Verbal Magazine

Just Talking

Claire hardly had her seat-belt on and Alec was showing her the ad from that morning’s Community Herald circled in red biro: Wedding Dress £150 o.n.o. 

‘Too good to miss’, he told her. ‘I phoned to say we’re coming.’
She’d wanted to head home to rest and put things off. But Alec insisted. He folded the newspaper with the ad face up and set it on the dashboard. Then they drove out to where it said—The Highlands, right on the edge of town, 50 or so new, redbrick houses. It looked unfinished, Claire thought, a forlorn little settlement. She tried picturing it in a month or so with the nights drawing in, rain every day and gales tugging at the tiles, the satellite dishes, the intruder alarms.
‘Do us’, said Alec. ‘Up here, I mean.’ He had the driver’s seat tilted well back, his driving hand barely touching the steering wheel, an elbow resting on the sill.
‘You think so?’ said Claire.  She stretched her arms above her head and yawned.
‘Well it’d do me’, he said. He straightened up and, with his free hand, lifted the newspaper, glanced at where he’d circled and set it back. Then he turned the car into Highland Avenue and read off the house numbers.  ‘Thirteen. Fifteen. Twenty-three. What happened to 17?’
Claire saw them before he did, a group of boys playing football up in front of the car. There was half a dozen of them, aged about eight or nine, all wearing the same black shirts and shorts, all with their hair buzzed to a blond stubble. 
‘Mind the kids!’ she said, pressing her foot down hard on the floor of the passenger side.
Alec slowed a little but didn’t stop. And the boys kept on playing. He was almost into them before the biggest of the group lifted the ball, halting the game. Then they stood aside and let the car through. Claire smiled but none of the footballers smiled back.
When they were past them, she tapped her stomach. ‘If this one’s a boy, no way is he having his hair like that.’
‘Like what?’ said Alec.
‘Like something just out of jail.’
Alec said nothing. Then he said, ‘That’s 17 over there.’
It was a bungalow, its front lawn trimmed to a perfect square, a white plaster lion in the centre.
‘Nice car’, said Alec, nodding in the direction of the grey four-by-four parked in the driveway.
Claire shrugged. It was the driveway she’d noticed more than the car. Instead of tarmac it had tiles set in a zigzag pattern. ‘Don’t park in the drive’, she said. ‘Park on the street in case it starts dripping oil again.’
‘I fixed it’, he said, and rolled the car up onto the zigzag tiles. ‘It’s fixed.’
Claire got out and closed the door as quietly as she could manage. She wished now that she’d had time to change or at least put on a coat. She was showing, she reckoned. Bound to be. ‘Let’s leave it’, she wanted to say, but she knew how he’d react. ‘It’s you I’m doing this for’, Alec would remind her. 
It took two rings before the white PVC door was opened by a man, short and stocky in a tight blue t-shirt, his thin grey hair gelled and combed forward. Around his neck hung a plump, silver chain. He was holding an ear-bud and a blue, model motorcycle about four inches long. 
‘Mr Daid?’ said Alec.
‘That’s me’, said the man, unsmiling. Claire reckoned him a young 50. 
‘We’re here about the dress’, said Alec. ‘You remember? Alec Manley. Phoned earlier on. And this is Claire.’
Daid showed them in, through the hallway, to a long, sparsely furnished living room with plain white walls and a polished wooden floor. A stone-clad fireplace stacked with pine cones dominated one side of the room, a bay window, the other. A widescreen television took up the corner nearest the door. In an alcove, at the far side, stood a tall, silver vase of fake-looking grasses and a wedding photograph—a solemn Daid next to a woman Claire’s age with short dark hair. The woman was smiling. 
Claire thought of asking if that was the dress in the photograph but Daid had already turned away from them and set the little motorcycle he’d been holding onto the mantelpiece. There was a dozen of them there, all the same size, all sitting with the front wheel turned to more or less the same angle. He lifted a red one now and busied himself cleaning it with the cotton tip, gently dusting the tiny exhausts, the wheels, the handlebars before setting it back down.
‘Do you have a bike?’ he asked Alec.
‘I’d like one.’
‘You’d like mine’, said Daid. ‘Out the back there. Kawasaki Ninja.’ He picked up another model bike and gave it a thorough cotton-tip dusting before returning it to the mantelpiece. ‘What’s it you do, Alec?’
‘Windows.’
‘What do mean, “windows”? You make them, fit them, sell them?’
‘I’m a window-cleaner.’
Daid whistled something harsh and formless. Then he stopped. ‘All the same’, he said, ‘You want to get yourself a bike, never mind a wedding dress.’
Claire saw her chance. ‘Can I see it?’ she asked. ‘The dress?’
Daid turned to her and she felt herself blush. She sensed him looking her over, reading her, working her out.
‘See if the wife was here’, he said. ‘She’d have told you its life story. Who made it for her. All that kind of thing.’ He said his wife’s name. Nadia, Claire thought. Or Naddy.
‘She’s from Belarus’, said Daid. ‘Up Russia direction. Only she’s over stopping with the sister in Canada.’ He straightened a model motorbike. ‘Not for good, like. Due home tonight, matter of fact.’ He bent the ear-bud in two and threw it into the fireplace among the pine-cones.  ‘She’s coming in through Dublin then getting the bus home. Two buses. One up from Dublin, one out to here. She was scared she’d get the wrong bus, but I said to her “Just ask someone, Naddy.” There’d be plenty there she could ask, wouldn’t there? At Dublin Airport. Bus should get her here round six, I told her. Quarter past maybe.’
‘It’s nearly half seven’, said Claire.
Daid glanced at his watch, then out of the window. Outside, the light had shifted to dusk but the boys were still at their game, still shouting, kicking. Daid closed the blind and drummed his fingers on the window frame.

‘Is it quiet round here?’ said Alec.
‘Quiet enough’, said Daid, turning at last from the window. ‘The odd time, though, you get some lads hanging round drinking, or someone snooping about the place.’ He looked straight at Alec. ‘Sometimes you want to go out to them. Ask them what they’re doing here, what’s their business. When you’ve a place like this, you want it right. You don’t want people mucking you about.’
‘I know what you mean’, said Alec.
Daid came over to where Alec was standing. He stood right up close to him, filling his own space and spilling over into Alec’s. ‘If you don’t know now’, he said, ‘You’ll know soon enough.’ He landed a mock punch on Alec’s shoulder. ‘You’ll know soon enough.’
Alec gave a nervous laugh. ‘Can she see it? Can she see the dress?’
Daid stepped back a little.  ‘Upstairs’, he said, looking at Claire. ‘In the master bedroom, end of the landing.’
She climbed the stairs, thinking for a moment that Daid was coming after her. But he stopped in the hallway. ‘Try it on’, she heard him calling as she closed the bedroom door.
The dress was where he’d said, laid out on the duvet in a polythene cover. Up close it looked expensive. Hand-made, Claire reckoned. Made specially. She took it, polythene and all, and held it against herself, checking how she looked in the mirrored door of the built-in wardrobe. Then she set it back.
She imagined the crush of Dublin airport, the people, bad-tempered, forcing their way through, wrestling their bags off the belt. And after that the dash to catch the last bus home. She peeped between the slats of the Venetian blind but saw only the boys kicking their ball back and forth under the streetlight’s amber glow.

‘Heavy enough on the petrol’, she heard Daid saying as she came back downstairs. ‘You need to be careful. A drive down to Dublin, say. That’s a good few quid’s worth of juice, plus a pound or two for the tolls, then whatever it costs for the airport parking. But the bus is just £20 return and the pound or so to get her out to here. So you don’t drive down to Dublin if you don’t have to. You have her take the bus, right?’
Alec agreed. 
The two of them went quiet and turned to look as Claire entered the living room.
‘I was just saying’, said Daid. ‘We didn’t have a cake at our reception.’
‘No?’ said Claire.
‘We’d muffins. Blue icing for the gents and pink for the ladies. We had them set up like a pyramid at the start, then the flower girls and the page boy handed them round. I can give you the card of the girl who done it for us.’
Insistent, he led them to the kitchen where he opened a drawer and took out a shoe-box.
‘It’ll be in here’, he said. ‘In Naddy’s box of stuff from the wedding.’ He tipped its contents out onto the table and began to rummage. ‘That’s the order of service’, he said, picking it up and throwing it back down again. ‘And what’s that?’ It was a rose, pressed between two pieces of card. Next came the name plates from the dinner table, a menu, a plastic horseshoe, a napkin ring, a length of ribbon, a pale blue garter, a handful of greeting cards, some telegrams, but nothing from the girl with the discount muffins.
‘Where could she have put it?’ said Daid. He went back to the drawer and rummaged some more—a tetchy, obsessive search. ‘She must have give it to someone else’, he said, ‘Or she’s took it with her.’
He left the drawer open and the wedding day mementoes strewn where he’d left them. ‘Anyway’, he said. ‘What about the dress. I’d been thinking £150. It was a tenner just to have it cleaned.’

The game of football was still in progress when Claire and Alec set off home. In the dark they could just make out the boys up ahead, the constant blast of ball from boot to boot, the shrieks as it neared the makeshift goal, the groans as it went out of play. As the car approached, the game stopped. The same boy as before caught up the ball and, as Alec and Claire drove slowly past, he bounced it off the kerb again and again, each bounce harder than the last.
‘What was wrong with it?’ asked Alec. It was the first time he’d spoken since Daid had shown them out, telling them he’d others coming, that they weren’t the only ones.
‘I didn’t want to take it’, Claire said. ‘It wasn’t me.’
Alec sighed,
‘My Ma and Da’, said Claire. ‘They used to fight all the time so they did.’
‘So you told me.’
‘No but this one night, Ma just flipped. Shut herself in the kitchen and smashed every dish in the house. Every cup and saucer. All the glasses. Smashed to bits the lot of them. Were yours ever like that?’
‘Sometimes I’d think they were fighting’, he said eventually. ‘But they were just talking.’
He turned on the radio and put his foot down hard on the accelerator. They’d talk later, Claire reckoned. A whole night’s talking still to come. 

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