Ursula

It must be easy for fiction writers—to make it all up. To shape reality and make it conform to some vision of the way it should be. Truth is not easy. I thought it was, that facts made it so. How could Ursula, she who was so vital, be gone? After Ruth’s death, I thought life would be easier, that death hardens one against pain. The endless well of naïveté. There is no chronology. I cannot weave them together.

*   *   *

We go for a walk up the hill of Howth. Ursula is coquettish, looking for my hand on the steep rises. It’s not like her and I like her more for it. We sit on a boulder and look out to sea. Gulls are squawking over a mass of brown in the blue sea.

—Enough to put you off your lunch.

All I can think of is kissing you. You turn and stare at me, a serious face.

—Kiss me.

I kiss her and her lips are lovely. She kisses back. We kiss and kiss and I burp in the middle of it I’m so nervous.

—Pig.

—It was an accident.

She pushes me on my back. We kiss and find each other. Her buttocks tight against her jeans. I run my hand down her leg. Her leg is hard as rock. Sweet, sweet touches. She raises herself off me and smiles intriguingly. She sits back and pulls her trouser leg up to the knee and knocks on the leg. She nods at my astonishment.

—Where does it start?

She karate chops above the knee.

—And the other one?

—That too. No, the other one is fine.

She shows a white ankle for proof.

—I never guessed.

She shrugs.

—No one knows. Except my family.

—What happened?

—Cancer. Let’s eat. It’s no big deal. At least not to me.

I open the basket we have brought and I think about telling her about Ruth, about the cancer but decide against it.

—Me neither. Leg? Of chicken.

—Weak.

I knew then I would ask her to marry me.

*   *   *

At work I find the slow constant hiss of the gun comforting. Ursula is getting ready for her job, back at the flat. Wife: how wonderful to have a wife. I imagine her dressing, smile at the pleasure of knowing her routine. I marvel at the work. The paint fanning over the black plastic frame turning it metallic silver. I swivel the jig to paint the next side, arcing the gun to cover the curved edge of the television frame. Love this job. It takes a special kind of concentration to paint television escutcheons five hundred times a day. Set the record last month with 578 in a single shift. Over six hundred if they included defects. Thinking of the defects, my skill wanes. The siren goes and Gerry and I drop the guns with relief.

The other workers scuttle across the factory floor to be first to the vending machines. We make our way to the toilets. We peel off the cotton gloves, the hoods, the face masks, and wash. The paint spray finds its way through to the skin, regardless. I blow my nose and decide not to think about the paint—it’s approved by the minister for health himself. Gerry spits into the urinal.

—Want anything?

I shake my head.

—What are you smiling at?

—Nothing.

—Go on.

—Ursula is my wife.

—You’re smiling at that? Sap. If that fucker Canning doesn’t lay off me I’ll knife him.

—Relax. You’ll be a manager too one day and then you can be a bollocks.

I sit in the cubicle and stare at the chipboard door. The same coarse talk out of them every day. Did he drop the hand? I’d fucking kill him if he said that to me. Shut up you. Prick. Got to get out of this poxy place. I’m about to swear when I stop myself. She warned me about my language. She has a habit of entering my thoughts when I’m on the edge of anger. The morning after the honeymoon. Lying in bed in the hotel. We were shocked with the drabness of the room. The place had seemed so grand, looking out onto the bay. I pretended its loveliness.

—It’s old-fashioned without the niceness of old-fashioned.

I delight in her directness; a mixture of bluntness and shyness. It was a still, hot night and we slept with the blankets off us. Her naked body lying on its side, facing me. Raising my fingers to the mouth, afraid to touch her. Her breasts are heavy and happy; full of smiles. So many pleasures with her. I stare at her in the darkness. Are you dreaming of us? Of when we met?

I had just entered sixth year, and swear I will avoid girls until after the exams, not that I’ve even touched one, acne and shyness deterring me. We meet at the school dance. She is sitting there in a long black dress, watching everything. And I am watching her. A month later she lets me slip a hand under her blouse, and I hope she can’t sense the trembling in my fingers. The gentleness of her breast; the nipple, hard as a nut. The consternation inside of me, knowing she is excited. The first time I touch her is in the park. We meet there after school and go to the back of the football pitches near the Basin. How she excites me. Her moaning frightens me but I can’t bring myself to stop until her hand tightens about my wrist. A butterfly taking flight. My fingers on her stomach slipping beneath flesh and jeans, down into the wetness between her legs, thrilled by the pulsing of her cunt’s heartbeat. Ripples there, minutes later.

I go to bed without having any tea or without studying. Under the blankets, breathing her in on my fingertips: Ursula. Her smell. Happier than the smell of grass after rain. This couldn’t be the fishy smell other boys joked about. How little they knew. How little everybody knew. How was it that people could go about their lives after discovering such a smell?

Because I am studying for the exams, it is three torturous days before I see her again. As soon as we are alone in the park I bring my fingers to her lips.

—Smell.

She shoves my hand away and stares at the fingertips suspiciously.

—I’m not messing. Smell.

She lifts my fingertips to the wings of her nostrils and inhales.

—You’ve been smoking.

—It’s not cigarettes. It’s you. It’s you. Your smell from Monday evening. When we were here.

She grabs my hand and lifts her nose a little as if sniffing herself from the air about us. She bends and kisses my fingernails; the undersides of my fingers; licks my palm. She kisses and licks the palm and bites it and I whisper it’s nice and it’s lovely and she better stop and she better stop now before it’s nicer and she says yes, she will stop kissing this palm all the time and I plead and she says she will stop in one kiss’s time and I say no you are to stop now and to marry me please.

*   *   *

Her stomach sags a little and it looks as if it, too, is fast asleep. I have an urge to kiss her navel but restrain myself, fearing I will wake her. I blush at the shock, only a few hours old, when she had taken her bright red knickers off: she is sitting at the far side of the bed with her back to me. She stands, straightening herself the way she does on her good leg, and my eyes rest on the dark triangle of hair.

—What is it?

I shake my head.

—What is it?

I count the stars on the carpet.

—Please don’t go quiet on me. Not on our honeymoon. Please don’t say nothing to me.

—I don’t know what to do.

My face is burning.

—I do.

I look up.

—I mean I’ve a fair idea.

She laughs and I laugh. She walks like a clown on stilts when she hurries.

*   *   *

We move into the flat in Lower Dorset Street over Youkstetter the pork butcher, after the wedding at the end of July. My father had offered us a room in the house until we got some money together but neither of us wanted to live at home any longer—she had reached the end of her tether with her mother who had just started to get into the swing of things with her fond-of-a-drop lover, Mulvany, who was living there now. No job, going around half naked, letting Ursula know with his eyes he’d do her too. Lover: it was the first time I’d ever heard someone use that word out loud, and it was silly coming out of her mother’s middle-class, middle-aged mouth. Lover: a word that should imply passion but in her implied only pretension and desperation.

Cats used to gather in the back yard and force the lids off the rubbish bins. We slept with the window closed so the stench wouldn’t waft in on top of us. That first blistering August we left all the doors open so that air could crawl into the bedroom from the front room. Staring up at the ceiling half the night, cursing the trucks passing on their way up the North, and stopping me from sleeping.

*   *   *

All that was after the honeymoon; adoring the sight of her; her arched foot; ankle with the tiny tattoo of the green and red hummingbird; her bent knee; thigh widening out, heavy hips falling down to the waist. I reach across and kiss the bottom. I take a breath and softly kiss her breast and my heart sings that I can please her and she not even awake. I go to the bathroom to relieve myself. The noise of the sea coming in the open window taunts me, whispering truths between each wave. My face is tired in the mirror. I have the responsible cut of a husband about me. Maybe this morning I’ll be able to keep it in her longer. The coldness of the tiled floor seeps into my feet. A new resolve floods me and I run hot water over my hands to heat them lest they’re cold on her. I creep back and slip beneath the covers beside her warm body and kiss her face. She stirs. I push my tongue between her dry lips and hear them part like glued paper. She stirs. I lick the surface of her teeth; the smoothness of hard ice cream. Her eyes open and she smiles at me.

—Morning, husband.

I raise myself on an elbow, away from the sudden surprise of her sour breath. My mouth must be the same, reeking of the night. She reaches out her arms, a tired child wanting to be lifted. Yet when I enclose her, I feel as if I’m the child and I hide my face against the nape of her neck, hiding the embarrassment that comes with the pleasure of her. The scent of her lilac perfume. Her body next to mine is the heavens unfastening. Let me manage it properly this morning. My father having to do the janitor job in the school when things got difficult at home: having to work for the Thorntons as well and put up with being checked on all the time as if he was a child when he couldn’t get painting work. How I love him so unquestioningly. I love her more though, love her more than I love my own father, and the treachery of it catches in my throat. The siren screams and I rouse myself from the reverie of the cubicle. I had started to pleasure myself but there is no time. Foul graffiti daubed on the back of the door. I stand and wince—my leg is gone asleep. She gets sore sometimes in the amputated leg. I rub my leg back to life. Back in the spray painting booth I attack the work vigorously, taking care not to let the hose of the gun hit the painted frames. I will the day to end, to be home with her.