Peach

There was a pregnant woman getting drunk in the back lounge; I could see her through the hatch, from where I sat at the bar. She was drinking and crying, sitting on the red velveteen couch alone. Chuffy wiped glasses, poured another Cidona for me, and served the few other customers. He looked over at the woman then nodded in my direction, as a way of asking if I had seen her. I shrugged, to indicate that I had, and watched her. She looked healthy and out of place. We never got many women in The Cova, especially ones we didn’t know. Most of us were regulars, bent out of shape by loneliness; we welcomed any intrusion.

The woman sobbed loudly and wrapped her hands around her belly, as if it were a beach ball she was about to throw. Her head drooped forward and I could see tears splashing down her shirt. I wondered what was wrong with her. Maybe, I thought, the baby’s father had walked out. Maybe, like most of us, the rough magic of her childhood haunted her and she hoped for a better life for her kid. Or, maybe, she didn’t want the child at all.

Chuffy walked over and dropped a box of tissues onto her table; she looked up, startled. He put his hand on her shoulder.

‘You should think about calling it a night,’ he said.

‘There’s no point.’

‘Drinking for two is not really the thing. You know that.’

The woman grimaced. ‘It’s too late,’ she said, ‘he’s already gone.’

I was at the Corporation Market, buying fish for my Friday-night kedgeree, when I saw Chuffy trundling down one of the cluttered aisles opposite me. I slotted my fingers inside my lips to whistle but, at that moment, he turned and spoke to a woman walking beside him. Looking at her long hair and the curved egg of her stomach, I realised it was the crying woman from the bar. I pulled my fingers from my mouth and stared. Chuffy’s head dipped close to hers, to hear whatever it was she had said in reply to him. They looked intimate and familiar and I was surprised to find that I felt put out.

I watched Chuffy in The Cova that evening, wondering whether to ask about the woman. Chuffy was fatherly, avuncular even, and he was growing old in that Irish way: the nose and chin sloping towards each other; the skewed, dark pools of his eyes getting lost in his face. I wanted to quiz him about how well he knew the woman – if he really knew her – but my curiosity baffled me, so I didn’t ask.

‘It’s dead tonight,’ I said, looking around at the mostly empty tables.

‘I might close soon and be damned,’ Chuffy said, flicking the remote at the television and talking over his shoulder to me.

‘Were you here earlier?’ I said.

‘I came in at six. Waste of bloody time.’

‘I got a nice bit of smoked haddock at Stony’s stall today,’ I said.

‘He had nothing left by the time I got there; another bloody waste of time. Drink that back there, Dominic; I’m going to close her up,’ Chuffy said, flicking the lights behind the bar to let people know he was shutting for the evening.

*

There was a commotion going on around the phone box at the end of my road; I strolled past and surveyed the huddle of heads in the group that had gathered. One or two people were looking up and down the street, as if searching for answers or an escape. There was someone lying on the ground, half-in and half-out of the phone box; the receiver was dangling. It was the woman from the pub.

‘Maud,’ a man said. ‘Maud! Can you hear me?’

I knelt down. ‘She’s pregnant,’ I said.

‘Not anymore she’s not,’ the man said and stood up.

‘You know her?’

‘Not really; she used to work in Creaven’s shop. Her name is Maud. Maud Peach.’ The man shrugged and walked away.

Maud opened her eyes and looked at me; I checked her over and put my hand under her head. She wasn’t cut or bleeding that I could see.

‘You’ll be OK,’ I said, ‘no damage done. Better before you’re twice married and once a widow.’ She smiled and I helped her to sit. ‘I’m a friend of Chuffy’s from The Cova; I’m Dominic. Can you get up, Maud?’

‘My arm hurts. I think I fainted.’ She hung her head and moaned; I helped her to her feet and brought her to rest on a low garden wall. Her jewellery was optimistic, I noticed, almost childish: an orange plastic bangle and a strand of multicoloured wooden beads.

‘I’ll ring for an ambulance,’ I said.

‘Don’t. Just take me home.’

At Maud’s front door a smoke-coloured cat with white feet brushed around my legs and pushed its torso into my shins. I half-kicked it away, being careful not to hurt it.

‘Your cat?’ I asked, while Maud unlocked the door.

‘No, that’s Chicago; he belongs to the neighbour.’ She shook her foot at him. ‘Psst, Chicago, psst. Get lost.’ Chicago ran through Maud’s legs into the hall; he looked up at us. ‘I should stop feeding him,’ she said.

*

There was a tension to the way Maud occupied her rooms. Even though she had invited me to come to her house, I could tell that her routine was upset in a way that she did not altogether welcome. She was straining to be hospitable and I felt as if she expected me to entertain her but didn’t trust me to succeed; it made me uncomfortable. I hadn’t seen her since I had left her to the door the day she fell.

‘How are you since?’ I said.

‘Grand now; not a bother.’

‘Will I open the wine?’ I said, pointing at the bottle I had brought.

‘Sure. I’ll get a couple of glasses.’

‘None for me; I’ll have water.’

‘Oh?’ she said.

‘Drinking gets in the way of my suffering.’

I laughed to kill the sorry weight of the comment. Maud smiled but looked unsure. She uncorked the wine, held it up to her nose and sniffed deep into the neck of the bottle.

‘It covers mine,’ she said.

There was a Kahlo-bright oilcloth on her table: it was yellow with cerise hibiscus flowers. An orchid, propped in a milk bottle, spilled orange dust from its stamen onto the tablecloth; the orchid seemed to spray its hot smell into the room. A birdcage on a stand was parked in one corner. I looked in at a budgie; he was a startling, fake-looking blue.

‘Wow, he’s attractive.’

‘This is Droopy,’ Maud said. ‘He’s such a little pet.’ She laughed and flicked her fingers at the bird. ‘Hello beautiful Droopy. Hello boy!’ She peeped and trilled at him before putting on a CD and sitting opposite me at the table, her back straight; the wheen of an overblown love song filled the room.

Maud was beautifully old-fashioned, I thought, with her long hair and simple t-shirt – like something from a 1970s film. Her lips were aristocratically full and she had the kind of tail-ended hair that I always wanted to gather in handfuls and press to my face.

I guessed, by the tense way she held herself, that she spent a lot of time on her own. I wanted to ask about her baby but couldn’t seem to get the words to form right; I thought that it must have died and I didn’t want to be nosey or insensitive. She looked different on the other side of the pregnancy: her cheeks were less fleshy, she was milk-pale, and lethargy oozed off her despite her nervousness. I had an urge to make things better for her, to help in some way by saying something that would heal her a little. But she was one of those chatless people, the kind that doesn’t feel the need to talk unless you make the conversation happen for them. And anyway, I didn’t have a clue what I should say.

‘Ah, I’ll have a glass of wine,’ I said, suddenly feeling the need for that prop.

‘Lovely.’

Maud looked brighter as she got up to get me a glass. The wine had a soapy aftertaste but I liked it. We didn’t talk much, but sat listening to the music. When we had finished the bottle of wine, I felt like a previous version of myself; someone more interested in things, more able. It was a short-lived high. I heard a train chuntering past on the tracks nearby and its long, lonely whistle cut through the spell, making me myself again. I looked out at the crimson tops of the maple trees in Maud’s garden, then at the wine glass in my hand, and wondered again about her child.

‘No more wine for me or I’ll be twisted,’ I said, putting down the glass.

‘Come on, Dominic; I’m fed up drinking on my own.’ She wiggled my hand. ‘Just a little more. A “dropeen”, as my mother used to say.’

‘I will so,’ I said, ‘I’ll have a dropeen.’

Maud smiled; the first genuine smile I’d ever seen on her mouth. I wanted to kiss her then and my euphoria for the promise of the evening returned. She filled fresh glasses with Prosecco produced from the fridge and pointed to the sofa where we then sat. I watched the bubbles squirting upwards in my glass, as seductive as a light show; I took Maud’s hand.

‘Tell me about your baby,’ I said, in the gentlest voice I could muster.

‘Oh God,’ she said, and I put my arm around her. She took a tube of rose salve from her pocket, buttered it onto one finger and slicked her lips with it. She tried to talk but began to sob and I held her and let her cry until she seemed ready. Instead of speaking she got up and lifted a photo-frame from the mantlepiece. She handed it to me – a photo of a newborn. Her baby, I presumed. It looked ugly in the way all babies look ugly to me. I nodded to indicate approval of some sort, sure she could read my disinterest in the child, or at least in how it looked.

‘Sweet,’ I said, eventually.

‘So beautiful,’ Maud said, taking the photo from me. She started to cry again. ‘Look at his head: wrinkled velvet. I’ve never touched anything as pure.’ She bent forward and hiccupped, dragging grief down into her throat.

‘A boy,’ I said. ‘What did you call him?’

‘I had no say in naming him. He’s not my son; he belongs to my sister and her husband. They called him Max.’

She bent forward and cried into her hands, her hair over her face. Her body jiddered and shook; I kept my arms around her and she cried and cried. Her tears were huge and snot streeled from her nose; I handed her some tissues. Her weeping reminded me of the lavishly grieving mothers of TV news – Muslim women shaking their hands, groaning into aprons, the dead child swaddled in some horribly ordinary floral cloth. Years of love reduced to public wailing and a small body rocked above a crowd, passing roughly from hand to hand. At least they had a process, I thought; Maud, it seemed, was left with nothing.

‘It’s hard going,’ I said, ‘to carry a baby for so long and then…’

‘The worst of it is, that’s not even the worst of it. They led me to believe I’d have a relationship with him, you know? A really close auntie-nephew relationship. But they’ve left. They’re gone to live three thousand miles away, to Boston, and I’ll hardly ever see them. See him. They had it planned; they must have had it planned for ages.’

‘Christ.’ I didn’t know what to say; I patted her hair.

‘I feel like my whole head – my body – is in some sort of dystopia these last few months; I’m me but I’m not me. Do you know what I mean?’

‘You’re grieving,’ I said. ‘It’s normal. I was like that after I separated from my wife; life was blurry for about two years.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you could grieve for the living.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘It’s all Roger’s fault – my brother-in-law; my sister wouldn’t have had the wit to come up with it.’ She explained that the surrogacy had been Roger’s idea in the first place and he controlled his wife’s life in a way that frightened Maud. ‘Now look what he’s done, the prick; he’s taken them both away from me.’ She swigged her wine. ‘He’s one of those conservative, determined types. You know, plays golf every Sunday; wears navy shirts with white cuffs and collars. How could anyone trust a man who dresses like that?’

I laughed loudly. It was one of those outbursts that sounds as insane and pointless as canned laughter on TV. I was trying to force lightness into the mood, into the room, but it came out wrong. Maud stared at me. I didn’t speak but breathed deeply on the smell in the air that was like the smell in a seldom-used church. Suddenly all I could think of was escape; her drama was too much for me. She took my hand and kissed my knuckles; I looked at her sad face and relaxed a little.