Snap them open again.
Afterward I sit back down on my bed in the corner of the attic, the piece of paper that Denz scrawled his number on resting on my thigh. My phone is in my hand, my thumb hovering over the digits. But in the end I text Fionnoula, ask her if she’d like some help at the wholesaler’s later, once she’s finished Mass.
She replies straight away. Yes. U OK?
Yeah, I tell her. I’m fine.
I’ve not gone with her before. She used to ask me all the time if I fancied it but I always said no. Even though her and Ali mean the world to me, I’m not sure if I can be on my own with her for that long outside of the caff. She likes to talk and I haven’t been good at that for years, but I don’t want to be alone today. Not with all these memories pulling at the edges of my brain.
We go there in their little beat-up transit van and although Fionnoula’s driving is terrible, it’s lovely, being inside it, like climbing into a piece of them both. Ali’s tinkling charms hanging from the rearview mirror. A picture of St. Christopher taped to the dashboard. Sweet wrappers all over the floor, and pouches full of herbs or incense or something dotted around the various wells and nooks. I want to close my eyes and just soak it up, but the effing-this and bloody-that and whattheshittinhelldyerthinkyerdoingyerdaftbeggar every time she has to so much as change a lane means I spend half the journey with my knuckles to my mouth and the rest with my palms pressed between my thighs, bracing myself for what’s to come.
Somehow we make it, and the pair of us potter around the wholesaler’s like it’s an everyday thing, chatting amiably about how-much-bread-will-we-get and do-you-think-one-slab-of-spread-or-two? We’re in the queue waiting to pay when Fionnoula pats me on the arm.
Thanks for coming with me, love, she says. Ali doesn’t like to do the shopping. He can’t bear it, in fact. Probably because of me, wittering on and chewing his ear off about whatever comes into me head.
I feel bad then that I’ve never offered before to keep her company for an hour or two. What do you talk about? I blurt out, and she looks at me in surprise. All these years I’ve been worrying that I wouldn’t be able to think of anything to say, that Fionnoula will ask me a question I can’t answer. And yet ever since Denz showed up, it’s like my mouth keeps coming out with things before it’s even run them by my brain.
Who, me and Ali?
I nod, even though I’m not sure myself if that’s what I mean.
Oh god. Anything. Anything, really. I mean, he’s a man of few words, isn’t he, but you know me! She laughs. I’ll talk about anything.
The woman at the checkout begins scanning our shopping and we busy ourselves with bagging everything up and paying and carting all the bags and boxes back to the van, stacking them up on top of each other in the boot. Once we’re on the road, Fionnoula picks up her thread as though she’d paused only a second ago.
That’s what Ali loves about me. How I talk. Or that’s what he says, anyway. It was my accent at first, he reckons. Said it sounded like a cat purring, daft old beggar he is. And I liked the look of him, ha-ha, that’s how shallow I am. Oh, but he was so handsome, Jen. So gorgeous. And his cooking, well, that’s enough to win anyone over, I tell you what. No wonder I’m the size I am, ha-ha-ha. I was slim before I met him, you should see the pictures!
I’d love to see them, I tell her.
She smiles sadly. I don’t have them, love. They were all at me mammy’s, but she’s long gone now. I’d been planning to move back there with Ali, see. To Ireland. Shipped a load of me stuff over, but we never made it in the end. Never even bothered to get the stuff back, too much of a hassle. No doubt me sister would have burned everything anyway, the old wench. She was the worst of them, even though it made the least sense, coming from her.
A car glides gently into the lane in front of Fionnoula and she stops talking to lean on the horn, a tirade of curses pouring from her mouth before she picks up where she left off.
You know, she lived over here for a time, me sister. She left in the end, got chased out really, with all the Troubles and that. She was the enemy, we both were—we all bloody were, us Irish. She knew what it was like to be singled out for nothing more than where you came from. And yet still she could hate Ali with such vengeance, such passion. Even though she doesn’t know him. Doesn’t know a thing about him, in fact.
Maybe if they spent some time together…I mumble, although it feels like an empty thing to say. Fionnoula shakes her head.
Oh, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t. My family never liked it, the idea of it, me with a Paki. That’s what they used to call him, the eejits. Didn’t make a jot of difference to them that he’s Iranian. I turned up on the doorstep with him a couple of months before we were set to move back. Thought I’d surprise them. It dawned on me, see, that maybe they should know him a bit, before we went there for good. I knew they had their funny ideas about people. But I never expected them to have so…so little…feeling, you know? Maybe I should have warned him, or them. Maybe it was my fault, but I just thought, if they saw him in the flesh, saw the kindness and the goodness, surely they could get past their ideas, the stupid ideas some halfwit put in their heads. And he was so nervous, bless him. He had flowers for me mammy and he’d put on his best suit. He so wanted them to like him, he’d have loved nothing more, I swear. But they wouldn’t even let him put his foot in the door, Jen. Wouldn’t look him in the eye. Turned us away in the cold, told me to come back when I’d seen sense.
Her voice starts to crack, and in that moment my mind darts to Danny. The slurs, shrouded as banter, that he’d be expected to laugh off. The countless infractions I pretended didn’t exist.
We were walking off back down the road, Fionnoula carries on, pulling me back from my thoughts. And me nephews, they were only ten, eleven or so, they started shouting at him out the window. Calling him all sorts of filth. The oldest one, he spat at Ali, straight at him. I could’ve killed them, honestly. But Ali, he just kept his head high, wrapped his arm around my shoulder. They’re only kids, he said, it’s not their fault. They don’t know what they’re saying, love.
It would have made another man run a mile, being treated like that. Humiliated. And rightly so. But he never let anyone see that it hurt him. Ali still made sure I rang me mammy every Sunday, even though we never had a word to say to each other. Every week she’d ask me if I’d got rid of him yet and I used to seethe with it, so I did. But still, he made me ring her.
It was the Twin Towers that did it in the end. The bloody Towers, thousands of miles from any of us, for crying out loud. My sister called me the next day. Gave me an ultimatum. Told me they would have nothing to do with me if I insisted on continuing to sleep with that type of a person.
Fionnoula slams the flat of her palm against the steering wheel.
That’s what she said, those exact words. As if it was Ali who’d been flying that plane himself, as if he was the mastermind behind the whole bloody thing. I’d been with him close to twenty years by then. That type of a person.
She is shaking her head, her eyes shining. I reach across, put my hand over hers on the wheel, try to still its tremor.
I’m sorry, love, she says. It just gets to me, you know? All this hate, this nasty, insidious hate. It’ll tear the world apart; I swear to god. It’ll tear us apart.