18

London, 1986

The call over, he decided to drop by a pub for a wee dram. It was not as easy as it used to be, forgetting a life he’d loved with the two ladies. Teedle-dee-dee-dee dee, two laydeez.

‘Time you headed for home,’ said the man behind the bar, drying glasses, a surly bastard, Mickey noticed, as he focused his eyes on a face that was all twisted towards the centre of the guy’s face: eyes, cheeks, nose and mouth turned into a pursing grimace. Mickey, rocking back on his heels, peered at the man, looking for the centre of this dial in front of him, deciding it could disappear entirely, leaving an empty smooth surface with a hole in the middle. Poor bugger, walking around without his features. The barman’s arms wiped the counter again with a cloth that didn’t bear looking at, thought Mick. Celia would have thrown that in the bin months ago.

Mickey’s own face was relaxed in a silly kind of grin, eyes looking around for a friend, the mouth ready to laugh, kiss somebody’s cheek or down just one more glass.

‘Cheers,’ he said to the man, who raised his eyes and gave only the trace of a smile.

‘Good,’ said Mickey, ‘that’s better. Ye won’t die of sorrow tonight. T’ra then.’

He walked out of the pub straight as a Grenadier Guard at the very instant that a young man in a fury about something – Mick saw his face clearly – was speeding by. Mickey just had enough time to note: if you invent a term like road rage, some little swine will surely come along for you, to make it legitimate. The thud of the impact onto Mickey’s soft and harmless body, before he flew into the air, could barely be heard. He didn’t hear it himself, just saw the youth’s face turn from anger to terror as he, Mickey, descended and slowly folded onto the road with all his insides collapsing. As he sprawled with his head on the street, he thought how Celia’s face which, as she was growing older, now had a somewhat stern cast to it, as if it would forgive the world nothing, yet could still melt into unexpected sweetness. His reserves ebbing, he laid his cheek gently on the macadam, embracing the surface of it, and thought the road must be very old or newly paved, for it was as smooth as worn fabric, as the velvet skirt of Marcia’s lap which had held his head, on a cold night such as this.

Celia saw the busy-looking man walking along before he saw her, outside the Royal Theatre in Drury Lane, where she had been moodily looking at the posters. She decided not to ignore him.

‘Albie,’ she said, holding out her hand, unsure of the response. He removed the hand softly and put his arms around her. ‘Celia, dear.’

‘You’ve heard, then?’

‘More than that, I was not ten yards away, as it happened.’

‘You saw the accident?’

‘If you could call it that. Got time for a drink? Or coffee?’

They settled themselves in the corner of an old haunt. Albie went to fetch the drinks and she looked distractedly out of the window. A young bouncer, good-looking, was expertly explaining to a middle-aged man, exceedingly drunk, that he couldn’t go back into the pub to order another drink. The older man, overweight, of sandy-ginger colouring, blue eyes swivelling madly, sporting a Mohawk haircut, listened briefly to the other, but wasn’t having any of it. The handsome young man held his ground and repeated his advice. He was expert at it, didn’t lay a finger on the drunkard, she noticed, but was barring the way in. Celia looked at Ginger. A shiver of repugnance rippled through her from shoulder to groin.

Albie returned and snuggled himself into the seat, as you do in an English pub. They looked at each other, hands around their whisky glasses.

‘What do you mean – it was deliberate on the driver’s part?’

What Albie saw, he recounted, was a man walking very straight out of the Red Lion, almost as if he was doing a mock kind of march. This maniac came along in a turbo engine car, driving like a demon, and Mickey just stepped into his path. He saw the car coming all right.

‘This makes it far worse,’ said Celia, twiddling uselessly with her glass.

‘Indeed, but I know what I saw. And I should have seen it coming. I had bumped into him just a few weeks earlier at the end of a show. He paused and let that sink in. ‘And he was saying that nothing he had done had made an iota of difference to anything or anyone. But he said it in that comical way, you know? I wasn’t sure whether he was serious or not.’

She looked out of the window where of course it was raining again. ‘Some of the things he said to me made a difference well enough.’

‘And then when I went through his things …’

‘His effects?’

‘Well, Celia, who else was there? I didn’t even know you were back here. And there was no sign of an address for Marcia, or his family in Ireland. From the look of his rooms he was living like a hermit.’

She leaned on her elbow, cupping her jaw. They sat for a while like this and looked at each other. We should anticipate these likelihoods and take better care of each other, she was thinking.

Albie told her how there was very little to clear. Mickey’s life finally was bundled into a single suitcase. He’d referred the matter of looking for family in Dublin to the police.

‘And?’

‘The sergeant was helpful. A cousin came forward it seems. They took him back to Dublin for burial.’

‘I see.’

‘I’d come across a note, that I kept to myself, not exactly a suicide note, but a piece of paper, written to no one in particular, that said: ‘Sorry, can’t be doing with it.’

‘Not in an envelope?’

Albie shook his head. ‘No, in fact it was a crumpled piece of paper on the table where he used to write. I picked it up, wondering if he’d been trying to start on something new, and straightened it out. It was a note to himself. Who else do you have in the end, after all?’ He finished off his drink. ‘It was deliberate all right, Celia.’

‘But why do it like that?’

‘Why not? The moment was a godsend. He wasn’t to know an old friend would be walking along the street to witness it. This way, it looked like any other road accident. He was sparing you the truth.’

‘And we’d not see it in the light of a punitive act, which is what suicide is, if you ask me. No?’ It was a conviction she wanted validated.

Albie made a head tilt meaning maybe and she looked at him candidly. He was always bouncing around the place, this bustling Englishman, an East Ender who had made good, taken speech lessons, learned how to dress. There were those who said he was always on the make, but she knew he was often on the giving end of a loan as well. She wondered how much Mickey had owed him when he died, and so she asked him. He waved his hand, dismissing it.

She said that she had seen Mickey as Peter Pan, never growing up. Was that the trouble? – she asked Albie.

‘Mick said to me once that you can hardly wait to get out of your childhood, then you spend years trying to recapture the sense of wonder you used to have. What would it be like to be a child again, with all that innocence and wonder? he wanted to know. Of course other men didn’t dare share such thoughts then – we blokes didn’t talk like that.’

‘No? Not even in the theatre?’

Albie shook his head smiling. ‘Not straight men; we save that kind of conversation for when we’re talking with women. We know you won’t laugh at us.’ He raised an empty glass. ‘Will you have another?’

She took a long breath, thinking. ‘No – I think I’ll make a trip to Ireland and see his grave.’ They stood up and he helped her with her coat, his hand barely touching her shoulder.

Albie looked at her departing figure, walking down the glistening London street. He had always liked her but she wouldn’t give him a second thought. He shook his head imperceptibly – she wouldn’t have noticed it if she’d looked back – thinking of how he’d propped Mickey up, one way and another over the years, with money, company when he needed a drink, jobs. Mickey hadn’t ever acknowledged the role Albie had taken in helping his mate to extricate himself. He now grimaced, knowing it was pointless and possibly not wise to expect gratitude from anyone. A passer-by briefly saw the look on his face and hurried on.

Celia went home from the meeting, wanting to contact Marcia but kept putting it off. Why write only now that she had bad news? She deferred it for a few weeks and made the pilgrimage to Dublin. Finally she did write however, but Marcia’s return note was noncommittal, distracted or something, as though matching the global distance with her own state of mind. Perhaps then this really was the end for them. It felt like it, but Marcia was so bloody secretive; maybe she simply didn’t want to reveal how she felt about Mickey and their strange parting.

Celia stayed on, finding anew an eccentric assortment of people – those she would always be drawn to – rediscovering old London with its steady, beating heart despite the punishment it had taken. Mickey stayed in her thoughts. He had once said to her, not long before he died:

‘I was a mother’s boy you know; when I was thirty I still used to cuddle up to her in bed, when Dad had gone to work.’

‘Christ,’ said Celia.

‘Yes,’ said Mickey.

‘So you escaped to London.’

‘And I came to London,’ he said to her. Gentle Mickey.

She was fairly sure that this recounting of part of his life was innocent. So much so that he’d revealed it. Unusual perhaps, but nothing to make anything of. And there were – anyone would surely know this – thousands of ‘unusual’ habits that went on all around. People don’t talk about them. Take her parents, who’d been ill, as people called it. But their ‘sickness’ was chronic alcoholism, a fact confirmed by her eavesdropping, a couple of years after the event. Died together of the booze. She had turned it into a romantic pact in her imagination, her parents’ end. Yet how could she have ever imagined that could be romantic? Later she examined the information more closely, turning over silently the words she’d overheard. In what state were they? Sitting across from each other with a glass of whisky in their hands? In utter degradation, sprawled on the floor of their kitchen? Nobody talked about it. It was assumed when people didn’t talk about family secrets, or indeed about any intimate details of others’ lives, that no one was interested, that it was none of their business. But Celia was inordinately interested and she thought she might pursue the life and death of her parents one day.

She and Albie met up occasionally, he knowing better than to press his suit. She sought out odd corners of the British Isles, alone or with Albie. The seasons folded one into another reluctantly. Longing for spring one year she waited and sighed, then unexpectedly found it on her doorstep one morning, delighting her with its scents and brightness, like a half-forgotten friend.