Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

‘Your mother’s very nice,’ she said that night as we lay together in the guest room.

I stared at the mottled ceiling, smells of strange detergent rising from thin sheets. I reached my arm around Carol’s waist; she rolled towards me.

The following day, we went to help my mother in her allotment. Carol weeded around carrots while I raked and turned the soil and Eamonn lashed new creepers to the trellis on the dividing wall. My mother hovered between us, standing at our shoulders, pointing at our work and making vague but firm suggestions. After we had returned home and showered, Eamonn went to watch a match in the pub and Carol and I went with my mother to an Italian place by the Dodder. We ordered salads and pizzas and a bottle of wine as though we had something to celebrate. I tried to pay, but my mother insisted. We walked back to the house together, my thighs and back aching from the day’s labour. At the foot of the stairs, my mother said goodnight and hugged me far too tightly, her fingers strong on my shoulder blades as though they sought to burrow there.

I was glad to spend the next two mornings and afternoons in the quiet of the National Library. I found a few small things of interest and beefed them up in my notes to keep the department happy. The first day, Carol hung around the house but kept me updated via Gchat on how my mother insisted they bake together, then drink tea and talk for two hours about the weather in New York. The second day, she went sightseeing, and in the evening I suggested a drink at a pub in Smithfield that had been my local as an undergraduate. We took the scenic route along Dame Street, past the Castle and Christ Church, Carol half-listening as I recited history I only half-remembered. We crossed the Liffey at a point too far to the west and got lost in a labyrinth of grey- and red-brick houses. It was quiet. Our steps echoed.

‘It’d be nice,’ I said, ‘to live here some day, wouldn’t it?’

Carol looked up at me, frowning. I smiled and kissed her forehead. We came to a junction and stopped a moment to get our bearings. I looked left and right, then chose what seemed the best direction.

‘You know,’ Carol said, ‘I wouldn’t want to move.’

‘No,’ I said, scanning the street for a landmark. ‘I meant if we ever did. If we ever — you know. Some day.’

The light at last was failing. Carol crossed her arms and rubbed her hands along her elbows. Behind her was a blank wall discoloured from old rain. We cut down an alley lined with shabby flats, depots and yards with broken signs and rusted gates.

‘I feel like you’re not listening to what I’m saying,’ Carol said. ‘What I’m saying is you can’t have some day . You have to make decisions.’

We found the square and walked the cobbled way beneath gas lamps and the distillery’s chimney. Above us, two small red balloons were hurrying towards the Liffey. I watched them hold together, sliding against the dusk, and felt it within my power to reassure Carol — or to deny her.

The pub was just as I remembered it. Its taps ran with flat Australian beer and its rooms were packed and sweltering. Carol and I fell into a rash discussion about the way things were and the way things ought to be. Neither of us, it was clear, had a point or a position — just a gnawing sense of unhappiness, of dwindled expectation, which, as I spoke, I realized I’d felt for quite some time, and which, as Carol spoke, I felt begin to deepen. We left our second drinks unfinished and set off again for a taxi. I walked as fast as I could manage, Carol struggling to keep up.

The driver didn’t know the way. I sat in the middle of the back seat and leaned forward to direct him through the wreckage of a Saturday night and out through the suburbs. We made the M50, went too far and circled back, criss-crossed roads that meant nothing to me and in the end found the estate by chance. Carol stood in the street as I paid the driver, blank windows staring down at her. She looked very small and very strong, and far away from me. In our room, she took her clothes from the dresser wordlessly and packed her suitcase. When she had finished, she plopped down heavily on the edge of the bed.

‘This trip,’ she said, ‘was a mistake.’

I said nothing. I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth with a trembling hand and stopped for a moment on the way back to listen at my mother and Eamonn’s door. I realized that I wanted them to hear us. The door was open a crack but I couldn’t see their shapes. Eamonn snored like an engine. Back in our room, I found Carol under the covers. I climbed in beside her. She knifed away and pulled the duvet with her. The draught from the window was cold on my skin. I fell asleep and woke sometime later to the sound of Carol crying, her shoulder heaving against mine.

In the morning, we kissed my mother and shook Eamonn by the hand, thanked them both for having us and promised to visit again soon. In the driveway, Carol’s face was pale, my mother’s was knowing. I loaded our cases into the boot of the taxi and looked back towards the house as we rounded the corner, fully expecting to find my mother and Eamonn standing on the step to see us on our way, my mother chewing her nails in worry, Eamonn’s heavy arm slung across her shoulder — but the door was shut.

As we rode in silence to the airport, I willed myself to make some gesture, to do something — anything — that might be the size of love. I kept willing myself as we divided for immigration, as we reconvened to wait at the gate, as we boarded and took our seats. After take-off, Carol passed out, her head against the window. Even in sleep her forehead was creased, her eyes not merely closed but clenched.

Back in Brooklyn, we circled each other for a few days until Carol had worked up her nerve.

‘I need some time to think,’ she said and called her sister to ask if she could stay with her. She stood in the hallway with a couple of bags at her feet and looked to me for a word — for punctuation, even.

And then she was gone.

I took her winter coat from the hall closet and held its lining to my nose. In the bedroom, I hugged her pillow to my chest and opened her dresser drawers. I ran my hand over the soft cotton of T-shirts and the rough nylon of gym shorts. I picked up all the little things she’d arranged on the dresser top — a framed photo of the two of us and one of herself and her sister, a perfume bottle, a porcelain saucer full of spare buttons and safety pins and lapel badges and earplugs — and put them down.

I went out drinking. At first, I haunted our old hangouts: the craft beer place where we’d spent Sundays over crosswords, the bocce place where Carol had thrown me a birthday party. But soon enough, I began to feel as though all the hipsters in those establishments were watching me — so I settled on six-packs and cigarettes in bed. I called her sometimes, knowing full well that she wouldn’t answer, just to hear the easy bounce of her voice on the answer message. After a few such calls her sister called me back. Her husband, she said, was a prosecutor. ‘And he knows where you live, motherfucker. He has a lot of friends on the force. So stop calling my sister or they’ll never find your body.’

I told Darren and Emma about the sister’s threat at the department’s welcome-back picnic. They were the first real friends I’d managed to make in New York. Their eighteen-month-old daughter, Sky, sat mewling in her stroller, her eyes blue and meaningless. We sweltered under a late August sun. Emma wore open-toed sandals and no bra.

‘What an asshole,’ Darren said, stuffing his moony face with a turkey sandwich. He was two years my senior in the programme but one behind in terms of progress towards a degree.

Emma laid her hand on my elbow. Darren watched her do it.