All of this from her parked car, in the lane outside his house; the boxed fury of my sister.
‘How am I supposed to look at her?’
‘Look at who?’ I said.
And we carried on like this for a while – like married people, shouting and lying.
‘I can’t believe you did this to me.’
‘I didn’t do it to you,’ I said. ‘It is nothing to do with you.’
But it turned out I had done it to everybody. The whole world was disgusted with me and worn out by my behaviour. The entire population of Dublin felt compromised, and they felt it keenly.
Fiachra, for example, ‘always knew’. He knew it before I did. ‘I am in love with him,’ I said, sitting in the back room of Ron Blacks after too many gin and tonics. And Fiachra waited a tiny, unforgivable moment, before he said:
‘I am sure you are.’
But it was the first time I had said the words out loud, and it might have been true all along but it became properly true then. True like something you have discovered. I loved him. Through all the shouting that followed, the silences, the gossip (an unbelievable amount of gossip) there was one thing I held on to, the idea, the fact, that I loved Seán Vallely and I held my head high, even as I glowed with shame. Glowed with it.
I love him.
It was something to say in the long gaps between things – because even though it felt like everything was happening, for long stretches, nothing happened. Except for being in love, which happened intensely and all the time.
I love him: dull, like a pain, when no one rang: thrilling and clarion in the arguments I had with my sister, I love him! And then like a punch to the stomach, the day his wife rang to say, ‘Can we talk?’ and I drove up there and saw her standing behind the old glass of the house in Enniskerry, before I put the car back into gear and drove away.
‘Don’t mind her,’ said Seán. ‘I know what she’s doing, here. Don’t mind her. You don’t know what she is like.’
But I just felt sorry for her – this woman who refused the truth. I had to remind myself this was something between me and Seán, not between me and Aileen. I might have liked her or hated her in another life. It was only incidental that she was not my type.
But this was much later – months later. For a week after that first phone call, ‘I can’t believe you did this to me,’ Fiona did nothing. I continued as usual, and Seán continued as usual, and no one spoke to anyone else as we waited for the axe to fall.
Walking around thinking, This will end, and This will end as I stacked the dishes in Clonskeagh, or turned out the bedside light. Kissing Conor, as he slept, and feeling stupid even as I leaned over him, his stone-still, dreamless head. It was all too melodramatic and silly. Maybe the axe would not falclass="underline" maybe we would continue just as before. Though I didn’t like Conor so much by then; I did not like the smell of his sleeping breath.
On Saturday morning, Seán got a call from Shay, asking him to drop round to the house. He rang me afterwards, walking back down the lane.
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much.’
My brother-in-law had been his rueful, back-slapping self. He brought Seán into the kitchen and pushed the letters across the table saying, ‘You’ll be wanting that cheque.’
‘Was Fiona there?’
‘No.’
Fiona had taken the kids off somewhere, apparently. Seán sounded a bit shook as he said this and I could imagine the delicate way Shay phrased it: Fiona bundling the kids into the car, as though the sight of the adulterer might scar them for life.
Another fabulous silence descended. For a week, maybe more, I waited for Seán to ring, for Aileen to turn up on my doorstep, for Conor to put his head in his hands at the desk and weep. None of these things happened. One evening after work, I went to the house in Terenure and fell asleep on the sofa. In the middle of the night I got up and went upstairs, to the bed where we last made love, and I have slept there ever since.
I woke to a sky full of rain, and I borrowed an umbrella from my dead mother to get the bus into town – the same bus I used to get as a teenager – there wasn’t a cab in sight. I went upstairs to windows thick with condensation, and the smell of wet commuters: stale lives, morning soap, last night’s fun. I hadn’t been on a bus in years. And I liked it. I liked looking down from this childhood height, seeing the gardens all redone, with their flagstones and big planters; the window boxes along Rathgar Road and cars guarding the gravel. The passengers were changed, too; they had funky haircuts and better clothes and they were all plugged into something, texting or listening to their headphones. We were across the canal before I realised that none of them were speaking English, and I liked that too. I had the feeling that this was the magic bus, and there was no telling our final destination.
Conor rang, sporadically, all day. I did not answer. I sat with my feet up on the desk, checking out the jobs pages of the newspapers. Undervalued, overlooked: I was completely fed up with Rathlin Communications. At four in the afternoon, the calls stopped.
He had rung Fiona.
The next few days were full of shouting. Much cliché. It seemed that everything was said. I mean everything, by everybody. The whole thing felt like a single sentence; one you could imagine bellowed, hissed, scrawled in lipstick on the bathroom mirror; you could carve it into your own flesh, you could chisel it on a fucking gravestone. And not one word of it mattered. Not one stupid word.
You never.
I always.
The thing about you is.
I think they all really enjoyed it. Fiona more than anyone. My goodness, the accusations flew.
‘I am glad she is dead. I am glad our mother is dead, so she doesn’t have to witness this.’
And, ‘Do you think he loves you? Do you think he cares about you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think he does, actually.’
That was all I said. I didn’t tell her she could fuck off back to her muppet of a husband, who rolls on to her after his bottle of Friday-night wine, and then rolls off again. If she calls that love. Wondering has he come yet, and how much it would cost to have a horse in livery like the woman down the road. I didn’t say any of this to my sister. How I saw her being broken into mediocrity and motherhood; her body broken and then her mind – or did her mind go first, it’s sort of hard to disentangle – and then for her to turn round and say Broken is Best, I didn’t say how that made me furious beyond measure.
We were in the living room of the house in Terenure. It was easy to shout there. It was like being twelve again.
I said, ‘You’re a prig. You’re a fucking prig and you always have been. This is something for me, Fiona. Do you understand? This has nothing to do with you.’
Our mother stayed dead through all of this. Amazingly. She was dead during every tantrum and silence. And she was still dead, when we woke the next day and remembered what had been said.
Because of course you are not twelve. And you regret everything. Every word you uttered. The fact that human beings learned the art of speech – you regret that too.
Stop! In the Name of Love
CONOR AND I spent a long evening in Clonskeagh not shouting, at least for the first while. He came in while I was getting some clothes out of the Sliderobe. I always hated that thing. You could specify the finish when you signed for the house. You handed over three hundred grand and, with a special smile, they handed you a little card with squares of polished wood on it. We chose ‘Birch’. Hideous. Anyway, I was taking a few things out of the Sliderobe, when I heard Conor coming up the stairs, and a few moments later he appeared in the doorway. We didn’t speak. He sat on the bed and watched as I took an armful of clothes and laid them in a suitcase, with the hangers still attached. Then he got up and left the room.