The Misremembered Man (5 page)

“Oh, I’ll be there right enough, Maisie.” Jamie observed her and for an instant saw her big eyes change through the lenses to a jungle of beer bottles and some blue sky as she made for the door.

“Right ye be then,” she said, satisfied with her mission.

“Right ye be, Maisie,” both men chorused.

The door clanged shut and the bar returned once more to its restive, smoky silence.

The public library was enjoying a lull when Lydia pushed through the main doors. Sean, the part-time junior—young, handsome and aware of it—was sprawled over the desk, chewing the end of a Biro and engrossed in the sports section of the
Derry Democrat
. He did not register Lydia’s approach and she had to cough to get his attention.

“Oh hello, Miss Devine.” He looked up but didn’t bother to stand. “She’s having her break. You can go on in if you want to,” he said to the open page, once again engrossed.

“Good day to you too, Sean. See you’re working hard as usual.”

She walked away, gratified that the insult had hit its target, and sensed him straighten up and glare at her retreating back as she knocked and went through the door marked “Private” at the far end of the room.

Daphne was glad to see her friend as always.

“What a coincidence: I was just thinking about you, Lydia. Haven’t seen you in ages,” she said, embracing Lydia warmly. “I expect you could do with a nice cup of tea.”

“Oh, no thanks, dear. I’ve just had some.” Lydia set her purse on the floor and sank down into the canvas Parker-Knoll chair.

“Sure? Just freshly made.” She held up the teapot.

This relaxed attitude was the quality Lydia prized most in her friend. Daphne never seemed distracted or pulled off balance by anything. She was solid, dependable; was not afraid to shine a light into the darkest corners and offer solutions to problems Lydia believed insoluble.

“No, really. I have to collect Mother from the Cut ’n Curl shortly. Just wanted to ask your advice about something.” She hesitated. “That’s if you have the time?”

Daphne settled herself in the chair opposite. “All the time in the world. His lordship is very underworked, as you probably noticed.” She nodded in the direction of the door.

Lydia considered her friend with an approving eye. She was wearing a coral twinset and matching cotton skirt. The color suited her, offsetting her honey-colored boyish bob and healthy, outdoor complexion. Only the gold-rimmed spectacles on the chain around her neck ruined the girlish impression. She had a perpetual air of enthusiasm about her which Lydia envied. Every time they met, she was reminded of a child on the brink of opening yet another birthday gift, of a child who would forever be the adventurer in a game of hide and seek, always looking and exploring while she, Lydia, remained in hiding, not wanting to be found.

They had been firm friends since their high-school days, after which, they had gone their separate ways for a time: Lydia to teacher-training college in Belfast, Daphne to the local technical college to follow a secretarial course which, a year later, had resulted in her securing a position at the library where she’d been ever since.

Their friendship was founded on a mutual respect and understanding of the other’s circumstances and aspirations. They shared their problems and celebrated their achievements in a spirit of empathy and genuine goodwill.

Like Lydia, Daphne was unmarried. She did, however, have a fiancé, a farmer named John whom she’d been going out with for at least ten years. John refused to get married until his mother died, and there was no sign of that happening just yet. At seventy-three, his mother was as robust and active as someone half her age, and had no intention of sharing her only son,
her
home—and indeed
his
inheritance—with another woman, even if that other woman was as amiable and good-natured as Daphne.

The idea of marriage was simply unthinkable.

“Do you remember Heather Price from school?” Lydia said. “Tallish, brunette, quite plain. We trained together.”

“You mean Ettie and Herbie’s daughter?”

“Well, you’ll never guess what I got this morning.”

She took the invitation from the envelope and handed it over. “She’s getting married.”

“Really? How nice.” Daphne unfolded her glasses and inspected the card.

“I expect you’ll be getting one too, Daphne.”

“Oh, I hope so! It’s been so long since I had a nice day out. Give me an excuse to buy a new outfit, too.” She removed the glasses, at once deep in thought. “Now, I’ll have to warn John well in advance so he can prime his mother. She can be very difficult, you know…” She looked up from the card. “Oh, Lydia, forgive me for thinking of myself. This is great news. Aren’t you looking forward to it?”

“Well, that’s just it, Daphne. I can’t face another wedding with my mother. I have to find someone else to accompany me. Otherwise I just won’t go.” She leaned back in the chair, deflated.

“You mean a man.”

“Yes, of course I mean a man! One of those alien creatures whom my father disapproved of and my mother thinks objectionable.” She sighed and looked out the window. “Oh, I do get so depressed with my life, Daphne. All my school friends are either married or engaged and I’m still alone, like some kind of reject at a jumble sale.” At that moment, the engagement ring on Daphne’s finger winked playfully as the sun bloomed in the window. The coincidence was not lost on Lydia. “No, I’ll just have to find someone to go with. And how on earth can I manage that in the next eight weeks? Something I haven’t been able to manage in the past twenty years.”

“Nonsense, Lydia, that’s easy. I’ve got the answer at the main desk.” She got up and went to the door.

Lydia looked up, alarmed. “Daphne, really! Sean’s a child, for heaven’s sake.”

“Please, give me some credit. Just wait here; be back in a jiff.”

Daphne amazed her, always seeming to have an answer at hand. The reassuring part of it all was that she was usually right about most things, too. Lydia thought her wasted in her monotonous job, stamping and shelving books, greeting the same people all day long. She should have been a hotel manager, or perhaps a hospital matron; the sort of position that would match her practical, problem-solving nature. But what could she have meant by “the answer?” What on earth could it be?

Lydia didn’t have to puzzle for long. In a couple of minutes Daphne was back, thrusting a copy of the
Mid-Ulster Vindicator
into her hands and urging her to turn to the second-last page.

“Lonely Hearts?” asked Lydia incredulously. “Honestly, Daphne!”

“Why not? I just noticed it the other day. There’s nothing wrong with it. You’re a lonely heart and you want to meet another lonely heart. Put an ad in and see what happens. Can’t do any harm. And you never know who you might meet.”

Lydia toyed with the idea. Daphne was challenging her to do something audacious for a change. It was an exciting prospect: stepping into the light of this new possibility. But still she hesitated, throwing up a protective arm against the glare.

“But it’s all so tawdry…not natural somehow.”

“Nonsense! When you’re living in a backwater like Killoran and you want results quickly, sometimes practical measures are needed. Besides, it’ll be a bit of fun and you just never know who you might meet. Go on, be a devil.”

There was a knock.

“Can I have my lunch break now?” Sean looked from Daphne to Lydia. They both chuckled.

“Yes, of course you can.”

“Oh God, is that the time? Mother’s hair! I’ve got to dash.” Lydia waved the newspaper. “Can I hold on to this?”

“That’s the spirit. You know, that humble paper could be the start of a whole new life for you.”

Lydia smiled. “We shall see, Daphne. We shall see.”

“
C
ome here, Eighty-Six.”

The voice, orotund, heavy with menace and dark design, rolled like thunder above the boy. He dared not look up but stared down glumly at his bare, dirt-caked feet, and shuffled forward. He could hear the rain streeling the mullioned window and the snapping, muttering flames in the grate behind him. The dreaded command tensed his stomach muscles tight against the blow that was bound to follow at some point.

He made his way to the voice’s source as slowly as possible, over the rug of sun-faded hummingbirds and peacocks.

He knew the room well, had been dragged into its musty confines too often; knew the position of all its gloomy appointments: the somber, claw-footed sideboard with the silver service that chittered every time the door was shut; the lumpy, velour sofa with the balding armrests; the copper-potted fern on the windowsill.

But he knew, better than anything else, the bed in the far corner behind the velvet drapes. He had felt every dip and swell of its mattress, could count every ridge in the blue chenille quilt, knew the suffocating stench of the striped bolster that reeked of sweat and night hair, so often had his face been pushed into it.

“Closer.”

The voice had raised itself a notch higher, just a notch—and the boy knew, even then in his innocence, that this was all part of the adult’s cruel game. He was the cornered mouse for the cat to paw and play with for a while. He inched his feet onto the second peacock’s head. Still a whole bird and a half to go.

“I hear you’ve been wicked again, Eighty-Six. And after all that the good Sisters of this school have done for you.”

The boy began to cry. The peacock dissolved into a wash of blue and began swirling round and round as his weeping became more intense. He coughed out great salty sobs and hoped that this pathetic display might wring some pity, and perhaps a rare reprieve, from the owner of the voice. He cried on and on, trying desperately to communicate his pain, until he had no tears left, until his throat was hoarse. But still nothing happened; the voice remained silent. The room shook with his grief and there was no one listening but him. It was useless, he knew.

After a time he stopped, wiped his eyes with the over-stretched cuff of his jersey and resigned himself to his fate. He was guilty of the crime. But he’d been hungry and the turnip had simply been there, about to fall from the sack.

“A turnip, a whole turnip this time, you greedy pig!” The voice rose on the last two words and lashed about the child like a savage wave.

“Come over here,
now
.”

He went quickly to the final peacock, a mere foot now from his accuser, but remained staring down, the tears still tightening on his cheeks. The man’s breath smelled of sour milk and fish heads; he could feel the rotten gusts waft across his face. He thought that if he looked up he might faint.

“Anything to say for yourself, boy?”

He attempted to raise his head but it was painful. He’d discovered that keeping his head bowed was the safest way to protect himself from the stinging stares, and the slaps that an upturned face could bring. So far the orphanage, with its flagged floors, its gravel-strewn yards and grassy gardens, had afforded him some safety, but not so the aging carpet with its faded birds. He knew he was in deep trouble when he was staring down at it.

“I was hungry, sir,” he blurted out in his defense, at last lifting his tear-stained face, and meeting the blood-veined eyes of his tormentor. He knew the lines of the face well; it was a practical lesson in the bogeymen of his nightmares.

The nose was pointed, and porous like a wedge of stone; a crooked mouth of ruined teeth half-grinned like a rip in a grain sack. The pallid, lumpy flesh called to mind the skin on his breakfast gruel. It fell away from his cheekbones, to crouch in a series of slack folds at the man’s neck. The white hair was surprisingly lush, yellowed and oiled back, showing the tooth tracks of a recent combing; his large withered ears stuck out like the waxy handles of a toby jug.

“You don’t deny it then, Eighty-Six?”

“No, sir.”

The boy was trembling. Fear tore at his insides, flinging everything this way and that. The black cane leered at him from the far corner. He prayed that the ordeal would be quick.

But then there came a sudden rapping on the door: loud, ominous, urgent. The room thrummed in its aftermath. The boy caught his breath.

“Yes? What is it?” The man hurled the words at the door. The sideboard silver shivered. The door opened.

“Master Keaney, can you come? We have an incident in the yard. Thirty-Two again.”

Mother Vincent stood in the doorway, bristling in her black robes, her stern face like the queen of spades, framed in its starched casing. She looked from Keaney to the boy, then back to Keaney again. Something cold and cruel reared up and twisted between them, then slumped and fell low.

Keaney rose.

The woman had spoiled his game, had flipped over a card she was not supposed to see. The boy thanked God, and the master cursed Him.

“I’ll be there presently, Mother Superior. Meanwhile, can you see that Eighty-Six here scrubs the refectory floor after supper—for the next five evenings.”

He shot out a fist and punched Eighty-Six full in the face. The boy doubled up as blood poured from his nose. Keaney pushed him toward the nun.

“Get out, you useless beggar!”

Eighty-six could not believe he’d been saved from the savagery of the cane; he wanted to scrub a hundred floors for a hundred nights in thanksgiving.

A
week after his visit to the doctor, Jamie bought the latest issue of the
Mid-Ulster Vindicator
. Last week’s had already gone up in smoke as fire kindling, the “Lonely Hearts” column having yielded a succession of candidates that were either too young (twenty-five to thirty), too experienced (widowed or separated), too eager (willing to travel any distance), or too righteous (Christian, teetotal, non-smokers).

Jamie, for the first time since his uncle’s death, was becoming excited at the great new vista that was opening up for him. Life was bearable again. The prospect of meeting someone gave him a fresh focus; he could see a light shining on a far hill, urging him on.

He didn’t have much of an idea of the kind of woman he wished to meet. All his life he’d felt exiled from the game of courtship and marriage. He had never felt himself worthy of that union, which somehow seemed the natural preserve of all other men but him. Marriage was for men who were not afraid. Men who could walk life’s tightrope and not allow each wobble and tremor to hold them back from their goal.

But, perhaps now was the right time. Uncle Mick’s passing had left a gap that needed filling. Rose and Paddy thought so, and even Dr. Brewster.

But what kind of woman would want me? Jamie tried to unpick the snarls to the knotty question as he cycled home from town, bumping over the hills and dales of the road he knew so well. He sat slouched over the handlebars of Uncle Mick’s ancient bicycle, chewing a Bassets fruit bonbon, staring down at the road flying beneath the shrieking wheels.

Maybe she’d like a bit of cawntry-and-western music, he mused—the Clancy Brothers and Jim Reeves were his heroes—and enjoy and encourage his “accordjin” playing. He sometimes took it along to Slope’s of a Saturday night, to relieve Declan Colt & The Silver Bullets when they needed a rest and the toilet. Up there on Declan’s vacated stool, Jamie would squeeze out “The Fields of Athenry” or “The Boston Burglar”. And if there wasn’t a stranger on the premises—someone whose unfamiliarity might mark him out as a Protestant—he’d risk a bar or two of “Roddy McCorley” or “Sean South of Garryowen”, both Republican songs having the same melody anyway.

Hopefully she wouldn’t mind the farm and the noise of the animals, and smell, and so forth. But she wouldn’t have to help outside if she didn’t want to, Jamie reflected. Rose McFadden didn’t do much outside except the bit of gardening, cooking being her major interest. So, above all, this imagined woman would be a good cook. Someone who’d have his fry-up ready and on the table when he returned from doing his chores. And wouldn’t it be great if she would wash his shirts and underwear now and again, without always having to take them down to Rose and the embarrassment of it?

Jamie sped down the hill toward his home, smiling to himself. He felt content that he had more of an idea now of what he was looking for.

In the yard he dismounted from his creaky conveyance and wheeled it over the raddled ground, scattering the brown-speckled hens, rousing the dog from its doze by the barn door and causing the two Ayrshires in the near field to lurch toward the gate and gaze hopefully at the customary source of their sustenance.

A so-far rainless June had baked the ground into a crazy cross-hatching of bicycle and tractor tires. Here and there, an assortment of deceased machinery—the innards of a cultivator, the limbs of a hay shaker, the body of a grain spreader—lay bogged down in the earth, trapped for ever.

The yard lay to the left of the house, sheltered by a ragged ring of sheds and barns. Those timeworn structures sagged forlornly in their ancient foundations; they had been erected many decades earlier with the meager profits from the ten-acre farm and by the callused hands of Uncle Mick’s great-great-grandfather. Mick had wisely kept quiet about his colorful ancestor, but Jamie had heard the stories.

It was said that Turlough McCloone was a lunatic with a passion for grog and loose women. He had begotten a string of children through a vigorous, lust-crazed violence, scattering his seed and deserting his women, before finally settling down. The Duntybutt farm was tangible evidence that he might have finally gathered sense. But unfortunately he did not live to find out. One day an enemy in a silk hat unseated him from his dappled cob with a five-shot Paterson-Colt, a gun that had proved notoriously inaccurate, until that day.

By the time Uncle Mick had come along, the fiery blood of his dissolute ancestor had been cut and thinned, to such a degree that only a weak trickle of lunacy remained.

If there was madness in Mick, Jamie never saw it.

The bicycle was propped by the gable, in the shade away from the saddle-cracking sun. From the bag that hung at its rear, Jamie extracted his shopping: first the newspaper, followed by a pot of lemon jam, a currant loaf, a tin of Andrews Liver Salts, and a white grease-stained bag containing an apple turnover and a cream slice. He cradled the goods in his left arm and rebuckled the saddlebag into place, a precaution he’d been forced to employ since the previous March, when a couple of mice had adopted it as their home and started a family.

On rounding the front of the house, he stood for a time contemplating the scene before him. His eyes traveled out across the fields and homesteads that stretched away in the distance, to meet the Slievegerrin mountains. In the hazy sunlight they appeared vague, obscure, as if seen through breathed-on glass. Above them, a vast blue sky was building clouds in rumpled masses of dove-flocked grays and whites.

What did Jamie see when he observed this tranquil scene, with its clumps of whitewashed dwellings and scatterings of short-shadowed cattle? In truth, he saw very little of it. The scene had become so familiar that all its rich beauty had faded, had been bled out to frame a mere backdrop to Jamie’s colorless musings.

The time he stood there gazing out across the fields was time torn from the present and fed to the murky past that trailed like sludge behind him; the past that messed him up and slowed him down to despair and indecision. For with Mick’s death, the memories of that child who’d answered to a number and not a name had risen again. That lonely, frightened boy standing in the wind-torn darkness of the past had come back to haunt him both day and night.

It was why, now more than ever, he reached for the drink and the lung-rotting smokes, the sweet cake in the greasy bag, the accordion in its musky case; all those fleeting pleasures to anesthetize his pain. Such joys lit the darkness, burned away the memories for a time, so that he could see all the way to “the sunlit clearing,” to that hallowed place where the future hadn’t shaped itself yet—a future which he knew to be one hundred times better than the present.

All he wanted was to somehow get there, and taste that joy which everyone but him seemed to be experiencing. And at that point in his beleaguered life, with middle age upon him and his loved ones gone, he felt that sharing his thoughts and few possessions with a woman might be the answer. He looked down at the newspaper and his armful of shopping and, with a wan smile, turned and went into the house.

After wetting the tea, he spread out the newspaper on the table, plonked his mug beside it and ripped open the pastry bag. The torn bag would do duty as a plate.

The cream slice had collided with the pot of jam in transit and emerged from the bag looking like a bull had sat on one end of it: a soggy, half-flattened rectangle with a frill of cream bursting out over the apple turnover and mapping the paper with greasy blots. Jamie was not too bothered at the sight of the ruined slice. Sure wouldn’t it get crushed in his mouth anyway, and who was about to see the state of it, only himself?

He ate with his right arm curled round the bag. In the orphanage he had learned to guard his meager rations from the other inmates in this way, his forearm becoming at once a barrier and a weapon which helped him survive.

When he’d finished eating, he wiped the crumbs from the newspaper and started reading the entries slowly, using his index finger as a guide. He stopped under each word as if stitching a series of short rows along the page. He’d learned this reading technique in the schoolroom, and had never forgotten it. When, in the course of perusing the classifieds, he came across words such as “professional,” “intelligent,” or “adventurous,” some inner guiding force would snap a blind down, stall the roving finger and move it automatically to the ad below.

This laborious task—reading, considering and reading some more—took time. Jamie had finished the tea and buns, smoked two cigarettes, used the outside privy, and rejected fifteen women before he finally came upon what he believed he was looking for.

He read it a second time aloud just to be sure it was real, and not his imagination playing tricks.

It was just the thing. He fetched his blue ballpoint from the broken ear of the ceramic cat in the glass case, and drew a careful circle round the ad. Now came the difficult part: writing a letter of introduction to the lady in question.

He had to find notepaper and knew he’d seen a fairly decent pad in the house at some stage. But when that was and where it might be—now that was another thing. There was a suitcase of Aunt Alice’s in the upstairs bedroom, where Uncle Mick had locked her effects after her committal. And she, being a woman, might have had writing paper, and it might still be in the case, going to waste. Mick had cleared the house of his wife’s presence soon after her departure, knowing she would not be returning. He could not bear to be reminded of what had been. And the young Jamie had somehow understood that.

He climbed the stairs two at a time and pushed into the dusty bedroom. He could not remember the last time he’d been in there, but it was probably just after Mick’s death; he’d no reason or desire to visit it since. The place held too many recollections of his ailing uncle in the big bed. He could still see Mick’s stricken face sunk into the fat bolster, like a wizened pear in a gift box, and could hear the rasping voice, vainly battling with the throat cancer that would finally claim him.

Jamie stood in the doorway, subdued by the memories of that awful time, somehow afraid to tread the unwalked floor, breathe the unshared air. This was
Mick’s
room, and it seemed that even in death he was still here.

Everything was as it had been left: the stripped bed in the corner, the dark dresser with its cloudy mirror, a cracked bowl and pitcher on the small table by the window. Then, all at once, as he stood there, a shaft of cloud-freed sun threw a bandage of light across the floorboards, as if in warning, as if to thwart his trespass.

Jamie could see the shabby suitcase under the bed, its secrets secure behind the rusted hasps, and he knew with mounting apprehension that he could not cross the floor to open it. Out of respect for his uncle, he changed his mind. He’d buy a pad of writing paper of his own. Sure he’d probably be needing a fair few pages, because he felt certain that he’d make some mistakes, him not being used to the writing down of things and all.

He shut the door quietly and turned the key. He’d go out straightaway to Doris Crink at the post office and get some.

“The post’s rather late,” Lydia murmured to herself and checked her watch against Cousin Ethel’s clock on the far wall. “Quarter past one…Probably no delivery now at this time.”

Elizabeth Devine, sitting at the other end of the table, in a Naples yellow sweater dress, left off eating her apple crumble and custard, and looked up suspiciously at her daughter.

“Why are you so interested in the postman all of a sudden? He’s a married man too, you know…and I should hope you wouldn’t even be
considering
anyone from the common classes—not even in your dreams.”

She resumed eating. Her purple-pansy rinse had turned out a deeper shade than expected. She’d blamed Susan for neglecting her. But the fact of the matter was that Susan could not get Elizabeth to come out from under the dryer until she’d finished reading an article in
Cosmopolitan
entitled, “Does He Only Want You for Your Breasts? 10 Ways to Tell.”

“Mother, please…” Lydia continued to eat her pudding, sitting straight-backed in the bentwood chair, chewing each mouthful slowly and thoroughly, her silver spoon dipping in and out of the bowl at regular intervals.

“You haven’t told me much about your Women’s Institute outing. Ballymena can’t have been that uninteresting.” Lydia was steering the subject away from the post. Her mother could be a proper old Miss Marple when she applied herself—a tendency which, to Lydia’s dismay, seemed to grow stronger with age.

“What’s any town like these days: only full of shops and vulgar pubs? And Beatrice couldn’t walk too far with her corns, so we had to sit down most of the time in tea rooms. And you know most of these places don’t know how to make a proper cup of tea. They don’t warm the pot first. Beattie and me, we could always tell right away after the first sip.”

“Didn’t you complain?”

“We did the first time, and the manager came out. Oh, you know the type: not long out of short trousers…a young galoot in a ready-made suit and rubber slip-ons. And he looked at Beattie and me as if we were crazy and said: ‘Ladies, where d’you think we are, Victorian England? This is a cafeteria and d’you see that big five-gallon steel vat over there that’s boilin’ and bubblin’ away? That’s the twentieth-century version of the teapot, and that big teapot serves everyone who comes in here, and I’ve never
hey
any complaints till now.’ (You know how they have trouble with their vowel sounds in County Antrim). And it was terrible because his voice was rising and his face was getting red and people started looking. Beattie and me were mortified.”