What Are You Like Page 19

  But that day in Clery’s, Joan took one look at her and said, ‘You must come out, sometime. Come out for tea.’ It was the kindness you afford to spinsters, but Evelyn took her up on it, and sat playing with the children on a Sunday afternoon, until the ring came on the door that brought Berts.

  Berts. A man in a brown suit, even on the weekend. A man with a child in his arms, who talked little, and did not touch a drop.

  Evelyn knew her weaknesses. She fell in love with Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, with Cary Grant in Philadelphia Story, all those easy, dangerous drunks. She knew that when the film ended, the real story was just begun.

  But Berts began and ended where he was. He stood in the doorway and did not know how to shake her hand, or where to put down the child. Evelyn saw there was no smoothness in him. He did not find things easy. This was a man who had to organise his life, before he could live it. A good man.

  He started to snore. Evelyn heard it and was astonished. It was for this she married him, for his ability to sleep. He would not leave his flies open, or bring men home who would eye her up and start reciting ‘My Dark Rosaleen’.

  She had chosen Berts, so she did not have to love him. Perhaps that was her sin. Perhaps that was the reason she was to blame. But she had loved him with her life, had she not? She had loved him with her days.

  Evelyn lay in the dark doing her accounts, over and over, trying to make them tally. At three in the morning she finally reached out and clamped Berts’ sweating nose in two fingers. There was a surprised silence, then his body bucked in the bed and his mouth opened and he turned away from her.

  Peace. She wiped the ends of her fingers on the pillow slip.

  After a while, he turned towards her again and she felt his face on the top of her back. She could not tell if he was awake. For a while she thought he was and her heart pounded. Then he said,

  ‘Absolutely.’

  He was asleep, and the touch of his face was terrible to her. She wondered could she leave him, at the nonsensical age of fifty-four. Evelyn lay with Berts’ cheek clamped to her back, the rest of him stretched away towards the far corner of the bed. She could feel the distance between every inch of him and every inch of her. His face pushed deeper, and she sensed something pass through his body. A sigh, a tremor. Then a terrible wetness. It was hot – as hot as his body was, inside. It spread over her skin, then cooled and itched on the nape of her neck.

  Berts was crying in his sleep. Or Berts had woken up and started to cry. After twenty-three years of marriage, she could not, for the life of her, whisper his name in order to find out.

  The Keepers of the Gate

  ROSE CLEANED THE flat before she left, thinking that there were few pleasures to compare with leaving a place clean, if you never knew when you would return. She relished the silence in the kitchen after the fridge was switched off, then the slow drip of the ice melting; the first tray full of water, so wide and shallow, you always spilt some on the floor.

  At three in the morning the silence woke her. She got out of bed, stood in the kitchen in her bare feet and punched at the ice with the breadknife, white slabs breaking wetly as they hit the tiles. The ice creaked and broke as she levered open the freezer compartment that had been frozen shut for months. She threw out the packet of spinach she found there, then worked the ice with her bare hands. She wanted to get it out clean, she wanted to hold a box in her hands that she could leave in the sink, melting like a treasure.

  In the morning she picked up her suitcase and went home.

  The first twenty minutes after she walked in the door her parents talked about how she had got there, the trains and buses, the minicabs and the weather. Rose used to think they did this in order to keep her from going anywhere, but now she knew it was simply true. There was never a clear way to get to the house she grew up in. Step out the door, and London was not on your side.

  Her mother lost her temper with a hot baking tray. She grabbed it with a tea-towel and rattled it on the cooker top. Rose thought about the long days they spent in each other’s company, now that her father had retired. They rubbed against each other until they had rubbed themselves away. Things could get at them. They were permeable to the world.

  After dinner, they each sat as they used to; her father reading in a loud wicker chair; her mother grazing around the kitchen, shifting objects from one place to another, and not making the slightest difference. An old transistor radio talked to itself on a shelf, a survivor of the foster boy wars. Rose rubbed the dial round until she found Radio 3. The oven needed doing, but that would need a symphony. This sounded like a Britten piece for oboe and piano, so she dumped small things into the sink and picked up an old toothbrush and started to clean.

  After they drifted off to bed, she made her way upstairs and ran a bath. Last bath here. Last bath before she knew who she was.

  When she was eleven she had fitted this tub perfectly. She looked up at the light, the damp spreading its dark mould around the ceiling rose. She looked at the shower rose. She looked at the roses on the dressing gown that her mother gave her when she was sixteen. She looked at her body and was surprised by how huge it had grown. The sigh and slap of water as she lifted a leg and put it back down, the broken ball of her belly, as it dipped below the water line.

  Rose.

  She hated flying.

  ‘You have everything?’ said her father at the airport, his eyes fixed on the top of the escalator, which sank, step over step, as they were pushed to the top.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Give them our best,’ he said, as if he were reporting what someone else had said.

  ‘If I find them.’

  ‘Yes. Well, hopefully.’ He was sad and uncomfortable, not sure if he was at fault, somehow. She kissed him.

  ‘Oh pooey,’ she said. They walked up to the check-in and his whole body was a nuisance to her, the length of his arm beside her, the fact that he was old. He had pretended to be her father, so that he could love her. What sort of a man did a thing like that?

  He put her suitcase on the weighing machine and stood back. She walked past him and laid her ticket on the high desk.

  Rose was on her way. She was on her way to people who were as vicious as blood, who were as real.

  She had imagined it so many times. Over and over she walked up the path to the door. She ran a gauntlet of flowers: dahlias, or gladioli, or nothing perhaps, a balding lawn, a stretch of gravel, a line of rusting tin cans and spare parts for cars. She walked past all these things up to a door which, for some reason, was always the same – a ray of wooden slats fanning out from the bottom left-hand corner, over a field of frosted glass.

  She knocked on the door.

  ‘Did you pack your bags yourself?’ The ground hostess pulled the tip of her pen down a list of questions. As Rose walked up a boreen and passed a dog tied with twine, as she checked the sky for rain in a suburban estate, as she squared her shoulders and lifted her fist, and knocked.

  Her father leaned into her suitcase to tighten the front buckle one more notch.

  ‘Do you want me to wait?’ he said as Rose took the boarding pass. She looked at him.

  There was a blinding white light when he opened the door.

  ‘No, Daddy. I’m fine.’

  He stood there. Her father. A second wife behind him in the hall. An aunt, perhaps. She would sit with them and drink tea. He would wear certain things, he would have a certain personality. There would be a particular cup in her hand, of china, or ceramic. She would look at the furniture, the piano in the corner perhaps, upright and out of tune.

  ‘Good luck, then.’ Her father’s cheek was rasping and dry.

  ‘Thanks.’

  She would sit and sip and see him as he was, this stranger who had an accent, a way of standing, a way of talking. She would not blame him. She would gather all her adult powers, all the stories that she knew, and force humanity to triumph over blood. She would sit there and smile. Or she would sit there and cry
. She would ask him about her mother’s grave. She would give in, like a child, to the blindness of the light.

  ‘Bye, then.’

  She watched her father’s back, as he walked away from her, and she lost him to the crowd.

  The flight was delayed.

  Rose felt a strange wrench as she took the exit from Terminal 1. She tramped along a metal walkway, past arbitrary rooms, a conference centre, a series of offices, the staff shop. She was off the beaten track, she was in a whole other place, an ordinary place where people never went, but was full of people all the same. The keepers of the gate.

  When she came out suddenly in Terminal 2 she felt excited by the foreign smell of cigarettes, as though they were already in Warsaw or Dar es Salaam. Downstairs, there was a low hangar full of check-in desks that made everyone look like a drug smuggler, or a refugee. Rose pushed against the flow, and felt like she was going to a place that no one had ever heard of.

  Outside, there was a multi-storey car park and no path. Rose crossed a tangle of roads and found herself beside a sign that said ‘Emergency Point’ – a set of concrete steps spiralling down to a basement, each marked with a yellow strip of paint, as though they were afraid someone might park on them.

  The Heathrow Chapel was a bunker. It reminded her of a nightclub she had gone into one morning to look for a lost bag. There was a main altar, made of steel, and side altars set in concrete bays around the wall. An airline worker in orange overalls leant on the back of a chair, a set of industrial ear muffs dangling from one hand. He was praying.

  The blue altar cloth had little embroidered airplanes flying across it. Midnight flights, edged in gold.

  Rose walked around like a tourist in a cathedral, looking at the art that was not on the walls. The Catholic altar had a 3-D picture of Christ that shifted, as you moved past, to an image of the Turin Shroud – like one of those tacky postcards. Rose swayed across and back, watching the dead sockets switch to living eyes, then empty again.

  She realised that she was looking for the boy who had died – as if his coffin would be lying there in the centre aisle. Because if a body went astray in an airport, then this church was the Lost and Found.

  But there was no body. There was a 3-D picture of Christ and a man in orange overalls, leaning on the back of a chair.

  She sat behind him, and watched his shoulders as he prayed. He held his forehead and rubbed his finger over and back along the hair of one eyebrow. He sighed, and Rose felt that he could tell her something that had nothing to do with God. He could tell her something about traffic. About the pauses that come, now and then, into which the better thoughts can fall. It would be something to do with his grey hair and the middle-aged, stockbroker’s face he carried, above the worker’s overalls.

  Simon Clark died outside a bar in Amsterdam. He wasn’t stabbed. He did not die in the toilets, with a needle sticking out of his arm. Rose thought of all the boys who had bled over her parents’ carpets, or shot up in the coal-house, or disappeared. All of them lost, as Simon was lost. As she herself was. Lost or thrown away.

  Simon was hit by a car. That was all. There was no talk of blame. There was no talk of what was in his bloodstream, or if anyone held his hand as he died. Though no one held bloody hands these days, no one would dare. All she knew was that he had ‘multiple fractures’ in his head. She could feel his skull in her hands, through the living skin and the hair. It was so hard and heavy and full of him. It was so intimate. She turned her hands up, and believed in nothing, and felt the bone bowl of his head pressing into her palms.

  The airline worker got to his feet and made his embarrassed way down the central aisle. The door shut behind him, then opened again to let in a man in a Salvation Army uniform. Rose got up. In a moment someone would come over, and touch her, and smile.

  There was another man in the porch, in a priest’s leather blouson jacket, his face polite and public even before he knew she was there. The place was stuffed with them, waiting for the call to the tragedy just in from Morocco, the heart attack in the Duty Free; men in black, who knew a short cut around the control tower and a quick way under the car park at Terminal 3.

  Out in the light she looked up at the sky and the thick, secular grey of the clouds. She watched a plane lift heavily into the middle distance and hang solid in the mist. It was very loud. It hesitated for the longest time, then disappeared.

  It was time to go. She made her way back to Terminal 1 and joined the queue for security. Glancing at her bag as it crossed the X-ray screen, she saw a cell under a microscope, the dark sac of her make-up bag, the biological bullet of her lipstick, various zips, like worms of DNA, all of it floating in the translucent fluid between her keys and an organic growth of coins.

  She picked it up on the other side, and walked on.

  Wallpaper

  OF COURSE SHE would not leave him. It would be too silly at her age. But Evelyn started to redecorate, without so much as discussing it. She decided to start plain, because that was the easiest way when you were replacing one thing at a time.

  Besides, she thought of the child, knocking on their front door, walking into their hall, taking one look, and thinking, Well, I’m glad I didn’t grow up here.

  She went into Arnott’s and got curtains in a sort of brown, she bought five litres of magnolia matt emulsion, she came home and started to rip the carpet up, all by herself.

  She loosened all the sides first, then she winkled out a corner and pulled. She did not know how she managed it, the edges and cut-out angles leaving the skirting board with a tear and pop of staples. The lint and the dust flying, until her chest was full of it. The lifting carpet was growing in front of her, pushing her back as she pulled it more, until it felt like the room was on top of her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, her heart clattering in her chest, ‘if I don’t go now then there’ll be no killing me ahead of my time,’ as it curved up like a wall into the room, a wave sweeping her out the door.

  Then she got sense and dropped it. She made herself a cup of tea and looked at the thing. Then she rolled it with a great humping across the diagonal, with the furled triangle of the corner pointing out the door.

  When Berts came in from work he stood at the threshold and looked.

  ‘Don’t ask me how,’ she said. ‘But I’m going to sort this mess out. Once and for all.’

  He leant his shoulder against the frame of the door.

  She didn’t bother with his tea, let him fend for himself, and started stripping the wallpaper off the walls.

  Voice

  ROSE BOOKED INTO an hotel that seemed to be in the centre of things. And then she didn’t know what to do. She looked at the wallpaper and realised that she had made no plans, except to find a man called Albert Delahunty, who had not answered her letter, and a whole family called Kennedy who might not know that she existed. As far as they were concerned, her life had never happened. Rose tried to tell them they were wrong.

  ‘I have always done the right thing,’ she said to them. Or, ‘I have always tried to do the right thing.’

  She gathered her loves and losses in her head, sorting through her memories for something that would prove that she had lived, that her life was worth it. There wasn’t much.

  There was a hotel bedroom with a Bible in the drawer and a little leaflet to tell you how to work the phone. There were flowers on the wall in peach and pink with faded green leaves.

  Ordinary. Ordinary. She said to herself There is nothing wrong with the ordinary.

  But it made her rise and walk out into the street. She browsed for a while outside a bookshop that had paperbacks set out under an awning. Then she walked up past a building that looked like an old academy or hospital, but which turned out to be the Irish Parliament. Beyond it was a museum and she ventured inside. The the place was full of stuffed animals in glass cases: flying foxes, the skeleton of an elk, monkey foetuses in jars. The whole bloody museum should have been in a museum.

  She cam
e out, upset, and tried to concentrate on nothing at all. Her breath. The feel of the pavement beneath the soles of her feet, the trees and parked cars on the other side of the road.

  She reached the hotel and took the key and made it back to her room. Registry of Births and Deaths. A solicitor. A title search, a company search. Or if he had gone to America a list of visa applications. Or if he had gone to England, then what?

  In the morning, she asked at reception where she could find a post office that had all the phone books. The woman reached under the desk and put two in front of her.

  ‘That’s them,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Rose said. ‘No.’

  ‘No, really. That’s the lot.’

  Then she would not let Rose take them up to her room.

  So Rose stood in front of her, a woman in a Kelly green suit, and opened the phone book and turned to A for Adoption services, and R for Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, and D, for curiosity, where she saw her father’s name sitting on the page. The address was the same. It was the same address as the one written in blue ink on her birth certificate twenty-five years ago.

  Delahunty, Berts. An address. A phone number. Her father. He had never moved house. He hadn’t even bothered.

  She asked for a pen, but found that she could not write the number. She put the pen down on the desk and picked it back up again. The woman in the green suit was talking into the phone, she was saying, ‘Not at all. No problem. Not at all.’

  And Rose was violently insulted, by the awful suit and the easy tone, by this incredible country – where people could be found in the phone book, just like that. Where people did the most appalling things, and shut their mouths, and stayed put.

  She made her way up to her room, lay on the bed and woke up six hours later, shivering and fully clothed.

  At four in the morning she woke again with the thought Registry of Births and Deaths. A solicitor. A title search. Then she remembered. She let her eyes settle on the bedside table. The number was still there, beside the hotel phone.