a small green space
The city is full of trees, reinforcing the idea that it’s not a city at all but a series of villages. Who can feel they belong in a place that is almost a thousand square miles? It breaks down out of necessity. You are not in the city but in a district or street. You can’t see everything at once or keep all you know in mind, just as you can’t arrange to meet someone in the city. You have to contrive a smaller place.
When Iris tells the story of this love she likes to make clear that they ran away together and that this caused someone else great pain. It is how she makes sense of what she allowed him to do to her. She met Adam when she spent the summer after graduation working with a team assessing a town hall for conservation while it was being prepared for sale. The team took note of every original feature: the skirtings, escutcheons, bathroom tiles and drawer handles. Iris couldn’t tell what was original or not. Something was identified and she went round the building recording it. She had already decided that she wanted to be a conservator and had a place to study for a masters degree that autumn.
A shop opposite the town hall was being refitted and one day she passed the open door and saw a man building a spiral staircase. Had he been building anything else – a cupboard, shelves, plain stairs – she would not have lingered. But a spiral staircase! He was not only a carpenter but a mathematician and artist as well!
Adam was huge and he shaved his head so that his face, which looked as if it had been hewn from stone, was all the more fierce. When he spoke he sounded Danish, South African, Irish … It turned out that he’d lived in all those places.
It was a brief time of golden evenings and when Iris finished work she didn’t hurry back to her studio flat. She took to sitting in a disused Quaker cemetery filled by an ancient capsized fig. The cemetery’s low brick walls leant against the offices that had grown up around it. It was one of those small green spaces to be found all over the city, where people think themselves unobserved, especially on golden evenings. You will see them, lovers in office clothes who have waited all day to hold hands and who must soon go home, only for now there is a small space in which what they do doesn’t count and isn’t wrong. It’s such a small space. Why do you think they look so sad?
One evening Adam appeared (had she mentioned the cemetery?) and sat down beside her. They talked a bit and then she set off home. The next day Iris went there again and so did he. After a week of this, Adam took her hand and told her that he was about to get married. He kept hold of her hand, something she couldn’t reconcile with what he was saying. From that point on, she failed to connect their conversations with what lay beyond them. (Failed or refused?)
Iris felt as if she were climbing a spiral staircase, finding the hidden perfected shape of things and even of herself. She also thought herself immune, so much so that she asked him about the woman he was engaged to.
How did you meet her?
I’m a journeyman. I set out on a journey.
You mean after your apprenticeship?
That’s right. I had five coins in my pocket and was forbidden to go home for three years.
When is your time up?
Adam shrugged. Two years ago, maybe?
A man who could build a spiral staircase and travel the world with five coins in his pocket. Only Adam didn’t seem like someone with only five coins. His work clothes, his bag and boots looked expensive. Iris would not let herself ask where he was living, how long he’d been in the city or where he was going next.
How did you meet her?
He’d got talking to her father on a train in Ireland, helped him into a taxi, shared the ride and after being directed towards a place where he could pitch his tent, returned to the old man’s cottage. He was a retired teacher and he liked to talk. They drank whisky till midnight.
I set off back down the hill and when I turned to call out goodnight, I saw a light on and someone at an attic window.
The princess in the tower?
Precisely.
The next day Adam walked up to the cottage again and there was a woman in the front garden hanging sheets on a line.
I introduced myself and she just nodded. I explained that I was there to repay the old man’s hospitality, that I could rehang the gate or mend the fence. Was he her father, I asked, and she nodded again and gestured towards the house.
She was dumb?
She didn’t speak.
Beautiful?
Iris despised herself for asking this and was not pleased by his answer.
Dark, wild hair, furious-looking.
Clever?
In a way. I stayed for the rest of the summer and—
That was that?
He ran a finger across Iris’s mouth.
That was that.
The stranger on the train, the light in the window, the silent princess. It was a story that required an absolute gesture. Of course he’d proposed to her.
One evening Adam told Iris that his work on the shop had ended. She thought she was relieved. It was a chance to conclude whatever this was without harm. Iris was the one who wrote down her number and address. The shop opened and she went in on its first day. The spiral staircase led nowhere and was used to display shoes. She was unsettled by the extent of her distress.
You can say yes without knowing that you’ve done so. Late one night Iris’s doorbell rang. Adam was standing there surrounded by plastic bags. Iris suggested that they carry them up to her flat, to get them out of her neighbours’ way, and he seemed to take this as her agreeing to a proposition he hadn’t yet mentioned. The bags were thin and carelessly filled and as she and Adam hauled them up the three flights they left a trail of his possessions. When she turned to go back for them he shook his head and shut the door. The first time he sat down in her one armchair he looked at home. From that moment Iris felt a responsibility to meet his conviction with her own.
They went to bed, where he dedicated himself to her pleasure. Her body felt nothing. For that one night she wondered if she was making a terrible mistake but by the morning she was in love. He still hadn’t explained what brought him to her with all his bags. In the end she asked.
I told her the marriage was a mistake. So I had to leave right away.
Leave where?
We’ve been staying at her aunt’s place.
Every evening after they’d left the cemetery he’d gone home to the princess. Of course he had. They were getting married. It took several days for Iris to gather the courage to ask more.
When you told her you were leaving, what did she say? Sorry, I forgot that she doesn’t speak.
Iris had imagined a language of gestures.
Of course she can speak. But she has a terrible stutter.
The silent princess.
Is that why she still lived with her father?
With her father? She worked in Cork, in IT. Most of the time he’s left to fend for himself in that breeze-block bungalow.
The cottage on the hill. The light in the high window.
They kept finding things for me to do. The fence, the window frames, the doors. By the end I’d more or less rebuilt the place. Everything fitted beautifully.
Why did you leave?
When I’ve finished the work, I move on.
A letter arrived. The princess wanted Iris to know that she had left a job and her dying father to come to be married. That her aunt could not keep her. She asked Iris to give him up. (Had she taken him?) The letter was on the table in front of him but he made no attempt to read it.
Questions swelled in Iris’s chest but she could only voice the smallest.
How did she get hold of my address?
I gave it to her.
When Iris read the letter from the princess, with its childish phrasing, spelling errors and raw threats, she felt nothing. Her life had been smashed into and she was stunned.
the real thing
While they were still fizzy with new love, Adam took Iris to visit a friend he describ
ed as a mystic novelist.
What does that mean? What kind of books does she write?
Nothing conventional.
Are they about love and how to live?
On the highest level, yes.
Perhaps I’ve read something. Which is your favourite?
I don’t know. All of them.
You’ve read all her books? How many are there?
So many I can’t remember.
The train passed painted cottages and run-down farms, any of which could be where a novelist lived, but the station they got off at was next to an industrial park. They followed a track round the edge of a housing development that led to a row of wartime prefabs built of corrugated iron. One had windowsills lined with animal skulls, another a wooden boat leaning against the wall, a gash in its hull. There was a garden full of withered cacti in red plastic pots.
Artists live here, Adam said.
The place made Iris sad.
Tina was in her garden, painting. She was very thin and wore old beige cashmere and a long necklace of roughly polished stones. Just like a romantic novelist, Iris planned to tease Adam later. She didn’t know yet that he was not to be teased.
Tina’s house was as tightly organised and equipped as the cabin of someone embarking on a long voyage. She took her time showing them all that she had accomplished. It seemed that she did everything – wrote her books, painted everything, made everything, grew everything. When she offered tea she poured some of the leaves into her hand and commanded Adam to smell them. Rose pouchong! Iris stored this away as a joke, noting exactly how she said it.
After tea Tina proposed a walk by the river. The water was slow and brown, and the land around it one of those pockets of dullness that the countryside throws up, but Tina entered the scene as if she’d walked into a painting. She kept pointing things out to Adam, her arm through his.
Look, Adam, a kingfisher! Do you think that’s a trout pool, Adam? Look!
He delighted in whatever she conjured and didn’t once turn to share his delight with Iris. She trailed behind them for a while and when they didn’t seem to notice, inserted herself between them like a jealous child. They walked on in silence. There were no more kingfishers or trout pools.
Do you remember our trip to the bank, Adam? Tina said.
Of course. You were magnificent!
We found some money, she explained to Iris. It was just lying there on the street. Toy money, I mean.
And it was right outside a bank, said Adam, so guess what Tina did?
Iris refused to guess so Tina explained.
I tried to bank it.
What about the cashier? Iris asked.
He was at a loss. Totally. Wasn’t he, Adam? Poor boy.
Perhaps he didn’t get the joke? Iris knew she sounded unnecessarily upset.
It wasn’t a joke, Tina said.
Adam explained.
Tina likes to test procedures. It’s part of her practice.
This didn’t sound like him, or what Iris knew of him, at all.
As they were leaving, Tina embraced Iris and said that she was sorry the two of them hadn’t had the chance to talk more. She hadn’t asked Iris a single question all afternoon. On the train home Adam was quiet. He asked if Iris had a headache. She said she did.
Iris and Adam were still in bright light. When something troubling arose she took note but put it away so quickly that she could tell herself that she hadn’t heard or seen. She was stepping behind walls of her own making.
A year later she was in the middle of an argument with Adam when that day rose up in her mind and at last she was able to speak of how miserable she’d been. Adam was amazed.
But I was so happy! he said.
Because you were with Tina!
No. You. I was happy because I was in love with you.
But you were completely wrapped up in each other. Look, Adam! Remember? The fucking trout pool or whatever it was in that muddy little river. You were so curious, so enthusiastic, and I was left behind!
I was showing you that I was in love!
It took several more years for Iris to see how this made sense. In walking beside Tina, and looking with her, Adam had been performing his delight in his love. And Iris would come to admire people like Tina and how she invested all she did. Her ecstatic approach to the world was sincere. And perhaps Tina hadn’t been rude. She just couldn’t be bothered with the etiquette of being interested in or including Iris.
*
Adam had several answers for every question.
Perhaps he’s just more truthful, Iris said to her friends.
She was about to give up her flat and her course to travel with Adam. It would be a year before she saw any of these friends again.
He arrived in my life as if that’s where he was always meant to be.
Everyone thinks that.
About everyone.
What makes him so special?
Iris tried to sound as if she knew.
She was someone who measured everything. Men had taken their cue from her and approached tentatively. They had circled her, whereas Adam surrounded her. He hadn’t approached at all. He was just there. The joy she then experienced, despite all she observed in him, was that of release. She had never felt so held.
*
Such love lifts you beyond the clouds and you lose all sense of direction and scale. You come to need the pull of the earth. Iris and Adam lurched from place to place, chasing jobs, alienating friends and scrabbling for money while his certainty rolled out before everything like a long smooth road. And then his certainty wasn’t enough. She no longer recognised herself. They were living in Spain, in a mountain hut, when Iris’s mother forwarded a letter asking her to confirm her return to the course. When Iris raised this with Adam he disappeared for twenty-four hours. Once the deadline had passed, Iris mentioned the course again. This time Adam just shrugged.
If that’s what you want to do.
But I can’t. It’s too late.
For a while he was sweet and contented. He had set her a test and by not replying to the letter she’d passed it. But Iris liked things to be complete. She wondered, out loud, if she was ever going to finish the course and Adam punched her in the face. She saw him hesitate for a moment, not in an attempt to control himself but while making the decision to do it. He punched her in the face and then he walked out.
Iris did nothing to stop him leaving. She couldn’t because she wasn’t there. She was ten years old, sitting on the sofa with her brother Jason, listening to her mother explain that her father had gone.
Why? asked Jason.
Because I don’t want him.
Doesn’t he want me?
Iris had said nothing. She knew, from her bad dreams, that there were silences which were part of being a family. You didn’t ask such questions because life depended on some things never being put into words. She met walls and so built her own because the worst thing could happen and it had. Her father had gone.
And because he never came back, Iris, alone in the night in a hut on a mountain, assumed Adam wouldn’t either. So when he appeared an hour later and went to elaborate lengths to fashion a cold compress for her face out of a tea towel and a bowl of snow, she was amazed and grateful. She felt as much joy as she would have had her father come home.
She pleaded with Adam to hold her and when he lay down and put a single limp arm across her body she pleaded some more. She needed to feel that she was back inside the small green space of his certainty. What could she do?
Do something, she said. Whatever you want.
What he wanted hurt and he knew it and so he forgave her.
It took her another six months to leave him. When she told him she’d written to the college, he pushed her out of the car and left her on the side of the road. She walked back to the hut and they had a fight during which her arm was broken. She was never sure exactly how it happened. The kindness of the doctors was the shock that made her realise how litt
le she’d come to expect. While Adam fussed over her in hospital, and the nurses remarked on his devotion, Iris said nothing. I am nothing, she thought. I have no home, money, work or friends. I live with a man I believe could kill me and I behave accordingly. Adam brought in her passport for the hospital paperwork. The doctor let her ring her mother, who hadn’t heard from her for a year but asked no questions and arranged a flight home. Iris never saw Adam again.
*
The panic attacks started one day when she was on the underground. The train braked hard and when the man standing beside her stumbled and raised his arm to grab at the strap, she crumpled to the floor as if she’d been punched in the face. The man was big like Adam and the carriage about the size of the mountain hut. The echo of a gesture struck her so forcefully that she felt afterwards that she was full of cracks, like a piece of stone which, hit by lightning, reveals its strata having never been solid at all.
When Iris was about to marry David, Adam inhabited her dreams. She woke each morning in terrible pain which she realised was self-disgust. She did not recognise the person who had gone on pulling towards such a man, pleading with him to stay.
You were young, said her friends, the night before the wedding.
But that suggests I was some other self who can be discounted now I’ve come to my senses. Only I am that person. I will always be that person.
Iris and Adam strode the earth as if they were the manifestation of something other people could only aspire to. She would never believe in anything on that scale again.
This is who I am, thought Iris as she travelled towards David the next morning. Someone capable of letting a man step into my life and take control – even of what I feel and think. I turned away from what he was stepping out of and what he might bring. Perhaps the pattern was being repeated? After all, David had surrounded her too. Only this time there was no danger. She had by then surrounded herself.
shall I leave you now?
Neither Iris nor Raif would say that they are in love but they have turned towards one another.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 12
