‘You know, Tab?’ he said, waking up. ‘I think this is all I need in life. Us on an island. Where no one and nothing can reach us.’
*
‘Sit yourself down there, Tabitha,’ Christy said, pointing to his old armchair and faded cushion beside a wood burner. ‘And I’ll make the tea.’
‘How is the writers’ group going? How many are you?’
‘There’s the six of us now. The stalwarts. All the way from Peggy who’s going on eighty-seven, down to Charles who’s a mere stripling of 67. Poetry isn’t bad at all. But you know something, Tabitha?I don’t know what I’d do without my poetry. Writing my little verses keeps me sane. I seem to have become more prolific as I’ve got older. It’s like I have to put everything down, make sense of everything, before I can’t anymore. Don’t stop, actually.’
He was wiping out two mugs with a tea towel and he unwrapped a large, almond-topped fruit cake, the kind of cake no one makes anymore. ‘Peggy’sthis is,’ he said. ‘We get all the reading and critiquing over and done with and then we have our reward.’
He handed me a mug of tea and a slice of cake. If I closed my eyes I could be twenty all over again. Our last year at college, Red and I practically lived in the room upstairs.
‘Now, there’s something I’ve been wondering, and before Red gets back I had better get it off my chest. So, tellme this and tell me no more,’ he said. ‘Why did you marry someone like Michael Fogarty? I thought you were one of us. And well, they’re the ones getting rid of the bowls club here in the town and cutting the winter fuel allowance. And a friend of mine, his daughter, well, she’s living in a bed and breakfast, grotty place it is, with three children, because they’ve run out of council houses.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I’m still the same. I still vote the same way. Michael is…’ Christy was exactly the same as he used to be but I was mortified he was asking about Michael. Michael who I’d married only a year after ending it with Red. Michael the father of my child. Christy never minded asking you the awkward questions if he needed to know something. He needed to fully understand everything aboutthe world until he was satisfied.
‘I couldn’t believe it Tabitha,’ said Christy, ‘when I heard. Not one ofthem, I thought to meself. That right shower with their shiny cars and shiny heads and shiny suits, doing nothing for the working man or woman.’
‘Michael isn’t that bad,’ I said, compelled to defend Michael. I didn’t want him to think I had married some right-wing lunatic. Michael was amoderate. And a good person. ‘Actually, he was against the bowls club closing.’
‘I saw your mam at the protest,’ he said, letting Michael go. ‘She’s a mighty woman, isn’t she?’
I nodded. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘And your daughter? Rose of summer… what age is she now?’
‘She’s doing her Leaving. Working hard you know. A bit stressed but…’
‘You were just the same, working hard, a goodbrain, all that,’ he said, taking the lid off the teapot and pouring in more hot water from the kettle.
‘Was I?’ I couldn’t remember being like that, but I was touched by how he remembered me. We chatted for a long time, about Christy’s coming and goings, my life at the school. I told him about Rosie and about Nora. We talked about films we’d seen and books read. It was like the old days. Andthen, a noise upstairs.
‘Dad?’ Red’s voice from above our heads caused beads of sweat to ping all over me, fear and excitement and delight at his imminence.
‘Down here! With a special visitor.’ Christy winked at me, indulgently.
‘Oh yes?’
Footsteps coming down the steps into the kitchen … and there was Red.
‘Hello Tab,’ he said, looking a little taken aback, as though he’d forgotten all aboutChristy’s invitation to me. ‘I thought Dad meant the writers’ group. I was hoping to hear a bit of Heaney…’
‘Well, maybe Tabitha will oblige, said Christy. ‘Tea Red?’ He filled the kettle. ‘What will you give us, Tabitha?’
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘You’re not going to make me recite something…’ Christy had a terrible habit of forcing people to do things, be someone they didn’t quite think they were.And when you’d done it, you realised that you were better for it. But today, with sweat prickling my back and my mouth dry, and brain gone, I knew I wouldn’t be able to rise to the challenge. ‘What about some Pam Ayres,’ I said. ‘O I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth?’
Red laughed but Christy said, ‘and what’s so funny. Poetry is poetry. Don’t tell me Redmond Power that you are a poetry snob. Wedon’t allow them in this house, do we Tabitha?’
I shook my head and winked at Red. ‘No, Christy, no we don’t.’ Red was smiling broadly. It was like the old days. ‘It’s just like the old days,’ said Christy.
‘I was just thinking that,’ said Red, glancing at me. Me too. Me too, I thought. ‘How are you feeling, Dad?’ he said. ‘Did the poetry group tire you out?’
‘Not at all. Strong as an ox Iam.’
‘Dad, you had a stroke six months ago. You have to face your own…’
‘Decrepitude.’
