The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna

Rose is worried about you, Jamie.” Paddy scratched his eyebrow and gazed at the fire. “Aye, Rose is worried about you, so she is.”

Jamie did not know how to respond. “Aye, I s’ppose…” He trailed off.

Since his uncle’s death, the McFaddens, being good neighbors and friends, had become increasingly concerned about Jamie. There was a woeful silence which he waited for Paddy to break.

“Y’know, Jamie, she said to give you…she said to give you…” He looked about him, confused. “To give you… Begod, now what was it she said to give you?”

“To give me a call?”

“Naw, it wasn’t that.”

“To give me the pancakes?”

“No, it wasn’t that either—well she did tell me to give you the pancakes—but there was something else she told me to tell you after she talked about the pancakes.” Paddy shot a look at Jamie’s smokestained ceiling, hoping to find illumination there. “What was it now?”

“Maybe to give me a lift somewhere?”

Jamie was fast running out of ideas. But finally Paddy’s brain tripped its memory switch.

“Och, now I remember. She told me to give you a bit of advice.”

“Lordy me, advice?” Jamie sat back on his chair and wondered where all this might be leading. He thought Rose a very wise woman and was eager to know what message she had for him. “Advice about what?”

“Aye, well now, that’s the thing…it’s about, about maybe…well it’s what Rose told me to tell you. It’s about…” Paddy was clearly embarrassed. Jamie saw him look about his untidy room.

“About cleanin’ the place up?”

“Naw, not about that. Well, what she told me to tell you is that…is that…” He took his cap from the armrest and started to examine it. “Well what she said was that maybe you should start looking to get…to get yourself a…”

“A car?”

“Naw, not a car, to get yourself…well, what she said was, that maybe you should…you should get yourself a woman.”

Jamie winced visibly. It was as if Paddy had dealt him a blow to his private parts. No one had ever broached the subject of a wife. Not even his Uncle Mick as he lay on his deathbed, when he would have had good reason to.

Paddy coughed noisily with relief. “Aye a woman... that’s what she said…and she said that you wouldn’t be on your own if you got yourself one.” Shep raised his chin off the floor and gazed up at Jamie, who was now focusing on the fire, his brow furrowed, as if he were attempting to solve a mathematical puzzle of some complexity.

Get yourself a woman.

The utterance hung in the air like a cartoon speech bubble. Paddy, aware of his friend’s discomfort, reached into his back pocket. He took out a packet of John Player’s cigarettes and extracted two, each curved to the contour of his buttock. He straightened one out and handed it to Jamie, who automatically struck a match and lit both cigarettes with an unsteady hand.

“Och now, nobody would look at the like of me,” he said finally.

“Well y’know, Rose drew me attention to something… to something…to something that might be a help to you. She sez to me yesterday, she sez: ‘Y’know, Paddy, that’s the very thing Jamie needs.’”

Paddy hesitated, puffed several times on the cigarette. He was nervous, realizing that he was on the verge of announcing what might prove to be a life-changing idea to his friend. The problem was: how to phrase it.

“And what was that?” asked Jamie.

“What was what?”

“The thing that Rose said would be ‘the thing’ for me?”

“Aye, well now, that’s the thing, she said…she said that you…she said that you wouldn’t have to go out and find one…in a pub, or whatever, because she said, well, what she said was that you could find a woman in the paper.”

“Boys o!” was all Jamie could say. He had never heard the like of it before.