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I half wish I hadn’t opened the door.
But she saw me through the stained glass and it was too late. I lowered myself towards her, stiff-limbed as the living dead. She waited in silence, trappist, total, soggy and prodigal, her red nose running.
I half wish I hadn’t opened the door.
She white-knuckled her suitcase, tapping her foot, disappointed in a damp dress, cold on the doorstep. The rain had a way of making her seem more or less naked in the wan porch light. She tells me she didn’t come back for herself. Tells me this time she came back to me.
I half wish I hadn’t opened the door.
She stares me down, wetly shedding sopping cotton, gives me a coat that is weighty with water. She hovers between the hallway and the night, one foot poised to trespass, carry her over the threshold like a dripping bride. Aren’t you going to let me in? She says.
I half wish I hadn’t opened the door.
…
Fireside beside and towelling her hair, she motions me to sit. She’s hung up her panties on the mantelpiece to dry with her dress. Her tights she says I can throw away. She is wearing my dressing gown, black with grey stripes. She fills it out better than I do.
She tells me she came to the reading. I saw you, she says, and I could see you needed help. I retire to my chair and begin again drinking. I ask what makes her think that I want her help?
She says what makes me think that I have a choice?
…
I need to take a bath, she says, show me to the bathroom. I sleep-walk her upstairs, it’s a difficult climb. She watches intently as I cleave to the banister, vertigoed and muscle-stressed, boozy and med-headed.
I hand her the towel and make to remove myself. She catches hold of my wrist and tells me to stay. I sink on to the toilet seat as she runs the water, testing the temperature with one chipped-polish toe.
When she’s done she teases and strips herself naked, sliding down in to the scented water. I turn my head but she snaps at me watch her. Watch her what? I ask. Just watch me, she said.
So I watched her. Lilly lived up to her name, floating Opheliaed, in the white ceramic bathtub, brown hair kelping and streaming behind her.
Her eyes half closed in cat-wise bliss she scooped soap bubbles up under her chin. Wearing a high collar of Victorian lace, she weighs each soft suet-pudding of a breast in her hands. She asks me am I getting in with her. I shake my head, feeling dim-witted. It all seems so unreal.
She arches her eyebrows and slides her fingers sexward, seeking something precious, clit like cultured pearl. She makes an airy sort of noise. I get up and leave. I go down to the kitchen. I left, not unmoved, but not aroused either, not the way she intended. What I felt was a terrible loneliness. A sense of disgust. A desire to do harm.
…
Lilly sits in the chair across from me. The kettle’s set to heat on the hob. The dog watches warily from his bed by the door. Lilly watches him back, she doesn’t like dogs. Aren’t you pleased to see me? She asks.
No, Lilly, I ain’t. Not anymore.
She shrugs her thin shoulders, says I suppose I deserved that. I get up and pour the water. We drink sweet, strong tea. I’m sorry I left, she says, before.
I ain’t sorry. I was, but I got over it.
Aye, looks like.
Fuck you, Lilly, not everything’s about you.
She puts out a hand but I push myself back. Because that’s what she does, that’s how she operates. She makes you need her, she cultivates your dependence, and then she fucks off and leaves you helpless and low-functioning. That’s how she operates. That’s how it happened. Last time, that’s how it happened.
Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been? She says, twisting a strand of red-brown hair around her index finger.
No, but you’ll tell me anyway.
I been in America.
That’s nice for you, Lilly.
I know where you’ve been.
But she doesn’t. No you don’t, Lilly, I tell her. You know where I went, you don’t know where I been. You know where they put me, but that’s all you know.
I’m sorry, Shane, she says, it must have been hard.
But it wasn’t hard. For hard then you need an awareness of time passing. I had none of that, not to begin with anyway. I’d say I lost everything, only nothing that mattered. To go mad the necessity is to travel light.
You were very kind to me, Lilly says, and that’s why I left. I couldn’t stand it, your being kind, I couldn’t get used to it.
You do understand, don’t you? You don’t hate me, do you Shane?
But Lilly didn’t know how I needed that kindness, my self-centred desire to be good, to take care. Lilly doesn’t understand how it really wasn’t kindness. It was my self I was trying to save, and not her. I had to prove what colour my soul was. I was metal tested and hell bent on compassion, desperately gentle, violently kind.
I needed that kindness, those expressions of softness, so I could live with me, with the mirror each morning, this stranger called I.
No, I don’t hate you, Lilly.
But I could. Because when she’d gone it fell apart. I had no one to be kind to, or for. I had failed in my last desperate attempt at goodness. The heart went out of me with the humanity, and the fight.
So everything slid. I drank myself downhill, to the day when it was okay to drink bleach, just to shut out the shit in my head, to stop myself from becoming anything worse.
No, I don’t hate you, Lilly. And I don’t blame you for leaving. I would have left me too, Christ knows I tried.
…
But now she is back. For me, she says, not because she’s in trouble. I ask her how did she find me, and she says it wasn’t hard.
I saw you at that reading you did. You didn’t see me, though.
I wouldn’t have recognised you. You’ve changed.
You haven’t, not really. But you looked so sick. It was a shock.
I don’t know why she’d be shocked. There’s lightening outside and the dog barks. Lilly shivers.
I always thought you were stronger than me, but you’re not, are you?
It catches up with you, Lilly.
What does?
Let’s have a proper drink, shall we?
…
So where did you go to, Lilly?
Lilly says she went to be beautiful. Not just anyone can be beautiful, she says, it’s the hardest work I know.
It’s not something that’s just there, says Lilly, the people who say so are full of shit. Truth is there’s no such thing as just being beautiful, that’s a trick. Beauty is something you need to do, and relentlessly, if you’re going to be any good at it.
The plus side is anybody can learn. The bad side is that it’s hard earned, harder to hang on to.
Being beautiful is a career, says Lilly. Other women will be unkind to you, they’ll call you a gold-digger or a whore, but they don’t know how much work it takes, how much effort, how much stamina, how much stoicism. They’re afraid of it, not just your beauty, but being beautiful. It frightens them, this power that I have, that they could have. They ain’t brave enough to be beautiful. They lack the discipline, the sacrifice. You see what I mean?
I drink, with guarded desperation. I draw the glass to me, keep it close to my chest as a hand of cards. I bluff my way through her monologue, tired tongue sticking and twisting at questions. I do not see, not exactly. You’re surprised? She asks.
About what?
What I’m like, with men.
No. I’m not surprised, Lilly.
She pulls a face. What? I ask her. You want me to be shocked? She laughs, propping her head in one hand. She’d like me to be something, she says.
You never give anything away. You never wanted me. You never want to fuck. I thought you were uptight or repressed or whatever. But you’re not a prude, you’re just completely indifferent. I shrug, wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. What the hell would you know, Lilly?
More than you’d think.
Like what?
But she doesn’t elaborate. Instead she tells me all I love is the drink. Alco-sexual, I am. Because you can’t feel, can you? You can do kindness, but you can’t feel it, can’t be it. Like me and beauty, me and sex. I can do it ‘til I’m blue in the face- and she gives a snort of laughter- but I’ll never be beautiful. I’ll never feel beauty, never feel love. I fuck and you drink, there isn’t much difference, not really.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, Lilly.
No, Shane, I do know. I’m smarter than I look.
…
I don’t mean to be unkind, says Lilly. It was a long flight is all. She’s stiff in the neck and dizzy from jet jag, worried about deep vein thrombosis and Islamic Jihad.
So how will you help me then, Lilly? How does knowing make the slightest bit of difference?
Lilly sits on the bed, painting her toenails, the towel wrapped round her red-brown hair. I lie on my back watching the ceiling spin round. Lilly cocks her head on one side. It’s funny, she says, people look at me like I’m some sort of monster. They think that I should be scared of sex, after what happened. Before, you know? You listening to me?
Aye, Lilly, I’m listening. Yes, Lilly, I know.
But I’m not. It’s the opposite, if anything. Have you go a cigarette?
Might be some in the top draw there, I tell her. So Lilly and me, we smoke. She sighs, stretching, splayed out beside me. She runs he hand over my jaw. The thing is, says Lilly. But she doesn’t say what the thing is.
There was this man, said Lilly. I thought he was different. But he wasn’t. She sits up, hugging her knees, restless. You know how many abortions I’ve had? Go on, guess.
I ain’t guessing, that’s fucking sick.
Offend your Catholic sensibilities did I?
And I have to laugh out loud at that. They were right though, weren’t they, Lilly? Mother Church was right, right about the supremacy of suffering. The other lot hang Christ on the cross with clothes pegs, like laundry, but Mother Church was right, raised a legion of little fucking wound wearers she did. You and me and everybody. Wore ‘em so well we became our wounds, our wounds wound up wearing us.
I cough. I cover my face with my hands. It’s in all the songs. That lyrical fucking stigmata. Make an exhibition of our wounds, we do. Only way we’ll ever be magnificent. That’s all we own, all we’ve got to offer. You give with your body, I give with words, pain and pain and pain and pain. A very Irish charity.
You’re drunk, says Lilly. And she’s not wrong.
…
I don’t want to do a good deed, says Lilly, it isn’t like that. In fact I might have lied, says Lilly, when I said that I wanted to save you. You need to lie back, says Lilly, you need to relax.
I could learn, you know, says Lilly, to get on with the dog. I wouldn’t mind, says Lilly, being a farmer’s wife. I could tell at the reading, says Lilly, that you weren’t kind or good anymore.
I ask her what she wants. Is it a man like her father to beat and abuse her? What does she expect of me. Nothing at all, she says, there is nothing to expect.
You’re done being good. I’m done being beautiful. Trying hurts too hard.
So now what?
It’s best this way, Shane.
Why?
It might be what we want, it might not be what we need, but it’s what we deserve. Nobody can argue with that, can they?
No, Lilly, I say, nobody can argue with that. She rolls out of bed and puts out the light. She pulls the cover over me and tiptoes to the door. I’ll sleep on the couch the night, she says.
You don’t have to.
Yes I do.
She stands for a while looking down at me. Four, she says at last, but one was two many.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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we are not amused
