Chapter 2 Bardy
BARDY
I would that I were low laid in my grave.
“Oy, Jon, you going to order something or just sit there looking pretty?”
Bardy responds automatically, even though he isn’t hungry. “Sorry mate, a bacon sandwich and a large black Americano.”
“So the usual,” Luigi replies, shrugging, as if bemused Bardy has wasted so many words.
Luigi is one of the few people who call Bardy “Jon.” They had met long before Hana.
Long before her nickname for him caught and stuck.
They had been classmates at the local school.
Luigi, the newcomer, had told class 3B that his family were Mafia.
Eight-year-old Jon had believed him. Kept close to him.
Well, you would, wouldn’t you? And even back then, Luigi was a big lad.
Jon has always been middling in pretty much everything.
Middling height. Middling at sport. Middling at schoolwork.
The only thing he was good at was English.
So he helped Luigi when he struggled with the language, and it had become “Jon and Lou.” Lou hadn’t laughed at his surname.
Just nodded. Pursed his lips, with what Jon Shakespeare likes to think was respect.
Well, even the Mafia had heard of Shakespeare.
Now, years on, it’s still “Jon and Lou,” men in their early sixties. He mentally rephrases. Two lonely old men. He glances at Lou behind the counter. Still friends. At times, still sticking to the code of omertà. Even if Luigi’s dad had, in fact, been a bus driver. A mild-mannered man from Pisa.
Bardy goes back to staring out of the window and contemplating the best way to die. He dismisses a gun. Doesn’t have one. Too messy. Drowning? He’s heard it’s a horrendous way to go. He’s just considering some of the deaths he’s read about in novels when Luigi dumps his order on the table.
“What is it?” Lou snaps.
“What? Nothing.”
Lou injects a suitable level of skepticism into his grunt before heading back to the counter.
Bardy knows the scales are tipped against him, saying anything to Lou.
The man whose wife died versus the man whose wife left him.
What’s he got to moan about? After a marriage of thirty years, Hana had finally got gut-achingly bored of him and decided she’d had enough.
He’s surprised it took that long. Maybe if lockdown hadn’t happened, she might have stayed.
But being shut up in a house with just him?
The boys gone, all the kids they’d fostered grown and scattered.
Her departure had shredded his heart and stripped the most important color from his world, but he couldn’t honestly say he blamed her.
He remembers the day she left as one of those bright, warm days of early lockdown.
How could the whole globe be in crisis when the world glowed like this?
As the sun set on the garden bench he had not moved from for hours, he realized that all before him was a mirage, there to mock him: his inadequacies, his blind stupidity.
How could he not have realized how she felt?
He tried to reach for her color, but despite the golden yellow of the evening taunting him .
. . it was gone. He saw himself as a stickman drawing sitting on his bench.
A scribble of gray on a white background.
No color. No substance. He had closed his eyes and dipped his head, unable to bear the warming rays on his skin.
He wondered if Hana was now basking in the relief of that sun.
A long-overdue decision made. Did the boys know?
Had they always known? This was too much shame to shoulder.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the stickman reach into his pocket for his phone. So that is what the man on the bench did. He phoned Lou.
He looks at his friend now. This is not something he should bang on about.
Not five years later. Still unable to move on.
He knows Lou would have sucked the leukemia from Tina’s body and swallowed it whole if he could have done.
So, no, on that scale, it was time for a different sort of omertà.
He should just shut the fuck up. Anyway, he wasn’t really serious.
Wasn’t really thinking of killing himself.
Had just been wondering—what was the point? Lou would understand that.
Bardy finishes his breakfast and goes to pay.
As he waits in line behind a young couple, he spots an orange card on the noticeboard. It has just two lines written in the center.
To be, or not to be . . .
If music be . . .
Reflex finishes the line for him: . . . the food of love, play on. Jon Shakespeare has taught enough of the Bard over the years to do that one in his sleep. Twelfth Night.
He reaches the counter.
“Tay in today?”
Why had the card made him think of her?
“Later,” Luigi replies, studying him.
“How’s she getting on?” It was Bardy’s idea that Lou offer her work.
Late afternoons and some weekends. He knew Tay was struggling, that her job in customer service paid badly, and although she still lived with her mom, it was Tay who made sure there was food in the fridge.
She might only be seventeen, but Tay was a born fixer. A coper. Always had been. Had to be.
“Doesn’t listen. Always on her phone. Doesn’t think timekeeping applies to her.” Luigi shrugs. “But apart from that.”
Bardy breathes out, “So you like her.”
“God knows why.”
Bardy nods his understanding and leaves.
Tay: heart-shaped face, cynical eyes; thick, wavy hair, tied back tight with short-cropped fringe; slight body in oversized clothes.
A girl of contrasts. She could alternate between monosyllabic and mouthy.
But in the space between, there were moments of surprising, considered conversation that Bardy relished.
He had thought Lou might too. There’s just something about Tay. If she lets you see it.
For Bardy, Tay is red ocher.
Maybe she had started life as ocher—that soft, earthy yellow—but by the time Bardy met her at three years old, the oxidation process had started.
Tay had been exposed to too much. Seen too much.
Her mother, Toni, had been fostered by Bardy and Hana, on and off, between seven and fourteen.
Toni was the product of a mother with a serious drug habit who was an easy target for abusive men.
At seventeen, Toni had given birth to Taylor.
“At the end of the day, T-Swizzle may be an icon,” Tay had later commented, “but WTF.”
Bardy knew that Toni loved Tay, but it was with the same intensity that made her such an obsessive Swiftie.
She wore early motherhood on social media like her rancid-bright clothes that exposed flesh and vulnerability in equal measure.
Then nothing for months. Periods when addiction reemerged.
A gift from her own mother. Then Bardy and Hana would do what they could.
Which was never going to be enough. But Tay had become a kind of foster granddaughter.
Close to Hana. She was the only person Tay would spontaneously hug.
Bardy, she wanted sitting close to her but not touching.
Talking. And he loved those times. Brushed by her red ocher.
An organic crimson tinged with yellow. He hoped Tay would stay that rich tone.
Not harden over time to an iron-colored rust. Sometimes he thought he detected streaks of it within her.
Her comments could be brutal. But he stayed steady. Still. Kept faith.
And it wasn’t just him, he thought his boys had seen it too. Maybe not the color. But the something.
They hadn’t started fostering until their boys were in their teens and Hana was only working a few evenings a week, running adult art courses at the local college. There had been a family discussion. His eco-warrior, quasi-charitable, we-all-have-too-much-stuff sons were initially dumbfounded.
“What, here?”
“In our house?”
So much for “ownership is bondage.”
But Hana had persisted. Persuaded. He had reassured. And eventually Tom and Ned had turned to each other and nodded very slightly: “Okay, we’ll give it a go.”
Big of you, Hana had mouthed silently behind their backs.
For the most part, the fostering had worked.
Some experiences definitely better than others.
The nuggets of real hope hard-won in the layers of trouble, piled on trouble.
Problems laid down years, sometimes generations ago.
The boys had connected with some, avoided others, and Bardy thought that was their right.
He thought they handled it well. Was proud of them.
They barely knew Tay’s mother, Toni, as they were out or away when she was with them.
But one Christmas Eve, they came home—young men in their late twenties—to find four-year-old Tay on the sofa wearing a hand-me-down dressing gown and an expression of deep suspicion on her face.
She would not let Bardy sit near her, and her eyes followed Hana around watchfully.
When the boys entered the room, she drew her knees up close to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and tucked her head down until only her eyes were visible.
At the time, Bardy thought he saw flecks of iron rust in her dark pupils.
From then on, the only time her eyes left the boys was when they flicked to the table laid with their normal Christmas Eve feast of favorite foods.
A family tradition of an eat-what-you-like picnic, a kind of MasterChef meets Walmart.
In a hurried aside in the kitchen, Bardy explained about the emergency placement. Then, realizing his boys were old hands at this, he asked their advice. After all, they still seemed like children to him despite their qualifications and jobs, and in Ned’s case, their live-in girlfriend.
Then followed their normal confab. Brothers finishing each other’s sentences.
Ned: “What she doesn’t need is all that Christmassy stuff, you’ve been a good girl for—”
Tom: “—Santa bollocks. She’d be freaked out. But she looks—”
Ned: “—hungry?”
Tom: “Yeah. Takin’ in all that—”
Ned: “—food. Me too. Bloody starving.”
Bardy (trying not to plead): “Still, I’d like to make it special for her. Hell, she’s only four.”
Tom (serious): “No idea what her Christmases have been like. Don’t want to set the bar too high. Make everything else that comes next look like shit.”
Ned, nodding: “Chernobyl.”
Tom: “Yeah . . . right bro.”
Bardy: “Chernobyl?”
Tom and Ned in unison: “Yeah, all those rich Americans having kids from Chernobyl over for a week. Feed ’em up. Throw toys at them. Then send ’em back.”
Ned: “Fucking cruel.”
Silence.
Tom: “She just needs to chill, feel safe.”
Ned (tentative): “Jolabokaflod?”
Bardy and Tom: “Not with you, mate.”
So, Ned explained. It was something his Icelandic girlfriend had told him about.
Bardy, thoughtful: “Yolbukflud?”
Ned laughed, shook his head, and headed up to his old room, followed by Tom to collect what they needed.
After that, until the boys left for good, they had celebrated the Icelandic Christmas Eve tradition of Jolabokaflod—or in English, a book flood.
Everyone gives presents of books, and you all sit around in silence reading.
And in Bardy’s family, also indulging in a crazy kind of picnic.
The loss of it is the main reason he now hates Christmas.
But he can’t ever regret the introduction of this tradition, as it brings back memories of their first one.
Tay eventually curled up on the sofa by Hana as she read her The Cat in the Hat.
Wide-eyed like it was something out of this world.
Which reminded Bardy that it really was.
And made him sad. But also hopeful. There were so many more books for Tay to enjoy.
His favorite recollection of that evening was when she let Ned read her a Hairy Maclary book, with Tom joining in the chorus.
They had sat on the floor by the sofa so she could lean over them.
But not touching. His boys their natural earthy tones: Ned, the color of a worn gray pebble washed by the sea; Tom, the color of marshland mud, flecked with sand.
In the soft glow of the Christmas tree lights, a skinny four-year-old, with yellowing bruises on arms and legs, had shone a rich red ocher.
So yes, with Tay, even years on, he continues to keep the faith. As in that beautiful deep ruby, he detects such hope.
Why is it then that he feels something has gone wrong between them? That she is hiding something from him?