Life Drawing for Beginners (17 page)

When he got back from Mass they were up, sitting at the kitchen table. She had a cup of tea in front of her and she told him they’d already eaten, although there was little sign of them having had anything at all.

Michael hadn’t pursued it. The boy clearly wasn’t a fan of porridge. Probably prefer one of those sugar-laden concoctions that had the cheek to call themselves cereals. If they’d rather eat nothing, that was their lookout. Michael had no intention of feeding them junk.

Her offer of help in the house or garden had touched him oddly. He supposed it was a good thing she was attempting to do something in return for her keep. He’d brought her out to the garden and shown her how to clear the weeds from between the paving stones with a trowel. The child had sat on the garden seat with his Winnie-the-Pooh book, which seemed to be the only one he possessed.

When he’d left for the cemetery Michael deliberately didn’t say where he was going, or when he’d be back, still reluctant to get too familiar. She made no mention of Mass: probably hadn’t seen the inside of a church in years. The child in all likelihood not even baptized.

He pulled grass from the sides of the grave and threw it into a bin. The graveyard was busy on Sundays, particularly on fine afternoons like this one. Families mostly, some older people, a few lone younger adults, some with a young child or two in tow. Widowed early maybe, like himself.

“I might be a grandfather,” he told Ruth. “Can you imagine me with a grandchild? I’m only fifty-one, for crying out loud.”

Walking home, it occurred to him that the girl knew where Ethan was buried, if her story was to be believed. She said she’d seen Michael at the funeral, so presumably she’d come to the graveyard. He wondered if she ever visited Ethan’s grave. Maybe she did, maybe she’d been the one to leave the flowers he’d seen. If that was the case, he dreaded to think where she’d swiped them from.

The patio was spotless, not a weed to be seen. She’d put them into the green refuse bag he’d left out for her. She’d cleaned the trowel under the outdoor tap and replaced it in the shed. As far as Michael could see, neither she nor the boy had moved from the garden since he’d left.

They sat side by side on the wooden seat. The boy cradled his book and she held a scratched tin box in her lap. Michael recalled seeing it on the bedside locker by Valerie’s bed, the morning after they’d moved in.

“Will you tell me when it’s ten to six?” she asked Michael. “I want to take him to evening Mass.”

“We can’t go on like this,” Irene said to Martin.

She was on her third very strong vodka and tonic, or she wouldn’t have said it. She would have known, if she hadn’t been a bit drunk, that there was no point.

Martin looked at her over his iced water. Martin was stone-cold sober. “Irene,” he said, “let’s just enjoy ourselves.”

They were at Chris and Pamela’s end-of-summer barbecue, which usually happened earlier in the year, the first week of October hardly qualifying as the end of summer. The delay had been caused by Chris surprising Pamela with a monthlong cruise for their twentieth wedding anniversary, from which they’d returned just the week before.

“You haven’t come near me in two years,” Irene said. “You’re punishing me.”

“Don’t do this now,” Martin replied calmly, glancing around the crowded lawn.

“You’re punishing me because I—” Irene broke off as one of the caterers approached with a plate of barbecued banana slices wrapped in bacon. She waved him away but Martin took two and held one out to her.

“You need to eat,” he said.

Irene ignored the food. “You always knew I didn’t want children,” she said. “I’m doing my best with Emily. I can’t give what I haven’t got.”

Martin ate the two canapés. He wore a black shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and grey jeans. He was easily the best-​looking man in the garden. Irene had spotted two women checking him out earlier.

“Our marriage is a sham,” she said. “Everyone thinks it’s perfect but it’s a sham. Are you seeing someone else? Are you sleeping with—”

“Irene,” Martin said, an edge to his voice now. “Don’t.”

“Daddy?”

Emily appeared beside them, her cheeks flushed, her dress stained with grass. Martin crouched and hoisted her into his arms.

“You having fun, baby? You want a drumstick?”

“I’m thirsty,” she said.

“Come on then—let’s get you a drink.”

Irene watched them walk towards the patio, her head spinning gently.

Short and to the point. Clearly not a man given to small talk. At least he’d put his full name to this one.

Not surprisingly, no mention of the children’s encounter in the cinema on Friday night, no explanation as to why he hadn’t come over and introduced himself. But he’d changed his phone setting to allow his number to be displayed when his text had come through.

Jackie saved the number under
Charlie
. She wasn’t responding before Thursday at least. And she wouldn’t invite Charlie to their house again. If they did meet up let it be in the park, or let him offer to do the entertaining.

But at least he was making an effort, he was showing some concern for his daughter’s well-being. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as he seemed, maybe he was just shy. Or maybe Charlie had badgered him into it.

“Not at the table, dear,” her mother murmured.

“Sorry.” Jackie slid her phone back into her pocket. She’d say nothing to Eoin until arrangements had been made. Her father cut more slices from the roast beef joint and Jackie held out her plate for seconds.

She lifted the boy onto the couch and whispered something to him, and then she vanished. Michael heard her running lightly upstairs. He sat in his usual armchair, already regretting his impulse to let them come into the sitting room for half an hour after dinner. It had seemed churlish to insist that they go straight upstairs to bed, particularly with her spending the afternoon doing his weeding, but now he had to put up with them. And once he’d made the offer for one night, they’d probably expect it all the time.

He and the boy regarded each other warily. That hair was a disgrace, all crooked fringe and ragged ends.

“Who cuts your hair?” Michael asked.

The boy’s mouth opened and he seemed to be saying something, but no sound came out.

“Speak up,” Michael ordered. “I can’t hear you.”

“Mammy,” the boy said in a tiny voice, shrinking away from him.

“Don’t be so frightened,” Michael said impatiently. “I’m not going to eat you.”

The boy stuck his thumb into his mouth and looked pointedly at the door.

“What’s your name?” Michael asked.

The boy whispered something around his thumb.

“What? Take out your thumb.”

For a second Michael thought he was going to bolt. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on the sitting room door and said nothing.

“I think you’ve forgotten your name,” Michael said. “I think we’ll have to find you a new one.”

Still looking away, the boy shook his head slowly.

“You haven’t forgotten it?”

Another shake.

“What is it so?”

He slid out his thumb and whispered, “Bawwy.”

Barry, the same name as Michael’s father. Ethan had only been ten when his grandfather had died—did ten-year-olds even know the first names of their grandparents?

And anyway, Ethan would hardly have remembered his own name, probably, by the time this boy had been born, never mind a dead grandfather. It was coincidence, nothing more.

The girl reappeared with the Winnie-the-Pooh book in her hand and settled on the couch next to the boy, who immediately clambered onto her lap, his thumb drifting again into his mouth. She opened the book and whispered, “Who’s he?”

The boy murmured a reply that was lost on Michael. He shook his newspaper open again and turned to the crossword page.

“And where does he live?” the girl whispered. Another inaudible response.

As Michael took a biro from his breast pocket he remembered her saying that she couldn’t read. So they were just looking at the pictures and talking about them. Better than nothing, he supposed.

“Look, that’s his friend—what’s his name?”

Ethan had loved Winnie-the-Pooh. Someone had given him a book of stories for his third birthday and Michael remembered reading it to him at bedtime, sometimes the same story night after night. There had been one story about a game that involved throwing sticks over a bridge into a river.

“The donkey looks sad, don’t he? Why’s he sad?”

Poohsticks
: The name of the game jumped abruptly into Michael’s head.

“Oh look, there’s the kangaroo.”

Ethan used to suck his thumb too. They’d tried everything to get him to stop but nothing had worked. And then he’d stopped overnight, all by himself, a few weeks after he’d started school.

“Look—the umbrella is goin’ down the river.”

The boy’s eyes were beginning to close. He leaned against his mother and yawned hugely, showing a row of tiny even teeth. The girl stroked his hair absently as they went through the book.

Michael returned to his crossword and attempted to concentrate, but he was distracted by the low whispers on the couch. He threw a couple of briquettes into the fire, causing a small shower of sparks to fly upwards.

He wondered if it had ever crossed her mind to look for a job. Of course there was the problem of the child—who would look after him if she went out to work? Would she have to wait until he started school? And even with him off her hands, what job could she hope to get, an ex–drug addict with no literacy skills and precious few qualifications, if any?

And what about a place to live when they left Michael’s house? How was she going to afford that? As a single parent, surely she’d be entitled to some kind of rent allowance; there must be a state handout for the likes of her. Not that she’d have the wit to go about claiming it on her own.

He read the same clue for what must be the sixth time. They weren’t his problem, not yet anyhow.

After a few minutes the girl closed the book and began to maneuver herself and her son off the couch, trying not to wake him.

Michael got up and lifted the boy from her arms, ignoring her look of surprise. “Open the door,” he muttered.

The boy weighed nothing, or next to nothing. He felt like a bird in Michael’s arms. His hair smelled of the mint shampoo Michael had seen in her toilet bag. They climbed the stairs silently, the girl in front. She opened the bedroom door and pulled back the sheets, and Michael laid the boy onto the bed.

For the first time, a tiny smile flitted across her face.

“Thanks,” she said. “His name’s Barry,” she added.

Michael turned and left the room without responding. She probably thought he was getting all grandfatherly now. Back in the sitting room he plumped the couch cushions that their bodies had flattened, and returned to his crossword.

Barry. It was a coincidence, that was all.

I am nothing to write home about
, Audrey Matthews had entered in her diary on her seventeenth birthday.
I have frizzy hair that looks red in the sun and my eyes are too pale and I’m big-boned. I have never had a boyfriend or got a Valentine card, or even had anyone whistle at me in the street. Nobody looks twice at me.

Of course she’d hoped, at seventeen, that she wouldn’t be alone for much longer. She’d woken each morning with a sense of expectation: Maybe today it would happen, maybe someone would catch her eye on the bus, or in the library after school, or walking home for dinner. Maybe today someone would look twice at her, and see beyond the frizzy hair and big build.

But it didn’t happen at seventeen, or at eighteen or nineteen either. When she was twenty and a student in Limerick’s College of Art, Audrey answered an ad in one of the local papers and arranged to meet a twenty-six-year-old man—
GSOH, honest, romantic
—​for coffee. She sat for half an hour in her pink jacket and blue skirt, sipping a cappuccino and trying not to watch the café door.

Three weeks later she tried again, this time choosing a man who described himself as easygoing and down to earth. He turned up, but ten minutes into their stilted conversation his phone rang and he left, full of apologies—his friend’s car had broken down. Promising, as he walked away, to call her again.

When the third man made it quite plain, before his latte arrived, that he wanted a lot more than coffee, it was Audrey’s turn to make an excuse and leave.

She decided to try singles holidays. The first one, a week in Rome, was truly awful. Audrey was the youngest by twenty years, and most of the other females were leathery-skinned divorcées who spoke bitterly of their exes to Audrey, and dropped her immediately whenever any of the men in the group appeared.

By the end of the week Audrey had had a single conversation with Frank, who invited her to his room after he’d downed several glasses of Prosecco, and another with Victor, who broke down in the catacombs as he described being left at the altar by the love of his life.

“She was my soul mate,” he wept, oblivious to the dark, earthy passages through which they trailed. “I’ll never find someone like her again.” Audrey felt like pointing out—kindly, of course—​that someone like his ex-fiancée might well leave him standing on his own at the altar for a second time, but she held her tongue and tried to ignore the curious glances from nearby holidaymakers.

After two similarly unromantic breaks, she gave up on the idea of singles holidays and decided to let nature take its course. At that stage she was twenty-five, and she’d recently gotten a job as an art teacher in the larger of Carrickbawn’s two secondary schools. She was heartened to see a number of single men among the staff: Surely one of them would regard Audrey as a viable proposition.

She was well aware that not much had changed in terms of her appearance since her seventeenth birthday. Her hair had improved somewhat, thanks to the arrival of de-frizzing products, but her weight had increased, food being her chief comfort in times of loneliness. She regarded herself as more curvy than obese, and while she’d never been overly bothered about not having a size-four figure, she wouldn’t have minded more shapely knees, and at least the suggestion of a waist.