Where Are We Now?

by Glenn Patterson

  ‘Is he really shaken?’

  ‘Tell you the God’s honest truth, I was nearly going to drive on up to A&E despite him. I watched him as he climbed up his stairs… He lives over his brother’s garage, did you know that? Or it’s his brother’s now, but it used to be the whole family’s, when the parents were alive. Weird set-up, if you ask me. He had to shout down to me to put a pound in the electricity meter before he could get the lights on. Must have spilt all his change clambering out of his car.’

  ‘Wait, the meter’s not even in his own flat?’ Emmet asked.

  ‘It’s on the garage wall next to the deckchairs. I near fell out of this flipping thing trying to reach it. I told him he was going to need more than a pound. I rapped the brother’s door. I could hear the television – I could hear Paul calling to me over it, “They never answer.” Ended up, I shouted through their letterbox, Police! That got them out, well half out. The brother’s wife, or whatever she is, was peeking round the living-room door all the time I was talking to him, telling him about the accident and saying he might, you know, want to stick a couple more quid in the meter and maybe go up there and sit with the fella for a while. I’m not kidding, you’d have thought the way they were looking at me I was the one had driven into him.’

  They sat on for another half hour after that, but the mood, in their small corner, had changed. The night’s events brought back to mind, and to the conversation, moments when they or those dear to them, or those known to those who were, had experienced scrapes and near misses, and not in traffic accidents either. Tales of flying masonry and shards of glass this size landing inches from heads, bullets lodged in window frames, cupboard doors, a headboard, if you could beat that (no one could); of a dressing table brought home from a furniture store with an unexploded incendiary device in the bottom drawer, an elderly aunt who had an actual heart attack when she went to put away her slips and briefs, and lived to fight and argue and generally be a pain in the BTM another day.

  Kurtis Bain’s songs were beginning to blend into one another. Diners started drifting out. The Post Office crowd went raucously just before the end of his second set. The applause when he took his final bow was enthusiastic but sparse.

  For all that he had been distracted for large chunks of his performance, Herbie didn’t want to leave without thanking the kid in person.

  He and the girl with the finger curls were sharing a hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows on top, two long spoons crossing in the ever-shrinking space between their mouths.

  ‘That was great,’ Herbie said. ‘I’ve got to ask you, but, where did you hear all that stuff?’

  Kurtis Bain succeeded in dragging his attention away from his girl. ‘My great-granny had these old reel-to-reel tapes, they were mouldering away for years in a box in the roof space, nearly got thrown out when my dad and his brothers were clearing out after she died. The guys who came to pick the skip up had the chains and all hooked on to the sides before I spied them and made a grab.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Nah.’ Kurtis Bain licked cream off his top lip. ‘YouTube.’ His girl bit down on her spoon, which is to say his. ‘I’m just working on my back story.’

  Derek arrived – just in time – at Herbie’s shoulder. ‘Everyone seemed to have a good night anyway,’ he said.

  Except Paul, Herbie wanted to say, and me for this last quarter of a minute of it, but, yeah, he said instead, it all went over well.

  ‘I must have looked a right fool back there,’ Beth said as they walked home. ‘A soldier!’

  ‘You’re across the water, you’re not to know that kind of thing still goes on.’

  ‘That’s not entirely true. I had a text a couple of years back from a girl in my class, Janet… Do you remember Janet?’ He didn’t. ‘She had really bad eczema.’ It wasn’t ringing a bell. ‘Oh, you know, her dad was a friend of someone you used to work with…’

  ‘She texted,’ Herbie said, rerouting her.

  ‘She did. A guy who used to sit in front of the two of us in RE was done for blowing some wee fella’s kneecaps off. I’m talking a married man, couple of kids of his own. I actually used to get on all right with him. I mean, he seemed as keen as the rest of us back then to steer clear of the real scumbags.’

  ‘I hate that word.’

  ‘Hate away, you didn’t have to go to school with them. The fights and things there used to be… and some of the other stuff went on. I’m telling you, they should have given us campaign medals at the end of it instead of certificates.’

  ‘You never told us any of this at the time.’

  ‘I never told you anything about anything. You wouldn’t have let me out of the house otherwise. And it wasn’t as if there wasn’t stuff going on in other schools. They are holding centres for the most emotionally volatile section of the entire population. What do you expect?’

  As they were turning into the street Herbie saw Peadar and Norrie come out of their gate at the far end and cut across to the pavement opposite, bent on some new mission.

  (‘Find the fucker who wrecked Paul’s car, Norrie. Find the fucker who wrecked Paul’s car.’)

  ‘Does that dog only have three legs?’ Beth asked out the corner of her mouth as the two drew near.

  ‘Yes, but don’t let on to it, it doesn’t know.’

  Peadar saluted. ‘Can’t stop.’ And didn’t. Nor did Norrie.

  4

  Next morning, bright and early, Tanya phoned.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Good morning to you too, Tanya.’

  ‘Beth messaged me last night. She says she’s in Belfast… and she’s bankrupt?’

  It was hard to say which she was struggling with more.

  ‘Sorry, I should have let you know before now.’

  ‘That stupid giraffe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The money box your mum and dad gave her.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Oh, come on: her third or fourth birthday.’

  ‘I always thought that was a zebra,’ Herbie said. A zebra, admittedly, designed by somebody who had never seen so much as a picture of one and had had it described by somebody who had never seen a zebra either.

  ‘It was stupid whatever it was. Martin says you should never give a child a piggy bank.’

  ‘Or giraffey.’

  ‘Don’t be funny. They never learn how to budget, they just hoard and splurge, hoard and splurge.’

  ‘She did all right up to now.’ He couldn’t quite understand how he had ended up acting for their daughter’s defence. Or maybe it was himself he was defending – him and Tanya both, together. We didn’t make a complete mess of things. A saying of his aunt June’s swam up from the depths. ‘Yous will know better with the next one.’ He pushed it down again with the same distaste as he had back then. ‘Anyway,’ he told Tanya, ‘you only have to turn on the news, bankruptcies have been running at record levels all over.’

  ‘Not the Crash again! I thought we were supposed to be over that.’

  ‘It’s like just when everyone else at school is starting to get better, your child goes and gets whatever it was that was doing the rounds.’

  Even before the sentence was fully out, he was transported back to the bathroom in Oriel, all yellows and blues and ornamental starfish. Beth kneeling on the floor, her head over the edge of the bath, sobbing, while he made lines in her hair with the pointed handle of a plastic comb on the hunt, sector by sector, follicle by follicle if need be, for nits. ‘The other girls are all saying they caught them from me…’

  ‘I still don’t know why she came to you,’ Tanya said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Tanya carried on over it. ‘She always found it easier to talk to me.’

  ‘Maybe it’s part of her bankruptcy conditions that she has to stay in the UK.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Tanya instantly sounded cheerier. ‘That’s probably what it is right enough. As long as
she gets out before they call a Border Poll.’

  ‘I think she’s safe a while yet.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure: the way things are going Up There. Even Down Here people who would never have given the Shinners the time of day are starting to say, Do you know what…?’

  Up There, Down Here. Tanya’s Ireland in a nutshell.

  She and Martin had met at a yoga retreat in Omeath, a few miles into the Irish Republic, and had moved steadily southwards, holing up for a bit, while separations were formalised, in a flat in Temple Bar (Martin’s maternal grandmother had grown up in it, though it was a whole different Temple Bar then, a whole different Dublin), moving on to Kilkenny for a couple of years, followed by three more in Kanturk, before taking up residence in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Schull, about fifteen miles short of the Mizen Head, from where it was pretty much next stop Cape Cod.

  It encouraged you, Tanya said, to take the long view.

  ‘Tell me you still have your Irish passport.’

  Passports – the need to hold more than one at a time – had always been a particular obsession of Tanya’s.

  ‘It’s expired. I have the renewal application in the kitchen drawer.’

  ‘I’d fill it in today if I was you and get it sent away. Martin says you might want to look at opening a bank account Down Here too. There’ll be currency controls next.’

  ‘How is Martin?’ Well, if Herbie was going to be treated to the gospel according to him…

  ‘He’s lying here beside me if you want to say hello.’

  Herbie thought he heard a light slap. Bare arse. A grunt. He saw it all: the rumpled bed, the light-walled room, the curtains open on to fields, glimpses of the Atlantic beyond.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘don’t disturb him.’

  *

  Actually, he hadn’t been completely straight with Tanya about the passport application form. It had been in the kitchen drawer (not, obviously, the kitchen drawer Tanya would have remembered, his-and-hers, though the function was the same), from way before the Referendum was even called. And he had thought in the days after the result that it mightn’t be a bad idea to get it in. Then he heard from Neeta that there had been such a rush of applications from north of the border and from people across the water whose great-grandparents had once spent a weekend in Galway that they had run out of passports in Dublin, and not wanting to look as though he was part of the general panic (the image in his mind was of helicopters taking off from embassy rooftops) he decided to hold off a while longer. And then other stuff went into the kitchen drawer. And then other stuff on top of that. When he did take the form out again he realised it had been signed and witnessed exactly three years previously. The notes said the photographs couldn’t be more than six months old. He tore the whole lot up. He would pick up another form. Soon.

  Beth came downstairs, still a touch bleary.

  ‘I’ve had your mum on the phone,’ he said.

  She yawned. ‘I texted her last night.’

  ‘She told me. She’s a bit put out you didn’t do it sooner.’

  That woke her. ‘This would be the same woman who notified me of her last change of address with a pre-printed postcard.’

  ‘I got one of those too.’

  ‘I don’t want to be harsh here, Dad, but she fell out of love with you. I’m her daughter. A little bit of forewarning would have been nice.’

  ‘From what I can gather it all happened very quickly.’ An elderly uncle of Martin’s, on his father’s side, last of three unmarried brothers, taken into a home.

  ‘Funny,’ she said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I used to take such comfort when I was small – nights I was lying tucked up in bed, or sitting in the back of the car listening to you and Mum talking in the front – thinking that we were this perfect unit, one of everything: mother, father, child… little heteronormative creature that I was. I couldn’t imagine any of it changing, ever – and now look at us, literally all over the place.’

  ‘You know you can stay here for as long as you need to.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘OK, but you can just the same.’

  She nodded. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and went into the bathroom. Came out again a minute or two later. ‘Another couple of weeks would be a help.’

  A couple of weeks passed, became a few.

  They met in the kitchen again one morning as he was making himself a sandwich to take to work.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘It’s not right. I can’t just be living here and not contributing.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s as easy and cheap to cook for two as one. Need I mention the lee—’

  She held up her hand: no more leeks, even in jest. ‘All right, but I was thinking I should look for some work.’

  ‘Can you work?’

  ‘Of course I can. The sooner the better, in fact.’

  ‘But then is it not up to the receiver to decide what you can and can’t do with your money?’

  ‘She’ll be fine with me paying you housekeeping.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘What’s the matter, not think a woman’s up to the job?

  ‘I just had never thought of it as an actual person.’

  ‘An actual person with an actual name. Polly. She’s lovely. Messages me a couple of times a week to see how I’m getting on. Fond of her emojis. Even has one for you. Where is it…?’ She dragged out her phone from her jeans pocket, performed a couple of quick swipes – ‘Ah!’ She showed him a face, careful to cover the rest of the message with her thumb: thick yellow moustache, tufts of yellow hair either side of a bald yellow head.

  ‘That’s me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She held the phone up, tilting the screen a little to the left and then to the right. ‘In a certain light…’

  ‘I can ask around, if you like.’

  ‘I was thinking I would make up some cards, call in a few places, see if they’re looking for anyone.’

  He left her sitting at the table with her water and lemon slice and his laptop, playing around with fonts and text effects.

  She was sitting there when he came home at four, a small stack of cards by her elbow: work wanted, anything considered, which wouldn’t have been quite the wording he would have suggested.

  ‘You haven’t been at that all day, have you?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I must have walked the whole of east Belfast. I was going to phone someone: I think I spotted a street that doesn’t have a Cash 4 Clothes shop on it yet.’

  ‘You’re not going to try and tell me it’s any different across the water.’

  ‘God, no, but when you look at all the money coming in here, those big new hotels down the town, they’re not exactly spreading the love, are they? Maybe if a few of those people getting their photos taken at the murals walked a couple of hundred feet and spent a few quid instead of getting back in their buses and their black taxis.’

  ‘I’m sorry if it was a wasted day.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say wasted.’ She searched for something in the shoulder bag hanging from the back of her chair. ‘See, I picked this up.’ She had pulled out an A5 flier in the local football team’s colours: pre-season friendly, the Saturday after next. Another search produced the ticket from the raffle at Sam’s. ‘You shall go to the football, Cinders!’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, you have been so good letting me stay all this time…’

  ‘I’m your father.’

  ‘Yeah, but even so, if anybody deserves that ticket’ – she pushed it across the table towards him as she spoke – ‘it’s you.’

  He pushed it back. ‘It was you won the raffle.’

  ‘I know, but’ – back to him – ‘take it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want’ – to her – ‘to deprive you.’

  ‘For the love of God. Please.’ Slumped across the table, arms outstretched, knuckles whitening as she held the ticket in both hands. ‘I’m beggin
g you. Take it.’

  Herbie had walked past the football ground every other day since he had moved here, with hardly a second glance.

  With its rendered concrete wall, corrugated-iron fences and enormous wooden gates, it was a throwback to another era, of rattles and bobble hats and alternating coloured scarves, that was already old when he was a boy. His father had taken him along to a few Home Internationals at Windsor Park while Herbie was still in primary school, although about the only things that stuck in his head, beyond the assault on the senses that was the men’s toilets (were there any other kind then?), were the crush on the railway bridge leading to the ground and his father’s disappointment that, once the match had kicked off, all Herbie wanted to know was how long it was to half time and if they were going to get a hot dog. What little interest he had had in the game then, the intervening years of crazy wages and blanket coverage had more or less completely put paid to.

  Still, for all her overacting, Beth had given him the ticket. He could always stick his head in for half an hour, just to tell her he had been.

  So it was, at five minutes to the hour appointed, on the Saturday after the Saturday after, he handed over the golden ticket at the turnstile, wondering if he had ever actually walked through one on his own, the convention in his primary-school days being that boys under a certain age could be handed up over the turnstile, free, by the adult who had brought them, or – in the case of boys who had turned up on spec – by any other adult whose eye and ear they could catch. ‘Mister, mister, lift us over…’

  The man operating the turnstile this afternoon, clocking Herbie’s ticket, asked him his name and squeezed his fingers through the gap in the glass for something like a shake before admitting him to a lopsided stadium – if that was the word: crumbling terraces to the left, a blank-faced redbrick pavilion or possibly social club beyond, and, to the right, across a low ditch, a grass bank rising steeply to the perimeter wall. It lacked only the watchtower to tell you all thoughts of escape were futile. The pitch in between, though, was unexpectedly lush and green in a way Herbie had not seen since his first time looking at a colour TV screen. Someone had invested an awful lot of time, and pride, in its preparation.