Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain
He’d had really bad spots, too, which were the first thing I’d noticed when I first got talking to him, at fourteen, on the steps of the little branch library whose librarian threw everyone out anytime she felt like it, so she could go and play the slot-machines at the back of the pub. But then, Markey hardly ate anything; he was so poor that the Brothers left out a loaf every day for him to take back after school to the cottage in the lane behind our house where he lived with his mother. The only good clothes he’d had was a man’s suit that was too big, which I happened to see on him once when I was going out our back gate, and he was opening the door of the cottage to the priest.
In those days the priest went around bringing Communion to the sick, with his gown flapping around his ankles and Holy Communion held high up in front of him in a kind of silver box.
‘The Eucharist. Not Communion,’ Markey corrected me when I mentioned it. ‘A pyx, that’s what that box is called.’
He had always loved unusual words and he had always loved putting me right. And typically, he didn’t say anything about whatever was wrong with his mother. He never did say anything about his home life.
Even when he grew up and the spots disappeared – even then, his eyes weren’t the intense grey they were now – though whenever I’d visualised him, I would begin with those grey eyes. But it was the skin around them that had actually changed, maybe from living over in Seattle where everyone is outdoors a lot. Somehow it had become a grainy, olive-brown.
The fact was, he was beautiful now.
‘Are you ready?’ He was practically pawing the ground. ‘If we don’t get going now, by the time we reach Canal we won’t be able to see across the street for traffic.’
He was turning away when he remembered his manners.
‘How’s Min?’
I didn’t answer for a moment. I couldn’t say that I’d ever known her to look at me with such comprehensive bitterness as she had when we’d passed, the morning before, a ragged queue of old ladies outside the dining room of the Sunshine Rest Home. Some of them propped in wheelchairs, and one of them calling ‘Mammy! Mammy!’ in a heartbroken voice as she stroked the wallpaper.
I couldn’t say that the last thing I’d said was ‘I’m sorry, Min’, and that she had looked at me as if she’d never seen me before and said nothing. What could she say? This was the same woman who a few nights before, after I burst into tears in front of the television at the sight of a row of little North Korean children with bloated stomachs and twig limbs, had strode across and changed channels, and had hissed at me, ‘People die, Madam! They die! Or they’re got rid of because there’s no use for them. Life is hard.’
I didn’t say how when I got into the car to leave the Home, I couldn’t drive because I was shaking so much. I wasn’t sure in the end that I’d done the right thing. The last few days before I left she not only didn’t go to the pub – she got up in the mornings and was out in the yard before I came down, putting new bedding plants in tins and old pots and in the hip bath that she was laboriously filling with soil that she stole in increments from the public park at the bus stop. She asked me did I want an egg for my breakfast? She was going to whitewash the coal shed, she said.
But even so…
People who drink fall, and they set themselves on fire, and they walk into traffic.
I’d left her sitting on her bed in the Sunshine, glowering at me. I’d been trying to help, when she went to the bathroom, by unpacking the bag she’d insisted on packing for herself. But digging into the chaos of it I came across something hard, and when I peeked into the foil I saw that she’d wrapped up some old pieces of toast from breakfast and a couple of greyish chicken legs from the fridge and a carton of yoghurt that was already leaking. I nearly wept. She must have been afraid there’d be no food.
I heard the toilet flush, and threw her things back into the bag. I didn’t want her to know that I knew. I emptied my wallet of all the money I had in it and left the pile of notes on the locker so that she’d have enough for anything she wanted. Then I told her I was sorry and somehow got out of there to the car.
‘Min’s fine, Markey,’ I told him instead. ‘Physically speaking, but she doesn’t look after herself. I solved the problem of coming over for this week by booking her into a kind of rest home. I think she’ll grow to like it.’
Should I return his polite enquiry? I didn’t actually know what his living arrangements were, but if I said something like, when he had to leave his home to go to booksellers’ conferences and so on, did he miss it? Wouldn’t that tell me? But maybe he’d only enquired after Min because he used to know her; that is to say, to know to come round to our house as seldom as possible, because she thoroughly disapproved of all the lending of books and going on walks he and I went in for. He wasn’t her idea of a boyfriend worth having, as she made crystal clear. She thought four years older than me was too old. She thought that we were poor but he was shamefully poor. And she thought – she said it so often, I was sick of hearing it – that he looked like something the cat dragged in.
But by heavens he didn’t any more. He looked unique: someone good-looking and confident and well dressed and at the same time someone who knew Kilbride. Everybody in Kilbride should come to America. Look at his nails. Look at his marvellous teeth. Look at the energetic way he was moving ahead of me holding himself straight. The men at home seemed to be perfectly content as they were, to put it mildly. Take, for example, Monty, who had spent his life playing golf and yet his tummy never got any smaller. It spilled over his waistband, while his bottom had migrated halfway down the back of his thighs. And Andy, though he ate like a horse, was so thin that we all said if he turned sideways you wouldn’t know where he was. And neither of them – no man, probably, in the whole of Ireland – would be caught dead wearing a long black coat with a kick pleat at the shoulders and a blue scarf made of something softer than cashmere and a fine black sweater and blue jeans and black loafers. And a hat! Oh my God, a wide, black hat! I hadn’t known a man who dressed like that since I lived in Italy. In my early thirties, I’d been – a good age for living in Italy.
There was a faint swathe of pale light in the charcoal-grey sky away to the left where the ocean must be. But it still felt like the dead of night in the street, apart from the faint dance music I’d thought I heard from behind the hoarding opposite the hotel.
‘It’s a hidden city,’ Markey was saying. ‘The old Manhattan. The meat market’s still hanging on – the streets and the buildings, anyway – but the fish market’s going soon. But just look at this’ – we’d reached Canal – ‘isn’t this just like the main street of a Russian merchant town if you raise your eyes? See the wooden storefronts, those windows and the shuttered cellars? Here’s a glimpse of the old commercial, immigrant city – not as good as the Lower East Side but as good as we’re going to manage in the time we have and still fit in Soho. See? Over there? Those buildings were warehouses. See the hoists? Those wonderful materials, granite, and cast-iron.’
You haven’t changed, Markey!’ I cried.
Then hearing myself, I added in silence – not changed? Are you kidding?
It was me who was the good-looking one, when we were young. Did he remember that? He used to walk with me as far as one of the other girl’s houses on a weekend night when I was going to a dance, in a cloud of whatever perfume the Pillar Department Store was giving free squirts of that week and a pencil skirt and a bra that yanked my breasts up to point at the sky, and all the while he’d be talking about Claudel or Robert Lowell or the urban models the planners had in mind when they rebuilt central Dublin after the 1916 Rising. I’d be tottering along in my stilettos. I should have been against high heels, since they’re a form of bondage, but even after feminism came and changed everything I continued to love it up there – where it felt sexy. Markey was just about the only part of my life that wasn’t twanging with the sexual. He’d turn away and go home to read, and me and my friends would go out on the town.
Which was where Min wanted me to be. She wanted me to work in the Pillar and go to dances and