Eager to Please

by Julie Parsons

  She looked at Daniel. He was very pale and very still.

  ‘And you took it all, didn’t you? Took it and threw it back in their faces. Always trouble. Never did what you were told. Nearly broke my mother’s heart with the way you behaved.’

  ‘Stop it, Martin. Stop it.’ She had found her voice at last.

  ‘Stop it? I haven’t even started.’ He turned towards her and moved closer. ‘Never at home. Couldn’t mix with decent people. Found your own kind. That gang of joyriders you hung out with, who drove into that woman and child, out for a walk on a fine summer’s evening, left them for dead, wasn’t that what you did?’

  ‘No, Martin, stop, please stop!’ she screamed at him.

  ‘Why should I? You didn’t stop, did you? You unbelievable, disgusting little bitch. How could you sleep with him, when you know the way I feel about him? And then passing that kid off on me. I should have realized she wasn’t mine. She’s the image of him, isn’t she?’

  ‘Don’t.’ Daniel had moved too. Moved closer. ‘Just don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what, Danny boy? Don’t you tell me what to do. I’ll do the telling now, and in the future. Because do you know what, Danny boy? I’ve just made a decision, a very important decision. I’m going to take my father up on his offer. I’m going to pack in the guards and take over the business. And do you know what that means? That means that you will have a new boss, a new man in the back of the Merc. A new man to take to the golfing dinners, to the girls in the massage parlours. A new man to live out your life for, waiting on his every whim and every move for as long as you can stomach it. But somehow, Danny boy, I don’t think it will be for very long, because, somehow, I think you’re suddenly going to be made redundant.’

  He turned towards Rachel again. He lifted the bottle of whiskey from the table and took a mouthful.

  ‘And as for you, you bitch, you’re redundant from right now. So why don’t you put that gun down and piss off out of here, and make sure that you and that brat of yours never come back?’ He made as if to walk past her. She tried to block his way.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I love you, Martin. It was nothing between Dan and me, it was just something that happened. It didn’t mean anything. Please, you’ve got to believe me. Please, Dan. Please, you tell him.’

  And suddenly Martin had turned on Dan, was reaching for his throat, and there was something in his hand, a knife, a kitchen knife. And she screamed out loud, shouted out to warn him, and then there was a noise so loud that her ears rang with pain. And a smell, the smell of a shotgun fired at close range. And Martin was on the floor. He was shocked, he was bleeding, his thigh was ripped open but he was still alive. He called out, ‘Help me, Rachel. Help me.’ And then there was a second shot, point blank, up close. And this time he was silent, not a sound from his open mouth. His eyes closed, then he whimpered once. And then there was silence, just for a moment, and then she heard her own voice screaming out, ‘What did you do that for, why did you that, what have you done?’

  And Daniel looked at her, and looked down at the gun in his hand and said nothing.

  And she noticed her nightdress, that it was covered in small drops of blood, and she said, ‘What are we going to do? We’ll have to call the police. We’ll have to tell someone. How will we explain to everyone about how it happened? What will everyone think? Dan, what will we do?’

  And he explained to her, slowly, calmly. He would fix it all. He pulled her nightdress over her head. He got her a change of clothes from the bedroom. He dressed her. Then he got Martin’s handcuffs from his car, and he tied her to the radiator. He said he would take her car and he would dump it. He would dump the gun and everything else somewhere they wouldn’t be found. He would do it all. She wasn’t to worry. She was to trust him. Sooner or later someone would come for her. And then she was to tell them the story. She was to tell them what he had said. And it would be all right. They would believe her.

  But they didn’t. She had trusted him and she had paid for it all. Become an old woman, with a shrivelled body and a dead heart. No one to love her. No one for her to love.

  Not even the girl who walked with her friends from the bus stop at the corner of Stephen’s Green. Black hair cut close to her head, dark eyebrows that outlined the curve of her eye socket, sallow skin with a faint flush of pink on her cheekbones. Laughing and joking, breaking into song. Until she saw Rachel waiting for her and then her expression changed. She walked more quickly, leaving the others behind, brushed past Rachel, ignoring her outstretched hand. Walked up the steps to the school door. Paused. Looked at her. Said just loud enough for only Rachel to hear. ‘I told you before. I don’t want to see you. Go away and leave me alone. I mean it. I really mean it.’

  And then she was gone. The other girls passed by. One of them pulled a fifty-pence piece from her pocket. She pressed it into Rachel’s palm, then turned to her friends and sniggered. ‘Good deed for the day, isn’t that it?’

  It was such a cold day, that day in March when Martin died. She sometimes felt that she had never warmed up again. She turned away and walked towards the canal. She opened her fingers and let the coin drop to the footpath. It spun on the stone by her foot and tumbled into the gutter. Like me, she thought. That’s where I belong. And the sun disappeared behind a cloud, and the day went dark.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BLUE AS FAR as the eye could see. Pale blue of sky meeting the darker blue line of the water, twelve miles out on the edge of the horizon. And below him the dense dark green of the pine trees on the clifftop, the bright gold of the gorse in flower, and between them and below them the bronze and brown of the bracken.

  Daniel Beckett leaned over the parapet and looked down. Children’s toys were scattered across the smooth front lawn. A bicycle dropped on its side, wheels still spinning. A pram parked neatly, the large pink and white doll propped carefully up against the lace-edged pillows. A long rope with a wooden seat slotted into it swung gently from the lower branch of a huge macrocarpa tree. Backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards as if animated by a giant unseen hand. And from somewhere in the distance he heard the sound of his son and daughter – playing, shouting, laughing, crying out – and the voice of his wife, calling to them, telling them it was time for bed, time to come in, time to say goodnight.

  He leaned further over, pushing his body across the stone ledge, craning his neck to see where she might be. But she was out of sight. In the vegetable garden, he thought. And he imagined the way she would look, her long fair hair pulled into a plait, her shirt tucked into the waistband of her jeans, the bones of her spinal column showing clearly through the tight material as she bent and stood – digging, pulling, cutting, coaxing and nourishing, creating order where once had been chaos.

  And he thought of the way his life had been. Before he met her. And felt again that familiar sense of panic and dread as he straightened up and moved away from the ledge, back towards the room in the bell tower, high above the garden. His special room. He put out his hand to open the French windows and saw himself reflected in the glass pane. A shadowy figure. Dark hair that fell back from his broad forehead to his shoulders. A dark beard, now with just a few streaks of grey, like the colour of his eyes, pale in contrast to his sallow skin. He stood and looked at himself. He noticed the bulk of his body, spread and softened by years of comfort and ease. Happiness, he supposed he could call it, now that he was in control of the company that his father had started, that he had wanted once to hand over to his younger son. But then after that son had died he had turned back to Daniel, the oldest, for help and succour.

  Daniel moved towards the filing cabinet in the corner. He took out his bunch of keys and unlocked it. He pulled out a large box file. He placed it on the desk and opened it. He flicked through the collection of newspaper cuttings and saw for the first time in years the face of the woman he had thought to put behind him, safely locked away, out of sight and out of mind, until today.

  ‘You’ll remember
her, won’t you, Dan?’ It was one of the guys who did some part-time work for him who said it. He was a guard in the local station, getting married next year, looking to earn the deposit on a new house. ‘I’d say you’d remember her. Seems like a lot of people do.’

  He remembered her all right, remembered everything about her. The colour of her hair and eyes. The feeling of her hand in his hand. The sound of her voice as she called out to him. How much he had wanted her. How he had snatched her from under Martin’s nose. Got such pleasure from her and the thought of how his brother would suffer if he knew. And he had waited until that night, when she had rung him and asked him for help. And he had given it to her. He had helped her all right. Taken the gun when she had handed it to him. But she had not been grateful and she had suffered for her ingratitude.

  And now she was back. He looked up from the pile of cuttings, out again towards the sea. He moved to the open door and heard his wife calling out. Calling his name.

  ‘Daniel,’ she was shouting. He listened to her voice with its American slur and drawl. ‘Daniel, where are you? Come outside. It’s lovely out here. Daniel. Daniel.’ A sudden wind spiralled up the cliff face, snatching the words from her mouth and flinging them away as the door to the balcony banged shut. And all now was silence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘SO, TELL ME, why did you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  Andrew Bowen sighed and swung back in his chair. He took off his glasses and placed them on the desk in front of him. He gently rubbed the bones beneath his eyebrows, then picked up his glasses again and swung them from side to side.

  ‘Rachel,’ he said slowly, ‘don’t play silly buggers with me.’

  The complaint had come through yesterday afternoon, just as he was about to leave the office. It was from Amy Beckett’s social worker. It seemed that Amy had arrived home at lunchtime, distraught. Her mother had turned up outside her school that morning, harassing her, embarrassing her in front of her friends, so she said. Her social worker wasn’t having it.

  ‘She’s always been absolutely clear about it, completely upfront. Told us all, including her mother, as soon as it looked as if the woman was coming out on temporary release. There was no way she wanted to have any contact with her.’

  Andrew had listened, made notes. He knew the social worker well. Her name was Alison White. They’d done their training together in Trinity College years ago.

  ‘I’ll grant you, it’s not what we would have wanted, you know that, Andrew. We’ve always tried to encourage the relationship between the two of them, difficult and all as it was. Amy’s a very bright girl, knows her own mind. She doesn’t want her mother around. And at her age, about to do the Leaving Cert., she’s old enough to make her own decisions. Anyway, Andrew, you know how the system works. If Rachel Beckett was that keen on seeing her daughter she knows what to do. She should have asked you to arrange it or contacted me. Not just turned up on the bloody doorstep like that. It’s just not on. Am I making myself plain?’

  She was. But then she had always been like that. Blunt to the point of rudeness. A lot of people didn’t like Alison White. She didn’t care. She used to laugh about it, say it was because she was a Northern Protestant. Andrew remembered getting drunk with her and the others from their class. Well, they were all getting drunk. Alison never did. And there was always a point when Alison would say loudly, ‘God, you Catholics are a hoot. Mad keen to have a united Ireland but have you ever thought what it would be like filled with a million stroppy Prods like me, making your lives a misery? Wanting to change everything? Getting rid of your bloody Angelus bell on the radio, for a start? Introducing a bit of plain-speaking into your devious Jesuitical little world.’

  There would be silence for a moment, then, before the backlash, Andrew would order the last round and start making tracks for home. Before Alison said too much, burned too many bridges.

  ‘So you’ll have to do something about it, Andrew. Make sure it doesn’t happen again, because if it does I’ll have to do something about it, and Rachel might not like that. OK?’

  It was quiet in Andrew’s first-floor office. The computer on the desk hummed softly, and from outside came the sound of voices, loud for a few moments as a door opened, then gone again. He looked across the desk at Rachel. A couple of weeks ago he wouldn’t have recognized her if he had passed her casually in the street. But now, watching her, he could see that the changes in her were only on the surface. In the colour of her hair and the pallor of her face. When she looked straight at him, managed to maintain eye contact for a few moments, she was the same woman he remembered from all those years ago. Now she was looking down at her hands. They moved constantly, her long thin fingers smoothing out the wrinkles in her skin, sliding up and over the bones in her wrists, clasping and reclasping her forearms, then slipping back down again. She fiddled with the narrow gold ring on the third finger of her left hand, twisting it round and round, then sliding it up and over her knuckle, almost to the tip of her finger, then pushing it back again to safety. As he watched her she shifted on the hard wooden chair and he noticed the way her breasts moved beneath her white shirt. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, twisting one calf around the other, and he saw that her hips bones protruded through the denim of her cheap faded jeans. Then she lifted her head and looked at him.

  ‘I went to see my daughter, because that is what she is. My daughter. Nothing can change that, nothing can make that anything other than it is.’

  ‘But she doesn’t want to see you, Rachel. She has told you. And you have agreed. It is, unless I am mistaken, one of the conditions of your temporary release. And you must abide by them. Otherwise this could turn into a hell of a messy situation. Do you understand?’

  She stared down at her hands again. He watched the way she touched herself. Gestures of comfort, he thought. And he thought of the nights that he lay alone, his hands between his thighs, drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the sound of Clare, crying out in fear or pain, asking for help and succour. Once they had slept together, their bodies curled fern-like, one around the other. But long before she had become ill he had moved out and into a room of his own. He had made all kinds of excuses. But how could he explain that he had woken up one morning and realized that he no longer loved her? That he had made a mistake? That she wasn’t the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life? And then as he drifted in the free fall of indifference he met someone else, someone who was brave and beautiful, who challenged him, made him think, opened up new worlds, new possibilities. But Andrew was, as always, indecisive. Frightened of making the move, of committing himself again. And just as he was poised to go Clare told him that she was ill, that she would soon be helpless and dependent, that she could not live without him. And that was that. On reflection, he now realized that he had been relieved. He could take the coward’s way out. Now he was Andrew the good, Andrew the saintly, Andrew whose opinions could never be challenged. Perhaps, if he had left Clare when her illness was barely perceptible, she might have found someone else, someone who would really love her and want her, not just someone like him who went through the motions.

  Rachel raised her head and looked at him again for a moment, before dropping her eyes to her hands.

  ‘Tell me, Rachel, why did you want to come and live here? Surely this place, this area must have so many memories for you? Surely it must make it all much more difficult?’

  She stared at him, a look of puzzlement on her face. Then she spoke. ‘Where else would I go? This is my home as much as anywhere, outside the prison, that is. And I have spent the last twelve years dreaming about the sea. I had to be by it again. You’ve no idea how wonderful it is to see it every day from my window, to walk beside it, to smell it, to feel saltwater on my skin again. You’ve no idea.’

  He nodded. ‘Fine. That’s what you say. But I’m warning you. Any more messing around and you’ll be back inside. It’s extremely important, particularly for your fir
st six months or so, that your behaviour is impeccable. Temporary release is just that, Rachel. There is nothing fixed and immutable about it. You are still serving out, you must remember, a life sentence. We cannot afford for there to be any trouble or scandal associated with you. We’ve been lucky that the media haven’t found out that you’re not still in prison. But it’s probably just a matter of time. Your case was such a huge story, there’s bound to be some snotty-nosed journalist poking around where they’re not wanted. And if there were to be any bad publicity we’d have no choice but to reconsider your position. And tell me,’ his fingers drummed on her file on the desk, ‘how would it feel to go back inside now?’

  She stared at him again, and this time her eyes did not drop. Her cheeks reddened, then the blood drained away from them and she was white again. She stood up.

  He watched her on the video monitor as she closed the street door behind her. She paused, hesitated, then turned towards the camera. She straightened her shoulders and smiled right up at him. Even the distortion of the wide-angle lens could not hide the transformation in her face. For an instant she was beautiful again. But then, as quickly as it had come, the smile faded and in its place was an expression of defeat and resignation. He watched her until she had gone beyond the camera’s narrow range. He had wanted to ask her how she felt about her husband now. How she felt about his death. He wondered how she had grieved for him. He wanted to understand how grief and guilt would combine. He wanted to know what she had thought about all through those years. When she lay in her cell in the dark, what pictures of her husband did she see? And what lies did she have to tell herself in order to stay in control? He wanted to know because he wanted to know how he was going to feel. Afterwards. After he had taken the decision and acted upon it.