She’s in here somewhere. I know it.
And she’s mine.
The lemon-yellow Wonderbra is gone, of course. I fasten the chain across the door and draw the bolts across the top and bottom. I will make a Fort Knox out of my front entrance. Like a wildcat, she will scratch and scream and scrape, desperate to escape. While I calmly close in on her and proceed to staple her with my heels to the wood.
The kitchen. I check everywhere. Under the table. Under the sink. In the broom cupboard. Nothing.
On tiptoe, I pass through the second kitchen door, which leads into the lounge. I traverse the lounge and go through the second lounge door back into the hall, cross the hall and search our sleeping quarters. Under beds, in wardrobes, in the hot press, behind the bathroom door, on the narrow bedroom verandas.
But there’s no sign of her anywhere. Not even inside our large dirty-clothes basket.
She must have left before Ronan.
The place is immaculate. It is clean and dust-free. The bathroom taps are shining. The hallway smells like a flaming pot-pourri. Ronan would never do this. I would never do this. It’s crazy overkill.
His own personal grooming is meticulous: he has his shirts professionally ironed, the washing basket receives a daily draft of his underwear, he uses Aramis aftershave, he flosses his teeth nightly and on occasion I’ve even seen the gobshite pluck his eyebrows. But not once have I ever witnessed him lift a sweeping brush.
How is he going to explain this new Hoover-friendly personality implant of his? I can’t wait to see what he dreams up.
Once back in the lounge, I pour myself a Cointreau. I notice the level has significantly diminished since I was last here, two hours ago. Ronan never drinks Cointreau. Only I drink Cointreau. Nicole has been guzzling it in the meantime, the greedy glut. And in somebody else’s house! No respect.
I drench my gullet with a large burning gulp of the stuff. Suddenly I notice something peculiar. I can feel my body tense up like a tiger.
The french windows are slightly ajar.
She’s outside on the balcony.
While I’m in town supposedly dining with Ronan, she’s lounging around here, practising being Ronan’s future wife.
Heart pounding, I clench my grip on the ice-pick. I proceed forward, but she’s beyond my range of vision. She must be at the far end of the veranda. I’m going to push her off the balcony. By accident.
I swing the doors open, remaining inside. “Get in here,” I snarl.
No reply. I’ll try the sly approach: “We can discuss this reasonably.”
Still no response.
“Get in here you bitchl” I’m snarling. “You’ve been sleeping with my husband!”
Still nothing.
“Have it your way.”
I burst out on to the balcony.
It’s empty.
There’s no one there. Just the white plastic table with two soiled wineglasses standing lonesomely on top.
I send the ice-pick crashing down on to the two glasses, scattering smithereens over the edge and down into the patio far below, and there’s this screaming sound now and I’m vaguely aware of our neighbours sunbathing in the adjacent apartment block and my throat tightens up like I’m being throttled and there’s this wet sensation filling my eyes and my nose and my windpipe right the way down to my heart and I lurch back into the lounge and stray like a ghost in no particular direction and I end up back out in the hall and my eyes fall on to the couch on to the baby booklet I’d forgotten all about and I go over to it and pick it up and stare at the huge pink grinning face of a baby with its mouth open and its tongue glistening and its beautiful grey eyes and its flecks of straw-coloured hair and its cute ears and the title Your Baby and You and suddenly I can feel my knees hitting the floor, and I can hear this unearthly wailing sound – as if it’s coming from outside me – and everything I touch is wet and slippery and my knuckles are stuck hard into my eye sockets and I’m ordering myself to stop this ridiculous behaviour, I tell myself that I’m overreacting, that I’ve been drinking and I might even be hallucinating and now I’m having difficulty breathing and the only thing I can think of to take my mind off this terrible, terrible pain is the Jameson’s and I’m begging someone, begging someone with all my heart, would someone please come and take it away…
11
Where am I?
In front of me is an ultramarine-blue wall with a familiar painting on it. It’s a group of female nudes, with translucently blue skin. Their hair is long and their flesh is pink, orange and yellow. They have large bums. Mermaids stranded on the shoreline, perhaps, forced out of their primordial submarine hideaway. I know how they feel.
It’s Cezanne, that much I know. But whose wall is this? Whose purple colour-washed pine floor? Whose large net curtains billowing gently in the infiltrating breeze?
I rub my eyes.
There’s a noise of clinking cups in a nearby room. I try to get up from the comfortable fat couch I’m lying on, but my strength fails.
I’ve certainly been here before.
Over the mahogany mantelpiece opposite me to my left is another familiar print. The picture is of a pale-faced woman sitting on a chair, caressing the skull of what appears to be her dead husband.
Each to her own.
Suddenly it hits me: this can only be Sylvana’s.
I stare at my watch and gasp: a quarter past midnight.
Everything floods back now, memory and anguish, and I collapse into the couch. It’s as if I’ve just had a heart transplant. Only instead of going through the regular surgical channels, Ronan has ripped it out of my chest without permission and now both he and his side piece are playing football with it, kicking it happily from one to the other, so absorbed in their game they’ve forgotten it’s a part of me.
I try to call out.
A familiar voice emanates from the kitchen. “Have you returned to the land of the living, Julie?”
Yes, I seem to remember being drunk out of my brains while I detonated on the hallway floor, haemorrhaging tears.
“How did I get here?”
“I drove you in my car. You called me, remember?”
“No.”
“You were in bits.”
I want to die. I’ve had a rotten life.
Firstly, I was born.
Then I grew up. Grew up in the shadow of my parents’ mutual trashing sessions, and spent my early teenage years trying to haul Mother from the emotional cesspit into which she fell, after she finally threw Father out. Me the quiet, unacknowledged partner throughout, the silent voice of suffering.
And it goes on: the unrelenting torment to which my life appears equivalent, with fleeting moments of solace in between, thanks to Sylvana and shopping. And whiskey. And chocolate. And Mother, when she’s not in excavation mode down your neck.
But what about that card Ronan gave me a year and a half ago, on Valentine’s Day? I remember the words he wrote: “This is just to say that since I met you I haven’t stopped loving you.”
What does that say?
When you handed it to me and saw me reading it, there were tears in your eyes, though you pretended to laugh it off. That says you meant it. And what about all the beautiful things you have given me? What about the twenty-four-carat gold bracelet you bought me for my last birthday? Surely that means something?
Hard heels click against the floor.
Sylvana strides in with steaming coffee and her favourite snack: Ryvita stacked with goat’s cheese and peanuts, glued on with mayonnaise. She sits down on the couch, pressing against my thigh. She starts munching a peanut. “So,” she says, flicking me her sly, you can’t-fool-me look.
I know what she’s thinking. “So what?”
“How did the Cherbury Court thing go?”
What a funny way to phrase it. It’s like saying: “How did the money-laundering thing go?” or, “How did the drug-heist thing go?” or, “How did the tax-dodge thing go?” She makes it sound like I
do this ‘Cherbury Court thing’ every day as a matter of boring routine. Jesus, what does she take me for?
“Oh, fine.”
“Meaning?”
“It was grand.”
“How did you get into the house?”
“Oh, you know…I got in.”
“That much we have established. But how?”
Like a sadistic dentist who enjoys pulling teeth, Sylvana gets a great kick trawling classified material out of me, and the more the procedure hurts the more she seems to enjoy it.
“You’ve nothing to be ashamed of.” She grins, chewing peanuts in that infuriatingly non-committal way of hers.
“I’m not ashamed.”
She’s dying for a bit of juice to liven up her day. She would love to discover that I happened to spend part of my Thursday afternoon criminally lacerating an unknown citizen’s living-room and leaving her fish world overbowled on the floor. But she’s not getting any more out of me than is strictly necessary.
“You prowled around the back, didn’t you, when no one was looking? You found an open door and sneaked through it like a thief.”
“You’re making me out to be some sort of criminal.”
“A criminal?” she disdains. “You wouldn’t have the guts.”
“Actually,” I reply, irritation rising, “I dislodged a glass panel in her front door.”
Silence, while she beams on me full force. “Dislodged.”
“With an…implement. Only so I could reach through and open the latch.”
“Of course,” she replies. “How practical.”
Now there’s this slender guilt creeper crawling up my spine.
“I admit I don’t do that sort of thing very often.”
“Using an implement to smash your way through front doors.”
“Yes, Sylvana.”
“That’s breaking and entering, you know.”
“I don’t necessarily feel good about it.”
“You don’t.”
“In retrospect.”
Tilting her head, she looks at me like I’m a cute newborn puppy. “She doesn’t feel good about it,” she drawls. “Well, my heart bleeds for you.”
“I…I was hammered… ”
I’m well aware that alcohol is no defence in law.
“You mean,” she corrects, “you were doing the hammering.”
“Ice-picking.” I correct her back.
Her eyes widen. “You used an ice-pick to break in?”
“Sylvana,” I blurt impatiently, “how else was I supposed to get into her house after I practically caught her in the middle of shagging my husband?”
She picks up a few more peanuts from the tops of the snacks, pops them into her gob and starts munching. “You could have tried ringing the bell,” she replies.
Why is she being such a cow?
“Julie, what you did is what the Indians used to do.”
“You’re thinking of a hatchet, Sylvana.” I sigh. “Indians didn’t use ice-picks. They didn’t inhabit de luxe apartments and drive down to the country on sunny weekends with their picnic hampers and iceboxes. The nearest north-pole analogy would be the Eskimos. Only Eskimos lived in igloos, not avenues, and besides…”
“You smashed her place up, didn’t you?”
She’s still chewing.
“What?”
“With the ice-pick.”
She gives me this rather sly look.
I laugh. “Whatever gives you that idea?”
“Admit it.”
“I will admit no such thing.”
I’m not a good liar. Have to work on it.
“I know you have a terrible temper, Julie.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“What about Ronan’s car?”
“He deserved it.”
“Of course he did. Julie, for God’s sake, you can tell me!”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Sylvana, but there’s nothing to tell.”
She stands up.
“Where are you going?”
“I get the picture,” she says, stalking into the kitchen.
“What picture?”
“You went in there with your ice-pick, determined to get even with Ronan, full of these wonderfully ambitious redecoration schemes. But once inside you chickened out and stared at a few paintings instead, and called me because you were secretly shitting a brick.”
Why do I get the feeling that she’s manipulating me? “You think I was shitting a brick?”
“It’s obvious,” she replies, her voice shrilling through the boxlike acoustics of the kitchen. “You left the house very, very quietly. And intact. The whole time thinking, God, if I get caught my law career is over.”
“You think so.”
“You probably told yourself it was Ronan’s fault, not hers, so therefore it’d be wrong to damage her property. You slunk back out of there like a rabbit.”
From the kitchen comes the crinkly sound of Sylvana removing the plastic wrapper from a cigarette box.
“You obviously think I’m some sort of angel,” I call to her, slightly hot under the collar.
“You ran out of there, all wobbly and virtuous, leaving the place like a palace.”
I can hear the metallic cling of her cigarette lighter lid. Now there is silence, now the lid is clinked shut again. She reappears at the doorway, stares at an old photo of her father hung up on the adjacent wall and scrapes a mark off it with her thumbnail.
“You think I left the place like a palace?”
“I do.”
“If you must know, you bitch, I happened to turn that woman’s living-room into downtown Baghdad.”
She moves around to another photograph, this time of her father as a young man, together with his first wife. “Yes, yes,” she drones, bored. “Of course you did.”
So I explain to Sylvana that I behaved like the Terminator in a china shop with no exit doors.
There’s a slight gap, then she asks me to explain myself.
My friend was never one for obscure allusions. Abstractions have the effect of making her eyeballs roll uphill. She loves the explicit, the vivid. In short, Sylvana worships concrete.
“For example,” I clarify, putting my head back down on the armrest, “I put a hole through the television with my foot.”
During a brief, shocked intermission in our dialogue, I do a little more boasting about all the wonderful and various activities I pursued in Nicole’s living-room. I can hear Sylvana’s shoes walk across the room towards me. We are now once more in eye contact.
“You didn’t,” she says, her voice tainted by the merest whiff of admiration.
“Well, yes, I did,” I reply with a rejoining whiff of pride. “I most certainly did.”
Now a deadly silence reigns in the room, interrupted only by the puffy sounds of her smoking as she stands there and quietly observes me. To shock her even further I confess that I also smashed her fish tank.
Dare I say it, but I’m beginning to enjoy myself.
“You could go to jail for that,” she says, her suspicious look slowly returning.
“Stop exaggerating,” says I, although I’ve a sneaky suspicion that that’s exactly where people like me are put. “Sylvana, stop looking at me like that. I was smashed out of my brains! I didn’t intend to do it, I just…”
“That’s right: someone forced you to do it at gunpoint.”
“It wasn’t like that…”
“No. You chose to go. You enjoyed yourself. You had a ball.”
This is an inquisition. Sylvana is interrogating me. Why is she being such a cow? “Well, now that you mention it, yes, I did have a ball.”
“Julie, you axe your way into a total stranger’s house in the middle of the afternoon and you proceed to smash up her living-room…” her face is a monument to incredulity “…and you stand here and tell me you had fun? ”
I don’t have to lie here and take this. “Yes, I had fun. It was brilliant fun. It was sheer one
hundred per cent quality enjoyment. I was blissfully happy during that minute of my life.”
She smirks at me. “But I thought you felt bad about it?”
I stand up. I walk straight out into her octagonal turquoise Ottoman empire hallway. “I’m going home. I’ll call you some time.”
I stop at the huge mirror with the thick grey metal frame where there stands a glass bowl full of bright-red tulips. I take one good look at myself.
This is what a jilted wife must look like: horrible.
No one understands what I am going through. You’d have expected Sylvana of all people to have some sympathy. But no.
As I open the door I’m hearing this strange panting noise.
I turn round.
I can see her through the door sitting on the edge of the couch, in a kind of convulsion. At first I’m curious about whether she has a medical condition she’s kept to herself, but after a while I realize she’s laughing at me.
She tries to stand up. She steadies herself on the armrest and totters through the sitting-room door and over to me. “You’re brilliant,” she says.
“W-what?”
“I never thought you’d have the guts to do anything like that.”
“You didn’t?” says I, confused.
She gives me a sudden hug. She’s giggling into my ear now like a crisp, deafening loudspeaker. I find myself deflating into a sigh of foolish relief.
“You should have seen yourself just now,” she says. “You looked furious.”
She’s hugging me, but I’m still very cross.
“I’d have done the same myself,” she cackles, “or worse.”
“You’re a bitch, Sylvana.”
“I know. Look, we’ll write them a letter of apology. I’ll compose it. “Dear Madam, we regret to inform you that on the recent occasion of the vandalization of your abode we made a slight error of judgement and we do hope that you will accept our humblest apologies…””
Sylvana is doing the theatrical bit now. I fold my arms and stare at the door latch.
“‘…and in particular, we regret the destruction of your lovely fish tank, but, given the serious danger of carnivorous behaviour, we felt at the time that we had no other alternative.’”
2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie Page 6