Touchy Subjects: Stories Read online

  "Laura?" he suggested, idling at a traffic light. "Leona? Lucy?"

  "We'll see," said Margaret, smiling. And then, "The light's changed."

  As the time went by, he bloomed. It was no hardship, he found, to be patient with a pushy new guy at work. When Margaret's strange uncle who picked his nose came to town, they put him up on the sofa bed for a whole week. Prayer was easy; he'd never had so much to say.

  Margaret, on the other hand, was getting more wired by the month. She wouldn't let her forty-third birthday be celebrated in any way, not even dinner out, not so much as a bunch of flowers or a card. The bigger she grew, the more substantial their future seemed to him, and the less she seemed able to believe in it. He wondered if she was frightened about the birth; it did seem to him a terrible prospect, and he cracked a joke about how the human race would soon die out if women were as cowardly as men.

  Margaret didn't laugh.

  "You'll have to trust God, hon," he said, a little nervously, as he knew the word made her twitch, but it was the only one he could think of.

  She laughed then, and said, "I've never even met him."

  He had a feeling everything would be better once they were a family. With Laura coming to church with him every week, first in one of those slings on his chest, and then in her little black patent shoes, surely Margaret wouldn't want to be left behind. It made sense that once she saw how good Jesus had been to them, she'd understand all the rest of it.

  Meanwhile, she didn't understand the slightest thing he said. She was always taking offense. She thought he was looking for sex when he was just as happy stroking her belly. She said the baby kept kicking her in the ribs. One day he was playing chase-the-foot when Margaret shoved him so hard he fell off the bed.

  When he got to his feet, she was laughing in that appalled way of hers. "Oh, I'm such a bitch these days," she said between snorts. "I'm so sorry, honey, I'm so sorry. I'm scared, you know?"

  "Of the birth?"

  "No, moron," said Margaret, still laughing. "Scared it won't happen."

  He could tell she was an inch away from tears so he lay down beside her.

  San Francisco should be leveled to the ground, he thought, when his mother called to tell him about her knee. It was only a little fall, but she'd rolled about twenty feet down the sidewalk till she landed against a fire hydrant.

  He knew he should be there to take her home from the hospital. If there was ever a time to be a good son, this was it. But he rested his ear on Margaret's drum of a belly and couldn't lift it away.

  "Get out of here," she said, pretty gently. "Those bastards owe you two weeks of vacation."

  "Not now."

  "Yes, now. Get out of my hair for a while. It'll be a good three months before this baby lifts a finger."

  So here he was, back on the coast. By the time he passed the Oregon state line he was breathing easier, and the farther he drove, the more peaceful he felt. He took his time; he saw all the places he and Margaret had missed on their truncated honeymoon. He could feel the horizon curving around him like a hand.

  It was then he started writing again. Just on beaches, at first. There was a little cove beside a lighthouse, washed clean as a slate by the morning tide. There was one small girl picking up shells on the waterline, and her family sunbathing farther up the beach. He stood staring out to sea, and all at once he knew what to write. JESUS is THE WAY, he put, in letters so big and clear they could probably be seen from a low plane. All the time he was marking them with the toe of his shoe, he was thinking of the surprise people would get when they wandered down the beach that afternoon. That's how you did it: by surprise. Minds were like mussels: You shouldn't try to force them open; it was better to catch them at an idle moment and slip inside.

  He was just finishing the Y when he noticed the little girl's mother. She was standing at a distance, reading the words upside down. When his eyes met hers, she grabbed the child's hand and hurried back up the beach.

  It gave him an odd feeling, as if she thought he was some kind of pervert or something. But you couldn't expect people to understand if they hadn't gone down their road to Damascus yet. That's all he wanted: to give people a glimpse of it, to throw strangers a split second of the joy that was filling him up these days so he hardly needed to eat except for a bag of grapes in the car.

  Whenever he got a surge of happiness, he wanted to ring Margaret, but she'd said the sound of the phone was getting on her nerves these days, and he knew she needed a break from him, so he sent her postcards instead. He told her things he'd never thought to mention before. "Did you know you are the most beautiful woman in the world?" he wrote on a picture of a glacial lake, and "I love you more every day," on a shot of a leaping salmon.

  Words were pouring out of him. He was a bit shocked with himself, the day he wrote on a wall outside Portland. He hadn't done a thing like that since he was a kid. But this wall already said DONT MES WITH THE MOFO BOYZ, LOLA SUCKS DICK, and ME N U 4EVER '03, so he felt he could only improve it by adding JESUS SAVES with a little can of white spray paint he got at the corner hardware store.

  Then, when he was walking through a grove of old-growth redwoods the next afternoon, his heart started to knock like a rattle. The forest was bigger than the biggest cathedral, but humans had had no share in the building. He felt like an insect. The trees were wider than he was tall, and taller than anything; all he could hear was a lone woodpecker. At one point where a huge tree had fallen across the path, the rangers had cut a section away to let walkers through. On the weathered wood, ridged by the chain saw, someone had cut ANGIE LOVES JEFF. He couldn't resist; he took out his Swiss army knife and carved the words JESUS LOVES us ALL.

  These days Laura was so clear in his mind that he could nearly see her, running along beside him. When he rented a gas lantern to go down an old lava tube, clambering down from the glare at the tunnel mouth into the cooling darkness, he promised himself that he'd bring her here someday. Haifa mile in, where the floor was slick with ice and the roof of the cave reached its highest point, he'd hold the heavy lantern up to show her the ridges and grooves the lava had left when it flowed away, the tiny kiss shapes of its final drops. Then he'd turn off the lantern for a minute and she'd yelp with fright, but she'd grip his fingers and know that everything was going to be all right.

  The next day he saw the best sunset he'd ever seen in his life. There was a phone booth by the side of the road, so he pulled in and rooted around in the glove compartment for his bag of quarters. Margaret would be out at her organic gardening class; he could just leave a message.

  But she was home. At first he didn't recognize her voice, it was so muffled. She must have been drinking. When he said, "Margaret? Honey?" there was a click.

  The connection must have broken. So he fed in more quarters and tried again.

  When she picked up the phone again, the first thing she said was "I lost it."

  "What?" he said stupidly.

  "You heard me."

  "You lost it?"

  "It wasn't my fault."

  He hardly knew what he was saying. "Was it a girl?"

  There was such a long pause he thought the line was broken. Then Margaret said, "It doesn't matter."

  The phone seemed stuck to his ear; sweat was running down his throat. "Margaret, honey," he said, as if that were a sentence.

  "It's over."

  It seemed a matter of urgency to say the right thing now. There was a sudden beeping, and he fed in his last quarters. "Listen," he said, too loud, as if his voice had to cover the distance by itself. "Listen, we'll try again in a little while."

  "Like hell we will," she roared.

  His legs were shaking; he leaned back against the glass.

  "To think I let you put me through this, you and your lucking Jesus!" Margaret's voice crackled down the line. "At forty-three, to think I was such a fool."

  There was a silence that seemed impermeable.

  "You know, I was happy enough before
we went and got married." Her sobs were as loud as the words they punctuated. "I had a full life. I was perfectly happy enough with no ring and no children. Weren't you? Weren't you happy enough?"

  He was still trying to think of an answer when the line went dead.

  The sun was a smear of red at the base of a dark sky. He went down and sat on the beach until his legs stopped shaking.

  The last of the light caught blades of shell in the sand. He dug one up with the point of his shoe. He couldn't think of anything to write, so he pushed it back, pressing down till he felt the hard damp sand give way and bury it.

  He knew he should call the hospital to leave a message for his mother that he wasn't coming, but all he had in his pockets was small change. So he turned the car around and started the long drive home.

  Oops

  James was overnighting with his oldest friends before a flight to the Yucatán. He'd managed to avoid ever sleeping in Eoin and Neasa's flat before. It was a dingy little fourth-floor on the wrong quay of the Liffey. Back in his twenties, some years before the Dublin boom began, James himself had been farsighted enough to snap up an elegant little cottage in Ballsbridge, which was now worth nine-and-a-half times what he'd paid for it—a thought that always gave him a frisson of satisfaction. But unfortunately on the day before his trip to photograph the Yucatán for Luxury magazine, the workmen were in to install a sauna in his basement, and the dust played havoc with his sinuses, so he had no choice but to accept his friends' offer.

  As always, James averted his eyes from the flat itself—cluttered with equipment his friends were storing for the rest of their sax quintet—and he remarked that they'd got an outrageously good view of the river. After dinner he insisting on taking them to a new club where you didn't actually have to dance if, like Neasa and Eoin, you loathed what passed for music these days; you could just lie around on yellow velvet couches on the balcony and look down on it all.

  Back in the flat, their sofa bed felt to James like a grill, only slightly padded with tinfoil. In the middle of the chilly January night, he staggered along the tiny corridor to the loo. Fumbling around on the shelf for paracetamol to ward off his hangover, his fingers found a curved white oblong of plastic; a futuristic glasses case, maybe, or a makeup holder? Curious, James pressed the little button on top. Suddenly a tiny blue light came on. "Oops," he said under his breath, and stepped back, knocking several dusty bottles of essential oils into the bath with a dreadful clatter. He pressed the button again, but the light wouldn't go off.

  He thought no more about it till a fortnight later when he got back to Dublin Airport with a Yucatanian glow to his cheekbones. Picking up some melatonin to ward off jet lag in the pharmacy, he noticed a cardboard woman in a red dress, holding the same strange little device in her hand. A speech bubble said TIMERA™: BECAUSE I NEED TO KNOW.

  James goggled at the small print. She needed to know what? TIMERA™ IS THE NEW AND UNIQUE FAMILY PLANNING DEVICE THAT WORKS IN HARMONY WITH NATURE'S CYCLES TO GIVE YOU CONTROL OVER YOUR BODY AND YOUR LIFE. What a laugh, thought James, a contraceptive computer! He quite understood that Neasa and Eoin had never wanted to swap their shiny saxophones for smelly babies; it was only natural.

  But then he remembered the little blue light that had come on when he'd pressed the button. Oh Jesus, he thought then.

  As the taxi inched its way through the gridlocked city, James shut his eyes and thought furiously. He wished he'd paid more attention to that lesson on the rhythm method at the community school that he, Neasa, and Eoin had all left nearly twenty years ago. He regretted his lack of information about women's innards in general. Maybe what his wretched fumbling with the button had done was to reset the thing so the days the machine would now call safe would, in fact, be highly dangerous. Oh Christ, why hadn't the woman just stayed on the Pill like everyone else?

  James had his Nokia out and their number half dialed before he thought of what he might say. Hi, I'm passing through Swords; I just thought you should know that two weeks ago I pressed your little button. . . Hot mortification swept up his face. He was being paranoid, ridiculous. He put his phone back on his belt and put the matter from his mind.

  Till a soft May evening in his little house when he was feeding his old friends crispy duck legs in chile-lime broth, and Eoin burped faintly and said, "What'cha think, Neasa? Is it time for the news?"

  James assumed they wanted to switch on Newsnight, but no.

  "I'm pregnant," Neasa told him, with a tight little grin.

  He thought he might throw up there and then, on his grandmother's linen tablecloth. But his mind was working at top speed, churning out conclusions: (A) It was all his fault. (B) The constant anti-abortion propaganda in their teens must have worked, because clearly Neasa and Eoin had decided to go through with having this baby. (C) He must never, never, never tell them what he'd done.

  "Wow!" he shrieked, his face a mask of delight.

  He knew this appalling accident would transform his friends' lives; what he never expected was how much it was going to change his own.

  He dropped heavy hints until they asked him to be Angela's godfather, and his christening present was 1,000 euros in a savings account, to start her college fund. (He'd wanted to make it 5,000 euros but knew that would look suspicious.) Then he became the regular Tuesday babysitter, plus any evening Eoin and Neasa were off at a jazz gig. Because, in fact, they didn't give up their music, not at all; that baby could fall asleep only to the sounds of the sax.

  When at, say, five years old, Angie stayed the night in her uncle James's cream-linen spare room in Ballsbridge, he always fed her organic vegetables and put Gregorian chant on the mini-disc player. Whenever he went abroad on a shoot—which wasn't as often, now, because of what he wryly called his "family responsibilities"—he brought home exquisite and educational toys. He would leave his darkroom at a moment's notice to drive her halfway across Ireland to reconstructed folk villages and drama festivals. On Angie's tenth birthday, James started giving her regular fistfuls of banknotes, and once when she was furious with him after he called her T-shirt sluttish, she told her parents about the money and got him into serious, though temporary, trouble.

  His other friends thought he was mad. He'd never told any of them about what he thought of as his secret parenthood: the fact that, by one careless mistake, he had made this child happen.

  At thirteen, the girl announced her name was now Ang, to rhyme with bang. For the next four years she was foul.

  "Sometimes I don't like her at all," Neasa said softly to James, looking out the window of his house to where her daughter sat between the fountain and the Japanese maple, talking on her mobile, her back as convex as a shield.

  His friend's confession filled him with panic. He had thought it was working out all right. He had assumed that every child turned into a wanted child, even if she'd been unwanted to begin with, even if her conception had been a bloody awful blunder, never meant to happen. But then, how could he say that Ang had never been meant to happen?—since he loved her, himself, with a guilty fervour of ownership that was unaffected by any of her shifting moods, unaffected by all the nasty things she'd said to him over the years, from her first howl of "You're poo" to their latest spat, when she'd called him a "sad old suburban queen."

  The summer she left school, she emerged from adolescence, shakily, like a convalescent. One day James looked at her across the table of a noodle bar and realized that she was an utterly charming young woman, sitting here, telling this middle-aged man her plans to work her way across Australia, her eyes shining at him as if he mattered to her, as if he always would. How did this happen?

  At Ang's good-bye party, James gave her a discreetly wrapped bumper pack of extra-strength condoms; she blushed, but said yes, of course, she promised she'd be careful.

  Four martinis later, James sat heavily on the arm of Neasa's chair and murmured in her ear, "I know you never wanted to have her, but isn't she fabulous?"

  Nea
sa stared at him.

  "Sorry, what I meant was—," he backtracked. And then he couldn't help himself: the eighteen-year-old story was spilling out in a passionate hiss—the little plastic machine, the terrible blue light.

  Neasa was smiling strangely. "You daft egg," she said at last, "you poor eejit! It was for ovulation, not contraception."

  He could feel his eyes cross.

  "We wanted a baby. We'd been trying for a year and a half." She laughed a little hoarsely.

  "So what you're telling me," he said blankly, "is that I made no difference."

  "None at all!" She grinned at him

  And James, who should have felt relieved, went home early from the party with a stitch between his ribs as if there was something he'd lost.

  Through the Night

  What sent Una over the edge was people asking "Does she sleep through the night?" For some reason it was often the first thing strangers said after "What a lovely baby." Una was all right with the lovely baby line, she could smile and nod, her eyes only slightly shiny, and she could even cope with remarks like "It must be so much fun!" If she just kept nodding and smiling, she found, people assumed that having a two-month-old baby was just like in the diaper ads, or the way they dimly and fondly remembered it. "Treasure every moment," the bank manager commanded her, rubbing his beard. All this Una could take. But when someone approached her in the supermarket or queuing at an ATM and tickled whatever bit of Moya was sticking out of the sling and said the fatal words, "Is she sleeping through the night yet?" . ..

  Before the birth, before Moya—B.M., as Silas called it—Una had not been a crier. In fact, she'd been known for her ability to sit dry-cheeked through Titanic or It's a Wonderful Life, while Silas was gulping by her side. Before her periods she'd turn slightly snappish, and when her father died, back in Ireland, she'd gone very quiet for a month or so. But crying wasn't something she did. Even pregnant, she'd maintained her steadiness.