Chapter 7
AL
Today Al would prefer not to go to work.
He would very much like to stay in bed and take refuge in the darkness and silence.
He would like to cry. He would like to sob in the way he did as a child, no holding back, ugly as can be.
Snots, tears, drool, soaking his pillow until his eyes are raw and he doesn’t know what he’s crying about anymore.
But he can’t. He is thirty-eight years old and he has a job.
Heartbreak is for the young, it’s a full-time job, it’s an all-consuming physical and mental breakdown that doesn’t allow for any other aspects of life to come into play.
Heartbreak must be front and centre, it cannot be interfered with.
It should be listed as a disability, an indemnity on a contract along with force majeure and negligence.
It must play out, like a course of antibiotics, if interrupted then the heart rot recurs and you have to go back to the start.
Pass go, pick up two hundred. He’s really in it right now.
He stands on the tram, his eyelids feeling heavy as he listens to the song for the third time.
It has a hypnotic effect on him, surrounded by people but no one connected.
No one meets his eye. Human bodies physically crammed together but nobody seeing or hearing each other.
And isn’t that representative of the entire world, the whole of humanity.
The Luas is like the UN. He can’t stop or change the song.
This is the melancholic casserole that he must stew in today, simmering in it until his meat falls off his bones.
This is how he woke up feeling, this is how he will fall asleep feeling.
At work he calls for the lift, the song still playing. He hits the sixth floor. It descends to the basement level. Of course it does. The doors open on the dark cold car park. Nobody is there. The doors close and it ascends. He can’t even communicate with the lift.
Natasha is back at her desk after being out last Friday.
She’s blowing her nose and her eyes are red.
The last thing he needs is to get sick on top of everything else, a spot of pneumonia to really take him out.
He’ll die like the women in the old black and white movies, of heartbreak and fever.
He sits at his desk and finally removes his headphones.
A busy office. Phones ringing. Things to do, emails to be answered, decisions to be made. He wants to cry.
Natasha raps lightly on the door and enters with a dish in her hands.
Natasha doesn’t look like Natasha. He can see her skin, she has pores, a few freckles across her nose and redness, a lot of it around her nostrils.
Her eyes are smaller than usual and bloodshot.
Her short lashes are no longer thick Venus flytraps and her lips are thin instead of the large heart-shaped cushions.
He has never seen her without make-up before.
She sounds like Natasha but she doesn’t look anything like Natasha with make-up.
He scans her face for bruises. Sometimes she comes in with lumps and bumps from her weekend fights, which range in colour from yellow to purple and give away their time frame. He has almost mastered the art of knowing what day her fight was by the colour of her bruises.
He eyes the dish in her hands suspiciously.
‘Helen Hanratty came by this morning. She baked you an apple tart as a thank you for removing the love locks.’
Al’s heart is momentarily warmed, perhaps human connection isn’t dead after all. Sun breaks through the grey clouds, until she slams the dish down on his desk and gives him a shrivelling look.
‘Am I supposed to know what’s wrong?’ he asks.
‘You took the love locks off the bridge,’ Natasha says -snappily, and folds her arms. ‘I told you not to take my lock off.’
He’s her boss and she shouldn’t be speaking to him like this but, frankly, he’s intimidated by her.
He has always felt that she could eat him alive, or know people in her dad’s boxing club who could and would snap him in two.
He’s a country boy, she’s a Dublin inner-city girl.
They’re made of different stuff. She doesn’t show outward love towards anyone or anything, apart from, all of a sudden, love locks on a pedestrian bridge.
‘But you wanted me to meet the woman—’
‘Helen Hanratty, say her name,’ she says, as if she’s one of those women in a protest standing on a box with a megaphone.
‘Helen Hanratty,’ he says like a scolded child. ‘You wanted me to meet her.’
‘Yes, because she was wrecking my head calling and emailing me all the time, and I wanted you to shut her up, not because I wanted you to take the love locks down.’
‘I filed a report. The locks were jeopardising the bridge. You are cc’d in everything.’ His tone is more one of amusement and surprise rather than anger at being spoken to like this.
‘I don’t read your stupid reports.’
‘You’re supposed to.’
He keeps his tone light, despite her anger; he doesn’t want his colleagues to think they’re having a domestic, which is kind of what it feels like.
‘Where are the locks?’ she asks.
‘Tony told me to send them to metal recycling.’
‘What will they do with them?’
‘Melt them down, I assume.’
Natasha looks broken. Suddenly she starts crying and he’s relieved about this because today he’s more comfortable with dealing with sadness than anger. Her shoulders shake and she folds herself into the chair in front of his desk.
‘Oh Jesus, this is so embarrassing,’ she says, pulling strands of her pink hair across to hide her face as she cries. Her nose is running.
Al reaches into his backpack for a tissue and comes out with a handful of wet snotty tissues from his own outbreaks of despair.
He finally finds a clean one and hands it to her.
She snatches it as though it’s a life buoy.
Al gives her time to compose herself and looks out to the open-plan office.
Walter looks down at his phone as he makes his way to the kitchen area, which is a surprising change to the new normal schedule.
Walter has avoided the kitchen area since he and Tara had broken the news to Al about them wanting to be together, that’s how they’d phrased it.
Al was assuming Walter’s self-imposed injunction was out of some twisted respect for Al, or fear and shame, which was right.
Al doesn’t like Walter’s cockiness today.
Al had gone to the house again at the weekend.
He would say he visited, only it’s not called visiting if it’s his own home.
His intention was to piss in Walter’s wardrobe.
He’d not actualised this intention. In theory, the smell of urine absorbed into the fabric of Walter’s shirts, which have no buttons from a previous visit, would have been satisfactorily disruptive to Walter’s life.
In actuality, as Al unzipped his trousers, he’d felt like an animal.
He’d caught sight of his reflection in the mirror over the dresser and didn’t like what he saw.
The expression on his face. The stormy snarl.
The brutal disgusting lewd act didn’t seem so humorous in real life.
Instead, he’d left the fridge open a little; they could argue between themselves about who forgot to close it before they left the house. Spoiled yoghurt and unsafe chicken are petty but significantly better than urinating on Walter’s clothes.
Natasha is still crying. He hears the pain, and he recognises the heartbreak. She’s hurting inside.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I broke up with my boyfriend.’
Pedro. He remembers seeing him waiting outside the office for Natasha, a six-foot-four MMA fighter from Barcelona.
‘He called me on Thursday and said he was tired of the long-distance relationship. Out of nowhere!’
‘It’s only two thousand kilometres.’
‘Exactly!’ Buoyed by the reinforcement she toughens up again.
‘And we’ve been making it work for three years.
It’s never been a problem before. I mean, it’s sometimes annoying that we have to plan to see each other, but we were going to move in together.
It’s not like I was going to stay here forever.
’ She looks around the office with a disgusted face. ‘No offence.’
Offence taken.
‘I was saving up. We were going to go travelling for a few years and then settle down in Barcelona. Anyway, that’s why I was out on Friday.’ She wipes her eyes and pushes the crushed drenched tissue up to her raw nose.
Al sighs. ‘You just never know what’s going on in people’s heads.
You think you know someone and they turn out to be someone completely different.
They stab you in the back. It makes you think, if someone who loves me can do this, then what can everyone else do?
If someone you love …’ his voice wobbles and Natasha looks at him curiously, ‘can do this to you, and can think so little of you, then what damage can a stranger do? I find it scary. It makes me question humanity. You can’t trust anyone. ’
‘Yeah,’ she says, sniffing. ‘I wasn’t really worrying about humanity, but he’s pissed me off. I’m hoping he’ll change his mind.’
‘You can take the day off if you want.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll stay. Keep my mind off it.’
Al doubts that she’ll be able to think of anything else.
Al had gone through a phase of thinking Walter and Tara would change their minds too.
He realises he’s still hoping, waiting for the moment they realise they were both out of their minds.
They’ve made a mistake, seen the error of their ways.
Tara can’t stand the sight of Walter’s naked body, he can’t get it up.
The passion that had stirred of not being able to be together while living together has worn off, or wasn’t what they thought it would be. It’s been five weeks now.
They sit in silence.
‘Are you okay?’ Natasha asks.
‘Yeah, sorry.’
‘Thanks for being so nice about it. I didn’t think you’d understand.’
‘I do.’