by Megan Nolan
If I try to travel my way out of this feeling, cities blur into one another. I waste money feeling bad in a piazza by myself, twelve-euro bland pasta, too much wine, some dull man always trying to speak with me.
When I go home to Waterford to try to even out and reconnect with myself and my past, people seem to be dying all the time all around me, and I argue with my parents about my reluctance to engage with them. I don’t want to hear about the illnesses and tragedies, and am amazed by their ability to keep attending funeral after funeral. It feels as though all I can do each day is eat and sleep and trudge through the hours and start again – and, in fact, it is all I can do. Anti-depressants come and go, making little difference either way to the fact that my reaction to all of life, all of God’s green earth, all of mankind, is often: So?
And then, whenever I fall in love, everything is made new, including myself. My body, my brain, the way I see the simplest things. And the best part is it doesn’t even have to be the first time to work. If I fuck it up once, the next time works just as well.
Looking out windows on public transport becomes unbearably stimulating, fields of rapeseed bringing tears to my eyes, the jagged coastline taking my breath away. My mind, which had seemed so stagnant and grey, feels suddenly like a baby’s, absorbent and crackling with new information. The new person not only makes a depressing and boring life feel interesting, but makes it into an entirely different kind of life. Afternoons, which I might otherwise spend cowering alone in bed hiding from errant sunlight coming through the curtain, I now might spend feeding ducks and reading poetry by the canal. A transformation which is the nearest to actual magic I have ever come.
When you fall in love with someone and your life is remade, you know instinctively that you must take great care of this delicate new world the two of you are building. There is infrastructure to be dealt with, dams and bridges and town halls to be planned. The high-stakes precarity of what you are doing will frequently bring tears to your eyes, both from fright and from exquisite pleasure. One wrong move and the whole thing could collapse before you have even finished construction. Couples will often disappear together for months in their beginning stages, which is not just about lust but also about building.
6
When Ciaran and I went to the cinema in our first few weeks I remember wishing I could watch a film of him, even while he sat there beside me holding my hand. I remember wanting a screen so big that I could see nothing outside of it. I wanted to be totally saturated by him, for there to be no room for anything else to leak in. I knew I was about to begin the most difficult and important building of my life. I felt on the cusp of a grand project, my best work yet. I would build a great sturdy red barn which could stand for centuries. I would build a magnificent golden cathedral. I would build the eighth wonder of the world.
When I read Freja’s email to him, my mind could not understand it in terms of my project, and so I couldn’t fully absorb it. The idea of our newly built world not continuing to exist was literally inconceivable to me. It was easy to deny because trouble receded when I could be with him physically, all potential intrusions rendered laughably unreal.
I had sex with him that dawn and was totally free of disquiet. To feel his long, strong fingers wrapped lightly around my throat. The smell around his mouth, the sweetness, hovering over mine. I arched my back up to get closer, tried to inhale that breath. I raised my hand to his jaw and held it still so that he was looking right into my eyes as he moved, and doing that made each individual second sacred.
Just as, in my younger days, my partying had seemed somehow important – seemed somehow to be getting at something bigger than other people were able to get at by doing the same thing – sex with Ciaran seemed important. It seemed each time to be driving towards a conclusion, and the conclusion would teach us something profound, if we ever arrived to it.
7
Things were good between us for the next few weeks, better than before, as though something foul had been released. I thought about the email, but with disgusted anger towards her only, nothing towards him.
I was shocked by the totality of the world she had described in her letter. The particular intimacy of her tone in addressing him, the details I would never have had cause to know if I hadn’t read it.
I tried to imagine the sweater of his she had kept, the porch they sat on, what view they had from it. It was disturbing, as it always was to be made aware that people with their own internal lives and individual perspectives existed all around you.
The idea of her having a long-held perception of who Ciaran was, which predated mine by years, was awful, but its otherness was also erotic. For the first time I googled her, to see what she looked like. At night sometimes when I couldn’t sleep my mind would force me to imagine them fucking.
Ciaran was gentler with me than before, and sweeter. He bought me little things and surprised me with flowers and took me out for dinner.
These things seemed especially significant to me since he was mean with money. He didn’t make a lot, but nor did I, nor did anyone I knew. If I didn’t have change on me to get a coffee he would pay for it but would always, always ask for it back. I found this bizarre and uncomfortable.
It wasn’t just with me. I’d seen him claim back drinks owed to him by friends who had no idea what he was talking about. When they’d turn their heads quizzically he’d recite the exact scene:
‘Don’t you remember, Harry, it was in the Duke after the second-to-last IMMA party? It was the week before your payday so I got you a beer.’
And everyone would laugh and roll their eyes about his stinginess. I found it harder to laugh, found it more genuinely embarrassing, because I was his girlfriend. I feared vaguely that this meanness implied other things to people, that they were embarrassed on my behalf.
Once, after a bunch of us had gone to dinner in a sushi place after an opening on Talbot Street, he had almost pushed a girl to tears. She was an intern at a gallery in town, new to Dublin, just moved over from Krakow and she clearly had a huge crush on Ciaran. She was younger than me, nineteen or so, with a lot of clean shiny hair and big solicitous eyes. She stared at him all night.
This happened all the time. Usually I didn’t mind much because he never noticed. It was a strange experience for me to be going out with someone so objectively attractive. In public, I was split between taking childish pleasure in it and feeling terrified that people looked at us and were puzzled by the discrepancy.
At the end of the dinner, Ciaran was settling up the bill and telling everyone what they owed. The intern was a few euro short.
‘It’s fifteen,’ he kept repeating. ‘That’s what you spent, with the beer.’
‘I’m sorry, I… I…’
He laughed, as though in disbelief. ‘I just don’t understand why you would order fifteen euros’ worth of food and beer if you don’t have it.’
Our end of the table had turned to look.
‘Here, I’ve got it,’ said her boss at the gallery, leaning across to toss a note in and giving Ciaran a funny glance.
He took me out on the last night I was in town before Christmas. We went to a French restaurant and ate rare steak and drank expensive red wine. He was nice to the waiter and ordered for us both in a way that made me feel small and contained and happy. We talked about bad shows we had seen and laughed about the artists and their ladder-climbing desperation, their sad trucker caps and hip tracksuits they were too old to pull off.
His lips were a little stained from the wine and he seemed incredibly sexy to me as we spoke, completely open and alive, none of his usual reserve or irritation interrupted us. When we were leaving, I pushed my chair back from the table and he stepped behind to help me put on my coat and dipped down to kiss me. I thought of everyone in the restaurant seeing us like this, as we truly were, as we would be from now on – two young, interesting, beautiful people at the beginning of life together. I glanced around as we left, at the other couples –
and I was right, people really were looking.
A pair of older women smiled indulgently at us as we passed them. The female half of an expensively dressed and meticulously groomed couple stared at us with an expression I couldn’t identify. I was flushed, head swimming with pride. We were something real, whatever problems we had were unimportant, were only a consequence of how intense it was to really live.
He walked me down to Eden Quay, and we stood in the shadow of the bank buildings which lined that side of the river. He held my hands in his and kissed my ears and blew warm breath on them. As the bus pulled up, he took a small, pale blue box out of his bag and handed it to me.
‘There’s your present,’ he said, and bent down, rubbing the side of his soft cheek against mine like a cat, kissing my forehead. ‘I love you.’
A profound calm swept over my body, affirmation that I was not crazy. We looked at one another, kissed again, laughed at our serious faces, and hugged a last time.
I climbed on to the bus and found a seat as far as possible from anyone else. I wanted to be alone and catalogue all the feelings I was experiencing, examine them one by one. I couldn’t help myself from opening the box. Inside was a folded-over scrap of paper on which he had written:
Happy Christmas. You are a beautiful woman and I love you.
Beneath the note was a delicate antique amber brooch. I held the stone in my hand and squeezed my eyes shut. It seemed to radiate heat, to throb, like a living thing. I was still holding it when we reached Waterford three hours later and the approaching lights of my home city made me cry as they did every time I arrived upon them.
2019, Athens
I was sitting in a café last week, reading my book and drinking a coffee before catching a train. It was a clear evening, the sun had just set, when an enormous electrical storm descended without warning. The waiters moved us all further inside the patio under a larger awning to avoid being splashed. Me, a businesswoman in her fifties and a couple of indifferent old men sat there looking out at it. The businesswoman was wearing a lot of very red lipstick and kept raising her hand to her mouth in fright when the lightning appeared. I was watching her and it with half-interest when a young couple with a baby in a pram ran in.
They were very beautiful and very wet and they were laughing. The woman was doubled up, clutching her stomach, howling with it, and her husband put his hand on her shoulder and rubbed her back affectionately. They looked around at the rest of us, with these big incredulous smiles on their faces. Look, their smiles seemed to say, at the rain! Look how wet we have become! Even after they had settled at a table and lifted their baby on to their laps, they kept breaking down into shuddering laughter every few moments.
I felt so lonely when I looked at them, remembering (but not quite clearly; through a veil) what they were experiencing; that part of being in love that makes inane experiences valuable. Laughing at getting rained on instead of it just being a minor pain on your way somewhere else. And even after, when they were just sitting eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, their contentment was amazing to see. I had forgotten that love has the power to do that. I envied them, felt glad for them, and frightened for myself. Having a sandwich and a cup of coffee in the rain was nothing I could render magical by myself.
It reminded me of when Ciaran would wake me in the mornings sometimes and ask what we should do that day. I would say, ‘Mm, I don’t know, we could see a film in the evening, or go to a gallery.’ And he would say, ‘Or, let’s just get apples and walk around.’
And this became a thing we did together, a thing I would get excited to get out of bed to do. We would walk into town and go to the fancy supermarket café on George’s Street and drink a couple of glasses of their tap water by the counter as the waiter looked on annoyed. Then we would buy (or sometimes shoplift if we were after an illicit thrill) two apples. We’d spend a few minutes picking them out, comparing them, weighing up size relative to flavour. Then we’d leave and for four or five hours we would walk around the city, just talking to each other and seeing what was going on. We certainly could stop into a gallery, or a charity shop, or to get a coffee somewhere along the way, but it wasn’t the point.
Getting apples and walking around was the point, just that, that was the whole point. That was more than enough.
Christmas 2012
Waterford
1
When the bus pulled in it was almost three a.m. and I was a few miles from my mother’s house.
She had lived in the suburb, Ballinakill Downs, since she and my father separated when I was small. Her second husband, Stíofán, moved in eight years later as I was turning fourteen. Mam’s name was Keelin until she met Stíofán, who was a school teacher and gaelgóir, and then she abandoned the anglicised version for the properly Irish ‘Caoilfhaoinn’, and snapped at you if you pronounced it the old way.
An objective outsider would think Mam had been the winner in the contest of their divorce, her tall rugged new husband, the kayaking trips and weekends away, but privately I thought that Dad was the happier of the two. I worried over his loneliness, but he was an easily pleased man, in need of not much more than a degree of casual company, reading material, and a bit of land. All of these he had in his small village a few miles outside the city, where he worked in their hokey library and drank with the same three pals a few times a week.
Mam seemed always to be anticipating disaster in a way that seemed unnatural and pointless for a person in their later life, and still anxiously dieted with the vehemence and optimism of a teenager.
‘How’s Stephen?’ my dad would ask her whenever she dropped me off to his house, where I spent most of my weekends, throwing me a wink.
‘It’s Stíofán, as you well know, Tomás,’ she’d say back to Dad, who had only ever been called Thomas.
Usually when I came home from Dublin at that hour I would have called a taxi, too lazy and afraid to walk to Ballinakill, but now I could think of nothing more wonderful. I listened to music that reminded me of him on my way, and felt a quiet dreaminess I hadn’t since I was a teenager. When I got home I let myself in and Mam was sleeping on the couch with a crime drama on TV.
‘Hi, child,’ she said, one eye opening.
‘Hi, mother,’ I replied, going over to squeeze her hand hello, before going up to bed.
I slept for twelve hours straight, as I often did when I first came home, as though recovering from having to be alive on my own all year round. When I woke, although it was only 19 December, my bedroom had the feeling of Christmas already. I reached down for my bag and took out the amber brooch and held it in my hand, feeling it warm.
That day and the next I sat in our living room and read fat silly novels of the sort I didn’t allow myself normally, helped to wrap presents, cooked. I drank wine with my mother and gossiped about people we knew and watched bad television. On the night of the 21st, I called Ciaran, not having heard from him since I left. I wasn’t alarmed – he was useless with his phone and rarely had credit unless I bought it for him. After three tries, he hadn’t answered. I was tipsy and eager to talk with him, but didn’t think much of it. I topped up his phone online and sent him a message saying to call me when he was free and that I missed and loved him. It felt cheering to write it down.
On the 23rd I went for drinks with two old friends of mine. On my walk to meet them I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window and had to stop and steady myself against a post. I was so disgusting. I was so big. When I got to the pub, people would talk about it, would stare and whisper about how much bigger and uglier I was than when I was younger.
I felt my stomach against the elastic of my underwear, spilling over it, both me and monstrously not-me. That I wasn’t thin was not the only thing about me, a fact which seemed obvious everywhere else in the world. But when I returned to Waterford it seemed again my defining trait, my characteristic failure. Every time I came back it was a reminder that, at least there, at least home, at least where it counted, I
would always be wrong. I would always look like a misshapen version of my True Self, a hastily sketched approximation of a human being.
2019, Athens
I’ve never understood how people can love their bodies, nor really understood how they can hate them either. I’ve always seen my body as nothing so much as deeply disturbing in its constant variance, a fluctuating, unmanageable thing that has basically nothing to do with me, is not really any of my business at all.
How am I supposed to accept or like or hate or be neutral about a thing that will not stay the same? How can I maintain consistent feelings towards a changing thing like that? Should I concede instead that I can’t, that it’s necessary instead to cleave my body – in all its hideous wilful growth and recession and blooming and withering – from myself, from me?
I am told this is impossible. I am told this most often by men. They have studied philosophers I haven’t, but the things they say in dressed-up terms are just like the florid self-help slogans by women they think are stupid. The things they say are: You are your body. There is no divide. When it changes, that’s you changing. You are not just a witness to your body’s vagaries, you are the architect.
People are scared of teenagers having sex but we might think sometimes about the misery of having a teenage body, a teenage girl’s body especially, how tedious and painful and punitive, and remember that sex might be the first time she realises that bodies can be made to feel good. That the million sensitive places which cause you to feel pain can also be sensitive to pleasure. That when you want to cry it will not always be from sadness.