Fly in the Ointment Read Online Free Page A

his hands rooting nervously in the depths of his pockets and thought of how often they’d filched money from mine.
    But the longer he stood there, the harder it would be to deny him whatever he wanted. And maybe he had brought a message from his father. So in the end I left Soraya holding fort, and crossed the street. ‘Hello, Malachy.’
    â€˜Hi, Mum.’
    â€˜Feeling all right?’
    â€˜Bit groggy,’ he admitted. He trawled through what little was left of his brain for proper manners. ‘How are you?’
    â€˜I’m fine,’ I told him brightly. ‘Have you seen your father?’
    â€˜No,’ he said, looking behind him anxiously. ‘Why? Is he here?’
    â€˜Not just this minute,’ I assured him. ‘I was just wondering if he had looked you up at all in the last couple of days.’
    I couldn’t tell from Malachy’s blank look if he was even trying to remember. I pushed a little harder. ‘So you haven’t seen him recently? No news? No notes or letters?’
    â€˜No.’ Out of sheer habit he started to forge excuses for failing to live up to what he took to be some expectation of mine. ‘But I’ve been moving about a bit . . .’
    â€˜Oh, yes?’ I recalled Mrs Kuperschmidt warning me not to appear too curious about his life on the streets. (‘It shades all too easily into seeming to sympathize with a choice that he’s making for himself.’) But I did try one question. ‘What, with that nice girl?’
    â€˜Which nice girl?’
    â€˜You know.’ I touched the side of my nose. ‘The one with the red jewel here.’
    â€˜Oh, her.’ He shrugged. ‘No, she’s gone now.’
    â€˜What, home?’ (More fool me.)
    â€˜London.’
    â€˜Oh, dear.’ I felt the old heart-sinking chill. There is no fighting this demon. Certainly no winning, evenfor girls who mean well. Unwisely pushing Mrs Kuperschmidt’s strictures aside, I asked my son, ‘And what about you?’
    Down came the scowl like a shutter. ‘What
about
me?’
    It all came back in force. The screaming and the tears. The hammering on doors at two in the morning. The brazen deceit and petty thievery. The angry phone calls from other parents. The visits from police and meetings with social workers.
    Never again. Mrs Kuperschmidt was right to have helped me make the decision crystal clear to him: stay clean, or stay out. I nodded back towards the dry-cleaner’s. ‘I’d better be getting back.’
    He shook his head like a dog scrambling out of water. I wondered if he was trying to rattle his brain into some different pattern in which his reason for showing up would become clear to him again. If so, it worked. ‘Mum, can you lend me some money?’
    It was another of Mrs Kuperschmidt’s rules, but still I broke it. While I was rooting in my purse, I told him reproachfully, ‘I bought you and that girl two really nice sandwiches yesterday, but by the time I came out of the supermarket, you had already gone.’
    â€˜Yesterday?’
    He clearly hadn’t the faintest memory. I tippedmore money into his grubby hand than he expected and, while he was still hunched over, greedily counting it, I hurried off back to my own life.

4
    WHO WOULD HAVE thought a husband of nearly twenty years could vanish with so little fuss? For days on end I went round waiting for the phone to ring. Nothing. I have my pride. I didn’t want to be the one to make the call. I would have scoured his letters for clues but not a single envelope that bore his name fell on the mat.
    That set alarm bells ringing. He’d left the paperwork to do with the house, the mortgage loan and the utilities. But I defy any woman to sit alone night after night, however contentedly, and not think about her future. After a week I borrowed Soraya’s mobile to ring his. I had intended to break off the call as soon