The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  I hear her steps behind me, the clip of her heels coming down like dropped coins across the hall’s Tigerwood parquet, and the front door closing. Not slamming shut but achieving the same effect. Neither one of us thinks to switch on a light, which is probably just as well. The dark is better, because we each look ugly with shame. I pull a chair away from the table and sit with my back to the window. I know where everything is, and yet the kitchen feels unfamiliar. When one certainty fails, everything else loses its standing. After the tapping of Jennifer’s heels, the quiet that opens up is deep. She hesitates in the doorway, and her presence is enough to shift the equilibrium. I lift my head, feeling as if I am under water. As my eyes adjust, the lines of the kitchen counter suggest themselves, and it must be the same for Jennifer because this is what she feels her way towards, leading with an outstretched hand. Her silhouette perches on one of the counter’s two high stools, but only as a gesture, leaning rather than sitting and keeping her feet on the ground. There’s actually nothing to see; so much of this detail can be real only in my mind, and yet it feels no less true for that. I’ve simply filled in the blanks from what I know.

  ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’

  I clear my throat. ‘I’m trying hard not to think.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer the question.’

  The words cause her voice to crack, but that’s an old trick. Another show of weakness, vulnerability, but another tool for gaining leverage.

  ‘No.’ I have never felt more broken. ‘I suppose it doesn’t.’

  Her hand is resting on the countertop. I know this because, after a few seconds of silence, her fingertips thrum a single rolling arpeggio into the white marble. The sound is minuscule, flesh and just the trim of nail against the cold stone, yet I identify it without hesitation or doubt. That’s how well I know her. We’ve been living together a long time, and I know the chocolate thumbprint birthmark high up on the inside of her right thigh, and the muffled whine she makes when our lovemaking reaches a height, head rolled back and lips pursed, and I know the feel of her foot in my hand, that small, cool, fleshy cupful of bones, when she has me massaging her after a long, tiring day spent in heels. These details, I have off by heart. It’s the bigger things I fail to notice.

  ‘Would sorry mean anything now?’ she asks, in the same fractured voice.

  I hitch my shoulders and let them relax, at once trusting that she’ll sense the gesture and not caring a damn whether she does or not. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s best, I think, that you don’t say it.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with saying I’m sorry?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. But I’d rather you didn’t. Because it wouldn’t be enough, and it’d just add to the list of things that I can’t or won’t let myself believe.’

  And now, across the room, tears do come. I sit there and let her cry, forcing myself to listen. The sound hurts me in the way it always has, the few times I’ve heard it, and for a second I am almost someone else again, the man that, up until a few hours ago, I used to be. But since then I’ve become the rocks that waves wash over.

  ‘You hate me, is that it?’ she asks, when she can.

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper. ‘Tonight I do. But I hate myself more. Christ, I should have put his head through a wall. If I had any kind of balls I’d have done it. I could feel him watching me, you know? And smirking, the whole time. That mouth, those big doughy lips. I can’t make sense of it, how you could bear him, how you could have him on you and actually want it.’

  ‘I told you, Jack. Don’t think about it. You’ll do yourself no good.’

  ‘Do you have any idea of what you’ve done, though? Are you even capable of understanding? And the whole bloody room knew. I could see it in people’s faces.’

  For a second she is angry, like she wants to shout at me, or get up and beat me with both fists. ‘For you that’s the worst of it, isn’t it? Not what I’ve done but that everyone should know about it.’

  I slam my hand down on the kitchen table, and am startled by the magnitude of its noise, which the dark amplifies to the sound of a gunshot.

  ‘You don’t get off so easy,’ I tell her. ‘Not tonight. Stop trying to simplify me, okay? I have a right to anger. If anyone has, I have. And don’t think I’m not blaming myself for it, either. Because I am. The signs were all there. If I’d had my eyes put out with a hot poker I couldn’t have been more blind. You, joining a book club. I mean, of all the excuses. You don’t even fucking read.’

  A word more would be an earthquake and the ground already feels unstable. The silence in our home is a void, as crushing as deep space. I blame myself for that, too, because marriages are built for a purpose. For some, that’s everything. We’ve acted casual about it, but it’s down to me. Unless a doctor insists otherwise, it’s always on the man. We never exactly lacked for effort, but I should have tried harder. Six years is a long time.

  We sit here now, miles apart. Nothing moves in the darkness, and perhaps that is why my mind torments itself with pictures of her getting up, moving out into the middle of the floor and slowly unfastening the zip that runs from just beneath her left armpit down to the jut of her hip, so that the red dress can spill away to pool around her high-heeled feet. There’s really nothing at all to see, or even to sense, yet I picture her in naked silhouette, as true and honest as anything I’ve ever known, standing there half turned away, defined by the elegant line of her back in profile, the curves of her breasts, bottom-heavy and slightly upturned. A body moulded to be touched, the waxy smoothness of her skin and the intimacy of her bones pressing cold and alive through the flesh. There to be touched, but not by me, not now and, depending on what the next few days will bring, maybe not ever again. These visions come to taunt me, of course, and to punish. In fact, Jennifer remains at the counter, perched on her stool, not moving and not having moved a hair. The night is packed with uncountable realities.

  Finally, when I can bear this no longer, I get up and leave the room. As I go, I seem to know that she is crying again. I feel like crying, too, but tears won’t come. I get the hollowed-out feeling of grief, but something inside has run dry, and if Jennifer is crying then I envy her the release. Because of it, though, I almost stop in the doorway. I waver. What has happened, what she has done, is a treachery as bad as any I can imagine, and the details I can’t help but attach to it multiply its horror, because that’s how the mind works. But people survive worse. Betrayal is such a poisonous act, and it’s a question of wanting to find a way on from it. The shards of what has been broken are scattered all around, but perhaps they have not yet been ground into our foundations. Plenty of couples have gone through similar. You piece things back together as best you can, and learn to live with the cracks. You decide how much you can lose, and how much you can bear. That’s what it’s really all about: deciding. And putting a number on it, quantifying pain and measuring your threshold. We’re each of us our mistakes as well as our virtues.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she murmurs, to my back. ‘Even if you don’t want to hear it, or believe it, I am.’

  I don’t answer, and I suppose she can’t be sure if I’ve even heard. But the words mean nothing. Everyone is sorry when they’ve been caught. That’s not the same as being sorry for what has happened, the act itself and the deceit of trying to keep it concealed, and it’s nowhere near enough. Out in the hallway I check the lock on the front door, slip the chain in place and snap shut the deadbolt. Securing the nest. Tonight, all my fears are inside this house, and they live with me, but I still go through the usual motions. If I am honest with myself, I’ll acknowledge that this is how our marriage has always been. Love’s got nothing to do with it.

  Last Christmas

  On the Carrigaline Road, coming onto Carr’s Hill, traffic had slowed to a crawl. It was Christmas Eve, already after six, and full darkness had taken hold. Having made a promise to get home early, today of all days, I’d spent the afternoon trying to close off a particularl
y convoluted account, but because the phone kept ringing I was still the last one out of the office.

  The rain of earlier had stopped, giving the roads a sheen inside the headlights, and outbreaks of sleet were forecast for later in the night, possibly turning to snow on higher ground. In the car, with the heat turned up, I moved through the radio’s channels, but nothing held my interest and I settled finally on a live choral performance of traditional carols, fixed the volume to an unobtrusive level and tried to relax.

  Beside me, on the passenger seat, lay a small palm-sized parcel, wrapped in heavy gold paper and neatly ribboned. My wife’s Christmas gift. A month or so ago, when I’d broached the subject of shopping, Angie had suggested that we forgo presents this year, because we were saving for a deposit on a house and really couldn’t afford the extravagance. Our plan was to rent for another year at least, and give the market a chance to settle. I shrugged and agreed, even though I was already, since early October, tied into a casual weekly instalment plan on a beautiful quarter-carat diamond and crushed sapphire pendant necklace that I’d seen in the window of the jeweller’s on Castle Street. What she’d said made sense, but I didn’t want the first Christmas of our marriage to pass without some kind of gesture. And I knew how it would go. We’d argue but she’d be secretly happy. We’d argue, but then she’d lift her hair for me and ask that I fasten the clasp, and she’d admire the way it looked in the mirror, with me at her shoulder, and we’d kiss and make up. Because these are the kind of games we play.

  After a few minutes, I cleared the brow of the hill and saw the reason for the delay. Some fifty yards ahead, just at the turn-off to Hilltown, a collision had taken place. One of the cars had run up onto the roadside verge and, from my distance, looked relatively undamaged, but the other had turned over onto its roof. A fire truck was parked at a diagonal behind the wreckage, obviously a necessary manoeuvre but one that reduced the two-way traffic flow to a single available lane. Inside my car, the only sounds came from the radio, the choir segueing from ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ into something unmistakably Latin, the name of which escaped me though I knew the melody well enough to have hummed along with, if I’d so chosen.

  The heat built, and after a few minutes I was forced to open the window a couple of inches. The initial flood of outer cold felt good but then, in a lull between carols and through the rumble of car engines, I caught the angry sound of a machine, some sort of an electric saw, and through it, screams. A thin, wet voice, pitched at an angle that couldn’t be adult. Ahead of me, the cars again began to move, and I eased forward, into that sound, gaining perhaps twenty yards of road before once more coming to a stop. I could have shut the window, or turned up the music. There are times when denial is the only protection available to us. But I did neither. The choir began to sing one of my favourite carols, ‘I Saw Three Ships’, the voices in a deft arrangement folding together in a way that seemed to put an echo or a shadow around the words. I closed my eyes and swallowed three or four mouthfuls of air. The machine groaned behind the music, a blade made for shredding metal, and the crying came in gouts, filling every available pore of night. I focused on the music, not attaching anything much to the words but letting their sense evoke something older, the recollection of some bright night spent in front of the television as a child, sipping cocoa and watching George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge stride the sullen, snow-clad streets of London. Music has a way of attaching itself to particular and apparently random moments in time, sealing them into a permanent state. When the song ended I switched off the radio.

  Again, the car ahead began to move. I watched it veer right by instruction, but held back a moment, letting a gap open, then crawled another twenty yards until a young woman in a luminous yellow traffic vest stepped in front of me, raising a hand for me to stop. I met her eyes and nodded. Because of the temporary lighting that had been set up I could see that she was chewing one side of her lower lip, and that her cheeks were wet. The accident lay just behind her, with the wrecked car and the assembled rescue units blocking off the entire left lane. Beads of glass littered the road, gleaming with the sheen of the rigged halogens. Two firemen knelt beside the upturned car, trying to brace themselves for the possibility of either a release or a sudden collapse, while a third lay on his back and worked a small hand grinder against some snagged knot of metal. Yellow sparks spun away from the cut, and within seconds the air took on the gun-heavy stench of oxidised steel. A few more uniformed types, police and medics, stood some paces back, watching, wanting to help but not knowing how, wanting more than anything, probably, to run. And to one side, away from everyone, a body lay on the road, covered head to shins in a white sheet. Beneath the low hem, the right foot was bare but the left still wore its shoe, something sleek and low-heeled, with an open toe, the single detail that from my distance helped define gender. And still the screams kept on, fragile, fuelled by terror and probably pain, but maybe also by some understanding.

  I considered the car’s exposed underbelly, something I’d never seen before, veined and channelled with a criss-crossing of cables and pipes, wheels settled in their cradles. Coming from just the wrong angle, though, the window holes gave me back only darkness, even with the halogens spilling hard over everything in between. For three or four minutes then, I watched the traffic being directed, the young woman conducting with swinging arms the line of cars in the opposite lane. Even shaken and upset, the work had to be done. She had her back to me, and I wondered if she had somebody waiting, if she would come home this Christmas Eve to a happy situation, let her hair down and allow herself to be kissed and held. I hoped so because, even though she was turned momentarily away, my mind refused to surrender the image of her tears.

  Something happened then. The grinding sound cut out and the car seemed to slump, or give, and all the men who were standing hurried forward to assist. The cluster of bodies made it difficult to see the details, but it seemed that one of the firemen had been able to wrench open the mangled door. While the others attempted to keep the vehicle from collapsing, the man who’d been on his back crawled part of the way inside. Ahead of me, the young woman had abandoned her traffic duty to watch the scene unfold, and was leaning on the front left corner of my car, the glow of the tamped headlight spilling up across her midriff. The howls that we’d been hearing reduced, gradually, to a softer weeping, and I leaned forward and stared, praying, I think, though not in any conscious way, until a child was lifted from the wreckage, a girl of about six, barefoot in a white bell-shaped dress with narrow shoulder straps that offered nowhere near sufficient protection against this weather. I only caught glimpses of her face, not enough really to set her definitively in my mind, but she had hair almost to her waist and a delicate, spidery body. In the fireman’s arms, she appeared unhurt but held her shoulders hitched, the corners of them visible through the spill of hair, as if still braced against an impact. As I watched, I saw her turn her head and stare past the men to where the body lay covered, but then the young woman in charge of directing the traffic stepped across my view and gestured at me to move. I nodded, put the car in gear and let her guide me around the accident site and away.

  For a while, the silence felt right but when it became suddenly too much I again switched on the radio. I’d expected something to have changed, but nothing had. The choir was still carolling, ‘In Excelsis Deo’, ‘Adeste Fideles’. The traffic into Carrigaline was heavy but moving, and I listened to the music and watched the footpaths on either side thick with pedestrians, mothers holding children by the hand, idling teens, young women in packs, laughing and full of freedom, with their coats worn open and dressed to catch the eye, probably on their way to the last or merely the latest of the Christmas parties. Ropes of lighting stretched above the road, slightly bellying, the bulbs a staggered order of reds, yellows, blues and greens adding something splendid to the night. Most of the shop and pub windows boasted some shade of the season, too; a bauble- and tinsel-clad tree, a slow-moving half-si
zed Santa, a Happy Christmas message stencilled to the glass in luminous, artificial snow. I moved through the town and turned right halfway up the hill, to follow a darker road home.

  Framed by the living-room window, Angie stood lighting mantelpiece candles. I parked on the road, but kept the engine running because I didn’t yet want to lose the music, or interrupt the scene with silence. The coloured lights of our Christmas tree shifted to a set rhythm, giving the otherwise dim room its own kind of movement. We’d decorated that tree together a fortnight earlier, the night after my birthday, and I remember threads of tinsel clinging to her hair and a fleck of glitter that I kissed away from one corner of her mouth when, still warm from our exertions, we settled down together on the settee. That night, in the dancing reflections of the fairy lights, we sat holding hands and sipping mulled wine, knowing that whatever we had was only just beginning. Tomorrow, though, would be a new day, and next week a new year, and we both understood that things could change, whether we wanted them to or not.

  On the radio now, a soloist was taking on ‘O Holy Night’, and I could feel the rest of the choir readying themselves to fall in. But for these seconds there was only one voice, a soft, pure soprano swelling unhurriedly towards an immense climax and then holding that impossible top note for longer than I could ever hold my breath. When I closed my eyes I found only colours, and then, through them, I saw again the twisted metal, the glass like hail across the surface of the road, and the shape beneath the sheet. And somewhere among the highest notes of the music, I heard the screams. That was enough. I killed the engine, locked the car and went inside.