The Shelter of Neighbours (16 page)

‘You looked out the window? What time would that have been?' The Garda's face has come alive, or as alive as a guard's face ever comes.

‘It was twenty past four. I looked at the alarm clock. Then I put out the bin.'

The two Gardaí look at one another and you could smell the tension in the room as if it were a gas.

Martha never put Luke's name down for Mulberry School, or any other school, because he died when he was two and a half years old. He was ill for almost a year before that – he had leukaemia. Many children recover from leukaemia and for most of that year Martha and Seamus and the doctor clung to the hope that he would be one of those, that he would pass through this nightmare and come out at the other side, delicate obviously, but alive. Alive. Alive. The thing you want most in the world, when all is said and done: your child, alive.

Martha wanted to stay with him all the time in hospital, but she couldn't. It was impossible to get time off work. There were no career breaks. You could get only one month's compassionate leave. When Martha explained the situation to the Personnel Officer, that person – a woman – made her feel that she was a malingerer, trying to cheat the system. She made her feel that she was the typical new type of public servant, the working mother, who now wanted the system to bend over backwards to grant her favours and privileges, which no public servant had ever had before, because until a few years ago there were no mothers, no married women, messing things up. They'd been obliged to resign on marriage; now there was all this change, this chaos. Married women. Maternity leave. Mothers demanding endless favours, causing headaches for the entire system and especially for the Personnel sections. This Personnel Officer was not going to give in to Martha, the very first mother to work in her section in the Department of Justice, and, the Personnel Officer hoped, the last.

‘She seems to hate me,' Martha said to Mitzy. Cried to Mitzy. She couldn't bear it. Luke was so tiny, and sick, and she wanted to be with him from morning till night.

‘Wouldn't you give up work?' Mitzy asked.

No, said Martha. She wouldn't. If she gave up her job, she knew she would never get another one. Seamus was older than her. If he died, and she didn't have a job, she wouldn't be able to pay the mortgage, she wouldn't be able to support Luke.

So Mitzy came to the rescue. She often sat in the hospital with Luke all day, when Martha was at work. Frequently, Siobhán, who was just six then, sat with her. They did that for eight months. In the end, Martha, although she got no time off officially, was told by her immediate boss, who had four children himself, that she should just take as much time as she needed, they would not report her to Personnel. She could make it up when Luke got better.

Her boss told her this around the time that it was becoming clear to him and to most people that Luke was not going to recover. But that was not something Martha accepted until Luke was dead and buried and she was expecting again.

Mitzy had a hand in that, too. Martha thought she would not have any more children after Luke.

‘You must.' Mitzy had been quite firm about this and her conviction cheered Martha up and calmed her.

‘I don't think we can,' Martha said, wondering. Something had happened to Seamus. He wasn't interested. He wasn't able.

‘These days, that shouldn't be such a problem,' Mitzy, who had more cop on than anyone Martha knew, said. ‘You'll be able to get around that.'

The Garda repeats his question.

‘Did you see anything from the window? Did you see anyone?'

Martha – and Seamus, and the other Garda – look at the window, as if they might see someone now. At that moment the street lamps go on, illuminating the hedge and the footpath. The evenings are closing in earlier and earlier. It's the twenty-first of September, the start of the dark nights, and – as it happens – Martha's birthday. Her fifty-first. They will celebrate later, with a special dinner and a bottle of her favourite wine.

She shakes her head slowly. ‘I noticed that I'd forgotten to put out the bottle bin.'

Seamus gives a start. He doesn't like it when he forgets to do his chores. The Garda waits.

‘So I put it out.'

‘That must have been about four thirty?'

‘Yes. It must have been.'

Seamus looks at her and bites his thumb, a habit he developed after he gave up smoking, all those years ago. Martha meets his eye.

‘But you saw nobody?' the Garda went on.

Martha is sitting on her hands. She looks at the faces of the three men, all staring at her.

Waiting.

She lets them wait. She's in no hurry.

In her fifth queue of the morning, the one at the traffic lights at the exit from the airport, Ingrid Stafford, middle-aged Swedish immigrant in mystical, mythical Ireland, realises something, which is this: today belongs to her. Her husband, Tim, is right now taking off his shoes and belt at the security check in the airport and will spend the next seven hours or so safely locked into a tube of steel crossing the Atlantic. The kids are at college (they are aged nineteen and twenty-one but still live at home, in the strange Irish way, and can justifiably be called ‘kids'; they certainly act the part). She has a day off – a rare treat, since the solicitor's office in which she has been working since she got her law degree, just a few years ago, is literally run off its feet. They specialise in conveyancing, and people are buying property – houses and apartments – with frenzied enthusiasm, as if the skill of building was about to be lost forever, tomorrow or the day after. Not much chance of that, to judge by the cranes that stretch across the horizon like the arms of benevolent giants, reaching out to embrace the Irish nation, with a paternal, irresistible, if steely, hug.

Today Ingrid could do anything. She could have a cultural day, visit all the art galleries in Dublin, or go to Newgrange, Monasterboice, the archaeological treasures of north Dublin (like many southsiders she only crosses the river to go to the Abbey Theatre or the airport). She could spend the day watching films in the Irish Film Institute – she is always missing something good that is on there. She could go to the zoo. Who would know? Or take the ferry to Wales and have lunch in Holyhead.

She fills the tank at the filling station near the exit. Petrol has just gone over a euro a litre; a year or so ago she wondered if it would ever go over a euro, which looked like a kind of rubicon. But of course it has, its rise is relentless and inevitable. And it is still cheaper here than up north. As she watches the clock on the pump rush through the euros – at least the two windows match now, litres and euros neck and neck as they spin to thirty, forty – she realises that is why she is tanking up now, because the North is where she is going to spend the day.

She does not tell herself what she is going to do. Not yet. But she knows it is unlikely to be cultural. Not up there in the North.

She met Tim in the north. In Uppsala, her home town in Sweden. Uppsala is one of those cities that is more of a passage than a destination. It is full of people in transit. Students in transit through college, and old people in transit from work to death. Not so many people spend their ordinary working lives there, but of course some have to, as in all such places. Her father had a job in the civil service and her mother in a school. Tim was over from Ireland on some sort of scholarship for a year; he studied botany. Ingrid was doing English. The chances of their paths crossing were one in a thousand. Or one in ten thousand, who knows? Anyway. Slight.

But they did cross, in the waiting room of the hospital. She had sprained her ankle skating, and so had Tim. This was December 1982, when the rivers still froze in winter, and the snow still fell reliably in Sweden. ‘That's a bit of a coincidence,' said Tim. He had noticed that she was good-looking, before finding a pretext to speak – he was adept at that sort of thing.

Ingrid had broken up with her boyfriend, Tomas, six months previously, at the start of term. Or he had broken up with her; he had met someone else during the summer holidays, on a dig in Gotland – archaeology was his subject. This had broken Ingrid's heart, which was not a thing she had ever anticipated happening to her; in fact, it was not something she believed could happen to anyone, until she saw Tomas walking across a street, hand in hand with another girl – that girl had been wearing a skirt identical to the one Ingrid had worn all summer, a gathered denim skirt, to below the knee, which somehow made Ingrid want to scream and tear her hair out right there on the street beside Ofvandahls Konditori (the skirt was from a chain store, so it was not much of a coincidence). Since that day she had been crying for weeks, months, and had considered killing herself as she sat at her desk, hoping the telephone would ring, and trying to type her essays about Jane Austen's comic style or Shakespeare's tragic heroines. Many methods had occurred to her. For instance, jumping into the river at a deep part with stones in her pocket. But she had not done that, or taken a lot of pills – she had dismissed slitting her wrists in the bath, she knew she would never do that, it sounded so horrible. And she was not practical, it would be hard to do it right. Ditto hanging. What do you tie the rope to?
Clickety-clack
, the keys of the typewriter sang out, mocking her, while the phone maintained a cruel silence.

The river was frozen and she had been persuaded to go skating by her mother, who was constantly trying to find diversions for her. She fell on the ice first time out – she was not concentrating. Three months, recovery should take, one of her friends told her. From the broken heart, that is – the ankle would heal faster. The friends had theories about heartbreak: it turned out that everyone knew about this condition. It was like some sort of familiar, though not everyday, disease – not like a cold, more like shingles, say. You never notice that such an illness exists, but if you get it yourself, you quickly meet dozens of people who have had it. Ingrid's friends swapped stories about their broken hearts the way people exchange anecdotes about their stay in hospital, or what happened when they got tonsillitis. And they had various suggestions about cures, too. Getting drunk was one, though not very effective. Time was the other most common suggestion for healing: a month for every year of the relationship was the theory. It was more than six months now and she still suffered. She wondered who came up with these theories. Were they scientifically proven? Had anyone done a survey?

Tim might know, since he was a sort of scientist. But she did not ask him, or tell him much about Tomas. She could have. He was – is – very kind. She did not think he would find her sad story very interesting, and she did not think he would even understand it. Heartbreak. He loved her, very much, but in a practical way. The way a tree might love another tree, and cross-fertilise it. Botanically, without undue emotion.

It takes about two and a half hours to drive from Dublin Airport to Belfast City Airport. That is where she is off to. She admits it, when she crosses the Boyne over the new bridge, those tons and tons of gleaming silver steel flung over the narrow enough river at Drogheda. It is a day in a million. And how is she going to use it?

Going to
ikea
.

The new store that opened in Belfast a few months ago to cater to the voracious appetite of the Irish for furniture, new kitchens, the latest kind of sofa. The only
ikea
on the island of Ireland so far, although they have been trying to get a branch in Dublin. The planners are holding them up, with a million and one excuses – no doubt the local furniture stores are pressurising, maybe bribing, the county council to keep the big foreign invader at bay for as long as possible.

But over the runway of Belfast City Airport the Swedish flag flies high! Nobody flies flags in the South, though up here in the North they are addicted to them. Even today she has seen Union Jacks in some estates, tricolours in others, as she drove along the A1. Seeing the flag of Sweden over Belfast City Airport makes her laugh and brings a lump to her throat at the same time. Direct rule from Stockholm might be a pretty good answer to the Ulster question.

Her feeling about this shop is also ambivalent, but it neither makes her laugh nor cry. She does not know what to make of it. It is much bigger than the one she knows in Uppsala: an enormous, brash, blue and yellow block, shamelessly ugly, without windows or any softness, like a blue and yellow prison colonising a bit of Northern Ireland.
ikea
Maze.

She makes her way through the showroom. The sofas, the kitchens, the bedrooms. Lots of things have Swedish names. The Karlstad, the Ektorp. Her father came from Karlstad – a square town, plain as ryebread, with a huge river running through it. The sofa is bright orange, not a Karlstad colour, but it has, she fancies, the same boxy, down-to-earth shape as that town. She begins to think about her father's family home, a fairytale house with high gables, shingled roof, a garden full of flowers and fruit trees.

It is not just Swedish place names that
ikea
uses. Many items are labelled in both English and Swedish. Sax/scissors, gardin/curtain, agga/runner. Taken in by it all, Ingrid finds herself speaking Swedish to one of the assistants, who looks bemused. Ingrid laughs at herself and repeats her question in English.

Although she does not really buy anything, in the sense of a kitchen or a sofa (she would like to; she would like to buy everything in the shop), her trolley is full when she comes to the checkout. Full of rubbish. Then just outside the big checkout area is the food store, where she stocks up on pickled herring, tins of biscuits, Swedish mustard, and other things, the things she takes great pains to acquire every Christmas from Sweden, so that they can celebrate the feast in authentic Swedish style in Dublin. So now she will not have to make her November trip home, an extravagance she introduced to her life when Ryanair started a direct Dublin–Stockholm flight a few years ago. But lingonberries and ginger snaps seem less important if all you have to do is drive for two hours up the M1 to buy them. Probably, the ease of access will make them less tasty, too.

If they want a Swedish Christmas this year, they will have to go to Sweden. But how could they? Her parents are dead; her brother is busy with his own family. She has not seen him for three years – just after their mother died. She could not turn up, uninvited, and ask to spend Christmas with him. She still thinks of Sweden as home. But since her mother died, she has nowhere to stay over there.

She brings her trolley load of things back to the car, then returns to the canteen to have lunch. It is three o'clock – she has managed to spend four hours walking around the store. The canteen is thronged with people. The chirpy Belfast accents are counterpointed by the flat intonation of Dubliners, middle-aged women slagging each other about the shopping trip. ‘Wouldn't it be awful if you came all this way and went home with nothing?' ‘Look at me lovely toilet seat!' ‘I ordered the fish and chips.'

Ingrid goes for the meatballs. You can buy either ten, or fifteen, or twenty, depending on how hungry you are. It is very fair. She goes for the ten.

‘Will ye have the jam with them?' The waiter has a thin, handsome face, which she thinks typical of young Belfast men. They look like young Swedish men. The narrow skulls and noses, not the round heads you get in the south of Ireland.

‘Yes,' says Ingrid, and he spoons on some lingon jelly.
Sylt
. And the creamy gravy.

‘A few chips?' he asks encouragingly.

‘Yes, well, a few,' she says.

He heaps the plate with so many chips that they spill over the edge.

The food is quite good, especially the gravy and jam – the meatballs are so overcooked that they have developed a hard skin, like little leather footballs. Maybe that is because she is so late, or else it is the Belfast way with meatballs. She is very hungry – she was up at 6 a.m. or so, and has been driving or walking constantly since then. She should have taken the twenty. The sauce and the combination of gravy and jelly and meat taste good: a blend of tastes that takes her back. They had this dinner on Wednesdays when she was a child. The berries collected by themselves in the forest during the summer, everything home-made – better than this, but not that much better, all things considered. The hours of work that went into one simple meal – not that the berry-picking was work, as such, at least not for the first half-hour. They would go on for about four hours, though – her mother made about fifty pots of lingon preserves at a time, and the children were expected to supply the berries. That is how it was at home, over there in Sweden.

She drinks her water but does not finish the meatballs. A small Ryanair plane speeds down the runway and takes off into the clustering grey clouds. The hill on the far side of the airport has darkened to a deep black purple. The chatter of the other diners is louder than before – a huge choir, in which she has no part, is raised in a harmony of many varieties of English in a crescendo around her. She is the only person sitting alone at a table in the canteen. The only silent one, with nobody to talk to.

She would have nobody to talk to in Swedish even if she had somebody with her. Tim never learnt – even back then, they gave botany lectures in English. And the children have not picked it up, which is her fault. She had thought it sentimental to speak Swedish to them, not thinking that she might have enjoyed having her own language around her occasionally, that it would have been a little personal luxury. Not thinking that she would miss it. Which she does. Especially here in this weird shop, where the language is just out of reach, like a stranger rushing away down the street, or a ghost passing, a shimmer of mist flitting across the garden.

Suddenly she feels sick and overwhelmed with a need to get out of here, to get back to her car and home to Dunroon Crescent. She cannot finish her meal. Stacks her tray on a trolley and gets out of the canteen as fast as she can.

But when she reaches the foot of the stairs, there is no exit. She asks a staff member where it is.

‘You have to go through the showrooms again,' he says, slightly apologetic. She has done something wrong. You are supposed to eat before you pay for your goods, then leave the premises for good. That is the system. You are not supposed to go out and come back again. ‘But there are shortcuts,' he says. ‘Just follow the signs saying “Shortcuts”. You won't have to go through everything again.'

He is a big Belfast man, about six foot four. A sort of bouncer, maybe, making sure that people like Ingrid do not break the rules.