The Kiss (2 page)

He gathered up his papers, shoved books into a carrier bag, unpinned his Rodin posters and photographs from the wall, and left the building where he had been employed, some would say gainfully, for the past fifteen years.

‘I’m going to phone Grandma,’ Cormac shouts up the stairs to Davy, who is moving around in his new room. Stay out of the way, is what he means. ‘Grandma Aherne,’ he adds in a mutter and closes the living room door.

He has decided he’d better do it in case she should ring their old house to wish them a happy New Year. So, all right, maybe she has never done it before but she could decide to do it now, couldn’t she, for the very first time, and if she got the dialling tone going on and on and on without the answering machine chipping in she might begin to wonder? To panic, even. So he has been telling himself. He flexes his fingers and punches out the number.

She answers at once as if the phone has been at her elbow.

‘I thought it might be you,’ she says and waits.

‘Happy New Year, Ma.’

‘Let’s hope it will be a better one than last year.’

He clears his throat and quickly tells her his news.

‘This isn’t your idea of a joke, is it, Cormac?

He tells her it is not. Would that be his idea of a joke, for goodness sake?

‘I never know with you, Cormac. You’re like your da when it comes to joking. You’ve a queer sense of humour at times.’ She sighs and gathers her breath and he keeps his head bowed and the receiver well away from his ear while the storm flashes and the breakers roll relentlessly over him, making, as they crash, a deafening roar. When they have subsided, he hears her say, ‘I always thought it was a mistake for you to marry a Protestant.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Ma, it’s time to give up all that old rubbish!’

‘Rubbish! Is that how you refer to your faith?’

‘I haven’t been a practising Catholic since I was eighteen, and well you know it.’

‘That’s part of your problem, Cormac. Faithless.’

She might well be right; he is not prepared to dispute that. He is conscious of the vacuum inside him which once he could fill with Hail Marys and pleas to God to have mercy on his soul. He still believes he has a soul for inside him somewhere there is something that he can give no other name to and there are times when he has longed to sit in front of a flickering candle and close his eyes. And find peace. That, of course, is the
attraction, the notion that seduces. He has done it a couple of times, crept up the steep, exposed steps to St Mary’s Cathedral and lit a candle. And sat there with an empty mind, feeling like a hypocrite, glancing idly round in case his mother or one of his holy aunts might be sitting at the back watching him. Spying on him. There wasn’t much chance of that since the Irish Sea yawned between them, he could thank God for that, at least. But he felt their eyes, nevertheless.

‘Are you still there, Cormac?’ His mother is making the line click at the other end.

‘Yes, I’m still here.’

‘Of course you had to marry her, didn’t you?’

‘I did nothing of the sort. We knew Sophie was on the way but that wasn’t the only reason. We’d been living together for a couple of years.’

He shouldn’t have reminded her of that. Living out of wedlock. In sin. What an eejit he is right enough! Will he never learn to stop passing her the ammunition?

‘Have you another woman?’ Her voice has dropped an octave. He hears the question that lies behind this one. Are you taking after your father in this way too?

‘No, Ma, there’s no one,’ he says and swallows. There is a lie at the heart of the truth he has just told. And each time he remembers it his throat swells. He
puts his fingers to his neck, feels the heat gathering. He cannot tell his mother the whole truth.

‘There’s still hope, then?’

‘For Rachel and me? I doubt it.’

‘She was a nice enough girl – I didn’t dislike her – but if you’d married one of your own she might have brought you back to the Faith. Brought up your children in the Faith. And what about the two of them? A broken home is the ruination of children, every mortal knows that.’

Can he lay the blame for his ruination at her door, then, hers and his father’s? She would say their broken marriage was no fault of hers; his father was the sinner who walked away. There’s no point in saying anything, he knows that well enough, so he keeps his mouth closed and makes a face at the wall.

‘Holy mother of God,’ she keens, ‘what did I ever do to deserve this?’

‘Nothing, Ma,’ he assures her. Except bring him, her only son and child, into the world, a child with strange notions and ambitions who was not content to become a clerk and work for the gas board or sell insurance. She got the length of forty without bearing a child and then something weird must have happened. A virgin birth? He tells himself to give over. If she could hear his thoughts she might have a heart attack. But that
could have been her mistake: not to have remained childless, like her four holy sisters. Originally there were six of them, but two had passed away. Not that the remaining ones are that holy; Mary, for a while, until she’d undergone treatment, was a kleptomaniac, with a notion for bath salts; Sal runs a pub in Dublin; Kathleen in her youth had a long relationship with a married man, a mortician, that ended with the death of his spouse when he upped and married the fancy woman of at least two other men that they knew. Cormac is not aware of any transgressions on the part of Lily, the remaining one of the four, though he has always wondered about her for she is never out of the confession box. But when it comes to holiness his mother is up front there alongside any of her sisters.

The children are fine, he tells her. Rachel is fine. He is fine. She need not worry though he knows that she will; it is part of her daily life. He has something else to tell her but that will have to wait. The relaying of one piece of bad news is as much as he can cope with in one phone call.

‘When are you coming over to see me, son?’ she asks, her voice wearied now after her outburst and turning querulous.

‘Soon, Ma. As soon as I can.’

‘You said you’d come over during the Christmas
holidays but you never came. Before that it was the summer holidays.’

‘We’ve had a lot to sort out, what with moving house and all that. I’d better give you my new address and phone number.’

She repeats the words and numbers as she slowly transcribes them, out of his sight. He can see her fingers, though, moving slowly and painfully over the lined pale-blue paper. Her hands are arthritic and she’s got a touch of it in her knees but there’s nothing wrong with her head. She forgets little. Nevertheless, he wonders if he should be thinking about sheltered housing, trying to persuade her. They’ve got some really nice properties, Ma, well set up, all mod cons, and it’d be your own wee place, with your own furniture and you could suit yourself and there’d be a warden to take care of you if you fell out of bed, answer your bell when you rang. He’d be wasting his breath. The only person for whom she’d toll a bell would be him. She’d say they’d have to take her out in a long box before she’d budge from her own home.

‘I’ll need to go, I hear someone at the door,’ he lies. The afternoon light is waning beyond the window and he has just realised that he is hungry. He’ll have to go out and buy something from the nearest Pakistani for their supper. Fish fingers and oven chips. His mother would have a fit if she knew.

‘Think about what you’re doing, son,’ she implores. ‘Think about it!’

He is thinking about it, all the time, he tells her, and says goodbye, take care, don’t worry, keep warm, make sure you get enough to eat, I’ll send you a couple of tenners next week, maybe a bit more, but I’m strapped for cash at present, Christmas and all that, you know what it’s like, but I’ll be over soon.

She says God bless.

Now he has given his mother another sorrow to nurse. He tries to comfort himself with the thought that she likes sorrows, that without them she’d feel bereft.

So there she sits in the little front parlour of her red-brick terraced house in Belfast, before a two-barred electric fire with only one bar glowing, the other permanently dead, to keep the bills down. Her shoulders are slumped under a heavy jumper, knitted before her hands turned rickety, her pale hair pinned tightly back, not one strand straggling, her thin legs encased in opaque greyish stockings that help her veins. Her back is held straight and her head is cocked as she listens to the sound of feet going by in the street. Kids knuckling the glass as they go past. Rattling the letter box. Shouting obscenities through the slot. Causing mayhem. It is not as it was when she was a child. Or
when her son was a child. Then the young had respect.

She abides by the ten commandments without difficulty. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery. Thou Shalt Not Steal. Thou Shalt Not Kill. Oh dear God, how that commandment has been transgressed in her province! How many doorsteps in the city have been stained with blood? The man who lived next door to her sister Lily came to the door to answer a knock one night. What a mistake to answer a knock. To take your life in your hands and open your own front door. There was a time when the front doors stood open and the kids played in and out. ‘Are you in, Missus?’ You trusted even the hawkers to stand in the hallway while you went to get your purse. The man from the Pru would just walk in. Your neighbour came in and out borrowing a half cup of sugar or a few spoons of tea. When you went up the road to the shops you didn’t lock the door. Trust. Faith. Hope. All gone.

Now he has depressed himself. What’s the point in running through all that old guff in his head? It’s not going to change the world.

He opens his front door and looks out into the unfamiliar street. He wonders what Rachel will be doing. Not standing at her door gazing out at the dark, he’ll lay a wager on that. She’ll be unpacking boxes,
hanging up pictures, setting out ornaments, creating a new
home
. She never lies down under adversity. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, boyo! You know that salt smarts in wounds, that it doesn’t do anything to heal them. Weren’t you told that at your mother’s knee? Come on, pick yourself up and stop making a fuss! You were told a lot at your mother’s knee right enough and the trouble is it’s not easy to forget it.

The houses across the street stand in a regimented row, their staircases lined up in serried ranks, like soldiers on parade. A few lights glow. Lighted windows reassure him. He likes signs of human habitation, is uneasy when he stays too long in country retreats with no other person in sight. What are they doing behind those lit windows? Watching telly. Sleeping off the New Year booze. Playing happy families. Mr Plod the policeman, Mrs Plod and all the little Plods. He wasn’t too good at the Plod bit though he loves his children dearly. You’re too restless for your own good, Cormac, his mother said, when she had him at her knee.

Above the rooftops a few stars are coming into the deepening sky. They haven’t changed. It’s just the bloody earth that has.

He goes inside, calls out again to Davy. ‘We’ll go and see if we can find a Chinese open. Their New Year’s different.’

Mornings are not Cormac’s best time, unlike his mother who used to be up with the lark, as she termed it, though no larks ever sang in their back yard. He struggles up to quell the alarm, dresses, and prepares his son’s breakfast. Davy is no better than he is in the morning.

‘Come on, Davy,’ he exhorts, ‘eat up your egg! And stop messing around.’

‘You’re not eating anything.’

‘I’m not going to school.’

‘You’re lucky.’

‘There’s different ways of looking at it.’

‘Why aren’t you going?’ The boy is just stalling, he doesn’t really want to know, he senses that it’s difficult
ground to tread on and he has been only too ready to accept what he was told: that his father has given up teaching to have more time for his sculpture.

‘I’m not hungry,’ he says finally and pushes the plate away.

‘But I made it specially—’ Cormac removes the mangled egg. He doesn’t know what he’s making so much fuss for; he has given Davy his breakfast on numerous occasions, got him ready for school, taken him there. He doesn’t have to prove anything, not on that score, anyway.

‘Away and get dressed,
pronto
! You don’t want to be late. You’ll just start the day on the wrong foot.’ He puts the dishes in the sink, on top of last night’s, and runs hot water on them, to be washed properly later. He hasn’t yet adjusted to the idea of no dishwasher. They sold it as a fitment with the house. As Rachel said, neither of them would have room for it in their new kitchens. She has a much more practical outlook on life than he has.

He clears a space on the draining board and quickly makes up two large wholemeal sandwiches, one with cheddar cheese and pickle, the other with peanut butter. That is one thing he is proficient at: making sandwiches. He puts them into a Tupperware box along with an apple and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

‘Davy!’ he calls, putting his head round the door. He can’t hear any movement. He climbs the stairs to find Davy sitting on the bed reading Terry Pratchett. ‘Hey, this won’t do!’ He takes the book from the boy’s hands.

‘I’ve got a sore throat.’

‘Tell me another one!’

‘I have! It’s very sore.’ He is prone to sore throats. ‘You can look if you want to.’

‘OK, I will.’ Cormac returns to the kitchen, washes a dessert spoon and rummages amidst the boxes on the floor for his small pocket torch, which cannot be found, and so he settles for the large black rubber one. He goes back up the stairs. ‘Right then, open up! Call that open? I can’t even get the spoon in.’ He places the back of the spoon firmly on Davy’s tongue and clicks on the torch. The beam floods Davy’s face as well as the cavity of mouth, making him yelp and scrunch up his eyes.

‘You’re blinding me.’

‘Looks perfectly all right to me,’ says Cormac, withdrawing the spoon. He hasn’t been able to see a thing. ‘I’ll give you some vitamin C and a drink of orange juice just to make sure.’

‘We haven’t got any orange juice.’

Cormac makes a mental note to add that to his shopping list. Then he tells Davy to finish dressing, fast!
His patience is not elastic. ‘You know what happens when a rubber band gets stretched too far.’

Sullenly Davy begins the hunt for socks. ‘Can’t find two that match,’ he announces triumphantly, laying out a red one and a white one with a black and yellow stripe round the top.

‘Let me look.’ Cormac tips out the contents of a green and white sports bag and picks his way through a heap of washed-out T-shirts, socks and underpants. What a lot of wretched-looking garments his son has! How has it come about? He and Rachel are what people would call ‘caring parents’ (how he dislikes the word!), who have washed their children’s clothes regularly, and as far as he is aware, reasonably carefully, even though they didn’t always find the time to iron them. He must do something about Davy’s wardrobe, if it can be described as such. He will as soon as he gets some extra cash. ‘You’ll just have to wear two odd socks.’

‘Everybody will laugh at me.’

‘They won’t even see them. Not under your trainers.’ Which reminds him: Davy needs a new pair. This lot, although only two months old, look as if they’ve been kicked through every mud heap in Edinburgh. Davy is kicking mad, like most of his pals. Preferably of footballs. But if none is available any old piece of rubbish will do. The soles of the trainers are beginning
to gape. ‘Now, listen Davy, I can’t take much more of this. So get a move on.’

‘My jeans are all scrumpled.’

‘Give them to me. I’ll put them in the dryer.’ Cormac holds out his hand, then remembers that Rachel has taken the dryer, on the grounds that Sophie generates more laundry than anyone else in the family. ‘They’ll have to do as they are. The heat of your body will help to take out the creases. And don’t forget to go to the loo.’

‘I hate that loo. It’s like sitting in a cupboard under the stairs.’

‘It is a cupboard under the stairs.’

Finally, Davy stands, ready for school, clutching his Tupperware box, his feet shod in the disreputable trainers, his backpack sagging from his shoulders, his anorak gaping open, exposing his stomach to whatever winds may blow. He has refused to zip it up, or to put on his woollen hat, for which he has declared outright hatred. Grandma Aherne knitted it for him with her arthritic fingers, though Cormac does not think this is the reason for Davy’s dislike. One thing is certain: Grandma Aherne would never have tolerated all this nonsense. Davy would have been in school hours ago, neatly dressed and pressed, with a well-scrubbed face, and his breakfast egg inside him.

‘Right then, boyo, it’s off to work we go!’

Their bicycles take up most of the space in the minute hallway, which makes going in and out something of a problem. Cormac’s machine sports two side panniers and a large wicker-covered basket attached to the front handlebars that is handy for shopping. Rachel has the car since she needs it for work. She is a full-time general practitioner.

On opening the door they see that rain has begun to drop from a leaden sky in large gobbets. It looks like being a good downpour but there is no question of waiting for it to go off.

‘Put up your hood!’ shouts Cormac, as Davy goes bumping down the steps in front of him.

Bulging sacks litter the pavement looking like giant black blisters, alongside sodden cardboard boxes jammed with empty bottles. It is bucket day. Sad-looking fir trees sprawl, their branches browning, shedding needles. The end of the old year’s garbage. Pity one couldn’t clear the rubbish out of one’s life as easily, Cormac reflects, and have it taken away in a truck.

They wheel their bicycles across the main road, then they mount to take on the track that the kids call the Snakey, which curves upward to the lofty Georgian splendour of Saxe Coburg Place. Davy goes ahead,
his bottom high above the saddle, his feet pushing strongly down on the pedals. Cormac finds himself puffing a little. He ought to get in shape, go to a gym or something like that. No, not a gym, he still remembers the awfulness of that at school, not having any talents in that direction. With the start of another new year the newspapers are full of healthy living plans, telling you what to eat and mostly what you must not (or drink), and which exercises will develop your weaker parts. All his parts feel weak at this time of the day. He always hated nine o’clock classes when he was teaching. He never got quite into his stride until after morning break.

He catches Davy up and in five minutes they reach the school. The puddled playground is deserted except for one or two stragglers dawdling towards the main door. It doesn’t seem to matter what time they get into primary school these days. In his era it was almost a hanging matter to arrive after the bell. He was never late; his mother saw to that.

‘See you later!’ Cormac taps his son on the bottom, hopes that the gesture will not be misconstrued by hidden watchers, watches while the boy stows his bike in the shed, carefully padlocking the front wheel and then flees into school without looking round to wave. Fair enough. Cormac doesn’t mind. He didn’t look round at his mother, either. His father never took him
to school; at this time of day he was intent over his last, working on his shoes, totally absorbed, as intent as any artist. And when he gave that up, in order to better himself and so please his wife, he was away from home much of the week, out on the roads of Ireland, selling shoe polish.

On the way back Cormac goes by a longer, more devious route. He cannot seem to resist it. Of course he could resist anything if he wanted to, couldn’t he? That is what Rachel would tell him. He is far too conscious of what other people would tell him. Does it indicate a lack of self-regard?

The playground is empty of people. The teachers’ cars are lined up in their allotted places. He recognises most of them, though not a red Citroën. He wonders if it might belong to his successor, a young woman, not long qualified, whom he has heard likes the kind of art that wins the Turner prize. This very moment she might be saying to a class, ‘Now take Rodin – or rather, don’t take Rodin. He was a tremendous sculptor of course, no one really could deny that, but his approach is old hat nowadays. You want to move forward with the times. You want to start thinking in terms of dead sheep or cow heads in formaldehyde. Shake up the world! That’s the artist’s role.’

He shook with laughter when the preserved dead
sheep came to Edinburgh and the art gallery-goers looked round at him as if he was off his head. ‘What a con man, eh!’ he said to Rachel, who would never let herself get so far out of control as to laugh too loudly in a public place. ‘What a brilliant con man! But if people are fool enough to go for it good on him!’

Leaving the school Cormac cycles up to the High Street where he has an errand to do at the City Chambers, then decides to have a coffee before starting work. The city is bristling with new coffee houses offering cappuccino and caffé latte and croissants plain, almond, or
au chocolat
. He took up the café habit after his suspension, working his way round a large and varied selection. He had to do something, he’d have gone clean off his rocker if he’d sat in the house all day watching old films, and he couldn’t bear to go up to his studio at the top of the house. The piece he’d been working on before he went to Paris had gone dead on him. Nearly every aspect of his life had died a death. His marriage, friendships. He avoided friends to spare them their embarrassment. Whenever he passed someone he vaguely knew he’d suspect they suspected him, were pointing the finger.
Look, there he is! The one who? Yes, the one! That’s him!
Chinese whispers creeping along the streets, swelling to an uproar.
That’s him! The monster! To think that a man like him was in charge
of our children!
He knew that even hardened criminals abhorred child abusers, gave them a hard time in prison. During broken nights when he rose from the marital bed sweating at the thought of being incarcerated, an outcast from society, any kind of society, he’d descend to the kitchen where he’d open the back door and stand gulping in the night air until the terror passed.

He puts thoughts of such nights behind him and cycles on down the Royal Mile. He brakes outside a café called Clarinda’s. Why does he do this to himself? He is not sure. He tells himself that this establishment, being along the lines of an old-fashioned type of tearoom with scones and apple tart (he has been here before, more than once), has an appeal after so much chrome and fizzy milk and cries of short-semi-caffé latte. He tells himself, too, that he has no need to run away from a café simply because it bears a particular name. He goes in and sits at a table with a lacy-edged cloth and orders straight black coffee.

Clarinda’s mother is a Burns fan. She is passionate about the poet; hence the naming of her one and only child. Burns’ Clarinda in real life had been a Mrs Agnes McLehose, a widow woman, but Mrs Bain would have ignored that. She took what she wanted out of any situation. The name Clarinda would have suggested romance to her and that was enough. She has a
photograph of the poet on top of her piano and another on her bedside table. She recites one of his poems every night before she goes to sleep. You could say she was obsessed, Clarinda told him, laughing. She knew that Cormac was interested in other people’s obsessions. She was his most attentive pupil in class, the most ardent.

He was talking about Rodin. At the end of the afternoon, in the dying moments of his last class of the day, which tended to be one of his older classes, he sometimes talked about the sculptor and showed slides of his work. He always felt relaxed when he got on to his pet subject; it was like coming home. He could start to unwind.

When he looked up from the slide projector he saw that Clarinda Bain was listening intently, elbows propped on desk, her face resting in the cup of her hands, framed by her pale shoulder-length hair. She sat very still in class compared to most of the others who tended to wriggle and twitch and shift on their seats and her eyes, a deep, intense blue bordering on violet, framed by exceptionally long dark lashes, held a level gaze when studying an object or a person. When talking to the class he often found himself looking in her direction. One tended to look at the pupils who were the most responsive so that one felt encouraged to go
on. She was one of the high flyers in her year, referred to as ‘bright’ by members of staff in all departments, a bit of a loner, not in with a crowd, which seemed not to trouble her.

He looked back at the screen, at the image reflected on it of the bust of a young woman with head inclined and eyes closed.

‘This is
Le Sommeil,
’ he said, ‘one of Rodin’s most tender pieces. Can you see how soft and sensual her face is? You won’t be able to appreciate his work fully until we go to Paris and you see it in the flesh. That’s what it feels like when you stand in front of one of his sculptures: you feel you can see the flesh that inspired him.’

At the mention of flesh one of the two boys at the back who had appeared to be asleep roused themselves to ask if anything but sex and women had inspired Rodin. Somebody whistled. The boy who had asked the question was a Damien Hirst fan, and unlikely to be converted to Cormac’s own passion, but he was himself quite a promising artist while lacking that commitment that would lift him into another sphere. He was young, though; Cormac had to remind himself of that when tempted to judge his pupils too harshly.