by Chris Binchy
She was trying to stop smoking. He didn’t make it easy for her. It was something he did, not an addiction or a thoughtless repeated habit but an activity that he loved, luxuriating in it. When we were out, I would smoke with him because he made it seem fun. Sitting outside in warm summer air blowing gray smoke up into the blue darkening sky, the tobacco sweet as it dispersed. She tried to stay off but failed. She would hold out for a while on a night out and then break.
“Face it,” he said to her after a few weeks of this going on. “You’re back on them.”
“Because of you,” she said.
“What did I do? I’m not forcing you.”
“You could have been more helpful,” she said.
“You’re the one wants to stop,” he said. “It’s your idea. Don’t blame me if it all goes wrong.”
She took cigarettes from him or from me, always saying she was going to buy some. She wasn’t even thinking as she said it, five times a night. It became a joke between Alex and me. The phantom pack. In his place one night, I was about to leave. We were sitting in the living room with the light on after a video, blinking. He lifted the pack off the table and took one out.
“Can I?” she asked, leaning forward, hand out.
“Sure.” He gave her one, then lit it.
“I’ll get some later,” she said.
We laughed.
“What?” she said.
“Ah yeah,” he said. “Of course you will.”
“What? What’s funny?”
“You’ve been saying that all summer,” he said.
“You don’t believe me?” she said.
“Well, there’s been no sign of it.”
“It’s a joke,” I said. “We’re just messing.”
She jumped up and walked out of the room. We heard the front door of the flat open but not close. The two of us looked at each other.
“What was that?” he asked. “Was she pissed off? Is she gone?”
“I don’t know,” I said. We sat in silence waiting for something to happen. For a decision to be made. Like we were both holding our breath.
“I’m going to ring her,” he said, but when he dialed her number, her phone rang in her bag, which was on the ground beside the couch. “I suppose we wait,” he said, and then she was back in the doorway, standing looking at him.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“There,” she said, and she threw a packet of cigarettes at him hard. It bounced off his head. “There’s your cigarettes, you fucker.” It was ferocious. She said nothing else, just left.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, and then neither of us spoke for a moment.
“It was a great shot,” I said.
He stood up and grabbed her bag.
“I better go after her.”
“Okay,” I said.
The next day they turned up on my doorstep. She was standing in front of him, looking up at me from under her hair.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she said.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry.” She stepped forward and hugged me. I tried not to melt into the warmth and the smell of her.
“For what?” I said. “I’m sorry for laughing at you.”
“It was stupid. I just got annoyed. I don’t know why.”
“Because you’re a head case,” he said somewhere behind her. I couldn’t see him because she was still wrapped around me.
“Did you think I’d gone mad?” she asked into my neck.
“No. I thought you were—” I stopped, trying to find the right word. “Magnificent,” I said in the end, and I could feel her laugh.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Alex said as he walked by us on his way to the fridge.
Chapter Eight
On a sunny Thursday I met him for lunch. We bought food and ate it in the park, watching girls from offices pass by in twos and threes, trying to look like they were having fun, tinkling laughs and louder conversations, being interesting because they knew they were being watched. He smiled, and they smiled back, but they all kept walking.
“I don’t know why you bother,” I said to him.
“What?”
“Are you not embarrassed?”
“Why would I be embarrassed? You think people shouldn’t look at each other, you mad fucking fundamentalist?”
“I’m trying to eat,” I said. We watched as out on the street the traffic light changed and another group approached. “What are you trying to do, anyway? What are you hoping for?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just fun.”
“If one of these girls came over and sat down here, what would you do?”
“I’d put her in a taxi and take her home.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Of course I wouldn’t. I have a girlfriend, you know?”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve met her.”
He laughed to himself, mouth full of sandwich, as if he were alone watching television in the dark. When we finished eating, we moved onto the grass and he lay on his back, watching through half-open eyes.
“I might stay here all afternoon,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I have to go back,” I said. “Busy day.”
“You should stop with that whole thing,” he said. “It’s making you boring.”
“How’s that?”
“For starters, you like wearing a suit. You walk differently when you’re wearing one. You’re a happy drone.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
He sat up, leaning on one arm, looking at me.
“I think it is.”
I laughed.
“People treat me better in shops,” I said. “That’s the only difference.”
“You sellout.”
“Says the young Communist who lives off cheques from his parents.”
“They’re loans at a favorable rate,” he said.
“So are you just going to hang around here all summer?” I asked him then.
“Here? In this park?”
“In Dublin.”
“I don’t know. Depends.”
“On what?”
“If there’s any jobs going. College. Stuff like that. I wouldn’t mind going away. America or something.”
“To work?”
“Yeah.”
“Actual work? Normal work?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like in a bar. Or painting. A job, you know?”
“Well, if something came up in film it would be great. New York, you know? Me and her. Living together on our own away from everybody, doing our own thing. It could be great.”
“Yeah. It could be. I didn’t know you were thinking about this.”
“You know what it’s like,” he said. “We’re always with people. Her friends and my friends and out all the time. It’s never just us.” I turned to look at him, lying there on the ground in front of me. I’d only just got her back into my life, and he was going to take her away again. “I don’t mean you,” he said, seeing the look in my face and mistaking it for umbrage. “You’re cool. You don’t get in the way or anything.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“But it could work really well.” He was getting enthusiastic now. “Get a flat in Greenwich Village or something.”
“Do you know how much that would cost?”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. More than you can afford.”
“So we’ll work. That’s what we’d be there to do. Work. Live together. You could come and stay.”
I had pains in my chest at the thought of it. Actual pains.
“You want t
o live with her in America? Just the two of you? That’s a big deal.”
“Yes. Are you not listening? That’s the point.”
“So does she want to go?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just an idea.”
“Oh,” I said. “But by the time you’d organized it, you’d have to be coming back anyway.”
“Not necessarily. We could stay for a while over there. Give it a go. It would be cool.”
“What would she do?”
“Work. Loads of work over there. It would be great to get out of this kip, you know. See somewhere new. Do something different.”
“But you love it here. Every time you go away, you come back talking about how you couldn’t live anywhere else.”
“Ah yeah, but you know . . .”
“What about college?” He just shook his head. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know if I’m going to bother finishing.”
“Why?”
“It’s not what I thought it would be. It’s just all theory and course work. It’s a pain in the arse.”
“I thought you liked it.”
“Yeah, but I think I may have screwed up.” He sat up then, cross-legged, and looked over across the pond.
“The exams?”
“Yeah. Or they were okay. But course work was fifty percent, and I don’t know how I got on.”
“What happened? Did you not get the marks?”
“Sort of.” He wasn’t saying anything else. I waited in case he was trying to work out how to say it.
“What happened?” I said again after enough time.
“I don’t know. There were five essays, and I only did two of them.”
“Okay.” Then. “Why was that?”
“Just couldn’t get into it. And then the whole Camille thing started up. In the end I just ran out of time.”
“Right.” I tried to think of something positive to say. “Well, you never know,” I said in the end.
“I think we both know,” he said.
“If you got eighty percent on the exams, you might be all right.”
“I’m sure I would be. But if I was the kind of guy who got eighty percent on exams, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You could just repeat,” I said to him. “There’s no reason why you can’t pass this year. You’re brighter than most of them. You know that. I’ve met them.” He smiled.
“It’s not a bad thing anyway. Waste of time me doing another year, I’d be better off getting a job now. Or going away and getting some experience.”
“Right,” I said.
“No point in worrying about it,” he said as he lay back down.
“Probably not,” I said.
It was like him. The initial enthusiasm that faded away, never followed through to the end. From when we were young. Piano lessons. Russian classes. Football training. Business studies. Film school. All of them at one time or another were the future that he saw for himself, an exhilarating moment when he decided that this was how he would prove himself to the world. Show his talent.
That he never finished anything, never made it past scales, never went to training in the wet, never learned to say more than “I speak Russian,” was something that nobody ever talked about. The pets that went back to the shop. The electric guitar that he sold when we needed drink for a party. Never mentioned again. Not by him or his family. It didn’t seem to matter to anybody, because everybody knew that he would get what he wanted out of life. What he had was more important. Happiness, enthusiasm, a good soul. A family with money. Those flashes where the world suddenly seemed to match up to his glorious expectations and his path became clear, they all eventually fizzled out in a moment that nobody seemed to notice. It seemed that it was the world that had failed him and never the other way around. The pure dreamer left intact. The dirty, unreliable world sullying its reputation again.
“You shouldn’t give up on it, though,” I said, standing to go. “You know you could be good at this. You’re interested in it. It’s the right world for you to be in. It’s creative, and you have to deal with people. And you like the pose.”
“I don’t care about that,” he said.
“Oh, I think you do,” I said, smiling at him.
“I’m just not interested in it as an academic subject. I wanted to make films, to actually be doing it.”
“And you have been. But you have to do the other stuff to understand it. Why am I telling you this? You know it’s all true.”
“Loads of people don’t go to film school. Loads of them. Truffaut and Pasolini and Kubrick. I could spend next year actually putting in my time and doing it. Come back to college later if I wanted and finish once I’d got the experience.”
“You know you could pass every exam, do every paper, and come out on top of that class. You just need to concentrate on it.”
He slumped back a little and thought for a second. Then he stretched and yawned.
“I’ll think about it. I’ll talk to Camille, see what’s going on with her.”
“Do that,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later. Have fun.”
“And you,” he said as he closed his eyes and lay back.
It was a Friday when the exam results came out. I went to work, but Frank sent me away and told me to take the rest of the day off. In the college I looked for the right board and found a few people from my class. It took a while to find my name. I didn’t say anything, but one of the other guys noticed me.
“You should be happy,” he said.
“I am. Are you?”
“Everybody is.”
We all had done better than expected. As we stood around, the mood lifted and then seemed to take off in an atmosphere of communal relief. It was only midday, but we went to the bar.
By the middle of the afternoon I was beginning to feel a wave of affection for my classmates. They were friends to me. We had gone through four years together and now were emerging into a world that valued us. It was a happy ending. I talked with a guy I barely knew about how we had to stay in touch and look out for each other, meaning it. At seven o’clock I knew I should be going. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I was on the border of forgetting everything. I had been meaning to leave for hours, but there always was a reason for one more. A different crowd had arrived, mostly girls who worked with somebody, and that livened it up again just as it was beginning to flag. The two groups had merged, and I was struggling with their names. I was sitting in the corner, and there was a girl beside me. She was a friend of a girl I didn’t know who was a friend of a guy whose name I didn’t recognize. She was studying at Trinity and had just left her rooms so she was staying with a friend. I remembered all this when she told me, but I forgot her name. The conversation had been going on too long for me to ask again. She was from the North, and I was enjoying her accent, the odd sexy thing she did with vowels. I kept telling her that I really liked the way she talked and every time I did, she moved a fraction closer to me until our faces were practically touching. It was a hot Friday night and the place was steamy and too loud with conversation. I turned away from her for a moment, looked around at the beered-up leery happy office crowds that had forgotten that they didn’t know each other. I was a part of this world now. I seemed to fit in to it. They were people just getting going, putting in the groundwork for a night that they hoped wouldn’t end. All of them full of the potential that the weekend allowed them, feeling that they might do wild impulsive stupid things.
That feeling would end on Sunday night. Not for me, though. This could be the start of something, taking this girl away from the couch in her friend’s place. She could stay with me, and we could just hang around and go to the park and swim and do all the things that I had never done with
a girl. I wanted to do them with her. But then when I looked again, I realized that she wasn’t who I thought she was. I was fooling myself, and as drunk as I was, I knew that the following morning it would all seem different. It wasn’t fair.
“Okay,” I said, and I sat back. “I’m going to go.”
“What?” she said.
“I’m drunk.”
“So am I. So is everybody. So what?”
“I’ve had enough,” I said.
She leaned over to me, put a hand across on my shoulder, and spoke into my ear.
“You can’t go now. You haven’t kissed me yet.” Cast, she said, and I wondered. Then she pulled my face to her gently and kissed me and I understood. For a second I went with it, and then I broke away.
“What’s wrong?”
She was a nice girl, as far as I could tell, and she was sitting here beside me. Why wouldn’t I? What would hold me back? I knew what it was, and when I thought of it again, it just wasn’t enough.
“Do you want to come home with me?” I said.
“Now? It’s only eight o’clock.”
“I’m going anyway,” I said. “You can come if you want.”
She laughed at me.
“Okay,” she said. “Why not?”
We got a taxi and leaned into each other in the back seat with a loose sloppy intimacy. I was talking into her ear, and she was laughing. Nothing to worry about. I knew this was what I wanted. It was what I should be doing. Getting on with things. Taking this girl home and seeing what we would do. Enough with the pining and hoping and waiting. I wasn’t going to talk about me or even think about anything. It was a release. Do something. Just let it happen.
I tried to put it together when I woke in the blue half-light at five o’clock, head sticky and feeling like something dreadful had happened. It came to me in pieces that wouldn’t slot together properly. I couldn’t remember her name or how we’d got back here. I remembered doing things on the couch and then coming in here. I didn’t know why I’d thought it was a good idea in the first place. I didn’t need anybody else. I was fine as I was, just needed a week or two of not drinking to get rid of this dirty furtive anxiety. Clean water. Not eating. Make me better. I could be better.
