An abridged version of “Fifty-Pence for the Meter” was broadcasted on BBC Radio 4 as part of their Short Works Series. That excerpted version can be heard here.
*
Number fifty-two.
Maurice pushes the gate. Knocks gently on blurred glass, gets led into the hallway. ‘Sorry for your troubles.’
‘Would you like to see the body?’ A man says, his forehead a mass of lines.
Maybe in a little while.’ Maurice heads for the kitchen, shuffling among black-suited men and flower-skirted women, to the spread where he loads a plate with square sandwiches. He takes a couple of Jammie Joeys and peppers the white spaces of his plate with loose crisps and grapes. A sour-faced lady pours him tea and Maurice meanders into a living-room of burgundy sofas and armchairs, complimented by hard-backed chairs that semi-circle their way into a bright-lit conservatory.
He hasn’t sat two minutes when a man walks in eating a slice of strawberry pavlova. How did he miss the pavlova? Maurice is in the kitchen again, loading a second plate, returning to the living-room where the constant fill and empty of seats provides him with a burgundy armchair and he sits and talks football with a baldy fellow who supports Manchester United.
He doesn’t bother with the body nor the widow, and heads home then, feeling the shift from summer to autumn air against his cheeks. He threads a wire hangar into his brown suit jacket and hooks it over the bedroom doorknob. Pulls a curtain. Slides into bed still wearing his clothes. Tugs the blankets around his shoulders.
In the afternoon he stands at the bathroom sink, smoothing water into ivory hair that has become disheveled against the pillow, then heads outside to leaves already loosening from their trees and gathering about the footpaths. He walks eastwards, finds the next house. Black-tied men smoking their cigarettes on the street. It is a small terrace affair, colourful hanging basket either side of the door. Maurice trails a fingertip across blue flower-petals as he enters. Thinks they won’t last. It’s usually the lady of the house that has the green fingers…
A line of people waiting to shake hands with every visitor.
Sorry for your troubles.
Sorry for your loss.
He is handed tea in a Charles and Diana china cup and checks into the kitchen for food, then tries the living-room. Stands in the gloom of a half-pulled blind and that kind of particular quietness where voices don’t rise above a mumble, for fear of wakening the lady with the cauliflower hair who lies in the wooden box.
An invisible fog descends then, one worse than the atmosphere of death itself, and he notices people glancing his direction and saying – who’s that? – so he sets his half-drunk tea on a sideboard and heads for the door.
A man follows him to the hall. ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your name on the way in.’
‘Maurice’
‘And how did you know mum?’
Maurice places a hand on the man’s forearm. ‘A lovely woman. I went to school with her.’
Outside, the grey sky broods with something like an impending storm, and its wind whips at the trees. Maurice turns up the collar of his suit jacket and leans into it.
His own house is chilly and he heads for a bath. He could sit in it for an hour, warm every inch of his body. As he twists the hot tap, nothing comes out. He tries the cold, but nothing.
‘Ach, for goodness’ sake!’
He goes down to the kitchen then, where those taps appear to work alright. Maurice shakes his head – for sure, he knows nothing about plumbing. Instead he finds himself kneeling in the cupboard under the stairs with two fifty pence pieces in his hand, eyeing the gas and electric meters, wincing a little, before opting for heat. He hears the coins clink-thud into the box, then the tick-tick-tick of the radiators starting to warm.
He butters two rounds of white bread and sits in the living-room then, where he catches the rain flittering his window and he turns on the television to watch his soaps.
* * *
In the morning he walks to the phone-box and calls the WaterBoard, who say they’ll be out in seven to ten working days. He hangs up. Talks to the glass door. ‘Seven to ten working days!’
By the time midday comes around he has breakfasted on his last heel of bread and heads for a wake, where the kitchen is rammed and Maurice manages to squeeze through to the sink. A woman with red lipstick and bobbed auburn-hair, smiles and touches his arm.
‘Hello, love. You look like someone who would take a nice cuppa.’
‘That would be lovely, thank-you.’
‘Right, I’m gonna make you a very special cup of tea.’ She lifts a small paper bag, spoons dark loose leaves into the centre of a neat teapot. Pours in boiling water.
‘Just takes a wee minute to brew.’ She offers her hand. ‘I’m Jules. What’s yer name, love?’
‘Maurice.’ He looks at the paper bag – Belfast Brew – then gives a chuckle. ‘Haven’t seen it made like this since my mother was alive. Do you read the leaves?’
‘But we only have the present moment, Maurice. So what is there to read?’ She sets out a mug and before Maurice has even tasted her tea, something about her gentleness, her calm, affects him and he momentarily forgets his hunger.
She pours. Adds milk. Stirs it slowly and precisely. Reminds him of those Japanese tea rituals.
Jules smiles as she hands it over and watches him sip.
Maurice takes on an expression of surprise. And another sip to make sure. ‘This is the nicest cup of tea I’ve had in my life!’
‘You enjoy that, love.’
When he makes it to the spread, Maurice eats a triangular egg and onion sandwich while adding mushroom vol-au-vents to one side of the plate, along with sandwiches on the other and shortbread on the top. He moves into the living-room, talks to a lovely couple, Susan and Steve, about their recent trip to Tenerife.
Then suddenly, he takes an urge to find the nice woman who made him the tea, so heads for the kitchen with something flickering inside him, some kind of feeling he can’t explain, that she will understand him. But there is no sign, and it is as though she were a ghost who came there just for him.
* * *
That night he attends a wake, with the open-coffin in the living-room and the pale deceased lying lips sealed and hands interlocked upon his stomach. Maurice sits beside a rotund, red-faced man, who offers his hand. ‘Harry.’
‘Maurice.’
‘You wouldn’t get ma a couple of sandwiches before you get comfortable there? Ma two ankles are swollen up like baps from the diabetes.’
Maurice makes him up a plate. Sits down again.
Harry chews a sandwich quickly, lips slapping together. Gestures towards the coffin. ‘Apparently he left a mountain of debt. Not too many know.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Uh-huh. Gambling apparently.’
At that point the door opens and a lady enters. Face riddled with devastation. She goes through to the kitchen.
They hear wailing. Harry raises his eyebrows momentarily, then becomes studious. ‘Have you heard of these pods you can get now, instead of your normal box of washing powder?’ He holds up a half-eaten sandwich, waves it as he talks. ‘Just wee pods. You stick one in the machine. No mess. No fuss.’
‘Fascinating.’
‘Ma daughter’s all into these pods. Can’t get enough of them.’ Harry finishes his sandwich. ‘Far cheaper than powder apparently.’
‘I must look out for them.’ Maurice crosses a leg over the other. Balances the plate on his knee. Starts into a vol-au-vent. ‘Did you hear the fella who invented cough drops died last week?’
‘No.
‘There’ll be no coffin at his funeral.’
Harry starts to laugh. Chokes on a biscuit at the same time.
The two men talk for a while and Maurice notices how Harry has either him or other people running little errands. Because of his swollen ankles. And the diabetes.
‘Does it stop you getting around much, the diabetes?’
‘Does it not? Huh. Put it this way – I’ve a jug beside the bed that I’ve to piss in during the night. Saves ma walking to the bathroom.’
Maurice doesn’t know if he is being toyed with, so smiles without responding, then after a few minutes have passed he asks, ‘You know anything about plumbing, Harry?’
‘Nope, sorry’
‘It’s just my taps upstairs at home aren’t working.’ Maurice sips his tea.
‘No idea, sorry. But talking of water – you couldn’t get us a glass from the kitchen? It’s just…these ankles…’
Maurice rises from the chair. ‘And your diabetes. I know.’
It rains on the way home and Maurice finds his suit jacket soaked through to his shirt and the shirt soaked through to his skin. He puts a hand on the hall radiator. Cold. Tries the bath-taps just in case, so attends the kitchen sink and undresses there to his white underpants and shivers as he tries those taps and nothing comes out of them either.
The next morning he rings the WaterBoard again and stops into the post office. A feeling of relief settles into his bones as he watches the girl count out his pension behind the glass, for his bread is done and the meters are empty.
‘Could you change half of that into fifty pence pieces for me too, love?’
‘We don’t do that anymore. Try the bank.’ She scowls. ‘And you don’t have to come in here anymore either. You can withdraw your pension from the hole in the wall?’ She points vaguely.
Maurice nods and heads for the bank where he passes the hole in the wall and it just looks to him like a big complicated computer or maybe that worldly web he sometimes hears people talk about.
When he returns home, leaves have started to gather around his doorstep and he kneels in the cupboard under the stairs, loading fifty-pences into each meter until they are well topped-up and he still has a few left for later in the month when things get tight.
The next week is plentiful and he eats well at the wakes, but his body begins to smell and he notices that people won’t sit beside him for more than a few minutes.
Another week.
No sign of the WaterBoard.
Then he can no longer bear the odour of his own skin.
* * *
An evening wake. Bottle of whiskey passing around and mourners drinking straight from the bottle. The stories are great. And funny. The Irish are experts at lamenting the dead, yet remembering a life lived.
A familiar face arrives shortly after nine o’clock.
‘Harry!’
‘Ach Maurice, it’s yerself.’ Harry sits. ‘Blowing a gale out there!’
‘I see that. You’ve a leaf in your hair.’
Harry rubs his head. Examines the leaf in his hand. ‘Huh, how do you think trees feel losing all these little friends?’
Maurice knows from the way Harry winces and starts to complain about his diabetes that he doesn’t require an answer. Then it isn’t long before the whiskey bottle is empty and another opened and the two brothers of the deceased have propped up the corpse, put a peak cap on his head, and stuck a piece of black insulating tape above each eye as funny eyebrows.
Maurice taps Harry on the leg. ‘Here, I was at a funeral the other day…fella died after a tennis ball hit his head…’
‘Is that right? A tennis ball?’
‘Aye. It was a beautiful service to be fair.’
Around eleven, two bearded fellows arrive, one with a fiddle, the other with an accordion and the craic begins and it is then that Harry’s diabetes suddenly leaves him and he gets up to jig to The Star of the County Down. Maurice dances too. In between songs, the two bearded fellas talk to the corpse as though he is alive, ask him for requests and oblige his imaginary answers.
‘Raglan Road it is!’
Everything ramps up a gear, until it is after midnight and Maurice finds himself sweating in the bathroom upstairs and staring into the empty tub.
Then one hand is on the tap. Turning. The other squirting in bath foam from a bottle of blue liquid.
He undresses. Eases into the water and listens to laughter and music drift through the floor.
Fifteen minutes later, he is dressed and coming down the stairs to chatter in the living-room and the red-glow of musician’s cigarettes between the blinds as they take a break outside. Harry’s chair is empty and as Maurice sits, he notices people are smirking. He begins to squirm, then the corpse sits up of its own accord and Maurice nearly jumps out of his own skin. The place erupts as Harry steps from the coffin, tears tripping him.
‘But where’s the -?’ No sooner has he got the words out when a cold hand touches Maurice’s shoulder. More laughter. He bounces from his chair to see the brothers, holding up their dead relative and their cheeks nearly bursting from the craic of it.
Harry pats his arm. Hands him a scrap of paper. ‘Here, I meant to give you this at the last wake. It’s my address. Call in anytime for a chat and a cuppa.’
Something about the gesture fills Maurice with happiness, and as he walks home and leaves gust around him, he feels certain then, that the trees mourn every leaf, but hold onto the promise of spring and new buds.
His house is freezing. A card on the mat says the WaterBoard will be out in the morning. He kneels in the cupboard under the stairs, fumbles in his pocket for a fifty-pence, finds one, tries to choose which meter to put it in.
Jamie Guiney’s short story collection The Wooden Hill was published by époque press and is available here.
Learn more about Jamie on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: Nick Vidal-Hall/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
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