2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (2 page)

Our beautiful home.

The white drinks cabinet and bookcase, the white leather suite, the pale marble floor flecked with grey, the white walls, the widescreen digital TV on the wall, the art-deco coffee table, the dark glass dinner table at the far end of the room beside the aquarium, the hung Paul Klee modern art…

The crucible of our dreams.

I escape through the french windows out on to the balcony. I lean against the railings. My head is spinning, my mind still skiing the white slope in freefall. Make-up is streaming down my cheeks, I know, because blobs of it are falling on to my black polo-neck jumper and plopping on to the balcony floor like droplets of dirty rain.

The bottle I am holding is like an oil pipeline straight into my veins. It’s starting to make me feel a whole lot better.

I strip open a fresh packet of cigarettes, light a double-barrel and suck away at it like a maniac.

What am I going to do?

A hazy sun spreads its lustful heat over my face, fanned by a thermal puff of air. The light-blue of water is set against the deeper blue of the sky across whose giant orb endlessly slant fluffy clouds. Across Dublin Bay is the incessant play of ships crossing back and forth. Closer, the sea’s white fingertips lap gently against your ears and mingle with the tinkle of boat masts, music in the light June breeze.

Over to the right is the catamaran terminal. One departed for Holyhead only a short time ago. It travels fast; now it is a small dark square on the horizon. It will return in approximately four hours.

Further right again is the sun-yellowed arm of Dun Laoghaire pier, articulated like a crab limb across a mile of water. Its massive shoulder meets the coastline only two hundred metres from our apartment.

All this beauty.

It has made me so happy. Us.

And now?

They have met secretly in
my
apartment. They have stripped their clothes off in
my
kitchen. They have had sex in
my
bedroom. In
my
bed.

And it’s
my
marriage. Even if, like everything else here, I strictly own just half. But this doesn’t give him even half a right to jerk it off with another woman for a few minutes’ joy. It’s
my
life and he’s threatening to destroy the whole of it, and he hasn’t got that right.

Not without asking me first.

O
f course, the holiday was Ronan’s idea.

It all started last week on our comfortable leather couch. We were on the point of moving to a more intense, groping phase of our mutual-lust session when I suddenly spat it out. “Ronan, I want a baby,” I said.

He froze. Ever so gently, he separated himself and beheld me at arm’s length. Then he stood up. Rubbing his chin, he peered down at me suspiciously for signs of emotional dysfunction.

He rushed out to the balcony to make a series of phone calls.

When he returned I asked him what all that was about. Staring out at the blue day, he replied that I required a period of ‘intensive care in an alternative environment’ (his shorthand for a break) to get myself together again. And since I wasn’t too busy in the Law Library at present, he had just booked a week for two in the Cliff Castle, to begin the following Sunday.

“What’s that? A sanatorium for the unhinged?”

“It’s a hotel cum health farm,” he replied. “It’ll do you good.”

I thanked him for being so thoughtful and told him I felt privileged indeed to be married to a man who could display such touching concern over my mental state. “But,” I added, “it’s not a holiday I need, Rpnan. It’s a baby.”

Standing by the french doors, with that slightly supercilious half-smile of his, he gently explained to me my problem. Job-stress, he said. It was giving me strange ideas.

It was understandable, he lectured, that with my every waking moment filled by ‘turgid legal problematics’ (to quote) such as trusts, probate, conveyancing and drafting defences for psychopaths and murderers (he has this romantic idea about my job) I should hanker after something more…

He paused. “…primordial.”

“Primitive, you mean.”

“I can understand this innate urge,” he said.

“You can?”

“Of course I can.”

He sat down beside me to talk, a rare enough event – at least on a sofa. His voice became all sugary and soft, a give-away sign that he’d just switched on the remote-control charm button. This works under normal conditions because, you know, he could be behaving like the worst pig-headed, arrogant creep in the whole world, but provided he did it with charm I’d do anything for him.

But wanting a baby wasn’t normal conditions.

Besides, I noticed a fundamental contradiction. His smiling lips said: “Of
course
children would be wonderful, Julie – what’s to stop us discussing it again in a year or two when you’re more established in your career?”

But his eyes said: “Julie, this isn’t you speaking, it’s your hormones: don’t fuck up your life over a hormone.”

It was clear that Ronan was in no mood for a steamy lay in the soft folds of our marital bed, or even on the leather couch in full view of several innocent tropical fish. To him, ‘steamy lay’ meant one thing and one thing only: twenty-year-long child-rearing horror.

(Incredible the way sex can make a man so nervous.)

Undaunted, I slid up to him and started pressing a few buttons of my own. I slid my arms sexily (or so I thought) round his neck and made these purring noises, which normally worked whenever I purred them. I pressed my hand under his shirt and started squeezing and massaging, and I buried my lips into the tight bristle under his jawbone.

But he drew back – ever so politely – escaped to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a brandy. He didn’t feel like me right then. No problem, I told myself, I’m a reasonable person. I could make allowances for these embarrassingly unmanly displays of impotence.

“Julie.” He sighed heavily, examining his brandy glass. “We’re far too young to be doing ridiculous things like having babies.”

“Twenty-nine. The older we get the more ridiculous it will become.”

“We’re professional people: we have an image to maintain. And I really don’t want it soiled by a baby.”

I laughed.

“They consume time, energy, food, money,” he observed. “They download on your peace of mind. They puke on carpets. They piss on armchairs. They do worse on car seats. They grin like clowns, they chew rugs. Babies bring disease, according to recent research. The whole thing is sordid.”

He emptied his glass, then extracted his silver cigarette case. After a series of deft movements the space around his head was billowing with smoke. Then he sauntered to the french windows and stood there gazing out to sea, indulging his Camel cigarette in that sophisticated
je ne sais quoi
way of his, a handsome figure silhouetted in his all-black trousers, jacket and polo-neck sweater against the deep-blue mid-summer evening sky, his gold Raymond Weil wristwatch glistening like a miniature sun on his dark-haired wrist. “As Louis Armstrong once said,” he mused, “we’ve got all the time in the world.”

“If he was singing about getting pregnant, then he had all the naivety in the world.”

“Come on, Julie, you know what having a child would do: it would tie us down. I’d lose my freedom. You’d lose your figure.”

“No man wants children until they arrive.”

“No man wants children
when
they arrive. Anyway, what do you expect? To have them delivered by taxi? Have you any idea what childbirth is like?”

“Yes.”

“I suggest you read up on it.”

“Books are your solution to everything.”

“Books could turn out to be an inexpensive method of contraception.”

“When you see its lovely pudgy face and tiny squashy fists you will fall in love with it.”

“Falling in love with a woman is quite enough, thank you.”

“It will change your life…”

“That’s true.”

“…you’ll adore it! You’ll end up ignoring me. Besides, you can teach her everything you know.”

“I know nothing.”

Actually, he regards himself as a bit of an intellectual.

“You’re sensitive to art and philosophy, Ronan. Don’t deny it…”

“Yes, and I’m sure a baby would be thrilled to be introduced to Kant and chiaroscuro on its first day on earth.”

“Just think about it, Ronan, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Fine, I’ll think about it. Anyway’ – he sighed – ’the holiday is booked. Go away for the week and enjoy yourselves.”

Yourselves?

“What do you mean ‘yourselves’?”

He told me he couldn’t go himself: his dental appointments book was full up. I was to take a friend. “That ball-busting friend of yours, for instance.”

“There’s no need to talk about Sylvana like that.”

“Take a girls’ week out: renew your friendship. Do you both the world of good. Think of it. Sauna and plunge pool, aromatherapy massage, reflexology, seaweed treatments, muck treatments, facials, electrolysis, manicures, exfoliants…”

“Of course. What more could a woman ask for?”

“You talk enough about needing to relax and destress.”

He’s right, I do. “But Ronan,” I purred, “it’s
you
I want to go with.”

“Sorry, Julie, but teeth come before love.”

He actually said that.

I figured Ronan was using the health farm idea as a tactical manoeuvre to make me drop this ludicrous egg-sperm creation thing. His theory was: baby blues are aggravated by stress overload, therefore they will be sedated by stress management. His ploy was this: send me away to be cured.

But I reasoned: go anyway. A chance to rediscover the sunny oasis of well-being trapped within that arid human wasteland called work. Destress, detox, depox. Read literature and sniff perfume samples from magazines. Eat abstemiously, but with plenty of liquor and conversation added. Concoct paybacks for all those people we love to hate, draft avoidance schemes for those we hate to love and bitch about the rest. Resort to the local bar and cackle till closing time like a couple of cauldron witches. On the more spiritual side, perhaps, experiment with yogic communion and, yes, muck treatments. Sleep like pigs in space, buy some new clothes, return home looking absolutely amazing.

And…get him pregnant.

Very simple, very basic, very effective.

He bent down, then, and kissed me on the forehead, assuring me that Sylvana and I would have a wonderful time together. “She’ll love it,” he offered, like he really cared about her welfare.

I reluctantly agreed. He smiled, thinking he’d won the day.

And now?

I know better.

He moved in his little whore while I was away. He swapped me for a few days’ marital cost-benefit analysis. He imaginatively transformed her into his wife, comparing and contrasting at every turn. He even tried her out in my bed. If she turned out good, he’d dump me.

Very simple, very basic, very effective.

I go back inside and pull the thick wine decanter from the drinks cabinet. It weighs my arm down like a ball of lead. I could use the empty bottle of Jameson’s instead, but although it might well be sufficiently sturdy to interface with one skull, it could splinter on the second and I don’t want to create a mess of glass shards around the place. Bone I can take. But not glass.

I drop the solid stopper into my jacket pocket and I close the door of the drinks cabinet. I pause on my reflection in the glass.

I look horrendous.

My face is thin and bony as a scarecrow, pale as milk gone off. My mouth is vexed and stark, my eyes small shiny discs. I had my black shoulder-length hair trimmed and further darkened by the resident coiffeuse at the Cliff Castle Hotel. The red lipstick and purple eyeshadow make me look weird: two elongated canines and I’d be perfect.

Sylvana often tells me how beautiful I am. I often tell her how crazy she is. She frequently adds that ‘even men think so’ but I know she’s only being ironic so I don’t have to go and stab her.

Once in the bathroom, I stand in front of the mirror and wipe the ugly-looking smear tracks from my face: no point in resembling a crazed madwoman even if I feel like one. I refuse to let the bitch see that I’m upset, even though I will have no choice but to let her experience a little-known alternative use for crystal glass wine decanters: cranial removal. By the swimming pool.

I finish tending to my face. Good. I feel instantly better. I am going to make an impression now.

In someone’s skull.

I go back out to the lounge to close the french windows.

Suddenly I stop dead.

On the floor, leaning semi-concealed against the side of the leather couch I spy a slim burgundy envelope case.

I pick up the case and place it on the coffee table. Inside are a fitted notepad, pens in pen holders, a mobile phone, a diary, a brochure of some sort, a tube of deep-red lipstick, a bottle of Issey Miyake eau de toilette and a packet of condoms. Unopened. Meaning that they are using ours.

Or using none.

There’s just one newspaper: last Monday’s. Unopened. Today is Thursday. What does that say?

I smash my fist down on the coffee table. A sharp pain runs up my inside arm but I don’t care because I’ve just seen something. A sketch pad. I take it out. It’s seven by five inches. On the first few pages there are a few detailed sketches of tropical marine fish. Did she sketch these from our aquarium? If so, how come there’s one variety I’ve never seen before?

The next few pages feature sketches of a man. In one, he is reading a paper. In another he is smoking a cigarette with his legs crossed. This is Ronan. She has perfectly captured his elegant, effortless posture and his trademark sexuality: pensive and intense. In another sketch he is asleep in bed, a study of serenity.

She has grasped his proportionality exactly: tall but not too tall. Slim but not gangly. Head and shoulders in proportion to his body, legs and arms neither too short nor too long. His stylish clothes accentuate this architectonic harmony.

I pick up a final sketch of Ronan’s face – a close-up this time. He could be watching TV. He is concentrated but relaxed. The large eyes, the long thin face, the long elegant nose, the slightly protruding but well-proportioned lips, the small chin, the high narrow forehead, the thin black receding hair, short thin sideburns, the perfect ears, the thick but neatly trimmed eyebrows, the clean-shaven, nostril-plucked neatness.