by Elske Rahill
Lily hoped he wouldn’t cry. She interrupted him by yawning loudly. ‘Oh well,’ she said.
He frowned in a way that made her want to touch him between the eyes, smooth the deep crease he made there.
‘I was smug about being in love,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘You shouldn’t be afraid to let life change you.’ Then he clenched his hand, turned his fist in the space between them, looking at it. ‘Did you know that your heart is the size—’
Lily heard herself laugh, another woman’s laugh. She threw her head back, showing the inside of her mouth.
*
The food was delivered by a teenager in a car. He apologized for being late; he had trouble finding the house, he said. He gave her a six-euro discount off her next order.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Lily, ‘easily done. They all look the same, don’t they?’
Many of the doors here were painted a muted shade of teal, like Lily’s. When she arrived today she had almost tried her key in the wrong front door.
Lily took out her purse, but her landlord came up behind her and pushed three folded tenners into the boy’s hand.
They laid the steaming cartons out on the table and two plates and a roll of kitchen paper. Lily kept her glasses on. Her landlord was wearing some scent like grass and the sea. It mingled with the delicate fragrance of fresh sweat, and sweet-and-sour sauce, and flavour enhancer. He had taken some beers out of the fridge, and she opened them using his key-ring.
‘Anyway,’ he said, and winked.
‘Anyway,’ she said, and closed her lips around the cold mouth of the bottle.
Tasteless
THE SEATING PLAN was obscured by a cluster of guests. His wife rubbed his chest briskly, as if to warm him.
‘Here Eoin, mind my glass,’ she said. ‘I’ll find out where we are.’
She slipped into the jostle of lacy hips and elbows. It was a spring wedding. Sheets of pale light shook in through the windows, casting patches of lint and heat over the gathering. The women wore crocus colours; clean, creamy purples and muted yellow. There were wayward ribbons and awkward hats and silk shawls sliding over shoulder slopes.
At the edge of the group, a big, lumpy man scowled and pushed, huffed and shook his head. Eoin vaguely recognized him, though perhaps he was thinner before, or perhaps he had more hair. Flapping the other guests aside with large palms, the man began to wade steadily towards the plan, peered and frowned, then turned with an antagonized snort and loped head-first into the dining room. Eoin had lost sight of his wife. He watched instead the ranks of satin-bound buttocks, glossy, warped curves like shrink-wrapped fillets.
‘Eoin!’
It was the father of the bride, buttery curls of silk down his throat and a frilly carnation at his heart.
‘Well. Steve,’ said Eoin.
‘I’m glad you could come, Eoin. Glad you could come.’ Steve slapped a hand down on Eoin’s shoulder, pressed a thumb hard into his collar bone.
‘Lovely ceremony,’ said Eoin. ‘Lovely. Congratulations, Steve.’
Steve was swaying with drink or joy, but his chubby mouth puckered in a sorry pout. He patted Eoin again, squeezed again, shook him by the shoulder. Holding a glass in each hand, Eoin was unsteadied for a moment, but Steve clutched him tighter, and bent his head in close. His lower lip cupped the air as some words reached his mouth and were dismissed. After a pause he said: ‘Glad you could come, Eoin. Good to have you here.’
‘Good to be here,’ nodded Eoin, and he turned back around to face the crowd. ‘Pam is just checking the table plan.’
A tall feather wagged over the huddle of head-tops. One Halloween his daughter had dressed as a flapper. She had a feather like that strapped to her head with a gold-sequinned band.
His wife scurried towards him with her face down. Her pearly nails dug at the clutch bag that she had bought for the occasion. It was good for her to get out. He was glad they had come.
‘The Kiss,’ she said. ‘Table 4 – The Kiss.’
*
The girl – he corrected himself – the woman seated beside his wife had a sloppy sort of face, loose on the bones. She wore a disc of lavender felt tilted precariously across her brow like a misplaced skullcap. When she asked how they knew the couple, Eoin could utter only the word, ‘Our...’ followed by a guttural suck like a draining sink. His wife pressed her fingers into the crook of his elbow, and explained how they knew the bride.
The woman cocked her head as she listened, her eyebrows gathering into elaborate shapes of sympathy. ‘I didn’t even know that could happen,’ she said, ‘I’ve never heard of that happening.’ Her gaze followed the plate that was lowered before her.
‘Oh dear. Well. I’m sorry to hear that. That’s very sad.’
Still forcing that pained expression into her brows, she stabbed at a dark lozenge of meat, opening brilliant strata of pink and ruby red. She lifted her fork and paused, the bright morsel quavering at her chin while she waited for Pam to finish speaking.
Pam always finished the same way when she was telling about Sharon, ‘So that’s it,’ and a wet huff of breath. Losing their daughter had mangled many parts of his wife, but it had not shaken her politeness, her consideration. He admired her for that, but he hated the ‘so...’, the way it made people feel like it was okay, the way it let them off the hook. ‘So,’ they would echo, ‘so that’s it.’ He could hear Pam’s breath catch sore in her chest. Her fingers perched tightly on the table edge.
Closing her mouth over the meat, the woman’s eyes pulled back to meet his wife’s. She chewed for a moment, then pushed the food into her cheek to say, ‘Must be hard for you to be here then.’
‘Oh. No.’ Pam’s smile strained thin. ‘It was very nice to be invited.’ Eoin could feel her shift beside him, crossing and recrossing her ankles under the table. Her shoes were pinching her. She had taken them off in the car after the church, and he had seen the red, hurt squash they had made of her feet.
Turning towards him, Pam plucked the menu from the centre of the table. ‘The starter is squab.’ Eoin thought of those tin-can phones he made as a boy – the sound was supposed to ride the wire from one can to the other, though it never worked well. That’s what Pam’s voice sounded like now – vibrations traversing the tiny channel strung between them. ‘Seared squab breast,’ she said. ‘What’s squab? Do you know, Eoin?’
The woman in the purple hat answered, relief relaxing her features into friendliness. ‘Don’t know,’ she said, chewing. ‘Some kind of game it seems to be. It’s a gamey taste. Juniper berries with it.’
‘Juniper berries?’ said Pam. ‘Is that what they are? Pretty aren’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘A lovely rich colour aren’t they? Yes.’
Eoin found his voice then. Grateful, he said, ‘It’s dove. A squab is a young dove, I think.’
*
There were five courses. After the squab it was three pillows of nettle ravioli fried to a brown fringe in sage butter.
‘Very nice,’ said Pam. ‘Very fragrant.’
A cold liquid trickled into Eoin’s lap, sending a bolt of rage up his throat.
‘Oh my God, I am so sorry.’ The man to his left was holding a glass at arm’s length, struggling with a writhing toddler. He jiggled more wine over the tablecloth as he placed his glass down and scrambled for a napkin.
‘Oh, God no,’ said Eoin, dabbing at his trousers, ‘no, don’t worry. I’ll get that. You have your hands full.’
*
A medallion of veal arrived with a squat tower of potato gratin. A kidney dish of garlic asparagus was passed around the table. Eoin offered to hold the child while his neighbour ate, but it clung fast to its father’s neck. It was a very blond little thing, with big raw cheeks, gluey stream of snot bubbling softly from one nostril. ‘He’s a bit under the weather,’ said the father, poking at the shut lips with a wad of potato. The child shook its head; ‘Want Mama feed me,’ and the father sighed and rolled his e
yes. ‘It’s Mama everything these days,’ he told Eoin, then to the child he said, ‘What about Dada? Please can Dada feed you, Reuben? Mama is being a pretty bridesmaid for now.’
‘Come here to me,’ said Eoin, ‘and we’ll see if we can make something with this napkin. What do you think we should make? A fish maybe? Or a swan? What would you like to make, Reuben?’
Reuben moved warily onto Eoin’s knee. Eoin folded the napkin while the father spoke between hurried mouthfuls.
‘He just won’t stay in his bed, you know? He is hung out of his mother day and night and Julie wants another baby now and I’m just thinking, how? She hasn’t slept a full night in years...’
‘I know,’ said Pam, smiling and smiling at the child. ‘I remember it well. Gosh, I know.’
The child wanted a plane, and was delighted with the floppy effort that Eoin created with the thick serviette. He flew the creation against his father’s shoulders, smashing open the soft folds, ‘Baff pchoooo...’ and disappeared under the table with the wreckage.
‘And our friends all have these babies who apparently slept all night through from birth and I’m like, really? Because no matter what we do, Reuben will not sleep in his own bed...’
‘Well they’re all different, aren’t they?’ said Pam.
‘So, your own kids must be grown up?’ asked the man, and Eoin felt his wife’s reassuring fingers on his knee.
They had been young parents, he and Pam, and it was a disconcerting effort for Eoin to align his place in life with the father of the bride, and not the frazzled young dad. When Steve Mahon had grabbed him earlier, Eoin stopped himself from calling him ‘Mr Mahon’. He should have thanked him for the invitation, told him his daughter looked happy, but he didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a well-brought-up child. Eoin was Steve’s junior by ten years maybe, but it wasn’t a question of catching up. He could never have afforded something like this for Sharon: all this champagne, all the flowers, the five courses with matching wine.
He watched Pam while she spoke, the tremble and flinch around her eyes, the climbing breath, the creases threading busily through her cheeks. The lines had played there for decades. Like spider webs, they only showed in certain light, but now there were heavier furrows too, delving her face into pouches and valleys. Had he done that to her?
‘So... that’s that,’ said Pam, picking up the menu again.
The child had crawled back up onto his father’s lap, a swathe of drying snot smeared across one cheek. The father pecked his head with unsolicited kisses, arms crossed tightly over the little body, shielding him from Eoin and Pam as though their loss might be catching.
‘That must have been very hard,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine... I’m sure, I mean. No one can imagine.’
Eoin leaned towards Pam and looked at the menu; a long thing printed on stiff card, gold detail and bottle-green lettering. Up the left margin ran a detail from The Kiss, the couple’s faces squashed together, the delicate curl of the woman’s fingers, the gold swirls of her clothing drizzling down the side of the page.
‘Jesus,’ muttered Eoin to his wife. ‘That’s crass, isn’t it?’
Pam sighed. ‘Don’t be nasty, Eoin.’
‘Yeah, but really. Would they not think about it like? Did they not look at the painting before printing it on the menu? Would no one tell them, ha?’
Thirteen years ago, they had seen the painting for real. They hadn’t travelled much – not compared to the likes of Steve Mahon – but after Sharon’s junior cert they took her to Vienna to see the galleries. Sharon wanted to be an artist. Her bedroom was covered with eerie pictures of sad bodies – pregnant women, fat women, skinny men with messy hair and big, dark eyes. She cut them out of calendars and art books, and arranged them in clip frames amongst her own little sketches and pictures and keepsakes – dried leaves, cinema stubs, photographs of her as a child, doodles of eyes and boxes and teardrops. She had done a project on Egon Schiele for her junior cert and that was what started her obsession with these strange artists – Schiele and Klimt. Their paintings were in Vienna, and Eoin thought, why not? So they had gone around all the museums with Sharon, and Eoin had seen The Kiss for real.
All over the city there were gift shops selling The Kiss-themed souvenirs; there were lighters and 3D pencil-toppers, and tins of chocolates with the scene printed on the lid and he had assumed it to be a romantic sort of a thing. But when he saw the real painting – tall and personal and alive with intent – he stood stunned and his mouth dried. Eoin didn’t know much about art – he’d be the first to admit that – but the painting did something strange to his blood. He closed his eyes and couldn’t swallow. It was the stiff resignation in the woman’s mouth as she was gathered up into the man’s dark shadows, his face turning to devour her, and her hand – pinkie curled in revulsion and surrender, thumb not quite touching the fingers, a private dissociation from the scene. It made him want to flee the room, find his daughter in front of whatever painting she was lingering at in the high-ceilinged building, wrap her in his arms and keep her from the world of men and women.
‘It’s a bloody rape scene, Pam,’ he whispered. ‘Who puts a rape scene on their wedding menu? I thought Clara did art at college. She knows better, surely?’
Two blotches were beginning high on Pam’s cheeks. She looked at the napkin on her lap, smoothed it out. ‘It’s not a rape scene, Eoin. Please stop.’
‘I’m just saying, what is that about?’
Pam winced. His noises pained her. ‘We are guests, Eoin. Have some grace.’
Out of habit Pam had chosen a blue dress to complement the bright eyes she once had and set off her red hair. But the dress was a luminous, artificial shade, and she had coloured her greys to shrill orange streaks for the occasion. The vibrant tones muted her, as though the things she adorned herself with were drinking all her colour for themselves.
He could remember the weeks after Sharon’s birth, Pam sitting up in bed, feeding, and the way it seemed that all the heat and blood was draining out of her into the hot bundle at her breast. Had he looked after her? He had read up about nursing mothers – the need for tea and toast, and a glass of Guinness every day, and he had usually remembered to bring a tray in during the early morning feed.
‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ Pam said, pushing the heavy chair away from the table and manoeuvring it back weakly. She hobbled a little as she went, uncertain of herself in those shoes. She’d be alright. By the time she got back, she’d be alright. Tensions were high, that was all. And her poor sore feet.
It was good that they had come, good for Pam to get out, get to the hairdresser’s and make herself presentable. The invitation had caused them to argue, though. Pam was uncomfortable with the gift Eoin had put together – a perfect gift for Sharon’s best friend, but Pam didn’t see it that way. Even to the last minute she wanted him not to give it. She had said something very hurtful about it. She said Eoin wanted to drench everyone’s joy with his grief.
She wanted to get them the hoover off the list. In the end, they agreed to give both – the hoover and the painting, which Eoin had fitted with an antique gold frame. It was overly ornate, but that was Sharon’s style. Her friend would appreciate that. The hoover was just a case of paying online (the price of it!), but he left his own gift – a gift from Sharon, in a way – on the table in a special room near the lobby. ‘Mahon-Brown Wedding Gifts’ was marked on the door.
‘Brown’ was a lanky thing who kept touching his bride’s spine and lowering his face into her veil. The bride was Clara Mahon, who perhaps – it was something Eoin wondered about sometimes – perhaps Sharon had loved? He had tried to explain it to Pam once, but she didn’t know what he was talking about. One Sunday morning he had tapped and entered – it was Pam who had sent him up with tea for the girls – and there they were, Sharon and Clara there in the bed. He had felt all wrong coming in on them like that, but there was a soft joy in the room too – all that fresh morn
ing skin and their cheeks creased from sleep, arms and fingers woven together and the way they froze when he opened the door. His daughter had turned and smiled at him. He recognized the gentle secrecy in her smile, and some light on her face made him squirm. He had frowned when he closed the door, and then he had laughed. He couldn’t describe it to Pam, what he had seen: two girls cuddling together, Clara blushing and Sharon smiling, the morning sun on the lovely contours of her face as she turned to look at him. My darling daughter, he thought.
Clara Mahon didn’t look very well on her special day, truth be told. She looked tired and ill, walking up the aisle dressed like a little girl in a neat lace robe, shoulder blades skimmed in skin. Eoin couldn’t bring himself to tell her father that she looked beautiful. He was afraid the lie would show in his face, and that was worse than saying nothing.
What was so changed about Clara? What age was she? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? But she had already lost her looks. Perhaps that was natural. Young people are always beautiful, thought Eoin, and twenty-eight is close to thirty and thirty isn’t as young as people think. By the time he was thirty he had a ten-year-old daughter, and felt too old to change career. He hated accountancy, but it was different then. Pam wasn’t mad about her job either, but work was work. Work paid for things, and the things were the goal – the roof over his child’s head, the food in her mouth, the new bike at Christmas. The holiday that time. There was nothing wrong with providing.
No, thirty was not young. His wife too had started to lose her looks around that time. It was just before her thirtieth birthday when she first asked him, ‘Am I still pretty, Eoin?’ and he had looked at her and wondered the same. He remembered thinking it must have been the birthday that had her talking like that, but in the years after she had asked him the same question many times, her tone shifting gradually from a question, to a demand, to an accusation – ‘You used to think I was pretty, Eoin.’
Time could tangle things. Outside the church there had been women wandering in and out of focus, calling him by his surname, hugging him and patting his arm like mothers, and perhaps it was just the day that was in it, the intimacy they now assumed, or the fact that they were all dressed up and painted, but it took him a while to recognize them as the teenagers who had once filled Sharon’s bedroom with the smell of aerosols and antiseptic ointments and all those oily new hormones. Under the dull faces were the girls he had collected from the junior nightclub on dark winter nights. He remembered them huddled together, shivering when he arrived, eyes sooty and lips pale; cold, round cheeks; child bellies and women’s shoes. They would lean into each other, linking arms as they approached the car, chewing fruity gum to conceal the toxins he might otherwise have caught on their breath, giggling and whispering in the back while he drove each of them to her door, and then took his daughter home. They had lost their sexiness. He could think that now, not being a father any more. Even if he didn’t recognize it at the time, with his daughter in amongst them, they had been full of excitement once, full of sexual energy and wonder, beautiful and each of them destined.