I was still rigid, halfway down the street. A sign for the Pro-Cathedral seemed a useful hint; I climbed its steps. It was smaller than I had remembered from the odd midnight mass my mother brought me and Gavin to when we were children, but still impressive. Banks of candles flamed on every side; ten pence for a little cup, twenty for the tall tapers, one of which (beneath Mary’s hem) keeled over as I walked by. I stopped to straighten it. Others had flags or ruffs of white wax. I would have liked to light one, but I had no more change. Our Lady’s head was bent under a crown of thorns with ten electric lights on it, strangely reminiscent of the European Community logo. She also had a faint blush. ‘I’m No Saint Reveals Queen of Heaven’, or maybe ‘Only Technically a Virgin Says Lesbo Mary’.
She must rue the day she had him, I thought, watching her pained eyes. All those high hopes, and then he went and got himself killed; what an anti-climax. In the thirteenth oil picture above my head, she was sitting straightbacked on a stool someone had thoughtfully carried up Calvary for her, with her son’s ungainly body sprawled across her lap. I had none of her certainty, only memory. I could almost hear us, me and Cara, sitting in the back row of the church, whispering the time away. ‘Will we be allowed to have sex in heaven?’ she’d ask me, or ‘What kind of fish would you like to be?’ She once said that the reason she kept coming back to me was that she couldn’t find anyone else who’d take her questions seriously.
When two women in headscarves groaned into the pew beside me, I realized that this was a queue for confession, and moved back three rows. The women would think me a sinner who had lost her nerve. Confession was a habit I had dropped from the menu of what the newspapers called A La Carte Catholicism some years ago.
It was on a school retreat when I first went off the whole business. The priest was very busy, and the sight of this long string of adolescent girls prompted him to adopt a novel strategy: instead of waiting for admissions, he asked the questions. I was only halfway through my opening prayers when he muttered, ‘Good girl now. Tell me do you smoke?’
‘No, Father.’
‘Do you drink?’
‘No, Father.’
‘Do you give cheek to your mammy and daddy?’
‘No, Father.’
‘Have you a boyfriend tell me now?’
‘No.’
‘If you had a boyfriend, would you do bad stuff with him?’
‘No.’
‘Aren’t you the great girl. You have the conscience of a saint. Say a nice act of contrition now.’
While I was saying it he began the absolution, and he was finished before me. I sat on the window-sill outside, bewildered by the unearned compliments. It became clear to me at last that my story just didn’t show up in their terms. I never much bothered after that.
As I walked down the side aisle now I passed half a dozen women doing their rosary beads, which clacked like spiritual knitting. In the porch, below ads for courses on Billings Method Natural Family Planning and pleas to Support the Missions, they were compiling November’s altar list of the dead already; there was a basket in which you could put your loved one’s name in an envelope for the priest to mispronounce. I could never quite work out the logic of the doctrine that if you got people to pray for your dead they would get out of purgatory faster. If it was a matter of contacts and pulling strings, then it hardly seemed fair. Sister Dominic reassured our class once that the dead who didn’t have living friends and relatives were the special concern of nuns in contemplative convents.
‘But Sister, Sister, if everyone gets prayed for, doesn’t it all balance out then?’
‘No, no, it’s not a competition.’
‘Well, he’s hardly going to let everyone out early, is he?’
‘Penelope O’Grady, you have an irreverent attitude.’
I tried to imagine Cara doing time in purgatory. If you put her in jail she would certainly not take it meekly; rather than doing a PhD, she would probably smuggle dope and get herself a big butch girlfriend.
On the steps the air hit me; it surely couldn’t get much hotter without the thin Irish sky bursting? Across the road was a tacky religious goods shop and an advice centre, its window featuring pamphlets called Think Before You Emigrate and Coping With London. On O’Connell Street a pair of fiddlers were making a gallant stab at Pachelbel’s Canon. The patient bars of it brought me back; Cara and I used to play it loudly on her tape recorder whenever I’d come over to the big house to ‘help her with Biology homework’ (oh, the salty leaves of her, magnified in my gaze). Time was I used to get turned on whenever I heard it, but my body seemed to be dried up these days.
In the shop beside the bus stop I bought a carton of grapefruit juice and a macaroon. I leaned against the rusty pole of the bus stop like a scarecrow, a knot of limbs that had forgotten how to walk. The bus looked top-heavy, leaning inwards at the corner as if it had had a couple of pints over lunch. I was sure it would be full up with schoolgirls three to a seat, their legs sticking together through the creased gaberdine. I crossed my arms on my ribs. A droplet trickled down my neck, hidden under my hair.
When the bus conductor opened the door a crack and held up two fingers I read it first as a flippant peace sign, and hated him. Then I realized that he had room for two of us, and leaped up, just ahead of an old man with a sunburnt scalp. I had to stay standing as far as the canal, when a worn woman lifted her four bags of groceries down and I had a third of a seat. I lowered myself so firmly that the boy in unlaced trainers had to shrink back or be sat on.
The high-pitched chatter of Continental students filled the bus; I tried to decipher the odd word on the basis of what Latin I could remember. Then I remembered the juice, and scrabbled in the bottom of my bag. After the first slug, I rested the carton against my belly; the chill of it made me shudder. Sweat was cooling under my arms. It was Cara who taught me to love the body’s infinitely varied soda fountain. She used to nuzzle under my breasts after a long day’s work, and sample the backs of my ears with her tongue. Her own liquors were so faint – she faded off my fingers as fast as they dried – that she envied mine. She liked to see my clothes stick to me in summer; she used to trace the patterns the salt water made as it broke through that silk vest she brought me from California.
I chewed on the coconut macaroon, alternating with sips of juice. I had enjoyed the toasted bit at the top, but it seemed to be getting bigger as I ate it down to the base. I didn’t stop eating; I liked the rhythm. The sun was making a kaleidoscope of my eyelashes. My shadow on the back of the seat in front of me joggled like a cowgirl with the motion of the bus. We passed the football club where the Immac school dances used to be held before someone got half his ear chopped off and they were banned. I remembered one in particular, some rainy night in my late teens when my ankles bled down the back of my new white court shoes as I danced to three songs in a row by David Bowie, who had one eye blue and one eye green and was living proof that a perv could win fame and glory.
Four seats behind, turned away from me, I noticed a girl carrying a three-foot sunflower upside-down. The top of its stalk was swathed in a plastic bag; the yellow head hung near the floor. I wondered where she was bringing this odd gift. Maybe it was for herself, and there was a basement flat and a rinsed milk-bottle waiting for this giant flower.
I finished the macaroon and wiped my hands on the paper bag. That ache in my fingers again, as if I had been wearing them out. The engine fumes were rising; there was a window behind me, but I couldn’t reach round to open it. The juice was sharp in my stomach, colliding with the coconut. I concentrated on planning tomorrow’s lessons in my head – industries and exports of the main Italian cities, then more long division – as we trundled past the shopping centre. Its white-and-blue shrine was positioned beside the bus stop, as if Our Lady was waiting for a 39A. The sunflower girl turned her head to look, then stared forward again. Older than I thought, very dark lashes; her hair curved round her ear as if a hand had pushed it back. She
looked like she was following a tune in her head. Freckles stood out sharply on her pale forehead. She had one of those snub ncses you laugh at but want to take between your lips.
I shut my eyes. Would you just look at me: my lover one day in the grave and I was fancying others already. Roll up, roll up, blondes, brunettes, we’ve got the lot, all aboard on the Big Dipper of serial monogamy. They said it was healthy. Life went on, it was only natural, mother earth’s rhythms would always jog you along. Eventually I would forget: Cara, which one was that, I’d ask myself; did she have grey eyes and red hair, or was it the other way round?
And there was Cara in the window of the bus paused beside ours, her features chaste and distant behind the scratched glass. I blinked. Don’t panic. It was somebody else, a total stranger. Don’t panic. Hallucinations are only to be expected.
Suddenly I felt that uneasiness in my teeth that meant I was going to be sick. I bent over, hanging my head a few inches from my knees. People were looking at me. I didn’t want it to go on, this cosmic cavalcade; I didn’t want to hurt and heal and survive like any animal. If this love thing was to be repeated over and over, how could the words stay fresh or even halfway sincere? How could I wrench any of it back from Cara and give it to someone else, with it all still reeking of the grave? No, I couldn’t wait just three more stops. Coffee, raspberry tart, pain-au-chocolat, grapefruit juice and coconut macaroon were going to splatter all over somebody’s shoes. I lunged for the pole, pressed the button, kept my teeth clamped shut.
Only when the bus had chugged away in a haze of exhaust fumes did I let myself throw up over a wall. The hedge hid most of it. I picked a leaf to wipe my mouth on. A man walked by, adjusting his tinted bifocals disapprovingly. I wanted to tell him that I was not odd or mad. Then it occurred to me that maybe all the people we saw behaving oddly or madly were not a distinct type at all, they were just us on a very bad day. Still, it wasn’t like me to panic like that. Maybe Cara and I were switching personalities; I was becoming a crazy lady as she sobered into death.
Any time I did lose my grip, she tended to wise up and look after me. The last time she came back, for instance. She’d spent a year vacuuming a library in Berlin, reading the spines of books, smoking so much dope that her memory was patchy afterwards. Meanwhile I was doing all right; I suspected she’d come back sooner or later. I got on with my new job at Immac, and bought myself a personal stereo; it was like a secret lover, spinning a private horizon of sound all around me. Only at Easter did I start having this recurring dream of a limitless warehouse filled with desks and chairs, through which I plodded in pursuit of Cara. At the end I’d corner her behind a desk, and she’d say, you’re always shadowing me, get away from me, and then it would all go black.
My phone bill was unbelievable. ‘I love you,’ I would repeat, my voice abasing itself along the line.
‘It doesn’t help.’
‘Don’t you want to be loved?’
‘Not this much,’ growled Cara. ‘Only as much as I deserve. When you walk into the room there isn’t enough air for me to breathe.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Pen, what do I have to say to get you to tell me to get lost?’
She can’t see my smile. ‘I’ll never do that,’ I say. ‘This is how I’m made: good at hoping.’
‘Well, stop fucking well hoping.’
I didn’t think either of us believed her. The phone calls were too intimate to be those of two people who will never kiss again. Sure enough, by May Cara was back in Dublin. She found me in my bedsit, watching breakfast television and unravelling a jumper every time I got the pattern wrong. We didn’t discuss anything. She pulled my clothes off, starting with the socks. As she lay on my back as if on a surfboard, her breath evaporating the sweat on my nape, she whispered, ‘There’ll be no more leaving, you know.’ And there wasn’t, not in the sense she meant.
I was glad my face was turned into the pillow when she said it, so she couldn’t see my expression, the odd mixture of relief and dread. Was the quest over then, was the lady won, and what would happen now? How would I recognize Cara if she was not always on the brink of leaving? How would I see her without the glint from the sword hanging over our heads? Would she relax, now, beginning to bore me at last as she thickened into some kind of wife?
I needn’t have worried. Cara meant it literally: she would not leave me. But she made no guarantees about not wandering, not straying, not falling for other women. When she nipped back to Berlin for a visit the following summer – telling me, not asking me – it was brought home to me that I could never keep her in one place. She spun herself an elastic chain that allowed her any journey short of leaving me. I was not sure which way I would have preferred it, if I’d had the choice. This way she never left but often seemed beyond my reach.
The following year when the ceiling of my bedsit fell in, bruising my cheek with a lump of plaster, Cara said it was a sign. She persuaded me to stay in the big house until the ceiling was fixed, then till Christmas. The sunny front bedroom became mine, and, since her small one at the back was so full of teetering piles of paper, it was mostly in my room that we slept wrapped round each other, never raising our voices above a whisper in case Mr. Wall heard us. I was the live-in long-term full-time hyphenated partner now, but Cara stayed as unwon as ever.
It amused me that it never occurred to her that I would be the leaver. We kept to our roles, like figures painted on an urn. Sometimes, yes, she would spit out some paranoid accusation, like ‘I hurt you, I wear you out, you’re only staying to look after me, you could just walk away and find someone nicer’. But that worked only as a rhetorical device. Both of us knew that I would never be the one to go; sometimes you just know these things.
Ever since she invited me to live with her I’d been sure that the pair of us would be together until we were ninety and as creaky as our rocking-chairs. It was not a particularly sentimental vision; I could imagine how viciously accurate our ‘discussions’ would be by then. But I did fancy the adventure of a lifetime’s journey in this unpredictable craft. It never occurred to me that she would slip away with the bogeyman, long before her time.
I had a suspicion that it was not purely accidental, either. Once I remembered saying to her, ‘I want to grow old with you,’ and she answered, ‘I don’t want to grow old.’ Whereas I was the type who would live to be a hundred, getting bigger and bitchier and scaring small children more by the year. And if I cracked up in my thirty-first year there would be no one to save me, so I should just get a grip on myself straight away, and stop being the kind of person who vomited into public hedges. I wiped my sour mouth on the back of my hand again and started walking home. It was as hot as ever, but the sun had gone in; clouds were thickening above the city.
Crossing the bridge over the dual carriageway, I noticed a tiny plaque: ‘Blithe Spirit’, it said, with a set of dates that I totted up as lacking a decade of Cara’s. The story suddenly came back to me: a laughing girl who’d tightroped along the handrail one night and tripped to her death in the traffic below. I traced the lettering with a fingertip. Was she drunk, or usually lucky, was that what made her try it? And what were we to do with these Achillean types, these careless losers of life, when there seemed no way of locking them up, strapping them down, forcing them to take only the risks the rest of us considered worth it?
The first drops were falling on my neck as I reached the big house. If Cara was home when I came in from school, she used to leave whatever she was doing and come to cup her mouth over my ears. It was not a big rainfall like on Monday, but a reluctant leaching of water. I went upstairs and changed out of my dusty clothes.
Pulling my shirt over my head, I heard a kind of grunt from the next room. Could Kate have been taken ill? Mouth to the wall, I said her name, but there was no answer. I pulled my shirt back on, and went and stood outside her door. It was showing a crack of light; I heard that painful sound again. When I pushed the door open, Kate’s startled eye
s met mine. She was lying on her back in such a contorted position that I wondered for a second if she was having a fit. Her head cradled in her hands skewed one way, her knees another; as I watched, she raised them higher and let out a careful breath. ‘Just doing my exercises.’
‘Right, yes. Sorry.’ I backed away.
Through dinner – Mr. Wall had grilled some turkey breasts into submission – the rain spattered down. I wore my black fringed shawl in an attempt to make myself feel elegant. The effect was rather like a chaperone watching the flappers do the Charleston.
The rain kept on playing on the kitchen windows as I worked my way through the paper, marking concerts and films with a leaky red biro as if this might inspire me to go to them. At five to eight I harnessed my irritation and rang my mother.
‘But I finish work at four these days,’ she said.
‘Oh. I thought it was five. Sorry, my fault.’
‘I waited till twenty-five past.’
‘Ah, Mammy, I’m an eejit, sorry.’ My voice was shaking so I sucked on my lips and waited.
‘Are you well, anyway?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, the words making a jolly arc.
‘How’s school?’
‘Grand.’
‘Is it still raining over your way?’
‘Seems to be drying up a bit.’
‘Getting heavier over here,’ she told me.
Some evenings my mother and I had nothing to say to each other, so we talked about the weather. We should have been hired by the Met Office as a forecasting double act. As if by quantifying a thin sheet of snow, or counting the seconds between lightning and thunder, we could get through the distance between us.
Kate stood in the hall as I was saying a protracted goodnight to my mother. I stared at her, but she didn’t move. When I finally put the phone down, she said, ‘I don’t suppose you fancy a drive?’