As You Were

by Elaine Feeney

  ‘Indeed,’ Jane continued, ‘others say other things. You see, mostly people won’t speak about it at all. Maybe that’s easier? For the best?’

  ‘But ma’god,’ Margaret Rose said, ever so slowly, ‘a septic tank, far poor children, babies, and those poor boys that found that tank.’

  ‘Some say they were only in that tank because it was a safe burial place,’ Jane said, ‘but I know what they thought of women, we should make no mistake of that.’ Her hands were shaking.

  ‘So do I,’ said Margaret Rose, oddly clutching her sheets. ‘Never trust them, I amn’t the best with the words, so never rang in ta the radio, but I’d have liked ta, but so many wans come on, telling us their story. Awful. But still, ma’God’s ma’God. And he won’na see us wrong. None of this is God’s work. ’Tis the work of the Devil. And we let the Devil control us. I knows it.’

  She blessed herself. I didn’t agree with any talk of God or the Devil. I thought about Ann’s guitar. Where had it ended up? Hegs should have it. The body remembers, human, instrument. Somatic pain. All the pain-filled belongings we’re encouraged to just dump.

  ‘I remember her beautiful hands. Such beautiful hands and the longest eyelashes you ever saw. People were so scared,’ Jane said, after a long pause. She eyed us both again, running another trust test. ‘The people were scared, I don’t blame ordinary people.’

  ‘Well, I don’na know how ya’d put yar daughter into wan of those places,’ Margaret Rose said, defensively.

  ‘But they put the fear of God into you,’ Jane responded, ‘and you didn’t even know why. What were we so afraid of? Hell maybe. Or shame? Or your parents, siblings . . . everyone was terrified.’ She knelt on her bed now, back poker straight, and began to join her hands as though to pray. ‘But Tom is a good man now, though we got off to a very bad start, and I don’t love him, but he stays to his side of the bed.’ She said, ‘Though he’s so very quiet, hardly a word out of him, and I’m not mad keen on silence.’ Jane lifted up her holdall with her narrow fists tightly closed and lay back with it on her naked stomach. Margaret Rose crept back to her own bed.

  I needed a plan. I would have to find something, Switzerland. Something. And I needed to make it clear to Alex. He needed to understand. Stories last a long time after you go.

  Chapter 11

  I slept badly. Ranting. Dreaming. Sweating. Raving. I was relieved when Wednesday morning arrived.

  Hey, morning! Please pop in x

  . . . Morning. Shit. What’s up?

  Just come in please, I’m lonely and sick/don’t feel gud –

  . . . You can’t be worse? You’re in the right place. Why the hurry? I’ll be as quick as I can, still horny?

  (Aubergine emoji. And syringe. FFS.)

  Fuck you. I’m bad. Seriously. This place is too much. Pls. xx

  . . . REALLY? OK. Soz. Gimme half an hour.

  If you’ve prepped lunch, then come, NOW Pls?

  . . . (Another aubergine. Christ.)

  . . . Fuck. Soz didn’t mean to send that.

  K. You idiot. Don’t come until you’re organised. Have you prepped?

  Bitch move. I always chose it. It quieted him fast. Guilt. Not being a provider. I’m so utterly afraid of marriage and its potential to become entirely catastrophic all of a sudden, that I self-sabotage regularly. I try to break the habit. But it’s utterly compelling, and lately I do it subconsciously. Yet as I watched A typing flicking this way and that with the dots illuminating/dying for minutes without a word appearing, I wanted to punch myself. I could never unsay them, these words I unleashed on him, I could try frantically to gobble them back in . . . this text has been deleted . . . but it never worked. Those words are utterly damaging too. Paranoia inducing.

  It was time to start saying some nice things.

  Tick Tick Tick Tick Tock Hynes . . .

  I’m sorry. Don’t worry about prepping anything. Mum will feed them. Love you.

  . . . I really do fucken love you too, even when you’re ratty, soz too, but you’ve been so . . . ratty . . . unpredictable

  Just bringing the element of surprise I’ll be grand – prob just the meds xoxo

  . . . I think you’re hungry. Hangry? Remind me to tell u bout a doc I watched on Hunger Strikers

  Can.Not.Fucken.Wait.More.Pain.

  Crazy shit

  . . . I’ll pop in, just need to check with your mother and I’ll get there asap

  K?

  K.

  Heart. Red.

  Heart. Red.

  I picked apart a split end, amazed at how many pieces a narrow hair ending can divide into, and splayed the hair out like the top of a skinny lotus. I couldn’t see my kids. They couldn’t see me. Not yet. Not like this.

  SPOTIFY: I Shot the Sheriff.

  I muted it, I needed one of those you-go-to-too-much-power-songs for when you can’t regulate your own emotions, when you know you should be sad, but you giggle, or you know you should be sad but you scream, or you know you should be sad, and you go out and fuck. No strings. Sad. Mad. Bad. Same. Emotion. I braved Sinéad O’Connor singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. She guts me, her voice like a pike or a bayonet. Her big eyes, that face, and the long sadness of the line where she goes to the restaurant, and just then my mouth filled with my tears.

  SINÉAD: MEANING: Irish form of Jane – God is gracious. (God my hole) GENDER: Girl | Female IRISH NAME: Sinéad PRONUNCIATION: shin + aid ENGLISH: Jane, Janet, Janette.

  But gawd, did Sinéad O’ Connor gut me open like a fish-o-filleted.

  *

  I first met Alex on a Friday, start of weekend. We had both gone to the canal near the Claddagh after work to watch the swans. I noticed him and watched him standing at the edge of the bank, legs spread and his hands in the back pockets of light blue jeans, a chocolate-brown Fred Perry hoody zipped up tight to his chin, grey runners with white stripes. When he turned to face me, I saw he had deep mistrustful eye sockets, as though he were constantly exhausted, but he had a warm and generous smile, with two deep dimples. He was laughing away to himself as two Whooper swans fought over a milk carton.

  He was just the type of guy I never went near. The jeans, the runners, the zip top. As the swans came closer, he attempted to pass pleasantries in my direction, about the wind, the milk carton, the orange beaks. I interrupted the swans with a flocking motion of my hands, cautiously, and tried to grab the milk carton, to break up the fight, but ended up being head-butted hard in the stomach by the most giddy of the swans, to which end he stopped laughing and ran to my attention. I knew he was an OK sort, for it was the first time anyone moved so fast towards me.

  ‘Alex,’ he said, putting out his hand after first rubbing it off his jeans. Steady handshake.

  ‘Sinéad.’ I smiled.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to see you at three a.m. outside a chipper,’ he said, and we both laughed. ‘Glad you’ve the milk carton though, that’ll come in useful, I imagine.’ I laughed again. I suggested we get a drink. We got many drinks. And we got very drunk, stayed up all night chatting and laughing until it turned to crying and I passed out on his futon bed in a flat with guitars and crystal ashtrays sunk into tall copper stands.

  After our day of breaking up swan fights we continued seeing each other, getting drunk, getting lentil curries from a small stand near the river, getting to know each other. He’d walk me over the Salmon Weir Bridge and back to my flat with all its cliché rubbish, white bread, a toaster, an empty bottle of peach schnapps with an ivory candle stump, colourful wax hardened on the glass, skins, dream catchers, Che Guevara posters, Harley Davidson Zippo lighters, mix-tapes, CDs, Portishead, Pixies, an unframed Proclamation of Irish Independence, large grandfather clock, guitars with three strings, strings of fairy lights, a menatwork sign or a yieldrightofway sign, damp patches, mildew, pizza boxes, loo roll, broken chairs.

  I felt intense pain. I always start out thinking they’re amazing, the men I meet, and then getting let down, or letting them down.r />
  But he was reliable.

  And love slid up on me. I didn’t look for it. I tried, if I’m honest, to utterly avoid it. I liked Alex and so I quickly showed him all my worst traits, to warn him. Still, he stayed. I had simply wanted to watch the swans, to escape, but we drifted along as a sort of a couple for some time, made no plans, visited the swans every weekend at one of the canal spots, until he proposed there, with a ring tied onto a milk carton.

  The Fred Perry hoodies were the first to go, next the posters, and on and on I went, fixing him. By year two, married him, everything in a strict order, and so it began. Or perhaps something ended and something else began. Planning. House. Meals. Wedding. Baby. Work. (Daughter.) Baby. Work. Baby. Children. Money. Cut your hair, grow a beard, clip your toenails, drink spirulina, eat less red meat, drink less beer, run, walk, run again, until my suggestion of hair plugs became the final straw and he threw a dumb-bell through the patio door of the New House (which is now just The House) and the glass smashed into a million little pieces, and he screamed at me that if he were to start on a Snag List of me, then it’d never end. It would be the first list of an eternity of things.

  And. There. Was. Nothing. Down. That. Road. He. Roared.

  We patched up the door with duct tape and a cornflake cereal box that offered free trips to the zoo, which Alex immediately began cutting out, meticulously. I consoled him by saying that I didn’t really notice his thinning hair, it was just a little bit John Travolta, and that he was still a ride, and not to worry and we eventually laughed.

  In an effort to also not age, I tried every shade of girlie pink blusher and he said I looked like a spy from the Soviet Bloc, with the stern jaw on me and square shoulders, and duck-egg walls in the house replaced all the yellow magnolia everywhere, except where we had carefully frescoed antique white, and a bed so big, you were guaranteed to never find each other. We had two en-suites at opposite ends of the bedroom.

  The fact that he was a real man and a real good man came as a surprise, like that Christmas present hidden far in behind the tree that you find on January sixth when you’re lifting out the Christmas tree. And despite driving each other insane, he was so solid, like a clove drop or bull’s eye or a bullet.

  What I lacked in maternal instinct, he had in abundance and what I lacked (or hid) in verbal expressive ability, he made up for, and what he lacked in his pockets, I sorted, and it was topsy-turvy and often neither of us felt particularly good about it. I wanted to express more and he wanted to earn more and perhaps because we went against the status quo, or perhaps because as time went on, I couldn’t cry unless I was drugged or drunk, or because I couldn’t show I loved him, because of my guilt or my constant self-sabotaging that I had become masterful at. And this was the most painful of all.

  Some weeks before landing on the Ward, I went back to the Whoopers. I hadn’t been since Magpie. I was feeling weak and restless, and needed to get out of the house. Alex was there, standing with his hands in his back pockets. Wax jacket. A lone black swan glided along the canal water, a wine beak like a velvet cupcake. He appeared to be stooping more now and I hadn’t noticed, and he’d thickened a little around the waist, his laces were undone. He had a chicken roll and a takeaway cup of tea from a petrol station, he smiled and rushed to me when he spotted me, and then very worriedly, remarked how thin I’d become, and not good thin, thinthin, as opposed to thin. He tore the roll in half and shared it with me.

  ‘Do you know you break bread?’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t ever cut it. I only heard that today. Weird.’

  ‘Yeah, I think that’s something medieval,’ I said, ‘something to do with knifes and hunting – blood and stuff.’

  *

  As a child I had clumsy hands and I found it hard to hold those really fat waxy crayons that the black flecks stuck onto, and I’d colour in a picture, I’d colour it with bright cyan, magenta, yellow, mauve, whatever else I had, and I’d seal the scene shut with inky ebony crayon, then take the back of a steel spoon to it, and release some colour. But the art was never quite right, for when I dug hard at the ebony wax layer, I took the layer of colour underneath also, and the wax rolled up onto the spoon, so that the house I carved or car or dad or dinosaur looked good, but faded, completely faded.

  *

  ‘Happy Wednesday ta us,’ said Margaret Rose, yawning. ‘How’re you this morning?’ Her eye was drooping towards her stiff chin, but she looked better. Facially. Fresh. Not entirely daisy-like, but she was definitely in better fettle.

  Hegs was back in his place, snoring.

  I waved my hand in the air, unable to speak, and lay back. My chest was a vice-grip. My stomach was on fire, and my pelvis was only safe if I lay down absolutely still; for rising up or attempting to move put tremendous pressure on it, like I was going to give birth or have some prolapse thing about to happen that I’d read about online. I desperately wanted a walk or a swim, to take the pressure off, and because each time I closed my eyes to try and rest, I saw Ann goggly-eyed hanging from the banister. Hospital rest means lying there with your fleeting thoughts on acid.

  Alex arrived, his temples were taut or hollow, his skin looked dry and he was agitated, greeted me in the way he does, not by smiling, but by lifting up his eyebrows and opening his eyes wider. This irritated me, but after a few moments, he revealed he had brought some nail polish, Punchy Soup Can Red.

  ‘I thought maybe I could paint . . .’ he drifted off mid-sentence, lifting my hand, and settling it on a pillow. ‘You know, maybe paint your nails, cheer you up . . . I’m no expert, but I’ll give it a try . . .’

  I smiled.

  ‘Don’t stir,’ he said, as he rummaged in his pockets.

  I tried to sit upright, but couldn’t.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘I can do it while you lie down. I’ve brought some sweets too,’ and he lifted a crisp small brown paper bag from the left pocket of the wax jacket. He unscrewed the top of the bottle and dipped the brush in and out of the pot. ‘Are you actually trying to lose even more weight?’ he whispered coarsely, eyeing around the Ward nervously, as though they were in on it.

  ‘Yeah, I am, yeah,’ I snarled, hardly able to speak.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just drop it . . . Jesus, paint if you’re going to paint . . .’ I said.

  ‘’K.’ Alex paused. ‘It’s just . . . well . . . I’m sorry but fuck me, Sinéad . . . you look like . . . death.’

  ‘Fuck. ’K.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but you do.’

  He placed the brushstroke a millimetre from the cuticle and began to stroke the nail, rounding it nicely at the tip, over the nail edge. After awkwardly manoeuvring the thumb, he blew them quickly, and gently lifted out the pillow and laid my hand on the bed sheet. He circled the bed and came around to the right hand, miming his actions.

  To break the silence, I attempted to tell him about Ann, but he looked concerned and furrowed down his brow. I was wheezing madly, and he told me that I was talking too much to the other patients. Wasting my energy. That ended the conversation, because it took the wind out of my sails and the moment was gone; upon noticing, he apologised, and with the tiny brush between his finger and thumb, he blew gently down again on my fingernails.

  ‘You’re in Hospital to rest and get better . . . that’s all . . . I’m not cross, but you’re wasting energy, and I’m so worried, but you’ll be right as rain in no time . . . you’re in the right place.’

  I grimaced.

  ‘Ah, here, there’s no need to sulk about it.’

  I didn’t respond. Couldn’t.

  ‘I’ve been Googling respiratory illnesses,’ he said.

  Shit.

  ‘Do you know it’s a major killer . . . even more than cancer?’

  I’d been Googling too. Animals that freeze or play dead:

  LEMON SHARKS PLAY DEAD WHEN FLIPPED ON THEIR BACKS. When faced with imminent death, certain species of duck will play dead. It’s called tonic immobility. Pigs and other f
arm animals can fall into a trancelike state. Snakes are good actors. The baby brown snake, or Storeria dekayi, will freeze if approached by a menacing predator — or scientist intent on a closer look. And the snakes stay in character, remaining stiff and lifeless even after prodding. (National Geographic)

  He apologised for the nails, as the more he painted, the more his hand shook. I reassured him quietly that they had cheered me up – and they had. They were summery, and I accidentally, for the briefest moment, looked forward to the summer for the first time in ages. Then I looked down at my body; black coarse hair sprouted out of my ankles and I remembered again. This was the way it happened, forgetting, remembering.

  ‘I want to be cremated, OK?’

  ‘Ah, now, I didn’t really mean that you look that much like death . . . I just don’t want you to lose any more weight. I was joking. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Shit, you don’t have one of those eating disorder things, do you? Where you . . . you know . . . puke? Fuck. I never thought, maybe . . .’

  ‘No,’ I said, interrupting him sharply.

  ‘Oh, no . . . sorry, just Paul’s daughter has one, and well, you’re similar, you know . . . you fit the . . .’

  ‘Fit the?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Fit the what? Go on, you started.’

  I gripped my two thumbs with my index fingers, smudging the polish.