‘Fitzy!’ the man said.
The woman was still staring at her.
‘After-work drinks. Some of us had a bit too much.’ Liam mimed drinking. ‘Thrown out,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve spent the last half hour trying to convince one of the drivers to take her.’ He pointed over her head.
‘Good old Fitzy,’ the man laughed. ‘Knows how to keep the staff happy.’
‘Are you all right, dear?’ the woman said to her. ‘Give her your coat, Liam. Jesus—it’s practically translucent.’
Kate didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘You’re right.’ Liam took his coat off. ‘We don’t know how to handle the young ones when they get like this. I mean, she’s not my responsibility. I just felt bad. Look at her. If I thought my Shauna—’
‘Here you go, darling.’ The woman gave the umbrella to the man and took Liam’s coat, wrapping it around Kate. The mossy smell was exquisite. The umbrella was over them both now and Kate could see how wet it was, all the pretty drops thudding on the plastic.
The man laughed. ‘Feels like we’re back in Belfield, Carroll.’
‘It’s not funny,’ the woman said. ‘Get a taxi to come around the corner and I’ll move her across.’
Liam vanished.
‘I can walk,’ Kate said.
‘She speaks,’ said the man.
‘Come on, now, we’ll get you dry. Watch the kerb. Watch the puddle!’
Her right ankle was submerged in cold all of a sudden but it didn’t seem to matter. She was going home now. They were going home.
‘I can walk,’ she said.
‘Help me,’ the woman said.
‘I’m trying to keep your hair dry,’ the man said. ‘Which do you want?’
‘Liam Bloody Carroll. I’m telling Joanna.’
‘He’s only helping a young one home. Look at the state of her. You can’t think.’
‘She had her arms around him.’
‘Still.’
‘I’ve known Joanna since we were kids.’
Kate felt her balance go and suddenly there was sharp, burny pain in her palms and on her knee.
‘Nicholas!’ The woman’s voice rang out. ‘Help her—help her.’
Kate was up in the air then, wriggling in someone’s wet arms, her knee still stinging. Then she was lying on a plastic bed and a stranger’s voice was telling her to sit up, to stay awake.
She came round to a prodding at her shoulder and an old man’s face far too close to her own. The sound of a scream went off inside her.
‘Get out,’ the man said. ‘Come on, lass, shift yourself. You’re here.’
With enormous effort, she sat up. The dirty cream paint of her apartment block was in front of her, a few metres away. Kate didn’t think she could make it inside. She tried to lie down again but the old man was stronger than he looked and he yanked her out of the car, shouldered her to the door, got her into the porch somehow and told her that was all he’d been paid for.
‘Look after yourself, lass. Get to bed.’
She eventually found her key and got it in the ludicrously small hole of the front door. In reception she sat on the floor beside the mailboxes and watched him drive away. Her keys were cold in her hands and she clasped her fingers around them, thinking how lucky she was to be inside, to have somewhere to go.
DUBLIN
Halloween 2018
Kate woke up on the couch with a cotton-wool mouth and muddy fingertips. The room had an alien vitality, the grey walls pulsing, a low hum in the air. She wondered how long she’d been asleep. It could have been hours, days, weeks—time was a tightrope snapped in two. She felt like she’d gone hurtling through the ages. So many forgotten things, and somehow, all at once.
The brownie.
On the coffee table, the paper bag was empty, chocolatey marks across the front. It was a neat trick of this drug that it could make her eat and not remember. And yet, it was such a strange, debilitating kind of trip, unsuited to a woman of thirty-two, to the adult personality she’d woken up with one day that was afraid of everything new. She would murder her brother if it lasted much longer. Moving gingerly towards the window, she opened the curtains to a luminous sky, heavy with weather. Three storeys down, the car park was quiet, the mean light of the street lamps the only semblance of life.
Finding her phone, she went to play a song, something minimalist and repetitive, with notes she could absorb. She longed to call Ray but it was too much of a gamble. What if he showed up with Liz? No—no way. Kate was alone in this, and she would either get through it or die. She lay down on the couch. What did it matter if time was broken? We were all alive somewhere. She remembered Peter explaining this the morning after Elaine’s funeral. He’d come into the bedroom to find her in Elaine’s bed, under the peach duvet that still smelled of her sister. It’s OK, he’d said. You know she’s still out there? We are all alive somewhere. Back then, she’d thought he’d meant in heaven but now she wondered if he meant that all times were simultaneously occurring and the real tragedy was our inability to choose a location. To choose a home. It seemed no less crazy an idea than Catholicism and its incentivized promises of eternity. But this was just the brownie talking. Narcotic time—narcotic thoughts—could not be trusted. Elaine was long dead and the true tragedy of time was that it went on regardless in the one lousy direction.
Rolling off the couch, Kate spread her arms over the soft carpet, waving them up and down. There was a rippling below her waist, not exactly desire, but the memory of it—what it felt like to want. Her mind was a set of Russian dolls, one thought inside the next inside the next. She wanted to escape her brain, she wanted to move. Her body said no—an unfamiliar, frightening sensation. In real life she could always make herself go, even if she was sick. She might be weak and sluggish for the warm-up but once she got going, the ill feelings disappeared. Her local gym was open twenty-four hours. Kate imagined going there now, hopping on the mountain climber in the thin, artificial light, watching her shadow bounce in the window, and beyond it, only the dark. It was like dancing with no one, for an audience that didn’t exist. She wondered why she’d spent so many nights there in recent months. It was something to do with restlessness. It was like science, or magic, the way you could convert one feeling into another. Lighter, fitter, happier, that old song, which really meant: less toxic. And there was the nebulous guilt if she didn’t go, as if she was betraying some self-inflicted principle. Ridiculous. She remembered a booklet they’d given her in the hospital, all those years ago, which had said that anorexics were bright girls who tried too hard and pushed themselves over the edge. This had made her feel safe, another bit of a fact to add to her armoury: she wasn’t one of those bright, try-hard girls like Miranda, or the blonde-ponytailed perfectionists who were always in the front row of lectures and the first in the library in the mornings, claiming the same seats every day, so that even when they were in the toilet or out for a cigarette, you could still see their ghosts in the nut-brown chairs, in the uneaten apples and empty coffee cups on their desks. The booklet had both absolved Kate and enraged her. Was there a similar information pack for all the bright, try-hard boys? She remembered asking Ray this question, in her most obnoxious college voice, in a pub one evening not long after she’d been discharged. They’d had a huge fight about gender politics while he’d stared at a few measly chips on her plate. Kate had clung to her arguments like a raft, desperate to talk about anything but herself.
Well, she was not that person now. But who was she? She’d been keeping secrets for so long, she’d started to keep them from herself. Stretching on the couch, she scoured the living room, trying to find something reassuring. Look—the tasteful paint on the walls, the charcoal carpet, the flat-screen television, the round-cornered coffee table with its smooth walnut finish.
And none of it was hers.
Who was she at all? Just a random woman in her thirties whose fine little life was falling apart. Impossible to isola
te the problem. The break-up, which was connected to the apartment, which was connected to her job and her friends and her family, which was connected to the past, to her father, to Elaine, to the shared womb, to the mother they’d been cut out of thirty-six weeks later, to her scarred stomach that had never recovered. And who was so connected to where, all the messy ‘W’s, really, and the worst one of all: why. Why were any of them here? She was not suicidal—just a healthy appreciation of death. She’d known it from such a young age that it was impossible not to consider it, frequently, deeply. And maybe that was connected to the way she lived now, but on the other hand, she had a talent for hunger.
Yet there were other ways to be, she knew that. There were people like Ray and Liz in their four-bedroom Ranelagh redbrick—the future that everyone seemed to want. Miranda from college, who’d married at twenty-five and had some archaic number of children. Most of the girls that Kate knew wanted this kind of life—Diya, the HR team at work, the girls down the gym too. Single girls in their thirties, who weren’t really girls any more. Oh, those tricky thirties. A decade of striving and uncertainty. A decade of want. Kate hoped her forties would be happier, though she knew it was foolish to be wishing her life away. Someday she’d look in the mirror at lines like tiny flesh-coloured tributaries around her eyes, and long to be thirty-two again, but it was impossible to imagine that time now, to try and leverage that future longing and turn it into approval in the present. Well, you couldn’t leverage things that didn’t exist, could you? She was being absurd. About what? Suddenly there was a blank horror in her head. Something in the ceiling or in the room, or in her own mind if she still had one, had wiped her memory.
When she came to, she was on the floor of the living room, curled into a ball. A weak winter sun was shining across the coffee table. Slowly she unfurled herself, the joints of her wrists cracking as she circled her hands. Her forehead was wet, her hair tight and damp against her head, and itchy at the back of her neck. She let her fingers at it until it hurt, a waxy lump coming away from her scalp, dots of blood along the rip. She put her hair in a topknot and touched the raw skin with her finger. Pulling her dress to her waist, she rolled off her tights. Her stomach was hollow and bloated, like she’d eaten too much of the brownie, but also not enough. The drugs had tuned into some forgotten part of her: a voice, not even, a solitary note trapped silent inside her for years. She picked up a cushion and howled into the suede, the lonely cry of a secret outed.
The first time she’d starved herself—some day of that endless week of Elaine’s funeral when the neighbours kept coming with tinfoiled plates, and her mother sat regal in the good room with vacant eyes and the meek, medicated voice of a stranger.
The next time—the day after the burial, disgusted by the food accumulating in the house: vats of lasagnes, quiches with lurid rinds, a cooked ham that was too big for the fridge and sat half-covered in the utility, her brothers hacking away at its globular carcass. She hadn’t eaten a bite all day. It had been easy. She remembered Mammy noticing, then unnoticing. Suddenly, her mind started to churn, hundreds of thoughts like bats out of a cave, but as with anything concerning her mother, they were too vast, too dense to filter. Instead: another time and another time and another time—all that year, in fact, rolling up her dinner in kitchen paper, running to the garden and stuffing it through the cypress hedge for the foxes, or the rats.
But there were secrets in the centre of the secrets that were still trying to come out. She was just hoping to keep something for herself. Something to feel good about, something that wasn’t tinged. Most of the time, she didn’t care how she looked—as long as she looked exactly the same. It was reversion to a smaller version of herself, to childhood, maybe, though why she wanted to go back there was anyone’s guess. For a split second, she saw herself: a vigilant, anxious woman who had turned away from life, from the deceptively endless sequence of events that occurred between birth and death.
Her mind cleared a little. She thought of her brothers at the dinner—Peter with his looks and questions, Ray with his godforsaken drugs. It was an intrusion into her life in Dublin. It was like they wanted her to live in chaos. Yet there was evidence, hard evidence that she was a functioning adult—her morning croissants, her chicken sandwiches, the sushi buffet she went to with Diya on Thursdays after work. Yes, there were plenty of days when she gorged herself. The pancakes she’d had with the maple syrup and cocoa nibs on the August bank holiday, the avocado smash she got in her weekend brunch spot and usually with an add-on of poached eggs. Would someone with anorexia ask for an add-on? She was certain they would not.
But—the dinner party.
The solitary note sounded again.
She’d tallied the bites when the others had left, but it was also true that she hadn’t been able to eat at all. Still, another voice persisted—a scallop cooked in butter, at least a slice of red meat, some pastry flakes, the salt on the vegetables—didn’t it all add up? No. But. Her mind was a saw, over and back, deeper and deeper, counting and countering. She had no sense of herself as an adult, of who she was or what she wanted. How come other people knew? Where did they learn it? She seemed to lack the capacity. It was like this messed-up moment was all she had, a hungry infant, unable to anticipate relief. This very evening she had thrown the Baked Alaska into the bin after hours of preparation, days—weeks—of planning, months and years if she was really getting serious. These were not the actions of a sane person. The terrible sanity of the insane. She had read the line somewhere and thought it would make a nice epitaph. At last, the tears fell quietly down her face. There was so much to mourn. All the people lost to her, all the years lost to hunger.
For a long time, she looked at the marks on the paper bag—filthy, liquidy squiggles. At some point, her stomach heaved and she ran to the bathroom. Gripping the bowl, she threw up. She vomited again before she’d time to wipe her face, and again and again, until there was nothing left but the slick bile on her fingers. She flushed the toilet, looked down into the clearing water and realized that her life was full of holes. Collapsing onto the tiles, she tried to find a point of concentration that might still the room. She fixed on the toilet paper holder, on the textured, double-ply roll she’d bought especially for the dinner party. All over her body, her nerves were stop-starting awake. A feeling that the world outside the bathroom was being ripped apart and if she let herself think about it, if she wondered long enough, there it was—the choice to go with it.
On the side of the bath she saw her razor. Then she was in the bath, taps running, her dress floating around her like weeds. Wrong way round, toes at the shampoo bottles, head heavy, the burn of the chrome T on the back of her neck. Underwater was a rainbow, orange and red wisps. The last time she went down, it was so warm and comforting that she felt she would stay there, that she’d found a kind of home, and here all along, hidden within the place she thought had been her home. Sinking into the haziness, she heard a banging in some faraway place. She tried to ignore it, but it grew louder and louder, bringing her back to the surface, horribly alive as a coughing fit sent her body into magnificent spasm. She dragged herself from the bath and lay shivering on the floor. Eventually, she peeled off the dress and crawled to the press beneath the sink. At her ankles, dozens of tiny nicks in the hollow beside the bone, thin lines of blood with dark red bubbles. She took a fresh toilet roll, broke the seal on the tissue and wrapped it around. Freezing, she sat for a moment on the tiles before getting to her feet and from there, into the woolly dressing gown on the back of the bathroom door.
The banging resumed as she walked into the hallway, and then, right out of another dimension, she heard the sound of her own name.
‘Kate!’ Ray’s voice, outside her front door. ‘Kate, Kate—let me in!’
She walked in a trance down the hall, opened the door and saw daylight in the corridor.
Her brother was in a Fila hoodie that was years old. ‘What happened you?’ he said.
�
�Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m grand.’
‘It’s almost three, Kate. I’ve been calling since ten.’
‘Time,’ she said, shrugging.
‘Tell that to Mammy.’
‘Mammy?’
‘I’ve had four phone calls—on the way over alone. She’s been ringing all day when she couldn’t get you. It’s like she has a sixth sense.’
That was not the name for it, but she knew what he meant.
‘She has me on tilt now. I left Liz and the girls at the zoo.’
‘Oh,’ said Kate. ‘I’m sorry.’
He looked down at the ground, saw her ankles.
‘Jesus, Kate. Let me in. You need—’
‘I don’t need anything,’ she said. Though for the first time in a long time, she knew it wasn’t true. She stood back from the door and let him pass. He looked like he might hug her but instead the two of them walked slowly to the living room, which was far messier than she’d realized. She looked briefly at the cushion pile on the ground, at the half-finished bottles of beer that were standing like miniature green sentries in various far-flung places. Ray said, ‘Bloody hell.’ Then they sat down on the couch and she started to talk.
DUBLIN
Halloween 2019
Through the whoosh of the wipers, the traffic on the canal looked endless, a long bleary line of red eyes. Kate was collecting Ray near his new practice in Portobello. She’d promised her mother they’d be down for seven, but as the Angelus came on the radio, she knew they’d be late. It was her own fault—she’d been the one to suggest Cranavon this year. For her mother. For Elaine, back to the only house she’d ever known. Seventeen years today. Her sister was dead now longer than she’d been alive.
Gripping the steering wheel, Kate resisted going for her phone. Her licence was barely a month old and she wouldn’t risk penalty points so soon, though getting a black mark in her mother’s book was arguably worse. Kate glanced at the passenger seat, where the glossy gold gift bag had fallen flat. She turned down the fan heater, switched stations to a zippy Dublin one and tried to tune into a conversation about dog training.
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