Fragile Lies

by Elliot, Laura

  Forever yours,

  Razor

  Sixty

  From the outside Blaide House had looked the same yet once inside Lorraine could see the changes. A finance company had taken possession of the entire ground floor where Strong–Blaide Advertising once sprawled. But it was in the atmosphere rather than the physical transformation that the change was most apparent. The young people who had formed the creative heart of the partnership no longer spilled out into the corridors and the finance house had a more sedate work-force hidden behind slatted blinds. Adrian’s company, she noticed from the signpost, was now on the same floor as Ginia Communications. She allowed the elevator to continue upwards to the next storey and walked the length of the corridor towards the familiar spiral staircase.

  In ten minutes’ time her exhibition would officially open. No one would come. She had been forgotten. If people did arrive they would laugh silently before drifting away. The art critics would slice her in two, their harsh judgements forcing her to crawl back to Trabawn for cover. Having rapidly run the entire gauntlet of first-night nerves she stepped forward to greet Mara Robertson.

  The transformation of her one-time functional studio amazed her. Mara had used the space ingeniously, creating brightly lit display recesses in areas Lorraine had previously used for storage. The ceiling seemed higher, the walls wider, more spacious. The Donaldson brothers and Ibrahim had done a splendid job hanging her paintings. Only the triptych was missing.

  Painting the triptych should have been a dramatic gesture, worthy of some form of liberation. An escape from the hurt and anger that had held her in thrall for so long. She had breeched their secret, exacted a nasty revenge which brought her no comfort. She had waited for Virginia’s arrival, knowing she would be unable to stay away, but, after she departed, driving too fast and furiously from the lane, Lorraine had collapsed into a chair and hugged her arms to her chest until she was calm enough to carry the ruined paintings to the end of the back garden. The flames licked the wood and canvas then roared into an incandescent flare and devoured their secret. It was over in an instant.

  Adrian arrived in Trabawn the following day. Unable to disguise his fear, he had approached her with bluster and denials. He demanded to know if the stress of their broken marriage had reduced her to making insidious and dangerous accusations. He called her neurotic, vindictive, crazy. He demanded an end to her conniving dangerous games. He covered his face with his hands and begged her to forgive him. Emily found him in this position on her arrival home from school. He left shortly afterwards.

  “He hates his apartment,” she announced when she returned to the kitchen after waving him off. “If you snapped your fingers he’d crawl back, I know he would.” She came over to inspect the roasting tray Lorraine was removing from the oven. “You could at least have asked him to stay for dinner. He adores roast chicken.”

  “He was in a hurry to leave.” Lorraine placed the tray carefully on a heat mat and pierced the tender flesh with a fork.

  “No way! He wants to be here with us.”

  The argument that followed was predictable and resulted in Emily bursting into tears as she ran up the stairs to her bedroom. The door slammed, the music thumped and texts flowed back and forth between her and Ibrahim as she demanded sympathy and understanding.

  Lorraine’s forehead felt bruised and tender. A headache that had been throbbing gently all afternoon developed into a painful spasm. Painkillers would take care of her headache but there was nothing in her medicine cabinet to protect her from Emily’s hopeless optimism.

  The invited guests filled the gallery. Meg and Eoin Ruane arrived, followed by Lorraine’s parents. The road-works crew were there in force and gathered around the portrait, teasing the woman who had dressed for the occasion in an off-the-shoulder red dress and dangling earrings. The Trabawn art group came en masse. Emily abandoned her combats for the occasion and wore a black, skin-hugging mini. Aware of the impact she made as she sashayed around the gallery, she delighted, once again, in being the daughter of an infamous artist. Lorraine heard her saying, “Extraordinarily effulgent and expressively executed,” to Ibrahim, who replied, “Spit out the dictionary, girl, and kiss me.” Adrian and Virginia did not make an appearance.

  Lorraine greeted old friends and familiar journalists. She smiled into cameras and uttered convincing sound-bites. Bill Sheraton held her hand in a forceful grip. She was air-kissed by Andrea. Lorcan made an impressive entrance, dressed in a black velvet suit and red frilled shirt. He seemed taller than she remembered, more confident, capable of smiling without pain. He introduced his girlfriend, a thistledown young woman called Marianne, who appeared to have an opinion on every painting in the collection.

  “Very noir-ish and filmic. Edward Hopper influences. I like your honesty, Lorraine. You’re not afraid of realism.”

  Bill Sheraton purchased the road-works painting. “Marianne claims it signifies the underground dominance of the matriarchal structures in post-modern society or some such crap,” he said in an aside to Lorraine. “For my part, I fancy that tough little woman with the cable. Reminds me of my mother.”

  Andrea’s mouth tightened. The colour scheme was obviously not to her liking.

  Other paintings had acquired “Sold” stickers, including the salsa women and the birthing of the calf, the latter proudly purchased by Sophie’s husband.

  Mara stood beside her, smiling. “Lorraine, I’d like to introduce you to the buyer of Sand Blizzard.”

  She turned and found herself face to face with Michael Carmody.

  Her paintings had been admired, criticised, analysed, misinterpreted, praised for their iconoclastic images of desolation, isolation, alienation, inclusion, exclusion – dismissed as being too representative, photographic, trivial – and now the gallery was in darkness.

  “A most successful opening,” beamed Mara Robertson before she led the Trabawn contingent towards Dawson Street and drinks in Café en Seine. Ibrahim had left with Emily whose grandparents were treating them to a meal in a Chinese restaurant.

  To be alone with him was the height of folly but he had asked her to go somewhere quiet and she had nodded, unable to refuse. Their footsteps beat time against the Liffey boardwalk. The city was restless, traffic still heavy on the bridges. Soon the pubs would empty, spilling young people onto the streets, and the air would be redolent with kebabs and violence. A young woman in a slip dress shouted as she walked past, a rag doll stumbling drunk. Her face beneath tendrils of blonde hair was hazed in the overhanging lamps, her plump body lurched forward on heels that were too high. Her companions surrounded her. They laughed and bore her away, accepting with good nature the causalities the night had to offer.

  Lorraine was conscious of his stillness when he stopped and rested his arms on the river wall.

  “Nothing has changed,” he said. “I love you. But you can’t forgive me. I see it on your face. You’re fighting against me as hard as I once fought against you.”

  “This is not about forgiveness, Michael.”

  “Then what? I know we can make it work. I’ve never been more positive about anything in my life.”

  “My marriage was built on deception. How can I begin another relationship when it was founded on lies?”

  “We have no secrets now.”

  “But you’re still tormented by what happened to Killian. You won’t rest easy until you find the people who are responsible.”

  “Would you be able to rest easy?” he demanded. “Knowing that if they’d stopped and called an ambulance immediately the trauma to his brain would not have been so severe. What would you do in my place?”

  “Exactly the same.” Her words dropped like stones into the sullen water flowing below them.

  “What happened to Killian no longer has anything to do with us.” When she made no reply he moved closer. “I’ve never been in love until now. I’ll never fall in love again. This will stay with me until I die.”

  The love he demanded
would be soldered with passion and tenderness. Her love would be fiercely insistent on honesty, trust. One vision, one truth. If she stood with him a minute longer she would never be able to leave. Her voice shook then steadied. “I can’t give you the love you need, Michael. And anything less between us would be a sham. We’ve said goodbye so often. This has to be the last time. Forgive me.”

  The river tossed seagulls on its crest, eddies spinning, twisting and turning as it wended under the luminous arch of the Ha’penny Bridge and continued its restless passage towards the sea.

  Sixty-one

  Brahms Ward, Midnight

  Perhaps the experts are right. Cannot be awoken … have not yet … Who am I to be the judge of anything? Reflex actions, fluttering eyelashes, your tight convulsive grip, I come here night after night seeking signs, hoping, praying, willing you – all of us willing you back to us. I’m no good tonight. Your grip gives me comfort but it changes nothing. My heart is a stone. She has left me bereft. The trail to the Great South Wall is dead.

  I went back there today, back to where the sea laps the pier and seagulls swoop through fumes of gas and oil. Dublin is in the grip of a renaissance, Killian. Office blocks are mushrooming along the quays, apartments, hotels. The motorways are marching onwards for Ireland; cement labyrinths carrying traffic outwards to the four provinces. Under ground, over ground, tunnels, tracks and grid-lock. On the docklands there is a new heart beating and only the old Customs House sprawling white along the quays prevents this city becoming a stranger to me.

  I walked the wall between the rocks and the sea and tried to imagine what you were trying to recapture each time you strayed there. Childish memories, stories of mysterious sea voyages – or was I weighing you down with my own dead memories? It rained while I was there. I let it wash over my face and when it stopped a rainbow spanned the lighthouses that guard the mouth of Dublin Bay. A white ferry passed beneath its arch. I saw you sliding deep into the indigo, hiding away from all of us, Jean, Terence, Laura and sulky brat Duncan who loves you so much he’s mixed it up with hate because that’s the only way he can cope. Love and hate, Killian. Two sides of a damaged coin. I spun a silver coin and found it to be baseless.

  Afterwards, I collected my painting. The exhibition is over. A new artist will soon take her place on the walls. Sand Blizzard, she called it. Snow on sand and a woman slight as a twig looking upwards towards the old boathouse. The gallery owner said it’s a good choice. Painting Dreams was illusion, fantasy, unfulfilled desire. There was no strength in her paintings, only yearnings. This collection is different. Energy jumps from the canvases. The night is magic.

  I stood among the cool white walls of the gallery and imagined a studio where donkeys used to live. I saw palettes of burnt sienna and yellow ochre, the luminous splashes on the walls, the canvases still drying. I saw her painting you … or was it me? That’s the way it will always be. I can deal with it. Rainbows are illusions. They disappear.

  On the way down I shared the elevator with Virginia Blaide. If she remembered our last meeting she gave no sign. She smiled and wished me good day.

  * * *

  The tide has receded. Black horses at rest. One by one, two, three and four, the stars appear, pinpricks shimmering, sparking. Dawn will come soon. The world will be green. What a colour that will be. A green new world. He stirs and reaches for the moon.

  Sixty-two

  MIRACLE RECOVERY OF COMA VICTIM

  A courageous young man has defied medical opinion and is recovering in hospital from horrific head injuries incurred when he was critically injured in a hit-and-run accident. For seventeen months Killian Devine-O’Malley lay in a post-coma vegetative state with little hope of recovery. Supported by his family and friends he fought back and is now in a stable condition. His reawakening has been greeted with amazement by the medical team at the Hammond Clinic.

  “We never lost hope that he would recover,” said his father, Michael Carmody, whose TV series Nowhere Lodge has won him legions of young fans.

  “For Killian to reawaken after such a traumatic injury is nothing short of a miracle,” said an overjoyed Ms Devine-O’Malley, whose vigil by her son’s bedside was constant.

  The family plan a quiet celebration when Killian is released from hospital.

  Gardaí hope to interview him when he is strong enough to answer questions. It is hoped he can provide them with relevant information on the circumstances surrounding his accident.

  “In the meantime we are renewing our appeal to anyone who was in the vicinity of the Great South Wall on 20 November 2001 between 11 p.m. and midnight and noticed anything suspicious,” said Garda Sergeant Murray. “The case is still open and we are particularly interested in interviewing the owner of a silver car (make unknown) which was seen in the vicinity shortly before the accident occurred.”

  * * *

  The fax machine in Virginia’s office clicked into receive mode. A document came through, slightly darkened in transmission. Not a muscle moved in her face as her eyes scanned the headline from the Dublin Echo. Adrian’s office was empty, his computer still on, a half-empty mug of coffee cooling. The faxed clipping had been shredded and flung into the wastepaper basket.

  The touch of lace on her skin. The cool whisper of silk. Virginia fastened hooks and suspenders. She stepped into a dark purple dress that flattened across her stomach, outlined her breasts. She applied lipstick, a damson streak, and sprayed perfume on her pulses.

  Temple Bar was crowded with cinema-goers and diners. The night was mild enough for young people to gather on the pavements outside the pubs, where they converged in groups. She entered an apartment block and took the elevator to the top storey.

  “I didn’t think you’d come.” Ralph opened the door wide and drew her inside.

  “Just hold me,” she said . “We don’t have to talk.”

  She knew his body intimately yet, now, it was as if she touched him for the first time. His lovemaking, once so demanding, moved at a slow, leisurely pace. She remained passive in his arms, willing to allow him control, knowing he was enjoying the languid lie of her body, her slow sensuous response. She remembered the violence of their early years, her delight when he twisted her arms above her head, locked her in a grim embrace, and how she had fought him, feigning resistance, teasing him into exhaustion, their excitement heightened to a point where it could no longer be contained. Youthful games that seemed so trivial after Jake died. Life taking its toll on fun and games, even war games.

  It was after midnight when she phoned Adrian. “I won’t be home tonight,” she said. “I’m staying overnight with friends.” She hung up before he could reply.

  “I never believed I could forgive you.” Ralph leaned on his elbow and stared down at her, smiling his sharp wolf smile.

  “But you haven’t forgiven me.”

  “If that’s what you believe why are you here?”

  “We always played games, Ralph.”

  “Games are for children.”

  “Games are for those who want to play them.”

  He pulled her roughly towards him. “Let’s play some more then.”

  The bells for Sunday mass were ringing as she drove through the city and out towards Clontarf. Joggers ran along the promenade, elbows tight to their sides. A flotilla of yachts swooped past Howth Head, white sails billowing towards harbour. What had they talked about? So many subjects to be skirted. No-go areas where she must tread with caution. But it was possible to recreate those early days, move back to London, make a fresh start together. The Celtic Tiger economy was slowing down, companies cutting back, hi-tech US giants repatriating their profits or seeking cheaper labour markets further afield. It was only a matter of time before Bill Sheraton took action. She was tired of Ireland with its constant inward navel-gazing and scandals. Time to bale out.

  Adrian was sitting by the window, a bottle of whiskey almost empty. All night long he had been waiting, she realised, looking at the overflowing ashtray,
the congealed remains of an evening meal.

  “Ah, Virginia, just in time to share the last glass.” He carefully poured the remaining whiskey into two glasses and handed one to her. “To us. To happiness. Are you going to tell me where you were?”

  “I was with friends. I told you I was staying overnight with one of them.”

  “Don’t make me laugh, Virginia. You have no friends.”

  The weight of desolation dragged his face downwards, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, everything sagging like a sad clown. Whiskey fumes, paint fumes, fumes of guilt; she was tired struggling. As he bent forward unsteadily to place his glass on the low marble-topped table it slipped from his fingers and shattered.

  “Broken glass – look, broken glass. Better not touch.” He laughed wildly and held his hand before her, pointing to a white scar across his palm.

  She forced him back from the table, suddenly terrified he would lift a shard and press it into his flesh or turn, in his befuddled and furious state, on her. “Leave it, Adrian. I’ll clear it up.”

  He sank heavily back into the armchair, his head bent forward, watching her with a bleary but focused stare. “You were with a man last night. I can smell him on you.” He gripped her wrist, pulled her downwards with such force that she lost her balance and collapsed on top of him. “Leave me and I’m going straight to the police.”

  “I’ve no intention of leaving you. You’re drunk, Adrian. We’ll discuss this again when you’re sober.”

  “I’m drunk and I’m serious. For better or worse. That’s us, Virginia.”

  “For better or worse,” she replied and opened the window to let the fresh morning air blow through.

  Sixty-three