Thanks for the Memories (24 page)
the wrong direction. Again. Has been since we left the Banqueting House but refuses to admit it, and also refuses to get a taxi to the hotel, as he is on a penny-saving mission.
He is still within my sights, and so I sit on my case and wait for him to realize the error of his ways and come back. It’s evening now and I just want to get to the hotel and have a bath. My phone rings.
“Hi, Kate.”
She is laughing hysterically.
“What’s up with you?” I smile. “Well, it’s nice to hear some body is in a good mood.”
“Oh, Joyce—” She catches her breath, and I imagine she’s wiping her teared-up eyes. “You are the best dose of medicine, you really are.”
“What do you mean?” I can hear children’s laughter behind her.
“Do me a favor and raise your right hand.”
“Why?”
“Just do it. It’s a game the kids taught me.” She giggles.
“Okay.” I sigh, and raise my right hand.
I hear the kids howl with laughter.
“Tell her to wiggle her right foot,” Jayda shouts in the background.
“Okay,” I laugh. This is putting me in a much better mood. I wiggle my right foot, and they laugh again. I can even hear Kate’s husband howling, which suddenly makes me uncomfortable again.
“Kate, what exactly is this?”
Kate can’t answer, she’s laughing too much.
“Tell her to hop up and down!” Eric shouts.
“No.” I’m irritated now.
“She did it for Jayda,” he begins to whine, and I sense tears. I quickly stand and hop up and down.
They howl again.
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“By any chance,” Kate wheezes through her laugher, “is there anyone around you who has the time?”
“What are you talking about?” I frown, looking around, still not sure of the joke. I see Big Ben behind me, and as I turn back, only then do I see the camera crew in the distance. I stop hopping.
“What on earth is that woman doing?” Dr. Montgomery steps closer to the television. “Is she dancing?”
“Oo han ee ha?” Justin says, feeling the effects of his numbed mouth.
“Of course I can see her,” he responds. “I think she’s doing the hokey-pokey. See? You put your left leg in,” he begins to sing. “Left leg out. In. Out. In. Out. Shake it all about.” He dances around. Rita rolls her eyes.
Justin, relieved that his sightings of Joyce aren’t all in his mind, begins to bounce up and down in his seat impatiently. Hurry! I need to get to her.
Dr. Montgomery glances at him curiously, pushes him back in the chair, and places the instruments in his mouth again. Justin continues to gurgle and make noises.
“It’s no good explaining it to me, Justin, you’re not going anywhere until I have filled this cavity. You’ll have to take antibiotics for the abscess, then when you come back I’ll either extract it or use endodontic treatment. Whatever I’m in the mood for,” he says darkly. “And whoever this Joyce lady is, you can thank her for curing your fear of needles. You didn’t even notice I’d injected you.”
“Aah haa ooo aaa aa ee a.”
“Oh, well, good for you, old boy. I donated blood before too, you know. Satisfying, isn’t it?”
“Aa. Ooo aaa iii uuuu.”
Dr. Montgomery throws his head back. “Oh, don’t be silly,
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they’ll never tell you who the blood has gone to. Besides, it’s been separated into different parts, platelets, red blood cells, and what have you.”
Justin gurgles again.
The dentist laughs again. “What kind of muffins would you want?”
“Aa.”
“Banana.” He considers this. “Prefer chocolate, myself. Air, please, Rita.”
A bewildered Rita puts the tube into Justin’s mouth.
s u c c e e d i n h a i l i n g a black cab, and I send the driver in I the direction of the dapper old man, who is easily spotted on the pavement, swaying in horizontal motions like a drunken sailor amid the crowd’s vertical stream. Like a salmon he swims upstream, pushing against the throngs of people going in the opposite direction. Not doing it just for the sake of it or to be deliberately different, and not even noticing he’s the odd one out. Seeing him now reminds me of a tale he once told me when I was so small he seemed as gigantic as our neighbor’s oak tree that loomed over our garden wall, raining acorns onto our grass. During the months when playtime was interrupted by the gray world outside, the howling wind would blow the giant tree’s branches from side to side, leaves going
swish swash
, left to right, just like my dad, a pin wavering at the end of a bowling lane. But neither of them fell under the wind’s force. Not like the acorns, which leaped from their branches like panicked parachutists pushed out unawares.
Back when my dad was as sturdy as an oak tree and when I was bullied at school for sucking my thumb, he recalled the Irish myth
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of how an ordinary salmon had eaten hazelnuts that had fallen into the Fountain of Wisdom. In doing so, the salmon gained all the knowledge in the world, and the first to eat the salmon’s flesh would, in turn, gain this knowledge. The poet Finneces spent seven long years fishing for this salmon, and when he’d finally caught it, he instructed his young apprentice, Fionn, to prepare it for him. When spattered with hot fat from the cooking salmon, Fionn immediately sucked on his burned thumb to ease his pain. Thus he gained incredible knowledge and wisdom. For the rest of his life, when he didn’t know what to do, all he needed was to suck on his thumb, and the knowledge would come.
He told me that story way back when I sucked my thumb, and when he was as big as an oak tree. When Mum’s yawns sounded like songs. When we were all together. When I had no idea there would ever come a time when we wouldn’t be. When we used to have chats in the garden, under the weeping willow. Where I always used to hide, and where he always found me. When nothing was impossible, and when the three of us, together forever, was a given.
I smile now as I watch my great big salmon of knowledge moving upstream, weaving in and out of the pedestrians pounding the pavement toward him.
Dad looks up, sees me, gives me two fingers, and keeps walking. Ah.
“Dad,” I call out the open window, “come on, get in the car.”
He ignores me and holds a cigarette to his mouth, inhaling long and hard, so much so that his cheeks go concave.
“Dad, don’t be like this. Just get in the car, and we’ll go to the hotel.”
He continues walking, looking straight ahead, as stubborn as anything. I’ve seen this face so many times before, arguing with Mum over staying too late and too often at the pub, debating with t h a n k s f o r t h e m e m o r i e s
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the Monday Club gang about the political state of the country, holding his ground at a restaurant when his beef is handed to him not resembling a piece of charcoal as he wishes—the “I’m right, you’re wrong” look that has set his chin in that defiant stance, jutting outward like Cork and Kerry’s rugged coastline from the rest of the land. A stubborn chin, a troubled head.
“Look, we don’t even have to talk. You can ignore me in the car too. And at the hotel. Don’t talk to me all night, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he huffs.
“Honestly?”
He looks at me.
“Yes.”
He tries not to smile. Scratches the corner of his mouth with his yellow-stained cigarette fingers to hide how he softens. The smoke rises into his eyes, and I think of his yellow eyes, think of how piercingly blue they used to be when, as a little girl, legs swinging, chin on my hands, I’d watch him at the kitchen table dismantling a radio or a clock or some other device. Piercing blue eyes, alert, busy, like a CAT scan sourcing a tumor. His cigarette squashed between his lips, to the side of his mouth like Popeye, the smoke drifting into his squinted eyes, staining them the yellow that he sees through now. The color of age, like old newspapers dipped in time.
I’d watch him, transfixed, afraid to speak, afraid to breathe, afraid to break the spell he’d cast on the contraption he was fixing. Like the surgeon who’d operated on his heart during his bypass surgery ten years ago, there he was with youth on his side, connecting wires and clearing blockages, his shirtsleeves rolled to just below his elbows, the muscles in his arms tanned from gardening, flexing and unflexing as his fingers tackled the problem. His fingernails, always with a trace of dirt under the surface. His right forefinger and middle finger, yellow from the nicotine. Yellow but steady.
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Finally he stops walking. He throws his cigarette on the ground and stomps it out with his chunky shoe. I ask the driver to stop. I throw the lifesaving ring around his body, and we pull him out of his stream of defiance and into the boat. Always a chancer, always lucky, he’d fall into a river and come out dry, with fish in his pockets. He gets in the car and sits without a word to me, his clothes, breath, and fingers smelling of smoke. I bite my lip to stop from saying anything.
He is silent for a record amount of time. Ten, minutes, maybe fifteen. Finally words start spilling out of his mouth, as though they’d been queuing up impatiently. Fired from his heart as usual, not from his head, and catapulted to his mouth, only to bounce against the walls of his closed lips. But now the gates open, and the words fly out in all directions like projectile vomit.
“You may have got a sherbet, but I hope you know that I haven’t a sausage.” He raises his chin, which pulls on the invisible string attached to his pride. He appears pleased with the collection of words that have strung themselves together for him on this particular occasion.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Sherbet dab, cab. Sausage and mash, cash,” he explains. “It’s the ol’ Chitty Chitty.”
I try to work that out in my head.
“Bang Bang, rhyming slang,” he finishes. “He knows exactly what I’m talking about.” He nods at the driver.
“He can’t hear you.”
“Why? Is he Mutt and Jeff ?”
“What?”
“Deaf.”
“No.” I shake my head, feeling dazed and tired. “When the red light is off, they can’t hear you.”
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“Like Joe’s hearing aid,” Dad responds. He leans forward and flicks the switch on the back of the seat in front of us. “Can you hear me?” he shouts.
“Yeah, mate.” The driver looks at him in the rearview mirror.
“Loud and clear.”
Dad smiles and flicks the switch again. “Can you hear me now?”
There is no response, and the driver quickly glances at him in the mirror, concern wrinkling his forehead while he keeps an eye on the road.
Dad chuckles.
I bury my face in my hands.
“This is what we do to Joe,” he says mischievously. “Sometimes he can go a whole day without realizing we turned his hearing aid off. He just thinks that no one’s saying anything. Every half hour he shouts, ‘
Jaysus, it’s very quiet in here!
’ ” Dad laughs and flicks the switch again. “ ’Allo, guv,” Dad says pleasantly.
“All right, Paddy,” the driver responds.
I wait for Dad’s gnarled fist to go through the slit in the window. It doesn’t. His laughter filters through instead.
“I feel like being on my tod tonight. I say, could you tell me where there’s a good jack near my hotel, so I can go for a pig without my teapot?”
The young driver studies Dad’s innocent face in the mirror, but he doesn’t respond and continues driving.
I look away so Dad isn’t embarrassed, but I feel rather superior and hate myself for it. Moments later, at a set of traffic lights, the hatch opens and the driver passes a piece of paper through.
“Here’s a list of a few, mate. I’d suggest the first one, that’s my favorite. Does good loop and tucker right about now, if you know what I mean.” He smiles and winks.
“Thank you.” Dad’s face lights up. He studies the paper closely as though it’s the most precious thing he’s ever been given, then
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folds it carefully and slides it into his top pocket proudly. “It’s just that this one here is being a merry ol’ soul, if you know what I mean. Make sure she gives you a good bit of rifle.”
The driver laughs and pulls over at our hotel. I examine it from the cab and am pleasantly surprised. The three-star hotel is right in the heart of the city, only ten minutes’ walk from the main theaters, Oxford Street, Piccadilly, and Soho. Enough to keep us out of trouble. Or put us right in it.
Dad gets out of the car and pulls his case up to the revolving doors at the hotel entrance. I watch him while waiting for my change. The doors are going around so fast, I can see him trying to time his entrance. Like a dog afraid to jump into the cold sea, he inches forward, then stops, jerks forward again and stops. Finally he makes a run for it, and his suitcase gets stuck outside, jamming the revolving doors and trapping him inside.
I take my time getting out of the cab. I lean in the passenger’s side window to the sound of Dad rapping on the glass of the revolving doors.
“Help! Someone!” I hear Dad call.
“By the way, what did he call me?” I ask the driver, calmly ignoring the calls behind me.
“A merry old soul?” he asks with a grin. “You don’t want to know.”
“Tell me,” I prompt.
“It means arsehole.” He laughs and then pulls away, leaving me at the side of the street with my mouth gaping. I notice the knocking has quieted and turn to see that Dad has been freed at last. I hurry inside.
“I can’t give you a credit card, but I can give you my word,”
Dad is saying slowly and loudly to the woman behind the reception desk. “And my word is as good as my honor.”
“It’s okay, here you go.” I join them and slide my credit card across the counter to the young lady.
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“Why can’t people just pay with paper money these days?”
