Between Dog and Wolf Read online

  It takes effort to lift my head off the bed, like pulling a plant up out of heavy earth. I can almost feel the little rips as the thread roots snap. How late is it? Helen and I were meant to do something tonight – go to some gig. I should put on mascara, brush my hair. I open the wardrobe. There is a mirror on the inner door that someone has stuck on with thick grey glue. My room is full of things like that – evidence of previous occupancy – it does not feel like mine, and I have no desire to mark it with pictures, or silk scarves draped from the coat hook or curtain rail.

  All that is here of me is a red duvet cover on the bed with the clashing pastel quilt my grandmother made for me when I was born, and some piles of books. The rest is bare but for half-removed stickers on the door; initials carved into the wall, flaking sequins glued to the light-switch. The mirror has a gilt frame around it. It is probably designed to hang from a hook, not to be stuck onto a wardrobe door with glue.

  I look at myself reflected there. I am taller than I feel, better looking than I feel, with much kinder eyes than I should have: large, brown, welcoming eyes like a gentle animal’s. Maybe that’s the way I was meant to be, kind like my eyes. Maybe this isn’t me at all. It’s just a chemical imbalance. The cheekbones and shoulders are broad, manly. That’s what gets me modelling jobs; high street fashion catalogues, nothing too glamorous. Some of the other models are so beautiful, so aesthetically balanced, so healthy, that it is hard to stop looking at them. But most of them are like me. Not pretty, exactly, but properly made: tall and thin, with something alarming about them – cat eyes, or children’s noses. I squirt a little glob of foundation into the space between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand and begin applying it with my right. That’s one good thing about modelling: the make-up tips.

  My phone rings. It’s this ascending electronic version of an old-fashioned phone ring. I haven’t figured out how to change it. I used to ignore my phone a lot, but since my grandfather became ill I always answer it. Even if his body means nothing to me now – its last sighs just any corpse’s jaded old lungs filling up and emptying out again – I should be there for my grandmother when he goes, because to her it means a lot, that pulsing of the veins, that breath. To her that’s still him. ‘Became ill’, that’s my grandmother’s phrase, it’s what she calls it. Actually, he took an entire bottle of sleeping pills. He didn’t become ill at all, he became comatose. Just that inch too far from death.

  He always told us he would do it. ‘Shoot me before I become a burden like that,’ he’d say, on passing some grumpy old hunchback who was poking children away with his stick, ‘or if you won’t I’ll take some pills. As soon as I start going toodle-loot,’ he’d say, whirring his finger around near his temple, ‘I’m off.’ Then he’d do the finger-whoosh towards heaven. We never believed him. It made me angry. I thought he was threatening us. As it turns out it was just a warning.

  It’s a number I don’t recognize. I don’t have anything to clean my hands on so I end up getting flesh-coloured fingerprints all over the phone.

  ‘Cassandra? Hi. It’s Brian.’

  For the year since we broke up he has called almost monthly, a sort of booty call, I think, but so far I’ve never given in.

  ‘Oh. Brian. Hi.’ I sound as though I love him.

  ‘How are you, Cassy?’ He always did that. Talked to me like I was senile or imbecilic.

  ‘Fine. Grand. Just rushing out though. I’ll call you back.’

  I hate talking on mobile phones. I never feel secure about it. The words are not safely contained in wires the way they are on a landline. Instead they’re floating about, blipping up to space and down to some soundboard on some island and then back into the person’s ear. It makes me panic if I think about it. So I try not to think about it.

  ‘My number has changed. Can I give it to you?’

  ‘It’ll be logged on my phone, Brian. I’ll save it.’

  ‘Not this number.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You have a pen?’

  I don’t answer. I want him to know I’m not really writing it down.

  ‘You have a pen – yeah? Oh-one … Six, seven, seven …’

  I don’t repeat the number. There is a silence. Then I hear him breathe in slowly. ‘You taking it down, Cassandra?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I saw you in the Morgan catalogue, you’re doing fashion now?’

  ‘A bit. Have to go Brian. Talk to you later, bye.’

  I hang up, exhale slowly. He’s made my face hot, and something in me crackles and melts like tinfoil in fire. I begin to write the number on the mirror with eyeliner while I still remember it, but smudge it away again. I’m not going to cry over it. I am very ugly when I cry. He told me that once.

  I make a special effort with my make-up, put on under-eye concealer and everything, and dress in an outfit I bought recently. Not one he has seen. Not one he likes my bum in. Not one he has taken off.

  Helen breezes in, wearing that awful sparkly pink top that she thinks is sexy. She has the kitten with her, and is holding it over her shoulder like a baby, stroking its head with one finger. It’s still mewing pitifully and evenly. Helen picks the little claws out of her hair and puts the kitten on my bed, where it continues to mew. It smells like dust and dried poo. She plonks herself down and grins. The top has only one sleeve and it shows a sloped shoulder to her disadvantage, but I don’t tell her this.

  ‘I’m going to wear that mad glittery eye shadow tonight,’ she says, excited, wanting my approval. There is a pinch of fat between her underarm and the fabric. I want to tell her to change, but I don’t know how.

  ‘What time is it?’ I say.

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘I thought it was later.’

  We walk to Whelan’s. It’s cold and the streets are dangerous at this time, full of addicts asking for change. My shoes slice into the back of my heel. Tall girls shouldn’t wear heels anyway. My grandmother is always telling me that. I haven’t called my grandmother all week. I will phone in the morning. I will ask that ridiculous question, ‘How is my Bompa?’ and she will answer at length.

  What horrifies my aunt is the word ‘suicide’: the thought of it, and the embarrassment. She prefers to think it was a mistake, though my grandmother insists it wasn’t – ‘What do you think he is? Some idiot is it? A mistake … he is no idiot.’ To me what is sad is not the unpopular attitude he held, but the failure. He got exactly what he didn’t want, a dragged-out end. He’s become exactly what he didn’t want to be: a family burden with a nappy and a feed-bag, and totally ‘toodle-loot’.

  We arrive early. The gig won’t start for ages but there’s already a smothering crowd. I hate this. It’s a waste of time, standing in a crowd like this. It’s too loud to talk, and there’s nowhere to sit down. We have to force our way through to get anywhere, loll against walls, sip drinks because there’s nothing else to do with our mouths or our hands.

  In this light Helen looks beautiful again: cherubic, all dimples and curls. The whites of her eyes and the pink hearts glint in the light. How is that? That Helen’s beauty comes and goes like a mood?

  She wants to get a drink so we push through the crowd to the bar and as we squash between two groups of men she grabs my hand so that we don’t lose each other. That’s why she takes my hand, so that we don’t lose each other. She doesn’t want to spend all night searching for me. She’s no pockets. She’s checked in her bag and I’m carrying her phone and purse for her. I know this is why she took my hand, or rather, gave me hers, but even so it feels like a gift. I haven’t held someone’s hand like that in a long time: firmly and like it is my right. Her fingers are cool, slender. The bones feel breakable. I grip her hand tighter, and we squeeze through backs and bums and elbows.

  * * *

  You have decided on the glittery pink eye shadow tonight, and that top with only one sleeve and pink hearts on it. Whelan’s is crowded, and you have to concentrate on weaving your way through all the bodies. Ca
ssandra is pressing on towards the bar, gripping your hand in the emergency. You like this sort of thing, this sort of panic, this fizz in the air: it excites you, unable to move without pushing through bodies, all vibrating with expectation, banging elbows, foamy beer that slops and slides down the sides of glasses, onto the floor, onto someone’s good top. This makes you feel like you are enjoying life, making use of it.

  You have your glow on tonight. You never know whether you have your glow on or not until you walk into a room like this. People look at you, men and women. They feel you behind them and they turn around. Your glow is a feathery joy that brushes your cheek and fills you up from the inside like light, surrounds you. The noise barely touches you, it passes over you like waves of heat.

  Cassandra orders the drinks briskly and leans back on the bar. Her top inches over the horizon of her low-cut jeans showing her tummy, jutting pelvic bones, concave stomach and the faint shadow trail that leads down to her pubes. Cassandra’s problem, you think, is that she doesn’t know she’s pretty. If she did she would smile more.

  She’s smiling now, lifting the drink to her lips, sipping, then smiling again, but it’s a forced smile, serious with the business of having fun.

  So when do you notice him? And what does it feel like when you do?

  Your face drops.

  He is with a group of friends, all very grown-up and cool. The three women have trendy hairstyles and subtle make-up. There is another man with them. He is slim-hipped, wearing a concert T-shirt, an arm slung about your teacher’s neck, and your teacher’s hand – the wide, bristled hand that used to touch your pencil case like it was your body – is around the man’s waist.

  Maybe it all clicks into place in one go. Maybe the sight of him is like the time you noticed that the woman plucking your eyebrows had a foetal-sized extra thumb; there’s a brief black-out, a moment of dizziness, a double take. For a beat you forget to swallow. Cassandra twists her head around to see what you are looking at.

  ‘It’s Mr O’Hara from Our Lady’s!’ She says, ‘He’s with Paul – I know that guy he’s with. That’s Paul. He’s an artist.’

  The teacher hasn’t changed, not at all. Not even the hair, the dark arms, the stubble. You remember his smile. You remember how his mouth moves when he talks. You have changed though, and you feel that suddenly – how unnatural the peroxide hair is, your shoulders and hips rounded with chub, heavy like a farm animal. Not that it matters now after all.

  One of the women touches his elbow and whispers something. He doesn’t hear her, stoops closer. She is looking your way. In a moment he will see you.

  ‘I didn’t know Mr O’Hara was gay, Helen, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe he’s bi. He must be bi because he definitely … you definitely …’

  He sees you. A nod and a fingery half-wave. The man he is with looks horrified, whispers something to him, his fingers at the back of your teacher’s neck.

  Cassandra grabs your hand again and it irritates you, this grabbing of your hands as though you were her child, and you pull away.

  He and the other man are gone by the time she drags you over to the gathering of friends. They eye you with humour and vague curiosity. Some kid he taught. Or maybe he has told them, ‘This kid who had a crush on me,’ and maybe they laughed and thought ‘how cute’, or maybe they made that sound from Psycho, raised their arms with mimed knives – nee nee nee nee – as though you were a stalker.

  So that’s that then. Cassandra is embarrassed.

  ‘That’s a bit rude, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mmm. who’s playing tonight, Cassy?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Want to go somewhere else?’

  ‘We’ve paid in Helen!’

  Bash your way back to the bar. Cassandra orders more drinks and you wait for the gig to start.

  * * *

  Brian told me once, ‘You know, Cassandra, you are ugly when you cry.’ I said ‘Oh.’ Just ‘Oh.’ Not ‘Thanks Brian,’ or ‘That’s a bit insensitive Brian,’ just ‘Oh,’ as though I would note it for future, which I suppose I did. He grafted a huge fake tear onto my cheek once, and carefully painted crow’s feet and a smile onto the other half of my face. On that side of my face he blanked out my pout with clown white so that he could draw the smile. I was immersed in water to my shoulders. He used a very slow shutter speed and a tripod so I had to stay utterly still. The pictures were taken in the bath, and at first the water was warm, but by the time he was finished I had to clench my jaw to keep from shivering. He had to wrap me in a towel and carry me into the bedroom.

  The photos were beautiful.

  At the opening night of the exhibition I wore a long dress the colour of a tropical sea that draped in folds about my breasts, skimmed my waist and had a deep, brutal cut all the way up the leg to the hip. My shoes had strings that coiled around my calves like seaweed. They thought I was beautiful, all his friends. They thought that the ‘piece’ was exquisite. I was quite a hit. I was better at that scene than he was, in fact. I sipped wine with poise, and without staining my teeth. I talked intelligently. The other men were jealous of him, taking along this young thing half his age. I loved that.

  There was a young artist there, nearly as young as me, gay. Brian introduced me to him and then disappeared to mingle. We spent the evening out the back of the exhibition hall, under a glowing patio heater. Paul, that was the young artist’s name, wore a black T-shirt and a grey silk scarf and smoked. His boyfriend was an art critic who had been invited to the opening, but he too had disappeared. Paul was an installation artist. He told me all about the piece he would be doing for The Edge Arts Centre soon: naked women with clipped pussies and dildos and whips, necklaces of little embryos strung around their necks, possibly murdering their aproned mothers, he hadn’t decided yet. ‘Misogynist Feminism,’ he explained, and I thought I understood. ‘Exactly,’ I said. He knew someone in London who was sleeping with someone who might be able to get him real human embryos from an abortion clinic. He would display them in little glass pods for the exhibition. ‘Wouldn’t that be fantastic?’ he said.

  We talked about feminism, pornography, art and agreed with each other and agreed and agreed. ‘Exactly!’ we said, nodding at each other, ‘Exactly!’ We got drunk gracefully and laughed and thought we were both such bright young things, such keen intellects. We didn’t know what we thought until it came out of our mouths but we agreed with each other so much and the concepts were so convoluted, the terms so esoteric, that we knew we were right. Misogynist feminism – exactly! We were more educated than our boyfriends, we knew that. A generation of third-levellers, we knew we were pedalling faster than they could. I was in first year of college. Paul was about to graduate.

  Brian came to get me around closing time. Those of us with contacts or prestige headed to a little bar nearby. It was a tiny, narrow place, shaped like a corridor, with nowhere to mingle but the doorway and a nook at the back. There were stills from obscure movies on the walls. By the bar a tall drag queen, draped and sequinned, wearing a flapper’s headband, shrieked like a mad bird. I thought something awful had happened and jumped, but Paul said she was doing poppers, that was all. Then she keeled over, the drag queen, cackling unnaturally the way a person might when confronted with some tragedy they can’t process. Everyone around her laughed too, but lightly, prettily, and looked away, then sipped their drinks.

  Paul and I stood near the exit, holding the delicate stems of champagne glasses between two fingers, sipping some blue sparkling concoction that our boyfriends had passed to us. He smoked. We tried to remember what we had been talking about, agreeing about. Our boyfriends had disappeared again. We talked frantically about Kant, to no real purpose, like children remembering their times tables. We used big words. At last, at 4 AM, we were shooed out of there too, and we all took over the desolate streets, sure of our importance, sure we were all artists, sure that that meant something, gesticulating wildly, gradually dispersing, d
isappearing into taxis and city apartments.

  Paul and his boyfriend lived in Temple Bar. He hugged me. ‘The old man’s getting edgy! Needs a servicing! Yours too by the looks of it!’

  He was looking at Brian, who was stroking my bare shoulder with the back of a finger. Paul’s man was holding him by the hips. Paul looked like a boy suddenly. He clutched my hands.

  ‘Cassandra I’m so glad we’ve met. We’re really … you know. I’ve loved talking to you.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Paul nodded and kissed my cheek, ‘I think we get each other don’t we?’ His boyfriend rolled his eyes to heaven, ‘Come on babes!’

  As he was lead off, Paul called, ‘Listen, come to the exhibition!’

  It was only me and Brian, and three artists still carousing down the street with a bottle of absinthe that someone had stolen from some illegal stash behind the bar. There was a stiff pickled snake coiled at the bottom of the bottle, eyes jellied by the green liquid. Someone said that in Asia they used it as an aphrodisiac. There was a name for it, but I don’t remember. I wanted to go home, but Brian wanted to go back to someone’s studio. It would be fun, he said, you never knew what would happen at Rajim’s studio, but it was always wild. We were arguing about this when a tall woman with cropped, pink hair, who had been talking to Brian all night, scooped me around the waist. ‘She’s a little nymph, Brian,’ she said, and she kissed me hard on the mouth. Brian laughed and kissed my neck, while she still held my waist, moved her tongue inside my mouth, and ran long nails through my hair.

  I won the argument. When we got home he gave me a small pill. I hid it under my tongue. He swallowed one and made love to me for hours, pressing me into the bed from behind, his hands clenched over mine. I pushed the pill quietly into the pillow with my tongue.

  ‘I loved that,’ he whispered; wet lips, fists crushing my hands, ‘the way you let Eileen kiss you. You’re my little Lolita aren’t you baby? My little bitch. They all wish you were theirs. Tell me you love me, Lol.’