The Children's Writer (8 page)

T
he week after Chanteleer visited Lootie’s school I came home to find her asleep on the sofa. The cushions were askew and while one arm was across her chest, the other trailed on the floor. I went to the fridge to get a beer. When I came back, she was in the same position. A chill came over me. The possibility that she was dead.

I reached down and shook her. ‘Lootie,’ I whispered. She grunted and opened her eyes. Seeing that it was me, she adjusted the cushions and went back to sleep.

Apparently I was not worth acknowledging.

It’s fair to say (and I am trying to be fair, to be truthful) that Chanteleer, that children’s writer, introduced the notion of competition to my life. I had never dealt with that anxiety before. I am sure now, years later, that I believed my love for Lootie was such that it didn’t matter if she loved me. Since I loved enough for two, what was competition? What was a bit of a leer from Georgio in his tight jeans? Nothing to me. But Chanteleer also provoked another sensation:
intellectual envy—what some might call ‘creative jealousy’. Worse, he posed as a gentleman who could flaunt his creative success. Who could actually lecture on that topic, and have people pay to hear him. And me? Where did I fit into this scheme of things? I was the creature at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder—the slob who hunched over his handlebars, the Monkey Boy.

Racked by self-doubt, I sat and sipped my beer, watching my darling sleep.

I recalled how I had watched my mother die as she lay in her bed.

While she had been a big woman, and never pretty, as she lost weight I saw that she was ugly. Her lank, dark hair fell across her face and no amount of combing would make it stay. I bought her hairclips, but she coughed them loose, or pulled them out, claiming, ‘They hurt.’ Sometimes I put a ribbon in her hair, something deliberately girly, which was more for my amusement than her vanity. She never asked for, and I never showed her, a mirror. I saw what she looked like, that was enough.

As her cheeks sank, her nose became more prominent. Red and veined and hooked. Sitting beside her, I could see into her nostrils, also red and veined. Black hairs sprouted there, always moist. Dripping. I would wipe her top lip with a rag, but I did not attempt to pluck the hairs. There was no point. Her moustache was more evident than ever.
After all
, I thought,
she has no suitor, no gentleman caller other than myself.

I sometimes thought how strange this tableau was—a
pièta
, almost—me sitting on a chair beside the bed, her
hand in mine, her head on the pillow, open-mouthed—but there was no one to see. The little balding doctor with his gold-framed glasses came once a week. He sat in my seat to touch her, and write things, saying, ‘Tsk, tsk.’ And with good reason. He saw old Florrie Bloome lying in that bed, all skinny and hairy and snotty and dribbling, a stupid, pig-headed woman who preferred to die than go to hospital, and her goofy son, Charlie, sitting fat and vapid beside her. Being a doctor, he saw that the umbilical cord was still attached.

‘I’m not going to hospital,’ she would moan, and she never did.

I have often wondered why Mum refused to go. Was it because she was afraid? I doubted that. She was afraid of nothing, having done everything by herself. But after she died, I came to wonder. Had she really? Had she really come down from the country alone, or had her parents, or my father set her up? Had someone stayed with her until I came along? What were the circumstances of her arrival at this place? And of mine? Whatever they were, she saw to it that I was with her at the end.

So for all her apparent self-determination, for all her denials, Mum expected me to be there riding the same line, you might say, sharing the same rut.

Not that Lootie was like my mother. I could never say that. I mean, she was far from ugly, and wasn’t dying, although she was playing some of the same cards, opening her eyes just long enough to ensure that I was there, that I was in her thrall, then drifting into whatever melancholy world she had elected to inhabit.

Lootie’s sojourn in the living room lasted nearly two weeks. She read occasionally, especially those novels by Chanteleer that she had bought, although one afternoon I came home to find my copy of Randolph Stow’s
Tourmaline
on the floor.

‘Why do you like that stuff?’ she said, reaching down and picking the book up.

‘What?’ I said.

‘This…’ She opened the novel at the first page and read, “‘The sky is the garden of Tourmaline…” What the hell does that mean?’

‘It’s literature,’ I said. ‘Imaginative.’

‘You see, Charlie,’ she huffed, easing herself back into the hollow of the sofa, ‘That’s where we differ. Good writers tell you what they’re talking about. They explain exactly what they mean. Take Sebastian for example: if he’s describing a dragon, or a scene, let’s say a scene, he spells it out. None of this arty-farty “the sky is a garden”, stuff. He doesn’t make me work. He doesn’t hurt my head. He
tells
me. That’s what a good author should do—a good book—it should
tell
you!’

I picked up Stow’s novel and took it to the study.

So the children’s writer affected us. Not that he came barging in bearing red roses or protestations of love. He was more refined than that. More gentlemanly. More creative, some might say. More subtle at least. He came from beneath, like some dark and monstrous being, barely imagined yet always there. He was the horror I had been too blind to see—although there was the occasion
in the foyer of the Redmond Barry when that creature had surfaced wielding a murderous and bloodied pen, stabbing,
thus
and
thus
and
thus
, but such beasts lurk within us all, or so Father Steven said, if he could be believed, considering his own fall.

During Lootie’s malingering, when I was at work or at uni, I had reason to believe that she did get up, did leave the sofa, probably even left the house. I saw clothes on the floor, her purse shifted, her shoes by the door. All the same, and despite her mobility (when motivated by Chanteleer, I came to learn), if I was at home, there remained the unspoken expectation that I would wait on her. On the understanding (never articulated, I might add, but known, nevertheless) that she was sick. Yet Lootie was not sick, not in the physical sense, not like my mother. She had no cough, no fever, she complained of no ache or pain. And seeing as she went out, and ate well enough (even what I offered), I doubted she was depressed. Not seriously at least.

It seemed to me (in her thrall, as I was) that her condition was more a metamorphosis, a change from one state to another. That Lootie would eventually emerge (stepping blithely from the sofa, the bedroom, the bathroom) as a new being. Not changed as such, not another woman, but refreshed. Renewed. Or so I deluded myself.

I chose not to fuss, to adopt a wait-and-see approach, all the while eager for the phase to be over, hoping (foolishly) for what was on the other side.

If I was in the living room watching TV and wanted a coffee, I offered her one. If I made myself a snack, I offered her some. But I refused to wait on her. Her half-empty mugs and leftovers remained on the table, her dirty plates in the sink.

I have heard others say that they were blind to the collapse of their relationship. That they were the last to know that it had ended. I was not so ignorant.

Cling to the past though I did, in my heart of hearts, I suspected that our decline had begun.

Deny as I might (and I did, under the elm, heartily, vociferously, drunkenly, nightly) from the first time I had seen her staring at Chanteleer in the Redmond Barry—no, now I lie—from the day of the garden party, where they exchanged glances—no, even that is not the truth—from the day of his encounter with her class at school—yes, better—or, even more definitively—from that first time she said, ‘I hate kids’—I suspected (intuited?) that our life together was over.

Eventually, after much agonising (and setting aside of the booze), I came to an understanding that since Lootie declined to tell me the full story of what Chanteleer had said to her in the staff room, she was lying to me. That the keeping of secrets, the hoarding of intimacies (whether advice or suggestion) is to deliberately refrain from revealing the truth.

Which is lying.

None of this should be taken to mean that I had stopped loving Lootie. Nor that I had given up on her.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason that I didn’t wait on her was that I loved her too much.

My experience with my mother had taught me that to accept responsibility for someone else’s life, even though they offer it to you, is as good as killing them. So I figured that if I did everything for Lootie, I wasn’t helping her. I was pandering to her, but what part of her—her misery or her ego—I had no way of knowing.

This proved to be true, but only after a fashion. I had reckoned without the subtlety of Chanteleer. How he could enter, and alter a life. Like a shadow, as I have said. Lurking.

At the end of a fortnight, Lootie announced, ‘I’m going out.’

‘Sure,’ I said, standing aside. This was new. She usually left the house in my absence, to go where, and to do what, I had no idea, only suspicion. But loving her as I did, I would not stand in her way.

This time, when she came home, her hair was cut in a style. Dressy, you might say. Business-like. The new Lootie was becoming.

A
s a relationship ends, there are movements, as in a concerto. But in saying so, I suggest that I know something about music, which I don’t. So I will say, as a relationship ends there are periods of acceleration and stasis. In yobbo’s terms: fast bits and slow bits. Quiet times when it seems that all will be well, frenetic times when breath won’t come. When life is bedlam. An experience played out by mad people.

I look back now in an attempt to understand. But that doesn’t mean I find either period (the stasis or the acceleration, the fast bits or the slow bits) easy to recall, and even harder to express.

Other than to say, those last days were hell.

We sat in the living room eating takeaway. The TV was on. I put my dinner plate aside, reaching for the remote.

‘What?’ Lootie asked.

‘You tell me,’ I said.

‘About what?’

‘Oh, come on.’ I really hated this dumb-arse game.

(Maybe this was the beginning of my growth. The start of my own metamorphosis. The shedding of my monkey suit. The first attempt to stand upright. To leave my childhood behind.)

‘Lootie,’ I said, taking her hand. ‘I’m worried about you. You mope around the house, then just like that you go and change your hair. I know that you’re skipping uni. I’ve seen the warning notice on your desk. What’s going on?’

‘Don’t you like my hair?’ She pulled away. (More dum-barse games.)

‘I love your hair. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying something’s going on…’

‘The notice from uni is bullshit,’ she said, banging her plate on the table. Readying for a barney, I expect. ‘And I
am
going. This week at least. I’m seeing a counsellor.’

‘For what?’

‘Because I want to change my degree.’

‘What?’

‘Relax,’ she said. ‘I’m not dropping out. I’m thinking of dropping Education. That’s all.’

‘That’s all? That’s all you ever wanted. To be a teacher. What’s gone wrong?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Evidently.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you. I woke up to myself. I thought that I would be good with kids, but I wasn’t. I’m thinking of doing Librarianship. Okay?’ She reached for the remote but I beat her to it.

‘No,’ I said, ‘let’s talk for a bit.’ She groaned. ‘Who told you that you were no good with kids?’

‘I worked it out.’

‘Was it because of that episode with Chanteleer?’

‘It had nothing to do with Sebastian.’

I took the plunge. ‘That’s not what I heard.’

‘Oh?’

‘Rory’s mother is a cleaner at St Xavier’s. He told me.’

She laughed. ‘And you believe that loser?’

I looked at her, lost for words.

She grabbed the remote and turned the TV up.

I went into the garden.

A few days later I came home very tired. ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ Lootie said, excited. ‘Wait.’ She pushed me onto the sofa and ran up to the bedroom, leaving me nonplussed. I heard rustling and a few minutes later she came down the stairs wearing a red dress,
crêpe de Chine
, low cut, expensive, sexy.

‘Lootie!’ I gasped. She looked great.

Standing on the bottom step, she sashayed this way and that, beaming. ‘You like?’

‘I do,’ I said, attempting to grab her. ‘Come here. I’ll show you how much.’

She laughed and danced away, which is when I saw her shoes. Lootie never wore high heels. These were black stilettos, her toes peeping seductively. For anyone with a shoe fetish, they were a dream. She looked wonderful, adult, feminine, sexual.

‘What’s this all about?’ I asked, as well I might.

She opened her arms wide and bowed. Looking up, she
said, ‘We’ve been invited to Sebastian Chanteleer’s for dinner.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Why do you hate him so much?’ she wanted to know.

‘When did he ask you?’ I answered. Like that mattered.

She stopped showing off and challenged me, throwing her chest out, lifting her chin.

‘I had lunch with Sebastian yesterday,’ she said. ‘He asked me then. He said that you could come, if you wanted.’

‘I could come? Why would he want me?’

Was this some frightful ménage à trois? Did he seek to humiliate me in front of her?

‘For dinner,’ I said, stupidly. ‘At his place?’

‘Where else?’ She was being silly now, ruffling the dress around her hips, flighty, angry.

‘Maybe a pub? A restaurant? Any public place would be easier to leave.’

She snorted, pushing me to one side. ‘You can leave anytime you like.’

‘Why am I invited?’ I said, my hands flapping, crazy. ‘Why are you invited? Why are
we
invited at all? Tell me, anything. Lootie, please?’

I was begging. I burst into tears. Sobs, snot, dribbly appeals. She laughed (nervously, true, all excitement) and ran up to the bedroom. I followed, in great leaps, stumbling to the door. I saw that she was pulling the dress off, over her head. She failed, of course, half-crazed as she was, flustered and stupid, catching the fabric up in great red ruffles.

I tried to help. I was all over the place, sobbing and wet and snotty.

When the dress was over her head, and off, I stood away, blubbering, which was stupid of course, as the entire event had been.

‘I want to go,’ she said, turning to face me, her bare breasts thrust forward.

I put my arms around her, pulling her towards me, wanting to kiss her neck, her shoulders, her nipples, pink and hard. Elevated.

‘Go away,’ she said, pushing her hand against my chest, pushing. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘I want to go anywhere you go,’ I said, thinking this made sense. That it might appease. Or appeal to logic. Or something. ‘I want to know everyone you know.’

‘Huh!’ she said, dropping on the bed and reaching for a T-shirt. ‘Huh!’

‘When?’ I asked defeated, standing away.

‘This Saturday night.’

‘Is it formal?’

Why do we ask such things at such times? How does the human mind work?

‘Hire a suit,’ she said, apparently having thought of this before.

‘Who’ll be there?’

I know that I asked this. I know because I remember the answer, ever so clearly.

‘His mother,’ she said. ‘That’s why he asked you. I guess.’

Like Lootie herself (I think), I recognised a vague logic in this.

‘Why are we invited at all?’ I asked yet again, still struggling to make sense of it all.

‘Because,’ she said, picking up the dress. ‘Because.’

‘Because?’ I said. ‘I want more than “because”. Tell me! Lootie, please?’

‘Because Sebastian is interested in my future. There. I’m saying no more.’

Once again I retreated to the garden, to my sanctuary beneath the sparse and leafless elm.

Saturday evening I dressed and booked a cab for six-thirty. I was determined to see this through. To be calm, civil, to observe dispassionately. By complying, I hoped to make sense of what was going on.

At six-fifteen, I plastered down my hair and while Lootie dressed I sneaked into the kitchen to sink two neat brandies. Not the best start, perhaps, but reinforced, I waited in the garden.

For a second time, a cab dropped us off at Chanteleer’s place. Once again we stopped to buy bubbly. I climbed out to help Lootie in her sexy red dress. I looked like a ponce in a blue business suit. The hire place had no dinner suits in ‘HUGE’. I didn’t care what I looked like (I wasn’t trying to chat up Chanteleer) but I did care that I felt uncomfortable. Anything with buttons made me feel tight.

‘Somebody will take your coat when we get there,’ Lootie said, which led me to ask why I was wearing a coat at all. She declined to answer.

We stepped up to the foyer and knocked. Lootie gave me the once-over, brushing off my shoulders. No one
answered, so Lootie waited, then knocked again. We could hear voices, a man and a woman. ‘The door,’ a second male said. ‘Go, go…’ This was Chanteleer, I think. Lootie looked at me. ‘They have company,’ she said, surprised. I was glad if they did, I wouldn’t have to try so hard.

Somewhere a door slammed. There were more voices. A man and a woman. A few minutes later Chanteleer opened the door. ‘Oh!’ he said, his bow tie crooked, his hair uncombed.

‘Are we early?’ Lootie asked.

‘No, no. Not at all.’ Clearly he was lying. We had interrupted something. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I was in my study. Writing.’ Another lie. He had a scotch glass in his hand. Only the ice remained.

‘I thought I heard company,’ Lootie said.

‘Company? No! You
are
our company.’ Lootie glanced at me. ‘Come through,’ he said, sweeping us before him, ‘come through. Mother is in her drawing room. Mother…’

The hall was dark, the walls stained-timber panelling. Every few metres, on the right and only slightly above my head, a light fitting protruded. Each held a single incandescent bulb in the shape of a flame, some lit, some flickering, one dead. We walked on a maroon carpet, threadbare in places. High-backed dining chairs were placed intermittently along the left-hand side, protruding awkwardly. These were a cause for muttered apology, if one was prone to apologising to furniture. Being Charlie Bloome (loser), I suffered from this affliction.

We shuffled along, Lootie first, then me, Chanteleer behind, his finger in my back, stiff, insistent. ‘A little further,’ he said.

There were rooms to the right and to the left, some doors shut, several open. I glanced in (so far as the gloom would allow), surprised at the bareness of the place, the lack of furnishings, of any degree of permanence. In one room I saw a solitary occasional table standing askew, in another an armchair, its back to the door, in another a pile of books on the floor. None of these spaces appeared inhabited. All was in a state of flux.

‘Still settling in?’ I ventured.

Chanteleer said ‘Um,’ dangerously close to my left ear. I quickened my step.

‘Next on the left,’ he said, and Lootie stopped before an open door. I came up behind her, Chanteleer behind me. I was struck by the cloying scent of
eau de cologne.
That smell of old lady’s handbag. I knew it from my mother’s clients. Chanteleer said, ‘Mother…’

In a corner, a parchment-shaded reading lamp cast an insipid glow. Beneath the lamp was a square of purple carpet and a chair, the same as the straight-back dining chairs I had apologised to in the hall. And on that chair, her pink-slippered feet crossed on the carpet, sat the mother. I recognised her from the garden party. Her head was bent, reading a book. A Bible, I could see. ‘This is Alice, from that school,’ Chanteleer said, pushing past us to enter the room. ‘And…’

‘Charlie,’ I said. ‘Charlie Bloome.’

The woman looked up. Bird-like. Alert.

‘I was reading the book of Jeremiah,’ she said looking directly at me. ‘Do you know the prophet says that the human heart is wicked and deceitful above all things?’

‘Mother…’ Chanteleer began, embarrassed, but the old woman went on.

‘If that is true,’ she continued, ‘why did God make us?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ I shrugged, making the goofy face.

‘And why,’ she persisted leaning forward to stare even more closely, ‘why does it say that our hearts devise wicked imaginings?’

I felt my face colour, and stepped back, but Chanteleer had evidently experienced her ravings before.

‘Mother,’ he said firmly, ‘Enough. Alice and her friend have come for dinner. They don’t need a sermon.’ As he spoke, I recognised a chink in his armour. He too had a crazy old mother. Is this what Lootie had meant when she said, ‘That’s why he asked you’? Knowing that I had nursed my own mother, was I expected to bond with Constance Chanteleer while Sebastian and Lootie talked their talk? While Sebastian and Lootie sneaked away to canoodle?

I felt a surge of anger, a monstrous jealousy, my hand gripping an imagined pen, that dark ecstasy as I plunged it into the writer’s throat.
Thus
and
thus
and
thus
…But now the old woman was on her feet, tottering towards me still adrift in the doorway. I gripped Lootie’s hand.

‘Let’s have a drink before dinner,’ Chanteleer said, indicating that we should step away from the door. That irrespective of elderly mothers, we should move things along.

‘I brought champagne,’ Lootie said, holding out the bottle. ‘It’s lovely and cold.’ She was suffering, I could tell. Nervous. Things were not proceeding as expected, whatever that meant. (And her with her new hair and dress.)

We followed the mother along the dark hall. There were more empty rooms. I kept my eyes out for the writer’s study but saw no sign. A flight of stairs led up to the bedrooms above, I imagined. I noticed a pair of richly stained double doors (closed), which I presumed would open onto a big room (a living room? a dining room?). Next was a kitchen (old fashioned but promising) and finally I saw the night sky.

Chanteleer turned on a light, a harsh fluorescent tube. We had entered a sun room, a conservatory. The space was glassed-in with sliding windows; there were four wicker chairs and two occasional tables, one of which sported a solitary silver bell, the other a pair of gardener’s gloves, all crumpled and grubby alongside a wilting begonia, the pot tied with a red satin bow (a neglected gift?). One window was open to the night and to the right a door was ajar, leading to a balcony and the garden below. I saw the shape of a balustrade. This was where Chanteleer and his mother, posing as royalty, had first appeared on the day of the garden party.

‘Take a seat,’ he said, settling the old lady. ‘Dinner is almost ready. I’ll get some glasses.’ He took the champagne from Lootie and left, his empty scotch glass still in his hand.

Where was the owner of the other male voice?

I sat beside Lootie, opposite the mother. She wore a pink dress, buttoned down the front. One button was undone. I saw her fleshy silk petticoat.

I felt uncomfortable, confined, even though the door was open to the garden. ‘Do you mind if I take off my coat?’ I asked, and since nobody objected, I stood up and draped it over the back of my chair. I sat again, settled, the loss of the coat and the two brandies skolled in our kitchen starting to relax me.

‘Who is the gardener?’ I said, satisfied that it was only polite to initiate small talk while Chanteleer was away.