Never Go There Page 8

  And she heard his name, heard them both speak it.

  James.

  Maggie

  Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  She’d felt sorry for Nuala Greene, until now.

  When the woman had first walked into the bar, Maggie had seen someone who needed a good night’s rest, a few decent meals and someone to make her smile, lift her spirits. She thought this woman might be the turning point for the pub; a sign that B&B and tourism could offer a way forward, the first small step out of debt and into the black.

  But then she’d seen Emma’s hands, worked to blisters like they hadn’t been for years, not since the aftermath of the fire next door. All because this ridiculous woman had come here from the city, stared at a photo on the wall, and stirred up painful memories.

  Now she just wanted Nuala Greene to go away, leave her in peace to sort out her bankruptcy and fragile goddaughter. She had too much to worry about already without adding this stray to the list.

  What the hell had Emma been thinking? Why was she so convinced that the woman was here because of James? And what did it matter, after seven years, if she was?

  But then the door handle turned and Maggie’s body locked with tension in the damask chair, the gin-nipped tea in her hand held still.

  ‘I’ve come to sort out the room,’ the voice said, from the door.

  Maggie stayed motionless, facing the swept-out hearth that Emma had forgotten to lay, the greasy crumbs from a bacon sandwich collecting in the creases of her blue striped shirt.

  A thick snot-clogged sniff. ‘I won’t stay another night after all.’

  Maggie felt her hand tighten around her mug, her insides clench against the sandwich in her stomach. The stress from the bank’s letter, the phone call from Arthur, the pink shock of skin across Emma’s knuckles, wound in Maggie’s gut.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ Nuala said, her voice breaking slightly on the last word, taking a deep breath before she continued.

  ‘Then why did you?’ Maggie wanted to shout, but her jaw wouldn’t unclench and she couldn’t get Emma’s hands out of her head, the burns on her knuckles, the bleach-scoured floor.

  She thought of the letter, in shreds, at the bottom of the graveyard vase. Thought of the bungalow she would never now build.

  She lifted the cup to her lips and sipped, tried her best to keep calm. No point getting cross with a stranger, with a woman who, so far, had done nothing wrong. She had more important things to concentrate on.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nuala said.

  And Maggie couldn’t take the last word. Her bacon-greased fingers slipped against the mug, lost their grip. It fell from her hand, the sound of the smash bouncing off the stone walls, spilling the tea and the gin on the wood. Maggie thought of Emma, imagined her bending to clean up the mess, saw her pale face, red fingers, the way they shook as they held out the photo of James.

  ‘You’re here because of him.’ It wasn’t a question any more. Maggie felt she had known it all along, ever since the woman walked in reeking of nervousness, desperation. Because it would happen now, when Maggie was on her knees and trying not to show it. Of course it would happen now.

  ‘I didn’t want anyone to know,’ Nuala said, her voice slightly fainter and wavering as she inched her way back to the door. ‘Not till I had a chance to see his mother.’

  Maggie turned her head slightly, saw Nuala pressed to the door, her wide-open eyes staring at the remnants of the mug on the floor, her blond hair hanging lank to her shoulders.

  ‘Who are you to James Lunglow?’

  Nuala straightened her back, tried to keep her head high even though her chin trembled. ‘James Greene, actually.’

  Maggie saw the woman had been crying, her face blotchy, eyes swollen, cheeks damp. Yesterday Maggie would have gone to her, held her in her arms and helped her to calm down. But not now, now she knew who the woman was here for.

  ‘He changed his name?’

  ‘He took mine when we married. He didn’t want me to become a Lunglow, hated the idea that I would be called Mrs Lunglow, like his mother.’

  ‘You married him?’ Maggie got up from the chair with a heave of breath and turned, face on, towards Nuala. ‘That worthless piece of – you married him?’ But beneath the question was another, one that Maggie couldn’t bring herself to ask out loud. Why did James marry Nuala? She must have reminded him, every day, of the girl he had left behind. All she needed was the scaly red knuckles, the scar by her eye and the habit of biting her lip.

  Nuala spat the words, ‘He’s dead,’ like an insult. They wiped the disgust from Maggie’s face.

  Maggie looked again, reassessing Nuala under the weight of the news. The lines on her young face, the shadows beneath her eyes that told of more than just sleepless nights, the unnaturally waifish body. Her frailty.

  She rubbed her face, felt the scarred ribbon of flesh on her cheek, whispered ‘he’s dead’ into the palm of her hand. She looked towards the ceiling, then to the bottle of gin by the bar.

  On top of everything else she had to contend with, James was dead.

  ‘Emma knew you were here about James. She told me your name, that you’d been looking at his photo, that you were here because of him. “No, Emma,” I said, “she’s just a grockle,” I said. “We’ll have forgotten all about her by the weekend.” And do you know what she said to me?’ Maggie shook her head clear, ran her fingers through the grey hair, flecks of dandruff falling on her blue striped cotton shirt. ‘She said you weren’t wearing a ring, that at least you’re not his wife! What the hell am I supposed to say to her?’

  Maggie sniffed back the mucus from her nose, her eyes raw from unshed tears, gritty from troubled sleep. She paced the room, Nuala still pressed against the door, and made it to the bar and back in eight strides.

  ‘He was meant to come back for her. We all thought he would, we were all waiting to give him the beating of his bloody life. But Emma? She was just waiting. She just wanted him back.’ The room darkened, the sun outside dipping behind a cloud, shadows creeping from the window across the floor and shrouding Nuala’s expression. But Maggie could sense it, even if she couldn’t see it, the narrowing of the other woman’s eyes, the tension in her jaw as she thought of Emma waiting for James.

  Maggie stopped, out of breath, and leant on the wooden sleeper. She spoke into her chest, the shirt covering her mouth, softening her tone. ‘I’ve been trying to put Emma back together for seven years. And all this time, all this time that I’ve been helping her, getting her to move on, picking up the pieces that he bloody well broke, he was swanning around London with a posh little wife.

  ‘How could you marry a man who had done what he did?’

  Nuala looked away to the lead cross-hatched window.

  ‘He never told you?’

  Maggie watched as Nuala picked at splinter of wood on the card table beside her, flicking it upright to a spike.

  ‘And you never asked him why he left? Never forced it out of him?’

  ‘He would have told me, one day.’ Nuala grazed her finger across the splinter, smoothing it down, lifting it up. ‘He didn’t like me to pressure him. He didn’t like it at all.’

  Maggie sighed, ‘You didn’t want to know.’ She tried a small laugh but the sound was hollow and flat. ‘Thought he did something so terrible it might change your feelings for him, that it?’

  ‘I love him.’ Nuala winced at the words, pushed her fingertip down and the splinter buckled beneath. ‘Loved him. Nothing can change that.’

  The building creaked and Maggie jumped, looked up at the ceiling, cocking her head to one side to listen. She glanced back at the kitchen door.

  ‘So James Lunglow’s dead.’ She rubbed her face, wiped her nose with the sleeve of her shirt and headed for the kitchen. ‘I need another tea.’

  Maggie returned minutes later with a large mug in her hands, fresh biscuit crumbs lining the creases of the shirt at her bust and the bulge of her stomach.


  ‘What happened?’ she asked, sitting at the card table. Her face was paler, the news beginning to sink in, draining the blood from her face as it did so. ‘I’ll need to know so I can tell Emma. She’ll have questions, I want to be able to answer them.’

  ‘I want to tell her myself.’

  ‘Absolutely not. She’s already in a state after this morning, I’ll not let you do any more damage.’ Maggie’s mind spun back to Emma, hopefully resting upstairs oblivious to all this, the bleach marks on her hands starting, tentatively, to heal.

  ‘She’s been writing to him,’ Nuala said, frowning as she leaned back against the wall. ‘For the past five years, at least. I want to tell her myself.’ She tried to keep her jaw relaxed, face calm and Maggie noticed the effort it took her.

  Maggie paled further, imagining Emma at the computer, on her phone, disappearing to the library in town where the connection was better. She had found him after all. Found him, but never told Maggie. Why hadn’t she told her?

  ‘No,’ Maggie said, disbelieving. She took a mouthful of tea before coughing into the crook of her elbow. She could smell an undertone of gin on the echo of her breath, hoped Nuala wasn’t close enough to catch it. ‘Tell me what happened. I’ll let Emma know after you’ve gone.’ She looked up at the ceiling again, cocked her head again. ‘Better still, just leave now. You don’t even have to pay: I just want you out. I’ll tell her myself.’

  And what would she tell her? What the hell was she going to say? How would Emma react to the news? But if Maggie got rid of Nuala now, made her leave, then maybe—

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Nuala said, her voice stronger, determined, the tremble in her chin no more.

  ‘What?’ Maggie flushed, her nose turning scarlet as Nuala read her thoughts aloud.

  ‘You won’t tell her. You just want me to leave so you can make it all up, let her carry on thinking he’s going to come back.’ Nuala rubbed her temples, her thin fingers bulging at the joints, her neck tensed, the sinew and tendons visible.

  ‘It’ll destroy her if she finds out.’ And again Maggie thought of Emma’s red raw knuckles. ‘She just needs more time.’

  ‘It’s false hope.’

  ‘It’s better than nothing.’

  Nuala moved one hand from her face to her belly, clutching the jersey where it hung from her body. ‘What about the baby?’ she snarled, mouth grimacing as she bit down, hard, on the littlest finger of her spare hand. ‘Or should I say, child? It must be seven years old by now.’ She kept the finger in her mouth, biting at the nail, the flesh around it, ripping a slice off with her teeth.

  The baby.

  Maggie’s face flushed with a wash of red, swallowing her face with its violence. She looked up from her place at the table, caught Nuala in the cold of her stare. ‘Who the fuck told you that?’ She spoke quietly, the venom all the more forceful.

  ‘Lois.’ The inflection in her voice making it sound like a nervous question.

  Maggie punched the table with both fists, startling Nuala and spilling more tea. A jolt of pain moved from her hands to her shoulder, reminding her of her age, that she should be getting ready to retire, relax, hand the business over to Emma, instead of her son, like she’d planned. Not to sit here and clean up the mess that another man had started, a mess his mother had made worse seven years ago and was still making worse now.

  Nuala’s hands flew to her mouth, worrying away at the bitten flesh on her finger.

  ‘If Lois thinks she can dig that up again, she’s got another think coming. I will not stand for it!’ Maggie straightened her back, her cheeks damp. ‘I will not stand for it.’

  Nuala inched forward, a deep v forming between her eyebrows. ‘Tell me what happened?’

  Maggie shook her head.

  Nuala stepped forward again, lifted her hand, tentatively touched Maggie’s shoulder. ‘Please.’

  ‘You really don’t know why he left?’ Maggie stared at Nuala, confounded by her ignorance. She wanted to push her away and send her out, but she thought of Lois, of the story she would tell Nuala given the chance. Of the damage it would do to Emma if she heard.

  ‘I’ll tell you.’ A creak from upstairs. The soft thud-thud of footfall. ‘But not here.’

  Nuala creaked open the door, slid outside into the cold and Maggie followed, wondering what else this strange woman might reveal.

  Two months ago

  Nuala

  Wednesday, 13th September, 2017

  ‘Hello.’

  The woman in the park stopped, looked around her, behind her, raised one hand to her eyes and scanned the distance.

  ‘I’m over here.’

  The woman looked again, dark bobbed hair swishing as her head turned, sending a breeze of Chanel over the low hedge and into the garden. She saw Nuala staring back, skin as white as the clouds, neck and shoulders as thin as the branches she was peering over.

  ‘I have a pram.’ Nuala’s lips were dry, small cracks radiating from the centre line. This was the second person she had spoken to that day, her lips sore from the effort.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ The woman in the park let her mouth hang open, her pretty young face confused. The hand that had shielded her eyes now gripped the strap of her handbag, the other jumped to her cashmere swaddled bump and Nuala felt her own small bump, flaccid and empty but still there, itching sympathetically beneath her clothes. ‘Do you want it?’

  ‘The pram?’ The woman in the park avoided Nuala’s gaze and instead looked behind her to the garden, frown lines deepening as she took in the overgrown grass, unruly hedges, the wilting rose, the weedy hemlock strangling the herb garden.

  ‘Yes.’ Nuala followed her gaze to the rose bed. Lingered on the dry, brown plants, the hemlock’s poisonous flower heads.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Oh.’ Nuala hung her head and began to shudder, the movements sending her own perfume over the bush; greasy hair, unwashed clothes, her dehydrated, stinking breath.

  The woman in the park rubbed her bump, the yellow wool rippling under her hand. She gave a weak smile. ‘We’re not ready for one yet.’ She stepped back, about to walk away, but stopped when she saw Nuala’s chin tremble.

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend. I’m superstitious, that’s all. I won’t even put the cot together until the baby’s here, let alone buy a pram.’ She gave a little shrug, another smile and waddled away, her hips swaying with the weight of the bump.

  Nuala felt her stretch-marks burn. The other woman looked over her shoulder, saw Nuala watching and sped up, her mobile phone now pressed to her ear. And Nuala wondered what that would be like, to hold the cold, hard plastic to your ear and talk to your husband, or mother, or friend.

  Nuala turned her back on the park, walked past the dying rose and through the kitchen door. Tiny flies buzzed around her, others formed a black mass in the fruit bowl, feasting off the putrefying bananas. More crawled across the fridge, lapping up the milky yellow juice that was seeping beneath the seal.

  The smell was too much, the air dusty with mould spores and sweet from rotting food, but to leave the kitchen would mean walking into the hallway. It would mean walking towards the cardboard box that had been delivered that morning, the picture on the side of a smiling mother gripping the handlebars of a pram, the feet and hands of a squirming baby poking from beneath the hood.

  She had bought it after her twenty-week scan when Maxwell still wriggled inside her. They would deliver it closer to her due date, they told her. That way she wouldn’t have to store it herself, they told her. She wouldn’t be tempting fate.

  She’d have to send it back, tell them it was no longer needed.

  She closed her eyes and walked through the hall, one hand feeling the wall until she reached the bannister, lifting her feet to walk up the stairs.

  Something brushed her calf.

  She jumped back, the corners of her mouth splitting open as she screamed, her hands grappling for something, anything.

  She fell to the floor
with a smack.

  It was the pram that had brushed her leg, the corner of the box tickling her calf. The woman in the picture looked out with a grin, triumphant and condescending, laughing at Nuala’s fall, laughing at her sagging belly.

  The baby in the pram kicked and kicked. ‘You can’t have me,’ it seemed to say between giggles and dribbles of spit, ‘you can’t have me.’ And it kicked on and on and on, the woman pushing the pram laughing, laughing, laughing.

  Nuala half lifted herself up, crawled on hands and knees up the stairs.

  She stopped at the top. The nursery was straight ahead. The door was closed but inside the walls were pale green, the carpet the same light grey wool that covered the landing, the cot a fresh white, the nursing chair, the little chest of drawers, the changing table, the toy chest – all white.

  She took the door beside the nursery, the door leading to her bedroom.

  The bed where they had made love, the cupboards that still held his clothes, the table where his flat cap lay, Maxwell’s pictures tucked inside.

  The sheets were yellow but once they, too, had been white. Her side of the bed was spotted with dried, stale milk spots, though her milk had dried up weeks ago. His side of the bed was spotted with Maxwell, the dark red blot from his umbilical cord, a black smudge of meconium.

  Nuala crawled across the floor to the wash of dried blood that she had never cleaned up.

  She stood up at last, on the rusty brown stain, the carpet dry and matted beneath her feet, eyes out of focus, memory sharp to that day.

  She was alone.

  She was all alone.

  Her friends from school had been out of touch since she had married James, feeling snubbed perhaps that they weren’t invited to her wedding (why invite them when it’s none of their business? Wouldn’t it be more romantic, just the two of them? And how could she invite all her friends, her distant cousins, when James had left all his far behind him? Did Nuala really want to rub it in his face, how alone he was? Did she really want to make him feel so lonely on what should be the best day of his life? Was she really so cruel? And of course she wasn’t, of course not, so she had left her old friends behind her.)