Read Online Fly in the Ointment by Anne Fine - Free Book Online Page B

he’d vanishedfrom Malachy’s life as swiftly and cleanly as he’d gone from mine. But who was to say the two of them hadn’t been in touch again over the last couple of years? Wherever it was that Stuart was living now, he might have come back, even for a single day. Perhaps, like me, he’d spotted Malachy hanging around in some doorway or waiting for a bus. He could have stopped to speak. And if the months of distance had worked some magic, the two of them might have even strolled off together to share an amiable pint. A thousand possibilities ran through my mind and, hating my own father as I did for his stern, calculated cruelty in not telling me about my mother’s death, I couldn’t bear to think that someone else might one day claim I’d treated them in the same monstrous fashion. I’d live in terror, knowing that one day my bell might ring and Stuart would be on the doorstep. ‘For God’s sake, Lois! Malachy was my son too! How could you not have tried to let me know?’
    I thought things through till I was dizzy. I
wouldn’t
look for Stuart. I would rather
die
. The craven coward he’d turned out to be must pay the price for sloping off without a word. I didn’t
care
. Then, in an instant, all my fine reasons for doing nothing would be swept away in waves of shamed embarrassment as I imagined my former husband standing on my doorstep, listening to me try to defend them. Afterall, the police had tracked me down. Who was to say they couldn’t find Stuart just as easily? A visit to his old workplace or a few phone calls to other government departments was all it would take. How could I kid myself there weren’t a dozen ways in which, if the situation were reversed, I would feel justified in thinking that Stuart ought to have looked for me?
    The weekend passed in a fog of guilt, then misery, then guilt again. I listened to the clock tell cold grey time. By Monday morning I knew I should be ringing Mr Hanley to tell him that I wouldn’t be coming in – no, not today and not tomorrow either. And probably not the day after that. I’d pick up the phone and stand there, paralysed, until the welcoming silence turned to a warning buzz. I couldn’t make the call. Oh, I could face his kindness, but not his astonishment. ‘Lois? Oh, Lois, I’m
mortified
. I didn’t even realize you
had
a son. Oh, Lois, we’re all so
sorry
.’ Before he’d even put down the phone there’d be a puzzled look on Audrey’s face. ‘Lois? A
son
?’ She’d turn to Dana for the confirmation that would appal them all: ‘I’m as surprised as you two. All of this time! And yet she never even mentioned him. What a strange thing!’
    The sympathy of decent people so profoundly shocked would be intolerable. And so on Monday morning I got out of bed, put on my plain grey skirtand ruffled blouse and went to the office as usual. The sun shone gloriously through the wide, freshly washed window. There was a heron standing in the reeds. I tried the old, old trick to put off anguish. ‘Wait until after work,’ I begged my sorrows and strains. ‘You’ve had the whole weekend. You’ll have the whole of tomorrow. Please let me off for just an hour or two so I can rest in work.’ Desperate for the unfeeling clarity of numbers, I stared at shimmering columns. Nothing made sense. I checked things over and over and, even when sure I was right, still had to go back to check that the calculation I’d done was the one that was needed.
    A shadow fell across my desk. ‘Lois?’ Trevor Hanley was staring. ‘Lois, you’re crying.’
    He laid a finger on my paperwork, then held it out for me to inspect. ‘That’s a tear, Lois.’ It wasn’t a question. And yet, as though to offer me the benefit of the doubt, he licked the tip of his finger.
    It was a gesture of such intimacy that I was