‘I knew you weren’t listening to me.’
‘Does Jacques know?’
‘He does.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’d suggest a threesome, but he’s too gorgeous to share.’
I have to agree. I get on the grass, arrange myself on all fours. Crawl over to her. ‘Use me like a table and pull yourself up.’ Which she does. ‘Do you want the last drag?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘Even though it’s a gateway drug?’ she says, handing it to me.
That makes me laugh.
She grins and arranges herself onto her sticks. ‘Cheerio,’ she says, and the word sounds so quaint and so … odd all of a sudden. Cheerio. Cheerio. Cheerio. I stand up and laugh again. Iris looks worried. ‘You won’t fall off anything, will you?’ she says.
‘Like what?’ I say.
‘I don’t know. A turret or something.’
‘You’re mammying me.’
‘I know, it’s strange, isn’t it?’
‘Go on, go and have some sex,’ I say.
‘Now you’re freaking me out,’ says Iris. I can’t blame her I suppose. I’m supposed to say something about his being too young for her. I’m supposed to ask about protection. I’m supposed to use my fingers to number the number of reasons why Iris should go straight to bed and not knock on a stranger’s door in a strange castle in the middle of a strange night and initiate sex which won’t be strange but, knowing Iris, will most likely be of the adventurous sort.
‘See you in the morning,’ Iris says, striding away on her sticks, like she doesn’t need them at all. Like they are just for show. The crunch of the rubbery ends of the crutches against the gravel fades and fades as Iris disappears around the stone wall that separates this secret garden from the castle.
And now I am alone. In the dark, by myself, in a foreign country.
Oddly, I do not feel afraid. Instead, I feel … aroused.
I sit bolt upright, as if the realisation has electrified me. I look around, but there’s nobody here. Nobody here but me. Heat floods my face anyway, as if there’re lots of people here and they’re all looking at me and they all know what it is I’m thinking. What I’m feeling.
I’m feeling aroused.
There’s no getting away from it.
I concentrate on smoking. The last drag burns my lips. I crush the butt against the ground, then do it again and again, making sure the thing is properly extinguished.
This is who I am. I am someone who takes the necessary precautions around combustible materials.
I am aroused.
It’s like an elephant in the corner of your sitting room. Teetering on the top of your television set. You can’t just ignore something like that.
I am not someone who is prone to random bouts of arousal. There is a time and a place for such things. My sex life is … well, it’s my own business really. Mine and Brendan’s. We have our routine. Routine sounds bad. What I mean is, it’s pleasant. Yes, it is. And no, perhaps it is not as spontaneous as it once was, but that’s only to be expected, surely? After all these years. And it’s fairly … well, noiseless I suppose. We got into that habit when the girls were little, and habits are hard to break. But I enjoy the intimacy of it. How familiar we are with each other.
I must be high because how else would I come up with the plan to ring Brendan and initiate phone sex.
It’s too late to ring Brendan.
And I’ve never initiated phone sex.
Or actual sex, come to think of it. I always leave it to Brendan.
I don’t think about any of these things. I am too busy being aroused. It’s a stampeding sort of arousal. Allows little opportunity to consider anything else.
I pick up my phone and ring Brendan. It rings and rings, then goes onto voicemail. I dial again. This time it rings four times, then Brendan’s voice, sluggish and hoarse, the way it gets when he’s been asleep.
‘Hello handsome,’ I say.
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s me,’ I say in a slightly breathy voice.
‘Terry?’
‘Yes. Terry.’
‘I rang you earlier.’
‘That’s why I’m phoning you back.’
‘At this hour?’
‘Do you want to know what I’m wearing?’
A fumbling sound. Then, ‘Jesus Terry, it’s after midnight.’
‘And something sexy’s lurking in the dark,’ I sing.
‘It’s evil,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Something evil’s lurking in the dark.’
‘Oh. Right. No, but, what I’m saying is … something sexy is lurking in the dark.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘No!’ I don’t tell him I might be stoned. I think I am. I feel most unlike myself.
Brendan says nothing. I hear him struggle into a sitting position on his side of the bed and I imagine my side of the bed, flat and empty, and something jolts through my body and I don’t know what it is but I’m worried that it might be relief. That I’m in a French chateau instead of lying on my side of the bed.
‘Why are you calling, Terry?’ Brendan asks, and his voice is tired and I am glad I can’t smell his breath which already will have acquired a stale intestinal smell and I feel bad, thinking that thought, and I’d love to hang up. No, I’d love to never have rung in the first place. But it’s too late now so I plunge on.
I inspect my watch, but the hands seem to be moving around the face. ‘When you said it’s after midnight, did you mean in Ireland or in France?’
‘So you’re in France now?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you won’t be home for the dreaded Shepherd family gathering.’
‘When is that?’
‘Tomorrow night.’
‘Oh that’s right.’ I can’t believe I’d forgotten.
The thing is, I love Brendan’s family. There are millions of them. Well, five siblings; two sisters and two brothers, Brendan being the youngest. They gather, at their mother’s insistence, with their partners and their children and their children’s partners and their children’s children once a month in the house in Edenmore where they all grew up. And yes, Brendan is right, it is manic and rowdy and noisy and crowded. But, in spite of the constraints, the house where they grew up seems to expand to accommodate everybody. Mrs Shepherd makes a vast pot of stew and several apple tarts, and even though she rarely turns the heating on – terrible expensive, she says – the house is the warmest house I’ve ever been in. ‘That’s just overcrowding,’ Brendan says when I mention it. He often offers to host it at our house, an offer robustly declined by his mother. As she has declined Brendan’s suggestion that she ‘downsize’ to an apartment in Sutton.
‘I like where I come from, Bren,’ she says, wrapping her arms around her youngest child, wearing the same housecoat and slippers she wore the first time I met her. Brendan hugs her back, but he is always the first to leave. Was the first to leave all those years ago too. The first to get an office job, the first to buy a house, to sell a house, to buy a bigger, fancier house with an address described as desirable by estate agents.
‘Canny,’ his brother says. But I don’t think that’s it. I think it might be fear. Isn’t that awful?
Silence down the line. I rush at it before I lose my nerve. ‘So … what are you wearing?’ This is how you initiate phone sex. I’ve seen a few episodes of Sex and the City.
‘I’m wearing my pyjamas, what else would I be wearing?’
Brendan didn’t always wear pyjamas. He used to wear just boxer shorts. And he was always warm, no matter how cold the night. All the hair I suppose. Black and thick, like the pelt of a bear. My husband is a hairy man. And now he is a hairy man in pyjamas. Good cotton ones from Marks and Spencer. They wash very well and need only a light touch with the iron.
The pyjamas conversation is a bit of a dead end in terms of phone sex. A cul-de-sac, as the French might say. I choke back a laugh.
Try to concentrate. ‘Do you want to know what I’m wearing?’ I ask. That might be a better tactic. I could tell him I’m not wearing a bra under my shirt-dress. That’s pretty sexy, isn’t it?
Brendan sighs. I hear the click of his bedside lamp coming on. Which is yet more bad news for the phone sex. We don’t have sex with the light on.
We don’t have sex.
The thought is a furtive whisper in my head. That’s not true. We do have sex. Just, maybe, not a lot. Not that often.
I can’t remember the last time we made love.
I don’t know what I was thinking with the phone sex idea.
I must be high. High as a castle turret.
‘You are drunk, aren’t you?’ Brendan says.
‘Maybe a little.’ If I told him I was high, he wouldn’t believe me.
‘Well, some of us have to be up in six hours,’ he says.
Anxiety flares like a match. I sit up straighter. ‘Why are you getting up so early?’
‘I’ve been summoned to a meeting. I rang to tell you about it earlier,’ he says. His tone is pointed.
I should have phoned him back sooner. I shouldn’t have rejected his call in the first place. Not with the Canadians rushing around the office like ants at a picnic table. Brendan said there was nothing to worry about, when he first got wind of the takeover.
‘I’m sorry Brendan. The coverage can be unreliable here.’ But that’s not true. The truth is that it is me who can be unreliable here. And just like that, I am no longer high. I am no longer under the influence of an illegal substance. I should be glad I suppose. I should be relieved. I grip the phone tighter. Brendan is in the middle of a sentence. ‘… at eight o’clock. And how can you take someone seriously with a name like Kurt Glass? It’s like a bloody stage name or something.’
I’m pretty sure Kurt Glass is Brendan’s new Canadian boss. But I’m not positive. Which means that I’ve only been half listening to him since the Canadians invaded, as he puts it. Maybe since before that. I bring all my attention to bear on what Brendan is saying now, as if I can make up for all of my previous scant attention.
‘What’s the meeting about?’ I ask when he stops talking.
‘He didn’t say.’ I hear him doing the thing he does with his hair when he wakes up, which is to muss the front of it with the heel of his hand. I hear him stifling a yawn.
‘You should get some sleep,’ I say.
He sighs then. It’s a weary sigh.
‘When are you coming home?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
Silence then. In my bedroom, I hear the tick of Brendan’s alarm clock, set for six instead of eight.
‘I don’t suppose you know where the tie Anna got me last Christmas is? The blue and silver one? It’s just I—’
‘It’s in the cloakroom downstairs. Third hook on the left.’
‘What’s it doing there?’
‘I’m not sure. I noticed it the other day and I meant to put it back on your tie rack and then I forgot.’
‘Oh. Well, thanks. I was looking for it today. I mean yesterday.’
‘You’re welcome.’
There is a pause, then, ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m …’ What am I? I’m not sure. But it’s something good, whatever I am. Which is odd, given the circumstances. I feel sort of, I don’t know, intensely present. Like I’m an undiluted version of myself. Condensed. I can’t say that. I can’t say, I’m intensely present. Who says that?
‘I’m okay,’ I tell him.
‘And your dad? And Iris?’
‘They’re okay too.’
‘Okay then. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
And because it’s goodnight and not goodbye, I say it just the once and then I hang up.
The quiet of the night after the phone conversation is tremendous. It takes a while for the conversation – the echo of it – to fade away, to lift and dissolve into the fabric of the blue-grey sky.
21
YOU SHOULD ALWAYS TAKE THE PREVAILING ROAD CONDITIONS INTO ACCOUNT.
Breakfast is served on the terrace outside the dining room on a rickety wooden table that has been covered with a red-and-white gingham tablecloth. The tablecloth is an old one that has been preserved by years of careful laundering.
People underestimate the importance of careful laundering.
The table has been set for three. Three brown speckled eggs in three silver eggcups. Three china cups. A jug of orange juice; freshly squeezed. A baguette, still warm. Triangles of brie, starting to ooze. Berries from the garden. A pot of coffee. Pats of unsalted butter. A jar of sticky blackcurrant jam.
‘Please,’ says Jacques, gesturing to the table and pulling each of the chairs out.
I examine his face for signs of Iris-induced fatigue, but he is spring-clean fresh and still smells delicious.
‘He’s like some kind of … mythical man,’ I whisper when Jacques spots that we have scraped the last of the jam out of the jar and replaces it with a full one.
‘He’s no myth,’ says Iris, grinning. ‘I can attest to that and so can my vagina.’
‘Your vagina?’ asks Dad.
‘My vagina,’ says Iris, still grinning.
‘Can we all stop saying vagina?’ I hiss at them. Mostly at Iris. I refill our coffee cups, stir sugar and milk into Dad’s.
‘Did you stay in the garden for long after I left?’ Iris asks, steering a strawberry towards her mouth.
‘Eh, no, no I didn’t.’
‘What’s wrong?’ asks Iris. ‘You’ve gone as red as these strawberries. Which are delicious by the way.’ She spoons some into a bowl for Dad. ‘Try them, Mr Keogh. You won’t regret it.’
I pick up my glass of juice, press it against my flushed face. I don’t know why I’m embarrassed. Nothing happened. And even if it had, it would have happened with my own husband. Of twenty-five years.
Perhaps that’s why I’m embarrassed.
Nothing happened.
‘Your mother loved strawberries,’ Dad says. I look at him. He rarely remembers little details like that. He has his stockpile of stories – like Frank Sinatra – but the inconsequential details of his life evade him.
My mother loved strawberries.
This small fact releases memories. My mother in her galley kitchen in Baldoyle, making strawberry cheesecake.
My mother crouched in the fields in Kinsealy, picking the berries. One for the punnet, one for me. The wide smile of her mouth stained red with juice.
My mother’s apron, carefully laundered, hanging on a hook on the back of the kitchen door.
‘What was her name?’ I ask Dad.
He looks at me. ‘Whose name?’ he says.
And just like that, she is gone.
My phone rings and I am alarmed to see that it is Hugh. Yes, we keep in touch, but it is usually a handful of phone calls at pertinent times of the year; birthdays and Christmas and Easter. So when his name flashes onto the screen of my mobile, I immediately imagine the worst. A road traffic accident. An abducted child. A terminal diagnosis. I excuse myself from the table and walk until I am out of earshot.
‘Hugh? Is everything all right?’
‘What the hell is going on, Terry?’ He doesn’t sound worried. He sounds angry. And Australian. I hadn’t noticed that before. How Australian his accent has become.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I rang Dad’s nursing home and they told me he’s not there.’
‘Did they tell you about the rats?’
‘What?’
‘There’re rats. In the nursing home. Well, they said vermin so I just assumed …’
‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ says Hugh, cutting through what he calls my conversational meanderings.
‘I … didn’t want to bother you.’ This sounds better than the truth, which is that it never occurred to me.
‘And Brendan said you’ve hared off with Dad and that friend of yours.’ He says the w
ord friend in a derisive tone. It could be because Iris called him a misogynist once.
‘Her name is Iris,’ I tell him, ‘and I haven’t hared off. I just happen to be in France.’
‘But you never go anywhere.’
‘That’s not true.’ Although it is. ‘Why did you ring the nursing home?’ I ask.
‘I always ring. Every week.’
‘Oh.’ I didn’t know that.
‘I don’t know why I bother,’ says Hugh. ‘He doesn’t have a clue who I am.’
‘Well, I’m sorry Hugh, I didn’t mean to worry you, I should have let you know.’
‘Yes, you should have,’ he says, but the anger is gone from his voice. ‘So how is the contrary old bastard?’
When Hugh says things like this, it makes me realise how long he’s been gone. Because Dad hasn’t been contrary in years. Or belligerent. Or scathing. He hasn’t been any of those things. He’s forgotten how.
Dementia has taken these things from him. Gifted him with kindness. Humility. Gentleness.
My mother was right. Every cloud does have a silver lining.
‘He’s fine. He’s sitting in the sun with Iris and me, eating strawberries.’
‘It’s well for you.’
‘You better be careful Hugh,’ I say, not commenting on how much like our father – the before version – he sounds. ‘Or I might decide to hop on a plane to Australia next.’
‘You’d be more than welcome,’ says Hugh. ‘I’ve been telling you that for years.’ It’s true, he has. But I sort of suspect – and I know this sounds uncharitable – that he invites me because he knows I’ll never come.
‘You’re right, Hugh,’ I say suddenly. ‘We shouldn’t always expect you to do all the visiting. I’ll look up flights when I get home.’
‘Did you win the pools?’ Hugh says.
‘I’ve a bit put by.’ I don’t mention the money Mam left me. The running away from home account.
Although I’m sure she left him exactly the same amount. She would have called it something else.
‘When are you bringing him back?’
‘Well, I, let’s see, today is …’
‘Thursday,’ Hugh fills in. My blood feels cold in my veins, and goosebumps break out on my arms. I know it’s Thursday. Of course it’s Thursday. Which is the day before Friday, which is Iris’s appointment with the doctor in Zurich. And two days before Saturday, which is Iris’s appointment at the clinic.
Rules of the Road Page 19