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Al untucks his napkin from his collar and coolly places it on the table. He stands up and positions himself behind his brother. He wraps his arms around his waist, and pumps hard on his stomach.
On the second push, the food is dislodged from Justin’s throat.
As a third person races to my aid, or rather to join the growing panicked discussion of how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre, I suddenly stop coughing. Three faces stare at me in surprise while I rub my throat with confusion.
‘Are you OK?’ Conor asks, patting my back again.
‘Yes,’ I whisper, embarrassed by the attention we are receiving. ‘I’m fine, thank you. Everyone, thank you so much for your help.’
They are slow to back away.
‘Please go back to your seats and enjoy your dinner. Honestly, I’m fine. Thank you.’ I sit down quickly and rub my streaming mascara from my eyes, trying to ignore the stares. ‘God, that was embarrassing.’
‘That was odd; you hadn’t even eaten anything. You were just talking and then, bam! You started coughing.’
I shrug and rub my throat. ‘I don’t know, something caught when I inhaled.’
The waiter comes over to take our plates away. ‘Are you all right, madam?’
‘Yes, thank you, I’m fine.’
I feel a nudge from behind me as our neighbour leans over to our table. ‘Hey, for a minute there I thought you were going into labour, ha-ha! Didn’t we, Margaret?’ He looks at his wife and laughs.
‘No,’ Margaret says, her smile quickly fading and her face turning puce. ‘No, Pat.’
‘Huh?’ He’s confused. ‘Well, I did anyway. Congrats, Conor.’ He gives a suddenly pale Conor a wink. ‘There goes sleep for the next twenty years, believe you me. Enjoy your dinner.’ He turns back to face his table, and we hear murmured squabbling.
Conor’s face falls and he reaches for my hand across the table. ‘Are you OK?’
‘That’s happened a few times now,’ I explain, and instinctively place my hand over my flat stomach. ‘I’ve barely looked in the mirror since I’ve come home. I can’t stand to look.’
Conor makes appropriate sounds of concern and I hear the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘pretty’ but I silence him. I need for him to listen and not to try to solve anything. I want him to know that I’m not trying to be pretty or beautiful but for once just to appear as I am. I want to tell him how I feel when I force myself to look in the mirror and study my body that now feels like a shell.
‘Oh, Joyce.’ His grip on my hand tightens as I speak, he squeezes my wedding ring into my skin and it hurts.
A wedding ring but no marriage.
I wriggle my hand a little to let him know to loosen his grip. Instead he lets go. A sign.
‘Conor,’ is all I say. I give him a look and I know he knows what I’m about to say. He’s seen this look before.
‘No, no, no, no, Joyce, not this conversation now.’ He withdraws his hand from the table completely and holds his hands up in defence. ‘You – we – have been through enough this week.’
‘Conor, no more distractions.’ I lean forward with urgency in my voice. ‘We have to deal with us now or before we know it, ten years on we’ll be wondering every single day of our miserable lives what might have been.’
We’ve had this conversation in some form or another on an annual basis over the last five years and I wait for the usual retort from Conor. That no one says marriage is easy, we can’t expect it to be so, we promised one another, marriage is for life and he’s determined to work at it. Salvage from the skip what’s worth saving, my itinerant husband preaches. I focus on the centre flame’s reflection in my dessert spoon while I wait for his usual comments. I realise minutes later they still haven’t come. I look up and see he is battling tears and is nodding in what looks like agreement.
I take a breath. This is it.
Justin eyes the dessert menu.
‘You can’t have any, Al.’ Doris plucks the menu out of her husband’s hands and snaps it shut.
‘Why not? Am I not allowed to even read it?’
‘Your cholesterol goes up just reading it.’
Justin zones out as they squabble. He shouldn’t be having any either. Since his divorce he’s started to let himself go, eating as a comfort instead of his usual daily workout. He really shouldn’t, but his eyes hover above one item on the menu like a vulture watching its prey.
‘Any dessert for you, sir?’ the waiter asks.
Go on.
‘Yes. I’ll have the …’
‘Banoffee pie, please,’ I blurt out to the waiter, to my own surprise.
Conor’s mouth drops.
Oh dear. My marriage has just ended and I’m ordering dessert. I bite my lip and stop a nervous smile from breaking out.
To new beginnings. To the pursuit of … somethingness.
TEN (#ulink_17903442-8a03-5381-a96b-cdac3ce46a18)
A grand chime welcomes me to my father’s humble home. It’s a sound far more than deserving of the two up-two down, but then, so is my father.
The sound teleports me back to my life within these walls and how I’d identified visitors by the sound of their call at the door. As a child, short piercing sounds told me that friends, too short to reach, were hopping up to punch the button. Fast and weak snippets of sound alerted me to boyfriends cowering outside, terrified of announcing their very existence, never mind their arrival, to my father. Late night unsteady, uncountable rings sang Dad’s homecoming from the pub without his keys. Joyful, playful rhythms were family calls on occasions, and short, loud, continuous bursts like machine-gun fire warned us of door-to-door salespeople. I press the bell again, but not just because at ten a.m. the house is quiet and nothing stirs; I want to know what my call sounds like.
Apologetic, short and clipped. Almost doesn’t want to be heard but needs to be. It says, sorry, Dad, sorry to disturb you. Sorry the thirty-three-year-old daughter you thought you were long ago rid of is back home after her marriage has fallen apart.
Finally I hear sounds inside and I see Dad’s seesaw movement coming closer, shadowlike and eerie, in the distorted glass.
‘Sorry, love,’ he opens the door, ‘I didn’t hear you the first time.’
‘If you didn’t hear me then how did you know I rang?’
He looks at me blankly and then down at the suitcases around my feet. ‘What’s this?’
‘You … you told me I could stay for a while.’
‘I thought you meant till the end of Countdown.’
‘Oh … well, I was hoping to stay for a bit longer than that.’
‘Long after I’m gone, by the looks of it.’ He surveys his doorstep. ‘Come in, come in. Where’s Conor? Something happen to the house? You haven’t mice again, have you? It’s the time of the year for them all right, so you should have kept the windows and doors closed. Block up all the openings, that’s what I do. I’ll show you when we’re inside and settled. Conor should know.’
‘Dad, I’ve never called around to stay here because of mice.’
‘There’s a first time for everything. Your mother used to do that. Hated the things. Used to stay at your grandmother’s for the few days while I ran around here like that cartoon cat trying to catch them. Tom or Jerry, was it?’ He squeezes his eyes closed tight to think, then opens them again, none the wiser. ‘I never knew the difference but by God they knew it when I was after them.’ He raises a fist, looks feisty for a moment while captured in the thought and then he stops suddenly and carries my suitcases into the hall.
‘Dad?’ I say, frustrated. ‘I thought you understood me on the phone. Conor and I have separated.’
‘Separated what?’
‘Ourselves.’
‘From what?’
‘From each other!’
‘What on earth are you talking about, Gracie?’
‘Joyce. We’re not together any more. We’ve split up.’
He puts the bags down by the hall’s wall of photographs, there to provide any visitor who crosses the threshold with a crash course of the Conway family history. Dad as a boy, Mum as a girl, Dad and Mum courting, married, my christening, communion, débutant ball and wedding. Capture it, frame it, display it; Mum and Dad’s school of thought. It’s funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when a moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.
Dad doesn’t pause for a moment at the revelations of my failed marriage and instead works his way into the kitchen. ‘Cuppa?’
I stay in the hall looking around at the photos and breathe in that smell. The smell that’s carried around everyday on every stitch of Dad’s back, like a snail carries its home. I always thought it was the smell of Mum’s cooking that drifted around the rooms and seeped into every fibre, including the wallpaper, but it’s ten years since Mum has passed away. Perhaps the scent was her; perhaps it’s still her.
‘What are you doin’ sniffin’ the walls?’
I jump, startled and embarrassed at being caught, and make my way into the kitchen. It hasn’t changed since I lived here and it’s as spotless as the day Mum left it, nothing moved, not even for convenience’s sake. I watch Dad move slowly about, resting on his left foot to access the cupboards below, and then using the extra inches of his right leg as his own personal footstool to reach above. The kettle boils too loudly for us to have a conversation and I’m glad of that because Dad grips the handle so tightly his knuckles are white. A teaspoon is cupped in his left hand, which rests on his hip, and it reminds me of how he used to stand with his cigarette, shielded in his cupped hand that’d be stained yellow from nicotine. He looks out to his immaculate garden and grinds his teeth. He’s angry and I feel like a teenager once again, awaiting my talking-down.
‘What are you thinking about, Dad?’ I finally ask as soon as the kettle stops hopping about like a crammed Hill 16 in Croke Park during an All-Ireland Final.
‘The garden,’ he replies, his jaw tightening once again.
‘The garden?’
‘That bloody cat from next door keeps pissing on your mother’s roses.’ He shakes his head angrily. ‘Fluffy,’ he throws his hands up, ‘that’s what she calls him. Well, Fluffy won’t be so fluffy when I get my hands on him. I’ll be wearin’ one of them fine furry hats the Russians wear and I’ll dance the hopak outside Mrs Henderson’s front garden while she wraps a shiverin’ Baldy up in a blanket inside.’
‘Is that what you’re really thinking about?’ I ask incredulously.
‘Well, not really, love,’ he confesses, calming down. ‘That and the daffodils. Not far off from planting season for spring. And some crocuses. I’ll have to get some bulbs.’
Good to know my marriage breakdown isn’t my dad’s main priority. Nor his second. On the list after crocuses.
‘Snowdrops too,’ he adds.
It’s rare I’m around the area so early on in the day. Usually I’d be at work showing property around the city. It’s so quiet now with everyone at work, I wonder what on earth Dad does in this silence.
‘What were you doing before I came?’
‘Thirty-three years ago or today?’
‘Today.’ I try not to smile because I know he’s serious.
‘Quiz.’ He nods at the kitchen table where he has a page full of puzzles and quizzes. Half of them are completed. ‘I’m stuck on the number six. Have a look at that.’ He brings the cups of tea to the table, managing not to spill a drop despite his swaying. Always steady.
‘“Which of Mozart’s operas was not well received by one especially influential critic who summed up the work as having ‘Too many notes’?”’ I read the clue aloud.
‘Mozart,’ Dad shrugs. ‘Haven’t a clue about that lad at all.’
‘Emperor Joseph the Second,’ I say.
‘What’s that now?’ Dad’s caterpillar eyebrows go up in surprise. ‘How did you know that, then?’
I frown. ‘I must have just heard it somwh—do I smell smoke?’
He sits up straight and sniffs the air like a bloodhound. ‘Toast. I made it earlier. Had the setting on too high and burned it. They were the last two slices, as well.’
‘Hate that.’ I shake my head. ‘Where’s Mum’s photograph from the hall?’
‘Which one? There are thirty of her.’
‘You’ve counted?’ I laugh.
‘Nailed them up there, didn’t I? Forty-four photos in total, that’s forty-four nails I needed. Went down to the hardware store and bought a pack of nails. Forty nails it contained. They made me buy a second packet just for four more nails.’ He holds up four fingers and shakes his head. ‘Still have thirty-six of them left over in the toolbox. What is the world comin’ to at all, at all.’
Never mind terrorism or global warming. The proof of the world’s downfall, in his eyes, comes down to thirty-six nails in a toolbox. He’s probably right too.
‘So where is it?’
‘Right where it always is,’ he says unconvincingly.
We both look at the closed kitchen door, in the direction of the hall table. I stand up to go out and check. These are the kinds of things you do when you have time on your hands.
‘Ah ah,’ he jerks a floppy hand at me, ‘sit yourself down.’ He rises. ‘I’ll go out and check.’ He closes the kitchen door behind him, blocking me from seeing out. ‘She’s there all right,’ he calls to me. ‘Hello, Gracie, your daughter was worried about you. Thought she couldn’t see you but sure, haven’t you been there all along watchin’ her sniffin’ the walls, thinkin’ the paper’s on fire. But sure isn’t it only madder she’s gettin’, leaving her husband and packing in her job.’
I haven’t mentioned anything to him about taking leave from my job, which means Conor has spoken to him, which means Dad knew my exact intentions for being here from the very first moment he heard the doorbell ring. I have to give it to him, he plays stupid very well. He returns to the kitchen and I catch a glimpse of the photo on the hall table.
‘Ah!’ He looks at his watch in alarm. ‘Ten twenty-five! Let’s go inside quick!’ He moves faster than I’ve seen him in a long time, grabbing his weekly television guide and his cup of tea and rushing into the television room.
‘What are we watching?’ I follow him into the living room, watching him with amusement.
‘Murder, She Wrote, you know it?’
‘Never seen it.’
‘Oh, wait’ll you see, Gracie. That Jessica Fletcher is a quare one for catching the murderers. Then over on the next channel we’ll watch Diagnosis Murder, where the dancer solves the cases.’ He takes a pen and circles it on the TV page.
I’m captivated by Dad’s excitement. He sings along with the theme tune, making trumpet noises with his mouth.
‘Come in here and lie on the couch and I’ll put this over you.’ He picks up a tartan blanket draped over the back of the green velvet couch and places it gently over me, tucking it in around my body so tightly I can’t move my arms. It’s the same blanket I rolled on as a baby, the same blanket they covered me with when I was home sick from school and was allowed to watch television on the couch. I watch Dad with fondness, remembering the tenderness he always showed me as a child, feeling right back there again.
Until he sits at the end of the couch and squashes my feet.
