Company, she used to read.
‘You stay here and rest that, I’ll take Beth.’
‘If you’re sure.’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
Or something like that. Maybe Beth wasn’t wrong though about the kissing. There was something, now that he thought about it, later that very day possibly, the wildness that came of trying not to make any noise. He could imagine next day they would have still been desperate to cling on to some of that, taking every opportunity to touch, handholding, neck-stroking, kissing.
He stood. ‘Do you want tea?’ he said.
‘Mm.’
As he was opening the cupboard for the teabags he caught sight of her briefly, reflected in the door’s high-shine surface, raised up slightly on one hip. Was she…? She was: slipping the photo into her pocket. He let the door close gently. He didn’t know whether he had a negative, but no matter. She needed it more than he did.
He opened the fridge, took the milk out and sniffed – OK, probably, just. He had a look while he was at it to see if they had the wherewithal for dinner. Again, probably, just. He brought the mugs through, holding out the one in his left hand.
‘That’s yours there with just a splash…’ He stopped. Beth had pulled over another box and was sitting flipping the pages of a small red notebook.
She frowned. ‘What’s all this?’
‘Ah, now, now, careful with that. That’s research stuff I’ve to sort through.’
‘It looks like just a lot of names.’
‘Yes, well, that’s genealogy for you.’
‘No, I mean the same names over and over and over…’ She ran her finger along a line. ‘One, two, three, four – five of them.’
He set the mugs down on the floor and went to take the notebook from her hand, but she dropped it on the sofa and reached into the box for another. She flicked through a couple of pages.
‘This one’s the same,’ she said. She reached again for another. ‘And this one.’
He picked up the first one she had cast aside, read the first page, the second, the third, jumping then to the last.
‘Ah, Sean,’ he said.
He didn’t recognise a single one of the five, but he knew without having to check they were the names of the people who had been murdered in Sean’s bar.
He sat on the sofa again next to his daughter, who looked into his eyes, trying to read them.
‘Not what you were expecting?’ she said.
He was about to say no, not at all, but stopped himself, or himself stopped him. This was a man whose life had been saved by a Toffo that he didn’t even remember he had in his pocket, that he might on another day just have tossed in the bin. (Was any sweet worth the effort of all that sticky paper?) Bullets that might otherwise have struck him, ending their journey right there or continuing, on the far side of him, at a different trajectory, carried on uninterrupted into five other human beings of his acquaintance.
That’s how he got to stand greeting newcomers in the entrance of the Records Office reading room and to go home every evening to his wife and his dinner and his shed.
Really, what else did Herbie expect?
He put all the notebooks back in their box, folded the lid over.
‘I’m sorry,’ Beth said.
‘It’s not your fault. Really.’
*
He opened his eyes. Voices coming out of the walls.
No. Not possible.
He hadn’t opened his eyes. He had only dreamed that he had. The voices weren’t real. They would go away.
They didn’t, they must be, and he wasn’t able to dream his eyes closed again: he was awake.
He reached for his phone, pressed the home button: 02.03. He had hardly been asleep at all. He realised, in the space of that movement, over the edge of the bed for the phone and back, that it was only one voice he had been hearing – Beth’s, of course – but that it was coming from more than one spot. She must be walking up and down in there.
He strained, listening, but her voice was pitched too low, conscious of him perhaps, on the other side of the wall, not sleeping, straining, listening.
He tried to cover his ears with his pillow. This is not your concern. This is not your concern.
*
She was already downstairs making breakfast when he got up in the morning. She still had no idea how to slice bread. There was more on the floor than on the board. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. She pressed the lever of the toaster. ‘It’s probably time I went back.’
‘Oh.’
‘I thought you’d be glad to get me out from under your feet.’
‘You’re not under my feet.’ Though the heel of the bread she had butchered was.
‘Glad that I was getting my act together at least.’
‘I am, of course, I just wasn’t expecting, you know, until your year was… I mean leases and things like that, are you even going to be able to find a place to live?’
‘My friend Abbie has a room.’ Maybe that was who she was talking to last night. Maybe 2 a.m. wasn’t late at night in Abbie’s life. ‘She says I’d be doing her a favour taking it, somebody in the flat when she’s away. Also, she has a bath, one of those big old-fashioned enamel ones with the brass taps, so you know…’
It might have been hurtful if it had sounded for a moment as though she actually meant it.
‘When do you think you might go?’
‘I don’t know, Tuesday morning maybe?’
This was Thursday.
‘Wow, that really is…’
‘Soon, I know, but it just sort of came up.’
‘But what about work?’
‘Tell you the truth, I think they have been waiting for an opportunity to let me go. They’ve got a cousin, just lost his job with a precast concrete firm down in Tyrone, he’s having a complete career rethink.’
For some reason his father came into his mind, chasing a start halfway across the city the day he was handed his cards from the shipyard. Maybe he would have fared better in today’s world of work than Herbie himself had. Maybe Herbie’s own generation, in time, would come to look like the anomaly, brought up to expect security, unable to adapt quickly enough to setbacks and reversals. Which only made him wish the harder for a future free from either for his daughter and all the generations coming behind her.
Her toast popped, charred at the thinnest corner. ‘It’s been good for me, this, being here. I don’t want to be too melodramatic…’
‘That wouldn’t be like you.’
You’re so funny, her face said, till her mouth overrode, ‘It probably saved me.’
‘Well, that really fills me with confidence for your going.’
‘Listen, I’m ready for anything. I’ll be fine.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her if she couldn’t set her sights a little higher, but talk about do as I say not as I do…?
He held his tongue while he got his own breakfast. Joined her at the table. That was long enough. He needed to talk to blank out the thought of the house without her.
‘We should do something, go out.’
She turned her phone face down by her plate. ‘Are they still doing BYO Thursdays round the corner?’
‘Somewhere else, I meant. There’s a whole clatter of places in town I’ve never even set foot in.’
‘I’m sure that would be lovely. I was just thinking, but, it would be nice to see everyone before I went, say goodbye.’
He wasn’t sure that wouldn’t just make matters worse for him, but, ‘All right,’ he said, ‘round the corner it is then.’
As he was getting up from the table with the dishes she was turning her phone face up again.
He looked back from the doorway.
‘You would tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you?’
‘I would, but there isn’t.’
*
Business at Sam’s had not yet recovered fully from the unfortunate incident of the rat in th
e yard, and this close to closing the Post Office crowd understandably had other things on their mind. Even at half past seven the cafe had an after-hours feel, couples and fews in deep conversation around candles craggy with wax. The craggiest stood atop the piano at which Kurtis Bain sat, sporting a moustache several shades darker than his dirty fair hair. (Beth said she was pretty sure she knew the exact Boots mascara he had used to enhance it: Natural Collection Definition Brown Black.) The suit had given way to a collarless striped shirt and braces, one strap of which was short of a button at the front to cling to. He sang tonight as though he had experienced deep and recent heartache. Goodbye George and Ira, hello Bessie Smith.
‘Girlfriend transferred to a college across the water,’ Derek explained to Herbie and Beth. ‘Told him the night before she went, she thought it was better if they Took a Break. From one another, that is. Word has reached him that she is energetically pursuing other options.’
‘I didn’t even know they were college age,’ Herbie said.
‘She is, he isn’t. Doesn’t do his GCSEs until this May.’
‘Rough.’
‘You’re telling me.’ He looked about the room, no more than one table in three taken. ‘I’m beginning to think he’s more of a turn-off than the rat.’
‘You want to tell him there are plenty more fish in the sea, don’t you?’
Derek shook his head. ‘He knows there aren’t, not for him. There was only her and she’s wriggled off the hook.’
‘See, just there is where the metaphor becomes really icky,’ Beth said.
Emmet and Yolanda had kept them a seat (not that there was competition) at the same table they were at last time they were all four there. ‘We never miss,’ Emmet said.
‘I tell him, at least it’s one night in the week he doesn’t have to cook,’ said Yolanda. ‘Beth thinks I’m joking.’ (Beth was not left the room to say she thought no such thing.) ‘It’s nothing to do with this…’ She patted the arm of the folded wheelchair (Beth mutely signalled she had not presumed that it was). ‘I just never cared much for it.’
‘She made dinner for us a couple of times when we were first together,’ Emmet chipped in. ‘My stomach didn’t care much for it either.’
‘Remember the steak sausage, beetroot and black bean stir fry?’
Emmet covered his face with his hands, stifling a sob, much to Yolanda’s evident delight.
‘I was doing fusion cooking before anyone here had even heard of it.’
‘Yeah, nuclear.’
Kurtis Bain was mumbling through ‘Old Boyfriends’ – ‘Remember when you were burning for them, why do you keep turning them into Old Boyfriends’ – as Derek and Sam served the main courses, as always on a Thursday a straight choice between one thing and another. (Beth ordered one thing, Herbie the other.) Tom Waits, if he’d heard the kid, would have tipped his hat in admiration, and maybe sidled up to him afterwards and suggested he get out now and again and skateboard with his friends.
They ate a while in companionable silence. Beth set down her knife and fork.
‘I’m going to miss this,’ she said. ‘In fact – and, forgive me, this is not a sentence I would have imagined saying nine months ago – I’m going to miss Belfast.’
‘It has a way of sneaking up on you, all right,’ Emmet said.
‘Some bits of it, mind you… maybe not so much.’
‘Everywhere has its downside.’
‘Yeah, but not everywhere makes it a part of their tourist industry. I keep thinking, they should stop their tour buses outside that pizza place where Paul was working and explain to people, those ridiculous-looking masked gunmen in all those murals you’ve been photographing…? This is mostly what they were getting up to, when they weren’t playing around in the big scary dressing-up box, what they are still getting up to, extorting money and pushing people around.’
‘Have you seen any of the new murals?’ Yolanda, this. ‘I said it a while ago to Emmet: look, the masks have started to come off! They’re all walking around in their civvies and smiling, like, what were you so afraid of, it was only us?’
‘Oh, good, maybe next we’ll actually see them standing over some poor guy kneeling in a ditch with his mouth taped up, or walking away from a kid they’re just after shooting in the knees.’
‘Or a big order of unpaid-for pizzas.’
Yolanda proposed a toast to Paul: may whatever he does next be allowed to turn out right.
Late in the second set (the take-it-or-leave-it this evening was treacle pudding: all present took) Herbie passed a note up to Kurtis Bain telling him Beth was leaving town and asking him to play something for her. ‘Whatever you think,’ he wrote, realising that that, in the pianist’s present mood, might just be asking for it.
Kurtis Bain stroked his moustache a long moment (kudos to Boots Natural Collection Definition Brown Black, it didn’t streak or smudge) then set the note on top of the piano, nodded over: I’ve got this. ‘For Beth,’ was all he said, an octave lower than Kurtis Mark 1, as his fingers began to glide across the keyboard, brushing keys, looking for purchase on the tune. It took Herbie a good twenty seconds to work out what it was, the angle that the kid came at it, the fact that it was several decades outside of his normal repertoire, but at last it settled – he settled – into ‘Changes’. The conversations that had been carrying under and occasionally above the last few songs (it had actually seemed a politeness not to eavesdrop on the wee lad’s grief) stopped as the other diners recognised it too and turned themselves to face him, strangely fascinated.
His improvising stretched it into a fifth and then a sixth minute and still no one spoke or stirred. (Sam and Derek, framed in the doorway, slipped an arm around one another’s waist.) Pretty soon now every single one of them was going to get older. Pretty soon now this moment too and all that so vividly led up to it would be the distant past, a flat line in history, irretrievable beneath the layers of Belfasts, worlds, yet to come, all their coffee rituals, their wheelie bins, their BYO music nights, as arcane as tithes.
In the Kurtis Bain biopic (Herbie couldn’t be sure Kurtis Bain himself wasn’t already at work on it, starring in it, even) that could well turn out to be the moment when things took an upward turn for him: the applause, the tears fought back. He leaned his head forward until it was almost resting on the piano, whistling the final saxophone solo, which he brought to a close with a whisper of a chord.
‘Is it sacrilege to say I never liked that song?’ Beth said under her breath. ‘Up to now, I mean.’
‘A guy I used to go out with gave me a copy of the lyrics for my fourteenth birthday,’ said Yolanda. ‘Like, I’d asked him for them, but you know, I was imagining handwritten parchment or something – he was actually a lovely writer – a nice frame. He’d just torn it out of a magazine, Disco 45, wasn’t that what you called it? Hadn’t even trimmed the margin. I ch-ch-ch-chased the skitter out of the house. It was two years before I got another snog off anyone.’
‘That’ll teach you,’ said Emmet.
‘Good job it didn’t. I had another half dozen to send packing before I got to you.’
As people were beginning to reach for their coats at the evening’s end, Sam brought Beth out a hastily iced Good Luck muffin. ‘It’s date and walnut… just in case you have any allergies.’
‘Only to making speeches.’
‘You are absolved. Anyway, we expect to see you back here next Christmas.’
‘At the latest,’ Derek said.
She went across and had a word with Kurtis Bain, who listened then put his arms around her and smiled: actually smiled.
‘Can I ask you what you said?’ Herbie asked her.
‘No, but it didn’t involve fish.’
Kurtis Bain cracked his fingers a couple of times and placed them back on the keys, trying something else out. Herbie had no idea what, but he took the line, if that was what it was he was singing, out on to the street with him.
The road was abs
olutely still in both directions, not so much as a distant taillight. The city had a way of doing that, even now, emptying out. It suggested that there was still spare capacity somewhere. It was just a question of sitting down and figuring it out to everyone’s advantage. He hummed that last line of Kurtis Bain’s, hearing the words in his head. The moment you know you know you know.
‘Where Are We Now?’ Beth said. ‘That that you’re humming.’
And she joined in.
12
He barely saw her at all Friday, and Saturday morning again she was gone almost as soon as she was up. A few last bits and pieces to sort out at work, she said. Or he thought she said.
Late on Saturday afternoon – he was just coming back from a match: another 0–0 – Roza and Micky called at the door.
By their van, parked out front, did he know them. If he had had to pick them out in a line-up otherwise, he would have passed them over as out of scale with the stories told about them. Micky couldn’t have been more than five foot three, Roza only a hairsbreadth taller.
‘I thought Beth was at the office,’ Herbie said.
‘Oh, she might have gone in,’ Roza said. ‘We were out on the road all day.’
‘Not much of it actual road,’ said Micky. He handed Herbie a box. ‘We just wanted to leave this off in person. It’s a wee bit fragile. Black crystal.’
‘Black Tyrone crystal,’ said Roza. ‘Last of its kind.’
He invited them in, but they said no, thank you, they had better get going if they wanted to have a full Saturday night at home, although… Roza had turned as though to leave and then turned back, ‘I couldn’t ask you for a glass of water, could I?’
So, in they both stepped, and in the time that it took Herbie to let the water run cold enough to drink did a complete recce of the entire downstairs, little glances passing – instinctively, it looked – between them. (Two sets of eyebrows rising in appreciation of the neat little yard.) You never knew when you would need a particular kind of place.
Where Are We Now? Page 17
