“Okay,” he said. “I’m only doing it for me. So my conscience is clear. Happy?”
“No,” she said. She walked to the car barefoot.
He drove up past the canal, out through Donnybrook, taking the N11 all the way to Foxrock. He vaguely remembered the estate from the house-warming party. When they pulled in to the kerb she stared into the setting sun, face immobile below the sunglasses he’d given her.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“See the icebergs?” she said.
“What?”
She nodded, and he turned to look. Light wisps of orange-tinged cirrus hung suspended above the sun. And it was true: three small, hard, glittering clouds had the appearance of icebergs floating in a patch of light blue sky. “How would that happen?” she said. “What are they?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She couldn’t reach up far enough to open the front door and so she handed him the key. They walked through the downstairs, then checked upstairs, but he wasn’t home. She didn’t want him to wait.
“Not here,” he said. “But I’m going to wait down the road. And when he comes home, I’m coming back in. Someone needs to tell him what’s what.”
“And what’s that?” she said. They were standing in the hall, the front door ajar.
“This isn’t about you,” he said. “It’s about him.”
“It’s about you,” she said.
“He has to learn. I’m only going to warn him.”
She bit her lip and looked down. “It wasn’t Sean,” she whispered.
He frowned. “Then who?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were jumped?”
“Jay,” she pleaded, “trust me.”
But he was adamant, insisting. She backed away into the corner behind the door and when he took a step towards her the words tumbled out as if they might fend him off. Job. Lost. Mortgage. Sean. Friend. Company.
“No fooling around, though,” she said. She sounded dull, a sleepwalker. “That was the deal. Just company. For the races at Leopardstown. Just drinks and company.”
And all he could think to say was, “You walked all the way in from fucking Leopardstown?”
“There was another girl,” she said. “In the room. I think she was Thai.” She reached up and removed the sunglasses, holding them out for him to take. Her right eye was closed behind a blackening bruise spreading from forehead to cheek. “They preferred her.”
He swallowed dry. “Where is she now?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What room, though?”
“I don’t fucking know,” she whispered.
He didn’t believe her.
He drove to the far side of the green in the middle of the estate and reversed the car so that he was looking directly at the house. He opened the boot, found the wheel-brace, sat in the car again and lit a cigarette, huddling back in the seat to watch the house over the rim of the steering wheel.
Sean arrived walking, maybe an hour or so later. Smaller than James remembered, stick-thin even beneath the overcoat. He trudged to the driveway and stood outside looking up at the house with his hands buried deep in the pockets. Then his shoulders seemed to fall forward and he trudged up the driveway. He reached with the key, reconsidered, and rang the doorbell instead. He rang three times before the door opened but when it did he stepped inside straight away.
Now Jay got out of the car and jogged across the green, sidling up the side of the driveway out of sight of the living room window. He gained the porch and stood with his back to the wall, half-crouched, the wheel-brace held rigid behind his thigh. Then he punched the doorbell with his forefinger and left it there, jammed down.
They didn’t answer. Four times he pressed the doorbell, half-crouched against the wall, looking out at the quiet estate. Wondering if he could be seen from behind the lowered blinds that faced their house. He pounded on the door but no one came.
He looked out across the estate to where the sun was sinking behind the horizon. The icebergs were gone. The porch lights hummed, flickered, winked on. On the far side of the green his car seemed impossibly distant.
He wondered how long was reasonable to stay before walking away.
The Same as She Always Was
Keith McCarthy
I am the same that I always was.
I am the same that I always was.
Acts do not change us. Acts spring from what we are, and what we believe, and perhaps most important of all, what we desire. I am still the Gilly I was on the first day I met Greg, as I was on the day that he left me, as I was on the day that the police came to call.
It was Greg that changed not me, Greg who altered the bargain, who changed the rules, who ripped up the contract. Greg who stole my life from me without even realizing it.
I still love Greg and I always will, until the day I die.
The rain comes suddenly but not unexpectedly. When Greg and Gilly set out on their walk from the pub in the Forest of Dean where they are staying for the weekend, the wind was blustering and clouds, fluffy and bright, moved briskly before it, casting huge, travelling shadows on the land around them. He said to her then that he thought it would rain and she said, “Maybe, but let’s go anyway.”
Gilly loves walking. When Greg first met her, eleven years ago, it was on a walk, one for a breast cancer charity, because her mother had died of the disease and because his mother had had a cancerous lump but was cured. She has vividly red hair and freckles and Greg has loved her from the first moment he saw her.
“We should take waterproofs.”
“Why?” she asks. “If there’s a shower, we’ll find some shelter somewhere; wait for it to stop.”
“If it does stop.”
She laughs. “So what if it doesn’t? We’ve nowhere else to go, nothing to be late for.”
And so they set out, walking through the lush green valley, beside dry stonewalls, past pretty cottages and copses and fields of potatoes, corn and grass. They have not been here since their honeymoon and the smells, the sights, the tastes bring back that time, reminding them of just how much they need the relaxation and respite from the stresses of their oh-so-busy lives.
Especially now.
A marriage is a pact. Everyone knows that, don’t they? And a pact involves sharing and pooling, giving and taking, so that something is created, something that exists that had no existence before. Gestalt. A third entity that is part man, part woman, but most important of all, part neither of them. A creation that is every bit as real as a work of art, or an invention...
Or a child.
They have come because they need to escape their troubles. They know that a week in the Forest of Dean will be only a temporary respite but they also hope that it will allow them to see each other anew, to regain something that they both know (without saying as much) they have lost and, more importantly, that their relationship has lost.
Recent times have been hard.
Greg’s IT consultancy has been going through a difficult phase and he has had to lay off all but one of the eight people he once employed; he has hopes to gain a new contract from a national retail distribution company but fears that he is too close to the event horizon of financial breakdown, the point beyond which no business returns.
And Gilly...
Poor Gilly has just terminated a pregnancy. She is thirty-eight now and she fears that she has made the wrong decision.
Who can blame her?