Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

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СКАЧАТЬ hung in the air as ghostly seagulls fed on the empty fields all around and dawn suffused the horizon. There was nothing to be done about the manner in which these images imprisoned me in solitary experience. It was life itself that had made me as distant from her as she, tip-tapping up to the pub with God knows what thoughts in her head, was distant from me.

      My memories certainly didn’t suggest any particular path I could follow into the future. I’d open my laptop and google the agencies I’d always got my jobs from – UNESCO, Overseas Aid, World Opportunity, the European Parliament. And I’d drift off into fantasy. Myanmar, now. How about trying to get into Myanmar? Rangoon must be a worn, humid version of somewhere like Valletta, say, in the 1950s. Tropical, but with stone clock-towers and municipal flowerbeds. British gentility overlaid on foreignness in a thick, humid atmosphere. But would it be right to work in Myanmar? There was a job going in Adelaide. I could manage a foreign language bookshop in Adelaide standing on my head. Someone told me that the wines in Adelaide were marvellous. Or Maracaibo. They wanted somebody to run a big school there where they taught the oil workers English. Men. But Latin men… It had always been hard to be the way they wanted, even when I was young and I was trying to please.

      Guatemala was my best bet. I was just about the most qualified Teacher of English as a Foreign Language in the world, and the beautiful town of Santiago was full of TEFL schools. I downloaded an application form for Santiago Atitlán. But there was no urgency to what I was doing. My hands would fall idle.

      It takes a while to come back to a place.

      When I was moving countries every few years or so, I acquired the privileges of an expatriate with every move. I could invent myself everywhere I went. But my women friends in Kilbride never let me get away with anything. They were, apparently, experts on how I should behave, though Peg – who was always around because she was Monty’s girlfriend – was six years younger than me; and Tessa, who’d been my friend since my first day working in Boody’s Bookshop, was at least six years older.

      She’d been the shop steward back then and had taken a brisk line with all of us, as she still did with me. Soon after I came back there was a party for her, because she was taking early retirement from the union, to which I wore a fabulous little Italian black suit I could still just about fit into, and three-inch heels.

      You really dressed up, didn’t you?’ Tessa said, when we were having a post-mortem. ‘Everyone was talking about you, Rosie, though I suppose that’s understandable, you’re still news. And that black suit is sensational. But what do you think? Could it do with a little something at the neck?’

      And, in a seemingly neutral tone of voice, Peg said, ‘A lot of the girls there had come straight from work so they couldn’t dress up.’

      ‘Oh, give over!’ I laughed at them. But they weren’t even conscious of how they were always trying to teach me what a single woman in her mid-fifties was supposed to be like in Kilbride, Dublin, Ireland. One of them would say ‘Are you going to the Eleven O’Clock?’ as if they somehow failed to remember that I didn’t go to Mass at all. And when I brought Andy along to the cinema, because he had given me a lift into town, they hardly spoke, even though they’d known him all their lives the same as I had. As good as telling me it wasn’t the done thing to bring a man along on a girls’ night out.

      I knew that they were shaping me for the community, and that there was concern for me in that. But I kept the card my friends at the Information Unit in Brussels had added to the binoculars they presented me with, at a farewell feast in a Flanders tavern, where we danced all night to waltzes from a mechanical organ. ‘Thank you for all the fun you brought into our lives,’ the card said. There was a promise in the words. I might be a bit down now, but I had been up, and I would be up again.

      I talked to the cat.

      ‘Ulysses was away for twenty years and his dog waited for him. Did you know that? Argos, the dog? He was so old he’d turned white but he waited for his master and when at last he saw him come home he allowed himself to die. ‘Thinking of dying, Bell, now that I’m back?’

      She looked up from licking her fur to flick me an insolent look.

      Apropos of dying, the insurance man wanted to know, did I want to top up Min’s funeral insurance? For the first time, money began to worry me. Then the bill for the new central heating came. Then one day Min remarked, in a voice with genuine longing in it, how there were lovely legs of lamb in the butcher’s, but at a terrible price. I had some substitute work in Kilbride Library every week that brought in a little cash. And I had enough savings for another year at the rate we were going, even though I’d bought a small second-hand car to take Min around in – not that she’d yet agreed to be taken around. I had a bond I could cash, even, to have the backyard glassed over and tiled if she ever said ‘Yes’ to the plan. If the yard was really nicely done, maybe she wouldn’t go to the pub so much.

      Not that she drank more than a very little at her lunchtime session, as far as I knew. But she’d have changed, all the same, by the time she came home. She’d be ever so slightly wrong. And sometimes something would bother her and she’d stay up at the Inn longer than a couple of hours. Then she’d come home and start doing something around the house, full of false elation, and my heart would be in my mouth, seeing how clumsy the drink made her. And a few times she came home and went to bed in the afternoon but got up again later and went out, and when she came back she had a smile like a grimace. I couldn’t look at her. She had only done that three times to date, which was nothing compared to Mrs Beckett two doors up who was an alcoholic, not to mention a whole lot of the local men. But the thing was, I never knew when it might happen.

      At the beginning, I sometimes went up to the Inn whether she asked me to or not. From the door I’d see her on the other side of the lounge, across a floor full of empty chairs and tables. I’d see the outline of her wild hair against the window there that she opened whenever she felt like it, as if she owned the place. She pulled an invisible space around herself in that big room, as if she was in a car and going somewhere. But she wasn’t going anywhere. She had nowhere to go. It shocked me to see her, so that I was already hopelessly full of emotion as I crossed the greasy carpet. Even before she’d look up with her child’s face.

      But she didn’t want me there.

      The only time I caught a glimpse of her inner life had been in September, when there was a Mass of Commemoration on the first anniversary of 9/11. For the few days before it she talked a lot, telling me about that dreadful day and how she glanced at the television and thought the plane flying into the tower was a game, and she couldn’t find Reeny’s number in Spain, and the stew she had on was burnt so badly that she had to throw out the saucepan, and Andy Sutton brought down the bedroom chair and went over to get Mrs Beckett because she only has RTÉ One, and Tessa came in after her work and made chicken sandwiches, and Andy went up to the Kilbride Inn for a dozen beers and a bottle of vodka because people were calling to the house all night. And all along the terrace front doors were open and you could hear the blare of television sets, and Enzo’s son brought down fish and chips though the Sorrento didn’t normally deliver, and then the boy stayed, watching the television with his mouth open.

      ‘I had a terrible fright right at the beginning,’ she said, ‘when I remembered Markey Cuffe, that was your big friend when your nose was always stuck in a book, Florence Cuffe’s boy that went to New York. I was asking everyone where did he work; he grew up out our back lane and he easily could have been dead; a lot of people around here had people over there they were mad with worry about and there was nothing they could do, the phones were all clogged up, you couldn’t reach America. But then I found the cards I’d put away since last Christmas because he always sends a big one with gold on it and the address of his business, and it was in Seattle. Sure I know all about Seattle, Reeny and me used to watch Frasier.’

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