Nicole pleaded with us not to say a word to Ronan about it; that when the time was right she’d tell him herself. Besides, she added, she wanted to keep it a surprise.
Sylvana was inspecting me like a magnifying glass. She asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I didn’t know. She offered to take me home. I said no.
When we got to a fork in the path I veered right. Nicole reminded me – pained – that she was meeting Ronan very shortly in the aquarium, which was to the left. I muttered something about going to the public toilets alone, that I would be back in a few minutes. I made Sylvana wait with her. Nicole told me to take my time.
I hobbled, crying, in the direction of the women’s loos. I wanted to find a temporary hole into whose muck I could sink, to bury that grainy, heavy, totally fucked-up feeling inside. The closest equivalent I managed to get was the toilet. I entered a small cabin and was repelled by the stink of urine. I went in nevertheless and spent five minutes regurgitating my breakfast into a soiled toilet bowl.
Washing my mouth out with Listerine and patting my cheeks with tissue, I got the hell out of there, my face a mess on account of there being no mirrors, but I wasn’t too bothered.
And I went straight through the turnstiles.
I just couldn’t face Ronan and Nicole. Not today. A baby changed things. Drastically. I had to go home and be alone and think.
I took a bus into the city centre and another bus home – my marital ‘home’. One and a half hours in total, but then what else would you expect from the bus services?
At four thirty I got back. Mother was knitting woollen socks for a friend’s grandchild in the kitchen. I sensed something was up, something was not right. On impulse I went into our bedroom.
The wardrobe was open. There were large spaces in his section, gaps where his clothes should have been. I flung open his drawers. They were half empty. I scrambled through them. They contained non-essential items. But Ronan’s passport, his documents, his professional papers – everything important was gone.
On the bed was a folded note.
Thursday, 2.30 a.m.
Julie,
I am going away for a while. I have been forced to leave because of your clear desire to bring this relationship to a standstill through your suspicious and destructive behaviour, which has cost me thousands of pounds.
So I am going to live by myself for some months. A break can be a healthy thing. It will give us both time to reconsider things.
A major reason for my decision is your mother. It is impossible to cohabit in the same enclosed space as that woman and I don’t intend to repeat the experience. This might sound like an excuse, but it’s not. She has made it her principal aim in life to sabotage calm, ever since she moved in with that ridiculous piano of hers. I’m sure she has her virtues (not that she aggressively advertises them) but she seems to seek out subtle and ruthlessly efficient methods of irking people.
For instance: she plays her out-of-time piano, but only when it is calculated to cause maximum offence. It would not be so bad, of course, if she could actually play. Another technique she has perfected is to storm into the lounge while you ‘re reading and turn on the television at full volume, only to disappear for ten or fifteen minutes to make herself a snack. She makes you think: is this worrian deaf? Or blind? Or a mysterious combination of the two? She’s certainly not dumb: her voice box seems to run on a permanently rechargeable battery.
The fishpaste episode suggests psychotic leanings. Its sheer deviancy is surely unrivalled, considering your mother’s age. She has turned molestation into an exact science, and you yourself are proving a worthy successor.
Of course, an old woman deserves her little pleasures in life. And indeed, pleasures she has had: was it not the very same Whip Chick I caught her watching yesterday afternoon from the comfort of our leather suite, when I returned from Paris? Of course, I’m the first to defend her inalienable right to enjoy pornography in the privacy of someone else’s home. I just thought you should know.
I trust that in the event of my possible return this woman will have been relocated to a place of her own. With her piano.
As for my future plans, nothing is as yet determined. But it is likely that I will sell off the practice now that I have a good excuse. I have potential earnings in lecturing, or in the art world, other than those I acquire through being what you quite rightly refer to as a professional ‘cranial-pothole filler’. And time will tell whether I decide to exploit these possibilities.
I have put the secretary in the building in charge of forwarding any business-related mail to my new PO box. So should any arrive for me, please forward it to the surgery address.
I should be in touch at some stage.
Ronan
I ran from the apartment, wailing, past my mother who stood immobilized in the hall. Cascading down the stairs, I switched on my mobile and called Sylvana. She said she’d been trying to get me but my mobile was powered off.
I screamed at her to f*** herself about my mobile. I told her about Ronan’s letter. She cursed. I demanded to know what happened. She said that because I hadn’t returned from the loo she’d left the zoo herself, just before Nicole met Ronan.
“Where is she now?”
“I haven’t a clue; I’m back in my office.”
I screamed and cursed at her for letting them get away. I flung at her a string of names so inappropriate and foul that if my mother had heard me she’d have stood up and cheered.
Sylvana, though, whose voice did not betray the slightest rufflement, pointed out that it was by no means certain that Ronan was taking Nicole with him, wherever it was he was going. She also sensibly suggested that I should call Nicole, then Ronan. And if I got no satisfaction I was to call her back at once and we would meet at Nicole’s B & B.
Neither Ronan nor Nicole was contactable by phone. I flew to the B & B in my MG. The lady of the house told me Nicole had left a while ago in her ‘funny little yellow car’ with all her bags, accompanied by a ‘good-looking, professional-type man’.
Nicole had told her they were going to Paris. On the four thirty sailing between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead, to drive through England to Dover and thence to Calais.
I flew back outside, updated Sylvana and ordered her to meet me at the Stena Sealink terminal in Dun Laoghaire.
52
The rusty railings were cold against my sweating palms.
My eyes burnt, my stomach was a rod of hot iron pounding spasms of pain throughout my body. Tears trickled down my face, cooling in the light breeze, the late-afternoon sun burrowed warmly into my scalp.
I stared at the huge white mass of the catamaran, floating barely fifty metres away on the bright-blue engine-simmering water of the harbour. I pestered Sylvana to explain why this was happening to me. She just kept replying: “You don’t deserve this, Julie.”
She urged me to accept the statement of officials at embarkation point that a yellow Fiat Cinquecento with registration plate 99D-54597 embarked just fifteen minutes previously. They refused to allow us on. I tried everything, short of telling them the truth. First I tried to calm down as they sensibly suggested. When that didn’t work I tried tears, pleadings, explanations. When that didn’t work I treated them to a lecture on public service and the priority of the customer, and one of them smiled infuriatingly and calmly repeated that the gates were now closed.
Sylvana, a dragon in most such situations, just stood there, thick and dumb as a pillar box, letting me take all this shite on my own. I informed both idiots that I was a barrister and could report them to their superiors for such ape-headed treatment of people who through no fault of their own were prejudiced by circumstances entirely beyond their control – too complex to discuss in any detail other than to say that my intention was merely to try to avoid a family tragedy.
“We can have an announcement made,” one suggested.
“No!”
The second man shrugged: “Do they have a mobile phone?�
��
“They’re not living in the dark ages.”
Stupid answer – they advised me to make contact with them.
We left, heading slowly towards the pier. I watched helplessly as the huge white craft shuddered, ready for departure.
“Come home, Julie,” Sylvana urged, tugging at my right arm. “We’ll think of something – it’s not over yet.”
But in her mind it was over: in her mind this was a painful but necessary and permanent expulsion of marital baggage.
On the pier, I clung like gridlock to the railing, mute, staring at the catamaran. The huge foghorn bellowed. The blue strip at the base of the craft began to wash with sea water and the thing started to grumble like a vast rectangular fridge.
On impulse I phoned Ronan.
He asked me where I was. I told him I was changing our bedclothes. The catamaran had begun to move now. It was making a low, machine-like hum.
“Julie…I’m sorry…”
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry, you bastard.”
“I couldn’t tell you directly. I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Oh, well now.”
“More than was necessary.”
“Is this necessary?”
“Julie, you smashed my surgery. You can’t just expect…That’s not a small thing.”
“I told you: I did not smash your surgery. It was probably that woman’s partner. I smashed everything else but not your surgery.”
Silence.
“Whatever.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I know; you’d go anyway.”
He didn’t reply.
“Where are you going?” I asked him.
“I can’t say.”
“I suggest you look at your ticket.”
“Julie…” He sighed. “How do I put this…”
“This is how you should put it: “Julie, screw you for all the times we’ve had together because I never loved you, I was just using you as a trolley while I shopped around for someone else.””
“That’s not it at all.”
“How is it, then? You’re bored with me. Is that it? I don’t give you a kick any more?”
“Of course you do…”
“Maybe it’s the way I’m kicking you that’s all wrong?”
“Julie, my plane is about to leave.”
“What did you just say?”
“My plane. Cellphones are counter to regulations on planes.”
“You’re trying to tell me that you are sitting on a plane?”
“I’m quite entitled to travel on a plane.”
“Mother’s right. You’re a fraud.”
“Whatever.”
“She thinks you’re contemptible.”
“Who could blame her for thinking that?”
“And totally insensitive. Those things you wrote about her in the letter – it just proves it.”
“I’m not afraid to be blunt.”
“You’re doing so well it’d be a shame to end it on a soft note.”
The craft emited a deep-bellied foghorn roar, which resounded throughout the harbour.
“Julie, I have to go now,” he said after a while.
“Of course. Your Stena Sealink catamaran is just about to take off into the air.”
“What?”
For the first time I noticed the sounds of the harbour. The wind whirring through the narrow gaps in the pier wall. The splash of water licking and lushing the seaweed-bedecked stone, the yacht ropes whipping and tinkling against their masts like Christmas chimes.
“Julie, where are you?”
Pause.
“I’m flattered you would want to know.”
No reply.
“Are cellphones still counter to regulations?” I laughed bitterly. “Have you fastened your seat belt? And extinguished your cigarette? Are you enjoying the oxygen-mask drill? Have you taken off yet?”
Still no reply.
I started walking in the direction of the harbour mouth, towards which the huge craft was zooming.
“Or is taking off something you do in the back seats of cars, or in conference hotel rooms, or public restrooms, or in wheatfields, or in kitchens? Or on desks? Or in my bedroom when I’m away?”
“All that’s over, Julie.”
“Yes, it’s history.”
“She means nothing to me.”
“Well, don’t you think you should have the courtesy to tell her? What if she has feelings and needs herself? And hopes for the future? Have you considered that possibility? She’ll need you to be gentle with her when you break it off. I’m sure she’s not a shaggable piece of meat that you can just dispose of when you’ve had your fill. Unlike me.”
“You still think I’m with that woman, don’t you?”
A huge, angular, fearsome seagull hovered above me in the light breeze, not moving, squawking for some reason. Calling its mate, perhaps, to one of these rare, roller-coaster experiences that seabirds are born to enjoy.
Pedestrians were stopping on the pier to look out at the Stena craft, rumbling through its channel.
“Enjoy Paris,” said I idly.
“Cannes, actually.”
“Oh, so it’s Cannes now? You know, it’s funny, Ronan. We were happy then. You and me. Don’t try to tell me you weren’t. And don’t even bother trying to tell me that people change. They change far less than you imagine and when you discover this it’ll be too late for you.”
“I didn’t mean it to happen like this, Julie.”
“I hadn’t planned this send-off myself. Goodbye, Ronan.”
“Wait.”
The ferry passed through the harbour mouth and disappeared from view behind the high wall of the pier.
“Look, Julie…”
“Unless you tell me now that you’re returning on the next ferry, it’s over between us.”
No reply.
All that remained in the harbour was the troubled rush and surge of the ship’s wake, the memory of cataclysm. And an eerie quiet, like the peace after a storm. I climbed the steps to the top level of the pier and peered out to sea. The craft was suddenly much smaller.
“Did you hear what I said? Unless you tell me that you’ve made a mistake and you’re coming home, it’s all over. I mean it, Ronan.”
“You destroyed my means of livelihood, Julie.”
“I’m warning you, Ronan. If we don’t resolve things now, they will never be resolved.”
Nothing for several seconds.
“Julie,” he says with irritation, “as I tried to explain in the letter…”
I pressed the ‘off’ button.
53
It’s five thirty. I am leaning with my back against the french windows on the balcony of my marital home, staring out to sea, a burning cigarette in one hand and a brandy in the other. Musing about my sorry, useless life.
Mother is presumably at bridge. She hasn’t a clue what’s happened. She should be in shortly. Sylvana is in the lounge behind me, reading another vampire book. She wants me to tell Mother everything. In Sylvana’s mind, this will accelerate the painful process of acceptance.
Thick, wintry clouds are gathering over the bay and a warm, restless breeze is fluttering against my hair. On the horizon is a thin, sunlit band of bright-blue, receding with the advent of dark clouds. The world wants to rain. Soon it will scatter its teardrops on road and rooftop, brush against tree, cry rivulets down window-pane.
I want the rain to come.
Safely departed, the Stena Sealink has now well disappeared over the horizon, skiing over the seas to Britain. Thief of the man I love.
I can see them on the rear deck staring out to sea back towards Ireland, hypnotized by the giant milk churn of the jets gushing white foam backwards for fifty metres. They are sailing east in the floodlit sunshine, enfolding them both in its heat and hope.
I fill up my glass with another brandy from the bottle on the plastic table
beside me. I wash it down.
On the table are some cards I discovered in Ronan’s denuded drawers. Cards I once sent him. One features two teddy bears wearing straw hats, sitting on a bed of roses. It’s a birthday card in which I personally wrote the following: ‘All the happiness I’ve found in life I’ve found in you. Have a wonderful Birthday. All my love’. The bottom of the page is covered in Xs.
Another card I sent him is a blotch of reds and violets surrounding a love heart. I wrote: “You make the good times we spend together the best times ever. I’m so glad I married you. Happy Valentine’s Day.” Then my name, with a heart over the ‘i’ and Xs everywhere.
The first few spearheads of rain fall like a mass of pin-tips fleeting against the dark-shadowed daylight.
I stare at the cards again. I rip them both up and throw them back on the table. Waste of a life that they were. I move to the far side of the balcony in case anybody is watching me in my present state.
My mother has just returned. She and Sylvana are in the lounge, talking about me. Sylvana is telling her everything that happened. I can hear them through the gap in the trench windows. In between earnest silences they are making cool judgements about my case. Between them, they are deciding my fate. Mother’s harsh voice is dispensing common sense like a doctor’s cures. Sylvana’s is firm and low, and quietly agreeing.
I should let him go, Mother says. Now I hear her telling Sylvana about the time my father returned home and how, like a fool, she took him back. She doesn’t want me to make the same mistake.
Has she forgotten what it’s like to be in love?
I must be beside myself, she says. I resent this. She is speaking as if I am suffering impaired judgement, as if I am somehow unable to see reason. Above all, as if I am no longer able to decide anything for myself.
Sylvana appears to agree with this diagnosis of my unfortunate situation. She says that what I need most of all at this point is peace and quiet to come to terms with what’s happened.
Angrily I stride through the trench windows and across the living-room, ignoring them totally. I slam the front door of the apartment behind me, wondering if they’ll try to follow. They don’t. So I go straight to my MG, get in and drive to my new apartment, making sure to power off my phone.
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