glanced down at his other hand, laid flat on the table, and I got this terrible shock. It was a big hand, broad, with a thatch of brown hairs on the back and nails that weren’t that clean. I looked, and the noise of the bar dropped away and I couldn’t look anywhere else, for I knew for certain sure that I had some business with this Liam that I didn’t want.
Business? Ah, tell the truth, Ellen. You knew this “business” of yours was bed, and maybe a whole lot more.
I dropped my cigarette, and it rolled onto the floor. I bent down and started fishing around for it, the sweat springing out on my skin. I’m going crazy again, I thought, though I wasn’t seeing anything and nothing was happening that definitely shouldn’t be happening; there was only this weird knowing-something-ahead-of-its-time that always frightens me stupid.
I didn’t want to come up, I’d have stayed right there, safe among the chair legs, but Robbie was watching me like a hawk since the hospital, so I didn’t dare.
I found the cigarette, wet through in a puddle of beer, then I unbent myself and lifted my head up over the edge of the table. My eyes met Robbie’s.
For fuck’s sake, woman, Robbie’s eyes said, for fuck’s sake get ahold of yourself—
Implacable, his eyes. No softness, nowhere to hide. So I knocked back the vodka, straightened my backbone, and turned to this Liam and talked.
I drank a lot that night, and I wasn’t the only one.
I was waiting for Stan—it was always Stan who made the moves—but he didn’t; he let them sit on.
He’d glance across at Liam, who was labouring away, trying to get the conversation up and running; then he’d sneak a wee look at Noreen, but she’d given up and was staring into her glass.
Sound move. She wanted to go—any fool could tell you that—but she couldn’t catch Liam’s eye, he was way too busy with me.
I began to wonder what game Stan was playing. Stan could be cruel—a cat-and-mouse streak a mile wide. Was he waiting for Robbie to catch on that someone was trying too hard with his wife?
The paranoia was fairly setting in when Stan starts reminding Robbie we’re meeting up with Suds Drennan and Josie at ten. Then he turns round to Liam, his face dead serious, and he tells him he’s sorry but the place we’ve fixed to meet Suds and Josie in wouldn’t be anything like the bar we’re in now.
Liam nods and smiles warily. He knows he’s being told something; he just hasn’t figured out what.
Stan says what he means is the bar we’re going to wouldn’t be that mixed.
They’re all attention, even Noreen. This is Belfast after all, this is what they’re here for. Stan says “hard line,” he mentions their accents, he mentions the fact that Liam’s called Liam, which is a Catholic name…He lets his voice trail off regretfully. They understand.
Northerners love frightening Southerners—telling them what not to say, where not to go, where not to leave their Southern-registered cars—seeing their eyes grow large and round. The Southerners love it too, you can nearly hear them telling themselves what they’ll tell their friends when they go back home down South.
Everyone loves it: the drama, the bomb blasts, the kick of danger in the air. So who’s suffering, tell me that? No one at all, till some unreasonable woman starts into grieving over the daughter blown to bits, the son sitting rotting in jail, the husband shot through the head, his body thrown down an entry or dumped on waste ground.
Some woman, or maybe some man. For men grieve too, and even your hardest hard-man is not as hard as he likes to let on when it comes to next of kin. And children are soft; children cry easily and long.
It’s a sorry business alright, we humans are a sorry business, the way it’s all mixed up inside us, the ghoulish bits that come alive watching the horror, the soft, gentle bits that will go thinking the sky’s fallen in when we find out that someone’s not coming home to us ever, ever again.
Where was I? In Hartley’s, 1988.
So we left them sitting there, the two of them, and went dandering off up the road to the Lancaster, which is a mixed bar, safe as houses, where you’ll get served till two in the morning, no bother at all. And I was drunk, and frightened even through the drink. I thought if I could only get clear of Liam that awful feeling that he was my fate would vanish away.
At the Lancaster we fell in with the crowd we still knocked around with from student days, so we sat down and set about getting much drunker. And somewhere along the way Robbie began collecting money. He was organising a carry-out to drink back in the flat.
It had got so late it had turned into early. There was no drink left, half the crowd had gone home, and the rest were mostly passed out in their seats or they’d slithered down onto the floor. Suds was still hanging in there, but wee Peter Caulfield was out for the count and so was Suds’s girlfriend, Josie.
Time for bed. Robbie made it up onto his feet, shook Stan awake, pulled out the spare blankets, and dumped them onto the floor. Stan was all for bedding down there and then, but Rita was soberer—she found their coats and somehow got him downstairs. Then she heaved his arm over her shoulders and staggered him off up the road.
Suds had given up; he was curled on the floor like a baby, and there was no way Josie was about to wake him up and take him home. I shook out a blanket and covered her up, then I threw another one over the foetal Suds. He stirred, tucked the edge of it in under his chin, smiled, and snuggled down deeper into the manky old carpet without once opening his eyes.
I thought I’d start lifting the glasses and bottles out into the kitchen, but I couldn’t seem to aim my hand straight, so I sat and smoked a cigarette instead. I could drink for ages without passing out or vomiting in those days. I thought I was great and Robbie was proud of me; I never once stopped to ask myself did I like it or what was the point or was it worth the crucifying awfulness of the hangover the next day.
I was desperate for bed, but I held off joining Robbie; I wanted to be certain sure that he wouldn’t wake up. I didn’t like sex with Robbie when he was really drunk, I could have been anyone or no one for all he cared, he was clumsy and rough and only thought of himself.
I’d have bedded down with the rest on the floor, but I knew there’d be no holding Robbie if he woke in the morning and I wasn’t there alongside him where I belonged. He’d accuse me of doing I-don’t-know-what with I-don’t-know-who—then he’d take me by the shoulders and shake the teeth near out of my head while the rest of them scuttled off-side as fast as they could like so many crabs with the runs. And it was all in his head. There wasn’t a sinner who wasn’t way too afraid of him to look sideways at me, much less try to get a leg over Robbie’s wife.
But if I hated Robbie in bed when he’d drunk too much, I hated him worse when we were out together and the drink took him in that twisted way it sometimes did. There were times he got so jealous I couldn’t even take a light off someone. I’d be grabbed by the wrist, pulled from a room, pushed into a corner of some landing or hallway, and fucked against the wall. That was Robbie with the drink on him: not caring how I felt, not caring if anyone saw, not caring about anything except himself and whatever it was that was eating him alive.
I’ve seen me walk home holding my skirt closed to keep it up, torn knickers stuffed into my pocket, dead tear trails running down my face.
And in the morning he’d be all over me: how sorry he was, how he knew I didn’t look at other men, how it was only the drink—
If he remembered at all, that is.
And I learned fast; I’d forgive him fast—at the start because I was shocked and ashamed, later because I knew if I didn’t he’d stop being sorry and start into listing the things he’d seen me do with his own two eyes. What I’d said to this one, how I’d flirted with that one—
It was a funny time, I