‘Jesus. Were there lights?’
‘What do you mean, lights?’
‘I don’t know. Snow lights. Or something.’
I need to see him safe in his plane. I need to look in through the porthole windows, with blue lights and white lights flashing in the darkness, like a fifties movie set; the snow swirling outside. And, as if he has guessed my problem, Seán says, ‘The man was not standing on the wing. Believe me, I checked.’
‘How’s Budapest? Is it snowing there?’
‘No actually,’ he says. ‘Listen, Gina.’
I know if he says my name, he wants to talk about Evie. Or not talk about Evie, he wants to tell me of some arrangement involving Evie that I will not have the power to change.
‘What?’
‘Everything’s had to be pushed forward. I don’t know if I can get back tomorrow afternoon.’
‘When can you get back?’
‘I don’t know. Definitely Saturday. If it doesn’t snow.’
‘Tell me when you know, will you?’
‘Of course.’
‘How’s Budapest?’
‘Is that where I am?’
He sounds worn out. I can hear the news on his hotel TV.
‘Have yourself a nice bath,’ I say.
‘I don’t do baths.’
‘No?’
‘Not in hotels. You don’t know who’s been there before you.’
It takes me a while to hear this, or to make sense of it. I am listening to the space he occupies, I am listening to his breath, to the timbre of his voice, that is the same to me, almost, as the texture of his skin. It has the same effect. Or better. I am closer listening to him than touching him.
‘Sure give it a wipe,’ I say.
I could live on the phone.
Evie, it turns out, has – I actually blank this bit of the conversation out. Seán says, ‘On Saturday morning, Evie has …’ and my brain goes ‘tweet tweet, oh is that the time, how pretty’ and I look out at the garden and beyond to the traffic lights, casting their beautiful light, as they switch senselessly from red to green across the serene stretch of tyre-mangled snow. So, Evie has, I don’t know; horse riding or a play date or drama or the orthodontist, which means that – tweet tweet – Seán will have to pick her up on Friday from the city centre, or Enniskerry, or outside her school if there is school, except it will not be Seán because he is not here, and I say, ‘Fine, no problem,’ realising after I have put the phone down that Seán is saying something new here. He is saying that because of circumstances that have released a whole flock of sparrows in my brain, I may have to pick up Evie tomorrow. I myself will have to do it, while Seán, presumably, flies home.
Great.
Aileen, of course, must not be disturbed on this one. Aileen must not be humiliated further. It would never be possible for Aileen to ring the bell of my home, or to meet me in the street in order to hand her child to me. Her child. To me. That would not be possible. That would be like dying. And no one wants Aileen to die in this particular way.
I will never be rid of that woman.
The first few months together in Terenure, everything reminded Seán of how much he hated Aileen. Especially me. Everything I did reminded him of his wife.
One morning, I told him he would catch a cold. This was in the early days, after the bike was bought but before he had figured the clothes, so he went out in his shirtsleeves, folding his suit jacket over the handlebars.
‘Careful you don’t catch cold,’ I said, watching from the front door, and he went still for a moment before getting up on the bike and cycling away.
That evening we fought about something stupid – our first domestic – and it turned out, once the spat was over, that I had reminded him of his wife. Because whenever Seán was going on a plane, in whatever season, autumn or spring – he could never remember what way it went – travelling to a warmer country or a colder one, Aileen would always say, ‘You’ll get a cold, you know,’ and she was always, but always, right. And Seán hated it. It was like she owned his entire immune system. And anyway, what was he supposed to do, stay at home?
There was a wasted intensity in the way he spoke about her; nailing the lid down on some coffin with nothing inside it. Or, what was inside? A joke. Some zombie wife who still twitched at the light. I spent my days trying to guess what Aileen might say, so I could say something different – and I learned, in jig time, not to mention illness of any kind. Or weakness even. I learned not to make him feel weak in any way.
I don’t know what she did to him, but she sure did it good.
It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife. That morning he looked at the clean shirt he took out of the wardrobe and said, ‘Is there something wrong with the iron?’ Both of us stopping right there. It was not that Aileen did Seán’s shirts. Aileen had a Polish girl in to do Seán’s shirts at twelve euro an hour. But if Seán was going to live like a younger man, he would have to change.
And he did change.
A second intimacy can be very sweet. There are so many mistakes you do not have to make. I could not believe he was beside me when I fell asleep. I could not believe he was beside me when I woke. We went to the supermarket; picking up boxes of laundry tablets like Bonnie and Clyde.
‘What about these ones? You think?’
Our shoes leaving bloody footprints, all the way down the aisle.
We did the things that boring couples do: Seán cooked dinner sometimes, and I lit the candles. We went to the pictures, and for that weekend to Budapest. We even went for walks – out into the world, side by side. Seán held my hand. He was proud of me. He took an interest in my clothes and told me what to wear. He wanted me to look good. He wanted me to look good for waiters and other strangers, because we still didn’t meet his friends. Which suited me fine, I couldn’t take the pressure.
We were out one night in Fallon & Byrne’s when a woman stopped by the table.
‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘Would you look who it is.’
I did not recognise her.
‘That’s right,’ said Seán.
‘So look at you.’
She was drunk. And middle-aged. It was the Global Tax woman, the one who was there at the conference in Montreux. She chatted for a minute and then sidled back to her own table, giving me a twee, ironic little wave before sitting in with her friends.
‘Don’t mind her,’ said Seán.
‘I don’t.’ I went back to my dinner. I said, ‘She just looks so old.’
Seán looked at me, as though from a new and lonely distance.
‘She didn’t always,’ he said.
‘When was it, anyway?’
‘It was … a long time ago.’
Later, as though to remind me that it comes to us all, he said, ‘She was the same age as you are now, actually.’
And he pulled my lip with his teeth, when he kissed me.
No wonder she shrieked and writhed, the zombie wife. I thought – just in flashes – that I was actually turning into her.
I had to trust him, he said. Our second row, this, when I expected him home and he did not arrive till late – I had to trust him because he had given up everything for me. Because Aileen had doubted every word that came out of his mouth. He could not live with that again. There were times he thought she needed to be jealous: that jealousy was part of her sexual machine.
Believe me, I thought about that one for a while.
Meanwhile, we never had any tomato chutney and the cheese I bought was just bizarre.
‘Come to bed.’
‘In a minute.’
‘Come to bed.’
‘I said, “in a minute”.’
‘You said that a minute ago.’
Seán told me that I have saved his life.
‘You saved my life,’ he said. And every small thing about me is wrong. I eat too much, I laugh the wrong way. I am not allowed to order lobster off a menu; the sight of me sucking out the meat would, he sai
d, last him a very long time. He holds me by the hips, and squeezes, testing for fat. If it hadn’t been for me, he says, If it hadn’t been for you and he kisses me, on the side of the neck, lifting my hair.
I have saved his life.
My mother is still dead.
The snow does not accuse, or not particularly. But I am alone and I do not know for how long. There is nothing on the internet. The TV rattles on. I sacked two people today, in Dundalk. I mean, I had to let them go. I sit at my laptop with my phone in my hand and wonder how the hell I got here. And where it all went wrong. If it did go wrong. Which it did not, of course. Nothing, as I am tired of saying, went wrong.
What was the last thing he said from Budapest?
‘Goodnight, Gorgeous.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, my love,’ whispering ourselves off the line.
‘Night night.’
Trailing our talk down to the fingertips.
‘Night.’
And gone.
Save the Last Dance for Me
THOSE FIRST MONTHS in Terenure, Seán did not talk about Evie, or mention her much, and I was so stupid, I did not realise he could not bring himself to say her name.
No one came to visit. It was strange, because this has always been an open kind of house – my mother used to complain about it, the way people would drop in almost unannounced. But no one dropped in on the fornicators, the love-birds and homewreckers in No. 4. The phone stayed mute: we did not even rent the line.
I said it to Fiachra: ‘We’re pariahs,’ and, as if to prove me wrong, he rocked up one Saturday morning with a bag of croissants, and a baby buggy the size of a small car.
It took all three of us to get it through the porch and parked in the hall. In the middle of this operation, Fiachra, who is a lanky object, bent over his daughter and unclipped the straps. He lifted her out and handed her to Seán, who without even a feint of surprise, set her on his hip, using his free hand to manipulate the thing closer to the wall. The child started to reach for her father just as Seán started to hand her back to him, and it was all quite deftly done. But Seán followed her with his face and, at the last moment, nuzzled into her fine, blonde hair.
Then he followed her head a little further. And inhaled.
It was unnatural. They might as well have been kissing, my lover and my friend, each of them attached to this large construction of wriggle and big blue eyes and spit.
But Seán wasn’t looking into her eyes. He was smelling her head. His own eyes were closed.
Fiachra said, ‘Watch out, she is a stranger to soap,’ and Seán gave a tiny grunt of appreciation.
‘Who’s a great girl?’ he said, pulling back to look at her. He jiggled her foot, which dangled from the crook of Fiachra’s arm. ‘Who’s a great girl?’
I am not saying it was sexual, I am saying it was a moment of great physical intimacy, and that it took place in my mother’s hall while I held a bag of warm croissants and looked on.
‘Coffee?’ I said.
‘Lovely.’
‘Yes, please.’
But no one moved.
After this first frankness, Seán appeared to ignore the child, who was, I have to say, a sweetie. She sat on her father’s lap and ate her croissant with close and reverential attention while Fiachra told stories about his new life as a stay-at-home Dad. He was queuing up in Cumberland Street dole office with the junkies, he said, his round-eyed daughter watching from her Hummer-buggy, when the guy in front of him holds up a little white plastic newsagent’s knife and waves it around saying, ‘I’ll cut myself, I’ll fuckin’ cut myself!’ The cop snapping on latex gloves as he moves, big and easy, across the floor.
‘God almighty.’
Seán leaned against the counter, and laughed. He moved to set the coffee pot further back on the stove. He went over to the bin and tucked the plastic bin-liner into place. He walked out to the hall, as though there was someone at the door, and then came back in again. After a while I realised that he wasn’t so much ignoring the child as prowling around it. He approached and avoided her, all the time. He was like something on David Attenborough, I told him later, one of those silverback gorillas maybe, who has forgotten where baby gorillas come from, then Mammy Gorilla pops one out, and he doesn’t know what to do. Cuddle it? Eat it? Pick it up and throw it in a bush?
‘Are you finished?’ he said.
‘Probably,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said. Then he walked out of the kitchen and did not come back for three days.
I had been so stupid. It wasn’t about Aileen – this anguish I had to live with, and avoid, and constantly tend. It was about Evie.
‘I failed her,’ he said.
He stood at the counter with the window at his back, the same place and silhouette as when he watched Fiachra’s child cover herself in apricot jam. It was July, and nothing was figured out yet, not even a holiday. Seán rubbed his hands up over his face, then scrubbed his scalp at the bottom of his skull. His mouth and chin distorted and his eyes shut tight. His throat produced a kind of whine, and tears popped from between his eyelids, round and clear.
He wept. And this was clearly something he had very little practice doing. Seán, the charmer, could not cry in a charming way. He cried like a mutant, all twisted and ingrown.
It did not last long. I made him a Bloody Mary and he sat at the table to drink it. He would not be hugged or touched – I did not try. How could he have done it, he said. To fail a child, it was beyond comprehending. It was not possible to fail a child. But he had done it. He had done the impossible thing.
I held him later, in the darkness, and told him the whole project is about failure. It has failure built in.
At the end of August, Seán brought me with him to Budapest to make up for the way my summer had been laid waste by loving a family man. We walked along the Danube and talked about what he was going to do, and he started to tell me about Evie.
When she was four, he said, Evie fell off a swing in the back garden in Enniskerry and they thought she had concussion. The au pair did not even see it happen, she just looked around to find the child gone, and the plastic seat of the swing still moving. Aileen arrived home to find Evie unwakeably asleep at half six in the evening. There was a trickle of dried blood coming down from the child’s mouth – not much – where she had bitten the inside of her cheek and her pants had been soiled.
‘I change her,’ said the au pair. And she shrugged, as though she was expected to live among savages.
When Seán walked in sometime later, he found his wife trembling in an armchair, Evie watching the ‘Teletubbies’ with a wan, important look on her face and the au pair upstairs, talking a mile a minute into the landline – presumably to her parents – in Spanish. Aileen had, in fact, slapped the girl but Seán was not to know this for some time: it was something he would discover later, when the arguments began. And though the room upstairs was always called the au pair’s room, this was despite the fact that there was no actual au pair after this, and from then on – from that moment on – his life was just.
‘What?’
‘Unexpected,’ he said.
And we turned from the river wall, where he had been watching the water below, and we walked on.
Apart from some speeding cyclists, the quays were quiet. We went across an iron bridge that was guarded by four beautiful iron birds. I said, ‘Bring her to Terenure.’
‘I can’t,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘I just can’t.’
‘Some Friday when I am away. Try it. Just bring her through the door.’
When we got back to Terenure, he looked around with an assessing eye. Then he went to the pink shop and bought her a pink duvet and a pink pillow. He also bought a matching net princess canopy for over the bed.
‘I couldn’t pass it,’ he said.
I said, ‘What age is she again?’
So he went back into town and swapped the p
ink bed linen for some with a chopped fruit design in acid-yellow and lime-green. He bought a lime-coloured dressing gown with purple trim, and oversized slippers with doggy faces on the toes.
He bought an iPod dock in the shape of a plastic pig and a little white chest of drawers to put it on. He bought a fish bowl and a goldfish, in a clear plastic bag. I said, ‘Who is going to feed the fish?’
‘I will,’ he said.
He gave it to me for a moment, and I held it up to the light. An orange fish, darting and stopping in its bright bubble of water.
Happiness in a bag.
Seán fed it for at least a month, every second day, faithfully, then one evening, I got a text: ‘check fish!!!!!!!!!!!’
So I feed it now, and it is still alive. A fish called Scratch. You can hear it when the house is still – actually hear it – nose down, picking up stones, sorting through the gravel. The first time she stayed over, Evie said the sound of it kept her awake all night, it was the noisiest fish on the planet.
Even Scratch is quiet, tonight. It has started to snow again and the tyre-welts on the street are softening into humps and mounds of white. The traffic lights work on. Upstairs, at the end of the landing, Evie’s room is a padded shrine of lime-green and acid-yellow, with pips, in the watermelon smiles of blood red. Her clothes, in the little white chest of drawers, tend more to black as the months pass, with rips in the right places, and skulls, and scrag-ends of tulle. Her father lets her wear what she likes. He talked about a carpet, so her sequinned hi-tops would have something to look good on, while she is away. It is like he has forgotten where he is.
‘A new carpet?’ I said.
‘Maybe a rug.’
So I hoover the rug.
I did not pay for the rug.
I nearly paid for it, mind you – that woman is bleeding him dry.
The rug has big coloured squares on it. It looks great. And I am not complaining. When it comes to housework, Seán is a clean sort. You don’t catch him at it, but after he has been through, the place is brighter, neater. His laundry tablets may glow in the dark, but they make my clothes smell like sunshine itself.
Forgotten Waltz, The Page 14