Selected Stories

‘If this is known they’ll take him in again.’

Jasmin shook her head. There was a mistake, she said. The woman said there wasn’t.

‘We look after him, we lie for him, my husband and I. We’ve done our best since my sister died. A family thing, you do your best.’

‘There wasn’t anything.’

‘My sister knew his chance would come. She knew there’d be a day that would be too terrible for her to bear. He was her child, after all, it was too much. She left a note.’

‘Honestly, I promise you.’

‘I know, I know.’

The woman got into her car and wound the window down as if she intended to say something else but she said nothing. She turned in the quiet road and drove back to her house.

Frying chops, Holby prodded them occasionally with a fork. He liked to blacken them, to see the smoke rising while still not turning down the gas. It got into her hair, Jasmin’s mother maintained. Smoke like that was greasy, she insisted, but Holby said it couldn’t be. He heard the door when Jasmin came into the kitchen and he called out to her, knowing it wasn’t her mother who’d come in.

‘How you doing, girl?’

All right, Jasmin said, and then her mother was there, back from her time with her betting-shop friend. Even through the smoke, her entrance brought a gush of the perfume she so lavishly applied when she met her men.

‘What’re you frying, Holby?’ She shouted above the sizzling of the meat, and Jasmin knew there was going to be a quarrel.

In her room, even with the door closed she heard it beginning, her mother’s noisy criticisms, Holby’s measured drone of retaliation. She didn’t listen. Probably he had guessed at last about the betting-shop man, as her father had once guessed about him. Probably it had come to that - the frying of the chops, the smoke, the grease no more than a provocation, a way of standing up for himself. And Holby – today or some other day – would walk out, saying no man could stand it, which Jasmin remembered her father saying too.

She pulled the curtains over and lay down on her bed. She liked the twilight she had induced; even on better days than this she did. Tired after the walk to the house with the man she had begun to love, and after that the walk alone to where she lived herself, she closed her eyes. ‘You like to go in here?’ he asked again. He carried her coffee to where she waited. She felt the touch of his fingers when he put the necklace on for her. ‘The sun all right for you?’ he said.

In the room she still had to imagine there were books on shelves, the vase of flowers, the pictures of castles. In a courtroom he put a case, his papers in one hand, gesturing with the other. They belonged, he said on the towpath, the rowers going by.

Downstairs something was thrown, and there was Holby’s mumble, the clank of broken china when it was swept up, her mother’s voice going on, her crossness exhausted as the woman’s had been. He had been shamed by the woman getting things wrong and was the kind to mind. He didn’t realize the woman didn’t matter, that her talk and her fury didn’t. He wasn’t the kind to know that. He wasn’t the knowing sort.

Her mother’s voice was different now, caressing, lying. She sent Holby out for beer, which at this stage in the proceedings she always did; Jasmin heard him go. Her mother called up the stairs, calling her Angie, saying to come down. She didn’t answer. She didn’t say that Angie wasn’t her name. She didn’t say anything.

When she went there, he would not be on the seat in the sun. He would not be waiting in the bus station. Nor playing the machines. Nor in the McDonald’s. But when Jasmin closed her eyes again his smile was there and it didn’t go away. She touched with her lips the necklace that had been his gift. She promised she would always keep it by her.

At Olivehill

‘Well, at least don’t tell him,’ their mother begged. ‘At least do nothing until he’s gone.’

But they were doubtful and said nothing. They did not promise, which she had hoped they would. Then, sensing her disappointment, they pacified her.

‘We’d never want to distress him,’ Tom said, and Eoghan shook his head.

She wasn’t reassured, but didn’t say. She knew what they were thinking: that being old you might be aware of death loitering near, but even so death wasn’t always quick about its business. And she hated what had been said to her, out of the blue on such a lovely day.

She was younger by a year than their father, and who could say which would be taken first? Both of them suffered a raft of trivial ills, each had a single ailment that was more serious. In their later seventies, they lived from day to day.

‘We’ll say nothing so,’ she said, still hoping they would promise what she wished for. ‘Promise me,’ she used to say when they were boys, and obediently they always had. But everything was different now. She knew they were doing all they could to keep things going. She knew it was a struggle at Olivehill.