Life Drawing for Beginners (18 page)

All her life Audrey loved color. She adored bright, primary shades and filled her wardrobe with patterns and swirls and bold designs that she knew many a similarly built woman would have balked at. She wore scarves and ruffles and layers, and she chose fabrics that tended to float around her as she walked. She was conscious of sniggers from the meaner girls in her classes—​and the disparaging looks of some of her slimmer female colleagues—but she did her best to ignore them.

She felt she was fairly popular with her students in general, and she was on cordial terms with the entire staff. She made an effort to be pleasant and good-humored with everyone, as her mother had always urged her to be.

“Audrey, you’re like a ray of sunshine,” one of her colleagues declared once. “Never in a bad mood, always smiling.”

But none of the men asked her out. Nobody even suggested going for a coffee after school, or lunch on the weekend. She was a regular attendee of staff outings, but there was never a hint of romantic interest from anyone. One by one she signed their engagement cards and contributed to their wedding presents, and as the years went by she struggled to keep her hopes intact.

And now she was thirty-seven, and twenty more Valentine’s Days had come and gone without a visit from the postman. Her thirty-eighth birthday was only a few weeks away, and she was at home alone on another weekend night. And it was becoming harder and harder to believe that there was still someone out there who was destined to fall in love with her.

She put another briquette on the fire—she must be the only person in Carrickbawn with a fire lit on this balmy evening, but she hated sitting in front of an empty fireplace. Back in the kitchen she made tea and took a packet of Ritz crackers from the press. She topped ten of them with a square of cheddar cheese, a wedge of apple, and a blob of whole-grain mustard with honey.

She brought her supper back into the sitting room and switched on the television, selecting a documentary on blue whales in favor of a repeat of
Love, Actually
, normally one of her favorite films. The last thing she wanted to watch this evening was several people falling blissfully in love.

As she settled back on the couch Dolly opened her eyes, grunted contentedly, and closed them again. Audrey lay her supper aside quietly and reached for the sketch pad and charcoal stick that sat on the little end table. She opened a page and began to draw the curve of Dolly’s head, the round black nose, the tiny pink pads beneath the paws, the short hind legs that quivered abruptly every so often.

Her charcoal flew across the paper as her subject began to appear. When the drawing was finished she regarded it critically. She flipped through the pad and looked at her other efforts—​Pauline standing by her patio table, cup in hand; a view of Kevin from Audrey’s bedroom window as he stood, lost in thought, in his garden; a couple of women deep in conversation outside a house across the road; some children playing by the lake a few weeks ago; the school caretaker, sitting in the sun outside the staff room window one lunchtime, enjoying an illicit cigarette while the principal was away.

Audrey was an observer, grabbing moments from other people’s lives and capturing them in her sketch pad. Maybe that was as good as she was going to get; maybe there was nobody waiting to meet her after all.

Oh, stop it
, she told herself impatiently.
You could be so much worse off. You could be homeless, or bereaved, or the victim of a crime, or dying of starvation in some third-world country
.

But she wasn’t any of those things, she was just lonely. Which of course was less of a hardship than not having a roof over your head, or not knowing where your next meal was coming from, but which was still quite enough to leave you feeling fairly desolate every now and again.

She laid aside her pad and went back to her supper.

T
hey ate their porridge as silently as ever. After making the lunchtime sandwiches Michael stood by the window and considered the sudden change in the weather that had caused the heavens to open. The garden was saturated—it must have been raining for most of the night. What was he to do? He could hardly throw them out in this rain, but he was equally determined not to leave them in the house all day on their own.

He turned and regarded the boy, his porridge half eaten, a dribble of milk at the corner of his mouth. He wondered what on earth he’d do with him in the pet shop. A small child would be bored to death. Still, it looked like he had little choice.

“He can come to the shop with me until it clears up,” he said to the girl. “You can call and collect him.” Let her sort herself out, she was old enough.

Before she could respond, Barry pulled at her sleeve and she leaned and put her ear to his mouth. He whispered something and she whispered back, and he shook his head vehemently. She whispered again, and again he shook his head.

Michael waited, his arms folded. Of course the boy didn’t want to spend the day with a grumpy old man: What child in his right mind would? He waited to see if she managed to persuade him.

She lifted her head eventually. “Can he bring his book with him?”

“Yes.” The more distractions he had, the better.

“An’ can I call in at lunchtime an’ see him?” she asked. “If it’s still rainin’, I mean.”

“You can.” Hopefully the rain would have stopped long before lunchtime. “We leave in ten minutes,” he told her, assuming she’d want to go as far as the shop with them. Assuming that the boy would insist on it.

Upstairs he pulled a suitcase from the top of his wardrobe and rummaged through the children’s books that were piled in there. He hadn’t looked at them in years, not since his children had stopped demanding bedtime stories. He pulled out half a dozen and packed them in the small rucksack that usually held just his lunch. He brushed his teeth and went downstairs.

They were sitting where he’d left them, the boy’s face turned into his mother’s chest. Michael added the three wrapped sandwiches to his rucksack. In the hall he took a black umbrella from the hall stand and handed it to the girl. She accepted it wordlessly.

“Don’t lose it,” he warned, taking his golf umbrella from its hook. The three of them walked out and Michael unfurled the big blue-and-green umbrella over them. A gift, his bank had called it, rather than something that Michael had paid for several times over in bank charges.

As they turned onto the path outside, one of Michael’s neighbors emerged from her house two doors up. Michael nodded as she passed them, noting the curious glance she threw at his companions. Let her think what she liked. They made their way along the wet streets and he wondered, with a mixture of apprehension and irritation, how the morning would go.

Dear Mama and Papa
, Zarek wrote. He stopped and stuck the end of his pen into his mouth. Writing his weekly letter home—​phone calls were for special occasions—was a task that he approached with mixed emotions.

The weather here has been unusually fine until today
, he wrote.
Now it is raining heavily, and the sky is full of cloud
.

He had the apartment to himself on weekday mornings, with Pilar and Anton both gone to work. The café didn’t open until eleven, and some days Zarek’s shift didn’t begin until well after that. He relished the peace of the empty apartment.

The café was busy last week. The good weather brought many people into town. This week will be quieter, I think.

As he wrote, he imagined his mother coming out to the hall in her dressing gown, sliding open his envelope and pulling out the sheets and unfolding them. He saw her tucking the bank draft into her pocket as she called to Zarek’s father that there was a letter from Ireland.

I have bought my plane ticket for Christmas. I will see you all, God willing, on December the twenty-third, and I will stay for five days.

He missed Poland deeply. He missed the different smells and tastes and sights, the different quality of the air. He missed his family and friends—and of course he missed being surrounded by his own language, where he could speak without struggling to be understood.

I was glad to hear about the new bookshelves. I look forward to seeing them when I am home.

That was what his
€
150 had bought. He was happy it was something that everyone would benefit from, but sorry that they hadn’t chosen something more frivolous than a bookcase, like a gas barbecue that would keep his father happily occupied, or one of those garden seats on a swing that his parents could enjoy on fine evenings.

Pilar and Anton are both well. Pilar found a
€
5 note on the street a few days ago and she bought a coffee cake, which we all shared. It was good, but of course not as good as your poppy seed cake, Mama.

The previous evening Anton had cooked a fish dish that was halfway between a soup and a stew, which he said was a specialty of Brittany. He was the first Frenchman Zarek had ever met, and in addition to producing delicious meals he played guitar and sang mournful French songs, and the words sounded like they’d been soaked in honey.

I was glad to get the photo of Beata’s new hairstyle. The shorter length suits her, I think.

Zarek finished the letter and added the bank draft. He made no mention of the art classes. It was the smaller by far of the two secrets he kept from his parents, and it caused him a lot less torment than the greater one.

As they approached the pet shop Carmel recalled their last visit there. Ethan’s father threatening to call the police, reducing her to tears as she and Barry had left. She’d called him a bastard—​did he remember? She glanced at him but he appeared to have nothing more on his mind than getting in from the rain.

He took a bunch of keys from the front pocket of his rucksack and turned to her. “We’re going in the back way,” he said. “We’ll see you later.”

Telling her to get lost. She crouched and gave Barry a quick hug. Immediately his bottom lip began to quiver.

“I’ll be back soon, promise,” she whispered. “I’ll bring you a surprise, like I said. Be a good boy, okay? An’ don’t forget to say if you have to make a wee, don’t wet your new pants, okay?”

She turned and left them before Barry had a chance to protest. How would they be, the two of them together without her? As she made her way to the main road she struggled to open the umbrella Ethan’s father had given her, her eyes swimming with sudden tears. She blinked them away and stood at the edge of the path and waited for a break in the traffic. This was the first time she and Barry would be parted for longer than a few minutes since he’d been born.

She crossed the street, the rain still pelting down. Already her shoes were soaked, and the hem of her skirt was sticking unpleasantly to her legs. She longed for a hot bath, and tried to imagine lying in the scented water, her hair spread out like a halo around her head.

Maybe Ethan’s father would let her have a bath this evening, after Barry had gone to bed. Maybe she’d swipe a bottle of bath stuff in the euro shop, just in case. And she could let her hair get as wet as it wanted, and dry it with the hair dryer afterwards.

A woman came towards her in a motorized wheelchair. Carmel stepped off the path to avoid her, almost colliding with a cyclist who swore loudly before swerving around her and cycling on.

She pulled her jacket more tightly closed and plodded on, tears running freely down her face, not caring who saw. Knowing none of them would give a damn.

From behind the vertical blinds of the gym’s floor-to-ceiling windows Irene watched the mechanic locking his car and jogging through the rain towards the front door, holding a sports bag over his head. While she waited for him to make his way to her she drank water and gathered her hair into a pink elastic loop.

The gym was almost empty, the afternoon members mostly gone home, the evening crowd not yet arrived. A man jogged steadily on one of the treadmills and two women worked their way around the circuit of resistance machines. A bank of televisions high on one wall displayed frighteningly thin models sauntering along a catwalk as music pumped from speakers on the ceiling.

The door opened and he appeared. He wore navy tracksuit bottoms and a blue T-shirt, and sneakers that had definitely seen better days. Irene walked across to him, her hand out.

“Hello there. You made it.” She pretended to think. “It’s…Ger, isn’t it?”

He shook her hand, his grip firm. “That’s right.” No sign of discomfiture. “Go easy on me.”

She smiled. “Not a chance.”

She’d forgotten how dark his eyes were, how solidly built he was. The T-shirt strained across his chest. He was slightly shorter than Martin, but just as broad. “Let’s see what you’re made of,” she said, leading him towards the bicycles.

He was strong, but not terribly fit. As Irene guided him through the workings of the various machines a sweat broke out on his forehead, and the fabric of his T-shirt began to darken, but he didn’t protest. He was pushing himself, trying to impress her with his strength and stamina, but most of her male clients did that.

Towards the end of the session the last of the other gym users left the room, and they were alone. “You’ll be rushing home after this,” Irene said as he replaced the weights he’d been using for the bench presses.

“I have a late job on,” he said, his back to her.

Expected home for his dinner, the wife slaving over a hot stove for him. Irene led him to the final station and demonstrated the correct rowing position. “Back straight,” she ordered. “Bend from the hips.”

He straddled the machine and put his feet into the stirrups and began to row. “Keep your back straight,” she repeated.

He was nothing to her, he was just her way of coping. Any man would do—any man had done in the past—but he was here now. If he asked, she’d accept.

He finished rowing and sat, breathing heavily. Irene tore paper towels from the roll by the water station and handed them to him, and he wiped the sweat from his face and behind his neck.

“Well done,” she said. “You put up a brave fight.”

He got to his feet. “That was good,” he said, still panting. “You’re good at this.”

“I like to see people working up a sweat,” she said.

“We might do it again sometime.” He ran a hand through his damp hair. His face was flushed, and it suited him. “When you’re not working.”

“Sure,” she said. “You have my number.”

Barry sat hunched on a chair behind the counter, book clutched in his arms, an occasional dry sob lifting his thin shoulders. Whenever the shop door opened he looked at the floor and made no response if any of the customers spoke to him.

Michael had ignored the earlier tears, preoccupied as he was with the normal Monday-morning chores, and also reluctant to unnerve the child any further. Maybe never separated from the mother before; not surprising that he was upset now, if that was the case.

When the tears had turned finally to sniffles Michael had pulled out his handkerchief. Barry had flinched at his approach.

“Just wiping your face, that’s all,” Michael had told him, in as gentle a voice as he could muster. “Just mopping you up before you turn into a puddle.” He’d put a hand under the boy’s chin and repaired the damage as best he could, and Barry had looked steadfastly over Michael’s shoulder and endured it.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Michael had continued in the same low, even voice. “I’m just a bit grumpy sometimes, that’s all.” He’d been struck by a sudden inspiration. “I’m a bit like Eeyore, you know, the donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh?”

Barry’s eyes had jumped to Michael’s face for a second, and slid away again.

“Eeyore is a bit grumpy sometimes, isn’t he?”

No response; but at least the tears had stopped. Michael had returned the handkerchief to his pocket. “Why don’t you have a look at Winnie-the-Pooh?”

But Barry had pressed the book to his chest and made no effort to open it, and Michael had given up. He’d told anyone who asked that he was looking after the child for a friend, and thankfully, nobody had pursued it.

Now, at half past ten, it was still raining heavily. Barry yawned and shifted slightly in his chair. Michael decided to give it another go.

“This is my shop,” he said. Leaning against the counter, a good six feet away.

No response.

“It’s a good shop, isn’t it?”

Nothing.

Michael indicated the tank by the wall that housed a dozen or so goldfish. “See the fish swimming around? They’re called goldfish, because they’re sort of gold in color.”

The boy turned towards the tank and regarded its occupants solemnly, his thumb drifting to his mouth.

“Have you any more story books?” Michael asked.

He shook his head slowly.

Michael went into the back room and brought out his rucksack. He set it on the counter and pulled out a book.

“See this?” he asked, holding it up. “It’s about a train.”

Barry let his thumb slide out of his mouth. “Thomas the Tank Engine.” A tiny whisper.

Michael looked at him in surprise. “You know it?”

A small nod. “I seen him.”

“Where?”

“On telly.”

Michael laid the book on the shelf next to the boy. “You could look at the pictures if you like.” He walked off and stood by the tins of cat food for a minute or so. When he returned, Barry was turning the pages.

It was what anyone would do. Children needed stimulation if they were to grow up with any bit of intelligence. Michael would have done the same for any child, particularly one as silent as this boy. It was unnatural for children to be that quiet.

He watched the white head bent over the book. He heard the small rustle as the pages were turned, and the shallow, rapid breathing. He thought there was something heartbreaking about the vulnerability of small children. Whatever tomfoolery the girl might be up to, her son was wholly innocent.