Free All the Old Haunts by Chris Lynch Page B

weren’t talking when Martin walked right up and picked us out of the small group disembarking.
    “Mr. O’Brien?” he said.
    I nodded.
    He did a lot of quiet chattering in an accent I had to listen hard to if I wanted to get anything. Most of the time I didn’t. He talked about the Beatles some. I knew plenty already about the Beatles.
    I listened to Cait more. Listened to her breathing, since she wasn’t speaking.
    She looked out the window. Held my hand.
    Martin stopped in front of what looked like a small version of the registry of motor vehicles back home. It was on a narrow street with a lot of other cold ugly stained square buildings.
    “This is your hotel?” I said, trying not to sound too insulting.
    Martin shook his head. “No time for that. This is the first clinic. I’ll be waiting right here.”
    The first clinic, where Cait was to have her preliminary screening appointment. She pulled on the door handle and got out.
    “Go on now,” Martin said, shooing me along after her.
    First we sat in a waiting room until a lady called Cait. I sat. Ten minutes later, we were reunited, but directed upstairs to another waiting room. There, we encountered five other girls, ranging between the ages of fifteen and forty or so. Two of them had guys with them. Nobody was talking. The light in the room was kind of shockingly bright, compared to the waiting room downstairs, and the street outside, and Liverpool. Bright, like fluorescent light, but yellowed, not white. We sat rigidly in our molded plastic chairs, flipping through Hello! magazines, which they had by the hundreds.
    “She’s Irish,” Cait whispered, motioning toward a very young girl in a blowsy yellow dress. “And she’s Irish,” to the older lady in the two-piece tweed. “And so is she. That one … maybe.”
    Slowly, agonizingly, the staff made their way down the list. All the folks ahead of us disappeared into some exam room, to be replaced by newcomers.
    They called Cait’s name, and she jumped out of her chair as if she’d been cattle-prodded. I sat, reading about Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery and Princess Diana when she was alive, and after.
    Cait came out. Sat. They called her again, and this time she pulled me by the hand into the room.
    “You will be paying, then,” said a woman behind a desk, who looked too busy to be dealing with me.
    “Ya, ya,” I said, overanxious. I started spilling notes all over the desk, the floor, the desk, looking at the woman, at Cait, at the floor, over my shoulder, like I was making a drug deal.
    She gave Cait a card. “Be on time,” she said.
    Martin was outside, just like Martin said he would be.
    “You’ll want to rest then?” he asked.
    “Yes,” Cait said curtly.
    Martin’s wife Jane led us up narrow corridors and stairwells, all well-lighted and revealing busy sad wallpaper of horses and carriages and dogs and birds. On the third floor we were led into tiny room twelve. “If you be needin’ anything …” Jane said. She nodded. I nodded.
    “Cheers,” Cait said, which sounded very strange to me.
    We spread ourselves out on the oversoft bed, and tried to watch the TV, which was bolted onto a steel arm so close to the ceiling it was like watching a light fixture. It didn’t matter. We could hear, so seeing it wasn’t all that important. We had three hours before we needed to be back out again. Staring. Staring was what we were going to do.
    “I’ve got to sit my exams this year,” Cait said, panicky, at one point. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through it, O’Brien. I don’t know if I’ll get through it.”
    “Well … you know, where I go to school we have exams every year. I try not to worry about it too—”
    “Some of those girls are here by themselves. D’ya realize … they came all the way here, with nobody ….”
    She closed her eyes tight.
    It was as much like a factory as anything. We ran into most of the same people from the other clinic. As if we all had