I will never be rid of that woman.
The first few months together in Terenure, everything reminded Sean of how much he hated Aileen. Especially me. Everything I did reminded him of his wife.
One morning, I told him he would catch a cold. This was in the early days, after the bike was bought but before he had figured the clothes, so he went out in his shirtsleeves, folding his suit jacket over the handlebars.
‘Careful you don’t catch cold,’ I said, watching from the front door, and he went still for a moment before getting up on the bike and cycling away.
That evening we fought about something stupid – our first domestic – and it turned out, once the spat was over, that I had reminded him of his wife. Because whenever Sean was going on a plane, in whatever season, autumn or spring
– he could never remember what way it went – travelling to a warmer country or a colder one, Aileen would always say, ‘You’ll get a cold, you know,’ and she was always, but always, right. And Sean hated it. It was like she owned his entire immune system. And anyway, what was he supposed to do, stay at home?
There was a wasted intensity in the way he spoke about her; nailing the lid down on some coffin with nothing inside it. Or, what was inside? A joke. Some zombie wife who still twitched at the light. I spent my days trying to guess what Aileen might say, so I could say something different
– and I learned, in jig time, not to mention illness of any kind. Or weakness even. I learned not to make him feel weak in any way.
I don’t know what she did to him, but she sure did it good.
It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife. That morning he looked at the clean shirt he took out of the wardrobe and said, ‘Is there something wrong with the iron?’ Both of us stopping right there. It was not that Aileen did Sean’s shirts. Aileen had a Polish girl in to do Sean’s shirts at twelve euro an hour. But if Sean was going to live like a younger man, he would have to change.
And he did change.
A second intimacy can be very sweet. There are so many mistakes you do not have to make. I could not believe he was beside me when I fell asleep. I could not believe he was beside me when I woke. We went to the supermarket; picking up boxes of laundry tablets like Bonnie and Clyde.
‘What about these ones? You think?’
Our shoes leaving bloody footprints, all the way down the aisle.
We did the things that boring couples do: Sean cooked dinner sometimes, and I lit the candles. We went to the pictures, and for that weekend to Budapest. We even went for walks – out into the world, side by side. Sean held my hand. He was proud of me. He took an interest in my clothes and told me what to wear. He wanted me to look good. He wanted me to look good for waiters and other strangers, because we still didn’t meet his friends. Which suited me fine, I couldn’t take the pressure.
We were out one night in Fallon & Byrne’s when a woman stopped by the table.
‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘Would you look who it is.’
I did not recognise her.
‘That’s right,’ said Sean.
‘So look at you.’
She was drunk. And middle-aged. It was the Global Tax woman, the one who was there at the conference in Montreux. She chatted for a minute and then sidled back to her own table, giving me a twee, ironic little wave before sitting in with her friends.
‘Don’t mind her,’ said Sean.
‘I don’t.’ I went back to my dinner. I said, ‘She just looks so old.’
Sean looked at me, as though from a new and lonely distance.
‘She didn’t always,’ he said.
‘When was it, anyway?’
‘It was… a long time ago.’
Later, as though to remind me that it comes to us all, he said, ‘She was the same age as you are now, actually.’
And he pulled my lip with his teeth, when he kissed me.
No wonder she shrieked and writhed, the zombie wife. I thought – just in flashes – that I was actually turning into her.
I had to trust him, he said. Our second row, this, when I expected him home and he did not arrive till late – I had to trust him because he had given up everything for me. Because Aileen had doubted every word that came out of his mouth. He could not live with that again. There were times he thought she needed to be jealous: that jealousy was part of her sexual machine.
Believe me, I thought about that one for a while.
Meanwhile, we never had any tomato chutney and the cheese I bought was just bizarre.
‘Come to bed.’
‘In a minute.’
‘Come to bed.’
‘I said, “in a minute”.’
‘You said that a minute ago.’
Sean told me that I have saved his life.
‘You saved my life,’ he said. And every small thing about me is wrong. I eat too much, I laugh the wrong way. I am not allowed to order lobster off a menu; the sight of me sucking out the meat would, he said, last him a very long time. He holds me by the hips, and squeezes, testing for fat. If it hadn’t been for me, he says,
I have saved his life.
My mother is still dead.
The snow does not accuse, or not particularly. But I am alone and I do not know for how long. There is nothing on the internet. The TV rattles on. I sacked two people today, in Dundalk. I mean, I had to let them go. I sit at my laptop with my phone in my hand and wonder how the hell I got here. And where it all went wrong. If it did go wrong. Which it did not, of course. Nothing, as I am tired of saying, went wrong.
What was the last thing he said from Budapest?
‘Goodnight, Gorgeous.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, my love,’ whispering ourselves off the line.
‘Night night.’
Trailing our talk down to the fingertips.
‘Night.’
And gone.
Save the Last Dance for Me
THOSE FIRST MONTHS in Terenure, Sean did not talk about Evie, or mention her much, and I was so stupid, I did not realise he could not bring himself to say her name.
No one came to visit. It was strange, because this has always been an open kind of house – my mother used to complain about it, the way people would drop in almost unannounced. But no one dropped in on the fornicators, the love-birds and homewreckers in No. 4. The phone stayed mute: we did not even rent the line.
I said it to Fiachra: ‘We’re pariahs,’ and, as if to prove me wrong, he rocked up one Saturday morning with a bag of croissants, and a baby buggy the size of a small car.
It took all three of us to get it through the porch and parked in the hall. In the middle of this operation, Fiachra, who is a lanky object, bent over his daughter and unclipped the straps. He lifted her out and handed her to Sean, who without even a feint of surprise, set her on his hip, using his free hand to manipulate the thing closer to the wall. The child started to reach for her father just as Sean started to hand her back to him, and it was all quite
