Two Fridays in April (11 page)

She couldn’t bear their pity if they knew what day it was. She’d had a bellyful of pity last year, everyone looking at her with sad smiles pasted onto their faces, speaking to her with the kind of voice you’d use for a child with a bit of a want in him. Pity is useless; pity makes her want to throttle someone.

‘Una’s birthday today,’ she says, to change the subject. ‘Seventeen.’

They’re aware she has a granddaughter but they’ve never met Una – she’s never set foot in the shop. Daphne looks in from time to time, actually bought a skirt once, but Una doesn’t come near the place. Youngsters wouldn’t be interested in buying second-hand: they all want new and fashionable. You can understand that.

‘Is she having a party?’ Martha enquires.

‘No, she’s not bothered. She might go out with the pals after school, that’s all. I’m going over there for dinner later. We’ll make a bit of a fuss.’

Gretta pulls a T-shirt from the bag. ‘You get her something nice?’

‘Voucher for that shoe shop on Connolly Street.’ Mo hasn’t got it yet – she’ll pick it up when she clocks off. The shop, whose
name escapes her, has awning in fat green and white stripes, and shoes of every colour imaginable in the window, and music blaring from giant speakers on either side of the door. It strikes Mo as the kind of place a teenage girl would like.

‘My granddaughter Charlene for her sixteenth,’ Gretta says, ‘and half a dozen of her pals, they got one of them make-up people to come to the house, did them all up, an’ then they went out on the town. She didn’t get home till three. Jean didn’t sleep a wink till she heard her comin’ in. This won’t sell – look at the rip in it.’

‘Sixteen is far too young to be out till that hour,’ Martha puts in.

Gretta sniffs. ‘Try tellin’ that to Charlene, see how far you’d get.’

Neighbours of mine,’ Martha goes on, as if Gretta hasn’t spoken, ‘took their daughter to Italy when she turned sixteen.’

Gretta yanks a yellow shirt from the bag. ‘I wouldn’t go to Italy if you paid me. Can’t stand the heat in them places, an’ all them mosquitoes. Gimme a week in Dingle any day. Another one for the iron here.’

Martha takes a biscuit, snaps it in two, deposits half back on the plate. ‘You’ve been to Italy, have you?’

‘Wouldn’t go if you paid me, I said.’

Mo thinks back to Una’s sixteenth. She remembers them driving from the morgue to the bowling alley where they knew she’d gone with friends after school. Daphne sat white-faced and silent in the back seat of Jack’s car.
I’ll go in
, he said,
I’ll get her
– but Mo climbed out on legs that barely worked. Couldn’t let Jack be the one to tell her.

She remembers pushing open the door of the bowling alley, walking through the voices and the music and the clatter of falling pins – so loud, everything unbearably loud – until she found her.
Come outside
, she said, watching Una’s face as it turned from happy to puzzled.

What for?

Just come
, Mo said, and she saw the fear in the girl’s eyes then, her birthday forgotten, pushed away to make room for whatever was to come.

They must try to make today better for her. Mo will send her a text, that’s what she’ll do. She gets to her feet and takes her bag from its locker – but the phone isn’t to be found in it. Left at home again, forgets it more times than she remembers it.

She tucks the bag under her arm, takes her jacket from its hook. ‘Going out the back for a pull,’ she tells the others. She turns the key in the rear door, pushes it open and steps into the small yard. The chill is shocking after the warmth of the shop, but she won’t be long.

She sits gingerly on the rusting garden seat someone had thought to position there and takes a pack of cigarettes from her bag. Her secret vice, nobody outside the shop knows about it. Gave them up when she married Leo, didn’t look at them for forty-six years. Bought a pack the day they took him away from her, started up again just like that. One a day is all she has now though, for old times’ sake. Daphne has no idea; neither did Finn.

She lights up, drawing the hot smoke deep inside. She pictures it billowing into her lungs, filling up all the spaces there. Leo never smoked, never even took a puff as a teenager
when all his pals were trying them out. He didn’t ask her to give them up when they got together, but she knew he wanted her to, so she did shortly before they were married. She’d have done anything for him.

Finn didn’t smoke either: she was always glad of that. He was healthy, hardly ever sick as a child, and strong from the cycling. She’s grateful she can think about him now without wanting to die … Took long enough for that to happen. Not that she’d care if she did die – what difference would it make to anyone? Who’d miss her? – but she doesn’t
wish
for it any more, which she supposes is a good thing.

She leans her head against the seat back and regards the sludgy sky. Saw a plane crossing it earlier, pulling what looked like a long white flag in its wake. Writing on the flag she couldn’t read: an ad for something, she supposed. Ads wherever you look these days.

She catches a sound in the lane beyond the low wall at the end of the yard. She sits up and sees a hooded figure walking by rapidly, blowing on his or her hands. Female, Mo decides. Something about the gait: too light, she thinks, to be masculine. Could be Una, similar height and figure, except she’s at school. All the young ones look alike now, afraid to stand out from the crowd.

The person passes a parked blue car with twin white ribbons strung across its bonnet – wedding car, must be – and approaches a gate that leads into one of the back yards of the houses that are lined up on the opposite side of the lane. Immediately a dog sets up a noisy barking, shattering the peace of the lane. Mo stubs out her cigarette and goes back inside.

‘What kept you?’ Sadie says, tapping buttons on the cash register. ‘I’m gasping for a cuppa.’

‘I’m here now,’ Mo replies, finding a carrier bag for trousers that lie waiting on the counter. Sadie spends most of her time in the shop drinking tea, only comes in for the company.

Left on her own, Mo tidies the bric-à-brac shelves, repositioning the chipped vases and worn leather wallets and mismatched candlesticks and soap dishes. She straightens the books and sweeps the floor and glares at a teen well known for his habit of forgetting to pay, keeps her eye on him until he eventually leaves, empty-handed and scowling. As the morning drifts on she sells a few more bits and pieces.

Just before noon she hears the repeated honking of a car horn in the street outside. She gets to the front door in time to see the blue car she observed earlier emerge from the lane a few doors up and turn in the direction of the charity shop.

As it makes its leisurely way along the street, horn honking repeatedly, the bride in the back seat catches Mo’s eye and waves at her, smiling. Mo lifts a hand in return, thinking back to her own wedding day.

Never stopped raining from early morning. Her mother fed her two poached eggs with warm griddle bread and gave her a miraculous medal – something blue – that Mo pinned inside the bodice of her dress. Her cousin Therese played the organ as Mo walked up the aisle on her father’s arm.

The look on Leo’s face when she approached, the way he took her from her father. The way he thanked him, like she was a gift he was being presented with.

Her mother had made her wedding dress. It was shiny and
white with short puffed sleeves, and when Mo took it off that evening its elasticated waist had imprinted a puckered pink line on her flesh that Leo kissed softly, all the way around.

She stands and watches the car moving slowly down the street, its driver continuing to beat out a cheerful tattoo. She waits until it vanishes around a bend before she turns back inside.

Minute by minute her shift draws to a close.

In the end she gets Una a gift box of shampoo and conditioner in the health shop near the train station.
Organic
, it says, and
rich in seaweed nutrients
. Amazing that it costs ten times as much as the shampoo she buys for herself in the supermarket – she would have thought seaweed was a free commodity.

Conditioner was unheard of when Mo was growing up. Her hair was washed once a week in rainwater scooped from a barrel outside the kitchen window, with shampoo that came in a big green bottle and smelt like trees, and stung like mad if it got in your eyes. In between washes, a more sinister liquid was scrubbed vigorously into her hair and left there for what seemed like an eternity before her mother dragged a fine-tooth comb painfully across every inch of Mo’s scalp, wiping the black smudges she unearthed onto a page of newspaper, and that was it as far as keeping her hair clean went.

Things are different now, of course, new fancy ways to get rid of lice, and any amount of bottles and potions and whatnot for hair. Hopefully Una will like this fancy stuff, nestling in a bed of shredded gold paper inside a bronze box.

‘Would you like me to gift-wrap it?’ the impossibly tall sales
assistant asks. Lashes tipped with silver, brows plucked so thin you can barely see them, nails sludge-green with awful square ends.

‘I would.’ Least they can do is make it look nice, the price Mo is paying.

‘It’ll be one thirty extra,’ the assistant adds.

Mo looks at her in disbelief. ‘One
thirty
? You’d get a roll of it for that.’

The assistant blinks, a silver flash. ‘So you don’t want it, then.’

‘I do not,’ Mo replies tartly.

The rest of the transaction is conducted in silence. Mo takes the plain brown bag and pockets her change without a word. Cheek of them, charging an extra fortune to put a bit of fancy paper on it. She’ll find something at home: tinfoil will do fine if there’s nothing else.

On the street her stomach rumbles. She normally eats her sandwich in the shop before she leaves, but today she’d had enough of Gretta and Martha, couldn’t face another minute of them. She’ll head to the park, have her lunch in peace there. The rain might hold off for another while.

Just as well, anyway, to delay the sandwich a bit – she won’t be eating again till eight. At home she has dinner at seven, always has done since the days of herself and Leo in the shop. She’d leave work soon after five to get organised; he’d be home at half six, time to have a wash and a beer before she dished up. Still, she’s not one to complain. And Daphne, it has to be said, is a good enough cook when she puts her mind to it.

As she approaches a café she feels a sudden urge to urinate. A
less accommodating bladder, she’s discovered, is one of the trials of getting older. She pushes open the door and steps inside, makes a show of scanning the faces of the people seated at the scattered tables as she strides across the floor towards the door that says
Toilets
. Look as if you have every right to be there, meet everyone’s eye and nobody will challenge you.

On her way out again, whatever look she gives across the room, she spots a woman seated alone at a table to the rear of the place, the kind of table you’d choose if you didn’t want to be interrupted. The woman’s face is in profile, head bent as she reads the menu. What looks like an untouched glass of red wine sits before her.

Her ash-blonde hair is prettily cut, falling almost to her chin at the front, becoming shorter as it moves around to fluff out gently above her hairline at the rear. She wears a dress the colour of the nasturtiums that bloom every year outside Mo’s kitchen window, and what look like black suede ankle boots with thin, pointed heels. A sky blue patterned scarf falls over the back of her chair. From the top of the dress her long neck emerges, white and graceful as a swan’s. The first time they met, Mo envied her that neck.

Isobel
, the woman said.
Delighted to meet you
. Extending a cool maroon-nailed hand in Mo’s direction, her pale hair longer then, pinned up to show off the neck, and the high cheekbones that Daphne had inherited.

Her mother ran off with someone else when Daphne was six
, Finn had told Mo – and it wasn’t until his and Daphne’s wedding that Mo first encountered the runaway mother and her second husband – not, she could gather, the same man who had spirited
her away from six-year-old Daphne and poor cuckolded Jack. Isobel was popular with the gentlemen, it would appear.

Not hard to see why men would find her desirable, with all that fragile femininity, those almost-silver eyes. Difficult to fathom, though, how a woman could possibly turn her back on her child: rabid dogs wouldn’t have kept Mo away from Finn when he was growing up. Had the woman no maternal instinct? Had she never bonded with her daughter?

Coincidental that Una and Daphne had both been deprived of mothers at exactly the same age, even if the circumstances were very different. You’d think something in common like that would have drawn them together – but as far as Mo can tell, all is not as it should be with them. They seemed to get on well enough while Finn was around; it’s only since his death that Mo has become aware of a difficulty, a gap in communication that neither of them seems inclined to bridge.