‘Em, eh . . . are you . . . like, are you – ’
‘Sure? Am I sure?! You have the nerve to ask me that? Am I sure?’ She lay over and buried her face in a pillow. ‘You don’t feel anything for me, do you?’
‘No, like I, I do. I didn’t mean, I swear I don’t even – ’
‘Emer! Emer! Ring Daddy, please; ask him to come over here.’
‘Brute!’ Emer snapped at Dermot as she lifted the phone. ‘May I speak to Mr Quin, please.’
Dermot’s gaping mouth tried to make words.
Before he could give any utterance to his turmoil Emer intruded. ‘Len, do you think it’d be better to wait a few days, see how you feel? Or not?’
‘Yeah, yeah, like, that’s like what I think,’ Dermot said. ‘That’d be the best thing, what Emer said.’
‘Couldn’t do that,’ Lenny whimpered. ‘Daddy should know now. It’s only proper that I tell him, out of honour. Oooohh, ooohh. Why did you do this to me, Dermot Connolly, why, why? Ooooohhhh.’
‘Er, y’all right, Lenny; I didn’t mean . . . are y’all right?’ He turned to Emer. ‘What’ll we do?’
‘What will you do? Stupid . . . man. She look alright to you, does she? I saw you last night. Sick, what you were trying to do to her. Beast!’
‘I swear I never meant, I can’t even remember. I swear. What’ll happen to me? I didn’t – ’
‘Oooohh,’ Lenny wailed. ‘I was looking forward so much to going up onto Mweelrea.’
‘We can go, Lenny, now, we can go,’ Dermot said. ‘I can bring the car around to the front door for you. And you can even drive if you want.’
Emer put her arm around Lenny. ‘Come on, Len, let’s go to Mweelrea now, then back to Dublin, and think about things for a few days, see how you feel. Look at it this way: if you tell your dad now, what’ll he do? You know his temper. He’ll go stark raving mad; probably shoot Dermot in the head with his shotgun, from up close. After all, you are the only daughter he has. What do you say we hold off telling him, wait and see?’
‘I don’t know. Dermot, what’ll I do? What?’
‘Ah yeah definitely, definitely what Emer said, do definitely do that, I think.’ Dermot’s words stole his breath. ‘See how you feel next Tuesday, or Thursday.’
‘Oh, I need someone to help me. What should I do, what should I do?’ Hugging a pillow to her midriff, she whispered dreamily: ‘Mweelrea, maybe that would help me; see the mountain, see the water, drive up the back road, probably help me decide.’
Dermot sprang up. ‘I’ll get the car. Want to drive, Lenny, do you? I’ll let you.’
‘Okay, we’re all agreed, let’s go.’ Emer turned to Dermot. ‘Get Len’s bag. And make sure the car is warm and the Neil Young tape is in the player.’
Dermot scurried off. Emer bolted the room door. Then locked together the two girls fell into the bed, in rapture.
‘You are rotten to the core, Len Quin!’ Emer glared into Lenny’s thrilled visage, then pulled closer until her lips kissed Lenny’s. ‘That’s why I love you.’
‘You’re right, I am’ Lenny said. ‘Very bad sometimes. And Emer O’Hare brings out the worst in me.’
‘And the best. You said so.’
Soon the purple Beetle was rumbling toward Mweelrea, leaving Claire Abbey and Aranroe in its wake. After touring the lower slopes, the trio set out for Dublin. Entirely as Lenny Quin had orchestrated.
15
‘Get back! Get back!’ His feet and hands welded to the skull of the summit. He pleaded in his mind for it all to be a dream, and pleaded with her. But to her, it seemed, he did not exist.
He shimmied closer, fixated, whispering her name, aware that any move could send them both to the rocks. In this slow dissolution he realised too that there was nothing more he could do. Now his body stopped responding, senses turned off, the furore silenced. And in what seemed like the next moment, he felt again the gale in his face, in his eyes, its racket in his brain. If it was a moment he’d been away, it had been long enough for all the pictures of his life to play out.
Now her beating dress commanded his focus. His body clawed back another foot of rock, a foot closer to her, almost near enough to touch her. If he struck and screwed up, doom. He sprawled lower to the ground, called her name, asked her to come to him.
There was no fear in her, that was clear, just a calm beyond his comprehension. Then cotton whipped his fingers, flew past. He reset his hands, hoping they were still fast enough. And once again, like lightning in mad flight the cloth snapped in front of him, chaotic movement impossible to predict. Second miss. No more deaths to his name, he told himself, nor could he fail to stop one; he owed it to a sixteen-year-old Latino Jesus, even more to Joel Vida. Just one half-chance, he’d take it, go for her, even if life ended for them both. That was the deal.
He braced his boot to a new anchor, set for the final try, and lunged toward her. But the anchor gave way, sent him slipping out slowly, feet first, hands digging against gravel and stone, until his boot found a ridge. He recomposed, looked directly up at her. Her hand opened out, called for him to take her.
With no conscious forethought he pitched forward, clamped her wrist, and crashed back to earth. But he was sliding again, out to the abyss, anchorless, scratching desperately, gaining speed. Could he let her go? Save her? Save himself? He was losing ground.
He let her go.
But in that atom of time, time stopped, and an instantaneous force re-locked him to her. His boot stopped hard against a divot. In reflex, he kicked powerfully, forced his body into an inward roll, still harnessed to her.
Then he saw her cotton dress, felt it in his hands, just the dress, billowing, beating, blowing over him. Was he dead already, gone, he asked, being seduced by a rogue reality? Tumbling toward Atlantic rocks? Already there? Was it over?
But next he was under Lenny Quin, on the ground, weightless, and the wind didn’t roar, a state without turmoil or fear, nothing pulling at him, and he heard the words of Joel Vida: In life, darkness, but in darkness always one star to aim for. He was ice cold now, spread-eagled, soaked in sweat, the world screaming in his ears once again, Lenny’s body manacled to his own. Alive. Secure.
Drained and disoriented, they crawled off the summit, made their way down the trail, stopping frequently to rest and touch the earth. At the Druidic stones they both fell onto the metal bench, a long, trembling silence over them before either found words.
‘I don’t know why. I don’t know. I’m deeply sorry.’ Her gaze stayed on the gravel at her feet. ‘I felt I was lost for good, that moment.’
‘Fuck! A moment?! You don’t know? How close that was? We could be stone fucking dead right now. Me too, not just you. Maybe we are fucking dead. Fucking ghosts.’
‘I’ll never be able to tell you how sorry, how enormously grateful, I am. I think it was the height.’
‘Fucking bullshit. What’s going on, Lenny? That happened before, didn’t it? Don’t take me for a dumb-ass.’
She shook intensely, said nothing.
‘I’m not dumb. Those things don’t just start. You looked like you were out of your fucking mind. What is it? Tell me now.’
‘Not now, Tony . . . Let’s hold off, please. Till we feel more able.’
He retreated. The bliss he’d seen in her terrified him. As though she wanted nothing more than to go to another world. He’d seen crack addicts the same way. With her it was something else. She knew what it was, he knew that. He’d find out, but could he deal with it, any of this shit, any more of it?
They left the Druidic stones and walked until they reached the Seaview Café, lower down, where they sat in facing chairs and drank tea. Out of fractured intimacy they retrieved a composure of sorts, eventually. But what had happened went on terrorising him. He kept his darkest thoughts to himself, and his words few and measured.
After a while it came back to him that he had begun this day with a mission, to find out if anything was left between them. He coul
d go there. But why? And about what he had done on the summit, when he was powerless, what god gave him that? Worth celebrating. He’d deal later with what he’d learned this day, and consider what he’d lost.
Lenny’s voice broke into his thoughts, a new voice that belied the trauma of a few hours before.
‘Tony, as I said earlier, I feel it’s only fair that you should know what I want to tell you. About me, who I am.’
‘If you mean about the guy you’re seeing, forget it. Don’t need it.’
‘There is no guy. How many times do you need me to say this? Why is it you can’t trust my word?’
‘Little things. Like dozens of photographs of a man, one man, you and him, his clothes on your bed, your secret disappearances, drugs. Simple shit like that.’
‘It isn’t like that. Not at all.’ Her eyes opened wide to him; she held her gaze. ‘Just listen, will you.’
* * *
Her mother, Róisín Doyle, had passed away when she was five, she said. She had no memory of Charles ever being with them. He had to go away to do business, she was told. Then he disappeared altogether from her life, or maybe that was just how she thought of it. But it wasn’t hard to be sure about the real parent figures in her life, the couple who dominated her early years, Leo and Peggy Reffo. Leo had been a close confidant of her mother’s, and to the degree that anyone was able to raise her – not easy, she’d been told – Leo and Peggy did that. Peggy died three years ago, in early 1991. Leo was devastated. But he went on managing informally most of what happens in Claire Abbey, and now in his mid-sixties he was nearing retirement. Despite him being the closest thing to a father-figure she had known, as a teenager she directed a lot of loose anger toward him and rarely expressed appreciation for the unconditional love he and Peggy always had for her.
At eight years of age she was deposited in her first boarding school, in Sligo, a fiasco that lasted six months. Then for a short while she lived in Dalkey, in south Dublin, in the care of a live-in housekeeper and Italian au pair. When she was nine-and-a-half her father tried again, she said; he placed her with the nuns at Regis Hall in Wicklow, a boarding school walled in by ten feet of granite and an army of disciplinarians. At least that’s how it felt. Two weeks into that experience she earned the first of what became many suspensions. And hated her life.
Before she reached eleven her persistent insubordination succeeded: she got expelled for good from Regis Hall. Charles was abroad at the time, as usual, so once again Leo and Peggy took her in. Three weeks later Charles took her back, screaming and kicking, to Claire Abbey, and hired a governess. When that didn’t work he enrolled her with the nuns in Castlebar, which meant a forty-five minute bus ride every morning and afternoon. That went on for a few months, until she got her way, a place in St Agnes’s Girls School in Aranroe. She had some difficulties there with people, to do with not fitting in. But she did well academically for the first time, and for a while she was happy and sad, which was an improvement. Otherwise, she suffered and sometimes barely scraped through her early teenage years.
Then, in 1976, when she was seventeen, she escaped again, this time by enrolling as an arts student in University College Dublin. She came to detest the constriction of college protocols but did well and lasted out the four years. That’s when New York called, and she didn’t hesitate. It spelt ultimate freedom, which she grabbed with attitude and a long-held passion to turn herself into a professional studio photographer. Her one other great dream, cherished even longer, would also be fulfilled: she’d get out from under the oppression of Claire Abbey and all it represented. And one day in the future she was about to march into, she promised herself she’d have her own real family and real home. Neither of which had come about.
The initial narcotic of Manhattan turned slowly into a depressing grind: often decrepit, always requiring compromises that at first shocked her Irish sensibilities. But, after three years of room sharing, learning to recognise the prima donnas and massaging the right egos, her name and talent had won recognition among avant-garde art cliques. She learned to exploit every stare that roamed up and down her body, every flirting comment on her accent, every buy-you-a-drink invitation. Thereby she negotiated the essential imprimaturs, and doors swung open; she was hot, her images and fashion eye in demand. And she grew even more clever at servicing the power set, the royal road to the top. Her credo was compelling: play their game, climb higher. By 1984, her fourth year in the city, she was a minor celebrity, some said major, free to shoot her own style, choose her art directors and contracts. As she saw it, there was no ceiling that couldn’t be broken through.
Her commercial work won acclaim in international markets and led to suddenly-huge fees. Hence the framed magazine covers in her apartment. And that’s how life went on. Though constantly troubled by it all, she was addicted. She drank up the embraces, the admiration, sank into the anaesthesia and false nurture of it. Being talented had become a means to an end, a path to belonging, to feeling powerful and sought-after, and wanted. She drowned in the elixir of being a social icon, top of the party lists, always ready to hover on regal arms and all that went with that. Looking back now, she said, it seems vacuous and immoral, but it felt better than anything else she could envision, always more than what she had left behind in Ireland, better than anything there to go back to.
She had succumbed to a cult, been blinded, become an insider in a world that was voraciously self-preserving, up-town emperors and empresses flaunting power, exploiting celebrity, turning over lovers as new obsessions arrived, a compassionless game. Penthouse parties, white lines, hugs and kisses, libidinous frenzy. The delusion worked. Most of all the conviction that she was loved, the lie that lasted longest and was ultimately the most damaging.
Except for short periods, the scene had never felt right, she told him. That was not her, in Manhattan; somewhere in her heart she had always known it. In time, the truth began intruding, usually just before she fell asleep, accompanied by an increasingly heavy affliction, the loneliness in her soul. Then full-blown despair set in, and other warning signs she could no longer suppress. Until she felt that life as she had been living it could not go on. And it didn’t.
The beginning of the end came in the form of odd social insecurities, then physical spasms and brief mental absences that could strike at any time; she didn’t understand what was happening to her, but told no one. Bouts of depression followed, sometimes for weeks.
Then one morning, out of the blue, everything became clear as day: she’d been masquerading, living a lie, a failed way of life, unable to find what she needed, never even understanding what that was.
Nearly a decade after she had kissed the city with twenty-one-year-old lips and impetuous naivete, it all crashed. The struggle stopped at 8.06am on a late-March day: there was no longer any reason to live. No reasons for her for suns to rise. No one real. Nothing to move on to. And not a single love in that decade, not a touch that even fantasy could disguise. All this became clear.
Two hours later, after walking out on an ad agency shoot, she wandered semi-lucid along Fifth Avenue, into Central Park, and a number of times around Columbus Circle. By some circuitous route she ended up on a street bench, trying to make sense of her seemingly disembodied hands and feet that felt somehow not her own. All around her was distortion, shapes fearful and frantic, things dancing, rumbling, whirring. She tried to re-attach to the security of people, cars, buildings, trees, escape a chaos that was urging her to an end. But it felt futile to fight, to return to a life where the meter had already run out.
A while later she forced herself off the bench, trying to win back lucidity. Right then, the world felt like it had become too heavy on her shoulders. On another street, somewhere different, she began winning back willpower and the ability to question her condition. Was she expelling herself again, she asked, from a bigger boarding school? Cutting out from a world she could not relate to? The answer came, clear and certain: it was over. The New York game.
The whole game.
A part of her protested, but the depth of loneliness extinguished all argument, blocked all retreat. There was no reason left to wish for one more day. Then, somehow, she was back by Central Park: cars and buildings again, people walking hounds, stick figures, cold-eyed doormen, a hurdy-gurdy grinder, but not one decibel of the clamour entered her ears. All around her, spongy pavements, skyscrapers blowing in the breeze, blues pouring from the sky, green-glowing bodies running through a Dali-like pastiche.
In the midst of this chaos her thoughts jumped to Róisín, her mother, a woman she didn’t know, pressing her to find a rationale for living. But other, stronger powers insisted her dreams were hopeless. Time to end time, she resolved. Quiet. Painless. Calm. Fix some things first. She dropped her gold Solvil-et-Titus watch into the gutter. A yellow taxi bounced to a stop in front of her, rocked her back to the pavement, the driver shouting, gesticulating.
Then, on that March day in 1990, one minute before noon on a digital clock bleeding red time, an alien stumbled into her impending denouement. A long-haired Englishman. An accidental bump in a publishing-house doorway, a client’s place of business into which she had wandered for no reason known to her then or later. A bump into a funny, intense apostle of good with an electric smile.
Over the next six days he built a new world. On the seventh, on his arm, she walked out on New York City. Restored. Left her studio, everything in it, with her two assistants, for them. Didn’t look back. Never went back. His name was Aidan Harper, the man with the short pony-tail whose photographs hung in her bedroom. That was four-and-a-half years ago, she said. She was thirty-one. She had seen his face for the last time three-and-a-half years ago.
Here, her voice dropped, her features turned trance-like. Previous fractures had resolved quickly, as though something in her compelled her to go on. This time, though, her hand repeatedly swept back her blond hair but no words emerged.
On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland Page 17