‘Come on, let’s do it,’ says Danny.
They throw the shots down their throats. It is a matter of ritual that this be done in a single movement. Danny struggles a bit. The tequila goes into his mouth, and from there is swallowed in two or three distinct gulps. Alexander, who has the considerable benefit of freshness, executes as choreographed, gasps, and bites into the lemon slice, which instantly overrides the burning sensation.
‘Are we back?’ Danny asks, carelessly dropping the remains of his lemon onto the floor.
‘We’re back,’ Alexander lies, and takes a cigarette from Danny’s pack on the bar. ‘I’d better get a pint. Actually, I still have a pint down below. . . . Fuck it, I’ll have a-quick-nother one here.’
As he is lighting his cigarette, he sees Aoife enter from the street, pushing the door open with force and purpose. She looks magnificent. The colours of her are elemental: the redness of her hair, wiry and wild; her long, green big-buttoned jacket with the high collar turned up; the pallor of her skin (she looks a bit ill, in fact); her tall black punk boots. She charges into the pub as though she has stepped from another dimension, like the horse that came out of the wardrobe in Time Bandits, sweating and steaming. She scans the assembled drinkers with intensely focused, marauding eyes, and quickly spots Danny and Alexander.
‘Angry missus at three o’clock,’ Alexander says to Danny.
Danny does not respond. It appears from his expression that he hasn’t heard properly or doesn’t understand, or perhaps the drink is delaying his reactions.
‘Aoife is here and she’s coming straight for you.’
‘Ah,’ says Danny, and his head gives a curious upward nod. He doesn’t turn around to watch her approach. Calmly he reaches for his pint and throws a good portion of what remains down his throat with far more ease than he did the tequila. She is upon them now. Alexander is nervous. He coughs to distract himself from the bodily sensations of fear. He has been on sessions with Danny when Aoife has tracked them down. It hasn’t been pretty.
She ignores Alexander as she grimly lays a hand on Danny’s shoulder. Danny turns around to greet her.
‘My darling ball and chain,’ he says. ‘Is it that time already? I’m sure you must be right. Haven’t I had more than enough of free living these past few hours?’
‘I have a taxi waiting outside, Danny,’ Aoife says in a low, livid voice. ‘You’re going to get up, and we’re going to leave quietly. The other option is that I kick the shit out of you right here and now.’
‘Well, when you put it like that, dear, how can I refuse?’
Danny turns around to finish his pint, which he does in a single swallow. He gathers up his cigarettes, lighter and newspapers (Irish Times, Racing Post, folded, frayed, smudged). He lifts himself carefully to his feet, sways deeply, corrects himself, leeringly fastens his gaze on the barman, inquiring in this way as to whether or not it was he who betrayed him. The barman gives a shrug that could mean anything.
‘Do you have money for the taxi?’ Aoife asks Alexander.
‘How much?’
‘Thirty euro.’
He reaches in for the stash of cash in his thigh pocket, pulls out some notes. This lucky dip goes badly for him: a fifty and a twenty. He reaches in again but there are only coins left. He looks at her. She stares right back.
‘Here,’ he says, handing her the fifty.
Danny claps him feebly on the shoulder and makes to leave. Aoife nods. She is imputing no blame to Alexander on this occasion. She expresses no gratitude for the money, gives no parting word, but her nod is respectful, an acknowledgement of shared existence, experience.
She turns and leads her tottering man out the door.
Alexander returns to his colleagues and stands modestly on the outskirts of the conversation until there is an opening for him to enter. Neville is telling the story of a suicide.
‘He hanged himself in the garage.’
‘At a party?’ Luke asks in consternation.
‘A big party. A friend of his had a free house – the parents were away. At two o’clock in the morning, he goes into the garage and hangs himself.’
‘Was it something somebody said to him?’ Imelda asks.
‘We’ll never know,’ says Neville. ‘But maybe you’re right. Maybe somebody said something to him, or maybe he overheard something, or saw something: his best friend getting off with his girlfriend; his girlfriend dumping him, laughing at him; somebody revealing to everyone that he was gay.’
In stating this last option, Neville looks pointedly at Alexander, or at least Alexander feels that he is looking pointedly at him. Either way, Alexander experiences a moment of discomfort.
‘It’s an epidemic,’ he says to deflect the attention. ‘People are topping themselves left, right and centre. I can’t understand it. If I wanted to kill myself, I’d go to Buenos Aires and drink myself to death . . . have a bit of fun on the way.’
‘I’d do a Hungerford,’ says Luke with a laugh. ‘I’d take a few bastards with me – go out in style.’
‘What’s a Hungerford?’ Imelda asks.
‘Columbine,’ says Neville.
‘It’s a small town in the countryside outside London,’ Alexander explains. ‘A few years . . . a long time ago now, a guy went bonkers with a rifle, killed more than a dozen people, then shot himself in the head.’
‘I’d drink weed killer,’ says Neville with a smirk. ‘I’d pour it into a Coke bottle, put it in the fridge like it was real Coke, then drink it some day after work, if I was bored, just for kicks.’
‘With slight modification, that could be a murder plan,’ Alexander observes.
Neville continues to smirk.
In the car on the way out to Malahide, Alexander and Julia barely speak.
She drives. To begin with, her handling of the car is staccato, angular. She is unfeeling with the gears. She slaps the indicator arm as though she wishes to damage it. She over-accelerates, then brakes. But the evening is so lovely, warm and bright, it is impossible for her to persist with this brutality for long.
The traffic is easing off. They cruise easily down Camden Street . . . Wexford Street . . . Aungier Street. In these minutes, he feels a great fondness for Dublin, these bustling, downbeat stretches, the tilt and curve of the terraces, how the straight lines of human construction bend and sink into the ground with age. Julia swings the car smoothly onto Dame Street. It seems to Alexander that everyone on the streets is in good form, looking forward to the night ahead and the weekend. There are fewer hurrying commuters now, more young people: freshly washed, in their best gear, boys with gel in their hair, girls with glittery eyeshadow. He feels at one with them.
Alexander has his window rolled down, elbow out. His perception has been heightened by the beer and tequila. The physical texture of the city appears different to him: the pavements, the buildings; these surfaces seem yielding, as if one could bounce off them. He experiences the sky as an interior ceiling, beneath which all is seamlessly integrated. Alexander finds himself on intimate terms with everything under the sun. He is superhuman, bulletproof.
At the corner of College Green, he studies with fresh attention the square-shouldered façade of Trinity College. It is the face of home. And the old parliament building, with its tall columns and scooped-out in-filled windows, is creamy, curvaceous. The traffic light here is green, but they nevertheless have to roll cautiously through the crossing flow of pedestrians, who have right of way because there are so many of them and because they jaywalk so expertly. Julia is patient in this.
When she met him earlier at the ramped mouth of the carpark under his office, she seemed unusually tense.
‘Why did you ask me to meet you here?’ she asked angrily, ‘You knew I would look like a prostitute, standing around waiting. I don’t find that amusing. And you’re drunk.’
He
reckons now that her mood has softened sufficiently for him to make a come-back.
‘I tried to ring you this afternoon. Your phone was switched off.’
‘You don’t own me, Alexander,’ she retorts, so ferociously that he thinks she is going crazy, until with a bolt – tinged with malicious glee – he realises she must be having her period, must be just about to get her period.
Julia doesn’t speak much on the subject of menstruation. Back when they first starting screwing properly, in college, they didn’t pause for that part of her cycle. He took his cue from her on this. If she didn’t mind, he didn’t mind. He would wake up in the morning and see the dark dried blood on his penis, some of it flaking off already, and the Catholic in him would feel like a sexual rebel, a desperado.
When they got back together again, after the split, Julia’s policies changed. First it was: ‘We don’t have to have sex every night.’ Then, a little later: ‘No. I have my period.’
Over the years, which have gone by like days, sex went from being the rule to being the exception, so much so that now he discovers her period through its effect on her mood rather than the sexual disruption.
But there is another clue, apart from her mood. Sometimes he notices a tiny cloud of diluted blood – no more than the size of a twenty-cent coin – at the bottom of the toilet, far below the waterline, resting in the concavity which is the low point of the visible portion of the pipe. There is something beautiful to him about this little pinkish trace that appears always in this same location in the toilet. He doesn’t know why it is there, in behavioural or scientific terms. He doesn’t inquire about how she disposes of her tampons. He doesn’t know if blood has a higher density than water, whether or not it is partially insoluble in water. In his teenage years, he wondered if menstrual blood was different from ordinary blood, but such questions do not trouble him now.
‘You seem a bit touchy,’ he says diplomatically as they turn left off the quays past Liberty Hall and head for Busáras under the heavy railway bridge.
She doesn’t answer.
‘Danny blew the money I gave him,’ he continues.
‘Of course he blew it. Being Danny. You should have given it to Aoife.’
‘I couldn’t have done that. He’s my friend.’
On the North Strand, they pass a Chinese takeaway called Fragrant River. He remembers, during their student days, when they would get the 42 bus out to Malahide, along this same route, to make a retreat from the hectic pace of their drinking life and get properly fed by his mother.
‘That’s an awful name for a restaurant,’ she said one evening as they passed it on the bus.
‘I was just thinking that it’s a good name,’ he said.
They laughed about this clash of opinion, but it seems to him now to represent an early indication of a fundamental difference in perspective.
Why, again, is he planning to marry this irritable woman?
Because the time is right and he has no one else to marry. Because she is relatively good looking and intelligent. Because she is the right age, has the right education. Because she is not a bad person. Because, above all, she knows him. He couldn’t bear to repeat the process of introducing and explaining himself, of working through to the point where it would be possible to marry someone else.
When and how should he raise the issue? Should he buy a ring first? That would be a waste of money if she ends up saying no. And now doesn’t seem to be the right time, since they appear to have drifted into a bad patch. Some time around Christmas she mentioned it herself. They were in the bathroom: she sitting on the toilet having a pee, which she rarely does in his presence; he shaving at the mirror, reaching up carefully into one of his nostrils with the corner of the razorhead.
‘So when are we going to get married, Alex? When is the day?’
‘Are you teasing me?’
‘You tell me.’
And he cut himself.
At the beginning, his mother took a strong dislike to Julia.
Out in Malahide, Julia was supposed to sleep in the spare room, but the first time she stayed over, she ended up spending the night in Alexander’s bed, accidentally. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, and remained the whole night entwined in the same position on the narrow mattress. They were very much in love in those days, and could maintain physical closeness for a long time without it becoming uncomfortable. Now, in their infrequent couplings, their bodies naturally and rapidly seek physical separation within seconds of the act concluding.
His mother woke them that morning with shocking knocks on the bedroom door, followed by a rash intrusion. Brigid in her morning glory would have scared the devil: full-length pink polyester dressing gown and matching slippers; face puffy and lined from sleep; hair sticking out as if she had spent the night sniffing solvents; expression raw and angry. She spoke with one hand in front of her mouth to cover the absence of her false teeth.
‘You, Miss, get across to the spare room, which is where you were invited to sleep, and where you would have slept if you had any manners.’
Brigid pointed across the landing and moved to one side of the doorway to give Julia room to pass. Julia rose silently and walked across the floor in a long T-shirt (one of Alexander’s) and bare feet. Even in those uncomfortable moments, Alexander could not but admire the girl: the slow grace of her movement; the turn of her calves.
‘You can do what you like when you have your own house,’ Brigid said to her son, ‘but so long as you live in mine, you’ll abide by my rules.’ Julia was out of sight but still within earshot as Brigid continued deliberately with a little stab of character assassination. ‘And let me tell you, she’s no good for you. I watched her yesterday. She drinks too much. She’s dissipated.’
This was well over a decade ago. All is forgotten now. These days, Julia gets on better with his mother than Alexander does.
Helena and her family live in a housing estate on the coast road in Malahide. The estate was built in the 1970s. The gardens are full, mature – somehow dated, Alexander finds, perhaps due to all the palm trees. But the cars are invariably up-to-the-minute. And there is a great abundance of them, parked along the kerb, crammed into driveways. Some of the gardens have been paved over, typically in red and beige tiles, to make way for two, three or even four cars. Helena’s front garden is one such, although they own only two vehicles: Derek’s 03 BMW 3 Series and Helena’s 02 Golf GTI. Their house is ‘detached’, separated from its neighbours by three or four feet on either side. It is a solid, square building, with a good high roof, the apex of which is directly over the front door, as it would be in a picture drawn by a child. Taking account of the house, the cars, household assets, pension rights and so on, Helena is easily a millionaire, which – when they were kids – was a fabulous thing to be. Nowadays, everyone is a millionaire. Except Alexander.
He presses the bell in three short bursts. As they wait, he is curiously nervous. An odd premonition comes to him. He turns to Julia.
‘Am I a bad lover?’ he asks searchingly.
His question physically knocks her. She takes a step backward, frowning. He thinks for a moment she is going to cry, but she gathers herself, steps nearer to him, reaches up with her hand on his arm, and plants a perfect kiss on his mouth, cool and dry on the outside, with a thin line of warm wetness through the centre.
‘No, I wouldn’t say that. But you finish poorly.’
She breaks into a loud affectionate laugh, as though she has hit upon a private joke, and is still laughing when Helena opens the door.
‘You missed a good lesson last night,’ Helena says to him, as she is bringing them into the sitting room.
‘Who were you on?’
‘Liath. We jumped quite high: four poles.’
Liath is a seven-year-old grey mare, Helena’s favourite horse in the stable. For a school horse, she is sensitiv
e in the mouth, and
forward going rather than lazy. When she is walking, she wants to trot; when she is trotting, she wants to canter. But since she is so responsive, it isn’t hard work to hold her back, which makes for a good ride: contained energy.
Alexander finds there is something intensely mundane – almost depressive – in the atmosphere in the big front room where Helena’s husband Derek, their two kids, and Brigid are sitting around, waiting for dinner, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
‘Well, hello to you,’ says Brigid with peculiar emphasis, as if this is a line she has rehearsed all evening.
She looks exceedingly relaxed, sitting on the sofa with her feet up on a pouffe and a celebrity magazine on her lap.
‘Howdy,’ says Derek from his armchair, with some intention to engage politely; but his eyes are repeatedly, magnetically, drawn back to the screen where Buffy is kick-boxing zombies. In a titty top and tight jeans, Buffy is indeed in mouth-watering form, as ever.
‘Mammy, I’m hungry,’ says skinny eight-year-old Nicky, fixedly watching Alexander. She is sitting on the sofa beside her granny, their arms cosily linked. ‘Can I have a glass of milk and two biscuits?’
Brendan, aged five, is sitting on the carpet right under the television set, playing with his dinosaurs.
‘Hiya, Brendan,’ says Alexander, making an effort to sound upbeat.
Brendan looks back at him sceptically.
‘Will you get the folks a drink?’ Helena asks her husband. ‘I’m just going to put the spuds in the oven.’
‘Did you not have dinner in your own house?’ Brendan asks, which causes Derek to chuckle.
‘Don’t be rude, Brendan,’ says Helena, as she leaves the room.
‘Our granny is a vegan,’ Nicky says. ‘That means she doesn’t eat any meat unless she wants to. I’m a vegan too, except I usually always like to eat meat, especially chicken and burgers, but not stew. Stew is yucky.’
The sofa and armchairs are arranged around the television. Julia sits beside Nicky on the sofa. Alexander takes the free chair, while Derek is creakily rising from his. Standing, Derek fondly caresses his substantial beer belly with both hands.
Being Alexander Page 9
