My Buried Life (12 page)

Sean spreads his hands at the open oven. He is laughing. ‘This is mad! Haven’t you heard of central heating? It’s all the rage, you know.’

I find myself laughing with him. Santa Baby leaves convertibles under the tree on the radio behind us. It’s ridiculous, of course it is, warming our hands at the oven. Andrew and I used to do this also, and once we realised how silly it looked it never failed to amuse us. I still miss him, miss my brother. Something in the laughter, the way it breaks up the shreds of reserve inside me, echoes with all the booze in my system, changes things. I have a vision of myself at Maude’s age, deep in my eighties, sitting here in this house, this wretched keeper of unhappiness, with my hands spread out in front of the oven, and I don’t like it. Not one bit. I see my books in piles, my papers everywhere, half-finished and long-forgotten poems floating around the rooms, empty bottles punctuating the stillness.

I can’t do it. There are many things I’ve got wrong in my life, but I can’t keep on getting them wrong. I can’t grow old here, in this mausoleum, my mother’s ghost keeping me in line, imprisoning me.

I take Sean’s glass from him, take his oven-warmed hands in mine. Maybe it’s the whiskey, possibly it’s fear of what lies ahead, but I have no problem kissing him, kissing this beautiful boy in my kitchen one week before Christmas, and not allowing myself to feel bad about it.

CHAPTER 18

I
thought it would be strange, being with another man after all those years with Isaac, and in a way it is, but it’s good too. Sean undresses me slowly, not asking if I want this or that, just assuming that I do. And I do want it. I need it, need to erase all of Isaac’s fingerprints on my skin, all over my body. For a young guy, Sean knows what he’s doing. He slips his jacket off, pulls his shirt over his head without undoing the buttons, gathers me to him. The kitchen is too small for this. I take his hand and lead him upstairs.

‘Christ, it’s freezing,’ he says, as we climb the stairs, me leading him by the hand. This strikes us as funny, and we convulse again. It’s good to laugh.

I take him to my room, and we lie down on my bed, kissing. He curls into me, dragging the bedclothes over us. His fingers trail my spine, coming to rest in the hollow below my ribs. I’m conscious of how thin I am, how visible my bones are under my skin. Since it got cold I haven’t run as much, but weight hasn’t added itself to my frame. I hope he doesn’t compare me to girls of his own age, all of them still smooth with that post-adolescent plumpness to their skin and bodies.

I force myself back to the moment. Sean props himself up on one elbow. His hair falls over his face, still long and surfer-blond despite the time of year. A tattoo marks the skin on his left shoulder, loops over and down his back. I touch my fingertips to it, follow the curve of ink.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

‘Yeats,’ he says. ‘It’s a total embarrassment.’

It’s corny, certainly, but he’s so young, so perfect, that it doesn’t jar.

‘I got it done in college.’ He rubs the words, pulls a face. ‘One of my friends was training in tattoos, and I offered to be his guinea pig. I liked the poem in school, and it seemed better than a heart or a skull or whatever.’

‘You could have got a rose,’ I offer.

‘I know. With someone’s name.’

‘Exactly! Or maybe just “Mother” printed underneath.’

He pinches his inked skin. ‘Yeah, I really missed out there.’

I trail my fingers once again over the lettering. ‘I like it.’

He shouts with laughter. ‘No you don’t, you’re just saying that.’

I grin at him in the faint light that leaks through the window. ‘Probably.’

‘Wait, you’re an English teacher, right?’

I shrug. ‘Of sorts.’

‘Of sorts? You either are or you’re not.’

‘I am. But usually in a university.’

Sean’s groan is theatrical. He rolls over on his back and puts his hand to his head. ‘Even worse.’

I prod him. ‘Why the drama?’

He lowers his hand. ‘The drama, my dear Aoife, is that you know your shit. You know poetry. I’m hoping to impress you with my prowess, and now I’m here, naked, all this stupid poetry all over me, and you, you’re probably laughing at me.’

I shake my head. ‘I’d never laugh at you. Judge you, probably. But I’d never laugh.’

He kisses me again, crushing our laughter. He is a surprising lover, gentle, considerate, all the things I’d assumed were pushed aside in boys his age in the race to accumulate numbers, add notches to bedposts, scalp their female victims and hang the trophies on their walls. Afterwards, we lie in a tangle of sheets, the moon spilling though the uncurtained window, painting our skin several shades lighter. I am the colour of milk, Sean a tint darker. His hands soothe me. I wrap my white limbs around him, afraid he might disappear. I push Isaac away, put him into the locked box that he needs to be kept in. Contortionist that he is I know he’ll be out before dawn, mocking my foolishness for thinking I could ever be rid of him.

I watch Sean’s chest rise and fall through the bars of light that stripe the bed. From where he lies, half a pillow away, he trails a finger over my cheek, my lips. I bite his finger gently. He taps my nose. We are crushed together in my single bed. I can smell the whiskey on his breath, the lingering notes of his cologne, spicy and warm. He pulls on my hair. I feel his fingers getting caught in the tangles and I put my hand up.

‘Don’t.’

‘Why not? You’ve great hair.’

I inch away from him, reclaim my hair, my self.

I’m embarrassed by the state I’ve allowed it to get into. I’m aware of the metaphor I’ve unwittingly created in letting my hair become so neglected. I’ll get it cut soon.

Sean’s fingers snake across my head again. ‘Hey, relax. I can fix this. It’s just a bit tangled.’

Great. The first time someone shows any interest in me in a long time, and he ends up offering to fix my hair. I pull away. ‘Another time.’

‘But why wait? It could be so much nicer.’

‘What are you now, a hairdresser?’

He laughs. ‘Trust me. I know what I’m doing. Have you any olive oil?’

I do. The cold-pressed, expensive kind. Not something I want to pour on my head. Sean disappears downstairs, and reappears with the bottle in his hands.

‘How did you find that?’ I reach for the bottle.

He lifts it out of my reach. ‘It was on the table. Now sit up.’

My instinct is to say no, but I have nothing to lose. My hair is a disaster. I obey, and sit with my back to him, the duvet wrapped around me. Sean pools the oil in his palms, rubs it over his fingers and then over my hair. Two handfuls later, the resistance in my hair buckles. Sean’s fingers eventually begin to trace paths through the impossibility of my tresses.

I allow him to unravel the chaos, the rhythm of his hands lulling me. Maude had often brushed my curls for me as a child, the strokes of my old paddle brush as hypnotic as drugs. My mother had rarely done my hair, except to yank it into a ponytail when it exasperated her.

‘There,’ he says, kissing my bare shoulders. ‘Finished.’

I touch my head with tentative fingers, rake them through the slippery locks.

‘I had a girlfriend with dreads. I helped her with them, so I know a bit about managing difficult hair.’

‘Thanks.’ I can’t quite look at him. It’s like I’m a naked grub, wriggling under his microscope. Self-consciousness is suffocating me, and I do what I invariably do when I’m in a situation that makes me uncomfortable: I reach for a drink. My second hot whiskey is still on the bedside locker, cold now, but necessary. I swallow it in one gulp, close my eyes, wince at its strength.

‘Hey, some for me too!’ Sean wrestles the glass from me. ‘My God, you know how to drink.’

Embarrassed, I turn from him. I hate having attention drawn to my drinking. I’m not that sort of alcoholic. Even at meetings, I find it difficult to stand up in front of everyone, wave my boozy flag in the air and declare myself.
My name is Eva and I’m an alcoholic.

Sean attempts to turn me to face him, but the moment has gone. It’s too much, my hair, the remark about my drinking, the way Isaac keeps edging his sneaky way into everything. I am cold, exhausted. The whiskey, instead of blunting things, is sloshing around in my stomach. I didn’t eat much today, just a sandwich at noon, and the night has closed in on me.

Sean hefts the bedclothes up over us, attempts to snuggle up to me.

I thump my pillow. ‘We should sleep.’

‘Have you a sweater or anything you could give me? It’s freezing in here.’

‘Try the drawer.’ I pull a long-sleeved top over my head.

Sean puts on a sweater, an old one I keep for reading in. He clambers back into the bed and touches the insides of my thighs. He kisses my back, then runs his hands over my oily hair. ‘It’s fucking sub-zero in here. How do you survive?’

‘Hot whiskeys.’ I inch my back into the curve of his body. My head hurts. ‘I need to sleep. I’m exhausted.’

‘I think I’ve a bit of marching powder in one of my pockets.’ His voice trails off, hopeful.

This is where a large age gap gets in the way. If he thinks I’m going to stand chopping lines of coke on the bedside table at half past five in the morning the week before Christmas, then he is definitely with the wrong woman. ‘Not a chance. In another lifetime, definitely. But not tonight.’

‘It was worth a shot.’ Another kiss to my back.

‘It was.’

Sean is asleep before I am, his sweatered chest pressed against the ribbed cotton of my top. It takes an age to get warm. I drag on socks. That helps. Then pyjama bottoms. I wriggle against Sean until I’m comfortable. I can’t help it. He’s so warm. He moves, and in sleep drops one arm over me, his hand resting on my stomach. I tighten my abs, then let them go again. He’s asleep. He won’t notice. I touch my hair, the slippery strands running easily through my fingers. The bed smells of olive oil, but I’ll change the sheets in the morning.

Downstairs, the clock chimes the hour. Six. I hear it again an hour later. Sean hasn’t stirred. My eyes itch with exhaustion, but my mind turns cartwheels in the frozen darkness and I cannot sleep. My thoughts betray me, find their way to the coke in Sean’s pocket. My credit card, a crisp twenty rolled into a tight tube, the hit of bitterness at the back of my mouth. But I resist, because, really, what would be the point? Gradually, I feel the whiskey leaving my system, taking with it all moisture from my cells. The requisite headache nudges at my skull. Sleep somehow captures me, but not before dawn quietly silvers the sky.

CHAPTER 19

I
t is early January before I hear from Sally, that murky time of year when the sky seems to begin at shoulder height and the entire colour spectrum consists of varying hues of grey. The electronic beep of my phone slices through the silence of the morning. I am working on a paper that I’ve been earmarked to deliver at a conference in Columbia next month.
A
t the last conference I attended
I delivered the keynote speech on imaginative literature of the early twentieth century. This year I won’t be there, but I want the paper published. I’ve been putting it off, filling hours marking essays and Christmas tests, wasting my time with the trite minutiae of grading instead of using my brain and producing something of worth. French schools outlawed homework years ago. I support the ban.

Isaac’s assistant emailed me a week before Christmas, asking me if I could still write the paper. ‘Emotion in Modernity’. So here I am, outlining the abstract, barely a dent in the required 7,000 words, my phone trilling loudly on the table. I don’t recognise the number, but I answer it anyway.

‘Eva?’

The voice is friendly, but unfamiliar. ‘Yes.’

‘Hi, this is Sally. Adam’s friend,’ she adds, when there is no instant reaction from me. ‘Sorry if this is a bad time. Adam gave me your number, and I thought I’d try and get you before school starts again.’

I remember her, and her wish to include some of my poems on the school English curriculum, although I have since wondered if I heard her wrong. Besides Maude, no one has mentioned my poems in a very long time.

It appears that I didn’t imagine it all. Sally wants to meet me to talk about the poems she has bookmarked for inclusion. We will get together in two days, for coffee. My palms are suddenly clammy with apprehension. I itch for a drink. What if she decides she doesn’t want my work after all? Or, worse, she requests new poems and then wonders why I don’t have any? What will I tell her?

If I stay in the house I will drink. It’s only eleven o’clock. It’s a dry day. Cold, but dry. Gritting my teeth against the desire to flood my brain with numbing alcohol, I change into my running clothes and flee the house before I succumb to the open arms of temptation.

The air is so cold it feels as though I am breathing needles of ice. My face numbs against the switchblade of the wind. The sky is the colour of bone, picked clean and held up to the midwinter light. I pound the footpath, no destination in mind.

I’ve allowed my running to slide, and I’m in pain. At the canal I pause, leaning on the wooden lock for support as I catch my breath. Farther down the canal, the Luas thunders overhead. I’m still not used to seeing this toylike silver tram sliding through the city. The water is still and dark. A swan hisses as it floats past.

Running is a habit. An old habit. It soothes me, and its aimlessness clears my head. When I started running, back when Andrew was sick, I used to leave the house in whatever I was wearing, and just run. I learned quickly that the very least I required was a decent pair of running shoes. Just to the canal and back, I’d promise myself, but as I got better and fitter I found that I couldn’t stop. I ran until I was so exhausted that I had no choice but to return home. I kept running from that house full of dark shadows, from my anger-shattered mother, from my crazy brother. Weight melted off me, I grew thinner, leaner, and still I couldn’t stop running. After my first stint at giving up drinking I picked up my running shoes again, and each time the urge to drink bit me I flattened it with a destinationless run in a New York park.

I want to stop drinking again. I can’t keep on doing what I’ve been doing since I got back to Dublin. I can’t live a healthy or productive life if my principal objective each day is to count the minutes until I allow myself a drink. It’s starting to show on my face, in my body. My legs scream at me to stop running, my breath is shorter, raspier than before. I don’t want to be that woman, alone with her books and empty bottles. I actually don’t know what I do want, but I don’t want that.

Coffee. I promise myself coffee when I’m finished running. It’s not the same, but it’s a pretty good substitute. Lots of espresso, so strong it makes my hands shake and my nerves jump. Maybe if I drink enough of it I can even pretend I’m high. I retie my ponytail. The difference in my hair since Sean detangled it is still a novelty. I haven’t heard from him since he left the following morning, but I don’t mind.

The pavement is icy at the edges. I pick up the pace. I keep to the centre of the path, the well-worn part. I allow myself to be guided by the pounding of my feet. I empty my mind of thought, a trick I learned all those years ago when I ran to escape home.