The Walk Home (21 page)

It was the mornings that were hardest.

Some days Stevie woke up with his Mum in the bed beside him. Grandad Malky had put an extra bed in the spare room, and Stevie would half-remember her getting up and shifting him over in the dark, closer to the wall, a few inches, making just enough room to fit her. His Mum used to lie with him when he was wee, to get him off to sleep, so even if it was a squeeze now, it was still cosy; more like the way things used to be.

Only then he’d hear his Dad come in. He’d open the bedroom door and stand there, a few seconds, a minute, and Stevie would keep his eyes shut, because he didn’t want to see his Dad’s wounded face. He knew his Mum wasn’t sleeping either: he
could feel it from the way she lay, tight and still, her back to the doorway. Stevie felt like this was all his doing.

If it was a school day, his Dad would get him up; over his Mum and into the kitchen. He’d nudge Stevie into his clothes:

“Socks, son. Mon. Breeks.”

Handing him his trousers, coaxing him out of his sleep. If Stevie’s Gran was there, she’d give him his breakfast and take him to lessons, so that would be fine then. But on mornings she was out and cleaning, Grandad Malky not yet back from his night shift, his Dad put out cereal and milk, and had to go to the bedroom door again.

“Lin?”

There’d be nothing first, and then:

“Yeah, yeah.”

His Dad left for work after that, and if his Mum still didn’t get up, Stevie would go and stand by the bed. Until she opened her lids, squinting a bit.

“Sorry, love. I’ll be upna minute, kay?”

Except he knew she wouldn’t. They’d always be late for school: best part of an hour, or more than, on a bad day, when she buried her head in the duvet. On bad days, she’d ask:

“Where’s your Gran, son?”

Like she didn’t understand his Gran had gone to work.

“Would you go and find your Gran, love?”

Like his Gran was the one he should go to, not her.

So Stevie took himself back into the kitchen and wished his Dad was still there, or Grandad Malky back from driving. To lift his Mum out of bed and into her jeans, or just to sit with him. Stevie didn’t like waiting on his own, because he was never sure how long he’d have to stay there, watching the hand on the
kitchen clock, ticking on, thinking who he should go to now. He knew he’d be going in to class with everyone turning and staring at him anyhow, and the teacher all torn-faced again.

Sometimes he asked his Dad, when he was handing him his vest:

“Can you no take me? Please?”

And his Dad looked like he might, only then he sighed:

“Your Maw’ll dae it, son.” All quiet.

Stevie thought it would be better if he shouted. Or if his Mum did. So then at least he’d know if they were angry, or what. If one of them was angry with him, or both. Who he belonged with. The way things were just now, Stevie didn’t know where to put himself, left alone in the kitchen, tying the laces on his school shoes. Time went on, he took to walking to school by himself.

On his days off, Graham would get to his Mum’s house early. Stevie wouldn’t be home yet, and Graham couldn’t just sit there like a spare part, so he mostly went to the spare room and looked at the bed where Lindsey slept now.

It would never be made, or Stevie’s single by the wall; the blankets all in a heap, and clothes all over the floor. Graham picked them up and folded, because he was meant to be doing his bit. Even if Lindsey didn’t want it.

On his hands and knees like that, he found an old shoebox one afternoon, half under Lindsey’s bed. He pulled it out and lifted the lid. Graham found a whole pile of Eric’s pictures.

So then he knew where she went; most likely she was with the old guy right now.

There was a small sketch at the top, of Auntie Franny: all
creased, like it had been looked at a lot. Graham lifted it away and found faces he knew, and faces he didn’t, a couple of Papa Robert among them. And then there were a whole lot of sketches with no one in them.

They were all of landscapes and they all looked like Ireland; just like the place Papa Robert had always told of. Rolling fields as far as the skyline, riddled with lanes, dotted with farms, framed by the hills that rose behind them.

Or were those the Tyrone hills behind Lindsey’s Dad’s house?

Graham leafed on through the pages, and there they were again, in the low summer sun, and the more Graham stared, the more they came to look the same as he remembered from that first time. When Lindsey pulled him up the path and in through the door, and there was no one home, nobody but them, half on the floor, half on the sofa in the front room.

Graham was stung. How did Eric know what those hills were like?

When he’d first fetched Lindsey back to Glasgow, when they used to cycle all over, she’d got Graham to ride them to the top of the scheme one time. Her fingers hooked into his pockets, she’d stood and shown him the view out west, beyond Drumchapel to where the back-country started, and she’d told him they were just like the hills her Dad climbed. She never said too much about home, but Graham could hear she’d been glad to escape that man. Lindsey was still an unknown quantity, but it had felt good that day, knowing he’d been the one who fetched her away. Graham had liked the pull of her fingers, that way she’d had back then of tugging him onwards. She’d pulled him through the flat that morning, when his Mum was out at work and his Dad still sleeping. Finger to her lips, Lindsey had led Graham into the bathroom, the only door with a lock in the
house, pressing herself up against him in her rush, the hard mound of her pregnant belly, the twisting life inside that the two of them had made.

But now it seemed like Eric knew her better. Probably the old guy knew what was happening with their marriage. It was more than Graham did.

There was even a sketch in the pile that Eric had done at their wedding: Lindsey and Stevie on the back of a coaster. Graham stared at the fine pencil lines, simple, beautiful, the pair of them.

He shoved the pictures back into the box. Graham lay down on the bed, hands to his head. He was still there when Lindsey came into the room.

She looked frozen to the bone, standing there, blinking at him. Then she climbed under the blankets, turning her back, curled over with all her clothes on, like she couldn’t get warm.

Graham lay on top of the duvet, next to Lindsey. Him on one side of the bed and her on the other. Time was she’d have had her arms around him, and her legs; it hurt him to remember.

He knew where she’d been, and he’d seen the drawings she kept. Graham didn’t know what to say, but he wanted to say something.

“They sketches you have,” he told her. “The wan on the coaster. It looks just like you.”

The thought just fell from his mouth, there where he lay, his head all heavy on the pillow, and there was some relief too, once it was out, because the picture was lovely, and a very good likeness. Lindsey stirred a bit then, and Graham thought she might turn over, but she didn’t.

After a while, she said:

“That was me ages ago.”

Eric didn’t have to wait too long before Lindsey came again. Wanting out, he thought, but not finding a way, and he watched her with concern, sunk deep into his armchair. He’d been drawing at his desk most of the morning, but he gathered up his sketches after she arrived, thinking to work near her instead, on the sofa by the gas fire. Eric had been sitting with her a good half hour when Lindsey pointed:

“How is it you’re always drawing that place?”

Her finger jabbed at his pages, Papa Robert’s much-mourned landscape, which Eric had laid on the rug between them: fields ready for harvest, sheaves stacked by hand, an uncut hayfield in the dawn light. There was one of his father too, as a boy of five or so, just by the low door of his childhood home; rough clothes and stonework, the lane beyond an unkempt abundance. Eric had given Lindsey sketches just like these, over the past few weeks and months, and she’d never passed comment, only he
could see now from her face that she didn’t like the drawings at all, the place they depicted.

It had Eric blinking a moment, looking them over. He’d been trying hard to make the place look beautiful, just as Papa Robert had always said it was; the family’s own smallholding that they’d lived on and worked. What did Lindsey find to take issue with?

Still he left his pages where they lay, because he reckoned he’d been just the same at her age: too sore to hear more, or even think more about his father’s Ireland.

“I know how it is, hen,” he said. “I couldnae have drawn these before now.”

And then Lindsey gave him a half-frown, like she needed him to explain that.

He’d put so much distance between himself and Papa Robert, two or more decades’ worth.

“Gets harder tae go back.” Eric shrugged. “The longer you leave it. That’s how it was, anyhow, wae me an my Da.”

“You couldn’t have done different,” Lindsey told him, firm. Like there were some people, some situations, where turning your back was all you could do. It had Eric blinking again, uneasy, this time at the girl. Was that what she told herself as well?

She sat a moment, brooding. Then she gestured, back down at Eric’s pictures, like she needed to change the subject:

“Looks just like where I grew up.” Lindsey kicked a toe at one, dismissive. “Put a petrol station at the fork there. Coupla clapped-out cars. Coupla shitebags, running guns.”

The girl shuddered at the thought. Her border hometown: not just boring, it was a war zone.

“Nothing’s changed, I’ll bet. There’s too many folk there can only hate. Can only pity theirselves.”

It gave Eric pause, how vehement she was, and he found himself wondering: did she count her Dad among them? But he couldn’t ask her, or not just yet. He didn’t know that he could be so direct. Eric had so much he wanted to say to Lindsey this morning, he thought he’d have to go careful, like Brenda said; he’d have to work on getting the girl to listen first.

So Eric looked down a moment, before he spoke, at the sketches of his father’s place. The farmhouse, such as it was, and those few Louth acres, still whole and wholesome, before the civil war descended.

“Aye, my Da,” Eric started, thinking Papa Robert had come to learn the harsh sides of his homeland as well. “He talked a bit like you sometimes, so he did.”

Lindsey raised an eyebrow at that unexpected common ground:

“You said he loved it there.”

She eyed him, doubtful, pointing at the soft Louth landscapes. But Eric thought he’d caught her attention at least, so he told her:

“He did, right enough. When he was a boy, aye,” he qualified.

Papa Robert had told of a stone and simple house, a single-room dwelling, lived in by three generations.

“He said they lived by the sod and the crop and the change ae seasons.”

Spring with the primroses massed along the ditches, when his father lent his horse and his hand to the harrow, and then the longer days of harebells and poppies, and skylarks rising from the fields laid to fallow.

“He who blesses hissel in the earth shall bless hissel in the God ae truth.”

Eric smiled at that, just a little, even if Lindsey shook her
head: even the tiniest scrap of Bible was mostly too much for her.

“Aye, but the faimly had reason tae feel blessed, hen. The way my faither tellt it.”

Eric glanced over his pictures, pushing one closer to the girl; of Papa Robert as a child, outside the house that he was born in.

“He said they were good tenants who’d had the great good fortune tae become owners.”

Eric pointed out the climbing rose, and the neat kaleyard below, that Papa Robert’s mother had tended, and he told Lindsey how they grew what they ate, and a bit more too: potatoes and oats that they sold for boots and cloth and soap.

“They didnae lack for life’s requisites. Or for company either. He said there were plenty farms round about; plenty ae faimlies, just like their ain wan.”

The girl nodded a moment, sage, only then she said:

“Except they went to a different church on Sunday mornings. Am I right?”

And she tilted her chin at him, like she knew she was in any case.

They were one of a handful, true enough, Papa Robert’s family; Louth Protestants, few and far between, farming the land, holding to a king and a country they felt their own was part of. But although Eric told Lindsey:

“Aye,” it still rankled somehow.

It had taken him time and thought to put together these drawings, from what he remembered of his father’s stories, and this was how Papa Robert had seen things as a small child, so of course it was a childlike view of things. Eric thought Lindsey could at least try to go along with him, just for now, to see Louth and its families as his father had.

He persisted:

“My Da said their life was graft, aye, an their riches were children, hands tae make light work.”

And Papa Robert was still young then, but not too young to be useful, so he’d tramped the lanes with his mother, bringing the midday food to the menfolk, because they didn’t only tend their own land, but went where help was needed.

“If they aided their neighbour’s ploughin, so they’d be helped when they were reapin. That’s how it went.”

Papa Robert’s father worked for wages too, from the grand house, like all the men round about, bringing in the crops at harvest. Eric told the girl:

“It was what aw the folk bought their winter stores wae.”

And in his mind’s eye, young Robert came down the rise, to see all the neighbours striding through the grand man’s hayfields with their scythes; Papa Robert’s father in their midst, and the farm dogs loose, leaping through the crop as it fell, tearing after the rabbits it had sheltered. All the men locked in the rhythm of work, just like the last year, all the years before.

But Lindsey’s grey gaze held him, sceptical.

“Aye, right.”

Like she just couldn’t recognise this common-cause Ireland he was describing.

So then Eric sighed:

“I know. I know.”

For all that the farming year rolled onwards, they weren’t peaceful times: there’d been war and slaughter all Papa Robert’s young life. Even after the country cut itself loose from the mainland, its king and its garrison, the fighting hadn’t ended there, it had only turned inward. Eric told the girl: