by Megan Nolan
November 2012
1
I separated my life with Ciaran from my life with my friends. I would still bring him to things occasionally, but only big public events which would not require us to stay too long or to talk to people. Although he was rarely again so rude as he had been at the reading where we had our first argument, he was not good at faking enjoyment.
Eventually it seemed easiest to let him do what pleased him, and see my friends on my own time. That he and they disliked each other was sometimes inconvenient, but no more than that. I preferred to be with Ciaran on my own anyway.
He was sullen and angry less frequently now. When he complained, he did so with some self-deprecation and conceded that he was behaving like a cantankerous old man. It had become cold and he wore a battered old pea coat and fingerless gloves and a thin ineffectual tartan scarf. I don’t remember a single argument in that part of the year. I was moving through our relationship with concentrated determination. With every week that passed, I felt safer and more at ease with him; the passing time legitimised the relationship and I was especially happy every time a new month began.
We met in April, I thought, and now it’s November. We had passed two whole seasons together and were making good headway on the next.
2
It was two a.m. one weekend evening. We had just finished having sex and I had gone to his kitchen to get us some water, and as I settled back into bed he asked, ‘How many people have you slept with?’
‘Why?’ I replied, keeping my voice neutral and low.
‘I was talking about it with someone at work recently and it became an interesting conversation. I just wondered.’
I thought of Freja cheating on him with multiple men. I did some quick calculations: how many boyfriends I had mentioned to him, who else I might have alluded to, what was a reasonable lie.
‘Nine,’ I said.
‘You see?’ he said, very quickly, sitting up and turning to me like he was expecting it. ‘I’ve slept with nine people too, and you’re years younger than me. Everyone I know has slept with more people than me. What is it with people? Do they just do it with anyone?’
I didn’t know how many people I’d slept with. It was probably something like thirty then, maybe more. I had lost substantial chunks of time to drink when I first left home, couldn’t and didn’t want to remember exactly what had happened.
It wasn’t the lie that disturbed me, but how quickly I knew how to do it.
3
During this time I drank less, and only seriously with my friends. Ciaran was grossed out by drunk people and said that he didn’t like to do it much himself, but on weekends sometimes we’d stand outside The Stag’s Head and he would get tipsy after two or three pints.
I loved him to be drunk. I loved us drunk together. He was not a good drunk in the sense that I was, tipping along more or less the same as ever – he was a great drunk. His seriousness evaporated, and he was excitable and funny. His eyes glazed over with bleary fondness and he was as sloppily affectionate as a kid, grabbing me and whirling me round and dipping me and covering me with kisses. He was happy, which he never was for very long when sober. Of course, it was a false happiness, but when it was so easily and frequently accessed who could blame me for believing in it?
On a Saturday night we might, at my demand, have White Russians and watch horror films and listen to records until dawn. That was even better – when it was just us he would sometimes let go, drink until he was really drunk, and we would dance around the living room, laughing and laughing.
I pinned him down on the couch and tickled him and pressed my mouth to that amazing place between belly button and belt buckle and he would shriek and squirm. We fell together on to the ground, tactile and giddy. We fucked there on the ratty old carpet on nights like these, flushed and breathless from our wrestling. In the morning I would get a fright from some violent inflamed bruises on my knees or back and then realise with a smile it was from this.
It was the beginning of one such evening that the incident about his poems for Freja took place.
We were drinking at a bar near his place, a sort of fauxdive with neon lettering and sawdust on the floor. We were sitting at the bar on swivel stools, facing in towards each other, hands on the other’s legs, or idling at the neck, or brushing the lips, always touching somewhere.
We were talking about Ciaran’s writing. He was now in a comfortable enough position he could take an extra day off a week to focus on his own creative work. He had never allowed me to read anything he had written except reviews and academic writing, most of which was meaningless to me. He was talking about a series of poems he had started on. I was nodding along, feeling proud and supportive, when something slipped through the veil of drunkenness.
‘… and that chapter will include the poems I’ve been writing about Freja…’
Freja’s name had rarely come up since our conversation about her six months previously. This had been fine with me. I was so determined and sure that things were going to be perfect between Ciaran and me that I didn’t have room for her.
‘What poems?’ I asked, heart pounding.
‘I must have mentioned it before,’ he said, taking a slug of his beer. ‘No? I’ve been writing a series about her and our relationship, especially the early part when we lived in Oslo together.’
I nodded slowly, taking this in, sized it up as quick as I could.
Don’t make a big deal of this, I told myself. I was pragmatic, entering panic mode already, trying to recover my composure.
(What could people be expected to tolerate of me? How much of what I needed could I reasonably demand?)
(Nothing, nothing, nothing.)
I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the sink and wept bitterly, immediately, without thought. I knew it was childish, behaving this way, but it was painful to be reminded so casually that everything I cared about was subject to the whims of others.
I walked back out and sat on the stool, touched his face, squeezed his knee, smiled as best I could. He looked bashful, but was grinning dopily too. I thought to myself, with the smallest hint of distaste, that he wouldn’t have told me if he wasn’t drunk. For all his performative distaste towards sloppy drunks, he could be one too.
‘You’re not upset, are you?’
‘No, of course not. Just surprised.’
‘Good, good.’ He was still smiling that vague, idiotic smile, not really looking at me directly.
‘Because I think, actually, they’re quite good. Freja was impressed.’
My face crumpled involuntarily, as it had privately at the sink a few moments before.
‘You sent them to her? You sent Freja poems you wrote for her?’
‘To get her opinion, yes. And I thought she’d like to see them. We’re just friends, you know.’
I stared at him, disbelieving, overcome. I didn’t cry really, only there was some physical breakdown, which I could feel and which must have been visible.
I hadn’t known until that moment how delicately I had been keeping everything inside me together those last few months. My body felt as though it had been holding its breath for a very long time and had just realised it couldn’t do so for ever.
What I was feeling was the failure of superstition and charms – the unreliability of prayer.
4
When I was a child and my cat was hit by a speeding car that didn’t stop, he lay out in the shed that night waiting to be buried.
I crept out into the damp mossy darkness after everyone was asleep and drew back the blanket he was beneath. I put my hand on his familiar ginger stomach but of course it was wrong in every conceivable way: freezing where it should have been warm, stiff as new cardboard where it should have been soft.
Feeling this wrongness I knew it was true at last, and couldn’t believe it. I kept on stroking and stroking him, making deals with God. Thinking, If I stand here all night; thinking maybe if I stroked the awful, dead-thi
ng stomach one thousand times exactly, thinking, Please, please, God, send him back to me, give him back to me, I won’t stop asking.
5
I had been living in a constant bargain with Ciaran for months. Every day that passed in which I was easy to be with, and accommodating, and a good girlfriend, was a ritual offered up. My body expected the perseverance to mean something. And suddenly it was clear that my intentions were meaningless, and I could no more magic him into loving me than I could an animal back to life.
When I looked back at him from my collapse, he had hardened.
‘For God’s sake. Don’t be a child.’
There was a scrape as he pushed his stool back and moved past me.
‘Wait,’ my mouth was saying instinctively.
I wish I could step inside this memory and steady myself, put a cool reassuring hand on my own and convince myself to wait. Have another drink, calm down, go home. But my body was moving without thought, scurrying under the bar to gather my belongings, running outside on to the tram tracks, peering in both directions. I saw him walking quickly down past the National Museum. He was moving steadily, betraying no sign of the drunkenness from a moment before. I ran after him, feebly calling wait, wait, and grasped for his shoulder when I caught up to him.
He shook me off so violently that I stumbled backwards, and then I was crying and saying please over and over again.
Ciaran found crying repulsive. Whatever distaste he already felt for me during arguments, the sight of tears sharpened it. His eyes would narrow and lose any residual warmth or compassion. He would turn away from me, refuse to witness.
Was he right to be disgusted? Was it all a show, a ploy to get sympathy? I can only say if it was one, it was both unconscious and misguided. It never succeeded in eliciting any good or compassionate feeling, and yet I kept doing it. I never wanted to. It seemed as impossible to restrain as vomit, and its ability to repel him only made me do it harder.
It was, I think, that loss of control he hated above all. To see an adult really cry is a perverse experience. The wailing adult is both childlike and pathetically defeated in a way that is alien to childhood (cursed by the breadth of their experience, lacking the single-minded purity of a child’s grief).
Some part of me had already decided to live for him and let him take over the great weight of myself. I was also so frightened of him and what he did to me that I could never admit this decision, inwardly or to him.
And so in moments like this one when I was unexpectedly confronted by my own need, my reaction was to deny – to hysterically deny – that it existed. Hence the wailing of sorrys and pleases, the desire to make him forget at once I had ever demanded anything of him.
In these moments – for this was only the first of what amounted eventually to hundreds, whole months, years, of prostrating – I pleaded with him to see how small I really was.
I said through my huddling and hiding that I was nothing, and I was happy to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best. If nothing was the least trouble, then I would be it, and gladly. I would be completely blank and still if that was what worked, or as loud as he needed me to be to take up his silences. I would be energetic and lively if he was bored, and when he tired of that, I would become as prosaic and dully useful as cutlery.
I didn’t ask love of him. I didn’t want him to look in my direction and see me; for there was no thing I could say, with confidence, was me. I panicked when my need shone through because it was real.
The need was a true and human part of me, but I could feel nothing else of myself to be true or human, and so the need seemed ungodly, an aberration.
He walked home and did not actively discourage me from following him. He ignored me, which I could tolerate, in that moment even enjoyed, the better to demonstrate how quiet and good I could be. When we reached his house he stopped outside and turned to me.
‘You can come in, and you can stay, but I do not want to talk about this tonight or ever again. Freja and I are adults. We’re older than you. We have a complicated relationship, but it has nothing to do with you and it does not affect you. Understand?’
I nodded eagerly. I didn’t speak again that evening, brushing my teeth and undressing in silence. I allowed him to turn away from me in the bed, as I knew he would, without protest.
I woke at dawn. Outside, the sky was a bright and sterile grey. Christmas wasn’t long away.
I looked down at Ciaran, frowning in his sleep. He seemed so young when he slept, his skinniness more apparent in the tight old T-shirt he wore. The damp heat he radiated was that of a child sweating out a fever. It is still especially easy for me to love him when I think of him this way. He seemed somehow pre-historic, still-becoming, an animal not yet ready to exist, with whom there is no point in being disappointed.
I crawled out of bed carefully, my stomach a pit of nausea and dread. I walked out into the front room and stared out the window, stretching and reaching towards the ceiling.
I glanced around and thought about eating some muesli when I saw Ciaran’s phone lying on the table. The sums were done in seconds. He was in the deeper part of his sleep; I would hear him getting up; his phone didn’t have a lock key.
I knew I was entering new territory from which I couldn’t return. I was invading him and his privacy, just as I had tried so hard to imply that I wouldn’t with my submission.
I opened his email account. Almost all of the emails were to and from Freja. I scrolled down. They had spoken nearly every day for months, the entire time I had known him.
I opened the most recent one she had sent, shortly before I had met him in the bar the day before. I skimmed it quickly, not daring to take enough time to read it all. It was long, a few thousand words. The first few paragraphs were a critical response to the poems he had sent, and then she began to talk about me.
‘… Now, having read your poems, it’s my turn to impose on you. I try to talk to you about us and you stop me by mentioning her. We both know you use her to get at me and make me jealous. There is no need. You’ve succeeded. I am jealous. I’m miserable. I’m angry. I think about the two of you all the time, idle away hours in the office finding pictures of her online, trying to imagine what you see in her.
‘She’s cute I can see, but a little chubby for you, no? You used to like that I was long and thin, not at all like her. Is that it? That she is so unlike me? Am I so terrible that you are cursed to seek my opposite? Doesn’t it feel strange to be in bed with her and not me, after all these years?
‘Do people ever tell you and her that you make a beautiful couple, like they used to with us? We looked right together because we are right together. Do you remember the first night in the new house in Oslo after we moved everything in and unpacked? Once we were done we sat on the porch drinking whiskies and looking around us at our new home, and an old lady walked past and stopped. She looked at us and said, “Aren’t you two the most beautiful couple I’ve ever seen,” and we laughed and she said, “Be good to one another” as she walked off. She could see how in love we were even at that distance, because everyone could.
‘When we met, we were both lost and hopeless. That’s part of why we love each other. I saw it in you from the beginning. There was a broken part in us both that only the other could mend, that’s why we had to be together. I woke up every day back then with you staring down at me, stroking my hair, as though you couldn’t believe I was real. You can’t take back or deny what exists between us.
‘Remember those days we would walk for hours in Nordmarka until we could barely take another step, then go home and take a bath together. You read your poems to me or we talked about what I was reading in school, and we dried each other off and fell asleep on the couch in front of the fire.
‘Do you expect me to believe you have what we had with her? I know you. I know what’s inside of you, and how little you can show it to people.
‘If only you would give us another chance, I could prove it to you. Bes
ides, what I did was only ever sex. It meant nothing. I never did what you are doing now. I never played house with anyone else, went on dates or any of that shit.
‘You left here because of your father, but he’s fine now. You say yourself you never see him. Come back to me. Or I’ll come there – I don’t care. I would go anywhere.
‘I don’t exist without you. When I come home after work I put on your old sweater and put it to my face, trying to gather any remaining scent. I think about kissing your collarbone, your ribs, your eyelids. I close my eyes and imagine the feeling of you coming back to me, of us disappearing together.
‘You know me, Ciaran. I don’t have boyfriends. Before you there were only people I had slept with. I’ve never loved anyone but you, and I have loved you for so long now. Seven years. This isn’t like other relationships. I’m not going to get over it and move on to the next one. It’s only you.
‘It will only ever be you.’
Crazy bitch, crazy bitch, I thought. Horrified jealousy was pulsing through my body like poison. Crazy bitch, crazy bitch.
I was sickened by her over-familiarity, her wheedling self-pity, the linguistic melodrama, but mostly by the smug portrayal of what they’d been like as a couple. Reading poems in the bath, chuckling about what a beautiful pair they were, some mutual understanding that they were more troubled than anyone else.
I heard a rustling in the bedroom and quickly exited his email and shut the phone back off. I ran the tap and filled a glass with water and went back to the bedroom. I slid in beside Ciaran, my chin on his shoulder, hugging him from behind. He cast his arm backwards and held me to him.
2019, Athens
Being in love feels like nothing so much as hope; a distilled, clear hope which would be impossible to manufacture on your own.
One of the saddest things to feel is that nothing in the world is new, that you have exhausted all your interactions with it. When I feel that way I wake each day into the already-dusky afternoon with deep regret that nothing has happened overnight to change me. I wake so late because although I can’t stand to be conscious, I can’t stand to try to sleep either. To lie down in the dark and think, for even a moment, seems an unspeakable prospect, so I drink until I pass out, or stare at the television until my eyes physically can’t stay open any longer.