It was February when Frank announced that he was coming up to the city if Dickie was around for a pint.
Oh, you have to bring me! Willie said, clapping his hands together. Dickie hadn’t the slightest intention of bringing him, and told him so bluntly. But Willie kept at him. Frank, the buccaneer, the football hero, the bane of Dickie’s childhood, the explanation of everything? He had to meet him, simply had to. Tell him I’m your pal, he said.
What else would I tell him? Dickie answered neutrally, taking secret pleasure in the momentary anguish that flickered across Willie’s face.
They had got into the habit, the bad habit, of sleeping in one another’s beds, particularly if they’d been out dancing, which they had been, last night; but they didn’t do anything, it didn’t mean anything, Dickie reasoned, other than that he didn’t like to sleep on his own. He still hadn’t told Willie the full story of what happened last autumn, but he made it known that he held him partly to blame; it was Willie who’d brought him to the Butterfly, after all, with the clear intention of seducing him. Willie denied this, but Dickie knew he felt guilty, and he used it to keep him in check.
He needed to have some way to restrain him. Willie was so clever! It wasn’t just that you couldn’t trust what he said; he was so persuasive that when he was around you couldn’t trust yourself. Last week in the Hist, speaking against the motion That Progress has failed us – so many of the debates lately had had a fin de siècle theme – he had given a speech that revolved around the story of a girl from a remote Amazon tribe in the 1960s, who, on falling ill, had been brought downriver by her father in a kayak to the city. With no map, no common language, he’d somehow managed to make his way to the hospital, from where she was airlifted to New York and, after many false starts, successfully treated.
Now in itself, Willie had said, that’s progress. Modern medicine and air travel save a life that wouldn’t otherwise have been saved. But progress isn’t just about stopping bad things from happening. It’s about creating the conditions for new things to happen – things that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, would never even have been imagined. The girl who didn’t die went on to be a scientist, and pioneered the photovoltaic material used to make solar panels – basing it on a kind of quartzite from which her tribe traditionally made its ceremonial objects. Because she didn’t die, the world now gets 10 per cent of its energy from the sun, pollution-free.
Who, listening to that story – he said – could maintain that progress had failed? Isn’t it truer to say that progress needs failure? That progress is what humans do with failure? Failure, bad news, dark times – these are its fuel. In the same way that little girl turned her illness into light for a whole planet, progress takes failure and turns it into the future.
It was a brilliant speech, even by Willie’s standards. People had tears in their eyes. Afterwards, Dickie was staggered – the word was not too strong – to learn that due to a miscommunication, up until an hour before the debate Willie had been under the impression he was on the opposing side.
But all of those facts and statistics he’d reeled off?
I made them up, Willie said.
The tribe? The girl, who became a scientist?
I made her up too, Willie said.
Dickie still struggled. It just didn’t compute. But you spoke so passionately, he said. It felt like you really believed.
Willie, lying beside him, grinned satanically up at the ceiling. That’s how you win, he said.
They met Frank in the Stag’s Head. The pub at that time was an outpost of the Hist: surrounded by Trinity types, Frank, with his lacquered hair, shiny shirt, good shoes, stuck out like a sore thumb.
There was a girl with him. Dickie remembered her vaguely from the previous summer; she used to turn up at Goldenhill from time to time for excruciating family dinners. Willie was very taken with her. She’s a goddess! he said afterwards. And she was, objectively speaking, very beautiful: blonde, with intensely green eyes, and high cheekbones which had been heavily accented with make-up. Still, to Dickie the beauty seemed impersonal, somehow; it didn’t have anything of herself in it, and she wore it a little over-anxiously, like a piece of very expensive jewellery that had been rented only for the evening.
She sat at his brother’s side, with her thigh-boots and her sequinned top and her own countrified notion of cool; she was stiff with them at first, as if she thought they were making fun of her, which they weren’t, yet, though obviously they were planning to later; and Frank was stiff too, clearly anxious that she be at ease. After a couple of drinks, though, she came to life. She had an accent that could strip paint, but she was clever, and quick – quicker and cleverer than Frank, who tried to tease her, but was obviously, and hopelessly, in her thrall. As she spoke, her personality flooded her face, and she became all the more radiant.
Dickie trod gently with them. He addressed them, flatteringly, as a pair, as if Imelda was as familiar to him, or unfamiliar, as Frank. What brought them to the city? he wanted to know. Frank told him they were going to a concert the following night, an act Dickie had never heard of. You should have said, he told them, you could have stayed with me. But no, Frank had booked a room in a ‘top’ hotel in Temple Bar. Clearly he wanted to impress her, and Dickie realized that he too was intended as part of some display of sophistication. He duly gave them some brunch suggestions, which Frank duly wrote down, as if they were always swapping restaurant tips. Although this one wouldn’t know brunch if it bit her on the arse, Frank said, with rather a forced laugh. We had an argument on the way up because she didn’t know what an aubergine was.
Not this again, the girl said.
And when I told her, Frank persisted, she didn’t believe me. She told me there was no such thing as an aubergine. Tell her, Dickie. Tell her aubergines are real.
They’re real, Dickie said.
Well, aren’t you the smart pair, the girl said, folding her arms.
She much preferred Willie to Dickie. People generally did. It was one of the surprising things about him: he seemed so cerebral and snooty – he was so cerebral and snooty, and smug, and full of himself – and yet he could talk to anybody. Not in a banal or fake or patronizing way: within minutes, he’d find some point of connection and next thing he’d have their life story. On two separate occasions, Dickie had had to sit in a stationary cab because both the driver and Willie were crying after Willie winkled some tale of heartbreak out of him. This girl had an interest in fashion, as – it turned out – did Willie; before long, they were gabbing away, exchanging names which meant nothing whatever to Dickie.
Frank watched the girl, positively aglow. He looked at her, it struck Dickie, with the same kind of reverential joy that the townsfolk had watching him, as he doled out miracles on the pitch.
Now he caught himself, and blushed, and tried to pretend he hadn’t been staring.
He’s a gas fella that Willie, isn’t he? A real character.
He’s just a friend from debating, Dickie said. He nodded at the girl. You two have been together for a while. This was unlike Frank; he tended to be more the wild-oats type.
Ah, Dickie, Frank said, seeming relieved to be free to gaze at her again. I’ve never met anyone like her. Look at her! She’s like a supermodel! But the place she’s from, it’s barely a hole in the ground. Nothing, not even a shop, only a Texaco that the pikeys keep robbing. Her father’s some kind of a gangster, you should see him. He’s obsessed with Dad! Keeps asking where he gets his blazers!
He shook his head again, while seeming on the point of bursting into laughter, then sighed. My fucking balls are blue with this one, Dickie. She’s half a savage but she says she’s saving herself for her wedding day. I’m after forking out two hundred quid for this hotel, and if I don’t get the ride off her tonight, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll have to marry her or something. He turned his merry face to Dickie. Can you imagine what the old pair would say to that?
Is that the way you’re thinking? he asked. Marrying her?
Ah, no, Frank said, and then, Well, maybe. I mean, why not? He sat up, looked at Dickie earnestly. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, he said. I’m not like you. You’re here in the city with your new friends, going to the fancy college, knowing all the cool places. You’ve got a whole life for yourself here. But me, I’m a homebird. I used to think I wanted to travel the world, when I was younger. (Dickie allowed himself a little smile at this.) But actually I reckon I’d be happy kicking around the old town the rest of my days. If I was with the right woman.
They both looked at the girl. She had flung back her head, her eyes tight shut, in peals of laughter; Willie, with tears in his eyes, was literally slapping his thigh.
The tumblers in Dickie’s brain turned slowly, and the mystery of their conversation that afternoon in the shed, Frank’s sudden interest in his future, began to click into place. Is that why you were asking about the garage that time?
Frank nodded. She got Mam talking one night and she took down a boxload of photographs of herself and Dad going on cruises. Like when VW would send them off to the Caribbean and Mauritius and all this.
I remember, Dickie said. He knew the photographs: Dad with his hair slicked back, a cocktail glass in his hand and a sunset behind him in every picture; their mother in a swimsuit, smoking, working on her tan. Children were not invited on the cruises; instead he and Frank used stay with an aunt, who had a dog they weren’t allowed pet and who always boiled his breakfast egg the wrong way.
Well, Imelda thought those were the height of glamour, Frank said. The height. That’s what got me thinking about taking over. But fuck it, I don’t need to be the boss. I’d stay on as a salesman either. I’d do anything, frankly. I don’t care.
Dickie mulled on this for a moment. Then he said, I’ve been thinking about that talk. I realized afterwards you might have had a point.
Was it true? Had it slowly been dawning on him that his life might lie elsewhere? Or did he only want to match the person in Frank’s description of him at that moment: the quester, the cosmopolitan, the adventurer seeking out knowledge? He didn’t know: but he found himself saying the words. I haven’t decided what I want to do when I’m finished. But you’re right, there’s a big world out there.
Listen, don’t turn your plans upside down for my sake, Frank said. God knows I’d probably make a mess of it anyway. Plus, what would Dad say?
He’d come around, Dickie said. I could talk to him. His voice in his ears sounded warm and generous, and in Frank’s eyes he saw himself as he so rarely had – as a big brother, someone solid, quiet, who knew the score: the kind of man of whom Frank might say to his friends, He keeps his cards to his chest, but get him talking, boys, and I’ll tell you what, he has the whole fucking thing sussed out.
She is a riot, Willie said that night, as they lay in bed. She told me her cousin had been arrested for stabbing a dog with a fork. She said very proudly that he’d been on the news. She also said a gypsy put a curse on her brother’s ‘digging hand’ and that’s why he was on disability.
He’s talking about marrying her, Dickie said.
I’d marry her in a heartbeat, Willie said.
Oh yes? And what would you do on your wedding night?
I would rise to the occasion, Willie said grandly. He turned onto his back, looked up at the ceiling.
I can’t see why you made such a fuss about him, though. I was expecting a he-man, a Cúchulainn type. I mean, he’s perfectly nice. But he’s pretty ordinary.
And you’re so much more interesting, Dickie said. Necking pills with the same fifty queers three times a week. Deciding which bow tie to wear to your debate.
But he was teasing. There in Willie’s room, with the electric heater glowing in the corner, the odious statue of Ganesh on the mantel that Dickie had made Willie buy because he thought it looked like the Junior Dean, and books piled everywhere, he felt powerful, that is, he felt light, and in charge, and free, and expansive: he felt the future – which for so long he’d thought of as immutable – he felt the future amorphous, ethereal, waiting for him to decide its shape. He turned, leaned over, kissed Willie on the lips. Willie looked back at him in surprise; it was a little like the look Frank had given him earlier, hope mixed with gratitude; and now he lifted his head from the pillow, and his face, his ugly, protuberant face, which was also beautiful, which Dickie thought he might love, came closer till it was all he could see. And he closed his eyes and they kissed.
Was that the best time? Had he ever been happier than in the months after Frank’s first visit? Three months, a season of the self, split between spring and summer. A season with its own weather, alternating between blithe sunshine and rain, proper rain, that hammered down purposefully and relieved you of the duty to go outside; with its own music – Daft Punk and the Backstreet Boys, Willie singing Jacques Brel in the stuttering shower; its own food (You’ve never had dim sum?); its smells – poppers and latex, sandalwood and E45; its own tastes and aches and ecstasies.
Roughly half of this enchanted time Willie spent nursing a cold. He was surprisingly sickly, always coming down with bugs, stomach aches, lurgies. He claimed this battery of minor ailments stopped him from ever getting anything serious; his mauvais santé de fer, he called it, ill-health of iron.
He was full of paradoxes like this; the more Dickie got to know him, the more unfathomable he seemed. He was endlessly licentious, but never missed Sunday service in the Trinity chapel. He shunned on principle anything calling itself ‘natural’, but nature itself he adored: he had an endless enthusiasm for hikes in the freezing glens south of the city. He dismissed the music of Nirvana as pure affectation, but he wore spats. He was bewilderingly eccentric, in speech, in dress, in his basic attitudes to life and society, but when Dickie asked why he liked him, he said, Because you are so strange.
One weekend he brought Dickie to the house he’d grown up in, an old stone manor in County Meath with countless mice and a broken dishwasher. His parents were elderly, and, other than some laborious conversations about cricket, left them to their own devices. There was an old wasps’ nest in the room Dickie slept in, and the bedspread was littered with tiny, weightless corpses. They spent most of their time hoovering.
He knew Willie expected him to return the invitation, and was hurt that he didn’t. But why would he want to take him back there? Dublin was their home. He felt like his life before belonged to someone else, someone he felt sorry for but had no desire to see again.
They spent countless nights in the Butterfly. He had been wary at first about returning, but Willie insisted he would be safe, and Dickie trusted him, trusted that nothing bad would happen when he was with him. He wasn’t sure where this faith came from; he had felt the same way with Frank, growing up, he realized, though he didn’t know what to do with this association. From there they began to explore the city’s growing underground. Every time you looked, there were new bars, new club nights, opalescent with a kind of righteous decadence.
They had to be careful, of course: gay men were regularly attacked on the streets. But we don’t look like faggots, Willie reassured him. You look like a nerd. I look like an oddball. Nobody imagines people like us ever have sex.
On the street, in the square, in the college bar, even in the Butterfly and at HAM, they acted as friends, no more. They limited their movements, refrained from touching each other; this public restraint made the moment they were finally alone together – often after elaborate excuses which doubled as private jokes – all the more incandescent.
Dickie had never especially liked having a body. No: he hated having a body. He wasn’t keen on his face either, but considered it only a minor-key prelude to the crashing debacle beneath his clothes. Scrawny, bony, unexpectedly hairy, a compendium of bad things, his body was coterminous with his shame. It was the generator of his endless shameful thoughts and desires; at the same time, it stood, in its shamefulness, in the way of ever acting on those thoughts. Its inadequacies were countless; nevertheless, he had, over the years, dedicated untold hours to counting them. He usually started with his feet. His feet! With their freakishly long, almost prehensile toes, their proneness to fungal infections and scaling, their grotesque patches of hair on the upper part, his feet alone were so uniquely repulsive as to stifle all debate. From there, if further demonstration were needed, one proceeded via his lower legs, where more gratuitous hair adorned bone-white, scrawny calves, to his knobbly (of course) knees, and then, after the sprawl of his thighs, at once fat and puny, to the dismal necro-pudding of his bottom. This was just his lower half, which, leaving aside the unspeakable tragedy that was his penis, he thought by far the better one. A mind brought low by a body: that was his life in a nutshell.
But that was not how Willie saw it. I like your feet, he’d say, and suck at his toes. And my knees? Dickie said, but Willie would already have buried his head in Dickie’s crotch, and Dickie could only yelp and laugh and lie back and let his body – his poor body! which had lived for so many years like an unloved dog chained in a basement – succumb to pleasure. It was like feeling the sun on his skin for the first time, like bathing in sunlight, being fucked by sunlight, fucked in every pore; and he would wonder, with the scattered remnants of his mind, why anyone ever did anything other than have sex.
After the pleasure, he sometimes hated Willie. It happened against his will, like he’d drunk a potion: he felt himself transforming, shrivelling, into a cold, sclerotic old hag. In those moments, he’d simultaneously hate Willie for loving him, and despise him for pretending to do so: though nothing so much as he despised and hated himself.
It wasn’t exclusively post-coital, this self-hatred; it came when he was on his own too, came and engulfed him. It presented itself as clarity. With all of the emotional candyfloss washed away, he saw the act, he saw what he had become, in pitiless detail. That word, faggot, that Willie threw around so carelessly – well, he would, wouldn’t he? That’s what Willie was, a faggot, and faggoting consisted of an essential unseriousness, a triviality, because having surrendered to their desires the faggots had been hollowed out by them, and made incapable of any serious role in the world of men.
In his mind, the poison of lucidity quickly spread, till it touched every part of his life here. From the neon falsity of the Butterfly it passed to the Hist. Once he had thought this a sacred place, where beneath the surface froth deep truths were forged. Now he could see it too was pretence, performance, clever boys trying to appear more than what they were; only here they used truth, justice, rights, instead of falsies and steroids. Clever boys like Willie, using facts about the real world to make it look like they cared about it, to make themselves look like serious people while they larked about and positioned themselves for fat jobs in law and the media.
The best time was therefore bound up in the worst time. He could no longer avoid what he was. He lay on his bed numb with self-hatred, wondering if he’d ruined his life already, if there was a way he could still get out of this and be normal. More than anything he wished he could go back in time and befriend a different boy – someone who would just be his pal, talk to him about tennis or obscure bands, walk beside him through the square in the sunshine as boys did, innocent and healthy and normal together.
He told this to Willie one night, to hurt him. Willie bowed his head. He never fought Dickie when he was in one of his moods. Then he said, I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common.
We’re all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a much happier place.
Dickie didn’t reply. It seemed to him that when Willie spoke tenderly or lovingly, or tried to describe his emotions, his intelligence vanished, and he sounded like a Hallmark card. He didn’t want reassurance, certainly not from Willie. He wanted to be home, and for the last three years never to have happened. Failing that, he wanted flagellation; he wanted punishment; he wanted someone to knock some sense into him, as his father would say; and once again he remembered the evenings in the garden, his mother’s lilacs and azaleas, her luminous phlox and philadelphus a-dance around them, as he stood toe to toe with his father, taking his lesson, little pieces of him knocked away until there was nothing left but the pale shifting shadows on the grass.
One time only he saw Sean again. He – Dickie – was walking down O’Connell Street on a Saturday afternoon when he ran into some sort of demonstration going on outside the GPO. Not large: twenty or thirty people, a couple of banners. A man was speaking into a megaphone that rendered everything he said unintelligible. As Dickie threaded his way through the crowd, someone turned and pressed a flyer into his hand.
He was not in uniform; he was wearing an Aran sweater that made him look like a fisherman, or a tourist’s idea of one. There was a strange delay as his eyes flickered over Dickie’s face. Dickie found he couldn’t move. Inside him, like the symptom of an illness you thought long gone, the terror of that night foamed up again. But only for an instant; it was all in an instant; then he lowered his eyes, continued on his way.
It wasn’t until he got back to his Rooms, and closed the door, and locked it, that he remembered the flyer. He still had it, balled up in his fist, damp with cold sweat: he smoothed it out on the counter. A picture of a foetus, covered in blood, partially dismembered. He saw himself on the floor of Sean’s flat, something that should never have been born.
But these moments were anomalies, outliers. It was the best time, that season of the self; for the most part he was happy, happier than he had ever been. Perhaps that was what made it hard to accept. He had always assumed happiness was for other people, for the plodders, the norms, the sleepwalkers, as the reward for their blinkered conformism. He felt like he’d been initiated into a secret cult – a group of people who outwardly looked like everybody else, but who concealed a miraculous secret: they were in love.
And then Frank came back.
It was all very dramatic: arriving in the middle of the night, pounding on the door. Willie said afterwards that Frank was one of those secret drama queens who put themselves across as regular Joes, yet whose lives seemed constantly to unfold at the level of opera.
Dickie had been in bed: he heard the commotion downstairs, and went to investigate. The elderly professor on the ground floor had opened the front door, and was remonstrating with him. I couldn’t remember which room you were in, Frank said to Dickie when he saw him appear on the stairs.
Dickie thanked the professor, and apologized, and invited Frank upstairs. Still waking up, he was within a heartbeat of bringing him through Willie’s door; he remembered just in time to lead him up the next flight of stairs to his own Rooms, which quite clearly hadn’t been inhabited in a month; he had to open a window to chase away the musty smell, though it was lashing rain outside.
There was no need to worry: Frank was oblivious. Dickie had never seen him in such a state. He was out of breath, and seemed to be sweating, though it was hard to be sure as he was drenched with rain. He kept wandering around the room, head bent, as if he were looking for something he’d dropped on the floor, ignoring Dickie’s injunctions to sit. He had a holdall on his shoulder, a light jacket, a fugitive appearance. I’m in the horrors, he said. The horrors, he repeated, and then, Do you mind if I smoke? He fumbled out a packet of Benson & Hedges. Dickie directed him to the window, but he lit up where he stood. Then he sat, finally, at the kitchen table. I’m fucked, he said.
He was so agitated it was hard to get anything more coherent from him, but finally the story came out.
It was the girl. Or rather, it was her father. He had made it known in unambiguous terms that he wanted them to get married.
Now? Dickie said. Why? Is she … she’s not pregnant?
Frank shook his head, wiped his nose. No, he said. At least, not by me. He pressed his lips together. We’ve never had sex, Dickie. Imelda’s a virgin.
Dickie wondered at this, but said only, In that case, why now? Why is he suddenly saying this now?
Frank covered his face with his hands, groaned into them. Do you remember last winter, when I’d been dropped from the team, and I was trying to figure out what to do – remember when we talked about the business that time? Well, I decided I’d go to London, with Dolly. Find investors, or whatever. She wasn’t happy about that.
But you didn’t go, Dickie said.
No, because Dad took me back into the garage. And the team took me back, and everything got sorted out. But Paddy Joe – Imelda’s father – he’s found out about it, and he’s going spare.
She told her dad you were leaving her?
She told her brother. And he let it slip to Paddy Joe and now he’s going mad thinking I’m about to do a runner to England.
But it was months ago, Dickie says.
I know.
And you didn’t go.
I know, Dickie, I know! I’m not saying it makes any sense! You don’t know this man, he’s a fucking headcase! He said – I was in her house, with her brothers all standing around me in a ring, and he said to me, You’ve had your finger in the pie – those were his actual words, can you believe it?
Dickie couldn’t believe it, not fully. It sounded like something from a Western. But he saw that he was afraid – Frank, who was never afraid.
What am I going to do? his brother said.
You don’t want to marry her? Dickie said. The last time I saw you, you seemed to be considering it.
I’m nineteen! I’m fucking nineteen years old! I don’t want to marry anyone!
Okay, okay, calm down, Dickie said. And have you spoken to Dad?
Frank’s head dropped, his hands flopped onto his lap. Oh Dad. Dad thinks I’ve dug my own hole.
He hardly thinks that, Dickie said.
Oh, he dresses it up with his usual bullshit. Be a man, act with honour, live by your decisions, all this. But he wants to punish me. It’s the same as when he’d catch me with a cigarette and make me smoke the whole box till I puked.
And marrying Imelda is the punishment, Dickie said.
Frank hung his head, still slick with rain. I don’t mean it like that, he mumbled. It’s just – it’s just too early! I’m not ready!
Couldn’t you … Dickie wasn’t sure how seriously to take this; Frank did tend to blow things out of proportion. If you had to, couldn’t you get engaged and … you know, you don’t need to name a day right away. Would that be enough, I mean?
But Frank slowly shook his head. And he began to speak about the father again, this man that Dickie had never met. He sounded like something from a fairy tale, the terrifying giant with the ravishing daughter, his monstrousness in direct proportion to her beauty. I think he’s killed people, Dickie. He’s got these videos of his fights – there’s one of them where this man, his eye … He shuddered. He beat her brothers half to death growing up. He killed her cat, Dickie! He killed Imelda’s cat when it got pregnant! And the dog, and a horse. And she calls it the homeplace! Jesus, Dickie, the things that went on there!
All right, all right, Dickie said, raising his hands again for calm. Let’s consider your options. You don’t want to get married – for now. Dad won’t help. What’s left?
Frank took a moment to compose himself. Then, summoning his energy, in a low voice he said, There’s a marketing course. It’s in Birmingham, two years. I figure if I sign up for that, it’ll get me out of Dodge, give me time to think, work out the best thing to do. And the timing’s perfect, it starts next week.
Next week? At last Dickie realized the meaning of the holdall. You mean you’re going now? You’re going to England now?
It’s not safe for me here! Frank implored. He keeps showing up in his van, when I’m training, or at the garage, he parks up outside and just sits there!
Inside, Dickie felt a sudden, cold clutch of nausea. He tried to sound objective. So you’re going to do exactly what he was afraid you’d do – that’s your plan. You’re going to do the thing you’d decided not to do, because he thinks you’re going to do it.
Ah Jesus, my head’s wrecked enough as it is! Frank protested.
Right, Dickie said. I’m trying to see the point of this, that’s all.
Well, it would be useful for the business, Frank said. And I could pay for it myself, I’ve money saved. And it’d give things a chance to settle down a bit. Like, even if I just did the first year, it’d give everyone a chance to cool off. Then we could go at our own pace.
He related this in a measured tone, as if he was explaining it to himself, or reciting it for a test: but at the end his voice broke, and he looked up pleadingly at his brother: But I don’t know! I don’t know if that’s right, or … What do you think, Dickie? What do you think I should do?
And Dickie knew that this was a pivotal moment: he could feel it, literally, the room swaying ever so gently up and down, as if it were balanced on a point – listing towards one future, then another.
He rose and went to put on the kettle again. As it boiled he fished a packet of Rich Tea out of the press. Inside he was thinking, If Frank goes to England he will never come back. Dickie knew his brother: he knew that whether he did part of the course or all of the course, whether he forgot the girl or didn’t forget her, none of that mattered, because whatever his intentions, if he went to England he would undoubtedly get himself snarled up in exactly the same kind of situation over there. He’d save a cat from a tree and the owner would turn out to have two beautiful daughters and he’d fall in love with them both, or he’d join the local GAA team and meet a millionaire who was opening up a business in Dubai, or he’d anger a local drug dealer and assume a false identity, or he’d fall off a bridge, or fall into an inheritance – something, there would inevitably be something.
And many years from now, he would sit in the back office of the dealership, in a padded-out waistcoat or a filthy anorak, reminiscing about the old days, the beautiful wild girl – Imogen? Irene? – who’d captured his heart once, but it hadn’t worked out. He’d clap Dickie’s knee – dutiful Dickie, reliable Dickie, in his manager’s chair, where he had been sitting for so many years – and he’d say, Well, it was probably for the best. Can you imagine the state this place would be in, if you’d stayed up in Dublin, and I was the one who took over!
Yes, Frank would go and never come back, and Dickie would end up in the dealership after all: that was what he saw, like a vision, when he opened the press for the teabags. And equally clearly he saw that he did not want to go back to the dealership. He did not any longer want that life.
And so he said from across the room, I suppose the thing to remember is, you’re marrying her, not her family. He brought the mugs to the table and set them down. I mean, the father sounds like a nightmare. But once you were married he’d probably leave you alone. You’d never have to see him again if you didn’t want to.
Frank took this in with a frown of confusion. It’s not that I don’t ever want to marry her, Dickie. But he wants me to marry her now. He wants us to get married now.
Well, in some ways that’s hardly surprising, Dickie said matter-of-factly, pouring the milk. You have to admit, you’re not the best at sticking to things. I mean, you’re telling me here that you want to run off to England, when last time you told me you’d decided you wanted to stay. You can see why her father might be concerned.
Frank pressed his lips together, took out a cigarette and tapped it on the table.
And she, does she want to marry you?
I suppose, Frank conceded.
And if she were to come and tell you she was leaving you because she didn’t want to wait to get married, what would you say? Or put it another way – what if she didn’t want to marry you? If she told you she enjoyed being with you but she didn’t see a future with you – would you be happy then?
Frank slowly wagged his poor fogged head. Dickie felt his spirits rise. How quickly the arguments came to his mind! How cleverly and persuasively his tongue parsed them! Yes, he had learned something after all from his time here in Trinity, from those nights at the Hist, watching the boys joust in their dinner jackets.
Don’t feel tied down by the business if you want to get away, he said, as if it had just occurred to him. We can always go back to the original plan if need be. I’m sure I’d find some position for you later, as a salesman or something.
No, no … I don’t want that, Frank said laboriously. I just … you don’t think it seems very early to be settling down?
Dickie considered this. I think the real question is, he said, bringing a thoughtful finger to his chin, just as he had seen Willie do, do you love her?
I don’t know, Frank said. I think so.
Well then, Dickie said.
And Frank had gone home, and there were many weeks that followed, during which he proposed to Imelda, and she said yes, and they began to plan for their wedding; and Dickie went back for the engagement party, and then the two of them visited Dublin again; and Frank thanked Dickie for his advice, and Dickie, seeing how happy his brother was, knew that it was for the best; and he and Willie went out and stayed in and drank and debated and, as the college year drew to a close, studied for exams and made their plans for the summer.
But in his memory afterwards, it seemed that he went directly from that conversation with Frank – washing the mugs out in the sink, telling him he could sleep on the couch for tonight – to standing in the good room at home, with Willie, red-eyed, somehow there in front of him; not months, not days, but an instant only, from that midnight conversation to now, as if the squalid papered walls of his Rooms had fallen away, while his brother was still sitting at the table, drinking his tea, to reveal a world from which Frank was already gone, lay buried in the churchyard, and Dickie, drenched, blasted, annihilated, stood in the parlour, a cloth still covering the mirror, with Willie facing him accusingly, asking the same question Dickie had asked of Frank an instant, a lifetime before, Do you love her? The same words twisted up, splintered, charred, like the wreck of the car they had pulled out of the field outside Naancross. Dickie had seen it go by; he had been in the garden with his mother and heard her cry out, as if a sword had run her through; he turned to her first, then to see what she was looking at, and there it was, going by on a trailer, mangled, incinerated, but still recognizably Frank’s car. His mother had dropped to the ground, she had covered her head with her hands, as you might in an air raid, though the bomb had already hit, the sword found its mark. It was worse than seeing his body somehow, though he couldn’t explain why. He couldn’t explain anything, that whole time was confusion, sightlessness, like crawling through a metal pipe, in darkness, while outside someone beat the walls with iron bars. But somewhere in there, yes, he had proposed to Imelda. He had fallen in love with her, now they were engaged.
Were you even going to tell me? Willie’s voice trembled, his protuberant face pale as death. His backpack still sat on his shoulder. A friend from Dublin, Dickie had called to nobody when he found him at the door.
You shouldn’t be here, Dickie said.
So you’re really doing this, Willie said. Or perhaps it was, Why are you doing this? It didn’t matter. Dickie checked his phone. He had new duties now, a million and one arrangements to make.
You laughed at her, Willie said. You called her Tinker Bell!
Dickie did not want to hear what that old self had done. You wouldn’t understand, he said.
I do understand! Willie cried, agonized. You think it was your fault, you think it should have been you that died and not your brother!
Don’t talk about my brother! His voice was like a whipcrack. Willie flinched. His face, white and wounded, looked up at him helplessly, his open mouth a weal. He had come to persuade Dickie, just as Dickie had persuaded Frank. But he was wasting his time.
Of course it should have been him. No one said it – there was no need, it was obvious. He had stood in Frank’s bedroom and watched his father weep over the coffin, his tears falling onto Frank’s waxy, reconstructed face – watched as he brought his fingers up and put them on his son’s lips; he seemed to stagger, if you can stagger standing still; while Dickie hung back in the shadows, warm and clammy from what he’d been doing in Dublin, still feeling it on him, clinging to him, like a skin, a sin-skin. His uncle, back from England, beside him, shaking his head, saying, This will kill your father. Kill him.
Why is that your fault? What has that got to do with you?
Everything, everything to do with him. He was the one meant to take over the garage. That had always been the plan. But he had tried to escape it. He had tried to push Frank into his place.
You didn’t push him, you didn’t push anyone! You told him what he wanted to hear! You wanted him to be who he was! Good! Noble! True to himself, to his girl!
Only because it suited him. Only so he could continue his sordid pursuits in Dublin. He had known that what they were doing was evil. He’d pretended otherwise, but he’d known. Contra naturam, against nature – he remembered it from long ago, when he was a holy boy who knew such things, though he hadn’t understood then what it meant. It was a very specific, very pernicious kind of evil, because it unwound, undid, the natural things it touched. Who was more natural than Frank, with his sports and his cars, his beautiful girlfriend with her sequinned dress? Dickie had tried to use his brother’s very naturalness to cloak his own perversity. Now everything had unspooled in a black mess, like the ribbon pulled from a cassette. It was his fault: it didn’t matter that he hadn’t known it would happen.
Or did he know? Somewhere deep down, had he foreseen this? Was it conceivable that he had brought this about deliberately, a final, spiteful act against the brother he’d always envied? Whose life he had always craved? The idea was too horrific to contemplate: yet it remained there inside his head over the endless succession of unsleeping nights, the hours upon hours of blank unfillable life he found himself burdened with now in the grieving house – acres of it, of wakefulness, when it was the last thing he wanted, as if all the unused time that would have been Frank’s had been dumped on him as a punishment. Did you do this on purpose? Did you do this to destroy him? Hour after hour he lay there, twisting under the silent interrogation – until one night, delirious with tiredness, he rose and went to Frank’s room. It was what he’d always done as a little boy whenever he’d had a bad dream or fears of monsters. Only when he saw her looking at him from the bed did he remember that she was there. He waited for her to spring at him, pluck his eyes out, shrieking the accusations that resounded inside his head day and night, You did this! He hoped, he prayed she’d speak the words.
But she said only, Did I wake you up?
It’s okay, he said. I wasn’t sleeping.
She lay back down, turned away from him. He went to sit at the end of the bed. She sobbed quietly under the covers. The sound brought him a strange peace, as if she were doing it for both of them. And when at last she slept, he stayed awake for both of them, he could be exhausted for both of them. Beneath the greenish ceiling stars he felt exhausted, bereft, and only that. Not evil, not accused. The night after he went back, and the night after that, and every night, at two, three, four in the morning, when he heard her cry out. They didn’t speak, he would just sit there with her, he with his howling skull, she weeping or lying in silence, wearing the same unwashed dress she had since the funeral. He felt like he had left the real world and entered another, like he was meeting a spirit in the forest who had nothing to do with the day, the person that he met in the kitchen, in the garden, with rings around her eyes. He sat, he laid his hand on her side. In the darkness she was like the reflection that he could bear to see. She took his hand and put it in her hair. He lay beside her in his brother’s bed, and she pressed her lips to his forehead, and sometimes he slept. They were the same: they fit together, like the shrapnel of a car and the ruin of a garage: she was the only person he could bear to be near. A new terror seized him, at the thought of her leaving, but it was a pleasant terror, because it made no sense that she could go. It made no sense not to kiss the tears from her cheeks, then to kiss her mouth. Those reservations were part of a world that was past. They were no longer who they were. When she took off her dress her beauty lay in fragments around her like the shards of a broken vase. And his thoughts, his cleverness, lay buried in the woods, stored against a winter that would never appear again.
That’s when it had come to him, what he had to do. He had wanted Frank to take his place: now he would take Frank’s. It was the best, the only way to atone. Not only would he be Frank – he would be the Frank that Frank himself was not. Once he had decided that, everything was easy. When she told him she was pregnant that only proved he was on the right track. What was more natural? It cost him nothing to jettison his old plans, his old self. The way was clear now. Perhaps it was clear for the first time in his life. He asked her to marry him and she said yes.
Do you think you’re in any fit state to make this kind of a decision? Willie said. Can’t you see how insane this is? He placed his hands on his shoulders. His eyes swam behind his thick glasses. He crashed his car, Dickie. It’s natural you feel guilty. But it isn’t your fault!
Expressionlessly, Dickie took his hands away. Still he persisted. This isn’t you, he said. The person I know would not just discard someone like this. You’re not well, Dickie. None of this makes sense. Do you think you can hide from the truth? Is that what you’re trying to do? You will hide from the truth for the rest of your life?
But what did Willie know about truth? What did he know about family, duty? He thought of Willie’s parents, the air of benign indifference prevailing in their mouse-infested home.
I’m changing it, he told him. I’m changing the truth.
That doesn’t make any sense!
Please, don’t keep arguing with me, Dickie told him. My parents need me, my fiancée needs me.
Your fiancée! Willie laughed, bitterly, violently. Can you not even hear what a joke that is?
No one had laughed in this house in weeks, it struck Dickie, not even bitterly.
A clock ticked on the mantelpiece, nestled among the family photos: Frank a little boy, a teenager, a man. When Willie spoke again it was softer. Are you really going to do this? he said. Leave everything you have behind? Leave behind the person that loves you?
Dickie must have sat down at some point, because now he stood up; Willie, too, stood, and took Dickie’s hands in his, as if they were there on the altar. Dickie, he whispered; he couldn’t speak. Tears were running down his face, his poor ugly face. Dickie, he croaked. Come back to Dublin. Bring her with you, your … wife. We don’t have to ever touch again. Or speak, we don’t ever need to speak if you don’t want to. Just be near, be near me.
Yes, it was sad, Dickie was sad to see him reduced like this. Once his talking lost its power, once you saw through it, there was really little left to him. He may have shed a tear too, as he stood there, watching Willie cry. But in the silence, he felt his heart lift, for he knew that this was the end.