Deceptions (17 page)

The following Saturday we were sitting together in McDonald’s when Killian asked what an abortion meant. He lowered his voice, as if he instinctively understood the question should not be asked amidst the clamour of birthday parties and family gatherings. Was it a big gun with bullets – or a dagger? He’d overheard Jean and Greta arguing. Greta may have been fighting on my behalf, demanding more time with him, perhaps. He did not know the details, just the essence.

“Mammy said you wanted to kill me when I was in her tummy.” He pulled apart a Big Mac and squinted at the contents then, noticing my expression, laid it uneaten on his plate.

Greta, whose bungalow was our neutral territory, was working in her kitchen when I collected him the following weekend.

“How could you tell Killian that Terence doesn’t love him as much as he loves Laura because he isn’t his real father?” She scrubbed a counter top hard and determinedly, her face tight with an anger I’d noticed only once before – when she’d slammed the door in my face. “Jean said he cried for hours after he returned home.”

I defended myself, made excuses. Self-justification is always an easier option than admitting shame. I always hoped Killian would forget that conversation. But I know now that such fractured incidents were stored in his head as carefully as a squirrel’s hoard. He absorbed our anger through his pores, breathed it deep into his nervous system, heard it in our voices when we questioned him about the life he spent apart from us.

On the morning of his First Communion I sat at the back of the church. I watched Jean and Terence escort him to the altar. After the ceremony I was presented to the Sheratons as a family friend. Greta took photographs. Now, when I look at them, I see the tension that frightened our son so much. It’s set like aspic in our fixed smiles, the strain in our eyes, the nervous clutch of our fingers on his shoulders.

I heard him acquire Terence’s accent, repeat his jokes. I watched him imitate his confident stride, his skill on the rugby pitch. My son had a Saturday father who didn’t exist, an invisible presence who walked beside him during school concerts, birthday parties, rugby matches. He no longer prattled heedlessly about family activities, aware that a careless remark could rouse Jean or myself to instant fury and retaliation. Tit for tat – tat for tit. I write with honesty, not with pride, and if there is a punishment for those who injure with words rather than knives then we, his parents, have served our sentence overlong.

He first asked about my mother, the grandmother he never knew, when he was eight years old. I spread photos across the floor.

“She looked like you,” I said.

He spotted the resemblance immediately and swallowed her with his eyes. His smile was her smile. The way he tossed his head when he laughed brought her instantly to mind.

He said, “That’s a weird name,” when I called her “Shady”.

“Her name was Sadie,” I explained. “But her friends always called her Shady.”

“Shady lady.” He grinned and tried it again. “Shady lady … Shady lady.”

He asked what age I was when she died.

“Seven years old,” I replied. His eyelids flickered as he tried but failed to imagine a world without a mother.

Shady died in a head-on collision with a wall. It was an accident that should never have happened. The police found alcohol in her bloodstream and traces of LSD. Such carelessness when life was so fragile. No wonder I carry anger. I remember a coffin borne on shoulders and a graveyard with rain; muck piled high as a mountain. A woman in a headscarf stood close to me. She had a mole on her cheek. It reminded me of a beetle. I expected it to crawl across her broad face and down her chin, drop silently on the muck where it would burrow deep. But only her lips moved.

“That Sadie Carmody was a wild one,” she said to the woman beside her. “Drugs, if you wouldn’t mind. Who ever thought we’d see the day?”

They nodded vigorously, their mouths slanting, as if opinions must be cautiously released in the presence of death. Who knows but the wild one could be listening from that distant sphere.

“Poor little lad. Never a mention of a father and now this.” They turned their eyes in my direction. I think they were surprised to see me standing so close. But they didn’t see me, not really. Just a shadow child, hollowed out inside.

The coffin was lowered by a rope. Harriet threw clay into the hole. She held my hand with her left hand, the one with only three fingers and a thumb.

“Frostbite,” she said when I asked. “I lost it in Alaska. It’s my wedding-ring finger. Fate, I suppose. Like Shady, I was never meant to marry.”

She held my hand so tight it hurt and I held her just as fiercely. I felt the space where her finger used to be and wondered if she had searched for it in Alaska. Did she miss it and, if she did, was it the same as missing my mother? My poor lost little boy, she cried. Lost like her finger. Shady was lost under the clay. Her eyes were brown as a bruise.

Harriet hung up her walking boots and we moved to Mayo. The cottage had a window overlooking Clew Bay. She tried her best to be a mother. I tried my best to be a son. We ended up being friends.

Killian stared at my mother’s photograph, a blurred image, taken, I suspect, at a family party. Her lips looked black and thin against her white teeth. It did not reflect the beauty I remembered. He asked if she had been a drug addict. His face was troubled, as if he was forcing the words from a disturbed place within himself.

“Mammy says that’s why you can’t love anybody but yourself.”

Jean was righteous when I rang. She reminded me of Slane, the anger I’d expressed over my mother’s death. As if I needed reminding. The memory of the pleasure we’d experienced throughout that passionate weekend when we opened our hearts and minds to each other had long withered – but the knowledge we carried away with us had become a poisoned arsenal.

Granny Greta takes tablets for heart scald … leave the child alone … shame on you both … carrying on like that over a little boy … tug love … tug of war love … tough love …

Stop standing up for him, mother. Killian could have been an abortion. A lump in a bucket. Why are you always hanging around, Killian? This is a private conversation. Go and play in the garden … bucket baby … rock-a-bye baby … bang bang bullet baby …

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
WO

Virginia and Razor run through a shower of rice. Dressed in cream chambray with freesias in her hair, Virginia carries her stomach as if it is an awkward but precious possession. A scan has revealed the gender of the baby. They are going to have a son whom they will call Jake. Lorraine has flown to London to attend the registry-office ceremony. On the night before the wedding she rests her cheek against Virginia’s stomach and feels the pattering feet.

“Have you forgiven me for telling Razor?” She is awed by the momentous event soon to take place and is relieved that the decision she made was the correct one.

Virginia smiles enigmatically, rests her hands on her stomach. “Time will tell.”

“Marry in haste, repent in hell,” intones Aunt Josephine who wears a lavender hat with a feather. Des Cheevers arrives with a frail blonde woman. Sonya does not look like a vamp in red stilettos – and Josephine is heard to say, “Those who sleep with dogs will rise with fleas.”

No one is sure whether she is referring to her son-in-law or her ex-husband.

At home, Lorraine waits for the phone call that will announce the baby’s arrival. It comes in the small hours of the morning. At first, she is unable to recognise Razor’s voice. It rasps down the line, as if something is lodged in his windpipe. Tears, she realises, feeling her heart plunge in shock when he tells her that their baby died during delivery. A distressed heart. By the time a caesarean operation was performed, it was too late to save him. He talks for over an hour, endlessly repeating his story as if repetition will bring understanding, some form of acceptance.

Lorraine returns to London and is waiting to greet Virginia when she arrives home from hospital. She has tidied the apartment, removed the baby clothes. Her heart ached as she folded vests and baby shoes, removed the carry-cot and pram. Virginia lies in bed and gives vent to a low keening wail that reminds Lorraine of banshees, old Celia stirring the shadows with her ghostly tales. Her scalp prickles as the hours pass and Virginia continues to cry, dredges her past, lacerates herself for the carefree, dangerous life she led throughout her pregnancy. Razor is reticent in his grief, as if her overwhelming sorrow drains him of any energy or expression. Her outburst, its very intensity, cannot last and by the time Lorraine returns to Ireland Virginia is calm again. She will return to work and develop some really wild promotional ideas.

Punk is dead. Sulphuric Acid have buried the remains and Virginia now refers to Razor as Ralph. She sends Lorraine a photograph taken on Tower Bridge. Her hair is long and back to its natural black. Under a wide-brimmed hat, which she clutches with one hand, her eyes seem enormous in her heart-shaped face. The wind is blowing across the bridge, flapping her skirt against her legs. Ralph’s hair is long at the back and he wears a sharp pinstripe suit with a pink shirt. Lorraine is surprised to realise he is handsome when he smiles. That night she uses the photograph to paint her first portrait. On her next visit to London, she presents it to them as a gift.

Their lives are in the fast lane, hectic. Razor and Virginia have gone into business together, setting up their own public relations company and working closely together on many high profile promotions. His briefcase has monogrammed initials and his Filofax is as essential as his right arm. The cramped flat where Lorraine lived for a summer has been replaced by a spacious apartment with a sun-filled balcony overlooking the Thames. With life in the fast lane there is no time for babies or hormonal urges.

Lorraine has a boyfriend, Louis, a sculptor who casts her hand in bronze and claims that life is a terminal illness. Their relationship, as far as Lorraine is concerned, is in terminal decline and even the dubious distinction of being a bronze casting no longer has any appeal. She is alone in her house one night when the doorbell rings. Afraid that Louis is returning to plead his case one last time, she does not open the door but waits, instead, behind the curtain until the figure retreats to the gate. He is taller than Louis, blonde, not dark, and there is no mistaking Adrian Strong’s graceful prowl. She raps the windowpane, calls his name, flings open the door and blurts out explanations about bronze castings and terminal life patterns. He is equally excited and brings a blast of Californian sunlight into the kitchen where she makes coffee, suddenly gloriously, insanely happy. He has returned to Ireland to establish the Strong Advertising Agency. What does she think of the name, he asks, sitting opposite her.

“It’s
strong
.” She laughs back at him and resists the temptation to stroke the golden hairs on his arms. They talk until after midnight when her parents return, merry from too much wine and a chicken curry with the Ruanes next door.

Donna invites him to stay in the spare room until he has found accommodation. Three months later he is still living with the Cheevers. Afterwards, Lorraine will remember those months as an idyllic phase in a relationship that will change its shape in many ways, allowing them a marriage of consuming highs, painful lows and settling finally into a contented flow that carries them through the years of career building and parenting. But for those three months their passion burns like a subterranean fuse – which is carefully disguised under Donna’s watchful eyes. At night Lorraine tip-toes across the landing to the spare room, it being furthest from her parents’ bedroom. She is aware that Donna will probably awaken at the first squeak of wood and, as she slips into bed beside Adrian, that need for silence adds an exquisite tenderness to their lovemaking.

He is a charming lodger, praising Donna’s cooking, respectful of her opinions yet able to tease her, to flatter her and compliment her sense of style when she dresses to go out for an evening. She remains adamant that he must find his own place and pencils rings around the rental sections in the evening newspapers before handing them to him.