When Light Is Like Water

by Molly McCloskey

  I had a dog of my own, a stray little mongrel who’d attached herself to me. I named her Betty. She had such a relentlessly happy disposition that she seemed a bit stupid. One day when my friend Stephen was visiting, we took Betty to be spayed, which, in the context of Kosovo, where strays were shot or left to fend for themselves, seemed an act of pointless or excessive care. Stephen was Welsh. We had met in Sri Lanka. Around the time I went to Kosovo, he went to Juba in South Sudan. After that we’d see each other three or four times a year. Either he came to visit me or we met in some more pleasant location – the Dalmatian coast or the Mediterranean. We were comfortable together, not heated or tortured, just good. I respected Stephen, respected his self-sufficiency. He could repair an engine and build a shelter out of nothing, and navigate by dead reckoning. He was like an explorer from the nineteenth century, someone most himself when alone. He’d go off on long solo safaris or extended cross-country ski treks. But the relationship lacked traction, it didn’t have a trajectory; we were as close or as far from each other after three years as we’d been after a few months. Anyway, his plan was eventually to retire from this work and take up the family farm in Wales, and I had no desire to end up on a farm in Wales, with Stephen or anyone else. Still, I felt envious. I envied the way he inhabited his life. I thought he knew himself, utterly.

  The vet was an Albanian from Tirana, his name was Bekim. He worked for the Department of Veterinary Services, and he told us we should come only after 6 p.m., which meant that he was pocketing the money. We arrived at 6.15. On the wall of Bekim’s office were pictures of a horse, a parrot, a rabbit and a goat, all made of a cheap velvet material, and a poster showing an American flag.

  I told Bekim I wanted to watch the procedure, and he looked at me with interest and scepticism. He gave Betty a shot and a few minutes later slit her open like an envelope and began pulling what looked like a long tongue out of her. Then he stopped, cursed and tucked the tongue back into her, the way you’d tuck a tissue up your sleeve. I had no idea how things were meant to be unfolding, but this didn’t look right. There was a lot of blood – dark, thick, purply-red – pooling on the table. I looked at Stephen. He raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

  After some more rummaging around, Bekim extracted something glistening and stringy with his tongs. He started across the room with it towards the garbage can but then looked at me and stopped and, instead, dropped it at his feet on the floor, as though issuing a challenge. The floor was already smeared with blood, and he was now operating with the dog’s long, stringy bits at his feet. I was afraid he was going to slip or, worse, that he would step on them and blood and other liquids would squirt out.

  Finally, he sewed up Betty’s insides and stitched her skin, then he stooped and picked up the stringy thing and laid it on the table. He pointed out the uterus. I looked at Betty. She was comatose, defenceless. I thought I had never seen a being more innocent. Bekim poked her gently in the face a few times with his finger and said, ‘She is taking the medicine a little too seriously.’

  ‘You didn’t kill her,’ I said, half joking.

  Bekim didn’t answer, either because my question was absurd or because he considered the dog’s death of negligible import. He motioned for Stephen to lift her off the table. I put an old blanket under her and Stephen lowered her on to it and carried her to the car, then he set her gently on the back seat. As we drove away in silence I had the sense that we had shared in something elemental, a ritual of bloodletting.

  Harry asks me if I read about the horse and cattle carcasses that were found at the bottom of a cliff in Doonbeg last week. I did. Their ears had been cut off to remove identifying tags and then they’d been pitched three hundred feet from the clifftop. There were tyre marks up to the edge of the cliff. The vet who examined them – there were sixteen dead animals – said it had been hard to count them, because their necks and legs were broken and their limbs were all tangled together and they were rotting. He said it was the worst job he’d ever had to do.

  We sit there gloomily, in silence. Then Harry says that the difference between nations is the degree to which acts of everyday barbarity are tucked away, conducted out of sight, and that what we call civilization, and what we know as peace, is only the papering over of what we really are: violent, venal, full of fear.

  There was a programme on TV the other night that we both saw. It was about the sex trade in Ireland, now divided into outdoor prostitution, which sounds hale and vigorous but just means standing on street corners, and indoor prostitution, which sounds cosy but means the women have been trafficked from Eastern Europe and Nigeria and are hustled from county to county, from brothel to brothel. There was CCTV footage of a few of them in a car park in Athlone, with their little wheelie suitcases and their cheap trainers, scurrying behind their pimp like dogs he was walking but didn’t much like.

  Harry says that if the nation were a rock we could lift we’d be horrified by what we saw. The two of us are essentially in agreement on this: that human beings have an infinite capacity for cruelty. I say to him, ‘I wish it were a happier world view we shared.’

  ‘I believe goodness exists,’ he says. ‘And love. You do, too. You loved your mother. And you’ve loved other people. Isn’t that a world view?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  We order another glass of wine each.

  ‘I met an old friend of Eddie’s today,’ I say.

  Harry’s eyes go wide. He knows that I was married, but nothing at all about the break-up. ‘Really? Where?’

  ‘On Wicklow Street.’

  He sips his wine. ‘And how was that?’

  ‘Strange,’ I say. ‘I never liked the guy. But it was one of those times where you stop to say hello because you’re sure you know the person from somewhere, and by the time you realize who he is and where you know him from and that you’d rather not talk to him it’s too late.’

  ‘So you spoke to him?’

  ‘Briefly. I asked about Eddie.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He didn’t say much. He did tell me Eddie’d sold the house. The one we lived in. I asked him where Eddie was living now and he just said he was still in the area. With his family.’

  Harry can see the encounter has thrown me, though he doesn’t know why, and I’m not sure myself.

  ‘Why did he sell the house?’ Harry asks.

  ‘No idea,’ I say. ‘I didn’t want to ask.’ I resented hearing about Eddie from this particular man, who I sensed was enjoying my discomfort, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of my curiosity. I was surprised at the twinge of possessiveness I felt. I had known, of course, that the house was for sale, but I hadn’t anticipated that Eddie’s leaving it would have any particular effect on me, that I would be unsettled by the fact that, suddenly, I had no idea where to picture him.

  Harry keeps eyeing me but doesn’t comment. He is doing that thing men sometimes do. You tell them something big and confusing, something that’s really rocked you, the sort of thing that would make a woman scoot forward on her chair so that the two of you could parse the thing to death, and they say nothing. And you are never sure if they are holding it there, in silence and respect, letting you sort it the way they sort things, or if they are simply at a loss, unable to cross easily from the territory of information to the territory of feeling.

  By the time we leave the Central, it has stopped snowing and doesn’t even feel terribly cold. We walk together down to the corner of Dame Street, where the twenty-four-hour Spar is, with its plate-glass windows that glare like a huge television. Harry kisses me, once on each cheek, and says, as always, ‘Mind yourself.’ And, as always, after a few steps, I turn to watch him go. I worry about him in the city, at night. Not just that he couldn’t run if he had to – does anyone really run from muggers? – but that with all the drunkenness and the jostling, he might be knocked to the ground. I’m making him sound old, or enfeebled
, and he is neither, but it can be bedlam in this little knot of streets at night.

  When I get back to Monkstown, I go straight to the laptop and type in the address of Eddie’s house, our old house. Sure enough, the place has sold. I go from website to website, everywhere it was listed, but the photos of the interior have been removed. A jolt passes through me, a kick of panic, as though someone has padlocked a place I’d half considered mine.

  It was midsummer before I told anyone about Cauley. Camille had gone back to Toronto the previous autumn, and I saw less of Jane since Eddie and I had moved out of the town. Cauley had told Kevin, and this made me nervous. Once, when Eddie and I were in Mulligan’s having a rare drink in town, we bumped into Kevin. He was on his way to being drunk, and I kept catching him staring at me.

  ‘What did he say when you told him?’ I’d asked Cauley.

  ‘He said that Eddie was a sound guy.’ Cauley looked almost sad.

  ‘Nice,’ I said. A lot of people – men, actually – said that about Eddie. It reminded me that Eddie had another world, the world of men, with its own clear codes and criteria. ‘So does that mean his loyalties are divided?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Cauley said. ‘We’re friends since we were six.’

  The next time I met Kevin on the street it was like meeting my gynaecologist, a relative stranger who possessed knowledge of my most intimate life.

  I had no confidant of my own. Kevin was Cauley’s friend, and I resisted the temptation to unburden myself to him, to enjoy an hour devoid of duplicity. There were days when it felt as though my very thoughts were in knots, and there were other times I experienced a clear-headedness that brooked no doubt. But I was afraid this clarity was itself a delusion, an indication of how far from reality I had strayed. Was Cauley only playing? Was I? And if we were, would we even know it?

  I had read an article recently about what people do when they get lost – in a city, or when driving, or walking in a wilderness. There are identifiable stages, like the stages of grief, and, not surprisingly, the first is denial. That’s when we ‘bend the map’, try to force the features we see before us to align with those indicated on a map, even though the correspondence between them is obviously poor. We focus on details that seem to confirm what we already believe to be true and ignore evidence to the contrary. I thought, as I read, that this sort of ‘reasoning’ was hardly confined to being lost and in fact probably directed the bulk of our life’s decision-making. The more distinctive stages come when denial breaks down, when we can no longer pretend that we aren’t lost. Adrenalin surges, panic sets in. Our perceptions become distorted. When this happens, the article said, it is best to ‘stay put and engage in a quiet activity to calm the mind’, which is – do I need to say it? – the very last thing we are likely to do. Instead, we will choose from a handful of strategies, including ‘backtracking’, ‘route sampling’ and ‘view enhancing’, deceptively rational-sounding terms for actions undertaken in alarm. The funny thing is that lost people – despite the fact that they often wander considerably long distances in their panicked peregrinations – are likely to be found relatively close to their last-known position. In other words, they could just as profitably have stayed put and engaged in a quiet activity to calm the mind.

  The article had a short but terrifying sidebar on spatial disorientation among pilots, a condition in which perceptions no longer agree with reality. In order to give his non-pilot readers a point of reference, the writer began by referring to the common experience of sitting in a stationary train when an adjacent train begins to pull away, creating the sensation that we are moving backwards. He then went on to describe the myriad reasons pilots become disoriented: non-visible or false horizons, night flying over featureless terrain, the strange things manoeuvres such as turning, banking, levelling and climbing do to our vestibular system. There is a whole dark vocabulary of disorientation: the ‘leans’, the ‘black-hole approach illusion’, the ‘graveyard spiral’. Many fatal accidents in private planes are the result of pilots lacking the training to fly with reference to instruments or, out of inexperience or panic, trusting their perceptions over what the instrumentation is telling them.

  Upon finishing the article, I thought two things: that the key to being a successful liar was the ability to keep your nerve when your mind was playing tricks on you, and that the affair I was having might merely be a futile detour I was taking within my marriage and in the end I would wind up not the far side of anything but right back where I’d started – with Eddie.

  I was in town when I bumped into Jane. I had come to turn in a piece I’d done for the local paper on the current state of a twenty-year-long battle over a proposed relief road through town (this was the tail end of the old days, when things still happened in three dimensions, and I trudged into the office and handed them four typed pages), and I was headed to the phone box to ring Eddie, who I’d been trying to reach for the last three hours. I’d worked myself into a state of anxiety, convinced – not for the first time – that Eddie had found out everything and needing desperately to hear his voice, to be reassured he hadn’t. It was a terribly cheap feeling, and the relief that followed each time I got my reassurance was so great that it left me vowing, for a few hours, to forsake Cauley.

  I saw Jane on the opposite corner of Wine Street. She spotted me at almost the same instant. She smiled, and then an odd look crossed her face and she signalled that I should wait and she would cross to my side. By the time she reached me, I was feeling the full wallop of a panic attack. Jane’s voice sounded to me like it was coming from inside my own head. I looked down at the footpath, which quivered slightly, as though it might crawl away.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she said.

  I don’t know how people know what to do, how they know to just take you in hand and talk to you until it passes. But that’s what Jane did. We stood on the street and she stroked me like you would a cat, and after a minute or two I stopped shaking. She had a little place on Harmony Hill, and we went there and sat at her kitchen table and I told her everything, or almost everything. She listened very carefully, and when finally I paused she said that she was incredibly sorry to hear all this but that, to be honest, she wasn’t shocked.

  I looked at her. There is nothing to make you feel foolish like someone telling you that your greatest secret is hardly a surprise.

  ‘I remember the day you got married,’ she said. ‘I was thinking what a strange thing love is – I mean, strange like miraculous – because it allows two very different people to see things in each other that aren’t so apparent to anyone else.’

  ‘You mean you thought it was far-fetched?’

  ‘No. I thought the two of you were very different, that’s all. When I say I’m not surprised, I don’t mean I didn’t think it could work. You know,’ she said, ‘I’ve always thought he loved you. Any time I’ve seen you together, that’s what I thought.’

  I stayed at Jane’s for a few hours. She cooked a stir-fry and we talked about her job testing water up and down the west coast, and then about a guy from Derry she’d been seeing. He was doing a Ph.D. in environmental toxicology and had just come back from field work in Indonesia. She showed me a photo of him. He had a beard and was standing on a beach, in wet-weather gear and a woolly hat, and he was smiling. He looked like one of those men who are instinctively at home in the elements. Her life seemed astonishingly clean to me, simple in the best sense, and my own, in comparison, seedy and scrambled.

  I put the picture down very carefully on the table and told Jane that I was happy for her.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she said, as though she hadn’t heard me.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’

  The following day was Saturday. As Eddie and I puttered around the kitchen making coffee, he told me about a dream he’d had the night before. In the dream, he had jumped off a cliff – or perhaps he’d been pushed, he couldn’t be sure – and he was flying, or floating, through the air, d
own, down, down, a little nervous but mostly curious. Then, abruptly, he realized that he would never hit the ground, and he became more rather than less afraid. The thought that he would keep falling through space, for ever – that that was his eternity – horrified him. He said it was the most frightening dream he’d had in ages.

  I bent to pour some Kibbles into Olivia’s bowl and didn’t look at him. I thought: he wants me to go, he feels us in a limbo that is worse than the worst resolution. I have become a burden. I have become, literally, a nightmare.

  A week later, I tried to leave him. I didn’t say that I was leaving him. I told him I was going to Jane’s for the night. I said a few of us were having dinner and there’d be lots of wine and I’d be better staying over. What I intended was to drive all the way to Dublin, check into a hotel and call Eddie from there in the morning, to tell him it was over. It was cowardly, but I reasoned that the amount of pain inflicted would, in the end, be hardly more than if I’d sat him down in our front room for the announcement. I hadn’t told Cauley either. Only after I’d phoned Eddie would I go to Cauley’s bedsit and reveal what I had done. In a strange way, all these convolutions and half-truths thrilled me. I felt as though I were finally taking hold of matters, making firm decisions.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to think much beyond the moment of my arrival at Cauley’s, but I was in thrall to my vision of that moment, the intensity of feeling that would follow my delivering myself to Cauley, the place it would assume in our mythology. Any uncertainties about how Cauley would receive me, now that I was all his, were masked by my excitement. What I had managed to make myself believe was that, once the deed was done, whatever doubts Cauley might have would evaporate; there would be only our future to embark on.

  I packed an overnight bag, just some essentials to get me through a few days. I’d have to come back for my things, of course, but that could be accomplished once the news had sunk in with Eddie. I seemed to have assumed that the practicalities of separating would be neatly split from the emotional storm, that there would be a linear progression of foreseeable phases and that we would proceed through them with rationality and order.