Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

  I talked to Lisa most evenings when the pain and boredom were overwhelming – it was good for there to be someone who didn’t know or dislike him but who could nonetheless hear my loss. She posted me a care package filled with benign films and TV shows, and most nights I would fall asleep in the chair watching them, smoking a few cigarettes and nursing green tea. That sort of watching is almost as good as being drunk if you do it enough, the jokes mild, the story always much the same, the ending always coming good.

  Every so often I would let myself become upset, would sit in bed with my back to the wall and head cradled in my knees. When the pain reached its pitch I would bang my head behind me twice in quick succession, hard enough to manufacture the feeling that my brain was being physically dislodged and to scare and then calm me. But those evenings were rare, and mostly I was too shocked to feel anything too intensely, for which I was grateful.

  I listened to sad songs in the shower and cried along. Sometimes I would stop and see myself as from the outside and even laugh at such trite performances of heartbreak. I took the train to the south coast of Dublin once or twice a week to swim and walk around the brambly masses on the outskirts of Shankill. When I tried one day to stand at the pier on Dun Laoghaire and look out to the sea and reflect on my misfortune, I lasted only a few minutes before becoming self-conscious and retreating.

  The feelings were real, but they could find no natural expression. I felt in Dun Laoghaire comically cinematic, swaying there in the grey mist. Was I feeling something true from within myself, or was I living out a fantasy I had assembled?

  7

  When I was fifteen years old I stopped eating and I became popular. Popular for me, anyway. The shockingly thin girls in my group at school – the ones who had Uggs and hundred-euro make-up palettes – had suddenly accepted me. It felt incredible. I would never be rich, but I could be with them, which was almost as good. Once we had a ‘school dance’, an expression of our desperate need to be American, and it was at the peak of my looking as much like a character in The O.C. as I would ever look. I planned my outfit for weeks, something that showed off my skeletal frame but also made me look Quirky, meaning only that there was a tutu on my dress.

  I arrived to the dance and it was terrible. The boys were as boring, as childish, as ever. They did not resemble the boys in films, all played by twenty-five-year-olds, I had wanted to impress. The picture I had made in my head of me showing up and everyone turning to applaud my newfound beauty had not been realised. I went home. I had made myself an image and it had not worked.

  My great-grandmother died in a nursing home. My father went to visit her there several times a week for years during my childhood and adolescence and occasionally I went with him. The place was as repulsive and frightening as you can imagine for a child, smelling of disinfectant or worse, and I always left feeling like I had gone there to be good, to do something good, but had failed to achieve that.

  Once I went outside ahead of my father and looked at the garden, and there was a rose there in the spring time which was so powerfully pink, with drops of dew clinging to it, that tears came to my eyes and all I could feel for one brief moment was the pure potential of life, and then I remembered where I was and who I had just seen, and knew again that the image I so longed to perceive meant nothing, was nothing.

  8

  When he left me, I didn’t contact him, partly because I knew there was no point and partly because I was convinced that she would see any message I sent. I could not bear to think of them laughing at me, or worse, shaking their heads in sympathy. I knew that being quiet was the right approach – though what I was approaching, I was not yet sure; the correction of things, a return to earth.

  I would not allow him to be gone from me for ever. That was why I was unable to mourn authentically, how I could keep from abandoning myself.

  In April one evening I sat in my flat, restless as I used to be in the old days, spoiling for a big, messy night out. I couldn’t let myself go, was too afraid and fragile still. I didn’t enjoy seeing my friends, around whom I was forced to pretend that I was not in love with Ciaran and that I was angry at him for what he’d done. As a concession I let myself get drunk alone, and was opening the second bottle of red wine when the Bob Dylan song ‘Don’t Think Twice’ started, a song he played often. A sadness that felt pleasurable in its fullness came into me and settled on my chest. Without thinking too much or anticipating a response, I grabbed my phone and messaged him:

  Listening to Bob Dylan, thinking of you. I miss you.

  His reply came a few hours later, by which time I had drunk everything in the house and was lying on my bed blindly watching television, saying only:

  I miss you too

  I held the phone to my breast and cradled it there like an infant. I clung to the heat of suggestion, I throbbed. A blissful patience swam through me, the certainty that I could wait for ever.

  9

  I would not have to. Three days later, days I filled with exquisite silence and restraint, he called me. He asked me to meet him outside the Natural History Museum the next day at two p.m.

  I made excuses to go home sick from work and walked over to Kildare Street. When I turned the corner he was standing there, nervously pulling at the unravelled thread of his cardigan sleeve, by the same animal hedges where we had begun our first date.

  When he saw me his face opened up and was full of light and my heart sang brightly in my chest. I had been right to wait, to be careful, to stay inside.

  The spell had been broken and whatever he had been on my doorstep he was no longer.

  I stood in front of him, my eyes soft with love, a smile of infinite tolerance and adoration. There was so much inside me that I wanted to give to him.

  In that moment I was as happy as I have ever been, sure that the abundance and purity of love I felt was obvious in every way, through my waiting and my tininess, my forgiveness and willingness to be pathetic.

  I was the woman. I had suffered. I was there.

  ‘I thought we could sort of start again,’ he said, and then kissed me.

  I had won. And how did I win? Oh, in its way, it was easy – it was nothing; I was nothing.

  Two weeks later, we moved in together.

  April 2013

  1

  I filled our new apartment up with a slow, lazy satisfaction. We unpacked our belongings and arranged them together just so. Our books lived alongside each other, but did not mix, a mutual invasion too far even for me. He had three ornaments he set on the window sill alongside mine, a small stone figure of a mouse, a thimble and a pocket watch, all beautiful and delicate and precise.

  I drew my finger over them and asked, ‘Where did these come from?’ without thinking.

  A long time passed while he went on unpacking a suitcase, before eventually responding, ‘A friend gave them to me.’

  I knew what this meant and spun briskly away from the objects as though burned by them.

  I never knew if he referred to Freja as ‘a friend’ in this way because he thought I was too dense to understand who he meant, or whether it came from a reluctance to say her name aloud, as if by doing so he would give her a way into our home.

  Since we had reconciled, we had spoken barely at all of our separation, except in vague and soft ways about having missed one another. We behaved, both of us, as though an inevitable war had come between us and fate had intervened to bring us back together.

  I had cleared up the most absolutely basic questions necessary on that first afternoon outside the museum: Is it over? Is she gone? Do you love me? Yes, yes, yes.

  He opened his mouth to go on, and I kissed him again and would continue to do so when any malign words threatened to escape him.

  We bought a blue flannel duvet cover, a casserole dish, a rug. At the flea market on a Sunday we acquired two amateur paintings of dogs which beamed back at us from where they hung in the bathroom, the charming incompetency suggesting some shared joke or histor
y that we didn’t, in fact, share. I shuddered with a thrill that could only be described as erotic while choosing a vacuum cleaner and bin. I felt proud and tearful every time I opened the wardrobe door, where his few pieces of clothing hung monastically next to my own bulk of old party dresses and garish sequinned sweatshirts.

  2

  It was the first time I had ever lived with a man, or shared a bedroom. It seems odd that there was no plan set out, no structure agreed to, about what we would do for one another and what we wouldn’t. How did we expect to know how often the other would wish to have sex? How were we to decide who slept on the window side of the bed? And how did it come to be, for instance, that I was the person who cooked for us, without it ever being discussed? That something as vast and daily and necessary as eating became a responsibility that I willingly took on for him, and he willingly gave up to me?

  It was the logical outcome. I was a good cook and he was not. I had to worry about my weight and he did not. I could taste, and he could not – not quite, not really. In any case, being dependent on another person’s cooking always made me bristle. The idea of eating according to another person’s whims, eating what doesn’t necessarily accord with the other choices of my day, frightens me. He had no such reservations, food being a necessity which, so long as it was not overtly unpleasant, meant very little.

  a) To me a food could be understood:

  b) through whether I enjoyed it, and through whether it made my body fatter.

  Ciaran was concerned with neither. His judgements were derived on a purely moral basis. He was inclined towards singularity in all things. He would have preferred to eat a large bowl of steamed green leaves for dinner each day, if his big man’s body hadn’t demanded more.

  For me, food was messier, more complex. It was stressful, yes, but could be joyful too, something to binge on, and then shy away from; something to wrestle with, and offer up, and bury.

  When, as a pious starving teenager, I learned to cook, it was an almost holy process. Until then I could only deny or destroy what was given to me by others – the balled-up sandwiches at the bottom of schoolbags, missed breakfasts, puked-up spaghetti, chicken thighs mummified in toilet paper and hidden in my bedroom drawers until the stench escaped.

  I learned to cook and everything changed. I was no longer merely a petulant schoolgirl who wouldn’t open wide and take it like a good girl. I chose what I cooked and because I chose it and knew it intimately, I was able to eat it. I chopped peppers and carrots and green beans julienne and fried them in a little olive oil, I steamed sugar snap peas until their leathery pods split at the sides and ate them in front of the TV like popcorn.

  When we moved in together, it had been a long time since I had pored over food in that way for myself. Something had broken in me when, as an adult, I had allowed myself to eat normally again and to gain weight. The betrayal of my thin self was too painful to confront fully, and so I refused to look food directly in the eye at all. To survive, I had to stop cherishing the individual slices of a polished pink apple divided up on a plate, had to stop finding them beautiful, or else I would never have stopped staring. I had to stop believing that the act of eating food could do anything at all to my body, because if I didn’t then I would never have been able to eat again.

  I began to cook for Ciaran, and a measure of the sanctity returned, and because it was for someone else and not myself, I allowed it.

  Living with him forced me to treat myself like a person in a way I was not able to alone.

  At work, now doing entry-level admin in a dental hospital, I would spend lunches at my desk reading recipes, noting them down, eventually settling on one.

  When I finished for the day, I would walk home and call into the good grocery place, the same place we bought apples to walk around with, and choose the ingredients. I trailed around the nicely lit aisles, which were overcrowded in a homely and pleasing way, brushing my hands against the overpriced olive oil, the dried seaweed, the rare kinds of honey.

  I glided by the fish counter, mouthing the names of creatures I didn’t know. The butcher sold me venison and when he handed over the package, bound nostalgically with brown string, the price made me swallow. I selected each part of the meal with tenderness and pride, to think of him eating it.

  I had never shopped there before, would never have thought to. I had lived previously on what was discounted in Lidl combined with whatever tins I had in the cupboard, but my life was to be new now, and I shopped for it beneath the high ceilings amidst the other things I coveted.

  It took a very long time for me to resent this part of our life. It was almost the last thing to go.

  Along with sex, cooking was what I did to make it up to him – whatever ‘it’ happened to be that day.

  He didn’t demand or expect these reparations. I knew instinctively to use them. The ritual of the meal was offered up, something more intricate than usual on days I had offended him.

  And afterwards, if I was able to have sex with him too, things were OK. When we had sex he forgave me, even when he didn’t want to.

  3

  I remember the last meal I ever made for him, before everything changed for good, because it looked so pretty that I took a picture – crawfish and crab, arranged in neat pink scoops on top of lettuce leaves, lime juice and chilli, a spoonful of avocado, a sprinkling of black sesame seeds, and as I took the photograph, my phone lit up with a call from another man.

  4

  There was a time – which I realise now was such a brief time, almost nothing – when it felt to me we had triumphed over all the squalor that preceded our living together.

  Before the real fighting began, and the worst he would say to me was, ‘Why do you leave the sponge in the basin after you use it? Do you want it to get mouldy?’ – mock-scolding me, wagging his finger, tossing the dripping thing at me across the room.

  And I would squeal and shout ‘YES!’ and throw it back, and run shrieking down the hall, laughing in the bedroom as I heard him advance, stomping like a cartoon villain, and when he eventually threw open the door and rounded on me, he picked me up as easily as a pillow and threw me down on the bed and tickled me and we lay there squirming together until there was no breath left in us and we touched our noses together and fell asleep like that.

  We napped together all the time, collapsing frequently among piles of sweaters in our freezing bed. The apartment was old, the ceilings high, and the heating whispered thinly out of the radiators to no effect. Droplets of water ran down the walls, and a dark stain crept threateningly across the bathroom ceiling.

  Once we had eaten and Ciaran had put away any remaining work he had taken home, we would often go straight to bed. There we dressed in ridiculous sundry layers of thermals and pyjamas and old sweatpants, laughing at ourselves, and would hide beneath the covers watching crime procedurals and horror films.

  I lived for this part of the day, both of us shivering still and kicking our limbs around to warm up faster, holding on to each other so tightly. That moment of dipping out of the freezing air and leaving the day behind, getting into our soft little palace, only us left in the whole world.

  I kissed his fluttering eyelids where the veins showed and warmed the tip of his nose with my lips, and then he bent forward a little until even our foreheads met and felt sacred in their union.

  I think, even now, if it was possible for me to have lived just like that, no other life coming in at the edges, no friends, no family, no work – if I had been successful in my attempt to boil my whole universe down just to us, burning bodies welded together in a cold bed – I could be happy there, still.

  5

  Then it was May and weak golden light filled our new home on weekend mornings. We woke up late, and yawned around together drinking coffee and chatting until lunchtime, when we would get newspapers and pastries and sit entangled on the couch, mindlessly petting one another as we read.

  I saw my friends a little, for a glass of wine after
work or occasionally for a film on Sundays, but none of them had been to our flat. I loved them in an abstract way, but was happy for our relationships to be remotely maintained with the odd message, a brief appearance at birthday parties. I was embarrassed in front of them, and they shy with me. I knew what they thought of Ciaran, could sympathise with their reasons. I didn’t feel like suffering the further humiliation of trying to convince them he wasn’t what they thought.

  The truth was I didn’t care what they thought of him, and Ciaran’s own lack of caring strengthened my resolve.

  ‘I saw your little friend Christina,’ he’d say, after coming in from work, chuckling. ‘I guess she doesn’t like me, huh?’

  And I would laugh along and roll my eyes, say something vague and conciliatory: ‘Oh, you know what she’s like,’ and would enjoy the safe feeling of us both being against the same enemy.

  It was the same feeling I had when he ranted about a rude colleague or someone cutting him off in traffic. At first I was inclined to soothe, to mitigate, because of how pointless it was to rail against them. Why get so incensed by these petty infringements when they were as inevitable as weather? But then I saw that siding with him was the safer thing to do. If I agreed with his outrage, and complained about the same things he did, we were by default teammates. He would begin to see me as not of the world that so angered him, but of his own world, the small one that we could build in our home together.