Chapter 19 #2
So Walter and Tara, Tara and Walter had found the mice.
He hopes they uncover a new mouse every day, the gift that keeps on giving.
Al feels a minor pleasure from their discomfort but mostly he feels deep, exhausting sadness.
He’s finished with the revenge acts now, they have run their course.
He must have accidentally included Natasha in his group text message about Walter and Tara, because she’s outside the bathroom when he emerges, with her purple swollen eye and a face filled with pity.
‘Don’t,’ he says, trying to stop her from hugging him, but she does it anyway.
‘I can get my brother to batter him if you want. I could do it myself but I don’t want to lose my job.’
‘No, no thanks, don’t do that.’ He knows she means it.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m dealing with it.’
‘I know how you feel.’
‘Pedro still hasn’t called?’
‘No.’
Taking comfort in each other’s sadness, they meander back to their office.
‘Do you want these now, or later?’ Natasha says, holding a half-filled bin liner in her hand.
‘What is that?’
‘Today’s post.’ She smiles. ‘About the Grace Plunkett Bridge. I read a few of them, they’re so romantic, and some of them are desperately sad.’
Stunned, he takes the bag from her, brings it into the office and dumps it in the corner.
Hot off his TV studio stint, Walter returns to the office a little later, wearing TV make-up, to a chorus of cheers, though Natasha snarls and looks away.
She looks to Al with a supportive smile before burying herself in her desk work.
She’s the kind of person you want on your side, staunchly loyal and protective and a nightmare if you piss her off.
Walter is embarrassed but gives his colleagues a kind of self-conscious wave as though trying to appear cool and go along with it.
The Walter he knew would have refused to go on the television, point blank, even if it meant losing his job.
He was humble and self-effacing. He liked hugging the walls, watching from the sidelines.
Al’s rowing buddies had nicknamed him The Shadow because he was always just there.
Al had always encouraged Walter to come along with him and get involved, come on let’s talk to this group of girls, let’s ask these lads if we can play football, come on let’s move to Dublin, let’s live together, come work with me, come on, move in with me and Tara.
Al had wanted to experience everything with his friend, his personalised version of social media.
Has it even happened if Walter isn’t there?
Now that Al analyses it, it may have been perceived as patronising behaviour towards his friend, trying to organise and motivate him as if his life hadn’t been good enough.
Because Al did think that Walter was living a shadow life, that he was falling short of his full potential.
He did think that it was his role to pull him along with him because that’s what his mum would have wanted and that’s what a friend should do. Walter had gone along with everything.
But he’d certainly stepped out of the shadows now and was making his own decisions.
Al might have felt proud of him if it hadn’t involved him sleeping with his fiancée, he could have stood back and admired this transformation if it hadn’t been to the detriment and sabotage of his own joy.
Walter’s new glow-up is by virtue of Al’s extinguished light.
The thought of Walter and Tara together in a bed now doesn’t revolt Al to the point of vomiting anymore, or fill him with such a red-hot rage.
Walter glances in Al’s direction before quickly turning away and stumbling as he bumps into a desk, with his thigh, and has to steady himself on a chair.
Al just feels sad.
He has lost. Walter has won. The fight is over.
At lunchtime he plays Boyz II Men’s ‘End of the Road’.
Soulful voices, smooth, grown men singing about heartbreak and crying.
They sing about being unable to sleep, unable to let go.
It’s everything he needs to sit and stew in his grief.
It’s raining as he walks to a café to buy his lunch, and he lets the tears run down his face.
It’s the end of the road. It is. The emptiness, the utter feeling of failure and devastation.
He needs a new landscape. He needs to be a new Al.
He doesn’t like this version of himself.
For some weeks he was dangerously angry, now he is sad.
The loss and the loneliness are seeping into the spaces anger was.
Tara is not coming back. He thought she would.
Walter’s not running scared, and he thought he would.
If anything he’s doubling down. He’s growing in strength.
Inside the café, Al takes a seat facing the window and watches people racing by.
He instinctively looks out for Melody, hopes to see her.
He removes his headphones. It’s not the first time he’s thought of her, he’s had many flashbacks of their night together.
Tender awesome moments sprinkled through his sadness.
The tiny music notes tattoo on her breasts near her nipples, the sound that came from the back of her throat in pleasure, the way her eyelashes fluttered gently when he touched her.
He has thought of her a few times. But he’s ashamed that it is the first time he thinks of her in regards to Walter sitting on the couch on New Day. Prunella had stolen Melody’s precious story, the very thing she feared.