“No, but I imagine it becomes quite annoying. Besides, at least this way I get to be in Pisa sooner rather than later and set up properly with the hospital.”
“I thought you’d be raging.”
Maria shakes her head.
“Just embarrassed,” she says.
“Don’t be.”
I reach my hand across the bike but she doesn’t take it.
“I wish Ines had shouted at me, instead of . . .”
I can see Maria’s about to cry so I hang the helmet from the handlebar and walk around the bike to hold her.
“Don’t,” she says, stepping away. “Just say what you came to say and let’s have done with it.
Even at this late stage I don’t know what it is that I’ve come here to say. I know what Maria’s expecting but that’s not it. I don’t want out. The phrase ‘for better or for worse’ goes through my head and that’s a part of it. I scare myself – that’s another part of it. I’m scared of my capacity to hurt and Maria is the last person in the world who deserves to be hurt – though, God knows, Max and Juliette did nothing to deserve it either. I’m scared of not being responsible for my actions. I’m scared of ruining yet another life apart from my own. I get back on the bike, unable to articulate these things to Maria – not wanting to articulate them because she has troubles enough of her own without taking on mine.
“I have to leave the Villa too,” I say. “Not right away, but in the next couple of weeks.”
“They’re throwing you out because you slept in my room last night?”
“I reckon I’ve just outstayed my welcome. My time’s up.”
“What will you do?”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Make a go of it on my own, perhaps, without the Padre to look out for me, and without the friendship of Giovanni and Ines.”
“You won’t lose their friendship just because you’re leaving the Villa. I don’t feel like I’m losing them and I’m moving all the way to Pisa. Despite my best efforts with Ines,” she adds.
“I’ve no idea where I should live,” I say. This is what it always comes down to: where am I going to be? Where on this earth? I’ve tried wandering aimlessly around Europe and North Africa. I’ve tried returning to Ireland. I’ve tried making a new start in Brighton – twice, after a fashion – so what now? “Italy’s still a foreign country to me,” I say to Maria. “I’m not sure I belong here.”
“The world is a foreign country to you,” she says, “but it doesn’t have to be.”
“I want to make a life with you.”
The words are out before I stop them – for better or for worse.
Maria rests a hand on the handlebar of the bike.
“In Pisa?”
“I don’t really care where I am, so long as I’m with you.”
“Are you serious? You’d really consider doing that – knowing what you know about me?”
Am I serious? Do I mean it? Or am I just saying this for the want of something else to say?
“It’s what I know about myself that concerns me,” I say.
“I’ll be sick a lot of the time.”
“Then I’d look after you.”
“I’ll be too sick for you to look after me.”
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Why? Why would you choose to do that?”
“Because you’re the best chance I’ve got?”
“I’m not some fucking charity case, you know. There are professional people who can look after me better than you can – and you know that. I’m going to be living next to one of the best hospitals in the world.”
“Yes, I do know – that’s not what I meant.” This is wrong; it’s not what I wanted to say. I feel like I’m the charity case, like I’m the one to be pitied, the one who should be embarrassed and ashamed, the one who is ashamed.
“So tell me what you do mean,” Maria says.
This isn’t about Maria being sick. When I look at her, that’s not what I see. I want to care for her like I’d care for my own daughter, but I know this isn’t the right thing to say either. I see Maria and I want her – it’s that simple and yet it’s that complicated, because it means engaging with the world, living out in the world and when I’m out in the world then bad things happen.
“Brendan.”
Good things too, I tell myself. I think of Laura in Brighton and how close I was to happiness the night before I was arrested. No – how happy I actually was, how happy we were going to be together.
“Brendan,” says Maria again.
I look up but I can’t meet her eye.
“Help me up on the bike,” she says.
I sit on the bike and show her where to put her foot so she can swing up on to the seat behind me. She puts her arms around my body and presses her hands to my chest. She inches forward on her bum so her groin is up against the bottom of my back. The inside of her legs are pressed flat along my own and her dress rides high up her bare thighs. She lays her head between my shoulder blades and I feel her breasts push in against me. I hear the harsh rasping breath in her chest and know beyond doubt that this is what I want, that Maria is who I want, and that this is the right thing to do. Who needs words?
III
The train from Rome to Pisa is disappointingly modern. I have memories of trains with corridors and sliding doors, of whole Sicilian families taking up a single compartment, radiating out with diminishing age from the matriarch in the corner – an ancient woman dressed in layers of black, who overlooked the distribution of a seemingly limitless supply of food and drink for the journey. I remember the lists of destinations on the sides of trains, and the knowledge that I could board any one of them and travel to a city on the other side of Europe.
I could take a train and change my life, is what I thought.
It made me feel a part of the continent. It made me believe this actually is a continent and not just some landmass separated from Asia by the Urals. I didn’t need to actually take the train; it was enough just to stand on the platform in some station south of Naples, next to a train that would eventually arrive in Copenhagen, or Berlin, or Gdansk, and be filled with awe and a huge sense of the possibilities of travel.
It’s not so many years ago that this is some sort of romantic nostalgia and I’m sure such trains still exist, but not this train and not today. The seats are clearly numbered and it’s easy and straight forward to find my reservation. I leave my bag on the seat to stake my claim and return to Brother Michael out on the platform.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
“Yeah – it even has my name on a reservation ticket attached to the seat.”
“It looks busy. We were right to book.”
Michael made the reservation for me. He and the Padre arranged everything, with the help and encouragement of Giovanni and Ines. I wish Michael had agreed to accompany me to Pisa but, having asked him once, I can’t ask again. He brushed off the request, asking what age I was to be thinking such a thing. I guess not wanting to travel alone for a three hour train journey does sound a little silly coming from someone who’s spent the past three years in solitary, but it’s not the memory of confinement that has me worried. It’s my fear of being set loose out into the world again. I wish I wasn’t heading to Pisa and that Maria had chosen to study in Bologna. There are too many memories – no, not memories, but resonances – of the last time I travelled to Pisa. Back then, of course, I took mainly local trains to lesser destinations, often to the end of some branch line that meant walking or hitching a ride when it came to moving on again. I did everything to kid myself I wasn’t making my way home to Dublin. I may be taking a more direct route today and there’s more than just a cheap Ryanair flight waiting for me at the other end, but the fact that it’s Pisa I’m travelling to has me worried.
Here we go again, I think. Brendan, travelling alone; things happen.
I know I have to go. I want to go. I can’t remain in hiding at the Villa forever.
It’s time. I want to be with Maria; she’s my one hope. She’s waiting for me, and she’ll meet me off the train, like I’m some child. I feel like a child. I feel at the mercy of things I can’t control.
“It’ll be fine,” Brother Michael says.
“Yes,” I say, but without conviction.
These people that think well of me – the Padre and Brother Michael, Giovanni and Ines, and Maria – it’s a faith they have. They believe in me. They believe in some inherent goodness, but what if they’re wrong? This journey isn’t just a repeat of a previous trip to Pisa; it’s also my travelling over to Juliette in England. I was this close to happiness then too, and look what happened. Ask Juliette if she believes in me now.
“She loves you,” Michael says. “You know that, don’t you?”
Yes, I know Maria loves me, but Juliette loved me too.
“And you love her, don’t you?”
Yes, I love Maria, but I loved Juliette too.
“And she wants to be with you. That’s all that’s happening here, Brendan. It’s that simple. Even a retard like you can understand that.”
I look at him and he smiles.
“Priests don’t call people retards.”
“I’m not a priest.”
“Almost-priest, then”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“She’s going to die.”
“We’re all going to die.”
“She’s going to die soon.”
“You don’t know that and besides – all the more reason to be with her now.”
“I’m scared.”
“Of course you are. There’s not everyone could do what you’re doing.”
“That’s not what I’m scared of.”
“Well, you should be. But again, Brendan – she loves you. As in, she loves you. Maybe it’s time you learnt to love yourself a little too?”
He takes my hand and we shake goodbye. I hug him.
“Christ,” he says, “people will think we’re gay. Will you please just get on the train?”
Michael holds up his hand in farewell as the train pulls out the station. I doubt I shall ever see him again. I’ve promised to come back to see Giovanni and Ines, but there’s no guarantee Michael will still be based at the Villa. The Church probably has plans for him. No doubt they had plans for the Padre too, only things didn’t quite work out that way. Whatever – I’m now cast free of my almost-priests, and I’m out on my own.
There’s a family taking over the best part of eight seats just along the carriage from me, two sets of four seats either side of the aisle. I can see and hear that they’re American. The parents keep asking their kids to please keep it down – conscious of their American loudness – and they look down the carriage to see if anyone’s taking offence but really, they’ve five or six kids so what can they expect? And the kids aren’t really that loud; there are just a lot of them, ranging in age from about sixteen down to a toddler. Two teenage girls, three boys between say seven and eleven, and the youngest – the one making all the noise. The mother is like some earth goddess who has managed to have all these kids and not be completely exhausted or ground down with the tedium of parenthood. Apart from her concern about the other passengers, she looks happy. Dad is relaxed and the focus for most of the toddler’s non-stop questions. But the other boys too, they seem to relate easily to their father – showing him stuff across the aisle, and laughing at some puzzle they’re trying to figure out between them. The girls are quieter, but not snottily so, and you can see they love their little baby brother. Travelling is never easy but these guys seem to have it sussed. It can’t be cheap, either, to drag such a large group across Italy, so Dad must be on a pretty good wage, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to be checking in on the office any time soon and he’s completely at ease amongst his family. Not every man can say that.
The guy sitting opposite from me has two seats all to himself. His long legs are stretched out below the table between us and he’s stubbornly refused to move them. He has a broken arm and struggles to do the smallest thing like take off his jacket or open a packet of sandwiches. He gives off a strong vibe of determined independence. Some time into the journey, he gets slowly to his feet and I see why he has to take up so much room: he can’t bend his legs as they’re each clamped in a metal brace. I move my legs now to allow him to stand and I offer to give him a hand. He thanks me, and tells me he has to try to do it himself. He speaks Italian but I’m guessing he’s either German or Dutch. I can see he’s in a lot of pain, and his movements are so slow it hurts for everyone in the carriage to watch. He reaches up to the luggage rack with his one good arm to hold on for balance as he makes his way towards the bathroom. Each step is a major triumph and I wonder what the hell has happened to him. He looks like he’s broken many, many bones in his body. He’s a big guy – well over six foot – and strongly built, but his body has been smashed to pieces. I think about the enormous willpower that it must be taking for him to walk again.
The American family are quiet as he makes his way past. The whole carriage is quietly in awe of his struggle and I guess – like me – they’re thinking we sometimes forget just how lucky we really are. The American toddler asks his dad what’s wrong with that man, and the earth mother groans in embarrassment. The boys laugh out loud and the teenage girls shush them, but the tension has been broken. All the passengers smile; they don’t need to speak English to understand. The earth mother catches my eye and shakes her head. We still have to get through the ordeal of the man with the broken body returning to his seat.
The thing is, seeing that family on the train, seeing their happiness and their togetherness, their completeness, and even knowing there’ll be days when it’s not like this, when there’ll be fallings out and nastiness even between the kids, but seeing all that love, and the successful working of a nuclear family – it makes me want to find a way to spoil it. I want to do to that family what has been done that man’s body and I don’t know why. I still have this in me. And this is the person about to join Maria in Pisa.
She has no idea what it is to be a pariah amongst people I once counted as friends; to be viewed with suspicion by those who at one time trusted me; to be finally written off as no good, a nothing human being, a person you wouldn’t want in your life. And because she is so far from even beginning to accept that this might be so – that anyone who has ever known me has finally come to have a zero estimate of my worth – she cannot see that one day this too will be the way she sees me. In fact, the opposite is true: she talks of my getting back in touch with friends I once knew, in Ireland and England and elsewhere. She talks about family, even though she’s fallen out with her own father. She says she wants me to find my own true self and it’s hard not to ridicule her. She believes that if my friends – what friends, I say – that if my friends could see me now they’d see what she sees, feel the way she feels, and invest in me all over again. I can’t deny how much her faith helps me through each day – like the Padre’s faith amused me and eventually astonished me when he worked so hard to get me free – and I feel blessed all over again. I feel blessed and unworthy of such a blessing and this isn’t just talk and modesty and a front because I know that not only am I unworthy of her love and her hopes and her dreams of our future together – however short that future might be – but I will take her faith and her love and her hope and her dreams and I will smash them in the way I wanted to smash the Padre’s face when he first came to see me in my cell. There is no one relationship in my life that I haven’t fucked up and fucked up in such a way as to be permanently damaged beyond repair, so when she talks about getting back in touch with Danny, for instance, I can’t but think how this will end and it will be badly, believe me Maria, this will end badly and if you live long enough you will live to regret that you brought me into your life. I will hurt you. I don’t know how. I don’t even want to, but I will find a way to hurt you. I am not the person you hope I am. I am the person I have prov
en myself to be, time and again, and I will not change. There’s a reason I have no friends. There’s a reason I’m alone. I have no past worth remembering. The only future I have is through you, and I fear what that future will bring. If I truly cared about you I would get off this train now, at the next station, before it reaches Pisa, but I won’t and that right there tells you what you need to know – that even though I know everything about me, even though I know all these things, still I come.
There is something in me and it will out.
I try to sleep because my daydreams are more damning than my nightmares but it’s no good so I listen to Maria’s iPod, switching the play mode to Shuffle. The Padre would be proud of me. I’ve never heard of most of the songs and the names of the singers mean nothing to me. I listen to The Dixie Chicks for the first time and their aggressive vulnerability reminds me first of Maria and eventually of Siobhan. I check and all Siobhan’s early albums are on the iPod. I don’t know what to think about this except that Siobhan’s songs always did speak to young women in their twenties.
When we reach the outskirts of Pisa, I ask the guy opposite – the man with the broken bones – if he wants a hand getting off the train or if he’d prefer to look after himself. He says he’s okay, as I knew he would, and I make my way along the aisle to wait by the door of the train. In fact, I make my way along a couple of carriages to avoid watching the workings of the American family as they prepare to arrive in Pisa.
Maria is waiting for me on the platform when I arrive in Pisa. She’s wearing a white dress, naturally, and this helps me to spot her before she sees me. She looks nervous, or maybe she’s just scanning the crowd and hoping not to miss me, and I take the opportunity to watch her without being seen. The short stay in the hospital appears to have done her some good, though I know enough not to be fooled into thinking everything’s okay. Maria doesn’t do the miracle cure kind of getting better, only the temporary reprieve and, for what I know won’t be the last time, I question what the hell I’m letting myself in for. Only the answer is there in front of me: even if we’d never met, I’d still pick Maria out of this crowd in Pisa station. I watch other men notice her, other women too, and know they’d never guess at the messy riot going on in her lungs. One or two people look back after passing her by – the men to look at her body and the women to see who she’s waiting for. It’s me, I want to tell them; she’s waiting for me. And unlike the last time I arrived in Pisa station, there’s a purpose to my destination and that purpose is Maria.
Dancing to the End of Love Page 30
