On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  I meet a washed-out starved looking version of myself in the bathroom mirror. Even my freckles seem to be fading. Thirty-two, I told Stephen as he stroked the side of my face in the early dawn of our first morning together. They’re very endearing, he smiled. But that was long before a lopsided asymmetry crept into the photos, contaminating every shot we took, not that there was time for many pictures in the hurried exhaustion of our time together. Once in an uncharacteristic wash of spontaneity, Stephen stopped a passer-by in the Tuileries and we posed in the biting February cold. I was leaning into the arm that Stephen raised to pull me close, but in the seconds between the opening and closing of the shutter, it looks as if I am clinging desperately to his chest, my mouth gaping on some unrecorded afterthought, half my face obscured by a thick lock of hair. Stephen’s arm is slipping away out of view and he is smiling straight into the lens, meeting his separate future head on. The five-year documentary of our coupledom, a handful of memories re-shot through the filter of breakdown. Hyde Park, framed in a late summer afternoon, Rex puppy-playing on the grass between us, and with the skinned finality of hindsight, Stephen’s wide smile seems taunting and mine naïve, both of us framed in a memorial to the sham we were becoming.

  In the early days when Stephen still found my personality intriguing, I would rest my head on his naked chest while he toyed with my numbers thing, trying to define its boundaries. Those days before he stumbled on the outer limits of our relationship, before the rain came through our waterproofed park walks and Rex seemed to smell and I stopped buying new lingerie every weekend and we were both able to fall asleep in the same bed without touching. Negotiating our way out of the skipping couple advert, where the walk-by suggestion of his scent on some other guy could make me wet between the legs, sliding down the waterfall of passion that was supposed to ripple out into a mature and enduring intimacy. If I hadn’t missed a few signposts along the way.

  There are ring marks on the bottom shelf of my bathroom cabinet where Stephen used to store his customised Penhaligon’s, and I am still finding things: Day 123 and the shock of a black tie at the bottom of a drawer had me standing again in between Stephen and the mirror, his chin tilted upwards in studied concentration while expert fingers knotted the silk strip round his neck. I suppose you learnt how to do that when you were five, I smiled. Eight actually, he said, in that manner I would now call self-congratulatory. I stood transfixed by the taunting reflection of his competence, the perfection of our public coupling unzipped to reveal a hideous bubbling beneath its shallow surface. What is he doing with me? I thought, retreating from the mirror with the loose bundle of answers unravelling in my arms.

  The phone trills.

  ‘Oh, I was expecting the machine.’ I picture Aunt Joan in her hallway gloom, standing rod-backed like it’s a deportment class, like she’s still carrying the book on her head. ‘Your office told me you were off on some trip.’

  ‘I’m just about to leave for the airport.’

  ‘I was going to leave a message, so.’

  ‘Well, I can always hang up and you can leave one if you’d prefer.’

  My smart remark is met with dignified silence. No matter how many resolutions we always find a way to fail at the first conversational hurdle.

  ‘Sorry. So what’s the message?’

  There is an audible sigh. ‘Your mother’s had a turn.’

  ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Ah, she won’t eat a thing.’

  ‘So what’s new?’

  ‘Your dad is worried. I wouldn’t call, only you know what he’s like, not wanting to upset you.’

  ‘He’s used to it.’ I can hear the dental edge in my aunt’s voice, the niece who is always off gallivanting around the globe instead of hand-holding by her mother’s bedside.

  ‘She hasn’t had a bite since Saturday.’

  It is only three weeks since Christmas morning when I lay in my old bed listening to the sound of radio hymns down below in the kitchen and Aunt Joan opening presses and rattling cutlery, her practised moves about the place that is a second home to her, reminding me of whose space she is trying to fill. In God’s name, what would a person be doing in an office at that hour of the morning, she said when I mentioned my usual 7 a.m. work start in passing. So is it like they show on TV when all the men are in their shirtsleeves waving their arms and shouting?

  I said, Yeah sometimes, then she was quiet for a bit, turning the cup on the saucer.

  Not many girls then, I suppose. She looked down into the bowl of her teacup, I flipped the lid on my cigarette pack.

  And what’s wrong with that?

  And she said, Nothing, and stood up from the table trailing the unexplained remark behind her while a sudden rage at my mother rose in my sleep-filled mouth. She should be here, fussing over porridge, patting my cheek like a TV mum, telling me I don’t eat enough, telling me I look a bit worn out and should have a lie down. She should be here, not holed up in the hospital a mile down the road, behind a heavy screen of medication, letting herself go, shuffling around in terrycloth, no longer caring about appearances for one who was always so fussy when we were small. Comb you hair, now, Kieran and straighten out that dress, Geraldine. George, let me do that tie for you. And mind your good shoes now, Geraldine, don’t be scraping them on the gravel. Kieran up front, me in the middle and my parents bringing up the rear. Picking at the front garden hedges on the way along the road, Mum telling me off for damaging the plants. Hello there, how are you, grand morning at least ten times before we even get to the church. Grey stone pile at the crest of the hill, the slow tide of cars in the park ebbing and flowing in the window between ten and eleven o’clock mass. And afterwards in the car park I would swing around with the other girls, admiring each other’s Sunday dresses, all of us enveloped in one big state of grace, having just eaten the Body of Christ. Dads lurked in the near distance, exchanging the odd word, while our mothers chatted over kicking babies in rocking prams and the occasional dog slunk past. And then off into the car with the hour’s drive to Granny’s. My mother fiddling with the radio, Kieran reading his stories while I counted receding pylons set against the grey and the car settled into a stillness, none of us knowing or guessing or having any idea of the shadows gathering up ahead – of what was to come, and how there would be no going back.

  ‘Anyhow, there it is.’ Aunt Joan sighed again.

  ‘What d’you want me to do? I’m just about to leave for the airport.’

  ‘You could call your father now and again, Geraldine.’

  ‘It’s just attention-seeking. She’ll get over it, just like before. Or they’ll have to do the tube thing.’

  ‘She’s after losing a lot of weight.’

  ‘That’s what happens when you don’t eat. Anyway, you know what I think. The mistake was putting her in there in the first place.’

  ‘Ah, well now, that was all a long time ago and you were only a girl.’

  ‘She never should have stayed there, drugged up to the eyeballs.’

  ‘Easy to be wise in hindsight.’

  ‘I’ve got to go. The car’s outside.’

  ‘Always on the move. Where to this time?’

  ‘Hong Kong.’

  ‘Oh, it’s well for some.’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘So you’ll call your dad.’

  ‘Yes.’ Though the truth is that I won’t.

  In her silence I hear the tumultuous roar of all the things Aunt Joan longs to say: how I have a heart of stone, how selfish I am, how my father suffers in silence, how I rarely visit and hardly ever call, et cetera et cetera. All the accusations I read each time I look her in the eye, the struggle to keep them in. A terrible extravagance, she said as I packed up the dripping boot of the hire car on St Stephen’s Day. So I should have taken an airport bus? I snapped and we were toppled as usual at the final hurdle. I stooped to kiss her dry cheek and she raised a hand to pat my head but got my neck instead. Drive carefully now, dear.
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br />   6

  fill or kill

  tuesday 15 january 1991

  13:35

  hong kong

  I WAKE INTO A WALL OF HUMIDITY, the hotel balcony doors open so that the curtains billow lightly over my bed. A band of pain shrinkwraps my forehead while Baker and Aziz, the double act, walk left to right across the silent screen for the hundredth time. I hit the volume button and the CNN anchorwoman looks straight into the camera and says: John Holliman joins us live from Baghdad. John, now that President Bush has secured Congress’s approval for the use of force to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, do you think it’s just a matter of days before we see military action?

  John nods enthusiastically and reminds us all that we are just 48 hours away from the UN deadline for Saddam to pull out. The scrolling ticker on the bottom of the screen confirms yesterday’s market closes that I already know. I play with the white paper cap on the juice glass wondering if a shot of vodka would make it more palatable.

  John says something about Apache helicopters and I switch over to a local station where a game-show host is holding a microphone very close to a young girl’s mouth. I press mute and walk into the bathroom. Maybe I should eat something. Maybe I’ll feel more motivated when I get into the office or maybe I just couldn’t give a shit about anything. In the centre of my stomach I feel a sudden wrench and lean over just in time to puke a rancid slime into the bidet. I stagger back against the wall and slide down to sit on the floor, trying not to contract the raw muscles of my throat until the heaving subsides into a sobbing hiccup. I don’t remember anything about the flight here except drinking on the plane with some guy relocating to Sydney for a job with FOX, some half-hearted argument about the war, an observation about how years of business travel has killed off any desire to see the world, the jaded airport lounges, the kerosene folded into your clothes, the stagnant cabin air, the petrified mucous membranes, the microwaved stink of bread rolls, the background roar, the sameness of your world. Looking at my watch, I calculate that I have napped for twenty-four minutes, which makes a steadily shrinking average of 302 minutes in each twenty-four-hour cycle since I started counting 180 days ago and I forecast that, at this accelerating rate of sleep decay, I will be constantly awake by the 1st of April.

  Don’t you ever sleep? Stephen would mumble when I slipped into bed at 2 a.m. and lay beside him, remembering how when I was a child, the night used to make everything possible, all desires and imaginings unleashed like caged animals to roam around my childhood bedroom, demanding that I stay awake. I used to sleepwalk through schoolday afternoons in Double Chemistry, the tedious blackboarding of molecular structures that I had already built in my head, immersed in daydreams of being an astronaut on a pre-moon flight training, cocooned in a chewing-gum-white suit, a tricolour emblazoned below the stars and stripes, my hair cut short for the Mission, the controller talking to me through a radio mike. A self-contained unit in a sealed pod, the only last-minute question I have is how do I go to the loo, but I am too shy to ask, don’t want them to think I am concerned about such trivia. It is, after all, such a wonderful and weightless suit and I can already see the photo on the front page of the Irish Times. The Controller runs through some last-minute detail about record-keeping and the search-and-rescue sequence in the sea. But I am keen to be off and making history for Ireland, to find some as yet undiscovered organism on the moon. I have spent my final earthbound night talking to my parents across a fence (no closer than fifteen feet in case I contract some hibernating virus and take it with me into space, jeopardising my health, the Mission, and the entire Universe). My mother clutches a tissue and says how lovely I look in my suit and to be sure and ring as soon as I arrive. On the TV broadcast I appear to be waving specifically at her while my dad grapples with his lifelong struggle to find something meaningful to say. Kieran shouts that he can’t wait till I get back and don’t forget his moon rock. I want desperately to touch my brother’s fingers through the wire, to bring him with me, to share the capsule hours.

  There is a faint tinkle outside as if a trolley is passing. I go back into the bedroom and press the TV remote. A shrill Cantonese shrieks from the studio audience so I return to CNN. As I step into the shower, John’s voice echoes off the tiled walls. The French have given up a last-ditch attempt to negotiate a way out and here in Baghdad they’re preparing for war.

  I stare at the curve of the bedside phone – I should fulfil my promise to Aunt Joan and call my father, offer hollow support down the line. I picture him crossing the chequered lino in the hall, but I am not ready to summon up the past. The day after Christmas I found him bent double on the nearside of my rental car.

  Was this on it when you picked it up? He tapped a scratch on the wheel arch.

  I didn’t check. I stubbed out my cigarette on the sodden footpath. Sure they’ll charge you for that if you can’t prove it, Geraldine, he shook his head at the waste, the squandering. It’s only money, I shrugged.

  He leaned a hand on his knee and straightened up, Lord above, it’s easy come easy go with you.

  Oh, pack it in, Dad, I looked up at the greyness that pressed down on us.

  Did you call your mother to say goodbye?

  I shook my head. What’s the point in calling when all she does is hold the phone and won’t say anything? And I turned towards him just in time to catch his face fold into that familiar look of resigned acceptance of the bad things life has thrown his way and the heartless disappointment of a daughter who has never been sufficient compensation for the losses he has sustained. And I longed, as so often before, to just push him over, a good sharp bang to the head on the drive might get him to focus on all that is in front of him instead of all that is behind. Instead we hugged weakly and I sank into the car seat, slammed the door, fumbling with the keys, head down so he wouldn’t see the stupid tears that were welling. I pulled out and waved blindly, heading down the road with the Mullens’ half-Alsatian tracking my front wheel at a trot. I watched him break into a run until he stopped, suddenly hitting the outer limit of his world at the corner to the main road.

  As I rounded the junction he was standing perfectly still, staring straight after me, his dappled body receding in my rear-view mirror until he turned and padded home. And I vowed as I do every year: last time I go back for Christmas. Last time I stand in the crowded departure lounge at Heathrow with all the scattered children of Eire – vets in Canada, doctors in Ethiopia, barmen in Boston, nurses in New York, drop-outs in Thailand, bankers in London, all of us headed back to the transit lounge that is Ireland and all that we had fled.

  Even on maximum pressure the water makes no impact so I tilt my head backwards, imagine I am walking in the park with Rex, a downpour streaming over my face. In the partly steamed mirror I see my own mortality wrapped in a thick white towel. ‘A simple answer to a simple question, Geri,’ I tell my reflected face, ‘that’s all.’ I wait for the familiar wash of a reassuring professionalism but the wave thrashes and pools around my feet. I need to shift this dead weight and kick-start my way out of this malaise into the real world where business needs to be done. I should have a drink. I should have something else but I forgot the Diazepam.

  A high-frequency scream crescendos in my ear, like the shrill insistence of a distant alarm clock counting out some non-specific warning as I fumble for a detonator switch. Maybe I have tinnitus. Maybe this tightness in my chest is some form of adult asthma; maybe my body is crumbling and as I reach for the toothbrush I wobble on my heels as if my capacity to balance is slipping away. Come on, Geri, it’s a day like any other. Back in my prehistory there used to be an engaging staccato of variety, the possibility of a day not going as planned. But now I have a nose for human targets with a definable range of manipulable needs. I know the sales routine so well that I can switch to autopilot and still effect an upbeat delivery. Trading favour for favour, that’s why I exist, and let’s face it, it’s not really anybody’s money. I am a heat-seeking missile, sniff
ing out the millions that need to find a way home to Steiner’s, laying mines for the second-rate competition. I come from a long line of white-shoe firms, we don’t do shit deals. Favour for favour.

  A simple answer to a simple question. This special mission should be a cakewalk, I can do it with my eyes closed. This jangled brittleness is just the distortion of fatigue. The sabre rattling in the Middle East is just white noise. I try to visualise how it will go: I will follow Felix’s lead to the boardroom, where he will order me some green tea. He will express his regret that my trip is too short for dinner at some newly discovered restaurant so that he can watch me struggle with local delicacies that he knows I despise. He will ask me what I read on the plane and I will say Descartes’ Meditations and he will smile faintly, Ah yes, the demon of deception. If he asks me to comment on the downfall of Cartesianism, my answer will be four sentences long and directly to the point.

  And then I will tell him why I am here. I picture myself departing an hour later, mission accomplished, with a confident smile and the simple question answered. Then I will call the Grope, pause for effect and tell him I’ve got what he wants.

  There’s a moment of dressing confusion when I wonder if my clothes belong to someone else: the linen skirt hangs insipidly around my hips, the shirt’s soft lilac reflects an embedded blue in my skin and the slingback slips off my right ankle as I close the door behind me and step onto the deep pile of blue and rust. The lift doors chime open onto two suits, who break off from their conversation to acknowledge this exiled camaraderie between white briefcases far from home at such a precarious moment in history. Perhaps we are crusaders, or maybe there was just no one begging us to stay.