In Pieces (16 page)

Embarrassed by his churlish reaction, but still astounded by the value of the present, Si leaned across the marble table top and pulled her face gently towards him. He kissed her carefully, self-consciously, with gratitude.

Mary pushed her lips against his greedily, almost as if she wanted to extract every last bit of passion as recompense for the camera.

A sense of duty more than inspiration moved Si to pick up the camera and christen it with some footage of Mary. He filmed her eating an elaborate ice cream, smiling attractively through the Dreamboat Surprise which kept threatening to escape through her parted lips and run down onto her chin. The scene was so fifties that Si wondered if it would come out in hand-tinted Technicolor.

‘Happy birthday, darling,' she purred, and, leaning towards the camera's silent, dispassionate eye, she puckered her lips into a passable imitation of a film diva. ‘Mwwa!'

Si stopped filming and, feeling the familiar physical surge, he laid the camera carefully on the table.

‘What do you say? Shall we get the bill and go?'

Mary treated him to one of her rare seductive looks. ‘Darling, I thought you'd never ask.'

~

Greta Andrews lived in a big Georgian terrace house in Westbourne Park Road with her husband Michael. She'd first come to London from Ireland in the early eighties to visit her older brother
Eamon. She'd planned to spend the summer, but had ended up marrying a handsome Englishman whom she'd met in Sainsbury's.

‘You can't marry him,' Eamon had protested. ‘He's a Prod and an Englishman.'

‘So what? I thought you were always telling me that the English weren't so bad after all, that they had lots of money and you were happy to take it off them.'

‘Oh sweet Jesus. That's different.'

‘Is it?'

Eamon furrowed his brow. ‘What'll mother say?'

‘I don't care what she says. What's she ever done for me? And since when have you cared what she thinks about anything? Listen, Eamon, I'm marrying Michael and that's that. If you want, you can come to the wedding. But if not, I don't care.'

They got married in the Finchley registry office in October and had the wedding lunch at Eamon's pub. There was a good turnout, although neither set of parents came.

After the couple had left, Eamon and his friends drunkenly agreed that Michael was a good man… for an Englishman.

When the Sleeper turned up some years later on Greta's doorstep she set down the baby and looked him up and down. ‘Come in. Eamon told me you'd be coming about now.'

The Sleeper peered past her down the elegant hallway and wondered if Eamon had told the truth when he said the room wouldn't cost much. The house looked posher than any he'd ever been in.

Greta sat him down at a scrubbed pine kitchen table which had a view over the garden. ‘Coffee?'

‘Aye, thanks. Two sugars, please.'

‘They'll rot your teeth.'

‘That's what my ma always says.'

‘She's right and you should listen to her.'

He thought about what Eamon had told him of Greta's stormy relationship with her mother, but decided not to say anything. Short of anything else to say and not wanting to broach the subject of the room for rent until she did, he asked her how she'd got her name.

Greta laughed and the Sleeper noticed for the first time how attractive she was. She had some of Eamon's better features, like the strong jaw and piercing green eyes, but it all fitted together better in her.

‘Not very Gaelic, is it?' She raised an eyebrow coquettishly, and he smiled, foolishly tongue-tied. ‘Well, Andrews is my husband's name, of course, and he's as English as they come. You'll meet him later, but he's at work now. He works in the City, you know.'

‘Oh.' The Sleeper didn't know, and in fact he wasn't sure what people who worked in the City were like. He'd not met any in West Hampstead at Mrs Donnelley's. Presumably, he'd be one of those short-haired, well-scrubbed tall public school types in pin stripes. He wondered how a girl like Greta had fallen for such a man, the antithesis of her working class Irish origins.

‘Greta's another story. My mother wanted to call me Mary if I was a girl. After her mother. But my father never got on with my grandmother, too religious, he always said, and so he refused point blank. They almost split up over what to call me. The arguments raged for nine months and they were both hoping that I'd be a boy to solve the problem. I'd have been James then. You see, my father had literary pretensions, and even when I turned out a girl he wanted me to be a writer.'

The Sleeper stared, but she seemed not to notice.

‘Anyway, finally, a week before I arrived, my parents went to the cinema to see a film. It must have been a rerun because it was a Greta Garbo film…
Blue Angel
, I think they said. Whatever, they both loved it so much that they agreed on the spot that if I was a girl I'd be called Greta. So there you are.' She threw back her head and laughed again.

He joined in without really knowing why.

That evening he told Mrs Donnelley that he was moving the next day.

‘So soon?' she was clearly surprised.

‘Aye, I've found a great place. Really posh and you know what, Mrs Donnelley, it's even cheaper than here.'

Mrs Donnelley sniffed and carried on making the tea. ‘Well, I've never heard you complain before.'

‘No complaints, Mrs Donnelley. It's just I think I've landed on my feet.'

‘Pride comes before a fall…'

He laughed. It would be good to exchange fiery old Mrs Donnelley with her laddered tights and greasy teas for the refinement of Greta Andrews' kitchen. If he was going to have to wait around—and as far as he could make out, there seemed little likelihood of a break in the cease-fire for the time being—then he might as well do it in style. Blend into the community, they'd told him. Well that was what he was about to do. To be honest, and he knew it was a terrible thought, he kind of hoped the cease-fire would hold.

~

Si wrapped his overcoat round him as tightly as it would go. It was bitterly cold. Beside him, Mary whinged about the ordeal he was putting her through. ‘This is stupid… Si, I'm freezing… How much longer?'

Si suppressed his irritation. After all, it had been his mistake to bring her to the match. ‘Another five minutes, my love.'

The capacity Old Trafford crowd roared as Cantona ghosted into space, but he couldn't quite get on the end of a looping Giggs cross.

Mary seemed impervious to the excitement of the sixth round FA Cup tie. ‘Then can we go?'

‘Well, that'll be half time and then there's the second half…'

‘What d'you mean, second half? Are you telling me there's more?'

‘Well, of course there is. Soccer matches are divided into two equal halves each lasting forty-five minutes…'

‘Si,' she whimpered, ‘you're saying that the second half is as long as the first half?'

‘Yes, of course it is. That's why it's called a half.'

‘Oh, I can't take it much more. I'm so cold. And it's not as if anything has happened. It's so boring.'

Si couldn't disagree with this last point. It had been a dull first half, apart from a disallowed Southampton goal, which had looked perfectly okay to him. Andy Cole had also been pulled down in the five-yard box, and United should have had a penalty, but otherwise it had been pretty routine stuff.

But Si didn't mind too much. He wasn't here for United or for Southampton. He was here to cheer on his friend. And he'd been warmed to the cockles by the few touches Jimmy had made. In his first full start for Manchester United he was performing well. Since signing for the biggest club in Britain, Jimmy had gone from strength to strength. Now he was competing for a regular first team place and, although he owed his start tonight to the absence through injury of Lee Sharpe, he seemed to be capitalizing on his chances.

‘I'll tell you what… You try and enjoy the match and then I'll treat you to the best dinner we can find in the poshest restaurant in Manchester. How's about that?'

Mary perked up a bit. It had taken some persuading to get her to come up to Manchester for the match, especially mid-week. She wasn't particularly enamoured of the north. Or rather her image of it, as she'd never been to Lancashire before. Si had been forced to resort to bribes such as a night in a smart hotel, and turning the trip into a mini holiday by taking a half-day off either side of the game—not easy given that Dougy was breathing down his neck these days. But the decisive factor seemed to have been an article in Cosmopolitan magazine which described Manchester's clubbing nightlife and pronounced the city as the coolest in Europe—this had forced Mary to make a reassessment and agree to the visit.

Mary was nothing if not predictable in her appreciation of what she considered appropriate romantic behaviour by a suitor. Si's dinner proposal had touched the right button. ‘Oh all right. You're a real sweet talker, aren't you?' She put her mittened hand in Si's and gave it a squeeze. ‘It'd help if I knew which one was Jimmy; then I could cheer him on when he got the ball.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry; I assumed you knew. He's the number 22, there, see?'

‘In the red?'

‘Yes, in the red.'

‘If Manchester are in the red, then who's in the yellow?'

‘I told you before… Southampton.'

‘Ahh.' Mary fell silent for a minute and made a determined effort to follow the game. ‘Why is Jimmy number twenty two if there are only eleven players in the team?'

‘Because that's his squad number…' Before Mary could ask the obvious, Si explained. ‘You see there are more than eleven in the squad and each player has his own number.' He was about to expand that it had not always been so, when an expectant rumble came from the crowd.

Giggs wove past one Southampton player and then knocked it through the legs of another before cutting inside towards the penalty box just beneath where they sat. He looked up and effortlessly lobbed the ball into the box towards Cantona. Three Southampton players crowded the Frenchman off the ball and no other United player was in position to convert the opportunity.

The ball was cleared, but only as far as Jimmy, who was arriving a bit late. He controlled the bouncing ball with his instep, and seemed to search desperately for a United player to pass to. Finding no one in space, he punted the ball goalwards. It looked more like desperation than judgment, but Jimmy's shot sailed over the goalkeeper, who was five yards off his line. The result looked spectacular.

Si leapt to his feet along with forty thousand others. The noise was deafening.

Looking slightly bewildered, Jimmy eventually emerged from under the heap of ecstatic, red-shirted teammates, who had buried him as they celebrated the goal. He pulled himself to his feet and, grinning broadly, trotted back to the halfway line. Like everybody else in the stadium, he knew that one goal would probably be enough to put United through to the semi-finals. One step away from Wembley.

Si shouted himself hoarse with delight, and his pleasure was doubled when he noticed Mary beside him, also on her feet, arms raised and cheering for all she was worth.

‘That was Jimmy, wasn't it?' she shouted above the din.

‘Yeah,' grinned Si, ‘that was Jimmy.'

~

The machine clicked on as Si was going out of the door. He paused with his key in the lock.

‘Hi, are you there? Darling? No, okay, just to say that I got your message about tonight, but I'm still at work and I'm going to be here for another couple of hours at least. So it's unlikely that I'll manage to join you at the pub. I'll ring later and try to catch you before you go to bed. Big kiss… Mwa!'

The machine emitted a long beep and stopped. Si emerged from his trance. Suddenly resolute, he stepped through the door and slipped the catch behind him.

He soon shrugged off the disappointment, which threatened to overshadow his evening. Jimmy was back on a rare visit from Manchester. Since he'd made the first team squad, he was rarely able to get more than one day off at a time, which ruled out overnight trips to London. Of course they talked on the phone. More than most men, Si imagined. But their friendship had always involved a significant dollop of mutual support and reassurance. They'd grown close over time, and their
friendship was more honest and openly affectionate than most male friendships. Partly because of this, he sometimes worried that Mary might misinterpret his relationship with Jimmy—she revelled in intrigue and looked for hidden meaning where the truth was self-evident. As a result, Si had become anxious about introducing the two key people in his life.

Mary's weakness for fantasy was such that she swallowed the conspiracy theories in the Sunday newspapers hook, line and sinker. She still half-believed that Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Jim Morrison were living on a paradise island somewhere. And she was at her most passionate when she got onto the subject of alien abductions.

Si had been determined to make the evening a success. He'd planned it carefully—a drink at The Feathers, where Jimmy would probably be on good form, relaxed in familiar territory. After that he'd decided to play it by ear, but on the assumption that the evening would be going fine, he'd booked dinner at a little French restaurant round the corner—to show Mary that although Jimmy was a footballer, he knew how to use a knife and fork and could drink wine as well as beer.

He hadn't worried too much about how Jimmy would find Mary. For a start his friend would take longer than one evening to make up his mind, and his initial appraisal would depend on how Mary looked; on that score, at least, Si knew she would impress.

Si strode along the street and fought back the feeling of disgust that threatened to overwhelm him—not with Mary or even her obsessional, morally suspect job, certainly not with Jimmy. The disgust, tempered with a splash of shame, was with himself. How had he been so stupid to make such plans? And what had he been thinking of when he'd thought of pandering to Mary's snobbism at Jimmy's expense? Why should he worry what she thought of Jimmy?