The Restaurant Read online

  Not that he’d take a job with him again though, if one was ever offered. He’s not a complete fool – or not in that respect anyway.

  The afternoon passes. He lets on to pump the tyres again on Rosie Doyle’s wheelchair – they never need it when she asks, but it keeps her happy – and replaces a cracked plug on a toaster. He does his weekly check on the smoke alarms in every room, and on the carbon-monoxide ones in the communal areas.

  He cleans two of the big dining-room windows, inside and out. He hoses down the nursing-home minibus and does what he can under its bonnet. He reckons the vehicle is about a decade past its best-before date, but it’s going to have to soldier on for another while. Keep it going as long as you can, Mrs Phelan told him, so he changes the oil every so often and keeps an eye on the brake fluid and the plugs and points, and tops up the air in the tyres. He does whatever he can think of to prolong its life, and crosses his fingers after that.

  At five to five he gets out of his overalls and packs up his tools. He washes his hands and makes his way to the day room where his audience is waiting, the dozen of them or so who enjoy this last bit of the afternoon.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ he asks, pulling out the piano stool, and they call out names to him. ‘Just A Song At Twilight’, and ‘As Time Goes By’, and ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, and ‘How Are Things In Glocca Morra’, and ‘We’ll Meet Again’. He plays every one of them, bum notes and all. He’s no pianist, never could get the hang of reading music, but he can plink out his own homemade version of a melody, and he can make up some class of harmonies as he goes along, and they’re not fussy.

  As he works his way through the tunes, Gloria McCarthy closes her eyes and sings. Her voice has grown a little wobbly with age but is still perfectly pitched. Nobody minds if the words don’t always come out right, and everyone chimes in with the choruses. Rory Dillon taps out the rhythm of each song with a slippered foot, and Rosie Doyle fishes a tissue from her sleeve and dabs at the tears the music always prompts in her.

  When Bill plays the opening bars of ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, Kate Greene and Jenny Burke get to their feet, as they always do at some stage in the proceedings, and shuffle slowly around the floor together – Kate thinking, Bill suspects, of Diarmuid, the husband who waltzed with her for fifty years. Elsewhere in the room heads nod along, and arthritic hands clap in time to the livelier tunes, and for half an hour they travel back through their stories and their songs, and remember.

  He can’t recall how it started, what chance remark prompted his first performance, more than a year ago it must be now. Someone mourning the fact, was it, that the piano was sitting there idle, no current resident able to play? Someone reminiscing maybe about the dances or showbands they used to love in days gone by. For whatever reason, Bill sat down one afternoon and gave them a spontaneous rendition of the first thing that came into his head – ‘A Bicycle Made For Two’ it might have been – and the gratifying reaction this received kept him there for a few more numbers, and saw him return to the day room the following afternoon when his shift was over, and again the day after that. Now they wouldn’t let him miss it, this bookend of his working day.

  The teatime bell is his signal to finish. He lowers the piano lid and helps them gather up their bits and pieces, and tells them he’ll see them tomorrow as they move off in the direction of the dining room. Not a bad life for them, he supposes – although he privately hopes to end his own days under his own roof.

  The plan isn’t working out. The plan was for him and Betty to make their way into old age together, looking out for one another as the years moved on – with maybe Christine playing some minor role in their welfare, although he’d never have wished either of them to be a burden on her. But the plan isn’t to be, not any part of it.

  He leaves the building through the rear door, turning up his collar against the continuing heavier rain. Left his umbrella at home again. If he’d thought of it he could have taken one from Emily’s – there’s half a dozen poking from a painted metal holder just inside the restaurant door. Help yourself if you need one, the sign above them reads. Drop it back next time you call. No matter, he’s homeward bound. He’ll shower and get into something dry, and have his bite to eat in front of the telly.

  Or maybe not.

  He sees her as he nears the house, squatting by the front door, hood up, head bowed. She could be anyone, with her face hidden like that, but she’s not. He wonders if any of the neighbours have spotted her. If Mrs Twomey has, she’ll find an opportunity to say it to him over the next few days. I saw Christine, she’ll say, watching his face like a hawk. Poor thing, you’d have to feel sorry for her, she’ll say, and he’ll make some noncommittal response and walk away before he says something he’d regret.

  Christine lifts her head at the sound of the gate opening. She rises to standing and watches him silently as he walks up the path. No smile, never a smile from her now. He can’t remember the last time he saw it, can’t recall the change it makes to her face. Finds himself completely unable now to summon his own smile on seeing her.

  He nods a greeting. She continues to regard him wordlessly. He recognises the tatty green parka, shoulders darkened now with the rain, and the brown cord trousers with the knees of them worn thin, but the suede boots are new – or new to him. What he can see of her hair beneath the hood is lank and uncombed. Her lips are dry and split, with a cold sore in one corner.

  Her left cheek is grazed; the skin surrounding the eye on that side is pink and puffy. He doesn’t ask about it. He’s not able for what the answer might be.

  ‘Hello, Christine,’ he says finally.

  ‘Hello.’ She hasn’t called him Dad in years. As she lifts an arm to bat away something on her face, he catches a glimpse of the bitten unpainted nails. He remembers how she used to mind her nails once upon a time, how she used to file them and paint them, and her mother’s too. He recalls their lowered heads, the words travelling quietly between them, and how they’d take no notice at all of him when he walked into the kitchen. He used to love to witness that closeness they had.

  He turns away from her and makes a business of taking his key from his pocket, his limbs feeling suddenly stiff and useless. He opens the front door and steps aside, and after a second she enters. He gets a waft of her unwashed odour as she passes him, and his stomach clenches in protest. He remembers the long baths he and Betty would give out about, the hot water gone, the bathroom smelling like a field of flowers or a mountain forest when she finally surrendered it.

  He follows her in. He shrugs out of his wet jacket and drapes it on the end of the banister. He walks past her down the hall to the kitchen – and as he opens the door Sherlock bounds out, tail pumping, butting against her, whining his greeting, like he always does.

  Traitor.

  No, not a traitor: Sherlock is faithful. Apportioning no blame, accepting her exactly as she is. Giving her the same unconditional love she always got from him. ‘Sherlock,’ she whispers, sinking to her knees and burying her face in his neck, giving the same love back to him. Easier to show it to a dumb animal than to her father.

  In the kitchen Bill rubs the worst of the rain from his hair with a tea towel and rakes his fingers through it. He plants his hands on the edge of the sink and looks out at the lawn as he listens to her continued soft murmuring to the dog. Three weeks, around that, since her last appearance, two or three weeks she generally leaves it between visits. Going that long without a proper wash, without a decent meal in all likelihood.

  First time she turned up was around two months after she’d moved out, taking the contents of Bill’s wallet with her. When he saw her standing on the doorstep he’d thought, in his innocence, that she’d come to her senses, that she was turning her back on drugs and returning home. Christine, he said, opening his arms to take her in, ignoring the unkempt appearance of her, willing, more than willing, to forget all that had gone before – but she stayed out of reach of his embrace. I just wanted a wash,
she said, not raising her gaze higher than his chest. I thought you might let me have a shower – and he lowered his arms and opened the door wordlessly and let her in, and the pattern was set.

  At length he goes through to the utility room. He opens a press and retrieves the clothes she wore on her last visit, laundered and ironed. He returns to the hall and she rises to her feet to accept the bundle. Her wrists, thin as twigs, break his heart.

  ‘Towels in the hotpress,’ he says, as ever.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispers, and climbs the stairs.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, and Sherlock pads after him to the kitchen and is fed. Bill opens the fridge door and peers in. If he had a bit of notice of her arrival he could pick up a cooked chicken or a lasagne or something on his way home, but when she turns up unexpectedly like this he’s forced to work with whatever he has to hand. Today he finds sausages and eggs, so he pulls out the frying pan and gets the bottle of olive oil.

  Not that it matters what he puts before her. Whatever it is, she’ll show little interest in it, she who always loved her food. These days it no longer holds the attraction it did, her body craving something different now. He’ll press it on her anyway; he’ll guilt her into eating at least some of it.

  When he hears the shower starting up he climbs the stairs and retrieves the small heap of her clothing from outside the bathroom door. He brings it down and loads it in its entirety into the washing machine, not brave enough to sort through it. He pours in detergent and softener, and switches it on.

  Although it’s still raining he flings open the big kitchen window. He turns on the hotplate under the pan and sets the table for two. He fills a jug with water that she won’t drink, and puts out a can of Coke that she will.

  Sherlock scratches at the back door: he lets him out. He stands by the cooker while sausages sizzle, and listens to the churning of the washing machine, and imagines it lifting the dirt of the street from her clothing. He pushes the sausages aside and cracks eggs into the pan. When they’re as done as they need to be he lowers the heat and sits.

  He props his elbows on the table and sinks his head into his hands. He wishes himself back in the nursing home, plinking at the piano keys or pressing the end of a sweeping brush into the red test buttons of thirty smoke alarms one after another, or rubbing a smear from window glass. He wishes himself anywhere but here.

  He has failed Betty, is how he sees it. He has failed to keep their only child safe. He is heartbroken. He is broken of heart, his only solace a restaurant designed to comfort the lonely, where he feeds from the company of strangers as much as from the proffered dishes, and where he loves a woman who will never love him back.

  He risks conjuring up an image of Emily, smiling and pink-cheeked, her beautiful coppery curls eternally escaping from their ribbon as she tends her customers, as she nourishes souls along with bodies. Emily, who is a million miles out of his reach. Emily, who finds her way into his dreams.

  He feels a small rush of happiness at the thought of Saturday afternoon. He loves that she comes to him when she needs help – he’d happily do her repair jobs for nothing but she insists on paying. He treasures the times they meet outside opening hours, when he doesn’t have to share her with all the other customers. She’ll be there for the half hour or so it’ll take him to fix the dripping tap, putting together whatever dessert is planned for the evening. She’ll send him home with some treat along with his payment, a wedge of cake or a trio of cookies.

  At length he hears the shower cutting off. He gets to his feet and returns to the utility room, where he takes a toilet bag from a shelf. He unzips it and checks the contents, the same things he always puts in. Toothbrush and paste, box of tampons, deodorant, pack of emery boards, shampoo, bar of soap, comb, Chapstick, tube of antiseptic cream, card wallet of plasters. He has no idea if she uses any of them, but he fills a toilet bag between each visit because it’s something he can do for her. He’d buy her underwear if he wasn’t clueless about sizes. He’d do anything for her, if only she’d let him.

  He opens his wallet and takes out the bundle of tenners, five of them, that he keeps at the ready, wrapped with an elastic band so he won’t spend them. They’ll be used to feed her habit: he knows this, he’s not a fool. They’ll be slipped one by one into a hand in return for a few hours, or maybe a few days, of oblivion, or happiness, or whatever she gets from it. He has little knowledge of how her life works now, and no desire to know.

  Would you let me organise for you to go somewhere? he’ll ask her, like he always does, sometime during the meal that neither of them wants. I’ll help you, he’ll say. I’ll pay whatever it costs. I’ll bring you there, you won’t have to do it alone.

  He lives in hope. It’s a lonely place to be. She’s said no every time he’s asked, but he’ll ask again. He has to ask again, has to go on asking until she gives the right answer. He must keep believing that one day she’ll say yes: the darkness would swallow him without that belief.

  On days like this, he feels every one of his forty-eight years.

  He turns on the radio. He’s not interested in it, but it will fill their silences. He leafs through the local paper as he waits for her, skimming the news items: a planned parish trip to Lourdes, an accident on the dual carriageway that put three in hospital, the opening of a skateboarding area in one of the parks.

  He turns the page and sees Dear Claire, the agony-aunt column he normally bypasses – but something makes him stop this evening. He reads the problems, and the responses. He sees an email address, and an invitation to get in contact.

  How could a stranger be of any help to him? What could anyone suggest that he hasn’t already tried?

  Nothing to lose though. Everything lost already. Might open a new email account, make up a name to go with it, and give it a go.

  And later that evening, after he’s said goodbye to Christine, he does.

  Dear Claire,

  I’ve never written to someone like you before. I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing it now, only you always seem to have the answers, and I could do with a few.

  My wife died eight years ago, when our only child, our daughter, was sixteen. After her death, our daughter’s behaviour changed. She’d never given us any trouble, she was always a happy girl with lots of friends, and she had a good relationship with both of us, but in the weeks and months that followed her mother’s death she became quieter and less inclined to talk to me like she used to. I put it down to grief and assumed it would pass, but instead it got worse as time went on. She’d be late home from school without an explanation, and if I questioned her she’d get on the defensive and accuse me of bullying her, and I’d back off because I didn’t know how to handle it. When I spoke to my workmates, who were all men, they said it was typical teenage behaviour and she’d grow out of it. I hoped they were right.

  One day I noticed money missing from my wallet. When I asked my daughter about it – not accusing her, just thinking she might have needed a loan – she flew into a rage. She denied taking it, but I knew it had to be her. She became even more moody and unpredictable after that, to the point where I was afraid to say anything in case she blew up. There was terrible tension in the house whenever she was there. In desperation I asked my sister to speak to her, thinking she might do better than me, but my daughter refused to have a conversation with her. My sister said the same as my workmates, that it was probably teenage moodiness, so I resolved to endure it in the hope that they were all right.

  One day, a little over a year after my wife died, I got a call from my daughter’s school asking me to come in, and when I did, the principal told me her teachers were concerned about her, that she was missing days and not doing homework, and showing aggression when they questioned her. She’d always been a good student, and she was in her Leaving Cert year, so this was very worrying. When I went home I tried to talk to her, tried to reason with her, but she told me to mind my own business – and then, a few days later, I got a visit from
the mother of one of her friends, who told me that my daughter had offered her daughter drugs.

  It came as a terrible shock. I was convinced she must be mistaken, that my daughter would never do such a thing – but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made, the easier the jigsaw became to assemble. I figured that my daughter must be taking drugs herself, must have been for some time, and was now turning to selling them to feed her own habit. What others had put down to teenage moodiness was, I decided, something far more serious.

  I had no idea what to do. I confronted her when she got home, but I didn’t handle it well – I hadn’t been sleeping for quite a while, and spoke more sharply than I’d intended – and she ended up storming out of the house, and staying out till the small hours.

  Sorry, I didn’t mean this to be so long, but you may as well have the full story. Basically, I lost her that day. She began staying out more and more, and ignoring me as much as she could when she did show up. I stopped answering phone calls from her school, too cowardly to hear what I knew they wanted to tell me. I was losing her, and the prospect was terrifying. I rang phone numbers that offered help for families affected by addiction, I rang every place I thought might tell me what to do, and I was told by pretty much everyone that if she didn’t ask for my help, I couldn’t give it. Basically, I could do nothing apart from join one of those groups for families affected by drug abuse, which I didn’t. The thought of sitting in a circle and baring my soul to a group of strangers held no appeal.

  One night, she didn’t come home at all. The following day I reported her missing. She was a few months off her eighteenth birthday, so technically still a child. The guards found her easily enough, sleeping rough with a few others in a vacant house. They brought her home and I tried to reason with her. I said I’d do whatever it took to help her. I thought I’d got through to her; she agreed to let me help. She went to bed in her old room, but the following morning she got up early and made off with the wallet I had foolishly left in the pocket of a jacket that was hanging in the hall.