by Helen Cullen
Ring ring.
Riiiinnnng riinnnnnng.
Ring ring.
A girl’s voice answered shyly.
“Hello?”
What luck!
“Finola, thank God it’s you!”
“Murtagh? Was that you a second ago? You’re brave, ringing twice. Hoskins is gone to see The Dubliners. I was hoping you were Fiachra.”
“Still nothing from him? Well, he’s a fool, Finola. Don’t be sitting in waiting on him now, girl.”
“S’pose not. I presume you’re after Maeve?”
“Is she there?”
“Well, she is, but I don’t think she’s feeling well. She hasn’t got up today.”
“What, at all?”
“I knocked in earlier to check on her, but she was asleep with the curtains drawn.”
“She was meant to be meeting me. Would you mind trying her again?”
“Hang on.”
Murtagh fed the telephone three more coins while he waited on the line, knowing already the answer that would follow.
“Murtagh, she says she has a migraine. She’ll call you tomorrow. I’m sorry, love. She wasn’t up to coming to the phone.”
“Ah, that’s okay. Thanks, Fin.”
“Don’t worry, she’ll be grand. I’m sure you’ll hear from her in the morning.”
“I’m sure I will. Goo—”
The line disconnected before he could finish his sentence.
* * *
A lingering worry tangled in his mind as he made his way home, about how much more there was to all of these migraines, but he hadn’t resolved yet how to broach the subject with her.
The episodes were impossible to predict and all-consuming.
“Maggie is here,” Maeve would say before she retreated to the cool darkness of her room. “I’ll call you when she’s left town.”
And while he waited, he worried.
Thinking of the times his own mother took to her bed, and the silence that engulfed the house. While he was elsewhere, did his father sit on the edge of her bed and stroke her hair? Pleat the woolen border of their embroidered eiderdown and speak soft words to her?
He doubted it.
Waiting things out, that was his father’s modus operandi.
I can do better than that, surely. Can’t I?
But it was hard for him, he who couldn’t remember the last time he’d hugged either of his parents; or ever said aloud that he loved them. Maeve was teaching him how to love in a different way, but he hadn’t fully learned the lesson yet and wondered if he ever truly could.
He struggled to find a voice for his fears, to pull stubborn threads.
Instead, he nursed bruises like babies.
Allowed another voice to whisper in his ear.
Maybe she was just avoiding him.
Perhaps the migraines were an elaborate ruse and muggins here fell for it.
Could there be someone else?
That awful Malachy with his put-on accent and pathetic mustache.
Or lanky Paul of the cottage in Brittas Bay that was so lovely for a night swim.
* * *
Murtagh walked halfway to Rathmines before he noticed the rain trickling down the collar of his coat. His long blond curls were matting like dreadlocks in the downpour; a mocking reminder of his umbrella that perched abandoned in the telephone box on Henry Street. The rain made the squeaking of his jacket even worse. When he reached his flat, he peeled it off, flung it in the back of the hall closet and slammed the door closed. Two wineglasses, and a plate of cheese and biscuits covered in tinfoil, anticipated Maeve’s arrival. He ate every morsel standing up, wiping away the crumbs from his beard with a tea towel, and then fell asleep on the couch in his wet clothes. An envelope with two tickets to Carmen remained hidden under Maeve’s plate.
* * *
The next morning, he woke with a crick in his neck and the aftertaste of his solitary feast unpleasant in his mouth. Under a hot shower he rotated his shoulders and lathered his body in Maeve’s apple shampoo until the water ran cold and the strain behind his eyes cleared. It would soon be Christmas; just four days until he presented Maeve to his parents on Christmas Eve like an extravagant gift they would be embarrassed to receive. Before then, they needed to be at peace with each other. One way or the other.
* * *
When Maeve opened the front door of her lodgings, Murtagh was standing on the doorstep holding a bottle of milk and a carton of eggs. He realized he had never seen her without makeup before and marveled at what lay beneath the kohl, the blusher, the powder. How had she managed that on the mornings they awoke together? Her face flickered from shock to frustration to acceptance like a traffic light changing to the green he was waiting for.
“You’d better come in.”
Ms. Hoskins looked surprised to see Murtagh appearing in her kitchen so early in the morning, but she demonstrated some uncharacteristic restraint and scuttled out without asking any questions.
Maeve slunk into Ms. Hoskins’s knitting armchair and hugged her knees. Her toenails, hot pink, looked mocking.
Murtagh took his coat off, rolled up his sleeves and started making scrambled eggs and coffee without speaking a word. Methodically he worked, carefully mixing the eggs and milk in a glass measuring jug, grinding the pepper just so. There was no sense of urgency; now that the time for the conversation had arrived, he was scared of how it might end, unsure how to proceed.
What if forcing her hand pushed her away?
He set the breakfast neatly on the table, placing a sprig of holly from his buttonhole on Maeve’s plate, and waited for her to join him.
The flower dissolved her annoyance at being ambushed.
She squeezed his hand, warm despite the cool kitchen air, and sat across from him, her back straight, palms flat on the table.
“This isn’t a confession,” she began. “I hate when people say that—how they want to confess to a problem they’ve had. Because nobody confesses to having a broken leg, do they?”
Maeve pulled her hair into a knot on the top of her head and made a few attempts to start:
“The thing is, well, it’s not one thing...
“I’m afraid that once I tell you...
“There isn’t an easy way...”
Murtagh reached across the table and touched the tips of her fingers with his own.
“If there’s someone else, you can just say it,” he said. “I’d prefer to know.”
She pulled her hands away from him and jumped up, leaning over him as her voice rose.
“Good God, Murt! How can you even suggest that? After all the time we’ve spent together! The very idea that you could even think such a thing makes me wonder what the hell I’ve been doing...”
He dashed around the table, and she stood stiffly as he wrapped his arms around her.
“Maeve, shhh, love, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’ve been so worried about your disappearances, and the migraines, and... I feared the worst. I should’ve known better. Please, go on. Forget I said anything. Please.”
She sat back down, stabbing at her breakfast with a fork while he pulled up a chair beside her.
“Seriously? You thought I was capable of that? And it’s not that I didn’t want to explain, but it never seemed the right time. I couldn’t bear—”
“Bear what?”
“To change the way you looked at me.”
She measured out her words carefully in spoonfuls of egg.
Rewarded herself with a small bite after each sentence.
Murtagh only ate when she ate; they were in this together.
“I swear there is nothing you can say that will make me leave this room,” he said.
“Apart from that I’m seeing someone else?” she snapped back, with an arched eyebrow.<
br />
Murtagh swallowed, said nothing, but his eyes were kind; he was determined to get out of the way of her telling. So, like a burst pipe, her story spilled out on the floor around their feet.
“I sometimes think it would be easier to understand all of this,” she explained, “if there had been one terrible, traumatic incident that set all of this in motion, but there wasn’t.”
She waved her hands around her head and then flopped them back on the table.
“Nothing bad has ever really happened to me, and so I have no excuse. But I realize now that this—this thing—was always in me from when I was a little girl, but I didn’t know that was peculiar then. I thought all children worried the way I did.”
“Ach, worries can get in on you. Sure, I can understand that. We all feel that way sometimes. I don’t know why people always say school days are the happiest times of your life. So many people hated school.”
She sighed. “Most kids don’t worry like I did.”
Murtagh urged her on with the shy smile her earnest face always summoned, a lightness that she fostered in him, even in the blue moments. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “What troubled you?”
“Everything,” she said. “World wars in general, and my father being conscripted in particular. My mother dying, or losing her mind. Kidnappers. Leukemia. Aliens. Cracks in the pavement. Sponges. The devil. Drowning in the bath. My parents getting divorced, even though they never argued. The basement. The attic. Old people. Babies. Amber traffic lights. Jellyfish. Nuclear power. Stuff getting in my ears. Stickers. That I’d lose my memory. Failing exams. Homeless people. Getting fat. Dying—that was a major one, of course. Falling asleep. That if I fell, all my bones would crumble. That if I cut myself, all the blood would go rushing out of my body. Questioning if I really existed. If everyone around me was an actor.”
He nodded slowly. “I was always afraid of crucifixes and electric fences.”
Maeve looked at him in confusion. “I’m not sure it’s quite the same. My parents were amazing, but, well, I don’t know how seriously any adults take children’s fears. They described me as sensitive and a little nervous, but I think they thought I would grow out of it. I used to have a stammer—did I ever tell you that?” She paused, her eyebrows a question.
Murtagh shook his head. “No. How did you lose it?”
“The same way I learned to cope with all of the other things I was scared of. Ma sent me to drama classes, and it helped a lot. When I was pretending to be someone else, I lost my stammer and I could be someone who wasn’t afraid of everything for a while. Gradually I started playing that character all the time, a version of me who wasn’t afraid, and the appearance eventually became a new kind of reality.”
Murtagh clasped her hands in his own. “Sure, isn’t that brilliant? And now look at you! You’re fearless up there on that stage.”
Maeve leveled her gaze at him. “It didn’t all just vanish, though, Murt. It just evolved into a more considered way of catastrophic thinking. I wasn’t terrified of particular things so much as I was of potential consequences, and I would become utterly convinced something awful was going to happen if I did X, Y or Z.”
“How do you mean? If you made a mistake you’d get in trouble—that sort of thing?”
“Not exactly. More, it was an amplification of potentially reasonable fears, like I was convinced that I would fail an exam and then end up having to repeat the school year and maybe never end up getting my high-school diploma at all. Or if I missed the school bus, that I’d have to walk home and would probably get abducted and never see my family again. I always thought small goodbyes would be last ones, so I was upset whenever my folks went out at night. I was convinced they were going to be killed in a car accident. I would jump from a minor anxiety to the worst-case scenario and then become paralyzed by fear.”
Murtagh stirred more sugar into his coffee then flinched at its sweetness when he tasted it. “I think we all have a bit of that, though, don’t we? Fearing the worst? You just have to not let it get in on you, my love.”
The linoleum in the hallway squeaked. Maeve stood up and turned on the radio, spinning the dial until she found some classical music. “The walls have ears,” she said. “And yes, but it’s not that easy for me.”
She rearranged a saltcellar, a sugar bowl and a milk jug into a triangle formation on the table and sat back down.
“So, my troubles became threefold,” she explained. “The anxiety evolved into bouts of, well, some seriously dark moods. I sometimes get so overwhelmed by the worry that I end up shutting down. Sometimes it works the other way, too. I feel this black mood coming in like a cloud over my mind and it summons the anxiety, but the two are often, if not always, linked for me.”
“And the third?” Murtagh prompted.
The kitchen door flew open and Maeve shrunk in her chair as Ms. Hoskins sidled in, made up in a shiny canary-yellow dress. “Oh, don’t mind me,” she said. “You can carry on your conversation. I’m paying no mind to you.” She started riffling through a drawer stuffed with papers, occasionally holding one up to the light, before discarding the document for another.
Murtagh cleared his throat. “So, as I was saying, I’m going to try and pick one pattern to focus on now, instead of trying lots of different designs, try to develop a signature collection, and then...”
Ms. Hoskins released a long sigh. “There’s lovely crockery in Woolworths now, you know, for next to nothing.”
She edged toward the windowsill and turned down the radio. “It’s blaring into my room,” she said, “and I can barely hear myself think.”
As she clicked in her heels toward the door, Maeve called after her, “Aren’t you forgetting something?” and she nodded to the open drawer.
Ms. Hoskins pulled her shoulders back as she returned, snatching up some papers and knocking the drawer closed with her hip before exiting into the hall, leaving the door ajar.
Murtagh closed it softly behind her and pulled his chair closer to Maeve’s so they could lower their voices. “And the third?” he asked again, his stomach doubling as he watched her fight to retain her composure.
“Problems with eating,” she said, her voice cracking. “I spent a long time in hospital.”
“Oh, Maeve, my love,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry, but that’s all behind you now, right? You have to try not to think about it so much—we have so much to look forward to!”
She started to clear away the plates, and Murtagh saw her hands were trembling.
“Actually, that was what ended up saving me because, when I was eventually discharged, I found a new psychiatrist, Dr. Goldman, and he had a totally different approach. He understood that the meds only worked for some folks and didn’t push them on me. We talked and talked and talked and he helped unlock the patterns in my thinking so I could try to reprogram my brain. He helped me believe in a more holistic way that I had to love and heal my body so my mind could be healthy, too. He saved my life.”
Murtagh came to stand beside her at the sink as she did the washing up, carefully drying each knife, each fork, each plate she handed him. When they were done, she leaned into his body and he held her tight for a few minutes before he spoke again.
“So, tell me about now,” he said. “The migraines?”
She pulled back from him and dried the sink with one of Ms. Hoskins Vatican City tea towels, polishing the aluminum surface with slow circles.
“That was an easier explanation, but not really a lie, because the feeling is not dissimilar to one of my spells. I’ve worked out what helps me—working, but not too much, avoiding the things I know cause me stress, meditating, exercising, but not too much, eating well, getting enough sleep, writing in my journal, talking to a counselor. There’s no magic remedy, but I feel I have some tools I can use. And I can recognize the warning signs. Sometimes it starts with feeling like I’m
getting the flu. Other times it’s a headache that grows more and more intense. Some days I don’t get any warning at all and can barely crawl out of bed. Sometimes months pass when I don’t feel any symptoms at all. Dr. Goldman says, as I grow older, the spells might become years apart, and may one day stop coming altogether, or...”
“There is no or,” he finished for her. “That’s what will happen, love, I know it. We’re in this together, and I bet now you’ve let it all out you’ll start feeling better.”
Maeve rested her head against him once again.
“I’m not sure you understand,” she said. “I don’t know how this will all...”
Murtagh shushed her. “My love, I look at you and I see the light of my life. The darkness is behind you. I’m sure of it.”
Maeve frowned as he kissed her forehead, smoothing her hair away from her face, and found a small smile for him.
* * *
By the time Murtagh left the house that evening, the frost had started to settle like silver dust on the street.
The soles of his shoes sounded different to his ears as he trod carefully.
He could smell the cold as he breathed in the night air and felt his lungs expand.
The city had transformed while they were talking; now, instead of houses, traffic and shopfronts, all he could see was nature: a fox nuzzling a discarded takeout box, dandelions peeking through cracks in the pavement, a robin that perched on an electricity line; the trees that lined the avenue appeared to be the rulers and no longer just aesthetics.
Maeve had told him her story, and now the world seemed more beautiful and brittle than ever before.
He was so relieved that what ailed her hadn’t come between them.
Her truth had cracked his heart and, immediately, a new love spilled from him to fill the gaps.
He would be a better man because of her trust, and she would be a happier woman for having trusted.
Their love could be complete.
Dublin: March 1981