‘Have you told anyone about coming here?’ he asked.
‘No. How could I after that dressing down you gave me?’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
‘I can’t figure out what you’re up to,’ I said. I really hadn’t a rats how to handle him.
‘What’s with the attitude? [chewing wasp’s face] You know nothing about me outside of a teaching environment but you seem to make a lot of presumptions anyway. And I hear you’ve been gossiping goodo.’
‘I haven’t,’ I said, gifting him my best little girl face, eyes lowered. I was panicky about how much I did know. Gross things he did to get by in American cities when dispossessed as a PhD student. Two gorgeous slappers he shacked up with in Rome. Oh so polyamorous. Oh so philanthro-eroticist! Men he’d beaten the fuck out of in house shares. I even knew the kind of women’s shoes he detested. What he liked to chew for Saturday breakfast: mouth open, brown sauce, no manners. Objects shoved up him at drug-fuelled parties. His dodgy politics. How he found his brother totally boring. His favourite sleepy town in Languedoc-Roussillon. Books that had made him mentally ill. I wanted to tell him I knew him comprehensively. I was practically his fucking biographer.
‘Who can profess to knowing anyone at all?’ I said instead. ‘Just that I get the impression sometimes you can be a tad cruel, a bit of a mé féiner.’
‘Why are you here then?’ he asked, snottily. ‘It’s all the same to me if you stay or go. Do you want to be here?’
‘You know I do,’ I said. ‘I’m here because I need to be here. Maybe we have the unfinished business thing going on.’
‘I’m actually very kind,’ he said. Really, I had to stop myself here. I thought of the stunning woman he humped on the first night of our North American Women Writers module in the summer term last year. The night we discussed Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Making a move on another student when we went out on the tear when it was finally over. Muscling straight in there in front of the first choice one, now discarded. Very kind fare indeed. I watched him do it from the sidelines, and he watched me watching him, that’s the type he is. I’d like to get to know you better. Sure he had it off to a tee, and why wouldn’t he?
‘I don’t doubt that you’re the kindest of gentlemen, that you do your very best for your students, that you somehow genuinely believe this,’ I said, grinning.
‘Are you mocking me?’ he barked. ‘Are you fucking mocking me?’
‘Jesus, no, I wouldn’t dare, seriously, calm down.’
I was utterly throbbing at this stage. He could tang it. Fuck, his mental eyes. His blue robin egg eyes. That smouldering madness. Disgusting ire. The soreness spilling all around him. This tick of darkness between us. His seagull-in-flight upper lip. His nasty fucking demeanour. How I adored it. This bad thing that was always destined to happen. His Satanic odious octopus nasty fucking psycho self. What a shithead. Fucking hit me I dare you. Fucking bastard. Hit me just the once. Sharp smack to the face but keep your eyes on mine. Watch yourself doing it. Watch me. Hit me. Hit me hard I can take it. One big slap and keep your eyes there, right there. I want to see you when you do it to me. What have I done to deserve this? To deserve you? Hit me, please, I want you to hit me. Afterwards you can hold me. I’ll hold you. We’ll be close and I’ll be upset. Holding on to you. Warmth of you. I love this. I want you. Your hot face in my neck; my hot face in your neck. Now look at that! We are closer than we could ever hope to be. But this is not anything near love. This is searing satisfaction. Get the fuck out. Out of here. Out of me. Fucking creep.
‘Get down on the floor, crawl around,’ he said.
‘I won’t,’ I told him. ‘I’d feel like a total plum doing something like that.’
‘Do it!’ he roared. ‘Or I might up and leave.’
‘I won’t, I can’t. Why should I?’
‘You will. You should. You want to.’
‘You’re a crass stereotype!’
‘Is that so? You really think that? Think you’re a match for me?
He came at me then, snapping, like he was in a teeming rage for feeling anything at all. I bit him on the shoulder but he quickly showed me who was Boss, didn’t he? Oh it’s funny, the diabolical fury. We stood shoulder to shoulder on the frontier asking will this, what if, should we? For a while it went mouse quiet, it was as if the fucker wasn’t there at all. Then small yips and whines, quite sweet, unexpected. There we go. Sat up facing each other, lightly biting our muzzles, touching noses, nuzzling, bumping bodies, but nothing you’d call hotel hectic. We nibbled at each other’s coats, tossing and tilting our heads about the place. Stopped for a small break and shared a bottle of sparkling Ballygowan from the fridge.
‘You’re not bad at sucking cock,’ he remarked. ‘But your nose runs and your eyes water, which is a pity.’ There was no time to answer. He shoved me back on the bed, smacking and pulling. ‘You’re a bitch who wants to be a dirty bitch, only a fucking bitch knows it.’
He flung his legs over my neck. Tail whipping in each other’s shit as wolves do, pushing one out in front of him. The mess on those beautiful cotton covers, the stench! I hope he paid in cash. He clattered me a little bit with his forepaws, forcing me to drop onto front quarters into a crouch position. I didn’t mind at all. Then he mounted me hard from behind. Belting and pounding. Yes, the swelling up inside was brutal, but I could see it was the type of sensual pain that’d morph into a primrose path once you’re used to it. The sheer agony when he twisted to get us end to end, tied like that for a good half hour. Only thing he bothered saying afterwards was in the lift on the way out, he whispered, ‘Your lipstick has worn off sweetcheeks.’ I can’t lucidly recall those tiny last moments. My bones really creaked, my pussy was sore. I do remember, however, his dark dismal head disappearing up the road. The flip of his long back. Sting of tail-swish lashing stray strands of night air. I’d watched it disappear many times before, wondering where he was taking himself off to. Who he’d meet. Charming nuggets he’d sling at bewildered yokes who lacked the basic emotional training to figure him out.
Liz wouldn’t leave the steam mop alone. Plug-in cleaning implements were a way for her to deal with the nattiness of the world. Her hand clasped the trigger chugging and puffing steam all over the kitchen floor out to the border edges where the more complex dirt hid. ‘You have to stop that scutwork and listen up,’ I said. ‘I’m worried about where you’re at,’ she said, ‘terrified in fact.’ I told her not to be, that it was all good. ‘I have it. I’m on top of it,’ I said. Scratches down my back and thighs looked like that of a crazed dog jumping briar hills to rid fleas. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you this, it’s confidential university business, but he’s made a second complaint about you,’ she said. ‘A formal one this time, I’ve seen the correspondence myself. You’re getting an official warning. Any further contact and you’re off the MA.’ I was stunned. I assumed a level of friendship … he told me it was alright to ‘sound off’ but you can never truly get what pulls a grenade in a fucker like that. ‘This can’t be happening,’ I told her. ‘He’s my George Barker. Have you read By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept?’ She wouldn’t stop glaring. ‘He means so much to me.’ She fired off a line about an appointment with the college counsellor. ‘What’s the bets his boozy Da knocked the bollix out of him and his Ma was a Valium-soaked thicko who lost contact with Planet Self?’ I was trying to sound amusing, but sadness had already started to bobble. ‘You’ve got to get a grip, she said. ‘You’re fucking obsessed. You do understand, don’t you, this could actually go legal?’ By slow degrees, sickness, and dizziness, and horror, merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. ‘You should’ve seen the way he flanked me Liz, those hefty paws pinning me down.’ I was now the problem that won’t go away. His complaints building in number as his mind handily snapped and temper took over. ‘Does he have a
new girlfriend, is that it? I think I’ve seen her. Long brown hair, no make-up, gentle, obedient, the usual. That’s not the kind of wanton madness we have.’ Liz went quiet as a nun. ‘I can’t hear any more of it,’ she said. ‘It’s nuts.’
There was just one shipwrecked moment in bed where I felt I’d got it all so catastrophically wrong. Wrapped, facing each other, relaxing, content. I saw in his facial expression an ordinary man, insecure and damaged, frightened from fighting himself for so long. I wanted to kiss him on behalf of every woman on the planet. Extract the darkness with a surgical scalpel. All that wrath, indignation, sorrow, the grated imprudent threats, differences of opinion, pettiness, dreadful public spectacles of pain, body parts sold to sleazy punters on city streets. All that wandering along roaring. Sick fantasies of rape and murder, of animals and even children. Piling more and more hate on himself just to stay screaming. I’d replace it all with chopped clear thinking. I wanted to say sexual jealousy brought me to this point and I’m horribly sorry. I’ve absolutely no idea who you are and I never meant for it to get so out of hand. I just wanted to make the grade. To be like all the others. For you to see me, notice me, fuck me, kiss me, want me, laugh with me, lie with me, cook me an omelette. This flick of jeopardy between us really is dangerous. We both know it. Let’s not go there. Let’s never go there. Let’s look out for each other from a distance. A love story that never permits itself to fly off the ground or smack its face off the stars.
I’d rarely known such torment over someone I barely knew and would never know and I wondered what that was really about. The streets seemed to completely hack themselves of colour. Counteracting this was a new-fangled sense of smell. From Lower Drumcondra where we lived I inhaled the blood-spattered hospital waste in Holles Street 3.3 kilometres away. Sitting in Fagan’s I was able to sniff severed fish heads down the docks and relish the tangy rust on the underside of abandoned cargo boats fastened to the Liffey walls. Light jilted and bluffed showing shapes of lonelier paths, judgements and views. With our son Bill growing inside me, I was learning how to shift posture, growl, glance. I did it with harmony and discipline, stood my ground and defended boundaries. I decided to build a den out the back about twenty to twenty-eight inches wide and fifteen to twenty inches high. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d be sucking the veins of chickens from vans at the back of supermarkets. Spitting bones at charity shop windows. I sprinted to Woodies to get some supplies: trellises, ball grasses and potting grit. It was important Bill and I were comfortable. It was only going to be a seventy-five day pregnancy and I’d have to eat his shit from the den to keep it clean. He’d arrive with eyes closed, deaf and totally helpless. I stopped walking and began to lope, trot, gallop, at such speeds that my eyes drank in the zipping line of traffic with its silhouette of seated ant-heads. A pain in my chest wouldn’t shift which I put down to the slaploads of raw meat I devoured daily. Bill’s muzzle began pressing into me, causing me to piss on the move in the thick of spaced-out shoppers around Grafton Street and surrounding alleyways. By week three I stopped going out around the city and just stuck to the back garden. Liz’s modus operandi was to totally ignore me, confident I’d tire of my camping adventure and take to being hominine once again, longing for the comfort of my king size memory foam bed.
She thought it’d be a good idea to have friends around on a weeknight rather than a weekend when everyone seemed to be terminally busy. The back of the house spilled down with LED light chains and solar-powered lanterns. Beef bourguignon bubbled away in a red Creuset on the stove rendering me delirious. I’d spent the week finishing off stocks of smoked salmon that had the perfect shelf life for outdoors but nonetheless gave me ferocious heartburn, forcing me to chomp the long grass. There was a shortage of large ungulates or hooved animals around the place, and of course muskoxen or exotic caribou. Cowardice had sidelined me to the neighbour’s bins. I’d also started to smell really putrid. I watched the guests arrive, one by one, two by two, handing over tacky bottles of expensive wine, rabbiting on about their reasoned choices. They were exactly the kind of University People my love used to describe in his early emails: ‘Lazy-headed snobs who love to sit in workshops only to improve their dinner party repartee.’ Liz, the back-stabbing stool pigeon, pointing me out as the aberration in the garden. Gawping out at me, necks craned, forks suspended. I waved back to show that I didn’t and couldn’t care. Up until this I’d managed well. He hadn’t tyrannised my head, not since his final crawling correspondence: ‘I have no problem at all with you in the class. Quitting the course is entirely your decision.’ I wouldn’t let a mean-hearted fool like that mildew my mind or bonk my bones when it suited. He was the type to drop the trousers at any time of day or night. I don’t know why he didn’t think of sewing in a trapdoor to make it easier on himself. ‘Desire is a public phenomenon, we’ve no right to resist it.’ Fuck off you disingenuous bastard! Rather than lower himself to empathy or any notion of altruism, he’d sent even more missives. It struck me that he might not stop until he heard of me stone dead. One harped on about a photograph of my tits I sent him. ‘Men do it all the time, we’ve grown to expect it,’ I informed Liz, in a Post-it on the fridge. I dumped my laptop and phone so I wouldn’t have to respond to further demands to meet with the dean. ‘Cheek of that philistine citing my behaviour as inappropriate when he uses the course as fanny fodder all the time and no one blinks an ethical eyelid! You need to carry out a full internal review of your operations in there.’
I crawled back into the den and told Bill to treat girls and women with the respect they deserve by the time he reached a certain age. ‘You’re a hoot Mum,’ he muttered back from deep in the willows inside me, ‘but I’ve no idea what that means.’ I’ll teach him how to hunt but he’ll have to pull his weight: hoovering, wiping down counters, chucking rubbish from the garage. There’s no way I’m wasting my days lounging around playing with Lego, I’m not cut out for it. We’d start with smaller prey, work our way up to tougher flesh, rip it raw, eat it quick. ‘When we’re proficient enough, we’re going all out after him.’ Go for his cheeks where the tender flesh lives. Eat his grin too. His leather laptop bag. His sense of self. His monstrous ego. Eat his toenails. His house. His job. Eat the bus he travels on. Eat his whores, all of them, yes, every last one. His printouts. Eat his dauntlessness. The toilet he shits in. Eat the rashers from his fridge. Eat his funding opportunities. His comfy pub chair. His many works in progress. Eat his tactics. His belligerence. Eat his swagger. Eat his vision of the future. Eat his contempt for anyone who disagrees with him. His scornfulness. His fanaticism. Eat his entrails. Feel your father’s icy chill creep through your pulpy heart and be glad of it.
I could hear the dining room door slide on its squeaky track and the legion of legs strutting out to the furniture. The gas lamps were hissing away matched in tempo by the gushes of the Cosmopolitan fountain we’d bought in a second-hand shop for a tenner. We’d got it originally to celebrate my last day at the university. On that day I’d only downed half a glass when I got the urge to sneak up the stairs and scrawl KARMA on the whiteboard in his lecture room. Liz was there in a flash, my praetorian guard, eraser in hand, the usual efficiency. ‘Leave it please,’ I said. ‘I need this one last clump of counter-play.’ All those pregnant sentences in his Inbox that consigned me to the hangman and to hell. ‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘Is it fuck!’ I replied. ‘Even if it takes five years, I’ll be back for his balls. That man always underestimated me.’
In the garden I watch the guests through the heat of amber eyes. Grasses bristle and jostle. I stretch forward to lie flat in the flimsy sunshine of early evening. The clouds are hungry and my mouth waters. Wind tears at itself as I pull layers from the sky to lay over me. Laughter grey and mocking. They do not know the danger love carries. Inside my son scratches and grows. I retract his moans back from the patio glass in a tender flow of light, creating a partial vacuum to insulate against emotional prowlers. They
do not dare and should not dare, not here, not near. I’ll rip them up. Licking and guzzling sick sour flesh. Springy muscle lathered in so much cloth. Juice of small succulent eyes. I’d gladly slash him in the same savage way. Licking, guzzling, digesting. Scorched screams in the small hairs of hell’s ears. Viscera of him, black and full of distemper. Vital organs crawling with lies. What would he say and how could I begin to understand it? Trees move, insects move, birds move, nothing matters. Sounds from out around the suburbs cannot distract from the pain. Horns, planes, cackles, barks. The screech of tyres on dry pelts of roadway. There is no let up to the wind. Loneliness stirs, shy and submissive, among the branches. Anger rises. It rises with such intensity I see its violent head, shaking. It flings me into the den. Forces me onto my back. Flash of fangs. I throw myself into the fray. What is this chorus of urgent plaintive howls? Aloneness deep and dark. I lick it, groom it. Snarl, scurry for cover. Tattling to keep it all under control. I could dig all night to go deeper, a shallower pit, only to find it’s still not the right spot. Only to find new clumps of dirt blocking the entrance. I am hardened now. Disrespectful towards the length of human days. Finally sleep arrives. Cavernous sleep. Squatting down in the treacherous hollows of the mind.
SOMAT
I was a controversial case. Even before Beard met Opus Dei met Speculum Man. Grey hospital cubicle punched with derma-grip, iodoform fungi, yellow tiles. Peter Papadoo giving it the: ‘No more babies!’ His job is not so much a sure thing anymore. He worries she will not cope. I hang above the flare; nail fur, metallic ale, unmoored. Knapsack of neurons showing me where to plop out on any given day. Mama goo goo-ing: ‘We’ll get by, we always do, go with it, get on with it, it’s all good, don’t freak the beak.’ Sleep brining sleep, reflex arc, breathe, swallow, lick. Magus of my future, she is packed with a million woolly things to say to me. ‘My butter fairy, nincompoop, my pickyuppy squidgy monkey. You will not stop running around. For the love of Jaysus. Oh you with the cut knees! What are we going to do about you? Rascal flower, pumpernickel. There’s no stopping you! Why would I want to? So cuddly-do. Let me squeeze that sweet gooey centre of you. Come here to me now. Don’t make me run! Would you look at the getup of ye.’ Then it happened: I heard no more from her.
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