The pub was too crowded. She sat at a table, which backed on to another, her chair knocking against the oak table top. The couple behind her spoke in low, terse murmurs. On the wall, pictures hung too closely, maybe to cover up the yellowing, curling wall paper, or maybe to add to the claustrophobia which hung, musky and cloying, amongst the thick smoke from a lit cigar.
‘What’ll you be having?’ The woman was an outline in the fug. The girl at the table squinted, but could make out no more than the shape of her, thick and matronly.
‘The pie… and water.’ The girl spoke too loudly, and the din dimmed for a second before rising again. The woman made no signal of acknowledgement and disappeared, her form fading. For a moment, the girl closed her eyes and imagined being in a white, sterile room, her senses raw from the smell of disinfectant and light. She was brought back by the thump of a glass being put down roughly on the table, water slopping over the edges and bleeding into the rough wood of the table. She looked up to say thank you and noticed the smoke was clearing, and the room was now hazy and yellow from the bare, incandescent bulbs that hung from the ceiling. The woman was gone.
Above the bar was a wooden sign, weathered as if it had been hung in the rain for too long. Faded letters spelled out ‘Tír na nÓg’, and a figure sat beneath the letters, beckoning, she thought, although she could not be sure. She sipped on the water, which was warm and sweet and reminded her of rainwater.
‘I’m sorry, do I know you?’ A woman had sat herself at the table, opposite the girl. The girl looked at the woman, as closely as she could through the haze, and wished that she hadn’t sat down without asking first. She reminded her of a teacher she had once had, black curls tight against her head and piercing blue eyes. She felt the discomfiture of being called on, as if she were being asked a particularly difficult sum. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, her eyes not meeting the piercing blue, ‘I’m just passing through.’
‘Are you sure? You seem familiar.’
The girl paused, caught her breath and sighed. ‘Yes, I’m quite sure.’
The woman with the black curls nodded at her, and stood up brusquely, with only a fleeting look of curiosity giving her away. She walked away, her brown tartan skirt swaying. The girl at the table remembered, suddenly, the sway of the skirt, and it was familiar to her. She thought again of sums.
The clatter of cutlery jarred her, and once again the matronly woman stood over her. ‘Your pie love,’ she set down a white plate, her tight smile revealing yellowing teeth. ‘Careful now, it’s piping hot.’ The rush of familiarity hit again — that yellowing smile, the lips that furled back tightly over them, like a snarling dog. The girl knew that smile, she was sure of it. Her brain flashed through memory after memory, but that yellow smile eluded her. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered dimly, and the woman, satisfied, moved away to tend her other patrons. The girl let the memories die down and turned her attention to the steaming plate in front of her. She felt hungrier than she had in a while.
Someone, somewhere in the belly of the pub, away from the door and the howling rain outside, had started to play music on an ageing jukebox. She caught the strains of the song, the bass notes mixing in with the low baying of the wind outside. She chewed slowly on a mouthful of pie and mashed potato, savouring it. It had been a hell of a drive, and the road had been slick with rainwater — she had seen the sign (it had come out of nowhere, just as she were wishing for somewhere to stop) and she was glad for the hot food and the warmth. The song faded and the voices around her merged and closed in on the last notes of the melody, a soft, churning rumble, where each voice was indiscernible and only served as part of a whole. Yes, this pub was too close, with the air hot and wet, like an exhalation, but it would do before she forced herself back out into the night.
She got up, telling herself that she should use the bathroom before she got back into the small, red car she had hired. Secretly, she hoped to see the jukebox on her way and slip in a few cents and play a song — something that wouldn’t get lost in the wind, something that she could hold onto through the next few hours of driving — and to her delight the jukebox stood next to the door of the Ladies. She looked around, furtively, and then dug into the pocket of her jacket for a few coins to jam into the machine. She selected her song — a song she had loved fiercely at seventeen — and as the first bar began she closed her eyes, remembering.
At first, she does not recognise her own name between the gentle, static strumming of the chords from the jukebox and the general din of the pub. He says her name again, sharply this time, as if remonstrating with her, and her eyes snap open. ‘Will?’
Will Peake, a man she knew five, ten years ago, more perhaps (how could she call herself a girl, when she is long past womanhood, she thinks dryly to herself), stands in front of her. She remembers the day. when she last saw him, his hand entwined with Lydia Fairchild, whose blonde hair swayed cheerfully as they walked out of her life. She realises he is speaking to her, that she has missed the beginning of his spiel, and that he is talking, as he always has, in this hurried, staccato tone that leaves little room for interjection. ‘…of course, it was terrible, what I did with Lyddie, but I’m real glad to see you. I really am.’
She smiles at him, and remembers how much she hated his affected Americanisms, his desire to sound as far from the Home Counties as possible. “It’s good to see you too, Will, what are you doing here?’
‘Travellin’, aren’t we all?’ It is a non-answer, another thing that frustrated her about him, even in the early days, when things were new and exciting. ‘Hey, so you’re here with your Grandma? I saw her over there,’ he gestures to a corner of the pub, unexpectedly dark. She finds it hard to look, for a reason she can’t fathom, but she squints into the darkness anyway. Her song, she realises, has ended and the lack of it, and the fact she missed it, gives her a small pang of something unidentifiable.
‘No,’ she shakes her head, sadly. ‘She died some years ago I’m afraid.’
He looks at her, his brown eyes locking onto her. ‘That’s real strange because she said hello to me, I know she did, and she asked after Everett, too.’ Everett, Will’s older brother, had sometimes, in the summer between junior school and high school, mowed her grandmother’s lawn for £10 and a glass of lemonade.
‘She can’t have,’ She is suddenly cross. ‘She died in ’08. I watched them cremate her body. Is this some kind of joke?’
He holds his hands up, clearly mystified. ‘Woah, take it easy, maybe I was mistaken.’
‘You were.’ She eyes him up and down, and remembers all the reasons she felt secretly glad when she saw Lydia Fairchild with him, balanced on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. ‘I need the loo.’
The cool air in the cubicle offers little relief to her skin, flaming both with anger and with resentment. She had not wanted to see him again. She hadn’t heard anything about him for a long time, not since… The girl stops peeing as a foggy memory surfaces from the depths of her tired brain. She tries to grab at it, and can’t. She sits, bemused for a moment, before finishing up and heading out of the bathroom. She wonders if he is here with Lydia, if he has gone back to his table to tell her what a strange encounter he had with the girl they had probably both forgotten about. She sucks in her breath. Maybe that song will soothe her. She digs out more coins from her pocket.
He is still there, stood at the jukebox. He is pushing coins in as she reaches him, and another song, not hers, starts playing. She knows it nonetheless, and struggles to place it. Then, with vivid clarity, she remembers standing in her bright kitchen, the radio on (that song, overplayed that year, playing for the fourth time since she switched the damn thing on), making a sandwich for Molly, glancing at the local paper that had been slotted through her front door moments earlier. She remembers the clatter of the knife on the floor as she sees his face, the thud of her heart in her chest, how her thoughts immediately turned to his mother and the loss of her youngest son.
‘You can’t be here,’ she whispers, but he does not hear, and suddenly nor does she care. She looks again to that dark, foreboding corner, and starkly understands, in a moment, that she must step into the corner to realise, what, deep down, she already knows. ‘Grandma,’ she whispers. Suddenly, she sees the road, slick with rain, and smells the strong smell of disinfectant once again.
‘Oh darling,’ her grandma says, ‘You’re here.’
