Chapter 24 #3
He was aware of the phone ringing. Of Maia coming in to check on him.
But he doesn’t remember speaking. Months later, Maia told him she’d worried to Meg that she might have broken him.
During those past few weeks, it had seemed as though she’d been doing something essential, something long overdue, but then, she’d doubted herself.
On the third day, when he woke, the bedside clock showed it was 7:30 a.m. As though he’d never strayed from routine.
He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling dazed, struck by his own stench, his furred tongue.
In the bathroom, he dropped his unwashed clothes to the floor and, standing in the shower, hot water pricking at his skin, the room obscured by steam, it came to him.
He was not his father. He’d thought he walked a narrow line, at any moment ready to tip over into likeness.
But the line wasn’t narrow after all. It was a great, uncrossable chasm.
Julian could never be like him. Even if he allowed his anger to unfurl—raised his voice in an argument—he would never be capable of the cruelties his father had inflicted.
Not even close. He could finally see that now.
He leaned against the shower wall and sobbed until he was empty.
It was a chance meeting that brought Meg into Maia’s life again.
A friend from homeopathy college had invited Maia to a summer barbecue, but when it began to rain, people moved inside, and it was Meg who sat down beside her on the sofa.
“Oh! I think we’ve already met. I came to you a few years ago. For hay fever?”
It had just been a few appointments, but Maia had warmed to her. She wore a lot of blue, the same shade as cornflowers—was wearing it that day too—and she had an open, generous face. “Meg?”
“Yes, good memory.” She nodded to the open patio doors.
“People always say the rain sticks pollen to the ground, but that was never the case for me; the moment it rained I could barely breathe. But I’m here now, breathing.
Proof of your brilliance.” She smiled. “I’ve actually sent a few people your way over the years.
Just a moment, let me fetch us a drink.”
When she returned, Meg flipped off her shoes and sank into the sofa cushions, feet tucked up beneath her skirt.
An intimacy that seemed to suggest she was there for the long haul, that she wasn’t about to claim needing the loo or spotting a friend across the room.
“I don’t know about you, but I think there’s an imbalance.
Like, you know all this weird stuff about me—and is it more of a nasal drip, or like you’ve got cotton wool in your nose?
—and I know absolutely nothing about you. ”
Maia laughed at how word-perfect her impression was. “Are you planning on coming back to me at any point? For treatment, I mean?” she asked, instantly regretting her question.
But Meg brushed it away easily. “Oh, God. Never. Absolutely never.” She laughed. And she leaned over, her hand glancing Maia’s knee as she spoke. Just the fingertips. Just for the briefest moment. But Maia felt something.
“Twenty questions, then?” Maia suggested, surprised by her own impulsivity. But Meg had only grinned.
“Okay, let’s start with a simple one. Eggs: scrambled or fried?”
“Scrambled,” Maia said, grateful to settle into a conversation that, for now, had a predictable formula. Something she might be contained within.
“Ireland or England?”
“Ireland. I came across when I was a teenager and never really picked up an accent. My younger brother is full Irish, though; he was only five. Sorry, that was more than a word.”
“Oh, we never said it was one-word answers. Morning or night?”
“Morning. I like the sense of possibility.”
“Town or fields?”
“Fields. My grandmother’s house where I grew up is surrounded by them.
” Maia thought of her own flat down in the town, not too far from Julian’s place.
It had taken several years for it to feel like home, the transition softened by the bits and pieces her grandmother left behind each time she visited—a favorite vase, a well-used baking tray; by Cian stopping in to fix things.
“We miss having you with us, but we’re so proud,” Sílbhe had whispered into her hair as they’d gone to leave one evening.
It was a fierce sort of pride. Something that made them hug one another more tightly.
Meg put a hand over her glass as a man in a county jersey bumped into the sofa, but her gaze remained on Maia’s face. “Summer or winter?”
Maia smiled. “Summer’s my favorite day in Ireland.”
“Past or present?”
“Present.” It was the truth, although the answer pained her; it felt like an erasure of her mum. She glanced up, ready for the next question, and caught Meg’s pause. As though she’d been able to read the turmoil on Maia’s face.
“Dishes: before bed or the morning after?”
“Oh, God, before. But I’ll leave wine glasses; they’re best done sober.” Although something in her felt compelled toward honesty and she added, “I don’t actually drink that often, though.” She felt sure Meg was someone who always had a bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter.
“Sorry, I should have checked. Is this okay?” Meg asked, tilting her glass.
“Oh, yeah, it’s not that I don’t drink. Just that…it would probably be misleading. To suggest I come down to a party of wine glasses in the kitchen sink every weekend.”
“Good to know,” Meg said, mischief flickering across her features. “But anyway, walking: fast or slow?”
“Slow. More time for conversation. Fast says I’m late.”
“Fiction or non-fiction?”
“Fiction, although if there’s a choice, I’d take poetry.” Meg raised her eyebrows and Maia wondered if she’d sounded pretentious. Or if it was meant to indicate they had that in common.
“Logic or instinct?”
“Oh, always instinct.”
“Happy or sad endings?”
“I want to say happy, but…”
“Agreed. Predictability or excitement?”
“Probably predictability.” Maia cringed at how serious she must sound.
“Commitment or fling?”
“I think my last answer covers that,” she said, hoping flippancy might lighten things.
“Regret or doubt?”
Maia thought for a while. “Mm, regret. Probably better to live and make mistakes.”
“Guard up or down?” Meg put her head to one side and held Maia’s gaze, not looking away even as a group over by the patio doors burst into raucous laughter.
“Right now? Being lowered one question at a time,” Maia said, trying to keep the smile from her face.
“Cherished or respected?”
“Oh, cherished,” Maia said, enjoying how the word had sounded as Meg said it.
Like something gorgeous. Plump and ripe like a cherry, the stain of it coloring her lips as they formed the sounds.
“I think respect would come with that anyway,” Maia added, unsure how she could keep giving such sensible answers, when she was giddy inside.
“Straight or gay?”
A change of tempo, a pause, an intake of breath.
“Gay,” Maia said.
“No qualifier for that one then?” Meg asked, her eyes laughing.
The rain must have stopped, because the group who’d been straggling were moving outside into the sunshine, leaving the room quieter and Maia’s words more exposed. “I only came out a few years ago. Back in 2015, with the referendum. But I’m…sure.”
Meg nodded, smiled. “So,” she paused, seeming uncertain for the first time, “is this twenty questions at a barbecue, or could it be something more?”
“Is this the last question?”
“I’ve not been keeping count,” Meg said. “But I think there’s at least one left.”
“Do you know what it’s going to be? The last question?”
“It depends on your answer to this one.”
“Oh, more then. Please,” Maia said, moving her hand so her fingertips brushed Meg’s.
“Come home with me?”
Meg is Maia’s first serious relationship. And it works, even though Meg leaves the dishes until the morning after, even though she finds the countryside claustrophobic, hemmed in by too big a sky and endless green.
They sit beside one another in bed, reading bits out from their books.
And Meg has adopted Julian as though he’s her own; sometimes when he rings it is she who listens and dispenses advice, astute but delivered with more sarcasm and direction than Maia’s.
Paint samples gather in the hall beside their shoes, as they try colors on the walls of Maia’s flat.
They decide on a warm blue called Juniper Ash.
In the bathroom cupboard there is a communal box of tampons, and this companionable distribution of things makes Maia feel oddly whole.
Maia tells Meg the things she’s never spoken out loud—not even to family—and Meg says, “Oh, you poor darling,” and holds her, and somehow that is enough.
And on Sundays, they drive to the beach and walk along the wet sand hand in hand, wind whipping at their coats, hair tangling, as Meg takes Maia’s face in her hands, cherished.
On a Tuesday in June, Cian comes around the corner of the house, a handful of feathery-topped carrot spears in his hands where he’s been thinning them out, and through the window he sees Sílbhe lying on the living-room floor.
He runs to her, wanting to find her just grazed, soon patched up.
But, instead, he finds her slack-jawed, her gentle face at rest. He kneels beside her, does the things we instinctively do: lowers an ear to her lips; checks her wrist for a pulse.
But it only confirms what he knows. He brings her still-warm hand to his cheek and weeps.
Because they have not had long enough. Because he is not ready for their shared life to be at its end.
He sits with her as the light fades, as the chill starts to creep in through the open door, as her cooling body sets in place.
He sits with her through the night, not ready to move into the next phase he knows must come.
One of phone calls and condolences. And her absence.
For now, for just a little longer, it will be just the two of them.