Life Drawing for Beginners Read online

  Zarek had never tasted as much as a chip in the café. Being surrounded by the smell of hot fat from the minute he walked in effectively killed his appetite, not that he’d ever been drawn towards fast food. “The chicken is good,” he said.

  She held his gaze, her hips thrust forward to push against the counter. “Is that what you like?”

  A snort from the table behind her, where two of her friends sat.

  “Is good,” Zarek repeated, keeping his expression neutral. He was well used to the flirtations, accustomed to the young girls who did their best to tease and tantalize.

  “Where are you from?” she asked, all pretense of wanting food suddenly gone.

  “Poland,” he told her, taking a cloth and wiping the counter that was perfectly clean. Her scent, much too sweet, trailed across to him.

  She twirled her hair lazily. “You got a girlfriend?”

  Zarek was ready. “Yes,” he said, injecting what he hoped was the right amount of regret into his voice. “In Poland I have fiancée.”

  Her hand dropped abruptly, and for an instant Zarek felt ashamed of the lie. But what else could he do, to avoid the blatant propositions? Wasn’t an imaginary fiancée kinder than admitting that he simply wasn’t interested?

  She turned without another word and swayed her way back through the tables, followed by her friends, who completely ignored Zarek as they got up and left. He waited until the door had closed before coming out from behind the counter and clearing their table of shredded napkins and chewing gum wrappers.

  —————

  Michael looked up as the shop door opened. Oddly, the sight of them caused him no surprise, and he realized that he’d been expecting them to return. He put down his pen and folded his arms and waited.

  They were dressed in precisely the same clothing as before. The sleeves of her black top were pushed to the elbows, her jeans so tight he wondered how she got them on and off. The boy stood beside her, his hand in hers, brown trousers several sizes too big, legs rolled up at the bottom, scuffed canvas shoes beneath. He gazed solemnly at Michael, a thumb stuck into his mouth. His hair had been clumsily cut. His face was unnaturally pale.

  They approached the counter, the boy moving closer to his mother. A half-full black plastic sack dangled from her free hand.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I know you don’t want us, but we got nowhere else to go, I swear.”

  Close up, he could see that her chin was pitted with small red marks, and near one corner of her mouth was a cold sore that he didn’t remember from their last visit. Her dark blonde hair was pulled tightly off her face.

  Michael shook his head. “I told you to stay away.”

  “I know you don’t want nothin’ to do with us.” She spoke rapidly, in a low voice that Michael had to strain to hear. He winced at the flatness of her vowels, her dropped th’s, her deplorable grammar.

  “You don’t believe what I told you,” she said, “but it’s true, I swear to God.”

  Michael’s eyes flickered to the boy, who stared impassively back.

  “I wouldn’t blame you,” she said. “You don’t know me, you never seen me before, but I’m not lyin’, I swear.”

  The shop door opened then, and immediately she stepped to one side, pulling the child with her, and stood silently, her gaze on a stand of bird food. The customer looked inquiringly in her direction, and Michael said shortly, “She’s not buying anything.”

  As soon as the man had left Michael turned back to her.

  “You have to go. This has to stop.”

  “It’s not for me,” she said. “I’m not lookin’ for nothin’ for me, it’s jus’ for him.”

  Michael glanced again at the boy who was clutching the end of her top, a dark smudge under each eye, a long thin whitish stain running down the front of his sweater.

  “I know you haven’t got no proof,” she said, “but I’m askin’ you to believe me, because it’s the truth.”

  “Why should I?” Michael demanded. “You’re a drug dealer, you told me yourself. Truth means nothing to your sort.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not dealin’ anymore—I gave that up, I told you, I gave it up for the child. And he is who I say, you can do any kind of test you—”

  “Why don’t you go back to your family?” Michael cut in. “Why are you bothering me? Go back to them: You’re a stranger to me.”

  Her expression hardened. “No way,” she said. “My father…if you knew what he done to me…I can’t say it here.”

  She was tiny, hardly five feet tall, and scrawny with it. Was she twenty? Michael was no good at putting an age on females. His daughter was twenty-four, but there was a world of difference between Valerie and this girl who stood before him.

  “It’s jus’ for the child,” she said then. “If you could jus’ take him in, jus’ for a while till I get meself sorted—”

  “Take him in?”

  “Only at night, jus’ to sleep,” she said. “It would only be—”

  Michael looked at her in disbelief. “You’re asking me to take your son into my house? You’d hand your son over to a stranger?”

  “You’re not a stranger—you’re his grandfather,” she shot back, her voice rising, a flush spreading across her pale cheeks. “You’re all we got. I wouldn’t ask only I’m desperate.” Her eyes filled suddenly with tears, and she brushed roughly at them with her sleeve. “Please,” she said. “I’m beggin’ you. I got nowhere else to turn, we been put out, we’re on the street, this is all we got—”

  She was willing to let her child off with a strange man, someone who’d shown them the door already, someone who’d ordered her off his property. She must indeed be desperate—that much, at least, must be true. Assuming he was her child, and not some ragamuffin she’d commandeered to gain sympathy.

  “Can he talk?” Michael asked then.

  She frowned, blinking away more tears. “’Course he can talk, he’s not stupid.” A thumb swiping quickly under each eye, a loud sniff.

  Michael came out from behind the counter. “I can’t possibly take him,” he said brusquely.

  She narrowed her eyes at him, defiant now. “Why not?”

  “Because,” Michael replied through gritted teeth, “you could have some cockeyed scheme up your sleeve. You could say I kidnapped him, or abused him in some way. You could be planning to go running to some lawyer and tell all sorts of lies about me, just to try and get your hands on some of my money.”

  Her head began shaking slowly from side to side. “God,” she breathed, “the way your mind works. I wasn’t thinkin’ nothin’ like that. I’m jus’ tryin’ to keep him off the streets, that’s all.”

  “Sorry,” Michael said, crossing to the door. “It’s not a chance I’m willing to take.”

  “Look,” she said rapidly, “I jus’ want—”

  He opened the door. “Out,” he said. “There’s nothing for you here. Don’t bother coming back, the answer will be the same.”

  Her face crumpled, the color rising in it once more, tears welling again. “He’ll have to sleep rough,” she said desperately, “or I’ll have to go back to dealin’, I got no choice if you won’t help.”

  “He’s not my problem, and you’re not either. It’s nothing to do with me.” He held the door open and waited for them to walk out.

  “But he is your problem, he’s your grandchild—”

  She reached for his arm but Michael pulled it out of her reach. He took his phone from his trouser pocket and began jabbing at buttons.

  “Jesus,” she cried then, “you’re some bastard.” She swept through the doorway, tears running unchecked down her face, the black plastic bag bumping against Michael’s knee as she passed, the little boy trotting to keep up with her. Michael watched them hurrying down the street—and as he turned to go back inside he narrowly avoided a collision with a woman approaching from the opposite direction.

  She looked uncertainly at him as he moved out of her way, and h
e knew she’d witnessed at least some of what had just happened. He nodded curtly at her and held the door open while she walked inside.

  “I was just…” She stopped. “This might not be…”

  “What do you want?” Michael attempted to keep the exasperation out of his voice.

  “I bought a little dog from you last week,” she said, “on Saturday. You lent me a carrier, I brought it back on Monday.”

  He waited. Probably looking to give back the damn pup, not what she wanted after all. Fat chance.

  “It’s just,” she said, fiddling with her hair, smoothing her skirt, making him almost twitch with impatience—“well, to be honest, she’s a bit…unruly, and I just—”

  “I’m not taking her back,” Michael said. “No returns.”

  She looked shocked. “I don’t want to give her back, for goodness’ sake—I just wondered if you, um, might have some…I don’t know, advice about how I could manage her a bit better, that’s all.”

  “You want some advice,” Michael said evenly.

  “Just a few pointers. I’ve never had a—”

  “Get a book,” he cut in. “Go to the library, or go to a bookshop and pick up a book. That’s my advice.”

  He turned on his heel and walked back to the counter, and by the time he’d resumed his place behind it she’d vanished. He slumped on his stool and rubbed his face.

  He’d done the right thing. She was an addict, she couldn’t be trusted. They weren’t his problem. He’d done the right thing.

  After a while he opened his newspaper and returned to the crossword, but for the life of him he couldn’t make sense of a single clue.

  —————

  Audrey banged the frying pan onto the cooker. The nerve of the man, the absolute cheek. She had a good mind to go straight back to that shop and give him a piece of her mind. How dare he take that tone with her, how dare he think he could treat people like that and get away with it.

  She sloshed olive oil onto the pan and pulled open the fridge, her blood still boiling, nearly an hour after the encounter. And that poor girl, rushing out in floods—he’d obviously upset her too, and a young child with her. Audrey tore the plastic from a half pound of sausages and stabbed them with a fork and flung them on the pan. Such an ignoramus.

  She yanked the lid off a tin of beans and upended it into a saucepan. She couldn’t for the life of her understand how he stayed in business. Surely no right-thinking people would willingly shop there? She wondered if there was anywhere she could lodge a formal complaint. There must be someplace consumers could go to report rogue traders, or whatever you’d call him.

  She shook the pan and the sausages hopped. When they were brown all over she lifted a plate from the dresser and opened the oven door and pulled out the tray of chips. She tossed them onto the plate and plonked the sausages beside them, and splashed the beans on top.

  She took her plate and brought it out to the garden and sank onto the garden seat. She was not going to let him ruin the rest of her day. She’d get a little bottle of wine to have with her dinner, even though she never normally had a drink during the week. But this was an exception, this she needed.

  She left her plate on the seat and went back inside—and in the thirty-four seconds it took to open the wine, pour it into a glass, and return to the garden, Dolly managed to dispatch one and a half sausages and an impressive amount of beans.

  Thursday

  When he drew up outside the school, James reached past Charlie to open her car door. She ruffled his hair, as she always did. “Stop messing my hair, you monkey,” he said, as he always did.

  “Can Eoin come to my house after school?”

  Eoin again. “Not today, poppy.”

  She scowled. “You always say not today.”

  “Well, that’s because I have to meet his mum first.”

  “But how can you meet her if you never come in?”

  Good point. James had yet to lay eyes on the famous Eoin. When he dropped Charlie at school, he stayed in the car and watched her walking in, and in the afternoon she was collected from school by someone from the nearby crèche, and taken there till James picked her up again at five. He had no wish to strike up any kind of acquaintance with the parents of his daughter’s classmates—not yet anyway—and he figured if the teacher wanted to see him, she’d let him know.

  All the same, he wondered how long more he’d be able to get away with distancing himself from Charlie’s school life. “Tell you what,” he said, “why don’t you and I have dinner out tomorrow?”

  “Why not today?”

  “Because I’ve already taken the bacon out of the freezer.”

  She thumped her feet against the seat. “I hate stupid bacon.”

  James kept his patience. “You do not, you love bacon.” He tickled under her arm, and she squirmed away. “Say you love it or I’ll tickle you to death. Say it.”

  Being a parent, he’d long since realized, wasn’t so much one job as several, all of them unpaid, and all with extremely unsociable hours. Cook, cleaner, minder, nurse, educator, entertainer, chauffeur, disciplinarian—and doubtless as she got older the list would lengthen, maybe with jobs he didn’t even know existed now. Being a parent was a challenge. Being a lone parent was bloody terrifying.

  When she eventually got out of the car he waited until she’d disappeared through the school doors before driving off. As he crawled through the Carrickbawn rush-hour streets, as eight more stultifying hours in the estate agency beckoned, James felt the familiar dread seeping under his skin.

  He yearned to be his own boss again, to be in control, to be able to stand over every decision he took. He wondered if he’d ever get back there, if he’d ever manage to steer his life back onto its original course. No—not its original course, that was gone forever, but something he could be proud of, something he could look forward to.

  He parked in the little yard behind the estate agency and took his jacket from the backseat.

  —————

  “Belshazzar, is that you?” His mother’s voice was as clear as if she were phoning from the house next door.

  Zarek’s heart stopped. “Mama—what’s wrong?”

  His father dead, his sister in a horrible accident. Someone in hospital, on life support. He wondered how much a last-minute flight to Wroclaw would cost, and whether he could borrow from Pilar or Anton.

  “We got the money,” his mother said. “It arrived this morning.”

  The money. Zarek had forgotten the money. Relief flooded through him.

  “You are a good boy,” his mother said. “Another son would get a bonus from his job and say nothing to his parents.”

  The bonus fib had been a necessary evil—any form of gambling was frowned on in the Olszewski household. Zarek figured it was a perfectly acceptable fib under the circumstances—​admirable, even, in its credibility. As well as €150, he’d given his mother something to boast about to Kasia Zawadzka, who lived across the street, and whose daughter Margeta worked in the Polish embassy in London.

  “Buy yourself something nice,” he told his mother, knowing he was wasting his time. His father’s shoes would be replaced, or the kitchen windows would get new curtains, or €50 would be slipped silently to his sister.

  “Any news?” his mother asked.

  Zarek thought. You had to have news when someone phoned you from Poland. “Work is busy,” he said. “Weather is mixed. Anton is cooking Irish stew for dinner. Pilar still hates her job.”

  He wouldn’t mention the drawing classes. Keep it simple.

  “Have you met anyone nice?” his mother asked.

  “Lots of nice people here in Ireland,” Zarek replied. “So many nice people, like Polish people but with more freckles.”

  “Belshazzar,” she said, “you know what I mean.”

  He knew what she meant.

  “I must go, Mama,” he told her. “The doorbell is ringing. Kiss Papa and Beata for me.”

 
He hung up and walked into the galley kitchen, where Anton, who came from Brittany, had just begun to peel carrots for the Irish stew.

  “Want to ’elp?” he asked.

  Zarek rolled up his sleeves. “Yes, I want.”

  —————

  “You got a new dog.”

  Audrey started, her trowel slipping from her hand. “Kevin, you gave me a fright.” So quietly he moved, like a cat. She should be used to it by now, but his sudden appearance on the other side of the dividing hedge startled her every time. She sat back on her hunkers and smiled up at him.

  “Did you have a nice time in Cork?”

  “Yeah.” His piercing green eyes were still fixed on Dolly, who was looking up at him from Audrey’s side of the hedge, tail wagging. “You got a new dog,” he repeated.

  Audrey stood up and lifted the pup towards him. “Yes, I did. I bought her in the pet shop. Isn’t she lovely? Do you want to hold her?”

  “No,” he said, flinching back.

  “Just pat her head so, to say hello.”

  He reached cautiously toward Dolly, but jerked his hand back quickly when the little dog lunged at it.

  “It’s okay,” Audrey assured him. “She won’t hurt you, she just loves licking things. It’s her way of being friendly.”

  But he kept his distance, regarding her warily. “Where did you get it?” he asked.

  “In the pet shop,” Audrey told him again. “She was sitting in the window, in a special kind of box, and I thought she was gorgeous.”

  “Did you pay money?”

  “Oh, I did, a lot of money. She was very dear.”

  “More than a euro?”

  “Oh yes, much more.”

  Kevin was forty, with a beautiful unlined face and the mind of a young child. He’d been living next door with his mother, Pauline, when Audrey had bought her house three years previously. He rarely smiled, but would occasionally give a sudden bark of laughter, gone as quickly as it had come.

  “Her name is Dolly,” Audrey told him. “After Dolly Mixtures, because she’s a mix of two different dogs.”