She asked him trick questions. Questions with yes or no answers, trapped him into the bad-guy corner and then attacked.
‘Do you wank to it? The porn where the girl is being raped … Do you get off on that?’
‘It’s acting.’
‘Do you like the idea? It turns you on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you like to see me raped?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Your mother? Would you like to see your mother raped?’
It wasn’t just sex stuff they fought about. She had started to ask him what his opinion was. She wanted him to account for everything he did and thought.
‘Do you think sweatshops are funny?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Then why did you laugh when your mates were talking about those kids in Thailand? How can you laugh?’
‘What do you think about the arms landing in Shannon?’
‘I don’t know. Bad.’
‘So why didn’t you go on the protest march?’
Now she was spent. For the last few days she hadn’t fought with him. She was congenial – she smiled, and cooked for him, and she had linked her arm in his when they had walked home from the cinema the night before. But she didn’t laugh, and when she smiled her eyes were blank, and when he woke at night she was always awake too. That morning he had woken in the small hours to find she wasn’t in bed. She was lying on the couch on her back, reading a magazine. She had glanced at him when he came into his living room, her face expressionless, and gone back to the magazine. In the early light he had found her back in bed beside him, and she made love to him like a well-practised prostitute.
The way she blinked when he kissed her goodbye … He’d pulled her to him then. He’d said he loved her, but he had mumbled it close to her face, he had growled it, he had said it in his Marlon Brando accent: ‘I love yeh baby, you know thath?’ He had squeezed her bum then, squeeze squeeze nudge nudge wink wink. Fuck. He couldn’t talk to her any more. He couldn’t say things like that any more. Like I love you. Only in a jokey way or a sexy way, not in a real way. She made it impossible. She made him embarrassed all the time now.
When she had walked away, wheeling her suitcase behind her, all he could feel was loss. He thought the word ‘desperate’, ‘I feel desperate’, and it annoyed him to be thinking words like that. Flattening everything into words. It did nothing. He watched her board the grey bus. Through the plastic window, she gave him a little wave.
Now he sat on her bed. The sag of string between its nail on the wall and the curtain rail, where she usually hung her knickers and socks and hold-ups and her hand-wash-only tops, was naked. He touched it. It felt damp. It was starting to rot. He pushed downwards with his finger in the middle of the rope to see how far it reached, and let it spring back up. He bit it. It tasted of soap and mildew. He unhooked it and wound it around his hand. She should have remembered to take it down.
Like a revelation he had that feeling again of wanting to slap her or shake her and he thought so many words that they made a din in his head. He punched the wall hard and his fist throbbed but it was a distant pain. It wasn’t enough. He bashed his head against the wall but it didn’t hurt as much as it should have. He cried quietly on her stripped bed. It was a superficial half-cry, as though he were crying for an audience. Slow tears and a pain in his throat. Not real crying. Not bawling or heaving. Not wailing. He couldn’t even cry properly.
She had made a shabby attempt to paint over her graffiti. Now that the paint had dried the scrawls began to glow through like the shadows of thought. He would have to give it a second layer or she’d be in trouble with accommodation. He was not nostalgic, so he decided not to think about eating beans on toast in bed with her, or when he read the quotes aloud and laughed at her.
‘ “Images of broken language …” what the fuck, Helen?’ He took a biro out of his knapsack. The ink had run out but he pressed the words in, correcting her. Then he wrote ‘Helen’, crunching it in to the drying paint. On a clear patch of the wall he wrote it again: ‘Helen’. He wanted to write ‘I love you’, but he couldn’t. He didn’t know any more. I love you – what was that supposed to mean? Then it occurred to him – he didn’t have to fix up the wall for her. What was it to him if she was penalized? He left her keys on the bed and went to pack. He was going home tomorrow.
He was thinking about the dress even before he reached the door of his flat. He could visualize it hanging coolly in his wardrobe, its folds falling long and still. Still in the way that water can be: full of possibility. It didn’t smell like Helen, but like his own clothes. She had never worn it. It wasn’t really Helen’s style. He knew by her face when he presented it to her, that puzzlement.
‘Who do you see when you look at me?’
It had made him angry. That phrase, like a line from a pop song, that ingratitude. The dress had cost him thirty euro. A few weeks before she would have laughed if he got her something she didn’t like. She would have giggled with her head thrown back and gone down on him and slagged him for days. But it had already begun by then. That quiet, measured way she had now of responding to him. Those lines like bad poetry, like famous quotes. Those crappy words.
What do you see when you look at me?
What the fuck, Helen?
It was so beautiful to touch. That’s why he had bought it. The feel of it. It was thin material, nearly transparent, light as foam, slipping over his hand. It had been on a model in the window as he passed the shop and what first attracted him was the way it clung to the plastic hips and the white, shiny breasts. It had a halter neck and fell to the floor. When he went into the shop to look at it he saw that it had no back. He imagined Helen in it. Making love to her from behind. He’d hitch up the long skirt. She’d be bent over and still dressed, her back dipped like a cat’s.
The leopard print is probably what turned Helen off. He knew it wasn’t really her. Once he had touched it though, he had to buy it. He had never felt fabric like that before.
He didn’t take the dress out immediately. Instead he sat on the bed looking at the closed wardrobe door. He knew what the garment was doing in there in the dark. It was waiting patiently, enjoying its own smoothness amongst all his bulky jumpers.
He might never fuck Helen again. He thought that now for the first time. And everything they did together? What did he have to show for it? He had loved her. He was sure of that. What evidence did he have of ownership over those parts of her, the parts other people don’t see? Helen sleeping, or flinching, or her face as she comes, gripping his hand, biting his ear.
They had taped themselves once, before he went home for a weekend – no, that wasn’t it. It was before Galway, before Petra came over. He had told her it was a lads’ weekend. When they were making love the night before, she had said, ‘Let’s tape us. So you can think about it when you’re away.’ She used her dictaphone – the one she used for her psychology module, for interviewing parents and taping kids with lisps. He had held it to her mouth in the dark. At the time it had turned him on, holding the dictaphone to her mouth, extracting all those cum sounds out of her, putting them on record. Afterwards though, when he played it back, it didn’t sound like Helen. It sounded like anyone, like any porn, or any phone sex. Just breath, and sighs, and moans, and then his cry – which sounded pathetic, weak – his cry when he came.
An idea had been forming since he left Helen’s. Sharon had invited him to a party tonight. He had bumped into her last week and she had smiled pleadingly and touched his arm. She was oddly attractive with her ugly haircut and those eyes. For the first time he had noticed her fingers, short and thick like a butcher’s. Her nails were gnawed to the quick. Her eyes were bloodshot and there was a ball of mascara stuck in a tear duct. Those eyes.
He had agreed to go but never planned to. He had planned to get the bus home to the lads tonight and drink and not care about Helen for a few days. But he wasn’t ready to go home. Not feeling like this –
pussy-whipped. He wanted to leave on a high. He wanted to arrive in Clonmel full of his wild nights at Trinners, his oats scattered. The party was a fancy dress. It would be all those drama people Sharon hung out with. They were taking over the Temple Bar Music Centre. There would be pills because the drama crowd all took pills. He was going to go. Screw Helen. Fuck Helen. He was going to go.
He still didn’t open the wardrobe. High and faint, he scavenged in the kitchenette for something alcoholic to keep him weighted. There was no beer so he opened a bottle of red wine that had been in the flat for ages. He couldn’t remember buying it. He sat on the couch and drank two glasses, sipping them, taking his time, holding the stem gracefully between two fingers the way a woman might. He didn’t remember buying the wine glass either.
The dress might not fit him. It was size twelve, a little too big for Helen. Women were impossibly small. Imagine having shoulders that delicate. Imagine having a tiny round bum. He would look stupid in the dress. His back would be too broad, his shins too long. What shoes would he wear with it? What shoes could he wear?
He would shave first. He didn’t want to look at himself in the mirror and see a boar in that delicate dress. He poured a third glass of wine and brought it into the bathroom. He put it on the toilet cistern and cleaned the toothpaste speckles off the mirror with a piece of toilet paper and some spit. He was going to do this properly.
He filled the basin with warm water and found a clean face cloth. He used that shaving cream that his brother had brought him back from Spain. You couldn’t get it here. It was brilliant. He hardly ever used it because it was so good. He smoothed on a pea-sized amount and moved the razor slowly and carefully. After shaving once he washed his face and exfoliated with a milk-and-oats facial scrub that Helen had left in his shower. He looked at himself. He had shaved very closely. His face looked narrower, his eyes bigger. His jaw looked as though it were sinking into his neck. He hated that. That’s why he didn’t shave as often as he should. He emptied the basin and refilled it and shaved again, just to make sure. It made his skin raw to the touch, soft as a girl’s. He smoothed his palm over his jaw again and again. He reached for the wine glass to take another gulp and there it was, as though strategically placed by some ghost to mock and encourage him. It lay there, knowing as fate, adjacent to the stem of the wine glass: Helen’s Extra-Black Super-Lash Mascara. The tube was as thick as his thumb, silver. The screw-on top was hot pink.
He swung onto the toilet and emptied his bowels in one swoop of pain and nausea and relief. It stank. He flushed the toilet but little bits still floated on the top. It was so loose and there was so much of it. He never usually got this except if he had eaten spicy food. He took the wine and the mascara and closed the bathroom door. He needed music.
twenty-seven
They’re moving me to a different room for the exam period. Helen too. I haven’t quite gathered why. The woman at the accommodation office kept repeating, ‘It’s not my decision,’ and flinching as though I were likely to hit her. I didn’t even raise my voice. I don’t even care. I was just curious.
I’m not going to go home. I’m just going to stay here until I have to move and then move. When term ends I stay in the building, pottering from my room to the kitchen to the bathroom and back to my room. I don’t change out of my pyjamas. I eat everything in the fridge methodically and without relish. I think a sort of pleasant madness is settling in me. I don’t sleep very well. I am not doing enough to warrant a good night’s sleep.
At last I am sick of my own smell and my own stupid, sweaty sadness. So I take a very hot shower, body brushing to remove dead skin cells, to remove four days of filthy, flaky dead skin. I want to be clean. I want peace. I want only peace. Peace. I want to forget my place in the world and be only me. I want to be good by wanting only good. I want to be good by not being bad.
But the shower is just a lot of water piped up from the tank and it runs off my skin with no apology. It is not enough.
I switch off the pump and stand shivering and naked in the hallway for what seems like a long time. There’s strange satisfaction in knowing that I am alone in this big building. The thirty rooms are empty and the beds have cooled. Some are stripped and some left tossed with the powdery stench of sleep and sex settled in their folds. The heaters have been turned off. I am the only warmth. Even the fish is gone. I still do not feel clean. I still do not have peace. I want darkness now, and silence, and alone.
twenty-eight
Despite the thrill of shaving it felt horrible to be hairless under there, skin sticking to raw skin. The constant chafing. How did women do it? He wanted more wine but there was none. He had been trying to clean out the kitchen before he left, so there was nothing in the fridge but half a jar of pasta sauce which he had opened the evening before. There was no more preparation to be done. It was time.
The dress was less than he had remembered. It was cheap looking, but as soon as he felt it slip through his fingers the enchantment of the garment was back. He stripped everything off and squeezed it over his head. Luckily it was stretchy material. He wouldn’t look in the mirror until he was ready. It felt incredible, his skin covered in that smooth fabric. It felt magic. He turned up the music.
The front of the halter neck fell flat against his hairy chest. The strings cut into the back of his neck. He found a vest top of Helen’s. It was one she wore to bed. It was made of swimming-togs material. He put it on under the dress and made breasts with socks and toilet paper. Then he put on a pair of pink tights that Helen had. They didn’t quite stretch to his crotch but it was a long dress. He was nearly ready to look. Shoes. Helen had left stringy shoes in his flat but he would never fit into them. He tried, but it was no good. The ankle strap would just about close over his ankle but there was no way he could get his toes in.
There was tin foil in the kitchenette from the time he and Helen had tried grilling marshmallows. He tore two big squares. He fetched his usual shoes. They were blank brown ones, not designed to attract attention. He put each shoe in the middle of each tin foil square, put his feet in, and scrunched the tin foil over them. Back in the bathroom he did his mascara and put Helen’s lipstick on his cheeks and lips, trying not to look at the rest of himself in the mirror. He wanted to see the whole effect. He scrunched his hair with hair wax and put on a sparkly hairband that Helen wore as a half-joke. If she was breaking up with him she would have to do a serious clear-out of his flat. He moved into the bedroom, switched on the light, and opened the wardrobe door. He stood in front of the mirror with his eyes closed, the blood throbbing in his eyelids.
twenty-nine
After getting dressed I strip the sheets and pillowcases off my bed and put my keycard under the naked pillow. I pack tampons and a bar of soap and a small paring knife stolen from the communal kitchen in the inside pocket of my jacket and walk out. I have no money and no phone. I can’t go back. I’m not sure why I might need a paring knife.
I walk for a long time, to Rathmines, across to Ranelagh and back into town again. I have been walking all night. I have seen the beginnings of first dates and the drunken end-of-night singing as the pubs are finally cleared. ‘The Fields of Athenry’. Songs of famine sung by well-fed clubbers wobbling home. I am jealous of their togetherness.
I can’t stop walking.
By the time the day begins I’m so exhausted that I am separate from my numb legs and balloon head. I am pared down to my aching stomach. This is good, I think, this is how it should be. I don’t know where to go now. There is nowhere I want to go, and no one I want to be with. I find myself at the little archway off South Frederick Street where the smell of rotting sick and urine smacks me so hard my eyes sting. I breathe through my mouth and I can taste piss.
There is a bundle in the corner, a person, or two people maybe, shrouded in blankets. Sometimes, in my first year of college, I left tea and doughnuts here early in the morning, my easy good deed for the day. Every time I did it I thought I was great, an
d I would vow to do it every morning. I sit down for a little while on the ground, and feel the stone coldness work its way into the bones of my skinny arse.
Now a doughnut would make me sick on this empty stomach. I would puke up my charity. Maybe I will try to beg some change later so I can check into a shelter. I can try out the humiliation of that. It will whittle me down, all of this, it will scrape away slowly all of the things that make me despicable. I will become earnest maybe, and humble, and good.
People like me would call this self-indulgent, but that doesn’t matter. I won’t be people like me any more.
At the shelter there will be real poverty, real addiction. Someone told me there are sober men at the homeless centre who dress in clean suits every morning, collect breakfast from the Capuchin monks, and trawl employment agencies. Some girl told me that – Sharon, a girl I got chatting to at a lecture last week. An insufferable do-gooder, I could tell right off. She’s building schools in Thailand for the summer.
But could that be true about those men?
Perhaps I should just ask my grandmother for my inheritance. I will leave college with half a degree. I will go to India and Peru and interrail around Europe. I will do all the things I could not do if I had stayed pregnant. That plan seems no less ridiculous than my current homeless endeavour.
My bum hurts on the wet stone ground. I need to piss. I open my jeans but that’s as far as I get. I can’t do it – I can’t pull down my knickers and piss on the ground. I button my jeans and sit back down on the stone. I have stopped feeling like I need to go.
‘Very cold.’ I say, to a man emerging from under the blankets, his lips black and cracked, his chin crusted with vomit. He rolls back his head and looks at me slantwise. His voice surprises me – so normal. ‘Very cold?’ he says, and he laughs and laughs.
Between Dog and Wolf Page 24
