One Hundred Names (27 page)

‘Zhi, thank you so much. I can’t thank you enough for cleaning that up. I fully intended on—’

‘My wife. She do,’ he snapped, and a scowl-faced woman bending over a dry-cleaning press looked up to glare at her.

‘Ah. Mrs Wong, thank you so much.’

She grunted.

‘We no do for you. We do for tenant. We show flat. New girl move in two week.’

‘You showed my flat to a tenant?’

‘My flat. Yes.’

‘But you can’t do that without my permission, Zhi. You can’t just let someone wander around my home without telling me. It’s … it’s … against the rules of our tenancy agreement.’

He looked at her, unimpressed. ‘So you write in newspaper,’ he snorted.

She looked at him helplessly but he didn’t care. She slowly backed away from the counter and retreated from the shop. Just as she was closing the door behind her he shouted, ‘Two week from today. You out.’

Kitty sat at the kitchen table with the names of her six subjects spread out before her. Each name was written on a card of its own and beneath each name was her story idea for each person. She laid them out neatly and then studied them slowly, one by one, hoping a link could be sparked in her mind. She drummed her fingers on the table, looking at the ninety-four other names, many of whom she had contacted and hadn’t had time to meet, many of whom she barely had time even to think about as they lived so far out of Dublin. Her stomach rumbled as she hadn’t eaten since tea with Mary-Rose, but she had no food in the fridge, no time to shop and no desire to steer off course. She was lost in the stories of the men and women who were taking over her mind: Archie, Eva, Birdie, Mary-Rose, Ambrose and Jedrek. Their worries were her worries, their problems were her problems, their delights her delights, their successes and their failures all hers too.

But – and there was a big but – no matter how much she stared at their names and how intrigued she was by their individual stories, they did not and could not make up one single combined piece for Constance’s tribute, one that would join their stories together seamlessly, unite them under one great glorious banner. Kitty laid her forehead down on the cool surface of the kitchen table and groaned. Pete had named Friday as the final day for her to present the story and he meant it. He had put up with her procrastination for long enough. He had somehow managed to ease the worries of the panicking advertisers, allowing her to write for the magazine, and for that she owed him a lot. He had fought hard for her and it was time she repaid him by delivering on her promise, but she had been so busy being on the move, meeting with the people on the list, that she had barely had time to face the truth. The truth being, she was in big trouble. It was time now that she admitted it, not just to herself but to someone of far greater importance.

Kitty knocked on Bob’s door. He was the only person she could bring herself to talk to honestly about Constance’s story, and she hoped that his understanding of the woman would help shed light on her problems.

Bob opened the door with a tired smile. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘You have?’

‘Though you’re later than I thought you’d be. Days later, my dear. Never mind, come on in.’ He opened the door wider, and made his way down the hall.

He sounded good-humoured but he looked so tired. He walked with a weariness that Kitty felt also, a weariness that came from a constant sadness, a hollowness in their hearts. The heart knew that something was missing and it was having to work extra hard to make up for it.

The living room was as cluttered as it always had been. Constance’s death had not changed that, though it may have helped add to it. Teresa had not managed to change Bob and Constance’s filing system, though Kitty was sure Bob would have fought her to the death if she’d tried to introduce a more linear, pedestrian form of living. Somewhere among all of that mess lay an order nobody else could decipher. It was impossible to sit at the kitchen table. The surface was covered in paperwork and miscellaneous items that spilled onto each of the six chairs that hugged the table.

‘Coffee?’ Bob asked, from the small kitchen.

‘Yes, please.’

Kitty knew she could do with getting some sleep that night, but a cup of coffee or two was certainly not going to prevent the inevitable from happening. She hadn’t slept properly for weeks, she doubted tonight was going to improve for her, and she needed to be alert for this conversation. She needed to defog her cloudy mind, a mind that felt it had scoured every avenue of possibility for the story, ransacking every home along its path as though it were leading a manhunt. She needed to view those pillaged avenues with a fresh eye and rewind, start afresh, and she needed Bob’s help to do this. What stalled her from asking outright was his gallant support in her ability to write Constance’s last story in the face of the doubting Cheryl and Pete. Now she had to tell him she had failed to deliver on her promise. There was no doubt that she had let herself down, that she was about to let Bob down was a sure thing, but as she stood in Constance’s home, feeling and smelling her friend as if she were just in the next room, more terrifying and heartbreaking to her was the unbearable feeling she had let Constance down. She was supposed to be Constance’s voice while Constance had been silenced, but what was she doing? Stuttering and stammering, humming and hawing, not being nearly as eloquent as Constance was somehow continuing to be in death.

A moment had passed in which Kitty had been studying the array of items cluttering every surface, then she realised she wasn’t smelling the anticipated aroma of coffee, nor was there a sound of Bob moving around in the kitchen. She found him standing in the middle of the small space, frozen solid, looking at the cupboards but not seeing them, looking more lost than she’d ever seen him. Though Bob was ten years Constance’s senior, they had always seemed to be the same age. Kitty wasn’t sure if it was Constance who acted older than her years or if it was Bob who seemed more youthful, but whatever it was they were just perfectly matched, always the same, always in sync, never seemed separated by anything as large as a decade, apart from the occasional viewpoint. It was as though they had arrived on the planet at the same time and accompanied each other through every day as though they were made to be that way. Kitty found it difficult to imagine Constance’s life before Bob, or Bob’s life before Constance, that there had been an entire ten years of his roaming the earth before she’d arrived. Kitty wondered if he’d felt it, the day she was born, but never knew why, a moment when the life of a ten-year-old boy growing up in Dublin suddenly felt right because of the arrival of a little soul in Paris.

But now, looking at Bob, Kitty could see the Bob without Constance and he was almost like a body without a soul. A little light had gone out.

‘Bob,’ Kitty said gently, placing a hand on his shoulder.

‘Yes,’ he straightened up, came to, as if suddenly remembering he had company.

‘Why don’t I make the coffee, you sit down and relax?’ she said casually, moving him aside gently and opening cupboards to get the coffee started.

‘Yes, yes, indeed,’ he said, distracted by who knew what memory or sudden thought he’d had, and sat in the only armchair free of a pile of newspapers and magazines.

Kitty opened the cupboards and was faced with books, crammed in as a regular bookshelf would be. Every single shelf in every press was filled; not a cup or saucer or plate, or even food was in sight. She frowned, searching for the coffee pot, for the cups, but failed. Trying to use Constance and Bob’s logic, she made her way to the living room to search the bookshelves for mugs but there weren’t any. No logic and no mugs, but plenty more books. Giving up momentarily on the mugs, she moved on with her task but there was no sign of a coffee pot, or of coffee granules, just a lone kettle that had once been their piggy bank of coins.

‘Bob,’ she said, a laugh catching in her throat, ‘where do you usually keep the coffee?’

‘Oh,’ he said suddenly as though the thought had never occurred to him. ‘We usually go out for coffee but Teresa is always drinking something from a mug. We must have something in there.’

Kitty looked around the cluttered kitchen. The calendar for that year was a Kama Sutra calendar. Stuck to the fridge with sticky tape, it displayed position number five for May: ‘Raised Missionary’. Kitty opened the fridge and was disappointed to find it empty; she had been hoping for something exciting after the presentation on the door. ‘Maybe she brings her own …’ She surveyed the empty shelves.

‘We have wine in the evenings.’ Bob spoke on behalf of himself and the empty armchair before him.

Which made sense. Constance was known to have at least a bottle of red wine every evening, and right now it sounded like a much better idea than coffee to Kitty.

‘And where would the wine bottles be hiding?’ Kitty smiled at Bob fondly.

He met her smile and the light returned to his eyes. ‘Ms Green Fingers herself liked to store them in the potting shed.’

Kitty wandered out to the still bright evening, across the grass to the potting shed, unslid the lock and stepped inside. It smelled of damp and soil. She switched on the stark white light, which dangled dangerously from a thin wire in the centre of the ceiling, and was faced with shelves of single bottles of red wine, each sitting in a terracotta pot of soil.

‘She liked to keep them warm,’ Bob said suddenly, appearing behind her. ‘She insisted they all have their own beds, kept to a temperature of no less than ten degrees.’

Kitty laughed. ‘But of course. And what are these?’ She examined the dozens of other pots with Post-it notes impaled by sticks stuck into the soil.

‘Her ideas.’

Kitty frowned. ‘I thought her ideas were all in the filing cabinet.’

‘They were the developed ones. Most of them began here. She called them her little seeds. As soon as they would pop into her head she would write them on a Post-it note and skewer them into these pots. Then occasionally, when she was short of an idea or two, she would come out to the shed to see if her ideas had grown.’

Kitty looked at him in surprise. ‘Why did I never hear about this?’

‘Because, my love, if I told anybody about this, Constance would be in a mad house.’

‘She already was in a mad house, Bob. With you.’ They both smiled. ‘So perhaps there’s something about her “Names” story here …’ She moved along the line of potted Post-its, reading the messy scrawled animated words and feeling an overwhelming urge just to be with Constance, to see her, to touch her.

‘There wouldn’t be anything here about that if it was in the filing cabinet. It may have started here first as one name, or five names or maybe not even a name at all. If it was in the filing cabinet, it had become something. This was the nursery for them all.’

‘Her babies,’ Kitty smiled, eyes running along the sporadic, spontaneous thoughts that had all at one stage popped into Constance’s mind. She thought about what Bob had said: the idea wouldn’t have appeared in the filing cabinet if it hadn’t
become something
and it was so frustrating not knowing what that something was.
Come on, Constance
,
Kitty silently wished, taking a last look around the shed,
give me a clue.
She waited a moment but the potting shed remained still and silent.

Kitty grabbed a bottle of wine, thought better of it, took a second and followed Bob back to the house. She removed the pile of photo albums from the armchair facing Bob, a French-style armchair with a metallic gold flower design. She could see Bob and Constance sitting by the roaring fire, discussing issues, theories, far-off, outlandish stories to cover, both arguing and bonded by their love for the unusual and fantastical, and equally so by the ordinary and seemingly mundane.

‘How are you, Bob?’ Kitty finally asked. ‘How are you doing?’

He sighed. A long heavy sigh that carried more weight than any words. ‘It’s been two weeks. One shudders to think that it’s been that long. The day after her funeral I woke up and said to myself, I can’t do this. I cannot get through this day. But I did. Somehow. And then that day was over and I was facing the night and I said to myself, I cannot face this night. But I did. Somehow. And then that night was over. I have said the same thing to myself every day and every night since. Each second is rather torturous, as though it will never move on, and as though it will never get any easier, and yet when I look back on it, look where we are. Two weeks on. And I’m doing it. And I still believe I simply cannot.’

Kitty eyes filled as she listened to him.

‘I expected the world to end when she died.’ He took a bottle from Kitty, opened it swiftly with a bottle opener that had been on the side table next to the
Irish Times
crossword, a biro and his reading glasses. ‘But it didn’t. Everything kept going, everything is still going. Sometimes I go for walks and I find that I have stopped moving, and everything else is still shifting and evolving all around me. And I wonder, don’t they know? Don’t they know about the terrible thing that has happened?’

‘I know how you feel,’ Kitty said gently.

‘There are good widowers and bad ones. You hear about the good ones all the time. Gosh, isn’t so-and-so great, so strong, so
brave
for doing whatever so soon. I fear I’m not a good widower, Kitty. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t wish to go anywhere. Most of the time I don’t want to even be here, but you’re not supposed to say that, are you? You’re just supposed to say insightful meaningful things that surprise people so that they can tell other people how brave you are. Brave,’ he repeated, his eyes filling. ‘But I was never the brave one. Why it should fall upon me to become that now is beyond me.’ Bob swiftly reached for the second bottle, opened it as quickly, deftly, and then handed it back to Kitty. ‘I don’t know where we keep the glasses,’ he said, then clinked his bottle against hers. ‘To … something.’

‘To our beloved Constance,’ Kitty said, lifting the bottle to her lips and drinking. The red wine burned her throat on the way down but left a delicious warm sweet coating in her mouth. She quickly followed it up with another mouthful.