Less Than Perfect

by Ber Carroll

  Little did I know that the danger I feared was, in fact, where I least expected it, where I felt safest and most secure.

  My room at the Elms had a small telly, an old portable set that had belonged to my parents. When I was on my own, I rationed it between periods of study, a treat at the end of two hours’ nonstop reading or a completed essay or assignment. When I turned it on, the telly felt like a flatmate, a voice in the room easing the silence and loneliness until Josh came around. Due to the misshapen aerial at the back the reception was patchy, but for all its obvious imperfections, I loved that box of colour and sound.

  Josh loved it too. Most of the time. Television frustrated him almost as much as it fascinated him, teasing him with dialogue he couldn’t properly follow and lifestyles he could never hope to emulate. He would flick through the channels, leaning towards the telly with the remote control in his hand – the signal didn’t work unless you held it close and pressed hard on the buttons. He liked to watch anything to do with cars: design, road testing, racing, anything that involved a motor and four wheels. He would have loved a car of his own, to feel the curve of the steering wheel under his hands, to command the vehicle with the gearstick and clutch, accelerator and brake. He knew how to drive – his father had taught him – but he wasn’t deemed fit for a licence because he couldn’t hear sirens or car horns in the event of an emergency.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ he’d protest, anguished by his exclusion from this aspect of everyday life more than anything else. ‘All those lazy, incompetent drivers on the road, and yet they’re allowed to sit behind the wheel and I’m not.’

  I tried to console him. ‘Maybe they’ll change the rules when hearing-aid technology improves.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, but I could be an old man by then!’

  When Josh had finished surfing the channels on the telly, we’d snuggle together under the covers and watch a film, usually a foreign one with subtitles, a quirky storyline and more nudity than the plot required. Those were happy times – the warmth of the duvet and his body next to mine, the small portable telly with its wonky aerial, its blurry screen a window to an exotic other world.

  Initially I didn’t take much notice of the peace talks that were reported on the telly.

  ‘Talks between the political parties and the Irish and British governments have been going on for more than thirty hours now, through the day and night, and now into another day, in a monumental effort to reach agreement …’

  It took a while for the television coverage to penetrate my cynicism. As far as I was concerned, there was always some politician talking to another, shaking hands and flashing phoney smiles at the cameras, but nothing ever came of those talks. Nothing happened other than the handshake, so firm and resolute, promising so much and delivering nothing at all. I imagined that both parties left with the best of intentions, and then at some stage reality intruded: thirty years of conflict; arms, hatred and history more powerful and dividing than any image of the future.

  ‘Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern have not slept, leading to reports that it’s not a matter of if agreement will be reached, but when …’

  The chairman of the talks, a US senator, had been up all night too. Though the deadline for an agreement had passed, the news commentator sounded excited and hopeful. Maybe it was a similar sense of hope that made me break one of my rules and leave the telly on past the allotted time. I muted the sound and resumed my work on the sociology essay I needed to submit before the end of the week. A few laborious pages later, I glanced up to see that Tony Blair was speaking at a news conference; the talks had apparently ended. I turned the sound back on.

  ‘Today I hope that the burden of history can at long last start to be lifted from our shoulders.’

  The agreement had been signed by the British and Irish governments and by most of the political parties. It was called the Good Friday Peace Agreement.

  When Josh came over later that night, we watched more coverage on the agreement. Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland were to amend their laws and constitutions regarding Northern Ireland, which would now have its own assembly with devolved legislative powers. From this point, any change to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland could only follow a majority vote of its citizens. All paramilitary weapons were to be decommissioned and prisoners released within two years. Referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would hopefully secure public endorsement of the agreement.

  The phone rang and I picked it up, knowing who it was even before he spoke.

  ‘Are you watching the telly?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘This is an important day, Caitlin, a day to remember.’ He sounded a little giddy. He’d always said that peace wasn’t possible without both Britain and the Republic of Ireland giving up some of their claim on the North. This agreement validated his views. I could see him in my mind, a smile of genuine satisfaction brightening his face, a celebratory glass of red wine in his hand.

  ‘Aye, Dad. I know.’

  ‘Goodnight, so.’

  ‘ ’Night, Dad.’

  Josh and I celebrated in our own way. That night, in the narrow single bed, he moved inside me for the first time. The bedside lamp was on and I saw wonder and ecstasy on his face, and knew that he could see the same expression on mine. It was as though the last barrier separating us had lifted away, and the fact that we had waited and not rushed this side of our relationship made it all the more significant and precious.

  ‘I love you,’ he said afterwards.

  Of all the times he told me he loved me, I remember this one the most vividly.

  ‘I love you too.’

  We fell asleep, bodies entwined, the lamp casting us in a gentle glow.

  The following month we voted in the referendum, holding hands as we arrived at the voting hall, walking past flyers thrust in our path and ignoring last-minute pitches from party representatives. Technically we represented opposite sides – I was Catholic and Josh Protestant – but we wanted and voted for the same thing that day: peace, an end to violence, a better future.

  Do you support the agreement reached at the multi-party talks on Northern Ireland and set out in Command Paper 3883?

  Yes, we do.

  Chapter 4

  Loving Josh wasn’t easy. It was wonderful and full of surprises, frustrating and hard work. He wore a hearing aid behind each ear, which enabled him to hear the odd word. He filled in the rest by reading lips. If we were out somewhere that had background noise – a pub or a busy street – the hearing aids didn’t function properly and then all Josh had to rely on was lip-reading, which wasn’t always possible. Things became particularly difficult when we were out socially with friends. He hated not being able to hear the banter, the one-liners, people talking over each other. Even though he was usually philosophical about his limitations, sometimes he became so frustrated he would walk off. I’d follow, steering him to a quiet corner where he could vent.

  ‘I feel like the village idiot, only understanding half of what’s being said,’ he’d cry.

  ‘I’ll remind them to slow down and to look at you as they speak …’

  ‘Don’t! Don’t say anything.’

  ‘What do you want then?’

  ‘I want to be able to fucking well hear properly!’

  Obviously, there was nothing he or I could do to make this happen. All I could offer was silence: an acknowledgment of how unfair it was.

  ‘Do you want to go home?’ I’d ask out of courtesy. I knew that he didn’t. In his heart of hearts Josh was a social being; he liked to be part of a crowd, despite occasionally feeling peripheral and left out.

  ‘No, of course I don’t. Oh, for fuck’s sake, let’s go back.’

  Hand in hand, we would return to the group, everyone guessing why he’d stormed off and, for a short time, making a greater effort to include him.

  When we were in Belfast, we socialised with my friends, students from my English or sociology cl
asses, or with Mandy, who was training to be a hairdresser in a salon on Ormeau Avenue, and her boyfriend, Brendan, a mechanic. Josh liked Mandy and Brendan more than he did my university friends. He found it amusing that Mandy, with her somewhat haphazard appearance, wanted to be a hairdresser, and he liked that Brendan was quiet and introspective and sometimes drew diagrams of car engines for his benefit. It made me happy, Josh getting on so well with Mandy and Brendan.

  While the boys were absorbed with talk of steering or suspension or torque, Mandy would lean close and shamelessly enquire, in a conspiratorial whisper, about my relationship with Josh.

  ‘So, youse two are getting on well, then?’

  ‘Aye, we are.’

  ‘And he’s good in the sack?’

  ‘That’s none of your business, Mandy!’

  ‘Ach, come on, don’t be so secretive. I tell you everything!’

  Without my asking, Mandy had shared with me intimate details about her love life with Brendan, so much so that sometimes I could hardly look at him without blushing. Mandy fondly called me her uptight, prim-and-proper friend, while I laughingly referred to her as my slapdash, blabbermouth friend. I was a little uptight – who wouldn’t be after living their first eighteen years under my father’s roof? – but I was a good friend, I was loyal and Mandy had been my friend forever. My mother often stated that there were two kinds of friends: friends for a reason and friends for a season. Mandy fell into the former category. My own more conservative nature fed off her openness and irreverence towards rules of any kind, and she always made me laugh. If that wasn’t enough reason to love her, she was as natural and open with Josh as she was with me. Mandy didn’t know how to be anything but herself.

  When we were home in Clonmegan we gravitated towards Josh’s friends rather than mine and as a consequence I often found myself socialising with Liam. The boys frequently played pool in a dark, poky room at the back of one of the pubs in town. Initially, Liam was uncomfortable with my presence among his circle of friends.

  ‘You must be joking,’ he exclaimed the first time I turned up with Josh.

  ‘Shut up, O’Reilly,’ Josh responded with a friendly push.

  Liam was equally unimpressed when I participated in the pool tournament they were running among themselves. ‘Jesus, you’re shocking, Caitlin. Don’t you know how to hold a cue? Look, watch me. Steady does it …’

  My pool skills improved dramatically under Liam’s tutelage, which was driven more by embarrassment on my behalf than by brotherly love or concern. But gradually he got used to me being there, and quite often the only female present, and we became closer, more like friends rather than brother and sister. In that dark pool room I came to know him as a person. He would tell me things he’d never say at home.

  ‘God, I hate it. Mum fussing over me like I’m still a child, Dad watching every move I make, always ready with a fucking opinion. Jesus, Caitlin, I need to get a job and a place of my own before I lose my temper some day and throw a punch at him!’

  With his friends, away from the tension at home, I saw that Liam was good company, talkative, funny in an understated way. I saw that he was kind, considerate, and generous with the little money that he had. He was more sensible than some of the others, often the one to moderate their behaviour if they were getting out of hand, stopping them from launching their bodies across the pool table or using the cues to playfully, and quite painfully, whack each other on the head.

  Sometimes, when he’d had too much to drink, Liam would hook his arm around my neck, half choking me. ‘This is my sister,’ he’d announce to his friends. ‘Isn’t she just great?’

  I would smile sheepishly, waiting for them to unequivocally agree so that Liam would let go of me.

  I realised that not only did I love my brother, I liked him too. And I especially liked that Liam looked out for Josh, that he always did his best to include him in whatever conversation or social event was happening. I felt deeply grateful for this.

  Josh’s speech challenged me and I often struggled to understand him. His voice was nasal and his consonants were clearer than his vowels, particularly the consonants you say with your lips, like ‘m’ and ‘b’. Invariably, he would lose the last sound in a word, as it was harder for him to hear that far. Though he practised and practised saying my name, it never sounded right.

  I discovered that he wasn’t deaf to music, as I had originally assumed. He could hear patterns, a beat, but not the pitch. I played CDs for him and he followed the lyrics by reading my lips, oblivious that my singing voice was just as off-key as his. He liked rap, Jay-Z and some Backstreet Boys, anything that had a strong rhythm. We had impromptu discos in my room, shimmying against each other before we ended up kissing on the bed.

  Sometimes, I watched his soccer games on the weekends, standing on the sidelines, often in soft rain that wasn’t heavy enough for the match to be called off. Josh was beautiful to watch, fluid as he ran after the ball, elegant when he extended his leg to kick it down the line or cross it towards the goal. I yelled encouragements that he couldn’t hear. He was one of the better players on the team, the only problem being that he couldn’t hear the whistle and often continued for a few seconds after play had stopped, smiling sheepishly when Liam or one of the others waved him down. When this happened, it brought a lump to my throat. I could see supporters of the other team, people who didn’t know him, conferring, shooting curious glances at the young man with the dark hair and eyes, wondering what was wrong with him.

  ‘He’s deaf,’ I wanted to explain. ‘He can’t hear. That’s all. In every other way he’s perfect.’

  Josh worked as a plasterer for a small building company. His boss, Phil, picked him up in the morning and dropped him home in the late afternoon, either to his parents’ house in Clonmegan or to my room in Belfast. Rather conveniently, most of their work was in the Belfast area. Once onsite, Phil took all the instructions and did all the talking to the client. He then communicated to Josh what needed to be done. He knew how to sign; his brother was profoundly deaf. Phil often commented to me how good Josh was at his job, how he could make the ugliest wall smooth, how his corners and finish were beautiful to behold. Though this praise for my boyfriend made me proud, it didn’t surprise me. Josh was good with his hands in every way. He instinctively knew how to fix things, taking them apart and fitting them back together again. He was artistic and could sketch quite proficiently. And – something I wouldn’t admit to Phil in a million years – Josh’s hands knew how to caress and sweep the length of my body, how to bring me to a point where I hardly knew what I was saying or thinking, where he began or I ended.

  Seeing Phil, a burly man with huge hands and bulbous fingers, signing so adeptly with Josh gave me the impetus to improve my own signing skills. As my relationship with Josh became deeper and more involved, so did our need to communicate on a more complex level. I asked him to teach me sign language and practised my skills by watching the RTE News for the Deaf, which was on after the main six o’clock bulletin. In a relatively short space of time I became quite good at sign language, with the added benefit, thanks to the news, of being very up to date on current affairs.

  Occasionally Josh and I had arguments. Not shouting matches, like other couples; our conflict was expressed with angry gestures, furious glares and slammed doors. More often than not, the arguments spiralled from frustration: a failure in comprehension, having to repeat what we were trying to convey again and again, until one of us would throw up our hands and stomp off. Jealousy also reared its head, Josh fearing that I would fall for someone in my class, someone who could hear and drive and speak articulately, me telling him that he was being stupid and immature and that he didn’t know me at all if he thought I would betray him like that.

  We had other arguments too, normal ones that had nothing to do with his hearing. Arguments that were silly, unprovoked, with absolutely no substance. It never took us long to make up, though. One of us would seek the other out and ap
ologise.

  ‘Caitlin, can you let me in? I’m sorry, okay?’

  I’d unlatch the door. ‘I’m sorry too.’

  ‘Fighting with you makes me feel sick inside.’

  I’d nod, my own stomach churning. ‘Let’s not fight. Ever again. Especially not about something so stupid.’

  Then we would hug, long, tight hugs where I felt like I was part of him and he was part of me, and I would think how very much I loved him, how lucky I was to have met him, and how perfect we were together.

  My exams signified both the end of the academic year and the end of the routine I had going with Josh. I gave the exams my all, revising late at night so that my knowledge was fresh the following day. At the end of the two weeks I was completely and utterly spent but happy and secure in the knowledge that I had done well in the exams and in the first year of my degree.

  I packed up my belongings at the Elms, amazed that I had enough to fill two big suitcases when I had initially arrived with just the one. In addition to the suitcases, I had several boxes filled with textbooks and writing pads, and garbage bags stuffed with clothes and towels and sheets, some of which belonged to Josh.

  My father knocked on the door before coming in. ‘Good Lord.’ He surveyed the baggage. ‘I’m not sure we’ll be able to get it all in.’

  It took a few trips up and down to the car, and between the boot and the back seat it all just about fitted. ‘I’ll do one final check to make sure I’ve left nothing behind,’ I said as Dad settled in behind the wheel.

  Back in the room, I took one last look around. The space looked small and bare and insignificant, as though Josh and I had never been there, as though we had already been relegated to the past, a memory. Next year the room would take on some other first-year student’s personality. The bed, stripped down to its chequered mattress, would be slept in by someone else – one person, I assumed, not two. Josh and I would sleep in another bed in another room and make another year of memories together. Though I felt a little sad to be leaving this room and this year behind, I already couldn’t wait for what was ahead.