Page 61 of Love Unlocked

Al recalls the night with Melody. He hadn’t laughed so much in weeks, in years with a woman if he’s honest. Tara wasn’t a funny person; Melody is funny and he’s realising a strong sense of humour is a trait he wants in a partner.

‘There are other women. You may not think it now, but there are and there will be. There’ll be some point in your life, when you’re in a better place, you’ll look back and thank them, thank them for stopping you from going down that path.’

Al thinks about Melody and smiles. Her nineteen flights of stairs to get to him.

Later, Al stumbles as he moves away from the lads and out the side door to the bins and the crates in the alley. He wants to text Melody who has come into his head, but he can’t see the screen properly, it’s blurred, and his fingers are too clumsy to hit the right letters. He settles on a voice note which takes him far too long to access. He watches the red squiggly recording line appear on the screen, which reminds him of a heart line on a monitor. He watches it squiggle, then shoot up as it responds to the volume of his voice, as he clears his throat and heavy breathes. He says nothing and it flatlines. ‘I’m dead,’ he says, and then it shoots up. ‘Oh, I’m alive again.’

He laughs at how funny that is. Then gets serious. ‘Okay. Hi. This is a message for Melody.’ It comes out as ‘Meddilly’. ‘It’s me, Al. The Stroke. I don’t know if I told you that I stroke. That’s a rowing term. It would sound kind of pervy if you didn’t know. Anyway, I wanted to tell you something.’

‘What’s going on here?’ His brother Séan appears at the door, doing up the buttons on his jeans, on his way back from the toilet. ‘You better not be calling her.’

‘I want to tell her how I feel. How she should believe in herself more,’ he says, closing one eye to focus on his brother. ‘She’s so great. But she’s so afraid.’

‘I don’t think Tara needs to hear that now. Tara is all gone,’ he says, with his hands out in the air, as if speaking to his baby brother.

‘Not Tara,’ Al says, almost falling over his feet and crashing into a crate of empty bottles.

‘Don’t be calling The Shadow either.’

Séan grabs the phone and Al suddenly doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain. The air has hit him and he’s very, very drunk.

‘I’ll be deleting that message, thank you very much,’ Séan says, clearing the voice note before tossing the phone to Brick. ‘We have a late-night caller. Put it behind the bar, Brick, he’s not getting that back until he sobers up and it won’t be tomorrow either. Let’s get you back inside, bro.’

Beano is sneaking off when they return, he’s been nursing a soft drink for the night. ‘It’s my turn to do the night feeds.’

‘Thanks for today, I can’t thank you enough.’ Beano has two heads and eight eyes. ‘I wish you could move to Dublin with me. I need a coxswain for my life. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going.’

‘None of us do. Sure isn’t that what we do best? We face away from the distance we’re heading in. And sometimes we win. You’ll be okay, Al, stay in touch, we miss you.’

He goes up on his tiptoes and reaches out to grab Al’s head. He pulls him down to his level, plants a kiss on his head, and leaves quietly and secretly through the side door before he’s locked in and held down against his will.

It’s only been a few hours with his friends but coming back here and being reminded of who he is has Al feeling lighter.

26

MELODY

Melody drives slowly out of Waterford, not in any rush to get home. She tries hard not to feel rejected, not to be filled with self-pity. She feels completely unwanted, which seems fair as she was the one to push everyone away, but a bitter pill to swallow.

She crawls along and cars overtake her as she tries to figure out some way to be able to turn the car around and undo everything. Leaving the supermarket where she stopped for some snacks for the drive home, she sees a familiar camper van parked on its own away in the corner of the carpark near the stock entrance. There’s nobody in the front seats. She knocks on the door and hears the scuffle of movement inside.

Derek opens the door and his face opens in surprise. He has always looked old. Now he’s an older version of his old self. He looks like he hasn’t slept for days and pats down his dishevelled hair.

‘Derek,’ she says, her voice filled with genuine pity.

His eyes fill with tears. ‘Come in, come in.’

It’s stuffy inside, smells like the inside of a sock, very much like he has lived inside it without opening the windows.

The booth table at the back of the camper van is hugged by a couch and is covered with jigsaw puzzle pieces where the border has been completed and he has moved to the centre. The radio is playing something by George Gershwin.

‘I was about to make dinner, will you join me?’

Melody’s about to decline but he seems so alone and she’s got nothing better to do so she accepts. She sits at the table eyeing up the jigsaw puzzle wondering if it’s the same one that tormented her mother and ended their relationship. It’s covering the entire table. Either an act of defiance or Derek has learned nothing, though it doesn’t matter now.

‘Thank you for the record player. It was very kind of you.’

‘Did you visit your mother?’