Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  They are whispering in the space around me, these people.

  There is a thread tied around my ankle, tugging, cutting into the skin. It is too dark to see, but I know that the thread is salmon pink and belongs to the sort of spool that is used with a sewing machine. There is someone on the end of the thread, wanting me to turn around and go back. They pull harder. It slices my ankle: the sting, the relief of blood.

  I can’t hear anything, not even my own breath, but I know there is water below, lapping in the dark. I can’t smell it yet but I know it will smell cool and earthy and it will make me think of that bridge in Tuscany beneath which Brian and I once drank a bottle of cheap red wine and made love against the wall, the cold stone pressing my breasts and stomach, river swathing my ankles with clean dirt; water worms, leaves, decomposing twigs.

  I reach it sooner than expected. Without seeing or smelling it first I plunge one foot in, the one with the thread. The water leaps up my foot to the ankle, as though it can smell the blood and wants it, and I am grateful for the coolness of it, the promise it makes of open places and of rain.

  Then I can see in the dark, and I realize that I could see all along, and I feel stupid for ever thinking otherwise. The people in the water are angry with me for overlooking them. They have faces anonymous like rotting corpses and no tongues and their ribs are bulging with hunger. All three of them are women. They have little folds for breasts, sharp nipples. They are opening and closing their mouths, trying to speak. At first I don’t mind this at all, but then the pain in my ankle begins to throb, the sting pitching higher and higher, up and up like a long, sliding vibrato on a violin string. My feet are losing their grip. It is muddy beside the river. I slip and slide flat into the water – but it’s not water at all. It’s solid, dry.

  I lie on my back hearing myself breathe, hearing my dry eyelids open and shut. The ceiling is grey-pink like the skin of the dying.

  This is the fourth-year dorm from school. I recognize it. This year every bed has a shaky woodchip partition with three drawers and a light running under the cardboard lip over the mirror. It jitters when the button is pressed before settling into a dim yellowish glow. I can’t reach it without getting out of bed, stepping onto the cold cement floor.

  The school is old and exclusive. Generations of girls have slept in this bed, slowly wearing a dip along the centre where the mattress has yielded to them over the years. They wore the same uniforms and spoke the same words at morning prayers.

  There are too many different heartbeats here, too many different dreams clamouring about this dim space.

  My lips meet and part. I try to say something but I can’t. I know what’s happening. I’m slipping into that dream again, the one I had all the time at school, the one that is lurking beneath every dream I have. In the dream a schoolgirl stands over me. I can’t see the face, but I know it is solemn and pale, and it holds a slender hand over my mouth as though it means no harm. I can’t breathe. I can’t move my body. I am suffocating quickly with the hand resting gently over my mouth. I fight with my head, jerking it from side to side in the struggle. Before I pass out I see the girl’s face at last; the brief, alarming flash of a pale alien-shaped head with schoolgirl’s hair. It is luminous, as though a low-watt light bulb is screwed in at the neck. The eyes are smudges of dark –

  I don’t come out of this dream quickly, I never do. When I open my eyes I’m still half in it. I have to switch on the light to believe I’m awake, and pinch my wrist, the way I did as a child when something bad happened and I wanted to make sure it was real before grieving. I can still hear the clanking pipes, the blank drumming of time.

  It was seeing Helen that way tonight – that’s what brought on the dream. She was curled on her bed, snoring lightly. I wanted to kiss her on her clammy, smoke-scented forehead. I used to feel like that when she slept beside me at school. Sometimes when I woke up I’d climb into bed with her and she would cry and I never asked her why, just stroked her hair until we fell asleep. I’d never sleep for very long. I always woke from the noise of the pipes, or that nightmare, or a slap of fear that came from nowhere. I didn’t kiss her then. I closed her door and got into the shower to wash the nightclub off me.

  I switch on the lamp beside my bed and try to read. The book is called Up From Slavery, with an African man dressed like a colonist on the cover. I can’t remember how I’m meant to be reading it, what it’s meant to tell me. I press my back firmly against the cold wall. I can’t shake the feeling that someone may creep up behind me, grab my shoulder, my face, take me somewhere. This is one of those terrible dreams that pull you down with it again and again. You can wake up in horror, have a glass of water, of whiskey, of wine, or hot chocolate, go to the loo, rub your cheeks, but as soon as you close your eyes it’s there again, creeping in from the back of your brain as though you loved it.

  In boarding school, one day flowed into the next, carried by the dulling current of routine. The air constantly smelled of the musty mashed potatoes that we got every day for lunch. Butter was only allowed at tea, but we each got a glass of milk at midday. Some girls poured it into the powdery white potatoes, studded with hard little eyes and grains of salt big enough to roll with your tongue.

  Sister Margaret was our dorm mistress. After a nervous breakdown she was transferred from a day school where she was the principal, to the lowest position in our convent’s hierarchy. She had bright, blushing skin, but her eyes were snuffed out. She kept us up until ten o’clock some nights talking about her sister’s children. She had wanted to be a policewoman, she told us that a lot, but her grandmother’s dying wish was that she would become a Sister. She went into the nunnery for a trial year and never left. Some girls said that she had lost both breasts to cancer. She should have been a mother, Sister Margaret. She should have been feeding babies with her breasts, not pressing it all down until her sex turned on itself. Then someone curled on her bed, maybe brushing her hair, would ask dreamily, ‘Were you ever in love, Sister?’ And just as they’d hoped, the veiled old nun would stare wistfully into the past with her dulled eyes: ‘I thought I was.’ Then she would pinken with the shame of her innocent sin, and for a moment we were all in a past of possibilities.

  I haven’t fallen asleep again. I can still feel the cold wall on my back, the soft weight of the book, but that dream bleeds into the room, that sense of other people’s sleep and someone about to finger your neck. The layers of sound: clanking pipes, a dripping tap, some girl’s quiet sobs, the quick slap of bare feet fading down the corridor, the dead walls and the sturdy wooden stools.

  All our minds floated about in close quarters. A person could think anything in there. You didn’t know if your thoughts belonged to you or the girl asleep next to you, or the ghost’s head that rested over yours on the pillow.

  * * *

  Through your drunken sleep a sound beckons from another world. A tap is dripping. You are called to one of those moments that is suspended somewhere forever; sandwiched between your past and your now. You are called to where you last left a bit of yourself, Helen, where you last stepped away leaving a faint outline of you in the air.

  Somewhere a tap was dripping. You didn’t care. You wanted to be alone to cry. When you cried in school the nice girls climbed into bed with you, and the mean ones threw their boyfriends’ rugby balls at your head. You didn’t want either. You sat with your bare feet in the ancient bath, the dripping tap patiently eroding its shallow, wide valley in the enamel; a wound dealt slowly and without passion. It was a cold, frightening sort of dark, but if you turned on the light Sister Margaret would kill you. Cassandra had been talking in her sleep again. You couldn’t sleep anyway. You couldn’t stand it. If anyone knew they’d think you were so stupid. They’d look at you and say, ‘I think every teenage girl has a crush on her English teacher, Helen,’ or something like that. But that wasn’t it.

  You were in love with him, he was in love with you. You knew what it would feel like with your head
on his solid chest, your face in his neck. You knew already the warmth of his skin and his man’s smell. He’d like the scent of your hair – apple blossom and peach.

  You wake too early, groggy. Take two Nurofens and lie on your side trying to get back to sleep. Your brain feels loose and heavy in your skull. There really is a tap dripping somewhere. It’s not the sink in your room.

  You had forgotten that night. It was uneventful. Why think of it now? Those ancient yellow baths! Sister Margaret. How archaic the whole thing was! And that crush! How often did you cry then, over that silly crush?

  You got angry with him sometimes in class when he looked at you, talking about Wuthering Heights. ‘There was more belief in true love then, but of course such love cannot exist in this world, only the less passionate love of Hareton and Cathy can survive, and only that love is purely good …’ and you drank it all in like wisdom. You had never liked English class before. He sometimes stood with the top of his thighs pushed up against your desk, touching your things, borrowing your pen, running his finger along the rim of your copybook. You got angry with him then because it was stupid of him to act like that, to think that he could. He’d call you back after class and forget what he wanted to say, he’d be all feverish and jumpy, and you were on the verge of tears for him because you wanted to touch him to still his body, and tell him, ‘It’s okay. Me too, me too.’

  Oh – last night. You had forgotten. That man’s hard penis and vomiting in the toilet. It returns in snapshots, like a film montage, and with the same muted impact. You don’t mind. Let thoughts of last night go – much nicer, much warmer to think of this older, sweeter pain.

  He had to supervise your table for tea on a Friday. You got a treat of chocolate spread on Fridays; you remember thinking that must be why he had chosen that day. He’d lavish it on as thick as the bread itself, but there was plenty to eat on a Friday, and there was always enough chocolate spread. Like all the other supervisors, he sat at the head of the table. Your place was right beside him. You talked about stupid things like summer games and the exams because people were listening. He always wanted to know what you did that day, that week even, every detail, as though by picturing it he could change it so that he was there too. You lived for those evenings. You spent your days silently describing your life as you’d tell it to him, storing up anything funny, imagining how he’d laugh.

  Once he kissed you right there in the refectory. Most of the other girls had left, it was your week to clear the fourth-year table and he had to supervise. The Sisters were sitting at the back of the room, discussing the roster. You were bringing the plates to wash-up and he stopped you by putting his hand out flat where your middle was. ‘Go on Helen, I’ll take them.’

  And you didn’t get butterflies, or whatever you’re supposed to get. What you felt was calm, relief. It was as though you had been waiting for him to touch you like that, and tell you to leave the plates, he’d take them. You knew then that you weren’t insane. It really was happening to you both, this thing that no one understands. You asked him with your eyes to tell you for sure. As he took the plates from you he leaned forward and kissed you. It was a gentle, brushing, just-touching kiss at the corner of your mouth. You said, ‘Thank you, sir, goodnight,’ and went upstairs.

  You can’t sleep. Get up and splash your face. Brush your teeth – your mouth tastes terrible. Maybe the kiss was more like a gift, a gesture of kindness, of charity even, or pity. But you cried that night from confusion, just happy-sad confusion.

  You had a sports day at the end of second term. You’d been sick for a week, Helen, and weren’t allowed to do games. So you sat on the slope at the side of the playing field, drinking the sweet orange cordial you only got on special days. And there he was, in shorts. You hadn’t seen him for a week because you were in the infirmary. It felt like a reunion.

  His thighs were muscle-packed, and hairy like his arms. And all these years later there it is: the image of his sleeves rolled up and the light playing on the hairs, changing them from black to blond and red, winking at them, camouflaging them and revealing again the delicate film of hair. That secret image you used to carry with you, that secret you would take out and handle in the dark.

  The girls won the teacher-student match and then you all sat on the grass drinking the orange out of plastic cups, the sun blazing on your face and shoulders and Sister Margaret rushing out with rugs, saying you’d all go home with the flu and what would your parents say. You were wearing a powder-blue tank top, which worried her to the point of hysteria, facing the sun with your eyes lightly shut. Your hair was very long and you liked the feel of it tipping along the small of your back. The distant shrieks and splashes from the unheated pool, and then the girls clambering barefoot up the slope, freezing in their towels, cut grass sticking to their feet and calves, and you were glad you weren’t allowed to do games.

  You knew he was watching you. You thought he wanted you. Not sex, but you: your voice, your arms, your eyes. Even then you knew you would never be that beautiful to anyone again. He took some Polaroids. First one of the Sisters, and then a few of you. Click and buzz and screams from the cold water and when you opened your eyes there he was, blue whirling blobs all over him from facing the sun too long, but you could see that he looked sad and hopeless and it frightened you. He looked like he had to do something hard, like salt a slug or crush a bird with a broken wing. It had been about six weeks since the kiss and by now you knew you loved him.

  There were lovely days like that – with diluted orange and cut grass, and for all their mistakes the nuns were good, resigned people – but mostly you hated school. You hated it anyway, but without him it was almost unbearable, days flowing in and out of one another with a maddening sameness no longer punctuated by his classes or your brief encounters. Then three weeks into the third term, when you had been told the substitute would be staying on for the rest of the year, you got a letter.

  All it said was ‘Helen’, typed at the top of the page. There was no ‘Dear’, and no date. Lower down on the page there was a poem printed in the same font. It began, ‘If I could live my life over, I would be less careful next time,’ and went on about walking barefoot in the fall and eating more ice-cream and less beans. At the bottom was a phone number and an address, no name. And that was it.

  You thought it was your secret but it wasn’t.

  You carried the poem around in the inside pocket of your school skirt for a long time. The girls used to call it your ‘ST pocket’, meaning sanitary towel, much like some boys in college call the small pocket at the front of their jeans their ‘johnny pocket’ – meaning condom. It was an all right poem. What was it about the poem that made you squirm with humiliation? He couldn’t leave it at this. He wouldn’t. You’d come up from study one evening and he’d be sitting there looking all out of place on the small, pink bed with its white iron frame. He would kiss you again, but on the mouth this time, and say sorry.

  ‘I’m sorry. Sorry I left you alone with the cold and the dust and the flesh-coloured walls.’

  Sorry I left you to the world. Sorry I left you to the man with the scarred eyebrow. Sorry.

  It was the kitchen tap that was dripping. You fill a glass of water and take it back to bed. It must have been the tap that made you dream about boarding school. You slept to the sound of bloody taps dripping for that whole school year.

  Turn over in bed and pull the duvet around you. That’s the past, silly Helen. Open your eyes in the dark under the covers. Do caterpillars see through the walls of their cocoons? An unborn baby can see light and shadow through its mother’s womb. Your aunt told you that when she was pregnant.

  Maybe you shouldn’t both have been so stupid about it, such cowards. It wasn’t such a big deal. It wasn’t such a scandal. It didn’t have to be all stolen moments and poetry through the post.

  If you’d kept the number you could ring him now and ask him about it. It wouldn’t even be embarrassing. You’d act like it was
so long ago, like you were a different person, that girl, that silly girl in a powder-blue tank top whose Polaroid he keeps.

  ‘Remember me?’ you’d say, ‘Just found this and thought I’d find out who sent it. You taught me English in fourth year, I think I had a crush on you …’

  Fall asleep Helen, fall asleep again and wake up when the past has shifted further away. Your mind is still funny after last night. Go to sleep.

  * * *

  In the morning he had sex with Sharon again, from behind, which is how he liked it best.

  She was not very interested but let him anyway. He tried to massage her clit a bit as he did it but her breath stayed the same, quiet and even. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she said. ‘It’s just ’cause I’m on the pill. It lowers the sex drive. But keep going. I don’t mind.’ He cupped her breast and closed his eyes.

  Pumping away, he had an image of his mother in the bath. It was something from his childhood. She was reading a book, her hands sticking up out of the water to hold it and her eyebrows focused in a frown. He tugged at lank wet strands of her hair, and poured water over her shoulders and breasts with the plastic cup she used to rinse his hair, but she kept reading. Could that be a real memory? He only ever bathed with his brothers as a child. When would his mother have taken a bath with him?

  Oisín’s mam didn’t catch his eye much. She rarely smiled. If she did it was a close-mouthed smile with faraway eyes. She read a lot, that’s where Oisín got it from, but she never talked about the things she read. Maybe she talked to his father when Oisín wasn’t about, but he doubted it. He was not very good at talking either.

  It was taking him a long time to come. Weird to be thinking of his mother while he was doing this. Everything felt wrong this morning.