The consultant was held up on his way from another appointment (heavy helicopter traffic coming in from Waterford; so much for him walking down any street in Cork), meaning they ended up in the waiting room for about half an hour. Though they were well looked after – pampered, Beth would almost have said – that was the only time Beth saw her mother scared. ‘You tell yourself you’re reconciled to the fact of dying,’ Tanya said to Beth twenty-odd minutes into the wait, ‘but of course you aren’t at all. It’s not some hazy fade-out, it’s a ruddy great wall and sooner or later you’re going to hit it. I just want it to be later. Much, much later.’
The consultant, however, when he did arrive, was very upbeat – very windswept-looking and upbeat. (He piloted the helicopter himself, apparently with the window open.)
He talked them through the most recent scans. (‘They must have been Ultra HD’, Beth said. ‘I felt like I was right inside there, which was confusing to say the least.’) There was already a marked shrinkage in the size of the tumour – the kind of thing you might expect to see after four or five months rather than four or five weeks. Even so Tanya was subdued in the car back to Schull, Beth now taking over the driving. (She would defy any cop or court that tried to fine or prosecute her.) She had seemed to be half asleep, in fact, head resting against the window, when she suddenly opened her eyes and announced she wanted to be buried at home. That was good to know, Beth told her, but it wasn’t going to be happening any time soon.
‘I am sure you’re right. Even so, it needs to be said. I can’t talk to Martin about it. It would only upset him.’ She rested her head on the window again. ‘He has too good a heart,’ she said quietly.
She did sleep then, didn’t wake until the car was turning off the lane into the driveway. She pulled down the sun visor before getting out of the car, checking her face in the mirror for streaks. She turned to Beth and asked her not to judge her, or Martin. Beth leaned across and put her arms around her, said she wasn’t in a position to judge anyone.
‘I think she is going to come through this OK,’ she told Herbie at the conclusion of her exhaustive account. ‘And I think she is in the place she needs to be, now and always.’
She had started to leave the room when she remembered something and turned back and sat on the arm of the sofa. ‘I never told you, the day I was travelling down, just before the bus pulled out these two girls got on and went straight back down to the bottom of the bus, looked like they were going to a gig or a party, no luggage apart from a carry-out, which they’d obviously started in on already, half ten in the morning – completely plastered the both of them, in a giggly, everybody’s my best friend way. They were all like, aw, and, that’s so sweet. We were barely out of the city centre when one of them announced she needed to pee, so of course next thing her friend needs to go too, and they start talking about where the bus pulls in…’
‘I thought the Air Coach was an Express?’ said Herbie.
‘Exactly. We passed the exit sign for Sprucefield and this one gave a wee yelp, Oh, Janey, it’s not stopping! And some man across the aisle – nice guy – he told them the first stop was Dublin Airport. And here they were, Dublin Airport? We can’t hang on till Dublin Airport. Well, that was them from then on, all they talked about was how badly they needed to go, swear to God… if I heard that once I heard it a hundred times. Swear to God, I can’t hold on much longer… Swear to God, I am going to pee all over this floor. And the moans of them! The driver shouted down the bus at them to stay in their seats because they were pacing up and down the aisle, the pair of them.’
‘They really should have toilets,’ said Herbie, seeing it from their point of view.
‘They should, but anyway, there they were, no toilet, and no hope of one for another eighty or ninety miles. I was going to say they had everybody’s heads turned, but you know what people are like in those situations, they would look anywhere but at what is actually going on, and then all of a sudden – we must have been driving for an hour and a half by this stage – the bus started slowing down and they were crouching, leaning across people, looking out the window, and here’s one of them, Look, look, it’s the border, we’ll have to stop! And they flew up to the front of the bus and started badgering the driver. Will you let us off here over by that bit of wall…’
Herbie said, ‘A wall? At the border? What road were you on?’
‘The M1. But that’s the thing, it wasn’t the border at all, it was the Toll Plaza.’
‘Drogheda?’ About thirty miles into the Irish Republic. ‘They didn’t seriously think…’
‘I suppose they just saw the barriers and thought, you know: frontier!’
‘I know the wall now. More like a sculpture?’
‘Like a big public toilet to them.’
‘Did the driver let them off?’
‘One of them had her jeans half down, he’d no choice. I’m not kidding you, you could hear them even over the sound of all those cars and lorries revving their engines – the sighs of them from the other side of that wall… And their faces when they got back on, you’d think they had won a prize fight.’
She did a little shimmy with her shoulders, fists pumping.
Herbie said, ‘I like the fact that they thought you had to pay to get over the border.’
‘I like the fact that they thought they were having a wee-wee on it. Talk about marking your territory. And the fact that they started again as soon as they were back in their seats, beating into the carry-out.’
‘That’s dedication.’
‘And actually, when you think about it, real self-control. I mean they knew when to stop as well as start, and they did hold it in.’
*
Later that night, lying in bed, grasping for sleep, he found his thoughts turning to the spring of the year after he started secondary school. Three Scottish soldiers went for a drink in a bar downtown one early March Saturday night, brothers two of them, one of them not even old enough to drink. They met some men there who told them about a party they were going to, asked them if they fancied coming along. It was a bit of a drive, like, but sure they could bring their pints with them, and there’d be girls there, more than enough to go round. So, yeah, the three boys said, why not, and out they went and got into the men’s car, and it was a drive, all right, they had to ask the driver to stop in the end to let them get out and take a leak. They were up in the hills above the city – the Hightown Road. However they had managed it, they were still holding on to their pint glasses, even as they were lining up at the side of the road to do the business. One of the men who had been in the car with them, chatting and carrying on the whole way up the road, got out with a gun in his hand and walked along behind them and shot two of them in the back of the head. When the third one turned the gunman shot him in the chest. Then he got back into the car with his mates and drove away, leaving three bodies there like so much refuse.
The soldiers’ faces for days afterwards were on all the front pages and news bulletins, smiling out from under the regimental caps with the tartan trim and black satin ribbon hanging down at the back.
Boys where Herbie lived started wearing tartan scarves in memory of them, knotted round their wrists rather than round their necks. Other – Protestant – boys in other parts of the city were doing the same. A virus to which all other sections of the population were immune. You could tell when you saw a crowd of lads where they were from, almost to the exact street, just by the tartan hanging off them.
At least, he thought that was how it started. Rod Stewart was getting going then too. They liked him as well, those teenage boys did: bluesy boozy Rod. One of the lads, wearing his Scottish heart with pride on his North London sleeve, thumping David Cassidy, so they said, for giving money to the IRA. Herbie had acquired a scarf himself – Royal Stewart tartan, funnily enough: blue, yellow, white, green and black on red – bought one day after school from a shop on Sandy Row that up till then only sold to old men and probably couldn’t believe i
ts luck. The shopkeeper asked him if he wanted it in a bag or was going to wear it home. ‘Bag,’ Herbie said, and as soon as he was out the door stuck that bag inside his school rucksack. He didn’t take it out again until he was back home in his bedroom, door closed. And on him or off him, it never left that room again. He was too young for the gangs, and besides if his parents had seen him with it they’d have had his life: That’s not how we brought you up to be.
Within a couple of years, tartan had been usurped by the Bay City Rollers and the teenage girls who worshipped them. In some places, the story was, the former Tartan gangs had been inducted wholesale into loyalist paramilitary groups. Round Herbie’s way, it was more like ones and twos, if he could trust the evidence of his ears and eyes. The age of the people these boys, still in their teens, were suddenly associating with, the air they acquired of being beyond rebuke, beyond any common moral code. Some of them in the course of time became dumpers of bodies themselves, defilers.
Herbie tried to imagine back almost half a century. He tried to imagine the final moments of those three young soldiers, the grass verge, the night air, Belfast at its most beguiling below them, a magic carpet of lights.
Then bang, bang, bang: black.
He tried to imagine too the boy who had been him, angling the small mirror that sat on top of the chest of drawers so that he could admire himself in his jean jacket, the cuffs folded back on themselves, twice, to set off the scarf, cascading from the knot at his wrist over the back of his hand, bunching it in his fist, whirling it above his head as he had seen scores of other boys do, in sync, chanting. He had tried a few of the chants out too, under his breath. Words that even after fifty years brought the heat of shame to his cheeks.
No matter how hard he struggled to recognise him, it was important that he didn’t lose sight of that boy and remembered to hold him to account.
*
Tanya suffered something of a setback the week after Beth was there. In the space of a couple of days she lost the rest of her hair and for a while looked as though the treatment was getting the better of her. Wretched was her word for it. Absolutely and completely wretched. When eventually she was too wretched even to talk, Martin took over the Skype duties. He and Herbie sitting at last face to face. The photos didn’t really do him justice. He was, Herbie had to admit, easy on the eye.
‘She’s had a rough couple of days of it,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. Tell you the truth, she sat and talked the other night about stopping the treatment altogether, but then…’
Actually, Herbie couldn’t altogether follow what did come then, though it appeared to involve the sister-in-law of Martin’s mother’s cousin who had been through the wringer with this exact same thing and who had had the same thoughts as Tanya had, but was talked round eventually and never looked back, though it may have been any of the mother’s cousin, the sister-in-law’s partner or, potentially, the mother’s cousin’s partner (they were all name-checked), the talker-round, rather than the sister-in-law herself who was being offered in this instance as the god of special knowledge.
‘I want you to know I’m taking care of her,’ was where tale eventually led teller.
‘I know you are,’ Herbie said. ‘And I really appreciate you letting me know, but I don’t want you thinking I’m sitting here judging you…’
Martin cut across him. ‘The love she had for you, that didn’t disappear, it’s in a different place now, but she knows where it is.’
‘Toome.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Sorry, I was… nothing.’
‘I’m not doing this very well.’
‘You are,’ Herbie said.
‘It’s just other stuff, newer stuff, like me, has been added. She stopped loving you, but she didn’t stop remembering that she loved you then. And, well, when I asked her to let me be with her, I was asking to be with all the things she was and had been, right back to the very start of her.’ He smiled and shrugged in one. ‘You’re part of my life too, in a way.’
It was hard for him to say it, but Herbie knew Martin was part of his as well.
‘Look after yourself,’ came easier, so that’s what he said and that’s where they left it.
10
A Saturday morning. Just warm enough, with a jumper on, to sit out in the yard with the papers. All the home news stories were of things that should have been happening but weren’t. He heard through the open back door the sound of the front gate being opened, the letterbox being pushed back then let go, the gate again, clacking on its latch.
A purple-liveried plane climbed at a forty-five-degree angle away from the airport to his right.
Beth came out and set the post on the bench beside him.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
She stood there, arms folded.
‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’
Probably a lot, but nothing he hadn’t not been telling her for years already.
She pointed to the address stamped in the left corner of the top envelope. Doctor’s surgery.
He had a moment of uncertainty himself as he worked his finger under the flap, with difficulty, and (difficulty doubled) took the letter out of the jagged opening he had made.
Writing this letter with considerable regret… wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for the privilege you afforded me of working with you and your family all these years…
‘It’s Dr Ross,’ he told Beth, once his heart had stopped beating up into his throat, ‘she’s retiring.’
‘Is that all?’ She sounded almost disappointed. ‘I thought she would have been gone long ago.’ From inside the house now. ‘She was old when I was a wee girl.’ Head round the door frame again, pleased with herself. ‘Old when God was.’
Herbie read on. Another doctor in the practice would be taking over her caseload. Every confidence in his ability and expertise… no interruption to the excellent care that, I hope you will agree, you have always enjoyed and no need for you to do anything further…
Actually – Herbie set the letter down – there was.
Plane coming in to land. Purple livery again. Looked like the same one coming back: sorry, forgot something.
A sudden gust of wind that might have been part of the same general disturbance lifted and separated the pages of the international news section and for a moment he was being offered – flash sale – a glimpse of how the world and all its parts fitted together if he could only blink and imprint it on his memory before…
The wind dropped. The paper settled again, messily.
First thing after Monday morning’s school-run madness he took the two buses across town and got off in front of the row of shops – although only one of them was strictly speaking still a shop – round the corner from the health centre.
Dr Ross wasn’t in, which he would have realised if he had had the foresight to make an actual appointment.
‘Tell you the truth,’ the receptionist said, ‘she was more or less finished up before those letters even went out.’
‘I want to change practice,’ Herbie said.
‘Right.’ The receptionist was trying to fit a pile of prescriptions into an envelope, watched by a pony-tailed young man, who may or may not have been waiting to receive them. ‘You know you didn’t need to come here to do that? All you do is fill in a form at the place you want to transfer to and they take care of everything for you.’
‘I did know.’ He didn’t. ‘But I was nearby.’
‘Of course. Still, I think it’s better that you do it at the other end.’
The phone rang. ‘Damn.’ The receptionist put an elbow on the prescriptions and answered. ‘Good morning, White Fields Practice.’ The young man with the pony tail, realising there was just him and Herbie, took out his phone. ‘Putting you through to the Treatment Room now,’ the receptionist said. She looked at Herbie, clearly wondering why he was still there.
‘Is there anything else I can hel
p you with?’
‘No, that was about it really.’
‘In that case…’
‘Yes.’
The receptionist went back to stuffing the prescriptions into the envelope. The young man put away his phone. Herbie made his way to the door.
What had he been expecting, after all, three cheers for Herbie? ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’?
He waited fifteen minutes for a bus back into town, during which time the only shop shop in the row facing him had exactly one customer. A goldmine, they used to call this part of the road.
A white-haired man across the aisle nodded as Herbie took his seat. The stop after, the same man leaned forward and called to another man who had just got on. ‘Willie!’
Willie was in the process of lowering himself into one of the reduced mobility seats behind the driver’s cab, but he hauled himself up by a chrome pole and staggered down the aisle, eyes narrowed, straining for focus.
‘Who’s that?’ he said as he approached.
‘What do you mean who’s that? It’s Kenny! Who’s that!’
‘Kenny! I haven’t my glasses. Shift over.’
Kenny did, tight against the window. ‘How you doing, apart from being blind?’
‘The best.’
‘Horses treating you well?’
‘I’m a few shillings up.’
‘You’re in front then? Good for you. I’ve put six on since Saturday and not a winner among them. I think the last one’s still running. Next time I hear of that one it’ll be on Tesco’s shelves.’
‘Where you headed now?’
Where Are We Now? Page 15
