Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby (14 page)

On the quayside Agnes tells Sean it was peaceful. Bernie asked for him, kept on asking for him. She made Agnes promise to have something hot ready for him when he came home. Then she just went to sleep. They have missed her by two hours.

Without thinking what he is doing, how he might embarrass his uncle, Pierce opens his arms and walks towards Sean. Sean sidesteps the embrace and, in the manner of a kindly doctor, gently but firmly directs him by the elbow into the arms of Agnes. With his plastered arm around her, Pierce holds Agnes and cries hard. He has known this woman as long as he has known Bernie and never realised before how precious she is; he loves her. He thanks God for her arms, her warm skin, her healthy beating heart.

No one else attempts to touch Sean. They follow at a respectful distance as he approaches the cottage. He doesn’t invite them in, not even Pierce. The funeral party, along with Pierce, keep vigil next door in Agnes’s house. Half an hour later Sean re-emerges and chaps the door.

He is taking it incredibly well. Though his voice is hoarse he actually claps his hands and rubs them together as he dispatches his willing friends to make arrangements. Bill will call the doctor to come and issue a death certificate. Roddy will arrange the drink and food from the Seaward Hotel for the wake tonight. Agnes and Jean, Bernie’s friends, will get her ready for the party, Sean will choose her outfit. Jim will take the dinghy to the other side of the island and bring back those that are able to come. Bill will tell the villagers that don’t yet know and invite them. Sean will phone the family on the mainland himself. Sean suggests, and everyone
agrees, that it would be a nice idea if Pierce could compose a few verses for his Auntie Bernie. Pierce nods.

Something weird has happened to his breathing. He can take in breaths easily enough, gulping down the fresh island air, it’s letting them go again that’s difficult. Maybe he’s developed asthma or a heart condition. Normally something like this would be worrying, interesting at least, but Pierce’s head is crowded with ideas for the panegyric he’s tasked to write for Bernie. Tasked. At last his skills have a practical purpose, at last he can provide a useful service. Pierce is going to write the poem of his life, no, not his life: Bernie’s. Not for his glory – he won’t even try to get it published – but for Bernie’s. He’ll squeeze out every drop of creative juice he’s got. Pierce doesn’t know whether creativity is finite or not but if it is he’ll blow the lot. If blood was creative juice he’d gladly bleed
himself
dry. This needs to be the most beautiful eulogy ever written.

Everyone is doing their bit. Agnes, anxious to fulfil her promise, pleads with Sean to eat something but he refuses. Bobby offers to go and collect Charlie McGowan the undertaker from the next island but Sean declines.

‘There’s no rush. You’re forgetting that now we have the big fridge we have time to wait for the mainlanders to arrive. I’ll take her up there myself after the wake. Let’s do this properly, not rush at it like we used to have to do.’

Every one agrees. This is an unexpected use for the refrigeration plant, one that no one had thought of until now. Sean claps and shoos and sends them all about their business. Only now will he let Pierce come next door and see Bernie.

‘She looks fine,’ Sean tells him by way of encouragement when Pierce lingers at the bedroom door. And he is right. She’s thin and her skin is a funny colour but she looks fine. Pierce almost laughs to see how groomed her hair is. Agnes or maybe Sean has brushed it and it lies thick and smooth, neat beside her on the pillow, regal, like an Egyptian queen.

Pierce remembers how when he was a child she used to clamp him between her knees and, as best she could, with a lot of squealing and grunting from both sides, haphazardly drag the brush across
his wriggling head. But she had to catch him first. The mad chase around the house was worth the pain. The child Pierce complained bitterly that she hurt him with her knee clamps and threatened to tell his mother but Auntie Bernie was never intimidated.

‘Well sit still then and I won’t have to.’

‘Brush your own hair!’ he shouted at her. ‘It looks like a bird’s nest!’

Bernie laughed. Despite her brutal manhandling – she brushed so hard Pierce swears she left permanent grooves in his scalp – Bernie accepted his cheeky retort as fair play. She couldn’t argue; her hair did look like a bird’s nest piled on top of her head with ineffectual hair clips and bits of ribbon or elastic. It was dark and curly and wild, and always falling in front of her face. Her bottom lip had a little line under it from years of puffing upwards, blowing stray strands out of her face when she was cooking or ironing or trying to brush his hair.

Pierce would like to see it like that now. He’d like to gently mess it up, break up the tidy waves into ringlets and place wisps across her cheeks and have her hand rise up to slap him off. But it doesn’t seem right, Sean might not understand. Would it be a violation to touch her like that?

His room is made up for him; Agnes did it last night after they phoned. Pierce empties his rucksack and sits at the desk by the window. He tries to adopt the same businesslike manner that Sean has taken and sets to work with his notepad and pen. No opening line jumps into his head so he comes at it from another
direction
. He makes a list of all the things he loved about Bernie. He is trying to be as honest as possible. Sean will not appreciate mawkish sentimentalism.

Bernie was not exceptionally beautiful or talented. She was a competent housekeeper, a reasonable cook, a loyal family member, a good wife. But the list, when Pierce has finished it, could describe any woman, all women, all the girls he’s loved before. They are all kind, loving, loyal, funny, sensitive, brave, etc., to one degree or another. There is nothing here that marks Bernie out from the ordinary.

Her relationship with her husband was not perfect; it had its ups and downs. They fought and sulked and chatted and laughed like any other couple. Pierce knows that Sean had an on-and-off thing with a woman on the mainland over several summers. He thinks Bernie might have known, too. But they stayed together. It wasn’t until Bernie got ill that Sean really began to appreciate her. A few years ago he refused to let her buy a new outfit for a wedding and they argued bitterly for weeks about it. Now Sean has an expensive diamond eternity ring in his pocket he was two hours short of delivering.

There is of course a rich seam of material for the poem in the romance and tragedy of the too-late trip to New York but Pierce senses that this should remain a secret. Maybe he should focus on Bernie’s ordinariness, or the ordinariness of their marriage. Surely there is poetry in that. It strikes him that there is nothing more eternal, and nothing more comforting, than the ordinary. He will write a poem about how lucky Bernie and Sean have been, despite the unexceptional quality of their life, to have had each other, for Sean to have had such a wife, such a plain, ordinary, good wife.

Sean laughs loud when he greets people at the door. It will be a miserable affair if he doesn’t. By his laughter he sets the tone, giving permission for the fun to commence. But he does seem genuinely pleased to see them. He hasn’t seen some of them since the last good wake. And this will be a good one. It has all the hallmarks of a long and memorable evening.

The Seaward Hotel has pulled out all the stops with the
catering
. It is a measure of the affection and respect that Bernie and Sean are held in that Harry, the owner, charges at cost price and throws in a crate of lager and the sausage rolls for free. There is plenty of good eating: salmon, venison, lamb. Someone has got hold of cherry tomatoes, a rare treat. Agnes halves them to spin
them out a bit but this does not diminish their glamour. A cello has arrived by dinghy from the other side of the island and is stacked until later beside the black hard-bodied coffins of accordions and fiddles. Drink is plentiful and of top quality.

As people arrive they bring in the fresh evening air, they take off their coats and shunt along the overflowing couch, politely budging up to accommodate new arrivals. They ask Pierce about his broken arm and he repeatedly explains it away as quickly as he can. At first they talk in hushed voices but as the room fills the volume rises. The women catch up with each other’s gossip: most of their grown-up children have left for university or jobs and they discuss with relish what the young folk are up to on the mainland. The men huddle round the sideboard laden with bottles of good single malts but although Sean is pouring large ones, everyone is taking it easy, pacing themselves.

As the food is cleared away and before the dancing begins, Pierce is called upon to recite his elegy. He raises his voice against the hubbub of clattering dishes in the kitchen. As he reads he is picking up reaction from the four corners of the room, in the form of sharp intakes of breath, and this excites him. The kitchen noise subsides and he is given the assembled company’s full attention. People are leaning forward and listening hard. This is what poetry is all about, thinks Pierce, and when he stops there is silence.

The islanders stare at Pierce, waiting for more, waiting for
revelation
. Then they look at each other, a consensus of confusion gathering, building towards outrage. Agnes McConnell screams and lifts the first thing that comes to hand, a heavy model of the Statue of Liberty, and throws it at Pierce. It misses him by a
two-inch
margin and takes a lump out of the plaster on the wall behind his head. With a mad banshee glint in her eye Agnes rushes at him but three men tackle her and she is bundled, still kicking and screaming, out into the hall.

Even here, on the island, he is misunderstood. They have
completely
missed the point, missed the beauty of it. They’ve focussed only on words and not on what the poem is actually saying. They’ve latched on to words like: passable, adequate, average and humdrum
and totally misinterpreted his meaning. Perhaps he should have gone with the mawkish sentimentality.

Next morning Pierce has trouble working out where he is. He still has his clothes on but this in itself is not that unusual and offers no clues. The room is familiar but what is foxing him is the quality of light. Then he remembers; he’s on the island. He cringes and hides beneath the duvet. What was he thinking with that fucking stupid poem?

Until he read out that poem he had always held the privileged position of being Bernie’s big boy. Last night, until he read the poem, he was Bernie’s orphaned son. Now he’s nobody, Bernie’s friends won’t give him the time of day, the steam off their piss. After the poem they were polite, but in a distant way, the way they are with the summer tourists. He has offended the whole island, he has insulted the memory of the best auntie he ever had and he has hurt his uncle with such a sharp deep cut that the wound might never heal.

A thick haar lies across the bay; it will be a lovely day if the sun gets strong enough to burn it off. He hears the diesel engine and metallic clunk of a van being parked outside. Pierce is too
hungover
to face Sean just now. He wanted to keep the vigil last night with him, he was desperate to, but Sean avoided him all night. Pierce spent most of the night down on the boat alone, rolling single-skinned joints, spinning out his hash to make it last.

Pierce opens the window and sticks his head out but if Sean has heard him he is not acknowledging him. Pierce wants to call out hello or good morning or something but everything he can think of to say sounds wrong. Sean opens the back doors of the van and enters the house. Pierce can hear him moving about downstairs, opening drawers in the kitchen, it sounds like he’s looking for something. Pierce sees the bald patch on Sean’s head re-emerging from the house and watches while he tosses his toolbox into the
front seat and puts his big Maglite torch on the floor beside it. His heavy working boots clump up the stairs and within seconds back down again. Sean is spreading the quilt from his bed on to the floor of the van. Again Pierce hears the boots thud on the stairs and this time the door to his room is thrown open.

‘Get up,’ Sean says and walks out.

Pierce complies immediately. He feels guilty, caught kneeling on the bed with his head out the window as if he were spying on his uncle. Now Sean is in the bathroom throwing things into a plastic bag. Pierce, unsure of what to do, does nothing. Sean strides back into the room and Pierce straightens up, standing to attention by his bed. Sean pulls back the quilt from the bed, but it’s the sheets he’s after. The bottom one is giving him some trouble, the sheet is fitted and is tightly hooked over one corner of the mattress. Pierce moves to help but Sean growls, ‘Leave it!’ He obediently takes a few steps back and leaves it. With surly glances Sean examines the pale green sheets, apparently looking for something. Pierce is mortified; this inspection is making him feel like a wet-dreaming teenager. Thankfully the sheets apparently pass muster; Sean
bundles
them under his arm and thuds out. He’s surely lost his mind, thinks Pierce.

Sean is downstairs again but now his movements are slower and quieter. He goes back out to the van and after a moment’s hesitation Pierce chances a quick peak out the window. Sean has Bernie in his arms. With tiny sideways steps he is moving carefully round the door of the van so as not to bang her head against it. He bends his knees and his back to place her gently on the quilt. He takes time to smooth out her hair, breathing hard with the effort of carrying her. There is such tenderness and intimacy in the gesture that Pierce wants to go back to standing by his bed but any movement might alert Sean that he is watching. Please, please don’t cry, thinks Pierce. He will not be able to bear it if Sean cries. But Sean doesn’t cry. He wraps the quilt round Bernie, leaving her face exposed, and tucks her in. He stretches bungee cords across her body, attaching them to the sides of the van to keep her firmly in place, warm and cosy. Then he closes the doors and drives off.