When I was ready, I said, saying it like I didn’t really care whether he told me or not, ‘What’s your news, Alex?’
I was half thinking that he was going to tell me he’d been selected for a course for potential NCOs, and would be away training a lot of the time, in the Glen of Imaal and that; that I would hardly see him for six months.
‘It’ll wait,’ he said.
I’d hoped he wasn’t getting the sulks.
‘Tell us how was your day,’ he said.
It was a cold summer evening, the fire was on one bar to save the gas in the bottle, and I was carrying a cruel headache. I was still working in Dunnes, and would be for as long as I could manage to stick it, till the baby came. I told him my feet were sore, and I’d a massive row with a customer who said I’d overcharged her when I knew for a fact that I hadn’t, because I’d triple-checked her change, seeing as it was her.
‘What do you mean?’ she’d said.
‘Sure you’re in here every week trying that oul’ trick on.’
And she had been, and the supervisor knew it too, but he said afterwards that I couldn’t call the customers names like that – because even though you were right in what you said, the wrong way of accusing someone can be turned and used against you. I was just being straight is all. That one would lick shite if she thought it’d fill her.
He laughed at that.
He was wearing his combat uniform. I knew he wasn’t supposed to be wearing it outside of barracks, and had been stopped by the military police a couple of times and warned. He could wear his ordinary everyday uniform. I think it was to do with the combat jackets; the lads sold them, or they were stolen. A security thing, I suppose, with the stuff that was going on up north.
The combats were green, and had good and plenty of pockets, and the lads on the building sites were mad for them. The army started stamping on them to stop the loss, and the guards were given the power to confiscate them off civvies. He sat in close beside me, lounged, and touched my belly with his fingertips, then laid his hand flat on it and kissed my cheek, and didn’t even take his hand away when I said I had a splitting headache, which told me he wasn’t after anything.
‘The CO brought me into the office today,’ he said.
I smelt drink off him, but it wasn’t very strong; he’d only supped enough to give himself courage.
‘For what?’ I said.
Alex had lovely green eyes, and they were full of life. Maybe it was the alcohol had got behind them and polished them up, for they really shone that evening.
‘He said I was selected for overseas.’
I sat up straight, my spine going rigid, like lightning hitting a rod, and snapped, ‘No way, Alex!’
I was on my feet, evading his reach for me, and at the table before he had even stood. That pitiful look he sometimes put on made my blood boil. I reached for the takeaway, and I was so vexed I threw it at him and spattered his combats with rice and chicken curry.
‘Vicky,’ he said, ‘for fuck’s sake!’
‘You lied to me, Alex!’
‘I didn’t! Joey Tierney failed his medical, and I was next in line, if Iturnit down Iwon’t get going for another three years!’
He put his hands out to beg for peace. I saw that stupid silver Claddagh ring his stupid mother had bought him last Christmas, buying it for him after I told her it was what I was getting him for a present. Such a cow, and me having to leave it in the shop where I was paying it off and instead buy him a silver chain and cross that he lost after a week. He put a foot forward.
‘Fuck off … don’t you come near me, Alex.’
He backed away, and began smoothing his cropped brown hair.
‘Come on Eileen’ came on the telly, and we liked to dance to that, and it was awkward listening to it because all I wanted to do then in that moment was dance with him. But he couldn’t see this, he missed that, and if he had stepped forward I wouldn’t have stopped him coming the full journey. He didn’t see it because he was gone, and I was left alone with an upset baby in me and the strains of a happy pop song bouncing off the walls in a flat that smelt of curry.
He was always sending me home parcels from the Leb, full of baby clothes, pink and blue, and he’d said the stuff was really cheap out there, and he’d the neck to be sending me crotchless knickers for when I’m better; meaning for when I’d be able to do the sex again.
I missed him more than I thought I would. It’s not till someone is gone that you realise the little things that he did around the place. Cleaning out the ashes, putting out the dustbin, doing the delft, listening and not talking, not saying anything, just being a pair of ears for me for whenever I had a row with Mammy or I was low in myself. I missed the warmth of him in the bed, and the heat he would leave behind him when he was just out of it, the way it was there for me to slide over onto, and I always seemed to sleep better in the ghost of his heat. Funny that.
He wrote a lot of letters, and this was hard for him because he’d left school when he’d turned 13, taken out of it by his ma to go work on a fuel lorry. ‘His ma’s a bollocks’ were Nano’s first words of friendship to me. I cracked up laughing because I’d never heard a woman being called that before.
Short letters, and usually saying the same thing over and over, and he couldn’t spell – atrocious. I’d have to read him the good bits out of the porn mags we liked to read in bed. I preferred the mags to the blue films. Sometimes these were okay to watch, but more often were not. I wouldn’t be prudish or anything, but that’s how I am, I prefer sex and that in the mags to watching the vids that Alex sent home. I gave them to the girls to watch, and they thought they were fucking brilliant, especially the one with the man who had a huge cock.
The girls could be a scream, and I missed going out with them, but I was too big, and I wasn’t in the mood for them after about an hour in their company; they’d get too loud, and when they got like that I went distant in myself, for I couldn’t see the sense of what the loud laughter was all about. I did before, but maybe being with a baby changes you.
‘That’s fucking lovely,’ Nano’d said, trying on the gold rope chain Alex had sent me for my 24th birthday.
We were in my flat the evening before the world caved in.
‘Yeah, it’s lovely all right.’
‘He’s good taste, Vicky, I’ll say that for him.’
‘He has, hasn’t he?’
‘My Gerry’s taste is in his hole.’
‘Ah, he’s not that bad.’
‘He fucking well is.’
Then I remembered that he’d surprised her with a cake and a band singing ‘you’re once, twice, three times a lady’ in the mess, and she was mortified because this was the song that was playing when she and Mouldy Jones were having sex during one of the nights Gerry was on duty, and he got stuck in her and couldn’t get out, and we had to call an ambulance. None of us knew till that night that a man could literally be trapped inside you. Gerry never found out, and if he did he couldn’t very well say anything because he used to go with Maggie Doyle, and no man who had respect for his mickey would go near her. Walking she is.
‘You’re right about Gerry’s taste,’ I said.
‘In his hole.’
‘Tea?’
‘Michael.’
‘The same Michael you used to go with?’
‘That was ages ago.’
‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ she’d said, looking around.
‘He is.’
‘Did he charge much?’
‘He woul
dn’t take anything.’
‘That was decent of him.’
‘He said I was to tell no one. In case anyone else would expect it done for free.’
‘You told me.’
‘You’re not no one.’
And she reached over and put her fat arms around me, and I thought she was going to hug me to death. When she let me be, she said, ‘My Gerry didn’t get his letters …’.
I’d given them to Freddie. I’d rang the barracks and asked them to send someone around to collect them. The boys going to and coming from the Leb do so on rotation: three chalks over three weeks. Alex was coming home on the last, so the new lads going out brought stuff to him and the others. I’d wanted him home on the first chalk, but he said the extra money would come in handy. I couldn’t argue with him on that score, but now I often wish I had.
The army took us out there last year. By us, I mean the families of those who had been murdered. They brought us to the actual scene during the day, but I insisted on being there in the evening, at the time it happened. So an officer brought us to the place when it was night, and he had the sense to leave me and Jamie alone with each other. It was dark, and a cool breeze stirred the fronds on the road verge. The silhouette of the crusader castle on the hill was darker than the night skies. Jamie said nothing. He smoked, holding his cigarette the same way his dad used to, sheltered by his palm, warming its lifeline perhaps.
I’d fallen asleep on the sofa, and woke sometime in the middle of the night. The TV was still on, all grey and fuzzy and singing signal. I lay there, touched my belly. The telly going and lighting the room in a sort of blue light, a Bush telly that Alex joked about. ‘Are we watching the Bush tonight? What’s the reception, like?’ Laughing goodo then at the wit of himself, my hand sliding over to adjust his aerial.
I was thinking about lots on the sofa, wide awake, wondering why that Freddie lad hadn’t given the letters to the lads. He was very quiet that lad, and had a way of looking at you when he had drink on him – not what he’d like to do with you, something more, like he would want to do that with you and much more besides. Alex didn’t like him, just said there was something about him. When I thought on it, that explained it better than I had; there was something about him.
I got up and turned off the telly, then made tea and brought the cup to bed and put it on the bedside locker, where it remained, untouched.
I was up early, feeling fresh in myself, really fresh considering I hadn’t slept too well. When I heard the doorbell, I thought that the rent man was early, and went to answer. I remember walking the hallway, my hand arced on my back, feeling like an elephant, opening the door to clear Dublin skies, an army officer and a chaplain. They didn’t have to open their mouths; their presence said everything.
One said, ‘Sorry,’ and this was the last thing I heard as the roars of me silenced all else they had to say. All that stuff, the bare facts, came later, and even then they had to pierce a numbness.
Why did they let live this bastard who pulled the trigger, left my son with a photograph for a father, a few scenes in a video cassette, and a green combat jacket on a wire hanger in a wardrobe? He lives in a gaol, and whenever they write or speak of early release for him my stomach rises to my throat, for how could anyone even consider freeing a scum who murdered four young men in cold blood, and put the gun to the head of one to finish him off? How could they? Do they think that a person forgets – that because I’ve moved on and remarried and had more children, that it’s all right? That I’ve got over it? I’m grand, so I am? In ways they are as bad as the scum who killed Alex, for I think they own his same lack of sensitivity and respect for the lives of others. But I will never forget. I see Alex every day, feel the goodbye kiss, the sad smile, the tears in his eyes, hear the promises on his lips, read the love you and kisses in his badly written letters.
I spit on the image in the newspaper photograph, and then I take scissors to the page, cutting around the edges, resisting the temptation to slice through him. I bring the cutting to the sink, place it in the enamel basin and set a match to a corner; I watch the flame consume his face, watch as he disintegrates into floating black motes. I run the tap, and watch the flow of water break the remnants of burned newspaper, hurrying them down the drain.
If Something Doesn’t Get Better ...
Larry always used to say, ‘If something doesn’t get better, it gets worse; what it doesn’t do is remain the same.’ He was so full of regrets that, if you were to shake him hard, all his remorse would sound like some godawful alarm. He was a man used to saying sorry. But the word was worn away in him, because it meant nothing any more. He had used it too often to too many people – it was now merely an automated word from his lips. A default setting. I mean, he was one sorry fuck.
We were in a people carrier I’d popped in the parking lot outside a Dunkin’ Donuts, and I was thinking about abandoning it before a cop pulled us over. A fella could drive 500 miles or longer and not be stopped in his tracks – it’s the longest distance I’ve ever driven without a traffic cop wanting to get close to my face, and my shortest run is about 500 yards. Meantime, during my thinking, Larry was staring deep into the bag and whistling, saying, ‘Fuck, fuck.’
‘What?’ I said, snatching the bag from his lap and putting it on mine. When I looked in, I nearly totalled us by wheel-kissing the curb and momentarily losing control.
Earlier, we’d relieved an old doll of her shoulder bag in New Haven. A morning of contrary winds, and we’d rigged things so it looked like the wind had bowled her to the ground and not a Larry shove. As soon as she was down, he was all over her like a great gentle bear, cooing in her ear after he’d slipped her bag to me. I did a runner then. The old doll was wiry and tough, and when she found her deep, husky voice she yelled blue thunder. Larry shouted and pointed in another direction, ‘Thief! Stop that man!’ And people actually grappled an innocent kid to the ground. Afterwards, Larry caught up with me and he had such a grin. Not a happy grin, but nervous. He was pessimistic, and always expected us to get caught – it was a huge relief and surprise to him when, after doing a job, we remained cuff-free. I hadn’t checked the bag on the spot because these days cameras peer from everywhere and every goddamn angle, and a monitor-watcher wouldn’t fail to notice a guy dipping his eyes and hands into a Gucci shoulder bag. So I just wanted to put a distance between us and the crime scene. Each of us had rap sheets with crimes enough to bead up several rosaries. Both of us were in our late forties, with failed everythings behind us and bad prospects ahead.
In the motel we booked into, walking a distance after abandoning the carrier in a wood, we found we’d struck it lucky: in her Gucci, the old doll had $93,098 in cash. Some loose change. Credit cards, donor card, an address book, a hairbrush with strands of old hair, spare clean knickers and some fanny fresheners.
We sat on the bed looking at that stash of greenery on the orange duvet, not believing our good fortune. We counted it three times. On TV, Captain Kirk was talking to Spock about beaming him up. Man, we were smiles. Not a sorry peeped from Larry. Larry Reddy. Larry had Irish blood in him from his mother’s side. He was tall, well-built, and had a stud in his left ear. He liked to go into empty churches to pray and light votive candles. That part of him came from his mother – his father was from the Congo, and he gave Larry his huge bottom lip that people knew right off revealed a truculent nature. But before people could read the lip, they took in his large brown eyes, and these shining diamonds just took people’s breath away long enough for Larry to get them over the hurdle of his father’s lip. Me, I’m short and skinny, and from a poor Jewish family that Israel didn’t want in the homeland, which tells it all about us. Like they’d even kidnapped Africans and settled them in the Promised Land. Mom said it was because we were the thirteenth tribe of the Israelites. When I said there were only twelve tribes, she said to cotton on to what she was saying
.
‘Jeez,’ Larry said, gazing at the stash on the bed. He whistled long and loud.
I said that was a real backwater Negro sort of thing to do, and he said, ‘Sorry.’
Before hitting up the old woman this morning, we had about $200 between us. Six previous old-timer targets hadn’t yielded us a whole ton: single bills, five-dollar notes, dimes, quarters, a set of false teeth, driving licences. Seventh time lucky.
I was thinking that 96 grand split two ways was a lot of money, and couldn’t help thinking that one way was a hell of a lot more. It would take me the guts of five years’ slogging as a short-order cook to earn that sort of dough.
Larry said, ‘What was she doing carrying so much money?’
‘I dunno … how would I know?’
‘We should maybe hang loose for a while.’
I’d been thinking the same. If Doris Marso – her name and address peeped out from an electricity bill – sang to the cops about how much she was cooked for, they’d see it as a wake-up call. If they could snatch us before we spent all her cash, they might get to siphon some for themselves. I know how a cop’s heart works.
‘There’s a place close by,’ I said, ‘in Amish land … I used to go there with Linda and the kids. They used to love it the way people do who aren’t familiar with rural.’
‘Okay. Sounds fine to me.’
‘For a couple of days,’ I said.
‘A-ha,’ Larry said, somewhat distantly.
So we checked out in the morning, and took a bus to Strasburg, where I bought a camper van from a man who ran an ad in a shop window that had a Conestoga wagon parked out front. Paid cash, which had given me some bargaining leverage – I’d always wanted one of those hippie vans. It was sky-blue with a white trim, and the guy had worked it to mint condition. Larry knew about engines, and he had a good look under the bonnet and said all was in order. The owner was broke – I can smell that off a person, because more often than not the same smell lingers about my own body.