Offcomer (11 page)

The interview was in the central teaching block. They had
done it up since he was a student. The corridors were clean and echoed as he walked along them. The room was on the third floor. There was an empty seat outside. Alan could hear low voices from behind the door. He sat down, glad for the chance to catch his breath, and waited to be called. After ten minutes had passed and he was beginning seriously to wonder if he was in the wrong place, the door opened and a young, tired-looking woman came out, a leather folder clutched under her arm. “Good luck,” she said. Alan smiled at her.

There were five people on the panel, three of whom he didn’t recognise. Professor Hughes was there, and Dr. McIlveen, but they seemed to be pretending that they didn’t remember him. Professional distance, Alan thought, persuading himself not to be offended. Only appropriate in the circumstances. He settled down into his plastic chair, crossed his legs, listened attentively to their questions. He described his thesis, his articles, and the imminence of their publication. As he spoke, his eyes flickered from face to face, to the cream-painted wall, to the blue squares of carpet on the floor, back to the faces.

The interview passed quickly. He enjoyed it, on the whole. It was good to flex his new-won qualifications in front of his former tutors. He hadn’t quite forgiven them his 2.1. If he had got the results he’d deserved back then, he would have almost certainly been awarded full funding for the Ph.D., if not for the B.Phil. He wouldn’t have had to scrape by all these years on his parents’ meagre allowance.

It was a bit of a rush to catch the bus back. He didn’t have time to visit his mum, so he didn’t call her. It would only complicate things. And things were complicated enough already. Claire was preying on his mind. Whenever he thought
of her, he found himself gritting his teeth. It had started to give him headaches. He had been good to her, he thought, so she should, in return, be good to him. And she most certainly wasn’t being, not at the moment. He was going to have to put her straight. She couldn’t go on neglecting him like this. But that row would have to wait. Right now, he had to get straight back to Oxford. He had to knuckle down and concentrate on the viva. That had to be his priority. He could deal with the Claire thing afterwards.

He bought refreshments at the Spar on Bradbury Place. Striding down into town, towards the docks, a green-red-and-white carrier bag swinging from his hand, he smiled to himself, smiled at the women that passed by him. Travelling light, Claire-less, he felt cool and confident and sexy. He passed new cafés, new bars that had opened since he’d left for Oxford. He noticed the customers: affluent, chic, besuited, and he thought to himself, Belfast, at last, is catching up with me. Belfast is getting ready. It is almost time to come back. In the low autumn light the city looked, he thought, almost beautiful.

During the crossing, he munched Tayto cheese-and-onion crisps and swigged brown lemonade from a two-litre bottle, oblivious to the rock and swell of the boat. He ate and drank as a salute, a communion. He found himself feeling tearful, and even a little holy. He would, he knew, be coming back. He would be coming home.

“Of course, it depends on the viva, but there’s no worries there. Unless they completely fail to understand what the thesis is about.” A moment’s pause. “Wouldn’t put it past them.”

“So you’re taking it? The job?”

“I thought I would. Why not? No reason not to.”

The voice was deep, unfamiliar. Alan on the phone. Perhaps for the first time. She leant back against the stair rail, swallowed.

Jen would be off, soon enough. As soon as she’d got bored with Tom. And that wouldn’t take long, Claire thought. Jen was too bright, too brilliant, too beautiful for Tom. There was very little to keep her there, and so much luring her away. That job she’d been offered, the friend who’d asked her to go travelling. Either way, whatever she decided to do, Jen was out of there. Leaving, and never looking back.

And what did she have? A headachy uneasy job in a shop that hardly paid the rent, and a 2.1 in reading books.

What about me, she thought.

“What about me?” she said, and immediately felt hot and wrong.

There was a moment’s static silence. Alan cleared his throat. He said:

“You can come too. If you want to.”

FIVE
 

It was a small bag, nearly empty, but nonetheless it had to go through the X-ray machine. Claire watched the security guy watching the screen, imagined the picture. A cat-scan of her brain. Soft, tangled stuff. Nothing clear or identifiable.

She had packed it last night, in Grainne’s house. Stuffed in what clean clothes she had left. A couple of pairs of socks, pants, her balding cords. The bag had remained flaccid, expectant, lying open-mouthed on the bed. It had looked hungry. It had made her feel guilty. She should have more stuff. Surely she should have more.

Claire shivered, pulled her jacket tighter round her. The lights were harsh, cold. They buzzed. She gritted her teeth, ducked down inside her collar.

On the way down to the docks, she had noticed a sign. Blinding bright in the early-morning dark, illuminated by
the taxi headlights. Never seen before. The word HEYSHAM and, underneath, a silhouetted lorry. She had realised, with mounting delight, that the way home was signposted. Not that Heysham was home, but it was close. Just a bus ride away.

But she should have known that already. She had leaned forward in her seat, grown tense with irritation. Stupid. All this time she had thought home was so far away. That it was across the sea to Scotland, then a long meandering coach journey through tiny Scottish towns, along the carious sea-coast. Home had seemed so immeasurably distant and remote. When in fact home was there, just across the water. A glowing sign had been there all along, pointing the way. Stupid.

They had pulled up outside the terminus and she had paid the taxi driver, walked into the bright-lit reception area, joined the end of a queue. When the woman behind the counter asked her, smiling, “Single or return?” Claire had suddenly realised that she didn’t know.

“You’re travelling this morning?” the woman had asked, helpfully.

“Yes—”

“And you’re coming back …?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you could get a return, and leave it open-ended …”

Claire had nodded.

“That’s thirty-five pounds. Or you could just get a single.”

“How much is that?”

“Seventeen fifty.”

Claire had stood gnawing her lip. The woman had stared up at her, waiting. Claire had pulled her purse out of her back pocket, opened it.

“I’ll take the single.”

And she had paid, taken her boarding card, and walked through to Security.

“You can come on through.” The luminous-jacketed woman was smiling at her, beckoning. Claire stepped through the empty electronic doorway, did not set off any alarms. She walked down the short, sloping corridor.

The chairs were blue. Except where they were red. Red seats were set out in a square at the far end of the room. If you smoked, you sat on a red seat.

Claire walked awkwardly, hands pushed into her pockets, bag bumping against her back. Her jaw was tight, her shoulders high. She kept her eyes out of focus, did not turn her head at all. She was aware that the room was populated, did not want to see if she was being watched. A soft uninflected murmuring, the high shriek of a child, the hiss and trickle of a hot drink being made. The far corner was empty. She sat down, slid the backpack off her shoulder, dropped it at her feet.

The sky was greying outside. The pot plants were plastic. A crumpled metal ashtray had a cold dead filter in it. She slumped deeper into her coat. Going home, she thought. Trying to get home.

Sitting on their new concrete doorstep. She pregnant and miniskirted, he moustached and smoking a cheroot, reaching out to grab the dog, to turn its attention to the camera. Faded to a pinky-orange now, as if turning, as the years passed, from colour into sepia. There were two copies. One in a clipframe
on Claire’s shelf, the other in one of the photograph albums at home.

The photograph albums. They shuffled them quietly out from amongst the shoes and shoeboxes at the bottom of the wardrobe. Her mother lifted one up onto her knees. The sharp edge pressed into her soft round belly. They turned the pages cautiously, speaking in whispers. Dad mustn’t know what was going on.

Her mother pressed a finger down onto the dimpling clear plastic. A little girl, her knees showing beneath a short green dress, a thick fringe across her dark eyes, frowning. Standing on the sun-hot pathway, in front of the doorstep.

“That’s the day we took you to the Butterfly House,” Claire’s mother said. It was a familiar story, warm. Claire drifted along with it. “A great big blue butterfly, the size of a swallow, landed right on your nose. You went cross-eyed trying to look at it. I wish we’d got a photo, but we’d left the camera in the car. The old Instamatic was no good indoors.”

Claire remembered blue-green iridescent eyes blinking at her, the tickle of tiny feet printed on her nose. She saw the untaken picture. A leafy archway above, the glass dome of the Butterfly House. Shiny ferns brushing against bare arms. A round nub of a chin, forehead creased, frowning with concentration. The rest of her face unseen, covered with the dark, papery, unfolded butterfly mask.

And when the butterfly blinked and was gone, Dad had scooped her up, his big hands meeting round her ribcage, holding her up towards the misty glass dome. And, exhilarated, laughing, her red shoes dangling in the air, she had stretched out her arms towards the butterfly. It flew stiffly away, bobbing along as if powered by a wound-up rubber band.

Alan had been good with Dad, and it seemed as if he had
liked Alan. Did he realise Alan wasn’t coming back? She wondered whether it bothered him, whether she could ever know. When he spoke, his intonation was perfect. He mumbled familiar skeins of sound, in phrases, statements, questions. The rhythms told you what kind of thing he was trying to say: there were no longer any words. Bubbles formed at the slack corner of his mouth, spittle gathered behind his lips. He held tissues to his face with thick, shaky fingers. Claire had, for years now, kept a clean tissue folded in her pocket.

When Alan had come to stay that one time, the rowan berries had been bright red, peppering the hillsides. The first sign of the end of summer, they always made Claire feel sad. She’d picked Alan up from the station in her mother’s buoyant battered Fiat 128, and she tried not to be irritated when she saw him flinch at the sight of it.

“Don’t worry. No one round here to see you.”

While Claire peeled carrots, she kept half an eye on Alan through the open kitchen door. He lowered himself into the chair beside her father. He made some low, meticulous observation. She could not see her father, but heard his reply, a fluttering, wordless, quiet phrase, and Alan nodded, his uneasy grin flickering across his face. She felt warm with guilt and forgiveness. Her mother, hearing, glanced round from the sink at Claire, lips puckering. They smiled at each other.

In the waiting room, her nose prickled.

Her mother turned the page, closing the album. She placed her hands down flat on top of it.

“Let’s look at the special one.” Her voice was low, conspiratorial.
The special one held the old family. Mum’s family. The ones who were gone long before Claire was born, when her mother was herself a child. The ones who had come before the adoption, before Ray and Fran, themselves now yellowing in a different album. Claire knew her father mustn’t find out what they were doing. She never quite knew why.

Her mother leant down, dragged out the old familiar photograph album from the bottom of the pile. It trailed cotton-silky threads. She lifted the scuffed fake-snakeskin cover and the pages inside lurched, tugged up by the tight binding. The paper was brown, powdery as mothwings. Tiny white triangles cupped the photographs’ corners, held them in place. Some pictures had slipped their moorings. They left blank black rectangles where the paper had not faded. The strays slid and shifted, loose between the leaves. Familiar images. Claire’s mother began again to name them, repeating things Claire knew so well that they no longer needed to be said.

A bushy-white-bearded man, watch-chain across his waistcoated middle. A grave, grey-suited little boy at his side. Their collars soft, shapeless. Behind them, a stack of splintering wood, a high fence. The old man was her great-grandfather, her mum’s dad’s dad. Over from Poland at the century’s turn, leaving his name behind him. In England, he had taken his name from his trade, and called himself and his family Taylor. The boy, eyes shadowed, was her mother’s father. Granddad.

On the next page, the muddy pair of kids in shorts so big they had to be held up with thick buckled belts, were Granddad and Great Uncle Sid. Great Uncle Sid was the older, bigger boy, who had his arm round Granddad’s shoulder, and who would grow up to drive a Vauxhall Velox and work for the
Electricity Board, and die, quite suddenly, aged forty-two, of a heart attack, whilst hanging up new net curtains in the parlour.