The Ruby Slippers (33 page)

‘No?’ For the first time there is surprise in the man’s voice, and this increases as Michael now becomes prey to his emotions.

‘You see . . .’

Grace looks over, baffled to see her man stammering so to get his words out.

‘You see . . . it, it so happens that Rosa Petraidis is my mother.’

‘What?’
gasps Jenny.

‘Excuse me?’ exclaims Grace, flabbergasted. Michael stands there looking a little foolish, as if he has just farted at a funeral.

‘Really? Tell me about it,’ says the lieutenant, looking at Michael with new eyes, as is everybody in the room.

‘That’s it, she is – was – my mother. And what is more, she died this day.’ He looks at them in turn: the detective eager for the truth, Grace in her state of confusion, Jenny in her cold hostility.

‘Now, this is on my shoulders, me alone. Please,’ he addresses the lieutenant, ‘take me wherever it is you have to take me.’

■ ♦ ■

James gets out of the cab and walks, drained, towards the entrance of his apartment block. Ten yards from the door, a voice calls brightly from one side: ‘Hiya, Daddy!’ He turns to see her, sitting on the wall of the disused French fountain, all dappled in sunshine and looking happy in an odd kind of way, with a jolly beret on her head to go with the jacket. ‘Siobhan?’

‘Hiya, Daddy,’ she chirps again, takes a candy from a bag she is holding, pops it into her mouth. ‘How are you today, Daddy?’

‘What . . . what are you doing there?’ he asks falteringly. He can’t quite come to terms with what he’s seeing – it belongs in a dream.

‘Oh I dunno, just . . . sitting,’ she says, wheezing a touch, and pops in another candy.

He steps towards her as she munches away, all childlike and delicious, with cheeks shining. ‘I don’t understand. How come you . . .?’ Then he sees that the bag of candy is a bag of nuts, half empty. Open-mouthed, he stares as she smiles insanely back.

‘Poor . . . Daddy,’ she says, a touch slurred now and holding out the bag for him. ‘Would you like a . . .?’ The hand just flops away and Siobhan’s eyes roll to white as she keels over and lands on her back in a bed of leaves inside the fountain. He runs to her, but she is gone in shock, blue and wheezing like wind in a bottle. He spins round in the street, looking for someone, anyone – not the smashed man on the bench; not the old woman sweeping outside her house. He runs fifty yards to a woman carrying a poodle and breezing along clack-heeled. ‘Quick, ring nine-one-one! My daughter – she’s gone into ana . . . anaphylactic shock.’

‘Oh my goodness. What is that?’

‘Just call them. Please!’ And he rushes back to Siobhan, literally scooping her floppy body out of the fountain and into his arms. With his thumb, he prises open her eyelid. The pupil is a big black moon. He is gazing into his daughter’s eyes. It was never meant to be like this.

■ ♦ ■

All this time since, McBride has been quiet, as meek as a lamb. They went home just as soon as they could get away from his son, who had been so wild and passionate in his rage. There, he went straight to the living room, put the TV on blaring loud, and she has heard nothing from him since. For a full three hours he stayed silent in there, the TV on, the ads sounding like chimes each quarter-hour.

So astonished is Inez at his muteness that she neglects to prepare his coffee in her special way – today, perhaps, he does not deserve to go to hell. Of course, she does not forgive him, even so. It was wrong what he did to his own son, humiliating him like that in front of everybody. She had even prepared herself to speak her mind to him over his shocking behaviour, but the son had taken his own actions and delivered his own retribution. For this reason she is in fear that sooner or later McBride will rise up and vent his anger and his shame, and that his vengeance when it comes will be terrifying.

It does come, while he is eating dinner that evening, but it is less of a storm and more of a dark brewing. ‘So, how do you feel, knowing that we mighta lost the ruby slippers?’ he asks, the old slyness in his eyes. She sits there unanswering, knowing full well that the shoes have no meaning for him, representing to him nothing but other people’s delusions, their possession offering no measurable gain. ‘Well, were you not looking forward to seeing them?’ he demands again, and for once she responds without fear: ‘The ruby slippers? As a matter of fact I was not.’

‘What’s the matter with you? I am asking you, oh saintly one, if you ever wanted to see those wonderful fantasy shoes that would have brought magic into our dark, miserable little lives and cured us of all ills.’ So, he will try this trick again, her religion the bait for his godlessness. She responds in kind: ‘Only God can do that.’

‘Well he didn’t make such a good job of it so far!’

‘It would have been nice see them,’ she ventures, ‘but I don’t understand why you would pay so much and go to so much trouble only to wound your own flesh and blood.’

‘Aren’t you the spunky one today?’ he smirks back at her, surprised that she has so perfectly understood his motives. ‘But what if “my own flesh and blood”, to use your quaint expression, is a confirmed sinner? And that is according to the Holy Bible, by the way.’

‘But it is wrong to punish a person so many times for one sin.’

‘Well aren’t you just full of it today? But at least you acknowledge that it’s a sin.’

‘But maybe not so enormous a one.’

‘To quote a wise teacher: that is for God to decide.’

Suddenly, he is red-faced and panting, his head dropped like a broken bull.

‘I . . .’ he rasps, trying to straighten himself. ‘I . . .’ His face twists, sweat springing on his brow. ‘I . . . feel —’ and over he doubles, a fierce spasm smiting him in the side.

‘Oh my gosh!’ she gasps as he slumps forward, in danger of tipping the chair, for this now will surely end in another place altogether.

■ ♦ ■

She’s not in bad shape as it turns out. Getting her there quick was a good thing, and the medics got the reaction under control at once. Even so, the deed itself was shocking – pure attention-seeking, of course, but then she had every right to seek his attention; it was her need, her nourishment and there was nothing trivial about it. He wonders that he is so resilient right now. Only a few hours ago he had felt that he could take no more, that the gods had played their cruellest hand. And yet here he is now, feeling really quite philosophical. Of course, it is because he finally got to be in control, and cast out at least one of the demons that had scared him half his life.

Right on cue, another one of these very demons appears in his line of vision: flying through the automatic doors, his ex-wife, looking wilder and more fearsome than he has ever seen her. James jumps up as she peels away and rushes to the reception desk. He plucks up courage and hurries over to her, saying, ‘She’s OK, OK. The worst is past.’

‘Oh. Thank God . . . really?’

‘Sure. They’re dressing her and giving her drinks and stuff, giving her time to recover.’

‘Thank goodness!’ And she actually puts her hand on his shoulder to steady herself, though just as soon she takes it away, realizing her slip. It has gotten very weird all of a sudden, the wildness on her face replaced by the scared look of an infant. Why does she not scream and shout and name him as the source of all her woes and blame him for practically forcing the nuts down her throat?

Emboldened, he assures her quietly, ‘They got to her in good time, she’s OK, she’s through it now.’

‘Oh, thank God!’ She sighs and begins to cry. Now he really doesn’t have a clue what to do next.

‘Go through,’ he says. ‘I’ll wait here.’ He points the way and she goes to their daughter. While he is putting coins in a coffee machine, his cell rings. It takes him a while to recognize in the faraway voice his father’s Filipino maid, who just launches in, saying, ‘It is your father. Please, he is very sick. He is in the hospital.’

■ ♦ ■

What feelings is he supposed to have? To see his father lying like this on a hospital bed, a warrior-king stretched on the lid of a medieval tomb. Convention says that he should be forgiving – the man who wronged him but is flesh and blood after all – but James can take no solace in such sentiments; the feeling is not there, it cannot be summoned for show. Until the confrontation earlier, he had always gone in fear of his father. Even as a child, when his young dad was easier and more gentle under his mother’s pacifying gaze. It was always the sheer bulk of the man, the savage energy that filled it, that left him in shadow: his father was sporting while he abhorred sport, competitive while he shrank from competition, acquisitive while he showed no desire for possessions.

If James is not yet ready to show forgiveness, he can at least sense the sadness of things that happened which never should have, and of happiness denied, which in turn caused so much pain. And this is what it comes to – this fallen person stretched out, the gathered mass of him reduced to the faintest trace and present only by turns as he ebbs in and out of consciousness, in and out of pain, and in and out of what is human and what is not.

James turns towards the foot of the bed and sees Inez, the nurse, who was so good as to show him kindness when his father was so cruel. He at least owes it to her to show common decency: ‘How long now has he been like this?’ he asks.

‘A day. Twenty-four hours, more or less.’

‘What? He suddenly just keeled over?’

‘Not exactly. He was having dizziness and nausea, but I thought it was to do with his sickness.’

‘Has he spoken?’

‘Oh yes, he can hear; he has said things. You can talk to him.’

‘And how long did you say he had been having these other symptoms?’

‘That’s hard to say. It’s all mixed up with his condition. A week or two maybe.’

‘Strange.’

And it is strange. A nurse has already taken James to one side and pointed out to him that his father’s collapse is not typical of his condition and that tests will have to be conducted. He tells Inez to go home and get some rest while he will do the same.

■ ♦ ■

Back down in the ER, he goes through to his daughter’s cubicle. Corinne is sitting there in a chair, while Siobhan, in her own clothes now, sits on the bed, swinging her legs and looking pale but otherwise all right. She looks at him sheepishly, a smile still lingering on her face. ‘Sorry for what I did,’ she says, as if she had just dropped a cup on the kitchen floor.

‘Can I speak to you a moment, please?’ asks Corinne, looking at him stern of face and then leading the way briskly to the corridor. Shuffling after her to the main door, a tremor passes through him – his old fear of her. Outside, she turns on him: ‘I don’t know how to say this.’ And then she simply bursts into tears, her handsome face crumpling under her anguish. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she stammers. ‘So sorry . . . I was petty and jealous and childish and just mad . . . and . . . and God knows what made me do such a thing!’

‘What?’ he wonders, seeing the tears take hold of her again. ‘What did you do?’

She tells him how she let the bitterness and anger get the better of her; how she had stolen into Siobhan’s messages and wiped out every trace of him she could find and had behaved in so vengeful a way. Strangely, he is neither mad at her nor resentful. ‘I understand. This wasn’t a petty thing, a spiteful thing – this was years of suffering, years of pain and insecurity, and I played my part in that. Please, don’t cry; don’t blame yourself.’

And she does stop crying and she does stop blaming herself, at least to his face, and they get to the point where she is able to ask him whether her mascara is all smudged, and he is able to tell her that it all looks fine. Eventually, the two of them are in a position to walk back along the corridor to Siobhan, who sits there looking chipper enough and only a little mystified as to why they both went out of the room.

Out in the darkness, on the way to the car, Siobhan finds herself walking between her father, silent on one side, and her mother, silent on the other. It takes her back to long-lost times and, like a five-year-old, she swings her arms in time with theirs, a bridge spanning their separated hands. ‘What am I gonna do with you two?’ she says. ‘I mean, you’re as bad as each other.’

James looks on as the battered old station wagon backs out of the parking bay, and remains watching as the tail lights fade from view, Siobhan’s stark silhouette in the back vanishing with them. He knows now that nothing stands between him and her, and that there is nothing for him to hide behind, either.

■ ♦ ■

Michael peers out into the mournful dawn, beyond the paint-peeled window of the boxy precinct room, beyond the grimy porch with the tattered old posters and the ghastly yellow light swinging in the draught. A taxi is at the kerbside, waiting. Even at this distance he can hear the motor running.

‘OK, mister,’ says the sergeant, bringing him back to formalities and producing his belongings from behind the desk. Michael runs his eyes over them and the sergeant puts pen and paper on the counter. He scribbles his name against ‘Items Returned’: his jacket, his belt, his billfold, his glasses in their case and Rosa’s precious letter pad.

He sits in the back of a taxi as the city awakes, scattering cluster-bombs of light to kill the gloom – windows in the buildings bursting iridescent to life, cars gliding in to make one serpentine organism, their halogen headlamps fusing to one dazzling shock of light. Thankfully, the driver is in no mood for talking, his whole attention tied into hypnotic Arab-sounding music that oozes tinnily from the cab. Now at last Michael can sit back in a soft seat and reflect on what has passed, and what might come. The night-cell bed has done him no harm, his bones and joints no more aching than ever and the breakfast was bearable. At least he can get back in time to open the shop and get back some order into his life.

Michael has begun to fully understand it all: the woman he was raised by not his true parent at all, and the ‘eccentric relative’, as Grace would have it, his birth mother. It is strange and tragic, the story she has left behind her. Harrowing, really because at the end of the day, all the cruelty and evasions in it were unnecessary. He takes the letter pad from his pocket and retrieves Rosa’s last words so that he can properly take them in and tie his grief to them again . . .