Table Talk

by Ed Walsh

It was after his wife got killed that my father's brother visited us. I was thirteen at the time, and (from what I understood) she was driving their car when she came off a straight stretch of road out in the sticks and hit a telegraph pole. There was nobody else in the car, and no witnesses, no explanation for what happened beyond her just losing control of the thing. As an incidental, the pole being hit meant that the people on the surrounding farms were without telephone conversation for a day or two. How I know that, I don't know.

Although I knew of them, I had never met him or his wife. I knew he was called Gabriel and she was Rita because I would hear their names mentioned around Christmas when cards had to be sent. They had a daughter, Charmaine, whom I also never met.

He lived in a town some seven hundred miles to the south, and it was too far and too expensive for them to go down for the funeral, so they sent a wreath through. A few months later, he came up. I don't recall whether he visited specially for us or whether he had business in the area, but I knew he was there when I saw the car outside – a Porsche 911. I had no huge interest in cars, but I knew that Porsches weren't a common sight in the streets where we lived, ours being Cedar Street. Even though we lived on the edge of an old mill town, all the streets in our area had those country-sounding names – Rowanberry, Pine, Elder –  that painted a picture of a place different from the one we lived in.

Gabriel – Uncle Gabriel, I suppose – had his own bathroom fittings company, and I knew they were rolling in it. We weren't poor by any stretch, my father was pretty high up in the sanitation department and was active in the union, and my mother worked part-time at the library on Ash Street, so we always had food on the table, and we had a week at the coast every year. But the way they described this Gabriel – six-bedroomed house on a good chunk of land, holidays in the Caribbean, top-of-the-range cars – it was obvious that he was better off by a long way. Not that it seemed to bother my parents much; they seemed happy enough with the life they had, more than.  

 ‘So, this is my one and only nephew, is it,’ he said when we were introduced.  ‘Pleased to meet you, young man.’ He stood and shook my hand. He was a casual kind of rich guy – scuffed Levi jacket, jeans, t-shirt, and cowboy boots. He had his hair pulled back into a ponytail, which at that time was pretty unusual. Looking at him, nobody would have taken him for somebody who sold bathroom fittings; he looked more like he could be in a rock band.

Another strange thing was that he referred to my father as Twinks. It was a small shock to hear , a nickname for my father, especially a nickname like that – Laurie or Larry I could have taken better, but Twinks? Apparently, it was something that came from their childhood. My father didn't seem to have any nickname for Gabriel; he was just Gabriel. And the way they looked and sounded, you wouldn't have taken them to come from the same family. My father was a suit-and-tie kind of fellow; he even wore a tie around the house – a habit that my mother used to rib him about. She was more the hippy-style, cheesecloth shirts and long skirts, a coloured bandana now and again. I suppose they must have looked like an odd couple, but I saw them every day, so they didn’t seem so odd to me.

After we were introduced, I did what I usually did which was go up to my room and get my homework done; I didn't like to have it hanging over me. I could never do what some of my friends did and rush it off at the last minute, sometimes on their way to the school on the morning it had to be handed in. I had to get it done and to the best of my ability. Even then, I had a notion of where I wanted to go with my life – something in the writing line, maybe journalism – and I knew that getting homework done on time, and to a decent standard, might go some way to getting me there.

Even though I was alone in my room (doing whatever I had to do), and even though I couldn't hear them clearly, I could feel the presence of another person in the house, the vibrations of a foreign voice. I don't know whether I had a bad feeling about him then, or whether I've just invented that feeling since.

Anyhow, that evening, after I finished my homework, we ate. Gabriel sat opposite me and smiled as if we were (or might become) friends. My mother had made a chicken pie, which was one of her few specialties; domestic stuff wasn’t one of her main interests. They reminisced for a while, at least my father took a step or two down memory lane. He mentioned names from their past, people they had known when they were kids, but Gabriel didn’t have a good word to say about any of them. According to him, everyone they remembered from their childhood was either a layabout, a crook, or a pervert. I knew some of the names since some of their kids were my friends, and I knew that they weren’t layabouts or crooks or perverts. They may not have been perfect, but they weren't any of those things.

Then he asked me about how I was doing in school, whether I had a girlfriend. (Pretty good and No, not yet being the answers to those questions.) They had the radio on in the background, and something about Kinsella came up - Kinsella, who was then running for president.

‘Damned communist,’ Gabriel said. ‘Who the hell would vote for him?’

‘Me,’ my father said. ‘And he’s not a communist, he’s a socialist.’ My parents were Kinsella supporters and gave out leaflets for the party.

‘Communist…socialist…what the hell’s the difference?’

‘A big difference,’ my father said. ‘You want me to explain?’

‘Let’s not,’ my mother said. ‘We all have our opinions, but we don’t have to go shouting them from the rooftops.’

There was a kind of awkward silence for a while, and then Gabriel said, ‘So, what about you, young man? What are you planning to do with your life?’

‘Me? I’m not quite sure yet.’

‘He’s hoping to get into journalism,’ my father said. By that time, I had started to get some stuff in the school magazine, stuff which I'm sure I wouldn't want to look back at now but was pleased about then.

‘Well, whatever you do, you’ve got to do it by your own efforts,’ Gabriel said. ‘Nobody’s going to give you a leg-up. That's why I got out of this place at the earliest. People ‘round here had no ambition, and I’m not so sure how much has changed on that score. I got out of here long ago with a plan to make something of myself, and in all modesty, I think that’s what I’ve done.’

From what I knew he had moved south at nineteen to make his fortune and had done just that in the bathroom fittings game. He had three showrooms around the town he lived in. For some reason, though, he looked at my mother when he gave his little speech about making a success of his life.

‘Yeah, you did well, Gabriel,’ she acknowledged. ‘We’re all pleased for you. That’s right, isn’t it, Laurence? We’re pleased for Gabriel?’

‘Yeah, sure. Of course,’ my father answered, but I don’t think he had been listening too closely.

‘You'd do well to do the same, young fellow,’ Gabriel said. ‘That's if you have a mind to make anything of yourself.’

In the very short time I was in his company – a few hours – I noticed that habit he had of making big statements as if they were the result of long and serious thinking. ‘Good pie,’ he said in a way that sounded like a solemn and important verdict on my mother's cooking, one that only a fool would contradict. I’ve noticed since that people like Gabriel tend not to be contradicted…just avoided.

I was struck though by the consequence of what he was saying, which seemed to be that by staying put in the town of his birth—in fact, living in the district next to where they had grown up—and working for the sanitation department, my father had not made a success of his life, that he had long fallen short of the Porsche 911 and holiday place on some (or other) Caribbean island. Even worse, he had not even aimed for those things. My father smiled at me and winked, making light of his alleged failures.

When I had finished eating, I asked to be excused. ‘Been good to break bread with you, young man,’ Gabriel said.

Our main room was kind of L-shaped – they all were in our block - and I moved around and out of sight to read my book, which at that time was probably something by Jack London or one of those fellows, maybe Hemingway. The fact was I always had my head in a book, and people tended to forget I was around. So, that evening they got to talking about things they wouldn't have talked about if they knew I was in the room, and pretty soon the talk turned to Gabriel's wife who had been killed. First, they agreed that it was a bad business, her coming off the road like that. Then, I heard Gabriel say, ‘Maybe I shouldn't say this, but what the hell.’ By that time, the three of them had drunk a fair amount of red wine, something my father wasn't used to in the least. ‘The thing was, we weren't happy. In fact, we were planning to live apart when it happened. We should have lived apart from the off. Should never have met.’

‘We didn't know that, Gabriel,’ my father said. ‘We didn’t know you two were unhappy.’

‘Why would you? Let's face it, we're not what you'd call a close family, are we? Barely seen each other these past twenty-five years.’

‘I know, but we each knew where the other was, didn’t we?’ my father said. ‘We knew where help was if we needed it.’

 ‘I’ve never needed help,’ Gabriel said. ‘And anyway, would you have turned to me if you needed help?’

My father didn't answer, so I supposed the answer to that question was a no.

 ‘You boys finished?’ my mother asked. ‘Can I get either of you anything else?’

‘No, I’d best be turning in,’ my father said.

‘Yes, you go up,’ my mother said. ‘I’ll just clear things away.’

‘G’night, Twinks.’

‘Night, Gabriel.’

I should have shown myself at that point, let them know I was still in the room, but I didn’t. I just stayed where I was and didn’t make a sound; it might have been the aspiring journalist in me, sensing a story. Whatever it was, I hardly dared to breathe. After my father went up, Gabriel said. ‘How about a nightcap, Laura, for old times’ sake?’

‘Ok,’ she said. ‘Just the one.’

I heard her go into the kitchen and come back. I heard the glasses being put down on the table, then picked up and clinked together. It seemed like a long time before anybody said anything. Then my mother spoke.

‘What you said before, about Rita…You couldn’t have been so unhappy for all that time, could you? I mean, that’s a long time to be unhappy.’

‘We weren't happy, and you know why, Laura. You know why I never could be happy at least.’

‘Let’s not, Gabriel, not after all this time. We made our beds.’

‘Maybe. I can’t help wondering though, how things might have turned out. What the hell was I thinking of? Why in God’s name did me and Rita waste each other's lives like that? Why do people do that to each other, to themselves?’

‘I take it that’s a rhetorical question.’

‘I only ever loved one person, Laura. And you know who that was…is.’

‘Let's not, Gabriel. We've got other people to think about.’

 ‘I haven't. Not now.’

‘Yes, you have. You've got Charmaine, haven't you? She wouldn't like to hear you talking like this.’

‘Charmaine?’ He made a sound that suggested a laugh. ‘Charmaine thinks I'm a joke. You know what she calls me, Mister Tappy. Says it to my face, as well. And she doesn't say it like it’s a joke; she says it with contempt. What she doesn't seem to appreciate is that it was taps and suchlike that paid for her fancy education, so it’s not the insult she thinks it is. Never even heard from her since the funeral.’

‘She's got children, hasn't she? If she's got children, they take up a lot of time.’

‘Maybe. You never think about what you might have had, though? If you'd given me another chance? Have you seen the machine I've got sitting out there? Instead, you've got this. You never wonder?’

I imagined him looking around the room, full of books and baggy old furniture, my father's banjo propped up in a corner. I tried to imagine the place he lived in; for some reason, I imagined large, sunlit rooms with bearskin rugs and a swimming pool, although I couldn't recall them ever referring to one (or bearskin rugs come to that). They had never been there. I suppose it was just my idea of luxury, an idea I must have gotten from films and books.

‘No, I never wonder,’ she said. ‘It’s been good to see you again, Gabriel. I do mean that. But just because Rita's gone, that doesn't change anything. Pointless complaining about things now. Pointless for either of us. It’s too late for any of that. And I hope you don't mind me mentioning it, but I'd be grateful if you didn't refer to Laurence as Twinks. I’ll just clear up here.’

‘As you wish,’ he said.

I heard their chairs being pushed back, and then silence; a picture came into my mind that I didn't want to have there. I heard him going up, and her clearing stuff away, switching the lamps and radio off, and then closing a window. Luckily, there was nothing to switch off in my part of the room, so she didn't have to come through, and I didn’t have to pretend to be asleep. When she went up, I sat there in the dark for a good while, waiting for the right moment to go quietly to my bed, to try and make some sense of what I had heard them say to each other.

The next day was a Saturday, so I lay in bed late. When I heard the goodbyes, I looked down from my window and watched them, their arms round each other’s waists, then waving as he drove out of the street. I never saw him again after that and, apart from hearing that he had died, never heard any more about him.

We had breakfast, as normal, and my father did what he usually did on a Saturday morning, which was (if he didn't need to be out on union business) read the paper and mess about on his banjo; I read whichever comic I had delivered then – either The Hotspur or The Victor; and my mother (if it wasn't one of her Saturday mornings at the library) did whatever needed to be done in the house.

For some reason, I remember that we went to the cinema that evening and saw, I think, the second Godfather. In the cinema and out on the street, they held hands, just like they always did. And they laughed like they always did. It seemed that things hadn't changed at all for them like they had for me.

BIO: Ed Walsh. He is a writer of so far unpublished novels and occasionally published  shorter fiction. He lives in the north-east of England.