There was consternation at the Whartons’. Rollo had killed a grey squirrel and then dragged it into the house. It was lying on the hallway mat, with one dead bright eye staring up at the ceiling. Two front paws were raised in supplication, a plump little friar caught up in an unexpected massacre. Rollo lay dozing some distance away, a crust of squirrel blood drying in the seam of his jowl. It was the first time he had killed anything, and the Whartons looked at the sleeping dog with suspicion and respect, as though after all these years he had become a fresh mystery.
That night I lay in bed at the top of the house, in the dark, wondering how it was that Rollo had managed to kill the squirrel. They were so fast: I had seen them shinning up trees like circus performers.
I didn’t sleep well. The dream that kept troubling me came back, or a version of the dream. In it, I was looking out of the bedroom window in the Whartons’ house. Below me, standing in the falling rain on the wet street, was a man in a dark hood. He was calling out to me, ‘Jacky, Jacky, come down here, I have something for you,’ and holding up the curled body of a dead squirrel.
‘I’m not coming down,’ I called out to him from the window. ‘I can get the squirrel in the morning.’
‘Then I’m coming up,’ the man said. He began to climb up the drainpipe towards my window, slowly at first. I felt myself filling with fear, like a flooding ditch. I was rooted to the spot.
The hood came waggling up the pipe until at last I could look straight into its eyeholes, but saw no eyes. In a panic, I picked up the lamp base from beside my bed and hit at the thing inside the hood over and over again. Then suddenly the hood fell off and the stunned face beneath it, with blood running down in a rivulet from the forehead, was Big Jacky’s.
‘Aw, why did you do that to me, son?’ he said, in a voice soaked with an immensely soft and patient sorrow.
I couldn’t speak. My hands were trying to press his bleeding head back together and make it well, but none of it would work.
‘Why did you do that, son?’ he said again, sadly.
When I woke up, my face was wet. My heart was beating at a hundred miles an hour, like a starling’s ticker, and the sheets were damp with sweat.
How could you explain love and how it creeps up on you? How it slowly takes a grip, spreading across you like blight across an elm tree, shortening your breath, sneaking into your dreams, making your mouth suddenly foolish, ambushing your clumsy, stupid heart with stabs of jealousy and desire?
And how can you explain the illogicality of it: how you might say there’s a girl there, who is certainly beautiful, and intelligent, and amusing, and if she were to be flattened by a bus tomorrow I would be very sorry, of course, for the loss of a life, but not that sorry? And there’s a girl there who’s not strictly anything that I can really convey, except that first I saw her laughing in a way that something in me understood, and then I thought I might love her.
She started as a waitress in the restaurant, about two weeks after I got the job behind the bar. She didn’t talk to anyone much at first, because she was too busy trying to work everything out, with the managers shouting in one ear and Francis in the other.
She had thick dark, wavy hair that fell jaggedly on to her neck, as though she had taken a chop at it herself with the kitchen scissors. Pale skin, as pale as paper, and dark, watchful eyes. She was small and fine-boned, as if pieced together by an intelligent hand. At the beginning, she spoke to me only in drinks orders, and her name was Eve. The significance of her name wasn’t lost on me, since I had already started to weave meanings around her. Eve, I thought, the woman at the start of everything.
One day, I tried a joke.
‘Two small glasses of house white, a gin and tonic with ice and lemon, and a margarita,’ she said.
‘And a thimble of lemonade for the pixie on table twelve,’ I whispered to her. She gave me a sceptical look, but I saw her glance over to table twelve, where a tiny man with a Florida tan and a permanently astounded expression, as though his eyebrows had been surgically tweaked upwards, was leaning forward into the monstrous bosom of his formidable blonde companion. A smirk crept up the side of her face before she could catch and kill it. I carried on quietly with my business, mixing drinks in the cocktail shaker, as though I had noticed nothing.
She had a six-year-old son, Francis said.
‘Any husband?’
‘Husband,’ he said, mocking me for being old-fashioned. ‘I don’t think so. Why, do you want to marry her?’
‘I’m not the marrying kind,’ I said.
Phyllis sent me letters from Belfast. They fell on to the Whartons’ doormat every couple of weeks or so: a page or two of blue ink, written in her painstaking, cramped hand.
There was one lying there this morning. I pictured her in the evenings in our front room, drawing the curtains and mulling over her account of events.
Dear Jacky, it said, Hope all is well with you. The weather has been terrible here, clouds and drizzle so no surprises there. Mary and Sam came up to visit at the weekend, Mary looking very smart in a green suit she bought in Lisburn. Sam hadn’t much to say for himself because the football was on so we gave him the remote and left him to it.
Two men I didn’t recognise came to the house looking for you last Friday. I said you weren’t here, you had gone to live in Scotland and they should leave us alone now. The next day there were dirty words sprayed on our wall but I spoke to Mr Murdie and between us we have managed to get it off with the paint remover. Hopefully that will be an end to it, as I can’t be doing with any more trouble.
I was round at Titch’s house on Sunday for his mother’s birthday. We had a lovely evening with a Chinese takeaway and white wine, and a coffee cake with candles in it. Titch is on much better form and is now going out of the house by himself a couple of times a week, although not in the evenings. He asks after you all the time. I am enclosing some snaps of us on the night, taken by his Uncle Joe. Titch got them developed in Speedy Snaps. Take care and give my regards to the Whartons, love Phyllis.
There were three photographs with the letter, of Titch, Phyllis and Titch’s mother sitting round the kitchen table on the big night. Uncle Joe must have been on his tenth can of lager, because they were all slightly askew, as though the kitchen floor had suddenly sunk in just before his finger pressed the shutter. Phyllis was in camera mode: teeth graciously bared, eyes staring straight into the lens, hand lifting a wine glass in a determined, recordable gesture of celebration. She was wearing a blouse I hadn’t seen before. Titch’s mother was laughing with her eyes closed, a paper party hat slipping off the back of her hair. And Titch was smiling too, but there was the ghost of something fearful in his eyes.
I turned to the last picture. Titch had arranged his arm so that his fingers were making rabbit ears out of the back of Phyllis’s unwitting, permed head. Good sport of Phyllis to have included it. She loved photographs. It made me laugh out loud. I slipped it into my wallet and went to work.