“And still the sea
Rears and plunges into me,
Shoving, rolling through my head
Images of the drifting dead.”
An Chailleach Bhéara
‘DO YOU always have to pick your nose after we have sex?’
Roisín watched Sean out of the corner of her eye while lying on the flat of her back. Sean, lying on the flat of his own back, rubbed the bottom of his nostrils with his fist.
‘I’m not picking. I’m bleeding. I’m trying to staunch the flow.’
Sean’s fingers withdrew and now pegged his nostrils shut, giving his voice that shrill, nasal quality.
‘Seriously, I’m bleeding.’
‘No fucking wonder.’
Roisín turned her back to him and thought of Katie. Katie all alone. Not completely alone, but without that most important thing – all hurting and confused and mammyless. Roisín rubbed the bottom of her own nose with her knuckles while Sean pulled her closer and nuzzled his face within the depths of her blonde hair to the point where he was merging with her shoulder blades.
‘I hoped you’ve stopped fucking bleeding.’
‘Jesus, I have, don’t worry… What are you thinking about?’
‘About getting up and going to work.’
‘I thought you phoned in sick.’
‘I did, but I’m still thinking about it.’
‘You’d think, with your doctor being your boss and all, you wouldn’t be able to take so much time off.’
‘He knows I’m not pulling a fast one, doesn’t he?’
‘Maybe it’s because he fancies you.’
‘Maybe he feels sorry for me because he knows what a complete dick it is that I’ve been going out with.’
‘He’s not my doctor. How would he know that?’
Roisín shook her hair free of Sean’s cheekbones and nose and chin and, as she bounded off the bed, he became suddenly penitent, trying desperately to put his finger on the reason why.
‘I’m sorry, okay? I just thought he might be a bit suspect. I mean, he can’t give you stitches or put a plaster on it, can he? Or see the blood.’
‘Forget about it. I’ve to go out. There’s tea bags and cereal in the cupboard, but you’d need to get milk. You know where the spare key is.’
Sean wanted to say he’d go with her. That he’d like to be with her. But he knew it was pointless. Every part of her was hardening against him. Her periods of vulnerability to him were shortening by the day. Over the years the illusion of her was tightened on his part but that of him was torn asunder on hers. There was contempt in the making and it was largely his fault. So despite all his good intentions all he said was, ‘Where are you going?’
And all she said was, ‘Out’.
‘Always so fuckin’ mysterious Roisín.’
And the inevitable ‘Fuck off Sean’ was returned.
So bit-by-bit, sock-by-sock on foot-by-foot, she left and blink-by-blink, bad-idea after bad-idea, he fell back to sleep. He awoke thinking of jam doughnuts and buttered baps and went for milk, but he put the snib on the front door instead of using the spare key and when he returned he had tea but no cereal. He watched British comedy reruns from the 1980s while rolling his first joint of the day, before making Roisín’s bed and returning to roll the second spliff of an undefined early afternoon.
Peter watched her hair drip drip filthy city rain all over his surgery floor and rose from his swivel chair to get her some post-colour paper towels from the dispenser. The water hung from her ears, clung to her nose and slathered her cheeks. The city’s aborted amoeba was compensating for what couldn’t come, for what was fatally delayed.
‘I was down at the graveyard and then I didn’t know what to do, so I thought I’d see if you’d ten minutes to spare. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be apologising Roisín. Tell me about it.’
‘Tell you about it? You were her GP. Let me pull that apart for you… General… Practitioner… So generally you practice what? Failed interventions? You know more about it than me, pull up her file on the computer there.’
‘I’m not talking about Deborah, I’m talking about you.’
‘It was Debbie. Nobody ever called her Deborah, she wasn’t even christened. And what would be the point in that anyway? I’m not the one who’s left a wee girl behind.’
Peter sighed, crossed his hands as if in Buddhist above-caste meditation, closed his eyes, rolled his head back and swivelled abortively in his chair, his ankles stopping him from doing a full swivel, knocking momentarily painfully against the metal. Roisín kept pulling viciously at strands of hair with the off-colour paper towels, ignoring the water dripping from her ears.
‘Have you laid off the gear?’
‘What kind? What you prescribe me or what we were putting up our noses in the toilets of that golf club you brought me to the other week?’
‘It was you who brought the coke as far as I remember. Did you want these ten with me for anything other than to be obnoxious?’
‘Has Debbie’s daddy been in about Katie?’
‘You know I can’t tell you that.’
‘Don’t play the fucking propriety card with me Peter. I work here, I can find out if you won’t tell me.’
And another sigh and aborted swivel and painful ankles, ‘As far as I know, Katie’s doing as well as can be expected, under the circumstances.’
‘Circumstances… What a cunt.’
‘Me or the circumstances?’
‘Both…. Most especially you’
‘Indeed. Have you not been to see her since the funeral? She might like it.’
‘I couldn’t bear to look at her wee face. I feel too guilty.’
‘You’ve nothing to feel guilty about. Katie needs to know there are people around her who love her.’
‘I should have been there for them before.’
‘If anyone should feel guilty, it’s Sean. He kept selling to her no matter how bad she got.’
‘So she took one too many joints for her own good, is that your diagnosis doctor? Smoking joints is killing people now? It was you who wouldn’t speed up her referral. Or change her prescription, no matter how many times she told you it wasn’t working.’
‘So we’re both the same to you? Me, a doctor, and your drug dealing boyfriend?’
‘He’s not a dealer, he only does enough to pay for his own, and he’s not my boyfriend either.’
‘Did you ever consider social work? You’ve all the temperament for it. Listen, about you Roisín…’
‘I’ll be ready for work next week, seriously.’
‘I’m not talking about that. You’re not coping.’
‘You noticed, did you?’
Peter put his hand in a pocket of the jacket that was draped over his chair and tossed the key that emerged to Roisín.
‘Go for a drive and come back for me at four. It’ll clear your head.’
Drive through industrial estates and back-and-forth, back-and-forth past Debbie’s empty house complete, Roisín’s head was through the open door of Peter’s wardrobe and he was behind her. Her shoulders rocked back and forth among grey suit trousers, cream slacks, cashmere and tweed jackets. Brown leather belts and purple shirts hung from the rail above, gently slapping her face. She craned her neck, the better to let the end of one belt caress her throat. The movement of everything recreated the gentle breeze of being outdoors in May. The feel of his shirts against her skin was almost unbearably soft. In a corner of the wardrobe was a pile of academic looking books. Neatly stacked, she twisted her neck the other way to try to read the titles: the ABC of anxiety and depression, edited by Linda Gask and Carolyn Chew-Graham was third from top; Attacking anxiety: a step-by-step guide to treating anxiety and phobias in children with autism and other developmental disabilities by Karen Levine and Naomi Chedd was next up; on top of which sat The Manufacture of Madness by Thomas Szasz. ‘Trust the fella to be the one to think he could write the book better on his own’, she thought.
‘Spit on my shoes.’
She snorted in sudden bemusement, ‘What?’
‘Go on, spit on them.’
She looked directly below her and saw desert brown suede, spick and span funeral black, ship shape navy canvass all studiously organised on top of one another between where the flats of her hands were resting on the wardrobe bottom. She rolled her tongue around the insides of her cheeks and the roof of her mouth to gather what she could and took aim at a particularly shiny tip of a funeral shoe.
‘Again.’
Again and again she released her saliva upon his formal footwear, his smart casual gear, his man about town shoes and his lounging around the house flip flops until she felt the shudders start. Beside herself, she took the arm of a pinstriped jacket between her teeth and drooled over it while, in the midst of his own shuddering, he muttered something over and over again below his breath. They finished on top of one another among the shoes and spit, their backsides and legs hanging out of the wardrobe, lying this way and that on the wooden bedroom floor, still and ever so momentarily sated.
It had been two days now. Peter had phoned in sick and called a friend from school who had gone wrong because Roisín didn’t want to talk to Sean. There’d been no sleep and no food. He had the downers stored safely in his wallet but neither of them had felt the need to take them just yet. There was a blur of dance floors, riverside apartments, of smoking joints laced with acid on someone’s grandmother’s stairs and bouts of giddiness while trying to piece it all together in a chronological fashion. It was late afternoon and they were hidden in the snug of what had once been a sailors’ bar at the now derelict docks. They were drinking brandy-and-port along with pints of stout on doctor’s orders that it would settle their stomachs. Neither had talked since their last trip to the toilets for a pick me up until Roisín broke the fugged up hazy reverie of silence with a query.
‘Would you ever take me away from this?’
‘Away from what?’
‘This, all of it.’
‘You’re saying nothing.’
‘You’re stalling for time, trying to think of a diplomatic answer.’
‘When you say all of this, you mean me as well. How can I take you away from myself? The best I can do is tell you to go.’
‘And there you have it.’
‘Have what?’
‘Your diplomatic answer.’
‘You’re fucking impossible, do you know that? That’s one of the reasons I love you.’
‘Don’t do that.’
‘Don’t do what?’
‘Don’t be giving me your coked-up bullshit.’
‘Okie dokie babe.’
‘I used to think Sean would take me away.’
‘Fuck.’
‘We were in this old, ruined mansion the first time, you know, we did it. Up on the north coast beside this temple. Except it wasn’t a temple, they just call it that, and apparently it’s eventually going to collapse right into the sea because it’s right on the edge of a cliff that’s eroding. We were staying in this caravan park with our mates, Debbie was there, all of us about sixteen or seventeen, all away together for the first time. Anyway, the two of us – Sean and me – dandered out to the mansion one night with a joint and a bottle of cheap wine. It was pitch black and we were giggling the whole way. And baaing at the sheep who were running away from us and he told me if we came across a cow and we pushed it over, it wouldn’t be able to get back up and it would eventually die of fright. Cow tipping it’s called. They actually have a fucking name for it.’
‘Yeah, I know. We used to do it when we were at university. It was great craic.’
‘When we got to the mansion, we realised there was no roof left on it and there was a bed of grass in every room where the floor used to be. There was a boudoir, a gallery, a drawing room and sitting room, a study, a breakfast room – there were signs naming them all on the big stone walls. We read them by flicking our lighter next to them. We lay in the library – a library with no books and grass for a floor and this total blackness above us. I looked up at it and it felt as if the dark was going to swallow me whole and the library and Sean’s bare arse and I wanted it to. I really wanted it to. I was daring it to eat me every time I moved my hips towards it. The grass was dry and prickling my spine from my tail bone all to my neck and I took my top off to feel it better. Most women don’t cum the first time, probably because, for most of their fellas, despite all the boasting, it’s their first time as well and they’re just as clueless and frightened as we are, except they won’t admit it, which kills it all a wee bit. I came though. And to this day I couldn’t tell you whether it was Sean or the grass tickling my spine or that blackness above that did it for me. Just think, maybe my virginity was taken by Johnny Dark.’
Roisín laughed to herself while Peter sat and smiled daftly at his half-empty pint of stout.
‘Well, that was certainly educational Roisín.’
‘And there was me thinking you’d nothing left to learn.’
In Peter’s head, everything was all eloquence and deftness. Until he talked. Then the words collapsed into dead flaky cinders as soon as they passed his lips. But he couldn’t help himself, the chemicals were working overtime in him.
‘There’s a world out there where seven-year-olds are cutting down their dead mothers from kitchen ceilings. And it’s our world. Do you know what I mean? There aren’t many different worlds and loads of different realities you get to pick and choose from. There’s one world and one reality. We’ve built toy forts and cubby holes with loads of old winter coats in them to hide under and we call them real. But they’re no more real than the words we use to mystify them. Our world is the world of dead mothers hanging from kitchen ceilings. It’s what we’ve inherited and it’s what we’ll bequeath.’
‘Selfish bitch. Doing that to the child.’
‘Considering she’s already self-administered the most drastic punishment possible for her selfishness and yet the cause, the consequences and the malice remain, what do you suggest bar self-righteous indignation, nurse?’
A ball of spit shot from Roisín’s pursed chapped lips and trickled down Peter’s cheek bone. In the act of looking through the open door of the snug, the old men at the bar tried to make it look as if they were looking away.
‘How’s that for malice, you cunt.’
Roisín stumbled from the snug, taking her purse from the table but forgetting her coat, and made for the window lit double doors and the street. Peter closed his eyes, crossed his hands, rolled his head back and sighed, not bothering to wipe the spit from his face. The sound of a horserace coming to a climax could be heard from the television above the bar and he thought of his grandparents, with their terraced house and their credit union books and their back garden where the dogs were buried and the dandelions that always looked so fucking out of control and gorgeous.
Roisín walked with purpose from the docks to the centre, not feeling the cold against her bare arms. She knew what she had to do now. Leisureworld. Teddy bear. Katie. Or a bunny. A big white fluffy bunny rabbit would be better. But Leisureworld the famous toy shop was closed, it had been for going on twenty years. So she stood in the street and stared at the blank office block that was now a call centre and thought of an alternative. Pound shops have everything. So she got Katie chocolate footballs and fizzy cola bottles, colouring books and crayons and a fluffy penguin that was almost like a bunny if you ignored the black around the edges. She took a bus out of town and began to feel the shivers running up and down her spine and the rotten turnip taste on her tongue.
Debbie’s daddy had to put her into a taxi. He told her to come back when she’d had a kip. What he really meant was to come back when her pupils had got back to their normal size and it didn’t sound like she was going to collapse under the weight of everything she was trying to say. She could see Katie then. She could bring the colouring books then. What Debbie’s Da would really like to have done was shake her until her hair changed colour and her legs grew a bit and her earlobes became ever so slightly shorter. He wanted to close his eyes, and cling to her shoulders and call her Debbie and open them to see her there. But that wasn’t to be. So a taxi it was.
As Roisín stumbled through her own front door, she spilled the books and crayons and chocolates and cola bottles over the hall floor, but managed to keep a hold of the penguin. She sank to her knees to try to pick them up but found her head on the floor beside them. Sean picked her up from behind as the sobs came. He’d been to the shop for more milk and the bakery for jam doughnuts but otherwise hadn’t left. He carried her to her bed, got a glass of water and the sleeping pills Roisín kept for the Sundays after a long weekend, and waited for the sobbing to become snores and the shivering to become twitching, stillness being too much to ask for.
And his mind drifted as it always did. He drifted. Perhaps he was a drifter, though he denied such things vehemently. In his drifting, he clung onto trunks like Roisín who had roots he couldn’t begin to imagine. So things were done and branches were broken, all the time he mocked while drowning. And time shed its weary leaves and it came to this. Not enough for attraction, neither enough for repugnance. It was simply gone. There was nothing to be said, nor to be done. There never was nothing to be done. Double negatives were ever their way. Except that they’d lost their lustre somewhere along the way. He talked of her often, thought of her more. But could never work out why. Longed for her presence but, when it came, had nothing to say. Nothing of consequence anyway. So he searched for her voice in every which way it presented itself, turned up when she least wanted him to. He became a pain. Let’s be realistic, he wasn’t right for her nor she for him but, still, he cared. Though not quite enough, he never could.