Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans [58]
The man in the corner moved, his chair scraping the floor.
They both turned to look but nothing seemed to have changed. Gerry threw his head back and tipped the bottle. The muscles in his neck contracted. Finally, with lips pursed he made a small sucking noise and lowered the bottle. He gave a contented sigh and then his face was still. Fine lines at the corners of his eyes lay slack and open, exposing thin white furrows on his tanned skin. He took another swig.
She followed his lead, allowing the cold carbonated bubbles to rest for a moment on her tongue. The liquid was cool and refreshing. She drank again, this time deeply.
He had begun to pick at the label, digging for a starting point with his thumbnail. A loose spot in the corner gave way and crinkled into tiny damp accordion pleats. “He let me down, you know.” For a brief moment his cocky self was gone and he looked vulnerable as he picked away at the label. His head came up then and he gave a short careless laugh. “It’s all past and gone now. But I sure as hell didn’t see it that way at the time. It was like he got me all fired up to take on the whole bloody world, and more besides, and then when I’m ready to go, he tells me not to be so goddamn foolish. Jesus, at the time I was mad as hell. I wanted to smack him one right there and then.” His fist jerked upwards and tightened into a hard ball. A devious smile spread across his mouth. He regarded the half empty bottle, trying with his thumb to smooth away the wrinkle. “My dreams were all bound to him. I hung on every word that fell from his lips, every move he made, every shift in his imagination. I stored it all away, like a precious stash, deep inside. I was in awe of him.” He paused and drank again.
“Did you have dreams, Nora?” He turned to her, his old jocular mood back.
She shifted but remained silent, feeling a tiny jab of intrusion, like the sudden prick of a needle penetrating a soft fingerpad.
“You’re right,” he said. “Guard your heart. Keep them to yourself.”
But the dream surfaced nonetheless, vivid and uninvited: Alicia Markova, prima ballerina, the breathtaking grace and elegance of the ballet. That was what she dreamed of. She had the physical attributes, the athleticism, the vision, but she had never even owned a pair of pink satin slippers, let alone learned to dance. She had studied pictures of the ballet, committing every detail to memory. She had read every book on ballet in the public library, devouring the words, and today the dream still lived in her imagination, vibrant and lovely as ever, for her eyes only.
“Thuras amac. Do you know this expression?”
She was jolted into the present. “Sorry, yes, of course. Yes, did you say thuras amac? This is Irish. A thuras is a journey and amac means out or outward, so I suppose an outward journey would be the direct translation.”
“Well, down this way when I was a child, it was often used as an expression meaning a bit of a disturbance. Someone might say, ‘Now, that was a right ould thuras amac last night.’”
“Really!”
“Yes, but Thuras Amac was the name he gave to an imaginary ship. The last half hour every day, all hands boarded the Thuras Amac. ‘All aboard,’ he’d call out. ‘Hoist the mainsail, McGrath to look out!’ That was the signal to cover up the windows in the schoolroom with coats.” Gerry laughed a deep throaty laugh that filled the tiny room. “We were pirates