Below me a row of houses underlined the glittering skyline of the Dublin suburbs. A telephone wire, curved like a gondola, seemed to carry a floating load of dark yellow lights. I kept to the path at first; if any of those blotches of darkness resolved themselves into an attacker I supposed I could always run for it and scream until the people in the nearest house heard me. I pulled my anorak hood down on my shoulders so I wouldn’t be surprised from behind. These were all habits; I did not seriously believe that anyone else was up here at half past midnight, nor that anything they could do to me could make my life much worse.
A stunted silver birch caught my eye; I strayed from the path to the tree’s muddy outskirts, and stroked its side. I wandered to the next, and the next, unnamed grey ones with slow muscles and knotted joints. It was almost bright here; I could see the difference between mud and grass. The streetlights had all disappeared behind the clump of rocks, so it had to be moonlight I was seeing by. Three stars hung in a row with a long line below them; I could never remember if this was Orion or the Plough. I wondered whether Cara had ever come up here at night and seen the stars. It would have been nice to have shown them to her, but I suspected she would have insisted on talking about them. The ideal companion would be silent.
I would have liked to meet someone up here, just by chance. I would be standing with my neck uncomfortably craned to see the Pleiades – I had no notion what those ones looked like, but I adored the name – when I would become gradually aware of a figure to one side of me. We would look across the small clearing, nervous at first, then, having decided that we were both women, exchange a small smile. Our faces would seem to float in the moonlight. We would stay looking upwards, our feet shifting us from one tree to the next. The two of us might end up crouched at the foot of the same tree, looking different ways. Not a word would be exchanged. There would be nothing domestic about such romance.
Cara comes back from an extramural course on French feminism one evening, full of metaphorical sites of otherness and the topos of phallogocentrism, at which point I laugh until she has to cover my mouth with hers to shut me up. She has a quote on a card, she reads it aloud in a careful accent. ‘Tout sera changé lorsque la femme donnera la femme à l’autre femme.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I ask, kneeling over the fire to poke it up a little.
‘Everything will change when woman gives woman to the other woman.’
‘I know what the words mean,’ I tell her scathingly, ‘I just don’t understand it. Who is this other woman?’
‘Any of us,’ says Cara, with a yawn, settling back into the cushions.
‘I might find it easier to give woman to the other woman if I knew either of their names.’
‘You’re taking it too literally, you’re missing the point.’
‘No I’m not. What is the point, then?’
‘If you’re going to be…’
‘Come on, Cara, just tell me what you think it means.’
‘All right.’ She glances down at the card again, to check. ‘The point is the giving.’
‘Ah, sure I know that much.’ The smell of coal clings to my fingers.
‘Look, maybe it’s like one of those riddles: what is it, that the more you give away the more you have?’
‘So I’m supposed to say “love”, am I?’
Cara turns her face away. ‘There’s no one answer.’
‘It’s not true, you know,’ I tell her, throwing another knob of coal on the flames. ‘The more you give away, the more you’ve given away.’
I found myself holding on to a tree, my hand gripping its corrugated bark. How long was I going to put myself through these rehashed re-runs of old arguments? I should just accept the fact that Cara and I had not always agreed, had not always understood each other, had not always liked what we did understand. Though we probably understood each other better in the fourteenth year than in the first, though we had both grown up somewhat, though we had made more of the necessary adjustments and were therefore officially happier, I was far from sure that it was a success story. Sometimes I suspected that what had really happened was that we became more resigned, more cynical, raised our pain thresholds as we lowered our expectations. All in all, settled for less.
We shouldn’t have talked so much, it occurred to me now; we should just have fucked our brains out. Because the memories left over from that were simple: no narrative, few details, just a blur of bliss across the brain.
Why didn’t we ever come up here at night and make love under the stars? All those wasted opportunities. If we’d known she was going to die young we’d have got around to everything. Once, in the twilight, we nearly did it. We were lying together behind the rocks in our long coats, beginning to feel the internal music. I was leaning up on one elbow, angled over Cara, my mouth hovering above her eyelids, when a straight couple walked by. We kept our faces together and didn’t move. ‘We’ll be all right if one of us looks like a boy,’ whispered Cara. ‘But not both,’ she added as an afterthought, ‘we’re buggered if we both do.’ And then at that word we got the giggles, of course, and lay there shaking until the couple were out of sight.
But that was early evening, and this was night, and the woods were not safe territory. I felt in my coat pocket and realized that I wasn’t even carrying my steel-handled comb, I’d left it in my bag. I turned and strode off across the muddy grass, trying to send out signals of confidence and bulk. My heels kept slipping on the spongy ground. I put my thumb and finger to either side of my little gold galleon and held on, the chain sharp along my sunburnt neck.
As soon as I got on to the road, the streetlight’s glare dimmed the stars. I felt the familiar anger at being driven out. A breeze was picking up, raising goose-bumps on the back of my wrists. I set off down the hill through the church car park, pacing out one giant C on the tarmac to finish off the night.
FRIDAY
I need it to happen soon, yet I want this feeling to last. If it doesn’t happen now I may weep with exhaustion, but I want to give up every volt of energy I have. I want it, I need it, I can’t think of anything else, but I have to wait till she gives it to me. I want it to end, but not till the very last possible minute.
I heave once, like a dying animal. My forehead smashes against the headboard. My mouth opens wide. I pull Cara’s hand away, holding her soaked fingers still. Our bodies are stuck together like the pages of a book left out in the rain.
After a little while, she says, ‘That was yum. Can we watch Northern Exposure now?’
The trick was to get up quickly. I shook the dream from my head, swung back the duvet and planted my feet on the floor. The first thing that struck me was the cold; no sunshine today. Exhausting as it had been, I found I missed it; I wasn’t ready for winter yet.
Only when I had brushed my teeth and splashed cold water on my face did I look at my watch and interpret the hands as a quarter to seven; I didn’t need to be up for another hour. I got back into bed and pulled the quilt over my head. The sheets had cooled already, enclosing me in a cocoon of chilly air.
Let’s be honest: I didn’t like being in bed on my own. Nearly all the times I was, I was waiting for Cara. Sometimes if she was far away being political or sociable, I used to wrap up in myself like a whale in deep waters, enjoying the respite. Other times it was hell frozen over. The jealousy that choked me on occasion wasn’t really about sex; I couldn’t imagine her having a better time in bed with anyone else than we had. Nor was it about possession exactly; Cara could never be owned by anyone, the way (though it’s against the rules to say so nowadays) some people can. No, it was more like a fear that whoever Cara was with on a particular night would turn out to be so interesting that she’d never come home.
Having fallen for Cara in the context of her infatuation with someone else, I could hardly have expected this to be a conventional relationship. Mrs. Mew (a woman with too much mascara who, though I never admitted it to Cara, I had never liked) was the
key, the catalyst, the flagpole on which we hung out our days. And after Mrs. Mew there were the others, one at a time, all in a row, a sort of emotional orienteering course. Once when she was doing a play at college, Cara met me for cherry buns and said glumly, ‘I think I may be falling for Jenny.’
‘Which one’s Jenny?’
‘You know, the one who plays the waitress. I suppose we’re going to have to break up again.’
Suddenly I felt like changing the script. ‘Nah, let’s not bother.’
‘Huh?’
‘You can fall for who you like but it doesn’t change what we have.’
Cara said I was unutterably wonderful. She said that no matter how her heart hurtled towards someone she always knew deep down that it was a loop away from the central point, the Pen thing.
And in fact she never really fell for Jenny; it blew over in a few weeks. Her unrequited loves were easy enough to handle. And when she left me for men, the issue was not jealousy so much as loss. What were harder to deal with later on, when I was living with her, were the times when she got lucky and slept with a woman who requited her lust.
It wasn’t so much the sex Cara needed as the sense of freedom, of unconstrained possibilities. Her rhetoric could always convince me that having a wee fling now and then was the best way to keep a long-term relationship alive. ‘Even when I’m with other women,’ she told me once, ‘I belong to you.’
‘You’re too flighty to belong to anyone,’ I answered, chewing on her earlobe.
‘Well, but if I was anybody’s I’d be yours.’
I believed her. I let her stand on my broad feet and lick my eyebrows. I was happy most of the time.
There were bad nights. I remembered the first time, the night I lay awake knowing she was in Kilkenny. It wasn’t that I imagined their lovemaking inch by inch or anything; I just felt so completely alone. But Cara got the train back early the next afternoon and came home on the bus with her pockets full of Cape gooseberries from an exotic fruiterer in town. We pulled their webs off one by one, popping the yellow balls into each other’s mouths. When we were lying in a bathful of dark water, with our breathing synchronized, I knew no jealousy.
Another time, Cara ran up to me with a paperback, and pointed. I read out loud: ‘It’s possible to see where Melanie used to live…’
‘No, higher up.’ She grabbed the book. ‘By betrayal,’ she recited, ‘I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.’ Cara paused for a reaction. ‘Well, I don’t do that,’ she explained. ‘I’m always on your side, I’m just not always in your bed.’ Put that way, it sounded fair enough.
But sometimes when I was alone in the big house at night and the wind made the panes rattle, I forgot the explanations, and I was three years old. My mother once said the worst thing about having children was that when she went into the cubicle of a public toilet, we would begin to snivel, and while she was struggling with her zip she would see these little hands come under the door, and would get an overpowering urge to stamp on them. I could understand that, but I could also understand the kind of abased neediness that motivated Gavin and me to put our hands under the door.
In the early days of our negotiations, Cara used to want to share every detail. ‘Half the fun would be running back to tell you about it,’ she’d say wistfully. But I knew my limits, and I knew that if she told me all about what she did with whom, my ears would burst. I could handle hearing who she’d slept with in another town far away, and that it was ‘nice’ or ‘O Kish’, but any more vivid details tended to form themselves into a video that played itself through my head at top speed on the nights I couldn’t sleep. And of late I had stopped asking her exactly who, either. I found it was easier to hear her enthuse about various people and make my own deductions. I adopted this policy the day Cara responded to some strained question with ‘Do you honestly want to know, love?’ and I realized that I didn’t.
I developed a taste for discretion – an outmoded concept, I knew, but maybe I was Mr. Wall’s true daughter, and Cara and I had been switched at birth. This way I had more of a sense of privacy and control than some blaringly ‘open’ relationship would have given me. This way I was the girlfriend, the lover, the partner. It was important to me not to feel upstaged, if we all bumped into each other in the street. And to be fair to her, Cara kept to other unwritten rules as well, such as: don’t bring anyone else to the big house, don’t make me beg for your time, don’t bring me to a party and go home with somebody else. She never fell madly in love with these women, and if they ever began falling madly in love with her, she wriggled away. I remembered overhearing a snatch of a final fraught call from the woman in Kilkenny. It surprised me how well my clumsy beloved learned this balancing act, keeping her dalliances (as I called them in my head) well in the background.
So much so that I had never got around to finding out which of the women in the Attic she was sleeping with this summer, the odd night when she stayed over there after ‘missing the last bus’. I hadn’t thought there was much to choose between them, with their torn woolly jumpers and home-grown yoghurt; it hadn’t seemed too important as long as she was alive. Cara always came home to me by lunchtime. Wasn’t that the important thing?
Sometimes it got to the point where it didn’t feel like love. No liking or bliss to it, some days, just a feeling of connection so sinewy and enduring that I could not consider doing without it.
Twenty to eight; I swung my legs out of bed again. This whole day had a feeling of déjà vu. My ‘To Do’ list hung on the cork board, mocking my inertia. I picked up a pencil to add ‘laundry’, and the sharp tip tore into the paper; I let it rip right through.
More mass cards had arrived. Mr. Wall (who seemed to be getting up earlier and earlier, since the smooth sides of the kettle were only barely warm after him now) had arranged them on the mantelpiece like Christmas cards. He probably didn’t mean to be macabre. Listening to the radio distracted me from the toast I was grinding through. The forecast said it would heat up again later; I went to look for my swimsuit. I bumped into Kate on the stairs. She looked at the crumpled green togs in my hand. ‘I’m going swimming after school,’ I said almost guiltily. ‘D’you fancy coming?’
She was looking pale again, behind her tan. ‘I’d love to, but I’ve no suit.’
‘Oh, I’ll find you one of Cara’s. Unless…’
‘No, that’s fine,’ said Kate hastily.
I couldn’t discover the swimsuit in any of the overstuffed drawers in Cara’s room, then I remembered that she would have brought it to Greece. I pulled the suitcase out from under the bed and zipped it open for the first time. Luckily the togs were on top, angel-blue in a tangle. When I held them to my face they smelt not of Cara but of salt. I had an impulse to keep them in my pocket, a slice of the Aegean for when I needed it. I didn’t want to give them to Kate to stretch out of shape and stink up with chlorine. But she called from downstairs, so I inhaled again briefly and carried them down.
Grace was on the table, nosing at the milk left in Kate’s bowl of cereal. I pushed him gently, twice in a row, then picked him up to lift him away. He lunged at me, claws catching my throat. I dropped him and swore. Mr. Wall came into the kitchen just then; I felt ashamed and contented myself with hissing as I rubbed the skin. He fetched me some antiseptic from the first aid box in the cupboard under the stairs. Grace sat by the cat-flap, scowling as if to blackmail us with his imminent departure.
On the way to Immac my abdomen felt leaden, with the occasional spasm; I wondered whether it was grief, or something I’d eaten. It was calming down by the time I got into the classroom. Ten minutes early. I wandered round reading all the tired posters for the nth time: The Proclamation of the Republic in 1916 offering to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’, the Road Safety Bureau’s informational cartoon strip, and a chart of common woodland flowers.
I had just enough time to comb my hair in the staff toilet. In the mirror I looked jus
t the same as ever; my mouth curled pleasantly at the corners. No one could tell at a glance that there was anything wrong with me. The wolf had eaten me up and was walking the corridors in my cardigan and lace-up shoes, burping softly so no one would notice.
I passed Robbie on the stairs; he held on to my sleeve with one hand and started scrabbling in his tartan satchel with the other. ‘Got something for you.’
I waited. What kind of present do you give on such occasions? Not a mass card, surely, not from a Glaswegian agnostic.
He pulled out a smartly striped paper bag. There was a book in it; he scraped at the price label with his long guitar nail. ‘Sorry, just a sec. I picked this up in town yesterday.’
The cover featured a woman in a lavender dress, her hands sunk deep into the pockets, strolling along a mountain path. Finding Yourself on Your Own, it proclaimed. Who else is going to help you to find yourself, I thought, then registered the subtitle in pale letters: A Guide for the Widowed. Robbie rushed to reassure me: ‘It’s not an Irish book. It covers all sorts of…partnerships. There’s a section on’ – before I could clap a hand across his mouth his eyes had swivelled to Sister Luke, descending the steps one at a time above us like a well-fed angel – ‘your line of business.’
I could not keep a slight smile off my mouth.
‘Sorry,’ whispered Robbie. ‘I don’t mean to sound patronizing.’
‘Thanks very much. I’ll definitely give it a read,’ I promised him, putting it back in the bag as Sister Luke passed us. Then a queue of little girls in tracksuits began to back up behind us, so I let him go.
My class were brats this morning. Lucy Parkes had got a paperclip caught in her fringe and couldn’t get it out, and no fewer than three of them claimed to have done their Irish grammar but left it at home. No one could remember the past continuous. Saoirse Mullan kept mixing up againn and agaibh like a four-year-old. I hauled them through the exercises till ten past ten, my patience fraying away strand by strand like a rope in an Alpine thriller.