On Monday, I bought him something.
The local vegetable shop is a little yuppie shed, open to the elements. In December it has boxes of Christmas satsumas, green figs, pomegranates woven about by white mesh in figures of eight. I chose a little bag of lychees, cold and bumpy to the touch. I ate one on the way back to the office, standing in a doorway and sheltering from the rain. I had never tasted them fresh, before. The skin was like bark; so thick you could hear it tear. Under it was the dark white of the fruit; smooth as a boiled egg and more slippy, and in the middle of this grey, scented flesh was a deep red pip, surrounded by its own pink stain.
We had been talking about China. Seán had said I should learn some Mandarin. He said he was in Shanghai – had I ever been to Shanghai? It was like the fucking wild west out there – and he nearly bought a Teach Yourself DVD for his daughter in the airport, though she was past that stage where they sort of sing their way into speech, that perfect stage, when you understand how Chinese got invented in the first place. He said you got on those roads, those eight-lane highways, completely empty, and you understood something about the future – that you could do it. Certainly, it was scary. But the future was also normal.
But no, I had never been to Shanghai. I put the little bag, still spotted with rain, on his desk. Is this what I wanted to say? – what is under the skin, stays under the skin. That I was willing to keep things small.
‘Where would you book,’ he said to me later, ‘if you needed an airport hotel?’
‘The Clarion?’ I said.
And three days after I shut the door of that second hotel room behind me, and caught a minibus up to the airport terminal, and got in the taxi queue, and went home unwashed and beyond caring, I answered the phone and found myself talking to his wife, being invited by his wife; who wanted, presumably, a good look at me, now that it was all too late.
It made me more sad, than anything. I put down the phone, and waved my little feather ballerina about, in an admonishing way.
Now see what you have done.
Kiss Me, Honey, Honey, Kiss Me
MEANWHILE, THERE WAS the office party to get through. At 9 p.m., I am standing in the hallway of l’Gueuleton in Fade Street, saying goodbye to Fiachra who is trying to get out the door and go home to his pregnant wife. When he succeeds, Seán, who was assisting, finds the wall with his back and tips his head against the brickwork – once, twice – saying, ‘Fuck. Fuck.’ I say, ‘Where can we go?’ and he says, ‘We can’t go, we just can’t,’ but we are both quite drunk and end up dragging each other into the Drury Street car park for another endless kiss in some concrete corner that smells of petrol and the rain, with the sound of people wandering through the far levels and the squawk of found cars answering the remote.
And this, too, is another epic kiss, a wall-slider if there ever was one, I feel like I am clambering out of my own head, that the whole usual mess of myself has been put on the run by it. By the end, we are barely touching and everything is so clear and tender I find myself able to say:
‘When will I see you?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know. I’ll try. I don’t know.’
I walk through the Christmas city lights, not a taxi in sight and the town going crazy all around me, and I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like bird-song; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness.
And then home: the bite of the key in the cold lock, the smell of the still air in the hallway, and the glow, upstairs, of Conor’s laptop. I go up there – drunk, surprised each time my foot meets a step. My husband is sitting in the armchair, his face blue in the light of the screen, and nothing moves except the sweep and play of his finger on the mouse-pad and his thumb as it clicks.
‘Have a good night?’
I had, of course, no intention of going to Aileen’s damn party. But it was a long Christmas in Youghal, pulling crackers, making small-talk, tippling through each day into a state of hard sobriety that kept you awake at night, angry as a stone. Conor’s family never drank in his father’s pub, though sometimes one or other of them would shrug his jacket on and jump in a minicab to take a turn behind the bar. They lived out the Cork road, with a stream in the garden, and they kept themselves separate from the ordinary drunks of the town with cases of French wine, which they got from their importer in Mullingar.
Conor’s mother wore cream trousers to match her ash-blonde hair, and fine gold jewellery on a permanent, light tan. His father was a big, physical man who liked to get a decent handful when he said hello; who thought a handful of daughter-in-law was, at his age, only fair. His wife might rebuke him, she might rap out a ‘Thank you, Francis!’ and everyone would laugh – I am not imagining this – at my discomfort, and the wonderful, horny badness of their old man.
They were a good couple, for all that. They had fun. The place was always busy with cousins and friends and various ‘associates’ who dropped in clutching bottles of Heidsieck or Rémy Martin and laughing about ‘coals to Newcastle’ as they were invited into the front room. It reminded me of my own father, the mock seriousness, ‘Oh take no notice of that fella!’, with its under-swell of self-importance and things unsaid; the way they were all in the know.
I am not sure what there was to know – my father either – I am not sure what they actually got, for all their air of being canny: the pub licence, maybe; planning permission for some bungalow. It hardly seemed worth all the nods and winks, and though it made me nostalgic for the men who tickled the back of my neck to produce fifty-pence pieces in the hall, Conor hated it – it made him literally itch in his clothes and try to shrug free.
What Conor liked about being home was the chance it gave him to be a boy again. He liked wrestling with his brothers and being a slob and leaving the kitchen work to the women, and it never ceased to astonish me. If this was regression then he was going back to some smaller self, one long ago discarded. So my rage at the sink was only partly to do with the drudgery of being a guest in that house, it was more to do with the loss of the man I knew to this loutish teenager who was a stranger, possibly, even to himself.
In bed, at night, I tried to claim him back – I was sleeping with Seán at the time, I know that, but these things don’t always work the way you think they should – and some night, before the drinking got too humourless and steady, I knocked on his shaved brown head to see if he was still in there. And he was. He opened his eyes in the darkness. Then he loved me up, down and crossways, as though I was a dream of his future come impossibly true, there among his old football posters and scattered CDs, as though the truth was better than he ever could have imagined.
We did not fight until New Year’s Eve. I can’t remember what triggered it. Money probably. We used to fight about money. His mother. I mean, tick the list. The way the washing machine was left to flood after he ‘installed’ it and pushed the button and went back to play Shattered Galaxy. The whole internet thing maddened me, by then – I can’t remember when it happened, when Conor at the cutting edge turned into Conor hanging out with a load of wasters online. I went so far as to check his browsing history once, but it was completely unremarkable – which just made it worse, somehow: at that stage I would have been happy to find porn.
But this could not have been the fight we had in Youghal because we were outside, far away, for once, from any screen. We were walking on the beach and the pain of the cold air on my lungs was like the pain of the view on my eyeballs, after four days of kitchen living and bad Christmas TV. It was being in the open that let it loose, I think. Even when I shouted, my voice seemed to happen in its distant echo, out where the sky grew low over the sea.