The silence is filled by the sound of the kettle boiling. It trembles and shakes before it clicks off.
“Do you take milk in your tea?” Xanthe asks.
“I live on a dairy farm.”
“Oh, is oat milk OK? It’s all I have. It actually tastes really nice. It’s sweet.”
“Yeah that’s fine. Are you lactose intolerant or something?”
“Haha, no.” She blushes. “I’m actually vegan.”
I gasp in pretend shock. “Really?”
“Yeah, I try to keep it on the down-low.”
“An unusual trait in your kind.”
“I know, we’re like the new Jehovah’s Witnesses. Anyway, was yer man nice? The county hurler?”
“Yeah. He asked for my number but I gave him a fake one,” I lie.
“Why?”
I shrug. “We have nothing in common.”
“How do you know?”
“I always fancy guys that I have nothing in common with.”
“Maybe you just don’t give yourself a chance to get to know them.”
“Maybe. What about you?” I ask. “Any fellas?”
“There is one actually. Met him out last week and we’re texting. Nothing serious at all, but he’s nice. He’s doing Physio in UCD. Another hurler actually, but there’s no photos of his face on his page at all, which is a bit strange. There’s just hurling ones.” She taps her screen to bring up a profile picture and turns the phone around to show him to me. “You can’t really see him. He has a helmet on.”
“I know him,” I say. It’s the boy who stands at the back of mass. “We went to school together.”
“Oh my God! This is gas. So, what’s he like?”
I hope she can’t hear my heart thumping in my ears. “I mean, I don’t know him. I don’t think we’ve ever said two words to each other.”
“Well, do you like him?”
“How do you mean?”
“As a person like. Is he nice?”
“You’ve met him. You know him better than me.”
“Does he play center-back? He told me he plays center-back.”
“I’m sure he didn’t lie to you. I haven’t seen a hurling match in ages.” I’ve been following his progress in the local paper. He scored 1–5 from wing-forward last Saturday.
“He seems to be good. He’s always going on about it. It’s a serious commitment.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Have you ever seen him play?”
“I’m sure I have. A lot of the lads are good. They bring their hurls everywhere they go sure, even to mass. They leave them outside the church on their way in and collect them after communion.”
“Oh my God, he goes to mass? That’s lovely!”
“Yeah, well there’s nothing much to do around us. It’s more of a social occasion to have a gawk at the neighbors.”
Xanthe smiles. “You actually live in the 1800s.”
“Sometimes.”
“This is so mad. OK, I like what I’m hearing. We’re going to the cinema tomorrow. I’ll ask him if he knows you.”
“Oh God, don’t. I mean we know of each other, but he doesn’t know me.”
“I’m sure he thinks you’re great. Your village sounds really cute.”
“Thanks. I just—” I say, pointing to the bathroom. “I’m just going to pee.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Xanthe says.
“Tell you what?” I ask.
“That you’re going to pee?”
“Oh sorry. It’s the hangover,” I say, closing the bathroom door. My heart is pounding in my head. My hands are shaking. I’m not crying over a boy I hardly know. It’s the hangover, I tell myself. It must be.
Train
I could have taken a train home at any time today, but I ended up in the station at rush hour. The carriage is packed. It’s roasting. People are beginning to surrender their personal space. Hands reach for the yellow poles or railings and fingers, shoulders, hips, and bags squeeze together. I’ve had more physical intimacy with these strangers than any member of my family and the train hasn’t even left Connolly.
I see a flash of a GAA gear bag swing onto the carriage and my heart jumps—but it’s not him. I let myself imagine what would have happened if it was him. We’d have to acknowledge each other. Make small talk. Or maybe our eyes would meet for a dangerous second before we’d look away and the world would readjust itself. We’d just stand side by side without saying anything, and I’d wonder if he could hear my heart beat or feel the same giddy tingle in his brain.
A well-dressed woman rushes onto the carriage in a pair of knee-high boots and shoves her way through to the disabled seats.
“I’m pregnant,” she announces.
I know that everyone is thinking the same thing. She can’t be that pregnant. She’s wearing heels, for God’s sake. The people on this train carriage have probably heard the news before most of her family and friends.
I feel sorry for the three pensioners and the man with a pair of crutches beside him. A woman in her seventies gives up her seat. The self-professed pregnant lady sits down, crosses her legs, and takes out a magazine. I can see a bald man tutting and shaking his head. He catches my eye and I look away. I’ve learned the hard way not to engage with strangers who love to complain.
I’ve ended up being squashed next to a handsome man in a suit. He’s slender but well built. He looks like Action Man if Action Man was born and bred outside of Galway, in one of the Gaeltacht areas, maybe. I can make out his pectoral muscles through the white shirt that is stuck to him—as tight as a corset—buttons straining to hold him in. He is one of the only people on the train who isn’t wearing headphones or watching his phone. He’s staring intently at the floor.
The train jerks as it slows down to stop at the next station. I bump into him and murmur my apologies but he hasn’t noticed me. We’re still rubbing shoulders. I’m tired. I lean my head against the yellow pole and begin to drift off.
* * *
The train jolts forward and I wake up with my head on his shoulder.
“I’m so sorry!” I say, springing away from him.
“No worries.” He coughs and smooths down his shirt. “I drifted off myself.”
I feel myself blush. I haven’t even looked him in the eye, but it feels like we’ve seen too much of each other. He moves toward the door. We’re in Maynooth. The train announces that this is the final station. He presses the flashing green button to open the doors.
I’m looking at him differently now. I recognize him the way you’d struggle to place an actor playing a different character in another film. He slides into context and clicks into my frame of reference. I’m just after waking up from being inside his head. And I know how he’s going to do it. He’s been thinking about it every day on the train home from work. He’s planning the best way to kill himself.
It will happen some time in the next month. He’ll make his excuses to his pregnant wife who will be lying on the L-shaped couch with their dog watching Game of Thrones. She is used to him going for a solo drive in the evening. She encourages it. She thinks that it’s good for him to get out of the house. He hasn’t been himself since he had to pull out of training for an ultramarathon after injuring his cruciate. So he’ll go on one of those drives where he turns the radio off and just starts shouting at himself. He’ll make himself cry and the only thing that will bring him relief is to end it. Swerve off the road. Make sure of it. He’ll make it look like an accident so that it won’t be so hard on his family.
* * *
I ignore my first instinct, which is to tap him on the shoulder. What would I say? Give him some sort of cryptic message? Give him a hug? Every scenario I’m imagining is too dramatic for the everyday end of a commute. So I watch him disappear through the turnstile along with everyone else.
Incubus
We’re being chased. There’s a crowd of us—people I don’t know but recognize the way you sometimes do in dreams. I figure that I m
ust be in the lead because I’m not stopping to help the others. The dream chugs like a bit of sleep gets caught in its moving cogs and then it grabs hold of me.
I’m in a cave. We’re shackled together, a human chain shuffling toward a tank of water. They shove us into it. It’s hot—like liquid fire. I swim through it and wash up naked on a beach. A little girl puts a foil blanket around my shoulders like I have just finished a marathon and gestures for me to wait in a line of sunburned people.
The place has the atmosphere of a dentist’s office in a spa resort. I wait to be called in front of a woman wearing a conical hat. She takes my blanket away and inspects me. Then she takes a scalpel and carefully cuts across the top of my hairline.
She starts to peel my screaming face away. A helmet of hair comes away from the back of my skull like the shell of a cracked coconut. Her scalpel works slowly and methodically, trying to keep the sheet of my skin intact from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.
* * *
I wake up screaming and touching my face. I’m in my mother’s bed. She pulls me over to her side of the mattress and turns the pillow around to the cold side. She holds me tight and rocks me, shushing into my ear. I’m crying so much that she can’t understand what I’m saying but I keep repeating it: “There was a man inside me, there was a man inside me, there was a man inside me . . .”
Conch
I wake up again holding something cold and hard against my ear. It’s a seashell that usually sits on Mam’s dresser—a conch bigger than my hand with white whorls and gaping pink lips that open into a mouth. I stick my fingers into it. The inside is smooth and nearly wet, the outside dry like an ancient ceramic bowl.
“Morning.” My mother is sitting at the end of the bed.
“Why?” I ask, holding up the shell.
“I use it sometimes.” She shrugs. “I didn’t make you hold it. I just put it beside the pillow and you reached for it and it calmed you down. You were thrashing in your sleep.” She puts the back of her hand against my forehead. “You have a temperature.”
I feel hungover. “What time is it?” I ask.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m supposed to be in college.”
“Do you remember how you got here?”
“I had a bad dream,” I say.
“You did,” she says and reaches across the bed to grasp my hand. “You dreamed someone else’s dream.”
I sit up in the bed. “Hah?”
“You didn’t think you made it up yourself, did you?”
“Oh Jesus, Mam, I’m fine.”
She looks at me closely as though she has just caught me masturbating. “I know that you know that wasn’t your nightmare.”
I lie down in the bed and put the pillow over my head. “I need to go to college.”
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“What? Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“You had a lot of sleep to catch up on.”
“Mam, please leave me alone.”
“You’re in my bed.”
“Right then, I’ll go.” I throw off the covers and swing my legs out of bed. “Did you drug me?”
“What? Why would I do that?”
“Never mind,” I say.
“Why would you say that?”
“Mam, I’m sorry. Please. I had a bad dream and now I would like to forget about it and go about my day, or what’s left of it.”
“You didn’t have a dream. It didn’t belong to you. You saw a dream—witnessed it.” She stares at me. “There was a man inside me?”
“Did you keep me dinner?” I ask, trying to change the subject.
She flops down onto the bed. “You haven’t had a dream like that in a long time.”
The queasiness at the pit of my stomach disappears the minute I walk out of the room. I imagine a corridor of doorways and glide through them before going outside to Billy’s.
Rise
I knock on the caravan door but Billy isn’t in. There’s a laptop open on the countertop. It’s a silver MacBook with a blue screen saver that floats definitions of words across the monitor, like fish on a modeling catwalk, gliding along the ocean floor. I tap the touchpad and the screen lights up showing the blue-bannered world of Facebook. The laptop is logged into an account I don’t recognize. The thumbnail photo is of a man in 1940s gear, like a catfish from another era. I click on it. A sepia portrait of an auld lad in a tweed jacket pops up at me. The duvet tumbles out of the bottom bunk bed and Billy rises up from the covers.
“O brave new world that has such people in it!”
“Are you impersonating Patrick Kavanagh on Facebook?” I ask.
“I am merely keeping his contrary spirit alive.”
“Why?”
“I asked myself who would be the most miserable fucker to rise up from the dead and transpose into cyberspace. It was between himself, Stalin, and Yahya Khan’s eyebrows.”
“Of course, that makes complete sense.”
“Come here,” he says, running outside. I follow him to the doorway. He throws out both of his arms and genuflects toward the satellite on the roof of the house. “Behold! I bring you a new dimension. Or the prisoner crawling back into the cave to worship some new, shinier shadows.”
“How much did this set you back?”
“What was that? Was that a, ‘Thank you, Billy, I will stop making ridiculous demands of you and I will accept my privilege to go to college?’”
I smile. “Is that my laptop?”
Billy shakes his head. “Women. We’re going to share it. I have to update my miserable statuses.”
“You absolute loser, why don’t you go on it as yourself? Actually, forget I said that. Where are you getting all this money?”
“Working hard or hardly working.” Billy grins. “Your mother told me you were in bed all day.”
“I conked out last night just. Dead to the world. Didn’t even realize how much I slept until I woke up there.”
“You’re only after waking up there now? That’s some going.”
“Yeah. I had a bad dream.”
Billy looks at me. “You didn’t tell your mother.”
“Well . . .”
“For fuck’s sake, Debbie. That’s what she was so smug about. Don’t fucking encourage her.”
“I didn’t tell her, she just found out.”
“Did she now.”
“I woke up in her bed. I must have sleepwalked. It’s not like I came running to her with it.”
“Eh well, clearly you did.”
“I have no control over what I do in my sleep.”
“Here we go. Listen, Debs, do yourself a favor and don’t remember your dreams. Please. Do that one thing for me.”
“How do I go about doing that?”
“Easy. Don’t dream. It works for me.”
“You mean you don’t remember your dreams.”
“No, I don’t. And you shouldn’t either, if you know what’s good for you.”
“That sounds like completely healthy advice. Ignore your dreams.”
“Put it this way, Pocahontas. The river splits into two and you’re in your little canoe. You can either take the easy smooth-sailing route, or the choppy one. Don’t come crying to me if you end up clinging to a capsized mind like your mother. She’s sick, Debs. Don’t let her drag you down with her.”
“I’m afraid to go to sleep again.”
“When you were little, she put the fear of God into you telling you that you were this dream-witnessing prodigy. It took all my strength not to hit her.”
“I can’t really remember.”
“Good. Don’t mind her.” He claps me on the back. “Now, get some food into you. Then come back out here and show me how to work the YouTube.”
Milk Bath
I’m afraid to go to sleep. I want to go and knock on the caravan door, but I’m not a kid anymore. I need to stop searching for the full moon from my bedroom window. I try to disappea
r into my phone, but the Internet is slow. The cool side of the pillow makes me feel like my head is floating on water. Then I remember the time Mam gave me a milk bath.
I creep downstairs and put one of Billy’s coats over my pajamas. I open the back door and feel the relief of the night’s wind in my face. The torch on my phone lights up the calf shed and makes it look like a silver castle. I grab the can and an empty bucket.
The milk comes out in a twirl of silk and smacks the bottom of the bucket. I feel somebody grab my elbow and turn around to find a calf sucking on my arm. It retreats to the back of the pen. I stretch out my hand and wiggle my fingers at him. He comes forward again, head bowed, and smells me. Finally, he gives the tips of my fingers a lick and lets me slide them into his mouth.
The suckling gets rougher the more frustrated he becomes when my fingers don’t squeeze out the milk he is looking for. It’s warm in there. I can feel the ridges along the roof of his mouth. I pull my hand out. Saliva stretches across it, webbing my fingers together.
The bucket lags against my leg, weighing me down as I carry it toward the back door. In the field, one of the cows is bawling. I shine the torch over and see that she’s down on her knees, calving. The calf is still in the amniotic sac. I know that’s bad. Usually, the pink balloon bursts and dangles from the cow’s tail for a few hours until it splats onto the ground for Jacob to come along and eat it. I watch the cow push the sac out of her like it’s a giant squid. It slides out onto the grass in a slimy bubble. All it needs is a prod or a poke and it would pop. I know that I should call Billy but I wouldn’t be able to explain why I was out in the yard at this hour. I’m so tired that I’m not even sure it’s happening.
* * *
I take the stairs slowly, trying not to slosh any milk over the sides. I fill the bath with hot water and tip the milk in. It spreads like smoke underneath the water. A bunch of dried lavender floats on its surface, their stalks overlapping. Mam used to use the pretty white-headed weeds from the garden that looked like sprigs of baby’s breath, but they give me a rash.
Once, when I had a really bad dream, Mam gave me a milk bath. I woke her by climbing into her bed and brushing my cold feet against her sleeping legs. There was a moment when I held my breath as she opened her eyes, but she didn’t give out to me. She ushered me out of the bed and led me to the bathroom where I was given orders to strip off while she got milk from the calf shed. I stood in the quiet of the early morning on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor and watched the water gush out of the taps, my arms crossed over my flat chest. Fresh ripples of goose-bumps rose in waves over the back of my neck. The bruised light made everything blue.
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