Speaking With the Angel

by Nick Hornby

  I told her to get herself out of those ghastly stiff suits and buy herself something slinky. Oh dear, I really can’t remember what I said. I think some of it might have been really rather louche. I feel so ashamed. I always said I’d never never lecture her. Was it the day before yesterday? Has it been dark once? Before this. It’s coming light now. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t come. Oh dear, and I was always complaining about her ringing every day and ‘popping round’ as if I was on the verge of death and now … oh dear.

  Anyway, after my little outburst there was the most filthy silence. ‘Mother,’ she said eventually, in a clipped little voice, ‘have you been reading the rules?’

  ‘What rules? Don’t be silly, darling. I don’t need to read any rules. I’ve known them since I could walk.’ And then she was maundering on about some dating book and ‘retrogressing’ and setting back the cause of feminism five hundred years, which as I said, ‘… is all very well except that a woman has her needs and what’s the point of being a feminist if you spend 90 per cent of your time trying to turn a man into one too? Besides, if one doesn’t get one’s needs met it makes one frightfully crotchety and frustrated, so how can one function effectively in the world?’

  But all the time I was thinking the reason I knew what to do with men was that my mother drummed it into me like the bloody sergeant major of Divas, but then the whole phone call with Lisa turned into a really quite dreadful, dreadful scene, and I knew, I knew I had somehow deeply hurt her and I never … I never, never wanted to hurt my little … my sweet, my sweet little … oh God, please don’t let me die. Please don’t let me die and I’ll go to church in a veil and really cut down on the spirits – I won’t drink a thing except champagne. But please, don’t let me die and leave my little one like this. Please, I’d rather be a stroke victim with a saggy mouth. I really don’t want to die. She put the phone down on me for the first time ever in our lives and then I went for a bourbon and … oh my God, that’s what it was. I was drunk! Oh, thank God, thank God and all his saints above, I was bloody drunk! That’s why I’m wearing the Escada, because I’d been out with Jeremy or whatever his name is, and then I came in here and sort of lurched at the basin and then I suppose I sort of toppled off my lilac Diors.

  Oh Christ, what a ridiculous bloody fuss I’ve been making. I must have simply broken my arm, because I really can move the other, so if I haven’t had a stroke then everything’s marvellous and all I’ve got to do is sit – or maybe shit! haha! – it out and try not to starve to death and then everyone will make the most enormous fuss of my plaster cast and sign it and things – maybe I could have it in pale, pale pink with a frill! Oh! It’s the telephone! The telephone! And I can’t get to it. If I could just get my other arm from under me – oh, the answerphone – oh, it’s Lisa! It’s Lisa!

  ‘Mummy, it’s me.’ She hasn’t called me Mummy for so long! ‘I’m so sorry I was angry on Friday and I haven’t called round. I thought about what you said and you really do have a point. So I’ve shopped – you should see what I bought, and I wore them with James on Saturday night, and do you know, it’s Monday morning now and we’ve only just stopped shagging! So I’m just pulling up outside your block now – I’m on my way to work. I’m not checking up, it’s just I’ve got a little something for you. If you’re not there I’ll just let myself in and slip it on the table. Oh Christ, Mother, I can hardly walk and I’ve got a clouting hangover but I’m so bleeding happy.’

  There, you see! Sometimes I’m so uniquely intuitive and clever, I really feel quite overcome … oh, here she is! There’s the bell! There’s the key in the door!

  ‘Lisa! Lisa darling, I’m in the bathroom. I’ve fallen over, but you mustn’t think it’s because I’m old. I was drunk, darling! Absolutely bloody steaming!’

  The Slave

  RODDY DOYLE

  Terry is forty-two. He sits on a stool at a kitchen counter. He wears a towelling dressing gown and slippers, no pyjamas. He has a cup of coffee and a book, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, in front of him. It’s very early, still dark outside.

  My very educated mother just showed us nine planets. My very educated mother just showed us nine planets. My, Mercury. Very, Venus. Educated, Earth. Mother, Mars. Just, Jupiter. Showed, Saturn. Us, Uranus. Nine, Neptune. Planets, Pluto. All of them, in the right order. It was brilliant. The only problem was the two M’s, Mercury and Mars. Mixing them up. Except for that, it was plain sailing. Simple. And that was what I liked about it. All that complicated business straightened and tidied into one sentence. Even if the sentence itself was stupid. My very educated mother. Just showed us nine planets. Mind you, that bit is good. Because there are nine of them. So it fits and helps you remember.

  And it’s about the only thing I do remember learning in school. I must have learnt more, I’m not saying that. A lot more, actually. I can read, for fuck sake. He nods at the book.

  I’m a two-a-week man. I eat the fuckin’ things. So, yeah. But I don’t remember learning how to read. And I do remember my very educated mother. Like it was now. The first week of secondary school. And the teacher, God love her. Miss something. O’Keefe, I think it was. Something like that. Her name was on the timetable, ‘O’Whatever it was. Miss’. And we were hoping that a nice bit of stuff would come walking in the door. But in marches your woman. Older than our ma’s. And as ugly as our da’s. With a box of chalk. Holding it up in the air, like a cup or something. A trophy, and she waits till there’s absolute silence.

  ‘What is this?’ she says, and she points at some poor cunt at the front. Me.

  ‘A box of chalk,’ I say, and wait to be told that I’m wrong.

  But, ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It is a box of chalk. And what type of chalk is it?’

  I look at the box.

  ‘Coloured,’ I say, and I’m right again. Twice in a row, for the first time in my life. And the last.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It is coloured chalk. And it is mine.’

  She goes over to the desk. The teacher’s desk, like, the high one at the front. And she opens the drawer, and in goes the chalk.

  ‘I am Miss’ – whatever it was – she says. ‘And I am your geography teacher. We will meet three times a week. And three times a week I will open this drawer and I will find my chalk exactly as I left it. I have information to impart but I cannot do this to my satisfaction if I do not have my coloured chalk.’

  And then she says – you’ve guessed it: ‘Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ say the saps at the front, mise* here included.

  ‘A stick of coloured chalk is the geography teacher’s essential tool,’ she says, God love her. ‘The box contains ten sticks and it will contain ten sticks when we meet again on Wednesday.’

  ‘Wed-nesday’ she called it. Some hope, the poor eejit. The other teachers took it, every fuckin’ stick. It was all gone by lunchtime.

  Anyway, she took a stick of the ordinary white off the tray at the bottom of the blackboard, and then she wrote my very educated mother down the board instead of across, and the names of the planets that the words stood for beside them. And she told us to copy it all into our copies, after we’d done the margin and the date. And I’ve remembered it ever since, and nothing else. Precious little. Damn-all, really. The only other thing I remember clearly is the Latin teacher – I did Latin, believe it or not, for three years. And I remember none of it. But I do remember him. He went round the room every morning, putting his hand down our jumpers to make sure we were wearing vests. A Christian Brother he was, and I can remember his name. But I’ll keep it to myself. Yeah, I remember him all right. Every morning, right through the winter. Feeling my chest. Leaving his hand there for ever. Freezing. Rough palms – old cuts gone hard, years of swinging a hurley. That was my only experience of abuse. His hand. He’s still alive as well. So I’m told. I should report him, I suppose. Only, (a) I don’t think I could handle the humiliation, and (b) I’d hate anyone to know that I used to wear a vest. And
it’s harmless enough when you hear about some of the things that went on. And he did it to all of us; he wasn’t just picking on me. Hang on –

  He listens, staring at the ceiling.

  No; it’s grand. One of the kids, or herself shifting in the bed, that’s all.

  He stares at the ceiling for a few seconds longer, then at floor level, around the kitchen. He starts to talk again as he looks, searches.

  It’s one of the things I like about getting up at this hour, before the rest of them. The coffee and the book, yeah, but I love hearing the house wake up, d’you know what I mean? The toilet flushing, them yapping at each other, their feet on the stairs. I love it.

  Used to, at least.

  And I will again. It’s a matter of time, I reckon. Just a matter of time. He drinks.

  Cold. Fuck it. Better than nothing, though. It’s the caffeine I’m after, not the heat. No, I can’t remember a word of Latin. Not a word. I’m not blaming the Brother, mind you. No. Not at all. I’ve no French either, barely a word – maths, history. Tiny bits, only. 1916. 1798. Black ’47. Irish? Ah, good night. Oíche mhaith.* Very, very little. The cúpla focail † only. I can hardly help the kids with their homework and the eldest left me behind years ago. No, the only thing I remember, consciously remember, is that thing, my very educated mother. But she was a clown, the teacher, God love her. We ate the poor woman after we got the hang of her. ‘Is there life on Uranus, Miss?’ ‘No, indeed.’ She was fierce enough the first day, with her box of chalk. Scary. Worthy of a bit of respect. But then, I suppose it was when she said about the chalk being her essential tool, we realized then she was just a mad ol’ bitch, and we made her life a misery. I’d say sorry to her now if I ever met her; I would, no bother. We ended up throwing the chalk at her every time she turned her back. She was getting on the bus in front of me once and there were coloured chalk marks all down her back. God love her, whatever her name was.

  But. It has to be said. She taught me the only thing I remember. So, that’s something. And it’s not just that I remember it now and again, when I hear one of the words, say, ‘mother’ or ‘very’, or there’s something on the telly about astronomy or anything to do with geography. No, I remember it every day. It’s not a memory, no more than the names of my children are; d’you know what I mean? One of your kids comes running up to you with its head split open, you don’t have to think of its name. The names are always there. And it’s the same with my very educated oul’ one.

  It’s like this. Every day, every working day I walk down to the Dart station – like I’ll do this morning. I’m on a job in town. Have been for the last eighteen months. And there’s another year in it, I’d say. On Westmoreland Street there. We’re converting a bank into another bank. It’s huge. Years of work in it. So, I don’t bother with the van. I leave the tools in a strong box on the job. So, I don’t need the van. I’ve given up doing the nixers, except for the odd one, for a friend, say. And the traffic in town is desperate. So I go in on the Dart. And she’s driving the van. She doesn’t mind. I thought she’d hate the idea, it not being a car, like. But she’s grand. It beats walking, is her philosophy. ‘I love a walk,’ she says, ‘but only when I’m going for a walk, not when I’m hauling the shopping.’ And the kids love rolling around in the back. Except the eldest. She wouldn’t be caught dead looking at it, never mind being driven in it. So, I walk down to the station every morning, and there’s a bit of a hill just before it and when I get to the top there’s the Pigeon House chimneys in front of me. God’s Socks, the eldest used to call them. In the days when she used to talk to us. And every time, every time I hit the top of the hill it goes through my head, the same thing every day: my very educated mother. Don’t ask me why, but it’s like clockwork. Just showed us nine planets. I don’t expect it or anticipate it, or whatever. I don’t wait for it to happen or even remember that it always happens when I’m going over the hill. It just pops into my head, new every morning, when I see the chimneys. And it stays, lodged in there, until I get into the station. My ver-y ed-u-cay-ted mo-ther just –. Every morning. Rain, wind or hail.

  And that was what went through my head the morning I found the rat.

  He says nothing for some seconds.

  I shut the kitchen door. And I leaned back against it. I had to force myself to breathe. To remember – to breathe. In, out. In, out. My heart was pounding, Jesus, like the worst hangover I’d ever had, pounding, pounding, pounding. It was sore. Really sore, now – like a heart attack or something. Huge in my chest. And I leaned against the kitchen door. He points.

  Just out there, out in the hall. In, out. In, out. My very educated mother. My very educated mother. And when I got the breathing together, I went back in. I braved it. I went in and I had another look, to make sure I’d actually seen what I’d seen. I was half-sure there’d be nothing there. It was a bit of brown paper, a wrapper or something, one of the baby’s furry toys. Or even nothing at all. A shadow. It was just about dawn, the blinds were open. Any of the things on the windowsill could have made a shadow – the washing-up liquid, the dishwasher powder. At that hour of the morning. Still half-asleep. Just showed us nine planets. I took the long way. Just showed us nine planets.

  He stands up, to demonstrate his movements.

  Instead of going straight to the fridge. The direct route. I couldn’t. I came around here, to this side of the counter. I was scared, yeah, fine. I’m not going to not admit that. But that wasn’t just it. I wanted to see, to be absolutely sure. To see it from a distance and an angle. To be absolutely positive.

  And, yeah, it was there. Of course it was. In under the pull-out larder. A rat. A dead fuckin’ rat. A huge fucker. Huge, now. Like a, like a teenage cat, d’you know what I mean?

  Lying there.

  And I still couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t – comprehend it. I was staring at the fuckin’ thing. There was nothing else, in my head, in the world, just that thing lying there, under my pull-out larder, that I installed myself – that was my own fuckin’ idea – and I couldn’t get to grips with the situation. I couldn’t say to myself, ‘That’s a rat there, Terry, and you’d want to think about getting rid of it.’ No. I couldn’t organize myself. I couldn’t think. I walked out and shut the door again. And I was going to go back in and go through it all over again, gawk at it and hope to fuck it would be gone or was never there in the first place. And I was on my way back in.

  And then I heard him. Little himself. The baby. Inside in the sitting room.

  And I kind of cracked up. I began to think, properly think, for the first time, really. Since I found the thing on the floor. It was only a few inches from my feet; did I tell you that yet? Yeah. Two, three inches. Making the coffee, I was. In the list of all the stuff I eat and drink all day, it’s the only thing I really care about. The first cup – mug. Good, strong coffee. I picked up the habit in America, in Florida, on the holliers. Orlando. Before the baby. He was conceived there, actually, now that I think of it. During a storm. Thunder, lightning, the works. It was something else; you’d never see it here. And good music on the radio at the same time. Good seventies stuff, you know. He sings.

  ‘On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair.’ It all seemed to fit. The music and the weather. Even though it was pissing outside and he was singing about the desert. But it was American. And we were there. Myself and herself, after all those years. And that kind of explains why we’ve one child that’s eight years younger than the others. He’s a souvenir, God love him. Him and the coffee. I drink tea on the job, unless I go over to Bewley’s. I could bring in the coffee in a flask, I suppose, but I was never what you’d call a great man for the flasks. As a matter of fact, if I was doing one of those word association games and someone said ‘man’, I’d never say ‘flask’. I’d go right through the dictionary before I’d say ‘flask’.

  Anyway, I’m making the coffee. I’ve done the plunger bit and I’ve gone to the fridge for the milk. I must have walked past it; I c
ould have stepped on it.

  I drop the spoon, taking it out of the drawer. He points.

  There, right beside the pull-out. I drop the spoon and I’m halfway to picking it up when I see it. Jesus. Inches. The fuckin’ spoon was right beside it. It’s probably the first time I ever dropped a spoon in my life. I don’t drop things.

  Anyway, I’m leaning against the kitchen door and I hear the baby chatting to himself in the sitting room. And that’s when I get really upset. I’m nearly crying, I don’t mind admitting it. But I’m also thinking for the first time. And I’m straight back in there, back into the kitchen. And I’m thinking, deciding. ‘Terry,’ I’m saying – out loud, for all I know – ‘action stations. Let’s get rid of the cunt. Gloves and bag. Gloves and bag.’ And I shut the door behind me, to make sure little himself doesn’t come in and see it on the floor or me with it in my hand. And I go over to the press where she puts the plastic bags. She’s mad into the environment, dead keen. We’ve a whole house full of plastic bags.

  Anyway, so far, so good. I’m doing something. I’m in control, kind of. And the press is over there –

  He points.

  The one under the sink. Well away from your man on the floor. There’s no need for me to go too near him yet. I’m assuming he was a male. It’s hard to imagine that there’d be such a thing as a female rat. But that’s just me being stupid. Let’s just say it was a male; it’s easier for me. I had to go past him, whatever sex he was. But I didn’t have to see him, to get to the sink, and I didn’t look. I go straight over and I have the door open before it dawns on me that he might have friends in the vicinity. Fuckin’ hell, I nearly shat myself, I nearly fell into the press. But it was empty; it was grand. There was nothing in there that shouldn’t have been there. No sign of disorder, claws, droppings – it was grand. I take out four of the bags. There’s hundreds of them in there. Supervalu. Irish-owned. We’re keen on that, too, in this house. Four of them. And one of the big black bin ones. Killeens. Irish company. And I shake out the bags and put them on the counter, one, and one, and one, and the last one. Really fast now; I wasn’t fluting around. No procrastinating. No way. Not with the baby in the room next door.