Читать книгу Montpelier Parade - Karl Geary - Страница 9

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The sun had shown great promise earlier in the morning, resting just behind the thin clouds, but as your father’s white Ford van pulled closer to the grand Georgian terrace of Montpelier Parade, it had yet to show itself. Your father’s hands fell across the steering wheel like a riverboat captain’s.

He was a countryman, your father. He came to Dublin young and had not felt at home since. Still, when he threw the steel of a shovel into the earth, his whole body moved with a single purpose: there in the physical landscape he became himself, and finally he made sense. It was true that men decades younger would try to keep pace and fall aside, silently watching. Even your brothers would give that much.

It was just nine o’clock, and you felt sick from the heavy lifting. You carried the tools from the car through a narrow laneway that went around the back of the house and into the garden. Everything you touched was wet and cold and refused to surrender last night’s weather. You wanted to rest, close your eyes a moment, and feel warm. You were worried you might faint and imagined your father, mortified, standing over you, pushing your body with the heel of his boot.

“Get a mix on,” he says as you rounded the corner holding the final bag of Portland cement, straining not to seem strained. He stood looking over the broken garden wall. Red bricks littered the grass, and a cast-iron gate hung to one side, knocked by the high winds some weeks back. A fisherman and his son had been drowned off Dalkey Bay when their boat capsized, their bodies lost, washed out to sea. It had been in all the papers.

The shovel felt enormous in your hands. You tried to mimic your father’s rhythm. With the ease of an alchemist he could bring sand, cement, and water together, but you could not. You could feel his eyes on you and knew that he was only waiting to finish his cigarette before he took the shovel back.

“Give me the bleeden’ thing,” he says. “You look like you’re having a fit.” You stood watching. Outside the house, you were free to admire him.

It was late morning before you found a rhythm—not his, but it would do. Your body had warmed itself, and as you gathered the red bricks into a neat pile, the world was silent, laid out before you slow and wide, punctuated by an occasional songbird and the wet scraping of your father’s shovel, like the gentle ticking of the day.

“Who lives here?” you say.

He stopped shoveling, and his breaths came quick as he leaned his hip against the wall, searching the sky above, his gums showing.

“Who lives here?” you say again.

“The people who have a broken garden wall live here,” he says. “Do you want them for something?”

“I do,” you say. “I want to buy the place and give us both a day off.”

He smirked, and that was lovely. He put a fresh cigarette to his mouth. A blue Bic lighter was dwarfed in his hand; he sparked it, then shook it a few times, and it took. Gray smoke came out his nose.

“It’d be some penny now, that house,” he says, looking over the three floors of pale sandstone, the perfect windowpanes.

“It’s big,” you say.

“Big all right, but big and all as it is, you can only be in one room at a time, no matter how much money you have.”

All but a single window on the top floor was covered with heavy fabric. The ground floor had closed wooden shutters. The longer you looked, the more decay began to show itself. Thick green moss along the line of the gutter. The plaster was cracked, and you could see into the exposed innards under the sill.

“Must be eleven?” he says. The question drifted and was not to you; his weight shifted, and he made a decision.

“Go on and get the sandwiches,” he says, and you found yourself about to run to the car, but you held fast and walked like someone whose body was heavy.

You sat almost side by side on the bricks you had stacked, unfolding the tinfoil, biting roughly at the sandwiches.

“You’d think she’d throw out a cup of tea,” he says, his voice low, still chewing.

“Who?” you ask.

“Your woman, in there.” He says, “You’d think a house like that, she’d spare a few tea bags and some feckin’ hot water.” He searched the blank windows. “Feck it,” he says, throwing his bread back

into the tinfoil. He stood and walked along the path to the door. His fist landed on the wood like two gunshots, then three. Someone moved past the upstairs window, but it might have been your imagination. Then you heard a woman’s voice muffled from inside.

“Yeah,” your father says. “Yeah . . . I just wanted to get in and make a tea, a cup of tea.” The roughness had gone from his mouth.

“Good enough, yeah.” He nodded at you as he walked down the path and sat back on the bricks. “Jesus, you’d give a stranger a cup of tea.” His voice low, satisfied. “That’s how they are, this lot, they’d walk all over you if you let them. That’s how they hold on to the money.” He dug his heavy boot into the earth and turned the heel.

You picked at dead skin on your hands, hoping you’d find a callus or a good cut. There were none, but red dust from the bricks lined the undersides of your nails.

A latch clicked on the other side of the door, and you and him cocked your heads like stray dogs. A woman emerged, trying to balance a tray in her hands and hold the door with her foot. “Go on and help her,” he says, and you felt his elbow hit your arm. You stood attentive, but that was all. She came toward you along the little garden path, her eyes fixed on the tray.

“Frank, I’m so sorry, but I got a late start today,” she says. She was English.

“That’s all right, ma’am,” he says. “But for the sandwiches get a bit dry without it.” Her fair hair blocked her face, but you already knew the smile rich people gave when they talked to someone they thought stupid. He stood up as she came closer. “Take the tray,” he says to you, but you didn’t, you stood motionless. Her head rose up, and without meaning to be bold, you let yourself look at her.

She wasn’t old at all, not in the way you’d expected—it surprised you—but she wasn’t young either. She was beautiful.

“Oh,” she says, noticing you beside your father. Her eyes were green and worn in, like she was watching from a big room behind them.

“And who is this?” she says to your father, her voice like a newsreader’s.

“Oh, that’s me lad,” he says, and his stout figure was transported to a market day out west, standing in the mud and shit, tipping his hat to a passing carriage.

“Hello, lad,” she says with a faint smile. “I’m afraid I’ve not brought you a cup.”

“That’s all right, ma’am,” says your father. “He’s fine without.”

“Are you fine without?” she says.

“Yeah,” you say, quick to agree. She stepped toward you, passing the tray, her smile lines still showing, and for a moment you knew how she smelled.

“There’s a few biscuits there—not the good ones, I’m afraid. I’ve not been out.” She lowered her head and searched around her feet.

“Oh, thanks, ma’am,” he says, then stared in silence. She pushed her hand into the pockets of what you assumed to be a man’s bathrobe. Sizes too big, worn and tartan—the kind old men wear in hospitals. You could see the flesh of her hand through a hole in her pocket where her finger had scratched from the inside a thousand times and broken through.

“How’s the work going?” she asks.

“Good now. Won’t be long getting done.”

She looked at the wall a moment, the way you might look at a jigsaw puzzle you were never going to do. “Great,” she says, and there was more silence. She looked at you again, this time in a lazy way. “Good of you to give your dad a hand today.”

“Oh, he’s a good one all right, smart too, not the building for him. He’s a good job up in McCann’s butcher’s during the week after school. Smart all right, get a trade indoors.”

You couldn’t look at her then. You could feel a burning across your face. Shut up, shut up, shut up, you thick culchie bastard.

“It’s a good profession,” she says simply and without interest, and turned and glanced at the back door.

“Good all right,” says your father.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” she says.

“Good enough, ma’am.” He sat back on the pile of red bricks.

“Oh,” she says. “If you need the toilet, it’s through that door, up the stairs, and . . .” She paused. Her hand fluttered in the air. “Yes . . . first door on the landing to the right.” Her smile landed in the middle of you both. And silently she went back along the little path, inside.

“Stop gawking like an eejit,” you heard him say. “Pour that tea and sit.”

The tray was wooden, smooth and lovely to touch. You set it carefully on the grass and poured his tea from an old-fashioned teapot. Your father fingered through the biscuits on a small plate that looked to be from the same set. He picked one up and held it under his nose, then flung it back with such force that it skipped off the tray.

“She didn’t kill herself with that spread, did she?”

You left the biscuits untouched even though you wanted one.

“Weak piss,” he says after the first sip.

The blue sky held only until late afternoon, but even then, when the clouds came dark and low, it didn’t rain. On the hour, you heard the coast train stopping at Seapoint before moving on toward Howth or Bray. Your father said nothing. You watched him carefully. He took off his shirt and used it to wipe under his arms and neck, packed sinew and muscle moving just beneath his skin, sallow and scarred.

The workday was ending when you heard him hum a faint, nameless tune. It lifted your mood. He told you to start cleaning up. It was two hours before the bookies closed, and now he was in a hurry to leave.

“Bring that tray back in to her,” he says. He was standing stock-still, looking at the great house. The pennies you’d pay for his thoughts. “Go on,” he says.

As you bent and picked up the tray, you saw a string of tiny ants leading from the grass along the rosewood, ending at the untouched biscuit.

“I need the toilet,” you say.

He looked at you and exhaled. “Just go behind the wall there, like I did.”

You felt your shoulders shrug.

“Take your shoes off before you go in there—be quick about it.”

When you got to the granite step, you dipped and pulled your boots from the heel. Your socks were wet, gray-white, and a blackened toenail was exposed on one side. You used your shoulder to push open the heavy door, and the first step on the cold flagstones chilled your feet. Narrow splinters of afternoon light found their way through the gaps in the shutters, burnishing here and there the contours of the kitchen. You found an old Belfast sink and unloaded the tray into it, putting the biscuits into the bin, and later you thought about her finding them.

In the hallway, stronger light filtered past stained-glass panels above the main door, and a patchwork of amber, red, and blue inched across the floor. The walls were high, the cornices seemed to float, and the pictures on the walls were not pictures of the pictures, even you knew that. The sound of your own movement up the stairs disappeared into the carpet. You found the bathroom following her directions: top of the stairs, first on the right.

Once locked inside, you finally admitted to yourself that you didn’t need to be. You were there to discover her, as if in the stacked white towels, the pile of books on the floor, or the assorted toiletries, both gilded and plain, she could be found. There was an ink drawing without a frame, hanging from a single thumbtack: a large woman, naked, drawn from behind, her head turned. Her eyes found you. Your fingers traced the outline of the ink, every curve, every curve. You wondered if she was still at home or if every room in the house was like this—empty and full of her at the same time.

You didn’t wash your hands; instead you ran the tap and watched how the rising steam fogged the mirror just a little, just enough to blur your reflection.

The lock made a steel popping sound even though you took great care to be quiet. Pat, pat, pat down the stairs without a whisper. You knew that the way to your father was back through the kitchen, but in the hallway off to the left, a door was open. You stood completely still, comforted by the fullness of the silence as it settled around you like water in the bathtub.

A few easy steps, and you were standing inside the doorway, watching her. She sat on a worn blue couch, facing into the room, her elbows stuck to her knees and her head resting in the pocket of her hands. Not reading or sleeping or even allowing her shoulders to rise with her breathing, just staring, the way you’d watch telly, but there was no telly. Her old bathrobe had been replaced with a soft red sweater and a dark wool skirt that ran just past her knee.

Without remembering your place, you say, “Are you not feeling well?” At first she didn’t move, then she turned and you could see one of her eyes, and she laughed a little, but just with her breath. Keeping the same half smile, she says, “I feel fine.” There was a joke in there, but it was only for her.

You wondered if she had heard you come in and traced your movements throughout her house. “I don’t want to be a butcher,” you say. You rubbed your fingers together and they were numb.

“No?”

“No,” you say.

“What do you want to be?” she says.

“I don’t know,” you say. “I want to go away, leave here . . . Ireland, I mean, leave Ireland.”

“Where would you go?” she says, and you heard the sudden blaze of a car horn outside, and you knew it was him, missing the 4:10 at Cheltenham.

“I don’t know,” you say, and felt you needed to pick somewhere, anywhere. “Maybe Barcelona,” you say then because, in case she asked, you knew it was in Spain.

“Well,” she says. “Maybe you can move to Barcelona and become a vegetarian.”

You looked away, unsure. The car horn again, longer this time.

“You have a beautiful face,” she says, but you didn’t think she was trying to be mean. Your face felt suddenly hot.

“I think that’s me da,” you say.

“I think so too,” she says, turning away. Her hair spilled forward, and you saw her white neck. You stepped back, out the door, through the hallway, across the kitchen, and outside into the still-light garden. You were running toward your father.