Wise Follies (5 page)

I head grimly towards my laptop computer and the subject of solo sexual stimulation. As I do so I glance at the photo of my mother, smiling wistfully out at me from her silver frame. I wish she was still alive. I wish I could ask her about Eamon and about so many other things. Because I know she heard whispers in other rooms. Whispers from another life that she might have lived, and now I often hear them too. Sometimes I think I mislaid a part of me a long time ago, and I just can’t seem to find it. Without it everything seems different, yet I’m not sure what it is. And maybe that’s why I so often find myself dreaming of the carefree childhood days Annie and I so seldom speak of. The days when the loudest whispers came from the wind as it blew through the tall trees by the river. The time when I loved Aaron and Aaron loved me, though we would have giggled if anyone had said it. I somehow need these memories, and yet if I could run away from them I think I might. For they are the ‘long perspectives’ Philip Larkin wrote about in his poem ‘Reference Back’. The long perspectives ‘Open at each instant of our lives’ that:

…show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.

Chapter
4

I think Annie is
right. I do need to get out and meet more people. I doubt if I could manage that ‘singles dance’ she spoke of. Maybe joining an evening class would be a good tentative step towards sociability. An adult education brochure from the local college came through the door last night. I think I’ll opt for figurative painting. I’ve a nice photo of my childhood home in my album and I’d like to try to capture it in oils.

I rather wish I hadn’t started to browse through that album actually. It’s made me very nostalgic. Even more so than usual. I didn’t know I’d kept quite so many photos of Aaron. He’s smiling out at me from every second page. As I look at his big wide smile memories come flooding back to me, startlingly undiminished. It’s almost as if I’m back in the small country village I grew up in. It’s as if he might tap gleefully on the window any moment.

Aaron was my first best friend. He lived near me in a big house. He had long legs and a mop of browny blond hair and was very keen on ants. He kept some in a special container. You could see what they were up to through the perspex glass. He also had one of those strange things between his legs I learned was called a ‘willy’. I’d seen a bigger one on my father when he was having a bath, and on that man who didn’t manage to keep the towel wrapped around him on the beach in Ballybunion. But, apart from his willy, Aaron and I were very much alike. He was a bit more daring than me, and he had a catapult. But we could finish each other’s sentences. And frequently didn’t need to speak at all.

Most afternoons, on the way home from school, Aaron and I used to go into the shop run by two spinster sisters – the Delaneys – and buy some pink marshmallow mice with proper tails. The Delaney sisters handed them to us with thin, careful hands. They always had the radio on and one bar lit on the electric fire. They were in their fifties and had Never Married.

Never Married. Those words had a strange ring to them when I was a girl. A bit like Never Washed, only marginally less surprising. I studied the Delaney sisters as though they were a kind of finch in one of Aaron’s bird books. What on earth made a woman ‘never marry’ and therefore be ‘alone’, even if she lived with her sister?

‘We just never met the right man,’ Ethel said when I asked.

This was not in fact entirely true. Agnes, her sister, had met the ‘right man’. I’d heard Mum talking about it. The thing was he lived in England and if Agnes went to join him who would help Ethel run the shop and look after their elderly mother? So she’d stayed in the village and this man was never mentioned, to us anyway. But when Agnes was behind the till she always had the radio on more loudly.

Primary school always had a smell of old apples to it. A sandy-coloured man called Mr O’Donovan gave us ‘special’ French lessons late on Thursday afternoons. You had to pay for them so only about half the class stayed on.

Mr O’Donovan used tapes and a lot of them were about a certain Monsieur Thibaud, only sometimes the tape went funny and he was called M on S i eeeeur TH I I b a uud. I liked when that happened. Mr O’Donovan used to get annoyed and started to fiddle with his machine while the rest of us got a break from Monsieur Thibaud, who seemed to lead an incredibly boring life. He told us all about himself in French. He got into his car and he got out of it. He went into a shop and reached into his pocket for his purse. He counted things very carefully, saying every number. He said ‘hello’ in many different ways and repeated his name and where he came from over and over again, as if we hadn’t heard him the first time. He went on and on.

Mrs Forrest, the Sunday School teacher, did too. The best way not to let her get to you was to pretend she was a television. She was supposed to be talking about Jesus, but she went on a lot about herself. For instance, the Feeding of the Five Thousand might remind her of a picnic she’d organized when there hadn’t been enough bread rolls. If it wasn’t for the felt pictures I don’t know how we would have put up with her.

The felt pictures were great. You could move say, Jesus, around, but the felt background remained the same. You could put donkeys on roofs and sheep in boats. You could move entire mountains.

Aaron’s Dad was very keen on taking photographs. Mine wasn’t. I had to pester him about it. ‘Take one now – pleeeease,’ I’d plead at family gatherings. ‘Look – Berty has a rose stuck in his collar. That would be a good one.’

Berty was my Aunt Phoeb’s Yorkshire terrier and she fussed over him far more than she fussed over her husband, Sean. Berty had piles of toys and doggy chocolate and stuff like that. He was rather neurotic. Aunt Phoeb had to be adored by someone and she’d groomed Berty for this task. When she was absent he was desolate. When she returned he was ecstatic. In the long bits in between he watched her and waited.

Uncle Sean didn’t mind all this because he was a fanatical golfer. ‘I’m going to play golf,’ he’d say, as if the words themselves would clear a smooth, respectful space around him. Sean seemed more married to golf than to my aunt. She was not one of those wives who watch their husbands trot off on some ostensibly pointless pursuit with an indulgent smile. His preoccupation with small white balls eventually made her lose respect for him. She used to tell my mother he was ‘running away’ and ‘shirking his commitments’. In fact she became so angry with him about it one began to feel a certain reluctant sympathy for his absence. Though people spoke of marriage as the ‘icing on the cake’, my childhood observations led me to believe it was sometimes more like marzipan.

I wonder if marriage to Eamon would make me revise this opinion.

I’m looking at the adult education brochure again as I munch my breakfast. I decide that I’d better ring the college today before all the painting classes are booked up. Then, as I make myself a cup of coffee, I notice that the stray cat who has adopted Mira and myself is padding around the garden hungrily. He isn’t hungry actually. I know this because when I tried to feed him he just looked up at me in a bewildered manner. Mira must have given him breakfast before she left. I don’t know what he’s waiting for – love perhaps. The thing is, any time I try to stroke him, he just runs away. I open the back door and address him sternly. ‘Look, I’m tired of this charade,’ I say. ‘You’ll just have to conquer your fear of intimacy or you won’t get any more Whiskas.’ This of course is a lie, and he knows it. Cats are rather like men in that way.

The handsome young man who’s just moved in – whose house overlooks the garden – is playing ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ on his guitar. He must be sitting outside. I can hear him quite clearly. He pauses at every chord change. All his chords sound much the same – a sort of loose twang. He’s singing very earnestly, lending great emotion to every word, but he’s off key half the time. He moves quickly on to Donovan and then Paul Simon. He doesn’t seem to be looking for a song to play so much as one that will play him. That will spring from the instrument with its own volition. I hope he doesn’t make a habit of serenading his neighbours in this manner. I’d have to buy earplugs. The cat, however, seems fascinated by the noise. He jumps on to the wall to have a look.

‘Hello, puddy. Come to give me a bit of encouragement, have you?’ I hear the man saying in what sounds like a slightly American accent. The cat doesn’t run away. He usually does when strangers talk to him. Maybe he’s getting tamer after all.

I glance in the hallway mirror before I leave. Dear God, I’ve got another small spiky hair on my chin. I know this can happen when one gets older, but why? Where on earth do they come from? I glance at my watch. Oh dear, I’m late. Time does funny things in the morning. It seems to speed up when I’m at home and slow down as soon as I reach the office.

‘Blustery day,’ says Mrs Peabody, my elderly neighbour, who’s picking up a carton of milk from her doorstep as I blast out my front door.

‘Yes, but quite bright,’ I answer, smiling from the teeth out. I can’t do a proper smile yet. It takes me a long time to wake up properly. I sometimes wonder if I’ve ever managed it completely.

‘It’s quite mild, but there may be showers later,’ says Mrs Peabody, who is an avid listener to weather forecasts.

‘Indeed, there is some patchy cloud,’ I agree. ‘Well, I’d better dash if I’m going to get my bus.’

As soon as I get on the bus I put on my Discman earphones. It’s a good way of not getting into conversation. When passing acquaintances on the street one can observe the rituals of friendliness and distance. When they plonk themselves beside you on a bus you have to summon up a plausible personality, and I haven’t been feeling plausible for ages now – especially not this early in the morning.

Sometimes I find myself staring at men on buses. Men who, perhaps, have a toddler on their knees who they are being nice to. I watch them burying their faces sweetly into their child’s hair and wonder if I could have spotted their potential, say, ten years ago. Back when they were probably as footloose as I still am. Could I have spotted this tenderness under, say, four pints of Guinness and a World Cup T-shirt? Someone obviously did. Someone who knew that tenderness was what she needed.

I take out my Discman and turn on my meditation CD. According to it I am on a beach and feeling enormously calm. An American voice is telling me that I am someplace between Naples and Fort Myers. I like that he presumes my acquaintance with these Florida locations. That he thinks that maybe I jump into a jeep and speed off to them at weekends with a stash of Budweiser cans in my trailer. The thing is, I don’t seem to have studied the map too carefully this morning because I don’t end up on a beach. I visit my imaginary villa in Provence instead.

It’s a wonderful villa. It has green wooden shutters and the front door is framed by bougainvillea. I wear silver rings with big interesting stones when I’m there. I go for long sunny walks in loose cheesecloth dresses and picnic in lavender-covered fields. I collect baguettes from boulangeries and watch lizards sunbathing. There’s a small town nearby and it’s full of friendly people. I sit with them at sidewalk cafés. Whole afternoons slip by without my noticing. I also paint wonderful landscapes which sometimes end up in Paris. I keep hens and don’t care when I find hairs on my chin. I am extremely happy. And though I am nearing my stop – I can tell this without even looking out the window – I linger at my villa for a small stolen moment longer. I need these patches of reverie and meditation – I need them badly. For not only am I in transition between locations, I am in transition between myself. Commuting from the leafy centre of my deepest longings to the stern suburb of necessity.

As soon as I sit down at my desk Gerry pops his head over the open plan partition that separates us. ‘Is it the fourth or the fifth?’ he asks.

‘The fifth,’ I reply. I have only become so sure of dates since Gerry has started asking me them. In some way he has shifted the responsibility.

‘Do anything exciting this weekend?’ asks Cindi, stopping by my desk. She always asks me about my weekends with great eagerness. It’s as if, after years of fairly prosaic replies, she believes I’m suddenly going to announce that Colin Farrell popped by for supper on Saturday. Or that I briefly joined the Folies Bergère and only just made the dawn flight back.

‘I had quite a dirty weekend actually.’