Mary said, ‘Come into the living room. We’re just going to have tea.’ She was shy. Almost as if I were a stranger. I was a strang-er. She said, ‘Mmm very smart,’ and made me turn around so she could see my dress, but she wasn’t sure about it. It was a smock. You could see she thought they were just for pregnant women.
Mary brought in tea. The cherry tree in the garden had silken branches of deep ochre. The windows were open onto the garden. The zing of the cars from the main road and the garden smells came through.
We talked about events. Occurrences. About Father’s book which was with the publishers. About the flu Mary had had. About the people who’d moved in next door. Father looked a lot older than a month before when I’d seen him in town. I hadn’t been to this house for seven months. Quite a feat, given the nearness of it. But then distances are always to do with love, or lack of it, seldom with space.
Father wanted to know why I gave up the job in College: ‘I thought you liked it so much?’
I said, ‘I get plenty of money from modelling you know. You can earn up to one hundred pounds for just one session.’ They didn’t like that. You could see they were thinking: that kind of money just means badness. At least Mary was thinking that—to Father it was probably meaningless.
‘I’m going to Paris for a week,’ I said. ‘For a holiday.’
Mary smiled. ‘Oh that will be nice for you.’ She said it flatly. Modelling and Paris and one hundred pounds—what would she tell her friends when they asked, ‘And how’s our Elizabeth doing these days?’—the competition for your kids’ careers—Is my one better than yours?—and all hidden under smiles of concern and interest.
‘I’m going with a group of friends,’ I said. ‘Some people from the television station.’ That would be something to tell them—wouldn’t it?
I told them I’d moved flats, that I was sharing with a girlfriend who had a flat out by the sea. I said we lived with the sound of the sea in our heads, day and night.
I wanted to say clever things. To say: ‘Look, I’m okay, and I made it, and who would have thought it?’ Things like that. I wanted to say sad things as well: ‘Why didn’t you touch me more when I was a child? Why did you never love me?’
I wanted to say, ‘You’ve changed and I’ve changed, and we’ve changed in spite of each other, but we could still perhaps learn to know, even to like.’
I wanted to say, ‘I’m living with Colin, the young man who was making the film about the history of Ireland. I’m a grown-up woman now, I’m not a virgin any more, I don’t go to Mass any more, I even sleep with men in the middle of the afternoon, and for money, and last week I got so drunk I conked out.’
I wanted to say, ‘Tell me what you’re most afraid of. Tell me your very favourite thing in the whole world.’ I wanted to try to tell them why I didn’t, couldn’t, come round more often ... all sorts of things. It was too late or too early.
We talked about the weather. We talked about the price of food and how everything was going up these days. Father talked about the state of the country and Mary said, ‘I don’t know what the world is coming to.’ We were very solemn, each in a chintz chair, slapping phrases like plasters over each other’s words, or wounds, the one hiding the other.
I excused myself and went upstairs to the bathroom. The house looked so small—a doll’s house. I went into my bedroom and lay down on the bed. Mary had left my room as if I was about to come back from school for the long holidays, or home from a trip abroad. There were posters of pop stars with marble eyes and shiny, every-day-washed hair and pink lips; there was another poster on ‘Exercising your way to Beauty’ and a course for twenty-eight weeks; there were two dolls sitting on the mantelpiece, their plastic legs stuck straight out in front of them, their blue-flecked eyes unwinking.
I thought, You change and you change and you change, but all the time you carry the corpse of your younger self inside you. Your body gets bigger and fuller and riper, then smaller and thinner and drier, yet all the time there’s yourself and the thrust of what you really wanted to be, buried inside you.
I went into the bathroom. Automatically I started making up my face. A bit of powder, a bit of mascara.
Something fell out of my bag onto the floor. I picked it up. It was David’s cheque. He must have stuffed it into the bag before I left. I suddenly wanted to laugh. How would I have explained that one to Colin? Oh just a little gift from an old admirer, darling.
It was one of those days when each event cancels out the one that went before. You live without responsibility. You feel a little melancholy, but it’s a friendly melancholy. You can afford to laugh at your own ludicrousness.
I crumpled the cheque up into a ball and flushed it down the loo. The water tank coughed and sneezed and shook its shoulders and then righted itself and then quietened down to refilling. A busy, soothing sound. The cheque came bobbing up again in the bowl. Buoyant, Bank of Ireland paper.
I fished the cheque out and wrapped it in some toilet paper and put it into the special zipper pocket inside the lining of my bag. When I’d bought the bag it carried a tag advertising the zipper pocket as ‘A secret pouch for the Mysterious Lady’. I’d never used it before. I thought, I’ll burn the cheque when I get back to the flat.
I told Mary and my father that I had to go. I said I was being taken out to dinner by that young man who was making a film about the history of Ireland. I wanted them to hear his name again, to be reminded of him, to know of his link with me. We said goodbye at the door. I said that Mary must come and have lunch with me one day, in town. I was into the car, and waving, and starting the engine, and then gone.
I belted the car down the road. I thought, I’m a balloon. If anything hits me it will just bounce off. I thought, It’s only four o’clock in the afternoon and I’m a changed person since this morning. I’ve had my face changed, and my body changed, and my childhood changed.
I sang in the car. I sang Johnny Cash. I felt my body. Every edge and surface of it. I felt how it touched the air. I thought of it replacing a body of air, like Archimedes getting into his bath and replacing a body shape of water. It was about the only piece of our science course I could remember.
Colin said I was stupid. I didn’t think I was. I felt things. I thought, If you were stupid you wouldn’t feel things—or not very much. I thought that once you felt things then the rest was just going to college or something like that.
Colin and his friends talked about things the whole time. They sat around pouring thick brown gravy of talk into each other. For hours. I liked listening to them. Sometimes I felt like saying, ‘Colin, couldn’t we just go to bed now?’ But I knew Colin would kill me if I said that. I once said I couldn’t understand Jean Paul Sartre; that it was all just words. Colin looked at me. They all stopped talking. Colin said, ‘For God’s sake, Elizabeth.’ He said it like a curse.
Colin was very good to me though. Giving me that cheque this morning for instance. Cheque, I thought, cheque. Poor David and his damn cheque. I hoped he’d left the hotel by now. It seemed like years ago. Imagine pleading like that. Will you do it for three hundred pounds?
I couldn’t imagine Colin pleading. He wasn’t that sort of person. At work he really shouted at the men in the studio but they didn’t seem to mind. They all went down to the pub later and drank. Colin liked really rough pubs. He said, ‘That’s where the Real People are.’ He said I was a terrible snob, but I just didn’t know what to say to those people.
Another thing he did was to read comics. He and these two friends, they’d rush down to the newsagent on Fridays to get their comics: ‘Dangerman!’ and ‘Batman!’ and they lined up with the poor kids and they bought about six comics each and the kids just bought one. They had their money ready in pennies and halfpennies. Colin and his friends paid with pounds.
Colin said, ‘Comics are part of our culture; they’re indicative.’ I thought t
hey were just for kids. I thought culture meant art galleries and Tolstoy and things like that—heavy, polished, difficult things.
Colin could be difficult. He could be hard. His eyes could go like diamonds. His face would shut down. He’d go on like that if his father came round. His father lived in a room in Blessington Street. He came round to beg money and maybe he just wanted to be talked to as well. Once he wept and held on to Colin’s knees. I’ve sometimes sat for a whole morning, giving him coffee and cigarettes, while he was shaking and dribbling and waiting for Colin to come. Colin said I shouldn’t let him in. But he cries through the letterbox.
Colin said, ‘I’m not his bloody nursemaid. If the old bastard wants to drink himself to death then let him.’ I thought, That’s an awful thing to say about your own father. Colin said, ‘And a lot you know about it dear.’
Colin drank a lot too. Not when he was working; he’d never drink when he’s working. But at night. Sometimes he’d get so drunk it was frightening. He’d become a different person. Cruel. He wouldn’t let me talk about it afterwards. Once he said, ‘Like father, like son.’ He threw a chair through the window and was shouting and I burst into tears. He was like a mad person. He punched me in the face; he said, ‘Shut up your bloody caterwauling.’ I had to tell people I’d fallen down the steps. They all smiled: Tsch, tsch. They knew.
I’d come to the railway crossing. It was 4.30 p.m. I thought, I’ll cross the railway. I’ll go and sit on the sand for a little bit.
The sea was grey. It was like a whale. Wet, solid and grey. Every so often it shifted. The sand was wettish. The grains stuck like wet salt when you tried to let them run through your fingers. The sun had sort of diluted itself throughout the sky. The sun leaked a pale yellow into the whole, sodden sky.
I thought, I’m hardly ever on my own. I was often alone in the flat in the sense that there wasn’t another person around: Colin had gone to work and I was there alone, but I put on records very loud, I did my exercises, I gave myself home facials, or hair conditioners, or I cooked something for our lunch. I never stopped. I never sat down and said, ‘Now, just think.’
I picked up this book once in the house of one of Colin’s friends. It said (or said something like) this: ‘Think of a grey wall. Think of a completely grey wall covering your mind. Think of all your thoughts imprisoned behind that wall, unable to get out. Look at the wall in your mind. Let yourself be blank, blank. Then slowly watch as thoughts present themselves to you.’ This was to do with relaxation or something. The book was to exercise the mind in ways of thought.
I sat looking at the sea. I thought, That’s my grey wall. I tried to think blank, blank. Did the wall have bricks? No. My hair tickled my face. The sand was cold. I thought: I’ll walk along and think of a blank wall.
I thought of Colin and me. Always. I was always thinking of Colin and me. Is it love? I don’t know. People say it’s love when you think of the other person the whole time.
I thought, This is me. This is Elizabeth O’Sullivan, walking along Sandymount Strand. I thought: I’m twenty. I thought: People die when they’re twenty. The following year they vote. They can be hanged when they’re eighteen. They can get married when they’re sixteen. In England the upper classes send their boys to boarding school when they’re eight. They put their names down for public schools the day after they’re born.
All those different ages.
I thought: I’m twenty and I’ve done nothing. I thought, That’s very melodramatic. I’m three years away from school. All those years and I’ve done nothing. I thought, Who am I? Twenty, and I’m nothing. But I have Colin, haven’t I? If Colin decides he likes that girl with the long hair in the pub—what am I then?
Valerie said there are plenty more where they come from. Meaning men. I thought of Valerie in big Wellington boots, fishing in the Atlantic with a huge fishing rod, for men.
I thought: Well if Colin leaves there’s always David. I could go to David and throw myself on his mercy. I could say, ‘David, David, forgive me. I’ve been so awful, so unfaithful, such a harlot, forgive me David.’
I could get married to David. Everybody gets married. Eventually. Colin said, ‘Why the hell get married? Particularly in Ireland.’ David and I could be married and live in a house. We’d give dinner parties. I’d shop in town. I’d probably have a lover. It might be Colin. Everybody in Foxrock had lovers. So.
I thought: You’re tired. You need a holiday. Colin is right. All you need is a rest. You’re twenty and you’ve got what you wanted, right? You’ve got Colin, you’ve got your flat together, well his flat, but you’re living there; you’ve got everything.
Haven’t you?
You felt scared. Scared he’d leave you? He ruined everything by going out with that girl; but that’s stupid. All these men have affairs. Anyway he said it was nothing. He said, ‘I suppose it’s all right if I have a drink with a friend?’ He said it in this very sarcastic voice. You said, ‘Yes of course, it’s just …’ ‘Just what?’ he said. You said, ‘Oh nothing.’
You went to bed with people, like David. Why? You lived with Colin, you felt you needed his reassurance. You wanted him saying, Yes, and No, and I like that, or I don’t. You knew what it was like to be on your own. Even if Colin was angry or cross at least he was there. He’d take you round, show you things, laugh with you. A hand to stretch out to in the middle of the night. Someone to smile at during the ghastly party. A person to write letters to: foolish, intimate things.
I thought about going to bed with people and how that had changed, coming from school where I’d lived with the nuns’ puritanism and the threat and danger of sex; and then sleeping with people and finding the heavens didn’t fall on you, like the nuns said, or open up for you, like the magazines said. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. There was nothing magical. Growing up, I read somewhere, is when you stop having recourse to moods and masturbation.
But you were young still, weren’t you? No need to worry. No need to worry about your life, you’d lots of time yet to think about it — to think about what you were going to do. Anyway lots of women didn’t have jobs, or careers, or anything. Why should you? Colin said, ‘It’s petit bourgeois conformism to want a job.’ He said, ‘Are you scared of living your life from minute to minute? Of not having schedules, timetables, targets?’
I was sure Colin was right. You just needed a rest. Still you thought, What’s the matter with me?
—14—
‘Do you want to go to the party, or not?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Do you?’
‘Couldn’t we just stay in and be together on our own for a change, just for once?’
‘We’ve been asked to go. A few minutes ago you were madly enthusiastic.’
‘It’s just ... I don’t know . . . it’s just we never seem to talk to each other at parties. I don’t quite know how to put it . . .’
‘You don’t go to parties to talk to each other, stupid. You go to meet people.’
‘Oh yes, we all know why you go to parties — to meet girls.’
‘So we’re back on that one again. You’re becoming like a bloody, nagging wife, Elizabeth.’
‘Darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be awful, it’s just . . .’
‘Look. All I want to know is whether you want to go to the fucking party or not, uh?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’ll come to the party.’
—15—
I still think, that damned party.
It began with the argument: would we go, or wouldn’t we. Colin said he had been stuck all day in the bloody editing room and now he wanted some fun. I wanted to stay in and talk to him. So many things happen and you fear you’ll lose them by tomorrow, feelings, tentative feelings. Then I said the thing about him wanting to go just to meet girls. There are times when you want peace and you want to sit at home in old jean
s and watch television, or at least that’s what you think might help. Something. I get tired of the battles outside. Colin said, ‘You want us to end up arthritic and snivelling over a coal fire, locked into endless, old-age boredom.’ The kind of thing you couldn’t answer.
I started getting dressed. Colin came up and watched me. He was very fussy about my clothes. He came shopping with me; he said, ‘Well seeing that you dress for the delectation of men, they should be the best judges of what looks good on you.’ I used to like it when he came shopping.
Now he was in one of those moods. Drinking. A bottle of whiskey in one hand, he lay on the bed and talked about work, and how those ‘fucking morons of production assistants could never read a studio script right, even if you shoved it under their bloody noses.’ You’d have to watch him. He might easily hurt you—a sort of Catherine wheel spinning off thousands of sparks: the fairy princess might get burnt up.
He was laughing and telling me about a girl he went to bed with once who had false teeth. He couldn’t get an erection, seeing this girl with her lips napping together like a fish’s and remembering the teeth quietly floating in milky liquid in the bathroom. Completely de-sexed him. She’d got a disease of the gums when she was a kid and her teeth had all fallen out.
She’d said she took them out because some people found it more disconcerting if they heard a clicking noise halfway through. The clicking false teeth make when you’re eating or doing something strenuous, she said.
I went to bed once with this friend of Colin’s with smelly teeth; you’d have thought it would have been his breath that smelt but his teeth were so yellow and ancient, I’m sure it must have been them. His name was John; he was a poet or something. Everyone said he was very good. It was at a party and Colin had been talking to a girl for hours and John was rolling joints and giving me the eye, and I’d thought, What the hell, anything goes.
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