The Belfast Review Team | 18 March 2024
Thanks for joining us for Week 5 of our Spring Blog. Each week we feature a handful of creatives, with certain days designated for different types of work: Feast Your Eyes Sundays (art, photography), Wordy Tuesday (fiction, nonfiction), and Rhythm-Verse Thursday (poetry, song lyrics).
This week we're exploring the theme of 'Connection.' It's a hot topic in a world where we have so many technologies to put us in touch with one another and yet loneliness has become an epidemic.
“Only connect!” as E.M. Forster wrote in Howard's End (published in 1910). And yet the full quote gives a better context, “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”
Over a hundred years later, thanks to new technologies and the pressure to monetise, we have very effectively divorced passion from prose and nearly everything else. With the Internet and the rise of social media, we live in fragments now more than ever.
Being perpetually online was once hailed as the only means to “stay connected.” And yet, those who obviously spend too much time online are advised to, “Go touch grass.”
In search of connection, this week's creatives take us a few unexpected journeys.
Featured writer: A. Joseph Black
This story was originally submitted to our first open call and later developed through our mentoring and editorial development service for emerging writers. (Our editorial services can be viewed here.) The author was a delight to work with, and incorporated our notes while also preserving his own voice and ideas - which should be the goal of all good editors.
The story revolves around a lonely widow, more than a bit isolated and set in her ways (ahem, gin), who encounters a series of upsets during her cherished weekly outing that leads to an unexpected connection.
It was a delight getting to know Nora and examine the roots of her psychology, helping the author tighten the story structure to bring out her wants and needs – and hit just the right notes to give a sense of her new relationship to the world after her ordeal.
Let's grab our bus passes and follow along.
On Wednesdays Nora Goes into Town
A. JOSEPH BLACK
On Wednesdays, Nora goes into town. But only on Wednesdays, because while the bus is free and the window shopping, the stew with wheaten bread and pot of tea in her favourite café is not. When her husband Jim died, Nora’s horizons narrowed sharply and her weekly trip into town had been one of her earliest attempts to broaden them. As a pensioner on a tight budget, Nora has learned to fill her day in town with things that don’t cost anything. Today, she’ll walk to Botanic Gardens – beautiful at this time of year, bursting into bloom - and get the bus back into the city centre to window shop in Queens Arcade, then maybe an hour reading in the Linenhall Library. The only expense is her lunch in her favourite café, Ross’s. On balance, however, she has decided the weekly excursion into town is a permissible indulgence. As are the six miniature bottles of gin that she packs in her handbag, monstrously more expensive than the litre bottles of supermarket own-brand which fuel her the rest of the week. Each miniature is wrapped in a delicate lace handkerchief to deaden the noise, and their consumption punctuates her Wednesdays.
*
On this particular Wednesday Nora has already had a run-in with a new neighbour, putting her bin out first thing. He’s just moved in, and he put his bin right where Nora always put hers, on her part of the pavement. Then he stood with his back to her, arms folded, looking round. Something about the figure of him, from the back like that, put her in mind of Jim. When he turned around to go back into his house, he didn’t look at all like Jim. Nora went out and told him that was where she put her bin. He just looked at her without replying. She repeated herself, a little less confidently. He looked angry, or maybe he didn’t fully understand her. He might be foreign. She told him a third time, “That’s where my bin goes” and he moved his out of the way. Back in the house, she was shaking and so drank one of the miniatures to settle her nerves – before she’d even set off for town.
Standing at the bus stop she watches a steady stream of young men and women, many still in their pyjamas, come and go from the little shop. Buying those energy drinks, and vape sticks, and scratch cards. The bus arrives and Nora smiles at the driver as she gets on, mentions the weather. But he just stabs his finger at the ticket machine, puts the bus into gear and pulls away without looking at her. Why is it never the same driver two weeks in a row anymore?
Nora sits halfway down the bus. At the next stop four boys get on, eleven or twelve years old. She recognises them from previous weeks. One’s the McLoughlin boy, they live a few doors up from her. His granny was in the same class as Nora at school. They’re harmless, actually quite polite in a sheepish way. There’s a boy with them today that she doesn’t know. Laughing and pushing one another, they swing down the bus from pole to pole before settling in the back two rows. Nora can hear them, almost feel them, behind her. A voice rises up. The boy she doesn’t know, probably.
“Do you have any granddaughters, Missus?”
She hears sniggering.
“Are they good looking? Or do they have a moustache too?”
They dissolve into laughter. Nora knows it’s just boyish bravado. Jim and Nora hadn’t had any children. That was the plan of course, albeit not Jim and Nora’s plan, but God’s. Her sister Veronica had described Nora’s childlessness (such a word) as “a wound that would never heal”. But over time, Nora had come to believe that Veronica was wrong. It had instead proved to be more like a bruise – visible and painful when touched, certainly, for a while. But like a bruise it faded with time until it was just gone, and it was difficult to remember where it had been.
So it had been just Nora and Jim, who she married at 23. Thirty happy years had followed, before he died after a brief and excruciating illness. Twenty years ago now, a long time to be a widow. Behind her, the boys’ attention is focused on a phone but as the bus passes the cemetery, one of them looks out and shouts to Nora.
“Here, Missus, shouldn’t you be getting off here?”
Nora feels her face flush and hot tears instantly prick her eyes. They’re passing the cemetery where Jim’s buried. The boys don’t know that, of course. How could they? She doesn’t visit his grave as often as she should, she knows that. For many years she hasn’t even gone on Cemetery Sunday. She pays a modest annual maintenance fee for the plot to be kept neat and tidy on her behalf. Besides, Nora doesn’t need to go to Jim’s grave to remember him. She does it every day – from the moment she wakes up in the morning, still keeping to her side of their double bed which she has never replaced with a more practical single – to the last moment when she bids him good night, just before her eyes close and sleep takes her.
She visited a few times, in the first couple of years after his death, but she found it impossible to remember Jim happily when standing beside the morose marble slab. The cold factuality of the dates. The pregnant space under his name where her own would in time be added. Nora had done her grieving twenty years ago. Yet the boy has pricked her conscience. Maybe she should visit his grave more often? She knows she should. But she never knew what to say – if anything – when she was there. She’d just stand there for what she thought was a respectful time and then leave. It was pointless, and she felt bad that it felt pointless. Jim used to say that life’s for the living.
Worried the boys will start on her again, she gets off the bus two stops early, on the edge of the city centre. She needs time to compose herself. She sits on a bench directly facing a concrete wall. Who decides where to put these things? At the end of the bench there’s a pram. It seems to be unattended. It’s a proper one, four big wheels, where the baby faces the mother. Not one of these strollers that they all have now. Those were for dollies in Nora’s day, not real babies.
Although she’s already one ahead of schedule, Nora decides a gin might help, just to smooth things out. She fishes another little bottle wrapped in its handkerchief from her bag, unscrews the lid and glances left and right before lifting it to her lips. Anyone watching will just think she’s blowing her nose. The gin burns her mouth and scorches its way down her throat. She feels her heart slow straight away. Putting the handkerchief back in her handbag and the empty bottle in the bin beside her, Nora smooths down her coat. She looks over the abandoned pram again and then heads for her favourite café, Ross’s.
Rounding the corner into Pound Street, Nora can immediately see that things aren’t how they should be. The tables that are always lined up on the pavement outside Ross’s, in wilful defiance of the Irish weather, aren’t there. Quickening her step, she can see it’s closed. A small handwritten sign with a black border around it, in the style of a death notice, has been placed in the window.
“The owners, management and staff of Ross’s regret to inform our loyal customers that after over forty years of serving them we’ve taken the difficult decision to cease trading with immediate effect. We’d like to thank our clientele for their custom, their company and their craic down those forty years.”
Nora’s stunned. When she was here last Wednesday, there was nothing to suggest they were about to shut up shop. Forever? She can’t believe it. They could have said something, should have said something, last week. Margaret who’d been serving Nora for years, or the new girl Irina. Surely they’d have known. Where’s she supposed to go now? She’d come here with Jim the second day it was open. They’d come into town to get Jim a new winter coat and had argued. The heavens opened with torrential rain, and they sought refuge in a new café nearby. They sat for an hour over a pot of tea, drying out and making up. Now Ross’s is gone, just like that, after all this time. She doesn’t know what to do, what she’s going to do with herself now.
She’ll never sit in Ross’s again.
She needs to sit down.
There’s a newish coffee shop just across the street, one of the big chains that’s everywhere now. They always look so dark. And a little dirty, which is probably why they keep them so dark. Expensive too, she’s sure, but it’s starting to rain so Nora crosses over. Standing outside, she repeatedly pulls the door clearly marked “PUSH” before realising her mistake. Inside she pauses as her eyes adjust to the gloom. She approaches the counter, behind which a young man and woman in their early twenties stand. They look like models in an advert for a trendy boutique. They’re shouting across to a couple sitting at a table by the window.
“Ah man, it was messy. Majorly,” the young man behind the counter says, laughing.
Nora has no idea what this means but her thoughts turn again to the standards of hygiene.
“Yes, madam, hello!” he says suddenly. “What can I get for you today?”
Nora doesn’t know. “Just a tea, thanks love.”
“The tea menu’s just here madam,” the young man replies, throwing a heavily tattooed arm toward the large blackboard behind him. Nora hasn’t brought her glasses. She doesn’t need to read the menu in Ross’s. She knows it off by heart and always orders the same thing. Now, she can’t focus. The chalk writing and playful drawings on the blackboard are swimming in front of her eyes. She can’t read a word.
“Sorry, what teas do you have?”
She hears a theatrical tut from behind her. Several people have come in out of the rain and a queue has formed.
“We have chai teas, green teas, iced teas, bubble….”
Nora stares at him. There isn’t a single thing he’s said that she doesn’t need explained.
“I just want a pot of tea really,” she replies meekly.
“Breakfast tea it is!” He leans forward and adds in a lower voice, “That means ordinary tea. Are you having anything to eat today?”
“Do you do stew?”
“No, sorry, no stew. Just wraps and paninis. Panini of the week is spiced black bean and mushroom with fresh cilantro lime aioli and red onion jam on rosemary olive bread. Tempted?” He smiles at Nora.
“Do you have scones?” she asks. The idea of onions in jam briefly distracts her,
“We do. Scone of the day is rosewater, walnut and cardamom. We also – ”
“Just a breakfast scone please, if you have it,” Nora interrupts, unable to bear another litany of things she couldn’t possibly eat.
“Plain scone it is,” the young man replies, smiling again.
Nora glances round at the queue behind her: the restless businessman checking his phone, the young couple breaking their gaze from one another’s eyes momentarily to see what’s happening, the pale-faced man with the serious demeanour and a computer tucked under his arm.
The young man behind the counter has spoken to Nora, but she hasn’t heard. A small pot of tea, cup and saucer, jug of milk and a scone with tiny portions of butter and jam are all laid out on a tray on the counter between them. Nora presumes he’s asked her for money so fishes out her purse and places a five-pound note on the counter.
“Sorry madam, it’s £6.75.”
Six pound, seventy-five! Jim would have had something to say about that, Nora thinks. She looks in her purse. She has no pound coins, and it doesn’t look like there’s enough ten and twenty pence pieces to make up the difference. Nevertheless, she begins to count them out onto the counter, reaching one pound ten before admitting defeat.
“Sorry,” she says and begins putting the coins back in her purse.
There’s a barely stifled snigger from the queue behind her. She unzips the pocket on the side of her handbag and retrieves the twenty-pound note that she keeps there for emergencies. She’ll need to replace that now. She’s never had to use it before and didn’t expect the “emergency” to be an incident in a coffee shop. She could put the tenner change in there, but what if a future emergency required more than that? She’s going to have to try and make up the difference in her budget somehow.
She carries her tray to a battered leather armchair in a dark corner, all the while feeling the eyes of the queue drilling into her back. Her face warms and a lacquer of sweat breaks out across her forehead. She feels embarrassed. More than embarrassed, mortified. She sits down and glances over at the queue. She sees knowing looks and low-voiced comments returned with smiles. They’re talking about her; Nora knows they are. She grabs her handbag and bolts for the ladies’ toilet, terrified she’ll burst into tears in front of everyone.
Inside, she takes off her coat and hangs it on the back of the door before splashing cold water on her face and sitting down on the toilet. They’re probably all joking about her outside now: the stupid oul doll who doesn't even know the price of a cup of tea. Well, she knows how much it is in Ross’s, and that was always enough until today. She a drink and retrieves one, and then another, of her little bottles from her handbag. Just in case one doesn’t work, better to be on the safe side. Removing them from their lace handkerchiefs she gulps the first down greedily. She feels the reassuring sear in her chest. But she doesn’t feel any different and so opens the second. She drinks it slowly, sipping with incongruous delicacy as she straddles the toilet, fully dressed. When she’s drained both bottles, she puts the handkerchiefs back in her bag and wraps the empty bottles in toilet roll, pushing them down to the bottom of the steel bin under the sink.
Standing, she totters and places a hand on the sink to steady herself. She straightens, takes her coat and returns to her table. Her tea is quite cold, but she drinks it anyway. She butters and eats the scone. It’s crumbly and too dry. Not enough milk, or the wrong fat-to-flour proportions. She wonders if the young man or woman behind the counter made it themselves.
Nora doesn’t feel ready to re-join the day. Everyone else in the coffee shop seems quite content to sit on, long after they’ve finished their coffee. She decides to stay where she is. In truth, she feels a little queasy. She shouldn’t have eaten the scone and she’s already drunk four of her six miniatures for the day, and it isn’t even one o’clock yet.
She closes her eyes, just for a second. When she opens them, the people in the queue have completely changed. She needs air. She stands up too quickly and her head swims. Back in the toilet, she splashes water on her face again and her eyes turn to her bag on the floor. Today is proving very difficult. She slips another gin from her bag and unwraps it with trembling fingers, the lace handkerchief falling to the floor. She doesn’t pick it up. Draining the tiny bottle, she drops it into the sink, where it skitters around with a pleasing metallic ring.
Back among the sounds and the smells and the other customers, Nora feels rather at sea. Her weight shifts suddenly from side to side as she walks. She’s certain all the customers are watching her half-jog to the door. She catches her foot on a chair leg and stumbles, almost falls. Reaching the door handle, she pushes it hard several times before remembering to pull it. Outside a fine rain hovers indecisively, as if unsure whether to fall fully or not. I’ll get the bus home, she decides. Have something decent to eat and a lie down.
She makes her way down the pedestrianised street leading to her bus stop. As she turns the corner, she stops dead. There it is again – the pram. It’s outside an optician’s now. Still empty, Nora can see, and still unattended. She crosses the road and examines it. It’s clean and well maintained. It looks like an expensive one. She peers through the optician’s window, but there are no customers. She scans the street, hoping to see at any moment a sheepish parent, red-faced, babe in arms, returning to collect it. Why is there an empty pram here? Somebody must own it. Somebody must have moved it from where it was earlier. Who did that? Where are they now? And where’s the baby? As she looks around Nora sees two policemen appear at the top of the street.
“Officers! Officers! Over here!” Nora waves.
The policemen cross the road and approach her, smiling.
“Yes madam, can we help?” asks the taller one.
“This pram, officer. I saw it earlier on the other side of town.”
The policeman shoots a glance at his partner before addressing Nora. He moves closer to her, his face right in front of hers. His nostrils twitch.
“Do you think it may have been stolen, madam?”
“What a stupid question!”
It’s out of Nora before she realises. The policeman’s smile slips, and his expression hardens.
“I mean, how do I know if it’s been stolen or not? But there’s no baby in it.”
This is self-evident and adds little to the policemen’s understanding, she knows.
“Do you have reason to believe, madam, that a baby has been abducted?”
“I have no idea,” Nora snaps.
Why do policemen talk that way now, as if they’re reading from a statement to the press?
“Was there a baby in it before?” he asks.
The policeman is talking unnecessarily slowly now. He seems to sniff the air between him and Nora. There’s a little thread of tobacco stuck to his bottom lip that vibrates as he talks.
“No, there was no baby in it earlier.”
“I’m not clear why you’re telling us all this. Do you believe a crime has been committed?”
“Don’t you think a pram without a baby in it is suspicious?”
The policeman glances sideways at his partner again as if an earlier unspoken conclusion has been confirmed.
“I’m not sure it is suspicious, madam.”
“So where’s the baby then?”
Nora can feel her patience fraying.
“Don’t you care about the baby?”
She can hear her voice higher than usual, cracking as she speaks. A young woman looks over from the other side of the street.
“Madam, there is no baby,” the policeman replies with a bemused smile.
He decides there is no more to be said and makes to move on.
“We’ll leave you to your day, madam. You have a good one.” He nods at Nora, touches the shiny black brim of his hat and moves past her.
Nora can’t believe they’re walking away. Her cheeks burn and a righteous indignation rises in her.
“Officer!”
The policeman slowly turns back to Nora, and she sees him roll his eyes at his colleague.
“You need…...I mean, can you not see.….?”
She trails off, at a loss to address such absolute indifference. The two policemen turn and walk away.
“Just go home. Sleep it off,” the second one says over his shoulder.
Nora looks down at the empty pram, tears swelling in her eyes.
On the bus, she doesn’t look at any of the other passengers. Instead, she stares out of the window at the trees by the roadside, watching dead leaves drift jaggedly down from black branches. She rocks as the bus lurches round the roundabout just before the cemetery. Jim! Unaccountably she needs to tell Jim what’s happened today, and her hand shoots out and presses the button
*
Pausing as she passes through the high metal gates of the cemetery, she feels a moment’s panic, wondering if she can even remember where Jim’s grave is. Her memory rescues her, however, and she turns left down a short steep path to the part of the cemetery where he’s buried. She needs to gather herself and stops to sit on the last bench before Jim’s grave.
A child’s voice pierces the still, graveyard air. Calling for their parents, getting louder and more distinct. Then Nora sees her, a girl of maybe seven or eight, coming over the brow of the low hill above. She’s wearing a quilted pink coat over a red woollen dress.
“Are you alright love?” Nora asks when the little girl gets closer.
“I can’t find my Mummy and Daddy,” she answers.
“Did they bring you today? Here to the graveyard, I mean?”
“Yes. We came to see Granny Teasie’s grave. She’s in heaven but today’s her birthday.”
The girl comes closer. Nora smiles and pats the bench beside her.
“Sit up here with me, sure. We’ll figure out what to do next.”
The girl joins Nora on the bench.
“Are you here to see your Granny, too?” she asks.
Nora laughs.
“No, I’m here to see my husband, Jim. Can you keep a secret – sorry, I don’t know your name. What’s your name, love?”
“Lily.”
“Hello, Lily. That’s a beautiful name. I’m Nora. Well, this is a secret so you can’t tell anybody, but I’m a wee bit worried about going to the grave. I hadn’t planned to, and I’m worried that I’m...that I’m not ready. Isn’t that silly?”
“I was scared too when Daddy said we were going to the graveyard. Conor said there’d be zombies.”
“Is Conor your brother?”
“No, he lived next door to us in our old house. But there aren’t any zombies. I knew there wasn’t. I think it’s nice here. It’s not scary at all.”
“It is nice, isn’t it? So hard to find a place nowadays where you can hear yourself think. I’ll tell you what, Lily. We’ll make a deal. Do you know what a deal is?”
“It means I do something, and then you have to do something.”
“That’s right. Clever girl. Well, the deal is if you come with me to Jim’s grave – it's right there – then I’ll help you find your Mummy and Daddy. They can’t be too far away. What do you think?”
“Yes,” Lily says, simply.
She jumps down from the bench and instinctively extends her arm for Nora to take her hand. Nora takes a deep breath and stands. She pauses a second to steady herself and takes Lily’s hand.
“When did your husband go to heaven?”
“Oh, years and years ago now, Lily. Before you were a twinkle in your daddy’s eye.”
“Mummy says that.”
“My mummy used to say it, too.”
Nora can feel the perfect smallness, the utter dependence, of Lily’s hand, warm and soft in her own. They walk in comfortable silence and Nora feels like she could just keep walking, on and on, hand in hand with Lily.
“This is it,” she says as they arrive at what is, to her relief, a neat plot.
Lily looks up at her, squinting in the watery autumn sun. “Are you worried now?”
“No, Lily, not a bit. Sure what do I have to be worried about when I have a big girl like you right here with me?”
Lily smiles.
“It’s lovely here,” she says again, for want of anything else to say. “Isn’t it, Nora?”
“It is, Lily. Lovely.”
Nora stops and closes her eyes. She feels the sun on her face and the warmth of Lily’s hand in hers, listens to the low breeze whispering through the graveyard’s trees, the birdsong. She opens hers eyes and looks down at Jim’s gravestone. All this time fretting over not having the right words to say to him, and she can see now that she doesn’t need to say anything, just being here is enough.
“Granny Teasie and your Jim probably love it here.”
Nora laughs.
“I’d say they do.”
Nora hears voices, a man and a woman, calling for Lily.
“Mummy! Daddy!” Lily squeals, squirming to look left and right although her hand remains fixed in Nora’s.
“Hello?” Nora shouts, feeling slightly foolish but determined to find Lily’s parents for her.
“Where are they?” Lily asks.
“If we stay here they’ll find us. Call them again.”
“Mum-my! Dad-dy!”
The parents’ reply comes loud and clear now. Within seconds they appear over the hill, jogging red-faced toward Lily and Nora. The mother sweeps Lily up into her arms and Nora feels the girl’s hand wrenched from her own.
“Where did you go, Lily?” the father asks, breathless, his voice lighter now with relief. It’s the man from this morning, her new neighbour. Nora smiles at the coincidence. He smiles back, an easy friendly smile. With the smile and his flushed cheeks, his resemblance to Jim strikes her again.
“I was with Nora. She was looking after me,” Lily says and points directly at Nora.
“Sorry, yes, thank you so much,” the mother gushes. “She’s a heart scald, honest to God, you can’t take your eyes off her for a second but she’s away.”
“Mummy, can Nora come with us for ice cream?”
“Nora’s maybe busy!” the mother laughs. “We’re going to the wee café that’s just opened across the road.”
“We promised her ice cream if she came with us,” her father explains. He smiles a bit sheepishly.
“Sorry about the bin thing,” he says, “I was still half asleep.”
“Oh, don't mention it.”
“Why don’t I put both our bins out from now on sure? Mine in my space and yours in yours, I promise.”
Nora laughs.
“That would be very kind, thank you.”
“You’re welcome to join us now, for a coffee,” he says.
“I’d love a cup of tea, thank you,” Nora replies, surprising herself with how readily she answers, and how much she truly wants to go with them.
Lily takes Nora’s hand again and the four of them walk up the hill leading out of the graveyard. At the exit, Nora pauses briefly to pull a small bottle, wrapped in a little lace handkerchief, from her handbag -- and drop it into a litter bin.
ARTIST BIO
A. Joseph Black lives in Belfast and writes short stories and flash fictions. Over forty of his pieces can be found online, in literary magazines, and in print anthologies. He was runner-up in the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award in 2018 and 2021 and was The Irish Times New Irish Writing for January 2020.
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Check out our other posts this week:
Rhythm-Verse Thursday (21 Mar) with Song Lyrics by Rory Strong and Poetry by Joshua Pipkins.
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