‘See, it’s lovely,’ our daughter says, once we’re back in her car. ‘She’ll settle in no time.’
I take Teresa’s hand in mine and say nothing.
*
Teresa sits on the bed; I pull her nightdress over her head. She giggles and nods.
‘You have a lovely smile,’ she says. I want to cry because that was one of the first things she ever said to me when we met at a dance in the Banba Hall.
I make love to her slowly and carefully, enjoying every press of her body. I push my hands into her hair and feel her breath on my neck; it’s like nothing has changed. She is my girl, my small thing, my tender, yielding doll. There has always been a softness about Teresa and me. Some couples look like they’d break each other in bed but not us; we always left our spiky selves at the bedroom door.
Afterwards I hand her a paradise square, and she nibbles at it, pulls out the sultanas with her fingers, licks the jam and savours the cake’s almond tang. When she has finished her cup of tea I pat her lips with a napkin and she lies back.
‘There now, Teresa.’
Soon she drifts and settles, her little silver head quiet beside me. I lift my pillow. Teresa pushes and fights; I stop, think of letting go, but I grip the sides of the pillow tighter and carry on. I hold it down, push my own face into the top of it and sob. Then, jerk one. Jerk two. And she’s gone. I pull the pillow off her face and take her in my arms until I fall asleep myself. The detritus of my mind gets locked down in dreams – Emerald Sunsets, paradise squares, our daughter’s nervous glancing in the rear-view, dancing in the Banba Hall, a single coral rose, the spongy hump of the pillow. And though Teresa is safe in my arms, even in sleep, I know she is gone.
City of Glass
Molly McCloskey
The locals used to say of my father-in-law that they remembered him when he came to town on a bicycle. They meant before the Mercedes, before the big hotel and the multiple properties and the house with extensive gardens. They didn’t mean it nicely, as in, Well done, you. They meant: You’re still nobody, underneath it all. He is dead now, he grew gnarled and bitter, then expired in his sleep without a sound. His son is no longer my husband.
I came to town riding shotgun in the van of a Donegal farmer. I’d hitched a lift from him somewhere just beyond Ballybofey. It was May, and the gorse was all aflame along the hillsides, and the farmer wanted me to kiss him when he dropped me off. I can’t remember if I did. I might’ve. He was harmless, if grizzled and a bit smelly, and I was twenty-four and saw adventure in each unprecedented moment. It was 1989, and the good old days were about to begin.
They would come to an end six years later, during a freakishly hot summer, in a bedroom not five kilometres from where I might or mightn’t have kissed that farmer, where on the floor there were heaps of clothes and broken glass that had been there for months, on a day I wished could go on forever.
*
I had come to Ireland from New York, via Heathrow and Holyhead. It was early evening when I disembarked in Dublin, my stuffed pack like a snail’s shell enormous on my back. I’d booked into a hostel on Gardiner Street but instead of dropping my pack I stopped for a pint. I chose at random a pub called Doyle’s, where a guy named Declan joined me. Declan’s line was that he had recently been released from prison for bombing a house. He wanted me to think: IRA. He wanted me to think: Ho! How hot is that! He said I should forget about the hostel and spend the night at a B&B with him. I had no desire to go to a B&B with Declan, though we did make a night of it, moving from Doyle’s to Bachelor’s on Ormond Quay, or maybe it was the Ormond on Bachelor’s Walk. Everywhere was too brightly lit and the sofas were all covered in the same prickly maroon upholstery that reminded me of AstroTurf. When the spins set in, Declan walked me to the hostel and left me there.
The next day I hitched out of Dublin. In the grey old days, such things were still possible. The motorways did not yet exist, and I took a local bus to the edge of the city and stood on a grassy verge as the lorries rumbled past. It wasn’t long before I got a lift. I climbed high into the cab and the driver offered me a Silk Cut and we smoked companionably, like old cronies. From my perch I could see over the hedgerows into the fields. They looked soggy, like sponges you could wring out. Low walls crawled this way and that. The sky was the colour of dirty soap suds. The driver quizzed me about my itinerary. I told him my plan was to begin in Donegal and move south along the coast, hitching the rim of the Republic before boarding the ferry again and returning to America to begin my life proper. He answered with a quick in-suck of air and a nod like an apostrophe. He told me I was a great girl for wandering aimlessly around Ireland all by myself, and the way he kept saying, Aren’t you great, made me feel like I might just be great.
In Donegal, I hitched from village to village, from damp to damper hostel, living on chip butties and Guinness and the thrill of so much sky. One night in Killybegs, in a pub down by the harbour, I fell in with a middle-aged couple from Derry named Bill and Lil. Overweight and florid-faced, their exuberance tainted with despair, Bill and Lil swept me into their orbit with a kind of desperate generosity. They drank buckets of Black Ta-ar, and I drank it with them, over a dinner they treated me to of grilled plaice. By the pavlova we were promising to keep in touch. We took instant Polaroids of each other, then sat staring slack-jawed as they developed, as though something other than our selves might appear.
After a week on the mainland, I escaped to the island of Arranmore. The weather had turned by then. The big black skies had stopped rolling in, and every day dawned fresh and clear. The afternoon I approached the middle-aged skipper in Burtonport to enquire about the next departure for the island, I was wearing a modest pair of shorts. Jimmy had a head of curls that looked like small waves breaking all over his head. He gazed up at me from the boat, gave me the sailing time, and then, with a cock-eyed leer, accused me of not wearing any underwear.
On the island I checked into a seaside hostel and sat on the pebbled shore watching the low waves slide in and out and trying to imagine, behind me, the tumbling of walls in time-lapse. I tried to hear the call of ancient things. I wanted to experience myself as a blink in the eye of time. But I just kept thinking about Jimmy. Eventually, I gave up and went down the road to Early’s where I fell into conversation with a handsome dark-haired guy who told me he worked for the UN. I thought he meant a diplomat. I tried to picture this guy, who lacked the gravitas I associated with diplomats, wearing a suit and listening to simultaneous translations on a headset.
At closing time we got a bottle of wine and drank it back at the hostel, kissing a bit until I passed out. When I woke in the morning, the diplomat was gone, but he had left a note – something nice and innocuous and, well, diplomatic. I fell back to sleep, and the next time I opened my eyes, there was the hostel owner, towering over me, arms akimbo. When she saw I was conscious, she said, in a tone of great declarative contempt: ‘You’re some cookie let loose on Arranmore.’ She said it as though my few hours revelling had thrown the local population into a tailspin of lust and confusion. As though I were a nightmare of modernity come to screw with their venerable traditions.
I spent the day in a fug of headachy shame, tromping the island’s laneways, attempting to appear robust and Teutonic. I did not stay another night but caught the evening boat back to the mainland. As we spluttered out into the channel, Jimmy gave me the nod like an apostrophe and produced a plastic shopping bag. He asked me had I forgotten it the day before. I looked down into the bag. Inside was a tangle of pastel-coloured girls’ cotton underwear – cheap-looking but new and clean.
*
Back then, if it wasn’t jagged and dramatic cliff faces shearing off into the sea, and greens and blues that glistened silver in a sudden clearing after rain, it was a dreary and a stunted world. The people were ashen-faced, and lots of them were out of work. They stood in dole queues, looking iconic and fated, the way Russians used to, queuing for bread. Birth control was illegal, a pr
ohibition I mistook for a quaint anachronism, like those laws in places like Alabama outlawing oral sex. Remnants of middling folk bands wandered listless and greying about the place. I felt like a time traveller from some riotous and colourful future.
Because there wasn’t much to lose, there was also a recklessness in the air, a lack of censure that made the place easy to fall in love with. Everyone smoked, and no one complained about the fouled air. Driving drunk was something people did frequently, naturally, and without serious remorse, as though it were a harmless indulgence, like having a second piece of pie. And everywhere were those pockets of beautiful dereliction – the gable walls toppled, creepers laying claim to what once had been bedrooms, floors now nothing but scutch grass. The country was like a beautiful failure – verdant, profound and full of laughter. There was a sense that we were all in it together, whatever it was. In the pub on Sunday mornings there were men who drove Mercedes and were big deals at the pharmaceutical plant, and there were others who were on the dole, and there were guys home on leave from the Lebanon, and there were grandmothers and children; there were christenings and first communions, and there were holes in every family where once had been the sisters and brothers who were now abroad, and there were many, many funerals. It was all this dying – it was a wonder there was anybody left alive – that kept us mindful of the truth: that our fates were unknown, that the great leveller awaited us all.
I decided to stay for the summer. A week after the farmer dropped me off in Sligo town I got a job at a pub and restaurant called Carroll’s. It catered to the square singletons, the bank tellers, nurses and civil servants. I earned one-pound-forty an hour, taking orders for drinks I’d never heard of from people whose accents I couldn’t understand.
Most nights they were three deep at the bar, and by eleven o’clock the place was sweaty and heaving with hormones. At closing time, everyone migrated to one of the two ‘discos’ in town – less like the shimmering palaces I’d imagined when I’d heard them spoken of and more like high-school dances. During the slow numbers, couples shuffled rigidly in tight circles, the kisses prolonged and adolescent in their monotony. When the fast songs came on, there was a great dash to the dance floor, and over the bobbing heads a field of arms flailed, as groups of women shouted into one another’s faces: I will survive . . . hey-ey-hey!
One early evening at Carroll’s, when the place was quiet, my future husband walked in.
Someone else served him, and we didn’t speak. He sat alone at the end of the bar. He was wearing a crisp striped button-down shirt. He had a strong nose and broad shoulders and a way of seeming in charge of himself. I could see in a glance he had substance. He was like no other man I’d met in town. Those who frequented Carroll’s struck me as dull, while the druggier guys seemed damaged and unsure, suffused by a vague, self-defeating disdain. Eddie drank his pint and put a tip on the bar and left, and though I forgot all about him, when I saw him again some weeks later, I recognised him immediately.
‘I know you from Carroll’s,’ I said.
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, cool as could be, but nice.
I’d kept myself busy in the interval. I took to partying with a guy named Animal and the members of the Pretty Felons, a local pop-rock band. I’d met them at one of the edgier bars, where the stuffing erupted through the seats and the air stank of patchouli. Animal had tight curls and a driven intensity that seemed to have no possible outlet, and he was thick-chested and borderline sexy. The Felons were different, slender and listless. They had lank, rained-on-looking hair and an air of aggrieved entitlement, like people done out of an inheritance, but they were gentler than any men I had ever met. In a bedsit above a butcher’s shop we smoked sprinklings of hash mixed with tobacco that burned my throat and gave me only a dim, headachy buzz. This way of getting high, so parsimonious and approximate, seemed just another instance of the way people here made do, and I would sit gloomily on the mud-brown sofa, ruminating on how history had diminished them.
One Saturday afternoon, Animal and I were smoking and drinking, and we did what everyone did back then after a few joints and several pints: we went for a drive. Out to Lissadell, where we lay on the white sand beach and watched the blue heavens pull away from us, breaking up into a profusion of dots. When I closed my eyes I felt the sunlight drifting down like snow, and I thought I’d dropped out of nowhere and landed smack in the centre of my life.
The following week, I began an affair with a married journalist.
Aiden worked for the national television station, and he was down from Dublin moving round the country covering that summer’s election – all tattered bunting and megaphones on the roofs of cars and tricolour posters that buckled in the rain. He came into Carroll’s one day. As I served him his meat and two veg, he looked me in the eye and said in a voice so mellifluous I nearly sank to my knees, ‘You’re not from here.’
Aiden was a Gaeilgeoir, fluent in Irish, and a passionate nationalist. In another age, he might’ve wandered the byways and earned his meagre crust declaiming epic poems of dispossession. As it was, he sat beside me on various bar stools expounding on key episodes in Irish history; the phrase ‘eight hundred years’ came up frequently. He gave the impression that he carried in his breast the collective memory of his tribe. He recited poems for me by Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, talked about the Táin and Cromwell and the Fenians, and how all of it related to the general election of 1989. Then he would throw back his head and laugh, with a wicked affection, at the thought of his own people hauling their tragicomic selves through history.
I had moved from town to the nearby beach village of Rosses Point, where I shared a ramshackle Victorian with two other women. We had no washing machine, and my housemates boiled their underwear on the stovetop, then hung the bras and panties from a clothesline strung across the dank kitchen. The carpets were brown-and-tan swirl and stiff with invisible grime. In the front room where I slept there was a huge bay window that actually overlooked a bay.
I had also quit my job at Carroll’s and was working at a posh restaurant in the Rosses frequented by local fat cats, old money and rich American tourists. Instead of chicken and chips, it was all confit de canard and gigot d’agneau. There were mussels plucked fresh from the rocks and the day’s catch being coolly filleted on the butcher block; there were delicate little breads baked each morning and a herb garden from which we tweezed aromatic miracles, and there was always something reducing on the stove. Everything felt exquisite and fussed over, and we – the whole staff, down to the woman who ironed the aprons – carried ourselves with a slight imperiousness, as though we were the keepers of something fine.
One side of the restaurant was glass, and you could see across the inlet to Coney Island, and every night we watched the sky turn with stunning slowness from a pale sunlit blue to a richer cobalt to a navy that looked the texture of velvet. The days stretched to breaking point, and for weeks the sky didn’t once turn a proper black. The rain had all but stopped. It was a rare, hot, magical summer, and every day someone would say to me, ‘This isn’t normal, don’t go thinking this is normal,’ as though to spare me the pain of a misplaced trust.
A couple of times I joined Aiden on assignments – once to a grim border county where the air was tight and oppressive. As we pulled out of the driveway of a big house where they’d been doing some filming, he asked me, by the way, what I thought of such-and-such a woman, one of the crew. He was already lining up his next lover. I was strangely unoffended by the query. I was that young.
I went to Belfast with him, too. We stayed at the Europa and had dinner at La Belle Époque. After much red wine we had our first proper fight, a drunken doozy up and down Victoria Street. There was something flouncing and erratic about the scene, one of those fights that seems contrived even as it’s unfolding, like the urgent melodrama of bad theatre. By the following day all was forgiven, as though it really had been a piece of theatre. He drove me to Dublin and left me at Connolly Station f
rom where I would take the train west, to my careless and impermanent life. As I rode the escalator up, I looked over my shoulder to where his car was waiting at the light, its windows fogged with condensation. The sky was a purply grey, and all the eaves were dripping from a just-finished rain, and I was certain that I had never loved the world in quite the way I did just then. Certainly, I was in love with him. I had told him so – an admission he rather sensationally declared an act of valour on par with the exploits of some great warrior he’d pulled out of a hat.
I smiled and thought: whatever.
In July, he took the family to northern Spain for six weeks.
‘Six weeks!’ I cried.
It wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t bear his absence. It was that where I came from no one went on six-week holidays. He sat up late at night at tiny kitchen tables in a scattering of rustic villages, composing letters to me, great thick packets that would arrive at my door. He wrote about the poems of Ó Raifteirí and Basque nationalism and how brave I was to love him. Often, halfway through the letter, his smooth loopy script would lapse into a jagged scrawl, the slant of lines across the page growing abruptly steeper.
Aiden was five weeks into his holiday when I met my future husband for the second time.
It was midnight on a Saturday, and I was in town drinking with some friends. Animal was there – his cameo in my life not yet concluded – and it was he who suggested we crash a wedding reception at the local hotel. The ballroom was nearly empty, and Eddie was sitting at the bar.
‘I know you from Carroll’s,’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. He crossed his arms over his chest, nodded towards the stool beside him and said, ‘What can I get you?’
I hoisted myself up and ordered a pint. We chatted about the restaurant in the Rosses and what I was doing over this side of the world, and he told me about the people who had just got married. At some point it dawned on me that he owned the place. The family did.