My Buried Life (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

I
t’s still bright when I awaken. I roll over and lie on my stomach. The whiskey is gone and only the melted ice remains in the bottom of my mother’s cut-glass tumbler. I drain it anyway. I pass my hand over my hair, damp from the bath.

The walls are painted yellow. The wardrobe is new, something plain, Scandinavian, blending with the clean paintwork. The blind is Roman. It looks handmade. Probably Maude. The shutters are white, restored fully and folded neatly to the side. The sash window is open twelve inches. It was swollen from summer rain when I struggled to push it open earlier. I drag my aching body from the bed to the window. The sun has found a gap in the clouds, and the garden is washed in a torrent of sparkling light, the sodden vegetation a lush, verdant green. The flowers, my mother’s prized blooms, are everywhere. They spill out of pots, scramble up walls, wind themselves around the trunk of the apple tree at the end of the garden. The effect is startling, and after the grey Irish morning the kaleidoscopic colour lifts my mood. A blackbird trills out of sight in the garden. Rain still weeps from the gutters. These are sounds I haven’t heard in over a decade, not from this exact spot. Dripping gutters and birdsong. The soundtrack of this bedroom. Pushing away from the window frame, I look around. There’s nothing of me in the room I’d slept in till I went to New York. The faintest indents on the walls, smoothed and painted over, whisper of the shelves that once housed all my books, inexpertly erected by my brother in a fit of DIY enthusiasm, one of his many short-lived spells. The wall is cold under my fingers, the paint as dry as a chalkboard.

My suitcases are half-exploded bombs along one wall. I pull on a long-sleeved T-shirt and an old pair of jeans, all frayed knees and bleach-splotched unevenness. They should have been thrown out years ago, but they were my brother’s. The denim is worn almost paper-thin, and they’re as soft as felt on my hurting skin. I stagger ever so slightly. Nausea swirls, and I lean against the bed for support. I reach for the empty glass then let my hand drop. I ache for a drink.

Only the rustle of newspaper is audible. I sigh. I’d hoped to have the house to myself. Maude sits, still in her funeral clothes, her back to the window, reading glasses slipping down her nose. A rug is tucked around her lap. Her tights pool at her ankles.

‘There you are!’ She is older, so much older than I remember. Funny how I only notice it now. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’

I slip into the armchair by the fire. The blackened grate is cold, blank. Sticks are piled neatly to the side, a box of matches on top, waiting for the first fire of the autumn. My mother obviously hadn’t planned on dying quite so suddenly. My hands shake. I sit on them so my great-aunt doesn’t notice. The drinks tray sits in the same corner as always. It’s a struggle to stay in my seat, even though I know it holds only an ancient sherry and something else congealed and sticky in a bottle with a withered label. I don’t have high standards though. Anything will suffice.

My name is Eva and I’m an alcoholic.

‘What happened, Eva? Where did you go? We waited and waited for you.’ Maude puts the paper aside, ready to talk.

I pull at a hole in the knee of my jeans. ‘I felt sick.’

If Maude thinks otherwise, at least she doesn’t say so. ‘Well, it was a lovely send-off. Esther would have been happy.’ Maude’s eyes fill and she dabs at them with the corner of a tissue. She looks worn out. A tremor in her hand is barely discernible. I wonder if she’s noticed it herself. Probably. ‘Poor Esther.’

Rain spatters the window behind Maude, a flat sound in the hush of late afternoon. I spot a photo of myself on the mantelpiece. I remember Maude taking that, and her quiet pride. In it, I am holding up a book, smiling. I hardly recognise myself. Maude sees me, and nods at the frame.

‘You were so beautiful then. Look how young you were, 18, and all that success.’

It’s like looking at another person. My hair falls almost to my waist, the weight of it diminishing the curl. My face holds its extra flesh, that padding of youth, without a hint of self-consciousness. The photograph is fading, the colours a shade paler than they were.

‘You’re still beautiful, Eva. You need to remind yourself of that every now and again.’

I stand. ‘I’m going for a walk.’ I know what’s coming and I don’t think I can bear to listen. The last thing I want to hear is how I could improve my appearance. I know what I need to do: stop drinking and get my hair cut. Not now though. Too much for now.

‘Now?’ She gestures at the window behind her. ‘But it’s starting to rain again.’

‘I don’t mind. I just need to get some air.’

There’s no room for argument. I’ve been living alone for too long to debate the insanity of going out in the rain. I don’t have a coat other than the one I wore earlier, now draped in damp folds over the end of the banisters. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to justify my actions.

I stand on the top step outside the front door. A woman I don’t know screeches her sports car to a halt in the driveway next door, popping gravel under the fat tyres. She takes the granite steps at a pace dictated by her black skirt and a pair of skyscraper shoes, a laptop bag slim and expensive in one hand, a folder in the other. The expression on her face is as tight as her skirt. Our eyes meet. Instantly she looks away and slides a key into the front door. A phone trills as she disappears. This must be the new neighbour Maude mentioned. Terribly successful. Loaded, no doubt. Something about the law, a huge salary, a partnership by the age of 30.

I remember Kathleen, our previous neighbour. Kathleen, kind and open, who allowed Andrew and me to pick her loganberries each summer and mind her cat when she visited her daughter in London. Early on the morning of Andrew’s funeral I had sat, numb, on the couch in the front room. The cold grate held that faintly depressing look of burned ashes and stray matches, the charred remnants of newspaper twists. Something, a feint
tap tap tap
on the front door, seeped into the hush of the oyster dawn. Kathleen, tired of crying, had taken a duster and a bottle of Brasso and was polishing the brasses on our front door, readying them for the mourners who would later congregate to eat sandwiches and pass around cups of tea.

That old, familiar crush of oppression gathers like a storm cloud over me. If I had a car and an infinite stretch of open road I would jump behind the wheel and zoom away. But this is Dublin, and there are no open roads, just these tangled streets, snarled and knotted with traffic. I tighten my ponytail and button my cardigan. Already I need to get away. Old habits don’t fade.

Rainwater is pooled everywhere. I step into a puddle and it runs into my canvas trainer, shocking my sockless foot with how cold it is. God, what a climate. Even New York, with its winters that shred you, can’t compete with Ireland for grey skies and rain that spills like paint from upturned cans.

The street is choked with cars. An old man fails to move on time and the traffic lights turn orange. A cyclist sprays me with water. I jump out of the way, but not in time to avoid the dirty water that soaks my legs. A bus rattles by, its windows bleeding condensation, its occupants inert, expressionless.

What has happened to Dublin? I pass a row of shops that, when I was a child, housed the butcher, the newsagent and a dry cleaner. Now there is a coffee house, a shop selling nothing but stationery and a lingerie store. I pause at the window. The display of lace and frills amuses me. I shade my eyes and look in, but a movement behind the glass catches my eye. A girl I was in school with leans against the counter. The shop is empty of customers. I move quickly away. I’m not interested in bland conversation, the vacant chatter of inquisition.

Just like the journey from the cemetery, nothing is familiar to me any more. The vaguely shabby village of my childhood has mutated beyond recognition: with its wine shops, copious eating places and specialist food shops it’s no longer a poor relative of the city centre. Despite some vacant shopfronts and three or four restaurants that have recently closed down, Ranelagh gives off an aura of new money, and like new money it glitters like a rhinestone in platinum.

The rain is sudden when it starts again. It tickles my skin, soaking my clothes; it blurs my vision. It’s like looking at the world through plastic. After the impenetrable heat of a New York summer, the cool that comes off the downpour is more welcome than I would have thought. My wet trainers slap the pavement. I walk on.

In the park the ducks swim in circles, oblivious to the rainfall that silvers their feathers and pockmarks their pond. The sky is dark, too dark for so early in September. The old bakery beyond the walls is gone, replaced by more apartments. They hang their ‘For Sale’ signs out like flags, small flashes of colour in the grey.

My brother and I as children had fed the ducks every chance we got. We fought over the bread and over who would feed the last piece, childish arguments that never lasted.

Andrew. My beautiful, fractured brother. It’s still almost too much to think of him.

That’s where my grief lies, not among spring bulbs and straw hats, but where my brother is, and in that shadowed room there’s no space for mourning my mother, no bed upon which I can drape my tears. Andrew would have grieved for her. He would have known how to arrange the furniture, how to give his sorrow space to breathe. Me? I just locked the door and threw the key in the nearest well, not waiting to hear the splash of black water before it was lost forever.

Drops spill noisily off the leaves, gunmetal in the grey September evening, slicing through my thoughts. I turn away from the ducks and their relentless circling.

I haven’t been in this pub since university, and even then it was never a regular haunt – too close to home for me to reach brute oblivion in peace. I prefer the scruffier version of the Dublin pub, where decades of smoke and spilled porter stain the upholstery and darken the floorboards. No one bothers trying to pick you up or cares what clothes you wear. I cut through the huddle of smokers at the door, wreathed in the brittle cloud of their own addictions.

It’s busy inside. Office workers celebrate the end of the working day, commuters from the dreary new suburbs seek refuge from the weather and the traffic and their negative equity. I slink to the bar, avoiding eye contact with strangers. I shed my drenched cardigan, drop it on a stool. My hair is stuck to my shoulders like tar, and my skin is visible through my saturated shirt. Not my finest moment.

A guy polishes glasses behind the beer taps. He raises his eyebrows.

I pull a high stool close to the bar. ‘Jameson, no ice. A double.’ I touch an old water stain on the polished wood.

‘Would you like a towel with that?’ A brief smile, as sudden as starlight.

‘I might just say yes.’

He slides the glass to me.

The smoky warmth of the drink is like crushed velvet on my tongue. I want to spin it out, make it last, enjoy it, but it’s impossible. I sip and sip until it is gone, some feeling finally edging back into my cold limbs. I signal for another. It disappears in the same way. A dish of olives sits on the polished bar in front of me, Greek, all wrinkles and shiny black skin. Another change I missed. I wonder what the seasoned drinkers, the hardened alcoholics, make of this, the provision of olives in their pubs? It must seem as foreign as shops dedicated to selling only lingerie. Dublin has been nudged further along the scale of capital cities. Despite the collapse, it plays its part well.

The barman picks up my glass. ‘Another one?’

‘No thanks.’ I put my money on the bar. A shout goes up behind me. A group of males wearing football shirts with the logo of some multinational enlarged across the chest slop pints over each other in congratulations at points scored. A mute television beams a rugby match into this corner of Dublin. It flickers distractedly on the wall.

‘It’s on me.’

I pop an olive in my mouth. ‘Why?’

He shrugs one shoulder. ‘No why. Just thought you’d like one.’ He winks, and somehow he manages to make it look cool. ‘Given the state you’re in, and all that.’

I laugh. ‘All right. I’ll have another.’

As he pours the drink the barman holds my attention for a second longer than is necessary. I blink and focus on my glass. A soapy bubble of excitement bursts somewhere in my stomach. I swallow more whiskey, glance at him, smile when I see he hasn’t yet looked away. I catch myself, sort out some money and place it on the bar. The notes of this unfamiliar currency are wet and flattened from being in my pocket.

‘Another?’

I cover the glass with my hand, hiding the remaining whiskey from view. ‘Thanks, but no.’ Not having eaten all day, I can feel the effect of the booze in the languid stillness that has crept into my head. ‘Not unless you want to carry me home.’

He laughs. ‘Mightn’t be the worst thing I’ve done today.’

He has longish hair and it falls over one eye in a way that is absurdly appealing. I think his eyes are green, but I’m afraid to look too closely. He’s out of place here. He should be waxing a surfboard on a beach in Malibu or leading hikes up high-altitude mountain trails. He’s probably fifteen years younger than I am, but it’s hard to ignore the smile and the way his hair falls. I place my palms flat on the bar. My wet jeans are cold and stiff against my skin, but the Jameson is working its magic and the world is starting to look less sharp around the edges. I loosen my hair, which is drying in a clump on my shoulders, and smoothe my T-shirt. That warm feeling, the high I get from alcohol right before I’m drunk, intoxicates me. I straighten up on the stool. My sodden jeans no longer bother me. I sip at what remains in the glass. The desperation has passed, that need I have to drink, drink, drink. It’s like swimming against waves, pushing back a heavy wall, and then the relief of breaking through into clean air, bright light. It covers me, and I’m filled with benevolence towards the world.

The barman pushes a fresh dish of olives towards me. ‘So, your first time in here?’