by Martin Roper
—No one knows. Except my family.
—What happened?
—Cancer. Let’s eat. It’s no big deal. At least not to me.
I open the basket we have brought and I think about telling her about Ruth, about the cancer but decide against it.
—Me neither. Leg? Of chicken.
—Weak.
I knew then I would ask her to marry me.
* * *
At work I find the slow constant hiss of the gun comforting. Ursula is getting ready for her job, back at the flat. Wife: how wonderful to have a wife. I imagine her dressing, smile at the pleasure of knowing her routine. I marvel at the work. The paint fanning over the black plastic frame turning it metallic silver. I swivel the jig to paint the next side, arcing the gun to cover the curved edge of the television frame. Love this job. It takes a special kind of concentration to paint television escutcheons five hundred times a day. Set the record last month with 578 in a single shift. Over six hundred if they included defects. Thinking of the defects, my skill wanes. The siren goes and Gerry and I drop the guns with relief.
The other workers scuttle across the factory floor to be first to the vending machines. We make our way to the toilets. We peel off the cotton gloves, the hoods, the face masks, and wash. The paint spray finds its way through to the skin, regardless. I blow my nose and decide not to think about the paint—it’s approved by the minister for health himself. Gerry spits into the urinal.
—Want anything?
I shake my head.
—What are you smiling at?
—Nothing.
—Go on.
—Ursula is my wife.
—You’re smiling at that? Sap. If that fucker Canning doesn’t lay off me I’ll knife him.
—Relax. You’ll be a manager too one day and then you can be a bollocks.
I sit in the cubicle and stare at the chipboard door. The same coarse talk out of them every day. Did he drop the hand? I’d fucking kill him if he said that to me. Shut up you. Prick. Got to get out of this poxy place. I’m about to swear when I stop myself. She warned me about my language. She has a habit of entering my thoughts when I’m on the edge of anger. The morning after the honeymoon. Lying in bed in the hotel. We were shocked with the drabness of the room. The place had seemed so grand, looking out onto the bay. I pretended its loveliness.
—It’s old-fashioned without the niceness of old-fashioned.
I delight in her directness; a mixture of bluntness and shyness. It was a still, hot night and we slept with the blankets off us. Her naked body lying on its side, facing me. Raising my fingers to the mouth, afraid to touch her. Her breasts are heavy and happy; full of smiles. So many pleasures with her. I stare at her in the darkness. Are you dreaming of us? Of when we met?
I had just entered sixth year, and swear I will avoid girls until after the exams, not that I’ve even touched one, acne and shyness deterring me. We meet at the school dance. She is sitting there in a long black dress, watching everything. And I am watching her. A month later she lets me slip a hand under her blouse, and I hope she can’t sense the trembling in my fingers. The gentleness of her breast; the nipple, hard as a nut. The consternation inside of me, knowing she is excited. The first time I touch her is in the park. We meet there after school and go to the back of the football pitches near the Basin. How she excites me. Her moaning frightens me but I can’t bring myself to stop until her hand tightens about my wrist. A butterfly taking flight. My fingers on her stomach slipping beneath flesh and jeans, down into the wetness between her legs, thrilled by the pulsing of her cunt’s heartbeat. Ripples there, minutes later.
I go to bed without having any tea or without studying. Under the blankets, breathing her in on my fingertips: Ursula. Her smell. Happier than the smell of grass after rain. This couldn’t be the fishy smell other boys joked about. How little they knew. How little everybody knew. How was it that people could go about their lives after discovering such a smell?
Because I am studying for the exams, it is three torturous days before I see her again. As soon as we are alone in the park I bring my fingers to her lips.
—Smell.
She shoves my hand away and stares at the fingertips suspiciously.
—I’m not messing. Smell.
She lifts my fingertips to the wings of her nostrils and inhales.
—You’ve been smoking.
—It’s not cigarettes. It’s you. It’s you. Your smell from Monday evening. When we were here.
She grabs my hand and lifts her nose a little as if sniffing herself from the air about us. She bends and kisses my fingernails; the undersides of my fingers; licks my palm. She kisses and licks the palm and bites it and I whisper it’s nice and it’s lovely and she better stop and she better stop now before it’s nicer and she says yes, she will stop kissing this palm all the time and I plead and she says she will stop in one kiss’s time and I say no you are to stop now and to marry me please.
* * *
Her stomach sags a little and it looks as if it, too, is fast asleep. I have an urge to kiss her navel but restrain myself, fearing I will wake her. I blush at the shock, only a few hours old, when she had taken her bright red knickers off: she is sitting at the far side of the bed with her back to me. She stands, straightening herself the way she does on her good leg, and my eyes rest on the dark triangle of hair.
—What is it?
I shake my head.
—What is it?
I count the stars on the carpet.
—Please don’t go quiet on me. Not on our honeymoon. Please don’t say nothing to me.
—I don’t know what to do.
My face is burning.
—I do.
I look up.
—I mean I’ve a fair idea.
She laughs and I laugh. She walks like a clown on stilts when she hurries.
* * *
We move into the flat in Lower Dorset Street over Youkstetter the pork butcher, after the wedding at the end of July. My father had offered us a room in the house until we got some money together but neither of us wanted to live at home any longer—she had reached the end of her tether with her mother who had just started to get into the swing of things with her fond-of-a-drop lover, Mulvany, who was living there now. No job, going around half naked, letting Ursula know with his eyes he’d do her too. Lover: it was the first time I’d ever heard someone use that word out loud, and it was silly coming out of her mother’s middle-class, middle-aged mouth. Lover: a word that should imply passion but in her implied only pretension and desperation.
Cats used to gather in the back yard and force the lids off the rubbish bins. We slept with the window closed so the stench wouldn’t waft in on top of us. That first blistering August we left all the doors open so that air could crawl into the bedroom from the front room. Staring up at the ceiling half the night, cursing the trucks passing on their way up the North, and stopping me from sleeping.
* * *
All that was after the honeymoon; adoring the sight of her; her arched foot; ankle with the tiny tattoo of the green and red hummingbird; her bent knee; thigh widening out, heavy hips falling down to the waist. I reach across and kiss the bottom. I take a breath and softly kiss her breast and my heart sings that I can please her and she not even awake. I go to the bathroom to relieve myself. The noise of the sea coming in the open window taunts me, whispering truths between each wave. My face is tired in the mirror. I have the responsible cut of a husband about me. Maybe this morning I’ll be able to keep it in her longer. The coldness of the tiled floor seeps into my feet. A new resolve floods me and I run hot water over my hands to heat them lest they’re cold on her. I creep back and slip beneath the covers beside her warm body and kiss her face. She stirs. I push my tongue between her dry lips and hear them part like glued paper. She stirs. I lick the surface of her teeth; the smoothness of hard ice cream. Her eyes open and she smiles at me.
—Morning, husband.
I rai
se myself on an elbow, away from the sudden surprise of her sour breath. My mouth must be the same, reeking of the night. She reaches out her arms, a tired child wanting to be lifted. Yet when I enclose her, I feel as if I’m the child and I hide my face against the nape of her neck, hiding the embarrassment that comes with the pleasure of her. The scent of her lilac perfume. Her body next to mine is the heavens unfastening. Let me manage it properly this morning. My father having to do the janitor job in the school when things got difficult at home: having to work for the Thorntons as well and put up with being checked on all the time as if he was a child when he couldn’t get painting work. How I love him so unquestioningly. I love her more though, love her more than I love my own father, and the treachery of it catches in my throat. The siren screams and I rouse myself from the reverie of the cubicle. I had started to pleasure myself but there is no time. Foul graffiti daubed on the back of the door. I stand and wince—my leg is gone asleep. She gets sore sometimes in the amputated leg. I rub my leg back to life. Back in the spray painting booth I attack the work vigorously, taking care not to let the hose of the gun hit the painted frames. I will the day to end, to be home with her.
Bath Avenue
The house was on a corner, and although my father always said never to buy a corner house, we did. Everything that could be wrong with a house was wrong with this one: the roof leaked badly, the guttering needed replacing, there were broken windows and the frames were warped and rotten, the bath was cracked, the toilet solidly blocked, the wiring was lead and dangerous, the wallpaper was soaked with rising damp, the plaster would have to be hacked off the downstairs walls up to a height of four feet, the walls drilled and injected with chemicals, the brick then left bare for six months to dry out, and finally, the walls could be replastered. Floor and ceiling joists were rotten. A ceiling collapsed during the renovations, barely missing the gas man and the builder. There was no heating. The gas cooker failed the Bord Gáis test and it and the pipes to the street would have to be replaced. We knocked down several walls to make a large kitchen. It was a dark, musty house on a corner between a middle-class and working-class area and everyone said not to buy. We did what every estate agent hopes a couple will do: we fell in love with what the house could be. The roof, even if it did leak, was a mansard of sorts and gave the room that would be the bedroom a romantic air heightened by a small window tucked under the eaves and sloping slate. The house, like us, was full of potential and hope.
We were in love with notions of each other. We were in love with opposites. She was a non-practicing Protestant with a Catholic name and I was a non-practicing Catholic with a Protestant name. She was from a middle-class background that had slipped a little after her parents divorced. I was from a lower working-class background but was now living in a middle-class world. Neither of us ever wanted to have children. We were disillusioned with Ireland. She was writing good poems and an insipid novel. I was jealous of her expanding life and ignored the competitive drive in her. She thought me funny and I never dared admit how seldom she got the joke; besides, I was drawn to her serious nature. So we bought the house made of the crumbling Dublin yellow brick on Bath Avenue in Irishtown. We took photographs of each other leaning against the Sold sign. She bought us matching key rings, two silver fishes. I made a joke about the religious significance and she said that was not the point at all; we were two faithful fishes swimming forever in a sea of sharks. This fish was working the nightshift in the factory for the extra money. Sometimes Gerry would hit the emergency button and all the machines would die and we would stand there listening to the silence in the factory and he would roll up the sleeves and the trouser ends of his overalls and he would hobble up and down in front of the booths reciting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
We hired skip after skip, and filled them with the old belongings left behind after Anna Condron had died there. Post still came for the woman, now nearly three years dead. The world takes its time letting the dead go to their graves. Work led to work. There were problems we hadn’t bargained for—even exceeding our happy pessimism about the state of the house. The water cistern in the attic burst, but only after the plumber had installed new pipes leading to it. These, time revealed, were insignificant problems compared to what was to come.
There were nice surprises. When we stripped the old plywood on the stairwell we discovered there were original posts hiding there. As the months passed and spring came and went, we learned what a beautiful garden Anna Condron had planted. Pale pink roses. Black-eyed Susans. Snapdragons. Flowers we could not name. Ursula found five hundred pounds under the carpet in old twenty pound notes. I wanted to blow it. She saved it for our future. Our future.
So engrossed were we in the house that we ignored the children who gathered at the corner every day. Some of the mischief they got up to is the kind of mischief any group of bored children get up to: ringing the doorbell and running away, screaming at us as we came and went. But there was something else in the air, a hint of menace. The children played football late into the night under the street lamps. The ball banged repeatedly off the gable. Even though we were exhausted we could not sleep with the noise. Summer came and with it the school holidays and the trouble escalated. I can’t remember the first time I told the children to move away from the house and not make so much noise. I can’t remember when their language got worse and they went from calling us silly names to more vulgar ones. I can’t even remember the first broken window. The children began to take on individual identities. There was Larry. He was about six and he was the youngest. He was put up to much of the trouble. I watched Larry from the window as he tore the windscreen wipers off the car.
There were many days when I talked with them as I loaded the skip. They asked questions nonstop. They asked if we were married and for some reason I lied and said no. This marked us in their eyes. Larry looked at me and said, Holy God will come duck and fuckin’ kill ya’ if you’re not married. Darina, one of the tallest, about fourteen, would be pregnant soon. It was in her eyes. Alan, a boy who held Ursula in great disdain. He spat at her and called her a cunt. When he hissed the word cunt he meant it. They made fun of the way Ursula spoke. They thought she was American with her accent that was a mixture of her English father and celtophilic mother. There was Sabrina and Joseph and Elaine.
Something was happening every day now. A ball would be banged repeatedly against the gable. A bag of rubbish thrown over the back wall in on top of the new flower beds. Graffiti sprayed on the side of the house: Psychohead! Cuntface! Geebag! Ursula began to spend more and more time at the office. Her career with the Tribune was up and running. We had been married three years before we decided to buy the house. Almost as soon as we did I knew it was a mistake. It was her money that bought the house and although I tried to make up for it by working hard on the renovation I couldn’t put it out of my mind that it was her house. During an argument about where we should put the cooker she snapped that it was her cooker and her house, not mine. I looked at her dumbfounded and her eyes dared me to question her. She had said it and even though I could see the regret in her face, I could see, too, the defiance of her mother, of being raised not to take shit from any man. It was over then but I didn’t know it. No I knew it but I didn’t want over. And without even thinking about it very much, I did what so many do, I began to look around for Ms. Next.
She never apologised about the cooker. It wasn’t her style to apologise, too much of the father in her for that. Shoulders back, look them straight in the eye. Never complain. Never explain. Never apologise. By the time she calmed down she knew there was a coldness in me that was permanent. The inequality had been spoken. I didn’t have the courage to confront her about it, and when later she offered to put the house in both our names I dismissed the idea. It was her house. And it was all exacerbated by the odd coincidence that her mother had a man livin
g with her, a man over twenty years younger who was living off her. Mulvany had no job and did nothing around the house except leave dirty ashtrays and teacups strewn about the place. He was a drunk. There were no parallels drawn between mother and daughter. There weren’t any—except the crucial fact that both women owned their property and the men in their lives were moneyless. It all lay there between us like a stillbirth. I began to hate Mulvany unreasonably. I began to hate her father and her mother for divorcing when she was four years old, hated her suspicion of men. Fear creating the thing it fears. I had to prove I was not a bastard rather than just be who I was—someone who loved her. I started loving her less. Only three years married and the intimacy between us worn more than the wedding shoes that I only wore on Sundays. We slept in the same bed but we never touched each other. In the night, if I awoke and felt our buttocks meet I moved away as if a hot poker was between us. I promised myself I would never touch her again but desire got the better of the both of us. Afterwards, I would lie there disgusted with myself for being inside her.
* * *
One night there was a knock on the door. I got out of the bath and towelled quickly to answer it. We were expecting her mother. One of the neighbors was standing there, heavy moustached, topless and wearing only a pair of jeans; a stupid, good-looking, chest-tattooed piece of shit from head to toe. He was smoking and he pointed his cigarette at me and said that if either that bitch or me ever as much as looked at his children he would fucking kill us. I asked to come in, hoping if he stepped into the hallway he might calm down but he stayed where he was with one foot on the door saddle. He went on and on, called us perverts, a word Sabrina used. He put a foot into the hallway. The ash lengthened on his cigarette and his reluctance to tap it on the carpet gave some hope he wasn’t a complete maniac.
—Your children are ruining our lives.
I looked around at Ursula, astonished she was interrupting him.
—Shut the fuck up you.
