Meatloaf in Manhattan (11 page)

Up on the hill, sitting in Synge's chair was Siobhan. She was holding a huge quill pen in her left hand. ‘Since love's argument was first on foot,' she said and then frantically scribbled some lines in a huge ledger book spread on her lap.

It was the next day that my world stopped dead. Jo and Ann-Maree and Dot had headed off after breakfast. It was an exceptionally beautiful morning. The clouds had peeled off in the night and the sky was a blue that captures your gaze. I'd taken a cheese sandwich and an apple and headed up the hill. By the time I made it to the cliffs the air was warm and the sea was calm. After a long leisurely walk I arrived at my favourite spot and sat in the big stone chair, content and at ease with the world. I ate my lunch and turned my face to the welcome warmth of the sun. I must have dozed off for the next thing I knew Christina was standing beside me gently shaking my arm. Rubbing my eyes to make sure I wasn't dreaming I looked up to see the worried expression on her face.

‘You must come back to the house. Now,' she said, pleading, beckoning me to follow.

Ann-Maree was in the parlour. She'd been crying. Dot was lying on the floor asleep.

‘We were playing,' she said, ‘by the caves. Jo said he heard her calling him. The Green Lady. He'd said it before. But before, we always laughed. Like we weren't scared. But this time he didn't laugh. Just said she was calling him to come. Then I slipped on the rocks. When I looked up again he was gone. I went into the cave, but it was so dark. I tried. I promise. I did,' she sobbed. ‘I did try and I called for him, and called for him, but it was dark and the water was getting deeper.'

Each day I sit in the chair, often for hour upon hour. I'll sit and stare at the sea or else I'll read the books I love, mostly about the sea
. Moby Dick, The Waves, The Old Man and the Sea:
that kind of thing. I bought the house. The one Synge used to stay in. It was a bit run down and lacked amenity. The young Mac Donnchadha was cook-a-hoop that someone was foolish
enough to take it over. The few thousand pounds I paid was plenty enough to get him to New York and to give him a head start in the life of his dreams. I patched the house up, but not so much. I like the idea of it being much the same as back then, and it's sturdy enough to keep out most of the weather. Siobhan came over as soon as she heard the news. They sent in divers, deep into the caves. But they found nothing. There were so many currents, they said, a body would soon be swept far out to sea. We grew closer, as only grieving parents can. She'd had her first break, a one-act play in an edgy theatre in Greenwich Village that was getting her noticed. She stayed on the island for two months, first with Christina and then, after the inquest was over and done, with its open verdict (‘most likely drowned at sea'), she spent three days with me at Synge's house
.

On the night before she left for the mainland and her flight back across the Atlantic we lay together in my four-poster that I'd found in the cellar. The wind whistled around us as we talked of the past and the future. I told her of my plans to stay on the island, to make some kind of a living out of it. I think she liked the bohemian I was becoming, what with my long hair and beard and ramshackle house and daytimes sitting in a chair on a cliff reading Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. She joked that I would become the oddity that tourists talked of and wrote home about. Maybe that's why we ended up making love that night. And maybe that's why not once did she stop mid-kiss and tell me she had to jot down an idea or a note
.

We send each other postcards and I know we'll always keep in touch. That's Jo's gift to us. The gift of this island. I've thought about taking up writing myself. I even have a title. Something Jo said the last night I ever saw him, the last night I put him to
bed. We were talking about our day. He told me how Ann-Maree had taken him to the Clochán na Carraige, a beehive hut that was circular on the outside, but rectangular inside
.

When it was my turn I described my usual routine of making stone structures and then sitting in the big chair to gaze out over the Atlantic. That very last night, just before he asked me when would mum be coming home (his usual night-time question), and just as he was dropping off to sleep, he turned to me, and in a whispered voice said, ‘Do you think the Green Lady ever sat in Synge's chair?'

ZORRO THE CHESS MASTER

Most people only remember one thing about Zachariah Zawadzki. But for me there are three. First, he had the craziest name of all us kids and I was the first to call him Zorro on account of all the zeds. Second, he taught me to play chess, just like his mad Uncle Pawel from Krakow had taught him. Third, and this is what most people know, his father tried to kill his mother.

The papers said Mr Z hit his wife with a hammer and stabbed her with a pruning knife. Many times; many wounds. I can't recall quite how many, but it seemed to have been more than enough. He was a gardener in a dark place called Highgate Woods. The picture in the newspaper showed him standing in front of some trees. Anyone could see from the photo that he was a quiet man. He had thick, round glasses and an expression on his face of mild confusion and slight surprise.

Before all this happened I used to visit Zorro's house on Saturday afternoons. I'd watch his dad eat fish and chips, though he never paid any attention to me. He never said much, not to anyone. But Zorro's mother was different, I sensed that, even though I was only about six or seven years old. She slept on a bed in the parlour, especially built so that her feet were raised above her head. Zorro said it had something to do with her back. People did that sort of thing in those days. Keeping their feet above their heads for their back. Just like taking to bed to help with their nerves. When she was up she'd walk around in a silky slip, with her long dark hair tousled and wild, her eyes caked in jet black mascara. She'd slam doors, complain about the house and the heat and how useless her husband was. Like ‘tits on a bull' I remember her saying once. I'd wanted to laugh, but sensed it might be unwise.

It was a hot day when her husband, still quiet and without answering her back, or shouting, or anything like that, went to the cupboard under the stairs, took out the knife and the hammer and proceeded to try to kill her up and down the passageway. She tumbled and stumbled out into the street, to be met by the postman on his rounds as she rolled down the steps from the front door, all bloodied and screeching.

In court, Mr Josef Zawadzki's defence was that he had no recollection of the events. He sat head bowed, saying little, even when asked questions where silence might imply guilt. His lawyer did all the talking, telling the jury that his wife had goaded him for years for his impotence and his lowly status in life. She had flaunted a number of affairs with men in the area: the insurance collector, the station-master, the pet-shop owner, to name but three. He got two years in prison for attempted manslaughter with diminished responsibility and I never saw him in the street again.

Mrs Z wore bandages around her head like a cancer patient and sometime later took off with Zorro to somewhere else. I reckon she must have told him to say nothing about their plans, or maybe she just upped and whisked him away. He would have turned up in a new place with his mother, to start all over again, with a different past to tell. Zorro must have had to keep a lot of secrets.

So the boy who showed me how to play chess disappeared never to return. I was only a young kid and didn't yet understand that people come and go in life. He left his mark though, by engraving a huge Z on the lamppost down by the alleyway. It stayed there for decades after, the deep imprint covered over by layer after layer of corporation paint.

I loved chess from the very first minute and for that I have Zorro to thank. The feel of the pieces: classical Staunton, always Staunton, just like in world championships. Tal. Fischer. Kasparov. Carlsen. A ‘wood pusher' I would become, as an old Texan said to me when, many years later, I entered a simultaneous match against an international master.

Zorro taught me chess in his garden shed. I can still smell the oil and the remnants of grass on the lawn mower. Maybe that's why I love the scent of cut grass so. Zorro was about five years older than me and I remember my parents worrying that I was spending time with a bigger boy. Once he got me to take off all my clothes in his bedroom. He had his Zorro mask on, which made him look a bit scary, something to do with his eyes being highlighted so. Then he showed me how to tie a towel between my legs and around my waist like a sumo wrestler. The first to pull the towel off the other was the winner. Nowadays they'd make a fuss and call social services, but back then it was just mucking about, like the scout leader playing with the elastic on your shorts, or us boys stealing soldiers from the toy shop and knocking on strangers' doors. Zorro was so patient with me, showing me the way the chess pieces move, all the possibilities. And then the finer points: the en passant rule; a knight fork on the queen and rook; the value of castling later in the game. Zorro had straight black hair and his mouth made a really nice smile when he saw I was understanding what he said.

Standing on the outside of the prison gates, plastic bag in hand, Mr Josef Zawadzki cleans his glasses, looks up and down the street, wondering what to do next. It is early and the traffic is light. Across the road is a café, just opening up for business. A woman is setting up the tables and chairs on the pavement. To Mr Z the sounds from the street are overwhelming: the car tyres on the damp tarmac, the whoosh of the wheels of a bicycle. A child's cry. The bark of a dog at a cat. Standing on the curb he feels the drops of rain on his face.

Brenda has seen a thousand men like Josef. The ones who have no one. Nowhere to go. No idea what to do next after months and years of being told. He is a little man. His huge black-rimmed glasses are hopelessly out of fashion. His sharp pencil moustache shows his age. He is looking at her as if she is the first woman in the world. She smiles at him the way she has done many times before and then goes inside the café to turn on the urn for hot water. He crosses the road tentatively and pushes open the door to the café.

‘Sit down, doll,' says Brenda, tying an apron around her ample waist. Her hair is dyed strawberry-blonde, but the roots sprout a peppery grey.

‘Cuppa tea?' she says with a kindly smile.

‘Yes please,' says Josef, wiping the raindrops from his glasses with his shirt sleeve.

‘Something to eat?'

‘Erm …' he says, thinking hard.

‘A bacon sandwich maybe?' she says helpfully.

‘Yes, thanks,' says Josef, finding her kindness difficult to understand.

The smell of the café is comforting. The ketchup bottle seems welcoming, the red tomato on the label so vibrant, so exotic, so impossibly bright after all the grey of the long prison months.

‘Where you heading to?' says Brenda from the other side of the counter, the rashers sizzling in the pan.

‘I have a sister in Moe.'

‘Nice to be in the country.'

‘Yes.'

‘You know how to get there?'

‘A bus.'

‘That's right,' she says, buttering the bread. ‘It goes from the depot across the road. Six minutes past the hour. Plenty of stops, but Moe's the end of the line.'

‘Thanks,' he says, as she places the tea and sandwich before him, the diamond in her eternity ring sparkling as dazzling as can be. He looks at the food in front of him, instinctively checking to see if anyone has messed with it.

Later on, standing at the bus stop, a blueberry muffin in his bag for the journey, he waves at Brenda as she cleans the inside of the café window. She waves back and Josef feels an unusual smile forming in the corners of his mouth. ‘Little acts of kindness,' he thinks.

He gets to Moe just before dusk. He stands stock-still, waiting outside the bus station with his small plastic bag of possessions. After about ten minutes, Krystyna, his sister, arrives. He follows her along the high street to her small bungalow behind the woodyard. She is nearly as taciturn as Josef, but they get along well enough. He tries to get work in the parks department, but when the supervisor learns of his history he decides that access to sharp tools is a chance he isn't prepared to take. Krystyna speaks to Stefan, a widower at the Polish Club who owns the supermarket. Next day Josef is given the job of collecting the trolleys from the carpark and sweeping up. Every Saturday, even on the hottest of summer days, he sits in silence with Krystyna in her tiny kitchen and eats fish and chips.

These days, I play chess whenever I can. I read somewhere that there are more moves on a chessboard than atoms in the universe. I like that idea. Down the years it's been a real social leveller, an international language. I got lucky and landed a job that takes me all over the world. It's a long time since I was back in Tottenham. Some say it's a bad place, but it is what it is and we were happy enough as kids. When people travel they often look out for churches or landmarks. I look out for chessboards.

Only the other week I was at a bus station in Jayapura in West Papua when I spotted a battered box with a chessboard exterior propping up the sign that showed the bus fares to Sorong, Kako and other anonymous places in the hinterland. I pointed to the board and gestured an opening chess move. The young ticket collector got my meaning. He picked up the box, replacing it with his shoe, opened the clasp and the worn plastic pieces tumbled to the ground. As soon as we set up the knights and castles, bishops and pawns, a crowd gathered. An hour later, in between jumping up to sell bus tickets, he trapped my king, in spite of my cunning rook counter attack that he spotted at the last minute. The crowd clapped and cheered and my conqueror mimicked smoking: a sign for me to buy him a pack of cigarettes as his prize.

And so it has been, chess running as a seam of silver and onyx through my life and travels. In the deep winter snow of a park in Bishkek I was annihilated by an ancient man in a bizarre hat, who talked to himself constantly and looked like he had come straight from the Gulag. In the sunshine of the Chimanimani mountains on the Zimbabwe and Mozambique border, I battled against the best player in its only secondary school and came out the victor. Wherever and whenever I play chess, I always think of Zorro and the gift he handed to me. That same gift I have now handed on to my own three sons.