Footnote by Glenn Patterson / Fiction / Untitled Books

"Later that year the neighbour's wife and her children moved away. The boy who had wished Maurice dead at the funeral waved as the car pulled away from the kerb for the last time. He had grown about six inches in as many months. You would hardly have recognised him as the same wee boy at all."

Footnote by Glenn Patterson

Back in the days when that was the sort of thing that did happen, Maurice McStay passed on details of his neighbour's car to another man he knew as a result of which the neighbour wound up dead. No one ever suspected Maurice. He had gone to the funeral with the rest of the street. He had puts his arms around his neighbour's wife, shaken the children's awkwardly offered hands. The youngest boy looked Maurice in the eye. I wish it had been you and not my daddy, he said. The boy's mother was appalled, forgetting for the moment in her rush to apologise her own grief. God forgive you, she said, and to Maurice, he doesn't understand what any of it means. Maurice was nursing the hand he had with difficulty wrested back. There's no need to apologise, he said. The boy had buried his face in his mother's skirts. She tried to get him to turn round. Really, Maurice said, no need.

The afters was in a hotel on the road into town from the cemetery. Maurice left as soon as was decent and stopped in at a bar he knew for a drink. When he reached out for the glass his hand shook so badly he had to pull it back below the counter out of sight. He tried another two or three times, but it was no use. I know how you feel, the barman said as Maurice got up to go, his drink still untouched. Maurice's neighbour had used to drink in the bar the odd time too. Once the two of them had gone in together on their way from a match. They had been at opposite ends of the ground and had laughed about it. Here . . ., the barman wanted to give Maurice his money back. Maurice didn't trust his hand out of his pocket. Put it in the charity box, he said. The hand carried on shaking for a week after that. Then it stopped. Maurice went over again the claims made by the man who had asked him for the details of his neighbour's car. Kill or be killed was what it came down to. Nobody ever said these weren't tough times.

Later that year the neighbour's wife and her children moved away. The boy who had wished Maurice dead at the funeral waved as the car pulled away from the kerb for the last time. He had grown about six inches in as many months. You would hardly have recognised him as the same wee boy at all.

The new people only stayed in the house a year, the people after them eighteen months, after which it lay empty for a time. A landlord bought the house and broke it up into flats. The woman, Jane, who moved into the bottom one was divorced. She had two teenage children, a boy and a girl, who had her heart broke, effing and blinding, staying out to all hours, getting up to God knows what. She took to calling at Maurice's door in the evenings the worse for drink. He would stand there and listen to the day's litany while she wiped at her eyes, spreading the sorrow. I'm sorry, she said every time, I've nobody else. One night in winter Maurice just said to her come in ahead out of the cold and that was it. Jane kept the flat next door - she didn't want Maurice thinking he had to take on responsibility for the children too - but she was there when he closed his eyes at night and there when he opened them again in the morning.

He helped her to stop drinking. He had never taken that much himself so it was no hardship for him to stop with her. The teenage children straightened up and in time moved out. Jane tried to persuade Maurice to sell his house and move next door. Prices in that part of town had been rocketing since the ceasefires and it wasn't as if they needed the room. But, no, Maurice said, he wasn't ready for a flat yet. Maybe when he was seventy-two, not fifty-two. Admit it, Jane said, you're too comfortable where you are. Maurice said nothing, which for Jane was admission enough. I knew it, she said. I just knew it.

Jane had been in catering before she met her husband and had her life almost ruined. It had been her dream then to have a place of her own. Now that she was sober and the children were away she started looking around for a little café she could run. She and Maurice drove all over the city viewing properties. In the end it came down to a choice of two: a Copper Kettle in the east and the well-named Nothing Fancy at the back of the university. They sat at the dining-room table over cups of camomile tea discussing the pros and cons. The east was up and coming; the east was still the east. You would be hard pressed not to make money within a mile of the university in term time; you would be standing looking out the window the other half of the year wondering where the next customer was coming from.

The Copper Kettle shaded it. Jane signed the lease on her forty-eighth birthday and started in the day after that with the redecorating. A week before she was due to open a police car pulled up in front of Maurice's work. He knew before the peelers inside had finished adjusting their hats that they had come for him, but still when one of them started talking about the Copper Kettle and some sort of fall he looked at them uncomprehending. Jane? was all he could say. He rode to the hospital in the back of the patrol car asking the questions he had not had the presence of mind to ask back at work. Hadn't anyone been holding the stepladder steady? How high up had Jane been when it collapsed? What way had she landed? Only when the car drove past A&E did he realize his questions were all academic.

The ladder had tipped backwards while she was stretching to reach a ceiling rose. The wee girl who had been lending her a hand had tried to describe for the police the sound of her head striking the tiled floor. It was like, I don't know, you just knew that was her, you know? Jane, the doctors told Maurice, would not have felt another thing until she was pronounced dead five minutes before he was ushered into intensive care. He sat beside her for three quarters of an hour holding her hand until the mortuary attendants arrived. She still had on the twisted scarf she had used to tie up her hair that morning. A look on her face like whatever it was was calling her she hadn't quite heard it the first time. The police had already contacted the son - he was in England now, doing well - and the daughter, who was driving up from down south with her boyfriend.

Later that night they sat, all four, in Maurice's front room, strangers, unable to speak. Jane had been failed somehow, alone at the top of that ladder. To have said more would have been to apportion blame.

Some time after nine Jane's ex-husband arrived with his second wife, who waited in the car until he had gone in to check that she would be welcome. Maurice had only met the man once before, the new wife never at all. He felt seeing her for the first time something of Jane's affront, often rehearsed in those drink-sodden laments on Maurice's doorstep, that her husband could have chosen this sharp-nosed little creature over her, over his own children. But her arrival prevented the evening from descending still further into grief and unspoken recrimination. She had the knack of starting a conversation then, when she was confident it could carry on without her, withdrawing, disappearing from the room altogether. By the end of the night the children were in a clinch with their father while his wife rinsed glasses at the kitchen sink and the boyfriend dried. Maurice went out to stand on the front step. There was music coming from the bottom flat next door, folkish. He could not have told you any more who was living there, the tenants came and went that fast. He could hardly have told you who was living in any of the other houses. The street was changing. People didn't bother the same way. He was aware that there was something perverse in this line of thought, but he felt it nevertheless to be true. They just didn't bother.

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Glenn Patterson is from Belfast. He is the author of seven novels and two works of non-fiction. A new novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, will be published soon. Among his awards have been the Rooney Prize and the Betty Trask Award.

Footnote is featured in New Irish Short Stories, edited by Joseph O'Connor, published by Faber and Faber

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Thursday, 24 March, 2011

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"Later that year the neighbour's wife and her children moved away. The boy who had wished Maurice dead at the funeral waved as the car pulled away from the kerb for the last time. He had grown about six inches in as many months. You would hardly have recognised him as the same wee boy at all."