Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

  –Romans 7:15–25

  That night after meeting Ciaran I drank until I vomited and blood vessels beneath and above my eyes burst, and I traced them gently in the mirror, knowing they would be markers of a beginning.

  5

  Events that were objectively worse than what was to follow with Ciaran had taken place in my earlier adulthood, sordid checkpoints of the wounded woman. I cannot speak about these things too soon because their names alone summon like a charm the disinterest of an enlightened reader. Female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking only for attention – and of all our cardinal sins, seeking attention must surely be up there.

  All the suffering I had so far endured before I met Ciaran, I had endured like a child. This is not to say the suffering was not severe, which it was, or that I did not understand it, which I did. But before Ciaran I still contemplated suffering as something with meaning. I understood even the most inexplicable of tragedies as being imbued with some as yet unknown purpose.

  It was my feeling that there were lucky people and unlucky people, and I was a lucky person. Even in my worst depressions, I had always known this. My misery seemed to come from knowing I was not good enough to warrant the objectively lucky life I had been given.

  I would not have thought so literally, or so religiously, as to say, ‘Everything happens for a reason’ or ‘God doesn’t give us more than we can bear’, but the feeling was not so different. It was the feeling that each human life has a narrative and a destiny. It was the feeling that misfortune, no matter how great, would eventually serve to lead each of us to our own particular and inevitable conclusion.

  My understanding was that every action would lead me to where I ought to be ultimately, and where I ought to be was in love.

  Love was the great consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as the great leveller, as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it. There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead.

  Oh, don’t laugh at me for this, for being a woman who says this to you. I hear myself speak.

  6

  I texted him in the morning and we agreed to meet at 2 p.m. outside the Natural History Museum. I showered in near-boiling water and spat blood into the sink when I brushed my teeth. I was badly hungover, but not ill, in the sweet spot before returning to full sobriety. I was glad to be so. Going through life hungover is an ordeal, but being without one is no picnic either. The fuzz and numbness of a hangover can carry you through a day without you noticing it too much; you’re too busy tending to aches and thirsts to pay much attention to anything else that might trouble you.

  I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before and was jittery as I walked. I tried to remember his face, and found that the intensity of my crush would not allow me to. I could recall individual parts but when I tried to assemble them they floated in a shimmering mess. I laughed at this nervously and shook my head, filled with affection for myself. I love myself in love. I find my feelings fascinating and human, for once can sympathise with my own actions.

  When I arrived, he was drifting about the lawns looking at hedges sheared into animal shapes. I went to him and put my hand on his elbow, felt it warm in the worn old rust-coloured cardigan he wore. I had noticed this at the opening, too – he dressed in clothes that, although elegant on his body, looked on the point of collapse. They weren’t merely distressed in a fashionable way but looked as though they had well and truly reached the end point of functioning as clothing. Instinctively I respected this: resourcefulness. My father told me once the trait he admires most in the world is resourcefulness, and since then I’ve looked out for it.

  We hugged hello and I felt how slender he was beneath his soft worn layers. I sensed something slightly different from him than I had the night before. He was still powerfully calm, but there was a tension in his face. I wondered if he was nervous. My own nerves had mainly to do with the sobriety of what we were doing. All of my romantic affairs until then had begun while drunk, and most of them accidentally.

  It was a bad location for a first date. We had to move around and focus our attention on things other than each other. We made observations about the exhibits between bouts of silence. We chatted enough to swap basic information in murmurs. I learned that he had moved permanently to Dublin a year ago, to spend time with his father who had become ill, but was doing better now. He had come from outside Copenhagen, where he wrote art criticism. Here he was trying to write his own essays, but his waged work was doing copy and reviews for a magazine.

  The silences were making me unbearably anxious and I feared I would burst into laughter at any moment. Being in the museum wasn’t helping; it was a shabby, dark and beautiful old place where the exhibits were sometimes unintentionally hilarious. My friends and I would go there hungover sometimes and become pleasantly hysterical at the old and incompetent taxidermy. But Ciaran was walking between them all in apparent seriousness, and I felt foolish for being amused.

  I looked over at him for as long as I could get away with while he inspected the butterflies. I wanted to be nearer. I approached and held his worn elbow and asked if he’d like to go and get something to eat.

  Outside, after walking down the staircase in more silence, he turned to me and said, ‘Well. That was a very bad museum.’ And his seriousness made me laugh then, and he laughed with me.

  We spent the rest of the day together and spoke more about our lives. He described the town he was from and said he hadn’t been sad to leave it. I told him about dropping out of university and the many odd jobs I had worked since then. I told him I wrote, too, in the way I always told people this: with the lowered pious eyes of a saint, looking away, worried and secretly a little hopeful they would want to ask me about it. This was not a justified worry when it came to most men and Ciaran was no different. He nodded briskly and moved the conversation on.

  In the evening we walked along the quays and he left me to go and work in his studio. He kissed me, and then held my head in his hands, studying my face with fond satisfaction, and said we would see each other soon.

  As we walked in opposite directions, I turned back to look at him over my shoulder and he did the same to me and I was filled with a soaring levity. We were both laughing, and I turned away from him and started to run – had to, the feeling was so strong. I ran and ran and I couldn’t stop laughing in amazement, thinking of how he kissed me, thinking that there was nobody else I wanted to kiss now.

  When I look back, what I find most odd was how sedate the day with him had been. We had got along fine, had found each other agreeable, were obviously attracted to one another, but there was no moment of breakthrough in the conversation. The moment I had shared with others before him, when you feel all the pieces lining up as a rhythm takes hold, had not occurred.

  I think even then in that first flush, running up the quays alongside the April sunset, I was aware of that. It didn’t matter to me how funny he was, or what he thought of me, or what books we had both read.

  I was in love with him from the beginning, and there wasn’t a thing he or anybody else could do to change it.

  7

  Before Ciaran I tried some other men on for size. I was trying a lot of things. I had become a strange age. I was no longer the barely-legal-but-knowing teenager who had wielded such power over men. Nor was I anything like a self-possessed adult woman who might attract them by way of her autonomy.

  People enjoyed me, because while I was attractive enough I was not intimidating. I was buoyant and good-natured and occasionally a little bit mean in an amusing way. I looked and fucked like a woman but could drink and take drugs and talk like a lad. I would bring some effete longlimbed DJ home with me and in the morning we could knock about town together without the awkward suggestion of romance or obligation.

  We could have coffee, in our farc
ical fur coats, or a conspiratorial too-early beer, before going our separate ways, and then I would see them that same night at another club, with one of the girls who was more like a real girl to them, girls who were tall and willowy and part-time modelling while they studied fine art. I think that I wanted more than anything to be real like those girls, but I didn’t know how to be, didn’t know any other way to be close to these boys except for partying with them. I was not without value, but the value I held was not the kind I wanted to hold, and I did not know how to exchange it.

  My life as a party girl dwindled away. I slept with too many people’s boyfriends, got sick in too many front rooms. I stopped being enjoyably fun and became only frantically fun, and then felt too old for it all anyway.

  I fell into the habit of being only with much older men. Not knowing what to do with myself, it was simple to stumble into their lives. Whether I was truly beautiful, exceptional, interesting mattered less with them. I was still very young in the grand scheme of things, if not young enough to be a nightlife novelty any longer. I was young enough to be compelling to them by virtue only of my youth, standing in as a monument to whatever things they felt they no longer had access to.

  I met one such man at a book launch not long before I would meet Ciaran. He was an editor at a small independent poetry press, American. He wore funny thick glasses and sweater vests and had a honking, obliviously loud speaking voice, which was what made me notice him first. He was talking to a friend throughout the book launch’s tedious speeches, with so little care for his surroundings that it made me laugh. His friend replied in whispers and tried to shush him but the editor didn’t seem to notice and went on broadcasting his flat Californian drawl. He caught my eye and grinned at me, and we drank together for the rest of the night.

  It was sort of amazing seeing men who weren’t particularly attractive but who believed, more or less correctly, that they could have and do whatever they wanted. I was always calculating with scientific precision the relative beauty of the people I wanted to be with, and would steer clear of the ones who exceeded me too greatly. But then you’d see guys like this one trundling around the world, reaching out, cheerily thoughtless, for whatever shiny thing passed. They didn’t feel the need to strike an equitable bargain, they just advanced towards you, grinning a little sheepishly maybe, and their entitlement was so alien and enviable that it was something like charming.

  ‘I have a sort of girlfriend,’ he gasped into my mouth after he had pushed me against a wall.

  ‘Okay,’ I said in response, then rolled my eyes and kissed him again.

  When he took me to his house for the first time some weeks later I immediately lost the upper hand it had felt as though I had. He was rich. It was a huge two-bedroom apartment in Merrion Square, everything in soft-brushed fabrics and beige tones. A small sleepy corgi named Dots blinked up at us from the sofa. Being young and beautiful felt like a lot sometimes, felt like it translated to real-world power, but money shat all over it every time.

  He took me to bed, where I was uncharacteristically shy. The grandeur of the house felt oppressive, my cheap high-street lingerie crude. Eventually he undressed me fully and laid me out on the bed, kneeling over me and patiently removing my hands each time they returned to protect my most embarrassing parts. He did this until I stopped trying to cover myself and lay there still beneath his gaze. He looked so happy, taking me in. He touched each part of me, and kissed my forehead gently.

  ‘I’ve wanted this for a long time,’ he said. ‘Since I first saw you.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said back, but I knew that I didn’t mean it. I hadn’t wanted to sleep with him. I had wanted never to sleep with him, had wanted us to keep talking, to wake up to his messages, to be amused by one another. I wanted our chaste coffee dates to go on and on, for there to be no end to these things, and this, the sex, was the end, I knew.

  It felt good in a way, because he was so excited and I was pleased to make him so, but I was filled with sadness at each new thing he did to me. Every thing he did was another ending. When we had done all the things there were to do, he passed out and I clung to his reassuringly solid, soft stomach – paternal, so different to the indie waifs – and cried.

  In the morning I woke up before him and went to the kitchen for water. I walked around and noticed things I had been too drunk to the night before. One room was wall-to-wall books, so comforting and stable to stand beneath. There were armchairs in different corners, where two people could sit reading in happy silence all day long before reintroducing themselves when evening came and it was time to be together again. I petted Dots, who panted happily, and looked out the window into the square and imagined what it would be like to walk her there every morning and every night, a routine so regular as that, a life where you knew what to do when you woke up.

  I went back into the bedroom and noticed a pair of high heels and a bottle of perfume and some Avène moisturiser in a corner on the side of bed I had been sleeping in. His girlfriend, I thought, could be my mother’s age. Here was an actual life, a real life, which I had walked into, dragging the mud of myself with me. I had never felt so unlike a human being, so disposable and flimsy and built purely for function. He called me a cab to go home and I knew I would never hear from him again and I never did.

  8

  I was waitressing in a hipster burger restaurant then, skittish from the running around and the bumps of coke we did in the toilets on double shifts. My friend Lisa and I lived together in a house we called the Ski Cabin for its weird low wooden ceilings and the feeling you got that they were going to slowly envelop you. Lisa and I met our very first week in Dublin, both sulking anxiously at the fringes of some nightmarish freshers’ week event, locking eyes in anguished relief. She was from a town considered even more small-time and hokey than my own by the confident Dublin people, who considered everyone from outside of their own hopelessly provincial suburbs to be ‘culchies’, farmers, inbred and unsophisticated.

  We were close straight away and remained so even after I dropped out of college abruptly. When she said she wanted to go out dancing, I was surprised to find that she meant it literally and not as a euphemism for getting drunk. Though I drank much more than she did, I appreciated that she never made me feel self-conscious about it, or even gave the sense that she would notice such a thing. She was wide eyed and gregarious and rarely alone. There seemed to be no part of her that wished for anonymity or the privacy of solitude. I admired this in her, the ease of it and the goodness, knowing as I did the different texture of my own solicitation of company, which was conditional and explosive when not satisfied.

  We moved in together when she had graduated and were both waitressing full time or as near to it as the whims of our managers allowed. We spent our days off huddled in blankets and fleeces on our awful bony couch, listening to the radio and writing in our notebooks or sending emails or ‘doing research’, which for me meant reading the Wikipedias of lesser-known serial killers and jotting down the details that struck me: ‘While holding the girl hostage, he gave his victim the book Treasure Island to read and watched the movie Hook with her.’ Or, ‘The killer could achieve sexual release as an adolescent only when he cut holes in photographs of women.’

  We drank strong tea with the teabags left in and chain-smoked roll-up cigarettes, and sometimes when the day had passed we would work on a crossword together. We cooked meals of tinned pulses and wilted greens with lots of garlic, chopped tomatoes and anchovies. We cracked an egg into more or less everything and let it cook and set off the stove, mopping it all up with leftover bread one of us had taken home from the restaurants we worked in. Though I was restless in a way Lisa never was, waiting anxiously for what was to come next, I felt soothed by our domestic union. I admired the way she had of making any place into a home – within days of our arriving, even the appalling damp toilet had wall hangings and figurines and felt ours.

  She was so wholesome that I sometimes didn’t know how
to react to her except by rolling my eyes, as though her picnics and sober dinner parties with edible flowers and whole roasted fish and adventures on trains were an affront to me. In fact, I wanted to want them, would have loved to live a life like that. Or rather I would have loved to appear to live a life like that. All the things that Lisa did for her own genuine pleasure were things I thought looked good, things I didn’t want for their own sake. I thought a life that looked that way – clean and gentle and high-minded – would get me what I truly wanted, which was to do with having as much of people as possible, their attention, their desire, their curiosity.

  Sometimes I thought about people like Lisa – people who never lost control of themselves, who never had too much of anything, who were never awake after one a.m. – with something like disdain. I valued what I thought of as my free nature, my willingness to do whatever I wanted at all times, my ability to be led by whatever base physical urge was singing to me in each moment. Wasn’t there some truth to the way I existed that those safer people were too timid to follow in their own lives? It didn’t occur to me that maybe Lisa was doing exactly what she wanted to do, that what she wanted was to live in the calm and benevolent way that she did. I didn’t think so because it was incomprehensible to me that someone could drink and lack the desire to keep on drinking, I didn’t understand that some people didn’t have that want inside them.

  She sat down some evenings and opened a bottle of red one of us had stolen from our restaurants, and took a little sip, and then a bigger one, and exhaled with pleasure and set it down and drank it over the course of an hour or two as she read or busied herself in the kitchen. Enjoying the first glass of wine was an alien idea to me, I who drained them within a quick grimace, alcohol tasting foul and acidic on top of the permanent hangover until the first two took effect.