Four New Words for Love (24 page)

Sanctuary! I don’t know if I just thought it or I actually said something. Anyway there was this polite cough from the back. And this guy came forward. He wasn’t wearing a funny
collar or anything, but you just knew he was one of the clergy. He was holding a rag like he’d been polishing the brasses. He didn’t look old enough to hold down the job, hardly older
than me. He had a nice face, a kind face, the kind of face you’d be prepared to take home to your mum, provided she didn’t behave like Gina’s. It was the sight of that face,
kinder than mine, that suddenly made me think it was all my fault.

‘I want to confess!’

‘We – we don’t actually believe in confession here. Not the way I imagine you’re referring to.’

‘A child was delivered unto the womb of my pal and smitten by death and I can’t help feeling that it’s all my fault!’ God knows where I got ‘unto’ and
‘womb’ and ‘smitten’ from. It’s all those big-beard Charlton Heston Bible epics they show at Easter and Christmas. He retreated to the front pew and took all this in.
Then he wiped his face with the rag and left a streak. Somehow I couldn’t help liking him for that. It made him look like a wee boy. And then he says, ‘I always find this place a bit
sombre. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Any biscuits?’

Fondant Fancies. Gone soft. You could tell he was a bachelor. His house was at the side of the church and he had this family kitchen he didn’t know what to do with. He sits there with the
streak on his face and asks me what’s wrong. ‘Where do I start?’ I say. It turns out that he wants what I want – to make
me
feel better. You don’t come across
many men like that. I start off with Gina and me as kids and he starts this kind of rolling his hand, like he wants me to fast-forward till we get to what he calls the ‘spiritual crux’
of the matter. So I tell him about Gina and me and
her
and Ruth and he says it can’t be punishment. ‘Because,’ he says, ‘by extension,’ he says,
‘Millie’s death would be part of that punishment, visited on you, and God doesn’t work that way. I don’t believe in a wrathful God. I believe in a God of infinite
compassion, and I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong and even if you had, it isn’t anything that He can’t forgive. You’re no worse, or better, than me.
There’s a purpose behind all this. I don’t pretend to know what it is, but I know it’s a good one.’

You look at a man like him, Mark, his name is, and you look at Quick Nick and Wee Tam, and you can’t believe they’re the same
species.
I was tempted to lick my hanky and
lean across and wipe his face, make a joke about mark and Mark, and take it from there. But I didn’t, cause with ten sentences he made me feel as if I’d fallen in love and climbed
Everest at the same time. I floated home congratulating myself on how I’d held back. I always knew I’d a spiritual side.

He phoned me up a week later and I thought – here we go. But I was wrong. I’d told him about our money worries and he’d got me an opening in a chicken factory. The shifts were
better and the money more than the hospital, so it was goodbye to all that. When he got me the job I don’t think he quite knew what was involved. There’s the ethics of animals and stuff
to consider, but if it means half your day with your hands up a chicken’s arse pulling out innards to keep the flat for her, then I can only say tough luck for the chickens.

We’d to wear wellies and coats and hairnets and latex gloves and the whole nine yards. Every last man of us on the production line was a woman. There was a bit of banter in the canteen
with some of the guys who worked in other parts of the plant, but you trudged in there, still wearing half the stuff, looking about as sexual as a Dalek. I couldn’t employ my assets. Looking
round you could barely tell one of us from the other. Well – Danny could. He came up to me and said he needed to take a swab.

‘Is that code?’ I said.

He ran some kind of lab in the place, or said he did, to make sure we don’t all die, or kill the customers, with some kind of bird lurgy. There wasn’t much of me he didn’t
investigate.

‘Is this standard procedure?’ I said. He was very, very clean. I pointed it out.

‘Scientific protocols,’ he said. I’m not sure I was so flattered by that.

‘And so, what can you do for
me
?’ I said. And lo and behold I became a receptionist – just like that. If that’s all it took then I could see my career in the
place going up like a meteor. Half a dozen office parties and I’d be vice president. But the truth is I
liked
being a receptionist. You get to meet lots of people and you can chat
and be nice to them if they deserve it, or send them in the wrong direction and make things generally rubbish if they’re not. I phoned Mark to tell him I got a promotion. I didn’t tell
him how I got it.

‘That’s marvellous,’ he said.

‘Too right,’ I said, ‘beats the hell out of fist-fucking dead poultry – excuse my French.’

Reception was a place where I could employ my assets, and I made the best of it. If we were really pushed for money I could get time and a half for Saturdays, or pull an extra shift downstairs
with the buggered birds, which I did sometimes, just to keep up with the girls and the factory floor chat.

All in all things were going very well. I couldn’t have been happier. Well actually I could. Well, truth be told, I wasn’t happy at all. I was fucking miserable. My first ever
Christmas without her was looming. I was dreading it. I told Ruth one titanic thing was missing in my life. ‘Kids?’ she said. ‘No – Gina!’ I said. She made a point of
cooking Christmas dinner. I offered.

‘I’m thinking of something more substantial than Pot Noodles,’ she said. Since I told her I loved her she seemed to be taking certain liberties, but I couldn’t take it
back because it was true.

‘Fair enough, but don’t go all sanctimonious about it. And another thing – no poultry. I’ve shaken hands with enough wishbones from the arse up to last me a
lifetime.’

So she made a pot roast. And we sat, the two of us, upstairs, at a table she laid out in the living room, some collapsible Formica thing she’d rescued from a canteen clear out. It sat
four, and you could see the four placings where the veneer had been worn out by countless plates and elbows and cutlery, like rocks rubbed out by geology. So we sit across from one another, beside
the two ghost settings. And suddenly I get this vision of what it would have been like, five years from now, if
she
hadn’t died and she hadn’t left. The four of us round the
table. Laughing. A little girl with her mum and two aunties who love her to distraction, confident as the focus of all that feeling, sitting with her own special paper hat. And a big tear plopped
off the end of my nose into the gravy. And I was just about to say ‘I can’t do this’ and get up from the table when I realised that would have been selfish. She was going through
this too. This was her way of coping, the way mine was to paste some slap on and go out for a knees up. And she had made this effort. She leaned across and rubbed my hand and said ‘Eat
up’ and I said ‘Merry Christmas’ and we pulled two crackers and put the hats on and read the jokes and she put on a CD,
Dean Martin’s Christmas Extravaganza
or
something. We were halfway through
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
, that I must have heard a million times without listening when, for the first time, I actually pay attention to
the words. He croons out ‘Faithful friends who are dear to us, gather near to us once more’. I smile across at her but I swear to God I felt like one of those chickens, that some
gigantic hand had just taken a hold of my insides and pulled them out.

And then it became that kind of timeless holiday time, the no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year, when you watch
Jason and the Argonauts
and stuff like that, and eat
chocolates you don’t want. Ruth worked. The factory was closed. I moped about the flat. I’ve always avoided my balcony. I’ve only ever used it during parties and never, ever, gone
out on it alone. It’s because it’s directly below her balcony, and if I were to stand here I’d see her with
her
, rocking, ten feet above my head. It’s been a
timeless day and I’ve run out of fags. It’s getting on for the early winter sunset, and I remember the way she was always drawn to stand out there at this time and look at – what?
And I think that maybe if I go out there, on my balcony, I’ll see what she saw and maybe I’ll understand better why all this happened. Why she went. So I brace myself and go out. The
cold is shocking. I look around. Everything’s gone kind of red. There’s just the river and the windows across the way reflecting light. Nothing to look at really. What did she see that
I can’t? What? What? My heart’s battering and I want to shout. I do shout. ‘What?’ and ‘What?’ then ‘What?’ leaning on the railings, craning out as
far as I dare, trying to catch something. Anything. The sound disappears with my breath. Nothing.

I wipe my eyes and blow my nose. The cold drives me in and I look around at the mess. Light’s flooding the room. It’s almost the colour of a blood orange. But it doesn’t really
matter. She took all the colour with her. And suddenly I realise what she meant, and I know that
I’m
only going through the motions. And I can’t bear this anymore. I just
can’t. I go out for fags for something to do.

I draw out the conversation at Davinder’s as long as I can but they’re not interested. Chit chat obviously doesn’t cover their overheads. For the first time I can remember I
don’t want to go back, but I don’t want to go anywhere else either. If nothing else the cold drives me back. There’s a folded envelope under the number plate. The sack? The place
is closed and they wouldn’t do it this casually. There’d have to be a proper postman and everything. I unfold it. The writing’s on the folded part but still on the outside.
It’s too dark on the landing. I take it into the hall. Ruth’s writing’s crap enough to recognise. I don’t know if she signs it cause I don’t get any further than the
first couple of lines. And suddenly I’m at her door, at electrical speed. Either she’s been waiting or she hears me coming. She opens the door and points along the hall. I take her hand
and drag her with me. I practically boot open the door, like troops on the telly. I don’t know what I expect. If I’d read the letter right to the end, instead of stopping at her name,
it might have explained. I might have an image in my mind that the scene fits onto, like tracing paper or a brass rubbing. The last thing I expect to see is this vague-looking older guy, staring at
me and taking stock. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. And he takes out some photos and hands them across. And although he doesn’t say anything Ruth and me know, we just
know
, that the thing we’ve dreaded so much we were afraid to say the words out loud in case it came true, isn’t true. She
isn’t
dead. And I don’t remember
anything about the next half hour at all till somehow
I’m
nominated to fix
him
a fry-up.