Between Dog and Wolf

by Sokolov, Sasha; Boguslawski, Alexander;

  You want them to like you but you have no idea how to achieve that.

  Oisín is different now. He hunches his back more. His voice is deeper and louder, his words all swallowed inside, as though he doesn’t really want them heard. He looks like he might punch someone, or as though he wants people to think he might. In fact the pose makes him look weedy. You have never considered that he might be weedy.

  They sit around a bar table and drink a lot of pints very quickly. You sit between Oisín and Denny – the one with the bald patch – and laugh when they laugh. You try to make eye contact with Oisín, but he doesn’t see you. Then you try to exchange something with the ‘long-suffering girlfriend’ – a look or a word, but she is looking at her boyfriend, blank faced. The corners of her mouth are turned down like an old woman’s, making little sags where spit might gather as she ages. Two more men arrive. They talk about things Oisín has never talked about with you, bands you didn’t know he liked, and MTV videos, which you didn’t think he watched. Mostly though, they describe previous nights like this, how drunk Denny was and how much he puked.

  Oisín’s face is fixed in a growl. He looks like a different person. You want to wave, you want to kiss him, shake him out of this trance. ‘Hey!’ you want to say, ‘It’s me, Helen, it’s me, you like me, remember?’

  A plump girl with dimples is sitting at a table nearby. The lads make jokes about her having a face like Kirsten Dunst and tits like Jordan, and you are not sure whether they are being cruel or kind. Then one of them, Aengus, the one with the girlfriend, says: ‘Oisín was rootin’ her for a while!’ Oisín says nothing. Under the table you try to slip your hand into his but he pulls away. ‘Biggest fuckin’ disappointment of my life, man! Lousy lay! Two weeks I was rootin’ her, and it didn’t get any better …’ Then he opens his mouth and a loud fake laugh you have never heard before rolls out.

  * * *

  She said she wasn’t drinking. He didn’t see that one coming. There was no better way to lose points with the lads than being some precious princess on a detox. He was trying his best, making an effort to pace himself with his own pints. She was humiliating him. She looked at him as though she had never seen him before in her life, as though they had not eaten ice-cream in the bath together only the night before, as though she wasn’t in love with him, as though she had not been excited about meeting his family and his friends. She sat tight-lipped, giving a cold, fake laugh when the lads tried to include her. He had told the lads she couldn’t get enough of his dick. She was making a fool of him.

  Oisín drank heavily and began to slur his words, to lean all his weight on her shoulder when he spoke to her. He knew he was pissing her off, but he didn’t care. She was behaving like a stuck-up Barbie – backing away from his beer breath and disappearing all the time. She went to the toilet a lot, or outside ‘to take a call’. He had a laugh with his mates despite her. They talked about the craic they had last New Year’s and about Kevin’s plan to play his songs at the strip club. ‘It’d be cool man! Imagine, the girls dancing away to the music, smoke machine in the background and me givin’ it socks, man! They’d make money sellin’ tickets, and I’d get loads of people in to hear my music. We could sell CDs from the bar!’ Poor Kev – his plans never worked. He was a good guy though. He had a FÁS job at the homeless centre. Girls loved when he said: ‘When I’m not making music I work with the homeless.’

  Helen took his hand, and kissed it.

  ‘Did you ever go to that strip club?’

  ‘No, baby. Never.’

  The lads laughed. He should have known she’d ask that question. All girls were the fucking same. It was well after closing time and Byrne was being an asshole. ‘Lads! Out! Or I’m not letting you in any more!’

  Aengus patted Byrne on the shoulder, squinting at him through puffy beer eyes. ‘We’re going man – we’re going!’ The girlfriend clung to his arm, tugged him out the door. The lads were the most regular of Byrne’s customers though, there was no way he’d bar them. A wave of nostalgia crashed over Oisín. No matter what happened the lads would always be here, drinking themselves stupid and talking shite on a Saturday night. He loved the lads. He wouldn’t give them up for the world, and certainly not for a bit of pussy. Helen had gone off again. Kev fumbled with his pocket under the table and took out a little plastic packet, ‘Hey, hey Oisín man – I got some yokes, you want one?’ It had been years since Oisín had done ecstasy, except the herbal stuff in Amsterdam. The lads were back into it though, he knew from Aengus’s emails, but the truth was it fucked with Oisín’s head a bit too much in ways he didn’t like.

  ‘No man. My bird …’

  ‘Oh sure, okay man, no worries.’

  Shame licked at his ears. The lads would think he was pussy-whipped by some stuck-up poshy from Trinity.

  He found Helen at the front entrance, Denny leaning on her shoulder, talking close into her face, and her leaning away. Just before they saw him he heard what Denny said.

  ‘So I hear Oisín popped your cherry? Yeah, you look real innocent but I bet you’re a minx in bed …’

  He went home with her instead of going on to the late club with the lads. She might be behaving like a cunt but she was the best ride he’d ever had, and he had introduced her to his mam. He didn’t want to lose her, not yet. They made crisp sandwiches together in his kitchen, trying to be quiet so as not to wake his parents, and she seemed okay again. She kissed his cheek.

  ‘Baby did you tell Denis I was a virgin?’

  ‘Denis talks shite. Don’t mind him.’

  They switched on the TV but there was nothing much on. He always switched on the TV when he got in from a night out in Tipp. The low buzz, the fuzzy picture, and that damp, worn smell of his parents’ couch – years of bums and feet – reminded him what it had been to be a teenager and not to have anyone to take to bed with you. It reminded him as well that the lads were there for him then, and would be for years to come, that it was Aengus he had run to after scoring for the first time. Aengus, a face thick with acne and bum fluff, who had whacked him on the back and said: ‘Fair fucking dues to you, man!’

  Helen laid her head on his lap. She fondled his crotch a bit, kissing his belly. She wanted to suck him off, but he pulled her to her feet. It was 3 AM. Helen’s lips were puffy – they always went puffy when she was tired. He was the only one, perhaps, who knew that about her. Suddenly he stopped disliking her. He kissed her lips. He never wanted to feel angry with her again.

  ‘You know I love you?’ She nodded.

  ‘Let’s go to bed. Dad always wakes me at eight in the morning! For mass. He’ll wake me extra early because of the wedding. He’ll be up at sunrise, shouting.’

  He laughed but she just looked at him.

  ‘They’re good lads you know. Kev is alright. He helps the homeless.’

  He kissed her goodnight when she was tucked into bed in the box room, went into the bedroom he had slept in since he was three, and closed the door. He had the room to himself; his brothers weren’t coming up until the morning. He could hear her sobbing through the walls. All women were the fucking same. He texted Denis:

  ‘Wa d fuck u say 2 my bird I’m in d dog house now ur a wanker hav a gud 1!’

  twenty-one

  I meet brian again today. I had planned to tell him about the pregnancy but I know as soon as I see him that I can’t. We have a drink first, downstairs. I have a gin and tonic, and I don’t worry too much about looking graceful as I drink it. He peers into my top and I wish I wasn’t wearing a padded bra. He grins at me. How stupid. He knows every inch of my naked body. What’s the point? He says there’s a recession coming. He was always telling me there was a recession coming, that the Celtic Tiger was toppling.

  ‘I’m not worried about it though. What happens to the artists in a recession, Lol? Not that much you know, because we never did ride the tide of Capitalism.’

  Upstairs things go pretty much the same as last time except that he’s more ag
gressive, flipping me over and lunging into me from behind. How strange that this really is how babies are made. I can’t stop thinking about our baby. It was only a speck though, a plunge of blood, a hormonal shift. I feel foolish for thinking a word like ‘baby’. Even more foolish for thinking ‘our baby’, particularly as it might not have been. It is more likely, in fact, to have been Oisín’s, unreal as that encounter now seems. I feel like some sort of lunatic, as though I have made it all up. No one else knows. It might as well never have happened.

  I know anyway, what Brian would say if I told him, and I know what he’d say if I cried about it or used the word ‘baby’. He would talk about the Church state, the national consciousness. He would laugh about my convent education and call me a fucking Catholic.

  My mouth is so dry that I keep reaching down beside the bed for my bottle of water while he’s pumping. I bleed a bit. I’m still not right after the whole thing. He doesn’t mind blood. He used to like my periods. Today he is still there when I get out of the shower. He asks if I want to go for lunch and I say no, I have to get back to college. He makes a stupid comment about me watching my weight and he can see my ribs, and we separate with a peck on the cheek at the corner. I realize suddenly that I don’t love him any more. It is a new thought and it hurts more than the longing I used to feel.

  I walk back to college watching my shoes squash the damp filth on the pavement, pink and blue and yellow paper sticking to the concrete, gathering in the crevices; sodden confetti from a town wedding.

  I want to love. I want my heart to stay open and bleeding for the world. I want to stay young, to hold on to the last traces of earnestness; even if that means being foolish, because once I lose that, once everything becomes sardonic, once I am grown up, nothing will matter as much. Moment by moment my heart is turning old and leathery. I am getting over this, all of it. I can feel it all seal over like a scab. In a few decades I’ll die with watercolour feelings.

  When I get home one of the goldfish is lying on the stones at the bottom of the water. The other one is puckering at his head, thinking he’s food. I fish him out with the smallest of Cahill’s assorted-sized sieves and flush him down the toilet. Then I sit on the floor in my room and cry for the dead fish and his unfeeling, un-remembering survivor.

  twenty-two

  Helen never told him she was rich. He knew she was posh, all the Trinity girls were, but he didn’t know she was this loaded.

  They had taken the bus to Wicklow town, and then a taxi to Helen’s house. It was a horrible trip. Cassandra came along. She was wearing red underwear. He could see the bra through her white T-shirt. When she leaned into the taxi her top rose, showing the red lace string of her thong. She had no boobs anyway, and a concave stomach. Too skinny to be sexy. He wasn’t attracted to her. Even now, after fucking her that day, the sight of her left him cold.

  The three of them sat together on the bus along the back row of seats. He hadn’t spoken to Cassandra since that day. You’re the girl in the A|wear catalogue. He had taken the poster down the following day. Helen must have known it was Cassandra all the time. She never said anything about it.

  The incident seemed to have no impact on Cassandra at all. Afterwards whenever he saw her, and whenever Helen mentioned her name, he felt ill and began to sweat. But she continued to treat him with the same disdain as she always had. Even the way she ignored him if she bumped into him and Helen in the kitchen or the library wasn’t any different to how she had always been with him. She seemed so unaffected by the incident that he sometimes wondered if it had really happened.

  On the bus Cassandra didn’t talk much, but she cast a humourless shadow over the whole journey. He felt that everything he said would sound ridiculous in her presence, every gesture of affection he made towards Helen would feel like a lie.

  The trip began with Helen trying to chat, but Cassandra was quiet. Oisín gave a clipped response to all Helen’s babble so that she realized how much she was annoying him and put on her iPod. She was getting better at knowing when she was annoying him. Then he opened a packet of Tayto. Helen wrinkled her nose. ‘Oisín, please. The smell is disgusting.’ He watched her upper lip curl a little as she said the word ‘disgusting’. He laughed at her: ‘Euw. Excuuse me madam.’

  Cassandra just shot him a look like a threat and he closed the crisp packet. Then Helen moved to another seat because she said she could still smell them. Precious bitch. A shock of hatred flashed through him, a sudden, pure emotion, sensual as pain.

  He opened the crisps and ate them, Cassandra sitting prim beside him, her cropped hair curving around her head like a helmet, those harsh cheekbones glistening, nostrils twitching. Could it have been a warning, that look? No. She was like a mother tiger with Helen. She wouldn’t hurt her by telling her something like that. That’s why she hated him – because she thought he hurt Helen. She thought he wasn’t good enough. Fine, he wanted to say. Fine. I’m not good enough ... Who is? She hadn’t told Helen, he was sure of that, and she wouldn’t tell her. He wondered if Helen would believe her anyway. He hardly believed it himself.

  The sound when he munched on the crisps was too loud. No method, not closing his mouth, not chewing more slowly, would make the crunching less offensive. He wasn’t trying to be polite though. He relished Cassandra’s repugnance. He would like to fuck her properly once, he thought, see the changes in her face and body as she came, expose her like that. He would pump cum all over her prudish little face then stand up and walk away, throwing her knickers back at her, spitting at her. He would like to call her ‘woman’ and make her suck his cock, atone for whatever she had done to him that day, making him lick her pussy like that. He would fuck her in the ass and undo all of this, undo Cassandra’s straight back, her stiff hair, undo Helen’s curled lip, her disregard. It was only with Cassandra that Helen was this way, that she was this person he could so easily hate.

  Cassandra was reading some book. She was ignoring him completely, but Helen, a few seats up, was leaning her face against the window, her eyes squeezed shut, clutching her stomach as though the smell of crisps was really inflicting some dreadful pain on her.

  He became intensely conscious of the eating process. The chewing turned the crisps into a doughy ball, butted about by his tongue. Then it was swallowed down, moving from his throat to his stomach by the contractions of his gullet. The over-flavoursome powder on the crisps and the salty smack of MSG sickened him, but he forced himself to the end of the bag, crumpled it in a fist, and licked his fingertips.

  It was a bumpy ride. Helen stayed in her seat up the front. He could see the back of her head, her ringlets bopping with the bumps of the bus. She had put away her iPod and curled her knees up to her chest. It was three o’clock when they set off and even though it was March now the evenings still darkened early. He spent the journey watching the coach windows turn from white to grey to blue.

  He carried Helen’s bag from the bus to the taxi, while she sat in the front passenger seat, massaging her temples. Helen directed the driver to a giant cul-de-sac that ran down a hill. Each of the houses was different: different shapes, different bricks. They were all huge, like embassy buildings. Some had tall security gates and tall trees. Others had low walls and no gates at all, so that all their splendour was on display. He noticed the taxi-driver fiddle with the meter as they passed a tennis court on one side and a Rolls-Royce on the other. Oisín snorted. If he had that kind of money he wouldn’t spend it on a Rolls-Royce. What a waste. There were much better cars out there for that price. He didn’t say anything though, not with Cassandra there and Helen in this contrary mood.

  Her home was down at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. A huge stone boulder at the foot of the drive said ‘The Elms’, the carved letters designed to imitate Irish calligraphy. The house itself was set atop a mound of gravel and greenery and half-concealed behind trees and shrubs in blossom. Only the top of the house – a muddle of peaks and chimneys – was visible from the road. A rockery gar
den was built into the sloping lawn: stone orbs, various flowering shrubs, and an assortment of ponds linked by a trickling stream.

  The driver stopped at the open gate. Helen didn’t move. ‘Would you mind driving up? We have loads of bags …’

  Oisín breathed deeply. He reminded himself that it was Cassandra who made him hate Helen. He tried to remember that he liked her. He tried to remember that feeling it gave him when she giggled. The driver didn’t answer, but turned the wheel emphatically and they crunched up the slope to the house. On the way up they passed under an iron arch with some sort of pink-flowered creeper growing on it. Big, loose blossoms dangled over the car, trembling from the vibration of the motor.

  When they stopped at the front door Oisín glanced at the meter. The journey had only taken fifteen minutes but it said thirty-five euro. He reached into his bag for his wallet but Helen touched his hand in a way that made him want to smack her. ‘Don’t be silly, my dad will get it.’

  Before he could answer, a woman with a huge arse came bounding towards the car. He could see that it was huge even from the front. It swelled out from her sides and inhibited her walking. What made the rear so absurd was that her shoulders were narrow. Her cheeks and neck weren’t even chubby, but her thighs were thick. She leaned forward as she ran, the way he had seen ostriches do on nature programmes. Her face was not unlike Helen’s but there was something a little crazed about the eyes. They protruded a bit, as though there wasn’t enough eyelid. She was much younger than Oisín’s mam. She kissed Helen briskly and then put an arm around Cassandra.