Minding Frankie (32 page)

“Moira is our social worker,” Lisa explained to the fast-retreating neighbors. “She’s absolutely great. She drops in at the least expected times in case Noel and I are battering Frankie to death or starving her in a cage or something. So far she hasn’t caught us out in anything, but of course time will tell.”

“You completely misunderstand my role, Lisa. I am there for Frankie.”

“We’re all bloody there for Frankie,” Lisa said, “which is something you’d realize if you saw us walking her up and down at night when she can’t sleep. If you saw us changing her nappy, trying to spoon food into her when she keeps turning her head away.”

“Exactly,” Moira cried. “It’s too hard for you both. It’s my role to see whether she would be better placed with a more conventional family … people with the maturity to look after a child.”

“But she’s Noel’s daughter!” Lisa said, unaware that the other women who had been about to leave were standing there, openmouthed. “I thought you people were all meant to be keeping the family together and that sort of thing.”

“Yes, but you are not family, Lisa. You’re just a roommate, and Noel, as a father, is unreliable. We have to admit that.”

“I do
not
have to admit that!” Lisa knew she looked like a fishwife with her hands on her hips, but really this was too much. She began
to list all that Noel had done and was doing. Moira cut across her like a knife.

“Can we move somewhere that we can have more privacy, please?” She glared at the two neighbors, who were still hovering at the corner, and they vanished quickly.

“I don’t want any more time with you,” Lisa said. She knew she sounded pettish but she didn’t care.

Moira was calm but furious at the same time. “In all this hymn of praise about Noel,” she said, “you managed to forget that he went off the rails and was back on the drink. That was a situation where the baby was at risk and not one of you alerted me.”

“It was over before it began,” Lisa said. “No point in alerting you and starting World War Three!”

Moira looked at her steadily for a moment. “We are all on the same side,” she said eventually.

“No, we’re not,” Lisa said. “You want to take Frankie away. We want to keep her. How’s that the same side?”

“We all want what is
best
for her.” Moira spoke as if to a slow learner.

“It’s best for all of us if she stays with Noel, Moira.” Lisa sounded weary suddenly. “She keeps him off the drink and keeps his head down at his studies so that he’ll be a good, educated father for her when the time comes for her to know such things. And she keeps me sane too. I have a lot of worries and considerations in my life, but minding Frankie sort of grounds me. It gives it all some purpose, if you know what I mean.”

Moira sighed. “I
do
know what you mean. You see, in a way, she does exactly the same for me. Minding Frankie is important to
me
too. I never had a chance as a child. I want her to have a start of some kind, not to get bogged down by a confused childhood like I did.”

Lisa was stunned. Moira had never admitted anything personal before. “Don’t talk to me about childhood! I bet mine could leave yours in the ha’penny place!” Lisa said in a chirpy voice. Moira
didn’t know what to say, then she surprised herself as much as she did Lisa.

“You don’t feel like having supper tonight, do you? It’s just that I’m a bit beaten. I was down in my old home and it was all a bit upsetting and there seems to be nobody in town …”

Lisa ignored the gracelessness of the invitation. She didn’t want to go back to the flat alone. There was nothing in—well, there might be a tin of something in the kitchen cupboard or a pack of pasta in sauce in the freezer. But it would be lonely. It might be better to hear what Moira had to say, but would it only be more of the same?

“Will we agree that Frankie is not on the agenda?” Lisa asked.

“Frankie who?” Moira said, with a strange kind of lopsided look on her face. Lisa realized that it was meant to be a smile.

They chose to go to Ennio’s trattoria. It was a family restaurant: Ennio himself cooked and greeted; his son waited on the tables. Ennio had lived in Dublin for rather more than twenty years and was married to an Irishwoman; he knew that having an Italian accent added to the atmosphere. Anton, on the other hand, had said to Lisa that Ennio was a fool of the first order and that he would never get anywhere. He never advertised, you never saw celebrities going in and out, he never got any reviews or press attention. It seemed like an act of independence to go there.

Moira had often passed the place and wondered who would pay seven euros for a spaghetti Bolognese when you could make it at home for three or four euros. For her it was an act of defiance to go there, defying her natural thrift and caution.

Ennio welcomed them with a delight that made it appear as if he had been waiting for their visit for weeks. He gave them huge red and white napkins, a drink on the house and the news that the cannelloni was like the food of angels—they would love it with an almighty love. He had opened his restaurant two decades ago and
his simple, fresh food had proved instantly popular. Since then, word of mouth had kept the place full to bursting almost every night. Lisa thought to herself that Anton might be wrong about Ennio. The place was almost full already, everyone was happy, there were hardly any overheads. No client was attracted here by style or decor or lighting—nor, indeed, publicity interviews. Maybe Ennio was far from being a fool.

Moira was beginning to realize why people actually paid seven euros for a plate of pasta. They were paying for a bright, checked tablecloth, a warm welcome and the feeling of ease and relaxation. She could have put together a cannelloni dish, but it wouldn’t be the same as this if eaten in her small, empty flat. It would not be the food of angels.

She relaxed for the first time in a long time and raised her glass. “Here’s to us,” she said. “We may have had a bad start, but, boy, we’re survivors!”

“Here’s to surviving,” Lisa said. “Can I begin?”

“Let’s order his cannelloni first and then you can begin,” Moira agreed.

She was a good listener. Lisa had to hand her that. Moira listened well and remembered what you said and went back and asked relevant questions, like how old was Lisa when she realized that her parents disliked each other, and irrelevant questions, like did they ever take the girls to the seaside? She was sympathetic when she needed to be, shocked at the right times, curious about
why
Lisa’s mother stayed in such a loveless home. She asked about Lisa’s friends and seemed to understand exactly why she never had any.

How could anyone bring a friend home to a house like that?

And Lisa told her about working as a graphic designer for Kevin and how she met Anton and everything had changed. She had left the safe harbor of Kevin’s office and set up on her own. No, she didn’t really have any other clients, but Anton had needed her to
give him that boost and he always said he would be lost without her. Even this time in London, this very morning, he had begged her not to leave, not to abandon him to April.

“Oh, April,” Moira said, breezily, recalling her lunch with Clara at Anton’s. “A very
vapid
sort of person.”

“
Vapid!
” Lisa seized on the word with delight. “That’s exactly what she is! Vapid!” She said it again with pleasure.

Moira gently moved the conversation away, towards Noel, in fact. “And wasn’t it great that you found somewhere to stay so easily?” she hinted.

“Oh, yes, if it hadn’t been for Noel, I don’t know what I would have done that night, the night when I realized my father, my own father, in our own house …” She paused, upset at the memory.

“But Noel welcomed you?” Moira continued.

“Well, I suppose ‘welcomed’ might be putting it a bit strongly … but he gave me a place to stay, which, considering he hardly knew me, was very generous of him, and then we worked out with Emily that it might be best if I could stay; it would share the whole business of looking after Frankie and I could have a place to stay for free.”

“Free? You mean Noel has to pay for you as well as all his other expenses?” Moira’s eyes were beginning to glint. More and more information was coming her way without her even having to ask for it.

Lisa seemed to recognize that she had spoken too freely. “Well, not exactly
free
. I mean, we each contribute to the food. We have our own phones and we share the work with the baby.” Lisa didn’t say she was overdrawn on her bank account.

“But he could have let that room to a real tenant for real money.”

“I doubt it,” Lisa said, with spirit. “You wouldn’t get anyone paying real money to live in a house with a baby. Believe me, Moira, it’s like ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more.’ It can be total bedlam at three a.m. with the two of us trying to soothe her down.”

Moira just nodded sympathetically. She was getting more and more ammunition by the second.

But, oddly, it did not delight her as much as she had once
thought it would. In a twisted way, she would prefer if these two awkward, lonely people—Lisa and Noel—should find happiness to beat their demons through this child. If it were Hollywood, they would also find great happiness in each other.

Lisa knew nothing of her thoughts.

“Now you,” she said to Moira. “Tell me what was so terrible.”

So Moira began. Every detail from the early days when she came home from school and there was nothing to eat, to her tired father coming in later and finding only a few potatoes peeled. She told it all without self-pity or complaint. Moira, who had kept her private life so very, very private for years, was able to speak to this girl because Lisa was even more damaged than she was.

She told the story right up to the present, when she had left Liscuan and come back because the sight of her father and brother having made something of the shambles of their lives was too much to bear.

Lisa listened and wished that someone—anyone—had ever said to Moira that there was a way of dealing with all this, that she should be glad for other people instead of appearing to triumph over their downfall. She might have to pretend at first, but soon it would become natural. Lisa had managed to make herself glad that Katie had a happy marriage and a successful career. She was pleased that Kevin’s agency was doing well. Of course, when people were enemies like her father was, and April was, then it would be superhuman to wish them well.…

As Lisa’s mind began to drift, she realized that the woman at the next table was beginning to choke seriously. A piece of amaretto had become lodged in her throat; the young waiter stared, goggle-eyed, as she changed from scarlet to white.

“What is it, Marco?” asked the young blond waitress—was that Maud Mitchell? What was she doing working here? Lisa wondered—who then, taking in the situation at a glance, called over her shoulder, “Simon, we need you here
now
!”

Immediately her brother arrived, and he too was dressed in a waiter’s uniform.

“She’s getting no air in …,” Maud said.

“It’s a Heimlich …,” Simon agreed.

“Can you get her to cough once more?” asked Maud, in total control.

“She’s trying to cough—something’s stuck there.…” The woman’s daughter was nearly hysterical at this point.

“Madam, I’m going to ask you to stand up now and then my brother is going to squeeze you very hard. Please stay calm, it’s a perfectly normal maneuver,” said Maud in a voice both firm and reassuring.

“We’ve been trained to do this,” Simon confirmed. Standing behind the woman and putting his arms around the diner’s diaphragm, he pushed hard inwards and upwards. The first time there was no response but the second time he squeezed her abdomen, a small piece of biscuit shot out of her mouth.

Instantly she was breathing again. Tears of gratitude followed, then sips of water and a demand to know the names of the young people who had saved her life.

Lisa had been mesmerized by the entire scene and suddenly realized she hadn’t been listening to a word Moira had been saying for the last few minutes. The entire episode had happened so quickly it looked as though few other people had noticed anything amiss. Really, those twins were something else. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the waiter they’d called Marco shake Simon enthusiastically by the hand and then give Maud a hug that looked more than just grateful.…

Lisa and Moira divided the bill and got up to leave, well pleased with their evening.

Ennio, in his carefully maintained broken English, wished them good-bye.

“Eet is always so good to meet the good friends who ’ave a happy dinner together,” he said cheerfully, as he escorted them to the door. They were not good friends but he didn’t know this. If they had been real friends, they would not have gone home with such unfinished business between them. Instead they just touched the levels of
each other’s loneliness but had made no effort each to find an escape route for the other or a bridge between them for the future. It was one night made less bleak by a series of circumstances and the warmth of Ennio’s welcome, but it was no more than that.

It would have saddened him to know this as he locked the doors after them—they had been the last to leave. Ennio was a cheerful man. He would have much preferred to think he had been serving a pair of very good friends.