by Chris Binchy
“I wasn’t thinking that way. I hadn’t worked it out. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was all over the place. Come on. You can’t put it all on me. You were there too. It just happened.”
“I know. But I thought it was what you wanted.”
“Really?” She looked at me now. “That’s what was going on? You were helping me out.”
“I don’t know. I just can’t understand why you had to tell him.”
“I should have lied? Is that it?”
“If you wanted to get back with him, yes. You must have known that telling him was going to mess with his head. That it would hurt him and fuck everything up. It couldn’t go back to the way it was after that.”
“He needed to know.”
“Needed?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. Of course I told him. He would have known. You would have told him, or I would, or something wouldn’t have been right and he would have guessed. I couldn’t not tell him. I wanted him to know so that he could decide if he wanted to give it another go. Knowing everything.”
“Oh, who knows everything?” I said. “Nobody. It’s not a right.”
“That’s just how I saw it. Maybe it would have been different if I hadn’t, but I couldn’t lie to him. You have to understand that.”
“I don’t,” I said. “Really, I just don’t.”
We said nothing for a moment, trying to work out something that didn’t matter. The two of us talking about him as if he was a ghost, arguing about what each of us had meant and thought and wanted even though we had barely known at the time. There were all these different versions of events, but at this stage the reality wasn’t important.
Where was he now? At this precise moment what was he doing? Had he moved on? I could picture him, standing at the counter of a better bar than this with people that he had met in the afternoon. A vision of it came to me. He’d be with a mix of guys and a girl. There would be scarves and it would be cold outside. They would have drunk a bottle more than they would have intended in the afternoon and would be making a plan for later. The girl’s eyes would stay a half second too long with him when he spoke to let him know what she wanted, and he would understand. He would have seen where it was all going.
Camille and I sat together, trying to work out what had happened, as if this was an equation that could be calculated from the information that we had, as if there was a solution that we could find if we talked about it for long enough. It could end anywhere. The two of us could walk out of this pub and never speak again if we let the conversation drift half a sentence too far into anger or blame. That could become the answer—a clean break at the end of it all. She might understand that without me, it would all have been different. It could have worked out for the two of them. She wouldn’t be here with me now, left behind, forced into a role she didn’t want to play.
“How do we get back to normal?” I asked.
“Who’s ‘we’? What are you talking about?”
“You and me.”
“I don’t know. What is normal for you and me? Alex was always around.”
“Not always.”
“But it was mostly the three of us.” A pause to remember. A twinge. Then she spoke again. She was clear. “Were you waiting around to see what would happen between me and him? Is that why you were there all the time?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know. I was just hanging around with him because I always did. And when you came along, I liked you.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“Maybe subconsciously,” I said then. “I don’t know for sure. I mean, I could ask, did you sleep with me to make him jealous?”
“No,” she said. “I was just confused and pissed off, and I didn’t know what I was doing.”
I smiled at the floor.
“That’s what every guy wants to hear from a girl he’s slept with.”
“I still think of you as a friend,” she said.
“Okay. That’s something.” I nodded, and she nodded back at me. It was very tidy. It seemed likely that we both might laugh. “I still do,” I said, “have a certain regard for you.”
“Well, you should,” she said. “I deserve it.”
“So is there anything else to say?”
“Maybe not for now,” she said. “But if I want to talk to you about it again, I can. Right?”
“Sure. Okay.”
I thought I should maybe do something, clink her glass or shake her hand or kiss her or some stupid thing, but in the end we just sat there looking out across the room.
“I have to meet people in town in a while,” she said then. “But we must meet up again some time.”
“You arranged to go out after meeting me?” I said as we stood to leave. “What did you think was going to happen here?”
“This,” she said. “Exactly this.”
“Really?”
“No, stupid. I had no idea,” she said, and she laughed.
I worked through the autumn, the days getting shorter until I saw none of them. Dark when I left the house and dark when I got home. On Fridays I went out with Frank and the others and drank. The job wasn’t what I thought it would be. The excitement and enthusiasm of the idea was hard to square with the day-to-day plodding. O’Toole was hardly ever around, off at meetings the whole time, but when he was, he cajoled and shouted and rarely encouraged. If you stood back, you could see that what we were doing was close enough to the big idea, but when you were in it, it felt like nothing. The same as before but less secure.
There was a hole in my life where Alex used to be, a space that hadn’t been filled. I tried to occupy myself with work, but I knew it was there. I met Camille sometimes for lunch or out at weekends with her friends, and I knew that she was feeling the same lack. We never spoke about it, never said his name, but we hung around like people who had been through some great trauma together. It was something we would never mention, but knowing that the other person felt the same way was enough. There was nothing to be said. We were both missing him. The rights and wrongs of it didn’t make any difference. He was gone, and we weren’t talking about him.
But then it began to fade. We established our own space between the two of us. Meeting on weekend mornings and spending the days together. Shopping for food or wandering around looking at clothes with her, admiring everything and smiling patiently through it all because there was nowhere else I would rather be. There was nowhere else I could be. I knew that her friends must have been wondering. Whenever her phone rang and the conversation started, she would say when asked, “I’m with David,” no explanation, and after a while it became so normal that it seemed there was nothing to say about it.
But there must have been. The two of us turning up together all the time. These friends must have known what had happened. What we had done together. They were friendly to me, I never felt like I was getting in the way, but it didn’t feel right either. Because I had no role. I was her friend, but really I was his friend. Did they think I was hanging around out of politeness after the breakup? Did they think I was waiting for another moment of weakness to jump her? Or could they accept that I was just someone to whom she had grown close in a necessary silence at the end of a relationship that had hurt her? I didn’t know myself. It was easy to be there and let things happen. No drama. Just company. Familiarity.
I wondered if it would happen. I wondered if that was what we were building up toward. Physically we were more distant than when she had been with him, as if without him around, we didn’t know where the boundaries lay. I hoped for something more, but then I didn’t know, because when you get to the stage with someone where you don’t have to think anymore, when you don’t hear their voice as something outside yourself, then you m
iss it when it’s gone. Any change in what was happening between us seemed like it could unbalance everything. I could live with this. There was a friendship that must have been getting deeper. It was better than what had been there before. But I still wanted her.
I saw his friend Patrick in a bank. I tried to look away, but he noticed me and stopped.
“Alex’s friend,” he said. “I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Hello, Patrick,” I said. “It’s David.”
“Right, yeah. How are you?”
“Fine. And you?”
“Great. Have you heard from the boy?”
“No, I haven’t. Have you?”
“I spoke to him last week,” he said. “In great form. Working on some Canadian film that’s shooting near Versailles. Set up in a flat.”
“Great.”
“Meeting loads of people through Harry. Do you know Harry?”
“No.”
“He was in first year with us. He’s been there a while, so he knows loads of people. The two of them are running amok. He said they weren’t, but Billy was talking to Harry, and apparently it’s been very heavy. You can imagine.”
“Sure.”
“Are you planning on going over?”
“I’m not sure. With work and all.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m in financial services. IT sort of stuff.”
“Oh, right.” He stood looking at me for a moment, trying to remember where he was and why he was talking to me. “Anyway. I better run,” he said. “Good to see you. If you’re talking to Alex, say hi. Tell him to give me a shout. I’m going to try and go in January.”
“Okay.”
I told Camille when I met her that night and we were walking into town. I didn’t know whether it was the right thing to do, but not telling seemed like a big deal. I told her what Patrick had said, trying to be as accurate as I could, getting the phrases right, leaving my interpretation out of it.
“Sounds about right,” she said.
“I thought so.” I couldn’t look at her to see what she was thinking as we walked.
After a moment she asked me, “Have you spoken to him?”
“Me? No. Why? Have you?”
“No. I rang him one time, but I didn’t leave a message, and then he rang back, and he didn’t either. Back and forth a couple of times, no message. And that was it.”
“Nothing to say?”
“There’s plenty to say. But I don’t know . . .” I waited. We walked in silence for long enough that I thought we’d moved on. “I’ll maybe see him over Christmas,” she said then. “Find out how he’s getting on.”
“Right.” I wanted to say something else to her. To ask her a question out of concern, to see if she was all right, but nothing came to me. It seemed like it wasn’t my business. There were things I could have talked about myself. The pointless twinge of jealousy that I had felt hearing that he was having a good time, that he had found work, that things were going well. Of course I wanted him to be happy. But in some way I wanted him to struggle without me and the help and advice that I gave him. I was here, and I was with her. So what? What good was it? He would laugh if he saw the two of us clinging emotionally onto one another for support while he had moved on to the next phase of his life without looking back.
“Do you miss him?” she said.
“Sometimes. Yeah. Do you ever?”
“Not really. But then we weren’t together for long. And the good times didn’t last. It was only a couple of months, really. I know he’s your friend,” she said, “but he’s an emotional fuckup.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose so.”
“But then look at us,” she said, and I laughed because it seemed right.
It was as if we had both been holding our breath, afraid that the mention of his name would change something. I had thought that maybe if I talked about him, I would bring everything that had been left behind into the foreground again, as if she had forgotten him and it was within my power to keep his memory from her. As if his name was the word that would wake us from this dream and let us know that whatever had happened since then wasn’t real. When you ask yourself, Is this a dream? it always is. You can hold on to it for a time, keep moving forward, driving it further and further into unreality, but you know that it’s over. You have to wake up.
We were in her house a few nights later, watching a film. At the end, when she flicked it off, she stood in front of me at an angle. There was something there, the way that she waited a second too long without saying anything, that made me look up. She held her hand out to me. I took it and stood up facing her. There was nothing that I could say, as if the moment would pop and be gone if I spoke.
“Come on,” she said, and I went. Down the hallway and into her room. We hesitated beside her bed, a moment of nervousness.
“He’s not here, is he?” I asked. “He’s not going to jump out of a cupboard and stab me or something?”
“No,” she said. “He’s gone.”
We knew each other already. Everything else faded away into the background. Work became a distraction. She stayed at my place most of the time, and when I got home from work, she would be there. I was with her.
But I still had to work at it. There were limits to what I could tell her and what she would tell me. There were things she didn’t want to talk about and things I didn’t want to know. Comparisons. Personal histories. Versions of events that would have to be edited, rewritten, excised. If she had told me before that she missed Alex, I would have understood, but now? Was she allowed to? Was I? Our pasts would keep changing to fit what was happening between us. Before, when I had been imagining the two of us together, my fantasy wasn’t just about her. It was about me as well, as if by being with her I would become somebody else. Somebody confident and fluent and certain. Somebody who knew what to do in any situation. But I was still the same person. I didn’t change overnight just because I was with her. It made me think before speaking. She noticed it. This reticence. The hesitation before answering questions.
“Just talk to me,” she said to me after a couple of weeks. “Speak. What’s the problem? You should just say what you’re feeling. Nobody will die.”
“I don’t know. I have to think.”
“You think too much,” she said.
“You’ve noticed that, then?” I said and laughed.
“Yes. Of course. Why?”
“I thought I was keeping it hidden.”
“You can’t hide things from me. I know everything now.”
“And yet still you’re here.”
“I am still here,” she said.
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas. I was going to meet her after work. The streets were packed in the center at seven o’clock on a Thursday night, the people moving in file and swelling at the crossing points until they spilled onto the road. It was still too early for the edge to have come into it, and the crowd moved together, docile and happy, the sound of footsteps and the music from shops and talking. I was letting myself be carried south to where I had to meet her. As we waited to cross from Westmoreland Street onto College Green, I saw Alex. He was straight across from me, and when the light changed, we would come face to face with each other. In the moment after I saw him, after the initial thrill that I couldn’t deny, I thought about turning around and walking away up the street. It was like I’d been caught doing something, as if I owed him something that I’d lost. But then he saw me and smiled, and when the light changed and the blips pulsed, he stood still and I crossed toward him. I held out my hand when I arrived, and he shook it. He had lost weight. He was dressed differently in some way that I noticed but couldn’t describe. He seemed taller, and as we spoke, he looked away from me, not meeting my eye. He was smiling still, but it wasn’t at me
.
“I didn’t know you were back,” I said.
“Monday, yeah. How are you?”
“I’m fine. And yourself?”
“Grand.”
“So how’s it going. How is Paris?” I asked.
“Wet. No. I don’t know. It’s great.”
“You’ve settled in?”
“Yeah. More or less.”
“I met your friend Patrick on the street. He’d heard you were having a great time.”
“Trying to. How’s your work?”
“It’s fine. I’m still getting used to it.” A moment of pause. “I didn’t know you were back,” I said again.
“Yeah, I was going to ring you. But you know what it’s like when you come home.”
“Yeah. Sure. What are you doing now?”
“Now? I’m meeting some friends for a drink.”
“Right.”
“And you?”
“Not much. Just going home.”
There was nothing there. I knew I had to say something. I knew it would come out awkward before I said it, but there was nothing I could do.
“I’m seeing Camille now. I thought I should tell you. Or maybe you’d heard.”
“I hadn’t, no.” He nodded and kind of smiled to himself. It could have meant anything. “Are you really? I’m glad,” he said. “I hope it goes well for you. For you both.”
“Thanks. It’s good of you to say that.” The words began to take shape. “Because I still feel shit about how it all ended. It wasn’t right and I’m sorry and it’s good to see you now. I’ve missed you around the place. So maybe we could meet up and try and sort it out. I’m sure Camille would want to see you too. How long are you home for?”
“Sunday.”
“Sunday? You’re not even staying for Christmas?”
“No. I’ve a job starting next week. This was all the time I could take.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, maybe over the weekend?”
Now he looked at me.
“I don’t know. It seems like a good place to leave it to me.”
