Just Another Kid (28 page)

“So I did. I had gloves on. I took them off. I had a necklace on. I took that off. I had my hair up. I took the pins out. This little pile of things was accumulating beside me as the meal progressed. And people certainly started noticing, once my hair came down. Then I took the jacket to my evening gown off …”

She sat up abruptly. She was blushing. With one hand, she gingerly touched the skin along one cheekbone. Then she put her hands over her face and rubbed her eyes. “I shouldn’t have had that coffee. Now I feel sick.” Lowering her hands slowly, she pressed her fingertips against her lips a moment before taking them away and looking at them. “See? I’m shaking.”

Silence came, and it grew very, very long.

At last she sank back into the cushions on the couch. She sighed. “If you’re wondering what happened that night, what happened at that dinner, suffice it to say that a lot of people forgot they’d come for an awards ceremony. I got the attention I was wanting so much.”

She glanced over, and I nodded.

“I’ve got to admit, I don’t even remember what all happened. What I do remember is so incredibly humiliating that I hate to even think what I might have gotten up to that I don’t know about. I remember John taking me out of the room. And I remember getting sick all over the sidewalk outside, but that’s about all, until the next morning, when I woke up in the apartment of this other guy on the project. God knows how I got there. I hardly knew him, which makes it worse, because I can just imagine what might have happened. Anyway, I couldn’t go back. Not after embarrassing John and the others in front of everybody. How could I? And I sure never told Tom. In the end, I just withdrew from the project. I came back here, wrote out my resignation and never returned. That seemed the only alternative.”

Silence.

Ladbrooke blew out a long breath. “So, now you really know what kind of stupid booby you’ve gotten lumbered with.”

“I can see where that must have been pretty horrific, all right.”

Lad sighed again. “It took me two years to come to the point where I could bear even thinking about it. This is the first time I’ve tried to talk about it with someone else. It was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done.”

A rueful smile touched her lips. She cast a long, sideways glance in my direction and caught my eye. “Well, of course, there was what I did in your room.”

I grinned, and the tension eased off abruptly.

“I suppose what happened in your room wasn’t as bad,” she said. “At least it was less public. But I think I felt about as bad, because there was no way of escaping from it. I wanted to die then, that time in with you.”

She brought her hand up and thoughtfully chewed the thumbnail.

“I don’t remember very much about that day. I’d been drinking from about 6:15 in the morning. I hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before, and all I remember was needing courage to face you. Everything else is pretty hazy. Up until I got sick. I sure remember throwing up everywhere. The
look
on your face when I did …” She smiled slightly then and looked over. The smile became teasingly affectionate.

I grinned again.

“You were a picture, Torey. You really were.”

I blushed.

“And you and those damned floor cloths …” She chuckled. “It’s probably not funny. I never expected to be laughing about it. Not in a million years. I was so terrified of you. You’d said, ‘You’re not going to be sick again?’ And I’d said no. But I kept thinking, what if I am? I felt paralyzed, sitting there. And you had those floor cloths. You were very gentle about it, but there was no nonsense. There was no doubt who was in charge. I was thinking, it’s like I’m just another kid. Which was all right. I think that’s the precise moment it occurred to me, really occurred to me, that I needed to do something. Not earlier, not when I was sick—that was just humiliating—but then, with you and your floor cloths. I thought, I need this. I need somebody else to take control for a while. Because I just wasn’t making it on my own. I needed to start over. I needed to grow up, because I don’t think I ever really did it the first time.”

Caught up in my own memories of the day, I was still smiling. “Do you remember threatening me with that lawsuit over my taking Leslie out of your car the day before? When you came into the room that next day, I thought you were going to kill me. No joking. You had death in your eyes. Do you remember that?”

“Sort of. I mean, I don’t really. I remember having been angry with you, but that’s about it. But Tom’s reminded me about the lawsuit business, because we got charged for the call I made to the lawyer.”

“You really did frighten me. I got a heck of a scare from that,” I said.

“I scared you? You scared the shit out of me. Right from that very first day. Remember that? In the front office, when we couldn’t get Leslie out of the car? I was scared to death of you. And remember that first meeting you set up for Tom and me, that first conference? I got so worried over it, I got sick. Tom was furious with me, but I just couldn’t go. I couldn’t face you. You scared me shitless.”

Amazed, I looked over. “Why on earth—?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just the way you looked at me. It scared me. I felt like you saw right through me.”

“I didn’t.”

She straightened up, stretched, ran her fingers through her hair, pushing it back over her shoulders. “I think you did,” she replied. “And that was what was so frightening. But it’s all right. I think I was ready to be seen through.”

“I
t wouldn’t be like this in Ulster,” Geraldine said, as she stared out the window. There was snow again, feet of it this time instead of inches. “Daddy’d have planted our broad beans by now.”

“It snows in Ulster,” Shamie replied.

“Not like this.”

It was a spring snow, deep, heavy and wet, but uncannily beautiful. The drab grays and browns of a fading Western winter had disappeared under what looked like heavy-handed dollops of marshmallow creme. But it was impossible weather for driving. I had managed to make it to work all right, and the Lonrhos had a four-wheel-drive vehicle, but we were it. The buses carrying Dirkie and Mariana couldn’t get through, and I didn’t know what had happened to Lad and Leslie. I assumed they had been defeated by the snow, like practically everyone else. It was almost ten o’clock and they still hadn’t arrived.

“Come on, you lot,” I said. “Let’s get back to work.” The snowfall was proving an irresistible distraction that morning. Everyone kept pausing to look at it. The fact that there were so few of us made it even harder to keep things going as usual. “Come on,” I said again and put my hand on Shamie’s shoulder to guide him back to his chair.

“We’d have our garden all laid out by now,” Geraldine said, as she sat down. “This is a silly place. You never know what’s going to happen.”

“I like it here,” Shamie replied. “You can do lots more things than you can at home.” He turned to me. “The trouble with Geraldine is that she thinks everything that happened in Ulster was good and everything that happens here is bad.”

“It
was
good,” Geraldine said.

“It
wasn’t
. It wasn’t, Geraldine. Where’s your memory?”

“It
was
. We had our garden in by now. Daddy was making our garden.”

“Garden?” Shamie cried. “Garden-schmarden, Geraldine. I get fed up with all your talk. Don’t you remember it over there? What kind of place it was? We couldn’t even go down to the playground anymore. Remember what it looked like after the riots? Was that good? And remember the cellars? Remember Colin in the cellars, making petrol bombs, and how Shemona got down there, got the petrol all over herself and cut her hand? Was that good, Geraldine?”

Geraldine’s expression blackened.

“She could have been killed, Geraldine. And she was just a wee child. And your sister. She could have been killed, like Matthew was.”

I could see tears glistening in Geraldine’s eyes. Her expression had softened slightly; she was obviously most intent at that moment on not crying. She swallowed, sniffed softly, swallowed again. Shamie was watching her closely. His mood wasn’t malicious, but I could tell he intended to make his point.

Although the tears hadn’t fallen, Geraldine removed her glasses and wiped them from her eyes. She replaced her glasses. “I just want to go home,” she said, her voice very small.

Shamie mellowed slightly. “It’s nicer here, Geraldine,” he said gently.

“I was going to have a wee bit of garden for myself. Daddy said.”

“Maybe you can have a garden here. Maybe Auntie Bet’ll let you.”

“They don’t have any garden at all.”

“Well, maybe they could make one for you.”

Geraldine wasn’t going to be placated. She shook her head morosely.

Silence drifted down around us, soft as the snow beyond the window. Shamie looked down at the tabletop and his folder. Geraldine had her eyes squeezed shut to keep the tears back. Beside me, Shemona sat, watching the other two. We were on the opposite side of the table from Shamie and Geraldine and a couple of seats down, so we weren’t directly across from them. Shemona, who was nearer to them than I, appeared to be listening intently to the conversation.

Shamie suddenly shook his head, as if still in conversation with someone. Then he looked at me. “I’m glad I’m here. It was no good there. All it was, was fighting.”

“There’s got to be fighting,” Geraldine replied.

“Why? What good does it do? It just kills people.”

“You’ve got to fight, Shamie. You’ve got to take revenge. People do you wrong, people take away what’s yours, you’ve got to take revenge,” Geraldine said, her voice quiet, as if she were stating a known fact.

“Revenge is for God to take. Not us.”

Geraldine shook her head. “God’s too slow.”

Shamie didn’t respond. Instead, he grew pensive. Clasping his hands together in an almost prayerful attitude, he brought them up and rested them against his lips. He stared, unseeing, ahead of him. I studied him as he sat. He was a good-looking kid, more beautiful than handsome, with his long lashes and his full, sensual lips. He had an artist’s face. It was in keeping with his soul.

“You know what the worst part of it was, over there?” he asked, turning to look at me.

“What was that?”

“You’re not free. You walk around free, but you’re still not free. I remember once, last summer, when Mammy and Daddy took us for a picnic. We went to County Down, down to the lough, and my mammy had made a lunch and put it in the picnic basket with a blue cloth on it. And we put it on the ground and we had sandwiches and crisps and lemonade. I was watching the swans on the lough. The car radio was on, and we heard on the one o’clock news that the Provies had blown up a Land Rover with soldiers in it near Ballynahinch. We’d come through Ballynahinch. Brid gets travel sick, so we’d stopped in a lay-by there, and Mammy’d taken her over to sick up on the verge. And after we’d heard the news, I was looking out across the water, across the lough, at the swans. I was watching them, but I was seeing these soldiers, these dead soldiers in the Land Rover, with blood on them. Like this dog I saw once. After the riots when Bobby Sands had died. There was a dead dog. I don’t know if he got run down or what, but he was dead in the street, lying in his own blood. It was dark, the blood was. Almost black, not red like what comes out of you when you cut yourself. It was blacky-red and soaked into the pavement. Except there were footprints made with his blood, where people had walked over him. Blacky-red footprints going down the street.” Shamie shook his head. “I was looking at swans on the water and I was seeing this dead dog’s blood.”

Then, jarringly, we were interrupted by the noisy arrival of Ladbrooke and Leslie. The classroom door went bang and there they were, red cheeked and cheerful, clumping across the room in heavy boots, leaving a trail of melting snow in their wake. Lad was full of their adventure. They’d been involved in a minor traffic accident on the way to school. While no one had been hurt or even shaken up, it had necessitated two trucks and police and a lengthy wait at the Mercedes garage. Ladbrooke and Leslie had walked to school from there and arrived, very excited by their experiences.

I regretted their intrusion. The three children almost never directly mentioned the Troubles or spoke of their former life in Belfast. There were odd, fragmented references shot back and forth amongst them, like coded messages, but they seldom included me when talking. And I was uncomfortable raising the topic when it did not come up naturally, partly because I was at a disadvantage as a foreigner, and partly because there had been so many traumatic consequences for these children, that I feared I would lumber in, inadvertently hurting more than I helped. But Ladbrooke and Leslie were there, wet and noisy and excited, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Within moments the other children had caught their high spirits. We went back to talking about snowstorms, and my quiet interlude in Ulster was gone.

I alone seemed unable to pull myself away from Northern Ireland. Throughout the day, the conversation kept coming back to me in snips and snatches.

Out on the playground that afternoon, the children were going mad in the deep snow. Carolyn and Joyce had come out too. They had only four children in their class, so the day had taken on a holiday mood. Carolyn got a game of Fox-and-Geese going with her children in which Leslie and Shemona happily joined. Geraldine and Shamie, feeling themselves above playing with preschoolers, kept apart. After constructing a crude snow fort, Shamie began lofting snowballs at Ladbrooke, who returned fire with unrestrained precision. Geraldine joined in, in a halfhearted way, but after getting hit in the cross fire, she withdrew and came over to stand next to me.

“Shamie likes her,” Geraldine said in a rather disgruntled voice. She seldom referred to Ladbrooke by name.

“Yes, I know.”

“You know what else? He keeps that picture she drew, that one she made on his spelling paper when he got 100 percent. He keeps it in his bedroom drawer. By his bed. And then he takes it out and looks at it. Sometimes he
kisses
it.” Geraldine made a distasteful grimace. “He’s in
love
with her.”

I smiled down at her.

“I think he’s silly. She’s a grown-up woman.”

“Well, it’s all right for him to feel that way.”

“He thinks she’s beautiful. He thinks she’s beautifuller than you are.”

“I suspect he’s right.”

“I don’t think so,” Geraldine said. “I think you’re beautiful, Miss. I think you’re beautifuller than she is. You’re nicer.”

“Thank you, Geraldine. That’s kind of you to say.”

We stood together in affable silence, watching the others play. Geraldine took one hand out of her pocket and put it through the crook of my arm. She leaned her head against me.

“You know what we were talking about this morning,” I said, “when we were talking about Ulster?”

Geraldine nodded.

“Shamie was saying how it was no good, all that fighting, how it wasn’t getting anywhere. What do you think? Does the fighting there seem good to you?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Then slowly, she shook her head. “No, Miss, it doesn’t seem good.”

“Does it seem right?”

Another thoughtful pause, then she shrugged. “I don’t know. I think maybe it’s right. Just because some things aren’t good, doesn’t mean they aren’t right. You have to fight back. When somebody fights you, you have to fight back. You have to take revenge.”

“You have to take revenge?”

She nodded.

“Do you think revenge is a good thing, Geraldine?”

She nodded again with no hesitation.

“Why?”

“Because it’s justice.”

I looked down at her. She was bareheaded, in spite of the cold weather. She was still watching the other children, still holding on to me, still leaning her head against my arm. I regarded her dark, shiny hair.

“What is justice, do you think?” I asked.

No answer. She just stood.

“Do you know what justice is, Geraldine?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“What?”

“What you take revenge for.”

Taking my hand from my jacket pocket, I put my arm around her, drawing her closer to me. She put her arm around my waist. I was silent a moment, watching Shamie and Ladbrooke. They had grown exuberant in their game, and snowballs were zinging back and forth at a remarkable rate. Ladbrooke had a childlike quality about her that allowed her to enter into the kids’ games as an equal, and the children always accepted her as such. On such occasions, she could become very free spirited, but it made her noisy. I tried to catch her eye and signal her to move away from Geraldine and me a little, but she was too absorbed to notice.

“I’m not so sure revenge is a good thing,” I said to Geraldine. “I think maybe it’s just an excuse to hurt someone else and not feel guilty for having done it.”

“No,” she replied.

“Someone hurts us and it makes us angry, so we want to hurt them back. But then, after we’ve done it, afterwards, what’s been accomplished? Nothing. It’s just another name for violence. And it’s a particularly wicked kind of violence, to my mind, because it’s been thought through first and not just done in the heat of the moment. In taking revenge, one’s set out only to destroy, and that seems evil to me.”

“But the soldiers kill children,” Geraldine replied. “My daddy showed me pictures of children who were shot by rubber bullets. He said the soldiers didn’t care if they killed women or babies or little girls. So he said it was right to kill them in revenge.”

I pondered what to say.

“He said that because he’s my daddy. He didn’t want them to kill me.”

“But do
you
think it’s right to kill in revenge?”

“It’s what my daddy said.”

“But
you
, what do
you
think?”

Geraldine sighed. She pressed closer to me, sighed again. There was a small silence, cluttered with the noise of the others playing.

“I don’t know. I didn’t used to think it was right. I used to think like Shamie did—you know—that they shouldn’t keep doing all those things, all that hurting.” A pause. It grew lengthy. “Then Mammy and Matthew got killed.”

“Did that change your mind?”

She didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It just made it seem more wrong.”

I watched Shamie running and laughing.

“Then my daddy died.”

“And that changed your mind?”

She nodded. “Revenge is what my daddy wanted. It’s what you do when you’re a grown-up. You see, you understand everything then. It’s what you do. And I’m the oldest now, so I must do it.”