Anyway, I am alone, and there doesn’t seem much I can do about it. I texted Jenny a few times but she hasn’t replied. Or I don’t think she has: the keys on my phone are frozen. She’s gone from me. I’m not sure exactly why, but it’s got something to do with coldness, with absence, with non-engagement. Things like that. I didn’t see this coming, though, her sudden burst of temper and tears, this exodus.
This is it, so, she said, and smiled with her lips downturned so her chin dimpled sweetly. I felt, I felt. Something new. A concentrated kind of love for her, winding me. A knowing that she wasn’t coming back. Will you be okay? Ya, ya, I’ll be grand, I said, in a whisper. She said, Hug? I just stood there so she walked over to me and put her arms around me and I stood stiff and unmoving though I hadn’t planned on being sulky and she drew away saying Oh for fuck’s sake in a weary voice and she was gone down the stairs before I looked up from the naked floor.
Her father crammed his ancient Jetta with her stuff and his big hand swallowed mine and he pumped it up and down just once and leaned in close to me and his forested nostrils flared and he jerked his head sideways towards his idling car and tear-streaked daughter and said, There’s plenty more fish in the sea, son. She’s as contrary as they come, anyway, that one. And he looked over at her, a gleam of adoration in his eyes, and he tied the lock of his boot to his tow-bar with a length of baling twine, and they were gone.
I ASKED MY mother the same questions over and over when I was small. Why have I no granny and granddad? Why do we never go on our holidays? She’d answer, a different answer every time it seemed to me, and her words would make no sense to me. I’d know from a shimmer of change in the set of her face and a coldness that would enter her eyes when to stop. I knew her so completely, so deeply. I felt the changes in the air about her, I sensed her quickening temper, her softening, the tides of her. I was besotted, obsessed; I mooned about her, I constantly wanted to touch her, to press myself into her softness. Jesus Christ, will you get out from under my feet, she’d say, and I’d crawl behind the couch and cry, and she’d lift me out and say, Sorry, little darling, sorry, my little man. And we’d sleep on the couch, curled into each other, in the long and empty afternoons.
Once, when I was four or maybe five, I made a batch of mud-men, in a wheelbarrow at the side of our house. I’d been crying over something and had lost myself in the making of them, limbless figures ranked in three files with hair of grass and features of tiny stones, and my mother said she loved them, my tiny army, they were gorgeous so they were, and so was I. She brushed my fringe back from my forehead and kissed the back of my head and my salt-stiff cheek, and I smelt fags off her, and perfume, and felt in that moment as though all the universe only existed so I could be there, beneath the sun, being kissed by her.
She’s going out with a man the last few years who used to be a farmer until he sold half his land and set the other half. Any time I meet him he turns red and the hand he offers me shakes a bit, and I feel sorry for him. How’s business? he asks. How’s things in the computer world? The finest, I say, all go. I talk the way he does to settle him, to stop him being nervous. I’m not worth being nervous over. Good, begod, he says. That’s the way to have it. Sure is, I say, and we look at each other, unsure of how to look away. Did you see the match? he asks me every time, and I lie that I did and he settles into a long analysis and the redness and uneasiness slowly recede. And I like that he’s there, for her, so I can more easily be not there, for her.
My father’s name was Finbar. I didn’t always know he was my father. He was an old man when I was a child, but tall and handsome, and he lived in a bungalow halfway up the Long Hill. He wore dark suits and smoked non-stop. He’d had a wife one time who had died. There was a picture of her in the kitchen, smiling beside the Sacred Heart. I’d be dropped at his gate and he’d answer the door with an expression of surprise, and act as though his life was completed by the sight of me. He lived three streets and a lifetime away from my mother. She’d been his secretary once, for a few months, and something had happened that led to me. He built a room on the back of his house for me, with a skylight, so I could look at the stars as I fell asleep. But all I ever saw was plain blackness. Finbar would look up at the starless night and down at me and put his hand on my face and say Sleep tight, little man. And in the mornings he’d say Come on, little man, rise up out of it. He never took me anywhere. It was years before I realized he’d been ashamed; not of me, but of the fact of my existence.
Finbar died when I was eleven and a man told me in the living room of the bungalow as I sat and stared in wonder at the stillness and smokelessness of Finbar’s corpse that he was my brother. He looked almost as old as Finbar had. He was bald and he wore glasses and his eyebrows were black and bushy and curled upwards at the ends like a cartoon devil but his face changed and seemed kind when he smiled. He told me he’d fallen out with Finbar years and years before and he’d never gotten the chance to make up with him. We had words, he said. Over you. Me? And he nodded, and then I knew, without anything more being said. Always be nice to your mother, he said. Don’t ever fall out with her. Or if you do, be sure and make it up. And I never saw that man again that said he was my brother. But someone sold Finbar’s house and my room at the back of it and I suppose it must have been him.
When I was fourteen I kicked a kitten against a wall with all my strength. I’d been walking through the castle demesne and saw her there, standing still, crying softly. There was a wet crack when the kitten struck the wall as tiny perfect pulsing things inside her burst. The day stopped, the breeze fell away, a drifting leaf came to rest at my feet. There was nothing now that could be done to undo this thing I’d done. I turned away and walked home and my mother asked how I was as I passed her in the hallway and I ignored her as I always did in those years but I wanted to cry and beg her to make it that I didn’t kill the cat, to make the world rewind so the clenching thing inside me would loosen and fall away.
Jenny left me once before, but I knew that she’d come back that time. But just to feel our scales were balanced I went to town and walked up Pery Square and nodded at a dark-haired girl who stood with her back to the railings of the People’s Park. There was glittery makeup on her face, her green-brown eyes were blackly ringed; her breath was warm and slightly sour, her teeth were prettily gapped. I told her what I wanted and I paid her twice what she asked for and she nodded and smiled and stroked me gently until I slept and kissed my ear to wake me in the early morning. I drove her back to town in the cold dawn and dropped her near a shabby door on a passage off a lightless street. I waited to see if she’d look back at me. But she didn’t. What did I expect?
You can’t destroy energy. So every sound ever made still exists. Everything I’ve ever said is still floating through the ether, and everything that was ever said to me. I stood before a whalebone in the natural history museum once that was set on a plinth behind a screen of glass and I imagined my father was standing beside me, a made-up father, young and lean, T-shirted and muscular. The two of us marvelled, and whistled our wonder; his arm lay lightly along my shoulders. I cried at the memory of a thing that never happened. Fuck you, Finbar, I said, out loud, but no one heard. And those words are floating gently still around the universe. I hope he never hears them.