Inch Levels (25 page)

Margaret needed to be protected.

‘Never recovered,’ Sarah said, ‘according to the neighbours. They had people watching out for her: but you know, when people want to go, they just make up their mind and go.’ She paused for a moment. ‘So she walked down to the foreshore and just walked into the water, and –’ Now she stopped and there was a beat of silence. ‘And the sea took her and that was that.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Poor soul.’

Patrick watched and watched. This autumn morning had already taken a different, unexpected shape. And now the shape was changing again.

Because his Saturday mornings tended to have a familiar pattern. He liked to be in town early to do a little shopping, and be gone before the crowds arrived. His father’s illness was beginning to prise apart his routine, but his Saturday mornings had thus far remained sacrosanct. Nobody else figured. Early meant avoiding his students, who would be storming through the Saturday afternoon crowds in their civvies. ‘Alright, sir?’ the older boys would sometimes hail him, jauntily, on the rare occasions their paths crossed in the supermarket, at the pictures. Sometimes – though more frequently, they lowered their eyes or looked at him as though at an animal on the loose from a zoo.

Early was always better.

But this morning, Margaret telephoned at cockcrow, suggesting a meeting, sounding tense and strained. ‘Just a coffee,’ she almost pleaded, beating against the solid metal walls of his Saturday morning. ‘It won’t take long.’ And so they met in a cafe off the Diamond and settled themselves in a booth by the window, milky coffees before them.

Margaret looked – dreadful, he thought. Her hair needed a wash, for one thing. He observed her more closely: her pale skin, her tired, shadowed eyes. ‘I need to tell you something,’ she said, lowering her voice so that she could hardly be heard over the Saturday morning hum. She paused: he waited. At last she said, ‘Did you hear about the mother of that girl? The girl who went missing? – they found her at Inch Levels.’

‘The mother, yes: something about it.’

‘It was on the news this morning,’ she murmured and he nodded.

And then, their mother appeared, framed for a moment in the doorway. A collision. What was she doing here? This place, this time, wasn’t part of her routine.

He watched her look around, and see them, and start, and pause for a moment. But there was no turning away – not from her own children; even his mother’s strangeness did not scale such heights – and instead he watched as she made her way between the tables towards them. ‘God, please no,’ Margaret murmured and closed her eyes. ‘I don’t need this.’

And now she was in front of them, surveying their coffees – and their clothes, most likely, and their hair. Their demeanour and their posture. ‘Straighten up!’ she liked to tell him when he was younger. ‘Pull your shoulders back!’ And now a memory flashed into Patrick’s mind, there in his blue bed, memories lying upon memories as he stretched flat: he is trying a pair of trousers on for size in a little shop, a little boy, long ago – a cramped fitting room and a curtain that does not quite cover the entrance. Yellow fluorescent strip lighting that shines around the edge of the curtain – and now the curtain is suddenly whipped across. The metal hooks glint and squeak in their channel. There stands his mother; he cringes in front of her in his shirt and his little yellow underpants, there in full view of the shop. ‘I thought I’d thrown out those pants,’ she says. ‘Didn’t I throw them out? We’ll do it when we get home.’ The assistant cranes her neck to see the underpants. ‘Get a move on now, Patrick. We haven’t got all day.’ The curtain is pulled across again, noisily.

There stood Sarah; and the waitress, stacking glasses now, just behind her. ‘What are you doing here?’ Patrick asked, perfectly unceremoniously.

Sarah shed her dark coat, exposing another layer: a long woollen cardigan, in lilac. This she kept on. And a purple scarf, wound around her throat. ‘I just felt like a cup of coffee,’ she told him. ‘Just a notion.’ She sat down and now they looked at each other.

He fetched her coffee, in the end.

But what was the news Margaret had wanted to impart?

And his mother in such a strange mood – and the conversation so strange too. So very strange. At last, though, she stirred and seemed to gather herself into the present.

‘And what about Robert?’ she asked. This was not a usual question: usually the attitude was that Robert didn’t exist unless he was incontrovertibly there, flesh and blood and impossible to ignore in front of them. And yet it was a usual question too: or rather, it had the feeling of it. It was one of Sarah’s usual questions: as a boxer might punch the underside of a jaw with a gloved fist, so Sarah liked to identify and isolate a weak spot too. She usually deployed the jab to take her mind off a given problem: Patrick had come to understand this over the years. What current problem might be preoccupying her this morning? – he had no idea; only that she had one, only that it was almost visibly there in this cafe, at this table, with her.

Hence the jab.

Margaret shrugged. ‘What about him?’

‘Well, how is he?’

‘He’s OK,’ Margaret said, expressionless.

‘Is he busy?’ Robert had a job now, for the first time in a little while. He worked as a landscaper of other people’s gardens.

A labourer, Sarah described him.

‘Busy enough.’

He leeched off his wife, Sarah liked to say. ‘A leech,’ she liked to say. ‘Couldn’t even pay for his own wedding.’

‘Making money?’ she asked now.

‘For Christ’s sake, would you leave off?’

Margaret was paler than ever now: and suddenly it occurred to Patrick that she might be pregnant again. Was that the news? Was it welcome? – or maybe it was unwelcome: did she want to go to England? – was that it?

But now their mother was launching into a new phase, holding forth across the table’s white plastic expanses. Talked about – what? The evil eye. What? The air was thickening as she spoke. As she went on and on and on. Patrick felt himself assaulted by strangeness. What was wrong with her today? Why go on and on like this – right now? She had moved on from the dead child’s mother, from Robert, from Margaret – and that was a relief, true enough, small mercies and all that – but what was she talking about and why?

What was wrong with everyone?

But this was the question of his life.

The cafe was filling up now, gearing for the lunchtime rush; the assistants were bringing out the hefty fare of this place: dishes of bronze sausage rolls, shining with grease, and trays of yellow chips, orange fillets of breaded fish and green, plump marrowfat peas. Their table, their comfortable banquettes would soon be needed; hungry shoppers were arriving in their turn in the doorway, sweeping the cafe with narrowed eyes, fixing on their emptying, cooling coffee cups. And yet they sat on, the three of them. It must, thought Patrick, have looked like fellowship, like family felicity – but it was not. It certainly was not. For his mother was behaving so strangely; and Margaret was silent. No, more than this: she had absented herself completely. It was her time-honoured coping mechanism: and he couldn’t blame her for that.

*

I can’t stand this, Margaret said.

To herself, she said it. She was scarcely capable – no, that wasn’t it; she was actually incapable, of saying a word aloud. At this point, anyway. She needed to pull herself together.

What was her mother
doing
here? What was she doing
here
? – of all places, here, appearing like that in the doorway?

‘The coffee’s fine,’ she said. ‘No, nothing for me.’

Patrick slipped off to the counter. She looked at her mother, seated there opposite, her arms tightly folded across the front of a long, warm-looking cardigan. She geared herself up to speak at last. She said, ‘What brings you to town?’

Sarah said again that she just fancied a change.

‘And how’s Daddy?’

Her mother shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. Their father, she seemed to say, hardly deserved a two-shouldered one, did he? ‘I left him in bed.’

Silence settled, then, until Patrick returned with coffee and a scone. Sarah stirred a little sugar into her coffee, she buttered her scone, she looked up.

‘You didn’t hear the news about that woman,’ she said. ‘The mother of that girl who went missing.’

There was a moment, and Margaret shook her head. No. That woman, who had walked into Lough Foyle and drowned herself at twilight. Their mother talked on for a little while, her voice fading in and out. She talked about the woman. She talked about her little girl: who could forget it? ‘That was the night of your birthday,’ she said.

I can’t stand it, Margaret thought.

The cafe was filling. Margaret thought about making a move, about bundling herself into her coat, braving the October chill. But now her mother was off on a new tack: so strange a tack that Margaret was almost distracted, for a moment, from her own concerns. Almost.

These would have to remain unsaid, if only for a few more minutes. Her windpipe felt constricted, with – grief, of course, and a creeping sense of horror and fear. Her life, surely, was over.

*

It had to happen just there, on that part of the coast, Sarah thought. She almost laughed: it just had to. She could picture it, of course: she knew it from childhood; she had gone paddling there, just there beside the pier where the best rock pools were to be found, poking in the deepest, coldest pools for crabs. ‘Mind yourself,’ her mother called, ‘go carefully.’ And her father pushed a stick into the water and – right there! a crab emerged from the deep and took hold of the stick with its pincered claws. ‘There now! But we’ll just let it go, Sarah, will we? No point taking it home,’ he said and she shook her head and her father shook the stick and the crab scuttled away, back into the seaweed and shadows.

And later, at the beginning of the war, she and Cassie had gone down to the end of the pier, to watch the grey warships sailing by – so close you could almost touch them – easing through the narrow mouth of Lough Foyle, and then sailing south to the docks at Derry. Sometimes the sailors waved. Sometimes the little pilot boat puttered out from the pier with apples and pears, with green stuff. ‘Sure, we’ll make a bit of money out of them, Cassie,’ the pilot said to them. ‘We have too many apples, and they don’t have enough. No harm.’ He threw a green apple at Cassie, gently. ‘Catch!’ and she caught, deftly, and smiled. ‘No harm,’ the pilot said again.

No harm.

Contaminated now, for her. That place, that town and its past, over and over again, contaminated.

And now here was this woman, choosing a shore that was already pregnant with death.

At least she hadn’t walked out to Shell Beach. Not to the beach itself: it seemed instead that she had clambered through those rocks that bristled, jagged and pitted with pools and oily with seaweed, just to the left of the pier. The tide was in, though, and that must have helped: in spite of the rocks, it probably hadn’t been all that difficult. Sarah imagined her setting out, in failing light, moving along purposefully.

And yes: it was a relief, a blessing that the poor woman hadn’t trotted out to Shell Beach, which after all was not a half-mile further along the coast; and much easier to access.

She had done Sarah a favour, there.

So she told herself. How sick I sound, she thought. Making it all about me. But she was wound up by this: of course with good reason; of course she disliked that coastline, disliked any mention of it; kept her distance from it; had never taken her children there; Kinnagoe was as close as they had ever come, and that was too close. She hated the remembrances, the dreadful reminder.

She sipped her coffee.

‘What are you doing here?’ Patrick asked here – but impossible to put into words: what? That she had felt her past snapping at her heels? That she felt the walls closing in on her at home? That she needed to move, she needed some movement, to escape the past that was snapping, snapping? Explosions and deaths. And so she had left Martin in bed and jumped into the car and into town – only to find, not space, but her children. But she could not form these thoughts into words: there were embargoes on every avenue, every sentence. She could hardly imagine the words; and speaking them was out of the question.

‘I just felt like a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘Just a notion.’

Just a notion – and looked at the two of them across the expanse of plastic table. Which was of course not broad enough, for any of them.

Then she spoke again: said something that surprised her just as much as it surprised her children.

‘Sometimes I think I have the evil eye,’ said Sarah, and in instant discomfiture she picked up her coffee cup and swirled around the dense, sugary remnant of coffee inside, first in one direction and then in the other.

They looked at her. ‘What?’ said Patrick – and indeed, it was almost as if another person had spoken, an invisible fourth person seated there at the table, putting in their spoke with dreadful unexpectedness. And yes, Sarah was as startled, almost, as everyone else.

‘Nothing. Nothing.’ Forget that. She was holding onto the edge of the white plastic table with her fingertips. There were rings marking the table surface, indelible marks, ancient cups of coffee. That was the trouble with such surfaces: they seemed to be wipe-clean and low-maintenance and all the rest of it; but they were in fact fairly unforgiving. She could have told them. Those rings would still be there come Doomsday.

‘No,’ Margaret said now. She leaned forward. ‘What did you mean, the evil eye?’

Sarah said abruptly, ‘I see a shop, I look in the window, and –’ And yes, it had been this that propelled her out of the house this morning: a need to escape her surroundings, at least, even if she was unable to escape herself. And perhaps it was this propelling her words forward now. She was aware that she was behaving in a way that was – unexpected, to say the least; she was aware that they were staring at her.

She had been drowsing off last night, safe and warm and snug in bed, when another bomb had exploded, its sound wave travelling down the river and colliding with the walls and windows of the house. As it had done countless times before. Well, not countless: countless was an exaggeration; but a great many times. It was abnormal and it was normal, all at the same time. Martin woke momentarily and then slid off again into sleep. She might have done the same: these blasts were routine; there was no need to break one’s stride in the face of them. They were nothing remarkable.