My Buried Life (3 page)

I shrug. First time in a long time. I don’t bother mentioning the underage drinking I did here in my teens, or how easy it was to get served with a slick of red lipstick and a bit of hairspray. Age limits were optional back then, or so it seemed. ‘More or less.’

‘I’d have noticed you if you’d been here.’

‘Your bar, is it?’ I swirl the last of my drink in the glass.

He flicks a tea towel over his shoulder. ‘Not a chance. Belongs to my parents, but I help out.’

I smile at him. I can’t help it.

He raises his brows. ‘What?’

I shake my head. ‘Nothing. Can a girl not smile?’

He leans on his forearms. They are burnished from being outdoors and the good summer. His white shirt is rolled to the elbows. I think about touching him, accidently, with my hands, and how his skin would feel beneath my fingers, but the thought is too much. I tip over that ledge, the one that changes everything in an instant. It’s always the same with alcohol: one minute I’m bright and shiny, the next the claw of dread reaches up and grabs me, dragging me down to the depths again. He says something, but I don’t hear. I look at him, but I can’t really see him any more. My damp jeans suck at my skin. My feet are freezing. I push away from the bar.

‘What, off so soon?’

‘Afraid so.’ I slide the coloured money towards him. ‘Maybe I’ll see you around?’ I hope my speech isn’t slurred.

He goes back to polishing glasses. A smile is aimed at his towel. ‘Maybe.’

Something is sticking into me. I blink. What happened? I’m face down on the living room floor. Chet Baker unspools on the stereo. I left him on replay, and his heartbroken voice swims in the empty night. The street lights glimmer through the unshuttered window, throwing bloated shadows across my thighs. Moving hurts me. Pain rolls through my head. I pull out what I’m lying on. The empty whiskey bottle. It’s only a half bottle, but so what? I bought it as a present for Maude. I don’t even like bourbon.

Waves of nausea crash at the back of my throat. I’m afraid to stir. In the end I have to, stumbling through the darkened downstairs, out the front door, down the granite steps until I’m kneeling over my mother’s cosmos, retching. Eventually it subsides and I come to a trembling standstill.

The smell of drenched earth is somehow soothing. At least it’s stopped raining. I rub my face against the spiky grass. The wet ground soaks through my clothes and I drag myself into a seated position.

I wipe my face with the edge of my sleeve. I’m still wearing the clothes from earlier. They’ve dried into me. I pull at the thin fabric, feeling it peel from my skin. The African drums in my head have retreated to a tedious pulse, and I rest my forehead on my forearms. It’s quiet, the traffic all but gone save for the odd taxi swishing alone through the empty night. The house is dark and silent, still towering above me in its imposing Edwardian manner. The red bricks of the terrace are dulled in the non-light. The long sash windows are shuttered eyes, keeping secrets hidden. It’s a beautiful sweep of architecture, the uniformity of the houses, the exact precision of red bricks, twin pillars flanking each door, the fanlight, curved like an orange slice, illuminating each hall. Dublin is full of beautiful houses, their periods of construction bookmarking the city’s history. They crop up everywhere, surprising the onlooker, elevating the town.

Maude’s room in the garden flat is without illumination. For that at least I’m grateful. I don’t want her seeing me like this, thinking that in all these years nothing has changed. I suppose nothing has, but I like to think I’m different too, in some ways.

I almost envy her grief. I’m like a fraud in comparison. It’s so easy for her to be sad. Thinking of my mother leaves me with the thin, bleak feeling of lingering regret. There had been so much to say, countless questions that I had sidestepped all my life instead of just asking her. I never even knew why she left my father, and by the time I’d got around to wondering he was long dead, buried in some traceless grave in the bleak midlands, another farmer succumbed to the land that bound him.

Grief is an abstract painting. Nothing is ever as it seems, and the shapes shift constantly. Mine is so old, so deeply buried, that I’m afraid to take it out. There are too many facets to it, too many ingredients that have gone into its making. I am afraid of it. It scares me to think too much because I don’t know how to approach it, never having dealt properly with it from the start. Andrew’s death I barricaded myself from, building walls from bottles of booze, submerging myself in writing, studying and drinking until I was finally able to leave. It was easy being in New York, refusing to come back to Dublin. But now I am here, and this infelicity, this wretched sadness, hangs itself over me once again, like cobwebs gathering around me. My brother’s ghost dwells everywhere in this damned house, chased out of corners each time a light is switched on, persistent as a migraine. I’ve never knowingly wished for solitude, but it’s all that seems to come to me, iron filings to my magnet, and now it is all I know.

Orphaned at 37.

And love, in all its manifestations, has galloped away.

CHAPTER 3

A
n Indian summer has suddenly replaced the rain. The blackberries at the end of the garden finally ripen with the combination of sun and showers. I lie in the old string hammock and watch the wasps gather and disperse among the berries. The garden appears stunned by the unexpected onslaught of heat. The birds, barely vocal, prefer to sit in the trees and preen in the shelter of the leaves. My mother’s late-summer roses, heat-starved, climb the trellising on the crumbling cinder walls, competing for space and heat. The herb garden Maude planted two decades ago struggles to escape its boundary of uneven rocks. Lavender, rosemary and mint sting the still, hot air. I’d forgotten the smell of home until this moment, and I inhale, the fragrances peeling back time.

Using my foot as a lever I rock myself back and forth, hoping for sleep. I’ve barely slept since my arrival, and even then, only when it’s been alcohol-induced. Exhaustion scratches my eyes and weighs down my limbs, lies like a wet rag over my brain. Leaving my bed in the mornings is an effort I do my best to avoid. Maude likes to talk, and with my head stuffed with a hangover and no safe topics of conversation it is easier just to drift around the house.

Maybe I shouldn’t have left New York so quickly. I grabbed at the first decent excuse to run. I mean, who could argue with a mother’s passing, or deny me the chance to bury my dead? Yet I miss it, that injured city, miss being surrounded by a thousand buildings that are surrounded by another thousand, and so on, almost into infinity. Lying on the grass in a park, I always felt my insignificance in comparison with all that architecture, instead of being bigger than everything else, which is how I normally feel. Too much inside my head, no getting away from the darkness that sleeps within me.

I plan to return to Manhattan. Dublin is only temporary, a holding place until I sort out my mother’s things, deal with the house, put my ghosts to rest. I miss New York. Maybe what I really miss is how it used to be, how I used to be in the city. I can live without the pounding of salsa from my neighbours’ apartment, the shouting in Spanish at three in the morning, the bantams crowing at dawn on the neighbouring roof. This year has been so difficult, and once again I’ve found myself wandering in my head, a fish out of water in the city I want to see as home. Everything changed. It started to become difficult to get out of bed in the mornings. The gloss turned dull; the excitement drained away. My usual bottle of California red and
tostones
at the Dominican bodega in the Bowery suddenly cost twice what I used to pay. Rising rents, Pepe the owner explained. Is all about the gentrification these days. They don’t care about no neighbourhood no more. All about the money. Man, they forcing us out soon. Isaac had wanted me to move further uptown, closer to NYU, closer to him, but after so much time in the East Village I wanted to stay, put down roots, be at home. Have somewhere to call my own. Even amid the clamour, the noise, the vortex of New York, I’ve sought out a sense of place, of belonging. It has never been quite within my grasp, but I’ve reached for it, and kept on reaching. Until everything fell apart, I was getting there. My sooty corner of the East Village, with its tricky layout of one-way streets and cul-de-sacs, where I no longer get lost. It may be still shabby, but it’s mostly residential, and I have finally started to settle, for the first time in my life. Tony, the Chinese mailman, knows my name. I am on nodding terms with the woman who runs the bagel place across the street from my building. The Australian barista knows I like my espressos double, long and hot. It takes time, all of it. I’ve invested my time, and for what?

My mother’s voice doesn’t help. Even in death, I hear her. She barely needs to speak: just one lift of an eyebrow, one brief flare of her nostrils, and I am put in my place. I could cover my ears, tell her to leave me alone, but it wouldn’t work. It never has.

A shadow blocks the light from my face. I shade my eyes and look up. Maude stands over me.

‘I thought you might like a drink.’

I always like a drink. It’s one of my less admirable traits. Thankfully, to my great-aunt’s mind there are no alcoholics, only heavy drinkers – heavy drinkers who can control how much they consume and can stop at any point. She doesn’t judge me for my excesses; I do enough of that myself.
My name is Eva and I’m an alcoholic.
Squinting up at my great-aunt I smile at her, take the cold glass and sip cautiously.

‘Thanks.’ It is disgusting. Maude likes to mix cocktails, but no one has ever shown her how to do it properly and everything ends up a sweet, sludgy mess. I’m not fussy, however, and she knows that.

‘Do you know what this one’s called?’ Maude squeezes herself into a garden chair, a green-and-white striped seat that barely accommodates her. She flaps a handkerchief at her throat. ‘My goodness me, it’s hot!’

The drink is thick and excessively pink. A wasp buzzes nearby and I swat at it. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Poet’s Dream!’ Maude toasts me, sips at her drink.

‘Is that a joke?’

‘Not really. I made it especially for you.’

I shake my head. We smile at each other.

‘The book?’ I ask.

She sips again. ‘The very book.’

Maude has a book of cocktails and has shaken her way through it diligently. The book is ancient, a sale find, its pages faded with age and wavy from spilled drinks. I raise my glass to her. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome, Eva. And who knows, maybe it will start you writing again.’

I cut her off before she launches into a discussion of my writing. I talk about that with no one, least of all my 89-year-old great-aunt.

I used to write, you see. Back when I was a functioning person with time flung out before me, a great big carpet of it, all those shiny hours and days and years stretching out in front of me, and words, more words than I could possibly put down on paper, bouncing around inside my head.

Because there were so many words, too many of them, I kept it simple. I wrote poems. Books of them. Hundreds of poems, written in notebooks, on random sheets of paper, sometimes even on the backs of till receipts, any paper surface that accepted ink. I wrote all the time, mostly to escape my home life, although I can only appreciate that now that I’m able to look back on it all. Poems kept me steady, allowed me to speak without a shake in my voice, let me find my own corner of the unsteady world I inhabited, the girl with the pen in the house of shadows.

I’ve always been subliminally aware of the huge darkness from which I’ve sprung. My mother was the wellspring of it all as far as I could tell, but she never told me anything about it, never felt she owed me an explanation of any sort. My mother, all my life, remained several leagues apart from me. Occasionally, if I sat still enough and observed her, in quiet moments I could almost see waves of secrets rolling off her, but that was the closest I ever got to knowing her. She kept herself apart from me deliberately, and she scared me too much to allow me seek the answers. She would pause in her digging, or place the rake aside, and in the stillness that followed she would rub her upper arms or smoothe her hair off her face. And I believed that if I could ever catch those secrets before they hit the ground and disappeared forever, I could claim some part of her for myself. Like sand, her secrets always slipped through my fingers. I never had a chance.

‘It’s good to have you home, sweetheart,’ Maude says, taking another sip of her drink. She touches my knee, her fingertips rough from decades of gardening. Her hand trembles, and I feel like crying.

‘Thanks, Maudie.’ I want to keep her hand there, hold on to the tremulous affection, press her to me, but the moment passes and Maude’s hand returns to fanning the handkerchief. The wasps, driven insane by the dual seduction of sticky pink drinks and ripened berries, buzz around us. We retreat into the privacy of our heads, but I feel nicer around Maude than I have in a very long time.

CHAPTER 4

I
begin to run again. It’s been a long time since I threaded the laces of my running shoes and pounded city streets, but a mixture of boredom and frustration forces me into filling some of the empty hours. Now on this hot morning I wind my way through the village, dodging delivery vans and prams filled with babies, destinationless, past the unfamiliar cafés and patisseries, the sleek office fronts and estate agents. Early traffic strangles the hot air with oily fumes, acrid and burning in my nose and throat. I duck into a delicatessen to avoid another girl from school, this one pushing a double buggy, full of purpose and determination. I have no need of news about people I haven’t seen for twenty years, or questions about what I am doing. Even more, I must circumvent sympathies proffered by those who mean well.

Outside one of the few establishments that I actually recognise, the small fruit and vegetable shop with its striped awning and boxes of fruit, I stop. I lean against the wall and catch my breath. Sweat wets my neck, pools between my breasts. Even the wall is hot beneath my hand. Traffic snarls on the road in front of me, and a flurry of horns vibrates on the muggy air. I peel my T-shirt from my back, and as my breathing slows I look around me. The fruit is exhibited as it was when I was a child, the apples wrapped in purple tissue paper, the prices on small white signs behind each tray. I grab an apple from the display. Holding it to my nose, I inhale its clean scent. Fruit that fresh is hard to come by in New York City. Even at the market in Chelsea, with its artisan stalls and buskers, the fruit always seems a day out of date, especially in summer, when flies cloud the sweet produce and the smell of vegetables can make your stomach heave. I bite. The apple is as I’d expected, strong and sweet. It cracks against my teeth and juice squirts onto my chin.

As I turn to go inside and pay, a man exits the shop. We smack into each other, my cheek colliding with his shoulder. The apple tumbles from my hands, rolls onto the road and is obliterated by a passing car. Juice sprays itself in a foot radius around the black wet patch on the melting tarmac.

I open my mouth to shout at the man who almost dropped his two large paper carrier bags on impact. New Yorkers always shout first, breathing in the maxim with the toxic city air – always blame the other person, never yourself, and never apologise. Before I have time to articulate a syllable, the bags are lowered and an apologetic smile is replaced with the surprise of recognition.

‘Hello! Jameson no ice, right?’

The barman from the evening of the funeral. Sean, I’d heard someone call to him. Sean, without his beer-stained white shirt and bartender’s black trousers, with the same longish hair and a smile that appears to be aimed right at me. He doesn’t seem to mind that I see him looking me up and down, that lazy once-over that a man twice his age wouldn’t possess the confidence to perform. I wonder what he sees. I touch my hair. Still tied back.

I lower my eyes. A car, its owner frustrated with the immobility of the traffic, honks its horn behind me, the sound cutting the air between us. Others follow suit, the cacophony rendering conversation impossible. Such impatient drivers, such intolerance. Everyone racing to go nowhere. It’s as bad as New York. The distraction gives me a moment to gather myself.

He looks good. In another life I would have allowed him to take my hand over the bar, draw me into the vortex of chemistry. I fight the impulse of attraction. I have no space in my overcrowded head for dwelling on an attractive man. I have the house to sort out, my return to New York to organise, my life to get back on track.

And yet I’m lonely. It’s been a while since Isaac. I’ve needed the space I’ve created around me, but I’ve been too good at shunning people, too exacting in my desire to be left alone. Once, hesitation would not have crossed my mind. Men have been the easiest way around the black spots in my head, and I’ve willingly given myself over to them. Glancing at Sean in the midst of the car-horn-induced fracas, I wonder how he would feel against me, how warm his skin might be. His lips are full, flaking slightly. I push his shirt up in my mind, place my mouth on him.

‘So?’ He regards me. His shirt is fraying faintly at the collar. It’s old, denim, and open to the waist. He wears a white vest underneath, and his jeans are low on his hips. Definitely fifteen years younger. At least. He has the flat stomach of a boy and the undentable confidence to show it off in ribbed white cotton. His arms are strong around the paper bags of groceries, but it’s his hands that grab most of my attention, large, capable hands, with clean nails and smooth skin.

I blink. ‘What?’

‘Are you on for getting some coffee? You look like you need one.’

‘I’ve been running,’ I begin, by way of explaining my appearance.

‘Relax. It’s cool. I like the dishevelled look. Not too many can get away with it.’ He nods at the café. ‘Coming?’

I have to say no. It’s too soon. Sure, I want coffee, and maybe him, but I also need to be careful. ‘Okay.’

The café is housed in what had always been O’Brien’s butcher’s shop. In the place of skinned carcasses, displays of chops and sawdust on the floor are clean, sleek lines and an industrial-sized espresso machine. The smell of coffee beans is powerful, but more than that, the pull of the man holding the door for me weakens my resolve to stay away. I fill a glass with water from the tray set beside the till for this purpose. Not quite cold enough, but I’m so thirsty it doesn’t bother me.

Sean’s eyes appraise me as I refill the glass. ‘Sporty, eh?’

‘Hardly.’ Sport is one great arena in my life that slides by, unexamined. Running for sanity doesn’t count as sport.

We sit at the window table. The wooden venetian blinds are closed against the luminosity of morning, which still manages to sneak in through the gaps, striping the table with thin bars of saffron light. The door is wedged open, and the heat from outside elevates the temperature. Awkwardness seizes my throat, and I rub my palms against my thighs. My running shorts, an old pair I salvaged last night from the attic, are too short, and I’m conscious of how dusty I must look, how hot and grimy I am from my five-mile run through the traffic-crammed streets. I feel old, too old to be sharing a table with this boy. I stir sugar into my espresso, a spoonful too much. It gives my hands something to do besides tap nervously on the table, or sweat invisibly. Music plays in the background, something loud and guitar-driven. Its interruption is welcome and it masks my self-consciousness. I fiddle with the empty sugar packet, folding it several times. The coffee disappears in a few swallows. What I’d really like is a whiskey, but it’s too early to drink in front of others.

Sean talks, and I watch his hands. They’re beautiful. I see Raphael painting his Madonnas and his angels with those hands, the power beneath the tanned skin, all those bones and muscles working overtime. Three leather bracelets loop his right wrist. A chunky silver ring circles his left thumb.

He’s an animator. Of course he is. Somehow, in the wedge of time between my leaving and my return, job descriptions in Ireland morphed into something infinitely more appealing. Gone are the generations of Irish teachers and bank workers, civil servants and insurance company employees, with their pensions, their reliability, their permanent jobs. In their place are the computer crowd, the artists, the young entrepreneurs. Recessions find it hard to penetrate the membrane of confidence and fake tans, the easy money and easier successes. I am exhausted by the gap in our experiences, aged by bridges I’ll never cross. But he’s beautiful, and I’m finding it hard to resist.

‘So, what brings you home?’

Is it? Home, I mean? Dublin hasn’t felt like home in many years. ‘Family things.’ No mention of my mother. I don’t want her here, spoiling the moment. ‘You know.’

‘Such as?’

I wave the question away. ‘Just some legal stuff. Nothing interesting.’

He points to his cup as the waitress clears the table next to ours. ‘Would you like another?’

I push my tiny cup towards the centre of the table. ‘Why not?’

‘So look, are you busy? I’ve a bit of free time on my hands, and I only live around the corner.’ He rubs his shoulder. His ribbed vest moves. A tattoo snakes over his skin. It looks like writing. Curiosity urges me to look closer, but I sit back in my chair. I shrug. ‘Not really.’ A tiny skip of excitement quickens my nerves. ‘I need to find a job of some sort though.’

‘What do you do?’

Explaining academic work is rarely easy, which is why most of us simplify and say we teach. ‘I work in a university. Research, some teaching, that sort of thing.’ I miss it. The new semester started this week. The beginning of the year is my favourite part, the new courses, new books and students, the possibilities. So much to find out, untried lecture material to test out on unsuspecting undergrads. My plans for a book on women in literature, which I must now set aside for a while. Thank God I didn’t mention the idea to Isaac.

‘That’s cool.’ He sounds like one of my undergraduates. He could be one of my undergraduates. My God, what am I thinking, sitting in a shaded corner of a café with this boy?

‘It’s actually really interesting,’ I offer by way of defence. Isaac once proposed that the reason so many academics marry each other is because they never have to explain what they do, the conferences, the urgency of new material, the pressure to publish. To outsiders it can seem pointless, a luxury in a world that can little afford it.

It is not without bitterness that I reflect that Isaac himself did not find it necessary to marry an academic. There was no difficulty in pledging himself to life with a corporate heiress. No brownstone in Brooklyn for them, no commute over the George Washington Bridge each morning from the suburbs.

A phone beeps from the depths of one of Sean’s grocery bags. He pulls it out, slides a finger across the screen. ‘Sorry,’ he mouths at me, pointing to the phone. As I wonder if it’s a girl he’s speaking to, he rolls his eyes at me, whispers ‘Work.’

I shouldn’t be relieved, but I am. My hand sneaks to my hair. Thankfully it’s still tied up. If Sean were to see it loose, see the mess it really is, he’d make his excuses and leave.

I wish I had a sweater, anything to cover up this ridiculous T-shirt and outdated shorts. My fingers drum quietly on the table. The espresso has made me jittery, the molecules of caffeine marching up and down my veins. A woman squeezes past me to get to a vacant seat.

‘So, listen, I have to split.’ Sean rummages in his pockets for change.

Disappointment prickles. I quell it. What was I expecting? He’s a child for God’s sake. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

He waves away my thanks. ‘You’re welcome.’ He grins at me. ‘It was good running into you. Unexpected.’

Sean produces a pen from one of the many pockets in his jeans. ‘Give me your number. We could meet up some time, if you like.’

I recite the digits of the home phone, embedded as they are in my memory, and remind myself to get a cell phone. If I am to be here for a while, the Bakelite in the hall won’t suffice. Sean transcribes them across one of his paper bags.

‘I run the same route every day,’ I venture.

But Sean is already gone, hoisting his bags in his arms, sliding his thumb over the phone again. Someone shouts out his name as he leaves. High fives and fist bumps are exchanged outside in the street. I turn from the window. The coffee machine shrieks. The waitress drops a cup. It shatters and she swears. I can’t place her accent. Eastern European, maybe.

I wish I felt easier around strangers. I wish I could just let them look at me and allow me to unsee my mother’s loathing. I should have written my own number on his paper bag without being asked. Maybe even added an exclamation mark or two, or a smiley face.

My espresso is cooling, but I sip it anyway. It palpitates in my blood cells, a caffeine high that can be stronger than drugs at times.

The café fills up, the late-morning crowd weaving in and out. A mother parks her pram in a space near me. The urge to touch the sleeping baby is so strong that I stand up and head for the door. I thank the waitress as I pass her. She is filling bowls with paper packets of sugar, cleaning tables, stacking cups. She looks tired.

The sun spreads warm fingers on my back as I walk home. My keys jangle on a cord around my neck. The day lolls in front of me, clean, bleached, an empty sheet on which I have no words to write.