The Forgotten Waltz (14 page)

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.

When I zipped up the case and came out, I found him on the sofa, going through my Pauric Sweeney shoulderbag.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Are you back on the pill?’ he said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I just want to know.’

I turned and went back into the bedroom. It was all too sad to shout about. But, after a small silence, we managed to shout about it anyway.

‘I’m your fucking husband, that’s who I am!’

Conor rarely loses his temper. He does it like a cartoon, with bulging muscles and popping veins. I was almost afraid of him. And I remembered something about him that I had somehow managed to forget: how exact he was in bed; how he could, in his ruthless, friendly way, destroy me between the sheets.

‘Oh right. Oh that’s
right.’

Because the unsayable thing is, that just before I started sleeping with Seán – when I was just thinking about it, when I was on the brink – myself and Conor had a lot of sex. Not the slow abandon of our early days, but rooting, rummaging, sudden sex that was not supposed to be enjoyable, strictly speaking; that was not about me. If Conor could have made me pregnant then, he would have done it without thinking (there was no thinking involved in any of this), which is why, incidentally, I think he did know about Seán, somewhere deep down.

The one thing he never said to me was that he was
surprised
.

Poor, terrifying Conor. Stood there in the halogen glare with his hands clenched and his head thrust forward. I tried to move past him to get to the stairs, but he would not give way so I stood back and thumped him in the face, quite hard. I thought I would feel pain when I hit him but a kind of numbness spread from the impact, it was like hitting rubber – not just his cheek, but my hand, the whole room seemed numb. So I swung at him again, to see if that would bring the feeling back.

Something messy happened, then. The suitcase was wrenched away from my grasp and, as I looked down, I was caught by the flat of Conor’s hand across my chin. There was no pain, just a jarring dislocation; my brain moving faster than my skull. When I was steady again, I saw Conor had backed away from me and was standing against the wall, rubbing his hand. It was only then that my cheek started to sting. The delay worried me. My nerves were slow. Even when the hurt happened, I couldn’t be sure that it was happening to me.

And then I was sure.

It was like that moment, many hours after the plane lands, when your ears decide to open. We looked at each other as the pain spread, and we realised that we were separate human beings.

And it exhausted us.

I waited for the script to continue, for the little surge that would make me grab my case and sling him a contemptuous glance and hurry down the stairs. But it did not come. I stood there, and lifted my face, and burst into woeful tears. Conor stepped forward and pulled my head against his shoulder and I said, ‘Don’t touch me. I don’t want you to touch me,’ but I stayed there against him. My chin was starting to ache, in the bone. I wanted a cup of tea.

We talked until four in the morning. We dredged it all up. And the things Conor told me about myself that night – ‘selfish’ was just the start of it – it was like a slug crawling over your soul.

‘Everyone is selfish,’ I said. ‘They just call it something else.’

‘You think?’

‘I know.’

‘Well you know wrong,’ he said. ‘Everyone is not selfish.’

I got him to bed before morning and I lay down alongside him, fully dressed. When he was asleep, I stood up, leaving the shape of myself on the duvet, and I walked out of the room. I took my bag, and the suitcase of clothes, and I took the thing he wanted most – a little boy, maybe, as yet unmade; a sturdy little runaround fella, for sitting on his shoulders, and video games down the arcade, and football in the park.

Then I went back to Terenure and texted Seán.

‘Have clothes. All safe.’

Seán – who likes to use a johnny
anyway
.

Apart from anything else, how were we supposed to pay for it? The mortgage was two and a half grand a month, the childcare would be another grand on top of that. A new house – because you can’t rear children in a lopsided box – would be hundreds upon hundreds of thousands more. So it didn’t matter what Conor wanted, or what I wanted – I mean, I like children. I have the reproductive pang – but for all his talk of bliss betrayed, Conor was actually, when it came down to it, a dreamer.

He could do the sums as often as he liked, there was something about us as a couple that meant money made no sense to us: it was always a terrible surprise.

I don’t know why.

But I am being hard on my husband, who I loved, and who is now fighting with me about money, never mind broken dreams. In fact everyone is fighting with me about money: my sister, too. Who would have thought love could be so expensive? I should sit down and calculate it out at so much per kiss. The price of this house plus the price of that house, divided by two, plus the price of the house we are in. Thousands. Every time I touch him. Hundreds of thousands. Because we took it too far. We should have stuck to car parks and hotel bedrooms (no, really, we should really have stuck to car parks and hotel bedrooms). If we keep going the price will come down – per event, as it were. Twenty years of love can be consummated for tuppence. After a lifetime it is almost free.

Money (That’s What I Want)

OUTSIDE IN THE
snow, the For Sale sign looks fresh as the day it was hammered home. No one knows what the house is worth now. No one will buy it, so that’s how much it is worth. Nothing. Despite which, we will owe tax based on that ‘two and a bit’. For a house that is currently worth whistling for. I can’t figure out the fake money from the real. I walk around this magic box, this trap, with its frost-flowered windows, weeping condensation as the morning proceeds. I gather my briefcase from the console table in the hall. I open the same door I have opened since I could reach the latch. And I head out to earn some money.

By the time I get to the motorway, all is quiet: a few yellow registrations, speeding back up to the border, trying to beat the weather. It’s not my favourite road in Ireland – too straight and flat – though I like the epic way the clouds always seem to lower over the Mourne Mountains, the gateway to the Black North. By the time they come into view, their dark slopes are streaked with white and my phone is jumping with warnings and dire predictions. The snow is above us. It is about to fall.

‘Book a hotel,’ says the office. ‘And stay put!’

I bailed out of Rathlin before it hit the buffers and started in the drinks industry. I wanted a new life, but it is possible I sensed what was happening, too – that autumn with my mother’s house suspended, like a dream, at ‘two and a bit’, it is possible I sensed there was nothing under our feet.

Not that I admitted it, at the time.

Selling the house was still the answer to everything. We brought the price down from ‘two and a bit’ to ‘nearly two’ and it was still short odds on winning the lottery; it was five-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand lamb chops, it was one-and-a-half-thousand years of lamb on your plate, it was so many shirts you would never have to wash another shirt, it was half of the townhouse in Clonskeagh and enough left over for a roof over our head, it was freedom and time to kiss, which is also called love.

But no one bought it.

Funny that.

Meanwhile I started in the drinks industry. I suspect my family thought the Sheilses a bit vulgar for being publicans but, you know, Conor’s father might have been low enough to sell the stuff, but my father was low enough to drink it. Maybe, in my separated, orphaned state, I realised what side I was finally on. Good times or bad, I thought, there will always be Al Co Hol.

As it turned out, the bad times were already upon us and what started out as a new and exciting web-based viral marketing campaign turned into me in a VW Golf, putting girls in bikinis into bars with trays of flavoured vodka. Which is about as far away from the future of the world wide web as you can get. It sure sells vodka though, and there is very little I don’t know, now, about fake tan. I’m like this really drawly air hostess I heard over the intercom once, then realised it was the captain speaking, and she wasn’t offering us drinks and snacks. ’Em, yeah, nothing much to report here, folks, we’re cruising now at twenty-thousand feet, bit of a tailwind …’ So I’m the really drawly one, in this bevy of bottle blondes with goosebumps on their Xen Tan Absolute. I am all white, and all real, I keep my clothes on and earn many times what they do, despite which I am pushed, sometimes actually shoved aside by local press, publicans, and many hundreds of drunken men, every second Friday night, from 5.30 to 9 p.m. Some of the men pause to sneer at me first, or they turn to sneer at me after,
Yeah, look what we got
. There is an amount of what you might call collateral anger to mop up. And there’s always one guy – a nice guy, a good guy – who decides, in all the excitement, that the girl to hit on is the one wearing the clothes. For this, I get paid. I’m a pimp. It’s a funny life.

But I am not going up to Dundalk to do a promotion, I am going up to Dundalk to let two of the sales staff go, after which, one of them will be taken back at a casual rate. I’m still relatively new, so I am the one who gets to fire people, the unspoken suggestion being, of course, that the last person I fire may be myself.

The office is a couple of rooms tacked on to a warehouse near the M1: grey walls, grey roof, blue carpet, red banisters, yellow cubes to set your coffee cup down. It is hard to think that people work here. No voices are ever raised. Nothing feels used.

I set up in the small meeting room and call the girls in, one at a time. I keep it neat and light, because that’s the way I like to work, but I can’t help but be caught by the look in their eyes. I am not saying I enjoy it, but you spend your time pretending you’re not actually the boss, that you’re all just friends, and they still bitch about you like crazy. Now the pretending was over. With benefits and casual hours they wouldn’t do too badly, but still you could feel it, the first snappings, strand by strand, as the rope started to go: Sinéad, with four-hundred-and-twenty points in her Leaving Certificate and a mouthful of veneers she got on the HP. Alice, who was a hippy chick at heart, just saving up for her trip to Peru. I said I would fight for the best possible package. I told them that human resources would be in touch. Then I stood up and offered my hand to shake. Then a hug, because we were all just friends really. And then they left. I did some photocopying, put my head around the distribution manager’s door – he was already heading home – then I walked out through the warehouse floor. I ducked under gallons of hooch raised in a toast on an abandoned forklift – there it all was: drink stacked high, walls of drink, drink on the move.

I drove back to the interchange and, after five miles of road, the car was swallowed by the soft and oncoming storm; a dream of red tail lights, in a dirty white mess of snow. Everything was so quiet, and the other drivers so gentle; I should have been worried, but there was something about this slow danger that was comforting and lovely. I don’t know how long it lasted. By the time I passed the airport, the air was clear. Seán was in there somewhere, in a welter of cancellations. The passengers were running from gate to gate, ‘like a herd of bullocks,’ he said. I crouched over the steering wheel and looked up, but the sky I saw through the windscreen was already dark and empty of planes.

It was half past four.

According to the radio, the entire country had bailed out of work early and was heading for home. I expected Dublin to be bedlam, but the port tunnel was so empty and pure it felt like the future, and the quays, when I surfaced in the dark of the city centre, were deserted. I imagined the traffic spreading like an aftershock, washing up in a dirty rim in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, where the pure snow began.

The schools had closed early. I wondered about Evie, if her mum would get there to pick her up, or how she would manage. I went to dial her number and then I didn’t. I have never actually rung Evie, though we are perfectly happy to talk if, by some accident, we end up on the phone.

Back in Terenure the house was dark and empty and cold. I turned on the heat and checked my emails, but I found it hard to settle. I was waiting for Seán to come home but he had not even left yet. It made me strangely angry, the thought of him sitting at the seafood bar, with a plate of smoked salmon and a glass of white. Neither here nor there. A man not unaccustomed to the departure lounge.

It took Seán seven months to leave Enniskerry. For seven months, after I left Conor, he got out of my bed and got in his car and drove home, so he could be there in the morning to make his daughter’s porridge (with cinnamon) and kiss her mother goodbye.

Just a peck, of course.

Seven months, I wasn’t allowed to ring or text or email, because it was more important than ever to be secret now; our love more urgent and sweet in these last days before he went clear.

But he did not go clear. After Christmas, he said. He could not do it before Christmas. They were buying Evie her first laptop; a little netbook. He wanted one himself, if only he could afford it, he said. And he laughed.

That Christmas – I can not even think about that Christmas. Whoever invented Christmas should be shot.

And when he finally washed up on my doorstep at two in the morning, after who knows what storm; when he finally broke free of her that spring and came to me, he did not come to live, but just to escape. He still spends the occasional night out – I assume in Enniskerry. I do not ask. In Ireland, if you leave the house and there is a divorce, then you will lose the house, he says. You have to sleep there to keep your claim. Which was all news to me, but there you go. You think it is about sex, and then you remember the money.

So here we are, some nights: me sleeping in my sister’s bed in Terenure. Seán sleeping in the au pair’s room in Enniskerry, where we kissed, or perhaps even in his old bedroom, beside the aggrieved body of his wife. Seán somewhere asleep, between the ageing flesh of his wife and the growing flesh of his child. Who knows where is he sleeping, in his dreams?

‘I never remember my dreams,’ he says.

It is not just the snow that makes me wonder these things. Though it is also, perhaps, the snow. It is Seán’s voice on the phone finally landed in Budapest, sounding just like himself and so far away.

‘Fucking Ryanair,’ he says.

‘Well, yes.’

‘We were sitting on the tarmac for an hour and a half, I looked out the window and there was a man at the wing with a shovel. He was taking the ice off with an actual shovel, and there was a kind of rope with two men hanging on to it, jumping up and down. They were sawing back and forth, with this rope thrown over the wings. Which was bad enough. I mean sitting there watching it was bad enough. But then we took off.’

‘Jesus. Were there lights?’

‘What do you mean, lights?’

‘I don’t know. Snow lights. Or something.’

I need to see him safe in his plane. I need to look in through the porthole windows, with blue lights and white lights flashing in the darkness, like a fifties movie set; the snow swirling outside. And, as if he has guessed my problem, Seán says, ‘The man was not standing on the wing. Believe me, I checked.’

‘How’s Budapest? Is it snowing there?’

‘No actually,’ he says. ‘Listen, Gina.’

I know if he says my name, he wants to talk about Evie. Or not talk about Evie, he wants to tell me of some arrangement involving Evie that I will not have the power to change.

‘What?’

‘Everything’s had to be pushed forward. I don’t know if I can get back tomorrow afternoon.’

‘When can you get back?’

‘I don’t know. Definitely Saturday. If it doesn’t snow.’

‘Tell me when you know, will you?’

‘Of course.’

‘How’s Budapest?’

‘Is that where I am?’

He sounds worn out. I can hear the news on his hotel TV.

‘Have yourself a nice bath,’ I say.

‘I don’t do baths.’

‘No?’

‘Not in hotels. You don’t know who’s been there before you.’

It takes me a while to hear this, or to make sense of it. I am listening to the space he occupies, I am listening to his breath, to the timbre of his voice, that is the same to me, almost, as the texture of his skin. It has the same effect. Or better. I am closer listening to him than touching him.

‘Sure give it a wipe,’ I say.

I could live on the phone.

Evie, it turns out, has – I actually blank this bit of the conversation out. Seán says, ‘On Saturday morning, Evie has …’ and my brain goes ‘tweet tweet, oh is that the time, how pretty’ and I look out at the garden and beyond to the traffic lights, casting their beautiful light, as they switch senselessly from red to green across the serene stretch of tyre-mangled snow. So, Evie has, I don’t know; horse riding or a play date or drama or the orthodontist, which means that – tweet tweet – Seán will have to pick her up on Friday from the city centre, or Enniskerry, or outside her school if there is school, except it will not be Seán because he is not here, and I say, ‘Fine, no problem,’ realising after I have put the phone down that Seán is saying something new here. He is saying that because of circumstances that have released a whole flock of sparrows in my brain, I may have to pick up Evie tomorrow. I myself will have to do it, while Seán, presumably, flies home.

Great.

Aileen, of course, must not be disturbed on this one. Aileen must not be humiliated further. It would never be possible for Aileen to ring the bell of my home, or to meet me in the street in order to hand her child to me. Her child. To me. That would not be possible. That would be like dying. And no one wants Aileen to die in this particular way.

I will never be rid of that woman.

The first few months together in Terenure, everything reminded Seán of how much he hated Aileen. Especially me. Everything I did reminded him of his wife.

One morning, I told him he would catch a cold. This was in the early days, after the bike was bought but before he had figured the clothes, so he went out in his shirtsleeves, folding his suit jacket over the handlebars.

‘Careful you don’t catch cold,’ I said, watching from the front door, and he went still for a moment before getting up on the bike and cycling away.

That evening we fought about something stupid – our first domestic – and it turned out, once the spat was over, that I had reminded him of his wife. Because whenever Seán was going on a plane, in whatever season, autumn or spring

– he could never remember what way it went – travelling to a warmer country or a colder one, Aileen would always say, ‘You’ll get a cold, you know,’ and she was always, but always, right. And Seán hated it. It was like she owned his entire immune system. And anyway, what was he supposed to do, stay at home?

There was a wasted intensity in the way he spoke about her; nailing the lid down on some coffin with nothing inside it. Or, what was inside? A joke. Some zombie wife who still twitched at the light. I spent my days trying to guess what Aileen might say, so I could say something different

– and I learned, in jig time, not to mention illness of any kind. Or weakness even. I learned not to make him feel weak in any way.