Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

  The thought of him filled me up comfortingly, reduced the scratchiness in my worn-out smoky throat and the tenderness of the bruising. Lessened the adrenalin and fear from the terrible hangover. If I could just stay in a single moment with him, talking to him and making him smile down at his phone as I was doing now.

  In his messages he said that he was going to move to London for at least a few months in January, recording with a band there and seeing how things went, and did I want to come and stay for a while?

  Did I?

  I saw it, felt it, straight away.

  The journey to the airport, having hastily packed up my things in the apartment while Ciaran shouted at me.

  The unbeatable feeling of being young and alone and on your way to the next thing.

  The cold clear air, moving fast on the icy tarmac towards the terminals, the sheer pleasure of meeting Noah there and being so free of everything I had done to myself.

  The pleasure of simply seeing what would happen.

  We could talk about it all, and about Ciaran, how wrong I had been to choose a person like that, how painful it was to try to love someone for so long. He would reassure me that things would be better now and let me cry sometimes and then we would fuck and be happy and live together in this new place, brand new to each other.

  On Sundays we would go to Deptford and New Cross where his friends lived and roast chickens and drink the five-pound fizz from Sainsbury’s.

  I would work in cafés or pubs and write in the daytimes while Noah was busy, and in the mornings take long walks around the Rye in Peckham or all the way to London Bridge and then go along the river.

  I would go to Broadway Market with him and eat samples of all the best things and buy some stinky olives to walk around with. We wouldn’t have anything to do. The walking around would be the point.

  And when he played gigs I would go to some of them – not all, because I would have my own life, too – and look at him performing and feel proud and turned on by the privacy of the public act, his face contorting and breaking into curious ecstatic smiles at high points.

  It wouldn’t be just us in the world because he wasn’t that sort of person, couldn’t be contained even if I wanted to do that to him. I would love him because of his expansiveness, his open heart and greedy appetites. I wouldn’t want to contain him.

  Some weekends we would get the train to Kent and take day-long walks, stomping over the coastline for fifteen miles.

  (But that wouldn’t be like you, Ciaran would say if he heard. Hiking? And that would be the point – it wouldn’t be me at all any more.)

  Or maybe it would be different to that. Maybe it would be a kind of life I couldn’t even imagine. Something I had no grounding in, something without precedent.

  I let myself think of all this for a few moments and feel the relief it would bring.

  To let an entirely new thing take me over, which was the only way I would escape Ciaran alive, that woozy joy of being able to leave a whole life, my whole self, behind me in an instant.

  But I didn’t know him.

  But he was just another image.

  But I wouldn’t be young and alone – I would be young and on my way to someone else.

  Noah was as different to Ciaran as could be, it was true, but I hadn’t changed.

  I would still be the same, I knew, no matter how badly I would have liked to believe otherwise.

  It might feel at first like I was leaving, swept up in a new, never-felt-before euphoria, but one day soon that theory would crumble (and probably not very long afterwards – Noah’s drinking problem mirroring my own, his rarely spoken-of possible-girlfriend, his natural need to flirt with everyone he met).

  I would be leaving in desperation, not joy, would be bolting away from something as much as towards another.

  No, there would be no end to it that way. There would be no end to it unless I made one myself.

  7

  I got straight into a taxi from the studio, not wanting to leave time enough to tidy myself up and have the chance to change my mind. I can’t remember ever having adrenalin like that, every last inch of me jittering and bumping off the other parts and my heart moving frighteningly from the alcohol and the knowledge of what I was going to do.

  Two parts of me were panicking for different reasons.

  The standard part, the one that depended on the dailyness of Ciaran and the promise of never being left alone, was trying to stop me, trying to tell me how to cover for this one, to clean myself up and lie.

  And now there was another part, and it was so strong and fast it seemed to be powering the speeding taxi through force of will, a part telling me to run, run, run. To get out as quickly and as completely as I could. To burn down the house, to lock him inside, to forget it all as rapidly as reality would allow.

  The daily part tried to soothe me, tried running a quick show reel of the good times Ciaran and I had shared, the ones which mitigated all the rest. And I did see them, the relief of getting into a quiet bed with him of an evening, the relief of his occasional dazzling good moods and the way he could be amusing then, the relief of him taking care of me when I was ill.

  I thought then that that was all those times were: relief. They were always relief from the absence of what I feared, the ordinary, truly daily things: the coldness, and the ignorance, and the disdain, and the hatred.

  The chiding and the shaping of me, the backhanded compliments and barbed advice. The constant knowledge that I would never, ever be what he wanted. The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain. It was binding yourself and feeling good when the bandages came off, it was cutting a hole in your leg so you could feel it heal.

  I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.

  8

  I stumbled out of the taxi, on to Rathmines Road, and it was early enough that a gang of thirty-somethings laughed at me in my state, perhaps amiably recognising their past selves in me.

  I put my key in the door of our flat but before I could turn it, it swung open.

  He looked at me, up and down, and then turned away and took the stairs two at a time. I followed behind, heart going like anything in my throat. I walked into our living room. I put my bag and my things down on the table, and collapsed heavily on to our couch.

  ‘I want to break up,’ I said.

  My head was still swimmingly drunk.

  ‘Oh, really?’ he said mockingly.

  He wasn’t surprised. I felt a sudden relief. Maybe it would be so easy. Maybe he had known it was coming. Maybe he felt the same way!

  ‘Why do you want to break up?’ he asked, eyes still doing the cold sarcastic dance.

  I didn’t know how to respond. I had expected the statement to be its own event, had expected him to be angry and shocked and shouting.

  He turned then, towards our bedroom, and indicated with a brief wave that I should follow him.

  He moved swiftly and smoothly as ever.

  I stumbled along the corridor grasping at the walls, head now starting to really thump.

  I turned into our room, where he sat on the edge of the bed.

  All around him were my diaries.

  He had arranged them so that they fanned extravagantly, taking up the entire space.

  The words were all there. What I had done. Who I had fucked.

  The things I felt about Noah.

  My frustration and eventual boredom with him, Ciaran. He sat in the middle of it all, grinning a terrible slow, hot grin and turned to one of the notebooks and read it aloud to me.

  ‘I don’t know why I am the way that I am. I don’t know why I need to be knocked around and hurt and humiliated in the way that I do. I have no insight into my reasons. But it simply is true that I do want those things and that Ciaran does not seem to have any interest in giving them to me.’

  He looked up at me again with that awful smile leaking into his
usually beautiful face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and it was almost comic because it was so inadequate.

  I was shaking. I needed sugar, cold water, a shower. I needed to leave.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  And it sounded so thin even I didn’t believe it, but then I began to cry. I sat down in the corner and put my head in my lap and wept and wept. With one hand I hid my face, and with the other I grasped for him. I touched his hand and then he stood up.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you wanted that,’ he said.

  I was crying still, not registering what he was saying, or what he was doing.

  He was unbuckling his belt. He was undoing his button and his zip. I was curled into the furthest reach of the bedroom, hiding myself from what was going on, from my shame. I was holding a T-shirt of his to my face to catch the tears and to breathe into.

  He was undressed then.

  He kneeled where I was and kissed me and the feeling of him not hating me was so good and so unexpected. I kissed him back, ecstatic with relief.

  Then he pushed his hands up my dress quickly and roughly. I made a noise of surprise.

  He kissed me more, gently. I felt absolved for a moment. He was forgiving me.

  He grabbed at my underwear violently, dragging it off me and up-ending me in the process.

  ‘Hey!’ I murmured, surprised out of my crying, upset, for the first time, by the strangeness of the situation and by his behaviour.

  He pressed his hand down on my lower abdomen just above my crotch, to keep me still. My heart was beating so fast. His touching me was making me feel so sick but it felt necessary. I thought to myself, If it’s just this, and then I can go, I can do that.

  He started fucking me and I closed my eyes and rolled them backward, trying to get the white light and sparks. Then he hit me.

  He slapped me first, and when I didn’t open my eyes, he hit me with his fist. I looked up at him, mouth open, shocked.

  ‘I thought this is what you like?’ he said.

  I began to cry, and to squirm.

  When I squirmed enough that he couldn’t comfortably fuck me any more, he dragged me up by my hair. He put his dick in my mouth while he forced me from behind my neck, and fucked me that way.

  I began to cry, really cry.

  ‘Stop crying, you bitch,’ he said, and I looked up at him then, through my tears, and I saw that he hated me. He hated me entirely and completely.

  ‘I thought you liked this,’ he said again as he fucked my throat. And when I cried more, he sneered down at me.

  ‘This is what you like,’ he kept saying.

  9

  When he had finished he walked straight into the shower.

  I packed a bag quickly and left.

  I stayed in a hotel that night, soaking in a scalding bath.

  Two weeks later I left the country.

  May 2015

  Athens

  1

  After Ciaran and I broke up, and I had been in Greece for six months, my friend Mark asked to visit. I had been alone a long time by then and my loneliness was of a different nature to what it had been both before and during my relationship with Ciaran. It existed in a more permanent and peaceful way, felt like a thing that could reasonably be expected to be endured for ever. I could not tell yet whether this feeling was one I should resist.

  My new aversion to company felt perverse and dangerous somehow, implied ensuing decades of strange behaviour, suggested a finality I was not sure I wanted.

  One day I realised I had not spoken to any person for a week. On the metro a man with a moustache and strong tan arms wrapped his hand around the pole I was leaning on, and I had to stop myself leaning forward just an inch to brush my cheek against its smooth brown back.

  2

  Mark arrived. It felt wrong to be speaking with another person, and one I could barely remember knowing. My words were hesitant, and getting drunk, which I had not done in weeks, did not help. When I told him how I was spending time – working, walking, reading, writing – it sounded lethargic and relaxing instead of how it felt, which was constantly charged with the newness of loss, the shock of chaos.

  He kept saying how amazing I was, how brilliant my work must be, how great I looked, how special a person I was.

  When, in conversation, I referred to having a bad day and not being able to work well, he immediately denied that such a thing was possible.

  I hate now for men to dote in this way, the ones who don’t know me. Their praise lands uncertainly in the air somewhere between the two of us, because it doesn’t belong to me. I hate to hear them tell me what I am, even or especially when what they think I am is kind or brilliant or beautiful. I hate when they insist that I have no faults, that my laziness or violence or cruelty simply don’t exist.

  When they speak this way I am even less in my body than usual, feeling the sickness of a stranger look me in the eye and describe what is not there. What I am feeling is their disregard for my reality. I am being made to wear whatever particular fantasy they wish to project.

  Each time it happens I have to restrain myself from screaming in their faces to prove I am not what they believe me to be. In these moments I am happy with my ugliness and want them to see it. Whatever badness I am I want to be it, to be as much like whatever my self is as possible; as far from the stranger’s projection as possible.

  ‘I think it’s just great,’ he kept saying, in response to any inanity I told him about what I had been up to. ‘Coming here all alone, it’s so brave.’

  I restrained myself from snapping in disagreement. What was brave about it? I was where I was because I was too stupid and weak to be with other people. I had needed them too much and had been destroyed by it. Now I was too afraid to try such a thing again, having got the whole idea so catastrophically wrong, and so instead I was here.

  I was also here because I could be. I was lucky enough to be able to run. I had no money, but also no dependents. I was young and agile and had no responsibilities that could not be shed in a matter of weeks.

  There was nothing brave about it. I had been braver every night I spent locked in the bathroom after a fight with Ciaran. I was braver every day I got up the next morning and went to work. Who would ever understand this, that the weakness was also steely and pure? In a way I myself could no longer understand.

  I hate my weakness, what I severed of myself and gave to him, but love it too, love it still. I do not take it back. I love the girl who did those things. I love the girl because I feel sorry for her, and understand her.

  Is it brave to be alone? Maybe, in a way. But it was also brave to ask someone to be with me, even though it was the wrong person, and in the wrong way. How could I have asked him to love me, day after day, when the answer kept on being no? What desperation made me live that way?

  I mourn for that braveness, which is gone; whether it’s gone for ever or not, I don’t yet know.

  That night Mark kissed me and I let him. It was the easy thing to do, the only thing to do. The idea of telling him not to and the ensuing conversation filled me with weariness. I wondered how many times in my life I had made this calculation, how the men would feel if they knew, if they would care.

  In my bedroom, his fawning was irritating me so much that at first kissing was a relief. Then he kept stopping to draw back and look at my face and do this move of slightly shaking his head in – what? – wonder? And then smiling and returning to kiss again. Every time he did it I felt worse and worse, more and more desperate for it to end. Sometimes he would laugh a little, as though in disbelief at his good fortune. It all felt rehearsed.

  After it had gone on a while, I pushed away and said I was going to brush my teeth and get into my pyjamas. I hoped this would be enough to neutralise the intimation that sex was to follow. I hoped that we could just go to sleep.

  When I returned, I shut off the light and climbed into bed with my back to him, with an overly cheery and definitive, �
�Goodnight!’ Behind me, shirtless, he inched nearer and then pressed his body into mine and thrust his arm around my front. He started to slowly stroke my ribs, his mouth was moving through my hair towards my neck. He kissed me there, my ears, was whispering some endearment. I stayed still and hoped this would be enough, that he would give up. He took my jaw in his hand and jerked it back to face him, began to kiss me. I kissed him back.

  After his hands had run over my breasts and he was edging underneath my T-shirt I put my hand on his wrist.

  ‘I’m tired, I don’t feel like it. I’m sorry,’ I said. He lay on his back. I looked at him: his eyes were wide and pleading. I turned back around and put my arm over my head, gathering the blanket to me.

  A few minutes later his body had moved back to cradle mine. I ignored it. I can sleep like this, I thought, I can deal with this. His dick got hard and he began, gently at first and then less so, to push it into me. His face was again rustling in my hair and softly kissing me.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I forced myself to say, instead of doing what I was inclined to – rolling over, giving in. I wondered if he knew how unbearable it was for me to say this to him, if he knew how every cell in my body was inclined to yield.

  ‘Aw, why not?’ he replied in the tone of a kid told he was no longer allowed to play video games.

  How could I answer this?

  Why not you now, Mark, when there have been so many others, and indeed you yourself have been one?

  Why did I want it before and not now?

  Why do your little laughs and smiles nauseate me?

  It’s not that my body means any more to me now than it once did, it’s only that I hate you more.

  I resent the fact that you can take pleasure from me.

  The comedian John Belushi once said, ‘I give so much pleasure to so many people. Why can’t I get some pleasure for myself?’