2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  Again I ceased playing. “I’ve actually decided I’m going to. Starting tonight. It’s the perfect time of month. Ronan won’t guess a thing.”

  My fingers were sweating on to the stilled piano keys.

  Returning to her book, Sylvana calmly informed me that this was a totally natural phase I was going through.

  I resumed my Beethoven, at once botching up the B-D minor chord progression at the start of the fast passage. I struck the B chord again. Hard.

  “This totally natural phase,” I intoned, “as you call it, might well be issuing between my legs in nine months.”

  Pause.

  “Can I remind you of a few facts?” she said, still reading.

  “Be my guest,” I hissed, tripping over some harrowing bars.

  It was like Ronan all over again.

  Now, I have never known a pair of people who disliked one another as instantly as Ronan and Sylvana. It was loathing at first sight. Their mutual antipathy is so intense that there is only one thing that could possible unite them: their baby philosophy.

  To both, the thought of babies is akin to the taste of cyanide: they kill off life as you know it. A single hour in their company would quell a woman’s maternal resolve for a generation.

  Sylvana first started lecturing me on the subject when we were eleven. She’s still doing it.

  Let her waffle on, I told myself.

  “You imagine, Julie, that having a baby is like helping yourself to a piece of cake.”

  “It is like a piece of cake,” I coolly replied, making sure to avoid her Interview with the Vampire glare. “One that will make my life sweet again.”

  From the corner of my eye I espied my friend leaning forward in her armchair and placing her book down on a nearby table. “There’s just one problem, Julie: you have to bake the cake first. Baking is equivalent to agony. Would you like me to remind you of the details?”

  No, I would not. Go away.

  “I already know.”

  “It’s one of the most awful things that can happen to a woman.”

  “Quite.”

  “Julie, are you listening?”

  “To Beethoven,” I replied, struck by a strong sense of deja-vu.

  While I mucked my way through the Pathetique, Sylvana proceeded to remind me that childbirth is like having a red-hot cannonball grow inside you, which simply refuses mercifully to explode and finish you off. She flung her standard childbirth lecture at me, containing samples on varicose veins, hyperventilation, contractions, bleeding, ripping, forceps delivery, strangulation. She told me that childbirth is a recipe for two days of agony, followed by two weeks of joy, followed by two decades of servitude, frustration, disappointment…and a fat, shapeless stomach.

  “This is all very Ronan,” I replied, trying to conceal my flusterment behind the musical score.

  Sylvana: “Do you really believe all that well-intentioned advice, Julie? Candy-floss such as: “It will pop out in no time at all!” Or: “Controlled breathing will defeat all pain.” Or: “Up to ten thousand babies are born daily; it can’t be that bad.””

  She paused for breath and continued: “Guess why people concoct all this nonsense about painless childbirth: because they don’t want you to panic. They lie to you because they ‘care’ about you. But what kind of caring is it if they let you squirm on your hospital bed begging for the last rites?”

  Sylvana is quite right.

  “You’re quite right, Sylvana,” I replied in between a G- and a D-major chord.

  “Oh Julie,” she begged. “At least think about it before you decide. Don’t rush in like a fool without at least…”

  I pointed out that I couldn’t survive an hour of Sylvana’s brutally honest friendship and remain a fool.

  Her voice then became softer, sad almost. “I tell people I’m child-free and proud. Not because I can’t have children but because I don’t want them. People think that if you don’t want children there’s something wrong with you. They say it’s selfish, but how can you be selfish to beings that don’t even exist?”

  She awaited my considered reply.

  “Sylvana, I’ve decided, okay? I’m perfectly well aware that I am heading for the most harrowing and crude and bloody disgusting experience of my life…”

  Sylvana, open-mouthed: “But the thought fills you with joy?”

  “Precisely.”

  She picked up her Anne Rice novel again, sat back in her seat and muttered, “I don’t understand you any more.”

  I stopped playing.

  I told her that I appreciated her concern, but that I had decided to surrender my existence to the torture chamber that is Mother Nature. I told her that pain comes, but then pain goes.

  I told her I was going to have a baby because it was the right time career-wise, and anyway I was almost thirty and balding fast. And babies aren’t much use to you when you’re old and grey.

  I readily conceded that a baby constituted – at a certain ontological, pre-linguistic level – a highly developed squawking, tearing, fast-food processing, puking and shitting machine. Nevertheless, I insisted that this highly developed squawking, tearing, fast-food processing, puking and shitting machine was the very entity that would in some inexplicable way bring me to the very source of meaning, fulfilment and love in my life.

  Sylvana fell silent at this point. She must have sensed my seriousnesss of purpose. She tried to protest that I was just doing it because my mother was desperate to be a first-time grandmother.

  I calmly shook my head and hit her with it then: I told her I was doing it for our marriage. For love. For a wonderful new family.

  “But Ronan doesn’t want a baby,” she shot back, shrewdly but cruelly.

  “They all say that.”

  After that, Beethoven’s Pathetique came to my fingers like a dream.

  Ironic, isn’t it? God, I’m such an unbelievable fool.

  5

  Staring at me through her car window, Sylvana’s caustic expression reads: Well, I’m here now: what are you going to do about it? “You forgot something, darling,” she drawls, eyebrow curled. “What?”

  “The present you bought for Ronan: Art and the Postmodern.”

  “Oh yes, that.”

  It cost me sixty pounds.

  “Now he’ll be able to bore us interminably on the nature of postmodernism,” she says.

  I look away.

  “Julie, is something the matter?”

  I look back. “Can I have that book, please?”

  “What are you doing with that decanter?”

  “I’m throwing a party.”

  She inspects me more closely. “Has something – ”

  “Give me the book, Sylvana.”

  She looks worried now. Without taking her eyes off me she passes a plastic bag through the window. I place the decanter on the ground and take the book, lifting it out of its bag. It is large and heavy. It is truly a beautiful book. The plates and illustrations are of the highest quality.

  Modern art is one of Ronan’s passions. If his father hadn’t forced him to do dentistry he would certainly have studied art. At twenty-three, he joined his father’s practice as an apprentice assistant, having studied anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, general medicine, endodontry, exodontry, orthodontry, pharmacology and a host of other tongue-entwining ologies.

  When all he wanted to do was learn about art.

  At twenty-four he left the apprenticeship and then, against his father’s wishes, he headed for the Sorbonne in Paris, where he received a diploma in aesthetics and history of art two years later. Then at last he got real (and poor) and returned to set up his own dentistry practice, his father retiring and sending forward his former clients. I was one of his first patients.

  One of his first casualties.

  I open Art and the Postmodern halfway through: page 186.

  Completely ignoring my friend’s protestations, I start ripping out the leaves in chunks of five and six pages. I collect
the twisted, loose sheaves in the same hand. I am careful not to drop any to the ground: it’s important to respect other people’s property.

  Now there is a gap between pages 186 and 270. Quite a large gap: my palm is stuffed with eighty shiny pages including two chapters devoted to Jacques Derrida and post-structuralism. This should increase the value of the book considerably.

  I am being closely observed by my friend, I sense. But, luckily for her, she doesn’t try to stop me. Perhaps she feels that this is somehow my prerogative? That it might even be good for me, therapeutically speaking?

  “Julie, what are you doing?”

  I glance down at her and put on this big frown. “Do you require a further demonstration?”

  “But that’s for…Ronan.”

  “Was.”

  “But…”

  Sylvana’s forehead is creased helplessly, like a person in great pain.

  “I’m amazed that you’re so concerned about Ronan’s property. It’s not compulsory to like him, you know.”

  “Julie – get in the car.” She reaches over and snaps open the passenger door.

  “Why? Are you worried what the neighbours might think?”

  My voice is shaking. Tears are welling up. “…I’m the one who has to bloody live here,” I sniff coarsely, “with that bastard!”

  Sylvana’s eyebrows go right up. Her expression reads: what the hell is going on here? Of course, she can’t know.

  She clambers heavily out of her car, comes up to me and tries to coax the remains of the book out of my hands, but I grip it all the harder, animal-like.

  She starts talking to me as if I am aged four. Normally I hate being treated like a baby, especially when Ronan does it. When Sylvana does it, though, I’m flummoxed.

  I allow her to usher me into the passenger seat. I feel like a semi-reluctant geriatric must feel: resisting but realizing you’ve got no choice. Sylvana picks the wine decanter off the ground, dumps it on the back seat, gets in herself, drives to the nearest parking enclosure and jams on the handbrake.

  She inspects me and informs me that my hands are bleeding.

  Very, very gently she asks me what the hell is going on.

  So I come clean.

  I tell her that I just smashed up Ronan’s car, which is presently lying in state in the next parking bay just over the low bush. Her face remains expressionless. She gets out of the car and walks to the corner of this section of the car park. She stands up on the stone border and peers. A second later her heels are snapping back towards me. I could be mistaken, but is that a suppressed smile I spy on her mug?

  She gets in again. “Was that you, Julie?” she asks in a clear, pleasant voice.

  “It was.”

  I swear I detect a glimmer of admiration in her eyes.

  She asks me why I did that, so I tell her everything, trying my best to remain calm. She falls silent, then looks away. With a dark, forbidding grimace, she is analysing the situation, dissecting it into small pieces.

  Just witnessing Sylvana turn bad-tempered on my behalf is in itself a supreme comfort. It’s like she’s transforming my problem into her own personal crusade. She is one of the greatest get-the-shit-off-your-chest friends I’ve ever had because she refuses to weep and flutter over the minutiae of your misery. No. Instead, she aquires this dark, brooding, apocalyptic expression on her mug like she’s just discovered rat entrails in her burger and she’s planning a secret hit against the manager.

  This can only lead to good.

  At last the oracle turns to me, her eyes gleaming diabolically, branding the air with one black-smoked word: reprisal. She wants me to confront husband and lover by the poolside.

  Like I need to be told.

  “The hose,” she says.

  “What?”

  Oh yes, the hose. Beside the pool is a hose used by the caretaker to wash down the stone slabs each day.

  She explains what we are to do: we are both calmly to enter the pool area, grab the hose, point it at the two sunbathers, smile, twist the knob and windscreen-wipe them off the face of the planet. We will watch them dance and scream like a pair of rats drowning in their sunglasses.

  Getting out of the car, she suggests that I might then give the woman a good smack across the cheek and warn her (pulling my well-practised vampire countenance, which she insists was inspired by Dracula, although in actual fact it was inspired by Hannibal Lecter) that if I ever see her ugly mug again I will tear it off, dry it in the sun, frame it and hang it over my mantelpiece.

  I swing my arm to the back seat and grab the neck of the wine decanter. Then I hop out after her.

  “What on earth is that for?” she inquires.

  “To fill up with her brains,” I explain.

  She says she’s sympathetic to this approach, but in the same breath she calmly advises me to put it back down. I cannot understand the ridiculous logic that says: “confront your adulterous spouse, yes, but take care to avoid aggravated assault.”

  In the end, though, I replace the decanter in Sylvana’s car. I hate being managed like this.

  Empty-handed and dumb, I follow her to the pool along a narrow path located between our apartment block and the one next to us. She reminds me of a fearsome headmistress dragging me to her office for some discipline. Soon we connect with the pathway that leads to the pool. A six-foot-high hedge encloses the sizeable swimming-pool area. There is a small wooden gate set into the hedge.

  Sylvana opens it. She is about to step through.

  “Wait!” I whisper furiously, teetering on the brink.

  “What?” she whispers back.

  Confrontation.

  This is not the right thing to do. I sense I am making a mistake. A mistake I will pay dearly for.

  A mistake my mother made and paid dearly for.

  “Sylvana, don’t go in there!”

  “Julie, if I have understood you correctly, they have both been using your bedlinen to get to know each other a whole lot better.”

  But something is tugging away at me, telling me no.

  “Come on,” she whispers seductively, smiling mischievously.

  “No!” I counter.

  The whole time she is whispering urgently at me to accompany her through the gate and be my husband’s worst nightmare. She is assuring me that she will be with me every second of the way on this joyride to Ronan’s ruination.

  But I can’t. I’m standing here making these crazy hand signals. Then my cellphone rings.

  We stare into each other’s eyes as if we’ve just been caught pilfering a safe full of banknotes.

  6

  “Hello there! You called, I believe?”

  Cretin.

  I don’t reply.

  I move surreptitiously to the left, hugging the hedge that conceals us. Sylvana follows me away from the wooden gate. I stop and peep through a tiny gap in the vegetation.

  “Julie, are you there?”

  I can just about make out the two of them. Still in their shades, skin textured like golden syrup, glistening like eels from sun lotion or water or sweat. Ronan is on his stomach, phone to ear. She’s still on her back, casually reading her book, her long golden hair tossed over her shoulders. Her figure again. I can actually feel my fingers closing in round her neck and squeezing.

  Sylvana is still inciting me to follow her into the pool enclosure and give Ronan an afternoon to cherish for the rest of his life.

  But I resist.

  “You’re breaking up.”

  “Hello, Ronan, where are you?”

  “Where am I?”

  Even before he opens his mouth I know what he is going to do. Before he utters so much as a word, something tells me that all is lost. Ronan is about to re-enact the haunted ghost of my past. He is about to lie.

  I’m gripping the hedge, squashing and twisting sharp twigs in my hand. I thought I’d finished with it for ever. But no, my family history has returned with a vengeance. For years it shackled me in a cage. Then I m
et Ronan and I believed that chapter of my life was closed.

  Father’s lies.

  I was eight or nine when my mother first learnt about his mistress. He stepped into a car outside his workplace one day. There was a woman inside, only it wasn’t Mother. She was in the taxi directly behind, wearing shades and a scarf, telling me to make myself scarce in the back seat.

  She confronted him, but he made an art of evasion. The next six months were filled with demands from her and lies from him, although at the time neither she nor I recognized them as lies. The woman was a business contact: that was his excuse.

  Mother so badly wanted to believe him. There were late-night bedroom arguments, early-morning breakfast rows. There were tears – always hers. There were pleadings for truth and reassurance – always her pleadings. There were angry remonstrations – always her anger. The broken glass issued from her own hand, the broken dreams were sourced in her heart alone.

  Then, six weeks later, I saw Father with that woman again. I was, unknown to him, on a school trip to the Law Courts. He exited High Court number two holding her hand. He spotted me, placed her to one side, and came up to me. One minute later he’d sworn me to silence.

  From then on I sat back, witnessing him spin around Mother his golden web of deceit, his silken tapestry of lies. I hated my secret knowledge. I hated Mother’s attempts to discover the minutest signs of infidelity – searching his pockets for clues, smelling his clothes, analysing his habits. I could have told her everything she needed to know and I would have told her if only she’d asked me. I detested her weakness. I was repelled by the trust and faith she reposed in him, revolted by her belief that honesty and confrontation could cure infidelity.

  All it did was alert him.

  Hand him the advantage.

  Her openness cost her a further wasted year of her life, until she was finally tipped off: he was seen again with the same woman. This time he was without excuse. She threw him out.

  “You know where I am, Julie.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s Thursday afternoon.”

  “So you’re still in your surgery?”

  “Is it a problem?”

  Sylvana is pressing her ear into the phone, her hair tickling the side of my face.