The Visitors (5 page)

In front of the pub was a bus stop. I considered taking a bus to the city center to see a film, but I’d seen every film that was showing. Many I’d seen twice. I’d do that, to pass the time, on days off, sit in the cinema all day, and there was nothing like it. You got to see and hear all the things you missed the first time around, and you got to escape the things that were in your head. Or I could buy a record. I had a list of them written down, along with a list of books, but the record shops and Eason’s were close to closing. A few friends I knew from the bar trade drank in a pub that was in walking distance. They were either there or in the games arcade next door, playing Space Invaders, pinball, poker, but I wasn’t in the mood for them, and game arcades bored me, and like everyone else, they would be watching that match. On my walk home, I’d stop at the Italian chipper and get something to eat. I’d chat with the young dark Italian woman. We didn’t understand a word we said to each other, but I enjoyed hearing the sounds of her words, and I enjoyed watching her, and smelling the frying cod and chips. She would not be watching that match.

I stood and went to the bar and ordered another Club Orange. The men’s faces transfixed by the game. I watched my reflection in the smoky mirror and wondered how I’d kill the dull minutes and the tedious hours until I’d see Una again next Sunday. There was the letter to write to my mother. (A cancer was growing in my mother then. She would be gone inside sixteen months.) I’d write to her tomorrow night after work. I’d sit at the table, write that I was fine. I hoped everything was fine there. I love my job. I’ll be down home soon. I missed everyone. And I did stop by Una’s flat after Mass. I rang the bell, but she wasn’t there. I might try her again some other Sunday. And I’d fold a twenty-pound note into the crease of the letter. That made my mother happy. She’d write back and say I was a good boy for sending it. God would reward me. And don’t forget to drop a line when I did talk to Una.

The country barman was looking up at the television when he handed me the Club Orange. I put the exact change on the counter, thanked him, and sat back in the seat. The sun was gone. The seat had cooled.

You’ll get tired of all that. Una was the one to say it. Day in, day out. Polishing mirrors, wiping dust from shelves, sweeping floors, cleaning up spills, stocking shelves, intervening badly in fights, mopping up the vomit and the shit in the jacks, filling endless pints of beer, small ones, vodka and red, vodka and orange, a drop of the cat, young man—but I liked chatting with the locals. They told you things. Their hatred of bosses and foremen. The factories closing. The need for stronger unions. Thatcher is less than a cunt because a cunt is of some use. The young ones and the drugs. The brazenness of robbers and criminals. The redundancy check will last only a few months. The missus and the fucking children wanting every fucking penny of it. Lucky if you get a few fucking pints out of it in the end. You’ll have to stand me a few pints, young fellow. You will. When there’s nothing left. You will.

The men sitting on the barstools looked like the men I served in the pub. Most lived locally, or they once did, before their families were moved to housing estates beyond the city center, and on Sundays they returned to the old neighborhoods to drink with friends they played in the street with when they were children.

A man I didn’t notice when I came in was sitting apart from the others at the very end of the bar. He was not looking at the match. He was reading the newspaper. He made me think of Nathan, who was a regular in my bar, but hadn’t visited in a while. Some regulars said Nathan had booked himself into a home. Others said he’d gone to live with relatives. Many said you never know with Nathan. A
FOR SALE
sign had gone up in Nathan’s yard that past week, and someone had gawked in the windows of the house and reported that the rooms were empty.

Nathan visited the bar every evening from four until eight. He sat on the same stool at the end of the counter and read the
Evening Press
.
Men read either the
Evening Press
or the
Evening Herald
. The men who bet on horses, which was most of them, also read the English tabloids: the
Mirror
, the
Sun
, the
News of the World
. Those papers had the horse-racing form at the back and on page three a color photo of a young woman whose breasts took up most of the page.

Nathan was in his mid-sixties. He was retired from his desk job at the post office. He lived down the road from the bar. The wife was dead. The children were grown and gone. They visited only at Christmas. When Nathan was drunk, he’d tell me how sad it was that he never saw his children. He’d lament the loss of the wife. He drank three pints, and between 7:15 and 8:00, he drank two half Jameson’s with water. Regulars said Nathan was a gentleman, because he had fine manners and he dressed the way you think a gentleman might: a pressed navy blue shirt buttoned to the neck, matching tie, and a sports coat, with a handkerchief in the breast pocket. During winter he wore a hat and a herringbone topcoat.

There is one story Nathan told me many times. He did when I put the second glass of Jameson’s on the counter before him, then wiped the counter and emptied his ashtray, and he folded the newspaper and smiled his dazzling denture smile. And I sometimes wonder why this story he told has stayed. But I also wonder why he never came in to say good-bye, why he never told me where it was he was going.

The story involved a close friend of his, and this happened when he and Nathan were in their early twenties. This friend was ex-army. He was notably handsome, a seducer, who happened to get one of the women he seduced pregnant, but when the woman told the ex-soldier she was pregnant, and that he was the father, the ex-soldier called her a hoor and a liar. She spent months begging and pestering him. He ignored her, went about his business seducing, and I’m not sure if Nathan ever told me, or I’ve forgotten, what happened to the pregnant woman. Anyway, the sister of the woman he got pregnant was a beautiful-looking woman, and she sought him out. She found out where he lived. The bars he drank in and the bookie shops where he
placed his bets. She went to the bars and sat close to him, and they got to talking. He bought her drinks. She drank the drinks and gave him a fake name. And after a few meetings, she let him take her back to his flat, but she would not let him make love to her. He put bunches of flowers he bought on Moore Street on her doorstep. He took her to the cinema. They walked arm-in-arm and he took her out to eat at good restaurants and paid. He even bought theater tickets. Still she did not allow him to make love to her, and he finally broke down and told her he was madly in love with her. She cried and said she would so make love to him, but only at Glendalough, in County Wicklow, in the meadow above Saint Kevin’s Bed. The ex-soldier arranged the trip, and one summer’s afternoon they took the bus there, and they sat down in a sunny meadow where they could see The Round Tower. He brought a flask. They sipped from the flask and talked. Eventually they got down to business. Buttons opened. Zippers unzipped. They lay back in the warm grass. The ex-soldier whispered in her ear that no doubt she was the one for him. He was ready to spend the rest of his life with her. He gets her skirt up, she gets his pants and underpants around his knees, and she strokes and strokes him, he shuts his eyes and once again whispers how much he loves her, and while he’s whispering, she slips a razor from the waistband of her skirt, and in one rapid swipe she slices his penis off at the base. Then she stands and flings his bloody penis as far as she can toward Saint Kevin’s tower, and next she runs off across the meadow, fixing her skirt back into place as she runs, laughing and telling him that she’s on her way home to tell her sister that the wrong that was done to her is righted. The ex-soldier lies whimpering and bleeding in the sunny grass.

When Nathan told the story it more or less went that way, but the last time he told it, the week before he vanished, the sister stands over the ex-soldier with her bloody razor, and she does not throw the penis toward the tower, she doesn’t even pick up the penis. No. She begs the ex-soldier’s forgiveness, says that she wants to marry him, no matter
what he is missing, because she is in love with him, too, but her duty to her sister had to be fulfilled.

Nathan laughed every time he told the story. Then a few weeks after he disappeared, I told it to one of the regulars, and when I finished it, I said Nathan used to tell that story to me. The regular smirked and said the story was about Nathan himself. Everyone knows that. I said that couldn’t be true. Nathan had children. Nathan was not that kind of a person. Nathan was a gentleman. The regular smirked again and said Nathan was a great man for the women. Got the cushy job in the post office because of his job in the army. Then some woman’s pregnant sister beguiled him and chopped your man off. Nathan became remorseful for the wrong he had caused and he ended up marrying this woman whose husband had died from the big C. She had three young children, and she and Nathan raised them. They did a good job. Children did fine. Then a few years ago the wife died, and the longer the wife is dead the more Nathan goes downhill. Eventually goes all the way downhill. All the way back to his old ways. But he didn’t only have age against him, of course, he didn’t have the equipment. But still he visited the prostitutes. The worst ones you could find. Nathan took to the leather like you’d slip the saddle on a racehorse. Got down on all fours and begged for the whip like the gentleman he was. Very fond of the whip, Nathan was. Had three pensions. The army and the post office and the old age. Spent them on the prostitutes. The rest in here.

The regular smiled and winked.

—We’re all gentlemen in here, he said. —Every single one of us. And now, young man, you have it. You have now what everyone else have.

The sun was shining again. It burned the back of my neck. I finished the Club Orange and stood up. I was heading through the bar door when someone scored in the match. Then the boisterous cheers and groans. I turned to look, but I could not see the man who reminded me of Nathan. Some of the men were clapping and laughing.
Others cursed and pounded the bar with their fists, jarring the cloud of cigarette smoke. I envied them in that moment, but then I let the bar door shut. Across the street, the steel curtains on the shop fronts were drawn. I read the graffiti: Damo loves Sandra. Derek likes a fat cock in his tight hole. Brits out! Liverpool rules! What do we get for our trouble and pain? The Six Counties is ours. P.A.Y.E. = pay all you earn. R.I.P. Philo. Then the band posters: The Blades at the Baggot Inn. The Smiths at the SFX. The Wolfe Tones at the Baggot Inn.

I shoved my hands into my pockets and decided to walk the streets close to the canal. Then I’d head to the chipper, buy something to eat, chat with the Italian girl. So I headed back down Dorset Street, crossed the canal bridge, and took a right onto Fitzroy Avenue. Sunshine brightened the red bricks and the windows of the tiny houses. Smells of supper from the houses. Fish and chips. Spice burgers. Bisto gravy. Reheated roasted potatoes. Family voices shot from the houses in spurts like from a machine gun. And I was at the Five Lamps when I remembered I had left the newspaper and Una’s biscuits on the seat in the pub. The paper I didn’t care about, but the loss of the biscuits made me dismal. She’d put them in the plastic bag then knotted it. And that stupid bartender would have flung them into the rubbish by now.

I stepped into a phone box. Tess was in nursing school in Cork. She’d been there a few months. A long letter had arrived from her two weeks before. I hadn’t written her back, although I’d read the letter every night after coming in from work. Tess liked nursing school fine. She was making some friends, though she missed home terribly. Did I miss it the way she did? And Tess couldn’t stop thinking about the stories she and I made up. Do you remember, Jimmy, the ones about the teacher and her husband? Do you remember, Jimmy, we made them live in a hovel? There was no light and there was a hole in the roof. The damp smoke flowed up through the hole. And they were starving. They plucked dock leaves and nettles from the fields and boiled them in a pot over the fire. And why was my last letter only a few lines telling nothing? And why hadn’t I rang? Tess’d rang my hall phone four or five times. Was I not listening for the ring?

I knew Tess’s number by heart, and I fumbled the coins into the slot and picked up the receiver. But the promise to Una came into my head, and I knew if I rang Tess I’d tell her about Roger, the forgotten biscuits, and I’d tell that something had happened to me with Una, that the wait to see her again was killing me. I would because that’s the way Tess and I were then, but the something that happened was not to be shared, poked fun of, banished, or changed into something else. And so I hung up the receiver, put the change back in my pocket, and stepped out of the phone box. It was a long walk back to my flat. I couldn’t be bothered with the chipper anymore. I wasn’t a bit hungry. And I could not wait to lock the door of my flat. Close the curtains. Put a record on, lie on the bed, and see Una again sitting on that windowsill. Her long shadow for less than a minute of your life along a single bed.

—How’s your life, I said to Zoë.

She was standing on the other side of the screen door.

—Quite fancy, I imagine, compared to your new friend, my dear.

I opened the screen door. Zoë stepped in and we hugged. I took the white tote bag and placed it on the chair Walter had sat on. Zoë looked about.

—The place looks clean, James—

—Some dusting wouldn’t be remiss, I said.

—Who cares, my dear, Zoë said.

—I can’t think of one person, my dear, I said.

I went to the fridge and filled Zoë a glass of water and said we should stand on the futon bed and watch for Walter. She slipped her sandals off. I was in my socks. We stood on the bed, leaned our elbows on the windowsill, and stared through the screen. I looked at her when I told her the light green summer dress suited her. She thanked me. I turned and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke through the dusty screen.

—I’m so excited to meet your new friend, Zoë said.

—I’m still not sure if he’s homeless, I said.

—You said he looks homeless, Zoë said.

—We would say that, I said.

—Then he is probably homeless, my dear, Zoë said.

—He might just be traveling around, my dear—

—He’s not a born-again, my dear—

—Not once has he mentioned Jesus, my dear—

I looked at my watch.

—You seem nervous, Zoë said.

—I’m not used to going places, I said.

—We’re driving twenty miles. You’ve gone several places, my dear. Did you discover any more about your neighbor?

—Not beyond the sneakers. She’s not been sitting on her porch. The mailbox is empty.

—Someone is picking her mail up. Her family came for her, my dear—

—The truth is there’s more to Walter, but I don’t want to go into it.

—I want to hear, my dear.

—Not now, my dear—

—Why not now, my dear. It’s so much more exciting than writing the proposals my dad sends my way—

—I might tell you later, my dear—

—Might, my dear.

—
Might
is what I said, my dear.

—You don’t have to tell me anything, my dear. That’s your call. But can I tell you something—

—I love to hear you talk, my dear.

—It’s about a trip I once took with my parents, my dear.

—Before they divorced, I said.

—Yes, before then, when I was a kid, my dear. We drove to Maine. It was a trip we had taken several times during the summer. My family owned a cabin on the coast. It was really a house, my dear, but we called it the cabin. There were decks and a huge sitting room downstairs with a big window that looked out onto the ocean. Dad’s parents owned the house, and Dad liked it to look rugged. When the families down the beach knocked down their homes to build mansions, Dad was determined not to change, but Mom wanted something different. Mom wanted skylights and wraparound porches. And at the end of this summer it was painted fuchsia.

—An ugly color, if I may say so, I said.

—I agree, my dear. And Dad hated it, too, I know he did, but my parents never discussed it in front of my brother, Luke, and I, but on this one trip I was sitting in the back of the car. I was ten or eleven, surrounded by books, and my parents did not speak during the entire trip. I played games. Luke and I always did, on the trips to Maine. My parents made us play games that increased our verbal skills—

—Like spelling things you saw on the highway?

—Not like that, my dear—

—Like what, then, my dear?

—I forget, my dear. It’s not important. Then my first summer home from college I was in Dad’s law office in New Haven. He looked great. He was going to a gym five mornings a week. I had a boyfriend in college I liked until we liked other people, but that happened later, my dear. Dad excused himself. He went down the hall to a meeting. I was left sitting in Dad’s leather chair. He used to lift me into that chair when I was a little girl, and he’d sit on the chair across the desk, where his clients sat. After he left I opened the top drawer of his desk. I was not snooping. I just slid it open. Wouldn’t you do that, my dear?

—In a heartbeat, my dear—

—There was a photograph in there of my dad with a woman. This woman did not look like my mom. This woman, my dear, was more than twenty years younger than my dad. The photo was taken in front of the fuchsia cabin. The woman’s shoulders were tanned. Her shoulders I remember, my dear. Swimsuits hung on the porch railing behind them. And Dad’s motorcycle was there. The helmets were on the ground. Dad kept this motorcycle in the garage behind the cabin. He spent hours working on it. He loved it. I’d look out my bedroom window in the morning and he would be kneeling before the motorcycle, the little parts in a circle around him, and the radio playing in the garage. He used to take me for rides on the motorcycle. I’d wrap my arms around him. We’d ride along the hard sand. The back roads and the village streets.

—That sounds cool, I said.

—It was very cool, my dear. But of course my dad and this woman were screwing. He had come back from the cabin two weeks before. He went up there once every year in late spring. His long weekend away from work with his old college buddies. They fished. They went to the bars in the village. They drank scotch and smoked my dad’s cigars. He kept them in this nice wooden box. I used to think when I was a kid if I opened the box I’d find pistols in there. They probably spent most of their time speculating on real estate and retelling their stories about their college days. Their glorious hijinks. And in the photograph, my dad’s striped shirt was opened to his belly button. I was so disgusted. The white hair on his chest. My dad looked like Hugh Hefner with one of his chicks!

Zoë paused. I handed her the water glass. She took two sips. I was watching the corner of the house.

—I ran out of the office and got into my car and drove home, my dear. I forget how I later explained why I left, and a little over a month later, Mom called me in tears to say they were divorcing.

—I know this part, my dear, I said.

—But I didn’t tell you, my dear, that this was the summer I thought I was going to be a painter. I’d studied it in an art history class that spring. I’d taken classes in high school and college, so I went to an art colony in South Carolina. And a few days after I arrived was when my mom called. Dad then called me. He called ten times a day for a week, but I never picked up the phone. He left messages, crying, apologizing. He said he loved me, but I let him cry, and I cried when I listened to his messages. My boyfriend came to visit. We hiked the mountains. We drove to the beach. We smoked pot I scored from some dude I met. Another message from Mom said Dad had moved into an apartment. I had told Luke about the photograph. And I never again saw the woman. I have often wondered who she was.

—Maybe they weren’t screwing, my dear. They were just hanging out, you know—

—They were screwing, my dear—

—If you think they were, then they were, my dear—

—Dad married my stepmom less than two years later, my dear. And my stepmom mails gifts on my birthday, the Fourth of July, Christmas, Hanukkah, my birthday, of course. And I write my stepmom a card every time she sends a gift. I tell her how the gift was exactly what I wanted, but I’ve never liked one gift she mailed. In fact, my dear, I’ve hated every one of them. You will think me very ungrateful, my dear—

—I’m more interested in the cabin and the motorbike, my dear.

—The cabin was sold. Luke and I call it the first victim. The motorcycle was the second. I laugh now, but not then.

—I believe you there, my dear, I said.

—But I looked forward so much to visiting the cabin, my dear. The beautiful house I grew up in was dull compared to it. And I’m sure the new people have torn it down and sold the property. They bought it for that reason, I imagine. I was driving close to there last summer, and wanted to go see it, but I was afraid. I loved the big front room. I read so many books at that window, while my parents ate out in the evening with friends who lived in other summer homes. The light was beautiful in that room. The sky turned this shade of pink over the water every evening. I called it the pink hour. The small boats bobbed on the horizon. But I apologize for going on, James. I just wanted to tell about the car ride. But you must tell me about a journey you went on with your dad.

—Is this one of the games you played in the car—

—It’s just something on my mind—

—It sounds to me like a game—

—It’s not a game, my dear. We are waiting for your new friend. You begged me to come along. A fun day in the country, you said. And we have not seen each other in a while—

—We haven’t, but I think this is something I got myself into—

—A short trip. Stop fretting, my dear—

—I’m not fretting—

—You are, my dear.

—You were mad with your father, I said.

—Back then. But I love Dad. Dad is very kind. Dad is Dad.

Dad is Dad, Zoë repeated—almost sang it, when she stepped off the futon. The fridge door opened. Water poured into a glass. The fridge hummed. A cloud shifted. Sunlight filled the yard. I lit a cigarette. I kept on staring at the corner.

—Sorry, I should have put on some music, Zoë, I turned and said.

—Don’t apologize, James. And you don’t have to tell me anything—

—I’m beginning to think he’s not going to arrive.

Zoë touched my shoulder. She placed the glass on the sill.

—He’ll show up, my dear. He wants to see this aunt—

—Who would think the homeless would be so impolite—

—Just tell me your story, my dear—

—Arrive, won’t arrive, my dear. I was around the age you were, my dear. My father was buying hay. It was raining when we started out, but then the sun appeared, and we stopped at all the churches we passed. My father did that, when he went on the road. He could not pass a church without going into it and kneeling for a while, and so going anywhere with him took time, because there were many churches. But we were on the road for a while, when we came to an abbey. It was Glenstal Abbey, which I didn’t know then. There is a castle next to it and a boarding school for boys. There were trees, stone walls, and trimmed hedges. I had never seen anything so lovely. My father drove in and parked. Flowers—roses, definitely, big bushes of them—but also copper beech trees, crocuses, lilacs, and hedges of rhododendrons, and we walked through a garden where cucumbers and rosemary and parsley were growing, and more flowers. My father knew this place, I think now that he did, but I only think it because I’m telling you. He ordered me not to touch anything in the garden. I obeyed him. I always did. And he reached into his coat pocket and brought out his beads and started praying, mumbling, like in ecstasy, or like a lunatic, depending
on your thinking. Maybe he was just praying that he would get the hay at the price he wanted—

—It’s a very good reason to pray, my dear, Zoë said.

—I suppose, my dear. But I couldn’t pray with the castle rising above the trees and the scent of flowers and herbs. And at this man’s house the hay was bought, the deal went down, hay bought at a price that pleased my father, because if it wasn’t at that price it wouldn’t have been bought, the bottle of Powers brought out, palms spat on then slapped, speculating about the weather and the price of cattle, the lack of jobs, the dreadful politicians, and last Saturday’s horse races. The man’s wife brought out the whiskey. She served little glasses of it, with a splash of water—she used a teaspoon. She smiled down at me when she put a tall glass of lemonade and a thick slice of sponge cake before me. The table was covered in an oilcloth. Two red geraniums bloomed at my elbow. A gray cat was sleeping on the windowsill outside. I put my hand through the window and petted the cat—

—How beautiful, my dear—

—It was, my dear. Indeed, it was. But on the drive back we stopped at the abbey again. It was darker now, on the ground, but not above the trees, and the place was silent but for the crows cawing in the big trees. My father stood in the same place and took out his beads and prayed. And he warned me again to not touch anything, maybe thanking God now for the price he got, that was all there was to it—

—Good karma, my dear—

—Karma, indeed, my dear. But we drove away from the abbey, and on the drive home he talked about the year he spent in England. He had never talked to me about that before, although I had heard it around the house that he had once worked in England. I was still too young to be curious. And we weren’t a family who talked about those sorts of things. His year in England was the year before he met my mother. He was home at Christmas, and he met my mother at a dance and never again went back to work in England.

—You’re losing it, my dear, but keep going—

—Thank you, my dear. My mother, she had a small farm. I think her whole life was about waiting to marry and have children. I don’t think she imagined much beyond that. That and God were it. She talked to God like I’m talking now to you. Maybe the glass of whiskey caused my father to talk, but he was in a good mood. He told me he liked working on the buildings, the hardiness of it, meeting men from all over. He said the Connemara men were the worst—you are not going to understand any of this, my dear—

—I’m liking your story, my dear. And your new friend has yet to show—

—He won’t appear, Zoë—

—Yes, James, he will—

—Well, the Connemara men spoke only Irish, and it was their version of Irish. They were the toughest, you didn’t want to get into a fight with them, because you weren’t just fighting one of them, you were fighting a tribe, and one Connemara man was more than enough for any man to fight, though the Connemara men were highly valued as laborers. All the building sites wanted them. These men were proud of their strength, and they sold it to whoever wanted it, for the right money, of course, which wasn’t much money, just enough for lodgings, food, and pints of beer. And then my father tells me that he never slept that year. After work he just walked the streets of Kilburn and Camden, he never went back to the digs he was staying in, he never went to the pubs, he was so homesick, he said, so he sat on park benches for the hours when he wasn’t working, and he slept on the benches and got up the next morning and went off to work, but I have no idea why he told me all of that then. Maybe, like you in your dad’s office, you just happen to be there—