‘What’ll you have to drink?’ he asks and belches. ‘Excuse me.’
Brendan launches into a big forced laugh.
Alexander asks for a lager. Julia ponders, then opts for a glass of white wine, if there’s a bottle open.
‘There isn’t, but I’ll open one for you. Do you want white?’
‘Yes, that’s what I said.’
‘No; you said, “if there is a bottle open”,’ Derek continues, exercising his sense of humour, ‘which there isn’t—’
‘You have to be careful what you say in this house,’ Brigid advises Julia. ‘You have to speak very accurately.’
‘But I’ll open a bottle for you. You’re more than welcome.’
Accuracy thus satisfied, Derek departs to get the drinks.
‘You should have come to Galway,’ Brigid says to her son, shaking her head solemnly. ‘It was just Mick and me from our side. The Gradys were there in shifts.’ Brigid, sniffing, wiggles her bum on the sofa to get more purchase for the important utterance to come. ‘She might leave you something in the will if you courted her a bit. She was always fond of you.’
Alexander feigns superiority to these vulgar considerations.
‘How is she doing?’ he asks.
‘They moved her back Wednesday to the nursing home. She’s very frail. If she sneezes queerly in the night, it could push her over the edge. But there’s nothing wrong with her as such, apart from a sprained ankle. And she seems to be perfectly in her senses, though she’s cross. She’s threatening to change her will.’
‘What’s in the current one?’ Julia asks conversationally.
‘What’s her will?’ Nicky butts in.
‘She doesn’t have a willy, stupid,’ says Brendan, breaking into uproarious laughter.
‘Don’t be so juvenile,’ says Nicky, and glances around at the adults for approval of this censure, for admiration of her vocabulary.
‘Nobody is sure,’ Brigid excitedly explains to Julia, laterally across the sofa, over Nicky’s head, ‘but I’d say she has divided it equally between her nieces and nephews. There are eight in all. You’ve met the four on my side. There were six Gradys in the same generation, but two of them are dead now. Cancer. Tommy Óg is the ringmaster. He’s the youngest and the meanest – a butcher by trade, and a brute by nature.’
‘Is Auntie Maisie D.Y.I.N.G?’ asks Nicky.
‘Stop spelling stuff,’ Brendan says. ‘That’s not fair. Just because I can’t understand.’
‘Well then learn how to spell. Anyway, you’re too young for certain things. You shouldn’t listen to older people talking.’
‘Fuck off. I can listen if I want.’
‘Ooooh,’ says Nicky with a long audible intake of breath, hand to her mouth, an expression of deep shock on her face.
‘You guys are in fine fettle,’ Julia observes.
‘I’m going to tell Mammy on you,’ says Nicky, slipping off the sofa.
‘Sit down,’ Brigid orders her, with surprising authority. ‘Don’t tell tales. It isn’t nice.’ She addresses her grandson equally sternly in turn: ‘Brendan, don’t use language like that. It’s very bold.’
‘I will if I like,’ says Brendan, staring at her defiantly, and reminding Alexander of Helena as a child, bravely striking an attitude against their mother.
Alexander sees the same old anger flare up in Brigid’s eyes.
‘You say anything like that in my presence again, young man,’ she says, ‘and I’ll whip you to within an inch of your life.’
Her forcefulness and the threat of violence shock everyone in the room. Brendan drops his head meekly and busies himself with his dinosaurs. Nicky edges away a little on the sofa, watching her grandmother with new fear. Alexander finds that his mouth is agape, while Julia is seeing the funny side.
‘Brigid, I’m really impressed by your ruthlessness,’ she says.
‘The older I get, the clearer I see things,’ Brigid responds, still infused with righteous indignation.
Derek reappears with a glass of white wine in one hand and a pint of lager in the other. He dispenses the drinks without comment, then moves back to his armchair and lets his body fall into its habitual slouch. The cushion oompfs and hisses under the weight of his arse. He picks up the remote control from the floor and switches off the television. Helena’s instructions, Alexander guesses.
‘Hey, I was watching that,’ says Brendan, rebounding, but unheard.
Julia once again seems ill at ease, shifting around on the sofa, leaning back, then forward again. She opens the big book of wildlife photos which is parked on the coffee table in front of her and begins turning the pages, though she has no known interest in wildlife.
Helena enters, her face glazed lightly with sweat from her efforts in the hot kitchen. This sheen, together with the brightness of her eyes, creates an impression of luminosity, of happiness. She is dressed simply in a white T-shirt, chinos and flip-flops. Her waist has thickened over the course of the years (and the birth of two children), but has retained its form well. Her thighs and buttocks are trim thirty-something. There is no embarrassment in her figure. With one foot she moves the bean bag from the centre of the floor to over by the fireplace, then sits deftly.
‘The duck is done, but we’ll let it breathe while the potatoes are roasting. It’s really juicy, even if I say so myself.’
‘I can’t stay for dinner,’ Julia blurts out suddenly.
She is sitting now on the very edge of the sofa, her right hand tugging at the fingers of her left hand, which is her habit when she is anxious.
Alexander trips into one of his fits. They are almost unnoticeable externally, but from the inside he falls into confusion: the walls lose their orientation in space; the room contracts; the people seem smaller or farther away, and somehow absurd, alien even. The situation feels keenly unstable, unsustainable, as though reality were being crushed from outside by an irresistible force or logic. Only his familiarity with these episodes makes them bearable. He knows it will pass in a second if he can just hold on. In other circumstances, he would move to the nearest external door, hand on his head to keep it together, and try to get outside for some fresh perspective and a blast of air. In this moment, he does no more than touch two fingers to his temple, and rub slightly.
Julia energetically snaps the wildlife book shut.
He guesses – discerns – that she does not have her period after all.
‘Alexander and I are splitting up,’ she says, speaking to Helena to begin with, then Brigid, then finally facing Alexander, although ostensibly the words are not addressed to him.
‘That’s a pity,’ says Brigid, sounding surprisingly unconcerned. ‘Are you sure you won’t stay for dinner, since you’ve come the whole way out?’
‘You stupid prick!’ Helena snaps at Alexander, angry to the point of almost shouting, rising from the bean bag to her hunkers.
Julia jumps to her feet, evidently intending to depart immediately, hastened no doubt by the prospect of a messy family scene. Nicky giggles. Brigid sniffs in slow puzzlement. Brendan watches voraciously. Derek sips his beer and leers, delighted with the free entertainment.
Alexander feels like a man shot but still on his feet, deathly pale but as yet no wound showing, no blood spilling from his mouth. Helena’s attack – the implicit judgement, the viciousness of the timing, the disloyalty – is what he finds most piercing. Julia’s revelation that she is ending their relationship is stunning, perhaps in time devastating, but for now he can take it with curious lightness. Helena’s reaction has slaughtered him.
‘Tonight, when we were coming through the village,’ he says to his sister, ‘I noticed that there aren’t any butchers any more. When we were growing up, there must have been three or four at least. Do you remember Tom Kearney’s, where they had the abattoir round the back?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Brigid asks.
‘That’s exactly the kind of shit I’m talking about,’ says Helena, standing now, vehemently shaking her finger at him, ‘that sort of non-sequitur nonsense. That’s why she’s leaving you.’
‘The reasons are between Alexander and myself,’ Julia says, but no one is listening to her.
‘What’s non-sequitur nonsense?’ Nicky asks her father.
Derek shrugs like a teenager.
‘It’s not a non-sequitur to me,’ Alexander says.
He has a history of finishing poorly.
All the boys on their road had bikes. For a while, one summer, it was a bike culture. You had to have a bike to be in it, and you had to have a cool bike, ideally a Chopper, if you wanted to be a respected figure.
Alexander’s first bike was a thing for a toddler with plastic wheels. When he grew out of that, he would have been ready for a Chipper, the Chopper’s little brother, but this was so out of the question financially that the possibility didn’t even enter his head.
His father announced one evening that they would get the old Raleigh repaired, which they had received second hand as a gift a few years earlier for Helena, although she had rarely used it. If he saw that bike now, Alexander might find it charming, but back then it was an appalling prospect: a dull dark-blue colour; oil-stained, scratched, and rusty from years of use; with old-fashioned handlebars, an ugly chain guard, and a braking system based on steel rods. Worse, it was a girl’s bike, with a V-shaped frame rather than a manly crossbar.
Alexander can recall the day when he and his father drove – in their banger of a car – to collect the bike from the repair-shop. It was a joyless occasion for all concerned, including the repairman. On the way back, Jim Vespucci stopped the car at the top of the long road on which they then lived, took the bike out of the boot, and told his son to cycle it home. This was a daunting task. Alexander knew how to ride at this point, but the old Raleigh was still a big step for him. He objected briefly, but his relationship with his father was not one in which there was any negotiation or toleration of differences of opinion. His father left him stranded; paused briefly a few yards down the road to observe through the rear-view mirror, then drove off.
Alexander walked the bike for a while, but the road was so long that he was forced to have a go at cycling the thing, which he just about managed, nervously, with a few wobbles. It was his first experience of pneumatic tyres, and the bike, for all its inadequacy as a fashion accessory, had large narrow wheels which covered the concrete ground with surprising speed. By the time he reached home, he was full of his own success as a grown-up rider and conscious enough of the possibilities of this new machine to give an impression of enthusiasm which was almost genuine.
The boys on the road organised a bicycle race. The arrangements were complex. A course was agreed: they would start in the cul-de-sac, turn up the hill, do a circuit of the park, return down the hill, then race back into the cul-de-sac, where the first person to touch the wall would be the winner. A time was agreed: the race would begin at half past two.
The contestants spent the morning preparing their racing machines. One kid fastened a narrow strip of cereal-box cardboard to the rear fork with a clothes peg, in such a way that the cardboard flapped rapidly through the spokes of the back wheel as the wheel turned, producing an engine noise. Then all the boys did the same, and some had two or three flaps. One taped a coloured number plate to the front of the handlebars; and again they all did variations of the same thing. Helena helped Alexander make a name plate, although unfortunately it was in crayon rather than marker. Thunderbolt, his bike was called, with a streak of jagged yellow lightning across the top of the word.
A big gang of riders and supporters assembled after lunch. They waited for prestigious individuals to be released by their parents, clarified the rules repeatedly, had a few false starts, then suddenly the race was on.
Alexander was slow to realise what was happening, hesitant in getting moving; but once the task was clear, he began to undertake it with diligence. He was an agile and physically fit child, who spent his days running around the fields behind the houses, or playing football on the road. His Raleigh, with its big wheels, was faster than the Choppers and the Chippers. Coming off the circuit of the park, he found himself in third place. He was cautious down the hill, but quickly overtook the final two riders on the home straight. With thirty yards to go, he and Thunderbolt were winning.
The spectators at the finishing line cheered him on. He was filled with excitement, overpowered by emotion, and lost sight of his task. The flapping of the cardboard in the spokes assumed in the moment huge proportions. The world tipped strangely. The road came up to meet him. His hands, elbows, knees scraped at high speed over the gritty concrete, and his head did a double smack against the kerb, with the bike wheeling off by itself toward the crowd, arching away, falling over. Even after the bike had crashed to a halt, the back wheel continued to spin, the cardboard flapping loudly in the spokes.
Cut and bloodied, concussed, unsuccessful, heroic, Alexander and his bike were led gently back to his home by a group of his street mates, who explained to his mother what had happened and hung around to gossip.
Young Brigid washed the grime out of his cuts. She did not do this as prettily or as tenderly as other mothers he knew. She didn’t have cotton wool balls with which to apply the disinfectant, nor a first-aid box with plasters and such, nor a little scissors for cutting bandages to size. And no jar of sweets to provide consolation to the wounded.
II
December
Alexander Vespucci has found that one of the many advantages of living alone is that there is no pressure to do anything on a Saturday morning. Unfortunately, his constitution is no longer such that he can take full advantage of this freedom. In his teens and twenties he used to sleep on Saturday mornings. On a good morning, he would sleep past midday. On a special occasion, he might sleep into the late afternoon. And if this happened in winter, it could already be dark again by the time he was surfacing. Such extremes were rare, certainly, but they were possible. These days, however late he hits the mattress, whatever his state of inebriation at that point, it is a struggle to sleep past ten.
On this particular Saturday, Alexander lies alone in the double bed in the back bedroom of the Rathmines flat, trying to read a book on evolution, but unable, even though he finds the subject fascinating, to make any progress. His mind is projecting a depressing mosaic of worries and negative observations on the state of his life and personality. And each old thing that is thrown up – from who knows where – his attention slavishly follows like a dog fetching a stone for the umpteenth time. There must be some pleasure in this. Otherwise, why would he do it?
He can smell Julia. Maybe that is why he has stayed in the flat when he knows it would be best to find a different place to live. She is gone now, but her smell lingers, like a spectral presence in a ruined house, at times remarkably tangible but ultimately elusive.
On first getting the keys to the flat, before they moved in, when there was still the thrill of owning access to this new private space, the sense of possibility, of unformed identity, he discovered an odour he didn’t like. He walked around the flat for a good half hour, sniffing the surfaces, the corners, investigating as an animal might investigate. It was a smell of cat. Just inside the front door particularly, there was a shrill metallic smell of cat’s piss. Julia didn’t notice it so much, or wasn’t bothered by it, but she had grown up with cats and was fond of them, while Alexander always professed to hate them.
He discussed it with the landlord.
‘Well, you’re right,’ the well-nourished, softly spoken man confessed with a grin, ‘although I don’t see how you could still get it. There was an old dear here a few years ago who had a cat. It got locked in one time for a couple of days and went to the toilet there a
t the door. But I changed the carpet and scrubbed the concrete with industrial cleaner. I can’t see how the smell would still be there.’
Years later, that smell is long gone, or faded beyond notice. Now it is the smell of Julia that his sense detects, that endures in his consciousness. And for this smell, it is early days yet, even though she – to his knowledge – never pissed on the floor, and all her stuff is gone, her clothes and possessions, whatever she wanted of the things they bought together, and the bedding has been washed (twice at this stage).
In this flat, in this very bed, he discovered that it is not possible in a relationship to return to how things were at an earlier time.
It is a tale of two embraces.
When they were in fourth year in college, Julia had a room on the campus where Alexander often stayed, so much so that they tripped into an almost domestic situation, which was full of unexpected delights. Simple things were infused with magic by their love: laughing over cornflakes and cold milk for lunch; a Chinese take away in front of the TV in the evening. In their best moments, they were easily as besotted with each other as any Romeo and Juliet. Not that they compared themselves with anything else in the universe. There was no need.
Julia liked to go to sleep early. Even on nights when she was supposed to be studying hard, or had an essay to work on, by nine thirty her dedication would begin to wilt. She would then quietly intimate, with a guilty smirk, that she was going to get into her pyjamas and continue reading in bed. For Alexander this meant sex, so he always encouraged her. There was nothing so intoxicating for him, nothing so steeply erotically charged, as when she – kneeling astride his body – slowly unbuttoned her pyjamas (put on only minutes previously), revealing the pale skin of her upper torso, her beautifully narrow shoulders, her superb plenteous sweet-nippled breasts.
Being Alexander Page 10
