Sex and Death (32 page)

I didn't hear the question at first and she had to repeat it.

‘Course I have,' I told her, ‘what do you think?'

I think she knew it was a lie but she let it drop.

‘You told me not to fall in love with you,' she said. ‘You remember that? It was one of the very first things you told me.'

‘Maybe I did,' I said.

The truth is it's what I tell them all. Let's have a good time, I tell them. Let's have some fun. Let's not get complicated.

She'd turned on the bedside light so I could find my clothes and she watched me as I pulled on my pants then sat on the edge of the bed to pull on my socks. Naked beneath the quilt, her makeup smudged and her hair messed up, she looked young again, more like when I'd first known her.

I found my shirt, picked up my car keys and wallet from the dresser.

‘It was good running into you,' I told her.

I was late for work, but I didn't drive on, just sat a while more watching Arlette alone in the shop window, turning the pages of her paperback as she spooned up her frozen yogurt. She glanced out a couple of times, but didn't notice me.

When she was done, she walked away down the block, the sunlight bright on her bare shoulders and curling hair, and from my car across the street I watched until I couldn't see her any more, my hand on the ignition key, wondering how much I was to blame and for what.

The winter bleeds us out here. These December mornings, it is often just myself and the dead jellyfish who are left to the beach. These are the lion's mane corpses that get washed in on the equinoctial gales and they come in terrible numbers some years, as if there's been a genocide out there. They look like pink foetal messes flung about the sand and rocks – kids call the place the abortion beach – and the corpses are so preserved in the winter air they're a long time rotting down. How one's soul lifts on the morning stroll. And then there's the endless afternoon to contend with – mostly, I have the bar to just myself and the radio, and we sit there and drone at each other. Maybe there's a lone customer, a depressed old farmer down from the hills, or maybe, the odd day, there's two. I am at this stage largely beyond caring.

But it was on just such a lifeless and dreary winter day, almost precisely as our ten streetlamps came on to glow against the dusk, that the rental car pulled up outside. I could hear two voices raised in an odd, quivery singing inside the car but they ceased as the engine cut. A slight man in late middle age stepped out and braced himself against the evening's chill. He looked at the sign above my door – it reads
Sullivan
, still, though it's years since there's been a Sullivan here. He came around the car and opened the passenger door and a frail bird-faced old dear in furs emerged. He offered an arm but she was proud to manage without. They stepped up together then to stare through my window and their eyes were lit so madly that my breath caught in a kind
of fear or forewarning. They pushed through the doors. They came into my sad pub like a squall of hectic weather.

*

There was a strange manner of cheerful eeriness about them I'd rather not get into. They took grinning to the bar stools. He swivelled a half turn and squinted hard as he read the spirit labels –

‘It's a very attractive selection, Mother,' he said.

‘Let's not be rash, Tony,' she said.

But she swivelled the half turn, too, and hers drew a slow creak to the room that sounded in a crescent-moon shape, ominously.

‘We're going to work our way across the toppermost states,' he said.

‘Oh, Tony,' she said. ‘Riding the Empire Builder? Again?'

He half rose from his stool.

‘Take me back to the Blaaack Hills,' he crooned. ‘The black hills of Dakota . . .'

‘The beautiful Indian country,' she sighed.

He was fey and thin and in the last gasp of middle age; she had the remnants of a sharp-boned beauty yet.

‘He's a dreadful child but kind,' she confided, and she laid her touch to the back of my hand where it gripped with white knuckles the bar top. Hers was paper-brown and cut deep with wrinkles.

‘A Laphroaig to set us off from the station,' he said, sitting again. ‘Let's strap ourselves in, dear.'

‘Laphroaig, Tony? Is that the peaty number?'

‘Like drinking the bloody fireplace,' he said.

‘Two?'

‘Water to the side,' he said.

I set them and they sipped, and they considered each other with the same liquid eyes, and relaxed. She looked at me kindly.

‘Our background is theatrical,' she said.

‘In all senses of the word,' he said.

‘Have you travelled far today?'

‘Oh Christ,' he said. ‘Was it Kenmare, Mother? Was the last place?'

‘Horrendous,' she said, and placed thin fingers to her throat in long suffering.

‘Full of horrible skinny Italians on bicycles,' he said. ‘Calves on like knitting needles and their rude bits in Lycra. I mean it's bloody December!'

‘In fact,' she said, ‘we were rather run out of town.'

‘There was an incident,' he confirmed, ‘over supper.'

‘Last night?' she said. ‘We're barely in the door and there's talk of the guards.'

‘Five-star melodrama,' he said. ‘As per. Matinee and evening performances.'

‘We had . . . stopped off,' she said. ‘En route.'

‘We were a little . . . tired,' he said.

‘We thought we'd take things a little more gently today,' she said.

‘Nonsense,' he said. ‘We're riding the Empire Builder. We're taking the high ground. Is that a Cork gin I see?'

It was second along the line of optics from the Laphroaig – I thought, surely they can't be in earnest? There was a line of nine spirits turned and hung there.

‘Mine's with just the tiniest drizzle of soda water,' she said.

‘Mine's a slice of lime, if you have it,' he said.

‘Actually . . .'

‘Surprise me,' he said. ‘Straight up is fine. Though I may become poisonous and embittered.'

‘Given you've a head start,' she said.

‘Do you see now?' he said. ‘Do you see what I'm dealing with?'

I tried for what I imagined was a half smile and set their gins.

‘One yourself?' he said.

‘I don't, actually.'

Sobriety was the mean violet of dusk through the bar's window; the mean view down the falling fields to the never-ending sea; the violet of another mean winter for me.

‘Toronto!' she cried.

‘Oh Mother,' he said. ‘It's barely gone five.'

‘Anthony was conceived in Toronto,' she said. ‘I was Ophelia to Daddy's Prince. We're talking 1953, barman.'

He didn't look sixty. He had the faded yellowish skin tone of a preserved lemon. Pickled, I suppose is what I'm trying to say, but it seems unkind.

*

Their moods came and went with each sip as it was taken. He took a sullen turn on the Cork gin –

‘Kenmare was the fucking horrors,' he said. ‘I had one of my spells.'

‘He hasn't had a spell since September,' she said. ‘Though I'm not saying October was a picnic.'

‘Five this morning?' he said. ‘I'm lying in the bed, my heart is going like gangbusters and there are bloody crows on the roof – crows! And they're at their screeching and their bloody cawing and the worst of it is I can make out the words.'

I couldn't but ask –

‘What were they saying?'

‘You don't want to know,' he said. ‘Suffice to say I've always suspected the worst of crows.'

‘A crow is a crow,' she flapped a wrist. ‘It's the rooks you want to watch out for.'

‘Oh, a rook knows,' he said.

‘Knows?' I couldn't but ask.

‘The day and the hour,' he said.

‘Of course sleep is a thing of the past for me,' she said. ‘You'll find this as you get older, boys.'

The bar was empty but for them. I just wanted to lock up for the day and not open for the night. I wanted to drink mint tea upstairs and watch television and go on the internet. But they were making light work of the Cork gin.

‘It was a dry town,' she said, narrowing her eyes, ‘was Toronto.'

‘Hideous Protestant bastards,' he said. ‘What's this is next along?'

I turned, coldly; I tried to look stern.

‘I'm afraid that's a very cheap and nasty Spanish brandy.'

‘How did you know I was coming?' he said.

*

The moving sea gleamed; it moved its lights in a black glister; it moved rustily on its cables.

‘Of course Daddy was several years the senior to me,' she said. ‘I was a young Ophelia. He was an old Prince. But impressive. He had range had Daddy.'

‘Do you realise,' he said, ‘that my father was born in 1889?'

‘My goodness.'

‘Picture it,' he said, swirling the last of his gin and signalling for two brandies; she'd already finished hers and had her palms placed expectantly on the bar top.

‘1889,' he said. ‘This was in County Mayo. In a cabin, no less, and in low circumstances. A whore mother bleeding down the thighs and seventeen screaming bastards swinging from the rafters . . .'

‘Anthony,' she said. ‘Really.'

‘To even emerge from such a milieu,' he said, ‘walking upright and not on all fours speaks of something heroic in the old lech.'

‘He carried himself well,' she said. ‘Daddy had class always.'

‘Meaning?' he said.

‘Apples and trees, dear,' she said. ‘You've got some, too.'

‘Some?' he said.

Together they tested their brandies with tentative lips.

‘Coca-Cola,' she said, and I set a small bottle for a mixer.

‘I shouldn't,' he said. ‘The caffeine doesn't agree with me.'

He took a hard nip from his Spanish – suspiciously – but smiled then and looked up with new glee and blew the room a kiss. Then he was halfways stood on the stool again.

‘When they begiiiin,' he sang, ‘the beguine . . .'

He slithered from the bar stool and landed on lizardy toes. He waltzed a slow-shoed shuffle as though with his own ghost.

‘
Quiero sentir las cosas de siempre
,' he sang, loudening, and he turned cock-hipped on a heel.

‘Julio Iglesias,' she said.

At which point the door opened and one of my poor farmers poked a glance in –

‘When they begin,' he came to quick refrain, ‘the beguine,' and he waltzed towards the door, and my farmer turned on his own heel and moved off down the village, and quick.

Tony grabbed the door and shouted to the night after him –

‘Come back at half past eight, dear! I'll be doing me Burl Ives!'

The chill of the evening faded again as he let the door swing closed and he took happily to his bar stool.

‘Toronto?' she said. ‘The house was half empty most nights but the company was lively.'

‘Evidently,' he said.

‘I think it happened the very first time,' she said. ‘He'd got his hands on a bathtub gin, had Daddy.'

‘The telling detail,' he said.

‘Tasted like turps,' she said, ‘but it did make one pleasantly lightheaded.'

He squinted again at the line of optics and shook his head.

‘Now my wife?' he said.

‘Don't, Tony,' she said.

‘Oh and by the way,' he said. ‘What did you say your name was?'

‘I didn't. I'm Alan.'

‘Well, Al,' he said, ‘it turns out that my darling wife has only taken off with the pilates instructor. A she. And twice the man I'll ever be.'

‘You should never have married an actress, darling.'

‘So you've been saying this last fourteen years, Mother.'

‘Marry the shop girl,' she said. ‘Marry the factory line. Marry the barmaid. MARRY THE WHORE! But you never, never marry the actress, Tony.'

‘Well it's a little late for it, Mother,' he said. ‘Given I can never set foot in Tenerife again. The shame!'

‘Nor Manchester,' she said.

‘The horror!' he cried.

‘Of course in Toronto,' she said, ‘there wasn't a great deal to do in the evenings. And the show'd finish for seven!'

‘He gave her one down the fish dock.'

‘Oh Tony,' she said.

‘By the mighty Ontario,' he said.

‘Folks,' I said, ‘listen, I mean really . . .'

‘County Mayo-style,' he said. ‘You know what I mean, soldier?'

‘Tony,' she said, disappointedly.

‘And as for my betrothed? I said, well! I said, this pilates has given you a whole new lease of life, Martina. You've come in glowing and you're up to four sessions a week.'

‘What's this is next along the line, Andy?'

‘Alan,' I said, and submitted to my fate. The way they moved was sure as a tide.

‘It's an Absolut vodka,' I said.

‘Marvellous,' he said. ‘One minute we're rock-chewing Spanish peasants humping the donkey in a humid night wind, the next we're on the porch of the dacha, it's a summer's evening, placid . . .'

‘A light breeze licking the trees,' she said.

‘Pine-scented secrets,' he said. ‘Cruel handsome souls with cheekbones like knives. Burly intrigue . . .'

‘Burl Ives,' she said.

‘. . . and some rather fetching Cassock-type headgear. A tubercular old sort about to hack his last . . .'

I poured and set the vodkas over ice – they slammed them back neat.

‘Of course Martina's not been right since the change,' he said.

‘Her manners are learned,' said the mother. ‘There was always something forced about her manners. As if she'd learned them by heart. From a library book.'

‘Pilates!' he cried. ‘If it wasn't for the kiddies, it'd be a clean break.'

‘The kiddies were a disaster,' she said. ‘At your age? I don't know what you were thinking, Anthony.'

‘Prolonging the noble line,' he said. ‘1889? Oh . . . Is that a Drambuie, Adam?'

*

The alcohol appeared really to have no great effect – it just kept them at a spinning clip.

‘He never talked about Mayo much, Daddy,' she said.

‘You could hardly blame the man,' he said.

‘Though he told a horrid tale. About the day his father decided the wife was a whore. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and screamed the foullest abuse up at her. She flung a loaf of bread down and hit him on the head. Your daddy, as a kiddie,
is watching the whole thing from under a table. The poor infant! And next
his
daddy flings the bread back up again and roars . . .'

She half stood on the bar stool and reddened as she called the line.

‘“Feed your fucking bastards with it!”'

‘Is it any wonder I turned out the way I did?' said Tony.

‘Folks,' I said. ‘In truth, I'm not feeling the best this evening, I think it's a virusy thing and I may lock up a little earlier . . .'

‘Mine's a Drambuie, Al,' she said.

‘Times two,' he said.