She wouldn’t think about Cillian Larkin.
Martha struggled into a short green dress, a pair of black leggings and her Doc Martens, which she tried and failed to lace. She left her hair down because she found it too heavy to lift in the circumstances.
She covered the worst of the bruising on her face with a layer of foundation, located the biggest, darkest sunglasses she owned, left a voicemail for the editor and left the apartment.
She drove to the hospital and thought about Cillian Larkin.
The way he hadn’t sat on the couch. He’d been about to, Martha felt sure. And then he’d remembered. All the things that had happened on that couch. The conversations they’d had. All the ways they had been there together. He had stopped just short of the couch, then sort of reversed until he was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs instead. But there were memories there too. Cillian, straddling the chair the wrong way around, his long hands draped over the back of the chair, as Martha cut his hair, the tickle of his breath warm against the skin of her arm as she snipped at the fringe that hung into his eyes like fraying curtains.
‘Don’t take too much off,’ he’d say.
‘I’ll take as much off as I like.’ But she never took too much. It had been dark then, his hair, the grey only beginning to make itself understood. Now it was almost all grey. A metal grey. It needed a good cut. It had always needed a cut, no matter how often she had taken the scissors to it.
He was no beauty. His nose was long and narrow and his bushy eyebrows held a suggestion of mono-brow and his cheeks bore the faded scars of a virulent strain of teenage acne. But, she’d had to concede – and not just when she’d been drinking – that there was something about Cillian Larkin, although quite what it was was difficult to put your finger on. The height, she supposed, might have had something to do with it. The brown eyes were wide and fringed with those annoyingly thick, dark eyelashes that men take for granted and women covet. He’d been mad about eye contact so that you felt sometimes, when he looked at you, like you were the only person in the world. Martha had always looked away first.
He seemed the same, mostly. Same clothes – straight navy jeans, plain navy T-shirt, black leather jacket, runners – but different too. In their last few months, he had looked worried. Fearful. She had resented that look, knowing what it was he was worried about. Fearful of.
The details were coming fast now, hurling themselves at her, as if she hadn’t decided not to think about him.
She thought about him. She came out with her hands up, gave herself up to it. Perhaps it was time. Overdue even. Maybe she needed to take those thoughts out of storage, look through them before she committed them to black plastic bags, tied them with string at the top, said goodbye.
She’d never said goodbye.
Not in the traditional sense.
Now, she thought about the fine lines that fanned from the edges of his eyes. About the fact that they were longer now. How they deepened and spread when he laughed. And the way he used to laugh. With his mouth open so wide you could see all the way back to his larynx. And his mouth. The way it formed itself around his words this morning, slow and quiet, stirring memories of that same mouth, long ago, moving around her body, slow and insistent and thorough. ‘If you’re going to do a job, you have to do it right,’ he’d said, lifting his head from between her legs when she got impatient with his pace, squirming beneath him. Then bending towards her again, with his mouth, as if they had nothing but time. As if there was all the time in the world.
The driver in the car behind pressed his hand on the horn, left it there. Martha glanced up in time to see the traffic light change from green to amber, then red. She was surprised to see that she was almost at the hospital. The car behind was still beeping. She thought about thrusting her hand out the window, giving him the finger, but it seemed too much of an effort and, besides, the noise was helpful in its way. The way it filled her head and left no space there for anything else.
At the hospital, Martha stood in front of the directory and tried to work out where Tara’s room might be. Katherine had told her which floor. Was it the third? The letters of the words seemed to shift and blur. Martha closed her eyes, shook her head, looked again. Or was it the fifth floor? St Colmcille’s ward? That seemed to ring a—
‘Martha?’ The voice was familiar although it must have been nearly two years since she’d last spoken to Cillian’s sister. At her child’s christening, and the less said about that particular fiasco, the better.
‘Joan. Hello. How are you?’
‘Are you looking for your friend? Tara Bolton, isn’t it? I was on the phone to Cillian earlier. He told me what happened at the bank. Terrible business.’ Joan shook her head. She looked the same: short brown hair framing a round, youthful face, belying the fact that she was Cillian’s senior by eight years. She wore no make-up or jewellery other than a fine gold band around her wedding-ring finger which had, Martha remembered, belonged to Cillian’s mother. Her uniform was an immaculate white, her shoes a soft black leather, comfortable as slippers. In her hands, a clipboard. Behind her ear, a pen. She looked like someone you would call in an emergency. Someone whose presence in a room would make people feel somehow safer.
‘Tara, yes, I wasn’t sure ...’
‘She’s in St Columba’s ward, on the fourth floor.’ Joan smiled. The smile held a trace of wariness, Martha felt. As if she was remembering the last time she’d seen Martha. Falling against the baptism font, unsteadying it, then trying to right it by reaching for the rim, only to unsteady it further still, causing it to crash to the ground and break into a fair few stony pieces.
Joan’s baby boy – Naoise – had begun to cry those long, insistent cries peculiar to babies, and Martha had left shortly after that.
Joan’s eyes rested briefly on Martha’s face. Martha could see her taking in the surplus-to-requirement sunglasses, the shadow of bruises visible beneath the thick layer of make-up. Had Cillian told her everything that had happened at the bank? Probably not, for surely Joan would have made some reference to the bruises. For a brief moment, Martha wanted to tell her. That she hadn’t been drunk and fallen over. That she hadn’t had a drink for one year, four months, two weeks, four days. That she was different now.
She didn’t say any of that. Instead, she gestured towards the bank of lifts. ‘Thanks, I’ll ...’
‘I’ll grab a lift with you. I’m heading to the fifth floor,’ said Joan, looking at the notes on her clipboard now, not looking at Martha’s face and thinking the worst.
In the lift it was just the two of them. Joan pressed the button for the fourth and fifth floors. Martha studied the numbers on the screen, waited for the lift to move. She had always found social interactions difficult without the benefit of alcohol. Especially when she was around people who knew her when she drank. Since that day, when she’d quit, it was sometimes like learning how to be in the world, all over again.
Joan did not appear to notice her discomfiture. Nor was she a person who found silence awkward.
The lift groaned upwards.
‘How’s little Naoise?’ Martha finally came up with.
‘Not so little anymore. He’s a big, bold three-year-old these days.’ She whipped out her phone, touched the screen a couple of times and presented it to Martha. The similarity was uncanny. Naoise was the image of Cillian.
‘He’s lovely,’ Martha said.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen him the other day in SuperValu. He took off all his clothes and ran through the fruit and veg aisle. It’s his latest thing. Streaking through supermarkets.’ Joan laughed so Martha did too, and when she stopped, the silence in the lift seemed deafening.
They were edging past the second floor now.
‘You won’t stay too long, will you?’ said Joan. ‘Tara’s doctor reckons the post-traumatic stress is severe so it’s best to keep things ...’ she looked at Martha with a sort of an apologetic smile, ‘quiet, you know?’
&
nbsp; Martha nodded, much too emphatically. ‘Of course,’ she said. Then, after a pause – they had just inched past the third floor – she said, ‘And Joan, I ... I just wanted to ... I mean ... the last time I ...’ She stumbled along the sentence, her voice straining as if her throat had constricted. That sometimes happened too, when she met someone she hadn’t seen since the old days. The old her. She supposed it had something to do with shame. And anxiety. A potent mix.
‘That’s all water under the bridge,’ said Joan. Martha hoped the water reference was unintentional.
‘Oh, I saw your piece in the Herald last week,’ Joan said then. ‘About becoming a humanist celebrant, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah, a friend of mine recently qualified as one.’
‘It was really funny.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m glad to see you’re working again. And Cillian’s moved on too. He’s really happy in Donegal. Everything worked out for the best in the end.’
The lift jerked and the doors slid open. Martha had to stop herself running out. Joan put one hand against the door to stop it closing. With her other hand, she pointed at a closed door along the corridor. ‘She’s in that room,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ said Martha, but the lift doors were already shutting. In the narrowing gap, she saw that Joan had taken the pen from behind her ear and was scribbling furiously on the clipboard, as if her meeting with Martha had never happened. Or had made no impression on her day.
Why would it? They had all moved on.
Martha approached the door that Joan had pointed to, knocked on it, waited and then, when nothing happened, she turned the handle, pushed at the door. The handle banged against the wall and the door swung back towards her. Katherine, who had been dozing in a chair beside the bed, jerked.
‘Sorry, Katherine, I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘Martha. I’m so glad you’re here,’ said Katherine. She looked exhausted, the skin on her face straining against the bone beneath. Damp strands of hair hung, listless, around her face.
‘Maybe she’ll respond to you.’ Katherine nodded towards the bed, where the blankets covered Tara’s head and the outline her body made against them was a small, tight circle.
‘She must be melting under there.’
‘If you pull the covers down, she only pulls them back up.’
From the bed, there was no sound. No movement. Katherine stood up, stretched. Martha could hear the pull of her bones.
‘Have you been here all night?’ she said.
Katherine nodded. ‘I kept thinking she’d wake up and leap out of the bed, you know? Insist on getting out of here.’
Martha nodded. She had thought the same thing.
‘What did the doctor say?’
‘He thinks it’s post-traumatic stress. Which might be true if it was someone else. But Tara? She was on that train that derailed and a plane that made an emergency landing. Not a bother on her.’
Martha remembered what Tara had done both times. She’d got on the next train, the next plane. She’d kept moving. She had never stopped moving, not since Martha had met her on her first day at school.
‘Has she ... spoken to you?’ Martha asked.
Katherine shook her head. ‘Not really. She hasn’t even asked for her phone or laptop.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know.’
On the table by the window was a bottle of Coke. Martha used to drink a lot of Coke. It was a handy drink for hiding things in. Things like vodka. Vodka didn’t have a strong smell. And a vodka and Coke just looked like a Coke. Nobody passed any remarks when she drank a Coke.
She looked away. ‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked Katherine.
‘At mass. She’s throwing novenas at the problem.’
Martha grinned even though it hurt her face.
‘Besides,’ Katherine went on, ‘she says she can’t look at Tara like this. She says it’s too unnatural.’
That was the word Mrs Bolton had said that day, way back in 1993, when Ireland eventually agreed with Europe that adults who make love to other adults of the same sex, in their own safe homes, in their own sweet time, were no longer in danger of being arrested. Jailed. ‘Unnatural,’ said Tara’s mother, shaking her head. ‘Grown men doing God knows what to each other. It’s just ... unnatural.’ Tara and Martha had been sitting at the kitchen table. Martha had opened her mouth to say something but Tara caught her eye, shook her head in her small, discreet way.
In the end, neither of them had said a word.
‘Why don’t you go home for a while?’ Martha said to Katherine. ‘I’ll stay here with Tara.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I promise I’ll ring you if there’re any developments.’
‘Thanks, Martha.’ Katherine lifted her coat from the back of the chair. ‘I need to get to the bank, see what’s what. The phone’s been ringing off the hook all morning.’
When Katherine was gone, Martha pulled the chair closer to the bed, sat down. A vase of lilies on the locker beside the bed leaked their cloying scent into the hot dryness of the room. Martha leaned towards her friend.
‘Tara?’
No answer.
‘Tara?’ She said it louder this time, accompanied the word with a gentle poke to the shoulder. Then another, not so gentle.
Nothing.
Martha stood up, picked up the vase, put it in the corridor on the floor, closed the door firmly on the misleading delicacy of the blooms. Next, she threw open the window, waving her hands to encourage the chill January air inside. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that much better?’
Still no response, even though Tara loved lilies and detested draughts.
Martha stood at the head of the bed. She curled her fingers around the edge of the blanket, pulled it down to reveal her friend’s flushed face. Already, Tara’s usually shiny, silky hair had the dull, limp appearance of someone who had been in a hospital bed for a long time.
The woman in the hospital bed seemed like a different person to the woman Martha had picked up from the airport only two days before.
* * *
Martha had driven from the airport to Tara’s apartment in Malahide where Tara had dropped her bombshell, albeit in her usual calm, collected way.
‘I’ve been seeing someone.’
‘What?’ Martha nearly choked on her tea.
‘Don’t say what, say pardon.’ Tara parodied her mother. Her impersonation was immaculate.
‘A fling?’
Tara shook her head slowly.
‘You mean you’re having a relationship with somebody?’
Tara nodded, slower still.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Martha.
‘It’s not that preposterous.’ Tara’s tone was a little injured now.
‘No, of course not, it’s just ... you took me by surprise, is all.’
‘I was a little surprised myself, to be honest.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Mathilde.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘She’s French, she loves knitting, skiing, historical fiction, has a pathological interest in the female orgasm and she owns a cafe in London. That’s how I met her. Do you want to see photographic evidence?’ Tara asked.
‘I do,’ said Martha, as Tara whipped out her phone, her fingers a blur as she tapped at the screen. ‘There,’ she said, handing the phone to Martha. On the screen, a photograph of Tara on a deserted beach standing beside a beautiful brunette with bright blue eyes and long, athletic legs. Martha couldn’t see her feet because they were immersed in the frothy surf but she was sure they were beautiful too; Tara was a stickler for good feet.
‘She’s stunning,’ said Martha, mostly because it was true and also because she was momentarily rendered dumb in the face of Tara’s uncommon enthusiasm when it came to, well, relationships. Stuff like that.
Tara was protective about her sexuality. She’d never really come out. Not in any form
al sense. ‘My sexuality is nobody’s business but my own,’ she’d said. ‘You don’t go around telling people you’re a heterosexual, do you?’ Martha conceded the point.
Tara had gone out with only a handful of women – and only after she moved to London – and had not invested in any long-term relationships. ‘I don’t have time,’ she’d said once, when Martha brought it up.
Her relationship with Mathilde was new ground. Unfamiliar terrain.
‘I’m happy for you, Tara. It all sounds great.’
‘There’s a catch.’ Tara set her cup on the coffee table and looked at Martha, her face grave.
‘What?’
‘She wants to get married.’
‘To you?’
Tara glared at Martha. ‘Stop being fatuous, Martha. She wants to have a wedding. Invite our families.’
‘Might be best if you tell your family you’re gay first.’
‘Can’t you be serious for once?’ Tara stood up, went to the kitchen and found a tin of tuna fish which she opened and began eating with a fork. This was her version of comfort eating, which was probably why she was so skinny.
‘Do you want some?’ she asked.
‘Don’t you have any chocolate biscuits?’
‘Any what?’
‘Oh, never mind. Go on. I promise not to say anything glib.’
Tara stood in the kitchen until the tuna tin was empty, then returned to the couch, sighed a tuna-fish sigh that Martha managed to avoid by pressing herself against the back of the couch.
‘She proposed to me. She had a ring and everything.’
‘Where is it?’ asked Martha, peering down at her friend’s fingers.
‘Well, that’s just it. I only wore it when I was with Mathilde. I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just ... I hate having to explain myself to people, you know that.’
Martha nodded. She knew.
‘Then, the day before yesterday, she showed up at Heathrow. I was checking in for a flight to Milan. She’d had a meeting at the airport and thought we’d have time for a coffee before my flight.’
‘And she noticed you weren’t wearing the ring?’
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