Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  The homeless man still isn’t there.

  I wish I wasn’t so early. The hall is occupied and everyone is waiting around in chatting clusters. I strike up a conversation with a few girls from my tutorial group.

  ‘Do you know who’s giving the lecture?’

  ‘No, I hope it’s Dave again, fantastic isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s funny, yeah.’

  Dave. I don’t know which one that is.

  ‘I had him for tutorials last term and oh my God, he is soo much fun …’

  * * *

  Cassandra is gone when you get back. She must have a lecture.

  Sitting on your bed, your legs crossed, resting your fingers on a small cushion someone gave you with ‘Helen’ embroidered on it, you paint your nails with the ‘Cherry Bomb’ polish you bought yesterday. It’s that new one-coat-only rapid-dry stuff that only takes a minute, but you blow on it anyway out of habit. You hold your hands out before you the way you do, fingers splayed, wrists bent back like the spine of a ballerina, head cocked like a parody of girlishness, lips puckered in concentration, while the first coat hardens. Then you apply a second layer, then a third, shrugging away your curls when they fall over your eyes.

  * * *

  There are a few seats in the back row of the lecture hall that aren’t lit by the orangey light. Sitting here I feel hidden. It’s a professor I haven’t seen before. Old. Twenty minutes into the lecture and already we know that he is separated after thirty years of marriage, that we are lucky in our innocent belief in love, that we cannot understand this poetry as we have not yet experienced the disillusionment of failed love.

  A strange word: love. A fool’s word everyone wants to trust, even this poor, broken-hearted, obsessive old sod, dismantling his like a public autopsy. He spits his words like bile as we watch and listen and scribble notes. A caged gorilla flinging his shit at spectators. He hasn’t shaved.

  ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Well, why is the poet so respected? What is the point in literature, if only those who have experienced the events described can empathize? Is empathy all it is? What do we learn?’

  I bore myself when I start like this. It is my argument against everything: ‘Isn’t it just self indulgence for the middle classes/for the upper classes/for the colonized/for the women? What is achieved?’

  I shouldn’t have started. He cares about this dead writer. He cares about this poem. God, let him have it if it matters to him. Let him be right. His wife left him, he stinks. I can smell it all the way back here. It’s that rotten-love-carcass smell that makes humanity revolting. He has mustard-like gunk clotting his eyelashes, and no one will love him ever again. I bet he hates our rosy cheeks and our reverence. I bet sometimes he wakes up and wants the dark back.

  The girl next to me, Alice, twists a rope of hair around her fingers, nodding.

  ‘Good point actually.’

  He glares at me. ‘It used to be harder to get into this course. Before the points system. We knew the kind of minds we were to deal with. Not any more. It was about culture then. Culture. Not Leaving Certs. Not points.’

  Helen told me it’s actually worse than that – not only did his wife leave him, she left him for another man, a younger and more successful academic. ‘And,’ she told me, ‘this academic lectures at Cambridge. The wife and kids go and live with him. Then the guy – the guy who stole his wife and lectures at Cambridge, whose book on Chaucer was published this year – has an affair with the sixteen-year-old daughter and gets her pregnant.’

  He shuffles his papers. His fingers are trembling. He’s a drinker, this lecturer. If you go up close you can smell it off him. What sort of knowledge will we inherit from this elder?

  He begins to explain again,

  ‘You cannot understand. How can you possibly understand what Chaucer means, he who lost his children, who lost … who lost … everything … in a fire …’

  Poor lonely old sod passing us this world like a poisoned gift: a feast of our grandmothers and our own little children, shoulder blades and eyelids and all. Our test-tube embryos served up like caviar.

  I resolved to go to the library after the lecture, so I resist the temptation to go home and see if Helen’s back. I wish I had removed that dead fish though. I hate to think of her noticing it alone, lifting it out with her fingers, handling the weight and the cold of that little corpse. I keep seeing his round sunken eye and the stiff curve of his body lying just below the surface of the water.

  My student card does not swipe me in like it’s supposed to. Instead I have to show it to the smug man at the desk, who pretends to scrutinize it. Then he faces the other way and holds two outstretched fingers towards me, the card slotted between forefinger and index. His arm is too high, and I have to reach up on my toes to snatch it back. Pushing a button under his desk, he releases the swing bar so that I can pass through. I want to say ‘thanks’, but only my lips move. A pain catches where the sound should be. That happens to me sometimes.

  The library is simmering with synthetic light and that hostile purr computers give off. There are a lot of computers in the library. They are dotted about in pairs, stuck back-to-back and perched on metal stands that make me think of spaceships. Everybody moves about in silence, tapping at computers, turning pages, scribbling in feathery sounds with soft felt-tips, or biros that dent the paper. I walk through desks of students, computers, bookshelves, forgetting what I’m looking for. I feel loud. My shoes are making a clack-clack sound and I don’t know what to do with my hands. I have no pockets, so I just hang them both on the shoulder strap of my bag, but that doesn’t feel natural. I don’t know why I wear heels. I am too tall as it is.

  Occasionally someone at a desk lifts their head as I pass, clocks me, and returns to their work. I try to wear an expression of urgency – I need to think of a dissertation topic, and then I need to find books on it. This is not the right section of the library though. The dissertation has to be on Victorian literature, and this is the theatre section.

  I hate this quiet crowding. The huge building is packed: every wide, low-ceilinged room is lined with books and periodicals and computers, and then filled with people. All these people filling the space have words, sentences, stories running in their heads. There are so many different lives racing on in here and no one speaks. Their silence is a smouldering of voices – like fire under a blanket.

  My chest contracts and my eyes pulse. The people walking around the library look hazy; anything I try to focus on blurs and sways. If I am not careful I will forget how to breathe and my eyes will fog over. This is another thing that happens to me sometimes.

  I make for the bathroom where it reeks of antiseptic and the kind of sewage smell you can’t clean away. I dart into a vacated cubicle, bolt the door, and sit on the closed seat, shut in with that nostril-burning contradiction of bacteria and chemicals. Head between my knees, knuckles pressed into my eye sockets, I concentrate on breathing until the blood stops fizzing in my veins.

  I focus on the interior of the cubicle. In front of me the door frame: white, with a black sliding lock. To my right the blue sanitary disposal unit, pregnant with knowledge of its festering contents. The scrawls on the toilet-roll holder clamour for advice:

  Swallow or Spit?

  I can’t poo!

  I’m in love with a married man, I know he loves me but he doesn’t want to hurt his wife or kids – should I stay with him? Don’t know what to do.

  Three girls, in contrasting shades, have given her advice.

  The next question is written in luminous pink felt-tip. The writing is curly, the ‘i’s dotted with halos.

  23 and a virgin – weird?

  The first reply tells her she is ugly. The second that her first advisor is a slut and that the virgin is right:

  Not at all! I waited for the right person and so happy I did!

  Someone else has responded to this advice:

  Well so did I but it turns out he’s shagged half of co
llege and gave me two different STDs! Sex doesn’t mean shit to men don’t fool yourself love! Lose it to a vibrator!

  There is a maxim beside it in different handwriting:

  Virginity is like a balloon! One prick and it’s gone!

  I use my eyeliner to write on the door:

  It is time to forget. The House of Atreus is better left vacant. Let the wind howl through its openings. Let worms devour the bloody carpet. It is time to forget.

  I look at the words scrawled there in black charcoal and I can see they look like ravings. I use toilet paper to smear them out. At the sink I watch the water run over my hands. They’re the kind of taps that you don’t have to switch off, which I prefer because there seems little point in cleaning your hands if you’re just going to touch the dirty tap again. They always run out too soon. I press the tap three times, using the upper side of my wrists instead of my fingers. I like when my hands become so cold it feels like they’re dead.

  There’s a harsh, ultraviolet light in here designed to prevent you from shooting heroin on the loo. It stops you from seeing your veins. It also makes your face look like somebody else’s; like you in a different world, under water, or on the moon. You in negative. It shows every pore of your skin. My reflection stares over the sink like a stranger. The nose is too big. Severe cheekbones jut in a way that gets me modelling jobs. They are unattractive. They make my face look like a man’s.

  I smile at the reflection, smooth some lipstick thickly onto my mouth, and step back into the library.

  Between the toilets and the steps up to the Ussher Library there’s an undefined area with computers and benches, no desks or books. It’s supposed to be part of the library but when there are no supervisors around students talk and make phone calls here. A girl with a small, lopsided jaw is sitting on the bench talking on her mobile. From looking at her I can guess she is a Business Studies student or something like that: streaky fake tan, pastel knits, tight jeans. She scribbles on her foolscap as she speaks.

  ‘No Mom. No, I’m not going out tonight, I told you. ’Kay. Ya. ’Kay. Will someone collect me from the Luas? I don’t have the car. ’Kay … Oh Mom? We didn’t have to go to lectures today cause – am – a girl died. Ya I know. I know – hardly bodes well for me does it? Like if some people are actually killing themselves already like – and exams haven’t even started! SUCH a high-pressure course. I know, what a week! Yeah. Oh, she jumped out a window. I dunno, I dunno. Maybe. Ya – I know. It’s so sad isn’t it? Not really, like I knew her to see … I think she had problems. Ya, ya … ya, ’kay. I’ll call you when I’m on the Luas. Bye! Bye. Bye-bye-bye …’

  I remember what I came in for. I’m looking for a book of critical analyses of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, hoping it will give me a dissertation idea. I look up the index number on the computer, write it on my hand and try to locate it on the shelves, mouthing the alphabet as I run my finger along the combinations of letters and numbers sellotaped to the book spines. I have located the space where ARTS8287 TH L5 should be, but in its place is a pale blue cloth-bound book called The Victorians and The Cult of The Little Girl. It’s bound to have something on Alice in Wonderland. Bunny holes and all that … In any case it will have to do. I take it to an empty desk and sit down.

  The cover feels pleasant: sack-cloth texture greased by decades of touch. I run my palm over it and then over it again before I open it. The pages are the colour of tea stains. A tiny insect, the kind that is not hatched from an egg, but born from darkness or rotting fruit, uncurls itself in the crease of the spine, and moves slowly, sleepily over the word ‘truths’. The tiny life has all the magnetism of something secret, primordial, significant in a way that I will never understand. Then it unfolds its wings and pings off the page. That shocks me. I didn’t imagine it having wings.

  The girl beside me is left-handed. Her elbow prods mine and we both make a lethargic gesture of apology.

  There’s no fresh air in here, it’s all been used already: inhaled and exhaled through noses and mouths; then sucked in and spewed back out by the humming air conditioner. That means the oxygen must be quite low by now, so everyone is drowsy. I am breathing someone’s cough, someone’s sigh, someone’s silent fart, blended and filtered by the machine. In London the water is sterilized sewage. There isn’t the silence here to think. Strangled words whoosh about – Afro-American Literature and Female Identity … Swallow or Spit? … Saussure and Truth … I’m in love … Salmon Rushdie and the West … Yeats and Apocalypse … SUCH a high-pressure course … What should I do? … The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature … What should I do? What should I do? What should I do?

  * * *

  After the ‘Renaissance Drama’ lecture, Oisín had a few pints in the Buttery with some of his class. A slim redhead with a push-up bra laughed at his comments on the chirpy, round little lecturer, though he knew himself that his observations were not particularly funny. When she giggled her gums showed. Oisín was encouraged: ‘I thought he was going to topple over, the way he kept swaying on his heels!’

  Her lips shrank back like melting wax, exposing gums and teeth, and a high trill rolled out. It kept going long after it should have. Maybe he was in there. ‘I rooted a ginger’; that’d be the subject title when he mailed the lads about it.

  Sharon from film studies was there too, at the other side of the bar. She didn’t see him. He had what might be a date with her tonight. He was suddenly a little panicked and didn’t want her to see him. He would be embarrassed. She might notice his dandruff and change her mind about coming over tonight. There was a short Indian boy talking at her energetically, but Sharon gazed about the dark bar.

  The skin beneath Sharon’s eyes sank in brown folds like an old man’s. Her hair was cropped along the jaw line, with a straight fringe that hung over her eyebrows. It was a frank, plain face, but not repulsive.

  Oisín liked Sharon, he didn’t know her very well but he knew he could sleep with her and that made him defensive about her ugliness. He didn’t want her to be seen that way. He wanted to grant her beauty. It was something about the gape of those unbeautiful eyes, like a vacuum that sucked you warmly in.

  Sharon was long-bodied with no waist and strong, wide-set shoulders. She wore dollar scarves. The Indian boy didn’t notice that she wasn’t listening. He looked like he was talking about maths or something. He wasn’t looking at her any more. Instead his gaze was fixed on his own hands as he explained something with them, drawing lines and circles and then chopping them to pieces with a downward swoop of the hand. She put her hand on his arm, told him something gravely. The boy raised his eyebrows as though surprised or impressed. They waved at each other as she rushed out of the Buttery. She hadn’t seen Oisín.

  Indian men treated girls like Sharon as though they were boys. That was something Oisín had noticed. There was one in his ‘Tragic Patterns in Greek Theatre’ class. He spoke to plain girls as though they were not women and he didn’t speak to the other girls at all. His name sounded like ‘I’m Sorry’, and every week he had to repeat it several times to the half-deaf lecturer, explaining that he was not sorry, his name was Am-sa-ri. He was from a different department, studying Latin and Greek, and took the course, unmatriculated, to ‘contextualize’ his learning. He had once explained this to Oisín walking out of class in one of his attempts to start a conversation. They were the only two men on that course so perhaps he thought they should stick together. He also told Oisín about his wife. He was married to a seventeen-year-old who was still in India and wrote him long letters in beautiful handwriting. Amsari was very proud of his wife’s handwriting. He said he would show Oisín her letters if he liked.

  Amsari was the first Indian man that Oisín had ever had a conversation with, apart from doctors and cashiers. Listening to him made Oisín oddly envious. Amsari fit so comfortably in his organized world. Like a wind-up toy he worked vigorously along whatever path he was pointed in, but he didn’t have to navigate. He was born into a
certain caste, and a certain role: a system designed to banish chaos. Amsari made it look very successful. When he was not taking notes his hands rested calmly in his lap, one folded on top of the other. His face was perfectly symmetrical, his square jaw always cleanly shaven to no more than a shadow on his golden skin. His whole being radiated a sense of peace and order. His parents had chosen his girl – a beautiful girl, Amsari told him – and lighter than her husband. To have even your sex partner chosen for you, thought Oisín – how simple, how complete. To have strong black lines marked all over the map of your life, the boundaries fixed. Beside Amsari’s, Oisín’s world looked like an ever-shifting sea of confusion: waves and crashes and swirls, then monotonous depths of stillness that penetrated down through the sun-warmed blue to the cold, black seabed. There was nothing but water above and dark beneath.

  If he had been born in Amsari’s family, thought Oisín, his life would be drawn like a bath and all he would have to do was step in. There must be some relief in that. The thought of this marriage, so different to anything he had ever encountered, so innocent, in its way, excited Oisín, but not enough to stop him from wanting to escape the man’s advances towards friendship or hoping, with disproportionate terror, never to look on the young wife’s letters. The other students, like Sharon, laughed and chatted with Amsari. They didn’t notice that he was Indian, or else he didn’t seem so exotic to them, but Oisín couldn’t relax. Amsari was too polite, too earnest, his teeth too white and straight. It made Oisín uncomfortable.

  No one seemed to notice how out of place Oisín really was at Trinity. He had the constant feeling of getting away with something. He was missing something, he was out of the loop. Everyone else knew things that he had never been taught. From day one that’s how he had felt – like he didn’t know the score, not really. The redhead kept chattering and laughing.