By Deirdre Shanahan.
The mirror says he’ll do. More than do. He’s made an effort though whether it’s in the right way he can’t tell. Too formal or not? On stage, years fell away and he knew he looked pretty good for his age. In real life he’s revealed. He’ll show he still cares. She’ll see him as he really is. As he can be. It’s not too late.
He runs through the tangle of streets north of Oxford Circus but has to walk west for the church with the steeple. The place she mentioned. He’s early but doesn’t care. Once in his life he should be early. Which door? Smoky grey glass hides something, maybe people. Part of a hotel and at the main entrance a gathering of suited men and women in heels. He tries a door but it is locked, though a smaller one falls open at his pressure and he tips in.
“Yes, I am.”
The manager approaches. “A table for one?”
“No. Two please.”
The manager leads him to a table by the window and lays down a menu. Night in here, late October afternoon out there. With the blinds down he feels ill-dressed. Too casual. Too smart. And threads on the trouser seam are loose. A nimble blonde darts between tables, her skirt too short when she stretches to lay out the cutlery. A student or actress when she’s off-duty? But someone should tell her. He opens the menu. Low muzak. He thinks of a pub in Manchester, where eighties tunes thudded out and someone started a fight. Loud, craggy blokes thrashed each other to the sounds of shredding guitars.
The waitress smiles. “Ready to order?”
“Not quite. I’m waiting for someone.”
“Sure. Take your time.”
He hates to disappoint and wishes he could say more, for her to linger. A clatter of footsteps. Two older women and a man with a toddler. The man shoots to the back, heading perhaps for the toilets.
The door opens and an older woman enters. But behind her. Her. In blue and lavender under a black leather jacket. Short boots. Dark suede.
“Hello.” He rises.
“So you found the place.”
“Of course.” He pecks her on the cheek. “Why not? I live in Islington now.”
“No longer the wilds of Somerset.” She smiles. Her face softens. She sits before he does, settling herself. In charge. But her hair is shorter. A blunt cut with a fringe. And a different tone. She has done something he can’t work out. “You look the same as always,” she says. “Pretty good.”
“Is that good or bad?” He tempts a smile. Her necklace of green beads shimmers. Her mother’s. Is it lent or has it been given?
“I was surprised to hear from you.” She stands the menu in front of her.
“But you don’t mind?” He won’t let this happen in future: looking her up online, ringing an old pal for her mother’s number to get hers as he had changed phones.
“Course not. You don’t interrupt my life. I get on with it.”
“I thought, as I’d moved here, I should let you know. In case, well, you need anything.” In his head he hears a startled, mocking laugh, but she smiles. “Will we eat?” Is it lunch or brunch or even heading to tea-time? He doesn’t know her taste, never has. When she was a kid he’d made burgers with lentils.
“I don’t want much.”
“You’re not hungry?”
“I’ll eat later.” She scans the menu.
“Have something.”
“All right, then. A croissant.”
When the waitress returns he orders for her and a brioche roll with egg for himself. His gut is queasy but eating might help.
“And I have to give you this.” He pulls out the notes.
“I don’t want it.” She presses his hand closed before he can give her anything.
“I owe you. And it’s not even with interest.”
“I don’t need it.”
Her words stab. She earns more in a week than he does in a month but it gives him a kind of pleasure to think she is independent. He will make it up, though. He will.
“You look well,” he says.
“Thanks. I feel well.”
“Maybe you’ve been away or are you always working?”
“I did go away. For a week in the summer. To Cornwall.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Portleven. Isn’t that near where you lived with that woman?”
“Who? Oh. I think so. It was long ago.” He pulls the napkin close. A stark white bandage.
The woman who played the dulcimer. Her warm brown eyes beguiling.
“Here we are.” The waitress hovers with two plates, an aroma of eggs and a sweetness.
He used to tell her about his guitars. Tested out tunes and delighted her when he changed the words: “my fairest girl” became “my lovely daughter.” A foolish thing, even then.
She eats little but there’s a greater chance of a meal later. They’ll find a cozy bar or a vibrant one with music. Drink together like old buddies. Maybe cocktails if she prefers. He’ll show her the parts of London he’s discovered. If she doesn’t know them already, which is more than likely. They’ll go on and stroll. Find a neat little restaurant. Italian or French.
“What was her name? Ramona? Lamorna?” She fiddles with tabs of salt.
“Mona.” He watches her face, her slim nose and violet eyes.
“Yes. But you never married. Her or any of them. You only wanted mum as your wife.”
“Your mother’s doing fine without me. Teaching. And you are.” He twitches the napkin up on his lap. “I tried to be there.”
“While gadding about the country.” She smiles.
“My work. I have to.” He shifts, hot under her gaze. The seats are too small, too hard. He should have sat where they are upholstered. He thought of the morning he and Mona woke to her little peering eyes at the bedroom door. He was more shocked than she might’ve been and dragged a sheet across himself to rise and slam the door shut. He’d dressed in a hurry, wracked by the fear that she’d report back to her mother and the fissure would widen. But in the weeks that followed he detected only continual silence. Until the weekend visits fizzled out. His fault, he knew. He was never in the right place.
He stabs the lettuce. Brioche. What did it mean? The sweetness is too much, anyway. But she should eat. She’s fuller in the face than last time but with a frail beauty as if she needs protection. And he wonders how it happened, in front of his eyes. The last year or rather fourteen months he’d been tied down to tours. Weeks flooded past. He hadn’t meant not to call but there was always a pressing demand. A clash of dates. Accommodation not fixed. The logistics of leaving one town for another. He’d missed her last birthday and, he suspected, also the one before. But it wasn’t his fault he had to work on her graduation day. The twenty quid he’d borrowed still bit. But he’d repay her. Make things straight. Show her. Give her a good time.
“She’s okay now. But she had to take on three different jobs.”
“Three?”
“She wasn’t likely to tell you.”
“I know she was put out.” He doesn’t tell her that Mona ended up leaving him after a year, taking his tunes and sheet music, for a man who ran a string of holiday flats. Someone else came after her, and a couple of others over the next decade, one or two resembling her mother, but whether it was because of that or not he couldn’t settle. “Sorry.” The word lands between them like a stone. He weakens, sliding into another being as he tries to be as he was: the young father, joking, entertaining his daughter. “I can make it up.”
“Yeah, right.” She sniffs. “Oh, eggs.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. The smell. I’m pregnant.” She smooths her hand over her stomach. She doesn’t look pregnant. And she is young. But she is, he realizes, the age her mother had been.
“Oh. When are you due?”
“Early next year. I wonder where you’ll be then.”
“London, I guess.”
“You haven’t gigs booked?”
“Not yet. But you? What part of London are you in?”
“Davan and I are in West Hampstead.” She takes a delicate bite and a dusting of sugar falls from the croissant.
“Does he work with you?”
“He’s in finance. A different company. But we met at a work thing.”
“I wish—” He blinks. “I hope—”
“Please. Don’t get teary.”
Her life has gone on without him. She is older. Different. But he will be. And he will be more present for this child. He tussles around the notion. Sun leaks through the blinds, throwing shadows like knives across the floor. Too hot. He has to remove his jacket. The restaurant is filling. People sit nearby.
“What’ll you do afterwards?”
“Go back to work. There’s a crèche. But much’ll depend on Davan’s work.”
“Has your mother met him?”
“She likes him very much.”
“And you’re happy? Of course you are.”
“He’s lovely. Thoughtful. Caring.”
Qualities her mother would say he lacked in himself. Brass rails burnish in the sun. A bright afternoon out there and he wonders if he’ll see the two of them again, the three as one. As at her First Communion. The spring before the break-up. Like a bride back then and now the age of being one.
“I’ll be better in future,” he says and she stifles a laugh. “What’s wrong? What d’you think?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think. You’ll do as you want. You won’t phone for months or make it easy to get in touch.”
“It won’t be like before. I’m not touring so much. I’ll be based more in one place. We’ll be able to meet.” He’d inch closer. He would. Sneak up like a fieldmouse. “I want to make it up.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
He couldn’t tell for what. His words? Himself for being there? Her quickness of mind slid and confused him.
“This year I’ll be around. You’ll see. We’ll meet again soon?”
“Why not. But you haven’t my work number.”
“Right.” He scrabbles in his pocket for a piece of paper, tumbling out sweet wrappers, a ball of fluff, a button. He flattens the back of the receipt from a drycleaner and searches for a pen.
“You’re going to lose that.” She checks through her bag and hands him a business card. “Only I have to go away.”
“Well,” he says, “soon as you’re back.” He’ll show her. Take her somewhere she likes.
“It’ll be a while. I’m going to Lagos.” She pushes back from the table as though it has grown between them.
“Nigeria?”
“We’re opening a new office.” She rises and his eyes blur. “We’ve had a nice time, but I’m due elsewhere.” He wants to cling to her. “I’ll call you.” She stretches out her arm and he thinks it is to shake hands. Businesspeople striking a deal. But she hugs him and he wraps his arms around her. Her. His missing part. He is heavy and ragged with time. So much happening while not happening within the scope of his embrace.
She strides across the marble floor to the door and a wind blows through him. He is slowed. Emptied. The food was too much. Or he has eaten too little. He is hungry and full at the same time and sits and kicks at something under the table. Bends to see what, bends to retrieve the shiny blue case of a lipstick.
He runs to the door and is out, passing down the street between the crowd, to see her walk arm-in-arm with a man who is tall and wears a striking dark tailored coat with a back vent.
“Ellen,” he calls out.
The man glances over his shoulder. A softly black face. High cheekbones. Then he turns and leans into her as they continue walking, laughing.
“You missed her?” The waitress holds open the door. “I can leave it in lost property?”
“No. I’ll keep it.”
“You’ll see her again?”
“Yes. Of course.” He must. He would. In his pocket the lipstick is the size of a lighter and he thinks of how he always had a couple with him, especially going to gigs with the chance of leaving one aside in error.
At the till the waitress rings up the bill and the receipt ruffles out. He pays and leaves. Outside, people rush past to bars and theatres and once he might have wanted to do the same. Now he wants to run as though he’s the one to have left something, only not behind but in front of him. A shadow. A ghost of the future or of what he’d hoped would be. He’d been pulled up and jostled by her news. She was a little taller or chubbier. Thinner or with greyness beneath her eyes. She was running ahead of him as she always had and how could he ever catch up. She’d passed out of his life and into her own. All he could do was hold on to what he had.
Go home. Home is what he has. It won’t change or run off. On a bus heading north, he is free of other people and the oncoming evening and he stops three stops before his own. The small weight of the lighter burns in his pocket when he checks for change. The Turkish supermarket is busy and Atlantic Stores which sells everything is still open. The late-night barber that never seems to close is empty. Inside would be warm and he’d share chat with the men but he lets it go. He wants people. But he wants his own. He slows to drink in what’s left of the day, of the night. He used to get into things quick and was out fast. Wasn’t that the way when you felt you hadn’t enough time even though you were young.
Chill air swipes his skin and he pulls up his collar. He might have to wait a while to hear. But he had let weeks and months elapse in the past. Now notes rise and filter in and he knows the tune, hears the chords with clarity. He sang it to her, that old song, when she was small, as mournful and discordant as it was. It used to make her cry so he stopped. But the strains of lilting chords rise and then sink, and linger, and won’t let go; they won’t let go. And look: here in the high road, pressed beyond the height of tower blocks and offices, up where the city flings its light, stars are visible. Almost white. He knows songs about stars, too, but they’re festive, all too festive. Wintery and it’s best to keep seasonal, so he won’t use them yet. But stars, the stars. Look at them all. Pressed back beyond darkness, he’s heard there are more stars than one can see. Packed in. Hidden. And he wonders if they also shine out away from him, through waves and curves of constellations, into the galaxy’s farthest reaches where their light is wasted.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deirdre Shanahan was a writer of fiction. Her début novel, Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind, was published by Bluemoose Books in 2019, and her short story collection, Carrying Fire and Water, was published by Splice in 2020. This story was one of two she was preparing for publication when she passed away unexpectedly in August 2026.
