Chapter 16
Julian
Each morning, as Julian walks down the corridor to his studio in the Old Chocolate Factory, he glances through the small internal windowpanes, absorbing fragments of each space.
Some are so overwhelmed by a chaos of tools and mess that the artist inside looks almost dwarfed by it, as though their work threatens to consume them.
Others are more orderly, with a discernible workflow: cutting table, industrial machines, bolts of fabric, pattern pieces strung from giant butchers’ hooks.
The old factory hums with the sound of banging and drilling, with the whir of machinery, but Julian detects a quietness amid the din, and after a few weeks he realizes it is the relative lack of voices.
Like him, people are mostly in their own heads, absorbed by whatever work is in their hands.
There is an unspoken etiquette: music confined to headphones; cups of tea offered only if a door is left open; not standing to watch one another as they work.
Julian keeps his door closed but imagines himself as part of a hive.
Taking a space here hadn’t been his idea but Sílbhe and Cian’s. “Will you be looking at the garages they’ve converted down in the town?” his grandmother had asked, putting a newspaper in front of him.
He’d shaken his head and slid the paper back across the table without stopping to look. “I’m fine at Cian’s, thanks.”
But a few weeks later, driving to the city to hand-deliver orders to the different jewelers where they are stocked, Cian had said, “You know, Jules, I shan’t be offended if you want to branch out, be around people your own age.
We’ll still see each other back at the house in the evenings, like.
” Julian didn’t say anything, and Cian added, “Just a thought.”
Even though Sílbhe had already laid the foundations, Cian’s words were unexpected, and Julian felt them as a soft deflation inside his chest, like air being gently eased from a hot-water bottle. “Maybe I’ll see what’s about then,” he’d said.
He knew his life had become more isolated since he left school three years ago, but he hadn’t felt he was missing out on anything.
His friendship with Connor and Liam had never revolved around common interests.
Instead, they’d been forced together by what they didn’t do.
They didn’t snap girls’ bra straps or throw things at the teacher’s back when she turned to write something on the board, and when they were no longer forced to participate in Gaelic games during their Leaving Cert year, all three defected.
For Connor and Liam, it was because they disliked the cold and mud, and the way the teachers shouted them down even as some strapping yoke twice their size sent them flying.
For Julian, it was more complicated. He was solid enough, and he liked the way his body felt springy and alert as he chased down a ball, but he found himself unable to put in the tackles, slowing or veering off at the moment he should have jostled against another boy’s shoulders.
The PE teacher bellowing from the sideline, “What are you like? Cop on and stop worrying over getting hurt!”
When Connor and Liam muttered their indignation in the changing room, Julian grumbled along.
Because it seemed less shameful than the truth: that he was afraid of hurting someone else.
When school ended, they’d kept in touch on Facebook, but Julian predicted they probably wouldn’t meet again in real life and after a while he deleted his profile.
He has business accounts on a few social media platforms, but he doesn’t put much time into maintaining them.
He has enough work from Cian’s contacts and word of mouth.
Cian tells him he should aim higher, that he should be approaching stockists in London.
But the idea of sending his pieces across the Irish Sea gives him a sinking feeling.
He hasn’t been back to England since he was five years old.
It’s the land of his father; the land that failed to keep Julian, Maia, and their mother safe.
“Your Grandma Sílbhe, she worries. Wants to make sure if us oldies were to, you know, that you’d have people about.
” They’d both smiled at that; it’s an ongoing joke that his grandmother will live forever.
At seventy-four, she’s the fittest she’s ever been.
She wakes at half-five each morning and leaves the warmth of the bed she shares with Cian, pulls on leggings that sag against her bird-like frame, and runs a six-mile loop around the surrounding fields, back to make breakfast before anyone else has even stirred.
One day, as Julian was doing his accounts at the kitchen table, someone interviewed on the radio compared the act of running to a wish to escape something.
“Will you listen to that,” she’d scoffed.
“I’m running toward my life—the three of you—not away from it. ”
Julian had smiled, not knowing quite what to say.
Sílbhe had continued, “When you start, they say focus on something in the distance, like a telegraph pole or a gate, and run toward it, and then when you get there, set yourself a new target and run toward that. I used to picture your next birthday, or one of you bringing someone home for the first time, and I’d run toward that. ”
“Please tell me you’re not still waiting for that to happen!” Julian has almost given up believing a girl might take an interest in him.
Sílbhe had laughed too. “Any day now. But like I was saying, on a slow day, it’s more of the same.
Then on others, I’ll look around and I’ll get this—this elation, you know?
Like, look at this magnificent sky and those trees and this grass.
And if that isn’t the most marvelous thing, I don’t know what is.
I think about your mammy too. About what she was like as a little girl. And what she went through later.”
Then she’d busied herself with turning the bread under the grill.
Julian’s own memories of his mother are blurry.
Somehow, he remembers more of him, as though fear had impressed that presence on him more deeply.
The memories of his mother feel untrustworthy, as though he might have constructed them around things Maia has told him.
But when “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” comes on the radio, he feels sure he can remember his mum substituting the name with some variation of his own.
Juley, perhaps. He has an image of grabbing at dust motes in front of some patio doors and her, kneeling just behind him, telling him to make a wish.
Another time, he’s sitting on her knee on a picnic blanket, and he can almost touch the warm cotton of her blouse.
He remembers a kitchen—blue lino, cream cupboard doors—her shielding him behind her skirt, the soft texture of it, and the sound of shouting, before Maia took him by the hand and led him away.
He doesn’t know if that was the day it happened.
He knows his mother was beautiful. The evidence is in the photo frames dotted all around the house, but somehow that only seems to make her more unknowable, like some Hollywood actress who died tragically young.
He tries to imagine wrinkles onto her smooth skin, flecks of gray into her hair, thinking that if he could picture the person he would have known now, it might make her more real.
But it doesn’t. He thinks it’s probably harder for Maia, who knows what she’s lost.
There’s a girl at the studios. It was her artwork he noticed first. Huge wall hangings that remind him of the patchwork quilts his grandmother’s friends make, but instead of fabric, the tessellating pieces are cut from battered yardsticks and the kind of old wooden rulers he remembers from school.
The geometry of the shapes, how they interlock, the way disembodied inches and centimeters mark the surface, makes him want to stop and look for longer.
But whenever he walks past, he’s aware of a small blonde figure bent over the workbench, and only allows himself to slow briefly on the way to his own studio.
After a few weeks, she begins to look up when she hears his footsteps. “Hey,” she calls out.
“You all right?” he calls back, his words mistimed, skittering off into the dark nooks of the corridor as he continues walking.
He will hear this phrase later echoing around his head as he buffs an edge smooth or hammers a disc of silver to replicate the perfect melon-balled recess of a doming block.
The words will not be drowned out by the scritch-and-bang of his tools but amplified and played on repeat until they cease to have meaning and become even more ridiculous to him than when they first left his mouth.
He starts to dread these brief daily interactions.
But then, one day, when his arms are full with a delivery of new supplies he’s just collected from reception, she appears at his door.
“Julian?”
He sets the packages on the workbench. He is thrown that she knows his name.
She seems to pick up on this and says, “I recognized your boxes,” nodding to the shelf where they’re stacked, each one bearing his name in embossed lettering.
“I have a piece—” He looks at her neck, then at her hand.
She laughs. “It’s not on me. Don’t want to fangirl you—it’d be like playing Ronan Keating his own music.
Not that I’m into Boyzone…” He doesn’t say anything, so she adds, “I wear it a lot, though. Or did, until you got here. It’s a necklace—a gold hoop with a silver bar across. ”
He knows the piece. “Oh, Balance. That’s what it’s called. Technically,” he says, and feels pretentious for having mentioned its name, as though he takes his work too seriously. “You might not know that unless you bought it through the website, though.” He is waffling and they both know this.