The Restaurant Read online

  She stoops to get a closer look, and sees that it’s not a scratch: it’s a collection of small red dots, some scabbed, the skin beneath them patched with blue. She glances at the right arm, inside the right elbow, and sees the same mesh of dots peppering the skin there. Like puncture wounds, like the marks left behind after blood tests, a lot of blood tests. Or maybe caused by an allergy, or eczema.

  Or …

  And slowly, Astrid makes her way to the answer.

  Ah. Yes.

  And everything makes sense then. Everything slots into place. Yes.

  She knows very little of addiction, has had minimal contact with it. Over the years, at various social functions, she’s noted people under the influence of alcohol, balance compromised, speech slurred. From time to time she has observed blank-eyed souls on the streets, removed from their surroundings. She’s listened to tearful radio accounts of uncontrolled gambling, and the damage it can wreak. She has heard tell, through various means, at various times, of broken marriages, and destroyed families, and addiction-related deaths.

  And here, lying in her garden this morning, is another addict, another slave to whatever poison she has been pumping into her veins. Moved out of home because of it, or maybe fell into wrong ways after she left the safety of her father’s house. Living who knows where, begging no doubt for money to feed her habit. Asking for an advance so she could buy her next few hours of oblivion.

  Astrid might have walked past her, might have dropped a few coins into her paper cup. You don’t look into their eyes. You never look there, in case they look back, and show you too much.

  She thinks of Bill, poor Bill, of his hunted expression at the mention of his daughter in their last conversation. All understandable now, his seizing his chance when Astrid mentioned needing someone for the garden. She feels no anger, no sense of betrayal, no fear. Pity is what she feels, for the father and the child.

  ‘Christine,’ she says quietly. ‘Christine, wake up.’

  The brown eyes flutter open. They look at Astrid. Do they see her?

  ‘You fell asleep,’ Astrid says. ‘You’re in my garden, Astrid’s garden.’

  A beat passes. They hold each other’s gaze.

  ‘Can you stand up? Can you do that?’

  The girl gets clumsily to her feet, staggers slightly before finding her balance. Pulls down her sleeves, gives a slow shake to her head.

  ‘Come inside,’ Astrid says.

  Without waiting for a response she returns to the house. In the kitchen she plugs in the kettle again. When it boils for the second time she makes tea and stands the pot on its trivet on the table. She takes the stew from the oven and ladles it into a bowl.

  A sound makes her turn. Christine stands in the doorway, her feet still bare, her hair pulled back carelessly into its ponytail.

  ‘Let me get you slippers,’ Astrid says. ‘Those tiles are cold.’

  ‘I’m alright,’ Christine says – but Astrid goes anyway to her room and retrieves her slippers.

  ‘Size seven,’ she says, offering them. ‘I have large feet, so you’ll have plenty of room. Please put them on: you’ll freeze otherwise.’

  They’re pink and cream check, and furry on the inside. Astrid bought them in the sales after Christmas, reduced from seventy euro – scandalous – to twenty-five. Christine regards them silently for a second before placing them on the floor and stepping into them. They’re ludicrously big on her, but they’ll keep her warm.

  ‘Do you want to wash your hands?’

  ‘I washed them outside, at the tap.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s only cold water – you should have used the bathroom.’ No response. Conversation will be tricky. ‘Have a seat,’ she says, placing the bowl on the waiting table mat. ‘Chicken stew,’ she says. ‘I hope you’re not vegetarian.’ Christine looks at it but makes no move to take up her cutlery.

  ‘Don’t you like chicken? I’ve made a cheese sandwich, if you’d prefer that.’

  ‘No thanks. I’m not hungry.’

  No wonder she’s thin. Astrid opens her mouth to protest, and closes it again.

  ‘Have you got any Coke?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I don’t care for it.’ Astrid pours tea without asking, and offers milk. Christine adds three spoons of sugar to her cup and sips, elbows planted on the table, stew pushed aside. Her fingers tap out a tattoo on the side of her cup. Astrid hears the soft scuff of her slippers on the floor.

  Twenty-five, wasn’t that what Bill said? She looks younger than that – and somehow, also older. Her frame is as slight as a young teen’s: a school uniform wouldn’t look out of place on her, but her addiction has stolen her bloom.

  Her mother is dead. Astrid recalls Bill telling her that, sometime during their first conversation. Cancer, he said. The big C. Was that the catalyst? Was that where it had gone wrong?

  ‘Christine, Bill told me about your mother dying.’

  The girl’s hand stills.

  ‘May I ask how old you were when it happened?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘That must have been very difficult.’

  No response. Christine looks into her cup.

  ‘I lost my parents when I was eleven,’ Astrid says, studying the teapot. ‘They died in the war – the Second World War, I mean.’ The first time she’s said it aloud in so many years. ‘For a long time afterwards I was very unhappy. It’s not easy, experiencing death when we are young. Especially the death of a parent.’

  More silence. She listens to the gentle whirr of the electric kitchen clock, and more scuffing on the floor. A foot jiggling, she guesses, the girl unable to be still.

  The teapot is sky blue and bulbous, with a chain of yellow and white daisies dancing around its middle, and a chip on the lid, a nick smaller than a baby’s fingernail. Astrid found it in a charity shop, after she’d dropped and broken her bone china one, part of a set they’d been given as a wedding present. For years she’d used the good one on special occasions only: the rest of the time it had sat with its companions in a glass cabinet, until Cathal died and she sold the house and moved into town, and left the cabinet where it was. Left a lot of things where they were. The china teapot came with her – she’d been fond of it, and vowed to use it every day from then on, but she managed to break it before it had served a week in its new surroundings.

  ‘My mum loved gardening,’ Christine says then. Gaze still directed at her cup, hands clasped around it.

  Astrid takes in the bowed head, the bitten nails, the unwashed hair. ‘Did she? What a nice interest. I enjoyed it too, when I was younger. My husband loved peas, so I grew those every year. Along with other things, of course.’

  ‘Mum grew flowers. She knew them all, all the names.’

  ‘You must have had a beautiful garden.’

  ‘We had.’

  Astrid eats her sandwich while the untouched chicken stew cools, her mind taking her back once more to the darkest period in her life. She remembers, after her family’s disappearance, waking in the middle of the night in the makeshift bed, the bundle of eiderdowns that Herr Dasler had set up in his attic for her. She would bolt upright, disoriented even after months of living in his house, clutching the bedclothes tightly, heart hammering, every muscle rigid with fear as she waited for the malevolent aftertaste of her nightmare to fade.

  Her family didn’t feature in those nocturnal terrors. They filled her waking moments; the loss of them took her over by day, but she never dreamed about them in the darkness of the attic, not once. It seemed as if her subconscious was afraid to let them in, for fear of what it might lead to. Eventually the memory of their voices faded. After that their faces blurred – how she wished for photographs! – and finally vanished.

  But the months, the years in Herr Dasler’s house! Creeping about by day, under orders to avoid the windows, not to run a tap or flush the lavatory, not to put on a light after dark unless he too was in the house. Scurrying up to the attic if anyone called. Reading his book
s, eating his food, wearing the clothes he bought when she outgrew her own. Using the flannels he tactfully provided to stem her monthly flow, scrubbing them clean in his bathroom sink, hanging them to dry on the rafters in the attic. Wondering, each endless day, each lonely night, if this was to be her life forever.

  And when it was all over, when it was safe at last for her to leave the house, how glorious was the fresh air she’d been denied for years! She returned with him to her old street, clutching tightly to his arm, still afraid to trust that the danger was gone – but where their apartment block had stood, there was only rubble. No trace at all was left of them, no photo albums or letters, not the smallest item of clothing. Nothing to remember them by but the precious pearl necklace.

  ‘Can I use the loo?’

  She shakes her memories away and shows the girl to the bathroom. Following some instinct, she closes the door to the adjacent bedroom softly on her way back to the kitchen. Just being careful, she tells herself. Just staying on the safe side. In the kitchen she extracts a twenty-euro note from her purse: unearned, but needed to soften the blow. She slips the purse into a drawer as she hears the girl slopping back along the corridor in the borrowed slippers.

  ‘Christine,’ she says, as soon as she reappears, ‘I’d like you to take this,’ proffering the note, waiting until it’s been pocketed, until thanks have been given for it. ‘I think it’s best,’ she said then, ‘if you don’t come back.’

  ‘What?’

  She looks genuinely shocked. How could she not have been expecting this? ‘Christine, you didn’t exactly do a good job today. You fell asleep – and my hedge looks worse if anything.’

  ‘I can do better. I wasn’t feeling good. I’ll come back tomorrow—’

  ‘No,’ Astrid says swiftly and firmly. ‘I’d prefer if you didn’t.’

  A beat passes. ‘Just give me another chance.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. Christine, I really don’t think you’re well enough.’

  ‘I’m fine, I’ll come back—’

  Astrid shakes her head. This is getting tiresome. ‘Please, I’d rather you left. It’s not going to work out, Christine.’

  The girl doesn’t move. Astrid feels a pinprick of alarm. Notwithstanding that she is Bill’s daughter, she’s virtually a stranger – and, given her actions this morning, probably under some kind of chemical influence right now. For all her apparent fragility, might she not possess strength when provoked? Might she lash out at Astrid at the thought of her income, such as it is, drying up?

  She tries again. ‘Christine, your father is a friend of mine, and a good man. I know he was hoping that this would suit you, but I really think he would agree that it’s best for you not to continue here.’

  To her relief, Christine turns abruptly and swings out through the patio door.

  ‘Can I put the stew in a container for you?’ Astrid calls. ‘Will you take it with you for later?’

  But no response comes. What does she eat? When does she eat? How long has she been living like this, from one day to the next, from one fix to the next? Did it come about from a combination of elements – the loss of her mother, lack of self-esteem, a desire to please, to fit in, whatever – or was it down to bad timing that put her in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was it as simple as that?

  If Astrid’s dance class had been on Wednesday instead of Tuesday; if the truck that took away her family had been delayed by fifteen minutes; if she hadn’t found Herr Dasler’s house that evening; if an Irish man, years later, hadn’t asked to share her table in a crowded London tea room; if any of these elements had been different, who knows how life might have gone for her?

  So many ways the dice can fall, so much depending on this decision or that, this or that course of action, this yes, that no.

  Christine could be Astrid’s granddaughter, or even great-granddaughter. How Bill must agonise, how he must despair for her. Where does she live? Where does she sleep at night? Who does she call her friends? How these questions must keep him awake, must torment him every hour of the day.

  She steps out onto the patio, where the girl is shrugging on the jacket, having already replaced her shoes and sweater. How can she need so much clothing on such a warm day? Astrid stoops to gather up the discarded slippers. ‘Christine, I’m sorry it didn’t work out. If you would like to come back for a cup of tea anytime, please do.’

  An expression, a grimace, passes briefly across the girl’s face. ‘Have you a plaster?’

  ‘A plaster? Did you cut yourself?’

  ‘I got a blister,’ she says, showing her palm – and Astrid sees the welt, red and sore-looking, in the webbing between thumb and index finger.

  ‘Oh, no – let me dress that for you. Please come back inside.’ She hurries down the short corridor and retrieves her first-aid box from the bathroom shelf. On her return, Christine is standing just inside the patio door.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Astrid says, dabbing antiseptic cream on the blister, cutting a length from her Elastoplast roll. ‘I should have given you gloves – I’m sure there’s still a pair in the shed.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Of course it matters.’ Astrid presses the plaster carefully into place, noting again the thin wrist, the protruding knuckles, the bony, nail-bitten fingers. ‘I’ll give you some of this to take away, so you can change the old one when it gets dirty. Make sure to keep it covered until it heals.’ She cuts two more lengths from the strip and hands them over. Christine pockets them and vanishes once more without a word. Astrid stands in the kitchen, listening to the soft sound of her footfalls travelling along the side passage until it too is gone.

  She opens the drawer where she put her purse, and finds it still there, and undisturbed. She tidies the kitchen, tipping the portion of stew into the compost bin. She could save it, untouched as it is, but her appetite for it is gone.

  She returns the ointment and plaster roll to the bathroom. It is only when she turns on the tap to wash her hands that she notices the absence of the bar of lemon soap from its dish on the side of the sink. Easily replaced, she tells herself. Not a major crime.

  She’ll say nothing of the girl’s return visit to Bill, next time she sees him. He won’t ask, she won’t say. And Christine, she’s sure, will make no mention of it to him either, whenever they meet again.

  The episode has left an uneasy flavour behind. She tells herself her actions were justified – how could she have agreed to let the creature continue, when clearly the work was beyond her? – and yet the vague edginess, and the regret, lingers.

  Later in the afternoon the sun comes out. She walks to the end of her road and waits on a low wall for a taxi to pass by. She could phone but she likes the small bit of exercise, and taxis are plentiful at this time of day. Sure enough, one appears before too long and she flags it down. At her local garden centre she makes her way slowly between the aisles of plants, inspecting the various offerings and making a mental selection, an exercise she likes to indulge in from time to time.

  A fuchsia and a red broom, definitely. A lavender, and possibly a blue buddleia, although they can take over. A potentilla for its beautiful golden shades. A clematis, some variegated ivy, a Virginia creeper for autumn colour.

  ‘I need someone to tidy up my garden,’ she tells a staff member, stout and freckled. ‘I need old shrubs dug up and replaced, and a few other things. I was wondering if you could recommend anyone. I’d prefer a mature person, someone reliable. I live alone,’ she adds.

  ‘I can put the word out, missus,’ he replies. ‘Want to leave us your number?’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ One of the bonuses of growing old, she has discovered, is that people are more inclined to be helpful. Perhaps she reminds him of his grandmother.

  In the taxi that brings her home she searches the streets. She sees shoppers with carrier bags, and holidaymakers with their golden skin, and a young female busker strumming a green guitar, and a man pulling a squeegee across a s
hop window, and another tugging at the lead of a little sniffing dog. She counts three hunkered figures with their hopeful cups on the ground before them, but no sign at all of a thin girl in an oversized jacket.

  She should have let her keep the slippers. Too big as they were, they might have afforded some warmth, some comfort, wherever she spends her nights.

  The following day, Heather arrives to do the windows. ‘What happened to your hedge?’ she asks, and Astrid tells her she got someone who didn’t work out. Heather tuts and shakes her head and gets the wheelbarrow from the shed, ignoring Astrid’s protests. She rakes up the clippings and deposits them in the compost bin, and promises to make enquiries among her neighbours for someone to finish the job. ‘I wish I could do it myself,’ she says, blotting her streaming eyes with her sleeve. ‘You can see my problem.’

  ‘I certainly can,’ Astrid replies, pulling tissues from their box. ‘I’ve asked at the garden centre and they’ll find me someone, I’m sure. Now tell me about your holiday.’

  Heather opens her bottle of cider vinegar. Best window-cleaner on the planet, she calls it, and it certainly works on Astrid’s windows. ‘It was good,’ she says, pouring a generous measure into her bucket. ‘It was kind of weird too, though. I mean, they were … pretty great with Lottie. Like grandparents should be, I guess – not that I’d know much about that. I never had a lot of contact with mine.’

  She holds the bucket under the hot tap. ‘They brought her out for pancakes and ice-cream, and they took her to the park, and to a drive-in movie, stuff like that. She had a blast.’

  She turns to face Astrid as her bucket fills. ‘And I don’t know, I couldn’t help it, but I found myself – resenting them a little. I mean, why were they never like that with me?’

  She turns away again. ‘They just passed me on,’ she says, above the sound of the running water, ‘from one nanny to another. They had no time for me. And now they have time for Lottie, and I’m finding it kind of hard to just accept it and be glad for her. I mean, I am glad, of course I’m happy that they like her, but I’m a little – well, I suppose, if I’m totally honest, I’m a little jealous too.’