Authors: C. K. Kelly Martin
The blond woman
clunks her heavy-as-a-slab-of-concrete purse down on the counter and rummages
for change. I thank her and point innocently to the uneaten half of the
chocolate bar now littering the floor. “Do you think he wants to finish the
other half?”
I wish Kevin
were working today so he could hear that line. I think he’d appreciate it.
The woman stabs
at me with her eyes. Her friend has begun to herd the kids towards the door. “I
can just get it later then,” I add.
But Will and Kate would be disappointed
to see it wasted.
I smile as wide
as the Cheshire cat once they’ve all gone. I can’t remember the last time I
smiled that hard.
Because of the
mess, I’m late getting out of the store. First I take in the items from the
outdoor display, collapsing the folding table and storing it in the back room.
Then I count the day’s takings, lock the money in the safe and survey the rest of
the shop. Many of the chocolate bars and candies on the lower shelves have been
mixed up. In the corner there are several bars on the floor, one of which has
been smushed under someone’s foot. I restore order to the shelves, mop the
entire floor and then leave a note for Marta about the chocolate bar casualty.
The
Handmaid’s Tale
tucked snugly under my arm, I activate the alarm, switch
off the lights and lock the door behind me. The sun shines golden into my eyes,
temporarily blinding me as I step out on the sidewalk and narrowly avoid
colliding with Liam.
“You’re closed,”
he observes.
I lift my hand
to shade my eyes. “We shut at five on Sundays. Were you coming in?”
“I was going to,
but no worries.” He hooks his thumbs into his front pockets. “I made the
mistake of bringing the Bourbons with me to the theater and that lot polished
them off in no time. What did you think of them, by the way?”
“I’m keeping
them aside as an after the root canal treat, like you said.”
“Oh right,” he
says, his eyes twinkling in the sun. “So that hasn’t happened yet?”
“This coming
Wednesday.” I feel my book slipping and adjust it under my arm. “How’s the play
going?”
“Good, good,” he
says thoughtfully. “I hadn’t done any theater in awhile. It’s cool to have that
direct line to the audience. You can feel their reaction in the moment. It’s
really different from what I’m used to.”
I nod, although
I don’t really know what that’s like. I haven’t seen much theater—a couple of
musicals and three Shakespeare productions (all of them comedies)—and I don’t
remember feeling particularly emotionally invested.
“So the Toronto
audiences aren’t as disappointing as the tea,” I surmise with a smile.
Liam grins back
and I realize, with a heavy thump of my heart, that I like to see him smiling
at me. It warms me up in a way that nothing else has lately. Guilt flips my
smile into a frown. I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I should go home, work on
Johnny
Yang
and keep future interactions with Liam short.
“The tea’s
really not that bad either,” he admits. The longer I stare at him the better
Liam looks—it’s as though I’m only really registering the contours of his face
and his rugged six-foot-plus frame for the first time. His hoodie’s hanging
open and he’s filling up a blue checked shirt and black jeans in an
effortlessly devastating way which makes my cheeks begin to blush crimson, and
I know we’ve both gone too long without saying anything when he stares past me,
down Lakeshore Road.
“Well, have a
good night,” I tell him, moving eagerly away.
“Wait, Leah.”
Liam steps away from O’Keefe’s along with me, his eyes seeking out mine. “If
you don’t have any plans, do you want to get something to eat?”
Some nachos or
something? It didn’t sound like a good idea the night of the concert and it’s
probably a worse one now.
Liam’s
expression reflects my indecision and discomfort. “I hope you didn’t think I
meant anything by that,” he adds. “I understand your situation. It’s just that
I haven’t eaten yet and since you just finished work…”
I’m being
ridiculous. Inserting drama where there doesn’t have to be any. I’ve entirely
forgotten how to deal with people in normal social situations. There’s such a
thing as casual dinners, casual friends, even when they look like Liam. I
didn’t stop noticing attractive guys in the street or around school when
Bastien and I moved in together, and feeling that visual pull to someone
shouldn’t throw me now.
“No, you’re
right, I haven’t eaten either.” I smile again to make up for my reticence, and
instruct myself to relax. This isn’t like the nachos would’ve been the other
night; Liam and I have eaten together before and the experience was closer to a
Roman Catholic confession (minus the prayers) than anything resembling
flirtation.
Liam nods
agreeably. “There’s a decent pub a couple of blocks from here. Maybe you’ve
been there? The Rose and Crown.”
I haven’t been
there but I’ve passed by it. Liam and I walk to the pub, which is full of
wooden paneling, old British WWII propaganda posters and classic prints from
The London Underground. It’s more of a restaurant than pub really, with the
majority of the space being taken up by the dining area, but there are two men,
one who looks like an Alfred Hitchcock doppelganger, sitting at the bar.
“We can sit
wherever you like,” Liam says, throwing out his arms to indicate our choices.
“They don’t do formal seating.” I point to a corner table for two and slide
into the booth end while Liam lowers himself into the chair. Our wooden table
reminds me of Deirdre and Marta’s living room furniture; it seems like a relic
from a time gone by. I set
The Handmaid’s Tale
down on top of the
heavily shellacked wood and Liam taps the cover. “You must read a lot. I always
seem to see you with a book.”
“It’s actually
the same book you keep seeing me with.” I grab the edge of the paperback and
flip through the pages with a flick of my thumb like I’m shuffling a deck of
cards. “Lately I’m reading at a snail’s pace.”
Our waitress
arrives with the menus and after perusing them Liam orders a steak and mushroom
pie and a pint of Smithwick’s,
and
I ask for chicken fajitas and water. I’ve started to eat a bit more recently,
but my appetite still isn’t what it was and I know I probably won’t be able to
finish—pubs are usually generous with their servings. With its lack of natural
light, The Rose and Crown seems womblike, and I feel my shoulders relax against
the booth upholstery despite my continuing unease at being here with Liam.
“So how long is
the play running?” I ask. There are many topics we can’t approach and few that
we can. This is one of them.
“Until
mid-November,” Liam says. “It really just started last week so we’re still
early in the run.”
“And what’s it
about?”
Liam smoothes
his shirt down and folds his arms loosely over his stomach. “An Irish guy,
about my age, who’s on the verge of moving to Philadelphia and has a lot of
conflicted feelings about it, especially about leaving his father behind. One
of the unusual things about it is the part’s played by two actors, one playing
the private side of Gar—that’s the character’s name—who lets the audience in on
all his secret feelings, and the other playing the public, the side Gar shows
to the world.”
I stretch my
legs out under the table, careful not to cast them out so wide that I hit
Liam’s. “So which one are you—the private or public side?”
“The public
one,” he replies. “I’d let it be known that I wanted to get away from Ireland,
but keep busy at the same time, and this was the first decent thing that came
up. The director’s someone I did theater with five years ago, when he was
spending time in Dublin, and the actor that was originally meant to be play
public Gar got into a horrible skiing accident down in New Zealand—broke both
his legs just before rehearsals were set to start; essentially snapped the
lower legs in half. Last I heard is still in a wheelchair, waiting for another
surgery.”
I wince. “That
makes my root canal sound easy.”
“The accident
details really did sound woeful,” Liam declares with a nod and pained
expression. “Apparently they had to insert rods into his legs with screws at
the top and bottom and he won’t be on his feet again for months yet.” He shrugs
slightly. “When I heard that it felt like a bit of a personal lesson, you know,
to say that things could be worse.”
“But it sounds
like he’ll be okay in the end,” I point out, and Liam nods again. I don’t
really hear the lesson he cited in the story. It’s far from a worst case
scenario. That man will heal eventually. He’ll walk again. This is just a
little blip in his life, a future story to tell about the year he broke both
his legs skiing in New Zealand.
“I had a
greenstick fracture when I was five,” I add. “My arm. I fell off a jungle gym
and my left arm got tangled in the bars.”
Liam’s puzzled.
“What’s a
greenstick
fracture?”
I try to
remember how the doctor explained it all those years ago. “The bone only cracks
on one side, not all the way through. It has something to do with the bones
being soft and young and bending instead of breaking.”
“Bending instead
of breaking,” he repeats. “That’s probably always a better option if you can
take it, isn’t it?”
“Mmm,” I hum.
“No one usually asks which you’d prefer.” The waitress sets down Liam’s beer
and my water. I glance up to thank her and then turn my attention back to Liam.
“So what about you?” I remember what he said about breaking someone else’s
bones, the guy who slept with his fiancée. “Did you break any bones as a kid?”
“No breaks. I
had a concussion once when I got knocked down on the football pitch. It was the
weirdest thing. For a few minutes I had no idea where I was or what had
happened; sort of like a temporary amnesia.”
We’re still
talking about our childhoods—not just injuries but childhood quirks, our
respective families’ oddities and our early experiences at school, things I
haven’t thought of in a long time—when the food is delivered to the table. Liam
was obsessed with magic, dogs and the concept of the devil as a child. Magic,
he explains, because he wanted to be able to perform it, dogs because his
family could never have one due to his older sister’s allergies, and the devil
because he had it confused with the monster under the bed and believed it was
always lurking, waiting for him to fall asleep so it could pull him under.
“I don’t know
how you ever fell asleep thinking that,” I tell him. “That’s terrifying.”
Liam pauses with
his fork about to pierce his pie. “I know. And bizarre. I must have seen a
horror movie or heard a story…Anyway, I’d leave the light on so the devil
wouldn’t dare to crawl out from under the bed, but I remember that I’d wake up
in the pitch black in the middle of the night—my parents must have crept in to
switch the light off—and I’d be afraid to stick my hand out of the covers again
in case the devil reached for it.”
My fear was
witches rather than the devil, witches with long curving fingernails that
they’d run down my back in my sleep. I tell Liam about those nightmares and
how, for a couple of years, I desperately wanted to be a figure skater,
although I wasn’t as light on my feet as most of the other little girls in my
class. Then there was the period of about ten days, when I was six or seven
years old, that I would only eat peanut butter and bananas for dinner because
I’d temporarily lost the taste for anything else and couldn’t explain why.
“That wouldn’t
have been allowed in my house,” Liam muses. “My dad would’ve gone mad. He has a
shout that would wake the dead. You should’ve heard him when he found out I was
dropping out of Trinity Collage to give acting a proper go.”
“He didn’t like
the idea?”
Liam smirks.
“Not a bit, and not any more now than he did back then.”
I shake my head
in disbelief. “But you have a career built up.”
“That doesn’t
seem to matter.” Liam reaches for his beer, downs a mouthful and motions to the
passing waitress that he wants a refill. “He doesn’t think much of the show I’m
on. I don’t think he’s ever watched more than a few minutes.”
“Some people are
only happy when you do exactly what they want,” I offer. My mind’s back on the
peanut butter and bananas and how my mother would try to tempt me with other
kid friendly foods like hotdogs and macaroni and cheese, but neither of my
parents punished me or yelled because of my stubbornness.
Liam tells me
about the show, called
Six West
, which he’s only technically on a break
from. It’s like a soap opera, but not the glamorous kind we watch here; closer
to
Coronation Street
or
EastEnders
. He’s been on it for three and
a half years and his character, Aidan, is gay and currently in a relationship with
a slightly younger man who isn’t out of the closet. He says that they wrote his
character off temporarily, when Liam’s various entanglements and conflicts with
his coworkers escalated, sending Aidan to Australia to spend time with an
ex-lover who is dying of cancer.
“So you’re going
back?” I ask. “To Ireland and the show?”
Liam’s eyes
harden. He pulls at his shirt collar, running his fingers along the inside
edge. “Eventually. It’s not something I really want to think about it.”
We’re getting
too close to the territory he didn’t want to cover and I nod and concentrate on
my fajitas. The pub’s gotten warm and crowded. In the center of the room two
kids are careening around a table in fits of giggles, playing
catch-me-if-you-can while their grandparents and parents (if that’s who they
are) stubbornly ignore the disruption. My irritation makes me feel ancient the
way I did at the concert the other night, and I begin to tell Liam about the
toddlers in the shop earlier and how I’ve lost all patience.