‘Fuck,’ he said loudly, brushing it away. He touched his face cautiously. He felt sure the damned thing had drawn blood. He glanced at the garden then, taking in its sorry condition with mild disgust. He supposed it really was time he did something about it, but he couldn’t afford to pay a gardener given the state his finances were in, and Kelly certainly wasn’t much of a gardener himself. Before she’d been taken ill, his long-time partner Moira had always been in charge of the gardens, the tiny one at the front and the slightly bigger walled one at the back.
Moira. Kelly didn’t like thinking about Moira. He really should have visited her that night. He hadn’t. It was too late now, far too late, he told himself. Once inside he went straight to the bathroom, stripped off his damp clothes which he left in an untidy pile on the floor, and wrapped himself in his big towelling dressing gown. Then he headed for the kitchen, made himself a cup of strong sweet tea which he took into the living room, where he switched on the gas fire and settled gratefully in front of it in his favourite armchair. With his free hand he switched on the radio which was more or less permanently tuned to Classic FM, Kelly’s writing and thinking music.
The journalist in him would not lie down. In his head, he went over again and again his meeting in the pub with the young man who had told him he was called Alan. The lad had been frightened. Genuinely frightened. There was no doubt about that. But on the other hand, he had also been drunk as a skunk. Alcoholic paranoia, Kelly told himself.
He sipped at his still scalding hot tea, deep in thought. Then his reverie was rudely interrupted by the phone. Kelly jumped in his chair. The telephone had a habit of making him jump at the moment, particularly if it rang late at night. Moira, he thought. Oh, shit. He reached out for the cordless receiver which was sitting next to the radio on the table alongside his chair, its battery light flickering weakly. Naturally, he had failed to put it back in its charger when he had gone out earlier that day.
The low battery did not, however, cause him a problem. He had no need to talk for long. The caller was Jennifer, Moira’s youngest daughter.
‘Mum’s been expecting you all night,’ said Jennifer, with only the slightest hint of reproach in her voice. At first, Kelly felt only relief. At least it didn’t sound as if Moira were any worse. But as Jennifer continued to speak he became immersed in the all too familiar sense of guilt.
‘You told Mum you’d be over tonight when you’d finished writing. She really wants to see you. Are you still coming?’
Kelly glanced at his watch. ‘Well, it’s so late. It’s after midnight...’
‘I know. But she can’t sleep. We tried to call you earlier, at home and on your mobile...’
Kelly squeezed his eyes tightly shut for just a few seconds. Inside his head he could see his mobile phone sitting on his desk upstairs, where he had left it earlier, and he really had no idea whether or not he had deliberately failed to take it with him on his jaunt to The Wild Dog.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, and automatically launched himself into a series of unconvincing lies. ‘I seemed to manage to let all the batteries go...’
‘You could still come over. She’s wide awake...’
Kelly took a deep breath.
‘Yes, of course,’ he responded as brightly as he could. ‘I’ll be right there. I’ve been working late. I lost track of the time, that’s all. The words were flowing for once.’
And that, of course, was the biggest lie of all. Kelly cursed himself roundly as he began the perennial hunt for his car keys, which he realised he must have put down somewhere only minutes earlier. But Kelly never ever knew where he’d put his car keys. He found them eventually on top of the cistern in the bathroom, and cursed himself and his various inadequacies all over again.
Back behind the wheel of the little MG — Moira’s home, where she was being cared for by her three daughters, was only a couple of streets away — Kelly was suddenly in a real hurry to get there. He was hit by a major wave of guilt and remorse. This was not the first time he had promised to visit Moira and then failed to do so. But worse than ever on this occasion, by the time he had returned home he had more or less made himself forget that he had ever made the arrangement in the first place. His subconscious had been at work again, he feared.
Moira was terminally ill with cancer of the liver. And although the disease had only been diagnosed four months earlier, this notoriously fast-developing form of cancer had already brought her close to the end.
Kelly and Moira had never quite shared a home together, but they had none the less shared each other’s lives for more than ten years. Throughout that time Moira had spent only limited periods in her own house, until the last few weeks in fact. By then Kelly had found himself quite unable to cope with his partner’s illness. Almost before it began to really take a hold of her, he had realised that he could not possibly nurse her. Moira, who had been a nursing sister at Torbay Hospital, had, Kelly later realised, been aware of that from the beginning and had made it easy for him by telling him there was absolutely no way she was going to let him attempt to care for her and, in doing so, doubtless botch up whatever life she had left to live.
That had actually made Kelly feel even more of a worm. But Moira’s daughters had promptly volunteered to share between them the task of caring for their mother in her own home until the end, and Kelly remained deeply grateful to them.
Paula, the eldest, drove down from London every week or so to spend several days with her mother, sometimes bringing her four-year-old son Dominic with her, and sometimes leaving him either with his dad, Ben, or with her mother-in-law. Lynne, the middle girl, came home each weekend from Bristol, where she was at university. And Jennifer, at barely nineteen the youngest of them, carried the biggest burden of all. She had returned to England after a gap year of travelling, following sixth form college, to find her mother in the grips of this terrible disease. Without appearing to pause for thought at all, she had promptly deferred a planned university course for another year and moved back into her mother’s home announcing that she was going to take charge of caring for Moira, which she had continued to do uncomplainingly, helped as much as possible by her sisters. Kelly thought young Jennifer was a miracle on legs. Indeed, he thought all the girls were. And they really did put him to shame.
As he pulled up outside Moira’s house, a three-bedroomed terraced job uncannily similar to his own home, even down to the angular style of the bay window at the front, Kelly leaned back in his seat and tried to prepare himself for the right sort of approach to a sick visit. He knew he had never got over the shock of Moira’s diagnosis and the speed of her decline. Almost every day he intended to spend at least part of the evening with Moira, but one way and another, he actually seemed to be visiting her less and less. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. John Kelly cared about Moira probably as much as it was possible for him to care about anyone. It was just that he did not want to confront the grim reality of Moira’s condition, so he refused to think about it. All too often that was Kelly’s way. And it had probably been one of the main reasons why many years ago he had so casually embarked along the road that had led him to near-terminal drug and alcohol abuse. Kelly had spent far too much of his life looking for ways to obliterate reality.
He took a big, deep, long breath, stepped out of the car and made himself approach the front door, first walking through a little front garden, which was also pretty much like his own except that he knew there was not a single weed to be seen in the pristine-neat flowerbeds surrounding a rectangular patch of stone paving. On the doorstep he stood for a few seconds more, taking another deep breath, before ringing the bell. Kelly had his own key, of course, but since Moira had become ill and the girls had been there looking after her, he had stopped using it. He couldn’t explain why exactly.