Resumed Service
By: Johannes Evans
Tags: Serial Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, Fantasy, Serial, Novel

AIMÉ

“You cut yourself?” Jean-Pierre asked as he got into the car, and Aimé didn’t try to argue, just obediently put his hand back between the seats so that Jean-Pierre could loosen the bandage over his palm and tug back to the gauze so that he could examine the nick on the side of his palm.

“I tried to throw a knife right-handed,” Aimé muttered, keeping his gaze on the road as Colm swore under his breath at the winding roads on the campus. “Would you put your fucking seat belt on?”

“Colm, you borrow Aimé and return him damaged?” Jean-Pierre demanded.

“He was taking a piss and I was messing around,” Aimé said loyally, and Colm laughed under his breath even as Jean-Pierre leaned back in the middle seat, clipping his belt over his chest.

“Did you hit the target?” Jean-Pierre asked.

“With my left hand, mostly,” Aimé said. “I kept hitting the target really high, though, or getting the angle wrong so it’d slide down and hit the floor.”

“He did well,” Colm said. “Wouldn’t let him touch your good knives any time soon, though, he’d be fucking lethal with them.”

“Thanks,” Aimé said, and he looked at Jean-Pierre’s sweet smile in the rear-view mirror, the way he giggled, his hand over his mouth. A pleasant warmth settled into his chest, and it only dissipated slightly when Colm reached across to hit him in the chest. Rubbing his breast and sparing a moment to give Colm an irritated look, he looked back at Jean. “How was class?”

“Good,” Jean-Pierre murmured. “Some of my classmates are squeamish about our cadavers.”

“Well, most people are, Jean.”

“Not doctors.”

“They’re not doctors yet,” Aimé said. “Most of them are doing this for the first time. They’re not on round seven.”

Jean-Pierre grinned, leaning back in his seat and looking out the window. “What is Bedelia cooking?”

“Does it matter?” Colm asked. “You, George, and Pádraic are going to be eating a fruit platter.”

“I cannot be curious?”

“She made chapati and a…” Aimé squinted down at his phone, which was a shitty, ancient brick of a thing that Colm had gotten hold of for him when Aimé had said he wanted something without GPS, “bhindi masala, and uh, some fried cauliflower, and mushrooms, and some baked pumpkin.”

“Bhindi masala,” Colm repeated, mocking Aimé’s accent.

“Well, how the fuck would you say it?”

“Bhindi masala.”

“That’s the fucking same!”

Colm kept his gaze on the road, shaking his head. “No, it’s not.”

Aimé scoffed, and when Jean-Pierre tried to lean right forward between the seats to turn the radio on, Aimé slapped him on the wrist and turned it on for him.

Pádraic and Bedelia lived in a fairly large cottage a little way out from the city proper, and Aimé was vaguely aware as Colm drove that they weren’t too far off from Colm’s allotment.

It was the sort of ancient old building with a thatched roof that looked four seconds away from crumbling at any moment, and Aimé didn’t think he’d ever actually been inside one — he’d just seen them in the background while flicking past documentaries on TG4. Built of mismatched grey brick, some of them covered in moss, it had a door painted bright yellow, and white painted bricks around the thin, fragile-looking windowpanes. It had been added onto through the years, Aimé could see — the main bulk of the building was two storeys, although the thatch came all the way down and he knew that the second storey likely had a sloped ceiling, and then smaller, one-sided sections adjoined on either side, built of the same brick.

Colm parked the car on a slope beside Bedelia’s motorbike, and as they climbed out, Aimé saw that Pádraic and Bedelia’s yard, which was a wide, rectangular space walled in by the same grey brick the house had been made of, with a huge farmer’s gate and a goddamn stile instead of a gate, was also alive with fruit and vegetables. They didn’t have a polytunnel or a greenhouse like Colm, but Aimé recognised a metal enchanted framework that ran on one side, the sort of thing some people grew enchanted wines with, and underneath this metal cross work were cucumbers and tomatoes. Colm’s gardens always had a sort of military regiment to them, with picture-perfect rows and labels, the same as he kept the pantry and the armoury, but in Bedelia and Pádraic’s garden, all the vegetables grew over and in between each other, and even in November, the messy, lopsided rows of planting were a motley spread of different coloured leaves.

A grey path built of huge, square slabs cut through the centre of all this wonder, leading up to the house, and it was this path that Jean-Pierre walked up to keep from getting his boots muddy, gracefully climbing over the gate.

“Concrete doesn’t exactly match the rest,” Aimé said.

“Wheelchair access,” Colm explained as he pulled the boot open, and Aimé took two plates from Colm, holding them against his chest as Colm pulled a crate of dragon fruit and a few other cactus fruits Aimé didn’t know the name of out, balancing it on his hip. “He added it in when Bedelia was born and he swapped jobs. You alright with them?”

“Yeah,” Aimé said, and as Colm headed up the path, Aimé pulled the boot closed for him.

Colm opened the gate for Aimé to let him through, and as Aimé walked up the path, he saw that Jean-Pierre had gotten distracted between the gate and the cottage’s door knocker: he was making loud cooing noises as he crouched in the mud, boots be damned, to let Pádraic and Bedelia’s chickens come up and nestle in his arms.

“Colm — ” Jean-Pierre said as they came up the path.

“No,” Colm said loudly. “You complain about the noise and you never clean the coop.”

“What about — ”

“You won’t walk it.”

Aimé laughed, trying to muffle it against his shoulder as he went ahead of Colm onto the doorstep, reaching up to ring the doorbell with his elbow, awkwardly shoving the knot in the rope so that it rang.

Bouncing off the stone-built porch’s hard walls, it was painfully loud.

“He took it from the abbey,” Colm supplied as explanation, and Aimé grunted an acknowledgement.

The door opened, and Aimé was met with the gangling figure of George, whose hair was wet around his face, and who had lipstick on his jaw. His clothes were ruffled and his lips were pink from a mix of mild bruising and the lipstick, but when he saw Colm and Aimé, his eyes widened, and he turned back to look with his jaw agape at the clock beside the stairs.

“Oh,” he said, “you’re here. Let me take those plates — ”

“No, it’s okay, George,” Aimé said, leaning away from the angel to stop him from trying to take them — even before Colm had advised him in no uncertain terms not to let George hold anything fragile, he’d seen Colm drop enough plates himself — “Just point me in the right direction, and I’ll hand them off.”

“Uh, kitchen’s through here,” George said, stumbling on the rug but managing not to fall down (just) as Aimé stepped inside, and Aimé stepped through the archway, surprised at the extreme heat of the cottage once you were inside.

The cottage had high ceilings — they had to, to accommodate Pádraic at all — and the archways were tall, too, so that Pádraic didn’t have to duck his head as he went through them, Aimé expected.

“Bedelia,” Aimé greeted cheerfully.

“Hi, Aimé,” Bedelia said, leaning over the wood table that served as countertop — most of the cupboards in the little kitchen were floor-to-ceiling, and they didn’t have the built countertops most kitchens had — to kiss Aimé on the cheeks.

“You didn’t leave lipstick on me, did you?” Aimé asked as he put the apple pie and the strawberry tart Colm had baked on the table.

“No,” said Bedelia, and Aimé grinned at her, at the way her dress was creased underneath her just-put-on apron. She looked past him to the hall. “Oh no,” she said, and rushed past to grab George.

“Leave those boots in the hall!” he heard Colm bark from the hall.

“They’re not even that mud — ”

“They fucking are.”

Grinning to himself, Aimé inhaled, taking in the scents that filled the kitchen and the house — from the huge, cast iron aga, which Aimé was fairly certain must have been a few centuries old, he could smell pumpkin and okra, a variety of spices, and the fresh, wheaty smell of the chapati bread.

Reaching over the table, he pulled a piece of candied orange peel out of the bowl Bedelia had set aside for the winged angels’ dessert, and chewed it as he went back to the hall.

Colm, gesticulating wildly, and Jean-Pierre, holding his boots in his hand, had sequed into Irish now, and Aimé didn’t even try to cut in as he stepped into the main room in the cottage, which had another large, wooden table and a variety of mismatched chairs pulled around it, as well as a roaring fire.

Bedelia and George must have gone upstairs, because it was just Pádraic in the room, laying plates on each setting.

He’d met Pádraic, or at least had him pointed out to him, but he’d never actually talked to the old man, and he steeled himself for a second, squeezing his hands into fists before he brought them up in front of his chest.

“Hi, Pádraic,” he said, and Pádraic glanced up at him as he moved his hands. “Can… I… help?”

Pádraic looked at him for a second, but then he smiled. In the light, which mostly came from the fire, because the lights on the ceiling were dimmed a little, his dark brown skin seemed to glow warm from underneath, like there were rubies in his cheeks, and he set down the last plate before demonstrating the sign that Aimé had apparently just fucked up, one wrist over the other, but with his hands perpendicular to the ceiling instead of parallel.

Help, he demonstrated. When he signed next, he did it slowly, and Aimé watched him closely. Soon, when we eat. Now, relax. Aimé smiled, gave a slight nod of his head, and Pádraic signed, Colm and Jean are fighting?

“Yeah,” Aimé said, shrugging his shoulders and leaning his elbows on the comfortable, wing-backed armchair that had been tugged to the head of the table. “Colm’s telling Jean not to track mud into the house, but Jean’s only being a bitch because Colm won’t let him have chickens.”

Pádraic laughed, nodding his head as he went to the fire and used a cloth to pull the kettle from over the flame. He nodded his head to one of the shelves, and Aimé pulled down two mugs, bringing them over and setting them on the table so that Pádraic could pour tea.

What happened? Pádraic asked, gesturing to Aimé’s bandaged hand.

“Uh, Colm is teaching me to throw knives,” Aimé said.

Pádraic snorted.

Although — because — none of the furniture matched, the room was impossibly comfortable.

Around the fireplace was a thick, semi-circular rug, and Aimé could see the impressions in it where the big armchair and one of the wooden chairs had been pulled away from it to put around the table instead. Still resting beside the fire was a basket full of knitting, a few stacked up magazines, and a set of stokers in a tin holder. Beside the fire, you could see through the window into the backyard, and this one, longer and so full of trees and overgrown bushes it was like a miniature orchard, had a trampoline at the end of it.

Proudly displayed in the cabinets, Aimé saw the evidence of a man exceptionally proud of his daughter: Bedelia’s smile shone out of a dozen framed photographs in between little trophies and plaques and framed pieces of embroidery. On the shelves were various pieces of Catholic ephemera — little icons and triptychs of different saints, some of whom Aimé wasn’t sure of the name of — and framed on the walls were more photographs, although these weren’t all of Pádraic’s daughter.

Most of them were in black and white, or in sepia, but Aimé could tell they’d been carefully taken care of. Pádraic was in some of the photos, but there weren’t any of him on his own — he was always there as part of a group of people in a row, especially when they were wearing what looked to Aimé to be old-fashioned nurses’ uniforms, or of Pádraic with children, holding them on his shoulders.

Aimé grinned at one photograph of Pádraic in the seat of a horse and cart, dressed up in a Santa suit, wearing a thick, white beard and big boots and glasses, and in the cart were a dozen kids, all of them laughing. It was newer than some of the other photos — it was from the fifties or sixties, Aimé thought, or around that time, but he wasn’t any judge.

“Tea,” Pádraic rumbled in a voice like distant thunder, and Aimé turned to pick up his mug, taking a sip. It was a fresh, fragrant tea, and he tasted the familiar honeysuckle sweetness — Jean-Pierre liked to put dried flowers in his tea, too. He signed, then, You practised?

“Yeah,” Aimé said lowly, giving a nod of his head. “I, uh. I got an app on my phone. I was nervous about fucking it up, but I guess it must be annoying, for us having to translate all the time, uh, I’m not great, but I learned a little when I was younger. There were some deaf boxers on the circuit.”

Pádraic stared at him, his brow furrowing. Is that common?

“I don’t know about common. But there’s a few — enough that I picked up a little ISL. I always tried to learn on the side so that they wouldn’t know I knew what their coaches were saying.”

Pádraic let out a low chuckle.

You and Jean-Pierre, he said, leaning back on his heels and towering over Aimé, you are the same.

“Ouch,” said Aimé. “Just hit me, why don’t you?”

Pádraic grinned, and looked to Jean-Pierre and Colm as they came into the room.

Aimé saw that Jean-Pierre was in his socks, but that at some point, Colm had obviously lost ground in the argument, because Colm was just in his socks, too.

“My condolences, Pádraic, on having so long an acquaintance with my brother,” Jean-Pierre said.

Pádraic patted Aimé on the shoulder with a heavy hand. Help Bedelia, he advised, and Aimé nodded his head, but as he went by he caught Jean-Pierre by the waist, pulling Jean chest-to-chest with him.

Jean-Pierre’s expression, which had been at its epitome of bratty irritation, softened, and he leaned his head in closer, their noses brushing against one another.

“Be nice,” said Aimé.

“I’m nice,” Jean-Pierre lied sweetly, and Aimé chuckled, pecking him on the lips, and then patting his arse.

As Jean-Pierre clambered into one of the wood chairs and Colm sank into another, Aimé moved across the hall and into the kitchen. Bedelia had George sitting on the kitchen table, his legs wrapped around her waist, as they kissed feverishly.

Aimé cleared his throat, and as the two of them split rapidly apart, George and a metal serving tray clattered onto the kitchen floor, but Bedelia caught the jar of candied orange peels before that could topple too.

Aimé wondered if this was how Colm felt, living with Jean and Aimé.

“Your dad told me to help,” Aimé said mildly, and Bedelia ran a hand through her hair and nodded her head rapidly, giggling a little as she rushed to pull the curry off the hob.