Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

There was a very nice old fellow, a hotel porter called Laddy though he had Lorenzo written on his badge, a mother and daughter, a real dizzy blonde called Elizabetta who had a serious boyfriend with a collar and tie, and dozens of others that you'd never expect to find at a class like this. Perhaps they wouldn't think it odd that he was there. They might not even question it for a moment why he was there.

For two weeks he questioned it himself, then he heard from Robin. Some boxes would be coming in on Tuesday, just around seven thirty when the classroom was filling up. Maybe he could see to it that they got into the store cupboard in the hall.

He didn't know the man in the anorak. He just looked out for the van. There were so many people arriving, parking bikes, motorbikes, the dame with the BMW, two women with a Toyota Starlet… the van didn't cause any stir.

There were four boxes, they were in in a flash, the van and the man in the anorak were gone.

On Thursday he had the four boxes ready to be pulled out quickly. The whole thing was done in seconds. Lou had made himself teacher's pet by helping with the boxes. Sometimes they covered them with red crepe paper and put cutlery on them.

' Quanto costa il piatto del giorno' ?' Signora would ask and they would all repeat it over and over until they could ask for any damn thing and lift knives and say ' Ecco il coltello't'

Babyish it might have been but Lou liked it, he even saw himself and Suzi going to Italy one day and he would order her a bicchiere di -vino rosso as quick as look at her.

Once Signora lifted a heavy box, one of the consignment.

Lou felt his heart turn over but he spoke quickly. 'Listen, Signora, will you let me lift those for you, it's the empty ones we want.'

'But what's in it, this is so heavy?'

'Could you be up to them in a school? Come on, here we are. What are they going to be today?

'They are doing hotels, alberghi. Albergo di p'rima categorìa, di seconda categoria .'

Lou was pleased that he understood these things. 'Maybe I wasn't just thick at school,' he told Suzi. 'Maybe I was just badly taught.'

'Could be,' Suzi said. She was preoccupied. There had been some trouble with Jerry; her mam and dad had been called to see the headmaster. They said it sounded serious. And just after he had been getting on so well and doing so well since Signora had come to the house, and actually doing his homework and everything. It couldn't have been stealing, or anything. They had been very mysterious up at the school.

One of the nice things about working in a cafe was listening to people's conversations. Suzi said that she could write a book about Dublin just from the bits of overheard conversation.

People were talking about secret weekends, and plans for further dalliances, and cheating their income tax. And incredible scandal about politicians and journalists and television personalities…

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maybe none of it true, but all of it hair-raising. But it was often the most ordinary conversations that were the most fascinating. A girl of sixteen determined to get pregnant so that she could leave home and get a council flat, a couple who made fake ID cards explaining the economics of buying a good laminator. Lou hoped that Robin and his friends would never use this cafe to discuss their plans. But then it was a bit up market for them, he was probably in the clear as regards this.

Suzi would spend a lot of time clearing a nearby table when people were saying interesting things. A middle-aged man and his daughter came in, good looking blonde girl with a bank uniform. The man was craggy and had longish hair, hard to know what he did, maybe a journalist or a poet. They seemed to have had a row. Suzi hovered nearby.

'I'm only agreeing to meet you because it's a half hour off work and I'd love a cup of good coffee compared to that dishwater we get in the canteen,' the girl said.

'There's a new and beautiful percolator with four different kinds of coffee waiting for you any time you would like to call,' he said. He didn't sound like a father, he sounded more like a lover. But he was so old. Suzi kept shining up the table so that she could hear more.

'You mean you've used it?'

'I keep practising, waiting for the day you'll come back and I can make you Blue Mountain or Costa Rica.'

'You'll have a long wait,' said the girl.

'Please, can't we talk?' he was begging. He was quite a handsome old man, Suzi admitted.

'We are talking, Tony.'

'I think I love you,' he said.

'No, you don't, you just love the memory of me and you can't bear that I don't just troop back there like all the others.'

'There are no others now.' There was a silence. 'I never said I loved anyone before.'

'You didn't say you loved me, you only said you thought you loved me. It's different.'

'Let me find out. I'm almost certain,' he smiled at the girl.

'You mean let's get back into bed together until you test it?' she sounded very bitter.

'No, I don't, as it happens. Let's go out for dinner somewhere and talk like we used to talk.'

'Until bedtime, and then it's let's get back into bed like we used to do that.'

'We only did that once, Grania. It's not just about that.' Suzi was hooked now. He was a nice old guy, the girl Grania should give him a chance, just for dinner. She was dying to suggest it but knew she had to say nothing.

'Just dinner then,' Grania said, and they smiled at each other and held hands.

It was not always the same man, the same van or the same anorak. But the contact was always minimal and the speed great.

The weather became dark and wet and Lou provided a big hanging rail for the wet coats and jackets that might otherwise have been stacked in the hall cupboard. 'I don't want to drip all over Signora's boxes,' he would say.

Weeks of boxes in on Tuesday and out on Thursday. Lou didn't want to think about what was in them. It wasn't bottles, that was for sure. If Robin were involved in bottles it would be a whole off licence full of them like the time in the supermarket. Lou couldn't deny it any more. He knew it must be drugs. Why else was Robin so worried? What other kind of business involved one person delivering and another collecting? But God almighty, drugs in a school. Robin must be mad.

And then by chance there was this matter of Suzi's young brother, a young red head with an impudent face. He had been found with a crowd of the older boys in the bicycle shed. Jerry had sworn that he was only being their delivery boy, they had asked him to pick up something at the school gates because they were being watched by the headmaster. But the Mr. O'Brien who terrorised them all nearly lifted the head off Suzi's entire family about the whole thing.

Only the pleas of Signora had succeeded in keeping Jerry from being expelled. He was so very young, the whole family would ensure that he didn't hang around after school but came straight home to do his lessons. And in fact, because he had shown such improvement and because Signora gave her personal guarantee, Jerry had been spared.

The older boys were out, expelled that day. Apparently Tony

O'Brien said that he didn't give one damn about what happened to their futures. They didn't have much of a future, but what they had of it would not be spent in his school.

Lou wondered what hell would break loose if it were ever discovered that the school annexe was acting as a receiving depot for drugs every Tuesday and was passing them on the next stage of their journey on a Thursday. Perhaps some of these very consignments were the ones that had been handled by young Jerry Sullivan, his future brother-in-law.

Suzi and he decided that they would marry next year.

'I'll never like anyone more,' Suzi said.