by Megan Nolan
I’ll want to remember what it was like to have a body that couldn’t be denied or regarded with ambivalence. I’ll miss all of it, even the secrets, even the lies.
2
When I arrived at the bar he was standing smoking in the yard with the other guys from his band. He introduced me and they all smiled and said hello and didn’t make me feel weird or smirk, although I imagine they all knew what I was there to do, that there could be no other reason for my presence.
They wandered back into the venue and he turned to me and framed my face with his rough hands and touched my hair, looking at me like he couldn’t believe me – but not with seriousness, not in any earnest or embarrassing way, just like he was looking at a particularly interesting plant or animal or toy, something fun and pleasurable. He was simple and easy and so was the pleasure he took in me and the way I looked.
He led me over to his van, littered with guitars and empty fast-food containers, and we climbed into the front seat. We faced the shadow of an ivy-covered wall, but were exposed enough for it to feel absurd and dangerous. I sat straddling him and bent my neck to kiss him so that his head was submerged in the sweep of my hair. I thought distantly how clean I was compared to him. I smelled the hotel-fresh lavender shampoo on myself, and the weeks-old tobacco sweat of him.
I looked down at myself. I was white and pink and in a thin blue dress which squarely framed the tops of my breasts and ended halfway down my thighs. I was strawberry ice cream, blue sky. I smelled so good it was crazy.
He was sun-beaten, handsomely haggard from living out of a suitcase and off booze and burgers, his skin tawny and tough like a farmer’s. He fumbled with his zip and his dick sprang loose; a stale, faintly urinary smell escaped with it and the distaste I felt made me more excited.
As in my dreams of fucking Freja, I could let myself feel pleasure from imagining it was me and not him who was doing the fucking.
I pushed myself into his head, tried to feel how it feels to crack something, someone, wide open.
I looked down at my body and was hysterical with the heat of invasion, mine and his.
He fucked me quickly and I let him come inside me, and walked back into the bar behind him, holding his hand, with the warm drool unfurling between my legs.
It felt like other men in the bar were looking at me appreciatively. I wondered if they could sense it somehow, if it was like being in heat, if they could smell his on me and wanted to cover it with their own.
Why does it take this to make me feel myself?
I was so myself, thinking of nobody but myself, I was nobody at all but myself in those moments.
2019, Athens
Sometimes, nowadays, when I am bored and alone, I try to speak to people. I talk to other lonely people in bars, I try to make them shocked enough to say something interesting, or to walk away from me.
If you saw me you would think I was very cruel, often laughing in the sad, soft faces of the kind of men who drink alone in this country, where drinking alone is not very normal, as they shrink away from me. They are grey-skinned, balding, spectacle-wearing. They are just the wrong side of gawky, wearing T-shirts of black metal bands and bad shorts, flirting hopelessly with the beautiful waitresses. They don’t notice me so much any more. I am no longer a girl.
When I talk to them I ask, ‘Do you think you are lovable?’ And while they’re thinking about it, or trying to turn away, I say quickly, ‘Do you think it would be possible for anyone to love you if they could see every single thing you do?’ And I watch them cringe as though I’ve reached out and struck them.
‘I’m serious,’ I say. ‘Imagine that everyone could see everything. Every secret, every base physical ejection, every category of porn you’ve ever looked at in a kind of coma when you’re numb to the normal stuff. Think about it all. Every moment of shame, of desperation – do you really think anyone could love you still? Anyone at all?’
3
I remember what it was like when I first loved Ciaran, before he left me that first time at Christmas, when I’d miss him so much when he went anywhere. He went to Limerick one long weekend to a conference and I had nothing to do with myself, nor did I want anything to do, I only wanted to be busy missing him.
I remember lying down in that lonely bedsit and thinking about him and crying. I wasn’t crying because I was sad or worried, because I wasn’t those things yet. And I wasn’t crying because of the pain of missing him exactly. I was crying with a kind of enjoyment at the very fact that I was missing him, at that modest pain in me whenever I was missing a man.
It felt like a correct pain, a baseline state, and that was what was making me cry – how right and comforting. I could never be happy without him, but it was a nice pain, for it could be solved, I knew how to cure it.
And that’s something to recommend love: that it has clear rules like a game, and it has speeches and sayings you’ll have heard in films and in songs. There are patterns and there are steps to be taken. If you lose the game that’s one thing, and that has to be dealt with, but at least there is a game to be played at all.
I remember when we were broken up I used to wake up crying, having dreamed all night that he was saying he loved me.
In the dream he was saying it and I was crying because I knew that he meant it.
I could feel it, I could almost taste the words, they were cool and delicious like a drink, but I knew that when I woke up it would stop being true.
I remember sitting watching him once when we were having a fight, or I was having one anyway.
He had kept commenting on what I was making us to eat, commenting on how much and what I was eating, until finally I asked him to stop, asked him why he did that all the time.
Immediately the shutter had gone down and his face closed up and he replied that my insecurities were my own problem and he couldn’t be expected to rearrange everything for them. He couldn’t watch what he said all the time just because I felt a certain way.
I cried when his face did that and said sorry and sorry and sorry but he was gone and moved away from me and sat by the window looking out and ignoring me.
He was lit up by the street lamps and the lights from the chipper across the road and even in my growing hysteria it still took me by surprise how beautiful he was in his absence, how like a painting or a statue sitting there like that. He could move so far away from me in a moment. I envied him his ability to remove himself.
He eked out his coldness a little at a time, for as long as we had known each other, while I saved all of mine for the end.
4
I remember that I read about Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper seller who died in the G20 protests in London in 2009 after being struck by a policeman. I was flipping through a newspaper and saw that he had died and found it sad. The next day there were more details, that he lived in a hostel, that he was an alcoholic, and that he had apparently said, ‘I’m just trying to go home, I’m just trying to go home,’ as he was dying. Reading that, I burst into tears in the passenger seat of my father’s car. I imagined his life, his alcoholism, his life in that hostel, his just trying to go home. I cried for days.
When I was a young teenager I heard a story that, long before my time, in a rural village near Waterford, there was a woman who was poor and she sold sex to some of the village men, and that the wives of the village had made a plan and they had murdered her. They may not have meant to, but they did. They attacked her and put her on the ground and eventually she was dead.
Another story in a newspaper. A young church warden manipulated a decent, good man in his middle age who was a Christian. The Christian man was gay, and had never known how to reconcile his Christianity with that fact. The young church warden made the middle-aged man believe that they were in love, with a view to taking advantage of him and changing his will. He staged a ceremony to celebrate their relationship, after which he slowly poisoned the man until he believed that he was developing dementia. But not before making him think he
had finally found love. ‘At last I do not fear the prospect of dying alone,’ the dying man wrote. You have to hope that he died before realising how alone he really was. You have to hope that he died still thinking that somebody loved him in the way he had wanted to be loved.
In our local paper when I was twelve: there was an elderly woman who would let some local kids hang around her house and she would make them cups of tea and give them biscuits, and of course that turned into some older kids bringing cans and smoking weed, and she didn’t know how to make it stop and one day one of the older ones hurt her. When you hurt an old person their skin is paper thin – they made her whole face explode with blue and purple, and the look on her face was, Why would they? And why would they?
These stories hurt me so badly, but I’ve learned to react to that hurt by thinking of them again and again, forcing myself to replay the details over and over and over, until they are meaningless.
You grow cold, or you die yourself.
September 2014
1
Then there were others, in quick manic succession: first a friend, then a colleague, and finally an artist.
I was drinking more and more and Ciaran knew that I had changed. I was grovellingly sweet to him at certain high points, but then would disappear for whole nights and not apologise, just stumble in pissed and collapse on the bed.
I started to see my old friends again, and because years had passed and we were older now it was the really dedicated drunks who maintained the pace I had known before. There were only a few who could afford to keep it up, financially and physically. They were carefree and chronically depressed, artists and musicians with social capital who would be signing on the dole for the rest of their lives. They were the funniest people in Dublin, as long as you were drunk too.
They were still DJs and nightclub promoters, some of them, and the ones who had done well at that were able to justify their continued nightly excess. The rest of us justified it through them as a proxy – if we were going out, it was just to see our friends, and it so happened that our friends worked in bars that didn’t open until eleven p.m. and necessitated great gulps of the cheap spirit-mixer on offer that week, and a not-inconsiderable number of trips to the bathroom to snort something or other off a key they held under your nose for you, politely.
I slept with the next man in this way, high and blind with drink, against the wall of a disabled toilet in a club on Harcourt Street. It was an old friend of mine called Mark who sold pills and played in four bands and who used to take me on hungover chaste dates to McDonald’s when we knew each other years before.
I didn’t remember the sex afterwards, not really, only the sniggering friends of his looking over at us from behind the DJ booth after we left the toilet, and me stumbling home along the canal by myself afterwards.
2
I was talking to Noah all this time. He was unreal – or what he meant to me was unreal – but he seemed like a miracle, bursting off my screen whenever he contacted me, his cleverness and weird hilarity. I would walk around all day and not look up at all. He took pictures of what he was eating and what he was seeing and told me what he was thinking without me asking him to.
After the freeze of Ciaran, Noah’s warmth was stunning, a sensory overload, a person without barrier. The idea that one could live that way was so wonderful, I didn’t know whether to believe it or not. Was it just a choice?
What was good about him was that he wasn’t even the most important part of what made him good. He made the world itself seem good and ripe and ready to be run towards, he made me feel funny and new and fizzing, and like he wouldn’t even need to be there for that to be true.
3
I received an email from Lisa, still happy in Berlin with her girlfriend and new unknowable life.
Though we hardly knew the business of each other’s lives any more, I knew we still loved each other. She told me in her email that she was finishing the first draft of her book.
I swallowed, throat prickly with pride and envy – my one dream in childhood was to make a book.
When I was small, before drinking and men and the rest, books were the thing that could absorb me entirely and let me forget myself.
I had liked the idea of making something for someone else to do that in. It seemed like the only thing I might have a real desire to do.
That was a long time ago, of course, and now it seemed borderline incomprehensible to me that someone could dedicate so much time and effort to a thing without a known outcome.
Life was so pointless, so opaque and shifting, that I could only think about immediate feelings.
Immediacy was all I had.
4
Then it was the same ugly obnoxious colleague who had groped me at the office party, on another night out – the one who had affected me so deeply by asking how Ciaran could have let me out like that.
Another blurred, weeping memory of him, of my initial drunken and reluctant compliance.
Then eventually something like enjoyment or at least need, a need to have his repellent hands all over me, I remember crying with his hands on my throat, the awful smell of his rotten inside self, the way he made me feel more Ciaran’s and more myself all at once, how powerful that was, how terrible.
5
And finally, there was an artist Ciaran shared a studio with, a sickly-looking pretty young student with a fashionably horrible haircut.
I turned up there one Saturday night, their fourth-floor room on the quays, after having been out drinking and dancing until two. I went to see if Ciaran was around, my phone, as ever, having died in the early evening. I had forgotten about this boy, who was young and shy and unmemorable.
When I knocked on the door he opened it with his pained, timid expression and told me that Ciaran had left hours before. He offered me a beer and we sat on the desks where I’d seen Ciaran work, and we talked and drank until he was drunk too, and then we kissed and then we had sex.
He alternated between seeming frightened and being erratically violent, hitting me and pinching me in the softest places and then shrinking back into himself.
I felt sorry afterwards, not just for myself this time, but for the boy too, for making him a part of anything.
I felt sorry for whatever was wrong inside him, whatever made him lash out and withdraw, lash out and withdraw.
6
I woke up in the morning on my own, the light from the long studio windows burning all over me and my dry mouth gasping.
I was naked and covered with a piece of tarpaulin. I gathered it to my body and propped myself up, shading my eyes and squinting out at that grand grey light over the Liffey you get on cold early mornings.
It was the first day of November in Dublin and it was my birthday. I was twenty-five years old.
My stomach was roiling, awash with acid. My lip was cut and swollen from being hit. My knees and the insides of my thighs were bruised, between my legs bloody, and inside of me there was semen eking out.
I was alone.
I crawled along the floor with one hand on my throbbing head to find my bag and fumble for my phone, plugged it in and lay heavily down beside it.
I pressed my hot bruised face against the wall, which smelled of paint and reminded me of school.
(And I thought then of how it had been once there, in school, how much I loved Bea and how we swapped notes all day long. We struggled not to convulse with laughter, vibrating and becoming purple with it, sometimes exploding helplessly at the doodles and nicknames and nonsense and getting hauled out by a teacher. Remembered going home one midterm and literally praying to God that we wouldn’t be moved from sitting next to each other in the classroom, as had been threatened many times, because I loved her so much.)
The wall felt cold and soothing against the parts of my face that were swollen and tender, places the strange, sad boy had struck me without warning.
I wondered how they always knew that I was someone to be hurt.
&nb
sp; Even when I didn’t tell them to, they knew somehow that there was a part of me that accepted or desired it.
But how was it that they knew?
Why was it that nobody ever thought to ask me in which way I wanted to be hurt, or for how long, or how hard?
And if they had asked, would I have known what to tell them?
I turned on my phone.
There were dozens of missed calls from Ciaran which I scrolled through blankly, and there were messages from Noah, messages teasing and being rude and telling me what he was up to, and saying he missed me.
Noah.
To think of him was fortifying in the wreckage of that morning. He was sturdy and strong and happy. He made me laugh and feel it was possible for things to start over.
He was smart without being boring, he talked in such a way as to make me think of new things, things I’d never thought of on my own.
He knew what he wanted to do in the world, and he made himself happy by enjoying it. I wanted to be near him, to absorb his surety.
I wanted him to touch me gently sometimes and harshly at others, and for us both always to know, without asking, which one was right in that moment.
I thought of his sleepy eyes fondly regarding me, like I was a thing of value he coveted and knew that he deserved, his lazy smile and the irreducible him-ness of him. To know him even a little bit was to sense the fullness of his character, how it burst through his every joke and kiss and exclamation.
There was so much him to grapple with, what was in him was so crowded and chaotic and vibrant that it felt like I would never get bored of sorting through it. With him it felt that there was no shortage of world to discuss, that there were no blank spaces or full stops.
