‘Where do you think? Put another one on. Seventh time lucky, what?’
‘Bookie’s down the road from your house scud you?’
‘Bookie’s down the road from my house is no worse or no better than any other bookie’s, but a change is as good as a rest, isn’t that it? And sure I have my bus pass. Gets me out.’
‘What age are you?’
‘What age am I? A peeler wouldn’t ask me that, or if he did I wouldn’t tell him.’
‘I’m sixty-seven next birthday.’
Kenny turned to face him. ‘Sixty what? Sure you’re only a wee lad.’
‘I feel like one, I’ll tell you that.’
‘Something you’re taking?’
‘Better than that. I’m doing a line with a girl across the water… Here…’ He had his phone out. It barely fitted in the palm of his hand. ‘Look… No, wait, there she’s there.’
‘Flip me.’ Kenny’s admiration sounded completely genuine. ‘I’d go across to see her myself. How’d you meet her?’
‘Wrestling. I was over in Liverpool last month for the big title fight…’
‘I didn’t know you went in for that carry-on, but I’ll let that pass.’
‘And she was there with some girlfriends.’
‘I’ll let that pass too.’
‘She told me she liked my shirt. Said how nice it was to meet a man who knew how to dress himself.’
‘You’ve had the practice, did you tell her that?’
‘I told her I didn’t mind spending a bit of money, if that’s what she meant.’
‘You’re right there. Those cheap ones, it’s one wash then all they’re good for is wiping floors.’
‘Wiping your backside, more like.’
‘Well, I didn’t want to be ignorant with other people present.’ Kenny took in Herbie and his fellow passengers with a sideways nod of the head.
‘Matter of fact, that’s what I’m heading into town for now,’ Willie said, ‘get a new one.’
‘You going back over to see her?’
Willie was still looking at the phone. ‘She’s coming here. I’m just waiting on her calling with the date. She’d have been here before now only her landlord was acting the maggot, saying she owed him back rent. I sent her a few quid, get him off her back.’
Herbie saw Kenny give his friend a glance before turning his head and looking out the window. Wellington Place. City Centre. ‘This is us,’ Kenny said. He sounded relieved.
‘Good luck with your horse.’
‘Here’s what I know about luck. D’you play cards? My da never went near a horse, but a great man for the cards. I saw him lose a hundred pound when a hundred pound was something, and people would be shaking their heads and saying, what do you think, Tommy, quit now? Live to fight another day? And here he’d be, fill my glass, deal me in, I’m not thinking of folding yet… Sooner or later, your fortune changes.’
‘That’s the spirit… I mind his funeral.’
‘Ah, sure, it broke my mother’s heart, the way he went.’ Kenny shook Willie’s hand at the bottom of the steps, held it tight a moment – ‘Just you watch yourself, hear?’ – then clapped him on the back. ‘I’ll see you again one of these years.’
‘God willing: isn’t that what they say?’
‘Aye, when they don’t know any better.’
Belfast was already at lunch. There were queues out all the doors. The Greggs the Costas the Starbucks the Nando’s the sandwich bars noodle bars burrito bars the cafe bars the bar bars and newly sprouted patisseries. It was something to be seen. The sheer appetite. Herbie bought a bag of crisps to pass himself and sat on a bench in front of City Hall next to a couple feeding one another sushi with their fingers. Um, that one said, um-um, said the other. Um-um-um… Um-um-um-um. A woman walked up and down before them, smoking, talking on her phone and, by constant swapping of handset and cigarette, eating sweet potato fries from a cardboard pouch. On a balcony on the far side of the street a waiter offered a basket of bread rolls to a party of three who had been conversing in Sign. A toddler in a buggy being backed by his father out the Burger King doors pulled his gold card crown down over his eyes and ears and moved his head from side to side, revelling in the sudden nothing.
As he was standing up to put his crisp packet in the bin Herbie caught sight of Willie from the bus passing by with a Next bag and a Subway to-go box. He had packed a lot into his twenty minutes in town. Girl Across the Water could be calling at any moment. No time to hang around.
At the stop for Herbie’s second bus, a young woman in a T-shirt that said ‘Don’t Even Think About It’ placed a filled panini in front of a man sitting crosslegged on a blanket with his back to a telecoms box. The man at once tore off the top two inches and placed it under the muzzle of the whippet that until the panini hove into view had been dozing on the blanket beside him.
Um-um-um-um-um.
He was standing by the driver’s cab of the bus, waiting for it to slow and set him down, when he saw Neeta come running out of the Post Office and cross the street, not even waiting for the lights to change, waving her apologies right-handed to the drivers coming this way, left-handed to the drivers coming that, the driver of Herbie’s bus included. ‘Yes, yes, yes… yes, yes, yes… I know, I know.’
‘Did you ever see the like of that?’ the driver said to Herbie, or to the world at large with Herbie just its nearest representative.
Herbie shook his head and then the second the bus doors were closed followed Neeta into Sam’s.
She was still getting her breath back when he entered. Sam and Derek were both behind the counter. ‘Are you ready for this?’ Neeta asked and drew herself up to her full five foot two. ‘I can tell you that your new neighbours-stroke-rivals over the way will be – drum roll, drum roll, splishy-splashy cymbals’ – Derek took Sam’s hand, squeezed – ‘the Christians All Together Church.’
‘The CATCH?’ Derek uncoupled himself from Sam. ‘In the name of fuck. If it’s not a sin to say it now.’
‘Not to them, it isn’t,’ Neeta said. ‘Didn’t you know? You can say it and do it as often as you like, drink too, I’m told. As long as you are sincerely questing after God the rest of the time. Maybe even at the same time.’
‘For all have sinned and fallen short, or however it goes,’ said Sam.
‘So stop beating yourself up and have another Bloody Mary… in bed… with your next-door neighbour’s husband, or wife, or both.’
‘Is that going to be better or worse than Jamie Oliver, do you think?’ Herbie asked.
‘I’ll say one thing for Jamie Oliver,’ said Derek, ‘you’d know where you stood with him. But that lot…? Have you seen them going in there on Sunday mornings? Look like they’re coming home from Saturday night, half of them, and not a prayer group either. I liked it better when they wore shirts and ties and ridiculous hats. At least you could spot them and give them a wide berth.’
‘I hear they’re going to call it Clean,’ Neeta said.
‘Call what Clean?’
‘Their restaurant.’
Sam shook his head. ‘Of course they are.’
A silent moment or two ensued then Derek spoke again.
‘You know if they’re Clean what that makes us…’
Herbie told them about the incident with the wreath.
‘Bit by bit,’ said Sam, ‘they are coming for us all.’
The Post Office was to close its doors for the last time at lunchtime on the final day of the tax year. After the prolonged lead-in the end was going to be swift.
‘I knew it was coming, but all the same, I’m not sure, now I’m staring right down the barrel of it, how I’m going to cope,’ Neeta said. She remembered when she was growing up, getting on a bus this one time with her mum and her wee sister and the driver refusing to take their fare. It was his sixty-fifth birthday: retirement day. He had this journey and then he was taking the bus back to the depot, and that was him, finished. He was letting everyone he picked up on free.
Here he was to them, ‘What are they going to do to me? Give me the sack?’
(The Happy Bus, her wee sister had called it for years after. ‘When are we getting the Happy Bus again?’)
Neeta wished she could do something to equal it – international postage for the price of a domestic second-class stamp, £10 on every senior citizen’s electricity top-up card.
The thought sometimes was enough, Herbie told her.
‘Here’s another thought,’ she said. ‘I could slip a pound coin into one of those Monday morning bags of cash, you know, take it over the legal limit for deposits…’ She savoured it a long moment then caught herself on. ‘Ah, all right, I’ll just give out free bags of Haribo to any kids that come in.’
‘I’m not slagging off your customers, but I don’t think you’ll be down many bags of Haribo by the end of the day.’
A couple of days later the CATCH called in person. Persons. Herbie had the whole thing from Derek.
A delegation of four – ‘cell’ was their own preferred term (theirs and the Provisional IRA’s) – who were – their term again – reaching out to neighbours on this part of the road, hoping to scotch rumours and allay fears. ‘We’re just ordinary folks, who happen to love the Lord,’ their spokesperson/OC said, ‘as crazy and mixed up as any other group of eleven and a half thousand people…’ She let that number sit a moment… ‘well, last time we were able to count.’
She indicated one of the cell’s number – Kim – adding pointedly that they (singular) were from the LGBTQIA+ group. ‘I think you would be surprised,’ Kim said, ‘the way attitudes have changed. Churches like ours are probably the most forward-thinking and accepting parts of this entire society.’
Sam was studying a leaflet another of the cell had handed him. ‘What’s this about Clean Thursdays?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said the OC, ‘they are like a healthy alternative to Bring Your Own. We’re going to have nutritionists and mindfulness therapists on hand, six o’clock to nine o’clock. You should give them a go.’
‘We’re sort of busy ourselves on Thursday nights.’
‘Well, if that changes any time, you won’t have far to come to find us.’
On the way out the door, they gave the Radio Ga Ga salute.
Sam didn’t even wait for the door to shut but flew around the restaurant, gathering up Scrabble tiles from this table and that, and that, and that, and that: the D, the I, the C, the K, the S. He placed them in a line facing out across the street.
‘I don’t care how comfortable they are with the word, I don’t care how comfortable they are with what any of us do with ours,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anyone to move those letters. Ever.’
11
Tanya had another appointment with the specialist in Cork City. Beth would hear nothing but that she would go with her. ‘It’s not that I don’t trust Martin,’ she said to Herbie. ‘It’s just that I don’t trust Martin.’
‘And Micky and Roza?’
‘They’ll get somebody in. It’s only a couple of days.’
‘Did you ever talk to Paul again?’
‘Every other day. He’s all caught up with this new thing.’
‘Not more driving?’
‘No, this is more of a solo venture.’
‘“I would tell you, but then I would have to kill you.”’
She laughed. ‘Not quite.’
Herbie nodded. ‘I thought I saw him the other day coming out of the Post Office, but by the time I got off the bus he was gone. Good he’s got something, whatever it is.’
Beth phoned, as before, late on the night of the day that she left for Schull. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ she said, ‘the change in her. Talk about darkest hour just before dawn.’ The specialist at the conclusion of another Ultra HD tour of Tanya’s insides concurred. Whistled his admiration in fact.
‘I’m inclined to tell you not to come back and see me for another six months,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ Tanya said, ‘that might just mean he is jetting off somewhere between now and then.’
‘Choppering.’
Beth hadn’t said when exactly she would be back. Evening, Herbie presumed, of whichever day. So he was surprised, coming home a couple of afternoons later, to find her sitting on the sofa surrounded by the boxes of photographs from the spare-now-her room, looking as though she had been going through them for an hour or two already. Martin had some business up in Dublin, leaving Schull first thing. She was able to hitch a ride with him right into Connolly Station. ‘Like, right inside,’ she said. ‘One of his uncles used to work on the cross-border mail deliveries – showed him how to come round the back and up beside the platform for the Belfast train. I hadn’t the heart to tell him I was booked on the bus, and there was a train sitting there waiting to board…’
Herbie had cleared a space on the sofa and sat down beside her.
‘You don’t mind me lifting these all down?’
‘Why would I mind? They’re as much yours as mine.’
‘I don’t remember ever seeing the half of them,’ she said. ‘Look at you in this. Where was that?’
He took the photo out of her hand. His eyes slid off the not much more than boy who had been him to the cathedral door before which he stood, the bronze rail to the left of it, endlessly repeating the same sight gag, and the legend accompanying it, à mon seul desir.
‘Saarbrücken, Germany.’
‘You must be… what, sixteen, seventeen?’
‘Eighteen just turned.’
‘Is that not about the time you met Mum?’
‘Same week, practically.’
‘Really? In Germany?’
‘We must have told you the story,’ he started to say, but – ‘Oh, my God, why did you ever let me out of the house in this?’ – she had already moved on. ‘Little Lady Gagaaaah.’ She mimed fingers down her throat. With good reason. Flowers and stripes. And frills. And knee-length lace-up basketball boots. In blue camouflage. What could he and Tanya have been thinking?
‘You were very strong-willed, or we were very weak.’
‘And this one…’
Velvet headband and bow on bald baby head.
‘Ah, now that one was your granny’s doing. She had bought you it and we didn’t want to hurt her feelings. You never had it on you again after we took the photo. She had it framed.’
They sat together until the light went, swapping pictures, trying to put names to faces – she could still manage an impressive twenty-three out of twenty-seven of her Primary One class photo – supplementing or subtly correcting one another’s memories.
He told her about the feeling he got now and then that he had somehow been separated from his own past, or pasts, ‘like someone else has been using my identity.’
‘Or you’ve taken on someone else’s, did you ever think about that? That your life is actually just a script you have learned by heart or a chip that’s been inserted.’
A little later: ‘It crossed my mind, you know, when the whole bankruptcy thing was starting to happen… Press delete and upload a whole other me… or other her, I suppose it would be. I actually had a number some woman I knew gave me. I carried it around in my purse for weeks.’
‘What do you mean, a number? Are you telling me you would have just disappeared on us?’
‘Oh, I kept thinking about how I would find a way to let you know, even though this woman had said to me, only use that number if you’re really, really serious about this.’
‘That’s a bit – what do you call the series that was on, the chemistry teacher in Arizona?’
‘Breaking Bad? That’s New Mexico, but, yeah, her whole world, I think, was a bit Breaking Bad.’
‘Nice people you’ve been hanging out with.’
‘I met her in court, as a matter of fact, well, in the cafeteria, between hearings…’
‘I thought you told me you did it online?’
‘I said you could do it. There were other people involved. I’d rea
lly rather not talk about it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You were in the cafeteria.’
‘I was.’ She seemed to be in two minds whether or not to go back there to finish the story. She came in, as it were, through another door. ‘Have you ever been in the cafeteria of a court? My advice? Don’t. It’ll crush whatever fight you might have had in you just looking around you in there, although even without that it was a pretty persuasive pitch your woman gave me. Said I’d be surprised the people I talked to every day who weren’t who everyone else took them to be.’
‘What stopped you in the end?’
‘Honestly? Money. If I’d had enough to pay to do that I would never have got into all that debt to begin with.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Sorry, I should have said to you or Mum I was feeling that way, but I was all the time writing notes to you in my head, leaving clues. I suppose that means I was never ever likely to go through with it.’
The conversation was getting uncomfortably close in its terms to suicide, which he guessed her desire to disappear like that was a form of. He picked out a photo at random from a Boots envelope that had long ago lost its flap. ‘Recognise that one?’
She leaned in, looking, pushing her hair behind her ears. ‘Edinburgh. What am I, seven? The bake on me!’
Her grin was principally gum.
‘We were only there five nights and you lost three front teeth. It was like every time you had something more solid than soup set before you’ – he made a cluck sound – ‘there’d go another one. People in the hotel were giving you money, in case the tooth fairy couldn’t find you. You came back with more than you took away.’
‘You know what I remember about that holiday? You and Mum kissing.’
‘Oh, come on, we kissed a lot.’
‘That wasn’t the way it seemed to me.’
‘Maybe we were just waiting all the other times until we knew you weren’t looking.’
‘I have a memory, up at the castle, whatever overtook the pair of you, you were like mwah-mwah-mwah.’
He didn’t know how to tell her, but he was as certain as he could be about anything that the three of them never made it to the castle together on that trip. Tanya had come down with something or, no: done something – that’s right, she had turned her ankle the night before. He had to go out and find a Boots to buy an elasticated bandage. Had he picked up a magazine as well? He could nearly see himself in the newsagent’s on the Royal Mile.
Where Are We Now? Page 16
