She had already accepted, grudgingly and with embarrassment, that her big present was going to be invisible, an electronic money transfer.
She gave him – oh very funny – a bottle of Brut at breakfast the next morning, then, just long enough after that he had begun to wonder (though he understood, of course he did), passed him a long, pale blue envelope, containing…
‘A fixture list.’
‘I couldn’t quite run to a season ticket, even there, and anyway it’s half over, but they said if you just picked half a dozen you fancied…’ Her voice tailing away. ‘You seemed to get such a kick out of it last time you went.’
‘I did,’ he said. ‘I’d been meaning to get back.’
She sat forward then. ‘They were saying that when I went in to buy it. Soon as I said your name, here they all were, “Ach, sure tell Herbie to just turn up on the days, we’ll look after him.”’
And there was one other thing. She stood and cleared her throat and recited – with only a couple of glances down at the text on her phone – Leigh Hunt’s Christmas poem: ‘What! do they suppose that every thing has been said that can be said about any one Christmas thing?’, followed by a long list of many an early 1800s Christmas thing about which you could never say enough (hackins, Julklaps and wad-shooting being three of the more dubious, saluting the apple trees one of the more surreal), culminating in the greatest plum pudding for the greatest number…
Beth by way of full stop, and for want of the thing itself, bit into another mince pie – the twenty-fifth of Christmas – and immediately clutched her stomach.
‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to eat my dinner before midnight.’
Tanya Skyped later in the morning from Bali, where it was already Christmas night. The fairy lights behind her swayed in the sea breeze. She and Martin – he was somewhere offscreen – appeared to have spent the eight hours’ time difference drinking sparkling Shiraz. ‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, lots,’ she said and collapsed sideways in a fit of giggles, till Martin’s hand, or its extended forefinger, entered the frame and righted her… for twenty seconds… until she toppled out the other side.
‘Wow, I’ve never seen her so pissed,’ Beth said when they had rung off. ‘Or so…’
‘Happy?’
‘At one with herself.’
He was going to ask her if there was a difference, but it would have sounded like he was taking issue with her general point, and really there was no arguing with that.
Beth, in matters of Christmas at least, a believer in the physical object, had insisted too on buying cards. The day before Christmas Eve he went up and down the street pushing envelopes through letterboxes where there was no one at home, knocking if he saw a light. ‘Just wanted to say Happy Christmas – no, not stopping…’ He wound up at the gate of the house directly opposite, Audrey Bannon’s. He nearly didn’t bother, but, ah, what the heck. He walked up the path – thought as he reached the door he could hear a TV somewhere in the rear, or maybe from upstairs. He knocked. Waited. Nothing. As expected. He pushed the card through the letterbox anyway, with best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. ‘I doubt you’ll thank me for it,’ he muttered as he closed the gate behind him.
So it was one of the bigger surprises that Christmas Day when, just after darkness fell, he heard the kitten mewl of his own letterbox rising and falling and pulled back the curtain to find a card lying on the hall floor. ‘Herbie and Daughter’ it said on the front. She had put the house number in brackets after her signature.
‘Do you think she was worried you wouldn’t know who she was without it?’ Beth asked.
‘I think maybe she is finally starting to admit to herself she lives there.’
They cleared the table after their late, late dinner and played a board game. Or read the rules and tried to set a board game up. It was like someone had torn a novel apart and shuffled the pages. Finnegans Wake, maybe. Then asked you to roll a double six to see them. One at a time. Actually it was like one of the games he remembered Beth playing with her friends when she was small, which were all scene-setting and name-choosing and deciding how the parents had died – because the parents, it was agreed without it ever having to be said, had to be dead – and then – ‘Beth! your tea’s ready!’ – everything put on hold until tomorrow when the names and scenes and causes of death would be debated all over again.
In place of the call to tea tonight was the sound of a message arriving on Beth’s phone.
‘Aw, that’s so nice of her.’ She turned the phone so he could see the message. He recognised the sender – which is to say the Receiver – by the Old Geezer emoji. ‘Taking time out of her Christmas Day like that.’
He did think about asking whether that might be considered to be going above and beyond, just a touch… But he held his tongue: some people were just nice.
Beth texted back. Got another in return. That happened two or three times more. The board game was quietly forgotten.
He finished the day as he had begun it, with a rapid back and forth of texts of his own with Louise. A quiet Christmas she had had. Exactly as she had wanted it. A walk along the lake shore, lunch with her friends, a couple of glasses of wine. There was a party just starting, but she wasn’t going to go to it. ‘I never do,’ she added.
‘I’m going to read my book now,’ he wrote at last.
‘Me too. Think of me, I’ll think of you.’
He read as far as page two and awoke in the wee small frozen hours with it open on his chest. He set it on the floor beside his bed. The border would still be there in the morning.
It was there six mornings later, thirty pages or so further traversed, when he opened his eyes on New Year’s Day.
His resolution that year as every year, made as he lay in bed waiting for his alarm, was do less, better.
The ‘less’ he felt he had maybe made some headway on. One of these years he would get to grips with the ‘better’.
One of these years he would learn how to focus on a single task to the exclusion of all others, work out finally what he was all about. He turned on to his back and listened to his breathing, the long slow in and accelerating out of it. Wouldn’t it be funny if that was what it turned out to be? The ultimate point of him. Keep doing that… i-i-i-i-n andout, i-i-i-i-n andout, i-i-i-i-n andout, i-i-i-i-n and
Stop.
Alarm.
Go.
Twenty-eighteen.
9
Sam and Derek had heeded their solicitor’s advice and rented a place up the North Antrim coast where at nights they sat before the open fire, tumblers of whiskey in hand, and plotted their reopening. As the weeks dragged on and the cost of the trade lost mounted, their plans were scaled back, from glitzy to grand, from grand to statement, from statement to Sam just walking up to the door in the end on the fourth morning of the year and turning the sign back the way it had been facing before Derek stepped into the yard ten weeks before and saw the rat.
Business that first week was slow. There was the inevitable Christmas hangover, of course, January pay cheques received a week early and already half spent. But they had to face the fact, too, a rat was a rat, however it got there, and the memory of it was going to be ten times harder to erase than the physical trace.
At least the Post Office staff returned, walked across the road, each at his or her designated tea break time, and pushed open the door as though it had never been shut at all. Sam and Derek at the counter.
‘The usual?’
‘The usual.’
Herbie was in there before any of them for his own usual. He met Neeta as he was settling up with Derek.
‘How are things across there?’ Derek asked her.
‘Starting to run the stock down now we’ve Christmas out of the way,’ she said, although every time Herbie had been in there in the lead-up there had seemed to be more bare shelves than there were actual goods for sale.
‘Including the greetings cards?’ he asked.
‘Oh dear God, no,’ Neeta said. ‘Those things will never shift. I swear, some of them must predate me.’
The postmaster had told her and the rest of the staff before the holiday not to expect to see him more than a couple of times a week once they got back. He would be spending most of his days from here on in briefing his successor in the filling station half a mile away.
‘Is that still the word for it, do you think?’ Neeta asked. ‘I mean, they already have a bakery, a butcher, a dry-cleaner’s and a greengrocer in there. And now a Post Office counter?’
If it went on like this there would just be them and the CATCH left. God versus Big Oil. And a load of little cafes and charity shops in between fighting for the scraps.
‘I remember I used to think it was great when that filling station started doing peanuts beside the till,’ Neeta said. ‘I never dreamed they would end up swallowing up everything else.’
‘Well, I suppose they’re seeds, aren’t they, peanuts?’ Derek said. ‘It all grows from there.’
The people working in it were sound, Neeta was quick to add, couldn’t be more apologetic any time she was in, sure they had used that Post Office themselves from when they were no age – first savings accounts, premium bonds, cashing grandparents’ postal orders. (Yeah, but did you ever buy a card?) Say, though, she was, I don’t know – eighty-five; say she didn’t have a car; say even walking to the shops was getting hard for her, was she really going to fancy taking her chances on that forecourt, those big four-wheel-drive things people drove now? She didn’t think so. Mind you, she wasn’t so sure she would fancy it either going in there on a Monday morning with a carrier bag full of cash, trying to pick her way through the people queuing for the baker, the butcher, the greengrocer… the dry-cleaner.
‘You’re not telling us,’ said Herbie, ‘you think you are an easy touch over there?’
‘I prefer “more straightforward proposition”: it’s a square box of a room with a door in one wall and a counter facing. No nasty surprises lurking, no clients under the age of seventy most of the time who could pounce the minute your back is turned.’
‘I suppose it’s like any other line of work, you have to ensure the smoothest possible running. I mean they have their materials – shopkeepers, amusement arcade owners, what have you – they have their particular set of tools…’
‘Which they don’t even have to use, just the thought that they have them at all is enough. That’s probably the best tool in the whole kit.’
‘Probably, and off they go every day…’
‘And night…’
‘… to extract maximum value from their materials, see that it’s safely deposited.’
‘I suppose when you put it like that. You’d nearly want to put your hand in your own pocket.’
‘If one of theirs wasn’t there first.’
They were so caught up in their little three-way riff they had none of them clocked the door opening.
‘You know if they even heard you talking like that, they would shove a pipe bomb through your letterbox?’
They all looked round at the same time. Paul.
With a stick.
He used it to turn a seat towards him, table nearest the door, and sat down into it. ‘The usual,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Jesus, Paul, is that still from your accident?’
‘Depends which accident you’re talking about.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve had another one?’
He shook his head. ‘See this place?’ he said.
*
A couple of weeks before Christmas Paul had collected an enormous order of pizzas for delivery to a house where there was a party going on: fifteen monster deep-pan meat feasts and a dozen garlic pizza breads with cheese; over £250 worth. Took him ten minutes getting them in the boot at one end of the journey and out again at the other end, an ordinary-looking semi-detached, from which a truly frightening squall of music was coming. ‘I’ve been at quieter festivals,’ he said.
Some wee squirt came to the door, couldn’t have been more than sixteen, jumper on him saying ‘Do my baubles look big in this?’, huge big lovebite on his neck, and insisted on carrying the whole lot in in one go – he could hardly see over the top once the garlic breads were added, but he turned around anyway and then didn’t he try to close the door with his foot. Paul stuck his own foot in to stop him. ‘It’s not paid for yet,’ he said and the squirt twisted his head as far as it would go without causing a garlic bread avalanche and told him to fuck right off, which with hindsight (and possibly even fore-) Paul would have been well advised to do, because the next thing, when he said he wasn’t budging, this big fucker – ‘Pull my cracker’, his jumper said, with an arrow pointing down – came barrelling out of the kitchen – Paul could see gleeful faces, women’s and men’s, in the doorway – and down the hall towards him. Here he was, ‘Nobody tell you, mate? We don’t pay.’ And then he stopped. ‘Fuck me, it’s you.’
It was him, the guy – the brigadier – who had driven into Paul’s Uber car. He started to laugh, put a big hand on Paul’s shoulder. ‘You’re really not having a good run of it, are you?’ he said, pat, pat, pat then push – out the door Paul went, staggering backwards, off the front step, over the garden kerb, losing his balance completely and landing – shit and fuck – tailbone on crazy paving, next to a landlocked camellia.
He sat for half an hour outside the pizza place before he was able to turn far enough in his seat to open the car door.
And what did they do? Docked him five nights’ pay. Here was the manager to him, ‘You’re not supposed to leave the client’s premises without payment, no exceptions.’
Paul asked her if she would like to go round there and try and get the money herself. ‘Not my job,’ she said, ‘and not my concern. My job – my only concern – is to make sure the books balance at the end of every week and I can tell you here and now one way or another they will.’
When the call came in on New Year’s Eve to take a delivery to a party at the same address, another couple of hundred quid’s worth, Paul point-blank refused. (He had been using the stick since he took the tumble before Christmas but left it in the car any time he went in to do a pick-up in case the manager gave his shift to one of the other drivers.) When the manager said to him she wasn’t asking him to do it, she was telling him, he started emptying his pockets on to the counter, pound coins, silver, a fiver folded over.
‘Here was me to them,’ he said, ‘take it. I might as well pay you now as later.’ He had the car keys out now too. ‘You can take them while you’re at it, that’s me, finished.’
The manager shouted after him, ‘You know I won’t be able to give you a reference if you just walk out like this in the middle of your shift?’
‘Like that’s seriously going to affect my future prospects.’
‘Any other time I would have told you you could have had a job in here,’ Derek said, and set Paul’s tea down before him, ‘but the way things have been lately…’
Paul batted away the apology. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple of things in mind.’
Neeta warned him to be careful. ‘You know what they say about things happening in threes.’ Paul assured her he was going to make absolutely certain not to bump into that guy again – or be bumped into by him – any time soon.
‘That’s maybe easier said than done,’ said Neeta. ‘Unless you’re thinking of getting out of here altogether.’ Paul stirred his tea. ‘Aw, you’re not, are you?’
The rain that had been threatening all morning chose that moment to unleash itself: 0–60 in two seconds flat.
‘And miss all the lovely weather?’ Paul said. ‘Nah.’
Three hours into the rain, just about the point where it tipped into extreme weather event, Herbie texted Louise. ‘Pity you arriving home to this.’
He was pretty sure it was today she got back. The last text he had had from her was eight
o’clock on New Year’s Eve. She was getting ready to head out with some of the others to watch the firework display. The networks were bound to be jammed come midnight, so she was getting her greetings in early.
He had thought nothing of it when he didn’t hear from her the next day, hadn’t dwelt too much on the fact that he didn’t hear from her the day after that again, though he had sent her a couple of messages in the meantime, asking about her travel arrangements, hoping she had fun her last couple of days on the slopes.
The day after that again… ‘Dad!’ Beth caught him at dinner, checking his phone under the table. ‘That’s about the tenth time since we sat down you’ve done that. What was it you used to say to me: why don’t you just ring?’
He left it until later that night, then rang. Answer machine. ‘Hi, this is Louise, I’d like to say I have something better to do than come to the phone, but it’s probably just sitting, charging somewhere where I can’t hear it. Tell me who you are and as soon as I have found it, I’ll call you back.’
He told her he was Herbie. (How odd his own name had always sounded from his own mouth.) Then he waited.
After a couple of hours of that he began to wonder whether something had happened, whether, instead of charging, the phone was lying out of reach on a table next to a hospital bed at the foot of a Julian Alp, or worse, was within reach but useless to her heavily bandaged hands. Finally, he went on to her Facebook page. It felt like spying. But she definitely wasn’t in hospital, and – a snapshot from her kitchen window of the previous day’s rain marathon – she was definitely back in Belfast. The days passed, became a week.
She would be back at work now. He could just have walked round there and seen her. Except he couldn’t.
The couple of times he found himself on the bus he couldn’t bring himself even to get off at the stop across the car park, getting up from his seat a stop early the first time and, the next (scrupulously – strenuously – avoiding looking out the window as he passed), three stops late.
Where Are We Now? Page 13
