Show Them a Good Time

by Nicole Flattery

  ‘We can’t throw you in jail,’ she said, with a tight, mean smile, ‘just for being a silly girl.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Not enough room?’

  The policewoman scowled at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired.’

  On the way back, her mother pulled the car into a quiet stretch of motorway so she could cry freely, tears vandalising her face, emotion she didn’t know she had left in her. Her mother let her cry, even allowed her to veer into self-pity, before she asked was she upset because the police didn’t think she could rob a car. They laughed despite themselves, a dark hollow-sized trench hiding inside it, surprised they were still capable of making the sound.

  The second time his wife reported a made-up crime, he went alone. He explained that after the birth of their son, his wife had developed postnatal depression, then just depression, the regular kind. So she can be difficult sometimes, the police said.

  When he came home to the house they were now renting together outside Dublin – in an estate of identical houses so alike that she often arrived at the wrong door – the back of his work shirt was soaked, and he was shaken in his own unshakeable way. In the middle of the night, he woke up, his breath sour, and told her he didn’t like the word difficult, had never liked it. They didn’t smile then, they wouldn’t dare, but there were still whispered jokes between them, in trouble with the law, like two teenagers on the lam.

  The third time the police got involved in their lives, they went together. A teacher had discovered bruising on the boy’s body, still and silent purple lakes, signs of abuse. After an investigation that moved slow, then fast, everything being worked out in rooms that didn’t include them, the boy’s mother was declared unfit and he was sent to live with them permanently. ‘By who?’ the woman wanted to ask, ‘declared an unfit mother by who?’ They had a few interactions with the same policewoman from her first encounter, the police seemingly attached to them now. She sometimes looked at the woman like she forgave her. This makes it easier for you. You must be happy now.

  They married in an embarrassed ceremony shortly before they went to Paris. It was a year after the funeral; he changed suits. Her friends donned confused formalwear. She was having them on, right? No one could be this in love, no one could make this sacrifice. Certainly not her. They thought the production of her life, always entertaining, was never going to end. She spent a lot of time in the bathroom, avoided the food, searched for her mother’s features in her own when they stood side by side in the mirror.

  Throughout all of this, the boy said almost nothing and she watched him like he was a crucial witness. Everything she knew about him was mediated through others: his teacher, his father, the guards. He had to speak sometime though. That was the deal in this life – no matter how much you tried to avoid it, you had to speak sometime.

  In bed with the man in the weeks before the ceremony – still her boyfriend then, fiancée if she felt like being technical, both terms startlingly trite for what they were trying to do – he held her tightly in his sleep as if she were going to sneak out. A restless one-night stand. His grief had been huge, paralysing, and the guilt was worse. So they put a ban on sadness, binned newspapers, left the television on cartoons of pink hyperactivity.

  Grief had a time frame and when they reached the end of that time frame, and he wasn’t recovered and neither was his son, money was the problem. If they had money, they could somehow circumnavigate the time frame. He was in numbers and was constantly trying to beat the morose odds, trying to outrun a train. He wanted to make her happy. It was her turn to be happy. People were the problem for a while, general people and then, more specifically, this country. This country was going to make him exercise, this country was going to make him get up early, this country was going to make him put a brave face on it. Let’s go somewhere, he said, that makes miserable a look, that smiles only when it absolutely has to.

  ‘Paris,’ she said.

  She bought a guidebook and flipped through it before bed. It was just pictures of macarons and rich, oppressive buildings. There was no guidance in it. At night, she curled her body into a promise in answer to his clawing question: she wouldn’t leave them.

  *

  There was occasionally something so cheerfully immoral about the city that it caught her off guard, made her feel like her former self. Go and have an absurd love affair, it told her. Go on. You’ve done it before. Do it again. Walk around naked underneath your coat. She considered the possibility that everyone was naked underneath their coats. It wouldn’t surprise her. The city was silent during the day and loud in the evenings, and the sudden transition alarmed her. It could be bossy in that way – be scared, don’t be scared, now be terrified. Once the Metro came to a stop, the lights died, total silence, not even a cough. Then it moved as normal. There was the sense of an unspoken resilience. Every Monday or Friday, regardless of where she was, how unpredictable she was feeling, she received a phone call from the school. This was what she talked about when she rang home. In a city of novelties, responsibility was the only real novelty.

  It was Halloween when she next stepped into the boy’s school, passing by unremarked except for a few fake skeletons dangling from the ceiling, an unsophisticated holiday. When she stood in the hallway, feeling like a student herself, the place spoke to her of sweat and failure. Already, at under twelve, there were violin, piano, language lessons abandoned, a sluggishness set in. A sea of uniforms swept over her; a tide of blue. The boys all had bad posture and awkward gaits as if ashamed of their childhoods. Why are you so sluggish, she wanted to ask. Perk up. Many of you are going to be rich.

  ‘What’s the collective name for a group of boys?’ she asked the teacher.

  ‘In French or in English?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘I don’t know in either language.’

  ‘A school of boys, maybe,’ the woman said, ‘a drooping of boys.’

  The teacher always so elegant, yet merciless, in her admissions, told her that morning the boy had hit a classmate – slapped him hard across the face for beating him at a race.

  The woman was quiet for a moment. ‘He doesn’t get this from me.’

  ‘No,’ she said, delicately.

  ‘I’m the stand-in.’

  The teacher gave a curt nod in response.

  She leaned forward awkwardly in her chair. ‘You think I’m not trying.’

  ‘I don’t think that.’

  ‘I love that boy.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  A silence passed.

  ‘We don’t want to have to expel him.’

  ‘I will speak to him,’ she said, ‘I will speak to him.’

  ‘He’s very good at running,’ the teacher said, a genuine smile on her face. ‘Fast.’

  ‘He does get that from me,’ she said and closed the door.

  In the hallway she waited for him, watched the overhead skeletons, seemingly relaxed without a skin. She spun one in her hand, made it dance. It seemed to resent the movement. A private school, she thought, its skeleton private.

  On the way home they stopped at the playground beside an imposing church. The city constantly humbled her, reminding her at every opportunity that people had been there before, waving its hands around in excitement about its incredible history. It was irritating. Out of his schoolbag the boy took out a drawing of a ghost, the eyes far apart, in opposite hemispheres. Squiggles representing horror. She wasn’t sure if he was proud of it.

  ‘That’s a beautiful picture,’ she said, cautiously.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, laughing, ‘it’s not.’

  She sat on the wooden bench, her breath rippling out in stubborn, icy waves in front of her. She watched him climbing, tried to spot any trace of athletic talent. Then she watched for what she was told to watch for – any signs of trauma, an impulse toward sadness.

  She never socialised with the other mothers. It was ri
diculous, her attitude problem resurfacing. She felt they knew she had been coerced at the last minute, didn’t have the correct paperwork. She had never held him as a baby, never heard him cry, a cooing from another world. She once listened to sounds of babies crying and decided which one he would have sounded most like. It was a high-pitched, argumentative wailing. She went on the websites with the mothers of newborns, introduced herself. There were some genuine points of interest but nothing to help with a nine year old.

  ‘Are you a troublemaker?’ she asked when he, out of breath, sat down.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s what troublemakers say.’ She rested her arm behind him. ‘Tell me about running.’

  ‘It’s stupid.’

  ‘I like stupid things.’

  ‘You like stupid things?’

  ‘Yeah, I like stupid things,’ she said loudly, finding freedom in it. ‘That’s why they kicked me out of college.’

  ‘You got kicked out?’

  ‘I kicked myself out. But it was the same thing. Tell me.’

  It was fun, he explained, it was good, but to be the best you had to keep practicing and what was the point? It was a version of the argument she had with herself daily. She wanted to encourage him but what was she supposed to do? Tell him, like a dog, to sit down, stand up, kneel? She had no authority. Why was she even here? What did she want from it all – a medal?

  On the Metro, at the last stop, she asked him outright. ‘Why did you hit that boy?’

  ‘The medal,’ he said simply.

  On the front door she stuck the picture of the ghost and drew a large, deliberate X.

  That night, in bed, her husband described his day and she listened. He was in love with the city, wandered around in a loving daze. The distance was good for him and, although his work was difficult, obscure, he was now a medium shade of grey, instead of a deep shade.

  ‘How did you know it would be right?’ he asked.

  ‘I know everything.’

  *

  She had been to Paris once before with her mother when she was twenty, a few months after she dropped out and it didn’t look like she was going back. She had settled into the rhythms of the joke but her mother knew, instinctively, without having to be told, how disappointed she was. It was a cheap trip; they shared a hotel room. Their room contained a tiny, electric Eiffel Tower.

  They were women who knew dirt, country roads, had learned to make conversation in corner shops. Confronted, finally, by glamour, by seriousness, they did everything wrong. They went to the wrong bars, the wrong restaurants, the wrong streets. She wasn’t sure they saw Paris at all, neither of them exactly clear on what a holiday was. They fought on several street corners, made up, and hid their giddy laughter behind their hands. The city was impatient with them. What is so funny, it asked. What could possibly be so funny? Her mother made her go to every museum and when her feet were sore she waited in the cafes. She remembered seeing her across the crowded room, her soles exposed, sitting patiently, waiting for her daughter, looking like an old woman.

  ‘You will make a great old woman,’ she told her mother that night.

  ‘I am an old woman,’ her mother said.

  Later, in their twin beds, she asked her mother was she hard to raise.

  ‘You had an answer for everything. Everything.’

  ‘I don’t anymore. Not at all.’

  Then her mother, a shadow on the wall of the hotel room, told her that she regretted some of her life. The usual. She would have liked to do more, although she didn’t really know what: live in European countries, make mistakes. She never had the time to figure out what it was. She felt her life was small, mechanical. She spoke for a while.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said all that,’ she decided, after a thoughtful pause.

  ‘It’s okay,’ the woman said, ‘it’s fine.’

  ‘I had a nice time.’

  ‘I had a nice time too.’

  They fell asleep, after a while, Paris coming through the slats of the hotel blinds.

  *

  She only saw the boy’s mother once. It was the woman’s fault for recognising her, for being too thorough in her investigations, combing through photographs – looking for what exactly? Evidence that he had adored her, evidence that she had once been someone you could adore. It was in a hardware shop, the woman had gone to buy some paint. She wandered through the shop, marvelling at the anarchic presentation, broken pieces of domesticity everywhere, a sink just sitting in the middle of the floor. It was a joke shop, everything too large or ominous or numerous, hundreds of versions of the same thing, everything gesturing towards a great future. In the lighting section she turned a lamp on and off, imagined it on her bedside table, a matching one opposite, lamps came in pairs. She was decorating the house, no longer able to look at the white walls.

  It was in the paint aisle, staring businesslike at the selection, that she felt the boy’s mother. It occurred to her that they were both standing in front of a wall of paint and that if they had been two different women, they could have been standing in the glow of a painting, a scene that would at least lend some ceremony. But they weren’t, and they weren’t. The tins of paint stretched far back into the wall.

  She glanced at the boy’s mother sideways, but didn’t fully look at her, because she knew then she would have to look at her twice, to see if she could tell from her face, from the planes of it, the missed medication and the locked cabinets and the attempts with the kitchen bleach. In exactly a week the boy’s mother would be dead, succeeding at what she had been trying for a lot of her life.

  The woman didn’t turn her head. She looked fixedly ahead and felt the boy’s mother only as a presence. She wanted to apologise, explain that she hated it all too, fake pleasantness and being alive and fucking paint, that nobody blamed her, but when she looked around, she was gone. It was like a dream and, afterwards, in the car, the paint on her lap, the light came through the windshield blindingly strong, like in a dream.

  *

  When she got a chance she went to cafes and pretended to be a tourist, a woman with a book and a coffee. That afternoon, underneath the coffee, she could smell the boy’s laundry on her – the clothes she had washed and dried earlier. In the long mirror that wrapped around the cafe, she watched herself, not like her idea of a mother, but when she smiled, resolved to smile, the face that looked back was her own mother’s. In the cafe, a parade of faces worked at their food and drink. A man walked around with a baby, clutching him to his chest.

  Her husband’s colleagues told her that after it first happened, you could see people quietly scanning the exits in bars and restaurants. How long would it take to escape? One minute? Two minutes? She waited for the call and, when it came, she went to the school. On the Metro she thought about how easy it would be to step off somewhere else, disappear. It occurred to her that, for the whole of her life, she might never stop having that thought.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in ages,’ she said to the teacher.

  ‘It was three days ago.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It was three days ago. I remember, believe me.’ There was the flicker of a bold smile.

  ‘I admire your relentless professionalism.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She walked behind the teacher, following the clip-clop of her work heels through the long corridor of identical lockers. They walked up several flights of stairs, until they came to a door marked ‘No Entry.’ They entered. Inside there was nothing, a couple of disused ping-pong tables, some broken furniture. At the front there was a curtain.

  ‘I thought you might like to watch,’ the teacher said and pushed back the curtain, revealing a pane of glass, opening, miraculously, into light.

  The woman came closer to the glass and leaned against it. Below, in the gym, a class was happening. She saw the fierce shape of a coach in the centre. Twenty young boys squatted on scattered blue mats, small heads, small bodies, in various states of stretching.
She searched for the boy and found him, his body taut, ready to launch, and she held her breath.

  You’re Going to Forget Me

  BEFORE I FORGET YOU

  My sister called because she couldn’t remember how to make small talk. She’d been having treatments with a doctor she’d encountered online. He specialised in torn minds. He helped women, specifically. It was a difficult process to discuss over the phone. When it first happened, she imagined the small talk words imprinted on the long, uncontrollable sausage-dog from our favourite childhood animation: off he went, walkabouts, his tail haughtily skimming the sky, the words she so desperately needed worn on his long body.

  ‘That dog was so bold,’ she said. ‘Do you remember him?’

  I did. The situation was that she could still discuss politics and art, if she wanted to discuss those things, which she usually didn’t, but she couldn’t say, ‘Hey, how are you?’ She was worried that this new development with small talk might lead people to dislike her in the workplace and other public settings; in her local coffee shop, for example. She would still, as a pregnant woman, like the pleasure of a small cake and an agreeable time. What was so wrong with that? ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ I said.

  I switched the phone from my left ear to my right ear. I switched it back. Something about hotel rooms always made me feel like I was being detained, like a prisoner, before I would be released into another darker, more savage room. A room where I might have to defend myself.

  On the other end of the line, my sister’s voice – her neurosis so familiar, the same shape and texture as my own – inquired as to why people worried so relentlessly about being liked anyway? What was the big deal? It was, she said, only when people liked you too much that problems arose. Problems of possession. Problems of which coffee shops to attend after relationships fell apart. We were two fairly average women – lacking unique selling points, with figures that the magazines, in their general meanness, might accuse of being pear-shaped, hair that suggested frazzled, working minds – but even we had experienced the phenomenon of being liked.