Stumbling to her door again in the dripping, rustling emptiness of the narrow street at three in the morning, knocking loud three times then trailing off in stutters of soft rappings as if to apologise for the intrusion, hoping she is asleep or not there, or that I will find it within me this time to turn and go before she comes to the door as she always comes to the door to let me in, the thought drops fully-formed and uninvited into my head: It’s New Year’s Day. That’s another year fucked.
If I’m back at her door and it’s only three or four hours (four or five hours?) into a fresh clean sheet calendar, then the whole thing’s shot to hell and I may as well wait another turning of the seasons, another full lap of the horoscope page by my starsign, to get my act together.
Tainted, sullied, tarnished, soiled: all words I associate with her, in their sound, in their meaning, in the sordid (yes, sordid, that’s another one) details of every time I find myself here, and the still air inside her house, and the saucers full of cigarette butts, and the tangled mess of her bed. The tangled mess of her hair. She’s beautiful. She’ll come to the door.
To know what I used to be like, one need only note that I actually spent time composing epigrams, polishing pithy sentences that I would deploy in conversation, cunningly inflected to imply quotation marks. “Who said that? Oh, I don’t know; me, I suppose.” I would chuckle and shrug self-deprecatingly, as around me people shook heads and raised eyebrows at my wit and charm. Part of it was to impress Meg, to be the person she imagined I was. This was when we still used to try and impress each other: before it became tainted; before I would find myself drunk at three in the morning leaning on her door, hating myself and wanting her, and not wanting anyone to see me there.
One more time down the steep stone steps to her door. One more time I look for the light in the bedroom window, knowing it will be on. One more time my palms break into tingles at the thought of her cool damp skin in the blue predawn light as I lie listening to her breath softly rise and fall and wonder how long I must wait before I ease my arm out from around her and dress quietly, close the door infinitely gently behind me. I remember one or two of my elegant little self-quotations. For example, “I used to think I possessed willpower; then I realised it was only lack of exposure to temptation.”
Sally knows about her, of course. It was hard not to notice us, when we were actually a couple, in college. The ones who slept in lectures, who drank in the mornings. Spotted running across the campus after midnight, kicking over bins and defacing debating society posters. Emerging from the toilets in the old college bar adjusting our clothes and looking shifty, yet smug. Everyone knew me, knew Meg. Her with the raven-hair in creeping tendrils down her back, the black, flowing clothes, the pale face and too much eyeliner. Me with the velvet jackets, the garish shirts with enormous collars and cuffs, the Gitanes in a cigarette case. We founded a Dadaist society, and wrote Spontanealist poetry in the cafeteria. We skipped lectures to watch foreign films in the little cinema off Washington Street. We stayed up all night. We crashed Drama Society parties and drank all their beer without ever having seen the play. We were insufferable. Of course Sally knew about us. I presume she hated us. I only ever acknowledged her with a nod, or muttered ‘hi’. She wasn’t our type; she went to the library, joined clubs, worked hard, didn’t smoke. She sometimes wore pastel colours and said ‘gosh!’, or ‘sugar!’.
I had known Sally for years, since we were children actually. Our parents were friends, and many was the time that we were thrust into each other’s company on interminable evenings when they sat long hours over dinner, the children sent off to ‘play’ together. As we grew up into awkward, furiously blushing teenagers, more and more layers of innuendo were added to the request that we make ourselves scarce and ‘play’ with each other, until it was only natural that at some point we ended up kissing, on a dare, or a bet; perhaps in some convoluted game invented by one of the others. Despite the teasing, it wasn’t the only time. That was all though. Just some kisses. Once I started smoking hash and reading Baudelaire, and she started planning a career and doing volunteer work, it was clear we need have nothing more to do with each other.
The few more times our paths crossed as teenagers were excruciating; we avoided each other’s eyes, pretended not to see each other as we passed in the street, ignored each other on the family visits we couldn’t avoid, like Christmas or a christening, or her dad’s fiftieth birthday. I’d be getting drunk as discretely as I could, sneaking outside to smoke, and staring blankly at any adult who asked me how school was. Sally meanwhile would be graciously accepting praise on her latest scholarship or prize, her piano playing, or her cheesecake, and participating in adult conversation on politics or social issues. My parents used to use her as an example, ask me why couldn’t I be more like Sally, did I know Sally was getting a summer job working in a lawyer’s office, would I like to come and see Sally starring in her school’s production of My Fair Lady? I would laugh bitterly and go back to my room to listen to Nick Cave.
There was more to it than that though. It was the last year either of us was in school, around Christmas. I had formed a band with a group of like-minded malcontents and we’d practiced two and a half times, then decided we were ready to play a gig. In a crumbling little dive on South Main Street, where you sat on kegs and bought cider by the flagon over the bar, we were allowed to set up our gear and play as long as the crowd let us. We were horrific of course, letting volume and posturing take the place of even playing together, let alone playing well. We were booed off after four songs, and repaired to the bar to mutter into our pints about how people didn’t know the next big thing when they saw it, and who came in at the wrong bit and threw everyone off. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around ready to defend us against a torrent of scorn, but it never came. It was Sally, looking very out of place in the grimy surroundings with her pink cardigan and soft prettiness, all blond hair and blue eyes, and strawberries and cream and tennis on the lawn. I stared at her like I was trying to identify the insect in my drink (of which I had at this stage consumed plenty).
“Yes? Can I help you? Do you want an autograph?” I followed that with a gust of smoke in her face. She ignored it.
“Hello Billy. My mum told me your band were playing tonight. I thought I’d come and give you a bit of moral support.” She smiled tentatively.
“Hah! I think we needed a bit more than that,” I said ruefully. “Sorry we were so shit.”
“Oh no! I though it was really interesting. It’s good to see you doing something with all that creativity.” She smiled encouragingly. “Look, I’m going to go back over to my friends. We’re just sitting over there in the corner, if you want to join us. Later. Or something.”
She blushed a little, and beat an awkward retreat to a table where two other very squeaky-clean and wholesome looking girls were squirming uncomfortably under the leers of some bikers standing by the wall. The drummer punched me on the shoulder, and mimicked her in a squeaky whine.
“Good to see you doing something with all that creativity, Billy.”
The others joined the mocking laughter. I laughed too, but thought about the fact that she had called it my band. And how I’d never noticed what nice tits she had before. We drank more. Later I made some lewd suggestions and tried to kiss her, and I think she brought me back to my house in a taxi. She’s never gone into too much detail. She’s sensitive like that.
We both went to college here. She got into the Law and German course, I scraped into Arts. I first saw Meg across the auditorium in the Philosophy introductory lecture. She saw me too. A couple of days later, on the way into a lecture on Beowulf, she grabbed my hand and said the magic words: ‘Let’s go for a drink’. Thirty-six hours later, I woke up in her bed, with her curled into my side, both of us still fully dressed, stinking of booze and fags, madly in love. We were inseparable. We were soulmates. We both graduated with a 2.2.
Funny, thinking about all that. That there was a time before, when she was everything, and ‘love’ was in the same sentence as her. Now she’s like a dirty magazine, hidden under the mattress, a bottle of whiskey in the desk drawer. The thought of her makes me cringe now. The thought of her is one I can’t keep away from, like a sore tooth. Thinking of her makes me hate myself. And I thought I was long finished thinking of her, that that was all a phase; I was young and foolish; you have to move on at some point. I thought I’d moved on. I thought I was happy.
We were getting ready to go to the party. I was looking for my other shoe while Sally put on her makeup in the bathroom. One of those tiny moments of domesticity that still sometimes stop me in my tracks. Our cosy bedroom, all soft in the muted lamplight. Chopin. She still plays it sometimes. As she leaned towards the mirror putting lipstick on, I admired the curve of her back and the fall of her hair through the open door. The shimmering grey dress looked great on her. She turned and caught me staring at her and blew me a kiss with her red red lips. They all think it’s hilarious of course. Sally and me. They all think she’s the one who changed me. Reformed me. I think I was just never like that in the first place, and all it took was admitting it. I think that all along there was this one just under the surface, waiting to take control: the one who teaches English in a school in a disadvantaged area (particularly to kids with learning difficulties); the one who uses phrases like ‘disadvantaged area’ and ‘learning difficulties’; the one who has a neat haircut, reads newspapers, sorts his rubbish for recycling; who enjoys a glass of wine, only smokes when he’s in a pub (not often), takes regular exercise, eats properly; who has bought a house with his girlfriend. Who probably will ask her to marry him.
I told Sally this and she laughed at me. Said it was called growing up, idiot. She kissed me, and gave my arm an affectionate squeeze, and we walked on. I forgot: walks down on the coast on Sunday afternoons. Eating breakfast together (real coffee, fresh orange juice). She drops me off at school on her way to work. Solicitors can afford cars a little better than teachers. Also, she had a couple of years’ head start on me in the working world. Fooling around trying to do the master’s in philosophy, and the mess everything turned into the year after that, cost me a little time, and when I had finally decided to go back and get the H.Dip., be a teacher, get on with my life, Sally was already nearly finished at Blackhall.
We saw each other again at a Christmas party at my parents’ house. She almost didn’t recognise me. She made faint allusions to it, but didn’t refer directly to Meg. Everyone knew more or less what had happened. My family never liked or ever really knew Meg. They considered her a bad influence. They made the right sort of sympathetic noises after everything happened, but I think they were secretly very pleased when she was out of the way. Best thing for her really, they said. They’ll be able to give her the help she needs there. I nodded dumbly, put Meg away in a box on top of a wardrobe inside me, like a broken toy, and gradually began putting a normal life together. By the time I was getting on fairly well again, that Christmas party came along, and Sally came back into my life. Quietly, undramatically, we saw more of each other. We met for coffee, or maybe lunch. We saw plays together. At some point began to hold hands, and not get invited places separately. That’s how it goes apparently. That was four years ago.
Last year, in the Autumn, I saw Meg again. I was sitting in the Gingerbread House, drinking coffee, reading a paper. It was Wednesday afternoon, so I’d wandered into town, and the evening swept in gloomy and wet after me. Now rain seethed down the enormous high windows at the front of the café. I saw her first, I think, sitting there staring into her cup, her hair bedraggled and dripping around her face. She looked just the same. I felt that old familiar sinking feeling, the one I used to call love. But I didn’t go over to her. I pretended I hadn’t seen her, until she was standing right next to me, and I went through the act of noticing her and looking up. Of course I have no idea how one does that; you don’t think about it unless you’re pretending. She just smiled crookedly, and said, “Hello Billy. Like the haircut.”, then left. I sat a long moment, frozen, then ran after her.
Sally never really asked much, she was sensitive that way. She knew that Meg and I had lived a pretty wild life at one point, and she knew, as did everyone, that it ended, as these things will, in tears. She never talked about Meg though, and neither did I. It felt safer. In the months after Meg was sent away, all my letters were returned by her parents, unopened. I opened them and reread them, then burned them. I started to believe the others when they told me she was bad for me, that maybe it was for the best. But sometimes she’d creep into the slow, drowsy thoughts that linger just before sleep comes, and I’d turn to the woman beside me and be jolted awake at the shock of it not being Meg. Sally was good to me. Gave me space. She wasn’t the jealous type. I told her I’d seen Meg again, that day, just in passing. She just asked how she was. I told her I didn’t know, we hadn’t spoken. That was almost true.
Meg turned to face me in the rain, and grabbed my wrists, as if to stop me hitting her, or hugging her, looked at me with quivering eyes. With half a sob, she fell into me, and my arms went round her, and we stood there, held tight against each other, as the rain hissed down around us and splashed in the gutters between the high, close old buildings in Carey’s Lane. She led me by the hand up through winding alleyways off Barracks Street, back to the same place she’d lived before. Her parents owned it. I’d noticed it on the way past after she left, done up a bit, rented to students. But now she had contrived to make it look as grimy and disreputable as it had ever been. I had thought that charming. Now it just looked seedy and run-down. But I went in there with her. It’s almost true to say we didn’t speak.
I left without a backward glance, looking furtively around me in case I’d see anyone who knew me coming out of the house. It gnawed at me for days, the guilt, until all I could do was go back there to tell her I’d not be seeing her again. Almost true. She waits for me, seems to know if I’m coming. I tell Sally I’m going out with Sean and Dave, and before I know it, I’m weaving up the alley to the little rows of red-brick houses, and I know she’ll open the door smiling crookedly, her dressing gown falling open at the front, smelling like gin and cigarettes, standing aside as I walk in past her without even saying hello. Every so often, I stop. Every so often, I start again, and over a year passes.
I sit on the bed looking at the grown-up life wrapped around me, as Sally’s putting earrings on. There’s someone else in the room with us tonight, some chilly stranger sitting on the dressing-table making us false and brittle with each other. Maybe not a complete stranger. New Year’s Eve, good time to clear the air, sort things out, clean start. I remember the feeling I got as a child, coming out of confession, that my soul was once more white and pure, washed clean, absolved. I can’t find the other shoe.
“Do you remember Meg?” I ask, my voice strained and unnatural in an effort to be casual. “Girl I used to go out with in college?” Sally doesn’t look round to answer.
“Of course I do. Poor girl. Wonder what she’s up to now.”
“I’ve been … recently I’ve been …”
Here it is now, time to press the red button.
“… thinking about her a bit. Again.”
I stumble to a feeble halt. Sally comes to the bathroom door. Her face is sadsmiling, full of understanding.
“Of course you think about her, love. It’s natural. You went through a lot together. I still think about Derek.” Derek was a medical student Sally went out with for two years. Presumably now a doctor. I imagine she thinks about him like some people count sheep. The malevolent presence on the dressing table is dancing with glee, but Sally does a very good impression of not noticing it. She finds my other shoe and we go to the party. I look across the crowded room at her, hear her laughing, and promise myself that I will never see Meg again, never risk all this. Someone offers me another drink and I take it hurriedly, my hand shaking, drink it quickly and take another. Because now I have to tell her.
I get smashed, and fall asleep in a pile of coats on a bed in a darkened room, where I just went to take a little rest. She wakes me up, angry, after almost everyone else has left, to tell me what a fool I made of myself. She’s embarrassed, and has had a little too much to drink herself to be honest, so I can forgive her for some of the harsher things she hisses at me as she bundles me into my coat and down the stairs. I nearly fall at the bottom, and she grabs me to steady me, not ungently. She’s lovely. What am I doing. What did I do. There’s something she isn’t telling me. I feel horrible, sick, mouth rank and gluey, head pounding, legs weak. But I can see clearly enough, as she’s saying goodbye to Tim and Aoife, apologising again for me, that there are tears glistening just below the surface of her eyes. She takes my arm and leads me out, and towards the car. What have I said? New Year’s Resolution is my last clear thought as the haze takes over, shortly after midnight. I remember staggering round and kissing everyone as the champagne corks popped, some people twice, and talking loudly and at length about something rivetingly important to someone utterly memorable, and then there’s a gap and lurch in my stomach, and fragments. I think I spoke to Sally, urgently, in hushed and garbled tones. I think she understood though. She’s very understanding.
We’re driving and she’s not saying anything, and I can see a tear on her cheek in the passing streetlights and I say stop and she doesn’t and I say it louder and hit the dashboard, and she slams on the breaks so that I lurch forward, then thump back into my seat.
In the sudden silence she looks down at her hands on the wheel, not at me, and I look at her. Undo my seatbelt. Open the door. “I’m going. You know where I’m going.” I get out and walk, unsteady at first, and then fast, until I’m weaving along the street to her house again, and going down the worn stone steps to her door. The bedroom light is on. I knock for quite a while, but there’s no sound from inside. I’m slumped against the door, gently still knocking, not even imagining, really, trying not to. It gets very, very cold.
I’m not waiting too long in the cab base on Barracks Street, smoking a cigarette and tipping ash on filthy carpet tiles, shivering on a bench while the controller alternately dozes and calls in his last few cabs, in the office behind the hatch. The radio buzzes and crackles. “Car four … where are you car four? One more needed at the base …”. He points as an engine slows and idles outside, and I leave the place, in greying light, and get into the car. We’re travelling some minutes in silence before I realise that I haven’t given the driver any directions, and he’s heading towards where my parents’ house is. Just as well, I suppose. I let him at it. He seems to be heading straight there.
“How do you know where to go?” My voice sounds cracked and out of tune.
“Fifteen, Finbarre’s Terrace, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. My parents’ house. That’s probably the best thing.”
He keeps his eyes on the road, as do I, but I can hear the smile in his voice when he speaks again.
“I know you, boy. Many’s the night I used to bring you home from there, few years back. Around this time of the morning, I’d say it was usually. And you usually half-asleep or too bollocksed drunk to know what you were doing. I know the way back to your gaff alright. I remember you used to be very chatty some nights.”
He says nothing for a while. The sound of the indicator plinking as we turn down my old street.
“You used to rant and ramble on at me. Full of yourself, altogether.” He laughs and pulls over, next to my parents’ house.
The light in the porch is still on, to welcome anyone home who has not yet made it.
“There was a girl there and all, wasn’t there?” His voice grows soft. He looks at me sidelong.
“You were mad into that young wan. Never shut up about her. I used wonder what happened ye. Did ye move away, or break up or what happened. But one of the lads from the base told me, about the night she was took off in the ambulance. I used say a prayer for ye, going past.”
There is a silence, perhaps a prayer. He takes a deep breath.
“But you have to put it behind you in the end. Better off never going back. Just takes a bit of resolve.”
He waves away the money I try to hand him. “Not a bother kid, this one’s on me. Just don’t become a regular again, alright? G’luck now. Happy New Year.”
He drives off. I fumble in my pockets for my old house keys.
Happy Fucking New Year.
MICK TWOMEY
A not-so-young man with a glorious future behind him, Mick has failed at everything he ever undertook. The lesson is, never try. He dropped out of university in 2001, towards the end of an Erasmus year in Paris, and never came back. He has worked as a bookseller, a bar-man, in telemarketing, and as a really terrible clown. Early dreams of being a famous writer have given way to frustration and resignation; he completed his first novel, Very Few to Love, in 2009, and failed to find an agent or publisher for it, despite his lackadaisical efforts. A second novel, and a third, were started and abandoned.
He currently spends many hours tinkering with worn-out and overwrought prose first written several years ago. He is a dedicated decadent, and pursues excess and self-destruction with wild abandon. Long fascinated with the darker side of life, he has become a slave to his melancholy and his anomie, and takes refuge in oblivion and ecstasy at every chance he gets.
