‘You’re welcome to join,’ Gael manages to say. ‘I’m sure M here has a California king.’
Harper’s downturned mouth is like a child’s drawing of a frown, except it’s always like that. It doesn’t lend her ample cynicism. Gael’s brown lipstick had breached its borders. ‘It’s the one in the middle,’ Harper says. ‘The one you were in front of.’
Gael gives a curt nod. ‘You’ve got good instincts, Harper. By and large.’
M presses the lift button in a way Gael hopes isn’t portending. ‘Let’s take the stairs.’
People are muscling past. Gael lifts her blazer from where it straddles her bag with all the togetherness she has in her. All the togetherness she needs. Harper seems to be searching for an Adam’s apple in the middle of Gael’s marble-white, marble-carved throat, but there is none. There is no flex. No hitting pulse. The skin appears so cool and smooth, you might wipe your finger across it and come away with dew.
Gael wants to wipe her fingers along the creases in Harper’s neck like hems; to kiss her cheek; to cripple her with tenderness and see what affections she won’t abide. She wants to take her by the hand and go shopping for an axe. She wants to see if laughter is something to live off; if it won’t fill her out, so she doesn’t hurt Harper with her hollows and edges. But they can’t have everything in between.
‘You want me to wait outside?’ M says.
Gael shakes her head and there’s the movement in the throat. ‘I’m coming.’ M holds out his hand, but she doesn’t see it. She’s looking at Harper’s wrist. At a welt the cuffs left on her skin, above the silly watch. ‘Please don’t follow me.’
Tears stream down Harper’s face, but it’s a contradiction:
‘Woolf was probably right,’ she says. ‘It’s better to be locked out than in.’
The wind runs straight through Gael’s too-light clothes and her heels feel shaky on the footrests. She has to hold faster to M than she’d like. At least he’s warm. The traffic is intimidating. They skirt and lurch through it; pick up speed across the Queensboro Bridge. All this part is new, so it perks her up. It helps to move the mind outward.
At the traffic lights on the far side of the bridge, M tells her there’s an artist called Jan Vormann who uses bits of coloured plastic, like LEGO blocks, to fill in holes in broken walls. ‘You find his works in cities all over the world,’ M says. ‘There’s a couple in Brooklyn. I can take you there.’ The lights have gone green, but he waits. Cars toot their horns and call out the window and veer around the bike until the lights are back to red. The streetlights gleam off the open visor of M’s helmet. It’s not what she had expected. It improves him.
‘No. Let’s just fuck.’
M twists the right handle back and the engine revs. ‘Your call. Your celebration. But maybe go there tomorrow. Take a picture for your brother.’
‘Celebrate selling his painting to a friend?’
M twists back a little and the leather jacket squeaks like a damp cloth on glass. ‘Your friend bought the first. Set off a run on the rest. Sold out in under fifteen minutes. It happens, sometimes. People see red stickers go up, they want in.’ The lights turn green again and this time he takes off. Before tapping down his visor, he says, ‘You made your brother rich.’
9
Diminishing Returns
December 2011
I
December can be dismally autumnal in Dublin; kids kicking puddle water at one another for want of snowballs. But the day she flies home is so exultantly blue and clear-skied, she doesn’t realize the plane is about to hit ground. A thousand feet of cloud typically serve as a warning: a duration of weather you can’t hold your breath through. She snatches the next passenger’s knee and glances out the window to see the glisten of frostmelt on tarmac. ‘Buy me a drink first,’ the woman says. As a laugh escapes her lips, Gael feels it happening already, upon the very moment of contact: the familiar tether slink around her wrist. ‘The shock of being home, is it?’
If home means Sive and Art’s, she isn’t headed home. She’s headed for Guthrie’s. Since that phone call in her very first week in New York, they haven’t spoken. But he had offered a kind of truce. He sent a photo of Ronan in A&E with the tiny hospital wristband in shot. The caption read: ‘Your nephew. Just turned two and already a druggie. Where did I go wrong?’ Gael was relieved to find out in an email from Sive that it wasn’t anything. Ronan had swallowed a fistful of pills from his father’s expired ‘medication’ that, in an effort to help clean up, Art had thrown in the waste-paper basket. At the hospital, Guthrie was concerned that they’d not pumped Ronan’s stomach; only had him drink something that made him puke. Was that enough? Poor Ronan. Having to spew the nice sugar pills. On the upside, he might be forever disinclined to eat sweets.
The twins are running rings round a woman seated on the lawn when Gael’s taxi pulls up. Although they’re running in a circle, it’s clear that Soraca is in front and Ronan is chasing in her wake. It’s only been a hundred days, but they’re bigger. More decided-upon. They’re dressed for the ski slopes. Hand-me-downs from some better-off kids who winter in Austria. They don’t run to her as she opens the gate, but they do come to a halt and stare with their fingers in their mouths.
‘Who’s yer one?’ the woman says to them, her eyes guarded on Gael. ‘Who’s that one, when she’s at home?’
Gael doesn’t want to feel the twins’ cool reaction to her, or to have to tell some randomer who she is, so she looks to the house. A narrow terraced house on the leftmost end of the block. Pebbledash walls. Flat roof. One of the upstairs tenants is looking out the mesh curtains and he lifts his chin at Gael when he’s caught. The reverse nod of the post-crash Irish. She reciprocates. In Guthrie’s flat, the living-room blinds are angled open, but it’s still hard to make out the room. Could it be a reflection, somehow, or are there really half a dozen people sitting around as at an AA meeting?
‘It’s nearly over now,’ the woman says. ‘One of these days.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Are you the one was in America? Are you their auntie?’
‘Yeah. Are you their babysitter?’
‘Not really. I’m Monica.’
‘Gael.’
Gael moves towards them and drops her bags. She’s brought the empty portfolio back for Guthrie. It seems charmed, now, even though she doesn’t go in for that sort of mawk. But maybe he will. All going well. She kneels down on the clumpy grass, facing the house, and invites high fives from the kids. They resume their running game – now around two people – and slap high fives on every orbit. Through the front window, Gael sees that the people in there are all ages and sorts, with bad clothes unifying them. It’s weird to see her little brother fraternizing with fully fledged adults. It occurs to her that this is something she hasn’t seen much of. But that’s not the only reason it’s strange. She asks:
‘What is it?’
Monica peeks over her shoulder, then back at the twins. ‘Check-in session,’ she declares. The way she pronounces them, the words rhyme.
‘Check-in?’ Gael spots Guthrie among the circle. She’d been looking for his bun, but he’s cut it off. Shaved it, even. It’s not razor short, but it’s not a barber’s cut either. She can see that he’s talking. ‘I’m guessing it’s not a hotel?’
‘Some kind of hotel!’ Monica tugs Ronan’s trousers up as he passes. ‘It’s more a sort of … community service, nothing official. Most lunchtimes, his door’s open for a chat. Some of them use and all. You know? On the brown. But the most it’s just a mental health ting, you know? Neighbourly. Making sure we’re all coping and everyting. He cured hisself of his fits. And the wee kids on his own and all. He’s a good influence on any of us. Noble sort of person. He has a gift, so he does. Sure you must know that. And you his sister.’
A few missed high fives impugns Soraca, who has run to the exterior wall where a casket-sized flowerbed is about to lose its parsley and mint. She grabs one plant in each hand
and is getting into a squat position to root them out. Monica’s up to stop her. ‘Seen her da pulling out weeds, so she did,’ she explains. ‘That’s a living ting, pet, so it is. You can’t go murderin. D’y’hear me, Soraca?’ Monica addresses Gael. ‘Would you ever mind runnin in fer me there love? They’re gettin antsy. There’s Tupperware with sausages and carrots in the fridge.’
Gael looks to the house warily. ‘Sure.’ But then the front door opens and a handful of people spill out quietly and file straight down the driveway so as not to overstay their welcome. One guy, who looks like someone to cross the street from – like the guy who spliced Guthrie’s face in Phoenix Park – ruffles Ronan’s hair and gives him a pistachio-toothed smile on his way. Ronan clucks, unjudgingly.
‘Here we go,’ Monica says. ‘They’ll get a proper lunch now. Nice to meet yiz anyway.’
‘Actually,’ Gael says, ‘do you mind hanging on for a few minutes? I’ll bring out the snacks.’
Monica looks unsure and scans Gael’s belongings.
‘It’s just,’ Gael says, ‘I owe him an apology and it’s easier–’
‘Say no more. If he’s owed an apolgy, I’ve all the time you like for that. Come here, Ronan, till we see can we find a shamrock.’ Monica takes Ronan by the hand and winks at Gael.
The first thing he says, she misses, because of the gaps where his two front lower teeth should be. She’d imagined an implant for the one she knew was knocked out. The other must have followed. It changes his face considerably.
‘I’m sorry.’
The words hang there and she resists all urges to qualify them. To vocalize the bulk of the debt of which those two words are the interest. To point out that, even a year ago, she would have done some very dark deeds to get what she needed. Look at that for growth. This is, after all, a more generous act than she ever plans to repeat. Guthrie waits, to see if the conditions of the apology will arrive in due course. He doesn’t look enraged. He doesn’t look forgiving either. He’s dragging the four beanbags to line them up along the wall. An oval coffee table is a new addition to the room. Other than that, there’s the sofa, tent and playpen. Boxes. Some books and blankets in the built-in shelves. The lingering smell of BO and hangover from the crowd just left. Guthrie looks out the window, with his hands on his narrow hips.
‘They’re doing beautifully,’ Gael says.
But he’s observing the portfolio; not his children. ‘You couldn’t save even one?’
Gael watches Monica delve through her bag and put whatever she retrieved in her mouth for safekeeping. Then she rolls up one sleeve of her fleece, takes the item from her teeth, unwraps it like a barley and slaps it onto her upper arm. Nicotine. Gael says nothing.
‘Why do I feel like you didn’t try?’
No wavering on the line taken. ‘I’m sorry.’
Guthrie looks at the crime scene of a carpet. Some moments pass. Then, he turns and says, ‘Okay. What’s done is done.’
It occurs to Gael that every single thing her brother says will refer in some way to his violation. And now she’s become another of his exploiters. Is this his way of healing himself, though? Tolerating the awful? How much can you write off as sunk costs?
She turns and steps towards him. ‘Can I say hello?’
Guthrie knits his brow, as if to say, What a question. Gael pounds herself against him in an embrace she’s been craving for months. He smells of tree sap. She feels their ribs lace like fingers. The onset of emotion. She presses her eyes into his shoulder to hold it back. That wouldn’t be fair. While her head is buried in the recess below his clavicle, she says, ‘I’m sorry for what happened.’ This is what she had been sorry for, and only this, but always and ever after, this. ‘I wish you’d told me. I could have–’
‘I heard …’ He takes her arms and unwraps them from him, but keeps a hold of her forearms, until it slips to just the ends of their fingers, hooked. ‘I heard you met up with Dad in New York.’
Gael nods.
‘And you didn’t bottle him.’
‘I got the sense some of the people around us were bodyguards.’
He smiles this new unbuttressed smile. ‘I’m glad.’
‘Wait, Guthrie. I can’t just … We can’t be … Listen. You’re the only one I want to be close to. And that means it has to be real. We can’t just … pretend. I can’t have been absent for this awfulness in your life and carry on at arm’s length from you so you never use me for support or the perspective I can offer because we’re on different wavelengths since–’ Guthrie unhooks his hands from Gael’s and crosses his arms so that his fingers are tucked in his pits, thumbs pointed to the ceiling. ‘I’m not about to hunt her down or anything. It’s you I’m concerned for–’
‘I have someone,’ Guthrie says. Pauses. ‘Who watches over me, so you don’t have to. I don’t need your protection. And if that makes you angry, Gael, then yes we are on different wavelengths.’
Gael counts down from ten in her head before she speaks. Ten-fuckthousand-nine-fuckingthousand-eight-motherfucking-thousand … ‘You did not get … what you deserved.’ She counts from five this time. ‘You did not have … a guardian angel protecting you.’ Now from three. ‘You do not get enlightenment … or anything at all fucking positive … from rape, except HIV.’
‘I got the twins. And I deserve them.’
‘There is no such thing as deserve!’ She’s nearly shouting. ‘It shouldn’t be a word! It doesn’t mean anything! “Deserving person?” It doesn’t make enough sense to be an oxymoron.’
‘I don’t know what matters to you. Everything’s throwaway.’ He sounds so mature, it’s scaring her.
‘Not everything.’
‘It’s all irony,’ he says.
‘It’s not. I’m not trying to be funny. It’s not funny. It’s massive. It’s everything. No one gets what they deserve. He fucked you up to make you think that.’
‘Listen to yourself ! “Make me think that.” Like I’m a piece of clay.’ His cheeks tighten and he glances out the window. ‘It’s as if … you think there’s something you can do for me. And part of me believes that comes from a good place. But it’s also from a selfish place, Gael.’
Looking up at the low ceiling, she tries to think of what to say, but there are too many competing lines of argument. Too much argument all together. She doesn’t know what substance it is that they’re pouring into the scales. But the weight keeps shifting.
‘Wait here a sec, will you.’ He disappears to the kitchen and hurries out the front door with the Tupperware. Monica looks bewildered as he speaks with her. Then he pulls back the waistband of Soraca’s ski pants to check her nappy. When he gets back to the living room, Gael notes that the pastiness of his skin has faded since she last saw him. The twins’ fondness for being outdoors has freckled him. He looked like the longest one sober from the group of drunks, or whatever they were.
‘You look good.’
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘You look thinner.’
‘Those teeth, though …’
Guthrie minces his jaw. ‘I’m used to it. And the twins love it when I stick my tongue through.’
‘That is a legitimate excuse,’ Gael says. ‘But what if you discover the perfect job you never knew you wanted in a few years’ time and the missing teeth cost you it?’
‘Then it wouldn’t be the perfect job.’
She sighs heavily. ‘I couldn’t mould you if I tried.’
Guthrie scratches his cheek and there’s the slightest suggestion of his nails meeting stubble. ‘I don’t want to make Monica late for work. She’s on a lunch break. Unless you’re running off straightaway?’
‘Just one thing first. It’s important. I’m gonna book us a meeting with an accountant. Is there a time that suits, before Christmas?’
‘An accountant? For what?’
She tries to give nothing away. No feeling, triumph or grief. ‘Your paintings, Guth. They sold.’
He looks like he’s clamping the
teeth he has left, as if he’s doing his own countdown. ‘I don’t know, Gael. I don’t know if I want to change anything. Things are good, like this. They’re tight. It’s not like it’s easy. The dole’s down to a hundred euro a week now, for people my age. But I can’t afford to be disqualified from it. With welfare pieced together, I don’t have to borrow too much to stay like this till they’re in school. Austerity cut subsidies for childcare. So that’s not an option. But anyway, I love getting to raise them. And doing what I can with the healing practice and … I’m studying for the Leaving Cert.’
‘What?’ Gael says. ‘You’re doing your Leaving?’
‘Yeah.’ He dips his head, to conceal his half smile. ‘Only a couple of subjects this year.’
‘That’s amazing! How the heck–’
‘I’m hoping to sit the first set of exams next May. Which seems like ages off, but I only manage an hour before bed and most nights I’m too wrecked to take anything in. May doesn’t seem far enough away.’
‘Do you have any idea how good I am at times tables, Guth? I can so help. That’s what you do for the Leaving Cert, right? I forget.’
Guthrie thumps her arm. ‘Don’t mock me.’
‘Long multiplication and Je voudrais aller chez vous, no? Quid pro quoi?’
‘Gael.’
‘Alright, alright. But I do want to help. I mean it.’
A few beats of silence play out before he asks, ‘Does that mean you’ll be around?’
Gael considers the serried beanbags at the wall and has an idea. ‘No. Just for a couple of weeks. I’ve got job offers to negotiate. But listen, I still want to take you to an accountant. But I have a suggestion … of what you could do with the money. Once we’ve fixed your teeth.’
Guthrie shakes his head resignedly. ‘I take it it’s not: bury it in the soil.’
Gael smiles. ‘No.’ She thought he’d been too young to remember. ‘Not that.’
‘Honestly, Gael, I think I need a while. To work through my feelings about it, before anything. I half wanted to just put it behind me.’ He’s distracted again by the twins. They’re getting stroppy.
Orchid & the Wasp Page 32
