This Is How It Ends (3 page)

I
T WAS HARD TO KNOW
what to do next.

He’d left a couple of messages for them. One the first day and two more yesterday. But he hadn’t heard anything back, not a whisper. He didn’t want to ring them again, that would make him out to be a stalker.

Maybe they weren’t in the habit of checking their messages. There are people who don’t check their messages regularly. Or maybe they’d tried to call and hadn’t been able to get through, maybe there was a problem with the codes. Then again, there was always the possibility that they were away.

He knew so little about them. He had plundered his sister’s memory and come up with almost nothing. That was nearly thirty years ago, Eileen had said in her defense. She was only twenty-two then, she’s fifty-one now.

Two months Eileen had spent with them and all she could remember was this. There were two little girls, not much more than a year apart. They had storybook names, Imelda and Adeline. The mother had died but nobody had ever told Eileen what had happened to her. There was no trace of her around the house, nothing to suggest that she’d ever been there in the first place. The house was right on the beach, that she could remember clearly. You could see two big chimneys from the front windows.

Strand Road, that was it. Bruno had found the address in the phone book and he’d copied it down onto a piece of paper along with the phone number. He’d asked the lady in the guesthouse, was it far. Strand Road? she’d said, looking at him as if he were simple. Sure that’s just around the corner. Left at the gate, she said, then left again.

He decided that he would walk past the house, just to look for signs of life. After breakfast, he would take a stroll down the beach and he would identify the house as he was passing. Just to get an idea of the lay of the land.

THE BEACH IS A
city beach, forming the eastern border of the capital.

Tucked in beside it is one of the city’s most exclusive suburbs, an expensive jumble of Victorian redbricks and Regency villas, a lovely seaside hodgepodge of houses. During the boom, a garden shed in this area would cost you a million euro. It’s the proximity to the sea, the estate agents would explain. Everyone wants to live beside the sea.

As Bruno strolled along the footpath, he took in the manicured driveways. He registered the multiple German cars squashed into the small front gardens. The fresh paintwork on the windows. Bruno grew up in a seaside town. He knows these windows would need to be painted every other year.

Some of the houses are numbered and some of them aren’t. Some of them have names rather than numbers, names like Vista Mar and Rusheen. When Bruno comes upon a numbered house he takes it as his guide. He looks right and left to find out which way the numbers are going. Then he counts his way along, allocating a number to each unnumbered house he passes. He counts them down one at a time, there’s only one side to this street. When he comes across another numbered house he has a little moment of satisfaction. He’s right on track.

He must be getting close now, he’s only a few houses away. He walks past a low bungalow set back a bit from the road. The next houses he comes to are laid out in a small terrace, four of them in a row. Tall and elegantly proportioned, each house has a wide flight of stone steps leading up to the hall door.

The first house in the terrace has been painted a pale pink, the next one a light dusky blue. Seaside colors, they look pretty up against each other, the contrast is nice. But the next house he comes to is unpainted, its façade a dull gray stone. It has none of the cheerfulness of its neighbors. It’s a numbered house, there are peeling white numbers stuck inside the fanlight over the front door.

This is the house of his cousins.

Bruno stands for a moment at the gate. He notices the weeds sneaking through the gravel in the driveway, the battered little car parked over beside the basement drop. The chipped black paintwork on the railings and the lichen-clustered steps. He looks up at the impenetrable black windows, two upstairs and one down.

As he stands there he sees a movement in the downstairs window. He peers, trying to figure out if there’s someone there or if it’s just a trick of the light. But he can’t make out anything at all. All he can see is opaque glass, the stubborn reflection of the sky glinting back at him.

Then he comes to his senses. He realizes he’s standing there on the sidewalk, staring into their house. He shouldn’t be staring. There might be someone in there, they might be able to see him. He turns away quickly, rushing along the sidewalk, like someone escaping a crime scene. Only when he reaches the corner does he stop. He looks each way to check the traffic, then he crosses the road, slipping through the gap in the wall and out onto the promenade.

HE’S TIRED.

He realizes this as he flops down onto a bench, he’s tired to the bone. He’s so tired he could lie down right here and fall asleep, like a vagrant. Nobody knows him here, nobody would care.

Even so, he can’t do it. No matter how tempting it is, he forces himself to stay upright, sinking down into his padded jacket for comfort. One of the strangest times in his life, he’s completely at sea. He doesn’t know what to be doing with himself.

He’s been sleeping during the day. He’s been going back to his room in the bed-and-breakfast, with the purpose of reading for a few hours, with the purpose of resting. But the next minute he’ll find himself in a kind of waking coma. Like he’s been given an anesthetic but he can still hear what the doctors are saying.

He sleeps, and yet he’s aware of being asleep. How can that be? How can you be asleep and yet at the same time aware of the degrading sensation of the side of your face squashed against the pillow? Aware of the hard waistband of your jeans digging into your hipbones. Aware of being cold but still unable to climb under the bedspread. Somewhere, way down below him, he’s aware of daily life going on. A vacuum starts and stops. A telephone rings and rings. Bruno lies there and hears and feels all of this, but he can’t move.

When he does manage to drag himself out of this strange nonsleep, he finds he’s shivering and his circulation is sluggish. He’s cold from the inside out, like someone who’s been involved in a scientific experiment. He has to haul himself down to the village for another cup of coffee before he can even begin to feel normal again. He sleeps, and when he wakes up he goes back for more coffee and then he wonders why he’s having trouble sleeping at night.

It could be jet lag, he’s thinking, it could be the time difference. He could be depressed. He could be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Only he doesn’t feel depressed. He doesn’t feel anything except plain old tired.

A LOT HAS HAPPENED
, he tells himself.

Just three weeks ago he was walking out the door of the Lehman building with a cardboard box in his arms, all his stuff packed into it. Out on the sidewalk, the tourists were stopping to take photographs, the cops trying to keep them back behind the crash barriers. There’s nothing to see here, they were saying, you’re not gonna see anyone famous. Just folks who’ve lost their jobs.

Across the street, television reporters were lined up in a wide arc, their satellite vans humming. As he walked by, Bruno wondered to himself why they’d all arranged themselves in formation, like a flock of birds following some unspoken rule of the universe. It was only when he got home and surfed the networks that he worked it out. They were all positioned so you could see the bank’s logo behind them, there it was, just over the reporter’s shoulder. As they were talking, they would move to the edge of the screen, angling themselves a little to the side. “Behind me you can see the bank’s employees leaving with their belongings. Many of them have spent most of the weekend inside the building, waiting for news. I’ve been talking to some of them this morning and they’ve described themselves as shell-shocked. What they’re saying is, this is a financial tsunami.”

The others took themselves off to Bobby Van’s to drown their sorrows. They tried to persuade him to come but Bruno had no stomach for it. He went home, sat on his couch, and watched his life fall apart on live television. He hopped from channel to channel, digesting the sound bites, letting the stock phrases roll over him hour after hour. There was a script to this, maybe if he heard it often enough it would make some sense.

It wasn’t just the job that was gone, most of his savings had disappeared with it. Half his pay going back almost six years, instantly and irretrievably gone. The funny thing was, he felt quite detached from it all. There was even a strange elation, an adrenaline rush. He was like a guy who comes home to find his house burning down, and all he can think is, I never wanted any of that stuff in the first place.

HARD TO BELIEVE
that it was only three weeks ago. Thinking about it now, it seems like someone else’s life.

He sees himself through a stranger’s eyes. A clean-shaven man in expensive clothes, he’s walking up the steps from the subway. He’s coming out onto Seventh Avenue, stopping to buy a coffee from the Iranian guy on the corner. He has the exact change ready. They toss a bit of loose banter back and forth. Then Bruno turns and disappears in through the doors of his office, coffee cup in hand.

Above his head, a map of the world is moving across the glass face of the building like a cloud across the sky. Islands and sea gliding silently over the surface, the Lehman Brothers logo crawling after them in a massive bold font. Magnificent, he used to think it was. It used to make his heart swell in his chest as he walked through the doors. Now it seems a lot like hubris, that gloating display of global supremacy.

He sees himself at his desk on the second floor, multiple screens in front of him. He’s tracking airline shares. He’s scanning those flickering rows of figures, looking out for anything unusual. Behind him, a wall of glass. If he swivels his chair around to the side he’s looking right down the barrel of Seventh Avenue. Below him, the heaving traffic and the fumes and the people. At his eye level, constantly shifting billboards and neon signs. Rising up on the far side of the street, great tracts of concrete and steel and glass. And above it all, that vulnerable New York sky.

It occurs to him now what it is that he’s been doing these past few years. He’s been sitting there, waiting for another plane to appear on the horizon, heading straight for his office building.

And in a way it did.

LATER IN THE DAY
, Bruno will wander the streets looking for little bookstores but finding only big ones. He’ll sit in a café and read all the local newspapers to catch up on the election. He’ll be forced to order something he doesn’t want to fulfill the minimum charge. After that he’ll wander through a city square, standing for a while to watch preschool children in quaint little uniforms collecting autumn leaves. He’ll rest on a bench by a reedy canal, and he’ll smile at the drunks gathering on the opposite bank. And he’ll wonder to himself, what am I doing here?

Later still, he’ll go back to the guesthouse and shower in the tiny bathroom. He’ll wander down to the village and eat supper alone in a bustling restaurant. He’ll go back home and get into bed, only to discover that he’s unable to sleep. And he’ll find himself wondering all over again, what the hell am I doing here?

This is the day ahead of him. He can see it laid out like a path, but he’s in no hurry to embark on it. Instead, he just sits there on the bench at the edge of the strand and stares out to sea. He’s surveying his past, as if it’s a field he’s just crossed. He doesn’t want to go back, but he’s not ready to go forward either.

He’s like a man who’s been shipwrecked. He’s been washed up on a desert island. He’s letting his clothes dry off in the air and he’s contemplating his new lease on life.

He’s not sure yet what to do with it.

I
FEAR OUR AMERICAN FRIEND
is lurking.”

From where Addie was standing in the doorway, it looked like he was just a stencil. He was a black outline against the bright light of the window.

“What makes you think that?”

She was squinting through half-closed eyes, still half-asleep.

“There was a strange-looking fellow out there this morning. I got the feeling he was spying on us.”

Addie walked over to the window. She peered out at the front drive but there was nobody there.

“How can you be so sure it was him?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind. The beard, the blue jeans, the general demeanor. Straight out of central casting.”

He made a kind of clucking sound in his throat as she bent to kiss the top of his head. His hair was baby thin now, a lick of it swept over his bald patch in a lame attempt at disguise. It made her tender towards him.

“Not much else I can do,” he was saying, “but sit here and observe. If I sit here long enough, something interesting is bound to happen. Touch of the
Rear Window
about it all.”

This is his stock-in-trade, this habit of captioning every situation with a film title. He’s well-known for it, people joke about it behind his back. “Nobody mention
My Left Foot
,” Addie’s sister had whispered as they stood in his hospital room on the day of the accident, watching him trying to flip the page of his hospital chart with his chin.

“Do I get to be Grace Kelly?” Addie asked cheerfully as she bent down to scoop up his laundry from the basket beside the door.

“You’re a dead ringer for her, my dear.”

It had been hard on him, the accident. Hard on her too. They were united by their helplessness in the face of what had to be done.

“I DON’T LIKE IT
any more than you do,” she’d said, before he had a chance to complain. “Anyway, it’ll only be for a couple of weeks.”

They had worked it all out between them, herself and Della. A conversation almost without words, a quick conference in the hospital corridor. Addie had offered and Della had just nodded. It was the obvious thing to do. Addie was the obvious person, she had nobody to be looking after but herself. And besides, it would do her good to have something to occupy her, that’s what Della was thinking. She’d been spending too much time by herself recently, she’d been moping. Looking after Hugh might be just the thing to take her mind off her troubles.

When they’re together they refer to him by his first name, they always have done. Can’t see Hugh making the easiest of patients, Della had said. And she wasn’t wrong.

Addie had gone straight home to her apartment and thrown some things into a suitcase. She’d loaded Lola’s bowl, her brush, and her blanket into a supermarket carrier bag. Grabbed her own coat and scarf and stepped out into the street. A strange feeling, closing the door of the apartment behind her, leaving her carefully constructed life sealed away inside. Her milk-white walls and her white cotton sheets and her lily-of-the-valley soap. The little pots of fresh herbs on the kitchen windowsill and the espresso machine and the Nicholas Mosse mug with the violets on it that she liked to drink her coffee out of in the mornings. She had left the mug behind her on the shelf. She would not try to take her life with her. After all, it would only be for a couple of weeks.

Why then the sense of dread when she had opened the door of the basement flat? She had felt her throat contract and her shoulders hunch involuntarily as she had stepped inside. Straightaway she had registered the smell of damp. It seemed to seep straight into your bones, making you shudder from the inside out. Even the dog had been reluctant to go inside. It’s not forever, Lola! That’s what Addie had said. But her voice had sounded brittle and unsure. It was Addie who had needed convincing, not the dog. She had dumped her bags onto the bed and fled back upstairs.

Together Addie and Della had moved Hugh’s bed down into the living room for him, shunting the couch back into the dining room and closing off the double doors. Of course he’d grumbled about it at first. But now Addie was beginning to think he quite liked it. There was something majestic about the whole setup. To concentrate your life into one room, surrounded by all your favorite things. It had been clear he was coming to terms with the arrangement when he’d asked them to bring the Jack Yeats down from his bedroom and hang it over the sideboard.

A week since the accident and still no friends had come to visit. Addie was beginning to wonder if he had any. Hugh didn’t seem to notice their absence.

“Did you get any breakfast?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “The ever-helpful Hopewell made me some toast.”

Hopewell, the unfortunate nurse who had been hired to help him get up and dressed in the mornings. Naturally, he loathes Hopewell. But it has become a major focal point for him during his convalescence, this hating of Hopewell.

Hopewell is from Nigeria. Black as the ace of spades, as Hugh would say.

“I hope I don’t detect a touch of racism in your attitude to Hopewell,” Addie had warned.

“On the contrary,” Hugh had replied. “My position on Hopewell is quite the opposite of racism. I am assuming that there are very many highly capable nurses, right across the continent of Africa, so I am at a loss to understand how, with all those millions of possibilities open to us, we have ended up with one as singularly useless as Hopewell.”

What Hopewell makes of her father, Addie shudders to think.

Hopewell is tall. He must be well over six foot. He’s black, black in the true sense of the word. His eyes are creamy white, his smile washing-powder blue. You could fit a one-euro coin through the gap between his two front teeth.

He takes his shoes off in the hall. Nobody knows if this is a habit he brings from home or if he thinks it’s expected of him here. It’s a little too intimate, the sight of him padding around in his socks, but nobody dares to say anything for fear of hurting his feelings.

He’s from Lagos. When Addie asked him whereabouts he was from in Nigeria, he seemed baffled by the question. I am from Lagos, he said, as if there were nowhere else you could be from. He told them he was a nurse back home and they took him at face value. There was no way of checking.

He can be quite chatty when he’s on his own with the patient. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that he’s so intensely disliked. Or maybe he doesn’t care. When Addie shows up he goes silent.

He’s punctual. He arrives every morning on the stroke of eight. Addie hears him ring the doorbell before he opens it with his own key. He embarks cheerfully on his morning routine, a series of duties that has been painfully negotiated down to the very last detail.

“He can unbutton my pajama top for me but I’ll take it off myself. He can turn on the bathwater but he’ll have to wait outside until I’m finished. He can pass me the towel but I insist on drying myself.”

Was it Della who said it was like dealing with a particularly demanding movie star?

Once Hopewell has guided him through what he refers to as his “ablutions,” he helps him into clean underwear and a fresh pair of pajamas. Then he assists him in putting on his clothes on top of the pajamas. It’s an eccentric scheme, but it seems to be working. He wears his normal clothes on the top half, tracksuit pants on the bottom. A hideous indignity, but one that’s unavoidable if he wants to be able to go to the toilet by himself.

Addie checks on him after breakfast. She collects the newspaper from the floor in the hall and brings it in to him, laying it out flat on the desk so he can scan the front page. Sometimes they have coffee together. Later in the day, Mrs. Dunphy comes. Before the accident, he only needed her for a few hours a week, but now she comes every day. She does his shopping for him, posts any letters that need posting. She puts on a wash, does some ironing. Before she leaves, she makes lunch, serving it up to him on a tray at his desk. He looks out the window as he’s eating.

“I could get used to this, Mrs. Dunphy,” he says, without turning round. This is his idea of trying to be nice. But it’s too late in their relationship for that now. She sticks her tongue out at him as she backs out of the room.

Come evening time, Addie arrives with the ingredients for dinner. Usually some kind of ready-made meal for two that she can throw into the oven, serve up on heated plates, and pass off as home cooking.

While the food is warming she helps him to get undressed, insofar as he will allow her to. She unlaces his shoes so he can kick them off. She helps him pull his jumper over his head, trying not to knock his glasses off while she’s doing it. She unbuttons his shirt, but he manages to step out of his tracksuit bottoms by himself. As if by magic, he’s back in his pajamas again, his modesty undisturbed.

He climbs into bed as Addie lights the fire and gets the DVD lined up. When she has his clothes folded and draped over a chair, she goes to fetch the drinks. A glass of red wine for herself and three fingers of Tyrconnell for him. He has a cupboard bursting with unopened bottles of whiskey, all gifts from grateful patients.

Addie pours the whiskey into a cut-glass tumbler and drops a plastic straw into the glass. Given no other option, he has quickly come to terms with the notion of sipping whiskey through a straw.

They’ve been working their way through a Bette Davis box set. Already they’ve watched
Now, Voyager
and
In This Our Life
.

“What about we throw on
The Old Maid
tonight?” she asks.

“Is that not a bit close to the bone?”

“You’re very funny.”

He doesn’t mean to be cruel to her, it’s just his way. He loves Addie, she’s his favorite child. She’s probably his favorite person in the world.

BEFORE SHE LEFT
to go back downstairs, she filled up his water glass for him from the jug on the bedside table. She checked that his stick was where it should be, leaning against the desk.

“I have to go and walk the dog. But I’ll check on you later. Be good, now.”

He was glaring out the window.

“Be careful out there. He could be hanging about the place.”

She had the laundry slung over her shoulder like a bag of swag.

“This is ridiculous,” she said as she backed out of the room. “We’re practically prisoners in our own home.”

He raised his voice. He had his eyes fixed on the road.

“I don’t like your complacency. Not with the enemy in the vicinity.” He was enjoying himself now, the drama of it. He had nothing else to be doing.

He heard the door closing but he kept talking to her as if she were still in the room.

“That fellow,” he was saying, “touch of
Deliverance
about him.”