Torn Water Read online

  Do you wonder about me too? One day we will meet. I collect deaths so I could die in many different ways for your love. I could take poison for you, or a knife, or I could be gunned down protecting you from rapists. I could go to the guillotine for you, or fight a duel like the knights did for their queen. It's late and my hands are moving lower. Even though we haven't met I will imagine they are your hands, even though I know I will be condemned for loving you. Then I will imagine that I am burning at a stake in hell but I won't mind because it will have been for you and the glory of your love.

  19. D-Day

  ‘Don't look at me like that – I've tried to talk to you and this is the thanks I get.’

  ‘You haven't talked to me. You just told me.’

  ‘Don't be stupid.’

  ‘You always just tell me.’

  ‘James, I'm in no mood for lip.’

  ‘I'll stay with Teezy.’

  ‘Stay where you like.’

  It's the weekend. Saturday. One day until Sully's appointed moving-in. His mother roams about the kitchen like a caged bird. He watches as she lifts the kettle before placing it back in the exact spot it was in before. She does the same with the teapot and the sugar bowl.

  ‘Listen, James, he thinks the world of you … of us both. Give him a chance.’

  ‘No.’

  When he slams the back door behind him, a part of him revels in its loud thump, and as he stomps his way to Teezy's house he curses the blue sky above him, he curses Sully, and wishes he were far away, far from the politics of his own life.

  ‘Leave them to it, son. Rise above it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It's just better that way. They've made their bed …’

  ‘he's a selfish bastard.’

  ‘James, no language in front of me.’

  ‘But, Teezy, he hates me.’

  ‘No one truly hates anyone, James. Try to remember that.’

  ‘But, Teezy …’

  ‘Listen, son, I know it's hard to fathom what people see in each other but let them get on with it.’

  He watches as her heavy body fusses around him, now and then resting her hands on his shoulders, or the cool part of his neck.

  ‘Now come on, eat. There's nothing on you.’

  ‘I'm fine.’

  ‘No, you're not. You've a face on you would scare God out of his throne.’

  ‘Teezy …’

  ‘You know and I know he's a loser. Now, do your auntie a favour and put up with it. Not for him, for your mammy. She's not up to this fighting and carrying on.’

  ‘Why does everyone always go on about her? How she's this and she's that. What about me?’

  ‘Listen, I'll make a deal with you. You behave yourself and I'll treat you to a fine holiday this summer. A fine lovely holiday where you can forget about all this nonsense. Deal?’

  ‘That's ages off. He'll be all over the house. “This is mine, kid, and you better goddam believe it.”‘

  She smiles as he does his impression of Sully, and for a moment he forgets his pain and smiles back. She sits down at the table beside him, reaches out, takes his hand and puts it in hers. He can feel the heavy warmth of her touch. He looks at her, at her big head and the soft love in her eyes.

  ‘When I was your age everything was so important. Everything was life or death. It's not that way at all, son. Things are much slower than you think. And one way or another we all end up back where we began. We all end up waiting …’

  ‘Did you never have a boyfriend, Teezy, or a … ?’

  ‘What – a husband? Damn the fears, I've enough trouble keeping this old corpse of mine ticking over without having to look out for anyone else – especially not a man.’

  ‘But you look out for me.’

  ‘Ah, but you're different. You're special.’

  ‘I don't feel special. I feel stupid and – ’

  ‘Stop right there, my boy, right there.’ She raises one of her large hands in front of his face. Then she leans her face into his and says, ‘If I say you're special it means you're special, because this is my house and I make the rules. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Good. And if you must know there was someone once. He lived up by the Green Road. This is years ago before they put up those concrete boxes they have a nerve to call houses. He was a handsome lump of a man with big rosy cheeks. He always looked as if he'd just been sitting by a fire.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Fintan.’

  ‘Fintan?’

  ‘Fintan Walsh. A fine man he was.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Well, we were courting on and off for three years or so. His father owned that land up behind that new school there … What's it called?’

  ‘St Peter's,’ he says.

  ‘That's right, St Peter's. Anyway …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Ah, it's a lifetime ago, son.’

  ‘What happened, Teezy?’

  ‘He broke it off. He said he had been promised to some girl. There was some arrangement made with some farmer owned a lock of land over by Meigh. It was different in those days, son. Different ways.’

  ‘What? He married someone else?’

  ‘After a while he did.’

  ‘That's mad.’

  ‘You see, son, we all have our crosses to bear. It just depends on the heaviness of the wood. Now, remember our deal and this summer you'll be like a pig in muck and you can forget about Sully and your mammy. Now, I'll sort it out with them. All you have to do is behave.’

  She gets up slowly, puts her hands on her hips and regards him for a moment. Then, very softly, she says, ‘I'll stick the kettle on so we can wet our beaks.’

  The next evening he can hear them below in the scullery. Sully is in. He imagines them sitting in front of the fire, their glasses full. He sees his mother's face, her hair piled up in swirls, held by the pins he had passed to her patiently only hours before. She had been standing before the bathroom mirror, her lips elastically working in her lipstick. ‘Midnight Cherry,’ she had said.

  He had watched her shade her eyes, watched them become bluer. He had watched her become her other self, the one who brought Sully the promises she thought he wanted. He sees her now, her black pencil skirt holding her taut, her body draped in Sully's direction, angled in offering, her mascara eyes, slow-lidded from the whisky he brought.

  ‘To a new life,’ he had announced, as he stood in the doorway, wearing his trademark lopsided grin, which said it all. Yes, he can see the two of them huddling and cuddling by the fire's warmth, his mother licking her Midnight Cherried lips.

  Sully and his mother will sleep in the low room, in her bed, the bed that is no longer just hers. Yes, Sully is in. More dangerous than before, more grinning, more full of shit than he has ever been, because now he is the master of all he surveys.

  Eventually James could stand it no longer and had left them to it, to their coded winks and lust-filled silences. He had gone to bed, looking for the dark hold of the room to swallow him. The chatter from below has stopped. He listens for a moment, then realises that his mother has taken Sully to her bedroom.

  He lies back in his bed and tries to stop his mind following them, stop it from skimming across the living-room floor and slipping under their bedroom door like an all-seeing vapour. He tries to stop himself seeing their naked lust for each other. He puts his hands to his face to stop the tumble of images before his eyes. Sully's slimy lips sucking and licking at hers, his hard-arsed passion making her squeal in submission as his sweaty flesh slithers all over her moon-white skin.

  He thinks of his deal with Teezy and tries to sleep, turning, dragging bedclothes this way and that. He remembers her eyes as she talked about Fintan. How her face had suddenly seemed young and open when she had told him her story. He thinks of his last contact with his father, when he had renounced him, and pushed his memory away as if it had been a plate of maggots. He thinks of the firefly, of the m
an in the alleyway. He thinks of his deaths and how stupid they seem. He suddenly feels terribly alone, and that the world is only what he sees and nothing more. There is no light above, no power beyond, no fireflies in the blackness of space; there had been no man in the alleyway. And as he falls towards sleep he feels a dark spear of fear nail him to the bed.

  The Death of My Dreams

  I feel so alone. Is this what it's like afterwards? To feel nothing, to be nothing? I want to die. I want her to stand over my grave and cry, to blame herself. I want her to rush to my dying body and beg my forgiveness. I want that to be the last thing I see, before I see no more. I want to see her beat Fathead Sully's chest as the last breath leaves my body. I want her to hold my bloody body and weep and know that I was the only one who truly loved her.

  I am dreaming this. My sleeping body is tossing and turning, rolling in and out of different thoughts. It's a cold place, the end of your dreams. It's a black, horrible place where Nothing is king. I feel as if all the loneliness of a cruel world is flowing through my veins, and there is no one to catch me when I fall into darkness.

  I hate my mind. I hate the way it runs and runs and runs like a wild horse. I can't keep up with it sometimes. It just drags me along behind it like the cowboys in the films who get caught in the stirrup of their horse and are bounced and bumped along until they die or are shot.

  You used to stand at the end of my dreams, just like you stand in the photograph, that smile on your face, wearing that pinstripe suit just like a gangster, just like Al Pacino. But, like I told you the other night, I think you only exist in the emptiness of my mind, and it is you who frightens the wild horse into fleeing.

  No, the fall at the end of my dreams is just that: a fall. And you are not there, like a guard, or a shiny policeman of light, to protect me. It is just a long fall into the dark kingdom where Nothing is king.

  20. The Performance

  He has never been on a stage before. At first it reminds him of the recurring dream that he began to have shortly after his father died, where he saw himself moving across a landscape of blackness, lit only by the fierce scrutiny of God's gaze. He remembers its heat on his skin, and he remembers trying to melt into the darkness that surrounded him.

  It was a dream that had stalked his sleep for many years, and often he had woken in the middle of the night to find that he had wet the bed. He remembers fumbling with the wet sheets, running water through them in the bathroom, then praying that they would dry on the radiator overnight. So, when he makes his first entrance as Martini, shuffling to join the other inmates at the card table in the recreation ward, his heart rears in his chest and he feels as if he is walking across the flinty terrain of old dreams.

  For a moment or two he hides behind Jarlath McAllister at the card table, but then something inside him charges his heart with courage. He thinks of the black jackdaw he had conjured on to his bedroom wall all those weeks before. Suddenly he feels a warmth seep into his soul, and slowly he begins to move across the territory of someone else's life.

  Afterwards they huddle together in the women's dressing room, their hands reaching for each other, beating out congratulations on each other's shoulders. Shannon is in the middle of the mêlée and occasionally James sees his beaming face appear through the tangle of upraised arms and elbows. Eventually he is hoisted aloft and carried round the room on the men's shoulders, ducking now and then to avoid the coil of heating pipes and rails that run across the ceiling. Somebody claps James on the back and shouts, ‘Bloody marvellous,’ before diving back into the pack of celebrating bodies.

  He refuses the wine that is being passed around in thin plastic cups. He thinks of the freedom he felt on the stage that night and wants more of it. He notices Kerry smiling at him, and looks away quickly, fumbling in his mind for something else to focus on. Then he realises she is walking towards him.

  ‘Well done tonight, Jimmy.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don't worry.’ She places her hand on his arm. He notices how each finger bears a ring. Her hair is hidden beneath a heavy creamy turban. She reminds him of a fairground gypsy, a fortune-teller ready to peer into other people's lives.

  ‘I'm not worried,’ he says.

  ‘Good. That's good.’

  He senses she wishes to say something else, and is thankful that Chin Chin comes over, stands by her side and drapes a long arm across her shoulders.

  ‘You were exemplary tonight, Master La very.’

  ‘Thank you, Chin Chin.’

  The three of them shuffle uneasily for a moment, peering down into their drinks.

  ‘he's waiting for you to repay the compliment, darling.’

  ‘Oh … Well done, Chin Chin.’

  Later that night they all go dancing. Shannon leads the way and the rest follow, streaming out of the stage door of the opera house, breaking into song, their footsteps ringing noisily on the rain-black pavement. Chin Chin and Kerry walk behind the main group, their arms linked, big grins spread across their faces. James is glad he is free of her, free of her heavy touch and her cannibal's heart. They queue outside the Europa Hotel, waiting to be let through the security cage into the dance club beyond.

  ‘Son.’

  He is about to be searched by one of the hotel policemen when he hears Teezy call him, his arms raised in the crucifix position, the cop about to frisk him. He turns round, looks back down the street and sees her standing there with a small man who looks familiar. ‘Teezy?’

  He steps away from the queue, nodding an apology to the RUC man.

  ‘Where you going, wee man?’ he hears Jarlath shout.

  ‘I'll follow you in, Jarlath. My auntie's here.’

  ‘Well, don't be long, sunshine, we've some pulling to do.’

  ‘Teezy, what are you doing here?’ he asks, as he reaches her.

  ‘Sam gave me a lift. You remember Sam, don't you?’

  Sam Butler lives three doors from her: James often sees him on the street or about the town, walking his black Labrador, hat tilted on his head. He is always well turned out as if he is constantly going somewhere important.

  ‘Hi, Sam,’ James says.

  ‘Young James.’

  ‘Ah, son, I'm fierce proud of you, fierce proud.’

  ‘Aye, son. You were magic so you were,’ Sam says.

  ‘Thanks. Why didn't you tell me you were coming, Teezy?’

  ‘Ah … I didn't want you worrying yourself, son.’

  ‘We're going for a drink, Teezy. Do you – ’

  ‘No, son, I won't. It's past my bedtime. Who'd have thought? You up on the stage all growed up and powerful-looking. Wouldn't have missed it for the world, son.’

  They stand there looking at each other. He senses she wants to say something else, something that isn't easy for her.

  ‘It's a pity mum couldn't have been there,’ James says.

  ‘Your mother has always been her own mind, son, you know that. Your mammy loves you in her own way, son. Anyway I'm here … Teezy's here.’ She gives him a tight little hug, then looks at him for a moment, her eyes misting. ‘My God, I'm proud of you.’ Then she turns to Sam and says, ‘Come on, then. Get me home, Sam.’

  ‘Goodnight, young James,’ Sam says.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  He watches them walk away, Sam's hand on Teezy's elbow as he leads her gently towards the nearby car park.

  He joins the rest of the cast inside the nightclub. Everyone is on the dance-floor except Jarlath, who has found a gap at the crowded bar. James goes over to stand with him. They watch as the rest of the company move to the music, laughing at Shannon and Patricia, who look as if they are trying to shake a colony of ants from their skin.

  Jarlath offers to buy him a drink, but he asks for a Coke, weathering Jarlath's insistence that he have something stronger. ‘What sort of a man are you?’ Jarlath shouts above the din of the music, raising a pint of frothy Guinness to his lips.

  He shrugs, and watches the gulp of Jarla
th's Adam's apple as the Guinness slides down his throat.

  ‘You're a strange one, Lavery,’ he says, wiping the cream of his pint from his lips with the back of his hand. ‘It's like you were possessed out there tonight – like a demon had got a hold of you – and look at you now. You wouldn't say boo to a goose.’

  Jarlath goes off to hunt along the edges of the dance-floor, and James watches as he stops to chat with some young women, his pint spilling over the rim of his glass, his head dipping and weaving. James sips his Coke, and thinks once more of the warm womb of the stage that night, and of the fire that had run through his heart. He thinks of Teezy and the way her eyes had looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. He remembers the warm pride in her voice when she spoke to him.

  He spends the rest of the evening jostling for space at the bar, guiding his glass back and forth as he is nudged and bumped. Eventually he gives up, fights his way to the exit and, with a sigh of relief, climbs the stairs that lead up on to the street. He is thankful of the cool air that hits his skin, and the damp drizzle that is falling. All around him he can hear the click of high heels on the pavements and the harsh shouts of rows beginning in alleyways. He looks at the thick-necked policemen as they frisk people, gruffly telling some of the drunker ones to behave. Some they let through the security cage with just a nod, young shaven-headed youths, all dressed the same way, in slacks and freshly pressed white shirts.

  ‘No wonder this is the most bombed hotel in Europe.’

  James looks round to see Cathal Murphy standing beside him, his cravat sodden with sweat, his forehead shiny and red.

  ‘They're all squaddies … Brits.’

  They're not much older than me, James thinks.

  ‘I wouldn't say no to one or two of them.’

  They look round to see Patricia standing behind them.

  ‘Behave yourself,’ Murphy says, as he tinkers with his cravat and runs a hand wearily across his shiny forehead.

  ‘”There's no business like show business” … la di da.’

  They turn to see Shannon standing behind them, steam rising from his large frame, his cheesecloth shirt unbuttoned to the navel.