Eden
02-14-2006, 01:53 PM
In The Dark
How stupid he looked! And though that was not the most worthy worry on Dara’s shoulders (that honour belonged to the notion of his obvious guilt, his sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb), it was one that niggled, that stung and distracted. How stupid you look! How deserving of contempt! Dara strode towards home, the handbag pressed to his chest.
He had no just reason for taking the bag. It had merely been there, its owner’s crime her lapse in attention. She had not been asking for it; she had not sat opposite him in the café to rile him. She had not thrown him a look of distaste as he sprawled in the booth with his head bent, hoodie shielding the world from all but his nose. She had placed the bag on the seat beside her, and had turned to a newspaper discarded by a previous diner. As Dara had made to leave his hand had brushed the leather strap of the bag, and his fingers had closed around it, and it seemed like time had jerked him forwards so that he was one hundred yards away instantly, clutching a dusky pink handbag… walking, not running. Dara didn’t care to run.
No one followed. He was aware that holding such a prize would not mark him out as a lazy transvestite or a young man unschooled in successful accessorising; he was aware that the first natural reaction from any passer-by should be “He’s stolen that! He’s making off with some poor woman’s money!”. But nothing could have pressed him into hurrying; a glimpse of the police would not even have coaxed him into a trot. He was shielded from the world, from his deed, as the world seemed shielded from noticing him. A numbing, blurring bubble, cushioning his leisurely escape; alcohol gently dragged him home.
It was Saturday. The day before had been eventful; Dara had seen a patrol car and an ambulance parked at the entrance to a short alleyway on his way to school.
The students itched with curiosity, scratched harder as drips of information found way to this classmate or that. Someone had been murdered. No, there had been a vicious rape and no one was safe. No, the police had found a glut of money and drugs that some gang members had stashed... Stories to whet Dara’s appetite, and the appetites of his friends, until some sort of definite news was established, anchored to reality by a teacher’s testimony. Someone had found a baby girl in the alleyway, and that was why the police and the ambulance were there. She was alive. She was dead. She’d been wrapped in black plastic bags and thrown in a skip. Not even rumour yet dared suggest where she’d come from. The girls in Dara’s class huddled, hands over their mouths in horror. Most of the boys lost interest, until one of the girls said, “But it was local. Who’d have dumped a little baby here but a local?”
“Such a tragedy,” Dara’s mother said, later; the evening conversation revolved around the forsaken baby, as it would have around any indigenous mystery. She tapped her cigarette over the sink. “They’re appealing for the mother to step forward.”
“Was it dead?” Dara asked.
“She, not it. For God’s sake, Dara. And no, she isn’t. She’s in the Regional… one of the nurses named her Catherine. C… the third baby, so I’m told, they’ve found this year.”
“Probably some young wan,” Dara’s father said, taking off his work boots. Grey clumps shuddered onto the carpet as he shook his feet free. It was testament to Mother’s immersion in scandal that she didn’t take it upon herself to notice or complain. “Some girl afraid to tell anyone, hiding it…”
“How can you hide a pregnancy?” scoffed Orla. At fourteen, she was two years younger than Dara, a stretch between them that reflected in the stretching of her mouth, always throwing louder words, screeching for validation.
“It doesn’t always show.” Mother’s face seemed the same colour as the ash she scattered into the sink. Mother was an emotional chameleon, though, a woman with great capacity for drama. “Strung up! Strung up, she should be.”
“And how would she come forward if that was the attitude she’d have to deal with?” Dara’s father stretched back on the couch, knocking his discarded boots; another sprinkling of dirt decorated the carpet.
“I never fecked one of my babies into a skip,” said Mother. “Though many’s the time I was bloody tempted.”
It was only when Dara was in his bedroom with the door closed behind him that he was able to pull the bag away from his chest. He tossed it onto the bed and sat at his desk, aware that he made a cave of his stomach every time he inhaled. He pushed his hands over his head, pulling the skin tightly over his forehead. The room spun as his eyelids drooped; he stood up, and glared at the furniture - Stay still! The vodka had been supposed to knock back the speeding thoughts inside him, but the vodka wasn't working. Dara eyed the handbag, pressing back against his bedroom door.
That afternoon, he’d met his friends, as was his custom on a wild Saturday. They’d picked their way to the back of the yard behind the railway station, where they’d arranged crates to sit on and a makeshift fireplace as a centrepiece.
“Sanctuary!” Dara grinned, as their lair had come into sight. His friends looked at him, and then at each other, and half-smiles tickled them and nipped at him.
This was the problem with his friends. Dara knew that what they had was not true friendship, it was association through convenience. Eric and Michael were from the same estate as Dara, and they’d grown up together without influencing each other’s quirks. They barely put up with each other’s quirks. Even Colette, who Dara had been seeing for seven weeks now, didn’t seem to know what to do with him, beyond throwing her arms around him and letting his tongue into her mouth from time to time. That she joined in the slight smirking when Dara came out with an unfamiliar word said a lot for their relationship.
But company was better than solitude for the time being. He could put up with the “Oh, hark at Dara and his scary language fetish!” bullshit until he finished school. Colette was warm; that in so many other senses she was as distant to Dara as the geisha was from the Viking was something he’d have to try to ignore. This company, and this quiet place behind the station, was better than spending empty hours at home.
“Any more news on that baby thing?” Eric asked Colette, as they settled, shoulders hunched under the cold.
“It was all my sisters could talk about,” Colette said. “It’s terrible. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all night. That poor baby, all on her own in the dark.”
“She’s alright now, isn’t she?” said Dara.
“What does that change? She was still just left there! Like, thrown out with the rubbish!”
“Y’know who I heard it belonged to?” said Michael.
They stopped shuffling, and sat forward.
“I heard nothing like that,” breathed Colette. “Who?”
“Ava.”
“What? Ava Byrne?”
“Yup.”
“Get lost! I saw her last week and she was not bloody pregnant!”
“That’s what I heard, is all.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me too much, though. She was always odd. And she gave me the creeps.”
“Yeah, right. Since when?”
“Always. There was always something weird about her.”
Dara hadn’t joined in the conversation. He’d spent some time with Ava the previous spring, but none of his friends knew that. He wouldn’t have confessed to it even if, tempted by gossip, his friends had tried to beat it out of him. Ava was an odd little thing, but he’d seen her scribbling the logo of his favourite band on her wrist at a party, and they’d got talking. There followed a few heady days together at Easter time; away from school and their separate clusters of friends, they’d discovered plenty to like about each other. But the Monday morning of resuming lessons had come around too soon, and they’d parted company as school society would have expected them to. They’d not really spoken since, and Dara was still puzzling over that; why the flush of embarrassment became such a barrier if allowed, why even a couple of civil words seemed a trial after a rush of intimacy. Now he felt something rise from his chest to catch in his throat, and a feverish blanket pull itself over the back of his neck. Colette had pushed against him, but he clasped his own arms, and pulled just slightly away from her.
“How much would have to be wrong with you before you’d keep something like that to yourself?” she said.
“Maybe she was scared,” shrugged Michael.
“It’s hardly unusual to be pregnant in this day and age!”
“My mother said hiding a pregnancy was still illegal. Maybe that was what worried her.”
“Yeah, right! As if anyone’s bothered by that anymore! I’d tell. No, that’s Ava down to the ground… just plain weird, all wrapped up in her own stupid little world.”
“What would you know?” Dara said, standing up.
He’d moved quickly enough to knock his arm against Colette, pushing her briefly onto her side. She sat up, glowering.
“Take it easy, Dara! I just said…”
“You don’t know Ava. None of us know Ava, so maybe we should keep our mouths shut. Besides, it’s just a rumour, isn’t it?”
“All I was saying,” said Colette, sulkily, “is that she’s strange enough for it to be true.”
“Where did you hear that anyway?” Dara turned to Michael.
“It’s going around, is all. Fiona said she was sick for ages a while back, and that she thought something was wrong then, and that she’s been off-colour since…”
“Fiona should mind her own business.”
“What’s it to you, Dara? Christ!”
Dara walked off, and Eric called after him.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get some cigs. Is that ok with you, or do I need to give you written notice?”
That he’d been unpredictably annoyed by their blether bothered him, because Dara had always considered himself to be close to unshakeable, distanced from everyone else’s concerns by his self-confidence, his faith in himself and his ability to get by on his own wiles. That he might have betrayed what was nagging at him bothered him more. He had an idea where Ava lived, and he took a detour through where he thought she might be, watching for police cars or… well, not that social services marked themselves out by anything but a professional benevolence, but… well, anything that might tell him whether this rumour was as grounded in something uncomfortably close to fact as most other rumours were. The residential streets told him nothing, nor did his eavesdropping in hushed conversations. He managed to purchase a small bottle of vodka from a distracted off-license employee, and he sipped at it furtively as he wandered, at once trying to get his head around the potent image of tiny cries from a rubbish skip, and trying to dull whatever notions of unwitting compliance sidled into his head.
So, beyond the bad temper brought about by the scalding lump in his throat, he had no reason to nick some innocent’s handbag. He didn’t make a habit of stealing, not even sweeties from the corner shop (a justifiable past-time, according to many of his peers). He considered himself above such behaviour – he didn’t have to prove his own daring to himself, or to anyone else for that matter. He could blame the drink, but he’d not turned to vodka to switch on bravery so that he could push himself into the role of the teenage badass. And if found with this prize he’d thrown onto his bed, what would he say? I saw it, and I couldn’t but take it? I needed the money? Neither was true. His parents would murder him if they saw the bag.
From his post at his bedroom door, he could hear his mother shout over the blaring televised football match, and thought he’d never felt as far away from her as he did now.
He took a breath and a shaky step to his bed, and sat down, heavily, beside the bag. Pausing to push down on his brow bone, to swear at his dizziness, he picked up the bag and opened it.
There was a notebook, and a purse, and some receipts. In the purse, a small amount of cash, bank and credit card – Dara had no interest in the money. There was a photograph of a woman and a man; the woman clearly the owner of the bag, her arm around a smiling bloke with blue sky behind them. Holidays. Dara had never been abroad. Another slip of paper echoed the name on the bank and credit cards: Helen Coleman. And her address.
The receipts meant little to Dara. And the notebook only seemed to contain scribbles pertaining to work appointments; Helen Coleman’s life was full, alien. He dropped the notebook back into the bag, and a loose paper slipped from its centre pages.
It was a letter. It was more than a letter, it was a love letter, scribbled in haste but heaving with sentiment…
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you… I know that our argument was only over something small, and that you’ll laugh at this letter as unnecessary, but Helen, I need you to know that even a brief frown from you is reason to apologise to you. I want to make you smile, I don’t want to waste our precious moments making you unhappy. Love you forever, as the moon loves the stars and the ocean loves the shore… Ivan.
Dara read the letter four times, and then he folded it back into the bag.
What was this? Fate having a go at him? Reminding him how far he was from the harmony shared by Helen Coleman and Ivan Whatever? Punishing him for taking what wasn't his, laughing at him for the mess this weekend had become? Dara grabbed the bag, and hurried out of the house.
He wasn’t sure of what he was doing, but he knew where he was going. He was following that written address to where Helen Coleman lived, he was going to laugh back at Fate for teasing him so. Anger mixed with the alcohol, and washed the streets into a Technicolor spin, as if Dara was at the centre of a merry-go-round. He wasn't calm enough to give a reasonable answer to the question of what this drunken march was going to prove – if he had to see if Helen Coleman’s happiness was as powerful as his imagination told him, if her unity with Ivan-who-loved-her-so was as real and as tormenting as he believed. If all of this had nothing to do with a baby in an alleyway, a girl who acted as if he wasn’t there, a gang who followed him but didn’t understand him, a family he couldn’t feel part of. He wouldn’t be able to explain his anger if he tried.
He found Helen Coleman’s house on a quiet close, and followed the path
to where he could get around to the backs of the orderly, pretty homes.
There were high walls around the back gardens; Dara settled down, half-hidden by the damp branches of small tree.
He saw her through her back window. She was standing as if at a sink, head bowed. Dara shifted on the wall, watching. It became apparent that she was alone. It became apparent that the occasional dragging of her hand across her eyes had nothing to do with housework fatigue.
She wasn’t watching the garden. Dara slipped off the wall, and went closer to the house.
Her being busy at one window gave him a chance to check the other. He held onto the windowsill, and when he blinked it was as if in slow-motion; he could feel his lashes rest gently on the soft skin below his eyes. His breath made the glass cloudy, and he smudged the window, gently, with a fist.
The room inside was a shrine. Close to it, at least, missing little but the odd candle and the curling trail of incense. He recognised the man Ivan in every one of the crowds of images… here, on the right-hand table, in a portrait. There, on the wall, photographed laughing with a paper crown on his head. On the shelf, caught in light pencil strokes. Dara wondered about the frames on the inside windowsill, their backs to him; Ivan in a work uniform, Ivan at the beach, Ivan in sports gear? Where was Ivan outside of the frames?
He stared, and dulled reactions allowed Helen Coleman into the room before he could start and duck – soon he was not simply staring at the pictures, but staring at her and her tear-tainted face; she stared back at him.
Eventually, she moved to the window, and opened it a little. She didn’t touch the frames on the sill.
“What… are you doing here?”
Dara swallowed. “I don’t know, really.”
“I saw you,” she said. “I saw you earlier.”
They said nothing for a moment, awkwardness or fear diluted by an unspoken acknowledgement of shared misery. After a while Dara held up the bag.
“This is yours,” he said.
She didn’t move to take it. “It is,” she said. “But I don’t think you came here to give it back to me.”
“I don’t know why I came here.”
“You said that.”
He put the bag on the sill.
“I’m sorry.” He stepped back.
She said nothing.
“Did you hear about the baby?” he said.
She nodded.
“I think,” Dara said, and later he wondered why it had seemed so important that he tell her, why even through their unfamiliarity he needed to share something with her… “I think it’s mine.”
“Only think? How is it that you don’t know?”
Dara swallowed, perturbed by this foreign honesty he’d been caught up in. Helen Coleman waited, and eventually he said,
“We haven’t spoken much since… at all… It just got so awkward, so quickly.”
“It’s not right that you don’t know,” she said. “You shouldn’t keep things from one another.”
“I barely know her.”
“Get to know her. Talk to her. It’s not right.”
Dara stood away from the window, as if retreating from this slow, sad woman, her uncomfortably unflinching stare.
“But what…” He paused, and swallowed again. “What if she says… that it’s mine?”
“It’s not yours,” she said. “Its Ivan’s.”
How stupid he looked! And though that was not the most worthy worry on Dara’s shoulders (that honour belonged to the notion of his obvious guilt, his sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb), it was one that niggled, that stung and distracted. How stupid you look! How deserving of contempt! Dara strode towards home, the handbag pressed to his chest.
He had no just reason for taking the bag. It had merely been there, its owner’s crime her lapse in attention. She had not been asking for it; she had not sat opposite him in the café to rile him. She had not thrown him a look of distaste as he sprawled in the booth with his head bent, hoodie shielding the world from all but his nose. She had placed the bag on the seat beside her, and had turned to a newspaper discarded by a previous diner. As Dara had made to leave his hand had brushed the leather strap of the bag, and his fingers had closed around it, and it seemed like time had jerked him forwards so that he was one hundred yards away instantly, clutching a dusky pink handbag… walking, not running. Dara didn’t care to run.
No one followed. He was aware that holding such a prize would not mark him out as a lazy transvestite or a young man unschooled in successful accessorising; he was aware that the first natural reaction from any passer-by should be “He’s stolen that! He’s making off with some poor woman’s money!”. But nothing could have pressed him into hurrying; a glimpse of the police would not even have coaxed him into a trot. He was shielded from the world, from his deed, as the world seemed shielded from noticing him. A numbing, blurring bubble, cushioning his leisurely escape; alcohol gently dragged him home.
It was Saturday. The day before had been eventful; Dara had seen a patrol car and an ambulance parked at the entrance to a short alleyway on his way to school.
The students itched with curiosity, scratched harder as drips of information found way to this classmate or that. Someone had been murdered. No, there had been a vicious rape and no one was safe. No, the police had found a glut of money and drugs that some gang members had stashed... Stories to whet Dara’s appetite, and the appetites of his friends, until some sort of definite news was established, anchored to reality by a teacher’s testimony. Someone had found a baby girl in the alleyway, and that was why the police and the ambulance were there. She was alive. She was dead. She’d been wrapped in black plastic bags and thrown in a skip. Not even rumour yet dared suggest where she’d come from. The girls in Dara’s class huddled, hands over their mouths in horror. Most of the boys lost interest, until one of the girls said, “But it was local. Who’d have dumped a little baby here but a local?”
“Such a tragedy,” Dara’s mother said, later; the evening conversation revolved around the forsaken baby, as it would have around any indigenous mystery. She tapped her cigarette over the sink. “They’re appealing for the mother to step forward.”
“Was it dead?” Dara asked.
“She, not it. For God’s sake, Dara. And no, she isn’t. She’s in the Regional… one of the nurses named her Catherine. C… the third baby, so I’m told, they’ve found this year.”
“Probably some young wan,” Dara’s father said, taking off his work boots. Grey clumps shuddered onto the carpet as he shook his feet free. It was testament to Mother’s immersion in scandal that she didn’t take it upon herself to notice or complain. “Some girl afraid to tell anyone, hiding it…”
“How can you hide a pregnancy?” scoffed Orla. At fourteen, she was two years younger than Dara, a stretch between them that reflected in the stretching of her mouth, always throwing louder words, screeching for validation.
“It doesn’t always show.” Mother’s face seemed the same colour as the ash she scattered into the sink. Mother was an emotional chameleon, though, a woman with great capacity for drama. “Strung up! Strung up, she should be.”
“And how would she come forward if that was the attitude she’d have to deal with?” Dara’s father stretched back on the couch, knocking his discarded boots; another sprinkling of dirt decorated the carpet.
“I never fecked one of my babies into a skip,” said Mother. “Though many’s the time I was bloody tempted.”
It was only when Dara was in his bedroom with the door closed behind him that he was able to pull the bag away from his chest. He tossed it onto the bed and sat at his desk, aware that he made a cave of his stomach every time he inhaled. He pushed his hands over his head, pulling the skin tightly over his forehead. The room spun as his eyelids drooped; he stood up, and glared at the furniture - Stay still! The vodka had been supposed to knock back the speeding thoughts inside him, but the vodka wasn't working. Dara eyed the handbag, pressing back against his bedroom door.
That afternoon, he’d met his friends, as was his custom on a wild Saturday. They’d picked their way to the back of the yard behind the railway station, where they’d arranged crates to sit on and a makeshift fireplace as a centrepiece.
“Sanctuary!” Dara grinned, as their lair had come into sight. His friends looked at him, and then at each other, and half-smiles tickled them and nipped at him.
This was the problem with his friends. Dara knew that what they had was not true friendship, it was association through convenience. Eric and Michael were from the same estate as Dara, and they’d grown up together without influencing each other’s quirks. They barely put up with each other’s quirks. Even Colette, who Dara had been seeing for seven weeks now, didn’t seem to know what to do with him, beyond throwing her arms around him and letting his tongue into her mouth from time to time. That she joined in the slight smirking when Dara came out with an unfamiliar word said a lot for their relationship.
But company was better than solitude for the time being. He could put up with the “Oh, hark at Dara and his scary language fetish!” bullshit until he finished school. Colette was warm; that in so many other senses she was as distant to Dara as the geisha was from the Viking was something he’d have to try to ignore. This company, and this quiet place behind the station, was better than spending empty hours at home.
“Any more news on that baby thing?” Eric asked Colette, as they settled, shoulders hunched under the cold.
“It was all my sisters could talk about,” Colette said. “It’s terrible. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all night. That poor baby, all on her own in the dark.”
“She’s alright now, isn’t she?” said Dara.
“What does that change? She was still just left there! Like, thrown out with the rubbish!”
“Y’know who I heard it belonged to?” said Michael.
They stopped shuffling, and sat forward.
“I heard nothing like that,” breathed Colette. “Who?”
“Ava.”
“What? Ava Byrne?”
“Yup.”
“Get lost! I saw her last week and she was not bloody pregnant!”
“That’s what I heard, is all.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me too much, though. She was always odd. And she gave me the creeps.”
“Yeah, right. Since when?”
“Always. There was always something weird about her.”
Dara hadn’t joined in the conversation. He’d spent some time with Ava the previous spring, but none of his friends knew that. He wouldn’t have confessed to it even if, tempted by gossip, his friends had tried to beat it out of him. Ava was an odd little thing, but he’d seen her scribbling the logo of his favourite band on her wrist at a party, and they’d got talking. There followed a few heady days together at Easter time; away from school and their separate clusters of friends, they’d discovered plenty to like about each other. But the Monday morning of resuming lessons had come around too soon, and they’d parted company as school society would have expected them to. They’d not really spoken since, and Dara was still puzzling over that; why the flush of embarrassment became such a barrier if allowed, why even a couple of civil words seemed a trial after a rush of intimacy. Now he felt something rise from his chest to catch in his throat, and a feverish blanket pull itself over the back of his neck. Colette had pushed against him, but he clasped his own arms, and pulled just slightly away from her.
“How much would have to be wrong with you before you’d keep something like that to yourself?” she said.
“Maybe she was scared,” shrugged Michael.
“It’s hardly unusual to be pregnant in this day and age!”
“My mother said hiding a pregnancy was still illegal. Maybe that was what worried her.”
“Yeah, right! As if anyone’s bothered by that anymore! I’d tell. No, that’s Ava down to the ground… just plain weird, all wrapped up in her own stupid little world.”
“What would you know?” Dara said, standing up.
He’d moved quickly enough to knock his arm against Colette, pushing her briefly onto her side. She sat up, glowering.
“Take it easy, Dara! I just said…”
“You don’t know Ava. None of us know Ava, so maybe we should keep our mouths shut. Besides, it’s just a rumour, isn’t it?”
“All I was saying,” said Colette, sulkily, “is that she’s strange enough for it to be true.”
“Where did you hear that anyway?” Dara turned to Michael.
“It’s going around, is all. Fiona said she was sick for ages a while back, and that she thought something was wrong then, and that she’s been off-colour since…”
“Fiona should mind her own business.”
“What’s it to you, Dara? Christ!”
Dara walked off, and Eric called after him.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get some cigs. Is that ok with you, or do I need to give you written notice?”
That he’d been unpredictably annoyed by their blether bothered him, because Dara had always considered himself to be close to unshakeable, distanced from everyone else’s concerns by his self-confidence, his faith in himself and his ability to get by on his own wiles. That he might have betrayed what was nagging at him bothered him more. He had an idea where Ava lived, and he took a detour through where he thought she might be, watching for police cars or… well, not that social services marked themselves out by anything but a professional benevolence, but… well, anything that might tell him whether this rumour was as grounded in something uncomfortably close to fact as most other rumours were. The residential streets told him nothing, nor did his eavesdropping in hushed conversations. He managed to purchase a small bottle of vodka from a distracted off-license employee, and he sipped at it furtively as he wandered, at once trying to get his head around the potent image of tiny cries from a rubbish skip, and trying to dull whatever notions of unwitting compliance sidled into his head.
So, beyond the bad temper brought about by the scalding lump in his throat, he had no reason to nick some innocent’s handbag. He didn’t make a habit of stealing, not even sweeties from the corner shop (a justifiable past-time, according to many of his peers). He considered himself above such behaviour – he didn’t have to prove his own daring to himself, or to anyone else for that matter. He could blame the drink, but he’d not turned to vodka to switch on bravery so that he could push himself into the role of the teenage badass. And if found with this prize he’d thrown onto his bed, what would he say? I saw it, and I couldn’t but take it? I needed the money? Neither was true. His parents would murder him if they saw the bag.
From his post at his bedroom door, he could hear his mother shout over the blaring televised football match, and thought he’d never felt as far away from her as he did now.
He took a breath and a shaky step to his bed, and sat down, heavily, beside the bag. Pausing to push down on his brow bone, to swear at his dizziness, he picked up the bag and opened it.
There was a notebook, and a purse, and some receipts. In the purse, a small amount of cash, bank and credit card – Dara had no interest in the money. There was a photograph of a woman and a man; the woman clearly the owner of the bag, her arm around a smiling bloke with blue sky behind them. Holidays. Dara had never been abroad. Another slip of paper echoed the name on the bank and credit cards: Helen Coleman. And her address.
The receipts meant little to Dara. And the notebook only seemed to contain scribbles pertaining to work appointments; Helen Coleman’s life was full, alien. He dropped the notebook back into the bag, and a loose paper slipped from its centre pages.
It was a letter. It was more than a letter, it was a love letter, scribbled in haste but heaving with sentiment…
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you… I know that our argument was only over something small, and that you’ll laugh at this letter as unnecessary, but Helen, I need you to know that even a brief frown from you is reason to apologise to you. I want to make you smile, I don’t want to waste our precious moments making you unhappy. Love you forever, as the moon loves the stars and the ocean loves the shore… Ivan.
Dara read the letter four times, and then he folded it back into the bag.
What was this? Fate having a go at him? Reminding him how far he was from the harmony shared by Helen Coleman and Ivan Whatever? Punishing him for taking what wasn't his, laughing at him for the mess this weekend had become? Dara grabbed the bag, and hurried out of the house.
He wasn’t sure of what he was doing, but he knew where he was going. He was following that written address to where Helen Coleman lived, he was going to laugh back at Fate for teasing him so. Anger mixed with the alcohol, and washed the streets into a Technicolor spin, as if Dara was at the centre of a merry-go-round. He wasn't calm enough to give a reasonable answer to the question of what this drunken march was going to prove – if he had to see if Helen Coleman’s happiness was as powerful as his imagination told him, if her unity with Ivan-who-loved-her-so was as real and as tormenting as he believed. If all of this had nothing to do with a baby in an alleyway, a girl who acted as if he wasn’t there, a gang who followed him but didn’t understand him, a family he couldn’t feel part of. He wouldn’t be able to explain his anger if he tried.
He found Helen Coleman’s house on a quiet close, and followed the path
to where he could get around to the backs of the orderly, pretty homes.
There were high walls around the back gardens; Dara settled down, half-hidden by the damp branches of small tree.
He saw her through her back window. She was standing as if at a sink, head bowed. Dara shifted on the wall, watching. It became apparent that she was alone. It became apparent that the occasional dragging of her hand across her eyes had nothing to do with housework fatigue.
She wasn’t watching the garden. Dara slipped off the wall, and went closer to the house.
Her being busy at one window gave him a chance to check the other. He held onto the windowsill, and when he blinked it was as if in slow-motion; he could feel his lashes rest gently on the soft skin below his eyes. His breath made the glass cloudy, and he smudged the window, gently, with a fist.
The room inside was a shrine. Close to it, at least, missing little but the odd candle and the curling trail of incense. He recognised the man Ivan in every one of the crowds of images… here, on the right-hand table, in a portrait. There, on the wall, photographed laughing with a paper crown on his head. On the shelf, caught in light pencil strokes. Dara wondered about the frames on the inside windowsill, their backs to him; Ivan in a work uniform, Ivan at the beach, Ivan in sports gear? Where was Ivan outside of the frames?
He stared, and dulled reactions allowed Helen Coleman into the room before he could start and duck – soon he was not simply staring at the pictures, but staring at her and her tear-tainted face; she stared back at him.
Eventually, she moved to the window, and opened it a little. She didn’t touch the frames on the sill.
“What… are you doing here?”
Dara swallowed. “I don’t know, really.”
“I saw you,” she said. “I saw you earlier.”
They said nothing for a moment, awkwardness or fear diluted by an unspoken acknowledgement of shared misery. After a while Dara held up the bag.
“This is yours,” he said.
She didn’t move to take it. “It is,” she said. “But I don’t think you came here to give it back to me.”
“I don’t know why I came here.”
“You said that.”
He put the bag on the sill.
“I’m sorry.” He stepped back.
She said nothing.
“Did you hear about the baby?” he said.
She nodded.
“I think,” Dara said, and later he wondered why it had seemed so important that he tell her, why even through their unfamiliarity he needed to share something with her… “I think it’s mine.”
“Only think? How is it that you don’t know?”
Dara swallowed, perturbed by this foreign honesty he’d been caught up in. Helen Coleman waited, and eventually he said,
“We haven’t spoken much since… at all… It just got so awkward, so quickly.”
“It’s not right that you don’t know,” she said. “You shouldn’t keep things from one another.”
“I barely know her.”
“Get to know her. Talk to her. It’s not right.”
Dara stood away from the window, as if retreating from this slow, sad woman, her uncomfortably unflinching stare.
“But what…” He paused, and swallowed again. “What if she says… that it’s mine?”
“It’s not yours,” she said. “Its Ivan’s.”