2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  He just laughs. But of course, he has no comprehension of the fact that fish have feelings too. “I’m going to bed,” he announces wearily.

  “Mother’s in the bathroom.”

  Unsure whether to believe me, Ronan gives me this look and disappears swiftly out to the hallway to verify my story. It sounds like he’s stopped outside the bathroom door. It’s locked, but I can hear that humming Jacuzzi sound from where I’m sitting.

  He must be thinking this can be only one of two people: either it’s Sylvana in there or it’s my mother.

  Please let it be Sylvana, he’s secretly pleading.

  For the first time in his life he’s desperate for Sylvana to be not just in our apartment but in our Jacuzzi. Because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate: that it has to be my mother who is in our Jacuzzi. Because if she’s in the Jacuzzi, then she’s certainly staying the night. And if she’s staying the night, Ronan will have to be civil to her tomorrow at breakfast.

  Soon he reappears at the doorway, ashen-faced. “She can’t stay here,” he croaks.

  “She’s an old lady.”

  “Not old enough,” is his callous reply.

  “If you can’t find it in your cruel heart to be generous to an elderly citizen who also happens to be my mother, I’m not sure I want to stay married to you.”

  He proceeds through the room and sits down on a leather armchair, grabbing last Sunday’s paper from the coffee table.

  “I have to live here,” he says, as if living here is a form of martyrdom.

  Jerk.

  I get up and go into the kitchen before I hit him, and make myself a cup of tea.

  When I return he’s left the room. I follow him through. Mother is still in the bathroom. Our bedroom is in darkness. I push the door open gently. I can hear the sound of breathing from the pitch-black space where our bed is.

  I pull the door to. Mother will have a relaxing, confrontation-free first night. And once she’s in it will be impossible for him to get her out again.

  One night gone, another several thousand to go.

  He’ll cope.

  22

  The apartment is quiet. It’s three o’clock in the morning. Mum and Ronan are in their respective bedrooms, fast asleep. I’m in the lounge lying on the couch, gulping tequila, flicking through photo albums.

  Ronan and me. At parties, with friends by the sea, in town. In some of the photos we’re laughing, hanging on to each other. We did things like that, you know. Things ordinary married couples do: laugh, hug, hold hands, kiss. Then, the future was like a roll of film hidden in a gilded can clasped tightly under my arm, waiting to unfurl.

  And now?

  I turn my face downwards and bury it in the cushion, wrapping it hard around my ears. It feels like the light, the heat, has gone out of my life and all that’s left for me to do is try to block it out completely.

  But in this oblivion of red blackness behind my eyes, memories are now flooding through me and I can’t get them out of my head. Good times together. The excitement of small things, when we first met. Sitting in a pub after an afternoon mountain jaunt, sharing a pizza, doing a crossword puzzle or going shopping together, walking by the sea in the late summer evenings, lying on our bed after making love and stroking his hairy chest as he switched on his CD player and proceeded to make love to the second most important devotion of his life: Chopin.

  Paris. Walking with him, hand in hand in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  Our wedding day…

  Mother.

  I want to go into her room right now and tell her what has happened. She’s been through it herself, she’d understand. She would listen carefully to me, offer constructive advice, she would build me up and make me whole again. She is my rock of strength and my fount of wisdom, my psychic sculptress and cosmetician. I can tell her anything. Well, almost anything.

  But how can I tell her this? How can I go in there and admit to her face that she was right about him all along?

  Besides, I want to protect her from pain. I want her to have a trouble-free old age. She might be a tough old bird, but still. Life has tired her out, her lined face bespeaks an oppressive past, she yearns for a future free of worry. Father is out of her life and only came back into it for a few hours to walk me up the aisle. She has her friends, her bridge, her walks, her knitting. Her television. Her concerts, her museums, her theatre. Her late-night blue movies, I suspect.

  How can I tell her our marriage is floundering? How can I admit to her that the destructive years she endured with Father had not even the single redeeming feature of warning, of parable for the next generation? That not one shining spark of wisdom has been extracted by me from the bleak, carbonized ashes of her years of total breakdown?

  I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it. Ronan is doing exactly what Father did.

  I want to smash every object in this apartment, because I know that every object in this house has her touch imprinted on to it like a black, indelible shadow.

  I want to rip everything out. Every item of furniture, every inch of floor and wall. She has contaminated everything. I want our apartment to be just as it was when we first came here.

  An empty shell.

  Then, I wanted to fill it up with our dreams. Now, our dreams are poisoned. By everything she has touched, sat in, laid on. By everything she’s seen, breathed upon, delighted in, wondered at, criticized…

  Our dreams have turned into nightmares.

  Once again this apartment is a barren shell. It is filled with cinders of promise, empty husks whose soul has fled like a spirit vanished from a corpse.

  I grab an as yet unopened bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream from our drinks cabinet and pour myself a half-pint glass full of the stuff. I don’t just consume it by way of a quiet sip. I guzzle and slurp and slobber and snort the medicine down my throat like I’m on a famine relief waiting list.

  Until I can’t drink any more.

  There’s still a quarter-glass left. I stride over to our newly blessed aquarium where a replenished variety of tropical fish aimlessly and eternally cavort. They don’t have too much culinary variety in their lives, so let’s not get a guilt complex about this.

  I pour the remains of the Bailey’s into the tank.

  Thing is, right now they’re getting an overload of variety. In a few short seconds it’s like a thick rain cloud inside. Brewed as they are up to the gills in Bailey’s Irish Cream, they are presently going catatonic.

  This, I believe, is excellent chi.

  Licking my chops, I go to the bottom of the bookcase and pull out our wedding video. I stick it on the VCR.

  Ronan’s face. It’s like a detachable plate, a pleasant mask concealing something dark and alien.

  I watch myself, moving gracefully beside him in my pale wedding dress, holding my bouquet, circling the church gardens, smiling up at him as we gracefully veer, under the guidance of the video operator, around the flowerbed, Ronan ambling with the golden walk of a god.

  Next we are in the church. My father is leading me up the aisle. Ronan steps out to meet me and smiles as I take his arm. The witnesses gather, the priest mutters a few sentences to which I devoutly listen. Throughout a beautiful female voice is singing an old Celtic wedding chant to the accompaniment of strings, as Ronan and I utter the sacred words and ring each other’s ringers with gold.

  It was a perfect day. A cliche, I know, but it was the happiest day of my life.

  I can only shrink in horror as I watch myself standing proudly and blissfully happy beside Ronan as if he is the central supporting column in my universe.

  I am both struck and revolted by my own naivety.

  And such a beautiful video.

  I remove it from the VCR and fetch a small bottle of white spirit from underneath the kitchen sink. Then a box of matches from the drawer. I grab our largest frying pan and bring everything out to the balcony.

  It is pitch-dark. The light of my life will soon burn bri
ghtly to extinguishment. I will be spotted by ships crossing the horizon. I will be just another of the thousand gleaming yellow city lights.

  I throw the video on top of the frying pan and douse it with white spirit. I throw a match on it and the whole thing whooshes up into the air like a bonfire. It emits an acidic stench. I lean back and fan the flames with the lid. When they relapse I add more white spirit. Another minor whoosh. I lean back again and wait.

  Soon there is little left but a piece of smouldering twisted black plastic whose dark smoke curls its way into my lungs, making me nauseous.

  When the handle cools down I lift it up, poke the plastic until it rattles loose on the pan and fling the contents over the balcony down on top of somebody’s patio. I know. I’ve no breeding.

  I fetch our wedding album.

  I stare at each photograph, stripping each one in turn from its transparent plastic cover. A dozen pictures of me and Ronan at the altar, pictures of us emerging from the church, people outside congratulating us including his friends from dentistry and two friends from Paris. Me alone in my wedding dress, me with my mother, Ronan with his fragile, adored mother whom he is so good to, me and Sylvana in her green dress, both families smiling obediently together, his family as a group, our family as a group and of course, Ronan and me standing blissfully in the limelight.

  One by one, the flame sears through each picture, familiar faces and shapes and colours turning black in the bright blue and yellow fire.

  The nicest photograph of all: we are both standing underneath a willow tree, kissing. Ronan looks so beautiful in his black suit. So smart, so handsome, so caring and sensitive.

  I flick a match and watch the yellow flame catching the edge of this photograph. It flickers and spits through his face, and twists itself into a carbon parchment and tears through my memories like the sound of someone screaming as they witness their treasured love letter being ripped apart.

  Twenty minutes later, the greatest day of my life lies in ashes: the charred ruins of my life with Ronan. I sweep everything into an old biscuit tin and drop it down the chute, entombing it like a coffin amid the rotten rubbish far below.

  I fling the remainder of the tequila down my neck.

  Now I stumble into the bedroom. Ronan is snoring, which makes me think that he couldn’t care less that he might, in fact, be in the process of destroying my life.

  I go back out and close the bedroom door behind me. I grab a blanket from the hot press, switch off the light and crash out on the couch, leaning my head against a hard leather cushion.

  I have taken a stand. I have wiped out our wedding video and photographs. I have destroyed the most precious reminder of our love that there is. I have no idea if there are any negatives. There is only one video – that is irreversible.

  What have I done?

  Something tells me I’ve just done something very big.

  Saturday, 18 June, morning

  23

  “Either she goes or I go.”

  Ronan has entered the kitchen for breakfast. His stark announcement is affably made, while withdrawing cornflakes from the press. He lets it hang in the air as if I’m supposed just to stand here and admire it.

  He sits down at the table opposite me and sloshes the cornflakes into his bowl. Then he splashes in some milk. The piece of poison spoons the crunchy mush into his mouth and the thought strikes me: what did I ever see in him?

  “So,” I reply, spreading low-fat marge on to a piece of Ryvita, “when are you moving out?”

  Motionless, he stares at his breakfast bowl. “You mean, you’re not going to try and stop me?”

  “What for?”

  “This is refreshing,” he approves, spooning in a second mouthful of cornflakes. “I’m impressed.”

  “At the thought that I can live without you?”

  “I should think you’d survive pretty well with your mother,” he says indifferently, munching. He grins now. “She’s tougher than most men.”

  He takes a sip of coffee, then reaches over to the sideboard for the newspaper. He must have popped out this morning to the shops while I was on the couch.

  “And where would you go?” I ask him.

  “Mm.”

  This could mean anything. It’s all in the intonation. Difficult one, that.

  He’s completely absorbed in an article now. He must have a lot of news to catch up on: jerking off with other women takes up valuable reading time. So I sit here, marginalized by a newspaper. His morning read is such an important ritual that I could be having a baby in here right this very minute and guess what he’d say? Could you lower the noise level, please, I’m reading.

  This is why, on occasion, I smash plates. I find he pays attention best to the sound of breaking crockery. I consider smithereening crockery a primitive musical form. It mellows him, like all good music. But right now things are too serious to go reducing our pretty Arklow pottery collection.

  “Where would you sleep, Ronan? The surgery? I suppose you could sleep on the desk. It’s exceptionally comfortable, as I found out yesterday lunchtime.”

  “It’s all right,” he says, ignoring the reference.

  “And what would you do for sex if I weren’t around?”

  He lowers his voice. “I can live without it.”

  “I suppose that explains the dearth for the last six months?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, darling,” he says in an agreeable manner, “but I’m not in the mood.”

  For what?

  Oh, the bastard, I don’t believe it.

  I stand up and tear the paper out of his hands, bunch it up and stuff it into the garbage chute.

  “Jesus, what’s the bloody matter with you today?”

  I have just defiled his very identity.

  “Blame the hormones, dear,” I reply, gobbling half a banana in one go.

  He leaves the kitchen with a scowl the length of a giraffe’s gullet. I follow him into the living-room where I can have another go at him. He sits on the couch. This time without a newspaper to hide behind.

  I take up position by the window, looking out into the slightly turbulent blue morning sea. Again the sky is a lovely blue and brilliant white clouds hitch-hike across the globe.

  I give him a few minutes to calm down.

  Then: “Do I pester you, Ronan?”

  Silence.

  “Well? Do I nag you?”

  His head moves towards me. “What’s all this about?”

  “Answer me.”

  “I’m sure we pester each other.”

  Dead calm.

  “So how do I pester you, then?”

  He leans forward and picks up a book from the coffee table. Aristotle’s Poetics, if you don’t mind.

  “You don’t pester me, Julie.”

  He opens it and starts reading.

  “I see.”

  “No more than any other woman.”

  “So I’m like any other woman?”

  “No, Julie. You certainly are not like any other woman.”

  “Have you experience of any other women?”

  “No.”

  “So I might actually pester you more than other women?”

  “Quite possibly,” he replies, after a brief spell of dumbness suggesting bewilderment.

  “We’re getting warmer.”

  It’s hard to know for sure if he is actually reading Aristotle or merely feigning to read Aristotle.

  “Does it annoy you, for instance, when I interrupt your reading?”

  He looks up at me, leaden patience on his brow. “Now that you mention it, I do enjoy reading in peace.”

  “Does it annoy you when I call you at work?”

  “Only when I’m busy.”

  “Like when you’re extracting teeth on hot summer afternoons?”

  Pause.

  He lowers his eyes to his book once more. “Precisely.”

  “So it annoys you.”

  “Julie, could we…”

  �
�It annoys you.”

  Glances up at me. “Okay. You win. It annoys me.”

  “And when my mother stays over. Does that annoy you?”

  Exhales a huge breath. “Well, that… annoys me. Yes.”

  “We’re communicating at last, Ronan. This is very healthy.”

  He puts down the book on the table. “I thought your period wasn’t due for another two weeks.”

  “That’s a line of questioning I would not pursue if I were you.”

  He picks up a copy of Time magazine instead.

  “Do you think I’m possessive?”

  He chucks down the magazine again, gets up and goes out to the balcony.

  I follow him out for the next instalment of nagging. “Well?”

  “What?”

  “I want to know if you think I’m possessive.”

  “Well, yes,” he says, averting his eyes. “Now that you mention it.”

  “I see.”

  I spread my vision around the blue bend of Dublin Bay. How lovely it is to live by the sea. You can actually hear the waves from here.

  “How am I possessive?”

  He’s turns to me now. “Julie, since you came back from your holiday on Thursday you’ve been making me feel like…like a rat.”

  I turn to face him directly, my bum pressing against the railings. “And how does a rat feel?”

  “Cornered,” he replies, avoiding my gaze. “I can’t move in the apartment without feeling like an endangered species.”

  “Rats aren’t an endan – ”

  “Yes they are – in an apartment.”

  “Do I endanger you? I do apologize. But I’m talking in general. Not just in the last few days.”

  “In general you’re fine.”

  “Even in bed?”

  “What?”

  “Are you happy with the sex, Ronan?”

  “Keep your voice down, our neighbours below will hear.”

  “Are you happy with the sex?” I repeat in a raised voice.

  “It’s fine,” he whispers, grinding his jaw.

  “If practically non-existent.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Why are you perspiring?”

  He takes a deep breath. I am seriously nagging him now. But is that not what I do? Is that not my speciality?