Life Drawing for Beginners Page 18

  “Don’t be so frightened,” Michael said impatiently. “I’m not going to eat you.”

  The boy stuck his thumb into his mouth and looked pointedly at the door.

  “What’s your name?” Michael asked.

  The boy whispered something around his thumb.

  “What? Take out your thumb.”

  For a second Michael thought he was going to bolt. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on the sitting room door and said nothing.

  “I think you’ve forgotten your name,” Michael said. “I think we’ll have to find you a new one.”

  Still looking away, the boy shook his head slowly.

  “You haven’t forgotten it?”

  Another shake.

  “What is it so?”

  He slid out his thumb and whispered, “Bawwy.”

  Barry, the same name as Michael’s father. Ethan had only been ten when his grandfather had died—did ten-year-olds even know the first names of their grandparents?

  And anyway, Ethan would hardly have remembered his own name, probably, by the time this boy had been born, never mind a dead grandfather. It was coincidence, nothing more.

  The girl reappeared with the Winnie-the-Pooh book in her hand and settled on the couch next to the boy, who immediately clambered onto her lap, his thumb drifting again into his mouth. She opened the book and whispered, “Who’s he?”

  The boy murmured a reply that was lost on Michael. He shook his newspaper open again and turned to the crossword page.

  “And where does he live?” the girl whispered. Another inaudible response.

  As Michael took a biro from his breast pocket he remembered her saying that she couldn’t read. So they were just looking at the pictures and talking about them. Better than nothing, he supposed.

  “Look, that’s his friend—what’s his name?”

  Ethan had loved Winnie-the-Pooh. Someone had given him a book of stories for his third birthday and Michael remembered reading it to him at bedtime, sometimes the same story night after night. There had been one story about a game that involved throwing sticks over a bridge into a river.

  “The donkey looks sad, don’t he? Why’s he sad?”

  Poohsticks: The name of the game jumped abruptly into Michael’s head.

  “Oh look, there’s the kangaroo.”

  Ethan used to suck his thumb too. They’d tried everything to get him to stop but nothing had worked. And then he’d stopped overnight, all by himself, a few weeks after he’d started school.

  “Look—the umbrella is goin’ down the river.”

  The boy’s eyes were beginning to close. He leaned against his mother and yawned hugely, showing a row of tiny even teeth. The girl stroked his hair absently as they went through the book.

  Michael returned to his crossword and attempted to concentrate, but he was distracted by the low whispers on the couch. He threw a couple of briquettes into the fire, causing a small shower of sparks to fly upwards.

  He wondered if it had ever crossed her mind to look for a job. Of course there was the problem of the child—who would look after him if she went out to work? Would she have to wait until he started school? And even with him off her hands, what job could she hope to get, an ex–drug addict with no literacy skills and precious few qualifications, if any?

  And what about a place to live when they left Michael’s house? How was she going to afford that? As a single parent, surely she’d be entitled to some kind of rent allowance; there must be a state handout for the likes of her. Not that she’d have the wit to go about claiming it on her own.

  He read the same clue for what must be the sixth time. They weren’t his problem, not yet anyhow.

  After a few minutes the girl closed the book and began to maneuver herself and her son off the couch, trying not to wake him.

  Michael got up and lifted the boy from her arms, ignoring her look of surprise. “Open the door,” he muttered.

  The boy weighed nothing, or next to nothing. He felt like a bird in Michael’s arms. His hair smelled of the mint shampoo Michael had seen in her toilet bag. They climbed the stairs silently, the girl in front. She opened the bedroom door and pulled back the sheets, and Michael laid the boy onto the bed.

  For the first time, a tiny smile flitted across her face.

  “Thanks,” she said. “His name’s Barry,” she added.

  Michael turned and left the room without responding. She probably thought he was getting all grandfatherly now. Back in the sitting room he plumped the couch cushions that their bodies had flattened, and returned to his crossword.

  Barry. It was a coincidence, that was all.

  —————

  I am nothing to write home about, Audrey Matthews had entered in her diary on her seventeenth birthday. I have frizzy hair that looks red in the sun and my eyes are too pale and I’m big-boned. I have never had a boyfriend or got a Valentine card, or even had anyone whistle at me in the street. Nobody looks twice at me.

  Of course she’d hoped, at seventeen, that she wouldn’t be alone for much longer. She’d woken each morning with a sense of expectation: Maybe today it would happen, maybe someone would catch her eye on the bus, or in the library after school, or walking home for dinner. Maybe today someone would look twice at her, and see beyond the frizzy hair and big build.

  But it didn’t happen at seventeen, or at eighteen or nineteen either. When she was twenty and a student in Limerick’s College of Art, Audrey answered an ad in one of the local papers and arranged to meet a twenty-six-year-old man—GSOH, honest, romantic—​for coffee. She sat for half an hour in her pink jacket and blue skirt, sipping a cappuccino and trying not to watch the café door.

  Three weeks later she tried again, this time choosing a man who described himself as easygoing and down to earth. He turned up, but ten minutes into their stilted conversation his phone rang and he left, full of apologies—his friend’s car had broken down. Promising, as he walked away, to call her again.

  When the third man made it quite plain, before his latte arrived, that he wanted a lot more than coffee, it was Audrey’s turn to make an excuse and leave.

  She decided to try singles holidays. The first one, a week in Rome, was truly awful. Audrey was the youngest by twenty years, and most of the other females were leathery-skinned divorcées who spoke bitterly of their exes to Audrey, and dropped her immediately whenever any of the men in the group appeared.

  By the end of the week Audrey had had a single conversation with Frank, who invited her to his room after he’d downed several glasses of Prosecco, and another with Victor, who broke down in the catacombs as he described being left at the altar by the love of his life.

  “She was my soul mate,” he wept, oblivious to the dark, earthy passages through which they trailed. “I’ll never find someone like her again.” Audrey felt like pointing out—kindly, of course—​that someone like his ex-fiancée might well leave him standing on his own at the altar for a second time, but she held her tongue and tried to ignore the curious glances from nearby holidaymakers.

  After two similarly unromantic breaks, she gave up on the idea of singles holidays and decided to let nature take its course. At that stage she was twenty-five, and she’d recently gotten a job as an art teacher in the larger of Carrickbawn’s two secondary schools. She was heartened to see a number of single men among the staff: Surely one of them would regard Audrey as a viable proposition.

  She was well aware that not much had changed in terms of her appearance since her seventeenth birthday. Her hair had improved somewhat, thanks to the arrival of de-frizzing products, but her weight had increased, food being her chief comfort in times of loneliness. She regarded herself as more curvy than obese, and while she’d never been overly bothered about not having a size-four figure, she wouldn’t have minded more shapely knees, and at least the suggestion of a waist.

  All her life Audrey loved color. She adored bright, primary shades and filled her wardrobe with patterns and swirls and
bold designs that she knew many a similarly built woman would have balked at. She wore scarves and ruffles and layers, and she chose fabrics that tended to float around her as she walked. She was conscious of sniggers from the meaner girls in her classes—​and the disparaging looks of some of her slimmer female colleagues—but she did her best to ignore them.

  She felt she was fairly popular with her students in general, and she was on cordial terms with the entire staff. She made an effort to be pleasant and good-humored with everyone, as her mother had always urged her to be.

  “Audrey, you’re like a ray of sunshine,” one of her colleagues declared once. “Never in a bad mood, always smiling.”

  But none of the men asked her out. Nobody even suggested going for a coffee after school, or lunch on the weekend. She was a regular attendee of staff outings, but there was never a hint of romantic interest from anyone. One by one she signed their engagement cards and contributed to their wedding presents, and as the years went by she struggled to keep her hopes intact.

  And now she was thirty-seven, and twenty more Valentine’s Days had come and gone without a visit from the postman. Her thirty-eighth birthday was only a few weeks away, and she was at home alone on another weekend night. And it was becoming harder and harder to believe that there was still someone out there who was destined to fall in love with her.

  She put another briquette on the fire—she must be the only person in Carrickbawn with a fire lit on this balmy evening, but she hated sitting in front of an empty fireplace. Back in the kitchen she made tea and took a packet of Ritz crackers from the press. She topped ten of them with a square of cheddar cheese, a wedge of apple, and a blob of whole-grain mustard with honey.

  She brought her supper back into the sitting room and switched on the television, selecting a documentary on blue whales in favor of a repeat of Love, Actually, normally one of her favorite films. The last thing she wanted to watch this evening was several people falling blissfully in love.

  As she settled back on the couch Dolly opened her eyes, grunted contentedly, and closed them again. Audrey lay her supper aside quietly and reached for the sketch pad and charcoal stick that sat on the little end table. She opened a page and began to draw the curve of Dolly’s head, the round black nose, the tiny pink pads beneath the paws, the short hind legs that quivered abruptly every so often.

  Her charcoal flew across the paper as her subject began to appear. When the drawing was finished she regarded it critically. She flipped through the pad and looked at her other efforts—​Pauline standing by her patio table, cup in hand; a view of Kevin from Audrey’s bedroom window as he stood, lost in thought, in his garden; a couple of women deep in conversation outside a house across the road; some children playing by the lake a few weeks ago; the school caretaker, sitting in the sun outside the staff room window one lunchtime, enjoying an illicit cigarette while the principal was away.

  Audrey was an observer, grabbing moments from other people’s lives and capturing them in her sketch pad. Maybe that was as good as she was going to get; maybe there was nobody waiting to meet her after all.

  Oh, stop it, she told herself impatiently. You could be so much worse off. You could be homeless, or bereaved, or the victim of a crime, or dying of starvation in some third-world country.

  But she wasn’t any of those things, she was just lonely. Which of course was less of a hardship than not having a roof over your head, or not knowing where your next meal was coming from, but which was still quite enough to leave you feeling fairly desolate every now and again.

  She laid aside her pad and went back to her supper.

  Monday

  They ate their porridge as silently as ever. After making the lunchtime sandwiches Michael stood by the window and considered the sudden change in the weather that had caused the heavens to open. The garden was saturated—it must have been raining for most of the night. What was he to do? He could hardly throw them out in this rain, but he was equally determined not to leave them in the house all day on their own.

  He turned and regarded the boy, his porridge half eaten, a dribble of milk at the corner of his mouth. He wondered what on earth he’d do with him in the pet shop. A small child would be bored to death. Still, it looked like he had little choice.

  “He can come to the shop with me until it clears up,” he said to the girl. “You can call and collect him.” Let her sort herself out, she was old enough.

  Before she could respond, Barry pulled at her sleeve and she leaned and put her ear to his mouth. He whispered something and she whispered back, and he shook his head vehemently. She whispered again, and again he shook his head.

  Michael waited, his arms folded. Of course the boy didn’t want to spend the day with a grumpy old man: What child in his right mind would? He waited to see if she managed to persuade him.

  She lifted her head eventually. “Can he bring his book with him?”

  “Yes.” The more distractions he had, the better.

  “An’ can I call in at lunchtime an’ see him?” she asked. “If it’s still rainin’, I mean.”

  “You can.” Hopefully the rain would have stopped long before lunchtime. “We leave in ten minutes,” he told her, assuming she’d want to go as far as the shop with them. Assuming that the boy would insist on it.

  Upstairs he pulled a suitcase from the top of his wardrobe and rummaged through the children’s books that were piled in there. He hadn’t looked at them in years, not since his children had stopped demanding bedtime stories. He pulled out half a dozen and packed them in the small rucksack that usually held just his lunch. He brushed his teeth and went downstairs.

  They were sitting where he’d left them, the boy’s face turned into his mother’s chest. Michael added the three wrapped sandwiches to his rucksack. In the hall he took a black umbrella from the hall stand and handed it to the girl. She accepted it wordlessly.

  “Don’t lose it,” he warned, taking his golf umbrella from its hook. The three of them walked out and Michael unfurled the big blue-and-green umbrella over them. A gift, his bank had called it, rather than something that Michael had paid for several times over in bank charges.

  As they turned onto the path outside, one of Michael’s neighbors emerged from her house two doors up. Michael nodded as she passed them, noting the curious glance she threw at his companions. Let her think what she liked. They made their way along the wet streets and he wondered, with a mixture of apprehension and irritation, how the morning would go.

  —————

  Dear Mama and Papa, Zarek wrote. He stopped and stuck the end of his pen into his mouth. Writing his weekly letter home—​phone calls were for special occasions—was a task that he approached with mixed emotions.

  The weather here has been unusually fine until today, he wrote. Now it is raining heavily, and the sky is full of cloud.

  He had the apartment to himself on weekday mornings, with Pilar and Anton both gone to work. The café didn’t open until eleven, and some days Zarek’s shift didn’t begin until well after that. He relished the peace of the empty apartment.

  The café was busy last week. The good weather brought many people into town. This week will be quieter, I think.

  As he wrote, he imagined his mother coming out to the hall in her dressing gown, sliding open his envelope and pulling out the sheets and unfolding them. He saw her tucking the bank draft into her pocket as she called to Zarek’s father that there was a letter from Ireland.

  I have bought my plane ticket for Christmas. I will see you all, God willing, on December the twenty-third, and I will stay for five days.

  He missed Poland deeply. He missed the different smells and tastes and sights, the different quality of the air. He missed his family and friends—and of course he missed being surrounded by his own language, where he could speak without struggling to be understood.

  I was glad to hear about the new bookshelves. I look forward to seeing them when I am home.

  Th
at was what his €150 had bought. He was happy it was something that everyone would benefit from, but sorry that they hadn’t chosen something more frivolous than a bookcase, like a gas barbecue that would keep his father happily occupied, or one of those garden seats on a swing that his parents could enjoy on fine evenings.

  Pilar and Anton are both well. Pilar found a €5 note on the street a few days ago and she bought a coffee cake, which we all shared. It was good, but of course not as good as your poppy seed cake, Mama.

  The previous evening Anton had cooked a fish dish that was halfway between a soup and a stew, which he said was a specialty of Brittany. He was the first Frenchman Zarek had ever met, and in addition to producing delicious meals he played guitar and sang mournful French songs, and the words sounded like they’d been soaked in honey.

  I was glad to get the photo of Beata’s new hairstyle. The shorter length suits her, I think.

  Zarek finished the letter and added the bank draft. He made no mention of the art classes. It was the smaller by far of the two secrets he kept from his parents, and it caused him a lot less torment than the greater one.

  —————

  As they approached the pet shop Carmel recalled their last visit there. Ethan’s father threatening to call the police, reducing her to tears as she and Barry had left. She’d called him a bastard—​did he remember? She glanced at him but he appeared to have nothing more on his mind than getting in from the rain.

  He took a bunch of keys from the front pocket of his rucksack and turned to her. “We’re going in the back way,” he said. “We’ll see you later.”

  Telling her to get lost. She crouched and gave Barry a quick hug. Immediately his bottom lip began to quiver.

  “I’ll be back soon, promise,” she whispered. “I’ll bring you a surprise, like I said. Be a good boy, okay? An’ don’t forget to say if you have to make a wee, don’t wet your new pants, okay?”

  She turned and left them before Barry had a chance to protest. How would they be, the two of them together without her? As she made her way to the main road she struggled to open the umbrella Ethan’s father had given her, her eyes swimming with sudden tears. She blinked them away and stood at the edge of the path and waited for a break in the traffic. This was the first time she and Barry would be parted for longer than a few minutes since he’d been born.