Читать книгу Best Love, Rosie - Nuala O'Faolain - Страница 16

I splayed like a starfish in the Harmony Suites Hotel so as to feel as much as possible of the sheet, my heels and elbows slithering across the fine surface, before turning over to feel its silkiness on my breasts and on the fronts of my feet. I even relished the sound that rose up to the room, a distant roaring and grinding beneath the traffic noise, which the doorman told me was rehabilitation going on around the clock at the World Trade Center. He also told me that it was unseasonably cool for New York in early June. But even though I’d turned off the heating I was as snug as a baby under the soft blankets and extra comforter that I’d taken from the second bed. Not to mention delighted with the luxury of everything after the plainness of Kilbride.

And for nothing, almost! The room cost less, on a special offer, than the midtown places I’d stayed in when I’d come to Manhattan to attend a conference on Violence Against Women at the UN or to shop with Tessa. Those rooms had smelt of stale air-freshener overlaid on city dust with windows that looked out on walls a few feet away. But this room had a wrap-around window, full of the lurid, night sky over New Jersey and of the dour river below, jostling down towards the harbour.

I delayed the bliss of falling into jet-lagged sleep, turning the pillow to recover the crispness of an untouched side, and thinking how a person could give a party in a bed like this, like the couple in Evelyn Waugh who lived a busy social life in theirs…

How come I never thought of our beds in Kilbride when I was bringing Min presents? The sheepskin rug the man in the airport in Perth said would be 100 excess but then let me check in in exchange for a kiss – a great kiss, too. Fully meant. Or the lampshade I had to hold on my lap the whole way from Helsinki. Or the Provençal oilcloth and matching napkins – which I bought in lieu of a day’s meals in Arles when I hadn’t a bean. Does she still have those? And if so, where would they be…?

Oh God, I should have rung. But the Sunshine Rest Home doesn’t allow phone calls after 9 p.m. and in Ireland it’s … oh God, I’ll be a wreck when Markey comes if I don’t sleep.

I slipped across to the bathroom, then stood for a moment enchanted by the huge swags of lights in the office blocks over on the New Jersey shore. The enormous sky was pricked all over by stars but ragged, inky clouds were moving in to blot them out. Down below a fire flickered where someone homeless must be living, on the rough ground behind the hoarding across from the hotel.

My soul doth magnify the Lord, I began. But I never got much further than that before I forgot I was saying a prayer of thanks – I was always just too happy.

I waited in the silent foyer at half-past-five the next morning. Even the traffic noise had died away outside, the receptionist asleep in her chair behind the desk.

‘Shoes?’ Markey said, as he charged through the swinging doors.

I lifted one foot to show him a sneaker with such instant obedience that I could feel him laughing as he held my head for a moment.

‘Rose!’ he said into my hair. ‘Rosie Barry! It’s been much too long!’

At least he couldn’t see my face, which was blushing with shock. How, how on earth, had Markey Cuffe become so handsome? Cuffo – that’s what the other boys called him when they needed him to come out for a game – but it was Spiderbrain the rest of the time, because his arms and legs were so long and thin and because he was always reading; always ‘had his head stuck in a book’, as reading was described in Kilbride. He had greasy curls all the time I knew him, nor had it ever crossed my mind that underneath them there lay the shapely skull you could see now that his silver hair was close-shaved. He’d had really bad spots, too, which were the first thing I’d noticed when I first got talking to him, at fourteen, on the steps of the little branch library whose librarian threw everyone out anytime she felt like it, so she could go and play the slot-machines at the back of the pub. But then, Markey hardly ate anything; he was so poor that the Brothers left out a loaf every day for him to take back after school to the cottage in the lane behind our house where he lived with his mother. The only good clothes he’d had was a man’s suit that was too big, which I happened to see on him once when I was going out our back gate, and he was opening the door of the cottage to the priest.

In those days the priest went around bringing Communion to the sick, with his gown flapping around his ankles and Holy Communion held high up in front of him in a kind of silver box.

‘The Eucharist. Not Communion,’ Markey corrected me when I mentioned it. ‘A pyx, that’s what that box is called.’

He had always loved unusual words and he had always loved putting me right. And typically, he didn’t say anything about whatever was wrong with his mother. He never did say anything about his home life.

Even when he grew up and the spots disappeared – even then, his eyes weren’t the intense grey they were now – though whenever I’d visualised him, I would begin with those grey eyes. But it was the skin around them that had actually changed, maybe from living over in Seattle where everyone is outdoors a lot. Somehow it had become a grainy, olive-brown.

The fact was, he was beautiful now.

‘Are you ready?’ He was practically pawing the ground. ‘If we don’t get going now, by the time we reach Canal we won’t be able to see across the street for traffic.’

He was turning away when he remembered his manners.

‘How’s Min?’

I didn’t answer for a moment. I couldn’t say that I’d ever known her to look at me with such comprehensive bitterness as she had when we’d passed, the morning before, a ragged queue of old ladies outside the dining room of the Sunshine Rest Home. Some of them propped in wheelchairs, and one of them calling ‘Mammy! Mammy!’ in a heartbroken voice as she stroked the wallpaper.

I couldn’t say that the last thing I’d said was ‘I’m sorry, Min’, and that she had looked at me as if she’d never seen me before and said nothing. What could she say? This was the same woman who a few nights before, after I burst into tears in front of the television at the sight of a row of little North Korean children with bloated stomachs and twig limbs, had strode across and changed channels, and had hissed at me, ‘People die, Madam! They die! Or they’re got rid of because there’s no use for them. Life is hard.’

I didn’t say how when I got into the car to leave the Home, I couldn’t drive because I was shaking so much. I wasn’t sure in the end that I’d done the right thing. The last few days before I left she not only didn’t go to the pub – she got up in the mornings and was out in the yard before I came down, putting new bedding plants in tins and old pots and in the hip bath that she was laboriously filling with soil that she stole in increments from the public park at the bus stop. She asked me did I want an egg for my breakfast? She was going to whitewash the coal shed, she said.

But even so…

People who drink fall, and they set themselves on fire, and they walk into traffic.

I’d left her sitting on her bed in the Sunshine, glowering at me. I’d been trying to help, when she went to the bathroom, by unpacking the bag she’d insisted on packing for herself. But digging into the chaos of it I came across something hard, and when I peeked into the foil I saw that she’d wrapped up some old pieces of toast from breakfast and a couple of greyish chicken legs from the fridge and a carton of yoghurt that was already leaking. I nearly wept. She must have been afraid there’d be no food.

I heard the toilet flush, and threw her things back into the bag. I didn’t want her to know that I knew. I emptied my wallet of all the money I had in it and left the pile of notes on the locker so that she’d have enough for anything she wanted. Then I told her I was sorry and somehow got out of there to the car.

‘Min’s fine, Markey,’ I told him instead. ‘Physically speaking, but she doesn’t look after herself. I solved the problem of coming over for this week by booking her into a kind of rest home. I think she’ll grow to like it.’

Should I return his polite enquiry? I didn’t actually know what his living arrangements were, but if I said something like, when he had to leave his home to go to booksellers’ conferences and so on, did he miss it? Wouldn’t that tell me? But maybe he’d only enquired after Min because he used to know her; that is to say, to know to come round to our house as seldom as possible, because she thoroughly disapproved of all the lending of books and going on walks he and I went in for. He wasn’t her idea of a boyfriend worth having, as she made crystal clear. She thought four years older than me was too old. She thought that we were poor but he was shamefully poor. And she thought – she said it so often, I was sick of hearing it – that he looked like something the cat dragged in.

But by heavens he didn’t any more. He looked unique: someone good-looking and confident and well dressed and at the same time someone who knew Kilbride. Everybody in Kilbride should come to America. Look at his nails. Look at his marvellous teeth. Look at the energetic way he was moving ahead of me holding himself straight. The men at home seemed to be perfectly content as they were, to put it mildly. Take, for example, Monty, who had spent his life playing golf and yet his tummy never got any smaller. It spilled over his waistband, while his bottom had migrated halfway down the back of his thighs. And Andy, though he ate like a horse, was so thin that we all said if he turned sideways you wouldn’t know where he was. And neither of them – no man, probably, in the whole of Ireland – would be caught dead wearing a long black coat with a kick pleat at the shoulders and a blue scarf made of something softer than cashmere and a fine black sweater and blue jeans and black loafers. And a hat! Oh my God, a wide, black hat! I hadn’t known a man who dressed like that since I lived in Italy. In my early thirties, I’d been – a good age for living in Italy.

There was a faint swathe of pale light in the charcoal-grey sky away to the left where the ocean must be. But it still felt like the dead of night in the street, apart from the faint dance music I’d thought I heard from behind the hoarding opposite the hotel.

‘It’s a hidden city,’ Markey was saying. ‘The old Manhattan. The meat market’s still hanging on – the streets and the buildings, anyway – but the fish market’s going soon. But just look at this’ – we’d reached Canal – ‘isn’t this just like the main street of a Russian merchant town if you raise your eyes? See the wooden storefronts, those windows and the shuttered cellars? Here’s a glimpse of the old commercial, immigrant city – not as good as the Lower East Side but as good as we’re going to manage in the time we have and still fit in Soho. See? Over there? Those buildings were warehouses. See the hoists? Those wonderful materials, granite, and cast-iron.’

You haven’t changed, Markey!’ I cried.

Then hearing myself, I added in silence – not changed? Are you kidding?

It was me who was the good-looking one, when we were young. Did he remember that? He used to walk with me as far as one of the other girl’s houses on a weekend night when I was going to a dance, in a cloud of whatever perfume the Pillar Department Store was giving free squirts of that week and a pencil skirt and a bra that yanked my breasts up to point at the sky, and all the while he’d be talking about Claudel or Robert Lowell or the urban models the planners had in mind when they rebuilt central Dublin after the 1916 Rising. I’d be tottering along in my stilettos. I should have been against high heels, since they’re a form of bondage, but even after feminism came and changed everything I continued to love it up there – where it felt sexy. Markey was just about the only part of my life that wasn’t twanging with the sexual. He’d turn away and go home to read, and me and my friends would go out on the town.

Which was where Min wanted me to be. She wanted me to work in the Pillar and go to dances and meet a husband. She knew, when I didn’t realise it at all, that I was being made unfit for my destiny by being Markey’s apprentice.

He’d checked my shoes first thing, too, the day we started off on our first-ever exploration of Dublin.

‘There was a big distillery here once,’ he said as he led me through a district where alleys between massive walls opened onto tracts of waste ground. ‘See? Workers’ housing,’ he pointed at a terrace of redbrick houses isolated at the edge of a derelict square. ‘They had bathrooms,’ he said. ‘There was full employment in Dublin at the time and they had to make the houses good to attract workers.’ High gates hung open and grass grew between the uneven paving stones of the wide yards. ‘The horses were brought over from Lincolnshire. I often wondered whether they were buried at the end of their working lives. People grow very fond of horses. Have you been to the Royal Hospital, where the old soldiers used to live? We’ll go soon. Wonderful topiary, and there’s a horse buried there. Upright. The officer who owned him wrote a poem that’s on his gravestone. At the end it says that there are men who believe that:

Dumb creatures we have cherished here below Will come to greet us when we pass the pearly gates. Is it folly that I wish it may be so

Markey stood in the weeds in front of what must have been a warehouse while he recited the lines. I’d never before heard a poem recited outside school.

Then he took me to an ornate pub and bought one mulled port between us. ‘These old drinks are dying out so it’s our duty to drink them,’ he said, before showing me how to tell original Victorian tiles from replicas. He then told me that a crowd came over from Hollywood and made a spy film in this district, pretending it was Soviet Berlin. ‘This is the only total backwater in Ireland that ever got a premiere in Beverly Hills,’ he said.

It was dizzying, being with him. I already loved The Hut, but apart from when I was there I was hardly conscious of place. But from the day I started walking with Markey, place has mattered more to me than I am able to explain even to myself.

By Spring Street I’d fallen to the rear like an Arab wife and the gap between us was exactly the same length as when we were young. But he then waited for me on the corner to show me where the seventeenth-century spring had been.

‘Did you know that Kafka knew what Manhattan looked like from watching newsreels?’ I told him between shivers from the cold.

‘Really?’ He looked at me with respect, then absentmindedly unwound the scarf from his neck and tucked it around my neck. ‘That’s interesting.’

We hurried on, side-by-side now, but he still didn’t match his step to mine. He never had. I used to think that was one of the ways he was always trying to prevent me from saying anything personal, just as I was always trying to trap him into saying something – anything – about me or about us.

‘Min can’t make up her mind whether Sister Cecilia is a bad influence or not,’ I’d once said, for example, about the nun who’d come to teach music in my school. ‘Well, she knows for sure she’s a bad influence, but then again she can’t be, because she’s a nun.’

‘Do you know what that’s called?’ Markey said over his shoulder.

‘What what’s called?’

‘Having to believe things that contradict each other.’

‘What?’

‘Cognitive dissonance,’ he said, turning around again.

‘I suffer that at you and me going around together,’ I said, would-be playfully. The kind of heavy hint I used to give.

He said nothing, of course.

‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘What’s a girl like me doing with a boy like you? I mean, you’re brilliant and you’ll be at college in the autumn and I’m going into the Pillar Department Store.’

Silence.

I tried to back-pedal. ‘What did the Martian say to the jukebox?’ I said to his hunched shoulders.

Still nothing.

‘Do you give up? “What’s a slick chick like you doing in a joint like this?” ’

I saw in the bathroom of Soho’s Moondance Diner that apart from a purple nose I looked normal enough, though I neatened my eyebrows with a wet finger. There’d been a lot of water under the bridge since I’d wiped off my precious PanStik because Markey said he didn’t like makeup on women, though I was by no means sure at the time that in women he included me.

I used to push open the heavy door of the church near the Pillar, and feeling my way past the leatherette curtain and into the warm air the congregation had left behind, I would pray to Our Lady, ‘Make Markey love me the way I love him!’

But She never did pull it off. When we went to the pictures in daytime cinemas that smelt of smoke and disinfectant, I’d hear breathing and swallowing and lips un-sticking from each other when the soundtrack went unexpectedly quiet. But Markey would be sprawled at ease, his knees on the back of the seat in front, and his face bright and mobile at the thought of something inside his head. As soon as the lights went up, he was talking again.

And the truth was that though I pined for him romantically for years, it was all in my head. A boy came to work in Despatch in the Pillar who I fancied so much my legs could hardly carry me when he was near. I loved being with Markey, even if there wasn’t a word for what our relationship was. But my body didn’t want him.

I wiped my breath from the mirror in the diner bathroom. Don’t forget that, Rosie Barry. Don’t start that oul’ pining all over again.

Back in the present, Markey was talking business.

‘I did some calling around, Rosie. A fascinating field you’ve got us into! I found there’s one company that supplies news-stands and supermarkets and gift shops all over the Midwest with booklets – nothing literary, of course – just humour, home decoration, health issues, and cookery. Louisbooks & Collectibles it’s called. Google it. It’s huge.’

Somebody must have told him once that people should smile even when they were in earnest. Either way I smiled at his smile. Even the waitress, an agile, hefty blonde, was smiling. She even took back the eggs on my corned beef hash when I grimaced at how runny they were and got them fried on both sides. She plied us with coffee every time she passed us in her patrol of her lively patch, calling out to the men behind the counter and dealing out great plates of food to the talking, laughing customers. In fact the diner was such a scene of sparkle and abundance that anything seemed possible.

‘Then I realised that I know the CEO,’ Markey continued, ‘though I’ve never met him. His name is Louis Austen and he buys books from us. He’s a real connoisseur, too. I have great respect for him: he turned down a Galen notebook that even the specialists believed in, and he was right. But I called him about your idea and he said that sure, his company is in the market for inspirational topics and he’d be glad to have his inspirational guy take a look at anything we send him. I told him you wanted to do something on the mid-life crisis and he said—’

‘The mid-life crisis isn’t really what I had in mind. That’s a glib way of looking at it.’

‘Get glib, Rosie. He told me Chico – Chico’s his guy on the inspirational side – says the Celtic thing is over, but Wise Women are still very in.’

The waitress was back with the coffee. ‘Where you from?’ she asked.

I’m sure she meant Markey, but he said, ‘She’s from Dublin. Do you not hear the lovely accent?’

Ha! Same old Markey: he doesn’t even notice she’s trying to flirt.

Elvis was singing ‘Hound Dog’ on the jukebox and by now I had a whole pile of French toast swimming in maple syrup and everyone in the diner seemed to be laughing. Was it only an hour since we’d shivered on the empty streets of a different Manhattan? A grave, lonely place it had been, in the cool dawn.

We ran with the fantasy. I’d be the writer and Markey’d be the agent. He’d edit what I wrote and pass it on to Chico. Why not try it? Someone wrote all the inspirational bestsellers. Why not us?

Markey half-stood and, leaning forward, gave me a kiss on the forehead, after which the people at the next table clapped and he blushed and sat down. Then the waitress, arriving to write the check, mimed smacking a kiss onto his head, at which he blushed again.

‘Know why you’re the right person?’ he assuredly said as we were shrugging into our coats. ‘It’s because I think us Kilbride people aren’t Californian New Agey and we aren’t East Coast Smart, either. We’re natural Midwesterners. I’m a hopeless writer – photography is my thing – but you’re great with words. And you’re not a cynic; anyone can see that from just looking at you. And neither are the people in Ohio and Idaho and all those places where Louisbooks are on sale. So it’s a fit!’

He practically danced out to wave for a cab, delighted with himself.

‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘And there’s an Inspirational Books Fair in the Sheraton on Friday that I can’t stay for, but you’re to promise me you’ll go. And keep dinner free tomorrow. And Rosie’ – sticking his head out of the window of the cab – ‘go and buy yourself a hat on Seattle Rare Medical Books.’

I waved his scarf at him but he shouted ‘Keep it! And Rosie – be positive. This is America! OK? And we’re gonna have fun!’

I imagined Markey’s sparkling eyes on me when I went into Century 21 and bought a velvet cloche with a scarlet flower over one eye. A very old lady shuffling past the mirror where I was trying it on quipped, ‘That’s right, Honey, keep ’em guessing’, which struck me as another reason to buy it.

On the way back to the hotel I also bought a pink notebook.

In the room I got back into my gorgeous bed and inscribed the first page.

NOTES FOR (title to follow). by Rosaleen Barry (New York, 2003)

Then I racked my brain for a wise thought, but I couldn’t think of a single thing.

So I ran a bath, with the intention of saying a prayer for our little venture while I was soaking, but I was too delighted and too jet-lagged and I couldn’t concentrate. Also, when I sat up in the water it just so happened that I could see myself in a particularly flattering mirror. So I got out and put on the new hat and got back in and sang the ‘Flower Song’ from Carmen at top volume instead.

I then took out my laptop to check my email.

From: MarkC@rmbooks.com

To: RosieB@eirtel.com

Sent: 12.00 p.m.

It was great to see you this morning – just great. And you haven’t changed a bit. I’d forgotten how your face lights up when you’re interested. Of course God help everyone when you’re not interested.

I called Louis as soon as I had a break and he wants to know the working title. Any ideas?

From: RosieB@eirtel.com

To: MarkC@rmbooks.com

Sent: 12.30 p.m.

How about A Wise Woman’s Thoughts for the Middle of the Journey? Or – seeing as how I have to put my specs on to type this – how about The Bittersweet Years? Or if you think that’s too downbeat, how about The Cheerful Book of Growing Older? Or – to lay my cards right on the table – Making the Best of the Middle Years? Alternatively, I noticed in the plane on the way over here the little icon of the airplane inching across the map. Wouldn’t Time to Destination be a great title? After all, the main thing about middle age is the consciousness that time is running out.

From: MarkC@rmbooks.com

To: RosieB@eirtel.com

Sent: 12.40 p.m.

Lay off the European gloom! Next thing you’ll be quoting Sam Beckett. I was talking to the women who serve coffee at the convention centre – they’re no chickens and they say they’re having the time of their lives. So we could call it – 50 Plus – The Time of Your Life!

From: MarkC@rmbooks.com

To: RosieB@eirtel.com

Sent: 1.30 p.m.

STOP PRESS!!

Chico just called. He said the maximum wordage for a Louisbook is 1,500.

From: RosieB@eirtel.com

To: MarkC@rmbooks.com

Sent: 1.45 p.m.

That’s not too bad. That leaves room for epigraphs, statistics, etc.

From: MarkC@rmbooks.com

To: RosieB@eirtel.com

Sent: 1.50 p.m.

1,500 words for the whole thing.

From: RosieB@eirtel.com

To: MarkC@rmbooks.com

Sent: 1.55 p.m.

WHAT IS THIS? A JOKE??? The greatest writers and philosophers and religious teachers have spent centuries trying just to approach, never mind give advice on, how to live. I SINCERELY HOPE YOU ARE KIDDING?

From: MarkC@rmbooks.com

To: RosieB@eirtel.com

Sent: 2:10 p.m.

I checked with Chico.

1,500 is what’s on the table, ol’ pal.

So, are you in or out?

From: RosieB@eirtel.com

To: MarkC@rmbooks.com

Sent: 4.45 p.m.

OK, OK!

In.

I’m a pro, after all. I write brochures.

So here’s an example of a kind of ‘Thought’ @ 150 words:

Attachment # 1: The Age of Miracles

Many of the experiences of our youth seem to pass without leaving a trace. But they do not. It’s just that, like plants put down for spring in the depths of winter, we don’t know which of them will flower or bear fruit.

We have to wait to find out.

In the middle years, the wait ends. What we planted earlier in life we harvest now.

This is a great truth: that you have to keep living to find out which bits of living come right. You can never be sure of what you’re laying down for the future. You have to wait for the future to happen, to find out.

The miracle is that even when the past seems to be lost ground, as long as you continue to live, it is not.

And so, middle age becomes the age of miracles. When, at last, you too can know how rare miracles are!

From: MarkC@rmbooks.com

To: RosieB@eirtel.com

Sent: 5.30 p.m.

I sent the ‘Thought’ on to Chico right away and he’s just called to say that Louis thinks the Irish are well-known to be very sensitive, and he goes right along with that.

Of course, people over here are polite to a fault, and we don’t have a contract or anything resembling one.

But can you do ten of these things? I mean, I couldn’t do even one. Are there even ten different ways of being inspirational in 150 words?

From: RosieB@eirtel.com

To: MarkC@rmbooks.com

Sent: 7.00 p.m.

No problem! They’re for people our age, aren’t they? Well, if I look around my own life I see that the rewards come from my body (not often enough!), from having a little money, from friendship, the arts, travel, food, and animals – even Min’s cat Bell, who doesn’t much like me, gives me endless pleasure. And not giving up: keeping going is itself a source of value. That makes nine topics, doesn’t it, if you keep the one about how miraculous middle age turns out to be? Which it is. Who’d have thought that you and I would be doing this, for example?

I’ll think of the last one when I arrive there.

OK?

From: MarkC@rmbooks.com

To: RosieB@eirtel.com

Sent: 7.10 p.m.

Brilliant.

Working title: Ten Thoughts for the Middle of the Journey.

Dinner tomorrow – I’ll come to your hotel

around 7.00.

Sleep well, Rosie.

Wot larks!