This Is How It Ends (10 page)

“This is not what we’re like.”

Afterwards Bruno would often think back to that night when they danced with strangers in Danny’s place into the small hours of the morning. He would think back to that night, and in his mind he would always have an image, of the band playing on deck as the
Titanic
slipped down into the sea.

Afterwards, people would argue about the precise moment when the bubble actually burst. Some people would say it was Waterford Crystal, they would say that when they heard Waterford Crystal was gone, that was when they knew it was all over. Other people would say Dell, they would say it was the thought of Dell pulling out, that was the death knell. One guy rang in to a radio station to say his orange tree had just grown a lemon.

But back when Addie and Bruno first met, back when they went on their first date, all that was still to come. The signs were all there, but nobody wanted to know. Every day there were new reports of job losses, declining house prices, banks in trouble. Everyone was saying it was inevitable, but they just didn’t believe it yet.

In those blinkered weeks in the run-up to Christmas, it was still just a train coming down the tracks. Already you could see its lights, you could hear the whizzing sound it made as it came towards you. But still you stood there in its path and you wondered was it absolutely certain it was coming your way, was it possible that it would stop before it reached you, maybe it would curve off onto another siding and sweep by you altogether.

Until it actually came and ran you over, there was still some hope.

F
ROM THE VERY
beginning, it was a romance.

There was a lot of kissing, a lot of hand-holding. Endless talking. And laughter, God, they made each other laugh. There was an innocence to it, almost like a playground romance. If you’d seen them together that first week, the two of them and Lola, you would have thought they were a family. The way they moved, they were in step with each other. They looked like they’d been together forever.

Every night they would fall asleep all tangled up in one another. And when they woke up the next morning they would find themselves still entwined. Nobody pretended it was just about the sex.

The most complicated things, the things that had been live minefields in other relationships, they were topics for discussion here. They were things you could talk about.

“Were you ever pregnant?” he asked her.

Even at the time Addie thought it was the most extraordinary thing to ask. And yet the most fundamental, if you wanted to understand a woman.

Their third night together, a Sunday night, they’d stayed in to nurse their hangovers. They’d sparked up the gas fire and settled themselves onto the couch. They had the telly on, but they were only half watching it. A movie about a pregnant detective. They’d both seen it before.

“Were you ever pregnant?” he asked. Like you’d ask someone if they’d ever been to France.

“Yes,” she said, answering straightaway.

She kept her eyes fixed on the TV. She was conscious all of a sudden of the way she was sitting, one foot propped up on the couch, the other tucked under her. She felt the need to stay very still, as if a dangerous animal had just crept into the room.

“No baby?” he asked.

“No baby.”

“Me either,” he said. “No babies.” And in that way, he closed it off for her.

She could have left it there, but she didn’t want to.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said, turning her head slowly to face him.

“I’m not thinking anything.”

“It was an ectopic. Do you know what that is?”

“Kind of,” he said, meaning no.

“It’s when the baby gets stuck in the tube. It doesn’t end well.” She took a deep breath and carried on. “I probably can’t have children.”

She tried to make it sound like it didn’t matter so much, like it wasn’t anything to do with him. But the way he looked at her when she said it made her want to weep.

She snapped her head away. Looking at the TV instead, she blinked her eyes to clear away the tears. She’d been blocking it out for so long. She’d been telling herself it wasn’t a big deal. Sure she hadn’t found anyone she wanted to have babies with, that’s what she’d been saying to herself. But now that she’d said it out loud, now that she’d seen his reaction, suddenly it did seem like a big deal.

THAT WAS WHY
she was getting all this pain, she was sure of it.

It was all because she should have had a baby by now. In the natural order of things, she should have had six. The back pain and the cramps and the bloated tummy, you could sense the source of it all, it felt like a blockage. She’d researched it on the Internet, coming across words she never even knew existed. Gruesome words like fibroids and endometriosis, words like cyst. Of course she’d heard of cysts before but she never knew what they were. When she googled the word she found it was exactly what it suggested. A disgusting, fluid-filled thing. She couldn’t even think about it. She couldn’t bear the thought that she had one of those things floating around inside her.

My insides are a mess, that’s what she told Della. That’s the way she described it. And Della had been a bit concerned. Shouldn’t you see someone about it, she had said. Oh no, Addie had responded, I know what it is. It’s because I haven’t had any babies. It’s going against nature is what it is.

After the self-diagnosis came the self-medication. The swimming helped, so did the walking. She tried acupuncture, she went for the odd shiatsu massage, she took a lot of vitamin supplements. She put herself on a regime of oil of evening primrose and starflower oil and calcium and multivitamins. She drank cranberry juice. And she took Solpadeine, lots of it. Nurofen too, if necessary, you could double them up without damaging your organs, that’s what it said on the Internet.

At the hospital they’d told her to come back and have a probe done, some kind of keyhole surgery. They’d told her to wait six months and then make an appointment. But she never did. In her heart, she knew. And really, for a long time she didn’t mind. She believed in fate. She believed that what’s for you won’t go past you. She looked at Della’s life and she wasn’t at all sure that was what she wanted, so she told herself that she really didn’t mind.

Strange, the way you manage to block things out. The way you convince yourself about something one way or the other, the way you manage to convince yourself so convincingly. Until the moment you realize you were never convinced at all.

ADDIE IS FOND
of her sister’s children, she loves them like they’re her own. She knows their birthdays. She keeps photographs of them on her phone.

She’s more like a big sister to them than an aunt. She takes them clothes shopping, letting them buy whatever it is they want. When she brings them swimming she always treats them to hot chocolate afterwards. She invites them for sleepovers and they watch telly together on the couch. They feed popcorn to the dog.

She likes the programs they like. She likes
The Simpsons
. She even likes
Friends
.

“I’m Rachel,” says Stella.

“No, I’m Rachel!” says Tess.

Why do they all want to be Rachel? wonders Addie. I don’t want to be Rachel. If I could be anyone, I’d be Phoebe. That’s the thing about getting older, she thinks. You don’t want to be Rachel anymore, you want to be Phoebe. But Addie knows Della is right, if she’s anyone, she’s Monica.

The kids have accents they’ve picked up from the TV. “Omigod that is so phew,” they say. They call Della Mom. They say “I’m done” when they’ve finished their dinner.

Della blames Addie. “You encourage them to watch this rubbish,” she says. “And then you walk away. I’m the one who has to listen to them.”

The not having children thing, it changes. That’s what Addie’s discovering about it now, it evolves. A few years ago it was all about the baby, it was all about being pregnant, and seeing other people being pregnant and yearning for it to be you. It was about the tiny baby, the smell of it. It was about holding that tiny baby in your arms and watching it fall asleep and placing it into the Moses basket and kissing it good night and standing there in the dark listening to its breathing.

Addie doesn’t really think about that stuff anymore. Maybe it’s because she’s single again now, maybe it’s because she’s given up hope of ever
not
being single again. Maybe it’s because Della’s girls are growing up and they’re not babies anymore, they’re just people now. Addie enjoys their company. She likes hanging out with them. Her own life seems very quiet by comparison.

“You have to think about the future,” Della says. “There’s nothing good about having children,” she says. “It’s hell. But it’s an investment in the future, you have to believe it will be worth it in the years to come.”

How many times have they had this conversation? Della is well versed in it. She has it all thought out.

“I like to have people around me,” she will say. “If you have enough children, you’re bound to have people around you. Even if it’s just their ghastly boyfriends and their ghastly husbands or their lesbian lovers. There’ll be people in and out. Otherwise it would be just me and Simon. And it’s hard to see how that would work.”

And on it goes.

“We didn’t have enough people around us. When we were growing up, it was too quiet in the house. I want to have people around me.”

She has such a clear vision of the future. She often talks about it.

“When they’re teenagers,” she says. “That’s when I’ll go back to work. I’ll get a job and you won’t see me for a cloud of dust. Simon can deal with all those hormones. He’s a doctor, after all. He should be well qualified to deal with it.”

Addie finds it strange, this planning thing her sister does. The way she has it all worked out.

“We’ll buy a house in France,” she says. “When the girls are older, the plan is to buy a house in France and I’ll go there for the whole summer and Simon will come back and forth and the girls can learn French and I’ll sit in the garden and read.”

She can see it all in her mind.

“Where do
you
see yourself in ten years?” she says to Addie. “What do you see yourself doing?”

“Jesus, Dell, I don’t know where I see myself in ten days.” And that way she kicks it into touch.

But she does worry about it. When she’s on her own, she worries about it. She tries to imagine herself at fifty, but she can’t see it. She simply cannot see it.

And this frightens her.

BRUNO CAME BACK
to it later. They were in bed, and she was lying with her face nuzzled into the hot curve between his shoulder and his neck. She was just about to drift off to sleep when he asked her a question.

“When did that happen, the baby thing?”

“At the end of last year.”

“So the baby would have been born by now. If it had lived, the baby would be here by now.”

He had worked it out, just like that.

She couldn’t bring herself to answer. The words wouldn’t come out. And before she even knew what was happening, she was crying, silent tears pouring out of her. She cried into his shoulder, the tears pooling into sticky puddles on his skin.

He didn’t say a thing. He just pulled her in closer to him and he bent his face down to kiss the top of her head as she cried. He let her cry and cry and when she was all cried out she was tired to the bone. Her whole body felt like it had been cast in lead. But for the first time in the guts of a year, her head was clear.

Never had she imagined that anyone would care that much about her. To guess what she was thinking, to keep her company in her most private thoughts. It had a powerful effect on her.

For the first time since her mum died, she had the feeling that she wasn’t alone.

S
HE’S NOT REALLY
talked about, Addie’s mum. Oh, she was mentioned over the years, of course she was mentioned. Your mother would have been able to make a much better job of this than me, he would say as he struggled to sew a button back onto a school blouse. Your mother was a great woman for the sewing.

Or when one of them would be struggling with the maths homework. That’s your mother coming out in you, he would say. I never had any trouble with maths when I was a youngster.

But he never remembered her to them. He never told stories about her. So Addie and Della know nothing of the person she was.

Whenever they take out old photographs, which isn’t often, their dad does this thing of skipping over her. He’ll say, “That’s me on the left there, and that’s a fella who was in medical school with me. What in God’s name was he called? I’ll remember it in a minute. There on the right, that’s Maura. You’d hardly recognize her, she wasn’t bad-looking back then.”

And he will have skipped over her in the photograph. He does it seamlessly, without even mentioning her. It’s as if she was never there. It’s an extremely odd thing to do.

“You have to understand,” says Maura. “Your father is a very odd man. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t love her. He loved her all right. He just has a strange way of showing it.”

Maura knew him well then. She was in college with him. He went on to specialize in surgery, and she did psychiatry. “Mad as a bunch of frogs,” says Hugh, “like all those head doctors.”

But she’s not a bit mad, of course. She’s eminently sane. To Addie and Della, she’s an endless source of wisdom.

“Your mother decided to marry your father because she liked the way he dried between his toes.”

That’s what Maura has told them. It’s a story she’s told them umpteen times over the years. They never get tired of hearing it.

“We all went swimming one day. A glorious summer day, the exams were just finished. We went out to Portmarnock strand, and your dad sat down after his swim and he dried between his toes. Your mother was very impressed by that. She always said that was the moment she decided to marry him. She realized he would always do things properly.”

Now Addie’s waiting for a sign like that from Bruno. She’s hoping for a moment of clarity.

The fact that he’s a foreigner, she’s not sure if that makes it easier or more difficult. His pronunciation is problematic for her, she doesn’t like the way he pronounces things. Like the way he says Ca-
ribb
-ean, that’s not good. But you could hardly call it a thing of substance. It’s not exactly a firing offense.

In other ways, he’s eloquent. She’s starting to notice that. He doesn’t stutter or stammer. He chooses his words carefully. He’s precise in his use of language, and she likes that. He takes care to pick the right word.

“Obama has grace,” he says. “It’s my favorite characteristic in a person. All the best people have grace.”

Now Addie is beginning to think that Bruno has grace. It’s in the way he leans his torso forward as he walks, the way he drags his feet behind him like a teenager. His head is too big for his body, but there’s an honesty about his movements, a humility to him. Courtesy too, the way he holds his hand out just behind her back to guide her ahead of him as they cross the road. It’s in the way he speaks, the thoughtful way he composes his sentences. The way he listens to you, he tilts his head a little and he listens. It’s the most flattering thing.

Are these the signs she’s looking for? Addie doesn’t know. She doesn’t trust her own judgment anymore.

“FIRST IMPRESSION,”
said Della.

“Oh, let’s not do this.”

“Come on, just tell me the first thing that came into your head.”

“I’m not sure I want to tell you. It will color your opinion of him forever.”

“No, it won’t. First impression is just first impression.”

Addie was making the tea. She’d poured out two mugs of boiling water and she was dangling tea bags over the mugs, dunking them up and down by their strings. The smell of peppermint rose in thick clouds between them.

Della was leaning in over the table. She had a tight white T-shirt on her. Across the front of it was written in bold black letters:
HOW WOULD I KNOW?

“What’s the story with the T-shirt?” asked Addie.

“Oh, I ordered it over the Internet. So I don’t have to keep on saying it. The questions they ask me, Jesus wept.”

Impatiently, she brought the conversation back to where they were before.

“Come on now,” she said. “First impression, spit it out.”

“OK, OK. I thought
Confederacy of Dunces
, that’s what I thought. I thought he looked like the guy out of
Confederacy of Dunces
. Promise you won’t ever tell him.”

Della gave a little scream and slapped the palms of her hands on the front of her thighs in a kind of drumbeat.

“Oh Jesus, Ad, are you sure you know what you’re doing? Oh, I can’t wait to meet him now.”

She was actually rubbing her hands together. This was all entertainment to her.

“
Confederacy of Dunces
! Didn’t he have special needs or something, the guy from
Confederacy of Dunces
? I can’t believe you’re sleeping with the guy from
Confederacy of Dunces
.”

“He’s not the guy from
Confederacy of Dunces
! That was just my first impression. It was the hat. You know, he was wearing one of those hats with the earflaps, what do you call them? And the beard of course, the beard was a bit off-putting. But actually, he doesn’t look anything like the guy from
Confederacy of Dunces
. He’s actually quite good-looking. Now that I know him, he reminds me more of George Clooney.”

“Oh Jesus, I’d forgotten about the beard.”

Addie was struggling to defend him. She felt disloyal talking about him like this.

“He didn’t always have a beard, it’s not like it’s an intrinsic part of him or anything, but yes, at the moment he has a beard. I actually find it quite handsome. It draws your attention to his eyes. He has nice eyes.”

Della’s brow was furrowed. She was thinking.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever kissed a man with a beard. Hang on, I must have kissed a man with a beard… surely I’ve kissed a man with a beard.” Her face was all scrunched up as she tried to remember.

Addie blew on the surface of her tea to cool it.

“It’s a bit like kissing a hedgehog. But in a good way.”

“I wonder, could I persuade Simon Sheridan to grow a beard.”

Della was sipping at her tea, her lips puckered as she sipped.

“What does Hugh make of him?”

Addie put her face in her hands.

“I haven’t been able to bring myself to introduce them yet.”

“Still!”

“I know, I know…”

She was peering at Della through her fingers, her voice muffled by her cupped hands.

“I’m afraid he’ll ruin it for me. I’m afraid he’ll say mean things about him and it’ll ruin it. I don’t have to introduce them, do I?”

When she took her hands away she had a pleading look on her face.

Della was shaking her head.

“I’m the wrong person to ask. I don’t think you should have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“Della,” said Addie nervously. “I think this one might be a good one.”

Della just raised one eyebrow.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Addie. “But I really think this one might be a good one.”

Addie was expecting Della to give her a diatribe. She was steeling herself for Della’s analysis, waiting for her to divide him up into bullet points. She was fully expecting her to write him off. But to her surprise she didn’t.

All she said was, “I hope so, Ad, I really hope so.”

But what she was thinking was, I’ll believe it when I see it.

“IS THAT YOUR SISTER,
the kid with her hands over her face?”

He was standing outside the bathroom, peering at a framed photograph on the wall. It had been there for so long that Addie didn’t even notice it anymore. She’d been walking by it ten times a day for weeks now but she had never actually looked at it.

She came up behind him and leaned her chin on his shoulder. A vivid color photograph, it had been professionally framed, but somehow water had got in behind the glass and now the mounting board was all stained.

You’ve seen the photo, you’ve seen a hundred like it. A little girl on the beach, she’s eating an ice cream, she’s wearing a summer dress. Her sister is sitting on the rocks behind her. It’s the first good day of summer.

Addie was studying the picture, trying to remember.

“I don’t know where that came from. It’s one of the only ones we have of the two of us together after our mum died. My mum was the one who took all the photographs.”

“You look exactly the same! You haven’t changed at all. How old were you then?”

That’s what Addie was trying to figure out. How old would she have been? Eight, maybe nine?

She’s wearing a yellow cotton dress with white daisies on it. The dress had come with a matching scarf but she’s not wearing the scarf in the photograph, it probably got lost somewhere. Anyway, in the photo Addie’s wading through the shallows on Sandymount strand, just in front of the house, and she’s holding her dress up out of the water very daintily as she’s splashing along, and the thing you can’t help but notice about the photo is that she looks so content. She’s in a world all of her own.

These days Addie feels closer to that little girl than she has done for years. She feels the water lapping around her ankles. She remembers the damp sensation of her knickers where she’d peed in them. The scalding feeling of the pee and the salt water where the tops of your thighs rubbed together. She remembers how the wet hem of your dress clung to your calves, the exotic vanilla taste of the ice cream and the way the cone went all soggy from the drips running down the side. She remembers with surprise how happy you felt to be on your own.

“I love you in that photograph.”

He announced it happily, in the lightest, easiest tone you could imagine. Then he went on into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

And Addie was left standing out in the hall, a grin on her face.

She knew what he meant by it, she understood the context. But it was the first time a man had said he loved her, in any context at all.

THAT PHOTO,
the one with the yellow dress, it was taken on the day of their mother’s funeral. Addie doesn’t know this, but Della does, she remembers. Sometimes it seems to Della that she remembers everything. It’s something she’s been cursed with, this constant remembering.

It wasn’t considered proper for children to go to funerals back then, it wasn’t considered appropriate. So a neighbor looked after them instead, someone they hardly knew. She took them to the beach. To this day, Della remembers being furious that she wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. She doesn’t remember being sad that her mother had died. She just remembers how much she wanted to go to the funeral.

She remembers sulking. She remembers an ice cream being bought, and she remembers that she refused to eat it, even though she wanted to. She remembers where she was sitting when the photographs were taken. She was sitting back on the rocks, watching Addie play with the neighbor’s children in the puddles. When the neighbor tried to take her photograph, she put her hands over her face.

That neighbor, Della can’t for the life of her remember her name. She probably meant well, taking them to the beach. But Della wonders now, what possessed her to take those photographs? Was it to remind them of the day of their mother’s funeral? Or did she just take the photograph because she happened to have a camera with her, because it was a sunny day and they were two sweet little girls in pretty dresses, playing on the beach? Della would like to know.

She’s a reader, she’s always searching out the story.