Dancing in the Dark (20 page)

‘Callipygian?'

‘Beautiful-buttocked.'

‘If this were a Doris Day movie, that would be my cue to slap your face.'

‘If this were a Doris Day movie, the word “buttock” would have been censored. You should be flattered; it's one of the attributes of Aphrodite.'

‘Consider me flattered. And for the record, I am not drooling.'

‘Drooling is in the eye of the beholder,' he says.

I laugh. I feel entirely at ease even though I hardly know him. Fergus demands nothing from me. Not yet, at least, though I suspect he may later.

‘You're looking very pretty.' He gazes at me with an expression on his face that I can only describe as hopeful. But I'm here to try and sort myself out, calm myself down. I've made my intentions perfectly clear. I'm paying my half of this holiday; I don't owe him a thing.

Of course I know that's not true. This place alone, I owe him that. And the peace which is dropping over me, the perfumed air, the shimmering sea below us, all that is a debt – but I do not intend to repay it with my body.

‘There's a garden I want to go and see,' I say quickly. ‘On the other side of the island. One of these days, while you're working, I thought I might hire a car, drive over and look round.'

His face droops and I feel mean, knowing he would like to come with me. But we've established the ground rules and we ought to abide by them.

Later, we put together a meal from the contents of the fridge and the stone-shelved larder. Fergus lights the barbecue. I find rosemary growing wild on the rocky slope outside the kitchen, and thyme. We sit out on the terrace and watch the mysterious movement of the sea. There are long candles in glass shades, another bottle of wine,
yoladze dolmas
out of a tin. The covered bowl pointed out during Maria's introductory tour proves to contain a rich green soup whose ingredients we can't figure out, though I recognize fennel in there, and dandelion leaves. We eat fresh tomatoes sliced and seasoned with coarse salt, dribbled with green oil. We grill a piece of anonymous white fish on the barbecue, with rosemary, thyme, garlic. Above our heads, little purple grapes cluster among vine leaves.

‘Maria was saying her husband caught this fish for us this morning.' Fergus lifts a forkful to his mouth and chews it with relish.

‘But you don't speak Greek.'

‘I know.'

‘So she could equally have been saying that she's read all your books and loathes them.'

‘Or that the fish is part of a fertility rite which has to be completed by sundown.'

‘Or even that it belongs to the family cat.'

‘Which hasn't yet – supposing it even exists – put in an appearance. It's the early cat that catches the fish – and we got here first.'

Some of my blood has been replaced by wine, and I'm enjoying the feeling. The smell of rosemary drifts from the barbecue and as the wind turns, we briefly hear Elvis belting out ‘You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog'.

‘I know the two of us are acting as separate entities,' Fergus says. ‘I know we are not in any way bound by the fact that we are here together, sitting across a table from each other, grown fat on the cat's supper, having gazed upon the wine when it was red and also when it was white but . . .'

‘What's your point?'

‘Tell me about your father.'

My father suddenly seems irrelevant. ‘Do I have to?'

‘Sooner or later, yes, so why not now?'

‘The thing is . . .' I hesitate. Where to begin? How much should I tell this man who seems able to prise secrets from me as though he were opening oysters?

‘Is your presence here something to do with him?'

I reflect on this. ‘Yes,' I say carefully. If James Bellamy hadn't arrived to destroy my illusions, I probably wouldn't be here now. ‘I think it is.'

‘You said you thought he'd died,' prompts Fergus.

‘That's what my mother always told me. And then I discovered . . .' I explain about the portrait of Thomas Bellamy. ‘And suddenly I feel as if my foundations have gone and I shan't be able to function until I know the truth.'

‘Can't you ask your mother?'

‘I have. And she won't tell me. Says I'm being unreasonable. Says I don't need to know.'

‘But you do.'

I am vinously eloquent. I gesture into the firefly-studded night. ‘Is it unreasonable,' I demand, ‘to want to know more about the blood which flows in my veins, the genes which have been handed down, the lines of my story which stretch back to grandparents and great-grandparents? I can't see it. None of us exists in isolation, but my mother has wished exactly that kind of isolation on me.'

‘She seems fairly unusual, your mother.'

‘She is.' I look towards the town and the lights of some nightclub flashing a hectic blue in the darkness. ‘Come to think of it, I don't know much about her either, beyond a few details.'

‘Such as?'

‘Her own mother died when she was quite young. Her father left her to be brought up by a housekeeper, before shunting her off to a series of boarding schools from which she was expelled for “inappropriate behaviour”.'

‘Like what?'

‘I've never found out. She's never been receptive to personal questions. Most of what I know I've gleaned from Terry Cartwright. They met at school in Canterbury. She's a dancer, maybe even a choreographer now. That's almost everything I know about her. Not much, is it?'

‘Not a lot.'

‘I don't have a close relationship with her,' I say.

‘I gathered that.'

‘I used to. I used to love her . . . oh, God, so much. We used to be absolutely inseparable.'

‘What happened?'

‘When I was eleven, she sent me off to boarding school.'

‘That's not so terrible, is it? Lots of middle-class parents do the same, especially if they're moving around a bit.'

‘There was much more to it than that.' Why is it all still so sharply painful? ‘She . . . she just completely dropped out of my life. Disappeared.'

Fergus sits forward. ‘Why would she do that?'

‘That's just it . . . I don't know. I lived with the Cartwrights; to all intents and purposes, they became my family, but they didn't know where she was either.'

He frowns at me, considering. ‘Could she have been in prison?'

‘I've thought of that, but it doesn't seem very likely. What for, anyway? I mean, ten years? That's practically a life sentence, isn't it? She can't have
killed
someone.'

‘Could she have been running away from some threat?'

‘Ye-e-es . . .' I say slowly. I remember her insane notions about spiders and fire-setters. ‘Maybe that's what it was.' My languid mood is dissipating. I'm starting to panic again. I drop my shoulders, breathe in deeply, try for calm. That man in the black suit: was it him she was running from? Was he a policeman, a private detective tracking her down? Had all her paranoia, our constant moving from place to place, been due to some crime she'd committed? ‘Trouble is, if she goes on refusing to tell me anything, how will I ever find out?'

‘Let's think about it while we're here.'

Her head droops and he wants to hold her, support her. Sad Theodora, fatherless, motherless. He knows about all of that, both of them orphans of the storm. Perhaps Grace Fargo is an orphan too, her husband all she has, which explains her long trek to find him in the Mexican jungle.

His own father, the whole grisly business of his mother's slow disintegration as her body putrefied from the inside out. Never spoken of, except the one wretched and retching time, to Carolyn. It pulses inside him now, a boil, an abscess.

‘At least you still have her. I had to watch my mother die,' he says suddenly, launched upon a sea of troubles before he can think too hard about where he might land.

‘What did she die of?'

‘Bowel cancer.'

‘Horrible, horrible.'

‘My brother and I had to nurse her. I was eight, he was six.' Just to think of it set his teeth on edge. Jesus, the stink of her rotting flesh and the slime on the sheet under her wasted buttocks, the shame he felt at such thoughts, this was his
mother
, and the two boys trying to clear up the vile mess and make her a little less uncomfortable, the father worse than useless, leaving them to it, leaving them memories which would sour the rest of the future.

Her eyes are round with horror. ‘Wasn't there an adult, a doctor? A hospital? Someone you could ask for help?'

‘We didn't know any better. Thought it was what we had to do. How would we know where to ask? Besides, our father was still in the house; no one realized we needed help.'

‘A neighbour? School teachers?'

‘Looking back, I can see that help must have been around. But we'd learned not to talk about our home life.'
If you tell, you'll go to hell,
whether it was a priest's probing fingers or a mother's cruel dying.

‘What about your father now?'

‘He still lives somewhere in Dublin. I've no reason to think the old soak is dead yet.' He picks up a fish bone, marlin bone,
those are pearls that were his eyes
. ‘I'll tell you what the truly terrible thing about it was, the real killer of it all. Just after I'd buried Brendan – that's my brother – my first book was published, with the usual inflated releases about the big advances I was getting. You wouldn't believe it, but my father had the gall to get in touch, saying he always knew I'd do well and could I give him the loan of a tenner.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Wrapped twenty quid round a lump of dog shit and sent it to him.'

‘Seriously?'

‘God's honest truth.' Fergus grimaces. ‘I'm not proud of that.' The thyme they'd cooked with is on his tongue, wine is in his nostrils. The moon is higher in the sky now, and smaller.

‘When did you last see him?'

‘Four or five years ago.'

‘Don't you want to find out how he is?'

‘He'll be drinking himself into a pauper's grave. If he hasn't already done so.'

‘All the same, it would bother me not to be sure.' She's thinking of her own non-existent father. ‘Have you ever written about it?'

A sad cadence of the heart. Brendan . . . ‘That's the book I don't want to write.'

‘Maybe it's the book you
ought
to write.'

‘I've left the past behind me.'

Small etch of lines between her heavy brows. Arctic eyes full of pity, which he doesn't want from her. From anyone. Pity in the eyes of the neighbours who finally offered help, pity in the face of the doctors and the undertakers, pity from the social workers. But none from the Brothers, the holy fathers, which was when he first understood what he and Brendan were up against.

‘That's nonsense,' she's saying and how right she is. ‘You know it is. How can you leave the past behind, when it's always there, when it shaped you? You are the past as much as the present, like it or not.'

‘I know.' He can't write about Brendan, won't
use
him like that. Besides, emotional self-flagellation is always suspect. When the time comes, maybe, but it won't be yet, not while there's unfinished, maybe unfinishable, business still to be dealt with.

Absorb it. Let it become part of you. As if he hasn't tried to do that already.

‘I thought I'd had a hard time,' Theodora says, leaning across the table to touch his arm with her rough gardener's hands. ‘But it was nothing like you. What happened after . . . after your mother died?'

‘Our father dispatched us to an orphanage run by the so-called Christian Brothers.' Face darkening, crow-black, bible-black, cassock-black. ‘The only thing Christian about them was the fact that they hadn't been circumcised. They were liars, hypocrites, sadists, perverts . . . They nearly killed us both.' Breaking off, breath coming faster, fury like a steam engine boiling. Swallowing the thick black phlegm of hatred. ‘They
did
kill Brendan.'

‘Your brother? Oh, Fergus, how?'

‘Me, they just thrashed the bejasus out of. Brendan was more unfortunate – he was pretty.'

‘I don't understand.'

Her childhood less fraught. Emotional abuse, maybe, but not physical. Which is worse? He takes her hand in his. Wounds bandaged by dreams. Clinging to the wreckage on the stormy seas of the past. Rugged hands, remnants of gardens under her fingernails, calluses on the palm, sees her digging, thrusting the spade in among the beetles and worm-trails, men have died and worms have eaten them. Squeezes the green fingers, feels the sprout of seedlings in them, the potpourri of roses, the plump of peaches.

‘Basically, they buggered the poor little sod to death. Not literally – he got out of there alive, more or less. Went on the streets for a bit, sold himself where he could – it was all they'd taught him – got into drugs. Last time I saw him, he was lying dead on a pile of newspapers in some filthy squat in Ballymun. OD'd on heroin, so thin I could count his ribs.' His mouth a bitter curve. ‘A bag of bones. A bodybag of bones.'

‘Poor, poor Brendan.'

‘Poor all of us. The human condition, what a crock.' Shrug. Reach for the wine. Drown your sorrows, except there can't be too much of that, not with the father an exemplar,
there's
an unexamined life, all right. As she's said, we're all weighted down with the past, the trick is to organize a life where the baggage becomes lightweight. ‘I'm sorry, Theodora. I had no intention of burdening you with my life story.'

Her face is smooth. ‘I'm not burdened, Fergus.'

But I am, of course. In my bedroom, two doors away from his, I undress slowly, wondering whether it is possible to unload the past or whether we are doomed to carry it forever on our shoulder. A small black spider hurries across my pillow and I flick it away, remembering the way my proud, courageous mother had stood, white and shaken, looking down at another spider. Why have I been so unforgiving? So many times I've envisaged myself taking care of her, but it was always for some neatly-broken ankle or dislocated shoulder, never for the messiness of mental breakdown.