2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  “I know why you’re doing this,” he says, studying me with a cruel mouth. “It’s that thing about having children, isn’t it?”

  “Thing?”

  “Ever since you’ve come back from the country you’ve been behaving oddly. You admitted as much yesterday.”

  I turn back round and stare out to sea. Two seagulls are lolling and lounging overhead, crying and cackling, wide wings like surfboards cruising the breeze.

  “This is about you wanting children, isn’t it?”

  It’s not about me wanting children, actually. Athough now that he mentions it, I won’t deny that having a child is a craving in my heart that is tearing away inside me. I don’t deny that it’s a longing and an emptiness, a scouring ache in my chest, a blockage in mid-stream craving to be freed.

  I’m so sick of everything.

  “You think this is about me wanting children?”

  “Manifestly.”

  “You prick!”

  I’m gleaming at him like a death ray.

  “Look, for God’s sake, I’m not saying we can’t ever have a child.”

  “Liar.”

  He grins suddenly. “Is that alcohol I smell on your breath?”

  He tries to put an arm round me. I forcibly shove him away and rush into the lounge, dart over to the aquarium and fling my weight against it as hard as I can.

  The whole thing – pedestal plus fish tank – topples and crashes and splinters on to the marble floor, deluging the lounge with gallons of pouring water and shards of glass. And a panorama of colourful fish.

  I fold my arms.

  I’m becoming a dab hand with aquaria.

  This is way, way better than Arklow pottery.

  Ronan enters and proceeds to go ape. He’s in and out of the kitchen. He’s got a bucket and half a dozen tea towels. He’s on his knees now, scraping around for survivors, dumping them into the empty bucket. Mouth agape, he shouts in a falsetto of panic what the hell is wrong with me. He needn’t think I’m going to answer that particular question right now.

  “Look what you’ve done!” he yells.

  “So?”

  Cool as can be, I stroll to the french windows and yet again admire our terrific bay view.

  Ronan reruns into the kitchen and re-emerges with a mop this time, and starts mopping and mulching and squashing and squelching the water into the bucket with his fingers. He’s shouting at me to grab a towel and make myself useful.

  I smile at him – this is not woman’s work.

  My feet splash through the torrent as I saunter my lazy way through to the kitchen, grabbing his bucket as I pass. He yells again at me, wondering why I’ve just removed his bucket. I reply that dirty water and fish and broken glass don’t mix. That he must care a great deal about fish if he’s happy to let them suffocate in jagged shallow waters, their piscal pores clogged with floor dirt.

  There are eight or ten poor darlings flippering helplessly away in the bottom of the bucket. By the tail, I extract the ones which Ronan brought home yesterday and drop them head first into the sink with a thud. In order of guest appearance: one skunk-striped clownfish, one oriental sweetlips and one lemon-peel angelfish. Barely a blip from any of them though I’ll admit to spying a small flicker from the sweetlips. I now fill the bucket with water before the remainder kick it. Then I wrap the sink-dumped fish in a plastic bag and stuff it in the back of the fridge-freezer.

  Ronan’s roaring at me for the bucket. It’s such a relief to witness him being human at last. I bring him the round metal bread bin instead – it’s sure to leak. He’s still thrashing about on the floor like a drowning rat (surely not extinct in de luxe apartments?), shouting and complaining, and panting like a dog. In short, seriously compromising his dignity.

  Housework: this is the effect it has on them.

  Mother appears.

  In the doorway to the hall.

  In her cream nightie.

  I join her, folding my arms. She looks at me, I shrug and she looks away again.

  We’re just standing here, watching him pick up the remaining flippering fish and dump them into the leaky bread bin. Now he’s soaking up the rest of the water with the mop and the drowned dishcloths, and squeezing them into same. Eventually he stops and turns round.

  He sees Mother. She’s smiling down at him.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he says, flushing.

  “I never knew you were one to wash floors, Ronan,” she says.

  Silence.

  “Whatever happened?” she presses.

  “This is Julie’s dramatic way of saying,” he pants, “that she desperately craves a baby.”

  Mother eyes me to see if it’s true.

  “That’s a lie!” I shout.

  “But I’m used to her,” he adds, mopping away. “Julie has always been quite demonstrative.”

  I glare down at him with all the venom I can muster and stride right out of the apartment, secretly wishing him as much ill as I can provide from this small, fragile heart of mine.

  24

  An hour later I make a silent re-entry into our apartment.

  It’s a fantastic day outside. I’ve just had a stroll along the west pier as it cuts into the smooth pool of Dublin Bay and arches around the huge harbour almost to join the tip of the east pier. I walked there and back, stamping my fury into the concrete and gravel and dog dirt underfoot. I rested on the low blue wooden bench, put my head back against the knobbly pier wall and soaked up the benign rays of the sun. For a solid twenty minutes my face burnt in this solar paradise.

  If I have nothing else, at least I’ll have a suntan.

  Ronan has left and Mother is fast asleep in her bed, a cup of semi-drunk coffee on her bedside table. The fish tank pedestal has been righted on top of the gleaming marble floor. The tank itself, of course, has gone, the glass shards more than likely shoved down the kitchen rubbish chute. But where are the fish?

  I go straight into the bathroom. And sure enough, the Jacuzzi is full of colourful fish. Some swimming and some not so swimming. But all of them to all appearances alive, including five of the fish he got from Nicole.

  I make a dive for the kitchen, extract the three fish from the freezer and dump them on the draining board. There’s not a blip out of any of the little fatties as they lie there, cold, sodden, ogling and dead.

  I grab a large glass bowl from one of the kitchen presses and place it beside our Moulinex mixer. From the drawer I extract a metal blade fixture and attach it to the pedestal inside the mixer.

  Don’t think about it, Julie, they’re no longer alive.

  First, the skunk-striped clownfish. It is orange-red in colour and has very pale fins. It’s got a single white vertical stripe behind the eye, edged with black. Just like a skunk. You find these fish in Indonesia. Soon you’ll find them in paste, manufactured courtesy of Julie Fitzgerald’s Moulinex mixer.

  The little bugger was a danger to life. A right little piranha. I saw it nipping away at one of our baby yellow-bellied devils earlier this morning. The clownfish eats only live food, whereas the devil – all the way from the East Indies – is a poor henpecked vegetarian.

  The clownfish is just three inches long. It will easily fit in the mixer, though at an angle. I pick it up by the tail and dunk it into the food processor. Then I close down the lid on top of it and twist. I press the button. I can’t stand that high-pitched, hoovering sound it makes so I leave the kitchen and stand in the hall for a minute.

  What a day!

  I’ve heard a lot of funny things recently.

  But the funniest thing of all echoes in my eardrums like the laughter of a circus clown: Ronan is a great communicator.

  Nicole would make you split your sides. Ronan the great communicator. The sensitive listener. The purveyor of meaningful human intercourse.

  I know better.

  Classic conversation with me: he pontificates and I ignore. Regularly he tries to lecture me on contemporary culture. It’s way easier to ignor
e him than to disagree with him because then he’s likely to shut up sooner and save you a trip to your bag for a paracetamol.

  Sylvana is quite right when she says Ronan thinks he’s God’s gift. He really does imagine that the sun shines out of his arse. I promise you that I’ve been to places where he hasn’t and I can quite definitely swear to you that the sun does not shine out of his arse, since his arse is just the same as anyone else’s arse (as far as I’m aware) and he’s just an ordinary guy who thinks he’s extraordinary and manages to dupe me and others at times into believing that his arse is extra high in calories.

  The heart is the organ that counts here. But Ronan doesn’t seem to have one. In the centre of his chest pumps a stiff muscle of rubber.

  I re-enter the kitchen, go over to the mixer and calmly observe my russet clownfish juice. This is going well so far. Next in line: the bright yellow lemon-peel angelfish, fairly straight from the Pacific Ocean. I pluck it off the tray by its tail, a heavy, greasy slob of a thing. I drop it into the mixer to join its ensouped cousin and press the button, and I race out to the hall where I again take up sentry duty, this time seated on the banana couch.

  Let’s hope Mother doesn’t suddenly decide to wake up.

  It really aggravates me, though, the suggestion that Ronan is a good communicator. Take the incident last November, for instance.

  One Sunday he drove me up the mountains for an afternoon trip. I say ‘he drove me’ advisedly; he doesn’t like it when I drive because firstly, he has this weird idea that I enjoy breaking the speed limit and secondly, he doesn’t trust me not to take a wrong turn.

  He took a wrong turn.

  He opened out his map without stopping the car. He wrapped it right over the steering wheel. Did he once ask me to consult the map for him for safety’s sake? He did not. He did not want to admit he required my help. Requiring my help is an admission of weakness. After all, it’s an act of communication.

  I said to him: “Why don’t you let me consult the map for you?”

  This sensible suggestion of mine was intended to make the vehicle in which we were travelling safe from a state of enwrapment around stray roadside trees.

  But he cut down my suggestion with a machete: “No, Julie.”

  His reasoning was simple: I required remedial classes in map reading to supplement my retarded spatial abilities. His way of describing this ailment is that I, like most women, was geometrically challenged. We were useless as a class, he said, when it came to lines and curves and angles and distances. He qualified this analysis by conceding that we were excellent at bends.

  Going round them.

  Here was an interesting concept, so I decided to pursue it further. I suppose I thought I’d get him to communicate.

  I did, but not in the way I’d hoped. Actually, it ended up quite nasty.

  “What’s so critical about lines and curves and angles and distances?” I wondered mildly.

  He gave me an incredulous sideways glance. “The civilized world as we know it could not have been designed without lines and curves and angles and distances. Never mind constructed.”

  “I get on quite well without them,” I retorted.

  “How would you feel living, say, in a mud hut?”

  Pause.

  “Unlucky.”

  “Exactly. You owe all your comforts to applied mathematics.”

  I thought about this.

  “Without lines and curves and angles and distances, Julie, your teeth would have fallen out by now.”

  “Every woman’s teeth would be equally rotten,” I pointed out. “Not just mine. Therefore it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Without geometry and mathematics you’d be wearing adapted potato sacks and animal hides instead of designer labels.”

  I made the point that as regards lines and curves and angles and distances, modern man has contributed precisely nothing to the single most important priority in Ronan’s life after aesthetics.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sexual pleasure.”

  “Correction: modern man invented the condom.”

  “Including the ones that burst.”

  “He invented vibrators.”

  “Thank heavens.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t need a man to do it with. A vibrator is ten times more effective. Do you want proof?”

  “You’re warped.” He laughed.

  “Actually, it’s the vibrator that’s warped.”

  He considered this point, poker-faced. “You’re right, Julie. And what do you think accounts for the warp factor? Lines and curves and angles and distances. If you’ve ever bothered to inspect the design.”

  “I have. Intimately.”

  “They’re all about engineering,” he prattled on, the condescending buffoon.

  “They’re also about multiple orgasms, something you’re incapable of giving me.”

  “Do you blame me?”

  It was getting nasty.

  But the point is: Ronan’s sheer inability to communicate in a way that women prefer is so thorough, so determined, almost, that it infiltrates even the most intimate area of our lives. In the very place where he has the opportunity to do some really mind-blowing communication – the bedroom – he bungles it and it’s all over in two minutes. When I actually think about it.

  It’s like a five-second confession: imagine you’re just getting comfy in the confession box and you’re about to reach the mortal-sin punchline and the priest suddenly stands up and walks out on you. Think how that would make you feel.

  Still, for all his communicative neglect, Ronan seems to bond well with Nicole.

  I go back into the kitchen and turn off the knob.

  The smell is that soggy, raw odour you get from recently docked fishing boats.

  The final fish to take a nosedive into my Moulinex is the truly lovely oriental sweetlips. It is dark brown and looks like it’s just been covered in random round blobs of yellow paint. I chuck it into the mixer to join its fluid comrades. I switch on the button again and leave it for a minute. After this, I strain out any stray bits of skin or eyeball or fin with a fork.

  Now I think I’ll give my darlings one last shake-up together with a carton of cream. I pour in the cream and add a sprinkling of herbs. I press the button and wait a full minute, to ensure a proper merging of personality. Now I pour almost a pint of the much creamier fish booze into the glass bowl.

  I must say, I feel a sense of achievement: we have here the basic, raw ingredients of my first fish mousseline, fine and lump-free as a soup.

  I cover the bowl with plastic and put it in the fridge. If anyone discovers it I’ll tell them I picked it up at the local deli.

  I open all the windows and wash my hands with loo detergent from under the sink and dry them with half a roll of paper towelling.

  Nauseated, I visit the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet lid, head hung low in my hands, I ponder the tragedy that is my marriage.

  Trust.

  It’s like biting into a golden apple, trusting to its healthy, juicy goodness – and finding a worm crawling between your teeth.

  Trust takes people as they are, sparing itself the effort of endless analysis and suspicion and doubt. But Ronan? His is a counterfeit generosity, a bogus sincerity, a fraudulent benevolence. Beneath the face of the man I thought I knew and understood lies a disease of deceit.

  And it’s making me sick to the gut.

  I hear a door banging.

  Feeling sordid, I stand up and flush my mouth with Listerine and wash and do up my face. In our bedroom, Ronan is lying on the bed with his hands behind his head. I must try to be normal.

  “Afraid of bumping into my mother?”

  “It’s safest in here,” he replies.

  I sit down on the chair by the open window through which you can hear the piercing summery noise of kids splashing and shouting in the swimming pool below.

  “Is everything okay, Julie?
” he says, with unexpected concern.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Ronan,” I sing. “Apart from the fish-tank episode, everything’s fine.”

  “That was a bit…” he begins.

  “Extreme?”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t reply.

  “I never cared much for fish anyway,” he comments, yawning.

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “They’re in the Jacuzzi.”

  “I noticed. Thank you again.”

  “I’ve phoned the dealer. I’ll pick up another tank.”

  The happy shrieking of the children in the pool is starting to dull my senses. I close my eyes. My eyelids are cold.

  Ronan tells me he has to go to town for the afternoon.

  I blink my eyes open again.

  “I have to buy shoes,” he explains.

  “Shoes.”

  “Yes, my brown ones are wearing out. I thought I might have lunch in town, cruise the bookshops, buy new shoes – ”

  “Why don’t we both go?” I interrupt.

  “I enjoy browsing in bookshops,” he says.

  “So do I.”

  “Alone.” He smiles. “I’m a bit odd that way.”

  Paternalistic prat.

  “Why don’t I meet you later on then? We can both go shopping together.”

  He stands up. “I’d rather shop alone. Women are always making impractical suggestions about style and colour, and especially about price.”

  “What women?”

  “Women in general.”

  It drives him bananas, he observes.

  “Okay, then, why can’t we meet after your bananas? I’d quite like a drink together, late afternoon…”

  “Julie, I can’t organize my life to fit exactly into your routine.”

  “Did I just say something wrong?”

  He gets up and leaves the room. I follow him out, sticking my foot in the front door to prevent him closing it behind him.

  I gaze deeply into his large brown eyes. “Where are you going?”

  “I already told you,” he replies, staring into the space above my head.

  There’s a taut, static tug of war going between the two of us, standing on both sides of the door. Me trying to draw him in and him trying to shut me out.