Evening Class (28 page)

‘Come with me,’ Suzi suggested, ‘that’ll make it quicker.’ Lou said he would, and they went to this annexe attached to the school but slightly separate from it. It had an entrance hall, a big classroom, two lavatories and a small kitchen space. In the hall there was a store room with a few boxes in it. Empty boxes.

‘What are all these?’ he asked.

‘We’re trying to tidy up the place so it looks more festive and not so much like a rubbish dump for when the classes start,’ said the deranged woman they called Signora. Harmless but very odd, and some most peculiar coloured hair, like a piebald mare.

‘Should we throw out the boxes?’ Suzi suggested.

Slowly Lou spoke. ‘Why don’t I just tidy them up and leave them in a neat stack in there? You’d never know when you might need a few boxes.’

‘For Italian classes?’ Suzi said in disbelief.

But at this moment Signora interrupted. ‘No, he’s right. We could use them to be tables when we are learning the section on what to order in an Italian restaurant, they could be counters in the shops, or a car at the garage.’ Her face seemed radiant at all the uses there would be for boxes.

Lou looked at her with amazement. She was obviously missing her marbles but at this moment he loved her. ‘Good woman, Signora,’ he said, and tidied the boxes into neat piles.

He couldn’t contact Robin but he wasn’t surprised to get a phone call at work.

‘Don’t want to come and see you, the toy soldiers are going mad with excitement these days. I can’t move without five of them padding after me.’

‘I found somewhere,’ said Lou.

‘I knew you would, Lou.’

Lou told him where it was, and about the activity every Tuesday and Thursday, thirty people.

‘Fantastic,’ Robin said. ‘Have you enrolled?’

‘For what?’

‘For the class, of course.’

‘Oh Jesus, Robin, I scarcely speak English, what would I be doing learning Italian?’

‘I’m relying on you,’ said Robin, and hung up.

There was an envelope waiting for him at home that night. It contained five hundred pounds and a note. ‘Incidental expenses for language learning.’ He had been serious.

‘You’re going to do
what
?’

‘Well you’re the one who said I should better myself, Suzi. Why not?’

‘When I said better yourself, I meant smarten yourself up, get a better paid job. I didn’t mean go mad and learn a foreign language.’ Suzi was astounded. ‘Lou, you have to be off your head. It costs a fair amount. Poor Signora is afraid that it will be too dear for people and suddenly out of the blue, you decide to take it up. I can’t take it in.’

Lou frowned a mighty frown. ‘Life would be very dull if we all understood everyone,’ he said.

And Suzi said that it would be a lot easier to get on with.

Lou went to the first Italian lesson as a condemned man walks to Death Row. His years in the classroom had not been glorious. Now he would face further humiliation. But it had been surprisingly enjoyable. First the mad Signora asked them all their names and gave them ridiculous pieces of coloured cardboard to write them on, but they had to write Italianised versions.

Lou became Luigi. In a way he liked it. It was important.

‘
Mi chiamo Luigi
,’ he would say, and frown at people, and they seemed impressed.

They were an odd bunch, a woman dripping in jewellery that no one in their sane senses would have worn to Mountainview school, and driving a BMW. Lou hoped that Robin’s friends wouldn’t steal the BMW. The woman who drove it was nice as it happened, and she had sad eyes.

There was a very nice old fellow, a hotel porter called Laddy though he had Lorenzo written on his badge, a mother and daughter, a real dizzy blonde called Elizabetta who had a serious boyfriend with a collar and tie, and dozens of others that you’d never expect to find at a class like this. Perhaps they wouldn’t think it odd that he was there. They might not even question it for a moment why he was there.

For two weeks he questioned it himself, then he heard from Robin. Some boxes would be coming in on Tuesday, just around seven thirty when the classroom was filling up. Maybe he could see to it that they got into the store cupboard in the hall.

He didn’t know the man in the anorak. He just looked out for the van. There were so many people arriving, parking bikes, motorbikes, the dame with the BMW, two women with a Toyota Starlet… the van didn’t cause any stir.

There were four boxes, they were in in a flash, the van and the man in the anorak were gone.

On Thursday he had the four boxes ready to be pulled out quickly. The whole thing was done in seconds. Lou had made himself teacher’s pet by helping with the boxes. Sometimes they covered them with red crepe paper and put cutlery on them.

‘
Quanto costa il piatto del giorno?’
Signora would ask and they would all repeat it over and over until they could ask for any damn thing and lift knives and say ‘
Ecco il coltello!’

Babyish it might have been but Lou liked it, he even saw himself and Suzi going to Italy one day and he would order her a
bicchiere di vino rosso
as quick as look at her.

Once Signora lifted a heavy box, one of the consignment.

Lou felt his heart turn over but he spoke quickly. ‘Listen, Signora, will you let
me
lift those for you, it’s the empty ones we want.’

‘But what’s in it, this is so heavy?’

‘Could you be up to them in a school? Come on, here we are. What are they going to be today?

‘They are doing hotels,
alberghi. Albergo di prima categoria, di seconda categoria
.’

Lou was pleased that he understood these things. ‘Maybe I wasn’t just thick at school,’ he told Suzi. ‘Maybe I was just badly taught.’

‘Could be,’ Suzi said. She was preoccupied. There had been some trouble with Jerry; her mam and dad had been called to see the headmaster. They said it sounded serious. And just after he had been getting on so well and doing so well since Signora had come to the house, and actually doing his homework and everything. It couldn’t have been stealing, or anything. They had been very mysterious up at the school.

One of the nice things about working in a cafe was listening to people’s conversations. Suzi said that she could write a book about Dublin just from the bits of overheard conversation.

People were talking about secret weekends, and plans for further dalliances, and cheating their income tax. And incredible scandal about politicians and journalists and television personalities… maybe none of it true, but all of it hair-raising. But it was often the most ordinary conversations that were the most fascinating. A girl of sixteen determined to get pregnant so that she could leave home and get a council flat, a couple who made fake ID cards explaining the economics of buying a good laminator. Lou hoped that Robin and his friends would never use this cafe to discuss their plans. But then it was a bit up market for them, he was probably in the clear as regards this.

Suzi would spend a lot of time clearing a nearby table when people were saying interesting things. A middle-aged man and his daughter came in, good looking blonde girl with a bank uniform. The man was craggy and had longish hair, hard to know what he did, maybe a journalist or a poet. They seemed to have had a row. Suzi hovered nearby.

‘I’m only agreeing to meet you because it’s a half hour off work and I’d love a cup of good coffee compared to that dishwater we get in the canteen,’ the girl said.

‘There’s a new and beautiful percolator with four different kinds of coffee waiting for you any time you would like to call,’ he said. He didn’t sound like a father, he sounded more like a lover. But he was so old. Suzi kept shining up the table so that she could hear more.

‘You mean you’ve used it?’

‘I keep practising, waiting for the day you’ll come back and I can make you Blue Mountain or Costa Rica.’

‘You’ll have a long wait,’ said the girl.

‘Please, can’t we talk?’ he was begging. He was quite a handsome old man, Suzi admitted.

‘We are talking, Tony.’

‘I think I love you,’ he said.

‘No, you don’t, you just love the memory of me and you can’t bear that I don’t just troop back there like all the others.’

‘There are no others now.’ There was a silence. ‘I never said I loved anyone before.’

‘You didn’t say you loved me, you only said you
thought
you loved me. It’s different.’

‘Let me find out. I’m almost certain,’ he smiled at the girl.

‘You mean let’s get back into bed together until you test it?’ she sounded very bitter.

‘No, I don’t, as it happens. Let’s go out for dinner somewhere and talk like we used to talk.’

‘Until bedtime, and then it’s let’s get back into bed like we used to do that.’

‘We only did that once, Grania. It’s not just about that.’ Suzi was hooked now. He was a nice old guy, the girl Grania should give him a chance, just for dinner. She was dying to suggest it but knew she had to say nothing.

‘Just dinner then,’ Grania said, and they smiled at each other and held hands.

It was not always the same man, the same van or the same anorak. But the contact was always minimal and the speed great.

The weather became dark and wet and Lou provided a big hanging rail for the wet coats and jackets that might otherwise have been stacked in the hall cupboard. ‘I don’t want to drip all over Signora’s boxes,’ he would say.

Weeks of boxes in on Tuesday and out on Thursday. Lou didn’t want to think about what was in them. It wasn’t bottles, that was for sure. If Robin were involved in bottles it would be a whole off licence full of them like the time in the supermarket. Lou couldn’t deny it any more. He knew it must be drugs. Why else was Robin so worried? What other kind of business involved one person delivering and another collecting? But God almighty, drugs in a school. Robin must be mad.

And then by chance there was this matter of Suzi’s young brother, a young red head with an impudent face. He had been found with a crowd of the older boys in the bicycle shed. Jerry had sworn that he was only being their delivery boy, they had asked him to pick up something at the school gates because they were being watched by the headmaster. But the Mr O’Brien who terrorised them all nearly lifted the head off Suzi’s entire family about the whole thing.

Only the pleas of Signora had succeeded in keeping Jerry from being expelled. He was so very young, the whole family would ensure that he didn’t hang around after school but came straight home to do his lessons. And in fact, because he had shown such improvement and because Signora gave her personal guarantee, Jerry had been spared.

The older boys were out, expelled that day. Apparently Tony O’Brien said that he didn’t give one damn about what happened to their futures. They didn’t have much of a future, but what they had of it would not be spent in his school.

Lou wondered what hell would break loose if it were ever discovered that the school annexe was acting as a receiving depot for drugs every Tuesday and was passing them on the next stage of their journey on a Thursday. Perhaps some of these very consignments were the ones that had been handled by young Jerry Sullivan, his future brother-in-law.

Suzi and he decided that they would marry next year.

‘I’ll never like anyone more,’ Suzi said.

‘You sound fed up, as if I’m only the best of a bad bunch,’ Lou said.

‘No, that’s not true.’ She had become even fonder of him since he had taken up Italian. Signora always spoke of how helpful he was at the class. ‘He’s full of surprises certainly,’ Suzi had said. And indeed he was. She used to hear him his Italian homework, the parts of the body, the days of the week. He was so earnest about it, he looked like a little boy. A good little boy.

It was just when he was thinking of getting a ring that he heard from Robin.

‘Maybe a nice jewel for your red-haired girl friend, Lou,’ he said.

‘Yes, well, Robin, I was thinking of buying it myself, you know, wanting to take her to the shop so that we could discuss…’ Lou didn’t know if there were to be further payment for his work up in the school. In one way it was so simple that he didn’t really
need
any more. In another he was doing something so
dangerous
that he really should be paid very well for it. To make it worth the risk.

‘I was going to say that if you went into that big place near Grafton Street and chose her a ring, you’d only have to leave a deposit on it, the rest would be paid.’

‘She’d know, Robin. I don’t tell her anything.’

Robin smiled at him. ‘I know you don’t, Lou, and she wouldn’t know. There’s this guy who’d show you a tray of really good stuff, no prices mentioned, and then she’d always have something really nice on her finger. And paid for absolutely legitimately because the balance would be sorted out.’

‘I don’t think so, listen, I know how good this is, but I think…’

‘Think when you have a couple of kids and things are hard how glad you’ll be that you once met a fellow called Robin and got a deposit for a house and your wife is wearing a rock that cost ten big ones on her finger.’

Did Robin really mean ten thousand pounds? Lou felt dizzy. And there was the mention of a deposit for a house as well. You’d have to be stark staring mad to fly in the face of this.

They went into the jeweller’s. He asked for George.

George brought a tray. ‘These are all in your price range,’ he said to Lou.

‘But they’re enormous,’ hissed Suzi. ‘Lou,
you
can’t afford these.’

‘Please don’t take away the pleasure of giving you a nice ring,’ he said, his eyes big and sad.

‘No but, Lou, listen to me. We save twenty-five a week between us and we find it hard going. These must be two hundred and fifty pounds at least, that’s ten weeks’ saving. Let’s get something cheaper, really.’ She was so nice he didn’t deserve her. And she didn’t have an idea she was looking at serious jewellery.

‘Which one do you like best?’

‘This isn’t a real emerald is it, Lou?’

‘It’s an
emerald-type
stone,’ he said solemnly.