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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393342758 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/17/2000 |
| Pages: | 210 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
A grey stain on the ceiling. A fly flits on it. The stain is a map of Ireland. Almost exact. There used to be an ancient truncated map of the world hanging behind the master's desk at school, China and Siberia missing at one side where a fire had clawed it. Centuries ago, it seemed. All the childhoods gone, years gone by in a blur like flashing fields passing a car at night. Who winds the crazy clock? Not God. Dilatory now when the night is black and wind and rain throb against the window, strange creatures dying in the swirl of the wipers: now fleet when the bed is warm and there is mother's hand on her forehead saying, 'There there pet.' Father Bennis standing behind the master's desk, Gargantua's shadow on the world. Gesturing with the pale tumid fingers. And where is Heaven? Nowhere on this map boys and girls. What's this the catechism says? Heaven is a place or state of grace. The stain is probably a leak, she thinks, an overflow from a sink upstairs or a toilet bowl. A cracked pipe. Someone else's world showing through in negative on the ceiling, like the images of people caught in the lightwave of Hiroshima. An indicator that such things have been. There are other people in the world. The fly is walking in Connemara, a secret invasion, the good people of the district sleeping in ignorance as the incubus goes a progress through their villages and towns.
She rolls gently on to her side and looks at the bare shoulder and curly brown head of the boy, hears his steady breathing. John is his name. The memory satisfies her. She remembers saying it during the night. John. John. John. Athin light falls on him from the gap in the curtains, a mixture of a watery dawn and the fading yellow streetlamp. Light steals all the glorious colour of his skin — achromatic hair, translucent eyelashes like the filament legs of insects, his left shoulder, a rind of dark hair extending at the armpit. Her body responds to this wan shape in a way that she cannot explain. She notices the warmth between her legs, a weakness in the muscles of her stomach, a slight quickening of her breath. She wants to put her hand on the defenceless shoulder or on the tight hair. She is overcome by tenderness. Then she thinks that she should allow him to sleep. It is five thirty and she knows he never wakes early because he told her that, a point of honour. He is a philosophy student. Philosophy students make the best lovers, he told her last night, they understand tenderness. The true nature of human relationships, he told her, is that in the good ones people assuage each other's hurt, in the bad ones they open the wounds. Later, bucking above her, aloft on his joy, he said, 'We are the lords of summer, Alice. Though deprived of all hope we are gods still.' It was the triumphant cockcrow. She knew even as he said it that the words were not his own, a borrowed poetry. Good enough still. It thrilled her.
The truth was he was not very good at love. It was his youth that accounted for her pleasure, a suggestion of theft. But what was she stealing from him? And his tenderness, he had been right about that. He was a slow, tender lover. Not like Paddy. Paddy was an in-again-out-again man, as he never tired of telling her. Abrupt in beginnings. Brutal in the end.
You know me, he always said. In-again-out-again-gone-again Flanagan. He had heard the phrase on their honeymoon from a TV salesman who shared their table at an Italian resort. The salesman was referring to his own relationship with a thin blonde who purported to be on honeymoon with him. He meant that he always liked women who didn't expect much from sex. The blonde seemed to expect nothing, was glad of anything that fell her way, cast-offs of conversation, second-hand affection. Paddy adopted the phrase immediately.
Paddy is a bastard.
A car hoots on the street outside. What kind of a bastard blows his horn at five thirty a.m.? She thinks the morning has been violated. The simplicity of daylight abused. She slips out of the bed and goes to the window, aware that she is naked, walking over the threadbare carpet of a student flat, her bare feet sensing the cross-hatching, the skeins that bind the fragile fabric thinned by twenty, thirty years of bare feet. She lifts the curtain as the horn sounds again. It is a Merc, stopped in the narrow streets behind a milk van. The milkman is walking down the concrete path of a house across the way. He is carrying three empties. In the early light she sees the semeny stuff at the end of the empties, his fingers in their mouths. The dawn belongs to lovers, and their early morning odyssey is within his dispensation. God is a milkman, waving empties at pale young men and women elated by their first taste of beauty, going home to cold flats and empty houses. The Merc is evil. That could be Paddy down there, foot-tapping the brake, hand poised on the horn. Blow, Paddy, blow. Wake the lovers in their beds. Wake the old men from their hard-won sleep, the old women tossing in their pain, wake the children to another watery day. This is your world. The lovers will learn that. Sooner or later there will be a man in a suit. A banker. A lawyer. A priest. A planning officer. All good things come to an end, they say. Let's face reality — decent profit, respectability, authority. The hegemony of the club tie. Face up to it. And the lovers, the old men, the women in their dressing gowns put out the empties and take in the new milk, and they are powerless. God the Milkman comes in the night and the only sign is the renewal of day. The man in the Merc rules the world.
Fuck you Paddy the Irishman Englishman Scotsman. Someone will go for you one day.
'What's up?'
The boy is propped on one elbow. The other hand rubs sleep out of his eyes. 'What's the noise?'
She turns her body towards him, conscious of the openness of the act, aware that she has never turned her body consciously on a man before, not of her own volition, without shame or subterfuge. She is aware of her vulnerability, and at once also her potency — it is as if she is glowing in separate parts, small coals of heat at the nipples, the thighs. She is shocked by a feeling of warmth in an earlobe he bit, intensely conscious of it now when he looks at her from the bed.
'Nothing love,' she tells him. 'A stupid bastard in a Merc stuck behind a milkman.'
He is out of bed in an instant. He reaches the curtain and her waist at the same moment, one hand lifting the fabric (there is magic in the web of it), the other drawing her to him, her side against his. 'Look at the stupid ignorant lout,' he says. The horn blows again. The milkman waves the hand that is not holding bottles. One finger stands upright.
'Jesus!' he says. She feels excitement in him. 'John,' she says. 'John.'
He does not look at her.
Now the milkman is turning into the next house and the door of the Merc is opening. A head appears, gleaming like chromium, a fringe of hair, wide protruding ears.
'Get out of the fucking way will you!' he shouts.
'Oh Jesus! It is Paddy,' she says. Now she sees the numberplate. It's the new Merc. 98 C. She draws back from the window. John turns to look at her. 'Your husband?' Deliberate, cold.
A long blow on the horn. She nods. He lets the curtain fall. The same narrow shaft of light falls on him.
'Didn't you know?'
'He's supposed to be in London!'
'Will he find out?'
She shakes her head. 'He'll go to the office first. He likes to get in before eight. He'll ring from there.' Did he get in early this morning or late last night? Did he sleep at home? Her place in the bed empty, her clothes missing, her car? Her face is pale suddenly, pale rings around her eyes and there is a slight tremor in her voice.
She looks around for her clothes. Someone (could it be her?) has folded them neatly on the only chair. Tidy yourself up child. Her panties are on top, her T-shirt underneath, trousers, jacket. Her socks are folded into each other in her left shoe. She recognises the signs. 'I'm sorry,' she says pointing at them.
She means the neat pile, the organisation, the contrivance. He shakes his head. 'Please,' he says. 'I love you.' He swallows three times. His eyes are big. Look what you did to the seat? Is that the way you were brought up? 'No. The clothes,' she says. 'I always do that. I hate it.' She rests her hand lightly on his forearm. 'I remember now. I did it when you were asleep. During the night. I'm sorry.'
He takes her hand from his arm and cradles it in both of his.
'Please. I want you to stay but I know you can't. I love you.'
Paddy is shouting at the milkman. 'Fuck you fucking shit-arse bastard,' he is saying. 'Some people have to fucking work you know. Get your heap of shit out of my fucking way before I call the guards.' He has his cellphone in his hand. The cold glow of his bald head, dawn turning off it, a shiny football.
Alice says: 'When I married him he was different. None of the boys I knew were like him. He was — interesting. Gentle even.' She did not add: for a while.
John nods solemnly, grateful for the confidence.
She turns her back on him to dress. When she is covered up again she asks if there is another way out. He says he will show her. He is dressed too. No, she says. Stay. Study. He laughs.
'I won't get much done today.' He points at an open book on the Formica desk. 'Not much Kierkegaard.' The room is wallpapered in an embossed floral design that seemed to glow all night, an infinite repetition of twined flowers and leaves as exotic through the haze of desire as a night sky in the tropics. A two-burner gas cooker stands on a Formica press, its ceramic coat dulled by grease. The sink still contains yesterday's mugs and plates. A crooked wooden bookcase contains his intellectual property: philosophy books — Steiner's After Babel she remembers from her own college days; a battered copy of T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. She catches herself in the shabby mirror of his wardrobe. Alice in Wonderland, she thinks. Or at least in the rabbit-hole.
She thinks there is always another way out. When the great wheel runs downhill it is only necessary to step sideways. No need for silent comedy, no Keystone Cops tearing across the city, no comedians high-stepping before a runaway. Let the wheel go. There is always another way out. Say a woman decides to poison her husband. She fills the cup carefully, measuring out with so much precision five times the lethal dose. She takes more care than if she were measuring Andrews. He dies in agony stretched out on their bed, his stomach churned to curds, does he think of the last woman he fucked? Say a woman decides to blow a hole in her husband's belly. She directs the gun and pulls the trigger though he has never taught her to shoot because it is a man's game. Now, as he dies slowly, staring at his cooling intestines, he wishes he had taken the time.
They tiptoe down the creaking stairs. He kisses her passionately on the first landing, his tongue pushing brutally against hers, his hands on her ass. He seems to find concealment exciting. When the timed light dies and they are in the darkness of the backside of the house, she feels that he would like to push her against the wall and open her clothes. The urgency is exciting.
The back door opens through a skein of webs and balled insects on to a concrete yard with a clothesline and three dustbins overflowing with ancient detritus, the uninteresting archaeology of the long-graduated. The dominant smell is cats' piss. The yard is surrounded by a blackened concrete wall. Lichen and moss thrive. 'Up and over,' he says. She stands on a dustbin. Her feet scrabble for a purchase. He catches her thighs and heaves up. She is on top of the wall looking down at him. On the far side is a neatly kept garden, two neat flowerbeds, a narrow border on each side. A spindle-thin weeping cherry tree in the centre. Another orderly world in which milkmen are milkmen and God is for Sundays.
'Up,' she says. For a moment they are both poised ridiculously on the wall, then he drops down on to the flower-bed and reaches up for her. She falls into his arms.
'Right,' he says. 'We have to go round this side of the house. There's a garage on the other side so there's no way out round there.' The hooting and shouting has stopped. Paddy will be on his way. 'Come on Alice!'
They pass silently round the house and unlatch the low gate. A cat sitting on a wheelie-bin drops down on to silent paws and moves off without looking at them. The milk van has just turned in at the top of the street. They see the milkman's face behind the flat windscreen. He watches them with interest, arms folded on the steering-wheel.
'Goodbye milkman,' she says aloud.
'That's PJ,' he says. 'He's decent.' The milkman waves and laughs. As they walk away they hear the clatter of the bottles, a remote nasal humming, snatches of 'I'll Be There For You'.
They find her car outside the Café Grec.
'Jesus,' he says. 'I can't believe I went into that place. I must have been well on.'
She likes the café. She has been going there since it opened because she believed in its bohemian image. She imagined the scruffy customers were students, writers, artists. Once she saw Tim Bredin in there with a blowsy American woman. She already owned one of his paintings. She used to sit and dally over her meal and watch the others, speculating which one was a poet, which an artist, which a musician. This one had a book in front of him. She wondered what it was until, passing within touching distance of his right hand, on her way to the ladies, she saw that it was a manual of some kind with diagrams and very little text. Then she remembered that someone told her Yeats liked detective stories.
He changed her mind about all of that while they were eating last night. Did she ever notice the prices? No writer could afford to eat there. The place was full of rich kids and businessmen slumming, travelling salesmen and Yuppies with cellphones. The women were all bimbos. He was anxious to show her his superiority. He told her the names of the real student bars. He explained to her that no self-respecting writer would waste money on food. Food was something that filled the gap when the bag was acting up, something to absorb the acid generated by too much Smithwicks or Guinness. He pointed out some students standing outside another bar drinking from bottles. 'Posers,' he called them. 'Paying extra so they can pose with bottles instead of glasses. Do you know how much a bottle of Bud is? Or a longneck?'
'I missed all that,' she told him. Growing up in the country. A protected life. Marrying before starting university. She had never had the student life. A home to go to. Money. A car by third year. She craved it. She wished for simplicity, a central purpose, a commitment. There's no way out child. You're in now and you have to stay in. 'I wish I needed books or pictures or music,' she said. 'But the truth is I can have anything I want. I don't need anything. I just have to write a cheque. Or else they accept Access or Visa.'
'Did I really come in here? This so-called Greek shitheap? Jesus I must have been pissed.' That was after two bottles of wine. He had kissed her in public, a crazy flamboyant thing to do. It was a small town and he already knew she was married because she had never taken off the ring. She remembered her own delirious surrender, the carelessness. Let him find out, she said. I deserve something too. I deserve to escape sometime. What if somebody tells Paddy? she had said to him, and he replied that he would marry her himself after the divorce. He dragged her into a high, rust-eaten gateway and fumbled her, his fingers desperate, his breath hot in her face. Slow down, she said. Let's go to your flat. She almost said your bed.
He is sitting in the passenger seat now. She runs her hand lightly along his right leg laughing.
'You're full of it,' she says. 'I didn't come down in the last shower of rain you know. You're so full of it.' I was full of it this time. Full altogether.
'I just never thought I'd find myself sitting in a red MG.'
'I should have bought a different colour?'
'I better go or your man will be home before you.'
'Thanks.' She looks at his eyes when she says it. 'Thank you John. For all of it.'
'I meant it,' he says. 'What I said.'
'I'll be here again on Saturday night.'
He groans. 'Oh God not more fake Greek food.' She turns the key. 'That's me,' she says. 'Take me or leave me.'
'I'll take you,' he says as he steps out. 'Any time.'
The door slams. She pulls directly out on to the street and has to restrain herself from tipping the horn. The quiet houses of Academy Road beam down at her. The gardens are already warming to the day.
The phone is ringing as she comes through the front door. Paddy calling from the office. Got home early. It was his second time. Why didn't she answer earlier?
Did she detect suspicion? That would be unlike him. Paddy was used to possession. He never suspected the things he owned of having a life of their own. When he fired someone (after appropriate redundancy provisions, of course, and strictly according to the terms of the contract) he never really believed they had a wife and children to go home to, someone with whom to share the news. He never believed in other people's mortgages, tax bills, children at school or university. In casual conversation, because all conversation with Paddy is casual, he would pretend to be aware of the world. At dinner parties, for example, he could discuss the unemployment figures as though they had an existence in reality. He could talk about the cost of living index. Social problems. He blamed society for the crime and drug culture. Misguided government policies that created slums to clear slums. Card-carrying liberal. That was Paddy. The truth was he had no capacity for faith. He drove between home and the office, home/office and airport, airport and conference. He was a member of a golf club and a yacht club. Nothing else had any presence. He didn't play golf any more because he couldn't win, or because the game was not predatory enough. On the water his boat won everything, a master of the rules, the protest, the right of way, aggressive to the point of being dangerous. And he was a member of a gun club. Shooting suited him. Hennessy the GP and Paddy the businessman — the doctor and the director go out to kill. They come home in the late evening with bagfuls of feathers and fur that turn out on closer inspection to be dead rabbits, dead pheasants. Killing things was an extension of his business drive. Owning a computer software company did that, the personal interest he took in the programming, his obsession with the digital. Reality is an analogue device for him, outdated, wasteful. His belief was in binary codes, the esoteric world of noughts and ones where every choice is simple and every event is a switch that is either on or off. It caused a fracture in space. To believe in people who were hungry or who walked the streets by day, or people who spent their dole on cigarettes, or people who spent all day at one of his keyboards and went home at night to grill a pork chop, people who were members of health clubs because they wanted to make friends: these required of him an act of faith. I believe in beings outside of myself. Things outside of binary codes, tracker bonds, offshore bank accounts. I believe in reality the creator. Reality the word made flesh. Paddy has no capacity for reality.
So now she simply tells him that she had been in the shower. That she couldn't sleep. That the early dawn woke her up. Birds in the garden singing their heads off. This is spring, she says. It's almost summer. The magnolia is in full flower. She hoped there wouldn't be a frost. Frost killed all the magnolia flowers last year remember? The daffodils are everywhere. There are bees nosing in every opening.
By the second sentence she knows he has lost interest. It is his garden. He owned it therefore he could forget about it. He would have missed the hint of joy, of awakening life.
'Missed you,' he says. She remembers the wax magnolia flowers going red-brown and then black, the ground littered with oedemic dead leaves. The stubby stamens, black and hairy, useless on every branch. That was last spring, a late frost. 'When will you be home?'
'Seven thirtyish,' he says. 'Maybe earlier. Dinner for eight.'
'Eight it is,' she says.
'Did you ring about the sail?'
She had forgotten to phone the sailmaker.
'No. I'll phone this morning.'
'Fine. I want it for Sunday.'
'How did London go?'
'Great. Talk to you later.'
The familiar sound of the cellphone going dead.
In the shower she scoops gel into her fingers, milk and water colour, reminding her of his semen. She thinks of John first, a shiver of pleasure: then she thinks of Paddy in his Merc. The shower pelts down. 'The bastard,' she says aloud. 'He's some bastard.'