The Forgotten Waltz

Paper Roses

A COUPLE OF months ago, I saw Conor on Grafton Street. He was pushing a buggy, which gave me pause, but then I recognised his sister beside him, home from Bondi. He did not seem surprised to see me. He looked up and nodded, as though we had arranged to meet.

His lips were chapped, I noticed. The light was too strong on his face – the way the sun sets straight down Grafton Street – and when we circled around, the better to see each other, I was bizarrely worried that my skin had aged.

‘All right. You?’

‘Yeah.’

His sister was watching us, with a look so tragic I felt like asking her did the budgie die.

‘Oh my goodness!’ I said, instead, and I bent down to look under the hood of the buggy. There was her baby, a little shock of humanity, looking me bang in the eye.

‘Gorgeous!’ I said, and asked how long she was staying, and what the news from Sydney was while Conor seemed more and more tired, just standing there.

After I walked on I got the blip of a text in my pocket.

‘Are we married?’

I kept going. I put one foot in front of the other. A second text arrived.

‘Need to talk about stuff.’ I glanced around then but Conor was thumbs deep in his mobile. Fatter too, in the harsh light. Or, not so much fat as more solid. He glanced up, and I had, as I turned away, an impression of his weight along the length of me, top to toe.

‘I’m just saying,’ says Fiachra. ‘He’s small, good-looking, witty.’

‘So?’

‘He’s your type.’

‘I don’t have a type.’

‘I’m just saying.’

So all right, they are both on the smallish side. They are both good company; both hard to know well. But underneath the charm Conor is an absent-minded sort. And Sean? When the party stops, when the door closes, when the guests go home…

They are completely different people. People love Conor, but they do not love Sean. They are attracted to Sean, which is not the same thing. Because Sean has a permanent joke in his eye, and it is usually you – the joke I mean – he is such a tease. And he likes to boast a little. And he likes to do you down.

My grey-haired boy.

He always compliments the thing you don’t expect. It is never the thing you made an effort with: the dress, or the jewellery, or the hair. He compliments the thing that is wrong, so it gets more wrong all night.

‘What do you think?’

Coming down the stairs, ready to go out: there is something about my expectant look that annoys him.

‘I like the lipstick.’

These days, it is always my mouth. I should not have told him about my father in the hospice. I know that now. I tell him less and less.

My poor, raggedy mouth.

Sean Peter Vallely, born 1957, educated to be obnoxious by the Holy Ghost Fathers, reared to be obnoxious by his mother, Margot Vallely, who loved him very much, of course, but was so disappointed he did not grow up tall.

You could be worn out by it, that’s all. By this man’s inability to lose.

I am only thirty-four. That is what I caught myself thinking. There is still time. There is something the fat on his chest does – I mean, he has very little fat on his chest, and anyway I do not care – but there is something this layer does, the effort it makes, that is dispiriting. And I do not mind until his eyes check me over, like the mirror does not see him.

Then, as though he knows what I am thinking, he says, ‘Look at you. You should be out there. You should be.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

Neither of us can say the word ‘baby’.

‘I don’t want to be out there,’ I say. Thinking, He will use this as an excuse to get rid of me.

And, This is one of his tactics too.

I came in late, one Saturday, after ending up in Reynards talking shite with Fiachra until three in the morning, just like the old days. I stumbled about the bedroom, and there was, I admit, a bit of cavorting as I discarded my clothes, then I jumped into bed and snuggled up.

Sean, who had been asleep, was having none of it. Recollection is dim, but, between one grope and the next, I must have conked out. Only to wake maybe two hours later in such a state of fright, I suspect he shoved me in my sleep. He was lying in the darkness with his eyes open, as he had clearly been doing for some time. He said something – something horrible, I can’t remember what it was – and we were in the middle of breaking up; shouting, grabbing dressing gowns, slamming doors. It went from Fiachra to everything, with nothing in- between.

You always.

You never.

The thing about you is.

It was, in a spooky way, just like being married. Though there were, crucially, differences of style. Conor used to take the moral high ground, for example, and Sean doesn’t bother – the air up there doesn’t suit him, he says. No, Sean doesn’t get aggrieved, he gets mean and he gets cold, so I always end up weeping in a different room, or trying to placate him. Sitting in the silence. Lifting my hand to touch him. Putting the work in. I coax him back to me.

Then he gets aggrieved.

Anyway.

Making up is always sweet.

And though I miss the future I might have had, and each and all of Conor Sheils’ fat babies, I do not think that we are selfish to want to keep the thing unbroken and beautiful; to hold on to the knowledge that comes when we look into each other’s eyes.

I just don’t know how to explain it.

I thought it would be a different life, but sometimes it is like the same life in a dream: a different man coming in the door, a different man hanging his coat on the hook. He comes home late, he goes out to the gym, he gets stuck on the internet: we don’t spend our evenings in restaurants, or dine by candlelight anymore, we don’t even eat together, most of the time. I don’t know what I expected. That receipts would not have to be filed, or there would be no such thing as bad kitchen cabinets, or that Sean would switch on a little sidelamp instead of flicking the main switch when he enters a room. Sean exists. He arrives, he leaves. He forgets to ring me when he is delayed, and so the dinner is mistimed: the Butler’s Pantry lamb with puy lentils that I heat up in the microwave. He reads the newspaper – quite a lot, actually – and there is nothing so wrong with any of this, but sometimes the intractability of him, perhaps of all men, drives me up the wall.

It’s like they don’t know you exist unless you are standing there in front of them. I think about Sean all the time when he is gone, about who he is, and where he is, and how I can make things right for him. I hold him in my care. All the time.

And then he walks in the door.

Sean in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry, with his back to me and his face to the view, and the rowan tree at his side has a skipping rope tangled in its branches that are still just twigs.