‘How long have you been there?’
His voice was low. Different. Gael lifted one shoulder.
‘Gael. I am telling you now to get out. I’ll say it again and I’ll say it clearly. Get out.’
But she didn’t move or speak. Only, with some relief, looked back at his eyes.
‘If you ever try to use this moment against me,’ he said. ‘If you ever misremember it. If your life takes a bad turn and you need someone to blame and you think of saying that your father exposed himself to you when you were a little girl, I am telling you now to get out. Do you hear me loud and clear?’
‘Mmm-hm,’ Gael said in a jolly kind of hum. ‘But did you hear me?’
The muscles in his legs strained against the skin when he stepped forward. Gael got flecked in his water. But she didn’t flinch, or draw her hands from where they were tucked under her thighs. The cleaners had been here yesterday so the toilet was squeaky. Jarleth dried himself vigorously before wrapping the towel around his waist. The hair on his belly made the small paunch more agreeable. There was something charismatic about a man’s belly fat, Gael discovered, as long as it was covered in hair. Something unapologetic. He wiped the mirror down with a face towel and took a small pair of scissors from the drawer.
‘So you’ve got ideas.’ He proceeded to trim his nose hair. ‘Out with them.’
‘Are you getting divorced?’
‘We’re not married. There’s nothing to divorce from.’
‘Are you separating?’
‘No.’
‘Is Mum really on tour?’
‘Yes.’
Questions. That was her error.
‘Mum could be cheating on you too,’ she said. This made him pause and glance at her.
‘We don’t police one another.’
‘You wouldn’t care if she was?’
‘I would care a great deal, as a matter of fact.’ He said this curtly, as if it would be a very serious affair.
There was a brief silence and Gael felt in her bones how late it was and how she wouldn’t sleep tonight. She asked:
‘Which is the commandment to do with adultery?’
Thinking this would make him mad. Violent, even. But he leaned on the sink and smiled. Forgetting who he was with.
‘Adultery only applies if a person is married. Think of it as a spiritual loophole. Your mother and I are both committing the sin of being … sexually active outside of wedlock. That’s because of her. Not me. I’ve asked her many times to marry me, as you know. Every month, I confess and receive the sacrament of Penance for not being married. Always with the intention of righting that wrong. Always meeting with resistance.’
‘It must make Mum feel like shit.’ Gael thought about how removed Sive had been lately. Always working. Or trying ‘to get things out of the way’ so she could get back to work. When she wasn’t tending to orchestral matters – studying a score, comparing arrangements – she was composing. But then, hadn’t she always been like that? Her truest self wasn’t communal.
‘Your mother’s self-confidence doesn’t rely on her being the apple of my eye. We wouldn’t be together if it did. Besides, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.’
‘What? Yes it can! If you have cancer but you don’t know and don’t take it out, it can kill you!’
Nose hairs neatened, he put the scissors away and turned to face her.
‘You have some gumption to address me like this. It’s none of your concern, Gael. It’s adult business.’
‘I’m practically a teenager, Jarleth. I can handle it.’
‘Jarleth, is it?’
Gael shrugged. This was new. It felt good. ‘It’s your name. Your Christian name. And anyway, I knew for a while.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You just knew it.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And who have you told … what you “just know”?’ Jarleth’s small, brown, hair-housed nipples were hard now and the flesh of his chest and arms had textured to sandpaper.
‘No one.’
He dipped his head for the first half of a nod. ‘And that’s the way you’ll keep it.’
Gael stared at him and heard her own breathing, loud. All the condensation from his shower had settled somewhere. It hadn’t been extracted, but it wasn’t hanging in the air either. What hovered instead in the night-poise were theories.
‘I saw you took the car out,’ he said. ‘It’s parked in the middle of the road.’
‘I drove it around.’
‘Good. And did you drive Guthrie to karate?’
Gael didn’t let her gaze drop to the floor, though that was the instinct. ‘He wouldn’t let me.’
‘Let you?’ Jarleth said. ‘You’re the older sibling. You’re the strong one.’
‘He values his life more than you think he does!’
‘He doesn’t know what’s good for him.’
Gael knew this was wrong. She also knew not to say so.
‘If you want to be part of the adult world, Gael. If you want to enter into society. You should accept that things aren’t as straightforward as you’re taught in the classroom.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that.’
Jarleth crossed his cyclist’s arms. Gael took her hands from under her thighs and crossed her arms too. It was chilly. ‘Do you know what I do for a living? To put this roof over our heads.’
‘Global markets something derivative.’
Jarleth laughed at Gael’s unintended joke – granted her the benefit of the doubt. ‘Not anymore, but okay. What I do, Gael, has taught me something no university on the planet could have had on its syllabus. And that is that we have a very simple choice to make. Do we aspire to have worth and influence and risk tragedy; or do we aspire towards love and togetherness and risk that it won’t have been enough. You can’t have both aspirations be equally weighted.’
Gael couldn’t respond to this. She didn’t know what he was asking.
‘Now. Bed. I have an important meeting in the morning.’
Gael stood up from the toilet and Jarleth held out his arms for a hug. But Gael felt that there was a contract in the hug and she hadn’t read the fine print. She was cold and the hug would warm her, but was it a trick? The thing about love and togetherness and the choice? She brushed past him on her way out and his body felt steely. But once she had passed him and she was at the bedroom door, looking back, she caught his expression in the mirror. A troubled frown.
The house felt as though it were wobbling in the dark. As though its foundations had liquefied. Surely there’d be time to climb out the windows, should they start sinking. Sleep would be impossible, Gael thought, so she made a series of searches on the computer. There was something important she’d missed. Since she was the one who would have to decide and then to live with it in the form of her mother every day of her life, she thought she should have all the information. Thus, at two in the morning she found herself reading the Wikipedia entry on cheating, as if it were a history that could be looked up, summarized and digested. There was one part that felt like information, though, and not just semantics.
‘Natural selection favours cheating in the biological markets. If a species can increase its chance of survival by cheating, then that strength is selected for. But cheaters need a whole society of cooperators to exploit. In ecology, cheating is regulated by making their success dependent on frequency. The more cheaters there are, the worse they do. The fewer, the better.’
So it was an aspect of nature and it was everywhere. Only most people are none the wiser. Then sleep took her. And that sleep knit up all the black and white and made grey of it. There couldn’t only be cooperators and cheaters – that was too reductive. Take the sea. She was neither the water nor the hero nor the sword. Nor a bird sitting on the crest of a wave, awaiting the upchuck of a tumid corpse for the easy meat of his eyes. Nor the fish tossed and roiled by a battle taking place, not at all to do with them. Nor
the industry of blacksmiths, fed and fat on heroes’ mettle. She didn’t know what she was. Black and white were too few. All the greys, too many. It wasn’t enough.
2
Sorry Is the Child
February 2003
I
One Friday afternoon a year on, when they were walking to Heuston Station to be babysat by Auntie Ada – who was, those days, relieving their parents more often than not – Gael came to know the depth of her brother’s conviction.
He had become quieter and quieter, as though he believed that each household had a noise quotient and that, as long as the total noise amounted to the same decibel sum, he could control the Foess household balance by way of his silence.
Gael handled him like a cloth, rinsing, wringing, twisting, hoping to get something out of him – some grime. She was trying to get him to play Cursery Rhymes as they walked. ‘Just do the next bit. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’
‘I’m not changing cockle shells and you can’t make me.’
Guthrie was pink-cheeked from withstanding her resolve to have him grow up at her abnormal rate. Even though nature would hold her to being eighteen months older than him, with each passing month it seemed as if an extra year of difference were wedging itself between them.
‘Genius!’ She mouthed versions over and over to perfect it.
‘Don’t, Gael.’
‘With silver bell-ends, cocks, rear-ends and pretty maids all in a row!’ She snorted with laughter.
‘Stop! Don’t. That’s disgusting.’
‘That was all you, Guth.’
‘No it wasn’t.’
‘Yeah so.’
‘No it wasn’t! I was going to say, Na-na na-na, na-na na-na. Wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘Not bad … for a barely-eleven-year-old. Less good than mine though. Man, I’d been trying to work in a gardener called José who uses his hosé to make the garden grow … but you beat me by miles. Maybe I don’t need to worry about you any longer.’
Guthrie had crossed his arms and turned into an open gate to get away from her.
‘And now you’re trespassing,’ she said. ‘This is what I call progress.’
He swivelled around. ‘I’m not trespassing. This is a park. Leave me alone.’
Gael could see he was close to tears, so she left him to it. The gated garden had an exit farther along. She moved slowly towards it, running her fingertips along the black railing and relishing the pins and needles produced. She only wanted the best for him. It seemed as if he looked up to her, so she couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t take her help anymore. He believed everything would go back to normal, soon. Whenever soon was. Whatever normal was. Now that Gael was in secondary school, it was hard to look out for him. He had over a year left in primary school, but even after that, he couldn’t join her, as her secondary school was single-sex. Girls became fatuous versions of themselves around boys and she hadn’t wanted to deal with all that performance. There were always lunch breaks for meeting lads and being fingered behind suburban evergreen trees. Whereas Guthrie wanted to go to a mixed school, for reasons unknown. She did spy pale blue welts on his torso when he stepped out of the shower room in a hand towel, when the bath towels were all in the wash. That probably had something to do with it. His friends were mostly girls – too few to make a pack, so they were no use. Jarleth believed in individual responsibility ‘to put the civil into civilization’: all fights had to be debated in an orderly fashion, ideally with an introduction, a conclusion and a moral revelation. It’s cool if he’s gay, Gael thought, but then he really needs to know how to strike back or, at least, how to survive a beating.
When she reached the far gate, she saw him standing before a bulb-shaped pond that held on its waters a cast bronze statue. It was the figure of a woman reclining, though longer and more still than a human. She had been weathered green from the rippled roots of her hair to her crossed ankles. Mythical art like that – the exalted mother figure – transfixed Guthrie. He could have stood there for hours, Gael knew, and she calculated how long they had before the next train. Thirty-two minutes. There’d still be time to pick up a chai latte at the kiosk. Auntie Ada made vile tea. Gael reckoned she used hot tap water and mangled three cups’ worth out of one tea bag.
They were at Croppies Acre Memorial Park. She’d heard of Croppies before and could make sense of that, but she didn’t get the Acre bit. This shard of park wasn’t an acre, surely. Sive had told her that the statue was named after a character in Finnegans Wake: Anna Livia Plurabelle. Good name. Gael wondered if the ‘Wake’ had to do with the fact that Anna seemed to be having herself a little lie-down. Females were always sleeping in folklore. Sleeping frigid, never snoring. The sculpture was meant to personify the River Liffey, Abhainn na Life, which flows through Dublin Town. It had first been part of a fountain in the city centre on O’Connell Street, but it became a target for litter and graffiti and piss. Fairy liquid squirts that sent the water sudsing over the pavements as if she were in heat. ‘Floozie in the Jacuzzi,’ people called her. ‘The Hoor in the Sewer.’ Why did Dublin have to be so scuddy? The city council used the excuse of street renovations to extract her from the mobs and she spent a grim decade recovering inside a crate in a yard at St Anne’s Park in Raheny in the Northside, far as you like from her proud river.
Gael would have told Guthrie an embellished version of this tale; only, just then, he needed to be told something very different.
‘Don’t. Guthrie!’
But it was too late. He had stepped out onto the water, towards the mother sublime, as if the thin film of scum might hold his weight. One wouldn’t have needed to know how to swim in that pond, it was so shallow, and Guthrie could swim, but even so he gasped and flailed, his schoolbag still on his back and loading with water. It tugged him the wrong way down and his moccasin shoes couldn’t get a grip on the pond’s slimed base, so his arms and chin were the only parts of him above water. The gulping sounds were what disturbed her more than anything. ‘You sounded like a donkey getting off,’ she told him after. But in fact, it had sounded of something new to them both: it had sounded of the will to survive, falling short.
It was her first real scare, dragging her brother from the pond. His face was translucent white and unfamiliar – as if the experience had orphaned him and him alone. His eyes were unblinking, like astonished fish eyes beholding the sky for the first time. They shimmered. The sun was breaking through, so Gael emptied his bag and laid all his books out on the grass to drain – an illustrated Bible among them – then she peeled off his clothes, piece by piece, and wrung them out as best she could, trying to fathom what he’d meant by it. She couldn’t have upset him that much. ‘What’s going on?’ she pleaded, her wrists aching as she laboured to dress him again, but the only sound that came from him was of chattering teeth. His arms were widest at the elbow. The plastic buttons of her phone kept failing to register her thumbs clicking Contacts – Dad (Irish#) – Call. Call. When she finally managed, she could hear the function in his voice. ‘I’m in the middle of a meeting, Gael. What is it?’
While they waited, Gael rubbed hard circles on her brother’s back, around and around, trying to imprint them into him like the growth rings of a tree.
She eavesdropped from the hallway when Guthrie’s words returned to him late that night. With heroic restraint, he asked his father why he couldn’t walk across the water. He had as much faith as anyone he knew, he said, quietly. He really believed his faith was so strong that he could walk across the pond’s surface, and the Virgin Mother had been there in the middle and she had told him to come to her. The alarm clock on his bedside table measured the pause, like a metronome long after the music has ended.
‘Why couldn’t I, Dad? Why wasn’t my faith strong enough to hold me?’
The delay was too brief for truth to accrue.
‘Because believing something will work doesn’t make it work,’ Jarleth said. Then he clicked hi
s tongue, exhaled with mild disgust. ‘The Lord Jesus walking on water was a miracle.’
‘But my faith’s as strong as it goes. It is. So why couldn’t I make a miracle?’
The bedroom light switched off. The clacking sound was Jarleth wrenching triple-A batteries out of the alarm clock. He tossed them under the bed, where they spun fitful nonsense orbits like moths.
‘There are no more miracles.’
II
The seizure came a week later, when Sive returned from a tour in Poland. The smack on tarmac of aeroplane wheels and Guthrie’s skull were coincident, as if Guthrie had held it off until her plane touched down in Dublin. At the trace of burning rubber, his bicycle keeled over – its front wheel whirling for purchase on the foreshortened sky. He might have felt closest to his mother in those blowsy, flurrysome moments, Gael supposed. He might’ve been able to sense the whyfor in how she moved.
‘You can forget about A&E on a Friday night,’ Jarleth had said, inspecting Guthrie’s purpling wrist. The fit had toppled him on the way home, alone, from a classmate’s birthday party. (Some bossy girl Gael vaguely recalled. Bossy girls seemed to like Guthrie. It was his bone structure; his pearlescent skin; paranormal potential; his rawny, elfin, death-dancer beauty. They could judge themselves against him without suffering true envy’s vitriol. It didn’t matter who he liked back. It wasn’t his role to do the choosing.) Guthrie stuck out his tongue for the anti-inflammatory tablets his father allotted. ‘It’s only a sprain – nothing a few prayers won’t cure.’ Jarleth administered the medication. ‘Wash those down and off to bed with you.’ With a glance at his watch, he added, ‘No waiting up for your mother.’
Gael brought a spare pillow into Guthrie’s bedroom and saw that his ears were pinned for sounds of car tyres crunching up the drive. There must have been thoughts boiling over in him, since Jarleth put the lid on them last week. Dark and scalding thoughts, befouling his intrinsic shine. She placed the pillow alongside him and lifted his injured arm onto it:
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