Under My Skin (9 page)

It happened with Matilda as he expected.

After they had made love.

That was how every real conversation happened with her. For five months they had been sleeping together, and breaking up and then sleeping together again, and that morning she wanted what he would describe later to The Chief as a ‘
personal
statement
’ from him. She needed to hear ‘I love you’ and ‘I miss you when you’re gone’. He knew about this from other women and he knew how to answer it now. Simply and to the point but in a gentle voice. And he was gentle with all of them, he hoped.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

And she turned her face into the pillows and then pulled her legs up, and rolled over to take every part of herself away. He knew about this too. The action women used, curling inwards towards their wombs, bringing their hearts downwards so they could be nurtured. The blood changing direction and going into a colder, more needing place.

At first he could not understand any of it. How he wanted sex and then felt nothing at all. It was the disease, his doctor reassured him. The devils that attacked his pituitary gland affecting, controlling, heightening and then diluting every mood. It meant that words like ‘love’ and ‘need’ were missing from his vocabulary now, and it was funny but women were never put off by his pain. They seemed to think that it was sent to him because he was able for it. That with it, bizarrely, he was somehow a stronger, more magnetic man.

So Matilda turned from him. And he was ready to explain. He knew the answers because he had tried to explain it before. To Boo. And she had listened – and then she had laughed, and he liked her more for that.

‘The disease has taken my endorphins’ – that was how he explained it to her, and the black woman who actually towered over him listened carefully.

‘I have no ardour,’ he said quietly, and with great sadness he gave the final part of his excuse.

And she looked at him with her eyes laughing and said, ‘Well, it’s a hell of a way to get dumped.’

Now with Matilda he waited and they both lay there apart and listened to the cars and dump-trucks of New York. Outside two jays were in courtship and he watched with sad dead eyes and envied their mad flapping wings and their screeching and their lust. And most of all he envied how they stayed together on the ledge after they made love.

The next day Matilda moved her things out as he knew she would and his apartment became empty again, and when he sat on his kitchen floor eating a carton of raisins and yoghurt he felt nothing, only the cold of his mosaic floor, and some lower back pain.

Later he finished some cottage cheese and noted with some mild questioning and wonderment that she had left her diaphragm in the refrigerator.

On Tuesday he called The Chief and asked him to meet him for lunch. On his way to Franks on Sixth Avenue the wind felt cold and it got in through his coat and clothes. He waited at the counter and as he drank a black coffee he tried not to think too much about his life. He wanted to shut off the memory of her last sad monosyllables and turn up the noise of New York. Any minute now and The Chief would appear, his broad shoulders and surly face reminding him that life was still OK. Today he would feel safe with Gallagher because he had no time for self-pity and he had no time for romance.

‘Walk away.’ That was his favourite piece of advice and when the glass door squeaked open he saw him, his grey hair brushed straight back from his forehead and his face red with
cold. He nodded to Arthur and then stopped for a moment and spoke to someone he knew.

‘Hey, buddy,’ he said to Glassman by way of greeting, the words coming out quietly under his breath, ‘… decided to come up higher than West Houston, huh?’

And Glassman grinned and felt himself slip comfortably into the male pattern that they both already knew. They would order lunch. Rare hamburgers. Fries. Coleslaw. Black coffee. Vanilla ice cream. All the things their women and their doctors told them to avoid. They would talk about The Knicks. They would talk about the cold. They might venture towards Glassman’s new heating system or The Chief’s new barbecue flown up from Maine. They would not mention blood pressure – or cholesterol – or their women. But in the last few minutes of their conversation, as Glassman walked beside his big bear friend, the problem would finally surface – and only for a minute and then it would die again. That was what he needed. He wanted to ignore it. To downplay it. He needed hamburgers and basketball and vanilla ice cream and none of the drama of his female friends.

‘So you and Matilda…?’ That was how it would come out. The question barely tagged on at the end.

And that was how it did come out and at the same time Arthur felt the gentle slap on his back from his friend.

He stopped and over the noise of the traffic he looked up at Gallagher and only had to shrug and shake his head. At times like this he loved his friend’s company. No more questions. No more emotion. No more analysis of things that should never have been said.

The Chief looked away. He put his gloved fist deep into a coat pocket again. He squinted in the cold. He turned quickly for an instant as a police siren flew past.

‘Probably better off,’ he said and his words were spoken up into the wind. And Glassman nodded without looking at him. They watched the street for a moment, both wondering what the other man would say.

‘Are you watching the fight on Friday night?’ The Chief asked then.

‘Yup.’

‘I’ll guess I’ll see you there.’

And with that The Chief turned and walked towards the Precinct. He had said exactly enough to leave his friend feeling calm and safe and on that day in February Glassman felt normal again.

The next day there were three messages on his answerphone and they were all from Matilda of course. He knew as soon as he opened his hall door and stood with the key still in the lock and the red number 3 flashing in his face.

He listened to the first one.

It began with her taking a slow deep breath.

‘Hey… it’s me… I know we said we wouldn’t do this… I miss you, Glassman… could you come over?… I’m just finding this really hard.’

He knew he shouldn’t listen to the second message but he did.

‘Arthur, why didn’t you return my call? Look. I’m sorry. I just… I’m having a hard time with this. I miss you and I don’t understand why we can’t be friends. I love you – Arthur? Are you there? Please pick up…’

And the third message was just the sound of her breathing and an angry little click as she put down the phone.

Melancholic adj. – 1. Feeling or tending to feel a thoughtful or gentle sadness 2. Experiencing psychiatric depression (archaic).

Pappy stands behind the counter of our shop. Behind him there are white chocolate mice, clove drops, bonbons, Love Hearts. On the other side there are boxes of red apples, cooked ham, stacks of eggs, today’s bread. The morning sun comes through the open door in a long white beam, like a searchlight. It is Saturday so we stand in a row behind the counter but no one says a word, not my pappy, not my brother Daniel, not me. There is a red leather barber’s chair in the corner of the shop and next to it a small white sink. There are three pairs of rusty scissors standing in a glass and an electric clippers. But since summer we only sell sweets and groceries, we do not cut people’s hair. In the background The King is singing and outside our shop seems to overflow and spill itself on to the footpath. We live in Oldcastle, on the Main Street. The shop is painted shiny red and outside there are two chewing-gum vendors, four cylinders of gas chained together and a plastic ice cream. And Elvis croons. He is always with us, a sort of wallpaper, a fourth member of the family now.

Every day Pappy gets up at seven and he puts a low side parting into his hair. He does this with a new brown plastic comb and then he drops the new brown plastic comb into the bin. The bin is beside his bed and because it is made from metal there is an odd rattling sound. It is the first sound we hear every morning. Except on Sundays when Pappy stays in bed.
There is a picture of four white horses pulling a carriage on the bin and every weekday morning when he drops the comb the horses pull it and some of his stray hairs away. They take them away to Comb Mountain and then they make a giant haystack with his hair. He runs a bath at 7.15 and when he sits down in the steaming water, he holds his wet knees and talks quietly to himself. Through the thin walls, his voice travels up and down, light and soft, in and out, on and on. Pappy is persuading, he is coaxing, he is laughing, he is teasing, and he is praying my mother will come back home. I know this because he sounds so kind and sweet and gentle about it and now and then he will say her name.

‘Leonora,’ he says and the sigh hangs in the air with the steam – but she could be in the water with him. She could be sunbathing on the flat kitchen roof. She could be standing on the wardrobe – wearing a yellow ballgown with a diamond tiara. She could be flying. She could be gliding. She could be driving a red bubble car around his bed. She can be anything she wants to be now. My mother is invisible. She is a spirit. Since last summer, she is with the angels – also known as ‘
Dead
’.

Pappy puts on a fresh cotton vest. He does not say any prayers. Every week he buys a new white shirt and these are the sounds that wake us. The comb in the bin, the squeak of the bath taps, the cellophane wrapping – and lastly his footsteps and a little fart on the stairs. Even though he has the depression Pappy still makes farts. And they sound like Noddy’s car – ‘parp-parp’.

His room is at the end of the back landing, a long narrow stretch of dusty oak, and there is a rose-covered rug and a brass fruit bowl on the windowsill. We also have a jar in the kitchen that still has Mum’s handwriting on it. ‘
Lemon
Marmalade
’ it says. Pappy eats his All Bran at ten minutes to eight. After that he makes his tea and has one slice of wholewheat toast. His braces make a snapping sound on his shoulders and then he puts on a long white apron and he opens up the shop.

On Saturdays we help him. Standing in a row and waiting for the first customer to come in. Only Pappy wears the white apron, Daniel wears his lumberjack hat and this year we are twelve. We were born on 2 March – but Daniel is fifteen minutes older than me. We have a grandmother too who lives in the country. She lives thirty miles from us in a place called Devlin in Westmeath. So far we have never met but we know her name is Djuna, which she spells with a ‘J’. She’s my pappy’s mother and he says she has snow-white hair now and that she was a famous swimmer ‘in her day’.