White Lies (9 page)

I hadn't pulled the curtains or switched on the light; I sat, numb, in the gathering darkness. The street lamp outside threw its light on the big gin bottle, giving it a strange glow in the dead room. The long neck and the rounded shape below made it look like a tall, imposing figure. A man presiding, priest-like, at some ceremony or ritual. A druid, I thought.

On the mantelpiece, beside the bottle, I noticed a couple of empty matchboxes left there since Jimmy stopped tidying the place. Standing stones, some fallen, some still standing. A rush of nervous expectation went through me.

‘The Glass Druid,' I said aloud, and almost looked around to make sure no one was there to hear me. I wasn't exactly sure, but I thought the ‘Glass Druid' was alcohol. Drinking was like joining hands with him.

‘Joining hands with the Glass Druid,' I said to myself.

All around us, the standing stones appeared, statues that were half-living and half-dead. And then I saw their faces. Nance, Jimmy, Mam, Beano, even Seanie, even Mahoney – and me. The vision was as vivid and as unreal as any dream, but I was wide awake. I was more than wide awake. My mind was opening out as if, for once, I understood everything. None of these stone people could reach me and I couldn't reach them. We were all alone no matter how close we got to someone else. But I was the only fool among them who thought the Glass Druid could help me.

Joining hands with the Glass Druid,
Calling to the standing stones,
The men and women who can't speak to me;
Voices like mine, without sounds, without tones.

In the yellow sodium light from the street, I scrambled around the kitchen and found an envelope and a stub-nosed pencil. I wrote down the four lines. There wasn't time to switch on the light, but I could just about make out the words on the brown paper. I read it through, ten, twenty times. I sat back. My first poem. I felt like I was glowing as brightly as the gin bottle.

I read the poem out loud once and then again. Suddenly, I realised why I was doing it. I wanted these words to be heard. I wanted to explain the mad logic of the thoughts behind them. And then, I knew it wasn't just anybody I wanted to hear my poem. Only Nance.

I threw the envelope in among yesterday's cold ashes in the fireplace and then I lost it completely. I cried like a blubbery baby. The hard man, poet, footballer, street-wit broke down some time around midnight, in a silent house somewhere in a universe whose desolate meaning had hit him right between the eyes like a backfiring rifle.

NANCE

As we crossed the wide, four-laned bridge into Waterford I wished that it was the only way into the city and that it had crashed into the river before we got there. Seanie's Morris Minor moved slowly as the lights delayed the Sat urday morning traffic. A little slower and I might have jumped out and started back along the bridge.

Just like on our expedition to Limerick, Seanie had to be back for a match in the afternoon. He seemed as uptight as me and we didn't talk a lot. If Seanie thought I needed quiet, he was wrong. It was the kind of situation when small talk, the weather, the Beautiful South tape he'd brought, even football might have delivered me from the confusion of questions that bothered me.

What was I going to say to Heather? Would she refuse to acknowledge me? Or would meeting her somehow leave me worse off than ever?

The Beautiful South were singing ‘Everybody's Talking' and that's how it felt inside my head.

‘I like the tape,' I said, drowning out the inner voices and wishing he'd brought something a little louder and looser – Blur, maybe, or The Prodigy.

His mind wasn't on music.

‘Nance? About you and OD … about us … there's something I want to clear up …'

‘We'll talk about it later, OK? When this is over,' I said – pleaded, really.

‘I just thought it might be better if I …'

‘Are you sure you know where the library is?' I said, looking blindly ahead.

‘Yeah, I checked when I rang. We'll talk on the way back, all right?'

I wished the library would come into view and I wished, at the same time, that it wouldn't. Seanie, distracted by my evasions, turned down a one-way street and we both jumped a few inches from our seats as a bus sped towards us, blasting its horn and flashing its lights. If we were on edge before, we were doubly so after that. I managed to stop myself from bawling him off but I knew I wouldn't be able to hold back for long. Seanie felt the same way, I suppose.

We pulled in at the library and Seanie let the clutch off before he'd got the car out of gear. It jerked forward within an inch of the red Mini in front. For some reason, I began to laugh. Seanie's doom-laden features relaxed to a smile and finally to laughter as loud and panic-stricken as mine.

‘Do you want me to go in with you?' he asked when we calmed down.

‘Yeah.'

When we reached the door leading to the main lending area, I said, ‘You go in first.' I was using him as a shield to the end. I couldn't help it.

He stepped inside and held the door for me. There were no more than a half-dozen people there, browsing among the shelves. Behind the desk at the far end, two women chatted. One was pale and dark-haired. The other one was Heather Kelly. From this distance, she'd changed very little since that photo had been taken all those years ago. Her hair was cut up shorter but that was the only difference. Even the smile was the same one that had burned itself on to my retina.

‘Don't go outside, Seanie,' I whispered as I passed beyond the threshold into the lending area, beyond the threshold from innocence to whatever lay on the other side. ‘Wait here, won't you?'

‘Course I will. You'll be fine.'

Then the long walk began. I struggled to focus on the woman who'd only just noticed me. In spite of my light-headedness, I saw more clearly with each advancing step the changes the years had made in her face. The strangest thought occurred to me – that it was my approach that was ageing her.

If she was in shock, she was hiding it well. She seemed quite calm. I got to the desk. Now that the big moment had come, my mouth went dry. I couldn't even swallow.

Heather stood up and motioned me to follow her. I looked back at the door where Seanie was still waiting. I shrugged my shoulders, not knowing what to do. He gestured at me to go along with Heather, who by now had reached a door marked ‘Staff Only' and was already halfway through.

When I got inside, she was spooning coffee into some mugs. One had a big red heart and announced boldly ‘I Luv U'; the other innocently declared ‘Forever Friends'.

‘Take a seat, Nance,' she said. My heart skipped a beat.

‘Thanks,' I said – or meant to; I'm not sure if the word came out.

This wasn't going according to plan. If a stranger had walked in on us, they would never have guessed that this was the reunion of a mother and child after seventeen long years. I tried to bring some urgency into the situation.

‘How did you know who I was?'

‘Well, I can't say you haven't changed, can I?' she smiled. ‘Maybe it's just instinct.' It was all too light-hearted and easy. She filled the mugs from the kettle and sat down next to me.

‘How are Tom and May?' she asked pleasantly.

‘Grand. They're grand,' I said, more lost and confused with her every word.

‘You lose touch, you know. And life goes on, doesn't it?'

I couldn't keep dodging around the issue any longer.

‘Are you my mother?'

At last, I'd succeeded in shaking her. Now I was waiting for the big meltdown that was supposed to have happened five minutes before. Instead, I got a nuclear explosion, mushroom cloud, the whole works, that might have lifted me off my seat if my body hadn't suddenly weighed a hundred tons.

‘Good God, Nance!' she exclaimed. ‘What gave you that idea?'

‘Look,' I said desperately, ‘I know you're my mother. I know you're lying to me. Please tell me the truth and I won't bother you again. I just want to hear you say it, that you're my mother.'

I was holding the sleeve of her neat white blouse, not just holding it but grabbing a fistful of it.

‘Nance,' she said softly, ‘I'm not your mother. I might have been. In fact, you could say I nearly was. But it wasn't to be.'

The answer was too complicated and too sinceresounding to be untrue. Or else she was a very good actress.

‘I was engaged to Tom,' she said. ‘Christmas Eve 1978, to be precise. Three months later he and May married.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘What have they told you?' she asked.

I gave her the old story about the crash and their adopting me. As I did, she nodded as if to confirm every detail. Then I told her about the photo, about her holding me in it and about the man standing behind her.

‘Chris,' she said.

‘My father?'

I hadn't expected him to have an English-sounding name. She hesitated and finally nodded.

‘Chris Mburu. His people were Samburu, from up north originally, but they'd been in Nairobi for years,' she ex plained slowly, as if not yet sure whether she should be telling me all this. ‘He was a nice guy. Very bright, laid-back. A teacher too, but not in our school.'

Heather began to chew her fingernails. Her face, which had been so open, suddenly seemed to cloud over.

‘Look, I shouldn't even have told you about Chris,' she said. ‘It's not my place to. You really have to talk to them.'

‘I can't.'

‘Nance, I have every reason to dislike Tom and May after … you know … but I don't. I can see they should have told you about all this but it's not easy for them.'

‘And what about me? Do you think it's easy for me?' I cried. ‘Please, tell me who my mother is … or was … or whatever. There was another woman in that photo. Is that … was that her?'

Heather bit her nails anxiously and her eyes avoided mine.

‘She was an American. They were just passing through, she and her boyfriend. We didn't really know them, Nance, we didn't want to. They were a bad lot.'

I could see that she was more than uncomfortable talking about the American couple; she was actually afraid, really afraid.

‘Talk to Tom and May, Nance. Let them finish the story. That's how it should be,' she said. ‘I hate to sound like the old voice of experience but if you don't you'll live to regret it. I know this because I've drifted away from my own family. It wasn't all my fault but I might have stopped the drift if I'd only swallowed my pride.'

I told her that I'd talked to her sister, and about the sense of disapproval I'd heard in Celia's voice, and how I felt that it had something to do with me.

‘Nance, my sister is one of those wickedly pious types and my mistake, as she would see it, was to marry unwisely – in her terms, that is.'

She sat perfectly still and spoke without emotion.

‘After Kenya, I went to Saudi Arabia, but it's no place for a woman to live, believe me. The veils are bad enough but they won't even let you drive a car, can you believe it! I stuck it out for two years and went down to Tanzania. That's where I met John Duffy. Father John Duffy.'

I was tumbling to her real ‘mistake'.

‘We fell in love. He left the priesthood and we moved to Zimbabwe. We came back to Ireland in '84 and my family have never spoken to me since. Don't let that happen to you, Nance.'

‘So you're not going to tell me about these Americans?' She dragged herself away from her own painful memo ries and took my hand.

‘I can't. All I can say is that there was a crash, Nance. I'm sorry … They'll tell you the rest. Only ask. Do ask.'

My chair scraped along the timber floor and I got to my feet somehow or other. ‘I finish at one,' she said. ‘We could have lunch.'

‘We have to be back home early,' I told her. I couldn't stay angry with her for only telling me some of the truth. ‘Seanie has a game. He drove me down here.'

‘Your boyfriend?'

‘My friend,' I said.

She came to the staff door with me. When I opened it she saw Seanie at the other end of the room.

‘Nice-looking fellow,' she declared.

‘Yeah,' I said.

‘Will you call again?' she asked. ‘Tell me how it worked out?'

I nodded, but I didn't think I would.

Two miles outside of Waterford, I turned the car radio off and told Seanie that I really appreciated what he'd done for me but that that was as far it went. There was no row, hardly even a breath of tension. After a while, he said, ‘You haven't told me what happened in there.'

He listened intently to every detail. When I'd finished he considered it all for a minute or two.

‘She's dead right, you know,' he said. ‘You'll have to have it out with them. There's no other way.'

I couldn't believe he was letting my treachery, my blatant using and discarding of him, pass. I wondered if I was capable of loving anyone any more.

‘I should have told you the truth about us earlier, Seanie. And not led you on. You deserve better.'

‘I deserve nothing,' he half-whispered. ‘I'm not so good at telling the truth myself.'

He didn't take his eyes from the road.

‘I never … I never talked to Dad,' he confessed. ‘All that crap about telling him what I really wanted to do was just … fantasy.'

We kept quiet after that. The journey seemed to take an eternity. I felt desperately sorry for Seanie, but what could I do? We'd soon be going our separate ways and that was it. I tried to think of one last crumb of kindness, one last bit of encouragement I could offer him, but nothing came.

At Cashel, he looked at his watch and cursed softly. He pressed the accelerator to the full and left his foot there.

‘Sorry, Nance,' he said as we hit a pothole, ‘I can't be late. We're going to be a few short today as it is.'

‘Who's out?' I asked, not because I wanted to know but just to pass these last few minutes with him in something other than deathly silence.

‘Vincent Morrissey is injured,' he explained, ‘and …'

OD, I guessed from his hesitation. As if he knew I'd want to know why, he added, ‘His father isn't well.'

I was frightened for Jimmy but I couldn't see that I could do anything for him.

‘Do you ever talk to OD these days?' Seanie asked.

‘Seanie, that isn't why I don't want to …'

‘I know, I know. It's just that he won't listen to me and there's something he should know … about the park … See, my father has plans to –'

‘I won't be talking to him. So there's no point in telling me this,' I said impatiently.

I had my own problems; I thought OD could deal with his. That's how he had always wanted it to be, no matter how hard I tried to convince him otherwise. I pushed in the cassette on the tape deck. The Beautiful South, ‘I'll Sail This Ship Alone'.