Chapter 27
The fizzing, apprehensive feeling from last night has cleared and has made way for something cold and grey.
For the last hour I have tried to distract myself in the hotel with shitty local TV news and the minibar.
I fiddle with the trouser press, for want of something to do.
I put the bathrobe and slippers on and sink into the queen-sized bed, as though this is any other nice mini-break.
Ignoring those from people in my old life – Johnny, Carrie, Mum – I check my recent emails.
I had messaged Jodie on Facebook after a few gins the night before, hoping that I might be able to sleep on her couch for a day or two until I find my feet.
I never responded to Elliott’s original message – I’m not exactly in a position to start asking him about sofa-surfing.
‘Hey! I’m out west until the end of the month,’ Jodie replies. ‘Sorreeeee.’
‘Does anyone you know have a spare key to your place or anything? Like a neighbour maybe?’
To this, she doesn’t bother replying. I try and self-soothe by imagining Ted’s form lying next to me on the hotel’s 4,000-thread-count sheets.
‘Do you think she will ever forgive me?’ I can hear myself asking Ted, tearful and afraid at how I have taken a blowtorch to my friendship with Naomi.
‘I think she’ll come around, eventually,’ he will say. ‘Probably not for a while, though. Let’s stay out of her way for now.’
‘I know, it’s just that …’ – and Ted will pull me closer and laugh, knowing innately what I am about to say – ‘drastic times call for drastic measures.’
‘I know. I’m actually quite flattered,’ he will say. ‘No one’s ever gone to those kinds of lengths for me before.’
‘Well, it was worth it,’ I’ll tell him. ‘I’d do it all over again, a thousand times.’
I open my phone and search for Ted Levy all over the city, hoping that someone on Twitter has mentioned bumping into him.
And lo, there’s a tweet from a random guy, Ray, who has bumped into Ted in Bambi’s on Dundas, an hour ago.
The selfie is like a kick to the face: the lighting is all wrong and washed out, Ted looking uncomfortable as he gives the smallest amount of animation required so as not to come off as aloof.
I look at Ray’s arm and how close it is to Ted’s.
Jealousy pounds through me. I’m jealous of an arm. A random stranger’s arm.
Mainly because I have one outfit and am waiting on a suitcase to materialize, I decide to stay put, even though doing so makes me physically ache with longing and helplessness.
As Conan O’Brien drones on in the background, a curious thought begins to settle just over my head.
I feel that I need to give myself a stern talking-to about all of this.
I have already hurt Naomi, incredibly deeply.
Johnny is hurting somewhere, too. I’m starting to hate the idea of wanting Ted Levy, as it’s brought me nothing but misery.
The feeling of want is barely distinguishable from the feeling of sadness.
And out of nowhere, I’m reminded of Lar Fucking Donovan. Of course I am.
Lar Fucking Donovan, to give him his semi-official title, lands in my life at the age of fifteen, almost a year after coming home with the Body Shop bag.
Instead of taking the awfulness and chaos to the grave with him as I thought he might, my father has left behind the sort of chasm that feels like the beginning of an illness.
The silence in the house is somehow booming off the walls; more so than the other stuff.
Lar stands next to me at an all-ages gig in Temple Bar, and even at sixteen his aquiline nose and amber eyes set him apart.
I drink in his beauty, otherworldly in my eyes.
During a pogo, he stands on my foot, belching out a quick ‘sorry’ from behind his curtain fringe.
I could stand to love you for all time, I think to myself.
Later, I walk out of the venue, fall on to the cobbles of Temple Bar and tell my friends that I’ve had a two-hour orgasm, unversed though I was in such things.
Someone eventually tells me that he is Lar Fucking Donovan, not heaven-sent but from Tullamore.
Before long, the crush swells until Lar is an outsized presence in my life; no longer a human boy but what feels like the entire sky over my world.
It feels like a colossus of a thing, as I let go of the reins and let my desire overpower me.
I can already see my unborn children, with dimples and amber eyes.
Desperate, I find the phone book and call every Donovan household in Tullamore, looking for Lar.
I’m not sure what I will do when I eventually find him – probably hang up.
But a few months later, a bonanza arrives in the Sunday newspaper, because there’s a report on Marie and Joe Donovan, owners of Adam’s Pub in Tullamore, complaining about the plumbing system in the town.
The report mentions two sons, Lar and Eamon.
Though I am not old enough to darken its doorstep, I take a train to Tullamore one Saturday afternoon and stand outside the bar, willing Lar to show up.
Back in Dublin, Lar materializes in the beer garden of Mulley’s a couple of Saturdays later. Though he is talking animatedly with two friends, I make my approach with my friend Jilly in tow.
‘Hi. I think I saw you at the Shinola gig,’ I say to him, ignoring the fact that the Shinola gig was five months ago.
Lar Fucking Donovan couldn’t look any less impressed if he’d been paid to be. Heavily, he turns to face us. ‘So you like music then?’ he slurs.
‘I love it!’
‘Do you know the band Blood Sausage?’
‘Yep!’ I lie confidently.
‘What about Cud?’ Lar is talking into the air in a lazy, non-committal way that just about registers as actual interaction.
‘Yes,’ I tell him, less sure.
‘How about Anal Beard?’ The two friends next to him suppress their unkind laughter.
Is he taking the mick here? ‘Only the first album,’ I tell him. He smiles in spite of himself. That’s when he clocks Jilly. Pretty, non-Anal-Beard-loving Jilly.
I can only stand to one side and watch on as Lar Fucking Donovan blooms to life and absolutely hoses Jilly with charm and interest. It’s quite something to watch someone you adore turn on their headlights and put forward their most enthusiastic self for someone else entirely.
Jilly, keenly aware of my ardour, is caught in a hinterland between flattery and awkward embarrassment.
He tells her about his parents’ pub in Tullamore, how he is starting a sound engineering course next year, where he likes to drink, the house-share in Drumcondra.
All this delicious intel about him falls around us like hailstones, and I’ve no choice but to put it in my pocket and wonder what to do with it.
He looks at Jilly with such adoring wistfulness that it feels as though someone has physically shoved me.
Nothing happens between Jilly and Lar, but for weeks afterwards I nurse that delicious agony of unrequited love, turning it over and over in my mind like something to be cherished. The next best thing to not having him is to be fully tortured by the thoughts of him.
And somehow, I’m back here now, the agony of having all these feelings for someone and nowhere to pour them. It’s an agony that is sometimes barely distinguishable from its exact opposite.
I just need this fever for Ted Levy to break somehow, I think to myself. I need to move past it, around him. ‘How do I quit you?’ I say out into the room. Even Ted having a beautiful supermodel girlfriend hasn’t dampened my ardour.
On the other hand, I’ve come this far. I’m like the marathon runner that needs to feel the foil blanket on my shoulders – some sort of signifier that the race is over and the hard work has been done. And that it hasn’t all been for nothing.
And, as though the universe has been hearing my exact plea, I get a notification that Alice Andre has finally accepted my friend request to her private Instagram account.
She follows forty-five people, and has 572 followers.
There are no pictures of Ted anywhere to be seen on her grid, but the images that are there are eye-popping.
I sit down as I am transported to New York, to Los Angeles, to Berlin, to cool warehouse parties in Vancouver, to the slopes of Aspen.
There are tanned legs, red carpets, street art, the top of a fucking mountain, a water hut in the Maldives.
Alice Andre has the sort of life the like of which I have never seen.
She makes the Stoke Newington mums look as if they’re battling for daily survival in a Ken Loach film.
What do you need to do in this life, or exactly how saintly do you need to have been in a past life, to deserve all this?
I look at a picture of her, floaty and ethereal, at a wedding in Italy holding a four-year-old flower girl, and something approximating a grubby, unclean feeling scratches at me behind my eyeballs.
There is something about how unguarded Alice is in front of the camera, that in this moment makes me feel sad and ugly and awful.
Me, the unclean outsider, judging her and wishing her both dead and to be adoring of me at the exact same time.
I keep scrolling and scrolling until, halfway down her grid, there’s a picture of Alice and some friends in her driveway, wearing pyjamas and artfully tousled bedhead.
The house is painted white, with blue shutters.
‘I love having sleepovers,’ she has captioned the photo.
It is tagged to a location in Wilson Heights.
In the background, across the street, I see a parked school bus.
A quick google of ‘Wilson Heights School’ brings me straight to Palm Drive where, on Instant Street View, I see the blue shutters.
I’ve found them.
I’ve fucking got them.