‘Oh, be careful what you want,’ said my mother. Whose maiden name was Mary Kearney, thank you very much.
She would have loved this: the opera. She would have loved the glam.
All right, I’ll tell you what I want. ‘I want a small win on the lottery, just a small one, just a few thousand, so I could feel, for once, LUCKY. I want my son to call me on the mobile phone he bought me for a present, that never, ever rings. I also want him to have sex with the right people, meaning female people, in particular the female person who is his wife. I want grandchildren. More than anything, I want grandchildren. Because grandchildren are simple. You wish for them and you have them. And I don’t care if they are ashamed of me. I want my son who has everything to have something, for once. Something real. To have a heart that isn’t withering in his chest. That little smile when he looks at me.
‘Hello, Mum.’
And when the man stops on the circle stairs, I want to look up at him, in his tux. I want to peruse the length of him, and meet him, eye to eye. Old Nick, my friend. I want him to know me, and be very scared of me. And I want to open my mouth, and sing.
THE BAD SEX WEEKEND
He said he had been in New York for a while. He talked about a rat in his sleeping bag in a hostel on Forty-second Street and a guy who got his kidney stolen in the next bed. He said the cockroaches poured out of every hole: the pipes, the flooring, the plasterboard; the room felt like a ship that was sinking in a sea of cockroaches. He was a boy — he did not talk about skating in Central Park, he talked about vermin in a Sligo accent. What did she expect? (What did she ever expect? He had nice eyes.)
She knew Sligo. It was beautiful. She got drunk there once, with some local heads who had a rockabilly band. One of them was in plaster up to the thigh — a car crash, he said. Then he sank nine pints and left to drive home again, pivoting with a hoot, at the door of the pub, on his little prosthetic heel. Sometimes, in her sleep, she tried to figure out how he managed the accelerator and the clutch, jabbing one or the other foot into the duvet and waking up dead. That was Sligo. A place where it rained all day and the rent-boys hung out for the blokes down from Northern Ireland, and they called a housing estate after W. B. Yeats, and you could rot, or you could run, as he did, to somewhere far away.
Now he was back, living in Dublin, talking about the whores in Bangkok, where he had never been, and the way they could blow smoke rings with their pussies, and she liked the way he said ‘pussies’ in a Sligo accent. He was such a sexy boy. All that self-loving self-loathing — that was very Sligo, and the little business with the razor blade after they did a couple of lines, the way his bad eyes said, ‘You can be the edge and you can be the cut.’
It did not turn her on much, truth be told — the promise of damage. It hit her in the heart and not in the groin and, ‘Oh, shit,’ she thought. Chaos. That was what was on offer. Driving home pissed with only one leg working. Total, sneering hatred, and then crying on her chest with his dick still wet. Oh, shit. The sex, when it happened, an aimless battering around the nub of him, which was sadly distant and, she supposed, numb with drink.
‘What do you do?’ he said afterwards, like it had turned into a job interview, now that he had (sort of) come.
‘Music stuff,’ she said. ‘I work with bands, coming through town.’
To which he said nothing, not even, ‘Which ones?’ And in the dull gap of his surprise, she fell asleep.
She dreams about a boy walking along a cliff road in the wet light; the mountains spilling water, the sea pushing against the cliff.
The boy’s wellingtons are worn to cloth, but that is the least of it. The socks are wriggling off his feet, putting a clump in his stride, leaving the bare backs of his calves to be sucked and left by the boots at every step. His shirt has a tinge of lilac to it and is riding up. You can see the elastic of his underpants and the pearly lump of his hip, where the hand-me-down trousers gape.
She tries to laugh in her sleep but the boy is not funny, or he is not funny enough. Still, there is a joke around him somewhere — she casts about to find it, but all she can see is an old fridge with the door open, abandoned in the ditch.
The boy’s nipples flower under his shirt, and refuse to flower, and the dream moves on, leaving him, nearly hilarious, with no one left to see.
It was afternoon when they woke. He said he had been to Tijuana and the smell of the jacks in the morning was enough to make you puke. He told her that he had crossed the Shenandoah River once in the Shenandoah Mountains and he slept in a town called Shenandoah, and he cased her vinyl collection; hunkered down like a picture of a wild boy, with the thin bones of his backside dabbing at the floor. He asked to borrow her toothbrush and then jumped back in under the duvet for the hangover ride, which was unexpectedly sweet.
He said a woman he was with in America had an abortion once, but he didn’t know if it was his. That there was something about foreign women — you didn’t believe your stuff would stick. But it did. It did even more than usual. Sex loved those Benetton ads.
‘Do you think?’ she said.
‘Little brown babies,’ he said.
‘So are you back now?’ she said. ‘Have you come back for good?’
He thought about it. He said he had driven halfway across America; put the boot down until he ran out of gas, ended up empty in a place called Dewey, Wisconsin. And he got out of the car and looked at people on the sidewalk and he wondered what the hell they were doing here. Maybe it was love. They fell in love, and were amazed by it — by the the fact that All This could happen in Dewey, Wisconsin.
‘And?’
‘No wonder they shoot each other,’ he said, swinging out on to the edge of the bed.
She knew he was leaving. He stood beside the dressing table, poking a finger through the little basket of mascara and lip pencils. He reached up to touch a painted Mexican belt and, in the mirror, his underarm opened to view.
She said, ‘I don’t believe you were ever in America at all.’
‘Oh, I was there all right,’ he said.
Then he looked at her and seemed to change his mind.
No, he said. He stayed. He actually lived out there for a while, in the middle of nowhere, in Buttfuck, Wisconsin. He picked up a job working security in the local mine. Two old guys and a big Italian called Alfie and himself; they flicked through porno magazines all night, sitting in front of TV screens that showed the plant in the weird green of infrared. One of the men was always on a round — you could see his torch leave one screen, then, a few minutes later, you would see it wander into the next. It got so it felt they were floating. Two old guys and Alfie and him. And one morning, around six, Alfie turns around and invites him to a pot-luck barbecue that weekend.
Pot-luck! He was so astonished he actually made something — a mix of Jell-O and whipped cream, from a recipe on the back of the packet. He drove around looking for the house, the dessert shivering on the seat beside him — finally finds the party by the number of people on the front lawn. It is a clear, beautiful day in Dewey, Wisconsin. There’s a bunch of guys on the front porch talking golf, cracking open too many beers. The wives are there, the kids squealing and running, and there is a smell of ironed cotton off these people, even in the open air.
Alfie is wearing a chef’s hat. He belts him between the shoulder-blades and takes the mutant dessert out of his hand.
‘Mnn, mnn!’
After a while, he’s tranced by the sun and the beer. Just looking at these people, the way they talk and laugh, and the little things with kids. It gets so he can’t breathe. He wanders into the garage, where it is dark and cool. A couple of small boys are pushing plastic soldiers through the front grille of the car and a woman’s legs are sticking out of a back door. One of her feet is dangling a sandal. When he looks in, he sees Alfie’s wife lying in the back seat, flat out, with her arms stretched up, playing with her beautiful blonde hair.