Of course I am bland, she thought. You too would be bland if you grew up with one gas pump in front of the house and nothing else except a view that stretched over half the world. Landscape made me bland, bears poking in the garbage can stunted my individuality, as did plagues of horseflies, permafrost, wild-fire, and the sun setting like a bomb. So much sky makes ones bewildered — which is the only proper way to be.
She rented a flat in Rathmines where the only black people in the country seemed to reside and the shops stayed open all night. The house was suitably ‘old’ but the partition walls bothered her, as did the fact that the door from her bedroom into the hall had been taken off its hinges. The open block of the doorframe frightened her as she fell asleep, not because of what might come through it, but because she might drift off the bed and slide through the gap to Godknowswhere. (In the shower she sang ‘How are things in Glockamorra?’ and ‘Come back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff’.)
The white man was beside her asking to look at her paper and he sat down to read.
‘Go on, ask her does she want to come,’ said the matinée man across the deserted bar.
‘Ask her yourself.’
‘Where are you from?’ said the matinée man picking up their two pints and making the move to her table.
‘God that’s a great pair of shoes you got on,’ he said looking at her quilted moon-boots. ‘You didn’t get them here.’
‘Canada,’ she said.
‘She can talk!’ said the villain. ‘I told you she could talk.’
‘You can’t bring him anywhere,’ said the white man, and she decided that she would sleep with him. Why not? It had been a long time since Toronto.
‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked, and was surprised at the silence that fell.
‘I’m skiving off,’ said the white man. ‘I’m on the hop. Mitching. I’ll get the sack.’ She still didn’t seem to understand. ‘Look at me,’ he opened up his palms like a saint to show her the thin rolls of paste in the creases. ‘I work over there. In the bakery.’
‘I guessed that,’ she said. ‘I could smell the fresh bread.’
She wrote this story in a letter to her flatmate in Toronto. It is a story about A Bit of Rough. It includes furious sex in redbrick alleyways. It has poignant moments to do with cultural distinctions and different breeds of selfishness. Unfortunately the man in question is not wearing leather, nor is he smelling like Marlon Brando. He is too thin. His accent is all wrong. He is covered, not with oil and sweat, but with sweat and flour.
The furious sex took him by surprise. She looked at a man sliding down the wall on to his hunkers with his hands over his face. He had lost his paper hat. There was flour down her front congealing in the rain. ‘I’ve never done that before,’ he said.
‘Well, neither have I.’
‘I’ve never done any of that before.’
‘Oh boy.’
‘And I’ve got the sack.’ So she brought him home.
‘Erections. What a laugh. My ancient Aunt Moragh bounced out of her coffin on the way to the cemetery. I will never forget it. You could almost hear the squawk. It was my cousin Shawn driving the pick-up when the suspension went. Now he was a bit simple — or at least that is, he never talked so you couldn’t tell. But he took her dying so hard that he was swinging the wheel with one hand and crying into the other and he drove regardless, with his ass dragging in the dirt. I swear I saw Moragh rise to her feet like she was on hinges, like she was a loose plank in the floor coming up to hit you in the face. And she yelled out “Shawn! You come back here!” I was only six, but I wouldn’t deny it, no matter how much they said I was a liar.’
There was a thin white man in her bed, and when he got up to go to the toilet he disappeared through the doorframe like the line of light from a closing door. They were no longer drunk. He stayed, because he didn’t know what else to do. He was fragile, like a man let out of prison, who bumps into a stranger on the street and feels a lifetime’s friendship. He stared, and she felt all the stories she had inside her looking for him like home.
‘So Todd tells me about this woman that he is in love with. I mean that’s OK, but why do men have to take all their clothes off before they can tell you about the woman they love? So there we were, sitting in the U of T canteen and I’m saying “Todd, please, it’s OK, I’ll survive, please put your clothes back on.”’
‘All the same, I could have spent the rest of my life with him, having bad sex. Honestly. He made love like I was a walrus, something huge and strange. Spent half an hour kind of paddling his hand on my left buttock which must be the least interesting, the most mistaken part of my body. Then sort of dodged in, like I was an alley on the way to school. I didn’t know whether he had come, or a picture had slipped on the wall … True love.’
He stayed the next day and she didn’t go into class. She opened a bottle of good wine to educate him and they forgot to eat. They lifted the sash of the bedroom window and were surprised by the taste of the air. He was so thin it hurt her and his laugh was huge.
‘We came across this swimming pool, in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. It was empty, with blue tiles and weeds growing out through the cracks. There was a metal ladder just going nowhere in the corner. So we climbed down and it was like being underwater somehow. Like we swam through the air. Then this crazy guy, he stood on the edge and he said he was going to dive in. My God was I freaked. I could just see his head splitting on the tiles. I screamed until I fell over. Men always think I’m neurotic and I suppose it’s true.’
‘Are you?’
‘I suppose.’
He was grateful for it, whatever it was. Compared to her body, her mind was easy to understand. There were wine stains on the sheets which he wrapped around him like Caesar. He sang, and paced the room, and looked at his naked feet, which weren’t ugly anymore. The razor in her bathroom confused him and he asked about other men. So she made love to him at the sink and he looked at his face in the mirror, as if it was blind.
He wasn’t so amazed by sex as by people, who did this all the time and never told. Never did anything but laugh in the wrong way. ‘They do this night and day,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t show. Walking down the street and you think they’d look different. You think they’d recognise and smile at each other, like “I know and you know”. It’s like the secret everyone was in on, except me.’
The light deepened. ‘What is it like for a woman?’ he asked.
‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘What is it like for a man? Sometimes, after a while, it’s like your whole body is crying, like your liver even, is sad. It’s more sweet than sore. In here. And here.’
‘Where?’
Her touch saturated him to the bone and he had to pull away from her, in case something untold might happen. Which it did.
The next day he rang up the matinée man whose astonishment was audible from the other side of the room. He asked for clothes from his flat and looked at her and laughed as the questions kept pouring out of the phone.
The matinée man’s name was Jim and he entered her place with a comic air of apology. Kevin poked his head around the jamb of the open doorframe and asked for his clothes. ‘You bollocks.’ They all went out for a drink.
What she noticed in the pub were his eyelids, that disappeared when he looked at her, and made him look cruel. She couldn’t understand most of what they were saying and they laughed all the time. He was wearing a nylon-mix jumper, cheap denim and bad shoes.
‘I thought the friend was the kind of Oh-so-interesting bastard,’ said the letter, ‘with that glint in his eye that cuts me right up. You know capital P. Primitive, the kind that want to see the blood on the sheet or the bride is a slut. What I mean is … Attractive to the Masochistic, which, as we all know, is the street I’ve been living on even though the rent is so high. What I need is a romantic Irish farmer who is sweet AND a bastard at the same time. So he’s looking at us anyway like we’ve been Sinning or something equally Catholic and I just started to fight him, all the way. He says “Did you have a good time then?” and I said that “Kevin was the best fuck this side of the Atlantic.” DUMB! I KNOW THAT! and Kevin laughed and so that was … fine. And then I said “Maybe that surprises you?” “Not at all,” he says. “That’s what they are all saying down Leeson Street,” which is their kind of Fuck Alley. And I laughed and said “Hardly,” I said, “seeing as he’s never done it before …” and there was this silence.’