Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘I won’t stay late,’ he started to say, but as he glanced at them he could see that he had got it all wrong. They were smiling at each other, almost glowing, sharing some secret, some private joy, and in the instant before they became aware that he was watching them, he realized that there were always new ways to feel it, the loneliness. It was not just bottomless, or endless, it was also inventive. It was smart, self-generating; it was various. The drunkenness of things being various : a line from a poem came into his head, and he blinked at it, dismissed it. Was it that they wanted to be alone? But he had only just arrived. They were still, technically, in the middle of dinner. That was rude, he thought, and then thought, You’re such a fucking moron. He could not be sure, actually, that he had not said it aloud. They were both staring at him. He was standing in the middle of the room.

‘We have something to ask you,’ said Deirdre, at exactly the same time as Sarah said, ‘We have news.’

‘Really?’ Mark said, and he stammered.

‘Yeah,’ said Deirdre, with a laugh.

‘Oh, right,’ said Mark.

They stood in silence for a moment.

‘I hope you’re not going to ask me to help you have a kid or something,’ Mark said, and he tried to laugh. It was meant to be a joke. He had wanted to say something that made him sound less nervous, made him feel more in control. But as soon as he had said it, he knew it was the wrong thing. At first, they both looked stricken, and then Sarah’s face moved into deeper upset and Deirdre’s into what he knew to be annoyance, though they both moved very quickly to cover these expressions. His face burned.

‘You’re not. .?’ he said, and felt stupider still as he saw how absolutely they refused his suggestion. They shook their heads as though he had confused them with two entirely different people. So it was not that he had blurted out precisely what they wanted from him, not that he had trodden on their announcement in that way: it was worse. He had crossed some line of propriety, of correctness; he had exposed himself as the narrow-minded boor who was still, in some part of himself, unused to the idea of them — two women in a relationship, two women sharing a bed. He was still a gawking schoolboy, ready at any moment to be found out, likely at any moment to make a comment that would give him away. And now he had done it, and they were looking at him so strangely. They were seeing him. They were judging him.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. He put his head into his hands. When he looked up, a man on the television was pulling a foal out from between a mare’s bloody haunches. The foal was covered with yellow slime. It seemed impossibly long. At the table, Sarah and Deirdre were silent. Then Sarah rose from the table and came over close to the television, settling into the armchair opposite Mark.

‘God, I hate those animal programmes,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘They’d show anything on the telly now.’

‘Seems so.’

This time the silence between them seemed deeper. On the television, the foal was already staggering to its feet, black blood still matted to its hair, the man holding it by the back legs, steadying it, before letting it go. It was much ganglier than calves were at birth.

‘Mark, we’re getting married, Deirdre and I,’ said Sarah. ‘We’re only asking a couple of people to be at the ceremony, and we want you to be there. As our witness. Would you do that for us?’

He looked at her. She was smiling, she was nodding; she was beginning to cry again. Wait, was that why she had been crying all along? Not out of sadness for him, or about him, but out of whatever rush of happiness and excitement she felt about what she had just told him? There was no time to think about it, and of course it was not good-natured, good-hearted, to think something so selfish as one of his friends told him something so good, but still as he widened his eyes and lifted his hands and got up to meet and return her messy embrace, he was thinking it, and chiding himself for thinking it, and replying that he was damn well bloody entitled to think of it, all at once.

‘Congratulations,’ he said, and held and squeezed and patted Sarah as she laughed and cried. ‘Congratulations, Deirdre,’ he said, over Sarah’s shoulder.

‘Thanks,’ Deirdre said, and came over to hug him too.

After a lot of this, hugging and smiling and laughing and saying the same thing over and over, they all sat down. Sarah was wiping her eyes, and Deirdre was exhaling and shaking her head, as though what they had all just done together had been strenuous, as though they’d hauled a heavy piece of furniture up a narrow staircase.

‘It’s brilliant news,’ Mark said again, and the women both smiled their hectic smiles.

‘Isn’t it?’ Sarah said, and she clutched at Deirdre.

‘Can you get married here?’ said Mark, and their smiles dipped and wavered.

‘Not officially,’ said Deirdre, and Sarah nodded. ‘It’ll be a commitment ceremony.’

‘Just as good,’ said Mark, and instantly regretted it. Deirdre was regarding him that way again, careful and serious. But she said nothing.

‘Of course I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much for asking me to come.’

‘And you’ll bring Aoife, of course,’ Sarah said. ‘She can be our flower-girl.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Mark said, not knowing what else to say. Maybe it was, once again, the wrong thing to say, but it was good enough, and once again there was hugging and kissing, and Deirdre went to the fridge and took out a bottle of champagne.

‘Is it. .?’ Sarah looked at him, and looked to Deirdre.

‘Is it what?’ Mark said, and then realized what she was asking: ‘Is it OK to open a bottle of champagne?’

The thing was, he didn’t know the answer. The answer he had to say out loud was that of course it was OK to open the bottle, that it was more than OK to open the bottle, that if Deirdre didn’t hurry up and open the bottle he’d snatch it out of her hands and burst the cork off it himself. And as he nodded, frowning as though there could be no question as to the rightness of this, and as he watched the bottle tilt and Deirdre’s fingers working at the foil, and as the cork hit the bathroom door, and as the liquid spilled and steamed and bubbled outwards, there seemed nothing wrong. It could not be wrong to do this, to celebrate with friends, to toast them, his glass held high. It felt easy. It felt doable. He managed it. He drank the champagne, and kept the panic down.

The mare was now licking her newborn foal clean, her huge tongue sweeping the rough, sodden hair and replacing the thickness of the birth fluids with the bubbled sheen of her own saliva. Mark glanced at Sarah. She was watching him.

‘You can talk to us, you know,’ she said, smiling sadly.

‘I know.’

‘About anything.’ She leaned in closer and pressed her cheek to his temple.

‘Even foaling,’ he was about to say, but instead he raised his glass again. ‘To the two of you,’ he said.

*

He was woken early next morning by his phone. Home. Outside, it was not yet fully bright. In her cot, Aoife was starting to stir. Mark silenced the ringing and took the phone out to the hall. When he put it to his ear, his father was already saying hello.

‘Hello,’ Mark said. ‘What is it? Is everything OK?’

‘I don’t know,’ his father said, sounding irritated. ‘You were the one ringing me.’

‘What?’

‘You were ringing me. Weren’t you?’

Mark sighed. This had happened at least once a week since he had bought a mobile phone for his father. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said, sitting on the top stair.

‘Sure who else would be ringing me on this thing?’