‘No.’
He refills my glass.
He says, ‘Don’t worry about the kitchen; I’ll clean it up.’
He says, ‘Don’t worry about the goulash; it’s not as hot as the last time.’
He says, ‘Don’t worry about the lemon and ginger biscuits; they’re supposed to look like that.’
I’m going out of my mind.
It’s later when I come up with the plan. It’s not a lie as such. It’s more like self-defence. I throw myself a lifebelt. I have to. It’s either that, or say, ‘Look, it’s not you. It’s me.’ Anyway, it’s not like I want to break up or anything as drastic as that. I just need . . . a break. A mini-break. That’s all.
I say, ‘Brona is anxious to see some of the new manuscript and I haven’t got much so far so I was thinking about barricading myself into the apartment, switching off the phones and just getting down to it.’ I don’t mention that I haven’t written any of the new manuscript. None of it. Not one word since the accident. The bloody miracle.
Thomas smiles and says, ‘Good idea. I’m glad you’re getting back to work. It’s a good sign.’ He puts his hand on mine. His smile is one of those encouraging ones. His tone is a master class in tenderness. I feel like I’m being crushed to death in the back of a bin lorry.
I say, ‘So I was wondering if you could . . .’
‘You want me to make myself scarce?’
‘Yes.’
‘No problem. I need to spend some time on the farm anyway. It’s coming up to harvest time. Need to make hay while the sun shines, eh?’
He leaves early the next morning, when I’m still in bed. I’m half asleep when he comes to kiss me goodbye. His hair is damp from the shower. He smells of my Clinique shower gel, which I’m always telling him not to use. He kisses me for ages and I worry about my breath because I haven’t brushed my teeth yet, but he just keeps on kissing me, as if there’s nothing to worry about at all. Then he takes off all his clothes again and gets back into bed and we have sex and Thomas calls it ‘one for the road’.
He says, ‘Give me a call. I know you’re writing. But the odd time. OK? Just to let me know you’re all right.’
‘Why wouldn’t I be all right?’
‘Well, maybe you might be wondering if I’m OK.’
‘You’ll be fine.’
‘A farm is a dangerous place, you know.’
‘It’s not a farm. It’s five stony fields.’
‘Five grand big fields.’
I say, ‘See you next week.’
He says, ‘Kiss me again, for luck.’
Then he says, ‘Hang on, I’ve left my wallet in the bathroom.’
Then he says, ‘Wait, I’d better take some of those lemon and ginger biscuits for the journey.’
‘It’s an hour’s drive, for God’s sake.’
After a very, very long time, he leaves. I stand in the hall and breathe it in. The silence. It’s like something physical, the silence. Something you can get a hold of.
I am alone in the apartment. I can do anything I like. Nobody will say, ‘Are you all right?’ or ‘How are you feeling?’ or ‘Isn’t it such a bloody miracle that you’re alive?’
Mostly, I do nothing. I watch a lot of telly and I eat Cheerios out of the box. I order a lot of takeaway and I make a fairly good dent in a box of wine. I don’t think about the accident – the bloody miracle – and I don’t think about my rib, mostly because it doesn’t really hurt anymore. When I’m in danger of thinking about anything serious – like my deadline or how quiet the place is since Thomas left – I turn on the telly. Daytime television is enough to banish even the merest whisper of a serious thought right out of your head.
I do this for a few days and then I have to venture out for essentials. Cigarettes. Wine. Dinner. Dessert.
It’s when I’m on my way back that I meet Nicolas. Nicolas from number thirteen, who always makes suggestive remarks when I meet him in the lobby downstairs. Today is no different. Nicolas is in the lobby, checking his post. He takes a few flyers out of his letterbox and straightens, which is when he sees me and smiles. His face is long, his teeth are small and his mouth is wide, and the combination of these features brings to mind a crocodile in long-term captivity. His expression tends towards resigned.
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Ms Kavanagh from the fancy penthouse. Looking foxy as always, Kat.’
I say, ‘Hello, Nicolas.’
‘Where’s Farmer Tom? I haven’t seen him recently.’
‘Thomas isn’t a farmer. He just tells people he is.’
‘Whatevs. Where is he?’
‘Gone away.’ I allow a trace of melancholy into my tone. Perhaps I’m after a bit of drama after my quiet few days.
Nicolas sweeps me up and down with his eyes. He always does this. I’d say he’d make a great eye-witness in a courtroom drama. He takes it all in. His eyes settle on the bags I’m carrying, straining with junk. ‘Let me help you.’ And before I can tell him to piss off, he’s wrestled the two bags out of my hands and he’s jabbing the lift call button with his index finger. Inside the lift, he puts the bags down and they clink and crinkle in a most revelatory manner. Nicolas looks inside. Cheeky rat. He says, ‘Having a bit of par-tay, are we?’ I ignore him, which does nothing to deflate him. He hunkers down and does a quick inventory. ‘Tub of Ben & Jerry’s, two bottles of Sancerre, family-size pepperoni, Kettle Chips, large bar of Cadbury’s mint crisp and . . .’ he rummages around at the bottom of the bag, ‘. . . ah yes, forty Silk Cut Blue.’ He looks up and grins. ‘How do you get to be so gorgeous on a diet like this?’
I don’t know why I let him into the apartment in the end.
He’s in sales. And I need a distraction from the deadline and the quiet. A pushy salesman and a woman in need of distraction. That’s a pretty deadly combination. But of course, I could have taken my bags of junk and shut the door in his face. I’ve done that before.
We eat the family-size pepperoni with one of the bottles of Sancerre to wash it down. Dessert is the gigantic bar of mint crisp and I resent breaking it into bits. We don’t bother with coffee. We just go right ahead and open the second bottle of wine.
Nicolas becomes less sleazy as the afternoon wanes into evening. And there is something attractive about him. I just never noticed it before. He starts calling me pussy-cat, which I find not unamusing.
We have decanted from the couch to the floor and are lying on cushions, halfway down another bottle, and we’re watching Judge Judy on the telly and roaring laughing at a woman who’s suing her ex-boyfriend for stealing her hair straighteners and the pair of FitFlops that, she said, were the main cause of the tautness of her calf muscles.
That’s when Thomas arrives.
I realise he’s in the apartment only when he’s at the door of the sitting room. He’s in his farm gear. A woolly jumper with a hole in the elbow. The trousers of an old suit, tucked into mud-spattered wellington boots. The wellingtons are the ones that I bought him. As a joke. They’re bright pink with yellow buttercups here and there. I never thought he’d actually go ahead and wear them.
Because it’s a bit of an awkward situation, I start to laugh. It’s not that I find anything funny, exactly. It’s just . . . I don’t know.
Thomas doesn’t laugh. In fact, I get the impression he’s pretty ticked off. The wine has anaesthetised me, but, still, that’s the impression I’m getting.
He says, ‘I thought you were working.’
I say, ‘I thought you were working.’
‘I was. But I got worried about you. When you didn’t phone. And I couldn’t get through to your mobile or landline. And you didn’t respond to any of my emails.’
I look at Nicolas and I giggle and I say, ‘I’m fine. There’s no need to worry. I’m having a lovely time, so I am.’
For a moment, nobody says anything and it gets pretty quiet in the apartment, and I’d say, if I were sober, it’d be a damned awkward type of silence.
&nbs
p; Then Thomas says, ‘I’m going to go.’
‘But you just got here,’ I laugh after I say that, as if I happen to think that’s pretty funny.
Thomas doesn’t think it’s funny because he just looks at me like he has no idea who I am. Then he looks at Nicolas, who stands up and holds out his hands as if he’s expecting Thomas to slap cuffs on him. Nicolas opens his mouth as if he’s going to recite a poem and that’s when Thomas says, ‘Goodbye,’ in a very serious, final sort of a voice and, before I can think of anything funny to add to that, he’s gone. Just like that.
Gone.
It’s as if he was never here.
I look at Nicolas and snigger, the way drunk people do when they can’t think of anything to say.
Nicolas says, ‘I should split.’
Split. The state of him.
He doesn’t try to kiss me or anything. I think he may have kissed me at one stage during the afternoon. I remember thinking: Christ, that’s a long tongue. But I have no recollection of an actual kiss.
It doesn’t matter now.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
Three months later . . .
I check the calendar. It’s the sixteenth of October, which means it’s ten weeks exactly till my tenth birthday, which is also Christmas Day and, who knows, it might even end up being the new baby’s birthday, if it comes three days late.
That’s a lot of things for one day.
I wasn’t supposed to come until the twenty-fifth of January. Mam says I was the best Christmas present she ever got. I got a dog for Christmas when I was a kid. I taught him to jump through Faith’s hula hoop. His name was Setanta, after Fionn MacCumhaill’s dog. He died about six months after Dad went to Scotland. The vet said it was something to do with his kidneys but I think Setanta’s heart was sort of broken, because Dad was the one who took him for walks and fed him and let him sit on his lap, even though Setanta was a really big dog who moulted a lot and was a bit smelly, to be honest. For ages after Dad left, Setanta sat in the porch every day at half six, waiting for him to come home.
I was mad about Fionn MacCumhaill and the Fianna stories when I was a kid. The Fianna were this cool band of Irish warriors and Fionn was the leader. They were always fighting with other gangs but the Fianna mostly won. They were pretty legend. Mam read the stories to me. Sometimes Faith did, if Mam had to work late at the Funky Banana or go to her book club or something. Faith was pretty good at reading them but she wasn’t as good as Mam at the voices. And she kept stopping at the exciting bits to play her violin. She said every story needs a soundtrack but I prefer just getting on with things.
My favourite story is the one with Fionn and the Scottish giant. Mam took me to the Giant’s Causeway when I was a kid. I saw the stepping stones the Scottish giant used to cross the sea to Ireland. I held Mam’s hand when I saw them but I wasn’t scared. Sometimes adults make up stories and they’re not true. Like Santa. He’s not true. Sully told me and Damo. Sully is Damo’s big brother. He’s in the army and he tells me and Damo loads of stuff.
Sully isn’t his real name. His real name is Jacob, I think, but everyone calls him Sully, on account of his surname which happens to be Sullivan.
It’s Sunday, which means we have to go to the graveyard. Faith likes going there on Sundays. I don’t know why. I don’t like going. It’s always really cold there, even if it’s warm everywhere else. Faith says, ‘Wear an extra jumper.’ She’s in the attic, looking for Mam’s rosary beads. She says she wants to put them on the grave. Mam got the rosary beads from her grandmother, who lived to be a hundred and one. I swear to God. She got a hundred pounds from the President of Ireland because she was so old.
I don’t think the beads are in the attic but Faith says she’s looked everywhere else.
I asked Mam if Santa would still come to you if you didn’t believe in him. She said she thought he might. She said even if you didn’t believe in him, he’d still believe in you. Adults say weird things.
Last year, Dad came to the house for a couple of hours on Christmas Day but I reckon he won’t be able to make it this year, because of the baby. Dad says he has to be there for that. I will be a half-brother. A half-brother means that Celia is not my mam.
Faith says that Mam can hear me and see me and when the sun shines, that’s Mam, smiling. Faith is my sister but she’s an adult. That’s because she was born a long time ago.
There’s a bit of cobweb in Faith’s hair when she climbs down from the attic. She’s got papers in her hand. I ask her if she found the rosary beads but she shakes her head and says, ‘Go and tidy your room or something.’ She doesn’t even look inside my room to see if it’s messy.
I pick up the clothes on my bedroom floor and put them all in the linen basket. Then I go and call for Damo.
He says, ‘Look at this,’ when he opens his front door. He sticks his tongue out and pushes the tip of it into his nose. He can make his eyeballs shoot up inside his head too.
I wish it were Wednesday. I’d be going to lifesaving class after school, if it were Wednesday. I might be getting my brown badge next week, if I know all the answers.
I check the calendar. It’s 16 October. Four months. Four months since the accident. Four and a half, I suppose. And only three months since Thomas left. It seems a lot longer than that.
Not seeing Thomas is like giving up cigarettes. I’ve never given up cigarettes but I imagine it would feel like this. There are triggers. Triggers that make me think about Thomas, and maybe even wish he was here. Like I’d wish for a cigarette if I hadn’t had one for an hour or so.
Stress. That’s a trigger. When I feel stressed, I think about Thomas. That’s probably why I’ve been thinking about him so much lately.
Or, oddly, when I’m happy. When something makes me smile. Or even laugh. Something funny, I mean. Or weird. Or one of those strange road signs. Like BEWARE – BLIND PEDESTRIANS. Something that makes me feel sure that when I look at Thomas, he will be smiling too.
Four months.
That’s all it takes.
Four months for everything to fall apart.
I’ll be forty soon. January. That’s when. And Christmas to get through before that.
I’m nearly forty and I should be dead.
I should have died in a pile-up. The newsreader would have described me as a thirty-nine-year-old woman. A thirty-nine-year-old woman was killed this afternoon in an accident on the M1.
A thirty-nine-year-old woman. That would have got people’s attention. Would have given them pause. Might have prompted them to look up from their dinners, shake their heads, say something like ‘Tragic’, or ‘Such a waste’, or ‘You just never know, do you? When your time is up?’
That didn’t happen. Instead, I’m a nearly-forty-year-old woman who has been the victim, it seems, of a miracle. That’s what everyone called it. I’m supposed to be grateful, apparently.
Instead, I’m alone and I haven’t written one word in four months.
And I’m nearly forty. It sits on my horizon, wobbling like one of those horrible jellies Mrs Higginbotham used to make for our birthday parties when we were between the ages of four and eight. Nine, according to Mrs Higginbotham, was too old for jelly-on-a-plate. Thank Christ.
I say, ‘I hate being nearly forty.’
Minnie says, ‘Consider the alternative.’
‘At least I’d make a nice corpse.’
‘A forty-year-old corpse. You’d still be forty, dead or alive.’
‘Nearly forty,’ but Minnie’s not listening anymore.
I’m going to be forty.
Soon.
I suppose the other stuff is bad too. The stuff about the writing and Thomas and the fact that I could have died. Everyone said I could have died. Thomas said it most of all. He said it was a miracle I walked away with hardly a scratch. I said there’s no such thing as miracles. He said it didn’t matter if I believed it or not.
One bloody miracle and everything falls apart.
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br /> ‘We want different things.’ That’s what Thomas said the day he came back for his stuff. I suppose that’s true. We were very different, me and Thomas. I didn’t mind how different we were. I even miss it, sometimes. Like the other day, when I was doing my impersonation of the weather girl on the telly (I can do a near-perfect imitation of her accent, even though she’s from Longford, which is one of the trickier ones), I smiled at the place on the couch where Thomas used to sit. As if he were still sitting there. As if I thought he were still sitting there.
I get nervous when that happens, so I find something to do. Like scrub the burned milk off the inside of the microwave. Ed likes hot chocolate but he hates cleaning. And I’m not betraying confidences by saying that. It’s there for everyone to read on his Facebook page.
It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. I hate afternoons. Cigarettes don’t taste as good in the afternoons. It’s too early for a drink but you’ve had too many teas and coffees and water would make you cry with the boredom of it. Consider its properties: tasteless, odourless, colourless.
I told Brona about the writer’s block. I was a bit excited about it, really. I’d heard of it, of course. There was a programme on the telly. But I’d never had it before.
Brona said, ‘Oh that. That happens to all writers. It won’t last long. You’ll be fine.’
I say, ‘No, it’s serious. I mean, I’ve had a life-changing experience.’
‘A life-affirming experience.’
‘I could have died.’
‘But you didn’t,’ she reminds me.
I produce Thomas, the ace up my sleeve.
‘He left me, remember? Right after the accident. My ribs were shattered, remember?’
‘Fractured,’ she says, but in her gentle voice so I can’t take umbrage. ‘One rib, wasn’t it? One rib had a hairline fracture.’
I say, ‘It was agony.’
Brona makes soothing noises down the line.
Lifesaving for Beginners Page 5