It was pretty sordid really. Colin was chatting up this girl, and then John said, ‘Oh come on,’ and ‘Don’t be such a frigid Brigid.’ I started watching for Colin and hoping he’d come out and then I’d smile at John and pretend to be listening to him, and Colin could damn well see that I was fine without him, but eventually John and I ended up in a bedroom upstairs on a pile of coats and anoraks. He didn’t take off his clothes and I just closed my eyes against the smell of his teeth. Colin had never even noticed that I’d left the room.
I was thinking, The thing is, you can never trust women. A man has just got to smile at them and they’re falling over him. I mean, Colin was one of those men that liked women. He liked the whole business of sex and flirting and stuff. You could see the women responding. Some of them envied you and said, ‘You’re lucky.’ In a way you thought you were—such a good, sexy catch. Nobody wanted a guy that nobody else was going to fancy; there’d have to be something wrong with him. But then you knew yourself, easy come and easy go, and that’s how you were, into bed the first night he asked you, and if everyone else was like that there was nothing to prevent him, was there?
A woman would never think like that about a man. She’d never say: Oh he’s a good type, or a bad type, depending on how long the gap between the time they met and the time they went to bed together. A woman would think: This is a special man, who is making this very special and exclusive gesture towards me. She wouldn’t be able to bear it if she thought the man could just as easily have screwed the little dark girl over in the corner.
Colin was saying, ‘There’s a girl I want you to meet tonight, she’s called Mary.’
I’d always hated that name. Mary. It was weighted with religion and stupidity and prejudices. My stepmother’s name.
Colin said, ‘She’s Ruth’s latest protégée—disarmingly honest.’ I wanted to go to the party even less.
Ruth was a lady producer in television. It was she who was giving the party. She produced ‘special’ programmes. Heavies. She and Colin had an affair about two years ago which was how he’d become a director. He’d been designing the studio sets for a programme Ruth was producing and they’d started sleeping together. Ruth thought Colin’s mind was wasted on graphic design work. She got him onto this directors’ course. Colin said they were always more interested in each other’s minds than each other’s bodies. I said, Mmm. We used to laugh about him sleeping his way to the top in television, just like a starlet in Hollywood or a secretary in the BBC.
All the time I was dressing, I had a feeling about this party —that something awful was going to happen. Something. I wanted to kiss Colin, to say, ‘You’ll never hurt me, will you?’, and couldn’t, and knew that he would, some day.
The party was the beginning of the end, or the other way round, depending on how you remembered it.
So it was at this party that I first met Mary. I was with Angus, a friend of Colin’s, who was married to a girl called Miriam and they both slept with everyone and anyone. Angus and I were talking to each other and pretending to be interested and interesting, and Ruth had taken Colin off to meet some Italian
journalist who was preparing a script for a film on the ‘Death of Dublin’.
A girl came up and said, ‘Hello, I’m Mary. Colin has told me about you.’ (I hate it when people say that.) She wore old blue jeans and a t-shirt. She spoke straight out, like a man, and shook hands. She said she’d just come back from two years in France where she’d started off selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune and ended up singing in cafés, and in France, she said, everyone shakes hands the whole time.
Angus, randy Angus, was widening his eyes at her and she wasn’t even bothering. She was talking to me, and I was looking round for a man to latch on to. She was asking me what I did and I said, ‘I just am.’ Men usually thought that interesting, to just be, (‘so delightfully unplebeian,’ as Angus would say). She just gave this odd look.
I said, ‘Colin says it’s simply petit bourgeois conformism to want to work.’ She burst out laughing, and said, ‘God, some men are incredible.’ I wasn’t sure what she meant but I didn’t like her, and her damned open-ended laugh.
We talked about various things and then Angus asked me to dance and he put his hand on my bottom and I cuddled up to him and both of us knew it would come to nothing. Then the Italian journalist came over and said he’d like to use me in his film, and Colin and I were to have dinner with him the following night.
The Italian was all smouldering eyes and tight Italian shirt and trousers and knowing, sexy looks. He and Mary started talking about Dublin—Mary had been brought up in the Coombe by a grandmother and that is one of the oldest parts of Dublin left so she promised to take this Italian around.
I looked round but couldn’t see Colin. I presumed he’d gone to the loo or something. The Italian journalist took a bottle of whiskey out from under his jacket and I went off to the kitchen to get cups and some water.
Ruth’s house was a bungalow. It looked out over Bray. She bought it cheap from an American playwright who had it specially designed for himself and was going to live in it, and write, and be inspired by Ireland; he only lasted a month and went off shouting it was the ‘most Goddawful country in the world’, and, ‘the women—Jesus H. Christ!’
All the rooms in the house opened into each other. The kitchen was in the centre of the house with the guest room off one end and the living room off the other. This was to allow guests to fix themselves drinks or food or whatever without tramping through the family’s area. The door to the guest room was slightly open. The light was off. There was some sort of noise, somebody in there. I listened for a minute and then realized there were two people in there. The bed was creaking and I could hear a girl going, Ooh, mmm, ahh—the private moans of love. Odd to hear them; usually you make them yourself so you don’t think of them as existing separately from the physical feeling of making love. I walked over to close the door feeling knowing, indulgent.
The light from the kitchen made a narrow yellow path into the room. I could make out two figures thrashing on the bed.
I stopped dead.
My hand was on the door handle. Black hands coming over my face, my eyes, my consciousness, spinning … spinning …
It was Colin on the bed. Colin and some woman.
I closed the door. Turned round. Went back to the sink. Gripping the cold steel sink, the cold wet hard feeling drove into my bones, like a kid in a comic who’s just been hit on the head with a mallet, the spinning stars and bolts, and then turning and out of the kitchen door and scrabbling among a pile for my coat, and the car keys, and keeping my back to the people in the other room—thinking like a child, If I don’t look, they won’t see me. Then my whole body turning electric, my head transparent, and thinking, If anyone touches me I’ll disintegrate, dissolve; and picking up the coat and saying to myself, Be calm, be white calm, but go, go quickly before the disintegration. Don’t scream, don’t make a fuss, just go; soon they’ll all be laughing at you, soon, but not now, don’t wait, get out before their faces follow you, laughing, laughing, laughing …
I was running down the road to the car. It was like those awful dreams when your heart pounds and you run and run and run but your legs have turned to liquid plastic and they squodge onto the pavements and stick and your arms are outstretched and something awful is following you and you know you’ll never make it round the corner.
I heard footsteps following. I got to the car. Tried to get the keys in. Stuffing them in. Which are the bloody, bloody keys, oh God help me find the keys and then—
A hand on my shoulder. I turn round. It was Mary.
‘What’s happened to you?’ she was saying. ‘I saw you charging out the door. What’s the matter?’ and I was screaming, ‘Just go away and leave me alone—everyone go away.’ There wasn’t anyone else. Just Mary.
I was shouting and
crying and thinking I must go, now, now, now.
Mary was saying, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t drive a car in that condition,’ and then she was holding me and I had my head down on her shoulder and tears were pouring out and she was just holding and saying ‘Okay now, okay,’ and I was wanting to drain my whole self out through my eyes, a hot liquid, let it pour and pour and then I’d no longer be, I’d just be a flowing stream, and Mary just held on to me and gradually I began to ease down again.
I pulled up straight. Sniffing, wiping my face. All I could think of again was running, going.
‘Have a cigarette,’ Mary said and pulled out a packet and lit one for herself and held up the light to me and my hands were shaking so much I could hardly hold the cigarette. She didn’t look at me. We stood there in the moonlight, smoking, and then she said, ‘Walk a little bit. It’s often better if you walk.’ So we started walking up the road and then I could feel the pain creeping back again and the tears coming up and this terrible confusion in my head and had to stop and I couldn’t remember what I was saying except something like ‘Help me, help me,’ and I was holding on to her.
We must have been out there for half an hour. I told Mary I’d seen Colin screwing this other girl. I didn’t know, yet, who it was. I hated that word, screwing. I said, ‘Screw, screw, screw the lot of you,’ and the anger and tears and hurt were all jumbled up again.
She said, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t walk away, run away from it. I’d go back to the party, go into the room and say, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I laughed at that, a cracked laugh with tears floating all around it, but the thought of walking into the midst of their passion was too much. I said, ‘You must be crazy.’
We were standing in the roadway having this weird conversation. Mary was saying, ‘Are you scared? Are you scared what might happen if you went back?’
‘I’m not scared at all,’ I said. I was thinking then, ‘Why doesn’t she leave me alone?’ I said, ‘The point is that we believe in free love; if Colin wants to go and sleep with another woman, then he can. I’ve no right to stop him. I don’t own him after all, I mean we’re both free people.’
‘Then why are you crying?’ Mary said. ‘If you have it all so well worked out, why cry?’
‘I’m crying because I’m tired. I’ve had ... I don’t know. I’m just so nervy all the time…’ Stop, I thought. Stop telling this woman. She’ll only laugh at you later. They were all the same. They’d listen to you and say There, there, and then off to bed with your man if they got half a chance. They really liked it if they thought they’d comforted you beforehand. Made it spicier.
Mary was saying, ‘Oh poor, bloody women. Always eating their hearts out trying to be cooler and more sophisticated than the doll next door and cracking up in the process.’
I said, ‘I’m not cracking up,’ and my voice sounded exactly as if I was.
Mary took my arm and said, ‘Come back in and have a drink. Maybe if you say Boo! to the monster he’ll turn out to have feet of clay.’
I was just going to say, very snotty, ‘Look I don’t need your advice thank you,’ or something like that, and then I thought, ‘Well why not? It’s better than going home to that flat and waiting for Colin to come in. Why not indeed?’ So the two of
us started walking back to the nightmare party.
By the time we’d returned, the party faces had slipped a bit. The girls were getting tipsy. Girls always seem to get tipsy quicker than men, but then they don’t get that evil, black drunk men get sometimes.
Girls just open their faces; their faces grow greasy and their pores open up and their eyes go smaller, swimmier, and their mouths bigger and they look up at men and you’d think some of them were just asking to be smashed.
Mary went off to get some drinks and I thought, Please let her stay with me and not go off with some guy. Please.
Angus came over. ‘Having little girly chats in the loo then?’ he said, a stupid, drunken smile on his face.
‘Oh Angus, piss off,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just leave me alone.’ Angus looked. His eyes went black, like pinheads in his big white face. Then he smiled, ‘Oh dear, cranky tonight, are we darling?’ I said, ‘Fuck you Angus.’ I said it quietly first, just mouthing the words, tasting them. Then I said it louder. I said it and saw the party faces turning, turning—Who is this? I said, ‘Fuck you Angus.’ Angus turned on his heel and walked away. I could hear my voice; it went up to the ceiling like a hard blot and then came down again; it went round and round the room, laughing.
That was the first time I ever said, ‘Fuck you’ to anybody. In public. I was standing on my own, watching the faces and bodies, and it was like looking through the end of a telescope—they’d all gone distorted and tiny.
Mary said, ‘Have a drink.’
We sat down on a sofa. Luckily I had one of those faces that didn’t show up all blotchy and red after tears; it just went sort of whiter and thinner. I was shaking again. Mary said ‘What happened?’ I told her I’d shouted at Angus. She just said, ‘About time too.’ Some of the people looked at us sitting there but by that stage I didn’t care.
Mary started talking about what she did in the telly. Something about Light Entertainment shows, she kept saying ‘LE’—that was what they called Light Entertainment. I wasn’t listening very much. I was drinking and wondering what I was going to do when Colin came out. I thought, I’ll go in like Mary says. I’ll just walk in and say, ‘May I inquire what you two animals are up to?’ I thought, That will sound laughable. Colin will just laugh. They’ll both laugh. They’ll be clutching each other, clutching breasts and penises and hair and saying, ‘Ha, ha, do go away little girl, nobody really wants you here, just go back to the nursery and play with your toys—there’s a good girl.’
I was beginning to get drunk. Systematically. I was thinking of forests inside my head. Dark forests where the trees met overhead and you ran and ran and never got out. I was thinking of a clown at a circus once, when I was a kid. His face all white with big red tears painted down his cheek. He used to ask us to come and sit on his knee and he’d tickle the girls, and his hands were like iron, tickling. After the show once he put his hand up my knickers behind a caravan and I went white inside and ran and never told anyone. I was thinking of rivers. I was thinking of a lake in Glendalough that had a hard, flat, grey face. It was held up on a rack between three mountains. It never moved. Just this flat, grey, face looking up at the sky. I was thinking of Father and Mary sitting in that house with the stiff-legged, unblinking dolls waiting and watching upstairs. I was thinking of Colin and why did I stay with him, why? And thinking it was because of definition, something to do with being told to do this and do that, a reassurance.
Ruth and a man joined us. He was an artist. He had a very long face. Long like a horse’s, and his lips were rubbery, they moved separately, up and down. He was saying, ‘I’d like to paint you some day, you’ve a beautiful face, a beautiful Irish face with all that black hair and those green-brown eyes and that marvellous white skin … mmm.’ I thought, any minute now he’s going to lick me, like an ice cream.
We were sitting on the floor. He passed round a joint. Ruth was very drunk; she was saying, ‘Marshall McLuhan will replace Jesus in the spiritual consciousness of Western civilization.’ She was looking at the artist as she was saying it. He would just say, ‘Yeah, sure Ruthy.’ He wasn’t interested in her, much. He was getting into himself on the pot. Going very quiet, still.
Mary didn’t smoke. She said, ‘I’m part of the Booze Culture,’ and Ruth and this artist (I can’t remember his name) just looked at her with their eyes glassy, and you could see they were thinking, Who is this creep refusing to play the game? I was thinking, God how is it that human beings can sometimes be so awful to each other? Colin would say, That is the morbidity induced by too much gin.
I was looking around the room at all
the girls and thinking of this story I was told once about a French king who dressed up all these dolls in the latest French fashions, high couture, and sent them round the world at vast expense to show what the latest Parisian designs were. I thought, That’s what we women are like. I told Ruth and Mary and the artist about the French king. I said, ‘Don’t you think that’s what we’re like—fashion dolls?’ The artist said, ‘Weird, absolutely far round.’
Somebody put on some music. There were only about twenty people left. No Colin. I thought, They’re asleep in there by now, must be. Couldn’t still be going. Asleep in each other’s arms. Sweaty and warm. Her damn eyes. Did she keep her eyes open during it?
Angus came over and asked Mary to dance. She went off and I nearly panicked. I wanted to scream out. I thought, Keep dancing, that’s the main thing.
Somebody put on ‘Zorba the Greek’. The sounds were long, like hunting horns over fields and fields of land—long, streaming sounds.
I could feel the music as if it were being played through me. The artist got up and started to dance; he was saying, ‘Dance, lovely lady, dance.’ His voice was like a snake’s: Dance, dance. We started dancing to each other, our bodies touching and moving and whirling in great curves of light and sound to the music, and he was lifting me up on a table, a low round table, and dancing round the table, the music was going faster then, the drums were in my head, and I was the music …
I was wearing this silk shirt and silk trousers, and I was lifting the shirt and feeling the air on my belly, and the shifting of my skin and I felt I was part of the centre of the earth, I was life, and I was pulling the shirt further and then unbuttoning it and the artist was dancing, his head rolling on his shoulders; he was saying, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and I could see more people watching, and they were all dancing round the table, sighing and moving, and the music was slowing again and I was undoing the zip on my trousers and letting them fall, fall …
… and my hands went up to my breasts and I was dancing just in my pants and the music was going faster, faster, and the people were going, Ahh, ahh, and I was swirling now, drunk; my body was gold, it was water, it was the moon melting under the sun, and dancing and dancing, and the artist was touching and hands were stretching out and touching, and touching, and I thought, I’ll dance for you all, I’ll dance for the pain and the sorrow and …
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