Grace After Henry

by Eithne Shortall

  He did that thing Henry used to do when he was hurt, where he’d inhale quickly but you’d never hear him exhale, and I felt bad because I didn’t want to wound him. But it was true. Henry had never wished for a sibling. He never missed having one.

  Something else hit me then: another, third version of Henry.

  ‘Henry is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery,’ I said. ‘Were you there? I thought I saw . . .’ You, him, a ghost. I didn’t finish that sentence. ‘Were you there?’

  ‘I’ve been a couple of times to visit Frances’s grave. South side of the cemetery.’

  ‘About two weeks ago? A Saturday?’

  ‘Yeah . . . I think so.’

  ‘Was there a group of—’

  ‘Tourists?’ he offered.

  I felt my head nod. But it was a big cemetery, even the south wing; he could easily have been there on a day I was not.

  ‘Yeah,’ he continued. ‘And some old man telling them where to go and what year some political guy was buried and what the waiting list for the place was like. Do you remember me? I wasn’t visiting Henry,’ he added. ‘I went to see our mother. I didn’t know he was buried there. Weird, ay?’

  But all I could hear was Henry’s voice, reverberating in my head: There’s no such thing as coincidence. Everything happens for a reason.

  In the fog that fell between Henry’s death and burial, I remembered a conversation with his parents. I’d assumed he would be buried in Mount Jerome, where both sets of grandparents were, but Isabel and Conor were adamant it would be Glasnevin and I thought that was strange because they lived on the other side of the city, but I had dropped the thought somewhere in the hazy grief.

  ‘Were you in the supermarket near here a few weeks ago?’

  He shook Henry’s head. ‘This is my first time in this part of the city.’

  ‘You sure? What about the Phoenix Park?’ My heart was beating faster and suddenly I was hurrying to keep up with it. ‘Were you cycling there? Or, or, the restaurant! Yes! Portobello Kitchen, three weeks ago?’

  ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘No you were, you were. Think! On Camden Street. You got a . . . a raspberry brownie!’

  ‘Well, that definitely wasn’t me. I don’t eat sweet things.’

  But of course it wasn’t him, that man was German. Tina had said. And the man in Tesco, I had seen his face. Why did I only remember the bits where I was convinced of the lie, and not the bit where I saw the truth? But the cemetery. It had been him I saw in the cemetery. It had been him and I’d lost him. Henry, that was the only thought making its way through my brain. Just Henry.

  ‘I’ve never properly looked like anyone before.’ He was pawing the cracked photo frame again, tracing the outline of Henry just as I did. ‘My cousins have hair like mine, but this . . .’

  My ears were ringing and I tried to remember anything from school biology. If there were billions of people in the world, surely some of them had to end up looking similar, very similar, even if they were not related. Because how many variations could there really be on western, Caucasian males? I thought of Tom Hardy and that other actor who looks so similar, and of that other guy, Nick Nolte, who I always thought was in Point Break but that’s not him at all, that’s another guy who looks just like him.

  But logic was irrelevant because here was a man with a pretty good imitation of Henry’s face sitting in front of me at the shitty, temporary table that should have been our shitty, temporary table.

  ‘Do you want to answer that?’

  I heard it then, the ringing in my head was actually in my handbag. I got up and emptied the bag onto the newly constructed couch now propped up by a copy of an unauthorised Davina McCall biography that Dad had gotten me for Christmas. Four missed calls. All from Dermot. Shit! The restaurant. It was almost three o’clock. Simon had to collect his kids.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said, stuffing everything back into my bag, and when I turned back I got a fright because for a second I forgot. I had never fainted, but twice in the one afternoon that had almost changed.

  Andy stood from the table like it was any other day and any other table. I had loved that face for so long, but he’d never clapped eyes on me before this afternoon. ‘So I’ll come back tomorrow?’ he said.

  The urge to throw myself at him, to push my torso against his until he wrapped his arms around me, but he picked up this strange tin box I had never seen before and I remembered. Not Henry. I gathered my own handbag and plastic bag of fresh whites and followed him to the door.

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘To fix the boiler.’

  ‘The boiler.’ I nodded, because there was a boiler again, just about. And when I opened the door I found the garden path and fence and patch of grass had also returned.

  ‘It’s a lot to handle,’ he observed, in the accent he said was Australian. ‘Believe me, I know.’

  And he smiled and I realised it was not quite the same smile but it was more than enough. I would have burned this house and everything in it to the ground for that smile. ‘Your smile.’

  ‘Is it like his?’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I said, the garden path and fence keeping me in reality. ‘I’ll be home at five, if that’s okay?’ I wanted to laugh now that boilers mattered again, but I didn’t because I was not actually insane. Probably.

  ‘Five is good.’ And he got in a car and waved and pulled away. I ran to the bottom of Aberdeen Street to hail a taxi and it was only after I was inside and I had sent Dermot a So-sorry-on-my-way text message and the car had stopped so a man with a buggy could cross and someone came on the radio talking about barbecue tips that I fully realised this was not a dream.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Iwent back to work and there were things to do, not least a grovelling apology. Simon had gone, he had to collect his kids, and Dermot had been left in charge of the kitchen. Nobody wanted that. Not the customers who had to eat the food; not the staff who would have to clean up the mess;and not Dermot who, though the proprietor of a popular restaurant, hated nothing quite like he hated cooking.

  There had been two small fires in the fifty minutes he was left on his own and when I came running into the kitchen, apology already in full swing, he balled up the chef’s hat that nobody except him ever wore because it was a costume prop stolen from some amateur dramatics group and so not at all flame retardant (it was nearly the cause of a third fire) and hurled it at me.

  ‘How do you do this?’ he exploded. ‘Day in, day out, constantly working. Slaving away for them!’ He gestured through the orders window, his voice dripping with disdain. ‘And nobody even claps! Not one of them. Look at them. Look! Just sitting out there, eating.’

  ‘Dermot, are you . . . crying?’

  ‘I have been here for hours! Days probably!’ He grabbed a piece of kitchen roll from the counter and blew air through his nose. ‘I am an actor, I am not a pepper peeler.’

  ‘Nobody’s a pepper peeler, Dermot.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘We don’t peel peppers, nobody does.’

  Dermot flung the used kitchen roll in the direction of the fridge but it fell limply to the floor almost immediately. ‘I have lines to run,’ he said, storming towards the storage-cupboard-cum-office, his meaty head glowing. ‘And I don’t want to hear another word about this unrelenting hellhole!’

  The orders were backed up and Tina was shouting from the floor. I grabbed a pile of dockets and started making my way through them. We hadn’t enough chicken for the hotpot so I threw turkey in instead and nobody complained. I flew through the orders, throwing plates onto the window at such a rate that Tina could barely keep up. And then I would be in the middle of julienning potatoes or making up vegetable stock when it would suddenly hit me all over again.

  The recurring realisations went something like this: The custard is starting to curdle. I better turn it down. And I need to get the crumble from the oven. The bowl is clean, but wasn’t the
re something else? Oh yes, that’s right – my dead boyfriend’s twin came for tea today and told me he was adopted. And now the custard is all over the floor and the bowl is smashed.

  I lost three ceramic dishes to this thought process but I cleared up any spillages before Dermot could see and I got no more orders wrong than I would on a typical off day. I managed to sustain an entire argument with the vegetable supplier about why we would not be paying more for weekend deliveries. Tina even complimented my hotpot when she came back from her lunch. Overall, it was more than any reasonable person could have expected of me.

  It all passed in such a hectic daze that when I made it back home and found myself sitting in the window of my study, watching people walk their dogs up and down Aberdeen Street, it took me a minute to remember how I’d gotten there.

  Henry had a brother. Henry was adopted.

  A man in a grey tracksuit allowed his white fluff-ball to dawdle, sniffing at poles and tufts of grass. He was definitely waiting for his dog to do its business, and I doubted he was going to pick it up.

  The idea of Henry’s brother being in Dublin, perhaps strolling the south side of the quays while I took the same path on the north, made me shiver. I imagined us crossing the River Liffey – different bridges, only a few metres apart – or him going to Tesco and picking up a shopping basket I had placed down a few minutes previous. He hadn’t been in the supermarket the time I thought I saw him, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been other places. He had been to the graveyard. What about all the people who pass you by on the street when you’re looking the other way? What about all the people whose faces get lost in the crowd?

  And what about the inside? Was he anything like Henry beyond the face and the shoulders and the sturdy hands? Did they share a way of thinking as well as a way of moving?

  There were too many questions. I would have to make a list.

  By the wheel of a Skoda across the street, the fluff ball bent its legs. It quivered on its hind paws for a moment then righted itself again. I turned away. I didn’t want to know.

  I rummaged in one of the half-unpacked boxes along the study wall and pulled out a jar of pens. I grabbed an envelope from the floor, turned it over, thought for a second, and started to write. I underlined the incongruous title and read it back.

  THINGS TO ASK MY DEAD BOYFRIEND’S BROTHER

  Then I crossed out ‘BROTHER’ and wrote in ‘TWIN’ because if I was going to accept this, I might as well embrace it fully.

  1. WHERE DO YOU LIVE?

  And immediately after that:

  1A. WHERE DO YOU LIVE IN IRELAND?

  1B. WHERE DO YOU LIVE IN AUSTRALIA?

  And even with two sub questions I couldn’t leave it there because suddenly I was thinking of C, D and E:

  WHEN DID YOU COME HERE?

  HOW LONG ARE YOU STAYING?

  ARE YOU GOING BACK TO AUSTRALIA?

  I decided to make these 2, 3 and 4. Best to retain some sense of order. I read over the list. I added a few flowers to the margin.

  5. WHY DID YOU COME TO IRELAND?

  (NOT RUDE. JUST INTERESTED.

  HENRY = ALREADY DEAD)

  6. HAVE YOU BEEN HERE BEFORE?

  7. DO YOU HAVE ANY WEIRD TWIN

  COINCIDENCES?

  I scribbled out that last one. Andy didn’t know anything about Henry so how would he know if they did things at the same time or in the same way? Besides, Henry didn’t believe in coincidences and I should ask questions for him too. What would Henry want to know?

  7. DO YOU LIKE DYSTOPIAN MOVIES?

  7A. IF NOT, WHY NOT?

  7B. IF SO, DO YOU AGREE THAT THE MAD MAX

  REMAKE IS BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL?

  9. DO YOU READ THE NEWSPAPER?

  9A. WHAT NEWSPAPER?

  10. CAN YOU DO THIS WEIRD THING WITH

  YOUR INDEX FINGER WHERE THE

  KNUCKLE POPS OUT?

  I’d forgotten 8. I went back and drew a little ‘insert here’ arrow. I thought for a moment.

  8. DO YOU ONLY FIX BOILERS OR CAN YOU

  FIX OTHER THINGS? DO YOU KNOW HOW

  TO BLEED RADIATORS?

  Then, in even tinier writing, to make it fit:

  8A. DO YOU EVEN NEED/HAVE RADIATORS

  IN AUSTRALIA?

  There were more questions than space on the envelope. And then there were the questions to which I couldn’t get answers. What if Henry were still alive? What would it feel like for him to learn he wasn’t the person he’d always thought he was? How would it feel to suddenly have a brother? Personally, I’d have loved that. Not the secret adoption bit, but there wasn’t even a remote possibility of that since Mam regularly reminded me of the pains she went through in giving birth to me and Dad readily verified her version of events. Most fathers talked about the indescribable joy of meeting their firstborn child, but mine just went on about the traumatising mess. ‘I didn’t know what bits we were supposed to throw away and what bits were still attached to your mother.’

  But the brother bit – I would have loved that.

  I imagined Henry’s parents, Isabel and Conor, asleep in their understated, beige four-bed detached house in a quiet estate about twelve kilometres and twenty socio-economic points south of where I was sitting. How could they have never told Henry? How could he never have figured it out?

  Surely he had asked, at some point over the years, what time he was born or how much he’d weighed? But then, maybe not. I asked him once how his parents had met and he hadn’t a clue. Henry didn’t think it was strange that he’d never enquired. He didn’t know their wedding anniversary either. Was it a female thing, to take an interest in the lives your parents led before you were part of them? If so, Isabel and Conor were lucky they’d gotten a boy. If it had been me, I’d have figured it out.

  I stood up to pull the curtains and felt a flutter in my stomach. This man who would come tomorrow to fix my boiler and answer questions was not Henry. I knew that. But if everything happened for a reason then there had to be more to it. Maybe somehow Henry had sent him, or the universe had done it on his behalf. Maybe Henry was as sorry to have left me as I was to have been left behind. Because who else could Andy’s arrival really benefit except me who was struggling to persevere and who had been calling out for a little hope.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Iwoke the next morning with a sense of purpose. The queasiness that had been my neutral state for weeks had subsided. This was the first time since Henry left that I had a reason to get up. I arrived at the Portobello Kitchen early – although when I got there, I found it had been rebranded THE PO T BELLY ITCH. Dermot was standing in the doorway and there was a man in a retro Adidas jacket and skinny jeans scuttling away in my direction.

  ‘That’s right, buddy!’ yelled Dermot. ‘You better run! There’s a Starbucks around the corner!’

  ‘More pesky customers?’ I said when I reached the entrance.

  ‘That’s not a customer, Grace, that’s a leech. Did you see his shoulder bag?’

  ‘Are we barring people with shoulder bags now?’

  ‘Nothing good ever came out of a bag that slim. He’d be ordering the smallest coffee, sitting at the biggest table and producing a laptop from that yoke quicker than you can say, “Get out of my restaurant, you home-brewing parasite.”’ Dermot was walking in circles, his anger intensifying with every 360 degrees. ‘They multiply. Like lice. You let one in and the place is suddenly crawling—’ He stopped pacing. He’d raised his head and caught sight of his restaurant’s new name, evidently for the first time. ‘FUCK’S SAKE!!!!’

  ‘I’ll get the ladder.’

  The morning was quiet, mainly because Dermot screamed at anyone who came through the door. Myself and Tina spent it scrubbing yesterday’s burn marks off the wall. I wanted to ask Dermot how he’d gotten a fork lodged in the toaster but then the bell on the front door jangled and I heard him roar again and I decided against it.

  ‘What’s up with Dermot?’ I asked Tina.
‘Is he still mad about being made to work yesterday?’

  ‘He didn’t get the chicken gig.’

  Dermot had had a rare call-back for the part of a chicken in some mortgage advert. He’d been squawking from his office on and off for days. ‘So?’ I said, finally giving up and chucking the toaster in the bin. ‘Dermot never gets any gigs.’

  ‘Someone called Pete got it instead?’

  ‘Oh.’ Pete was Dermot’s best friend and, as they were both actors, also his arch-nemesis. They became pals because they were the only forty-plus men in their drama class. They were also the only two who, aesthetically, didn’t immediately strike you as actors. This meant they were always up for the same parts. And Dermot was a God-awful actor.

  At the front of the restaurant, the door jangled again.

  ‘Out! Out!!! Parasites!’

  Then another jangle as the would-be customers hurried back out. Tina grimaced at me and I giggled. I stopped immediately. I never giggled, not anymore.

  It was strange carrying such a life-altering, unimaginable secret. It was like I existed in a parallel universe to everyone else. I talked to Tina like it was any other day, except maybe I was a little giddier and I checked the clock with increasing regularity: seven hours, six hours, five and a half hours until I would see Henry’s face again.

  Just before one o’clock, Dermot decided we were changing the menu.

  ‘No more chicken.’

  I sighed. I had made a whole batch of chicken hotpot and there was a pile of cooked meat sitting in the fridge. ‘Seriously?’

  Dermot glared at me, his face the colour of a Gala apple, and I backed off. ‘You’re the boss,’ I said. ‘What do you want instead?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Steak. Can we do steak? Do we have steak?’

  ‘As part of the lunch deal? I’m not sure that would be wise financially. But, as I say, you’re the boss.’