by Tim Buckley
I used to love those secret moments, I still do, hidden away in full view of the city with a pint in front of me, nothing but my own thoughts to occupy me and nobody else’s entitlement or prerogative demanding my compromise. It was early in my relationship with Emily and I was still finding my way, not sure how much time I should have been spending with her without suffocating or being suffocated, not sure either how much time apart would make me mysterious without taking the risk that she’d find somebody better. It was all hurting my head a little bit and moments like those, when I could just be without having to think it all through, were like Chance cards in my real-life game of Monopoly.
So when this tank of a man with a ruddy complexion topped off with a generous head of red hair wandered over to check the score, I had no idea who he was. When he grunted and gestured with his glass to the empty chair beside me, I just nodded and, when he sat down, I set up the imaginary barricade and hunkered down into my own thoughts and away from a meaningless conversation. The newcomer seemed no more interested in me than I was in him and so there we were – two men with a couple of pints, sitting beside each other in a bar, watching the game without so much as a word passing between us. The way it was meant to be.
The bar filled up slowly, knowing regulars nodding their orders to the barman, young couples on big dates gangling awkwardly in a grown-ups’ place. Dublin might have been drinking less champagne, but she still liked to get out on a Saturday night. Nobody seemed interested in the rugby, so we were left to our own separate devices. The game was coming to a dramatic, frantic conclusion and as the visiting pack drove one last time at the line for the score that would win the match, the referee raised his arm and blew his whistle. An attacking forward caught coming in from the side and it was all for nothing. The ball was booted gleefully into touch and the referee blew his whistle for the last time.
“Ah, Jaysus!” said the ginger giant under his breath in a gravelly growl, thumping his glass onto the table so that a little wave of beer slopped over the rim and spattered his trousers. He didn’t seem to notice. “How does a fella with his years in the game not know better than to do something stupid like that?”
It took a moment before I realised that he wasn’t just chuntering away to himself and that the question was directed at me. I shrugged and shook my head, lips pursed in rueful sympathy. Rueful, partly, at the big flanker’s mistake but more at this stranger’s intrusion. When I’d allowed him to sit down at my table, this was explicitly not part of the deal. My glass was empty so, and partly to bring an end to the conversation before it got going, I tried to catch the lounge girl’s eye. But she was busy sorting out the bill for a gaggle of old ladies who, it appeared, had been drinking afternoon tea for hours and were now trying to settle the bill, one by one – “No, Mary, sure I had a half of that scone, I owe you…” – fumbling blindly in tissue-stuffed handbags for coppers and balled-up notes. I gave in and got out of my chair to go to the bar.
The older I get, the more I feel bound by the rules and regulations that impose a bit of order on the world. There is the law of the land, of course, that says you can’t kill, steal, drive when you’re drunk or underpay your taxes. Then there are the voluntary rules that keep us in check – it’s not illegal to jump a queue and yet we’re happy, for the most part, to stand obediently in line and wait our turn. And then there are codes that apply specifically to society’s little cliques and clubs and which their members must respect without question to earn the right to belong. To be an Irishman, for example, you may never go to the bar without offering to buy a drink for any person in your group with whom you have been engaged in even the briefest conversation, no matter that you might not even know their name. My uncle Eoin could take twenty minutes to order his round because as soon as he got to his feet, he’d spot an old farmer at the back of the pub from whom he once bought half a five-bar gate and, sure, he’d have to buy the man a drink. The rules might be more important now I’m older but, even then, I knew well enough to respect them. So it was that, with a resigned sense of the inevitable, I found myself turning to the stranger whom I had carefully ignored for the whole of the second half.
“I’m just going up to the bar, can I get you one?”
“You can of course, thanks very much.”
And that’s how it all began.
The afternoon tea ladies were still fussing and faffing as they hugged and air-kissed each other goodbye and clattered anybody within reach with their bags, coats and umbrellas. When finally the sound of their chatter and the fog of their mélange de parfum faded through the door and onto the street outside, I got to the bar and ordered a couple of pints.
“Quiet enough,” I remarked to the barman, looking round.
“Aye, quiet enough,” he nodded, “it’ll be busy later though, I’d say.”
That’s the password, a casual assessment of the size of the crowd. Like asking a taxi driver if he’s been on long. The barman was pulling the second pint when the tap spluttered and coughed.
“Mikey,” he called over to one of the other barmen, “do me a favour and change the porter, yeah?”
He turned back to me.
“Won’t be a minute,” he said, and went off to serve another customer. Quiet enough, they agreed, but busy later.
There were two girls sitting at a table close by and, as I waited for the barman to change the barrel, I caught the eye of one of them. She smiled at me and said something to her friend. She was pretty and she looked nice in that wide-eyed, honest way that you sometimes see. I smiled back but then turned again to the bar. My days of checking out and chatting up were over. After a long time being single for a whole raft of reasons, not least of which being that I was probably designed to be single, I was revelling in the unknown of my new life with Emily.
***
She worked in an off-licence near my flat and, although it was out of my league, I started going there more and more just to see her. I say ‘off-licence’, but really it was more of a specialist wine shop – the sort of place that treats you like a bad smell when you go in to buy a six-pack of cheap lager for a house party. Emily, too, was way out of my league. Her father was a French diplomat – he had worked for a time in the French Embassy in Dublin – and she had spent her childhood moving around the world with his diplomatic postings. Of all the cities on her whistle-stop world tour, Dublin was the place that felt most like home. She had just moved back to Ireland after studying viticulture at the University of Bordeaux and she carried herself with a sort of ethereal distractedness so that she always seemed to me to be looking at something somewhere just beyond where I could see. I found myself transparently seeking her advice for wine to bring to imaginary dinner parties and searching Wikipedia for clever facts to drop into our conversations. It was costing me a fortune, but at least I was waking up with a much better class of hangover.
I finally summoned the courage to ask her out, not daring to believe that she might actually say yes. My experience of first dates had, up to then, been a movie or the pub but, for Emily, I was determined to do better. She had mentioned, during one of my visits to the shop, that a play was coming to the Gate theatre that she had long wanted to see. I’d heard of The Doll’s House but I knew nothing about it – of course I assured Emily that day that it was one of my absolute favourites. I booked tickets and then set to reading everything I could about it to avoid looking like a troglodyte.
The night of our first date arrived and I was, predictably enough, a bit of a nervous wreck. The boys, predictably also, didn’t make it any easier. I’d shared a flat with Cian and Ronan since I was in college. They were good mates but typically short on sympathetic support at times like those. It was indoor soccer night and they were heading out, reluctant to leave in case I went into full meltdown and neither of them wanted to miss that.
“Listen,” Cian said with a grin as they finally left the flat, “we’ll be in the pub
after, so we’ll probably see you there? She’ll surely have had enough of you by half nine?!”
At that moment, I wished more than anything that I was playing football that night too.
I turned up at her flat and the image of her opening the door is burned into my memory, I will never forget how she looked or what she wore. A black dress with a dark grey stole over her shoulders; her hair tied up with a black ribbon, just one deliberately stray lock falling down the side of her face; a simple silver pendant on a chain round her neck and black trainers on her bare feet for a little bit of rebellion. It was like meeting the movie star you’ve always had a crush on only to find that she’s infinitely more beautiful in real life. When I talked to her in the shop, I always felt that I was an interloper where I didn’t belong. But there I was at her door and she had chosen to be with me. That changed everything.
We took a taxi into town and had a drink before making our way to the theatre and the evening was going better than I could have hoped. Emily was relaxed and chatty and I was even managing to come down a little from the peak of Mount Terrified. Inevitably, it was a false dawn. We got to the theatre and the doorman punched our tickets before calling me back.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, “could I just have a look at those again?”
The tickets, it turned out, were for the night before. I’d mixed up the dates and we were a day late. The doorman went to the ticket desk to see if there was anything they could do, but that night’s performance was sold out and there were no tickets available. I silently begged for some unseen hand to kill me there and then.
“I’m really sorry, Emily,” I said, “I’m not usually such an idiot, I swear!”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said with a smile, putting her arm through mine as we walked back down the steps of the theatre. “It probably wasn’t good material for a first date anyway, don’t you think?!”
We walked away from the theatre and back down towards the river. We talked about the statues on O’Connell Street – Parnell and Larkin, William Smith O’Brien and Daniel O’Connell. We passed the GPO and I told her stories about the Rising in 1916. It turned out that, in all her time in Dublin, Emily had never been on the Ha’penny Bridge. So we wandered down the quays and crossed over towards Temple Bar, pausing halfway over the bridge to look up and down the river at the city’s lights in the fading glow of the evening. We strolled around Temple Bar, stopping to listen to the buskers, and then on to Grafton Street and around the Green. I bought her a red rose from a flower seller and she kissed me on the cheek with a shy smile as I gave it to her. We talked and talked about everything. She was so modest and so happy to laugh at herself that I found myself telling her things I should never tell on a first date, embarrassing, silly things. But she just laughed along and squeezed my arm at all the right times.
We stopped for coffee and profiteroles in a little café and talked some more and, by the time we were heading for home, the last bus had already gone and so we walked back to her flat. It must have been after one in the morning by the time we got there, and the conversation that had flowed all evening became inevitably awkward as the evening drew to a close. After a moment of looking at each other in silence, she said, “I think this is where you kiss me, no?” So I did, and when she had gone inside and closed the door after her, I bounded down the steps and almost skipped down the street towards home.
Being with Emily was like uncovering a portal into a whole new world. It was only then that I started to see what it was she was looking at, what had been distracting her – it was possibility. Emily saw possibility in everything, in things where I only saw the ordinary and the mundane. She would look deep into the everyday and see the opportunity secreted inside, and her head seemed always to be near exploding with all of the dreams and visions she had for the future. Either that or near exploding with a temper that burned short if somebody or something got in the way of those dreams. Emily loved stories and so many of the dreams she had were founded in something she’d read or heard or seen. She never simply watched a movie or read a book, she always found something in it that spoke only to her and gave her new ideas. She never even just talked to somebody without taking something from the conversation, something to learn or to inspire a new entry on her list of things to do. Everything she did had to have a point and she seemed to find the point in everything. The stories she loved most were the real-life stories of people she met. Like the night we were in the pub and she went to the bathroom and, when she’d been gone for what felt like an age, I went looking for her. I found her deep in conversation with an old man who’d been sitting quietly at the bar on his own with a crossword and who reminded her of her grandfather. Or the night when, on her way to join me for a pizza after work, she got waylaid chatting with a young couple out on a date because the girl’s necklace reminded her of a picture she’d seen of an Indian princess bride on her wedding day. And their wide-eyed reflection of her child-like enthusiasm would only stoke the flames.
Girlfriends had come and gone but I hadn’t spent much time in serious relationships and I was still getting used to the give and take. To be honest, there were times when I just missed a bit of my own company. And so it was that I would seek out these small moments of refuge where I could switch off my brain, or at least slow it down a bit. I adored her and I craved the passion that came with her but a bit of time off was sometimes just what I needed. All of which was why the stranger’s intrusion irked me so much, and why I was all set to hand him his pint and explain politely that I’d rather be left to my own company. All set, that is, until I got back to the table and found him paging through the manuscript that I’d dropped there.
“Thanks very much,” the man said, without looking up.
I wasn’t sure what my reaction should be, so I sat down and just watched him as he read.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he said after a few moments, as though hearing my thoughts.
I just shrugged, dumbly, and so he read on.
Eventually, he put the manuscript back on the table, took off his glasses and tapped his teeth with the end of one of the arms.
“Nice piece of work,” he said. “You were next door, I take it?”
I nodded and he kept tapping.
“You’re looking for someone to take you on?”
I nodded again. He kept tapping.
This seemed to go on for an age until he finally put the glasses back on.
“Brendan O’Halloran,” he said, stretching out a huge hand.
And that was that.
19
The first time I knew that Emily was lying to me was a few months after we’d started going out together. I’d seen it before, the slightly distracted look that passed over her face like the shadow from a cloud passing in front of the sun, but I hadn’t known what it meant. That day – that evening actually, while we were having a drink in Howth watching the light fade over the bay – I asked her if she’d like to come to Galway with me for the weekend. I was writing a piece for a magazine about the horse races on the beach at Ballyconneely and I thought it would be nice, a weekend away together by the ocean, dinner and a few drinks in the little town of Clifden and maybe a day in Galway city or exploring the wilds of Connemara…
“This weekend?” she said, and now I recognise the liar’s play for time to construct the lie. “This weekend coming?”
I nodded, and that’s when the cloud passed overhead.
“Actually, I can’t,” she said, just remembering why. “I’d love to, but I’ve got a load of reading to do for this exam and I’m way behind. I should really take the chance to catch up, get ahead of it even. You don’t mind, do you?” She squeezed my arm. “I’m sorry!”
There was no malice in the lie, nothing mean or ugly. She was taking a master of wine course and she did have reading to do, but that wasn’t the reason that she didn’t want to come. In truth, we’d only
been together a short time and everything had, I admit, moved along very quickly. I think now she was just looking for a bit of breathing space and my trip to the west coast would give her a chance to put her feet up, not wash her hair, slop around in her old jeans, catch up with her girlfriends… And I can hardly complain given my quiet evenings in the pub hidden away from everything. There was no malice and I knew that, I think, but it was the first time I knew she was lying to me and it hurt my head like a brain-freeze.
She doesn’t lie often to me, and there’s still no malice when she does, but now I can tell – or I delude myself into thinking I can tell – by the shadow. It was a couple of weeks after Cara disappeared that the cloud passed in front of the sun.
I went into town to go to the bank and to call into the police station to see if Willis had anything new to report. I stopped by The Pantry on the way back to get a couple of coffees and a bite to eat. Emily had stayed behind to do what she did every day – trawl the internet for any news item from anywhere in the world that might have something to do with a missing child, a lost child, a child out of place. I pulled into the yard when I got back to the house and got out of the jeep awkwardly, balancing the jumbo coffee cups and the sandwiches, closing the door with my knee. I was backing gingerly away from the jeep, trying to get to my keys to lock it, when the brake handle of the quad bike that I hadn’t noticed skewered me in the back so that I dropped the bag and spilled the coffee all down my shirt and my jeans.
“Oh fucking hell,” I roared, frantically wiping hot coffee off my clothes. “Fuck it!”
Emily came running to the front door to see what the commotion was about and came out to help me.