They talked the whole way back – across the Channel, up through England, Scotland, across the water again – to Larne where the boneshaker had left him less than a month before and where her brother was waiting at the terminal doors to pick her up in his bread van, Ormo it said on the side. (OMO boxes and lights flashing across the Rhine Valley already felt like another lifetime.) She placed a kiss chastely on his cheek. ‘Wait, how am I going to find you again?’ he asked, and she took hold of his wrist and wrote her number up his forearm – there – and signed it Tanya, with a little smiling flower of a full stop.
I mean, what were the chances?
*
He waited another two days before he rang Louise. ‘I knew you wouldn’t call yesterday,’ she said. ‘It’s like, nobody orders the first bottle of wine on the menu any more. They probably don’t even bother keeping the first bottle on the racks.’
‘I once phoned a girl from the phone box round the corner from her house,’ he said, ‘about a minute and a half after she gave me her number. Here she was, “Is that you, Herbie?” I said to her, “You surprised to hear from me so soon?” She said, “If you’re phoning from where I think you’re phoning from, I’m surprised you could even bear to step inside.” And swear to God it was only as she was saying that that the smell hit me, I’d been so puppy-dog keen to call her it was like all my other senses were suspended, and I looked down at the ground and…’
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘I get the picture. I take it all back, you were right not to rush in.’
He suggested a film, or a play. ‘I was thinking more of the two of us talking,’ she said, ‘rather than paying to listen to other people. Music’s OK, but not too much. Drink should definitely be involved.’
‘Hm, I’m beginning to see the outline of the sort of establishment you have in mind.’
‘Can you see bras hanging from the ceiling?’
‘I can now.’
‘Right, then, we’re flying. How is Tuesday night for you?’
‘A rare blank in an otherwise jam-packed calendar.’
‘We will grab it while we can then.’
He told Beth he was going out to meet a friend. It sounded unnatural even to his own ears.
‘Sam’s opening on Tuesdays as well as Thursdays now?’
‘Not Sam’s. In town.’
‘This is a bit of a departure,’ she said. ‘Tell me if it’s none of my business, but anyone I know?’
‘Her name’s Louise.’
She did the arched eyebrows thing at mention of ‘her’.
‘She works round in the M&S.’
‘First time meeting in the real world?’
He nodded.
‘She’s very lucky,’ she said, no trace now of tease. ‘And you look very smart, without looking like you were too worried about it.’
Which was nice of her, though entirely wrong. Because he had been worried, almost from the moment he had put down the phone to Louise. Who knew that two jackets, five shirts and three sweaters could throw up so many combinations? Though it was probably an immutable law that no matter how many there were you would revert in the end to the first one you tried.
The place with the bras on the ceiling (they were not so much hanging from as strung across, like bunting) was famous for… the bras on the ceiling, obviously, but also for occupying the site of what had once been Belfast’s smallest bar. Mind you, how it managed to be both on the site of and twice the size of was a feat no one had yet been able to explain to Herbie. He had been in it once when it was still the smallest bar. Another customer – the other customer – was talking to the barman about the bad old days of pub bombings and shootings.
‘You were lucky to come through it, all the same.’
‘Well, a fella did try to leave a bomb in here one night,’ the barman said, ‘but there was no room. Now, duck down there while I serve that man behind you.’
The present-day bouncers, one woman, one man, each flanked by a storage heater (first sign of the season changing), nodded as Herbie crossed the short forecourt and pushed open the door. Noise – beards – aroma of botanicals – air of immortality: how could this ever end, any of it?
He had been inside two minutes before he realised Louise was already there ahead of him, in a corner at the back of the room, beneath a wall-length frieze of glass display cases featuring hats and veils and mannequin heads. A little more austerely dressed than he had imagined, gold and blue patterned scarf, black pearl earrings.
She lifted her bag from the seat to make room for him. ‘I always make a beeline for this corner.’
‘You’re a regular?’
‘I drop in for a drink the odd time when I’m in town. I thought at least if you didn’t come the bar staff would be used to seeing me on my own.’
‘Why would I not have come?’
‘I don’t know. You could have been hit by a bus. It’s a rare occurrence, but pianos have been known to drop.’
He dragged a hand across his forehead. ‘I feel like I’ve had a narrow escape.’
‘Celebrate every day, I say.’
‘In that case, what will you have to drink?’
‘Surprise me.’
‘I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.’
‘Cocktail of the day, then.’
He battled through to the bar and ordered two. No liquid darker than water in the mix, though honeycomb was also enlisted, the hard kind he was brought up to call Yellow Man. She asked him as soon as he came back with the drinks – held high above his head – about his marriage.
‘Might as well get it out of the way… Leaver or left?’
He could have asked her why she presumed he had been married, but let’s face it, she had presumed right. ‘Left.’
‘Relieved or bereft?’
‘Somewhere in between.’
‘We’ll call that rereft. Long ago?’
He blew his cheeks out. ‘Some days it feels like another lifetime.’
‘And have you done much of this sort of thing since?’
‘Let me see, this must be the…’ Counting on his fingers, left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand, then back to the left again, stopping at the index finger, ‘first. And what about you?’
‘See when you were doing the actual adding up on your fingers there? That, and then some.’
‘I actually meant your marriage. Who did the leaving there?’
She took a moment, tilted her glass. Clack, went the Yellow Man. ‘I would have left him, but…’
‘There’s always a but,’ he was about to say and was instantly glad he didn’t.
‘… but the cops got to him first.’ She turned the glass on its mat a couple of times. Clack, clack, clack. ‘Indecent images,’ she said. ‘Thousands and thousands of them. His hard drive was like a warehouse where other creeps like him came to browse and buy. He was some sort of celebrity in those circles. I had no idea, I mean none whatsoever, but nobody believes you. If it had been some other woman in my position I probably wouldn’t have believed her: seriously, I’d have been, how could you spend all that time with someone and not know? But it was me, and, I swear, I didn’t. I got so tired of having to say it I was nearly going to get cards printed and deliver them door to door, but it was less of a heartache in the end just to sell up and move to another part of town.’
‘So, you did leave, sort of.’
‘I’d have been better off leaving the country altogether. I still see people the odd time, from where I used to be, they’ll come into the store, half an hour to kill before a big concert down the road in the Odyssey’ (this didn’t seem the moment to remind her that the arena in question had sloughed off the O, the d and both the ys), ‘and it’s all, ah, Louise, how are you keeping, haven’t seen you for an age, but they can’t get away fast enough. You’d think I had a contagion.’
‘That first time I met you,’ he said, ‘I was embarrassed for days afterwards.’
‘You stared.’
‘I
did and I’d have been even more embarrassed if I had known all that. You were probably thinking to yourself, oh brilliant, here’s another one come to stand and gawp.’
‘No, gawping’s different. Your sort of staring stopped annoying me a long time ago.’ Then, ‘Wait,’ she said, to herself as it sounded, ‘that came out wrong. It’s just. People have this reaction, women as well as men, they think they recognise me but they’ve no idea how.’
She had turned as she said this until she was looking him straight in the face or rather letting him look at her, her features composed as though for a game of charades. She held her hands up in front of her face, fingers spread. Ten letters? Ten syllables? Ten words?
‘I’m sorry…’
‘Billboards?’ she said.
Add a little sparkle to her Christmas with a diamond from… ‘You’re not a hand model, are you?’
She let both hands drop into her lap, palms up.
‘Have you been watching Zoolander?’ He looked at her blankly. She shook her head – never mind – raised her hands again, spoke out from behind them. ‘The fingers are supposed to represent prison bars. Don’t be locked in by despair…’
‘Call the Samaritans today… Oh, God, yeah, I remember now. That was you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But those used to be everywhere. Them and the confidential telephone number… and… and that was about it. You and the RUC, you had the market cornered.’
‘I know. But you couldn’t really see it was me, that was the point of the ad.’
And right enough, when he tried now to call it to mind, he still couldn’t have said what colour her hair was.
‘And were you, then?’
‘Locked in by despair? A Samaritan? I was married to the photographer.’
‘You mean… Oh.’
‘Sorry, I left that bit out. Lots of those images the cops found, that warehouse he had built up, he took them himself.’ She looked him straight in the face again. ‘It crossed your mind there too, didn’t it? “Really and truly, how could she not know?”’
‘That wasn’t what I was thinking at all.’
She held his gaze a moment or two longer then took a drink. Moving on. ‘I didn’t just work with him. I did other bits and pieces. I nearly had a national campaign once, a magazine ad for brandy. I went over to London to do the shoot and of course there was fake snow everywhere and a massive great St Bernard that kept wanting to stick its bloody tongue in my ear, up my sleeve, anywhere it spied an inch of bare flesh, which in those days as you can probably imagine was pretty much everywhere. Ended up I grabbed hold of one of its ears and said, listen, Buster, any more of that you’re getting this bottle right over your head.’
‘You’re just right.’
‘I don’t know if I was. The ad agency people had me into my own clothes and in a taxi back to Heathrow before you could say… think of something dog-related.’
‘Woof?’
‘Woof? You missed your calling. Anyway, apparently the female humans were interchangeable. The dog was the star. The bloody St Bernard.’
From where it was a very short step indeed to Herbie’s telling her about Norrie, and about how he had taken rescue dog the wrong way the first time Peadar had said it. She agreed with Peadar, he was, in fairness, a bit of a dope. For a while after that, all the same, they swapped scenarios – supermarket shoppers dragged by their collars from beneath avalanches of two-for-one extra-soft toilet rolls; pairs of shoes, laced together, liberated from the telegraph wires where they had been dangling for decades: the grace of Norrie as he glided along, Great Blondin style, on his one firm back paw…
There was a break then for a replenishing of glasses, on the far side of which Louise crossed the species divide and started telling him about the cat sanctuary where she had worked one summer between O Levels and A Levels – not much more than a big shed out the back of some woman’s house, half a dozen rows of cages stacked two or three high, with these cats people had handed in, kittens most of them, often entire litters at a time, or the odd boy cat that turned out to be a girl.
The woman had started with a stray that turned up on her back step looking to be fed and it had just kept growing from there. Of course, it couldn’t just go on and on expanding, there needed to be cats going out as well as coming in. She had like an open day, every couple of Saturdays, and there’d always be a few would get adopted, but nowhere like enough. The hardest of all to find homes for – no surprise – were the older ones, family pets whose owners had died or grown too frail to care for them. The woman who ran the place had the idea of attaching little slate boards next to the cage doors with their occupants’ names and ages and a little about their background and temperament – ‘quite a shy cat’, ‘a very comfortable cat around children’, ‘fond of having his tummy tickled’ – humanising is not the word, but you know, giving them a personality. And it worked. People started talking to them, through the bars of their cages – ‘So you like snooker on the telly, do you? Well me too’ – and then the next thing they would be wanting to take them out and stroke them, by which time, of course, the deal was sealed.
There was this one, but, Louise said, right at the end of a row, third cage up, big tabby, just sat there all day every day hunched up, the way they do, staring out. And do you know what was on his board? ‘Mike, a…’ then a whole big swirl of rubbed-out stuff – you know the way they used to do in the Beano or the Dandy when there was a fight? Like that, and then underneath it, ‘cat’. Because whatever you wrote about him he would only go and make a lie of it. So, Mike, a… cat: that’s what he was.
‘There’s something noble in that, all the same,’ Herbie said.
‘Noble?’ Louise shook her head. ‘No, not Mike: a cat, like the board said, nothing more.’
‘Tell me there’s a happy ending at least, somebody comes in looking for a cat, nothing more.’
‘I don’t know. I went back to school at the end of the summer with the intention of keeping up my Saturday mornings there, but I didn’t last more than a couple of weeks. Last I saw of Mike he was sitting in his cage exactly like he always sat. He was like a lifer: the entire rest of the population had changed since I started there. Actually that was the autumn I met him.’ The now ex-husband, former photographer, current convicted sex offender, she meant. ‘I’d no time or thought for anything else, not even my schoolwork in the end, which is partly why I ended up being a lollipop for a St Bernard. It was all, sure why would you want to go away to university? Sure we can have as good a life here the two of us.’ She picked up her glass, brought it to just short of her mouth, stopped. ‘Baz,’ she said flatly, ‘a cunt.’
The bar had grown loud around them, the spill from the conversations to the right and the left of them too great to compete with. They finished their drinks and put on their coats and went on to somewhere nearby, quieter, less of what you might call bravura, more of what you would call red leather club chairs. Which they eschewed, ordering a drink instead sitting up at the bar.
‘I don’t think we should sleep together tonight,’ she said when they were getting to the end of it. (A barman glanced up from wiping glasses. Dipped his head a little lower as he resumed lest they should see him smirking.) ‘I mean I’m assuming it had crossed your mind too.’
Crossed it to the extent that he had – God help him – checked the use-by on the condoms in the drawer next to his bed, one of which, with six good months still left to it, was in the wallet in his hip pocket.
‘I wasn’t ruling it out entirely, no.’
‘Let’s give it one more night.’
‘All right.’
*
He had ended up paying for the odd round in three, so she insisted on booking them each a cab, paid for – appracadabra! – before he even had time to argue.
‘So of the several handfuls of nights like that you’ve had,’ he said and got no further. She put her arms up, linking her hands at the back of his head.
‘Surprisingly few of them even got as far as this,’ she said and kissed him and he had truly truly forgotten how that felt, to lose yourself so utterly, become mere mouth. Mouths.
A phone beeped. One became two again. ‘That’ll be our taxis,’ she said. She turned her head to check, arms still about his neck, then turned again, head bowed, laughing into his chest.
The taxi drivers sat at their wheels, scowling, disapproving parents waiting for their teenage children.
‘And that’s you probably grounded,’ he said.
She left another kiss on his lips and ran.
The reason for his own driver’s scowl became more apparent the second Herbie got into the car beside him. His seat resembled nothing so much as an orthopaedic bed in the upright position, headrest doubling as neck brace. There was even a sports drink bottle fitted into a bracket on the door jamb by his right ear, a metal straw coming from it that he could drink from with just a quarter turn of his head. Herbie asked the obvious question (it was a taxi after all, the home of the obvious question): ‘Bad back?’
The taxi driver grimaced, addressing his answer to the wing mirror, as he found reverse then first gear. ‘Bad back, bad hip, bad knee, can’t feel my toes, as my oul lad used to say, I need rubbed out and redrew.’
‘I suppose sitting in the car all day…’
The taxi driver turned his martyr’s eyes on Herbie’s. ‘Murder picture. You’d want your head examined doing the like of this week in week out.’
Herbie thought better of the next obvious question, but the driver answered it anyway, pulling down the sun visor, into which was tucked a photograph. He pulled out an inch or two.
‘See that there?’ he said. A steeply sloping field, scrubby grass and boulders. ‘That’s the only reason I put up with all of this. Mine, all the way down to – it’s hard to make it out on this – the wee river at the end here.’ Two taps of the forefinger. He pushed the photograph back and flipped the visor up again. ‘Best part of an acre. I’m going to build a bungalow on it, right at the top. The views in the other direction are nothing ordinary: lake, mountains, forests, the whole shebang. I’m putting floor-to-ceiling glass in all the way round.’
Where Are We Now? Page 8
