Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  ‘I see the way you sit there staring through class,’ she said, thumping his shoulder gently.

  ‘You’re not listening to a word he says are you? You hardly even take notes. I bet you ace the exams anyway though, I know guys like you!’

  There were long, fine hairs resting on the powder-blue wool of her shoulders. That was probably caused by running her hands through the thick curls, which she did a lot. They criss-crossed delicately, forming a fragile mesh that shimmered like liquid in the low light.

  * * *

  I try to read the introduction but I can’t concentrate with all the breathing that’s going on in here. I skip to the chapter entitled ‘Alice as Wonderland: Exploring the Male Gaze’. The chapter is filled with pictures of the real Alice as a girl, some photos of naked babies and postcards collected by the author. I stop reading and flick through them instead. Most of the postcards are of little girls, half naked, half understanding: their hipless waists bent to curves and a hand near the bare bumps between their legs, feigning womanly modesty. Some of them are on swings that they have well outgrown, with big bulbous seashells held to buds of breasts, eyes extinguished. This should be repulsive but I want to keep looking. I don’t think I have seen a naked little girl since I was one myself. My face is following me. I catch her staring out of the evening-blacked windowpane. The eyes are big gaps in a white disc.

  Two centuries ago men believed in innocence. They thought it was incorruptible. That’s why these postcards were okay. Because men didn’t think they were up to it – after all, who were they in the face of such a thing? They thought it was something hard and smooth that they could finger and leave down again, like a pebble. They didn’t know they had the power to fracture it. They thought it would always be there, regenerating itself perpetually like a garden of paradise.

  I begin to make a note of that thought, but then I realize it is irrelevant to the topic. I press the biro into the foolscap as though an idea might write itself, but it just makes a little black dent in the paper. I can’t think of anything but quiet. How much I want quiet and blank inside my head.

  I do not want this slow motion image that’s replaying itself over and over, insensitively comical: the image of the business student with the wonky jaw floating slowly, silently, out of a window, down and down and down, her coat billowing behind her, angora scarf swirling like seaweed.

  How did that happen, and when? I do not imagine her hitting the ground – I can’t – so she just keeps falling indefinitely.

  I will go for a walk. I only have my A4 pad and some pens to gather up, but somehow I am making a racket. I am sweating. My eyes are stinging. Click-clock, click-clock, along the library floor. I’m getting out of here. I am leaving. I’m approaching the exit of the Lecky and soon I’ll be outside breathing air – through the swing bar, the glass doors, the Arts Block, and outside. But the Arts Block is crowded and making it to the street is a battle. An earnest-looking boy hands me a flyer with a pink monotone photograph of a young Chinese man on the front. Maybe I know him, but I think I would recognize him more easily if he were in colour. The pink is a little off-putting.

  ‘Please help to save Zeng Qiáng,’ the boy implores, ‘Please sign.’

  Behind him is a desk where a dusty looking girl sits, leaflets, petitions, and booklets spread out before her like a lean banquet. She has a boxy haircut, a heavy fringe weighing down on deep-set, no-colour eyes.

  ‘I think I might have signed already,’ I say. My voice comes out hoarse and faint.

  ‘Well please sign again just in case,’ says the girl, her eyes widening. I envy her goodness, her earnestness, the frank ugliness of her haircut.

  ‘Have you got our literature?’

  The skin beneath her eyes is brown, puffed and covered in small blisters. Such constant desperation must be tiring. I think I recognize Zeng Qiáng – that’s the same boy who’s been missing since Christmas break.

  ‘No. I’ll take it. I’ll sign again just in case. Is this the same boy …?’

  ‘He went missing on New Year’s – the day before he was due to fly back here from China. He’s a Falun Gong practitioner, that’s why. It’s a peaceful religion … All his books are still in his room. We just found out last week that he’s in a camp. He has been told his family will disappear if he tries to communicate … so he takes a risk …’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I say, trying not to sound cold or like I don’t care. I think I do care, but the outcome is the same whether I cry over it or not.

  I sign quickly, scribbling my email address and phone number as illegibly as possible. I’ve made the mistake before, of filling in my contact details too neatly. My email account ended up clogged with updates of various horrific and hopeless tragedies. The cutting-off of a young lesbian’s breasts is the one I remember most vividly. She was forced to walk the streets with a sign saying ‘I am a lesbian’, while she bled to death from the two rounds of open flesh where her little breasts used to be. It was somewhere in the East. She was fourteen. Something about her age stuck with me. Hotmail kept advising me to buy more storage space but I don’t have a credit card. I ended up changing my email address.

  ‘Well good luck!’ I sound sarcastic but I don’t mean to.

  I am grateful to be outside at last in the lamplit cold. The homeless man is folded away against the wall at the exit; he is holding a white polystyrene cup. The cup is perfectly intact. Funny, how he hasn’t bitten it, or bored a hole in it, or anything. I would have. I don’t give him any money.

  He says ‘God Bless’ – a curse to make me feel bad. I stop and rustle about in my bag. There are a few coppers, which I am too embarrassed to give, receipts and what feels like breadcrumbs. I think of the word ‘karma’ and wonder whether Zeng believes in it, or whether Falun Gong is a different thing altogether. I can feel the man watching me as I walk away. I turn back over my shoulder and I’m right: he’s staring at me. He doesn’t smile when he says it, but he looks at me the same way he looked when he asked for change, imploring, ‘I’d love a girl to wrap up with tonight.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I walk on. What is it like to be him? What does his mouth taste like?

  Zeng Qiáng’s face is pink, gazing off the cheap paper. He looks at me like he knows. Like he is better than me and I shouldn’t be looking.

  The crazy homeless man knew something too. The earnest and the mad see things their brains can’t process, smell and taste the things that make them gag. They look in directions they’re not supposed to see, at things they cannot change. They look and look and look. They look even when it does no good. They look even when the light is too bright. They keep looking while the sun frizzles their retinas. Their eyes are wounds.

  Where am I going? The church, I think. I will kneel and pray. Pray away Zeng Qiáng’s pale pink skin, his deeper pink pupils, his accusation. Pray away the billowy-coated girl and her high-pressure course, flying out a window with sheets and sheets of business statistics wavering slowly down around her. Pray away the homeless man’s chilling horniness. Wrap these things up, tie them with a ribbon and give them away. Forget it all for now.

  But the church is locked, a big chain and bolt around the gate. God’s House. Is there not a rule about sanctuary or something? I suppose that must have been in the past. Things are different now. Homeless people and heroin addicts would creep in at night if it was left open, smell the place up.

  It’s nearly seven. I’ll head back and get ready for tonight. I promised Helen we’d have fun.

  * * *

  Actually, Oisín was not doing very well in college. This fact embarrassed him a little. He was disappointed with the way he had turned out. In his early teens, before he had found his niche with the lads, he had read a lot for a boy his age, pursuing wisdom with fervour, preparing for something great. During this time he had a series of pleasant, undemanding relationships with the sorts of girls who understood his silences and who were always available for quiet, lights-out s
ex. He sat with them in their bedrooms reading books and film magazines. They exchanged novels and ’Pumpkins albums and went to the cinema together. They did not need to talk. When he grew out of this there was nothing to replace it. Literature seemed silly to him now, just a lot of confident people all voicing too many opinions to ever be heard. He was bad at his subject and that hurt him a little because English had always been his thing. Amongst the lads he was the clever one, the one who read books.

  Oisín lived alone in a flat his father had bought him in celebration of his Leaving Cert results. The lads didn’t know this, they thought he was renting. He was a little ashamed of his father’s patronage, and of the quiet pride that he himself took in the decor. Oisín had picked the curtains: navy and grey tartan. He had replaced the cracked plastic toilet seat with a wooden one from Argos, and screwed it on himself. It had taken him almost forty-eight hours to settle on the positions for his five posters. For the first two days of Fresher’s week he had hardly left the flat for gazing at the arrangement, shifting the posters about a little, and then reverting to the original positions. Just when he thought he had got it right, when he had settled into the couch with a beer, mentally preparing to go out to a Fresher party, he would see that the Matrix poster needed to be shifted a little to the right, the Withnail and I one needed to be less straight and he should, after all, move the picture from the A|wear autumn footwear catalogue – of the hot girl in lace-up boots gnawing at a rope twisted around her wrists – into the bedroom. The composition of the posters was now perfect. He hadn’t moved them in two years.

  The lads all lived at home, so they wouldn’t understand the sense of competence Oisín found in doing his own laundry, hanging it to dry by the radiator, or in choosing the cheapest detergent.

  Despite this pride, a waft of failure sometimes greeted Oisín when he walked into the small flat made for one. It was a dusty, carpeted place with a kitchenette-cum-living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom with a shower. The air seemed heavier inside the door of the flat. The first thing he did on arriving home was to flick on the radio and take a beer from the fridge. Sometimes he switched on the TV as well, with the volume low. Otherwise the silence and the heavy air gave him a feeling of panic and desperation, as though there was something important he was forgetting to do.

  He hadn’t had a girlfriend since school. There were girls he had met camping in Europe who he still kept in touch with. They lived abroad in places like Germany, Estonia, and France. When he was very lonely he sometimes called one, and said, ‘So do you miss me baby?’ Sometimes during these sudden torrents of loneliness, if he was drunk enough, he would invite them to stay with him for a few days. ‘But where will I sleep?’ Carmen had said last time. ‘You can have my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch …’

  He didn’t call them fuck buddies. Even when discussing them with the lads he usually said, ‘I have a cutie Frenchy coming to stay with me,’ and they knew what he meant. When it was one of the less attractive girls, or they invited themselves, he got the niggling feeling that they couldn’t get a lay back in their own countries and came over for guaranteed sex. This was true, in a sense: they came over after break-ups or when their college terms finished. It didn’t bother him that much. ‘A ride is a ride,’ as he told the lads.

  The redhead wanted one badly, he thought, watching her trace a finger over painted lips and hook it to her lower teeth. Her breasts were shoved together like an offering, the small, ripe rounds nearly touching. Between them, the flesh was squashed together in three folds, making a third, miniature breast. ‘So what about you?’ she said, removing the finger and running it along the rim of her glass instead, ‘What do you want to do after college?’

  ‘Dunno.’ He wouldn’t mind giving it to her. He could imagine her going down on him in a mechanical sort of way. The red lips would be cold and thin and not moist enough.

  Occasionally it occurred to him, from the ‘I miss you’ emails and letters, that maybe the German girl, Petra, thought there was more to their relationship than a casual friendship and the convenience and certainty of having slept together before. She had been a virgin. That probably had something to do with it. When she had come over the first time he had forwarded her money towards the flight. Maybe she misunderstood that a little. Even the lads said she was a fox – the money was a gesture of gratitude and fair exchange. Really, he had given her no reason to think that there was anything but friendliness behind these transactions.

  Anyway, Oisín thought, smiling as the redhead giggled at a joke he didn’t understand (she talked too fast, and through her nose), Petra may not have got the wrong idea, she may be playing and flirting with him. She sent him a tape with local birdsong on one side and her snoring on the other: ‘I thought it was kinda sexy,’ she wrote. That was a joke: he had once teased her about snoring and then retracted when she became embarrassed. ‘No, it’s sexy,’ he had said, ‘really! I’ll miss your snoring …’ and rolled on top of her again. Come to think of it Petra could be a lot of fun. Perhaps he’d send her an email.

  He had cancelled work tonight for this date with Sharon. She better be on for some action ’cause it was the third time this month that he had cancelled on Martin the day before. He wanted to keep this job. The pocket money was useful, and working was good for him. It gave structure to his week. The game of earning gave order to his world.

  The redhead’s drink was finished. She tilted the drops of watered cream about the bottom, streaking the glass, clinking the melting ice. She probably wanted him to buy her another. Why not? He’d be able to tell the lads what colour her pubes were. That’d give them a laugh. They’d slag him for months!

  The fresher behind the bar had a lot of pimples and he didn’t know how to pull a Guinness; did it all in one go instead of letting it settle before topping it up. Not his fault. They should have taught him that when he started. Oisín’s dad owned two pubs, so he’d been able to pull a perfect pint since he was ten.

  Maybe it was because he was a barman, but going to pubs in Dublin depressed him. The whole event just depressed him. He missed the comfort, the swaddling, anonymous bosom of the lads – he could hide and relax in their gang. They stuck to the same three pubs and this drew a perimeter around a night out. He knew how to don the right laugh, the right voice, the right phrases to merge with the group – he knew them so well he didn’t even have to try. Every time he went out with people from college – gelled his hair, put on aftershave, and stood around talking or just looking happy – he did it in hope of something. He wasn’t sure what.

  Even after a lecture he was a little disappointed that nothing had happened. He might as well not have gone. He liked when they took a roll call: it made it matter more whether he turned up or not. The lecturers always gave the impression that there was some goal to their teaching, that there was something very important about his generation and they were being prepared for something great. Something these elders didn’t have the courage to do themselves would be performed by this bright, uninhibited, unafraid youth. They made passing comments like ‘Oh, the naivety of youth,’ and ‘Read it for next week, if ’ (and a laugh gurgles up the gullet) ‘you haven’t fed the first chapter to the fire to heat your freezing little flats.’ They sounded like they envied these cold flats. Oisín’s actually had a very good heating system, a fact that he was a little ashamed of when these comments were made. These academics sometimes seemed a little intimidated by their students, as though they didn’t think them naive at all, as though they were the clueless ones teaching the wise, brave youth of today and afraid of being found out.

  He handed the redhead her drink, then changed his mind about picking her up. There was no need. He’d probably be getting some tonight. In any case, he was sure she’d begin to find him boring soon. She was very clever. He didn’t remember her name either, which was bound to become embarrassing if he got anywhere with her. He’d tell the lads about rooting a ginger anyway; it was as good as true, and it’d give th
em a laugh. He knew that, with his bookishness, the lads considered him a little effeminate unless he kept them updated on his virility.

  He went back to his flat and read a chapter of A Very Short Introduction to Critical Theory because someone had talked about Saussure in class that morning and he had been confused. He showered and changed for his date. Then he sat in bed and emailed Kevin about the redhead and about Sharon:

  ‘PS. My ship’s come rollin in! Got a date with a hotty with a botty tonight too! She’s CUMin (ha ha) over to mine for some ‘study’ you’d do well here man … college girls are HOT!’

  two

  It’s that look: directly in my face, it travels my skin. I think of flies, the lightness of their little legs, the way they fracture your image with their many-mirrored eyes. I blink him off my lashes but he’s persistent. I know he wants to touch the cliff of my lip with his thumb. I have bee-stung lips, blow-job lips. I got them from my mother. Men like them. Lips and breasts are things men prefer swollen, like sores. He’s trying for conversation but I have a heavy cry in my throat. Where is Helen?

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Em … No. No thanks. I’m looking for a friend.’

  ‘Well aren’t we all? It can be a lonely world, little lady …’

  After queuing for so long I always feel a little disappointed when I get inside. It’s the name, I think, ‘The Vatican’. It makes me expect some velvety secret: a forbidden interior, plush and cool as a vault. It’s the doors too: thick metal like there’s something to hide, something of value inside. I’m sorry I came.

  I spot Helen, or someone with Helen’s halo of ringlets, move away from me across the room. Someone is leading her by the hand. She isn’t walking like Helen, she’s not even walking like Helen when Helen’s drunk. She’s walking slowly, very carefully, looking at her feet and steadying herself every now and then with the bar or someone’s hand. I have never seen Helen like that, but it must be her. No one else has hair that moves like that, bouncing at the small of her back like a taunt.