The Little Red Chairs (21 page)

The Waiting Room

You will have to wait, Fidelma is told. The waiting area is in the reception room, along to the left.

‘I would rather wait here,’ she says, but to no avail. The young woman behind the desk is testy and three phones are ringing at the same moment. She picks up one for either ear and with a cursory nod, points Fidelma to the reception area.

She had worked for five and a half weeks, but when she arrived at the staff entrance, her pass card did not allow her through. She tried several times and then asked one of the security guards, who also tried and failed. She knew he could let her through, but he said he would rather not and it was better that she speak to someone at the reception desk. She asked the receptionist to ring Bluey, which she did, but it was obvious by her frustration that he could not be reached. He must be floating about from floor to floor. The message was being passed on.

The reception room was large, with several armchairs and on a table English and international newspapers neatly laid out. Everything so clean and so hushed. The deep armchairs faced one another, but she chose one opposite the television, on which there was a programme entitled
Money Markers – On the Move.
The screen was the largest she had ever seen. Several images of the American flag hung over the White House and suddenly the steps leading up to it were no longer actual steps, but stairways submerged in pools of water. It was both real and unreal.
Limousines were moving at a dizzying speed, helicopters flew overhead, joints of rare meat were being carved, as businessmen in identical suits, white shirts and ties arrived for a conference. Then the image shifted to different countries, and always alongside the native flag, the American flag hung in solidarity.

Quite soon it was issues of equity and yield, the level of fundraising in capital cities, the mortgage credit score and the action being taken for world rates to remain the same. Apple would soon open a store in Brazil and in Puerto Rico, life was on the brink. Then a long queue of people at an airport, which she assumed to be Puerto Rico, waiting like lost pilgrims, their fates foreknown.

All of a sudden she jumped, finding that she was not alone in that room. A man, unnaturally still, sat at one of the computers that were on a raised platform and it occurred to her that he might be dead. The plants in a long container looked dead, they were green and needly, but with no life in them. Only then for the first time did she look around, walls marbled and one wall dominated by a huge abstract painting in deep red, with red foetuses moving within it. Any minute, Bluey would come, tapping her on the shoulder, saying
What’s the story, what’s the story?

She hears footsteps, gets up, but it turns out to be a young woman in stiletto heels, who looks around anxiously, then drags a chair to face the entrance, and consults her phone, which she lays on her lap.

On the screen, for the commercial break, African women in huge headdresses and ceremonial dresses, not unlike Jasmeen’s, are walking onto podiums, where they are greeted effusively. The programme that follows is entitled
Women to Watch in African Business.
The whole world is in that room and yet there is no
one in it, it is lifeless, it is lonely, it is empty, save for the fidgety woman, the seemingly dead man and the machines. She wants to go to the desk and ask if Bluey has been located, but is afraid to annoy the receptionist, who has already shown her displeasure. Instead, she goes to the hospitality niche to get water and it is then she flips. Everything in that cooler is a vapourish blue, the bottles, the bottle caps, the vapour itself, the water, and as she reaches her hand becomes soft and pliable as putty.

Luckily there is a different woman at the desk. She is matronly with grey hair tied in a bun and listens attentively, then tries one extension after another, until she is actually speaking to someone. She listens, frowns, listens further, puts the phone down carefully and says, ‘I am sorry love … but Bluey is gone for the day.’

‘But I was waiting in there … for nearly an hour,’ Fidelma says and sensing her anguish, the woman asks her name, looks at her ID and decides that they will try Lukas. She comes off the phone, crestfallen, because Lukas has said he cannot do anything, suggesting that they try Bluey on his cell phone. It is turned off. Callers are told to please try later and not to leave a message.

It had been raining when she arrived, but now, as she re-emerges, it is deluge. London is like black night and the figures moving through it drenched and scowling, herded into one another. It happens to be the day of a tube strike, but crowds have gathered outside the tube station, because it was rumoured that some drivers had refused to strike. She stands with others before the locked gates and then, like them, reconciles herself to walking.

On the Embankment it is a tussle just to get through, figures drenched and half-blinded, bumping into one another. Cars,
buses and cyclists all on a collision course, fighting for their footing and the tour buses, coming in twos and threes, send lashings of water in all directions, so that pedestrians are even more wrathful, their patience spent, in their urgency to get to where they belong or half belong. Belligerence peaks by a pedestrian crossing, as the lights do not allow enough time to wade through and people vent their rage by wielding their umbrellas and thumping on the windscreens of the halted taxis.

In the foggy wet, the lit signs of red and blue above offices on the opposite side are not nearly so imposing, nor are the white pleasure boats and the gangplanks leading up to them, water slurping against them, in and out it comes, in hopeless, hungry gurglings. In the various kiosks that she passes, the garish souvenirs look sodden and tawdry and a canvas chair left outside sags with water. In the distance, the hanging cradles from the London Eye do not sway by even a fraction.

The whole moneyed might of the city is at a standstill.

The chapel was set alongside a school, in a street of otherwise unassuming houses, somewhere in Chelsea. It was not palatial, like the one near Westminster, where she had once prayed. The holy water was in a little glass dish, laid into a large circular stone font and the smell that greeted her was of warm wax, that familiar smell from Cloonoila, in chapel, after Mass or benediction. A little woman with one wellington boot and the other foot bare whispered that the chapel was just closing, but then took one look at her and said, ‘Come in … you craytur.’ This was Grainne and her job was to lock up for the night. She was caretaker, did the altars, the candles and also had the thankless job of scraping the wax from the sconces. The priests were very nice to her, gave her things. To prove it, she took out a holy picture with
the prone figure of the Lord and a caption that read, ‘O Croix – Hail Cross.’ ‘
O Croix
,’ she whispers, proud of her French pronunciation. Yes, it was a very nice area and low on crime and guess what – in a bookshop not far from there, hangin’ on a wall, was Dirk Bogarde’s kitchen clock.
Cross my heart, Dirk Bogarde’s clock.
Dirk was a friend of the owners and a good customer.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it
. She could see that Fidelma, apart from being drenched, was in a state, so there was nothing for it but to storm heaven. They knelt in one of the pews halfway up, the church almost in darkness, except for the pale gleam of two sacristy lamps that hung on long chains, a red light for the Sacred Heart and a blue light for Our Lady. Grainne did the praying. It was loud and it was generalised, asking that they be kept safe from assault and would never go hungry and beseeching God, up there in his golden parlour, to reserve a place for them.

‘There’s a lot of Irish, knocking around London … so you’re not on your ownio,’ she said then, as she drew on the second wellington and embraced Fidelma fiercely, before parting.

*

Jasmeen called out, the moment she heard Fidelma’s key in the door and then she appeared, wearing a kaftan over her working clothes. The table was already laid in the kitchen, a red cloth and place settings for three with mitre-shaped napkins in glasses. There was music playing and it seemed to Fidelma that it came from her room.

‘Hi there,’ a voice said. It was a young girl that she guessed must be Jade, who had moved out some time ago and shared a flat with friends in east London. She was like a moonlight creature, all
black and silver, her eyelashes thickly crusted with black and an array of silver bracelets up along her forearm. When they shook hands, she said Mum had been telling her about the heart-to-hearts that they had on the Saturday nights and those wicked glasses of cava.

‘I can bring a duvet into the hall,’ Fidelma said, but Jade would not hear of it, the bed was plenty big for two and they would be like babes in the wood. She needed sleep, having just got back from Ibiza, where she had spent four amazing days with her boyfriend and friends, raving on the beach until sunrise and then chill-out swims. As a surprise, she had brought a takeaway, yummy things, spicy cashew chilli stir fry, sesame prawn toast, butterfly tigers, sweet-and-sour chicken, crispy duck, egg fried rice and Jude’s Very Vanilla ice cream. The wine was already open and she poured liberally into the glasses.

At dinner, she did most of the talking and there was something frantic about her, wildly gesturing, barely touching her food, on edge, waiting for that phone to ring. She had been up for a modelling job, a singing job, an acting job and one of them had to come through.

‘But she’s famous in Africa,’ her mother said proudly, describing how Jade’s face was in more than one African country, advertising a cream.

‘A skin product Mummy,’ Jade corrected her and then made kiss-kiss noises. Jasmeen asked her then to tell Fidelma about the nightclub where she worked as a hostess and Jade drew pictures of a club in the East End that looked grotty from the outside, cool inside, carpets for the celebs, bouncers with crew cuts, the security men who came early to suss out the joint and then the celebs themselves and their hangers-on, all in dark glasses, like a
fleet of funeral undertakers. Then there were the beautiful girls, especially the beautiful Russian girls, who always came with the richest men and sometimes the catfights if their men so much as looked at another woman. Now and then she was sent over champagne, but as it was not allowed, Huey, an old man who took coats, hid the glasses in a cupboard and in the mornings, before she cycled home to her pad, herself and Huey had a few swigs. Huey was her best friend there. He had come down in the world. He had been married several times, including once to a lady-in-waiting to the Queen and he could enter the palace by one of the side doors in the yard. That wife was gentle, never raised her voice and was always embroidering. Three other wives were vultures, only in it for the lolly. He saw his son occasionally, during school holidays, but he was never able to bring him to his lodgings for a night, as she felt it was beneath them. Bizarre things happened in that club – all night men and women trooping to the lavatories for their lines of cocaine and coming out giggling.

‘You promised,’ Jasmeen said, suddenly distraught.

‘I promise,’ Jade said and jumped up and hugged her mother, quoting from the psalm they both knew – ‘Rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.’

In the bedroom Jade was opening drawers that Fidelma had not dared touch, pulling things out, jeans, scarves, her lucky spider scarab, her Pout Box, her lipstick palette, lip liners, glosses, strewing them about and then, without even thinking, she began to make up a face that was already painted. She put on an ermine bolero that she found, ran it down her cheeks, caressing it. Suddenly she is talking, arguing, expostulating, a whirling dervish of contradictions. Her dream was to be an actress. She
had played Portia, wife of Brutus, in a school play and audiences were blown away. Night after night, her emotions brimming – ‘Is my place only on the outskirts of your happiness?’ – and then she broke down.

She sat on the bed, like a little girl, hugging herself in the ermine bolero. ‘Shit … Rat …’ and it all came out in a tumble and how she couldn’t tell Mum, but something awful had happened and she would never see Ronnie again.

‘Get this,’ she said and described only a few hours previous, walking up to a theatre, where she was to meet him, to go to a show with friends and his coming down the street towards her. What’s wrong? He wouldn’t say. He couldn’t say. Eventually he did and it was horrid. When he got to the ticket desk, there had been a mistake and there were only five tickets on the booking sheet, with not a chance of a sixth, as there was a big queue, people waiting for returns. He couldn’t do it to his friends, couldn’t let them down, especially as they were going back to Cornwall and the Isle of Wight the next morning and poor Muggins would understand. Understand! Fidelma heard then how she called him every name under the sun, and he just turned around and walked off, and she went the other way, towards Seven Dials and sat on the steps howling, people looking at her, phoning him twice, except his phone was turned off, and eventually calling in sick at the club, and doing her face in a pub loo, so as to come home to Mummy, all sparkly, not cry on her shoulder, just to be home. It was over. No it wasn’t. They were soulmates. She wouldn’t see him again, ever. There was a gig in Hackney at the weekend and she would go with friends and sit at a table and completely snub him.

They sat side by side on the bed then and Fidelma tried to
calm her, telling her, without actually believing it, that it would all be all right.