Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  ‘I love you.’

  I love you.

  * * *

  The woman in front of you in the bathroom queue drags her gaze up and down the length of your body, glaring. You must still have your glow on then, Helen, despite yourself. The woman is a little drunk, a little too old for her outfit, with dead, too-black hair. You are her rival – that much is clear, but rival for what?

  One of the toilets has been locked for a long time. It’s silent in there. The woman raps her knuckles on the door and there is a faint sound of giggling, sliding heels, and then the quiet, quick, no-nonsense snort of coke sweeping up nostrils. The lock slides open and two models walk out with bright eyes. They must be models. In fact, you recognize one of them from the window of Oasis. They are impossibly tall and narrow, but without the stoop that lanky girls have. They are beautiful. They love their own faces, their own bodies. They are happy, you think, not having to wonder whether they are pretty or not, they know. That must feel wonderful. You said that to Cassandra once – that it must be wonderful not to have to wonder, but she didn’t get what you meant.

  The woman darts past the models. ‘Well you took your time girls!’ They look at each other and laugh and you hear the woman’s piss hit the toilet bowl.

  When it is your turn you bolt yourself in and sit on the closed seat. After staring at two Health Board ads for some time, you leave and wash your hands.

  One of the ads told you to carry a condom, the other said not to forget to wash your hands. They had the same Health Board symbol in the lower right-hand corner, but they were very different posters. The wash-your-hands one was a hand-drawn, two-tone poster that looked like it was made in the sixties: a picture of hands being washed. It’s the same one they had in your school toilets and on the walls of the infirmary. The sexual health one was trendier, cooler, designed especially for the youth of today, a grainy close-up of flesh on flesh.

  You massage the frothy soap slowly and with care, watching it as though it means something. Now look at your face, Helen. You are beautiful tonight. What for? You return to Cassandra, resolved to tell her that you’re not well and will head home. It’s a waste of time this, all of this.

  She’s bumped into a group from college, and it will be easier now, you won’t be leaving her alone. You don’t really recognize any of them, but she seems to know them well. She is smiling her superior smile while one of them, a boy with dreadlocks wearing a T-shirt that says ‘21 cotton farmers killed themselves last week and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’, talks to her. She doesn’t introduce you, she barely acknowledges you at all. One of these students, a boy you’ve never met before, walks right up to you, stands too close, puts out his hand. ‘I’m Oisín.’

  It is not the way people usually introduce themselves. There’s something barefaced about it. He seems to be missing something, a sort of self-awareness, a self-consciousness, the social grace that would make such bluntness impossible. He has a country accent. You let him shake your hand, ‘Helen.’

  He has dodgy hair, fluffy and sparse like a newly hatched chick, wetted with gel or something. You don’t know what to say now. Why did he shake your hand? You turn to Cassandra, stroke the crook of her elbow. ‘I’m going to head, Cassy. I’m not feeling well.’

  Oisín insists that he was just going and will walk with you. He is hyper, babbling about books and films. He tells you that The Matrix is the best film ever made, that it actually says things about society, that it’s actually really important. That even the lads at home – who wouldn’t usually be into films and shit – thought it was good, that that just shows how good it is. You don’t tell him that you hated The Matrix, that yourself and Cassandra went for chips after seeing it and slagged it all evening, not only the film, but the sort of people who would like it. ‘The kind of guy,’ Cassandra said, ‘who thinks he’s a genius ’cause he can see the meaning in it …’

  ‘I must watch it,’ you say.

  Your mind is tender at the moment and even the effort of talking hurts a little. You do not want to be asked out or kissed right now. You are sad. Your own silly obsession with Mr O’Hara becomes clear now. Love. God, you had actually thought love.

  ‘Have a hot whiskey in the Buttery before you go home.’

  ‘I’m really tired.’

  You think of something Cassandra once said to you, a quote from her grandad, that you need a little corruption if you’re not to be ruined altogether, that you need to harden the heart so it doesn’t break. Stupid to be broken-hearted over something like this.

  He nods. ‘Maybe tomorrow?’

  He asks for your number. He gives you the feeling of being looked at straight on, and that sense that he is not aware that he is breaking a sort of rule; he is oddly, disarmingly direct. He has a pen and you write your number on his arm, touching his fingers with your other hand accidentally-on-purpose.

  The heart is very adaptable. It lives off love; it will love anything if you let it. Be careful, Duckling. The heart is not as hardy as you think and your mind will not protect it. The heart is very naive, very gullible. It is apt to believe its own lies.

  You raise yourself up on your toes and kiss his cheek like a child, but he holds you to him and he doesn’t move his cheek away after the peck. He moves his lips over yours, brushes them very gently. You open your mouth to the kiss. It feels like surrender.

  six

  I try to finish the dream, even now that I am awake. I try to see the girl’s face and tell her to take her hand away, ‘I don’t need you or want you. Go away – ’ but I can’t picture her. Even now that I am awake that face eludes me. I can’t shake the feeling of being smothered by someone’s dead hand. She means no harm by it, the girl in the dream. She thinks she’s doing me a favour.

  I pull the duvet over my head and try to sleep, but I can’t stand the warmth of my breath, the sound of my own pulse. I want to stop having these dreams. I want to go forward now, into something else. There are tablets you can take. Brian took them. He didn’t dream at all. I resolve to get myself some. He thought they affected his art and his libido, but I don’t have any sort of art that would be cheapened by a lack of dreams.

  That night at the gig Helen left early. I talked to a boy from my class who was wearing an ethical T-shirt and had tried to kiss me in Fresher’s Week. Later, at the bar, I saw Paul and he ignored me again, and I thought of him holding my hand that night and saying, ‘I think we get each other.’ I went alone to his exhibition six months later. It was nothing like he’d described. There were dummies with whips and Brazilians and plastic embryos, but it said none of the things he had meant it to. All of the other visitors were tourists. They took photos of themselves with their arms slung over the dummies’ shoulders and their thumbs up.

  I get up and make a coffee. Sometimes when I wake at night Helen hears me in the kitchen and comes in, but she is busy with that boy tonight. He’s probably boning away at her now, grinding her into the mattress. The kitten has been banished to the kitchen at night for bothering Helen, sitting on her face when she’s asleep. Its litter tray is beside the bin. The cleaning lady said she wouldn’t tell on us. She has two cats herself, she said. I pick it up and it rubs its wet nose against mine, then its ears. Miserable thing. It still has no name. It perches on my shoulder like a parrot while I make the coffee. Oddly it shows no interest in the fish bowl, which is on top of the fridge now in case the cat gets any ideas, and contains two new fish, both mottled black and white and orange.

  Oisín has been around for six weeks, and Helen has gradually lost that glow, as though something in her is stepping lower and lower out of sight. She has become quiet with me, as though she has let me down. When I asked her if she was still a virgin she told me to fuck off.

  I cover the bottom of a mug with milk and bring it, and the plunger, back to bed. I wait for ten minutes, while the kitten claws the duvet. When the coffee is very strong I push down the sieve and pour. It is not as hot as I would like. That’s from putt
ing the milk in first and not scalding the mug. I read in bed with the covers pulled over my head, nothing but my eyes and the tips of my fingers uncovered. This is my favorite thing to do. I feel a little better now, and I know I will go to all my lectures today.

  * * *

  Their bodies were tangled when Oisín woke up, their fingers entwined, her round bum in his lap, skin on clammy skin, his face in her neck, mouth in her hair, breathing her sleep. He wanted to make love to her while she slept. He unknotted his hand from hers as gently as he could and rested the pads of two fingertips on her skin. He moved his touch slowly over the curve of her shoulder, under the duvet, down the slope of her waist, over the round of her buttocks and ran a finger along the lips of her furred pussy. He wanted to move it inside, find her clit, make her wet at a time when she couldn’t fake it, wake her with pleasure … then he changed his mind. Something about it made him shudder. They touched so gently, the lips, like a mouth about to kiss.

  He dislodged himself from her limbs, but not too carefully. He wanted her to wake up. He was lonely without her. He rolled onto his back, put his hands behind his head, turned his face to the window.

  The bed was too narrow for them both. The curtains were crap. They were slug-orange with a brown pattern like leaves, or like whales if you looked at it differently. Not only were they thin enough to let the light in, they didn’t quite cover the window. There were gaps, through which he could see the wet leaves of a tree and the pink morning light. Helen’s floor was low enough that the tops of heads passed her window. He was glad. At night it gave him a thrill to hear people pass, see their shadows crossing the walls as he did Helen, his fingers in her mouth to stop her from screaming; their sex talk low and breathy against the talk passing beyond the window. When he was having sex with Helen everything else seemed like bullshit. It turned out she was a screamer. He wouldn’t have known that.

  There were students rushing past the window now to early lectures, chatting, or listening to too-loud iPods. They made silhouettes on the curtains, head shapes cut out of the morning sunlight. All a passer-by would have to do was peer through the window and they would see her sleeping, and they would see him beside her, and they would know they were missing something. They would know he was a lucky guy.

  The lads couldn’t even imagine this. He was still sending them emails about the other girls. He didn’t know what to say about her. What he couldn’t explain to them was that she got him.

  The kitten was scratching at the door now, mewing desperately. Helen gave a little snorty, purry, inward-breathing snore, and turned in her sleep to face him. He wanted her to open her eyes. He had noticed yesterday that when Helen opened her eyes they were navy for a moment before the pupils shrank and the irises lightened to the shade of a thrush’s egg ringed with midnight blue. He relished the new discovery, and now he watched for it every time she opened her eyes.

  Things were slotting into place at last, coming together, making sense. Everything that happened now had a déjà-vu feel to it that made Oisín believe it was always meant to happen. He was different since he’d started seeing Helen. He followed happiness, now. Now it didn’t bother him that there was no point to his lectures, no point to his days: he could be happy just like this. Simple as.

  Going back to his flat no longer gave him that sense of despair. If he was alone in the flat, something that happened only rarely now, he walked around the two rooms, checking everything. He checked that the fridge was stocked so that he didn’t have to go and get milk in the middle of the night when she felt like a Bailey’s hot chocolate. He found himself wandering into the bathroom just to look at her toothbrush lying at the side of the sink. He liked to have her clothes there too, hanging in the wardrobe or bundled at the end of the bed.

  It occurred to him that this might end, but he only had to remember that he had the surety of history now. If it all stopped tomorrow nothing could change that he had watched her sleep, warmed her small hands in his, been surprised by her sudden kiss. He had made her laugh until her back arched and her neck opened to the sky. He had pumped his cum into her as deep as he could and she had liked it. He wanted to get some photos of her. He had no photos.

  The kitten groaned, mewed one more time, a long, final wail, and scampered off. Let it annoy that other girl, Helen’s friend, Cassandra. It was her kitten too.

  The best thing of all was that when they made love they both came at the same time, Helen’s eyebrows lifting as though shocked by the pleasure, pussy tightening to pull him even more inside her, as though his cum were precious and she wanted every drop. He could fall asleep afterwards without feeling the need for a shower, and he could make love to her again soon after, even if the cum from earlier was still on her tummy or breasts or back in crusty white streaks.

  One night he came five times, and twice the morning after. He would tell the lads that. That’s how he’d explain what he meant about Helen.

  He had told her he loved her. It was at the beginning, one of the first days. She was straddling him, her jean-clad legs either side of his, her arms over his shoulders, her breasts near his face. A tight pink T-shirt. He hadn’t even seen her tits yet. They had been laughing, giddy. Then they had stopped laughing and they had stopped talking and they were looking at each other. She had raised her eyebrows in a question, and he said it, ‘I think I love you.’ She kissed him and fingered the buttons on his jeans and he cupped her breasts and she laughed as though his desire were silly. She didn’t say it back for three weeks. That’s another thing that amazed him about her.

  ‘You’re amazing; cool and vulnerable at once. It makes me want to fuck you all the time.’ She laughed. It was a dismissive laugh that made him laugh at himself and forgive himself because it said that it didn’t really matter how corny he was, or how crude, because he was only a tiny person in a very big world that plodded on with or without him. It didn’t really matter who he was. She liked him anyway.

  The first time they went out he took her to the cinema. He bought the tickets but she insisted on buying popcorn and ice-cream and a big bag of Pick ’n Mix. They only had Virgin Cola, which she didn’t like, so she left him holding it all in the cinema lobby while she ran next door to the newsagents to get cans of Coke.

  They saw Eight Women, a mad French film he didn’t really watch. He watched her watching the film. He watched her suck her upper lip, a habit he thought made her look mildly retarded. He watched her lopsided, curly grin become a girly giggle that surrendered the underbelly of her throat. His mind contained an ever-growing Helen file: Helen concentrating; Helen in pain; Helen eating; Helen thinking distant thoughts, unaware she’s being watched.

  Lit by the colourful, flickering light of the film, her beauty petrified him. He could not touch her for the first four hours of their outing. Her whole attitude confused him. She was so willing to be with him but she didn’t seem to care what he thought of her. Nothing surprised her: anything he told her about himself, or his family, or the lads. She didn’t really care about the details. If he made a crap joke she would raise her eyes to heaven as though she knew already what he was like. She just liked him for no reason at all. She expected nothing from him.

  It was only after the film, walking back to college, that a drunken homeless man gave him the opportunity to touch her, to mind her. The drunk was meandering along the path towards them, his face streaming with tears. He had the croaky, swollen-gummed speech of the truly desperate and was holding a bleeding hand before him in the air like a trophy, screaming at real or imaginary passers-by:

  ‘You wanna suck this? Wanna suck my blood? Hey, hey – you want … yousuckmine an’ – I’ll-suck-yurrrs. You. Want. Does AN-Y-ONE wannasharemyblood? Do I have any takers? You. Anyone wanna SHARE …’

  Oisín had put his arm around her, curling his fingers daringly at the waist and steering her across to the other side of the road. That look on her face – wide blue eyes, the whites glowing in the lamplight, her sad, sad mouth – not fright
ened, but sad.

  He looked forward to winding his comprehension all the way around hers and holding her like a right answer in his mind. They kissed deeper and longer than he had expected that night. When he kissed her she arched her back and let her hands drop to her sides.

  There were boys outside her window now, leaning on the wall, talking shit he couldn’t make out. He wanted to pull back the curtain, show them what he had here: Helen’s wet, puffed-out, sleepy lips that had taken his balls only a few hours ago, the wide pink nipples.

  She wasn’t perfect. There were things he wouldn’t tell the lads about. She sometimes bitched about her mother. She was sometimes so moody that he felt he had done something wrong but it turned out he hadn’t. She sometimes cried for no reason. There were lots of things he could have complained to the lads about, but even the thought of that – of a time when he might complain to the lads about her, a time when she might securely be his ‘girlfriend’ even – gave him a thrill.

  He hadn’t known she was a virgin until she began to wince and cry. The German girl hadn’t done that. There had just been blood afterwards and then she had told him. Helen was so tight that it was like cracking something open. It had made him feel sorry and heavy. He felt he was seeing her for real then, her face ugly with pain, accusing, round-eyed, and for a moment he didn’t like her at all. Then there was a pop when he broke the hymen, a seal being snapped. She put her face into his neck, took a sharp gasp and breathed out slowly. ‘Ow.’ Her hot tears ran into his ear and he felt nauseous. He was surprised that he was still hard. That was when she had said she loved him, with him inside her, with tears over her cheeks, with a wavery voice, as though it were a resolution she was making right there; I love you.