Surviving Michael (2 page)

Liam’s head dropped, and he began to sob.

‘But we say he jumped,’ Charlie said again, breathing heavily. Danny and Nick looked at one another, then at Charlie. Liam had his face covered with his hands.

‘Please,’ Charlie pleaded.

They both nodded. ‘Okay,’ said Nick.

‘Okay?’ Charlie asked Danny.

Danny nodded.

‘You have to say it,’ Charlie told him.

‘Okay, okay.’

Charlie walked up to Liam and put his hand on his shoulder.

‘Liam,’ he said, but Liam continued to cry.

‘Liam, listen to me,’ he said louder, and slapped him on the back.

Liam moved his hands away from his face.

‘We’re all going to say he jumped, okay?’ Charlie told him. Liam looked at Charlie through his fingers.

‘Okay, Liam?’ Charlie asked him. ‘He jumped.’

Liam nodded and then covered his face again and began to cry harder. Only then did Nick turn and race down the pier and did not stop running until he reached Blessington village.

July 5, Friday, 3pm.

THE CLOBBERING SOUND of Alysha Devon’s stiletto pumps coming down the wooden stairs is having such an adverse Pavlovian effect on the warehouse staff’s general tranquility, that I’ve long ago stopped looking forward to her little visitations. It’s not even as if the warehouse staff ever had any great surplus of enthusiasm for their work in the first place. But now that there’s such erotic excitement in anticipation of, during and after her little escapades out of the office, I feel that something is going to have to be said.

But what’s to be said? And more importantly, to whom? If every rumour is to be believed, and I believe every sordid one of them, she’s bed-hopping from one manager to the next. Last Friday she took a lift from Gary, the sales manager, in his Touareg jeep. On Monday, she arrived in with Tony, the financial director, in his BMW. Poor old Mr. Boylan hasn’t even been seen in the last two days.

It’s not that I even begrudge them their bouts with the bawdy little gold digger. It’s just that, well, if there’s going to be any screwing the system going on, then I want my fair slice of the screwing. Am I not a manager? Albeit warehouse manager, but a bona fide manager nonetheless. She could at least have started with me. We’ve all had to pay our dues and resentfully work our way up the ladder, so why not her?

Instead, all I get are these five-minute mickey-teasers of her descending the stairs on some bogus errand, and then climbing the stairs again. Every masculine eye on every feminine curve of her legs; her heels to her sublime calves, to the tender valleys of the back of her knees and all the way up her thighs like a bewitching boulevard to a hidden treasure. If this is her modus operandi for management manipulation and for getting my attention, then why do I have to share my fringe benefits with the rest of the staff down here?

We all used to laugh at first when little Barry Stephens would run off to the bathroom for ten minutes every time she came down, but now he’s become depleted and even emaciated of late, to be frank about it, I’m becoming quite worried about him. He’s of no use to me whatsoever for the rest of the afternoon. The poor chap’s become somewhat of an addict to her perfect contours. Last week she had a half day, and he was itching and scratching at himself like a junkie.

Perhaps she sees me as just one step above the likes of them, and barely worth the bother. Sees me for what I am. Or rather, what I could have been but am not. She knows well enough that I have enough clout in this place with the boys upstairs to warrant a nominal amount of respect from her at the very least, and that very little leaves this factory without my input. But she’s seen through all that with the inherent perception that only women possess.

I’ve been in this place since it opened, and it would undoubtedly struggle to function without me, but still, after, what is it? Eight years... Christ, eight years. After eight years, that’s as high as I’ve risen and am ever going to rise. Sure, they flatter me with public praise and throw me a perfunctory salary raise every now and then, but then I do make their lives run a lot smoother. I open up in the morning and lock up in the evening more times than even the owners do. There used to be twenty of us down here, but after the Celtic tiger emigrated, we’re back down to the same six that we were eight years ago. I do realise the freedom I have, and the level of trust too, but it comes with a price tag. I have my leeway, but only as far as the links in the chain will allow me. I’m fully aware that the end of that chain is bolted securely to the floor of the warehouse, and its length will never increase to allow me beyond the base of the stairs. I am what every smooth running body needs to function at its optimum efficiency – an arsehole. I deal with all the shite and make sure everyone comes out smelling of roses.

And it took Alysha Devon all of five seconds to realise what it took me eight years to. And I’ve just got to admire her for that. One look up and down at me from those green eyes over the rim of her first cup of coffee that morning, and she had me sussed down to a tee. Guessed my past and predicted my future. He’s not worth riding, she thought. Not even worth a quick hand job in the toilets.

So this is my worth. A five minute flirtatious tease every afternoon.

‘Nick, can I ask you about this?’ she says, conspiratorially, and then leans into me to show me some papers, as if presenting her cleavage to me for inspection, while every other pair of eyes in the place devours her. She says by the way I smoke my cigarette that I look like a young Martin Sheen from
Apocalypse Now
, when what I feel like is a very old Charlie Sheen.

‘You’re such a pet,’ she might add, and then touch my arm. Or chew on her pen. Or squeal with laughter at something I say. Or shake her hair loose with her free hand. And then off she’ll go back up the stairs. The hot summer days making her skirts as short as the nights. Up, up, and away. An angel rising to the heavens. Her heels clobbering on the wooden steps again. Bang. Bang. Bang. That sound like nails being beaten into a coffin. Bang. Bang. Bang. A gavel sentencing me to an eternity in this warehouse below. Bang. Bang. Bang.

And then the shuffling sound as little Barry Stephens scurries his way out to the toilets again.

After Aoife was gone, one of the things I most dreaded was coming home to a quiet and dark house. Actually, it turned out it didn’t bother me that much. In fact, I quite liked it. We were going out for just under ten years when it happened. Not that I had anything planned for our anniversary to celebrate.

It’s strange that if I try to visualise her sitting in her favourite reading armchair, as I’ve seen her hundreds of times, that all I can see is an empty chair. Or if I sit and listen and pretend that I can hear the rattle of her keys outside and then the front door opening, as I’ve also heard hundreds of times, all I can hear is silence. But her perfume, her smell, her scents, all these I can smell and even taste in the air; smells that I never even noticed for years, ironically enough.

People have asked me why I don’t move out of such a big house, but I know what they mean is away from her memory. Away from the past. How do I explain to them that it’s her memory that keeps me here? If I moved to a small apartment then my sense of loss would have nowhere to hide and could quite possibly smother me.

We’d also been together so long that I never had a chance to hang out with myself, and I’m not so bad a person to live with after all, despite her complaints. She’s been gone for almost a year now, and there’s still lots of her stuff around the place, but I don’t mind.

They’re right though that the house is too big for just one person, but I’d hate to have to rent out a room. Liam’s mother once walked in on him ‘mid-stroke’ in front of his computer and there was much talk of him finally moving out of his parents’ house. He asked me if he could move in here with me, and to be honest, I wish that I hadn’t just laughed at him. It was around the time that the banks were throwing mortgages at anyone who walked by them on the street, even Liam. But then after many debates, a solution was agreed with all parties in the form of a two euro lock from B&Q for his bedroom door.

I generally don’t work at the weekends, unless there’s a big order that needs to get out, but there aren’t a lot of them anymore. Not these days. It’s funny how long the weekends are when you’re not going out with anyone. I usually have a few pints with the lads on a Friday night, but then when Saturday morning comes around, it sometimes seems like a desert of time before Monday. I particularly hate bank holiday weekends. My sister thinks I should get a hobby. I thought hobbies were something teenagers did. You spend so long with someone, they sort of become your hobby. We used to argue a lot in the last year. Maybe that was my hobby.

To be honest, I’m happy enough at this stage to just plod along. Years ago, while in the abyss of possibility that is youth, I’d had other ambitions. I’d even toyed with the thoughts of a journalist’s or a writer’s life. Unfortunately, I spent too much time battling the torments of my own aging life and found little energy to wrangle with that of a writer’s. So I neither wrangled nor wrote, and resigned myself to years of merely aging.

When I still lived in my parents’ house, over ten years ago, my brother jumped ship and moved to Boston. The house just wasn’t the same after that. Aoife and I tried it out over there ourselves for a couple of years, but eventually life there became as routine as life here. At least here you could get a decent pint, so we came home. It was worse living back with my parents. They had their own kind of shared companionship of silent routine that I felt I was intruding on, so Aoife and I got our own place.

We used to rent a great apartment near Fitzwilliam Square when we got back from the States, but when we finally decided to buy a place, she wanted somewhere with a garden and near her mother’s, so I guess I’m stuck out in the sticks for the time being.

My mam and dad had married quite young, then one day, like most couples, romance deserted them and they ran out of things to talk about so they did what most couples do - have children and talk about them, and then talk to other people who have children and like to talk about their kids too. They’d lived and loved once, though. I’ve seen some old black and white photos of a holiday in Galway. Their honeymoon, I think it was. Her in a long white dress that was probably yellow, sitting on a tall black horse that was probably brown, and himself, proudly standing with broad shoulders and smiling with big white teeth; and the dark grey mountains in the background looming benevolently over them. I wonder which he lost first, his teeth or his smile.

I try to call around to them a few times a week. With my brother living abroad, and never bothering his arse to come home for a visit, and with my sister’s continual doctor and school appointments for her litany of kids (perhaps she should have got herself a hobby), there’s no one else except me to annoy them on a consistent basis. I also like to go by in order to show them that just because Aoife isn’t around anymore, everything is normal, in that I’m still as dismally despondent as everyone else in the world.

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be cheering them up or vice versa, but we do our best. They provide me with tea and offer me safe, perfunctory questions, to which I obligingly reciprocate between sips of scalding tea and an occasional custard cream, with customary and soothing answers.

It’s an innate flaw in all of us. We wish so much for our parents to be omnipotent, and for many years they are. And they, in turn, wish us so much to be irreproachable, and for many more years, so too are we. Then we both realise that we’ve been lied to, that one’s offspring is merely a normally dysfunctional human being like everyone else, and that one’s parents are our exact equivalent, only older and duller. Inevitably we get angry at each other, and spend years in obscure habitual impatience at best, and hysteria at worst. And then finally, acceptance, hopefully sooner rather than later, and a realisation that their infallibility is as fatuous as our own. Only then can we sit, and drink tea, and dunk custard creams, and nod, and lie to each other that we’re okay, and that everything is going to be okay, and that there will, after all, be a satisfactory conclusion to each of our own individual stories.

There’s an eclectic bunch of fellow travellers on the Luas this evening. Must be the heat that has them all out. That’s why it’s always those hot countries like in the Middle East that seem to be constantly at war. The heat just pushes them over the edge. Charlie spent a little bit of time on a kibbutz in Israel about ten years ago. Somewhere in the desert. I don’t think I could stand this heat all the time. Anyway, when he came back he read the first three chapters of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ‘
The Siege
’ and ever since thinks himself an analytical expert on the Middle East. We just try to avoid the subject entirely in conversations now.

He has an amazing apartment in the docklands that must have cost a fortune. I’ve been to a few of his plays so I know for definite he’s lying about his acting paying for that place. I met Richard, his agent, or whoever he says he is, a couple of times. He looks a lot like Stephen Fry or some sort of Oscar Wilde character; only better dressed and even more English looking, but without the wit or charm. Liam told me he saw Charlie in a porno once, but Liam’s seen so many pornos that if he told me he’d seen me in one, I’d believe him.

Charlie texted me earlier to say that he was coming in. It’s been a while since we were all out together for a pint. ‘Will b der later Nicolas,’ he wrote. I hate when he calls me Nicolas, but I try not to say it as it only provokes him to use it more often. I don’t think I’ve been called Nicolas by anyone else since Father Jim poured holy water over my head and made me a fully-fledged member of the Catholic Church. I can’t think of any other international organisation with fewer entry requirements and vetting policies than the Vatican; any sort of a pulse and you’re in. Even Facebook demands a certain level of computer skills and an email address before signing you up. However, adding someone as a member before they acquire any say in the matter has to be handed to them as a stroke of genius.