Afterwards (16 page)

Alice turned back to the photos, started sorting through them again. She wasn’t particularly enjoying the conversation. Keith was quiet for a minute or two, but she could feel him watching her, wanting her to look up again.

– Joseph was a squaddie, wasn’t he?

– Yes.

– I’m sorry.

Keith was embarrassed. Alice blinked at him.

– Don’t be. No need. Wasn’t you that said it anyway.

– I know. I mean. I don’t know.

He was smiling about himself now, back-pedalling and failing, and the unnecessary apology left Alice irritated. She looked through the last of the photos, mostly pictures Joseph had taken, and mostly better than her own. Lichen on stone walls, thick twists of seaweed, careful about detail and framing: Alice started a small pile to show him. Martha got up to go to bed and then she was alone with Keith.

He didn’t try to pick up talking again, and she was glad, because the conversation had unsettled her. Not the thought of Joseph drunk and watching porn in exotic locations, it was the idea of Keith’s family adjusting that got to her: puzzling over the strange world inhabited by one of their own. When Joseph told her he’d been in the army, she’d made the same distinction as Keith’s mother, between doing national service and joining up voluntarily. That was in those early weeks when it felt like the more she found out, the more she liked him. Alice couldn’t get the army to fit with Joseph somehow, and it had made her curious.

July weekend, sitting in his kitchen, Sunday papers spread across the table, Drumcree and decommissioning were both on the inside pages. Fewer marchers that year, but still plenty of police there and plenty of tension. Alice had watched Joseph skimming the headlines:
he’d already lifted the page to turn it, but it was as though he couldn’t let go of it, his eyes intent, settling on an article.

– Were you out there, then?

Joseph looked up briefly, then back down at the paper. Pictures of banners and sashes, bowler hats.

– Yeah. For a bit.

He turned the page, but found more of the same, and

Alice persisted.

– What were you reading just then?

– About the IRA. The Garda know where they have most of their arms dumps now.

– Will they ever open them, do you think?

– I could tell you what the article said, if you want.

He didn’t sound defensive, looking at her across the table, eyes clear and friendly enough, but the answer hadn’t come immediately. Difficult to say if she was being told to drop it. Joseph was watching her, as though waiting for her to respond, but he wasn’t exactly opening up the conversation:
if you want
. He flicked through to the back pages.

– The little bit I know is years old anyway.

– You’ll still know more than me, though.

Joseph shrugged and Alice couldn’t tell if he was irritated or what.

– Sorry. Do you get it a lot? People asking you about it?

– Not that much, no. Enough.

Joseph closed the newspaper, slid it away from himself across the table, and Alice thought he wasn’t angry, but he was uneasy with the conversation, resisting, and it was strange to feel like she was pushing him, when she’d hardly asked him anything.

– It’s just the obvious, isn’t it? Ireland. If you’ve been in the army, people think you must have been there, one tour at least.

– Have you had people get angry with you?

– Sometimes. It’s not that, though.

He shrugged.

– It’s fair enough to ask, I reckon. Especially when something big hits the papers. Good Friday, Omagh, Bloody Sunday inquiry. You get so you expect it, but it doesn’t mean I’ve got anything worth offering. Nothing you haven’t heard before, just more information.

Joseph sat for a while, as though trying to decide whether to continue. She wanted him to go on and couldn’t quite believe he would try to leave it at that, when they’d only just started talking. The window was open and Alice could hear kids, kicking a ball around outside, small voices shouting below them in the courtyard. She looked at Joseph across the table and thought he wasn’t enjoying this at all, so she was surprised when he relented: told her he was working in Portugal when the Docklands bomb happened. Sitting in a bar that had English telly when he heard.

– Might even have been an Irish pub, but that’s probably just memory laying it on.

He told her it was the day after, Saturday lunchtime, and most people in there were from home, a lot from London, so the place went quiet after the news came on.

– Windows shattered, office blinds flapping, sheets of paper flying all over the road. You’ll remember what it was like. No one could believe it. IRA ceasefire over anyway, no doubt about that.

A few men in the pub knew him, and that he’d been in the army, and word got round the room fast. Joseph said he could feel them looking at him, expecting, kept his eyes on the screen. Remembered thinking he could say the IRA are animals. Or arseholes for breaking their word.

– Something easy like that, because then at least you’ve said something.

But Joseph said it wouldn’t come out, and he told Alice it wouldn’t have been good enough anyway, not for that crowd. Frank from Glasgow shouted from down the bar: said Joseph was only keeping his mouth shut because he knew putting soldiers over there made everything worse.

– A wind-up, could have been.

Meant to annoy him into talking, probably, but it didn’t work.

– Everyone’s a bit hyper, because of the news, and they all want you to kick something off, you know what they’re thinking: he was over there, so he can’t have
nothing to say, can he? They’re waiting, and you know you’re making it worse for yourself, but there’s still nothing coming.

The news went on, reporters, police and politicians, and Joseph said he tried but he couldn’t find any words or thoughts that made any sense of what they were watching.

– I felt like a wanker. But why say something? For the sake of it? Enough of that goes on already.

Joseph told her Frank had started off an argument down his end of the bar by this time. One man said he agreed with the IRA’s aims but not their methods, and got shouted down. He tried to keep talking through the beer mats aimed at him, and the noise went on like that for a good while longer, until someone else cut in, said he didn’t know what all the bawling was about:

– Only two dead and one was a Paki, so he doesn’t count.

Alice remembered how she had to sit back in her chair when he told her that part, and how Joseph smiled. As though he knew that would get a reaction from her.

– Just another wind-up, probably, but then who could tell?

– In very poor taste anyway.

Joseph nodded, said maybe so, but he’d been grateful for it at the time.

– It got a big enough laugh, and then nobody was too bothered any more, whose side anyone was on, or what I thought about Ireland.

Keith was sorting his receipts again when Alice started packing up her photos. He looked up and nodded to her, affable, his bungled apology and the cause of it already forgotten. Alice had wanted to join in the conversation earlier, but couldn’t, and she’d found the whole thing embarrassing. Keith putting his foot in at the end had been the least of it: far worse was sitting there hoping they wouldn’t ask her too many questions. How Joseph had come to join the army, what it had been like for him or why he’d left. All those things that Keith knew about his brother, and she’d expected to hear about Joseph too. If not in those early weeks with him, then at some stage at least.

Alice had told her grandfather that Joseph used to be in the services: she’d thought it might help him accept Joseph’s offer to redecorate the house. But she hadn’t told her mum and Alan yet, and she knew they might find the idea difficult. Alice had driven past Catterick Garrison with them, two weeks ago in Yorkshire, on their way out to the Dales. They’d made their usual comments about the MOD holding acres of prime walking land hostage: it was a family lament, but Alice had kept quiet. Joseph might agree with her mum and Alan, for all she knew. She had no idea. If she said he’d been in the army, they’d want to hear more about it. Bound to find it strange if she couldn’t tell them, too many gaps she couldn’t fill in for them.

Alice put the photos for Joseph in an envelope, ready to give him when he came round tomorrow. A day off to spend together, and she was looking forward to it, but she couldn’t help thinking the Paki joke had worked for Joseph a second time around too, because she still
didn’t know anything really, other than that he’d been in Ireland. She could remember feeling he’d explained something at the time, but she wasn’t so sure now. Looking back, it seemed more like don’t-ask-me dressed up as a story. Alice didn’t like to think about it that way because it was just too cynical:
and then at least you’ve said something
. A careful way of not revealing anything. Maybe this made her like the staring men in the bar, but Alice couldn’t believe Joseph had nothing worth hearing.

It was over two weeks before Joseph went back to David’s. He had three days clear to do the hallway and they arranged it all without speaking to each other directly. Joseph didn’t plan it that way, but the old man was out both times he tried phoning, so Alice passed on his dates when she visited, and then Joseph was over at Eve’s Sunday dinnertime when David called to confirm. He came home to a short message on his answerphone, which he listened to twice before deleting.

– Sixteenth and seventeenth I’ll be out most of the day. Eighteenth I’d be happy to provide you with lunch.

He didn’t see David at all the first two days. Let himself in and worked steadily, damp curls of wallpaper lifted by the scraper, layers falling away to reveal the grey-pink of the plaster: bare walls for David to find when he got home. Joseph got the papering table out on the second day, relieved to be covering them up again, getting the job over and done. Autumn now, and the sun was lower in the sky, moving around the house more than over, the way it had when Joseph was working here in the summer. Threw longer shadows in the front garden in the afternoon, and he worked with one eye on them, thinking time was getting on and he should get going. Joseph packed up quickly, locking everything back into the garage, untidy, and he felt like a coward, but he didn’t want to see the old man. He left a note for David on
the kitchen table, said his brother-in-law would be coming tomorrow, late morning, to help him hang the paper on the long wall from the landing to the downstairs hall. Not to worry about lunch: they’d sort themselves out with something from the high street, thanks all the same.

David was there in the morning, and Joseph couldn’t decide if he was put out. Pruning the roses by the front path, he raised his secateurs and nodded while Joseph parked up, but the old man didn’t show any sign of coming into the house when Joseph got to the door. Just gone eight, and it was a clear morning, but the front of the house was still in shadow, dull blue and cold with it. Joseph pulled up his shoulders.

– Thought I’d make it an early start. Booked up into November, so I’ll need to get it all finished today.

– Right you are.

Friendly enough. Joseph let himself in and thought this was maybe just normal David behaviour: Alice always said her grandad was hard to call. The old man brought a mug of tea through to him after an hour or so, and made a bit of small talk about the state of the skirting boards, a bit scuffed and bashed near the front door. Joseph said it would be easy enough to do that one section and David listened, polite but not like it mattered that much to him, one way or the other. He kept on like that, cool and cheery, even after Arthur pitched up with Ben, which hadn’t been part of the plan.

– You don’t mind the nipper do you, Mr Bell? My girlfriend, Joey’s sister, she’s working today and I forgot.

Arthur stood in the porch, apologetic, tapping his big forehead with his knuckles. The old man had opened the door and Joseph was standing behind him in the hallway, so he couldn’t see David’s expression, just the hand he offered:

– No, indeed no. Thank you for coming.

Arthur hadn’t been keen on the idea: he didn’t get that many days off at the moment. Said he’d only papered his mum’s spare room before, and the corners didn’t bear looking at, but Joseph persuaded him. He’d be buying pints for a while after this, especially now he’d landed Arthur in trouble with Eve, but it still felt worth it: less chance of the old man talking with someone else around.

Ben shoved his little trucks up and down the hall and Arthur leant back against the banisters, listening while Joseph talked it through. He’d done up to the dado rail upstairs and down, so they just needed to paper above it now: start on the landing and work their way down to the hall. David watched them from the front door, keys and shopping bag in hand, waited until Joseph had finished and then said:

– I’ll be back early afternoon.

There wasn’t much morning left, but they set themselves up on the landing anyway. Ben got hungry and narky before they could get going properly with the papering, and he shouted when neither of them would listen to him, too busy pushing the paper up and down the wall, matching the pattern, to notice his upraised arms.

Joseph lifted him up onto his shoulders for the walk down the road to the chippy. Ben chatted and swayed while his uncle kept a firm grip on his calves: easy to make him happy. Joseph felt himself smiling too, properly, relaxing. Glad to have an uncomplicated conversation with Arthur in a café, away from the house for an hour or so. They made their way back along the suburban pavements. The town hall clock struck the halfhour and Ben was falling asleep, his mouth open, arms draped over his father’s shoulders. Joseph took Arthur’s car keys from him, got a blanket and the baby monitor out of the boot. They laid Ben down in the front room on the sofa, moved quietly up the stairs to carry on working.

David came home shortly after three, but he didn’t call up to them. They heard his movements downstairs, amplified crackles on the baby monitor. He was in the kitchen first, unpacking the shopping, and Joseph, listening, heard packets and tins put into cupboards, feet walking into the living room, a chair pulled back from the dining table, and then newspaper pages unfolding and turning. A little later there was a young boy’s cough and Arthur put his paste brush down mid-stroke, headed for the stairs.