‘Really?’ his mother replied, grimacing, and put the shirt back on the rail. ‘I don’t know if it’s the right colour for her, really.’
Then why did you show it to me? he wanted to say, but he left it. It was becoming clear to him what was going to happen. This was a woman shopping, and a woman shopping meant looking at things you had no intention of buying, things you didn’t even like, just for the pleasure of looking at them and pawing them and putting them back.
‘Sorry,’ Mark said, as he jostled a woman going through the rack behind him.
‘Hello, Mark,’ she said, and he turned almost in fright. It took him a moment to recognize her. Pamela Doherty. She’d been on his school bus, and when she stepped on in the morning, every boy down the back took a good look at her: some of the girls, too. Every morning her brown hair would be damp and loose. She had been friendlier, more easy-going than a girl that good-looking should, by rights, have been. She was still good-looking, but harder-looking, too; there was something forced to what prettiness was still there. She was groomed. Tanned in the middle of December. Wearing a suit you’d wear if you worked in a bank.
‘Pamela,’ he said, and nodded with a breath of a laugh. ‘How’s things?’
‘Not too bad,’ she said, and he noticed her accent — Edgeworthstown pure and undiluted, the bit of a rush on the last word. ‘What are you up to, these days?’
‘Ah.’ He shrugged, and gestured back to his mother. ‘Helping out with the Christmas shopping, you know.’
‘Good man yourself.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m working in the bank,’ she said, and he congratulated himself silently on having got it right. ‘Pain-in-the-arse work but it pays the bills.’
‘Lot to be said for that.’
‘Sure is. And you’re in Dublin, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘At Trinity, isn’t it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Lecturing?’
He hesitated a moment. It was always the same dilemma, when someone from home asked him what he did; whether to clarify for them the difference between being a lecturer and being a teaching assistant — which felt, most of the time, like being a jumped-up grinds tutor, only on less pay. He nodded. ‘Yeah. Lecturing. Pain-in-the-arse work too.’
‘But, wow,’ she said, raising her eyebrows. ‘That beats anything that’s going on around here. A lecturer at Trinity. I mean, fair play.’
He shrugged. He could feel himself flushing. He glanced down at the thing she had in her hands. It looked like a piece of underwear, silk, a slip or a top or something that made him think of what she must look like naked, what she must have looked like naked back in the school-bus days, at sixteen. He felt as though the walls of the place were closing in on top of him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘good to see you anyway.’
‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘Might see you around over Christmas. You be in Valentine’s on Stephen’s night?’
‘I’d say so, yeah.’ Mark heard in his voice a local lad’s confidence that he did not have.
‘See you so.’ Pamela winked at him, as he nodded a goodbye.
His mother was down at the back of the shop now; she could not have heard the exchange. Still, she glanced at him quizzically as he joined her. ‘Who was that one?’
‘She used to go on my bus,’ Mark said. ‘Doherty. You don’t know them.’
‘I do know them,’ his mother said, and craned her neck to get a better look.
Mark took an intense interest in the blouse his mother had in her hand. ‘That one’s nice.’
‘I don’t know,’ his mother said. ‘It seems a bit skimpy to me.’
‘Whatever you think.’
‘What about this?’
It was a cardigan in dark grey; long, plain. Joanne would wear it. He touched it. The wool was soft and smooth. ‘Looks nice,’ he said.
‘It’d want to, for the price of it.’ She showed him the tag and he did the taken-aback look he knew she was expecting. ‘Cashmere,’ she said. ‘Still.’
‘It’s too much,’ he said. ‘That blouse you had a minute ago would do fine.’
‘Would it?’ She did the uncertainty dance now, with her mouth and her eyes, looking between this rail and the other one, sizing each piece up, frowning, chewing her lip. ‘Which of them do you think she’d get more wear out of?’ she said.
Mark tried to picture Joanne, first in the blouse, then in the cardigan. The blouse would be sexier. But the cardigan was something she’d come in and put on in the evenings, something she’d wrap around herself. Then again, that would mean the cardigan would be covered, soon enough, in baby puke. Just as he was about to say this to his mother, he heard Aoife’s cries. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, and as he pushed his way up the shop, past what seemed like thirty women, the baby’s cries grew louder and more urgent than seemed possible: had she not just woken up? Had she actually been awake, crying, all that time, and he had not heard her? He made his way through, and every woman seemed to glance at him disapprovingly as he passed. Except Pamela Doherty. What was on her face was not disapproval but disbelief, and laughing disbelief at that.
As he took the handles of the pushchair and steered it out of the shop, Pamela was still watching him, a faint smile on her lips, her eyebrows raised. He nodded to her, another goodbye, and she nodded back, but he could see it on her face: all that he had not told her, all that he had not admitted to, all that he had tried to hide.
It was raining outside, and the night had fallen completely now, the Christmas lights high over Main Street in their gaudy yellows and greens and reds. The sound of the rain splashing against the footpath seemed to calm Aoife, and he stood by the bright shop window with the slickly dressed mannequins, rocking the pushchair back and forth, until his mother emerged with a shopping bag and they headed for their cars.
*
It happened again that night. The wailing drifted into their room, angry, jagged, catching on itself like an engine trying to start in the cold. Maura pulled on her dressing-gown, left the room without turning on a light. She called out to the child as she moved along the landing.
Then Tom could hear Mark’s voice along with hers, puncturing the clamour of the child’s hunger. A door opened and the cries grew louder for a second, nearer, then more distant; they were taking her downstairs. Tom lifted himself slightly to look at the clock; it was almost six. He stared into the half-light of the room. Already his mind had stretched open to sleeplessness, to the blankness of an hour too early to use. He thought about going down to the kitchen, but Maura would be fussing over the child. The tiles would be cold under his feet. He pushed his knees together and drew them closer to his chest; he pressed the quilt between his shoulder and his chin. He wondered if the dog, in the back kitchen, would be confused now, if the noise had made her think it was time to get up, time for the day’s work to begin. Footsteps sounded on the landing again, and the bedroom door opened quietly. A blade of light fell over the pillow beside him, then vanished as Maura shut the door. He kept his eyes closed as she eased back into the bed, kept them closed as she pulled the quilt to her. He did not open them until he felt her shuddering her way back to sleep. Then he heaved himself out of bed and dressed quickly in the clothes he had taken off the night before. As he closed the door behind him, he heard a sudden rustle of the bedclothes. Maura, he knew, had jolted awake again.
The child seemed to be quietening as he made his way down the stairs, and when he reached the kitchen the crying had stopped completely. Mark stood facing the window, the bottle jerking in his hand as the child sucked. He looked at Tom’s reflection and nodded a greeting.