Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

  Then we went to bed, where I wished we could be always, where he felt finally and truly mine, the friendliness of a body’s smell and softness overpowering all the sour rest of him.

  I greedily anticipated the luxury of whole undefined weekend afternoons of fucking and talking sprawling into evening, the shutting of the front door on Friday evening keeping trouble out and letting us become ourselves in private.

  In my head, we woke late and lazily explored the limits of the bed and whispered and took care of each other until lunchtime. We read on the couch with our limbs intertwined and ordered in for dinner and drank wine and were back in bed by dusk.

  There had been something like that once, something that made it feel possible.

  There had been weekends when the containment of our apartment meant what it was supposed to mean – that we were good together when left alone.

  There had been those times to prove to me that it wasn’t my fault or his that he made me feel so degraded and sad, but the fault of the whole rest of the world.

  If there wasn’t a time like that (and I think just one would have done), how could I have believed in it so much, for so long, week after week, for months?

  12

  My father met Ciaran only once, when visiting Dublin for a funeral. He was always going to funerals, despite being significantly shy of sixty. He went to funerals for every person in his parents’ peer group as well as his own, to those of old colleagues he hadn’t spoken to in decades.

  He went not out of the grim compulsion you sometimes see in people with not enough going on in their own lives, and not with any reluctant sense of duty. He went instead with a willing generosity of observance, a genuine desire to bear witness. He has always been good at seeing people, my father, which I think is why he has always been so well liked. He makes people feel that their lives are unique and worthy of interest, which, although true, is something rarely felt by ordinary people.

  He had a few pints after the funeral – this one for a schoolmate he had been close with as a boy – and then met us in Neary’s off Grafton Street. He was slightly drunk, which I could tell only from a fond mistiness in his eyes. He was warm and effusive with Ciaran, who was, I was relieved to notice, passably convivial. He was making an effort, and any of his natural coldness could be seen as mere deference to my father and me catching up.

  We were mainly happy that day, Ciaran and I, and held hands and leaned close to one another when my father went to the bar to get us drinks. I noticed that his clear handsome face was in a state of constant and unusual gregariousness while we all chatted. Dad asked him about his work and he made self-deprecating jokes about his silly reviews while also subtly making it clear that he held some importance.

  ‘My editor asked me recently to make my review of a show a little more glowing – old friends, you know? – but once you start down that path who knows where it ends, right, Thomas?’ And my dad agreed, chuckling, as though he did know.

  I was so happy that my father could see him this way. Towards the end of the evening I absent-mindedly chewed on a thumb hangnail and Ciaran took my wrist and withdrew it from my face without breaking his conversation with Dad. It was a thing I wouldn’t have noticed or would have been even slightly pleased with, a cosy action, if we were not in company, but I met my father’s eyes as he did it and dropped my hands to my lap, and then sat on them.

  Afterwards, as he went to get a bus back to Waterford, my father hugged me and said he was delighted to have met Ciaran.

  ‘And… are you always like that, so nice to each other?’ he asked, and I was elated that this was the impression we had given off, that we were capable of such a thing, but then saw that there was something else in his expression, the gentle urgency of his face when I was a teenager and he wanted me to explain myself without wanting to force me to.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Always.’ And he gave me a warm dry kiss, landing awkwardly between my eye and my mouth, and I turned away to go back inside to Ciaran.

  October 2013

  1

  We went to a film together in the old Screen cinema on Hawkins Street one Saturday night. I had looked forward all week to having a date with him, to dressing up and drinking afterwards. As we walked there Ciaran was relaxed and talkative and shrugged his overcoat off one arm and draped it around me, containing us both inside, so that we were clinging tightly to one another as if in a three-legged race. We irritated others on the pavement and smirked about it.

  The film was a rowdy drug thriller with Brad Pitt, and behind us a group of teenage boys shrieked sporadically and exploded with laughter when shushed. I felt the good mood evaporate from Ciaran and his body tense, sinewy and bristling. I searched out his hand to stroke reassuringly and he let it lie warm, dry, inert beneath my probing.

  Each time the boys made a new noise my stomach lurched and I couldn’t stop myself from sneaking looks at Ciaran until he whispered sharply, ‘Stop looking at me,’ and withdrew his arm from my lap. I stared ahead, panicked, wondering if I should suggest that we leave, but then the noise would lull and I’d think perhaps things were OK and could be salvaged, before they’d start up again hooting at an actress’s breasts or a pile of cocaine.

  ‘Should we move?’ I whispered to him, which he ignored.

  For an hour I sat still, dreadfully aware of each second passing, waiting for the next shout. When eventually the boys began to climb over their seats and rows and throw food at one another, Ciaran twisted around and said, ‘Can you shut the fuck up please?’ I squeezed my eyes shut as they jeered at him, repeating what he had said, exaggerating his accent and laughing uncontrollably. As ever, to be laughed at was the most galling experience for Ciaran, intolerable, and he stood up and left, exiting the opposite direction from me so that he did not have to involve me, take my hand to bring me with him or climb over me. I followed him, flinching from the triumphant crowing of the boys.

  Outside he was lighting a cigarette.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  ‘What are you sorry for?’

  I didn’t know.

  ‘Let’s just go get a drink?’ I asked, pushing my arm beneath his coat and around his waist.

  ‘Fuck that, it’s Saturday night – everywhere’s going to be full of idiots by now.’

  I didn’t say that it was the same Saturday night it had been before the film, a Saturday night in which he had been happy to go for a drink, had discussed with me which bar it might be earlier that afternoon.

  ‘We could get some food and wine or whatever and bring it home, then? Watch something there or play some records?’ I was getting desperate now and could hear it in my voice.

  ‘What are you talking about? We had dinner before we left, why do you want to eat again?’

  I didn’t want to eat, or even very badly to drink, but only for there to be some thing that we were doing together that might bring us back to his good mood, an activity to give the night some shape and which might allow it to end with us having sex, resetting everything and making it bearable. We walked home in silence. I took his arm, which he allowed.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked after a few minutes.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said and continued to look away from me. ‘OK! Just checking,’ I said.

  Back at home he got changed into his soft clothes and took out a book and began rolling a joint.

  ‘Will I make some tea?’ I asked.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ he said, amiable enough now he was back inside.

  ‘Do you want some, though?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘I’ll only make it if you’re having some.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked again.

  ‘I’m fucking fine! Jesus!’

  I turned away and made the tea.

  ‘Did I do something?’ I asked a few minutes later, after he had begun to read.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You seem upset wit
h me.’

  ‘I’m not upset with you.’ He kept his eyes on the book. ‘I’m not anything with you.’

  ‘Why aren’t you talking to me?’

  ‘Why do I have to be talking to you? I don’t have to be talking to you to not be upset with you. Do I have to talk to you all fucking day and night? We live together, I’m here all the time, I can’t talk for all of it just to keep you amused. Christ, it’s like living with a toddler sometimes.’

  I nodded, knowing that it was. I started to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ciaran. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘What are you crying about? This is insane, you know that, right? You’re making yourself cry right now, about absolutely nothing. You’re crying about the absence of me being upset with you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know. Just – please, can you please, please—’ And because I didn’t know what the end of the sentence was, what I was pleading for, it just kept going, I kept asking, and asking, and asking.

  2

  My mother called to check when I’d be coming back for my birthday in November. Every year I went back home and had dinner with both my parents, a ritual they’d maintained since splitting up and during which they would harmlessly snipe at one another in a way I had grown to enjoy and be comforted by. It was nice to remember that they had existed together once and weren’t always these now permanent versions of themselves, settled in middle age.

  It was nice, too, to indulge the part of me which thought longingly of the three of us being united – this wasn’t a scenario I wanted in any material sense, but one I thought of in the same abstracted terms as I thought of God and heaven, unreal but sacred. I didn’t want my mother to leave Stíofán and beg my father to take her back and for them to be living in the same house; I just wanted a wishy-washy platonic ideal of us as a family. It was something I thought of when I thought about death, that if I had to die, I would want to sit with the two of them one more time together, to eat as our original, own family, that if I could do so one last time I would be able to feel peaceful and whole.

  I told my mother I wasn’t sure when I could come. I had gotten it into my head that Ciaran and I should go away on a trip, something we had never done before.

  ‘What do you think about going away somewhere?’ I asked in bed one night. I’d been looking at him fondly as he flipped through a magazine, shirtless, glasses on, hair damp, delicious.

  ‘No money,’ he said cheerfully. Sometimes it seemed to me that he took pleasure in the fact he earned so little, that his ability to live without comforts and luxuries so exceeded everyone else’s.

  ‘Well, we don’t have to go abroad,’ I said, winding a curl at the base of his neck around my finger and releasing it gently, again and again. The hollow gap in his sternum – I bent down and pressed my nose into it. ‘We could just go for a weekend somewhere in Ireland.’

  He stopped reading and smiled at my fidgeting around his body.

  ‘You know, I actually do think I should see more of Ireland. It’s dumb to move to a different country and stay in the same place all the time, right? I’ve only been here and to my father’s.’

  ‘Right!’ I said, excited now and feeling the flush of intoxicating adulthood that a weekend away implied.

  Maybe there would be a flask on the train, maybe I would wear something special – could it be that I was the sort of person who wore a hat?

  In work the next day I looked at discount websites and hotel offers and finally booked a voucher for two nights at a bed and breakfast in Galway for the weekend of my birthday. I packed swimming things – I was proud of the fact that I could go in the ocean all year round – and a new black dress with a deep neckline and pearl buttons at the waist. On the train there my heart hurt at the sight of Ciaran’s happiness.

  ‘I love trains,’ he kept murmuring, gripping the window excitedly as he watched the scenery, and sliding his other hand over to me, squeezing my knee. I stared at him and when he looked back he crossed his eyes and grinned wider, mocking the fact of his own merriment. We did a crossword together and drank coffee and ate chocolate bars and he said, ‘Why does coffee taste so good with sweet things?’

  In Galway it was freezing and clear skied and gorgeous. I said we should go to the beach while it was still bright out and as we walked to Salthill along the promenade I saw that he was happier still. I remembered that he really hadn’t seen much of what makes Ireland itself. He spent all his time being irritated by the mundane city things of Dublin, things that were generically urban and had not much to do with specific location.

  ‘We should go places more often,’ he said.

  At the end of the prom on the Blackrock diving board I took off my backpack and coat and he laughed.

  ‘You’re not seriously going in there, are you?’

  I raised my eyebrows and kept undressing to the bikini I had under my clothes and he joked around trying to bundle me into his jacket. It really was too cold and if I had been alone I would have left it, but his disbelief was inspiring a hysterical bravado and there was no turning back. An elderly couple strolling were looking as well and I laughed with the attention and the shock of the wind on my bare body, and then I ran and jumped.

  When I surfaced I gasped for air that didn’t seem to come and waded until my heart slowed back down a little, then thrashed perfunctorily for a few minutes. I looked up and he was smiling down at me and shouted, ‘Brava! Brava!’

  When I climbed out he was waiting to surround me with a towel and my coat and he licked the salty water from my ears and said, ‘You’re beautiful.’

  Afterwards we got a taxi to the hotel, which was further from town than I had thought it would be, but perfectly nice once we arrived. We showered and wore the fluffy robes for the novelty for a few minutes, before we started to kiss and shrugged them away to grab on to each other. He stopped me when I trailed my hand downwards and said, ‘No. I want to save it for later. I want you to want it all night.’

  And my head was light. I bit my lip and breathed in sharply.

  He had packed nice clothes and I felt touched watching him dress, a beautiful soft pale blue shirt and a white tie, and he looked so handsome, so sharp and manly but heartbreakingly delicate that I wanted to photograph him, or paint him, make him model for me all night instead of going outside. He looked like an illustration of superiority, like propaganda for the idea of a man.

  I had chosen to take him to a restaurant run by a friend of Lisa’s, a woman whose whimsical charm was so eyewateringly acute I could barely speak to her. She was the kind of person who ran dinner events full of the best looking people you’d ever seen in your life, in bogs and old vacant military barracks, using only what she had foraged in a 50-foot radius to cook with. I told him about her on the walk and he said, ‘Oh wait, I’ve heard of her; she does collaborations with an artist we interviewed in the magazine last month.’

  I felt clever and proud to have done something related to his interests without even meaning to. At dinner he admired the sparse room with its handful of tables. It was like restaurants in Copenhagen, he said, and happily if thoughtlessly ate everything on the tasting menu. If Ciaran couldn’t taste food with as much enthusiasm as I could, I had reasoned when choosing the place, he could at least enjoy the aesthetics of her plates, artful piles of tweaked sprigs and things you would not expect could be pickled, but it turned out could, and minuscule sea life I had never heard of before.

  On the street after, tipsy from some strong seaweed-flavoured cocktails, I asked, ‘What now?’

  ‘Let’s go for a drink. I want to go to one of the real old-man pubs with the nooks in them,’ he said.

  I took him up to Tigh Chóilí and he stood behind me as we waited to be served, one arm around my waist and one hand brushing my thighs under my dress so that I was flushing giddily, and that’s when I saw him. A man from Waterford I had dated a little bit in my late teens and then slept with on and off during the odd Christmas holiday or summer
festival was serving behind the bar. Michael, a little older than me, a sweet person who played drums and didn’t have a huge amount going on but liked to drink and was friends with my friends from home and was nice to me.

  ‘Michael!’ I said and jerked reflexively to remove Ciaran’s hand from beneath my dress.

  We caught up for no more than thirty seconds – he had moved to Galway, yeah, it was very busy in here, time goes faster that way anyway, though: can I get two pints of Guinness? – and I turned back around, smiling broadly, heart thudding. I was afraid to find what I knew I would find, which was that things had been ruined in the space of that minute, that I would spend the rest of the night trying to claw my way back to the good feeling, and that I would fail. We stood in silence, being jostled by the crowd, waiting for our drinks and then moved out to lean against a wall.

  ‘Who was that?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s a friend from Waterford.’

  ‘Why did you move away from me when you saw him?’

  ‘I didn’t – I…’

  ‘You did, yes. You moved away from me as soon as you saw him. He’s a boyfriend?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that.’

  ‘Someone you fucked, then?’

  I said nothing, grew hot.

  ‘You’re blushing,’ he said, mocking. ‘You fucked him?’

  ‘It’s nothing, he’s nobody important.’

  ‘What’s nothing? It was nothing when you fucked him?’ I looked up at him, agreeing miserably in silence.

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘It’s not a big deal, Ciaran; you’ve slept with other people too, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes and yet we don’t bump into them in totally random places, there aren’t so many that they pop up from behind bars in different cities.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Please what?’