Five Days Apart

by Chris Binchy

  “Nothing. I just know she didn’t realize that you were interested. It wasn’t on her mind. She was there because of me—”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “—and I know that may hurt you and I wish I could do something about it but I can’t. She came along that night to see me. I realized it as soon as we started talking and then I saw that I was there because of her as well. It wasn’t planned or calculated. It’s just how it worked out. I’m not saying it’s fair, and if the situation was reversed I know I’d be as upset as you are, but it’s just bad luck that you liked the same girl. That’s all. I’m so sorry, but I love her. I can’t tell you anything more than that.”

  “Love?” I said. “For fuck’s sake.”

  “Yes. Love. That’s it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s enough for me now.” He looked at me, and I saw hope in his face for a moment. He thought that it was over, that in an instant I had believed and forgiven. He could be so stupid. “There’s no point in talking about it anymore, is there? You’ve told me everything.”

  “Do you understand?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t,” I said, “but you’re not going to say anything to change that.”

  He stood up.

  “I know what you wanted, David, but this is how it’s turned out. I’m not messing around. This is different. I’ll give you a ring next week sometime.” He took a step to the door and then stopped. “And she doesn’t know that you were interested in her. She didn’t know and I didn’t tell her.”

  “Why would you tell her? For Christ’s sake, don’t make out that you did me a favor. It’s no consolation.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said one last time, and he was gone.

  I sat there and replayed the conversation. Relived it. Cut out the irrelevancies. Broke it down into good and bad. The sinner and the sinned-against. A two-dimensional cartoon world. The clarity and simplicity of a reduced moment was what I needed. Rage could turn this murky depressing dilemma into something that I could evaluate and judge. Let the mob rule of my emotions sort it out. Burn away the detail. I thought myself into a fury. It was simple. It made sense to me. We could never get back to where we had been. It was certain. I couldn’t trust him, with his talk of connection and love and bad luck. He didn’t value me as a friend. That was over. It was almost a relief, not to have to deal with the situation but to begin imagining a future without him around. There were other people. I had friends. There were alternatives. With my finals coming up I would have enough to think about. Cut him out. Clean. I stood up and stretched. For the first time since the Saturday, I left the flat and walked to the supermarket.

  But rage burns out if you don’t keep feeding it. When you come back only hours later, all that’s left are ashes and no memory of the heat that you’re sure you felt before. I wouldn’t have the energy to sustain my anger. I knew that quietly, reluctantly even, when I was deciding that I would eliminate him. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that in time a different version of this would begin to unfold and insinuate its way into my consciousness, one that was more nuanced and subtle and sensible. One that realized that big sweeping gestures aren’t always the right way to go, that would consider the possibility that if the situation had been reversed then I might have behaved the same way that he had. I might recognize that to lose my closest, oldest friend, would damage and hurt me no matter what else I felt, and I might see that I hadn’t in fact been humiliated, that the offense that he had committed only existed between the two of us. Nobody else knew about it, if he was to be believed. And already I believed him.

  But there was another reason that the resolution of this situation was inevitable. To cut him out would mean not seeing her again, and that was something that I was never going to allow to happen.

  Chapter Four

  The room was in the depths of the college arts block, the farthest possible point from daylight or air, down a staircase that was used by the cleaners to get bleach and floor polishers and new mop heads from the caged storage area or by the porters who came, bickering and sniffing, looking for the spare flip charts and podiums and trestle tables that lay with broken chairs and desks along the corridor that led to our room. A sheet of typing paper with the words “Computer Lab 005” on it was the only marker. Walking in to the wheezing and coughing of the put-upon old computers, the buzz of the strip lighting, the smell of bedsit and underwashed males and bad coffee and hot printers, I would feel my heart slow slightly. I would breathe deeper. A feeling of comfort, if not happiness. My own space.

  There were deadlines coming. The end of the term was weeks away, and projects had to be delivered. They would contribute to our final grades and follow us around in the months ahead when we began to look for work. Anything that went wrong now would come back to haunt you, visible in the facial expressions of people on interviewing panels, who would equate low marks with badness, good marks with intelligence and character and honor. It was a moral thing. The lab had been given to us at the start of the year when the department realized that leaving us to share facilities with a bunch of first-years and engineering students would result in the more motivated of us complaining and the quieter ones disappearing. They thought that putting us in our own space would allow us to bond and support each other through what would be a difficult year, and it worked. Having been independent hostile republics for most of our course, in the final year we came together as a group, united in complaint. This bunker that they had sentenced us to for the rest of our stretch, the outdated, outmoded equipment that we had to use, the contempt of the porters and cleaners and the other students, the length of the projects, the smell of each other. It was a jaded kind of railing against the system that didn’t reflect how much we enjoyed being there, speaking in a language that we all understood, doing work that was vital and important and beyond every other person in the maze of corridors and classrooms that was there above us, invisible and silent, stretching into the sky.

  I had been a solid performer for the previous two years, but now, with the end in sight, I started to do well. Anxiety sharpened my abilities. We started putting in twelve-hour days to make those final deadlines. I arrived with the same black rings under my eyes as everybody else, drank the same burnt sugary coffee, and ate the same cling-filmed sandwiches and sweaty pastries. I sat on the same discarded breeze blocks outside the fire exit and smoked the same cigarettes and hid my nausea. We played games on the network and sniped at each other, shot each other in the head from balconies, through trellises, suspended from wires. At some point that we all instinctively recognized, we would stop playing and get back to work for a few more hours. Complaining, yawning, stretching.

  I plugged into the low-grade panic in the room, could feel the crippling stasis that afflicted some of the shakier people, cursed in their inability to settle, to concentrate, to get things done. None of them would have picked me out as a confident person. I wouldn’t have seen myself that way, but I was cooler than I might have anticipated, and just smart enough when I discovered this fact not to talk about it.

  Walking home in the first warm evenings of the year, I would think about what I had to get done the next day, how I could finish a project that had been nearly ready for weeks. I thought about what I would do for the summer and wondered where I would end up working. Whether I would be of a suitable standard, and whether my coworkers would be bearable. At the weekend I went down to my parents’ house to wallow in their concern.

  “You look so thin,” my mother said after hugging me when I came in. She saw what she expected to see, the poor student down from Dublin in need of fattening. I couldn’t tell if it was true. “You look so tired.”

  “I’m not, really. I just fell asleep on the bus. It was hot and slow.”

  She was putting things on the table.

  “So how have you been? Not too hassled.”

  “Not at all.” />
  “It’s going well then?” my father asked.

  “I think so. I feel happy enough.”

  “It’ll all be over in a couple of weeks,” she said then.

  “Yeah. That’ll be good.”

  “Are you sleeping well?” she asked.

  “I’m sure you’ll do brilliantly,” he said before I’d answered. It was as if they had bought a book. Ask questions. Show concern. Remember to seem relaxed.

  “Yes, I hope so,” I said. “How are things here?” I asked then.

  “Fine,” my father said. “You know yourself. No news.”

  “Boring really,” she said. “You hungry?”

  I had no idea of what they talked about when I wasn’t around, or even if they talked at all. It seemed possible that their routines were so established that there was no need for conversation, that they existed in a happy silence of familiarity. Since I’d left, they never had anything to tell me. It was almost suspicious.

  In the living room later, with the smell of old flowers beginning to turn in a vase in the fireplace and the sound of the country coming in through the open window, birds and farm machinery ticking away and beneath that the faraway sound of motorway traffic turned into something shimmering and natural in the distance, I was lying on the couch reading the paper. My mother was across from me with a book, and my father was harrumphing down in the kitchen as he followed too literally the instructions on our dinner, counting the number of times he pierced the plastic film with a fork. I was happy to be there. I was allowed to have a Saturday like this. What else would I be doing?

  “How’s Alex?” she said then, casual, and I looked at her for a second too long, wondering did she know something.

  “He’s fine.”

  “Have you seen him recently?”

  “Yeah. Well, no, not recently, but he’s okay, I think.”

  “We haven’t seen him in ages.”

  “I know, yeah. He’s had a lot on.” I looked back at the paper.

  “Does he have exams as well?”

  “Yeah. But he’s got another year to go.”

  “Yes, of course. That’s right.” And then when I thought she’d finished, she said, “You should give him a call and have a night out.” I put the paper down and stared at her. “You look like you need it, is all,” she said.

  “What are you talking about? Who?”

  “You,” she said.

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  She smiled.

  “I know that. But it would do you good. Forget about the work for a while.”

  “Why? Do I seem stressed? As I lie here reading the paper?”

  “Yes, to me you do.”

  I shouldn’t have asked, I should have known what she would say. I felt a prickle of agitation.

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “I think you should give him a call.”

  “I’m not going to,” I said then.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t need to. Because I was out last week with people from my class, and because I’m busy. It’s all okay. Everything is under control. But I don’t need to be ringing Alex up and arranging nights out to keep you happy.”

  “Did something happen?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “Jesus, no. Not at all. I’ve a lot going on, and he’s busy with other things. Is that hard to understand? He’s seeing somebody, so he’s not around as much. It’s fine.” She waited again before saying anything.

  “Do you not like her?”

  I smiled. This was my own fault. I’d let her drag me down here.

  “She’s fine. That’s not it at all. Just . . . nothing at all.” I half laughed then. “There’s no story. I’m busy, he’s busy, that’s it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But I still think you should give him a call.”

  “I will. When things quieten down, I will.”

  “Old friends, you know?”

  “I do,” I said, though really I didn’t. Old friends what? I held the paper up and hid behind it. I could feel her looking at me. After a minute I put it down. “Yes?”

  She was smiling at me.

  “You’ll meet someone, you know.”

  “Meet someone?”

  “You’re a good boy.”

  “I know I am,” I said. “You are very kind. I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with this conversation, but thank you for that.”

  “You will,” she said. “I know you will.”

  “That’s enough now,” I said.

  I wasn’t lying to her. I intended to get in touch with Alex. There had been messages from him on my phone that I had deleted without reading. There were phone calls that I had ignored, not to be cruel or out of anger. I just didn’t know what else to do. I could think of him and what he meant to me. I could picture her and immediately the stupid hope that had been blown apart came into my head. I didn’t know where I could go with it. What could I say to him? I missed him around the place but something was stopping me from getting in contact. It was a mess. If I could talk to them one time and tell them everything: the innocence of how I had envisaged it all, how much I wanted her but realized now that that wasn’t going to happen. But did that mean that I had to be her friend, some nice guy that she could talk to?

  I thought about her as I fell asleep, and of him, and then tried to guide myself anywhere else less contentious. Often I woke with the impression of having sorted it out, a clear sense of having stood in front of them and explained my position. I was fluent and focused. I enjoyed myself as I made well-argued points about honor and propriety and friendship in language that got progressively more complicated and unanswerable. How I had been wronged, but it didn’t matter because I had other, bigger things to worry about. It always ended the same way, with me walking away as they stared after me, devastated. It was the impression of my language that stayed with me, the thrill that I felt when I was concisely summarizing the whole story in words that explained everything as it should be, with no room for interpretation. I left them speechless, realizing how grave their transgression had been. I tried to remember what I had said to them when I woke, what it was that had shook them so deeply, but nothing stuck. Then one time, not long after I’d gone to bed, I jerked awake with a bump from a racing half-sleeping state. I had just started to address him, and the words were still in my head when I came to. They were “You fucking cheating prick.”

  As soon as he saw her that first night, I must have realized where it would all end up. That it wouldn’t be me. I just indulged my fantasy until reality eventually crashed the party and I stood looking at the two of them, pretending to be surprised that the pattern of everything that had gone before had overridden the alternative plans that I had imagined.

  I kept it out of my mind as much as I could. My days were filled with study and going to college, and then when the exams started, it took no effort at all to forget about everything else. I slept and worked and did what I had to. It was exhausting. I was nervous and at night thought up questions that I couldn’t answer and visualized how time might disappear, how hours would pass as I looked at the clock and watched them counting down. The reality of my days, when I went to the exam hall and was handed papers that were more or less what we had expected, had no impact on this other imagined half-life where I was always destined to fail. By the time we came to the end of them all, I was washed out, and I slept for two days, dreamless and happy.

  Chapter Five

  I took a few days off. I went to films and caught up with what was going on in the world. I watched television and read the papers. I spent time making meals. After a week I was ready to move on. I sent out letters to possible employers, the same one five times over. They would be hirin
g graduates on the basis of their marks and personality, their ability to get on with other people, I thought. How much of that comes across in a letter? I made mine sound like I was a normal person, except with an interest in banking and money and finance. It was a joke that we would all understand. It was what I would have to do, get in there and examine the numbers and formulas and percentages of percentages, and insofar as it was a project, I could motivate myself, but they had to know that nobody normal would be turned on by this stuff. And in a place like that, with dozens of people working together in a limited space, being normal would matter more than being interested in math.

  Ten days later I got a letter from one of the banks. When I saw the logo on the envelope, I recognized it. They were inviting me to an interview the following week. I laughed when I saw it. It seemed so easy, and then I thought what it would mean, sitting in a room across a table from people, having to explain why I wanted to work there. I thought about it as I went back into my living room. There were the things I should say and the things I should hide and the things they would know but that I wouldn’t say. There was a degree of comfort that I could see in working for a recognizable financial institution, a role that was understandable to anybody that asked what I did. I could silence that conversation. I work for a large multinational bank. Only the most inquisitive would ask another question after that. It was a job that was simultaneously recognizable and familiar and utterly anonymous and dull. It answered the question and communicated nothing. It would work for parents and family, for friends and people I met at parties. I could visualize big buildings, architecture and glass with views and hundreds of people that didn’t know each other. I had no idea what kind of work they would want from me or who my coworkers would be. It seemed like a world where I might disappear.

  The building was nearly as I had thought. It calmed me when I arrived underslept and shaky, wearing a suit that fit me in every possible way but still didn’t look right. It didn’t help that I was met in reception by a girl who struggled to hold back her laughter as we went up in the lift.