by Ciara Smyth
“OK, that’s the formula. All stories have formulas. It’s the characters that make them special.” Ruby looked thoughtful. “And there are hardly any gay romantic comedies, so our rules might not be the same. We could reinvent the genre.”
“Oh, they’re definitely not the same. If this was a lesbian film, unfortunately, one of us would have to kill ourselves at the end.”
“Drastic.”
“I don’t make the rules. Do I wish there were lots of nice happy rom-coms with girls? Of course. We deserve as many glossy, high-budget films as anyone else. But there are, like, two and they kiss four times total across both films. Not even any . . .” I make interlocking gestures with my fingers.
“There’s definitely never enough kissing,” Ruby said, meeting my eyes. The way she said it made me want to leap across the room and kiss her, but somehow my feet were glued to the spot. What was wrong with me?
“Right. I mean there’s like two kisses in one film,” I said, vaguely aware I was repeating myself.
Ruby nodded. She got off the bed.
“And you can’t even really call them big budget. I just mean you actually recognize some of the actors in those ones.”
Ruby walked toward me keeping her eyes on mine.
“I saw this lesbian movie once,” I blathered on, “where a girl jumps off a building and it really looks like she turns into an eagle and . . .”
Ruby stopped walking when the toes of her glittery flats knocked against my scuffed military boots. The rest of my sentence got stuck in my throat.
“You talk a lot,” she said.
I nodded.
She flipped her hair over to the opposite side. My stomach flipped over to its opposite side.
“I think we should kiss now. You got me the star, after all.” She gestured at the night sky. “And I get the feeling you’re nervous so maybe we should just do it.”
I wasn’t nervous. I mean, we’d kissed before. So why would I be nervous? I tried to say I wasn’t nervous, but nothing came out.
Shut up.
A moment of silence passed, the energy between us building. Her fingers found my arms and she traced a line from my elbow to the palm of my hand with her finger on both sides, holding my hands lightly when she reached them. Our fingers played gently. I could feel the rise and fall of her chest against mine. All the hairs on my arm stood up. A shiver ran from my throat to my stomach and further still. Our lips didn’t touch yet, but the tip of her nose grazed my cheek and I could feel long eyelashes flutter against my cheek as she closed her eyes. For a second we breathed the air between us. Her hips moved, squeezing out the last bit of light between our bodies.
“I know some guys who’d pay good money to see this.” Oliver leaned in the doorway, a smug grin across his face, as always. “But it’s not really my thing, so close the door next time.”
I was going to murder him.
“Oliver!” Ruby squealed. She buried her face in her hands.
“Go away, creeper.” I started toward him and he jumped.
“Believe me, I have no desire to see my darling cousin lobbing the gob on my mortal enemy, but the door was open.” He looked so genuinely affronted that I would think he’d spy on us that I believed him.
“It’s fine, Oliver,” Ruby said through gritted teeth; her face had reappeared, but her cheeks were pink. She had retreated to her chair and had her knees pulled up to her chest.
“You left your phone on the couch.” He threw it to me and I just about caught it. It must have fallen out of my pocket.
“You better not have messed with it.”
“Would I?” he said, indignant. I made a mental note to check through my photos and messages later.
“Mum asked me to drive you home,” he continued. “She said it was too late to let you walk home by yourself. I said you’d probably rather face a murderer in the bushes than spend ten minutes in the car with me, but for some reason, she thought I was joking.”
I hesitated.
“I haven’t been drinking,” he added. “It interferes with the integrity of my instrument.” He stroked his throat.
I could have called Dad to pick me up, but at least this way I wouldn’t run the risk of interrupting him mid-anything. And if it inconvenienced Oliver, so much the better. I looked behind me, Ruby’s face was back to its normal color. Was that disappointment I saw?
“Can you give me five?”
“Even I last longer than five minutes, Saoirse. There are pills for that.”
I scanned the room for anything in grabbing distance, but he ducked out too fast, and the pen pot hit the door instead of his head.
“You two are funny,” Ruby said.
“He’s like the annoying brother I never wanted and will have to poison with cyanide someday.”
I wanted to go back to the kiss, but I wasn’t sure how to get the moment back.
“So what now?” Ruby said.
What was I supposed to say? I was the one who’d come back. I was the one who’d said I wanted to kiss her again, but when it came to saying Let’s do this again or I’ll call you, it was like a stone dropped into my stomach, heavy and cold. It had been so easy to stick to my rule until now, and sure, I could throw it away, but I’d made it for a reason. I’d spent most of my life with Hannah, best friends and then girlfriends. When she told me she didn’t want that anymore I didn’t know how to be without her. I had gone through the motions of my life with the constant refrain She doesn’t love you anymore and it made me feel like I didn’t count as a whole person on my own. I’d barely got past that stage and I couldn’t go back. And I couldn’t say that to Ruby. It was pathetic.
But I could explain it a different way.
“So you know in the rom-com where there’s always a person who doesn’t want to be in a serious relationship?”
Ruby raised an eyebrow and it made me wish I could raise one eyebrow. Not that that’s the thing to concentrate on here, but it would be so cool.
“That’s you, I take it,” she said with the same expression my French teacher would make when I told her I really did leave my homework on the kitchen table. I was a good student and yet somehow I always inspired nothing but skepticism. Can’t imagine why.
“I want to be honest,” I said (dishonestly keeping the real reason I didn’t want to get into a relationship a secret).
“What’s wrong with relationships? You want the stuff that goes with them.”
“Some of it,” I conceded. The kissing and groping stuff. With her. I wanted more of that with her than I had with anyone. Since Hannah. “The thing is, though, relationships are doomed to fail. No one stays together. Breakups are never mutual. One person gets blindsided and hurt and it’s ugly and messy and . . . and besides, I’m leaving in a few months for uni and you’re only here for the summer. So there’s really no point.”
I declined to mention the bit where I was seriously doubting my decision to move away. There was nothing to be gained from getting into all of that drama as well.
“Is that it?” Ruby said, incredulous. “Relationships end?”
“Pretty much.” I braced myself for a lecture about how you have to give love a chance and true love is out there and you’ll never find it if you don’t put your heart on the line and a story about how her grandparents met when they were seven and they are still together now even though they’re a hundred and sixty-eight.
“So what?” is what she said instead.
“Er . . . what?”
“I’m not trying to force you into anything you don’t want to do. Trust me, I’m not in the habit of begging girls to go out with me. But I like you and there’s another way of thinking about this.”
I was interested but not convinced. I was also a bit miffed by this “trust me” business. I bet girls were all over her. I bet there were loads of hot girls in England just waiting outside her door. I forced myself to shut down that tangent and pay attention; Ruby was still talking.
“Like
you said, I’m going back home in September. We already know exactly when it will end.”
“OK . . . ,” I said, my tone conveying that I did not get where she was going with this. She was proving my point. We were doomed from day one.
“Sooo,” she said, impatiently explaining what she thought was obvious, “no blindsiding, no expectations of everlasting love. Our own experiment with a different type of lesbian story. The fun stuff. The kissing and the talking and the dating and no one dies at the end.”
“Just the romantic montage,” I said, finally understanding.
“Exactly. You don’t have to take everything so seriously.”
She had a point.
“You have a point,” I said. Was it possible to have your cake and then not be sad when your cake leaves you and smashes your heart into a mushy pulp? “But how would it work?”
Ruby thought for a second. “We could try it out. One date, something classic from the movies. If we have a good time, we make a proper plan. If we don’t or I fall hopelessly in love with you, I swear we can call it off.”
She was making fun of me, but it did sound good. Did it count as breaking the golden rule of no relationships? Technically. But it was a loophole. Loopholes were fine. I hadn’t factored in loopholes before.
All right, listen, I’m going to level with you, we both know I’m full of shit, but just let me have this one, OK?
“What kind of classic are you thinking?” I asked. “I feel like people always go ice-skating in these films, but we don’t have an ice rink. And it’s June.”
“That’s a ‘Christmas film in New York’ classic. We’re doing summer by the beach. And that? Has to be a funfair.”
“How convenient,” I said. “We have a funfair here every summer.” I hadn’t been in a while. Honestly, getting whiplash and nausea gets old after a few years. With Ruby, it could be fun, though. It would be cool to get our grope on in the hall of mirrors.
“Of course you do.” Ruby got out of her chair, stood in front of me, and tugged on the fabric of my top to pull me close. She kissed me softly. I rested my hands on her hips and just as I started to feel the urgent pull to hold her tighter, closer, she broke away.
“It’s a romantic comedy,” she said, finishing her sentence, leaving me wanting more. “In rom-coms people bust out coordinated dance routines, they run through airports without being stopped by security, and they come up with perfect speeches on the spur of the moment. Do you really think we’d have to try to find something as basic as a funfair?”
8.
Saturday morning after Ruby’s birthday, before I’d even got a chance to go see Mum, Dad begged me to go view a flat with him. You see, with the exams over, I had decided to switch up my schedule and visit Mum first thing. I had always gone after school during the week, but mornings are better for people with dementia. The doctors don’t know why, but in the evening they become more agitated. Part of me felt guilty that I was avoiding seeing that side of her, but I didn’t dwell on it. It was better for her too, less upsetting. I also didn’t like when my visits overlapped with Dad’s and he always visited in the evening after work. There was something about being together as a family that felt like a lie. Especially when I knew about Beth and Mum didn’t and couldn’t understand. Now with the engagement, it was ten times worse. Every moment I let Dad pretend that “Dad and Beth” and all the changes they were making were normal, it was like I was complicit. I thought I should be engaged in some kind of nonstop protest, but I wasn’t. Sure, I grumbled and I made snide comments, but Mum deserved better than that.
The flat was smaller than our house of course, though that bit didn’t bother me. It was out of the suburbs, closer to the promenade, near the tourist beaches. When I stood in my new bedroom, I could hear the noise of tourists, laughing, squealing, shouting, and it smelled like candy floss. He asked me if I liked it and I grunted. There were other places, he assured me, but I could tell that this was the one he wanted. It was sleek and modern inside, black glass and chrome. So different from our cluttered, cozy home, which was thick rugs and knickknacks adorning every surface. I wondered if the crisp lines and monochrome were Dad’s taste or Beth’s. Maybe this was what they both liked. Maybe everything that made home, home, was Mum. I’d told him it was fine and his face lit up at my lukewarm tolerance. I felt sick to my stomach with guilt.
Coming straight from the viewing to see Mum felt like I was the husband who buys his wife flowers because he did something wrong. But I put it out of my head; I was getting good at that. I took a deep breath before knocking. I do it every time. It’s the breath that says, Don’t expect anything, don’t let it get to you, don’t get frustrated, don’t get angry. It’s the shields-up breath.
When she didn’t answer, I opened the door myself. She was watching TV and a stream of sunshine lit up her face, making her skin glow. She was only fifty-five. When I walked through the halls of the Seaview Home building, I saw elderly people, wrinkled skin collecting in pools around their neck and elbows. Some could barely move; they had to be shifted by staff every few hours so they didn’t get sores where their paper-thin skin broke. All of them had dementia of some kind—it was a specialist home—but none of them looked like my mother. She had always been beautiful and that hadn’t changed. I topped up her roots every month so her auburn hair stayed glossy and gray-free, like she would want. It seemed to make her happy.
She looked up at me and smiled and I could breathe again. The good days were the days when she looked at me like that. When I could tell she was happy to see me walk into the room, even if she didn’t know why.
“Hi, Mum,” I said.
“Hello, hello.” She ushered me inside, “Do you want a cup of tea?”
She asks everyone this when they come around. Her room is like a little self-contained flat. There’s a bedroom/living room, a bathroom, and a “kitchen” with a sink. All the appliances are dementia friendly, like a shower that automatically turns off, or a sink with a pressure sensor that drains if it gets too full. One of the problems with having dementia when you’re young is that you’re still fit and able and can get into a lot of trouble that a less mobile person cannot.
“Why don’t I make it and you can stay where you are,” I said.
I had to ask one of the staff to bring us some tea. Mum’s not allowed a kettle in her room, but I don’t like to embarrass her by saying so.
“Why don’t you get us some biscuits, Mum?” I said when the girl came in with a tray. Mum pottered into the “kitchen” and took a melamine plate off the shelf.
Sometimes it strikes me how strange this all is. My smart, amazing mother couldn’t even have a kettle anymore. I followed her into the kitchen and threw my arms around her and hugged her tight. She hugged me back. Sometimes she doesn’t. When I pulled away she was looking at me with that absent look. Mum was always so shrewd, so insightful. It was her job as a psychotherapist. When that sharp look in her eye is missing, she looks like someone else.
She stood in the kitchen dithering and I could tell I’d distracted her and she’d forgotten why she was there. It’s funny; we’ve all had that moment where you go into a room and suddenly the whole reason you were there is wiped from your brain. You know it’ll come back to you if you give it a second. I sometimes wondered if Mum felt that way, that whatever she’d forgotten, a task, a memory, someone’s face, would come back to her in a second. Or if it’s gone so far that she doesn’t even know she’s forgotten anything.
“Biscuits, Mum,” I prompted.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” she asked.
“We’ve got tea. We need some biccies. Do you want me to get them?”
She shooed me away from the kitchen and arranged some chocolate digestives on a plate. She was getting clumsier all the time, as though her muscle memory was fading too, so I watched her carefully.
There was an Australian soap on the TV so I flicked through the channels until I found the news. Mum hated soaps. She was h
ighbrow to the point of snobbish and Dad and I always teased her for it. She and Hannah used to talk about fancy-pants things all the time. They read the same boring books with lots of wordy metaphors where nothing really happened. They watched the same boring films with lots of visual metaphors where nothing really happened. Once they even went to a concert together. Vivaldi played by Vilde Frang. I only remembered the name because I thought it sounded funny and I still don’t know if Vilde Frang is a person or a band. The same night, Dad and I had gone to an unauthorized musical version of Jennifer’s Body. It was fucking amazing to be fair, but I sometimes felt a pang of regret that I hadn’t done the things Mum wanted to do even if I hated them. There’d been moments where I wondered if she would have preferred Hannah as a daughter. When we broke up, I was glad that Mum didn’t really understand anymore, but I was angry with Hannah because it felt like she had abandoned Mum as well.
I could feel myself getting sucked into that black hole of ruminating on things I’d done wrong and honestly I could be here all day if I let that take over. As a great philosopher once said: shake it off.
“How are you, Mum?” I asked, trying to inject some lightness into my voice.
“I’m really good. Dad is picking me up soon.”
Mum often thinks she’s younger than she is. Sometimes she seems to think she’s at work. She often thinks her parents are still alive—her adoptive parents, I mean. She doesn’t remember finding out she was adopted. That didn’t happen until she was in her late twenties. It felt like her memories unraveled up to a certain point. She could tell you stories from her childhood in vivid detail, but she didn’t remember that she had a daughter. Most of the time she thought she was in her early twenties, as near as we could tell. That person was Elizabeth O’Kane. She wouldn’t even meet Rob Clarke for thirteen more years, let alone be my mother. It was like that part of her vanished. I tried to remember the last time she knew I was her daughter. But I hadn’t known it was the last time then so it hadn’t stuck out. Another memory gone, for both of us.