No Way to Say Goodbye (15 page)

Ivan was late but only by half an hour. Sam hadn’t noticed – he had disappeared into his thoughts, accompanied by Roberta Flack’s melodic melancholy. Ivan’s knock broke the spell, returning him to earth and Mary’s floor.

Ivan looked down at his new friend. “Well?” he asked.

“Agony.”

Ivan shook his head. “Four days later. I’m telling you, the Bone Man will sort it in five minutes.”

Sam sighed. “So you keep saying.”

“Well, if a thing’s worth repeating it’s worth repeating,” Ivan said, chuckling to himself while he got comfortable on the sofa.

“What do you think, Mary?” Sam asked, having established a kind of rapport with her over the previous ninety-six hours.

“I don’t know,” she said. Ivan gave her a dirty look. “I don’t know,” she repeated to her cousin, flinging her hands into the air.

“What about Tommy the Coat?” he asked.

“What about him?” she replied.

“He was on his back for four months. One trip to the Bone Man and he was dancing a jig three days later.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. The doctor said it could be a disc and a disc isn’t bone.”

Ivan was exasperated. “Bone Man is just his name. He deals in back problems – all back problems.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Sam.

Mary went back into the kitchen to finish making dinner while Ivan nipped to the loo, leaving Sam alone.

The front door must have been on the latch because it opened at Penny’s push. She closed the door behind her and she walked past Sam apparently without noticing him. “Mare, there’s an American on your floor!”

“Where have you been?” Mary asked, ignoring the matter of her lodger.

“Cork,” Penny said.

“Cork?” Mary’s tone suggested she was alarmed.

“Not with Adam. I was working.”

Ivan emerged from the toilet. “Hey, Penn, where’ve you been?”

“Cork.”

“Cork.” His tone was similar to Mary’s.

“I was working!”

“OK. Good.”

“Are you hungry?” Mary asked.

“Starving,” Penny said. It had been a while since she’d eaten an actual meal.

Once more Mary returned to the kitchen, and Ivan and Penny sat on the sofa with Sam at their feet. Ivan apprised Penny of the details of Sam’s accident. Penny suggested he see the Bone Man.

“Hah! I told you!” Ivan was vindicated.

“Who’s singing?” Penny asked.

“Roberta Flack.”

“Nice.” Ivan nodded.

“You had your music brought in from next door?” said Penny.

“Sure. I’m going through a phase.”

“Wow!” Penny laughed. “Mary won’t like that.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, she’s funny about music,” Penny said, and Ivan concurred.

“I don’t understand,” said Sam.

“She has a band or a sound or a song for every mood, emotion or event in her life. You could say she lives her life to a soundtrack and now you’re here and messing it up.” She was laughing.

“You’re kidding me?”

Penny and Ivan shook their heads.

“Unusual,” he murmured.

They had dinner in the sitting room so as not to leave the patient alone. Mary cut up his food, helped him onto his side and positioned cushions to support him as he ate. She put a straw into his drink and pushed it towards him. Then she sat down in the armchair opposite her friends. Both Ivan and Penny had noted the significant shift in Sam and Mary’s relationship with some interest. Of necessity he relied on her, but more importantly he appeared comfortable with her and she attended to him deftly, knowing exactly what to do.

“What?” she asked her friends, whose mouths were slightly agape.

“Nothing,” they said together.

“Do you want to change the music?” Sam asked, out of nowhere.

“No, it’s fine,” Mary said, unsure why he was asking – he’d taken over her CD player and been listening to nothing but American black women since he’d arrived.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I like it,” she replied.

“OK.”

Penny and Ivan laughed.

“We mentioned your analality regarding music,” Penny confessed.

“Analality isn’t a word,” said Mary.

“Well, it should be,” said Ivan.

“I’m not anal.”

“Hah!” Ivan said, snorting.

“When Mary listens to Radiohead…” Penny began.

“… she’s sad,” Ivan finished.

“When Mary listens to Dolly…”

“Happy.”

“And when Mary listens to Nirvana?”

“Frustrated,” Ivan said firmly, and Penny stuck out her tongue at her mortified friend.

“Wow!” Sam said. “The wall between us is pretty thin and she listens to Nirvana a lot.”

Mary bit her lip.

Penny and Ivan left together. As Ivan put on his coat, Mary asked after his ex-wife. He told her she seemed fine. Mary seemed unsatisfied by his answer. “Is there something wrong?” he asked.

“No.”

He crossed his arms and waited for the truth.

“I mean I don’t know,” she admitted, screwing up her face.

“What did you see?” he asked, a little alarmed.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Penny exclaimed.

“It’s nothing,” Mary said, embarrassed by Penny’s indifference to and Sam’s ignorance on the subject of her dubious psychic abilities.

“Mary!” Ivan had always believed in them and now he was worried that something wasn’t right with his ex-wife.

“OK.” She sighed. “I saw her calling for you.”

“Calling for me?”

“That’s it. She was calling out for you.”

“How?”

“What?” Mary wished the conversation would end.

“For God’s sake!” Penny said again. “Was she calling out in a Heathcliff-it’s-me-Cathy kind of way or in a kids-come-in-for-your-dinner way?”

“Oh. Neither. I don’t know.”

“Was it real?” Ivan asked.

“I don’t know.”

Penny harrumphed. “I wish you’d stop wrecking your head with all of this stuff,” she said to Mary.

Sam was wondering what the hell was going on.

Penny pushed Ivan out of the door. “I’ll give her a call tomorrow,” he said, then added, with a grin, “Tonight I’m on a date.”

Penny and Mary stopped in their tracks.

“A
date
?” Mary quizzed.

“Ah, yeah,” Sam remembered aloud, “good luck with that, man.”

Mary looked from Ivan to her uninvited guest.

Ivan laughed. “Sam’ll fill you in.” He winked and closed the door behind himself and Penny.

Mary was wondering what in the name of knickers was going on.

Sam, a practical stranger, filled Mary in on her cousin’s exploits in McCarthy’s bar the previous week. They had been having a few pints and a girl whose name he couldn’t remember had sidled up to them. She had sat beside Sam and asked him to a party. He explained to Mary that he had declined the invitation.

At this point Mary interrupted to clarify that the woman Ivan was dating had originally asked Sam out. He considered this for a moment, then conceded this was so. Mary screwed up her face at her cousin’s having opted for sloppy seconds. Sam laughed at her distaste, and explained that when it was his turn to go to the bar, Ivan and the girl had struck up a conversation and had got along so well that by the time he’d returned with the drinks they’d forgotten he was in the room. Mary gazed at him sceptically and he assured her it was true. She wondered how it was possible that a week had passed without her cousin confiding in her, and acknowledged inwardly that his omission was made all the more grievous by her uninvited guest’s delight in knowing something about him that she didn’t.

But of course Sam was delighted – the horror on her face was comical.

After that Mary cleaned the kitchen while he flicked channels, bored with TV but too tired to read.

During Sam’s short sojourn with Mary he had noticed she followed a series of routines. For instance, in the evening she cooked, she ate, she washed, she dried, she brushed the floor, she emptied the bin, and while the kettle boiled for tea she covered the leftover food with clingfilm and put it into the fridge. It was always in that order, and it was a pretty innocuous thing to notice, but noticing the innocuous was one of the things that had made Sam great at his job. She wasn’t a clean freak but she liked everything in its place, possibly to a pathological degree. If he put his book down for more than five minutes, it mysteriously appeared in the magazine rack, which, considerately, she’d left close enough for him to reach. The second he dropped the remote, it found its way to the left-hand side of the coffee-table on the TV guide, which was placed so that its edge met the rim of the table.
Weird.
Her CD collection, which was vast and too far away in the corner for him to see, appeared to be in alphabetical order, and a disc was only out of its case when it was playing.

Her friends were right: behind her calm exterior she was anal, but it wasn’t overt. She was also painfully honest in both word and deed. When he smelt she told him so. When she promised she’d close her eyes while she helped him to wash, she didn’t open them once, even when she somehow swallowed some suds. He had guessed that she’d given up any attempt at lying years before as her expressive face would have given her away. In that respect she was nothing like him.

Every night before she went to bed she adjusted a photo on the wall – the one closest to the door of her son and the damn dog. She never straightened any of the others, and it was always the last thing she did before turning out the light and leaving him with the glow of the television, as per his request.

She had noticed a lot about him too. He didn’t like questions but then again neither did she, so that was OK. Still, he could sidestep an uncomfortable or uninvited query as well as or better than a seasoned politician, while she was forced to resort to rudeness. This irked her. He liked American soul, R&B and gospel singers, but she’d known that already. When he laughed she’d noticed that his nose crinkled, his jaw stuck out – he unconsciously covered it with his fist as though he was suppressing a cough – and in that moment the darkness lifted from his eyes, if only briefly.

He could play the guitar too. During his first day on her floor Jerry Letter had arrived with a package that turned out to contain a very valuable instrument, which he’d had shipped from the US. She had helped him to sit up, if only for a few minutes, so that he could examine it for damage. When he told her it had been Scotty Moore’s she was impressed, and he was impressed that she knew who Scotty Moore was. This pissed her off until he apologized for presuming her ignorant. He had proved himself stubborn as he only asked for help when he was desperate for the loo and unable to travel the distance unaided. He laid the guitar on his chest and strummed and, although he messed up a lot and cursed under his breath, she enjoyed listening to him; as he was loosening up now, he improved each time he picked it up.

She noticed he was what her father called eagle-eyed. It was annoying when he pointed out her foibles, which she had no idea were so many, but it was also interesting, if not a little disturbing, to have a mirror held up to her face. She liked that he seemed relaxed in her care and that he didn’t pander to her past. If he thought badly of her he said so, while most people tiptoed around her, afraid of breaking the shell she’d constructed around herself.

“Why do you work in a bar?” he’d asked, out of the blue, that very morning.

“Because I do,” she answered, yawning and clutching her morning mug of coffee.

“You’re better than that,” he said, as though he was interviewing her for a job rather than taking up half her floor.

“Excuse me?” she’d said, annoyed at his arrogance.

“It probably made sense once, but not any more.” He looked at the wall where the pictures of her son hung, then met her widened eyes. “Those photos you took are truly beautiful. Trust me – I have an eye.”

“You’ll have a black one if you don’t shut up,” she said, getting up and striding to the kitchen.

“I was only saying!” he called.

“Yeah, well, nobody asked you,” she said, and slammed the kitchen door behind her.

Of course, seated at the kitchen table, she started to think about what he had said. She’d tried not to, even singing “Ring Of Fire” in her head to escape it, but she couldn’t because he was right. Why, after six years, was she tending bar when she had once been so full of ambition? Ben had stopped her becoming the photographer she had always dreamed of being, but what was stopping her now?

Despite Sam’s unwelcome observation, Mary had to admit it was nice having someone to take care of.

And it was nice for Sam, the guy who had painted himself as invulnerable to the world for so long while he had been silently destroying himself, to be taken care of. Like Danziger, his nurse in rehab, Mary was stronger than he was, and it felt weird being there but also good – even if he did think about the pain pills he hoarded under his mattress a little too often and even if the stupid dog, the cause of his predicament, attempted to sit on him at least twice a day.

That night Ivan shared his first official date with Sienna. They had agreed to meet for dinner in Packie’s because that was Ivan’s favourite restaurant and, a creature of habit, when he ate out his order never deviated: a herb potato pancake followed by a medium to rare steak with the softest, sweetest carrots in the world, creamy cabbage colcannon and caramelized onions on the side. He wasn’t a dessert man so that was never a factor in his choice of venue. The other places, as good as they were, didn’t offer the same menu, or not exactly, so when he’d asked her to Packie’s he hoped to God she’d like it.

When Sienna said she was happy to allow him select the wine, he panicked a little as he was not a connoisseur and to order the house wine might seem cheap. So he deferred to his helpful seventeen-year-old waitress.

They sat together in warm, low lighting, surrounded by well-dressed people. They ate slowly, concentrating on the conversation – of which neither was short.

Sienna had been living in Kenmare for six months. She was working on reception in the Sheen Falls Hotel, having worked in a number of five-star establishments. She was used to the trappings of wealth but it was apparent that she had little time for luxury. Sienna had flaming red hair, much like Mary’s, soulful brown eyes and a heart-shaped face. When they stood he had to look down. She was five six to his six four, and a hippie at heart. Beads were threaded into her hair and she sat comfortably in a dress that flowed from rather than clung to her body. On her right hand she wore two rings, on the left three, one a tiny Claddagh ring. They were all silver – she preferred it to gold.