Francis was annoyed at himself and swept them into the bin with a snort of irritation as if to erase all evidence of his mistake. I saw Raymond’s face fall. It wasn’t the burning he minded, I think, so much as the discourteous disposal.
‘I’ll make you some more and send them back with your mother,’ I told him, and he stared back at me with his oddly lucid, grey-green eyes.
‘I made those ones myself,’ he said, with the air of someone quietly stating an obvious fact.
When Eve was taking him home later, holding his hand, I saw something like a broken stick of charcoal hanging loosely from his side trouser pocket as he ambled out the door. He had fished one of the blackened bodies out of the bin.
There were times when I thought there wasn’t much point to the life I had. I sat up in my room and looked at the squares of grey city sky through the dilapidated window frame. I missed Phyllis, for all her ways. I missed Titch and his mother. I missed my father most of all, and I thought sometimes that, now he was dead, there was no one in the world who my own death would really matter to, beyond casually saying, ‘Oh isn’t it terrible what’s happened to poor Jacky,’ no one who might lie awake night after night and ache for how big the darkness was without me.
That’s how we measure out our own reality, through the pain that the absence of us will cause in others. That’s what roots us and gives us substance. Without it we’re just ghosts passing through a series of doors, river water running into the ocean and leaving no trace.
When she wasn’t at the restaurant for a couple of days, I even found myself missing Eve. It felt good to miss someone I could see again.
16
It was getting colder. The leaves had rusted and fallen from the trees, leaving them spiky and shivering in the breeze. The days were shorter, guillotined by early darkness. I went up to Oxford Street and bought myself a heavy coat made from dark, thick tweed: it weighed me down and lent me substance against the wind. But London was choking me: the clotting of people, the taste of fuel in the air, the relentless voice in the Tube station that never tired of telling me, day after day, to Mind the Gap and Let the Passengers off the Train First.
Eve and I were friendlier now. We would sometimes share a cigarette out at the back of the restaurant, leaning against the wall beside the bins. I told her all about the Whartons, and she told me about Raymond, and her mother who drove her mad.
The mum had developed a habit of calling round, she said, and then passing the evening cosily lamenting the state of affairs that had left Eve working as a waitress with a six-year-old child to keep and no man to support her. Each time, the lamentation would take a fresh shape around familiar themes, a never-ending work of embroidery on life’s misfortunes. Sometimes she would reproach herself for not forcing Eve to study hard enough at school. Or she would shift the blame over to Eve, for being – as she put it – ‘too easily distracted’. Often she would rail against the duplicitous character of Eve’s former boyfriend, who left Eve a year after Raymond was born and got on a plane to Canada (never to be heard of again) but inevitably this well-worn path carried her straight back to poor, gullible Eve, and her now legendary inability to ‘find a decent man’. Eve wasn’t even looking, so far as I could make out, although I was looking at her all the time.
‘Your father liked a drink, and God knows he was no angel,’ the mother would say. ‘But he would never have gone off and left his wife and child to fend for themselves.’ Her outrage on Eve’s behalf, enlarged by five years of repetition, had become a sort of quilt to be clutched around her at every opportunity. The trouble was, it was no comfort to Eve. Every time her mother walked in the door, she came hand in hand with the unwelcome spectre of Eve’s feckless boyfriend.
When the mother at last cheerily waved goodbye, her conscience satisfied after an evening spent helping out her unfortunate daughter, Eve would creep into bed, defeated, and pull the covers over her head. It would take a couple of days back in the restaurant before her spirits recovered.
One day, Eve was quieter than usual. She didn’t sing when she pinned up the orders, or tease me about being slow with the drinks. I asked her what was the matter, and she hesitated for a moment before telling me.
‘My mum came round last night,’ she said, ‘and it started off all right. We were watching a film on TV, and Raymond was on the floor, trying to make a mobile, shaped like a football, to hang in his room. For once it seemed as if everybody was happy.
‘Ray was making a bit of a mess with the football, and I was telling him to be careful about where he put the glue and only to use a little bit. That was what started her off: she couldn’t bloody resist it.
‘“It’s a pity Ray doesn’t have a dad to help him out with that. Women can’t really get to grips with footballs,” Mum said, with that wistful, grieving look she gets on her face every time she talks about my home life. She doesn’t normally say that sort of thing in front of Ray, but for some reason it just popped out last night. It didn’t even make sense.
‘Anyway, that did it. Something snapped in me: I’ve had years of her going on and on like a stuck record, using the old more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger-Chinese-water-torture voice, about what a failure I’ve been. So I told her: “I’ve had enough of this crap, Mum. The truth of it is I’d be pretty happy if I didn’t have to listen, twice a week, to you telling me how bloody sad I am.”
‘Then I went and got the notebook that sits beside the phone, and threw it so it just missed her head. I said, “Next time you feel an observation coming on about how it’s a desperate pity that Ray doesn’t have a dad, or that I didn’t work hard enough at school, or that I have a job carrying plates of food over to City bankers, don’t tell it to me straight away. Just write it down in there. Then I can have the joy of reading all your criticisms at once, perhaps on Christmas Day, as I carve the turkey that the strong-jawed, smiling man should really be carving in the family that I have failed to deliver. It can be my Christmas present from the Misery Club.”’
Eve’s face had taken on an expression of remembered anger and exhilaration. ‘What did your mother say then?’ I asked, awed by this sudden surge of eloquence. It was another thing I liked about Eve: the way that, once she was pushed to her limit, she would actually say the sort of things to her family that I would only dare to think.
‘She didn’t say anything. Her jaw dropped, and she looked shocked. But then I looked over at Ray. He was standing up, still holding that gluey football, with a wounded look on his face. “I do have a dad,” he said, “Everybody has a dad. But mine has gone away for a while.” Then he set down the football, and went out of the room. After that he wouldn’t talk to either of us.’
The exhilaration had gone: she was upset now at remembering Raymond. I wanted to put my arms round her, and stroke her fallen face, but I thought maybe she wouldn’t like it. I put my hand on her shoulder.
‘He’ll come round. His feelings were hurt,’ I said.
She let my hand rest there for a moment, saying nothing. Then she went to take the order from the couple on table twelve.
I had been out with girls before, of course, in Belfast. I liked them well enough, but I was never very sorry to see them go. In fact, by the time they did go, it was a relief. I could sense that there was a whole range of emotions they wanted and expected me to feel: passion, jealousy, acute distress if they weren’t available that evening and a keen excitement if they were. I tried to feel this way, if only to make them happy, but I didn’t. The more I didn’t feel that way about them, the more they felt that way about me.
They exhausted me, with their storm of inexplicable feelings. I could see them, like mime artists watched through a thick pane of glass, gesturing furiously, weeping with frustration because I had forgotten to phone them when I said I would, or tearful with joy if I had forced myself to make a special effort and bought them a bunch of flowers. It was a fake, though. I realised that they were happy with the flowers because they thought the flowers said
‘I love you.’ But I didn’t love them, I only quite liked them, and so gradually I stopped buying the flowers because I knew that the flowers were telling lies. Then, after a while, my heart would slowly sink when the phone rang, with its irritable summoning. Brrrrrrring. I had briefly enjoyed sleeping with them and maybe kidded myself it could go further, but the weight of their disappointed expectations became a burden to me. I would catch myself guiltily yearning for long rows of evenings spent on my own, or just watching television with Big Jacky.
I had the hazy feeling that perhaps I was the kind of man who was discussed in detail in those articles in women’s magazines with headings like ‘What to do when he seems distant’ or ‘When he won’t commit’. All that endless talk. I always felt a bit sorry for the men in those articles, the anonymous villains of complaining anecdotes. If you ever got to hear their side of things, perhaps they wouldn’t have seemed so bad after all.
If a woman has a pretty face and a laugh just a wee bit like the buzz of an electric carving knife, for example, what should a man do? Should he be frank and say: ‘I have slowly come to realise that if we were to spend thirty years together, the cumulative effects of your distinctive laugh – in spite of all your other virtues – might one day make me dream of going after you with an actual carving knife. It is surely better for us to stop seeing each other now before things get that serious’? Or should he just let longer and longer intervals lapse between his phone calls, until – wreathed in mystery and irritation – he finally disappears from view, a misty folk-memory of masculine disappointment?
Except that often he doesn’t just fade away into nothing, as he might have hoped. The worst parts of him are kept hideously alive, simplified and distilled in a thousand feminine retellings, until at last he emerges as a creature of malevolent energy or pitiable confusion: the bastard or the useless man who just can’t get himself together. Although they were really the same person, I always preferred to inhabit the latter character.
For a long time, I never thought that much about the girls I had been out with. But after I fell for Eve, I felt sorry for all the unhappiness I had caused them. I hadn’t really understood it before, but I did now. If she wasn’t at work, for some unexpected reason, my day clouded over. If I saw her laughing too long with a flirtatious customer, I was seized with pain. Was this what they had been feeling about me, as I lay listening to the phone ringing and deliberating over whether to bother picking it up or not? Was this love, then, this busy, hungry rat let loose in my chest? If so, it was unbearable. Suddenly, I was on the other side of the thick pane of glass, watching her working and talking, and wondering if she had ever really noticed me.
If I woke up early, I took advantage of the extra time to do nothing but lie in bed and think about her. I thought about the obvious, of course, but that wasn’t all. I wanted to run the flat of my hands all over her and feel exactly how she fitted together, to trace the line of her vertebrae with my finger and take account of each small bump. I wanted to cook her dinner and for her to fall asleep later on the sofa in the crook of my arm. When I caught myself yearning for things like that, I knew I was in trouble, because if nothing happened between us now after all, I might be hounded for ever by a sense of loss.
One day, I asked her if she wanted to come and see a film. I tried to make it sound casual, as if I could have easily asked anyone at Delauncey’s, but she just happened to be standing there when the thought occurred. She looked surprised: what sort of film? An arthouse French film, I said, about a man who dreams of becoming a famous architect but who is locked up in an asylum by his scheming relatives, where he builds scale models of the world’s most famous buildings from empty medicine bottles and packets of drugs. It sounded pretty dreadful, she said. I thought it did too, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘There’s probably a bit more to it than that,’ I said. ‘Come on and see it, it’s got great reviews.’
There was a silence while I stared uselessly at my futile shoes, with their veneer of city dirt. Then she thought for a while. She would come and see it anyway, she said: she would telephone her mother and ask her to look after Raymond for the evening.
Our shifts ended at six. It was a dry night, but crisply cold, and we were both wearing our winter coats. Her thin shoulders sloped under the heavy cloth, and an arc of her pale neck was exposed where the wind lifted up her dark hair. When we were walking down the street, navigating the crowds, I took her arm in mine. She turned towards me for a moment, with a question in her brown eyes. I looked back at her. Then she turned forward again and we carried on walking down the street, arm in arm.
In the cinema I reached for her hand, as we sat in the darkness and watched the thwarted architect build a teetering scale model of Notre-Dame cathedral out of empty packets of antidepressants. After he fixed on its clumsy spire, he raised his fists and pounded them in frustration against the asylum walls. It was a strange and slow-moving film, but nothing about that evening was boring to me. Her hand lay still and cool in my hand, like a sleeping bird.
Life had battered Eve a little bit already. Well, that was all right; life had battered me. I liked that about her. She had learned that happiness wasn’t a right, you had to try and make some of it yourself. She didn’t expect me to sweep her up on a white charger and carry her off to a big house with hot and cold running money flowing from gold taps, its rooms swarming with laughing, photogenic children. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have. She just wanted me to love her, but she was suspicious of love, and therefore of me: she came towards me jumpily, like an animal that was once pelted with grit and hasn’t forgotten the sting. Sometimes when she forgot to be suspicious and I forgot to be secretive, I was happier with her than I had ever been before in my life.
She wouldn’t let me stay with her when Raymond was in her place, a square two-bedroom council flat in a block in King’s Cross. It would confuse him, she said, and he had had enough of that already. But on the nights when he went to her mother’s we would lie folded together in the dark, whispering to each other and doing other things too without my old urge to escape afterwards, but only to stay there always.
You could hear the wind and the traffic outside, and I loved her the most then. I can’t remember all the things I told her: silly stuff to soothe her, about Big Jacky and the aunts in Carrickfergus and the way the starlings swooped and shifted like thick black smoke above the Lagan river at dusk. When she finally mumbled words to say goodnight, and her breathing grew deep and regular, I would wrap myself tight around her sleeping back, her breasts like heavy silk beneath the weight of my arm.
With her there beside me, I found that I could remember things without so much pain. I never told her the truth, though, about how I got the scars.
‘How did you get those?’ she would ask sometimes, tracing the marks on my legs and face with the tip of her finger. ‘What happened to you, Jacky?’ she would say lazily. She liked the defective tracks left on me, the way a child is pleased by a patterned stone it picks up on the beach. Each time she asked, I gave her a different explanation: sometimes a car crash, sometimes a motorcycle accident, sometimes a love affair with a woman who had hands made out of can openers. The explanations were different on purpose, to let her know that I was lying, because I didn’t like the idea of her being fooled. But I didn’t want to talk about what had really happened. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me, or to see me the way I saw myself, lying on a patch of waste ground crying in a pool of blood and piss.
Every so often, though, the dream returned: the hooded figure advancing towards me as I filled with fear. Eve would tell me in the morning that I muttered and shifted in my sleep but she couldn’t make out what I was saying. I was grateful for that much, at least. I said I had always had bad dreams, even from a child.
17
‘You’re a weirdo,’ Raymond told me one day, as we sat on a wooden bench waiting for Eve to pick up some things from her mother’s house. We were both f
reezing cold and his voice rang out in the icy air like a clear bell. He didn’t say it in a show-offy way, the way children do when they playfully rehearse a whole singing string of insults in front of some frowning adult: ‘You’re a nerd, you’re a prat, you’re a big cowpat, you’re a weirdo, you’re a freak, you’re a geek.’
No, he said it calmly, as though the thought had first occurred to him some time ago and he had pondered it carefully since, turning it over in his mind, and had finally assured himself of its truth.
I felt disappointed. I suppose we always hope that children will give us back the best sense of ourselves, the sense that the world has slowly rotted; that they will see us as capable people who can handle things more confidently than they can. Instead, just this flat assertion: ‘You’re a weirdo.’
I checked that no thick werewolf-hair had sprouted from the back of my hands; that I had not absent-mindedly donned eyeglasses with milk-bottle lenses or a mustard-coloured shirt with a hilariously large collar.
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked him.
He pondered a while longer. I stamped my feet to keep them warm and blew on my hands.
‘You say your words in a funny way. And you’ve got some funny lines on your face,’ he pronounced in his little London voice.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes.’ He stamped his feet to keep them warm too. I felt a stab of affection as I looked at his ridiculously small feet, encased in scuffed brown lace-up shoes. One of the laces had unravelled. I bent down and retied it for him, then stood up again.
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