Then one morning, she walked in and the men were gone. The place was perfect; the carpets fresh and new, the hoarding dissolved into thin air and, in the middle of the floor, a pair of escalators, one going up and the other coming down. The steps tugged lightly at each other as they passed, snagging and loosening all day long. It ticked in the corner of her eye, making her feel balanced, or dizzy, depending on the light. They were so clean. The up escalator always mounting itself, step over step, the down escalator falling like syrup; burying itself slowly in the flatness of the floor.
They were beautiful and they never stopped and finally they got on her nerves. Nothing happened in the bed department. People bought a bed, or they did not buy a bed. Kitty used to like the open space, the hummocky slabs of mattress, the headboards like tombstones in a giant graveyard. ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ But all her satisfaction was gone, now. The way people lay down and curled up, in the middle of the crowd. The old couples sitting on either side of the mattress and looking over their shoulders at each other in a way that was almost coy; the giggles and the silences. Most people buying a bed were in love, she used to think, or hopeful at least of finding love. Now, they just bounced up and down, or put their dirty feet up, or looked as though they could kill for a decent night’s sleep.
Kitty was at home one evening, washing the dishes, when the phone rang. It was a young man who said he was looking for a Kevin Daly. She was listed as K. Daly in the phone book, and Kitty didn’t want to give too much away. She said there was no Kevin Daly at that number and the young man asked was she sure. He said that he was looking for a Kevin Daly he used to know, a man who had gone to school in Malahide. ‘I’m sorry,’ Kitty said, but they were talking to each other now. He told her that Kevin Daly was his brother, long out of touch. Then he said that, actually, Kevin Daly was his father, but that he did not know he was his father, at least he did not know that he was his son. He said he was looking for his father because his mother was sick and that was why she had given him his father’s name, finally — Kevin Daly — and the fact that he’d gone to school in Malahide. It was a schooltime romance, he said. Kitty just said, ‘Sorry,’ a lot, the way you might say, ‘I see.’
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘So that’s why — you know?’
‘I’m sorry.’
He asked did she have a brother called Kevin Daly, or a cousin, and she just said, ‘No, sorry.’ But he was quite insistent, as though she might be harbouring the man. ‘No, really, I’m sorry,’ she said, and put down the phone.
The next day, Kitty expected someone to float down the escalator into the bed department and call her by name. She did not know who it might be, or how they might be dressed. A girl, maybe, with green eyes, or a slender young boy. She imagined a man in a perfect black suit — something extra about him, anyway, like Cary Grant. A young man with curly red hair gazed at her — or through her — all the way from the floor above and she wondered, bizarrely, if he might be the person she was waiting for. Also, what he might say to her, if he was.
Then a figure did appear that made her heart turn, and it took a while before Kitty realised it was her own mother, sailing down from fabrics and soft furnishings like a queen.
‘I didn’t recognise you,’ Kitty said.
Her mother was in town looking for a shower curtain and thought she would pop in to say hello. But after that, there was little enough to talk about. Kitty was used to seeing her at home: out in the open, she seemed surprisingly well dressed and mute.
‘Well, you always know where to find me,’ Kitty said to her, with a stranger’s smile.
Kitty ended up seducing a man from the local drama society, a little to his surprise. He had been courting her for months, but in an old-fashioned sort of way. He was sixty-plus and Kitty was forty-plus, but that was the kind of age gap you could expect, with two nearly grown sons. They were both in a production of Johnny Belinda, a play about a deaf mute who gets pregnant, though it comes out right in the end. Kitty did the interval coffees and had a walk-on in the final scene. Tom, for that was the man’s name, did the set. He was good with his hands, he said, as he bent over a saw-horse in the scene dock, and Kitty flicked a glance at him to see what he meant — but all he meant was that he was good at making things. Nice. In a way. He drove her home after rehearsal most nights, and one evening they stopped out to eat. After which, Kitty asked him in for a drink.
Tom. He said all he needed was a couple of hours to fit two dimmers where the old light switch was, but she’d need to redecorate, after. He looked at the photos on her mantelpiece. He was recently bereaved. His daughter had told him to join the drama society, so there he was. In a moment, Kitty thought, he would tell her about his teeth, that they were all his own. Faded brown eyes, silver hair, a handsome where-did-it-all-go-wrong face. They were safe enough. Kitty’s eldest lumbered in from the pub, and stayed to be introduced. Her youngest was upstairs with his own TV. They were nice boys. They did not expect their mother to seduce old geezers in the front room, and neither did the geezer. It was awkward all the way through, and quite satisfying. Kitty did not tell him about her ex-husband, as he did not talk about his dead wife. She did not tell him that her husband had strayed, that she had done everything to keep him — up to, and including, porn videos in the bedroom — and that when she stormed out, the judge had held that desertion against her and awarded him the house. She did not tell him how her husband moved a woman in two weeks after they walked out of court, how the boys had followed her finally to her bedsit and looked after her, as only young boys can, how together they had made their way here, to the outer suburbs and a decent life. Nor did she tell him that she was pregnant, when she realised that she was pregnant. She just let him, and the drama society, lapse, soon after the curtain had rung down on Johnny Belinda, and before anyone could be surprised.
At first she thought it was the change of life. She stood in the bed department and waited for hot flashes. She did not mind growing old as long as it meant growing easy, but it did not seem to be working out that way. There was an agitation, a turbulence in her blood. She rode all the way up to accounts to query her payslip, and she landed back down in the bed department with a thump. She walked the floor and sat on the beds. She had a terrible need to lie down on one of them. One Monday evening during stocktaking, she actually did lie down. She simply reclined. She let her back sink into a double-sprung Slumberland, and felt she might never rise again.
It was not until she bought three pots of apricot jam that the penny dropped. She did not even bother to take a test. She felt that swooping blankness she had felt with each of the boys, so delicious, like diving into a pool and finding you could breathe. The child was no bigger than a pip in the flesh of her stomach. She took it for walks and little outings. She gave it a go on the escalators and on a park swing, scuffing the coarse sand under her feet and feeling a little mad. What would she tell the boys? As for the people in the bed department — Jackie, who shared the floor with her, and the customers who came in to look or buy — they all looked empty to her, like husks. As though she were the only real thing left. It was like that film with the pods, and she wanted to run away somewhere, to a deserted lighthouse, or a shack by the beach, and sit in a shaft of light while her baby grew.