At a Time Like This

by Catherine Dunne

  I didn’t tell her that all that Guinness had ended up on the grasses of suburbia. I was in Dublin six now, much closer to the centre of things and much more in the midst of the action, the thick of life. It would have to be my secret. And after the party, we could all pretend that dope didn’t suit me. Nobody would mind. All the more for those who wanted it. No force, no flatter, what the hell matter, as my mother used to say when we were children.

  And anyhow, despite it all, I was content. My friends, my flat, my freedom and never mind the small embarrassments. And Paul was hovering. He had a nice face. No. The word ‘nice’ was banned. Georgie did not allow it. It was a nothing word, she used to argue, a sit-on-the-fence word, a lazy, useless kind of adjective. In the same way, she didn’t allow ‘I don’t mind’. ‘Decide!’ she’d say. ‘Stop hedging and say what you want!’ I decided that Paul’s face was both strong and angular with something familiar about it. I didn’t know him. I was sure I had never laid eyes on him before – but wasn’t that the whole point of a party, so that you could get to know the people you hadn’t known before? My stomach settled, my vision cleared and finally, my head stopped racing in front of me. I turned to Paul and smiled.

  ‘Thanks for the tea,’ I said.

  I watched as his whole face brightened. Even I could see that he wasn’t able to take his eyes off me. I felt Maggie and Georgie begin to draw away, could sense that they had already returned to their party. My new-found sense of my own self was urgent and important. I could already feel the pull towards this – what – boy, man? This young man who knew nothing about me, about my past and all my family baggage. This tall and handsome man who took me as he found me. A little the worse for wear, perhaps, but still sexy and fashionable, at her ease around people like Georgie and Maggie. In short, someone who didn’t really exist – or hadn’t, up until then. Until right then, right at that moment.

  ‘Look after her, Paul, you hear? Or you’ll have us to deal with.’ Georgie’s drawl was clear again, crystal, just as she had been with the Eng. Lit. guy on the first day we’d met. The one she’d warned about wasps and autumn weather and getting stung.

  ‘No problem,’ I heard Paul say as he smiled down at me. ‘More tea, Claire, or are you ready for a beer?’

  I hesitated. ‘I think I’ll stick to tea, for now,’ I said, ‘if that’s okay’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be okay?’ His manner was easy, friendly. He took my cup and plugged in the kettle, and at the same time reached for one of the cold beers from the sink for himself. I liked the way he moved. I liked his long hands with their tapering fingers, his dark curly hair.

  ‘My name’s Paul, as you’ve probably gathered,’ he said, the ring-pull on the can of Carlsberg suddenly hissing. ‘I’m Maggie’s brother.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. Now I knew why I’d found something familiar in his expression. It felt as though I knew him already, that Maggie linked us in a way that made each of us already intimate with the other. He grinned at my ridiculous formality. ‘Sorry’ I slapped my palm against my forehead and shook my head in disbelief. ‘But I am pleased to meet you. You look like Maggie.’ I hoped that that was the right thing to say.

  Because I couldn’t say any of the things that I was thinking. I was imagining myself lying beside Paul, his body strong and warm and close to mine. I was already falling for the long-limbed, practised air he had about him. Here was somebody alive, confident, manly. This was as far removed from Jamesie and his blunt, awkward fingers as it was possible to get. ‘I’ll be moving in with Maggie and Georgie in a week or so,’ I added lamely.

  He nodded. ‘I know. In fact, I know all about you.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the main party room. ‘Maggie’s told me you’ve all become thick as thieves. God help us men. A new force of nature. Something else to be reckoned with.’

  I laughed. ‘Well, yes, it seems that way’ I was beginning to feel completely recovered, apart from the delightful and uncomfortable hammering of my heart.

  ‘Hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for,’ and he took a huge swig of beer. ‘They’re a pair of witches, those two, d’you know that?’

  ‘Well, now there’s three of us, so we can be wicked together, like the witches in Macbeth’

  ‘“When shall we three meet again?”’ he declaimed, striking a dramatic pose: back of hand to top of forehead. ‘Did it for my Leaving Cert. That’s about the only bit I can remember.’

  ‘“In thunder, lightning or in rain.”’ I said. I was aware that I was flirting madly now.

  ‘Pure English?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘No – English and French. What about you?’

  He grinned. ‘Medicine. Though I don’t know how anyone could ever want to be a patient of mine. I’m in third year. Maybe I’ll get better.’

  I knew that I was already thinking: third year. That’s good. At least he’s got a few more years to go. I was already feeling his loss, that gnawing anxiety that one day he’d walk away from me and I’d never get him back. On that night, I knew without knowing that here was someone I would always need, someone I’d never want to let go.

  This is where I came in, I thought. This is how my life began: first Georgie, then Maggie. And now this. Paul and I were about to begin, too. I knew it, I could feel it. So many beginnings. So much that happened over and over and over again.

  There was movement in the hallway. We both watched as the Midnight Cowboy pulled on a full-length army coat over his bare chest and underpants, opened the front door and lurched forward in his boots, disappearing down the garden path out into the cold night beyond.

  Paul raised his can. ‘Welcome to madness,’ he said.

  I poured milk into my cup and stirred the tea carefully. Then I threw away the teabag. It was all I could do to stop my hands from trembling.

  Welcome, indeed.

  To madness.

  What I remember next is that the party room seemed to empty all at once. Paul and I were the only ones left that could loosely be called guests. We had stayed in the kitchen, and now we stood at the door, both of us observing the after-party slump in the living room. Georgie was half-asleep on the rickety sofa, while Danny sat on the floor between her feet with his head resting in her lap. I’d noticed that the more stoned he became, the more his physical presence seemed to deflate. Now, snoring gently, he looked pale and spent, somehow. Ordinary.

  Paul nudged me to look over at Maggie. She was kneeling by the stereo, flicking through one of the cardboard boxes that contained her collection of vinyls. On the floor beside her was a half-finished glass of beer, flat and tired-looking, with white froth clinging to the sides.

  ‘Watch her,’ he said. ‘You’d better get used to this if you’re goin’ to live with her.’

  As though she’d just heard us, Maggie turned towards where we were standing and waved a psychedelic record sleeve in the air. I recognized it at once. ‘This one’s for you-hoo,’ she called. My chest tightened.

  Paul looked at me. ‘She means you,’ he said. ‘I was never big into the Beatles. More a Stones man myself. Fancy a beer now? Or a glass of wine?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘why not. Wine, please. White, if there’s any left.’ Maybe if I could be alone for a moment I’d have the time to gather myself. I’d told Maggie I loved the Beatles, told her how John Lennon had saved my life, dying on December the eighth. He had lain spent and bleeding on a New York pavement, five years to the day after my mother abandoned us. My brand-new seventeen-year-old self had rejoiced. Not because he was dead, but because he gave me a reason to be sad, a reason I could live with. Now, I remember thinking, now I can mourn. I’ll have all the companionship of loss, a worldwide community of grief. I won’t have to do it on my own any more, won’t have to confess my mother’s treachery. When I weep, I weep for John Lennon and the end of innocence. My mother doesn’t even have to come into it. Callous, I know, but that’s how I felt.

  I took the wine Paul offered me and
drank half of it as quickly as I could. It was vile – warm and sickly sweet, but I didn’t care. I’m lucky that alcohol doesn’t take the pain away. I know it does for some people, but for me, it simply blurs it at the edges. Makes it sit around the heart a little more easily. Anyhow, it worked that night, just enough. That, and Paul’s arm, warm around my shoulders. I leaned into him and he bent down and kissed me. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandbelted out ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and all the words came flooding back to me.

  I listened as the Beatles sang about an ordinary Friday morning; I listened as their nameless young woman made her way towards her second-hand car salesman and the disaster that her life was about to become. And then I saw her, my mother, dancing around the kitchen in Ennistymon, her face flushed with pleasure, a tea-towel flung over one shoulder. I remembered feeling how incongruous the sight was even then, and I must have been only a small child. This woman didn’t suit her surroundings, she didn’t fit into her life. She was willowy, her red hair was wild and gorgeous and her hands were floury up to the elbows. Her body seemed strangled by an old-fashioned pinny, tying her down at neck and waist. I know that I was shocked when she abandoned us, but I don’t think I was surprised.

  I pulled back from Paul for just a moment. He looked at me, his green eyes questioning. I put my hand around his neck and pulled him towards me again. I’d made up my mind. I remember thinking that my Aunty Kate hadn’t been surprised by my mother’s departure, either. ‘Helen must have had her reasons,’ she’d told me again and again, in the early years after my mother left. ‘My brother,’ she’d once said, very dryly as she lit one untipped Craven A off the other, ‘was never the most exciting of men.’ As a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl, I couldn’t be sure of what she meant, and was too shy in those days to ask. But even then, I knew it had to have something to do with sex.

  John and Paul’s mournful tones sang goodbye goodbye as their girl tiptoed away from a life that had become too small for her. Not that my mother left us for a man from the motor trade. No. That was just another one of life’s tired little jokes. My father was the man from the motor trade. Not the seedy salesman of the Beatles’ song, but the town mechanic, complete with overalls, dirt under his fingernails and skin that smelt faintly of diesel, no matter how often he washed. Mother’s sights were set higher.

  I felt angry: could she not leave me alone? Tonight of all nights?

  Paul squeezed my hand. ‘You okay?’ he asked, brushing my hair back from my eyes.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, as softly as I could. He continued to stroke my face. All I wanted was for him to kiss me again. ‘This record brings back a lot of memories.’

  He nodded. ‘It’s John Lennon’s anniversary. Did you know that?’

  I smiled. I didn’t want to tell him the whole sad history of my mother, my youth, my dubious moral genes. Not yet. ‘I think I must have forgotten.’

  ‘My sister,’ he said, ‘is a music nut. Watch her. She knows every word of every song of every album – well, of the ones she keeps playing, anyway. This could turn out to be a very long night. She’s got Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye already lined up. Knowing her, things’ll go downhill as the evening goes on. It’ll be something like Gladys Knight and the Pips next.’ He stood, and pulled me up after him. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

  And it was as easy as that. I followed him into what would become my bedroom in a few days’ time. The air was freezing, the bed sheetless, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Still fully dressed, we huddled under the blankets that the previous tenant had either forgotten or left behind. They were pretty threadbare, anyhow. At first, we clung to each other for warmth and then, as our bones defrosted, we played a game, whose rules I can no longer remember. What I do recall is how we stifled our laughter as we threw off one piece of clothing after the other. There was the delicious, intimate shock of skin, finally, on skin. And then there was the sudden ambush of guilt like a sledgehammer, mixed with fear and longing and all the impossible terrors of pregnancy.

  ‘Paul, I—’

  He kissed me into silence. ‘I’m not going to do anything you don’t want me to do. Relax. We’re not going to go all the way. Trust me.’

  I tried to read his face in the darkness. ‘It’s my first time,’ I whispered. I could feel him grin at that. I saw the contours of his face change as he brushed my hair back from my eyes.

  ‘Oh, really?’ he said. ‘I’d never have known.’

  I could feel myself blush and I was glad of the darkness. ‘Don’t tease me,’ I said, my breath warm against his ear.

  ‘You’ll have to trust me.’ He stayed very still, resting one hand on my face. ‘We can make this really special, but you’ll have to trust me.’

  I had a sharp snap of memory. My Aunty Kate, standing in her kitchen, fag in one hand, glass of Rioja in the other. She’d been to Spain on holidays and had come back believing that red wine was very sophisticated. The fire crackled in the grate, late October winds howled in the chimney, forcing the smoke back down into the hazy kitchen. I remember how she shook her head in disbelief, heard her hiss at Mo, her best friend – whom she called Maureen only if she was very angry – ‘For Christ’s sake, Maureen, how many times do you have to be caught? You’ve got five kids already and they’re all “trust mes”. Brendan would say High Mass if it’d get you into bed. And you’re expecting again?

  I can’t remember how many seconds it took for me not to care about Kate, or Mo or any of them. To dismiss the village voices and the gossiped tales of ruined women and abandoned babies, all the backwoods horrors of what would happen to people like me, people who refused to know their place and obey their God.

  ‘I trust you,’ I said.

  ‘Good girl.’

  The first devil-may-care moment of my life. It was almost pure in its recklessness. I managed to brush it all aside: that here I was in bed with a medical student – a definite no-no for good girls from the country. Their reputation was legendary. They were known to be fast and fickle and dangerous. That I was trusting my whole future to someone I had known for only four or five hours. That I was being seduced by someone about to become a doctor. The irony was not lost on me, Mother, oh no. Not even then.

  ‘You okay?’ Paul’s kisses paused for a moment. The liquid pleasure that we’d been swimming in for what seemed like hours was suspended gently around us. ‘Happy?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, pulling him closer. I remember feeling that I would never be able to pull him close enough. ‘Happy and happy and happy some more.’

  It must have been some time around four in the morning. The whole house had grown silent. I couldn’t even hear Marvin Gaye any more. Strangely, my bedroom seemed to have grown brighter and I remember that I took that as an omen. I know now of course that my eyes had just grown used to the dark. But I didn’t know that at the time. I was thrilled that Paul and I could see each other, that our faces were real and warm rather than shapes shifting in and out of the shadows. I know that I had been thinking, this is so nice – and then stopped myself, remembering Georgie’s rules about lazy adjectives, no matter what the . . .

  But I never got to finish my thought. Suddenly, I gasped, slammed from drowsy arousal, from sensual restfulness into full-on, wide-awake wonder. Paul’s fingers were inside me again, but this time, they made me feel powerfully alert and alive in a way I had never been before.

  ‘What are you doing to me?’ I whispered, my heart hammering, my soul racing, my mind speeding. My new, eighteen-year-old body was caught in a clutch of delight I had never even imagined, could never begin to imagine. All my nerve endings seemed to flood, to flush with heat and feeling. I no longer knew myself.

  Paul leaned forward and took one nipple between his teeth, rolling the other between thumb and forefinger until I thought I might be just about to faint.

  ‘I think I’ve found the switch,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m doing to you. I’ve just turned you on. Sergeant Pepper would appro
ve, don’t you think?’ And he slid away from me and bit me, gently. Ever so gently. ‘I told you you could trust me, didn’t I?’

  But by that stage, I was beyond speech.

  I had never known it could be so easy: such fluent matching of bodies, of tongues and hands and legs and arms. There had been no awkwardness here, no fumbling at my bra, no hot breath on the back of my neck and no painful surprises with teeth and jagged fingernails. No. Paul was all easy movement, his hands tender and sure. He had surprised me, that first night. I’d been prepared for pain, discomfort and at the very least some unpleasantness. But there was nothing. Nothing but pleasure.

  Sleep had become impossible. I lay as the dawn light filtered through the grimy curtains that had once been tweed, although I couldn’t make out what the original shade was supposed to have been. We lay like spoons, Paul’s arm over my shoulder, his hand cupping one grateful breast. A small, white breast; long, square fingers; the dip and swell of our thighs under a blue blanket. I wished that my eye could be a camera.

  I couldn’t stop myself thinking of Kate, of how right she had been about so many things. There is life after whatever the shit is that happens to you. But this was beyond Rioja and Craven A, beyond the sad lace curtains of a country kitchen and self-knowledge that was hard won, hard bought. Now, I thought, at last: now I understand my mother. This was love. And I wanted it. No, more than that, I craved it and needed it and breathed it in like oxygen.

  And yes, I wanted its madness, too, perhaps. Although I was aware of its clear and present dangers. Or thought I was.

  But when has that ever stopped us?

  2. Georgie

  And now, outside, the day’s blue light is already slanting away from my balcony. Volterra has just begun to recede into the evening, sliding towards night. A low-key murmur begins in the grasses below. How do I describe it? As shrill droning or musical chirping? I can’t tell any more, because I’ve just decided to close my windows against the possibility of mosquitoes. I don’t entirely trust the screens. Anyway, who cares? Even if the windows were open, I couldn’t tell the difference between a cicada and a cricket. They tell me that one colonizes the afternoons, the other the evenings. But one bug is very much the same as another, in my eyes, even in Tuscany. Especially so if they bite.