Dad’s shoulder blades flared through his shirt as he turned the bike over and laid it on its tyres.
‘Look,’ he said, a bead of sweat forming in the crease of his lip. ‘I know you don’t know what I’m on about now. But you’ll understand me when you’re older.’
Dad’s hand moved along the crossbar to the saddle. I took a step towards him, then a step back.
Everything
Dark clouds had followed us from Dublin to central Meath. When finally they broke on Saturday morning, neighbours telephoned Melissa’s parents with news of flooding. In the early gloaming, Ciarán and I hauled sandbags to the milking shed, and then, while he spun the Land Rover into town, Melissa and I ate a three-hour lunch with Siobhán and covered invites, footwear, cake.
‘We’d better be leaving early tomorrow if we’re going to get yous home,’ Ciarán said that night over dinner (boutonnières, placecards, flower girls’ dresses).
But on Sunday morning there was a break in the rain. I sat on the edge of the bed to tie my trainers. Melissa yawned and rolled over, baring a white shoulder. The sheets caught in the crook of her knee and tautened against her back. I bent to place a kiss at her ear and at once I felt cunning and ashamed: what I’d really wanted, when I’d packed my running gear for the weekend, was to ensure some time alone.
A bank of swollen cloud loomed over the puddled driveway. The wind had stilled and the countryside was eager and delirious. Above the blackberry bushes a swarm of greenflies hummed a crazy music. A flock of starlings burst from the telephone line and squawked at nothing. A narrow road took me under a canopy of dripping trees, to the crest of a brief hill and down into a flooded gully. I came to a stile and looked beyond it: rolling, quiet gold. I clambered over. Tongues of corn applied their slaver to my shins.
Melissa was waiting for me in the hallway at the foot of the staircase, wearing only the mock-Victorian nightgown I’d bought for her the previous Christmas. Its hanging collar framed a hard nub of breastbone; its tail hit just above the jagged scar sunk into her left thigh — mark of a refusing mare and of a shattered femur that ached still whenever the barometer dropped.
‘They’re away at Mass, you know,’ she said, narrowing her eyes.
‘Are they, now?’ I said.
I watched Melissa climb the stairs, and for a moment — the fall of her feet, the flex of her calves — it was as though I were nineteen again and back in the fusty hallway of her Rathmines digs. My hands were sweating, I realized, not from the run but from her, as they had done back then — so much so, once, that I’d dropped the cheap bottle of red wine I’d spent half an hour selecting.
In the bedroom I found her naked, the nightdress flung on the floor. She stood in front of the full-length mirror squeezing the flesh at her ribs. I struggled out of my gear and crept across the room, but when Melissa felt me against her back she tensed.
‘Shower first,’ she said. ‘You stink.’
I reached my hands around her waist.
‘I thought you liked my stink.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ she laughed. ‘When did I say a thing like that?’
‘Before.’
‘Before! Before, I pretended to like a lot of things — before I knew better!’
‘Like what?’
‘Your singing.’
‘What else?’
‘Your dancing!’
‘Be honest, now, you like my dancing.’ And I danced, flesh slopping back and forth on its loose tethers to my bones.
Melissa turned and laid her hands on my chest. Her hair smelled of fruit.
‘I liked it in a boyfriend.’ She bit the corner of a smile. ‘But my husband will have to be a better dancer.’
‘Oh, really?’ I fumbled for her hips but she skittered away from me and disappeared into the wardrobe crammed with her teenage clothes. I planted my bare arse on her desk. ‘Well, then, maybe I’m just not husband material after all.’
‘If you say you’re not, you’re not.’ I heard the click of many hangers. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing: you’d better not embarrass me for our first dance.’
‘And if I do?’
‘Then I’ll be forced to get a divorce.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Clumsiness.’
‘ “Your honour, I can no longer in good conscience remain married to this man, for he is clumsy”?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Seems a bit extreme.’
‘It is what it is.’
Melissa emerged from the wardrobe holding in each hand a blue polka-dot party frock, nearly identical. She laid them both on the bed and turned to finger through the necklaces arranged on hooks in her travelling jewellery box. Her hand moved quickly, stopped, and rose to rub the notches at the base of her neck.
‘Have you seen my little Claddagh earrings?’
‘No,’ I sighed. ‘But I’m sure they’ll turn up. We’ll look for them after.’
‘After?’ In her eyes there was a glimmer of gleeful cruelty. ‘After what now, exactly?’
Whenever I stayed at Melissa’s parents’ house, I liked to take long showers in the screened, claw-footed tub. Then I’d sit on the toilet, leaf through the copies of Old Moore’s Almanac arranged on the cistern and study their alien world of weather lore and sheep dip. I rooted through the medicine cabinet to check the progress of Siobhán’s anxiety treatment, cracked the frosted window and looked out over moving fields. The sky above them was murderous but the fields were reconciled and quiet. I leaned my elbows on the window sill and endured for as long as I could.
The air in the kitchen was sharp with the tang of bleach and the tiles were tacky underfoot. Melissa’s eyes were riveted to the screen of the wall-mounted TV, where a grave-faced meteorologist laid hands on the country’s centre. At the opposite end of the room, Siobhán busied herself unloading things from shopping bags. The bite marks of elastic across her stomach made her look as though she’d been assembled in a hurry.
‘Need a hand, there?’ I asked and Melissa turned on me, her tongue a spike between crooked teeth.
‘No, you’re grand,’ Siobhán said.
Rain resumed its beat against the kitchen window. Water bubbled at the base of the sliding door. Outside, beneath the eaves of the milking shed, a herd of sheltering cattle moaned.
‘Squalling out there, ha Mel?’ Siobhán said, stacking beans on top of peas on top of corn.
Melissa studied the television.
‘Looks like,’ I said.
‘Melissa.’ Siobhán could not be deterred. ‘I forgot to tell you who I ran into — only Mary McConvey of all people. Has a voucher for glycolic peels over at Alchemy that Christy gave her for her birthday — subtlety, as ever, not exactly being Christy’s strong suit. Face on her of recent, to be honest, like a bumpy road. Herself and myself are considering one before the wedding. Interested?’
‘So, she’s coming too?’
Siobhán finished her task in silence. When everything was put away she made a beeline for me, took my stubbled jaw in her hand as she strode past and said:
‘You’ll do.’
I gathered breakfast things from the cupboards and seated myself beside Melissa. When I reached for the white plastic flower she’d pinned to the side of her head, she recoiled, her face pinched.
‘I’m not in the mood,’ she said.
What had happened, I knew, was what always happened: Melissa had fought with her mother out of fear and frustrated love. She wanted the reception to be elegant and intimate; Siobhán wanted to invite a mob of family and friends.
My head slid into my hands. The pulse in my thumb met that in my temple.
‘Okay, look,’ I said, ‘I mean, they are paying … Would it really be the end of the world —’