by Tim Buckley
She stares into the glass as she swirls the wine around it, she seems mesmerised by its hypnotic eddy.
“Do you think you’ll start again? Or with something new?” she asks.
I shrug and drink.
“I don’t know. I hope so. Maybe.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
That stops me in my tracks. Emily used to help me when I got stuck. She has a great imagination and a rich sense of the dramatic and she sees things in a different way to me. She has heard and read and seen so many stories in her life and concocted so many of her own that, when she stood in the shoes of my characters, she had an unnerving ability to tell me what they would do next. Those evenings, fuelled by wine and bowls of her soul food, helped me more than I could tell her but, more than that, they were a lot of fun. It was like going to the theatre, rewriting the play and then playing all of the parts yourself. I miss that. I miss the support and I miss how much I enjoyed those evenings. I’ve never expected to do it again and I’ve never expected her to make the offer.
“Once I get going again, if I do, then yeah, I’d love to run some stuff by you. If you’d like to, I mean.”
She looks me in the eye and time stops again.
“Yes,” she says, “I would like to.”
We say nothing for a moment, locked in each other’s gaze, until I pour more wine to break the spell.
“What about you?” I say, handing her the glass. “I’m guessing you haven’t been thinking too much about the vines?”
“No, I haven’t. I’m sorry. I just…”
“Don’t. There’s no need to apologise. We’ve both been pretty useless these last months. I don’t think anybody would beat us up over it so we shouldn’t beat up ourselves.”
I reach over and the rim of my glass touches hers with a crystalline chime.
“To starting over,” I say.
She smiles a sad smile.
“Yes. To starting over.”
64
Cecil Farnham was true to his word and, the day after the hearing in Bunbury, he went to see Pete Baxter and the planning department lawyers. The upshot was that I was liable for the costs of demolition, as we already knew, and the council was determined to pursue that in court, if necessary. I couldn’t tell how much of that was to do with Leo Gretz’s influence but, even without him, the council – and those councillors who had been waiting to say “I told you so” – were always going to chase me for the money. The only questions that remained were how much I would owe and how I was going to pay it.
I spent hours poring over the same old spreadsheets but, to be honest, I could have spent ten minutes and I’d have come up with the same answer. I had nothing like the funds available to pay my debts and no source of income to count on. I did think about going back to Ireland – it wouldn’t rid me of the debt I owed to the council, but I might have a better chance of getting back on my feet in a place I knew and among people I knew well. The idea had cleared its throat before, somewhere deep in the back of my mind, but I had dismissed it then. Now, though, there was a part of me that wondered if sliding down a snake back to square one might not, in some ways, be the best thing to do. For a start, it would take me thousands of miles from Bryce Cooper’s rotting corpse. But even as the idea raised its head again, I knew there was no way I could leave here. Cara might have been a thousand miles away but this place was still the only connection I had to her. Going to Ireland would feel like leaving her behind.
The only other money I had was the loan I’d made to Cathal and it was clear from the last time I’d spoken to him that another call was not going to achieve much. So I called Gerry to see what he knew and to see if he had any ideas. He was Eoin’s man first and foremost and so I knew his loyalties lay with the family, but I knew too that he was a decent man and I felt sure that he wouldn’t screw me over.
“Not good, Wilde,” he said with a plaintive sigh when I asked him how things were with Cathal, “not good, now.”
Cathal’s business had failed and he’d had to wind it up leaving an unpaid debt to the bank and a queue of angry suppliers who hadn’t been paid for months. He was still working the farm with Seán but what was left of Eoin’s legacy would struggle to support one family, let alone two and Mairéad. There was a short but pointed silence while he thought and then he warned me that what he was about tell me was to go no further, under any circumstances.
“Do you understand me, now, Wilde? No further, no matter how ugly this all gets?”
I gave him my word.
“It’s been bad, the last while,” he said, “a bad time for the family. Cathal’s wife left him a while ago, that hit him hard. She was the one thing he thought he could count on, so for her to up sticks and leave him for a schoolteacher from Nenagh, well I don’t need to tell you how hard that hit him. He tried to kill himself, Wilde. He tried to commit suicide.”
“Jesus Christ.” The words came out of my mouth slowly while my head tried to catch up. “The poor bastard… Is he all right?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say he’s all right, but he survived and he’s out of danger now. He took a dose of sleeping pills and whiskey down by the river, in one of the far fields. Seán went looking for him and lucky he did. They took him to hospital in Port Laoise and pumped him out, he was in for a week, I’d say. Hardly anybody knows, the family’s kept it quiet, but sure they’re all walking on eggshells around him, all terrified of what he might do next.”
I don’t suppose I had ever really liked Cathal. We had never bonded as children and the bitterness that I only discovered later deepened the gulf between us. But despite all of that, I understood. I knew what that despair felt like, I knew the blackness that came with being powerless to protect what you love most. I understood why he did it but I stopped short of feeling the sympathy for him that I felt for the woman living over the pharmacy in Carravale and for what she had been forced to do to protect her little girl.
“What chance do I have of getting my money back, Gerry?” I said. There was no point in sugar-coating it, we both knew why I had called and I couldn’t afford to be the Good Samaritan anymore.
“Honestly? None,” he said. “I’m sorry, Wilde, but that’s it now. He has no money. The house is mortgaged and it would have been repossessed long ago if there wasn’t such a pressure on the banks here at the minute to leave people be. You’re just one of forty or fifty unsecured creditors who’ll get to share in a half of fuck all, pardon my French. That’s it, now. I wish I could tell you something different.”
His bluntness was refreshing and I actually laughed at the candour of his summary. There was never any bullshit about Gerry.
“How’s Mairéad doing?” I asked him.
“She’s not good, Wilde. She’s aged terribly and that house isn’t a place for a woman of her age. There’s never any heat on and it’s damp now, damp so it is. The rest of them are all the time at each other’s throats and she can only watch them pick each other apart. She’d be better off out of it, but she has nowhere to go.”
I remember one evening, just home from school, griping to Eoin about a boy in my class called Pádraig Clancy. Pádraig’s father was a wealthy businessman in the town and he wanted for nothing. That day, we had all stared wide-eyed at the new football boots that he had unveiled proudly at training after school. Every one of us would have sold our soul to be him but all of us resented him and his good fortune. Eoin’s face darkened and he pointed an angry finger at me.
“I’ll have no talk like that in this house, boy, do you hear me?” he said. “Remember this, you can’t see the fireplace behind someone else’s curtains.”
The boy’s mother died later that year from cervical cancer. I had no idea what Eoin meant, of course, and I’d probably have scoffed at it even if I had, but those words have popped into my head many times as I got older. I had often envied Cathal and Seán
and the family to which they belonged. I had often envied too the lives of others as my own life seemed to spiral into the abyss. Eoin would have warned me to be careful what I wished for, everybody had their own troubles to deal with.
65
Even as I wake up, I know she’s beside me in the bed. As the mist lifts and reality comes into focus and the day ahead takes shape, I know she’s there. There’s no television drama-style realisation as I turn over to see her face or open my eyes and see her hand on my chest. I know because I know that feeling; it’s the most natural feeling in the world to wake up in bed to the sound of her breathing. The smell of her hair, the curve of her back, the things about her I know so well and only I know. It’s just that, today, it’s not natural.
I replay what I can remember of the night before, before we opened the third bottle of wine, before… what happened after that? The gritty feeling in my eyes tells me that I didn’t take out my contact lenses and I’m still wearing my socks. Nice. I’m not wearing anything else and from the soft warmth of her skin beside me, I’m pretty sure she isn’t either.
I remember we talked about my writing and she said she’d help me. Then we talked about the vines and about the wine. Then… what came next? We talked about the house, I’m sure we did, about what we’d do with it and with the land if we didn’t sell. I think we talked about what we’d do to make money. Did I say I’d move back in? Or did we just assume that I would? That can’t happen, there’s no way that could end well. I hope she doesn’t think… but who am I kidding? She wouldn’t want that any more than I would, she knows too well how big a mistake that would be. So no, nobody thinks I’m moving back in. But after that, I don’t really remember. I don’t really remember how we got here.
I freeze as she takes a deep breath and stretches out a leg but she’s not awake, she’s not waking up. I don’t want her to. I’ll admit that my first impulse was to slide my arm out from under her head and creep out of the room, picking up my clothes as I go. From here I can’t even see my clothes, they could be strewn on steps and banisters all the way up the stairs for all I know. But I don’t do that, I don’t sneak away. Partly because that would be cowardly and mean, but partly too because I like this. I don’t know what’s going to happen when she wakes up but, for now, I like this.
Like I told David Napier all those lifetimes ago, Emily sleeps like the dead, especially after she’s had a lot to drink. Sleeps like the dead and wakes like the devil, I remember with a silent chuckle, so those waters will need some careful navigation. I remember well the first morning I woke up beside her. We’d been to a birthday party in Dalkey, one of her friends from work. The party started in the garden of the Queen’s Arms at around five o’clock on a warm August Saturday evening and finished in her friend’s flat at five on Sunday morning. Emily never really drank beer or spirits, she always drank wine, but the pub’s wine selection was red or white and so she experimented her way through the evening. She didn’t like vodka, she discovered, gin was too tart and whiskey burned her eyes until they watered. But then she discovered rum and blackcurrant and all was well in her world.
“It even looks like wine,” she squealed again and again as she sent me back up to the bar for more.
I should have known better than to buy her a bottle of Bacardi from the off-licence to bring back to the birthday girl’s house, but she was making her way through it so slowly I figured she’d probably only manage a couple more anyway. And, to be fair, there was still most of the bottle left when we tottered out to the taxi in the early morning light of Sunday.
It was early days in our courtship – that’s what it felt like, an Austenesque courtship more than some wild young fling – and I hadn’t got past a coffee after dinner at her place before walking back home alone to mine. But that night all of her inhibitions had been corked inside a bottle of rum and she insisted that I stay with her. She kissed me like she meant it and we staggered into her bedroom and into bed, knocking over a standard lamp and kicking shoes and shirts and jeans across the floor. Of course, she was asleep inside a minute but I didn’t care. Truth be told, I was relieved. And as I lay there holding her, I realised it was the best night ever. I was lying in bed with a beautiful girl, a beautiful French girl for Christ’s sake, and she was my girlfriend. I remembered all those summers when my mates and I would hang around awkwardly where the French exchange students used to congregate in Thurles, trying to be cool and urbane. We didn’t even know what urbane meant. Then, when a couple of them might come over to talk to us, we’d mumble and stammer something stupid and they’d giggle and say something to each other in French and we’d slope off under a cloud of their disdain to the amusement arcade where at least we knew the rules. But here I was, with the prettiest girl I’d ever seen sleeping beside me and, even though I still didn’t know the rules, at least I was in the game. At some point in the night she turned over and, when I woke up, I could feel the curve of her back and the softness of her skin and smell the sweet scent of her hair. Just like I can today.
I remember when she woke that morning, when she turned over and looked into my eyes. We said nothing because there was nothing that needed to be said. I kissed her and held her and after a while we got up and went to the beach in Sandymount on the train. We walked along the strand holding on to each other and saying nothing. We said little that day and the silence was comfortable. We had a coffee somewhere in town and wandered round a second-hand market, then I took her home as the weekend faded away. I kissed her standing on the step to her house and walking away was about the loneliest I’d ever felt. Something had changed and, suddenly, being away from her hurt like a migraine. That was really when it started, when it stopped being part of something and became all of everything.
This can’t be the start of something, I know that. We can’t magic away what’s gone before, pull a sheet over it and make believe that everything is going to be OK. What’s gone before was real and founded in the real disharmony that was our life and we can’t drag ourselves back into that mire, no matter how much I want to believe it might work. It feels warm and comfortable now, maybe because I need that now, but the first time it goes south, the first time she gets on my nerves or I get on hers, that’s when we’ll pull out the old guns and fire the old shells. I can’t trust myself not to scream at her that she left my child alone to be taken away in the night. I just can’t. Because no matter how time salves that wound, no matter how reason might explain that she didn’t mean it, that she made a mistake, that she should be forgiven, I can’t forgive. To forgive is not to forget; it’s not to decide that what’s done was OK; it’s not to say that what’s done doesn’t hurt anymore. No, to forgive is to say that I no longer want you to hurt for what you did – and maybe there will always be times when that’s exactly what I want.
She snuffles, takes a deep breath and holds it, stretches her limbs stiff and then relaxes so her whole body goes limp. She’s waking and I wait. She lets out a long breath that sounds like a groan and rubs her eyes. Then she turns over slowly, lifts herself onto an elbow and looks down at me.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning,” she smiles, awkwardly. I can see her brain whirring, trying to put the pieces together and to find the right words. “Shit, Wilde. How did this happen? This can’t happen.”
“I know. But you had too much wine, I’m irresistible, your defences fell and… here we are. Don’t feel bad, you’re only human.”
She smiles and punches my shoulder.
“Seriously,” she says, and her eyes sadden just a bit, “I’m not going back here. It’s all hurt too much to go through it all over again. And we would go through it all over again. You know?”
Some part of me wants to say no, it doesn’t have to be like that again. Let’s try, let’s see if we can make it work.
“I know,” I say, instead. “And look, nothing happened. Nothing’s going to happen. We got a bit tipsy and we slep
t in the same bed. Let’s not make a big deal out of it, yeah?”
She nods and falls back onto the pillow, her eyes closed and the ball of her hand to her brow. She knows that what she does next will define more than just today. So do I. So I do nothing and hope she will take the lead.
She turns her head to look at me.
“So it’s not going to be weird?” she says. “We’re going to carry on and be grown up?”
“Look, Emily, we loved each other. I still love you, but I don’t want to be with you, not that way. And you don’t want to be with me. It doesn’t mean we don’t care about each other. I hope that one day we can be friends and I can hold you and be there for you when you need me. Maybe that day will never come, but let’s just accept that what we used to be is always going to be a part of us and get on with our lives. We will never – we must never – go back, but it’s not going to go away so we’ll just have to live with it.”
She looks at me for a moment then nods.
“OK. Now you get up. I have no clothes!”
I smile and get up and, just as I get to the door, I turn round and rip the duvet off the bed. She squeals and throws a pillow at me but it hits the back of the door as I duck out of the room. It used to be like this all of the time. But it can never be like this again.
66
If money coming in was one side of the financial equation, understanding what was going out was the more urgent other side. That meant talking to Emily and I couldn’t put it off any longer. I sent her a message and asked her to meet me in The Pantry. The thought of Cooper’s head exploding at the end of a baseball bat was still too raw and I couldn’t bring myself to go to the house. I think Emily was relieved to meet on neutral ground and agreed to meet me in town.
I was ordering a coffee at the counter from Gemma when she walked in, floated in really, her long skirt and hair trailing gently behind her in the breeze.