Bright Burning Things(12)

‘As it so happens, I do. Adopted.’

‘What about the poor child? Do you have a licence there?’

I walked right into that one. Tommy reaches his small hand towards me and I take it, encircling it in my own. He looks at me with his serious face, his ancient barn-owl expression, and shakes his head at me. ‘It’s ok, Yaya.’ The man bends over and speaks in Tommy’s face: ‘If your mother does anything like that again you tell your teacher, yes?’ Tommy nods, deflecting attention away. The man leaves, looking back over his shoulder, his overdeveloped sense of responsibility leaving him struggling with all sorts of stuff that’s not his to carry. How I intuit this is beyond me, but it always served me well as an actress, that flash of insight into other people’s psyches. How much easier it is to inhabit someone else.

‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’ the girl says.

How old is she to adopt that tone with me? What does she know about rearing children? It wasn’t so long ago that it was perfectly acceptable to give your offspring a wee smack. I know, I was at the receiving end of many, and I know: too the humiliation, how it doesn’t achieve anything. Even still, my palm is tingling at the thought of making contact with the little madam’s cheek, knocking that smug expression from her. But my boys need to eat, so I open my mouth to speak in what I think is a reasonable manner: ‘I’m sorry about that. Just had a stressful day. Your dad knows me, I’m a regular.’

‘I know you too.’

‘So you know this is a one-off and I’m a repeat customer.’

‘You owe thirty euros.’

The daughter hands a box of steaming contents to the woman wearing the perfectly ironed, crisp shirt, whose eyes have not left the ground until this point. She says thank you and leaves.

‘Seriously? I’ll tell your father about this.’

‘Dad is the one who told me not to serve you unless you pay your debt.’

I place my hand in my pocket and get the fifty euros, waving it triumphantly in the girl’s face.

‘That’s not enough.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ One of the two men that were staring out the window, pretending not to notice anything, suddenly breaks his charade. ‘Serve the poor woman and her kid, and I’ll pay any shortfall.’

I think I might be about to cry, so I twist the skin on the back of my hand and force my mouth into a bright smile that accentuates my one dimple. ‘No need, no need at all.’

The man doesn’t look at me. ‘Just feed the little fella, will you?’

Heat rushes through me and my skin becomes red and blotchy.

‘How much does she owe?’ the man says to the girl.

‘I don’t want your charity—’ My helium-high voice escapes me.

‘It’s not for you,’ the man says.

Tommy is petting Herbie on the same spot on his head over and over, so it looks as if he might rub away the hair. I take Tommy’s hand in mine and bend to kiss his fingers. ‘Ok, thank you,’ I say.

‘You’re welcome,’ the man says in a gentler tone. ‘Here.’ He hands me a business card with his name and number: ‘David Smythe, McManus Smythe solicitors’. This has to be the most perplexing mating strategy I’ve ever encountered. ‘I’ve been there too.’ The man is speaking low. ‘It’s not fair on him.’ He gestures to Tommy. ‘There’s a meeting later.’

Ah so, what is it about me that makes it so obvious? And now it isn’t just old ladies that are noticing. Uncle Dom, my father’s younger brother, floats unbidden into my mind. He found sobriety and Jesus in the same instance. I preferred him before, when he went around with red-rimmed wet eyes, and lamented the world as being in a permanent ‘state of chassis’. I liked his taste for the melancholy; he seemed to walk straight out of the pages of an O’Casey/Chekhov hybrid: a frustrated, apparently brilliant man thwarted by the world and its machinations. I was his ‘little dolly’ before he fell in love with Jesus, his special little girl, and he used to love to brush my hair and sing to me. There was nothing in it, not in the way my father later interpreted, but his banishment from our house was part of him getting sober. Jesus cards arrived, addressed to us all. My father had always welcomed God in all his guises into the house, but Dom never entered our door again. I missed him, like I missed my mother’s sister Amy, a blowsy ‘floozie’ (according to Lara). Following a spectacular row with Lara the Christmas Eve when I was thirteen, Amy left, or was thrown out, I can’t remember exactly, but I never heard from her again. Lara orchestrated this: our insular life, where she held all the control.

The man has turned his back on me and is staring out the streaked window at the traffic hurtling past. A silence has descended in the shop and the noises from outside are amplified. The daughter’s voice rises over the rush and roar of the cars and speaks to the man’s back: ‘That will be an extra eight euro fifty.’ He hands her a tenner and says, ‘Keep the change,’ and walks out of the shop. The girl shouts after him, ‘Your pizzas are nearly ready.’ He’s gone.

I turn the card over in my hand and study it: David Smythe. A sturdy name. In his wake he has left an impression of orderliness and togetherness, though I can’t recall a single fact about his appearance. Hair colour? Eyes? Clothes? Nothing, except polished brogues and his long fingers. And cheekbones, taut skin pulled upwards. A reverberation. A voice that knows things. And a feeling of solidity, being near to him.