Beth was coming in the front gate as Herbie was opening the door to let them out.
If she was surprised – or in any way caught out – to see them she didn’t show it.
‘I saw the van,’ she said. Which might have accounted for the lack of surprise. She opened her bag. ‘Your keys.’
‘You could just have left them with the doorman.’
‘I know, but you like to make absolutely sure, don’t you?’
Roza put her arms around her. ‘Feliĉo en ĉio, kio postulas,’ she said.
‘Happiness in all that comes after,’ Micky said, by way of translation and reinforcement, and wriggled his way into the clinch with them.
‘I don’t think they had been expecting you to go into work today,’ Herbie said when they had gone.
‘No?’
‘You did go in, didn’t you?’
‘I stopped by… Wait’ – she looked at him, incredulous – ‘are you checking up on me? What do you think I was up to?’
Which was a good question, and one to which he had absolutely no answer.
He shook his head, ‘Falling into old habits… Me, not you.’
She had opened the gift box and lifted out one of the glasses, from which she removed the tissue paper. ‘They are beautiful.’
‘Roza says last of its kind.’
She looked at him.
‘Factory’s gone. The whole industry. About five years ago.’
She wrapped the tissue paper round the glass and – gently, gently – set it back in the box again. ‘Would you be OK if I left these here? Just for the time being. I mean they literally are irreplaceable now.’
*
While they were having dinner on her last night (of course he cooked leeks, in a pie, with mustard and nutmeg), she told him that he wasn’t to bother himself coming to the airport with her in the morning. ‘I’ll just be straight out of the taxi and in through security.’
‘This is George Best City Airport you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘The closest the taxi can drop you is a hundred yards away.’
In an age where air travel had been recast into a set of ever stiffer challenges for travellers to overcome, Belfast’s airport had excelled itself by making the first and last steps – dropping off and picking up – as awkward and frustrating as anything that lay in between.
‘That means it will be even more of a dash,’ Beth said. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to be making it into a whole big goodbye. I’d much rather just go out the way I came in, me and a taxi driver, you at the front gate.’
He decided not to press her on it, but when he looked at her again across the table next morning as she sat at breakfast, an expression on her face that called to mind the day she started secondary school, cheerfulness stretched so tight it only accentuated the apprehension underlying, he had a second change of heart.
‘It’s big for me, you know, you leaving, no matter how soon I’m going to see you again. I want to say goodbye properly.’
She looked down at her hands beneath the table.
‘We’ve time yet,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I thought you were checking your clock.’
‘Yes. Sorry. You’re right, we’ve time.’
‘Would you rather I booked the taxi now anyway?’
‘Is that bad of me?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Then, maybe, yes, just to be safe.’
She went upstairs to finish packing. Less than ten minutes it took. The rucksack, slumped in the hallway, looked as full, or as empty, as when she first arrived, which is to say about half.
The taxi driver asked her, as she took it and put it in the boot, if Beth was heading across the water to a festival.
Beth said she thought her festival days were maybe behind her.
‘You’re as well out of here, then,’ the driver said. The T-shirt under her leather jacket proclaimed there was no such thing as luck. ‘It’s flipping festivals from one end of the year to another now. If they found a day where there wasn’t a festival happening, they would probably have a festival to celebrate it.’
She asked Herbie when they arrived at the airport if she wanted him to keep the meter running: easier than having to book another taxi.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘I’ll maybe just get a bus into town.’
‘Just as long as you don’t get into one of these airport cabs,’ the driver said. ‘Sit here waiting on work walking up to them while the rest of us are out chasing our tails all day, then charge you extra for the privilege.’
There was some confusion at the bag drop counter when the airline rep asked Beth if Herbie was her travelling companion.
She leaned in across the counter. ‘I’m travelling alone,’ she said, and the rep looked at the screen and said, ‘Oh. Right.’ And typed some more.
He walked back through the concourse with her as far as the covered corridor leading down to security. Passengers only beyond this point. Last chance to stock up on Tayto Crisps! The Taste of Home!
He thought he detected a last-minute hesitation. ‘You’re absolutely sure you’re going to be all right?’
‘I am, a hundred per cent.’
‘All right, but no more talking to strange women in courthouse cafeterias?’
‘No more of that, promise.’ She squeezed his hand.
He tried to slip his other hand into her pocket. She trapped it with her elbow, it and the £200 in twenties he had meant to leave in there.
‘Oh, no you don’t,’ she said.
‘Just to tide you over the first few days. Look,’ pre-empting her next objection, ‘they’re Bank of England and everything.’
She shook her head, you seriously don’t need to do this, but she must have realised there was no winning this one.
To their right, the terminal doors parted and the space was filled by a large party in navy-and-white tracksuits – school team, it looked like, for a sport designed specifically to use up as much as possible of their excess energy and requiring a whole clatter of bags and equipment tipping off the trolleys that clashed repeatedly as they pushed them to where a coach or teacher (smaller than the smallest of them by several inches) took up position and tried to call them all to order.
‘I wouldn’t want to be stuck behind them in security,’ Herbie said, while they were both still looking.
‘No.’ Beth’s eyes flicked up towards the clock bracketed to the ceiling. ‘I guess I’d better go on through.’
She stretched up to kiss his cheek and in the next instant was round the corner, down the corridor, and that was her, gone.
He stood a while looking at the place where she wasn’t, not entirely sure what his next step should be.
The school team coach was moving among his charges, collecting passports.
‘Just one each,’ he was saying. ‘I don’t care if you have two, I just want one from each of you.’
And suddenly, Herbie knew exactly what his next step would be: next two or three thousand.
Long ago, when George Best Belfast City was still the Harbour Airport, and a quarter of a mile nearer the city centre, you had been able to walk out of the compound (was what it was in those Troubled days) and straight up a footbridge over the dual carriageway to a railway halt, from where, if you were fortunate enough to arrive at one of those twice-hourly moments (once hourly on Sundays) when trains actually did halt, you could be in the city centre in minutes. If instead of taking the footbridge you had turned right, you would have arrived, by way of the apparent sight gag that was the East Belfast Yacht Club, at Victoria Park, then a somewhat isolated and dingy place of public resort, now the beneficiary of much council love and investment, with landscaped paths connecting to the greenway that in turn connected to the road leading up to Herbie’s house and, before that, the Post Office.
It was the last week of trading. He could pick up his Irish passport form and say his goodbyes at the same time. Two birds, one stone.
He was pl
eased to discover, turning out the main gate, that the footpath had followed the airport all the way to its new location. Almost as soon as he set foot on it, though, he understood why he might have doubted it – why he had never, in the more than fifteen years since the airport’s eastward translation, seen a single person walk along it. The traffic hurtling by was truly terrifying, tugging at his sleeve, his trouser leg, wanting to suck him into its slipstream (and, yes, it was in his mind the whole time, Beth’s friend and all that flowed from his error of judgement coinciding with the relentless march to digital-only broadcasting). He was never in his life so glad, reaching the little side gate into the park, to step in goose shit. The geese responsible – year-round residents, these, who had long since adopted Belfast ways – sized him up for edibles then, nah, turned their backs and looked for the next likely human.
He had gone about twenty yards when he saw a young seagull, its brown feathers just beginning to turn white, standing right in his path. He tilted his head to the left, looking at it. It tilted its head to the right, looking back at him. It couldn’t be. Could it? He didn’t suppose it was all that far from its normal flapping ground, and that spot on its bill just beginning to turn red looked more than generically familiar. He clucked at it, encouragingly, rubbing the pads of his forefinger and thumb together, all the while trying with his other hand to slide his phone out of his pocket to take a picture, but as soon as the seagull saw the object in his hand it spread its wings and rushed at him, beak open. He only just managed to pull his hand out of the way in time. The seagull lifted off the ground and landed a few feet away. It looked over its shoulder at him – a look that said, remember, I only need to be lucky once – then went about its grooming.
*
The Post Office was jammed to overflowing.
Should have guessed.
It looked, as he drew near, as though half of east Belfast had just remembered it was the last week too. The senior, non-Haribo-eating half, in the main. Some fella was actually part walking, part riding his scooter up and down the footpath, looking for a way through the press of bodies out front and on to the road. He had a helmet on that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a bike ten times as powerful and he seemed to jerk his head in Herbie’s direction not once but twice, as he finally got clear before put-put-putting through the gaps in the road traffic and off down a side street, though he may simply have been checking over his shoulder, making sure there was nothing coming behind him, or no one.
Herbie went into Sam’s: give it twenty minutes, see if the crowd across the road thinned. A few of those minutes passed. A few minutes in which Herbie chatted to Derek – yes, Beth had got away, or got as far as the airport anyway, early, which was unlike her – ordered his coffee and took it to his favourite table beneath the capital S. Observed his customary prayerful pause. O, Avatar of Simple Pleasures.
There was a sound then – kkkrrrkkkhh – like a rip in the everyday.
Herbie looked up. A big black BMW had slewed in at an angle right in front of the Post Office (the rip was its handbrake being yanked), paying no heed to the giant BUS STOP painted, in yellow, on the road beneath its axle. No heed paid either to the traffic that began almost at once building up behind by the two occupants who got out, leaving their doors wide open, and went into the Post Office then came back out half a minute later, two become four, looking this way and that for a person, a thing even, on which to vent their collective rage. Variously they pulled down the drawer of a metal bin, stuck an arm in a post box, shook their fists in faces of passersby. One of them strode out into the road as though intent on Sam’s – everyone in there had by now congregated at the window around Herbie’s table – just as a double-decker bus came along, city-bound. The bus driver jammed his foot on the brake, his fist on the horn. The fella in the road didn’t even flinch. He slapped the bus’s windscreen – Herbie would have sworn it shook – and when the bus driver still didn’t let up with the horn went round and tried to pull the folding doors open with his bare hands. Other drivers on the blind side of the bus started tooting their horns too. The fella let go the bus doors and went and smacked a couple of car roofs – Fuck do you want? (Nothing, their drivers’ faces said, they wanted nothing ever again, ever, ever, ever) – then he and his mates got back into their own car, reversed, went forward, reversed in a looping arc and drove off up the road, one door still flapping.
Derek broke the silence that had fallen in the cafe. ‘I wouldn’t want to be sitting at home waiting on him coming back tonight.’
The police arrived half a minute later, putting on their caps as they got out of their car, adjusting them, using up another few seconds before going into the Post Office. ‘What’s the betting,’ said Sam, ‘they were sitting round the corner, waiting till they heard that BMW go?’
‘Well, you wouldn’t want to create a whole scene,’ Derek said. ‘You wouldn’t want to run the risk you’d actually have to lift those fellas.’
While all of this was going on, Herbie’s phone rang. Unknown caller. He nearly wasn’t going to answer. No, I didn’t have a recent accident at work. Yes, I think I would remember…
But then he thought it might be Beth, using a call box to save her battery. He pressed the little green phone symbol.
‘Herbie?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s me: Paul. I’ve done something really stupid.’ What he sounded was really excited. ‘I lifted one of their bags.’
‘Whose?’
‘Theirs.’
Herbie heard again the sound of that handbrake. He saw the bus windscreen shake with the force of a slap. He remembered the guy in the motorcycle helmet, as he was arriving, jerking his head at him: definitely, he thought now, he was jerking it at him.
‘Wait, was that you on the scooter?’
‘You were looking straight at me. I thought you must have known.’
To Herbie’s shame his first thought was for his own phone, the trace… Could they do that? He got up and walked down the cafe and out the back to the yard.
‘Where are you?’
There was heavy traffic noise in the background.
‘Well away,’ Paul said, ‘and staying.’
‘Is it worth all this for nine thousand pounds?’
‘It’s not the nine thousand, though don’t worry, that’ll not go to waste. It’s beating them, just once.’
Herbie looked back into the body of the cafe. Beyond the heads at the window he could see the commotion continuing on the street.
‘And in case you’re worried,’ Paul said, ‘I bought this phone this morning and I’m standing with it right next to a bin.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ he lied, but before he was even halfway through he was talking to himself.
It was only later – taking his seat again in the window – that he wondered how Paul had managed to get his number on a phone he had never used before. And in the next instant it occurred to him that the noise he was hearing while they were on the phone might not have been cars, but planes.
He tried Beth but she wasn’t picking up. He started composing a text. Then stopped. Started again. Stopped again. He couldn’t for the life of him think what it was he wanted to say. Or ask.
The whole episode was like… like something out of one of those old black-and-white comedies. That was Neeta’s verdict, once the police had gone and she was able finally to slip across the road. You know, Alec Guinness and Alastair Sim and what do you call him, did Jackanory – Cribbins. The guy comes up to the counter, same as he does every week, lifts his carrier bag, pulls it open and… His eyes are practically out on stalks. What the fuck, he says.
(Bit strong for a black-and-white comedy that, they all agreed.)
He starts chucking about these bundles of printer paper, it looks like, cut roughly to banknote size and held together with elastic bands. He turns to his mate standing at the next window. ‘Is this some sort of fucking joke?’ His mate opens his bag wide for al
l that little world to see. No – money, money, money, money – his is all right. They stare at each other. They turn around, look at everyone in the queue, looking back open-mouthed at them. Push them, knock one old woman’s shopping all over the floor. (Four tins of carrots. That’s all.) ‘What did you fucking do with it? What did you fucking do with it?’
It was when they threatened to block the door that Neeta slipped into the back and called the police, though by then one of them had already been on his phone reporting to his hoody friends, who turned up like the BMW cavalry and went through the whole what-did-you-fucking-do-with-it routine again, only louder. Practically screaming. ‘Which one of you took our money?’
One customer – a retired Methodist minister – told Neeta when it had all quietened down and her own ears had stopped ringing that there had been someone else in the queue right behind one of the two boyos. (They had their phones out the whole time they were queueing. One of them he thought was watching a film.) Young lad, was his impression, arm threaded through the open visor of a motorcycle helmet, though he didn’t pay him too much attention. The place was busier than it had been in years – like the bad old good old days. He noticed the bag more, on the ground at the young lad’s feet. He remembered thinking ‘two Lidl bags’, because that was what the boyo in front had too, reaching down every so often without taking his eyes from his phone to drag it forward by the straps another few inches. The minister was turned talking to the woman behind him – a former member of his flock, first day out since she had her hip done – so he didn’t see your man with the helmet go. Fed up waiting was all he thought; if there hadn’t been someone to talk to he would have been pretty fed up himself, last week or not. Anyway, the young lad went, him and his helmet and his Lidl bag. Or the other boyo’s Lidl bag, as it now seemed. Hell slap it up him and all his mates (God forgive him for saying it).
When the other two – the ones who arrived in the car – had gone too, Neeta said, the whole place erupted in laughter. Sounded like the customers had been hanging on to it for years, decades even.
Where Are We Now? Page 18
