Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  To show me a book he’d take it into the sitting room and open it on his lap for me to follow the words as he read. The sitting room smelled of clean. It had a big mustard-coloured velvet couch with swallowing cushions. We read a lot of books. There was one with pictures. It was called The Silly Duck. It was a ‘My First Reader’ book, but we kept reading it long after I had mastered the skill. It was about a little duckling that hatches from an egg in the reeds. The first thing it lays its eyes on is a fox. Ducklings think the first thing they see is their mother and fall in love with it. The fox would normally eat the duckling, but he is so touched by the naivety of the fluffy little thing that he cannot. The fox raises the duckling until it is time for the duckling to join a flock of ducks. My grandfather thought it was hilarious – I remember him chuckling on and on, and I would become embarrassed waiting for his laughter to finish. ‘Such a simple idea,’ he would say, ‘but brilliant!’

  I remember The Little Prince as well, and Marcus Aurelius, but the rest has sunk into the past. It was important to him that I read these books. After each chapter he would ask me what I thought and we would argue together. We both knew we had to reach a conclusion before my grandmother poked her head into the room and called us for dinner, ‘A table!’ I thought we were important, the pair of us. We were on a quest together, and together we would eventually find that solid thing – the right knowledge. I would hold it in my fist and hand it to him and we would right forever’s wrongs.

  My grandfather would always make everything clear. The night of my mother’s funeral he sat on the bed with a box of Laughing Cow cheese in one hand, and a mug steaming with hot malt in the other. The cow on the box was smiling and she had two round boxes of Laughing Cow cheese for earrings. ‘And the same pictures must be on this cow’s earrings, and the same on those. Imagine, forever, never ending.’ I could not imagine it, and it terrified me to try. Forever was inconceivable. The thought was unbearable. I understood why people had to die.

  I wish I could recover the glimpse I had then, because it was a glimpse of something. I understood something. It was okay that life was not perfect, that people were unhappy, and that people died. The whole mess had value regardless. I wish I could remember that.

  At night we would sit together drinking from rose-patterned teacups and I was safe and content in the knowledge that there was nothing Grandad didn’t know that we couldn’t find together. But he shook his head slowly: ‘What happened, you would never have foreseen it, she was never like this as a child.’

  That was true. My mother used to be young and happy and beautiful. She used to have soft black hair that moved like waves. She used to sit on the grass in fields of tiny blurred flowers, decorated with pastel pinks and blues, squinting in the white sunlight of fading photographs.

  Even before my mother died, I had a little pine bed in my grandparents’ house. The sheets were clean and cool. After sliding my bathed body flat between the stiff cotton, investing my heat in the brittle white, I would lie still, listening – though I didn’t want to hear – to the sound of my grandmother downstairs, dialling. I knew they liked to have me there, to teach me, feed me, watch me paint with big flat brushes and bottles of squeezy colour. So why would she ring my mother’s flat? Every time: ‘She’s your child, darling.’ Then she would hang up and cry and I knew that my grandfather was shaking his head impotently and sighing because she was never like this as a child, while my grandmother sobbed angrily into the soft crêpe of her palms. I understood that for my mother our life was a dark thing now, something that existed too long, after everything had stopped mattering. Even when she loved me it was a copy, a flailing effort.

  My mother. Mummy; woman with the prosthetic heart.

  I enjoyed it when she let me watch as she put on her face. It was a lovely face with rosy cheeks and a smile painted over her big, sad lips. When she was not angry she would wear a black, wide-rimmed hat with a thick pink bow around it and smoke through a long black-and-gold holder. The smoke twirled like a dreaming ballerina, like choking seaweed. We would sit at the kitchen table, mother and child, me with a mug of water or Coke and Mummy with a glass of yellowish liquid that she would down with a knock of the head. It smelled like her nail polish while it was still in the bottle. She would roll her ‘r’s and hiss her ‘s’s and lean across the table to give the moist whisper: ‘Remember my beautiful darling, there are no parts for women – it’s a man’s world, baby, it’s a man’s world, my beautiful little baby! There are no parts for us worth playing.’ Then Mum would laugh, and then she would cry. Sometimes she would start to take photographs of me. ‘Beautiful. Beautiful. Look at that face …’ It didn’t seem to bother her if I didn’t smile for these photos. I think a lot of them have been thrown out because they made my grandmother sad afterwards.

  On these evenings Mum often told me stories: ‘And I told them, princess, you stupid little man, I said. I mean to say. Stupid little man!’ Her voice would sway in and out. I knew all the characters of our tragic fairy tale. The short, moustached agent would shake his bald head and say, in the stout voice for which Mum buried her chin in her neck: ‘It just isn’t working Marie, it simply isn’t worth our while …’ and the conversation would circle.

  The lecturer looks like a politician. He puts so much feeling into every word that his whole frame shakes.

  ‘And what Chaucer understood, about love, was that afterwards … afterwards nothing is the same. Something is lost. But not just something, the very essence of a person, the very thing, the thing …’

  He is still talking to the girl with the highlights. I wonder what she thinks of all this. I draw a droplet on my foolscap, and a smaller one under it. Then I draw the splash when the drops hit the end of the page; an upside-down tear and lots of little ones all around it. I used to be good at art.

  At twenty-three my mother’s life was over. For her the present did not exist, it was a dream beyond the day and she killed it with a tiny shot glass of liquid gold. Or many glasses. In my memory it is always the same one. Mum loved me and hated me because I had my father’s eyes, because I frightened him away, because I was very young.

  I was only very young, and I loved her. I would have been whatever she wanted me to be. Love: the thing that makes the blood fizz. The cruel thing that blurs the mind with gentle bubbles. Hubble Bubble.

  I am always hoping to close the book on the story of my mother, to think her out. But my thoughts work in circles, panting persistently like a choo-choo train.

  She didn’t always hate me, and if I was her demon I was also the light of her world. If she didn’t love me why would she keep me locked in our flat while Grandad banged on the door? And if he did drag me to school, why would she pine for me? She’d open the door, hugging herself in too-big pyjamas that made her so tiny it hurt to look.

  ‘I’m glad you’re home my angel, I’ve been so lonely all day without you.’ We’d climb into her bed and she would kiss my head, my eyelids, my ears, my face and neck and arms, then each little finger and each little toe: ‘One, two, three, four, five – all there!’ and she said she loved me, she loved me so much. She loved me. I could never know how much. I could never understand how much. Her bed was warm and comfortable and smelled of her sleep and her farts and her drink.

  She folded me as small as I could go and tucked me between her breasts; I was beloved. She traced my profile with her ring finger; I was beautiful. She followed the blue path of my pulse where it showed at the wrists; I was strong.

  Unlike me, my mother was small with a neat nose, swollen, geisha lips and Bambi eyes. She was made differently to me. These big, jutting cheekbones must be my father’s doing, because she had limbs that thrilled men with their fragility. In the street or the pub or the post office, I saw the way men watched her wrists, her hips, her calves, and I clung tighter to her. They wanted the feeling you get when you hold something tiny and trembling and beautiful at your mercy, a small bird on your palm. That must have been what my father
liked. It must have been why he had stayed so long before I came along, while his wife, who was more successful, but not as good an actress as Mum, hated us and bawled until he went back to her and put her in another play.

  I gave Mum stretch marks. Some evenings she would lie on her back and cry over them, and I would trace each silvery snail-trail with my fingers as though I could heal what I had done. She had a pink ridge that curved under her pelvis. That’s where they cut me out. ‘You wouldn’t get out of me, would you, baby? You were tight as a shrimp, stuck. You wanted to stay there until your daddy came back for us. They had to pry you out. You were a ball clamped shut like an oyster, with tiny red fists, screaming at the world. The midwife uncurled you and made me hold you but you didn’t want me. My milk made you sick. We waited in the hospital for three days. He never came.’

  I understood this story very well. He didn’t love Mum, or want to put her in his plays now because she was no longer that girl, that woman who could play fourteen and no one would suspect. He might come back though. I was put on lookout while she drank in her bed. I would know him by his red hair. We had very few rules in our home, but those she made, I obeyed. My feet made imprints in our carpet where I stood for hours, forbidden to move from that spot by the window in case Eoin, that was my dad, came back. On the last evening I was put on lookout again while she wrote me a note and put herself to sleep. I gazed out the window until my vision blurred.

  She did her best. Well, we all do our best. In our own ways we all do our best all the time, don’t we? We do what we do. We are no better than that. No better, and no worse.

  I need to remember my mother. I need to shake off her kiss, tug out the fragile, intricate weave of memories and spread her like a ribbon before me, outside my head, so she cannot watch me while I sleep. Someday I will light the ribbon and watch it taper into ash.

  Until then I must stop thinking the same things over and over. I must stop.

  I stuff my foolscap and the list of essay titles into my bag and stand up. The lecturer spots me. He looks stricken and stops speaking. A few students turn to look at me, straining their necks because I’m at the very back. I pretend not to notice and leave urgently.

  I slouch back to my room, hunched against the drizzle and cold. My mind is full of noise. I can’t unknot the shapeless, nameless thoughts filling it. When there is nothing left to do, walk away and don’t look back. Leave the problem in a bundle on someone’s doorstep. Forget.

  I lie on the bed and gaze at a smudge of lamplight reflected on the wall. I try to cry about love and the things it does to people, but that feels too stupid and I give up. I watch the light blankly and wait for sleep.

  * * *

  It wasn’t planned. Not at all. He didn’t even fancy Sharon, but suddenly his tongue was in her mouth, his hands under her sweater. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Now he remembered; she had flopping breasts, long and shapeless, with flat nipples. She opened his fly and it all happened very quickly. No foreplay. He bent her over the couch and grabbed her ass on either side, spreading the cheeks as much as he thought she’d allow. She was so dry it hurt to enter her. Afterwards they sat on the couch. She rested her head on his bare chest. She wasn’t crying any more.

  ‘Oisín? Thanks for listening. I just want to know, cause I’ve been sleeping with this guy lately and I should stop if we’re … I just want to be clear about everything. Are we …?’

  ‘I thought we were just mates.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to be clear. Okay. No. That’s cool. Okay.’

  She cried a little, her nose and eyes wetting his skin. He straightened his back. ‘Beer?’

  ‘No. I should be going. I’m glad we’re friends Oisín. I think you’re cool.’

  ‘Cool. Me too. Stay as long as you like. I’m going to take a shower.’

  In the shower he thought about the sheep’s eye in school. The smell of it; not like meat but clean and sour the way poison might smell. He turned the temperature up as hot as he could bear and worked up a lather in the long hair under his arms. He scrubbed the back of his neck and stood with his face to the faucet, letting it all rinse off. Then he switched off the water and dried himself vigorously inside the shower. That was something he always did, to avoid wetting the floor. He hoped she wouldn’t make a habit of this. Those deep round eyes. They had a draining effect.

  Towel around his waist he put his head around the door of the kitchen-dining area. She was gone. The bedroom was warmer than the bathroom had been, and he dropped his towel while he searched for his boxers. He couldn’t find them. That shower hadn’t satisfied him. He didn’t feel refreshed. He opened the wardrobe door and rooted about in a pile of clean laundry.

  On the inside of the wardrobe door there was a full-length mirror that he had always hated. It belonged to a girl’s room, he thought. His body looked silly and wrong in it. There was something unbalanced about his naked body. He always thought that. It looked as though there was something missing at the waist, like the two halves of a man sandwiched together. He straightened up and looked at himself, trying to decide once and for all what it was that was wrong with him. It was the connection for sure, the connection between the top half and the bottom half of him.

  Oisín was tall, widely built. He was rugged looking, he knew that was his charm. He looked best with a little stubble. His chin hair was black, but certain light showed up red bits. He hated seeing his penis lax like this. It looked stupid and useless. He felt like laughing at it. He jumped up and down and it wiggled flabbily. It was nauseating.

  Then he did something he hadn’t done since he was a boy. He tucked it back between his legs and looked at himself. He smoothed his hand down over his stomach and the triangular slope that was left. Then he looked from the side. You couldn’t see a thing. Another thing he had learned in science class was that all embryos started as girls. Then some of them turned into boys. That’s why men had nipples.

  five

  It might have happened easily with your English teacher, Helen. Like tripping on your shoelace, like dreaming, like going with the flow, like swimming. With the schoolboys though, everything was effort. Talk was awkward and always felt a little embarrassing. It didn’t seem like a possibility, that passing from the outside of them – the skin, the ironed shirts, the lips – to inside their mouths. So it never happened. The girls called you a ‘kiss-virgin’ and ‘lip-tight’.

  At one of the inter-school socials, when you had spent the whole evening standing with Cassandra beside a bowl of tortilla chips, passing them one by one into your mouth for want of something to do, Cassandra raising her eyes to heaven every time anyone approached, Antonia from your dorm tapped you on the shoulder.

  ‘Will you be with that guy?’ she gestured to a boy a few feet behind her. He was holding a mobile phone – that was before everyone had them – pushing the buttons and frowning at the screen. There was mouse-coloured fluff on his chin and upper lip. He looked very clean, as though he had been vigorously towel-dried after a long bath. Even his pimples were scrubbed raw.

  They were Clongowes Wood College boys, from good families. Getting kissed at one of these socials was almost encouraged by the Sisters.

  You thought you must have been pretty. You had no spots and a good figure and you dressed just right. It embarrassed your uncles to see your naked legs or shoulders. You had come to expect a double-take from men in the street. There were boys who would kiss you if you let them, but you never really knew how to let them. How did it go from them liking you, chatting to you, smiling at you, to kissing up against a wall? How did that happen? It seemed miraculous, the way the others did it. One minute they were grinning, talking, touching the boy’s biceps, the next they were gone. The things that could happen during the disappearance: deep, wet kissing, love bites like berry stains on necks and chests, even fingering, even blow jobs, sometimes, if you believed the girls.

  You never did it though. Cassandra didn’t either, but it was different for her. She
had no fear of inexperience. By fifth year she had started modelling, and she had an older boyfriend. She went to arty, adult parties where people rolled joints. She was way ahead.

  ‘His name is Henry,’ said Antonia, ‘My parents know his parents. His dad practically owns RTÉ.’ You shook your head. She scrunched her nose, shrugged, and as she spun around, muttered the word ‘lezos’. Antonia kissed him herself about an hour later though, and he became her boyfriend, so it all worked out.

  Your virginity, and your secret one-and-only-kiss took on a sacred quality. If the nuns dedicated their virginity to God, you dedicated yours to Mr O’Hara.

  By the time you got to college you were far too old never to have kissed a boy. It became a shameful secret. You hoped to fall in love again, and to be loved. That would solve the whole thing, but that seemed less and less likely as you dampened out from a lithe seventeen-year-old to a muffin-topped twenty-one.

  You started kissing in second year of college, getting drunk and letting it happen so you would know there was no mystery. You worked it out one night. It’s about letting them know you’ll let them. It’s about vibes. The blow job was a first. At least now you know. At least you know what a man’s erection is like – not like a dog’s. That’s what you had imagined: something pink and slithery drawing out from a wrinkled sheath, flailing about. That’s what your dog’s looked like.

  * * *

  I must have been lying like this for a long time, though I didn’t fall asleep. It’s that numb thing I can do with my brain sometimes. The evening has closed in around me, wrapping the room like a blanket. I am still looking at the lamplight, and it glows orange and more distinct in the dark.