Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  Heaving, frowning, trying to come without hurting her, he returned the compliment.

  For the next while Oisín had the feeling of triumph. He was a little closer to possessing Helen with the whole of his understanding. And he definitely had history on his side.

  Still asleep, she turned onto her back, a breast showing over the duvet. He put his hand over it, squeezed it, massaged the nipple. Her back arched. Then he pulled the duvet over it, to protect her from the voices of the men outside the window. Talking shit. They had no idea what he had here.

  When she woke up he would take her for a banquet breakfast. She was always hungry when she woke up. There was a place in Temple Bar that did steak and ginger ale for breakfast. That’s where the lads went the morning after a Dublin piss-up. He’d sit by the window with her and eat a bloody breakfast steak and fried eggs and everyone that walked by the window would know just why they were both so hungry. He’d get up in a minute and shower. Maybe then if she was still asleep he’d go there on his own and bring her back a take-away fry, though that might not be the same.

  The small bed was uncomfortable but he found it hard to leave, to un-stick his skin from hers and wash their love-making off. He wanted her suddenly. He wanted to go under the duvet and kiss her. She would wake as she came, wetness flushing his mouth.

  He loved being in her little college room. It gave him the feeling of being inside her mind. He loved the laundry drying on a bit of rope strung between the curtain rail and a picture hook, and her walls plastered with pictures of her unnumbered sisters and images of faraway places: a sky, a fairy grove, Venice, the high-rise skyline of New York. The pictures opened out the room like windows, as though she was expanding her world from inside her space, as though life was not big enough for her. Any white spaces on the wall were graffitied with telephone numbers, Shakespearean sonnets, bits of songs.

  ‘Are you sure it’s language that’s broken,’ he had asked, ‘not light?’

  She had kissed his neck, put her hands under his T-shirt and stroked his chest, ‘Dunno …’

  * * *

  Your first time was a prayer to a man who could have loved you. It hurt. You offered up the pain to him, knowing in your sanity that he had cringed and forgotten you long ago, and that this pain could never reach him. Out there is only space, you know, and space is insatiable. It gobbles all it can.

  You bled a bit afterwards, but not as much as you would have thought. You imagined another, who might have been kind, and not fallen into a doze with a satisfied Cheshire-cat grin while you swallowed into the pillow, who might have attached some archaic value to your virginity.

  Oisín rolls out of his half-sleep and reaches for your breast. You decide that this will be the last time you’ll think of him: his hands and his warmth and his man’s smell. The gentle, brushing, just-touching kiss.

  seven

  One wall of the waiting room is covered by a rack full of leaflets on eating disorders, suicide, sexual health, sexual abuse, testicular cancer, family problems, money problems … all in varying pastel shades. The boy opposite avoids my gaze, staring instead at a leaflet on financial loans. He thinks I am interested in the fact that he is here and that I care why. He thinks this is a secret, safe place. He thinks his pain is special, his story is special and someone here cares.

  I have my own delusions too, my own hopes. I hope this person I am going to see is not some psychology student who just passed their finals, but one who will see into me, assess the cogs and bolts of my faulty mind, see what’s missing and maybe fix me. Better still, maybe they will tell me there is nothing wrong with me at all, that someone else is to blame, someone else made me unfit for this world. Maybe they could break it all down, disassemble all the machinery of my mind, and let me start again.

  A woman emerges from the open doorway. ‘Gavin?’ He looks up and smiles and she smiles. This is all conducted in a whispery way, as though he is an invalid and sound might hurt him. ‘I’m ready for you now if you want to come on through?’ They both pad softly along the green carpet to her room.

  After flicking through all the brochures I stare at my fingernails and pull off one of the cuticles. At last a girl appears with the same soft voice, the same long, insipid face, the same gentle manner as the first woman, but with darker hair.

  ‘Cassandra? Hi. I’m Amelia.’

  When we are seated in her office, her back to the door and my back to the window, we begin.

  ‘So. Cassandra, is it?’

  ‘Cassandra, yes.’

  ‘Unusual name.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Amelia.’

  ‘Hi. Nice to meet you.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, what can I do for you Cassandra?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What prompted you to make the appointment? What do you need to talk about?’

  ‘I have a new boyfriend.’

  I had no intention – absolutely no intention, when I came in here – of lying.

  ‘I see.’

  Her fingers are slender and clean with pink, oval nails. I wonder whether she does that herself or if she has just treated herself to a professional manicure. I tell her he is my first and I feel jealous of his past – I feel so insecure. I feel, I say, like I am sinking away from myself, like I don’t know who I am and like I don’t know why he’d love me, why I would be any better than any of the women before.

  ‘I have no reason to believe he will be unfaithful to me but I can’t stop thinking about all the girls he’s slept with.’ She sighs. ‘That’s very difficult.’ Then, after a silence, she says, ‘It reminds me of a song … what’s the name of the singer? It’s on the tip of my tongue …’ She frowns and there is a long pause during which I tear off another cuticle.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘It’ll come to me,’ she says, ‘the brain is like a filing cabinet.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I’ve heard that. You just have to press “search”, and wait.’

  I resist the temptation to pick at my damaged finger while we wait. Then it comes to her, and without warning she recites a song to me about a man who is in love with a woman but has had a lot of women before her.

  You are the only one that has my heart

  But all the loves that have gone before

  You can never be sure. No you can never be sure.

  I don’t know what to say now and nor does she. She looks at her notepad, and then back at me.

  ‘Have you any idea where this insecurity is coming from? I mean, apart from the fact that he has had a lot of partners?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, how was your childhood? What was your relationship like with your parents?’

  This is too boring. I know my own story too well. I explain myself over and over and over in my mind, and that doesn’t help, I know why I’m depressed but I’m still depressed. My worth is not the same as that of someone whose mummy wanted them, or someone who saved their mummy from the place that mine wandered to. That’s just life and it would be a lie to pretend otherwise. Even if it were possible there would be no point in reliving my short and uneventful past to Amelia.

  ‘I don’t want to do this,’ I say, ‘I don’t want to have to go to counselling. There isn’t time. It seems such a waste – no offence – but it seems such a waste. When there is so much life I should be having. It just seems a waste to do this.’

  Amelia frowns: ‘I’m not sure I understand. But I do think it is worth taking the time to work through things.’

  ‘God.’ I say, ‘God. But life is so slow – isn’t it? It is so slow and short.’

  ‘I really – Cassandra I am having trouble understanding what it is you are saying. I think it might be useful to talk about your childhood … your parents … how are things at home?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Then, without planning to, I add, ‘My mother’s dead though.’

  ‘I see,’ she s
ays, ‘When did she pass away – on. When did she pass on?’

  I didn’t mean to tell her that. I don’t want to talk about my mother, give rein to that cry. If I talk about her I feel as though she is at my shoulder, my mother, touching my neck, touching my hands, touching my face as though she means no harm. I feel the drunken spittle whispers in my ears. I do not want to talk about the dead, just as my grandmother does not want to talk about the war. The dead have nothing to teach us. The dead are just dead. That doesn’t make them wise, or worthy. That doesn’t make them anything.

  ‘Two months ago. She walked into an electricity box. The ones with the signs on them, saying “Danger” with a picture of a man being electrocuted …’

  I don’t mean to say that either. I didn’t plan on lying. I am aiming for profanity, I think, but I am behaving ludicrously. The joke is on me.

  ‘I didn’t know they still had those,’ says Amelia, ‘Did you get on to the council?’

  I’m about to laugh but instead I start to cry. Do I hate my mother so much that I would have her walk into an electricity box? And how is it possible, anyway, to hate the dead, or love the dead? How can the past hope for a resolution? What can it hope to achieve by haunting the present like this? What can the living offer the dead? And there is nothing at all that my mother can do for me now – nothing I can do to extract what I need from her – not talking about her, not thinking about her, not hating her – nothing.

  ‘Take your time.’ Amelia tells me, ‘You are in a lot of pain.’

  ‘Yes I am. I am having bad dreams. Is there something I could take?’

  ‘What kind of dreams?’

  ‘Bad dreams,’ I say, ‘terrible dreams. Dead people in them. The women always dead. I don’t want to re-live them, please.’

  ‘What kind of dreams?’

  She’s very interested in the dreams thing. I thought other people’s dreams were famously boring, but maybe not. Not for Amelia. It occurs to me then that maybe she is a writer gathering material, not a counsellor at all, but that’s just paranoia. I am a little ashamed of my dreams.

  They are all about me, just me. They have no social conscience at all. The night the twin towers were hit, the night war was launched on Iraq, the night children were being shot in some shanty school, I dreamed about me, my mummy, my ex-boyfriend. I tell Amelia that I dream about the Holocaust. I am the victim and sometimes a Nazi. My grandparents were involved, I say, in anti-communism.

  ‘That was before the Nazi camps, before Hitler was even up and running; that was when Stalin had already killed more people in the Gulag than were to die from Nazi persecution …’ I must be careful she doesn’t think I’m a Nazi for saying this. Her degree is not in history. Mine neither. I wasn’t there either anyway was I? So how would I know? It is my grandfather’s cant I’m using, and some facts from a book I read last week. I try to be honest, I try to be myself.

  ‘I don’t think they really believe the Holocaust happened – is it illegal to say that? I don’t think they can get their heads around it, are surprised by it still …’

  ‘You have inherited that guilt?’ says Amelia, writing it down on her notepad as though she has cracked a code. She is proud of that phrase, so neat, so articulate, inherited guilt, she writes.

  ‘That’s what I’m saying, Amelia. Yes, exactly, Amelia.’ I tell her I dream about the war.

  ‘Which war?’ she asks. ‘The war,’ I say, ‘the one in Iraq. Isn’t it a war?’

  I go on and on with these made-up dreams, and she seems pleased with them. Maybe they are sort of true anyway, seeing as I made them up. Maybe it’s her job to figure it out. I tell her I see children’s faces covered in that curiously clean-looking blood, guns in their dead fingers. I tell her about Zeng Qiáng’s face haunting me, the email about the breastless lesbian, the way I don’t know what to do with that sort of information.

  ‘He’s been released,’ says Amelia, ‘Zeng Qiáng has been released. I think he’s coming back to college. They’ve held his place for him.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So you don’t need to worry about that any more anyway.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘I want you to keep a dream diary for me, okay? You don’t have to show me, but I want you to write them down. I’m also going to refer you to student health. They might prescribe you some Prozac or something. Just for the moment. To get you through the grief.’

  ‘Prozac? Do people still take Prozac? Is there anything just for the dreams?’

  ‘Yes, they’ll give you something for the dreams I’d say. I don’t know actually. It’s not my field. That’s more psychiatry, as opposed to counselling. I’m a counsellor. But I’m hoping to train as a psychiatrist as well …’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘We’re going to have to finish up now,’ says Amelia, ‘I have another client coming in at twelve, but if you want to make another appointment I’m here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Look after yourself. You look like you should be eating more.’

  ‘I’m a model,’ I say, making it sound very glamorous. Coke and bulimia and a lot of money glitter under my voice. ‘I’m supposed to look like this.’

  eight

  It was the first sunny day of the year. They skipped lectures and went to Howth on a day trip. It was supposed to be a surprise but he couldn’t blindfold her the whole way to the Dart station. He bought two return tickets to Howth, led her to platform one and gave her three guesses as to where they were going, and she pretended to think they were going to all kinds of unlikely boring and exotic places.

  ‘Prague?’

  ‘Funderland?’

  ‘The National Library?’

  She was wearing a sleeveless yellow top with silly pink buttons for straps and he kissed her bare shoulder as she gazed out at the sea whooshing by. An old woman on the Dart smiled at them, her head bopping along with the train as though her skull were weightless under the frill of blue curls.

  In Howth they walked around the second-hand bookshops and he bought an illustrated pocket-book of terriers for seventy-five cent because the dog on the third page looked like the dog he had as a child. He told her about Koogo and she listened even though she had heard it before.

  Then they got fish and chips from Beshoff’s and sat on the grass in the sun, using their hands to eat the chips and battered cod drenched in vinegar and ketchup, and afterwards they both smelled of chipper. They licked their fingers and wiped them on their jeans but they still stank.

  He lay on his back and she crawled up to him from behind and kissed him upside down and he grabbed her and flipped her over and kissed her the right way up.

  Then they bought whipped ice-cream cones and went down by the shore and sat on the cold rocks and shivered because the sun was sinking now. He gave out to her for not bringing a jacket and took off his jumper, which she didn’t want him to do. She refused to put it on so he stretched the neck and popped it over both their heads and held her under the wool. The sky was luminous blue with an early moon seeping through, faint as a watermark. He said he had always thought it was impossible for the sun and the moon to be up at the same time and she said they were both only half up and they finished their ice-creams in silence.

  Her lips were very red from the cold. They were alone and he thought briefly about making love to her there on the rocks but decided it wasn’t the right moment and she might get scratched. She talked about college, and about a board game called ‘Guess Who?’ which he had never played. He talked about hating his dad, and about a girl he had sex with when he was seventeen. He didn’t know that the girl thought it meant something and she became very angry and clingy. He ignored her letters and calls and never said sorry, but he has always felt bad about it. He told Helen this like a confession and he could see she was trying to say the right thing to absolve him.

  Then they moved down closer to the sea and picked up stones that they thought looked like things: horses and hearts and Coke
bottles, and one that looked like a dog. Oisín put the heart-shaped one in his pocket. He wanted something to keep.

  By accident she stepped in a little pool between the rocks and screamed when she felt the cold water seep in through her socks. He laughed at her.

  ‘You’re a disaster!’

  ‘Ahhh! Give me your socks!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Give me your socks!’

  He stepped in the same pool. ‘Shit! That’s your fault!’

  They took off their socks and threw them into the sea and dried their feet on Oisín’s jumper.

  ‘Fuck it, I liked those socks!’

  ‘They were the same as all your other socks!’

  He picked her up and lumbered over the rocks towards the water and she screamed in fun and then out of fear, ‘If we fall we’ll smash our skulls, Oisín!’

  When they got to the edge of the water he put her down and tried to teach her how to skim stones but she couldn’t learn and began giddily hurling them out as far into the water as she could, and she kissed his cold bare chest because she was wearing his jumper now.

  They were shivering all the way back on the Dart and didn’t talk much. They tried to warm each other’s feet with their hands.

  When they got back they took a warm shower together at Helen’s, whispering like bold children in case someone walked by and heard them. He grew hard from the sight of her naked with the water and suds running over her round breasts and down between her legs and she kissed his mouth and touched him a bit to tease him and stepped out of the shower. He groaned and turned the shower to cold before stepping out. Then they ran back to Helen’s room in their underwear, her wet hair dripping all over the floor and Oisín’s hands cupped over his crotch, covering what was left of his erection. They pattered as fast as they could so that no one would see them, trying not to skid on the wet lino floor.

  They made love in bed, looking at each other, kissing each other’s faces, whispering sex talk and love talk in the twilight beneath bed sheets. When Oisín closed his eyes at last to sleep, she said, ‘I love you Oisín,’ whispered it close to his hair so he could feel her breath, her kiss at his temple. Then she fell asleep too.