Offcomer (23 page)

TEN
 

Mechanical cranes hung over the city streets like mothers over children, carefully putting things in order, setting things to rights. The Seacat, sliding into its berth, drew past the ends of canyon-streets, past office windows, past shopfronts and car-parks. It seemed to be sailing straight into the city. It seemed to be sailing up a street. Claire saw the gasometer-barrel of the Waterfront, the squat green dome of the City Hall, the distant glow of the Europa’s neon sign. Unexpected perspectives, new distances and juxtapositions. She realised for the first time how close everything was, how close it was to everything else. She hadn’t noticed until that moment the straight, obvious lines that linked each of her landmarks, that laced them all together. And now, at the end of almost every street, a crane stooped, Meccano-frail, transparent against the sky. Putting things together, setting things to rights.

As the Seacat slid past the quayside buildings, Claire glimpsed pale expensive offices, suited workers. People who tapped on keyboards, poured coffee from filter-jugs, leant against desks to flirt. On the pavement below, a woman in a red-white-and-blue Kangol jacket was pushing a buggy with one hand, trailing a toddler from the other. Traffic streamed around a bend. The lights changed, the traffic lined patiently up, bunching together, and a new flow of cars swept past, dispersing, spilling out across the lanes. She saw the flashing lights of an ambulance, heard the wailing siren, and watched as the cars slid in towards the kerb, stopped, and the ambulance slipped past them and away. It looked natural, it looked balletic; it was almost beautiful. And she wondered, for the first time, who all these people were, and what they did, and where they were coming from, and where they were going to.

“Excuse me—”

A uniformed woman stood near her, holding open a grey plastic binliner. She nodded to the empty cellophane wrappers, the dry plastic coffee cup on the tray-table. Bright hazel eyes, kohl-lined. Claire recognised her. She had worked on the trip over. She was the one Claire had spoken to, before running off to throw up. Claire smiled up at her, knowing she would not be remembered.

“Have you finished?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Claire swept the debris into the binliner.

They had gone to Helen’s Bay. They had taken the train. It was three carriages long. The seats were bright blue. The track ran between houses, hedges, then alongside the smooth blue
lough. Grainne, released from school for Easter, was like a little girl, all smiles, head turning to look out of the windows on either side of the carriage. She leaned forward every few minutes to offer Claire her open packet of Milky Way Stars. Grainne’s mum and dad ran a newsagent’s in Armagh. She always had a packet of sweeties on the go. When she yawned you could see her fillings.

“This is us,” and Grainne was on her feet, at the doors, stuffing her sweet packet into her coat pocket, hand on the “open” button before the train had even stopped.

It was a brilliant, blustery April Sunday. Low sun, the wind chasing clouds across the sky, wringing out sudden spatterings of rain. The sand was perfect, rich, marked only by a few booted prints, dogtracks and the delicate patterning of birds’ feet. The water’s surface was mottled with cloud-shadows and sun. Ahead, it frothed against sharp black rocks. The sand was strewn with blue and silver mussel shells, kelp, and limpet husks worn away to pale translucent quoits.

“When I get round to decorating the bathroom,” Grainne said, “I’m going to paint it these colours.”

“The water’s beautiful. We should have brought our swimming stuff,” Claire said.

Grainne crouched to pick up a pebble. She skimmed it out across the water. It sliced into the surface, sank.

“It wouldn’t feel beautiful,” she said. “You’d be foundered. It’s very deep. And not very clean.”

“It doesn’t look polluted.”

“No, right enough, it looks fairly clean.” She scuffed her toe around, looking for further skimmers. “Sometimes you see the odd seal. So I s’pose it can’t be that bad.”

Claire strained her eyes after cormorants, ducks, buoys, as
they bobbed and turned just nearly out of sight, hoping that what she could barely see was the blunt-nosed turning head of a seal. But it never was. A cormorant flapped its wings, a duck took off, a buoy bobbed too long in the one place.

On the far side of the lough, there were smokestacks, low industrial buildings, a lighthouse. White-sailed yachts scudded out towards the sea; bits and scraps of rainbows opened out like fans, folded away again. And, slowly, like a scenechange, the Stena HSS slid by, vast, incongruous, much too close.

“This place is incredible. You can’t quite believe it,” Claire said.

“It’s nice this time of year. Nice and quiet.”

“So many rainbows,” Claire said. “I’ve never seen so many rainbows.”

Grainne smiled.

“You get this much rain, you’re bound to get the odd rainbow.”

Which didn’t solve anything, Claire thought, stabbing at the pedestrian-crossing button with a forefinger. Which did not, in fact, help at all. The temple-square Customs House was behind her; she crossed the road towards McHughes’s. She would, she realised, be passing within whispering distance of Conroys. She felt herself bunch up inside, like a finger-touched snail. She wouldn’t be calling in. She couldn’t, yet.

A pink folded towel on the end of a neatly made bed, a warm dim room, pale curtains drawn against the streetlamps.

“I’m just glad the room’s ready. I’m only after decorating.”

“Right.”

“D’you like it? What do you think of the colours?”

Claire looked round at the pale walls, up at the dark reddish ceiling. “Yes. It’s nice.”

“Only, if you don’t like it, we can always change it—”

“No, no, it’s fine. It’s lovely. Cosy, you know.” Claire dropped her bag down on the floor. She smiled round at the curtains, the wardrobe, the chest of drawers. She felt again that sudden sad suspicion that she and Grainne would never quite be friends.

Which didn’t help either. Which only, in fact, made things worse. The sun was warm, almost directly overhead. St. George’s Market was scaffolded and rigged up with tarpaulins. The sheets snapped in the wind. A grey car passed, then a white van. She stood waiting unnecessarily on the kerb, looking out across the slate-blue tarmac. The lights changed and she crossed the empty road. The urgent bleep of the crossing insinuated itself into her stride, making her walk faster. No rush, no rush, she told herself, and dragged her feet back to slow. Get there soon enough. Get there far too soon. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, tugged her jacket tight around her. Not even her jacket, really, she thought, remembering Grainne chucking it at her as she had hesitated at the front door one evening. It had been raining, and she was coatless. Hang on to it, Grainne had said, for as long as you need it. I’ve got plenty. Claire watched as the breeze rolled decaying cigarette filters around in the gutter. Tiny whorls and plumes of dust were lifted, settled, lifted again.

Ormeau Avenue opened out to the right. Halfway down, concrete pillars and steel girders rose out of the ground, nursed by two tall mechanical cranes. It had been a carpark, not so long ago, Claire remembered. There had been cars pulled up snugly beside each other, an automatic barrier and a man who sat in a yellow fibreglass box and took money and handed over tickets. A fleece zipped up to his chin. It must have got so cold in the winter. Just him in his little pod and a hand stretched through the slot, chapped by the wind, soaked when it rained, always colder than the rest of him. Now there was a hoarding, a picture in elegant muted shades. A substantial, confident structure in red brick and glass. Claire peered at the lettering. A hotel and leisure complex. The artist had even sketched in the clientele and passers-by. Elegant, slim, busy people who nonetheless had the time to pause and chat to one another after work, on their way to drinks in the hotel bar or callisthenics class in the hotel gym. They didn’t seem real, these people. They must exist, or why build the hotel, but Claire couldn’t quite believe in them, or in their lives.

She passed the entrance to the old gasworks, glanced up at the high spiked railings, the chained and padlocked gates. Through the fence she could see sculptures: stone obelisks and bronze astrolabes on smooth, new-laid lawns. New offices and apartment blocks rising out of the old brown earth. Traffic lights, not yet hooked-up, not yet synchronised into the city’s choreography, stood blind, waiting for the gates to open, waiting for the streams of cars and vans and lorries and slim-legged boys on bikes with dispatch-bags over their shoulders. The buildings were unfinished, unfurnished, and, the billboard said, already sold. Who on earth bought these things, Claire wondered. Who purchased hectares of earth and metres
of air and storeys of brick and glass and steel? Who earned enough to buy a
place
? Whoever it was, Claire thought, they wouldn’t be stopping to chat outside the new hotel-leisure-complex. They would be far too busy. They would be rushed off their feet.

She crossed the Ormeau Road slowly and inattentively, at an angle. She turned the corner into University Street. The breeze tugged at her hair, blew grit into her eyes, made her jacket billow and bulge. Ahead, visible between the bosomy Victorian terraces, was the dark gothic spire of Fitzroy Presbyterian Church. A corner of a flying buttress, a sliver of algaed tiles. Opposite the end of Wolseley Street. She would be passing right by. She wavered in mid-stride. Alan still lived there. He could be on his way back from the newsagent or from lunch at Maggie May’s or dragging the washing back from the laundrette. There were any number of reasons he would be walking down the street towards her now, just around the corner, just a step away. And her bags were still there. Her stuff still heaped up in the corner of the bedroom. Clothes that she couldn’t quite remember anymore. Odds and ends of winter-coloured make-up. A book or two. Her old ink pen. Unless he had thrown it all away.

Which he might have. She wouldn’t blame him if he had. He wouldn’t want her stuff lying in the corner of his bedroom, first thing he saw when he woke, last thing he saw when he went to bed. All this time. Claire could almost see him, the evening that she left, lugging her bags down the street, his breath misty in the lamplight. He would have heaved them off his shoulder, into a waiting skip. He would have turned away and rubbed his hands together as he walked back towards the flat. He would, perhaps, have smiled to himself.

She kept her eyes unfocused, looking vaguely down at the paving-slabs. If he was there, if he was nearby, if he was walking right at her shoulder, she wouldn’t see him; she was determined she wouldn’t see him. Because if she saw him, he would catch her eye and open his lips, and speak, and she would have to stop and stand there watching the spit sticking to his lips, or look down at his hands, flat against his thighs, and the words would loop around her again, drawing her back in, describing her, delineating her, marking her out.

The lights changed; she crossed.

She chewed the cuticle on her thumb, pressing her fingers down onto her cheekbone as she counted out the months. March April May June and now into July. Four and a bit. Four and a bit months. She should have taken a taxi and fetched her bags that first night. She should have got Grainne to drive her round that weekend. It could’ve been dealt with at that stage, if she’d only dealt with it at that stage. Because now it was too late, it had swelled and grown and been ignored, like a headache you keep telling yourself is just a headache, but doesn’t go away.

She passed through the park gates. A custard-coloured cat sat in a patch of sun. The tarmac path wandered between lawns and shrubbery, meandering up towards the far gates. Grainne’s house. Just out of those gates and round the corner. A cramp in her ribcage made her flinch, curl up on herself. There should be a blade to draw across her arm. Lightly, sinking in a little like an inkpen into thick paper, and the skin beading with blood and the blood curling round the curve of her arm and dripping down to her wrist and trickling through her fingers to the ground, and the pain gathering itself together so she would clap her hand down over the cut and hold it there as it stung and smarted with the salt from
her palm. It had all seemed to simple at home, when she was drinking tea with her mother in the half-light of the kitchen. She knew she had to get back and sort things out. She had to, somehow, deal with it. Quite how she would do this she had not considered, but she had nonetheless felt a kind of vague confidence that she would know, when the time came. But the time had come, and she did not know.

She tugged at a cuticle with her teeth, tore off a strip of skin. The flesh stung, but did not bleed. She turned the scrap of skin around with her tongue, bit through it again. Her shoes were wearing out. She could feel the sharp grit through her soles.

A tennis ball was thrown across the balding grass, bounced. A dog ran, low and fast, caught it on the rebound. A collie. Liver and white. It hared back towards its owner, a young woman in a green summer dress. The dog bounced up at her, ball between its teeth. The woman took it gingerly, grimacing, and Claire remembered the warm softness of a dog-spittled tennis ball, the rainbow in the shower of spit as Dad whacked the ball for six, and Moss speeding off up the village street after it. The young woman threw again. They had the park to themselves, today. They had the run of the place.