Simon Leogue finally slid across the floor towards me. A gray suit. Sandy haired. Sharp-faced. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old, it’s increasingly difficult for me to tell anyone’s age. He glanced down at where Georgie was lying and said that he’d be happy for one of his employees to take the dog outside for what he called a wee stroll. I told him the dog was quite all right, thank you very much, and was tempted to berate his attempt at a northern accent but decided against it.
“Would you like to come to the back office, Mrs. Carson?”
“I’d rather conduct my business here, thank you. I have nothing to be ashamed of. You can call me Hannah. I’m not a tombstone.”
“Of course not,” he said.
He had quick eyes. He flicked a look at Georgie. Undid an elastic strap from around a folder. His fingernails were not well groomed. There were red welts at the quick of his thumbs. But his hands disappeared when he went into the rather obvious annihilation of my finances. My mortgage. My overdraft. A spear is a spear — it can be thrown from a distance or slid in slowly, perfectly placed between the ribs. He did both at once, remarkably well. I almost liked him for his cool and aplomb. He said he might have to freeze the overdraft until I sold the house. Otherwise it would be foreclosed. He remained even-keeled, artfully uninformative, said there were a number of wonderful small apartments for rent around town, or even out by the sea once my finances were properly in order. “It’s a lough, not the sea,” I said, but he shrugged as if there would never be a difference. He didn’t mention assisted living or a nursing home, which really would have sent me off the cliff. I said something ridiculous about Mayakovsky and the amortization of the soul, but even I knew it was hopeless. I had to admire the skill and unfailing politeness with which I had been very quickly outmaneuvered. He sat there, a young hound pleased with himself, and I felt denser than usual. The ancient iconography of the Irish imagination: eviction.
I said I would like to take the figures away with me and have my accountant study them properly.
He sighed heavily and slid his business card towards me. “Accountant?” He said he would give me as much time as he could, but quite frankly there wasn’t much left. “My home number is on here if it’s of any help.”
I was too self-sunken to respond. Strangely, there was a shine of grief in his eye. He blinked and looked away from me. I was terrified for a moment that he might be upset on my behalf.
“You should wash your hands better, Simon,” I said.
Georgie dwelled a little long on the floor and I yanked the leash hard, a savage thing to do, but my fury was welling towards tears, and I was not going to let it happen inside the bank.
Outside, the Bangor light stung my eyes. A surge of self-pity lodged at my breastbone. A farm tractor, of all things, trundled down Queens Parade. They are hardly seen anymore these days, but this one had a young boy at the helm, a collie dog at his heels near the gear stick. He actually smiled back and raised a forefinger from the steering wheel when I nodded. Tomas was never the sort of boy who was cut out for work on the farm. He avoided it at all costs. Preferred the boat. Why Tomas took the shotgun out with him that morning, I have no idea. He wasn’t even fond of bird hunting; it was simply the done thing, the stuff of his stepfather. In his early teens he never hunted at all. He preferred binoculars. Drifting out on the water. It all came down to vectors and angles. He wondered if there was a way to chart the natural world. There was a laze to him, our Tomas, he was never going to be one who lit up the world, but he was more than enough for me. The stolen gun never resurfaced. Who knows what history it served, or whether it was just thrown away and buried down in the bog to join the ancient elk, the bones, the butter?
I watched the tractor go, then straightened out soon enough with a quick slap of reality. The Land Rover was at the far end of the street, clamped. A pretty yellow boot. I wasn’t even about to argue with the parking attendants. They stood, surly and malevolent, at the far end of the street. I went straight back across to the bank and got the cash from the machine in the wall before Simon could freeze the overdraft.
I begged them to let me go for free, but the parking attendants exercised their abundant ability to shrug. I paid the fine, but it still took them an age to remove the boot.
Georgie was sleeping in the backseat by the time I pulled down the laneway. I went digging in the garden out back to burn off the anger, or the fear, of the day. I turned a few sods in the old tomato patch. A drizzle fell across the sky, orange in the ambient light from Bangor. One never thinks the stars will disappear. Our failed attempts at navigation. I kicked the mud off my boots and went inside. How many times do we end up scraping the muck from the mirror? There was a gallery of rogues in the passageway near the pantry where I dropped the shovel. The everyday suspects. My mother in her tennis dress, a full-bodied red wine. My father in his RAF uniform. My grandfather at the gates of a linen factory. My American grandmother on the deck of a transatlantic liner. My Tomas holding up six mackerel on a single string. Jon Kilroyan, the farmhand, outside the fisherman’s cottage. My husband in tweeds and knee-high wading boots. Neighbors and old friends from the Women’s Coalition. A photo of me out fox hunting when I was very young, a beagle trotting behind me, my whole life so apparently prearranged, the privilege aligned along my spine.
TWO DAYS OF storms. Georgie and I stayed indoors. The weather hacked across the lough. The sky was dark. Branches fell from the trees. Rain fell relentlessly. I got lost in its antiphonies.
On the third day, I left. The letter sat in the passenger seat beside me, sleeved in its archival plastic. Hardly the best way to keep it, I suppose, but short of a humidified bank vault, it would have to do.
The road to Belfast thickened with traffic. Cars behind me flashed their headlights and beeped loudly as they passed. I practiced my victory sign again, though it seems that the middle finger is the salute of choice these days. The cars beeped and swerved. I was glad to crawl along.
Roundabouts have always confounded me. Just beyond Comber I somehow discovered myself on the road to Stormont, where my mother and I spent a good deal of time over a decade ago. She cried on Good Friday when the peace agreement was signed. Great fits of happy tears. She slid, like a seal, out of any old sadness she carried. There were still four more months left in her. She wanted to hold out for the full century, but told me shortly before she died that enough was enough. Why does death so catch us by surprise? When Tomas was taken away from her, she said it was as if a hole had been punched through her chest to wring out her ancient heart. Now she was graced by the idea of what she called George Mitchell’s peace. She had a fondness too for John Hume, his head of wavy hair. Good men, she said. They had the courage to remain volleying at the net. One of her happiest moments was meeting Mitchell at the tennis club. His gray hair. His tracksuit top. The unfailing politeness of the man. The slight touch of an inner rogue to him. He stood with the racquet behind his back. He bowed to her as she spoke. The wheels turning in his mind, she knew. She told him he needed to work on his backhand.
For her, Mitchell’s peace laid Tomas to rest. She went in her sleep. She was cremated and we billowed her out over the western sea. Her whole life defined by water, Newfoundland and beyond. There are times I imagine that she rode in that Vickers Vimy herself, willed it across the ocean. She so loved the story of Alcock and Brown, and often took out the photographs, showed them to us, went over them in intimate detail. So much of it was where her own life began.
My own felt as if it were taking the swinging pendulum down. It was three or four years since I had been in Belfast. Our dreary, shapeless, soot-sullied town. Murals, alleyways, black taxis, high yellow cranes. It has always been so aggressively gloomy. But the university area surprised me — it was brighter, greener, full of spark. I parked and walked a distracted Georgie along, pulling hard at her leash. What marvelous names the city has, perhaps to carry away our grief. Holyland. Cairo Street. Damascus. Jerusalem. Palestine.