Between Dog and Wolf

by Sokolov, Sasha; Boguslawski, Alexander;

  ‘Sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll do it,’ you stoop to help but then you stop, embarrassed by her disregard. She doesn’t look at you. She keeps her head down. ‘Is no problem. Is okay.’

  What you want is for her to look at you, but she doesn’t, and it occurs to you that she is not used to cleaning people’s houses and she doesn’t know the way it works. She does not know how to address you. She does not know that in this house the staff and the children are comrades. She wants to be invisible and do this job and get paid. She is about ten years older than you, with bad skin. Your feet are tucked up as though too precious to touch the mess, and you watch her tidy the glass and clean the milk, you keep saying sorry, sorry but she ignores you so then you stop. You badly want to pour yourself another glass but that seems impudent.

  The woman has tidied the glass and returns to the washing-up. You have to shout to be heard across the big kitchen, and you know she would prefer you not to speak at all.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. One moment it was in my hand and then it wasn’t. Sorry.’

  She turns and looks at you. She has no idea what you said. She tries to read your face, responds with an ambiguous turning upwards of her mouth.

  ‘I’m Helen.’

  She nods, the expression still fixed on her face.

  ‘Are you Tatiana’s friend?’

  ‘Excuse me. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Are you a friend of Tatiana?’

  ‘Ah, Tatiana. Yes.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Ah. No thank you.’

  ‘You are having a baby?’ You pat your own belly. She smiles.

  ‘Ah. Yis. I have another, my Nik. He is five. He is a funny boy … He is so a funny boy. He is doing Irish dancing.’ She smiles and it looks as though she might cry with the intensity of it; her little boy’s loveliness.

  You pour another glass of milk and drink it on the landing, sitting on the top step. All the bedroom doors are closed. Somewhere a bathroom is open, the light left on. The persistent night bears down through the giant skylights two stories up.

  Oisín is still asleep. He doesn’t stir when you pass through the bedroom to the en-suite. You twist the shower controls and the water jolts from warm, to hot, to hotter – as hot as you can bear. You face the gush from the faucet. You want to be cleansed of everything but this pregnancy, you want to be left clean as a pebble, hollow and smooth like the large shell they had in the fourth-year bathroom at school. It was a beautiful thing with curling ridges on the outside, but inside it was impossibly white, impossibly smooth and empty. The Sisters said that when you put it to your ear you could hear the sea. That’s how empty it was. The sea echoed through it.

  You will the water to do this for you. Wash through me, wash through me. Hollow me out. You imagine yourself glowing from the inside with all this emptiness, your blood washed pale as watered milk, a shell for other things to echo through.

  You know something now, or you will know something. The almost-crying, ‘My Nik’. There was a promise of knowledge in the little square of blue. Blue: Positive. You feel now that you knew the moment it happened, in the quiet after climax you could feel yourself softening, the angular hipbones losing their sharpness, tight anxiety at your heart loosening into something else. If you are ever to know your mother this will be how. But you will not become your mother, with an ass that stretches all the way around her, with that hatred that glints like evil itself, with all that flailing discontent. Maybe you will take away your mother’s core excuse and cripple her. Maybe you will love and love, stupidly, blindly and perpetually, and the future will fly onwards and leave all this sickness behind.

  Oisín stays asleep as you slip between the covers, naked and clean. He is curled up again, his hands folded neatly one over the other and tucked under his cheek.

  You try it out, while he is asleep beside you. If it is not true it will feel wrong in your mouth. You will feel like you’re lying.

  ‘Oisín, I don’t love you.’

  Nothing. He is asleep. It doesn’t feel like a lie but it doesn’t ring quite true either.

  ‘I don’t love you.’

  Nothing. Go back to sleep, Helen.

  twenty-five

  I am in my grandmother’s attic amidst the stacks of boxes: records of sixty years that no one will ever have the patience to go through, bills from the 1950s with proof of payment, photos of her dead children, a yellowed lace christening gown, the programme from my mother’s first real play.

  I explored up here once when I was twelve. It felt like sacrilege then, fingering the things my grandmother had lain to rest. Now it feels like due respect.

  The programme is printed on expensive gloss paper, cool and weighty. In the play my mother had the title role, though she was killed after Act One. There is a stamp-sized headshot beside her bio. She is wearing a black polo neck and trying not to grin.

  It is pitch black up here but I know where I am from the smell of damp, packed paper, and the sense of something bearing down on my head. I am looking for my grandmother’s cashbooks. She is proud of how well she survived on nothing when she first came here with my grandfather, how she never begged a penny, how she fed her husband and her children on dandelion leaves and nettle soup and pulses. Her children who weren’t worth the sacrifice.

  ‘The little boy who died’ – that’s what she calls him. He took a lot of her love, that little boy. She never trusted anything else that came out of her again. She couldn’t feed her other babies. The milk clotted to stones in her breasts. She fretted but she needn’t have. They weren’t worth much anyway, the next three. My mother, the youngest and prettiest and most disastrous, always jealous of the love she wasn’t given, as though the clothing and feeding and care and fussing from the dregs of a heartbroken heart – the constant endeavour – were not enough.

  I need to find those cashbooks: little orange notebooks thatched on both sides of the page with my grandmother’s handwriting, pink elastic bands squeezing them together. It is dark though, and all the boxes smell the same, and they all look the same: dark blocks in the dark. Then the realization strikes me like a thud on my back. There is another thing up here – my miscarriage/abortion, whatever it was. It’s not gone at all. It’s here somewhere in the dark, a little fishy thing with silver eyes, glinting my reflection in the stifling blind. It’s in a jar of odourless pink vinegar and there is no lid on the jar. I wish there were a lid on it. I feel sure that if there was a lid on it, that thing would turn into itself and expire, but it is turning in the pickle, sloshing, watching me. I asked it not to. I told it not to. Don’t I have that right, at least? To say no, say goodbye, walk away?

  My grandmother is somewhere here, she is telling me off. ‘We never wasted a penny,’ she says, ‘We never borrowed a penny …’ and I need to find the cashbooks to understand and I need to escape the gaze of that dumb, determined, fish-thing with giant pods for eyes.

  The little boy who died is here too: a beautiful child with warm cheeks and dimpled hands. He is perched on a box somewhere, singing himself a nursery rhyme and swinging his feet against a stack of memories. He is only an infant of two and a half, but because he is a very clever child he knows all the words and the tune. I recognize the tune but at the same time I can’t quite hear it. In the same way I know what he looks like, though there’s no light to see him by. He has my grandfather’s eyes. None of the next three had my grandfather’s eyes. He wants to forgive us all, especially his namesake, my uncle Jeff. He is glad he died in the olden days instead of living now. Two and a half years was all he wanted. He wants to tell my grandmother that, but she is too busy not thinking about it. He wants her to know that she need not regret. He doesn’t want to be a man of the Celtic Tiger. Poverty, for him, and his mother’s breast, and some nursery rhymes, were just fine. His life was just fine, and its end was just fine. ‘Don’t fret,’ he wants to tell her. He is perched on the box smiling at me the way those kind of ch
ildren do, those beautiful, blessed-looking children full up with their mother’s love. He’s smiling at me because he thinks I am someone else.

  I wake to the black skylight and aloneness of this attic room. I can hear birds twittering somewhere, which can’t be right. The night is still thick outside. I come out of the dream full of all sorts of shapeless knowledge, a strangled sense of having something wordless to tell. My seaweed dress is in a tangled heap at my feet. I went to bed in my thong. I have no idea how I could have slept in it. The lacy string is unbearable, chafing at my bum, and I have just acknowledged my hangover, which has been there all along through my dream, a persistent, dull pain in every part of me. When people die from old age that must be what it’s like. Pain everywhere, and too tired to care. How ridiculous it is to be young and give yourself a preview of that misery. How ridiculous it seems, sometimes, to be young.

  I swing out of bed into the cold of this house and root in my knapsack for the nightdress I brought. I did bring a nightdress. I have no idea why I went to bed in my knickers. I put on my nightdress now only as a sort of formality. I will have to get up and be dressed when my grandmother arrives anyway, shake off the hangover, smile at her and look happy in the mysterious way that young people look to her now – cheesy, inaccessible, saying words like ‘cool’ and ‘kosher’, words that have different meaning for her. It baffles her: I do not have a man or a child, I have nothing to love when she is gone. What am I happy about? I can’t answer that, but I will bamboozle her with my smile and my prettiness and she will believe that I am really happy, that she does not need to understand. That is all I have to offer her, the promise of my happiness; the promise of my future.

  I will have a little boy some day, for her. Some day I will pick up the little fishy thing, take it out of the pink pickle and nourish it into a baby. I will stop drinking and eat all the right things and I will give birth with courage. I will not curse as he smashes out of me. My breasts will flow with creamy milk. I will not call him Jeff. I will not think his life has been a waste if it expires at two and a half. I will not fret.

  Somehow in the dark that really seems possible, to take it out of the pickle, and I resolve not to forget what I must do.

  I lie on the covers, enjoying the cold. I can feel it burrow its way into my bones, my back, my shoulders, especially my pelvis: the place my grandmother always insists I keep warm. ‘Your kidneys,’ she always says – but it’s not about my kidneys. It’s the future in there, the pulsing uterus, the place that will carry some remedy to all her disasters. I like the terrible chill in my boy’s hips, in my stunned womb, begging to be covered up, to be swaddled warm. I am proving something, letting it freeze like this.

  I don’t even hear him come up the stairs, but he crashes into the room, Helen’s daddy, in blue striped pyjamas, a piss-horn pressing through the fly. His eyes are screwed. He is blundering, half-asleep. Man-sized blue striped pyjamas? It is as though he has been dressed up to be mocked and petted, the way people put ballet dresses on kittens and stick them on greeting cards. I have a vision of Helen’s mother, ten of Helen’s mother, sitting in a circle around him laughing and watching him blunder sleepily. He makes his way towards the bed blindly, a hand supporting the weight of his crotch. I am sitting up now and he sees me, and stops, and mumbles something. I don’t know what to answer.

  ‘I’m just getting up,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Cassandra. Sorry, sorry. I thought it was empty.’ He turns to leave, swaying, and then stops to stare ahead and shake himself awake. I have to speak to make us less alone together. It is not natural that we should be alone together, this shadow and his piss-horn and I.

  ‘I’m just getting up,’ I repeat.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Okay.’

  ‘I can take my bag out, if you want to sleep here?’

  ‘Yeah okay. I – Mary and Denis are in my room.’

  I didn’t mean it and I certainly didn’t expect him to take me up on it. At first I don’t understand, and then I get up and pack everything into my bag: the twisted-up thong, the seaweed dress. He stands, sways, and tries to keep his eyes open while he waits.

  When I get off the bed he keeps standing there, his eyes closed. He looks much older than I have ever seen him. His face is wrinkled in pain and I can see, because a grey light is starting to glow in from the skylight, that the little squeezes of his eyes are pink. He looks, for the first time, like a sick man, like someone on medication. I make my way to the door and he is still standing. I put down my bag and walk to the bedside. I lift the duvet cover back, opening a place for him to climb into the bed, as though he needs to be shown the way. He gets in and lies on his back. I pull the duvet over him. Then I leave.

  twenty-six

  When Oisín had kissed her goodbye her eyes were blank like a doll’s. He had wanted to scream, shake her, make her look.

  ‘You’re breaking up with me aren’t you? Aren’t you Helen?’ That was what he had wanted to shout, what was tumbling on his tongue, pressing forward, threatening to leap. He almost wished he’d said it, at least then he wouldn’t be left with this dumb non-feeling. But that’s a silly thing to say to someone if you want them to stay your girlfriend. At the bus station she gave him her key card. She asked him to hand it in because she had forgotten to do it in the rush of packing. She had to move rooms even though she’d be back in two weeks for exams.

  She brought the fish with her. He told her it would survive two weeks without food but she didn’t care. She had given up the cat very suddenly. The cleaning lady took it. He didn’t understand why Helen wasn’t keeping it. He thought she loved the cat.

  It was terrible, uprooting her right before exams, moving her to a totally new building. He thought she should complain, but she said she didn’t mind. They hadn’t made any future plans. When he had said he’d call her she’d nodded and blinked. She’d taken a breath to speak, and then swallowed it.

  Neither of them had had much sleep in the last weeks. They had been fighting. They had been staying up all night just to fight. Often in the small hours, they had lain on the bed side-by-side because their bodies were too tired to sit, and they fought like that, each looking at the ceiling, their lips moving. Sometimes he fell asleep like that, but when he woke up Helen was still talking and crying. ‘You don’t care. You don’t even care …’

  Sometimes she put her hands over her face and wept. Sometimes she pinched him with frustration, taking a fistful of his flesh and squeezing as hard as she could, her eyes red, her lips drawn back. That was what he hated the most. He hardly cared about the pain, but he wanted her to slap him, to scream. The pinching was weak and ugly and mute.

  Sometimes they became so exhausted that they made quiet, painful love then, and cried, and took a shower, and ate, but then they resumed fighting. Sometimes, even in the middle of the lovemaking she would take the opportunity to punish him. Once, just before he came she had whispered:

  ‘So, would you like to see me fucked by those guys in your porn? One in the mouth and one in the ass … can you imagine what it feels like to be fucked until you bleed? Is that what you’d like?’

  Once she had pulled her knees under his torso and tried to thrust him off her just as he came. She had whispered, ‘No, no, Oisín. Please stop.’ He couldn’t stop. Afterwards she had rolled over and sobbed like a hurt child.

  It was hard for him even to understand what they were fighting about. She interrogated him. What did he do in bed with other girls before her? Did he prefer them? Did he think about them when he was fucking her? What did sex mean to him? Did he think it was wrong, the way he lost his virginity that time; what would he tell his children, if he had them, about sex and love and what they meant?

  She had found porn on his laptop. Was that when it started? After the party at her parents’ house? Or maybe it had already begun by then. He remembered the evening of her parents’ anniversary, the look she had given him when he came down the stairs, freshly shaven, to find her. The wa
y she stood in the mill of wealthy guests, and turned over her shoulder, her eyes moving down his body. He had been confused then by her eyes. It was as though he were hurting her just by being. He didn’t know what that look meant. He thought she didn’t want him to come downstairs yet, or something. He thought there was some reason that he didn’t understand, some etiquette he was unfamiliar with. But by now he was used to that look.

  Something else changed that day. Was it seeing her touch herself like that on the bed? After that he understood their lovemaking differently. When they came at the same time he used to feel they were together then, moving higher and higher into a pleasure they created for each other. He used to look at her and feel that this was as close as they could be to each other, as close as he could be to anyone.

  After that evening he watched her when she came, and he could see that when it happened, that final plane, when she opened her mouth and lost her voice and shuddered, touching herself – she never came without touching herself – when her eyes rolled back and her eyebrows raised in surprise, her pleasure was a private one. He knew now, that at that moment she moved further away from him, her head back, her eyes closed, crying out for no one, and he felt a fool.

  Somehow she knew about Petra. He felt that. Sometimes he was on the brink of confessing the whole thing, maybe it would lose this monstrous power it had over them. He was sure she knew, but there was always the chance she didn’t, or not quite. What he couldn’t handle, if he told her, were the questions she would ask: How many times? How old was she? How big were her tits?