Erin
Eighteen months after their wedding, they bought a house.
Before the ink could dry on their mortgage papers, the Celtic Tiger keeled over and died. Within the year the country’s property bubble had burst, wiping nearly thirty per cent off their new home’s value and trapping them in negative equity.
Thank you for your interest in our BA (Hons) in Horology, the cover letter read.
She took it with her to work and left it there.
Because she’d heard it all before. About high-end menswear.
TVs. Nissans. She knew this wasn’t real, but phase one of a cycle that she’d already seen play out several times: Jason gets a job he loves and everyone there loves him.
Phase two: promises of premature promotions, talk about training or qualifications, a certainty that this is it.
Phase three: before any of that can become a reality, the complaining begins.
He’s frustrated. Surrounded by idiots. If they just listened to him, everything would be so much better.
Or, a longing for what it was like when he started, before so-and-so joined the team or the company changed x or y policy.
Phase four: quit, get a new job, love it there so much more.
They love him too. The manager is already talking about promoting him. This is it.
Maybe one day Jason would figure out the common denominator, but Erin wasn’t holding her breath.
As it happened, this time, phase four was forced upon him.
There was no place for luxury-watch advertisements masquerading as retail outlets in this new, bleaker Ireland where the excesses of the boom years had almost instantly become shameful embarrassments.
He was told on a Friday morning that the store would be gone by Sunday night.
After a couple of weeks of half-hearted job-searching while lying on the couch watching Jerry Springer, it became clear that getting another one like it wasn’t going to be easy. It might not even be possible.
So Jason started minimum-wage shift work, cold-calling customers for a mobile phone company, and Erin stretched to cover their monthly outgoings.
It would only be temporary, they thought.
Most of the people in Erin’s department were her own age and unable to hide their surprise that she was already married and a homeowner.
‘You’re, like, a proper grown-up,’ one of them said in what felt like more of an accusatory than congratulatory tone.
They were still planning backpacking trips and maxing out credit cards.
To them, settled was death. But listening to their complaints about bad dates and worse housemates – most of whom were their own parents, since they couldn’t afford to leave home – Erin felt relieved to be past it.
On the Saturday of the June bank-holiday weekend she invited the entire team to a barbecue.
She stressed it was casual, but it was weeks in the planning.
The house had to be polished to a shine from top to bottom.
A barbecue had to be purchased and tested.
She got Jason to paint the garden fence and hang lanterns.
They did their biggest ever grocery shop – three full trolleys’ worth of meats, sides and, most importantly, alcohol – and on the day Erin got up at the crack of dawn to start prepping.
She made pitchers of cocktails, filled a toddler’s inflatable paddling pool with ice and bottles of beer, and made sure there was far too much of everything.
This was her chance to show off, to show them she’d made good choices. Success would be everyone having a great time and leaving feeling slightly envious. And they’d finally get to meet Jason, who they’d heard so much about.
She was never able to figure out what went so wrong.
From the moment the first person arrived, Erin felt a suffocating judgement.
Maybe it was the way her colleagues looked around the house, or smiled tightly, or exchanged glances when they thought she wasn’t looking.
Or how, when they said, ‘Oh, wow,’ at the extent of the spread or, ‘This is so nice,’ during lulls in conversation, she was sure she sensed an underlying bemusement or even sarcasm.
Chats kept drifting towards things Erin couldn’t relate to, like how to get into a notoriously selective club in town, funny stories about finding places to have sex when you didn’t have your own place, and a band they were going to see next month that she’d never heard of.
She felt distant from them, separated in a way she didn’t understand. Older, though she wasn’t. Ahead, but behind in ways she hadn’t realized mattered.
Not even an hour in, she started wanting them to leave.
Jason didn’t help. He’d spent the morning sighing his way through everything she asked him to do and trying to get a rise out of her by musing aloud that he might skip the whole thing and go to the pub to watch whatever match he was only pretending to be interested in.
Then, the moment their first guest arrived – which happened to be Camille, the ethereal Parisian who had transferred from La Défense and who Erin had caught regarding the outside of their house with what she could only describe as alarm – the switch flipped.
Jason was suddenly an entirely different person.
Funnier. Kinder. Better. Back in the early days of their relationship, she had, occasionally, edited their story after the fact, but here he was, rewriting his own character in real time, shamelessly, right in front of her.
Giving everyone a totally false impression of what he was really like. A great one.
Carol, her deskmate at work, looked from one of them to the other and said, ‘How did you two meet?’ with a face that really asked, How is it that you two are together, seeing as you’re so different, so totally mismatched?
Jason was burning something on the grill when Erin threw him a look – and then caught Amy, the youngest member of the team, giving him a look of compassionate solidarity.
He and Camille got into an animated conversation about Patek Philippe that no one else in the group could possibly penetrate.
Erin lost track of how many times he jumped at the opportunity to do something for someone – grab another drink, skip that song, shift the parasol a few inches – when he always made his wife feel as if the simplest request was like pulling teeth.
So she shared stories that embarrassed him, like how he’d repeated his exams only to increase his points shortage by a factor of six.
When he claimed to love the Foo Fighters, she said, ‘Really? I have never heard you listen to them or even mention them once.’ When he said something about her having bought a cheap beer, she told him he could buy what he wanted when he was able to pay for it.
He’d disappeared for a while after that. She found him outside the front door, whispering something to Camille while she smoked.
Erin knew what she sounded like, how she was coming across. She could see that it wasn’t going down well, that her guests were on his side, still.
More each time she did it.
But each wound she managed to inflict felt like a little victory.
Having arrived at four, everyone was gone by seven.
Erin had been expecting that they’d stay late – that maybe even some of them might crash; a taxi back to the city would’ve been eye-wateringly expensive – but they left early enough to make the train.
On Monday morning, Camille would let it slip that they’d gone to a club on Harcourt Street and stayed out until all hours.
Life flattened out into a relentless monotony.
There was nothing to look forward to except the plans they made for themselves, and those started to get smaller and smaller.
They couldn’t afford to travel. Going anywhere at the weekend risked spending money they didn’t really have.
A takeaway and a DVD on a Saturday night became the focal point of their weekend, the thing that just about got Erin through the week.
But then Saturdays got to be too far apart, so she started treating herself to lunch out on Wednesdays.
A breakfast roll on Monday morning, to lessen the blow of the start of another long week.
A brownie from the bakery outside the office every Friday lunchtime, as a reward for getting through it.
Her clothes got tighter, her body softer, and Jason started making pointed comments about how they should get out more, do more activity, like start hiking in the Wicklow Mountains at the weekend.
This only made her feel worse, which made her eat even more, because she didn’t know how else you were supposed to make yourself feel better.
And then, a strange new phenomenon: intense reactions to the strangest things.
For weeks, Erin became so involved in a US singing-competition reality show that she cried throughout the two-hour final, sobbed when the winner was announced and missed it like a person when it was over.
When a blogger she followed, a Canadian woman living in London, excitedly announced that she was going to hike to Everest Base Camp, the news plunged her into a funk for days.
A movie about an angsty teenage girl who fell in love with a vampire left her feeling almost hungover with an adolescent longing that was so much more potent than anything she had ever experienced in real life.
A fucking vampire.
She didn’t want to interrogate this in any depth, but she had watched enough Oprah – the imminent end of which threatened another disproportionate emotional response – to know that it had something to do with wanting life to be bigger. More vivid. Just more.
Back in school, she had doodled a paraphrase of her favourite Oprah quote in the margins of her textbooks.
The future is so bright, it burns my eyes.
But she could look directly at it now, it was dim enough. And parts of it were in total darkness.
How had she got here? Erin had no idea, but she was sure of this much: it was too late to turn back.
One night, while they were cleaning up after dinner, Jason said that he’d been thinking about what his life might be like with someone else.
Erin froze with one hand in a sink full of warm, soapy water and floating butter beans. The other hand inadvertently released a plate that crashed on to the draining board, a drop of only a couple of inches, but later she’d find a hairline crack running the full width of its diameter.
This was classic Jason, casual and offhand, a comment meant to sting but not to ignite. He didn’t want her to react to it, that was the whole point.
But he’d gone too far this time.
‘What did you just say?’ Her hands dripped as she turned to face him.
‘I’m just trying to be honest,’ he said with a shrug.
‘About what?’
‘About how I’m feeling.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Don’t attack me.’
‘Don’t attack you? What the …? I’m not fucking attacking you. I’m reacting to what you said!’
‘Overreacting.’
‘Are you fucking serious?’
‘Erin, you don’t need to shout at me.’
He said this so quietly, so evenly, it filled her with a rage so intense she had the sudden urge to smash the plate into smithereens and drag a jagged edge along the soft skin of his neck, right under the jaw. Wasn’t there an artery there?
She felt a distant, dull pain and realized it was because of how tightly she was clenching her fists.
‘Maybe I feel like I do,’ she said.
‘Oh, that’s mature.’
‘You want to talk about mature? Really, Jason?’
He folded his arms. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’re barely employed.’
‘See? I can’t talk to you. You’re impossible. This is impossible.’ He threw up his hands in frustration – and then he walked out. Of the kitchen, she presumed, and into another room to steam and sulk because he had no clue how to be an adult.
But then the front door slammed.
And she panicked.
Real, breath-stealing, chest-constricting panic. Because while Erin might not have had the life she’d imagined for herself because of Jason, she was suddenly, acutely, horrifically aware that without him, she didn’t have anything at all.
Half a house, worth less than they owed on it. Mortgage payments that left no room for her to cover rent somewhere else. A thunderclap of I-told-you-sos.
What would she have given up all her other lives for, then?
And if he wasn’t here …
Well, who would she have left?
He came back an hour later and they stayed up all night, talking. Neither of them wanted this; they agreed on that. But they also agreed that they wanted to be with each other, said they still loved each other.
‘I can’t imagine not being with you,’ Erin told him, which, strictly speaking, was more accurate.
Jason admitted to being in a slump these last few months, which she sensed was as close as he was willing to get to the word depressed.
She suggested he see his GP, who prescribed regular exercise. She offered to pay for him to join a local gym.
This was in keeping with the typical Irish approach to mental health, which was that therapy was for actual trauma or certifiable crazy, and never, ever anything less.
Later she’d wonder what might have happened if he’d spoken to someone other than the man he saw for occasional antibiotics and blood-pressure checks, how things would’ve been different.
For him and for her.