Somehow I was still in this other present.
‘I didn’t say you should be feeling jealous,’ Órla said, ‘I’m trying to work out what you were feeling. Fuck me, I think you were jealous because you don’t like the friendship I have with him,’
‘You know he’s gay, right?’ I said. My head was in a dark barn with lamplights, burnished metal. I was going to be free of this, somehow, telling Mark. I didn’t want to. It was soft there, softly lit. Órla opened and closed her mouth. I saw silver time in the water, running in crisscrossing lines like the fishes for Daniel’s net.
‘But you were feeling lonely, weren’t you?’ she was saying. ‘You aren’t – you seem – a bit out of it. What’s been up with you, Tom? What’s been going on?’
I didn’t speak. The fish in the river multiplied, branched out into channels, black and silver streams of fish, and the man was waiting for them to reach him, and everything was glinting. Faster than the current. A temporary overload. I blinked, seeing fish trails in cutting water. Feeling wet pages under it, held in my hand. And then behind me, just out of my line of sight, was the man. He wasn’t in the river now, he was walking with us, towards the house, and we had stopped – making him late. He had an appointment there.
‘I’m worried about you,’ Órla said, in a brittle voice.
‘I can’t tell you,’ I said, pushing myself back from the wall. My light mood was gone altogether. My rushing thoughts gone cold for the time. I heard a faint buzzing – so many days and what had I really done with them? Sucked back thoughts. He wanted. I heard him want like a faint breath in my breath. Órla gently took my arm.
‘What’s the big secret drama, eh? You had a few nightmares? You’ve been really into some book?’
‘What?’ I rubbed my face again, my nose stung, my eyes. I couldn’t focus. Tempting to say to you, I saw the sea and it was so welcoming. I saw a circle in the sea, going round and round, saying, fall into me and don’t have worries any more.
‘Did you notice, with that diary you’ve been into lately, there’s something wrong with it?’
I shook my head. It was better to feign ignorance, to keep the threads separate.
MacAshfalls’
Do I decay, right now? Have I fallen already? Do you see the stars are out, there, through the gap, there’s one. No, probably space junk. I want a coffee. Do you want one? The stove doesn’t burn like it should. Wait. I’ll keep feeding it though. Sparks come over me. Sparks enter me. I won’t. I’m still here, for now.
Órla had sensed I was tired – I was tired, wasn’t I? She’d stopped speaking at me – like birds singing in the end what she had told me, making no more sense – and dragged me off towards the party. I saw the long women in silver white dancing and the men their slaves dancing too. Never mind we’ll talk about it later. For tonight we’ll just have a good time. Words in that vein. From me, from her. We walked up and down some suburban hill streets towards what was going to happen talking little, consulting the map on my phone – I couldn’t quite understand how to get there on foot without it, not knowing I’d already been set on this way a long time before I’d even realised. Maps in my mind were overlapping – empty countryside sprung up for a moment and faded like a camera light going off – then dimness. Are you still with me? I can’t see you. Blinded myself from staring. At flames. At the night dark up here. We had arrived at the MacAshfalls’ house. I patted the book in my pocket. I pat the book in my pocket.
The house seemed even more like a magazine spread: giant beautiful green leaves, the wooden panelling and the slant of the roof – I think even feeling so bad I made a note – at the next meeting, talk about the narrative this house would add to their business. People love this sort of space. A couple of online pieces accompanied by pictures of this would work like a charm. A warm light suffused it at that time of day. Beyond the tiredness. The people were the only corruption – out of time themselves, the interwar look, short chinned, rosy, white satin, only the cigarettes in long holders were missing, because it would be inauthentic to us, now, to be that authentic. I eyeballed a couple of Cloudberry clients as we passed by, but they didn’t recognise me in my white suit and purposefulness. I was suddenly struck with the thought that we had passed from the outside into a place where a mock-up of the nineteen-thirties was ongoing in a strange kind of experimental set-up, itself taking place in the time before I was born, the nineteen-seventies – overseers in heavy-framed glasses gripping clipboards just out of sight, some head-ups in their carpeted conference room were the ones smoking constantly as they watched us through black and white monitors. I was in step with my own mission, but the overall aim was something higher than I could grasp. A question of how we behave in circumstances where our mortality hovers above us – can we feel its white wings gently brush the top of our heads? Can we feel our circuitous pointlessness?
Almost with a cry as the music of this strange set washed us further in I grabbed Órla by the hand
