Deceptions (16 page)

“Can’t you sleep either?” He removes the earphones as she passes by him. The faint strains of a violin, the strummed rhythm of a cello are audible for an instant before he switches off the stereo.

“It’s so hot.” She fans her face, creating a breeze, and sits down beside him. Blood from a cut has congealed above his right eyebrow. “Does it hurt?” Her touch is light as she runs her finger over the wound.

“Not much.” He grins. “You should see the bastard who did it to me.”

“I can’t,” she replies. “He’s in intensive care.”

They laugh quietly. She tries to imagine him married like her parents, semi-detached in suburbia, wheeling a buggy past neatly mowed lawns, his trouser chains clanking, the skeleton on the back of his leather jacket terrifying children and setting the dogs barking.

“Thanks for rescuing me, Razor.” She has found it almost impossible to address him by that name but now it slips easily from her.

“All part of the service.” He pulls a curl of her hair and lets it run loose between his fingers. His grey hooded eyes remind her of a hawk.

“Do you think I’m scum, like her parents do?” The abruptness of the question, or even that he should ask it, astonishes her.

“Of course not. I’m sure her parents don’t –”

“I know what they think.” He allows his hand to fall heavily to his side. “She’s going to dump me. There’s some other fucker waiting in the wings to step into my boots.”

“Who?”

“Could be anyone. I’ve seen the way they look at her, the guys in the band, that fucker Adrian. If I thought she was cheating –”

“Did she say that?”

“She doesn’t have to. I know her mind, her thoughts. I feel them here.” He taps his head, thudding his fingers against the side of his skull. He talks so low she has to strain to hear him. “I’d walk through fire for the bitch and she knows it.”

“Her name is Virginia,” she snaps back at him. “It’s not a difficult name to pronounce if you try.”

“She likes it. Vampire
bitch
.” He watches her reaction and she sees Virginia, blood on her lips, draining him. It is such a vivid, disgusting image that she draws away from him with a muttered exclamation.

“Why is she doing this to me?” His mouth is tight, even his nose seems thinner, sharper, an urchin’s face, unable to disguise his hurt.

“She’s afraid of you, Razor. She doesn’t think she can talk to you – tell you things that are important.”

“What things?”

“Things like … oh, how should I know? If you stopped pretending to be on stage all the time it might help.”

“Don’t change the subject. She tells you everything. What’s going on?”

“Do you love her?”

“What kind of shit question is that?”

“Do you?”

“She’s my life. Anything else you want to know?”

“Why do you think that she and Adrian –?” Unable to complete the question she lets it hang between them.

“It could be him. It could be anyone. What difference does it make? She’s breaking my heart and he’ll break yours.”

On the wall a spider scuttles slant-ways towards a crack. It slips and hangs suspended on invisible silken threads. Razor’s arm slides around her, awkward and comforting. They sit silently together. It is the first time they have touched. She cannot remember even shaking his hand when they were introduced.

“I’ll love her until the day I die.” He makes this admission without embarrassment.

She rests her head against him, whispers into his hair. “She’s pregnant, Razor … and she’s scared to tell you.”

After he leaves her and his bedroom door has closed, Lorraine sits alone on the sofa. She plays with the edges of a cushion, twirling tassels around her thumb, the skeins biting deep into her skin. A coral dawn steals over the rooftops and she listens for sounds beyond the bedroom wall where Razor and Virginia lie. There is only silence, a silence that remains unbroken throughout the house – except for the hoarse rasp of her breathing.

The following morning Razor has the exhausted look of someone who has run a long race and crashed through the pain barrier.

“We’re going to have a baby.” Virginia’s laughter tinkles like delicate glass smashed against stone.

Lorraine’s summer in London is over. The train sways through tunnels, hurtles towards Heathrow. Beside her, not speaking, keeping an eye on her luggage, Adrian sits with his feet on the seat in front. A word, a nod, a whisper, a hint and she will go anywhere with him, the two of them together, forever. He laughs defiantly when an elderly lady with rose-powdered cheeks, tells him to remove his feet. She waits to see if he will obey her and, when he ignores her order, she threatens to call the guard. Her threat is not carried out. He keeps his feet in the same position until the tube shudders to a halt at the terminus. He carries Lorraine’s luggage to the check-in desk. He hugs her, promises to be in touch, a vague promise she knows he will not keep. Last night he announced his intention of moving to California to work in advertising.

It has been a year of conflict and famine. Argentina invaded the Falklands. The Brits took it back. Beirut is in rubble, besieged by Israel – while Iran and Iraq are slugging it out along the Gulf. The IRA continue to etch their message of freedom into the charred remains of bomb victims while Charles and Diana hold a temporary cease-fire to celebrate the birth of their first born. The world is spinning on its usual axis of war and famine and terror but for Lorraine Cheevers, as her flight is announced, 1982 will always be remembered as the year her heart was broken.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-O
NE

Ferryman

(an extract from Michael Carmody’s memoir)

Regards from Aunt Anna
, my first screenplay, was written shortly after Jean and Terence married. Forget about pure streams of consciousness.
Regards from Aunt Anna
– based on the adventures of my roaming aunt and developed into a weekly half-hour sitcom which brought me a moderate success and my first realistic pay cheque as a screen writer – was written on a pure stream of fury. But there was money in the bank, which enabled me to make regular maintenance payments into a trust account for Killian.

I struggled for recognition as a television dramatist. Some screenplays are worth remembering, others best forgotten. I moved into a larger flat where we spent rainy Saturday afternoons watching old movies, playing Snap and Snakes and Ladders, and eating his favourite meal of sausages and chips, food that was never allowed on the Devine-O’Malley menu. Meg Golden lived in the flat above mine and always dropped in over the weekend with her collection of classical records. Killian was never too young to appreciate
real
music, she insisted. Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, U2, Bruce Springsteen were dismissed with a snap of her fingers, my taste consigned to the scrap heap of popular culture. Killian adored her bossy ways and listened with equal absorption to Chopin and Puccini as to Dylan or Morrison. One morning, finding her in my bed, he crawled between us, tickled her under her chin until she awoke and read him
The Cat in the Hat.
It was his favourite book, tattered, stuck together with tape on tape.

They had hats in common. Meg wore them like a badge of identity and could instantly change her image with the tilt of a brim. She was Killian’s golden girl.

“Why can’t she be my Saturday mammy,” he demanded time and time again. “Why don’t you love her best of all?”

The question was valid but unanswerable. I imagined our lives together, her hats tilted rakishly, mysteriously, sensuously, and the temptation to sink into the future she envisaged was difficult to resist. But I did resist and she eventually moved on to marry a musician who shared her fascination with Chopin. We remained friends – a painful transition, but one we worked hard to achieve. I was godfather to Aoife, their first child. Meg brought her to visit us one Saturday afternoon when she was three years old. Killian read her
The Cat in the Hat
. What goes around comes around.

After Meg, there were other women. They came and went, bestowing on Killian a casual affection. I met Roz O’Hara around that time. She was an assistant script editor who worked on one of my plays. We had a brief emotional relationship which we ended with mutual agreement after a month and settled down to a working relationship which lasts to the present day. As my script editor she cajoles and bullies the best from me.
Nowhere Lodge
is our most successful series. But I was never able to reach a compromise based on friendship or business with Jean Devine-O’Malley.

Killian was delighted when his mother gave birth to Laura. He was an inquisitive child, always asking questions. If I made a baby with Meg or Jackie or Roz or
anyone
– would it be his
real
sister or brother? Would the baby belong to Laura as well? Could he live with my new baby some of the time in Laurel Heights – or would the baby always have to live in my flat? He must have asked Jean the same artless questions. She rang after one of his Saturday visits and accused me of corrupting his innocence. He must not be encouraged to form attachments to the women he found in my bed. Their presence in his life would be fleeting. She had first-hand experience of my definition of “commitment”. If I continued to confuse my sex life with his welfare she would stop his visits.

The war of nerves we fought was carried out far from the front line, or so we liked to believe. But when Killian began to cry one Saturday afternoon and pressed his fingers nervously into his mouth, his face suddenly pinched and nervous, I realised we’d placed him in the centre of the fray. He was six years old and Jean had ordered him to call me “Michael”. The word sounded foreign on his tongue, especially when he uttered it in front of me. He looked thinner that day, an unhealthy pallor, the skin around his eyes shadowed, puffy.

I tried to draw him out but he sobbed, “Mammy says you’re not my proper daddy and I must never tell bold lies to Lorcan.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned Lorcan, his new school friend, who lived in the house opposite him.

“A castle,” said Killian. “It’s a really huge castle with flags.”

Jean was adamant when I rang and accused her of using Killian as a weapon between us.

“You can talk.” Her voice rose. “You keep asking him questions that have nothing to do with you. My life and how I live it is none of your business. Killian needs a strong sense of his own identity, not to be torn between two fathers. Terence is bringing him up as his son. He’s willing to send him to a private school and pay for his education. He deserves the respect of a proper title.”

“But
I
am his father. Nothing will change that fact. I’ll drag you through every court in the land to prove my point.” I parroted the same familiar clichés and she replied in kind, reminding me that I was a struggling writer with no visible means of educating
her
son.

The school Killian attended was select and private. It had an avenue of beech and a statue of the Sacred Heart, arms outstretched, above the entrance. The school principal was well known for her views on the sanctity of family life, which she enshrined in the three R’s – Reverence, Respect, Rectitude. The fact that Sr Maria was never likely to endure the slings and arrows of the marital state made no difference to her belief that the family who dined together should whine together. Jean had been appointed treasurer of the school fund-raising committee, which was presided over by Andrea Sheraton. When it came to status and wealth, the Sheratons were in the premier league and Jean Devine-O’Malley, successful businesswoman, mother and wife of a managing director with a nose for fine wines, had an image to maintain. Reminders of a heedless weekend on the slopes of Slane did not feature on her social agenda.

The following Monday morning I rang Sr Maria. She spoke with crisp authority but her voice grew warm, almost human, when I introduced myself as Killian’s father. She thanked me for the wine I’d contributed for the school’s fund-raising auction. For a short while we discussed the distinguishing qualities of wines from the old and new worlds. When we had exhausted such pleasantries I told her my son had a dental appointment. I would collect him from her office at twelve that afternoon.

I timed my watch for Jean’s phone call. Twenty minutes after midday she rang, demanding to know what game I was playing. She’d been in the middle of a business meeting when Sr Maria rang her office, wanting to know why Killian hadn’t been collected by his father. I’ve no idea what Jean said in reply – but adding two and two and getting four must have been easy for a graduate of business studies. I imagined her sitting tall and straight, those chestnut lights in her hair, tapping her finger furiously against her desk as she struggled to bring me into line.

“This is blackmail,” she said. “You’ll be dealing with my solicitor if you dare contact Killian’s school again.”

Did she intend signing a barring order to prevent me attending the next fund-raising event, I asked. As Killian’s father, it was time I met his principal and the parents of his friends. When I reminded her that my story was already in the public domain, albeit anonymously, I felt the satisfaction of a worm turning and striking back. This time I’d have no hesitation in going public. My friend, the journalist, was not one to avoid tabloid ink on his fingers. His editor could be guaranteed to provide an appropriate headline and a photographer outside the school gates where I would be waiting, hoping to catch a glimpse of
my
son. She fought back valiantly but I’d touched her Achilles heel. By the end of our conversation she’d bought my silence in exchange for a full weekend with Killian once a month and a week’s holiday during the summer.