Where Are We Now?

by Glenn Patterson

  ‘Are you sure you have the room for it?’ Hannah asked when they pulled up outside Herbie’s front gate the first time.

  ‘There’s only me there,’ he said, and instantly wished he hadn’t. As if she needed reminding she was on her own now too.

  They stood together at last in the empty shed. ‘What do you think you will use it for now?’

  ‘Honestly? I think I’ll knock it down. It’s been blocking the sun at the back of the house from the day and hour it went up.’

  Last time Herbie visited there was decking with a rattan corner sofa, grandchildren’s toys scattered everywhere.

  The notebooks meanwhile remained untouched in their boxes in Herbie’s spare room. If he was being honest with himself, he was daunted by the responsibility. Those many, many years of painstaking research in his hands.

  He would get round to collating and cataloguing it all.

  Soon.

  A few months back, he had taken on a little bit of extra work filing in the Records Office archive – 0.2 of a Grade F, seven and a half hours a week. Hardly a fortune, but it kept him ticking over and gave him access besides to staff services and perks.

  The Records Office was a half hour’s walk from the house, a couple of minutes longer coming back, the penultimate stretch being uphill almost as far as Sam’s, where the road levelled out just long enough for him to think as he put the key in his front door – two streets further along on the right – he would be fine doing this tomorrow again after all.

  The route to work took him through an area known as the Rivers – Mersey Street, Severn Street, Tamar Street, Frome, Derwent, Tern – and over the Dee Street Bridge and into the old harbour estate – the shipyard – for ten ship-free years now the Titanic Quarter. At the Dee Street end of the bridge was a hoarding, ‘You Must Be Born Again’. At the far end, just beyond the roundabout that routed all but a trickle of outbound traffic away from Dee Street itself and on to the Sydenham Bypass (Bangor that direction, M1, M2 and M3 the other), a new Porsche dealership was nearing completion, a hundred yards from the BMW one – a great hangar of a place that, any time Herbie passed it, was as busy as a Bank Holiday ferry port.

  As he crested the bridge the morning after his doctor’s appointment, two feet where in industrial boom-times gone by there were thousands from the Rivers below, the sun put in an appearance. For a few moments while his eyes adjusted, every window in the city seemed to sparkle. Cars on the Sydenham Bypass to his left were daytime shooting stars. He slipped off his jacket and folded it over his arm. Take your summer while you can get it, the Belfast watchword.

  The pedestrian traffic got heavier as he carried on along the Sydenham Road – the tail end of the morning commute coming out of the footpath down from Titanic Halt, bound for the Metropolitan College and the tech and finance companies further down towards the end of what his father used to call the East Twin Island.

  His father had worked there straight out of his apprenticeship, already saving up to get married, when – ‘sorry, lad, but you know the drill, last in first out’ – he got given his cards: a Thursday, just before the dinner hour. Him and his mate, who’d been second last in, heard they were starting men in a factory in one of the new industrial estates out in the eastern suburbs, so they walked with their toolboxes to the train station on the edge of the harbour estate (apartments now) and put them in left luggage then jumped on a bus, which was packed with men who had heard the same thing they had – had to go all the way to the top for a seat – and of course when they arrived at the factory everyone else got up to get off ahead of them. (Last on… last out.) By the time they reached the factory the foreman was taking the ‘Men Wanted’ sign down off the gate. He said to them, but, they might be starting more men in a couple of weeks if they wanted to leave their names, so that’s what they did then caught the bus back down to the station, and here, when they got on, didn’t they get talking to a fella who had worked in the shipyard with them and who told them there was a wee shop specialising in panel welding, a couple of stops short of the station, and he had it from another fella that they were starting men in there. So when the bus pulled in again and your man was getting off they got off with him, and he was right: they were starting men, and it was a wee shop. ‘You’d have bigger sitting rooms nowadays. Cobbles on the floor – inside, I mean – and the only light from a skylight that was wiped once a week with a cloth on a broom handle, though all that did was move the dirt around, spread the gloom a bit.’

  Two questions, the interview consisted of: do you have your union cards – good – and do you have your own tools? ‘We were just on our way to get them.’

  ‘Well go yous on and get them and I’ll start you as soon as you are back.’

  And that was them, started. They had been out of work for two and a half hours.

  ‘Gentleman of the reformed faith, was he, your father?’ asked a colleague in Wages to whom Herbie had once told this story, the colleague’s point being that jobs in those industries, even in wee shops with cobbles and filthy skylights (‘I was never as glad to get out of a place in my life,’ his dad’s story ended) tended in those pre-Troubles years to be the preserve of Protestants.

  ‘He was, but his mate wasn’t.’

  ‘The exception that proves the rule then.’

  His dad’s mate had moved to America at the start of the Seventies, worried about his son getting sucked in. (Herbie’s dad’s term? Herbie’s dad’s mate’s?) Herbie wondered if this was the boy whose bedroom he had sat in once, while the adults talked downstairs, pitching their voices low (the very definition of Troubled), a creased Club International that had already passed through – paused in – many hands open on his lap. Was he even the other boy? Whose heart shrank hearing the word ‘minge’ for the first time? Whose thoughts were haunted by it long, long after the pictures that had caused it to be uttered had dimmed in his mind’s eye.

  Maybe that wasn’t the day then when he sat in the family car, trying to ignore the fact that his dad was sitting, separated from him by more than just the gap between the seats, crying through fingertips pressed to his eyes. ‘Best workmate I ever had. Best workmate anybody ever had.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand being in the same room as him,’ a woman said, to the little white stubs coming out of her ears Herbie assumed, since no one around her, and him, at the pedestrian crossing he had reached responded, although everyone else, apart from Herbie, was absorbed in their own hand-held or wrist-worn devices, checking steps, heartbeats, likes, checking checks. Independent States of One.

  So, of course, whose phone should loudly proclaim with parping horns an incoming text at that moment, but his own? Even the woman with the stubs glanced round. He was going to have to work out how to change his settings.

  ‘Sorry.’ He dragged the phone from his pocket before the horns could parp again and held it at arm’s length and angled away from the sun. Was that…? It was. Beth. Coming back for a bit. That OK? The box on the crossing beeped. The people around him stepped out on to the road. He followed a couple of paces behind, texting as he walked, trusting to spellcheck to compensate for clumsy thumbs. Be lovely to see you. Then almost as an afterthought, When were you thinking?

  He stopped on the other side, watching the pulsing ellipsis of his daughter’s reply in the making. Plane boards in 30 mins.

  He turned around and pressed the button for the Green Man again.

  An open-topped tour bus came between him and the lights facing, half empty, or maybe, given the early hour, half full.

  ‘We just passed the SSE Arena. On your right now, the famous Harland and Wolff cranes, Samson and Goliath, an early attempt at power-sharing in Belfast…’

  Beth hadn’t been across since her granny’s funeral – a year and a half ago now: morning flight in, evening flight out – and before that it was… When? Not since he had been in this house, that’s for sure. There had been plans, but, well, she was a hundred kinds of busy, something always came up. He n
ever pressed her. ‘Totally understand,’ he would say. The busy-ness, he meant, rather than the business. Promotions. He had been imagining music festivals to begin with when it seemed he should have been seeing people dressed as blackcurrants handing out soft drinks in train stations and shopping malls, and actually the odd music festival too. She had chopped and changed a bit the first few years, jumping from one moving train to one moving even faster was how she had described it herself, but seemed well settled now. Well thought of too. There had been talk (when had they last talked about work?) of a partnership in the firm she was with. She was getting together the deposit on a flat of her own. In central London.

  First thing he did when he got back to the house was push the shoeboxes into the dead corner of the spare room with the Sean archive and cover the whole lot with a bedspread. He unrolled the futon mattress and had to back out of the room to allow the dust he raised to settle. When he came back, he weighted the corners with books while he ran the vacuum over it. A bit better. Floor looked worse, mind you. He vacuumed it too then lifted down the anglepoise lamp from the top of the wardrobe, only remembering as he plugged it in and thumbed the switch that the reason it was up there in the first place was that he hadn’t got round to mending the fuse… because – another ten minutes of hoking in drawers – he didn’t have a fuse to mend it with. Bollocks.

  At the last minute he raced round to M&S. He seriously didn’t think he was up to Brian. He took his six items to the till at the end furthest from his. A woman he had never seen before, though it was in the nature of the job and the uniform that he knew at once her name was Louise. White-haired – prematurely, he wanted to say, but even on that first glance he could nearly not imagine what other colour it could ever have been. She passed his ready meals, his salad, his cheesecake and his Scottish strawberries over the scanner. It was as though he had never seen that before either. Never seen hands before. He was conscious suddenly of staring. Conscious of her being conscious of it.

  She drew her hands back, folded one inside the other next to the money drawer.

  ‘Cash or card?’ she asked, something told him not for the first time.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just, I don’t know, miles away… Card.’

  She took it and a moment later gave it back.

  ‘Receipt?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  She nodded, looked past him. ‘Who’s next there, please?’

  *

  The taxi was turning into the street as he reached through the front gate to raise the latch. He opened the door, set the shopping in the hall and waited. The driver was leaning forward, counting down the numbers with his index finger: forty-five, forty-three, forty-one, thirty-nine – Bingo! – he lit on Herbie finally. Beth dipped her head as she paid the man, then stepped out. He caught himself repeating under his breath what his own father had said the first time he laid eyes on her in the maternity hospital, twenty-seven years ago: Egg 1 Sperm 0.

  ‘I look awful, don’t I?’ She grabbed handfuls of hair, trying to restore the volume the airplane cabin pressure had robbed it of.

  ‘I was just thinking how well you were looking.’ Too thin, but when did he not think so? He came back down the path to meet her. She brought her cheek up close to his, circled him with her arms without any part of their bodies touching. The girl whose hugs had used to hit him like a cannonball.

  ‘Are you forgetting something?’ The taxi driver had got out and popped his boot.

  ‘What am I like?’

  She went back and collected her bag from him. The same army kit bag Herbie had carried into the departures lounge for her the night she left home.

  ‘You know you can always come back if it doesn’t work out.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but it will.’ And it had.

  The driver tooted his horn in parting. Beth waved.

  ‘He was telling me he used to have an aunt lived down this street. He practically lived here himself during the school holidays. Just as well, I wouldn’t have had a clue.’ She looked up at the front. ‘Would it put you in mind of Granny’s house a wee bit?’

  ‘Almost brick-for-brick identical.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s nice.’ Then as though he had contradicted her, ‘No, it is, it’s really nice.’

  ‘Wasn’t a big lot needed done, which was part of the attraction for me.’

  Inside now, the lower part of the knock-through, with its armchair and two-seater sofa and the television he hadn’t yet got round to replacing with a flatter screen.

  ‘Cosy,’ she said.

  He picked up her bag. ‘I can’t believe you still have this.’

  ‘Oh, no, that’s not that one.’

  ‘It’s very like it.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  A moment. Neither spoke.

  ‘Will I put it up in your room?’

  ‘I have my own room?’

  ‘Where did you think you were going to sleep?’

  ‘I don’t know… the sofa?’

  They looked at it together. It seemed to sag under the scrutiny.

  ‘Right.’ He hoisted the bag on to his shoulder. He would have sworn it was the same one.

  She stayed a step behind him the whole way up the stairs, down the short landing.

  ‘Here you are.’ He opened the door, leaning in with it to let her pass.

  ‘I remember that lamp!’ She tapped it and it genuflected. She pressed her hands flat together beneath her nose, bowed in reply. ‘Venerable Giver of Light.’

  ‘It needs a fuse.’ Herbie was at the wardrobe. ‘There’s plenty of hangers,’ rattling them. He turned. ‘How long are you able to stay?’

  ‘It sort of depends.’ She went and tilted the wooden blinds, down then up again. ‘Where’s your loo?’

  ‘Downstairs, through the kitchen. Light’s on the hall side of the door.’

  ‘It is like Granny’s.’

  He used the time that she was in there to fill the kettle and lift down a couple of mugs.

  ‘You’ve no bath,’ she said when she came back into the kitchen.

  ‘The people that were here before me took it out.’ He couldn’t say he’d missed it up to now.

  ‘Pity.’

  And it came back to him, all at once, the long soaks she and Tanya used to take – together when Beth was small, and, even when she had outgrown that, both following the same routine. Lavender oil. Scented candles. Classic FM. Balm, Tanya would say, for the troubled soul.

  ‘Coffee? Tea? I have, let’s see, ordinary, and mint, in at the back here somewhere.’

  ‘Actually, I think I’ll maybe go and lie down for a while.’ She dragged her fingers down her face, widening the dark rings under her eyes. ‘I had to be up at five this morning to get to the airport on time.’

  ‘Of course, of course, go on ahead,’ he said and put her mug away again and then a moment later his too.

  He sat for a long while in the silence she left when she went upstairs, a little dazed by the entire morning’s turn of events. If it hadn’t been for the faint smell of perfume he could nearly have persuaded himself that she hadn’t been there at all.

  She slept in the end till past six o’clock. (She could sleep for Ireland, that girl, wasn’t that what they had always said? Sleep for Britain too.) Got up, showered. Another forty-five minutes. He could actually have had something made instead of buying in ready meals, looking like he didn’t know how. He paused in the act of peeling back the plastic film of a chicken supreme – of watching his hands peel back the plastic film – and realised he was blushing. He had stared at that woman on the till. Louise. And then his apology… attempted apology. Dear God. He wanted to go back round and say sorry properly: I am not a man who stares, honestly. To which she would say what? Oh, right, so I just got lucky?

  Maybe the reason he had never seen her wasn’t that she had just started but that she only worked the morning shift. And, really, how often was he there in the early part of
the day? Hardly ever.

  *

  Beth still had a towel on her head when they sat down at the table.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she asked.

  ‘Not at all. Like old times.’

  ‘Minus Mum.’

  ‘Well, yes, there’s that.’

  They ate a while in silence. ‘Did you know you’ve a wee leak in your shower tray?’ she said then. ‘Corner nearest the door. Futon’s comfortable, though. Where was that out of?’

  ‘A place over on the Lisburn Road. It’s gone now.’

  ‘Really comfortable.’

  They ate.

  ‘This chicken is lovely.’

  ‘Marks.’

  ‘I know, but still.’

  Another minute passed of more or less silent chewing and swallowing. Herbie cleared his mouth, set his fork on his plate. ‘So…’

  ‘Tell me about your job,’ Beth said quickly.

  ‘Mine? Job’s maybe too big a word. I’m only contracted for seven and a half hours.’

  ‘But you go in more than that…’

  ‘The freelance stuff? It’s a little bit in the lap of the gods, but this time of the year, yeah, it can get pretty busy all right.’

  ‘And is it still in that wreck of a place on… what’s this you call it?’

  ‘Balmoral Avenue?’ That’s right, there had been a time when she was at school, some history project she was doing, he had taken her there thinking they kept old newspapers. A hodgepodge, it was then, of Edwardian red brick, Elizabeth II concrete and Troubles-stalwart prefabs. And barbed wire, of course: barbed wire in abundance. None of which prevented the bombers getting through eventually. ‘No, they moved it four or five years ago, Titanic Quarter, brand-new building down by the Visitors’ Centre.’

  ‘Is that not a bit like putting sweeties next to the till?’ she said. ‘Family trees and maritime disasters?’

  ‘It gets worse – you know they’re filming that Game of Thrones down there now as well? Huge big shed of a studio.’

  ‘Oh, God, the two women in front of me on the plane, that’s all they talked about. I think they were actually expecting to find boars and direwolves roaming the streets.’