What a charming scene! I looked at Felix (he smelt of gutting rats and climbing trees) and he looked back at me and laughed with an innocent, evil sense of complicity. That same cold dawn broke over my body and I had to shut the door.
Please believe me, I waited for months. I did not touch him, but carried instead a deep, hard pain in the bowl of my pelvis. I became clumsy again, everything I reached for fell to the floor and the kitchen was a mess of fragments. All that I saw opened up the ache, and I wanted the whole world inside me, with Felix at its centre, like a small, hard pip. The loss of dignity was wonderful, ghastly. I mimicked my daughter at the bathroom mirror, and haunted the fitting rooms of increasingly expensive shops. I put sex back into my appearance; brittle enough, but real. His sharp boy’s eyes, meanwhile, became blank again. Perhaps he was waiting too, though it seemed that when he looked at me, he saw nothing at all. I only had to touch him to become real.
He came to the house one day when she was out. I sat him in the kitchen on the promise of her return. I made a cup of tea and the impudent child held the silence and looked bored, while one knee knocked and rubbed against the table leg. I set down the mug of tea and the Eden-red apple on the table before him and then … I leaned over and touched him, in a way that he found surprising.
Small, dirty, strange. Felix’s eyes focused on me and it was like falling down a tunnel. He put his hand on my arm, to stop me, or to urge me on, and the pain I carried inside me like a dead child dropped quietly, burning as it went.
This was just the first time. There was a second, a third, a fourteenth. I might describe them — I have the words for it — but your prurience does not interest me; neither does your disbelief.
Our subterfuges became increasingly intricate, snatching an hour here or there while I pushed my daughter out to hockey practice, piano lessons, even horse riding. Lucky girl. Meanwhile Felix and I pressed out the sour honey of the deepest ecstasy that man or beast has ever known. And while she bounced along on rattle-backed, expensive old nags, while my husband fretted over mislaid returns and his secretary’s odour, I wrapped Felix, insensate with pleasure, in the fleshy pulp of my body where he ripened, the hard, sweet gall inside the cactus plant.
Then, of course, she found the letter:
Dear auntie Iris,
Mammy is sick and I can’t come today.
Love
Felix.
PS Larry Dunne was talking about sex again today enough to make you puke. He says he has been putting it into Lucy down the road but I just had to laugh because he obviously hasn’t seen any of that and was just blowing. I nearly said about you but I didn’t. Don’t worry.
I never throw hysterics. So how could I have reared such an hysterical child? She gave up the riding lessons, the hockey, the piano, and became a large, uncultured lout. She rang him night and day, she wept in his bedroom. She lived at our throats and by the time she left, he had turned into a large, normal young man. He went to discos, he wanted to get into the bank. I met his mother on the street one day; she boasted of his many girlfriends, and complained that they never lasted long. I can imagine why.
I could have killed myself then. I allowed myself to fantasize cancers and car accidents. I might have killed myself even before Felix, but I didn’t have a life before, so it was ridiculous to think of throwing it away. Felix made everything possible, including dying, and it is for this that I am grateful, more than for anything else. I lived, of course. For a while I thought of finding a replacement, combing housing estates like a queen bee, waiting for the look of recognition. There was one supporting lead in a school play, but that blank gleam in his eye was only stage fright.
Recently I discovered their dolls’ graveyard; decapitated plastic, split by my spade. There was clay in the artificial hair and I thought about — I longed for — the clay that would clog my own.
So. Adieu Adieu Adieu. Self-indulgent, I know, but what do you want me to become? My husband’s nurse? (Oh, the grateful took in his paralysed eyes.) And then one of the army of widows, with headscarf and shopping bag, who stop in the middle of the street, shake their heads and say ‘Someone must have walked over my grave.’ Felix.
Felix sitting on my headstone, with an apple in his fist, like he sat at the bottom of the bed, laughing, puzzled, amazed at every inch of me. Felix at that particular point of refinement where wonder, cruelty and hair-trigger skin make even the imaginary and the ridiculous real. He could look at offal, at grass, at the streaks his fingers made on my thigh with the same indifferent glee.
It is easier to die when you have seen your own flesh; as I saw my own flesh for the first time, some five years ago. It was, at that moment, on the very cusp of decay. But decay, I have since discovered, takes far too long. I don’t want to drift away, I want to splatter.
I met him in the local shop one day at the height of it all.
‘How’s your mamma, Felix, and haven’t you grown?’ and he turned to his friends.
‘Stupid old bat,’ he said. Making up was very sweet, and his tears tasted hot as needles.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
‘Luck Be a Lady’ first appeared in the Summer Fiction series in The Irish Times, July 1990; ‘The Portable Virgin’ was first published in Revenge (Virago, 1990), edited by Kate Saunders. Both of these stories, along with ‘The House of the Architect’s Love Story,’ ‘Men and Angels,’ ‘(She Owns) Every Thing,’ ‘Indifference,’ ‘Historical Letters,’ ‘Revenge,’ ‘What Are Cicadas?’ and ‘Mr Snip Snip Snip,’ first appeared in The Portable Virgin (Secker & Warburg, 1991). ‘Seascape’ and ‘Felix’ were first published in First Fictions: Introduction 10 (Faber and Faber, 1989).
Thanks to Mary and Bernard Loughlin, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, where many of these earlier stories were written.
The rest of the stories in this collection were first published in Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008). ‘Pale Hands I Loved, Besides the Shalimar’ first appeared in The Paris Review; ‘Pillow’ was first published in Picador New Writing: 11 (Picador, 2002), edited by Colm Tóibín and Andrew O’Hagan; ‘In the Bed Department, ‘Nathalie,’ ‘Taking Pictures,’ and ‘Della’ first appeared in The New Yorker; ‘Little Sister’ first appeared in Granta; ‘The Bad Sex Weekend’ first appeared in The Dublin Weekend; ‘Honey’ first appeared in The Irish Times — it was written for, and won, the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in the Bloomsday centenary; ‘Green’ first appeared in The Literary Review (Radio 4); ‘Shaft’ first appeared in Granta 85 (Radio 4); ‘Yesterday’s Weather’ was first published in Irish Stories 06; ‘What You Want’ first appeared in Prospect, March 2008 (Radio 3); ‘Here’s To Love’ first appeared in The Guardian’s Christmas edition, December 2007; ‘Caravan’ first appeared in The Guardian, October 2007; ‘Until The Girl Died’ first appeared on RTE Radio; ‘Cruise’ first appeared on Radio 4.