The Forgotten Waltz (16 page)

Neither did he forget how to drink. Fiona would dispute this, but I have the clearest memory of us both walking down to the hospice on Harold’s Cross Road with a naggin of gin that we had bought for him in the off-licence before the park. We had saved our pocket money for it.

He was sitting up in the bed when we found his room, but he did not know who we were. He said to Fiona, ‘Who are you? Why are you kissing me?’ But he still remembered the difference between vodka and gin – it was supposed to look like water, we knew that much, but it seems we got the wrong one – he spat it back into the tooth mug, and said, ‘What do you call this?’

Then he drank it anyway.

It was as though he was made of glass, his insides had gone so slack and loud. You could hear the liquid travelling into his stomach, spilling down his oesophagus, gurgling into his belly. There was a wrung-out kind of creak as it rose back up and the expression on his face as he willed it down again was comically fierce. He closed his eyes and rested. Then he opened them again and, for two minutes, maybe five, he was completely himself. He was the man we knew; clever, busy, large.

‘If you stopped biting your lips, my dear, then you wouldn’t have such a raggedy mouth.’

My father used to complain about my mouth, the way it gave me an insolent look. ‘What’s the puss about?’ he said, or once, memorably, to one of his cronies, ‘She didn’t get that, sucking oranges through a tennis racket.’

But he said plenty of nice things, too. My father never treated us as children. If you hurt him, he would hurt you right back. If you made him laugh, he would bring the house down with delight. I don’t remember people ‘doing’ children, the way Fiona ‘does’ hers in that
tidy your toys and we’ll have a nice hug
sort of way. There was drama all day when my father was around, and it was all as big as it needed to be. He fought with my mother, he loved my mother. He went missing. He came home and was shaggy and large with us. I loved that about him, the wonderful air of danger and surprise.

I just hated, as I got older, the look of him when he had drink taken: the way he swivelled his face around to find you, and the chosen, careful nonsense that came out of his mouth when he did. I hated the way he sat there, benignly absent, or horribly possessed by some slow creature, who rolled, across the distance between you, whatever sentence he could shape in his head; lovely, mean, grandiose, small. Or fond: that was the worst, I think. Fond.

‘Look at you. Aren’t you lovely?’

By the time we were teenagers, he wasn’t around all that much. He always kept Sunday at home, but even on a Sunday he was in bed till eleven, and went out around five so, let’s face it, six hours a week, a bit of roast lamb with mint sauce on the side – you could take it either way. You could be mad about him, as Fiona was, you could be pretty and perfect, you could have plaits that were sweet, and hairbands that stayed put, you could work on your Irish dancing and your songs from
Oklahoma!
or you could slob about and glower, like me. I was clever. I mean, Fiona was clever in a let’s-all-get-a-B-plus sort of way, but I was clever because if I was clever then I would not have to care.

Now she has a perfect life, my sister has taken to inventing a perfect past to match it. She doesn’t think our father was a drunk – which makes two of them, I suppose – and she would certainly deny the memory I have of us hanging on to each other laughing, coming back up the Harold’s Cross Road.

‘Who are you? Why are you kissing me?’ he had said to her. ‘And why, my pet, have you stopped kissing me, when we were getting so nicely acquainted?’

Demented is different to drunk. I think people get demented the same way they get annoying. The thing you don’t like about them just gets worse, until one day you find that’s all there is left of them – the fuss and the show of it – the actual person has snuck out the back and gone home.

I can’t remember how long his illness took. Too long. Not long enough. When the school holidays came, we were sent across to our Granny O’Dea’s house in Sutton where the sea lapped the garden steps or exposed a rocky shore and sometime, between one tide and the next, he died.

At the funeral, then, we got him back: this wonderful person, our father. The church was packed, the house overflowed with men in suits, who sat and leaned their hands on long thighs, to tell tales of his wit, his acumen, his canny charm. He was the last of the great romantics. My mother said that. Someone had sent a case of Moët, and she asked for it to be served. She stood up and raised her glass. She said, ‘Here’s to Miles, my handsome husband. He was the last of the great romantics.’

Why not?

Then they left and we were alone.

We had a way, all that autumn, of hanging out and moping – that’s the only way to describe it: the three of us talking about clothes and hair and weight, pecking at things, idling them through our fingers, going on the same diets, swapping clothes; stealing from each other too.

‘Did you take my halterneck top?’

‘What top?’

And nothing in these conversations was ever satisfactory, or wanted to be, there was only one direction, and that was downhill.

When Fiona hit seven stone my mother brought her to a shrink, who said my sister had stopped eating in order to stop the clock: if she stayed a child, then her father would not have to die. Which was too sad to be useful really. Joan went back to wearing her dressing gown all day and Fiona went back to her cottage cheese and there was no food in the fridge anyway – at least not after I had been through it – and then, when the spring came, we discovered boys.

Or I discovered boys. Fiona, if you ask me, only pretended to.

People might think it hard, growing up with a pretty sister but Fiona was lovely the way girls are lovely for their Daddy, and after he died, she did not know what to do with it, really. Her beauty was a sort of puzzle to her. And she always ended up with the wrong sort of guy: the kind who want a girlfriend to match their car; prestige types, bottom feeders, liars. At least that’s what I think; that boring old Shay was probably the best of them. That she ran into motherhood in the hopes that she would be safe there, and they would all leave her alone.

But in the spring of 1989, six months after Miles died, my sister was pretty and I was lots of fun. Joan screwed a fag into her white plastic filter, and got out the powder and blush. We were the Moynihans of Terenure. It was our duty to have a queue of young men knocking at the door.

Across the road – which is now a busy road – is the bus stop where I used to say goodnight to those early boyfriends: sitting on the wall for hours, or strolling around the corner on some excuse (‘Let’s see what’s around the corner!’), for a bout of kissing. Rory or Davey or Colin or Fergus: it was supposed to be about their eyes or their fringe or their taste in music, but despite the way I persuaded myself, with doodles in the backs of copy books and shrieks among friends, that I loved them, each in turn, it was all just about this: the smell of petrol from the buses, and the evenings getting longer, and kissing outdoors until the tips of our noses went cold. In those days, just being in the open air gave me goosebumps. Walking down the street alone, thinking my beautiful thoughts, picking the yellow blooms off the neighbour’s forsythia and shredding them on to the path: kissing was the answer to all this too.

It took me a long time to move on to anything more serious, sexually: Fiona too, I think. The Moynihan girls were old-fashioned. It was something to do with our mother being a widow; an instinct we had about power.

It was Fiona I missed, that first Christmas back in Terenure. Seán was in Enniskerry doing Santa Claus for a child who no longer believed in Santa Claus. Aileen was serving a light fino before lunch. I was alone. And the person I missed was my sister, the woman who was glad – as she said,
glad
– our mother was dead, so she wouldn’t have to witness the way I was carrying on.

She was wrong about that, by the way. My mother would have understood. My mother with her handsome, infuriating husband; she would have kissed the top of my sad head.

I slip between the curtains in the front room and press my forehead to the glass, with the nets falling down my back, the orange light of the streetlights outside turning the shadows violet, and I remember, or think I remember, some childhood snow, Miles bringing us to the big hill in Bushy Park, half the neighbourhood going down it on tea trays and body boards and plastic bags, Hold on tight! The outraged ducks slipping across the obstinate pond, our screams bouncing off a low, blank sky.

Miles in the room behind me, with the rug rolled up, old twinkle toes.

Once round the dresser!

Teaching me Irish dancing, singing out the patter: one two three, one two three,
down
-kick and tip and heel
-fall
, bang, kick up, heel-step tip-drum.

And just for a moment, I do not care what kind of a man he was. Perhaps it is the way the snow opens up a space, but for a moment, all my memories of my father are chocolate-box, and smell of winter: icing sugar thrown on the fire, in a shower of yellow flame, a crate of satsumas cold from the garage, my mother in a Nordic knit, Miles with a daughter under each arm standing on the doorstep, listening to Mr Thomson down the road, playing ‘Silent Night’ on his military bugle. Of course Christmas in this house was always a bit of a torment – there was always, before the day was out, some crisis with handsome, pissed old Miles – but it started well. Bursting through the door to find our presents in heaps at either end of the sofa – Fiona’s one end, mine the other – a big comfortable sofa, the fabric a dark embossed red; picked out, along the seams, with a beige fringe.

There I am, on my father’s knee, a little pietà. I am waiting to be tickled, playing dead.

My father lifts one hand and holds it high.

‘Is that the way?’

‘I’m dead!’

I start to wriggle to the floor and, as I slip across his knees, he pounces, finding the spaces between my ribs and digging in. By the time I have hit the carpet I am beside myself. I am out of my skin, stuck to the spinning floor. I am tied to my body where his fingers hold me together, as I fly apart.

‘No! No!’

My father tickling me from the sofa, as I squirm on the ground, my shoulders churning into the carpet.

‘Oh no!’

His cigarette is clamped between his in-rolled lips: he gathers my ankles in one big hand, then he turns to leave the cigarette in the ashtray.

‘Oh the mouse,’ he says. ‘Oh the mouse,’ and his fingers dance and scrabble across the soft underside of my foot.

Being dead was like being tickled, except that when you flew out of your body you never came back.

*  *  *

When I was twelve or so, I used to practise astral flying – it must have been a fashion then. I lay on my back in bed, and when I was fully heavy, too heavy to move, I got up, in my mind, and left the house. I went down the stairs and out the front door. I walked or I drifted along the street. If I wanted to, I flew. And I imagined, or I saw, every single detail of the passing world; every fact about the hall or the stairs and the street beyond. The next day I would go out to look for things I had noticed, for the first time, the night before. And I found them, too. Or I thought I had.

The pubs have shut: there are shouts in the distance and the screams of girls. I lean my forehead against the cold glass, as the traffic lights change and change again. It is time for bed. But I don’t want to go to bed. I want to keep them company another little while: my father and mother, dispersed as they are along the sweet, bright arc of the dead.

Paper Roses

A COUPLE OF
months ago, I saw Conor on Grafton Street. He was pushing a buggy, which gave me pause, but then I recognised his sister beside him, home from Bondi. He did not seem surprised to see me. He looked up and nodded, as though we had arranged to meet.

His lips were chapped, I noticed. The light was too strong on his face – the way the sun sets straight down Grafton Street – and when we circled around, the better to see each other, I was bizarrely worried that my skin had aged.

‘All right. You?’

‘Yeah.’

His sister was watching us, with a look so tragic I felt like asking her did the budgie die.

‘Oh my goodness!’ I said, instead, and I bent down to look under the hood of the buggy. There was her baby, a little shock of humanity, looking me bang in the eye.

‘Gorgeous!’ I said, and asked how long she was staying, and what the news from Sydney was while Conor seemed more and more tired, just standing there.

After I walked on I got the blip of a text in my pocket.

‘Are we married?’

I kept going. I put one foot in front of the other. A second text arrived.

‘Need to talk about stuff.’ I glanced around then but Conor was thumbs deep in his mobile. Fatter too, in the harsh light. Or, not so much fat as more solid. He glanced up, and I had, as I turned away, an impression of his weight along the length of me, top to toe.

‘I’m just saying,’ says Fiachra. ‘He’s small, good-looking, witty.’

‘So?’

‘He’s your type.’

‘I don’t have a type.’

‘I’m just saying.’

So all right, they are both on the smallish side. They are both good company; both hard to know well. But underneath the charm Conor is an absent-minded sort. And Seán? When the party stops, when the door closes, when the guests go home …

They are completely different people. People love Conor, but they do not love Seán. They are attracted to Seán, which is not the same thing. Because Seán has a permanent joke in his eye, and it is usually you – the joke I mean – he is such a tease. And he likes to boast a little. And he likes to do you down.

My grey-haired boy.

He always compliments the thing you don’t expect. It is never the thing you made an effort with: the dress, or the jewellery, or the hair. He compliments the thing that is wrong, so it gets more wrong all night.

‘What do you think?’

Coming down the stairs, ready to go out: there is something about my expectant look that annoys him.

‘I like the lipstick.’

These days, it is always my mouth. I should not have told him about my father in the hospice. I know that now. I tell him less and less.

My poor, raggedy mouth.

Seán Peter Vallely, born 1957, educated to be obnoxious by the Holy Ghost Fathers, reared to be obnoxious by his mother, Margot Vallely, who loved him very much, of course, but was so disappointed he did not grow up tall.

You could be worn out by it, that’s all. By this man’s inability to lose.

I am only thirty-four. That is what I caught myself thinking. There is still time. There is something the fat on his chest does – I mean, he has very little fat on his chest, and anyway I do not care – but there is something this layer does, the effort it makes, that is dispiriting. And I do not mind until his eyes check me over, like the mirror does not see him.

Then, as though he knows what I am thinking, he says, ‘Look at you. You should be out there. You should be.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

Neither of us can say the word ‘baby’.

‘I don’t want to be out there,’ I say. Thinking,
He will use this as an excuse to get rid of me
.

And,
This is one of his tactics too
.

I came in late, one Saturday, after ending up in Reynards talking shite with Fiachra until three in the morning, just like the old days. I stumbled about the bedroom, and there was, I admit, a bit of cavorting as I discarded my clothes, then I jumped into bed and snuggled up.

Seán, who had been asleep, was having none of it. Recollection is dim, but, between one grope and the next, I must have conked out. Only to wake maybe two hours later in such a state of fright, I suspect he shoved me in my sleep. He was lying in the darkness with his eyes open, as he had clearly been doing for some time. He said something – something horrible, I can’t remember what it was – and we were in the middle of breaking up; shouting, grabbing dressing gowns, slamming doors. It went from Fiachra to everything, with nothing in-between.

You always
.

You never
.

The thing about you is
.

It was, in a spooky way, just like being married. Though there were, crucially, differences of style. Conor used to take the moral high ground, for example, and Seán doesn’t bother – the air up there doesn’t suit him, he says. No, Seán doesn’t get aggrieved, he gets mean and he gets cold, so I always end up weeping in a different room, or trying to placate him. Sitting in the silence. Lifting my hand to touch him. Putting the work in. I coax him back to me.

Then
he gets aggrieved.

Anyway.

Making up is always sweet.

And though I miss the future I might have had, and each and all of Conor Sheils’ fat babies, I do not think that we are selfish to want to keep the thing unbroken and beautiful; to hold on to the knowledge that comes when we look into each other’s eyes.

I just don’t know how to explain it.

I thought it would be a different life, but sometimes it is like the same life in a dream: a different man coming in the door, a different man hanging his coat on the hook. He comes home late, he goes out to the gym, he gets stuck on the internet: we don’t spend our evenings in restaurants, or dine by candlelight anymore, we don’t even eat together, most of the time. I don’t know what I expected. That receipts would not have to be filed, or there would be no such thing as bad kitchen cabinets, or that Seán would switch on a little sidelamp instead of flicking the main switch when he enters a room. Seán exists. He arrives, he leaves. He forgets to ring me when he is delayed, and so the dinner is mistimed: the Butler’s Pantry lamb with puy lentils that I heat up in the microwave. He reads the newspaper – quite a lot, actually – and there is nothing so wrong with any of this, but sometimes the intractability of him, perhaps of all men, drives me up the wall.

It’s like they don’t know you exist unless you are standing there in front of them. I think about Seán all the time when he is gone, about who he is, and where he is, and how I can make things right for him. I hold him in my care. All the time.

And then he walks in the door.

Seán in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry, with his back to me and his face to the view, and the rowan tree at his side has a skipping rope tangled in its branches that are still just twigs.

The day has been warm and I have had a lot of Chardonnay. I am recently back from Australia. I am in love and I am working really hard at the whole Enniskerry thing with the neighbours and the kids. So the man who is standing at the bottom of the garden is just a little rip in the fabric of my life. I can stitch it all up again, if he does not turn around.

Seán stands at the window in his pyjamas, with the frost flowering across the window. Or he stands at the window in the summer light and his naked back is a puzzle of muscle and bone – he still looks like a young man, from behind – and I want to whisper,
Turn around
.

Or,
Don’t turn around
.

The weeks I spent waiting for his call, the months I spent waiting for him to leave Aileen. The loneliness of it was, in its own way, fantastic. I lived with it, and danced with it. I brought it to a kind of perfection the Christmas before last, just a few months before he went clear.

The house in Terenure had been on the market four months already, and a flood of people had been through the place, opening cupboards, pulling up the corners of carpets, sniffing the air. My living room, the sofa where I sat, my mother’s bed, were all – they still are – on the internet for anyone to click on and dismiss: the stairs we slid down on our bellies, the dark bedroom over the garage, the stain around the light switch. I found a discussion board online where they were laughing at the price – but other than that, it was hard to know what people thought. A single bidder who might have been an investor made a lot of fuss but didn’t come through. A married couple with kids offered low, and then faded. And so it was Christmas. My father was not there to ruin the day. My mother was not there to make it all better. My sister was not speaking to me. My lover was in the cold bosom of his family, wearing a paper hat.

I thought about him all day: his daughter sitting at his feet, writing her first ever email,
Hello Daddy!
His wife in the kitchen, her hair drooping in the steam from the brussels sprouts. His wretched mother looking about her with a glittering eye.

I had a pathetic little tree in the corner of the living room, a plastic thing you plug in, with light running to the tips of its fibre-optic needles. I made myself a sandwich for lunch and drank a cup of tea. I thought about leaving the house but I just couldn’t. There was traffic on the road outside, but they were all travelling to each other: even the taxi men had their wives beside them and their children in the back seat.

There were times, in the last years of my mother’s life, when she could not walk out the front door, and on that day, moving from room to room, I think I understood why. Inside was unbearable, and outside beyond my imagining.

I finally drove into town around two o’clock; where I abandoned the car on a set of double yellow lines. In the windows of the Shelbourne, you could see the respectable flotsam tucking into their hotel turkey, or lifting their heads to look out on deserted streets. I walked past the locked gates of Stephen’s Green, down the empty maw of Grafton Street, the mannequins in the shop windows frozen as if to say: this is it! this is the day! I thought, if I fell down in the road, there would be no one to find me until morning. By the wall of Trinity, I passed a tall couple who looked like tourists. They turned their faces as I walked by, chiming,
Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas
, and I felt it keenly; the pure shame of it. I did not exist. I would end up breaking windows, just to show that I was real. I would shout his name: my lover who could not risk – he could not risk it! – a text or a call.

I didn’t break any windows, of course. I made my way back to the car and drove home. When I checked my phone, I found a message from Fiona. It read, ‘Happy Christmas, xxxxxx yr sis’ and it made me cry.

In fact something did come through from Seán about seven o’clock. It said, ‘Check the shed’ where I found a bunch of roses and a slender half-bottle of Canadian ice-wine. And despite the fact that I do not really drink anymore, I ended up drinking the lot of it, following the last sweet drops with a skull-splitting dose of whiskey. None of it was right – the perfect drink does exist, but it is never, somehow, the one you have in your hand. I worked on, nonetheless, until I was steady and empty and clean. The next day I was worried I had made a noise sitting there; some keening, lowing, honk of pain, but I am pretty sure I kept silent, and that when the day was over, the season slaughtered, I managed, with some dignity, to rise and turn and walk upstairs to bed.

I woke up late on Stephen’s Day with the headache I so richly deserved and, after a breakfast of tea and Christmas pudding, I got in the car and crawled out to Fiona’s house in Enniskerry. I wept a bit as I drove, and put on the windscreen wipers by accident. I did not call beforehand. I did not know what to say.

It was three o’clock when I arrived and darkness was already in the air. I parked for a moment and saw no sign of life, but my nephew Jack was in the front room and he opened the door before I had the chance to knock. He stared me up and down, wondering how to respond to the amazing fact that I was real. Then he decided on indifference.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi Jack.’ He hung on to the side of the door, staring at me through the gap.

‘Where’s your Mum?’

‘She’s upstairs having a cuddle.’

‘Right.’

There seemed very little I could say to this, but he had already turned and run back into the front room. The door was still open, so I pushed through into the hall and closed it quietly behind me.

‘And where’s your sister?’ I said, carefully. ‘Out.’

‘And what are you doing?’

‘I’m writing a book,’ he said.

He was on his knees in the living room. I thought he might tell me more about it, but he just flopped back down on to the floor and pulled the pages of his copy book into the crook of his arm. He stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and wrote: bum in the air, cheek on the page, eyes inches away from the pen’s moving tip.

I sat and watched him for what seemed like a long time. The house was entirely silent. I was about to ask him more questions, when I heard someone come downstairs and go into the back of the house. It was Fiona, I saw her through the connecting doors. She was wearing her dressing gown and she looked, I thought, distinctly rested, you might almost say ‘refreshed’. She put the kettle on, then saw me and took fright.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘I just arrived,’ I said.

‘Jack, you should always tell me if there’s someone at the door. Always, all right?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said trying to protect him from her.

‘Do you hear me, Jack?’

‘All right.’

She looked at me and gave a crooked smile.

‘You want some tea?’

‘We need to talk about the house,’ I said later when the relief hit.

‘Yeah. The house,’ she said, and waved a depressed hand in the air. And to be fair to Fiona, she has never been greedy in that way.

‘Did I tell you, we sold the place in Brittas?’

‘No.’

‘Well we did. I’m telling you, nothing is shifting over a million. Nothing. Shay says.’