Page 31 of Love Unlocked

‘You’re welcome. I enjoyed it.’ A bubble of a laugh travels from his chest and escapes his lips.

‘I think you still have the locks,’ she says softly, starting to walk away.

He rolls his eyes. ‘How many times have I told you that I was instructed by my boss to send them to the recycling centre. Would you like to speak to him?’

She calls his bluff and stops walking. ‘Actually, yes. I have time.’

He laughs again. ‘Melody.’

The ease with which he says her name.

‘Al,’ she replies in the same tone as his.

Yes, now they are definitely flirting.

‘Okay, at least I tried. It was nice to meet you, Al. Thanks for taking me seriously.’

‘I didn’t really,’ he teases. ‘It was nice to meet you too, Melody. Good luck.’

‘I’ll hear from you soon when you send me the Dublin City Council phone contact details,’ she sings.

‘Okay,’ he sings back.

She’s about to go through the revolving door, which is now taped up with heavy-duty black tape, with the scooter in her hands, folded this time, when the security guard runs ahead of her and opens the wheelchair accessible door wide for her.

She hears Al laughing good-naturedly behind her, and she grins into the cold January air, feeling warmth from head to toe.

11

Al

‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police is from their 1983 album Synchronicity, four years before Al was born, and was voted by Rolling Stone magazine as song of the year. Al has always found it an ugly and creepy song, which is why it’s number four on his break-up song list. He’s feeling sinister and ugly. He’s feeling possessive of the woman he loves.

Twenty minutes on the rowing machine at vigorous intensity, he was able to listen to the song almost five times straight through this morning. He misses the camaraderie of his old rowing team back home, though the wild WhatsApp group keeps him up to date. The connection between Tara and Al was instant. He knew on meeting her that she was the one for him and she quickly became his everything. He wanted to spend every spare second he had with her, further cementing his life in Dublin and he had little time to travel back and forth for training and races. She never asked him to do that for her, but it was the kind of man he was, fully focused on her as if she was his new hobby. He invested his time in her because he knew that she was his future. And for what? He forces Tara out of his mind and tunes back into the music.

Not the typical go-getter song to listen to during an intense workout but the rhythmic lick of Andy Summers’s guitar guided him like a lighthouse beam through the fog. Though Melody Yates had literally stopped him in his path that morning, trapping him in the revolving door. He had surprised himself with his laughter, he hadn’t laughed for five weeks, he hadn’t felt that release. He smiles now thinking of the moment again, feeling a giddiness bubbling in his stomach at the sight of her tugging in panic at the trapped scooter in the door. She had lightened his day, coming into his mind regularly. She had thawed him out when he thought he would never feel that human again. He had wanted to be near her, he had wanted to continue speaking to her, he enjoyed the back and forth, the unpredictability of what was going to come out of her cheeky mouth. How she had lured out a different side to him that he hadn’t seen even with Tara. He didn’t flirt with other women, he wasn’t that kind of fella. Today with Melody he was flirting. But Melody Yates is the opposite of sinister and ugly so he puts her out of his head to get back on course with his mission.

He regrets giving his house key back to Walter. He wants Walter to continue feeling his breath on his neck, he wants him to feel judged and under surveillance. He wants him to know that no matter what they do, he will always stomp over their territory just as Walter had done with every single one of his memories with Tara. Giving the key back was akin to giving in and accepting their relationship, which he can never do. He will have to amend his error.

At lunchtime when Walter was out of the office Al accessed Walter’s locker and retrieved his house key, then hurried to the local locksmith, had it copied and then quickly returned it to Walter’s locker. He knows Walter’s locker code because it had been Al’s first. He’d given it over to Walter when he moved to the company, to use for his bicycle helmet and his annoying high-vis jacket. He thinks of Melody’s bright pink high-vis vest, which again was the opposite of annoying. It was both cool and cute. He’d seen her from his office window after she left, going over the bridge on her scooter to her apartment on Spencer Dock. Maybe he had been watching for her. Anyway, back on the sinister and creepy track, he’d given Walter his locker, then Walter had taken his fiancée.

With Al’s newly cut key in hand, he leaves work a little earlier than usual, on a mission. On Wednesday nights Tara has yoga, he used to meet her there after work. He’d work out in the gym while she had her class and they’d make their way back home together. He also knows that Walter has a later meeting today because it was on the meeting schedule list, so he won’t be home either.

‘Every Breath You Take’ is on full blast, the repetitive guitar riff on a loop keeping him going. He’s moving without noticing, like he’s floating. He’s in the zone, walking his old route to his perfect house in Ringsend that he found and fell in love with at first sight. He turns into the street and stops to take it in. This final part of his walk home, the last stretch is the best part, like the last sip of a drink he doesn’t let the glass collectors take away. Redbrick, mid-terrace, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a small enclosed rear patio. They transformed it from a damp house from the early 1900s to a stylish Dublin city pad. He’d invested well, the house had gone up in price every year since they’d bought it. Walking distance from everything they needed: their work, their social lives; it was everything he dreamed of. He’d wanted the city, Tara had wanted a bigger house in the suburbs and this kind of village in the city was the ideal compromise. They could just about afford it together but they could easily with Walter’s contribution. It was petite, with tight proportions and there was nowhere to hide from each other on first glance but they found their places.

Most of the time they weren’t trying to avoid each other. Walter was easy company. They sat together and ate together. They liked each other. At first Tara wasn’t so sure about having Walter around but she soon realised that Walter’s rent allowed them to have a better life. And Walter was good company, he judged the mood well, knowing when to disappear and when to stick around. Eventually she’d stopped complaining about Walter’s presence, or his bicycle taking up space in the courtyard, or his ugly coat hanging in the hallway, or his unstylish shoes that stuck out from under the hall table. They all became friends, and then they were like family.

Al doesn’t know when that changed. When the person Tara saw as ugly became the man she wanted to be with. Had Al unknowingly played matchmaker by pointing out Walter’s good habits, his positive character attributes? Then when talking to Walter about the things he loved about Tara, had he been helping Walter to fall in love with her too? He doesn’t know how he’d missed it and what exactly he’d missed. They both said nothing had been going on behind his back, they promised there’d been no sex, but something clearly had been going on. Even if it was just shared looks, gentle touches, intimate and precious as they could be. We are in love, Al. We’re so sorry but we can’t fight it anymore. Well Al will fight it for them. He’ll fight their love, he’ll fight them and he’ll fight their future happiness, the smug, deceiving cheats.

Al and Tara didn’t have a baby but a child existed in Al’s head. A sometimes boy and a sometimes girl and he’d loved and adored them. He’d seen the future, looking forward to parenthood, holidays, birthday parties, Christmases, gatherings, old age. Always with Walter in the picture. Walter the godfather, Walter the best man, Walter’s kids and Al’s kids as best friends, Walter’s imaginary wife being friends with Tara. Al had looked forward to it all with a sentimental feeling that there wasn’t enough time on this earth to live and to love. Each time with his imaginary child he would teach them to look up; look up at the stars, look up at the treetops, at the chimney tops in the city. He missed it already before it had even begun, he’d been grieving the loss of his imaginary children as strongly as he’d been grieving his marriage that never happened.

Al had looked ahead so much and planned a detailed life for them in his mind, he had missed what was right in front of him. A fiancée who wasn’t ready to marry, who didn’t want to have children, who was in love with Walter. He stalls in front of the house, pondering this for the first time, an ounce of empathy for the unfortunate couple who had perhaps been trying to tell him all along.

No.

His neighbour Clink appears beside him at his front door, giving Al a fright. He’d thought he was Walter. They call him Clink because he always walks with a plastic bag of beer bottles that clink together in the bag. He lives alone apart from the stray cats he feeds in his courtyard that backs onto theirs and stinks of cat piss, and they’d had to plant a bed of lavender to block it out.

Clink likes to sit in the miniature garden at the end of the terrace, which consists of a bench and some planting by a well-meaning neighbour. He sits there most days, always with his top off when it’s sunny, basking in the sunlight without an apparent care in the world, while he works his way through the contents of his plastic bag.