by Megan Nolan
On my twenty-first birthday I had a party in our house. Lisa and her new girlfriend Hen baked me a cake in the kitchen. I heard their excitable fresh-romance conversation thrumming sweetly below as I got ready in my room, and they cooed as I descended the Ski Cabin’s spiral staircase in my sweeping red dress.
Lisa had done the thing that seemed as impossible as moderate drinking to me: she had remained single – actually single rather than single-and-dating – until she found someone right for her. She had barely kissed anyone in the time I had known her and I wondered privately how she wasn’t bored or lonely, but I knew too that this was the better way to live. You earned the eventual love story with your restraint.
So it happened for Lisa, she made her own life, one that was happy and fully formed. Then Hen arrived into it and that was that. They were in love and there was nothing torturous or humiliating about it. It was as they said it would be, and I knew that it could never happen that way for me because I couldn’t spend a day, much less a series of years, without looking around me for someone to feel things about.
I remember that a lot of people complimented the drama of my birthday dress, and invited me to twirl around so they could see it splay out around me in its red cloud, and that I felt beautiful and funny. I remember everyone leaving to go to a bar at some point, and that I had an altercation with a neighbour of ours after we trundled out and lingered on the pavement smoking and waiting for the others. I remember Lisa’s arm on mine as I was rude to the neighbour, defiant in my birthday glamour. Then I remember nothing at all until I awoke the next afternoon, inexplicably in Lisa’s bed rather than my own.
I climbed carefully down the stairs, depth perception shot, and saw Lisa cleaning up pizza boxes and cans overflowing with ash.
‘Agh, what happened last night?’ I said, trying to sound casual, a laugh in my voice, stomach tense with fright. ‘Why was I in your bed?’
‘You bled in yours last night and wandered out, so I put you in my bed after I cleaned up.’
She was tidying and wouldn’t look up and meet my eye.
‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry, Lisa. I must have taken out my tampon when I was drunk or something. Jesus, I’m really sorry.’
‘You were in there with Peter,’ she said, frowning at this having been the case and at her having to tell me so.
Peter was the on/off boyfriend of a good mutual friend of Lisa’s and mine, a sweet girl called Greta who was looked upon with patronising compassion by everyone who knew her for being unaware of Peter’s philandering.
I didn’t know what to say, so instead I laughed shrilly and said, again, ‘Oh my God!’, as though what she had said was just an ordinary embarrassment like spilling a drink. Then she did look up at me and what destroyed me was that, overriding her disdain for what I had done, there was such troubled concern. In that moment I knew that Lisa, and only Lisa, was able to see me as I really was. She alone could see the reservoirs of need that existed in me and would never stop spilling out, ruining all they touched, and she didn’t hate me for them, but felt sorry for me. This appalling and instant knowledge cut into me and I recoiled, turning from her and returning upstairs until I heard her leave the house.
It wasn’t long after the party that Lisa told me she was moving to Berlin with Hen. A part of me was relieved. I couldn’t stand to live with her any longer after the way she had looked at me that morning, but nor could I bear for her to drop me. I didn’t want her near me, because she was the only one able to see me for what I was, but I couldn’t lose her for the very same reason.
I made sure to spend the months before she left being a faithful and devoted friend. I was trying to say without words that I needed her, of all the things I needed, she was the only one that was good, and I would need her even more after she left me. She promised that she would not stop being my friend just because she was moving, and was mostly as good as her word.
9
Ciaran and I saw each other a few times a week after our first date. Most often I would finish a late shift in the restaurant and walk or get a taxi to go and stay in his apartment. He lived in a ground-floor flat near the jail in Kilmainham. He didn’t mind the hours I kept. He never slept well and would only ever pass out fitfully between 4 and 8 or so. I arrived still gently sweating and smelling of the kitchen. He ran me a bath and I lay in it for a while, listening to him hum and make us tea or hot chocolate and put some stale biscuits on a saucer.
He didn’t drink much and didn’t care at all about food. He had lost his sense of smell and most of his taste in a car accident in infancy, and never had anything but what he needed to fuel himself – great reserves of bland muesli, tins of chickpeas, white rice. After I drained the bath he passed me a T-shirt and old waffle fabric long johns of his, which were soft from age and filled with holes. Although I slept over frequently I never brought my own things to sleep in. I liked the feeling of his clothes close to my skin and smelling his Pears soap smell.
Then we would sit on his couch hugging and touching each other slowly, speaking quietly about our days. We were so kind those evenings. Laughing softly, indulgently, at the other’s little observations. We touched each other with such care and delicacy, as though afraid to break the new thing we were to one another.
When we had sex for the first time I felt out of my mind with happiness, with the obvious rightness of what was happening between us. Around his mouth there was some perfect smell that I could almost taste – I knew whatever made up that indefinable smell was also in the chemicals that drove our bodies together.
(A few weeks later in work, one of the chefs made a truffle-essence. He passed it to me, saying, ‘Smell that!’ I waved it under my nose and thought instantly, It’s Ciaran.)
We listened to records most evenings. He liked Bob Dylan and Hank Williams and so I did, too. Sometimes we would rent films and watch them in his bed. He was so big I could sit cradled in his lap without causing him discomfort. We watched schlocky 50s B-movies, which we both liked but he found especially hilarious. I was always curious to see what he would find funny or what would make him happy. He was so solemn.
In the beginning it seemed like the solemnity of a toddler learning their surroundings; an innocent or even admirable one, a necessary impulse caused by new information. Perhaps he was like this because of being new to Dublin, I thought. But as we came to know each other better I began to see the other side of this solemnity.
He was angry at a great many things, disgusted by more. He didn’t understand events which seemed completely normal, if not ideal, to me. When we took walks in Merrion Square or in Phoenix Park on Sundays, children on the street sometimes shouted insults after him because of his glasses or his shabby clothes. He grew incandescent with rage. ‘Why are they like this?’ he demanded of me, looking back over his shoulder as though wanting to start an argument with them. I would try to steer him on as gently as I could, sympathising and agreeing.
Our conversations in his apartment could veer into thirty-minute rants about a homeless person on the street who had offended him in some way, or an artist he had run into who was rude to him. He would eventually stand up, furiously rolling his cigarette, then pace around smoking as he recounted the perceived slight. His anger was always contained enough that it didn’t alarm me, and in fact there was something invigorating about him venting his grievances to me, something unifying and bonding.
I would offer comically exaggerated sympathy, tug at his tattered sleeve as he walked to and fro and pull him towards me on the couch. ‘Oh, poor baby,’ I’d crow, and cradle his head to my chest and cover his face in a flood of kisses until I succeeded in making him laugh.
10
At the end of May I asked Ciaran to come with me to a reading at a gallery some friends of mine were doing. He had met some of them before, in passing, or had known them slightly from openings. This was the first time we were arriving together to an event and behaving as a couple publicly. To my mind, we spent so much time to
gether already that we functionally were a couple, whether or not we were named as such.
Ciaran was tetchy and stony-faced from the beginning. He hadn’t wanted to come, but had already arranged to see me that evening, and had no good reason to cancel. As we stood around chatting to people, he said nothing, and gazed over our heads as though disturbed by some presence invisible to the rest of us.
I caught several people exchanging quick glances that seemed to note his strange behaviour. I had seen him be quiet in company before, but never completely rude. I was embarrassed, and talked louder and faster to compensate. I held his hand gently, and when the conversation arrived at a publication he sometimes worked for, I turned and directed a question to him. He nodded very slightly and continued to look away, dropping his hand out of mine and putting it in his pocket.
During the readings his face was fixed in an almost comically extreme expression of disdain. I kept my eyes forward and hoped nobody else would notice. Once it was over I took him by the sleeve and dragged him outside so we wouldn’t get trapped talking to anyone else.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, shaking me off.
‘Why are you being so rude?’
I hated myself for being near tears, but I was. I had been looking forward to going there with him, introducing him to people, being seen with my beautiful, interesting boyfriend.
‘That reading was shit.’
He shook his head, fumbling for tobacco in his bag. Glancing up at me, he saw that I was going to cry. He clocked the tears and caught my eye, jutting his jaw and pursing his mouth in an exaggerated gesture of disgust that I would come to know very well and hate completely.
‘Of course it was shit!’ I said. ‘It’s just a stupid reading. It’s what you do, you go to things your friends do to be supportive, and you pretend they’re good even if they’re not.’
‘These people aren’t my friends. Just because you and I sleep together, it doesn’t make them my friends.’
I didn’t know how to respond to this. ‘Sleeping together’ was the least generous reading of what had been going on between us and could only have been intended to hurt me. I lowered my head and let myself cry, aware of people I knew looking at me from the gallery porch and whispering to each other.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Did you want me to say I’m falling in love with you? Because I’m not.’
‘No,’ I said, and feeling that I had no more energy to do whatever we were doing, I turned and walked towards home.
11
It was the first time he had been cold in this way to me, although I had glimpsed his coldness before.
One evening in his kitchen we had been talking about the performance artist Chris Burden, who I knew of for having allowed himself to be shot in the shoulder for a film. Ciaran’s eyes lit up, and he said I ought to read about TV Hijack. He grabbed his phone and showed me a picture of a man standing behind a woman in a chair with his hand pressed to her throat. The backdrop was bright blue. She seemed to be struggling to escape the man’s grip.
Ciaran explained. This was one of Burden’s earlier works, born from his interest in television, more famously illustrated in his later work, TV Ads. The circumstances that led to Hijack were this: an art critic named Phyllis Lutjeans had asked Burden to do a piece on an arts and culture show she presented on local television. Several proposals Burden made were rejected by the station or Lutjeans, and he agreed instead to do an interview. He insisted that the interview be broadcast live.
When he arrived, Lutjeans began by asking him to talk about some of the actions he had proposed which were ultimately shut down. At this point, Burden stood behind her and held a knife to her throat. He threatened to kill her if the station stopped broadcasting. He then went on to detail what he had wanted to do, which was to force her to perform obscene acts live on air.
Lutjeans was unaware of Burden’s plans. Her alarm and humiliation were real.
I listened as Ciaran talked, and stared at the picture with growing unease.
‘She didn’t know?’ I asked. ‘He just pulled a knife on her?’
‘That’s beside the point,’ he said. ‘Anyway, she didn’t mind. She said so later.’
Reading about her afterwards, I found interviews in which she confirmed she was not complicit, was shocked and frightened, but defended the piece – it was simply Burden’s style.
I thought about this, about what the alternative was. I thought about Lutjeans being released from Burden’s grip and spinning to face him, searching his face, the second in which she had to decide whether to cry and scream at him, or to wink.
What would you choose? Either you can be famous for being a shrill prop in a great man’s work, a victim sacrificed to the gods of art, or you can nod along and applaud. You can have a seat at the big boys’ table for being such a good sport. So, go ahead: ha ha ha.
2019, Athens
Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once. Being a victim is boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through experiences which are instrumentalised constantly as narrative devices in soap operas and tabloids.
Is this why I am so ashamed of talking about certain events, or of finding them interesting? This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an interesting way.
If I want to say something about my hurt, I hear my voice enter the canon of Women Who’ve Been Hurt, becoming unknown, not-mine.
I can’t, and don’t much want, to make myself understood. Why should I make my experience particular, and what would be the point? Should I tell you about rape?
I was angry at having been made real in that way against my will. There is good reason for not living inside your body all the time, and this event trapped me back in it for a long while, until I could struggle back outside again.
The functionality of it depressed me, that I was so prosaic. My body was not glorious or miraculous or alive, it was just a thing of use. This did not sadden or surprise, so much as bore me: I looked at myself, lumpen and inelegant and abused, and thought: So what?
The act of unwanted sex was not what angered me most, but rather the tedious reminder that men can often do whatever they want and that some of them will. I know it is unfashionable to describe rape as sex (the implication being that rape is a violent, rather than a sexual act; can’t it be both? And sometimes more one than the other?) but it felt very much like sex to me. From a purely physical point of view it didn’t even feel very different to some of the worse consensual sex I had had, those times where I had realised immediately that I would rather not continue, but did so to be polite, feigning enjoyment to make it end quicker.
It would be easier if I could paint a line down the middle of the house, and have rape on one side and sex on the other. I have had sex without wanting to many times in my life. It was only once that I protested and was overpowered.
I feel no common understanding grow between myself and other women who have been hurt in the same ways that I have, no thread of sisterhood connecting our experiences. The inherent tenderness of the person (me) who is raped, their assumed softness, pliancy disgusts me – the femaleness of that disgusts me.
Am I ashamed of myself for this? Of course; somewhat; a little.
12
A few days after our fight at the reading, Ciaran called and asked to come over. Convinced he was going to break up with me, I sat up waiting for his knock. When he arrived he was wet-eyed and soft like I’d never seen him.
We sat side by side, not touching, for a long time. I was bursting to say I had been an idiot, that I wanted him to forget the whole evening, couldn’t we just go back to how we had been, whatever that was? Couldn’t we – please, please, please?
Before I could launch into this he began to speak. As always when he spoke about anything personal he seemed physically strained and c
ould not look up, but he struggled through what he had prepared.
He was sorry.
He needed me to understand that what had happened between him and Freja, his ex, had scarred him. She had been unfaithful to him, not just with one man, but with many men, not in isolated instances but constantly throughout their long relationship. She had been the first woman he loved, and when he found out about her betrayals they had entered into a long period of vicious arguments, followed by tearful reunions, late-night screaming followed by going out and drinking and vengefully fucking strangers.
They had been bound up in each other so inextricably he didn’t think they could ever get away from each other. It was only when his father became ill and he decided to move to Ireland that he realised they had a chance to make a clean break.
‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘the best times of my life were with Freja. She is not a bad person.’
I narrowed my eyes.
‘She did terrible things,’ he said, ‘but they were really because she was unhappy. It hurt her that she did them to me. I hate her, but I also love her. Can you understand?’
My mind was working double-time to selectively absorb and reject the various things he was telling me. He was sorry: good. He was opening up about his past: good. He loved her: bad.
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to be mature.
‘It hurt me so much that, since then, I haven’t wanted to be close to anyone. I was exhausted. I don’t want to be hurt any more, or hurt anyone else. But I want to try. I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said, and in that moment I remember thinking, clear as a bell, that I could never hurt him. I remember the fierceness in my chest. I promised myself I would make him trust me. I would rebuild what she had taken away from him.
He pressed his burning forehead to mine and we closed our eyes and were together.