Loving Josh wasn’t easy. It was wonderful and full of surprises, frustrating and hard work. He wore a hearing aid behind each ear, which enabled him to hear the odd word. He filled in the rest by reading lips. If we were out somewhere that had background noise – a pub or a busy street – the hearing aids didn’t function properly and then all Josh had to rely on was lip-reading, which wasn’t always possible. Things became particularly difficult when we were out socially with friends. He hated not being able to hear the banter, the one-liners, people talking over each other. Even though he was usually philosophical about his limitations, sometimes he became so frustrated he would walk off. I’d follow, steering him to a quiet corner where he could vent.
‘I feel like the village idiot, only understanding half of what’s being said,’ he’d cry.
‘I’ll remind them to slow down and to look at you as they speak …’
‘Don’t! Don’t say anything.’
‘What do you want then?’
‘I want to be able to fucking well hear properly!’
Obviously, there was nothing he or I could do to make this happen. All I could offer was silence: an acknowledgment of how unfair it was.
‘Do you want to go home?’ I’d ask out of courtesy. I knew that he didn’t. In his heart of hearts Josh was a social being; he liked to be part of a crowd, despite occasionally feeling peripheral and left out.
‘No, of course I don’t. Oh, for fuck’s sake, let’s go back.’
Hand in hand, we would return to the group, everyone guessing why he’d stormed off and, for a short time, making a greater effort to include him.
When we were in Belfast, we socialised with my friends, students from my English or sociology classes, or with Mandy, who was training to be a hairdresser in a salon on Ormeau Avenue, and her boyfriend, Brendan, a mechanic. Josh liked Mandy and Brendan more than he did my university friends. He found it amusing that Mandy, with her somewhat haphazard appearance, wanted to be a hairdresser, and he liked that Brendan was quiet and introspective and sometimes drew diagrams of car engines for his benefit. It made me happy, Josh getting on so well with Mandy and Brendan.
While the boys were absorbed with talk of steering or suspension or torque, Mandy would lean close and shamelessly enquire, in a conspiratorial whisper, about my relationship with Josh.
‘So, youse two are getting on well, then?’
‘Aye, we are.’
‘And he’s good in the sack?’
‘That’s none of your business, Mandy!’
‘Ach, come on, don’t be so secretive. I tell you everything!’
Without my asking, Mandy had shared with me intimate details about her love life with Brendan, so much so that sometimes I could hardly look at him without blushing. Mandy fondly called me her uptight, prim-and-proper friend, while I laughingly referred to her as my slapdash, blabbermouth friend. I was a little uptight – who wouldn’t be after living their first eighteen years under my father’s roof? – but I was a good friend, I was loyal and Mandy had been my friend forever. My mother often stated that there were two kinds of friends: friends for a reason and friends for a season. Mandy fell into the former category. My own more conservative nature fed off her openness and irreverence towards rules of any kind, and she always made me laugh. If that wasn’t enough reason to love her, she was as natural and open with Josh as she was with me. Mandy didn’t know how to be anything but herself.
When we were home in Clonmegan we gravitated towards Josh’s friends rather than mine and as a consequence I often found myself socialising with Liam. The boys frequently played pool in a dark, poky room at the back of one of the pubs in town. Initially, Liam was uncomfortable with my presence among his circle of friends.
‘You must be joking,’ he exclaimed the first time I turned up with Josh.
‘Shut up, O’Reilly,’ Josh responded with a friendly push.
Liam was equally unimpressed when I participated in the pool tournament they were running among themselves. ‘Jesus, you’re shocking, Caitlin. Don’t you know how to hold a cue? Look, watch me. Steady does it …’
My pool skills improved dramatically under Liam’s tutelage, which was driven more by embarrassment on my behalf than by brotherly love or concern. But gradually he got used to me being there, and quite often the only female present, and we became closer, more like friends rather than brother and sister. In that dark pool room I came to know him as a person. He would tell me things he’d never say at home.
‘God, I hate it. Mum fussing over me like I’m still a child, Dad watching every move I make, always ready with a fucking opinion. Jesus, Caitlin, I need to get a job and a place of my own before I lose my temper some day and throw a punch at him!’
With his friends, away from the tension at home, I saw that Liam was good company, talkative, funny in an understated way. I saw that he was kind, considerate, and generous with the little money that he had. He was more sensible than some of the others, often the one to moderate their behaviour if they were getting out of hand, stopping them from launching their bodies across the pool table or using the cues to playfully, and quite painfully, whack each other on the head.
Sometimes, when he’d had too much to drink, Liam would hook his arm around my neck, half choking me. ‘This is my sister,’ he’d announce to his friends. ‘Isn’t she just great?’
I would smile sheepishly, waiting for them to unequivocally agree so that Liam would let go of me.
I realised that not only did I love my brother, I liked him too. And I especially liked that Liam looked out for Josh, that he always did his best to include him in whatever conversation or social event was happening. I felt deeply grateful for this.
Josh’s speech challenged me and I often struggled to understand him. His voice was nasal and his consonants were clearer than his vowels, particularly the consonants you say with your lips, like ‘m’ and ‘b’. Invariably, he would lose the last sound in a word, as it was harder for him to hear that far. Though he practised and practised saying my name, it never sounded right.
I discovered that he wasn’t deaf to music, as I had originally assumed. He could hear patterns, a beat, but not the pitch. I played CDs for him and he followed the lyrics by reading my lips, oblivious that my singing voice was just as off-key as his. He liked rap, Jay-Z and some Backstreet Boys, anything that had a strong rhythm. We had impromptu discos in my room, shimmying against each other before we ended up kissing on the bed.
Sometimes, I watched his soccer games on the weekends, standing on the sidelines, often in soft rain that wasn’t heavy enough for the match to be called off. Josh was beautiful to watch, fluid as he ran after the ball, elegant when he extended his leg to kick it down the line or cross it towards the goal. I yelled encouragements that he couldn’t hear. He was one of the better players on the team, the only problem being that he couldn’t hear the whistle and often continued for a few seconds after play had stopped, smiling sheepishly when Liam or one of the others waved him down. When this happened, it brought a lump to my throat. I could see supporters of the other team, people who didn’t know him, conferring, shooting curious glances at the young man with the dark hair and eyes, wondering what was wrong with him.
‘He’s deaf,’ I wanted to explain. ‘He can’t hear. That’s all. In every other way he’s perfect.’
Josh worked as a plasterer for a small building company. His boss, Phil, picked him up in the morning and dropped him home in the late afternoon, either to his parents’ house in Clonmegan or to my room in Belfast. Rather conveniently, most of their work was in the Belfast area. Once onsite, Phil took all the instructions and did all the talking to the client. He then communicated to Josh what needed to be done. He knew how to sign; his brother was profoundly deaf. Phil often commented to me how good Josh was at his job, how he could make the ugliest wall smooth, how his corners and finish were beautiful to behold. Though this praise for my boyfriend made me proud, it didn’t surprise me. Josh was good with his hands in every way. He instinctively knew how to fix things, taking them apart and fitting them back together again. He was artistic and could sketch quite proficiently. And – something I wouldn’t admit to Phil in a million years – Josh’s hands knew how to caress and sweep the length of my body, how to bring me to a point where I hardly knew what I was saying or thinking, where he began or I ended.
Seeing Phil, a burly man with huge hands and bulbous fingers, signing so adeptly with Josh gave me the impetus to improve my own signing skills. As my relationship with Josh became deeper and more involved, so did our need to communicate on a more complex level. I asked him to teach me sign language and practised my skills by watching the RTE News for the Deaf, which was on after the main six o’clock bulletin. In a relatively short space of time I became quite good at sign language, with the added benefit, thanks to the news, of being very up to date on current affairs.
Occasionally Josh and I had arguments. Not shouting matches, like other couples; our conflict was expressed with angry gestures, furious glares and slammed doors. More often than not, the arguments spiralled from frustration: a failure in comprehension, having to repeat what we were trying to convey again and again, until one of us would throw up our hands and stomp off. Jealousy also reared its head, Josh fearing that I would fall for someone in my class, someone who could hear and drive and speak articulately, me telling him that he was being stupid and immature and that he didn’t know me at all if he thought I would betray him like that.
We had other arguments too, normal ones that had nothing to do with his hearing. Arguments that were silly, unprovoked, with absolutely no substance. It never took us long to make up, though. One of us would seek the other out and apologise.
‘Caitlin, can you let me in? I’m sorry, okay?’
I’d unlatch the door. ‘I’m sorry too.’
‘Fighting with you makes me feel sick inside.’
I’d nod, my own stomach churning. ‘Let’s not fight. Ever again. Especially not about something so stupid.’
Then we would hug, long, tight hugs where I felt like I was part of him and he was part of me, and I would think how very much I loved him, how lucky I was to have met him, and how perfect we were together.
My exams signified both the end of the academic year and the end of the routine I had going with Josh. I gave the exams my all, revising late at night so that my knowledge was fresh the following day. At the end of the two weeks I was completely and utterly spent but happy and secure in the knowledge that I had done well in the exams and in the first year of my degree.
I packed up my belongings at the Elms, amazed that I had enough to fill two big suitcases when I had initially arrived with just the one. In addition to the suitcases, I had several boxes filled with textbooks and writing pads, and garbage bags stuffed with clothes and towels and sheets, some of which belonged to Josh.
My father knocked on the door before coming in. ‘Good Lord.’ He surveyed the baggage. ‘I’m not sure we’ll be able to get it all in.’
It took a few trips up and down to the car, and between the boot and the back seat it all just about fitted. ‘I’ll do one final check to make sure I’ve left nothing behind,’ I said as Dad settled in behind the wheel.
Back in the room, I took one last look around. The space looked small and bare and insignificant, as though Josh and I had never been there, as though we had already been relegated to the past, a memory. Next year the room would take on some other first-year student’s personality. The bed, stripped down to its chequered mattress, would be slept in by someone else – one person, I assumed, not two. Josh and I would sleep in another bed in another room and make another year of memories together. Though I felt a little sad to be leaving this room and this year behind, I already couldn’t wait for what was ahead.
In no time at all we were driving out of Belfast towards Clonmegan. As the concrete and uncompromising lines of the city gave way to the gentle roll of countryside, I dwelled on the year gone past. I felt grown up and more worldly than this time last year. I had lived away from home, fended for myself, and I now knew what it was like to love someone and to be loved in return. The fact that Belfast wasn’t an easy city to live in, that it was unpredictable and sometimes rough, made me feel strong and more resilient.
And the fact that loving Josh could be hard too, that we had greater challenges and frustrations and limitations than other couples did, made me love him all the more intensely and completely.