Grace After Henry

by Eithne Shortall

  ‘That’s right. I am the boss. I am a successful restaurateur. I don’t need to prance around in an animal costume for the amusement of others. All right.’ He stood straighter. ‘Well, I say steak. No chicken. Only steak.’

  Tina rolled her eyes at me through the service window, but said nothing as she wiped the specials list from the blackboard.

  ‘Everything else staying?’ I asked. I hadn’t the concentration for this, not today.

  ‘Yes.’ Dermot looked uncertain. ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Veg soup, sausage and mash, frittata—’

  ‘Frittata. Is that eggs?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s all made up so you’d basically be chucking away fifty quid if you scrap it now.’

  ‘Okay, fine. Frittata stays.’

  The familiar jangle as the door pushed open and a group of office workers filed into the restaurant. Dermot growled, but at a low level, as he headed for the storage cupboard. ‘Is there nowhere else for these slack-jaws to go?’

  The place filled up quickly without Dermot around to discourage them. And I moved my concentration from the clock to filling orders. I was doling out the new vegetarian hotpot when Tina came into the kitchen to collect cutlery.

  ‘I’ve never heard you sing before,’ she said, smiling, fists full of knives and forks as she caught me off guard. ‘You’ve a nice voice.’

  I was so nervous leaving work that I couldn’t make myself wait for the bus. I started walking, glancing back occasionally to see if the bus would catch up with me, but it never did and I was home at quarter to five. I was out of breath coming up Aberdeen Street. I hadn’t so much spent my anxious energy as I had riled myself up. There was an argument going on across the road over a parking space. I waved to Betty sitting in her front window with some kind of sandwich.

  I shoved a few Ikea instructions and plastic bags into a kitchen drawer, and stacked some empty boxes in the corner. I changed my top – I had started to sweat once I stopped moving – and washed my face before applying BB cream. It was, I realised, the first overture I’d made to make-up since Henry died. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m going to meet your brother, Henry,’ I told my own reflection. ‘I’m going to find out everything for you. You don’t need to worry.’ I held my gaze in the mirror above the sink and repeated: ‘There is no need to worry.’

  Ding-dong!

  My stomach jumped. Part of me wanted to fly down the stairs, the other part wanted to jump out the back window. I made my way down, stepping over the box of moisturiser and shampoo still sitting where I’d left it the previous day, stalling only when I saw his silhouette through the stained glass. They had the exact same shape.

  ‘Evening,’ he said as I opened the door to a distorted version of the only face I had ever loved. Countless mornings I had woken up to that face. Countless nights it was the last thing I saw. ‘How’re you going today?’

  ‘Good,’ I said. At least my responses were quicker than yesterday. ‘Just, yeah. Good.’

  Well, it was a start.

  TWENTY-THREE

  He picked up his toolbox and lumbered inside. He slouched slightly as he entered the house even though the doorway was a good foot taller than him. Force of habit, I thought. Just like Henry.

  ‘I reckon I’ll take a look at the boiler first? Get that out of the way before . . .’ He smiled and I, no longer in full control of my own facial expressions, smiled back.

  I walked back up the stairs, knocking the BB cream into a new Ikea wicker basket as I entered the bathroom ahead of him. I opened the hot press and pointed at the large cylinder with the red lagging jacket. ‘There it is,’ I said, for want of something to say. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘All right then, I’ll just take a look.’

  He started to remove the lagging jacket and root in his box for some sort of wrench. I was jealous that he had something to do.

  ‘Do you want a tea?’

  ‘No thanks. I don’t really drink the stuff.’

  ‘Of course. You said.’ I wiped away dust from the rim of the sink with a sheet of toilet paper, but the bathroom was too small for two activities. ‘I’ll be in the kitchen.’

  ‘No worries.’

  Standing at the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle to boil, I realised I was shaking my head. Henry’s twin brother was upstairs fixing the boiler. The same boiler Henry had enquired about when we first came to view this house. He didn’t know a thing about them but he thought boilers were what you were supposed to ask estate agents about, to show you were wise to their ways and that if they were looking to sell a dud, they should try the next chump. Boilers and insulation. They were Henry’s go-to topics. I heard the clang of metal bouncing on the floor above me and I pinched myself through the sleeve of my ribbed sweater. I felt like a character in one of Betty’s soaps. God she’d have loved this. There she was getting her kicks from a little parking tiff, and her very own As the World Turns moment happening right next door. I almost felt bad keeping it from her.

  I made a cup of tea and pushed myself up onto the counter, dangling my legs as I drank. To nobody at all, I stated the obvious: ‘This is ridiculous.’

  For the next hour, I did my best to busy myself with putting away the last of the kitchen utensils. I fought the urge to go back upstairs. I got as far as the bottom step a few times but managed to restrain myself from climbing. At 6.30, when I was about to ascend with the excuse of asking if he wanted dinner, Andy appeared in the sitting room.

  ‘All done.’

  He dried his hands with a cloth and threw the oil-stained rag into the toolbox. His arms were so like Henry’s. Sturdy with light hair, and one protruding vein that curved faintly around the right forearm. I knew those arms by heart. He rolled down his sleeves and cleared his throat.

  ‘Is it fixed?’ I asked quickly, my cheeks burning.

  ‘Should be. I reset your thermostat and the water levels have started to rise. I have the heating switched on now, just to check it’s all working as it should.’

  ‘That’s great, thank you. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘No worries. It’s . . . family rates.’

  It was my turn to clear my throat. ‘Will you have some dinner?’

  ‘Sure.’ Andy looked around the kitchen, where the only visible counter appliances still had their Ikea tags attached.

  ‘I haven’t done much cooking here yet . . . But I’m a chef. I should be able to rustle up something.’

  ‘You’re a chef? Awesome.’

  ‘Well, I make sandwiches and hotpots. But they’re good hotpots.’

  ‘Sounds great to me,’ he said. ‘What are we having?’

  ‘Em.’ I opened the cupboard store for possibly the first time to find the beans, chickpeas, pasta and instant soups my parents had brought on one of their first visits. ‘I’m just going to run to the shop,’ I told him. ‘It’s only around the corner. Is that okay? Will you be all right here?’

  ‘I’ll put a light bulb in the hallway while I’m waiting.’

  ‘That fixture is actually broken,’ I said, rooting through my bag for keys and my purse.

  ‘Then I’ll fix that first.’

  I looked up from my handbag.

  ‘Really? Amazing. That’d be great. Thank you. If I could just remember where I put my keys . . .’

  ‘Do you need them?’ he asked, picking up a chair from the kitchen and walking into the hall. ‘I’ll be here.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, watching that familiar silhouette walk away. ‘You’ll be here.’ Tears appeared in the corners of my eyes before I realised they were on their way. I shook them off and hurried after him into the hallway. ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ I said and pulled the front door.

  I was slightly out of breath when I got to the shop, swinging the door open as Pat looked up from his copy of the Mirror.

  ‘We’ve no brie.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘No brie,’ Pat r
epeated. ‘The supplier never came this morning. So there’s no Red Bull either.’

  ‘You get your cheese and Red Bull from the same supplier?’ I asked. ‘Actually, never mind. It doesn’t matter.’ I made my way through the modest aisles. ‘I’m not here for brie.’

  Usually I went straight to the dairy fridge and then picked up a baguette at the till. I didn’t know what else Pat sold, but it didn’t take long to ascertain that the answer was ‘Not a whole lot’. It’d be a good place to go to stock up your bunker for an impending apocalypse but it didn’t offer much in the way of fresh produce. There was nothing with a best before date this side of Christmas, except a few pieces of fruit already starting to expire in a basket at the back. I picked up a couple of bags of ricotta-filled pasta and a packet of frozen spinach.

  ‘Any tomatoes?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Beside the jam.’

  I found a jar of sundried tomatoes, which would have to do. Pat rang up the lot and I could tell he wanted to ask but it was against his hear-no-evil see-no-evil code of conduct.

  ‘I’m making dinner for someone.’

  ‘Dinner for two,’ he said, putting the four items in one of the plastic bags he’s supposed to charge for but never does.

  ‘Not like that,’ I clarified.

  Pat shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen Betty in a few days. She okay?’

  I thought of her twitching curtains earlier that evening. ‘She’s alive.’ And I took the bag.

  I jogged all the way back to the house but when I got to the gate I stopped. There was light shining out from the hallway. In the ten minutes I’d been gone, this end-of-terrace house where I’d dwelled for a month had become a home. The light shone out through the stained glass of the front door like a beating heart. The whole place had come alive. I stood for a moment and admired it. It was almost welcoming. I pushed the front door, left on the latch, to find more light streaming from the study and banging coming from the sitting room.

  Andy was kneeling on the floor beside the Ikea chair I’d been avoiding constructing for weeks. ‘Just one more . . . There.’ He placed one hand on the seat and pushed himself up.

  ‘I wasn’t gone fifteen minutes,’ I said, unable to hide my astonishment. ‘Henry could barely hang a picture. Are you sure you’re related?’ He looked at me and I wondered when it was going to stop taking me by surprise. ‘No need to answer that.’

  I carried the bag through to the kitchen and he followed.

  ‘What was Henry like?’ he asked, leaning against the makeshift table where we’d sat across from each other the day before.

  I pulled the pasta from the bag. Like you, I wanted to say, he was just like you.

  ‘I’m not sure how to answer that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, offering me a smile that really wasn’t his to be offering. ‘I didn’t know what to ask first.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. It’s just . . . I’ve never had to explain him to anybody.’ I shook my head. ‘Would you believe this is the first proper conversation about him since he died that I’ve had with someone who didn’t know him? It’s so strange that you didn’t know him when—’ I flapped my arms up and down in his general direction. He looked down at his body as if he was as surprised by it as anyone else.

  ‘What was he like?’ I considered. ‘He contained multitudes, like everyone, I guess. He was happy. I’d say that about him. And he was fun. He was caring, about me anyway, and loyal and he was easy-going.’ I cringed. It was the speech of a best man who was only up there because the groom’s mother had insisted he pick his brother. I puffed out my cheeks. ‘That doesn’t really make him stand out. It’s hard to condense someone you know that well into a few sentences. It’s like having to describe yourself. You can’t. You’re not objective.’

  I pulled the rest of the items from the bag and read the instructions on the back of the spinach.

  ‘It must be crazy having me here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded.

  ‘But it’s good too.’

  I broke up the spinach through the plastic before pulling the bag open. ‘How about I cook and you can ask me questions? Not that you could really call this cooking.’ I held up the jar of preserved tomatoes as I switched on the kettle. ‘These don’t go off for another two years. In fact, all these ingredients would probably survive a nuclear attack. Do you cook?’

  ‘If I have to,’ he said. ‘But a lot of the time I’m cooking for one, and it feels like you need . . .’

  ‘Other people?’

  ‘A home.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That makes sense.’ And I switched on the hob for the first time since moving in.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Andy told me the basics of his life in Australia. He’d been doing maintenance at a holiday resort in Sydney before coming here. But six months before that, he was working for an apartment complex in Brisbane. He couldn’t settle on an answer to the question of where he’d grown up.

  ‘All over,’ he said. ‘Mum was always moving, a free spirit.’

  ‘Was she artistic?’

  ‘Not unless you count selling crystals. But she saw herself as a troubadour, and I guess that made me her roadie.’

  He’d been staying at a B&B in Harold’s Cross since he got here. I told him that was near enough to Henry’s parents’ house, but when I saw how it piqued his interest I regretted saying anything and moved on quickly.

  ‘How did you meet Larry?’ I asked, adding the pasta to the boiling water.

  ‘I needed to find work. I hadn’t a clue how long I was going to stay here, how long it would take to find what I was looking for. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I thought I’d pretty much reached a dead end until I arrived at your door,’ he said. ‘Must have been fate.’

  ‘Or maybe just a coincidence,’ I ventured.

  ‘Nah.’ Andy inspected the double doors that opened to the backyard, frowning at the gap at the bottom where a piece of rubber draft excluder was missing. ‘There’s no such thing as coincidence.’

  With his back to me, or even from the side, he was identical. I felt myself doing that thing Henry did, where he breathed in sharply but snuck the air back out without anyone noticing. No such thing as coincidence.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Henry thought the same.’

  I liked having him in the house. There was a thrill to him wandering about, inspecting the place and making everything a little more just-so. I heard the curtains coming down in the living room and pictured him reattaching the folds to the hooks, catching the one I’d missed. The sound of his step as he passed from living room to kitchen and back again. The floorboards creaked with a confidence I had never coaxed from them.

  When the pasta had been spooned into the brand-new Ikea bowls, he crossed to the sink and with the heel of his hand turned on the faucet. I watched the water dividing over his fingers. His were strong hands. Henry’s hands.

  He wanted to know how Henry had died. He asked it like that, straight out. ‘How did Henry die?’ he said. ‘The adoption services said a traffic accident . . .’ And he trailed off.

  ‘He was cycling,’ I replied, keeping my eyes on the spinach that was done but which I continued to stir. ‘To meet me.’ I scooped the sundried tomatoes out of the jar and tossed them in. I saw the red scarf spinning in the spokes: rapidly, viciously, turning and turning and turning, until the whole wheel was dripping red. ‘He was cycling along the Liffey, the river that runs through Dublin city, rushing to get there on time. And it was raining.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  I set the pan on the draining board and held a hand up to shush him, to say it was fine. ‘It was a truck, a massive thing heading for the port after making a delivery. The back wheel went right over Henry and it didn’t even stop. The guards caught up with the driver at the port and he said he hadn’t felt a thing. Can you imagine the indignity of that? His entire life eviscerated and nobody in the whole wi
de world, not even the man who took it from him, felt a thing?’

  I rested my hands flat against the counter until they were still again. Then I picked back up the wooden spoon and added the highly preserved vegetables to the pasta. ‘Here.’

  ‘Good on ya,’ he said, taking the bowl. Then after a pause: ‘Can I ask you something?’

  I forced a laugh. ‘Was that not it?’

  He finished a mouthful and wrapped his hand around the water tumbler so his fingers almost reached his thumb. ‘Do I look like a tourist?’

  Now I really did laugh.

  ‘Everywhere I go, everyone already knows I’m not Irish. Even though, genetically, I am Irish. How do they know?’

  I considered him from across the temporary kitchen table that looked like doll’s furniture now he was sitting at it.

  ‘I look like a tourist, ay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But Henry didn’t? How does that work?’

  I tried to see his face objectively. The lines, the slight pigmentation around the mouth, the patch-free stubble. I was amassing them, the ways in which they were the same and the ways they were different. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, genuinely stumped. ‘It must be the tan.’

  Most of Andy’s free time – ‘all of it, really’ – was spent trying to uncover more about his past. He was at his most animated when he talked about this and it was easy to get caught up. It was like coming in during the ad break of one of those English village mysteries my parents were always watching and being filled in on the plot. Before the show had started again, I’d be suggesting potential endings and routes the detective might take. Only this was somebody’s life. And if he’d lived, it could have been Henry’s life.

  Andy had the basic details on Frances Clinch and he had managed to piece together a fairly informed idea of where she had had the babies and how they had ended up where they did. Although he still couldn’t understand how his mother had gotten a child.

  ‘She was single, of no fixed abode, and her career changed as regularly as her boyfriend,’ he said. ‘From what I understand, she was the kind of woman they were taking babies from.’