The Light of Amsterdam (36 page)

‘She's cool with it.'

‘That's good,' she said, not trying to disguise her sarcasm.

‘Maybe we should go somewhere else. If you've finished?'

‘In a minute, Shannon. There's some things I need to know before we go anywhere,' she said, leaning closer across the table so that she didn't miss any of her daughter's answers. ‘So when did you first meet him and how often were you seeing him?'

‘That first time – the time he came to the store – was in January. The sales were on. We met every so often, went to his house a couple of times – that's all.'

She wanted to stretch her arms across the table and pull her daughter into sharper focus. Vagueness would only allow uncertainties to rattle round her head for longer than she could bear.

‘How often? Once a month, twice a month, more?'

‘Mum, what does it matter whether it was once or twice a month?'

Her face said she was weary of the questions but she didn't care about her daughter's weariness and if she had been able to maintain a secret for almost a year then she could have the decency to bear them now until she had answered every one.

‘It matters to me, Shannon, everything matters to me, so how often did you see him?'

‘I don't know,' and in her voice was a thin little whine of protest. ‘No more than once a month, mostly he'd meet me after work and we'd have a drink and then he'd drive me home.'

‘He drove you to the house?'

‘Don't panic, he never came into the street, just left me off somewhere I could walk. Mum, let's go somewhere else.'

‘In a minute.' Then she paused. ‘And did he ask about me?'

‘Just if you were all right but before you start we didn't spend the time talking about you.
OK
?'

‘So what did you talk about all these times you were meeting him?'

Shannon leant back on her seat and pushed her finished tray of chips away from her as if they had nothing to do with her then wiped her fingers with the tissue, scrunched it and dropped it into the empty tray.

‘I'll tell you if that's what you really want but not in here and not if you're going to go berserk over everything I say.'

‘
OK
, we'll walk or find somewhere else. And I'm not going to go berserk,' but as soon as she had said it she didn't know whether she'd be able to keep her temper or not.

The man behind the counter called goodbye and told them to come again as they stepped into the night street and turned the corner to join the main thoroughfare that she knew was the start of their journey back to their hotel. As they set off she sensed the awkwardness between them and her daughter didn't link her arm as she had done earlier.

‘So what do you think of Amsterdam?' Shannon asked, glancing at her across the self-conscious gap that separated them.

‘It's beautiful.'

‘Beautiful?' Her daughter's voice echoed with incredulity. ‘I think it's a hole and these bloody bikes do my head in – everywhere you go you nearly get run over. And we saw the red-light area this afternoon. Just tacky and gross. I don't know why we didn't go somewhere else, somewhere closer and cheaper. Even Dublin would have been better than this dump or we could even have stayed in a Belfast hotel with a health spa.'

She resisted the temptation to remind her of her own opinion offered when the trip was announced and they walked in a laboured silence under the beaded strings of Christmas lights and those in the shapes of flowers and butterflies attached to the fronts of shops. Across a canal the complete outline of a house was illuminated and as they walked at an angle to it, it seemed to move and lend its light to its neighbours. Back home most houses had their trees and lights up for weeks and every year there were more and more families turning their homes into Santa's grotto with every single space of house and garden plastered with so many lights and illuminated figures that they could probably be seen from outer space. It was all a show, all a competition to be better than everyone else – she'd no time for it and she wondered if they felt so smug when their January electricity bills arrived. She remembered that Shannon had complained that their tree was too small and the decorations ugly. She wanted a tree dressed all in the same colour, in red or silver, like she had seen in a magazine, but never showed any inclination to do something about it herself, or spend some of her money in the store where she worked to make it possible.

Her daughter thought the city was ugly. Well she was glad because she didn't want to share the truth of it with her. So let her think that. She glanced at her as they walked, the gap between them just wide enough for both to know its meaning, and in that moment her daughter's beauty, the thing in which they both took so much pride, seemed suddenly a little tawdry, a little threadbare. She saw something of her own hardness in the face that was pinched and sharpened by the cold but there was something else she didn't like. She knew that she could never tell her daughter about the pictures with the light coming out of them, about the music in the church, and she realised for the first time that there were so many things she never shared with her child. She had said nothing about the dying man, or the missing bracelet, or what it was like to work in the home. And after what Shannon had kept hidden from her there would always be this distance between them even when it was over and they had made things up in whatever way was possible.

They walked quickly, from time to time glancing in at the doorways of some bars, but everywhere looked crowded and noisy and so they kept on and she wondered who would be the first to break and bridge the gap by linking arms. She told herself that it wouldn't be her as she constructed glossy images of his house, hurting herself by compiling unfavourable comparisons with theirs. He knew where she lived and so understood that she hadn't made anything of herself in terms of what would impress him. It couldn't be hidden either by a new wedding outfit which despite the money she had spent on it wouldn't ever make her look more than someone who was trying but who hadn't had enough to spend. She couldn't even console herself with her daughter's beauty because he would be able to claim at least half of that. It suddenly felt like the mist was in her eyes and throat.

In a short while they would be back at the hotel that was really only a cheap hostel. She had established a surer grasp of the city's geography now and knew that soon, in the company of the rest of the party, there would be no chance of hearing or saying what she needed. So she pulled her daughter by the arm and silently gestured that they should sit on one of the sheltered metal benches at a tram stop. It would do. There was no one else there. Shannon wiped the seat dismissively with one of the serviettes that she had carried with her but sat down, her hands stuffed deep into her thin jacket.

‘So, Mum, ask me whatever it is you want to know and I'll tell you.' Her voice was stubborn, almost resentful.

She wanted to ask her how she could stick this knife in her heart, how it was that she had no idea of the pain and betrayal she had caused. She wanted to ask how her daughter could believe that she could go to the wedding and sit at a table with someone who had left her pregnant and abandoned her to the world's scorn with a scribbled note pushed through her door in the darkness. Part of her wanted to slap her again and she would have done it, if even for a second she believed that it would make her understand.

‘Did he invite himself to the wedding or did you?'

‘I invited him. But not for ages and ages. He wasn't going to come at first but I persuaded him. It wasn't easy.'

‘But why, Shannon? Help me to understand why?' The pleading in her voice shocked her – it was not something she had ever heard before.

‘Because he's my father and because he's sorry – he's really, really sorry. He said he behaved like a bastard and he's always regretted it. Says if it's not too late he wants to try and make up to me for it in any way he can.'

‘And what about me – how's he going to make it up to me?'

‘He knows he can't.'

‘And how's he going to make it up to you after twenty years? Get in a time machine and travel back, make everything different?'

A bicycle went by with an old woman hunched over the handlebars and labouring a little. She heard the whirr of the wheels, the slow rasp of her breathing. Only the steady beam of her lamp's white light signalled any sense of conviction. As she watched she felt intense sympathy for her then an anger that life had to be such a struggle, that nothing was given easily to people like them. An idea came to her that if someone had been able to paint her that morning as she read his letter, the same way that someone had painted the young woman in the blue smock, then her daughter might have been able to understand. But she knew she would never even be the centre of one of the photographs that she looked at each morning, much less a painting. Shannon took her hands out of her pockets and blew into them, then with her eyes focused on the other side of the street said, ‘He's giving me money.'

‘Money?'

‘A deposit for a house.'

‘How much?' She shivered then started as a tram rattled round the corner, its warning bell a loud clang that seemed to echo inside her head. She felt sick. There was a shrill shunt and a wheeze of brakes as the tram stopped in front of them and people emerged from the opened doors. She glanced up at the illuminated faces behind the glass and saw them looking down at her. She turned her eyes away. There was no way of knowing what her daughter might say any more. The tram snaked into the mist and they were alone again.

‘Twenty thousand pounds. He's giving us twenty thousand to put down as a deposit. He knows a builder who's doing some town houses out near Dundonald and we're getting first choice of a site. And they're turnkey which means everything's already done for you – the kitchen, floors and everything. All you have to do is put your furniture in.'

‘And you think twenty thousand pounds makes everything all right?' She stared at her daughter but Shannon continued to keep her eyes fixed in front. ‘Twenty thousand pounds – that's a thousand pounds for every year he wasn't there for you.' But as she said it she knew it was over. Shannon had been bought out and there was nothing she could put on the table to change that. She slumped back empty-handed against the glass and felt it cold on the back of her head. Faced with the hard currency and power of money, what could compete? All the years she had scrimped and saved, the years she went without, all the times she got up half-asleep in the middle of the night to look after her, even the nine lonely months she carried her – none of these could be traded in for a deposit on a house. And so everything she had given her daughter was in the past and it was her father who was to give her the future. She felt the sickness in her stomach again and knew she would have cried if that had been something allowed to herself. There seemed a special cruelty in that she had seen the wedding as her single chance of reward, of receiving public credit for having paid for so much and brought everything to its moment of success. It had pleased her that despite it all, despite being a single parent, people would acknowledge that she had done right by her daughter, that she had given her her big day. Now there was to be no reward and all that remained was to decide what it was she was going to do about the wedding. Her attendance was the only card she had left to play. As she glanced at her daughter again she thought of making her choose between her presence and her father's and she cringed at the very use of the word father. To use it was to put them both on an equal footing and give him a status he had never earned.

‘I don't forgive him,' Shannon said, looking at her for the first time. ‘I'll never forgive him. What he did to you was terrible and no money can make that right.' She paused as if waiting for her mother to say something but she sat silently, unable to trust her voice. ‘I know that, Mum, and I won't ever forget it. So don't ever think that.' She paused again, looking for a response.

‘I'm glad,' she said in what sounded whispery and uncertain to her and like someone else's voice. Two young black boys in white tracksuits ambled past, inspecting them briefly before disappearing like twin ghosts into the mist. The sound of music seeped lazily in from the distance.

‘I think he's sorry about what he did and wants to try and find a way to say that.'

‘He's never said sorry to me.'

‘And what would be the point of that, Mum, because you wouldn't accept it and you'd be angry that he's even said it! He knows that. You know that. And he said he wouldn't come to the wedding unless you allowed it.'

‘But I don't allow it, Shannon.' Her voice was stronger now, renewed with the passion of her feelings but shaken by the shock of her daughter telling her something that she knew was true.

‘I know you don't want it but I'm not asking for him, I'm asking for me and that's a big difference. I think he's probably not the same person you knew. He's good to his two children and I know he wasn't good to me but he's ashamed of that and I want to let him be a part of my life. So I'm asking you to let him come, to do it for me and because it's my day and I want him to be there even if he doesn't deserve it.'