Double Talk

by Patrick Warner

  But boredom, I discovered, could be relieved by a number of methods — dope was effective. Also terrifically entertaining were the musty paperbacks in Wallace’s bedroom: Anaïs Nin’s Little Birds, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Phillip Roth’s The Breast and John Rechy’s City of Night. Novelty and naughtiness had never been closer to hand: Playboy and Penthouse, banned in Ireland, could be bought in any shop, though you would not find the magazines Wallace kept in the back of his bedroom closet. As well, condoms could be had from any drugstore, if you had the nerve. Beer and wine could not be found at the supermarket, though beer could be bought in any corner store; wine lived at the liquor store; you had to be nineteen to buy any of it.

  But the drink supply was never a problem because every second weekend Wallace and Geoff arrived at the house, bringing with them every kind of potion. They also brought trailer loads of furniture and household wares. Geoff gave me my own Sandinista apron and taught me how to cook chili and spaghetti. Wallace installed a brilliant stereo in the sitting room, with a pulsing green liquid crystal display, and four fifty-watt floor speakers. The next week he brought half his record collection to town. It was an uneasy marriage of the old and the new: Steely Dan, Joan Armatrading, Van Morrison, Roxy Music, The Beatles and David Bowie. But also Soft Cell, The Clash, Duran Duran, Culture Club, the Eurythmics and The Thompson Twins. I sniffed at it: no ska, no reggae? Where was their Village People album?

  Most weekends we didn’t spend much time at the house; instead, we went out to restaurants that were bars and bars that were restaurants: Spaghetti House, Napoli Pizza, The Curry House, but most often to the Side Street where I ate diabolical amounts of cannelloni and where Wallace and Geoff successfully pooh-poohed all attempts by the serving staff to get me to show an ID. I was still two years short of legal drinking age. We went to the Side Street so often that I couldn’t believe it when, a few months later, Violet told me she had worked there at that time, usually three nights a week, and remembered seeing me there. I racked my brains but could not remember seeing her.

  I could say I lived alone, but I didn’t live alone. After only one month on my own, loneliness moved in with me. I was ashamed of her and lied when Wallace or Geoff asked me if I found it hard being by myself so much. I said I didn’t find it hard at all — a pretence easy to keep up while they were around, but one that collapsed as soon as they departed on Sunday night, slamming the door behind them.

  Loneliness was an obese giantess. Her fingernail was the hot-red receiver of the phone that sat on the hallway radiator. I was familiar only with Irish phones, heavy monstrosities that seemed to be made from black lava, with a fly-reel dialler on the base; they were mostly silent objects that rang with a fearsome jangle, and rarely for me. But this red phone was something else again: smooth and curved, light in the hand, it beckoned to me through the long dark evenings. At first, I wasn’t even sure how to use it. There seemed no way to dial it until I discovered twelve buttons clustered in the hammock between the earpiece and the mouth piece. White and small as milk teeth, each button glowed green around its edges and gave off a musical note when pressed.

  Loneliness lived in the house as a series of creaks. She hovered on the stairs, worried the floorboard outside my bedroom door until it gave out a slow, high-pitched squeak. Sometimes, on bad nights, she lived in the radiator pipes as a rhythmic knocking. I would lie in bed, under a weight of blankets, imagining I was trapped in a mine and those distant knocking sounds were the efforts of family and friends, with picks and shovels, trying to tunnel in.

  Keeping busy helped. I became fanatical about getting my university assignments in on time. I maintained a B-minus average, which I was pleased with, having only pulled off four borderline honours in the Irish Leaving Cert exams. There was also plenty of work around the house. In late November, I prised open the cans of off-white paint Wallace had stacked in the hall and began to attack, with a vengeance, the paint job left by the previous tenant, an old lady. She had painted the walls all through the house in bright high-gloss oils: the living room gold, the dining room lilac, the hallway silver and the kitchen a fire engine red. She had then taken a turkey wing and, dipping its tip in metallic paint, proceeded to daub a feather pattern all over the already brilliant base coat: silver on gold, gold on silver, red over lilac and black over red. The brothel, Darcy called it.

  And how those marks resisted paint; it didn’t seem to matter how many times I rolled over them, the colours and patterns still bled through.

  “Did you prime it?” asked Wallace.

  “Should I have?”

  “Well, you’re painting latex over oil. You need to prime it first.” And all along I had thought he had just bought cheap paint. It still took five coats to cover the walls in the living and dining rooms, and six to cover the hall. Even so, forever after, when the late evening sun flooded those rooms, feather marks were still visible. They were like obscene moles, indelible birthmarks.

  If an empty house in Newfoundland became our meeting place, it was marijuana that animated my courtship with loneliness. Wallace and Geoff kept a quarter-pound bag of it in the basement deep-freezer. More and more often I found myself dipping in. There were roaches and half-joints all over the house; I rarely had to walk more than a few yards to top up my high. I practiced my rolling: one skin, one skin rolled with one hand, three skins, five skins, six skins. And then I perfected “the pipeline” — an eighteen-skin masterpiece that would win me acclaim with Keppie and the gang in the months to come. Grass did not make loneliness disappear, but it made her easier to be with, gave her a form and sometimes a voice. She spoke to me in low whispers. And sometimes, late at night, when she creaked outside my bedroom door, I would draw back the covers and call her to come in.

  More often, though, she came to me as something more poetic, as a kind of ennui. I would stand in the upstairs bay window of my new home, gazing out over the bare trees of Victoria Park and remembering how it had been in the last few months before I left Bridgetown. With most of my friends having already made good their escape, I had little reason to go into town. Instead, I began to take long walks by myself, visiting those places where I used to go to be alone. I wanted not so much to see my favourite haunts one last time, as to gather something of their textures. I would stop and run my hand over the rust that year-by-year bit more deeply into the abandoned water tank at the end of our garden. In that tank I had defeated Rommel at El Alamein and later halted Panzers advancing through the Ardennes.

  Other times, I threaded a path through the briars at the bottom of Mrs. McDermott’s garden, on my way to my favourite tree, a tall mountain ash. Thirteen hand-holds — I could have climbed it with my eyes closed — to my perch in the topmost fork. I often stayed at the summit of that tree for an hour, lighting cigarette from cigarette, crewman in a crow’s nest, registering the timber in the living trunk, and the relentless movement of the earth below me. Somewhere beyond — where the sun stubbed itself on the grey ashtray of the horizon — was my destination.

  Newfoundland, Newfoundland. The word washed through my mind, dragging with it a phosphorescent trail of wonder. Was I really going to leave behind everything I knew and loved to go there? Well, yes, for a while, but I would come back again. Newfoundland, Newfoundland. I had looked it up on a globe. It was Spam pink and small as a postage stamp. I read in a musty encyclopaedia that it had world-class fishing grounds, the Grand Banks, and that the island was mostly forested. Uncle Wallace, who had lived there for ten years, sometimes included snapshots along with his Christmas card. The only things that stood out from those snaps were the cars — they were big like those on American television shows — and the houses, which always seemed to be half-buried in snow, like toy houses partly removed from their packing.

  What did I really know about the place? Sometimes the emptiness of my vision struck me with terror, but more often I was content to sit in contemplation before that almost blank canvas. It was enough that Newfoundland was wi
ld and pink and smelled of fish. And that it was foggy. Too many facts might slow my momentum.

  III

  Violet Budd

  Violet thinks getting pregnant will be easy. Over the years, she and Brian have used a grab bag of contraceptive devices: rubber caps, condoms, spermicidal foams, pills, and, on one notable occasion, a sandwich bag cinched with an elastic band. All they have to do to set new life in motion, she thinks, is to stop taking precautions. So she takes it personally when, at the end of their first month of rowdy bare-back sex, she experiences an unmistakeable mood swing, finds herself on her hands and knees at the kitchen cupboard, trying to decide if she should arrange the pots by size or by metal alloy.

  “We need to get more scientific about this,” Brian says, meaning Violet should visit the peeling clapboard façade that is Planned Parenthood. Which Violet does the following Tuesday, finding it much the same as she had found it when she first arrived in St. John’s: dingy, prone to leaks and doing its best to remain anonymous. Everything, Violet thinks, that Dr. Holly, with the help of insufficient government funding, has made it.

  “Violet! Hello. How long has it been?”

  Violet grins, tries to decide what, if anything, about Dr. Holly has changed. Her tightly clipped curls have turned white and she has lost some of her roundness, but otherwise she looks the same. She still prefers an old cardigan and jeans to more formal doctorwear. Dr. Holly once told Violet’s class that she wanted physicians to stop treating all aspects of a woman’s reproductive health as an illness. “Part of the challenge is to create a more welcoming environment for women. In France,” she said, “a gynaecologist’s office is more like an apartment.” When she said this, Violet pictured a kitchen drawer full of stainless steel specula.

  “Holly, hi.” Violet says. “Gosh, it must be ten years.”

  A moment later Dr. Holly is hugging Violet, who registers simultaneously the pressure of small breasts against her ribcage and kneecaps against her thighs. Short of torso and long of limb, Violet thinks.

  “No more wild hairstyles? No more nose rings?”

  Violet laughs. She had forgotten Dr. Holly’s smile, how it is permanently clipped to her mouth, but never spreads to the rest of her face. A shit-eating grin, Devlin called it, after Violet introduced them at a fund raiser for a women’s shelter.

  “So, how can I help, Violet?”

  Violet tells Dr. Holly why she is there.

  “And how long have you and Brian been trying to conceive?”

  “A month.”

  Dr. Holly’s smile increases slightly in wattage. Violet is suddenly back ten years, reliving the experience of asking a dumb question in Dr. Holly’s seminar.

  Violet undresses and assumes the position, feels the greaseproof paper cover on the table wrinkle up underneath her back when she scoots down. The stirrups on Dr. Holly’s table wear little crocheted covers. How twee, Violet thinks. She wants to warm to Dr. Holly, but can still see the zealous church lady lurking underneath the surface.

  She looks away while Dr. Holly probes. On the wall, in a handmade picture frame, is a photograph of two toothy girls, both with Dr. Holly’s woolly curls, both with her eyes.

  “Your granddaughters?”

  Dr. Holly’s head appears above the tent Violet’s knees make. “That’s Maria. Age seven. And Tanya, age four. Aren’t they just the sweetest?”

  Her gloves make a snapping sound when she removes them.

  “They’re beautiful.” What Violet sees in those pictures reminds her once again — as if she still needs reminding — that her radical days are well and truly over. Now, when she thinks of those times at all, she sees them as an extension of her teenage rebellion. Back then she was adamant she would never have children. She also remembers what a politically charged scene it was: even talking about having sex with a man felt a little like a betrayal.

  Violet dresses. She and Dr. Holly sit in armchairs around a circular coffee table, its surface a mosaic of broken crockery.

  “Is that a Rachel Barker?” Violet asks.

  “Good eye. I got it at Devon House a few years back.”

  “Gorgeous.”

  “I think she’s doing decoupage these days.”

  “Cool.”

  “Everything looks fine, Violet.”

  “Well, that’s good. I thought I should get checked out down there. Just in case.”

  “Any history of fertility problems on the female side of your family?”

  “No. Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Periods regular.”

  “Oh, ya.”

  “Then it sounds like everything will be just fine. It’s far too early to think that there might be a problem. You just keep trying.” She fixes Violet with a finishing grin.

  Violet leaves, feeling slightly foolish and carrying a slim booklet: Best Practices for Those Trying to Conceive, as well as a chart she can use to track ovulation. She pins it to the fridge, next to the bus schedule.

  Over the next month, Violet and Brian go into training. They get to bed early each night. They take daily walks along the train tracks to Bowring Park. They eat plenty of plums and green peppers — Nancy’s advice. They pledge to abstain from sex until the red-circled date on the chart, though they cheat a little bit. She insists that he not smoke pot or drink more than a couple of beers in the hours leading up to Ovulation Sunday, as it becomes known. She wants fresh, vigorous sperm, and lots of it. And Brian, she is happy to report to Nancy, obliges.

  Later, Brian will tell Violet he knows the exact moment it happened: “During the omnibus showing of Coronation Street,” he says. “Remember that episode where Vera and Jack tie one on at the Rovers Return, and when they get home Vera is randy and Jack keeps giving her excuses. He doesn’t want to do it. But Vera won’t take no for an answer. She won’t back off. Jack gets more and more cornered looking until finally he gets this resigned look on his face. He sits on the edge of the bed and carefully removes and folds his half-glasses. Like he doesn’t want to see what he’s about to get into. Jesus, it was just brilliant.”

  Confirmation comes two weeks later when, perched over the toilet bowl, Violet pees on three different name-brand sticks, and all respond with a blue horizon.

  Violet first feels her baby as a series of flutters and tickles. It freaks her out a little bit, but she soon decides she loves the feeling of the baby inside her. “You’re so lucky,” her mother tells her when Violet reports no morning sickness. “Just like your Aunt Margaret. I on the other hand …” And she goes on to describe in great detail her martyrdom to the Goddess Nausea. She then tells Violet that all the time she was pregnant with her she had a bottle of Thalidomide on top of her dresser. “I don’t know what stopped me from taking it,” she says.

  Once the first trimester is over, Violet is full of energy again. It all starts to feel so simple, so natural to her. When she listens to other women trade war stories, she thinks they are exaggerating, that they are being unnecessarily negative. Some treat her like an invalid. “I feel fine. I’m just pregnant.” Most disturbing to her, though, are the old whiskery ones in plastic headscarves who stop her in the street to tell her that her life will never be the same. “I mean, come on,” she says to Nancy, “I’m not superstitious, or anything, but I find it a bit creepy. And they touch me. Complete strangers patting me on the arm or touching my belly and telling me that everything is going to be okay. Like there’s something wrong.”

  “But they mean no harm,” counsels Nancy. “Think of it as community outreach.”

  By her third trimester Violet begins to wonder. Is it something about her face? She stares into the mirror, searching for any signs of weakness or deficiency, any sign that she’s marked. There must be something wrong, she thinks. Why else would people work so hard to reassure her, keep telling her it will be a change for the better? Sometimes they make her feel angry. Just who are they to assume that her life has been in any way lacking? And to whom exactly are they talking? She develops
a theory that these sages are not counselling her at all, but using her as a stand-in for some younger version of themselves, or for a daughter or granddaughter who will not listen.

  Then, weirdly, in the final month, Violet develops a new axiom (#543): “The amount of baby I can feel at any one time — a head, a bum, an elbow — exists in direct proportion to the uncanny feelings that are beginning to engulf me with disturbing frequency.” Reading it a second time, she pencils a small question mark beside it, deciding that it needs more work. Still, some days she thinks that the life growing inside her is slowly revealing a counterpart in the exterior world, a world outside a world, one she has been deliberately blind to. When she confides her thoughts in Brian, he suggests that she may want to consider converting to Roman Catholicism.

  By early September, Violet is being pummelled by knees and elbows. One night she is awakened by an uncomfortable weight on her pelvis. At her next gynaecological appointment she is told that her baby has somersaulted into a breach position, but will likely right itself again. She waits, but the baby stays put, content to kick its mother in the bladder and head-butt acid up into her throat.

  Violet passes her due date. The phone rings twenty times a day. It is her mother or Nancy or Keppie or Amy or Devlin or Igor or Eva or the lady who lives across the road. And they all want to know the same thing. “Any movement yet? Any change?” Towards the end of the second week Brian unplugs the phone.