The Ruby Slippers (6 page)

So her body lies, fixed and substantial on the outside, but on the inside in that state where the thing we call self is so diminished it no longer knows how big it is or how small, or how dark or light, or even if it is dead or alive. And in that weakened state, the particles of thought and feeling that make up being start to fall like leaves and drift from their bodily bounds, radiating outward and away, beyond the reach of all the world and in step again with the unfolding universe.

■ ♦ ■

Grace stands in the doorway like Horatio holding the bridge, an unyielding barrier to Michael, who holds the dog tight to him. For twenty minutes they have stood like this, while he has conveyed to her every detail of what the police officer told him. She has stood with eyes wide to hear how the bizarre accident happened; she has winced to hear about Rosa’s sorry condition, and has shaken her head ruefully to learn that they will have to go to the hospital the next day. And only when she’s satisfied she has it all in her head does she turn her attention to the dog:

‘So, the officer told you all this? And this was outside Rosa’s apartment? So how come you come back with the dog?’

‘Well, I couldn’t not come back with the dog.’

‘Really? So why didn’t you give him to the policeman?’

‘The policeman? How could I?’

‘Michael, I wonder about you sometimes! We have no responsibility for this dog. So I suggest you take it somewhere right this minute!’

‘What now? On a Sunday night?’

‘There are places – the precinct – they would know. You shoulda given it to the guy there and then. Now listen, you gotta do something, Michael, or you got one big problem on your hands. And don’t you dare even think of bringing that smelly animal in this door!’

Michael is a little crestfallen when she slams said door in his face. But then, suddenly thoughtful, he steps back from the doorway and off the edge of the sidewalk to get a better view of things. He surveys the Sunrise as if for the first time, then looks up at the sky – well, at least it’s not set to rain. He gives Barrell a gentle tug, leads him down the alley by the side of the store, and ties him to a drainpipe. He slides out a layer of cartons and drops them flat on the ground. ‘C’mon on, old boy, sit yourself here.’ Michael is not at all certain that the dog will take to this – not if he’s anywhere near as stubborn as his mistress. But Barrell does take to it. Immediately, he climbs onto the bed of boxes and sits with his head lolling. ‘He’ll survive the night at least,’ thinks Michael. Later on he will bring the dog something soft to lie on and some meaty scraps to keep him going.

■ ♦ ■

James knows he should have gone back to work. He has taken liberties to be with Paolo and, considering that his line manager at the NYPL is an asshole and a bully, it will not be overlooked. For now, though, he sits on the couch and waits, drinking coffee after coffee, the curtains drawn, the dishes piling up, the shadows creeping over his face. It will not be long – the vital signs have said it, the evasive looks of the medics have said it, and Paolo’s last desperate bid to express words confirmed that he knows it, too. As plain as day, he is going. He thinks of that last fragmented request, ‘Remember me’, and he thinks of all the ways that people have ever commemorated their loved ones, from Mount Rushmore to the Taj Mahal to park benches. But as soon as he has assembled these thoughts, he wishes them away – God, Paolo isn’t even dead yet, and here he is planning his memorial. He turns and looks at his own reflection in the TV screen, seeing what he has become: a ghoul – empty, lonely and possessed of death.

■ ♦ ■

Corinne shuts the window on another tired dawn. Thankful at least that there is no rain, she takes her coat and gathers up her storage boxes stacked by the door. ‘So, you’re gonna be OK going in with Kelly, yeah?’ she asks in as unconcerned a way as she can manage. Siobhan, at the battered table, stops short in devouring a bowl of Weetos. ‘I’m not ten, Mommy. How about you? Are you gonna be OK, driving all that way and going to work all on your own?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Exactly . . .?’

‘OK, OK.’

Corinne, made to look the fool again, gathers up her boxes, makes her ragged goodbyes and merges herself into the greyness of the day beyond the door. As soon as it closes, Siobhan wanders slyly to the window, there to watch Corinne load the boxes on top of the trestles in the back of the old station wagon. It is such a delicious agony, waiting, willing her mother to hurry round to the driver’s door, anticipating the quivering of the exhaust and the dipping of the bumper that means the car is all fired up and ready for the road.

Siobhan sidles over to the phone, sits down, finds the courage to pick up the handset and dials. A pompous secretarial voice issues orders for parents to leave messages for due attention. Then comes a day-bright beep. An uncanny separation takes place inside Siobhan, and she is both fascinated and appalled to hear a passable imitation of her mother – weary and stoical, with the faintest rasp – delivered, magically, out of her mouth: ‘Uh, hello, this is Corinne Harper. Um, I’m afraid Siobhan has a temperature and a very sore throat today. We both do as a matter of fact. And, well, we’re waiting for the doctor right now. Hopefully she’ll be all right tomorrow or the next day. I’ll get in touch to let you know. Thank you. Goodbye.’ She puts down the phone, dull and deadly, but then, realizing it is done, she flashes a whoop and a clap of the hands, topped by a cry of delight: ‘Wicked or what?!’ She gets up, throws on her yellow woollen jacket, rolls her bag across her back and marches to the door and out.

■ ♦ ■

Kelly is over at the corner of the road leading down to the bus stop. An older boy, Kelly’s brother, stands shoulder to shoulder with his sister, but the minute he glances over and sees Siobhan coming, he lazily steps aside, shunning her company in the same old way. As she crosses over to join Kelly, Siobhan returns his cynical look with a resentful stare of her own. The brother – Siobhan no longer allows him a name – has always been ‘off’ with her, as if he has uncovered a hole in her that the world has yet to see through. And at this moment she is so totally consumed in her hot little deceit that it enters her mind that perhaps the brother really does possess some special insight into her iffy character. She has let Kelly in on part of the secret – that she intends to travel on the school bus only to get closer to the main terminus – but has kept the rest of her plans to herself. It took all of her cunning to swear her to secrecy without coming close to spilling the reason, and now Kelly is on fire with curiosity.

Even as the brother swings onto the waiting bus and they scurry down its shining yellow flank towards the door, she yammers at Siobhan for the lowdown. ‘Where, Shibby, where? Just give me some idea, a tincy-wincy clue . . .’ And when they are safely in their seats and the brother has checked in with his own pals in the back, she keeps up her whining: ‘Please, please just tell me. Is it to meet a boy? Just tell me. Someone at least should know.’ Frustrated still, Kelly is driven to more desperate tactics, letting out her fears in a sudden, dramatic whisper, her hands open like a scarlet fan in front of her mouth: ‘Oh no! Don’t tell me you’re hooking up with some weirdo on the Net!’ With a superior roll of the eyes, Siobhan lets it be known that she would never be so foolish, but that’s as far as it goes. Only when they get off the bus and the rest, Kelly’s brother included, have hightailed it for school, does Siobhan give any kind of hint at her mission: ‘Listen, Kelly, I have to do this. It’s a good thing, a right thing I owe to myself. That’s as much as I can say.’ She presses Kelly’s arm, swings her knapsack and heads away. Defeated, Kelly heads along the well-trodden path to school. Only once does she turn to follow her friend’s progress, but Siobhan has already flitted from view, lost in the hazy patchwork of faraway things lining the sidewalk, leading downtown.

■ ♦ ■

The bed that she lies on seems impossibly vast, making Michael feel all the more small and outside himself. The sight of Rosa’s head, served up on a pillow in its helmet of bandages, and the insidious wheeze of oxygen from the cylinder, unnerves him even more. Looking over at Grace, stooped neon-pale on the other side, he can see that she, too, is disconcerted. And there is yet more strangeness in the way the prim nurse, who was earlier so soft-voiced and shiny-eyed, now stands there in a new guise, her back stiff and her voice mechanical as she recites her well-worn patter: ‘Try, for example, saying things to her. The patient is in a coma for the moment, although of course we don’t know how long that will last. It could be four or five hours only, or it could be weeks or even months. By talking to them, the idea is that maybe we can stimulate their consciousness. There have been many cases where recovered patients have repeated back things that people said when they were out. You could have a conversation – kind of comforting talk about nothing in particular – but include her, too, just like you would at any other time . . .’

This takes Michael well and truly into the land of the weird. The last real conversation he had with Rosa was more than twenty years ago. Since then, the most he has said to her is, ‘Stay your side of the street,’ or, ‘Please, go take a bath.’ Well, at least she won’t require that kind of nagging any more, although he can still smell the faintest whiff of death’s taint on her, despite the fact that she’s been bathed and scrubbed and her ghastly clothes incinerated.

‘Thank you,’ squawks the nurse and marches away, leaving the two of them stuck for words of any kind, let alone conversation. Michael speaks finally, but only because he feels so foolish: ‘So what are we supposed to say to her?’

‘How should I know? Hi, Rosa, how’s it going?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Well, what am I supposed to say? I never had much to say to her and, come to think of it, I never wanted to neither.’

It pains Michael that Grace should carry even now the same old grievances against his old aunt: ‘Come on, Grace, be charitable,’ he urges her.

‘What, because she got knocked down I’m supposed to forgive and forget everything she ever did?’

‘No, because . . . because she’s old and harmless now, and all of that business is long over.’

‘No it is not. And that person lying there is the same person that did those things. And that person still has to explain one day why she did them. And then maybe I might find it in my heart to say nice things.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. How is that ever going to happen?’

‘That’s right, it is ridiculous, and that’s why I will not stand here another moment. Look at her, Michael. No way does she hear what we’re saying. She’s out of it. Gone. Tell you what, let me know the moment she sits up and says sorry, then maybe we can all get together and chew the fat about the good old days. Now excuse me, I have a store to open up three hours late!’

And she walks right out, leaving Michael standing there like a lemon. He is in no kind of position to go running after her, there are matters still to be sorted – Rosa’s things, her money and keys and so on; he must stay and talk to the people. He watches Grace’s bird-like figure flutter away down the corridor and has the same old sinking feeling. He prays she doesn’t let her bitterness about Rosa get the better of her all over again.

Michael walks back to the bed, leans over the cushioned head and looks, truly looks, at Rosa’s face for the first time possibly in his life. It reminds him of a chestnut squeezed hot from the husk: yellow, translucent, sort of, and imprinted with lines. He leans over and says in a half-whisper, ‘Listen, Rosa, I don’t have time right now, but I’ll come back, depend on it. In the meantime, you lay right where you are. Stay right there and take it easy, yeah. I’ll be back.’

■ ♦ ■

Siobhan sits on a bus-station bench. Smart girl that she is, she has shot-gunned the seat next to a together-looking woman who could pass as her mother. The bus is late, and she has grown empty-headed with waiting, her eyes wandering with her thoughts, around the dingy concrete arena, scored across with arrival bays. With each circuit, the keen sense of expectation that led her here drains away a touch more. First thing in the morning and everything seems so limp and pathetic. There are people dotted around the place, but they all seem out of it, sitting either slumped or hunched or lolling against walls, each one of them somehow careless about who and what they are. On the bench to the other side of Siobhan, a woman jerkily sneaks a cigarette, while her little girl of three or so flops about, every ounce of her concentrated on sucking a lollipop. Just opposite the little girl and her mother, a fat old man sprawls behind
The National Enquirer
, while a large German Shepherd dog sits prick-eared at his feet, as if it alone is mindful of some noble purpose in their journey. For some reason, Siobhan is reminded of the tear-jerker movie where the two dogs and the cat take off across 1,000 miles and incredibly find their owner. It gives her a momentary feeling of warmth to compare
The Incredible Journey
to her own heroic mission, but then it occurs to her that the three lovable animals travelled across America, half dead and starving, on homing instinct alone, whereas she will travel the length of Long Island on the scheduled bus, after which she will snatch a bite in McDonald’s or wherever before taking the subway to her destination. Even so, she reassures herself, it’s kind of in the same territory.

Something nudges against her leg. She looks down to see the girl-child looking up at her, lips plumped and cheeks sucked in, her eyes glassy with lollipop exertions. Siobhan smiles and leans in to her, but already the child has rolled down the length of the bench towards the next one along. Siobhan watches intrigued as the toddler comes to rest in front of the dog, who momentarily bounces on his haunches, his owner still totally oblivious.

The child considers a while, then takes the lollipop from her own mouth and offers it, warm and dripping, to the dog. Having no apparent fear of the animal, she jabs the stick at its fearsome head, all the while giggling with delight. The dog flinches and jerks its head this way and that, doing its best to keep out of harm’s way, but the little girl presses on and will not rest content until she has inserted the lollipop into his mouth. She drags the lollipop along the dog’s ragged jaw, bouncing it along the row of serrated teeth as though playing a xylophone. Siobhan watches with mounting fear. She can’t believe that the fat man still hasn’t stirred from behind his newspaper, and she can see that the dog is close, literally, to snapping point. She has an awkward choice: call out hysterically and draw the world’s attention to the danger, or stay silent and anonymous, which is what a fourteen-year-old girl bunking off school and up to no good would be sensible to do.