Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

I was competent and efficient in my workplace, but only because I required a decent job to maintain the sort of life I wanted with Ciaran, not because I suffered from any ambition. I got through my days with a minimum of exertion, and was constantly shocked by how little actual work was accomplished in offices.

  It was possible for me to spend only an hour or two a day doing my assigned work, and still finish the week with my assignments under control. After I had been there a while I realised the superhuman time-wasting skills I thought unique to me were in fact universal, and everyone was reading recipes or emailing friends or going for hour-long coffee breaks and calling them meetings.

  When I unlocked our door each evening, my real life began, coming into technicolour focus. It rendered everything outside dull and irrelevant just like I knew it would, like I had counted on it doing.

  Making a good meal at the end of a bad day can redeem the whole thing. No matter what else has taken place, if you have the time to do this one thing for yourself, it all falls away. It’s not unlike the moment you sit down with a bottle of something strong if you’re a drunk. You know there is a window approaching where the reality you inhabit will stop mattering, stop hurting.

  My whole relationship with Ciaran was like that – a refuge, a singularity which obliterated other concerns. It was the best meal, the finest bottle of wine. As long as I could keep things going, as long as we could get along, the rest fell away.

  6

  I wonder now at my desperation to perform domestic acts for him. I wanted more than anything to present him with the products of my labour, for him to see how invested I was in maintaining our life – and how joyfully invested. I was even happy when I baked him a cake or cooked a meal, which he would then ignore or eat without thanks. I was happy when I washed a jacket of his which stank, unbeknownst to him, of cigarettes and weed. I was happy – I smiled, I sang! – when I scrubbed the toilet on my knees. The bleach smelled strong and delicious and burned the bloody creases I had bitten into my fingers and thumbs.

  I wrote out meal plans and stuck them to the fridge with hearts and smiley faces and stars doodled around each neat entry, stretching weeks into the future – comforting to know already that we would eat a lamb kofte salad a month in advance, sweet to determine our faraway actions so precisely.

  I wanted, I suppose, for him to need me, without knowing that it was me that he needed at all. I wanted him to live in a world where each need he might have had been preemptively filled. No button left unsewn, no white collar still ringed with browning sweat when he needed it clean. That’s why I didn’t need thanks. I didn’t curse the absence of praise for my efforts. There was to be a whole functioning ecosystem surrounding him and he would have no cause to worry, or try, no cause to question anything at all.

  It’s easy to disappear beneath the incessant cycle of chores necessary to keep a pleasant and clean home. Women who once were individuals despair of being made into nothing more than wife, housekeeper, mother – a person whose identity is secondary to their ability to make things easier for everyone else. But I was not a mother. Doing everything for one other person, one man – in the heated flush of those first months we lived together, it felt sexy and intimate and even profound.

  And after all, what individual had I been before? What identity was there to erase with my newfound house-pride? I had never found one resilient enough to live on in my memory once it had gone. There had never been one real enough to miss. I disappeared with perfect peace.

  Was there even some feeling of mine that the whole dynamic was coated in a dusting of irony? Did that make it easier to love? The ludicrous idea of myself as a person who fetched slippers and roasted pork and made cold drinks for the big tall man in his overcoat smelling of outside evening, of real life that I was not a part of, it was so absurdly at odds with the way I had lived before.

  If I thought that times had changed so much, that we were a modern couple after all, if I thought that my subservience could be ironised and eroticised out of reality – oh, I feel sorry for myself.

  But I wanted it then – I remember the wanting, the greed for it, leaving work early so I would have time to prepare great midweek multi-course feasts, making his life into a production, a lively play of domesticity too loud to hear anything over. And when I was tired from it all and wanted to cry because I had got something wrong, a soufflé had collapsed, I had broken a bowl – or when he offered to help me – those were the few times I would become really angry with him. No, I would tell him, you just stay there and I’ll take care of it. Meaning: you just stay there. I’ll take care of you.

  If he got something out of me, I was taking something from him, too. I was taking away his ability to live without me easily. I subbed his rent, I cooked his food, I cleaned his clothes, so that one day soon there would come a time when he could no longer remember how he had ever done without me, and could not imagine doing so ever again.

  7

  In June, when we had lived together for almost three months and the weather was warm, I noticed that I had begun to look at women as he would, as though I was inhabiting him. When we walked around Dublin together on weekends and the weak sun caused us to wear less, I began to see them through his eyes.

  I had never been attracted to women in anything more than a passing way, but now I registered some of them in the same way I registered a handsome man. First it was only when I was with him – we would pass a pretty girl, I would notice her first, and my eyes would dart to his to see him clock her. Every time he did, I experienced it as a betrayal, but I also gloated inwardly that I had learned who would attract his attention in this way. What use I thought this knowledge might be I can’t imagine now.

  Soon it happened when I was alone, too. On my walk to work in the morning, down through Portobello and crossing over the canal where I passed other office girls and wealthy joggers, my eyes instinctively scanned for the ones he (now he-and-I) would like. There was no strict type in terms of ethnicity or colouring, but if I was to identify common threads I would say – delicate small features, maybe skewed towards the fashionably plain, large dreamy eyes, a suggestion of frailty and sensuality. Long hair, prominent collarbones.

  I noted and stored them, regarding them with a twinge of prurient lust and the same helplessness I felt towards everyone he found attractive who was not me. There was nobody who was safe from this panic of mine. He referred once to his losing his virginity, fifteen years prior, to a beautiful girl named Jessica. For weeks after, I boiled. Jessica. Jessica. I wondered if I could find her through this forename alone, to stare at her, compare, rank.

  When I gathered these women I saw on the street, filing them away internally, I was trying to protect myself as best I could. I was trying to build a registry of every threat in our vicinity, the better to prepare myself against them. But my mind had bled into his so that I wanted these women as he would have wanted them. So that the desire I regarded them with was lethargic and self-assured, as his would have been, and my mind wandered towards them in the invasive and probing manner I associate with the masculine thrusting of penetrative sex.

  My gaze fell over them generally for a time, and then returned to its original target.

  8

  It was a Saturday in July when a far-right terrorist shot three people in Malmö. The gunman was dressed as a Catholic priest and had walked on to the grounds of Sankt Petri Church where office workers sat to eat their lunches on sunny days among the tourists and opened fire.

  One of the three fatalities was a seven-year-old Japanese boy holidaying with his parents, the other two local women who worked in the vicinity.

  Ciaran and I had come back from getting the papers and coffee when he saw the news online. The colour drained from his face and he stood up, muttering something inaudible at me, fumbling with his phone. He hurried out of the apartment into the hallway, where I heard him pace and then the low sound of his voice. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I stayed exactly still, star
ing into my coffee and down at my bare legs with the breath caught in my chest. I forced my eyes to stay open, unblinking and dry, until tears gathered in them. Freja lived in Malmö now, I knew.

  It was insane for sexual jealousy to have entered my head even momentarily at such a time, let alone paralyse my entire body, but I was in love and so I was insane, and I can only feel glad I am at least no longer insane in that particular way, no matter what else I have lost alongside it.

  He came back into the room, cheeks flushed slightly but otherwise normal, so that I knew no harm had come to her. He sat down without looking at me and opened the paper with a brisk shake like a father in a film at the breakfast table. I tore open the bag of pastries and put them on a plate, knowing already I would not be eating that day. I felt within me something I had not in many years, which was the desire to punish someone by not eating.

  This was a regular inclination when I was young, an ineffectual but unignorable urge in the direction of someone who had wronged me. Most often it was towards boys who did not love me back or who did not love me in the right way, but it could also be towards parents, teachers, anyone, really, who failed to validate me in the way I required. It was never intended as a rational response; I knew, of course, that they would never know that I was not eating, and even if they did, they would not know it was they who had caused it.

  That the pain was private made it better – I made them torture me, without their consent.

  I took off the lids of our coffees and poured milk into them both unthinkingly – Ciaran took it black. ‘Hey,’ he murmured in protest, and, realising, I gripped the cardboard cup too tightly and spilled the scalding liquid across the table where it drizzled on to his lap and shoes. Horror filled my body and my throat swelled with it. He screamed – ‘Oh what the fuck?’ – and leapt backwards off his chair, brushing his trousers down.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I said over and over, and, ‘Here,’ as I grabbed a tea towel and tried to help. He kicked his leg to the side – not with violent intent, not to hurt me, but to get me away from him efficiently, as you might a dog.

  ‘Just fuck off, can you?’ he said and walked to the bathroom and locked the door.

  I cleaned the spilt coffee off the floor on my knees and wrung out the rag in the sink. I boiled a kettle to fill a bucket so I could mop too. As it whistled I heard him let himself out of the apartment.

  I walked over to the window and looked down at the street and saw him emerge, the sunlight glaring on his blond hair giving the impression briefly that it had caught fire, and he stalked towards the canal at a pace, no hesitation, as he always walked. I watched until I couldn’t see him any more, and then I went into our bedroom, opened my computer and looked for Freja.

  9

  Freja has long fingers which arch through her dark shaggy bob in one picture. She looks right at the camera, or maybe the photographer, with a haunted intensity. She is leaning back against a chair splaying her legs like a man would, a pose which could only look beautiful on the elegant and thin. A man’s white vest falls over her sharp bones and small perfect breasts.

  Click.

  In the next she is sitting in sand at sunset, drawing her hands through it to make shapes, squinting up at the photographer and shading her eyes. She wears a red paisley dress, which falls off one shoulder, and a pair of cowboy boots. She is smiling and her teeth are very white.

  Click.

  In another she dances in the corner of a bar, lit by the glow of a jukebox and a cigarette machine. Her head is thrown back, eyes closed, and she is wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, hard classic clothes for a cowboy, which perfectly fit her hard girl’s body. A cigarette dangles from her mouth – she looks like Patti Smith or a particularly pretty Manson girl.

  Click, click, click.

  10

  I looked up Freja’s accounts every day – in the morning on my way to the office, or sitting in the park with a coffee on my lunch break. I checked her Facebook and her Instagram and if I had time would trawl through her Google results and follow where they led me, hunt for clues.

  I searched her friends, the ones who tagged her in pictures, to see if they had posted any others of her (they had), and to see what kinds of bars and restaurants they went to together.

  The best was when Ciaran would go out on a Friday evening and I had the house to myself. He only ever went out alone on a Friday, when friends of his from galleries would meet after work to drink and eat pizza and gossip about shows and each other.

  When we first lived together I would sometimes go with him but they were unbearably male evenings. I was often the only woman and got used to being ignored and spoken over. Occasionally, one of them would remember to be polite and turn to me with practised determination and say, ‘And what do you think?’ as though this was what conversation was. Once someone inclined towards me after I hadn’t said anything for an hour as they chatted about a Hal Foster essay and asked if I’d read him.

  ‘No, who’s that?’

  ‘A theorist,’ he said kindly.

  ‘I don’t really like theory, I just do things instead,’ I said, trying to make them laugh, which some of them did, slowly.

  The part of me that enjoyed being an accessory to him felt gratified by the calm and stillness of sitting beside him in silence, no demands made of me except to be attractive and pleasant and friendly, but soon the boredom became too much and I stayed home instead.

  Despite the vague dread of his being unfaithful to me, I came to look forward to these Friday nights. It was the only part of the week I was alone. Before, the idea of even an hour or two alone disturbed me, but now I was with Ciaran at nearly all times outside of work, and my Friday nights alone gave me space to look at Freja and to drink.

  I got in at five or six, with a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes, opened my computer and put something mindless on to watch, something soapy with a lot of intrigue and sexual shenanigans, or reality TV starring a hoard of blonde teens looking at their phones.

  I put on my pyjamas, which were still Ciaran’s old threadbare long johns and a T-shirt, and curled up in the corner of the couch. I poured a glass and lit my first cigarette and inhaled it and exhaled it and felt in that moment completely at peace. Then I would start looking at Freja on my phone.

  A lot of the time it was going back over old ground. She didn’t update very often and I had worked my way back through the four years of existing material. But I could never exhaust this bloody desire to examine her, to work my way inside her, to perceive her as he perceived her. I swiped through old albums which had pictures of Ciaran and her together.

  My mind bent trying to look at these as an outsider would. I looked at them and then, as quickly as I could, clicked on to a picture of him and me together, trying to compare them to one another. Were we as well matched as they had been? Did we look as good? Did he appear to be in love with her, in a way he did not with me?

  Because I knew that Freja looked at me too, I also looked at myself. I reviewed photos going back years and years. I tried to see myself as she saw me. I deleted the unflattering ones as I went, hot with the knowledge she had probably seen them already. As I looked at myself I pushed myself into her mind, the same way I pushed myself into Ciaran’s when we passed girls on the street I thought he wanted to fuck.

  By eight or nine p.m. I would be drunk, the TV show mumbling on in the background, chain-smoking, and knowing Ciaran would not be home for four hours or more I would go out to get another bottle of wine. Bleary eyed, I pulled on clothes and on my way down the street would toss the empty bottle away. He could find one the next day – he would expect this, and tolerated me being a drunk for one night a week. But two bottles would alarm and confuse him, would lead to a conversation, so I smashed it merrily into a skip, buzzed and lit with the comforting foreknowledge of the second one on its way.

  2019, Athens

  Before I had ever kissed a boy, I once walked for miles and miles with my
most treasured childhood friend, Bea, reading her love poetry, from a book I had saved up a lot of pocket money to buy. She was cleanly beautiful like Freja. She was naturally tanned and naturally skeletal, like Freja. She had wide blue eyes set far apart, she had long limbs, she was so soft and good. Even then, when we were thirteen, she was much kinder than me. There were reasons for that – a person so beautiful has no reason to be cruel. How jealously I regarded her beauty, her cleanliness and smell of fresh clothes and the way that boys loved her and the way she was appropriately removed from them. I was always down in the dirt.

  I envy women who are removed. I never really had that luxury.

  11

  I noticed after some months had passed that I now ignored the pointless spite he padded out stories with, instead of encouraging it as I had once, to prove I was on his side. The stories made me feel bored and hopeless.

  Still, I responded to him with manic cheer. Sometimes I really was happy and untroubled and sometimes I pretended to be, and it grew harder and harder to tell the difference. It was as though he had vacuumed up all the available negativity in the apartment and I was afraid to let any seep out of me, lest it disrupt the balance.

  After dinner we sat on the sticky leather couch and I listened to him noodle on his guitar, or watched him write in his notebooks out of the corner of my eye, anxiously, as I pretended to read, wondering if they were poems about her.

  When he looked at his phone my heart went faster, I felt the blood moving through my terrible weak body, was completely unable to think of anything else. My eyes stayed fixed at a blank spot on the top of my page and then slowly leaked over into his space and I tried to peer sideways so hard my temples throbbed, to see if it was her he was speaking to.

  I raised my hands to my mouth and began to gnaw on my fingers and thumbs, tearing thin strips of flesh systemically, grating them between my grinding teeth, swallowing.