She was silent.
‘This is so silly, Kitty.’
‘It’s not. Please tell me.’
‘I suppose I got used to being treated as if at any moment I could break. Not to run too fast, not to jump too high, not to laugh too loud, not to do anything too much, just take it nice and easy, but I never liked it. The whole town knew that I was the headmaster’s sick daughter and many of them thought the TB would come back. I was brittle, I was fragile, I was not to be treated the same. I was the one who could drop dead at any moment, the one who wouldn’t live to see her eighteenth birthday. When I moved away it broke my father’s heart but I needed my own space and my own identity. I forgot about all those feelings over the years as I got married, had my babies, reared my children, and I could look after people for a change. But I see that is all I did. As though it was my way of rebelling against my adolescence. I became a childminder and cared for other children, never wanted to be cared for in that way again.
‘But coming here to this place has brought it back to me. That feeling of …’ she thought about it and looked as though she’d a bad taste in her mouth ‘… of being mollycoddled. Of being powerless. My children, as beloved as they are, have almost written me off already. I’m old, I know that, but I still have fire in my belly. I’m still … alive!’ She chuckled at that. ‘Oh, if the village could see me now.’
When Birdie looked at Kitty, her eyes sparkled mischievously. ‘On my eighteenth birthday I made a bet. I used the birthday money my father had given me and on the day I left the village for ever I made a bet.’
‘What was the bet?’
‘That I would reach the age of eighty-five.’
Kitty’s eyes widened. ‘Can you make a bet like that?’
‘Josie O’Hara, the meanest man in town, had the bookies in his family for what seems like for ever. He thought I was on my way out, just like all the others, and he was only too happy to take the bet.’
‘How much money?’
‘I bet one hundred pounds. A lot of money back then. And so confident was the bookmaker on my demise that he gladly offered me odds of one hundred to one.’
‘So that means, to the bookie’s dismay, you’ll be collecting …’ Kitty calculated it.
‘Ten thousand pounds,’ chuckled Birdie.
‘Birdie!’ Kitty gasped. ‘That is phenomenal! Ten thousand!’
‘Yes,’ Birdie raised her eyebrows. ‘But it’s not just the money.’ She turned serious. ‘Not that any of those old codgers are alive now. I just need to go back there for myself.’
‘You have unfinished business,’ Kitty smiled, loving this story.
Birdie thought about that. ‘Yes. I suppose I do.’
‘So here’s the plan,’ Molly said, leaning in towards Kitty and Birdie conspiratorially around the garden table. ‘Now that you’re in on it, we could use your help.’
‘Oh, don’t drag poor Kitty into this,’ Birdie interrupted.
‘Are you joking? I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’
‘Really?’
‘This is the most exciting thing I’ve heard all day. Apart from a man who hears prayers and a woman who gets proposed to every week.’
‘What?’ Molly asked.
‘Never mind.’
‘Okay, so the bus is out of action from Thursday morning, when the Oldtown Pistols return from their semi-final with the Balbriggan Eagles, to Friday evening, when the Pink Ladies go to bridge. Which gives us a window of opportunity to take the bus Thursday at
10 p.m., drive to Cork, stay the night, pick up the money and drive back the following morning to be home by Friday evening.’
‘Hold on,’ Kitty interrupted. ‘You’re taking the nursing home bus?’
‘Unless you have a car or any other ideas, it’s all we can do.’
‘Are you allowed to take the bus?’
‘It’s strictly for nursing home activities.’
‘So you’re not allowed to take the bus.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So you’re effectively stealing the bus.’
‘We’re borrowing the bus.’
‘Birdie,’ Kitty said in surprise, ‘did you know this?’
‘The woman is going to collect ten grand – what does she care how we get there? So I’ll get slapped on the wrists if they find out, it’s no big deal, but Bernadette won’t find out. We’ll be gone and back before they even notice we’re gone.’
Kitty thought about it – it seemed innocent enough when she put it like that – but she didn’t need vehicle theft on her record to top it all off. ‘But what about you, Molly? They’ll notice you’re gone.’
‘I don’t work that shift. I don’t start work until Friday evening, and before you ask, as far as the old battle-axe knows, Birdie is going out with her family on an overnight trip for her birthday.’
‘You two have thought this all through, haven’t you?’
They chuckled mischievously.
‘Well?’ Molly asked. ‘Are you in?’
‘I’m in,’ Kitty replied, and the three reached into the centre of the table and held hands.
On the way home, Kitty took out her notepad.
Name Number Six: Bridget Murphy
Story Title: Birdie’s Nest Egg
After a long day working on her subjects for the story, Kitty finally felt like she was getting somewhere. She had scratched the surface and was getting glimpses of the people beneath, the underneath part everyone hid from everyone else, the part of a person beneath the mask, beneath social politeness, beneath insecurity. She felt that she was beginning to get to the juicy parts of her list. Despite that, she had only met six of her one hundred names, had less than a week left of her deadline and she was no closer to establishing a solid link. Could it be hidden secrets, like Birdie and Archie’s? She was going to have to dig a lot deeper with Eva, Mary-Rose and Jedrek, if so.
She called Pete for the second time that day.
‘You better have something for me, Lois Lane.’
She laughed. ‘Not that I’m ready to reveal yet. I told you, Friday. I forgot to ask, how long is the piece?’
He paused. ‘Kitty, considering you should be finished and merely going over the article for perfection right now, I’m a little surprised to hear you ask that.’
‘Have we gone back to bad Pete again?’ She moved to the vacated back row of the bus for privacy.
‘Bad Pete,’ he laughed. ‘Am I really that bad?’
‘At times you are horrendously scary.’
‘Well, I don’t mean to be horrendously scary,’ he said, and she almost felt his breath on her ear, one of those conversations when every pause, every word, breath and sigh meant something. ‘Not to you, anyway.’
She smiled and then looked around to make sure no one was catching her obvious silly smile.
‘So how many words have you written?’ he asked more gently.
‘You can’t answer a question with a question, Pete. I asked you first.’
‘Okay.’ He sounded like he was stretching and she pictured his broad muscular shoulders and then her hands running over them. She surprised herself with this fantasy: this was Pete, bad Pete, duty editor Pete, who had often given her nightmares, not sexual fantasies on buses. What was happening?
‘It’s the main feature so you have five thousand words. However, I could reduce it to four if you’re having problems. You could draw matchstick people to take up space or something,’ he teased.
‘I’m not having problems – well, okay, I am but in the opposite way. It’s just that there is so much material. One hundred people’s stories in five thousand words is near impossible.’
‘Kitty …’ He was warning her now.
‘I know, I know, just listen.’
‘No, I’ve heard you. This is your baby, you drove this thing forward. If this was Constance’s idea for a feature then she would have figured out a way to do this. You knew her better than anyone, you’re a great writer,
Kitty, you’ll figure it out.’
Kitty smiled at the praise; she hadn’t had much of that for the past year. ‘Thanks.’
‘It’s true, but I don’t want to ever have to tell you that again.’
‘I know, I’m sure it hurt you to say it.’
‘You think I hate you so much.’ She heard the smile in his tone. He lowered his voice so nobody could hear him. ‘What can I do to make you believe that I don’t?’
She heard herself say, ‘Hmm,’ and they both laughed.
‘Actually, what are you doing tonight?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you don’t want to know.’ She thought of the manure lining the stairway to her flat, an impatient Zhi and a long night ahead of her, cleaning.
‘So you’re busy.’
‘Why?’ She sat up, her heart beating faster. She wanted to backtrack, say no, she had no plans. What had she been thinking? That had been a deliberate lead on from her previous suggestive comment and she was too stupid thinking about manure to have realised it.
‘Oh, no reason.’ Pete cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been working late here to get this done. I’ve been here most nights till ten or eleven; if you wanted any help or a meeting about anything, just drop by.’
‘Thanks, Pete.’
‘Otherwise, putting my bossy hat back on, you know Friday is the deadline, we’re having a staff meeting and I need you to be there to present the story. No excuses.’
Kitty hopped off the bus, feeling lighter than before. When she reached her apartment she expected the smell of manure to greet her but it was clean. In fact, it smelled of turpentine, which was actually a welcome scent compared with the last. She pushed open the door to the dry-cleaners with a big smile on her face.
‘Zhi, thank you so much. I can’t thank you enough for cleaning that up. I fully intended on—’
‘My wife. She do,’ he snapped, and a scowl-faced woman bending over a dry-cleaning press looked up to glare at her.
‘Ah. Mrs Wong, thank you so much.’
She grunted.
‘We no do for you. We do for tenant. We show flat. New girl move in two week.’
‘You showed my flat to a tenant?’
‘My flat. Yes.’
‘But you can’t do that without my permission, Zhi. You can’t just let someone wander around my home without telling me. It’s … it’s … against the rules of our tenancy agreement.’
He looked at her, unimpressed. ‘So you write in newspaper,’ he snorted.
She looked at him helplessly but he didn’t care. She slowly backed away from the counter and retreated from the shop. Just as she was closing the door behind her he shouted, ‘Two week from today. You out.’
Kitty sat at the kitchen table with the names of her six subjects spread out before her. Each name was written on a card of its own and beneath each name was her story idea for each person. She laid them out neatly and then studied them slowly, one by one, hoping a link could be sparked in her mind. She drummed her fingers on the table, looking at the ninety-four other names, many of whom she had contacted and hadn’t had time to meet, many of whom she barely had time even to think about as they lived so far out of Dublin. Her stomach rumbled as she hadn’t eaten since tea with Mary-Rose, but she had no food in the fridge, no time to shop and no desire to steer off course. She was lost in the stories of the men and women who were taking over her mind: Archie, Eva, Birdie, Mary-Rose, Ambrose and Jedrek. Their worries were her worries, their problems were her problems, their delights her delights, their successes and their failures all hers too.
But – and there was a big but – no matter how much she stared at their names and how intrigued she was by their individual stories, they did not and could not make up one single combined piece for Constance’s tribute, one that would join their stories together seamlessly, unite them under one great glorious banner. Kitty laid her forehead down on the cool surface of the kitchen table and groaned. Pete had named Friday as the final day for her to present the story and he meant it. He had put up with her procrastination for long enough. He had somehow managed to ease the worries of the panicking advertisers, allowing her to write for the magazine, and for that she owed him a lot. He had fought hard for her and it was time she repaid him by delivering on her promise, but she had been so busy being on the move, meeting with the people on the list, that she had barely had time to face the truth. The truth being, she was in big trouble. It was time now that she admitted it, not just to herself but to someone of far greater importance.
Kitty knocked on Bob’s door. He was the only person she could bring herself to talk to honestly about Constance’s story, and she hoped that his understanding of the woman would help shed light on her problems.
Bob opened the door with a tired smile. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
‘You have?’
‘Though you’re later than I thought you’d be. Days later, my dear. Never mind, come on in.’ He opened the door wider, and made his way down the hall.
He sounded good-humoured but he looked so tired. He walked with a weariness that Kitty felt also, a weariness that came from a constant sadness, a hollowness in their hearts. The heart knew that something was missing and it was having to work extra hard to make up for it.
The living room was as cluttered as it always had been. Constance’s death had not changed that, though it may have helped add to it. Teresa had not managed to change Bob and Constance’s filing system, though Kitty was sure Bob would have fought her to the death if she’d tried to introduce a more linear, pedestrian form of living. Somewhere among all of that mess lay an order nobody else could decipher. It was impossible to sit at the kitchen table. The surface was covered in paperwork and miscellaneous items that spilled onto each of the six chairs that hugged the table.
‘Coffee?’ Bob asked, from the small kitchen.
‘Yes, please.’
Kitty knew she could do with getting some sleep that night, but a cup of coffee or two was certainly not going to prevent the inevitable from happening. She hadn’t slept properly for weeks, she doubted tonight was going to improve for her, and she needed to be alert for this conversation. She needed to defog her cloudy mind, a mind that felt it had scoured every avenue of possibility for the story, ransacking every home along its path as though it were leading a manhunt. She needed to view those pillaged avenues with a fresh eye and rewind, start afresh, and she needed Bob’s help to do this. What stalled her from asking outright was his gallant support in her ability to write Constance’s last story in the face of the doubting Cheryl and Pete. Now she had to tell him she had failed to deliver on her promise. There was no doubt that she had let herself down, that she was about to let Bob down was a sure thing, but as she stood in Constance’s home, feeling and smelling her friend as if she were just in the next room, more terrifying and heartbreaking to her was the unbearable feeling she had let Constance down. She was supposed to be Constance’s voice while Constance had been silenced, but what was she doing? Stuttering and stammering, humming and hawing, not being nearly as eloquent as Constance was somehow continuing to be in death.
A moment had passed in which Kitty had been studying the array of items cluttering every surface, then she realised she wasn’t smelling the anticipated aroma of coffee, nor was there a sound of Bob moving around in the kitchen. She found him standing in the middle of the small space, frozen solid, looking at the cupboards but not seeing them, looking more lost than she’d ever seen him. Though Bob was ten years Constance’s senior, they had always seemed to be the same age. Kitty wasn’t sure if it was Constance who acted older than her years or if it was Bob who seemed more youthful, but whatever it was they were just perfectly matched, always the same, always in sync, never seemed separated by anything as large as a decade, apart from the occasional viewpoint. It was as though they had arrived on the planet at the same time and accompanied each other through every day as though they were made to be that way. Kitty found it difficult to imagine Constance?
??s life before Bob, or Bob’s life before Constance, that there had been an entire ten years of his roaming the earth before she’d arrived. Kitty wondered if he’d felt it, the day she was born, but never knew why, a moment when the life of a ten-year-old boy growing up in Dublin suddenly felt right because of the arrival of a little soul in Paris.
But now, looking at Bob, Kitty could see the Bob without Constance and he was almost like a body without a soul. A little light had gone out.
‘Bob,’ Kitty said gently, placing a hand on his shoulder.
‘Yes,’ he straightened up, came to, as if suddenly remembering he had company.
‘Why don’t I make the coffee, you sit down and relax?’ she said casually, moving him aside gently and opening cupboards to get the coffee started.
‘Yes, yes, indeed,’ he said, distracted by who knew what memory or sudden thought he’d had, and sat in the only armchair free of a pile of newspapers and magazines.
Kitty opened the cupboards and was faced with books, crammed in as a regular bookshelf would be. Every single shelf in every press was filled; not a cup or saucer or plate, or even food was in sight. She frowned, searching for the coffee pot, for the cups, but failed. Trying to use Constance and Bob’s logic, she made her way to the living room to search the bookshelves for mugs but there weren’t any. No logic and no mugs, but plenty more books. Giving up momentarily on the mugs, she moved on with her task but there was no sign of a coffee pot, or of coffee granules, just a lone kettle that had once been their piggy bank of coins.
‘Bob,’ she said, a laugh catching in her throat, ‘where do you usually keep the coffee?’
‘Oh,’ he said suddenly as though the thought had never occurred to him. ‘We usually go out for coffee but Teresa is always drinking something from a mug. We must have something in there.’
Kitty looked around the cluttered kitchen. The calendar for that year was a Kama Sutra calendar. Stuck to the fridge with sticky tape, it displayed position number five for May: ‘Raised Missionary’. Kitty opened the fridge and was disappointed to find it empty; she had been hoping for something exciting after the presentation on the door. ‘Maybe she brings her own …’ She surveyed the empty shelves.