Home Stretch

by Graham Norton

  ‘Sorry. It’s not easy for the woman at first. It’ll get easier.’ He touched his lips to hers before rolling over to sleep.

  The next night he tried again, this time pushing his fingers in first. Ellen had let out an involuntary yelp of pain. Martin had responded to this by taking hold of her hair and pulling her face downwards. She wasn’t stupid. She knew what she was supposed to do and she had tried, but she had gagged until she retched. He released her and while she coughed and spluttered over the side of the bed, Martin sighed heavily and made a great show of ‘going to sleep’.

  On their first night back in Mullinmore, Ellen brushed her teeth and got into bed, wondering if Martin was planning to try again. Part of her hoped that he would. Maybe they would both feel more relaxed now they were home. She turned on her side to look at her new husband, but he quickly got out of bed and grabbed his dressing gown off the back of the door.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  She could hear the creak of the stairs all the way down to the ground floor. He must have gone into the surgery because when he came back into the bedroom, he was brandishing the largest tub of Vaseline that Ellen had ever seen.

  ‘This will help,’ was all he said before he got under the covers.

  In one sense, he was right, it did help. It made it possible for her to endure him poking away at her, but it did not reveal what part of intercourse might be designed to give her pleasure. Was sex just for men? She knew they really liked it, but she had heard enough to know that women were meant to enjoy it too, or was that just talk?

  Ellen attempted to ask her mother about it, but Chrissie was rather vague and dismissive.

  ‘Sometimes you enjoy it and sometimes you just do it for him. You’ve a good man there and you want to keep him happy.’

  Ellen stared at her mother. Were they talking about the same thing? Did her father paw great dollops of Vaseline between her mother’s legs? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Trinny was also a wife now. Her husband Dom had come to Mullinmore to work behind the counter in the bank, and being on the shorter side himself he made a perfect mate for Ellen’s petite friend. ‘Aren’t they gorgeous together?’ Ellen said to whoever would listen at their wedding reception.

  She felt she could broach the subject of sex with Trinny, as a fellow newlywed bride.

  ‘How are you finding it?’

  Her friend’s face burst into ecstasy. ‘Isn’t it great? So much better than I thought it would be.’

  ‘Do you do it a lot?’

  ‘Well, sometimes Dom is too tired when we get to bed but then we just do it in the morning. What about you guys?’ Trinny inched closer.

  ‘It’s good,’ Ellen spoke slowly, ‘but do you sometimes find it a bit, a bit sore like?’

  Trinny’s eyes opened wide. She seemed delighted by the question. ‘Oh, does Martin have a big one? He looks like he’d have a big one!’

  Ellen didn’t have an answer. Was it big? Bigger than what? Too big for her? Was that the problem?

  She had attempted to raise her dissatisfaction with Martin and of course the conversation had turned to what her friend had said.

  ‘Trinny!’ he had barked at her. ‘What does that little midget know? I am a doctor, a medically trained doctor, and I can tell you it will get better. It’s just a matter of getting used to things. If you don’t believe me, you can talk to my father!’

  ‘No, no. Of course I believe you,’ she said, trying to placate him.

  Marriage, it seemed to Ellen, wasn’t about being happy or making someone happy. It turned out it was just a matter of deciding whose unhappiness was the easiest to deal with. It was hers. Her unhappiness seemed an acceptable price to pay for not living with Martin’s.

  She tidied the jar of Vaseline away in the bedside locker on Martin’s side of the bed, but some nights when she came back from the bathroom in her nightdress, it had reappeared, a heavy glow beneath the lamp. Her stomach sank.

  III.

  ‘Babies, baby. It’ll all change when you’ve some little ones.’ Chrissie was comforting Ellen as she sobbed in her arms at the kitchen table above the pub. Her daughter had complained to her more than once about her marriage, but she’d had no idea she was this unhappy.

  ‘The first year is always the hardest. It’s difficult for everyone.’ She stroked Ellen’s back, wondering to herself why these young girls with so many more choices than she’d ever had, were still in such a rush to become wives. ‘You’re both finding your feet, figuring things out.’ She lifted Ellen’s head to emphasise the point she was making. ‘At first you forget why you ever got married, I remember that with your father, but then everything makes sense, it just clicks into place when you have children …’

  Unfortunately, the mention of her own children meant that Chrissie had now made herself cry too.

  Ellen sat up and swiped away her tears. Clearly this mother and daughter bonding was no longer about her. Connor. He haunted every moment of her parents’ lives. Dan was forever going in to see the guards: ‘You’ve got to keep reminding them.’ They had written to some missing persons organisation in the UK but had heard nothing. Ellen lost count of the number of times she’d come into a room and her parents had stopped speaking. She knew it wasn’t because they’d been talking about her. Ellen wasn’t heartless. She understood that it must be sad not to know where your son was, but, seriously, had they forgotten the funerals, the loss, their own empty pub?

  ‘I’m sorry, pet.’ Chrissie was composing herself. ‘It’s just …’ Her eyes filled with tears once more.

  ‘I understand, Mammy,’ Ellen said and hugged her mother before heading down the stairs and back to her own problems.

  As it happened, babies were a sort of fix. Not for the marriage, but for Ellen. Caring for little creatures that didn’t judge you, who stopped crying when you held them, meant that Ellen could exist on a small island of contentment, only wading out into the choppy waters of criticism and regret when she was forced to. The mornings spent soaping perfect fleshy little puddings in the plastic basin she placed on the draining board made her feel half crazed with love. She wondered if any mother had actually bitten into their baby because they adored them so much. She would quite happily have had more than two, but after their daughter was born, it appeared that Martin had decided that was enough. They never spoke about it, and Ellen felt she couldn’t raise the subject for fear of sounding as if she missed Martin clambering over to her side of the bed, his hot breath against her neck. It reminded her of the educational toy Martin’s father had given the children, where you matched the peg to the correct hole. She wished the old doctor had had the foresight to have bought it for his son.

  Of course, as soon as he could, Martin began to erode her isle of contentment. She felt foolish for thinking it would be otherwise. She remembered a breakfast when she had burnt the toast. It wasn’t her fault; she was trying to do a hundred things at once. Martin, freshly shaved, gelled-back hair, sitting in a shirt she had ironed, had turned to their son in his high chair. ‘Silly Mammy burnt the toast. Silly Mammy.’ He kept repeating that phrase, while Ellen tried to ignore him. She put fresh slices under the grill, she poured the tea. ‘Silly Mammy, silly Mammy.’ Then the little baby boy, her baby boy, banging his plastic spoon on the tray top in front of him, said, ‘Silly Mammy,’ or something that sounded very like it. Her heart broke as Martin let out a great braying laugh that was met with childish cackling. ‘Silly Mammy.’ And just like that Martin found his style of parenting. He bonded with his children through the seemingly endless mockery and fault-finding of their mother. Always done with a smile on his face, never a cross word. ‘We’re only having a bit of fun’ said with an innocent, almost wounded expression. As if it was Ellen, by complaining, who was threatening to disrupt their family harmony.

  Did she think of leaving? Of course she did. Sometimes in the mornings as she wandered around the house in her chaotic attempts at housework, she listened to
the radio. Tearful voices on the phone-ins would describe their awful marriages and how they had managed to escape. The calm, concerned presenter would read out phone numbers and addresses for women in similar situations. But that was just it – her relationship wasn’t like the ones on the radio. She felt that if she had called in to one of the programmes, the listeners would have rounded on her, telling her how lucky she was. Living in that lovely big house, healthy children, a doctor for a husband, and he never raised his hand nor his voice to her.

  Maybe when the kids were older, she could just slip away without much fuss. Would that ever be possible? Had she the strength to be cast as the villain, the ungrateful bitch who left the man with a heart so big and forgiving that he had married Ellen Hayes?

  Sometimes she wondered about her brother. He had left under such a heavy blanket of shame, but there were times when she envied him. Whatever life he was living, at least it was his own. He wasn’t stuck in Mullinmore making choices based on what their parents wanted or what the neighbours might think.

  She never considered the possibility that Connor was dead. Maybe that was because she had heard her father reassure her mother so much. ‘They’d have found a body, Chrissie love. We’d have heard if it was the worst.’ Dan sounded so plausible as he explained, ‘The lad is just embarrassed and ashamed. God knows what went on in Liverpool. We should have known he’d never make a go of it on the buildings.’ Then with the inevitability of the call and response at mass Chrissie would say, ‘One postcard, Dan. One postcard in all the years.’ To which Dan replied with the reassurance, ‘He’ll be back. When he’s good and ready, he’ll come walking into the pub as if he’s never been away. Mark my words, love, mark my words.’

  After eight years the conviction in Dan’s voice had faltered and faded and yet he continued to say it. To stop was to abandon hope and he couldn’t do that, not for Connor, not for Chrissie.

  Ellen wondered if, had she been Connor, she would ever consider coming back. Maybe after dark one night, just to reassure herself by catching a glimpse of her parents through a window, but then she would vanish before first light. She presumed that was why he’d just sent a postcard. The London postmark had told them more than his few scrawled lines. It was just a way of signalling that he was fine, but without having to engage with his parents or the town. Mullinmore might not have felt the pain so intensely any more, but no one had forgotten. When little Dee Hegarty had passed away the year before, it was as if she had been added to the death toll from the crash. Another life ruined because of Connor Hayes. No, Ellen decided, if she was her brother she would never return to Mullinmore.

  2012

  I.

  Two Irish men walked into a bar.

  The first arrived out of breath from running down the stairs from the apartment where he lived above the premises. It was three thirty and he was heading into the bar for his shift. He paused for a moment on the street to enjoy the heat and light of the New York afternoon. He cursed himself for sleeping the day away. Tomorrow he would definitely head over to sunbathe on the piers. He banged on the door of the bar and after a moment it opened.

  ‘Hi, Judson!’ he said to the grey-haired man in the tight blue T-shirt standing in the darkness.

  ‘Afternoon, Irish. How are you after last night?’

  ‘Grand.’

  ‘Grand,’ Judson repeated, mimicking the lilt of the Irish accent.

  Finbarr still found it charming the way New Yorkers reacted to his Irishness but then he had only been in the city six weeks. He’d arrived with a J1 visa which meant he could work for the summer. His plan had been to head out to the Hamptons, where his friend Dean could get him a job. Just before he left Dublin, however, he received news that Dean had been sacked, so Finbarr needed a Plan B. Dervla, a girl he knew only vaguely from his design course in Dún Laoghaire, was working as a nanny in Brooklyn and fortunately, after a charm offensive by Finbarr via email, she and the family who employed her had agreed to let him crash for a week, no more, in the small basement granny flat Dervla lived in. The pressure was on for Finbarr to find a job and a place to live.

  On his fifth day in the city, by some Manhattan miracle, he had done just that. Finbarr might have been young, just turned twenty-two, but he already knew his currency on the gay scene. Growing up he had never had any sense of his looks, good or otherwise, but when he got to Dublin, he soon understood that people found him attractive. Quickly he learned how to use this to his advantage. If he thought he was struggling in a certain course, he would wait behind and ask the lecturer, male or female, some innocuous question, peering at them with his pale brown eyes from beneath abnormally long eyelashes, feigning interest in their reply, laughing at their bon mots. If he didn’t have the money for a drink, he would still go out, confident that some friendly stranger would provide a cocktail or two in return for a little harmless flirting. He might let them steal a kiss, but nothing more. He understood that desire got him what he wanted, but if he allowed them to possess him, he lost his power. Finbarr had never had a boyfriend.

  On his first night in a Manhattan gay bar, he had felt intimidated. The place had been full of men with better bodies than his, chiselled features and perfect teeth. But after he had downed a couple of beers, he relaxed and realised that eyes were still glancing his way, maybe not as many as at home, but being a pretty twink still meant something, even here amongst the bodybuilders and models. His accent, which had never been a part of his arsenal in Dublin, was now proving to be one of his greatest assets. Barmen laughed at the way he pronounced the names of beers, a couple of them gave him drinks on the house, and whoever was standing next to him at the bar invariably gave him an appreciative gaze and asked, ‘Where are you from?’

  Finbarr had heard horror stories from friends about the hours they had spent tramping around the city filling out application forms in restaurants and cafés. Some of them never found a job and just turned the trip into a holiday, heading back home early. None of this sounded appealing. Instead, when he was ordering a drink, he would just lean across the bar and ask, ‘Are there any jobs going here?’ When the answer was ‘no’ he followed that question up with, ‘Do you know anywhere that’s hiring?’ Often the barman would just shrug his strangely overdeveloped shoulders, but occasionally they would suggest a bar he might try. After the first three nights, Finbarr felt he must have visited every gay bar on the island, which was fun but had still not resulted in his finding a job. He was beginning to wonder if he might have to resort to looking during the day instead of just nursing his hangovers lying in Dervla’s bed watching cooking shows on television.

  The fourth night, about nine o’ clock, he was in a small cocktail lounge. He knew from looking at the rest of the staff, with their preppy polo shirts and carefully gelled hair that this wasn’t the place for him, but no harm in asking. The condescending look the barman gave Finbarr boiled his blood. The expression that said ‘You wish you were good enough to work here’. Finbarr didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of informing him that no bar in New York was hiring so he just picked up his vodka and soda and turned to look at the other patrons huddled at low cocktail tables facing a small area that Finbarr assumed would become a stage later in the evening.

  ‘You looking for work?’

  A man was on the bar stool next to him. Finbarr could see why he hadn’t noticed him before. A cheap suit. Just beginning to go to fat around the jaw. His brow had a sheen of sweat. He was the sort of man Finbarr would normally have ignored or dismissed with a half-smile before he removed himself to another part of the bar, but tonight was different. Finbarr had new priorities.

  ‘Yes, I am. You know somewhere hiring?’

  ‘Well my boyfriend just walked out of Sobar an hour ago. I doubt they’ve replaced him already.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like a great place to be working.’ Finbarr was thinking out loud.

  ‘Oh no,’ the man reassured him, ‘the bar is fine. My boyfriend is just a bit of an
asshole.’

  ‘Your boyfriend is an asshole?’ He didn’t really care but wanted to be sure he’d understood.

  ‘I know.’ The man shrugged. ‘I keep meaning to dump him, but it’s not so easy to find a boyfriend in this city.’

  For you, Finbarr thought to himself. The man was now staring into the middle distance, playing with the straw in his drink.

  ‘Where is Sobar?’

  ‘What?’ It was as if they had never spoken before, but then the man remembered. ‘Oh, Sobar? It’s on Twenty-fifth, I think, just off Seventh. Like six or seven blocks from here.’

  ‘OK.’ Finbarr was still unsure how you could tell if the street numbers were going to go up or down, but he could figure it out. He slurped the last of his drink. ‘Thanks.’ He gave the man one of his best smiles, which made Finbarr feel as if he had done the man a favour rather than the other way around.

  Sobar was spelled out in red neon in front of a narrow building with blacked-out windows. He pulled open the door and was bathed in a gust of cool air. Finbarr had confided in Dervla that air conditioning was maybe his favourite thing about the city. She had laughed as if he was joking.

  Inside, past a man checking IDs, Finbarr looked around. He liked the place. It was a bit rough around the edges. One of the bulbs in the lamps above the bar was broken, a patch of silver duct tape appeared to be holding the seat of a bar stool together, and the two barmen in simple jeans and T-shirts were good-looking but not so gorgeous that they would have been celebrities back home. Best of all, the clientele seemed to be older and the ones perched at the bar looked like they were more interested in their next drink than finding love. Twinks nursing single cocktails weren’t great tippers. Finbarr should know.

  The room was long and narrow with a bar running halfway along the side wall till it opened up into more of a lounge area. There was a large glass door at the back which seemed to lead out onto a narrow strip of patio for smokers. The dark-haired barman serving the end of the bar nearest the door raised his hand, which held a red cocktail napkin.