January 2 – Friday
Tess had always been a morning person. Then again, it wasn’t as if she was any more sociable at one end of the day than the other. Maybe it was getting older – but she preferred to get her day over with quickly, if there was a choice. Usually, if she could, she sat in the square garden in the afternoon, but apart from that, so long as she wasn’t falling over snotty office girls she chugged along unnoticed mostly.
Sometimes, on wet days, when she sat in the flat on her own, she dreamed about what her life might have been if she’d married Douglas. She’d have been a teacher’s wife, certainly, Douglas would not have wanted her working outside their home. She tried not to think of it too often, but sometimes, well, in that flat, she could go mad if she didn’t think of something.
‘Ah, Mrs Cuffe,’ the secretary called her name through her nose, as though it might keep the smell of something undesirable from pervading her lovely reception desk. Tess didn’t usually work in the financial services centre. They were too far away to walk to, but the agency had promised double time and she never turned down easy money. Of course, double the hourly rate was probably what they felt would entice her back over the New Year break. Her bruises had died down a lot in so short a time and it was nice to have something to mark out the week. The holidays mean nothing when you’re on your own. ‘We’ve an outbreak of winter vomiting bug so there’s lots to do. Mr Boyce has asked if you can go up to the third floor and get started on some filing.’ She hardly looked at Tess when she spoke and Tess wondered if she’d ever know what it was to be old and invisible or would she learn too late?
‘Filing?’ Tess repeated, as though she would automatically slip into place like a well-oiled wheel ready for action. ‘I’ll have you know, young lady, that filing is a very specialised job, each business is different, so I’ll be taking my time and I’ll be seeing it in my wages.’ She walked towards the waxy faux oak escalator doors, silently praying the filing system would be easy to follow.
But somehow, with all those buttons and directions, she managed to arrive in what she supposed was the executive floor. It was a sea of deep snowy carpet, modern muted artworks and heavy occasional tables partnering club chairs lining up between a series of arrogant maple doors. You could smell the money, raw and dangerous in the air. By the time she turned to make her way back to the third floor, the elevator doors had shut and she was left stranded and waiting for its return. To her left, she spotted the toilet. She decided to nip in; these cold days played havoc with her kidneys. They never warned you that it’d be the innards that would give you away first, as you grew older.
It constantly amazed Tess how the rich spent their money. Take this toilet for example, closed with a sign that said cleaners at work, when everyone knew that there was no place for cleaners during sociable hours. Air freshener pumped in so it smelled like the hairdresser her aunt Beatrice visited every week all those years ago. Mrs Mooney had converted her front sitting room into a little salon down at the very end of Ballycove. Her whole house smelled of hairspray and apple shampoo; sweet but nauseating after the first half-hour. Tess often wondered if it was why Mr Mooney spent all his days in the pub. There was something unnatural about a man living in such a perfumed atmosphere.
The music in here too throbbed as though it was a nightclub, then Tess heard it. Later, she’d wonder, had she really heard it? Had she heard anything at all, or had she just imagined it, but there it was, a scratching, thumping, grinding, breathless sound.
It was the sound of sex, of course, not one that Tess was what you’d call overly familiar with, but she was a woman who considered herself worldly, if not widely experienced. She’d grown up in the fifties – even if it was in Ballycove. It was definitely the sound of sex; rough and ready, the kind that youngsters thought lasted beyond a first night – Tess knew different.
Well, they weren’t running her out of the toilet. Now that she was here, with the sound of water flowing and the cool air conditioning hitting her anew, she really needed to go. The next loo could be a mile of corridors away. She rounded the cubicles, expected the lovers to have taken refuge behind a flimsy closed door.
But no.
There, in all his glory, stood her neighbour and nemesis, Richard King. He reminded her of a little haystack on his spindly thin legs. His trousers sank at half-mast, shorts standing valiantly about his knobbly knees and calves, pumping himself like a donkey into a red-faced woman who was leaning forward, white-knuckled against the sink.
‘Find another loo,’ the woman shouted at her rudely, but it was too late, it seemed, because Richard had obviously lost all motivation. He slunk away from her, trying to hold his balance, while righting his trousers too quickly for his pristine drawers to catch up.
‘You could do yourself an injury with that kind of carry on, Richard,’ Tess said and managed to keep a straight face. Then she walked casually into the first cubicle, sitting comfortably on the toilet while she listened to the skirmish outside. Heated toilet seats, there was no such thing as cold bums in the Dublin banking world obviously.
When she’d finished and taken a deep breath so she was fairly certain she wouldn’t laugh in their faces she went outside.
‘It’s not what it seems,’ Richard King was white-faced, ashen didn’t even come close.
‘Really? Because I could have sworn you had your,’ she looked down now at the offending body part safely tucked behind his closed zipper, ‘little willie stuck in that woman, who I’m fairly sure was not average Amanda – or did my eyes trick me?’ She shook her head, feigned bewilderment as only a woman of her years could.
‘You know full well what I mean.’ He rounded on her now and she could see again that rotten temper that flared so easily with her before. Of course, it had let him down then too. The judge was not impressed when Richard shouted brutishly at her in the court case, it had probably swung things in her favour as much as anything else.
‘Oh yes I do, Richard,’ she said calmly, keeping her eyes on him so she could enjoy watching him squirm. ‘So, if it’s not what I think, then I’m sure your wife won’t mind one bit when I tell her about the most amazing coincidence…’ She rubbed her hands thoughtfully beneath the tap, enjoying the feeling of expensive soap upon them.
‘You wouldn’t’ He looked as if he could cry.
‘Well, I mightn’t…’
‘Go on,’ he leaned back against the sink, defeated. Perhaps he was counting his breaths as Tess had counted hers each night when they first arrived and made it obvious they wanted her out.
‘It’s just, I suppose, I was going to mention…’ she looked about this lovely plush bathroom, mentally comparing it to her own meagre-tiled, wet-rotted, damp-patched, apricot-coloured water closet. ‘It’s my bathroom, it’s a bit… outdated, I suppose you’d call it. It could do with a good overhaul. I’m not getting any younger, you know. I need to look at things like a walk-in shower, a good immersion, maybe…’ She stopped for a moment, it was now or never, she nodded towards the cubicle she’d just left. ‘A heated toilet seat – it’d be a great relief to me, don’t you know.’ She enjoyed pulling the words out slowly, so he could just imagine her sitting there, on her lovely cosy toilet seat, and laughing her head off at the pair of them upstairs.
‘I’ll organise it,’ he said before gathering himself up as much as he could manage.
Tess watched as he walked without any pep back to his important job.
‘Yes, do that,’ Tess said, but of course, she knew he couldn’t hear her, he was far too concerned with the notion that Tess really had managed to get the upper hand at last.
*
After that, Tess felt lighter in herself than she had for years. So much so, that when she got home, she decided to take herself out to the square garden with her cup of tea and sit for a while. She put on her coat and wrapped her best scarf about her neck then chose a seat opposite her little flat so she could sit and watch the world go by.
The square was lovely at this time of year. It felt as though everything was sleeping, just beneath the surface, there was a calm about January that could fool you into thinking time was standing still in some arcane way. Sometimes Tess thought she could hear the bulbs moving about like an infant in the womb, waiting for their time to bloom. A lively game of start-stop football filled the air with roars of ‘goal’ and ‘foul’ and Tess fought down an urge to slug across the grass and kick the ball belligerently past the scrawny keeper. It was mad of course, this deep-buried desire to kick about a ball when she passed children in the street, slyly pick up where she left off before she even got the chance to start. Tess remembered being in such a hurry to grow up; she didn’t realise then that growing up meant growing old.
She sat and watched as young mums wheeled prams with contented sleeping tots. Toddlers rushed about burning off energy before their evening nap and dogs strained on leads that probably their owners wished they didn’t need. A woman, no doubt well-meaning (the worst sort of do-gooder, in Tess’s opinion), pushed a flier into her hands and had the audacity to smile sweetly as she moved off towards the other end of the square.
Across the road, she saw Amanda King return with dry-cleaning slung across her arm. Tess watched as she marched up the steps and into her pristine house. Funny, but she never thought of that as being a home and she wondered absently why that might be. Then her mind flitted to Richard with that woman who would eat Amanda for breakfast, given half a chance. True, Tess felt no sympathy for Amanda King, but there was no doubting that Robyn might have the makings of a nice girl, one day. To give credit to the girl, she was looking after that cat as if it was a newborn baby. She could become quite fond of the girl, if she didn’t watch out.
It was beginning to get cold and Tess knew she should go back to the flat soon. Night was drawing in early and they would lock the gates before she knew it. Still, she lingered, feeling an overwhelming sense of loneliness grip her. It was happening more often now; when she was younger, she put it down to Douglas. It was natural enough, under the circumstances, wasn’t it? Now though, she knew it was everything in her life, and the fact that really, if she was honest, there was nothing in her life.
She watched as one of the young porters from the Swift Centre made his way through the park. He was locking the gates for the evening, checking that people had left. He nodded and had a word for everyone on his path, something mundane, forgettable. Tess knew, he could as easily have not bothered to salute the cross old woman on the bench. What if he was the last person she spoke to? What if she died here, on this bench, on this black night – all alone? The thought hit her suddenly, out of nowhere.
Was it out of nowhere?
She really couldn’t fool herself on that one, could she? She looked down at the crepe skin on her hands and it seemed that they were prompting her to take stock of her life. Was that all she had? A mixture of temping jobs about the city that the younger girls wouldn’t touch, a poky little flat filled with memories – mostly despondent at best – and the fridge of groceries Robyn bought that she would eat alone.
An overwhelming sense of dread cloaked her, wound itself around her so tightly, she thought that it might snap her out. It was as though the square was closing in on her, but she knew that if she moved, the sensation would only get worse. It felt as if the darkness of night could snuff her out; extinguish her as easily as a wavering flame.
What was wrong with her?
She was having some kind of panic attack. That was it. It was simple. Life had gotten on top of her. Stress. She read about it all the time. Top executives got it, running on adrenalin, high blood pressure – she had low blood pressure; was that even worse? That frustratingly direct doctor had scared her at the mention of a stroke.
No, she wasn’t stressed. That was just silly.
But she wasn’t happy either, was she? She took a deep breath, exhaled long and weighty. For a moment, she stopped everything. Everything in the square, everything it seemed in this city, stood still. She knew that something was wrong and it wasn’t just her blood pressure. It wasn’t that she should be eating more greens or checking that she’d turned off the gas. She was missing something and it was something far more profound than just food in her fridge. She looked again at her worn-out hands and the crumpled flier for a choir recital that she would never see. In that moment, in the darkness, out of nowhere, Tess Cuffe realised, that not only was she alone in the world, but it turned out that now, in her sixty-sixth year, she might be the loneliest person on the whole planet.
This time there were no tears. She would do something about it, make something of all these wasted years and the empty ones that surely lay ahead if she didn’t make some changes. She shuffled out of the garden, glared at the traffic as she crossed the road to her flat.
‘If you so much as squeak, my lady, you’ll feel the hard end of my foot,’ she said as she passed the cat sitting stoically on the footpath.
‘Do you think she knows that they’ve abandoned her?’ Robyn asked her. She was standing in the porch, over a basket of suspiciously familiar clothes.
‘Where did you get those?’ Tess glared at them with the practical eye of a woman who knows she has been saved a lot of work in drying clothes that she’d hung out less than an hour earlier.
‘Well, they won’t dry in this weather, will they?’ Robyn said, heaving the basket up into her arms and dropping it inside the hallway for Tess to sort from there. ‘I mean, the air is so damp and cold, and there’s no point hanging them about in your flat when I could just pop them in the dryer in our laundry room.’
‘And your mother is happy to do that, is she?’
‘Well, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind, especially since your arm is plastered and you’re still all bruised.’ She stood back into the porch again, mildly putting aside that she was not welcome here, but perhaps she was happy to take what she could get. The porch provided some shelter for that nuisance cat she was so fond of. ‘Anyway, she was out somewhere, so I couldn’t ask either way,’ she said casually, as though it didn’t matter.
‘Well, I suppose I should say…’ Tess looked beyond the girl, couldn’t quite think of a way of saying thanks without it sounding trite.
‘It’s okay, you don’t need to,’ Robyn said as she turned to gather up the cat who was wrapping itself affectionately around her legs and purring like a train. ‘Come on you,’ her voice softened even more when she reached to pick her up.
‘I…’ Tess began, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. ‘It was thoughtful of you to take my washing in,’ she said, looking towards the darkening sky, where rain loomed in heavy clouds. ‘You’ve saved me a lot of time and trouble, very decent of you indeed.’
‘Really it was no bother,’ Robyn said into the cat’s fur and turned towards the garden leaving Tess to watch from the silence of her flat.
‘I don’t think…’ Tess called out, remembering Robyn’s question of earlier. ‘If that cat does realise the O’Hara’s have forgotten, well, I don’t think it can mind too much.’ Tess cleared her throat, let her voice fall into a slightly gentler sound. ‘I think it looks as happy as I’ve ever seen it.’
‘Really?’ Robyn said and when she smiled it lit up her eyes as Tess had never noticed them before.
The door closed with a soft and even click and with it, Tess thought she heard the world move just a beat too far away. All at once, it seemed her little flat and her life stretched further into abiding solitude. The familiar din of emptiness drummed louder than any other noise on earth and Tess thought she would scream if she had to endure another second. What was wrong with her? It had never bothered her before. Tess had no idea what she was going to do, but she had to start somewhere. Tonight she would begin to walk about the square, it would be a start in the right direction. Exercise for the sake of keeping her alive long enough to outlive Awful Amanda and Randy Richard. It may not be the answer to all her problems, but she had to start somewhere.