The Ruby Slippers (2 page)

But these are not the kind of things you say over coffee. James looks up and sees Michael gazing at him, all downcast. He takes a last sip, neatly replaces the cup on its saucer, lines up spoon and cup and stands down from the stool.

‘Please give Paolo my best wishes,’ Michael ventures, pointlessly, because James has already moved off through the door and back into a closed world of his own making. Michael sighs, slides away the cup and saucer and gives the spotless table a precautionary wipe-down.

■ ♦ ■

In a city built so high into the sky, people don’t allow their vision to stray much above eye level. Only fools, romantics and children walk around with faces raised. For the rest of us, compelled by the daily grind, the must-gets and the must-dos, the sidewalk is the place to stare. But, if we were to lift up our eyes . . .

On a balcony, high up in one of those tombstone buildings for the rich on Fifth, sits a man in a wheelchair, the two fused into one, statue and plinth – the appearance so weighty you fear for the balcony’s safety. Malachi McBride sits and glowers down upon the Parade as if it passes at his command, as if he could turn down his thumb and bring the whole teetering juggernaut to a halt. The beginning of a smile creeps like a seismic crack from the fault line of his jaw. But before it can take hold and climb to the upper reaches, he quickly bulldozes it flat, burying it in the jowly foothills. He wheels the chair round and heads back into the lounge; time for fun and games. A woman, an agency nurse, stands in the cold room watching the Parade too, on the TV. Inez is her name. Next to McBride, in her corn-blue frock, she looks like a tiny Madonna, stolen from a wayside shrine. But McBride shows no respect for her frail saintliness. With a hawkish jerk of the head, he makes his intentions clear.

‘Well, don’t it just make you swell up with pride.’

His words come out like bile, and Inez knows that darker, more poisonous stuff will follow. She turns away with a sad little dip – the eye contact thing – and struggles to keep the mask blank.

‘We’re all fucking Irish today,’ he continues.

She closes her eyes and breathes deep. Of course, she knows why he is like this. He is sick; he knows he is going to die sooner rather than later (God willing and heaven forgive her!); and he is angry with his Maker. She braces herself to receive the next toxic secretion, but instead he tries a different tack: ‘They show this stuff back in that tin-pot tropical fart of a country of yours, Inez?’

Inwardly, she stirs at this surprise tactic – when did he ever call her by her first name? – but outwardly she doesn’t give a twitch, because he is looking for the smallest chink, a tiny drawbridge of tenderness she might let down, and then he will storm it.

‘Hey, maybe the kids are watching right now, right there in Manila – if they show this kind of shit there. How are the rickety little coolie babies?’

How dare he strike her in the womb like this! Holy Jesus forgive him. McBride allows himself a sly sideways glance to see if she will react to his jibe. Inez bites her tongue, refuses to give him the satisfaction of her humiliation. It is at times like these, good Catholic though she is, that she would gladly see this man dead.

He makes the mistake of introducing a pause to the proceedings as he sits, staring her down, waiting for a new line of assault to open up. It becomes a bridge for her to cross. Meek but cunning, she seizes her moment: ‘I think I go now and buy something nice for your lunch, Mr McBride.’

She walks straight to the door and takes her coat. He can’t reach her here, and if he says something, she will pretend not to hear. McBride vents a snigger, a gloating celebration of his own wickedness, but he knows he’s beaten – for the moment. Her hand on the latch, Inez takes in a great bucket of air to feed the sigh she’ll let out with sweet relief on the other side of the door.

■ ♦ ■

17 Pinto Mews, Riverhead, Long Island sounds a good address, but it’s no great place to live: a row of apartments, box-square and drained of colour, like cartons that have been left out in the rain. It’s the kind of building you would pass by a hundred times and never recall its being there. From inside, you would have to poke your head impossibly far out of the window to catch a view of anything more uplifting than the used-car lot on the one side, and the scrubby patch behind the run-down old theatre on the other.

Two women sit poles apart at either end of a table that serves every purpose. Siobhan King, a girl with merry freckles, hair like tangled brass and bright blue eyes that somehow do not belong to her surroundings, follows the Parade on TV. She is fix-faced, her eyes flickering side to side, as if impelled to memorize every face in the crowd. A TV guy burbles on all folksy about this proud platoon of officers and that happily marching band, but to her his voice is just a wasp trapped in a jar, so total is her concentration. Even so, one thing is really getting to her: the woman at the other end of the table. Her mother.

A handsome but overburdened woman, Corinne sits rifling through racks of display cards studded with cheap jewellery, all the time mumbling and muttering, ‘Agate, agate, agate, amethyst . . . amethyst . . . Shit!’

Last week, at the Newton Harbour Monday Market, she sold so many of this particular semi-precious stone that she made her best profit ever.

‘Shit!’

Now, the night before she is due to set off for the same weekly event, she discovers that she has cleared her supplies, forgetting meantime to buy in more of her bestselling line.

‘Shit!’

It’s not like her. She’s normally so ahead of the game. But she has no choice, the stall is booked. She will just have to fall back on the agates, opals and moonstones that she knows do not sell so readily – it’s that or risk losing her place altogether.

‘Shit!’

Siobhan turns away from the TV and looks straight through Corinne, saying, ‘Could you please be quiet, Mommy, and kindly do something about your language.’

Corinne looks up, caught out. At fourteen Siobhan has taken up indefinite occupation of the moral high ground and Corinne fells compelled to account for herself: ‘You don’t understand. I’m out of amethyst, it’s Sunday night, and if I don’t have the right stuff to sell tomorrow, I don’t make enough even to pay for the pitch. It’s catastrophic!’

Siobhan shakes her head with practised forbearance. ‘Annoying; frustrating; a total pisser even; but catastrophic? Hmm . . .’

The superior manner of this remark unsettles Corinne all the more – not because Siobhan is being so damn high and mighty, or because basically she is right, but in reality because it confirms that her daughter sees their whole goddamn situation for what it is: the shabby apartment excused by bohemian trappings, the not quite respectable neighbourhood, and the whole shitty territory that goes with being a single mother making her own way by the sweat of her brow, always, always bogged down in tiresome details that mount up and weigh so heavy in the balance. Corinne steers the conversation to matters practical: ‘Listen, if I have to get up and go at the crack of dawn, you’ll just have to walk to the bus with Kelly.’

Siobhan rolls her eyes at this feeble tug of the apron strings, but secretly she is delighted. With her mother off her back the next morning, she will be at complete liberty to work her own wondrous plan, and won’t that be so cool? Inwardly relaxed now, she goes back to watching the Parade, her beady-eyed search suddenly less urgent. Every year for the past five years she has followed the Parade, not for pleasure, not for the pomp and the ceremony, but in the dear desperate hope that one day she will catch a glimpse of
him
, standing in the crowd. Yes, she would surely recognize him – his face, the way he holds his head and the kind of clothing he would wear. She has only her hazy memories and one crumpled photograph to go on – the one she sneaked out of the bottom of her mother’s drawer – but she would know him anywhere. In a way, none of that matters now, because tomorrow, or the day after maybe, she will go there, to the heart of the city where he lives, and she will not come home until she has tracked him down, and found him and won him back.

■ ♦ ■

Sure enough, trade has picked up, and Michael has never before set eyes on half the customers wandering in. So many saying, ‘Well, just look at this!’ and ‘Oh, doesn’t this just take you back?’ It pleases him to greet these people coming from every corner; it gives him purpose to see them squinting through the glass, their senses awakening to the fine things on display. He loves to see them drift away from their busy routines, slowing down and finding the time to enjoy a coffee and a Danish, turn the pages of the newspaper, even fall into conversation with one another. It has long given him a kind of wistful pleasure to think about the countless people who have arranged to meet here at the Sunrise, to sit outside and eat bagels and sandwiches, or enjoy a smoke. It is as if he has played his own small part in their exchanges, the ideas generated, the projects born, the deals struck. He looks across at Grace, behind the counter. All very well for her to accuse him of running a museum, but is it so terrible a thing? After all, it was precisely because he had the foresight all those years ago to keep the place exactly as it once was that it is so very special now. If being a museum-keeper also means being a carer, a provider of comfort, a preserver of worlds, then it’s a sad day when such a thing should amount to an insult.

Michael sniffs; Benjy is hovering at his heels, expecting no doubt to take his break five minutes early. He waves him on to go down and fetch more cartons, then wanders over to the cold-meats counter. A little girl jumps out from behind the counter where she has been hiding. Sylvie, his granddaughter, girl of his girl. ‘Boo!’ she shouts, and, ‘Oh my goodness!’ he exclaims, making a show of looking shocked to the core, all of a quiver and fanning his face. She shrieks again, delighted to have such fantastic power over her old grampa. Michael catches her, both hands on her waist, and hoists her up towards the ceiling – he is strong for a tubby little man, and he tilts her so she is nose to nose with him and giggling. His daughter Jenny is somewhere out back. He lowers Sylvie to the ground. ‘Here, honey,’ he says, and hands her a Sesame Snap out of his top pocket. ‘Now, what did your mommy say you should be doing?’

Although Sylvie can yell things like ‘Boo!’ and ‘Hey!’ and ‘Ow!’, and can giggle louder than a passing train, Sylvie does not yet have words, or at least she chooses not to use them. At the age of three it is, of course, her prerogative. So in answer to Grampa’s question, Sylvie silently toddles off behind one of the shelves and brings back the colouring book she left there, holding it up for him to see.

‘Ah good,’ he says. ‘OK. Oh look, did you do this? Was that really you?’ She nods energetically, pride glowing on her face. ‘Splendido!’ he says, ruffling her golden hair and sauntering away from her to the window, where the brightness fades from his face as quickly as it had sprung. There they are again, across the street, just in front of the boarded-up entrance to the disused record store – the three black boys, loitering and gassing all the time and hopping on and off the kerb without a care for the cars – the tall one, the small one and the one who once worked for them and gave them pain. He glances over at Grace, who sucks her teeth. ‘What do they want, just hanging around there every other day and doing nothing?’ she says, drawing in a sigh. She’s all set to dredge up more tired old complaints, but then she sees through the window the black ragged shape of a dog and is suddenly propelled into her own urgent exclamation: ‘Michael, your eccentric relative is outside!’ This prompts a shudder from Michael, who looks to see for himself and confirms that Old Rosa is indeed louring on the sidewalk opposite the store. His back stiffens, his lips purse and he gives a shrill whistle to summon Benjy, who magically appears, alert and ready – these minute actions part of a practised response to impending disaster. Michael raises an eyebrow of command, and Benjy, reluctant but mindful of duty, obeys. He wheels round, lines up with his master and marches stiffly in time with him to the door and out onto the sidewalk. There, he strikes his pose, keen and attentive, like a minor figure on a war memorial, as Michael raises a defiant hand and says, ‘Stay right there, Rosa!’ Rosa isn’t actually going anywhere, but just saying the words makes Michael feel he is in control. Then, exactly as she has done for the past ten years, Rosa reaches towards him – arms stretching forward, hands open, palms up, as if he should go and embrace her. As if all would be well. This, he has never been able to handle. He cannot do it. And so, shaking his head, he ignores her. Out of the corner of his eye he can see the three black boys watching, sniggering from their safe distance. He drops his voice in search of a gentler tone, but it comes out weary and patronizing: ‘OK, Rosa, send it over.’

With clock-stopping slowness, Old Rosa produces a rolled-up piece of paper and tucks it under the dog’s collar. Michael watches with studied forbearance before issuing the next instruction: ‘Let go the dog.’ She hasn’t in fact had a hold of the dog, there being no leash, but she says not a word. Instead she glares at him in her thick foreign accent. Michael hasn’t heard his old aunt speak in fifteen years, but he knows how the words would sound: painful, with the vowels impossibly long and at war with the hard, clipped consonants – the whole effect comic and at the same time strangely noble. Barrell, apparently without prompting, now steps up to play his part in the dumbshow and plods across the street. Benjy shoots forward like a quarterback, snatches the list and scoots back inside the store, where it is his job to interpret the tortured handwriting and to obey the sentences that come from some cold, old foreign place:

1 small rye bread. Please to make sure that this was fresh today
.

A large jar of dill pickel. I do not prefer the one from Hungary the one from Poland is much more to my liking
.

Half a pound of smoke ham slice acord to existing arrangment
.

1 ripe tomato but not to ripe
.