What Are You Like Read online

  When does the coast become a river bank? At the change of water, from fresh to sea salt. It was a shining line of salt, then, that he was tracing around the country, he saw it glittering and lacy in his mind. He would walk up one bank of the river, cross at the first bridge and walk back along the other bank, while yesterday’s path pulled away from him on the far side. Then the headlands of Galway and Mayo, which made you hungry just to look at them. Donegal would be the worst of it and, after Donegal, the North proper, where he would slip past policemen with guns and keep his mouth shut. Round the curly head of Ireland, down to the docks of Belfast and the sweep of the Mournes, after which it was a quick slither south and home.

  He saw himself standing again on the spot he had started from, looking at the Pigeon House and Dublin Bay before turning inland. The house would be the same when he got back, but it would be better the second time around, or at least different. His wife would be dead, but he would be alive, with a circle inscribed around that life. She would leave him alone.

  But perhaps it didn’t stop at Dublin Bay. Shouldn’t he walk back on the other side of the street, so the circle would close at his own front door? Or would it close inside the house? Should he wind his way around the walls until he got to the exact place he started out from – this bed, and his side of this bed? Would he cross, last of all, the space left by his wife?

  Or would he cross it first, as he set out? But, as he rolled over the hollow she had left in the mattress, he might catch the edge of her absence like an elastic band on his foot, he might drag it with him around the entire country, until his wife’s death had filled the map, emptied the map.

  There was no doubt about it, he would have to start from his own side. He would have to cross her last, or even not cross her at all, but, by skirting the bed at the end of his trip, leave her outside the circle, on the side of the sea. But would that mean he would have to head north instead of south when he reached the coast? End up walking widdershins around the country, like some sort of eejit?

  Night after night, he set out in his mind, from one side of the bed or the other, edging around the inside walls of the house, with the room to his right or the room to his left. But he got mixed up going from the bedroom to the bathroom, or he crossed the line coming down the stairs. Out in the streets, he clung to one side of the road and it led him, around corners and up alleys, all the way to Phibsboro. He took his courage and crossed at traffic lights. Then he stood on the far side of the road turning this way and that, sick and dizzy, until, back in his bed, he started to cry.

  Years later, he realised how simple it was. He should have put his faith in the constancy of the left-hand side. Left would always be left. She was on the left, the sea would be on the left, that was all.

  It was a relief to bring a woman into the house after the year was passed, though it was still hard to say when Berts’ wife had actually died. The sisters turned out on a Tuesday morning to a cold church scattered with old women and muttered their way through the memorial Mass. The baby cried and smiled. It was done.

  Evelyn was a nice girl. Berts knew she would grow to hate him and he welcomed it as his due, but she surprised him with love and he thought again how strange women are. He had Maria to look after so there were no dances, or trips to the cinema – just a baby to pull at her, the grime in the sink and the yearning in his pants. He bought a record player and a record and they waltzed in the front room while Maria watched them from the sofa, her mouth set like Churchill’s at the Yalta conference. Berts’ hand sweated into the arch of Evelyn’s back until the artificial silk of her blouse grew limp and started to cling. Their talk stopped and the record stopped but still they circled around, while on the sofa Maria began to think and then to shit, her eyes intent, mournful, forgetful of the room. And as their turning slowed to a sway and the carpet seemed too thick to let their feet take another shuffle Maria started to fill her nappy, her face fixed on some distant, unknowable thing. By the time Berts leaned in to kiss Evelyn, Maria’s bottom was in the air like the green velour was pushing it out of her, and the kiss that they had waited for, tasting of sweat and lipstick, the surprising coolness of Evelyn’s tongue and the bitterness of Berts’ Sweet Afton, was not finished until Maria swung her backside over the edge of the sofa and let it fall, splat, on to the floor.

  ‘Who would have thought’, said Evelyn, ‘that so much could come out of them,’ as she hung the towelling down by the side of the toilet bowl, and flushed.

  Evelyn was neat, and soft about the eyes, but her mouth was too wet and her smile settled pouches of fat around her chin. She would not age well. Berts watched as she speared the new nappy with a safety pin, so firm you could hear the crunch of the cotton threads. The chain around her neck hung down over Maria’s watchful eyes.

  But the child fixed on her. She amazed Evelyn with her hunger, took her first steps towards her. She tried out sounds, like small moves into the future, and one of them was ‘Ebbelyn’. That settled it. On the night they came back from the honeymoon Berts picked the child up from Bernie’s, brought her back home and put her in her new room. The noise of her crying made his lovemaking so fierce that his new wife said, ‘You’ve put me into next week,’ and she stood naked before him before going downstairs to heat the milk.

  They were a family.

  Berts could not sort through the different kinds of pain he felt: perhaps it was the grief that comes to the man who wins. When Maria looked at him he turned his pockets inside out and,

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘All gone.’ But he knew it was a lie. He began to shore up small losses that would count against him. He slurped his tea like an animal and turned his back in the bed but Evelyn did not seem to mind. Perhaps she wasn’t very bright. All day long she played with the child, infatuated, kind. One day he saw her go to unbutton her blouse.

  That was it, then. He made love to her every night and kept a secret chart, he wore his underwear loose and took cool baths. This child understood too much, had always understood too much. He did not like to see her touch his wife.

  But Evelyn was so happy pregnant, he thought he had won again and the same need to spoil it came over him. She was mad for paintshops, colour swatches, books full of wallpaper and he indulged her for a while, teasing her along. He picked his moment, though. When it came to carpets, he stalled.

  ‘They’re not three years old,’ he said, making her fight for it.

  ‘I want my own carpet,’ she said, finally, as he knew she would say, now that she had her own child.

  And Berts said, ‘My wife chose this carpet. You know that. My dead wife.’

  Maria watched them. She was sitting on the carpet in question, which was brown in patches and beige in others with black spidery bits scattered here and there. She sat with her backside spread firmly over the floor, her hand poised on its way to her mouth, a stray button between finger and thumb, while they said things that could not be unsaid about her dead mother and her living father and the child he had conceived to supplant her. And when Evelyn was crying and Berts had walked away she put the button into her mouth and swallowed it.

  ‘Would you murder me as quick?’ cried Evelyn from the kitchen.

  It was then that Berts told her about his wife on the bed, the child filling her stomach and the tumour filling her brain. How they wheeled her down to the operating theatre, her pelvis surging and her face blank. How they took out the child and turned off the machines, and waited. And later, when he touched her corpse, as he was obliged to do, he felt the size and carelessness of the stitches under the cloth and he knew that she had bled to death, and that it had taken her all day.

  What kind of child comes out of a dead woman? A child with no brain? A child with two heads? Or no child at all? Just the smell of one maybe, or its wriggling, in the shape of a box. Evelyn looked at Maria, sitting on the carpet, all flesh and smiles and spit. She was small for a monster. She was not enough.

  ‘She was born innocent,’ said Evelyn. ‘Like
the rest of us.’

  But Berts was looking at her now with a silence so hard she could feel it tighten around the back of her neck.

  After that they said no more about it, but changed the wallpaper and left the carpets and decided to love each other if they could.

  2

  A Bed of Roses

  New York, 1985

  WHEN MARIA WAS twenty years old, she fell in love.

  She met him in a café, high up in Spanish Harlem. He slid open a plate glass window and stepped outside and Maria, who was just drinking a cup of coffee, looked at him and said, ‘Oh shit.’

  It was one of those places with art on the walls and ceramic mugs that set your teeth on edge. They were on the top floor, looking towards the park – all you could see were the backs and staggered roofs of the brownstones on the next street down. Someone had pitched a two-man tent on top of one of them, and three windows had a fluffy blue sky painted directly on to the glass. Deeper south was the pop-up book of the Manhattan skyline, a distant surprise.

  Maria was taking it easy, eating a sandwich. She was wearing brown shoes with black trousers, but otherwise, everything was just fine.

  She saw his loose-knuckled hands as he worked the lock, and the fresh skin of his neck. She saw his profile as he twisted through the opening, his curly black hair. He looked like a guy from another life, a different magazine. She tucked her feet, in their wrong shoes, back under her chair.

  The window gave on to a tar-paper ledge, too big for a balcony, too small for a roof garden. There were a few potted plants out there – nothing else. Maria looked for a twenty-dollar bill blown into a corner. She looked for a stalled cat, or a bird trapped by its reflection in the window pane.

  Maybe he just liked the weather. He was out in the bare skyline now; he was part of the picture. He put his hands back to steady himself. Three fingertips bulged white against the glass, and

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Maria to herself as he pushed away towards the rail.

  He turned, as though he had heard, and looked at the place where she was sitting.

  Maria drew breath. There was nothing between them but the reflection on the glass. She thought of the view shining back at him; her face a dim reminder among the buildings and clouds. She saw his eyes privately meet themselves, before he turned back to the yellowing sky.

  When he slid the glass back again she could feel how different the room seemed to him without the reflecting sheen – how open and dark and real. As he passed her table she said,

  ‘Thought you were going to fly away,’ and he laughed, as he tried to focus on her in the dim light.

  When he saw her properly, he stopped and said, ‘What accent is that?’

  ‘Irish.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Well, you were right,’ she said.

  He stood there.

  ‘You?’

  ‘I’m from all over,’ he said, in a London sort of voice.

  ‘Ah. I should have known.’

  Their flirtation was already weary and sweet. They might as well talk as strangers; like each other the way strangers do, suddenly, entirely. Never mind all the rest.

  ‘Nice little town,’ she said. ‘Allover.’

  ‘For a while.’

  He smiled. Maria lifted her coffee and took a sip and could not swallow it.

  That night she pressed her forehead against the dark windowpane. When she went back to the café three days later he was there, as she knew he would be. When he sat down at her table, Maria realised that she would take him home. Sometime. Soon. Never mind all the rest.

  He stayed for a week.

  Maria used to say that first ride lasted three days, but they both knew that if he left, on Monday morning or Tuesday afternoon, he would never come back again.

  They lay by her window with the sound of radios coming up from the street, listening to the warm air fights. Couples who had to exhaust each other before they could put the key in the door. Couples who put the key in the door, and turned back to fight one last time. From the distance the sound of shots or a cab backfiring and Anton jolting beside her in the bed.

  ‘Uhh, got me.’

  That was the thing about Cowboys and Indians, he said. It wasn’t about shooting people: it was about dying. Huge dying. He stood up on the bed and clutched his chest. He staggered back and staggered forward again, then pitched down beside her.

  ‘You, you . . . you got me,’ and looked at her and fluttered his eyelids shut, and let his head slump back.

  He had a long waist and short legs; as though the top of him had surged ahead, leaving the rest behind. She loved the way his jeans bagged between his belt and the arch of his backside. She loved the vanity of his shirt, which brought out the colour of his eyes. His eyes were nearly green when he wore the shirt, and grey in bed.

  Anton.

  He rolled over and played the theme from The Virginian along her thigh.

  He told her how his grandfather used to play the piano along the edge of the kitchen table, starting slow, then speeding up until he was thundering through some silent sonata, grunting whatever notes he could catch. When he got a bit wrong he would stop and throw his hands up in the air. Then he would smile.

  The next morning she went back to work. She pictured him in daylight, walking her single room, getting paler. She pictured him naked among her things.

  She was surprised to see him when he opened the door. This small handsome man. This charmer.

  ‘I missed you.’ His eyes were bright and creased at the edges, everything they saw was slightly funny. She cooked a meal and was afraid of him. She did not know what tone of voice to use. They ate politely and when she was clearing the dishes he caught her and pushed his face into her stomach, while his hands pulled at the backs of her thighs. Maria put the plate down.

  On Saturday, she brought him to a party at her friend Cassie’s and they came back white-faced with hate. They stood in the street and argued about Cassie and her Buddhism, and her boyfriend with the big teeth. They argued about Tibet in general. When they finally got back in, the room looked as though it had been robbed.

  Anton leant against the wall and watched her as she undressed. He told her about a Japanese girl he had slept with once. He said Japanese women were all muscle, didn’t care who they fucked. Maria went to the ice-box and took out a jug of cold water for the night, imagining the scant torso, the unreadable knot of anatomy between her thighs.

  There wasn’t enough room to ignore each other in the bed. Maria finally got up and sat in the armchair. He was watching her in the dark, through half-shut eyes. When he closed them, she walked over and slid her hands under the sheet, not kissing him until after they came.

  He sat up at the top of the bed and lit a cigarette and looked at her.

  ‘Look at you. How come you’re here? In New York?’

  She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘For a laugh.’

  ‘What’s your family like?’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Nice?’

  ‘They’re fine. I can’t stand them.’

  ‘Poor little Maria,’ he said, so she told him that her mother was dead.

  He smoked on.

  ‘I don’t remember my mother,’ he said. ‘I mean she’s still alive, but . . . I remember her sitting in a cupboard and crying, that’s all. I must have been about four. Fucking cupboard.’

  The next morning he left to see a guy about a job on a roller coaster on Coney Island. He laughed and told her all about it; about standing there with a hose and sluicing out the kids’ pee in time for the next ride.

  He talked while he was dressing; joked his way into his trousers and muttered through the buttons of his shirt. He grabbed his jacket and threw a ‘See ya’ over his shoulder, while she lay there watching him. She did not get up. She lay there naked and turned her back to him, just before he left the room.

  When she heard the door shut, she reached for his pillow and balanced it
on her face, feeling the weight and the dark smell of his hair.

  Anton said she had sad eyes and funny eyebrows. He said she had a familiar face. He said that, when they kissed, he could see her cheeks flushed out below his eyes and it always made her look like she was smiling.

  Always.

  He was always describing her. He never asked her to describe him back, but, if he had, she would have found it easy. She would have said, ‘You are a mistake.’ The kind of mistake that drove you mad in bed, trying to put it right.

  His mistaken legs with their mistaken thighs, the long mistake of his stomach and the bitter mistake of his mouth.

  Maria took the pillow off her face, wandered across to the kitchen and poured some water into the coffee machine. She leaned her bare haunch against the cupboard door, waiting for it to bubble through. He would not come back.

  It was August in New York. So hot. The sound of the city was everywhere: you were swimming in it. She looked at the mirror, cool and mute on the far wall. After a while, she went over to it and touched the glass.

  ‘What are you like?’ she said, checking her ordinary face and the marks of her tan. She turned around and clenched her bottom, looking for cellulite, then stalled a moment, caught by her eyes.

  Anton said she had puzzled eyebrows, Buster Keaton eyes. He said she dressed well but her underwear was a hoot. He said she was more clever than she knew.

  Maria wanted to take the mirror and throw it across the room.

  She went back to the bed and sat beside it, not wanting to disturb the dent in the sheet, the faded cotton roses where he had lain. He would not come back. She traced the cut-out shapes of green and pink, ran her finger around a stain they had left there, remembering things she could not name.

  When the knock came, she could not believe it was him. She looked out of the spy-hole at the comic bulge of his face and did not want to open the door. He was wearing a different shirt and had a bag slung over his shoulder.