Between Dog and Wolf

by Sokolov, Sasha; Boguslawski, Alexander;

  She helps me on with the dress. When she has pulled it down over my face and shoulders, when I have scootched it around so that it sits the right way on my frame, I look at her again. I feel grateful to be allowed to look at her when she is glowing like this. It’s that thing that happens with her, that effervescence. She is as tall as me now, because I’m bare-foot and she must be wearing high heels. It feels uncomfortably intimate to be on a level with Helen, face to face, when she is beautiful like this. Not for the first time, I have to suppress the instinct to kiss her. So that I won’t kiss her, I speak. ‘You look beautiful.’

  She smiles, ‘I have piles of make-up on! I totally forgot to get something new. You think it’s okay to wear this dress again? You think it matters? Will they notice?’

  ‘Oh shit, I didn’t bring any make-up!’

  ‘You don’t need any.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You don’t. There’s no one here who matters.’

  I get ready quickly and don’t bother with any other make-up because Helen is right, there’s no one here who matters. She’s right as well, to want an escort to descend the stairs with. The hall is packed. The walk downwards seems to take forever, as vaguely familiar faces turn towards us and whisper, ‘Now, which one is that?’

  There is muttering about Helen’s boyfriend, that he is around here somewhere and he is from college. All this I gather on the journey from the top of the stairs to the bottom. Then we find Helen’s sisters huddled in a corner, all beautiful in a similar way to Helen, all like sexy cherubs, but only Katie, the youngest, with that glow that Helen has. It’s a freak of genetics, how the O’Brien girls turned out. Neither parent has the high, round cheeks or the ringlets. I shouldn’t say they are all beautiful. Emma looks awful. She is wearing a dark, long-sleeved dress and her shoulders jut out. She has transformed into a streak of sinews, sharp edges and fluffy skin. Her face is sunken. Her ringlets have turned to drooping scraggles. Perhaps she is beautiful in a new, dangerous sort of way.

  Carla and Laura have boyfriends too, and Katie has invited a few boys who are all just friends and are all pining for her. They are dreadful gangly things with puberty sprouting around their chins. Katie is fifteen. She is wearing a clubbing outfit and too much make-up. She came to the family late enough to be comfortable with this wealth. It’s all she knows. She is not as serious as her sisters. Katie is the only one likely to have a free gaff and let her friends trash the house. She is the only one likely to be caught with hash or cigarettes stashed in her room. She talks differently, through her nose, doing a funny thing with her vowels, and she wears only brand-name clothes. All the same, I like Katie a lot. There is something genuine about her despite, or perhaps because of all this.

  The boys hang quietly on the edges of the circle. All of the girls’ boys are a sort of protection against the mother, something of their own that they can take to the party and take away again into their other life, away from Trina. The girls are excited. They are enjoying the solidarity of this, the togetherness of being in their own home full of strangers, of looking communally beautiful. Katie kisses Helen on the cheek and says, matter-of-factly, in case there is any doubt, ‘You look really nice.’

  Then she gives me a bear hug and so do Emma and Carla and the twins, Laura and Sorcha. They say they haven’t seen me in ages and they miss me and so on. Then Katie looks over my shoulder. ‘Oh shit, Helen, it’s Mammy. She’s already got us. You’re on your own. Do you know that guy? Mammy says we know him. Uncle Raymond?’

  Trina approaches us with the elbow of a heavy, bearded man in her grip. She runs a hand all the way down Helen, from under her arm to her hip, then holds her chin with her thumb and the bend of her fingers:

  ‘You look pretty when you’re in a good mood, Helen. You’re dog ugly when you’re not.’

  Trina has an odd way of touching her girls that is somewhere between midwife and brothel keeper. Though the eldest, Helen has never learned how to deal with Trina. She shudders as her mother’s hand brushes her waist, lifts her chin for her and then stands blank-faced, waiting for someone to say something. Carla, taller and a little darker than Helen, with long hair piled on top, puts her hand on Helen’s arm.

  ‘Yes, she’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

  Trina introduces the man as Uncle Raymond, as though he is a fond and familiar relative. He says something sleazy about Helen’s exposed back, and then Trina leads Helen over to meet ‘Deirdre, you remember her? You knew her when you were little …’

  We walk out over the damp grass to the marquee and I talk to the sisters until they begin to disperse and then I pal up with little Katie, who is ignoring the boys she brought and who used to crawl into bed with me and Helen on the mornings when I stayed, tucking her neat eight-year-old body in between us.

  The boys are standing awkwardly in a corner, watching everything. The marquee is surprisingly warm. The fabric inside is a thick purple velvet, and the tiny twinkling lights lend a fairytale charm. Katie and I pile salads and kebabs onto our plates and find some chairs to sit on while we eat. Katie is comfortably getting drunk before me, though she is underage.

  Where is the dad in all of this? Helen’s dad, Trina’s husband, Pat? I spot him standing beside the drinks table, his mouth set with a slight curl at each edge, an expression of friendly neutrality, if that is possible. If asked for his opinions on anything, Pat will shrug and shake his head saying, ‘Well, you know, you can’t be too extreme about these things.’

  It seems to go on for hours, the waiting about, the guests approaching Katie and saying, ‘Which one are you?’ and ‘Do you remember me?’

  Some of them aren’t that rich. I didn’t see that from the window. Some of them are wearing cheap suits and flimsy ties, the women in high street dresses. Some of them are shocked by all this. The lavishness is as much for them as for the wealthy neighbours. Trina loves her money, and she loves to display her life like this, like something to be sold. She would love to think they envied her.

  At last someone taps a glass and someone else tells the DJ to turn off the music. Denis, the parents’ friend, makes a speech. It is a comical thing of rhyming couplets, with dirty bits, about Trina and Pat and how they met and what happened then and all the sex they must have had to make six children. I don’t hear very much of it, all I grasp is the limerick rhythm of it, and the crude, unnatural laughter that whoops out of the guests every few lines. Everyone is grinning.

  They are all taken up with this idea, the generous couple, happily married for twenty-five years and still going strong, six beautiful daughters, rich as fuck, fair dues to them, that’s what everyone is thinking. Except Pat, the dad, who is still standing by the drinks table with that still face, laughing politely, non-committally, and not as loudly as everyone else. Trina is standing beside him now, holding his hand and snuggling her face into his shoulder. Trina wrote most of this speech. I can tell by the way she follows Denis’s lips as he recites. As long as I have known Helen though, her parents have not shared a room. And Trina has hated Pat for as long as I have known them, calling him a fucking idiot a few times a day, a pathetic bastard, a loo-la, and he has been silent on all this for as long as I have known them, so there is no way of knowing what he feels.

  All the same it is infectious. The iambic meter is like a heartbeat, lulling us into its own world. And I can see Helen thinking, ‘Gosh, maybe they love each other after all. Maybe we’re all happy and we all love each other after all,’ and she kisses Oisín and folds his beefy arms over her bare back and raises her face to him like an offering and he grins smugly, stupidly. All the O’Brien girls do this now, cling to their men and smile at Denis and then at their parents, believing in this happiness, surprised at it, but believing in it.

  The party takes off after the speech. The music changes and the beautiful daughters begin to dance wildly and jokingly. I dance too, and we’re having a good time now; we are enjoying looking beautiful and carefree and silly. Pat comes over and dance
s too, stiffly, and smiles at his daughters; his achievement. The boyfriends and the wannabe boyfriends dance too.

  We are so beautiful. Especially Helen, even though she is getting tired suddenly, around the eyes and skin, the places where her glow was a few hours ago. Even Oisín. He looks beautiful too: rosy-cheeked, young, healthy. He’s smiling at her with love and astonishment and a vague, respectable sort of desire, swinging his hips stupidly. I can feel my own beauty, the way it swells under my clothes, the perfection of my body at this age of twenty-one, the perfection even of the flaws just because it is all smoothed in youth. And I think for what? What is all this beauty for?

  After a few hours the guests begin to leave and Helen stops dancing and touches my elbow, ‘I’m tired. Do you want to come inside?’ We all sit in the kitchen, Helen and I and the other O’Brien girls, and some teenagers I haven’t met before, who must be friends of someone’s. Everyone’s drunk, except Helen, who looks tired and happy. The boys sit outside the babble, quietly intoxicated, while the girls laugh and nibble at some leftover pavlova roll with fresh berries and cream. Carla boils some milk on the Aga to make us all Baileys hot chocolate, and then asks me to take over because I am better at whipping the egg. I love this, the girlishness, the warmth, the togetherness of it. I feel privileged to be part of it.

  At the same time I want to tell them to be grateful, the sisters, because they don’t know how precious this is. I feel like a sister too, and so do the teenagers. The family love this. They love this patronage, this adopting of other people. There are a few of us, ‘my other kids’, Trina calls them, though she has very little to do with us. It is more a case of being adopted as a sister or brother. They say things like, ‘I love the way Cassy makes hot chocolate, don’t you? I love the way she puts the marshmallows in and cooks them a bit …’ and you get the feeling of being loved, of mattering, and are grateful for it. In this way the family expresses its abundance and its lack.

  I don’t know what we talk about, because I’m quite drunk now too, sipping my hot chocolate and looking at the girls, all those bouncing ringlets and the animated O’Brien eyes, all different depths of blue. Helen looks fragile, leaning back in a kitchen chair, one hand on her abdomen and the other dangling loose beside her. The dress is losing its magic. She isn’t speaking with the others. She is frowning slightly. Sorcha is saying something funny, about her mother, probably, and the others are laughing.

  Helen stands up suddenly. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to go up.’ It is the end of some private train of thought in which she thinks we were included. She goes upstairs without ceremony, and there is a sense that the rest of us have been jilted by her. The fun is gone out of our little gathering. The boy, Oisín, hangs around a bit longer, leaning on the Aga, looking awkward with his too-long arms, and then leaves too. I want to go to bed now. I kiss all the sisters, bear-hug them all, and begin making my way through the dregs of guests that are admiring the photographs in the hallway, and up the stairs.

  On the landing there’s an antique grandfather clock. It’s 3 AM. I actually need to be up early. My grandmother will be coming to collect me in the morning. It is typical of her. ‘No, I won’t go Trina, if you don’t mind, it is too tiring for me, but if you don’t mind perhaps I could come in the morning? I could bring some croissants. It’s been some weeks since I have made a batch. I could bring the pastries if you had a cup of coffee for me? What time do you think you’ll be up? Is ten too early?’

  My eighty-four year old grandmother, ever-dignified, skidding about in her old Merc, coming to collect me so that I can spend tomorrow night between clean sheets, wrapped in the smell of her utility room and her care. At my grandfather’s funeral she sat like a guest. It meant nothing to her, this ritual for people who don’t know what life and death are really about. It had nothing to do with her or my grandfather. All the grandchildren did a party piece. My cousin played something slow and impressive on the violin. I read a poem by Goethe that my grandfather had copied for me once in pencil onto a piece of paper, about death and rest. It was in German. I didn’t cry because she wasn’t crying. I hadn’t the right.

  I am angry with my grandmother for her resilience. My grandmother, well used to mourning, administering yet more of her never-ending supply of love to us hungover shits, folding home-made croissants – a two-day process, a miraculous skill that will die with her – fixing us coffee that tastes as though she has made it, because she has something, my grandmother, a wisdom that makes everything she touches sacred, and I think, well, thanks, but what a waste, what good is all this to me when you will be dead soon anyway? Leaving only us kids with all our potential, all our future, all our waste of beauty.

  twenty-four

  You wake, and remember. No, you don’t remember because you haven’t forgotten. How could you forget when it’s in your body, this knowledge? You wake and it is the first thing you know.

  You’re not sick from it, though there is a vague waking nausea, and a nagging need for more sleep. Oisín is curled beside you, his hands tucked under his chin, his mouth pushed into a pout, snoring mildly. He looks like someone else the way dead people look like someone else. This is not how he would like you to see him. This pose, curled like this, is remiss on his part. He has forgotten – because his body holds no knowledge in its folds, lets everything dangle outwards, shakes off memory, feels for more, retains nothing – because his body is like this, its rest separate and total, he has forgotten that he is asleep beside you.

  Your nausea is like a hangover. You can almost taste it in your morning breath though you didn’t drink last night. You didn’t drink even a sip of wine. That’s how you know you’ll have your baby, Helen, because it wasn’t planned at all – the not-drinking. It was a decision made by your body, your stomach that lurched from the smell of deep-fried brie and the antiseptic champagne, that is guarding that other beat in the deep red of your womb. With this haze of hormones your body protects it from you and whatever you would normally think or do. Your body, ushering you into the past already like a gentle hand on the small of your back, make way, make way … You are already moving dumbly, you already feel bovine. It’s your body, which has a better sense of destiny than you do, and better navigational skills, that has been making the decisions all along.

  Oisín breathes in noisily and turns onto his back. Something in his dreams is disturbing him. As often happens when you wake beside Oisín, the air feels used-up and dry. He saps the moisture from a room when he sleeps. You need to open the window. You roll over and sit up, aware of your lithe body, its miraculous capacity for movement. The small of your back aches, the spot where that hand is placed, nudging you on. The dress is collapsed on the floor, the shape of you still warm in its bodice and the full skirt spread in peaks and valleys all around it. Instead of opening the window you go downstairs. You need out of the room altogether, the exhausted air, Oisín’s privacy.

  This house is always cold. It is too big to be otherwise. Any warmth in it feels superficial, like the sweat from synthetic clothing. Your bare feet hit the heated floor of the hall and you remember then the feeling of mornings in this house: stagnated blood in your hands and feet and that cold in your back; the plush darkness beyond the glossy black windowpanes because there are no next-door neighbours, not really. Night drags on into morning here, something to do with the house’s low-lying position, but you don’t know what.

  In the kitchen a long-legged woman with stripy hair is tackling the washing-up. It’s your mother’s Villeroy & Boch. It can’t go in the dishwasher. She has a high, round, denim-clad bum, this woman, and no hips. She doesn’t turn when you come in and you have left it too late to say anything. By the time you reach the fridge the dumbness is insistent, pressing on your lips, goaded by slosh of the washing-up. There is a clawing in your throat, a clot in your stomach like a lie let slide. You want her to turn and look at you, and you want to say, ‘Do you have any babies? I am going to have one. It’s being made right now. I am a
woman too.’ But she doesn’t turn and you can’t speak.

  The kitchen is immaculate already, apart from the washing-up, which is stacked to this woman’s left and covers the worktop all the way around the corner. There is nothing in the fridge that you feel like eating. It all smells like fridge. Then you think ‘granola’. Your mother has a new slide-out press. It works by twisting a little knob on the wall. An array of dry food glides out. The food contents are accessible from both sides, the jars and packets held in by a little railing. There is no granola. But there are Coco Pops. A bowl of Coco Pops is just what you wanted and you can’t get enough. You eat three bowls, one after the other, trying not to be too loud because you’re sitting alone at the new oak table that seats twelve, in the huge kitchen with a transparent ceiling, your knees tucked up under Oisín’s jumper, continuously chomping while at the other end of this kitchen a woman with her back to you is washing precious plate after precious plate, and placing them in the second sink, which is a sink for rinsing, like they have on the continent, or so your mother says, and this woman is pretending not to notice you. The bowl you are eating out of is not Villeroy & Boch, so she will not have to wash it, it can go in the dishwasher. It is a plastic thing from your childhood with a faded Bosco on the inside. His hair and nose are pink. The rest of him has paled to grey.

  You want milk now. A big glass of milk, which is something you haven’t had in years. Another sliding press contains the glasses, and you select a dishwasher-proof one, because the thought of putting your used glass alongside all those wine glasses – about two hundred, it must be, the red ones with a little pool of water at the bottom to stop them from staining – is excruciating. It’s a thick beer glass you take out, and you fill it with cold milk, but something happens as you lift it to your mouth. You let go. Then the glass is smashed at your feet, shards poking up from a pool of clean milk, and at last the woman with the striped hair turns around. Her face is older than her body. She looks Russian. She must be a friend of Tatiana’s, hired to help with the party. She has a small swelling in her abdomen, elasticated jeans, an early pregnancy, and she squats and picks up the broken pieces and places them in the base of the glass, which has remained intact.