‘Hi Sean, sorry about the Poles. I’m still after them to get the numbers for you. They say Thursday. Is that all right?’
‘It’ll have to do.’
‘I’ll keep pushing,’ I say, desire like a kick of blood, that hits low down, then spreads all through me, delicious and alight. It is contained, held by the secret, my skin is the exact shape of it, because I am the secret,
Anything.
Except tell anyone, of course. Which means I can do nothing, in actual fact, in real life. Except be still and know.
‘Thursday,’ you say. ‘What’s that in Polish?’
‘Czwartek.’
‘Oooh. Nice.’
But the deal was not done after the first meeting in the Gresham Hotel. Nothing was certain, afterwards. If anything, he seemed disappointed – with himself, with me, with the inevitability of it all.
‘Give it five minutes,’ he said, when I tried to leave with him.
He placed his finger against my lips, rough and human, and then he was gone, leaving me to the blank walls and the digital display of the hotel clock, which refused to change. Five minutes. I stood by the window and saw him emerge on to the street below, bareheaded, hunched under the November drizzle.
That was it.
No arrangements, no hint of an arrangement.
Which might explain my little lapse outside his gate a week later, sitting in my car until after midnight, hanging on to the steering wheel. Because a week waiting for him to call is a very long time. You could go mad in a week.
You could go mad in an afternoon.
Our hands met, once. In bed. I remembered the shock. Our hands touched when we were otherwise naked and busy, and it was actually embarrassing – such was the charge of reality they held. I apologised, the way you might to a stranger you brush against in the street.
For a week, after the Gresham Hotel, I pulled his love towards me, sitting utterly still and thinking of nothing but the next split second, and then the next, when he would materialise, smiling, in front of me, or my phone would jump at his call.
But it did not jump. No matter how many split seconds I imagined, in how many long days, it just refused.
I did meet him sometimes, of course: I passed his desk, he passed mine. We discussed, on one occasion, the hidden calories in your average cafe latte. And then he moved on.
At home, I was cross with Conor all the time. How could he be with me all evening, eat Indian takeaway, watch ‘The Sopranos’, and not realise the turmoil I was in? If love was a kind of knowledge then he could not love me, because he hadn’t the faintest clue. It was a strange feeling. Some fundamental force had been removed from our love; like telling the world there was no such thing as gravity, after all. He did not know me. He did not know his own bed.
I turned from him at night or, maybe just once, suffered his attentions – for the misery of it, and the solace. I got up at 4 a.m., to eat cereal straight from the box, with spoonfuls of peanut butter on the side. I woke in the early morning and dressed and redressed; high heels, higher. Then I climbed down off the heels and put on my flats, and buttoned my blouse back up, and went to work. And, on Sunday night, eight days after I left that room in the Gresham Hotel, I found myself outside Sean’s gate in the darkness, hanging on to the steering wheel, making deals, casting spells.
On Monday, I bought him something.
The local vegetable shop is a little yuppie shed, open to the elements. In December it has boxes of Christmas satsumas, green figs, pomegranates woven about by white mesh in figures of eight. I chose a little bag of lychees, cold and bumpy to the touch. I ate one on the way back to the office, standing in a doorway and sheltering from the rain. I had never tasted them fresh, before. The skin was like bark; so thick you could hear it tear. Under it was the dark white of the fruit; smooth as a boiled egg and more slippy, and in the middle of this grey, scented flesh was a deep red pip, surrounded by its own pink stain.
We had been talking about China. Sean had said I should learn some Mandarin. He said he was in Shanghai – had I ever been to Shanghai? It was like the fucking wild west out there – and he nearly bought a Teach Yourself DVD for his daughter in the airport, though she was past that stage where they sort of sing their way into speech, that perfect stage, when you understand how Chinese got invented in the first place. He said you got on those roads, those eight-lane highways, completely empty, and you understood something about the future – that you could do it. Certainly, it was scary. But the future was also
But no, I had never been to Shanghai. I put the little bag, still spotted with rain, on his desk. Is this what I wanted to say? – what is under the skin, stays under the skin. That I was willing to keep things small.
‘Where would you book,’ he said to me later, ‘if you needed an airport hotel?’
‘The Clarion?’ I said.
And three days after I shut the door of that second hotel room behind me, and caught a minibus up to the airport terminal, and got in the taxi queue, and went home unwashed and beyond caring, I answered the phone and found myself talking to his wife, being invited by his wife; who wanted, presumably, a good look at me, now that it was all too late.
It made me more sad, than anything. I put down the phone, and waved my little feather ballerina about, in an admonishing way.
Kiss Me, Honey, Honey, Kiss Me
MEANWHILE, THERE WAS the office party to get through. At 9 p.m., I am standing in the hallway of l’Gueuleton in Fade Street, saying goodbye to Fiachra who is trying to get out the door and go home to his pregnant wife. When he succeeds, Sean, who was assisting, finds the wall with his back and tips his head against the brickwork – once, twice – saying, ‘Fuck. Fuck.’ I say, ‘Where can we go?’ and he says, ‘We can’t go, we just can’t,’ but we are both quite drunk and end up dragging each other into the Drury Street car park for another endless kiss in some concrete corner that smells of petrol and the rain, with the sound of people wandering through the far levels and the squawk of found cars answering the remote.
And this, too, is another epic kiss, a wall-slider if there ever was one, I feel like I am clambering out of my own head, that the whole usual mess of myself has been put on the run by it. By the end, we are barely touching and everything is so clear and tender I find myself able to say:
‘When will I see you?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know. I’ll try. I don’t know.’
I walk through the Christmas city lights, not a taxi in sight and the town going crazy all around me, and I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like bird-song; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness.
And then home: the bite of the key in the cold lock, the smell of the still air in the hallway, and the glow, upstairs, of Conor’s laptop. I go up there – drunk, surprised each time my foot meets a step. My husband is sitting in the armchair, his face blue in the light of the screen, and nothing moves except the sweep and play of his finger on the mouse-pad and his thumb as it clicks.
‘Have a good night?’
I had, of course, no intention of going to Aileen’s damn party. But it was a long Christmas in Youghal, pulling crackers, making small-talk, tippling through each day into a state of hard sobriety that kept you awake at night, angry as a stone. Conor’s family never drank in his father’s pub, though sometimes one or other of them would shrug his jacket on and jump in a minicab to take a turn behind the bar. They lived out the Cork road, with a stream in the garden, and they kept themselves separate from the ordinary drunks of the town with cases of French wine, which they got from their importer in Mullingar.
Conor’s mother wore cream trousers to match her ash-blonde hair, and fine gold jewellery on a permanent,
