He wants to do something. He drops to his hunkers and takes hold of the Buddha, one hand on the smooth roundness of the skull, the other on the base, which he tilts up. The object is heavier than expected. He is careful in lifting it, making sure that his knees and thighs do the work, rather than his back.
Carrying the statue with his hands and lower arms, he crosses the threshold into the bathroom. The bath is filled with an uneven landscape of foam, like the surface of an exotic planet. Above the glistening foamy mountains, which are rising perceptibly with the waterline as the gushing taps continue to fill the bath, the upper portion of Grace’s body is visible: her simian head, the bare neck and upper torso, the faint twin swells which just begin to define her breasts and the interesting space between them. He pauses at the end of the bath, where the taps are, seeking to disguise the fact that his breathing is slightly laboured under the weight of the statue.
She faces him calmly from the far end. Her penny eyes are brighter than usual. Her tied-up hair is damp from the steam, with loose wet strands sticking to her forehead and hanging prettily about her ears. Her skin glows pinkly in the humid heat.
‘That’s an expensive piece,’ she says.
He feels foolish now. What is he going to do with the thing? What’s his punchline? The Buddha is so heavy, he finds it impossible to maintain a smooth composure. The physical strain expresses itself in his face. He doesn’t want to bring the thing back to the hallway, nor to bow down and place it on the floor. And he can’t hold it for much longer.
‘You look like a gobshite,’ she says, with more pleasure and complacency than is wise at this moment.
‘You’re right,’ he concedes, and with a little impulsion releases the Buddha into the bath, just below where he imagines her feet to be. His execution is clumsy. He slips backward as the thing is leaving his arms and misses his aim. The Buddha crashes off the edge of the bath, crunching the tiles, losing some of its momentum, then tumbles with a heavy splash into the water.
Grace reacts with surprising speed. She pulls up her legs, her shiny knees erupting through the foam like the crystalline beams in Superman’s palace, her torso shooting forward into a more upright position, which partially, increasingly, reveals her small sexy breasts as the watery foam slides downward away from them.
‘I thought it would look better in here,’ he says with a smile, though his heart is thumping.
‘You fucking idiot!’ Her lips are tight with anger. ‘You could have broken my feet.’
‘It was just a joke. Don’t take it so seriously.’ He finds that these words are insufficient, so he adds more, realising as he does so that he is contradicting himself. ‘If you were a little bit kinder, or more polite, there wouldn’t be any call for such gestures.’
‘What?’ she asks incredulously.
During this exchange, he observes with clarity for the first time that her breasts are not the breasts of a young woman. In each case the main wad of flesh has stretched downward and lost its shapeliness. The nipples point in different directions, one down, one out, like loose cannon.
She takes hold of the handrail on the wall and carefully, impressively, raises herself to stand. Water runs off the sallow planes of her body, leaving chunks of foam stranded like glacial erratics. He admires her pubic area: the narrowing rectangle of auburn-coloured hair, matted with wetness; the bikini bottom of pale skin; the leanness of her thighs.
She steps out onto the porcelain-tiled floor, which is splashed wet from the tsunami created by the Buddha’s impact with the bathwater. Her shins are gleaming and bristly, her toenails crimson. She removes a thick-pile white towel from the rail, wraps herself in it as a woman does: beneath the armpits, around and around again, tucking in the top corner.
She steps forward and punches him on the jaw. It is a straighter punch than a man would deliver, direct and strong. He staggers backward until he reaches the wall by the door, then allows himself to slide down into a sitting position on the wet floor. For a second he thinks he is going to faint, but the fuzziness passes and he is left in a condition of transported awareness.
‘Wow, I feel good,’ he says, surprised, speaking as much to himself as to her, touching his jaw where she hit him. ‘I ought to get punched more often.’
‘I can arrange that,’ she says humourlessly, not looking at him, focused on the damaged tiles at the edge of the bath, which she fingers exploratively.
‘Sit down for a minute,’ he suggests. ‘Let’s talk about broadband.’
‘Fuckwit,’ she snaps, but her anger is diminishing. ‘You’re going to have to pay for this. And for Buddha Bud, if he’s damaged.’
‘You can deduct it from my bonus,’ he offers generously, speaking from the position of authority in which he appears to have landed. ‘That’s one of the things I want to talk to you about. Why don’t you sit down on the toilet? Such a handsome toilet. Let’s make ourselves comfortable.’
Amazingly, or perhaps not so amazingly, she does as he asks. Wrapped in her towel, she steps barefoot across the wet tiles, a movement he finds arousing, all the more so for her being momentarily compliant. She sits on the wooden lid, loosening the towel as she does so, crossing her legs, folding her arms across her breast.
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Blackmore and Associates have nearly finished the report.’
‘Is he going to say what we want him to say?’
‘That depends. He’s a businessman. He’ll be guided by me. That’s why I selected him. And he’s coming to see me next week to discuss the recommendations, to find out which way the wind is blowing. He won’t put it like that, since it’s an independent report.’
‘Of course not. . . . This is good news.’ She licks her lips, uncrosses her legs and slides her feet apart, opening – under the towel – a new territory of dark invitation. She places her open palms on her towelled thighs. ‘I get horny when we start to talk money.’
These simple moves melt him, the solid thing in him that turns to liquid when he is suddenly aroused, when he experiences an erotic shock. It is an immediate shut-down of one part of his brain, an instantaneous change in the ways the neurological traffic is flowing. It precedes erection, though that physical transformation follows immediately.
She spreads her legs wider and slides her body down and out into a more horizontal position, her back pressed against the cistern, the tips of her buttocks leaving the seat. She slowly draws the towel up to the tops of her thighs, presenting her vagina to him. Her fingers feel for the labia, pulling back to reveal the pinkness of her clitoris and the sloping entrance beneath.
‘Come on over,’ she tells him in the silly whispery voice with which he is now well acquainted. ‘Let’s get your face wet. . . . But take off your clothes first.’
Alexander removes his coat. He pulls his fleece and T-shirt over his head in one go, carefully unzips his jeans, which are completely wet, front and back, lifts up his arse to push them and his jocks down to his ankles.
‘Stop,’ she tells him as he is bending forward to take off his boots. ‘Sit back. Let me see your cock.’
He sits back against the wall. His penis is hard, hardening further with every move she makes, every utterance. The angle of the erection is high, but it leans to one side in a way that seems faintly comical to him.
‘Hand,’ she tells him.
He slowly pumps his erection a few times, watching closely. With each upward stroke, the lower part of the knob disappears into the foreskin, leaving visible the engorged purple slit and the angry globular surface around it. He finds this view too anatomical, and eases his focus. He rubs his palm down over his penis, cups his tightening scrotum in his fingers, groans lightly with pleasure because he knows she likes that.
‘That’s good, let me hear you. Get your tongue out.’
Meanwhile, with her expert middle finger she has begun to work t
he underside of her clitoris, dipping down to fetch some moisture, then pressing upward, squeezing the top of her clitoris into the apex of the labia.
‘Tell me about the broadband recommendations.’
Alexander snorts into laughter, which also causes a surge of gas to rasp out of his anus, making him laugh even more.
‘What’s so fucking funny?’
The delightfully poisonous odour of his fart has risen to his nostrils, and he sniffs discreetly to get a good whiff of it, continuing to cackle in pure unforced enjoyment. In reaction to this mirth, Grace crossly closes her legs, pretty and almost prim in the manner she brings her knees together. She pulls the towel back down over her thighs.
‘You can’t talk about broadband in the middle of sex,’ he says. ‘I thought we’d already established that.’
‘Men are so lame. You’ve no ability to multitask.’
Later – Alexander dressed again, Grace still in her bathrobe, sitting together on the leather couches, looking out over the grey cloud-covered city, smoking her Camel filterless, which are too strong for him, sipping espressos he made under her fussy supervision – he finds that his jaw is sore and his energy level is dropping. The coffee will help him.
‘I can work Blackmore. At this stage, he can go either way. He can come back and say that the cost of state intervention outweighs the benefits. Or he can come back and recommend state investment. Then there’s the issue of the form of intervention: a single contract awarded nationally; or the local authorities funded to make the purchase at local level, which would mean multiple contracts.’
‘The money must go to the local authorities. I’ve told you that before.’
Grace is uneasy, made more so by Alexander’s air of relaxation, of not being in a hurry to leave. She wants the conversation to be ended quickly. She smokes her cigarette too hard, and keeps turning her head over her shoulder to look out of the window. Beyond the heavy entombing glass it is drizzling. A fat seagull flies by within fifty feet or so, opening its mouth for a squawk which Alexander hears only faintly. He’s very far inland, Alexander thinks; but then remembers that in fact the sea is quite near, particularly as a seagull would fly it.
‘What’s your business plan, Grace? That’s the piece I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t go there. There is no business plan.’
He drinks from his coffee, savouring the sharp bitterness on his tongue, preparing himself for his next gambit, which he delivers more convincingly than expected.
‘Well that’s a shame, because you need my assistance, and it’s going to cost you more than a flash of your tits and a few hand-jobs.’
She smiles thinly.
‘What have you got in mind? Instrumental anal penetration?’
‘I want to buy a house.’
Grace laughs drily, but with genuine surprise.
‘I can get you your recommendation that the money should be spent at local level,’ he continues. ‘And more than that: I can make sure that the recommendation lands. We have to get the Chairman behind it. He’ll support it if there’s publicity in it for him, a bit of national profile. So we make a big thing of it, maybe arrange for the Minister or the Taoiseach to do the launch. I know guys in their offices. I can do that. . . . It’s important as well to have the trade unions and the employers involved, make it a Social Partnership gig. We can organise that through the Council. . . . And we’ll round up all the regional types, west-of-the-Shannon et cetera. Everybody loves Regional Development. We’ll create a big photo opportunity outside Government Buildings. The Chairman will cream himself. And then maybe we’ll have a special feature on him in one of the Sunday papers: picture of him chatting with the Taoiseach; in-depth profile of top businessman doing his bit for the country. I have the contacts to set that up.’
‘Everyone has the contacts to set that up,’ she says, but she is thoughtful rather than dismissive. ‘You’re better than I imagined. But don’t think anyone is going to buy you a house.’
‘I don’t want anyone to buy me a house. I want a decent deposit, eighty grand. Then I’ll get a mortgage like everybody else.’
‘Eighty grand is out of the question, and you know it. I can buy a politician for ten grand in fifty euro notes – even a good one. You’re a fucking nobody, an insect on the street. . . . But I tell you what, because I like you: let’s talk again when you’ve had your meeting with Blackmore.’
‘I think, deep down, Irish people aren’t really comfortable with abortion,’ Danny comments to Alexander.
The sentiment is fitting to their current location. They are standing on the steps at the entrance to the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. Alexander has not yet been in to pay his respects to the mother and child. He bumped into Danny in the hospital foyer and they went outside for a cigarette. ‘Even modern enlightened types such as myself,’ Danny continues in an ironic tone. ‘Leave aside your raving feminists and your loony lefters, people who positively enjoy the destruction of foetuses on principle, and leave aside genuine hard-luck cases and so on; when it comes to discretionary family-planning-type abortions, Joe Irish-Punter really doesn’t have the stomach for it. We’re too Catholic, and I say that as someone who isn’t even a Catholic.’
Danny is Church of Ireland.
‘Let’s go in,’ Alexander says, more because he is feeling the cold than because of any urgent desire to see Aoife and the new spawn. He also wants to get rid of the flowers and chocolates he is carrying.
‘I never told you,’ Danny continues in a confessional tone, ‘we went to London for an abortion.’
Alexander experiences a moment of mental disorientation in which the fabric of existence appears to make an impossible turn, as in an Escher painting.
‘Think again and you’ll recall that you blew the money that you borrowed from me to go to London for an abortion.’
‘Oh yes, that money,’ Danny recalls, squinting in shame for a second, but recovering quickly. ‘No, I borrowed different money from Hugo to go to London. I didn’t tell him why. We flew across, stayed with Vladimir Foster—’
‘How’s Vlad?’
‘Full of shit, as ever. We took the tube in the morning to the clinic, but couldn’t go through with it. It was Aoife’s call. I didn’t – you know – want to influence her one way or the other, but I was relieved when she said she’d changed her mind.’
‘Oh,’ says Aoife with low-energy exclamation, seeing that he has brought her gifts, ‘aren’t you very good?’
Sitting up in the bed in a private room, she looks exhausted, but seems to be in positive humour. As Alexander lays his offerings on the rolling table at the bottom of the bed, he senses that she is making fun of him, though he doesn’t know exactly why. Is it very square of him to bring flowers and chocolates? What else would you bring?
‘What about a helium balloon?’ she asks. ‘Didn’t they have any of those in the shop?’
‘Evidently not.’
Swaddled in a white sheet and a standard-issue blue blanket, the baby lies quietly in a small iron-bar cot on wheels, parked within Aoife’s reach. Alexander approaches cautiously to investigate.
He finds it repellent: pink and shrivelled, blind and useless, with obscene greasy black hair glued to its oblong skull.
‘What are you going to call it?’ he asks, for want of anything better to say.
‘Merlin,’ Aoife replies, evidently expecting enthusiasm.
‘Nice one,’ Alexander says, with a glance at Danny, who is standing uneasily between the end of the bed and the window, desperately wishing to get away, to commence with the drinking. ‘But would you not go for something unusual? To give it a head start in life.’
‘Did Danny tell you that my mother threatened to beat him up?’ Aoife asks with pleasure.
‘No, he didn’t mention that.’
‘I have to admit
I feel like a bit of a cad,’ Danny says with a shrug. ‘I was out on the town, getting plastered—’
‘With your mobile switched off,’ Aoife interjects.
‘With my mobile mysteriously malfunctioning. But how was I to know the baby was going to be born? It was three or four days early. I can tell you: coming home to your mother in that form – that was a punishment far worse than the crime.’
‘She threatened to hit him about the head with a lump hammer,’ Aoife explains with a beaming smile.
‘I wouldn’t have guessed that you guys owned a lump hammer. Not that I doubt your DIY capabilities, Danny.’
‘We don’t. Her mother carries one in her handbag.’
Julia arrives.
It is a physical shock to Alexander to see her. She looks changed. She looks great: fresh-faced; her hair cut to the shoulder in a new shorter, fuller arrangement. There is something more feminine about her, more grown-up, and she has lost weight.
She too has brought flowers, but better ones: white lilies, wrapped in transparent cellophane, the roots enclosed in a bulb of water. The lilies are young. Most of the pale-green lozenge pods are still closed, but a few are opening at the point where the seams meet, as though for kisses. She places them on the table next to Alexander’s already wilting multicoloured offering, which lies flat, wrapped in garish pink paper, the flowers gasping silently from neglect. Beside the lilies she sets down a large crisp brown paper bag containing magazines.
‘I got you a couple of mags,’ she says to Aoife as she takes off her coat, ‘in case you’d nothing to read.’
‘Thanks,’ says Aoife, this time without irony.
Julia kisses Aoife on each cheek, almost fiercely. Aoife seems a little taken aback by this show of affection, and Alexander is also surprised, since the two women have never been that close.
Being Alexander Page 12
