Scarlet Feather (31 page)

‘And what brings you here?’ his mother asked.

‘I came to see you both, and to know how Da is getting along.’ He kept the smile on his face.

‘You know how he’s getting along. We sent you a note to thank you for that basket of fruit.’ His mother’s face was hard.

‘Yes, yes, indeed. It was a very nice letter.’ Joe knew that Tom had written it, typed it, made it up for them. Anything to keep a lifeline open between them all.

‘Anyway, now that I’m here, Ma…’ He began to take a step over the doorstep.

‘Who asked you to come in, Joe?’

‘Well you’re never going to send me away?’ He held his head on one side, the way of pleading that rarely failed. But he was at Fatima now.

‘What makes you think you’re welcome in this house? You often come to Dublin, and never come to see us. I saw you one day myself out of a bus, laughing on the corner of a street. Why should we welcome you here?’

‘I suppose any man who wants to see how well his father has recovered from a heart attack is welcome in his old home,’ Joe said.

The legendary Joe Feather charm was not finding its mark with his mother.

‘I’ve had to live with the results of your selfishness year after year, your father having no one to lift a hand to help him at his work.’

‘Ma, I was never going to work in Dad’s business, you know that.’

‘I do not know it, and a fine example you were to your brother, too…’

‘Tom was never going to work in it either, Ma

‘Not good enough for you, only good enough to pay your school fees and buy you clothes and football boots and a bicycle, but not good enough—’

‘Could I see Da, do you think?’ Joe cut across her.

‘What makes you think you can walk in here after all this time, and that your father will be pleased to see you?’

‘I had hoped that you both would,’ he said.

There was a tic in his forehead. Why was he doing this? One more refusal and he would leave, but he just had to see the old man before he went. He moved gently but firmly past his mother to the room where his father sat in the chair, straining to hear every word. The man looked white and papery. But there was a welcoming light in his face that Joe hadn’t seen in his mother’s.

‘Joe, good to see you, lad.’

‘And you, Da, I know it’s been a day or two but I wanted to make sure that you were as good as they say.’

‘They?’ His mother sniffed from the door.

‘Well, Tom for one, Cathy Scarlet for another, Ned in the yard for a third. People who care about you.’

‘Huh,’ said Maura Feather.

‘Look, I’m so glad to see you well, and you looking fine too, Ma. I’m just rushing through Dublin and I haven’t been back here since you were in hospital, so I thought it would be good for us to meet just for a few minutes.’

‘It is indeed, Joe.’ His father reached out for Joe’s hand.

Joe pretended not to see the gesture because he could sense his mother’s hostility towards any hand-grasping.

‘I brought us a quick small drink and a sweet biscuit, and maybe the next time I come Ma would make us a cup of tea and a scone…’

He didn’t look at her, instead he opened the sherry and found glasses on the sideboard.

‘I hope the next time will be soon. If you knew how tough it is over in London…’

‘I can’t remember anyone forcing you to go there.’ Maura Feather was not won over yet.

‘I liked it when I was young and foolish, Ma, everyone likes a big bad place then… But people aren’t really happy there, like they’re not in any big city.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you know yourself. You can see it in Dublin too, though of course London’s much bigger. People are restless. They’re looking for something to explain what it’s all about…’

They looked at him blankly.

‘You know, when I went to London first the churches were empty… Today there are people going into them at lunchtime, in the evenings looking up, everyone looking for answers.’

‘How would
you
know?’ Maura Feather asked.

‘I know because I go sometimes, and into a temple or a mosque or a synagogue… There’s not just one God, Mam, not like there was when we were young.’

‘There’s only one true God,’ she snapped.

‘I know, I know, but honestly nowadays it’s much better than it used to be, isn’t it, people respecting everyone’s beliefs.’

‘It’s very little belief you respected, Joe Feather, when we last saw you.’

At least she had used his name. It was an advance. He poured the sherry and smiled at them. His professional smile. He didn’t care for them himself – they were strangers, a weak man, a bitter woman. True, he had felt a tug of pity when he heard that his father had been fighting for breath in the hospital. Joe’s own inclination would have been to continue sending the occasional long-distance gift. But he had promised Tom he would make the effort. And somehow he owed Tom.

Tom had been right, he hadn’t helped the business of being a son of Fatima. He had been of little help in sharing what he saw as the burden of elderly and tiresome parents. He would keep smiling and talking about searching for more meaning in life and pouring sherry. He saw that his mother had relaxed and his father was touchingly pleased at his efforts. Joe thought he had put much, much more work than this into selling a line of coordinated tops and shorts to a tough Northern businessman. He would stay another half an hour.

The photo shoot was endless. Tom just could not believe that grown-up people spent such huge amounts of time doing something so trivial. Marcella had taken two days off work and arrived home with a selection of Haywards garments for both of them. The sweater and jacket she had chosen for him were astronomically expensive.

‘It’s all with Shona’s blessing… It’s as good as an unpaid advertisement for them. And you are so gorgeous to look at I’m going to have trouble beating them all off you, the make-up artists’ the hairstylists, the lighting people… And that’s only the men,’ she laughed excitedly.

It was beginning to happen for her. The work dream coming true, as it had for him earlier this year. Tom would do his utmost to smile and look rugged, or whatever they wanted that would help Marcella’s career.

The man who was meant to know the timescale of everything hadn’t known it, according to Neil. It was a new posting, it was all up in the air, it was not fixed to any date. There was plenty of time to talk.

‘Good,’ Cathy said.

Muttie and Lizzie whispered in the dark bedroom. ‘They’ll be gone at the end of the week,’ she said. ‘I know, and I was just getting to like them,’Muttie said.

Neil said that Kenneth and Kay Mitchell were now installed, and everything was in place; they were ready and waiting.

‘I told the social worker that it would be a bit hard on the kids to go straight back in, and she agrees entirely. She’s very nice, by the way, you’ll like her; her name is Sara. Anyway, Sara says that we should bring them to visit their parents once or twice before leaving them there. She’ll come with us.’

Cathy felt an unreasonable twinge of jealousy. This was
her
call, hers and her kind parents, who had put themselves out for the children when nobody wanted them. Now it seemed that everyone wanted them – mad, runaway fathers, mad, drunken mothers, bossy social workers called Sara.

‘Okay, I’ll fix a time to take them over to the House of Horrors,’ she said.

‘Don’t even whisper that name in front of those two. You know the way they pick up on everything,’ he warned.

‘You’re right. I’ll see when I can snatch an hour and take them.’

‘Well, we’ll have to coordinate when you’re free, Sara’s free and I’m free.’

‘But Neil, that could be next year. This isn’t a conference call that we’re setting up, it’s my taking those kids back to where they’re going to be living from now on without frightening them to death. It’s about putting some kind of mad appearance of normality on it, not about checking everyone’s diaries.’

‘Hon, I
know
what you’re saying, but in these kind of things it’s best to do it by the book, keep the social worker on board, then if anything goes wrong we’re all in the clear.’

‘But we know exactly what will go wrong… Eventually Kenneth will hear the sounds of distant excitement in far-off lands and Kay will smell a vodka bottle and we’re back to where we were.

Tom had never seen Ricky at work before. He had only seen him as the relaxed man who watched everything and knew everyone. He had no idea of the preparation that went into taking what would result in five or six photographs in a magazine. Tom’s face was a picture. He felt sure there had been some mistake, and that this was a multimillion-dollar movie that was being made in the small apartment in Stoneyfield. What he could not begin to understand was Marcella’s sense of calm throughout all of this. She served endless coffee and ice-cold mineral water. When asked to smile, she did so with a radiance he could hardly believe. It didn’t matter how many times she had to do it, the same smile was delivered as fresh as if it had come from the heart. She sat motionless as they applied yet more make-up, touched up the lip gloss and lacquered her already perfect hair. Tom, on the other hand, made jokes, clowned around, felt awkward, knocked things over and apologised again and again. He thought the day would never end. No night working in a noisy pub, no back-aching hauling of food up flights of stairs, no squeezing through tiny narrow corridors without upsetting trays of food had ever been half as exhausting as this. When they were finally alone in jeans and T-shirts, with all today’s finery at the dry-cleaner’s and tomorrow’s hung up in readiness, Tom lay down on the sofa with his head on her lap. She stroked his brow. Still fresh as a daisy, and her eyes dancing with the pleasure of it all.

‘Thank you, dear, dear Tom. I know you hated it,’ she said softly.

‘I didn’t
hate
it, exactly, but it was very stressful. I was hopeless, I’m afraid.’

‘You were wonderful. They all said so.’

‘Marcella, how have you the patience?’

‘I ask you always how have
you
the patience to do all that fiddly work. Those little perfectly shredded garnishes, and rolling up those tiny bits of sushi… I would go mad rather than do it, I tell you.’

She stroked his brow and he wanted to go to sleep there and then. ‘That’s because you don’t eat,’ he said, smiling up at her. ‘You’ve never had a lust for food like other fatter folk.’

‘Oh, I might have had a lust for food once upon a time,’ she said.

But he knew that she never had. Any of the few pictures of her childhood that he had seen showed a little waif-like girl. Marcella had never been a foodie.

‘I have to go, alas,’ he said, dragging himself up.

‘Surely not? After all the work you put in already today?’

‘We have a do. Cathy’s been working on it all day while I’ve been posturing here. I have to go and help her serve it.’

‘Sure you have to go. Though your posturing, as you call it, may well get you lots more business.’

‘Marcella, be serious!’

‘I was never more so. What is it tonight?’

‘Our Lady’s Ladies.’

‘What?’

__]

‘I don’t know. Some past pupils’ group. They’re all twenty years left school this year, and apparently two decades ago they swore a mighty oath that if they were alive today they’d have a party.’

‘They’re not really called that, are they?’

‘Something like that. Anyway, off I go. Am I too casual, do you think?’

‘I’d say Our Lady’s Ladies will just about tear you to pieces,’ said Marcella admiringly.

‘Jesus, Cathy, what a day I’ve had: I’m so sorry for leaving all this to you.’

‘No problem, Mister Cheesecake… I was glad to be distracted, I have to take those kids to meet some terrifying Nazi called Sara tomorrow, and ease them back to the madhouse… I preferred making salmon
en croute
.’

How they got through the night, they never knew. Tom, who was nearly dead from smiling at cameras for over seven hours and with the thought of the same thing again the following day, smiled and laughed and told the women that there must be some mistake, none of them could have left school twenty years ago. Cathy, who was nearly dead worrying about how to handle the horrific social worker Sara without putting anyone’s back up managed to weave and duck around the room as the women shrieked and remembered funny things from years ago. Almost everyone had turned up, they told Cathy, only three had cried off. Janet who was in New Zealand, Orla who was in some kind of weird cult in the West of Ireland and Amanda who was in Canada running a bookshop with her lover. Was that Amanda Mitchell by any chance, Cathy had wondered, too much of a coincidence. Yes, it was, apparently! They were annoyed about Amanda, she always had plenty of money, her family owned that big house, Oaklands, so she could well have come back. It wasn’t as if any of them were going to be worried one way or another about her lover.

‘And who is he?’ Cathy had asked politely.

‘Aha, it’s not a he at all, it’s a she. Imagine! Amanda Mitchell is the only girl in a class of twenty-eight females who fancied a woman, what does that do to statistics?’ asked the woman who had set up the party.

Cathy sat down in the kitchen. Her sister-in-law was a lesbian. What else would the day bring?

‘They were a nice lot,’ June said as she helped to pack the van.

‘And they seemed pleased with it all,’ Tom yawned.

‘They gave me a good tip, too. And four of them asked me where I got my streaks done.’

‘Did they like them?’ Cathy was still doubtful about the startling violet sections of June’s hair.

‘They loved them, they were dead impressed that I could afford Haywards. Thanks again, Cathy, it was a great gift.’

‘That bit was nothing, it’s my hair we have to worry about with Hannah,’ said Cathy.

They left June at a taxi rank. ‘You know, I have a great life because of you two,’ she said, and trotted off.

They drove in silence towards the premises.

‘I didn’t know it was all going to be so bloody exhausting,’ Cathy said.

‘Nor I. The food’s no trouble, it’s just the people who are a pain,’