Phil Brogan. Five foot nine, at a push. Fortyish. Sex machine.
Actually, she liked him. Clever and restless and constantly perceptive — in some ways, he was not like a man at all. And it wasn’t as if he was married, as she said to her partner Tom, so why not? There was a story about a stationery cupboard — which she didn’t believe — but even so, it said something about the suddenness of him. She assumed this was what got them going. Though she didn’t know what it was that brought them back for more.
‘Big cock,’ said Tom.
‘Do you think?’ she said.
‘Absolutely.’
Which was a brittle enough attempt, as these conversations go. But in the last while, they had other things on their minds.
Catherine’s mother was dying, far too young, and far too painfully, of cancer. So as well as all the phone calls and the ferrying, there was the mother thing, which is to say, too much complaining and too much love. She was in chemotherapy: four months in from a late diagnosis, and an unknown number of weeks or months or years from the end of it all. Her mother was so weak she reeled into the car door every time Catherine went around a corner, and when they braked, it was only the seat belt that stopped her from bumping her face on the dash. And she complained all the time. Catherine was going too fast, she was going too slow, she wanted to have a cigarette; what was wrong with high heels, when was Catherine going to lighten up, get something done with her hair.
And then in the hospital, when the pain relief was good, such peace: her mother existing — breath by breath — at her side. Both of them listening to her body, the silent chemicals doing their silent work, and the dent on the side of her breast the largest thing in the room.
Catherine thought about bees in a swarm; the cancer being smoked out of her mother’s body to settle in the space under her arm, a drowsy mass. If she could just scoop them up as a beekeeper might, and carry them away, and leave not a single one behind.
In the evening, while Catherine dozed in the chair, a hand might come out to startle her. It would touch her arm or face, her mother’s voice behind it, saying, ‘Go home, Kitty-kit. Go home to that man of yours.’
Tom was being sadly perfect since these days; there was always food in the fridge and clean T-shirts in the basket, and silence when silence was the necessary thing. But Catherine knew that once the light was out he would break across the space between them, in a rush to comfort her, with hands and mouth and all his large, physical self.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me cry.’
As the months ground on she told him it was as though she was missing something down there — a widget, or a grommet, or a switch you might throw. She did not say that when he stroked her, it felt as though her skin was coming off under his hands.
And so they had some sex — not much — and snapped at each other or did not speak, while Catherine’s mother was discharged with no talk of readmission and, around a schedule of home helps and neighbours, work staggered on.
The maddest thing was the way she decided her mother must be better, if the hospital had let her go: the way she thought, very clearly and thoroughly, that even though her mother was not cured — even though she was, in fact, dying — she was also much, much better, in many significant ways. Of course she was better. She was back home.
In the middle of this strange and untrue time, Phil Brogan rang. He needed to bring a client to a conference in Killarney, he said, in May. Would she do it? Would she mind? The hotel was fantastically swish. Call it a freebie. Her Christmas bottle of brandy, arriving early in the year.
‘Hang on,’ she said, and checked her diary. She could go if her mother was a little better by May. Or she could go if her mother was dead by, say, the end of April. But if her mother was actively dying during those four days in May, then Catherine would not be able to make it. So, because she loved her mother, there was only one answer she could give: ‘Yes. No problem. Thanks.’ Not even stopping to think whether a conference in Killarney was really her bag.
In the next four weeks her mother’s pain became unbearable and, talking to her GP, Catherine realised that she would have to beg for a hospice bed. Once she gave in to the idea of death, she could not stand the wait. People weren’t supposed to linger in hospices — who was clogging up all the beds? Keep moving, she shouted in her head. Keep moving.
Nights, she and her sister took turns to sleep in their mother’s spare room with a shelf full of medication and a list of times and doses that they checked and re-checked until the writing made no sense. Rolling her mother over to change the soiled sheet, or scolding her while she tried to get a hypodermic into her thigh, Catherine was sustained by a peculiar fantasy — she was riding a horse around the lakes of Killarney, like a bad costume drama, with Phil Brogan in tow. Sometimes, they got down off the horses and went for a swim. Sometimes, they stopped under a spreading oak tree.
And then the hospice. The doctors were generous with their drips and shots — her mother one day wild on morphine, sitting up in bed, applying green eyeshadow and saying, ‘These are the things I regret: I never slept with a Frenchman. I never slept with that little fucker whatsisname who went on to make all the money. I didn’t enjoy you girls enough when you were still young enough not to thwart me. I deeply resent all that dieting. Deeply. Bitterly. What else? Nothing. I hate the taste of caviar.’
For two weeks, Catherine walked the corridors with sympathetic nurses and murmuring friends and did not give in to the obscene urge she had, which was to say, ‘Well, she’ll have to die soon. I am going to Killarney in May.’
In the event, her mother made it with more than a week to spare.
Catherine threw twelve white roses into the open grave, and stepped back from the loose earth and the sharp drop. Tom held her by the waist and forearm as though they were skating, and that was what it felt like — an incredible lightness as she walked away from the mess of ground. The air was shocking; pure and sharp, with the smell of early summer rising from the soil. In the distance, someone was mowing the graveyard grass. It was May. The planet was turning. Her feet still touched the ground.
She packed and repacked for Killarney four or five times. She had to bring togs; she had to have business suits, and dresses for the evening, and mid-morning jeans for lounging around in and horse-riding gear. She wondered if she could play golf.
‘Have I ever played golf?’ she shouted at Tom through the open bedroom door.
‘No,’ he said.
‘I’m sure I played golf with you once. Somewhere high — like Howth, or Bray Head.’
‘Not with me,’ said Tom.
That evening, he walked into the bathroom as she was waxing her legs, and winced, and went back out again. In the morning, he dragged the oversized suitcase to the car, and kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘Relax. Have a good time.’
The hotel was a large old country house. Catherine felt like another person when she walked up the granite steps: she felt like a person who liked hotels. There wasn’t a piece of chintz in sight, it was all slate and warm wood and waffle-cloth robes.
She rang Phil’s room from the phone beside her bed. She could hear him shift and settle after he picked up, and she knew that he was lying down too.
‘So. You made it.’ Then he didn’t seem to want to hang up, for a while.
They met downstairs and ordered coffee.
‘No,’ he said. ‘What the hell, it’s after four, we could have a gin and tonic or a beer, something fizzy, what about champagne? Do you do it by the glass?’
The waitress blushed. Catherine thought he was being really cheesy, until he turned back to her and said, ‘Sparkling wine?’