And then we had the summer and we were freer than ever, completely free, and I lied blithely to my parents about where I was going and who with, using a rotating cast of old friends, and neither of them ever cottoned on, and I assumed it was the same for Mr Beattie too.
*
I don’t want to think about the rest of it: the evening he finally confronted us, walked right in on us. I don’t want to give any room to the disgust or the revulsion, to the anger and the panic that followed, and the tears, our tears, our wild apologies, when we should have been defiant, because what was there, in truth, for us to be apologising for, and to whom did we owe any apology?
‘I have to do it,’ she kept on saying. ‘I’m all he’s got. It won’t change anything. But I have to do it.’
*
That winter, my English class studied Keats. I wrote a whole essay, six, seven sides, on the final stanza of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. ‘And they are gone: aye, ages long ago / These lovers fled away into the storm.’ In the stanza before, the lovers are gliding like phantoms into the wide cold hall and the iron porch where the Porter lies in a drunken stupor. His bloodhound wakes and shakes its flabby face but doesn’t bark. The bolts slide open one by one, the chains stay silent, and the key finally turns, then, just as they think they’ve made it, the door groans on its hinges. You think it’s all over for them, but then you read on, and you realise they’ve slipped away, out of your hands, before your very eyes, a miracle, a magic trick, a wormhole to another place, another time, where no one can ever follow.
The teacher kept me after class. She didn’t believe I’d written it, at least not alone. I opened my lever arch and showed her my notes. Page after page after page in my crabbed, self-conscious writing. Ending rights the focus, I’d written, does not leave us in too cosy a glow but reminds us of age/decay/coldness of religious characters. I left this part out: I finished my essay with the lovers escaping. We talked about the real ending, Keats’s ending, and we talked about his drafts of the ending, some of which were printed in the footnotes of the cheap Wordsworth edition.
‘You’ve really thought about this,’ she said. ‘You’ve really taken this to heart.’ I started to cry. ‘Oh dear,’ the teacher said, and she found me a tissue from a plastic pouch in her desk drawer, and she came round and sat on the front of her desk and asked if there was anything I wanted to talk about. I shook my head and held out my hand for my essay, and I wondered how much she knew, or guessed, my whole body liquid with shame.
*
I looked her up on the Internet just once, some months ago, on impulse, spurred by the Marriage Equality march in Belfast. It instantly felt too easy, too much. She’d never made it as a solo or even an orchestral musician, but she was a music teacher – and she was married; she and her husband ran a small music school together in Ayrshire. There were pictures of them both on the website, taking group lessons, conducting ensembles, standing with students of the most recent Woodwind Summer School. She was still whippet thin, no make-up, choppy hair. He looked younger than her: Doc Martens and skinny jeans, spiky hair, an earring. I clicked from one picture to the next. I don’t know why I was so taken aback. I was engaged, after all. Engaged, happily engaged, and about to buy a flat. I just had never imagined it for her.
A memory came to me: one time in Ruby Tuesday’s, or The Other Place, one of the studenty cafés across town in South Belfast where you could sit and eke out a mug of filter coffee for a whole evening. We’d said I love you by then – maybe for the first time, or maybe very recently; we were huge and important and giddy with it, with all of it, with us. I felt as if my blood was singing – that sparks were shooting from me – that everything I touched was glowing.
I could have done anything in those weeks. I could have run marathons or swum the length of the Lagan or jumped from a trapeze and flown. And yet I was happy, happier than I thought it was possible to be, just sitting in a café, talking. We sat in that café and talked about everything and nothing, talked and talked, and we were us. I remember that; I couldn’t get over that. The room and everything in it: the scuffed wooden booths, the chipped laminate tables, the oversized menus, the fat boys in Metallica T-shirts and Vans at the table beside us, the cluster of girls across the way still in their school uniforms, the waitress carrying a plate of profiteroles, the rain on the window, the yellow of the light – it seemed a stage set that had been waiting our whole lives for us and at last we were here.
The waitress at the table, splashing more coffee into our mugs: ‘Anything else I can get for yous, girls?’ and we say, ‘No, thank you,’ in unison, then burst out laughing, at nothing, at all of it. For all the waitress knows, for all anyone knows, we’re just two students, two friends, having an ordinary coffee.
‘I want to tell her,’ I say. ‘I want to stand up and tell everyone.’ And for a moment it seemed as if it might just be that simple: that that was the secret. ‘I don’t want us to have to hide,’ I went on. ‘I want to tell everyone: my parents, your dad, everyone. I want to stand in front of the City Hall with a megaphone and shout it out to the whole of Belfast.’
Suddenly neither of us was laughing any more.
‘I wish we could,’ she said.
We were both quiet for a moment.
‘When you were older,’ I said, thinking aloud, ‘you could team up with a male couple, and the four of you could go out together, and people would assume, assume correctly, you were on a double-date. Only the couples wouldn’t be what they thought.’
I was pleased with the idea, but she still didn’t smile. ‘Hiding in plain sight,’ she said.
‘You could live together,’ I went on, ‘all in one big house, so your parents wouldn’t get suspicious. If you had to, you could even marry.’ I started laughing again as I said it.
‘No,’ she said, and she was serious, more than serious – solemn. She reached out and touched one finger to my wrist and all of my blood leapt towards her again. ‘We won’t need to,’ she said. ‘By then we’ll be free.’
*
That night, I walked the streets of East Belfast again in my dreams. Waking, the dream seemed to linger far longer than a mere dream. These streets are ours. I was jittery all day, a restless, nauseous, over-caffeinated feeling. I could email her, I thought, through the website. I wouldn’t bother with pleasantries or preliminaries, I’d just say, ‘There we were. Do you remember?’
Chasing
I STEPPED INTO THE PORCH AND HAULED my suitcases in behind me.
‘Close the outer door before you open the inner one, remember,’ Mum said. ‘The plants don’t like the draught.’ Then she went to park the car round the back. I bumped the front door shut with my hip. There seemed to be more plants than ever. The succulents, the geraniums, the spineless yucca. A spider fern in a hanging basket was shooting out runners and making clumps of babies in a desperate attempt to reach the floor. I managed to get my bags and myself through the pot plants without knocking any over and opened the inner door to the hallway.
The house smelt clean and still. Mum had steamed the curtains with the Polti and polished the parquet tiles for my arrival. I stood, looking around. The pine cones in their bowl in the fireplace, which would be replaced in December with gold ones she’d spray-paint herself. My sister’s and my profiles, cut from sugar paper by a street artist in Paris all those years ago, carefully transported and mounted and framed.
I heard Mum coming in the back door, putting down her handbag and keys, taking off her shoes and coat. I hadn’t taken off my own shoes yet. For some reason, I couldn’t seem to move. ‘The house looks lovely,’ I called out. ‘So clean.’ My voice sounded too loud, forced.
‘Right,’ Mum said, coming down the corridor. ‘Let’s get your things upstairs then.’
‘Great,’ I said.
It was harder with two people than it would have been with one, manoeuvring each bag around the dog-leg landing, Mum at one end, me at the other. Down the landing, a step at a time. The
carpet in my old room had been freshly steam-cleaned too, and there were yellow and pink carnations in a vase on the window sill.
‘There you are,’ Mum said.
‘It looks lovely,’ I said again.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Mum said. ‘Come down when you’re ready.’
I was ashamed, suddenly, of the long, gulping, incoherent phone conversations. We wouldn’t mention them again: I knew that.
*
There wasn’t enough room in the wardrobe for me to hang my things. My dad had started keeping his winter overcoats and bulkier suits in there, and the rest was taken up with my jotters and lever-arch files, going all the way back through secondary school. I didn’t know why I’d kept them. The Weimar Republic, Metternich, the Russian Revolution. I’d known this. It seemed improbable now. Earlier files were graffitied with the slogans of Therapy? and The Levellers, bands I’d copied from our babysitter, pretended to love.
I was still looking through the files when Mum called up that she had to collect Molly from school then take her to her music lesson. My cup of tea was on the kitchen counter, she said, though I might want to put it in the microwave for thirty seconds. I listened to the back door closing, the car starting up and reversing down the drive, pausing at the gate and moving off. I had forgotten how suburban silence felt. The click of the central heating kicking in. The quarterly ting of the hallway clock.
I got up and went downstairs. The tea was barely even lukewarm. I poured it down the sink, rinsed out the mug and put it upside down in the draining rack. The window by the sink looked out onto the neighbours’ new fence, six feet high, the yellow wood still raw-looking, and my parents’ army of bins: blue for recycling, brown for compostable, black for all other waste.
With a rush of relief I decided to get rid of some of my old stuff. I found a roll of heavy-duty waste sacks in the utility room and went back upstairs. But I overfilled them: as soon as I tried to lift them, the bottoms broke, and the files tumbled out again. Suddenly tired, I stacked everything back where it had been. My clothes I bundled into drawers and what didn’t fit into the drawers I just left in the suitcases, pushed under the bed. Then I lay back on the bed and let myself realise what I knew already, what I’d known almost as soon as I set foot through the door.
Coming back was not the answer.
*
Molly and Mum were making a terrarium for Molly’s GCSE art project. They’d found, in the attic, the huge glass carboy that had sat in Mum’s flat in the seventies, and they were filling it with a species of plant called Tillandsia that they bought online, an air plant that didn’t need soil or even much water. Molly was experimenting too with making miniature terraria out of lightbulbs. She snapped the metal tips off with pliers and yanked the wiring out, then lined each bulb with a teaspoon of sand and a few strands of desiccated moss, finally inserting the baby tillandsia with tweezers. She intended to tie invisible thread around them and hang them from picture hooks on the ceiling, in clusters. The theme of her project was Self-Contained.
She gave me one of the early lightbulbs. There were all sorts of rules about terraria, like bonsai trees or flower-arranging, and she was having fun with them. To mine, along with the sand and the moss and the wisp of fern, she’d added a Lego figure and some small coloured blocks so that it looked as if the Lego person was building her own house in the jungle. She’d decided it was too silly for her final project, but it was impossible to dismantle the bulb without breaking it. I hung it from the paper lampshade in my bedroom, and it twisted and swayed, a fragile bubble of a new world in thrall to its huge implacable sun, or moon.
*
I got vague back home. Even a few days in I could feel myself blurring. I developed a habit of reading the first chapter or sometimes only the first few pages of the books I’d loved as a child then finding myself unable to read any more. Or I’d spend a long time choosing a book to read, whole afternoons going through boxes in the attic, then not be able to summon up the energy to start it.
We hadn’t discussed how long I’d be back for, and we hadn’t discussed what I’d do next. ‘You just need a break,’ my parents kept on saying. None of us ever said, at least not out loud, that a break can also mean something is broken. This was a good break, a rest, a recuperation. And who knew – my mother was careful to say this only once, and in a deliberately off-hand way – maybe I’d decide I wanted to stay. Things were really picking up here. The new name for the Belmont Road and Ballyhackamore was the Upper East Side, there were that many new cafés and bistros and shops. One morning – it must have been the second or third week back – Mum found me holding an old cassette tape, a collection of songs that had been childhood favourites of ours, and crying.
‘Right,’ she said, and she bundled me into the car and drove us into town, to Bradbury Graphics, and spent a small fortune buying me new canvases and oils and a book of tear-off palettes. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘isn’t this fabulous? You don’t have to spend hours scraping the old paint off, you just throw it away and tear out a new one. Isn’t that just fabulous?’ The assistant was my age and obviously at art school – an undercut, pink-streaked hair – and I didn’t meet her eye.
That evening, Dad dug out the spare easel from the garage and set it up for me, on sheets of newspaper in the dining room. By the utility-room sink they lined up a row of jam jars for my brushes and a tub of white spirit. They were trying too hard.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s really good of you all. Thanks.’
‘Only you will remember, won’t you,’ Mum said, ‘not to pour any paint or turpentine down the sink?’
‘I was fourteen,’ I said.
*
For a day or two I tried, or pretended to. I primed my own canvas the textbook way, rubbing it down with sandpaper after the first layer of primer had dried, adding a second, then a third. I held it under an anglepoise lamp at all angles to check for clumps or bumps or rough patches, and it was perfect.
Then I decided to put down a coloured ground and squeezed three fat worms of yellow ochre onto my palette and a single worm of titanium white. It was as we’d been taught at A Level, the traditional way of painting. Yellow ochre, toned down with white, is the best beginner’s choice because it’s brighter than you think and will make you paint more boldly, Ms Donnelly said.
My tutor at art college had snorted with derision when she saw me painting that way. It was timid and old-fashioned, she said; no one painted that way any more. Not since the Impressionists had a real artist laid down a coloured ground. All it did was take away the fear of the blank canvas, and you had to face that fear. She barely commented on my work for the rest of the term. She wasn’t that interested in painting, anyway – no one was, even though it was meant to be a fine-art college. They liked conceptual art.
I signed up for a private course of life-painting classes, and the tutor there insisted that you paint straight onto the white as well. They were both right. The colours were utterly different when you painted onto white: brighter, more vibrant. An opaque primed surface reflected back more light too, even under the colours, especially if you were painting with oils. The painting was more alive in every way. For a while it was exhilarating.
I gazed at the canvas, at my palette, picked up my palette knife and blended the paint I’d squeezed, the streaks of white reluctant at first, then giving way, the yellow ochre turning creamy. I stopped. I’d thought that if I could go back to how I’d felt most comfortable, how I’d first learned, it would help, but it didn’t. I was just delaying. I tore off the top palette and folded it up; such a waste of paint. Then I sat down at the table instead and watched Molly. She was cutting and gluing and making collages and hasty charcoal drawings, filling a sketchbook with what was meant to be the initial inspiration for her project, the story of its conception. She finished a drawing of an air plant, copied from a webpage on her laptop in front of her. Tillandsia juncia, this one was called, tall and slender with hair-like fronds. She�
��d done it with white charcoal on black paper, not particularly carefully; she tore it from the sketchpad and slid it into her book. ‘Ms Donnelly says I’ve to have at least ten of these,’ she said, and rolled her eyes. She had grown up, even in just the few months I’d been away. She sat straighter, talked louder.
‘Ms Donnelly,’ I said.
‘She says I’ll get marked down if I can’t show where the idea came from. How am I supposed to know where the idea came from?’
‘Where did it come from?’
‘I don’t know. Mum was just sorting some stuff out for the cancer shop and she found the glass thingy. Then we looked them up online.’
Molly started another. I moved to sit beside her and looked at the screen. Tillandsia ioantha. The tillandsias looked like shy underwater creatures, spiders or anemones, or like life forms from another planet. Molly drew red tips on the ioantha. ‘Are you not painting anything?’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Am I putting you off?’
‘It’s okay,’ she said, and there was a sudden silence. She watched me for a moment. Then she looked away and picked at her lips. She’d had her braces off – she’d had full-on train tracks, top and bottom, elastic bands in between – and she still plucked at where they used to be. ‘What happened?’ she said, fast. ‘I mean – what actually happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and there was another silence.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Will you do one for me?’
She ripped out a sheet of black paper and pushed over the box of charcoals so it sat in between us. Then she turned to her laptop and scrolled down the screen. ‘I need this one – magnusiana – or else you can do this one, incarnata.’
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