Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

  In the hospital my dad was listlessly eating and it moved me to see his boredom. I sat with him for a few hours, watching news programmes and quiz shows and chatting about this and that. He asked what I was reading and I could not remember the last book I had read so instead recounted an opinion of a novel I had gathered from a Sunday supplement. His voice sounded clearer than it had the day before. I wanted to be touching him, to have my arms around him or to lie in the bed beside him but there was no way to do these things.

  On the bus back to Dublin I travelled in a state of prayer. I bargained and pleaded. I would give up drinking, food, pleasure. I would stop daydreaming about sex with strangers, stop writing sordid thoughts in my diary. I would relent, go back to being whatever had made him capitulate in the first place.

  And then my father couldn’t die and Ciaran couldn’t leave me.

  Ciaran would never have to suffer through finding out what I was really like – so desperate to be filled up, to be of use, to please.

  I would be small and safe and dry and quiet. I would learn humility and true meekness, not just the performance of them.

  8

  When I got in that evening I greeted him and curled up beside him on the sofa where he sat typing in pyjamas and glasses. His hair was a little long and the loose curls smelled like sour sweat and I breathed them in. I threw my bag and coat on the ground, as though completely exhausted, and pulled a blanket over me.

  He asked how my dad was and I told him we wouldn’t know for a while. I rested my head on his shoulder as my heart hammered in my chest, wondering if my voice sounded different, if there was some hair or mark of Reuben’s on me somewhere which could give me away.

  Later in the bathroom I saw that a small bruise dappled my thigh, and though it could have come from anywhere, I cut right through it with a small kitchen knife, filled briefly with the mad and pure decisiveness of a teenager once more. I would have carved his name all over me if I could have, if I thought it would make him happy.

  I was home, and every mitigating thought had vanished. In Waterford I had tried to rationalise what I had done, telling myself that Reuben and I were such old news that it barely counted as infidelity, telling myself I was upset and needed comfort, I was drunk.

  But back in Dublin – back in my familiar position, slumped on the tiles, head against the cistern, muffling sobs into my lap to avoid a fight – I knew the truth. I had done it because I wanted to do it. I had done it because I wanted someone who wasn’t Ciaran, wanted someone whose affection and attention was straightforward. I wanted something easy to understand, and I understood Reuben and I understood fucking and I got what I wanted. Ciaran was going to lie in bed beside me, touch me, maybe even want to fuck me himself, not knowing that I was dirty, and a liar.

  I didn’t understand how I had lied about so many things when they all felt true at the time. I loved him so much, no other love had ever felt as stingingly clean as the one I felt for him. I had meant it when I said that I wanted more than anything never to hurt him, to help him be able to trust people again.

  Even that, I supposed, had been a lie – I hadn’t wanted him to trust people, I’d wanted him to trust me, only me. I wanted to be the one who could shatter his outside and get to the good parts, wanted to be the saint who made him see it wasn’t all women who were sluts and liars; or maybe to make him see that it was all of them, except for me, only me, and I was the only one he needed.

  But now I’d done it, now I’d fucked it up. No matter how sweet Reuben and I were, and how innocent the quality of our ancient romance, the physical facts were plain. I had let another man kiss and touch and bend and fuck me, and were Ciaran to know these facts he would despise and leave me. I cried harder, biting down on my wrist to shut myself up, my brain a livid and impotent blaze.

  After calming myself down I went to our bedroom and took out my computer. I blocked Reuben on every available platform and then on my phone too. My desperation had made me clear headed and cool. There was no strand between the two men except me. Nobody could ever tell him but me. He wouldn’t find out. I just had to deal with it, put it away, and be good.

  9

  For one more month I did live this way, I pretended it had never happened, that it was a thing that could be ignored. I cooked dinner and stayed in and stopped drinking. I read books and stopped watching garbage TV. On Friday nights when he went out, I waited for him to come back, and did nothing except wait. He seemed happy, as happy as he had ever been. Having sex with him made me feel ill and psychotic with splitting but I forced myself to do it anyway, put it down as one more duty to make things safe again.

  Then my father called in July, telling me he had got the all-clear.

  He would not only live, he hadn’t been very sick at all. Everything was fine.

  That night I called Ciaran to tell him I would be home late, and I went to a bar.

  I drank wine on my own until I was drunk, and then I went to a party, where I met a man I had known briefly many years before. We kissed against the wall and then left to find a hotel and fucked there all night, him pulling my hair and slapping my face and grabbing my throat, me urging him to keep doing it, asking him for more, more, more.

  10

  In the morning Noah left to find his band and get back on the road, a ferry to catch and a gig in Liverpool that evening. He grinned his lopsided grin and told me he would be back in a few weeks and would call me then, ruffling my fringe and kissing my forehead as he went.

  I showered in boiling water. My hair was a long matted mass from being tossed around with such casual abandon and I tore it into manageable segments, to soap it through and make it normal again. I scrubbed myself everywhere, especially inside. I was raw from the sex and made myself rawer with the cleaning. I had no idea what I would say to Ciaran when I returned home. My phone had died early the evening before.

  I left, walking down Fitzwilliam Square.

  I had been at a party in Portobello with Christina, already completely totalled, and had recognised Noah. He looked like an irresistibly attractive mess, handsome and chubby in a way that suggested pleasurable excess and partying, a chipped front tooth, mismatched clothes. He was something like a surfer gone wrong, with that long hair and the crinkled smile, and the laughing, knowing eyes. I saw him staring at me.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ I walked over and said.

  He told me I was right, and I remembered then: we had met at a gig years before when he had played in a line-up with an ex-lover of mine.

  ‘Are you still with that guy?’ he asked, and I told him that I was not.

  I kept trying to figure out what the exact moment was, the moment where I went from being convinced that I loved Ciaran and would do whatever it took to be with him, to standing swaying at a hotel reception at five a.m. with a near-stranger, giving it all up again, and again, and again.

  11

  I saw on my way home, checking my balance, that I had paid for the hotel – the whole lot of it, a week’s wages for me, another little indignity to store away for later.

  I had tried to do myself up as convincingly as possible, normal, pretty make-up, but I could feel myself sweating through it.

  I had never been as afraid as I was that morning standing outside our apartment looking up at the window, seeing his books and cigarettes resting on the sill, knowing he was in there.

  The moment I walked in I could see that everything had changed for us, for ever, already. Gone was the blank Ciaran, the cold Ciaran, the one who made me second-guess myself. He was frantic and red-eyed and shaking. He was shouting in a way that was almost crying.

  I had been so worried about what I had done – the sex, the hotel – I had forgotten all about the fact that I had simply failed to come home.

  ‘Where were you? Where the fuck were you?’ he shouted in rising waves of indignation, grabbing my coat lapel and yanking on it.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I kept repeating, waiting for him to calm down, waiting
to lie. I tried to touch his wrist soothingly and he pushed me away. I half fell, half sat on a kitchen chair.

  ‘Are you still drunk?’ he demanded, and I went to deny that I was before thinking better of it. I told him that I was. I told him that I was so relieved about my dad’s news that I wanted to drink, that I had met Christina and we had had too much and gone back to her place and I’d just fallen asleep on the sofa.

  He believed me. It was incredible the way he believed me. He was still so angry, but he was angry about the drinking and about the not coming home, about having worried him. He simply believed me, thought it was true just because I said it was. I marvelled that he who had lied to me for so long, about Freja and all of it, could assume I was telling the truth.

  I got undressed and showered again, left him alone to come down from the shouting a little, and to clean myself more. When I finished and came back to the bedroom, he grabbed me and discarded my towel, lay me down on the bed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again and again as he kissed my neck and my hollow chest.

  ‘I know,’ he said, and kept going, insistent, although I was still and did not respond. His hands moved over me, touched me in the way he did when he wanted to have sex. I said nothing but did not move away. He put his fingers inside me, although I was not wet.

  ‘I’m really tired,’ I whispered, wriggling away. I didn’t like to turn him down, but the alternative was worse. My body felt radioactive.

  He smiled at me and lay my head down on the mound of pillows, arranged them, fanned my hair out so that I felt like a doll, or a corpse in repose. He knelt over me and kissed me gently on the forehead and, so slightly, in a way that could usually make me shiver, on the lips.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, and he shushed me. The way he was treating me would have made me so happy not long ago, the tenderness, the attention. It reminded me of a doctor’s attention, firm and sure in that way. A few times a year I would go on my lunch break to give blood, just because I liked how careful they had to be with you, and that they’d touch you with such practised ease.

  It was hurting me now, the attention. I wanted him to forgive me but to leave me alone, let me get some sleep, wake up and start again as though none of it had happened. I closed my eyes but he didn’t stop. He kissed and stroked my neck again and began to move downwards.

  ‘Please,’ I said, and then, ‘I don’t want to’ – a thing I’d never had to say before.

  In the past he had turned away huffily at the merest hint of reluctance.

  He knows, I thought, on some level he must know that I’ve done something.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, still smiling down at me gently. ‘You don’t have to do anything. I’ll do it. I’ll make you feel better.’

  And he went on kissing me, my breasts and my ribs. I prayed that the bruises that would surely appear had not appeared yet.

  I tried one more time to stop it, turning to my side and huddling that way, saying, ‘I – I –’ Not able to construct a sentence that accounted for my distaste.

  ‘It’s OK.’ He smiled again, as though I was just denying myself pleasure to be self-punitive, as though I needed to be reassured that I was allowed to enjoy this. He gently hooked an arm beneath my knee and prised my legs apart, and then he went down on me.

  He held my hands down by my sides as he did so.

  I rolled my eyes back in my skull as far as they would go, trying to get at the white light to block things out. I wanted to cry with repulsion, the idea of his mouth being where Noah’s dick had been hours before. And yet I could not make him stop without telling him the truth, without making him hate me. I could not bear the idea of him hating me. I was afraid of him, but I was selfish, too.

  I counted in my head and when I thought I could, I faked an orgasm, stiffening the sinews in the softest part of my upper inner thigh, gasping and grabbing at his hand. I thrust myself towards him one, two, three times and then collapsed.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and had to hug him close to me for one more moment before I could turn over and pretend to sleep.

  12

  That was when it should have ended. It seems insane to me now that I somehow went on, but I believed still that I loved him and that the cheating was a symptom of my innate foulness. I didn’t deserve love but I needed it.

  The idea of telling him was simply beyond my imagination. The idea of willingly severing our domestic, daily devotions; the idea of having to get up in the morning without him. I could not picture it. It wasn’t just that I dreaded it, I was genuinely unable to conceive of a world in which these things would take place.

  I was in great pain, the lies and suppression, the smiles and fucking I had to fake. But I had lived with pain before. It would recede, I knew. A person can get used to anything.

  Something else, too: I could not imagine reversing the narrative of us. I knew that I was bad, but nobody else did. With the telling, there would be a rewrite.

  The way all of my friends secretly or not-so-secretly hated him, and thought he was bad for me. The fact that he had loved Freja, left me for her. His incredible coldness, the way his whole body could act as a refusal, facing away from me as I cried. The way he spoke to me, which left me feeling that I must be insane. All of these things would be different, re-cast. It would change everything, the telling, the badness inside me coming real.

  August 2014

  1

  Noah and I messaged every day. I sent him pictures of my body and he made me laugh in a way I hadn’t in for ever. One day in the office as we were chatting he told me to go to the bathroom and lock myself in a cubicle and masturbate thinking about what we had done in the hotel. I tucked my phone into my bra so my boss wouldn’t see me carrying it out, and did as he told me. I came explosively, the thought of his lopsided grin looming over me, his dick in my mouth. I sent him a picture of my flushed face afterwards so he would know.

  It felt almost like a safe game, a reasonable distraction because he didn’t live in Dublin and was far away touring America.

  I thought about him all the time, to get me through the nights at home. I thought about him when I cooked and when I bathed and when Ciaran had sex with me.

  Then, he was headed back in our direction. He had gigs in Scotland and England, finishing with one in London, and asked me to come and see him.

  I had been intentionally vague about what my situation was, saying only that I lived with my boyfriend but that things were complicated, implying perhaps that we were open, or had broken up already. I shouldn’t have worried that he would care in any case. Part of what was between us was a conspiratorial acknowledgement that we were gross, that we were perverts, that it was nastiness bonding us together. He himself had some kind of long-term, on-again / off-again situation, which he would allude to occasionally without explanation or worry.

  I knew as soon as he asked that I would go to see him, I could not imagine not doing it. There was money in my bank account and nothing to stop me. I foresaw in an instant the bus to the airport and the bad coffee on the plane and how excited I would feel pulling into the station. I booked a flight quickly before I could change my mind.

  I told Ciaran that Lisa and Christina were going to see a gig and I was going to go with them. He was a little unhappy but not in any unmanageable sense, was trying to be cute about it.

  ‘But I’ll miss you,’ he pouted. ‘It’s a long weekend; I thought we could hang out.’

  I smiled and kissed him and booked a hotel.

  It was the first time I had planned to cheat and the planning was almost as good as the doing, every boring bit of journey made potent. My alarm went off at five a.m. and I looked at his beautiful sleeping face and felt a pain so tender and engulfing it could hardly be called pain at all. I left and closed the door with the prickly knowledge that I was changing things.

  I was doing something. I was finally doing something.

  On the bus to the airport I did my make-up in exquisite, slow detail
until I was completely beautiful.

  When we arrived, two elderly women who had been sitting beside me grabbed my shoulder to tell me they’d been watching the whole time, amazed that I hadn’t let my eyeliner or mascara slip, afraid I was going to poke my eye out! I was gorgeous, they said, and I was to enjoy my holidays. I smiled sweetly and went to find a bathroom to check my outfit.

  On the train from Stansted to London I re-did my make-up and drank a quarter bottle of wine and brushed out my hair and took pictures of myself. I put one on Instagram and sent the same one to Ciaran.

  Cute, he replied.

  As the train pulled into Liverpool Street Station, light flooding down from the glass roof, I felt the incautious excitement I had as an eighteen-year-old moving to Dublin. That feeling of being young in a city, letting it do things to you, wanting to become something different in it.

  It was lunchtime when I arrived at the hotel, a cheap one near London Bridge, and I took a long bath and removed all my make-up.

  Noah and I messaged about how excited we were to see one another. My heart was pounding already, I couldn’t stop smiling. I reminded myself not to start drinking until it was evening. We weren’t meeting until eight p.m., at the bar in Brixton his band was playing.

  At six I reapplied all my make-up and got dressed in a short blue dress I had bought specially, then went to the hotel bar and drank two gin and tonics on the patio.

  A group of drunk German football fans were there too and cooed and shouted at me and I glared back with icy indifference. I looked so good. The discrepancy between what was going on inside me and how good I looked made this power of mine seem infinite.

  The way that I looked lent all of the inward mess a saving grace, a chaotic glamour.

  I will be glad for this when I’m old, I thought to myself, stubbing out another cigarette. I will want to remember this exact feeling, of sitting on a hotel patio waiting to go and have sex with a man I want so much I could faint.