Eimear McBride - The Lesser Bohemians

Ah ha! Over the threshold. Into his room. Look, I’ve tidied, even cooked! Jesus, I say Even hoovered! What’s the occasion? Early birthday, he says setting me aside to pootle with pans, cigarette kept and skilfully managed in the corner of his mouth. Then chicken flipped. Hiss and spit. Are you annoyed about last night? No, you made your point a little dramatically perhaps but well. I kiss relief to his shirt and slide a hand up his leg. Brief he lets, then No! Dinner first, we’re being normal tonight. A quick one? Go on, he shoos My culinary skills are virtually nil. So catting a little, I wander across to push back the curtain and look into his road. Crown-flowered chestnut. Weed-cracked path. A livelier wreck than last winter implied. Nobly crumbling. Time has passed and it’s long since I first came here. I like your street. Changed a lot, he says All of those houses were bedsits once. It won’t be long before this one goes for luxury flats too. Not yet though, I say shutting out the streetlight. Well, he agrees Not tonight. Then the room becomes Here, and Mind it’s hot. At his desk — set as table — we use new plates, knives and forks, drink wine from new glasses. Make out civilised. Pretending nothing separates this night from its lineage of before.

Soon lax, dinner-sated, dissolving desiccated peas we nift through the tidy of scrape rinsing clean. Wet hands wiping. Pass to dry. Stack. Flop on his bed, top to tail, sipping wine. And I toe smooth wrinkles from his duvet, from his jeans, right to his No! No! socks yanked off Have Mercy! Mercy only if you sit up here on me. So I take the chance. Make playful. Lacing fingers. Kissing palms and I am light bright to the glint in his eye. I’ve been thinking about you all day, he says Sitting here writing by myself. What were you thinking? About how you smell just like the right thing. I stroke his hair. Its neat parting. Odd ribs of grey. Watch him arranging mine, so precisely as to invite a Why’re you doing that? Reminds me of What? Some girl from your wicked past? Rush to his face Yes no the first. Oh my God, you’re shy! Yeah well, he says Even I was a virgin once. Trace his chest. Kiss his collarbone. Were you mad about her? I really was, she was beautiful and good to me when I was a mess. And although the eyes close, making hard to read, I already know the word Mess is why we’re here so clumsy on into where it leads. Was it your mother who did that, made you a mess? Why do you say that? You once said you weren’t sorry she was dead. But then a thing I don’t expect, a click, like a tic, at the side of his mouth. Fuck, he says You going in for the kill tonight? then — trying to hide it — What the fuck must I look like. You look fine, I touch it You look perfect to me. Well, he says If I’m going to tell you those things I’m going to need some help. Anything, what? Take off your top. Done. I don’t think that’ll be enough. Take off your bra as well, and helps undo the clasp You have really beautiful breasts, and bringing to his mouth the tic dies away. Catch his eyes, and we begin again. Gets his jeans off. Opens me with his tongue. Every muscle in him relaxing and tensing. Getting to and going in. As though kissing can barely hold the line. You’re my beautiful you’re my A helpless smile like he knows I know what’s happening to him inside. And I do. Me too and I. Keep with him. Like as we have always been struggling to find the find the Come with me, he says and I, holding on as it rises, the high tide. Him and. live words I can’t make out. Cracking with the. Slam. other. Let each other. Out. Just being together. Being so fucking close. And I feel so much love for him in this moment I can’t imagine ever feeling anything else.

But.

Soon.

It’s the past again.

Pity the finished. We do and lie quiet remembering which body’s his, which is mine. Well, I’ve never experienced anything quite like that, he says and laugh as our legs twitch in time. Only part of each other for such a short while and move no more than have to. Until he slips out. Settles beside. Damp and this is how we try, listening to each other now and someone coughing in the road. Toilet flushing. Cars cars. Music above. Blood going round us. His vein like my own. But sooner than I’d like he gets from bed and lighting up smiles That did help, so what was the question again?

Do you have brothers and sisters? Why do you ask? Nosiness, do you? He refills my glass Halves on both sides but I don’t know most of them or even how many there are. Really? Really. Make a guess. Two boys on my mother’s, that’s easy enough. My father though, eleven? Twelve? Could be twenty. Might be more! Do you see him much? He occasionally comes scrounging when I’m up North on tour but not if I can help it, no. And your mother’s dead. He nods but rubs at his lip. And she was? Irish. What was she like? Difficult. Strange. Fucking nightmare actually — the tic again and he so conscious of it — Sure you want to know all of this? Yes, everything. Alright — he lights up and sits back opposite — So tomorrow, but in nineteen fifty-six, they had me.

And the long night begins.

Well, you know where she was from. The family came over after the war. Her mother died soon afterwards and the father was a doctor. Well off, I think, but I don’t know much. They were traditional Catholics. Pretty strict. There was a younger sister I never knew because she didn’t keep in touch. Or with her father who she always said was very tough. Then in her late teens she met mine, which was really terrible luck. He was older, twenty-two, twenty-three. From there, Sheffield, originally. I’m not sure what he did back then — being a man of mystery — but I think some kind of salesman. Apparently it was love at first sight, followed by a great deal of sneaking about because her father regarded the English as immoral, especially the men. An opinion somewhat justified by my father taking off with someone else the minute my mother got pregnant.

So they weren’t married then? Hmmm, he says

She was hazy about that, sometimes said they were but mostly avoided it. I did ask him directly once but he was uncharacteristically tight-lipped and rambled on instead about her sainted memory or some shit. By the time I was two though, they’d both ‘remarried’ so I’d say probably not. Whatever the truth, she never forgave him. I think she married my stepfather for spite — that said, back then, in the late fifties, she can’t have had much choice. He was a lot older — fifteen, sixteen years. Factory floor who’d worked himself up, a bit. And he was an alright bloke I suppose. I mean he took me on as part of the deal but the marriage went shitwardly fairly quick. Not rowing or violent. Nothing like that, just people living together, disliking in quiet. Certainly there was never any sign of love and the children she had with him she didn’t like much. Both boys, three and four years younger than me. We all shared a room and got on fairly well but we had to stick together back then.

When I ask What was she like? he gives a weird smile.

Intelligent and very angry. Those were the poles she ran between. The intelligence covered what the anger did but the anger did so many things the intelligence had to work very hard and ever harder as the years went by. The trouble for us was never knowing which way she’d go. Perfectly rational one moment then screaming, breaking things. It made getting through the fucking day a process of inching. Don’t say that. Go there. Mention, you know. I suppose the problem was this life she never wanted but couldn’t escape, the man she’d married and didn’t love, place she hated living and couldn’t leave, two children she’d no interest in yet was expected to rear. Then somewhere in the middle of all that was me who she did want and did love but couldn’t stop punishing for whatever my father had done. And all of that led to some very interesting behaviour as time went on.