Lost Boys

by Darci Bysouth

  “It was too small,” she says. Or maybe she just thinks it; it’s hard to know with the feel of his skin on hers, with the candle blurring her words.

  He’s talking. “It’s what people do. They move on and try again. We could, we should. Once you’re well.”

  His eyes so blue. Once she thought you could figure the soul there, in the eyes.

  “There’s time,” he says. “You’re young enough, still.”

  She wonders what he would do if she blew out the candle. If she tossed her wine in his face, or threw her chair, or screamed loud enough to raise the dead. How he would salvage the show then.

  Of course she does none of these things. She calls for the check.

  The waiter gives it to Simon and he takes it. He offers to call her a taxi, and nods when she declines. He walks her to the door and down the street, away from the girl and the restaurant window. It’s still light out, and the sunset is only a blood-red streak of sky over the horizon.

  “The waiter?” she says, “She was just a girl. A baby.”

  “Don’t start,” he says.

  But he walks with her a little more, and they stop at the place where the path veers from the road. The scent of damp hay rolls off the meadow, and she breathes it in. There’s no one around. Simon must feel the seclusion too; his shoulders slump and his face looks parched, thinner. “You have to know. What you’re doing to us. It doesn’t look good, does it?”

  She steps onto the path and turns. The sun is in her eyes. Simon is backlit and shadowy, hard to see.

  “I don’t know.” He sighs, deflates a little more. “What do you want?”

  Luce kisses his shadow self. Then she leaves him.

  She passes the fawn on the way home. It lies where she’s left it, its eye clouded, its belly already swelling. She kneels in the bunch grass and throws up a clump of brutal meat, panting and heaving until nothing more comes.

  Luce stays there on her knees and she sees this, a last performance piece: the woman, crouched with her baby until the dark closes in, until the moon rises and shows the silent shape of things. Luce stays, seeing the marbled blue veins and their delicate tracery, how each divergence was a tiny galaxy, expanding, infinite. Holding this like a jewel in her closed mouth, tasting it, turning it over and over.

  THE FABULIST

  WHERE I GOT YOUR PICTURE is not important. That I thought I needed it? This is what matters.

  You stand with a close-mouthed smile and your chest offered, your hands behind your back and a blue tie ringing your neck. You look well fed and important. You look official against a background writ with slogans: Family First, Time to Trust, Éirinn go Brách. The article says there’s been rumours dogging you but this is to be expected, for you are a charming man. I wonder which acolyte is taking your picture. You look both at her and past her, like she’s something you could have but don’t really want.

  But for that, I never would have recognised you.

  I remember you barefoot, sitting cross-legged on a hostel carpet flecked with ash and beer stains, eyes half-mast and a spliff hanging from your mouth. Your cheekbones shone in the dirty light, your eyelashes left spiky shadows. I sat next to you, facing the French boy cultivating laissez-faire and a pair of English girls trilling for your attention. Our hands touched when you passed it on, and your knee juddered against mine. You did not look at me. The first thing you ever told me, with your tongue lilting and thrusting on the t, was to stop bogarting the joint. I didn’t know what you meant but I thought I could taste you when I inhaled. The French boy slumped sideways and the English girls left for the loo and never came back. You rolled another and told me about the horses, about the time you’d stolen a Connemara pony from the Christian Brothers and rode her across the cliffs and how the wind felt, how the wind was more than the fall and the snapped wrist, more than the beating they gave you after. Your eyes half-lidded on me, your tongue thrust and rolling. Da brudders da wind da horrsses. It was a given that we would sleep together.

  But not for some time. You were a Catholic; you understood how denial fed the sin. I was new world suburban and brought up on low fat and no sugar and the moral imperative of just saying no. The English girls whispered about sex in the showers and who did who in the laundry room with the door blocked with a chair. They said the best place was the roof. The Belgian boys didn’t care; they hung their bedding from the top bunk and bumped together behind it, and the Aussies snickered about shagging sheets. The travellers came and went, hooked up and fell apart, and neither of us made a move. We averted our eyes from the grappling and told each other we didn’t have the money to leave just yet, that we needed a few more weeks of under-the-table temping, that it was the wrong season for travelling anyway. We went to the museum and the castle and the cathedral, and you read me the words from the pamphlets, your accent rolling and clogging on the plosives. I’d watch you drift between the glass cases, loose-boned and lanky, your hair too long and in your eyes. The young mothers flashed looks over their strollers, the older women stared. It occurred to me you were beautiful. It occurred to me that I was not. But it was me you brought cups of tea night after night while the others spilled beer and threw chips at the telly when the wrong team scored. Your hands were delicate on the porcelain, fine-fingered as you pinched tobacco for your rolling papers. We did not touch.

  You sat with me in the fug of old beer and cigarette smoke, and you told me you were going to Greece or Turkey or maybe Ibiza. One of those blue sea and white sand places, where you’d trance out the night and sleep through the day, pick up work in the clubs and move on when you were done. You talked, and your eyes glinted silver when they caught mine. You talked, and I imagined the blood warmth of the Aegean, the rub of desert wind and the spice market stink, the feel of clouds at my feet. Morocco, Rajasthan, Tibet. Each name in your particular pronunciation, claimed by your tongue.

  You told me what you had left behind. The horses, and how it was possible, hoofing over sand or flank deep in seawater, to lose the sense of the ground. Your father there one day and gone the next and your mother tight-lipped and clipping coupons. Your big sisters running wild, knee deep in the tidal pools and fists blackberry-stained, wreathing the lambs with foxglove, knuckling your hair and pounding your flesh and stopping your mouth with violet sweeties stolen from the corner shop. Each had fallen pregnant before leaving school and, weighed down and strung out with every child thereafter, had asked you when you’d find a nice girl and do the same.

  There was a girl. You told me this with your eyes half-lidded and your hand tracing circles on the carpet. My lips closed over a spliff damp from your mouth. A nice girl. But it was not for you, this doing what was expected. Not without the passion. You’d left.

  For what was the point of it, the point of anything at all? Without the passion?

  The passion. You watched me like you needed an answer, your eyes a slippery silvery grey. My head floated free, drifted from my body like a rowboat cut from its moorings. My mouth opened, scuttled air. Something clunked under my ribs, dragged through my belly. I passed you the joint.

  You took me to the roof later. We stood on tiles sticky with heat, and the air was thick with the scent of coffee and cinnamon, cigarettes and petrol. It could have been any European city on any summer night. I turned to say this and you lifted me right off my feet. Charmed, alarmed, I couldn’t speak with your tongue in my mouth.

  I remember I did not sleep. Not that night, or the next, or the one after. We built a nest next to the chimney with stolen sheets and cushions, and we hoped it would not rain. The candles were your idea; the light flickered over your closed eyes, the rise and fall of your chest. I played with the wax and memorised the bones of your face. I took in the thumbprint hollow where throat met clavicle, the constellation of freckles marking flesh, the whorl of hair funnelling to curled cock. I thought I would need these things later.

  One such night, you brought a bag of peaches from the market. You bit into one and kissed
me, and traced the opened fruit over my breasts and belly. Your mouth moved downwards and I told you I loved you.

  Of course you left. That too was a given.

  You had the wit to do it by degrees. You missed a movie and blamed it on the Belgian boys plying you with moulesfrites and beer. You got a job across town and worked the night shift. You moved to a flat full of Australians and told me it was lads only, with dirty cups and never any loo roll. Your tongue stumbled while your hands circled air, and your eyes flickered away. You gave me a phone number that rang and rang when I called.

  Of course I got over it. I took what you had left — a grey t-shirt, a pewter lighter, the phone number in your jumbled writing — and zipped it into the hidden pocket of my backpack. I flew home. I told those who asked that I’d had enough of travelling, I’d lost the passion.

  I married a nice man. I had two nice kids. They weighed me down and strung me out, they filled me up and shaped my days. I was happy. I forgot you.

  But there were moments. Between the tidal flow of meals and dishes, the school run and part-time job, the sore throats and bleeding knees and toothpaste kisses, there were moments. After a party, when I woke to a hand drifting over my hip, with my head floating and throat bubbling you you it’s you and my husband laughing of course it is, you ninny, who else would it be? Another time, when a man at the meat counter in the supermarket asked for lamb chops in your voice. Once, when polishing our dresser with beeswax and a grey rag, as my mouth filled with a taste of acrid smoke. I unrolled the rag and saw the sleeve, a long-ago label fading at the collar, and I had to sit with my head on my knees.

  But these were only moments. If I had found your photo then, I would have seen a family man softening into middle age, a minor celebrity from some other place, a face pleasant enough to read the weather. I would have passed you over and picked up the kids from school. I had nothing to purge then.

  My husband was an honest man. He preferred fact over fiction, and photographs to paintings. He used his camera to document the time passing through us; the months of my waxing belly, the creep of candles on birthday cakes and the years of our children sprouting up the doorframe. He bought the best editing software available but he had rules. He would not manipulate the truth. I asked him to blur my frown lines once and he scoffed what do you take me for, a fabulist? But our Christmas cards were pretty; our kids had gapless teeth and unscraped foreheads, and I looked like I slept well.

  I thought of you one late winter day when I was home with a cold, when my husband was at work and the kids were at school. The house was quiet and the day had lost its shape, had come unstrung. I was scrolling through other people’s photos on Facebook, comparing their families to mine. I was feeling lucky. I was feeling bored. I wondered if I was happy or simply doing what was expected. When I closed my eyes, it came back; rooftop sticky from heat, the hum of traffic far below, the feel of warm wax. The sound of your voice.

  You were easy enough to find. You’d gone home and become a little bit famous; the newspaper called you a prodigal son.

  Your photo fills my screen now. You stand with a close-mouthed smile and your chest offered, your hands behind your back. Your silver eyes are hooded and pouched, your curls cropped. There’s a blonde woman standing next to you, two tall children flanking you. The caption gives their first names along with your last name. It says the woman was your childhood sweetheart. Family First, Time to Trust, Éirinn go Brách.

  The walls of our house are bare now. I want you to know that. There are dark shadows where our family photos should be, and the pictures themselves sit facing the wall, shrouded in white sheets. This was the first thing I did when I got home from the hospital.

  Your wife will have to go. I crop her and clip away one of your children. The other goes next. Now there’s just you, and Éirinn go Brách.

  You look self-satisfied, despite your losses. The tool bar frames you; a strip of hieroglyphics, a language for the dead. I blow up your face until it pixelates. I smudge shadows under your eyes, darken the hollows under your cheeks and deepen the lines from nose to chin. I swipe the smile from your face and blacken the corners of your mouth. The soft flesh of your jaw I leave hanging. You don’t always lose weight with sorrow.

  I print out eight copies in full colour, and tape you to every wall of our house. Your face hangs at different angles and heights; you’ve been called to testify, to bear witness, to buckle under the weight of these silent rooms.

  When the dinner hour comes, I sit at the kitchen table with a packet of stale pita crisps and a bottle of wine. Your face hovers, a tragedy mask above the empty chair. I wonder if you ever got to Greece.

  We were going to do Europe this summer, did you know that? The whole family. We bought the kids luggage for Christmas; purple metallic for my daughter and a Spiderman wheelie for my son, with the tickets tucked inside. We planned EuroDisney, yes, but also Chartres and the Rijksmuseum and Neuschwanstein castle. My husband looked up the correct pronunciation and fed it to the kids in bite-sized pieces. No one was going to laugh at our accents.

  You stare back at me from above the chair.

  Da brudders, I say. Da wind, da horrsses. You prick.

  Silence. I see that your face looks wrong, lopsided. One eye crinkles up more than the other, one side of your mouth smirks while the other turns down. It’s not the wine. No one is perfect, the orderly told me, no one is entirely symmetrical. But our eye fills in the blanks because we are made to dodge discord. We tilt towards balance, every time.

  I take the wine bottle to the computer. When I am finished cutting and pasting, I have two photos, the halves the same and the wholes different. Your face crinkling up, smirking like a satyr. Your face turned down, cheekbones dull as slabs of meat. The satyr I tape to the living room wall. It’s you I want to talk to.

  My husband was not a passionate man. He woke when it was his turn to warm the bottle, he arrived on time and left the toilet seat down and took the bins to the curb on recycling day. He remembered the kids’ birthdays and picked up ice-cream cakes from the Dairy Queen. On Saturday nights, he touched my collarbone then my nipples right and left. I was not unhappy. You need to know this.

  He was an accountant and the son of a wheat farmer, with clean fingernails, but hands as solid as spades. He sat with his hands on his knees, like his father before him, and laughed without making a sound. He took up space. I knew when he entered a room; I could feel the displacement like water banking over the sides of a bathtub. Something settled and locked when he came home, and he always came home. You should know this.

  The slab-cheeked you stares up from the desk. You look drugged, inanimate.

  The orderly took me to the basement. It got colder as we got closer to the core of the building, as we left the heat of the summer street.

  The sheet covered half of my husband’s face. He looked wrong, off kilter, unlined and amorphous and less than he was. I can’t be sure, I told the orderly, and reached out to take the sheet. The orderly held my hand. The accident, he said. It’s not possible.

  I lay your halves on the table, meat slab and satyr, side by side. Neither is you. Not really.

  I open another bottle of wine and pull up your face on the screen. You’re not as I remember. You’re not what I want. I soften your shadows. I darken your hair and fill in your temples, erase the hollows under your eyes and blur the lines knotting your forehead. I fill your eyes with a silvery light.

  This one I hang in the bedroom. I lie on the bed with the wine bottle nestled between my thighs.

  You you it’s you. My husband and his solid flesh against mine, my fists kneading his back. My eyes closed and seeing constellations, the glint of silver, the tongue thrust and rolling, telling of horses. Feeling the long lanky bones of you. My husband heavy on my chest after and my traitor hand smoothing the damp hair from his forehead. My gorge rises.

  The porcelain of the toilet is cool against my skin. My hair hangs in strings; I can’t remember th
e last time I showered. Like this in front of my husband, three months along and throwing up soda crackers, terrified, sure I would dislodge the kernel of our first child. Weeping and stinking while my husband held my hair and rubbed circles onto my back, and it was not passion. It was not passion and that was the point. You need to know this.

  I rinse my face under the tap and wipe it dry. My reflection stares back at me, eyes red and hollow. I want to sleep but I have not finished with you.

  Your photos make a tidy pile in the barbecue. The match gives a little snick of anticipation, of birthdays and illicit moments, then the paper catches and flames, high and hot and out in less than a minute. Your smoke clogs my nose and tongue, and I can taste your ashes for some time after.

  Toward the end, I woke up and reached for you, and found the sheets cooling around the space where you’d been. A snick of lighter, the catch and flare of your cigarette in the dark. I couldn’t tell if you were looking at me, at anything at all. That ember, pulling and receding for a time, then the soft creak of the roof door. I never called you back. I knew better.

  Toward the end, I woke up reaching for my husband and felt the displacement. The kids were with my mother; we were supposed to be working it out. I had a long list of evasions and he had a methodical optimism. There was the snick of a dresser drawer, the click of a belt buckle. Can’t sleep, he murmured. I lay on the bed and listened to the car start. The headlights swept over the bedroom and I never called him back, I never stopped him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Not then.

  I fall asleep on my daughter’s bed with the stink of you in my nostrils, and I sleep through the rest of the night and well into the next day. When I wake, I shower and wash my hair. I grind coffee and toast bread and take my plate to the computer.

  Your family takes me by surprise. There they are, smiling on the screen; your wife and your boy and girl, clustered around you like last night never happened. Your wife looks resigned. She’ll know you, have forgiven you countless times, and stay with you out of love or habit. The boy looks so much like you. Your daughter is not as pretty and her face is wide open, too trusting. She will adore you and you will love her absolutely, for every fabulist needs an accomplice.