The Art of Friendship (11 page)

‘I’ve been offered the job at the museum,’ she said quietly and glanced at Harry to gauge his reaction. He ground a toe into the gravel, thrust his hands deep in his trouser pockets. ‘And I’ve decided to take it,’ she said.

Harry nodded and a little of the ramrod straightness went out of his stance. His shoulders dropped a fraction and he nodded resignedly. There was something defeated about him that reached out to her.

‘You do know that this doesn’t change anything, Harry? Not for you and Dorothy and the boys. In fact, you’ll probably see more of them, so much so you’ll be sick of the sight of them!’ she said, injecting a note of humour.

He forced a grim smile. ‘Never.’

‘Please be happy for me,’ said Kirsty. ‘It’s only a part-time job, Harry. It won’t interfere with my responsibilities towards the boys. It won’t change things,’ she added, and realised that this was not true.

Taking the job was the first step towards cutting the ties that bound her so closely to her in-laws. She knew it and so did Harry. For her it was a positive move towards a new sort of life. She was young enough to start over, to have a second chance at happiness.

But what of Dorothy and Harry? All they had were memories of a beloved son taken in his prime, a daughter they rarely saw and two grandchildren who were the centre of their world. No wonder they were terrified of a change in the status quo. For every step towards independence on Kirsty’s part would, by necessity, undermine the intimacy of their relationship with her and the boys.

‘Okay,’ said Harry resignedly, and he had the good grace to summon up a pleasant smile. ‘If it’s what you want.’ He put his arm around her shoulder then, heavy like a yoke, and steered her up the steps into the house. ‘Come on, then. I suppose we’d better tell Dorothy the good news.’

Since taking up scrapbooking last year, Janice had comman-deered one of the spare bedrooms on the third floor as her work room. The never-used single bed had been removed and replaced with an office chair on wheels and a large ash-coloured table, pushed up against the window to make the most of the natural light. A bookcase held all the things she needed in pretty cardboard boxes decorated with floral prints.

Neither Keith nor Pete ventured up here often and the work room had become something of a sanctuary for Janice. A place where she could escape and immerse herself in a hands-on practical activity that she had once derided – and now found addictive and strangely therapeutic. And, if truth be told, it helped to fill her long, purposeless days.

This particular wet and windy Friday afternoon at the end of March, finding herself with nothing to do, Janice had chosen a project that she knew she would find absorbing, though difficult. She wondered if it had escaped the notice of her new friends from the scrapbooking course, that she had never made an album of her only child. They probably thought it odd. And it was.

She’d made albums of her wedding, holidays they’d taken as a family both abroad and in Ireland. She’d given books as gifts and even made one of the house, The Rectory, to pass
down to future generations, whom Keith imagined would inhabit the place long after they were gone. But, in almost a year of scrapbook-making, she had never made an album of Pete. Now she was about to rectify that.

In planning this album Janice had come to the realisation that it wouldn’t be a baby album as she’d first envisaged, and there was a very good reason for that. She had only two dozen or so pictures of Pete under the age of two, all of them taken by other people. She hadn’t owned a camera until Keith bought her one, two months after they met. So the album would be a childhood album instead, populated by photos of Pete in his Scout uniform, playing football, in his rugby kit, Christmases and birthdays – all the memorable events that formed the pillars of a happy childhood. Only the first few pages would be devoted to his babyhood.

It would be a special gift from her to him before he left home to go to university – her way of saying that she loved him, even though she hadn’t always been able to show it. She would give it to him in April, on his eighteenth birthday. After he’d left home, she doubted he would ever come back home again to live. He was so incredibly self-sufficient, so determinedly self-contained. He had told her once that he did not need anyone for anything and she believed him. She did not know if this fierce independence was an asset or a flaw.

Standing on tiptoe and reaching, just, with the tips of her fingers, she teased a brown cardboard box from its place on the top shelf of the bookcase. There was a thin film of grime on the top; she ran her index finger lightly across the lid then examined the soft pad of flesh on the tip. It was, as she knew it would be of course, charcoal with dust. She wiped her finger on her jeans.

Once seated at the table, she removed the lid, set it on
the floor and lifted out a handful of the mostly six-by-four inch photos that lay at the bottom of the box. She spread them out and sifted through them until she came across the ones she was looking for – the earlier photos of Pete. She found twenty or so photos in all, half of them taken with her in the picture too, either holding him in her arms or on her knee. They were of varying quality from very poor to okay.

Blond-haired and delicate, Pete looked like someone else’s baby, staring out from the photos with those pinched blue eyes and that hostile expression. In only one photo was he laughing, revealing shiny gums and four brand-new front teeth. In every picture he was dressed in bright primary colours – his clothes, she remembered, had come mainly from charity shops. Janice hardly recognised the young woman in the photographs. It pained her to look at herself as she was then, knowing the misery and the pain behind that sunny smile and pretty face. For she
had
been pretty, beautiful even, though it had taken Keith to make her realise it.

She had met him when Pete was two, after she had dropped out of a degree course in physiotherapy at Jordanstown. Falling pregnant with Pete, her one and only child, in her second year had put paid to any dreams of obtaining a degree. It was just too damned hard. She had raised Pete alone with no practical or financial support from anyone but the state – until Keith came along. She had sacrificed her ambitions and hopes to give her child the very opportunities his birth had so cruelly taken from her.

Not even their closest friends knew that Keith was not Pete’s real father. She’d gone against Keith’s wishes in not telling Pete he was adopted. But that had been a mistake, Janice could see now, and one that, as Keith repeatedly
pointed out, they would have to rectify soon. Pete would find out anyway when he eventually saw his birth certificate – he’d need it to enrol at university. They couldn’t put it off much longer. He was almost an adult, careering towards the day when he would leave home. And, much as she dreaded the idea of telling him, even Janice acknowledged that he had the right to know.

But Keith was one of the few moderating influences in Pete’s life. Finding out that he was not, after all, his real dad might change the dynamics between father and son, and that, to Janice’s mind, could only be a bad thing. She had at one time entertained the idea of persuading Keith to pretend that he was Pete’s real dad. But how then could they explain away ‘father unknown’ on the birth certificate? Not unless Keith also pretended that he had initially abandoned her and the baby…she could never ask that of him. And besides, anyone who knew Keith, including Pete, would know that he wasn’t capable of doing such a thing.

She picked up a blurred photograph of a Pete aged about six months, strapped in his buggy, wearing a blue corduroy coat and staring crossly at the camera. She recalled with sudden clarity an aspect of Pete’s babyhood which, along with many others, she had tried to forget. When he was past the newborn stage, around five months old, Janice refused point-blank to lift him from his cot before seven in the morning, no matter how early he woke.

After a few weeks of prolonged screaming he eventually got the message and lay quiet and wide-eyed until she came to him in the mornings. Back then, as an exhausted single mum on the verge, she realised now, of breakdown, it had been a coping mechanism. With hindsight it looked more like neglect. This insight merely confirmed what she
had known from day one: she was, and had been, a bad mother. Guilt consumed her. She’d made him what he was.

Looking at these pictures, it was impossible not to open the floodgates on the past. Her heartbeat quickened as other, more painful memories came crowding in. She set the photos down on the table and took a deep breath to steady her nerves. She wiped the sweat from her palms on the fabric of her jeans and took a deep breath. Best to concentrate on the task in hand, she told herself. She selected a handful of the best baby pictures, and set about arranging them on three album pages she’d laid out on the table. Once she’d decided on a layout, she selected sheets of coloured paper to make the backgrounds and a selection of baby-related stickers, chipboard cut-outs and thin blue ribbon.

Then she pasted a sheet of pale blue paper on the first page of the album and set about cutting out shapes from a contrasting paper. She found plain cream card, cut it into little squares with pinking shears to create crimped edges, and wrote annotations for the pictures. Banal stuff like ‘at the park’ and ‘on the beach’, that added nothing to the photos but filled the page nicely. Then she set about gluing everything in position.

She concentrated hard on the task in hand but her thoughts took themselves off in directions she would rather they did not go. Frustratingly, she could not seem to control them. The photos had stirred up the usual disturbing memories, the ones she coped with on a daily basis.

She was nineteen years old, in her second year at Jordanstown. Janice had arrived at university not knowing a soul and hoping that she might somehow be able to shed the skin of her past and emerge like a butterfly, entirely reinvented. In halls she was befriended by two girls, Marie and Katy from Tandragee, County Armagh, a village best known
as the home of Tayto, Northern Ireland’s favourite brand of crisps.

According to Marie and Katy there really was a Tayto Castle, just like it said on the back of the packets, which housed the crisp factory. Janice had always been sceptical of this claim, even as a small child, but she was glad it was true. She imagined a fairytale Disney-inspired castle, with turrets like needles pricking the sky, and festooned with coloured flags. The reality, Marie assured her, was far more mundane. She maintained you could smell the crisps frying three miles away. The formula for the famous cheese-and-onion flavoured crisps was, Katy said in a conspiratorial tone, a closely guarded secret. Not even her uncle who had worked there for the past seventeen years as a shift manager knew the recipe.

For some unfathomable reason, Marie and Katy made it their business to take her under their wing, not noticing that her lack of confidence and low self-esteem made it hard for her to reciprocate their friendship. She lived with the fear that they would find her out, that one day they would realise that she was not worthy of their acquaintance.

Men on the other hand she understood, or thought she did. She’d spent her first year acquiring a well-justified reputation for sleeping around, constantly trying to bolster a fragile self-worth. So long as she could pull, it kept her chronic insecurity at bay. Other girls began to avoid her, and still Marie and Katy did not abandon her. She gained the impression that they were slightly in awe of her. She imagined they thought her experienced, worldly-wise and sophisticated. She tried not to disappoint.

Janice sat with them in the busy cafeteria at lunchtime, trying very hard not to look self-conscious – she always felt that people were staring at her, subjecting her to scrutiny
and uncompromising judgment. She sat between Marie and Katy, not listening to a word either of them said, wondering what she was doing here. She wasn’t like most of the other students – bright-eyed, keen, enthusiastic. Or indeed the ones at the opposite end of the spectrum – the ones that feigned no interest in their subjects (while taking care never to actually fail), chain-smoked in public and were at pains to adopt a nonchalant, worldly air. At nineteen Janice was already jaded – she didn’t have to pretend.

Three men, dressed in working clothes, came in and Janice, in an effort to calm her wayward thoughts, gave them her full attention. They wore matching fluorescent jackets splattered with mud, hard hats and heavy boots. They were in their early thirties, well-built and bronzed from working outdoors. One of them in particular, the tallest one with thick, dark hair, caught her eye. He got a tray, selected some food, paid for it and went to sit with his colleagues at a table close by.

‘Look at him over there,’ she said and pointed. ‘Now there’s a real man,’ she added to impress Marie and Katy. ‘Not a boy like the rest of this lot.’ She glanced deridingly at the skinny, pale-faced physics students sitting at the table next to them.

Marie giggled. Katy said, in that North Armagh accent that made her sound like a softer female version of Ian Paisley, who hailed from the same county, ‘They’re the builders working on the sports hall extension. I’ve seen them in their van.’

Marie said, ‘You’re terrible, so you are, Janice. Don’t tell me you’re going to chat him up?’

‘Watch me.’ Janice got up and swaggered over to the table where the men were seated.

‘Mind if I join you?’ she asked and slid onto the bench beside the handsome man.

He shrugged without taking his eyes off his plate. One of the others said, ‘Suit yerself, darlin’.’

She sat down beside the handsome man and crossed her legs, well aware that this hoisted her already short denim skirt up a further two inches. She wore opaque tights and those flat-heeled crumpled ankle boots that were fashionable back then. ‘Mind if I have one,’ she said and took a chip from his plate.

He scowled and she said, ‘You don’t mind, do you? I’m starving.’

He carried on eating.

‘I’m Janice,’ she said and extended a slim hand.

He paused, looked at her hand, and one of the other men sniggered.

‘Hmm,’ he said gruffly, his innate manners preventing him from ignoring her entirely. He gave her a limp handshake and withdrew his calloused hand quickly.

‘So are you working round here or what?’

‘Have been these last three weeks,’ said one of the other men and gave Janice a grin, revealing a mouthful of rotten teeth like decaying tree stumps. She ignored him.

The third man finished eating, burped, stood up and said, ‘I’m off. Need to get some fags. Are you coming, Pat?’

‘Reckon I am,’ said Pat. ‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd. Know what I mean?’ He gave Janice a wink and licked his lips.

When they were alone, the man said nothing until he’d finished eating. Then he pushed his plate away, finished his can of Coke and said, ‘What do you want, Janice?’

‘Just some company,’ said Janice. She placed her elbow on the table, rested her chin on her fist, and tried to look bored. As though all the humanity around her, apart from this man, was beneath her. ‘Is that a crime?’

He looked round the vast, high-ceilinged space and then
brought his calm gaze to rest on her. ‘Reckon there’s plenty of company in here more suited to your age than me,’ he said and speared her with a cool glance. His eyes were the same blue-grey colour of the curtains in her bedroom at home.

She squirmed uncomfortably in her seat, glad that Marie and Katy were too far away to hear. ‘I prefer the company of older men,’ she said brazenly.

He flicked his eyes over her, ran his tongue round the inside of his mouth and said, ‘Not ones that are married, you don’t.’

‘Wanna bet?’ she said and gave him a sultry smile.

He regarded her coldly, took a toothpick out of his pocket and picked his teeth. ‘Listen, doll,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna give you some advice. Stop behaving and,’ he added, running his eyes quickly over her attire, ‘dressing like a prostitute.’ He leant close to her and she caught sight then of a silver cross around his neck on a thick belcher chain. He whispered angrily, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Look at you. You’re little more than a slip of a girl and, if you were my daughter, I’d tan your arse, so I would.’