‘Murr-lot,’ declares Patrick, pouring an extravagant splash into a dingy-looking wine glass and swilling it around. Everything in this flat feels a bit bachelor-tastic. ‘Ruby red, from the foothills of Tuscany, the grapes squeezed dry by fit peasants.’
He looks at me – a questioning sort of smile on his sweet face – and I sink more deeply into the broken-springed embrace of his velour sofa. It’s the most uncomfortable thing in the world and the most comfortable thing in the world, all at the same time.
‘Are you reading that off the back of the bottle?’ He hands me the first glass and gingerly pours one for himself. ‘Have a beer if you want a beer.’
‘I’m keeping you company,’ he says, chinking his glass against mine, and dropping his long limbs down onto the sofa. ‘You look like a girl who needs company.’
I hook my feet over his lap, lean backwards against a cushion. I feel like I could sleep forever.
‘Your company. Not any old rozzer’s.’
‘Think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,’ he says.
‘Don’t say that!’ I bat him with my cushion, and he pulls me close.
‘Are you going to tell me about it?’ Am I? Am I really? I look away, try to work out where I would start. He reaches for my face, turning it gently towards him. ‘You look different, you know.’
‘I look like a crone who hasn’t slept since we last declared war on Germany.’ I put some lipstick on in my rear-view mirror, tried to rescue my mascara: nothing worked. I nearly gave up on this evening and went to take refuge at Mum’s, but I realized in the nick of time I was being ridiculous.
It’s funny the way time concertinas with Patrick. Sometimes I feel like I’ve known him for months, years – light years even – whilst at other moments it feels like the slim sliver of weeks that it really is. Will I sound like damaged goods, remaindered stock that’s been sold off cheap, if I tell him the whole sorry truth?
‘No you don’t. Can’t explain it. But you look different.’
I unconsciously run my fingers over the contours of my face. That was one of the bizarre things about today, remembering the pieces of me that come directly from him. The angular triangles of my cheekbones, the expanse of forehead that I used to hate – a great big spam – my hairline lodged too far back on my head. Now I wonder if the reason I hated it was for the quiet reminder it gave me every time I looked in the mirror.
‘I wasn’t fishing for compliments,’ I tell him. ‘Are you really going to order a pizza?’
‘Just say if you don’t wanna talk about it. I’ll see straight through you if you give me an hour-long defence of pepperoni.’
‘I HATE pepperoni. It’s made from dead dogs, surely?’
Patrick gives me a long look, then unfurls himself from the sofa. Bruises, an almost pretty greenish colour, are still visible on the left side of his face; every time I see them they shock me anew. How could anyone set out to do that to him? I resist the urge to reach out and stroke them, rage at their existence.
‘I’ll go and find my phone. Luigi,’ he says, reaching for it, ‘thirty-four-incher with extra pepperoni and a pepperoni salad.’
‘Ask him if he can make me a pepperoni trilby.’
‘Jaunty!’
Pizza is by no means my death-row dinner. It’s greasy, fattening, all the things I hate, but I don’t want to be a princess. I stack my crusts neatly on the side of my plate, roll off the leathery olives like I’m staging a miniature bowls tournament. Patrick’s watching: I guiltily pick up a crust and nibble on it.
‘I don’t know where to start.’
‘Let’s start at the very beginning,’ he says, sing-song, like Maria.
‘Now you tell me you’re a fan of musicals!’
He reaches for my hand, gluing us together with pizza grease. I look at him, too scared, too overwhelmed to start.
‘Edited highlights then. Match of the Day style.’ He stares back at me. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . I just want to try and understand, at least a bit.’
‘You do.’ It’s funny, I feel like he gets it, the vibration of it, even if he doesn’t know the cold, hard facts. ‘He was everything to me . . .’ I say eventually. ‘He was James Bond and Peter Pan and Mr Benn.’
I lie back, put a cushion in his lap and look at the ceiling, twin streams of tears running down my cheeks as I start to unravel it for him. Of course you can never properly convey the past to a person who wasn’t there. As I’m telling him, his arm wrapped around my body like the warmest scarf in the world, I find myself longing for a parallel universe in which he had been. Why did I make it so hard for myself? It always felt like it was all on me.
I stumble over bits – the Jim bits mainly – not wanting him to feel that he’s competing with my ghosts. Jim and Lorcan: twin spectres. But, as I describe it, I realize how much Jim was a piece of Lorcan broken off and transformed – another man who couldn’t be captured in the butterfly net of my wanting. It takes all my strength to tell him about the baby – the baby that was, but never was – and yet I somehow eke the words out from somewhere deep within myself. I haven’t got much puff after that. I don’t tell him the details of that prison visit, the words still too blistering, too emotionally incendiary, to fling into the atmosphere. Besides, this isn’t an exam. It turns out that life isn’t an exam. I look up at him when I’ve run out of words, shocked by the expression I find on his face.
‘Hey! You don’t need to cry.’
He doesn’t say anything for a second.
‘I’m not. I’m just . . . I’m just taking it in.’ He gives me a half-smile, his eyes dark, almost bruised. ‘Thinking about who I want to hit first.’
‘Let’s not have any more hitting,’ I say, reaching up and touching the sea-green traces of the violence with the softest pads of my fingers. I’m cringing a bit, my insides crumpled and small like holiday washing at the bottom of a suitcase, but I know it’s old shame that I don’t need to lay claim to any more. I never did.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says gruffly, but softly, like he doesn’t trust himself to say more.
‘Thank you,’ I say, my heart suddenly racing. ‘I promise it’s not going to be all about me. I want to hear about the dodgy priests and the communion wine and the sixth-form discos . . . and your dad. I want to know everything.’
‘There’s time,’ he says, unexpectedly solemn.
‘There is!’ I say, knowing now why my heart was racing. I can do this. I can. ‘I love you,’ I mutter, my face turned away, my hair a curtain I’m hiding behind. I force myself to look at him: his face is hard to read. ‘I love you,’ I say, declamatory now. Fuck it. ‘I love you. I don’t care if you’re not ready to say it’ – that’s a lie, I care loads – ‘but still . . . I love you.’ He’s grinning now, his face split in two, his eyes shining. ‘I love you, Patrick O’Leary.’