by Megan Nolan
We drank in strangled silence for a few minutes.
‘I’m sorry. Please can we just forget it and have a nice night?’
‘Fine,’ he said, but wouldn’t speak to me or look at me, and when we were done said he wanted to go back to the hotel. We couldn’t find a taxi and the walk seemed to take for ever, cutting through pitch-black mucky fields.
‘Why is this place so fucking far away? We couldn’t have just stayed in town?’ he asked, and I tried not to apologise again, knowing it would make things worse.
When we got there and went to our room he undressed and shut off the light as I was still doing so, and I got into bed gingerly, facing his turned back, and reached out to touch him. I worked the knots of his shoulders and stroked his neck and then moved closer to him, putting an arm around his waist and touching beneath his T-shirt.
‘Stop it,’ he said, not moving. ‘Just go to sleep.’
‘I can’t go to sleep with you angry at me.’
‘I’m not angry with you.’
‘If you aren’t angry with me why can’t I touch you?’
‘I don’t want you to touch me. Not wanting you to is reason enough, isn’t it?’
‘Of course, just, let’s talk about it and we’ll figure it out.’
He made no response, his breathing even and deep.
‘Just tell me what you’re thinking and it will be OK,’ I said, but there was nothing.
The insult of his ignoring me struck me suddenly and made me recoil, taking my hands from him and returning to my side of the bed. I started to cry, filled with self-recrimination and grief for our lost trip, silently at first and, as I went on, wetly, snivelling.
I could feel that he was awake and feared or hoped he would reprimand me for crying and making noise but he remained that way, turned away from me, long and still tense and blank.
3
Many nights I spent doubled up on the bathroom floor. I didn’t lock myself in to protect myself from him. I did it when I had begged him to forgive me, answer me, acknowledge me, and he would not. Sometimes this lasted for hours, and to punish us both for that humiliation I locked in and began to cut myself.
‘What are you doing in there?’ I imagined him saying, knocking on the door. ‘Please, don’t hurt yourself.’
I wished he would do as an old long-ago boyfriend once had – had grabbed my scarred and crusting forearms together, which were then as rickety and pale as ossified twigs, and looked me urgently in the eye and said, ‘I want you to promise me you will never do this again.’
4
Or even to do what a man working in a department store had once done, which was to turn away from me in disgust.
I was fifteen or so, shopping with friends, and the most manically able to endure pain as I ever would be. Nothing seemed to touch me, no matter how I tried.
When the man floated past, offering samples of a Marc Jacobs perfume (which I remember as also being embedded in the nightmarish beauty of that time in my life, the long-legged anorexic icons of my youth, who decorated my walls, the flowery vaguely sickly glamour of it infecting everything it touched, Mischa Barton, Nicole Richie, size zero and enormous It bags), the girlfriends I was shopping with accepted wordlessly, only half paying attention, still idly browsing with their free hand.
I did the same, thoughtlessly proffering my wrist while looking away at some feathered dress I coveted, and when the man went to spray the scent, he gently pushed up my sleeve and sprayed automatically, too late to stop by the time he registered the open wounds he was spraying into.
He gasped and looked at me with curious revulsion, and I yanked my arm back and pulled the sleeve over the cuts, which were now burning alarmingly. I kept shopping, but was sullied by the judgement.
5
But nothing came from Ciaran. Nothing came, and it had become impossible to hurt myself with the convincing rage I once had. I had grown reflexively weak and self-protective, not able, as I was back then, to harm myself without thought, without fear of the pain that would follow whenever I showered or dressed in the days to come.
Inside me things were boiling and rupturing and sprouting, and twenty feet away he sat looking out the window, calmly smoking, with a book resting on his lap, an indefinite horizon of stillness, silence. A great fear swelled in my chest as I crouched there holding my body, my body, which felt to me so much to blame for everything that happened to me. In these moments I knew that if I could be smaller, smaller, less and less, if I could be tidied, then he would love me fully and properly; and that anybody – oh, everybody – would.
That knowledge, which felt as clear and undeniable as laws of science, as nature, as the fact I had a body at all, drove me mad. It fizzed in my brain, frustrating me with its nearness and impossibility – because I knew from experience that although I could approach it practically, with calories and carbs and sit-ups, there would never be a bone sharp enough, a size small enough to let me reach the place I wished to get to.
6
It wasn’t that, on balance, there were more good times with Ciaran than bad, and that’s why I stuck around.
There is no better feeling to me than to wake up in the middle of the night and thrust my hand out and say, half in a dream still, ‘I love you so much,’ and for a person to turn towards me from muscle memory and say through their own sleep, ‘I love you too.’
There’s never been a drug or a friend or a food that’s even come close.
7
People at work thought me odd and treated me with friendly suspicion, but I was unfailingly pleasant and even almost well liked, smiling and willing to nod and chat about someone’s kids, or take on extra tasks for people who wanted to leave early.
When I refused the endless boxes of chocolates and biscuits that were passed around, they lauded my amazing self-control, and chided themselves for their greed. I grinned and rolled my eyes in a self-deprecating way and turned back to my computer screen (where I copied and pasted long articles into documents and emails so that I could spend all day reading, while looking at a glance as though I was busy).
I didn’t know what to say – how to explain that I would rather shit in front of them than eat chocolate in front of them. How could I explain such a thing, the shame it would bring me to participate in the office food chat?
Or that I would prefer that none of them knew much more about me than my name and the area I lived in and that I more or less adequately performed my job?
I didn’t want them, their sticky over-familiar comments, on me. I dreaded for them to see what I ate, to know what went inside me, because the more they knew the more I would be forced to sincerely inhabit the role I was playing, the harder it would become to tell the difference between the me in there and the me at home.
8
My friend Christina would sometimes call. I saw her and a handful of the others maybe once, twice a month, always straight after work and for no more than two hours. When I left I didn’t say why I had to go, or where, and they didn’t ask.
Once she called on a Friday night when we had nothing planned, when I had just got in and was readying my bottle of wine and pack of cigarettes and laptop and phone to curl up and drink and look at Freja and watch shitty television.
‘Come on, it’s just a small thing but everyone will be there and you should come. When was the last time you came out properly?’
We both knew that it had been a year or more now since I had spent a full evening with anyone but Ciaran.
‘Come over now,’ she said, ‘and we can get ready and have drinks here and go together. Anyway, you have to come, Lisa’s home from Berlin.’
It gave me a funny dreamy pain in my chest to hear this and to think of Lisa.
It seemed a different lifetime in which we had lived together. I thought of her goofy face and the earthy smell of her leather jacket and the endearing swagger of her walk, so incongruous with her small self. I thought of the way we had lived together. We were autonomo
us, could happily go whole days without speaking to each other, me reading on the couch and her drawing at the table, passing cigarettes back and forth. And yet there was such pleasing self-containment, too. The combined force of ourselves made the silence rich, made the rooms we shared into a home. We had done together what I had never managed to do with Ciaran.
But still. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t be absent when Ciaran arrived in or, worse still, couldn’t be here and pissed when he did.
‘N – no,’ I replied to Christina shakily, and heard her impatient sigh blown out the other end.
‘But tell me what you’ll do. I want to know what you’re going to do.’
And I closed my eyes and breathed slowly and let her tell me how exactly the night would happen, although I knew it already.
They would drink wine and prosecco in Christina’s flat, put on make-up. They would go to the pub at ten and smoke Marlboro Menthols and drink rum and coke or G and Ts or more white wine. They would go around the corner to the Workman’s Club and stay there till closing as long as it wasn’t full of arseholes and as long as nobody’s ex was there with someone new. They would spend lots of money on poorly mixed cocktails.
They would go to DiFontaine’s for a pizza slice on the way home. The staff would turn the music up and let people treat it as a little post-club party so long as nobody got carried away.
And then, if everyone was up for it and not too tired, they would head back to someone’s house and take pills or lines of coke and drink more wine and listen to music and smoke a million more cigs and fall all into each other on the couch, laughing and dancing and maybe some people kissing, and they’d stay up till six or seven at least and if it was a particularly good buzz someone would pop down to the shop then and get more booze and they’d go all day, but otherwise they’d all get a few hours’ kip and then drag themselves up at midday to go for food, all bedraggled and smeary-eyed, and laugh about what idiots they’d all been the night before.
She finished and then a soft click as she hung up.
9
One Monday night I peeled potatoes over the sink, ready to mandolin them into thin slices and bake on top of a pie I had read a recipe for in the newspaper on Saturday. It had been an unusually calm weekend for us. When, at a certain point, Ciaran had stopped speaking or responding to me for no reason I could work out, I felt less agitated than I often did, and went to our bedroom to read. The next morning he was pleasant and affectionate and I thought with disinterest how little I could comprehend the movement of his moods.
I was tired from working, that Monday evening – it was a day with more meetings and compulsory speaking than most – and my back ached from the way I was always hunched tightly over my screen, not realising I was doing it until it was time to leave and I felt that all my muscles had cemented together and had to be prised apart.
A dull ache spread in the base of my spine as I stood at the sink, and I was suddenly livid. I didn’t want to be standing there, on my own, preparing food for another person. I craved with visceral, addict thirst the experience of buying a frozen pizza and a bottle of wine and not thinking remotely of anyone else.
I wanted with a frightening violence the blankness of that evening, which I had wasted so many of in the past, not appreciating their luxury.
It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do. And it’s a peculiarly impotent sort of anger that domestic labour brings about. It was building up in me, a feeling like the blood of my body slowly becoming dirty as it coursed through.
With every strip shorn off the potato I cursed him and the apartment, even though as I did so I knew it was I who had begged – quite literally at times, had begged on my knees – for the privilege of living in this place with him, in this exact manner. It was I who had been so anxious for domesticity, for the reassuring sameness of our shared routine, for the comfort of knowing that it was me he slept with every night.
I had begged to be standing there over that sink, had begged for that very potato, slimy in my grasping hand.
I heard him come in, speaking on the phone. Heard him shrug off his backpack and hang his coat and walk into the bedroom. I halted my peeling for a moment and strained to hear his voice. The words were unclear but I could make out from a particular tone that he was speaking to Freja.
What was this tone? It was not quite flirtatious. If it was, I would have been more emboldened to object to their semi-regular conversations.
It was, if anything, a cautious tone, careful and reticent. But, unmistakably, there was a softness underneath it which I only ever otherwise heard directed to me, a surrendering shyness absent from his usual ready-to-go spiels that could be fired out at gallerists or artists or journalists or friends at will.
And it hurt me and fascinated me because it was so beautiful to hear.
It was so much clearer to hear when it wasn’t for me, because when I heard it I couldn’t help but dissect and worry over it, prodding it to mean more than it did, or investigating it for sarcasm. Separate from me I could hear its reality and that there were other parts in Ciaran than the cold and forbidding ones. This reality saddened me because it meant I wasn’t myself able to bring them out; or worse, it meant they were as far out with me as they ever could be.
He was careful not to speak of her too much or to behave as though she held much importance. She was forcefully relegated to the same status as several other friends in Denmark he spoke to every few months. The only thing that could goad him out of this neutrality was news of her promiscuity. She would drop into conversation that she had slept with some mutual acquaintance of theirs, or a friend of Ciaran’s would laughingly inform him of her alluringly seedy exploits – the club she was thrown out of for being found on her knees in the men’s bathroom, the time she fucked a guy in a park before wiping herself off and going to meet another date.
He fumed about these to me, wondered aloud why she couldn’t get herself together, why she didn’t respect herself. I never knew what to say, torn between wanting to encourage his disgust and the awful feeling of his still-present connection to her. And, too, it amazed me to conceive of her out there in the world living luridly but still the object of his love and fascination. I was here, in the home, safe and useful as a sink.
I stood suspended as they talked and when he began to softly laugh at something she said I pressed the sharp blade into my thumb for as long as I could and then quickly tore it downwards. I bled into the wet colander of peeled potatoes, until Ciaran emerged from our bedroom and I showed him that I had ruined dinner.
‘That’s OK,’ he said, sitting down with a book. ‘Let’s just order something.’ And I turned back to my mess, furious, boiling, wanting so badly for him to be angry with me.
10
Ciaran didn’t like me to be drunk, a fact I had always known and accepted in the same way I accepted that he didn’t like eggs, or modern fiction – just one of those things. It didn’t much matter until later, in any case. For the beginning of our relationship and the beginning of our living together, my primary desire was to please and be loved by him. It wasn’t my only desire but it shadowed all the others, so that when I wanted to drink and Ciaran didn’t it was filed away neatly, not causing me any worry.
We were grocery shopping in the Lidl near our place one evening that November. He didn’t like to come with me and he annoyed me when he did – someone who doesn’t like food will not respond convincingly when asked to evaluate different kinds of lettuce – but I had taken to insisting that he did.
‘I’ll be bored otherwise,’ I would say, but what I meant was, ‘I want you to be bored too.’
I didn’t see why he should get away with so much.
(I must remember, keep remembering, that he never wanted it, never wanted it, never wanted it – I begged him.)
I had my meal plan for the week noted down and was checking off ingredients when we passed the wine aisle and I felt an itch.
‘I want to have some wine with dinner,’ I said to him. ‘Do you want a beer or anything?’
I kept my eyes away from his, scanning the shelves, so that he wouldn’t be able to silence me just by looking.
I was trying something out.
I wanted him to have to explain it, out loud.
‘No,’ he said, with a little surprised disquiet – it wasn’t a weekend, when I might be expected to say such a thing. ‘Don’t get wine, it’s a Wednesday.’
‘Why not?’ I asked, still facing away, brushing the labels of the Rioja with a testing finger.
‘Because… it’s not good for you,’ he said, and he was trying something out himself.
This was a kind of victory for me.
He had never had to say aloud why he didn’t like it before.
Now he had been forced to come out with something concrete, a thing that could be reasoned and argued with.
I turned back to face him, innocently.
‘But you don’t mind that I smoke?’
Ciaran smoked. Ciaran was what my mother would call a ‘real smoker’, as in, a couldn’t-go-a-day-without smoker, a smoker who got antsy on aeroplanes.
I smoked endlessly when drunk, it was true, but wasn’t bothered with cigarettes in between. They were the same as drinking to me, a kind of full stop to thinking and daily life, an end-of-the-day excess.
‘Why doesn’t it matter that I smoke, if it matters that I drink?’ I went on blankly, enjoying his discomfort.
‘It’s… smoking is bad for you, yes, but drinking interferes with things, stops you functioning as well.’
‘I won’t be hungover from half a bottle of wine, or even a bottle of wine,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine. You know my job is easy.’
‘Do what you want,’ he finished irritably and stalked towards the tills. I had won something from him, I knew, even though I would pay for it in silence.
