What Are You Like Read online

  All the things she found difficult she did not have to do any more. She did not have to wash or speak or dress. She had to go to the toilet sometime, but perhaps not yet. The sunlight moved from one corner of the room to the other and broke her heart. She did not have to watch it. She could sleep instead, or just close her eyes and sleep. The nurse’s smile was the right size as she handed her the tablets. There was nothing to it, the nurse held the cup. After, Maria slept a tablet sleep.

  If she dreamt, she dreamt of sleep. If she dreamt it was of this room and this bed and her in it, sleeping. But she did not dream, did not cry in her sleep or even awake. Except for when she went down the corridor and found the toilet and came back and got into the bed. She cried a bit then, but it did not matter.

  After a few days, a nurse pulled the curtain back, by her bed, as if to say,

  ‘Enough of that now.’ She did it tactfully though. If they despised her they did not show it. If they pulled the curtain back, that meant it was time to pull the curtain back.

  Maria felt her mind starting up again. She wanted to leave. Everything would be all right. The psychiatrist brought her down to the day room, full of butts, with a crucifix hanging on the wall. Maria was fine. She did not look at the crucifix or the ashtrays, she sat easily in one of the mismatched chairs, the green one with knobbly upholstery that people had been sitting on for years, some of them dressed and some of them, like her, in their nightclothes, so there was a feeling of other bottoms off it through the thin cotton; sad women’s genitals, where the green was smooth and worn.

  ‘So?’ said the psychiatrist, who was sitting on the sofa. ‘Better?’

  ‘I’m not so drowsy. But the place is a little.’ The psychiatrist moved from the sofa to another chair. Perhaps she didn’t find it comfortable. She could sit where she liked, but there was no need to be so abrupt. As Maria talked, she found her eyes kept returning to the place where the woman should have been but was not. She talked about getting back into the swing of things, how she had decided that she might go back to college when this was passed. Or maybe not. She could just be bored for a while, if needs be, give herself time.

  ‘Yes,’ said the psychiatrist, from the wrong chair. ‘Give yourself time.’ And when Maria suggested that she might be able to leave soon, perhaps tomorrow, maybe the next day, she said again:

  ‘Give yourself time.’

  Back in bed Maria cried. She cried with her face but her brain was full of other things. Why did the woman move like that? She listened at an angle, letting Maria talk on, while she sat in the other chair. Then the angle lapsed. The decision was made. Maria talked on, but it did not matter. Talking wasn’t the test, and she had already failed.

  ‘Give yourself time.’

  The woman had moved from the sofa to the chair to see if Maria could take it. And she couldn’t. It confused her. She couldn’t help talking to where the woman should have been. She was not ‘better’.

  Maria yanked the curtain closed down the length of the bed. There was no point leaving it open. She was not better. She couldn’t be bothered.

  She had made it here by herself. She had caught the plane. She had sat in her seat, except when she needed to go to the toilet. She had opened the plastic trays with the food on them. All this after putting her things in a suitcase and shutting the zip. And sitting in a cab. She sat in a cab all the way through the Queens mid-town tunnel. The one that had the sign ‘No Explosives’ at its mouth.

  The man beside her took both arm-rests. She sat back in her seat, with her shoulders high and her damaged arm resting in her lap. After a while, she realised she could not let her shoulders down, because they were flying. She thought that it would never end. That she would be on this flight for the rest of her life.

  She waited at the baggage carousel until everyone was gone. No one claimed her bag. She waited until another flight had gone through, but still no one took it away. She sat at the end of the baggage hall and watched it circling with her life inside, or the corpse of her life. And when the woman came over, she said her own name.

  But if the plane had been delayed. If she had jumped out of the cab in the middle of the Queens mid-town tunnel. If she could not find the departure gate. Sitting in the toilets and killing herself, or walking out on to the tarmac and then killing herself as soon as she was able. She looked at her bag as it passed through the X-ray, like a cell on a microscope slide: the dark nucleus of her purse, the squiggle of her jewellery like strands of DNA. She would have to pick it up on the other side. She would have to get on the plane and keep her shoulders high, because this small thread of life took everything she had just to follow it, not to touch it and make it snap.

  When the psychiatrist came back, she would be more flexible. Even if it was something uncontrollable like a woman coming in and asking did she want tea. She would be flexible. That’s what being alive was.

  They sat in the room in silence. Maria was relieved to know that it didn’t matter what she said to this woman, how the words went, how her tone of voice lifted and played. A ‘Here I am’, in the way she rounded her sentence – then went back to gather the last little bit, ‘There you are’, a small irony, for them both. The psychiatrist moved from the sofa to the chair, day in, day out, for women, in cotton or rayon or silk, for women who showed their wrists as they smoked, while the skin across their chests withered and slackened in the hospital air. She moved for these people in all their dignity, while they explained to the chair she had left, as if it was stupid perhaps, that they had a life, A Life.

  Or no life, some of them. ‘I have no life.’

  She moved from the sofa to the chair, like a bad morning – which has a different idea in the middle of it all, which shifts just when you have fixed it in your head. The next time, Maria would follow her with her eyes and look at her in her new chair and talk on, as if nothing strange had happened at all.

  In the meantime, she lay there untangling herself, the monster and the ball of string. She waited for her life to unravel in the dark, so she could follow the string and slay the monster – which was nothing at all. The monster was this: lying in a bed, breathing up and down in the dark. The monster was breath.

  ‘Better?’ It was a word like a gift. These were the most important days.

  ‘How’s the constipation,’ Evelyn said, while her father looked at something more interesting outside the window. ‘Better?’

  If she heard that word one more time, she would die.

  Tissue

  London, 1986

  ROSE SAT IN Melody’s office, and thought about all the other people who had sat in this chair over the years, waiting for news, good or bad. It was a round-backed chair, covered in brown loose-weave fabric, with slim wooden arms. All the discarded children. They must have gripped the wood, as she did. They must have sweated from their palms some keen, musty essence of themselves. This is me. This is the smell of me, hoping.

  She put her own palm to her nose. It smelt of iron.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Melody. ‘I’m so sorry about this.’ The woman was walking up and down the room. She was practically shouting.

  The letter was handwritten, in dark blue ink. It was on a sheet of light blue Basildon Bond notepaper, you could see the watermark, and a scrap of glue where it was torn from the pad. It looked like a childhood thing. The writer had used a ruler, to keep a straight line, and the bottoms of the letters flattened out, curiously, as they told her that her father was ‘unknown’, and that her mother had died in childbirth, on 12 March 1965.

  Please accept my deepest sympathy,

  Yours sincerely,

  Sr Agatha Simmonds.

  Rose thought that it was all fine. She wanted to say this, but what she actually said was,

  ‘Tissue.’

  ‘Oh sorry,’ said Melody, and snatched a Kleenex from the box she kept on the desk. But what Rose meant was tissue like the stuff they took out in a biopsy, like the cells they scraped off the inside of your cheek
. What Rose meant was that it did not matter.

  ‘What I am supposed to do’, said Melody, ‘is bring you in here and sit you down, and hand you that piece of paper and watch you cry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Rose.

  ‘Those fucking nuns. They lied all the time, you know? It was just a thing they did. All the time.’

  There was silence for a while, then Melody sat back behind the desk. She pulled the flesh of her face down with both palms and said,

  ‘It’s not over yet.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Rose. ‘I know she’s dead.’ And it was true. She did know. She started to cry.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Melody.

  London was so lovely in spring. Rose walked out into the clear air and sensed the shift in the weather – the first warm day. She started to wind through the streets for no reason at all. She started to wind through the streets, like a ball of string, trying to confuse herself with turns and changes of mind. She crossed from one side of the road to the other. She doubled back. She looked into people’s faces as she went and decided that, yes, they were confused. Confused by her, confused by the weather.

  Father unknown, mother dead.

  She had been running on a long leash. All her life, she had been attached by an invisible rope and when, finally, she got around to tugging on it there was no one holding the other end.

  Rose started to run. She ran all along Camden High Street to the canal, then tumbled down to the towpath and under bridges until she hit Regent’s Park. She ran into the very middle of the grass, where she stopped and bent over to catch her breath, and sat down and lay down, feeling small and naked and pinned to the earth, here in the furthest place she could be from anywhere. She looked at the spring sky and listened to London in the distance, as it pushed its noise up into the air. Then she closed her eyes and felt the planet turn.

  It was a Thursday. When she opened her door to her Thursday man, she told him that she could not possibly sleep with someone who wore a yellow V-necked jumper, that he would have to take it off immediately, along with those horrible cords. But when she came, it was high up and hard, as though something thumped her from inside.

  ‘I think I’m pregnant,’ she said, even though it was a lie.

  That got rid of him.

  She showered and dressed and packed an overnight bag. When she turned up at her parents’ door, she thought, impossibly, that they might not be in, after all.

  In the hall she was startled by her own reflection in the coatstand mirror.

  ‘Hello?’

  She did not recognise any of the coats any more.

  ‘Hello?’

  She looked into the kitchen, where not even the cats were moving. The door to the downstairs bathroom was open, and a tap dripped its amber stain on to the enamel.

  Rose wandered round the empty house, thinking that it was all true. She had died and woken up in the same place. She was dead and resurrected, and everything was exactly the same, and entirely changed.

  She could do anything now.

  In the front room, she sat down at the piano and played into the absolute silence. It was so simple. She sat down at the piano, with no music, and improvised.

  Spring

  Dublin, 1986

  MARIA WANTED TO find her watch, hefted herself around in the bed, reached for the locker and realised it was over.

  The plane had landed.

  It was nothing you could name. It was a change in the weather. It was a fly banging against the window that finds the gap between the sill and the sash and is gone. The silent woman in the next bed started to ooze tears like glycerine. No one here could bear change. The wind had shifted to warm and Maria picked up her watch. She wanted a packet of crisps. It was four o’clock. Fine.

  There was a tune in her head and she hummed it as she swung her legs over the side of the bed, and felt her feet hit the warm floor.

  She tried to figure out how long she had been there, and the fact that she couldn’t remember made her despair, sweetly, made her feel important as she fastened the belt of her dressing gown.

  ‘I had a nervous breakdown,’ she said in her head, to a man who was wearing nothing but a sympathetic air.

  She walked along the corridors, looking at all that misery.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘Goodbye,’ but did not wave, in case they thought she was mad. When she packed her bag it was so small it made her weak. How long had she spent here? She pulled the zip up over the whole lot of it and walked out into the Dublin air.

  5

  Berts in Love

  Spring, 1986

  IT WAS ABOUT this time that Berts embarrassed himself by falling in love. It was a foolish thing to happen to a man of his age. It was not something he either liked or could act upon. Nor, in the final analysis, was it something he even believed in.

  The girl in question had come to his attention on the night of the Christmas party. She had curled her hand around his tie and pulled him over to the wall that she was using for support. Berts was sober. He listened to her with a smile on his face and stretched his arm across the wall behind her. It seemed to him that she deserved what she was asking for, more or less. And it did not take much, it took a slight adjustment of his weight, before she was leaning, not against the wall, but against the open doorway: it took a mere shift in the balance between them before she was both saving herself from falling, and pulling him after her, by means of the tie she still held in her hand.

  Once they were out of sight, he kissed her, in a way. It happened awkwardly, as he handled her back up against the banisters. She wriggled away from him and screamed and gave him a puck in the stomach. Berts was angry and confused, even before he kissed her. He had never kissed the mouth of a woman who smoked, for example. It gave him the uncomfortable feeling that he might be kissing a man. He had never kissed a woman who could hardly stand on her own two feet. He still found himself nuzzling into Evelyn, now and then, but it wasn’t a kissing sort of marriage. Her mouth was not the sort of mouth this young woman had, which made you want to squish it, and split it against her teeth.

  Her body was all elbows and hinges, collapsing even as he tried to straighten her out. It was as he hoisted her up, and she grinned back at him, that their faces met. Another man would not have gone for the mouth. Another man would have simply dropped the hand. But the feeling he got, when she grinned at him like that, came, not even from his lips, but from the very root of his tongue. And so he had leaned towards her, not with his face, but with a sort of word that he wanted to say into her mouth.

  So she wriggled away and screamed and pucked him in the stomach. But in the pause, in the first shock, her mouth opened under his, just a little.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ said Berts, and stumbled, more than was necessary, back into the main room. That was all he did. He said ‘Happy Christmas’. He should have given her a slap on the backside, just to show there were no hard feelings. But a lurching dread sent him back into the room.

  Because her mouth had opened under his. Her large lips had tested the dry skin of his mouth, and when her teeth opened, just that fraction, Berts felt as though he were falling into it and would never hit bottom.

  In the office the next morning he could not distinguish her moaning from the general shrieks and groans of the girls from the typing pool. Of course it wasn’t the typing pool any more. He had to remind himself of that. Even so, she had behaved like a typist. And he, it had to be said, had been very foolish.

  He did not see her that day. But a smart little one, who annoyed him for files, gave him a wink as she shut the door. And, as he walked the corridors on the way home, every person who bid him ‘Happy Christmas’ seemed to be in on some general, private, hilarity.

  When Christmas Day actually came, Berts could not shift out of the bed. He felt the temperature of the house rising. Evelyn was up to high doh, Laura was Sulk-Almighty. Then Cormac arrived and spent the entire dinner Having Opinions. Maria rang around
six o’clock, already the worse for wear.

  His sister Joan came out on Stephen’s Day and Berts noticed that she too had been hitting the bottle. Where did they come from, these drinking women? They had crept up on him.

  Twenty years ago it would have been a disgrace, but now a drinking woman was all the rage. All the rage, he said to himself, watching the slurry-load of his sister’s life threaten to brim over and spill all over the house. She was thin. The clothes she wore were too bright. She had a blouse on like a TV screen that made her neck look, not so much old, as marked. She leant her elbow on the table and waved her forearm loosely at the room, while the husband, Maurice, just sat in the chair and worked his way, plumply, through a six-pack of stout.

  On New Year’s Eve, Berts went out into the front garden. He had decided to join the general slide and got through a fair amount of whiskey in the run-up to the midnight clock. Evelyn had made no remark. They sat and watched the television, Berts tippling through the Powers, which made it bearable, just about. Laura was off at a friend’s house and Cormac, who said he had a party, was probably sitting watching the same rubbish they were. The drink had no effect that he could tell, and when the clock struck Evelyn looked over to him and he said, ‘Well there we go.’ He stood up and so did she and they met briefly in the middle of the room. She put her hand on his shoulder and he bent and pecked her hair, wanting suddenly to fold himself into her like a picnic table.

  He kept himself upright instead and walked past her into the hall. She followed him into the front garden and called to the other few neighbours who opened their doors. Someone on Griffith Avenue let off a rocket. Berts watched it, and, after it was gone, found himself still looking at the stars.

  It was a cold night. Evelyn checked him and moved back indoors, but Berts stayed where he was. He recalled a man he had worked under for years, who had retired and fallen apart. First one thing, then the other. He left the office, as he had come into it, a man with a future. He would be the type for a consultancy, for a seat on some board, but he had fallen apart, first the waterworks, then one thing after another, until Evelyn was driving him out one Saturday afternoon to Vincent’s Hospital, saying, ‘You always said he was good to you,’ and they had walked the corridors while the wives sat, and poor old Dempsey in his dressing gown, until they reached, somehow, a mixed ward, and a woman who shouted, ‘Tell us! Is that your handbag?’ and Dempsey had laughed and tucked the colostomy bag in under the dressing gown and shuffled back to his own ward, talking about Planning Permission.