mum and Dad’s grave, reads the words she knows by heart.
She comes here once a month, drawn by a yearning for what they had, the three of them – although after more than ten years her memories of Mum are all but gone. Not her face – she has photos to make sure she never forgets that. It’s more her voice and her smell, it’s her gestures and habits, and the way she moved.
It’s like Mum stood up one day and walked away from them, and all Una could do was watch her getting smaller and smaller, until she became little more than an infinitesimal speck, then nothing at all. Now she’s just a smiling half-stranger in a photo album.
But Dad is still so real to her. She can still hear his voice, she can recall the feel of his arms around her, the reassuring warm, buttery smell of him. My beautiful girl, he’d say, holding her tight.
Except that she wasn’t his girl, not really. He’d claimed her when he married Mum, he’d treated her like his own, but she never really belonged to him, even if she felt like she did. Even if she wished every night that she did, like she used to when she was younger. Screwing up her eyes tight in bed, whispering the words to whoever or whatever might be listening. Stupid wish, as if she could turn the clock back and change everything. As if anyone could do that.
She crouches and lays the yellow flowers in front of the headstone. She stands silently in the cold, hands shoved deep into her pockets, and talks to him in her head.
She tells him everything.
It’s gone half ten, later than she’d planned, by the time she turns up the alley that leads to the rear of the terrace of narrow little houses, blowing on her hands to warm them and thinking of Mo in the charity shop just across the way. If she only knew.
She sees Kevin’s blue car parked by the wooden gate, white ribbons already in place. As she approaches the gate, a volley of enthusiastic barks erupts from the tiny yard. She reaches over to slide back the bolt, and submits herself to the usual welcome as soon as she steps inside.
Two Fridays in April Page 16
