Out of Love

by Hazel Hayes

  We pack up our things quietly, so as not to wake the still-sleeping people all around us, and then make our way slowly towards the exit. Our breath fogs up the crisp morning air as we trudge through fields of grass, still glistening with dew, and the damp soaks straight through my boots, which are already sodden from rain and mud. I feel crusty and cold and I wish that I were going home with Theo, back to our own place in London. Just a little longer, I think, and I’ll be living here with him and we can fall into bed together after weekends like this, and nip to our local shop for bread and milk, and order pizza when we’re too tired to cook and complain about our noisy neighbours. I can’t wait.

  On the train we find our seats and fall asleep before we even leave the station. An hour later we wake up, groggy and cranky and desperate for a cup of tea, so Theo goes in search of the food carriage. Before he goes, he gets a blanket from his backpack, and covers me with it, then kisses me softly on the forehead.

  I snooze again and when I wake up, Theo has returned with only one cup of tea. I frown up at him in confusion.

  ‘Slight problem,’ he says, sitting down beside me. ‘They only had one cup.’

  ‘They only had one cup,’ I repeat.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the whole train?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘They have apparently run out of cups.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say, with a sigh, then close my eyes and snuggle back into my blanket. ‘Enjoy your tea.’

  ‘Wait,’ says Theo, laughing in disbelief, ‘we can share this one.’

  We can’t share this one, actually, because Theo doesn’t take sugar in his tea, and I take an embarrassing amount – so much, in fact, that the idea of tea without sugar is repulsive to me. It’s been a bone of contention between us since the night we met.

  ‘There’s no sugar in that,’ I say.

  ‘Firstly,’ says Theo, ‘we need to address your sugar habit.’

  I roll my eyes. I don’t want to have this argument again.

  ‘And secondly,’ he adds, ‘I’ve got you covered.’

  Theo produces four sachets of sugar from his pocket, finishes his half of the tea, and then pours all four of them into the second half. He shakes his head as he hands me the cup.

  ‘Enjoy,’ he says, and then he settles back into his seat.

  This is the moment I know that Theo is in love with me.

  Are You a Banana?

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asks.

  ‘How long have you got?’ I say.

  She smiles politely.

  ‘As long as it takes,’ she says, then she glances at the clock and adds. ‘Today we have one hour.’

  Her name is Nadia, she’s fifty-two, she grew up in New Delhi, and she’s been practising psychiatry here in Dublin for over a decade. That’s what it said on her website, anyway. There wasn’t much else on there, just her credentials and an old photograph. At least, I assume it’s old; the woman in front of me has the same unruly, dark hair as the woman in the picture, but now it’s peppered grey, and her wrinkles are far more pronounced. They suit her, though. I wonder if my face will age as gracefully as hers.

  Nadia is sitting opposite me, legs crossed, with a notebook on one knee and a pen at the ready. The epitome of poise; she practically exudes calm through every pore.

  I haven’t felt calm in weeks.

  ‘Are you waiting for me to speak?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘I’m not sure what to say.’

  I look around me. The room isn’t quite what I’d expected. Not that I thought I’d be lying on a squeaky leather couch, pouring my heart out about my daddy issues, I just didn’t expect it to be quite so homely; we’re both sitting in comfy, mint-green armchairs, there are fresh daisies on the window ledge to my left, and a soft April sun drifts lazily through a pair of white net curtains.

  I notice her notice me scratching my arm so I stop scratching, but then my big toe starts tapping inside my shoe. I feel like a water balloon springing leaks; if I cover one up, another one pops somewhere else.

  ‘Let’s start with something simple,’ she says. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘I’m good, thanks.’

  ‘Is that true?’ she asks, her eyes narrowing on me.

  ‘No. It’s just what you say, isn’t it?’

  She smiles and when she does, a pair of perfectly symmetrical dimples appear either side of her mouth. I find this comforting. The rhythm of my tapping slows slightly.

  ‘Fine. I’m awful.’

  ‘Good,’ she says, making a note on her notepad.

  Did she just write ‘awful’, or ‘honest’, or ‘fidgety’? Has she noticed something about me that only her expert eye can see? Has she solved it already? Can she fix me? Or did she just remember that she needs to buy some milk on the way home?

  I hate this.

  ‘You told me on the phone that you’re a writer,’ says Nadia.

  ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘You tell stories.’ It’s not a question.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then tell me your story.’

  I stare sceptically at her.

  ‘I’ll even give you the ending,’ she offers. ‘How about that?’

  ‘All right,’ I say.

  ‘All right,’ she says, ‘the story ends last week. When you picked up the phone to make this appointment.’

  Nadia kicks off her shoes and tucks her feet underneath her on the chair. I decide in this moment that I like her.

  ‘Off you go,’ she adds.

  I nod. Then I take my first proper breath of the day and let it out slowly.

  ‘There’s this theory,’ I begin, ‘that none of the events of the first Star Wars trilogy would have taken place if it weren’t for the gunner on the Star Destroyer.’

  I pause, wondering if she’s with me so far. She just smirks.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, if he’d just blown up the escape pod with the droids on it, then Luke wouldn’t have got Leia’s message, and he never would have met Obiwan, or gone with him to Mos Eisley, or—’

  She cuts me off with a wave of her hand.

  ‘Rescued the princess,’ she says. ‘Got it. You’re describing the butterfly effect.’

  ‘Right!’ I say. ‘Exactly. And I feel like the reason I’m here started with this tiny little thing that if it just hadn’t happened, I’d maybe be fine.’

  ‘And that thing was?’ she asks.

  ‘I was singing in the shower.’

  I moved back in with my mother just over a year ago, after what I describe to Nadia as ‘a fairly horrendous breakup’. She doesn’t ask for the details; maybe she knows that’s not the story I want to tell. ‘Suffice to say, I met Zak when I was seventeen and he was twenty-four. It took me eight years to realise he wasn’t a very nice guy. And when it did finally dawn on me, I ran home to my mother’s house with nothing but the clothes on my back and the ring on my finger.’

  ‘You were engaged?’ asks Nadia, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Yes.’

  She makes a note of this.

  ‘I had a dress,’ I add, though I’m not sure why.

  Ten months on, I’m still living at home with my mother, which sounds like a recipe for disaster, but I like it. I know my mam likes having me home too; after my brother left home she was alone for the first time, so having someone there to cook and clean for, to eat dinner with and say goodnight to, is all she really wants. Even if I did want to move out, I still can’t afford to; I lost all my savings when I left Zak. He convinced me to use his bank account for the wedding fund but never quite got around to adding my name to it. Top bloke.

  The trick with mothers and daughters is simply not to spend too much time together. I get the train to work every morning and I’m gone all day; Thursday evenings I take writing classes; on weekends I go out with friends; and then of course there’s Theo, who I’ve found myself spending more and more time with since we met at Christmas.

  O
ne night, a few weeks back, my mother popped her head around my bedroom door to say goodnight.

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘it was nice to hear your voice again.’

  ‘You hear my voice every day,’ I said, confused.

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘You were singing in the shower.’

  ‘Was I?’

  Now, I’m not a singer by any means. It’s not a big part of my life. But singing, like laughing or masturbating, is not something I do when I’m sad. I didn’t sing for a long time after the breakup; in fact I couldn’t listen to music of any kind – too sad and it made me cry, too happy and it felt wrong somehow – so for around six weeks, I commuted to and from work every day with my headphones in but no music playing. I knew this was a weird thing to do but I liked it; the headphones were like a little barrier between me and the world and I enjoyed having silence piped directly into my brain. Anyway, my mother pointing out that I was singing again marked a milestone of sorts on my path to healing.

  The next day, a friend from work convinced me to go to New York on a whim. One miserable Monday morning, Aoife and I were looking up flights on our lunch break and by that weekend, having had far too much tequila in some filthy dive bar, we stumbled into a tattoo parlour on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I could not for the life of me tell you the name of said tattoo parlour, or indeed find it on a map, but I know the chairs were covered in threadbare purple velvet and there was a white cat sleeping in the window. Although it might have been a dog. I was really very drunk.

  Aoife squealed and writhed and winced her way through her tattoo – an extravagant peacock feather on her shoulder – so when it came my turn I wanted something small. I panicked and asked for a treble clef on my right foot.

  ‘Why your foot?’ asked Aoife, while a deathly thin Korean woman slathered gel on her freshly tattooed shoulder.

  ‘I don’t like my feet,’ I replied. ‘Plus they’re all the way down there, so if the tattoo lady fucks up, it’s okay.’

  The tattoo artist looked up from Aoife’s shoulder and frowned at me.

  ‘And why a treble clef?’ asked Aoife.

  ‘Can’t remember,’ I said.

  Drunk Me had forgotten why music was suddenly such a significant signpost of my happiness, but she knew it definitely meant something, and that was good enough for her.

  I tell Nadia about the tattoos and the trip in general, struggling all the while to convey just how much it meant to me. I use words like ‘fun’ and ‘free’, but they don’t even scratch the surface. I tell her about the day I wasn’t feeling well, so I left Aoife shopping in Macy’s and went back to the hotel to rest for a while. I was lying on the bed of our thirty-second-floor hotel room, looking out at the city skyline, and I was overcome with gratitude for my past self for having the courage to walk away from that wedding and, more importantly, from that marriage.

  I had received an email from Zak that day – I’d long since blocked his number – accusing me of stealing a set of his mother’s dishes when I moved out. I’d done nothing of the sort, of course. This was just another one of his desperate attempts to exert control over me, to make me feel crazy. Time was, it would have worked. But seeing Zak’s behaviour now, with a little time and distance, was like the difference between seeing an elephant in the zoo, or turning a corner and bumping into one on the street; I was suddenly and unavoidably aware of the enormity, absurdity and danger of the situation.

  It had seemed completely normal to have a partner who knew my whereabouts at all times, who checked my text messages in front of me, who never let me see my male friends alone; and now here I was, bounding about New York City with my friend, while halfway across the world Theo was rooting for me, telling me to get out there and enjoy every second of it. He was capable of loving me and letting me live my life and in that moment I felt freer and happier and more like ‘myself’ than I had since I was a teenager.

  ‘You weren’t feeling well?’ asks Nadia.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you weren’t feeling well,’ she repeats.

  That’s what she got from all this?

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I was shopping with Aoife in Macy’s, then suddenly I felt woozy.’

  ‘Woozy?’

  ‘Yeah, like the lights in the store were too bright, and the music was too loud. It felt like maybe I was getting a migraine or something and I wanted to lie down somewhere dark and quiet.’

  She scribbles something on her notepad and as she does I feel compelled to go on. ‘But I was fine after I lay down for a bit.’

  She nods.

  ‘Was this before or after you read the email from Zak?’ she asks.

  ‘I can’t remember. It’s a bit blurry now.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she says, with her reassuring smile. ‘Go on.’

  When I got back from New York I went straight from the airport to Theo’s apartment. He knew my flight wouldn’t land until 3 a.m. but he insisted; he even promised he’d wait up for me. When he opened the door, half dressed with pillowcase creases on his face, he smiled sheepishly and told me that he’d tried to stay awake. I threw my arms around him and without saying another word, we stumbled to his bedroom, where he proceeded to slowly remove each item of clothing from my body, kissing every morsel of skin he revealed in the process. First he slipped one strap from my shoulder, then the other, kissing his way across them to my neck. Then he unzipped my dress, his lips moving gradually down my spine as he went. He playfully kissed my stomach and my hips, and by the time he reached my legs I was standing there shivering from the cold and the anticipation. Suddenly, the kissing stopped.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, looking up at me from where he was kneeling on the floor.

  ‘Oh!’ I said, beaming, ‘I got a tattoo!’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that.’

  I laughed, excited to tell him all about it. ‘So I was singing in the shower and—’

  ‘When did you do this?’ he asked, cutting me off, and right then I sensed something shift. The shift was practically imperceptible – most people wouldn’t even have noticed – but when you spend enough time around volatile men, you get good at predicting changes in their mood, like a drop in air pressure before a storm. And just as a bird detects that drop and instinctively takes shelter, I noticed myself scan the room for something to cover myself up; I felt exposed and vulnerable, standing there half naked as goose pimples silently crawled their way across my skin.

  ‘What’s wrong, honey?’ I asked, my voice a mousy little version of itself.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, mentally shaking something off and standing up to kiss me. I pulled away.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ I said, but he just shook his head.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, and this time he did kiss me, but I was tense and he could tell. He stopped and stared at the floor for a few seconds before he spoke.

  ‘You know I don’t like tattoos.’

  I was expecting him to be upset that I’d done such a momentous thing without him, that I’d kept it from him maybe. I was not expecting … that.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, calmly and quietly, trying to avoid an argument at all costs. ‘I’m not sure I did know that.’

  ‘I told you. The night we met, I told you I don’t like girls with tattoos.’

  He had told me that. I remembered now. And I had, of course, assumed he was joking.

  ‘You were serious about that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he shot back, ‘I hate them!’

  ‘You hate them? A second ago you didn’t like girls with tattoos, now you hate them?’

  ‘Not girls with tattoos,’ he said, flustered, ‘just tattoos. I hate tattoos. Stop trying to mix my words!’

  ‘Stop talking nonsense then!’ I said, aware we were now teetering on the edge of an argument, unable to stop ourselves going over. I started putting my clothes back on.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ he said.

  ‘Like what!? You just announced that you hate tattoo
s, and as far as I’m aware they’re kind of permanent, so there’s not much I can do about it.’

  ‘Then maybe you should have asked first!’ he blurted.

  ASKED?!

  That was it. That was the moment I mentally checked out.

  The next hour or so happened as though I was hovering a few feet outside my own body, watching the scene unfold. We fought a while longer – I’m not sure what either of us said – then I broke down in tears, sobbing to the point of convulsion, unable to catch my breath. Theo, to his credit, instantly stopped fighting with me, sat me down, wrapped me in a blanket and tried to comfort me. I found his face suddenly frightening though, and each time he got close I pushed him away. One time, he tried to hold me by the shoulders and I shoved him so hard in the chest that his eyes widened at me and I knew he was afraid. I couldn’t speak to reassure him. I was completely frozen in fear.

  When I was around nine years old, I saw a group of boys throwing cans of tomato soup at a skinny old dog in the alley behind my house. After they’d gone, I took a leg of chicken from the fridge and brought it outside to the dog. It backed itself into a corner the moment it saw me coming, not growling or even baring its teeth, just staring at me, shivering and scared. I remember the dog’s paws still scrambling to reverse, but there was nowhere left to go; its hind legs were right up against the concrete wall. I held the chicken out in front of me and the dog just stared back, so I moved closer, my hand reaching out, inches from the dog’s face. The dog snapped, sank its teeth into my arm, and bolted.

  My mother heard my screams and came charging out, only to find me stood in the middle of what looked like a complete bloodbath; there were puddles of red soup all around me and the walls were splattered with it too. The poor woman shrieked when she saw me.