‘I’ll let you know next time, ok, Tommy? Only seven more sleeps till you’ll see your mummy again, ok?’
He sniffs, rubs his nose with his sleeve, looks into my eyes with such a lack of guile it might break me in two.
‘There, Tommy, seven more sleeps. We can do that, can’t we?’
He nods, tries to be a big boy, a strong boy, all those labels I bet have been placed on him. He reaches his hands towards me and pulls my head down to his level. He flutters his eyelashes on my cheek. A kiss like butterfly wings.
35
The restaurant is loud and bright, busy and bustling with a forced joviality that makes me want to back out the door the moment I’ve arrived. Tang of microwaved metallic tomato sauce on the air, matching napkins with walls, striped lime green and deep purples, try-hardy. Low pop on the airwaves – some she-wolf young one, one of those sexually liberated ‘feminists’ that writhe in their underwear in a cage. Something about broken dreams, about bastard men that ‘steal’ their hearts away, about yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m so sexy, sexy, sexy…
‘A treat,’ he said. ‘Let me take you out somewhere nice.’ It’s been so long since I’ve been dressed up, on some man’s arm, out in the public arena, that I allowed a frisson of excitement to live in me for as long as it took to get ready, even as I knew this was the greatest fantasy of them all: the greatest addiction containing the greatest high, and everything that follows. Coming home to the clean house, the feel of my son’s eyelashes on my cheeks, the dog and kitten lying sleepily on the rug in the living room, I could almost imagine a world where good things happened and continued to happen. Then he rang. I agreed, in my moment of rose-tinted weakness. And because the fridge was beginning to whisper to me.
I decided to go for a walk in the park beforehand, noting with intense concentration the beauty of the fallen leaves, crisp underfoot with frost, and the silhouettes of the almost-bare trees against the high, domed, almost-blue sky. Present-moment awareness: an antidote to craving. Marmie looked so sweet with one of Herbie’s heavy corded leads attached to her tiny collar with its loud ringing bell. She has taken quite well to the lead, considering her feisty nature. There were, of course, lots of stares, but this time they were accompanied by smiles and oohs from various children: ‘I want to do that with Snowy, Mummy.’ Mummy smiled indulgently as they passed, then spoke in a whisper that carried on the clear, crisp air: ‘That’s just plain odd.’ Who cares what other people think, Yaya? I smiled and shook my tail feathers.
Now, dressed in a fifties vintage-style dress – a testament to my previous incarnation as a London leading lady – I am standing in the queue of this overlit, straining, faux-Italian franchise in suburban Dublin, when I see him coming. My hope, situated somewhere in my chest cavity, a beating, pulsing thing, pitches forward, as if it were plummeting down the track of a Giant Dipper. He looks overdone, smells of a clean chemical concoction that climbs into my nostrils; the waistline of his jeans is too high. Sanitised and shining. He moves towards me, smiling possessively, and kisses me on the lips.
‘David Smythe,’ he says to the receptionist, a young, pretty, unformed girl, who flushes from her chest to the roots of her hair.
‘Follow me,’ the girl says, smoothing her skirt over her spindly hips and rump as she leads us to a booth by the wall, to what should be a cosy alcove except that the light dangling overhead is as white and glaring as in an interrogation room. I slide in across the leatherette surface, sticky and hot against my thighs in their 40-denier tights. In spite of my judgement of the blushing girl who has skipped away, a timid fawn, my own blood is rushing too fast to the surface.
‘You look gorgeous,’ he says, which makes my skin angrier, that probing light irritating.
A waiter arrives and pours iced water into my glass. I gulp greedily, wanting to remove the ice cube and rub it on my inflamed skin. I sit on my hands.
‘You seem a bit jumpy,’ he says. ‘Did today go well?’
How to bat the question away without causing offence? I attempt a smile. ‘Good, great, no time at all now, you know. You? How was your day?’
‘I had a great day, actually. A day where I could be of service. Called in to do an intervention on a young lad, his family sick with worry, twisted and reactive with worry. Amazing how the presence of a neutral, skilled facilitator can defuse a charged situation.’
He positively bloats with self-importance as he relays the facts of his successful ‘rescue’ operation. The air buzzes around my head with judgements, and some of them must land. His hands start shredding a napkin. My own are hot and itchy. I shift my weight so that they can’t escape my body’s heft.