‘Dad, you make it sound like a game show,’ said Red. ‘Ignore him Tab. Dad, it’s a difficult decision. Tabitha is already going through enough without anyone poking and prodding.’
‘I’m only asking,’ he said, innocently. ‘Anyway, Tabitha here doesn’t mind, do you, loveen? She’s not the type to take umbrage and offence… She’s one of us.’ He smiled at me, confident in his pronouncement. But there was a slight puzzlement in his eyes as if to say, she was one of us but something happened and now… now she’s married to a Progressive Conservative.
‘I haven’t made a decision yet, Christy.’ I managed to keep my voice steady. ‘But when I do, you will be the first to know.’
He nodded. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I want to see you sometime. Come over to the house. Cup of tea and a chinwag. We haven’t had one of those in quite a few years. Time to stop being a stranger.’
For a moment, I didn’t think I was going to be able to get the words out. For years, I thought that they both hated me and I would never be forgiven and here he was being so lovely. ‘I’ll call in,’ I managed.
‘Promise me?’ He caught my hand in his two big warm rough hands and held it tightly. ‘What about tomorrow?’
‘I’ll come, I promise.’ I felt nervous, as though I was putting on an old coat and wasn’t sure it was going to fit. But I wanted to be that person who wore that old coat so much. I hadn’t realised I still could.
We said our goodbyes and I walked into the darkening sky, towards the red lighthouse at the end of the pier. It hadn’t been just Red I’d missed, it was Christy too. And it was the person I used to be. I missed all of it and wanted it back.
*
There was no doorbell on the door, just the old lion head knocker, so I rapped, loudly, and stood back, holding a yucca plant. Christy was always growing things. Or he used to. There were always spider plants rooting in little plastic cups of soil or plants trailing up the pipes in the kitchen. The house was exactly as I remembered it. Large, Victorian and in one of the wrought-ironed railed squares in Dun Laoghaire, but shabbier and more run-down than its neighbours.
And then, something, a noise, a figure, materialising through the glass.
‘Just in time,’ said Christy. He always used to say that to us when we’d come home, me and Red. ‘In time for what?’ we’d say and he’d answer, ‘whatever you want.’
‘In time for what?’ I said.
‘Whatever you want,’ he said, making me smile.
‘These are for you,’ I said, handing over some biscuits and the plant. ‘I don’t know if you still…’
‘Still eat shortbread?’ he said. ‘You bet I do. Whatever the doctors tell me.’
‘And still green-fingered?’
He nodded. ‘I feel like a matron on a ward sometimes, tending all my little plants, nursing them to bloom or to sprout. And this plant is a beauty. Like a tiny slice of jungle. You shouldn’t have. Now, tea. Come downstairs will you? I’ve just had my writers’ group and there’s some fruit cake left over. I always say, if you’re going to have to listen to bad poetry – mainly mine, it has to be said – then fruit cake helps the situation enormously. Or we can open these fancy biscuits. You’ve missed Red, he’s gone for a walk.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said, following him into the large hall; with the staircase that led upstairs, the coving and celling roses, and I noticed that nothing had changed: same paper, same paint on the walls, same tangle of vine twisting around the banister. ‘I came to see you.’ But I hadn’t realised how much I wanted to see Red until I knew he wasn’t going to be there and felt disappointment curl around my insides.
‘Red’s on at me to get the house cleaned,’ he said. ‘He’s starting one room at a time. Doesn’t understand how I live like this. I don’t see it, but he says the dust isn’t good for me.’ Christy leant heavily on the handrail as we descended into to the kitchen, his breath all wheezy. Maybe, I thought, Red had a point about the dust. ‘He’s done downstairs, so the kitchen is visitor-friendly.’
‘So you’re doing well, then,’ I said. ‘Apart from your son being on at you to dust more.’
He turned on the stairs. ‘Well, I’m not doing too badly. Red is a one to worry… I’m not dead yet.’
Before
Laughing and giggling. Red carrying me on his back down these stairs when I thought I’d broken a leg. I hadn’t. I’d just sprained if after drinking too much cheap wine at a party. And then the next morning, Christy putting a fried breakfast in front of me, Red already tucking in.
‘You need to get some fat on those bones,’ he said, giving me a wink. ‘Get that into ye.’
‘Dad, enough of the personal remarks,’ Red had said. ‘You need to get some fat off yours.’
It was always such a comfort to be with the two of them in that lovely, quiet house.
‘What are you up to today?’ said Christy.
‘I don’t know,’ said Red, glancing at me. ‘What do you feel like doing?’
‘The boat to Dalkey Island?’ I said. ‘I haven’t been there since I was little. Mum took me.’
‘Now, that’s an island,’ said Christy. ‘It doesn’t belong to people at all, just the goats.’
‘How are we going to get there?’ said Red.
‘A boat.’ I grinned at Red. ‘Obviously. You can ask one of the fishermen to take you out. It might blow away our hangovers.’
‘I think,’ said Red, carefully. ‘I think you might be on to something there.’
And we did. For a fiver, one of the boatmen dropped us off on the island and once we were landed, and our seasickness quelled, we explored: walking the full perimeter, exploring the old ruins and sitting for ages, Red lying down, hands behind his head, me cross-legged making daisy chains.
‘You know, Tab?’ he said, waking up. ‘I think this is all I need in life. Us on an island. Where no one and nothing can reach us.’
*
‘Sit yourself down there, Tabitha,’ Christy said, pointing to his old armchair and faded cushion beside a wood burner. ‘And I’ll make the tea.’
‘How is the writers’ group going? How many are you?’
‘There’s the six of us now. The stalwarts. All the way from Peggy who’s going on eighty-seven, down to Charles who’s a mere stripling of 67. Poetry isn’t bad at all. But you know something, Tabitha? I don’t know what I’d do without my poetry. Writing my little verses keeps me sane. I seem to have become more prolific as I’ve got older. It’s like I have to put everything down, make sense of everything, before I can’t anymore. Don’t stop, actually.’
He was wiping out two mugs with a tea towel and he unwrapped a large, almond-topped fruit cake, the kind of cake no one makes anymore. ‘Peggy’s this is,’ he said. ‘We get all the reading and critiquing over and done with and then we have our reward.’
He handed me a mug of tea and a slice of cake. If I closed my eyes I could be twenty all over again. Our last year at college, Red and I practically lived in the room upstairs.
‘Now, there’s something I’ve been wondering, and before Red gets back I had better get it off my chest. So, tell me this and tell me no more,’ he said. ‘Why did you marry someone like Michael Fogarty? I thought you were one of us. And well, they’re the ones getting rid of the bowls club here in the town and cutting the winter fuel allowance. And a friend of mine, his daughter, well, she’s living in a bed and breakfast, grotty place it is, with three children, because they’ve run out of council houses.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I’m still the same. I still vote the same way. Michael is…’ Christy was exactly the same as he used to be but I was mortified he was asking about Michael. Michael who I’d married only a year after ending it with Red. Michael the father of my child. Christy never minded asking you the awkward questions if he needed to know something. He needed to fully understand everything about the world until he was satisfied.