The Living (16 page)

‘Cruel Cate :-)'

‘Vicious, I am.' Indeed, I felt pretty vicious. It wouldn't have killed him to check how I was.

There was silence for a little while, and then another buzz: ‘Room in your schedule for an evening with me, or will you be too busy being vicious?'

‘Think I can squeeze you in between drug deal this afternoon and regular Tuesday night dog fight. Come round to mine and we'll cook dinner? I'll abduct a small child; we can have it with 3 veg.' Oh, I liked this idiom. I could keep it up all day.

‘Sounds good to me. Can I bring anything? PS: I applaud your use of semicolons. 990'

That softened me a little. ‘Just ur l33t slicing skillz; I'll get provisions. 90'

‘There were no small children to be had,' I explained when Matthew arrived at my flat. ‘Not even for ready money.' We made our carbonara instead, elbowing each other around the tiny kitchen.

We ate sitting opposite each other, drinking the wine that Matthew had brought and talking about nothing. We were skirting, both of us. I didn't want this interval of ease to end.

‘Have you seen that car again?' he asked eventually.

‘I don't know. There was a car parked across the road this morning. But I didn't see its number plate.'

‘You didn't check it?'

‘No, I could not be arsed.' I groaned loudly. ‘I am so fucking bored of the car.'

Matthew frowned. ‘And no more disturbances in the flat?'

‘No.' I chewed on a nest of pasta, enjoying the salty zing of the bacon.

Matthew said, ‘How long have you been living here? Did you move in when you started at uni?'

I shook my head. ‘God, no. Two solid years of hellish commuting back and forth to Ardee. Uncle Fintan rescued me. Mum and Dad weren't pleased at all, to begin with.'

‘Why not? You were an adult – you needed a bit of independence.'

‘Yes, that was precisely their problem with it. I still went home every weekend until I graduated.'

‘Gosh.'

‘It's kind of normal here. You left home to go to university, didn't you?'

‘Yes, I went to Cambridge when I was eighteen.'

‘And what was that like?'

‘Oh, you know. Kind of normal, as you say.' He looked off into the distance. I thought I could feel the portcullis quiver, the ropes groaning in the effort to hold it open. ‘New city, away from my family. Nobody knew me. It was great. I used to tell the most outrageous fibs about myself. I went a bit mad, to be honest.'

‘Mad how?'

‘I don't know.' A note of frustration had entered his voice, as if he found it tedious to spell out these trivialities. ‘I drank too much and didn't go to my classes, if you must know. I was predicted to get a First, but I only just scraped through my first-year exams.'

‘Really?' I couldn't conceal my surprise. ‘You big rebel.' I pointed a finger at him. He frowned. It was not quite right.

‘Big idiot, more like. My father wasn't best pleased. I got used to stony silences at the dinner table that summer.'

‘Ha. We didn't have those. We had torrents of hostile cheerfulness.'

‘Now, that surprises me,' said Matthew, with a small twist of his head. ‘I'd got the impression that your home life was fairly … untroubled.'

‘Bland hell,' I said. ‘Every now and then a crisis, but always miles under the surface. My parents weren't the sort to confide in us kids.'

‘Seen and not heard?'

‘No, not as Victorian as that. I think they just have a very rigid sense of what children can handle. They'd never discuss grown-up stuff with us. It just wouldn't occur to them that you could.'

I was remembering Sunday lunches with my grandparents and all the aunts and uncles and cousins on Dad's side. We were the youngest of the cousins. The children would be put sitting round the kitchen table, with the plastic-handled cutlery and the old, dishwasher-bleached plates and glasses, while the adults had linen and china and silver in the dining room. Mícheál and I were usually made to lay the tables; I'd bags the dining room, for the pleasure of handling the best things. The cousins were loud and overbearing, violent and derisive with each other, contemptuous of people and places they had seen. I tended to keep quiet and hope the conversation wouldn't touch upon me.

‘What are you thinking about?'

‘Sunday lunches.' I gave a theatrical shudder.

He reached across to stroke my cheek. ‘It's OK, sweetness,' he said, saccharine-toned. ‘All better now.' The warmth of his fingers moving across my skin was electrifying.

After dinner, we curled up together on the sofa and escaped into the stylized elegance of
The Third Man
. I hadn't watched it in years. Matthew stayed the night, but despite the superficial ease of our interaction, despite the physical closeness, I couldn't relax. Though he'd been smiley and tactile all evening, somehow it felt like a deliberate decision on his part, rather than spontaneous desire.

I couldn't sleep. I lay in the dark, in the grip of this weird sense that the room (the idea, the history of the room) was disintegrating around me. The bed where I lay with Matthew could bear no relation to the bed where I had lain with others before him – and none of these spaces could have anything to do with the scene of my frantic, ludicrous escape the other night. Nor could those past selves be incorporated into the self that lay here tonight. A crowd of people, all Cate, battered on the door, the windows, but must be firmly resisted: curtains closed, bolts shot home. Tonight's self felt paper-thin – or worse, as if a breath of air, a draught even, would send her flying in swirls of ashen flakes.

Damn. I'd made myself cry. Torn between wanting Matthew to notice and hoping he wouldn't, I let two or three tears slide down my cheek and into the pillow, unwilling to move to wipe them away. I fought to keep my breathing regular – then blew my cover by sniffing.

‘You OK?' Matthew's voice was thick with sleep.

‘Yeah, I'm fine.'

‘You sure?' He brought his hand up and laid it on my shoulder, breaking the hold I had over myself. For the second time in as many days I turned to him sobbing, burying my face in his chest, feeling like a caricature, a crude figure cut out of newspaper. Matthew held me, stroked my back, murmuring ‘Shhhh' and ‘It's all right', and I could feel his embarrassment as if it were my own.

‘I'm sorry,' I said at last, when I could trust my voice again.

‘It's OK.'

We were strangers, suddenly, alarmed to find ourselves in bed together, naked, in a tableau of intimacy that was belied by our awkwardness, our wooden expressions.

We were silent for another while, then Matthew said, ‘Anything I can help with?' He sounded like a shop assistant.

I sniffed again, and thought about what to say. I wanted to puncture his calm; I didn't want to make myself vulnerable to his indifference.

‘Are you afraid they'll come back again?' he asked.

‘Kind of,' I said. ‘But … that's not it.'

‘Seriously, Cate, if there's anything worrying you, anything on your mind … maybe I can help.'

‘Oh, it's complicated.' I had no will for this.

‘I can do complicated,' Matthew said. ‘They taught me how at university.' A reassuring note of interest in his voice.

I rallied myself. Maybe we could have a conversation after all. Maybe. Don't rush it.

Then I meant to say, ‘I can't really describe it,' but what I said was, ‘I just don't feel real.'

My words hung in the air.

‘You don't feel real,' Matthew repeated, wooden again.

‘I don't know. I was lying here, thinking, and I felt as if I were disappearing – or dispersing, maybe – as if nothing I did had any weight in the world. I'm just a shadow falling on thin paper.'

‘I see what you mean,' Matthew said – then sensing me begin to recoil, added, ‘no, I mean, you're right: it is complicated.'

‘And you,' I found myself saying. ‘You're not real either.'

We let this assertion infuse. My heart beat hard, and my legs began to throb – fight or flight. I'd gone too far. Now was not the time. I drew breath to speak, to retract, but then Matthew said, ‘In what way?'

Onward, then, and hang the cost. I spoke quickly: ‘I barely know you. We're so intimate in some ways, and I sometimes feel there's a – a real understanding there, and yet at the same time we're so distant. Sometimes I feel as if I'm meeting you for the first time. We joke about how private you are, but it's more than that. You … you. I don't know. You're so reserved. You vouchsafe so little of yourself.'

He murmured, ‘Vouchsafe.'

‘Sometimes, I ask you something simple, like what you did today, or what your life at school was like, and I feel like I'm giving you the third degree. It's never just an easy exchange of information. It's as if … I'm out in the cold, trying to peek through the cracks in your curtains. Picking through your dustbins.'

He laughed, but kindly. ‘Come on, Cate, that's stalker talk.'

‘I know,' I said. ‘OK, it's not really like that.' I forced a laugh of my own. ‘I don't go through your bins. Often.' But I felt miserable.

‘Go back to the bit about disappearing,' Matthew said. Still calm, still interested –
and still evading like hell
. The habit must be absolutely ingrained.

I shook my head. ‘It's just that I have no handle on my life at the moment, what I'm doing, what I want to be doing. I get up in
the morning and go to work, and I come home and watch television, or read, or see you, or go to choir, and at the weekends I go out, go shopping, see a film, visit my family, and it all seems, just, flimsy. Like mist. And I'm floating along through everything, not thinking. Not engaged. Just empty. And it's been like this for ages. And I'm so tired of it.'

‘So … you
want
to disappear?' Matthew said.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘No. I don't. It's a frightening feeling. I want to wake up and be real again, really in this world. I'm sorry – I shouldn't be spouting on about this to you.'

‘Why not?'

‘Thank you for listening.'

Later, I awoke in the velvet dark from a dream filled with worry. I was alone. There was no sound from the bathroom. I slipped out of bed and padded to the half-open door. Matthew was standing by the sitting-room window, at an angle, looking out into the street.

T
HE WORRY PERSISTED
through the next few days, reified by a headache that wouldn't leave. I neither phoned Matthew nor heard from him. It was all unravelling. There was no comfort. He was lost. I was resigned.

Thursday rolled round again, and Carmina Urbana convened for a miserable rehearsal.
A Song of Ireland
, that jewel among peace anthems, continued to cause strife, with Daintree's impenetrable rhythms and gratuitous discords tripping us up every few phrases. Tom discovered a footnote explaining that the text had been
written in English and translated into Latin, which he pronounced crass and pretentious.

Diane was in bossy mode, the ice and brass in her personality to the fore. ‘This gig is
nine days
away,' she reminded us tartly, ‘and the piece is barely presentable. At this rate we're going to let ourselves down badly. Nobody wants that.' We'd been too arrogant at the start. Her remonstrations, of course, made us sing no better. Our tuning deserted us entirely.

‘All right,' she said at last, shaking her head. ‘Learn your notes, OK? Just learn them. I don't know how I can be any clearer. Seriously. I want to start putting some sort of shape on this, not to embarrass ourselves.' She sighed, squared her shoulders and gave us a stiff smile. ‘Right. Bernstein.'

The choir palpably relaxed.

After the break Diane handed out a piece for our set in Belfast, a new arrangement of ‘Danny Boy'.

Tom groaned, ‘Aw, Miss, do we have to?'

‘It's a special request,' said Diane.

‘But won't the Northern choir be annoyed if we nab their most famous song?'

‘It's all about the peace and tolerance,' Diane explained. ‘Seems they thought it would be good for us to sing music from each other's traditions. All right' – she gave the notes – ‘from the top.'

Matthew sang the melody, with consummate skill and dignity, while the rest of us provided a sludgy backdrop of
Ooh
and
Aah
. Diane barely conducted us at all, as we hummed and crooned
under Matthew's solo. His voice was smooth and lustrous with a pleasing depth of texture.

I grew tenser and tenser as we went on. I wanted to jump out of my seat and run away – Matthew's voice was too much: it came at me, surrounding and smothering, piercing and flaying. I missed my cue to join in the rousing finale, and limped along to the end, out of tune and harsh. The harmonies were trickier than they looked.

After we finished the read-through, Tom made a show of clearing a phlegmy throat and spitting. ‘The things we do to maintain diplomatic relations! No offence to your good self, Matthew,' he added. ‘You made the best of it.'

‘That's right, Tom,' said Diane. ‘We'll wow them. They'll love us.'

‘It is so ridiculous,' I heard Anja say to her neighbour. ‘This is not a man's song at all. People don't think about these things.'

At last the rehearsal came to an end. I helped put back a chair or two, keeping half an eye on Matthew to see would he come over to talk to me. We hadn't said a word to each other all evening.

I was standing near his coat, so we met as he came to put it on.

‘All right, Cate?'

We made our way towards the door.

‘You coming for a drink?' I asked, as we crossed the little hallway.

‘Not tonight,' Matthew said. ‘I'm for my bed, in fact.' He held the outer door open for me.