Lifesaving for Beginners (23 page)

Not much happens.

I think about ringing Thomas.

I don’t ring Thomas.

This might be how smokers feel when they think about cigarettes but don’t light up.

It gives me a twitchy feeling.

I smoke a lot.

Brona rings.
I tell her I can’t talk.
I’m in the middle of a chapter.

I don’t write anything.

I examine my face in the mirror.
My almost-forty-year-old face.
Every day I look a bit older.
The lines lengthen and deepen.
If I watch long enough, I can almost see it happen.

Minnie rings to tell me she has stopped vomiting in the  afternoon, evening and night.
She says, ‘It’s just the morning sickness now.
Proper morning sickness.’
She sounds delighted.

I don’t tell her.
Even though Minnie is the only one in the world who knows everything, I don’t tell her.
About the letters.
The three letters.

I pick up the phone and put it down and pick it up again.
Then I put it down.

I don’t ring.
I don’t ring Thomas.

So when he does find out, it’s quite by accident.

He comes to Ed’s swimming gala.

He remembers.

Of course he remembers.

I arrive late so he’s already there, in the best seat in the house.
He turns his head, looks behind him, smiles when he sees me.
A benign sort of a smile.
As if nothing had ever happened between us.
Nothing good.
Nothing bad.
I don’t smile back.
All of a sudden, I am seething with resentment.
We were so close.
He’s the one who said that, not me.
That day on the farm.
Only a couple of weeks before the accident.
The bloody miracle.
I was wearing a pair of one of his sisters’ wellington boots.
Three sizes too big.
They all have massive feet, the Cunninghams.
Massive hands too.
Even the tiny one, God help her.

I was in a field.
We were making hay.
Thomas said it would be ‘fun’.
Later, he said, ‘Do you fancy a roll in the hay?’
And I said, ‘All right.’
So we rolled in the hay and I made sure that I was on top because hay turns out to be prickly and not as pliable as you might think, and afterwards I sat on Thomas’s jacket and leaned against a stack of hay – a hayrick, he calls it – and smoked a cigarette.
Thomas said, ‘You shouldn’t smoke around the hay,’ and I said, ‘Shut your mouth,’ and he said, ‘I love this time of the year when everything’s at full tilt,’ and I slapped at a mosquito and said, ‘I fucking well hate it,’ and he took my hand and held it and I pulled it away and then I put it back into his hand and we sat there like that for a while and then he kissed my mouth, even though I tasted like cigarettes and he hates cigarettes, and I kissed him back and my eyes were closed and I could feel the heat of the day in my bones and the softness of his mouth on mine and, for a moment, I was so happy I thought I might cry.
So I stopped kissing him and I looked away, and that’s when he said, ‘You’ll get used to it eventually,’ and I said, ‘What?’
and he said, ‘Us.
Being all coupled up, like Minnie and Maurice.’

‘We are nothing like Minnie and Maurice.’
The very idea.

He said, ‘We are.
We’re close.
I’m sorry but that’s the way it is.’
He spread his hands in front of him and shook his head as if he were sorry, but there was nothing he could do about it.

I punched him in the arm.
I said, ‘You dirty-looking eejit.’
And we sat there, with our backs against the hayrick, and we watched the sun spill her gold into his five stony fields in Monaghan and we didn’t say much.
We didn’t say anything.
There was no need.

Now Thomas smiles a benign sort of a smile, as if we are two people who might have known each other a long time ago.

He stands up and people in the rows behind click their tongues and crane their necks.
He shuffles along the row saying, ‘Sorryexcusemesorryexcuseme .
.
.’
as he goes.
He is careful not to stand on anyone’s toe.
The last time he did that, it cost him three hundred and twenty-four euro in surgeon’s fees and a four-and-a-half-hour wait with a peevish woman in A&E.

He looks .
.
.
the same as always.
Casual.
Smiley.
Easy.
There’s something so easy about Thomas Cunningham.
If he were a sum, he’d be two plus two.
I’m more like algebra.

His clothes are terrible, but that’s to be expected.
And there’s a bit of a dog smell on him.
Or goat, maybe.
And his hair could do with a cut.
But apart from that, he looks .
.
.
well.
Healthy.
He looks like someone who never smoked but would just say, ‘No, thanks,’ when you offered him a cigarette and never ‘I don’t smoke,’ in that smug way that non-smokers have.
Or reformed smokers.
Thank Christ, I’m never going to be one of those.
They’d do your head in with the smugness.

The hair is the same; the grey curls are more knots now where the weather has twisted and tossed them.
I always told him his eyes were the colour of the mud in his five fields in Monaghan.
But that’s not true.
They are grey from a distance but they change to green the closer you get.
Or blue sometimes, depending on the light.

Today, they are grey.

He says, ‘Hello, Kat.’

I say, ‘Hello.’

He says, ‘Ed’s on in five minutes, I think.’
He looks at the pool.
Ed sees him and waves.
Thomas smiles and waves back.
When he turns to me, his smile has faded, like wallpaper in a house where nobody lives anymore.

The thing is, I never said sorry.
I wanted to.
Lots of times.
But I just couldn’t say it.
And time rolled on, the way it does, and now, if I say anything, it’ll come under the category of ‘picking the scab off an old wound’.
I’m pretty sure there is such a category, although it might be called something different.

It was just one of those things, I suppose.
What happened to us.
After the accident.
The bloody miracle.
Things were fine before that.
But Thomas wanted to change everything.
All the talk of marriage.
And children.
Although he didn’t say ‘children’.
He referred to ‘a child’, as if this child already existed and it was just a question of us going somewhere to pick it up.

It’s true what I said.
It was Thomas who ended the relationship.
But he said he had no choice.
That I left him with no choice.
After the lies I told.
How I avoided him.
And the Nicolas incident.
Thomas, standing in the doorway, looking at me.
Never even glancing at Nicolas.
Throwing his keys on the table.
‘This is what you want, Kat?
Fine!
I’m done here.’

The silence after he left.
The hollow depth of it.

I’d say sorry now.
If I could go back.
I’d make Nicolas from number thirteen leave.
No, I’d never invite him in, in the first place.

I’d say sorry.

If it hadn’t been for the accident – the stupid, bloody miracle – we’d be fine, me and Thomas.
Thomas and me.
I believe that.
There’s no reason not to.
Everything just got out of hand in the end.

And I never said sorry.
I should have.
But it’s like Mum calling Dad Kenneth.
It’s too late now.

The heat from the pool rises and collects between us.
I pull at the neck of my jumper.

I say, ‘I didn’t realise you’d be here.’
It sounds like an accusation, the way I say it.
I try to smile, to show that it is not.

He says, ‘I promised Ed, remember?’

I nod.
Thomas happens to be one of those people who mean the things they say.

‘Would you like to .
.
.’
He points towards his empty seat in the middle of the row.

‘Oh.
No.
Thank you, I’ll just .
.
.’
I nod and smile and point towards the pool.

He nods and then contorts himself into a sort of squat and shuffles back along the row to his seat, with the ‘sorryexcusemesorryexcuseme’ and the sound of tutting and shifting all around as he goes.

I think Ed comes second.
I’m nearly sure he does.
I cheer as if he does.
I hurry from the balcony when it’s over.
I don’t catch Thomas’s eye.
Don’t want him to think that I expect him to stay and congratulate Ed, like he would have done, before.

In the car park, Ed spots him immediately.
Inconspicuousness is not something that Thomas is good at.

It takes a while for him and Thomas to dispense with their formalities, which include a long and complicated system of hand slaps and shakes.

I am freezing.
Thomas does not take my fingers and put the tips of them into his mouth, like he used to when they went a bloodless yellow in the cold.
I told him not to do that.
‘That’s disgusting,’ I said.
‘Do you have any idea how many germs are in that cake-hole of yours?’
I never told him that I liked it.
The warm wet of his mouth on my skin.
The pleasure of the pain, as he coaxed the blood back into my fingers.

I make fists out of my hands and shove them inside the pockets of my coat.

‘Did Kat tell you?’
Ed smiles at Thomas.

Thomas looks at Ed and smiles because Ed’s smile is contagious and that’s just a fact.
Even John Banville’s face would crack if Ed smiled at him.

Just as it dawns on me what Ed is about to say – the cold has given me brain-freeze, in much the same way a bowl of Chunky Monkey would – Ed comes right out and says it.

He says, ‘I’m going to be an uncle.
Uncle Ed.
I’m going to be Uncle Ed.
Did Kat tell you?
Is that what Kat was telling you?
When I was doing my swimming race?’

And, just like that, it’s out there, and for the first time since I opened the envelopes, it seems real.

Ed will be an uncle.
He is an uncle.
Uncle Ed.

And I am a mother.

The baby was a girl.
Her name is Faith and she’s twenty-four years old and she wants to meet me because I’m her mother.

Realisation grabs me from behind like a mugger.
I feel like I might fall with the force of it, but I don’t.
Of course I don’t.
I stand there and concentrate on Ed.
He is smiling at Thomas, waiting for Thomas to say something.
The world seems strangely quiet, as if we are not standing in the middle of a car park with engines revving all around us.

Ed nudges Thomas.
‘Did you hear me?
I’m going to be an uncle, I said.
Uncle Ed.
Her name is Faith and when she comes to Dublin I’m going to meet her.
She’s going to sleep in the bottom bunk and I’m going to bring her to Arch club and everything.
Isn’t that right, Kat?’

Ed taps my arm with the tip of his index finger.
He is smiling but there is confusion around the edges.
I nod.
‘That’s right, Ed.’