It is 2002, and already, none of these people smoke. I sit on my own at the kitchen table and look for someone to talk to. The men in the garden seem no more interesting than they did when I arrived – in their short-sleeved shirts and something about their casual trousers that still screams ‘slacks’. I am just back from Australia. I remember the guys you see along Sydney Harbour-front at lunchtime, an endless line of them; running men, tanned and fit; men you could turn around and follow without knowing that you were following them, the same way you might pick up a goddamn Rice Krispie cake and not know that you were eating it, until you spotted the marshmallow on the top.
‘Ooh, pink!’
I really want a cigarette now. Fiona’s children have never seen one, she told me – Megan burst into tears when an electrician lit up in the house. I pull my bag from the back of the chair and idle my way across the threshold, past Shay, who waves a piece of meat at me, through rain-bleached tricycles and cheerful suburbanites, down to where Fiona’s little rowan tree stands tethered to its square stake and the garden turns to mountainside. There is a little log house here for the kids, made out of brown plastic: a bit disgusting actually – the logs look so fake, they might as well be moulded out of chocolate, or some kind of rubberised shit. I lurk behind this yoke – and I am so busy making this seem a respectable thing to do; leaning into the fence, smoothing my skirt, furtively rooting in my bag for smokes, that I do not see him until I light up, so my first sight of Sean (in this, the story I tell myself about Sean) takes place at the beginning of my first exhalation: his body; the figure he makes against the view, made hazy by the smoke of a long-delayed Marlboro Light.
Sean.
He is, for a moment, completely himself. He is about to turn around, but he does not know this yet. He will look around and see me as I see him and, after this, nothing will happen for many years. There is no reason why it should.
It really feels like night-time. The light is wonderful and wrong – it’s like I have to pull the whole planet around in my head to get to this garden, and this part of the afternoon and to this man, who is the stranger I sleep beside now.
A woman comes up and speaks to him in a low voice. He listens to her over his shoulder, then he twists further to look at a small girl who hangs back from them both.
‘Oh for God’s sake, Evie,’ he says. And he sighs – because it is not the child herself who is annoying him but something else; something larger and more sad.
The woman goes back to scrub at the gunk on Evie’s face with a paper napkin that shreds itself on her sticky skin. Sean watches this for a few seconds. And then he looks over to me.
These things happen all the time. You catch a stranger’s eye, for a moment too long, and then you look away.
I was just back from holidays – a week with Conor’s sister in Sydney, then north to this amazing place where we learned how to scuba dive. Where we also learned, as I recall, how to have sex while sober; a simple trick, but a good one, it was like taking off an extra skin. Maybe this was why I could meet Sean’s eye. I had just been to the other side of the world. I was looking, by my own standards, pretty good. I was in love – properly in love – with a man I would soon decide to marry, so when he looked at me, I did not feel afraid.
Perhaps I should have done.
And I can’t, for the life of me, recall what Evie looked like that day. She would have been four, but I can’t think how that would play on the girl I know now. All I saw that afternoon was a child with a dirty face. So Evie is just a kind of smudge in the picture, which is otherwise so clear.
Because the amazing thing is how much I got in that first glance: how much, in retrospect, I should have known. It is all there: the twitch of interest I had in Sean, the whole business with Evie; I remember this very clearly, as I remember the neat and indomitable politeness of his wife. I got her straight off, and nothing she subsequently did surprised me or proved me wrong. Aileen, who never changed her hair, who was then and will always remain a size 10. I could wave to Aileen now, across the bridge of years, and she would give me the same look she gave me then, pretty much. Because she knew me too. On sight. And even though she was so smiling and correct, I did not fail to see her intensity.
Aileen, I think it would be fair to say, has not moved on.
I am not sure I have, myself. Somewhere up by the house, Marshmallow Woman is laughing too hard, Conor is elsewhere, Aileen’s paper napkin, in a tasteful shade of lime-green, will soon leave shreds of itself on Evie’s sticky skin, and Sean will glance my way. But not yet. For the moment, I am just breathing out.
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 ‘snoord’.
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
