settle on any one thing. He spent hours – days – at the screen, then he was up and out of the chair; walking into town; cycling over to the Forty Foot where he swam, in cold seas and warm, with much splashing and whooshing. Everything was slightly too much, with Conor. He wore too many clothes, and when he was naked he heaved large sighs and rubbed his chest, and farted hugely as he stood in the bathroom to pee. And I ended up not believing it, somehow. I ended up – this seems a peculiar thing to say – not believing a single thing he did; thinking it was all gesture and expostulation, it was all air.
Sunny Afternoon
BUT THIS WAS later. Or perhaps it had happened already, perhaps it was happening all along. We might have run along these parallel tracks, of believing and not believing, for the rest of our lives. I don’t know.
Because we were also flying along, myself and Conor, we were happily, sensibly, married married married. The next time I saw Sean, I had forgotten all about him. It was 2005. We were stuck at home for another summer, clearing the costs of buying the house, so we went down to Brittas Bay one bank holiday Monday, to see Fiona.
She was there for four or five weeks with the kids while Shay came down when he could – which was to say, when it suited him. You have to understand that Shay was coining it at the time, so not only did they have a house practically in the country, which is to say in Enniskerry, but a few miles away, thirty minutes in the car, they had a site in a posh mobile home park by the sea. This was – I don’t know – a hundred, two hundred grand’s worth of tat on a caravan site by the beach. It is not something I would normally be jealous of, except that I didn’t have two hundred grand to throw around like that, and nothing makes you jealous like something you didn’t actually want in the first place.
We got up early and drove down the N11, Conor with his windsurfing gear, and me with a couple of bottles of red and a load of steaks I grabbed for the barbecue. I offered the meat to Fiona when we arrived; a bulging white plastic bag that was stained on the inside with blood turning brown.
‘Ooh!’ she said.
‘It seemed like a good idea, in the shop.’
‘It was a good idea,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s an arse in a bag,’ said Conor. Which was exactly what it looked like, dangling there.
‘Leg of lamb steaks,’ I said.
My niece, Megan, started to laugh. She must have been nearly eight, and Jack, her little brother who was five, ran in shouting circles. Conor went after him, hunched over with hands waggling, until he caught the child, and threw him on the ground screaming, while Conor went (something like), ‘Har har, I am the arse, har har.’
I thought Jack was going to vomit, that this would be the end of us as a Happy Bank Holiday Family, but Fiona just gave the pair of them a steady look, then said, ‘I hope I have room,’ before clumping up the little wooden steps and going into the caravan.
When I followed, she was on her knees, pushing the meat like a pillow into the bottom drawer of the fridge. There was a pile of salad and vegetables beside her on the floor.
‘God, this place.’
‘It’s lovely,’ I said.
‘Bedsit
‘Well,’ I said – because it was hard to know what to do with it. I looked around. The plastic partitions had a sort of inbuilt wallpaper pattern, and everything shook a bit when you walked. But it was nice, too. A toy house.
‘The woman three down has wooden blinds.’
‘It’s not supposed to be real,’ I said.
‘Oh, you have No Idea,’ she said.
Shay, it turned out, was thinking about a proper summer house near Gorey, or they might look on the Continent, probably France. This Fiona said later, after too much sun and wine, when there were more people to hear. But in the morning, kneeling in front of the little fridge on a floor made slithery with sand, I felt sorry for her, my so-pretty sister, who would always be outdone by the woman three caravans down.
The weather improved through the day. The clouds headed out to sea and their shadows moved, sombre and precise, over the water. It was better than the telly. We sat outside in our big sunglasses, and waggled our painted toes, turquoise and navy blue. Fantastic. I should have brought our mother along, she would have liked it, but it hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t know why.
Conor was out on the central green, throwing frisbee for the kids, treating them like dogs.
‘Fetch!’ he shouted. ‘Fetch!’
‘They’re not dogs, Conor,’ I said, as the children stuck their faces in the grass and tried to lift the frisbee with their teeth.
‘Sit!’ shouted Conor. ‘Paw!’
It wasn’t the children I was worried about, it was their mother. But she gave another of her measured looks and said, ‘Good ploy.’
There was some code of practice here, and I never quite knew what it was.
Another child arrived. She and Megan jigged briefly in front of each other, then she too ran after the frisbee, over and back, jumping up in a doomed sort of way.
‘No, here. No here. No give it to me.’
And she tripped on her flowery flip-flops and cried. Or yowled, actually. It was an interesting noise, even in the open air. It cut out as she stopped to inhale (or choke, perhaps), then it started again, even shriller than before.
Conor, to be fair to him, did not run over to tickle her while har-harring about arse. This was a substantial child, both round and tall, and it was hard to put an age on her. It was hard to know if those were small breasts or largish amounts of fat under the cross-over cardigan – the very pinkness of which insisted she was still a child.
A woman walked across the grass and spoke to her quietly, then waited and spoke again. Which only made things worse, as far as I could tell. Megan and Jack looked on, in a state of uneasy, furtive delight. They loved a crisis, that pair. Made them shiver. Which, in turn, made me wonder how much shouting and mayhem they saw at home.
Fiona was half-out of her chair, but she seemed unsure. Even the child’s father hung back. They had been on their way from the car park when she ran ahead and he stood apart, waiting for the fit to subside. I remember feeling that someone should be grown-up about this; effect introductions, offer drinks. So I waved. And he shrugged and came over, and for a moment, it seemed as though the rest of the world had gone into slow motion, leaving us outside and free.
It was Sean. Of course. More handsome than I remembered, with a tan and longer, curly hair. A bit cheeky, actually, from the front; a bit too ironical. As though he knew me, which, I was keen to tell him, he did not. Or not yet. So we had got to, ‘Your point being?’ before the seat of his trousers had touched the stripy cotton of the fold-up chair.
I am surprised, as I remember all this – the immediacy of it, the copulatory crackle in the air – that it took almost another year before we did the bold thing; before we pulled the houses down around us; the townhouse and the cottage and the semi-d. All those mortgages. Pulled the sky down too, to settle over us like a cloth.
Blackout.
Or maybe he was like that with all the girls.
I have to backtrack a little, and say that there were other things that could have happened with our lives. We might have done it all in secret, either. I mean, no one had to know.
But, back in the daylight of the caravan park, Evie was still baying, Aileen was murmuring in a firm and even tone, while Fiona turned to Sean, like a fool, and said, ‘Would she like an ice-pop, d’you think?’
Sean winced. Our children, whose selective hearing could beat bats’, came running across the grass, and Evie limped after, whinging in a half-hearted and hopeful sort of way.
‘I’m afraid Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops,’ said Sean. ‘Do you, Evie?’ She stopped, her flip-flops clutched to her
