The Little Red Chairs (12 page)

‘Unto your necklace,’ he said and kissed her and they lay down, his body next to hers, seeking her with his hands, with his mouth, with his whole being, as if in the name of love, or what she believed to be love, he could not get enough of her. Her breath came in little gasps, their limbs entwined, the healer and she, the stranger and she, like lovers now, as in a story or in a myth. At the moment of immolation he shouted, ‘Take it, take all … I am yours,’ and she teased him with her knuckles, which he bit into, with a primal hunger.

Afterwards, he spread the strands of her black hair along the pillow, and he smelt it and kissed it and tasted it. She would
remember this forever, the room with the candles burning down, the smell of warm wax, yellow roses opening in the heat, as outside the sky was a deep blue, that soft satiny blue when night has her to herself.

‘I will let you sleep now,’ he said and gathered his belongings, with his boots and his laptop under his other arm.

It was early when he knocked on her door, already dressed to leave. He would not be staying for breakfast. She guessed it was caution, but she did not say anything. She was happy, still half inside a dream as she got out of bed and stood on his insteps, so that he could kiss her and smell the different perfumes of the night that clung to her body and the crumpled nightgown.

‘The coming weeks will answer all our questions,’ he said.

‘But we will meet,’ she said.

‘We must not get your story mixed up with my story Fidelma,’ he said.

‘And what is your story Vlad?’ She could barely hide her dismay.

‘My sacred duty to God and my own people,’ he said in the words of a preacher.

Later, she went with the porter, as she had promised, to see the sculptures. There they were by a wall, hoops of bronze, black and ambered, affixed to a wire mesh, but with no revelation, no trace of the passions that had informed them, tall grasses growing up around them, guarding their weathered silence.

*

Jack was waiting for her in the doorway, a reproachful look in his eyes because she was one hour later than she had promised.
He believed she had gone to a Carmelite convent for two days of silence, fast and meditation, because that was what she had told him. He wore an old brown leather glove that was usually kept on a shelf in the potting shed and thrusting it at her, he said, ‘Look, look.’ Then he opened it to reveal the ooze of a bat that he had squeezed to death. Two, as he said, had come in, in the night and when he got up and later went to wash his hands, he found them in the washbasin, clung together like vampires. The moment he touched them they began to fly, big circuits, out of the bathroom, into the hall, up to the ceiling, passing back and forth before his eyes, in winding, evil loops. He had to go outside and get the stepladder and then stand on the top rung, hitting out with the sole of his slipper to lure them down where he could do for them. Eventually, he belted one that fell into the tallboy with the maidenhair fern and seizing the china flowerpot, he squashed it to death, blood and pus spewing out like slime, black and bloodied, while the second one, the she-devil, escaped through the open window.

‘I would have pulped her too,’ he said. Such seething words from a man who had never harmed anyone in his life.

‘Oh poor Jack,’ she said.

‘Oh poor Jack,’ he said sourly, adding that he had not had a wink of sleep. She heard herself say that they would go out for dinner, go over to Renvyle, where they went each June on their wedding anniversary. He said they could not afford it. She parried. She had buyers for their pair of antique mirrors and the silver lampstands in the shop. She had discussed it with the porter, who promised to try and find a purchaser for her. Eventually Jack agreed and she brought him upstairs, drew the blinds in their bedroom, put a wool rug over him and went out.

It was downstairs that she confronted herself. The daylight of crime. Images kept crowding in, Vlad’s high boots, the rim of one toppling over the other, the miniature golf club, the scarf that smelt of verbena, crusts of wax like spent roses on the wooden bureau and his two selves, the passionate one and the ruthless fugitive. She remembered the dream she was having when he knocked, first on the outer door, then on the inner door and how she jumped up. In the dream, she was in some mountain place, a terrain so real that the scrub pricked and bled her skin. Then three dogs came to unseat her in her lair, circling it, yelping, but instead of trying to chase them away, she began to think up ploys and strategies to deceive them. It seemed to her that her night of passion had made her both deceitful and animal-like. She disliked the alacrity with which he had taken his leave of her –
We must not get your story mixed up with my story Fidelma.

Long before they were ready to set out, Jack was in the hall with his coat on, pacing back and forth, rattling the small change in his pocket, as he always did, and urging her to hurry up. How the sound of those footsteps, the rattle of loose change, his punctuality, his bursts of affection, repelled her.

The dining room where they sat, so contrasting with the previous evening, everything shabbier, frayed embroideries, dust in the folds of the taffeta curtains, faded photos of ancestors and little knickknacks, all falling into neglect and melancholy, the world she was retreating from. From the two sherries, Jack’s eyes had clouded as he leant over her with a terrible and weeping ardour, saying too loudly that no man had a wife so beautiful and so constant. He began to reminisce, the dancing lessons they had taken in Nassau Street in Dublin, the evening in Formentor
when she lost her ring in the sands and how he dug and dug until he’d found it, the yew trees they put down and that would outlive them.

Mujo

‘I am not going up there,’ Mujo tells them, ‘I am staying down here … All boys he round up. Many thousand in one day. He go on TV and say it not happen. My mother and sisters say our brothers are gone. So are our cousins. They are down in the ground but not dead. My mother and sisters they taken in a cart. I am not going up there.’

For one known as the mute, it is the longest speech he has ever made and could not have come at a worse moment.

‘This is fecking crazy,’ Carmel says and the pan she threw into the air in temper, drops with a zing on the stone floor. Two major functions. Sister Bonaventure’s sixtieth, an English shooting party and Mujo will not carry trays, because the man at table seventeen is a bad man. Mujo had been sent up earlier with boxes of candles and saw the bad man. But, as she reminded him, last week the man at table seventeen was a bad man and he turned out to be a missionary, home from Africa.

‘It’s the fecking table,’ she says, but he is adamant.

‘He done evil.’

‘What evil?’

‘He take everything.’

‘You have no memory …’

‘I don’t need memory … it happen …’

‘Oh … feckin’ clairvoyance.’

Mujo has begun to cry.

‘Why are you crying Muj?’ Tommy has brought him to the pantry to talk sense into him.

‘I am not crying.’

‘Look, son, all you’re asked is to carry up heavy trays, not to serve tables and if you don’t do it, you have no feckin’ family here either … it’s back to some piss hostel, in the middle of nowhere …’

A truce is reached. He will carry up the trays, but he will not go near the table, where the bad man’s wine is already breathing, in a special decanter, red circles, manifest on the white tablecloth.

‘Thank Jesus,’ Carmel says, as she plunges lobsters into vats of boiling water and prays for the repose of their soul.

‘Coming through … coming through,’ the voices on the stairs are now heard, as they pass one another, going up and down, up and down, careful to avoid a crash.

Upstairs all are in thrall. Bottles of wine and water placed along the length of the table and the colours within the wedges of cut glass, dancing like billy-o. Sister Bonaventure is lost for words and also worried about the palpitations. She can hardly believe it. A surprise party and she thinking she was going to the chapel to say the rosary. Mona had various people in the town contribute and had chosen the menu. Celeriac and apple soup or pâté to start, with pheasant or lobster Thermidor for the main course.

The second large party is a group of English people who have come for the shoot and the mother, or perhaps it is the grandmother, holds court as she describes to several young men her fall in her own house in Devon. It was like this: she had just put the pot pourri in the guest room, came out onto her landing and somehow must have been distracted or else exhausted, because she missed a step. Yes, tumbled on her own stairs, never letting
go of her little dog, her little Winston, even though it transpired that because of that, she had sprained her neck and dislocated her right shoulder. Her voice carries through the room, but she is oblivious of that and the fact that people are laughing at her.

Mujo stands holding the tray, and the group at Sister B’s table are marvelling at the sight of the piping hot lobsters, their pink tentacles branching out, holding onto one another. They stand up in twos and threes, in order to be photographed. Desiree is taking the photographs on her smartphone. Then when all have been photographed, he helps to pass the plates around, while Hedda crosses to the sideboard for dishes of potato dauphinoise and mixed vegetables, from the burners.

Mujo is now asked to capture their faces, their elation, as they behold the feast set down before them. First he refuses, says he does not want to, but they insist and for it he is told to stand back, and get a wide shot. The doctor’s table is just to one side, which means he might be in the picture. Suddenly he is shouting, ‘
Stani
, stani – ne, ne, ne,
’ as he tries to seize the phone, except it is too late, the picture has already been taken. Mujo will not hand the phone over, as it belongs to Desiree and not this man.

‘
Glupa
budala
.’ Stupid idiot.

‘
Ja
znam ko si ti
,’ Mujo says. He does know him. The voice is unmistakable. This is the voice from before, the voice he heard on television when he was three, or maybe four, the voice that put terror into people and filled him with fear before he fully knew what fear was. But he is fearless now. He will fight. It is for everyone, it is for the dead people. They stand, as on the battlefront – man and boy. It seems to Mujo that something he did not know, or rather something he half knew, is happening. The wanted man, the mass murderer.

‘Beast,’ he says in an instantaneous righteousness.

The doctor rushes suddenly, his fury unleashed, and strikes the boy several hard slaps on the cheek. He catches him by the hair and whirls him round and round, like a circus exhibit, Mujo hitting any way he can. They stumble and in that brief hiatus he breaks loose, leaving a tuft of hair in the man’s fist, then hooking himself to the man’s breeches, like a goat, he begins to kick, the kicks tremendous, athletic, almost phantom-like. They fight, the one with his hands, the other with his feet, in an entwinement that could be farcical if it were not so fierce and then, together, they fall over the table, where the red wine from the overturned decanter begins to spill harmlessly. Amidst screams and cries that are both desperate and despairing, Salvatore, one of the waiters, and Plodder Pat pull them apart and a cluster of waiters surrounds the healer, craven with apologies, while Mujo is thrown to Carmel in the other room. She lugs him by the ear down the back stairs, as he is still kicking and on the last two steps, flings him down.

He lies where he has fallen, with staff having to vault over him, carrying their trays.

The kitchen is aswirl with gossip, how the healer stormed out, refusing any offer of apology or hospitality, Desiree’s phone was confiscated and the manager had driven over from his own house and ordered complimentary Irish coffees, for everyone, sending the staff ballistic.

A sort of calm has descended, cutlery and cruets are put away, the linen is bundled up, the drinks fridge locked and the various dishwashers rumbling away. The brouhaha will soon be forgotten, but Ivan thinks differently, that poor boy’s head is full of demons. Once, on a Sunday, he had looked in a scrapbook and seen the same words over and over again –
Blood. Bleed. Brother
.
Bleed
like pig. Brother. Krv. Svinja. Brat. Blood. Pig. Brother.

For over an hour Mujo lies there, bunched up, and every so often his body arches into sudden aghast spasm.

‘Get up for God’s sake.’ It is Tommy who moves him and sits him on a chair. Then they wash the wounds and the crown of his head from where the hair has been pulled and put disinfectant on them. It is as if they are not there. He is all alone, his eyes terrified and hopeless and with the frozen lostness of the abandoned.

Next day he is called to the office in the yard, where the manager and his young assistant Conor are waiting. They sit him down. It is a leather chair that swivels and he feels lost inside it. They speak reasonably, saying this unfortunate incident has to be cleared up. They ask him to give an account of himself and why he had behaved like a whelp. He is unable. He is almost a mute again. The manager’s retriever keeps chewing the tongue of his boot that he hasn’t laced. Was he out of his mind when he insulted the gentleman? They have looked up photographs of wanted war criminals on the internet, which they now show him and none remotely resembles their healer in his black outfits and his white hair. No way. Only a madman would see a resemblance. No.
Ne. Ne
. So why did he do it? Why did he name him? Had he mistaken him for someone else? He doesn’t know. He isn’t sure. He isn’t sure of anything. Could he please explain himself and his violent actions. He looks up at them, his face blank and tragic. Always bad things, bad things long ago and bad things last night and bad things just minutes away. The moment they say that they will take the matter up with the police, he begins to shake, uncontrollably.
Ne, ne, ne
. He asks to be let back to the kitchen, as the peeling for the dinner is now. They tell themselves
it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding, a fantasy, from a boy given to fantasies.