Love

IT SEEMS TO be a cause for celebration. We have done one hundred and fifty of the fuckers and are obliged to eat dinner and consume wine, which isn’t so bad now that we are grown up. We have a dispensation from the LoveWagon to like each other, without her paranoia getting in the way. Apart from which she knows her limits, drinks herself into silence and not into speeches about how we couldn’t have done it without Gary in Sound.

I sit beside Jo who has an instinct for order, and across from Marcus and Frank because you need a good fight when things start to get sentimental.

Frank says we’ve never had a virgin on the show, that he can smell one from five hundred paces.

‘What about Marie from Donnycarney,’ I say with one eye checking Marcus, ‘convent bred, the flower of Irish womanhood?’

‘Not a chance,’ says Frank. ‘Convent girls go like bunnies.’

Frank likes little girls, but he is too sophisticated to like virgins. Frank wants a little girl that knows all the tricks. He’s like most men I know, except he’s not afraid to admit it.

‘I never was a virgin,’ I say. Which Frank ignores because he is perfectly sane. Frank has worked for his sanity. He has a wife and a house and he talks too much. He used to tell me how Sheilagh won’t have sex at home anymore but drags him into the bathroom by the belt every time they have dinner with friends. Now he is talking about younger ass. I don’t want to know. Married people should not tell tales. Being miserable in silence is the price they pay for being happy. They bought it. I did not. I am stuck with a couple of one-night-stands and an angel in the kitchen who breaks my appliances and won’t put out. I understand the difference between sex and love, between love and the rest of your life. So don’t let any married man tell me that he has problems with his dick. And keep their wives away from me too, at parties.

‘An angel?’ says Jo.

‘Never mind,’ I say.

‘Hang on,’ says Marcus. ‘We were all virgins. Even you had a childhood and lost it. Or maybe you’re born with a diaphragm installed, here in Dublin 4’, and a little trail of insult crosses behind his eyes, like beads on a miserable string.

* *

My mother thinks that the loss of my virginity caused my father’s stroke and so do I. Never mind the facts. The first fact, fuck it, is that I never was a virgin, never had a hymen, never knew the difference between loss and gain.

The other fact is that I stayed out all night, the night my father’s brain sprung a leak, and that rage kept my mother awake and in the kitchen while my father lost half of his bladder and half of his bowels into his half of the bed.

Never mind that I had spent the night talking and fully dressed, while my mother sat up, listening to the hall door opening, over and over, in her head.

So my virginity, if I ever had a virginity, was just an idea my parents had. But it was my father who took the brunt of it, because it was his brain that tore and bled and was transformed. No wonder my mother felt like a hypocrite. No wonder I felt bad.

I came in at seven in the morning to an empty house. I rang the neighbours and so broadcast the facts that I was a slut and that my father was in hospital, both at the same time. Since then, my father’s illness has not been made my concern.

A few weeks later I did sleep with Brendan (large, rooted and sincere) for the first time. I mourned all right, but not for my virginity. I mourned for my mother in the kitchen and my father in the bed. I was astonished by sex. And I was astonished by the fact that the rhythm of love, when it happened, was the awful swing of my mother’s hall door, always opening, never shut.

Brendan took it all very badly. We lay there in his dirty and tangled sheets. I said ‘That was my first time.’ I said ‘My father’s just had a stroke.’

* *

‘Anyway’ says Frank, ‘she can’t be a virgin. Not after Marcus gave her one that Friday night.’

‘It doesn’t matter’, says Marcus, who has an urgent mind and very little in his pants, ‘whether she was a virgin or not—because on the screen, for the duration of the show, for the punters at home, that young woman was as good as a virgin. And that is the lie we get paid to tell.’

‘She was as good as a ride,’ says Frank.

‘Whore,’ I said into my dinner.

‘All things to all men!’ said Marcus. ‘Which is why, when people criticise the programme—yes, it’s a trashy show, yes, it’s complicated—it’s as trashy and simple and complicated as a one-night-stand is, or as paying for a blow job is, or as falling in love. So when people criticise that experience, whatever it was that they saw on the screen, they are telling you more about themselves than they are about the show.’

‘Gosh!’ said Frank.

‘I know what I’m looking at,’ said Jo.

‘Exactly’ said Marcus. ‘Just what I said.’

Marcus always wins a) because he changes his mind all the time, which he is allowed to do because b) he read somewhere that truth is just a matter of building contradictions. So now he has his cake, he eats it and his shit comes out wedge-shaped with icing on the top.

‘Marcus,’ I said. ‘I was not calling Marie Keogh a whore, whether or not you slept with her. I don’t know how to break it to you, but she is just a distracted young woman we put on the telly the other night. I was calling you a whore. I could have called Frank a whore, but we all know that he’d get up on the crack of Dawn, so it’s not exactly hot news. I was calling you a whore because you get off on television and you love talking shite.’

‘And you are working for Mother Teresa,’ said Marcus. ‘As we well know.’

‘I know what I am,’ I said. ‘I know that I’m out on the streets with my high heels on, earning a crust. You just hang around because you love the smell of cock.’

‘Why do you talk like that?’ said Marcus.

‘I’m just talking. You’re the one who is waving it around.’

‘Oh. You think I slept with her.’

‘I think you don’t know the difference between fucking her on-screen and off.’

‘And what exactly is the difference?’ said Marcus, who wants to make Drama and doesn’t put out.

‘Are those shoes new?’ said Frank.

He has just retrieved a fork from the floor. He ducks down again, followed by Marcus and Jo, their elbows cresting the air like whales going under, with the coffee cups sailing by. It was my shoes they were looking at, so I joined them.

Under the table the world was huge. The sounds were old. Our childhoods were sitting there, with a finger to their lips.

We looked at each others’ faces, small beside our thighs, which were broad and easy on the flat of the chairs, sitting any way, privately akimbo. There were our legs, frank and tender without their torsos, thinking about the possibilities of mix and match. They might for example, walk off in different couples, leaving our bollocks and bits abandoned mid-air.

We laughed. I lifted my flanks to make them look thinner, then dropped them again and twisted my head back up, leaving them to talk in the secret way that legs might have. As I came to the lip I lost Marcus’s and Frank’s knees and crotches, and found their shoulders, shifting blindly along the line of the table top.

Back in the open, the sounds of the restaurant collided like two trains slamming past each other. I was still laughing. Marcus, Frank and Jo surfaced and smiled.

I knew that the trains had crashed and we had all died. It was just that no-one had noticed yet.

‘These old things?’ I said. ‘I’ve had them for years.’

‘Nice,’ said Jo.

‘Well I’ve met him,’ said Frank.

‘Met who?’

‘Your man. Stephen. Met him in the bookies.’

‘He is not my man.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ said Marcus. ‘I don’t care.’

‘Gave me a winner for the Gold Cup so I bought him a drink. And it so happens he knows my name from the credits. “Frank Fingal!” he says, “from the LoveQuiz?” “Is this fame at last?” I ask. “No,” he says, “I’ve just moved in with Grace.”’

‘He’s a flatmate.’

‘Who’s for coffee?’ said Marcus.

‘You shut up,’ says Frank. ‘All right he’s a flatmate. I didn’t mean to annoy you, Grace. I just …’

‘I’m not upset.’

‘I know you’re not. I just wanted to say. And what the fuck do I know about women?’

‘I’m not a “woman”.’

‘Two coffees?’ said Marcus.

‘Grace,’ said Frank. ‘Go for it. I’m serious. He’s the one. OK, say you were casting something—he’s the one that would jump straight bang through the lens and land in your fucking lap. And he’s lucky. He’s lucky.’

‘What is going on around here?’ said Marcus. This is not the Frank we know and love.

‘Frank’s lost the run of himself,’ I said. ‘He’s probably doing it for a bet.’

‘Oh fuck you,’ said Frank. ‘Fuck you, Grace darling.’

‘Who’s this?’ said the LoveWagon calling down the table, right on cue. Which is when I realise that whatever is going on, it is not mine.

‘Just a guy who asked me for an audition,’ said Frank.

‘Well bring him in.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘No. No, he’s wrong. He’s too … he’s too natural.’

‘Natural?’ said Marcus. ‘What’s natural? Yellowstone Park is natural. But if you throw a packet of Daz down Old Faithful it’ll shoot just for you.’

‘Well God knows we need a bit of right,’ she said, ‘after last week. Two anoraks, a psycho and a spoilt priest. Any more shows like that and we’ll be eating the cabin boy.’

‘Shouldn’t we pull straws?’ said Frank.

‘Why don’t we pull contracts instead,’ said the LoveWagon with a smile, ‘and see who’s got the shortest?’

‘Jesus,’ said Marcus under his breath. ‘Man the lifeboats.’

‘Jump don’t fall,’ said Frank.

‘Jump don’t fall,’ said Jo.

‘How can you tell?’ said Marcus. ‘How can you tell if you’re falling?’

* *

My father’s stroke changed nothing. He still said there was no difference between blue and green. He dried the dishes and still put them back in the wrong place. He was the same, inappropriate man, except that now he was waiting for the real thing to come and tap him on the shoulder with ‘COME ON SWEETHEART. TIME-TO-DIE TIME.’

So his second stroke when it came, was a strange relief. Now he lives on the wrong side of the mirror and says table instead of chair. He is not surprised and neither are we. Perhaps he wants to sit on the table after all and eat his dinner off the chair.

His death might have relieved us more. We are a very private family. We would have buried his wig with him and gone our separate ways.

My mother put a bed downstairs and took him out of hospital because she wanted him to die in the right place. We were called back for the wait, all grown up. The ceilings were too low, the toilet was surprisingly near the ground. We slept in our old rooms, Phil shedding his own hair on to his childhood pillow, myself and Brenda polite as strangers in twin beds.

He was to die in the living room, so we turned on the telly to tease out his poor tangled synapses. We took turns at his side and waited for the peculiar silence after his last breath. I sat there thinking, Just keep going, just keep going until I’m out of the room. Da was unconscious. His fingers were swollen. Half his face was already dead. There was an Australian soap playing. I heard his last breath and I heard the silence. Then another last breath, another silence. He went on for days. We drank a lot of sherry.

I looked at his face, that I still could not remember from one moment to the next. The wig was obscenely young and jaunty on the top of his withered head. It was fake like a hero. I sat there and looked at it, as it looked back at me, and we both hung on.

The house was full of women, delighted, in for the kill. They said decades of the rosary in the front room so we couldn’t throw them out. My father gave off a sweet smelling hiss of disapproval and tried to turn his face to the wall.

He managed to tell us that he was still alive:

He started to say the word Canal.

He tore up an atlas and ate all the maps of America.

We took the hint and started to fight like family again. My mother stood by the sink and called Brenda a slut. Brenda shouted back. She said why did she always have to start an argument when she was on the toilet. She said that if she was a slut then she wasn’t the only one—meaning me I suppose, though now I have the excuse of a good job. Brenda works with children. My mother thinks this is the wrong place to find a good man.

Brenda’s promiscuity is the great family joke. No-one has the heart to say that she sleeps with women, least of all Brenda. She may sleep with a lot of women but I doubt it. My mother probably hopes that she has the sense to avoid housewives on benefit and go for professional women instead. Brenda’s sex life, however, is entirely political. I think that she likes men well enough, she’s just terrified their hair will come away in her hand.

No-one cares who Phil sleeps with. When my father dies Phil will marry a small expensive woman who knows quite a few fun people. She will be very nice and we will despise her. Phil is normal, which, as every sister knows, means buck mad. We remember him at thirteen—his horror of menstruation, his obsession with soaps shaped like animals, his religious inclinations, the delicate way he would carry an egg in his mouth after confession, as a private penance.

My mother loves Phil like a son and loves all his weaknesses, but she loves Brenda like she loves herself—the middle one, the one who is left out. They fight about everything and cry in separate rooms. They mooch around the kitchen finding things to do. As for me, I couldn’t be bothered picking up a cloth to dry a cup.

I am my fathers daughter. Nevertheless, when he tied his wedding ring to the cord of the lamp and plugged it in, it was time to leave home one more time.

* *

I only hate the LoveWagon before eleven o’clock in the morning. After noon I am quite indifferent. Late at night I find myself getting sentimental about her washed little blue eyes with the hurt sitting behind them like a stupid child.

She is doing her imitation of a woman at a party, telling stories about the days when she was out on the road. Duck and cover, wait to be seduced. ‘Please like me,’ she says, and it makes you feel a little soiled, a little eager. ‘OK,’ you say.

She tells us about the movie star with the hair transplant, the priest with his pockets sewn up, the minister for health who took the sound man aside and asked him what a blow job was.

‘She is a woman,’ says Marcus, ‘she flirts like a woman.’ Because as far as he knows, the only place a woman can betray you is in your bed.

Marcus is convinced that she is having an affair. He says that she has to be, that the show would have been pulled long ago if it weren’t for the smell off her of someone big. Like who? I say. Like when? She couldn’t be that stupid. ‘But she’s not clever,’ he says.

She has him well fooled. Marcus thinks that someday his talent will shine through, that he will tell them all what power is and what is television. I say he’d do a lot better to be a little thicker, which, being from the country, you’d think he’d understand. It will be a long time before Marcus gets there. He doesn’t have the nose for it—or at least, he has a nose all right but his brain gets in the way.

‘There is only one way to beat her,’ I say. ‘You can confuse her with her own stink.’

‘How do you do that?’ he says.

‘How should I know?’ I say. And he looks at me like I have two heads.

The LoveWagon is telling the story of a woman in Belfast who picked up bits of her husband out of her own front garden. It was a brilliant interview, even the sofa was right. There was a silence after the woman finished, the tears still running down her face and the LoveWagon made the slight move that is the sign to quit, a kind of undertaker’s nod to the gravediggers. When the cameraman, who shall remain nameless, spoke directly to the woman and said ‘I am sorry. I have a technical problem with that. Would you mind saying it again’ and horror stalked the semi-d.

They did the whole lot again and it was dreadful, unusable. And when she viewed the tape later, she saw that the cameraman had just flicked the off button! Which was the kind of thing you could get fired for, but not as bad as the way he took the woman’s hand on the doorstep and looked bang into her eyes.

‘I think it was sexual,’ she says, ‘not to mention sackable. But what can you do?’

‘Maybe it was love,’ says Jo.

‘Love?’ says Marcus.

‘LOVE!’ says Jo and bangs the table with her fork. We all look at her, trying to imagine the kind of love she is talking about. Love that makes you want to turn the camera off.

* *

I have been in love. After we all settled down, between the two strokes.

I left home. At the time I thought that it was nothing to do with my father. I thought it was a political thing, because a girl has to grow up any way she can. So I went to England, a country where women didn’t bury their babies in silage pits, a country where people knew the virtues of stripped pine. Exile was mainly a question of contraception and nice wallpaper.

I woke up six months later with the feeling of a hand choking me in the dark. There was no-one in the room. I was in Stoke Newington and very little of it made any sense. If I hadn’t fallen in love with an Englishman I might have gone home.

Love. Amid all that alien corn. It seemed like I had been practising for so long and still I wasn’t ready; for the way the chair sat so well by the window, for paint that was too bright, for skin. He was blond. He was old enough to know better. He was restrained. There is nothing like taking the clothes off a restrained man.

It wasn’t easy, this difference between one and two. I ended up thinking about death all the time because it was simpler, his death, my death, his funeral, my funeral, the coldness of his face and my swooning to the organ in a blindness of grief.

His face was cold anyway, his eyes nice and cold and blue and his hands were both hot and soft. He used to run a bath after we had made love and lie in it and talk to me, while I sat on the toilet seat and watched the wonder of his mickey floating free. His face would be blood red in the steam, his mouth thin and pale, the roots of his hair almost white where it was stitched into the blush of his scalp and his eyes impossibly blue.

I have always found liars both subtle and exciting, for which, of course, my father is to blame. At the same time, I thought his wig was a talisman against other, less interesting lies. I thought I was immune. And yet, here I was, in Stoke Newington, watching a man wash my smell away.

I came home to the country where you could tell if a man was married, and if you couldn’t, then you could always find out. Not that I could care less, because I was in love, whatever that meant, with a man who rang one Saturday morning and asked me to have his child. Certainly, I said. In Ireland we have babies just like that. We have them all the time. So I got on a plane and flew across the Irish Sea to a hotel bedroom where I took off my clothes and lay down on a candlewick bedspread and crooked my knees, and said ‘I love you’ and he said ‘I love you’ and swung his slow bollocks down to me, full of the miracle of creation.

Oh I wanted him all right; his troubled heart, his ribs like knives, his eyelids leaking a flash of blue. I wanted him so much I thought it would never happen, never end, this love you could hear, like a song in the room. So I was quite surprised to find that my body had deserted me in its finest hour, that it had slammed the door and pissed off home. What had been a space was now a rope, twisted through my guts and moored to my heart, which would not let it go. I was spitting out even the thought of him—so hard I was afraid I might turn inside out, there on the candlewick bedspread, in a little corner of a foreign hotel that was forever Ireland.

So after this dry birth, my cells taught me how to forget him, one day at a time, and my eyes would not cry for me and my womb remained tactful and serene. ‘Bitch,’ I said, and gave up politics with the memory of his voice and of his absolute and irreducible rightness, that didn’t really need me.

* *

Frank has gone quiet. No jokes Frank? No jokes.

So we talk about the movies we are going to make. Marcus is going to make a comedy about Northern Ireland, because that is the only real way to approach it or a fake snuff movie with one real bit left in, just to get back at the snobs. I’m going to make a Country and Irish thriller that is about love. Love? ‘A gay country and western road movie. Set in Kinnegad.’

‘Not a lot of gay in Kinnegad.’

‘Not a lot of road in Kinnegad.’

‘You’d be surprised. So it starts with a body in the boot of a car.’

‘Love?’ says Frank.

‘If you insist. It starts with a body in the boot of the car. Credits. No, flashback. This country and western singer he picks up a young fella in a bar, a gurrier, ordinary looking, dangerous. Loads of sex. Insane sex. And he sets him up in his flat in Dublin, with the white piano and the white ten-gallon hat, and the white bedroom with the shag carpet, and one day he comes home, comes home hot and worried and kind of poignant and horny, and there’s a body on the bed. Not just any body, a dead body. So he sits on the bed, doesn’t move. And then he reaches over, undoes the dead guy’s shoelace, while the young fella sits in the next room and picks out a tune on the white piano.’

‘Stand by your man.’

‘Cut to the road. White Beamer. No, a red Thunderbird. No, it has to be white, and they’re driving along with a song on the radio.’

‘Stand by your man.’

‘So cut to the back of the car, and there’s something dripping out of the boot. There’s blood dripping out of the boot, because the body is in the boot, and it is bleeding in the boot.’

‘And?’

‘And they have this body in the boot.’

‘And?’

‘Well they don’t know what to do. They’re just driving along, music on the radio. The boot is leaking.’

‘Come on,’ says Marcus.

‘Well you tell me,’ I say. And I mean it.

‘OK,’ says Marcus. ‘They stop for lunch.’

‘They stop for lunch?’

‘It’s a movie. They stop for lunch.’

‘No!’

‘Yes,’ says Marcus. ‘They stop for lunch. In one of these hotels on the main street that’s just a house smelling of cabbage and a broken down woman serving dinner who looks like his mother.’

‘And outside’, I say, ‘the blood is still dripping out of the boot. Dripping on to a styrofoam cup in the gutter.’

We think about this for a while.

‘A young girl,’ says Frank, ‘the waitress, with her hair not washed, kind of … underused and country-sexy …’

‘Don’t tell me. A young girl.’

‘No really. She arrives with the chips and she recognises the singer. She looks at him, and he looks at her and she knows.’

We stop. Too many things are wrong. So Marcus says ‘He runs out through the door.’

‘Yes,’ says Frank, ‘and when he looks back through the window, the psycho is still in there, peeling notes off his wad, like a cowboy, having a joke with the girl. Only it’s the dead man’s money.’

‘I don’t know about this,’ I say.

‘Whatever,’ says Frank. ‘The car roars off low angle and we see the styrofoam cup in the gutter. Cut to the girl waving tragic pathetic and then she looks down and sees the cup.’

‘And?’

‘It’s not my movie.’

‘Oh come on Frank,’ I say. ‘There’s a body in the boot of this car.’

‘The girl sees the cup.’

‘So they’re driving along the road,’ says Marcus. ‘And something stops them. They get stuck in a herd of cows. All right?’

‘No, not all right,’ says Frank.

‘Seriously, the cows smell the blood and panic. And they’re climbing on to the bonnet and there’s a dog barking at the boot. And there’s a farmer.’

‘I don’t know,’ says Frank.

‘The psycho loses it,’ says Marcus, ‘and reverses over the dog? Yes?’

‘No!’ says Frank. ‘The girl sees the cup.’

Which is when we realise. Frank has fallen in love. How can he put an end on things?

‘I interviewed a man once’, says Marcus, ‘who nearly drowned under a herd of cows. They stampeded off the back end of a ferry’

But Frank is in love and will have none of it. Marcus looks at me over the top of the table. This is serious. Who is it? He always got away with it before.

Because Frank likes women. He likes their hair and their hands and the fact that they are more interesting than men, when they talk. He likes the way they tell him to fuck off. He likes their breasts when they are young and their jewellery when they age. He is happy to find them complicated, or even false-hearted. So women like Frank. They like him in bed because he delays penetration in the recommended way, though for some this is too long and too late. Then of course, there is always his wife.

But Frank was careful. He always said that women’s bodies are treacherous, and full of holes. When you can’t put it off any longer they take you in and hold you, so when you flup your dick back out on the sheet, you have left yourself and all of you inside. In there. I told him that a woman’s body provokes a lot more anxiety if you happen to have one yourself. He didn’t believe me. Now everything is upside-down, all his careful sanity.

* *

My father claimed to know the secret of happiness. He said that we’re better off without it. How would he know? There is only a scrap of him left in the room, the rest of him is dead or elsewhere.

The piece of my father that sits downstairs is cunning as hell. His working eye is hooded and his dead eye is fierce. He knows how to survive, knows all about revenge. He says ‘The teacher who twisted my ear is dead and my ear is dead.’ He says ‘I bought this house for twenty-five years. The banker is dead and the money withered and the house is half dead and so am I. But only half.’

My mother too has her little ferocities. She makes him cups of tea, she leaves the television on full blast. Sometimes she catches him trying to poke at the buttons with his stick. She takes the stick away from him and says, ‘If you crack that tube, the whole thing will explode.’

It would be wrong to say that my mother does not love my father. It is with love and patience that she tends to his wig. She might have thrown it out long ago, but instead she pinched up her face, put on her rubber gloves, plucked it free and flung it in the washing machine. I like to think of it spinning around with her knickers and her bras like a rat on holiday, but my mother is much too nice for that. The wig was washed alone. She put disinfectant in the prewash to kill it stone dead. The main wash was both concentrated and biological and she put hair conditioner instead of fabric softener in the rinse, because she is thoughtful and good.

The wig went out on the line where it soaked up the smell of the sun and tortured the cat. By the end of the day it was a new thing. It had, it was true, shrunk slightly, but then, fortunately, so had my father’s head.

Now she dresses the wig in the morning with her back to my father’s skull. She uses a bristle brush and vigorous strokes, then she turns and crowns him, with one light gesture. She gives the wig a tug at the back and a double, symmetrical tug at the sides. It is done in silence. They both look elsewhere; though sometimes my father cannot shift his dead eye away from her. She never says the forbidden words (bald, cradle cap, wig). At their age it must be better than sex.

All the same, I fight with my mother. Upstairs, like an open window, she has hung the three secret photographs of my father in his own hair: the picture of their wedding day; the picture of my mother on their honeymoon, sitting on a rug with me in her belly; and the picture of my father on the same rug, standing on his head. It is a pornographic display.

My father is not able to climb the stairs, so he will never see the three bald photographs hanging on the wall. My mother thinks she hung them out of sight because she loves him. She says she wants to remember things as they really were. As if she didn’t know, that seeing things as they really were is the greatest possible revenge.

My mother sits on a rug. My father stands on his head. His genitals are quietly upside-down, having a good time with gravity Nothing sums up love better for me, its weight and weightlessness, its tender and inverted freefall, than the picture of my Da giving his bollocks a rest, on a Foxford rug, in the sunshine, in the first hours of my life.

* *

Marcus is dug into a conversation with Jo about how wonderful she is. Keep digging, says her face. It will all be one in the morning.

Frank has taken off his wedding ring and put it in his mouth. He flips it out and holds it like a monocle between his bottom lip and the base of his nose. Then he flips it back in again, holds it between his lips and teeth and sticks his tongue out through it. Is he drunk? I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to see the wet and remarkable red of his tongue. I don’t want to see how it fills the gold of the ring. I am afraid that he will swallow the ring, that it will lodge in his gullet or in the sphincter at the top of his stomach, or in his pyloric sphincter or in, God knows, any other sphincter I could name.

Never mind Frank, I think I’m drunk myself. I imagine his alimentary tract lined and jointed with gold rings, like the neck of a Masai woman, only on the inside.

I say ‘Take that out of your mouth before you choke on it’, and Frank laughs like this is a really good joke. Love does not suit men.

I say, ‘So will it pass?’

‘Not this time,’ says Frank.

‘Shit Frank. You fucking eejit. Just hang on. Just hang on and keep your mouth shut and you’ll be fine.’ Frank laughs again.

‘She knows,’ he says. ‘I told her last week.’

‘Well take it back. Don’t do it Frank. Don’t even think about doing it. Don’t break my heart.’ I sound sincere. I must be drunk. I am drunk.

So I cannot claim to remember all the revelations that followed after Frank laughed too much and hedged a bit and drank some more and finally blurted that he has fallen stupidly, horribly, in love with his own wife. And she doesn’t want to know. Why should she, fifteen years on?

I do remember the appalling detail of her childbirth scar, like an impossibly beautiful child whose harelip makes you love it, because it has a flaw.

‘Of course you love your wife, you pillock,’ I said, feeling abused.

‘You love your wife like a wife,’ he said. ‘You don’t love her like a fucking car crash.’

Frank was worried he might have a cardiac arrest. He got a hard-on half a mile from the house, and if he didn’t plan it right he would still have it leaving for work the next morning. If he kissed her too fast when she said ‘Is that you?’ if he pulled her gently by the hips, with the flat of his hands wrapped around the bone and his fingers pressed into the dent on the north side of her iliac crests. If he did this at the wrong time, when she was at the cooker with a pot in her hand for example or talking on the phone, or wiping a child’s nose, or any of the hundred moments where she forgot herself, and he wanted to love her into further loss, when he wanted to worry the nub of her cervix like a boy playing with the knot at the base of a balloon. If he mistook or mistimed and she pushed him away, like a wife might, instead of like the woman he loved so hard it hurt.

‘Well that must be nice,’ I said. ‘After all these years.’ Fuck you Frank.

‘I can’t touch her,’ he said. ‘She thinks I’ve picked up some nineteen-year-old and the guilt is making me horny. She went through my dirty shirts with a nose like a Hoover and then smashed up the kitchen because there was nothing there to smell. She says this is the last time. She says she’s looking for someplace else to go’, which is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time, so I laugh until I feel good.

Frank smiles. He is in love, and ordinary things are unbearable, changed and sweet. Even I am beautiful, here on the other side of the table—though who can say if it is really me. Frank’s eyes make me sad for Stephen and then the penny drops.

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘I don’t know. Forever. A couple of weeks.’

‘After you went to the bookies?’

‘I’m always going to the bookies.’

‘After the Gold Cup?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘Oh just men,’ I lied. ‘How everything changes when they feel they’re winning.’

On the other side, Marcus is telling Jo how much he would like to be in love with her. Jo’s face is smiling. She knows it’s just his way of complimenting people and insulting them at the same time.

‘You’re real,’ he is saying. ‘You’re the real thing. You’re everything I admire.’

‘Well fall for me so,’ says Jo. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘I admire you too much,’ says Marcus.

Down the table even the LoveWagon is getting misty-eyed, she is playing with the knife in her hand like each man kills the thing he loves.

‘The thing about you is, you’re not ambitious,’ says Marcus to Jo. ‘Even though you’re better than the rest of us all put together. You put up with a load of wankers. You hold the gig together, and you never complain.’

‘That’s my job,’ says Jo.

The LoveWagon is touching the lip of her glass with the knife. If I don’t start a fight, she’ll start a speech.

‘Why are we talking about work?’ says Jo.

‘I was talking about you,’ says Marcus.

‘Oh?’

‘I was saying how great you are, but you don’t want to hear.’

‘Right.’

‘You’re too calm, Jo. It’s more than you’re paid for.’

‘Looks like I’m into overtime so,’ she says and looks at her watch.

‘Don’t worry Jo,’ I say loudly. ‘Marcus never falls for real, even when he wants to. Marcus falls for expensive-looking women that make him think he’s in the movies.’

‘You know fuck all,’ said Marcus.

‘Then he tells them they’re not real enough. He has a poor man’s heart.’

‘At least I have one.’

‘Yeah yeah.’

‘Don’t you two start,’ says Jo. ‘Or I will lose it.’

I look at him and he looks at me and both of us wish that we could stop using the wrong organs, heart and mouth, both of them liars and nothing more appropriate down Mexico way. Poor Marcus, says the drink, poor Grace. No love lost, no love to lose—two of a kind. Which is why I say, ‘You think. You think … well fuck you.’

* *

My father worked for the electricity supply board. He put on his hat and walked out the door and switched the nation on. He put up pylons single handed, knotted the cables, flung them over the country like a net. He set the turbines spinning, saved old ladies from the dark. Everyone’s father is a hero. Everyone’s father is loved. They have it easy, in a way.

But my father did not have it easy. This is a man who had to teach his children how to swim, without getting his head wet. This was a man who could not suffer a breeze, but put us on our bikes and let the saddles go, each at the right time. This was a man who could not bear history, but bought a television set so we could look at the moon.

My father treated facts like sweets in his pocket that he could take out, surprised that there was one left. He took a personal interest in low wattage bulbs. Traffic lights made him sentimental. His children broke his heart just to look at them.

There are many other fathers I could have had. I could have had a bus-kicker for a father, who walked along the street, said ‘Gyoarraughhdah’ to the double-deckers, who got on at the corner and fought his way off before the next lights. I could have had a soldier for a father, who gave me fifty pence to shine his buttons and told me that men are animals. I could have had Marcus’s father, coming up the stairs in his long-johns, with the soft rain streaming down and the mastitis on the heifer in the haggart. I could have had the LoveWagon’s father, a cut-glass drunk, nearly a Protestant, who came home from the hospital on a Thursday evening, rattled his paper and said ‘I should get a job in England. You can say what you like about English women, but they know how to wash.’

Instead I had a suburban father, an ordinary man, who bought his new house for his new children and built a better life. Why should I blame him, that he kept a little over for himself?

* *

Jo bangs on the table with her fork again. She hits her own chin by accident and doesn’t seem to notice. Apart from that she looks entirely sober.

Marcus says, ‘You’re the one who should be calling the shots Jo.’

‘I don’t want to call the shots.’

‘You should want to call the shots. You’re better than her. You’re better than …’ The LoveWagon has laid her knife on the table. She looks ready. When Jo pushes her plate away like a bad memory, she takes it as a signal to stand.

‘Why should I want?’ says Jo.

‘Don’t do it!’ shouts Frank and the LoveWagon smiles.

‘Because you’re good, that’s why You’re real.’

‘What’s real?’ says Jo. ‘I couldn’t be bothered.’

‘Look at you. You’re bothered.’

‘Don’t do it!’ shouts Frank and the LoveWagon raises her glass.

‘You’re clever. You’re in touch. You are the country at large.’

‘You don’t know the fuck who I am,’ says Jo, swatting him away. ‘The nearest I ever came to being the country at large was getting raped by a rich bastard. Him and the tax man. A barrister. Now there’s a thing. He’d never heard of consent. Forget it. I like my job.’

Jo is limping through the silence that has fallen for the LoveWagon’s speech. When she looks up twelve different monologues break out at once.

‘I like my job,’ she says as Marcus says ‘You like your job’ as I say ‘Anyone want the rest of this pecan pie?’ as Frank says ‘The golden table’ as the LoveWagon says ‘One hundred and fifty. Hey! What more can I say?’ and sits back down. And from the other end of the table comes Gary’s voice singing, ‘My young love said to me “My mother won’t mind. And my father won’t slight you, for your lack of kind”’ and we all relax. Now Jo can be our own again because when it comes to singing she has the voice of an angel.

The songs were as follows

Frank (badly): I am stretched on your grave.

Marcus (bravura): Raglan Road.

Everyone: Carrickfergus.

The LoveWagon: not asked.

Damien (on spoons): New York, New York.

Me (tortured recitative): The Old Triangle.

Jo (in a voice of sweet despair): When Other Lips (by special request): Drink to me only with thine eyes.

By which time everyone was pretty well on and we sat in the rising tide of friendship like milk was slowly filling the room while we sat up to our oxters in it, not knowing if the gathering clots were inside us or outside but only knowing that they were to hand. Feeling them and teasing them out, while our eyes sentimentally left one object for another, as if they all made too much sense.

The milk was up to the lip—its meniscus dragging out of the wooden edge, pulling at the island the table has made in this embarrassing, waist-high sea. Frank talked about the Golden Circle of Someplace where the Marquis and the Marquise, the Monseigneur and his niece, the General and his suave subaltern, made adroit puns and political manoeuvres and bet their estates on keeping a straight face while men and women, under the table, unnamed and all hungry, earned a shilling by eating their way, delicately, respectfully, wittily, through the assembled guests—ate moreover with their unwashed fingers and their sharp little syphilitic teeth.

This is what Frank had to tell us as the milk rose, swamped the table top and formed a cool clear lake of perfect flatness, that sucked around the saucers and lifted them all at once and all together until someone moved and sent a ripple through the milk and the saucers floated away from us one by one or circled on the spot according to unknown currents, while small milk mermen with mouths like guppies and fins like wings, grazed their way politely through the wet sweet sea lettuce of our pubic hair.

* *

‘You’re giving me hallucinations,’ I said to Stephen.

‘Don’t look at me,’ he said. So I turned my face to the wall and I slept like a baby.