This Is How It Ends (5 page)

The next thing she broke through into the air. Above the bobbing line of the water she could see Bruno standing up to look for her. He was scanning the water for her.

She found herself sticking her arm up and waving back at him.

THEY WERE BOTH
cold after the swim. They needed a pint to warm themselves up. As soon as the barman set it down onto the table, Bruno reached out to pick it up.

“Don’t!” Addie yelped.

He looked up at her, confused.

“You don’t drink it until it settles.” She pointed to the cloudy horizon between the black stout and the white head.

“It’s part of the pleasure,” she said. “The anticipation.”

And he caught her gaze across the table and held it, his dark eyes glinting. They sat there, the two of them, looking at each other and trying not to smile.

SHE DROVE FAST
on the way back.

She had the heating turned up high inside the car, so they had to raise their voices to be heard. After a while they let the conversation fall off. There were longer and longer gaps, there didn’t seem to be any need to talk. Outside, the day was gradually fading. The whole city looked like it had been dipped in deep blue ink.

By the time they crossed over the railway line and drove out onto the Strand Road, it was really dark, the beach just a black space to the right of them. Addie let the car roll past the open gates of the driveway, bringing it to a stop out on the street. She turned the engine off and they sat there for a moment, registering the silence.

“So,” she said. “Are you coming in or aren’t you?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“Oh, I’m coming in.”

He climbed out of the car. Closing the door quietly, he followed her over the crunchy gravel, down the side steps, and in through the basement door.

And it was only then, only after they’d spent six hours straight in each other’s company, only after they’d found out everything there was to be learned about each other in a single day, only then did they fall into bed together.

I
T’S AN INTIMATE THING
to do, sleeping with someone.

Addie has been told this a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. It’s what the nuns were getting at, all those years ago. And there was a central truth to what they said. Oh, how she wishes now that she’d listened to them.

Don’t give yourself away lightly, that’s what they used to say. Don’t sell yourself cheap. Your body is a temple. Addie remembers the hilarity in the locker room, how they’d sniggered at the nuns behind their backs. How they’d imitated their accents, how they’d sneered at their saintly tones. Sixteen years old and they were already veterans of a world the nuns would never know.

They had a different vocabulary for it, the girls did. They had phrases that were especially constructed to take the intimacy out of it. They talked about getting off with people and when they were a bit older they were having it off with them and the next thing you knew you’d be giving him one and in the end all they talked about was riding. How Della reveled in all that unlovely language!

Even now, Della loves to reminisce about her colorful past. She delights in remembering all her conquests, the seedier the better. She remembers the roadies and the visiting businessmen and the college lecturers. She remembers the where and the what and the how and she laughs out loud at the memory. Her wild days, it does her good to remember them. Now that they’re well and truly behind her.

How different it is for Addie. Addie remembers her past intimacies with horror. She’s haunted by them, degraded by them. She has flashbacks. Things she said, things she never should have said. Oh, things she suggested in a moment of passion. Impulsive things, things you could never live down.

Like the time she went to meet a boyfriend at the airport. She wore a long winter coat with nothing on under it. No knickers, no bra, just a pair of high suede boots and the coat belted tightly around her waist. She’d been planning it for days. The whole time he was away she’d been imagining how she would whisper into his ear in the arrivals area. How he would slip his hand inside her coat, just to check. How she would let the coat fall open as she was driving, and he wouldn’t be able to stay in his seat. She would be forced to push him back over to his side of the car, just so they wouldn’t crash.

Only it didn’t work out that way. His bags never came through and they had to wait around the airport for hours and she kept worrying that her coat would open and by the time they finally got to the car they were squabbling and she was freezing cold and covered with goose pimples. She dropped him off in town. They kept seeing each other for a few more weeks after that, but they both knew it was over. From time to time now she bumps into him in the supermarket. They make small talk while his two kids sit there in the trolley and Addie wants to die.

They bubble up, these memories. They simmer away in her mind like a toxic stew. A proposition that was turned down, a misunderstanding about a Valentine’s card. A suggestive text message, sent to a client by mistake. Do these things happen to other people, or is it just Addie? Do other people get over these things?

It’s a form of hemophilia that she has. The wounds just don’t seem to heal.

IT’S ALWAYS THE
distant past that she dwells on. It’s the little things rather than the big things. Perhaps because the recent past is too painful, she can’t even bring herself to talk about it yet.

Even the mention of it makes her feel queasy, as if she’s standing on a ship and the ground is tilting up to meet her. She doesn’t know what vocabulary to use to tell the story. Nothing she tries to say tastes right in her mouth. Any words she does manage to produce seem too hard and too sharp, like pebbles on her tongue.

In her mind, it’s still a silent movie.

There she is, lying straight as a mummy in the hospital bed, her head resting on a stack of pillows, her bare arms on top of the covers. She’s pinned down by tubes, a thick plastic drain is feeding gunk out of the wound in her abdomen, a thin line pumping antibiotics into her through a needle they’d inserted in the back of her hand. An ugly bruise spreading up towards her wrist like a stain. The surgical tape that’s holding the needle in place is stinging her, it’s all puckered and uneven. She longs to peel it off but she’s afraid of dislodging the needle. She doesn’t want to be a nuisance. She tries to think about something else, anything to take her mind off it.

To the left of her bed, a wide rectangular window. A row of empty vases lined up on the sill. Outside the window, endless rain. If she turns her head to the right, she’s facing her bedside locker. Crowded on top of it, the yellow roses Della had brought, the lilies from her dad, the homemade cards from the girls.

There had been no flowers from David, just a series of breathless voice messages, a litany of excuses and promises. I should be able to get away tomorrow, he’d said when she called him back, there’s a flight first thing in the morning. Everybody loved the show, he told her. There was a gallery in New York interested.

Great, she’d said, that’s brilliant. Good for you.

His art was shit, she’d always known that. But she’d never really admitted it to herself before. It didn’t seem to matter, not until she was lying there in the hospital. The hospital was when, suddenly, everything seemed to matter.

A man is tested only a few times in his life, that’s what Hugh said afterwards. He will seldom recognize the test when it comes along. And by the time he realizes that it was a test, it will be too late. But how he behaves in that moment, that’s what defines him. That’s the mark of the man. Needless to say, David did not pass the test.

He did bring her to the hospital. In fairness he even went as far as the waiting room with her. He waited with her until she was seen by a nurse. But he was late for his flight, and if he missed the flight he would miss the opening. He couldn’t miss the opening, Addie understood that, didn’t she? As she was being led in for the scan, he was already out on the street, wild-eyed, flagging down a taxi. When the doctor pointed to the screen and showed Addie the fluid flooding her abdominal cavity, as he pointed out where it was seeping right up towards her chest, which would explain the pain under her collarbones, when they showed her the extent of her internal bleeding, Dave was sitting in the taxi, barreling through the port tunnel towards the airport. As she was being prepped for surgery, as the anesthetist was being told to hurry, there was no time to waste here, he was trying her phone again while he stood in the queue for airport security. Let me know how you get on, he said to the answering service. Then he turned his phone off before putting it into a basket and sliding it onto the belt of the scanner.

He did try her once more before he boarded, but her phone rang out. He ordered a vodka and tonic when the drinks trolley came round. As soon as he’d finished the drink, he fell asleep. The stewardess had to wake him to tell him to straighten up his seat back for landing. When he called her again from baggage reclaim, it was Della who answered the phone, her tone distinctly chilly. They were able to save Addie, she said, but not the baby.

Ignorance is bliss. It never even dawned on David that this was a test. It never once occurred to him that he had anything to reproach himself for. Not even when he swung into the hospital three days later, a box of duty-free chocolates in his hand, the review from the London
Independent
rolled up in his pocket to show her.

His timing was unfortunate. As he came out of the lift, he walked slap bang into Hugh.

HE WENT STRAIGHT
from the hospital to the nearest Garda station and claimed he’d been assaulted. The Guards had no choice but to come to the hospital. After all, a complaint had been made. They had to question all the witnesses. They followed Hugh into his office for a chat, the soles of their big boots squeaking on the lino floor.

Hugh admitted everything straightaway, he was quite unapologetic. “I gave him a bit of a hiding, that’s all,” he said. “He had it coming to him.

“The fellow’s a cad,” he said, by way of explanation. “A cad and a bounder.” And the Guards chuckled at that swashbuckling language. They were highly amused by the whole thing. This was light relief for them, a break from the drunks and the smackheads. They both leaned over to shake Hugh’s hand before tucking their notebooks into their breast pockets and trundling off.

They wouldn’t be taking this one any further. You never know when you might be needing a doctor.

THAT WAS THE LAST
they saw of David. He never dared to show his face again.

When Addie got home from the hospital, she gathered up his stuff and packed it into a cardboard box. There wasn’t much to pack, just a few T-shirts, a couple of pairs of black denims, and some threadbare socks. There was a thin woolen scarf of his that she’d always liked, so she hung on to that. A painting of his he’d given her one Christmas. She took it down, wrapped it up in bubble wrap, and stuck it in the boot of her car. She was thinking she might return it to him. Or maybe it would be easier just to drop it off at a charity shop.

She drove around with the painting in the boot of the car for a few weeks. Then one day on the spur of the moment she pulled over and chucked it into a roadside skip. It wasn’t anger that made her do it, or bitterness, or heartache. It was just that she’d never liked the painting in the first place. She’d only ever hung it on her wall out of politeness. She was absolutely certain it would never be worth anything.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Della would say whenever he came up in conversation.

“David, who was David again?” That was Simon, trying to be sweet.

“I saw him off,” Hugh would say proudly. “I put a stop to his gallop.”

And it wasn’t that Addie was sorry he was gone, because she wasn’t. She knew he was no good. She knew he’d failed the test. It was just that nobody had ever thought to ask her.

It never even occurred to any of them to ask.

Did she ever love David? In retrospect, she would think not. She certainly fancied him. He was her type, long-haired and lanky and unreliable-looking. She had been flattered when he had first asked her out. She had been unsure what it was that he had seen in her, but it had been reassuring to think that there must have been something.

She fell easily into step with him. They slipped into a round of gallery openings and club nights. They went to dinner parties where people smoked joints openly at the table and drank copious amounts of red wine. At the weekends they lounged around nursing their hangovers. They ate a lot of takeaways and they watched a lot of TV. And in between the parties and the hangovers they managed to squeeze in some work. Neither of them had high expectations for the other, and that was a nice safe feeling. But no, she had never for a moment been under any illusion that she was in love with him.

The worst of it was, she wasted six years of her life on him.

AFTER SHE BROKE UP
with David, Addie threw herself into her work. That was her way of escaping it, she worked and she worked and she worked.

There was a craze out there for extensions. The world and his wife seemed to want an extension. They all wanted the same extension. They wanted light-filled American kitchens with worktop islands and glass doors opening onto what was left of their meager gardens. They wanted Velux windows and chalky paint colors and designer tiles. So Addie gave them exactly what they wanted.

Then, almost overnight, the work dried up.

The first week in August, the phone stopped ringing. Addie thought maybe everyone had gone away on holidays, but then September came round and still nothing. Addie supervised the building work on her last few jobs and she signed off on the snag lists and then she had nothing left to be doing.

To her surprise, she found that she didn’t mind in the slightest. She would sit down at her drawing board every morning just like she always did, and the only difference was that she wasn’t bothered by the phone. She was spared all those ghastly consultations, the bottomless pots of fresh coffee and the endless poring over Farrow and Ball paint charts and the interminable discussions about the suitability of travertine marble for a kitchen floor. It used to take all her self-control to keep her sitting there, nodding away as if she gave a shit. It was all she could do, to stop herself jumping up and screaming. It doesn’t matter, you silly cow. That’s what she always felt like saying, what does it fucking matter?

She didn’t need their money. That made it all the harder to put up with them. Her flat was paid for, she had no mortgage on it. And there was still enough of her mum’s money left to keep her going. She lived on practically nothing anyway.

So when the work dried up Addie didn’t mind. She took all those paint charts out of her portfolio and she pasted them up on the wall above her desk. They were a thing of beauty, when you set them free of their purpose and allowed them to exist all on their own.

She placed her little jars of ink along the windowsill next to her desk, where they could catch the light. Now, in the early evening, when the sun comes round, they glow like stained glass, each color shocking in its beauty. Hard to know which is her favorite, she can never decide. She sits there and tries to pick one. The Apple Green or the Cobalt Blue. The purple with the drawing of a plum on its label. Sunshine Yellow and Canary Yellow and Scarlet and Burnt Sienna. Some of them she loves for their names. The Carmine and the Viridian and the Vermilion. Others she loves for their labels. The long-legged spider on the front of the Black Indian ink and the frog on the Brilliant Green. She loves those inks. She only has to look at them and she’s happy.

She enjoys sorting out her pencils, grouping the blues and the greens and the purples together in one jam jar. The sunny colors in another jar, the yellows and the reds and the oranges all bunched together in a gorgeous jumble.