had to go up a size, due to too much wedded bliss, and went mad in the shop and bought two. ‘One on, one drying on the line.’
Sean talked about wearing his father’s navy underpants on the beach in Courtown, and never forgiving his mother for it, the way she stitched up the flies and said they were just like the real thing. The story made us realise how much older he was than us – which also explained the stone house down the road from Fiona and Shay’s in Enniskerry. Myself and Conor still got age-rage when people waggled their bricks and mortar at us. ‘You have a nice house? That’s because you’re old, you bastard,’ though Sean – so wiry and compact – seemed hardly grown-up at all. The pair of them, husband and wife, were like mantelpiece ornaments, each so particular in the way they moved, and I felt myself inflate slowly on the beach beside them. I was huge! I was horny! I was… careful. When I looked at Sean, and he at me, it was always eye to eye.
In fact, as I discovered later, Sean wasn’t judging my body one way or another. He just waited for my own judgement to rise and then smiled it back at me. It was one of his tricks. I should have known about his tricks.
Two passing teenagers, for example, fabulous and tall; he stared at them for a second too long – stared hard, like he might have to go over there and fuck them, right now. Then he turned back to look at disappointing you.
I was sort of scorched by it, I have to say.
This is why Fiona started burbling on about buying a house in France. It was because she wanted to impress Sean – a man who, in his Speedos, was not exactly a siren song. He stirred us up. Everything he said was funny, and everything seemed to do you down. Or buoy you up. He could do that too. He sat about; a black T-shirt covering his little mound of stomach, and he pushed into the sand with his tough, white toes.
Even in the strong sun, I was caught by the beauty of his eyes, which were larger than a man’s eyes should be and more easily hurt. I saw the child in him that afternoon, it was easy to see: an eight-year-old charmer, full of mischief and swagger. But I don’t know if I saw how tactical it all was. I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.
Or not me. It was hard to tell.
One way or another, we all ended up boasting. Practically naked as we were, in our very ordinary, Irish bodies (except Fiona’s, which wasn’t on show), we sat and bragged for a while, while the children dug in the sand and ran about, and the beach and the sky continued, beautiful, without us.
‘What was all that about?’ said Conor, in the car on the way home. ‘Jesus.’
Will You Love Me Tomorrow
THAT WINTER, JOAN complained of swelling in her feet, which, for our mother, was a terrible comedown, the row of shoes she had, going back thirty years, all forsworn for Granny boots: she just hated it. She got supplements in the health food shop and complained of depression – she was, actually, depressed, I thought – and it never occurred to her, or to any of us, to do anything about it except mope and talk on the phone about kitten heels and peppermint lotion and the various shades in which you might get support tights.
And I had gone back on the pill, which isn’t exactly important, except that the pill always makes
And I was busy, it seemed like I was always on a plane. There were times my toiletries never made it out of their see-through plastic bag.
Conor’s mother arrived for the weekend; she sat there eating breakfast and floated the opinion that two pillowcases were more hygienic, she always thought, than just one.
‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s a third of your life.’ And I didn’t throw her out or shout at her that the son she reared didn’t know you could change sheets, he thought they came with the bed.
‘You know,’ I said. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’
Mrs Shiels had five children: two in Youghal, and two breeding mightily in Dundrum and Bondi. A capable, glamorous woman, she was all set to use us for her Dublin shopping base – she knew it and I knew it. For Christmas, I got her some vouchers for a posh hotel.
‘The Merrion!’ she said. ‘Lovely.’
This was a Christmas I could have been with my own mother, but which I spent instead in the middle of a scrummage down in Youghal, with forty people whose names I did not know, each and every one of whom hated Dubliners (don’t tell me otherwise) for the fact that they weren’t from fucking Youghal.
Christ.
I can’t believe I am free of all that. I just can’t believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It’s the nearest thing to magic I have yet found.
But the pill is important for another reason too, I suppose, because if it hadn’t been for the pill, I might not have slept with Sean that time in Montreux. Which was – and this is a peculiar thing to say – the only time it did not matter. Apart from anything else, there was a lot of, I think, Alsace Riesling involved.
It happened at a conference. Of course. A week of management-speak on a Swiss lake with flow charts and fondue, and a little trip on a wooden boat, with a mixed gang of semi-state and private sector, a few from Galway, most Dublin-based, and drinking on the last couple of nights, until 4 a.m. Most of them, I might also mention, were men.
The title of the week was ‘Beyond the EU’. I was there to talk ‘International Internet Strategy’ – delighted to get the invite, which was a step up for me. The hotel was a confection in cream and red velvet, with gilt everywhere and stains on the carpets that might have been a hundred years old. And there on the first morning, under the heading ‘The Culture of Money’ was the name ‘Sean Vallely’.
‘You made it,’ he said. He looked better than I remembered. Maybe it was the fact that he was dressed.
‘I wondered who it was,’ I said.
‘Ah, wheels within wheels,’ he said.
We shook hands.
His palm felt old, I thought, but most palms do.
I checked him out giving a seminar that first morning: I glanced in through the open door and saw him eating the room. His open jacket flapped behind him, as he turned to one corner and then the other. He worked the air in front of his chest; he cupped the thought, and held it out, and let it go.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘do you dislike rich people?’
It was quite a spiel.
‘You. What’s your name? Billy. OK, Billy. Do you like rich people?’
‘I’m not bothered.’
‘You take it personally, don’t you? The house, the car, the holidays in the sun. You take it personally, because you’re Irish. If you were American, you’d let them have it. Because, you know, these people are not connected to you. They bought their nice house and your name didn’t even come up. They went to the Bahamas and they didn’t even forget to invite you.’
There were two speakers each morning, and people were split into groups for workshops during the afternoons. I thought Sean was sleeping with the ‘Global Tax’ woman, or that he had slept with her. But, I learned later, they just didn’t like each other, or so he said.
Meanwhile there were the chocolate tastings and shopping opportunities and much rubbish to talk. The wilder ones, myself included, formed a kind of gang, with large amounts of drinking to get through. There were two Northern Irish guys ‘from either side of the divide’ whose catchphrase became, ‘just so long as nobody gets shot’. There was a really nice gay guy who played torch songs at the piano in the bar and the Global Tax woman, who drove me up the wall by stopping the conversation, many times, in order to make her point yet more clear. By
