Page 75 of Calling Frank O'Hare

They raised their glasses and drank the whisky back in one go.

‘Good luck Billy, you crazy fecker,’ said Martin. He began to laugh again. They almost joined in, until they realised he wasn’t laughing at all. He was crying.

Frank would have liked to have cried. He would have liked to have screamed, and yelled, and ranted. But he couldn’t. Not because he didn’t need to, but because he didn’t have the right to. Because the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced, he’d played a part in Billy’s death.

48

Footsteps on the landing – 1995

When Ellen came back to Frank, she’d been full of remorse and desperate for his forgiveness. Nothing was too much trouble when it came to regaining his love. Not that Frank had fallen out of love with her. It was just that he’d resigned himself to living without her and had settled for someone else. He’d realised that within the first month of her return and was thankful Gavin had called that night and stopped him from ruining both his own life and Eve’s. That was what he told himself almost every day until he was convinced it was true. But when the cracks in their sticking-plaster marriage began to reopen, Frank knew he’d been kidding himself.

It started as it always did, with the snipes and digs, the pointed remarks about his job, his appearance, and his paintings. They were tiny little things at first, building up layer by layer until it was unmissable. That’s when it dawned on him that the honeymoon period was over and they were back to square one. In the space of two years, he was in exactly the same place he’d been in before she’d walked out on him.

Tonight, the griping began as soon as he came in from work. She could have got the dinner started, or done last night’s washing up, but that kind of thing was beneath her. She was lying on the sofa, reading that hideous magazine she wrote for. ‘At last. I’m starving.’

‘If you want me home earlier, we should move closer to my work.’ He’d given up apologising for the traffic long ago.

‘Or you could just give up your job in that horrible school. Gavin could get you into somewhere much nicer and closer to home.’

Frank didn’t bother to answer. He went into the kitchen and switched on the radio. The Happy Mondays were playing back-to-back. He turned it up, took a beer out of the fridge, and danced to ‘Step On’ as he pulled together the ingredients for a vegetable chilli. Ellen was going through her ‘Meat is Murder’ phase. Or at least she would be, if she actually liked The Smiths. She’d grown up with the hunting, shooting and fishing set, so it wasn’t that she thought it was murdering the poor wee animals. It was more that she thought it was murdering her. She had some weird ideas sometimes.

She appeared in the doorway, having managed to extricate herself from the sofa. ‘You look ludicrous. Has no one ever told you, you can’t dance?’

‘Nope. And I wouldn’t give a toss if they had.’ He turned the radio up a notch. The Stone Roses were on now, ‘Sally Cinnamon’.

‘You’re so pitiful.’ She trounced off, back to the sofa.

Frank congratulated himself. He’d won that round.

She stayed away from the kitchen, never her favourite room, until he called her in. He was in a good mood now. He’d successfully batted away her jibes, had a couple of cans and the food was smelling pretty good.

Ellen reappeared, her face set like a sulky teenager. ‘What is it?’

‘Dinner’s ready. Do you want to try it?’

She peered into the pan. ‘I can’t eat that slop.’

That was it. Frank snapped. ‘If my cooking’s so bad, why don’t you get off your arse and take a turn for a change.’

‘Because I don’t need to. I can buy someone to do it for me.’

‘You know what, Ellen? I’ve had it up to here. You’re just not worth the effort.’

‘Oh for God’s sake. I was just joking.’

But Frank was already on his way out the door. For once, he was going to be the one that walked. Although he wasn’t one hundred per cent on where he was walking to.

An hour later, he arrived at Billy’s usual pub. Billy practically lived there these days. Eve would often joke the only way she knew she’d see him was if she went there. They were friends again now. Out of necessity more than anything. It was too tricky to make excuses not to see each other when your partners were all for it. At first it had been awkward but they’d got over it.

Billy was at his normal table holding court over a couple of mates from work. They might even have been the newest pop sensations. Frank wouldn’t know. He was too busy trying to stop himself drowning in misery and self-pity to be keeping up with the latest chart-toppers.

He got a couple of pints, with a whisky chaser for Billy. Beer didn’t touch the sides for Billy these days. He drank it like normal people drank tea.

When Frank reached the table, Billy patted an empty seat next to him. ‘FB, how are yer? Am I glad to see you. These lightweights were gonna leave me here on my own.’

The others looked relieved to have someone to hand the baton over to. They were soon gone and it was just Frank and Billy.

‘Where’s Lottie?’ Only Adrian called Ellen that and it took Frank by surprise to hear it from Billy. Especially since Billy’s opinion of Adrian was a pretty poor one, although Frank never got why Billy didn’t like him.

---