by Martin Roper
Her car isn’t there. I think about going back into town and staying at Muriel’s but then decide I’ll wait. I pay the driver and walk up the driveway. Willy is sitting there, watching me. She rises up off the windowsill, stretches, and jumps pertly onto the gravel. She’s got big. Lost the kittenishness. She walks over and rubs against me. No sign of Vomit. Out hunting. Vomit was always the wild one. I sit on the bench in the front garden. No sound anywhere. The cat jumps up on me. Darkness falls about the house. The cat drifts off and after a while I hear the flap slap back and forth. She’s gone into the heat. A light goes on in the house and startles me, making me feel like a thief. Through the high window over the hall door I see her turning slowly on the stairs, her back to me. I walk up the garden, and passing the garage, realise the car must be in there. She would have cleared everything out by now. Bye bye books. The overhead sensor picks up my form and the outside light comes on. I knock on the door. She pulls the curtain aside and looks out. A slow unlocking of bolts.
—You got here fast.
I start to tell her to back off. The news of my father will deflate trouble, at least for now. She turns and I see the bruises on her face. She shifts and faces me. She is centuries older. The hall is quivering with silence.
—What happened your face?
—Hi husband still.
She closes her eyes.
—I was attacked. Didn’t Mum tell you?
—Attacked?
—On the hill. They got in the car. Come in. Welcome home.
Vomit runs in between our legs, meowing.
—Who did?
She closes her eyes again.
—The children. The hill on the corner where the car sometimes stalls. It cut out and as I was starting it one of them jumped in beside me and shouted to the other to push it. I just started it again and then the others got in the back. They made me drive around. It was a blast. She goes ahead into the kitchen. I am taken aback by its vastness. She has had all the downstairs walls demolished. She lies on the sofa by the fire and pulls the blankets up around her.
—Want some tea?
—Where did it happen?
—What do you mean where? The hill. Where the car cuts out. It doesn’t matter where. They did things to me.
She stops talking and lies back down. I lie down beside her and hold her tightly, expecting a struggle. But there is no struggle. She is motionless on the sofa like a drunk. I see the card I sent her from New York propped up over the fireplace. Two signs like interstate directions over a highway: Men who comb their hair to hide their bald spots. Women who put too much effort into relationships.
—I bet they’ve burned out the car. Pigbastards. I’d love to roast their smelly balls.
—What did they do?
I dread the answer.
—They felt me. They put their hands all over me as I was driving.
—Why didn’t—
I stop myself. Lord save me from asking stupid questions.
—I’ll live with the whys, thank you. There were two boys and Darina. One of the boys was Larry. I don’t know who the other one was. I hate them. I hate her most of all. She put her hands between my legs. She spat in my hair. I drove them around for an hour. Jesus I was so stupid. I always lock the doors.
I can’t believe she is telling me this. I can’t believe the children from Irishtown followed her. What was it with them?
—Have you reported the car?
She looks at me with tired, cynical eyes, an older woman now.
—I told the police. It won’t make any difference. Why won’t they leave me the fuck alone?
—Where’s your mother?
—At work. She’ll be here soon, she says, looking up at the clock on the mantle. I told her not to phone you. There was no point in you coming home.
—She didn’t. At least she didn’t get me. My father is dying. I got the call yesterday. I didn’t know about this.
—That makes me feel better—really. I didn’t want you here because of this, because of them. Sorry about your Dad.
—I would have come.
—Easy on the sugar. Want to see around the place? Lot of changes.
—It looks wonderful. Never imagined it could not feel damp. You shouldn’t get up.
—I’m fine. Just tired.
The stairwell is the only part of the house that is not done up, bare walls, the newel missing from the top of the staircase. We go into the bedroom. Her bedroom. I am a guest who knows where the hot-water bottle is kept, which drawer stores the cutlery. The photograph of the two of us taken on top of the Empire State Building is gone. The colour scheme is the same as Bath Avenue. She has held on to some of our choices—if she ever thought they were ours. I tell her about Daddy, that he really is dying.
—Where are you staying? I don’t mean to sound rude.
—I’m staying with an aunt.
—The Muriel I met at Ruth’s funeral. She’s a character.
—Yup.
—You’re quite the Yank.
—I used to accuse you of that.
We smile at the history between us.
She is asleep now, deep in the drowning nightmare. A juggernaut screeches to a halt outside, its brakes hissing and sighing. She whimpers in her howling sea. I wait for the tension to leave her body, ease onto the bed and rock her slowly in the nest of my lap. She clings to safety. Her eyes open, full of shock and relief. She stares into my face, still fighting the maw of waves. I speak without thinking.
—I want it to work. I want us to be together.
She turns her head into the pillow. What to do with the bag of feelings I have left for her? What to do with everything that’s gathered like dust in some forgotten room? All the intimacies that made up our life.
* * *
My father dies happy with the inaccurate knowledge that I love him unconditionally. There is no reason to forgive a life of profound ignorance. The insignificant moment of his death is a lame reason to forgive sixty-two years of a life flooded with self-absorption. There is no resentment. I will not wound my life with bitterness. But I will not cajole myself, or be cajoled into some cathartic understanding of who he was and why he was the way he was. He was wrong too long. There is no resentment. There is no absolution. Would need to know all to forgive all. I know more than enough. How can one know a man who lived every spare moment in front of a television, believing in his heart that his wife might walk back in any moment and all would be well?
Back at Muriel’s house I start to cry and people are relieved by my brief. I am not crying for him. I am crying for Budgie, the blue bird we had when I was five. We fed him too much and he used to sit on the bottom of his cage, incapacitated with fatness. His nails were curled like the swirls on a snail’s shell. I’d hold Budgie’s scared body in my hand and my father would clip his nails. We were in a hurry to get to Mass and he cut a nail too high up and Budgie bled and died. I never forgave him for being in a hurry out to Mass. I watched him pass the collection basket down through the congregation, smiling at everyone. My father had a smile for everyone. Except us. Daddy: everyone’s handyman.
* * *
I am gardening in the front when her father comes with that woman he married after he divorced her mother. He asks if he can do anything. If. You can go fuck yourself.
—She’s resting.
—We shouldn’t disturb her then.
—Not at all. You’ve driven so far. She’d be upset if I didn’t wake her.
He leans against the car, cornered. Even in the vulgar face of drama we are cripplingly polite to one another. Rachel is her name, the woman he married. Rachel. Chalk squealing on a blackboard. Everyone was so surprised, so shocked with his choice. I think her a perfect selection after Ursula’s mother: a mannequin who spreads her legs for him. He walks around the garden looking at the roses, flattering this and that. His forte was always to stand in the garden and talk of greenfly and blackfly and aberrations. Now he babbles about how well we have
done. He is of the brigade who gets too nice too late. He hoicks up the knees of his pants and squats to sniff the Peace rose. He looks up at me, vaguely guilty eye, like a dog caught in the middle of a shit. He stands abruptly and goes up to the house. He approaches it as if it is a sleeping tiger. Rachel asks me about the flowers. She is being a woman, engaging the man. Talk to him. Ask him questions. He will adore you for adoring him.
—Flowers are such an important part of us, she says.
—Fuck flowers.
She looks at me a long minute. I continue digging.
—I could fuck on them perhaps, on their petals. Hardly with them.
I stop digging, lean on the trowel.
—I’m sorry.
She shrugs. She is used to not existing. I can think of nothing to say that makes a difference. Sorry. A word to make me feel noble to myself. I lift the small tree out of the boot of the car and sit it on the gravel. It looks tremulous, nervous of its surroundings. I cut off the black plastic holding pot. Roots.
—They don’t get on, do they, she says, looking back to the house.
—No. He doesn’t like women, not even his daughter.
She smiles without feeling.
—Rachel, it’s not a great time. I didn’t mean you. I’m sure he—
—You should have been a priest. No, a bishop. The speaker of great truths.
I set the tree in the bed, push in hills of soil around its base. Go away. I want all of them to go away. Rachel standing there aware of the freshness of her beauty, of what it allows her; her breasts suggest she has solutions. Every time I meet her I try to like her and fail.
—Why did you marry him?
—For the sex. Why did you marry her? Surely not the money.
I look up at her answer and she pouts her disappointment. I had hoped the question would get rid of her but instead it satisfies her. She must be asked that question often.
—The truth is even more shocking. I married him so as not to be alone. Yippety doo dah.
I press the soil in firmly with the heel of my foot. Already, it is establishing itself, its tiny leaves finding a breeze. She refuses to go.
—An altruistic gesture?
—What?
She nods towards the tree.
—You’re not going to be here to see it grow, are you?
—No.
She reaches out and touches my arm. I can’t bear to think about any of this. She has mouthed words that no one else would dare. This is the one thing I do like about her. We go up to the house and put the kettle on. He must be still up there in her bedroom. The memory of her parents’ divorce when she was six flashes into my mind. He had gone into her bedroom and pleaded with her to stay, to choose him. The air is damp. I wish I was in New York. Wish I was lying on Holfy’s warm body. I make the tea; a truce. Rachel tells me about her life in Stillorgan. Of raising Ursula’s brothers and sister. Her words blur in my mind; they become past tense, her life is decided, resolutely directed. As she talks (it’s about how the children play on her not being their mother) I catch sight of a toy on the kitchen shelf. It’s the little Latvian doll I bought for Ursula the day Holfy and I had lunch in McSorley’s. We came out of the pub a little drunk, and it was raining and we took shelter in the doorway of the store. It’s a little wooden russian doll. It sits beside the tea canister, untouched in its cellophane wrapper.
Our life ended with the completion of the house. The state of the marriage went in inverse proportion to the state of the house. If it were a graph, it would be a clean X. The strange patterning of lie. Ursula explaining about Fibonacci numbers. He loves me, he loves me not. It will always be he loves me, she explains. Nature and numbers colluding. Only if the flower is complete, I say. Yes, she says, it depends on perfection. The smell of her cunt is as vivid as the smell of cut grass. I am a fool.
* * *
As I’m walking them both to the car he says that Ursula is in a bad way. He is impressed with his courage to say something as intimate as a feeling his daughter might be having. He manages to sound like a rather perplexed doctor. Rachel moves, on the verge of being the soothsayer. She stops herself. I resist the involuntary urge to nod, to agree with him in any way. He looks down, kicks the tyre of his Volvo.
—You’ll work it out, so, he says.
His nose twitches at the air; gesture made; he’s gone the extra mile; more than many a man. Vomit wanders up the driveway. When she reaches us she arches, looking for a reason to ignore us. Rachel stoops and pets her. Even in her stoop Rachel acts being a woman; she flattens the back of her skirt beneath her buttocks as she bends; flattens the front of it when she stands. Always a woman wanting to be wanted.
—Do you want to know?
—I beg your pardon?
—Do you want to know about Ursula and me? About working it out.
—You don’t have to go into—it’s not our business, the details of your—
—Because if you want to know I’ll tell you. But if you don’t want to know that’s very good too. You can have it either way but you can’t have it both ways.
Her father is exhausted. Even with the sun glinting off his heavy spectacles I can see the struggle to contain his anger. A woman passes by at the end of the drive looking at the house as if it’s a dress she’s considering buying. Gooooey, I yell, waving to her. She hurries on. The old man makes a decision. He’s going to drop the pretence. He puts a hand on my shoulder.
—You do whatever you think is right in the eyes of God. Let’s leave it at that.
He pats me on the shoulder and gets into the car. I am stunned, not by the aggressive hand on the shoulder (I am used to the patronising pats of other men) but by the mention of God. I expect God to appear and tell us all to go to hell. Rachel extends her hand. I want to hurt her, to make sure the old bastard’s day worsens:
—Good luck, whore.
—It’s not about luck, sweetie.
She winks, seats herself with ladylike aplomb in the car, and waves as she closes the door. I can tell he’s asking her what was said. Drive David, she says loudly. The core of us in aloneness. Rachel is nearer than any of us. She knows herself and knows too she can live with him without compromising what matters most in her life. Strange, I never thought of Ursula’s father having a first name. I sit on the garden bench long after they’ve gone. He was a child once, had a mother yelling David at teatime. A lawn is being mowed somewhere, far enough away to sound nothing more that a bee buzzing. The sun, exhausted, has given the last of its heat to the day. Night comes. The bathroom light goes on. Timid tinkling. The pull of the toilet chain and a clang. No flush. Another pull, more violent. Nothing. I rise to go and help her with it. The light goes out. I stop halfway across the lawn. Already back in bed by now.
Separate, it’s what we both want.
I walk down to the village. The phone box is on the corner near Haverty’s. Great craic going on inside. I push the phonecard in and punch the thirteen digits to reach Holfy’s voice. Her machine comes on, more soothing than any drink.
—It’s me. I’m here—
She picks up.
—Here? Where’s here? You’re never here.
—Funny.
—I’m just in. I was stuck in the Holland Tunnel for—
—I love you.
—Yeah?
I smile. The American intonation mixed with her Icelandic gravel charms me even now. I have a pain in my stomach with yearning for her. A group stumble out of the pub, roaring with drink. It’s odd to see people drunk on the street. One of the women is pushing a pram, and yelling at her husband not to piss up against the wall.
—It’s the locals out of the pub. It’s noisy your end too.
—They’re making another movie. I had to walk from Horatio with my equipment.
—Move away from the window. I can’t hear you.
—I am away from the window. I’m in bed.
—In bed?
—On it. Want to do it?
We lau
gh the giddy, greedy laugh of happy lovers, rush to fill the precious silences to make the most of the call. There’s a violent beating on the roof of the phone box. Rain, come thunderously without warning like the threat of a clenched fist.
—We need rain here. The humidity is worse since you left.
Finally, she asks about the funeral just as the phone pips. I give her the number and wait with an elbow on the cradle, the phone to my ear. Nothing but the fierceness of the rain belting down. The pubs are closed now, the streets deserted; lashed into silence by the sudden storm. Nothing but wetness. A car approaches; the glare of its headlamps catching me full in the face. Blackness. Slosh. Evidently, she can’t get through. I decide to wait two more minutes. Shame whistles through the door and I hum to stop myself from thinking. My father is dead. The rain looks like it will go on forever. I’ll wait until it ends. The phone rings, its loudness echoing.
—I’m sorry. A client called as soon as I hung up. She’s a bitch. I had to take it.
—I want to be back with you. It’s over with her. I’ve told her.
Silence. Tiny international beeps. Tell her it’s over.
—Holfy?
—I’m here.
—I want to be with you. I’ve told her I’m leaving.
I bite my lip on the lie.
—It’s not my call.
—Fuck that. What do you know? We’re at each other’s throats. I can’t help her.
—Don’t leave her for me. Leave her for you.
—Such devastating fucking wisdom.
—I mean it.
—I am leaving her for me.
—I don’t believe that.
I slam the phone down. Her voice goes on in my head. I hope she calls back to hang up on me. The rain has a grudging ceaseless look at it. It’s weakened, running noiselessly down the phone box. The phone doesn’t ring. I rifle my wallet for a phone card but know already I used the last one. It feels like winter has slipped inside my coat. If Ursula is up, she might be worried. Still enough feeling left for worry, perhaps. I tear the cover off the telephone book to use as a hat and set off up the hill. At the top of the first steep rise, where the car stalls, I pause. I look out across the city. A scattering of higgledypiggledy goldenwhite lights that is Dublin. Lights sparkling as if they have nothing better to do than look magical. To the east, nothing but blackness, the scooped neckline of Dublin Bay and its seawaves washing up against the city. A ship far out in the bay. The tremendous noise of the sea slapping against Bray harbour, slapping too into the scoop of Sandycove, into Scotsman’s Bay, into Dun Laoghaire pier where it washed clean over us that day and we kissing near the lighthouse, and across the bay; slapping its old song against Howth. And deep in the middle of its waters, away from the bobbing city, the sea is silent. The sea is nothing but silence. Silence and waiting. So much is hidden.
