Epilogue
Four Years Later
I hear the siren of the Garda car well before I see it.
I push the bedroom curtain open a crack to see the car coming slowly down our street.
‘Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,’ I tell it.
Sure enough, it eventually slows outside the front door of Hiroshima.
I’ll never not fret when I see those blue lights now. The muscle memory remembers.
There are two gardaí on the doorstep, their uniforms making my pulse quicken. ‘Are you a resident here?’
‘I am,’ I tell them.
‘Esther Loftus?’
‘That’s me.’ I guess it took Ted and Alice a while, but they finally got there in the end and found me.
‘Did you make an emergency call from this address about an intruder earlier in the evening?’
‘Whuh?’
‘You called to say there was someone in the house who shouldn’t be here.’
My brain falls on to the explanation easily.
‘No, that was probably my mother, I should think,’ I reply.
One of them peers past the door beyond me, his fingers grazing his notebook. ‘Is your mother available to come to the door and talk with us about this?’
‘Well, no,’ I tell them. ‘She has dementia, and is living in the Brideswell nursing home, just down the road.’
This seems to stump them, so I press on.
‘I think what’s happened here is while she technically made the phone call to tell you about an intruder in this house, which was once her home, she will have absolutely no memory of making the call if you ask her about it.’
She’ll be about as useful to you as a handbrake on a canoe, I want to add. I breathe out, relieved.
‘I’m sorry, but Mrs …’ The garda refers back to his notebook. The ‘Mrs’ bit still chafes a little, now that I am no longer one.
‘It’s Miss Loftus,’ I say. ‘My mother is Mrs Loftus. My guess is she was probably trying to turn the volume up on the TV remote control over in Brideswell. She now mixes the handsets up all the time.’
They are unmoved at this explanation. This isn’t something I feel I even need to apologize for, but I say it anyway. ‘Look, I’m really sorry for wasting your time.’ Apologizing on behalf of my mother feels like the least I can do.
These days, I am the only person living in Hiroshima.
Occasionally, I bring my mother back from the care home for the afternoon, and she compliments me on the new curtains, rugs and cerulean glasses as though I am a salesperson in Arnotts, not knowing or maybe not caring where her swan ornaments, Ibiza tea towels and duck-covered tea cosies ever went to.
‘Oh, you’re like your lovely dad, you are,’ she tells me one Monday afternoon, her eyes twinkling with genuine affection, as I drive her back to the Brideswell before my 2 p.m. appointment at the fertility clinic.
I never thought I would, but I miss her attempting to massage some order into my life.
‘You should be in Dubai. Big, big money to be made out there.’ ‘You’re forty-two!
You can’t afford to be picky about boys.
A pulse should be optional at this stage.
’ My admin job in a small theatre company in Wicklow isn’t big, big money, but it suits me just fine.
‘Aksel’ is twenty-four, and studying law in Copenhagen.
He has sandy hair and nondescript features, but volunteers in a child literacy agency on the weekends.
‘Lucas’, twenty-five, has qualified in shot-putting for the Olympics and is six foot three.
‘Emil’, twenty-three, is pre-med. I don’t know how I feel about a 23-year-old’s sperm making its way inside my body, even if he is on course to save many lives in the future, but I press on regardless.
‘Jon’ is twenty-one and, frankly, this is starting to feel a little bit creepy. I keep flipping through the catalogue, hoping for a thunderbolt but secretly willing myself not to pick the wrong person.
This is like Tinder, but they’re headed for my cervix, and without so much as a drink bought. Most unsettling.
It’s the eyelashes that I see first on ‘Elias’. Full-fat and fluttery, shading huge milk-chocolate eyes. The hint of a receding hairline. For a moment I feel a slight stir from the past.
The nurse at the fertility clinic in Blackrock creeps up behind me, and watches me flick through the profiles at high speed, as if I’m going through Cosmo magazine and hurrying towards the ‘drive him wild in bed’ content.
‘It’s a strange one, isn’t it?’ She laughs, her earthy Northside Dublin accent making her immediately feel like a friend.
‘Really weird,’ I affirm.
‘The cream of the crop,’ she says.
And they really are. Perfect male human specimens. If you’re going to be making babies with anyone, it is this lot.
I puff and blow air out of my cheeks as I flick through the catalogue of donors. I am becoming paralysed by choice. In this specific instance, I envisage myself telling my mum, I am paying precisely so that I can be picky.
‘It’s a big decision, so take your time. If you want to come back and look again …’ the nurse begins.
But I’ve decided. Full-fat eyelashes are overrated. ‘I think it will have to be Aksel,’ I tell her. ‘He looks kind.’ If anyone’s getting their junk up in there, they’re going to have to be a kind person, I want to tell her, but don’t.
I make an appointment to get hopefully knocked up by Aksel on the twentieth. It’s a weird feeling. I’m coming out of the clinic contemplating what my womb might say about all of this if it spoke English when Johnny calls.
‘How was it?’ he asks.
‘You know, it’s … OK?’ I tell him. ‘It’s funny to look at these guys who I’ve never met and think I could potentially be making an entirely new person with them.’
He tries to laugh lightly, but I can hear the awkwardness right underneath it.
‘I know dozens of women who would love nothing more than to be choosing their child’s father from a catalogue of hot Danish men,’ Johnny says.
Oh yeah, dozens? I think but refrain from saying.
‘Hey, how is Ciara?’ I ask him, making sure I don’t deliver her name with any kind of sneery undertone, like I’ve definitely done in the past. We are keeping things light-hearted, and this vibe is a relatively new thing for us.
It’s delicate, and I don’t want to break it.
I can barely remember a time when he and Ciara weren’t together.
He was on the apps for a total of fifteen minutes before she very sensibly snapped him up.
As for the time when we were together … it feels like several lifetimes ago.
It’s like the Renaissance, or medieval France.
We can barely make out the broad outline of that period any more.
‘Oh, you know, good,’ he says. ‘Twenty-week scan is happening next Thursday. It’s stressful. She’s happy enough that everything is going well but … I don’t know.’
‘I know this is next to impossible, given everything from before, but try not to worry,’ I tell him. ‘You’ll have that baby in your arms before you know it.’
‘Yeah, I … Look, we’ll see.’ I can hear the apprehension that’s doubtless been living in his throat for the last few months.
‘Ten little fingers, ten little toes, just you wait.’ And I mean it. Johnny is going to be an outstanding father to this child. Ciara and this new person coming to join them … well, they’ll be luckier than pools winners.
A silence bleeds through the line. Time once was, and not too long ago either, that we never thought we’d be talking like this.
‘I’m actually so happy for you, Johnny,’ I tell him. This is only half true, but I tell him anyway. Or rather, I’m happy for him, but still sad for myself.
‘Oh, you actually are, are you?’ he teases gently.
‘Stop. I’m trying to say the right thing here and it’s not easy.’
‘I know. And I’m sorry.’
‘You’ll be great at this. I know it.’
He exhales sharply. ‘Well, maybe before things get crazy, we could catch up if you find yourself in London, meet for a coffee. Discuss all of these Danish guys, put them through their paces.’
‘I’d love that,’ I say, although we both know it will never happen. We sign off and I know that whatever happens with him from now on, I’ll be watching it all at a remove, and he will be doing the same with me.
The theatre company in Wicklow has given me a brand new laptop, which means that this doesn’t yet have the browser extension that can ‘block’ certain keywords, like ‘Ted Levy’ and ‘Alice Andre’ from my internet browsing.
Though I made a promise to myself never to seek him out, curiosity gets the better of me and I give myself one last look before I download the new browser extension.
The moment I see the name ‘Ted Levy’, for the first time in a long time, my sphincter seems to do an involuntary pucker.
I haven’t thought about him in a long time; I had removed him and all those around him from any and every social media platform.
And yet there he is, in a new newspaper article.
In the accompanying pictures, Ted looks older and paunchier, with bleached-out dreadlocks and the sort of facial hair that can only be charitably described as ‘experimental’.
‘Ted Levy and girlfriend Ella Kaplin spotted grocery shopping in Los Feliz, Los Angeles’, the headline reads on the story.
Page Six, 21 July 2016
Ted Levy looked as though he didn’t have a care in the world as he ran errands with his long-time girlfriend Ella Kaplin.
Levy, 48, whose latest movie A Cool, Dry Place was a critical and commercial flop in Hollywood, dressed down for the outing in black shorts and cargo pants, keeping his long locks cool under a fedora.
Art gallery owner Kaplin, 25, looked ethereal in a broderie anglaise floaty dress and Salt Water sandals, her blonde locks tied up in a loose bun.
It’s been a challenging year for the Canada-born actor, who has had to weather a flurry of accusations of sexual harassment and bullying.
The incendiary claims, which Levy strenuously denies, have been brought forward by five women, one of whom was Clara May, a runner on his breakthrough Hollywood role.