Good Eggs

by Rebecca Hardiman

  Ahead, Aideen sees an old fella walking his dog and she calls out an uncharacteristic “Hiya!” and coasts past man and beast and lets the scene that just occurred in Gran’s living room seep luxuriously into her mind, something she will do relentlessly over the next week, both alone and aloud with Brigid back at Millburn: relive, deconstruct, repeat.

  When Sylvia and Millie had left to get the dinner on, Aideen, dead nervous, had immediately moved to the fireplace and begun shifting the briquettes.

  “Your grandma’s a trip,” Sean had said.

  “That a good thing?”

  “Oh yeah, definitely. She’s really funny, don’t you think? ‘Sean likes music!’ ”

  “That’s the worst Irish accent I’ve ever heard.”

  He had laughed and tried again: “I’d love to get a jar down the pub.”

  “Stop!” Aideen had clapped a hand to each ear in mock protest. “That is truly awful.”

  He was smiling at her. “So what music do you like?”

  “Oh, I love Clean-Cut,” Aideen said. “He’s my favorite. I’ve seen him, like, four times.”

  “Clean-Cut?” Sean shrank back and raised both palms straight up before his face, as if warding off an infectious disease. “Is that the really tall dude with the beard who sings, like, all covers?”

  If anyone else in Aideen’s orbit reacted thus—and some have—she’d have stinging words for them. But Sean seemed to be teasing her, sweetly, and of course there was no question of her responding with even a hint of hostility.

  “He writes his own songs too,” she’d said, looking up into his face. It was almost painful, certainly not possible, to straight-on gaze at this boy with his soulful eyes and his beautiful head of hair, which was thicker and glossier than her own. “He’s actually amazing, really down-to-earth, you know, nice to his fans.”

  “Oh really? That’s cool. But so that’s it? Clean-Cut all day, twenty-four-seven? No other music?”

  Aideen suddenly wished this weren’t so. “What about you?”

  “I like lots of different stuff, all kinds. Right now I’m really into old music. Sonic Youth, Nirvana. Fugazi. I could make you a playlist if you want?”

  Aideen felt that this conversation—her first like this ever—amped up her entire existence, as if she’d been unwittingly plugged into just one earbud all along and now, talking to this boy, the second one just exploded on. When he’d gone to locate his mobile, she’d frantically wiped the oily residue that had accumulated on the slopes of her nose and forked her hands through her hair. Hearing Sean come back toward her, she glanced her sweaty hands down the front of her jeans, though they felt immediately clammy again. More than anything, she feared he might want to shake her hand or touch her fingers, even inadvertently, or who knows, and come away with a damp hand and regret ever having met her. More than anything, she wanted him to like her.

  “I’ll send you some links.” This was happening. “If you don’t like them, then, well…” He shook his shaggy head. “We can’t be friends.”

  She laughed. Were they friends? She’d only just met this guy an hour ago.

  There once was a boy with green eyes

  Pop boy bands he truly despised

  He’ll make me a list

  Will I ever be kissed?

  He looks at me, I’m paralyzed.

  Phone in hand and without looking up—thank Christ because she would have passed out, her face felt so aflame—Sean had said, “What’s your number? And your email.”

  Now Aideen emits another liberating shout into the sky. She pedals mightily, can’t get home fast enough. She’s bursting to send Brigid a text message.

  Once she reaches home, Aideen tries but fails to slip by the tenacious parental net.

  “Aideen?” Dad calls from the sitting room. “Can I’ve a word?”

  “I’m really tired.”

  “Won’t take a moment.”

  Sighing, she nudges the door open with her high-top, stands uncommitted in the doorway. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “You know you’re grounded.”

  “From Gran’s?” She rolls her eyes.

  “No, not from Gran’s, obviously. But don’t think you’re roaming free this weekend.”

  “I know, but I didn’t drink any of it. I was throwing it out.”

  “Look, let’s just—just come in and sit down a minute. I’ve barely heard a peep about school. How’s it all going?”

  She hears a ding from her phone alerting her to a new message.

  “Fine. I mean, I hate it, but…”

  “How’s your grandmother?”

  “Good.”

  “Oh? Tell me.”

  Aideen slings a hand on her hip. “Good, fine. She was talking with the helper most of the time.”

  “Sylvia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they seem to get on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does your Gran like her?”

  “Yes.”

  In a robot voice, he says, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Please disconnect my wires.”

  “Dad I’m tired.” Her phone dings a second time. She pulls it from her back pocket, types in her pin code—lest Nemesis try to pry—and sees an unfamiliar number and the following heart-stopping message: “Sent some tunes. Dare u to dislike them.”

  “I think it’s going to work out with Sylvia,” Dad’s saying, clueless that her life has just irrevocably transformed. Adults never know what the fuck’s going on. “Your gran seems to have come round to her pretty quickly, thank God.” He chuckles. “Though apparently she’s not used to driving over here.”

  The message, having arrived so fast, indicates so much. Aideen’s desperate to get upstairs. But even she, master emotion-masker, can’t suppress a coy smile, which her father scrutinizes curiously.

  “What’s that about?”

  “Nothing.” She lunges out into the hall before he can detect further joy, sings out “Good night,” and tears up the stairs and even grunts a hello at her twin in passing.

  19

  Kevin stinks. Earlier, he’d splashed across his neck and torso, spectacularly it now occurs to him, his Euro-trash bottle of cologne, which, if the advert’s to be believed, promises to transform him from a smelly wanker to a carefree gent just coming in off the green. With any luck it’ll mask the noxious evidence of his anxiety, since it’s bitterly frigid today yet his pits feel a touch swampy. Not exactly ideal for one’s first toe dip into potential infidelity. And Kevin means this to be ideal.

  In one hour’s time, provided this bank queue ever bloody well moves, he will be seated opposite Rose Byrd in Land of the Young, a hip little gastropub located in a crooked, narrow, obscure road north of the river, a place he’s selected for this, their initial, clandestine meeting. Kevin takes a small measure of dorky joy in the symbolism of his restaurant choice since, as a boy, he’d been fascinated with the mythical story of Oisín and Niamh wherein Niamh brings the naif to Land of the Young, the underworld where youth, beauty, and pleasure rule. Rose can certainly provide the beauty and youth, he’s happy to supply the pleasure. Bada-fucking-boom. Ever since this flirtation began, he’s become quite adolescent. Nothing nearly as intense as his and Grace’s courtship, mind you, which had begun in the college library of all places—not the pub or the disco or a drinks party. Kevin was shelving books part-time and Grace consistently sat at a window table, swotting long before exams had rolled around, a pair of John Lennon specs inching cutely down the bridge of her nose. Her beauty—dark, glittering eyes, a light spray of freckles across strong cheekbones, inky hair, much longer then—sneaked up on him. He began to look out for her, have a peek at what she was reading (history textbooks, invariably). He tried to chat her up. Not a chance! He liked that, the challenge she posed. One day, he waited until she stepped away and then he slipped a poem onto her book. It was not a love poem; it was a poem about heartbreak by a bitter British alcoholic poet that Kevin had spent a long time choosing. Underneath it he wrote,
“If you don’t come for a drink with me, I’ll end up like this.”

  He taps his debit card against his wallet, checks his mobile. How only one cashier is available at Monday lunchtime, the fact that Kevin’s precious minutes are being usurped, is too irritating to ponder since he can’t afford, emotionally, to blow his stack right now. He certainly won’t use his card at the pub. Ever since he was made redundant, Grace has taken to more faithfully eyeballing the bills, increasingly convinced they may be a hair’s breath from ruin, one check between Dalkey and destitution, which, however inaccurate, is not impossible.

  Kevin has the irrational sense that if he is even a minute late, Rose will vanish, a thought he cannot bear, having wrestled with his surprisingly strong temptation versus his heretofore adequate moral standing and long-held sense of his own occasionally dodgy but fundamentally good honor code. Kevin has, for example, forbidden himself to order wine today. A glass of luncheon Muscadet will lead to another and a third and would strip him of any scraps of restraint or judgment he might by then be clutching onto, the raft of his murky moral fortitude. He knows himself enough to know that if he got The Look from Rosie B. and was even slightly inebriated, he’d find them a bed or a back seat or a wall or the rough bark of a giant oak in Stephens Green if need be.

  The biggest surprise in this dirty cerebral dabble of his has been his natural bent toward deception. Turns out he’s quite a good sneak, which was never a skill he needed to hone much, even in his school days (Mum being necessarily focused on her husband’s long decline into illness). Kevin deliberately arranged this afternoon’s tête-à-tête, for example, when he knew his wife would be in Limerick for a day-long meeting followed by a dinner with the president of that city’s preeminent university. The fact that she hasn’t sensed some withholding on Kevin’s part, some furtiveness, underscores a growing belief that she is not tuned in, that she’s lost that lovin’ feeling. After all, they’ve been together so long, know the meaning behind each put-upon sigh or off-pitch word—any are a cinch, too easy, too predictable, to decode. They barely need speak. A single raised eyebrow suggests, haughtily, “Bollocks.” The translation of a bodily shift toward the bedside lamp: “Fuck off. I no longer find you appealing.”

  Maybe it’s just simpler, more tranquil, to coexist in parallel, to embrace the path of least resistance? Grace arrives home, boots kicked off, bag dumped on the hall floor, asks about the children on a perfunctory, need-to-know basis. If no one is injured, if there’s no blood, no corpse, then she feels no need to know. The trials of his day, which, from want of adult company, rot away in him through the long morning and afternoon until early evening when he’s bursting to relay to her the bitty details, go largely untold. She remains, or acts, oblivious. Grace, it would appear, feels no need to unburden herself with the minutia of her stressful day. She eats, if she hasn’t already, from a plate he’s kept warm in the cooker, and pours a hefty glass, wrecked from long hours of meetings, barely the energy left to unpeel her stockings and slump in front of bad television.

  But he knows all of this; what he doesn’t know about are Rose’s evenings. He imagines, for no particular reason, her tossing clams with garlic and linguini in an earthy flat with cluttered, bohemian shelves, playing Satie or sitting, eyes closed at her childhood piano, her short, silken robe fluttering open…

  He wouldn’t be running late if it weren’t for Ciaran having just rung from school in need of his trainers for P.E. He loves no one more than his children, yet their capacity to unwittingly destroy a possibility of fun or escape in his life, from a catnap to a singles match to a possible tryst, slays him in a way he finds decidedly unfunny. As Kevin glances to compare the accuracy of his Timex with the digital wall clock, emitting a soft “bloody hell,” he sees that the current customer at the cashier’s window is his mother’s helper, Sylvia Whatsit.

  Sylvia’s pushing a slip beneath the glass partition and saying, repeatedly, “withdrawal” as if she is in Croatia or Portugal and not among English speakers. Eventually, the cashier counts out a pile of bank notes and Sylvia begins walking in pink-tinted croc-skin boots in his direction.

  Kevin, not wishing to small-talk, panics, as if she’ll intuit from his face where he’s headed. He shifts his body slightly away and studies his mobile with a pang of guilt. He ought to say hello, of course, and inquire after his mother. So much for his honor code. Any soul who tolerates Millie Gogarty, day in, day out, deserves to be greeted at the least. But the idea of being one step closer to his cash and, therefore, his rendezvous, pulls his thoughts back to Rose Byrd. He relives the moment she’d scribbled her number nonchalantly onto Aideen’s orientation packet and said, in a decidedly nonadministrative tone, that he should contact her directly with any question, “any question at all.”

  He opens a few of the screenshots he’d taken of their brief, heady text message exchange, a conversation he’s wisely deleted from his history, and which is now, at any rate, burned onto his animal brain.

  Fancy lunch?

  Who’s this?

  Ouch.

  Gotcha! Hi Kevin.

  Kevin’s gone off to throw himself into the sea. Try back later.

  What sort of lunch?

  The platonic sort. The sort where you tell me about your ghastly childhood and your deferred dreams and I don’t tell you what I want to.

  That doesn’t sound platonic.

  “Kevin?” It’s Sylvia, standing, waving, in front of him. “Hey there.”

  Kevin arranges a look of mild surprise on his features. “Sylvia. How are you keeping? Is my mother here?” thinking, Christ I hope not, I don’t have time for a granny stickup at the bank or a faux stroke on the promenade.

  “She’s home. I just had to run some quick errands.”

  “Oh great. All going well then? Is the car fixed?”

  “Yep, though I’m not sure I should be driving it.” She laughs.

  Kevin chuckles politely as the queue finally begins to shift and he steps forward. “Better you than my mother. Trust me.”

  * * *

  Today, with the kinetic bonanza of the post-Christmas sales—as if the country en masse hasn’t given and received enough crap these past weeks—town is teeming. Kevin reaches into his jacket pocket for a mint or a piece of chewing gum as he nears a destination at which fresh breath has never been more of an imperative, but his hands instead fall upon a smooth, hard rectangle and he realizes it’s his lost iPod, found again. Grace had given it to him last year, after thoughtfully loading it up with his classic rock favorites. It was the sort of gift that could cause a man to remember that the person across from him is his person.

  He could still return to the car park and climb into his minivan. He could drive home. He could pick up steaks and a decent bottle of wine and build a fire and shoo away the children and they could have one of their long chats of yore, planning the future, a holiday in Thailand, say, or buying a run-down cottage in the country and fixing it up. He could drive home to his wife.

  Instead, Kevin inserts the buds deep into each ear and holds down the power button and, amazingly, it boots up. Not since roaring around town in his Docs and his motorbike jacket and his clunky Walkman has Kevin felt the surprising bolt of joy that portable, blasting rock music offers, unwitting passersby clueless that you’re pounding down the road, star of your own private film with your own private soundtrack. It’s like a swift, satisfying karate chop of mojo. He circles past Creedence and Clapton and the Doors, whom he actually despises (Grace wrongly believed he was a fan and he hadn’t the heart to delete it) and cues up the most badass song he can think of: Zeppelin’s “The Ocean.”

  Instantly, the music’s thrashing, pushing to the corners of his mind, at least for now, the fact that he’s on the brink of something creepy and terrifically damaging to the ones he most loves. The lyrics speak directly to this moment upon him. Got no time to pack my bags, my foot’s outside the door / I got a date, I can’t be late… Kevin stops himself from scre
aming and head-banging along with Robert Plant and settles, instead, for more sedate, middle-aged, half-hearted lip-synching.

  He realizes, just as the bridge winds down and the song crescendos again into beautiful noise, that this might actually be one of his life’s rare perfect moments. He slows down, stretching out the delicious anticipation of his small miracle. A gorgeous woman is waiting for him. He practically glides down Talbot Street. He remembers once when he and his gang of schoolmates found a substantial stash of Heinekens atop a rubbish bin at the end of this very road. Some underage crew just like them had probably been spotted by the coppers and dumped the loot with plans to return later. What a boon! He remembers the lads and himself taking the piss mercilessly out of each other later on the top floor of the last bus, heading merrily home on a night’s worth of free gargle.

  Land of the Young is one of Dublin’s first all-organic, nouveau farm-to-table eateries. The menus are miniblackboards framed in twine tethered to a chunk of chalk; baskets runneth over with polished Granny Smiths no one will ever bite into and someone has carefully pyramided scores of limes in gleaming white-lacquered mod bowls.

  Rose Byrd sits at the restaurant’s most discreet table, situated in an alcove toward the back. Kevin can’t help wondering whether this is deliberate. In what he fears is an obvious attempt to belie the heart hammering beneath his Oxford, he waves and heads confidently over.

  “Hello, hello, hello. You found the place okay?”

  Rose, in pale silky yellow, stands. She wears a flowy top that masks her tiny waist and skinny, ink-blue denims not unlike those his daughters sport on weekends—seriously, what is he doing here?—tucked into dark, expensive-looking platform anklets. Thin hoops of gold perch at each ear.

  Rose Byrd meets Kevin Gogarty’s eyes, but if there is a message there, he cannot decipher it. Her lips part into a smile and Kevin likes to think, but isn’t sure, that the bottom one is slightly aquiver. He takes her hand and holds and squeezes it, since it feels too raw and soon to go anywhere near her with his lips.