The costume was like a thing alive, the way it jumped in my hands. Half alive, then dead again, in and out of consciousness. The client swivelled his head quickly to look at it.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. I meant the costume. I was shaking my head. I didn’t know what to do, whether to fawn over him or to be cool. I was never good at this sort of thing. But I found, while I was looking at him, that I had tears in my eyes.
Because he had told me. He had told me. He said, Thank you. I said, You’re welcome. As they say in America. I opened the front door and we stepped out onto the veranda. I went very sensible.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Me go on?’ He looked pointedly at the costume but I didn’t say anything. I could see his face now. The sky had a last bit of pink.
‘The whole street was at the O’Connells’, adults and kids packing in, and Old Mrs O’Connell (that was his mother) was being held up under the arms by two women because she’d collapsed like a puppet. She was whimpering and Aunty Theresa and a couple of other women were trying to get her to drink tea out of a saucer but it kept spilling down her front and Young Mrs O’Connell (his wife), who was shaking like a leaf, was saying, Leave off with the tea, will you, can’t you see she doesn’t want it? But the other women kept trying to give her the tea and saying, It’ll do her good. Ma was saying, Leave her in peace, won’t you. But still the other women kept trying to give her tea, until after a while everyone seemed to have forgotten about Mr O’Connell being dead. We were there to debate the issue of whether Old Mrs O’Connell should have tea or not.
‘I remember at home we had soup.’
Soup. A gas ring because it was a squat.
He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t swallow, even the soup. I had some kind of trapdoor in my throat. Ma was smoking in the candlelight and swinging her foot and saying, It’s alright, son, he had a good innings, he was getting on. It’s a tragedy when someone young dies, but he had a good life. She went on thinking up more good ways of looking at Mr O’Connell’s death. At peace now, gone to a better place.’
He was motoring. I wouldn’t interrupt him again.
‘Dad wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘Probably down the Working Men’s Club.’
‘Working Men’s Club? But I thought they didn’t—’
‘They didn’t. There was no work. But there was a Working Men’s Club.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. Shut up, GoGo! ‘And?’
‘And, nothing. Except I could sense something coming to a head during the evening. When Dad came in, us kids were in bed. I heard Ma say, It’s in the pot. Then, They mistook him for you, you know that, don’t you? And Dad saying, That’s rubbish. They were silent for a while. Dad was eating. I could hear his spoon. Then Ma said, You’re a stupid fool for hanging round here, and Dad was saying, Stop it, will you, you know nothing about it. Ma said she knew something happened on the twelfth, and she asked him what it was. Dad told her to keep out of what she knew nothing about. Ma said, I know this—you have Jack O’Connell’s blood on your hands.
‘I got out of bed and looked through the crack in the door and saw in the light of the candle that they were leaning forward in their chairs, clinging to each other. I wondered how they could be slagging each other off, and the next thing be hugging. Ma said we’d all go to Liverpool now. We’d stay with Deirdre and Finoula. Dad stiffened and leaned back. Ma was staring at him, her eyes looking crazy in the candlelight. She said, Well you don’t think we’re going stay now, do you? Dad got up and slammed out the door. Ma called after him, Hope you die out there, you bastard! Ma sat there and you could tell she was thinking away like anything. You could see the thinking coming off her.
‘I must’ve been a bit slow, because it was only after lying there for a while that I put two and two together. If the sniper was meant for Dad, then I had led him to Mr O’Connell.
‘In the morning Dad wasn’t there, but that was nothing unusual. Ma was like the head of Sinn Féin, she was like a little general. She marched next door to Aunty Theresa’s.’
‘This was your aunt?’
‘No, everyone called her aunty because her two sons had been shot joy-riding through a checkpoint and now she had no children. She had the only phone in the street. Her husband had got compo for his arm, but he’d been on the blanket in the Maze and the only way he was coming home was in a box. She was in the money.’
‘The blanket?’
He shrugged. ‘They didn’t wear clothes or wash. Well, they were political prisoners, treated like criminals. Thatcher said, “Crime is crime is crime.” Apparently. I was only—’
‘Twelve, yes. Very poetic. Very Gertrude Stein.’
‘You’ve finished it, haven’t you?’
‘Just get on with it, get on with the story.’
‘It’s not a story.’
‘Okay. Get on with it anyway.’
He nodded as if he could read the fabric, which was just a blob in the dark, and which I knew he wouldn’t be able to see anyway, even if they got the stop-gap cable going. But he was scrutinising it, his face twisted as if he were illiterate and trying to figure out his letters. ‘So the phone, anyway, Ma came back after using the phone and said matter-of-factly, We’re booked on the ferry on Friday.’
‘What day was it?’
‘Tuesday maybe. A few days to go, anyway.’
‘Shouldn’t you have gone right then?’
‘We should’ve.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Just listen.’
‘I am listening.’
‘Because I don’t have long. I really don’t.’
‘Ooh, Milly’s waiting!’ I tooted.
‘Wasn’t it you who wanted me to tell this?’ he asked. He sounded indignant. I couldn’t see.
‘I thought it was you wanted to tell the story.’ I did.
‘It isn’t a story.’
‘Okay. Whatever it is. I thought you wanted to tell it.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Okay.’
‘I had no intrinsic interest in telling it,’ he said. ‘It was just to pass the time.’
Oh, intrinsic.
He went down the bouncy steps to the garden. I felt each step.
‘Tell the story,’ I said from the veranda. ‘Or whatever it is.’
‘Alright.’ He turned around and addressed me from the garden. ‘At teatime that night . . .’
‘What night?’
‘The night after Mr O’Connell—wasn’t that what we were talking about?’
‘We were.’
He stood in the wild garden. Tonight I would heat water.
‘We were having our tea. Just us kids. Ma never ate. She’d hang around in the scullery doorway, smoking. There was this bashing on the door, bang bang bang, and it was Aunty Theresa. She was yelling, Concepta, Concepta. I remember there was fried bread on my plate, the colour of copper. It was about Dad. There’d been a man killed at the parade. Aunty Theresa told us kids to get our things. Dana and Sharon—my sisters—ran into the bedroom, but I stayed in the kitchen. Aunty Theresa was saying, Concepta, you’ve got to go. They know they got the wrong man. But Ma was dazed. She said, How do you know? It was a leak in the prison. There’d been a leak. Aunty Theresa was saying, Just go for Christ’s sake! But Ma was asking where Dad was. Aunty Theresa said she didn’t have a clue, and not to worry about Kevin, he knew what was going on. This was us, Ma and us kids, we had to go from the house, now.
‘Then I knew he’d killed a man at the parade. A Prod.’
Well, I knew that for a start. I boinged down the steps myself, to the garden. We stood on the path among the tendrils, the clag of datura in my nostrils. He spoke close to my face.
‘Suddenly Ma seemed to come to, like a switch flicking. She said, We’ll go! Aunty Theresa was all excited, as if Ma had won a raffle. Then there was general chaos. Dana—ten years old—going crazy. The UDA, the UDA! And then Sharon started up. The UDA! Ma said, Keep quiet about the UDA, will you? It’s a lot of nonsense. So I knew it was true. Aunty Theresa ran back next door to book us on the ferry. I’d never seen her run before. I said to Ma, who was whirling about plucking at random coats and things, They’re after Dad, aren’t they? She didn’t answer. Her eyes were bright, as if it was Midnight Mass. She said, We’re going to Liverpool, we’re finally going. Dreadful and Frightful would meet us there.
‘Aunty Theresa came back to tell us we were on the night sailing, and a taxi was on its way. Ma wanted to know how she’d got a black taxi to come over here at this time of night. Aunty Theresa said she just did, and they laughed. They actually laughed. It really was like Christmas. Ma had the box she’d packed under her arm. There was no time to take the sheets from the beds, or anything. We had our jackets, our schoolbags. As we were going out the door, there was a woman waiting in the lane with five or so kids and a whole lot of supermarket bags. She said, Can we have the house? News travelled fast. You had to be bold to get a squat. Ma said, sort of quiet, that it was a marked house and she wouldn’t be wanting it. That was the first time I knew this. It was a marked house. I saw the woman’s face, like a mushroom under her scarf, all blank. Ma told her to come back in a few weeks, but the woman said it would be too late by then, and she went away.
‘As it turned out, the black taxi didn’t come. We had to walk to the Falls Road! As we ran I looked back and caught a glimpse of the tea table, everything on it, the dishes and the half-eaten food like the Mary Celeste.’
Yes, the Mary Celeste. I was looking into his face with the garden framing it, but couldn’t see it.
‘We were kissed by neighbours all along the lane. They’d never kissed us before. All the way along the lane, people were calling in whispers from the doorways. We walked through the streets of Clonard till we got to the Falls Road. There was a checkpoint on the way, and we were trembling. We got a taxi which smelled like an old leather trunk I hid in once at a friend’s house, and then couldn’t open again.
‘Dad was waiting on the wharf, smoking, looking nervy. Ma said, So you’re coming then, are you? He ground his fag under his shoe and took the cardboard box from Ma, and we all walked onto the ferry.
‘We watched Belfast getting smaller and smaller.’ He held up his hand to the westward sky, comparing it with the Waitakeres. ‘When we were turning out of the Channel—I remember this because suddenly the sea was boiling, it was the Irish Sea, and that was what everyone said about it, it boiled. I thought about my Superman being left behind, and I started to go on about it. A couple of kids stared at me, and I did the classic what-the-fuck-d’you-think-you’re-looking-at, and Ma shooshed me and said we didn’t want to be drawing attention to ourselves. I asked why not, loudly, and Dad gripped my shoulder and hissed through his teeth, It’s just the way it is, which were the first words he’d spoken on the journey. I can still feel his thumb poking into that soft bit under your shoulder blade. He held it there, saying, There goes Ireland, there’s your last glimpse of Ireland. The lights of Belfast were disappearing into the mist, and then it was just black water slopping about. We went and sat in the cabin and I started up again about my Superman. Ma said, For goodness’ sake, you’re too old for a toy like that anyway. But it wasn’t for playing with, it was for keeping. For keeping. I knew who would get my Superman—the boy who would move into the house after us, from the family with the plastic bags. I couldn’t stand it. I was wailing. The girls were saying, Tell him to be quiet, Ma! Ma said, We’ll buy another Superman if it means that much to you. Well, we had six thousand pounds, give or take, burning a hole in our pocket. But I knew we wouldn’t. All the way across the Irish Sea I said under my breath, I’m going back, I’m going back to get my Superman. At one point Dad said grimly, None of us are ever going back, and Ma said, Well you’ve changed your tune all of a sudden. That was us leaving Ireland. When you tried to look out the window all you could see was us. From now on it was just us.’
Insects brushed against me on the path. I thought I felt warmth coming off him. I heard Bell crackling in the undergrowth, and his breath. There was more. ‘What?’ I said.
‘The boy with the plastic bags didn’t get my Superman. They did move into the house, a few days later, and it was firebombed and he lost an arm and bled to death before they could get him to the hospital. That’s what I heard. The boy who’d taken my place. But I didn’t know that then. I heard it later.’
I caught my breath. No words. None. I supposed this was some kind of end, the end of the story, the most tragic bit. You couldn’t get more hyperbolic, could you? He should’ve died but he didn’t, he came to paradise and lived happily ever after. End of story. There are more pages to go in this book, and so we know there is more. We’re privileged as readers and writers. And as immigrants.
I recovered. ‘But what about Dreadful and Frightful? Weren’t you meeting them in Liverpool?’
‘They weren’t there. When we got to the address they’d given us, we were told they’d got on a ship.’
‘Well, they were ship girls.’ He laughed. I laughed. It was almost completely dark.
‘Are you still there?’ he said.
‘Of course I’m here.’
‘But none of this is what I meant. What I meant to say.’
‘What did you mean to say?’
He shook his head. I felt the skim of his hair.
I cuddled the costume, my muff. It was finished.
‘Seeing it’s not finished, am I coming back tomorrow?’
‘Do you want to take it to another mender?’
I heard his sigh. ‘She’s probably not coming home tonight or I would’ve heard.’
I couldn’t make out his face anymore in the dark, and among the trees and vines.
‘Milly?’
‘Of course Milly.’
‘Come tomorrow then. It’s almost finished.’
It was done. It was done, despite everything.
‘This can’t go on,’ he said. I felt his lip brush my upper lip. Hesitate. And again. The smell of cigarettes. A warmth coming from him. I stepped back.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing.’
‘The power will come on.’
‘I know.’
‘What should I call you? All this time and—’
I told him.
‘GoGo?’
I explained about my posh school.
I knew his name, of course, but I liked to think of him as the client. Perhaps I was always the mender to him. I don’t know.
He made his way along the overgrown path. I heard the gate click and him curse gently as he dashed his keys against the car door. He was meant to be dead, and this was his new life. I felt a rush of excitement that I was in it.