Fionnoula goes to Mass every week, but still calls herself a bad Catholic. It’s like a private joke between her and Ali. The Bad Catholic and the Bad Muslim, they’ll quip, exchanging this look that’s only for them. They’ve been together for years and years, longer than I’ve been alive, she likes to tell me. But they’ve never married. Mostly because they couldn’t figure out where to do it, and besides, who would come? She laughs when she says that but I know it hurts her.
It was hard for them at the start, being together. Too hard for their families, Fionnoula says, although that’s her being kind, trying to forgive. It’s better now, down here at least. People from all corners of the earth walk past the caff every single day and still there are some who don’t like it. Folk can be strange like that. But at the start, she says, it was terrible. All the looks, the names, the turned backs. They got a brick through their window once, with a note tied to it. She’s never told me what it said. It doesn’t surprise me, though, how tough it was. It would have been strange to see the pair of them together even when I was a kid, round our neck of the woods at least. I just have to think of all the ways Danny used to get it, growing up in that pallid town where barely anyone looked like him.
The only reason I walked into the caff all those years ago was because I saw the hunched-over bloke with the ripped-up shoes and dirty coat go in before me. I figured if they let him in, I might be all right. That bloke’s got different shoes these days, but he still wears that same old brown coat. That’s why we call him Sandy. No one knows his real name, no one’s ever asked. He drinks tea with milk and two sugars and if you put a coffee in front of him, he’ll sip it slowly with a downturned smile, but he’ll never tell you he doesn’t want it. Some days he’ll have a bit of toast; most, he doesn’t bother. He’s as thin as a rake and Fionnoula would happily feed him more if he’d have it, but he’ll only take what he needs, he has his pride. I don’t know his story, how old he is, where he comes from. All I know is that he’s there every day. Him. The old lady with the scarred face and the limp who works down the corner shop. The night cleaner whose empty eyes never seem to close. The shy musician with the long, graying dreads that fall all the way down his back. We’re all the same. A flock of silent souls circling around each other day in, day out, safe among chosen strangers. None of them know me, either. Not even Fionnoula and Ali, not really. They’d be disgusted by me if they did. They call me Jennifer, Jenny. Jen, sometimes. I don’t care which. They don’t know who I used to be, that I’ve spent almost half my life pretending to be someone else.
Fionnoula thinks I’m a dreamer but Ali knows better. Not that he’s ever said anything. It’s just the way he moves around me on those days when he catches me staring, unblinking, at the steam curling out of the kettle, or turning circles with a damp cloth on the same patch of table over and over again. Mostly he’ll leave me be, but every so often I’ll feel his hand on my shoulder, warm and heavy, a reminder that he’s there. It brings me back somehow, when he does that.
Fionnoula has another tack. She’ll swipe me round the back of the head with the corner of her tea towel, or wave her hand around in front of my eyes. He-llaaaaw? Anybody home, Lady Head-in-the-clouds? she’ll trill, her accent still so singsong Irish no one would guess she’s lived down here all this time.
And then I’ll snap out of it, come to. Sorry, I’ll say. You caught me at it again.
It’s easier to let her think it’s a daydream, but in fact it’s the opposite of that. It’s doing anything I possibly can for it not to be a dream, for my brain not to get carried away with itself and take me to the places I want to stay away from. Sometimes it’s a song, a lyric on the radio, or a flat vowel that sounds like home. Other times it’s the gap between a stranger’s front teeth, the way someone shifts their weight, the cadence of a laugh.
When I first arrived in London, I’d see Danny everywhere. On the back of every bus, the corner of every street. But as the years passed, I got better at blocking him out. Sometimes months would go by without me having that sense of him, the feeling that if I were to turn around he’d be there, within arm’s reach. Just the other day I followed a lad all the way down the High Road, hoping that when he turned it would be Danny’s face I’d see. I caught myself in time, the foolishness of it. Turned around and walked the other way.
I didn’t have any choice in the end, knew that if I had any chance of pulling through I would have to forget all of it, the bad and the good. But still I have these moments, these days when thinking gets the better of me. Because there were parts that were bliss, there were parts that were full and faultless and laden with joy. When Danny and I were kids, when we were innocent and daft and just the sight of each other, the split second of a look, could make us keel over laughing. And then later, in that middle bit. Fuck, that bit. It was beyond. The way everything we did, everything we felt, we did, we felt together. The way we loved and loved and loved each other. The way we loved each other.