What Are You Like Page 14

  Her mother sat, finally, behind a desk at the adoption agency. She said that some of the Irish records were distorted. That was the word she used, ‘distorted’. She said, ‘They didn’t want the children to turn up on the doorstep. So they put the wrong things on the forms. Do you understand what I’m saying? They lied routinely. They lied all the time.’

  Rose sat on the other side of the desk and stayed very, very quiet. She made no sudden moves. She answered all the questions just so. Her mother had her own life to lead, she said, she didn’t want to intrude.

  ‘But it is your right to know,’ said her mother, from under her foundation, from behind the pinkish eyeshadow. She had a cheerful twist of maroon hair sticking up from the back of her head. Her glasses were half-moon and full of ‘character’. She looked out over them kindly.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Rose knew that this was just a test. She knew not to frighten her, not to frighten any of them.

  ‘Well, she has her rights too.’

  Melody, for this, impossibly, was her mother’s name, twinkled in a searching manner over the glasses. She lifted her bosom with her folded arms, and settled the lot on the table in front of her.

  ‘By law,’ she said. ‘You are entitled to know. All the rest is up to you.’

  Blood

  Christmas, 1985

  THE SOUND OF the city eased suddenly, and Maria realised it had been there all day. The sound of traffic and of feet, and millions of people speaking millions of words. New York was as loud as a fridge in the corner, switching itself off.

  She shook her head slightly, and looked around her room. Two lawn chairs. A round table with fold-down flaps. A rickety bookcase with a small can of blue paint sitting on the top. Her life.

  Christmas had come and gone. She had helped it go, by closing her eyes for long stretches of time. She could not imagine where Anton had spent the day. He was on a beach somewhere, he was in a bar. He was with the girl in the photograph. He was in a different month of the year.

  She sat in the armchair and tried to fall asleep.

  She could hear a child’s toy spinning across the floor of the room upstairs. It sounded like a marble. Over and over. First she heard the sound of a winding mechanism and then the sound of a marble, hopping out on to the floor. Which meant that it wasn’t a marble after all – there is no such thing as a mechanical marble. Maria listened for hours and tried to figure out what kind of toy it might be.

  They were moving the furniture around up there, and every fifteen minutes they put on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. They were the kind of people who turn up the volume for some bits and down for others, and turn the whole thing off in the middle of the song.

  Maria sat in the chair and looked at the door.

  What she was waiting for was the sound of the key turning, that liquid click, whether to close or to open. She heard it over and over again. She could smell the cold metal. She was licking the latch.

  When dawn came, she walked the streets to get some light. She would feel the photons hitting the back of her eyeballs: more photons in a second of light than people who have ever lived, or are yet to be born. No wonder Einstein slept for fourteen hours a night.

  She was looking for something clean and inevitable. Death might do, but she knew it wasn’t clean. A face on the street, perhaps, sudden and sexual. But the face on the street speaks and there is nothing interesting coming out of its mouth, something about shoes, and the rain.

  ‘It was hard to find you,’ said the man in her dream. ‘I had to look for you in so many countries, across so many times.’

  But Maria knows that she is lost. There is no one to find her. No one who even wants to look.

  Maria puts her head in the middle of the room and examines the contents. It is full of tatty little thoughts. They keep repeating in no order at all. She should give them numbers. Number Three: Anton lied.

  Number Four: Going mad.

  Number Two: Staying. Leaving.

  Number Five: The wrong things that keep coming out of her mouth every time she opens it to speak.

  And finally Number One, which is just a phrase, We are on our own, she says to herself. We are on our own.

  Each of them is followed by a small swoon, a tic, a want. One morning, as she is rooting under the bed for a pair of shoes, she finds a man’s sock and the phrase comes to her translated into words, fully formed.

  ‘I want to die.’

  Once she has it, she cannot avoid it.

  ‘I want to die,’ she says, as she watches the door, as she walks out into the painful air.

  ‘I want to die,’ as she stacks the pots on other people’s draining boards, as she empties the dust into the trash.

  At night, Maria sits in the chair and counts her thoughts, sorting them into bags like marbles, but this one keeps hopping out and rolling across the floor.

  ‘Oh please. I want.’ As she swings out of bed and her feet hit the floor. As she touches the windowlatch, or the cold handle of the door.

  She does not think of Cassie or of her other friends, the goodness of them that pursues her and tries to shoulder her clear. She does not remember her luck.

  She buys a plane ticket home, but she does not know if she will make it. She does not think she can make it.

  ‘I want.’

  She has forgotten even the word for death. She has a bottle of yellow sleeping pills from a bathroom cabinet on the Upper West Side. She has a bottle of blue ones from the back of a bedside locker in Eighty-fifth Street. She takes one pill out of each bottle, just as an experiment, and she sleeps for fifteen hours.

  Rose sat in her room, back at college. Christmas had come and gone. She needed to be alone. When she was alone, her brain did what she told it to do, just about.

  Her parents were in the Caribbean, on a cruise. They left after Boxing Day, very concerned about Rose. Watching them going up the gangplank, her father wearing sneakers and her mother in a powder-blue tracksuit, she realised that they would die, someday. It was the tracksuit that did it.

  She told them she was going to spend New Year with William, but the truth was she had kissed William goodbye on Christmas Eve in Paddington, and did not have the heart to tell him it was for the last time. Since then, the phone in the hall rang sometimes, sometimes for a long time.

  But she was better off alone. When she opened her mouth, the wrong words hopped out of it. Everything she tried to do came out backwards. She drank from the hot tap. She said things like, He is the kind of woman who.

  On New Year’s Eve, she stuck in a pair of ear-plugs, not so much to get away from the phone as from the noises in the street. Her room became an underwater place, full of sudden frights. Someone was breathing in the corridor outside, someone else stood behind her back and sighed.

  At two in the morning, her eye was caught by a lampshade hanging over an archway in a flat across the road. For a second it looked like a body hanging there: the archway as a dark coat, and the lampshade was the head, broken at the neck like a blossom on its stem. Of course, it didn’t exist, except in the corner of her eye, but the face was awful, dead and fleshy and somehow pleased with itself, and the coat, or cloak, the shapelessness, was worse. The face was blank when she saw it first, down-looking, perhaps a little sad and surprised by the sight of the floor. It was only when she saw what it really was that it took on this pleased expression, no doubt because she had been fooled.

  Turn the light on, thought Rose, Turn on the light.

  The flat belonged to a woman who sometimes stayed up late, as Rose did, and sat in a chair and rocked. She might be there at eleven and gone at five past, she might be still there at three.

  Rose wondered if she might sense the collusion between the arch and the lampshade despite the different view she had – the inside view, where the arch was on one side of her and the lampshade on the other. Perhaps the way the lampshade hung over the arch was oppressive to her in the middle of the night, when space flattened and arranged
itself at angles, as it might for a painter or for someone who was very tired.

  What if the woman really did hang herself? What if the woman hanged herself, maybe next week? She would wait until Rose’s head was turned and then climb up on her chair. Or she would wait until Rose had gone to the toilet and then she would climb up on her chair and tie the knot. She would wear the coat for effect, or perhaps because, in her distress, she felt cold. (Why would she leave the curtains open? Because she did not want to rot at the end of a rope, did not want the rope to grow wet with her, to creep over her skull and pull her face away at a slow crawl, until she slipped through and fell on the floor, and then the rest of her face dropped off after her – a day later, because gravity is slow, a whole day. She left the curtains open so that Rose could get the authorities on the phone and watch their fumbled pietà, in trilbies and trenchcoats, as they caught and cradled and lowered her down, one on the chair, now put to rights, and one standing on the ground.)

  The woman knew Rose. She saw her at the shops, or she saw her at the bus stop. And she didn’t like her. She would wait until Rose looked over before she kicked away her chair. Their eyes would meet. She would smile and kick away the chair.

  And what could Rose do?

  I could smile back, thought Rose. I could look into her eyes and say goodbye.

  But of course it has nothing to do with Rose, nothing to do with anyone. The woman is very distressed. Space has flattened for her, she does not so much cross the room as crawl up the face of the floor. She is cold even though the night is warm. The rope feels funny, numb, the rope does not feel at all. She knots it carefully, because she is not sure what it is under her fingers. She hopes it will hold. She places the chair carefully, unsure of the angle of the floor, unsure whether it will slide away from under her feet.

  And here am I, thought Rose, there is a street between us, stairs to run down, a door to fight, a peculiar state of dress in which to run out into the middle of the night shouting ‘No! No!’ And then what? The chair is fallen, she is bucking the rope, her face does not bear thinking about. ‘No! No!’ and the neighbours and the delay and the excitement and no one with any sense (except me, except me) or any keys, or a battering ram, or the calm hands to slip a credit card into the lock, if and when we have run and fallen up the stairs. Her stairs.

  There she is. Here is Rose across the road, three floors up, sitting in her socks. She doesn’t even have a credit card. She is climbing on to her chair. She looks calm, because once she is up there (and the chair does not slip away) the world is steady again and she has a view. She slips the rope over her head. (It is a just a rope, after all, she can feel the tight twist of its ply.) It is a smooth, clear feeling to let it down over her head and tighten it like a tie, a smart, old-fashioned gesture. Whoops, there’s a wobble.

  But Rose is thinking fast over here on the other side. She will run to the window, scatter the books from the sill, throw the window open. Throw it! and not feel the wood stick. She will shout ‘No!’ and the woman will see herself, suddenly, standing on the chair. First their eyes will meet and then she will see herself on the chair. She will look down at her feet and see the distance to the floor. She will pause.

  Then what?

  ‘Don’t do it!’ she could say. But is that enough? ‘Don’t do it. Talk to me.’ About what? She is a stranger. Her life has not been happy. It is possible she is not clean, it is possible she walks the streets a lot and talks rubbish – any amount of it, of all different kinds. She is in a state of distress.

  Still. She is standing on her chair, her face tilts up to look at the light fixture, wondering if the cord will hold. (There is the lampshade, back again, but this time at an angle, stuck out above her head, like a hat blowing off.) Nothing matters. The only thing that matters is that Rose should shout at this woman, to give her pause. After that, we’ll see. And so she is wrestling with the window, which shoots open, and out fly her doubts followed by the only possible, the only human thing to say.

  ‘NO!’

  Maria puts the blood on the mirror because it is dripping on the floor. She can wipe the mirror later, although if she is dead then there will be no reason to wipe the mirror at all. She puts it there as a stop-gap, anyway.

  She cannot make it home. She bought a plane ticket because if you fall apart in New York you die. But she is also dying. She is caught in a fold of time, like a fold of cloth. She is on the plane – slitting her wrists on the plane. She is at the baggage carousel, she slips into the toilets and takes some scissors out of her shoulder bag. No. She is still in New York, smashing her wrists against the side of the cutlery drawer. She is on her knees sorting through the knives that have spilt on the floor. She sticks a vegetable peeler into her wrist. She stands up and cracks a glass against the sink and pulls it back along her arm. She is in her bathroom looking for a razor. There is some blood but not enough. She puts it on the mirror. Just for now.

  The pills are in her hand. She could not wait for them. She held them in her fist to keep her wrist taut as she dug through the skin to something white that flooded with red. When she opens her hand, it is yellow where she held the little bottle so tight. And the pills are in the bottle. The blood drips on the floor, so she puts the blood on the mirror, just for now.

  She tries to open the bottle with her teeth.

  ‘NO!’ Rose shouts it. She shouts it clear into the street.

  The woman does not hear. She is checking the floor, checking her feet on the chair. How will she jump and kick at the same time? She tries a little hop.

  ‘NO!’ The hop and jump seems to have jolted her. She has heard. She looks out the window.

  Rose waves, ridiculous as it seems. Rose waves. And the woman sees. Her eyes dilate, even from here Rose can see them. And into the widening gap . . .

  ‘NO!’

  Already they have gone too far.

  ‘I’m coming over,’ shouts Rose. ‘Hang on!’

  What did she say? She said she would enter this woman’s life. Then she told her to hang on. ‘Hang on!’ she said. The woman spreads her mouth in a smile.

  It is a very slow smile, very contemptuous. It is intimate and distant at the same time. Rose is already in her life. It is not a nice life.

  Hey. Nice knowing you!

  She hops on her right foot, skips with her left, kicks with her right, like a Morris dancer. And then, like a Morris dancer, she shakes all her bells.

  Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-deh-de-DEE-DEE. Duh-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-DEE-DEE. Duh. Duh. Duh.

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Rose.

  There was no hanging woman. There was no shouted, awful pun. There was an arch and a lampshade, suspended on its core. Its cord. Cord.

  Some time later, the phone down the hall starts to ring. Rose looks up. Across the road, the light is back on, the woman is rocking again.

  She listens to the phone for a while and to the sounds of the street below. She reaches up to draw the curtains and the rocking woman looks at her. Rose, on the other side of the street, gives her a slight, tentative wave.

  ‘Hello.’

  The mirror is flat and cool against her skin. Maria can see the sheet of glass between the real blood and the reflected blood. It is very thick. It is very clean and calm. She is trying to open the bottle with her teeth. She looks into her own eyes.

  ‘Hello.’

  Wrist

  Dublin, 1986

  MARIA FELT LIKE a fraud until the nurse asked for her date of birth and she could not get beyond the day and the month. Maybe it was the familiar Dublin accent, or the dampness in the air. Maybe it was because she was home, at last. She had made it. Or she had nearly made it. She was nearly there.

  Because the bed was very close by then. Maria balanced herself with the flat of her hand on the blanket, and lifted her foot to take off her shoe. The nurse was still there and Maria felt she should undress in front of her. She knew that the nurse felt this was not necessary, but the bed confused her. It was too nea
r. The nurse was sorry she had asked for the date of birth but Maria knew that once she was in the bed, then she would be in the bed and her date of birth would not matter.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the nurse.

  ‘The eleventh,’ she said. The year was there all right. She just couldn’t get to it.

  She was worried that she might not get her clothes off in time, that she might be in the bed with her clothes on. She pulled her trousers halfway down and sat up on the bed. The nurse was ashamed at her legs, but that was what they were paid for. Maria pushed the trousers down the rest of the way, turned and plucked at the sheet. But she was sitting on it and it would not fold down.

  Then the nurse stepped in and Maria let go.

  She woke later and found her nightie folded on the coverlet beside her: as if they knew she would not move in her sleep. How did they know that?

  It was dark. She pulled her jumper over her head and unbuttoned her blouse, freeing her hands slowly from the sleeves. She tried to undo the hooks and eyes on her bra, but she could not. She ended up dragging the straps down her arms, so the cups were strung around her middle, inside out.

  ‘So this is what it is like’, she thought, ‘to be alive,’ as she saw her breasts bare in the hospital night. There was the sound of another woman crying softly down the hall, the sound of a nurse’s shoes on the corridor.

  She opened out her nightie half and half again, found the gap at the base and put it over her head. She lifted her face as the cloth fell past it, until it was out through the hole for her neck. Out into the same dark room. She felt for the sleeves, all the way down, until her hands came out the holes at the wrists. She had the nightie on then, but everything was rucked around her middle. She tried the hooks and eyes of her bra again. She pulled them round to the front, looked at them in the fold of her stomach, and tried to breathe. She would not get upset about it. She could sleep in her bra, if she had to. There was nothing wrong with that. Nothing much.