On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland (22 page)

‘It isn’t like that. Not at all.’ Her eyes opened wide to him; she held her gaze. ‘Just listen, will you.’

* * *

Her mother, Róisín Doyle, had passed away when she was five, she said. She had no memory of Charles ever being with them. He had to go away to do business, she was told. Then he disappeared altogether from her life, or maybe that was just how she thought of it. But it wasn’t hard to be sure about the real parent figures in her life, the couple who dominated her early years, Leo and Peggy Reffo. Leo had been a close confidant of her mother’s, and to the degree that anyone was able to raise her – not easy, she’d been told – Leo and Peggy did that. Peggy died three years ago, in early 1991. Leo was devastated. But he went on managing informally most of what happens in Claire Abbey, and now in his mid-sixties he was nearing retirement. Despite him being the closest thing to a father-figure she had known, as a teenager she directed a lot of loose anger toward him and rarely expressed appreciation for the unconditional love he and Peggy always had for her.

At eight years of age she was deposited in her first boarding school, in Sligo, a fiasco that lasted six months. Then for a short while she lived in Dalkey, in south Dublin, in the care of a live-in housekeeper and Italian au pair. When she was nine-and-a-half her father tried again, she said; he placed her with the nuns at Regis Hall in Wicklow, a boarding school walled in by ten feet of granite and an army of disciplinarians. At least that’s how it felt. Two weeks into that experience she earned the first of what became many suspensions. And hated her life.

Before she reached eleven her persistent insubordination succeeded: she got expelled for good from Regis Hall. Charles was abroad at the time, as usual, so once again Leo and Peggy took her in. Three weeks later Charles took her back, screaming and kicking, to Claire Abbey, and hired a governess. When that didn’t work he enrolled her with the nuns in Castlebar, which meant a forty-five minute bus ride every morning and afternoon. That went on for a few months, until she got her way, a place in St Agnes’s Girls School in Aranroe. She had some difficulties there with people, to do with not fitting in. But she did well academically for the first time, and for a while she was happy and sad, which was an improvement. Otherwise, she suffered and sometimes barely scraped through her early teenage years.

Then, in 1976, when she was seventeen, she escaped again, this time by enrolling as an arts student in University College Dublin. She came to detest the constriction of college protocols but did well and lasted out the four years. That’s when New York called, and she didn’t hesitate. It spelt ultimate freedom, which she grabbed with attitude and a long-held passion to turn herself into a professional studio photographer. Her one other great dream, cherished even longer, would also be fulfilled: she’d get out from under the oppression of Claire Abbey and all it represented. And one day in the future she was about to march into, she promised herself she’d have her own real family and real home. Neither of which had come about.

The initial narcotic of Manhattan turned slowly into a depressing grind: often decrepit, always requiring compromises that at first shocked her Irish sensibilities. But, after three years of room sharing, learning to recognise the prima donnas and massaging the right egos, her name and talent had won recognition among avant-garde art cliques. She learned to exploit every stare that roamed up and down her body, every flirting comment on her accent, every buy-you-a-drink invitation. Thereby she negotiated the essential imprimaturs, and doors swung open; she was hot, her images and fashion eye in demand. And she grew even more clever at servicing the power set, the royal road to the top. Her credo was compelling: play their game, climb higher. By 1984, her fourth year in the city, she was a minor celebrity, some said major, free to shoot her own style, choose her art directors and contracts. As she saw it, there was no ceiling that couldn’t be broken through.

Her commercial work won acclaim in international markets and led to suddenly-huge fees. Hence the framed magazine covers in her apartment. And that’s how life went on. Though constantly troubled by it all, she was addicted. She drank up the embraces, the admiration, sank into the anaesthesia and false nurture of it. Being talented had become a means to an end, a path to belonging, to feeling powerful and sought-after, and wanted. She drowned in the elixir of being a social icon, top of the party lists, always ready to hover on regal arms and all that went with that. Looking back now, she said, it seems vacuous and immoral, but it felt better than anything else she could envision, always more than what she had left behind in Ireland, better than anything there to go back to.

She had succumbed to a cult, been blinded, become an insider in a world that was voraciously self-preserving, up-town emperors and empresses flaunting power, exploiting celebrity, turning over lovers as new obsessions arrived, a compassionless game. Penthouse parties, white lines, hugs and kisses, libidinous frenzy. The delusion worked. Most of all the conviction that she was loved, the lie that lasted longest and was ultimately the most damaging.

Except for short periods, the scene had never felt right, she told him. That was not her, in Manhattan; somewhere in her heart she had always known it. In time, the truth began intruding, usually just before she fell asleep, accompanied by an increasingly heavy affliction, the loneliness in her soul. Then full-blown despair set in, and other warning signs she could no longer suppress. Until she felt that life as she had been living it could not go on. And it didn’t.

The beginning of the end came in the form of odd social insecurities, then physical spasms and brief mental absences that could strike at any time; she didn’t understand what was happening to her, but told no one. Bouts of depression followed, sometimes for weeks.

Then one morning, out of the blue, everything became clear as day: she’d been masquerading, living a lie, a failed way of life, unable to find what she needed, never even understanding what that was.

Nearly a decade after she had kissed the city with twenty-one-year-old lips and impetuous naivete, it all crashed. The struggle stopped at 8.06am on a late-March day: there was no longer any reason to live. No reasons for her for suns to rise. No one real. Nothing to move on to. And not a single love in that decade, not a touch that even fantasy could disguise. All this became clear.

Two hours later, after walking out on an ad agency shoot, she wandered semi-lucid along Fifth Avenue, into Central Park, and a number of times around Columbus Circle. By some circuitous route she ended up on a street bench, trying to make sense of her seemingly disembodied hands and feet that felt somehow not her own. All around her was distortion, shapes fearful and frantic, things dancing, rumbling, whirring. She tried to re-attach to the security of people, cars, buildings, trees, escape a chaos that was urging her to an end. But it felt futile to fight, to return to a life where the meter had already run out.

A while later she forced herself off the bench, trying to win back lucidity. Right then, the world felt like it had become too heavy on her shoulders. On another street, somewhere different, she began winning back willpower and the ability to question her condition. Was she expelling herself again, she asked, from a bigger boarding school? Cutting out from a world she could not relate to? The answer came, clear and certain: it was over. The New York game. The whole game.

A part of her protested, but the depth of loneliness extinguished all argument, blocked all retreat. There was no reason left to wish for one more day. Then, somehow, she was back by Central Park: cars and buildings again, people walking hounds, stick figures, cold-eyed doormen, a hurdy-gurdy grinder, but not one decibel of the clamour entered her ears. All around her, spongy pavements, skyscrapers blowing in the breeze, blues pouring from the sky, green-glowing bodies running through a Dali-like pastiche.

In the midst of this chaos her thoughts jumped to Róisín, her mother, a woman she didn’t know, pressing her to find a rationale for living. But other, stronger powers insisted her dreams were hopeless. Time to end time, she resolved. Quiet. Painless. Calm. Fix some things first. She dropped her gold Solvil-et-Titus watch into the gutter. A yellow taxi bounced to a stop in front of her, rocked her back to the pavement, the driver shouting, gesticulating.

Then, on that March day in 1990, one minute before noon on a digital clock bleeding red time, an alien stumbled into her impending denouement. A long-haired Englishman. An accidental bump in a publishing-house doorway, a client’s place of business into which she had wandered for no reason known to her then or later. A bump into a funny, intense apostle of good with an electric smile.

Over the next six days he built a new world. On the seventh, on his arm, she walked out on New York City. Restored. Left her studio, everything in it, with her two assistants, for them. Didn’t look back. Never went back. His name was Aidan Harper, the man with the short pony-tail whose photographs hung in her bedroom. That was four-and-a-half years ago, she said. She was thirty-one. She had seen his face for the last time three-and-a-half years ago.

Here, her voice dropped, her features turned trance-like. Previous fractures had resolved quickly, as though something in her compelled her to go on. This time, though, her hand repeatedly swept back her blond hair but no words emerged.

Tony’s hand reached across the table.

She pulled back. ‘I’ll lose my . . . I want you to hear.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I want to. For me. For you.’

* * *

It was incredible and beautiful what happened next, she told him. And terrifying. Like something out of a novel. Those seven days with Aidan Harper took away the city. And took away despair. In an altogether unimaginable way he gave her more faith in attaining joy than she had ever known. They spent every hour of that week in her apartment. Unplugged everything, even the phone, had food delivered, went out only twice, once to the zoo, once for a long stroll. She knew within minutes of their meeting that she had discovered a new reality. And soon to follow was a way of living that was foreign to anything she could ever have dreamed. His untidy, mismatched clothes, his silver mane, his awkwardness at nearly everything, all came with a rare heart. And brought with it, for her, another certainty: her Manhattan addiction was done. From that moment she would live only for what was true; she’d save dying for the day truth left. He brought love and wonders and wisdom from somewhere she had never travelled, never even known; he infused her with life. It was glorious, in all its seconds; not just him, as much as he was glorious, but his world.

Clients were screaming for transparencies, proofs, appointments. She didn’t care, really didn’t care. She had found her heart, maybe her soul, on a day when everything was worth nothing, no star shining.

By the end of the week her before-Aidan life, the agencies, magazines, the parties, the favour-takers, didn’t exist. Gone too were the distortions, the delusions, the brief but crazy notion that her limbs were detached from her body. Real joy had taken her beyond it all. All because of a silvery prankster who’d approached her with a British accent and a deadpan face, asking if she knew where one might buy an African elephant, deceiving her in her craziness into insisting the zoo was the obvious answer. And, yes, she did know how to get there; and, yes, she would have a free hour or two to accompany him. And she did. A funny encounter on a terrible day.

Unbelievably, she said, the future looked exciting and wonderful. And so it was. It was truly all those things. And that’s how it remained. Until he was gone. The only one who was real.

Her voice sank to a whisper, then silence, for moments. ‘Mind hearing this, Tony?’

He shook his head.

* * *

‘Aidan . . . He was killed.’

She returned to expressionless staring. His calling was to care for the poor, she told him, the sick, the down-trodden of the world. A relief worker, he cared for others like no human she had ever known. More than he cared about himself. In the pain of Africa and Central America, he told her, he had found himself. The day they met, he was in New York seeking funding, but also because he was ordered to take a break from eighteen-hour days in drought-ravaged Ethiopia. He held no ambitions for wealth or status; only higher causes commanded his talents. At the publishing house at which they’d accidentally met, he was being interviewed about famine and AIDS in developing countries. The media, to him, was a mere vehicle for generating funds for food, water, sanitation, medicines, and saving lives.

In that halcyon week together word came that he was to go to Iraq, not back to Ethiopia. There, in a Manhattan loft, they charted their journey together. It was 1990. Iran and Iraq were counting their dead after almost a decade of war with each other; the region was dangerous, potentially explosive. That didn’t bother him. Or her. She’d go with him, no question; she couldn’t imagine living outside his world, a world filled with hope, belief, love, the opposite of what had been hers.

At zero hour, flashing a bunch of papers and her out-of-date Irish passport, Aidan rushed them through tarmac security and aboard a chartered relief flight to Baghdad, via Amsterdam. In the air, fellow relief workers Bobby and Kathy Tracy made a Polaroid mug-shot of Lenny and glued it in place on an improvised ID document. And so, high above the earth,
Lenny Quin, Relief Worker, Ireland
was born. On landing in Baghdad, Bobby’s take-charge style and knowledge of protocol sailed them through every checkpoint and into the heart of the city.

She accompanied Aidan into village after village of noble people, grateful strangers in need of nutrition and medicines and hygiene systems, and later into searching out the sick in the underbelly of other cities and towns. Never had she felt more fulfilled, she said. Never more frightened. Never closer to being killed. Never more alive. Even the longest days seemed easy because they worked together, she and Aidan, her irreligious but holy English eccentric. Every moment counted, and she counted them. In that desolate land she was reborn. Life gave her back the bright light of day and the stars of night. It was overwhelming at times, in a positive sense. What she had thought of as romance bore scant relation to what she was experiencing. More than once in private moments she wept for having found inside herself what she realised was unconditional love, which she had never previously acknowledged nor felt capable of, and the glories it brought.