Shift

by Mia Gallagher

  Two days later Mark returned. Doubt swamped me. Patches of guilt. Rage. Resentment. Fear. I became miserable, elated, miserable again. Useless at work, couldn’t concentrate. I messed up an important pitch and was taken for an inquisitorial lunch by my boss. Twenty questions later I had him satisfied that I wasn’t pregnant or losing my marbles. I told him I’d picked up some virus, something that had been at me while I slept. It wasn’t a lie.

  Oh, dear, said Carmel when I told her. The moment I saw the two of you together, I…

  She bit her lip.

  I haven’t got his number, I said. I’ve no way of finding him again. And waited for her to say something characteristic, something wise, like this was clearly a distress call, or in time I’d get over it, but she didn’t.

  So I told one or two or – okay, three – other friends. Not Lorraine. They reassured me that what I was going through was normal, most likely only a sign of something, a communication meltdown in my marriage, an early mid-life crisis. Nothing to do with Johnny. He was just the superhighway that would lead me to a brand new I, me-and-Mark to a brand new Us.

  I told Carmel what they’d said. I could hear her thinking down the phone. I waited for her to ask me if I’d told Mark. I had my answers prepared. Of course I hadn’t. That would do no good. That would only lead to hurt. The timing was dreadful. Anyway, there was nothing to confess. It wasn’t serious, like I was going to leave him. Christ’s sake, it wasn’t even an affair.

  ‘I haven’t seen him again, Carmel,’ I said. ‘I want to. I think. No. Jesus, I do. But—’

  ‘He’s a wanker. Stay away from him.’ She’d interrupted me, not her usual thing. She sounded angry. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just. Mark’s a great guy. I don’t know why you’re doing this.’

  But it’s obvious, I wanted to tell her. Can’t you see it? Can’t you feel it, the relentless compulsion of the cunt-mad need? You said it yourself: the minute you saw us together, oh dear.

  They say stasis withers, but I remember the next four months as an infinite progression of vicious little moments, each lined up like a razor blade, me hanging over them, suspended. Death by a thousand papercuts. I had no idea what to do next. I told myself, and the friends I’d confided in did too, that this was good. The longer I didn’t indulge the obsession, or distraction, whatever it was, the sooner it would retreat, letting the status quo claw itself back to where it should be. This didn’t comfort me. I can’t tell you how things were with Mark then. I was snow-blind, unable to see anything with clarity.

  In May, I got a ticket to a benefit gig in aid of some charity. One of our clients had done the sponsorship and there were a load of freebies going. Mark was supposed to come, but he’d cried off at the last minute, some beta deadline to sort out, so it was just me and Carmel, and a cousin of hers over from Toronto who she’d insisted on bringing along.

  The gig was fine, a muso pub, mediocre songs played too loud. I was at the bar, buying a round and swapping jokes with the guys from work, when I heard him through the PA. I looked over at the stage. Johnny was behind the mic, working the crowd while his band fiddled around, tuning up. The lights made him taller, flooding him in incongruous colours. Rose and amber. The music started. I’ve no memory of what it sounded like. As he sang, Johnny kept looking around the crowd. Sizing up the women, I assumed. He lingered down at the front, and I saw long blonde hair, arms held high, swaying. I half-turned to go and he looked at me. The lights changed. Humours coursed through my body, bile black, bile green, phlegm and blood.

  We found a dingy little room on the top floor where the bands stored their riders. We cleared a space among the chilly cans of Heineken and Guinness and he lay on his back and I rode him. His body was soft, damp with sweat and adrenalin. I thrust myself around him with a grim determination, like I was willing myself to swallow him whole. It was more comfortable than the alleyway, a bit less messy, and that put me off. I felt any certainty that had been in me drain away into a black void that was telling me it used to be my soul, but just as I was about to lever myself off him, he did something – moved, relaxed, held still, impossible to say – and that surprise came again, freeing me. Though I can’t, even now, articulate what I was freed of. He moaned. I imagined him absorbing it, whatever the act had sloughed off me.

  Are you my bitch? I said in his ear after we’d come. He laughed, and that made me feel like a fool, so I bit his ear, hard enough to draw blood. He made an odd little sound with his mouth, like a baby’s fart, and yanked me closer. I laughed then. You dick, I thought. He pushed what was left of his erection deeper inside. I stopped laughing, let him come down. For a while all I could hear was his breathing.

  I reached for my clothes, started to get up. He locked his leg around my ankles. His fingers touched my back. I could feel his plectrum nail digging at my skin.

  ‘Same night next week.’ His voice was too crisp for the dank room. He mentioned a pub I knew vaguely, on the northside. I grabbed his hand, the one at my back, and squeezed his fingers, willing them to break.

  You are only here, I said to him in my dream last night, because I want you to be.

  Every week, more or less, for six months. I look back and am staggered by my bloody-mindedness. Any gap longer than a week was iffy. We – sorry, there I go again, I mean I – would go from sated to restless to hankering to fearing with tedious predictability. Eight days in, the fear could turn to guilt, or doubt, and that would be a recipe for disaster. Shorter gaps were dangerous too, leading to a risk of discovery, though on some weeks Mark was away, I let us meet more than once. We picked different nights, so I could come up with a range of alibis. What kind of idiot would do it without one, out in the open, run the risk of being caught? I don’t know what Johnny told his blonde. I never asked. We did it everywhere. Outside, inside, grass, sheets, stone, concrete, pine needles, cushions. In the dark as much as possible, and always with our clothes on, getting at each other through fabric or zips or under elastic, as if we were teenagers. Sometime we hit, or bit, or scratched, or kicked. Vanilla, nothing to write home about. I’d expected that the moments of connection between us would turn out to be part of some game I was playing on myself, that they’d reduce as time went on, but instead, that side of things only got more intense. Not consistently, but any time I felt the need to end it, fuck right off, something would happen and bang, there I’d go, surprised again. I knew about tantra and mild S&M, roleplay: this didn’t feel like that. This just felt weird, off. But interesting. How could so much surprise come out of so much mess? At times I almost believed in it. That other shit, I wanted to say to whoever would listen, that crappy story we’ve all been fed – eternal companionship, fucking affection – it means nothing, not compared to the intensity of an individual moment.

  Was this enlightenment, I wondered, my hand pressed on Johnny’s chest, feeling for his breath. Was I Siddhartha?

  After those evenings, I would go home and sleep. Like a baby, no dreams.

  By then, only Carmel knew. I wanted her to. I needed it: for my friend to hear, and by hearing, get caught up. In it; in me. At times I nearly had her. No! Leaning in, eyes bright. Cheering me on, almost. Complicit, like we were back in school, fourteen and into Iggy and the Velvets again, enjoying the thrill of a meths-dipped needle spiking our pale earlobes. But it was a struggle. I felt it off her, smelt it off her. She’d be fine for a few minutes, or half an hour, and then she’d have to bring Mark into it. Did he not even have a sense of what was happening? A suspicion? Was I sure? How would I feel if, you know, the boot was on the other foot? Jesus, Carmel, I said. This isn’t about Mark. This is about me. Yes, she said, but. Hadn’t I thought about the future of our marriage, what I might be doing to it?

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ I said. We were upstairs in the mezzanine in Bewleys, when Bewleys was still Bewleys, having coffee and carrot cake. She was picking at hers, moving it around the plate with her fork. An irritating habit, though it had never bothered me before. ‘I don’
t want to think about that stuff. That’s not why I’m telling you this.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Aren’t you even a bit guilty?’

  I exploded. ‘Of course I’m fucking guilty. I don’t want to hurt him. Like you said. Mark is such a great guy.’

  ‘But?’

  I didn’t answer, just ate more cake.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I really don’t.’ That line on her forehead looked painful. Between the tines of her fork, her cake was babymush, grey and oozing.

  Mark was being attentive, but I couldn’t tell whether that was because he suspected, or just how he was, how he’d always been. I hadn’t lied to Carmel when I’d said I didn’t want to think about him, about us. I felt stuff around it, sure, lots – guilt and doubt and fear and yes, pity, even – but I was done thinking.

  We never talked, Johnny and I. No point. We just fucked and sensed it, that thing that kept us bound to our meetings in backrooms and scruffy parks and dodgy pubs all over Dublin. We. Us. Apologies again. I. Me. And each time I felt freer. As if more of my self was being pared away, but whatever was left was more me. Essential, perhaps. Is that the word?

  A paradox. As those moments added up, collecting mass, exerting force, I began to feel less and less substantial around Mark; like I, not anyone else, was the spectre in our bed.

  It finished in early November, about a year after our first encounter. Maybe things like this have a natural timeframe, as mappable as mammal gestation or the growth-cycles of crops.

  We met in the Gravediggers pub in Glasnevin and walked out into the cemetery. The sky was dark except for a thin skin of early evening clinging on in the west. It was bitter. Johnny pulled me down onto an overgrown grave. We lay facing each other, his hand on my hip. Through my skirt I could feel his skin, soft and hot from the pub. Succulent. A strange word, the word you’d use for a houseplant, but there you are. I grabbed his fingers and pushed, rolling him onto his back as I lifted myself up to straddle him. My palms bore down on his, forcing his fingers into the earth. The ground beneath my shins was icy, my knees warm against the lining of his coat. I went to kiss him but he held my wrists so I couldn’t, pulling me in so our faces pressed against each other. He said my name into my ear, then something else. I twisted my mouth around. ‘What?’ He repeated it. I froze, then stuck my tongue into his ear, began licking.

  He twitched. ‘Stop. You heard me.’

  ‘Stop?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh.’ I moved to get off.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  I didn’t want him to talk. I was afraid of that, the talking. So I moved forward, trying to kiss him again. He pushed me back. Then he said it, the other thing. It hurt. Oh. A blow to the chest. I think I might have flinched.

  ‘Fucksake,’ I said. ‘That has nothing to do with anything.’

  ‘But it does. You know it does.’

  No, I wanted to say, it doesn’t. Instead, I pulled myself off him, turned my back. His voice kept on, too crisp again, for the night, for us, for the stupid words he was using.

  Look, we’re both feeling, um, it.

  This, um – this thing.

  It’s. Good.

  And I um, don’t want it to stop—

  Real!

  It’s real, yes. And, you know.

  I’ve been um, going over it, in my head, Christ, whenever I can and – I don’t think I can be with anyone else anymore, with…

  Don’t say her name.

  And you. I know you can’t either, and—

  He’d sounded nervous to start with, but was getting confident as it went on. I stared at the ground and kicked at a stone at the edge of the grave, some unworded swear boiling in my gut.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I made myself look at him. To do otherwise would have been unfair. I am nothing if not a fair person.

  Then I explained.

  I could see something like a question in his eyes, but it flickered out fast and all he did then was make a little laugh and shrug back into his coat. A slinky movement. He moved well, I remember that. He started to get up, then stopped. Took out a cigarette. Lit it, inhaled. Leant forward and looked at me.

  I looked back.

  We stayed like that a long time.

  When the cigarette had finished, he lifted my chin and kissed me. The burn of smoke on his tongue. Then, somehow, he had moved, or I had, and I was straddling him again. Please don’t ask why. Oh, silly me. A tendon in his neck. Mouth opening. Teeth small knives, stalagmite spit. An unbuckling. The work of fingers, tongue, skin. Melting, fusing, all that, the usual. Lunge, grip, flesh, cloth. In and out. He pulled back my head by the hair. Ouch. That was new. Something – chemicals, chemicals – down the spine. Hip sockets straining. Knees grating. Will I be doing this, I thought, when I’m sixty—

  Ah, there it is. Snake from tail to crown. Grabbing, let it ride.

  He was about to come when he groaned and pushed me off him. Held my waist with one hand, like he’d done after we’d done it the first time, and pushed me into the ground. I tried to turn, but he shoved my head back, away from him, arrogant, English, the prick, even on his knees, his body crossbow-tensing away from me. I kicked against his thigh, awkward and panicking, found that tender spot above his knee. An old football injury or something; he’d never said. He grunted, ground. What a beast. The cunt. Yet. See me as he saw me: sinking down in myself. Inviting. Pathetic. All gowl. See me holding. Waiting. The nasty feeling: eat him up, spit him out, the two-faced lying swine. He tried to avoid me, I could feel it, the attempt to hold back, make me meat, but the habit was too strong, the moment had too much mass to it, and neither of us had much choice by then. I held him and wouldn’t let go, and there we went again, like we always had.

  He left before I did, without setting up another meeting. Don’t ask me if I doubted, thought of calling him back. I watched him go through the bones and the weeds, my mouth full of dirt, my nails black with his blood and tiny pieces of his skin.

  When I told Mark, ten days later, I never mentioned Johnny’s name. He confessed immediately: he’d been sleeping around too. His words. Trendy girls from San Francisco, he said, programmers he’d met at his conferences. But they hadn’t made him feel any better. They just made him want to come home. He took my hand, kissed it. By then I was exhausted from it, the lies and the manipulation and the not knowing and – if I’m honest – the stuff with Johnny too, and he’s good at sentimentality, my old Mark; pictures of wrinkly everlasting love in a rose-covered cottage. Wasn’t that why I’d married him in the first place? So I duly fell apart and agreed with everything he’d said. It was the same for me. He, Mark, was the one I really loved. I was just looking for excitement because I couldn’t handle what had happened to us since we’d got married. I loved him, always had and I really wanted us to work.

  I didn’t mention Carmel, or seeing them snog on Grafton Street, that moment Johnny swept his coat aside like a highwayman’s cape and turned to face me. Nor did Mark. I did drop Lorraine’s name a few days later. And got it straightaway. The smell, the prickle on my skin, like I’d got around Carmel that night in the pub before Johnny walked in, the other times too, when I’d been baiting her, or guilt-tripping her, or god knows what. I knew I’d been right about Lorraine being their go-between. She always was a tight-mouthed sneaky little cow.

  We fell into bed and fucked till three in the morning. You can call it an exorcism if you want. The next week, we began to go to counselling. A few months in, when the counsellor looked like she was going to hit a seam, I began to talk about needing to have a baby and we dropped out. I got pregnant pretty fast. Good genes. Our kids are beautiful.

  I would kill anyone who tries to come between me and that.

  I’m a pragmatic person. I don’t like to regret and I rarely let myself think about might-have-beens. Bu
t I’m only human. When I’ve had one or two too many or the kids are, you know, or I look over and I realise I hate the man I’m with, I can’t resist it, pulling at the scab. For a while, it was all silly adolescent stuff. The two of us haring around the world on his motorbike – though I never even knew if he had one – stealing from banks to get by, sleeping rough by the side of French roads, with nothing but fucking to keep us warm. When the fucking got boring, I saw us selling each other’s bodies in Bangkok, playing mindgames with respectable colonials and disenchanted Americans, relieving them of their last, dearest-held beliefs along with their wallets. When that wore thin, my fantasies turned moral, and I had us fighting for freedom in Nicaragua and Venezuela, cracking code and Yakuza in Tokyo, climbing to the top of the Statue of Liberty and holding it hostage on behalf of the global dispossessed. Idealism palled, as it always does, so I turned us anarchic, capricious: fomenting discord in the Arab world, assassinating dictators, singing with Elvis in Vegas, where Johnny’s accent would have gone down a storm. Then, in the end, caprice ran out. I backed us into a corner, put us living in Berlin like rats, underground. My mind is a limited thing. I desiccate with age. My visions now are just as silly, if less operatic. Walking on a beach together, snuggling in bed, eating good food, the odd christening.

  I’m glad I never asked Johnny what he had in mind the night he asked me to be with him. I’m glad I gave it to him straight. Let me explain. I am using you. You are only here, you vainglorious boy, because I want you to be. That stupid phrase. I love you. He had no business saying it. Even though, after nights like this, when that stubborn ghost has crept back in under our covers, I wake and am once again found wanting. Thinking: come back. Oh, Jesus, come back.