The Forgotten Waltz

there must be someone they could sue.

Or we thought Sean was making money. It turns out he was actually losing money. But you know, it still felt good.

I don’t think he liked the baths, though. ‘Talk about Midnight Express,’ he said – meaning that Turkish prison movie from the seventies. We talked all evening, and we stayed too late in the hotel bar, and he fell asleep still holding the remote control.

‘There’s an Ibis out by the airport.’

He has a third bag now, hauled out from the bottom of the wardrobe, a knock-off Bally he got in Shanghai. The bed is covered with luggage.

‘No, don’t do that,’ I say. ‘Stay in town.’

And he stands there, looking at it all.

‘Jesus, it’s cold.’

He slaps over to the wardrobe and comes back to the bed empty-handed. Then he grabs his clean gear out of the gym bag and says, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just come back.’ And he starts to put the tracksuit on.

Sean’s legs are white. The hair has rubbed away from his shins and calves – not a thing I would have noticed, until I saw him one day in front of the mirror, craning around to check, like a woman with crooked seams.

‘I’ll do a quick gym.’

‘Good luck.’

‘I’ll be back in a bit.’

‘I’m gone too,’ I say. ‘Dundalk.’

‘Don’t make me jealous.’

He kisses me, quickly, as I lie there in the bed.

‘If we make it, either of us, through the snow,’ I say.

And he goes. No breakfast. The scrape of the garage door, with his bicycle being pushed through it.

An empty space in front of a window. A wilderness on the glass, of encroaching ice. The smell of snow.

I am late, myself, now. I lie there for a second, then another second, and am out from under the duvet and into the bathroom before he has joined the flow of traffic on Templeogue Road.

I twist the knob on the shower and go to brush my teeth while the water warms, turning the light on over the mirror.

Rrr-chink.

That string – the little plastic doo-dah at the end of it is chipped, and the string is knotted underneath to hold it on – it is eating itself with knots, crawling higher up the wall, and the twine itself is dense with whatever is left by twenty, thirty years of human fingers, as we approach that mirror, and pull it down. Rrr-chink! I am so intimate with the sound of it, and the silence that follows as we acknowledge the image that meets us in the glass, and allow it, a little grudgingly, to be ourselves.

Remember me?

No.

The cleanest place in the house, that mirror; the way it refuses to hold the past. I leave it to the blank contemplation of the far wall, step into the shower-stall, and drag the door closed: the same metal pipe squirting water at its base, the same shower head. New water though; nice and hot.

The towel, with a pattern of pink roses and mint-green leaves, is nearly as old as I am, and still soft. But most of the family stuff is gone, and I rarely use what is left of it. We sleep in Fiona’s old room, which seems a little odd – but less odd, somehow, than my childhood bed, which is next door to my mother’s old bed, which was once my father’s bed too. The spare room is for Evie. So we make love in this one place, the rest of the house remains inviolate. I take up only two drawers in the chest of drawers, and Sean takes the other two. We live on the sound of my mother’s old radio, our laptops, one clapped-out TV. We leave very little trace.

This is, surprisingly, easier for Sean who would rather have nothing than the wrong thing – and this is part of his snobbery too.

‘Don’t be such a snob,’ I say.

‘Why not?’ he said once and I said, ‘It’s so ageing.’

I love Sean. I am in love with Sean. I only punish him to keep him by my side. The cufflinks are gone, the Ray- Bans are forgotten in the glove compartment. He cycles into work now, his iPod playlist is a joy to behold. And in the middle of the night I help him kick off the pyjamas. I place my foot between his thighs and push them down.

The empty bedroom makes me want him again. I go to the wardrobe and pick out something he likes, even though he will not see me wearing it. I take his perfume from the bedside locker – the gift of rain – and grab the laundry basket on my way downstairs.

Halfway down, I step over some version of myself; a girl of four or six, idling or playing in the place most likely to trip people up. This is where children sit, I know this now; how they love doorways, in-between places, the busiest spot. This is where they go vague and start to dream.

Oh for God’s sake.

My mother’s shoes are some posh colour that is hard to name; sable, or taupe. Her arms are full of clean clothes.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I go about on her familiar track and I find it all comforting and sad; the jolt in the neck of the tap as the water hits; the aimless click of the ignition waiting for the gas to light.

Whomp.

The washing machine is the new one she bought, after the old one that gave her so much trouble. I know she found it hard to build up a full load. A lot of her stuff was dry clean only; it is possible, in that last year, that the machine was not much used. Or so I thought when I opened the wardrobe in her bedroom and caught the thin, sour smell of abandoned clothes.

‘Old age doesn’t smell much,’ she said once, in her arch way. And she was right. But it does smell a little.

It was some time before we opened the cupboards and the drawers. Shay said nothing could be touched for two weeks – something to do with probate, though I am sure we left it for nearly four. A month at least, to let the place fade a little, before we could begin to dismantle her life; divvy it up and throw it away. Then the surprise to find that it had not actually faded. All her things were just as she had them; bright and clean and particular. It was too hard. She liked all that Scandinavian stuff and I brought it back from my travels: a reindeer holding candles in its antlers, paper stars I bought in Stockholm, a beautiful wooden platter. The place was frayed at the edges, of course, the flooring a little clapped out, the fittings and fixtures, as the estate agents have it, in need of renewal. But she painted the rooms in those floating northern colours between blue and green: aqua, Pale Powder, Borrowed Light. She did it herself, the lines were not quite true. I wonder why she didn’t get the painters in and where the money went: school fees, college, Armani jackets. All fur coat and no knickers, that’s the Moynihans for you, though when you think about it, the home-improvements thing didn’t happen until recently. Fiona, who for weeks at a time sees more of her plumber than her husband – that’s all new.

We went in together, to clear her things away. We met at the corner and walked down, as we used to do from school. Fiona is, in fact, the same weight she was in sixth year, though motherhood has settled in her gait and her hair colour has brightened over the years from mouse-brown to a more glamorous afghan-hound.

I don’t know what I looked like. If you asked me my age, in the weeks after Joan died, I would not have been able to say. I seemed to shift from hour to hour around some heavy, unchanging thing. I felt ancient. I felt like a child.

We looked to each other, at the front door. Fiona deferred and I put my version of the key in the lock, and we walked in to the smell of our childhoods, and the bright, neat hall.

We didn’t, in fact, sort Joan’s things. We went, as though by agreement, to our old bedrooms at the back of the house, and we sorted our own. I had a roll of bin bags and I filled two of them with fluffy toys, books, belts, beads and shoes. Only a mother could love this tat, I thought, wondering what Joan saw when she looked at this faded plastic – some happiness of her own, some childhood, that was not quite my childhood. I had lost this too.

I knotted my bags and left them on the landing, ready for the skip. Fiona took hers with her out to the car.

‘You’re not going to hang on to all that?’ I said. And she said, No, she would take them home and throw them out there.

‘Right,’ I said.