by L.J. Shen
Moral of the story: clutching something desperately doesn’t mean you’re going to keep it. You might just kill it.
Plus, call me a conceited son of a bitch, but I truly don’t see Malachy Doherty as competition. He looks sloppy, his house is an utter mess, and his life is shaping up to look even worse. Those are things women don’t find attractive.
And Rory, she is a bit of a wild spirit, this one, but she is not daft. I don’t think.
In the cab, I take my phone out of my pocket and wipe away the idea of Rory and Malachy together.
I can keep her.
I have thus far, haven’t I?
And let’s not pretend she was always into it.
Only a bit more before I seal the deal. Then Weirdo Wackhead can be a distant memory again.
Eight years ago
Mal
Whoever invented the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” evidently had the memory of a goldfish. “Out of sight, out of my fecking mind” sounds more fitting.
I miss her.
Oh, how I miss her like a flower misses the sun. Like the Clash missed the mark with “Cut the Crap.” I can’t stop thinking about her, and that contract is possibly the worst idea I’ve had since wanking into a Shepherd’s pie in tenth grade, straight out of the oven.
My mate, Daniel, claps my back as Sean, his twin, slides a pint of the black stuff across the table of The Boar’s Head. They motion for me to drink up with their chins.
“Feck the contract,” Daniels spits. “Pick up the phone and call the girl.”
I stare at the thick, white foam of my stout. It’s not that simple. It’s not just the contract part, but whatever comes after it. The making-it-work part.
“What if she’s moved on?” I ask my drink.
“In three weeks? Unlikely.” Sean lets out a gruff laugh.
Sean and Daniel look alike, as identical twins do. Same blond hair trimmed close to the scalp, green eyes, and I-fucked-your-wife kind of cocky smirks. The only way I can distinguish them is that Daniel makes some sort of sense every now and again when he opens his mouth, and Sean is a complete ape. And I say that with a lot of love. (Not to Sean. To apes. They’re lovely, intelligent creatures.)
“I can’t do long distance.”
I dip a finger into my Guinness and suck the bitter foam. I hear a sigh from the table next to us. Kathleen. She is sitting with her friends, Maeve and Heather. She flicks her straightened hair, smiles at me shyly, and turns back to Maeve.
“Clearly you must, since you can’t stop thinking and talking about her. You’re a complete puss.” Daniel shoves a handful of crisps into his mouth.
“Two people shorten the road.” Sean taps his temple. “Think about it.”
“Wrong saying, but the sentiment is correct, brother.” Daniel laughs. “I know you said you don’t want to settle down, but that’s exactly what you’re doing, and she’s not even here. You’re settling for misery instead of taking a chance. You haven’t shagged a soul since she left. At least give it a shot. You owe it to us, if not yourself. We cannot listen to your whining much longer.”
“Mal?” Sean asks.
“Hmm?”
“Is Kathleen…single?”
“As far as I’m aware.”
“Do you reckon…”
He completes his question, I’m sure, but my mind is drifting back to Roryland. I pick up my phone and type her name in the search engine. There are only so many Aurora Belle Jenkins in the world, surely. There are a load of pictures of Disney princesses and articles about how to make your own Disney slime before I get to the important stuff.
Outside, thunder cracks, and out of nowhere, it starts to hail.
Random or fate? Sometimes I feel like the world is screwing with me when I think about Rory.
I find her on a New Jersey-based high school website, in an article dated two years ago. She won a photography award of some sort. There’s a picture of her holding her cheap statue in the shape of film, staring at the camera, flipping the finger with a mocking pout. Eyeliner, fishnets, and Toms intact. The girl who left me behind.
Why did I have to find out you exist?
“Anyway…” I shake my head. “Even if I wanted to give her a ring, I don’t have her number or anything like that.”
“Pity,” Sean mumbles into his drink, eyeing the girls at the opposite table.
He looks a bit cross. Then I remember he asked me something about Kathleen. Sean and Kathleen are not in the same IQ bracket. A bit of an odd pairing, but stranger things have happened, I suppose.
“Wait, doesn’t your granddad know her mam?” Daniel snaps his fingers, his eyes lighting up.
Yes, yes, he does. He would have their home number. Rory is not supposed to know about it—not about him knowing her mother, and not about how I know and kept it from her. There’s no chance in hell my granda is going to give me the number, but I could just look at his little phone book. Problem solved.
Of course, there’s a chance Rory went back, got to college, and has already met the love of her life. But if she hasn’t…
If she hasn’t, I’ll take long distance.
Or casual dating.
Or anything, really.
I stand up, finishing my pint in one go.
“Keep us posted.” Daniel slaps my back.
Sean loosens the collar of his shirt, clearing his throat and sliding into a seat next to the girls.
I get out of the pub, heading toward my grandfather’s house on foot. He lives across the village, not terribly far, and I need the fresh air to sort my mind. I hear footfalls behind me, but I don’t slow down. Kiki appears by my side. She is wheezing.
“You’re actually going through with this?”
“Why not?”
It should bother me that Kath has been eavesdropping on my conversation. She’s had her nose stuck in my business as long as I can remember. I chalk it up to Kath being Kath. You take the bad with the good in people.
The good: she’s a grand friend, protective, and never steers me wrong.
The bad: she’s mad as a box of slimy frogs and likes it when I torture her with mixed signals. If I stop, she crumbles and enters a state of depression.
“It’s crazy. You live on different continents. She will never leave America and move here permanently. What kind of future do you have with her?”
“We’ll work it out.”
I round a corner. She’s at my heel.
“That’s just something people say when they can’t figure out how to make something work.”
Kath is practically running to match my stride. We are at my grandfather’s door now. I fish the keys out of my pocket—I have a key for granda’s lock, because his cat, Saoirse, needs taking care of sometimes when he’s on one of his week-long church things.
Kath grabs my arm and yanks me back, jumping in front of the door. “Don’t!” She flinches. “Don’t call her.”
I give her a slow once-over. Christ on a bike, Kath’s oddness has an extra shine today.
She pushes my chest away from my grandfather’s door, her eyes shimmering. “She is not the girl for you, Mal. I am. I’m the right O’Connell girl.” She slaps her hand against her chest, full-blown crying now. “And I don’t care that you probably slept with my half-sister. And I don’t care that you have feelings for her. And I don’t care that she told me you were nothing but a fling to her. I still want you, and I’m tired of waiting.”
I’ve always known Kathleen had a crush on me. I discouraged it any way I could without rejecting her, by being unavailable and cutting our interaction to the bare, acceptable minimum. But I always thought it was the crush of the same variety I had for Miss Flynn, my middle school teacher, when I first discovered my penis was good for more than pissing—one where you feel attraction toward a person, but also recognize how deeply mental the idea of actually being with them would be.
Kathleen is the most put-together, ambitious, levelheaded, motivated person I know. I’m
a busker and a bum and, on weekends, a bloody drunk. We have absolutely nothing in common, other than the fact that we both breathe. Even that is something I’m sure Kathleen is better at.
Wait.
A fling?
“Back up. What did you say she told you?” I hold my palm up.
A part of me acknowledges I’m a heartless SOB for asking about Rory when she just bled her heart out and confessed her undying love, but we’ll get to that in a second. Right after we discuss my bleeding heart. (See, Kath? I’m selfish, too. Really, what did you find in me?)
She stares at her feet, biting on her lip.
“Remember at my house, when you went to the toilet? You got back and saw Rory and me holding hands. That was a minute after she told me she was planning on sleeping with you. I confessed my feelings for you, and she told me she didn’t care. She said I got the money and Da and the heritage, and she would get the guy. That she’d ruin you for me. That’s why I haven’t tried to stay in contact with her, Mal. I was deeply hurt.”
I take a step back, digesting.
It sounds nothing like Rory. Not only is she not a cunning cow, but she’s also too blasé to voice something like that aloud. It sounds like something out of Cruel Intentions, not the mouth of a Disney princess. Then again, Kath is not a liar. At least, I’ve never caught her in a lie before, and I’ve known her all my life.
I gather Kathleen in my arms, pulling her to my chest.
“Kath?”
She flinches in my arms. She knows. She can’t not-know. I’ve shagged/snogged/fingered nearly every girl in this village, always careful not to touch her, and not just because her dad warned me off.
“Listen to me. You’re beautiful, smart, funny, and make a mean cup of tea. But you also feel a lot like a sister. Too much for me to want to shove my hand into your knickers. And I don’t think that’d ever change. I’d rather kick someone’s arse for treating you badly than be the wanker to actually mistreat you. You following?”
I feel her body going rigid in my arms. I press a kiss on her shampooed, carefully combed hair, missing Rory’s tousled nest of random colors—light roots, dark middle, bleached tips.
“I’m sorry if she said that to you,” I add.
“What do you mean if? She did.” Kath rears her head back, the light in her eyes flickering like a dying flame. “You believe me, right? You know I’m telling the truth.” She tugs at my shirt.
“Sean likes you.” I change the subject.
“Really?” She sulks like I just suggested she date a bucket of lube. “Well, I don’t like him.”
“That’s fine, but I think it’s time to find someone you do.”
I’m trying the Band-Aid method. Fast and burning, as opposed to slow and excruciating. If I break her heart once, she’ll glue it back together and move on. If I break it one crack at the time, she’ll hold on to some silly hope this could happen. It won’t. Whether Rory wants me or not, I’ll never be with Kath.
I sidestep, push the key into the lock, and close the door behind me, leaving her outside. Then I walk into my granda’s darkened living room, take his phone book from the coffee table, sit down on his couch, and dial Debbie Jenkins’ number.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Jenkins?”
“Who is it?”
“My name is Mal. Malachy. I’m Father Doherty’s grandson.”
I expect her to feign recognition. I know she knows my grandfather. But instead of offering some sort of greeting, she says nothing at all. The silence is like a nail dragged over a blackboard. I cram words into it, desperately trying to fill the void.
“I’m calling because…well, I wanted to see how Rory is doing. We got to hang out while she was here, and she was quite emotional, and…”
Put more ands in the sentence, muppet.
I sound like I need to wear a helmet indoors. What the feck is wrong with me? But she is still not saying anything, and now I’m trying to figure out what the feck is wrong with her. I tally all stupid things I’m saying and thinking right now, as if this is some sort of a job interview.
“Anyway, is she there?” I clear my throat.
“No,” Debbie Jenkins clips.
More silence. Rory Jenkins despises her mother, and I’m starting to see why.
“May I have her number, please?”
“Malachy…” She lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Listen, I know you and my daughter had…a thing. We’re not as distant as she’d like people to believe. Rory is inexperienced, impressionable, and hopelessly romantic. I’m sure it got blown into this huge something in both your heads, but let’s admit it, just between the two of us—it doesn’t exactly have a future, does it?”
I’m torn between telling her to feck off and pleading my case. If I thought it didn’t have a future, I wouldn’t be calling.
She continues, “She moved out. She’s in college. She’s dating—”
“Dating?” I snap.
“Mmm-hmmm.” Debbie lights a fag on the other side of the line. “A very nice guy, too. In fact, I’m sure she won’t mind if I send you the pictures she took of you. They’re lying somewhere around her room. She never took them with her. Would you like that? For safekeeping?”
I can feel the napkin with our contract burning a hole in the back of my jeans. I take it everywhere, like I expect to see her, out and about in Tolka or Dublin, and wave it in her face.
See? Remember? We’re supposed to be together.
My pride urges me to tell Debbie she can shove the unwanted photos of me where the sun don’t shine, but ego is a luxury broken hearts cannot afford.
“Please do,” I mutter.
I start to give her my address, but she tells me she’ll send them to Father Doherty. I actually prefer it that way, because my house is the farthest from anywhere else in the village, and I’m prone to having my mail lost.
“How is she doing?” I ask again before she hangs up.
I can’t help myself, even if I’m starting to believe Kathleen about the whole one-night-stand thing. So what if Rory suggested long distance? She was caught in the moment. The magic wore off quickly for her, that’s for sure.
“I told you, Malachy. She’s fine.”
“Can I call you and make sure she’s okay from time to time?” Hang up the phone, you sorry pile of shite.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Debbie says apologetically. “It’d be for the best if Rory leaves Ireland behind her.”
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
I received the pictures Debbie Jenkins sent me earlier today. I’ve dropped by my granda’s house every single day since our phone call, waiting for them. It took them two months to arrive. Two months of me being a celibate, moody eejit. Two months of me breaking every rule in our stupid contract.
I looked for Rory on social media, but she doesn’t have any profiles. Or if she does—they’re not under her real name.
I subscribed to her college’s newsletter because it sometimes shouts out students, and seeing her name makes me happy. (She’s won two photography contests and helped film a short student movie.)
But nothing could prepare me for the moment I flipped the pictures over (fine quality, by the way) and saw the captions she’d put on the back of them.
Picture one, of me singing/busking:
He was a terrible flirt, and he could be soooo cheesy!
Picture two, of me standing on the threshold of The Boar’s Head, posing for her like Marilyn Monroe.
He talks too much, and sometimes doesn’t make any sense.
Picture three, both of us in bed, my bed, after I gave her three hundred orgasms and a part of my heart.
He tries way too hard in bed.
The worst thing is, shortly thereafter at The Boar’s Head, I took the napkin out and compared her handwriting on the contract to the words on the back of the pictures. Sean, Daniel, and I all concluded it was the same handwriting. So it’s not like her mother could have faked this.<
br />
Daniel drums the table. “Well then, I think it’s safe to say you can move on with your life now. She sounds like a world-class slag.”
“The thing is, she is not,” I slur.
I pick up my fifth…sixth pint and chug it down. Kathleen is sitting across from us with her friends again. Sean is staring at her, pining…again. She’s doing the same—to me. I wish they’d just shag and let me drown in my misery.
“She is not a slag at all.”
But the more time passes, the more the crisp memory of her not being a slag dims. The captions on the pictures are now more vivid than her innocent smile in my head.
“I’m going to call her mum,” I announce.
“Dumbest idea you’ve had in a while.” Daniel does a thumbs-down, whistling as he crashes his hand against the table. “And you’re never short of those.”
“Borderline suicidal.” Sean bobs his head, dragging his eyes from Kath.
Ever since our conversation by my grandfather’s door, she’s been dropping by my house quite a lot—always in skimpy dresses that look very odd on her, and always with a fresh platter of something good for me to eat, plus a bottle of wine or a few cans of Guinness in her hands. I invite her in, eat while she tells me stories about whatever is happening in her life, then send her on her way. On the surface, she seems content with being just friends. A dom-girl friend, I suppose, with that kind of attire.
“No, I need to talk to Rory directly.” I shake my head and stand. I still keep the napkin, of course, returning it carefully to my pocket, but I’ve broken every rule under the sun.