Life Drawing for Beginners (10 page)

“Very nice,” she said, popping the tab on her can. “Get Pilar to roll up your sleeves, they’re getting wet.” Anyone with an ounce of common sense would have done that before the painting started.

Irene regarded the top of the au pair’s head as Emily’s sleeves were rolled to the elbow, as the spilled paint was cleared away. She couldn’t see why anyone who had hair as naturally dark as Pilar’s would imagine they could get away with going blonde.

“Next time you’re painting, please cover the table fully with newspaper,” she said before turning toward the door. Well aware, as she left the kitchen, that the atmosphere she left behind was considerably cooler than the one she’d walked into. Training in a new au pair was always such a thankless task.

“‘There was once a little boy,’” Jackie read, “‘whose name was Charlie.’”

“Charlie is a girl’s name,” Eoin said.

“Well, normally it’s a boy’s name. Anyway, ‘Charlie lived with—’”

“Why is it normally a boy’s name?”

She lowered the book. “Because Charlie is short for Charles, which is a boy’s name, but sometimes girls are called Charlie for short, if their name is Charlotte, or…Charlene, or something. Ask your friend at school if her name is short for something else, and I bet she says yes.” She waited for another question but none came. “Will I go on with the story?”

“Yeah.”

“‘Charlie lived with his mum and dad in a small yellow house.’”

“Charlie’s mum got lost.”

Jackie stopped again and looked at him. “Did she?” The first mention he’d made of Charlie’s mother.

“Yeah, a long time ago. Everybody looked for her, but nobody could find her.”

“Oh…that’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Got lost” sounded like a peculiar way to explain death to a child—wasn’t it a bit odd, didn’t it leave the possibility open in the child’s mind that the mother might suddenly reappear someday?

“I said my dad is in heaven,” Eoin added, “so maybe her mum went there.”

“Yes, maybe,” Jackie said quickly. “Let’s get on with the story, will we?”

What else could she have said when he’d asked about his father? It had seemed the simplest explanation—although she wondered what she’d do in years to come if he decided he wanted to look up his father’s family. She’d deal with that when it happened.

“Can Charlie come to our house to play?”

“Of course she can, as soon as I meet her dad.”

Charlie was always in the classroom by the time they arrived—​Jackie dropped Eoin to school on her way to work at the boutique, and they usually made it by the skin of their teeth. Jackie’s mother collected Eoin after school every day except Thursday, Jackie’s day off.

But there was never any sign of the father on Thursday afternoons either—not that Jackie had been actively looking for him up to this. She supposed she’d have to make it her business to make contact with him if Eoin insisted on his new friend coming to play.

“Next time I collect you,” she promised. “I’ll talk to her dad then. If he comes before I get there, ask him to hang on.”

But Eoin shook his head. “He doesn’t come at home time—​she goes to Little Rascals.”

“Oh.”

She’d have to think of another way to track down the elusive father. Maybe she could ask the teacher to deliver a message, or at least pass on Jackie’s phone number so he could make contact. Arranging her son’s social calendar wasn’t proving too straightforward.

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Grossman next week,” she said, raising the book again. “We’ll figure something out. Now come on, or we’ll never get this done.”

They finished the story and she kissed him good night and went downstairs, leaving his bedroom door ajar and the landing light on. In the sitting room her parents were watching the news. Jackie sat next to her mother and thought about the good-​looking man from the art class again.

She wondered what job he had. He’d been well dressed in the street: Maybe he worked in an office of some kind. He probably had a partner. Most people had found someone by the time they got to his age, which she guessed was somewhere in his late thirties or early forties.

They had yet to exchange a single word, and he’d seen Jackie fully undressed. How strange was that? Before the life drawing class she’d shown her naked body to exactly three men, and they’d all been similarly undressed at the time. And she’d had some degree of interaction with each of them before they’d taken off their clothes.

The first had been a boy she’d met at fifteen, the brother of a girl in her class, who’d walked her home from a teenage disco and become her first proper boyfriend. They’d deflowered each other when Jackie had been sixteen, late one night in the shed at the bottom of his parents’ garden.

The experience had been both embarrassing and painful for Jackie, and on the two occasions they’d repeated it, there had been no significant improvement. Shortly afterwards he’d ended the relationship, and she’d done her best to hide her relief.

Eoin’s father had followed, the summer she was seventeen, an encounter she could barely remember, and whose consequence understandably caused her to lose her taste for men for some time afterwards. When Eoin was three she met another man on a night out with some friends, who charmed her into his bed after a few dates, and dropped her abruptly after a few more.

Three men, a handful of sexual encounters: She was hardly what you’d call experienced in that area. Ironic, when people who heard she’d become a single mother at eighteen probably assumed she was jumping into bed with men every night of the week. In fact, the man at the art class was the first man to interest her in a long time. And chances were he was happily married.

But maybe he wasn’t.

S
he’s definitely got some Yorkshire terrier in her,” the vet told Audrey, scratching the top of Dolly’s head. “She’s crossed with another small breed, possibly a Maltese or something similar. I can’t be sure without talking to the original owner. Where did you get her?”

Audrey named the pet shop.

“Ah yes,” the vet said. “Michael Browne.”

“Does Michael Browne have a beard and glasses?” Audrey asked.

“He does.”

Audrey waited, but no further comment was made. Either the vet had only met Michael Browne on a good day, or he was being extremely diplomatic.

“Dolly is very lively,” she told him. “I find her quite hard to manage.”

The vet nodded. “You’ll need lots of patience. House-training is a slow job, unfortunately. But don’t be afraid to be firm when she does something that’s not on. A smack on the nose, or on the rear end, won’t do her a bit of harm, and it’ll give her something to think about.”

“Oh.” Audrey doubted that she could find it in her to smack Dolly, however much she might deserve it.

“You probably find that she chews things,” the vet went on.

Audrey nodded. “Everything.”

“Get her a rubber bone; that’ll keep her distracted. Some people recommend an old slipper, but I feel that just gives them the idea that all slippers are chewable. Michael will have rubber bones.”

“Right.” One of Audrey’s old slippers would do fine, if it meant avoiding a visit to the pet shop.

The vet lifted Dolly’s head and examined her teeth. “She’s about twelve or thirteen weeks old, I’d say—again, hard to be accurate without talking to the owner. Did Michael tell you whether she’s been vaccinated?”

“No, and I forgot to ask. But even if she has, would it do her any harm to get another dose?”

The vet made a face. “Not a good idea—I’d need to know if she’s been started on a course, otherwise it’s very hit-and-miss. Could you call back to the pet shop and ask Michael?”

Audrey’s heart sank. Was there a conspiracy afoot to get her to revisit that man’s premises? “I suppose I could…” she said doubtfully.

The vet smiled. “His bark is worse than his bite, you know.”

Audrey looked unconvinced. “His bark is bad enough.”

It was the last thing she wanted. The prospect of coming face-to-face with him again was unpalatable in the extreme, but he was the only person who might have information about Dolly’s vaccinations, so it looked like a return visit was unavoidable. Was she never to be rid of him?

She’d go on Monday, on her way home from school. And as long as she was going back, she’d pick up a pet carrier, and a rubber bone. Much as she hated giving him any more business, they would make life considerably easier.

Saturdays were always good, she didn’t know why. Maybe the supermarket did a special clear-out on Saturdays. She lifted the lid of the Dumpster and waved the smell away with her hand as she ran her eye quickly over the tumble of boxes and packets and bags inside. She pulled out a tray of dates, a few cartons of yogurt, sandwiches wrapped in plastic, a packet of cheese slices, and a box of jellies. There were trays of kiwi fruit but she couldn’t reach them, and some tomatoes but they had furry stuff growing on them.

“Is there crisps?”

“No,” she said, “no crisps.” He’d live on crisps if she let him.

She stuffed most of the food into the plastic bag she’d used so much the writing had all come off the front of it. She opened the tray of dates and handed one to Barry. “Try this, it’s nice.”

They had no way of cooking, so the only hot food he got was if they went to a chip shop. She didn’t know what they’d do when the weather got colder and he was eating mostly cold food. And would they even survive a frosty night in that shed? She was scared all the time of being in charge of Barry with nobody to ask when she didn’t know something.

She tried to give him different food to eat so he’d have a mix of good and bad. She remembered the dinners Granny used to cook for them, bacon and cabbage with white sauce, stews full of different vegetables, roast chicken sometimes on Sundays, although everyone fought over the legs.

Barry began to make a funny noise. She looked down and saw that his face had gone bright red, and was all screwed up.

“
Jesus
—” She reached a finger back into his throat and yanked out the date stone and threw it away. He retched and brought up a small amount of brown mush.

“Sorry,” she said, wiping his mouth with her sleeve. “I forgot about the stone. Are you all right?”

“I don’t like them things,” he whispered, his eyes wet from the choking. “I want crisps.”

Carmel hugged him tightly, her heart going wild. “Okay,” she said. “Come on, we’ll get crisps.”

“Can I get my hair dyed?” Charlie asked.

“Sure,” James replied. “How about blue?”

She didn’t laugh, like he’d been expecting. “No, I want purple.”

He stopped and looked at her. “You’re serious.”

“’Course I am. Loads of people dye their hair.”

He resumed walking. “Not at your age they don’t. When you’re grown up, you can dye it whatever color you like.”

She sighed dramatically. He wondered what she’d be like at thirteen if she was beginning to show diva tendencies at six. Up ahead he spotted the hairdressing salon—and walking into the sandwich bar on the far side of it was a woman he knew but couldn’t place. Dark hair, a phone clamped to her ear as she pushed open the door.

Who was she? And then he realized, and laughed softly. He hadn’t recognized her with her clothes on.

“What?”

“Just saw someone I knew,” he told Charlie. “Someone from the drawing class.” They reached the salon and he ushered her inside.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s make you look like a beautiful princess.”

“
Daddy
.” But she smiled.

I
t took a minute or two for the crying to register. Irene lowered her magazine and scanned the crowded playground, but didn’t see her daughter. She got to her feet, frowning—and just then Emily appeared from behind the slide, still wailing, holding the hand of a skinny teenage girl who was leading her towards Irene’s bench. A little towheaded boy trotted behind them, his eyes fixed on Emily.

Irene sat down again. When the trio got closer, she saw the blood on her daughter’s knee. She laid her magazine on the bench and opened her bag and pulled out a travel pack of wipes, regretting her choice of cream jeans for the trip to the park.

When she reached her mother, Emily set up a fresh burst of sobbing. Irene hoisted her onto the bench. “Silly old thing—​what have you done?”

“She fell off the ladder,” the teenager said. “Her foot slipped.” Her voice was flat, no inflection in the words. Her face was pale, her black top rumpled. A good wash wouldn’t go astray. Close up, she also looked older than Irene’s original estimate. Twenty, or thereabouts.

Irene pulled a wipe from the pack and dabbed at the cut, keeping the bloody knee and the cream jeans as far apart as possible. She was conscious of the woman’s eyes on her, and of her handbag sitting on the bench within easy reach.

“Thanks for bringing her over,” Irene said. “She’ll be fine now.”

They remained standing there, both of them watching the proceedings mutely. Irene wondered if one of them was going to make a lunge for the handbag. Maybe the boy was being trained, like one of Fagin’s pickpockets.

Emily winced as her mother worked. “Ow, you’re
hurting
me.”

“Keep still then,” Irene said, gripping the leg firmly by the ankle. “You need to be brave, I have to clean it.”

She felt irritated by the continued presence of the others. Maybe they weren’t thieves, maybe they were waiting instead for some kind of reward.

“I could look after her,” the woman said suddenly. “If you wanted someone, I mean. I’m lookin’ for a job, and I have my own child.” Indicating the boy, who promptly stuck his thumb in his mouth and pressed closer to her side. “They were playin’ together when it happened,” she said.

Emily, playing with that ragamuffin. Irene would have to keep a closer eye on her in future. She pulled another wipe from the pack and dabbed at the cut again. “Thanks,” she repeated, “but I already have someone.”

When the woman still didn’t move away, Irene reached for her bag and rummaged in it until she found a fiver. “Here,” she said, “I appreciate your help.” Tucking the bag casually between her feet as she smiled brightly at them.

For a second she thought the money wasn’t going to be accepted. A beat passed before the woman put out her hand.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, slipping the note quickly into the pocket of her jeans. She turned, grabbing the boy’s hand. When they had gone about ten paces he looked back at Emily, but the woman immediately pulled him around again.

Talk about optimistic. Irene would want to be pretty desperate to employ someone like her to look after Emily. Much as Pilar irritated her, with her sloppy timekeeping and careless cleaning—​deliberately misunderstanding the instructions half the time, no doubt—Irene had to concede that Emily was in safe hands when she was with the au pair. And Pilar was always fairly well turned out, even if she could use a bit more deodorant at times.

But this woman had definitely been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, in her grubby clothes and those dead eyes. Imagine the accent Emily would have after a week with her. Irene wouldn’t be surprised if she was on drugs, she looked the type. And the boy, with that blank, half-witted stare—for all Irene knew he could have pushed Emily off the ladder, just so they could claim some reward.

Compared with them, Pilar was practically a saint.

“Right,” Irene said, packing away the wipes, “let’s go home and put you into the bath.”

“I want Smarties,” Emily said, sniffing.

“Well, you certainly won’t get them if you ask like that.”

She’d never pretended, she’d always been honest about not wanting children. Martin had known where she stood before he’d married her; she’d never lied to him. He’d probably been convinced that he’d change her mind somewhere along the way, but Irene had known it would never happen. She hadn’t a maternal bone in her body.

It had been nobody’s fault when the contraceptive hadn’t worked. Her first instinct had been to have an abortion, but she hadn’t bargained for Martin’s persistence: He’d worn her down with his pleading and his promises of full-time nannies, and because Irene loved him, she’d finally given in. She’d been sick all the way through her pregnancy, as if her body was confirming what her mind had always insisted—she wasn’t designed for motherhood.

She’d endured twenty hours of labor, sixteen without an epidural, despite her screams. And the baby, when it was finally placed in her arms, looked exactly like an aunt Irene had never gotten on with. She’d regarded her new daughter and felt precisely nothing, apart from an overwhelming urge to sleep.

It had taken months of crunches and lettuce leaves for her abs to recover fully. The nanny that Martin had promised had turned into six different nannies by the time Emily was three—for reasons Irene couldn’t fathom none had stayed longer than a few months, and one had walked out after three days.

In between nannies, Martin was the one who stayed at home while Irene went to work. It made perfect sense: He was the boss, he could easily delegate, whereas Irene would have gone mad stuck in the house with a small child all day.

And now they had Pilar, who’d been with them for just three weeks, and who was already irritating the hell out of Irene.

“My knee hurts,” Emily whimpered as she slid off the bench.

“It’ll get better,” Irene replied, slinging her bag onto her shoulder.

Michael didn’t often visit the park. The manicured lawns and ordered flower beds held little attraction for him—he preferred his nature wild—and the ubiquitous evidence of dogs whose owners couldn’t be bothered to clean up after them, despite prominently posted reminders, was profoundly depressing. Further proof, not that he needed it, of the innate selfishness of the human race.

But walking home from the graveyard earlier he’d felt an uncharacteristic reluctance to return to his empty, silent house, so on impulse he’d turned in the park gates and claimed a bench that was far enough away from the play area for the shrieks of children not to irritate. He determined to sit and enjoy the sunshine, and banish the gloomy thoughts that had dogged him lately.

Easier said than done. Every woman who passed with a small child—and who’d have guessed how many of them were in Carrickbawn?—reminded him of the girl’s departure in tears from the shop four days previously. And try as he might, he hadn’t been able to get them out of his head since then, hadn’t been able to stop the doubts from tormenting him.

Had he done the right thing, sending them packing? What if she’d been telling the truth, and the boy was indeed Ethan’s? Had Michael turned his back on his own grandson?

Oh, he had all the arguments to justify his actions. She was a drug dealer, she’d admitted that. How could he trust anything she said? He’d seen what drugs did to people, how they wiped away decency and left cunning and dishonesty in its place. He’d done what he felt to be the right thing: Why couldn’t he leave it at that?

His throat was dry. He was too hot, his clothes all wrong for this unseasonable weather. The last day of September and everyone wilting in the heat. The climate had certainly gone haywire. He thought longingly of a glass of ice-cold beer, or even ice-cold water. He became aware of a repeated yapping somewhere to his left, and he turned, frowning, to see what animal was responsible.

She sat two benches away, the little dog attached to her wrist by a red leather leash, and she ate an ice cream cone. Michael couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a cone. He watched her lips closing over the soft whiteness of it, and he imagined the cold, creamy taste in his own mouth, slipping down his throat, cooling deliciously as it went.

He watched her licking the drips from her fingers as the little dog pawed at her skirt and attempted to scramble, still yapping, onto her lap. Yes, a handful, by the looks of it. Hardly surprising that she’d come back to the shop asking for his advice.

He’d been a bit short with her, he acknowledged it. She’d caught him at a bad time, arriving just as he was throwing the other two out. Probably had him pegged as a cranky old so-and-so—which of course he was.

She seemed oblivious to the dog’s demands for attention. She was totally taken up with the ice cream, and clearly enjoying it. There was something oddly appealing in her complete abandonment to the sensory pleasure the food was affording her. She ate with the greedy preoccupation of a small child, everything else forgotten.

The sweat trickled down Michael’s back. The sun blazed on his face, but he was mesmerized by the scene in front of him. He watched her tipping back her head to bite off the end of the cone, and he remembered doing the same as a boy, sucking out the soft ice cream that was lodged inside, pulling it down into his mouth.

When the cone was gone, she licked the ends of each of her fingers again before rummaging in the red canvas bag that sat beside her on the bench. She pulled out a tissue and wiped her hands and dabbed at her mouth. She wore a white skirt that was splashed with giant blobs of scarlet and purple and bright blue, and a loose, flowing yellow top whose sleeves ended at her elbows.

Her face, what he could see of it, was pink with warmth. He liked to see naturally rosy cheeks, far nicer than some paint that had come out of a pot. When would women learn to leave their faces alone?

She bent and murmured something to the little dog, whose yaps increased in volume and whose tail immediately began to wag vigorously. As she got to her feet Michael ducked his head and pretended to be tying a shoelace, but when he heard no sound of their approach he glanced up and saw her walking off in the opposite direction, the little dog straining at the leash as she attempted to cross the grass towards a flower bed. Michael heard her owner say a sharp “
No
.”

When they were no longer in sight he rose from his bench and made his way to the little kiosk by the park’s main gate, and he bought an ice cream cone for the first time in years.

It tasted wonderful.

Pilar reached across the table for the bowl of Parmesan cheese, her sleeve narrowly avoiding contact with Anton’s plate of food. “My boss is crazy woman,” she said.

Zarek twirled spaghetti around his fork and thought of the small boy who’d come into the café a few days before with a girl who looked too young to be his mother, but who probably was. Such a pinched little face he’d had, so pale and lost looking, not responding in the least to the smile Zarek had given him.

“You know what she say me?” Pilar demanded, sprinkling cheese liberally over her Bolognese sauce. “She say I must clean toilets every day—
pah
!”

And the girl had been pathetic too, in her shabby clothes and with eyes too old for her face. Zarek had known, handing her the job application form, that there was little chance of someone with her appearance being taken on by Sylvia.

“Cleaning toilets every day is waste,” Pilar declared crossly. “We clean one time in week, and our toilet is okay, yes? One clean on Saturday, we are okay, yes?”

The two of them had still been sitting there when Zarek’s shift had ended at seven, their single portion of chips long since eaten, the girl’s newly washed hair drying slowly. He wondered how much longer they’d stayed, and where they’d gone afterwards. If she had to wash her hair in a café toilet, what kind of accommodation could they possibly have?

“I not understand,” Pilar said, “how stupid woman is mama to beautiful little girl. But she is not good mama, she is very bad mama. The papa, he look after Emily, not the mama.”

Zarek thought the girl in the café cared about the little boy. He’d seen the way she’d watched him as he’d eaten the chips she’d bought, how she’d hardly taken any herself, although she’d looked hungry enough to Zarek. He hoped the cardboard box of chips hadn’t been their only meal of the day.

“
Zarek
.”

He pulled himself back to the present. Pilar was frowning at him.

“I ask if you want bathroom later,” she said. “I need bath for one hour.”

“Please,” Zarek said, “remain in bath as long you like. Two hour if you want.”

“Is good for skin,” Anton added, “to remain in bath for two hour.”