Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  Yankee doodle went to town a-ridin’ on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. Macaroni. Not majagory.

  The break-up nearly killed my grandmother. She had loved Brian instantly on the basis that I loved him and that therefore he must have been worth something. She had invested a lot in him. She had accepted his greying hair, his tendency to kiss my neck with my grandfather in the room, his unwillingness to earn a living. She had defended me when my aunt had called me cheap for moving in with him.

  ‘Well what do you expect, Hannah? Two young things like that, and when you like each other? Well there must be something wrong with you if you do not want to spend all evening together isn’t it? They have just red blood, both of them.’

  While Brian and I were living together my grandmother used to arrive at our flat – Brian’s flat – with a basket of treats: homemade fruit cake, organic coffee, Italian ham. She would never stay long. Her presence was never an intrusion, even on our odd little bubble of a world. She has a rule, and that is never to interfere in someone else’s relationship. Nurturing it doesn’t count as interference.

  She tells stories to back this up: a young man whose mother wouldn’t let him marry a Jewish girl because she thought the girl wore too much make-up. He ended up marrying a plain, Catholic woman who had a string of affairs. In the end the humiliation killed him. ‘You should have seen that man,’ she would say, shaking her head. Another one was about a young woman whose mother wouldn’t let her marry a poet because he was too poor. The poet became very famous, and the farmer that the girl was forced to marry drank all his money and ended up selling the farm, piece by piece. The girl had ten sons one after the other, all over ten pounds with farmer’s hands. On the tenth, she died in childbirth.

  What my grandmother really meant by these stories, I think, was that no one should ever leave anyone they love. That makes perfect sense, in theory, but Brian, love for Brian, consumed me, and what I learned was the truth of that awful cliché Mr O’Hara wrote on the board in school, ‘Happiness writes blank.’ He was looking at Helen as he wrote it, blushing, and she blushed, and the rest of the class wanting to puke. And I thought, what wank-talk. I get it now though. Brian was an artist. He was incapable of the blank of happiness. The pleasure of his life was found in the tug between elation and hell. Without the hell he wouldn’t have known who he was.

  We would be having a beautiful morning, eating pancakes and drinking coffee on the balcony, watching the sun rise, and me trying not to ruin it, when Brian would say, ‘Isn’t it a pity that this is an illusion, our love? This sense of common understanding, this apparent need for each other?’

  He thought it was still intellectual to deconstruct everything. He would launch into a monologue about the transience of love. He had been to a conference on an Arts Council bursary about it. Love lasts four years, he would say, chemically it lasts four years, then it’s just a matter of falling in love again or finding someone else or pretending. ‘Which will we do, Lol?’

  That was the name he gave me when we first made love. He had whispered it against my cheek with his big hands gripping my shoulders and waist. I had the feeling of being covered by him completely, as by the many suckered fingers of an octopus. ‘My little Lolita.’

  There was never any deviance from that nickname. I used to envy other girls when I heard their partners call them baby, or lovebug, or pushky-bunny. Most of the time he treated me with an odd mixture of resentment, desire and repulsion, disallowing that thing I called romance, and that he called kitsch. I loved him utterly. Sometimes, if I was lucky enough not to be noticed, I would watch him contemplate something before he photographed it. He would frown when he was working in a way that let me know what sort of child he must have been. His gaze was like a tongue, licking every crevice, taking in every subtle texture, every change of temperature depending on where the light hit. That’s what I felt like when he first photographed me: like I was being licked. That is the party trick of the self-regarding: they can make you feel as though their consideration might transform you, like love, into something sublime. When I watched him work that miracle on someone else; some other face, some piece of household equipment, gracing it by virtue of his gaze – by virtue of the miraculous transfer of reality into art, the play of light on that dark strip waiting behind the shutter – with an importance beyond its station, I was overcome with a desperate need to say those words, I love you. Or to touch him calmly on his thick back, breathe the smell of his hair and say, mine.

  I used to remind myself of how it began, how much he wanted me then. I was still too young to understand that there are so many ways to want and that his desire had very little to do with me. I would whisper it in his ear as we made love. ‘While you watched me undress,’ I would say, ‘what did it feel like? Did you ever think you could touch me, did you ever think you would be pulsing and throbbing inside me like this, your big, hard, hot, fat …’ and he would say in that high, weak, desperate, about-to-come voice, ‘No I never thought … my Lol, you are impossibly perfect. Watching you sit there, your naked spine, your taut virgin tummy, your skin, your …’

  The impression we gave in public was a little off. It was not uncommon that at an exhibition, or post-exhibition piss-up, a woman would whisper enviously, ‘Brian has been talking about you all night, my god that man adores you …’ Later on in the evening a man would crack some joke about how lucky Brian was, and what was his secret? I suppose I dressed up for these evenings, floated about as though oblivious to Brian and his desire for me. I suppose I was a catch. At home it was different. I was like a puppy, irritatingly zealous. I was always having to be brushed off and patted down or thrown a bone. ‘I’d love an ice-cream,’ he would say, and I’d be off to the Italian ice-cream shop with his coat thrown over my nightdress. There was something missing from us as a couple, I knew that. All our conversations were like a college tutorial, theoretical and self-conscious – all words. There was a level of communication we simply couldn’t reach. I would disperse his brooding black moods with an insistent blow job, having no other access to him. At night I often lay facing his back and, despite my own resolve to say nothing, whispered, ‘Brian? Do you love me?’ at which he would pretend to be asleep, or laugh, or say: ‘What do you mean, Lol? What is love?’ or he would begin to shout at me, ‘What more do you want from me? I can’t hug you all the time! I left my wife for you, I pay your rent, I don’t sleep with anyone else, ANYONE ELSE! What do I need to do?’Again, the only way to end this rant was a blow job.

  The best thing about us was when we were making love in unlikely places: the theatre, on the abandoned set of Salome after the audience and the performers had left; behind a screen at an exhibition; in the open-windowed toilets of a train rattling through Tuscany. This gave me the impression that we were in love, so desperately needing each other’s bodies, so defiant of all the artsy trappings that made up our world. But without them we were nothing at all. Without them we only had each other. A fuck-you to that world was, to me, like a declaration of true love. When we were out in public I was calm and as near to happy as I could get. Then I could believe in our love for a while, because everyone else did.

  I tiptoed about his moods. If he was having a bad day I had a heavy lump in my tummy until I had fixed it. There were days when he was plunged into depression like a black liquid, swallowing black, seeing black, crippled by a private hell that used to open up in him. It was one evening, after he had had one of those days, that I left. Thick wrinkles had descended over his eyes like the frown of a bulldog. He had tied my ankles and painted a black eye onto my face, a bloody scar over one breast, and photographed me sipping tea in an armchair. I had been posing for hours, cold, with him complaining that the photos weren’t right, that I wasn’t sitting the right way, that he was shit.

  ‘I’m shit, I’m shit. I’m getting old, going blind …’

  Finally I made it better by telling him to tie me to the bed, that this might work bette
r as a sequence. The whole idea might read better, I said, if the woman was photographed in a lot of different settings. He took some photos there, but he still wasn’t happy. I needed to do something.

  ‘Oh God,’ I moaned. ‘Please, Daddy, let me kiss your cock!’ He looked at me, raging that I would take his artistic block so lightly, but the lump already swelling in his trousers. He could never resist sex. That is what made it seem impossible that he could have been faithful to me. I began to roll my tongue, purr, talk in that Eastern European accent that he found such a turn on: ‘I vant tho sock urrr coch, plis, oh leth me …’ I strained away from the bed, as though I were dying of thirst and his crotch contained the only drops of moisture. I took him in my throat, which is hard work every time. You learn how not to gag, but that doesn’t mean you don’t always feel like gagging. My hands were tied and it was difficult to balance. After he had come he was calm and sleepy. I kissed his flaccid penis, ‘Brian, untie me.’

  He did, and I got up. As I was nearing the door he grabbed me, turned me over, and pushed himself, hard again already, into my bum. That is something else I never really got used to. Then he was spent and lay panting peacefully on the bed.

  ‘I didn’t like that,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ He swatted the air sleepily, as though I were a fly preventing him from rest. He was in no mood for this, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake Lol. You were the one … I just wanted to photograph you. You were the one. Don’t be a baby. I’m tired.’

  I was determined to keep him in his better mood, proud of myself for dispersing his bad one. I could make him happy. I could make him happy. After cleaning up his semen in the bathroom, resting my shocked bowels a bit and brushing my teeth, I went for a walk. He would be hungry when he woke up. We would have a good evening, I was determined. He was my man and that was my job and I couldn’t bear the unhappiness that seemed to settle on our home for no reason.

  I went to his favourite restaurant and asked for take-out. The dark, round main waiter said the chef would do it for me, though they didn’t usually do take-out. He said this as though ‘take-out’ were a dirty word, a hideous concept, like instant coffee, and I should know better. I think he liked me though. I intrigued him: the skinny girl with the older, fatter man. The waitress who served me was the same one who always worked there and always treated me with the silence and knowing of a servant who has been solicited by her mistress’s husband. I got him spinach and ham ravioli, with the sauce and pine nuts on the side. I got myself tagliatelle with broccoli. He loved their ice-cream. It was home-made Italian stuff and didn’t have as much cream as normal ice-cream, which meant he didn’t wake up with sinus pain. I should have got the ice-cream in tubs but instead I got it in cones and hoped to rush it back to the freezer before it melted. I paid with my debit card. There would be money going into that account in the morning from my grandfather for college books and food. I resolved to take some cash from Brian’s wallet to pay myself back, or to pay my grandad back.

  The journey back didn’t work out as I had planned though. It was a Wednesday evening but for some reason Temple Bar was full of stag parties. Overweight men sweating drink, tops off, toppled about the street. There was hairy, tattooed flesh everywhere. It was a battle to get back to our flat. By the time I arrived one of the cones had been so crushed that I had thrown it out. There was ice-cream all down my fingers. It had made the handle of the take-out bag too soggy to hold so I had to carry it by the base.

  Brian was up when I got in. He was just out of the shower and walked, wet and naked, into our kitchen, where I was washing two plates for our dinner.

  ‘I got take-out.’

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘Ravioli.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you not want ravioli? I can swap with you. I got tagliatelle with broccoli.’

  ‘I just don’t feel like pasta.’ He slapped his hairy belly, and it wobbled. ‘Too starchy.’

  There was dried melted ice-cream in the crack of my elbow. I remember that. It was pink and there was fluff stuck to it. The heat rose to my face. I was going to cry.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ he said.

  ‘I got ice-cream too. There’s one in the freezer. The other one broke.’

  He opened the freezer and let out a bellow. It took me a moment to realize that it was laughter, not anger this time. It could have gone either way.

  ‘Lol! Lol! Is that what’s all over your hands? Ice cream? There’s some on your arm there too! My silly little Lol! I don’t even like the strawberry!’

  ‘I know. That one was for me. Yours melted. I told you …’ I was crying now.

  ‘Lol,’ he said, ‘Lol, I don’t need food, look, I’m a fat old sod as it is! Come here!’

  I was hungry, but he began to lick my arms, my abdomen, my groin, ‘Tell me I’m the only one who’s ever done this.’ This was something he said a lot, our sex talk.

  ‘You’re the only one who’s ever …’

  ‘You’re my girl, my best girl aren’t you, Lol? You’re my best girl.’ I was weakening now, with his tongue inside me, hungry, ready to fall or faint: ‘I’m your best …’

  Afterwards we lay in bed. My hunger had disappeared, left unattended for too long. It was after midnight by now, bedtime anyway.

  He held my hands, kissed each fingertip, ‘My perfect Lol. My perfect girl. Look at all your perfect, long fingers, one, two three, four five – all there!’

  I felt the heat flow out of me, as though her ghost had put a hand on my head. Had I ever told him that? The way she used to kiss my fingers, keep me in bed with her all day. Maybe. It didn’t make a difference; he was her incarnate regardless. He was as impenetrable as her and my stupid, eager, puppyish love was running off him, would keep running off him like water over oily feathers. He was as incurable as her, as incapable of care, or even of looking at me. When he had fallen asleep I packed a few things – I realized there wasn’t much that was mine at Brian’s flat – and left for my grandparent’s house.

  My grandmother’s reverie for love came from the fact that she had found it at seventeen and it had taken her from a claustrophobic home where, as the eldest girl, she cooked and cleaned instead of going to school, and into the exciting life of my grandfather’s attic room. They had survived the war together, the confusion of it, the instability of it, the fuddle and shifting of rights and wrongs, the pervading, constant fear for your own life. My grandfather was the love of her life. For my grandmother, love, for both sexes, was the ultimate goal and the ultimate achievement; without that, everything fell apart. For her, my mother’s failure was in love. She had chosen the wrong man, or failed to keep him, and her bad motherhood was merely an extension of that.

  Brian was not an escape for me, though. I was not running from a home, a mammy and a daddy and a set of moral codes, but searching for it. For my grandmother, freedom was the goal, an opening out from the ideas of her parents, but all I wanted was some of those rules, constraints, some idea of order, some daddy to pat my head. He was just like my mum though, a child himself and unfixable. I know all that, all the things Amelia would have said to me if I had told the truth to her.

  What my grandmother said to me, the night I turned up on her doorstep with mascara on my cheeks, semen in my pants, and a backpack, was: ‘Well, who is right for you then, Cassy? Who will love you my darling? You will need someone to love you.’ My grandfather said nothing. We read together the next day as we used to. Two days later though, he interrupted the dinnertime quiet with, ‘I have been thinking Cassandra – Pouske and I, we were actually through a lot you know? When I think on it … but I think we were all right. We could come through it, because we were together. You can come through a lot if you are together.’

  I try to finish up these thoughts before I get up this morning, so that I don’t carry them around with me all day. It is nearly 2 PM, though. I need to get up soon. I suddenly see my life the way an old person might see their last years: a dragging on of tim
e after the real living has been done. No one knows whether I get up today or not. It makes no difference.

  It was not gentle and good the way some love looks, but at least with Brian I was living, I was feeling things. And little details, like what we had for breakfast, mattered.

  I remember the number. I call him and hang up and then I call again. This time he answers quickly.

  thirteen

  Oisín was walking Helen to college. It was one of those clean, mild mornings when the fresh air itself seemed rested, happy to brush his face and fill his lungs. She was wearing kitten heels and walked awkwardly in them, making an uneven clacking that echoed on the concrete, bounced up the walls, petered off down the empty street. They were passing a strip of sex shops with blacked-out windows. This street was always empty during the day but for a few straggling drunks or the odd junkie heaped in a shuttered doorway.

  Her slender, wobbling ankles made him want to carry her, scoop her in his arms the way they did in old movies, swing her around, kiss her, dance with her. Now that she had slipped the book into her bag all his feelings of irritation had faded. Once the threat had been set in motion the terror of losing her came roaring through. He had heard of men who liked to watch their wives strip for other men. This was something like that. The threat heightened his arousal, put her back out into the world of the uncertain, the world where she was only a hope, her worth set alongside that of other prospects, her value weighted by the possibility of loss.

  They had settled into something now. Perhaps that’s what had happened this morning, the realization that they were settling into something. She should have been making him strive harder for her. He wondered how he could explain that to her.

  ‘Baby, I’m not that great, you know.’

  She laughed, ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean don’t be too nice to me baby, okay? You have to make me work harder for you. Ask me to do things for you.’