The Ruby Slippers (15 page)

‘This oven is useless. And on top of that I am no kind of cook.’

Siobhan coughs fit to die – the more to make her mother suffer. But Corinne is unmoved: ‘Ten minutes, Shibby darling. Keep an eye. And lay the table, please.’ And she bounds out of the room to attend to some spinning plate elsewhere. Siobhan is in no hurry to leap to the task.

Nothing – two whole weeks and not a word. Not so much as a text! How could he do this to her? She throws the phone at the one soft chair in the room, and it bounces off and onto the floor. Her own father! He promised, took her number, wrote it in his own phone in front of her eyes and vowed to contact her the very next weekend! It is totally shabby and, yes, disgusting. She was forced to lie when her mother oh-so-casually ‘wondered’ if ‘he’ had been in touch at all – meaning, of course, that she knows Corinne is totally screwed up by the very idea that James could get to her, and is just itching to get something on him to show him up as the contemptible piece of work he is. So Siobhan has lied, telling her mom, of course, he had called her and the two of them had shared harmless daddy/daughter talk, and that he would ring again the week following. So now she cannot even share her feelings with her mother; cannot get the rage out where it belongs. She asks herself, if she did share the truth with her mom, would that be such a bad thing? Why should she defend him when he can’t be assed himself? Why shouldn’t she betray him to her mother so they can both rip him apart and spit like witches over his good-for-nothing maggot-ridden carcass?

She cannot get out of her head that last sight of him before Mom whisked her into the car: him standing on the sidewalk outside Pizza Paradise, or whatever it was called, rooted to the spot with his phone, far away, like a lost boy for all the world to see. It was stupid of him to take the call like that, of course, just as she was leaving, but she knows it must have been to do with his sick partner, and, putting two and two together, well, it must have been kind of bad. She should, then, be a grown-up and accept that this is not a good time for him, as he had said. But the fact is she is
not
grown up and this is
not
just about how he let her down in the past week or so – it’s also about how he’s cheated her for the past seven years. Had someone died every week in his life? Had there been a whole procession of tragedies that had kept him away from her? And even if Corinne did throw him out and he was the scum of the earth, was he always so weighed down with sorrows that he never stopped to think about his simple duty as a father? After all, she needs him just as much as the man in the hospital needs him, the man who might well be dead for all she knows. And anyhow, why could he not at least have let her know? It would not be beyond him to ring or text and tell her that he would be back in touch soon as things looked up. That would be giving something, allowing for the possibility that she was there for him to share things with. But to say nothing, that surely said everything about his real priorities. Even worse, maybe it said that she was never truly in his thoughts in the first place, that for him she did not properly exist, even though she had taken the difficult and painful step to reach out to him.

Reflective now, she thinks that it’s maybe all the worse because she’d actually liked the person she’d met, her father James. It would be easier after all if she had hated him, if he had been the puny creep of her mother’s making. Yes, on balance, now she has had time to think about it, she had liked him. He was pleasant-looking for a start – shallow to think of such a thing but plenty of fathers were not good to look at and she liked his neat, likeable features, blue eyes and silky brown hair. She liked his quiet, easy voice, the evenness and good humour that added up to an intelligent and, well, OK man. ‘Pleasant.’ Is it the best she can say for him? She has had friends who were pleasant, and yet were vacant and sometimes as treacherous as cats. A father should be made of stronger stuff; he should be dependable, brave and above all true. She wonders if pleasant James might also have these things in him, but then who is she to say what a dad should or shouldn’t be – she has been without one all this time. Still, she can allow that James might also turn out to be a good dad.

Corinne comes running back into the room, not quiet, not good-humoured, not pleasant, and dives into the oven again. ‘Shit. It’s gone way over. Why didn’t you tell me?!’

Once again, fumes everywhere and Siobhan wheezing and hacking. Corinne grabs a cloth, fretting and fumbling to rescue the hissing dish, and burns her hand: ‘Shit! Ow! Get the . . . Quick! Get the—!’ Siobhan, simmering, slides over a mat for her mother to drop the dish onto. Her best intentions come to ashes. Corinne whines, ‘Look at it. Don’t tell me you didn’t even lay the table!’

While Corinne runs cold water on her hand, Siobhan, sprightly all of a sudden, grabs cutlery and mats and lays them like a dealer with a hand of cards. But Corinne has lost all patience. ‘You coulda done that before now!’ Elbowing Siobhan aside, she slams the food down on the table. ‘Look at it – ruined! Well that’s what you get when you rely on other people!’

Siobhan is seriously pissed at her mom now: how dare she transfer the blame onto her! As Corinne scuttles back to the refrigerator in search of a salad, she cranks herself up, ready to spit: ‘Excuse me, Momma, but—’

But then, right on cue, Corinne steps on the discarded phone and skids, almost doing the splits as her legs splay comically and, with a demented shriek, she clings to the work surface to stop herself from going down flat. Siobhan laughs, despite her anger, and Corinne’s attempts to haul herself up to a more dignified position are all the more hilarious as she keeps declaiming, tragically, ‘It’s not funny!’

Seeing her daughter in fits, Corinne is even more in need of a target for her venom: ‘Damn phone. Damn, damn phone!’ She shrieks and kicks it spitefully – the hateful handset, the contaminated thing, containing everything she detests: his influence, his presence and everything she wants kept out of their life together, for ever. What a dumb-ass thing was that, leaving it on the floor? She drags herself over to the table, plants herself hard in her chair and takes up a serving spoon. ‘Well, shall we at least attempt to eat the burnt offering?’

How monstrous is this: the blame back where she first pinned it? Siobhan loses her smile; she was prepared to see the funny side and let it go, but now, seeing that her mother will not yield, she lets her have it with both barrels: ‘Don’t blame me, bitch!’ this shouted so loud and sudden and unexpected that Corinne sits there, stunned, while Siobhan raves on: ‘You’re right, you’re a useless cook. And there is nothing wrong with the oven, by the way, but you are a shit cook and this is total shit!’ And with that, she marches to the door and out of the house.

Corinne takes a second to catch up with the state of play, then jumps up and runs over to the door in time to see Siobhan heading up the drive towards Kelly’s. ‘Christ!’ she says to herself, baffled as much as anything. She looks down to see Siobhan’s phone lying on the floor. Slyly, she shuts the door, picks up the cell, flops into the chair and carefully, painstakingly, presses the keys, trespassing into all the poisonous places he could have implanted himself: call log, text box, message box. Place by place, window by window, she searches for his sugary messages; his creepy overtures; his whiny, self-pitying voice.

Nothing. Not a sign. Strange: there are other bits and pieces of communication, mostly nonsensical, from Kelly and others. But from him, from James, or
to
him, there is not the tiniest jot.

■ ♦ ■

James downs a last drink. In a short while he will pull the shambling parts of himself together to go home, though not so unhappy as when he arrived. Everybody has been so wonderfully kind. They bought him so many drinks that he still has several untouched, lined up in a row at the bar. And Woody’s itself: friendly and luminous, with long cinnamon-brick walls hung with jazzy abstracts. The guys, the regulars, have been so lovely. It touches him, as it has always done, just to look on from his place at the end of the bar, into the cosy space that opens out from there, and see them all ranged around the piano, singing their hearts out. He and Paolo couldn’t hold a note between them, but they always loved to come here on Friday nights and soak it up. Some of the guys who sing here are pros – chorus-liners, names even, or were, once upon a time. It has always been intriguing, compelling at times, to watch a person just walk in off the street and take his place among fifteen or so other guys around the shining old baby grand, all poised and ready. And, in an instant, everything outside would be gone. It has been moving to witness that moment when, without a word, Rick the pianist would strike a chord, a couple of beats for recognition, and, as one, they would all start to sing. This was not just ensemble singing, one voice lost among many, it was each man singing to the pitch of his emotions, matching his own joy, his own sorrow, his own sense of what is true to the music. Beauty, truth and showbiz – a cheesy combination, but here somehow it was meaningful. ‘There’s a Place for Us’, is the song of the moment. James has already been treated to ‘Who Knows’, ‘Officer Krupke’ and even ‘I Feel Pretty’, sung entirely without camp self-consciousness.
West Side Story
was way out in front his and Paolo’s favourite musical, and it warms him to know that they sang it this evening for the two of them.

Jack, clearly something of a secret performer, has been in the thick of it since they got there – in among the rest and singing so naturally and at one with it all that James concludes that he must have been there all those times before. James squints blurrily at the clock: is it really that time already? He places his glass back on the bar and gets up to go. In a flash, Jack comes hurrying over to help him into his jacket. ‘It was a shame about today,’ he says. ‘Everyone here loved Paolo. You know that.’ That does it: James shakes his head and starts to cry, dropping back down onto his stool. For the next half-hour, it pours out of him – all the hurts and the injustices; how he had gone to the hospital the day after, trying again to see Paolo, only to find that
they
had already taken him away. ‘The body, for Christ’s sake; they took the fucking body!’ How
they
had put the phone down on him when he tried to make contact. But worst of all, how
they
ignored what Paolo would have wanted, allowing no concession to the reality that the two of them had lived through all this time: ‘That was cruel; that was evil; that was downright un-Christian,’ he sobs to the uncomplicated youngster.

And, having got all these bad things off his chest, James moves on to the things about Paolo that no one ever really noticed, or had just taken for granted. James shares what he has never really shared with any other person before: the finely inscribed expressions of love that had passed between him and his dead lover and, at the end, the erosions that had reduced Paolo’s spirit to its palest flame.

‘It must have been awful for you,’ says Jack.

Awful doesn’t come close to describing how it has been. Even now, inside this warm, friendly place, he is staring into the void. But then, pulling back from the brink, he takes one of the glasses and slings it back. ‘Have a drink,’ he urges Jack while reaching for another. ‘Or two, or three, or four . . .’

‘Steady . . .’ Jack puts out a hand, making James feel like a corrected toddler. Although they work at the same place, he hardly knows the guy, and now he begins to regret having revealed to him things that were sacred and personal.

Rick’s nasal voice rings out from the piano room: ‘This one’s for Paolo!’ and a blazing chord strikes up. The chorus close their eyes and begin to sing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ from
Carousel
. Jack looks across at James and, seeing James listening, enthralled, he hurries into the throng and starts to join in, bright and beatific, with the wash of voices. But when he looks up a few bars in, a smile already formed on his face to bestow on his sorrowful friend, of James there is no sign. He is gone; he could not remain so cold and hollow in so bright and friendly a place, and has slipped out and away into the shadows, where he belongs.

■ ♦ ■

Crazy days: thoughts tumbling and turning like particles inside a broken kaleidoscope, never settling into any shape that makes sense. Michael Marcinkus stands at the deli door, looking out at the street, but inwardly reliving, as he’s done since waking, the terrifying events of the previous night. He has felt again the last desperate pangs that made him cut those words on a frozen flank, and that same sinking into submission as the cold closed around him like a vice and, inch by inch, squeezed his spirit out.

Not surprisingly, he’s still dog-tired. He hadn’t woken till an hour after dawn, and then he had to go down and start another day as if all was right with the world. The physical toll on him is bad enough, but what really shakes him to the core is that the Harrison boy should know about the slippers in the first place. How could he have known about the hatbox and what it contained? It has even entered Michael’s mind that Benjy is somehow involved in it all, but that just doesn’t add up.

Then there’s Grace. She’ll be back at nine and in no way is he looking forward to looking her in the eye; she has a knack for seeing through him whenever he’s been up to something. So now Michael makes the superhuman effort to clear up the mess before she gets back from Brooklyn – sweeping up the glass, hiding the flattened hatbox behind Barrell’s kennel, taking down the side of meat and hacking those dreadful scars into oblivion.

In readiness for Grace’s arrival, Michael places himself behind the counter, keeping up as normal an appearance as he can muster. But when the taxi draws up, his heart almost stops, for there, sitting in the back alongside Grace, is Jenny, and little Sylvie too. Two pairs of eagle eyes. He wonders exactly what Grace has told Jenny about the ruby slippers – everything, probably. However, it’s him Jenny’s concerned about as soon as she sets eyes on him. ‘Poppa, the state of you!’