by Ciara Smyth
“Over my dead body,” he muttered.
I ignored them both and made a scene of pouring myself some orange juice. This conversation needed taking down a notch or two, so doing normal things seemed like the best solution. Act casual. I took a sip while Dad waited. Apparently, he wanted a response to Beth’s statement even though he obviously disagreed.
Drinking had never felt so unnatural in my life.
“It’s not that. I just don’t think it’s for me, that’s all.”
Dad blinked exaggerated blinks.
“I mean, let’s be honest,” I went on, “it’s likely going to be a bit of a waste.”
“What on earth do you mean a waste. How can a world-class education be a waste?” Dad shouted the words. Beth winced and with great effort, he reeled it in. “Is this about Ruby? Just because she’s not going to university doesn’t mean you can sit around here and do nothing. I swear, Saoirse, if you don’t go you are not staying here. End of story,” Dad said.
“Believe me, I don’t want to live with you one second longer than I have to.” I spat the words out, hoping for maximum hurt. He was incapable of listening to reason. I should have known better. “I want to be close to Mum.”
“Hold on now, Rob.” Beth cut across Dad before he could speak. “Of course you can stay here, Saoirse, this is your home. We can talk about this.”
Dad opened his mouth and I thought he was going to give off to Beth, but she gave him a look that would silence an angry mob. “Don’t even think about it,” she said. “This is my home too.”
“So you want to enable her to waste her life?” Then he turned on me. “Go see what it’s like to try and get a decent job without a degree.”
“You don’t have a degree,” Beth snapped at him.
“It’s different now. You want to throw all your hard work away because your girlfriend is a slacker? I’m not going to finance that.”
Beth looked like she was going to argue, but I got there first.
“No one asked you to finance anything. I can get a job.” I doubted that would be easy in this economy actually. I hadn’t been able to get a job over the summer. Not one of the jobs I applied for called me for interview. Our little seaside economy wasn’t exactly busting with well-paying, no-qualification jobs, and commuters to the city had pushed rents up so much I didn’t think I’d actually ever be able to live in the town I grew up in. Unless I bumped off Dad and Beth and inherited the flat. Tempting but messy. But I would work it out, right? If I had to.
“Ruby isn’t going to university yet because she’s staying home to help her family. I know you can’t imagine sacrificing anything to care for someone, but she’s not like that.”
Dad closed his eyes and his lips thinned, but he didn’t say anything.
“And anyway, it’s got nothing to do with her. We broke up, remember?” I added, knowing Beth had told him, even though he hadn’t had the guts to broach the subject with me.
“Well, what the hell is it about, then?” Dad said, his fury and bluster deflated.
“You know exactly what it’s about. There’s no point in learning a bunch of useless stuff when I’m only going to forget it all later.”
Dad took a deep breath and I watched the muscles in his face soften. Beth’s fingers covered her lips. She looked sad.
Finally, Dad spoke, his voice quiet but firm. As though he thought if he spoke reasonably enough I would have to agree with him. “Saoirse, you don’t know what will happen. You have to keep living a normal life. Your mother did.”
Where did it get her? Locked up in an old people’s home and she doesn’t know her own last name. My phone vibrated again. I only half registered it. “She didn’t know this was going to happen. I know what the odds are. It changes things.”
Dad exchanged the most infinitesimally quick glance with Beth.
“Dad?” I suddenly knew what that glance meant. I knew it with my whole body because my legs started to feel weak. “Did she know?”
I asked because I wanted him to deny it.
“We should sit down. I’ll make a cup of tea,” Beth said.
I ignored her.
“Not early,” Dad said. “Not as young as you.”
Maybe he thought half the truth would satisfy me.
“When?” The word fell out like a stone.
Dad appeared to wrestle with himself and then finally one side won.
“Your mum was adopted, you know that,” he said. “But around the time we met, she was searching for her birth parents.”
I didn’t know that part. She’d never spoken much about them. Her adoptive parents were my grandparents and I never thought to ask her if she’d met her birth family. They never seemed very important to my mum, so they weren’t very important to me either.
“She found her mother, Joan. Or rather, she found a relative. A cousin. Joan had passed away already. The cousin, I don’t remember her name anymore, she told us Joan died young. Early-onset dementia. It progressed rapidly. We did some research and we knew then that there was a chance your mother would get it too.”
When Mum had told me I had a chance of getting it too, I had thought, doesn’t everyone have a chance? It was a while before I really understood what it meant. Mum and Dad had argued about it. A couple of years after they’d told me about her diagnosis, when I was about fifteen, I overheard them fighting. Mum thought I deserved to know. Dad thought it could wait. Mum said he’d wait forever if he could. Dad said maybe that wasn’t a bad idea. Mum said it wasn’t right for them to make that decision. Mum won.
“She knew before she had me that this would happen to her?”
I couldn’t believe she would do something so selfish.
“No,” Dad said quickly. “We didn’t know. We knew there was a chance. Just as you know there’s a chance for you. But the point is, it never stopped her from living any part of her life fully and it shouldn’t stop you. I sometimes think we should never have told you. I was afraid you would live your whole life in the shadow of something that might never happen and I was right.”
“How could you have a kid when you knew what could happen?” I said, voice shaking. I pressed my fingertips tight against my thumb. Don’t cry.
“Honestly,” Dad said, rubbing his face, his words coming out from between his hands, “when we found out she was pregnant I asked her if she was sure this was a good idea. Your mother insisted it was her life, her choice to make.” Dad’s voice cracked. “Then when you came along, I felt so ashamed that I’d ever thought you could be a bad idea.” He said it like an apology.
It wasn’t the apology I wanted.
“Well, you were wrong,” I said through gritted teeth, and I pushed past Beth as she wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “It wasn’t just her life.”
31.
My mother knew before I was born that she might lose her mind. That I’d lose her. That she could abandon me. It was like stepping off the waltzer when your body thinks it’s still spinning, but the ground beneath you is still. Like the moment of finding out for the first time that Mum had dementia, of Hannah breaking up with me, of realizing that Mum had to move out, of being told Dad was getting remarried. Over and over again I kept settling into a new way of living. I’d reel and then adapt and just when I thought I knew what life was going to be now, it threw something else at me. I thought I was living on a roller coaster like everyone else, ups and downs, but my life was more like emotional dodgeball and I kept getting hit. And yet again, like at all the worst moments of my life, I had nowhere to turn.
My phone buzzed again and I checked it this time, more out of habit than any real interest in what the message was. Downstairs, when I felt it go, I had hoped against my will that it was Ruby. But the texts were from people from school asking about my results. Shane and Georgia, who I’d hung about with a bit but hadn’t spoken to since the last exam, and a couple of others who I barely spoke to at all, the kind of people who needed to compare their results to everyone else to
figure out if they were happy about their own or not. I ignored them all. Another text came in while I was deleting those.
OLIVER
Don’t you want to know what I got?? ☹
SAOIRSE
No.
OLIVER
6 H1s TWINSIES
SAOIRSE
No.
OLIVER
Party tonight?
On the one hand, I really wanted to get drunk, and getting drunk in a group is socially acceptable. Doing it alone is considered “a problem.” On the other hand, in spite of what I’d told myself before, I still didn’t know if I could handle running into Ruby, even if that’s not something totally over it people worry about. I wanted to ask about her, but I wouldn’t give Oliver the satisfaction. I didn’t know what he knew about the breakup. He and Ruby seemed pretty close and he might tell her I was asking after her.
OLIVER
Ruby won’t be there. She went home for a couple of days so she could pick up her results with her friends. Not back here until the weekend.
SAOIRSE
Fine. I’ll be there but it has nothing to do with her. We’re cool.
OLIVER
Whatever you say. There’ll be plenty of tipsy straight girls for you to crack onto instead.
SAOIRSE
I don’t crack onto anyone. I merely welcome advances.
My reply felt hollow, though. Kissing girls who don’t really fancy you, who just want to see what it’s like (hello, my lips are not actually that different from teenage boy lips. I even have a light moustache when I’m not keeping up with personal grooming) feels very different to kissing someone who touches you like they want more. I pushed those thoughts out of my head. They weren’t helpful. Thinking of Ruby and the feeling of her skin, of her hands on my body, of the way she pulled me close like she wanted to melt together, wasn’t going to get me anywhere good.
Though I’d planned to go and see Mum after getting the results, I didn’t have it in me anymore and I was too raging to even look at her. I was even more angry knowing that I couldn’t go and tell her off, scream and stomp my feet like I did with Dad. So I lay down and tried to ignore the guilt. It wasn’t like she’d notice anyway. She wasn’t exactly always putting my interests first even when she was well.
I forced it out of my head. I put Ruby out of my head too. I put my fight with Dad out of my head and exam results and the future out of my head. I let it all go blank. Feelings are overrated.
Arriving at the party gave me déjà vu. Same people, same music, same house. The main difference was that as I wandered through the house, being stopped every few minutes, instead of how did I think the exams went, I was asked what results I got. After a few minutes, people began coming up and congratulating me on my results without me saying anything. As I always do at these kinds of things, I kept one eye out for Hannah, my lizard brain on the alert so I didn’t accidentally bump into her.
Part of my brain was also on the alert for Ruby, even though it felt a little different. When I thought I might run into Hannah, I panicked. I genuinely didn’t want to see her. And yet tonight, even though I knew she wasn’t here, a part of me was hoping in spite of myself to see Ruby. Maybe that’s what a relationship means, carrying a part of someone around for the rest of your life. I pictured myself elderly and skittish, the ghosts of so many girlfriends past following me around. Lifelong voluntary celibacy seemed like a good option. Unless I didn’t get that far. Perhaps whoever they were to me would all crumble away, bit by bit, until I didn’t even know I’d forgotten them.
The jostling party organism swilled me around in its mouth and spat me out in the kitchen, where I poured myself a large drink from the bottle at the back of the freezer even though it was cheap Tesco Value vodka tonight.
“Ahhh!” a girl from my English class, Laura, screamed in my direction, though the sound was mostly swallowed up by the music. She embraced me, sloshing half her drink on the floor. We never really spoke much aside from usual class chitchat. She was tipsy but not completely wasted. Her words tumbled out, slippery on her tongue, but her eyes were focused.
“How are you?” she sang. “I heard you got, like . . . all the points? That’s wild!”
I didn’t tell her that I had a lot of time to study when I had no real friends and nothing else to do.
“What about you?” I asked.
“Average. I did good in maths but it was ordinary level. I got what I needed.”
I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to make excuses. That my grades didn’t mean I thought she was stupid because she didn’t get them too. I thought it would come out patronizing so I asked her what she was going to study instead.
“Animation. I had to submit a portfolio. That mattered more than my grades.”
I didn’t even know she liked to draw. Of course, there was no reason why I would.
“What about you?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
The final confirmation had come that afternoon, but seeing it in black and white only filled me with dread. I watched as she reached for comforting words she could give me. I could practically see her scanning her brain for the right ones, a child choosing a toy carefully from the shelf to share.
“You’ll figure it out,” she said. “You can do anything you want with your points.”
I smiled and agreed that I would work it out, because what was the use of telling her that I didn’t want to go to university anyway?
I heard a dozen different career options from my classmates that night, shouted into my ear with beer breath and crisp crumbs. Biomedical science, hospitality and events, philosophy, graphic design, pharmacology, and the oddly specific town and country planning and landscape design.
I nodded politely and told everyone That sounds really interesting. They asked me what I was doing and I stopped telling them I didn’t know. I told everyone something different instead, borrowing from other classmates. When Jennifer Loughran told me she was going to do occupational therapy, I told Shane Nelson I was doing occupational therapy, and so on. I told Aisling Cheung I was going to study forensic science in Glasgow and when she started talking to me about CSI, I pretended I had to pee.
Oliver was in the piano room again. He wasn’t at the piano this time; he was sitting on the floor against the wall, reading a book. There was an empty glass and a bottle of vodka beside him.
“I knew the good stuff would be in here with you,” I said. “You’re very predictable, you know.” I slouched down beside him.
“This is for you,” he said, handing me the empty glass and the bottle. “I’m teetotal tonight. I have to drive in the morning.”
I pursed my lips, but I took the glass anyway and poured myself a drink. “If being predictable means I get bottle service then I guess I can live with it.”
I sipped it. It didn’t burn like the cheap stuff. “Where do you have to drive in the morning?”
Oliver blushed. “Summer camp,” he mumbled. “I’m volunteering at a summer camp, OK? Ruby saw a flyer about it and my parents wouldn’t leave me alone.”
I didn’t laugh like I normally would have, picturing Oliver rounding up kids and teaching them archery and canoeing. Ruby’s name hung in the silence between us. Ruby Ruby Ruby.
“What happened?” Oliver asked eventually.
I swished the memory of the fight around in my mouth like I was trying to extract flavors from a nice wine, but it all tasted bitter.
“I think I fucked up,” I said.
“That sounds about right.” Oliver nodded. “She didn’t say anything. I don’t know if I should tell you, but she’s really upset.”
My heart was torn, half aching for causing her pain, half trilling that she cared enough to feel it.
“What kind of fucking it up did you do? Did you pluck some poor girl from your harem and have your way with her?”
I shoved him gently. “No. She wanted something I can’t give her.”
“Not an STD, then?
” he said, grinning.
“Oh fuck off.”
“No, come on,” he said, putting a serious face on, “I genuinely want to know. I care about her.”
I sighed but reluctantly gave him one more chance to act like a human being.
“She wanted something more . . . I dunno . . . real? That’s not what I wanted. We had an agreement. I told her that the first night.” I realized I sounded like I was defending myself on trial and maybe I needed to tell the truth. “I made all these rules for myself about what I shouldn’t do so I wouldn’t get hurt. Don’t have serious conversations. Don’t picture a future together. Don’t fight and don’t make up. Basically don’t have feelings, don’t fall in love. I knew it wouldn’t work. I shouldn’t have let myself get talked into it.”
“Maybe you wanted someone to talk you into it,” he said, knocking his knee against mine. “Maybe you want something real too. Why are you fighting it?”
I resisted the urge to make fun of his Oprah psychobabble and really thought about it. In the beginning, it felt so important that I didn’t tell her about Mum or about anything to do with me, and that was OK because it was a fling. But after a while, it started to feel like a lie and I clung on to my rule of not talking about it even when it no longer did what it was supposed to do, which was give me space not to think about it. It was meant to stop me from getting hurt. Instead, I thought about it and it festered and I stomped it down so it wouldn’t slip out.
But the thing was, as much as I could have these realizations, they didn’t change anything. They only made me more certain that it was not good for me to be in a relationship. If I’d let her in all along, let myself be honest, it still would have ended, and we’d have lost something even bigger. We’d both be even more hurt. What use would all that pain be? I’d tried to have a relationship where it was only the fun stuff, the kissing and dates and holding hands, but you couldn’t have a romantic montage and skip the rest of the movie. As much as I’d tried to avoid feeling it, if I was being honest with myself, the last couple of weeks had been torture. If I wanted to stop feeling pain, and causing pain, I needed to go back to a strict no-relationships policy.