The Forgotten Waltz (2 page)

Love is Like a Cigarette

LET’S START WITH
Conor. Conor is easy. Let’s say he has already arrived, that afternoon in Enniskerry. When I go back into the kitchen he is there, lingering and listening, having a good time. Conor is low and burly and, in the summer of 2002, he is my idea of fun.

Conor never takes his jacket off. Under the jacket is a cardigan, then a shirt, then a T-shirt and under that, a tattoo. The wide strap of his bag is slung across his chest, keeping everything tamped down. He is on the mooch. This man never stops checking around him, as though for food. In fact, if he is near food he will be eating it – but neatly, in an intelligent, listening sort of way. His eyes keep travelling the floor and if he looks up it is with great charm: he is caught by something you have said, he thinks you are funny. He might seem preoccupied, but this guy is always ready for a good time.

I loved Conor, so I know what I am talking about here. He comes from a line of shopkeepers and pub owners in Youghal, so he likes to watch people and smile. I used to like this about him. And I liked the bag, it was trendy, and his glasses were trendy too, thick-rimmed and sort of fifties, and he shaved his head, which usually annoyed me but it suited him because his skin was so brown and his skull so sizeable. And his neck was large, and his back bulged and sprouted hair from the shoulders down. What can I say? Sometimes it surprised me that the person I loved was so fantastically male, that the slabs of muscle were covered in slabs of solid fat and the whole of him – all five foot nine, God help us – was fizzed up with hair, so that he became blurred at the edges, when he undressed. No one had told me you could like that sort of thing. But I did.

Conor had just finished a Masters in multimedia, he was a happening geek. I was also in IT, sort of, I work with European companies mainly, on the web. Languages are my thing. Not the romance languages, unfortunately, I do the beer countries, not the wine. Though I still think the umlaut is a really sexy distortion, the way it makes you purse your mouth for it, and all those Scandinavian ‘o’ and ‘u’ sounds give me the goose bumps. I went out with a Norwegian guy called Axel once, just to hear him say ‘snøord’.

But I went out with Conor for the laugh and I fell in love with him because it was the right thing to do. How could this be possible? That, in all the time I knew him, he never did a cruel thing.

There was no big decision to buy a house, it just made sense. Australia was our last fling, after that everything was salted away for deposits and mortgage insurance and stamp duty and solicitors’ fees – Jesus, they wrung us till we squeaked. I can’t remember what this did to the love we were supposed to be in. I can’t recall the nights. Ours was, anyway, a daytime kind of love; Conor took up windsurfing out at Seapoint, and came back smelling of chips and the sea. On Saturday afternoons we tramped around other people’s houses – three-bed semi, Victorian terrace, penthouse flat. We looked at each other standing beside thirties’ mantelpieces, and sort of squinted. Or we wandered into separate rooms where we could imagine ourselves in the space more easily, with a wall knocked, or a smell gone, or the place less uninhabited.

We did this for months. We got quite good at it. I could walk into some kip and slap a tobacco-brown leather sofa up against the longest wall, on sight. I could dangle a retro lampshade as soon as you said ‘fifties semi’, and stick an Eames chair under it, and switch on the light. But I didn’t know what my life would be like in that chair, or how I would feel about it. Better, no doubt. I was sure I would feel serious-yet-playful, grown-up and happy, I would be somehow fulfilled. But then again, as I said to Conor.

‘Then again.’

There was, when we made love at the end of these long Saturdays, a sense in which we were reclaiming ourselves for ourselves, after some brief theft.

You walk into a stranger’s house and it is exciting, that’s all, and you are slightly soiled by it. I could feel it, in the second-hand, abandoned kitchens, and in my Sunday-supplement dreams. I could feel it drain away in the moments after waking, when I realised that we hadn’t bought, we probably never would buy, a house with a sea view. It didn’t seem a lot to ask – a house that would clean your life every time you looked out of it – but it was, apparently. It was far too much to ask. I did the figures up down and sideways and I never could believe the bottom line.

The bottom line was the place we had started out from, before we lost the plot. The bottom line wasn’t so much a house as an investment; somewhere to swing our cat, that was not too far out of town.

So we found exactly that; a townhouse in Clonskeagh for three hundred grand. We were the last in, bought off the plans, drank a bottle of Krug to celebrate – all one-hundred-and-twenty euros’ worth.

Krug, no less.

It was nice.

I loved Conor then. I really did love him, and all the versions of him I had invented, in those houses, in my head, I loved them all. And I loved some essential thing too; the sense of him I carried around with me, which was confirmed each time I saw him, or a few strange seconds later. We knew each other. Our real life was in some shared head space; our bodies were just the places we used to play. Maybe that’s the way lovers should be – not these besotted, fuck-witted strangers that are myself and Seán, these actors in a bare room.

Anyway. Before our lives became a desolation of boredom, rage and betrayal, I loved Seán. I mean, Conor.

Before our lives became a desolation of boredom, rage and all the rest of it, I loved Conor Shiels, whose heart was steady, and whose body was so solid and warm.

The weekend after contracts were exchanged, we went into the unfinished house and looked around. Then we sat on the concrete floor and held hands.

‘Listen,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Listen to the money.’

The place was going up by seventy-five euro a day, he said, which was – he did the calculations under flickering eyelids – about five cents a minute. Which didn’t seem like much, I thought. Which seemed almost piffling, after all we had been through. Still, you could almost feel it, a pushing in the walls; the toaster would pop out fivers, the wood of the new-laid floors would squeeze out paper money and start to flower.

And, for some reason, we were terrified.

Don’t tell me otherwise.

The house fitted Lego-like with its neighbour, which had the basement and split the middle floor, and this threw me a bit, the fact that it was only half a house until you went upstairs. It was like the place had suffered a stroke.

Not that this was a problem, or at least not a problem you could identify. I just hadn’t expected it. And I still dream about this house, about walking up those steps and opening the front door.

The day we moved in, Conor was inside in among the boxes, sitting at his laptop like a demented organist, cursing the internet connection. I didn’t complain. We needed the money. The next few months were all about work and there was something frantic and lonely about our love in that little house (don’t get sentimental, I tell myself, the sockets moved in the wall every time you stuck in a plug). We clung to each other. Six months, nine – I don’t know how long that phase lasted. Mortgage love. Shagging at 5.3 per cent. Until one day we decided to take out a couple of car loans and get married on the money instead.

Vroom vroom.

It was the silliest thing we had ever done – either of us – and it was surprisingly good fun. It happened, after much fuss and diplomatic incident, on a lovely day in April; church, hotel, bouquet, the lot.

About seven hundred of Conor’s cousins came up from Youghal. I’d never seen anything like it: the way they stood their rounds of drink, fixed their little hats in the mirrors, and checked the weight of the hotel cutlery when they picked it up to eat. They treated the day like a professional engagement, and danced until three. Conor said it might as well be your funeral; he said they hunt in packs. And my mother – who had, it turned out, ‘always been saving for this day’ – led a seasoned troupe of the Dublin middle classes, many of them old, all of them entirely happy, as they chatted and sat and sipped their peculiar drinks: Campari, whiskey and red, Harvey’s Bristol Cream. We were just the excuse. We knew it, as we went upstairs to change out of our duds and ride each other rotten against the back of the bedroom door. We were beside the point. Free.

My mother is there in the photograph album (five hundred euro, bound in cream leather, now mouldering under the kitchen counter in Clonskeagh). She wore a lilac-grey suit and a fascinator, no less, in grey and mauve, complete with face net, and those funny black feathers that arc out, stripped to bobbing dots of black. She is there beside me. Tiny. Her hair a kind of mystery; she had it caught up some way at the back. My mother’s favourite film was
Brief Encounter
, she knew how to cry under a veil. And she always spent money on her hair. Even when she was skint, she had a way of convincing people to make her look beautiful, that it would be possible, and they did their best by her. When it comes to the hairdresser’s, she used to say, it pays to leave your moods at home.

She wouldn’t give me away, refused point blank, fixed me up instead with my father’s brother; a man I had not seen since I was thirteen years old. I thought we might meet the day before, at least, but he turned up on the morning, fresh from the airport, and when everyone went off in the first car, we were left in the front room looking at each other, while the driver idled outside.

It was the strangest moment of a very strange day. I stood trembling at the window, in my pewter silk Alberta Ferretti with a mad Philip Treacy yoke (you might even call it a fascinator) stuck to the side of my head, and every time I made to move, this guy checked his fat watch and said:

‘Make them wait. You’re the bride.’

Finally, at some mysteriously ordained moment, he crossed the living room carpet, took me by the shoulders, and said, ‘You know who it is you remind me of? My own mother. You have her lovely eyes.’

Then he offered me an old-fashioned arm and conducted me out to the car.

Was that the creepiest bit? Taking the slow march down the aisle on the arm of this old geezer, who hadn’t expressed an emotion, by the look of him, since 1965? I don’t know. The local church, which does a good line in cherry blossom, also has a very peculiar crucifix suspended over the altar. A huge thing, made of wood. The figure of Christ, which isn’t especially gory, hangs not just on the front, but also on the back of it – this for the people who end up on the other side of the altar. And it distracted me throughout the ceremony, the way it used to distract me as a child, this double Jesus, back to back with His own reflection. Standing there, in two-hundred-and-twenty euros’ worth of underwear, never mind the dress, I wanted to say, ‘What were they thinking?’ This just a milder version of the things that used to flash through my head in this church – the shapeless obscenities that plagued my school years, and which started, at a guess, at my father’s funeral when I was thirteen. All grown-up, I stood where his coffin once lay (his ghost drifted, head first, through the small of my back), and I regretted my choice of basque over Spanx, while the priest said:

Do you take?

And I said:

Yes. Yes, I do.

And Conor smiled.

Outside, the sun shone and the photographer waved, while the shiny black cars nudged each other in the yard.

We had a great time. The seven hundred cousins from Youghal, and my uncle in from Brussels. We had, Conor and myself, enormous amounts of sex on the strength of it, and a holiday in Croatia (cheap after all that excess), and we woke up back in Clonskeagh one morning; hungover, giddy and unafraid.

The next year, the next two years, I was as happy as I have ever been.

I know this. Despite the bitterness that was to follow, I know that I was happy. We worked like crazy and partied when we could. We fell into bed, most nights, after a hard day and a quick knock-back of whatever: I was beyond Chardonnay by then – let’s call them the Sauvignon Blanc years.

Conor had a sudden jump of money when he hooked a travel company who wanted to get online. He was working with other people by then, you might even say he was working
for
other people, but I don’t know if he cared. The internet was made for Conor: the way he was always interested but could never settle on any one thing. He spent hours – days – at the screen, then he was up and out of the chair; walking into town; cycling over to the Forty Foot where he swam, in cold seas and warm, with much splashing and whooshing. Everything was slightly too much, with Conor. He wore too many clothes, and when he was naked he heaved large sighs and rubbed his chest, and farted hugely as he stood in the bathroom to pee. And I ended up not believing it, somehow. I ended up – this seems a peculiar thing to say – not believing a single thing he did; thinking it was all gesture and expostulation, it was all air.

Sunny Afternoon

BUT THIS WAS
later. Or perhaps it had happened already, perhaps it was happening all along. We might have run along these parallel tracks, of believing and not believing, for the rest of our lives. I don’t know.

Because we were also flying along, myself and Conor, we were happily, sensibly, married married married. The next time I saw Seán, I had forgotten all about him. It was 2005. We were stuck at home for another summer, clearing the costs of buying the house, so we went down to Brittas Bay one bank holiday Monday, to see Fiona.

She was there for four or five weeks with the kids while Shay came down when he could – which was to say, when it suited him. You have to understand that Shay was coining it at the time, so not only did they have a house practically in the country, which is to say in Enniskerry, but a few miles away, thirty minutes in the car, they had a site in a posh mobile home park by the sea. This was – I don’t know – a hundred, two hundred grand’s worth of tat on a caravan site by the beach. It is not something I would normally be jealous of, except that I didn’t have two hundred grand to throw around like that, and nothing makes you jealous like something you didn’t actually want in the first place.

We got up early and drove down the N11, Conor with his windsurfing gear, and me with a couple of bottles of red and a load of steaks I grabbed for the barbecue. I offered the meat to Fiona when we arrived; a bulging white plastic bag that was stained on the inside with blood turning brown.

‘Ooh!’ she said.

‘It seemed like a good idea, in the shop.’

‘It was a good idea,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s an arse in a bag,’ said Conor. Which was exactly what it looked like, dangling there.

‘Leg of lamb steaks,’ I said.

My niece, Megan, started to laugh. She must have been nearly eight, and Jack, her little brother who was five, ran in shouting circles. Conor went after him, hunched over with hands waggling, until he caught the child, and threw him on the ground screaming, while Conor went (something like), ‘Har har, I am the arse, har har.’

I thought Jack was going to vomit, that this would be the end of us as a Happy Bank Holiday Family, but Fiona just gave the pair of them a steady look, then said, ‘I hope I have room,’ before clumping up the little wooden steps and going into the caravan.

When I followed, she was on her knees, pushing the meat like a pillow into the bottom drawer of the fridge. There was a pile of salad and vegetables beside her on the floor.

‘God, this place.’

‘It’s lovely,’ I said.

‘Bedsit
sur mer
.’

‘Well,’ I said – because it was hard to know what to do with it. I looked around. The plastic partitions had a sort of inbuilt wallpaper pattern, and everything shook a bit when you walked. But it was nice, too. A toy house.

‘The woman three down has wooden blinds.’

‘It’s not supposed to be real,’ I said.

‘Oh, you have No Idea,’ she said.

Shay, it turned out, was thinking about a proper summer house near Gorey, or they might look on the Continent, probably France. This Fiona said later, after too much sun and wine, when there were more people to hear. But in the morning, kneeling in front of the little fridge on a floor made slithery with sand, I felt sorry for her, my so-pretty sister, who would always be outdone by the woman three caravans down.

The weather improved through the day. The clouds headed out to sea and their shadows moved, sombre and precise, over the water. It was better than the telly. We sat outside in our big sunglasses, and waggled our painted toes, turquoise and navy blue. Fantastic. I should have brought our mother along, she would have liked it, but it hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t know why.

Conor was out on the central green, throwing frisbee for the kids, treating them like dogs.

‘Fetch!’ he shouted. ‘Fetch!’

‘They’re not dogs, Conor,’ I said, as the children stuck their faces in the grass and tried to lift the frisbee with their teeth.

‘Sit!’ shouted Conor. ‘Paw!’

It wasn’t the children I was worried about, it was their mother. But she gave another of her measured looks and said, ‘Good ploy.’

There was some code of practice here, and I never quite knew what it was.

Another child arrived. She and Megan jigged briefly in front of each other, then she too ran after the frisbee, over and back, jumping up in a doomed sort of way.

‘No, here. No here. No give it to me.’

And she tripped on her flowery flip-flops and cried. Or yowled, actually. It was an interesting noise, even in the open air. It cut out as she stopped to inhale (or choke, perhaps), then it started again, even shriller than before.

Conor, to be fair to him, did not run over to tickle her while har-harring about arse. This was a substantial child, both round and tall, and it was hard to put an age on her. It was hard to know if those were small breasts or largish amounts of fat under the cross-over cardigan – the very pinkness of which insisted she was still a child.

A woman walked across the grass and spoke to her quietly, then waited and spoke again. Which only made things worse, as far as I could tell. Megan and Jack looked on, in a state of uneasy, furtive delight. They loved a crisis, that pair. Made them shiver. Which, in turn, made me wonder how much shouting and mayhem they saw at home.

Fiona was half-out of her chair, but she seemed unsure. Even the child’s father hung back. They had been on their way from the car park when she ran ahead and he stood apart, waiting for the fit to subside. I remember feeling that someone should be grown-up about this; effect introductions, offer drinks. So I waved. And he shrugged and came over, and for a moment, it seemed as though the rest of the world had gone into slow motion, leaving us outside and free.

It was Seán. Of course. More handsome than I remembered, with a tan and longer, curly hair. A bit cheeky, actually, from the front; a bit too ironical. As though he knew me, which, I was keen to tell him, he did not. Or not yet. So we had got to, ‘Your point being?’ before the seat of his trousers had touched the stripy cotton of the fold-up chair.

I am surprised, as I remember all this – the immediacy of it, the copulatory crackle in the air – that it took almost another year before we did the bold thing; before we pulled the houses down around us; the townhouse and the cottage and the semi-d. All those mortgages. Pulled the sky down too, to settle over us like a cloth.

Blackout.

Or maybe he was like that with all the girls.

I have to backtrack a little, and say that there were other things that could have happened with our lives. We might have done it all in secret, either. I mean, no one had to know.

But, back in the daylight of the caravan park, Evie was still baying, Aileen was murmuring in a firm and even tone, while Fiona turned to Seán, like a fool, and said, ‘Would she like an ice-pop, d’you think?’

Seán winced. Our children, whose selective hearing could beat bats’, came running across the grass, and Evie limped after, whinging in a half-hearted and hopeful sort of way.

‘I’m afraid Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops,’ said Seán. ‘Do you, Evie?’ She stopped, her flip-flops clutched to her chest, and after a long and horrible pause said, ‘No.’

He sat with her in his arms during the wrangle that followed, which ended with Megan and Jack banished to the other side of the mobile home to eat their half-promised ice-pops, out of sight. He is a small enough man, Seán. He rocked her, this large child, through distant and imagined slurps and suckings – I wanted a damn ice-pop myself by this stage – while Fiona talked to Aileen about minders and crèche fees, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be better just to hit the child? Wouldn’t it be quicker and more humane?

I exaggerate. Of course.

Evie was a normal enough eight-year-old girl, Aileen was not a monster of calm, Seán was a businessman with too sharp a crease in his summer pants. It was a boring, nice day. After lunch, Conor pulled his hat down over his face and pulled his T-shirt up to warm his brown and hairy belly in the sun. I folded a sheet of paper, the way we used to at school, so you could open and shut it like a little bird’s beak with fingers and thumbs, first forward, then out to the side, and myself and Megan played fortunes: Go Figure, You Smell, Easy Peasy, with True Love hidden under the last flap. After lengthy negotiations, Evie and Jack went inside to watch a DVD. They did not have the resources, it seemed, to do anything else.

In the middle of the afternoon, my brother-in-law Shay turned up. He stopped on the grass, held his phone up high and, with a cartoonish finger, turned it off. Then he came on to the deck, kissed Fiona and said hello all round. Then he walked inside and switched off the television, and told everyone to get down to the beach, with much shouting for togs and towels and inflatable toys while Fiona found – or couldn’t find – missing sandals and keys to the front door and the hundred mysterious objects her children need: water, suncream, a green golfing visor that Megan liked, Jack’s yellow plastic rake; because, as far as I can see, kids will do anything to stay in a place where they are happy enough, up to and including making their mother weep.

‘Have you ever heard of a Loon A Tic asylum?’ I said to Megan, who regarded me with wise, monkey eyes. Meanwhile Seán’s wife, Aileen, just read the paper until everyone was ready, then she walked back to their car and lifted a single bag from the boot.

‘Right!’ she said. ‘Onward!’

Conor laughed all the way home.

‘The ice-pop!’ he said. ‘The fucking ice-pop!’

And I intoned, ‘Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops, do you Evie?’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Apparently she has some kind of thing. The child,’ I said, because that was what Fiona muttered to me by the sink, as we washed up.

‘Like what?’

‘You know, something wrong. Fiona didn’t say.’

Evie was a funny, disturbed little article, there was no doubt about it. She didn’t seem the same age or stage as Megan, though they were both around eight years old – or maybe I was biased, my niece being such a little sprite. If I had known more about these things I might have put her on a spectrum, or tried to. Except that Evie was all there – alert, trembling with it – she just found things very difficult. And whether this was, as I suspected, her mother’s fault, I couldn’t say for sure. I did find her slightly unbearable, though. It might have been something to do with the fat; those plump, kissable baby wrists; but with the wrong sort of face above them, the wrong kind of eyes. I didn’t say this to Conor, of course. I mean, I might have said, ‘She is quite an object,’ but I am pretty sure I didn’t say the fat made her unpleasant to me; I did not share my ‘failure to love’, as Megan’s teacher calls a sin these days. Besides, whatever slight annoyance ran through me when I looked at Evie left, as a residue, something both calm and keen.

Pity.

‘Poor child,’ I said. ‘It’s all her, you know,’ meaning the mother. And Conor said, ‘They should both be shot.’

He seemed to like them well enough at the time. He chatted to Seán as we all trekked over to the cold Irish Sea and Fiona chased and cajoled her children into their togs and creams, while Shay opened a bottle of red, sat on the rug and shut down, massively and at speed – it was frightening to watch – like a power cut running through Manhattan.

‘I thought he looked terrible,’ I said to Conor in the car.

‘Who?’

‘My brother-in-law,’ I said. ‘I thought he looked like shite.’

‘Shay’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about Shay.’

Conor was being a bit obtuse, these days. He was recently finding the whole contraception thing a bit ‘unconducive’, for example. To what? He did not say.

We did not talk about Seán, as far as I recall. Perhaps there was no need to. It is possible that we held an uncomplicated silence, the rest of the way home.

Certainly, in his togs, Seán – my downfall, my destiny – cut a less than imposing figure. I suppose you could say that of us all. In the bare sunshine we looked a bit peeled. Fiona, being, in her day, the most beautiful girl in Terenure, didn’t bare an inch, of course. She had some way with sarong and towel that made Brittas look like Cannes, and when we toyed with the idea of a swim, said, ‘Oh, I was in this morning,’ because whatever effort she puts into it all (and I suspect it is considerable) she never lets on.

So it was just the four of us, Conor and me, Seán and Aileen, playing Houdini with bra straps and towels, then pretending not to look at each other’s bodies on the beach. Truth be told, I didn’t really bother with Seán that day, I was too busy checking out his wife; so dull when dressed, so elegant and boyish in the nip, never mind her age. Her odd little breasts screamed ‘breasts’ at you, though – they looked so tender on her little bony ribs, like they had been grown there specially.

Seán gave me the full flat of his face, as if to ask if I had some problem with the body of his wife. But I had no problem with it, why should I? I had problems enough of my own. I had to keep Conor in front of me, for a start, until the other pair were safely wet, or, at least, looking the other way.

‘What is it?’ said Conor. ‘What do you want?’

While I hung on to him, bickering and talking rubbish, managing the towel.

Seán headed down to the surf, hugging himself, with high shoulders and picking, bouncy feet. Aileen gave the sea a cold look, snapped her suit down under her bum and started to walk. Then, at the last moment, Evie flung herself in the sand and caught her mother’s leg, hugging her thigh in terrible supplication.

‘Evie, please stop that.’

While my sister checked round her with vague eyes and loudly said, ‘Megan, what did you do to Evie?’

And I walked away from them in silence, and kept walking until the water covered my thighs.

Then I screamed.

‘Whuu! Freezing!’

But it pulled all the uncertainty out of my bones – the surprise of lifting your feet and finding there was no need for sand. I made my way through the wave’s sharp swell, towards the flat line of the horizon. By the time I turned back to the shore, pushed and loved by all that weight of water, I was happy.