The rain had eased to less than a drizzle — a spit they called it here — by the time he emerged a second time on to Botanic Avenue. He kept the umbrella furled.
As before not a single shop was open. He remembered, though, having noticed a man sitting on a stool at a corner, selling newspapers. They were covered this week with polythene sheets, held in place by a brick. Randall bought the Sunday Times — the thickest newspaper the man had — and when he had arrived at his spot in the Gardens took out the sections he had no interest in reading and laid them on the wet bench.
Lander’s arrival as managing director was accorded a single paragraph — little more than a press release (the hand of Bill Haddad?) — on the bottom left of a front page dominated by more horror stories from inside the prisons. (Women prisoners in Armagh had added menstrual blood to the palette of dirt on their cell walls.)
He had been sitting for less than ten minutes when Liz appeared. One moment she wasn’t there, the next moment she was. She wore a fawn-coloured raincoat, darker at the shoulders, the belt’s keeper lapping itself, tucking in finally above her left hip. He could imagine its having been given a determined yank.
‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he said and thought that he meant it.
‘I wasn’t expecting me either,’ she said and sounded as though she thought she meant it too.
He handed her the sports pages. A moment. ‘Thank you,’ she said then. She folded the pages, smoothed the seat of her raincoat and sat.
‘My mother lives just over the river,’ she said and nodded, sideways, in the direction of the sunken garden and — apparently — eventually — the river and its far side. ‘I take a stroll here the odd Sunday on my way over to see her, get my strength up.’
‘Is she very old?’
‘Sixty-three, but to hear her you would think she was a hundred.’
They were both taking pains, now that there were only inches between them, to look dead ahead. A dog trotted by with a stick in its mouth, head jerking from side to side, looking for whoever had thrown it.
‘Do you still have your parents?’ she asked.
‘In a manner of speaking. They separated when I was six. I haven’t seen too much of my father since.’
‘And if you don’t mind me asking, have you…?’
‘Children of my own? A little girl. Tamsin.’
‘Nice name.’
He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t my choice. Very little to do with her life has been. Her mother and I mainly communicate through lawyers.’
‘Carrying on the family tradition.’ Now she did turn to look at him directly. ‘Sorry, that came out the wrong way.’
‘Believe me, I have wondered about it myself.’
Something caught her eye. His followed. The dog again, passing in the opposite direction, faster than before, head jerking more frantically. A church bell rang. Liz stood.
‘I had better get going.’
‘So soon?’
‘Siegfried!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
She had clamped a hand to her mouth. ‘When we were at school, any time anyone said “so soon” we all shouted “Siegfried!” He was a poet we studied. Siegfried Sassoon. First World War.’ She handed him the sports pages. Warm. ‘There you go, don’t say you didn’t learn anything.’
‘Another couple of Sundays I’ll be ready for my Literature paper.’
‘No, I mean learn anything about me.’
8
Since his arrival in Belfast Randall had not made it back home for more than three or four days at a stretch. That Christmas he managed five. As before it took him the first couple to adjust to not seeing soldiers, and cops in body armour, at every turn. More than once he was bawled out by people trying to get in the door behind him after he stopped in the entrance to a store for a search that never materialised. Mark Chapman had shot John Lennon outside the Dakota two weeks before, since when another seventy or eighty men, women and children had been shot, stabbed, strangled or otherwise done to death in New York City. There had in that time in Belfast been a single killing. He was at a loss for how to explain the difference to people. It was not just a question of comparative size for, even allowing for that, New York was ten times more deadly. Something to do instead with the unpredictable nature of the violence, the daily — or at least weekly — reminders that for all the searches in shop doorways, for all the cops in body armour, the soldiers on round-the-clock patrol, there was no guaranteed safe zone. Coffee-jar bombs. Maybe that was what it came back to. Maybe that was all he needed to say. Coffee-jar bombs.
He got to spend three hours of Christmas Eve with Tamsin, who was turning out to be a better kid than he and Pattie had a right to hope after the way they had conducted themselves, were still conducting themselves.
Pattie made him wait on the sidewalk by the car until she released Tamsin on to the porch. He barely even saw his ex-wife’s face. Tamsin seemed not to know at first what to do with her feet with so much path to cover. About halfway down she decided to skip.
Randall wrapped her in his arms. ‘What would you like to do?’ he asked her. ‘See a movie?’
He was thinking maybe Popeye.
‘I’m good just going for a ride and talking,’ she said and for a minute or two afterwards he didn’t trust himself to say anything in case she took his laughter the wrong way.
Not that she seemed to notice. Whatever spaces he left she filled with her chatter, about school mostly, complicated stories involving groups — ‘tables’ she referred to them as — named after forest animals and losing good-behaviour acorns because Nate (his name came up a lot) kept making a sound with his hand in his armpit and saying it was someone else, and not their armpit either.
They stopped for a soda. (He remembered as he always did now his first time asking for one in Belfast, the shop assistant directing him to a bakery down the street where his request was this time rewarded with a triangular bread loaf, an inch and a half thick.) The Ronettes were singing, ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’. Tamsin frowned. Here it comes, he thought. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
The frown deepened. ‘Will this ever happen again?’
‘Us, you mean? Together?’ This wasn’t what he had expected at all. ‘Of course.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘will I ever pick this soda in this diner, with that song on the radio?’
He laughed. ‘Well, not the exact same soda, no, because you already have most of it finished…’
‘Will anybody else?’
He tried to find a form of words that would console her, for he knew now that what she was grappling with could not be laughed away. ‘Maybe some day you will be somewhere else and you will lift a soda or hear that song and it will be like you are right here again, like we are, together.’
‘OK,’ she said, as though it was just as suddenly a matter of no importance, and leaning forward to her straw, drank.
He must get back here, before she was grown up entirely.
He had bought her a ballet-dancer doll with straps to go over her feet and hands so that they could dance together, face to face, or face, judging by how much his daughter had grown, to somewhere between breastbone and chin. (He had never watched it, so couldn’t say for sure, but he had a feeling anyway that face to face was not the way the actual ballet worked.) He took the box out of the trunk, wrapped, when they arrived back at Pattie’s place.