Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

  My body disgusted me when I was that age, but at the same time I was learning to love it – love it too much. I hated it but also worshipped it with an obscene devotion, because I knew what it was capable of inciting in myself and in others. In the mirror, I wanted to cry out with distress one moment, wanted to break the glass and cut great chunks of it away. The next I was on my knees staring in dizzy adoration, grazing my hands over the gentle shelving of my ribs, looking down at it from the same angle a boy would. I was on my back in bed with a camera, I was reflecting on how lucky anyone would be to see a sight like this.

  There is no truce to be made with my body; if I make one, I know it will only be negated by a new enemy in time. What is the point?

  When I go back home I am angrier than ever. I am all at once submerged in every body I ever was, all the failed attempts at being a certain kind of person. My old scales are there, my old photographs, the skin across my face taut with hunger, my eyes bright and wild with it, very beautiful, nobody could deny.

  And at home there is my mother. Around her I am ever more nauseated by myself. There are the usual itemised wrongs in my head, the ones I might trot out to a therapist, throwaway comments she made when I was at formative ages. She was always somewhat mad about her own body, but especially when she was young and single and probably driven to distraction with a whiny child and little idea of what the rest of her life might look like, if it would be any good.

  She said these things without any meanness or vitriol, said them in the same chipper conversational way she said most everything, but of course I remember them. So unfair – I’m sure I don’t remember hundreds, thousands of other things she said, telling me I was fine as I was. It seems likely. But nevertheless, I don’t remember them, they don’t exist for me.

  Instead, what exists are the moments like this one: I was eleven and the usual routine was for my mother to collect me after school, and on the drive home we would stop and get me a snack from the shop, a packet of crisps or a cereal bar. This particular afternoon I had decided I was going to become skinny and virtuous like the healthy trim little girls in my class who ate rice cakes and whose socks did not strain against their calves in the least.

  ‘What do you want to eat?’ my mother asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I’m just going to have chewing gum after school from now on.’

  ‘Good girl,’ she said, and I remember feeling a sad, deep worry that she had been hating me all along for the eating I was doing before, that she had been waiting for me to give it up.

  When I come home now, still, I am self-conscious and defensive before her. I hate that she can see what weight I have gained. I hate to listen to what she is or isn’t eating any more, what she is doing at the gym. I hate that hearing those things feels like a dare to me, or an invitation to raise the stakes. I hate that I have never found an appropriate response, that all I can do is defensively eat nothing, in a rage, or eat everything, showing her that I am past that, I have transcended her petty concerns, I am mind, not body, I am better than her. I stop wearing the kinds of clothes I wear in my normal life, fun and pretty ones, and recede into sullen, voluminous sweatshirts.

  Even if my mother had never uttered a word about her body or mine, I think I would still feel this way when I come home, the same claustrophobic fury under that shared roof, the two of us so close together. I came from her, she made this body-thing I hate and love so much. I resent her for producing it; I’m mortified I have made such poor use of it. How dare you? I want to scream at her, on the one hand; I love you so much! I’m sorry, on the other.

  2

  By the morning of the 24th, Ciaran still hadn’t called and I was veering into dread. I tried to comfort myself – maybe he had lost his phone. Then why was it still on? Maybe he was just busy. Too busy to send a text in four days? We hadn’t spent so long without talking in months. I began to genuinely worry – he didn’t have close friends who would be checking in on him, he wasn’t due to see anyone until Christmas Day. He refused to spend any of the holiday with his father in Wicklow, claiming that the usual mutual grumpiness which existed between them soured into outright aggression whenever he had tried to, that there were resentments from childhood Christmases which would not stop resurfacing no matter how much time passed. Instead, he had dinner with friends on the day itself and visited his father in January, when the worst of the feeling had passed.

  Maybe he had had an accident? He could have fallen while cycling, or just slipped coming out of the shower and hit his head, or – or anything.

  A few hours before I was to meet my dad for a walk, I called Ciaran’s office. I knew he wouldn’t be there: his holidays began the day before. His boss Michael, who I knew socially from openings, answered the phone.

  ‘Hi, Michael,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘Sorry to bother you – I’m just wondering if Ciaran was in yesterday.

  I’ve broken my phone and I don’t know his number off so I haven’t been able to get hold of him.’

  ‘Happy Christmas! Lucky you, you’ve been down the country all week, haven’t you? I’m nearly finished now but I’m the only one left here who can do layout for January so… anyway! Yeah, Ciaran, he was here until lunchtime or so, I told him to go home then. He was fidgeting so much all he was doing was annoying me, ha. I’ve got his mobile here somewhere; I can give it to you if that’s any use?’

  ‘Ah!’ I heard myself say with a forced laugh. ‘That would be great.’

  He read out the number, and I repeated it back as though

  I was writing it down, as though I didn’t already know.

  I called him constantly for the rest of the morning, knowing there would be no answer, but unable to stop myself. The frenzied certainty that a terrible thing had taken place was stronger now, but no longer was the terrible thing a cracked skull or a blocked windpipe. The terrible thing was a mystery now. I could focus only on the immediate. I needed with every part of my body for him to pick up the phone. That was the only thing I could think of; the sound of his voice saying hello. Everything after that would be dealt with.

  My dad picked me up at lunchtime and we went for coffee and a walk. I struggled to appear relaxed and happy. I answered his questions about Ciaran as brightly and truthfully as possible. Because of our closeness he knew I was lying about something, and having ascertained I wouldn’t be telling him what it was, became brisk with worry and frustration.

  I wished I could unburden myself but I couldn’t verbalise what was happening because doing so would bring it into existence. So far, it was all taking place in my head with no verification from an outside party, and so long as I kept it that way I could suppress it. That urge you have with an envelope of results, delaying the future in which you are unwillingly privy to terrible news.

  I knew also that if I began to describe more or less anything about Ciaran and what our relationship was like I would upset my dad. The split in me was so wide that these two states could coexist:

  1. I knew that my relationship was strange and uneven and not reciprocal and that speaking about its reality would confuse and upset people who loved me.

  2. I didn’t feel it to be those things.

  That is, I could understand that a truthful account of it, according to actual events, would sound disturbing, but I did not feel disturbed by it. It was only that other people would be incapable of understanding the way in which objective reality did not account for its essential truth.

  I could not withhold from my dad as easily as I could with others. When I obscured or omitted important things, I couldn’t then behave normally. Usually when I did this it was to avoid upsetting him, when the problem was something he could not help with and I could therefore see no point in burdening him.

  It had been like this when I was a teenager. My depressions were without source or resolution, and so I had no real answer to the question ‘What’s wrong?’ My relationship with Ciaran had the same feeling of inevitability. It just was. I
just was in love with him, and any of the problems that came with it were simply to be borne. There was no point in describing them.

  The denial of information to Dad made me feel weak and depressed at the irreconcilable distance between us, which was so much smaller than between most people, but still existed and always would.

  Sometimes this distance between everyone comforted and pleased me. I would die knowing things about myself that nobody else on earth did. There were experiences that lived only in me and could never be replicated or recounted. And sometimes, like now, the distance seemed too sad to live with.

  In the car on the way home we were chatting idly about his eldest brother leaving home when he was a kid, and I asked if his parents had minded him going away.

  ‘Same as me with you, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I’d prefer if you were here for my own sake but I wouldn’t wish it on you. The thing that gets at me sometimes, like now getting to spend a relatively long time, more than a day, is thinking about how little this will happen again.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I mean, if you count the times we’ll spend a significant amount of time together from now on, more than a day at a time… those stints are limited. They’re very limited, really.’

  He was driving, frowning slightly out the windscreen at the winter sun, and didn’t seem distressed by what he was saying, had said it matter-of-factly.

  I turned my face to the side and stared out my window. I was filled not only with misery about what he was saying, and his awareness of it, but also with shame at how squalidly I was wasting my short life. I was sitting in a car with someone who loved me more than life itself, and yet all I could think about was Ciaran. How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.

  3

  On Christmas morning I woke up at seven and sent a message to him:

  Happy Christmas. I love you very much. Please call me.

  I irritated myself as I wrote it, the ‘very much’ shrill and manipulative.

  I ate breakfast nervously and exchanged gifts with my mam and Stíofán and then Dad collected me. We drove to meet my grandmother and uncles at the church we always went to for Christmas. We looked for them when we got in, but the service was beginning so we slipped into the nearest pew. In front of us an elderly woman was crying silently into her hands, an adult son sat beside her with his arm firmly around her shoulder. Her husband must have died, I thought, imagining it, and this is the first Christmas without him.

  Then I was off too – the combination of witnessing her grief, standing there with my father, being in the church I had come to in my school days. I hardly let up for the next thirty minutes, breaking down utterly hearing my dad’s strong tuneless voice join in with ‘Silent Night’.

  I said sorry to my dad afterwards, but he understood. He suffers too.

  We went to the graveyard to do our traditional walk to see his own father’s stone, and that of my mother’s mother. In the car we avoided each other’s eyes and spoke with wobbling voices, and as we arrived back at Mam’s house he put his hand on my wrist and said, ‘It’ll be OK,’ and I was sad for him that he had had a child at all if it meant his happiness was tied to mine always. I was sad I wasn’t able to learn to be happier, more regular and peaceful, because it meant he would never have that peace for himself, which he of all people deserved and had waited for.

  It was painful that he loved me so much and wanted things for me I knew I would never have and never deserve. I owed him so much and I would never repay it. I wished I could somehow make him understand this so he could give up on me. I kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘I know, Dad. Love you, I’ll ring you from Dublin,’ and left the car quickly before we could hurt each other any more.

  The rest of the day was easier. I drank wine on the couch and read and smiled listening to my aunties teasing Mam as she cooked the dinner and felt happy in the complete containment of the house, and wished I could stay in it for ever, wished I could erase all the other parts of my life and give up on the idea of progress. We ate and played board games and drank and smoked and watched films and at the end of the night I went on to my mam’s couch and curled up next to her and cried and cried and she petted my hair and didn’t make me say what was wrong. The next morning I left before anyone was awake and got the bus back to Dublin.

  4

  The city was still quiet and empty when we pulled into it just after nine. I walked home, crossing over O’Connell Bridge slowly so as not to slip on the ice. I went up Grafton Street where people were gathering for the sales, stopped for a coffee at the top and went around the edge of Stephen’s Green, where I often walked with Ciaran after work. I was putting off the moment of unlocking my door and stepping in to the emptiness and having whatever was happening happen to me.

  I was often like this on evenings when I wasn’t seeing Ciaran after work. I’d begin the walk up and be filled with lurching dread at the thought of all the steps yet to take, the familiar corners to turn, the nothing, the nobody, waiting for me when I got there. I’d stop into a pub on the way, buy a magazine, anxiously smoke and sip two glasses of red wine and pick at my hands until I forced myself to leave.

  It was like that now but worse. It took me an hour and a half to do the forty-minute walk, wandering in wrong directions and stopping to look at shop window displays. I unlocked the door and sat on my bed, unpacking the few things from home. I took out the note: You are a beautiful woman and I love you. Looking at it agitated me further. How could he have written it if – he can’t have written this and then –

  I put it away and took out my phone and messaged him that I was home and I was going to come to his house. He replied immediately: Stay there I’ll be there in an hour.

  I clung to the phone, flooding with relief.

  There had to be some explanation for what was taking place. His dad could be ill – could be in the house with him, for all I knew.

  I made coffee and smoked and tapped the kitchen table, looked at the note. Stroked my hands, soothing myself, trying not to bite them or hurt myself.

  He knocked on the door exactly an hour later. When I opened it, he had changed entirely. The momentary hardness that crossed his face during arguments was total now, and occupied every part of him.

  ‘Come in,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ And losing it already, all of the pent-up energy of useless hope draining in a moment, my body sagging, I grabbed the doorframe to stay upright.

  ‘I’m not coming in.’ I looked again at his face, it cut into me. ‘I came here to tell you it’s over. I’m leaving now.’

  And he really did turn to leave.

  How did he do it? It was amazing, remarkable to me even through the sickening shock of it; how could a person be the way he was?

  ‘Wait, please, come back,’ I heard myself say, hating the sound of my craziness, and calculating quickly what would make him come back. ‘Five minutes, I swear, just five minutes.’

  He turned back and stood as he had before, with one hand on his backpack strap and one on his hip. A stance of parental irritation, one you might take with a child who won’t stop asking why they can’t have ice cream for dinner.

  And indeed, he was narrowing his eyes, shaking his head, as though I was asking an impossibly grandiose favour of him. His expression suggested that whatever was taking place was a usual thing that I was failing to understand because I was stupid, or unwilling, or delusional.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Please come in and talk to me. You have to talk to me. Talk to me.’

  My voice was raising with each sentence as he shook his head at me.

  I searched, trying to push through like there was some telekinesis fuelled by desperation and love I could use to penetrate him.

  ‘I’m not coming in,’ he said again, and in the madness of the moment I was in, this was the only thing to overcome. It was like my
feeling that hearing him pick up the phone would resolve everything when he had disappeared. If I could just get him over the threshold, get him to step into my normal, same old room – if I could get him to sit on the bed we had slept and loved each other in, he would surely relent.

  He would have to break his surreal character, would be forced to remember and soften.

  ‘Please come in and talk to me,’ I begged, and with a petulant sigh he came through the door and threw down his bag.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  I didn’t know where to start, how to describe the lunacy of what was taking place between us, what to demand of him first. The nearest thing I had to evidence was the proximity of our last meeting. I grabbed my bag and scrabbled for the blue box. I held out the amber to him as though it was a talisman, as though it could summon something from within him.

  ‘You gave me this, you told me you loved me, a week ago!’ I was screaming now and along with everything else I hated him for making me into this.

  I felt crushed with the sudden certainty that I was the crazy one. What I thought had happened could not have happened.

  ‘Look, the reason I didn’t want to come in is that there’s nothing to discuss. There’s no point in sitting down and talking about it. It’s just over. I have nothing to say to you now that you know.’

  ‘Why didn’t you want me to come to your house? Why didn’t you answer my calls?’

  Silence, still glowering, as though I was being impolite, crossing some boundary of propriety.

  ‘She’s here?’ I asked, voicing aloud what I had felt dirtying me for days. ‘That’s the only reason you came here, so I wouldn’t turn up and see her.’