In Too Deep

‘Billy O'Callaghan's writing evokes a sense of longing for place and the familiar … His characters are rendered with a lyrical stoicism that lends dignity to all our struggles.' 
Suzanne McConnell –
 
Bellevue Literary Review

‘Billy's short stories are always a pleasure to read …' 
John Dolan –
 
Evening Echo

One morning last July, while wedged into my usual standing place on the train, heading into the city and work, I fell headlong into love. The force of it, an actual physical impact, really did rock me in my shoes, and in that instant I fully understood what people in those old films meant when they talked about the thunderbolt.

The girl was perched on an aisle seat midway back through the carriage, almost as if she had been placed there just for me. The stretch of aisle between us was clogged with people, arms gripping overhead handrails and shoulders that shifted constantly in an effort at balance, but I could see her perfectly. Her hair hung in a straight, almost old-fashioned, shoulder-length style and my mind can still picture even now the way its hazel colour gleamed like rich honey whenever blades of sunlight jabbed past the trees lining the track and through the window. Her interest was fully on the novel that lay open in her lap, so I had time to study her, but the fact of the matter was that a single moment would have been enough, the time left over a luxurious pleasure, but hardly necessary. Perhaps I had formed a false impression, had been sucked into judging a book by its cover, like so many before me, and maybe familiarity and the long, slow passage of time would have worn away the edges until nothing of substance remained. But in that one second, faster than the turn of a coin, I was stricken, truly sickened to my bones with the kind of torment that could only have been love. My throat ached with the effort of breathing; I had never seen anyone quite like her before.

If I had a type, she would have been it, I decided; petite, like a porcelain trinket, all nimble delicacy. She wore a white blouse with the sleeves rolled midway up her slender wrists, and a pair of sky-blue jeans that might have been distantly related to some low-ranking designer, but then again may have simply been a cheap, poorly-cut knockoff. Her legs were crossed demurely at the knee and a scarlet slip-on shoe hung from the toes of her otherwise naked foot. I stared openly, my hunger for details ravenous.

After a few minutes of stalemate, the train jolted, and she was jerked from her story. The book flopped shut in her hands; something by Anne Tyler, though I couldn't make out the title from my inverted vantage point. She gazed around as if just escaping a dream, and then her eyes met mine and it was the turn of her world to change. Her mouth fell agog, honestly, and the colour, what little there had been, seeped from her face. I could see that she was pretty, though not unaccountably so. Certainly, she was a long step out of the league of the world's greatest beauties. But she had the same fresh glimmer as the morning, a youthful vigour that made her as hallowed and insubstantial as dew-tinged air, and that essence was truly captivating.

I found myself pushing through the crowded aisle, muttering apologies along the way whenever I bumped a back or stepped on a blocking foot, but not really caring much about the discomfort I was causing. On a sliding scale of importance, every other passenger on this train was rooted at the bottom, somewhere firmly out of sight. Only this girl mattered.

When I reached her seat I got down on one knee, gently took her hand from where it lay on the book –
The Clock Winder
I now saw – and asked her, right then and there, to marry me. Blushing and just a little panicked, she glanced up at the faces of the other passengers who, curious and amused, were pressing in like new moons, and then she bowed her head and mumbled that, actually, she was already engaged. ‘Engaged is not married,' I told her, not really sure where this daring was coming from, because this was completely new territory for me. Usually I struggle to say two words to a stranger, especially a woman. Her hand was still trapped by my fingers, and her flesh was soft and milky, the bones of her inner wrist spindle-thin beneath the skin. I traced the tangle of veins a little way up her arm and decided that I wanted to play that game forever.

At last, she looked up again, and she was smiling. Her eyes were large, at least in staring mode, a two-toned shade of brittle glassy green imbedded in a darker and less tangible base colour, and if her nose was slightly too big and her chin a touch too defined, then it was love's task and duty to re-align such details to fit its own mysterious symmetry. ‘Okay,' she said, and her voice seemed to come from the air all around, like a word from heaven, soft and truthful. ‘Yes, I'll marry you.'

We got off the train at the next stop. Everything was coming up smiles, and the world seemed to bristle with possibility. We both had other places to be, but work had lost all sense of importance. The big white clock-face in the station proclaimed the time as closing in on nine o'clock and we had the entire day to be together. ‘The first day of the rest of our lives,
'
I whispered against the ridge of her jaw just below her ear. A vague downy fuzz coated her flesh just there, a most delightful discovery. My words, warm with my breath, caused her cheek to tug back in a joyful smile, and I knew in my heart that I would have gone to war for her. Nothing could be allowed to come between us.

The streets were alive with our excitement, a teeming rumble of traffic noise and busy people. We walked aimlessly, holding hands and swapping tangles of nearly delirious conversation, and whenever we grew tired or thirsty we'd stop off at some street-side café to drink coffee and consider each other from different angles and perspectives. She enjoyed cappuccinos, she said, and each small revelation fused embarrassment with pleasure, another step along in the flowering of what really had to be love. I told her that I enjoyed watching her drink them. Her first sip daubed froth onto the tip of her nose, and I leaned in and kissed it away, making her laugh. Our first kiss, I said, and she said that it was nice but that we should try to make our second even better. So we did.

I told her that I could be lazy, sometimes, that actually laziness has marked my life. Honesty was important, I said, and she agreed that it was. ‘It's only fair that you know what you are letting yourself in for. The truth is that I'm not really the great prize I might appear to be.' She looked me up and down, cleared her throat in an exaggerated way and nodded yes, but she was smiling. I told her that I'd suffered a kind of breakdown once, when I was seventeen. I'd been accepted into Cambridge to read history, but just prior to my going something seemed to knot up inside of me and after a lot of deliberation I decided that I probably wasn't best suited to an academic career.

Instead I took a job with a delivery company, work that I could do without any thought at all. My father told me in no uncertain terms that I was wasting my life. There was no arguing with the fact that I had a natural and obvious aptitude for packing away the least little filaments of information, no matter how obtuse or archaic, but the simple truth was that history held no appeal for me. Really, I didn't think I knew what I wanted.

‘Despite what everyone else thinks, I do believe that not going to Cambridge was all for the best.' She cradled her large cup in the straightened fingertips of both hands, sipped relentlessly through the pale froth for the kick of coffee underneath, and barely nodded. ‘You should know right from the beginning,' I said, my tone more than half-serious, ‘that I may be the least ambitious person in the entire country. Maybe even in all of Europe. Goals and achievements just don't tickle my happy button. I sometimes like to tell myself that I'm going to write a book one day, but millions of people live a little of this fantasy, and I doubt that I'll ever get around to putting a word of it down on paper. I mean, I don't even have an idea. How is that for a head-start?'

‘I don't care about any of that,' she said, after staring into my eyes for half a minute or so. A little smear of chocolate clotted one corner of her mouth, lying on her lip like a sweet bruise, and she fished at it with her tongue, missed and gave up on it. I thought about taking it with a kiss, but decided that maybe I'd be overplaying my hand, forcing things a little too much. It's funny, the things that can cause us regret. Anyway I folded a paper napkin into a tight triangle, reached out with one corner and gently wiped the mark away. ‘There must be more to life than work and dusty old books,' she said. ‘We're meant to be together, and that's all that counts.'

A second cappuccino was required before she could bring herself to open up, but that, I could see, was merely her nature. I held her hand across the table while she talked, her small shy voice inflecting music into her words, tossing out details of her upbringing and of her own hopes and dreams. There were things I wanted to know, but I let her flit from subject to subject, not wanting to interrupt. We'd have years of time for questions, I told myself, so I feasted on her offerings and understood her a little better with each passing minute.

She loved to sing, she said, and it took no effort of imagination at all for me to imagine her on a stage, perhaps leaning against a piano, basking in the rainy jazz of something husky and sublime. In my mind I could see that she was born for the chalky wash of a spotlight. She adored Sinatra's voice, said that she must have thirty or forty of his albums, and not CDs either, but the old long-players. Over the past couple of years or so, she had developed a sort of hobby out of wandering around the charity shops. Expendable Saturday afternoons put to some use, she said. ‘You'd be amazed at the things people give away, nowadays.' The staff in these places were all volunteers, and they had come to know her over time. Her tastes, too. Anything that might be of interest to her, she said, they'd just put to one side, which was how she had managed to gather such a horde of records. An ambition of hers was to wear them down to stumps, to drain every drop of music from them until they had nothing left to give. I smiled with pleasure at her enthusiasm, but when I asked if she would sing for me she looked around, blushed again, and said that she'd like that, but not now. Later, when we could be alone together. Those blushes made me ache for her.

After a while, she grew silent. We were walking, holding hands, and had taken a detour through a park. A few paces in and the trees masked the buildings, a few paces further and the city might not have existed at all. Clouds lay in heavy tufts across the sky, so the late morning seemed to wax and wane, the brightness a genuine effort and the settling gloom a far more natural state, but just then the sun had broken through and the leaves of the manicured alders shuffled to the light beat of a warm breeze. She led me to a bench just off the pathway and we sat. I leaned back and stretched my arm along the latticed rail so that we were just a slip away from an embrace, but she perched stiff and upright and I knew that she was wrestling with some important concern.

Her hand touched my thigh and settled there, her narrow fingers gently splayed, and her mouth pinched up in a serious way, her upper teeth pinching dimples into the soft flesh of her lower lip. Then she spoke.

‘When I was seventeen, I became pregnant by a friend of my father's. That sounds worse than it actually was, and we did keep our relationship a secret, but it really wasn't as if he was abusing me or anything. It just sort of happened.' Her eyes fixed into a trance state, staring out along the grassy fringe, and shone wetly with the morning's light, but I could see that this was the only way she could bring herself to broach the subject. Reality had to be blurred. She said that she had thought it was love, because she didn't know any better, but of course she learned the hard way that it wasn't love at all, or anything even close to it. She had the baby aborted, as that was the best thing for everyone. Her father would have gone berserk and her mother's health wasn't all that great. It would have torn their lives apart and it just didn't seem fair to put that stress on them. Besides, she said, she had been just seventeen, with little or no knowledge of the world. A baby would have ruined her life, too. I listened, and read things into her distant gaze and the wavering lilt of her voice. Her father's friend had dealt with everything, making all the necessary arrangements, settling the bills with cash. He collected her at a pre-arranged place, in the car park of their local shopping centre, dropped her off at the clinic and waited in a bar around the corner until she and the doctor had taken care of business. It had been a lot easier than she'd imagined, too; not that terrible at all, really. ‘Easier than having a tooth pulled,' she said, bending her mouth up into a smile that nearly fit.

But here was the thing; since then, once a month and just as regular as a new moon, she found herself dreaming of a child. ‘In the dreams, everything seems perfectly normal.'
The smile clung tenuously to her lips, out of synch with the general stiffness of the rest of her face. A couple of folds creased her forehead, too vague yet to leave any lingering trace, but certainly a start, a sign of what lay ahead. ‘At first, I told myself that this was just coincidence, that people drift in and out of dreams all the time, but when the next month came and he was there again, and then again the month after that, I decided that it was probably a natural reaction to what had happened and that in time I'd begin to forget. Except I haven't forgotten. It's been seven years now and there he is, every month, as real as you or me. My little boy. I really do believe that. And he is the most beautiful boy that you could ever hope to see. Every month he's a little further along, growing all the time. I can still remember how it felt to breastfeed him as an infant, and I know his smell and the way he used to grip my finger in his tiny hand. As a baby he had jet-black hair and wide green eyes. The sort of eyes that seem to understand everything. Now when he comes he is tall and slim, with a strong look of his father. I've bathed him, walked him by the hand to his first day of school, held him in my arms while he cried away the pain of a skinned knee. Now I stand and cheer while he wrestles his way through football games. He looks born to run, and I feel so proud when some of the other parents pass some remark on how natural he seems with a ball. Talented, they say, and I smile and try to remain modest, but I know that they can see me glowing.'