I took out my Silk Cuts and said, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ and he said, ‘I don’t mind if you burst into flames.’
I smiled.
He asked if I’d like to go for a drink sometime.
‘Sure,’ I said. And then, ‘But I’m not looking for anything, you know, serious.’
The things we say. Some of them just don’t bear thinking about.
‘Me neither,’ he said, and took a large but seemly swallow of his Guinness.
Next thing I knew it was jaunts to all the beauty spots. There were fresh mussels in Mullaghmore and smoked salmon in country pubs and there were cool milky pints in snugs up and down the coast. I thought I had never known anyone quite so solid, quite so devoid of agendas.
With autumn came Sunday lunches with the family, gleaming crispy roasts and linen napkins, silver that made me think of medieval banquets. There were glasses for each drink course – the aperitif, the gin and tonic, the red and white wines, the liqueur – and as I sat there with a crystal tumbler heavy in my hand, I felt as though something reassuring and true had entered my life at last. It’s not that the family was terribly rich; the father had come to town on a bicycle, recall, and had done okay. But there was an old-world aesthetic about their domestic lives – the civilising influence of Eddie’s mother. The way they planned menus. The way they arranged flowers from the garden for their table. The way they retired to the sitting room for a smoke and a cognac after dinner, the fire crackling demurely on windswept evenings.
Eddie and I married the following summer in the church where he’d been christened. There were lots of big hats, and outside the church the women periodically clapped their palms atop them to keep them from flying off in the fresh summer gusts. Afterwards we all drank champagne and ate boeuf en croute and danced in a marquee to a hokey quartet, and I knew that I need never be alone again.
Within a couple of years of our marriage, the new Ireland had begun to show its face. I had my first glimpses of it on our visits to Eddie’s brother. Peter and his wife Siorcha lived in the suburbs of south Dublin, and we stayed with them whenever we were up. Peter worked for one of the banks, and Siorcha had a job at an investment firm. They talked about their home alarm system the way people talk about their kids. They didn’t cook anymore but ate feckin delicious pre-prepared meals from what Siorcha coolly called Marks and Sparks. She waxed rhapsodic about the latest addition to the line – korma! cannelloni! brie quiche! – tips that were lost on us: there was no Marks and Sparks where we lived.
Sometimes we thought Peter and Siorcha were a bit full of themselves. We had no idea that they were merely the vanguard, the earliest glints of materialism and convenience culture, the first trickle of what would soon be enormous obliterating waves. I imagine that once it happened, and their own minor indulgences were left in the shade, they too were appalled. But by then I didn’t know them anymore.
One night, Siorcha and I found ourselves having dinner alone in Dalkey. I was trying to tell her something, to tell her I was scared, and she was giving me the old all-marriages-go-through-that advice. She couldn’t get what I was talking about. It wasn’t her fault. Whatever it was that was wrong with Eddie and me was too insidious to explain or describe. The spirited bonhomie of our early days was morphing into careless disregard. We lacked direction. We couldn’t get our footing. We drank bottles of fine wine and dined on delectable food, and it’s a cliché to say it but it was the very ease of my life that made clear it was wrong, because there was nothing – no want, no trauma, no lack of love – that could account for my unhappiness.
It was not long after that night, in the summer of that same year, that I found myself travelling west by train from Dublin. I was with a man named Kevin. We were drinking bottles of cold beer, standing in the no-man’s-land between carriages, bracing ourselves against the wall while the floor plates shifted under our feet. It was like being on a ride at the amusement park. The day was glorious, and the country slid past in alternating panes of pastoral, industrial and domestic. The fields were green and empty, or full of sheep who didn’t look up when we whooshed by. Then patches of weedy cracked tarmac surrounded by cyclone fences. Then the backyards of houses, all in slots, with their propped bikes and their coal bunkers and the random flotsam of family life. And then all was green again, and there were cows where sheep had been, and a breaker’s yard, and a bungalow sitting proud on a knoll. In the distance, a road on which two cars were moving tinily away from another. We leaned out the window, and the wind whipped over our faces in an invigorating wash, and I felt as alive and unencumbered as if we’d hopped a boxcar.
Kevin and I had met when he was down for a weekend from Dublin. We were in a pub, sitting with friends on a row of high stools, and we sat there for so many hours that finally I slipped, with an unusual grace, right off of mine. As though I were a sheet of paper or a feather, making its unhurried way to the floor. It didn’t phase him in the least.
He was like no one I had ever met. Intelligent, self-deprecating, shockingly irreverent. All the ideas and people I took seriously, the pretensions I bowed to, the collective obsessions of the nation, everything I thought sacrosanct, Kevin lampooned. He was an autodidact. He’d never been to university but he’d read everything, including Beowulf. Kevin was a grafter, too. He had the fierce drive of a young man determined to be someone. He had a deal with a London publisher for his first novel and a hot agent who kept telling him he was on the brink of being big.
About a week after our first meeting I had reason to travel to Dublin. I checked into my hotel and went to meet Kevin. My appointment was in two hours. I never made it, nor did I make it the next day. By the time we boarded the train to go west, with the floor moving under us and the country sliding past in frames, the world had cracked wide open.
When we got off the train that evening, back in the town where I lived, we went to a poetry reading. There were too many people we knew there, and it was a self-destructive act that can only be explained by the compulsion illicit lovers feel to exhibit themselves. The only empty seats were in the front row, and we crept up the aisle and sat stiffly through the next hour, resisting the urge to giggle or touch each other or rise from our seats, raise our arms to the heavens and shout Hallelujah! The reading was being given by a fleshy guy from California with a goatee and a Latino surname who remained poignantly unaware of the scandal that was unfolding in front of him.
Afterwards, a friend named Johnny offered Kevin and me a bed for the night. He said it out of the side of his mouth, like we were on the run. Which in a way we were. But Johnny said most things out of the side of his mouth. He spoke in long circuitous sentences that ended back where they’d begun.
‘Yeah, well it’s a kind of ah . . . yeah, ya know a sort of a . . . right, you know what I mean, yeah?’
Johnny’s house was out in the Rosses, not far from where I’d once lived in the Victorian with the swirly carpets and the big bay window. It was on a quiet laneway overlooking a white powder beach, a piece of real estate that would very soon be worth a fortune. The house had charm, but Johnny, who had inherited it from his parents, was too disorganised to keep it up, and the place, frankly, was a disaster area. For Kevin and me, it had the combined charms of a honeymoon cottage and a safe house. We slept in the spare bedroom, which, even in the context of the general disorder, existed on another plane of chaos. It was not simply messy, it was hazardous. On the floor, mixed in with the piles of dirty clothes and the faded paperbacks and a few split-open cigarettes, were several large isosceles triangles of broken glass, as though from a window or a picture frame. It was a sign of our own disorder that we regarded a floor full of jagged glass as amusing. Kevin christened it the City of Glass. He was a master of literary allusion. We spent hours in there, lying in bed discussing books and people, our fathers and mothers and their broken marriages, our plans, our hopes, the funny and the sad things that had happened in our lives. It felt less like we had met than like we had redisco
vered one another, and in that finding was a happiness that bordered on delirium.
On the third day, we decided to walk across the big open fields out the back of the house to a pub in the village. It was hot – freakishly hot – and our progress was slow. Our initial brisk gait degenerated to a trudge. It was becoming hallucinatory. I was a few steps behind Johnny and Kevin, and with the sweat rolling off them and their pale skin so unsuited to the sun they made me think of malarial explorers on the verge of expiry. It is one of my most enduring images of Kevin, plodding across the field in safari gear and a straw boater, though of course he was wearing nothing of the sort.
Upon arriving, we collapsed dramatically at a picnic table in the gravel yard. The bay was an icy blue. I could hear Kevin talking to Johnny but I may as well have been listening to my own thoughts. My boundaries had dissolved, and he was as much me as I was. To leave him, or to lose him, would have been as impossible just then as taking leave of myself.
That evening, back at Johnny’s place, when the air had cooled and we were lying in the front yard, our dinner plates scattered like frisbees on the grass, I felt utterly, deludedly complete. At that moment, I would happily have committed the rest of my life to laughing at Kevin’s clever witticisms, following the train of his allusions, catering to his inexhaustible desires, and getting drunk. I didn’t ever want to work again, to earn money, or even to be required to think straight. I never wanted to leave that house or the City of Glass or the Rosses. I saw no reason – no compelling philosophical or moral or existential reason – why, once we had found our little Edens, we should ever have to leave them.
But I was in hiding, and the clock was ticking. I made calls from the phone in Johnny’s front hall, and people tried to coax me home, like I was like a spy coming in from the cold. Finally, on the fourth day, I went.
*
There is nothing, in theory, that a marriage cannot accommodate. It expands infinitely in order to contain itself. Somewhere, in a parallel dimension, I stood humbled by my own appalling selfishness, which shattered the mould we had and allowed us to begin again as different people. Somewhere, we were reconciled. What I had done was blistering and flagrant and ineradicable. But it was not the case that we were incapable of surviving it; it was only the case that I was.
Once, a few years after the divorce, when I was back in the town where Eddie and I had lived, I saw him walking towards me over the bridge. We had bumped into one another a few times since the split, and the split itself had been amicable enough. But there was always something uncanny, unsettling, about seeing him. It was like seeing a ghost, yes, but at the same time like becoming a ghost myself. When we reached each other, he shook his head ruefully and said, ‘Jesus, I was saying to myself there’s a nice looking bird coming over the bridge, and then . . . it was you.’
I could hardly speak. We were just across the road from where he’d said to me that first night ‘I don’t mind if you burst into flames.’ It was a throwaway comment, but it was an indication of everything he was to offer me: generosity, indulgence, forgiveness. A lifetime of occasionally heedless celebration.
There was a day, some months after Eddie and I had separated and I was still scratching around in the rubble of my life, that Aiden came to see me in the west. He parked his red Camaro in front of the cottage where I was living. It was like an alarm throbbing in the tiny drive. He was all sparkle and sobriety. He drank Cidona in a way I found self-congratulatory and described his letters to me from Spain that summer as the diary of an illness. Whatever magic had once existed between us had curdled – I looked at him and saw a philandering smoothie, and I detested myself for having allowed him to visit. As I watched him pull away the following morning, the wheels turning on the gravel, the car a slash of red against the chill blue dawn, I felt a dozen different kinds of sad.
I went back to Johnny’s house only once, eight summers after the fact. I was living in Dublin by then. Johnny was on the dry and I had long since straightened myself out. I brought a bottle of Perrier, and we sat in the bright clean kitchen like two suburban housewives. The floors were clear of debris. Johnny’s sentences had an end point. He told me he’d been near wet brain, and I couldn’t argue with him.
Out the back he’d planted a small garden, and he picked herbs and different kinds of lettuce and made us a salad. He had edible flowers, too – one a sunburst yellow and the other burnt orange – and he added the petals to the salad, and I nearly wept at the small remarkable beauties life throws our way. The house felt still and reconciled around me, and one minute it was as simple as that and the next I’d feel it swarming with the ghosts of us all.
We talked about the people we knew or used to know. We talked about Kevin. His life had run wild for a time. I’d heard stories. It was easy to imagine. He was reckless, and unable to protect himself from his own sharp edges. But by the time we’d bumped into each other again – in a Tesco, of all places – Kevin was in the process of reconstructing himself. He was doing some radio work in Dublin. We went for coffee on Clarendon Street, and, as such encounters go, it was not the worst. I felt acutely self-conscious, but there was also something tender, like a kind of compassion for whoever it was we had once believed ourselves to be.
I wonder sometimes if anything was ever really as we recall it. Standing on the escalator at Connolly Station and realising that the grey sodden world was perfect in itself. The crystal tumbler and the hearth, a solid house around us. Watching the earth flash past from the window of a train, as free as if we’d hopped a boxcar. Now, it was like we all existed in some nebulous afterlife, a vantage point from which we gazed down on everything we had destroyed and all the parallel dimensions in which we were reconciled. Where we had learned, finally, how to put to better use all those Edens we’d stumbled on.
While You Were Working
Neasa McHale
She stares up at the ceiling where wispy cobwebs flutter in the draught. Her eyes follow the cracks a fresh coat of paint would cover. They are superficial. It’s a Tuesday morning, the worst day for traffic but she isn’t going to work today.
He turns over in the bed and faces her back. The radio plays some song she doesn’t know – recently, the radio has been left on throughout the night. She has another twenty minutes of lying there before it’s time to get up. She closes her eyes.
When the alarm clock goes off, he stretches his hand out and ruffles her bed hair.
‘I went first yesterday, it’s your turn today,’ she says as she reaches out to the alarm. ‘I’m on a go-slow today. I’m not going into the office.’
‘Think I’ll be having a go-slow myself,’ he says. ‘I’m knackered.’
‘The quicker ya do it, the easier it is.’ She wipes sleep from her eyes.
He stretches his whole body, scratches his head, gives a loud sigh and gets up. He walks towards the bathroom, turns on the shower and closes the bathroom door. A few moments later the toilet flushes.
She reaches out and flicks a stray hair from his pillow. The pillow is still warm. Picking up his upended book from his bedside locker, she scans the page. Yet another book about Ancient Greece. She never understood what that was all about. All those myths and made-up stories. She had watched one of the films before, guts and gore, all in 3D. He had tried explaining, and she had tried understanding but still it confused her. She leaves the book back the way it was. At least it’s not one of those books that makes him laugh out loud.
‘What ya laughing at?’ she’d said one time.
He turned his head and looked at her.
‘Ah just the fella in the story? He’s after fucking up again and his boss is giving him a bollocking. The excuses he’s giving are priceless.’
‘There must be some really funny excuses.’
‘Ah ya’d have to read it to really get it.’
‘Suppose so.’
Putting her feet to the floor, she bends down to pick up a sock, aims it at the laundry basket and misses. She goes and
takes her light-blue dressing gown from the back of the door. The collar is stained from when she went blonde to brunette. Not owning a pair of slippers, she puts on socks.
Turning the tap in the kitchen, she fills the kettle. The shower stops, and she hears him pad across the landing into the bedroom. Opening the fridge, she takes out an almost-full carton of milk. Leaning on the worktop, she waits for the kettle to boil. The steam gradually rises a little and then hits the underside of the presses and travels away towards the window. Looking out, she sees a sunny day with a clear blue sky. The kettle comes to the boil; she pours the hot water into the cup over the tea bag. He doesn’t drink tea so there is no need for a teapot – when people call to the house, she is more likely to go looking for the corkscrew. Taking a bowl from the press and bringing it to the table, she pours cereal in first and then milk. She doesn’t sit down but stands there and eats a few spoonfuls of her cereal. She picks up her cup from the worktop and warms her hands.
Last night she had tried to talk.
‘Say if we couldn’t afford the mortgage this month?’
‘Wha’?’
‘Just say.’
‘Savings.’
‘None.’
‘Loan.’
‘Couldn’t get one.’
‘I dunno.’
‘That’s it.’
‘Wha’?’
‘Those kinda things.’
‘I don’t get ya.’
‘We’re just flying along.’
‘And that’s bad because?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Ya want us to be strugglin’ along?’
‘Ah no but . . . ’
‘We work,’ he said.
‘Wha’?’
‘Us two, together.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So it’s easy.’
‘What if it’s the other way around?’