‘You want to?’ she asked.
The room was furnished with a bony double bed and a tilted painting of a foxhunt hung curiously close to the ceiling. Maroon drapes were pulled adamantly shut. The girl lit a candle by the bed. It gave off a strong scent of vanilla.
‘If your family is staying at Jury’s,’ Ciaran ventured, ‘Why are you …’
‘I rented this place just for myself. They don’t know. I’m sleeping at the hotel with them.’
‘What do you use this place for?’
‘It’s my nest,’ she said, falling down on the bed straight as a pin and looking up at him. He sat on the edge of the bed beside her.
‘Why do you need a nest?’ he asked.
‘I always need my own space,’ she said, sliding off her bracelets and placing them under her pillow.
‘And what’, he said, feeling acutely alert, ‘is it that you are recovering from?’
‘I’m addicted to romance,’ she said. He chuckled.
‘Isn’t everybody?’
‘It’s a recognised syndrome,’ she said seriously, folding her hands on her chest.
‘And what are the symptoms of your malady?’ he asked, looking down at her.
‘If I see a romantic movie,’ she said, ‘I can fall in love with the man in it. It’s pretty bad. I’ve been arrested for stalking. I’m not allowed to tell you who it was, though.’ Ciaran nodded his head in sober agreement. ‘So I can’t go to romantic movies any more.’
‘What else?’
‘Well, I’m not supposed to do this. Renting a room like this is a real no-no but – I couldn’t help myself.’
‘You mean to say you rented this room secretly so you could –’
‘Meet people,’ she said.
‘And have you?’ he asked.
‘I met you,’ she said, removing her bulky sweater and revealing a creamy silk camisole. Her breasts were small and pert, a girl’s breasts. She was sitting up now, staring across the bed at him with such frankness. A black widow, he thought, waiting in her web to catch unwitting male flies. He must leave. He was absolutely leaving.
She leaned forward and reached between his legs, her hand not quite touching, as if she were warming her hand over a stove, or casting a spell. He felt helpless, leaden, and faintly sick. She had a box of condoms under the bed.
Her sex was stripped hairless as a child’s. Nipples pink as tea roses. Her belly was fleshy, springy. She mewed when he touched her, eyes closed like a new kitten. He felt repelled by his desire for her. He wished he could spread the condom over his head, his whole body, to shield himself from this experience. Yet he was having it, oh, he was having it! Faithful for eighteen years, he was gobbling up a disturbed American pet-store clerk at two in the afternoon, and he was doing it fervently, desperately, hungrily. He, Ciaran Fox, and no one else on earth, was doing this!
Afterward, he lay there, staring at the ceiling in blank disbelief.
‘Will you come visit me in America?’ she asked, her voice higher now than he remembered it. An icy feeling of panic washed over him. He sat up and thrust his hands deep into the bedding, his fingers scrabbling for his briefs.
‘No,’ he said, seizing them at last, ‘I won’t.’ She was sitting naked on the bed, her firm, plump belly creased at the waist, big legs flung out at odd angles, as if she were the doll of a giant. Her round face was getting blotchy, a film of tears dulling her raccoon eyes.
He was hopping on one foot, pulling on his rumpled woollen trousers. ‘I’m sorry but – that is unrealistic. If you’re going to get better,’ he said, reaching absurdly for a therapeutic tone, ‘you need to learn to see things as they are.’
‘Why did you say that, then?’ she asked petulantly.
‘Say what?’ he said.
‘About how you wouldn’t be getting me a pet.’
‘What are you – ’
‘I said most people turn pets into little people they can control, and you said, “I won’t be getting you a pet, in that case.”’ She was angry now, and tugged her leggings on forcefully.
‘I was joking! I was flirting!’
‘I wouldn’t have slept with you if you hadn’t implied we had a future!’
‘That’s –’ crazy he began to say, then stopped himself.
‘You know how you feel about me,’ she said, dressed now, and calmer. Her voice had gone soft and assured. ‘You just can’t admit it to yourself.’ She was smiling slightly, gazing at him with tenderness and – was that pity?
‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘I am so sorry.’
And then he fled. He ran – truly ran – all the way back to Clarendon Street, taking the most higgledy-piggledy route he could think of, so he could be sure to lose her. A grown man, acclaimed novelist, sprinting through the streets of Dublin like a purse-snatcher. When he reached the parking lot he had to stop and catch his breath, doubled over, the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes, as if to erase the memory of the naked girl. He felt as though he might faint. Fingers trembling, he tried to coax a dirty twenty euro note into the slot of the pay kiosk, but the bill kept reversing back out at him like a mocking blue tongue. Once in his car, he raced down the ramps of the lot, brakes squealing, and sped home to Dalkey.
Maeve was in the kitchen making tea when he walked in. He stood in the doorway for a moment to take her in. Her long, black hair was threaded through with silver strands; the lines of her body were coltish, athletic. Her little paunch seemed a joyful imperfection, a reminder of three girls whom he adored. The fact of his wife made him euphoric, nearly tearful with relief, as though he had woken from a nightmare to the smell of toast. Hearing him, Maeve turned and checked him warily, as if to gauge his mood, to predict the scene ahead. He wanted to rush straight over to her and take her in his arms, but, afraid that the scent of the girl was on him, he walked over to the couch by the window and beamed at her. He felt so grateful.
‘How was the meeting?’ she asked.
‘What – oh shit!’ He had completely forgotten the lunch with the film producer. That was why he had driven to the centre of town! ‘I forgot all about it.’
‘But you drove there to –’
‘I – I was thinking,’ he said. ‘I just – I was thinking, and I lost all sense of where I was supposed to be.’
Maeve shook her head and smiled, the thin skin around her eyes crinkling into a fan of wrinkles. ‘Thinking about what?’ she asked.
‘I might have a book in me,’ he said, realising at that moment it was true. ‘A character. She came to me today, in town.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ she said.
Boom
Mary Morrissy
‘DEE-DAW.’
‘Did you hear that?’ Patrick Shaw has just come into the kitchen. It is a late summer’s evening after rain, drenched and lambent. He is in shirtsleeves, tie loosened, elasticated braces like forked leather tongues. ‘He said Daddy!’
Rosemary, rubber-gloved in suds, turns around to look down at her toddler son. Little Timmy is sitting in the playpen on an upholstered bottom, clenched fist aloft in salute.
‘Dee-daw.’
The child seems rapt at something going on at calf level – the tanned denier of his mother’s stockings, her pert kitten-heeled slippers, the pink feathery rosette on her instep that he always wants to eat.
‘He said Daddy!’
‘No, he didn’t!’ Rosemary lifts a glass in her muffled paw and holds it up to the golden light.
‘I tell you, he said Daddy.’
Timmy’s father stoops down, a big urgent face leering through the bars. ‘Say it, Tim, say it again.’
Dee-daw.
‘Oh Pat, you’re hearing things.’ Rosemary tamps down something on her eyelid with the back of her pink gauntlet.
‘Say it, Tim, Da-dee. Da-dee.’
‘Dee-daw!’ the child brays. ‘Dee-daw!’
Today you have been to see the Man with the Quiet Voice who smells of tobacco and wet tweed and isn’t
called The Doctor. The Doctor has an office full of sneezes, a torch with a blazing light and a finger made of sandpaper that he puts on your tongue. Not like the Man with the Quiet Voice who sits on a wet park bench with his hands hiding in his pockets while the rain drips from the hood of the go-car down onto your knees. Your mother in her clear plastic raincoat so that you can see her dress and her cardy and everything underneath, opens her mouth and the Man with the Quiet Voice looks inside.
And how’s my little man, he says, gripping your nose in a fleshy vice between his big fingers.
Say hello, your mother says, sweet and secretful. Say hello to the nice man, Tim.
Tim! Ti … m?
His name has always sounded emaciated to him. Timid, timorous, a thin-lipped emaciated hum. When the strangeness of waking up calling out his own name passes, he thinks it might have been Reggie calling him. Maybe she’s left a message and it’s her subliminal voice that has woken him. But no, when he checks, the red light is steadfast.
‘You still have a machine!’ Reggie marvelled.
Voicemail and texts and disembodiment, that is Reggie. Now, there’s a name! He loves the two-syllable strength of it, the juicy rich double consonant of the diminutive.
‘Yeah, well, you can imagine what convent girls made of Regina,’ she’d said. ‘They pronounced it with an I!’
Tim was lost.
‘Rhymes with?’ She’d cocked a saucy eyebrow. Tim had to think hard. Sometimes Reggie made him feel quite maidenly.
Now that he’s up he goes to the window and stares out over the water. His is a docklands flat. Regenerated. The water below is a hemmed-in canal basin. At the other side is a large flour mill. A pair of monolithic towers of bleached concrete rise up looking like they’ve been lightly dusted with confectionary sugar, a six-storey warehouse of blistered stone with cataracted windows stares back at him. As Tim watches, a door opens in the lowest floor at water level and a man steps out onto a metal platform. He lights up. His cigarette tip glows against the inky water and the glower of a wakening sky. In his white baker’s coat and paper hat he looks like a clownish doctor, a refugee from a Marx Brothers fancy-dress party, stepping out of a portal of the last century. Tim inches the sash window open a fraction and the spell is broken. The rattle of a candy-coloured commuter train leaving the depot at the far end of the basin animates the silent scene. Its empty windows are ablaze, a glow-worm on the move, its clatter at a distance like industrial knitting. There it is, Tim thinks, the world is officially awake now.
Paris is an hour ahead but even so Tim does not dare to ring Reggie at this hour. She would be livid. Their life is like this – careful calculation and fearful discretion. One weekend in three they spend together. Here, there or somewhere in between. The rest of the time airline schedules keep them apart. To anyone looking in from the outside, they are a boom-time couple. What is the sound of boom? The rush and seethe of cappuccino makers, Tim would say, the bloated heartbeat of car stereos. But these were only the signature tunes of prosperity. What of the boom itself? Was it the low, threatening rumble of thunder, the zip and whistle of fireworks or the flat thud of explosion? The abstract sound of boom.
‘Oh God, Tim,’ Reggie would say when he would speculate like this, ‘get a life!’
But Tim is old enough to remember what everyone calls the bad old days. Dole queues and hunger strikes, explosions on the streets, when everything seemed in short supply, except chronic damage.
The first time the Man with the Quiet Voice comes to your house he brings a comic. You sprawl on the kitchen floor as the colours leap out at you in great muscled arms – Zap! – and fiery explosions. Boom! He and Mum sit at the kitchen table. There are a lot of silences between them just like when you and Mum are together, Mum doing the ironing, the smooth swaying motion of her hand, the small slap of the iron’s flex hitting against the legs of the board. It creaks when she puts her weight behind something tricky – the collars and cuffs of Dad’s shirts. She hums along to a tune playing on the radio, catching a word here and there. Hello darkness, my old friend. Dah, dah dah dah again … Except today she’s not ironing; she’s saying small soft things to the Man with the Quiet Voice and then laughing in a silvery way. You can see the Man is holding her hand, examining her fingers like the Doctor checking for warts. You know what’s going to happen next. She’s going to open her mouth and say Aaaaah.
‘Aw, Rosemary!’
It’s Dad, voice vivid with complaint.
‘What?’ Mum turns around, hand on hip.
‘How many times have I told you? I don’t want Timmy reading comics.’
Dad stands, arms crossed, bulging biceps, cape flying.
‘Sure he can’t read yet, isn’t he just looking at the pictures?’ Mum says.
‘I just don’t want this kind of rubbish in the house.’ Dad leans down and whips the comic away. Whoosh!
He rips it in two.
Wa-a-h! Hot tears of injustice.
‘Perfect!’ Mum bangs the iron down. ‘Just perfect!’
*
He likes the disruption that is Reggie Mundy. Her flights away, her lavish returns. He’s in love, or at least in thrall, and he has never felt so helpless. He is dazzled by her and dazed by the distance between them. She’s only twenty-four. Then there’s her job. A trolley-dolly with Plein Air, that’s how she described herself.
‘We’re there to distract their attention from what they’re not getting,’ she explained. He finds Reggie’s sardonic tone, this light contempt, disconcerting. (Is this how she talks about him behind his back?) Tim loves his work; it’s a calling. If he ever got to the point of regarding it as lightly as Reggie does hers, he’d have to jack it in.
He took her on a tour of the studio one night when P45 was recording. She was coolly impressed.
‘P45,’ she breathed, ‘that makes you a legend!’
Or did she mean a has-been, Tim wondered. When other teenagers were buying rock albums, he was buying LPs of sound effects. Most people could detect that boy in him, until, that is, he saved some coked-up boy band from mediocre oblivion. Then, he was a wizard.
‘My God, Tim, it’s dark down here,’ she said. ‘Don’t you feel buried alive?’ In comparison to Reggie’s world of harshly over-lit terminals, the studio must have seemed sunk in a scriptorium gloom.
He did his best work in the graveyard hours. There was a sanctity about the studio then as if it were a cathedral of sound, though sometimes that idea was hard to sustain watching wasted musicians sitting around smoking their brains out. He was the organist, the sound channelled through his hands and transformed. He wanted to mix music so that each constituent part – the woozy reverb of a bass, the crystalline ting of a high hat, even the grating dry rub of a palp along a string – would detach itself and cry out, so that the listener might think he was stoned. He loved the absolute clarity of those moments himself, the certainty of singular sensations. That’s what he wanted to reproduce, that purity. But he couldn’t possibly explain that to Reggie. Purity? Reggie?
Once you meet the Man with the Quiet Voice in the church. You have to sit at the end of the last pew on the aisle that leads to brazen glory while he and Mum go off to light candles.
You say your prayers, Timmy, there’s a good boy, Mum says.
She seems flustered; she storms up the aisle. She seems always to be running away.
Pray for your mother’s intentions, Sonny, the Man with the Quiet Voice says as he follows her, coat-tails flying. Their voices came back to you, solemn and jilted, from the side aisle where the shrine to the Blue Our Lady is.
What’s that man’s name, you ask when Mum comes back.
What man, she replies crossly.
They had met in Paris. It sounded romantic in the telling. What they neglected to say was that it was not in the Luxembourg Gardens or Montmartre, but in a launderette near the Rue Mouffetard on a Sunday afternoon. Tim restless in the desolate idleness of a foreign city; the band was sleeping it off
at the hotel. There were museums he could have gone to but Tim was not up to the solemn, wearying silences of art. He was drawn into the launderette by the sound of it.
‘How sad is that!’ Reggie said.
No sadder than doing your laundry amidst the splendours of Paris, Tim thought. It was one of those automated places. A voice from a tall headstone of stainless steel barked the machine number, the programme required, the length of the wash. It was a flat voice, Daleky, robotic. Tim liked the effect of it and the absurdity of the disembodied voice like a muezzin calling for prayer, issuing instructions to the unwashed. When he stepped inside the small glassy shop he was met with the bland owlish glare of stacked washers and dryers. Reggie was standing in front of the talking plinth, coins in one palm, the other hand raised in expansive helplessness while she howled at the flinty dial. ‘But how much do I put in?’
‘Can I help?’
She turned swiftly. He got an impression of blonde exasperation.
The Quiet Man appears out of the bathroom wearing Dad’s dressing gown. You are laying in wait outside for the game you and Dad play. You hide in the well of the stairs and when you hear the bathroom door open, you leap out with a tiger growl – Grrr! – and Dad grabs you and tickles you until you cry for mercy. You pounce.
Jesus Christ, the Man swears.
Denis!, Mum cries and puts her hand over her mouth.
Then she yanks you up roughly by the arm from the top step and propels you down the landing. Go to your room, this instant, and not another word!
Dee-daw, dee-Daw, dee-daw, dee-daw…
Tim turns on the TV and slumps in front of it with the sound down. The breakfast news comes on. The newscaster, dressed like a sober schoolboy, sits casually on the side of the desk, feigning informality. Suddenly there is live coverage. Footage of panic, a fluorescent street strewn with wrecked cars, the glare and dim of pocking fire engines. Stretchers bearing shrouded forms being humped inexpertly along; the walking wounded lean and limp. Northern Ireland, Tim thinks dully, an old response, but no, he corrects himself, aren’t we living in a time of peace? The Middle East, then. He catches a glimpse of the wrought intaglio of a Metro sign. Jesus, this is Paris! Where Reggie is. She might be lying under debris, mangled, mutilated. Her fiery head crushed, her hair smeared with blood. He imagines phoning her and her mobile ringing out. Before he can locate the remote, the carnage has disappeared and it’s back to the newscaster with a tickertape of shares running along the bottom of the screen. Has he dreamed it up?
New Irish Short Stories Page 19
