Touchy Subjects: Stories Read online

  "Uh-huh."

  "And she said actually this year, with Greta and Mick and all the kids being over from Sydney, she and Dad were wondering if we could maybe ... do something with the dogs."

  "Do something?" repeated Louise. "What does she mean? Do what?"

  Trevor cleared his throat. "Not bring them."

  Her eyes were little dark buttons.

  The last three days of term crawled by; the stack of exam papers deflated. To celebrate the holidays, Louise and Trevor went for a long hike across the Cliffs of Moher. Gide barked fiercely at mountain goats. "Do you think Proust's coat is looking dull?" she asked.

  "Hmm?" Trevor stared down into his half-zipped jacket, where Proust was curled up. "Maybe a wee bit."

  "The vet says you can put vegetable oil in their food to increase shine. We'll have to take Mallarmé to that grooming place this week; she's all burrs," added Louise, watching the dog lope silently away towards a group of Japanese tourists.

  "Yeah, she must have a bit of collie in her, she gets so snag-gled. Mallarmé!" Trevor tried again, more loudly. "Mallarmé, no! Come back!"

  "She won't bite, will she?" said Louise, breathless as she ran.

  "She bit Mrs. Quirk last week."

  "Only because she messed with Mallarmé's ears."

  "Don't touch her ears," Trevor bawled at the tour group.

  Afterwards, when Mallarmé was back on her leash, Louise burrowed around in the bag for dog biscuits and Mars bars. "You're brooding about Christmas, aren't you?"

  "A bit," admitted Trevor.

  "That was a really good phone message you left your parents."

  "You think so?"

  "Nicely balanced, you know, between warmth and firmness."

  "You sound like that trainer." They'd gone on a night course called Good Dog! but dropped out after three weeks.

  Louise giggled reminiscently. "Well, handling parents isn't so very different, I suppose."

  "Except you know where you are with dogs," said Trevor. "They never claim to love you and then stab you in the back."

  "Trevor!" she protested. "Leave it, Gide," she said, suddenly turning. "Drop it, dirty. Gide! Give. Give to Mammy."

  He watched her wrestle a Ballygowan bottle out of the dog's jaws. "How can my parents have the gall to say leave them at home, when it's hundreds of miles away and we'll be gone for forty-eight hours!"

  "I suppose we could hire a sitter," she volunteered.

  "But they'd hate to be away from us at Christmas. I mean," he said, conscious of having strayed into irrationality, "they may not know exactly what it is—in the theological sense—but they can sense it's a special occasion."

  "You know," murmured Louise, "there may be class issues involved here."

  "Such as?"

  "Well, your parents have a fundamentally suspicious attitude towards our lifestyle. Being academics, going to the opera .. . and I suspect they see our dogs as an expensive whim."

  Trevor groaned. "It's not like we spent thousands of pounds buying pedigree puppies! We rescued them from the pound."

  "Mmm," said Louise, "but remember how they made fun of the plaid coats and shoes? And there was this one time—I didn't tell you because I knew you'd be annoyed—but your dad asked me how much we spent a year on their food and vet bills."

  He winced.

  "It's understandable; he did grow up on a farm where dogs were just exploited workers," she added. "And your mother's from a tiny terrace where there was barely enough food for the kids."

  "That's it," said Trevor, so sharply that Proust started to whimper and worry the zip of his jacket. "It's all about kids. They're trying to punish us for not having any! What my mother's saying at a sort of unconscious level is 'I won't let your pseudo-children under my roof. Lock them up and throw away the key.'"

  "Oh, hang on, hon—"

  "She is! She's saying, 'Have some real children like your sister, Greta, and then maybe I'll love you!'"

  "Come on, Trevor, she does love you; they both do."

  "Then what about the proverbial love my dog?"

  Louise was scanning the skyline distractedly. "Did you see which way Gide went?"

  Trevor jumped to his feet. "Gide!"

  They both caught sight of him simultaneously, a hundred feet away, as he raced along the edge of the cliff.

  That evening, during dinner, Proust left a long red scrape across Louise's collarbone. "Put him down on the floor," Trevor urged her. "Remember, the trainer said to punish him by withdrawing our attention. Proust, sit!"

  "He's only acting out, poor baba," said Louise, setting him down. "They all are; they always pick up our vibes when we're upset."

  "Make a nasty sound...," Trevor dropped a fork on the tiles. Proust stared back at him, unmoved. "Then turn our backs."

  They twisted away from him in their chairs. Trevor looked at his half-eaten risotto and felt his appetite drain away. He stood up and adjusted the framed photo of the dogs carrying the flower baskets on Louise and Trevor's wedding day. "How's he reacting?"

  "Hang on," breathed Louise, peeking over her shoulder.

  "Don't make eye contact," Trevor warned her.

  "He's gone."

  They found Proust in the living room, watching the blank screen.

  "Do you think we've hurt his feelings?" asked Louise.

  "Dunno. It's a fine line between gentle discipline and crushing his spirit. Proust?" Trevor crouched to stroke the tiny dog behind the ears. "I don't think he likes the Chopin."

  "OK, I'll switch to Mozart."

  "Proust? Want to turn the telly on again?"

  They didn't check their messages till they were going to bed. There was only one, from Belfast. "Trevor, this is your mother," it began, as always. "Your dad and I have been thinking about it like you asked, and we've decided we really can't have your dogs this Christmas. Sorry about that, but. There's your dad's allergy, and Lucy and Caitrfona are still awful small, and the general chaos and peeing on the rugs. Not to mention the incident last year, I didn't want to have to bring it up, but—"

  The voice changed to a gruffer one. "Let me talk to him. Trevor, those creatures are a menace, especially the quiet one. After it bit your mother, I have to tell you, I thought it should have been put down. So let's have no more nonsense—stick them in kennels and let's all of us have a nice peaceful Christmas together, who knows when we'll get the chance again."

  At two in the morning Trevor was wide awake in the dark. "Have they ever even seen a kennel? I still feel guilty about that time we went to Athens and left the babies in that, that concentration camp," he said, spitting out the words. "And Dad's always had a runny nose; he's only called it an allergy since he started watching ER. Animals get blamed for everything. Remember that part-timer in Spanish who claimed she'd gone to a party where there was a cat and she was wheezing for six months afterwards?"

  "Calm down, sweetie." Louise was stroking his arm.

  "And as for the so-called incident with Mum—"

  "It wasn't a real bite."

  "It was a quick reflex snap, that's all. I told her not to touch Mallarme's ears."

  "Anyway, no skin was broken."

  "It's as if they said, 'Don't bring your Negro friends to our house,'" Trevor ranted. "It's a human rights issue. Well, a rights issue."

  A silence. Then Louise rolled heavily away from him. "I give up," she said in a small voice. "It's not worth the grief."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You should go on your own, see your sister and all. And then when you come home on the twenty-seventh, we'll have our own Christmas dinner."

  "Oh, but Louise!" He started to sit up. Did she want him to accept gratefully or to say he wouldn't dream of it? "You're wonderful. But you shouldn't have to make the sacrifice."

  "Believe me," she said into the pillow, "I couldn't swallow a bite of turkey in that atmosphere."

  Christmas Eve in Belfast, and Trevor had escaped into what they used to call the good room to
ring Louise. He listened to Santa's Pop Faves blaring through the wall from the living room, mingled with the voices of his squabbling nieces, and longed to be back in the house outside Limerick, where Christmas crackers full of doggie treats would be hanging from the tree, and Louise and the babies would probably be curled up watching Lady and the Tramp.

  Before he'd finished dialing, his father's bald head came round the door. "You on the phone, Trev?"

  "It's OK," he said, putting it down.

  "Carry on, don't mind me," he said, dropping heavily into an armchair.

  "Louise is out, actually," Trevor lied, "probably on a walk." Then he felt awkward for having implicitly brought up the dogs; it wasn't as if he wasn't trying his best to make this a cordial visit.

  His father blew his nose like an elephant trumpeting.

  "How's your allergy?" asked Trevor neutrally.

  "Nah, I'm just getting over a cold."

  His mother came in and set down a large bowl of toffees. "I've just been mopping up the stairs; poor Lucy got sick."

  "Why don't you take the weight off your feet, love?"

  "Just for a sec, then. All right, Trev?" she said as she sat down beside him.

  "Aye, Mum."

  "The kids are wee dotes, with their Aussie accents, aren't they? Oh"—turning to her husband—"you'll have to have a look in the U-bend for me; wee Jasmine dropped my wedding ring down the sink."

  His father let out a small sound of exasperadon.

  "Oh well, accidents do happen," she said.

  The words burst out of Trevor. "That wasn't what you said last year about Proust chewing through the Christmas lights!" There was an awful silence. He tried to regain control. "I just think, Mum, there's rather a double standard operational here. I don't think you're aware how unconsciously biased you are towards Greta."

  His father's eyes narrowed. "You high-and-mighty tosser."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "You heard me, Professor Pillock, that's if your ears are operational!"

  His mother flapped her hands. "Ah, stop it now—Trev's just missing his doggies."

  Trevor nearly punched her.

  His father grunted. "The boy's besotted!"

  "Boy?" he repeated. "I'm forty-three years old."

  "Then act it. Jesus Christ, if I have to hear one more word about those wretched animals—"

  "I don't believe this!" Trevor was practically screaming. "I have to leave my entire family behind, while Greta and Mike jet in with three of the brattiest girls on the face of the planet—"

  "Trev!" His mother's voice was a gunshot. "That's enough."

  "At least the girls don't climb on your arm and start humping it," his father observed.

  Trevor thought he might cry. "This is unfair, it's oppressive, it's humiliating—"

  "Sure it's Christmas," said his mother.

  He collected his bag and left. The drive was more than seven hours, but at least he was going the right direction this time. It was two o'clock on Christmas morning when he drew up outside the house. There was one light on, in the bedroom. Trevor let himself in quietly. In the hall he almost stumbled over the small table that they always left out for Santa. Suddenly starving, Trevor ate the mince pie in one bite and rinsed it down with the brandy. Upstairs, a door opened and the dogs hurled themselves down the steps. Trevor squinted into the light and grinned up at his wife. "I'm home," he said.

  DOMESTICITY

  Lavender's Blue

  Leroy and Shorelle had always wanted a slate blue house. It had come up on their first date, in fact, driving to the lake: Shorelle said, "When I get a house I'm going to paint it that exact colour," indicating with one long manicured nail a three-storey redbrick Colonial with porch and gingerbread the shade of a rain-threatening sky.

  "Me too," said Leroy, unnerved by the coincidence.

  "Really? Are you just saying that?"

  "No way! That's the colour I've always wanted."

  She gave him a smile so slow, so intricately blooming, that he very nearly drove into the curb.

  For the first three years they lived in Shorelle's apartment above a discount shoe outlet, then when the baby was coming they managed with the help of Leroy's stepfather to scrape together a ten percent down payment on a nice little two-bed in a neighbourhood that was neither too graffitied nor too suburban, neither too noisy nor too white. On the porch, the Realtor told them they wouldn't find the house they were looking for at a better price. "Is that because of the colour?" Leroy asked.

  The Realtor screwed up her forehead. "What's wrong with the colour? It's a nice sort of faded adobe pink."

  He let out a brief laugh. "I'd call it Puke Peach."

  Shorelle rolled her eyes at him.

  "Well, after closing day you can paint it whatever you like," the Realtor said a little crisply.

  But life intervened, of course. Moving in and getting the place fixed up—curtains, wallpaper, bookshelves, magnets to keep the kitchen cupboards shut—took all their energy, and then Africa came along. (Leroy wasn't a hundred percent fond of that name, but Shorelle believed she should have the casting vote. "Twenty-six hours of labour, five stitches," she reminded him stonily.)

  There was something the public health nurse said that stuck in Leroy's head: that the days would be long but the years would be short. That was so true; every day with a small mewling baby seemed like a mountain to climb, but blink! and here was Africa at her first birthday party, triumphant fists full of chocolate cake. And the house was still the colour of puke.

  Leroy would have liked to paint it himself, but the sad fact was he had no head for heights, and now he was a father he was noticing in himself this strange, almost cheerful refusal to do dumb things: His life wasn't his own to risk. He never even rode pillion on his friend CJ's Honda Magna anymore. So he asked around for a painter who wouldn't rip him off. He ended up hiring a quiet white guy called Rod who lived a couple of blocks away.

  "You picked your colour yet?" Rod narrowed his eyes at the roofline.

  "Not quite, but it'll be some kind of slate blue."

  Rod seemed to have been born with a neutral expression. He handed Leroy a brochure. "That's the only brand I use," he said, "but they can colour-match whatever you want."

  "Great."

  That evening Leroy and Shorelle sat on the porch with Africa stumbling back and forth between them. They flicked through sheaves of paint chips. "Well, not Niagara," said Shorelle with some scorn, "and not Old China, either. Where do they come up with these names?"

  Leroy snickered in agreement. "Who'd paint their house Muddy Creek?"

  "Or Yacht Fantasy!" She pulled a strip of glaring royal blue from Africa's mouth and showed it to him. "Timothy says his clients come in with scraps of cloth, lipsticks, dead leaves, even, going 'This is it.' Half the time he's got to talk them out of it."

  "Why's he got to?" Timothy, owner of a small interior design company, was Shorelle's best friend from school, whom Leroy had always pretended to like. Before the baby, on nights when Leroy was working late, she used to go over there to watch black-and-white movies and eat Timothy's homemade gelato.

  "Because they've got no clue what they're doing!"

  "Well, I don't think we need to hire anyone to pick a paint for our house; it's not that big a deal," said Leroy flippantly. He held up three blues against each other; they seemed to melt in and out. "Is there one actually called Slate Blue?"

  "Oh no, that would be too easy. Wait up—here's a Blue Slate, but it's not blue at all," Shorelle complained, "it's plain grey."

  "This one's kinda nice—Porch Lullaby."

  "Yeah, it's nice, but it's not slate blue."

  "No."

  "I thought we agreed—"

  "We do," he assured her. "I just can't tell which is what we agreed on."

  She laughed at his grammar, and Africa joined in, looking from face to face.

  Finally, when they'd gone indoors, Shorelle found another brochure called Historic
Tints. "Look, Leroy, I think we've got it—Evening Sky."

  "What's historic about these ones?"

  "Oh, that just means more expensive."

  He groaned.

  Over breakfast, they glanced at the Evening Sky chip and it still looked good, so Leroy dropped it off in Rod's mailbox on his way to work.

  For three days it rained, and then they were at Shorelle's parents' for the weekend. By the time they got back on Sunday evening, roughly the top third of the house had been painted. Leroy turned off the car and stared up.

  "Wow!" said Shorelle.

  "Wow is right," he said in horror.

  "Rod's a fast worker. Look, Africa"—as she heaved the drowsy child out of the car seat—"look at the lovely colour our house's going to be."

  "That," said Leroy, "is not slate blue."

  "Oh, Leroy."

  "It's not what we chose."

  "It must be. It just looks different against the peach."

  "It's purple!"

  "It's catching the last of the sunset, that's all."

  The argument continued right through Africa's bath and bedtime. "You think it should be darker, then?"

  "Not exactly darker," said Leroy.

  "Lighter?"

  "Just less gaudy. Bluer."

  "What, like royal blue?"

  "No! I'm just saying, right now it stands out like a neon sign."

  "That's because everybody else on this street paints their houses boring neutrals," objected Shorelle.

  Leroy stalked out on the porch to gather more evidence, but it was too dark to tell what he was looking at.

  "It's a lurid shade of lavender," he told her in bed, in the whisper they always used after Africa had gone to sleep. "If you look at it with no preconceptions—if you didn't know it was meant to be blue—I'm telling you, purple's what you'd see. People are going to say, 'Oh yeah, you're the guys who live in that lavender house.'"

  "Well, so?"

  He stared at her in the dark. "You're fine with that?"

  "Lavender's blue, anyway, like the song says."

  He felt frustration tingling in the roots of his hair. "That's a nursery rhyme, Shorelle; they're not supposed to make sense. Lavender's blue, diddle diddle, lavender's green ...I guess you're going to tell me it's green now?"