He rolled on to his side with his back towards me.
And I couldn’t let him be that way, not so alone and sad, over so little. “Robert. Robert, let me . . .” I balanced myself behind him on the chair, lay fitted to his back and hugging this awful, ridiculous pain he had, the one that was flaring into me. “Come on and we’ll forget this. It never happened. You had a wee dream.”
I kissed his ear, his shoulder, I tried to say things that would please him and smoothed my hand down his stomach, then lifted, took him, worked him until he straightened against my palm. He didn’t quite want it.
“This isn’t—”
“I know. But let it be. Let it go now. That’s my man. Let it go. Let it go, my good lamb, my good lamb.”
Until he worked with me, drew and pressed, drove up a new sweat, both of us being savage with him until he couldn’t help but come.
The peace of him after that, the surrendered quiet—he was mine, then: so much that I was his.
Which is why I’m reduced to the cough mixture now—I’m not meant to be drinking.
We are both not meant to be drinking—or, at least, not drinking very much. We are doing this together, because we want to. Simon and his wife, they wouldn’t understand that kind of sharing. Nor would anyone else in the congregation—I’ll guess they’ll never have masturbated anyone, for any reason, not even to help them, to make their bad thoughts go away. They’ll be unfamiliar with that kind of charity.
They won’t understand why I have to be out here, either, holding an empty bottle of blackcurrant linctus. So I might as well head off down the steps, find the CPG van and drive away. I can’t explain myself and there’s no use trying.
I should never have come here. I don’t go to church.
“What do you mean, you don’t go to church?”
I knew before I answered that it would be Simon—who else would call my mobile on a Sunday. I hadn’t even made it back home before he rang.
“Well, I don’t . . . I mean, that doesn’t matter. I just felt poorly.”
“Poorly.” Both syllables gritty with sarcasm—my brother never used to sound like this with me.
“Yes.” I realise that the background noise he may be hearing will not aid my case, because I am currently in Stirling and a pub. It’s Sunday— things don’t open on Sunday. If it’s late in the day and you’ve had no lunch and you want a sandwich, you have to go into a pub. “Yes, poorly.” I am eating a sandwich.
And drinking a glass of wine.
I have to drink something, or else I’ll seem rude.
“You couldn’t even be bothered to wait for us.”
“I could be bothered, I was bothered. But you wouldn’t want me there and ill.”
“Gillian had food ready. We were supposed to be celebrating.”
A knot of young guys are suddenly amused by something on the TV and produce the sort of unruly whoop that is only heard in a certain bad class of bar. I know that Simon will have registered this, too.
“But you seem to have your own celebration going on there.”
“No. I’m just having a sandwich.”
“I thought you were poorly.”
“I’m not so bad now. I’m managing a bit of food.”
He doesn’t say anything more, just sighs.
“What?”
He doesn’t respond and another whoop rises around, I think it’s something to do with Australian football.
“Simon, what?”
“C57 mice.”
“What?”
“C57 mice. They’re bred to be addicted, to take part in experiments. Give them a choice of alcohol or water and they’ll always pick the drink. They can’t help it. The way they need alcohol buries every other instinct. They love to kill themselves.”
He stops and I’m left holding silence again. “What? Is that me? Simon?”
“You know women die quicker, don’t you? Always. The winos on park benches—check how many of them are men. The women just die.”
“Is that supposed to be me? You think I’m a wino? You think I’m an animal?”
“I think you act like an animal, yes. Goodbye, Hannah.”
“Wha—”
“Goodbye.”
And the reception’s so bad on this bloody phone that I can’t judge how he said this, not clearly. I’m not sure if he sounded upset, or tired, or sad. And why should I care?—I’ve just been insulted by my own closest relative. And if I’m an animal, I’d like him to consider that he must be the same—he is my brother. I’d like him to pause for thought. I’d like him to be here now and see me eating my sandwich and drinking a glass of wine and leaving. I can do that.
I can do that.
He thinks I’ll sit here and get pissed, because that’s all a mouse knows how to do.
Well, fuck him.
If he thinks that I have to be drunk all the time, then why not? I’ll call his bluff. But I still won’t get drunk, I still won’t be incapable. I very, very rarely am.
He doesn’t know me. I can put the best part of a bottle away and still drive perfectly.
Fuck him.
As it happens, when I lost my job, one of the points in my favour was my spotless driving. I got the van back from Stirling, and from every other professional and private location, perfectly intact. There had been some appointments missed, that’s all—having Robert around in a more regular way had upset my sleeping patterns and then I caught this bug after Christmas (I may have been sickening for it at the carol service) and I missed some more appointments and the spring is a crap time to sell anybody cardboard—that’s an established fact—but modern business has no flexibility. We’re supposed to be flexible, the people who do the working, but the businesses, they’re allowed to be carved in stone. Big, stupid, unsympathetic stone.
Capitalism—whoever invented that didn’t drink—no imagination. They’ll just sack the first person they see, no matter what.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to—”
“I don’t need overtime, the hours. I do extra hours and I don’t record them.”
“Miss Luckraft, we will have to le—”
“This time of year, there’s no movement. If I had anoth—”
“Hannah, we’re letting you go.” Mr. Robinson there in his rumpled shirt—he can fire people, screw up their lives with a sentence, but he can’t manage ironing shirts. Wife left him. Can’t manage keeping a wife who could iron a shirt. Can’t manage getting someone else to replace the wife he couldn’t keep and who could have ironed his shirts. Although why would she have bothered?—he’s just Robinson.
Which is to say, he is a fuck-up. Not even raising his game when he booted me out, no trace of spirit at any point in his delivery. “I’m sorry, but it’s not working out. The end of the month.” Being fired by a mumbling rodent, it just adds insult to your injury.
“But I . . .” I’d been hoping he’d interrupt me again, because I had no more to say, only this general, wordless sense that everything was wrong. But Robinson had no more to say, either. He handed me over some unpleasantly terminal papers and then picked up the phone to avoid further complications. I’m sure he dialled the speaking clock, or his empty house—anything to end the conversation and force me out.
Robinson—one day he’ll be in trouble and no one will help, they may even hinder instead. I’ll never hear about it, but I’ll get this soft, bright feeling some afternoon and I’ll guess—somewhere Robinson is being done over, really thoroughly kicked about.
Meanwhile, I haven’t found another position yet, but when you know cardboard the way that I do, it’s only a matter of time, no sense in brooding. I do brood, naturally, but I also understand that I don’t need to. I’m more preoccupied with my health at the minute, in any case. Physically, I am not quite what I should be.
The whole thing started with my toe. It was the usual scenario: your left big toe begins to be stiff in the mornings and then uncooperative when you walk and then you notice that it’s st
arting to be reddish and then purple and then one day you’re fighting to get on your shoe and you discover this appalling object, smirking at the far end of your foot—something very like a victoria plum, but with a toenail. For a while, you can only limp about with your swelling bundled up in a hill-walking sock and an optional plastic bag for when it’s raining.
I prefer not to bother doctors and so I don’t have a clue what the trouble was. It passed away after something approaching a fortnight with no permanent harm done. The real difficulties arose thereafter, due to a lack of discipline. When one half of your body realises it can misbehave and get away with it, then you’re in for serious grief. Taking its cue from my foot, the whole of my left side has made just such a decision and I haven’t been healthy since.
The next mishap arrived when I was vulnerable and in bed. Robert and I were sitting up together and smoking a ridiculously large cigar, which we had been given earlier in the bar by a man with an American accent who claimed to have worked for the CIA. It was a Cuban cigar and he handed it to us in its silver tube as if this act were as splendidly illegal in our country as it would have been in his. I felt he was a bad example for the CIA to set, but kept my mouth shut in case he knew, or was willing to invent, any interesting stories about spies.
I can’t say if there were any stories, that isn’t clear now.
But the cigar was irrefutable and we were sucking on it, turn and turn about, until our heads spun: blue, communistic tissues and ropes of smoke gradually crowding up towards my ceiling.
“Hm.”
Robert sighed. “Hm, I know. I could get used to this. A cigar-smoking dentist. The patients would enjoy that. It would reassure them.”
“Hm.”
“I always was intended for better things.”
“Hm.”
I wasn’t, in fact, murmuring agreement, or satisfaction—I was making the only noise that I still could.
A dreamy, soupy, horrifying thing was happening. From the tip of my tongue and back, sparkling and spreading, there was this totally authoritative numbness.
I inhaled for what seemed like the course of a day and by the time my lungs were expanded, if not overtaxed, the left side of my tongue was wooden and cold, thicker, foreign. A tingling suffused my cheek, licked up to my eye, kissed my ear and I thought in beautiful, peaceful words, tranquil as cigar smoke, I’m dying. It’s finally starting. This is when I get to die.
I gave up on attracting Robert’s attention and monitored the progress of my death: first came the fine wave of tickling ice and then the numbing down the neck, across the chest, along the left arm and pushing clear into the depths of each finger. I imagined peering down and seeing extinction caught for a moment under my nails, a hint of blue light fading.
If I’m having a stroke then it should be in my right side, shouldn’t it?
So not a stroke. Unless they’re ambidextrous.
Probably not.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter.
Not unless I survive.
My deterioration became less straightforward after that: a sleek sense of weakness nibbled down into my leg at the same time as a dunt of nausea staggered me out of bed and off into the bathroom.
“Hannah? Hannah, what’s wrong?”
“Hm.”
I was moderately sick while Robert stayed in bed and suggested that I shouldn’t smoke cigars if I knew I didn’t have the head for them.
“Hm.”
I returned to him, face doused in water, mouth rinsed, and shifted to find the warmth that my body had left for me in the sheets, even as it ceased to function. I slept then, solidly, for about a day, surfacing to a mildly concerned note on the coverlet.
I didn’t feel particularly off-colour, only dragging. My left foot was lazier than it should have been, likewise my left hand. Good thing it wasn’t my right hand, I use that more.
Thinking was possible, but slower in a way that I couldn’t precisely identify and the left side of my face was fine, but slightly less alive than it had been. That was the main sense I had—of being less alive than I had been.
“Yes, you don’t look great.”
“Thanks a l-lot.” The bar was unruly that night. Something political had happened somewhere and everyone—even the Parson and I’d never heard him raise his voice—had decided to argue about it. I’d discovered that my eyes were delicate and so I was wearing dark glasses which deepened my sensory confusion. “I don’t feel . . . ahm, great.” Squinting up at Robert as he approached our table, yelling tenderly.
“You sure you don’t want to see a doctor?”
“Yes. They never tell you anything you haven’t already worked out.”
“Not a check-up?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Well, you have this. Do you good.” He popped down a double Scotch that sparked and flirted, even through tinted glass.
“I thought we weren’t drinking spirits any more.”
Robert folded himself in beside me on the booth seat. “Special occasion. I was worried about you.” From behind his back, he magicked another Scotch which he drew at almost nervously. “No being poorly. No being sad. No letting anything go wrong with you.” I watched the whisky ignite, sharpen his eyes, take him back to the good, high, familiar place that waited for him during all his abstinence. “Oh, that’s . . . that isn’t a word of a lie. Yes. Good. Fine flavour.” He took my left hand, mouthed the inside of its wrist. “Just this one and then we’ll get you home, tuck you up.” He tilted in another sip and I watched his throat doing what it was made for, swallowing. I reached over, feeling slightly clumsy, to kiss his Adam’s apple and he swallowed again, quick and warm against my mouth. “Home and tucking very tight.”
“Just this one.”
“Mm-hmm, just one.”
“One’s the very thing.”
“But no more than that. One will be just right.”
Three or maybe four hours later, we decided that we ought to go to Dublin.
This is always unwise. Ireland is like a huge, disinterested echo chamber, or a magnifying glass, a distorting mirror, a combination of the three. Whatever unruly tensions you may have in your character, your relationships, your health, your mental equilibrium: every weak and dark and painful place you’ve got will be screaming and turning elephantine before you’ve even reached an exit in Dublin airport: before you’ve collected your bags in that bloody, sepulchral basement where they keep all their baggage conveyors and bad coffee and timetables for buses and gaggles of Dubliners eyeing you and gnawing at fatty baps: letting you see that they know why you’ve come—you’re hoping you’ll have fun. They understand about your fun—that it will be impossible. No matter where you are. For you, fun is a barely legal size of minuscule chocolate bar: your natural ration of all the cheapskate, bonsai snacks and treats and jolly moments that evaporate and leave you feeling swindled and distressed. Fun, real fun, that was never intended for people like you. Because of this, Dubliners laugh inwardly, if not outwardly, as they watch you try to scrabble for your passing case—your case full of clothes to have fun in and uncomfortable underwear.
This welcoming combination alone should tell you how awful things will get and persuade you to turn round and go directly home.
Above all, you should—and never do—remember that Irish people can drink in Ireland: they are Irish, they are used to it. They can do that whole easygoing, back-to-my-place, pissing-in-the-street-on-occasions-maybe-but-otherwise-in-control and what-a-devil-may-care-scamp-I-am style of drinking. They can pull it off. They are not hoping they’ll have fun—they are just drinking. They haven’t dragged themselves over the Irish Sea in hopes of bonhomie and entertainments they would never get at home. They do not hit Irish soil and instantly expect to be somebody else— somebody fun. They are not plummeting into crevasses of disappointment at each step.
They can, for example, afford to complain about Scots being evil drunks when in Ireland—because the Irish drinkers are at home ther
e, they’re mellow, they’re not spending a precious holiday ballooning beyond their own reach, watching defects they didn’t realise they had stretching up around them like fucking redwoods, with no chance of absolution. They aren’t going to get lost in the north of Dublin and see several men with head wounds gently standing against walls in disturbing silence, as if they were waiting for worse, Irish drinkers aren’t going to be terrified like that—they aren’t going to eat bad soup in Temple Bar and then throw up on the steps of the General Post Office while intending to pay a respectful late-night visit to a place of great historical import. People they love—in fact, dentists they’re going out with—will not keep behaving like cretins, like embarrassing New Year uncles, and will not spend every fucking minute dragging about with them, as if they were a pair of fleeing convicts, chained ankle to ankle and hip to hip by a kind of debilitating mutual lust which is almost fun but also makes you want to scream. And, beyond that, the left side of any self-respecting Irish drinker will not have decided it should belong to someone else, somebody dead.
Although at the time, believe me, I was much less troubled by my dying sinister half than by my cretinous beloved and that bloody lust.
“Hha!”
Robert had decided to develop a barking laugh. As if he hadn’t already ruined himself enough, Dublin was bringing out the dog in him. “Hha! What have you done? What are you doing?”
Behind him were the orange and brown convolutions of the original seventies, or maybe retro, carpet in the hotel room that he probably couldn’t afford to pay for and that I couldn’t afford to think about. “I mean . . . Hha!” He pointed at me and barked again.
By employing numberless, lightning calculations I worked out that he wasn’t leaning against the floor, but lying on top of it, which in its turn implied that I was standing over him.
I sat down. “What do you mean, what have I done?”
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