Whitethorn Woods (30 page)

   My mum works in a travel agency, she spends her whole day finding cheap holidays for people, she is quite good at it now. She can get great discounts for all kinds of vacations. The West Indies for half-nothing at short notice, a long weekend off-season in Venice . . . But Dad can't fly, he tried once and his ears went funny so he never did it again. Mum has to go on trips with her colleagues, which isn't quite the same. But they are happy, they are really quite happy compared to most of the world.

   Dad is a vegetarian and Mum is always on some kind of nutter's diet so it made sense to have a shelf for each of us in the fridge. And we arranged everything else in the house very well.

   We have two television sets, one in the kitchen and one in the sitting room, so there are no heated debates about what we watch. Every third week we each do the washing; there is no ironing, we have everything drip-dry. My sister, Bella, found that sad too. As if her life with these two dull women who all wore organic clothes and ate organic food and talked organic talk was somehow less drear.

   Mum and Dad are just fine and I've been driving a taxi for long enough to know they are better off than a lot of people of their age. You can see a lot of human misery from the front seat, let me tell you.

   Anyway one morning my mum said she was going to Dubai next weekend for eight days and my dad said that was great, she'd love it, and he might go to a sanctuary for injured animals—he has always wanted to give the time to poor donkeys with their bones coming through their skin and to frightened dogs who often had only three legs and haunted eyes. They both asked me, would I be okay, and I said I'd be fine. It was my weekend to do the washing anyway so they could just leave everything for me.

   "You're a very good boy, Hugo," my mum said.

   "A man, really," my dad said.

   "Maybe you'll be off getting married when we get back," my mum said.

   She said it as a joke but I know she was serious. She'd have loved to see me married. I felt a failure to them in a way. When they were my age Bella was five and I was four. I had nothing to show for anything but a reasonable bank balance.

   "No, I think I'll be around here until you are old and gray," I said.

   "I hope not, son, it would be nice for you to meet someone you chose rather than living with us, people you didn't choose at all," my dad said.

   And I got a sudden chilly feeling that I never would meet anyone I knew was right for me because I realized I could never make up my mind.

   I just went with things that fell into my lap. Like Uncle Sidney getting me to drive a taxi and going with this girl because she was someone's sister or that girl because she was the mate of some pal's girlfriend. I played football on a Sunday because someone else had set up the team and booked the place to play, I bought my clothes in a place where Gerry, a friend of mine, worked. He always held a few things back for me when they had a sale.

   "You could look really well, Hugo, if you tried," he said to me a couple of times. "You have that thin pointy face that women go for. You should wear good leather jackets." But then Gerry is a very cheerful fat guy who says nice things to people all of the time.

   He wouldn't know whether I looked good or like the back of the Rossmore-to-Dublin bus. So I don't go out much testing my so-called good looks.

   And oddly, apart from Chrissie, I never really met anyone I'd like to get to know a lot better. And even with her. Well, I wasn't sure.

   It would be foolish for us both to get our hopes up if we weren't really sure. I mean, Chrissie was great fun and she was fascinating about flowers and everything but forever? All day and all night? I don't know.

   And neither did Chrissie, to be honest. We had both told each other that nothing was worse than people trapped in loveless relationships. Chrissie saw that all the time. She said that a good sixty percent of the brides that she dealt with over wedding flowers were all wretched.

   I knew that so many of the people I drove were miserable too and seemed to fight all the time. Particularly those going on vacation. They often actually seemed to hate each other.

   Anyway the night after my mum had gone off to the Gulf to get a tan and buy a gold bracelet, and my dad had gone to feed little broken fawns with bottles of warmed milk and bind up the wounds on donkeys' backs, I worked an extra shift. I was thinking it would be really nice to have someone who just adored you and would fight your corner, like happens in the movies.

   And then I was going past this Italian pasta place, where people were coming out into the street, most of them fairly drinky, as it happened. You want to be careful of a fare like that. Uncle Sid always said, Turn off the meter but slow down to see if they can stand and pay what they will owe you and especially keep a beady eye out for those who might get sick in your cab.

   A nice young fellow came out and hailed me, he was sober anyway, American or Canadian maybe. Very polite.

   "I wonder if I could ask you to take this young lady home?" He gave me a tenner, well above the fare to where she was going.

   The y
oung lady
was weaving round the place, but she didn't look like a barfer—you get the feeling when they're going to throw up—she hadn't that kind of aura about her, if you know what I mean. Anyway she fell into the taxi on her knees, which was a poor start.

   He climbed in and straightened her up, very tenderly.

   I asked him, was he going to come with us, possibly? I was thinking he might be useful at the other end hauling her out again.

   "No, I wish I could but, you see, Monica . . . is there . . . and it is Monica's night really and we do live in the same direction. You're all right, Emer—wake up, darling, wake up and talk to the nice driver."

   "I don't want to talk, Ken, I want to sing to the driver," she said mutinously.

   "Is that okay, driver?" he asked me anxiously.

   "Sure, Ken," I said. "I'll sing too."

   "I
hate M
onica, Ken, you're much too good for her, she has a

face like a marshmallow and she paints as if she dipped another marshmallow into pinks and blues and yellows. She's a really terrible gross person, Ken, it's just that you can't see that."

   Ken seemed anxious for Monica not to hear this description and he looked at me wildly. I often think this job is a bit like being a diplomat and a marriage counselor all rolled into one.

   "I'll be off now," I said.

   "Take care of her, she's very special," he said to me. And we were gone. She sat grumbling in the back, asking why if she was so special was he going to take home that Monica who had a face like an almond bun.

   "More like a marshmallow, really," I corrected her. She was delighted with me.

   "That's exactly what she's like. Exactly. How clever you are to notice." She smiled happily to herself and repeated it over and over: "Like a marshmallow," as if she had not come up with the phrase herself. "Hey, Ken asked me to sing to you—what would you like?" she asked eventually.

   "Why don't
you
choose." I was polite, as always.

   She was a nice girl, late twenties maybe, long straight fair hair. She had drunk far too much wine but seemed pleasant about everything except Monica with the flat face.

   "Ken is very nice, you see, he knows taxi driving is a dull job and that you might want to be entertained on the way back, that's why he suggested it. I'll sing 'By the Rivers of Babylon.' " And she did, quite well, as it happens.

   I suggested we sing "Stand by Your Man." She told me that men were foolish and didn't need people to stand by them, what men needed was a wake-up call. But we sang it anyway, and a few more.

   Then I was afraid she was going to go to sleep and we might have trouble identifying her house or if it was a flat which one it might be. So I made every effort to keep the conversation going, by asking her, what did men need to be woken up to?

   "To the fact that they usually have perfectly good women just within an arm's length and they never seem to see them," she said crossly. She told me at confused length about this guy Ken and how he had been taken in by Monica's sheer silliness and had wrongly believed that that stupid woman needed looking after. She didn't think that they were sleeping together but you never knew with men. And tonight could be the night. Tonight could be the very night they might do it. In Monica's horrible house at

35 Orange Crescent. She was pretty glum about that.

   "Maybe he's too drunk to do it tonight," I said, thinking that would help.

   "No, he hardly drinks at all. He was the sober one, who paid too much for the meal for everyone."

   She was brooding heavily about it all. She said she had been to pray at St. Ann's Well and St. Ann hadn't bothered at all. St. Ann had let the truly awful Monicas of this world prowl round and destroy people. Taking them home to ravish them on the way.

   "Well, I imagine he just saw her home, you know, and then went home himself." I soothed her as best as I could.

   "But he doesn't see me, that's the problem. What's your name, by the way?"

   I told her I was called Hugo.

   "Hugo—that's a bit fancy, isn't it?"

   "Is it? I don't know. I always thought it would look good on a CD or outside a gig where I would be playing. I had my dreams, you know." I didn't usually talk about myself. I was surprised at myself. But what the hell, she was one drunken woman, I might as well have been reciting the Highway Code.

   She was prepared to fight with her shadow. "Well, why didn't you do something about your dream, then?" She was like a small, angry terrier dog on the backseat. "My family wanted me to be a teacher or a nurse, they didn't want me to do arty things, but I fought for it, and tomorrow I have this interview for a huge job, and I hoped that Ken would come home with me tonight and pat me down instead of going to 35 Orange Crescent and patting down that stupid marshmallow, as you so rightly called her." She was near tears now.

   I had to stop that at all costs.

   "Listen," I said, "I suppose men are a bit hopeless, cagey . . . whatever. It's just that we don't want to get into something which may be wrong and there will be a load of grief and aggravation getting out of it. That's all it is, really."

   "That's such bullshit," she said. "I bet there's some nice girl who has hopes of you, Hugo, some foolish insane girl who thinks you could be a singer if you weren't so cautious, who thinks she might make you happy if you'd let her in. The world is full of women like that. I don't know where we'd stretch to if you put us all in a line. Really I don't." She shook her head at the tragedy of it all.

   I thought I saw her eyes beginning to close in the rearview mirror.

   "I do have a friend, Chrissie," I shouted, trying to keep her awake, "but I'm not certain that it's the real thing and I don't think she's certain and it would be silly to get into something we might have to get out of."

   "Oh for God's sake, Hugo, you are one dumb fool. Who can be certain of anything on this earth? I ask you. I never met such a ditherer. In about forty years I'll meet you again and you'll be exactly the same as you are now, older of course and bald and you won't have one of those sharp thin faces that would look so well on a CD, you'll have a fat cautious face and wear a greasy checked cap. But basically you'll be the same."

   I wasn't going to get annoyed with her. I asked her what she thought that I should do. Oho, she knew that too.

   I was to go round to Chrissie's house tonight and say I was prepared to give it a go, that life was short and love was good and that we would both give it our best try.

"I might," I said.

"You won't," she told me.

   "Why don't you say all these things to Ken?" I asked her with some spirit.

   "Because I just couldn't bear it if it didn't work," she said very truthfully.

   Then she got out of the taxi and teetered about a bit. I got out to steady her up and help her up the few steps outside the hall door. There was a bit of fumbling with her key but eventually I got her into her flat.

   "You're quite a good singer," she said as she left me. "Yes, quite good. You'd need to work on your repertoire but you can certainly hold a tune," she said before she crashed indoors.

   It was a quiet night as I was driving around when I saw I was near Orange Crescent. I remembered what she had said about my being a ditherer. I'd show her.

   I rang the doorbell.

   Marshmallow Monica came to answer it. She wore no shoes but she did have all her clothes on. Maybe I was in time.

   "I've come for Ken," I said.

   Ken came out, bewildered.

   "You ordered a cab," I said.

   He was very polite but confused, there must have been some mistake. I was adamant. How else would I have known the name and the address, I had come specially, a long way, to collect him.

   "Well, perhaps, Monica, since the driver has come for me . . . I should really go with him."

   There was a poutish display of bad temper from the Marshmallow, but I had him in the cab. I would now drive him home.

   "Emer loves you," I said.

   "No she doesn't, she loves her career," he said sadly.

   "You're wrong," I said. "You're so very wrong. When she wasn't singing she was telling me how much she loved you."

"She's drunk as a lord of course," Ken said.

   "I think it's the same drunk or sober," I said. "And she's going to have some hangover tomorrow, maybe you should go round and straighten her up for that interview she's going to."

   He looked thoughtful. "Are you into therapy or crisis intervention in your spare time?" he asked me.