My friends and I had idle thoughts that we should be elsewhere – at the small, mean local summer camps, perhaps, improving ourselves – but we dismissed them. If feeling energetic, we entertained the idea of tennis – but only the idea of it. We ran and scattered, ran and scattered. We rehearsed, again and again, the stories of the missing girls. We sketched love hearts on our skin with sun cream. We were always projecting futures: we were dropping out of school, we were going to live in caravans, raise our children collectively with few rules. On my fourteenth birthday, we went to the one pub that allowed us in and leaned across the pool table like we were working for tips.
One night, collecting me, the Australian caught sight of my friends and I could see him appraising their outfits and sly, knowing gaits.
‘Those girls will get you into trouble,’ he said.
I shrugged like I couldn’t wait.
(He was right. In three years, at exam-time, I would be dragged into an airless room, papers would be flung at me, and a nun would say, Well, things aren’t looking so amusing now, are they? It’s a shame, the nun would say, because when you came into this school we thought you were going to do great things. Now, we would be surprised if you do anything – anything at all. And, not for the last time in my life, I would curse myself for laughing when nothing was funny, and staying still when I should have been moving, and moving when I should have been staying still.)
If my parents went out, he was instructed to call to the main house to check on me. They were meant to be brief visits but time always got away from us; two people aware they were doing something wrong but not knowing how to name it. One evening, I begged him to stay and watch The Exorcist. As an incentive, I offered microwave pizza.
‘Are you old enough?’ he asked, referring to the film.
‘Yes,’ I said, disgusted.
The film was dark, but I thought it would be darker, more twisted. It was just priests, really – priests in unusual circumstances.
He yawned and leaned back on the leather couch, revealing a large scar running from the top of his trousers to his belly-button, healed but still red and angry- looking. I glanced and he pulled down his T-shirt. ‘What are you scared of?’ he asked me.
‘Nothing,’ was what I wanted to say, but I had somehow got it into my head that it was wrong to lie to the people you love. So I told him – I knew the way I talked with my friends was silly, that the man who took the missing girls didn’t have a hook for a hand. He was probably normal, and you would be an idiot if you believed otherwise. And that’s how it would be forever – the people who hurt us would look normal and be normal, except for the one thing that meant they weren’t.
‘They are some interesting thoughts for a thirteen-year-old girl,’ he said.
‘Fourteen,’ I corrected him.
I slid closer to him on the couch and thought about how his hands would feel underneath my clothes. Onscreen, the actress spewed and I explained it was pea-soup. I wanted him to understand that you could fool other people but you couldn’t fool me.
*
We read aloud an article from a woman’s magazine and giggled. ‘In her lifetime, a woman will have an average of twelve lovers.’ Twelve seemed an extraordinary number to us then. What would we say to all these men? What would we say to them with our clothes off? We thought about the missing girls. How many boyfriends did they have before they were taken? One? None?
He invited a woman to stay with us and, unbelievably, she did. Her named was Genevieve. He didn’t call her his girlfriend, but he didn’t have to. It was my first encounter with jealousy and I took a lively interest in it. Out of solidarity, so did my friends. Together we hated her with all the blackness we could muster. We hated her haircut, which we suspected was a pudding-bowl style but spiked up. A secret pudding-bowl. We hated her long, thin legs which she paraded in shorts. We hated the colourful silk underwear she hung up to dry outside the caravan. This underwear was so obviously corrupt that we wondered if there was an authority figure we could contact about it? What did it cover? Where could you buy it? We hated her Australian accent and her expression of gentle, calm acceptance. When the boys from the green asked about her – they had seen her striding through town – we nearly lost our minds with outrage. She was ancient. She was twenty-four.
I rifled through her things, her creams and lotions, as though, if carefully handled, they could reveal her secrets to me. I had become an expert at this scandalous practice from babysitting for a family who paid me very little, or sometimes paid me in chocolate, or, most usually, didn’t pay me at all. I quietly ripped apart their home as if it were a formal duty. I studied receipts, flicked tiredly through their clothes, checked out the hidden corners of their bedside lockers. If I took something, I felt no guilt about it. I told myself it was because they were blow-ins, because they had more money than my family, because they had lived. Or I told myself these small items would prefer to come with me, that I could give them a better home.
The parents were oddly faceless to me. They trusted me with their child, when they probably shouldn’t have. He ran around the house naked, shrieking, exposing his nubby penis, and I did little or nothing to stop him. I often hid in the hope that my disappearance and dramatic reappearance would calm him. Or I closed my eyes and wished that when I re-opened them he would simply be gone. This worked once, and when it did, my body shut down. I ran through the house, wearing new shorts that felt grim and foolish, shouting his name. Eventually I found him outside, playing happily in the patch of land they called the green.
That night, on the drive home, mistaking my terror for sensitivity, the Australian complimented me on my silences. He said most people didn’t know when to be quiet. I agreed and I huddled closer to the car door. I couldn’t tell him I had magicked away a child, that I was evil, that my legs looked squat in shorts. Passing under the eerie streetlights, on the blank roads, we looked like a photograph from an instructional pamphlet warning about the dangers of strange men. Or the dangers of babysitters. Or the greatest pamphlet never written: a warning of the romantic danger of being left alone in a car with someone you’re attracted to.
A willing silence working in my favour, he said, ‘Genevieve wants me to marry her.’
I suspected that she had followed him here with that in mind. I often found her looking disagreeably at the notice board in the supermarket, picking up signs for gardening jobs or part-time secretarial work, and putting them down again.
‘People like to do that,’ I said, as if I had already dismissed marriage as an option for myself.
‘Should I?’ he smiled the useless, halting smile of the perennially uncertain. He looked at me, urgent, as if it was a decision we could reach together.
‘You should do whatever you want,’ I told him.
I had been measured for a bra recently and my breasts were actually largish. We were probably going to start going to discos soon. I owned several skirts. I would be fine.
Genevieve’s problem was she came to Ireland looking for her boyfriend, the one she met at home, but he was gone. He had changed. ‘Big deal,’ I said to my mother. We all had stuff going on. ‘Big deal,’ my mother promised. ‘Until it happens to you.’
Genevieve hung around the main house, snacking, exchanging tips for lined eyes with my mother. Her presence only confirmed what I’d always known about my mother – she would have been a different sort of woman if my father and I had let her. My father and I had something definite in common that didn’t even need to be mentioned, and we excluded her. In that hot, rotting kitchen, the flies conspiring above our heads, my mother talked to Genevieve about her life as though it was still a work in progress. She spoke condescendingly of the people in the town, as though they were characters in a book she had picked up and quickly put down, bored. It was unnerving. One more week with Genevieve and I think my mother would have lost all inhibitions, and said: ‘You know what? I hate this dump and every last person living in it.’ There were several th
ings I couldn’t bear to hear and that was top of the list.
We felt sure Genevieve wouldn’t last until the end of the summer, but she confounded even us with how quickly she left. I watched her outside the caravan most nights and, despite myself, I felt pity for her. She sat in an old deckchair, smoked roll-ups and sang quietly, holding slight notes. She drank beer and let the bottles roll away from her. I had never heard songs like that before, they weren’t rock songs or songs off the radio, and she never knew all the words.
If she was waiting for him to come out and join her, he never did. Her last week they fought loudly and frequently. Her face developed the sunken look of someone who has become familiar with saying sorry.
This was it, according to my mother, the only story – the woman behaved desperate, got it in the neck, went ugly. He took her bag to the front gate, but didn’t wait with her. I asked her if she had a plan and she said, God, no, I don’t have a fucking clue where I’m going, and that answer seemed brave and insane all at once. My friends and I celebrated her departure like it was an amazing heist we had pulled off. We went to the pub and got ambitious with alcohol left in abandoned glasses. It made us solemn. Genevieve was tall and the right age. She had good legs. We hoped she didn’t hitch.
Shortly after she left, my mother came into the bathroom when I was in the tub and sat on the edge. I pulled my knees up. Our bath was cracked and plastic and, if I splashed, water flooded the floor, soaked into the hallway, trickled into the kitchen and someone, it didn’t matter who, screamed.
‘Was Genevieve pregnant, do you think?’ she asked me.
This was how it was with my mother – everyone was either pregnant or dying.
‘No,’ I said and dipped the tendrils of my hair into the water. I watched them floating shapelessly like weeds. ‘Not pregnant,’ I said, preoccupied. ‘Just annoying.’
(At sixteen one of us would become pregnant. Statistics dictated it would be one of us and statistics will have their dreary way.)
A man was caught violating a woman in a car, not far from us. The woman escaped. The man became a suspect in the missing girls and we gathered around our parents’ leftover papers. Violating, we agreed, was a funny, old-fashioned word. When they questioned this man, he said of the escaped woman, ‘She’s lucky: she’s alive.’ We widened our wild eyes at each other, still brave then, still merciless. Can you believe that, we repeated? She’s lucky: she’s alive.
The summer slipping away from me, I went to the caravan. He wasn’t there but the lights were on and I let myself in. It was damp and musty and had the air of everything being put together in a hurry. The duvet cover was from an old set I recognised from my parents’ room. There wasn’t an oven, just a hotplate with a tube linking it to a canister of gas outside. There was barely anything hanging on the clothing rail. No photos, no postcards. I thought he would revert back to himself, happy again, after Genevieve left, but the opposite happened. He kept odd hours, stayed up all night and returned from the fields in the mornings rumpled, smiling manically. He made mistakes with the animals. He bought a pack of cards and let me beat him, howling mockingly at the moon. He touched my face, told me I was a good girl.
In the bathroom, Genevieve’s creams still littered the shelves as a reminder of her. My intention hardened when I saw them. I sat opposite the slim sliver of wardrobe mirror. I had a babyish face that no amount of make-up could transform. I removed my top. I took off my trousers too and I was, surprising myself, in my underwear. My bra and pants were gritty, cheap and childish looking so I took them off too. It was cold because the window was not a proper window, just two boards my mother had nailed up.
Outside, I could hear the familiar creak of the deckchair and I knew he had arrived back. There was the short snap of matches being lit one after the other. I felt something fluttering on my back teeth. I reached right in, all the way into the part of my mouth I did not know, and yanked out a trail of dead flies – black, long and sticky-looking. I discarded them and I waited.
Hump
At seventy, after suffering several disappointments, the first being my mother, the second being me, my father died. One evening he gathered the family in his room and asked if anyone had any questions. No one did. The next day he died. At the funeral everyone looked like someone I might sort of know. These strangers told anecdotes and made general health suggestions to each other. I passed out the sandwiches. The sandwiches were clingfilmed and oddly perforated, like they had been pierced again and again by cocktail sticks. I said ‘Sambo?’ to every single person in that room. It was a good word, a word I hoped would get me through the entire evening. I wasn’t strong on speaking or finding ordinary things to discuss in large groups. The place was crowded with false grief, people constantly moving positions, like in A & E, depending on the severity of their wounds. I mentioned that I held his wrist when he passed and through the use of the phrase ‘flickering pulse’ I was booted up to First Class.
My father told me he regretted not talking more. He felt the time others used for conversation, he had filled with snooker or nodding or looking away. He surmised, through a mouthful of diabetic chocolate, that he had only spoke thirty per cent of his life. It was a dismal percentage and I was familiar with what dismal percentages could do to a person. We were spending a lot of time together then, linking arms and being totally happy. I had this one trick I did for him. I’d curl up tight into his bed, under the starched sheets, and peep out at the nurses like I was an old lady. It was a scream. They said I was their youngest patient. I laughed and asked them to leave the pills in a tidy arrangement on the bedside locker. My antics gained me a certain level of recognition and infamy in the retirement home and, at times, I could feel my father almost bursting with pride. We both agreed it was the perfect trick for the occasion of his near-death.
I was good at gestures, but it was only in that function room when I spoke my sad-but-true stories in my fragile tone that I finally got the appeal of talking. I thought this is what I will be now: a talker. My career had taken a sinister turn and I had started to keep an eye out, like you do for a new lover, for other things I could try. There weren’t many. All jobs seemed to contain one small thing I just could not do. It was maddening.
I told a number of stories about my father that evening. I was there, but I wasn’t. My mind was mainly preoccupied with what I could do in my new life as a talker: I would be both stylish and intelligent but also deeply affecting in my conversation. When that room of strangers looked up at me I did not know if I wanted them to cry or to clap.
It was in the shower where I found it first. I had moved into my father’s old house, and sometimes would shower sitting down on the stool that was installed for comfort or, if I was feeling up to it, I would stand. The bathroom was filthy with intermittent flashes of what looked like the colour peach. On sitting-down days, I often crawled from one side of the room to the other. I could get away with this because I lived alone. It must have been a standing day as I realised I was a lot closer to the taps than I used to be. I was a lot closer to the hair on the taps. I was stooping over like I was playing the Old Lady in a celebrated stage production, except I was all scrunched up and very naked. I pressed my fingers below my shoulders and felt it shifting, unfurling. The hard roundness of it – like a golf ball or a marble. I dressed myself quickly, being careful not to catch sight of it in the mirror. When I stood on the train that morning, my fingers gripping the rail above, I could feel it growing beneath my skin like a second layer of flesh.
I worked in an office outside the city and we all had the appearance of people who had been brutally exiled. We shed our city selves but, lacking imagination, we had nothing to replace them with. Between the forty of us, I think we could have made a complete person. I had been there six months and it was probably the longest position I ever held. None of it mattered but I liked to pretend it did. If someone came in, I might say ‘Come in!’ That was it. That was the whole script. It wasn’t exactly spirit
ually fulfilling. Often, I was so bored I couldn’t hold a conversation. I walked around cubicles abandoning sentences. Whenever I entered the kitchen area, my colleagues left quickly and without warning. I think they were jealous because my desk got the most direct sunlight. I didn’t understand them at all. I had a habit of thinking I was very unique and interesting.
My one friend spent her days on the phone to the refuse collection. There had been a dispute over the bins, no one knew who started it, but the rubbish had not been collected in six weeks and it was not a time for chit-chat, idle or otherwise. I wanted to tell Paula about my discovery, ask her had she noticed anything different about me, but all she did was place her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone and mutter ‘Sorry’. She had married young and was squeamish about all sorts.
I used my mornings to investigate what was wrong with me. I opened several internet tabs, each one containing something possibly wrong, and explored them all. In the afternoons, my boss came and sat at the edge of my desk, like a hip teacher, and tried on being a thoughtful man. He was always trying to sell me things that were allegedly good for me – almond butter, aloe vera juice, himself. His face was stupidly handsome and so symmetrical it made me roll my eyes to the ceiling. He wasn’t perfect though. I noticed he had a hidden aggressive streak and, at times, I suspected he was responsible for the absent bin men. Also, he was not someone I went to for love and affection and he was maybe better dressed than I would have liked. I had a lot of problems with him. He was obsessed with success. I felt I was under constant inspection, and he had a way of looking me up and down like I was a CV full of errors and misspellings. He was older, but it was hard to pin down anything precise. We went to a lot of dimly lit restaurants. Anytime I thought I got a handle on his age, he ordered another bottle of wine and it was gone again. We talked mostly about the office, the flies that we couldn’t get rid of, the people we disliked, how we physically had to wrench ourselves out of bed in the morning. Afterwards we would go back to his and he would attempt one of his two-and-a-half moves. He always fell asleep with both hands on my shoulders like we were in a conga line at a party. Conga, conga, conga. Honestly, I hated him.
Show Them a Good Time Page 4