Our Little Cruelties

by Liz Nugent

  One day, I counted the peas on each of our plates as Dad served them. Will had thirteen, Luke had nineteen and I had ten.

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They got more peas than me.’

  ‘Ah, Brian, not this again!’

  ‘And Luke’s pork chop is bigger than mine.’

  Will piped up. ‘I should get the biggest chop. Mum said boys need meat to make them grow stronger.’

  ‘We’re all boys, you eejit,’ I said.

  Luke picked up the chop with his hands and put it on Will’s plate. ‘I don’t mind, you can have it.’

  ‘Ugh! Now it has your germs all over it.’

  I speared it with my fork and lifted it on to my plate. ‘Fine, I’ll have it!’

  Will was furious and started pulling it back towards him.

  ‘Boys!’ Dad shouted, and he rarely shouted. ‘Shut up and eat your dinner or I’ll take it all away and there’ll be no dessert either. Why can’t you be more like Luke? You’re supposed to be setting an example to him instead of the other way around. Cop on and behave yourselves.’ Luke smiled at Dad and Dad ruffled his hair.

  Will let go of the plate. I did another quick check. We had two potatoes each. Dad turned round to serve his own dinner and, as he did, Will leaned over and spat on my chop.

  ‘What did –’ The anger took me and I could scarcely articulate my rage. I lifted his plate and threw it at the wall. Dad whirled round, lifted me out of the chair and carried me towards the stairs.

  ‘Will spat on my chop!’ I screamed. He said nothing. He flung open my bedroom door and threw me on to the bed and closed the door behind him.

  ‘You can stay there until I tell you to come down.’

  I stewed with anger, furious at the injustice of it all.

  Half an hour later, Luke crept into our room with a napkin containing his smaller chop and his two potatoes.

  ‘You must be hungry,’ he said. ‘God says we should feed the hungry.’

  ‘What about the peas?’

  He looked troubled. ‘I ate the peas.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

  Ravenous, I demolished the food quickly and then was called downstairs by my father.

  I entered the kitchen.

  ‘Well, what have you to say for yourself?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Right then, that’s over. Your dinner is in the warming oven, but I ate your dessert.’

  He went into the sitting room and turned on the TV.

  Will laughed at me. ‘Eejit. It was strawberry shortbread. Delicious.’ He licked his lips and went up to do his homework.

  Luke watched as I ate my second dinner.

  ‘Brian, can I have one of your potatoes?’

  I gave him the smallest. He watched like a hungry dog as I ate the rest in a hurry, my arm circling my plate.

  29

  1993

  Will takes what he wants. He always has. He had this inbuilt confidence and sense of entitlement that I’ve never felt. Maybe it’s the fact that he always knew what he wanted to be when he grew up, or because he is the oldest. He’d been obsessed with the cinema since he managed to sneak into Jaws at the Forum under Dad’s coat when he was eight years old. I had no doubt he was going to end up being a hot-shot film director, because, like I say, Will always got what he wanted.

  Luke was different, and that’s putting it mildly. He was odd. His childhood obsession with religion was nuts. He was always a loner, the school dork with no friends who was always pretty bright and got decent results. Then, two summers before his final school exams, I found him messing with his old Meccano set, and casually said he should try to do engineering in college. He agreed, and then studied really hard, until he got As or Bs in almost every subject. He always had an obsessive personality. But nobody – and I mean nobody – who knew him growing up would have expected that by the age of twenty-one he’d be an international pop star with his own big house.

  I was envious of both of them. Luke was rich and successful and famous, and Will got Susan.

  Susan and I were just colleagues in the bookshop where I worked but I had an inkling that she liked me. I hadn’t had a proper girlfriend by then, just a series of one-night stands with girls I had no real interest in, though to be fair, they didn’t show much interest in me either. They were mostly drunken encounters. I was sharing a house with Cillian Gogan and Nicky Sharpe, two college friends, and bringing a girl back was always a risk. None of us were natural housekeepers and the rent was cheap for a good reason. The house was semi-derelict. Hot water from the taps was never guaranteed. Mould crawled up the kitchen walls. The downstairs carpet had almost been eaten away by moths. Consequently, we did not treat the place with much respect. We went months without buying toothpaste or using the vacuum cleaner. Nicky kept goldfish in the bathroom washbasin, but there would often be a dead one floating on the top, and he wasn’t particularly conscientious about changing the water, so the reek from fish poo combined with Cillian’s digestive disorder made the bathroom a particularly challenging scene for visiting girls. An old armchair in the front garden had mushrooms growing out of it.

  We were a pretty chaotic trio. Nicky was an accountant during the week, but at weekends he DJ’d at raves and consumed enormous amounts of pharmaceuticals. Cillian was a bit of a drifter, like me. I was an English teacher, not a particularly good one and certainly not a committed one. Dead-eyed teenage boys in a Christian Brothers school depressed me as much as I depressed them. I was a part-timer and worked a few days a week in a bookshop in town. Cillian was a night manager of a three-star hotel on the wrong side of town. His parents had been my parents’ friends when we were kids, but I think they lost touch after Dad died. They visited the house once, recoiled in horror and never came back. Mum never visited, thank God.

  So getting a girl back to the house was something we only did at night, and then we’d have to try to hustle her out before she got sober or dawn broke and the full horror of her surroundings would be apparent.

  When I met Susan at work, she always asked me to help her with the heavier boxes of books instead of the other guys and I guess that stoked my ego a bit because I was clearly fitter and stronger than them. Then we started taking lunch breaks together. We’d conspire to get rostered with each other. It was all platonic. She referred to me as her friend when talking to other people, but she’d wink and put her hand on my arm in conversation in such a way that led me to think she was interested in more. And that American accent was so unusual in Dublin. She looked and sounded like someone in a TV show.

  A few weeks into our ‘friendship’, over lunch, she squinted at me and said, ‘You have coffee foam on your nose,’ and I wanted the floor to open up. I wiped my nose with my handkerchief and, trying to make light of it, I said, ‘Yeah, I have a weird nose.’

  She saw my embarrassment and peered at my face and laughed. ‘Oh my God, it’s not bad or ugly. Come on! We’ve been lunching and working side by side for months and this is the first time I’ve even noticed. Are you seriously self-conscious about that?’

  Yes, I was seriously self-conscious. Mum and Will in particular would often mention it. I’d spent most of my teenage years with my hand in front of my face. It was hard to believe that Susan was only noticing it now, but then, I wondered, maybe she was just being kind or else she hadn’t been looking at my face as much as I’d been looking at hers. Her skin was milky pale, her huge brown eyes were full of expression and mischief, and her lips – her lips were kissable. She was slight and slim, and extremely attractive. She dressed in a flamboyant punky style, spiky short hair and scarlet lipstick. She belonged on an album cover.

  Susan had a friend who worked in the box office of the Abbey Theatre and occasionally she’d invite me to see some awful show with her and I’d sit beside her in the dark, wanting to take her hand but terrified that she might recoil. And then I decided I would invite her to Mum’s for lunch. Our home was larger than most, I suppos
e, and way more impressive than my shared house, which I was ashamed to show her. I knew Mum would make a fuss so I didn’t tell her in advance that Susan was coming. I wasn’t sure what Will and Luke would make of her. I just prayed they wouldn’t say anything to embarrass me or to insult her.

  Will and his girlfriend, Irene, and Luke and the drummer from his band were there when we arrived. Irene was hanging off of Will while he more or less ignored her. I guessed he was bored by her already.

  Over dinner, Mum was fascinated to learn that Susan grew up in a house without a television.

  ‘But what did you do, in the evenings, for entertainment?’ she said.

  ‘Well, mostly we’d read, play cards and board games, or discuss current affairs, argue about politics. My family would have been Republicans originally, but Detroit is beginning to get real run-down these days. No more Motor City. My mom and I voted for Bill Clinton last year. My pop would turn in his grave if he knew.’

  Will joined in the conversation. ‘But didn’t you feel left out, when you heard other people discussing television programmes?’

  ‘Not then, but we went to the cinema every week. We weren’t completely unaware of who were the big-name actors and actresses. When I started sharing apartments with my friends, it took me ages to get used to the tiny TV screen …’

  We were heading into dangerous territory then, because Will could discuss film until the end of time and I could see he found her interesting.

  ‘William is going to be a film director,’ said Irene, and Will scoffed and corrected her. ‘A producer, actually. Directors are just hired hands. Producing is where the power is, and the money.’

  There was an awkward silence then and I was glad because Will had just made a tit out of himself. The rest of the afternoon went fine. Susan had come to one of Luke’s gigs with me, she’d met him before. He and his drummer were so obviously stoned that Mum just ignored them. They left early to meet some visiting French music arranger in Windmill Lane.

  I walked Susan to the bus stop and she kissed me on the cheek when her bus came. I thought I could make my move soon. I liked her, she liked me and my family. I wasn’t going to wait around.

  I had full teaching hours for the following week, covering for a sick geography teacher, so it was Saturday before I got to see Susan again. She had made a cake. We were going to St Stephen’s Green on our lunch break. And then, about an hour after the bookshop opened, Will walked in. I was surprised to see him, but he wasted no time.

  ‘Where’s Susan?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I broke up with Irene, I like Susan.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Will, you can’t just pick up women and drop them like that.’

  ‘You mean, you can’t.’

  ‘Susan’s a friend of mine.’

  ‘I know, but it’s not like she’s your girlfriend, is it?’

  I couldn’t say anything. I was furious. He found her in the children’s section, and afterwards, when he’d left, she came to me, smiling and blushing.

  ‘Your brother’s just asked me out for dinner, like, on a date!’

  I stared at her. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Well … I said yes. Why? Is he a monster? Should I have said no? Tell me all about him.’

  The most hurtful thing was that she didn’t appear to notice how hurt I was. I made some excuse to cancel our lunch plans and worked in the education section for the rest of the day.

  I expected that Will would date her for a few weeks and then drop her, but as the months went by they became closer, and she delayed her plans to go travelling. My dreams of mending her broken heart and putting her back together again after Will had dumped her faded. They were a couple, and they seemed to be solid. I tried to maintain our friendship, but she would talk about Will and Mum and Luke, often telling me things about my own family that I didn’t know. I found it increasingly hard to be around her, but even harder to stay away. We would all three go for drinks together sometimes, but it killed me to see their hands intertwined, her head nestling into his shoulder.

  Did Will know I was in love with her? I honestly don’t know. And would he have cared if he did know? Ultimately, Susan chose him. If she had been interested in me, she could have said no when he asked her out that first time, but was it just lousy timing on my part? I didn’t have any ownership of her. I’d read The Female Eunuch. I’d discussed it with Susan. She was free to do what she wanted. She said I was a good feminist. But I did not like it. Not one bit.

  In the summer of 1993, Luke was headlining Ireland’s largest summer music festival. It was a big deal for him and he was nervous about it. There had been hints in gossip columns about his bizarre behaviour, but he laughed it off when we questioned him. He was hugely successful abroad, but the home crowd was always tougher and readier to take the piss out of him. He would perform in front of 50,000 people, and his manager, Sean, was turning up at his house every morning to take him to the gym and bring him to dance rehearsals.

  Luke, to everyone’s surprise, could really move. Mum said he got that from her. I think it’s the only thing she ever claimed that Luke might have inherited from her. He had a way of dancing that was original. He could move elegantly across a stage in an almost balletic style with this boyish charm that he simply did not possess in real life. He was not as good as Michael Jackson but better than George Michael. They had a damn good choreographer. He had a troupe of twelve stunning-looking girls who danced with him and around him, and sometimes on top of him. Some of it seemed a bit indecent considering the age of his fan base. There had been complaints to the phone-in radio show Liveline about him. Mothers saying that he was perverting their children. His videos were played on heavy rotation on MTV Europe. But I think the attraction of Luke for these kids was that he looked so young. No matter how he danced, he still looked more like a child than an adult, and his appeal lay in the fact that he appeared asexual and therefore non-threatening to prepubescent girls.

  Luke had arranged for backstage passes for Will and Susan and me for this festival. Now that school summer holidays had started, I was working full-time in the bookshop. Avoiding Susan and missing her like crazy. I was determined to find a girl to come with me so that I wouldn’t be Will and Susan’s gooseberry, but the closer it got to the day, the more I thought about spending a whole day in Susan’s company, and I didn’t want to waste any of the time on someone else. And then, the best news of all – Will got finance for a short he was going to produce and he needed to fly to London to convince some English actor to be in it. He invited Susan to go with him, but she wanted to see Luke’s gig and I took that as a sign that maybe she wasn’t fully committed to Will after all. I mean, who would turn down a weekend in London to see an Irish teenybopper pop star in a field, but then she told me she was going ‘to support Luke and to represent Will’. There were a few other more serious acts on the bill and I knew she liked The Sugarbombs. Maybe that was the attraction. It certainly wasn’t me.

  Backstage that night, in Luke’s dressing-room trailer, Sean tried to calm him with some positivity mantra bullshit. We hung out with him, reassured him that he was going to be great. Sean left the room and Luke pulled a bag of pills out of his pocket, bit one in half and put it on his tongue.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s new stuff. It just gives you a huge lift, makes you feel ace! Want to try one?’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘You can’t perform in front of that crowd off your face, Luke. Are you mad?’

  ‘I’ll try one,’ said Susan, and I immediately felt like some old fuddy-duddy dad character, ruining everyone’s fun. Luke picked a pill out of a small plastic packet and pushed it into her mouth. Susan grinned at me. ‘Come on, Brian, we have to let our hair down a little!’ Luke laughed and gave me a pill too. I swallowed it with a bottle of warm beer.

  ‘They’re quite strong. I’ve only taken half because I have to go out there, but I guarantee, you two will have a great time.’ Luke went to get re
ady and we were left alone in the dressing room.

  ‘I take a few pills with Will now and then, it’s no big deal, Brian.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, not sure at all and grasping at excuses to seem cool. ‘We all do that from time to time, but I’m not sure Luke is the most stable of people to be taking this stuff. We don’t even know what it is.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe nothing will happen, in which case we’ve nothing to lose.’

  ‘Or maybe we’ll all end up in prison or in hospital.’

  ‘Brian, you are so cute.’ But she meant cute in the American way. Cute like a bunny rabbit.

  Ten minutes later, at the side of the stage, waiting for Luke’s big entrance, I felt a warmth spreading out from the pit of my stomach and a feeling of contentment and satisfaction reached my fingertips. Everything was going to be fine.

  Luke burst on to the stage at the centre of a whirling dervish of dancing girls in scanty spacesuits and the drumbeats cracked the air like fireworks. His energy was electric. Susan, beside me, clapped her hands in joy like a little girl and I felt like doing the same thing. I caught her hand and we laughed at the sheer madness of it all. ‘We’re not in Kansas any more!’ she yelled. ‘Are you feeling it?’

  I was feeling grace and love and acceptance and joy and positivity and beauty and all good things. We hugged, and didn’t pull away from each other, and I stood behind her with my arms around her waist, her head against my shoulder, as we watched my little brother work his magic. God, I loved that weird kid, despite everything. Even the older crowd who might have been there for the support acts were energized by him, and we watched as the crowd surged towards the stage.

  Susan’s hand brushed my thigh as we moved rhythmically to the music and it was the most erotic thing I’d ever felt. I moved my mouth down and kissed the back of her neck. She didn’t stop me. She moved back into me, pushing her arse against my groin. I knew she wanted it too. Without words, we slipped away from the side of the stage and walked, almost ran, back to Luke’s trailer, giddy with laughter and anticipation. Once inside, I locked the door and we kissed hungrily and undressed each other in a hurry.