Malarky (26 page)

Things were slipping from us: Me and Halim. Whatever we came together to do had an inevitability and we shoulda just got on with it – left the talking, the walking, the thinking alone. Instead we slipped into too much chat and comfort and that was an awful bad idea. Things can get sloppy around the teapot. I see that was the trouble in it all. I confused the objective. I blame myself. Was he, in the end, too nice a man for what I had in mind for him? For Halim too was beginning to burden me.

During one visit where I ironed a pair of trousers for him, Halim asked again why was I so saddened. Where was my son?

—My son came home I said slowly, for a reason we didn't understand and now he is gone for another reason we don't understand.

—Leave him alone and he'll tell you eventually, Halim said.

I didn't like it.

I didn't like it one bit.

Here was another man presuming to know more about my son, than I, his mother did.

I didn't like it at all.

I wouldn't stand for it. He was stamping on my patch in a way he wasn't welcome to tread.

Halim came to my kitchen again, but we had to reacquaint ourselves. I could hardly recall how forward I had been to him and that afternoon I commenced polite and distant. I made no move to hug him on arrival but there were sexual things I longed to do with him the moment he sat down. I've never been clearer in my life about what I wanted to do with someone. There were two items on my list, but I remained female and farmish, indecisive how I was to make the ascent. He did not seem disappointed. He had two shirts for me to iron.

—I see you found the locker key? I laughed. So much trouble at work, he said. One woman in particular was gunning for him.

—Why do women do this? he asked. I am from a good family and they treat me so bad there.

He watched me while I iron. He watched me closely. Every time I moved past him his eyes were on my hips. I wanted to put my hand under his chin and tip his eyes to my eyes. Up here Mister. But his gaze remains fixated on my pelvis.

It occurred to me this could be useful.

In turn I lowered my gaze to his pelvis. The back not the front, which meant a bit of craning my neck. I had begun to do some thinking.

He made only one gesture. As I am coming with the teapot, standing, he, sitting, grabs me about the waist and presses his cheek against my belly which I had already sucked in and hugs me strong wrapping his arms around me. He murmurs. I had the teapot uncomfortably above his head and my elbow was wobbling. I did not want to tell him to get off. One eye on the backdoor, I'm aware the things I want to do with him are not finished yet. He stayed like this long enough and strong enough to convince me this is the time to do them.

It may not have been the time.

If he hadn't made that stomach gesture I doubt I would have proceeded. But he dared me and I was invincible in this state with him. I wasn't in my ordinary life, I was in an extraordinary moment in my ordinary life. And he had presumed to know something of my son, which angered me, so much so that I must prove he knew nothing.

—Come, I told him, once the pot met the table. I want you to see my son's room. I watched the clock. I'd no idea when Himself might be back but I can't risk his catching me. We were safe until the hour of hunger.

And once in Jimmy's room, I closed the door pert and swift. Laid me down on Jimmy's bed positioning myself as the watery fella had, while Halim browsed items round the room. I reached my hand out and tugged him, he knelt beside the bed watching me. A pat of the mattress and up he hopped. I began
to work on his nipple exactly the way Jimmy did with the watery fella and tried to remember what came next.

Before I could recall the sequence, his hand slid up my leg and seemed to be examining the shape of my pelvis rather than vagina. He darted around my vagina messing about with his hands like an engineer. Measured his hand span across and down.

—Will you let me do something? he asked. Tentative. I like tentative. Tentative means permission given is permission owed.

Whatever he was so polite to request permission for, I had bolder plans for him.

—Work away, I said.

The problem with Jimmy being gone was not just that he was gone, and gone off somewhere dangerous, it was we'd so little information about what he was doing.

Since men and women can faithfully never agree on what to worry about, I put this to my husband.

—Aren't you worried about him?

—Not at all, sure it's the first time that fella has been useful. I'm not a bit worried about him. I only worry about idlers, men who sit about thinking instead of getting on with it.

He admitted he was proud of him.

—I like the way he took us by surprise. I didn't think he had it in him. I might even write and tell him, Himself said.

I lay and thought and thought and lay and I could not see things the way my husband did and after this amount of marriage perhaps that should have surprised me, but it ceased surprising me many years ago. I paid close attention to the news and I began a system of recording the war casualties on the
bottom of my table mat. I had the notion that using a process of subtraction I would be able tell if my son was killed. As far as we knew Jimmy was in a training camp in Pennsylvania or some place beginning with the name Camp. I was anxiously waiting on a letter from him. I stopped sleeping well at night, indeed I stopped sleeping at night. I would wake with the fear at me, that Jimmy was hurt and always so close to me physically, yet I couldn't grab him. Men waving bayonets clustered themselves into my dreams and all I could see was men with their hands around each others throats and in their last minute frightened, regretful eyes that seemed to appeal with words like I'd rather be at home mowing the grass, it wasn't what I expected and why am I here anyhow? In my dreams Jimmy was always fighting like World War I, muddy and in the trenches. Even though he was in Pennsylvania and in one of his seldom letters had described very modern equipment, bunk beds and plastic cutlery.