Cassandra Voices

Tag: New Irish writing

  • Fiction: Change

    Neil went to tea break for the gossip, to find out what was going on, although he screened out the small talk about football and politics. The canteen overlooked the carpark with the smoking shed at the other end – another good source of information. It was raining the day he heard a replacement boss was coming at the end of the month. She was something new, a bit of an innovator. The rain continued as the men discussed this new woman. Some were dismissive of anyone making a difference. Neil was silent. Sometimes change was a good thing, there was certainly no point in avoiding it. He had joined the organisation five years ago after college and he still daydreamed about the future. Nothing would stop him, he smiled slightly. He had his plans and maybe this new woman would help him.

    By three thirty the rain had stopped, but the roads were flooded, pooling around the drains in large puddles. It was dark when Neil got on his bike to cycle home and, on the way, he was soaked through by unforgiving passing cars. His mother was in the kitchen boiling potatoes the windows running with condensation.

    ‘I have a lamb chop for your tea,’ she said accusingly.

    Neil took off his backpack and hung up his wet jacket in the hallway.

    ‘How’s the captain of industry?’ his father asked amiably as he passed.

    One day Neil thought, they’ll all see. He ate his dinner without comment reading The Evening Herald unenthusiastically and then went to his room. It was his belief that things would change, his life would be transformed. He was certain of it.

    The office was a large room on the third floor. Desks were mainly clustered around the windows with managers discreetly hidden behind wooden framed screens. They were the middle managers; the senior managers had their own offices filled with books and manuals of all kinds. One of them kept a full set of golf clubs leaning against a cupboard under the window while a framed picture of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca hung on the wall. Neil wasn’t even a middle manager; he was an executive assistant which meant he was a nobody. In the afternoons after lunch he let his thoughts wander to his amalgamation project. Imagine consolidating all the programmes and centralising the funding. Think of the savings! He’d done the research, and it was possible. Why had no one thought of it before? It came up at his last annual appraisal. They were in the process of discussing his Key Core Deliverables when he took out his folder with all his ideas and the costings to back them up.

    ‘That would be a matter for Corporate Affairs,’ his supervisor said primly.

    Neil shouldn’t have expected more from Amanda. She’d been in the job so long she could remember when they’d worked things out on their fingers.

    Down in the pub he complained to his mate Kevin.

    ‘No one can see the bigger picture,’ Neil said taking a gulp of his pint. ‘They’re all so busy squirrelling away at their own jobs no one puts their heads above the parapet.

    ‘Good way to get it shot off,’ Kevin said glumly.

    ‘What do you mean?’

    ‘Well if nobody does anything then nobody makes a mistake.’

    Neil had to admit to himself that Kevin was right. He was having doubts about spending much more time in the place anyway. He’d already done two competitions for promotion without success largely because Amanda had commented that he needed to improve. She said he needed more training to bring him up to speed on the organisation’s mission and objectives. It was a polite way of saying he didn’t know his job, but the idea of training wasn’t a bad one and he toyed with it over his ham and cheese sandwich in the canteen. He thought about the training courses he’d done so far in management skills and accountancy. He really needed to get a qualification like a Masters of Business Administration. Meanwhile the replacement manager was due to arrive on Monday. Rumours spread wildly, on the one hand describing her as a ruthless manipulator to a listening ear on the other. Neil decided to wait and see.

    Over the weekend he googled admissions criteria for an MBA. None of the colleges were taking applications until the spring, still it was something to aim for. He took out his C.V. It wasn’t impressive. For the last five years he had been working for Amanda in the same job. It didn’t look good, and HR had blocked his application for a transfer because of his poor performance at his appraisals. On Monday Kevin emailed him:

    ‘Just met the new boss. Her name is Stella Reynolds, and she has the corner office across the hallway from the D.G.’

    So she was a highflyer, well that could be a good thing.

    Usually Neil didn’t discuss work with his parents. Occasionally his mother asked him if he was happy at the office. It wasn’t a question he asked himself. The job wasn’t about happiness. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves Amanda was fond of saying. He had good days when he got something done and he felt satisfied for a little while. A lot of the time though the days were long and tedious. He was twenty-six and Neil didn’t consider himself young anymore. At this stage he should be getting on with his career, things should be happening! Instead he woke each morning with a heavy feeling of apprehension about the day ahead. He looked at Kevin’s email again and wondered if he was fooling himself thinking there was anything significant in her arrival. At tea break he skipped the canteen and went down to the smoking shed. Kevin was there smoking and drinking a can of Red Bull.

    ‘Everything OK?’ Neil asked cautiously.

    ‘I’ve had enough,’ Kevin blurted out. ‘I’m going to my brother in New Zealand. He says he can get me a job.’

    ‘When are you going?’

    ‘Next month.’

    So Kevin had found an escape route. Neil was envious, but also felt a surge of energy, now he really had to do something. When he got back to his desk there was a notification about a presentation on Financial Efficiency in the board room on Friday at three. Stella Reynolds was the lead speaker. So this was Neil’s opportunity to meet her. He accessed the slides for the talk and the topics covered coincided with the work he had done on amalgamation. This was it; this was his chance. Kevin once asked him if he believed in God. Neil was so surprised that for a few minutes he didn’t say anything. Then as if it was obvious he said:

    ‘No I believe in myself.’

    ‘But what if you’re not enough,’ Kevin said. ‘What if you try and try and it’s still not enough.’

    Was that why he was going to New Zealand? Was Kevin looking for God on the other side of the world? It wasn’t true that Neil just believed in himself, he also knew that luck had a large part to play in it. Even the best plan could come asunder if you were unlucky. He thought about Stella Reynolds and looked up her staff details on the HR link. She wore glasses and peered anxiously towards the camera. It wasn’t a good picture. She was probably nervous about having her photo taken. Then he looked at his own staff details. The photo wasn’t too bad, but he was wearing that striped shirt that always made him look like a wide boy. On Friday he would look his best and his most confident. If this plan didn’t work, it wouldn’t be because he didn’t make the effort.

    On Friday morning he left for the house early and noticed that the day was fine and dry. The trees were still bare and wintry, but there was a brightness in the sky that suggested spring. At his desk he took out his folder and went through his spreadsheets again. It wasn’t perfect, but he was sure some of his ideas would work. Then he looked up and saw Amanda was standing beside his desk.

    ‘Come with me,’ she said tersely.

    He followed her to a large cupboard hidden by a row of filing cabinets at the bottom of the room. She opened the cupboard to reveal a mess of documents lying higgeldy piggeldy on the shelves.

    ‘These have to be ordered by subject and date then filed away.’

    ‘But this will take days.’

    ‘Have you anything else on hand?’

    ‘I wanted to go to the presentation.’

    ‘This takes precedence.’

    Neil reminded himself that there was nothing to be gained by getting angry and set to work. He tried to work quickly, but the task was more complicated than he realised. By Friday evening he reckoned he was about halfway through. He took a break around four and went down to the smoking shed. Kevin looked up and asked the obvious question:

    ‘Where were you?’

    ‘Don’t ask.’

    ‘Let me guess, Amanda. Why not bring your stuff up to Stella Reynolds anyway? You’ve got nothing to lose.

    The two young men sat in silence for a few moments, smoke hung in the air and the light faded gradually as the day ended. They talked about New Zealand and staying in touch. There was a note of sadness in their conversation. Neil finished the filing job although it was difficult to tell if Amanda was happy with it. She was nowhere in sight when he left the room and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. He walked slowly to the corner office, the door was open, he went through. Stella Reynolds smiled at him and said:

    ‘What can I do for you?’

    ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ Neil said.

     

  • This Is The Leg I Use When I’m Thinking

    His blue look was on the ground, as though it held the reason for the last five minutes. She took him all in. The hair was wavy on top and cropped tight at the sides, sprinkled grey. He looked down at her on the step. Are you ok?

    My hero? she ventured.

    From her seat on the steps in the archway, she watched the rain come fast and heavy on the lane.

    He laughed, lowered his head and folded his arms, looked at his shoes then at the rain, searching for the next thing to say.

    We should bring you to the hospital.

    No, she said. No hospital.

    The steps led up to what looked like two apartments with dark, imperious doors. Across the lane, the open back door of a commercial kitchen, wheezing steam, chattering work and a churning smell of Italian food mingled with the food bins parked by the door. The rain was the type that felt like God tipped over the sky and the blue was washing away. She loved it. She wanted to ride down a newborn river crashing through the buildings, forests, mountains, meat till she reached the ocean and swallowed it. But she had just been hit by a car so instead, she wanted her seat.

    Do you live near here? he said, biting his lip.

    He sure wore that black suit.

    Sorry I slapped you, she said.

    Ah, he waved his hand. You were in shock.

    Ask me the next thing.

    Are you drunk? he said, smirking.

    No. I just want to go home.

    It’s just I saw you in the restaurant –

    I want to go home.

    I’ll take you.

    No, she said, trying to rise.

    She stopped because she lacked the strength, so she concealed it by instead shifting to fish out her purse from underneath her.

    Were you drinking? he pursued, worrying his lip again.

    Ignoring him, she lit a cigarette, and blew a drag at him, careless, spent. With something like tiredness, her long lashes closed slow and long on him. She felt languorous, suspended for an unknown interval, free and anonymous on a step behind the rain. Her head rested on the wall.

    A pack of girls in hotpants skittered trilling and swearing through the alley like a fuckle of turkeys, their jackets held high over their heads as umbrellas. Celine could taste blood on her tongue.

    Gimme one a’those, will ya? he said, dabbing his face dry with the cuff of his jacket.

    His finger grazed hers when he took the packet – a shock of intimacy worse than his manhandling when he cowboyed her clear of the road, away from the traffic and chaotic onlookers. Snatching her lighter from the air between them where she threw it, he moved closer. Her palm massaged the hip that caught the bumper. The car that hit her threw bawls of abuse out the window, taking her for drunk as well. It struck her how much taller than her her rescuer was when he was close, the way trees get taller when you walk toward them.

    So what are you fallin’ all over the place for? he said, squinting down at her.

    Fuck off, she said, quietly.

    He laughed. Is it your birthday or something?

    She looked at him.

    Well, you’re all decked out in leopard print and silk and eating alone in a restaurant. And falling all over the place drunk.

    I’m not drunk, she said, emphatically flat.

    Really? he smirked.

    And I’m not engaging your asshole-ishness either because if I do collapse and start spitting up blood you’ll know I’m not drunk and that yes, you tool, I have a condition. Tachycardia.

    I don’t care.

    Jesus.

    Because you’re just so fucking beautiful I can’t think of anything else.

    She laughed, a great blart of a belly laugh.

    Fuh – I haven’t laughed like that in a while, she said.

    Well at last, he beamed, A fuckin’ smile outta ya.

    You think this is funny?

    I do, a bit, yeah.

    She spiked him an awful look.

    He retreated and exhaled, letting the air flupper his lips like a horse.

    The rain was thunderous on the cobblestones and rooftops.

    And I’m not a l-lady, she stammered, I’m a strong woman. I’ll take it from here.

    I’m Bob by the way.

    Ya. Call me a taxi, will ya?

    I can drive you.

    No.

     

    Bob followed Celine’s taxi in his car without her knowledge. It brought her through Shantalla and dropped her at the University Hospital. The night was dirty green and umber with trees and street light. He parked outside Mr. Waffle and watched her in the mirror walking away from him toward the building where she was born.

    He shadowed her to the ICU. In an open plan of a dozen beds, she rounded a corner and was gone. Staying hidden, he spied out from the corner and saw her. Four beds down, stopped at the one near the window. The bed contained a small figure, a child.

    As she faced the bed with slumped shoulders, Celine’s expression was sombre. Her heart separated through water. She stood still at the foot of the bed and raised a hand to her mouth.

    You won’t let me leave, wee one, she whispered to her fingers.

    The child’s small, closed eyes, with the tubes up her nose and down her mouth. Her daughter hooked up to the Matrix, and not the Ribbon, where it was easier to spend time with her. Celine softly traced a curl on the sleeping forehead. With soundless poise, she placed herself on the plastic grey seat next to the head of the bed, and lightly rested her hand on the bedspread. The night drank the place down. Beyond the window, it painted with hate.

    You can’t out-G me, she said to it. I’ll hate you dead.

    She wished she knew what she thought. In that moment she was blessed with the truth that it was not possible to know anything, not even that you didn’t know, because you often did and had no excuse. And what did knowing and not knowing at the same time do to each other? Give birth to something, anything you wanted. She wanted freedom. In that moment, she had it. But the guilt of having it swept in to rob her of it. Nothing after nothing, and she was herself again, for the first time that day, without self, nobody, happily, with all the answers and no way or wish to convey them. She was without her body, left with a voice that would not speak, wiser than her and uncontrollable until the time called for it, and it just came to cut through the ugly and vulgar. She almost worshipped it. She hesitated to call it truth, in case it taught her a lesson in manners about labelling and chose never to speak to her again.

    Christ, anything but that, she prayed.

    No, it wasn’t gone. It would hold its peace. It would hold all the pieces.

    Maybe it will be today, she thought. On your birthday, Polly, pet. I’ll be there to welcome you. Here or there, in the next place. Don’t be scared. Ever. When it comes time to go.

    Polly hadn’t moved. Not a twitch or a sniff, in her deep sleep. Did she sense her mother? Celine did not aspire to that level of vanity. She loved her daughter, she wasn’t in love with her, and didn’t expect the same in return, she didn’t expect any love.

    It will cleanse you, she said silently, covering her mouth with her fingertips again, afraid that the world might see the words.

    Your death, love.

    Something selfish made her acknowledge death; where it was in the room, where it came near and pulled up a chair. It carried the details, and the world’s ‘reality’: the floating world, a weaponised litany of details masquerading as facts, aiming her memory at her with diagnoses, prognoses, projections, reflections, incompetence, fallacies, failure, contingencies, hope for the best, prepare for the worst, deny God, deny faith, accept death, a reality that did not accept the agency of free will, but stole it and sold it back in the form of vanity branded as truth. Untraceably, one’s own truth. Good or bad.

    Details. She didn’t want charts, names of medicines, names of doctors, nurses. Let death slobber over those. But she had them. Like a disease, she couldn’t get rid of. If she had them, Polly didn’t have to have them and if Celine tossed them, they’d be far from Polly. Either way, Polly was free. Either way. She would be free.

    And with that endorsement, Death reached a hand out toward her child. Celine caught the wrist. It was like catching solid air. It struggled. She put its fingers in her mouth, and bit down. They slithered down her throat and fizzed in her oesophagus. Peristalsis saw them to her stomach where they were corralled in a dance of digestion. She swallowed all the death in the room. And felt better.

    The pain of envy struck Celine’s breast. Polly was closer to birth, and therefore death, and was the only guide Celine had to her own point of origin, the point in space and time where she was born. Yes, Celine was caught in vain self-preservation and all its grey shades. With a shock, she realised that it had been here in this very building, thirty years ago in two days time. Celine was born into this on September 17th 1988, perhaps on this very spot. It was violent genius, divine.

    Polly or Celine. One or the other would go. The old way. Barter. No. Not that way. It was what Celine would mean it to be. For one to live, the other did not have to die. No deal of Celine for Polly. Or the threat of what no intervention would bring – Polly for Celine – with nature favouring the robust. She appealed neither to the god of nature or the one who was supposed to control it. She blessed herself and thanked whatever was the most honourable aspect of God, the one who protected the meek, for her life and for Polly’s. She had always accepted Polly’s immortality. For the first time she was able to accept her mortality, two years into her small but powerful life. If Polly lived, her mother would live. If Polly died, her mother would die, she promised God. But she swore neither of them would die and she put her foot down.

    If she dies, she said to God, I’m coming for you.

    Bob, watching her from the corner, saw a small curly brown head on the pillow above a face of rosebud features. A potted plant sat on the bed stand. He was struck by its dark green leaves and bright red flowers, a liminal vigil above its small human ward. What he saw – mother and daughter – he couldn’t process at that moment, and slipstreamed into an oblique thought.

    Bob considered the watering of a potted plant, why it could never be a good thing to pour water from a jug down on top of the soil. It would only wash the nutrients away after the manner of a flood. For another thing, if plants were sentient, and he had some doubt as to whether they were not, it would become distressed, and he couldn’t abide the thought of that. For the overall health of the thing, at least, it was better to be gentle with watering, like rain, as gentle as nature is when it waters. Even heavy rain distributes water evenly, hitting the ground lighter than a jug’s spout aimed at a stem.

    The roots took in water from below, he acknowledged, watching Celine’s face. The leaves took in light from above.

    Be water, said the martial artist once.

    And the meek inherit the earth.

    Feature Image: Kaique Rocha

  • Parallel Weekend

    I hadn’t heard from you since Wednesday, the morning before you flew to Copenhagen. You’d messaged me while I was at work “Are you free at all, can I give you a quick ring?” I was the only one in the office and Jen, my manager was in a meeting. “Yeah, go ahead.” You proceeded to tell me your fears about whether you would make your connecting flight from Stansted to Bordeaux. “I’ve left it very fine and I’ll be checking in a bag.” I’d talked it through with you and reasoned that since your flight from Denmark was so early in the morning it was unlikely to be delayed, plus you had four hours to play with in Stansted. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. It’ll be fine.” You’d started to list some of the things you still needed to do before heading off, and ended the call.

    Afterwards you sent me a photo of yourself in your suit with the new shirt you’d bought, a white floral number. “What d’ya think?” In the fitted suit you looked like someone else- older, more serious. The long, toned body, normally swaddled in a woolly jumper and loose jeans, was picked out. “You look UNREAL.” The last thing you’d said was, “Thanks”.

    Now I was walking into town on Friday night, for pints in Neary’s, then techno in Tengu. Neary’s was a pub off Grafton Street I’d never been in until a week before, but was now promoting as a summer meeting spot, mainly down to the fact it had a few tables outside that got sun until late. It was still warm, a gorgeous evening coming to its end, and as I walked down Fenian Street I could see the sun, fat and orange, half hidden by the dental hospital, the sky around it stained hot pink. My outfit was a bit of a departure.

    Instead of a soft, flowing shirt tucked into jeans, I had on a tight, short skirt and boots, plus a shiny black top I’d bought that day. I’d gotten my hair cut earlier in the week and I had mascara on. I looked hot and I felt excited to be heading towards town, my friends and dancing. It’s partly to pass some of the ten minutes I had left before I reached Neary’s that I started recording you a voice note. But I also wanted to share my jubilant mood with you.

    I told you about the sunset, the warmth, though not my outfit or the details of where I was going, and said that I hoped you were having an amazing time with your friends and that you were going to totally nail playing fiddle at the wedding.

    Two drinks in at Neary’s, sitting outside with Conor, Rachel and Nessa, I took out my phone to take a photo of a snail we had collectively noticed climbing up the side of a plant on the windowsill. It moved with impressive speed. You had texted me back “Thanks! I having a great time! I love Copenhagen”. There was no need to reply, the “I having” told me you were already fairly on it, so I put my phone away.

    A few hours and several dabs from a bag later, I went upstairs to the bathroom in Tengu. It was hot in the crowd of bodies and I felt sticky but good. We’d been dancing and chatting shite to strangers since midnight. Now, checking my phone while I peed, I saw it was 2.37 and it seemed time to update you.  As fun as the downstairs antics were, I wished you were there. To get to know my friends better and to see me around them, in my element. We mostly spent time with your group where I was an outsider trying to establish myself. “Sounds class, in Tengu. It’s turned into a very gurny evening.”.

    I came out of the bathroom, and as I passed him a guy standing near the top of the stairs called to me, “You look like Amelie Lens”. I stopped beside him. He was cute; tanned with dark hair that fell into his brown eyes. “I don’t know who that is.”

    “She’s a DJ. Look.” He took out his phone and googled her, then held the screen towards me so I could see the photos coming up on screen. A very thin woman, with dark hair and eyes and sharp cheekbones. “Oh, I don’t look like her. I mean she’s very pretty, but I’m nothing like her.”

    “You are,” he said, meeting my blue eyes. “You’re very pretty”.

    “Thanks”, I said stepping back from him. As I did, he said, “My friends and I are going to an after party near Stephen’s Green now, do you want to come?” I stopped again. I hadn’t planned on a big night. I’d been half thinking of catching a train home to see my parents the following day. I hadn’t been near them since the last bank holiday. My friends didn’t know the offer had been made, and I could have just walked away. Of the four of us, I was probably the least likely to take it up. But a voice in my head said, “Go! You’re always letting what you have to do tomorrow decide what you do right now.”

    While I considered the idea, he showed me his phone again, a video on screen this time, panning across a crowd full of people dancing in a dim room, coloured lights falling across them to the rhythm of the techno track I could just about hear, up to a DJ booth I couldn’t see anyone behind. “Looks cool. I’m out with friends, can they come?”

    “Sure.”

    “OK, I’ll go and see if they’re up for it”.

    He took my number, only then did we exchange names, his was Al. “I’ll text you when we’re leaving.” Seconds later I got a message, “Hi Amelie 😊”. I went back downstairs and found the others outside in the smoking area, pupils huge. “I just met this lad outside the toilets who knows about an after session. Would you guys be up for going?”

    A few minutes later we were outside, introducing ourselves to Al and his friends. They were a mix of ages, mostly younger than us, and from abroad, Turkey, South Africa, Spain. After weighing up whether to hail taxis, we started to walk. On the way, we called into the 24-hour Centra on Dame Street to get cash for the door and whatever we wanted to buy inside.

    I fell into step beside Jorge, from Alicante, got talking to him and as we made our way up George’s Street, a couple of younger guys, sensing we were going somewhere besides home as the closing bars around us emptied their contents onto the streets, asked us where we were headed and if we knew of anything open. “Ah come with us,” Rachel said without hesitation.

    We picked up a couple more people this way as we passed the junction with Kevin Street. It felt nice, a troupe of pied pipers drawing in strays just by walking a little faster than those around us. Eventually Jorge noticed we’d lost Al, the only one who knew where we were going and stopped to call him.

    He’d gone ahead to talk to the guy he knew on the door and sent Jorge directions that brought us down a side street to a row of Georgian houses. Al was waiting on the curb and pointed to a house a few doors down. On the bouncer’s orders, only two or three of us could go in at a time. Conor and I went first. I paid his entry as he’d been handing me drugs all evening. The man in a red woolly jumper who took our cash pointed us towards a staircase and once Rachel and Nessa had paid in, we went down to the basement.

    The floor was covered in grime but I didn’t realise until I was taking my boots off several hours later. Downstairs was busy, the scene similar to the video Al had shown me. There was a five deep queue at the bar, which was at the far side of the room, past a crowd dancing in looped movements to the pulsing tune. Rachel and I left Conor and Nessa to queue for drinks, not before we each took another dab from Conor’s bag, and nudged our way into the crowd. We found Al and some of his friends who had come in after us, and he made his way around the circle to me. Leaning in, he asked, “Do you want some coke?”.

    “I’m ok,” I said. I didn’t want the shrillness of coke confusing the soft high I was getting from the MDMA. I also didn’t want to take anything from him while he was still under the impression that I was single.

    “Ok. Well do you want to come upstairs with me for a cigarette?”

    “No thanks.” He cocked his head, frowning and I looked into his eyes. “I should be clear. I have a boyfriend”.

    “Ahhhh”, he shook his head then but smiled. Like for a moment me rejecting him couldn’t have made sense but now there was a reason he could metabolise. “Ah, ok. I understand. “He left then, for a bump or a smoke or both and the rest of us kept dancing. There was a tall guy, dancing near us, pretty out of it but doing nobody any harm. He leaned in towards Rachel and I. “Is this not class?”

    “Yeah, it’s pretty good”, we returned. Kept dancing. A few minutes passed and I felt someone very close behind me, then hands placed on my shoulders. I shifted forward. Again, this time hands around my waist. I reminded myself how high he was and turned my head to him as I stepped forward, “Could you please not do that?” But Jorge and the others had already seen. The group had shifted away from the guy while Jorge came and planted himself between us, so I could move in the same direction, into the middle of the circle.

    He turned to me. “Are you ok?”

    “Yeah, no worries, thanks.”

    We got back to dancing and after a while Jorge said in my ear, “You’re a good dancer, I’ll give you that.”

    I smiled. “Thanks. The trick is to not think about it or give a fuck.”

    “Ah so you just dance like no-one is watching?” I laughed at that.

    “Can I kiss you?” he asked.

    So, he hadn’t heard me tell Al. “I have a boyfriend”.

    “Oh, are we doing that?”

    He thought it was a line. I didn’t mind you not being there anymore. I shouldn’t have to prove your existence to this guy. I looked around, Rachel wasn’t on the dancefloor and suddenly I felt like getting off too.

    I went in search of her and Nessa. I found them in the toilet, which was visible from the corridor as there was a massive hole in the door where there should have been a pane of glass. Nessa and Rachel were blocking the space so a woman with long wavy hair could pee in privacy. When I came in, they did the same for me and from outside, two more women asked if they could come in. While they took turns peeing and Nessa and I once again covered the open space in the door, we got chatting.

    Everyone was gurning a little and we were all extra interested in one another.  The smaller of the two girls, Charlie, said she felt a good energy in here and asked us our star signs. When we told her: Cancer, Pisces and Sagittarius, she started to nod. “Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.”

    “I’m a Taurus rising”, I added. Not knowing what that meant really, but thinking it might be relevant. The four of us moved into the hallway. We stayed there, for what felt like hours, talking about how we’d ended up at the rave, our jobs, what Dublin used to be like and what was going to happen if rents didn’t somehow magically drop.

    “Are ye single girls?” Charlie asked. “I’m not”, I said.

    “Oh”, Charlie turned towards me, “What’s their star sign?”.

    “Scorpio.”

    You’d told me that on our first date, and when I asked you what Scorpios’ deal was, you said, “Well, raw sexual power”. That was a bold move. I don’t remember anything else you told me about Scorpios after that. But it made me curious, so I’d read up on our compatibility.

    Apparently, Scorpio and Cancer make a seriously good sexual pairing. And that’s what I had found so far. A year in, and I was still just as impatient to be naked with you whenever we met up, as I had been that first night. “Oh, a Scorpio? Really?”.

    “Yeah. He’s a Scorpio. He’s great”.

    “I don’t know,” she said, “I just find Scorpios can be really temperamental, you know? Plus, Scorpios, when they turn on you, It’s brutal.”

    I felt like I had read this exact description of Scorpios in Allure, or some other online magazine, whenever I was scrolling to see if you and I were a good match after that first meet up and decided she was repeating from the same article, rather than speaking from experience.

    “Aw I don’t know; I have two Scorpios in my life and they’re both really sensitive and kind and creative”.

    “That’s fair enough,” she said. “They can be.”

    At that moment she caught sight of a guy with a beard who seemed to have been looking for her. “Sorry Matt, I got talking to these girls in the bathroom.” She introduced us, and I suddenly felt like this was the time to go dancing again, so I caught Nessa’s eye and tilted my head towards the main room.

    “Will we get back in amongst it?”

    Inside we found Conor and Rachel dancing with some of our strays from earlier, the cute young Australians who’d first approached us.

    “Do you want half a yoke?” Conor asked me. I thought for a second. I hadn’t taken a pill in a while…but it was hard to pass up the chance. He’d already bitten into it and was holding the remainder, pink and tiny, towards me. It’s only half. I thought. It mightn’t even do anything after everything else.

    I took it and swallowed and he passed me his drink to wash it down. About ten minutes afterwards, I took my phone out and seeing the time, 6:38, I suddenly just wanted to be home. Looking around the room I felt like all the good juice had been squeezed from the night already. Nothing new was about to happen. I ordered a taxi and told the others I was heading on.

    Getting out of the taxi, I realised I was only coming up from the little bit of yoke. I’d already been acting strange in the car, rubbing my hands up and down my tights, looking out the window as if I’d never seen any of the streets we went down before. I’d caught the taxi driver’s eyes in the mirror and he didn’t look too delighted to have this space cadet as a passenger.

    The rational part of my brain panicked. Why had I left the others? I was just alone and high now. But that concern couldn’t override the feeling of my chest floating upwards and the desire to spread my hands out and touch things with my fingertips. I half ran, half skipped to the door of our building and up the stairs to the flat. It was empty.

    Francesca and Darragh were spending the weekend with Darragh’s parents in Galway. My bedroom door was open, and sunlight was pouring in onto my bed. I walked past to the living room and sat on the couch. I could feel my mouth contorting and twitching, it had been a long time since I’d taken anything that made me gurn that much.

    I took out my phone and laughed at my face in the camera. I took five or six pictures as my lips and cheeks moved involuntarily and the photos made me laugh even more. I was having a good time. I hooked my phone up to the speaker in the living room and put on a playlist I made in January when you were being kind of a dick.

    “Fucking catch”, It’s called. I took my boots off and started to dance, sliding around in my tights on the wooden floor, the curtains open. I thought about the start of the night, walking into town in the still warm summer sun and the turns it had taken since.

    A while later, I’m not sure how long, I got into bed and tried to sleep. Flat on my back, on my side. Duvet on and then kicked off. It wasn’t coming. Even with the curtains shut it was bright enough to read in my room. Around 8.30, I started to feel low. I wished you were there again. This is exactly the kind of moment when I’d been single and regularly recovering from raves that I had wished to be in a couple. Now I was, and you weren’t even there.

    “What is the actual point?” I asked myself. “No, you’re being unfair, It’s not his fault he happens to be away this morning”. I knew it would be hours before I could hang out with anyone and being by myself was making it impossible to ignore how slowly time was moving. I text you “Hey. Feeling a bit ropey, could you give me a call if you’re free”.

    You wrote back, “We’re all busy here. Rushing to get suited and booted and head out for the wedding”.

    “Yeah, I figured it might not be a good time. Have fun. Just feeling a bit edgy/shook here cos I haven’t slept.”

    I texted a few people to see were they about today. The problem with deciding not to go and see my parents was that now I had an empty weekend ahead. Mark had a friend visiting, and he had asked me to go out to Howth to walk the cliff path with them, but I wasn’t feeling up for that. Though maybe in a while I’d change my mind.

    Since the sleep ship had clearly sailed, I decided to get up and shower. It was hot in the room, even with the curtains closed, and I felt like some direct sunlight might do something for my serotonin. The normal joy of morning, waking up hungry and pottering around making breakfast, was absent along with my appetite. I did force down some heavily buttered toast so I could take a couple of Ibuprofen. Again, as you know, on an ordinary day I’d be stopping mid-bite to exclaim how great toast is, but this was purely functional eating.

    “Even food don’t taste that good,” I sang to myself, smiling in spite of the dread. When I’d cleared the dishes away, I got into the shower and let the water run down my head. I’d only washed my hair the day before, but I felt like it was holding onto all of the sweat from the past twelve hours.

    When I was dressed, I put my wallet and a bottle of factor 30 in my little backpack, and headed outside. I didn’t know where I was going to end up, but headphones on, I played the John Prine song you’d shared with me a few weeks before, “That’s the Way That the World Goes Round” and turned on the song radio feature so that Spotify would follow it up with music of a similar mood. Upbeat acceptance of life’s lows as well as highs was what I needed to hear.

    It was still only coming up to 11am, and nothing was giving me joy. It was going to be hard to pass this day. By the time the next track on the list had started to play, I was turning onto that little path by the Dodder near Lansdowne Road. I didn’t know it, but I recognised the voices, and then heard the chorus “How lucky can one man get”, followed by this gorgeous instrumental. And somehow, I remembered that I am lucky. I wasn’t alone. Ok, so nobody was free to immediately come and hang out with me early on a Saturday morning. But I had so many friends I was able to ask. I had someone I loved.

    I was alone now, but that only felt terrifying because I’d had too much fun the night before, and I would feel like myself again soon. Then another song I’d never heard before, The Swimming Song by Loudon Wainwright came on, and the opening bars were just so buoyant and beautiful I forgot I was in a chemical hoop for a couple of minutes. I wished the other people strolling along the boardwalk could hear it.

    At this point, I hooked around to the left and took Newbridge Avenue to head toward Sandymount, thinking I’d walk out to the coast, but then I got a message from Nessa. “Are you awake? I’m in bits. Rachel’s asleep on the couch. Don’t be on your own. Come over.” I was saved.

    I walked back to mine to grab my bike, and listened to the Swimming Song on repeat all the way to Nessa’s flat in Terenure, bouncing out of the saddle to every loud strum of the banjo. People in the horrors should be prescribed Loudon Wainwright and John Prine I thought.

    I got to the estate where Nessa lives with Helen. You’ve never been there but their place is great. It’s a duplex flat and they have a little yard outside that they’ve put a fire pit in, which was great last summer when we were all supposed to be meeting up outside. I went to a lot of parties in that garden while you were away.

    As soon as I saw Nessa, (and Rachel, who was now awake and sitting up on the couch telling us about some guy she’d managed to shift, changed her mind about and escaped without any of us even noticing the night before,) I started to feel better. Appetites now returning, we walked to the deli up the road to get rolls, and then got straight back into the soothing dim of Nessa’s living room where we watched an episode of Peep Show, before deciding it was actually too bleak for our fragile mental state and switching to the American Office.

    Hours later, while we sat in comfortable silence eating takeaway, I said to Nessa “You know, if you’re with someone and you love them, but you don’t think It’s something that can last… Like maybe it’s something that has two or three years in it, but you just don’t think it can go the distance. Is it ok to stay in it and see it out to its natural end? Or is that stupid, like should you cut your losses and finish it?”

    Nessa considered this, probably wondering where this slightly pleading question had come from. “There’s just no way of knowing”, she said.

    I cycled back from Nessa’s, listening to the Swimming Song again. During the day, Aoife had written back to one of those desperate texts for company I’d sent out, to say she wasn’t about today but that she’d love to go for a swim tomorrow. I met her early the next day and we spent the morning chatting. First in the water, after jumping in at the Forty Foot. Then over coffee in Sandycove.

    On the way home, I bought groceries. Back at the flat, I cleaned the bathroom and started on a pie for dinner. Felt better, but still uneasy that I hadn’t heard from you. I’d told Nessa the night before, I didn’t expect to until Monday, when you’d be traveling all day and have some free time. I knew you were with all your friends and wouldn’t be focused on your phone. You aren’t someone who has it out to take pictures. All your friends were there. Besides me, who would you be texting? But you did have me to text. And I’d told you I wasn’t feeling great.

    I woke up on Monday to a message from you. Sent at 6:40. “Just about to head to the airport. Phone is gonna die soon. Hope you’ve had a good weekend. I’d love to talk to ya soon.”

    Great, that was all I needed to know. We would talk soon. Maybe once you were through security and could charge your phone. Or when you landed in London. I texted back that I was heading into work, but that things were quiet. So, you could give me a shout when you had battery.

    I got to the office before 8am and while my laptop was loading, I went out to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Sometimes I wait to do that at work if I need to get out of the house quickly. Today had been like that. I’d been rushing to make it in early, so that I could leave on time for a gym class.

    At the sink, as I gently scrubbed my molars, my gaze unfocused, I had this sudden fear there was something wrong in your message. Why did you want to talk to me? Had something happened at the wedding? I imagined you running into someone there, a person you hadn’t seen in years. An old friend, someone’s sister, or even someone you had hooked up with before we got together and something happening. You were calling to tell me that you’d realised you wanted to be with them, whoever they were, because they were already part of your group of friends and it made more sense. I wouldn’t be able to convince you otherwise.

    I shut my eyes and shook my head. You are being ridiculous. He said he’d love to talk to you. That isn’t exactly suggesting a heavy chat.

    Around quarter to ten, you called. You asked me how my weekend was and I chattered happily about Friday night, the come down, being rescued by Nessa and Rachel. I told you about the Swimming Song. How it had saved me while I walked along the Dodder and helped me enjoy the sun and know I was going to be ok. “I think It’s now my favourite song.”

    “Oh, send it to me,” you said, “I need something like that to cheer me up right now. Feeling very shook.”

    “Ah, ok. How was the wedding?”

    “The wedding was good, yeah. Very Danish. Irish people losing the run of themselves.” Then a pause. “Alice…This is really hard to say.”

    I knew then. You weren’t going to break up with me from departures in Stansted, so it had to be. “What is it?… What happened?” Silence. “Just tell me.”, I said, my voice hard.

    “I kissed someone else at the wedding. An old friend.”

    Staring at the wall opposite the windowsill, I felt like I should react in some way. Cry. But I didn’t feel sad or even angry then. Rather, it was like I’d gone through a door that had disappeared behind me, and now I was stuck in this horrible place I didn’t want to be in. Still on the phone to you.

    “How could you do that to me?” I asked but didn’t actually want to know. There was no answer you could have that would give me any way back to where I’d been before. “I don’t know, Alice I’m sorry I was so drunk, I…”

    “Like, at the wedding? In front of people? In front of your friends?” For some reason, that aspect was the part to bother me. I wasn’t thinking about you flirting with someone else or leaning in towards them. Yet. You had humiliated me in front of those people I’d spent months making an effort with, getting to know. “Yeah. Well yeah, they saw us kiss. It was…”

    “Wait. They saw you kiss? What else happened? Did you sleep with her?”

    Another few seconds where you said nothing and then. “Yes. Alice, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe…”

    I hung up. Sank down until I was sitting on the carpeted floor of the office and stared forward. In my hand, my phone started to buzz again, your name lighting up on the screen. I ignored it and went to Spotify. Put on the Swimming Song. And for some reason what I was thinking as it started to play, is that I am someone who tells people my story too easily. I’ll confide in almost anyone if they want to know. But you used to call me mysterious. There are so many things about me you don’t know. That I never told you. Because you never asked.

  • Getting Away

    Margaret didn’t like Walls, so why had she agreed to go walking with him in the mountains, and afterwards for a drink in a remote hotel bar? She had no self-control, she broke all her promises, she was weak and gormless. Flaws she contemplated, unlacing her boots at the fireplace.

    “You should take off your socks too,” said Walls. “So that your feet dry off properly. Hang them off the mantlepiece, here.”

    “Can we just do that?”

    “Do you think we have to behave ourselves in this dump?”

    Margaret smiled with warm disapproval. It wasn’t a dump, but she liked that he wanted better for her. She felt nice; she felt a sense of belonging. It was the end of December and it was a strange, antique hotel – empty, save for some old people at the collapsing little bar. The chairs shook. The evergreen strung along the mantlepiece looked feeble, picked clean by time, and even the fish in the boxes on the walls were dead.

    “Evening.” A narrow-faced unsmiling man lowered a tray of hot ports to their table.

    “Thank you, Sir,” said Walls. “Hits the spot – we feel we deserve it, too. We were out at Glendalough today, hillwalking with the best of them. Busy, here, this time of year?”

    As the men found things to say Margaret cupped the port in her hands and dipped her nose to the bitter scent of liquor, lemon and cloves. She took a long drink, gazing affectionately around. The empty floral armchairs sat facing each other, backs reclining, arms outstretched as if caught in a ghostly confab. A grandfather clock sounded. The clock was strict, censorious, like a clacking tongue.

    “It’s just so pleasant here.”

    “It’s a nice place to come and disgrace yourself anyway.” Walls picked up The Shooting Gazette and read from a story about gundogs and winter grouse, making Margaret laugh. He propped the ankle of his desert boot up on his bulky knee and leaned back, testing all the strength of his chair. His legs were long and sturdy. How much were the rooms here anyway? She didn’t have to decide on anything yet. Margaret gulped her port, sinking back, sinking further inside an evening she’d never imagined she’d agree to.

    On Christmas Eve she’d sat on a kerb on Dawson Street with her bags of shopping spread around her and into her phone typed: “Not only do I not love you, I don’t even like you, now get away from me.” She sat in the sleety cold, reading back through all their texts: the block paragraphs of his voluble accusations alternating with her neatly edited retorts. She did not feel safe. The shadows of ruthless passers-by bore over her, feet thumped, her ass froze on the cold stone.

    Margaret pressed send, then put up her furry hood and fled the streets. Their love was over, and it hadn’t even been. On Christmas day, she kept her phone switched off for discipline with the benefit of also torturing him. On Boxing Day, she turned back on her phone to face three new emails from him. One sad belated Groupon offer for ice-skating – even the offer had expired. A press release for a pantomime, subject headed ‘Matinée with me?’ Then a sonnet, typed into the body of his email and evidently authored by him too in some dismal late-night rage: the couplet ended with the words ‘dishonour!’ and ‘suicide?’. (His punctuation).

    Then on the 27th of December, she wrote that she hoped he had had a good Christmas. He wrote back that it was awful. ‘Awful’, he wrote. ‘I’m sorry,’ she replied, not knowing what for. On the 28th they chatted all day about themselves. Now we find the former soulmates on the 29th December in a hotel with buffalo horns displayed in the creaking hallway – something about the Boer War, the unsmiling concierge had told Walls – and sullen photographs of aristocrats in sporting gear. Why had she come all this way? Because that morning she’d opened her curtains to a bright winter sky booming down on her. ‘Beautiful day’, she texted, and exactly an hour later she pulled into the traffic island opposite Donnybrook church, grinning and waving at Walls as if he was a friend. He got into the car, bulky and ungainly as the wrong jigsaw piece. He looked so suspect, checking around him – always guilty, stigmatised by some certain yet unclear wrongdoing. She liked the boyish glint, the boyish smile – he was terrible, incorrigible – he was her punished pupil. They got along well. They both liked walking in the mountains, they liked wine, books, planes. He liked politics, man’s worlds. Both liked the idea of causing trouble – of escalating something, shocking other people. He edited a little online magazine in his spare time and she’d been his intern and his girlfriend the past year. His protégée, unpaid apprentice, the weirdo in the corner of his study eying him while he worked, blushing at his glances, her amorous eyes – though never undressing him there and then. Their fantasies remained just that, ethereal, abstract ideas transacting between them, through a fug of newspapers, laptops, coffee cups, vape and sandwich wrappers. All physical sex was had after dark and in the dark. About once a week, or twice a week, one of them would say something pointed and disruptive and they would argue. Arguing would last hours or days. Arguing became yelling, slamming, became toxic waste – life was flammable and unhinged, something she couldn’t control. Once, on holidays abroad, he drove her drunk late and night and told her he had the power to kill the both of them. He speeded up the car and scared the shit out of her. Then he slowed down the car. She never asked him about it afterwards, she told the story only to herself, she reasoned with its oddness; it was all bluster, wind-up. A joke – just a stupid joke.

    At Glendalough, the surrounding hills were plush and velvety with deep colours, and snow lit up the mountain peaks. The cold air blanched her face as the soles of her shoes gripped the railway sleeper tracks along their path. They chatted happily, normally, like decent people, offering nods to ruddy-cheeked women and their dogs. The sky grew dark and the hikers dispersed, leaving them alone in the mountain ranges. She felt shy and elated; she wondered if they would touch. When her ankle turned on a rock along the track, she almost fell, but he grabbed her wrist and held her glove, looking at her with tender fright. After that she let him hold her ungloved hand.

    The man came carrying two more ports, and a Christmas cake, encased in white marzipan, with little mince pies in paper cases laid out on a doily, their pastry tops dusted with icing sugar. Margaret spooned whipped cream all over a mince pie and ate it.

    “I adore whipped cream! I think whipped cream must be my greatest pleasure. If I had cream every night I’d be happy for the rest of my life.” She licked her lips of cream and sugar powder.

    “We could actually eat before we go,” he said.

    “We could. But the ice. Would the ice be dangerous?” She had no interest in the answer to her question, a formality in the resistance she would need to provide. Her limbs felt heavy, her skin baked in the heat of the flames.

    “They have a table, if we want.”

    “Oh, you already asked them?”

    She tilted her head as if she was considering something. “I suppose I am very hungry.”

    The grandfather clock ticked, jaunty, like horses galloping. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-TICK, it went. So percussive, so repetitive it couldn’t possibly signal change, or progress.

    “Leave your boots.”

     

     

    The dining room was a solemn rectangle with every table set and nobody there. Serviettes were ironed into fans, candlesticks loomed unlit. Margaret admired a very big fork, and touched the white table cloth as if it was a sheet of gold. “This is all so nice!” She gave a histrionic shiver and at this cue, Walls took off his suit jacket and tossed it on her shoulder. The jacket buried her in warmth, and as the chill eased from her body a big bottle of red wine came. The bottle did seem bigger, fatter than an average bottle, and she assumed it was expensive. Getting home was going to be impossible, though they both had a history of reckless driving – she was chaos, did not take care with things. Food arrived with the rapid pace of an establishment with very little to do: scrolls of ham with out-of-season melon cut in half moons, thick slabs of game terrine. A blue fish with a crispy eye was placed in front of Walls and for Margaret, a duckling’s breast stewed in dark juices.

    “How are we going to make it back? I’m so tired for driving,” Margaret announced after a time.

    “Look, the rooms are fine, if you want.”

    “You think.” She let her voice trail off – she would not contribute any more to this discussion.

    “Only €75 a head, dinner included,” he said. “And it’s on me.”

    “You don’t have to.”

    “I owe you anyway.”

    “That’s separate.”

    “Sure.”

    He must have been referring to the fee he normally paid for two articles, for which she had invoiced him, and which he still hadn’t paid her for. She sliced a piece of meat in two and ate quickly and unhappily the morsels on her plate. Next week, she’d have to send him the invoice again, for the third time. They sat in silence for too long. Walls sloshed wine into her glass, and she drank as much as she could in a mouthful.

    “Let’s order dessert. Apple and rhubarb pie, sticky toffee pudding, blancmange, or – oh goodie. Baked Alaska. Or did you see the cheese on the trolly earlier? I think I saw cheese.”

    The door brushed over the carpet, and in came the serving lady and behind them, a tall fair-haired couple in handsome coats. Margaret’s head lifted and turned as the man and the woman crossed the room. Her eyes were tugged, locked, as the man pulled off his hat to reveal a face that was as familiar to her as it was intimidating, in its classic lines of beauty and clear, healthy skin. His name was Antonio, and he was the tech millionaire who had taken her to the party where she first met Walls. Millionaire, or billionare. Secret investor – someone of great worth, great wealth. She didn’t care about wealth, but. Antonio, she knew, moved easily in the world, had experiences. He had fulfilled more of his dreams than, for instance, Margaret.

    Walls was saying something.

    “Sorry, what?” she was dazed. “Sorry – It’s – did you see, who just came in?

    Antonio and the woman had seated themselves at the furthest corner, leaving a barricade of empty tables between them and the suddenly inferior, suddenly scruffy Walls and Margaret. Margaret touched her hair, damp and unbrushed, and seized a silver spoon to check her reflection – she had the face of a bumpkin, nose, lips, eyes blown up. She tilted in her chair, trying to catch Antonio’s eye while also paying Walls extra attention.

    “Did you see the dessert menu?”

    “All I saw was you staring at him.”

    As ever, it came in a single rough blow.

    “I wasn’t – ”

    “You were.”

    “But – ”

    “You were staring at him like a little girl in a shop window.” Her cheeks were hot, and her heart beat in a way that hammered, weighted her. Superglued to where they sat, stitched into the furniture, she felt that life would run on, this way, facing Walls, answering to Walls. She looked around her, so as not to have to look at him, and Antonio turned around just in time.

    “Ah!” He said, and stood from his seat.

    Both men faced each other, chests puffed as they shook hands. Antonio kissed Margaret’s cheek, and the other woman and Margaret kissed politely. “Pearl,” she said. “Pearl,” Margaret said, forgetting, for a moment, her own name. Pearl and Margaret talked for a few minutes about their jobs.

    “I’m hoping to specialise in equine law,” Pearl finished.

    Margaret dropped into her chair to see puddings and cheeses all laid out in front of her.

    “This is really great” said Walls. “I’d have to say the food has really been first class, you wouldn’t have thought it.” Hunched forwards, he sawed into his tart. “Taste, here.”

    Margaret recoiled. Like a child she shut her lips to the advance of his laden fork.

    “What? Oh, are you annoyed or something? Because I teased you for looking at Antonio? Come on, weren’t you? Don’t tell me you weren’t staring at him doe-eyed – don’t tell me you’re not mesmerised. I don’t blame you – he’s a handsome guy. You know, who cares. I’m not annoyed with you. Are you? Are you annoyed with me or something?”

    “No.” Margaret smiled politely, and then did something strange. She asked the serving lady for the bill, and she paid it using her credit card. She zipped up her wallet, threw his jacket on his lap.

    “That was very generous,” he said.

    “I’m feeling generous.” An eerie pause. She started to laugh. “Because I’m so happy. Really, you have no idea how happy I am. Because I remembered something, just there. I’ll never, ever have to do this again. I’ll never have to see you again. You have nothing to do with me anymore. You are a hole – you don’t exist. Oh, this is a relief” She tore a handful of grapes off a branch and popped the grapes between her laughing jaws. “And you know maybe I was looking over there. Maybe I wasn’t. I can actually look at people, ha ha, I can look at whoever I want, whenever.”

    Margaret hacked out a wedge of yellow cheese and lined up three crackers. “And you know I will think about all these other people, other men maybe. I might even kiss them too, on the lips.”

    “Yeah!? he goaded.

    “Yeah! I will probably go to bed with them!” Margaret flashed her eyes at her defeated lover. “And then, well, who knows what might happen? Once I’m alone with them.” She leaned over a debris of cheese rinds and blue crumbs and broken biscuits. “I’ll take my clothes off, everything. One by one. Down to my underwear, and then I’ll sit on the bed, with no clothes on, and they will look at me. Oh! I am so young, and you are not. I am so young and free, and you are so irrelevant!”

    Should she go on. Tell him all the things that she could do, with these imaginary men, or just carry on insulting him, get all the bile out on the table. No, someone had to drive them home. Margaret was over the limit. And she knew enough not to eliminate the fear that he could try and kill her, or at the very least, threaten to do so, which is also blood-chilling. She drew in a series of deep, imperious breaths, then picked up the wine bottle and upturned it in her glass. She drank the rest and sat up.

    “I’ve to go.”

    “Go,” he repeated. “Just go, just like that.”

    “Yes, now.”

    “And you probably want to go home without me, do you.”

    “Oh god yes.”

    “I booked a room. But you don’t care.”

    “Nope.”

    “That isn’t very nice – I thought we.”

    “Nope. Cut it out now. I want to go. Now. And you should drive, because I’m too drunk. And I don’t feel like driving.”

    Margaret handed Walls the key to her car, or rather, her mother’s car.

    In the dark of the courtyard, he turned the key. The engine breathed, and omitted a lengthy energetic death rattle, then cut out. He tried again. It cut out again.

    “Look,” he said. “I know you think I was out of order –”

    “Start the car.”

    “I was just going to say.”

    “Start the car.”

    He stamped his foot and the sound of pumped gas wheezed, then thinned into the night air. Tree branches crouched behind them.

     

    Later, under her duvet, fully clothed and shivering with adrenaline, Margaret’s head raced. With outrage, disbelief. Revulsion. She felt excited by the hate in her, enriched with its potency. She was free and alive, shot of him – what had she been thinking; of course, he never would have killed her, not like that.

    New year came, like a homecoming, a beneficent place of safety. And as the years passed, she still triumphed in the afterglow, the feeling of survival. But he came with her, he lived in her. His voice was in her mind, talking and lecturing and murmuring and making her laugh. It was his face that hovered in her dreams, his eyes that spotted her in a crowd, or narrowed on her in quiet moments. ‘Get away from me!’ But he wouldn’t get away. She couldn’t get away. She couldn’t get him out.

  • Homer

    He who fights with monsters should look to it
    that he himself does not become a monster…
    when you look into the abyss the abyss also
    gazes into you.
    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Day 1.

    On the question of the one against the many, as opposed to the many against the one, White was decidedly with the former after having proven, to himself at least, that his poor father was a lost one without any direction having given himself to the latter and now, after spending his life among his own, was fundamentally on his own more than ever, isolated more so than White himself was, for whereas White had taken the conscious decision to oppose the many by choice, thus accepting to lead a life of solitude, whereas his poor father by accepting to choose a life among the many, sharing their so called ‘core values’, White’s father, all his life, would go on and on about shared values; now, at the end of the day, nearing his end, ironically he was perhaps more alone now than he ever was! This was something that White, to a certain degree, could take satisfaction in. The fact that no matter what way you decided to lead your life, in the end, you always ended up on your own. Solitude was, in this sense, always the end result. Of course, this is something that White had always taken into consideration. It is, you could say, the reason why he chose to accept a life of solitude in the first place. If the truth were known, White was always intensely anti-political, which is why he hated groups. He always had. So, the idea of any kind of group consensus was anathema to him. Family being the first! The first group. He had always hated being apart of it, at least since he started to see through it. That is to say when he first started to question it when he was a very young man.

    Even White’s friends, some of whom were considered to be quite wild, were shocked by White’s initial coldness. White would refer to certain animals who would leave the family to fend for themselves. Why did humans insist on remaining in contact with their parents? Out of all the animals on the earth, only humans, as far as he could see, remained in such close proximity to their parents, and at what cost?

    Of course, White’s whole vision of the world had been profoundly altered or shaped by the tragic death of his brother. His brother had committed suicide when White was still a very young man, and this act had such an incredible knock-on effect on everything that White would do. This act had fundamentally altered White. Utterly, you could say. It wasn’t the only act to have had such a powerful effect on him, there was another, but it was the first event rather which was to have such a radical impact on his whole worldview, if one could say that White did have such a thing, a view of the world, as it were. I should probably say what the second event was now after having already alluded to it and in this way setting out the trajectory of the present tale. Building up the horizon, as it were.

    The second great event to influence White, after his brother’s suicide, was when he eventually was to separate from his wife, whom he was to eventually divorce. This was the second great event in his life. The second of the great Ds. So, first Death and secondly Divorce. Life was made up of a series of Ds, White had noticed. The 3 Ds, he called them. White being Irish, alcohol, or Drink, was the 3rd. It was a so- called coping mechanism. The results, of course, were disastrous as a man who has already been struck by two of Life’s greatest events, Death and Divorce, to then resort to Drink to get over them is simply asking for even more trouble, and of course this is what this story is all about. Stories all involve trouble, the interesting ones at least.

    I’d like to get back to White’s father now, after having presented you, the Reader, with an overview of the overall substance of the narrative of the following tale, having thus fulfilled, to a certain degree, the duties of the Author – ha, dead me arse!

    If there was one person in the world who was to have such a singular effect on White, apart from his late brother and former wife that is, it was the old pater familias. God, what an absolute cunt! A curse on his kind, indeed, as that is in fact what he was, White had surmised. The Patriarch! The cunt! The superlative arsehole of the Universe! The sum total of all his woes! As when it came to the Patriarch, the many were truly the One. They all conformed to the same depths of depravity. Hitler being the superlative. You had to nail your colours to the mast.

    Because of the dire nature of White’s relationship with his father, to a large degree White’s relations with men in general were pretty shitty. Indeed, it was rare that he actually liked one. Though not an impossibility too, having said that. He had had great friendships with some men, over the years. But, in general, White was more a Woman’s man than he was a Man’s man and this was primarily to do with the whole very complex relationship that he had had with his parents. White’s poor mother, for example, had been a martyr to all women as she had come from that very particular generation of women in Ireland who simply stood by their men, come hell or any amount of assorted high water! High water indeed, the expression was literally true now, now that they were all expecting a biblical like deluge to submerge them all due to global warming. Patriarchy and Fossil Fuels, now how many academic papers were headed in such a way in Humanity Departments in progressive universities all around the world?

    One could dream of Noah and his drunkenness. White saw again Uccello’s depiction, all cascading in glorious Rouge, or Reds….

    The fact of the matter was, no matter how you wished to look at it the situation was truly awful. The man had been the worst possible fucking cunt of his kind. There were no redeemable qualities, the more he looked the more shit was uncovered. How many could say the same? These shits, shits of their kind, this kind, this kind of shit kind, the shitty fucking shit kind, the kind of shitty fucking shit that you wouldn’t want to shit next to nor sit beside mind, that kind, mind your backside! The fucking shitty shitters and their fucking shitty shitting shits! Those kind of shitty fucking shitters… That Kind!

    End of Day One!

    Day 2

    Now White hadn’t always been an aggressive son of a gun. He had become one. His nature then was historic, you could say. Informed as it had been by the unending deluge of experience that had gone on over his time in the world. Planet Earth. What they had done to it! It was nothing short of disastrous. The so-called strong men. What a bunch of dipshits. Strong men my ass. Show me a man and I’ll show you an ass, that is what White would say. As he had lived with one. Oh yeah, he had survived him too. Mister Universe spinning around in his tight leopard skin briefs. Bikini briefs! God forbid. It was infectious. The briefs that is. “Be brief!” Puts a whole new context on it…

    When he thought about his childhood, which was rare, White remembered particularly the long torturous dinners which went on in the depths of winter. The family, all six of them, surrounded the table upon which the food had been placed. Every Patriarch worthy of the name has his place at the table and mealtimes are a particular pleasure for control freaks of this nature as these events allow for a certain element of theatricality and ceremony. Placing people at the table involves a whole network of categorisation. Hierarchy within families, for example. Directors on Boards. They all involve systems of power, and so invoke a little ceremony.

    White, for example, used to sit at the head of the table directly opposite his older brother who eventually committed suicide. White was the second in command, following the patriarchal hierarchy. His sister sat beside his mother on the left side, important detail, as you came in the door and then on the right- hand side sat the Father and on his right side his youngest son whom neither White’s older brother nor sister could stand. He was the porte parole while the eldest brother was the weakest link. White could see it all, how he had been set up to fail. As he was not a natural leader, White’s eldest brother. This had been his great tragedy and which was to kill him, literally, in the end. It would have been better, in many respects, if White had been the eldest as he had leadership qualities but then they had been acquired by White from a sustained practice of observation. This is how White seemed to have learned everything, from the point of observation. Seeing how Not to do something, typically then in everything in later life also the very point of departure.

    White could remember the hours spent at the kitchen table listening to the voice of God drone on endlessly about some subject matter. Omnipotence. This was a key idea in the pater familias. The all seeing all knowing One, like the Sun. The King without a throne. The King looking down at his subjects, all knowing, all condescending! And oh God how he would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on…in a monotone.

    Of course, the atmosphere around the table would be unbearable. I have read accounts of Hitler at the dinner table, apparently he gave these endless monologues talking for hours and hours and hours and hours. Omnipotent. All knowing, addressing all kinds of subjects. Not really knowing all of the subjects at all, and so talking absolute horse shite half of the time. Can you imagine it? One of the World’s Most Important Figures Talking Absolute Horse Shit. And for hours!

    Yes. In retrospect, White had been well prepared. All his life. For his Life. LIFE. In screaming capitals. He could take great pleasure in that fact. That it had all, all the horror, all the boredom, all the manic pain and apparently pointless suffering. It all had some kind of purpose, in the end! It was preposterous, really. And for what? By what grand design had it all been arranged for?

    Were there reasons for it all, after all? Some universal truth? There in the great black firmament, shot through with countless stars for millennia, in the great abstraction of the night of the cosmos was there, after all, some kind cosmic arrangement where the infinitely, infinitely small and inconsequential, most insignificant of beings finds a place after all in the great scheme of things?…

    No answer. Silence. The kind of silence that could sink whole nations. A Black Hole. You are on the event horizon. Don’t fall in. Or perhaps we are already in and have come out the wrong end? That would make sense.

    Platitudes

    The people who live here will never get bored with the beautiful views…
    The truth is they do, and this kind of explains the whole god-awful mess.
    Whether it is the young man who, having finally won over his ‘beautiful
    Princess’, starts focusing now on her bad breath and tiresome habit of
    Complaining already after only two years in and who will,
    After breaking up with her one year later, dreams only about bottling that
    Same horrendous breath and keeping it as a heady perfume
    To remind him of his most cherished memories.

    Loss, that great Optician, Loss, and absence its partner,
    Are the great rose-coloured lenses that truly help us to SEE
    The many-splendored colours of the world.
    Seeing through the cracked lens offers alone true vision.

    (There’s one  for SpecSavers!)

    Day 3.

    White never actually liked his parents, if the truth were known. How could he? His mother, after all, was not very intelligent. She was smart, and quite pretty. Actually, very beautiful when she was young, but she was also extremely subservient, not very curious, she could be a real bitch and was not at all tactile, so not prone to showing any kind of affection to White nor his siblings. This was hardly surprising considering the fact that her mother before her was a horrible woman who was hysterical, fanatically religious, cunning, cruel, malicious and spiteful. In fact, whenever White did think about her, which was rare, ugly was the word he would use to describe her. Such were his memories.

    As for his father… It was even less pretty, the picture. He was a profoundly vain and ignorant man and it was this twin display of vanity and ignorance that were particularly horrendous to behold; the latter of course cancelling any reason for the former to exist, you would think! But no, the ignorance was such that it apparently clouded all judgement in the so-called thinking subject, as it had no awareness of its own faults, and what was even worse, if it did, and sometimes it seemed to show some inkling of awareness (For example, when it was eating at the dinner table, it had the habit of chewing its food with its mouth open, a truly odious habit, and then, seeing that White was actually observing it, instead of closing its mouth like any normal person would, it instead continued to masticate its food in an even more exaggerated manner like some ghoulish creature, which is why I am speaking about it as opposed to him.) but even so continued its ghoulish behaviour nonetheless. That is when White started to think of his father in terms of the mythic creature fabricated by Homer.

    The Cyclops was, at least for White, the most truly amazing poetic metaphor in all of western creation. White never ceased to be amazed by Homer’s creative genius when he did think about it, which was a lot due to his particularly horrendous relationship with his father. White wondered was he alone, in this, and, by the fact that Homer’s metaphoric beast was being re-invented time and time again for generations and generations of people down through the millennia so that they too could understand the truly epic horror show that they were dealing with which was, in a word, PATRIARCHY

    There it was. The bullet stopped here. This ten- letter word fell off of the pen or the tongue with all of the monumental obstinacy of the one-eyed monster himself. The cave dweller of old, horribly blinded by the clever and equally intelligent Odysseus himself. It is this twin pillar of cleverness And intelligence that had made Odysseus the truly remarkable hero that he is and again this is a further testament to Homer, or the Greeks, their incredibly astute insight into man’s nature. In other words, what it meant to be a Man. A Real Man, that is, as opposed to some One-Eyed King of some barren cave dwelling along the coast. You could of course say, perhaps must, here we have the two kinds of man, in the end. The Cyclopean Monster, or what we would call in modern parlance – The Narcissistic Toxic Male. TNT M. Nietzschean dynamite. All metaphors being carved specifically from the finite, as good old Friedrich knew.

    Back at the kitchen table, White could only look upon the creature before him as the Cyclops personified. There before him, that grotesque vision of the creature masticating on the meat before him. Contemptuous, almost, of him. The beastly couldn’t give a FUCK look of him. I AM THE KING. The Cock-eyed face of power on him. Tunnel vision. Hence the voice. HMV. His Master’s Voice. Lacanian. Tripping on the Real. The lexical field filled with metaphors is far more really lasting then the mere sports field with all its associated bruises and weather stains, for they will all be memories. Whereas, the symbolism will reign eternal. Such then is the very potent power of poetry. This is why the intelligent princes feared it. Not only the Greeks but in every culture.

    White saw again his Irish Master incontinent with piss- stained grey pants, his face a travesty of a man. More a Terminator in decline, his rusting member leaking out like some old oil well. Grotesquerie. For teenage boys a male mockery.

    White would go home alone and strip and slip into his mother’s room would steal, like countless boys before him, tights and underclothes. Fetishes that he would take away to his cave where he would sit alone unmanned and Freudian.

    Enter the imagery of Salvador Dali. The Great Masturbator. Eros and Thanatos. Sex and Death. Such were the twin pillars guarding the Exit, from the mad man’s lair. Such was the wonder of her hair. The other worldly feminine. That offered some kind of safe-haven. From IT. From Him.

    Enter then the Muse.

    Feature Image: The blinded Polyphemus seeks vengeance on Odysseus: Guido Reni‘s painting in the Capitoline Museums.

  • Gull

    Try to envisage Odysseus, on stiff headland, on the Western Atlantic coast of Ireland, tilling the soil with an ancient looking hoe. His hands are dry, chapped and his thick fingers curled around a parched shaft, steady palms supporting the implement, with which he works effortlessly. The slap, jut, and pull of the short blade into the earth turns up an odd purple worm which twists its belly upwards to the hot palpitating sun; and a hessian sack, half-filled with grass seed ready for planting, is slung over his back; its strings stretched across his well-defined, sinew-led, shoulder. Small dragon neck swathes of lime-coloured samphire shoots slowly emerge in sandy verges of the high field where he works. There is not a cloud in the endless ream of blue sky.

    When he spreads grass seed, as he has done in the past, many times, the canvas bag becomes a sail and his hand arcs as minuscule seedy flints shoot out over fertile mother earth and come to land among waxy ribbons of grass.

    The man looks now over a fluttering Atlantic Ocean, and it could almost be the Aegean Sea. It roars, breaks, and shatters into lucidity and calm, with white horses crashing on out further, out towards the ellipsis of the infinite horizon of his gaze. Gleaming, smooth black cattle, way off to his right, graze in a greenfield, in a verdant county. A county older than the Celts. Even Mother Nature does not know of its name. The herd, glistening, serves as a bovine footnote of nature’s essayistic form. They bellow and holler at each other with an incongruity that floats on the air. A brocade of whitethorn keeps them penned in. The enigmatic cattle are dark forms, staples of a slowly sifting tenure and lenient to the west’s wilder ways and moods. It suits them to bellow here in the hull of infallibility, amid the streaming whitethorn, sea Campion, and sandwort. The whitethorn is in flower, billowing, and its scented blooms are carried by the wind.

    Atop these cliffs, sat Eoghan whose hands were worn, he rubbed the soil and clasped his hands together to smell the earth, the olfactory bulb flickers, antediluvian and almost pristine in a broken social world. He drew a deep draught and took in the living earth with one unbroken breath. These were the elements, indeed, the pastures of his making. After a few minutes of solitude, he heard the scrunch of footsteps on seashells and sandy screed in a lane nearby. Eoghan turned his head to see a girl in her early twenties walking towards him.

    “Hi-yah”’ she called out as she approached. He cleared his throat, smiles, and replies,

    “Hello there; nice day…”

    “Oh, aye, it’s a grand one, that’s for sure…”

    Coming closer, he noted her translucent plastic sandals, linen-white shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt of navy blue with white stripes. Her auburn hair, worn in a ponytail, danced and bounced as she walked in the golden sunlight. She studied him and then cast a glance at a shred of olive green kelp which had blown up from the shore and was now stuck to the barbed wire fence on the headland.

    “Bladderwrack… I believe they call it,” he said mildly.

    She turned to him with an almost startled look, her tawny eyes furtive and her lips thinning, then biting her bottom lip she said,

    “That’s a rare auld name for some seaweed, isn’t it now?”

    Eoghan nodded and smiled up at her in the summer sun. She dropped down onto her knees just in front of his sitting position.

    “I remember, the other morning, on Inch Island, disturbing an old heron that was in a settled way…” he began.

    “What happened?” She exclaimed, looking at him more attentively.

    “I was just walking past when he looked at me,” he continued in a quiet voice, “and rose, languidly, from a clutch of rushes and off he took, one foot trailing behind the other slightly and flapping away towards Lough Swilly.”

    “Sure. It must have made a good picture. Did you upload it on to Instagram?” She asked smiling.

    “No.” He replied, softly, “No Instagram.”

    “Then what use is that?” she said, giving him a look of yearning.

    “Mother Nature has the table ready and all we have to do is go and eat. When I rise very early in the morning and go out to nature, I like to immerse myself in the landscape, to see the countryside come alive and open up in front of me; to see bright buttery gorse flower flourish, to smell honeysuckle; to smell wild garlic in woodland, Nature’s larder.”

    She was quiet, looking nonplussed and uncomprehending. An uncomfortable silence then passed between them.

    “Are ya on Snapchat or Twitter?” She asks her voice suddenly brightening.

    “Twitter?” He tentatively queries.

    “Yeah.”

    “No.”

    “Why? Are you eighty, like?” Her teeth glittered with the brightness of the sun as her mouth curved into a cynical smile.

    Eoghan looked down from the headland towards the sea; the sea breeze caught his thoughts and corresponded with the ripples in the blue torn water. He drew a deep breath as if to acknowledge her persistence.

    “Well, I guess, I just don’t really like this modern stuff …is the honest answer,” He replied turning his blue eyes back on her hazel brown ones.

    “We live in an age,’ he began again, but looking at her, taking stock, he realised he did not know her name. She comprehended this and gave him the thought he was seeking.

    “Aoife.”

    He smiled.

    “Aoife, we live, as I say, in an age known to thinkers, and to those logical enough to figure things out, as Neoliberalism. In an age of instantaneous gratification, of wishes granted instantly. And this is a kind of curse, this culture is a throwaway culture, and it’s not really for me that stuff…these belief systems.”

    The imbroglio of her young mind sent her into a dream state. Yes, she thought this young man, this guy was, “Oh, Janey-Mac, pure gorgeous,” but she was still on the faltering line between being a young girl, and the precipice which would send her into womanhood, and which had not yet been delivered fully formed to her feminine threshold. Just then her phone buzzed. She shook off her teenage sensibilities and looked at the phone’s screen.

    “I have to go,” she said, looking back up to him. “Me Mam wants me to look after our Daniel, a wee dote.” And she took off, saying as she went, “Hope to see you around sometime,” smiling. He smiled as he watched her disappear into the horizon.

    Early the next morning, very early, before any hint of daybreak, Eoghan was at the water’s edge in Inishowen, by Inch Island. He was in deep silence as images entered into his consciousness: yew trees; blue milk; a honey drop caught in pure amber sunlight, wheat-chaff which dances away in a furmy haze; three girls were strolling across a golden beach, past a wooden curragh laden with salt and beginning to crumble into wisps of wooden flakes that disintegrate in the hand. Insects given a firmer design by ancient runes with Neolithic symbolism, crawl, swirl and settle down to become geometrical shapes and patterns, known as Celtic Art. They retire and pass into the art and geometry of stone. A cow’s loin and flanks turn on a spit over a fire pit in the hill fort, Grainán of Aileach. The creature’s dead eye, bulbous, staring, almost bull-like, reminded Eoghan of the tearful eyes of sage storyteller, Paul Auster. Whose gaze could strike the bullseye of fear and desire among those he knew with big, wet eyes, like he had been crying. Bull-eyes.

    A crowd of screaming dark crows broke from branches where there was no tree trunk or tree and scattered across the immediate skyline of his memory’s eye. A spearhead of mackerel which were shifting and turned in a giant ball in the ocean; the sky darkening and rabbits and hares quaking in laneways; stars agleam in a bowl of night water strewn with a garnish of seawrack, seaweed, a mermaid’s shawl.

    He exhaled for a long moment and slowly opened his eyes; the sun continued to traverse its solitary hike towards the noon-time hour. He was down upon his haunches, almost kneeling, but had begun to rise. Feathers grew over his skin like a soft suit of pallid armour. He rose from the reeds, water dripping off his golden, feathery membrane, and gave out a loud piercing squark. He took off towards the beckoning sun which knew the bipedal, avian shapeshifter. This majestic bird that was soon flying high and then gone. Unwatched by man.