The Boy in the Moon. Kate O’Riordan
Brian ran back to the escalators. Julia was pulling her wet hair back with two hands and shouting at some man in a uniform. Brian heaved a sigh of relief. A uniform. At last. But the uniform was not looking very reassuring; his face wore a decidedly worried expression as Julia gesticulated at it. Then the uniform turned and ran up the escalator, speaking into a radio at the same time. Brian’s heart beat twice, then seemed to stop; he had to remember to breathe. Julia’s expression was dazed when she turned to him. She staggered backwards with her hand over her mouth. Brian approached slowly but her other hand began to make a waving motion, a film clouded the blue of her eyes. Brian remembered to breathe again. He took another step but she ran sideways and crashed through the door of the Ladies.
She was blacking out. Little sparks of light erupted then vanished on the periphery of her vision. Her heart felt like a huge dysfunctional machine within her chest. It hammered down on her ribcage. Beads of sweat solidified on her forehead. She ran to a sink and splashed cold water on her face. A long, slow moan erupted from the pit of her stomach; she felt it carry up, through her gut, into her lungs, strum silently on her vocal chords for a moment, until it broke free and the sound made her body shudder. She saw little fat legs kicking, she heard the muffled sound of his terrified screams, she saw his exposed, vulnerable white belly, she heard him call her name … She splashed water again. Her legs could not sustain her weight. They buckled. She hunkered down and from some unknown corner of her consciousness she saw, beneath the cubicle door which skirted the floor by a foot, a pair of white sneakers, standing perfectly still, perfectly aligned, and perfectly familiar. She dry heaved and called his name. The lock on the cubicle slid back. A brown eye peered through the crack.
‘Mum?’
‘Oh, Jesus. Jesus. Sam. Sam darling – Sam darling …’
He ran to her. She clutched at him. And had to turn her head away to stifle the dry heaves. Sam was crying. He shook her shoulders. ‘I only went to the video things,’ he said, ‘then I couldn’t see you or Dad so I came in here in case the bad men … like you told me …’
She had to swallow a mouthful of saliva. ‘It’s OK now. I’m here. Mummy’s here. It’s OK, darling …’
They rocked together for some minutes. A woman entered the toilet area and stood staring indecisively at them. A drunken mother perhaps? One of those drug addicts? Julia gazed up at her and laughed. She had to force her grip to loosen on Sam’s shoulders. He would show bruises tomorrow. When his crying subsided, she staggered to her feet, reached down and scooped him up. He clung to her. She covered his face with kisses and carried him out to his father.
Brian was standing beside the security guard. As Julia approached with Sam’s head nestled between her cocked head and her shoulder, a cry went up from the surrounding onlookers. She ignored them, she ignored the visible double take of the guard. She ignored the woman to her left who repeatedly made the sign of the cross over her breast. Gimleteyed, she approached Brian, who did not move, did not emit a sound or display a single, solitary show of emotion. He stood motionless, his hands by his sides, his face white and taut-looking. Sam turned and reached out his arms.
‘Dad,’ he said.
‘Sam.’
Julia felt life itself drain from her arms as she surrendered her grail to the outstretched arms before her. People clapped. The security guard moved to disperse them just like on the television. Sam was nuzzling the side of Brian’s face. Brian’s eyes met hers for an instant, then he hooded them and whispered something to his son. Julia swung past the dispersing crowd, the newly officious security guard, the glass doors, and as she headed for the car, she felt her shoulder bag slap against her waist in a rhythmical, rain-drenched adagio. She reached the navy blue estate and slumped against it. Inside, she could see the meticulously packed suitcases, the crates of wine, the well-concealed Santa boxes – Sam’s new bike, his puzzles, his stocking-fillers – and she felt entirely alone for a moment. As if in a way Sam had really been taken from her. She lifted her head and gazed at the approaching sight of Brian with his arms wrapped protectively around Sam. Even at this distance, she could see the tremors still quake through Sam’s otherwise limp body. She wrenched at the door, then remembered that Brian had taken the keys from her.
Julia was silent for so long that Brian instinctively knew that she was mouthing to herself first, the familiar litany of his past transgressions. He could feel little waves of sympathy emanate from Sam in the back. Brian stared blankly ahead. The trick with Julia was to keep apologizing, over and over again, in the same modulated tone and never to flinch or show her a wound, because if she saw a gash or suspected one, she would tear at it with her teeth. Brian cleared his throat, it was difficult to get the timing right in these matters. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said.
He could see her shoulders stiffen. Her palms clapped together silently. ‘It is one thing to try and bring up your son as best you can,’ she began, enunciating each word as if speaking to someone learning English, ‘but it is quite another to have to do so in direct competition with a father who would appear to have some sort of a death wish for his son …’
‘I am really sorry,’ Brian said.
‘What is it with you? Is this a macho thing between fathers and sons that I haven’t been told about – or are you just inconceivably stupid?’
‘I thought he was with you.’
‘Did you think he was with me the time you took him up the loft ladder in your arms?’ She flexed her lips. ‘You walked down that ladder – frontways – with a two-year-old child in your arms. A week later, you fell from that ladder yourself and broke your arm …’ Her foot was tapping. ‘Did you think he was with me the day I caught him running around the garden with a secateurs pointing up at his throat? Or the day I just happened upon you chopping wood in your father’s shed with your three-year-old son behind you, swinging – swinging, I say – an axe over his head? Hmm?… I didn’t hear you …’
Brian rubbed his jaw. This was a two-hour job, easily. He longed for Pembroke. Sam had covered his ears in the back.
‘This is going to be a bad one,’ Sam said.
‘Of course I have only myself to blame really,’ Julia continued. ‘I mean, you’d think I’d know by now that I must not under any circumstances, not even for one lousy fucking second of the day, allow my son out of my sight when his kamifuckingkaze father is around –’
‘Mum, you used the fu word. Twice,’ Sam interjected.
‘I know, Sam, and I apologize. Forget everything I’ve ever told you – you may, from now on, occasionally use the fu word. All right?’
‘I do already in the playground sometimes,’ Sam confessed soberly.
Brian observed from the corner of his eye the double tic of Julia’s features as she digested that bit of information. He felt a sharp spasm of love for his son, aware of what he was trying to do. But Julia was in mid-flow and would not be appeased until she had tasted blood. She was working herself into a frenzy, fisting the glove compartment and crashing her knees together.
‘… And another thing,’ Julia continued. ‘Sam is seven now. Old enough to notice things. I won’t have your father drinking from his saucer like he does, do you hear me? He can bloody well use a cup like the rest of us, at least while we’re there … And that dog – that dog is not to come inside the house while I’m in it – filthy, flea-ridden creature …’ She continued, without stopping for a breath, saying all the things she had vowed to herself that she would not say.
Brian adjusted the windscreen wipers to accommodate the sweeps of rain which made visibility almost negligible. He stuck his tongue in his cheek and tried to wander in his mind to a safer place. Instead, he thought of last Christmas. He had rarely been so miserable. A misery he could see etched on the faces of Julia’s parents and her sister also. Carol, Julia’s only sibling, younger by six years, had spent her time slipping into the kitchen after Brian, lighting surreptitious cigarettes and downing extra stiff measures of her Canadian rye so that