Chapter 24
Julian
He’s leaned on Maia a lot during the pandemic, since Orla left with the children.
That first lockdown, when his stockists were closed, when unemployment suffered the highest monthly increase in the Republic’s history, it was like free-falling through open sky, a crash-landing rising up to meet him.
Nothing he could do to stop it. And while many seemed to be making sourdough and growing vegetables, there was no support for the self-employed.
Not at first anyway, and Julian and Orla’s interactions quickly came to feel like sandpaper chafing up against itself.
“Why have you bought more coffee?”
“What?”
“It’s a luxury, not an essential.”
“It’s essential to me.”
“More than feeding your own children?”
The words could have been said by either one of them, depending on their mood, depending on who was more anxious in any given moment.
And the woman he’d once romanticized, the way she’d looked as she turned to him just like that, the peachy glow of her skin in that last hour before sunset when everything was cast in gold…
he no longer did. She was just Orla. Jeans slightly too tight, dark circles beneath her eyes, an annoying habit of clicking her tongue absent-mindedly until Julian felt the noise might bore a hole in his skull.
In the May of that first lockdown, the washing machine flooded the kitchen and Julian spent two days amid a growing pile of tools, trying to fix it, feeling he was always just one YouTube video away from a solution.
“Let me come down and look at it for you,” Cian said.
“I’ll be careful. I can wear a mask.” But Julian refused, too worried about giving him the virus, of breaking the rules, and a neighbor or the gardaí finding out.
And so, they’d taken to washing their clothes in the bath, wringing out each item, and leaving them to drip-dry from the old Sheila Maid rack above.
The whole house felt damp, and the kitchen floor began to darken where the wooden boards failed to dry out.
At night, slugs appeared, thick bodies stretched thin like pulled bubblegum to breach the slightest gap.
Julian stuffed wire wool into the cracks beneath the skirting boards and around the water inlets, but it did nothing to slow the invasion, and when Orla came down in the night for a glass of water, she put her hand on one oozing across the kitchen tap.
Everyone wakened, lights on, adults glaring at one another as they soothed the children back to bed.
“This house!” Orla said as she crawled back under the covers.
“Did you not think screaming like that might have been an overreaction?”
“I hadn’t planned on it, eejit.”
Julian lay with his hands flattened beneath the covers, a lid on his anger. Always too fearful of who he might become to do things any other way.
Another day, when the girls were arguing, Julian had asked, “Will you be dealing with that, Orla?” He was sitting at the kitchen table doing his accounts, while she cooked dinner.
“Will I be dealing with it?” Orla said, as the volume increased in the next room.
Julian looked up from his paperwork and saw frustration, or perhaps even a flash of hatred, on her face.
“Have you ever thought that you could be the one to go in there and read the riot act? I know that might mean not being Mr. Popular for once but, actually, they’re your children too, Jules.
Why should you always just get to do all the warm and fuzzy stuff? ”
He sighed, raised his hands at her tirade as though in self-defense.
“Don’t do that! Why do you always do that?!”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You did! That face! That face that’s meant to make me feel like I’m some sort of unhinged banshee.
I might be furious, but what I’m saying is completely reasonable.
You know, Jules, when you set a boundary for a child, it makes them feel safe.
Did you get that? Safe. They’ll look at you like you’re some kind of gobshite in the moment, but really that’s you being the good guy. ”
“Orla,” Julian said, wincing at her language, at the possibility the girls might hear.
“Do you have to be so passive in your own life all the time? I’m trying to tell you something—to give you a chance—and you can’t even hear it. You can only think about how I’m saying it.”
One of the girls—Aoife, Julian thought—was crying by then, the words Give it back! audible over Orla’s shouting. He went through to the living room where the two girls were snarled in a tug-of-war over some toy. “Okay, who wants a biscuit?”
But before they could answer, Orla was there, tearing another strip off him.
“That’s your solution? A biscuit! It’s nearly dinner time but you’d rather give them a biscuit than man up and be the adult here?
When are you going to grow up, Jules? When are you going to start putting us first?
” She left the room, slamming the door behind her, and he’d felt so tired.
Because no matter what an argument appeared to be about, it always came back to this.
That he was unable to leave behind the past—his hostility toward England—to secure their future.
At night, Maia’s words circled in his mind, something she once said about contempt being the most corrosive thing in a relationship, the indicator of a marriage on the rocks.
He felt it. The crashing carnage of jagged words on damp air; hostile bodies that no longer turned toward one another.
And he couldn’t see what he needed to do to change it, even though Orla screamed it at him in pretty much every argument they had.
Had done for all the years they’d been together, as though all her frustration had its roots in one single thing.
But it was only when Cian spoke the words that he heard them.
There’s something about that—when the quietest person, most reserved in their opinions, most reluctant to impose their thoughts on others, finally speaks; you hear.
Oh. Oh, and you’re suddenly face to face with the truth.
“Julian, son. You will lose your family for good if you keep with this foolish pride. Sell to England. It’s just a place. It’s not your father.”
His family had already gone by then, though.
To Orla’s parents. When Ireland started shutting down again in October, Orla had said for the sake of them both—for the children too—they couldn’t go through another lockdown together.
I can’t be living with you like this, Jules.
Always plucking at you to try to make you into the person I want; I don’t like who it’s turning me into.
Although she hadn’t taken everything, the house felt dismantled.
Empty coat hooks in the hall, shelves with books and board games missing, the toothbrush holder with its unfilled spaces.
Without Aoife and Niamh, without Orla to get home for in the evenings, Julian started working longer hours.
He spent more time at his computer, approaching stockists, trying to drum up business.
Some days sending emails felt like dropping stones down a well; the only confirmation they’d landed anywhere at all, the occasional bounce-back: This email user no longer exists.
He found unspoken tales of closures and redundancies everywhere he went.
It should have made him feel less alone, but it didn’t.
He imagined these people having fallen into exciting new roles, ditching their old lives in favor of fledgling start-ups or positions at companies that could ride out the pandemic.
Sometimes he imagined they’d found their way into making jewelry themselves and he had the sensation of lift doors closing, no room inside for him.
He picked through old emails, searching for contacts who’d once approached him.
It was a shameful feeling, seeing how many he’d let go unanswered.
And now he must hold his hands out, begging.
Some nights he slept at the Old Chocolate Factory, only breaking from his work to say good night to Aoife and Niamh over Zoom.
The calls were frustrating. It was hard to keep their attention through the screen and they would float away like dandelion seed heads, momentarily reappearing, cheeks glowing, pajamas on, smelling—he knew—of bubble bath and fabric softener, before drifting off again.
“Come and speak to Daddy, Niamh,” and then some side conversation, negotiating a bedtime story. “No, no, come on, quick. Daddy’s waiting.” He could hear Orla trying to make it work, trying to draw them all together through the screen, but never quite managing it.
Some nights, their faces would crowd in, filling his laptop for those last seconds prior to being released from duty.
Other times, it was just him and Orla there at the end.
Both sad, but unsure how to fix things. “You look tired,” she’d said.
And he’d rubbed at his face, suddenly feeling it.
“I’ll be right. I could probably just do with getting my eyes checked. ”
Some nights, he would drive over to visit them.
Orla’s parents were uneasy with the idea of him coming inside, though Julian wondered if this wasn’t a convenient cover, an excuse to excommunicate their feckless son-in-law from the family.
And so they went to the park, breath cutting funnels through the early-evening darkness as they stamped their feet to keep warm while Niamh had one last go on the climbing frame.
Walking back toward the gates, they’d swing the girls up in the air between them and Julian would find himself taking mental snapshots, as though a photographer were always standing a few feet ahead of them.
This is you, when you were still almost a family.
This is you, when you thought there might still be a hope of putting things back together.