Just Like You Said It Would Be

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  “Knackered but hungry. Want to get some lunch?”

  I touched his forearm, approximately where his tattoo was, although it was hidden underneath layers of clothing. “You sure you’re okay?” I pretended not to feel the electricity that jolted between us, withdrawing my hand slowly.

  Darragh pretended along with me, showing no reaction. Then his fingers relaxed their grip on his bag, only to stiffen again. “Do you think we could talk somewhere privately?” he asked. I felt my eyes grow with curiosity and watched Darragh register an approximation of my thoughts. Frowning, he shook his head. “Marieve’s still in the hospital—it’s nothing to do with that.”

  “Okay. Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

  “Do you mind if we go round to mine then? No one will be there.” I would’ve gone anywhere he’d suggested and I nodded and exhaled, wondering what was the matter.

  “I’ll buy you something to eat so you’re not starving by the time we get there,” Darragh offered, shifting into small talk. He told me his mom had been sick with a bad cold the entire time he was in London and that Derek had taken him out to see a Scottish band called Henny one night. The rest of the time he’d spent wandering around the city, playing his guitar and shooting things on Derek’s PlayStation.

  “Like your brothers,” I kidded as we shuffled into O’Briens and picked up two wraps to go. “Do you have to share a room with them when you’re in London?”

  “They don’t go over,” Darragh replied. “They don’t really know my mother that well anymore and she and Derek, they’re out a lot and there’s not much room in their flat.” I flashed back to what Zoey had said about Darragh’s mother not being child friendly.

  “Do they miss her? Do they talk about her?” I didn’t want to sound shocked, but I think it came across that way anyway.

  “They’re grand.” Darragh smiled a little at my fretful tone. “Emotionally desensitized by a steady diet of video games and reality television. My dad’s the one with issues. Typical dysfunctional family, you know? She’s got a new boyfriend, but the ex-husband can’t get over it. I can’t even mention Derek’s name. You want to see it, it’s almost laughable the amount of hassle I get from my dad every time I mention going over to see her.”

  “That’s kinda shitty behaviour on his part. It’s not your fault they split up.”

  Darragh shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

  We ate on the bus to Raheny, sitting on the upper deck where an old man was stealthily smoking a cigarette and a couple roughly the same age as us were making out while Wolf Alice spilled out of one of their phones. I kept expecting Darragh to say something about what was bothering him, but each time he opened his mouth it was either to say something general yet personally unrevealing about his trip or to ask me a question.

  “Zoey says your mum grew up in England,” he prompted.

  “My grandparents moved from Alexandria to London with my mom when she was eight.” I explained that Teta and Gedo had passed away within three months of each other about six years earlier. In my head it felt as though they could still be over in England and that I just hadn’t spoken to them in a really long time. “That’s where my parents met. In a tube station, of all places.” They were in their late thirties when they tied the knot and relocated to Canada together only months later.

  “Which station?” Darragh asked.

  “Tottenham Court Road.” It was one of my favourite stories about the two of them and I relayed it to Darragh as the bus rambled through suburban Dublin. How Mom’s friend had just discovered she’d been pick-pocketed. My genuine nice guy dad spotted Mom and her friend riffling frantically through her friend’s purse. He went to check on them and the three of them traversed the station together in case the thief had dropped the wallet while making his getaway.

  “Then we might’ve met somewhere in London if your parents had never emigrated,” Darragh mused. “Do you know much Arabic?”

  “Only bits and pieces, like a toddler.” La, leh, yalla and akeed brushed my lips, unspoken. No, why. Let’s go. For sure. With my mom growing up in the U.K. she’d mostly just used Arabic with my grandparents. While Teta and Gedo primarily talked to each other in Arabic, they’d developed hybrid accents, speaking to others in fluent English with an Arabic inflection.

  “I can understand it better than I can speak it,” I added, an unbidden phrase twitching in the back of my head as Darragh nodded. Ana bahebak. It was the last thing I’d ever want to say to him, and I cringed and buried it in the shadows, where it belonged. My grandmother’s tender but capable voice slipped over words spoken to my younger self, drawing me into a cascade of memories. Khodi balik the first time she watched me play on the monkey bars at the playground down the road from her house. Ma’laysh, said with infinite patience when I’d spilled chocolate milk on her couch or made other childish mistakes I felt bad about.

  “I was in Alexandria once, when I was too young to really remember it.” Only the vaguest feelings and images remained from the trip to visit my mom’s cousins and aunt. Family fawning over me, the smell of their kitchens just like ours. Crumbling buildings, graceful and stately even in their decay. An atmosphere that was Mediterranean as well as Middle Eastern. “I want to go back someday.” It made me so angry that the Arab Spring that was supposed to bring political reform and greater social justice had so far given birth to more violence and repression in Egypt. The people would rise again. They would win in the end. That’s what I believed and hoped for.

  Rain had begun to tap the bus windows and Darragh and I glanced at the streaky-glass as the phone behind us kicked on to the Arctic Monkeys. “What about you—can you speak Irish?” I asked. I knew Irish kids learned it in school the same way Canadian schools taught French, but that didn’t mean it took root.

  “Tá tú go hálainn.” Darragh smiled cryptically. “My Irish is shite, but trust me, that was a compliment.”

  “This is us coming up.” he said, reaching behind him to press the stop request button before I could prod him for an explanation.

  The bus lurched to a halt. We scrambled downstairs and out into the rain which was cascading towards us in sheets like it wanted to smother us. It was the worst downpour I’d seen in Dublin so far; usually Irish rain was more drizzle than deluge. Neither of us had an umbrella, but Darragh thrust his guitar case and duffle bag into my hands so he could rip off his hoodie and offer it to me. There was a biting chill in the air and if he hadn’t been wearing long sleeves underneath I would have refused to take it.

  “Thanks,” I said, jamming my arms into the sleeves. Darragh pulled the hood up over my hair, his own already damp. The motion felt so much like a girlfriend-boyfriend thing that my face heated up despite the cold.

  We made a run for it, me holding his duffle bag and him with the guitar case, both of us drenched and breathing hard by the time we reached his house. The neighbourhood looked much like my Aunt and Uncle’s, typical middle class Dublin—semi-detached houses with well-tended yards and driveways composed of interlocking paving stones. Darragh slid the key into his front door and pushed it open. We barged into the house, water pooling at our feet. I laughed at the way our shoes squeaked.

  “C’mon,” Darragh said, his fingers brushing my sleeve. “I’ll give you the loan of something dry.”

  I set his duffle bag on the hardwood floor and peeled off my loafers. Nobody seemed to bother slipping off their footwear when they stepped inside Irish homes, but in Canada most people wouldn’t dream of walking into a house with their shoes on in case they towed snow or muck inside with them.

  Darragh kicked off his shoes next to me, then his socks which he left balled up in his Doc Martens. His hair was dripping and I watched him push it out of his eyes as I said, “You’re soaked.” At least my hair was dry, every inch of Darragh needed ringing out.

  “You too.” He pinched a soggy inch of the hoodie he’d lent me. “Brutal summer. Even for Ireland.”

  Darragh led me upstairs, past
a photograph hanging at the bottom of the staircase of a much younger version of himself, wearing a school uniform and standing behind twin boys who couldn’t have been any older than five, enormous smiles pinned to their faces.

  I stepped into his bedroom behind him, my eyes darting to the Bat for Lashes poster tacked up near his bed. She was wearing a tight black dress that showed off her curves, her feet disappearing into unlaced combat boots as she leant back against a wall. Long black hair, crowned with a gold headband, cascaded down over her shoulders. Her face was pensive; a thick stripe of gold makeup slashed from cheek to cheek, her gaze pointed off camera.

  There was no denying she looked gorgeous; I couldn’t fault his taste. But mostly I was thinking that I shouldn’t have been up in his room. The location itself didn’t mean we’d crossed a boundary, but I felt like a chemical with the word flammable scrawled across its side.

  A second poster hung on the back of the open door and I peeked around it to have a better look. The image was a hazy black and white, and the woman’s head was thrown back, her dark hair whipping around along with it and her lips parted in song. One of her hands was wrapped around the microphone and the other was firmly on the mic stand. Her clothes were nothing sexy—an ordinary T-shirt topped with an equally generic long sleeve shirt—but she was so into what she was doing that the photo radiated sex anyway. If Darragh were lying on his bed, staring straight ahead with the door closed, this was the image his eyes would land on and I couldn’t stop thinking about some of the things he might be doing when he looked at it. Those mental flashes got me going like you wouldn’t believe—I didn’t know where to put myself or what to say.

  “Alison Mosshart of The Kills,” Darragh explained, answering the question I hadn’t asked.

  “I haven’t heard that much of their stuff. But that’s some photo.”

  “Yeah. She’s sex on legs and talented like nobody’s business.”

  My gaze continued flicking around the room, which looked like it’d been ripped out of a second-hand music store. Four metal CD racks towered over his stereo while two large boxes lay open on the floor to reveal a ton of vintage vinyl. An overflow of assorted CDs and music DVDs crowded onto a pair of wooden bookshelves. I peered inside the nearest box and spotted a girl’s delicate taupe cardigan balled up next to a stack of Clash albums and an eclectic collection ranging from Mozart to Motown to seventies punk to current indie rock. If there’d been any doubt about this being a serious musician’s room, the presence of three guitars—an acoustic on the bed and two electrics in the corner—clinched it. A cluster of music magazines were half-slid under the bed.

  Meanwhile Darragh had started to riffle through one of his dresser drawers. “Here,” he said, handing over a pair of his sweatpants and a T-shirt that says “Villagers” across the front in a stark font. “The bathroom’s at the end of the hall.”

  “Thanks.” I moved past him, shutting the bedroom door behind me. Down the corridor, I flicked on the bathroom light and edged inside the room. There were four toothbrushes in a plastic cup on the window sill behind the sink and traces of someone’s stubble in the basin. A single green hand towel hung unevenly from a chrome rack that would easily have held half a dozen towels.

  I changed slowly out of my wet things, draping them on the chrome rack behind the hand towel. Then I stepped into Darragh’s sweatpants and eased on his T-shirt, feeling simultaneously wound up and turned on. Darragh’s clothes were soft and smelled faintly fruity. Whoever did his laundry was obviously a fan of fabric softener. Since Darragh hadn’t given me any dry socks, I stepped out of the bathroom in my bare feet, holding my rain-soaked clothes away from me.

  When I slipped back into his bedroom Darragh was sitting on his bed, having moved the acoustic guitar to the floor, about four feet from the pile of his own wet clothes. He was wearing a dry pair of jeans and fresh T-shirt, his feet as bare as my own. He looked surprised to see me, like he’d forgotten I’d come home with him. “Have a seat,” he said, his Celtic guitar tattoo jumping out at me just like his blue eyes had the first time I’d really stopped to look at them. “I’ll toss your things into the dryer.”

  I sat down on his bed just as he was getting up. Soon I heard his footsteps fade, disappearing into the music he’d left playing on his stereo. I didn’t recognize the song or the male voice singing it, but it was the kind of melancholy thing that would’ve made me sad if I’d been really alone instead of sitting on Darragh’s twin bed in the middle of the afternoon with no one but ourselves to stop us from breaking the rules.

  “So,” he said slowly as he reappeared in the open doorway, “can I get you anything? We have some half-decent coffee I could put on.” Darragh’s lashes seemed nearly as long as either of the girl musicians’ he had on his wall as he stood there blinking at me.

  “No, I’m fine thanks. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” It came out like a demand, which wasn’t how I’d meant it to sound. But I needed to keep us on track. Friends. I was sitting in Darragh’s bedroom in his soft warm clothes ready to listen to whatever he was about to say to me as his friend.

  Darragh leaned back against his dresser, the light in his eyes dimming. “London wasn’t such a brilliant trip. My mother’s up to her usual shit. But it’s not important now. We don’t need to go into it.”

  “We came all the way over here,” I reminded him. “The whole ‘being able to talk’ thing doesn’t just work one way.”

  He nodded almost imperceptibly and stared at the wall behind me. “Something came out last night. I was still seething about it on the plane this morning, but I kept thinking about you as well—how I wanted to talk to you about it. That’s how I ended up outside your class.” Darragh squinted at me, his eyes an ice cool blue that made me shiver. “You’ve gotten too far inside my head. How long is it until you go now?”

  “Six weeks from today.” Not long enough. And it wasn’t right for him to say things like I’d gotten too far inside his head when he was the reason we weren’t together.

  Darragh folded his arms firmly in front of him and said, “Last night my mother told me she’s had an offer from a publisher that wants to put out her autobiography.” His head wilted on his shoulders. “I don’t know if you’ve heard of her, but she used to sing in a band called The Scarlet Nevers.” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “It was ages ago. They had some hits, but she couldn’t handle the lifestyle. Couldn’t live with it couldn’t live without it, that sort of thing. Her official diagnosis is bipolar disorder. She’s been in and out of hospital, but she’s been better the last few years and now”—he bit the side of his lip—“now she wants to come out with everything she's done and been through: sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, her bipolar issues. Which will mean my life getting shoved under the spotlight as well—all the things that happened between her and my dad. Doesn’t matter how I feel about it, she says it’s something she feels she has to do. I have no say in the matter.”

  Darragh twisted his hands into his pockets. “She knew about the book days before I got there. She could’ve told me over the phone. But she waited until my final night in London because she knew I’d give her grief about it. She was right. I wasn’t speaking to her when I left.”

  “Is there any chance she’ll change her mind once she calms down?” I asked. “Or at least try to keep you out of the book?”

  “I doubt it. Last night she kept banging on about how it was finally time for her to deal with the truth and that she was sorry if it would hurt me, but it was her story, her life and she had a right to it.”

  Darragh confessed that on top of dreading having his past dredged up and served for public consumption, he didn’t want The Brash Heathens to be known for his personal connection to Shel D. He wanted the band to succeed solely on its own merit. “My dad will lose the head when he hears about the book,” he added. “He tried to stick with her through everything. She was the one who couldn’t hack having a family and left. He would’ve done anything to ge
t her to stay. She left once before, when I was three, and he tracked her down and convinced her to come back. Then she did it again when my brothers were five and stayed gone.”

  I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up without my mother around; I didn’t understand how Darragh’s mom could leave them. “Do you have to be the one to tell your dad?” I asked.

  “I told her I wouldn’t. I said she’d have to tell him herself.” Darragh hunched over, unclenching his arms so that they could grip the side of the dresser. “She’s so bloody selfish. It always has to be about her—what she wants.”

  “It sounds like things have been rough on your dad.”

  “Loads of people have it rough.” Darragh’s voice was flat, unsympathetic. “And they get through it, get over it. He never does. I can’t blame her for leaving. He does my head in sometimes. But she’s just as bad in different ways. She couldn’t give a shite how dragging the past into the present will make the rest of us feel.” Darragh grimaced, his gaze unfocused. “When I was growing up sometimes I wondered whether there was a bi-polar gene in my DNA, just waiting to be triggered. It’s part of the reason I never did any drugs—not even hash—I was afraid it could make me go off the deep end like she did.”

  I could see it in Darragh’s eyes— the way she’d made him doubt himself, the pain of being abandoned by his mother, of her making a life somewhere else and never being the person he needed her to be.

  “You’re not your mother,” I said, the deep frustration emanating from him pulling me from the bed and walking me towards him.

  “I know,” he replied, his irises appearing nearly grey in the shadows cast by the storm clouds outside. “But for a long time I thought maybe the only reason I wasn’t her was because I wouldn’t let myself be.”

  I folded my arms around him and hugged him. He held me back. Lightly and carefully at first. Then his face dropped into the crook of my neck, settling there as though it meant to stay for good. We fused in place like a marble sculpture, our arms tightening around each other and our bodies pressing seamlessly together.