Between Dog and Wolf

by Sokolov, Sasha; Boguslawski, Alexander;

  ‘Hi! Hi! Hi Cassy, love, how are you sweetheart? You skinny bitch, look at you! So you’re Oisín! I’m Helen’s mammy.’

  Oisín saw Helen flinch at the word ‘mammy’. She had told him she didn’t get on with her mother. As she spoke the mother fumbled in a black leather bum bag with silver studs on it. Then she turned her head towards the house and let out a roar: ‘Emmmmmaaaaaa! Tell Daddy, Helen is here! We need money for the taxi!’

  A bony girl with lank hair came out of the house in a baggy jumper and pyjamas and handed fifty euro to the taxi-driver without looking at him. Then she kissed Helen on the cheek, gave a weak wave to Oisín and Cassandra, and disappeared back into the house. The driver didn’t argue. He lifted the bags out of the boot silently and got back into the car.

  Hands on massive hips, the mother looked Oisín all over. Oisín wanted to glance at Helen’s little bum. He wanted to make sure it was still there. Was this what Helen was destined for? Would her bum spill out, when she reached thirty, into a blubbery ring around her? He smiled and stretched out a hand. He was trying to look boyish. ‘Hi, Mrs O’Brien.’ He wanted to say something snappy, something witty that would make him seem familiar with this sort of wealth, but he could think of nothing. He felt betrayed by Helen. She must have been shocked by his parents’ small house. She must have thought all kinds of things that she never said. If he had known she was loaded he wouldn’t have brought her there, put her in that pokey spare room, let his mam serve her discount smoked salmon as though it were caviar.

  Helen’s mum gave a shriek of laughter, throwing her head back. ‘Missis O’Brien … Ha! Call me Trina!’ Her hair was not Helen’s halo of ringlets, but it had a bit of a curl in it and it was blonde too. It was hard to tell how blonde though because the hair was wet. It was cut into a youthful bob. She really was very like Helen. Or rather, Helen was very like her. The similarity was obscene, as though her likeness to Helen, coupled with the deformity of the swollen arse, was a gesture of mockery.

  ‘Anyway,’ said her mother, ‘I have to get dressed so you three can look after yourselves can’t you? Helen, put Cassandra in the attic room. You and the boy can’t sleep in the back room because Mary and Denis are in there. I told Tatiana to put sheets on all the spare beds, so sleep wherever.’

  She was just out of the shower, dressed in a long, baggy T-shirt and towelling slippers with the name of a hotel on them. The hair dripped steadily onto the T-shirt. It was the smell, Oisín decided – that disgusted him. It was the smell of her warm, fat, just-scrubbed body and some other lingering fragrance, like cooked fruit. It was her posh-totty soap, or skin polisher or whatever people like her used. She had no trousers on, just the very long T-shirt. Her legs were swollen, the skin dry and flaking with pink spots and blue veins. His own mother would never have greeted people in that state. She turned and disappeared back into the house.

  The three of them carried the bags in. There was classical music playing from invisible speakers. The hall was huge with a marble floor and high ceiling. Portraits of Helen’s parents and five sisters hung everywhere: studio photos with everyone standing like figurines and raising their chins slightly. There was one he liked of Helen when she was a toddler. She looked like an angel: huge eyes, sprigs of curls filling the frame. There was a baby on her lap. It was newborn with a scrunched-up face and scrunched-up hands and a mass of black hair. Helen was looking at the camera as if to say, ‘What?’

  Glass doors on either side showed two immaculate rooms. Those rooms lead to other rooms, connected by more glass doors. To the left was a room with a marble fireplace and a coffee table that might be an art piece of some sort: a naked iron woman holding a slab of glass. It was the type of thing that belonged in government buildings and posh hotels. The room had deep, plush chairs, couches of the same fabric as the curtains. To the right was a room with a piano, a harp, and a dining-table. He had never seen a harp before. It was bigger than he would have imagined a harp to be. Messy oil paintings hung on the walls. The hall branched into a staircase on one side and a kitchen ahead. The staircase lead up to more than one floor, you could tell just by looking at it, and by the light pouring down from a high skylight.

  Helen didn’t dally in the hallway. She didn’t give any commentary, even when he raised his eyebrows at her as if to say, ‘What’s all this?’ Cassandra didn’t react either. Maybe she was loaded too.

  The two girls dumped their bags in the hall and went into the kitchen. Oisín followed. There were several foreign women milling around, preparing food. They looked at the three students with irritation and returned to their work, except one of them, who stretched her arms out and smiled. Helen kissed her. ‘Hi Tatiana!’

  ‘Helen how are you, darlink? Cassandra, you have come too!’

  He felt vaguely jealous. How come Helen’s servant knew Cassandra? Helen never told him she had servants. He didn’t know they still existed. Then a squat Asian woman with a giant salad bowl in her arms elbowed Helen.

  ‘You can’t eat this stuff now you know? This is for the party. Your mammy told us no one is to eat it until the party.’

  The kitchen made him uneasy. It felt like another world. The light was evenly dispersed, as though each reflective particle was suspended at equal distance from the other. He looked up to see what sort of light fittings were giving that effect. The entire ceiling was glowing from strips of pink light. The lights were set in a thick, clear glass ceiling. Up through the ceiling he could see the landing above, and another glass ceiling above that one.

  * * *

  You can tell Oisín is annoyed with you for something. His jaw is set in that harsh line. You send Cassandra up to dump her stuff in her room so that you can be alone with him. You still feel queasy, but it’s easing. All the same you are glad that Oisín is carrying the bags. First you look for a room to stay in, opening doors and inspecting the beds for wash-bags, books, a pair of pyjamas to mark it as taken. Oisín follows you, lugging the bags from room to room.

  ‘But which is your room?’

  ‘Oh, I slept in the back room for a while, then I moved to the yellow room, then back to the back room. But while I was in secondary school I slept in that room there at the holidays.’

  His eyes slide around the sides of your face, they don’t meet yours. You grab his hand and kiss it, and you know what a strange gesture that is, and how useless. It’s with your skin that you know each other though, and you urgently need to remember. You need him to remember. Something is slipping; you are losing something. It’s this house. You hate this house. Your sisters hate it too. When you were stoned one night last summer, you and Emma and Carla, the three of you sat in the kitchen and talked about burning it down, the whole house. You really meant it that night. All three of you meant it. You would light a match to Mammy’s recently done seventy-two thousand euro kitchen, starting with the ‘Family Organizer’ on the wall. The flames would soar upwards in exaltation, blackening all the glass ceilings, the fresh paintwork, the new tiles, until everything trembled and shattered with the heat. Up with the house would go your childhoods, the fake versions and the real ones, the violin lessons, the maths grinds, the carefully planned meals cooked and frozen by staff under your mother’s supervision. Up in flames with the wedding photo in the hallway, of your slender mammy and your frightened-looking daddy before all of this began, you and all the babies, before all the money came building up, and the au-pairs and the staff and the home improvements. The blaze would lick at the six studio photos of each of the O’Brien girls that are hung in ascension along the staircase, marbled backgrounds, French plaits, airbrushed noses, all would be blacked out by the blaze, glass splitting, paper melting, those faces shrinking out of being.

  Oisín takes his hand back and kisses you coolly on the cheek. It’s this house and Mammy. It was stupid to bring Oisín here. Somehow, you will lose him here, Mammy will make him go away. She can do that in a look. Because Mammy, and only your mammy, knows what you really are, and in her gaz
e you become just that.

  * * *

  After he had spent ten minutes following her like a lap dog, she found a double bedroom at the back of the house that was free. Oisín dropped their bags at the foot of the bed. Everything in the room was matching. The curtains and duvet had a bright, splotchy floral print on them. There was a border running around the room with flowers of the same colour and the same water-paint effect. They were made-up flowers: petals like poppies but in bizarre colours with fluff of some sort bursting from their centres. The furniture looked antique. There was a double bed of carved mahogany with a mahogany side cabinet by each pillow. A mahogany table stood in the farthest corner beside a mahogany wardrobe. The table had a mirror attached to it, built with the same wood and flanked on either side by two smaller mirrors on hinges. There was a cushioned stool at it. The floral pattern reflected out of the mirrors from various angles. On each cabinet was a lamp with a pleated shade made from the same material as the curtains.

  ‘That’s freaky! Everything matches!’

  She grinned and nodded, rolling her eyes, ‘I know. It’s Mammy’s idea of decorating!’

  He was disappointed. Ever since arriving at the house he had felt an intense urge to insult her home. Her attitude to her own house, though, was that of an outsider. She seemed to have no loyalty, no attachment. She didn’t even have a bedroom in the house. She didn’t care if he hated it.

  Helen sat on the bed with her arms behind her and made fuck-me eyes at him. It was her way of calming him down when he got worked up, but now that look made him tired. He didn’t feel comfortable having sex in this big house, with people milling about everywhere. Didn’t her parents mind them sharing a room? He hadn’t met her father yet. He couldn’t imagine what he was like. The mystery made him anxious. Helen began to remove her shoes. ‘I’m going to have a shower.’

  When she was down to her bra and knickers he turned the key in the lock. She leaned back and parted her knees. He shook his head. ‘No. I’m just locking it ’cause I don’t want any of your servants walking in while you’re changing.’ He was sure this would hurt her – his tone when he said the word ‘servants’ – but she still seemed unperturbed. She laughed and rolled onto her tummy, so that he stood looking down at her slender back and buttocks. He had to resist the impulse to smooth a hand over her back, to trace the journey it made, the way it tapered in at the waist, the small of her back with that transparent covering of hair and those two little peaks at the pelvic bone, the cheeks of her ass pushing through the pink panties. He could see the shadowy crack through the material.

  ‘They’re not servants Oisín! Tatiana and Kitty have been helping here for years. The others are relatives of theirs. They’re just helping to get things ready for the twenty-fifth.’

  ‘Couldn’t your mum do it? You have lots of sisters, couldn’t they help? It seems like a lot of fuss for a wedding anniversary.’

  She shrugged, and removed the rest of her clothes.

  ‘There’re lots of people coming. My family are lazy. What do you want me to say?’

  She walked into the en-suite bathroom, leaving her knickers in a twisted cord beside her shoes. There was a little white discharge mark on them. He hated the way she did that, walked about naked even when they weren’t fucking. He hadn’t decided on how to tell her that. It made him feel less of a man, it made him fancy her less. That was it. How could he explain that?

  He didn’t go in and take a shower with her. That’s what she expected him to do. Instead he leaned on the windowsill and looked out onto the vast back garden. He would show her the knickers when she got out. He’d tell her the sight of the discharge made him want never to go down on her again. He’d say it as though he was joking, but it might make her less cocky.

  The garden was the size of a field. There were fruit trees and exotic plants, some sort of wooden building that belonged at a health spa, and a paved area with a huge outdoor table and chairs, and a built-in barbeque. In the middle of the grass a huge canvas tent was being erected. He looked for someone who might be Helen’s Dad: someone directing the men, or helping them, but all of the men were dressed in paint-splattered work clothes and steel-capped boots. Beyond the garden was a field with high yellow grass, a cloudy pink sunset rolling along the horizon. He opened the window and let in the pecking and clacking of the workmen. The cool air moved against his cheeks. I want to cry, he thought. He was hungry though. The crisps from earlier kept exploding back up his throat in little parcels of cheese-and-onion-flavoured air. He had forgotten his toothbrush.

  Helen came out of the bathroom warm from the shower and completely naked. She stood behind him and pressed herself against his back, her hand creeping towards his fly. He moved away and pulled the curtains over.

  ‘Helen, do you want those men to see your tits? Is that it?’

  She fell back on the bed as though she had been thrown. ‘They’re not looking. They’re busy building the marquee.’

  She rolled onto her front. His own arousal bored him, but he put a hand on one cheek of her ass and kneaded it slowly. She drew her legs under her and raised her bum towards the hand like a nuzzling calf. The angle opened her cheeks out a little and he could see her clean pink asshole. It was still raw after that Brazilian wax ordeal, but the little sores had healed up. He wanted to lick it. Her hand was moving slowly between her legs. She was massaging her clit with one finger. He was hard already, his cock out. She whispered something in a soft, high, baby voice. He leaned in closer so that his face was next to hers and clenched one of his hands over one of hers. Her hand was so fragile, so easily crushed. ‘What, baby?’

  Her cheek felt cool and he realized that his was not. He was sweating and trembling. She said it again, but still too quietly.

  ‘What, baby?’

  ‘Fuck me?’

  He breathed out slowly. Not since his first time had he felt such disempowering arousal. He was suddenly aware of his jeans around his hips. The buckle of his belt dangled forward, cold against his thigh. She was making a fool of him. He slapped her ass and drew back from her. ‘Not now baby.’

  He wanted her to beg him. He wanted her to cry and ask him why he didn’t want her but she didn’t. Instead she slid her own fingers inside herself. One hand was on her clit and in her pussy, the other moved over her bum and slipped a pinkie into her asshole.

  Oisín was leaning back on his hunches now, watching, his cock pulsing like a sore thumb. She moaned. It was a high, twangy sound, like a parody of pleasure.

  He walked into the en-suite and closed the door. She stopped moaning instantly.

  There were four toothbrushes on a glass shelf over the sink, still in their packets, and pink toothpaste that smelled like disinfectant lying open beside the taps. He opened one of the toothbrushes and used the strange paste. It made his gums tingle. Then he took a short, cold shower.

  * * *

  Helen puts me in the pink room at the top. It has a sloping ceiling with a skylight facing the bed. This is where I always used to stay if I went home with Helen on bank holidays. Helen hates her house. She used to want me to go home with her all the time. It wasn’t because she wanted to see more of me. She used me as armour. For me though, it was always an adventure going to Helen’s. Her mother’s cruelty, her tantrums, the anonymity of cleaning staff wandering about the place, amused me. I never understood why it damaged Helen so much. Her mother’s expressions of dislike came in little outbursts. They were hateful – that’s the only word for them – but so petty that I never saw what was so disastrous about them. One mid-term break we got in to find that the drawers in Helen’s room had been emptied into the middle of the floor, the books and keepsakes washed off the shelves with a swoosh of her mother’s hand. A little ceramic cherub had lost its wings. They lay in jagged white fragments amongst the books. Helen sat down on the floor and cried. I didn’t think it was such a big deal. I folded her clothes and put them away while she sobbed. Then her mother came to the door.


  ‘I couldn’t bear to pass the door knowing the shit-heap that was in here. I made a start on it. I emptied the rubbish into a pile. All you have to do is sort it out. And don’t make Cassandra do it for you. She’s not your skivvy, just because her mother is dead, are you Cassy? You’re not Cinderella.’

  She thought this would embarrass Helen, this lack of sensitivity. Rudeness is a sort of weapon Helen’s mother uses against her children. She farts at the table. She used to tell us to watch how she could eat an entire packet of caramel hobnobs in one go, filling her mouth from the packet and then crunching down on the whole lot, bits of biscuit flying like sparks. The other thing she would do was spray canned cream into her open mouth and swallow it down defiantly. With her mouth still full of cream she’d answer her daughters’ repulsed faces by quoting the tin: ‘zero-fat!’ If there was any reaction at all on Helen’s face her mother would imitate her, pursing her lips and sticking her nose in the air. Helen, she said, had been a little madam since the day she was born.

  The other thing Helen’s mum enjoys doing is making sex jokes about Helen’s dad not being able to get it up. It was a regular thing when I used to stay here. She would gesture to his trousers: ‘I’m telling you Cassandra, it’s been a while since that old boy’s been in action. What with all the medication he’s on for being such a bloody loony!’

  Helen’s dad rarely speaks. He is handsome and tall but with the sort of face that betrays nothing. When she spoke like this he didn’t even go red. He didn’t even flinch.

  Helen didn’t see her mother all that much though. It’s a huge house. Staying here was a sort of all-expenses-paid hotel with the slight drawback of an angry woman bashing about determined to make Helen’s life less pleasant. We were kicked out of our rooms by Sally around noon every day so that she could make the beds and pick up our laundry. Our holidays here were spent avoiding Helen’s mother. We had to. Helen couldn’t stand to be in her presence. She would visibly shrink when she was in a room with her mother, and a prickly heat rash would appear on her arms and thighs. Her mother was always slamming in and out of the house with painters and builders and gardeners. There was always work being done. When she was called to the phone by ‘the help’, she would say, ‘Look, I’m very busy. I have six children and a house to run! Make it quick!’