Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  After he had stayed at Sharon’s as long as was polite he went to the computer labs, but he didn’t feel like telling the lads about Sharon. He’d tell them another time.

  She had washed her hair again before he left. When he kissed her goodbye he could smell her shampoo. It was like some sort of fruit. Saliva rushed into his mouth and he thought about breakfast. She stayed by the door as he walked away. Her eyes were like an owl’s now, big in their round sockets.

  four

  I am not coming to this lecture any more. He is ranting about love again. I thought this course would be about parody, and religion, and form. I should have known better.

  He hands out a sheet of suggested essay titles, and the bundle travels up from the front rows to the back, diminishing quickly. ‘Chaucer and Love as Madness’; that’s one of them.

  ‘Of course you can’t possibly know …’ he says, focusing on a girl at the front with blonde highlights and blushing cheeks. He always directs his lecture to her, and she always blushes and then argues weakly, and blushes some more. At the end of class she often goes up and discusses something with him.

  ‘Love, real love is so rare,’ he says. ‘Love: what a mad and complex and stupid and absolutely fundamental part of our thinking. Aren’t we fools to believe in logic when the most basic beliefs are founded on feeling, on the blind choice of light over dark, God over Satan, pleasure over pain? When we are building our cities on the shifting sands of our healthiest madness, in a land where the rules of gravity and equations are nothing but a word game?’ The girl looks down at her lap, then up at him again through her lashes. He grins like a boy.

  I picture my grandmother arguing with him, dismissing his philosophizing with a swish of her hand and a wise little laugh. I wish I were like her: less concerned with the ideas of things and more with the things themselves. She has no interest in stilling reality, fixing it into a rigid logic. That’s what Chaucer is to Professor Delahunt – love, the volcano victim, preserved forever in molten lava. Love, frozen like flowers in the thick glass of a paperweight. That’s what he wants. Suddenly I feel as though that’s what I want really, as though he has found me out. Love. I want to hold it in my hand, turn it in the sunlight and study it from every angle. I want to own it so that it cannot wriggle and shift.

  * * *

  The lecture was called ‘The Novel as Women’s Literature’. The guest speaker looked like a weasel, Oisín decided. Though he didn’t know what weasels looked like exactly, he thought he had a good sense of what impression they made: feral and sharp. Twitchy.

  Oisín began to describe the lecturer in his head. He thought of suitable words for his features. ‘Aquiline’ was wrong, but he liked that word and hoped to use it someday in front of a pretty, clever girl. This man had a pointed nose, no chin and short, light brown hair that started far back on his sloping forehead. His eyes were tiny points of green light darting nervously around the auditorium. His voice, in contrast, was confident. Each word landed with a weight and certainty out of joint with the tetchy rhythm of his eyes. He left a lot of reflective pauses, as though he was just thinking up his theories on the spot. Of course he knew a lot about his subject, but his underdog Scottish accent gave him a down-to-earth quality that the girls loved. Oisín hated him.

  He was talking about the novel as escapism. The popularity of the form began out of the needs of bored housewives, he said, they were erotic fantasies or romances that offered relief from the dull domesticity of their lives. There was something not right about this man scrutinizing the private lives of ‘bored housewives’, invading their fantasies like that. What did he know about it? Anyway, who was the lecturer’s mother? What was she that was so much better than a housewife?

  The first book Oisín had ever read was Fire in the Stable. It was one of his mother’s Mills & Boon novels. She read these paperbacks at her eleven o’clock coffee break and in the evening as her reward after she had done all the housework and the boys were watching television. Sometimes, if she and Oisín were completely alone and she was bored of her book and there was no washing or ironing or vacuuming or cooking to be done, she talked to him. Sometimes she talked about places she had been when she was younger: Paris, Rome, about abortive emigration plans for Australia … or about the pony she had owned as a child. There was nothing in the present to talk about, really. She didn’t feel very welcome in Clonmel and had few friends.

  Neighbours occasionally called to the door, sure that this quiet, conservatively dressed young blow-in would be grateful for the company, and she made them cups of tea, offered them the best biscuits, spoke gently and responded quietly to their chatter with ‘yes’ and ‘mmm’ and ‘really’. His mother just wanted to finish the housework and settle down with her book. Sometimes she hid and didn’t answer the door at all, but the visitors didn’t know this. As Oisín grew older he learned that locals found his mother rather strange and boring, and left her kitchen with the feeling people get after dropping change in somebody’s cup.

  During the occasional private conversations between them, his mother looked at his hands or touched his hair. She listened to him. He knew she loved him, though there was a pain about his mother that made even her love a sort of accusation. As a child he followed her about the house quietly, skulking about door frames, wanting to be talked to, wanting to help and consistently failing at whatever task she gave him. He had her eyes: brown almonds.

  The Mills & Boon books – and not his brothers – were Oisín’s rivals. For a long time he had hidden them from her jealously – stowing them in cupboards, under beds, behind the toilet bowl. It never occurred to him to destroy them. It was only after some time that he thought of reading one.

  He was nine at the time and did not find it very interesting, though he liked some of the words. He stored them in his head and whispered them to himself. They were little weapons, little empowerments – something he had belonging to his mother. Those words would not be alone with her if he couldn’t be.

  Some of the words he had never heard of before: ‘voluptuous’, ‘quivering’, ‘unkempt’. She usually found the books when she was cleaning, and took them back without mentioning their disappearance.

  His mother had wanted to be a writer. She had won the Clonmel short story competition five years ago, with a tale of a woman who one day stops speaking. The story ended with the word ‘Bang’ and the woman leaving, slamming the front door on her husband and two daughters. The prize was a book voucher and a fountain pen.

  Oisín brought her home a copy of A Doll’s House for Christmas after his first term of college, but she never read it. She didn’t like reading plays. She said she found it hard to picture the people.

  He left the lecture early, slipping out as quietly as he could, but people still looked and sighed. He didn’t usually do this because it embarrassed him to be looked at, but he was in a foul mood. He was bored and he didn’t like the lecturer. There was no point describing his weasel features any more because he had no one to describe them to. The lads had no interest in this kind of crap.

  * * *

  ‘Love is lovely,’ my grandmother would say, ‘and terrible when it’s gone. Now sit still and eat your dinner!’ We used to talk about things like that over meals, or driving back to school after the holidays, a gnawing pain in my spine and between my ribs, a tickling anxiety creeping up through my whole body from the gut. I wanted to understand things. I wanted her wisdom. I understood nothing: not love, not the war she lived through, not survival. Nothing.

  ‘But –’

  ‘But nothing,’ she would say. ‘Everything is fine. Everything will be fine. Stop inventing complications. Life is complicated enough. Smile. You need to smile more. You are very pretty when you smile.’

  Grandad would have loaded my cases into the boot of the car, kissed me and said to be a good girl now and be gentle to the nuns. After fifty years in Ireland he still spoke the written English he had learned from classic novels. He used a lot of cli
chés, but that was okay because he didn’t know they were clichés.

  ‘You need a little hypocrisy in you,’ he told me more than once. ‘You need to be a little tainted if you are not to be corrupted altogether.’

  He loved these kind of paradoxes. He thought they were very clever. He was a great advocate of the practically impossible theory of silently questioning everything, and he was a great hypocrite: he could never keep from saying what he thought.

  He would keep us too long at the front door, ‘… and it won’t be long before you are back with us,’ and my grandmother would be shivering by the car saying, ‘Stop it now or she will be late,’ and he’d laugh like a bold child, and draw out his speech on purpose to annoy her. Then she would laugh too and call him sieverer, which was a fond way of saying ‘dribbling idiot’ in Flemish, and they would share something no one else could ever be included in. That was love then. I remember thinking that. That’s love. What I am looking at is love. Need to get me some of that.

  We would drive along in the half-dark and every time I’d say how I loved this time of evening, though I knew I’d said it before, and she’d answer that the French called it entre chien et loup. I remember saying that I didn’t see how canines were at all like times of day and she said that yes, it was a funny expression all right, and sighed because she had failed to tell me something.

  We were silent for most of the journey and I would watch the shimmery black tarmac of the dual carriageway as it thickened and rolled on under us, taking us nearer and nearer to Wicklow. My mother and my aunt had attended the same school. I wonder if my grandmother thought about that while we drove through the early dark, whether the journey reminded her of my mother as a girl, and whether I was anything like she had been.

  I comforted myself with the knowledge that my tuck box was filled with surprises: cold pancakes and sandwiches for that evening, seedless grapes and a two-week supply of apples and oranges. After that I’d live on tortilla chips and Kinder bars. There’d be a few clean hankies in there, which I never used, and that made me cry because they smelled of my grandmother and our utility room: a smell of brown soap, and care, and fabric softener, and not the itchy industrial stuff they used at school. I used to think that if I willed it enough she’d miss the turn, but even when that happened we were only delayed a little. Eventually we’d crunch up the gravel drive. I wouldn’t let her come in with me. I’d kiss her outside the car and then trundle in with too many bags. The candlelight and the familiar stench of floor polish said that really, it wasn’t so bad.

  ‘Love … so mysterious, so intangible … so … unrealistic, if you will.’ The lecturer addresses the girl in the front row. Her hand shoots up. He pauses, looking at her, waiting.

  ‘Why?’

  He raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  She swallows, ‘Professor, why “unrealistic”? Why do you say “unrealistic”?’

  * * *

  ‘U home?’

  She didn’t use his name. Maybe the text message was meant for someone else? He knew he shouldn’t reply but he had nothing better to do. ‘Just left a lecture 2 boring wot u up 2?’ The reply startled him: ‘NOTHN CAN I CALL IN?’ Did she think she was his girlfriend? He hadn’t had Sharon down as that type at all. He thought she slept with lots of guys. He put the phone back in his pocket and continued home. The flat was a mess, mugs piled in the sink, last night’s pasta dried into the bowl. He pulled the mugs out of the cold, slimy water, stacking them in twos on the draining board, and rinsed his fingers. Then he scraped the shrunken swirls into the plastic bag he’d been using as a bin, and filled the bowl with water to re-hydrate those bits he couldn’t get off. He boiled the kettle, switched on the TV, and re-read the message, ‘NOTHN CAN I CALL IN?’ Had he ever told her where he lived? It looked like the message of a stalker – all those capitals – but he was bored. ‘Sure. Jst havin cup t.’

  She arrived minutes later, her eyes and lips puffy, her voice small.

  ‘Hey Oisín.’

  ‘Hi.’

  He couldn’t believe he had slept with her. He couldn’t picture her breasts now and he thought her skin smell would turn him off. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl he could get physically close to at all. She had a bottle of red wine in her hand. He took it, and put it in the kitchen without thinking to open it for them. Unzipping herself from a tight suede jacket, she sat down on his couch. Underneath she was wearing a sweater like a giant child’s with an eighties colour scheme; it was brown with orange and yellow cuffs and two small, useless pockets. Her attitude made him uncomfortable. She had a sense of knowing the space, of having a right to be in it.

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you?’

  ‘No.’

  She sniffed, tucking her hands up under her sleeves, kicking off her pumps and folding her knees under herself. She rubbed her face. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, and sighed. ‘Could I have a cup of tea?’

  Her eyes frightened him. They were too big and watery. The grey was pinkish like the white part. It reminded him of when they had dissected a sheep’s eyeball in school.

  He boiled the kettle and there was no conversation. Every sound he made – the clack of the kettle, the soft thud of the presses – seemed too loud, embarrassing.

  ‘Sorry to burst in on you like this Oisín.’

  ‘No it’s cool, it’s cool. Lecture was really boring. Did you take “The Novel” last term? The lecturer is a wanker.’

  ‘I just … Oh God, I mean. I don’t know why I’m even here. I … my sister’s going into hospital. She has anorexia. I just …’

  Oisín knew he was supposed to interrupt here with some expression of shock or sympathy, a hand on her shoulder even, her face, her neck … but he didn’t. He pretended to wash a mug, rubbing his fingers around the bottom over and over. She continued to talk. From what he gathered her sister was starving herself to death, and her family was broke, and she had got a 2.2 in her last essay. He made the tea slowly, handed it to her, and sat next to her on the couch, examining her shoulders and mouth and the broad chin as she spoke. He avoided the eyes. In his mind he sectioned the sheep’s eyeball again. It had been neater than expected, the whole affair. Usually real things looked nothing like the diagrams. Vegetable cells, for example, didn’t relate very well to the neat bricks in the science book, but the eyeball had made sense. They could easily label the parts: retina, iris, and what was the name of that hard bit? The bit that looked like a glass pebble? It acted like a mirror, un-jumbled the image before sending it to the brain. Reflected it backwards and upside down and then right way up again, so that the image that reached the brain wasn’t the raw reality at all.

  ‘Thanks Oisín, for listening. I just need a friend, you know? My friend Lucy is away. And John. John is a good friend, my best friend. He’s away too. On Erasmus. I have a lot of friends you know. Don’t think it’s that I don’t have friends, it’s just, there’s something about you Oisín. I think we get each other.’

  * * *

  He stutters, this lecturer, mirroring the blushing student, ‘Because … well. You will see. You are too young, all of you. You are too young.’ As a child I felt too old, always.

  When I got to school I’d unpack and sit on my bed listening to various lies about the other girls’ holidays, about what they were wearing to the races and who would be there, discussions on who would make head girl and why and whether this was fair. I tried to join in sometimes and they tried to include me but I felt foolish. My interest was unconvincing. They knew I didn’t get it – the races, the boys, how to wear the kind of dress that is respectable and sexy both at the same time. Until fifth year, when I met Brian, I stayed at home with my grandparents during the holidays, wearing jeans and baggy T-shirts and my grandad’s cardigans. The worst thing of all, my dark secret, was that I liked it. That was where I was happiest. I didn’t care at all who would be head girl.

  When I was homesick I’d think of my dead mother and blame her for my lo
neliness. The poor ghost-girl whom I have pieced together from stories and hazy, ever-changing fragments of memory. My father was never very real to me. I didn’t suffer from his absence. I occasionally wondered what he looked like but never blamed him or cared much where he was, or whether he loved me. I blamed my mother. I hated her as you can only hate those the heart chooses too soon.

  I had some memories that still felt real. I knew that sometimes she would leave me on my grandparents’ doorstep when I was bold, saying she wanted nothing to do with me, I had ruined it all. For some reason I can’t remember, I would never ring the bell, but would sit in the darkening air and let my blood stagnate. I used to enjoy that feeling, thinking about mongooses from the Discovery Channel, or trying to figure out how they made balloons. I had a useful way of shrinking into my head, away from my body with its cold fingers and all those unnamed feelings that burrowed away in the pit of my stomach. Or maybe that was just once. Memory is funny like that. I don’t know.

  When my grandmother opened the door she would lift me up into the powdery, floral heat of her body and carry me silently into the pine glow of the kitchen. I was wrapped in my grandad’s cardigan and placed on his lap to watch my grandmother move about the kitchen. Her methods of comfort were hot chocolate with a gloopy skin, camomile tea, brown sugar biscuits, and carrot cake. The carrot cake had white icing that was soft like cream.

  My grandfather knew everything. He spoke eight different languages and could explain the merits and flaws of every religion and every prophet. His library was the very cold basement that smelled of disinfectant more than of books. The walls were lined with full shelves and fat, titleless volumes were stacked up from the floor. A large freezer hummed in the farthest corner of the room. We used it to store raspberries and peas from the glasshouse when we couldn’t eat them all.