Belinda McKeon - Solace

Joanne shook her head.

‘Turns everything yellow. Not to be recommended. Or, say, you burn your fingertips, and suddenly nothing feels the same. And what I want to know is, how capable are we, really, of dealing with it, of taking it up and synthesizing it into a new concordance, a new idea of what’s normal? Not only on these small scales, but on much larger scales — on a global scale, if I have the guts and the longevity to get around to addressing that.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Here I am again, rattling on.’

‘No, no,’ Joanne said. ‘It does sound fascinating.’ And the way he glanced at her then, with a half-smile, and the way his eyes fell away again to the ground made her want, for a moment, to cry.

‘It’s something to do,’ he said, and he looked down to the plastic bag she was carrying, the groceries and the wine she had bought in Centra. ‘But I can see you are busy,’ he said. ‘I won’t keep you any longer from your night.’

‘It was really lovely to see you,’ Joanne said, and they shook hands, and he offered to see her as far as her door under the shelter of his umbrella, because it was raining now. But Joanne said there was no need, that it was only a drizzle, that she lived only a couple of steps away. At the house, as she opened the front door, she could hear Mark in the sitting room, talking to Sarah. She found herself impatient for the sight of him. Her heart was jumping in her chest as she came down the hall.

*

‘I thought about joining a monastery once,’ Mark said, as they had dinner. Somehow, they had got to telling each other the hymns they’d been forced to learn in primary school, and he’d made a joke about how he hadn’t expected to spend their third date talking about ‘Ave Verum’, and how maybe for their sixth they should go to Glenstal Abbey for a mass at dawn. And now this. Which was presumably another joke. But he wasn’t laughing, and he didn’t seem to be expecting Joanne to laugh. All of his concentration seemed to be focused on getting an equal amount of meat and potato and mushroom on to his fork. He chewed slowly.

‘I’m serious,’ he eventually said.

‘Fuck off,’ she said, and it came out sounding harsher than she had meant it to. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I read a piece about a monk from Glenstal in the paper, when I was an undergrad, and I thought it sounded pretty cool,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to bother with the religious side of it. I just wanted to be somewhere where nobody could reach me. Where I could just get on with doing what I wanted to do. I liked the idea of this very silent, steady routine.’

‘You wanted to be a monk ? So. . are you religious?’

He shook his head. ‘Not even slightly.’

‘So you wanted to be an atheist monk.’

He shrugged. ‘I doubt all the monks in there are that cracked on religion,’ he said. ‘The guy I was reading about spends most of his time writing.’

‘Writing what?’

‘Chick-lit.’

‘Ah, come on.’ Under the table, she hit his knee with hers. ‘You’re taking the piss.’

‘No, no, no, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I mean, I am about the chick-lit. But I just liked the idea of this guy, writing away in there without anyone to bother him.’

‘Right.’

‘And then I decided I didn’t want to get up every morning two hours before dawn. And that I’d get my essays written between nights on the tear the way everyone else did.’

‘And that you wanted people to bother you.’

He laughed. The laugh of someone who hadn’t thought of it that way before. ‘I suppose,’ he said, looking at her. ‘Some people.’

They sat in silence for a moment. In the sitting room, Sarah roared with laughter at something on the television.

‘Should we bring her another glass of wine?’ Mark said. ‘Or should we go up and join her?’

‘No,’ Joanne said. Often, before, when she and Sarah had invited somebody around to the house, dinner for two had turned into drinks for three, and it had always been a laugh, but not tonight; tonight, that was not what she wanted. ‘Let’s stay here for a while.’

‘Thanks for dinner,’ he said, and she smiled at him. On his forehead, between his brows, she noticed three pock-marks. Like the skin had once been a pool of something; like it had bubbled as it dried.

‘You scratched your chicken pox,’ she said, putting her fingers to the marks.

‘Oh,’ he said, and he breathed out a laugh. ‘Yeah. My mother was raging with me. She said she’d buy me a new tape if I didn’t scratch them.’ His fingers were over hers, stroking her hand. ‘But I couldn’t resist and I scratched them when she went into town to get me the tape. By the time she got back they were gone.’

‘You brat,’ Joanne said, and she traced her fingers over his lips. ‘What was the tape?’

‘Billy Joel,’ he said. ‘She came in and took one look at me and pegged the tape at me in the bed. I listened to it for weeks.’

‘And you got holes in your head for keeps.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Ah, well.’

She stood and gathered their empty plates, taking them to the sink as he refilled their glasses with wine.

‘You don’t have to go down home this weekend, do you?’ she said, sitting back down.

‘Not for another while.’

‘They don’t mind?’

‘They mind but they’ll manage.’

In the pub the night before he had talked to her about the farm and about his father. It was a story she recognized. It was her brothers’ story, her cousins’ story, the story of every son with a father who owned meadows and animals and haysheds. It was hers, too, if she substituted her father’s practice for his hundred and forty acres, his clients for his cattle and sheep. She’d said that to Mark, and he’d seemed glad that she understood, grateful, but he had not asked any questions, had not shown an interest in hearing any more. It seemed strange to her, but it made sense, too. He had just returned from two days of dealing with his father, of working with him, of fighting with him. He probably hadn’t wanted to talk about family — anybody’s family — or about home.

But she found herself wanting to talk about those things now, for some reason, and she had said it before she could stop herself. That she had not been home herself in several months. That she didn’t miss it. That it would probably be months before she visited again; probably Christmas.

‘Which is the biggest fucking nightmare you can imagine,’ she said, feeling how the wine massaged her into fuller sentences, bigger descriptions, than would normally occur to her. She was glad to have them. She was glad to be telling him this. ‘My brother Frankie spends the day on the couch reading old issues of the Sunday World , and my other brothers bring their awful wives and their awful children, and my mother acts like she’s run off her feet trying to look after everybody when actually she’s in the kitchen topping up her gin and bitching at me not to ruin the turkey. What do I know about turkey?’

‘Who knows anything about turkey?’ he said, and she laughed.

‘Exactly. So that’s Christmas, and I come back here as soon as I can, and then every April I go down as well. Every April, I should say, I get guilted into going down.’ She paused. It seemed suddenly very important to find the right tone. But whatever that tone was, it seemed out of her range. ‘For my father’s mass,’ she said, and it came out in a blurt. ‘I can’t stand going down there, but I can’t not be there for that. That just wouldn’t look right. You know?’

He nodded, but he did not say anything; he did not ask her to go on. She looked at him. She wanted, she realized, for him to ask about her mother, to ask what it was about her mother that bothered her so much. She wanted him to draw her out, to let her tell him things, to let her vent — to let her get upset, even, if it came to that. She wanted his eyes on her, she wanted his hands on her, stroking her, giving her the attention he had given her a minute ago, giving her more of it, pulling her close. She wanted to say, My mother, I don’t think she ever actually loved me. It sounded like something a teenager would say. She wanted to say, My mother, she saw me as a nuisance, as a rival, as a drain on her money and her nerves. She wanted to tell him how her mother had always sided with her father. How she had told Joanne she was only a stuck-up little bitch for throwing everything back in his face. You’ve always thought you were better than us, her mother had said to her, the night Joanne had announced that she wouldn’t work for her father any more. But she’d never thought that. She’d just thought, for a long time, that something was missing in her, or that something was wrong with her, because she felt so different from them all.