Finding Alison Page 12

  ‘Can I get you anything else, sir?’ The waiter’s voice was soft, as if acknowledging the sacred space surrounding the small window table.

  ‘No, thanks, just the bill.’ William looked into the young man’s eyes and for one brief second wished he was there again. There at that wonderful launch into life where anything, everything was possible, the whole world and all its adventures out there for the taking. A small fist of fear tightened around his heart at the thought of the little time left to him, the uncertainty, the unknown that followed. He was relieved to see Alison return to the table.

  ‘Time to head on?’ She gathered up her bag and jacket. ‘I hope I haven’t bored you.’ The lightness of her tone failed to mask the sadness in her wearied face.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed every moment.’

  They left the city behind and followed the dark, winding road to Carniskey. ‘That was one thing that took me a while to get used to,’ Alison remarked, ‘when I moved out here first. The darkness. That absolute blackness at night. In Dublin we had a street light outside our bedroom window. Same when I lived in town. That pitch black at night was quite a shock, but I soon grew to love it. Isn’t there something about the dark that allows you to be yourself?’

  ‘I think it encourages the parts of us that are too timid for daylight.’

  ‘And it heightens the senses,’ Alison jumped in, enthused. ‘You know, like when you try to find your way in the dark, you’re much more aware of sounds and smells, the presence of objects – even the energy around them.’

  ‘Maybe it’s more our natural state,’ William offered. ‘I mean, when you think of our nine months in the darkness of the womb. And who knows, maybe we came from darkness before that. Maybe all this electricity and neon we’ve invented is killing off parts of our soul.’

  * * *

  ‘Yes!’ Rob spun on his heel and punched the air. He flopped down on the couch, swung his feet up on the cushions and laying his head on the arm rest, closed his eyes. Thank God she had said yes because at this stage the girl had just about exhausted him.

  He had never imagined that winning a woman could be such hard work – especially a woman who had already declared her love for you. They were a strange species, women, and none stranger and harder to crack – he was willing to bet – than the one he had chosen.

  And that wasn’t the only thing he had learned about women. That line you often heard about them thinking they had a monopoly on feelings, well it was actually true. All this talk on the phone about how hurt her feelings were, how confused she felt. Almost four weeks now since she had given him the door – well, she had really, given that she had left him with no choice but to walk out – and not a word about how he might have felt. Did she think he was made of wood? Didn’t the flowers and the calls and the texts and those big balloons he’d had delivered to her work tell her anything?

  She had literally laughed out loud when she had admitted that yes, she had seen him that evening in the frozen food aisle at Whites. ‘Lurking,’ she called it, before laughing and likening him to a stalker. He could have taken offence, claimed his ‘feelings were hurt’. But oh, he knew better. Practically a whole month now he had waited to hear that laugh, the full, deep uncensored thrill of it. He knew as soon as it reached his ear that she was melting and that a yes would surely follow. What did his pride matter when risked with losing that?

  He stretched to his full length, luxuriating in his plans. Saturday night – all going well – would lay the foundations and within two weeks, he reckoned, he’d have the whole thing cemented. He smiled to himself. Rob, the humble construction worker, building a whole new world!

  * * *

  Alison snuggled down under the bedclothes, pulled the pillows beneath her shoulders and relived the day in her head: the morning on the beach, the book shop, wandering around town, the meal and the chat, the laughter on the way home. She sighed, her whole body seeming to join in her smile. Something inside her felt different, like a stone had been lifted, shifted somehow, and the light was finally getting in. She didn’t allow herself one moment’s guilt about missing today’s visit to Maryanne or Hannah’s telephone call. This had been the first day in an age that she had taken completely for herself and she reckoned she well deserved it. Maryanne wouldn’t miss her for the one day and Hannah was barely fitting in her five-minute calls as it was. Anyway, she reasoned, she’d be better for both of them if she learned to take some time for herself.

  She liked William. Loved his sense of fun – it had been so long since she’d laughed like that. At nothing. At stupid, childish things. And the way she could talk to him. About things she had never dared voice before. Things that she’d hardly admitted to herself, let alone spoken out loud. But something about him drew her out, encouraged her, made her trust him completely. There was a gentleness in him, a genuine acceptance, something in his eyes, in his whole face that let you know he already understood what you were struggling to get across. He could make a really good friend. There was something totally safe about him. He won’t be around much longer, a niggling voice in her head pushed to the front to be heard. He’ll be leaving as well. She switched the voice off with the light, turned on her side and, smiling, closed her eyes, allowing the day to replay behind them.

  * * *

  William sat on the edge of the cliff at Tra na Leon. He closed his eyes to block out the light of the stars. Darkness. Darkness and silence and emptiness surrounded him. He could hear his heart beat. Feel the warmth of his exhaled breath on his upper lip. The sound of the waves embracing the rocks below rushed to meet him, the giggle of the shingle as it danced with the tide.

  And he could feel it again. That cold metallic hand squeezing his heart, making it shrink and pound harder, like a tiny creature, cornered. He sat with it and listened.

  When his cancer had first been diagnosed six years earlier, William’s doctor hadn’t held out much hope. But the brain tumour had been removed and the chemotherapy and radiation had eradicated the invader from his body. He shivered now, remembering that time. The fear, the anger, the denial. And above all the unbearable loneliness. He had brushed death’s cheek in the quiet of that sterile ward, had watched it lead Joe, a frightened thirty-three year old, slowly, bed by bed, down the ward, and then across the corridor to the single room, death’s waiting room, and finally away to its own world. William had waited, resigned, ready to follow, ever watchful, even in sleep. But death chose to pass his bed and William had walked from the hospital. Walked into a world that he had never really been aware of before. His intimacy with death had opened his eyes and his heart and his mind to a life he had so long endured but had not lived. He walked back into that world as if he was entering it for the first time. Death had stripped him of all but his name. Layer by layer, it had peeled away who or what he was, or thought he had been. It had shown him how what little control he imagined he possessed could so easily be thieved – from his mind, his feelings, everything, right down to his bowels. Dignity, pride, independence, talent – all that he had for so long defined as self, stripped like garments, one by one, to reveal a naked, frightened child. And he looked at the world again from that child’s place: enthusiastic, liberated, open. He knew at that moment, when he turned at the door and took one last look down the hushed ward, that he would never again take one single day for granted. And he would never again fear death.

  When the cancer returned before Christmas, this time positioning itself under the brain from where it could not be lifted, William had not panicked. Like an army invading and claiming new territory, it had travelled to his hip by February. William did not fight back. Any attempt at surgery, Fogarty advised, carried almost certain loss of motor and nervous function. Loss of mobility, loss of speech. William had decided to go with loss of life in its entirety. He was aware that radical drug treatment would prolong the time left to him. But he had been there before. Had endured their harrowing effects. No, not this time. This time death would take him. And he would g
o sooner in relative health, rather than later, ravaged by the battle the drugs would fight, and eventually lose.

  This evening in the restaurant was the first time he had felt that pinch of fear, felt that pull towards life, and he couldn’t understand what had prompted it. Was it that it was getting closer now? Was it the raw life in Alison’s throaty laugh? Or was it the huge sense of birth and reawakening, the almost magic of this place? It seemed such a contradiction to die at this time of year. He sat on, eyes closed in the darkness, till all the voices stilled in his head and peace returned with the dawn.

  Eight

  Straightening the pot of pansies at the front door Alison sat on the step and opened her post: a telephone bill – double its usual amount from all the calls to Hannah; a final reminder for her last oil fill; a motor tax renewal form. Great, she sighed, pushing back her hair. How on earth am I going to pay even one of them? She had gone out with William for a drink a couple of evenings last week and had treated herself to a new shirt in town on Thursday, hardly extravagance. And of course there was no sign of Eugene’s eighty euro for her article – delivered early again this week. Was it always going to be the same, this barely scraping by, counting out every cent?

  She had always hated taking money from Maryanne. Felt useless and awkward every time the woman would slip a note into her bag or pocket with a stern, ‘Not a word now. It’s how Sean would have wanted it.’ And you didn’t argue with Maryanne. At the beginning Alison had decided to treat Maryanne’s ‘gifts’ as a loan. Vowing to pay back every cent once Sean’s body was found and the life assurance came through had helped her to hold on to some small bit of pride. One blue wellington: that had been the sea’s great compromise. One blue wellington thrown up on a beach six miles west.

  She’d be glad of one of Maryanne’s handouts now, she sighed, pushing herself up off the step and walking around the house to the back door. She’d have to drive into town to collect her money from Eugene. Damn! She bumped her toe on the corner of the path. Damn!

  She banged the back door shut behind her, switched on the kettle and opened the fridge. No milk! She grabbed a glass and, filling it with water at the sink, stared out the kitchen window. The piled pots and nets seemed to glare back at her. That was all Sean left her: a useless collection of pots and nets that most of their money had been sunk into. Their last conversation flashed into her mind. She had followed him out to the back kitchen, pleading with him at first as he pulled on his boots and fishing jumper. ‘Are you out of your mind, Sean? Look at the sky, for Christ’s sake! Look at the stripes on the water!’ He hadn’t answered, just zipped up his coat, tugged on his cap and walked out the door. Alison had followed him out to the van, her voice and her temper rising against the wind. ‘Will you listen to me, Sean? Think of us for a change, think of Hannah. Sean, SEAN!’ The thin, tight line of his mouth had reminded her of a fault line, the pressure behind it mounting. He sat into the driver’s seat, closed the door on her words. ‘Go on, then, you selfish bastard,’ she had shouted in desperate defiance. ‘Go on! You’re not with us anyway, you might as well be gone!’ He had looked at her from somewhere far deeper than his eyes, then turned the key and was gone. Arms hugging her trembling body, Alison had caught Hannah’s eye as the child turned her face from the back bedroom window. In that tiny moment something inside Alison had known that her life was about to change forever.

  She turned now from the window, grabbed a pen and paper from her desk and sat at the kitchen table. Her hand moved in a frenzy:

  For Quick Sale

  Lobster & Shrimp Pots / Salmon Nets

  Contact: Alison Delaney, Carniskey. Tel: (051) 785330

  She grabbed her keys and drove to the village.

  ‘Alison, how are you keeping?’ Joan, Carniskey’s shrewd and only shopkeeper, smiled from behind the counter, scanning Alison from head to toe.

  ‘Fine, thanks. Can you put this in the window, please?’ Alison thrust the note across the counter and looked straight into Joan’s pinched face as she read it.

  ‘No problem, Alison. There’s a small charge of two euro.’ She reached for the sticky tape. ‘Will that be all?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Alison’s smile was tight. In her rush out the door she almost knocked Theresa Doyle sideways. ‘Oh, Theresa. Hi! Sorry.’ She smiled widely into Theresa’s disapproving face. Turning the jeep, she headed back out of the village. ‘Damn!’ She had meant to pick up some milk.

  Leaving the engine running, she swept back into the shop. As she reached the fridge, she could hear the whispered conversation at the counter. Hand grasping the fridge door, Alison listened.

  ‘Sure, who’d buy them?’ Theresa was pontificating. ‘A drowned man’s gear? Anyone’d know they’d bring bad luck.’

  ‘And to think of all the hard work and money poor Sean put into getting them. And there he is now, gone, God rest him, and she selling off the lot.’ Even in a whisper, Joan’s voice had an edge that could cut through stone.

  ‘I wonder has it anythin’ to do with that new fella she’s been seen with – that hippy type up over the strand?’

  ‘Don’t you know it has, Tess. May told me she saw them early one morning. Right cosy the two of them were below on the strand.’

  ‘What is she thinkin’ of, throwin’ herself at an ould fella like that without tuppence to his name?’

  ‘That’s the way it’s gone nowadays, I’m afraid, no respect for themselves – or anyone else. Poor Sean, isn’t he the lucky man that he’s not around to see it?’

  ‘And she’s the young one packed off to England, I believe. Still, at least she’s not around to witness it, though the same one can be a right little pup too, you know. I heard—’

  Joan tapped Theresa on the arm and silenced her mid-sentence. Theresa followed her friend’s slack-jawed stare to where Alison stood, arms folded, before them.

  ‘Oh, Alison we were just . . . ’ Joan began, her mouth opening and closing like a landed fish.

  Alison glared at them, shook her head and snapped the note from Joan’s hand before walking slowly towards the door and out of the explosive silence.

  She sat in the jeep, taking deep breaths to cool the heat of her threatening tears. She was damned if they were going to make her cry. She jerked the jeep out onto the road. Oh, Hannah was right, she seethed as she tore out of the village, past her own house and on towards town. They’re nothing but an insensitive bunch of good-for-nothing dried-up old gossips. What the hell was she still doing in this place? She passed the football pitch and swung onto the main road. She’d go into town, collect her money from Eugene and use the computer in the library next door to place her ad in one of the fishing papers. She turned up the music, drove on at speed and wished from the bottom of her heart that she’d never again have to set foot in Carniskey.

  * * *

  Hands on her hips, Kathleen turned from the boiling kettle and looked into Alison’s pale, sleep-deprived face. Her blood had boiled in tandem with the kettle as Alison recounted what had passed in the shop the previous day. ‘Alison Delaney, are you telling me that you’d actually take heed of anything they’d have to say? That you’d let them do this to you? Honestly, I thought you had more spunk in you that that!’

  ‘I don’t mind them having a go at me, blast them, but when they started on Hannah!’ Alison stubbed out her cigarette, her temper rising.

  ‘I’m sure Hannah could care less! The girl has more sense.’ Kathleen grabbed two mugs from the press. ‘God, if we were all to listen to everything that was said about us we’d never put our heads outside the door.’ She resented that even now she could still feel a slight stab of that old pain of falling prey to the village vultures. She spooned in the coffee, lifted the kettle. And she knew that survival meant forever thickening your skin and holding fast to your own strength, your own worth. ‘Why do you let them get to you? You’re just feeding them, you know.’ She placed the mugs on the table, pulled out a chair to sit.

  ‘Maybe
it gets to me because they’re right,’ Alison sighed, drawing the steaming mug into both hands. ‘Sean worked so hard to get all that stuff, and selling it off, well, maybe it is wrong.’

  ‘No, Alison. It’s what Sean would have wanted. You know he’d want to provide for you. The best for you and Hannah, that’s all he ever wanted, you know that.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Her eyes searched Kathleen’s face. ‘Then maybe I asked too much, maybe he’d still be alive if . . . ’

  ‘Don’t even go there,’ Kathleen cut in, anger sharpening her words. ‘Sean is gone. It was an accident. A horrible, tragic accident. But it happened and there’s nothing you could have done or can do about it. Except kick it in the teeth and get on with your life.’ She grabbed her friend’s hand. ‘You’ve got to leave the past where it belongs, Alison. Believe me, torturing yourself isn’t going to change things. It’s not going to bring him back.’

  ‘It was the look in his eyes that day.’ She took a deep breath, pushed out the words that had always refused to be voiced. ‘I can’t help thinking sometimes that it wasn’t an – that he knew what he was doing. Knew where he was going . . . I, I really don’t believe it was an accident.’

  ‘Alison, you don’t know that. You’ll never know. And even if that was the case, then it was Sean’s decision. His decision. For his own reasons. You had no part in it. You’ve got to let it go. Let him go. It’s you and Hannah now, and that has to be your focus if you’re ever going to get past this and get your life back.’ Kathleen felt that old knot of discomfort twist and tighten her insides. Her tongue sought out the groove in her lip. Sean’s death had been no accident. At sea since childhood, he would have known full well that night when he left the harbour at Tra na Baid that he wouldn’t be returning. The great unspoken truth about the mighty Sean Delaney!