My Buried Life (15 page)

The thing is, I do like him. A lot, in fact. He’s intelligent, funny, extremely attractive. He is interesting, he reads and writes, likes music, so why am I hesitating? Most women complain that there aren’t enough men like Adam to go around. He’s obviously a good father, seems to have few neuroses, and he’s been more than tolerant of my quirks, which I know are legion.

His foot nudges my leg. ‘So?’

It was much easier to sleep with Sean. There was lots of whiskey involved, plus Sean’s lack of years, which kept everything on a lighter level.

Adam could be someone. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, only one year after Isaac walked away from me and everything threatened to come undone. Came undone, for a while. If something happens with Adam, it’s not something I will leave lightly. And I believe I will leave, eventually.

I’ve been gone too long. They say two years is enough to make you a stranger, five years a stranger forever. I don’t know if I can be here, in Dublin, living here, inhabiting this space I vacated so long ago. Sometimes it feels as though I’m skipping along on the surface, expecting something to change. Waiting for the a-ha moment that will clarify everything.

I suppose it could be Adam who clarifies it all, but somehow it needs to be more. I need more.

‘Everything okay?’ He shifts. His shirt has all its buttons undone. Did I do that? His skin is tawny in the firelight, smooth, except for the tangle of hair across his chest. I touch my palm to it. He catches my wrist, kisses the white skin on the underside. I push against him, slip his opened shirt off his shoulders, kiss his skin. No, it’s not like it was with Isaac, but this isn’t Isaac. I’m also older now, and the fact that Adam already has more possibilities, fewer complications than Isaac, adds to his appeal. He unzips my skirt. I trace the line of hair on his stomach, open his jeans in a rush. We shed the rest of our clothes, but in what order and how I do not know. For once I am enveloped in the moment, self-consciousness swamped by the glorious, thrilling fact that a man, a gorgeous, clever man, wants me. Even the first time with Isaac was clouded by how concerned I was about myself, about how I looked to him, whether I could ever measure up to the myriad lovers whose spectres ghosted my thoughts. Now my mother is absent, her mocking smile no longer bothers me. I don’t want a drink. I don’t even think about needing a drink. For the first time that I can remember, I’m fine as I am. I haven’t felt this liberated since I discovered the boost an early morning vodka can bring to a dark day. Maybe it’s Adam and how gorgeous he is in the flashes of firelight. I am wrapped in his attention, reassured by his presence and the appreciative sounds he whispers over and over. A raised ridge of pink scar disturbs the smooth plane of his shoulder. I press my lips to it, run my tongue over its uneven surface. Damage is unbearably endearing.The fire is hot against our skin, but we pay it no heed. Maybe the rug is less comfortable than it could be, but we do not notice. The rain pounds so hard against the windows that it sounds as though the glass will surely break, but we ignore it. Time is ripped out from under me, and everything else ceases to matter.

Adam is a shockingly good lover. Maybe it’s the last vestiges of dope in my blood, but something about this is much, much more than I’d expected. Afterwards his arm is draped across me, and I kiss him. My smile is foolish as I snuggle against him. The vague promises I invariably make to myself at moments of utter contentment such as this gather as one.

I won’t mess this up.

I will be good.

I won’t let him slip away.

I will be good.

I won’t destroy everything like I usually do.

I will be good. I will. I will.

CHAPTER 23

T
his room is bigger than mine. The open curtains allow a thin stream of street light to trickle in. The window is mottled with rain. It splashes from the gutters onto the path below. From the village of Sandymount there is little to suggest activity, nothing more than the muffled sounds of distant drunks, wheeling around the green long after closing time. It’s a couple of miles or so from Ranelagh, but another world entirely. Every night from my bed I hear cars swishing past, the drunken screeching of students on their way to a party in someone’s flat, trucks making late-night deliveries. Down here, the silence lies heavy upon the night. I can hear the sea sucking at the sand, a swishing sound that seems only to come out at night, when everything else has quietened down to rest.

Adam is on his side, facing away from me. Asleep, I think. The duvet is bunched around his waist. I touch his back with my fingertips. His skin is warm. I turn once more to the window. Outside, the rain is starting up again, its intermittent patter shutting out the sounds of the sea. The patterns the drizzle is making as it rivers down the glass shift and disappear as quickly as they are made. Adam snuffles and shifts around. When he settles on his other side, his mouth at my shoulder, he kisses me.

I should respond in some way, but I prefer to watch the rain. There’s something calm about the noise of it outside, as though it magnifies the silence in the room. I’m also not good with intimacy this early on with someone new. I can’t help it. I want to be affectionate, to stroke skin, drop insubstantial kisses on whichever body part is nearest to me. I know the expected moves, and part of me yearns to make them, but I can’t. Rejection horrifies me, and worse than that is the fear that I’ll be found out, discovered for the phoney that I am, playing the part of a satiated lover. I’m no good at acting.

Adam’s hand snakes onto my stomach. He splays his fingers on my skin, absent-minded in the rhythmless way he caresses me.

‘Great skin,’ he mumbles into my shoulder.

‘It’s just skin,’ I say, moving so that his hands falls away. Men love to admire skin, whether or not they even notice it. I mean, it’s just skin. Maybe it’s because skin is easy to compliment, unlike hair (are you serious? It’s horrible, you’re mad) or bodies (God, I’m so fat) or even clothes (this old thing? I’ve had it for years).

‘Never underestimate the power of good skin.’ He pulls me in close to him. He rubs the pad of his thumb up my ribs, over my collarbone, then into the dip between my breasts. I give up and allow him. It feels too good not to. It’s all so new, so unexpected, yet I can’t relax. I wish he’d fallen asleep and left me to my contemplation of the rain. That way I could have become accustomed to being in a different bed, would have had the night to come to terms with the fact that the even breathing on the next pillow is not Isaac’s, won’t ever be Isaac’s again. Adam draws me to him, and I empty my head of Isaac. When it is over, his fingers smoothe my face, my hair, my shoulders. I compare him to how Isaac used to be after we’d made love, how Isaac invariably plunged into sleep, like a stone, heavy and unaware.

‘Eva.’ Adam’s voice is sleep-thickened.

‘Yes?’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘I will.’

‘Give all those thoughts a rest and just go to sleep.’

I tug the duvet up to my chin. I’m cold. I don’t think I’ll sleep, not in this strange bed, but maybe it’s the weed that claims me, maybe it’s the violence of the rain against the window as the wind picks up, possibly it’s just plain exhaustion, but not long after Adam drifts off, I too succumb. It’s probably the weed, but I sleep better on this rain-sodden night than I have in a long time.

‘Have you ever been pregnant?’

The question is a shock, opening up the cold freeze of morning more effectively than any bucket of iced water to my face. Blindly, I feel my way along the rock wall of my grief, hands splayed, fingers twitching for something to grip. Adam is circling his fingertips on my stomach again. The clock says half past eight. Too early by far for such a question.

‘What kind of a thing is that to ask me?’

Adam rolls onto his back. ‘Shit. Sorry, you’re right. That was way over the line.’ He leans over to his bedside locker and takes a drink from a glass. Did he go downstairs during the night to get that while I slept?

‘Why do you ask?’ I shift, my back still to him. What is it about parents, this right they seem to acquire by reproductive osmosis, the right to assume that everyone else wants children, or has children, or spends their lives yearning for them?

‘Just curious, I suppose. About you, your history.’

‘Why?’ I check the clock again. There is over an hour left before we need to leave. We have the first two classes off this morning, something to do with the computers being upgraded. ‘Do you think I’m hiding my child from you?’ I am aware of a rising edge to my voice. This is territory uncharted for me.

Adam shushes me, attempting to flatten the hackles his question has raised. ‘Sorry, Eva. I don’t even know why I asked.’ I push the bedcovers to the side, thankful for the gloom of winter. Adam must have drawn the curtains during the night, probably when he fetched the glass of water. Then I notice a similar glass sitting by my side of the bed. Thoughtful. That was a thoughtful gesture. I elbow another photo of his daughter. Annalie, her name is Annalie. I shouldn’t forget, because her photos are everywhere. Annalie, blonde and fantastic, strong and confident, smiling the same smile from every frame. I don’t know how he can stand to live so far away from her. If she were my child, I’d wrap her in the softest blankets, crush her to me. Keep her safe.

I ward off Adam’s apologies because this is something I will not discuss with him, with anyone. ‘It’s fine, no problem. I just need to get ready.’ He points me in the direction of the towels.

The drive to school is quiet. Political discussion on the radio plugs the gap left by Adam’s unprovoked question. It washes over me like sea foam, numbing in its repetition. The lies, the accusations, the nonsense about the imploded property market, as though property were the only thing wrong with this country. As though politicians and cute hoors hadn’t been ripping Ireland off in every guise imaginable since the dawn of independence, and now, when they’re still at it, people are somehow required to be surprised, shocked that any of this could have happened. I want to switch it off, all of it. I want to point the finger of blame at them all, the bankers, the politicos, all who allowed this to happen, with their mock shock, their disbelief that this could be happening to Ireland. Poster child for neo-liberal economics. Celtic Tiger indeed. Who actually believed that all Ireland needed was houses built on every cubic centimetre of land, badly constructed rubbish that would disintegrate with the arrival of the first heavy storms? Public money plundered for private gain, and now the public money will pay the private losses. A headline from the newspaper sometime in the past week said it all: privatise profits, nationalise losses.

I switch to a classical station. Vivaldi cuts through the strain in the air, kicks up its heels and mixes everything in its wake. Adam reaches too late to stop me.

‘Hey, I was listening to that.’

‘I’ve heard it all before. So have you.’

‘That’s not the point.’

I face him. His profile is in the shadow thrown by the visor in the sudden burst of late-winter lustre. The sky is water-washed, clean, uncertain. ‘So what’s the point, then?’

‘If it’s important, it needs to be said enough times to sink in.’

I sit back. ‘Rubbish.’

Adam takes his eyes off the road for an instant. ‘You’re joking.’

‘I’m not. Everyone knew what was going on here was ridiculous. I even knew it, and I haven’t been here for a decade.’

‘So you just ignore it now?’

This isn’t what I’d expected so soon after being asked if I’d ever been pregnant, a political argument about the collective blindness of an entire nation in the face of sudden and inexplicable wealth.

‘I didn’t know you were political.’ He pokes me in the soft part of my side. It tickles more than it hurts. I twist away. He does it again.

‘Bugger off, Adam.’

He laughs out loud now. ‘What’s this? You’re feisty?’

With laughter, I pinch him. The atmosphere has softened again. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Seriously, I never had you down as political.’

‘Why not? Because I don’t talk endlessly about it?’

‘Who did you vote for?’ Adam pulls into the staff car park. He hauls the car into a narrow space between two SUVs. ‘One day, I swear I’m going to leave notes on those fucking cars.’ His leather bag is on the back seat. He grabs it. ‘Who drives those things anyway? Idiots, that’s who. The bigger the car, the bigger the asshole driving it.’ He gropes under the sea of paper and homework notebooks on the back seat and pulls out a tatty history textbook and another even rattier anthology of war writing. ‘Go on, McCain or Obama?’

I pull a spare scarf from my bag, rummage for my classroom key. ‘I won’t dignify that with a response.’ I slap his hand away as he reaches to poke me again. His laugh is a shout in the empty air of the car park. The morning is one of those bright, cold affairs, all colour drained away by the heavy banks of cloud that are gathering again. The smell of rain hangs heavy about us, in puddles, on the wet shrubs, the leafless trees. It is both clean and tainted, a metallic edge to it. I breathe it in deeply, then twist my scarf around my neck in the hope that it will look as though I am not wearing the same clothes as yesterday, the day I did not attend the rugby match.

We drift apart before entering the school. I wonder if he has noticed the sudden change between us, how things seem lighter, easier, despite his intrusion. The word I am searching for is intimacy. Things are more intimate between us.

Further meditation is impossible in the swarm inside the building. I watch Adam’s head bob among the boys, the high fives and greetings that he bestows, the shouts from the students that he never fails to respond to with wit. He fades into the crowd, swallowed by the mass of grey uniforms. I settle my skirt, smoothe my hair. The school day closes over my head like water.

CHAPTER 24

A
elita’s child sits on the bottom step of the staircase, a picture book on his lap. He is absorbed by the colours, and doesn’t notice me watching him. His name, I’ve learned, is Seamus. ‘Beautiful Irish baby,’ his mother proudly announced when I asked her about him. He accompanies her each week, and I assume to every job she does. Seamus doesn’t seem traumatised by his mother’s occupation with her work. He seems, in fact, to relish being close to her. He’s quiet, but happy, and radiant when he glances at her. I observe him, observing her, and again there is that catch, that unnamed well of longing, its depths dark and unplumbed.

‘Seamus?’

He stills the fingers that stroke the page of his book. His answer is silence.

‘Would you like something to drink?’

Now that I have his attention, I’m not sure what I can offer him. A half-bottle of Russian vodka, procured in a discount German supermarket, and which I am avidly avoiding, is the only thing I can find besides coffee. A clutch of oranges languishes in a bowl. These I squeeze, then present to him on the stairs. He refuses to come into the kitchen, a shy shake of his head the only indication of his desire to stay put.

The child swallows the juice quickly, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and hands me the glass. He does not leave the step.

‘Seamus, you are behave, yes?’ Aelita struggles down the stairs, a bucket filled with bottles in one hand, hauling the vacuum cleaner behind her. I take her cleaning supplies from her and deposit them on the hall floor.

‘He’s perfect,’ I say. And I mean it. A perfect child. I wonder if Aelita knows how fortunate she is. My brother was perfect in that way in his baby pictures, all that smooth skin and plumpness, the huge eyes and fluffy hair. I sense him sometimes, here in the house. I don’t mean his ghost is here; nothing as prosaic as that. It’s more of a feeling, traces of him in rooms, behind doors, on creaking stairs. It’s impossible to be here and not think of him. Death takes the physical person, but everything else is left intact, so much so that in the aftermath of Andrew’s death I lived as though he were still alive. I brought him news from school, the remnants of fights with my mother, snippets of conversation, books I read. I brought them all, and more, to my dead brother, and I recounted it all to him, not forgetting he was gone, but not allowing it to get in the way.

And so the strangeness that had always been in our family, in this house, grew up around me, like grass in a neglected garden. My mother retreated further from me, and it suited me just fine. I wrote poetry, read books, studied for my exams and finished school. The strangeness stayed with me through university, but I was used to it. Like a parasitic limb, it became part of me. In the aftermath I took to wandering the house at night, after Maude and my mother had turned in. I walked through each room, touching things. A shawl Maude had crocheted, itchy, rough mohair that I couldn’t tolerate against my bare skin. Cushions, curtains. The wooden banister with its polished balusters. I bumped my fingertips along the wallpaper, the heavy flock velvety and unpleasant. In this desperate Braille I found little in the way of solace, but I kept on seeking proof of my own existence, waiting for something to reach out and touch me back, but nothing ever did.

When I ran out of things to touch, I took to sitting on the top step at the front of the house. I witnessed the slow change of summer to autumn, smelled the first fires of the season. Night fell easily and early, and my mother, mummified in her own private sadness, took to hibernating earlier and earlier. We never spoke of what we were going through. I was aware of her writing countless letters, watched her slip a memorial card of my brother into each envelope before sealing it, but I wasn’t consulted or acknowledged. He was mine too, but it was as though I’d faded away.

In this way I let the shield harden, allowed it to become unmoveable. It was easier that way. I studied harder, got better marks, and eventually applied myself to my work with a dedication that I know I couldn’t have mustered had there been distractions in my way.

Aelita wears a cross around her neck. It sits on a heavy silver chain, and she zips it from side to side when she looks out the window or stares into the middle distance. Maybe she prays. A priest I studied with asked me once about God. He was a kind man, with a brilliant mind. We developed a rapport based on mutual interest in each other’s field. Dan was his name. He’s a professor of poetry at a university in Vancouver now.

‘What about God, Eva? Is there room for God in there?’ His index finger tapped my temple gently.

There is no God for me. God’s face remained stubbornly hidden when I was at my lowest. I’d never given him much thought before Andrew died, but afterwards he evaporated. Having no faith in a place like Ireland is difficult, especially when all around me people bathed in religious radiance. I waited for a sign after I found my brother, but none came. Eventually, what little belief I’d had petered out and expired. My mother had never wanted me; why would God be any different?

At Dan I had shrugged. ‘It’s a bit crowded in there, to be honest.’

‘Just don’t close off the possibility,’ he’d said. And I had liked that. No dogma, no screaming insistence, just a gentle reminder.

Seamus tugs on my shirt tail. He holds out his book to me. ‘Can you read?’

Aelita grabs the book from her son’s hand. ‘No!’ Her other words are in Polish, but she lowers her voice in admonition. I know what she’s saying.
Don’t annoy her. Don’t do anything but sit quietly. We need the money.
She puts the book in her bag by the door. Seamus sticks his lower lip out and sits back down on the stairs.

‘It’s fine,’ I say to Aelita. ‘I’ll read to him.’

‘No. He fine.’ She pulls a yellow duster from her bucket. ‘He like read with himself.’

‘Really, Aelita, it’s not a problem. I’d like to.’ She doesn’t believe me, but she shrugs and starts spraying polish on the hall table. I wait a second, then retreat. She is displeased, but she will never say so. I pay her, so she’ll allow her son, albeit grudgingly, to have a book read to him by me.

Seamus retrieves the book from his mother’s bag. He slips his small fingers in mine. Dry baby skin, warm softness. I want to squeeze his little hand, never let it go. The urge overwhelms me, catches me unawares. 37. The longing is only growing.

For someone my age, I’ve spent a surprisingly small amount of time with children. I’m almost nervous of this quiet child, with his solemn face and his big eyes. He sits on a chair, swinging his jeaned legs. I pull out a chair and ease myself in beside him. He shifts on his seat, moves closer to me.

The book is something bright and simply drawn, a story of a pig and her family. I finish reading in minutes, and Seamus sits on his chair, his face expectant. The clock hums on the wall, the same old electric clock from my childhood that I’ve always hated. It may have come from the farmhouse where we lived before my father died; I actually have no idea how it ended up on the wall in this city house, big, ugly thing that it is. I hate it because it’s so old and unstylish. It’s like something I remember on the walls in school when I was a child, functional and unsightly. The glass has been cracked down the centre of the face for as long as I can remember, and my mother never had it fixed because she couldn’t get it off the wall. It’s too high up, and Andrew was the only person who could reach it, standing on a chair. I mean, who even has electric clocks any more? It reeks of institutional living. I will hire a handyman and have it removed.

‘Again,’ Seamus says, patting the cover of the book. ‘Read it again.’

We read the story of the cheerful pig three more times, until I finally close the book and place it face down on the table. When we have drawn and coloured on some paper that I had left on the table for making notes, I wonder what I should do with the child now. He does not get off his chair or call for his mother. Aelita has moved into the front room now, the vacuum cleaner muffled by the closed door.

I move to the fridge. ‘Would you like something to eat?’

Seamus shakes his head. He looks up at me. ‘My dada,’ he begins, then breaks off. ‘My dada.’

Where is his father? Aelita wears no ring. Is the man in Latvia or Poland? Somewhere far away, unreachable to this small boy? Do they talk to him, about him? I was a child with no father, and his absence was keenly felt. I was 4 when we left, 5 when he died, and we never spoke of him. We weren’t allowed to.

The night we left was a warm one. My parents had been fighting all day. Mostly it was my mother fighting, hissing at my father so we wouldn’t hear, her anger a rattlesnake in the quiet confines of the small farm, her face an abstraction of fury. Andrew and I were sent out to feed chickens, play in the fields, anything that would keep us out of the house. The day was hot, the mute dryness of the midland air rendering it difficult to amuse ourselves. When we weren’t chasing hens in the yard or letting the calves suck our fingers with their rough black tongues, we sat in the shade and made up games and willed the time away, the cornerless sky stretching beyond us and our sheltered, rural world. We hid outside the kitchen door, beside the boot scraper, and listened as words we didn’t understand drifted to us.
Degrading, demented, disgraceful, damnation.
I stored their alliteration in my alphabetic mind, their sounds washing me.

Later, Andrew and I were ready for bed, our pyjamas too warm in the sullen heat. The order to go upstairs never came, and we sat in the living room, our father’s jazz records strewn on the floor, the volume on the television turned up high. Tension filled the small house.

I was asleep in the overstuffed armchair when my mother woke me, roughly jostling my shoulder. She ushered Andrew and me into the car. We were going to Dublin, she said, to the place she was from.

Like a sleepwalker, I stumbled to the car, loose gravel sticking to the soles of my bare feet.

‘Ow!’ I hopped, my foot punctured by a sharp stone.

‘
Get in the car.
’ She brooked no argument.

‘And Daddy?’ I asked her, fretful of leaving him behind. He was such a gentle soul, his feelings often hurt by my mother’s abrasiveness.

Her face was obscured by a box she carried. ‘He’s busy. Don’t start arguing with me over this.’

But it was dark, and there was no work to do on the farm when it was dark in summertime, unless a cow was calving or there was some other emergency. My father wasn’t around as my mother stuffed our things into the boot of the old Hillman Hunter, her movements frenzied.

The red leatherette seats were still warm from the day’s sultriness, the pattern of tiny holes textured under my hands.

‘Why isn’t Daddy coming with us?’ Andrew wanted to know.

‘Because he isn’t.’ My mother started the car, swearing when it didn’t turn over the first time.

‘But I want him to come too.’ My brother started to cry.

My mother leaned over and slapped his pyjamaed leg. He howled louder. One of the farm dogs barked into the quiet night. I stared at our house, the grey brickwork matte black in the overwhelming darkness, perfect as an illustration. All the lights had been turned off except the small lamp in the corner of the kitchen. The windowpane threw the muted light into the night.

‘Stop that this instant. Daddy’s busy. He’s not coming with us.’

Eventually, Andrew stopped crying when my mother let him sit in the front with her. I was pleased to have the whole back seat to myself. The seat was shiny and slippery, and I could sit where I pleased. Kneeling up, I gazed out the back window at the thumbnail moon, curving in the carbon paper sky, the stars scattered like glitter.

We left sleeping towns in our wake, the indifferent landscape swallowing them whole. My mother kept the radio on, nothing but the white noise of static as we passed through long stretches of countryside. She didn’t speak to me once during the journey, and I was glad.

Dublin, when we arrived, was another world. Its strangeness was unlike anything I could have imagined at 4 years of age. We passed traffic lights, their lollipop colours changing before my eyes. I begged my mother to wait so I could watch the lights change again, red to green to orange to red. She tutted with her habitual impatience and told me not to be such a nuisance. Traffic lights weren’t for admiring. Yet they were. I’d never beheld them before, and they stood to attention in the metropolitan landscape, coloured sentinels in the navy night. Row after row of buildings slipped by outside the car window, railings encasing them in a silent embrace. The river was dark, unmoving, the street lights in their curlicues reflected imperfectly in the glazed water. I poked Andrew to wake him, to show him the hugeness of the sleeping city, its bizarre components, but he mumbled thickly in his sleep and turned away.

Seamus traces a hairline crack in the table’s surface. It leads nowhere. ‘Would you like to draw something else?’ I ask him. Again, that childish shake of the head, side to side, his fringe swinging. I am exhausted. It’s been possibly ten minutes, and I’m spent. How do people do this? What spurs them on, allows them to keep on asking and offering, coming up with new things to suggest and proffer? Adam’s daughter arrives next week. He has made me promise to spend at least one day with them. Where will I find the resources? I place my hand on Seamus’s. Surprised, he looks up at me. His smile splits his lovely face in two. With his free hand, he pats my cheek.

‘Eva.’ He pronounces it
Ava.
‘Eva, more book.’

As we finish the book again, Aelita appears, summoned as though by magic, at the kitchen door. She is shrugging on her raincoat, pulling her ponytail out of the collar. ‘Is all finish. Mrs Maude she is finish too. Next week same, yes?’

I say yes and pass her an envelope with her pay. All cash. No cheques, ever, just hard cash.

She holds Seamus’s coat out. ‘Come now, Seamus.’

With a nod at me, she turns. The door closes behind her.

In the silence that follows, I remain in the kitchen. I can hear Maude’s door open, then close. Back from bridge. Then the muffled sounds of her at home, the dulled noise of the television, the creak of ancient plumbing. I will visit her in a few minutes, bring her something to eat and the day’s paper. Maybe next time Aelita comes I’ll bring Seamus down for a visit. Pretend to myself for ten minutes that he’s mine.