by Maria Hoey
He leaned over and I let go of the belt but not before his fingers grazed mine. I caught the warm smell of his skin and could hardly breathe as he fixed the belt.
“What do you mean, not like me?” I said then as he sat back and reached for the ignition.
“Just that you have changed since I saw you last,” said Robbie. “I didn’t even recognise you you’ve changed so much.”
“Have I changed in a good way or a bad way?”
Robbie turned and grinned at me. “Oh, I’d say it was in a good way, wouldn’t you?”
I held his gaze. “It was seven years ago you saw me last,” I said. “Of course I’ve changed. I was a little girl then but I’m not a little girl now.” Kiss me, I was thinking, please oh please oh please, will you kiss me?
Perhaps something in my voice had betrayed me. When Robbie smiled this time, it was a different sort of smile and when he spoke his voice was very gentle. “You know, you’re quite right,” he said. “You’re not Little Kay any more – you’re almost all grown up.”
Almost grown up, I thought. I glanced down at my pleated skirt and wished again that I’d been wearing something else, today of all days.
I attempted a nonchalant smile. “I’m only wearing this uniform for the exams,” I said. “After today I’ll never wear it again in my life. Actually, I’m planning to build a fire in the garden tonight and burn it.” I had only just made that decision but I meant it.
Robbie laughed. “I remember that feeling,” he said. “OK, Kay Kelly, let’s get you home.”
He started the car and we drove away and though he chatted to me about various things for the short drive to my home, all I could think about was that I didn’t want that journey to end, because when it did Robbie Duff would be gone again and I’d probably never see him again in my whole life. And even if I did, he’d most likely be married to one of those girls he would meet in Greece.
We parked outside my house and Robbie said something about hoping he would see me again soon and how he was sure I would do really well in my exams but I didn’t hear half of what he was saying because my heart was too busy breaking.
I did hear one thing, however – Robbie saying with obvious amusement in his voice, “I see you have an admirer.”
I followed his gaze to where Ken Fitzgerald was busily pretending to be doing something with their gate while all the time watching us.
“Ken Fitzgerald?” I said contemptuously. “I can’t stand him and anyway he doesn’t like me. He never stops teasing me.”
“In that case he definitely doesn’t like you,” said Robbie.
“Now you’re teasing me,” I said and I jumped out of the car.
But Robbie was quick and he caught me up before I reached our gate and pushed it open for me. Then he leaned in and gave me the barest peck on my right cheek and he was gone back to his car.
As I watched him drive away to his future full of Greece and sunshine and rich girls in shorts, the anguish and the unfairness of it all moved me to sudden anger. I took it out on Ken Fitzgerald who was still watching me.
“Put your eyes back in your head, Kenneth!” I yelled at him, then I banged the gate behind me and stalked up the path to the door which opened suspiciously fast before I had even knocked.
“Who was that in the car?” said my mother.
“Robbie Duff,” I told her as I made for the stairs.
“Robbie Duff? What ... why is he ...?”
“Stop worrying, Mam,” I said. “He’s going to Greece and he’s probably going to be a famous archaeologist and I’ll probably never see him again.”
As I thumped up to my room, through the open door to the kitchen I could hear the radio playing Sinéad O’Connor and “Nothing Compares to You”andI felt like I had lost Robbie Duff all over again.
That night I built a fire in our back garden and burned my school skirt. It was the single rebellious act of my teenage life so far and even then it was a half-hearted one because I had a second skirt and wore it the next day for my Geography exam. But it felt good all the same watching the terrible blue-and-green checked fabric begin to scorch then burn.
A week later, Ken Fitzgerald asked me to go with him to his Debs’ dance and I said yes, because, after all, what did it matter. What did anything matter?
Book 2
Chapter 14
I still don’t fully understand why I decided to move to London. I never really wanted to; it was just something that sort of happened. It was 1995, I was twenty-one and two years into an arts degree in English and History. I entered a competition run by a London publishing company – I had to write a novella for young adults – and somehow I managed to win first prize. Part of the prize was having my novella published and although it made me only a very little money, it did earn me a couple of good reviews, one of which referred glowingly to my future potential as a writer. Then somebody I met at a college party, I cannot even remember who it was anymore, suggested that if I meant to take my writing seriously I should get out of Ireland. And I suddenly decided, why not? The Nugent twins had gone to England straight from school and were nursing in Manchester now – half my sixth-year class were there, in fact, including Ken Fitzgerald. Why shouldn’t I go?
“Oh, you wouldn’t want to go to London,” my father said when I first mooted the idea at home. “It’s very big, is London. You wouldn’t like it, Kay.”
When I told him I didn’t mind that it was big, I quite liked the idea of it being big, he tried to put me off by telling me the Irish were hated in London.
“They think that all we do is blow things up,” he said.
“Well, in fairness, some of us did a bit,” I said, “but I’m not planning on blowing anything up. And I don’t suppose they all hate us.”
I knew my mother did not want me to go either and perhaps if she had said outright, “Kay, I don’t want you to go,” I might not have done so. But she said nothing, only banged plates and did a lot of sniffing. Besides, I had ridiculously romantic notions of what it would be like to live in London. Whenever I imagined myself there I saw myself living in a beautiful apartment overlooking a leafy park where I would sit in the window and write my next book, the one that would make the world sit up and take notice.
My father was right. London was very big and made me feel very small. I arrived in Victoria Coach station with no accommodation booked. I walked around a bit and found a B&B close to Pimlico. The following day I saw an ad in a shop window and that evening I had moved into my first London home, a pokey basement bedsit with precious little natural light. The landlord was a horrible little goblin of a man with a great bulbous nose, a permanent bubble of spittle at the side of his mouth and a penchant for eating pears. He seemed to be always slobbering on one when he knocked on my door to collect the rent and forever afterwards I have had a disgust for the smell of the things.
Not alone did London make me feel small, it made me feel almost invisible, which in a way, at least in the beginning, was a point in its favour. Nobody stared at me on the Tube, nobody cared what I wore, or if I smoked, nobody was judging me, or that was how it seemed to me. People dressed as they liked and there seemed to be no “norm” and as a result I felt less self-conscious than I had at home. And, horrible as the flat was, the location suited me. Pimlico felt sort of safe and I enjoyed the mix of nationalities that we didn’t get in Ireland back then. It was great too to be able to hop on the Tube and be in the very centre of the city in next to no time. One stop on the Tube or a short bus ride took me to Victoria or, as I loved to do, I could walk along the river bank. One direction brought me to Westminster Cathedral, which appeared so massive to me, and had a different feel to it than any church I had known before, the other direction took me to Battersea Park where I spent many hours walking or sitting on the grass reading.
I loved passing the Apollo Victoria Theatre too and stopping to read the billboards for Cats and whatever other shows were on. I never went to see any of them but it gave me a
sense of excitement just to be there, me, Kay Kelly, making it on her own in the city.
In truth I wasn’t making very much at all. I spent days on end walking around Victoria, registering with job agencies. I had a notion I would get a job in a publishing house, a prestigious one of course where I would rub shoulders with established writers but in reality the first job I got was in an estate agency typing up letting agreements and promotional brochures. I was also supposed, as part of my role, to promote sales but I was hopeless at it. I told myself it was only for now and my real work would take place in the evenings with my writing, but somehow it never quite happened that way. I produced some short stories but somehow the book I had dreamed of writing happened only in my mind. In fact, I lived mostly in my mind that first year. I was very aware of being Irish, of being immediately identifiable by my accent but that anti-Irish feeling my father had feared on my behalf never really manifested itself to me. Perhaps I had arrived at the right time – certainly, when I heard things on the news about Ireland, it was mostly positive stuff, about how well the economy was doing and how business was booming there.
I met Dominic in 1997 on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral. I had stayed in all day, only venturing out around nine o’clock for a drink in my local bar. I had made friends with one of the girls who worked behind the bar but she wasn’t working that night as it turned out. I ordered a drink and was just paying for it when a drunk next to me looked me over and informed me “We could be lovers!”.
I gave him a dirty look, picked up my drink and turned to walk away. The dirty look must still have been on my face because the guy who was standing just behind me raised one eyebrow and said, “If wit were shit ...”
“He’d be constipated!” I finished for him and I remember being delighted because he was the first English person I had ever heard using that expression.
He was older than me by ten years, very articulate and quite good-looking. To me, he seemed very cool, by which I mean that he never got over-excited about anything. He was also very sarcastic in a clever sort of way, or so I thought, and I was going through a phase where I considered sarcasm the highest form of wit. His irreverent take on the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana impressed me too, in spite of the fact that I had watched hours of the state funeral on the television earlier that day. I had even sobbed uncontrollably, a little because of those two little boys but mostly I suspect for reasons totally unconnected to Diana or her sons and more to do with my own sense of loneliness. My mother phoned me and knew by my voice that I had been crying so she had a go, mostly because she was outraged that the death of an English princess had overshadowed that of a living saint, which was how she saw Mother Teresa, who’d had the misfortune to die on the same day.
In his turn, Dominic seemed impressed that I’d had a book published which I found very flattering.
We began seeing each other and ‘saw each other’ – Dominic did not date – for the next two years. It did not hurt that, when we first slept together, it was obvious that he knew what he was doing, unlike me with my one and only previous sexual partner.
On the downside he was very unforthcoming about himself. He told me almost nothing about his past or his family and I learned not to ask. Occasionally, usually after he had been drinking and when we were in bed having made love, he would grant me morsels of information, unsolicited verbal snapshots of his life, passed to me under cover of darkness. I told myself it was a little bit mysterious. I also told myself he would be a great subject to write about.
Dominic had an analytical and scientific mind at complete variance with my own. His gods were logic and physics; they were, he once told me, the only tools necessary to beat one’s way through the thickets of life. Physics, he said, cut right through the mumbo-jumbo and exposed the universe for what it was, fascinating but rational and casual.
“But doesn’t it strip away all the beauty?” I asked him once.
“Rubbish. Clarity in itself is beautiful.”
“But the world is not logical,” I said.
“It can best be understood logically.”
“Not by me,” I said obstinately. “Not everything can be explained in terms of maths and science. Science has its limitations. And most of the greatest mathematicians were mad anyway.”
“All greatness is perceived as madness,” said Dominic.
Sometimes he would try to explain things to me with drawings, inscrutable diagrams and incomprehensible formulae and he would grow impatient when I failed to understand.
And then I would get annoyed. “You don’t understand – I don’t want to decipher the universe,” I told him once. “It is not a code I need to break, I just want to be at peace in it. You can keep your thermonuclear reactors. I like my stars twinkling and unknowable.”
He laughed at me. “Twinkle, twinkle, little thermonuclear reactor,” he said.
The way his mind worked intrigued me, the way mine worked bemused him. It snowed that first winter we were together, quietly in the night and made ugly and imperfect things clean and white. When I woke to it and the wonder of it brought tears to my eyes, Dominic found what he considered my overreaction almost inconceivable, so I put my tears down to the dazzle-effect. But this, apparently, had nothing to do with snow itself and everything to do with the molecular structure of the individual ice crystals and how they reflect sunlight, or so said Dominic. I remember it only made me laugh. I think I even thought it was cute and was a little bit proud that my boyfriend was so clever in a way that I could never be clever.
My parents came to London to visit me and while there they met Dominic. It was clear from the start that my mother did not warm to him; she also thought he was too old for me. Although he made a real effort, I am fairly sure my father was not Dominic’s greatest fan either.
We moved in together in the winter of 1999. I gave up the lease on my bedsit and went to live in his apartment. Dominic did not believe in marriage and, in fairness to him, I knew that the first week I met him; he was always unambiguous on the subject. So coming from him, an invitation to cohabit, in my mind at least, equated with commitment. In truth, though, he did not so much invite me as suggest it as something that “might make sense”.
When I told my mother she said nothing but I knew she wasn’t happy about it. I heard her as she was handing over the phone to my father saying, “She’s moving in with that fella.”
“She doesn’t approve, does she?” I said when my father came on the line.
“She’s only worried about you, that’s all,” said my father. “If you’re happy she’ll get used to the idea. I’ve a bit of news for you anyway – the Swedes have sold up. Some arts crowd have bought the Duff house and I hear they’re going to turn it into some sort of writers’ retreat. Good luck to them.”
I remember lying in bed next to Dominic that night thinking about the Duff house and the day when I had sat in Robbie’s car wishing he would kiss me. I wondered where he was right that minute. The truth is, I thought about them all from time to time through those London years. I even saw Violet-May on television once. I was flicking channels and there she was, playing the part of a sort of vampy nurse in an American soap opera. I was almost certain it was her, but I waited for the credits to make sure. Her name was there although she had dropped her surname and was calling herself simply Violet May. I did an internet search on her after that and it seemed she had done a bit of work in American theatre and appeared in a couple of daytime television shows. Good for her, I thought – at least she had pursued her dream and made some sort of success of it. At the time I had two half-written plays, a smorgasbord of stalled short stories and two half-hearted attempts at novels on the go. Somehow I could never seem to finish anything.
Of course, I did a search for Robbie Duff’s name too then and found numerous references to him, all in the context of archaeology. There was one long article about the discovery of a Mycenaean hoard and with it an image of Robbie bent over something or
other that he was in the act of unearthing. There were other images too, outdoor shots mostly, showing him squinting into the sun or examining some find. In one shot, taken with him sitting behind a desk in a blue shirt which intensified the colour of his eyes, he was staring directly into the camera. Meeting that head-on gaze I experienced something like a pulse of energy and for a moment I was aware of myself as a living being, by which I mean that I was conscious of being completely and unequivocally alive, the way you occasionally know yourself to be after a close shave such as a bus missing you by a fraction of an inch or when you wake from a dream of dying to find that you are not only alive but the sun is shining.
I thought it would make me happy to live with Dominic. His apartment was in Purley, which was a nice area really and it was not Purley’s fault that I was not as happy as I had expected to be. It was not the fault of Dominic’s apartment either – that was spacious and full of leather and chrome and pale shining wood and in every way modern, but the truth was I preferred things with a past, things with a history. I told myself I was crazy. I had moved on from the awful damp basement with the creepy goblin landlord but my second home was nothing to write home about either – compared to it, Dominic’s apartment was a palace. But perhaps that was the problem; it always seemed to me like Dominic’s apartment, Dominic’s home, not mine, not ours.
It was not until I was actually living with him that I fully realised how different Dominic and I were. That sarcasm I had so admired wore thin quite quickly while I found his views on the world and almost everything in it increasingly cynical. I discovered too that there were only two things he really feared: one was being suspected of showing enthusiasm for any earthly thing, the other was losing his hair. He was absolutely terrified of losing his hair and constantly asked me if I thought it was thinning.
