The transformation was almost immediate, when they stepped into his flat (heat blasting, windows open wide, lights left on – including the spotlights above his paintings, the floor lighting below the kitchen cabinets and the film studio standing lamps – all incandescents). ‘Sorry about all that. Trying company, I’m sure. It’s all showmanship, really. Our way of alleviating the nefarious pressure of our jobs. When we’re sober, we’re sober. We treat our work like bloody brain surgery. And not remote-control-robot-up-the-nostril twaddle. I mean lifting skulls off like … yarmulkes! I’m dreadfully conscious of how many lives are on my desktop, Tonic.’
‘My flatmate just lent me The God Delusion. If you like, when I’m done– ’
‘It’s no delusion, Tonic. No matter how much money you make for others, it’s the failures that stand out in one’s memory. The individuals on their knees. You do what you can to make them cognizant of how complex our products have become – how they can’t possibly … That they often – we often, even – don’t fully understand what it is we’re dealing with. I forget what you do, but I know you know what I’m talking about. If I make an error … a misjudgment … it’s consequential beyond … so many lives and careers … It’s dreadfully … demanding. It’s …’
Gael couldn’t believe her eyes when Jules’s chin dimpled with cellulite. ‘Fucking exhausting.’ He threw himself on the green leather Chesterfield and limply wept. Gael was more amused than she’d been all evening, since being with Harper. She poured herself a bourbon at his antique globe bar and considered the situation. Nothing here was from IKEA. It was the weird mixture of aesthetics afforded by someone with the means, but without the modesty, to hire a designer. He had warned her in the taxi that she might have to wait until dawn before the Prime Minister’s tranquilizer wore off – he’d consumed a stallion’s dose of the stuff – but that her removing her frock and languishing on his carpet might prove just the antidote. When he realized she had no intention of doing housework in the nude for him or of swallowing his tears, he flicked on his sixty-five-inch curved-screen TV and began defensively explaining to Gael (who sat behind the sofa at the enormous dining table, messing around on his laptop) how much one could learn about markets from StarCraft, which was on the TV. He was watching people play a computer game? Gael asked. ‘Electronic sports. It isn’t gaming. This is witnessing the nimblest, sharpest minds of our generation challenging the bounds of pattern recognition and prescience. Titter all you like, Tonic, but there are ten million followers in South Korea alone. Since my MBA, I’ve learned more about strategy and tenacity from watching StarCraft than I have from any roundtable or mentorship. The truth is, I have eSports to thank for salvaging my relationship with my father …’
Gael tuned out his hero’s journey, took his credit card from his wallet on the hall table and carried it back to his laptop. Jules twisted around, his arm across the top of the couch. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Buying lingerie,’ Gael said. ‘How do you feel about latex?’ She gave a little smile. ‘You can write it off as protective clothing.’
She could see the briefest of considerations challenging his torpor. Then he waved his hand, which sent him slipping down the leather. He drew a blanket to his chest and breathed the greedy wet breath of a drinker.
Gael opened her calendar to do a little planning. In a few months, she would have been three years in London. Far too long. She never wanted to spend another underwhelming year such as this. This was not the heart of things. Here, there was too much protocol and not enough staking. The city was sprawling and uninspiring and flat. It took too long to get across it. She needed a hill to consider her prospects. She wanted a sore neck from looking up. She searched the weather. New York’s snowploughs bank metres of the stuff along the pavements until as late as March. That means it will still be cold and the wrong side of the work year. Wait a few months. Go in August. September, maybe. After summer’s dormancy, when the sharper air of expectation blows in. In the meantime, check in on Mum. Spend a long goodbye with Guthrie. Make sure his kids have an image of their auntie while she’s young. It would be a while before they’d see her again.
Round-trip business-class flights, Dublin–JFK. Pay Now. She listened to Jules’s snores, which sounded glad of their lot. No timbre of a life more vitally lived.
Proceed to Checkout.
No, she caught herself just in time. She’d only be met with more of the same. More Jarleths. She changed the selection to first class. Unticked the return box. One-way. That’s what she wants. She clicked: Enter. Only those who will have to click Return.
To sober up on the Tube, she texted ‘unsatisfied customer’ to a contact made earlier and worked down the backs of her shoes to stand on them walking home from the station so she wouldn’t have to suffer a shred more than she deemed fit. A shred? She looked up the unit of measurement for suffering but found only dols from the Latin dolor, which brought to mind Jules’s wad of dollars and false idols, specifically the scarecrows in cucumber fields from the Book of Jeremiah Jarleth loved to bring up, because the name began and ended as it did.
Thus He said, ‘Learn not the way of the nations, nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens because the nations are dismayed at them, for the customs of the peoples are vanity. A tree from the forest is cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman. They decorate it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move. Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good.’
Arms crossed against the cold, shoulders lifted to the rain, her delivery waits in the doorway. He’d gotten the message. He pulls down his hood when he sees her. ‘Had me dow-in was you comin.’
Gael drops her bag beside the pink panache plant on the doorstep. It’s not the worst neighbourhood in London, but she’s amazed every day when the plant’s not been stolen.
‘What do I call you?’ he asks.
‘Names can hurt, IKEA. They’re wrong to say that they can’t.’
The orange streetlight skims his cheekbones. ‘If I’m Eye-keeya, you’re Buy-ah.’
Gael takes out the fifty-pound note from Jules’s hall table and pushes it into IKEA’s trousers – not into the pocket, but inside the belt, inside the boxers, drives it past the warm tight knit of his pubic hair. ‘A tip.’ She feels the blood rushing into him. ‘My gosh,’ he says. His teeth sing in the dark. ‘Thass problema-ick, love. You can take that back when I done wiv you. Miss Aar-pah paid already. This just checking in like. Make sure you serviced propah.’ He picks her up as if she’s a strongbox to carry into the house.
No. They’re not going in, she says.
‘Wha? You don lif wi your movah. I seen your flah.’
He complies, coolly, when she says to put her down. He smoothens his clothes with his hands, trying to figure where he misunderstood. Gael doesn’t spot the offence in his expression because he’s squinting in the rain which is spilling like an argument that will leave everyone cross and sick. His thin rain jacket can’t be waterproof but his white musk scent must be. Without holding hands, he follows Gael around the side of the town house, where there’s a strip of pavement, a narrow column of grass and a six-foot hedge for privacy. ‘Vat’s ha’ a body get pneumonia,’ he says, eyeballing the pavement. Gael draws him up to the textured wall by his belt and opens his jeans buttons. He lifts her face by the chin and stalls until she looks at him. Her makeup runs. ‘Beau-y. Like Lois Lane, comic sty-el.’ When he tries to kiss her, she turns her head. He turns it back to him, looks confounded. ‘Can’t ki-shew neevah?’
She takes his hand from her chin, brings it to her mouth and spits. The saliva is half rain. He’s tries to pull away from her, deciding she’s a nutter. ‘Nah,’ he sings, ‘vis ain’t worf it,’ but she keeps a firm hold of his hand and draws it down between her legs. She pulls her knickers to t
he side, keeping them on. He falters only for a moment, then wrestles with the obstacles, presses her against the wall, one arm above and tries to interlock his fingers with hers. The scabrous wall exfoliates their knuckles. She wonders why Harper’s dad didn’t buy a solid British redbrick, like the old warehouses of the dock. He must not be an idiot-romantic. When he moves, IKEA’s jacket hisses and cracks like firewood. His muscles and ligaments inside the nylon slicker feel like bagged butcher’s cuts. Skirt steaks, maybe. His penis is so thick Gael feels a tiny tear on one side of her on first entry – a soft-tissue slit that keeps being worked, as if by a thumb – and the mild pain trumps whatever pleasure could have been achieved. She draws him down onto the pavement to have all his weight on her, which is not enough. His brow is furrowed but it’s too late now to change anything. Her tailbone digs into the coarse cement. He tries to protect her back and her head with his hands, cradling, but she pushes all the non-essential parts of him away. She turns from the convex meniscus of his lips, like a child from a spoon of medicine. ‘Do you wan this?’ he’s asking, gently, over and over. ‘You wan it like this? Out hee-ya? Say what you wan.’ He’s asking. He’s forced to take consent from her fingernails tearing his buttocks, the back of his neck, his skin that fits so tightly to his muscle that fits so tightly to his bones, it’s astonishing there’s any give. She’s feeling for it. The margin of error. ‘Shit, can’t you relax?’ he says. ‘I can’t keep goin you tight like tha, girl. Juss relax.’
But she couldn’t. She can’t. She couldn’t let go of him. If you press your fucking lips against my face again, she says, you better fucking draw blood. ‘Aw-right, I won’t ki-shew.’ Bite me instead. ‘Nah. White skin mark easy,’ he says. ‘Bruise like when you squeeze a flower peh-al. I won’t bite you. Won’t ki-shew neevah.’
Good.
‘Won’t warm you wi my hands. Won’t hold you. Won’t ask your name. Won’t come inside. Won’t come back.’ His groin goes and goes. Uncircumcised. And there it is. There’s the give. His eyes startle like hazard lights. ‘Come on now, girl. You geh-in weh.’
The hallway lights flicker on when Gael finally goes in. Her trodden shoes lie on the grass somewhere. London can have them. Three flights of stairs thaw her just enough so that she can turn the key in the lock. She’s functioning in the way a phone with no credit still lets you call emergency services. In the dark, she soundlessly goes to the front window, looks down the street. IKEA is gone. The living room is equipped with his wares, as if it always has been. His cum is like sleet on her stomach. She wipes her dress against its glacial slip. The only movement out there is weather and animal. A large rat, or a small fox worrying a flooded gutter. Gael reminds herself of a shop owner, just now, standing inside her shop window, looking out, burdened by what’s going unread, unpurchased, stale. Then, the tableau of her own mother looking out the rained window occurs to her like a gas. She starts. Harper is there at her room door, lifting her eye covers (cucumber slices on white cotton) to her forehead. Her hair is a thorn-halo. She goes to say something, but breaks off at the sound of Gael’s teeth chattering. She turns on the light and forgets sarcasm. ‘Where’s your coat?’
Gael shakes, or shrugs, half turned.
Harper steps towards her. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘Outside, maybe. Switch off the light.’
Harper approaches Gael warily, peers out the window down to their gate, then draws the blinds. She gets her dressing gown and drags her duvet – still warm with sleep – from her bed to the couch. ‘Get under.’
‘I think … I’ll shower.’
‘Later.’ Harper sees that Gael is dripping wet and holds out the dressing gown. ‘Take that thing off,’ she says, eyeing the dress.
Gael didn’t realize how drunk she must have got, but her head is hot and thick, as if filled with an untried substance. There’s no spinning, but her sinuses throb and all down her throat, it aches. She’s on the sofa when she starts to tremble. Or it could be the kettle boiling. Harper reaches around Gael’s hips and behind her bottom to lift her. She peels the dress upwards and Gael puts her hands routinely ‘up to heaven’ as Guthrie had done by the pond. Just as matter-of-fact, Harper peels off the wet underthings. The shivering is its own force. She feeds Gael’s hands through the gown’s fleece arms and the dampness of her skin makes the fabric clump and stick. Soon she is covered by the duvet and Harper is kneeling on the carpet, cupping one of her soiled and blister-ruined feet. When the towel lands on her skin, Gael cries out, but the heat is a greater relief from the stinging cold than the sting of the sores is painful. Harper has a whole stack of face towels beside her, with one empty basin and a basin full of boiling water. She throws the first towel into the empty bowl and takes a fresh one, dips it into the boiling water and scalds herself trying to wring it out.
‘I was reading Nabokov. To remember what it’s like to have a friend. An’ a intact ego,’ Harper says. ‘Vicodin sucks. An’ I broke my vibrator. Anyway, in his novel, which is mostly a poem, there’s this bit that reminded me of your brother. How you said he’s barely having fits now, even though they got way worse when the kids were due. At the start. The way he talks about them like they’re a gift, when they happen? The auras. Nabokov went:
There was a sunburst in my head.
And then black night.
That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed
through space and time.’
After a moment, Harper takes another face towel from the stack and soaks it. She squeezes the excess water out. It steams around her, as if – with the cucumber eye covers on her forehead – she’s performing some lavish spa therapy. She runs the hot towel up Gael’s shin, then along the inside of her knee. And doesn’t stop. She doesn’t look up and Gael doesn’t make a sound. Only, she thinks, Of course, and aches with all that hasn’t been achieved. Harper must be able to see her, finally, how she has always wanted to see her. So she could relieve her doubt: the biggest distress of Harper’s life. ‘It’s beautiful, I thought,’ Harper says. ‘When I read that poem. Even though … it’s meant to be a farce.’ She pushes the duvet aside and kisses Gael’s thigh just once. She wipes Gael’s white belly and hip with the towel, where someone had left their mark. She will leave no such mark. No one will ever make of Gael territory. Harper knows this. She draws the towel across Gael’s sex and then meets it with her lips. The soft tissues stick, because the hot towel made the pink delicate skin dry and tight, so Harper traces her tongue around her lips and it’s hard to believe anything could feel so excessive and essential at once. No textile could approximate it. No precipitation. No thing could be sunk into like the organs of speech, belonging to no one, just as Gael had wanted. Belonging only to the moment. The glug of water is the basin spilling its contents into the carpet. Tomorrow’s mess. But Gael had already decided to have left, by then. She had stayed in one place too long. Foolishly lingered long. A little longer, there … here … No – it can’t. It’s all too formal. Foreseeable. What quality of person would push a boulder along an even field? She needs to lift herself up to be lifted. Her hips rise with her pulse and the cucumber slivers are staring at her like an idol. This is less … routine. This is not at all – take it or, left – hips above her head and, leave it, how did they get? there or that, dizzy. She is so like a sunflower turning, up, in spite of, its long tough stem needing, take its, light, its synthesis and she is she’s, uproot risen, symbiotic – barely as much as needs blood left in wherever her head – the blood reversed course, must it have – it was; she tries though, tried then, to tell her, self to say nerve ending, it’s, fuck, nerve only – all nerve us less – just – fuck – no function to it less, least of all, least of everything, meaning – she can’t
felt
only
she could have
swallow the sound it makes
the bliss
too like a
whimper
Over. alltoo much
much
/> now
all too
Off.
Over.
She pushes Harper away.
She pushes her away, lovingly.
Forces her away.
5
How to Price an Option
August 2011
Home was no longer where she’d left it by the time Gael returned to its doorstep. In the year and a half since she’d been home, Guthrie had moved into a one-bedroom flat with the twins. Croftwood Drive, Cherry Orchard, Ballyfermot. The address didn’t seem so bad. The Cherry Orchard part sounded romantic, even. (Granted, Harper had once dragged Gael to Chekhov’s play by that name. Their seats were restricted-view dress circle perches, so it was all a bit of a blur, but Gael recalls the sound of the cherry orchard being cut down at the closing curtain.) But the reality of Guthrie’s place is more marble orchard than cherry. At least Sive and Art’s new address isn’t misleading: Ashbrook, Pelletstown.
Standing at the window of her mother’s study, Gael surveys the ashes and pellets. The urban-sprawl territory of half-dreamt, half-cement department stores, FOR SALE luxury apartments still-not-sold by the furlong, construction-site car parks without arrows to tell cars which way to carry on because no one really knows what’s up ahead or if we’re better off circling back or staying put. Sure, all sorts of things are put on the back burner. Wasn’t the Tower of Babel left up in the air when they ran out of funds? A load of foreign workers left in the lurch. Couldn’t understand a word of their eviction notices.
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