“I’m Mark Kelly. I was in the taxi.”
She stayed still and reeled within. “Oh?” She thought she should add, “Perhaps you had better come in,” but her tongue had turned to sponge in her mouth. She chewed at it cautiously. Her mouth filled with saliva and bile.
“Excuse me.” She squirmed, threw open the catch, dashed past him and vomited thickly on the lawn.
Mark fell to his knees beside her and clapped her on the back—a bit heavily, she remembered thinking.
“Get it all up, love. Nothing to be ashamed of. You’d had a fuck of a night.”
She spewed and among it all came the questions she wanted to ask. They crackled inside her skull, scored lines in a dot to dot that never quite articulated itself. Mark drew his arms around her thin cottony blouse, pulled her into the illustrated warmth of his body, fed her a documentary, supplication, apologies. All of which she followed only vaguely.
“You’ll be all right. Any more? Come on, have another heave.”
She did—and wondered at herself for trusting him in this most vulnerable of moments on her mother’s lawn. Sheer bile and water welled up in her stomach. She pulled with both hands at Mark. “Mark? Is that your name?”
She felt him nod.
“Look after me for a bit, Mark.”
He whispered against her hair, which, she felt disgusted to realise, was slicked up with spew. He whispered that he was already looking after her.
A few minutes later he hauled her indoors and snecked her mother’s door after them.
THEIR SECOND CAFÉ THAT LUNCHTIME WAS VERY SMALL AND FULL APART from one cramped table in the corner, and decorated with a display of novelty tea cosies that were ‘available upstairs’. They squeezed themselves in, Sam brushing irritably at the scum of breadcrumbs, dried gravy and sugar crusts that grimed the tablecloth. “It’s horrible in here,” she hissed.
“Stop talking so loud. They’ll hear you.”
She fell to watching a family group across the aisle; a young couple with aged parents. The old man was stiffly formal in hat and coat, consenting to be taken out at Christmas. Neither he nor his wife looked as if they got out much. His daughter-in-law scrutinised the menu on his behalf.
“Lasagne, Dad?”
He wouldn’t look at her, nor modulate his voice to café-polite level. “I don’t know what the hell that is.”
“It like…pasta.”
“We like things with gravy,” said his wife.
“I don’t want gravy when I’m out,” he shouted. Sam thought he must be off his head. Inadvertently she caught his eye but looked away again. The old man dropped his voice to add, “I won’t have anyone’s gravy but Mother’s. No one else can do gravy, as far as I’m concerned.”
His wife glowed with pride.
Sam wondered what her father would have been like by now. Loud, oblivious, wedged into a café in out-of-date clothes, shouting about gravy?
Mark was ordering some coffee. He asked what she wanted. She shrugged and let him plump for toasted sandwiches.
Peggy knew what lasagne was. She had moved with the times. It was something middle-class, something you didn’t get years ago because it was too foreign. Package trips with Iris. Her horizons had been broadened like anything.
“They’re just so nauseating together,” she said. “Peggy and Iris.”
“They might think that about us,” Mark shrugged. They had been through this conversation before.
“But we’re married. We’re allowed to be nauseating.” She watched his jaw muscles work in irritation, denting the pattern of his face.
“They’re happy, right? Nothing you can say or do will spoil that, so leave it be, Sam.”
“I can’t help wondering what Dad would think about them.”
“Just because he’s gone, you can’t make him the arbiter of all taste and moral judgement.”
The waitress was unloading their coffee cups and milk jugs. “The management apologises if your coffee tastes like tea,” she said, but remained unheard.
Sam warned, “Leave my dad out of this.”
“You dug him up again.”
Her hand shot out, upsetting the milk. “Fuck!”
The waitress frowned. “I’ll fetch a Jay cloth. It’s a shame, wasting good milk.”
“I’m sorry I said that, Sam. But your dad isn’t here to judge any more, and he hasn’t been since you were fourteen. What would he think of me? By your reckoning, he wouldn’t approve of me, my tattoos or my past.”
“He wasn’t a complete fascist. And he needn’t have known anything about what you used to be.”
“So he needn’t know anything about what his wife is now. Your mam needs what she needs. Leave her to it, love.”
Sam took the proffered Jay cloth and swabbed the table herself. “I don’t want any funny business from those two in my house on Christmas Eve.”
“IS THERE NO ONE HERE TO LOOK AFTER YOU?”
Sam stood swaying by the sink, in case she felt ill again. Weakly she pointed out where everything was kept for coffee. Mark made two strong cups.
“I live with my mam. She’s out. She doesn’t know about any of this.”
“You must be in a right state.” He gave her a mug, which stung her fingers. “Let’s go and sit down.”
Mark sat on the corner of the settee, under a shaded lamp whose orange light turned his tattoos a puzzled grey. He nudged Sam’s knees, got her to put her feet up.
“When will your Mam come back?” She wants looking after, he thought. Besides, when her mother does come back, I’ll have some explaining to do. I’m a complete stranger.
“She probably won’t, till morning. She’ll stay with Iris. I’ve told you that once.”
“Oh, yeah.” He was thinking about Tony, driven home in a police car after visiting the outpatients and the station. His taxi left on the roadside to be towed away, with vomit on the back seat and blood up the front fender. It was his livelihood and he had most likely lost it tonight.
“I’ve thrown up too,” Mark said, and Sam looked at him with muzzy interest.