The Misremembered Man (7 page)

Jamie McCloone was in despair as to how to address the anonymous woman behind the ad. Having already used and discarded four pages on the salutation, he worried that the whole writing pad might be in the grate and up in smoke before he’d manage to get the first sentence down.

He leaned back on the kitchen chair and sighed heavily. There was nothing else for it but to cycle down to Rose McFadden and ask her to write it for him. Because although Jamie’s handwriting was reasonably legible, he wasn’t so great at the spelling and punctuation and the like.

Of course, this would mean that Rose would know his business. But since she was on intimate terms with his underwear anyway, sure what did it matter? And wasn’t it Rose who had suggested the idea to Paddy in the first place, after all? And, at the end of the day, Rose was a very decent woman and not one to go spreading rumors or smearing gossip about—unlike Maisie Ryan and her sort.

Rose understood at once. “No trouble at all,” she said. “You just sit yourself down there, Jamie, and we’ll see what we can do.”

She pulled out a chair from the cluttered table, straightened and patted a plump cushion.

The kitchen was hung about with the aromas of baking bread commingling with past and future meals: the breakfast fry-up, the lunchtime casserole, a pot of broth a-bubble on the stove. She appeared like a dust-blown mason in a quarry; flour coated her strong forearms and powdered her ginger hair, unwisely permed in a nimbus of loopy curls. Her cheeks were forever reddened from heightened blood pressure, broken veins, and the heat from oven and stovetop.

She was an industrious housewife and capable cook, had conquered most recipes in her
Raeburn Royal Cookbook
with varying measures of success, could knit and sew, produce and fashion most things from instruction sheet or pattern.

Every chair and window and surface in the house expressed Rose’s devotion to creative crafts and a liking for thrift-store tat. Drapes: swagged, tailed, pleated and flounced. Cushions: ruffled and ribbed. Antimacassars and runners: laced, crocheted, appliquéd, embroidered, tatted and frilled. Items of basketry: a bowl and matching stool wrought in a postnatal occupational therapy class when she’d felt depressed. A papier-mâché rooster made over six Friday nights at the local parish hall, whilst Paddy competed in the Duntybutt Championship Darts Tournament in Murphy’s pub. Items with shells and ideas from Portaluce beach: a wine-bottle lamp with a fringed shade; a postcard plate of a whale; a card table trimmed with cockles and scallops; a collage of a fish with milk-bottle-top gills, a Fanta cap eye and a seagull’s primary wing feather, stiffened with glue for a tail.

“Ye know,” Rose told him, “I drew them ads to my Paddy’s attention for you. I sez: ‘Ye know poor Jamie could be doin’ with a woman about the place, to help him out now that Mick isn’t about no more, and here’s the very thing,’ sez I, and I showed him the paper and he sez: ‘Ye know, Rose, you’re right,’ sez he.”

She won some space on the messy tabletop, pushed the rolling pin and mixing bowl to one side, wiped the area clean with a damp cloth. The plastic tablecloth showed a repeat pattern of piglets hopping over gates in a green field, their tails spaghetti twists against a blurred, blue sky.

“God, that was very good of you, Rose.”

Jamie settled himself, took the ballpoint from his inside pocket, fumbled out the notepad and envelopes from his string bag.

“Now, Jamie, I’ll just get me glasses. I’m as blind as a mole without them, so a am.” She plucked the spectacles from the gaping lips of a china guppy on the mantelpiece, and held the ad at arm’s length, murmuring over the wording. “Oh, she sounds like a fine lady, right enough.”

“Maybe she’s
too
fine, Rose, to be havin’ anything to do with the like of me.” Jamie was studying the plastic pigs in the plastic field, growing depressed at the thought of rejection before the project had even got underway.

“Nonsense, Jamie! There’s many’s the woman would give their back teeth to have you as a husband. And I’m not just sayin’ that. It’s the God’s honest truth, so it is.”

Jamie wondered what back teeth had to do with anything, but had the idea that Rose was paying him a compliment all the same. It was a rare thing to inspire, or indeed hear such praise from another, especially a woman. He was nonetheless confused, and had a vision of a half set of dentures that he’d found at the back of a drawer in Mick’s bedroom. He tried now to reconcile the set of yellowed grinders with the beauteous creature this woman might prove to be.

After a minute or two he gave up, fondled his ear and fairly glowed with embarrassment. He wanted to thank Rose for the compliment but thought that if he did, it might seem as though he were agreeing with her. So instead he coughed and said, “aw, now,” looking away to the picture on the wood-chipped wall: an image of the Virgin Mary crushing a writhing serpent beneath her perfect, blessed feet.

Rose took up the pen.

“Now I’ll do a wee rough one, Jamie, first. Then you can copy it out—or if you like I can write it for you. Either way, it’s all right by me.”

“Naw, Rose, if you write it, I’ll copy it out. Wouldn’t want to be puttin’ you to any more trouble than was called for, like.”

“Good enough, Jamie, good enough.” Rose began to write. “Now, first after your address I’m gonna say ‘dear lady’.” Rose peered over her glasses. “’Cause y’know, Jamie, a woman always likes to be called a lady even if she isn’t one. Not that I’m sayin’ this lady you’re gonna meet isn’t gonna turn out to be a lady, ’cause I’m sure she will be, but y’know it’s always better to be on the safe side.”

After several minutes of Rose writing—stopping every now and then to shoot a look heavenward for inspiration—and Jamie following the words that flowed from the pen in her exuberant hand, the task was done. Rose read it aloud to Jamie’s nodding approval. When she’d finished he scratched his head in amazement.

“That’s the best I ever heard, Rose! Just the thing, so it is. God, but you’re powerful good at the writin’. Y’know I’d a been sittin’ at the table from now to Christmas, begod, tryin’ to get the like a that writ.”

“Deed ye might-a been, Jamie.”

Rose beamed and handed the page over. “Well, it’s great that you like it, and if there’s anything you want added or changed just let me know and I’ll do it.” And she stood up. “Now, Jamie, I’ll get us a wee cuppa tea while you’re at the copyin’ out-a it, so I will.”

“Good enough, Rose.”

“Oh, and Jamie, it might be an idea to give your hands a wee rub before you start, because you don’t want to be soilin’ the page, mightn’t look so good.”

Jamie looked at his hands, ingrained as they were with several days’ dirt from cowshed and barn, conceded that Rose was right, and immediately set to with soap and brush at the kitchen sink. When he finally got round to the writing task, he applied himself with great deliberation and care.

The complicated task finally finished, Rose poured more tea for Jamie, and pushed a plate of drop scones lathered with butter and jam in his direction.

“Well done, Jamie! I’ll just run me eye over it to make sure all’s in order.”

She replaced her bifocals and held the page up to the light for inspection. He hoped she’d find no mistakes.

“No, that’s fine, Jamie. That’s very good writin’ too. Well done. Happy enough with it yourself, are you?” She folded the page into a neat rectangle and slipped it into the envelope which Jamie had already addressed.

“Aye, but a was just thinkin’, Rose,” Jamie glanced at one of Rose’s artistic endeavors on the far wall; a collage of Christ with macaroni hair, a vermicelli beard and petit pois eyes, out of which the Savior cried copious pearl barley tears. “Well, what a was just thinkin’ was, what if she turned out to be a Protestant, Rose? What would a body do then?”

“That’s nonsense, Jamie,” said Rose. “What does it matter what she is, so long as she has a good heart and can bake a bun or two and keep a nice tidy house?”

In Rose McFadden’s world, a woman’s true worth could only be measured by the texture of her pastry, the whiteness of her wash, a sock heel turned on four needles without a pucker. But Jamie, half listening, was imagining all sorts of unfortunate scenarios and thinking up any number of unfounded reasons for the failure of this venture.

There was a silence, while Rose sipped her tea. Her china mug showed a garish Giant’s Causeway with a seagull a-flap above it. The amateur artist had rendered the bird’s bill too big and given it a paint-dot eye that had missed its mark.

They sat in the warmth of the kitchen vapors, the broth bubbling contentedly, a light rain brushing the window panes like blown sand; each thinking their own thoughts. Jamie was envying Paddy all this domestic harmony. Rose was thinking: Another half hour and I’ll add the chopped swede and pearl barley to that drop o’ soup.

She thought also that Jamie would need to clean himself up quite a bit before meeting this woman, but she could help there, and she thought also that it was time he bought himself a decent outfit. With a good scrub and a proper suit he could look quite respectable, she decided, and not one to be ignored by a far-sighted woman with an eye to the future.

Jamie’s gaze—as if he were reading Rose’s thoughts—now settled on a framed photo of a more youthful Paddy holding aloft a silver cup, won for the unrivaled breeding capabilities of his Bluefaced Leicester ewe at the Balmoral Agricultural Show in 1963.

“What if she wants a photo, Rose?” he blurted out. “I haven’t got one, and even if I had, I couldn’t send it to her because…” He trailed off, depressed at the very thought of his hair—or rather lack of it—his skewed ears, his scar and his broken smile.

“Now, Jamie, I’ve just been thinkin’ about that selfsame thing meself, and y’know everything in this life is fixable if a body just puts his mind to it. That’s what I always sez to my Paddy when he comes to me with a problem. Y’know, he came into me only last week, when I was in the middle of a jam sponge for the Vincent de Paul Bring and Buy. And sez he to me, he sez: ‘Rose I’m havin’ terrible bother dippin’ that Wiltshire Horn; can’t seem to get him to stay still atall, atall.’ And I sez, sez I: ‘Well, there’s only one thing you can do with a awkward bugger like that, Paddy,’ and I grabbed a holt a the rollin’ pin.”

Jamie’s astonished eye fell on the rolling pin on the floured board. It lay beside a pastry cutter in the shape of a dancing bear.

“Aye, that very one there, Jamie. Well I grabbed it and sez I to Paddy, ‘This’ll sort the brute out, so it will.’ And we ran out the pair of us to the pen and I hit him a dunder with it, and y’know it stunned him for a minute—”

“What, you hit Paddy a dunder?” Jamie interjected, his mind still on the photo, his ear not properly tuned to Rose’s long-playing tale.

“Naw, Jamie, the
ram
,” shouted Rose, a wee bit annoyed that Jamie had made her gramophone needle jump its groove.

“Oh, Christ aye, the
ram
. I’m with you now.”

“Aye, the
ram
, Jamie, the
ram
. Anyway I hit him a dunder with it,” Rose continued, “and it give Paddy the time to dip him horns and all, and he got up again and staggered about a bit, stunned as a say, like somebody comin’ late outta Slope’s on a Friday night, and that was the end of it.”