‘You know, your granddad was a great dancer,’ said Martha, leaning towards the girls. ‘He taught me how to waltz.’
‘I didn’t think boys could dance,’ said Amelia.
‘Not all of them,’ said Martha. ‘But some can.’
‘Yes, your granddad wasn’t a bad dancer,’ her mother conceded. ‘When he was sober,’ she added, under her breath.
‘What’s sober?’ asked Amelia. You could never get away with anything with Amelia. Martha loved that about her.
‘Better eat your ice-cream before it melts,’ Anna advised.
Now James and Mark – who ran a dry-cleaning business together – were telling their mother about a new shop they were planning to open.
‘ ... never been a dry cleaner’s there before but my market research showed that—’
‘I did the market research, James.’
‘You started it and then I—’
‘Only because I had to attend that boring bloody conference in—’
‘You volunteered yourself. You said you’d never been to Leeds, remember?’
‘Why would I bloody well want to go to Leeds?’
And on it went. Martha wondered how they ever got any actual work done but they did, somehow.
Anna was telling Helen about a great yoga class she had attended when she was pregnant with the twins and Amelia wanted to know where she and Alice had been before they were in Anna’s tummy and Martha thought about her father, dancing with her in the kitchen one Christmas Eve, and about the last time she had danced. The night she had taught Cillian Larkin how to waltz.
* * *
He had cooked dinner for her that night. He liked to cook, used it as a way to unwind after work.
‘This is pretty domesticated, isn’t it?’ he’d said.
‘Don’t go getting any ideas.’
‘Still, it’s been a year.’
‘Not until next Thursday.’
‘So you do know.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘How would Madame like her steak?’
‘Bloody.’
Cillian had turned his back to her, poked at the meat on the barbecue. From her vantage point, she could study him, undetected. She drank him in, like a cold beer on a hot day. There was something deliciously untidy about him. Perhaps because of the length of him. Or his dark, thick hair that grew out as well as down, if left untended, which it often was.
He wore cut-off jeans. Nothing on his feet. She could see blades of grass poking between his toes. His T-shirt was so old the writing on it had faded away. ‘It’s my lucky T-shirt,’ he’d told her when she’d offered to burn it. He claimed that Kurt Cobain had taken it off his back at the Point Depot in 1992 and Cillian had caught it, worn it ever since.
‘Have you ever even washed it?’
‘I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.’
Nobody believed him about Kurt Cobain. Well, Martha didn’t anyway.
She thought about the T-shirt then. Brushing against his smooth, sallow skin, covering his wide, hairless chest, not quite reaching the top of his jeans so she could see the small of his back, the delicious hollow of it.
Martha lifted her glass and swallowed a mouthful of wine. Cleared her throat.
‘You OK?’
‘Fine.’ She looked away, collected herself. Sometimes, she felt her physical attraction to him was overwhelming. Something beyond her control. She struggled to contain it. It felt like trying to get a lion into a shoebox.
‘I know you were staring at me.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
‘It’s my bum in these jeans, isn’t it?’
‘You have no bum in those jeans.’
They ate at the rickety wrought-iron table Cillian had found in his sister’s attic and repainted. According to Joan, it was the table where their parents had sat when his mother told his father that she was pregnant with Cillian. Martha noticed that Joan often spoke to Cillian about their parents. Anecdotes. Like a photo album he could flick through in their absence.
‘How did she manage to raise you? She was eighteen and you were only ten.’
‘She told my mother she would. So she did.’ Cillian made it sound simple. A matter of promises made and kept. Sometimes, when Cillian talked, Martha felt something curious. Like anything was possible. She was almost always able to put it down to the drink, the next day.
Cillian had bought the house a little over a year before. Just after he’d been promoted to detective.
A year later, the garden was improving quicker than the inside of the house. ‘I’m better outside,’ Cillian said and Martha thought this was an accurate observation. There was something untamed about Cillian. He didn’t look as comfortable when he was in an enclosed space, always bending his head through doorways.
‘How’s your steak?’
‘Fine.’ It took her by surprise, every time. How good he was at cooking. Nothing fancy, mind. Chocolate cake, T-bone steak, served with the mushrooms he picked in the woods at the back of the house, fried on a pan with butter and garlic. That kind of food. Martha – who didn’t happen to be an enthusiastic eater – ate whatever Cillian cooked. It was always tastier than she expected.
‘Have some salad.’
‘No.’
‘It’s good for you.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Do you want more baked potato?’
‘I want more wine.’
She held out her glass. Cillian poured.
‘How’s work?’
‘Fine.’
‘I saw your report on Primetime. About the asylum-seekers. I thought it was really good.’
‘Thanks.’
Cillian mopped up the juice from the meat on his plate with a crust of bread. He sat back in his chair, looked up. She followed his gaze and was startled by the number of stars. There were certain things about the countryside that were proving not as awful as she’d feared. Not that she lived here. Of course not. But she was here quite a bit, all the same.
The quiet, for one thing. You could hear yourself think. If that’s what you happened to be doing.
And on a clear night like tonight, there were stars.
‘There’s Orion’s belt,’ said Cillian, stretching out his long arm and pointing towards the constellation.
She knew he was going to say that.
Before he said it.
She knew.
‘Remember what we always say,’ Tara had reminded her, when it looked like she and Cillian were going to make it past their one year anniversary. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt.’
But sometimes, familiarity could be ... well, nice, she supposed. Saved you the bother of second guessing.
‘There’s Orion’s belt,’ he said, as she knew he would.
Martha smiled, reached for her wineglass.
‘How’s the case going? Did you catch the baddies yet?’
His face when he smiled. Especially here, outside in the dusk, with the lengthening shadows smoothing the edges. Yes, his nose was too long 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 when he smiled – which was more often than not, Martha felt – something happened to his face. Something good. He looked happy. No. Content. Martha didn’t know anyone else who looked like that.
‘I caught a few this week. But apparently there’s more.’
‘At least you’ll never be out of a job. A bit like a funeral director.’
‘That’s a comfort.’
Martha’s wineglass was empty. Again. She didn’t want to reach for the bottle. Be seen to be reaching for the bottle. Instead, she excused herself and went inside to what Cillian called the powder room but which was just a room bearing a toilet with a chain flush and a rusting claw-footed bath that Cillian swore would be beautiful again, some day.
She sat on the edge of the bath and fished a miniature bottle of vodka from the inside zip sect
ion of her handbag. She kept a selection of them in there – along with tissues so the glass wouldn’t clink and give her away – for emergencies.
Not that this was an emergency.
But Cillian could get funny sometimes. About how fast she drank. Or how much.
He sometimes commented on her drinking and she didn’t like it, and they were having such a lovely evening, she didn’t want to spoil it by drinking the last of the wine, then having to go inside and hunt down another bottle while he looked at her in that way he had. That concerned way.
This way was better. She tipped the contents into her mouth. Swallowed hard.
There was no smell from vodka but she brushed her teeth anyway, with the travel brush she kept in her make-up bag.
‘I’m getting a lot of work done on the house this summer. Make it ... more homey, y’know?’
‘Less of an outhouse, you mean?’
‘I’ve been thinking ...’ He stopped then, looked suddenly shy, his thick fringe spilling across his forehead.
‘What?’
‘Well, the house, it’s a bit big for one person.’
‘Cillian, it’s a two-bedroomed cottage. You’re not going to get lost in it any time soon.’
‘The bed. That’s pretty big.’
‘Well ... yes, that is a big bed.’ Martha felt the familiar rush of blood around her body, a pulse beginning between her legs. She’d never been like this with anyone else. She’d always liked sex but she’d taken it, left it, not dwelled on it. All Cillian had to do was say bed or graze his fingers against hers as they both reached for the pepper shaker or just arrive in a room in his awkward, lanky way and she’d be off, thinking about him in all manner of compromising positions.
Impure thoughts. That’s what they’d called them in school, those worrying nuns.
‘It’s even bigger when you’re not in it.’
‘What?’ Martha dragged her thoughts back to the conversation.
Cillian sat forward in the chair that looked too small for him – although most chairs looked like that. He dragged his hands down his face, took a breath. ‘What I’m saying is ... I’d like you to be in it. In bed with me. More of the time. Actually, all of the time.’
‘What about work? We’d get nothing done. Dublin would be like Gotham City, with the baddies running riot.’
‘I’m being serious.’ He reached his hand across the space between them, put it on her leg. ‘I want you to move in with me. Or at least think about it.’
For a moment, Martha said nothing. Instead, she poured the last of the wine into her glass. Already the empty bottle was distracting her. The fact of it. She always liked to know where the next drink was coming from. And the next.
‘Martha?’ He took his hand off her leg, waved it in front of her face like he was attempting to wake her from a trance. She shook her head.
‘Sorry, I just ... you took me by surprise there.’
A part of her – a not insignificant part – wanted what Cillian wanted. She’d thought about it, thought about how lovely it would be. He was a strangely gentle man despite the rangy heft of him. And he could lift things. Her sofa, for instance. The one that was too big for her living room. He’d said it was too big. She’d bought it anyway. And then he stopped saying it was too big and somehow got it up the stairs of her apartment building where the lift never worked. All the way to her apartment on the third floor. He eased it in through the door. Slid it into position. He wasn’t even out of breath.
‘Joan wants me to dance with her at the wedding,’ Cillian said then, like nothing had gone before. ‘I still can’t believe she’s getting married.’
‘It’s a pity Naoise can’t walk yet. He’d make such a cute pageboy, wouldn’t he?’
‘He’s criminally cute, alright.’
‘When you say dance, do you mean proper dance? Or are you talking about your version of the eighties disco dance with the shuffley legs and sticky out arms?’ Martha said.
‘No, proper dancing. Like a waltz or something. She said it’s traditional. The father of the bride dances with the bride apparently. Except there’s no father of the bride. So she’s asked me.’ He sounded worried. He was one of those people who could do things. Without being shown. He’d re-thatched the roof on this ridiculous cottage, for fuck sake. Although he later admitted to watching a YouTube tutorial. He tuned in Radio 4 on her digital radio without being asked. There was nothing IKEA could throw at him that he hadn’t been able to assemble. He could replace a string on her violin even though he had never played a musical instrument and, when she asked him to buy tampons on his way over to her apartment, he knew to get tampons and Panadol and a slab of dark chocolate.
He just knew.
And now here he was, not knowing. Not knowing how to waltz.
‘There are tutorials on YouTube,’ Martha offered.
He shook his head. ‘It’s not something easy like making an igloo.’
‘I suppose I could teach you,’ she said slowly.
He looked at her and she saw his surprise. ‘I didn’t know you waltzed.’
‘I don’t as a general rule. But I know how to. My dad showed me.’ She didn’t mention that he’d been pissed. It was after a trip to Bonn. He’d attended some ballroom dancing thing, one of the nights. They were mad about waltzing, the Germans.
‘It’ll only take a minute.’ She stood up. Marched towards the grass.
‘Take your shoes off,’ Cillian called after her. ‘Your heels will sink into the ground, it’s still soft from the rain.’
Martha took her shoes off.
They stood in the grass, in the field he called the garden. They stood beneath the canopy of stars that punctured the dark of the sky where no clouds dared. She arranged his arm around her waist, fitted one of his huge hands into the small of her back, the other in an upright L-shape, so she could slip her hand between his thumb and forefinger. It had no right to feel so dainty there, her hand, and yet it did.
They began to move, she whispering one-two-three and his hips hard against hers and they turned and they turned, there, in the garden, in the dark, with the moon glancing against their bodies and she hummed the ‘Emperor Waltz’ and wondered if this is what people meant when they said, It’s good to be alive.
It was good to be alive.
That night.
It was good.
She’d got up after he’d fallen asleep. Opened a bottle of wine, careful not to wake him. He’d wonder why. Was she thirsty? Was she stressed? He’d want to know.
They were exhausting, the questions.
The truth was, she liked drinking. Better still, she liked drinking alone. It was like a hobby, although not one that she talked about. She’d be the same if her hobby was ten-pin bowling. She wouldn’t tell a soul.
She sat in the room that would some day become a den, if Cillian’s plans saw fruition – which, she had to admit, they usually did. Tipped the wine into a mug that could be passed off as tea if he woke.
He’d say, ‘Can’t sleep, Martha?’ He said her name like it was a question that could never be answered.
He didn’t wake but she worried that he would, and that took the good out of it. When she finished the bottle, she brushed her teeth and got back into his big bed, careful not to wake him.
She lay there, staring into the dark, and she knew. That she wouldn’t be able to move in with him.
In the sober light of morning, she told herself that it was because of her work. The unpredictable nature of it, the way she needed to come and go at odd hours. And the novel she sometimes thought about writing. She’d need her own space for that, wouldn’t she?
But that night, lying in Cillian’s big bed, with the empty wine bottle hidden in her handbag and the mug she had used to drink it rinsed and dripping on the draining board in the kitchen, she knew. That she couldn’t live like this. Live with him.
She was better on her own, never having to explain.
Much better.
&nb
sp; Martha thanked her mother for lunch, bade her brothers and sisters-in-law goodbye and gathered her nieces in her arms, kissed their sticky vanilla ice-cream cheeks and reiterated her offer to babysit, which was politely but firmly declined. She supposed she couldn’t blame Anna and Mark. For most of the little girls’ lives, she had not been ideal child-minding material.
‘Keep in touch, won’t you?’ her mother asked, lifting Martha’s hair away from her face to inspect the bruising at closer quarters. ‘And stay out of trouble. Please? I’m getting too old to be worrying about you.’
Thirteen
Tobias could not tell how much time had passed, only that it had. One night. Perhaps two. Or more. He thought it might be the afternoon. There was a sag in the air that he associated with afternoon, those hours between the first tentative light of dawn and the dark certainty of night that stretched and stretched.
He sensed Rosa in the room rather than heard her, although it wasn’t until she stood beside his bed that he knew for certain she was there. He recognised her quietness. And her scent. Lily of the valley, he thought.
He could hear the rub of Rosa’s shoes as she walked around to the other side of his bed, faint against the floor. She still favoured the right leg. Had done so since her accident late last year. Most of October and November she was gone. Nobody told him where she was and he hadn’t asked. It was not his place to do so. It was only when she returned, her wrist and ankle still swollen from her fall, that he conceded – privately – the impact of her absence.
He had missed her.
To Rosa, he merely said they had much catching up to do and told her to be at the library the following Thursday at their usual time.
He heard the creak of the chair beside his bed as Rosa sat down. He could feel her tension; it was like a physical presence in the room.
When she spoke, she whispered, as if she were afraid someone might find her there. Instruct her to leave.
Tobias was certain that he was ill enough to warrant a ‘next-of-kin-only’ visitor policy but perhaps they had relaxed that policy when they realised there was no one else.
He couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying. If he could, he would have told her to speak up. Speak clearly. Something about her boy. How he didn’t want to see her. She had sat outside the room where he was being questioned. She wanted him to somehow know that they were in it together.
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