When Light Is Like Water

by Molly McCloskey

  It shouldn’t have surprised me, her refusal to imagine deeply for fear of imagining the worst – it’s hardly an uncommon strategy – but it was only when Stan died that the implications of this approach revealed themselves, for better and for worse. When my mother said to me, three months after her husband’s death, ‘I’m surprised how much I miss him,’ I got the impression her surprise was adding to the pain. I was astonished. How could she not have known? I had known. I’d been dreading, on her behalf, her aloneness. Unlike my mother, I dwell anxiously on the future, convinced that expecting the worst will render the worst less destabilizing. But the future, when it arrives, is never quite as I pictured it, and even if there is suffering, it is somehow not what I’d prepared for. I find myself as though in a dream, one of those dreams in which I realize I have studied for the wrong exam. All I have done, with my fretting and my vivid imagination about the future, is render myself miserable, yet again, in the present.

  After Stan’s death, my mother never really shook the air of someone going through the motions. What point was there in rallying? There were no corners of the earth she hankered to see, and nothing left to strive for. There would be no more loves, no intimate companionship, no one to partner her in the quotidian. Life had thrilled her, and I could see that it no longer did.

  I passed Cauley’s old bedsit the other day, not by chance. It’s on the Rathmines Road, on the top floor of a terraced house of grey-brown brick. I stood at the black gate and stared up at the windows – single panes that looked like they could shatter at the slightest tap – and they were blank and lifeless. The house itself looked dead, as though nothing on earth had ever happened there.

  I met Cauley in the spring of 1995.

  It was late afternoon, I had just dropped Eddie at the station. He was catching the afternoon train to Dublin for a trade show. I was relieved he was going away; we both were. We had argued the night before, for the first time in ages. Things had been good with us lately. We’d spent the winter working on the house. We had stripped the kitchen wallpaper, which was oily with grime, scrubbed everything and painted. We’d sanded the sitting-room floorboards till they felt like peach fuzz, then varnished them, dizzy for days with the fumes. We had even drawn up plans for the back garden.

  The argument had happened after an uneventful dinner down at a pub and restaurant in Carney, a couple of miles from home. When we’d finished eating we moved to the bar area for a nightcap, and Eddie said why didn’t I come with him to Dublin the next day.

  ‘You mean tomorrow?’

  ‘Why not? You could go round the shops, change of scene. We could go for a meal.’

  I’d been looking forward to my evening alone. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe next time. We can plan it.’

  ‘What’s to plan? It’s an overnight in Dublin.’

  ‘I’m in the mood for staying home,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ He sounded hurt, which surprised me. The invitation had seemed offhand; now, my refusal felt mean-spirited. I sat there reconsidering. I thought: Why not? I was about to say to Eddie that maybe I would come, when he began, out of the blue, to tell me a story. It was a story someone had told him recently. It concerned a man who was having an affair. His wife knew. It was an agonizing time. When the man would go off to whatever city his lover was in, the wife would pack his case for him, as she always had – he was someone who travelled a lot. She said that just because he was behaving like a monster was no reason for her to change her habits. It was both a strategy for containment and a way of retaining her equilibrium in the face of uncertainty and possible disaster. Whoever had told Eddie the story thought the wife was a fool, but Eddie disagreed. He said it took a lot of spine to do that, and a lot of wisdom, and he bet anything the marriage would survive.

  It was a strange story for Eddie to tell. He wasn’t prone to mulling over the nature of other people’s intimacies or pondering abstractions.

  Naturally, I asked him if he was having an affair.

  He shook his head, his eyes thrown heavenward. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then what are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m just telling you a story,’ he said.

  ‘About the kind of wife you want me to be?’

  He said why did everything have to be about me, and I said that it didn’t but that clearly there was a moral to the story, and he crossed his arms and looked around the bar, which meant he wanted to move on.

  We talked about other things – the trade show, and a piece I was researching on the seaweed industry, and what we might do over the weekend. And then, because we’d had too much to drink, I went back to that story. I wouldn’t let it go. I became convinced it was apocryphal, something Eddie had made up in order to warn me or to impart a lesson. I told him I could see right through it, what he was trying to tell me.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ he said.

  I straightened up on my stool and said self-righteously, ‘Am I?’

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘Am I?’

  He got up and nodded towards the door, then headed for it, expecting me to follow.

  I sat, in a show of childish defiance, but when he opened the door without looking back, I followed.

  He put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the car. Instead, he heaved a huge sigh and said that sometimes he had no idea what I wanted from him.

  The sudden collapse of his anger confused me. Because I didn’t know what else to say, I said that I was sorry, but it came out sounding more exasperated than contrite. He stared straight ahead for a moment at the windscreen, then he turned the key and we drove home in silence.

  In the morning, a drab light came through the Velux window. Eddie was asleep, his face towards the opposite wall but his body turned partly towards me, one arm bent under him. He looked like someone who had fallen from a height, whose body was twisted in ways that can mean only one thing. In the far corner of the bedroom, where the laundry always piled up, were our clothes from the previous night. There was a lamp one of us had set temporarily on a pile of hardbacks and its shade was askew. Eddie’s small suitcase, which had only a can of shaving foam and a pair of boxers in it, was yawning open on the floor. Everything looked random, and careless, and I had the thought that I was doing it all wrong, that I had been from the start, as though I’d been playing a game whose rules I had entirely misunderstood.

  In the afternoon I left him to the station, then went to town for groceries. It was one of those lifeless, grey days when all you see are plastic shopfronts and skids of dog shit. Where the footpath met the bridge, a drunk was standing. He stood there like a sentry at Buckingham Palace, like he wouldn’t budge if you paid him. His few strands of silver hair had been combed neatly across his head. His face was empurpled and large-pored from drink, and his nose was swollen, its tip gnarled like a root. But he had that unlikely air of dignity that certain drunks have – purposeful and upright and very fragile. I thought if I said, Boo! his very heart would shatter. I nodded to him in greeting, and he smiled back, glassy-eyed, a very small and knowing smile, almost priestly but for its humility.

  I was halfway up the path between the two bridges when I spotted Kevin, a guy Eddie and I sometimes talked to at the pub, coming towards me. I stopped. We exchanged the usual cascade of banalities, and then he said that his old friend Cauley was due around six and why didn’t I join them in Mulligan’s for a drink?

  ‘Eddie’s away,’ I said. I thought it might be awkward without him. I didn’t know Kevin well.

  ‘But you’re not.’ He was smiling, but there was something behind it, a slight smirk.

  We looked down at the river. It was low tide and I could see a couple of car tyres, a single shoe lying forlornly on its side, a mangled umbrella. I had a perverse fascination for the detritus on the river bank. Today there was also a package of processed meat, unopened, and nearby a naked doll, an arm and a leg locked in goose step. Big white swans slumbered on
the gravel, their bodies spreading fatly, their heads lying inert on their backs, something disconcerting and suggestive in those long, limp, supine necks of theirs. When they lifted off from the surface of the water, their wings made a great thwocking sound, and on a day of low spirits, a day like today, I found them creatures of particular menace.

  I looked at my watch. It was five-thirty. I felt suddenly impatient for six o’clock. ‘I’ll come for one,’ I said.

  I already knew a bit about Cauley. He and Kevin had been friends since they were boys, and Kevin had once suggested that we should meet because we were both in radio, though I was with the rinky-dink local station and Cauley was getting gigs on a national station. I knew that Cauley came from a little town in the midlands, where his father still lived, and that his mother had decamped to Dublin and was with another man. Cauley lived in Dublin now, too, but he was known down our way because an aunt of his had married a local man, and together they ran a shop and petrol station out on the Donegal road. Growing up, Cauley had spent summers with them, and that was how he and Kevin knew each other.

  His first name was Darragh but everybody called him by his surname. When he turned up at Mulligan’s, Kevin introduced us and he shook my hand. It wasn’t the firmest of grips and his palm was a bit sweaty. I was ready to be defensive, even cutting, because I expected him to be full of himself. He was twenty-eight years old. He had just had his first play staged at the Peacock in Dublin and was working on a film script, for which he’d reportedly gotten a nice lump of development money. I had heard him on radio, reviewing films or theatre productions in London, and he was good – rapid-fire, excited, but with a hint of the sardonic. Instead of trying to hide the country accent, he sometimes thickened it, as a kind of fuck you to all the formal education and privilege that had not been his.

  What kind of a picture can I paint of him? He was tall, by Irish standards, but thick-set, with a kind of hunkering quality that could make him look furtive and up-to-no-good, even when he was neither. He had a funny way of walking – always rushing, the very picture of someone running late, but with an odd, loping stride, as though he were walking a dog, one of those monsters that jerk their owners along, or as though he had himself on a lead, which I imagine was often how he felt. His skin was fair, it flushed a baby-pink in the heat. He was not, in other words, dashing. But he had a pent-up quality, a hunger, and an obvious intelligence. He had a habit, during lulls in the conversation, of chewing his lips with an intensity that looked capable of drawing blood, and when he smoked I sometimes saw a tremble in his hand. His response to this tangle of anxieties was to behave as though he had nothing to lose, and that recklessness seemed to me, and perhaps still does, a form of courage.

  Would I call him a drunk? Not quite. That would be to suggest a certain sloppiness, a lack of focus or the living of a lie, and none of those things quite applied. To spend time with Cauley was to watch someone throw himself at life, someone who happened to drink a lot. Even when sitting still, or as still as he ever got, he churned; he had the compression of a piston, one of those guys who’s always got one leg juddering under the table.

  We sat three in a row on high stools, the kind with no arms and whose slippery vinyl seats puff like a risen loaf. Before I could say anything Cauley told me he’d read something I’d written in a Sunday paper. It was about a young woman from the town who had been sexually assaulted and whose attacker had gotten off on a technicality. The girl had given me an interview. Cauley knew both the families involved and said that the guy’s brother had done worse two years ago and the girl had been too scared to press charges.

  ‘The same girl?’

  ‘A friend of hers.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no reason you would.’

  I felt foolish. I was the one who lived here, I’d interviewed the girl, and he knew more than I did. Not that I could’ve done anything with the other story, but the fact that no one had mentioned it to me made me feel I was out of my depth.

  Cauley caught my discomfort. ‘They’re savages, that family. Nobody knows the half of what they’ve done.’

  And then he peered, pointedly, into my almost-empty glass, and I said okay to another drink.

  By the time he was making his way back from the bar, two other people had squeezed into the space beside me. Someone was talking to me but I was watching Cauley, who was holding my eye as he wormed through the knot of people between us. He handed me the pint and I leaned forward to say something, and the heel of my boot caught on the rung of the stool and I started to slip off the vinyl seat.

  He steadied me, his hand just above my hip, and said, ‘Whoa!’

  I was gripping his shoulder.

  ‘Shall we move to a table?’ he said.

  More people had arrived – there were now eight or ten in our group – and we crowded into one of the U-shaped booths with the hard, mud-brown benches. Cauley scooted in beside me, and soon another round appeared. The night was reaching the stage where there was much pointless clamour and the half-serious slapping of palms on tables for emphasis. In the hubbub, Cauley and I pressed closer. We talked about Dublin, and where he’d grown up, about childhood summers in Sligo and about his parents, who were still technically married but had nothing to do with one another.

  ‘My parents were never married,’ I said, by way of solidarity. And then added, as though the second fact somehow followed from the first: ‘I’m married.’

  Cauley nodded and lifted his brows slightly, as if what I’d said was too obvious or uninteresting to warrant a response. It was the first time I’d referred to Eddie, but it was clear that Cauley knew about him. It was always like that there – you’d meet someone for the first time and get the sense that they’d been briefed on you. We sat in silence for a moment, childishly glum, until at last he leaned away from me and cocked his head to one side and said in his camped-up country accent, ‘And, how is it, being married?’

  We were drunk by then, and I stared at the table for a dramatically long time and murmured, in a tone so woebegone it shames me still, ‘I wouldn’t know any more.’

  ‘Ho!’ he said, then gave his head a quick shake as though to clear it.

  Cauley was always saying things like ‘Ho!’ and ‘Mighty!’, always exclaiming, always ironic. He looked me briefly in the eye, just a glance. Then he put his arm over the back of the bench behind me, pressed his thigh to mine and leaned across me to say something to Kevin, who was sitting the other side of me. I felt the heat of him, a sudden strong pull. I picked up the merest scent of sweat. I leaned my head back against his arm and let them talk.

  At some point, I saw that Cauley had fished a pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and was scribbling an address on a scrap of paper. Underneath the address he wrote a telephone number. Then he clicked the pen and tucked it smartly back into his pocket. It was only then I noticed how out of place his big-city after-work outfit was. It was April, but down the country we were all still in our winter woollies and jeans, and in that jacket Cauley looked like a boy playing dress-up. Poor Cauley. He was only just becoming himself at the time, or trying to, and it was a hit-and-miss process. But he was out there in the world and you could tell that he was proud, and it touched me. He handed me the bit of paper and said, ‘Here’s how to get hold of me.’

  At closing time, we stumbled out on to O’Connell Street. The crowd from inside was milling about on the footpath. There was a spring frost, and after the smoke and stink of indoors the sharp night air felt as clean and other-worldly as if we’d stepped out on to a mountaintop.

  Cauley rested his head for a moment on the shelf of my shoulder, puppyish and awkward. ‘Ring me,’ he said, in a voice so hushed and intimate I half thought I’d imagined it.

  Then he lifted his head, squeezed my hand and called out his goodbyes, and off he went, in a terribly self-conscious saunter, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other swinging slightly at his side. He k
new I was watching and he was striving for just the right effect but, poor Cauley, he had no idea what the right effect was, let alone how to achieve it.

  I met a Somali on the Liffey boardwalk today. It was one of those fine, blue winter afternoons you so rarely get here, cool but hardly a breeze. There was something so still and perfect about it that it felt sorrowful, the sort of day you’d call to mind if you were leaving this world behind. I was dressed warmly enough that I decided to sit outside along the river, at one of the high tables beside the coffee kiosk on Ormond Quay. A few gaunt junkies sat on the benches, and I eyed them furtively and with some amazement. On a wet, dreary day they look not so very different from a lot of Dublin’s pallid and bedraggled foot traffic. But on a clean, clear day they can seem another form of life entirely, slithered up from the deep and unaccustomed to the light.

  A briny smell was coming off the river, which was a milky green in the sun, and on the railing seagulls squalled and the pigeons gulped like turkeys. Two suitcases being wheeled along the footpath sounded like a squad of jack-booted soldiers approaching. When the din faded, I heard his voice. He and his companion spoke first in Somali – a rapid-fire paddle of words, as though they were barking urgent orders at each other – and then in English, ordering coffee. A dart of nostalgia passed through me, as though it were my own native tongue I was hearing, and when he turned around, I said, ‘Are you Somali?’

  He was from Baidoa, in the south of the country. I told him that I had been to Baidoa, and he was surprised, but not shocked. Everywhere thinks that it’s the centre of the universe. I invited him and his friend to join me. His friend knocked back his espresso and said that he was going, but Ahmed stayed behind. He asked me who I’d worked for and what I was doing now, and I told him that I had spent the better part of the last four years reading field reports from Gedo and Mogadishu and Kismayo, and that I was now writing a report on Dadaab. I took pleasure in pronouncing the place names, because I knew that it gave him pleasure to hear them, but also because it connected me to a part of my life I’d left behind.