Dublin 4 (20 page)

He caught the number ten with agility just as it was about to pull out. There right in front of him was Clare Kelly. ‘The lovely Clare … well, aren’t I steeped?’ he said with a mock gallant manner that played to the rest of the bus.

Clare was embarrassed and irritated to have run into him. Gerry could see that. She was a distant, cold sort of woman, he had always thought. Full of sarcasm and the witty answer. Gave poor Des a bloody awful time at home. Des had nothing to say to her these days, he had often told that to Gerry. He had said that he and Clare didn’t actually talk, have real conversations; there was always a state of war, where one or the other was winning. Nobody could remember when the war had been declared but it was there, in private as well as in public, putting each other down. Not that there was much in public these days. Clare didn’t have much time for her husband’s friends. Des preferred it that way. Let her have her meetings and her own life, let her laugh and sneer with her own friends, mock and make little of people. That suited him fine, Gerry had been very sorry for Des, the best of fellows. No matter what things went wrong in his own life at least Emma didn’t mock him.

Clare had moved over to make room for him. ‘You’re looking marvellous,’ she said.

‘Why wouldn’t I, with all it cost?’ he said, laughing. ‘Can I get your ticket? Two to … are you going home or are you off to reform the world somewhere?’ He paused as the conductor waited.

‘Home,’ she laughed at him. ‘You haven’t changed Gerry, they didn’t knock the spirit out of you.’

‘No, only the spirits,’ he laughed happily, and handed her her ticket like you would give it to a child. ‘
Here, take this in case we have a fight before we get home and you and I separate.’

‘Are you on your way home now from … you know?’

‘Yes, just released. They gave me back my own clothes, a few quid to keep me going and the names and addresses of people who might take on an ex-con …’ He laughed, but stopped when he noticed that Clare wasn’t laughing at all.

‘Wouldn’t you think Emma … ? It’s awful to have you coming out on your own, like this.’

‘I wanted to. Emma said she’d come in the car after work, your Des said he’d come for me in a taxi, Brother Jack, the ray of sunshine, said he’d arrive and escort me home after work, Father Vincent said he would come with a pair of wings and a halo and spirit me home … but I wanted to come home on my own. You could understand that, couldn’t you?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Clare, managing to get some lofty superiority into the two words.

‘Well, how’s everything been, out in the real world?’

‘Quiet, a bit quieter without you.’ She didn’t smile as she said it. She said it as though he were a dangerous influence, someone who had been upsetting people. There was ill-concealed regret that he was back in circulation. He smiled at her pleasantly as if he hadn’t understood her tone. He had to be very calm, no point in becoming touchy, no
seeing insults, fancying slights, imagining hostilities; no running away to hide because people were embarrassed about his treatment; no rushing out to console himself because the world didn’t understand. Nice and easy.

‘Ah, if that’s the case we’ll have to liven it up a bit. A quiet world is no use to God, man or the devil, as they say.’ He left the subject and drew her attention to some demolition work they could see from the bus. ‘Hey, that reminds me,’ he said cheerfully, ‘did you hear the one about the Irish brickie who came in to this site looking for a job …’

Clare Kelly looked at him as he told the story. He looked slimmer and his eyes were clear. He was quite a handsome man in a way. Of course it had been years since she had seen him sober so that made a difference. She wondered, as she had wondered many times, what people saw in him; he had no brain whatsoever. In between his ears he had sawdust.

She smiled politely at the end of the story, but it didn’t matter to Gerry because the bus conductor and three people nearby had laughed loudly. And he was really telling the joke to them as much as to Clare.

*   *   *

He was pleased to see the flowers. That was very nice of Emma. He put his little case down in the sitting room and moved automatically to the
cupboard under the music centre to pour himself a drink. He had his hand on the door when he remembered. God, how strong the old habits were. How ridiculous that in all those weeks in the hospital he never found himself automatically reaching for some alcohol, but now here at home … He remembered that nice young Nurse Dillon saying to him that he would find it hard to make the normal movements at home because he would be so accustomed to connecting them with drink. She had said that some people invented totally new things to do, like drinking Bovril when they came in to the house. Bovril? He had wrinkled his nose. Or Marmite, or any unfamiliar beverage, like hot chocolate. She had been very nice, that Nurse Dillon, regarded the whole thing as a bit of bad luck like getting measles; she had even given him a small Bovril last night and said that he might laugh but it could well come in handy. He had said that he was such a strong character he would go to the drinks cupboard and pour the bottles down the sink. Nurse Dillon said that he might find his wife had already done that for him.

Gerry opened the doors. Inside there were six large bottles of red lemonade, six of slimline tonic, six of Coca Cola. There was a bottle of Lime Cordial and a dozen cans of tomato juice. He blinked at them. It was a little high-handed of Emma to have poured away all his alcohol without so much as a by-your-leave.
He felt a flush of annoyance creep up his neck. In fact it was bloody high-handed of her. What did all this business about trusting him, and relying on him, and not pressurising him, mean if she had poured his drink away? There had been the remains of a case of wine, and two bottles of whiskey there. Money to buy things didn’t grow on trees.

Very, very upset he went out to the kitchen and put his hands on the sink deliberately to relax himself. He looked at the plug hole. Without a word of consultation she had poured about twenty pounds’ worth of drink down there. Then his eye fell on a box in the corner of the kitchen, with a piece of writing paper sellotaped to it. ‘Gerry. I took these out of the sitting room cupboard to make room for the other lot. Tell me where you want them put. E.’ His eyes filled with tears. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and sniffed as he struck the match to light the gas to boil the kettle to make his cup of Bovril.

*   *   *

Mrs Moore had rung once or twice during the day, but there had been no reply. That Emma and her precious job. What was she except a glorified typist? Just because she was in Montrose, just because she had sat at the same table as Gay Byrne in the coffee shop, and walked down a corridor with Mike Murphy, just because she had given Valerie McGovern a lift and had
a long chat with Jim O’Neill from Radio Two, did that make her special? Oh no, it didn’t, just a clerk is all she was. And a clerk with a heart of stone. The girl had no feeling in her. Wouldn’t any normal person have taken the day off to welcome her husband back from six weeks in hospital? But not Emma. The poor lad had to come back to an empty house.

‘Ah, there you are, Gerry, how are you, are you feeling all right now, did you have a good rest?’

‘Like a fighting cock, Mother, grand, grand altogether.’

‘And did they give you medicines, injections, did they look after you properly? I can’t think why you didn’t go to Vincent’s. Isn’t it beside you? And you have the Voluntary Health.’

‘Oh, I know, Mother, but they don’t have the course there. I had the whole course, you know, and thank God it seems to have worked. But of course, you never know. You’re never really sure.’

‘What do you mean you’re not sure, you’re all right! Didn’t they have you in there for six weeks? Gerry? Do you hear me? If you don’t feel all right, you should see someone else. Someone we know.’

‘No, Mother, I’m fine, really fine.’

‘So what did they tell you to do, rest more?’

‘No, the contrary in fact, keep busy, keep active, tire myself out even.’

‘But wasn’t that what had you in there, because you were tired out?’

‘Don’t you know as well as I do what had me in there? It was the drink.’

His mother was silent.

‘But it’s all right now, I know what I was doing to myself and it’s all over.’

‘A lot of nonsense they talk. Don’t let them get you involved in their courses, Gerry. You’re fine, there’s nothing the matter with you, you can have a drink as well as the next man.’

‘You’re not helping me, Mother, I know you mean well but those are not the facts.’

‘Facts, facts … don’t bother with
your
facts, with
their
facts up in that place. The fact is that your Father drank as much as he liked every evening of his life and he lived to be seventy, Lord have mercy on him. He would have lived to be far more if he hadn’t had that stroke.’

‘I know, Mother, I know, and you’re very good to be so concerned, but, believe me, I know best. I’ve been listening to them for six weeks. I can’t touch drink any more. It’s labelled poison as far as I’m concerned. It’s sad, but there it is.’

‘Oh, we’ll see, we’ll see. A lot of modern rubbish. Emma was explaining it to me. A lot of nonsense. People had more to do with their time when I was young than to be reading and writing these pamphlets about not eating butter and not smoking and not drinking. Wasn’t life fine in the old days before all these new worries came to plague us, tell me, wasn’t it?’

‘It was, Mother, it was,’ said Gerry wearily.

*   *   *

It
had
been fine for a while. When Gerry and Emma got married he had a good career. There was a lot of money to be made from advertising in the sixties: one day it had been a bottle and an elegant glass, another it had been a consultation about photo-graphing new banks, the sites, and personnel, the buildings. He had known all the agencies, there was no shortage of work. Emma had been so enthusiastic about his work – she had said it was much more vibrant and alive than her own. She had taught book-keeping and accountancy for beginners in a technical school. She never called it a career; she had been delighted to leave it when Paul was expected, and she had never seemed to want to go back when Helen was off to school and out of the way, and that was a good seven years ago. Now that the bottom had fallen out of the market in advertising and there were no good photographic jobs left, Emma wasn’t able to get back into teaching either. They didn’t want people who had opted out for fifteen years, why should they? That’s why she was up in the television station doing typing, and thinking herself lucky to get the job.

They had said in the nursing home it wasn’t very helpful to look back too much on the past; it made you feel sorry for yourself, or wistful. Or else you
began to realise what had happened was inevitable, and that wasn’t a good idea either. You started to think you had no responsibility for your actions. So let’s not think of the past, the old days when life was fine. He made the Bovril and took it, sniffing it suspiciously, into the sitting room. Hard not to think of the old days. A picture of their wedding in the silver frame, laughing and slim, both of them. His own father and both Emma’s parents, now dead, smiled out more formally. His mother had looked confident, as if she knew she would be a long liver.

Then the pictures of Paul and Helen, the series he had done; they looked magnificent, people said, on an alcove wall, a record of the seventies children growing up, turning into people before your eyes. But they had stopped turning into people photographically about five years ago. The children seemed stuck in a time warp of his making.

He looked back at the wedding picture and again he felt the prickling in his nose and eyes that he had felt when he read Emma’s note in the kitchen. Poor girl, she was only a girl, she was only thirty-nine years old and she had been keeping four people for two years on a typist’s salary. That’s really what it boiled down to. Of course, there had been the odd cheque coming in for him, the royalties from some of those coffee table books; a little here for a print he’d taken from stock for someone’s calendar, a little there for a
permission to reprint. But he had cashed those cheques and spent them himself. Emma had kept the family. God, he would make it up to her, he really would. He would make up every penny and every hour of worry and anxiety. He wiped his eyes again, he must be big and strong. Gerry Moore was home again, he was going to take over his family once more.

*   *   *

Emma hadn’t liked to make a phone call while the office was quiet. It was too important a call, she couldn’t suddenly hang up if she felt that people were listening to her. Anxiously she watched the clock, knowing that he must be home by now, wishing that she had done more to make the place welcoming, mentally ticking off the shopping she had done at lunch time; she was going to make them a celebratory meal. She hoped he wasn’t regretting his decision to come home alone; going back to an empty house, to a changed lifestyle after six weeks in a hospital, it wasn’t such a good idea. To her great delight the office filled up with people and she was able to turn her back and call home.

‘Hallo?’ His voice sounded a little tentative and even snuffly, as if he had a cold.

‘You’re very welcome home, love,’ she said.

‘You’re great, Emma,’ he said.

‘No I’m not, but I’ll be home in an hour and a half and I can’t wait to see you. It’s grand you’re back.’