Two Fridays in April (23 page)

Her phone beeps. She takes it from her pocket and sees a message from Ciara:
Where r u?

She types back:
Sick, tummy bug

The lie causes a worm of discomfort in her gut but she can’t tell, not even Ciara. Not until it’s over.

Aw, happy bday. U OK? xx

OK, c u 2moro xx

She carries on, rubbing her hands together. She knows this route so well, could do it blindfold. Cycled it every weekday afternoon for years.

Come to the shop after school
, Dad had told her when she started at the comp.
You can do your homework in the back room and leave with me when I close
. And that was what she’d done, delighted to be finished with the primary-school routine of being collected each afternoon by Mo and brought to her house on the bus, waiting there until Dad came to pick her up on his bike. Homework done at Mo’s little kitchen table, trying to ignore the smell of cabbage that she always got there. Now she
was allowed to cycle to school on her own bike and come home with Dad.

Things didn’t change towards the end of first year, when Dad married Daphne and she moved in with them.
I could run you to school in the mornings
, she’d told Una.
It’s on my way to work. We could take your bike in the boot, and you could still go to the shop after school
– but Una opted to keep the old arrangement. Cycling to school woke her up, and rainy days didn’t bother her: she had all the wet gear.

Of course, eventually she grew out of going to the shop in the afternoons – she still cycled to school, but went downtown with Ciara and the others after. Her and Dad’s Sunday cycles didn’t stop, though, it was still the thing she shared with him. It was their time together, with no Daphne to come between them. Daphne wasn’t interested in cycling.

But now it’s completely different. Una hasn’t got onto a bike in the past year; she just can’t. Daphne drives her to school now, and her bike sits gathering dust and rust in the garage, just like his blue one is doing in the shop. Useless now, both of them – and yet she can’t let hers go.

And his death brought about another change, one that nobody knows about. Daphne assumes she still hangs around with Ciara and the others after school; they think she goes straight home. They’re all wrong.

A couple of weeks after he died, still broken in bits with loneliness and hungering for what she’d lost, Una hunted down the shop keys. She went through the house one day when Daphne was still at work and eventually found them pushed to the back of the wardrobe in what had been his and Daphne’s
bedroom. She had copies made and replaced the originals exactly where she’d found them.

She lets herself in the back way every day after school, keeping an eye out in case Sean from next door is around. She turns off the alarm and makes her way to the little room at the rear of the shop where she does her homework. It’s always cold: she leaves her jacket on.

As she works she pretends Dad is there on the other side of the door, selling bicycles and helmets and pumps and puncture-repair kits like he always did. She tells herself he’ll appear in a minute to tell her it’s closing time. He’ll lock up and they’ll cycle home together, maybe stopping first for a quick chat with Sean, who would always stand at his door when he had no customers.

It sort of works. She fools herself for a while, as she bends over her books in the silent room. It’s the only small comfort she can find, the only way to feel close to him again. Of course it stops the minute she packs up her things and walks out into the shop and finds it dark and empty, and without him.

She hates the way it is now: a layer of thick dust settled over everything, over the counter top he kept so shiny, over the rows of new bicycles, over the silent cash register. Cobwebs dangling from shelves, spiders spinning their houses uninterrupted. The place permanently gloomy because of the shutters she can’t open.

Horrible to have it like that, like something out of Dickens, like a place where creepy Miss Havisham might sit in her falling-apart wedding dress, or Scrooge might crouch to eat his gruel. Horrible that Daphne and Mo don’t seem to care about it any more – it feels like they don’t care about
him
.

On the other hand, she can’t bear the thought of it being sold, of strangers coming in and changing it all. It would be like wiping the last of him out, scrubbing him away like chalk from a blackboard.

She reaches the street where the shop is located and turns down the lane that leads around to the back. Outside the shop’s rear entrance she lifts the red brick where she stashes the keys. She opens the door and presses the familiar code on the alarm box inside to silence its beeping. She stands in the dusty gloom for a few seconds, sniffing the oily, metallic smell she knows so well. She puts out a hand and finds his ancient blue bike, leaning against the wall where he’d left it a year ago. She runs her fingers along the bar where she’d sat so often as a child, before she was old enough to have her own bike.

No time to hang around today: she drops her rucksack on the floor, sets the alarm again and leaves, replacing the keys under their brick before scurrying back down the lane to the street, keeping her hood up, her face averted from the butcher’s shop as she crosses to the other side.

The scent, so rich and gorgeous you can almost taste it, stops her for a few seconds on the threshold. She breathes it in, fills her lungs with it. Must be wonderful to work here, to be surrounded by that scent all day – although you might get so used to it you wouldn’t notice it after a while.

‘Can I help you?’ a woman behind the counter calls, and Una lets the door swing closed behind her as she steps forward.

The woman is overweight with a round, pretty face. Her
peach blouse is tied with a bow at the throat. Her wedding ring, embedded deep in the flesh of her finger, looks like it will never again come off.

‘That looks sore,’ she says, nodding in the direction of Una’s chin, which is still smarting.

‘It’s fine,’ Una tells her. ‘I just bumped it – it looks worse than it is.’ She wonders what it looks like. ‘I want to buy some roses,’ she goes on. ‘Yellow, if you have them.’ He liked yellow roses.

‘I certainly have.’ The saleswoman indicates a bucket of opening blooms in a glorious shade of bright lemon. ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’

‘How many can I get for a tenner?’ Una asks.

The woman smiles. ‘Let’s call it ten,’ she says, and wraps them in pale green tissue paper. ‘Whoever they’re for will love them.’

‘They’re for my dad,’ Una tells her.

‘Ah – isn’t that nice? Fathers don’t often get flowers. He’ll be delighted with them, I’m sure. Would you like a card?’

‘No, thank you.’ Far too sad, writing him a message he’ll never read. She considers revealing the flowers’ true purpose, but decides against it: talking about death makes people awkward, and saying the words out loud might just bring on her own tears again.

She pays and leaves the shop, the bouquet cradled against her chest. In the doorway she takes out her phone and checks her email: no message. The cold is sharp, she’s glad the cemetery isn’t far. She dips her head into the roses, but to her disappointment they smell of nothing.

Ten minutes later she walks through the iron gates. The place
is quiet, just a few people standing in front of headstones, a few more strolling along the paths. She makes her way to Mum and Dad’s grave, reads the words she knows by heart.

She comes here once a month, drawn by a yearning for what they had, the three of them – although after more than ten years her memories of Mum are all but gone. Not her face – she has photos to make sure she never forgets that. It’s more her voice and her smell, it’s her gestures and habits, and the way she moved.

It’s like Mum stood up one day and walked away from them, and all Una could do was watch her getting smaller and smaller, until she became little more than an infinitesimal speck, then nothing at all. Now she’s just a smiling half-stranger in a photo album.

But Dad is still so real to her. She can still hear his voice, she can recall the feel of his arms around her, the reassuring warm, buttery smell of him.
My beautiful girl
, he’d say, holding her tight.

Except that she wasn’t his girl, not really. He’d claimed her when he married Mum, he’d treated her like his own, but she never really belonged to him, even if she felt like she did. Even if she wished every night that she did, like she used to when she was younger. Screwing up her eyes tight in bed, whispering the words to whoever or whatever might be listening. Stupid wish, as if she could turn the clock back and change everything. As if anyone could do that.

She crouches and lays the yellow flowers in front of the headstone. She stands silently in the cold, hands shoved deep into her pockets, and talks to him in her head.

She tells him everything.

It’s gone half ten, later than she’d planned, by the time she turns up the alley that leads to the rear of the terrace of narrow little houses, blowing on her hands to warm them and thinking of Mo in the charity shop just across the way. If she only knew.

She sees Kevin’s blue car parked by the wooden gate, white ribbons already in place. As she approaches the gate, a volley of enthusiastic barks erupts from the tiny yard. She reaches over to slide back the bolt, and submits herself to the usual welcome as soon as she steps inside.

‘Hey!’ She stoops to make a shelf of her thighs for the front paws, rubs the head that butts into her chin, offers her face to be licked. ‘Good girl.’

Dolly’s provenance is uncertain. The pendulous ears of a spaniel, the long nose of a collie, the round barrelly middle and spindly legs of a terrier, the goofy soul of a Lab. Una was slightly disappointed when she discovered that everyone, even total strangers, gets the same enthusiastic welcome. As a guard dog, Dolly is a total disaster.

The back door opens. Una looks up.

‘Thought it was you,’ Judy says.

She wears a blue dressing gown, her hair bumpy with brightly coloured rollers, her face unfamiliar with eye liner, lipstick, foundation – the first time Una has seen her with make-up on.

‘Come here to me,’ she says, and Una crosses the tiny yard, Dolly trotting along beside her. Judy opens her arms and Una steps into them, inhaling the familiar savoury smell of her as they embrace. Day or night, Judy always smells of food.

‘Good to see you,’ she murmurs into the side of Una’s head. ‘Delighted you could come.’ As they draw apart, she frowns. ‘What’s that on your chin?’

‘I bumped it, it’s nothing … I saw the plane,’ Una says, ‘with the banner.’

‘Oh, did you? That was Brian’s boss – he has a pal who does those things. Wasn’t it nice of him? Charlotte hadn’t a clue – he never said a word. Now, get in before we both catch our deaths.
No
,’ she adds sharply, ‘not you, missy’ – and instantly Dolly’s tail stills, and her rear end thumps down in disappointment.

‘Oh – can she not come in?’ Una wouldn’t normally question Judy, but she hates the thought of the dog stuck out in the cold.

‘Not today she can’t – what if she jumped up on Charlotte? She’ll be fine, don’t you worry about her.’

The kitchen is warm, and smells tantalisingly of sausages. Charlotte sits at the table in pink fleecy pyjamas, eating.

‘Hi there,’ she says, through a mouthful of food, and Una smiles back. She doesn’t know Charlotte well – she’s hardly ever here when Una comes around.

Kevin stands at the worktop, rubbing a brush over and back across a black shoe. He wears yellow rubber gloves and a long-sleeved vest that was probably white once upon a time. One of Judy’s aprons – red and green stripes with a red frill – is tied around his waist, over grey trousers. His hair is shorter than the last time Una saw it.

‘Here she is,’ he says. ‘What’s that on your chin?’

‘I banged into something. It’s OK.’

‘Florrie can cover it with concealer,’ Charlotte says.

They don’t know she had to sneak away from school today.
They think Daphne knows about the wedding, they think she knows that Una comes to visit them. All the lies she’s had to tell.