He had never taken sex pictures before. It made him uneasy but he felt a little sorry for Petra, having taken her virginity, and he didn’t know how to say no. She had taken the camera home with her. She sent him a single picture in every one of her letters, and usually he jerked off once to it, then placed the photo and letter in a shoebox along with the other ones. Filthy photographs and girlish letters, written on pastel-coloured paper. She wrote in brightly coloured biro, sometimes with a different colour for each line, pink, then purple, then blue; little doodles in the margin to illustrate what she meant. Beside the sentence, ‘I didn’t mind that you were so grumpy. You are cute when you are grumpy,’ she had drawn a little picture of an angry face surrounded by love hearts. The letters were full of phrases unnatural to her language, ‘I miss you, honey.’ Where did she learn a phrase like that? He hadn’t even wanked to the last photo yet. He had slipped it and the half-read letter back into A Very Short Introduction to Critical Theory.
Helen had turned around now; she was looking at the reflection of her back and her bum. She had a hand over one breast, plumping it up so that the image reflected in the mirror implied that her breasts were rounder, fuller, higher than they really were. Red filled Oisín’s stomach. There was a reason, he thought, that literature showed women as artsy and manipulative. Look at her, watching herself, posing for herself, pretending things. There were plenty of women with better breasts, plenty of women he had made love to, nipples he had licked; who did she think she was fooling?
She pinched her own hips and wrinkled her nose. Then she did something that made him love her again. She stuck her tongue out at her reflection, and closed the wardrobe door. She walked back towards the bed and he closed his eyes. ‘Baby, I’m going to shower,’ she said.
* * *
You used to take stock of yourself when you woke, run a hand over your head, your breasts, your armpits. You used to smooth your palm over your abdomen, your crotch, the back of your neck. It was a way of feeling yourself placed in the pace of your life, remembering who you were and where. Sometimes you would watch your hands, the way babies do, entwine them above your head or trace patterns on the low ceiling. Now when you wake he is already on you, cupping your bum, your breasts, a large hand wrapped around your thigh.
In the mirror you look older. The morning after you first made love you turned to him with your face blank for perusal, ‘Do I look different?’ and you giggled. You have always had cherub’s lips. This morning you can see that they are thinning, or perhaps it’s just the mood you’re in.
Once, when you went to buy mascara in Brown Thomas, the lady tried to sell you a thing called ‘lip freeze’. She said that as you got older your lips would just get thinner and thinner. That day you felt pretty and invincible, you had your glow on and everywhere you went men glanced at your blue eyes, your luminous blonde head. ‘Lip freeze’. That was a marketing ploy, fear mongering. You had some good years left in your face. This morning though, it looks true. Everything is growing looser, flabbier, becoming less valuable. For a few days now, you have been gripped by a sort of panic after making love, a sudden sense of something wasted. Every time you have sex with him your pussy gets a little looser, you can feel it. Pussy is his word, part of your sex language. You never used that word before him. This morning you have woken without the sweet, murky veil of love. But the other thing is still there – that engulfing desire for him, or the desire, at least, to be wanted by him.
You turn around to look at your bum and back in the mirror. You have a nice bum, a good waist. If you angle your arm a certain way and turn your head back towards the mirror, you look as though your breasts might be larger than they are. You have been waiting for your breasts to get bigger ever since puberty. You remember the excitement when those few downy hairs began to sprout, and a hard little ball under each nipple. What kind of body would you get? What kind of breasts? The things your body decided to do now would affect you for the rest of your life. You would become a beautiful woman, or a plain woman, or, the ultimate fear – you wouldn’t become a woman at all. You would be like the sexless little bird woman who taught gym. You did all right out of puberty, considering the vast possibilities.
Oisín is asleep again.
This morning your own face – with the little laughter lines, the gradually thinning lips – is making you angry with him. You close the wardrobe. You’ll have a shower.
* * *
Before leaving for the bathroom she kissed his forehead again. She didn’t usually do that. She was annoying him this morning. When she was gone he picked up A Very Short Introduction to Critical Theory from where it lay closed on his laptop, and slipped out the photo. Petra had beautiful round breasts with brown nipples. He remembered them bouncing up and down when he had taken the photo. He reached under the covers and fingered his foreskin. Then he swapped hands. He spat into the hand that had been holding the book and began to move it slowly up and down. He thought of Petra’s rosy little bum hole, the way she had bent over so willingly and spread the cheeks for him. Helen had never done that. He had never even thought of doing that to Helen. She wouldn’t like it. She would probably cry again and make him feel like a monster.
Petra’s breasts were better than Helen’s. It gave him pleasure to think that. Was her pussy tighter? Hard to remember. It was easier to remember what girls looked like than what they felt like. He tried to tell himself that he would rather have sex with Petra right now than with Helen.
He wanted to have a proper wank over Petra but he couldn’t come like this, with Helen in the next room. He closed the book. He made his way to the bathroom door and watched Helen shower there, a blur of pink behind the water and glass. He got into the shower too and they made love silently.
He planned it while he was inside her, looking at the tiles with his hands around her wrists, his cheek against hers, the water running over their backs and anger in every thrust, with every thrust wanting to undo the quiet power Helen had gained over him, making him want her like that.
As they were getting dressed he handed her the book with the photo still in it. Making his voice sound as casual as possible he said, ‘Read this for your essay. It will help.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve read it.’ Her cheeks were pink from sex and the heat of the shower.
‘Read it again. It’s good. It will help.’
Even as he pushed the book into her hands, Petra’s naked breasts glowing between the pages, her pelvis waiting there with him inside her, waiting for Helen’s soft eyes, her shock, the fluttering and crumpling she would feel, the hot face, pounding ears, he thought, ‘But I want you.’
twelve
After we broke up it wasn’t just Brian that I missed. It was them too, the artists. While I was with Brian I was someone to know. The artists called me honey or darling. They touched my hips and kissed my cheek. I was someone who had a place at the after-show parties. I had plenty of brunch dates with arrogant and unusual people, the striking kind, people who give the impression of being famous even if you don’t recognize them. I was privy to an exciting underworld where everyone was broke but lived in a sort of feline leisure. There was always wine and good coffee and gourmet food for us. That was simply the world we were in. It was what we felt we deserved.
For a few months after the split I still held these brunch dates, meeting the artists at my regular place, Café Rimbaud, an Italian café with a French name where they served excellent coffee. Your office – that was the joke – I saw you in your office with Jo Reilly this morning. It applied to everyone about their regular haunts, Butlers is Bridgeman’s office, she networks between ten and one …
Café Rimbaud was famous for the authentic rudeness of the waiters. There was a mahogany barista area and an assortment of elegant tables and chairs that must once have belonged to various grand houses. The effect was that of a pirate home, a shanty place built from a plundered colony, abandoned big houses, collapsing old money. Introduce an artist to the p
lace and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how bijou. Mismatched chairs. Fantaaastic!’ There were three types of customers who frequented the place. The first were the wealthy businessmen, their bronzed daughters, trophy wives and mistresses. They were trying to be knowing: ‘This is where the artists hang out. You know those paintings that we have in the dining-room? Well that painter lives around the corner and he’s always in here. You can see paint under his fingernails.’ Then there were artists and writers. There was always some half-famous Dublin playwright sitting at the one of the tables outside with pillar-box-red lipstick or a distinctive hat, musing alone over a glass of house red in the early afternoon. The third were Arts lecturers from Trinity, along with the most promising of their PhD students, talking loudly about Foucault. It was a trendy place to be, probably still is. I haven’t been there in a while.
This was the place where I had my brunch dates with people whom I think of now as Brian’s groupies, or ‘colleagues’ if I’m feeling kind. Back then I saw them as mutual friends.
I would order a croissant with butter and jam, and it would arrive without butter or jam. I would order the butter and jam and when I was halfway through the fatty pastry, butter would arrive; white continental butter that wouldn’t melt. It lumped the dough and tasted like nothing. I would order jam and another Americano and by the time the coffee arrived with a little pot of jam on the saucer, the croissant would have been eaten. Whoever I was with would say ‘Fantastic, isn’t it? So rude. Very Italian. They just don’t give a shit. When I was in Rome …’ It was fantastic coffee though. Fantastic. That was indisputable.
I thought I was the more interesting half of our couple. I was brighter, more entertaining, a better listener. I saw more of the friends than Brian did, my company was more sought after, but I was always ‘Brian Durcan’s partner, the young one he left his wife for. Stunning.’ At these brunches I would talk with Brian’s colleagues about their work, sharing ideas and so on. The fact that I didn’t paint or take photographs didn’t give me less authority on the subject, in fact, it made them more comfortable discussing it with me. I was not a rival.
After we broke up I felt as though I were in a sort of limbo. I didn’t even know whether it was real, the break-up. Pain emanated from me like a bitter but intriguing smell. I began to talk about the relationship. The artists wanted details. They wanted dirt on Brian, sex stuff, but the pain was blinding, I couldn’t think properly, I couldn’t tell well-structured anecdotes. Gradually they stopped contacting me, stopped answering my calls, and I realized that the reason they had continued to meet me was that they thought this was a temporary split. They thought I was still in the loop. When he began to take a tall black girl with him to openings – a slender Somalian actress with the shoulder blades of a panther – it was clear that we were no longer a couple on a break, and I was no longer someone to know. The mutual friends, as I had considered them, would be turning their attention to her now, having brunch with ‘Brian Durcan’s partner, the actress, the one he left that model for. Stunning.’
Their rejection hurt a lot more than I had expected. At first I had been so aware of the superficiality of it all, I had engaged with their talk in an effort to be polite to Brian’s friends, but somewhere along the way I had fallen in love with them, with that whole self-contained world where mismatched chairs were charming and installation art was serious and vague lives like theirs were at the centre of everything. It was like a second childhood, the smallness, the fiction of it. They had become home.
The last meeting I had was with Matilda – Tilly. She arrived late, out of breath, lugging a potted tree. ‘It’s a Japanese red maple. Isn’t it beautiful, Cass? So rich, like? That colour. It’s for my piece on Nymphs …’ Tilly was from Cork. She had buck teeth and bulky bones. Her hair was bleached to a watery orange and roughly chopped like the hair of a TV self-harmer. She was ugly, and the hair was designed to make a feature of this ugliness. That day she was wearing striped tights and a vintage blouse with shoulder pads and pearl buttons up to her chin. She had large, protruding ears that added an endearing childishness.
At that time she was photographing pubescent children through the dappled light of leaves, and painting fairy wings onto the prints with real gold. She had recently received an arts grant, which accounted for the good mood and the purchase. She pulled out the cast-iron chair opposite me – a piece of Victorian garden furniture, I think – leaning in to kiss me on either cheek as she did so.
What betrayed Tilly’s image, that well-honed sense of pride in her aesthetic wrongness, was that, up close, it was possible to see that she was wearing the subtle, laboured make-up of a woman who hates her face. The hollows were expertly lightened, the eyes widened with natural brown shadow, the cheekbones faked on with expensive bronzer. A flat mole by her mouth, which might have been cute, might have been an ironic sort of beauty spot, was thickly daubed over with skin-coloured paste. She was wearing a perfume that smelled like sweets.
‘So,’ she stroked my cheek. ‘Poor petal. How are you doing?’
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘fine.’
‘What are you doing with yourself now, Cassy? I hate to think of you all alone out there in the world. Do you have friends?’
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Was she clearing something up? Had she been sent as a messenger on behalf of all of those I considered mutual friends? Had I been harassing them with brunch invites? Did they have a meeting? I didn’t have friends. I thought they were my friends. I don’t know how I would have answered had we not been interrupted by the maple tree. It toppled towards us, its crimson leaves spiking my head and spreading their colour over our table. She was right. It was a beautiful thing. It would be wonderful to be the one to plant it somewhere, I thought, pack the earth around it like some act of half creation. I tried to straighten it but we were sitting outside. The wind had suddenly taken up. The tree was in a light plastic pot, hardly large enough to fit the trunk. It toppled the other way, dusting black compost over the ground. Tilly sighed, straightened it, and held the bark close to her face so that the canopy of leaves made a headdress that gave her the look of an ancient fetish. She really was a bizarre thing to look at, Tilly.
‘I suppose you have your college friends. What are you doing these days?’
‘College.’
A dark waiter with a V-shaped back picked his way over the spill of compost, disgust on his face, as though smelling something vile. Tilly turned a knobbly finger in the air in an attempt at elegance. ‘We’ll order,’ she said.
The waiter turned around. He had very high, thrusting cheekbones and a strong chin, and looked as though he might be wearing eyeliner. ‘Yes?’
It was a miraculous achievement on Tilly’s part; usually they ignored you until they felt like serving. There was a sort of authority in Tilly’s bizarre looks. No one would be that brazen about their buck teeth unless they had reason to be. People thought she must have been an intellectual or a famous person’s child. The waiter attended our table with much more haste than if I had asked. I didn’t order a croissant, because she only ordered an espresso. This was to be a quick one. Time with me was no longer an investment. Our coffees arrived promptly. I was still formulating an answer to both of her questions – who my friends were, what I was doing – when I spotted Paul’s long neck, a cerise silk scarf, a little hat with a feather. ‘Yankee Doodle’, a rhyme I had not heard in years, began to loop in my head. He clocked Tilly with a nod and a side-grin. But not me. I gave a little nod but no, definitely not me.
‘Hello my little siren.’ At first I thought Paul was being nasty to Tilly. He had applied for the same arts grant. Whenever he talked about her he dismissed her art, calling it ‘fantasia crap for paedos’, commenting publicly on her ugliness. He had explained to me once that because he was gay he had licence to bitch, being neither a sexual rival nor a prospective mate. I used to defend her. Paul and I had become close friends, I thought, but now he was ignoring me outright. He approached the
table, kissed Tilly noisily on each cheek.
‘Oh, hi Cassandra.’ He said it as though he had just noticed me.
‘Hi.’
‘What are you doing these days?’
I don’t know how I replied. I remember the coffee. It was perfect – bitter and smooth, with creamy spume, and it stayed hot through all of this. Paul sat inside, where he was meeting someone. Tilly downed her espresso like a Sambuca shot and clanked a two-euro coin onto the table.
‘Can I leave that with you Cass? I need to talk to Paul about something. Take care. See you soon.’
‘Yes …’
Tilly wasn’t listening any more. She was lifting the pot to her chest as though burping a baby; the tree wagged over her shoulder. I still hadn’t quite got the message. I was straining my head around, trying to catch her eye, ‘Yes, let’s have dinner next week or something.’
‘Next week’s not good,’ she said, ‘but soon, yes. Good to see you. Mind yourself.’
It was only a small americano but the coffee seemed to take forever to finish. ‘Yankee Doodle’ played around and around. I watched the table, tried to make a fish skeleton from a maple leaf that had fallen there, but failed. They weren’t that sort of leaf. Yankee doodle went to town a-ridin’ on a pony, stuck a feather in his hat and called it majagory. Were they really the words? ‘Majagory’ wasn’t right.
It was impossible to get the waiter’s attention to ask for the bill. I was tempted to shame them both by going inside to pay, walking past them, walking out again, the better person. But I was stricken. I didn’t feel better. I felt like nothing. What was I doing now? Who were my friends? Helen. That was it. There wasn’t a single other person. I left the money on the table and walked away.
Between Dog and Wolf Page 13