Walking the Dog

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘It’s so utterly primitive – prehistoric,’ said Maureen.

  ‘How could it be prehistoric. Gunpowder was invented in the middle ages.’

  ‘There would have been an equivalent – fire, torches, sparks.’

  ‘Come on let’s get outa here before somebody gets hurt.’

  The troupe had split up and before Jimmy and Maureen could move three dancers had run up the steps and appeared behind them. Close up their robes were embroidered with Miro-like symbols. One of them held aloft a thing that looked like the spokes of an umbrella. Suddenly it burst into roaring fire – five Catherine wheels with whistles on them spraying sparks in every direction. They rained down on the crowd – white magnesium sparks – drenching them in light and danger and everyone screamed and covered their heads with their hands.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ shouted Jimmy. Maureen saw the white hot sparks bouncing off the cobblestones like dashing rain – white, intense, like welder’s sparks. She tried to cover her head – she knew the skin of her shoulders was bare. But she felt nothing. Neither did Jimmy. They ran, Jimmy elbowing his way through the crowd away from the dancers, pulling Maureen after him by the hand. On the edge of the crowd they looked at each other and laughed.

  ‘They’re like kids’ hand-held fireworks,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’re harmless. Fuckin sparklers.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m not going back to check, I’ll tell you that.’

  Again there was a series of enormous explosions just above their heads so that Maureen screamed out. What Jimmy had thought were broken fairy lights were fire crackers going off a few feet above their heads. They both ran holding hands.

  They stopped at a small pavement area outside a bistro still in sight of the fireworks and they were both given a free sherry. The three supposed priests sat at a table near the door. They nodded recognition to each other. Jimmy ordered Menorcan gin and because he was going home the next evening allowed the barman to fill the glass with ice. They sat at the same side of the table, shoulder to shoulder, at a safe distance from the fireworks.

  ‘It’s pure street theatre,’ said Maureen. ‘The audience are involved because of their fear. The adrenalin flows. The costumes, the music, the fire –’

  ‘It could never happen at home.’

  ‘Yeah, we kill people outright.’

  ‘The danger brings pleasure. It involves the audience totally.’

  ‘Look,’ said Jimmy. The young German couple were walking away from the fireworks. They had an arm around each other. They stopped to kiss and the boy slid both his hands down onto Heidrun’s backside to hold her closer.

  ‘They make a fine couple – even though we don’t know their language.’ When the kiss was finished the lovers walked passed the bistro. The boy’s hand was worming its way down the back of her shorts and Heidrun was leaning her blonde head against his shoulder.

  Jimmy mimicked the gesture and laid his head on Maureen’s bare shoulder.

  ‘I’d still be interested to know how far you went with previous – the men before me? You knew some pretty good tricks.’

  She looked at him tight-lipped then moved away from his head.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to see you with another man now – but I’d like to have seen you with one then.’

  ‘This got us nowhere before,’ she said quietly. ‘Jimmy, give it a rest.’

  ‘No, why should I? Tell me about the first time you came, then.’

  ‘I would if I could – if it’s SO important to you. But I can’t so I won’t. Would you like to ask your daughters this question the next time you see them?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. That’s a totally different thing.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Why can’t you tell me?’ said Jimmy. ‘You’re repressed. Why can’t we talk openly about this?’

  ‘It’s you that’s repressed,’ she almost shouted, ‘wanting to know stuff like that. It’s becoming a fixation.’

  ‘It was a question I’d always wanted to ask. I thought – what better time. Holiday. Alone. No kids.’

  ‘No time is a good time for questions like that.’

  When she lifted her sherry her hand was shaking.

  ‘Don’t make such a big thing of it.’

  ‘When you do those kind of things with people there’s a pact – a kind of unspoken thing – that it’s private – that it’s just between the two of you. Secrecy is a matter of honour.’

  ‘So you have done it.’

  ‘No – don’t be so stupid – it could be just kissing or affection or kidding on or flirting. Whatever it was it’s none of your fucking business.’

  She did not finish her sherry but got to her feet.

  ‘I’m going home. You can stay here with your priests, if you like.’

  *

  At about three o’clock Jimmy crawled into bed beside her and wakened her from a deep sleep. He was drunk and crying and apologising and patting her shoulder and telling her how good she was and how much she meant to him and that he would never ever ever ever leave her. He was a pest but that’s the way he was and she could like it or lump it. But she was a wonderful woman.

  ‘Jimmy, shut up – will you?’ Now that he had disturbed her she got up and went to the bathroom. When she came back he was snoring loudly. She closed the latch of the bedroom door so that he wouldn’t waken and tried to get some sleep on the sofa. She felt alone on the narrow rectangle of foam – lonely even – a very different feeling to the wonderful solitariness she had experienced in the cloisters. She couldn’t sleep. The thought of leaving Jimmy came into her head but it seemed so impossibly difficult, not part of any reality. Nothing bad enough had happened – or good enough – to force her to examine the possibility seriously. Where would she live? How could she tell the girls? What would she tell her parents? Jimmy was right about getting a job. It seemed so much simpler to stay as they were. The status quo. People stayed together because it was the best arrangement. She slept eventually and in the morning she could not distinguish when her deliberations had tailed off and turned to dreaming.

  ‘Jimmy, I think we should try and salvage something from the last day.’ She spoke to wake him. Startled, he turned in the bed to face the room. Maureen had the large suitcase open on the floor. She was holding one of his jackets beneath her chin then folding the arms across the chest. She packed it into the case, then reached for another. Jimmy tried not to groan. He sat on the side of the bed and slowly realised he was still in his clothes. She must have taken his shoes off him. He put his bald head in his hands.

  ‘Is the kettle boiled?’

  ‘It was – a couple of hours ago.’

  He got up and finished the packet of All-Bran – bran dust at this stage. He made tea and a piece of toast in the skeletal toaster. Maureen continued to pack.

  ‘What time’s the flight?’ he asked.

  ‘Eighteen hundred hours.’

  ‘I hate those fucking times. What time is that?’

  ‘Minus twelve. Six o’clock.’

  Jimmy had a shower and changed his clothes. After he cleaned his teeth he packed everything in sight into his washbag. He came out of the bathroom with a towel round his middle. He was grinning. Maureen was kneeling on the floor packing dirty washing into a Spar plastic bag.

  ‘I’ve got the hang-over horn.’

  ‘Well, that’s just too bad. There’s things to be done.’

  ‘Indeed there are.’

  Maureen got a brush and a plastic dust-pan. The living room floor was scritchy with sand spilled from their shoes. Earlier in the week Jimmy had knocked over a tumbler and it had exploded on the tiled floor into a million tiny fragments. She thought she had swept them all up at the time but still she was finding dangerous shards in the dust.

  Between the bathroom and the living room the dead ants still blackened the margins of the honey-poison. There was no mop and she had not wanted to sweep them up and make the floor sticky underfoot. Now
it didn’t seem to matter and she swept the whole mess onto the dust pan. Individual ants had lost their form and were now just black specks. She turned on the tap and washed them down the plug hole.

  Jimmy was sent down the street to the waste-bins while she put any usable food in the fridge as a gift for whoever cleaned up. When he came back everything was done and the cases were sitting in the middle of the floor. Maureen was drinking a last coffee and there was one on the table for him.

  He stood behind her chair and put his arms round her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘About last night. Going on and on about those . . .’ He kissed the top of her hair.

  ‘Jimmy – promise me. You mustn’t annoy me about that again.’

  ‘Okay – scout’s honour.’ He began massaging the muscles which joined her neck and shoulders.

  ‘Oh – easy – that hurts.’

  ‘What time do we have to vacate this place?’

  ‘Mid-day.’

  He bent over and whispered, ‘That gives us twenty minutes.’

  They left their luggage at the Tour company headquarters for the remaining hours and went down to the beach. They walked along to the rocky promontory at the far side.

  ‘I’ve really enjoyed this,’ said Jimmy. ‘The whole thing.’

  ‘Who did you meet up with last night?’

  ‘They said they were social workers. ’Which means they admitted to being priests in mufti. They were okay.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘I’m afraid eh . . . Large chunks of it are missing. We seemed to laugh a lot. I think they were every bit as pissed as I was.’

  ‘I don’t like the look of them. They’re the kind of people who’d go out of their way to take a short cut.’

  They sat on the rocks watching the sea swell in and out at their feet.

  ‘It’s very clear,’ said Jimmy. The water was blue-green, transparent.

  ‘You can be a real pest when you come in like that. You look so stupid.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  They became aware of an old couple in bathing suits paddling into the sea close by the rocks. They looked like they were in their eighties. The woman wore a pink bathing cap which was shaped like a conical shell. Her wrinkled back was covered in moles or age spots as if someone had thrown a handful of wet sand at her back. The old man had the stub of an unlit cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. Their skin was sallow. Mediterranean but paler than those around them for not having been exposed to the sun – although their faces and arms were the nut-brown colour of people who had worked in the open. The old man was taking the. woman by the elbow and speaking loudly to her in Spanish, scolding her almost. But maybe she was deaf or could not hear, her ears being covered by the puce conical cap. She was shaking her head, her features cross. They were thigh-deep and wading. When the water rose to her waist she began to make small stirring motions with her hands as if she were performing the breast stroke. She made the sign of the cross. The old man shouted at her again. She dismissed him with a wave of her hand, then submerged herself by crouching down. She kept her face out of the water. The old man reached out from where he stood and cupped his hand under her chin. She began to make the breast-stroke motions with her arms, this time in the water. The old man shouted encouragement to her. She swam about ten or twelve strokes unaided until she swallowed sea water, coughed and threshed to her feet. The old man yelled and flung his damp cigar stub out to sea.

  ‘Jesus – he’s teaching her to swim.’ Jimmy turned and looked up at his wife. Maureen was somewhere between laughing and crying.

  ‘That’s magic,’ she said. ‘What a bloody magic thing to do.’

  BY TRAIN

  ‘. . . your man was travelling from Glasgow to Aberdeen by train. In the opposite corner of the carriage sat a man pretending to be absorbed in his copy of the Scotsman. He did not speak until after they had pulled out of Dundee and then he had a strange, almost unbelievable tale to tell.

  ‘ “Recently,” he said, “I was travelling from Perth to Lancaster and my only carriage companion was a young woman. Even though she wore a veil of some kind I could see that her features were of great beauty. But what fascinated me most was her hands. She wore gloves for much of the journey but shortly after we had pulled out of Kilmarnock she removed them to reveal scars the like of which I have never witnessed. She must have seen my eyes flinch away because she said, ‘I hope, sir, I do not offend you but behind these broken hands is a story which some people find hard to believe. Recently I was travelling by train between Lancaster and Wolverhampton and the compartment was occupied by just one other person. He was of average height, a thick-set man in his forties, dressed in the garb of a country gentleman. He did not speak to me,’ she said, ‘but shortly after pulling out of Crewe he burst into tears. His whole body was convulsed with weeping. I offered him my handkerchief from my sleeve. “You are most kind, ” he said through his sobs. “Forgive me.” “There is nothing to forgive,” I replied. “Sometimes we are asked to endure things too heavy for the human heart,” he said. “Up until Tuesday last I was married to a girl of unsurpassable beauty twenty years my junior. On our honeymoon we were travelling by train from Berlin to Venice. In our carriage were two German farmers, each with a muzzled goose on his knee . . .” ’ ” ’

  THE WAKE HOUSE

  At three o’clock Mrs McQuillan raised a slat of the Venetian blind and looked at the house across the street.

  ‘Seems fairly quiet now,’ she said. Dermot went on reading the paper. ‘Get dressed son and come over with me.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘It’s not much to ask.’

  ‘If I was working I couldn’t.’

  ‘But you’re not – more’s the pity.’

  She was rubbing foundation into her face, cocking her head this way and that at the mirror in the alcove. Then she brushed her white hair back from her ears.

  ‘Dermot.’

  Dermot threw the paper onto the sofa and went stamping upstairs.

  ‘And shave,’ his mother called after him.

  He raked through his drawer and found a black tie someone had lent him to wear at his father’s funeral. It had been washed and ironed so many times that it had lost its central axis. He tried to tie it but as always it ended up off-centre.

  After he had changed into his good suit he remembered the shaving and went to the bathroom.

  When he went downstairs she was sitting on the edge of the sofa wearing her Sunday coat and hat. She stood up and looked at him.

  ‘It’s getting very scruffy,’ she said, ‘like an accordion at the knees.’ Standing on her tip-toes she picked a thread off his shoulder.

  ‘Look, why are we doing this?’ said Dermot. She didn’t answer him but pointed to a dab of shaving cream on his earlobe. Dermot removed it with his finger and thumb.

  ‘Respect. Respect for the dead,’ she said.

  ‘You’d no respect for him when he was alive.’

  She went out to the kitchen and got the bag for the shoe things and set it in front of him. Dermot sighed and opened the drawstring mouth. Without taking his shoes off he put on polish using the small brush.

  ‘Eff the Pope and No Surrender.’

  ‘Don’t use that word,’ she said. ‘Not even in fun.’

  ‘I didn’t use it. I said eff, didn’t I?’

  ‘I should hope so. Anyway it’s not for him, it’s for her. She came over here when your father died.’

  ‘Aye, but he didn’t. Bobby was probably in the pub preparing to come home and keep us awake half the night.’

  ‘He wasn’t that bad.’

  ‘He wasn’t that good either. Every Friday in life. Eff the Pope and NO Surrender.’ Dermot grinned and his mother smiled.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. Dermot scrubbed hard at his shoes with the polishing-off brush then stuck it and the bristles of the smaller one face to face and dropped them in the bag. His mother took a pair of rosary beads out of h
er coat pocket and hung them on the Sacred Heart lamp beneath the picture.

  ‘I’d hate to pull them out by mistake.’

  Together they went across the street.

  ‘I’ve never set foot in this house in my life before,’ she whispered, ‘so we’ll not stay long.’

  After years of watching through the window, Mrs McQuillan knew that the bell didn’t work. She flapped the letter-box and it seemed too loud. Not respectful. Young Cecil Blair opened the door and invited them in. Dermot awkwardly shook his hand, not knowing what to say.

  ‘Sorry eh . . .’

  Cecil nodded his head in a tight-lipped way and led them into the crowded living-room. Mrs Blair in black sat puff-eyed by the fire. Dermot’s mother went over to her and didn’t exactly shake hands but held one hand for a moment.

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear . . .’ she said. Mrs Blair gave a tightlipped nod very like her son’s and said,

  ‘Get Mrs McQuillan a cup of tea.’

  Cecil went into the kitchen. A young man sitting beside the widow saw that Mrs McQuillan had no seat and made it his excuse to get up and leave. Mrs McQuillan sat down, thanking him. Cecil leaned out of the kitchen door and said to Dermot,

  ‘What are you having?’

  ‘A stout?’

  Young Cecil disappeared.

  ‘It’s a sad, sad time for you,’ said Mrs McQuillan to the widow. ‘I’ve gone through it myself.’ Mrs Blair sighed and looked down at the floor. Her face was pale and her forehead lined. It looked as if tears could spring to her eyes again at any minute.

  The tea, when it came, was tepid and milky but Mrs McQuillan sipped it as if it was hot. She balanced the china cup and saucer on the upturned palm of her hand. Dermot leaned one shoulder against the wall and poured his bottle of stout badly, the creamy head welling up so quickly that he had to suck it to keep it from foaming onto the carpet.

  On the wall beside him there was a small framed picture of the Queen when she was young. It had been there so long the sunlight had drained all the reds from the print and only the blues and yellows remained. The letter-box flapped on the front door and Cecil left Dermot standing on his own. There were loud voices in the hall – too loud for a wake house – then a new party came in – three of them, all middle-aged, wearing dark suits. In turn they shook hands with Mrs Blair and each said, ‘Sorry for your trouble.’ Their hands were red and chafed. Dermot knew them to be farmers from the next townland but not their names. Cecil asked them what they would like to drink. One of them said,