Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘Disaster.’

‘But if you’re around later, we’ll be up in the Rising Sun for the dinner, myself and a few of the lads. Sure drop in if you’re done with your shopping.’

‘Will do.’

‘Your messages,’ McGrath said, with a laugh.

‘Yeah.’ Mark laughed back, and they shook hands as they parted.

On Main Street he met his mother coming out of the entrance to the shopping centre. She was tired, he could see, and she was carrying too many bags. He took some of them from her and packed them under the pushchair. She had been to her usual spots: Kenny’s for jumpers for himself and his father, the bookstore, the shop that sold candles and ornaments and other kinds of crap.

‘Are you sure you want to have her out in this cold?’ his mother said.

‘She’s all right,’ said Mark. ‘Sure you can throw one of those Kenny’s jumpers you’re after buying across the pushchair if it gets any colder.’

‘Don’t you be so bloody smart,’ his mother said, but she took his arm, and she was laughing. ‘Come over with me to one of these shops across the street,’ she said. ‘There’s a few things I was looking at as a present for Joanne.’

‘You don’t need to get Joanne anything,’ Mark said, but he was already crossing the street behind her.

‘Of course I have to get her something.’

‘Why?’ he said sharply.

‘Because,’ she said, in an imitation of his sharpness, as they reached the shop door. She looked down pointedly to the pushchair. ‘And that’s the end of it.’

The shop was narrow and brightly lit, clothes lining each wall and splitting the walkway between the walls. It was busy, women looking intently through the racks, touching things, pulling things away from the rails. His mother did not hesitate: she headed straight for the middle aisle. The clothes looked all right, Mark noticed, with some relief. They seemed, at least, to be in the colours Joanne preferred to wear: browns and greens and greys, nothing too colourful, nothing too sweet.

He looked for somewhere to put the pushchair; it would not fit between the aisles. There were already two parked by the counter.

‘Leave her by the door there,’ his mother said, looking back to him. ‘She’s asleep, isn’t she?’

Mark nodded.

‘She’ll be all right.’

‘I’ll keep an eye on her,’ the woman behind the counter said.

‘Thanks,’ Mark said, and his mother beckoned him over to look at a shirt she had taken from the rack. It was pink, probably the one colour in the shop that he could not see Joanne wearing. ‘It’s grand,’ he said.

‘Really?’ his mother replied, grimacing, and put the shirt back on the rail. ‘I don’t know if it’s the right colour for her, really.’

Then why did you show it to me? he wanted to say, but he left it. It was becoming clear to him what was going to happen. This was a woman shopping, and a woman shopping meant looking at things you had no intention of buying, things you didn’t even like, just for the pleasure of looking at them and pawing them and putting them back.

‘Sorry,’ Mark said, as he jostled a woman going through the rack behind him.

‘Hello, Mark,’ she said, and he turned almost in fright. It took him a moment to recognize her. Pamela Doherty. She’d been on his school bus, and when she stepped on in the morning, every boy down the back took a good look at her: some of the girls, too. Every morning her brown hair would be damp and loose. She had been friendlier, more easy-going than a girl that good-looking should, by rights, have been. She was still good-looking, but harder-looking, too; there was something forced to what prettiness was still there. She was groomed. Tanned in the middle of December. Wearing a suit you’d wear if you worked in a bank.

‘Pamela,’ he said, and nodded with a breath of a laugh. ‘How’s things?’

‘Not too bad,’ she said, and he noticed her accent — Edgeworthstown pure and undiluted, the bit of a rush on the last word. ‘What are you up to, these days?’

‘Ah.’ He shrugged, and gestured back to his mother. ‘Helping out with the Christmas shopping, you know.’

‘Good man yourself.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m working in the bank,’ she said, and he congratulated himself silently on having got it right. ‘Pain-in-the-arse work but it pays the bills.’

‘Lot to be said for that.’

‘Sure is. And you’re in Dublin, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘At Trinity, isn’t it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Lecturing?’

He hesitated a moment. It was always the same dilemma, when someone from home asked him what he did; whether to clarify for them the difference between being a lecturer and being a teaching assistant — which felt, most of the time, like being a jumped-up grinds tutor, only on less pay. He nodded. ‘Yeah. Lecturing. Pain-in-the-arse work too.’

‘But, wow,’ she said, raising her eyebrows. ‘That beats anything that’s going on around here. A lecturer at Trinity. I mean, fair play.’

He shrugged. He could feel himself flushing. He glanced down at the thing she had in her hands. It looked like a piece of underwear, silk, a slip or a top or something that made him think of what she must look like naked, what she must have looked like naked back in the school-bus days, at sixteen. He felt as though the walls of the place were closing in on top of him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘good to see you anyway.’

‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘Might see you around over Christmas. You be in Valentine’s on Stephen’s night?’

‘I’d say so, yeah.’ Mark heard in his voice a local lad’s confidence that he did not have.

‘See you so.’ Pamela winked at him, as he nodded a goodbye.

His mother was down at the back of the shop now; she could not have heard the exchange. Still, she glanced at him quizzically as he joined her. ‘Who was that one?’

‘She used to go on my bus,’ Mark said. ‘Doherty. You don’t know them.’

‘I do know them,’ his mother said, and craned her neck to get a better look.

Mark took an intense interest in the blouse his mother had in her hand. ‘That one’s nice.’

‘I don’t know,’ his mother said. ‘It seems a bit skimpy to me.’

‘Whatever you think.’

‘What about this?’

It was a cardigan in dark grey; long, plain. Joanne would wear it. He touched it. The wool was soft and smooth. ‘Looks nice,’ he said.

‘It’d want to, for the price of it.’ She showed him the tag and he did the taken-aback look he knew she was expecting. ‘Cashmere,’ she said. ‘Still.’

‘It’s too much,’ he said. ‘That blouse you had a minute ago would do fine.’

‘Would it?’ She did the uncertainty dance now, with her mouth and her eyes, looking between this rail and the other one, sizing each piece up, frowning, chewing her lip. ‘Which of them do you think she’d get more wear out of?’ she said.

Mark tried to picture Joanne, first in the blouse, then in the cardigan. The blouse would be sexier. But the cardigan was something she’d come in and put on in the evenings, something she’d wrap around herself. Then again, that would mean the cardigan would be covered, soon enough, in baby puke. Just as he was about to say this to his mother, he heard Aoife’s cries. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, and as he pushed his way up the shop, past what seemed like thirty women, the baby’s cries grew louder and more urgent than seemed possible: had she not just woken up? Had she actually been awake, crying, all that time, and he had not heard her? He made his way through, and every woman seemed to glance at him disapprovingly as he passed. Except Pamela Doherty. What was on her face was not disapproval but disbelief, and laughing disbelief at that.