The Shelter of Neighbours (12 page)

You may remember me? I am the woman who had lunch with you in Vienna last March. You told me about your divorce. I have been thinking about you and wondering how you are.

She deletes ‘wondering how you are', which is a bit Hiberno-English and would confuse him. She replaces it with a full stop and ‘I wanted to say hello. How are you?' Then she continues.

Thanks for everything. The lunch and the conversation. It was a miracle.

I am sorry I did not meet you in the wine bar. But please write to me. Please tell me about Mauthausen.

My family is Jewish, too. Was. Until a generation ago. I forgot to mention that, when we were talking.

All the best,

Sara Feldman

She puts the letter in her draft folder, as she has been advised to do with emails. Leave them, reread them before launching them into the ether.

Then she writes another email, to Thomas, telling him about her misadventure on the roller coaster, and Lisa's marriage, and the trip back from the cottage. She tells him the house has not been burgled, the grass is not too long, the asters and the goldsturm have come out in the garden. She says everything is
ok
.

This email she sends immediately. The rule about keeping it for a day does not apply to things you write to your partner or loved one. You can tell them anything.

Just as the bin lorry turns the corner and drives out of the estate Clara reaches the footpath. Now her rubbish will be festering in her bin for a month because she's going abroad the day after tomorrow and she doesn't feel brave enough to ask her neighbour, Martha, to take it out next week. Martha has already offered to look after Bran, Clara's dog. Martha adores Bran, and is delighted to take care of him, but you can't push your luck. So the bin will be there for her when she comes back. Stinking the place out.

C'est la fucking vie.

She drags the bin back through the house with a certain ease – it's heavy, and there's a step to negotiate, but Clara's arms are as strong as a weightlifter's. You wouldn't think it to look at her, a petite woman, with a certain smart quality to her, even when dressed, as now, in a faded dressing gown, spattered with raindrops. (She was in bed when she heard the drone of the bin lorry.) Clara would look chic in a sack, some of her friends say. The thing is, she looks a bit like what she is: a beautician. And it's her job that explains her physical strength, too – she paints nails and puts on make-up, but quite a lot of her day is spent removing hair from women's skin. You need to be strong, as well as dexterous and determined, to rip off the waxed paper so swiftly that the client doesn't realise what's happening. Zapping upper lips and chins with the laser beam all day long develops the muscles of the upper arms, too, although it's not heavy work in itself.

She puts coffee in the coffee machine as soon as she's stowed the bin, and lets it filter away while she's getting dressed. There's a hectic day ahead, even though she's closed her salon, as she calls the ‘shomera' in the back garden where she sees her clients. Before you go on a trip, even a short one, there's always a load of things to do. Maybe if you were better organised, it would be different, but Clara is not organised – she tends to put things on the long finger, to throw an important letter on the kitchen table and say, ‘I'll file it away later'. As a result, she spends half her life looking for mislaid items. Today, when she has plenty else on her plate, she has to dash off to her accountant with the P60s and the other tax stuff. All those horrible forms with the anaemic-looking red print. Halloween's coming up. Tax time.

The rain doesn't stop. It's still bucketing down as she makes a dash for the car. Everything looks awful in this weather. The suburbs of south Dublin (and this is supposed to be the good part) are bleak with cement gardens and grey pebble-dashed walls. If there's anything Clara can't stand, it's pebble dash. Those hard little nubbles, like pimples, make her shiver. She longs to plane them down to a creamy smoothness.

But they don't bother her today. Nothing can really dent her happiness because in a few days' time she will have left this place behind her and be with her son, Eoin, in San Francisco. He's been there for two years, working in a hotel. He can't come home because he's one of the undocumented. Clara has not seen him in all that time. She didn't realise how much – how very much – she missed him until she was filling in the form online for her air ticket. Then, as she keyed in her credit card number, she started crying and she didn't stop for twelve hours.

But that was ages ago. In two days she'll be with Eoin and therefore everything makes her happy. She is playing ‘San Francisco' on the
cd
player – she's been playing it for about two months, nonstop. There's a Bewley's porter cake in a tin with shamrocks on the lid lying on the passenger seat, ready to go into her case the day after tomorrow – Eoin's favourite cake. Everything is wonderful.

Even this boring suburb that she's driving through. It looks as if all the roads and houses fell out of the sky and just happened to land on these unremarkable fields, miles from anywhere that makes sense. Miles from the city and miles from the mountains and miles from the river and the sea. Such places look haphazard and bleak when you're passing through them, but Clara knows when you live in them, they have a meaning. When you live in them, they can be as lovely as any medieval village with its castle and churches and narrow, cobbled lanes. She knows this because she lives in a similar place herself, less than a mile away.

If you're going to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

Watermill Grove. That's where the accountant lives, in a semi-detached house with pebble-dashed walls and a picture window looking out directly on another semi-detached house with pebble-dashed walls and a picture window. His office is around the back in a wooden shed. There must have been a watermill here at some stage, although you'd never guess it now. And there must have been a river, or a stream, which has been long buried under houses and tarmac. Maybe it's under this very road, under Watermill Grove, but who's to know? She parks her car in the first free spot she sees, which, as luck would have it, is just opposite the accountant's house.
You're gonna meet some gentle people there
. She turns off the motor and grabs the big brown envelope. Off she dashes across the road.

The accountant is not in the office.

But his wife is. His wife is a woman with soft creamy skin and a big warm smile. She is padded and comfortable-looking in a baby pink jumper made of cashmere or some smooth wool. A fawn skirt.

‘Michael had a bypass operation two weeks ago,' she says cheerfully. Michael is the accountant.

‘What!' Clara says. What will happen to her tax returns now? She gives the office a furtive glance. It has a reassuringly worked-in look: papers are stacked in wire trays and a few letters are scattered on the desk. And there's a work smell: coffee and computer and sweat. ‘That's terrible! How is he?'

‘He's fine.' The wife smiles. ‘He made a really fast recovery.'

‘Oh, good, good,' says Clara. Only four days to the deadline. After that they'll start shovelling on the fines. Heart surgery will be no excuse. ‘I'm really shocked. I didn't know.'

‘He didn't know himself until three weeks ago,' the woman says, and she laughs proudly.

‘Really? Didn't he have pains …' Clara fiddles with her brown envelope. ‘Angina or whatever?'

The accountant's wife shakes her head. ‘Not a thing. No pain. Apparently when the blockage is on the left side, you feel nothing. If it's on the right, you get shortness of breath and chest pains and so on.'

‘You get a warning?' Clara nods, interested. Her mother, who died two years ago, a month after Eoin went to America, used to have angina. She had pains on the right side. She got a warning. But she didn't get a bypass because she was on the Medical Card, so she got some pills and then she died. Eoin couldn't get back for the funeral. If he'd come home, they'd never have let him in again.

‘But on the left, not a thing. No warning. I never knew about any of this until now,' the woman laughs.

‘No,' says Clara. ‘You only learn all the complicated details when something happens.'

‘He wants me to take files in to him already!' the woman says, pleased. ‘Can't wait to get at them!'

‘Oh don't, it's much too early for that,' says Clara. She hands over the brown envelope. He'll be able to do her returns, sitting up in bed, on a laptop. Pass the time for him. ‘He should rest.'

‘Don't worry,' says the woman, still smiling. ‘Most of them are done. It's only a few of the stragglers that are left. I can do them myself; they're the little ones.'

‘A woman's work is never done!' Clara laughs. It's so great not to be made to feel guilty, even though she is ridiculously late. She's always ridiculously late.

The woman sighs contentedly. ‘If there's a problem, I'll give you a ring.'

While Clara was in the accountant's shed the sun came out. Now golden light washes the houses, so they glow softly in their frames of autumn shrubs and trees. In the driveway of one of them, just beside where Clara parked her car, an old man and woman are working. The woman is raking leaves and he's putting them into a wheelbarrow and wheeling them around to the back of the house. Light mounds of golden foliage are lined up along the sides of their drive, like a range of tidy little mountains. It's a pleasant sight.
There's a whole generation with a new explanation, people in motion
. Clara smiles at the woman and is about to say, ‘Isn't it a lovely day?'

The woman looks up from her sweeping.

Venomous.

That's the only word to describe the expression on her face.

‘Are you the person who blocked my driveway?' she hisses.

Clara glances at her car – a twenty-year-old Mercedes-Benz, the only luxury – near luxury – she allows herself. It's parked very close to the edge of the gateway. She hadn't paid much attention to how she was parking because she was so glad to be getting the tax papers out of her hair.

‘Oh gosh, I'm really sorry!' she says, in dismay. ‘I didn't notice I was so close to your drive.' She smiles then and adds, ‘But not to worry, I'm off now, anyway!'

The woman is not placated. Instead, her face grows angrier.

‘You parked illegally,' she hisses. ‘You broke the law. Do you always park like that?'

‘What?' Clara is puzzled. ‘I'm sorry!'

She looks carefully at the woman. Elderly. Her clothes are verging on the shabby: grey pants and an anorak in a drab shade of yellow old women often wear. The clothes are ordinary but her face is not. It is contorted with rage, like the face of a witch. Clara wonders if she suffers from some mental disturbance.

‘It was only for a few minutes!' she says, and shrugs, dredging her keys up from the chaotic depths of her handbag.

The old woman snarls. ‘It was not a few minutes! It was not a few minutes! You broke the law. Are you always breaking the law?'

Are you always breaking the law?

Clara inhales deeply. She feels like a child, in her tight jeans and purple leather jacket, her high boots. She feels like a child, although in fact she is probably not that much younger than this angry old woman.

‘You broke the law,' the woman says again. ‘I couldn't get into my drive.'

Clara glances at the car parked behind hers and assumes several things without thinking too deeply about them. One of those assumptions is that the car behind hers, a red Yaris, is the woman's. She must have arrived when Clara was in with the accountant's wife and had to park on the road, instead of on her driveway. But would that be so irritating that you'd eat the face off a complete stranger? Not being able to get into your drive is not quite the same as not being able to get out of it.

‘You're overreacting,' says Clara, frowning. She glances at the house. It has a name, carved on a piece of fake wood: Assisi, and a number: 134. Probably holy statues all over the place inside. She shakes her head.

She should go now, before she says things she'll regret. One part of her is urging her to leave. But some emotion boiling up inside stops her doing that. She's getting drawn in.

‘You're crazy.' She can't stop the words.

‘And you're a criminal!' The woman's voice rises to a real scream.

Then Clara makes a supreme effort, suppresses her annoyance, and climbs into her car.

She has to retreat down Watermill Grove, do a U-turn and come back up, to get out onto the main road. As she drives back towards the corner she sees that a small crowd has gathered at the old woman's gate. There's a young woman, with a pram, and the old man, his face as angry as his wife's. The old woman is pointing at Clara and the others are looking at her accusingly. There's something unreal about the group. It looks choreographed, like a scene from an opera or a ballet.

The old man beckons Clara over, crooking his finger and gesturing menacingly. With his big hooked nose, he's the evil count. He could be wearing a black cloak and three-cornered hat, shiny pointy-toed boots. But his clothes are as ordinary as his wife's. It's the eyes that belong to the other dimension, as they splutter and sparkle with rage. The two old people glare at her. The house and driveway are like a backdrop on a stage. The faces are like masks, not like real faces, which change expression in response to what people say. She wonders, seriously, if this is some sort of reality
tv
hoax. But Watermill Grove isn't the sort of place where they do reality
tv
hoaxes. It's too far from town. It's too boring. It's too real.

Clara could decide to ignore him and drive away from this farce. She's calmer than she was; she's distanced herself. Discretion is the better part of valour, that she knows. But something holds her, some dark spell. She stops the car. The evil count stalks up to her and she rolls down the window.

‘Show me your driving licence,' he barks.

‘What?' She wasn't expecting this.

‘Do you have a driving licence?'

‘Of course I have a driving licence,' Clara says.

‘I'd like to see it,' he snarls.

Naturally, Clara hasn't a clue where it is. ‘I'm not showing it to you,' she says.

‘In that case, I'm going to report you to the police.'

She laughs in surprise. ‘
ok
,' she says, with an elaborate shrug. ‘Go right ahead. Report me to the police!'

Now he's taken aback.

‘Go on,' she says, encouraged. ‘Report me! Report me to the police!'

‘I will,' he says uncertainly. ‘I will. I will.'

Repetition is the name of the game.

He ambles off across the road and into his house.

The young woman moves away down the road, her head bent towards the contents of the pram. The old woman picks up her rake and begins to work at the leaves. The scene is beginning to lose momentum; it's time to draw the curtain. But the old man hasn't made his final exit. He returns with an old envelope and pencil and makes an elaborate show of taking down the registration number of Clara's car. He gives a last grunt, scowls at her and returns to his garden.