‘Let’s try and do it again this year,’ Beth said.
‘I don’t mean to dilute the Christmas spirit…’
‘But does he take IOUs?’
‘I wouldn’t have put it like that exactly. Do you need to check in with your receiver?’
‘I keep telling you, Polly’s cool with everything.’
He shut the front door. She took a couple of steps into the hallway, stopped. ‘Wait, did I dream it, or did you tell me when I was small one of your uncles used to give you IOUs for Christmas?’
‘He only did the once. Robin. He was always a wee bit odd, lived on his own.’
‘Ah’ – she turned her head this way and that and this again – ‘have you looked around you lately?’
‘Not odd because he lived on his own. Odd and he did. Most years he gave all us nephews a bottle of Brut. I must have been eight when I got my first one. Don’t ask me what I got from him before that. Soap on a rope. Then one year, I don’t know, maybe the Brut boat sank or was hijacked, he sent us an envelope, no card or anything, with an IOU…’
‘… one bottle of Brut.’
‘Item, one bottle of Brut, was how he wrote it. Brought the bottle round eventually in the middle of February. Your granny was completely deadpan. Here she was, “Herbie, stop playing with your Lego there. What do you say to your uncle Robin?”’
‘Did I ever meet him?’
‘Oh, no, he was long dead by the time you were born. Tragic really.’
‘I think I can guess…’
‘Well, I don’t remember ever hearing the term then, but looking back I’d say it was Early Onset Alzheimer’s.’
‘That’s a relief. I thought for a minute you were going to tell me it was Troublesitis.’
He wished he could have said he shared her relief. At least they seemed to have found a cure for Troublesitis, or the most virulent strain of it at any rate.
(Paul could testify to the persistence of a milder, but occasionally still just as dangerous strain.)
He wondered about those moments of profound detachment he had been experiencing in recent months. Was that how it began, the other thing? Was that how it began for Robin? There must have been a boy Robin once, teen too, a whole host of Robins, even eventually the Brut bringer, looking at him blankly from shore as the ship finally slipped its moorings. Drifted. Rudderless.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve any Baileys?’ she said.
First drink they had ever let her have, when she was – fourteen? Younger? – this time of year too probably. ‘Tastes like melted rum-and-raisin ice cream. I love it.’
He told her to check the top shelf of the cupboard next to the fridge. She did, and he had, Bushmills too, pushed right to the back, behind the other things he had no real use for these days, beater attachments, birthday candles, methylated spirits. She held the bottle up, angled, to the kitchen light. ‘Enough for about two eggcupfuls, I’d say.’
‘You can have mine.’
‘That would defeat the whole purpose: it’s a toast! Besides I don’t think I could stomach more than a single eggcup any more.’
They toasted the wreath, the season, and that was their glasses pretty much drained.
A couple of evenings later, there was a knock at the door.
Herbie opened it to two men he had never seen before. Thirties. The haircut of the moment. A Canada goose emblem on the shoulder of one jacket, a cord collar on the waxed body of the other. It was cord-collar man who spoke.
‘Nice wreath.’
‘Nice of you to knock to tell me,’ said Herbie. He was already halfway to what was coming next.
‘We’re from the Christians All Together Church.’
‘I’m not really interested.’
A tilt of the head. ‘In what?’
‘Whatever it is you have come here to say.’
‘Apart from the compliment about the wreath, you mean.’
‘I’m even slightly sorry you said that now.’
The man pulled a little sideways smile. ‘Would it surprise you if I told you I was as defensive as you are the first time someone from the church turned up on my doorstep?’
Herbie understood what was happening here, classic hustler’s technique, draw the mark into a conversation, don’t let him disengage. Understood, but couldn’t stop himself. ‘I’m not being defensive, I just want to get on with my evening.’
‘I said life.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I asked the person who turned up on my doorstep to leave me to get on with my life. Although’ – there was the sideways smile again – ‘I may not have put it quite so politely.’
‘I can vouch for that.’ The Canada goose man spoke for the first time. He might actually have been Canadian. North American at any rate. ‘It was me called at his door.’
The first man nodded. ‘And, do you know what? Before the night was out, the pair of us were kneeling together right there in my hallway.’
He pointed past Herbie as though it had been right there in his.
Herbie looked from one expectant face to the other, then slowly sank down on to his knees, hands joined in supplication beneath his nose. ‘Please, please, please,’ he said, three taps of the hands against his chin and top lip, ‘will the two of you turn around this minute and walk down my path?’
And with a shake of the head that suggested they knew better – would always know better – that was what they did.
‘And shut the gate after you.’
They did that too. Or cord collar did. Left a hand on it a moment. ‘We’ll pray for you.’
‘Whatever makes you happy,’ Herbie said, because he was damned if he was going to let them have the last word. Damned too if he was going to have them still standing at the gate staring when he tried – son of a bitch – to get up off his knees.
*
Louise had mentioned on one of their early dates that she had gone away the past few years over Christmas and New Year, skiing in Slovenia. She preferred to use her annual leave then, she told him, cut down on the opportunities the season provided for sitting and thinking what an utter car crash her life had turned into.
‘Until you met me.’
‘Goes without saying.’
One early December afternoon as she got up from his bed to get ready for her two-to-ten shift, he asked her if she would like to spend this Christmas with him and Beth.
She turned. ‘Have you talked this through with Beth?’
‘Well, she asked me what you normally did.’ (She didn’t. Didn’t talk about Louise much at all.) ‘You could just come for part of it, skip dinner, join us later for turkey sandwiches, or just go for a walk.’
She looked down the length of her face at her chest. She had missed a button. ‘Attractive though that sounds’ – there, that was it fixed – ‘I think I am going to throw in my lot one more time with the Skingletons down in the Julian Alps. After some of the states they’ve seen me in, I feel I owe them at least that.’
‘That’s not really what yous call yourselves, is it?’
‘Skingletons? More like they and themselves, but, yes, I’m afraid it is.’
‘Do you think that might be part of their problem right there?’
She launched herself back on to the bed beside him, fingers seeking out his armpits. ‘Listen to you, doling out relationship advice!’
He writhed, curled into a ball, fended her off with a pillow, play-bellowed finally and jack-knifed forward, but she was out the door and down the stairs before he had set so much as a foot on the ground.
They had their own mini Christmas the night before the night before she left. (An early morning flight out of Dublin; she didn’t want to be cutting short the time they had or to spend it worrying about not waking up for the 4.30 Air Coach.) They went to a new rooftop hotel bar where, by Herbie’s reckoning, they added between them five years to the average age of the few dozen revellers already installed. They mooched about by the doors on to the narrow,
wall-length balcony – the very thing, seen from the street, that had enticed them in – until a table came free. It meant having to keep their coats on, even with the patio heaters planted every three or four feet going full blast. The view was over a high corrugated fence painted grey with black and red diagonal flashes, into a former police barracks. Or a former police barracks in the process of becoming a modern police station. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘for the longest time I had no idea what was actually in there. I used to think from the fence it was a DIY store.’
‘That reminds me of the graffiti: Help the RUC…’
‘Beat yourself up! Even my old fella laughed at that one and he was the type would have got up and switched off the TV if there was somebody on it complaining about police brutality.’
‘The famous Belfast black humour… Wouldn’t you just have liked to grow up in a po-faced place with no bombs instead of one that prided itself on the speed with which it turned a tragedy into a gag?’
To the left a hundred yards, the Albert Clock offered them two of its four moon faces. The Cave Hill jutting out in black profile against the navy-blue sky was a head thrown back in silent howl. The clock hands went from downturned moustaches to evil villain eyebrows in the time it took them to finish off the bottle of wine they had ordered without realising how little appetite they had for it. Sheer bloody-minded Protestantism got them through it in the end. We’re not paying that sort of money just to leave half of it sitting there!
They were on their last glass – shoulder to shoulder, and hand in hand beneath the table – when she reached sideways into her bag for a package, at more or less the same moment as he produced one from his overcoat pocket.
‘Ha!’ they said in unison.
They sat a moment, comparing wrapping paper and techniques. (Hers was nicer, his was neater.) ‘Save for Christmas Day?’ he said.
‘Fuck that.’
‘One, two, three…’
They unwrapped, he a book about walking along the border, she… a book about walking along the border. ‘Well, what do you know about that?’ she said. It wasn’t as if it was even something they had ever talked about. ‘Curious to say the least,’ he said.
‘I heard it…’
‘On the radio…’
‘And I thought…’
‘Me too.’
As they descended in the lift at the end of their night, he wondered aloud whether the upstairs bar would slowly detach itself and float away without the ballast of their extra years to weight it down.
‘It did OK before we got there,’ she said. ‘Anyway, some of those faces in there I don’t think would bear too much scrutiny.’
Between the wine, the season, the prospect of not seeing one another for more than a fortnight, they thought about venturing down into the underpass just along from the hotel’s entrance for a more than goodnight kiss but caught themselves on in the nick of time and wrapped their arms around one another where they stood on the footpath, mouths meeting… almost. Her hand came round from behind his back, stopping him short.
‘Ahm, how do I say this? Your softback’s digging into me.’
Shit. His overcoat pocket. He pulled the book out, bending back the cover in the process, revealing the inscription: his handwriting, his sweated-over, fretted-over words. ‘Actually this one’s yours… Sorry.’
She took it with her left hand and with her right gave him the one with the looping Love Louise on the flyleaf, the single x. She smoothed out the crease. Sort of. ‘At least now we’ll be able to tell them apart the moment we lift them down from the shelf.’
She looked him in the eye as she said it, then put her arms around his neck again the way she did the first time they kissed. It was something of a signature move and every bit as beguiling now as it was then. More, maybe. Yes, more. Everything was more. The word seemed to expand until it filled his entire being, in his head, in his mouth, in his hands on her waist.
When she unlocked her own hands its first letter was still on his lips. Mmmm.
‘Is that going to do us, do you think, until I get back?’
‘It’ll just have to.’
*
He and Beth rose early on Christmas Eve morning and caught the bus into town. The lower deck couldn’t have been more than a third full and when they walked upstairs to see if the front window seats were free, they found the top deck completely empty.
Maybe another bus had gone by, full, just before they arrived at the stop. Or maybe once again the whole festive season had peaked a little early.
The Christmas market had been taken down and packed away the afternoon before, all its churros and Schwenkgrilles and zoo burgers, its galettes and glühwein, its scented candles and hand-tooled leather, gone, leaving nothing for yards on end around the tree in the grounds of the City Hall but a muddy mess, Whoville after the Grinch had been. The shop windows along Donegall Place, running away from the City Hall’s front gates, had their sales signs up – some of them had never taken them down – and there was a general air of a second Sunday in the month (April, going by the weather), money all spent, and energy with it. Then cutting through it all came the sound of a violin, amplified by a horn attachment, at once louder and thinner, but playing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and it came back to him that this had always been his favourite part of Christmas, ticking off the last things on the to-do list, knowing that after this it was home, the front door closed not to be opened again until Boxing Day. And maybe after all that was why the bus had been so empty: the turning inwards already underway.
He emptied his pockets of coins as he passed the violin player and dropped them into his open case. The man nodded, smiled. Beth apologised, trying to convey by hand gestures alone that she had to hold on to her money this morning. The man nodded again, smiled again, played on regardless.
A little further on, where Royal Avenue kinked across North Street, and where there were still the vestigial remains of the Seventies’ Ring of Steel the last time he and Beth had done this, a long vista of building works opened up – a new campus for the University of Ulster, and hundreds of studio flats for the students who would attend it. The city was about to take a Great Leap Northwards into places he suspected he would never live to experience fully. He and Beth, though, turned east, at what his own father had taught him to call Blitz Square, on to Donegall Street – the old newspaper street, now, in its upper reaches, two long lines of restaurant and bar signs. A different place entirely. The cathedral at this lower end and the Dean standing on the kerb before it were almost the only constants, or – since this current Dean was the fourth or fifth descendant of the original Black Santa – the Dean’s cape was, as though that was where the power was invested and the human beings took turns holding it up for a while.
The bishop from the Catholic cathedral on the west side of the Royal Avenue junction was keeping him company this morning. There was something in their various scarves and snoods and gloves over gloves that suggested the make-do of the trenches. Foot soldiers both in a war that showed no sign of ending. It was the bishop who lifted the lid for Beth to place her money in the wooden collecting barrel, standing, where a brazier might have, between them.
‘God bless you,’ the Dean said and reinforced the sentiment with a raised right hand.
‘Merry Christmas,’ Beth and Herbie chimed.
Beth took his arm as they walked away, up Donegall Street towards the old Assembly Rooms, snuggling up close. ‘I never told you,’ she said, when they were well out of earshot, ‘but he used to terrify me.’
‘Black Santa? But, wait, you asked to come, and you always seemed so happy.’
‘Yeah, afterwards: tribute to the troll to ward off evil for another year.’
‘So nothing to do with charity?’
‘Oh, that too, that first probably, but you know how kids turn every little thing into good and bad juju. I was more scared of what would have happened if I had missed.’
A beer bike went acro
ss the end of the street. Santa hats, Weiss beer and women’s voices Wizzarding.
Despite the sales there too, Christmas was still going strong round in the artfully deconstructed shopping centre that was Victoria Square, to where, describing an almost complete circle from (or was it to?) their bus stop, they wound their way next. They leaned on the mezzanine rail and looked down at a primary-school children’s choir ranged before the flawless (because entirely artificial) Christmas tree, singing about bells ringing and other children singing and all being merry and bright.
‘Are you going to hang a sock on the fireplace?’ Herbie asked, taking his lead from the song, and thinking of the big multicoloured stripy thing she had had when she was small, the toe reaching almost to the hearth, and the neck – when they held it up against her – to the tip of her nose.
‘I might just.’
They wandered through a while, not talking much, not buying anything, barely even looking. It was the crowd they craved, the sense of common purpose, which was simply to be there, finally. They decided on hot ports (the second drink he and Tanya had let her have) in the Kitchen Bar, somewhere not a hundred miles from where the old Kitchen Bar used to be. He had met Alice Clark there one Saturday afternoon, the autumn after the summer trip they had started together and ended apart. She apologised for leaving him high and dry like that. She hardly knew herself what had come over her, other than that she was far from home, and all sense of right and wrong, and, well, the guy had turned out to be a shit – slept with her friend from Guides as well – but even if he hadn’t, she would have regretted it. Did regret it. Herbie had been her first, and she knew she had been his, and that had to mean something, hadn’t it?
And he had had to say to her, it’s too late, Alice. Much, much, much too late.
In America, heading up her own law firm, last he heard.
‘OK,’ Beth said when she had squeezed the last of the port from her lemon with the heel of the spoon and drunk it down, ‘now we’re ready.’
She didn’t hang up a sock in the end. He put a few small things in a pillowcase and hung it on her door handle, the way they had started to do once she hit her teens. Chocolates, a novel, the DVD of a film she had complained had dropped off Netflix.
Where Are We Now? Page 12
