As You Were

by Elaine Feeney

  She waved her Take a Break mag at me.

  ‘Here, loveen. I’m going to sleep now. Wud ya like Michaela ta sit with ya this evening?’ she offered, gently.

  I wanted to say yes. But, really, it was Margaret Rose’s life I was after. I could manage a philandering husband and a pregnant daughter, in fact, I’d welcome it, and not the handsome man who smiled at me and kept coming back for more. Not the decent man that I was about to abandon and who would soon be alone in the world with three sons. I needed someone neutral, or entirely disinterested in me, to pour myself out to, to tell them how sometimes I felt a kind of loneliness with such a force that I needed to lie down, or vomit or take myself into the sea.

  I would have told Michaela that night, if she’d sat with me, about the Night of Peach Schnapps. I was about her age then, perhaps a little younger, and I’d like to tell her that once I had looked like her (a little) and how many times I, too, went off into the midnight air in only hot pants (OK, jeans) and a skinny slink of a top (OK, T-shirts and big jumpers) while boys gawped at me, and oh, how I loved it but pretended not to even notice. (OK, I would keep this bit to myself.)

  I would tell her that Magpie swooped in and destroyed all my good memories, that it ruined my entire fucking life, that it inked itself all over everything. Magpie had so quickly surpassed Night of Peach Schnapps as the most bursting-out fuck of a day in my life, swooping in with its beady eye, wings all outstretched, and just landed in to destroy me, uninvited. I would say it was a fuck of a rude bird and that every thought that fleeted through my head since Magpie, felt either wrong or very wrong.

  Wrong for thinking about flippant things, very wrong for not thinking at all.

  On Night of Peach Schnapps, it was coming to the end of summer. Darkness arrived earlier, the stretch in the evening evaporating. It was dark by the time I headed out to a disco at the back of Dwyer’s Hotel, in the next town over. East Galway. From the minute we’d left our coats in the cloakroom and stood around a tall sticky table, I spotted a guy, fair curls, long flat arse, goofy, flat mushroom freckles on his lips that the club lights illuminated. He had good teeth, even from a distance.

  I had chosen him because a) he stared at me all night as I pretended not to notice, b) he was wearing a colourful woollen friendship bracelet which I considered to be a safety signal (I couldn’t envisage a guy with a rainbow friendship bracelet as rapey – though I have since displaced all theories on correctly identifying rapists), and c) I was slightly taller, OK, I was about a foot taller, and this was important at this juncture.

  I eventually approached him and asked him if he wanted to head out and up town to get chips, or go sit by the lake and smoke. The music was loud, ‘Children’ by Miles, trancey. I shouted, he shouted back. What?/where?/you?/lake?/what?/sorry can’t hear/yeah/yeah/go . . . to . . . the . . . lake? OK. Great.

  As we walked towards the playground at the top of the town, he went into a biker bar for alcohol (on my insistence) and came out with a light grey bottle of peach schnapps. It was all they’d sell to him, possibly not knowing it had the same percentage as top-shelf liquor, but what with its soft orange peaches and the delicate feel of the glass bottle, no self-respecting barman in a hardy town would believe it was as strong as whiskey.

  When we reached the playground, I lay back on the merry-go-round, and he pushed me around for some time. The lit cigarette made bright orange circles in the night sky. I smoked one cigarette off the other in that way you do when you’re excited. Or nervous. In the middle of the lake was a house, and the light was on in the front window, McGahernesque – the local bishop’s palace, perched on the island in the centre of the lapping water. We played at guessing what was happening at this hour of the morning to deserve a bishop’s attention. Eventually we agreed that whatever was happening at two a.m., or shortly after, was bad news.

  The smalt mist rolled in, near us a swing clashed in the dark, the plastic seat was broken in half. We took turns with the bottle, chatted about music, teachers, the light in the house, the sugar content in the alcohol, the Leaving Cert. Then we kissed. He put his hand down the front of my velvet tan hipster pants and kissed me harder and I kissed him back, open-mouthed. I was lovely drunk. The lake water lapped up near the playground. Sweet papers whipped up in the tennis court. Someone switched off the light in the house as we finished off the end of the thick liquid.

  I never liked peaches.

  I tasted his hair in my mouth, cheap body spray, my hips were tense, the skin on my stomach like bodhrán goatskin, stretched and pulled tight around its wooden frame, then nailed. My skin stung.

  After, as we lay back on the merry-go-round and ran our feet off the ground, he told me about his mother, how she liked to keep everything spotlessly clean so that he’d rather stay out of the house for as long as possible, often for days on end; she rarely noticed his hiatuses, but immediately screamed at him to remove his shoes as he returned, as though he’d never been gone. She made him play piano and read poetry aloud at Christmas for a house full of guests he’d never met before. But mostly, when there wasn’t an occasion, his mother just hung around the house, spaced out. His father was a judge in the courthouse that sat beside the playground. I knew his father’s name from news reports about farmers round our way who kept dogs locked up or put cheap diesel in their tractors. He wasn’t for me. She’d hate me, the mother, who sat at home polishing and forgetting about her son, except during Christmas when the piano-­playing and poetry recitals were required. I didn’t suggest we see each other again, though I wanted to. But I knew his mother would make sure he didn’t waste his time with girls like me, and in that way mothers know best – I didn’t stand a chance.

  A cormorant landed in slo-mo on the water’s surface, its black shadow flapping down on the dark water and in that lovely drunk, he said he was really into me, and I laughed and told him he was fucking daft, that I was actually quite a cunt, and he laughed, and said that kind of soft talk was mad. Sometimes it’s even dangerous talk, he said then, seriously. I tried to explain how mostly I was utterly mean. Or frozen. We settled on frozen. But he said that it was the drink talking – he didn’t believe it for a minute. We promised each other that this moment was the world, the best spinning drunken world we could muster. I said I’d better head on, it was so late, and he’d said grand, and that he’d have to sneak in his bedroom window for he was freezing. I reminded him to take the shoes off. Then he asked if perhaps we could think about going to the cinema or even for chips sometime. I laughed and said no, no way, I was busy. Washing my hair, hiding under my bed, going mad. I walked off quick into the dark night as he called out after me and I blew a kiss to the dark. I carried the peach schnapps bottle off into the night and the sugar hardened like a sweet glass coat as I sat in our garden and waited for the sun to come up.

  Years later I met Schnapps at a business lunch in a fancy fish place. A loud woman with bouncy curls and shoulder pads was seated at our table. She handed over the large leather wine menu and told me to choose an appropriate wine, fast as you can, dear, as she flicked her hair towards him. I quickly chose a thick honey Chardonnay, for such was my limited experience and limited pronunciation of wine back then. She guffawed loudly like a pig might (and everyone there for her importance guffawed like little piglets and found her exhilarating, in the way wankers like people in power, finding them endlessly funny). Peach Schnapps rose up and said there would be no deal today or any day, then pushed his thin café chair backwards and threw some notes on the table. He kissed the side of my face and said that the wine, whatever fuck of a bottle the lady chose to choose, was perfectly fine by him, as it was accompanying crab. And crab, he said, sits at the bottom of the ocean and eats shit.

  Lady.

  He was the very first. Peach Snap. Large peach. Moreish.

  Morello. A dark sweet cherry. Morning after. Delightful.

  Morning-after pill. Necessary. Morning stars. Beautiful.

  More of them hollowed out f
rom the black sky.

  iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouicanloveicanijustneedtorememberourlovemylove

  More time. please. IlovehimilovehimilovehimIcanlove. Morphine. More time, I beg. Mother-of-pearl.

  Midnight. Morgue.

  Mortuary.

  I went to sleepzzzzzzzzz.

  Badly needed.

  Dreamed about mud falls and large peach crabs at traffic lights.

  Chapter 14

  The sun was spinning, wisps of light danced across the apricot floor, refractions from the rainwater in the gutters. There was a low hum of dawn chorus and some wood pigeons hooting. Jane, perched beside the window like an arrow in a quiver, drowned them out by singing Amazing Grace at a ferocious pitch and then sat and pretended to knit a baby’s bonnet or a small tea cosy, something tiny and delicate. She needed a different shot. Nothing had been done with her since the lovely woman who spoke Portuguese to the air was sent in to calm her.

  ‘Stop that nonsense, Claire Hegarty, at once, stop that nonsense at once and sit yourself back down,’ Jane bawled out, abandoning her singing and knitting, at Claire who was attempting to raise a coffee cup to her lips.

  I circled my finger at my temple. Margaret Rose laughed.

  ‘Oh, please,’ Claire said, hesitantly, and then sipped from her morning’s coffee.

  ‘Keep singing, Jane, ’twas lovely . . .’ Margaret Rose prompted, devilment lurking in one eye.

  ‘Sit down, sit DOWN. Sit back down at your desk immediately, MISS Claire, or you’ll stand out on that tiled area for the rest of the day . . . d’you HEAR ME? You see, Miss Hegarty, you are an awful sort of a girl, you really are not behaving like a scholarly student at all with this sort of ruffian behaviour. Now let that boy’s hair go, or I am absolutely warning you. I will get my ruler and you’ll know all about it.’

  The word all went down her nose, slowly. She was so terrifyingly precise.

  ‘Uh, oh . . .’ Margaret Rose said, switching on her radio.

  Don’t think Twice, it’s All Right

  Molly blew upwards at her pink bandana, as she arrived with meds in a grey kidney dish. It fell back into her eyes. ‘Well, good morning, Sinéad, nice to see ya looking a bit brighter. Some drugs?’ she said, attempting cheer. ‘Hi ya feeling, hun? Blow into this, no other arm, too many in there, thanks, oh, wait; OK, we’ll go with this one. Jeez, you’re like a pincushion. How’s this one feel? Naw. This OK?’

  I winced.

  She flicked her finger a few times to the back of my hand. I winced again, it was a cold pain, sharp; as she flicked the swollen hands, clear water ran from the little cannula holes dotted on my fat hand.

  ‘Sorry, darl. OK, I’ll just try maybe flush them through, OK?’ Molly said, distracted.

  ‘’K.’

  Her eyes were darkly dull and pale ivory make-up congealed in the pores around her nose and in the creases of her eyelids.

  Michal arched his head round the door and his panda eyes were even more pronounced. He shot a glance to my hands and winced. I shut my eyes.

  ‘OK . . . now, hun, a little pinch, sharp, you feel that?’ Molly said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah . . .’ I said, my voice unreliable.

  ‘Really, you sure?’

  Yes. I’m sure. Pain is pain. Visceral. Sharp. Pounding. Tightening. Slicing. Throbbing. Separating. Forgetting. Losing. They tell you it’s entirely in your head, and yes, precisely, it’s in my head, my pain, in my fucking head, processed by me, my brain. All in my head.

  Bob Dylan finished his song. Margaret Rose turned down the radio and picked up the phone and called Niquita, to ask, in her coded way, if she was all right. If it was all right? If it hurt. If she was all right again? And the words were brief. Margaret Rose let out a long sigh, staring at the phone after the call ended, then shook it, maybe wondering if there was a static that had reduced her conversation with her daughter to such stilted fragments and not at all like the chats they were capable of having.

  ‘Molly . . . hey . . .’ Michal said.

  ‘Hi . . . you ’K, hun? Ya looking for me?’ Molly said, twisting back to him.

  ‘Yes, ya, no rush, yes, someone here wants to see you . . . visitor from . . .’

  ‘She got a seat? Give her a seat and till her I’ll be there in one sec,’ Molly assured him.

  ‘No, no seat, no seats. Nothing. Nothing in this place. No even wheelchair for SinAID. No pads either, or no milk, no shampoo, no razors, no coffee, where’ll I put him to sit, eh?’ he went on, reddening.

  ‘’K, hun,’ Molly said, calmly, ‘no problem.’ She continued flicking my line with her thumb and middle finger; the nails tapped the soft plastic, gently coaxing more fluids through. ‘Tell her I’ll be there in a minute.’

  ‘It’s a man, he . . . I said he . . .’ said Michal, throwing his arms, defeated, in the air and turning at the door, walking away. ‘Few ticks, now, darl,’ she said to me, ignoring Michal. ‘I’ll be back . . . in a sec. I need to page the Reg to put a new line somewhere, this one’s in a miss. So sorry.’

  All better. I kiss it better. You all better now.

  ‘Back in a jiffy.’

  It was gruelling without Shane’s Wi-Fi.

  ‘That’s her. No just here, left, blonde girl, red eyes, just there, there . . .’ Michal said, pointing at me, his watch hanging from his wrist.

  A tall man walked towards me with a flamboyant Avengers bag slung over his lean shoulder. It banged off his hipbone. He was skinny and tall like a sailboat and looked down over me, large squirrelly nut-brown eyes, neat navy cardigan zipped tight and fitted onto him like a cheese wax, beige canvas Tom’s, sallow feet, ambitious for April. He leaned his head towards his chest like a stallion being tucked under by a good rider, an appoggiatura.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, lifting the three fingers of his right hand and fussing with the strap of the bag.

  ‘Hi.’

  I was so fucking glad Michal had dressed me.

  ‘I’m really so very sorry to hassle you. Hey, I’m Stephen,’ he said as he extended his arm for a handshake, turning his eyes downwards.

  ‘Oh, shit, shit, you’re bleeding, you’re, actually . . . fuck . . .’ and he trailed off, fanning his left hand over his lips.

  Jesus.

  You are now entering a Hospital – there may be blood and crying and dying. Buckle up.

  ‘Hi.’

  He didn’t look like another weirdo religious converter ready to take me away from the black hole of my godlessness as I fast approached my own death.

  ‘Hi, lovely to meet you. Bet Hospital’s not much fun, huh?’ he said.

  Correct.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, again.

  He placed a coffee on my tray-table and lifted the man-bag off over his square head.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry to just . . . drop in . . . I’m Stephen,’ he said, again, and placed out his hand, again.

  ‘Sinéad . . .’ I whispered, but he already knew who I was.

  ‘See, Shane,’ he said.

  ‘Stephen, no?’ I said.

  ‘No, no, I mean Shane . . .’

  ‘You’re Shane?’

  ‘Jeez, sorry,’ he said, as I glanced at the coffee, Costa, and attempted to guess the contents. Americano. Double shot. No milk. Actually – coconut milk cappuccino. Double shot. ‘I’m Stephen. I have. I mean. I’m here to. Hold on . . . one sec . . .’ He tried to open the man-bag. The zip was sticky. ‘I’m being very unclear,’ he jittered. ‘I’m Shane’s brother, Stephen, the ma didn’t call us both Shane.’ He tried to laugh. Couldn’t.

  ‘Shit. This about Wi-Fi?’ I blurted. ‘I’m genuinely sorry, it’s just I’m so sick, and so sick bored, and I was so bored, I didn’t think it would matter, I mean, I tried to talk to him, but I was afraid I was making a nuisance of myself. Look, I’ll fix up with you for it . . . it’s just I have no money with me . . . I mean, I have money, they just don’t recommend it . . . keeping it here.’

  ‘What?’ he said, perplexed. ‘Wi-Fi? N
o, no, thing is I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Do you need money?’ He rattled in the leg of his jeans.

  ‘No, no, sorry . . . right,’ I whispered.

  ‘None of us had, you know . . .’

  ‘Cared?’

  ‘Visited.’ He coughed and put his fist to his mouth. ‘Maybe you just don’t understand, you see . . .’

  ‘Right,’ I said, lifting my inflection at the end, question.

  ‘Not after Da . . . you know, died . . . oh, I don’t know, it all became too much, the care and the minding and all.’

  A text lit up my home screen.

  My mother.

  Good morning, Love. x.

  I turned the phone upside down.

  ‘And the carers rely on us more, you know, like the more we were there, see, when we weren’t there they didn’t seem to need us at all, you know, like I found this odd, if I could have chatted to him, and left everything, you know, the way it was when he was, oh, God . . . this is hard,’ Stephen went on, lifting the white plastic lid up and down on the paper mug.

  ‘Mind if I?’ He motioned to the edge of the bed.

  ‘No, you’re fine, sit . . .’