Where Are We Now? Read online

  Neeta, who had been with the Post Office from the year dot, and had from dot and a day taken all her tea breaks in the Caddy, had been the one to let the JO kitten (well, even at forty-something, she could never think of him as a full-grown cat) out of the bag. Fifteen months on and not a sniff of a new tenant, she was mortified. ‘To think I might have scared those poor people away,’ she said, even though if pushed (and not all that hard) she would have said, yes, she much preferred the cafe as it was under Sam and Derek. And, no, she didn’t suppose the Caddy’s owners, sitting on the deck of the house they had bought in Marbella on the proceeds of the sale, very much missed getting up in the dark on winter mornings or carting waste out to the giant bins in the back alley at the end of every day.

  From Neeta too had come the news that specially trained staff were to be brought in two mornings a week ahead of the closure to help familiarise senior citizens with online banking and benefits payments, although the commencement date for that had also been revised back several times in the past year and a bit.

  The senior citizens Herbie had overheard in the cafe discussing the closure were split between those (OK, that: there were only two of them) already mourning the passing of the Post Office – the yarns you would have in queues in the good old days – and those/that saying there was nothing good about the old days at all. ‘I mind once standing a full hour to draw a tenner. I tell you, I did a jig when they put the first cash machine in outside.’

  What nobody had yet told Neeta – under her breath this, though there happened to be only Herbie and Derek in the cafe at that precise moment, and with a glance first over her shoulder – was who was going to counsel the guys who came in every Monday morning with the carrier bags of cash for deposit. She had mouthed to Herbie and Derek the three initials familiar from a score of paramilitary murals within ten minutes’ walk of Sam’s front door.

  Derek said, ‘They don’t really?’

  ‘They do. Really.’

  ‘Bags of actual cash? That all sounds a bit 1970s. I mean, I thought there were laws now.’

  ‘There are, and they can give you chapter and verse themselves… unusual payments, which theirs aren’t since they’re there every week; no more than nine thousand pounds, which theirs never are, even if that means there’s two or three of them in succession coming up to your window. They even offer advice on filling in Suspicious Activity Reports for the Financial Intelligence Unit, knowing fine well that having any sort of a conversation with them about a report would be an offence under the Proceeds of Crime Act. We’re standing there counting their money and they are literally laughing in our faces.’

  ‘What do you reckon to that?’ Derek asked when Neeta was gone.

  ‘I don’t think she’d make it up.’

  ‘Imagine something was to happen,’ Derek said. ‘Between the front door and the counter, say. Say one of their bags was to go missing somehow… That would be the test, wouldn’t it? Who would they report it to? The police?’

  Herbie had shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but if I was the person who had made one of their bags go missing, I think I would be taking it straight round to my undertaker, save any delays: give me the finest coffin a couple of pence under nine thousand pounds can buy.’

  *

  Peadar appeared again now at the Post Office door. Norrie jumped to and got a chuck under the chin for his patience. On they went together, full tilt and partial list.

  Herbie turned his attention again to his coffee. A little bit of time got away from him while he drank, with no clear thoughts to account for it. And sometimes that was all right.

  He needed a couple of bits and pieces of shopping so decided to take the scenic route home, by M&S Simply Food (it had been a better sentence when it was still Iceland, easier on the pocket too), stopping at the door to pick up a basket in which was abandoned a leaflet for a pet crematorium. Calculations in the margin for something smaller than the headline cat and dog figures… actually, for two things. Tortoises? Guinea pigs? Tragic accident? Pact? He couldn’t bring himself to bin it but handed it instead, as he came back round towards the tills, to the security guard. (Herbie had long ago given up trying to predict when she would be there, which days were deemed least secure.) ‘Somebody’s heart must be broken,’ the guard said and carried the leaflet respectfully across her open palms to her station in the corner of the store.

  Brian was on the ten items or less till. Herbie would have lined up behind the bulkier buyers, gone back round even and picked up a couple more things he didn’t actually need to put himself over the limit, only Brian, following the movement of the security guard, caught his eye. ‘Come here and I’ll take you.’

  Heavy was his heart as he set his basket down.

  ‘No work today?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Doctor’s.’

  ‘Ah!’

  He started ringing in the items, frowning, which was a giveaway.

  ‘Man walks in here earlier the day,’ he said, ‘looking for a pair of stockings for his wife.’

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘Says she has been going on and on about this kind she saw on the shopping channel, never stretch, never ladder, never even smell.’

  ‘It is a joke.’

  Brian had his hand out. Herbie put a twenty in it.

  ‘Here’s me, stockings that never stretch, never ladder, never even smell…? That’s nylon impossible.’ He allowed the line to sit then gave it an extra little nudge. ‘Ny-lon… Nigh on…?’

  Herbie had long ago exhausted his lifetime’s reserve of polite laughter on Brian’s jokes.

  ‘That actually hurt.’

  Brian smiled. If you couldn’t get a laugh get a wince. ‘Twelve pounds twenty-one change… See you again soon.’

  ‘In the nicest possible way, Brian,’ Herbie said, ‘I really hope not.’

  There were a few spits and spots of rain as he exited the automatic doors. He thought of the American tourists in their macs. Didn’t we tell ya it always rained? Didn’t we tell ya? By the time he had got to his own corner, though, it had stopped again. He paused a moment, swapping his bag from left hand to right. The street looked, with an hour to go yet before the great end-of-day parking scramble began, as the developers a hundred and some years ago must have imagined it would always look, not a car in sight: two long opposing terraces, each interrupted halfway down by an entry leading on to an alleyway, which some residents treated as an extension of their backyards, with barbecues going in summer, fairy lights in winter, and some – having no mountain within easy reach and not giving that much of a fuck who picked up after them – treated as the repository for all that they had grown beyond or had failed them, the id to the ego of their neat front rooms.

  Herbie felt an upsurge of affection at the sight of it. To begin with, it was true, he had had to fight the thought of the place where he lived as a settlement, rather than a home, that portion left to him after the division of the marital estate, or semi- in his and Tanya’s case. (‘Oriel’, their old house had been called. A long-lost kingdom, which might have been asking for it.) In fact, it had the comforting sense of the familiar: he had grown up in a house just like it… his entire life in between now seeming like one of those Escher staircase engravings – up and up and up to arrive at the place from which he had started.

  There were, he had discovered within days of moving in, settlements to the immediate left of him and two doors to the right, and an unsettlement facing, proceedings in that case being then still pending. The woman who lived there kept her blinds permanently tilted, as though refusing to acknowledge even to herself that she was there, that this thing was happening to her, Audrey Bannon. She scowled at neighbours she bumped into on the street, despite her best attempts at avoidance, like it was their fault, all of it, right back to her husband stumbling in at two in the morning that time with the dirty neck he seriously tried to tell her came from catching the strap of his shoulder bag in the taxi door, for that, again despite her best
attempts, was the story that had got out. That and the fact that he had ended up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs (he was far too pissed to have broken anything vital), which was why she was the one to move out, complete with restraining order, pending those proceedings, and he stayed put.

  And here’s the thing – Herbie thought it again now as he reached his front gate and glanced, instinctively, across at those blinds, yes, still tilted to repel, several years and one lost court case on – he wasn’t so sure she was wrong. Hang on for as long as you can, because once you let go there’s no calling back the true feeling of any of it.

  Tanya emailed him a couple of times a month, chatty letters of the kind he remembered her writing to old school friends, all past intimacy between the two of them now on a par with them having once been assigned adjacent lockers. She sent him photographs too sometimes, the beach holidays she had not wanted to go on when she was with him (it was her objected to them, wasn’t it?): this is good of Martin, not so good of me (it was the other way round of course). Very occasionally there would be a line or two delivered as it were out the corner of her mouth, or behind the locker door: God Bless HRT…! Can you imagine if there’d been Tinder when we were young? The fortune we’d have saved on drink… They’ve found a polyp on the lining of my womb, completely benign, I am happy to say and – even happier (as is Martin!) – not having any other (double underline) adverse effects.

  Herbie closed the door behind him.

  Home.

  A mismatched pair of shoeboxes was still sitting out on the table at the dining end of the knock-through. Dining, computing, sitting some weekends with the Sunday papers from one end of the day to the other. He swept up the alien-seeming passports, the union cards, the car and TV receipts, the evidence, scattered round about, and pressed them down on top, then lifted the boxes one after the other and set them with two others at the foot of the table. He eyed them balefully all the way through dinner then the moment he was finished took the whole lot up to the spare room and shut the door.

  The doctor was probably right.

  He needed something else to do with his nights.

  His days too, possibly.

  2

  His days had for the best part of three decades been filled with other people’s pay packets: uneventfully, those people would probably say, which was fair enough. It was one of those jobs – what was the saying? ‘For those who know, no explanation is necessary; for those who don’t, no explanation is possible.’ If no one beyond the Wages Department door was aware of the dramas involved in getting out three hundred and fifty pay packets from month to month then he and all those who worked with and eventually under him were doing their job.

  You’d be standing in the canteen, and a couple of guys would join the queue. ‘Herbie. Anything strange or startling?’ And you’d think, should I actually? But, no, ‘Not a thing,’ you’d say.

  Ah, who was he kidding, it was uneventful.

  Then the Crash came.

  Almost overnight the three hundred and fifty pay packets – or their (by then) electronic equivalents – shrank by a hundred, then fifty more and carried on shrinking, in the couple of years that followed, by twenties and tens before settling at eighty. The Wages Department shrank from seven to five to two. Then even two became too expensive to maintain. It was staring him in the face every month, as was the solution: outsourcing, in a word.

  And, of course, if it was staring him in the face it had to be staring other people, higher up, too. It mightn’t have come as a complete surprise, but the end was still a shock, though nothing like the shock of what came after. What didn’t.

  Nobody was hiring, or nobody who was was hiring anybody like him.

  For the first few months he felt utterly becalmed.

  Then one morning he got a letter from New Zealand – a cousin he had last (and first) met in the early seventies at their grandparents’ diamond wedding anniversary dinner and had corresponded with maybe four or five times in all the years since. (Her letter had been forwarded from Oriel and included best wishes to Tanya.) She hoped he didn’t mind her writing to him like this, but her husband was coming on fifty in a few months and she wanted to surprise him with his family tree, which like her own had roots ‘over there’. Only problem was she hadn’t a clue how to go about it: the websites she had been on up to now sent her round in circles. Herbie hadn’t much more of a clue, beyond knowing how to find his way to the Records Office, but he did have, as never before in his life, time on his hands – lots and lots of time – and over the next few weeks he was able to uncover just enough to persuade himself that he maybe wasn’t completely useless after all and – of far greater importance to his cousin – exactly the right amount to fit the genuine Connemara bog oak frame that she had already had made to display the family tree in. A friend of his cousin who was at the house the night of the fiftieth birthday – the grand unveiling – then got in touch asking him for help and put the fruits of his research up on Facebook, along with her undying gratitude, after which the requests started coming in from everywhere.

  Still, he had been at it more than a year before he felt able to refer to himself as a freelance researcher or had the confidence to deal with queries from people who had simply fetched up at the Records Office on spec, days when he was there. Their numbers had been steadily climbing, the other researchers told him, but in the past couple of years they had rocketed. He was in there two or three days a week now out of season, all the hours God sent, if he’d been willing to accept them, April to October, when the cruise ships were in town, guiding searchers through the idiosyncrasies of local spelling and pronunciation and the occasionally haphazard transcription of early-nineteenth-century church clerks.

  On one of his first visits to the Records Office he had run into another freelancer – actually would have had to take extreme steps to avoid him. The man – Sean Copeland you called him – stood, as though it was his official station, just inside the door of the reading room, keeping an eye out over the shoulder of whoever he happened to be in conversation with in case anyone lost-looking wandered in. It was hard to put an exact age on him – closer to seventy than sixty, certainly. He had used to manage a bar just north of the city centre – had worked in the trade since he left school – and then one Friday lunchtime in 1975 two fellas with flour sacks over their heads walked in and sprayed the place with bullets, killing four of his regulars and a trainee barman who had only started the afternoon before. Sean had booked himself out that lunchtime to go and see the dentist – lost a filling eating a Toffo he’d found in his pocket – so was spared: spared too having to see the very worst of the aftermath, though what he saw, when he arrived a quarter of an hour after the last ambulance left, was bad enough. He helped with the clear-up, went to all five of the funerals, saw that the bar was got ready for reopening, then walked away. ‘Just hadn’t the heart for it any more. Haven’t so much as crossed the door of a pub since.’

  It made sense of his stance, though, there inside the door of the Records Office reading room. That was his bar now. The chat probably wasn’t that much different. Do you not mind him? Big tall fella? His wife’s sister married a man whose grandmother on his mother’s side was one of the Suffragettes who dug up the greens at Fortwilliam Golf Club with kitchen forks.

  It was Sean who introduced Herbie to tithes, or to be absolutely accurate, Church of Ireland tithe applotments, 1823–37, a particularly narrow area of expertise, as he cheerfully admitted, but many indeed were the furrows in history where ancestors might lie hidden: the trenches, rather.

  This, Sean explained, was deep-sea diving, the abyssal zone, compared to snorkelling in the shallows of births, deaths and marriages. The records had been rendered in negative, inky black cells flooding the screen of the microfiche reader (itself in this slimline world of laptops and tablets as ungainly as a manatee) and teeming with strange luminescent squiggles that on first encounter bore little relation to actual handwriting. At the ver
y, very bottom, where some parish clerk had tried to make sure he didn’t go over a page, there was barely a peak or a tail to hold on to and the squiggles aspired to the condition of flat line.

  ‘Just think,’ said Sean, ‘this might be the only trace this human being left. All those decades of living, all those dreams and disappointments, reduced to this. It’s got to be worth the effort to coax it up to the surface.’

  Sean kept all his research notes in these little red notebooks that you could pick up for less than a pound in any filling station or newsagent’s, preferred sending letters (written in ballpoint pen) rather than emails to clients, and always made duplicates. (Carbon paper, not photocopy.)

  When, a couple of years after Herbie met him, Sean died – in his sleep, lying on his back the way he always lay, his wife, Hannah, said, as though all these years he had been in training – Herbie went round to the house to pay his respects.

  Hannah had taken Herbie through the kitchen and out to the shed – it more or less filled the small back garden – that had been her husband’s study, where there were scores of red notebooks bound together with elastic bands, dates on the front of the ones on top going back to 1975, six weeks after the shooting in the bar, boxes of his duplicate letters and the letters they were replying to. ‘What on earth am I going to do with them all?’ she asked. Three of the yellow-and-black pencils he always used lay on the little card table, freshly sharpened, perfectly aligned. She picked one of them up, pressed the point against her finger until she grimaced. ‘Don’t think me heartless, but I’m not sure I could bear to have to look at it all.’

  Later he thought he should have suggested straight away that she donate it to the Records Office. But, no, ‘I’ll look after it, if you want,’ was what he said.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to be putting you to a whole lot of trouble.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be.’

  They filled her Fiat Uno, back seat and footwells as well as boot, and still had to go back for more.