Chestnut Street (20 page)

“Look, I know you were going to see the match, but there’ll be no traffic on the road and I’ll give you twice what’s on the meter.”

The man was nice too. He wasn’t at all patronizing, just doing a deal.

It would be a good few quid extra. Kevin thought he might take Phyllis shopping tomorrow in the wheelchair—she’d like that.

“Get in,” he said, opening the door.

They had little to worry about, this couple. A big solid house where the roof wasn’t a permanent anxiety. They had the use of all their limbs, both of them. The woman didn’t have to bend over a knitting machine and the man didn’t have to work long hours in a taxi that he shared with another fellow.

Kevin wasn’t normally envious of the passengers that traveled in the back of his cab, but there was something about this pair that got to him. They seemed relaxed with their money and good clothes, and their ability to get a taxi and cross Dublin to go to
a big party in a house where no one would ever have supported football a few months back. They didn’t nag each other about the car that hadn’t started, about one making the other late.

He called her Lorraine. Kevin wondered about names. No one in his street was called Lorraine or Felicity or Alicia. They were Mary or Orla or Phyllis.

Lorraine: it suited her somehow. Gentle, calm—and she seemed happy too.

They spoke with the easy confidence of good friends. He wondered how long they’d been married. Maybe twenty-three years, like he and Phyllis were. It would have been a different kind of wedding.

They gave him the extra money with an easy grace, and they left him with huge wishes and hopes for Ireland’s victory.

Kevin tuned in the car radio. They would be just in time for the match; he would be thirty minutes late in Flynn’s.

It was only four days later, on Monday, June 25, the day that Ireland played Romania and won on a penalty shootout, that Lorraine’s husband met a girl with big, dark eyes. A lot of them had gone from work straight to a bar, and there had been great excitement. The girl had come in from her office nearby, and somehow they had all got together in the celebration, and then, of course, nothing would do but they all had to have a meal. They could get taxis home afterwards; nobody had brought a car.

Kevin had cheered the match to the echo in Flynn’s but he had been drinking red lemonade. He could get in a great couple of hours on a night like this. The other fellow who shared the taxi wouldn’t want to be driving, even though it was officially his night. Kevin might take in thirty quid if he got a few good fares.

Half of Dublin seemed to be wandering round the streets looking for taxis.

He recognized the man and assumed that the woman was Lorraine.
He was about to say wasn’t it a small world, but he stopped himself.

“First we want to go …” The man was checking with the girl.

There was a lot of giggling and then whispering and the man said, “Actually, that’s all—we’ll both get out here,” and then there was the sound of nuzzling and kissing. The man looked Kevin straight in the eye as he paid the fare, plus a tip. He didn’t even recognize him. Taxi men are invisible.

Lorraine came to the rank next morning. She recognized Kevin.

“You’re the man who drove us when the car broke down,” she said.

She had nice eyes, trusting eyes.

“And did it break down again?” Kevin asked.

“No, but Ronan’s office was celebrating the match and they obviously all got drunk so they decided to stay in a hotel, the lot of them,” she said. “So I need the car to go up to the school and I’m going to pick it up from outside his office.”

Kevin grunted. It was as if he had sent out a signal of disapproval.

Lorraine sounded defensive. “Much better to have done that than drive home drunk,” she said.

“Much,” said Kevin.

“And there wasn’t a taxi to be found anywhere on the street,” Lorraine said.

“Never is when you need one,” said Kevin.

Dublin is small, no matter what people say. There are over half a million people in it, but it is very small.

Kevin picked up a girl at Heuston Station. She was with her mother, who was coming to Dublin for an operation.

The older woman was nervous and bad-tempered.

“Most other women of your age, Maggie, would have a car
of their own instead of throwing away money on taxis,” she grumbled.

“Mam, don’t I live in walking distance of work and isn’t it healthier to walk?” Maggie said. She was about thirty, Kevin decided, long, dark, curly hair.

“If you had a car you could come home for the weekends.”

“I come home every month on the train,” Maggie said.

“Any other woman of thirty-five would have three children of her own and a house where I could stay instead of a one-room flat.”

“You’re sleeping in the bed, Mam. I’m sleeping on the sofa.”

“That’s as may be. But it still doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t settle down one day.”

“I will, one day,” Maggie said with a sigh.

“Oh, yes,” her mother said.

Ronan got Kevin’s taxi from the rank when he was going to the airport. Kevin saw Lorraine waving from the garden. A boy and a girl were also waving—they looked about fifteen and sixteen.

“Nice to have children,” Kevin said as they pulled out into the traffic.

“Yeah,” Ronan said absently. “Of course, they’re not children anymore, lives of their own; they don’t really care about home at that age.”

“They might, you know, without actually showing it,” Kevin said.

Ronan didn’t answer; he was rooting in his briefcase. He was a man who didn’t want to chat all the way to the airport.

When they got to the set-down at Departures, Kevin got out to take the case from the boot of the car.

He turned in time to see Maggie running into Ronan’s arms. Ronan took the case and they went hand in hand into check-in.

Kevin always worked Christmas Eve. He drove Maggie and Ronan to Heuston Station. Maggie was crying. “I can’t bear it—four days,” she kept saying.

“Shush shush shush, you’ll soon be back.”

“But they’re such special days, and I want to be with you,” she said, weeping.

“Sweetheart, they’re just days. They’ll pass. Don’t fret.”

“All that Christmassy lovey-dovey stuff,” she wailed inconsolably.

“You know there’s no lovey-dovey stuff,” Ronan said.

He went into the station to put Maggie on the train, then he asked Kevin to drive him to a florist and a supermarket. In both places he had orders ready, a huge flower arrangement in one, a food hamper from the other.

Then he went home. The door of the big red-brick house opened and from his car Kevin saw Lorraine and the children running to greet him. In the cold night he heard Ronan calling out, “Happy Christmas!”

Ireland lost to Italy and the dream was over. But life went on.

After Christmas, Phyllis had to stop working the knitting machine because her hands got too misshapen.

There were two new grandchildren that spring, and the babies were often brought around to Chestnut Street for Phyllis and Kevin to mind while the parents had a night out or day off. They sat there and looked into the two prams.

“Life didn’t quite turn out as we thought it would,” Phyllis said to Kevin one evening.

“It doesn’t for anyone, Phyllis,” said Kevin. “Let me tell you that from my experience of the world.”

That day he had taken four suitcases from the red-brick house
and a box of papers and books. He had driven them with Ronan to the block of flats where Maggie lived. It was a different flat, a bigger one, one that would have room for them both.

Ronan had left the car behind at the red-brick house.

He was in walking distance of work; he was now a member of the serious taxi-taking community. So it was only natural that in the month ahead Kevin, as a taxi man, should come across him occasionally.

As on the day when Kevin transported the suitcases, he never entered into the man’s life. Ronan didn’t invite it and, although always courteous and pleasant with small talk, he gave no evidence of ever having seen Kevin the taxi man before.

Also Kevin wanted to punch him hard in the chest for having left that nice woman with the kind eyes.

Kevin looked up at her house often. The garden had become neglected, a fence was falling down. The paint was peeling off the front door.

In his own house, Kevin had done a few improvements. His sons had helped him repair the roof. They came up every Saturday until it was done. Then they put a coat of paint on the place. He bought them a lot of pints in Flynn’s to thank them for their work.

Over the months he saw his own property improve while Lorraine’s house went downwards. He was interested in her life because he had seen her so happy before it all fell apart. He wondered whether the children were a help to her. He knew that they went out with their father on Saturdays. Kevin saw them getting the bus. Their mother would wave goodbye from the house, but it wasn’t a jaunty wave.

He knew that’s where they were going because one time the bus had been full and they had taken his taxi instead.

They had talked at the back of the cab.

“Please God he won’t bring Lady Margaret again this time,” the girl said.

The boy was more tolerant. “She’s okay, just a bag of nerves, and she always says the wrong thing.”

“She can’t keep her hands off him. She’s always stroking his sleeves and things. It would make you throw up,” the girl said with disgust.

“Well, she has to do something—he won’t let her smoke in front of us, because it’s a bad example,” said Ronan’s son.

“He’s quite mad in a lot of ways, isn’t he?” Ronan’s daughter said in a conversational and casual tone.

Kevin watched the next World Cup, not in Florida but in Flynn’s.

Most of the fellows on the rank were deep in debt when it was all over. Some of them got sunburned, and had red, scaly heads as well. From time to time, Kevin thought of the sunny day he had driven Lorraine and Ronan across Dublin, before Maggie had come into their lives and changed them forever.

Kevin still worked long hours. It had become a habit with him. He couldn’t stop. He was tired and depressed on the cold February evening in 1995 when the hooligan element that came to Dublin for the Ireland-England match wrecked Lansdowne Road. There seemed no point in a game of football when a minority of thugs could take it over. He sat glumly by the fire.

Phyllis asked Kevin not to work so hard.

“You’re only doing it for me, and, honestly, we have enough. We got the roof mended way back, the house can’t fall down. The kids have all got jobs. What I’d really love is if you spent a bit more time at home, and maybe we could go out to the new cinema complex once a week and maybe go for a pint afterwards. I had someone check it out, and it’s all on the level, no steps anywhere. Wouldn’t it be a great outing?”

Kevin thought how true it was that life doesn’t turn out as you think. Five years back he would have thought there was nothing
good ahead of them, but they had fine times. He knew they were luckier than a lot of people.

He saw Ronan and Maggie from time to time. They were like man and wife. Even more so when their baby was born. A little girl who was baptized Elizabeth. Kevin had driven Maggie’s mother and sister from the christening.

Maggie’s mother had not improved in temper.

“Well, I’d say the Blessed Virgin is delighted to have that scrap called after her own first cousin.”

“Aw, Mam, will you stop? Didn’t they have it christened to please you—isn’t that good enough for you?”

“It is not good enough,” Maggie’s mother said. “All this talk of partners and union and everything, with everyone there in the church knowing that he’s a married man and that our Maggie deliberately set out to have a child out of wedlock.”

“Shush, Mam, the taxi driver will hear our business.”

“Hasn’t he his eyes and mind on the road, or he should have,” she said and closed her mouth with a snap. Just in case.

Lorraine didn’t seem to mind Ronan calling in to his former family home. Sometimes Kevin took him back from there to the flat where he lived with Maggie and Elizabeth. It was all very difficult. Kevin could tell that Ronan found the old family house restful.

His children were not always free on Saturday nowadays; there was a match or a project or a date.

They said that Daddy shouldn’t be so doctrinaire. Even if he lived at home he wouldn’t be seeing them on a Saturday—nobody’s parents saw people on a Saturday.

So Ronan did a few of those little jobs around the house,
propped up the garden fence, painted the window frames and the front door.

Kevin thought he seemed loath to go when the time was up. The flat was festooned with baby clothes, and he didn’t get all that much sleep, probably.

Kevin didn’t believe they would get back together, but things were definitely less hard for Lorraine with the kind eyes than they had been in the days and weeks when Ronan had first left the nest.

Kevin drove Maggie and the baby one day.

It was on a trip to examine a new baby-minding facility—apparently the first two had not been satisfactory.