Читать книгу Hand in the Fire - Hugo Hamilton - Страница 12

It would take a good nine months or more for the court case to come up, so there was lots of time to sit around and agonise over the situation. Better to go out and have a good time while I was waiting, Kevin advised me. What helped to take my mind off things was that I found a girlfriend. Her name was Liuda and she was from Moldova, working here as a beautician on a temporary visa. I got talking to her at the pharmacy where she was promoting some skin-care products and we started going out.

I felt badly not telling her that I was charged with assault, but she was better off not knowing anything about that.

We got on very well together and maybe immigrants were better off sticking together, I thought, because we might have more in common. Put it this way, we both knew what it was like to live away from home and what a comfort it was to float around in each other’s arms. When it came to sex, you could say that we spoke the same language. Some of the things she did with her body gave me such a rush of blood to the head that I forgot everything. She was so full of stagecraft and imagination that I could never think of anything else but the act of making love itself. Her legs. Her mouth. Her breasts pointed slightly upwards at the tops of trees somewhere. Everything about her in bed demanded such full attention that I could not concentrate on anything other than the specific details of her body. The incredibly soft areas on the inside of her thighs. The brush of her nipple against the side of my face. All those breathy voicemail sounds in my ears. The encounter with her seemed to prohibit all memory. For instance, I could not remember any old people. I could not get myself to remember any dead people either. She distracted me from thinking about the news, about war and climate change, disasters of any sort, like famine and poverty and people dying of AIDS. She produced such a powerful urge in me, pulling me so vigorously inside herself that I became truly blank. In other words, we were fucking to forget. We created this little enclave of love and sex which inhibited us from getting a proper foothold in the real world.

Yes. You could say it was love, but there was no future in it. Under the circumstances, with my court case coming up and her being here on a temporary visa, it seemed pointless for us to accumulate too many memories together.

We did all the right things. We went for picnics in the Phoenix Park. We spent time at the Zoo. We went walking along the pier together. We took photos of each other with all the local landmarks in the background. Her eyes caught the sunlight – glossy, hazel-brown pebbles at the bottom of a stream. She came from a place where they still had bears and wolves and numberless trees, where nature might still make a big comeback some day. We heard the sound of the accordion coming and going on the breeze. We passed by the man from Romania playing a gypsy waltz and wondered why we had left home in the first place. We remembered the same kind of things, the sight of villages and church spires and headscarves and open shirts and unshaven smiles in the fields. We felt close to each other – same nostalgia, same tug of self-loathing, same shock of familiar tastes and images from which we had walked away.

In the long run, we were only preventing each other from integrating and moving ahead. It was there in our eyes, in the kind of choices we made, the places we went to, the kind of things we purchased that didn’t cost too much, like ice-cream cones.

For instance, one day I brought her to a place called Howth. It’s meant to be beautiful out there. Famous too, because this was the location where the writer James Joyce first made love to his future wife Nora, something which is commemorated publicly on the sixteenth of June every year in a national celebration of sex and literature and first love. People told me that Ireland used to be sexually repressed, but you’d never think it now, would you?

Howth was just another hill, basically, with a big golf course and some wealthy villas and gates and planes landing nearby at the airport. It didn’t really mean anything to us. When I gave Liuda the relevant tourist information, she shrugged as though I was talking about a past lover. We walked around and sat on a bench. We felt the dampness in the air, rising up into our shoulders. We gazed at the clouds moving fast overhead, which made us want to hold on to the bench with our hands. We kissed and touched, but we couldn’t really connect to the place. It was a mistake to bring her out there because it already belonged to somebody else. We were the latecomers. She looked lonely and pale, so we didn’t stay very long.

‘Come on, Vid. I’m cold,’ she said.

There was quite a breeze blowing and she started rubbing her arms. As we got up and walked back, I spotted a used condom hanging like a pink piece of stripped fruit in the gorse bushes. I deflected her attention, pointing eagerly like a child at the lighthouse, but I think she had seen the condom before me and didn’t mention it out of courtesy.

We were both dragging our feet. When you come from somewhere else, you develop all these prejudices about the people of this country being superior, more funny, more gifted with language and jokes. She said Irish women were strong and very independent. She wanted to learn that. Every time we stared into each other’s eyes, we were reminded only of our own inadequacies. We had to be realistic, I suppose. We were both on the lookout for something better. There was something missing, something preventing us from committing fully to this love in a damp climate.

We stuck it out together for about six months, but there was never any mention of us moving in together permanently. And the idea of setting up a family seemed completely out of the question. Think of it. We would remain strangers to our own children. We would be like two homesick parents, living in a fantasy. Lacking essential local knowledge. Routine stuff that everybody knows around here. Our children laughing at us and correcting our mistakes. Talking to us like we were deaf and blind and had no idea what was going on in the real world outside. We would speak to them in a foreign language and they would never get used to what we sounded like in our own mother tongue. It would remain a life of confusion and contradiction and naturally occurring blasphemies.

I tried to integrate her as much as possible into my life, but it never worked out. One night, I brought Liuda with me to meet Kevin and Helen, but that was a bit of a disaster. Nobody knew what to say except Kevin. He couldn’t take his eyes off Liuda all night. Kept talking only to her as though myself and Helen were not even present.

Liuda was very shy in his presence and hardly said a word. Helen was even more silent, almost aloof. The only thing she said all night was to mention Dursey Island.

‘I believe the cable car is down,’ she said, and Kevin looked up with great surprise, wondering where this thought had slipped out from. ‘They have a new one ordered from Germany,’ she added. ‘So I read in the paper.’

We had more fun on our own, Liuda and myself. At least we had love and sex, like living on our own island. We could also talk about our observations as outsiders, without offending anyone. We spoke about some of the funny things, the contradictions we experienced here. I loved listening to her talking about her clients and how envious they were of her complexion. She told me how Irish women often hated their own skin. They wanted the make-up lashed on thick. ‘Does my face look like a plate of chips?’ they sometimes joked. And how could you answer that? Beauty therapy was not about being honest but about making the customers feel good.

We agreed that people here didn’t want the straight answer all the time. They needed lots of praise. They loved exaggeration. They used compliments like mind-altering substances. She was on commission for skin-care products, so she got used to telling people that they looked gorgeous, cool, brilliant, absolutely amazing – out of this world.

She told me the story of how she came here. She met an Irish businessman who was in Moldova sourcing timber. She ran into him in a bar and he offered to get her a job. Paid for her flight over and put her up. She was nervous because she had heard about girls getting their passports taken off them when they arrived. But her passport didn’t matter as much as her visa, which put her at the mercy of her employer. She could not work for anyone else. So she lived with him and slept with him and cooked for him and worked in the office of his joinery firm.

Once he got tired of her, he allowed the permit to lapse. When he came back from another business trip with a new woman from São Paulo and a consignment of hardwoods that he swore were not from the rainforest, Liuda had to move out and find herself a new employer who would apply for a new visa. Asshole, she called him, and it made me laugh to hear her putting the emphasis in the wrong place. Ass-HOLE.

Inevitably, she was taken out of my hands, as the saying goes.

We were in a bar together one night and this guy came up to me in the jacks, talking about her. He was staggering around the place, pissing dangerously beside me in his urinal, chasing the green, pine-smelling dice around in circles with the force of his flush.

‘Come here,’ he said, zipping up. ‘Is that your girlfriend?’

‘What?’

Out in the corridor, he held my arm and smiled with great sincerity. He had something important to tell me.

‘I just want to let you know that your girlfriend has the most beautiful arse I’ve ever seen. I’m not joking you. I’ve never seen such a beautiful arse before in my whole life.’

What was I meant to say? Thanks?

‘No offence, like. I’m just saying, in case you haven’t noticed.’

He had me cornered.

‘Come ‘ere. Is she a model or something?’

I smiled and tried my best to walk away, but he insisted on shaking my hand to congratulate me.

‘Look, I hope you don’t think I’m coming on to her or anything like that. I’m just telling you the truth, that’s all. Her arse is only fucking amazing. You should be proud of yourself.’

He was right of course. Liuda was wearing incredibly tight jeans with zips across the back pockets like long, silver eyelashes, fast asleep. And knee-high boots. I could never really understand the boots, or the jeans for that matter, but that was the whole idea, wasn’t it, attracting lots of attention to herself.

‘Only messing,’ he said, putting his arm around me. ‘I’m just having the craic, that’s all.’

He leaned on me all the way back towards the bar. I could hardly interpret this as a form of aggression, because he was being so friendly.

‘I was just remarking to your man here,’ he continued, nodding to me but speaking directly to Liuda this time. ‘You have the most perfect arse that ever came into this country.’

He waited for her to smile.

‘There’s no woman anywhere around here to match you.’

I thought she might have been offended, for my sake. But this was really her opportunity to land on her feet at last, so I could not allow myself to stand in the way.

I became a has-been. I felt like shit. All my inadequacies like a tray of cakes on display in front of the world. I tried telling myself that she was the traditional sort of woman, expressing her femininity, enjoying the attention she got, not only from men but also from the jealous eyes of women who wanted to tear their false nails across her face. I told myself that I was the more progressive type, adjusted to the give and take of love, while she was still nostalgic for the time when men were men and women were women. I think she expected me to be more of a man than I appeared to be. Protective. Knowing what to do in case of emergency.

Look, I’m a lover, I wanted to say to her, not a fire-fighter. I didn’t know how to stand up for her in a row.

‘He’s only messing,’ I tried to warn her.

‘Look, Vid,’ she smiled, ‘we both know this is going nowhere, you and me. We’re in the wrong place.’

It didn’t help that I was working in a restaurant at the time, in the kitchens, coming back home every night with a heavy film of grease on my face and the stink of chicken breasts in my clothes. Early bird all night. No matter how much I showered, it would not remove the toxic residue of cooking. Each plate with criss-crossed potato wedges built up like sleepers in a railway yard. And the amount of salt they piled on to make it taste better. Then one night the manager, who must have been only nineteen years of age and looked more like fifteen, came up to me and said it was my duty to clean the toilets. They were covered in vomit. You could read the menu in small print all over the floor and the walls. I told him I wouldn’t do it. He said he understood my position. But then he told me that refusal was not an option and threatened dismissal. He informed me that everyone took their turn cleaning the toilets, so I told him he could have my turn and left.

I walked out along the pier at Dún Laoghaire harbour. I had a small apartment out there, not far from where Kevin’s mother lived. It was handy, because he was giving me more and more work at the house, so I could walk there from my place.

The wind was quite strong that night. The sailing boats were being tossed around and the guy ropes made a ringing melody against the masts. All kinds of things banging and squeaking and set loose. I was wondering if Liuda had already deleted the photos on her phone, taken at the bandstand by the accordion player from Sighişoara. The sea was churned up and as I walked around by the elbow of the pier, the wind was like a hand on my chest. A big bouncer preventing me from walking any further, pushing the words back into my mouth.