Julian #2
“Even though you moan about it every Sunday?”
“Only while I’m still in bed. That doesn’t mean I don’t get something out of it once I’m there.
It’s not even really the religion bit. It just warms you, the familiar faces, feeling a part of something.
And the incense too. It smells like home.
Safe, you know? And you sit there in the quiet, listening, and you get to thinking about something you’ve been wrestling with.
And I don’t know if it’s those big high ceilings that just spirit it away—the blessed space—but when I leave, I always feel lighter. Ready to go into the week.”
“But what about confession? Why would you want to tell someone your sins?”
“So I can be forgiven,” she says, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “The alternative’s hanging onto them. Having them grow inside you and making your face look like sour milk.”
“Is that how I look?” he asks, souring his expression.
“You don’t need to go making faces. Even smiling you could curdle fresh cream.” Orla laughs, nudging his stomach with her toes.
She’s sitting in the window seat that looks out onto their small road.
Her blonde hair is lit up from behind by the sunshine.
Her hand is resting on her belly. “There you are, looking like the Madonna. What bad things do you do that need confessing?” Julian asks.
He can’t think of a single thing she does that merits being called a sin.
“Stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“I don’t know. Maybe like not always thinking good thoughts.
So, when Gráinne’s work was exhibited over in London last year, instead of being pleased for her, I had all this horrible jealousy banging around in my head.
About how her work isn’t even that good and how that big yellow piece the critics loved looked like something a toddler might have done.
And how sometimes I think she’s better at applying meanings to her work retrospectively to make it seem deep, rather than just doing good work in the first place.
” Orla’s cheeks flush like peach skin. “Yeah, maybe I’m still carrying some of that.
” She laughs, and her halo aura only seems to grow bigger and more lovely to Julian.
“But I agree with all that,” he says. “Is it really sinful just to think it? You gave her a hug and bought a round to celebrate. It’s not like you went into her studio and slashed her canvases.”
“Oh, but I probably wanted to! But, yeah, that’s part of trying to be a good Catholic. To notice when your thoughts aren’t healthy. To do penance and try better next time. But from a selfish point of view, like, it also just stops it eating away at you too much.”
Orla’s version of religion always makes sense to Julian. But then he thinks of the Fathers, the abused choir boys, the unmarried mothers forced to give up their babies. The men who beat their wives and then head to the confession box for absolution. And he wants no part of it.
Maia crosses the bridge, and at the main road, turns south toward town, which has a canopy of dark cloud hanging over it. She switches off the radio and uses the rest of the drive to think through the day’s patients.
She checks her watch and makes a run for it across the street to Doyle’s as fat splotches of rain begin to fall.
When the bell above the door rings, Maureen looks up and smiles.
“If only I’d still got you behind the counter.
We’ve had the world and his wife wanting a cooked breakfast this morning, I tell you.
And Lizzy’s called in sick. Again. That girl, she’ll be the death of me, she will. ”
“Well, at least I can get my own coffee,” Maia says, going into the kitchen.
“Oh, be off with you there. Getting your uniform all dirty,” she says, shooing Maia away. Maia’s never thought of the wardrobe of navy and white she wears on workdays as a uniform, but she supposes it is in a way.
She heads back across the road, trying not to slop the hot drink down her front, and turns on the lights and heating in her practice rooms.
Her first patient of the day is a middle-aged woman.
She came first with persistent headaches around the time of her divorce, returning a year later with symptoms of menopause.
Maia asks questions to help narrow her choice of remedy.
Do you prefer hot or cold drinks? Spicy or sour flavors?
Sometimes, these supporting details fail to reveal a clear picture and Maia knows she’ll spend hours consulting her battered copy of Murphy’s Materia Medica.
But other times, some small aside feels like being handed a corner jigsaw piece, the other symptoms coalescing around it.
“I think I know what we’ll try this time,” Maia says, heading to her medicine chest. There is something reassuring about opening a drawer and seeing all the carefully alphabetized caps labeled with their different potencies.
As Maia taps pilules into a bottle and prepares a label, the woman mentions seeing her ex-husband with an old friend. “How are you feeling about it?” Maia asks.
“I don’t know,” she admits. “Sometimes it feels easier not to think. It’d be like opening a dam.”
Maia nods. She knows this feeling. She’s been seeing a counselor for the last few years, but she, too, has been slow to lift the heaviest stones and look at the dark earth beneath, where her fears and worries flee the light like scurrying woodlice.
She’s talked about her early childhood, said just enough about that awful day to acknowledge its existence.
But she hides the details even from herself.
Lately, she’s been wrestling with other things too.
The idea that Julian, nine years her junior, is moving on with his life at a pace that’s outstripping her own: married, with a mortgage, and a baby on the way.
People tell her to get down to the annual matchmaking festival in the tiny village of Lisdoonvarna, where couples have been brought together for over a century.
They joke that she needs to lay her hands on Willie Daly’s lucky book to break the spell and meet Mr. Right.
And she smiles and laughs along because she wants to be good craic.
But inside she feels an Englishness: what business is it of theirs and why does she have to be fun all the time?
But it’s not just this—Julian lapping her, failing to find the right man.
One evening, watching the television with Sílbhe and Cian, a piece on the referendum around legalizing same-sex marriage comes on.
“Is it not just common sense that folk should be left alone to get on with their lives?” Cian says.
“It’s down to the Church that it’s even taken this long,” Sílbhe says.
Maia is surprised to find herself comforted to hear their views confirmed out loud.
The television shows a montage of public opinion—at a bus stop, in the aisles of a supermarket. Most are in favor, apart from an older man in a flat cap who says gravely, “No, I don’t think it’s right.”
Two women are interviewed on a beach. One blonde, one dark.
They wear knitted hats. One has pierced ears, the other a small nose stud.
They’re not touching, but you can tell they’re together.
And they glow. They just glow. The presenter’s question is lost on the wind, but their answer is clear.
They say they’re in love, that they just want the opportunity to spend their lives together like any straight couple.
Watching the rest of the news segment, Maia feels the same discomfort she does whenever a sex scene comes on TV if she’s watching with Sílbhe and Cian.
As though she mustn’t move, mustn’t betray any sign she’s aware of what’s happening on screen by reminding them of her existence.
Even though she immediately aches to uncross her legs, to move a stray hair from her face, to breathe.
She realizes she feels a personal investment in the referendum and reddens—although she’s unsure why; they’ve already made their views clear.
It wouldn’t matter to them if she’s gay.
So, it is not family pressure, guilt, or the Church that she takes to counseling. But something harder to deal with: her own judgment.
“I’d always thought it was because of what happened to my mum.
That that’s why I’m not with anyone. But then, I was watching this couple being interviewed on television about the referendum.
Two women. And I realized perhaps I wanted that.
That it somehow felt right, you know? But then I felt ashamed too. ”
“Because you might be gay?”
“Because I might be an imposter. Jumping on a bandwagon.”
“Can you say more?”
Maia glances at the clock, reassuring herself there’s enough time left to go into this. “Everyone says being gay isn’t a choice. That you’re born that way. But I’m thirty-seven. And I’m only thinking about it now.”
They revisit this idea over several sessions.
And Maia feels she and her counselor are like two old ladies from her grandmother’s quilt group, gathering around with magnifying glasses, peering at the stitches, inspecting from all angles.
Well, it looks like a quilt. It feels like a quilt.
There’s definitely a layer of wadding in there. But is it actually a quilt?
“What if I only want a relationship with a woman because I’m scared of having one with a man? In case he turns out like him.”
“Would that matter to you?”
“Yes. I’d be making life choices out of fear, avoidance.”
The counselor pauses. “I’m trying to put myself in your shoes…
” Maia looks down at her own trainers, imagines the therapist coming to join her in them.
She remembers walking around the living room that way with her mother.
Her feet planted atop her mum’s, their legs moving as one.
“What if those two things were to coexist?” the counselor says.
“That you could be both gay and understandably fearful of a romantic relationship with a man?”
Maia blinks away the memory and considers the question. “So my gayness is, what, natural and manmade?” They both laugh at her choice of word. “I keep asking myself why now, though.”
“And have you come to an answer?”
“Obviously it wouldn’t have been an option in my father’s house. But I’ve been with my grandmother for so many years now.”
“But the things you can’t admit to yourself at a formative age, do they suddenly become acceptable with a change of circumstance or because you’ve reached eighteen?”
Maia doesn’t think about how she might meet someone, doesn’t join a dating site, or consider telling her family.
Instead, she just turns the possibility of being gay over in her mind like a smooth pebble in the palm of her hand, and occasionally she thinks of the couple on television.
And when the right to same-sex marriage is enshrined in law on November 16, 2015, a bubble of hope inflates in her chest, as though some distant part of her future has been secured.