Thirst Trap, page 16
‘Really? Where are you moving to?’
‘Anywhere else. I mean, not back here. But somewhere else. I need out of that house.’
‘Getting a bit much? After Lydia?’ Ciara asks.
Róise warms her hands around her coffee cup. ‘I still…It’s been over a year and I can’t really believe she’s gone. When I’m steaming in the pub with Maggie and Harley I keep accidentally buying rounds for four people instead of three, as if she’s just gone to the toilet. I’ve had to neck the extra drink at the bar before they see. It’s costing me a fortune plus my liver.’ She shudders. ‘Can we talk about something else?’
‘We’re thinking of moving back to Belfast,’ Ciara says smoothly.
‘Oh?’
‘We’re talking about it. Domhnall agrees it makes sense. And if we think there’s any chance of moving then really we should do it before Finn gets to nursery age, to give him continuity.’
‘Is this really just a ploy to get your child socializing with weeins who don’t have culchie accents?’
‘Perish the thought,’ Ciara laughs. ‘But yeah, we’re thinking about it. I was a bit worried about Mum being isolated if we just upped and left, but she’s got Granny and she’s out having the craic with Lesley and Vera every weekend. I swear she’s got more of a social life than me.’
Róise nods while Ciara talks more about moving, about things like mortgages and school catchment areas. She feels a low-level disdain for people her age who think it’s quirky to claim that they are witless babies in denial about the admin of adulthood, but when Ciara goes off on one about council tax rates or bathroom square footage, Róise feels keenly that her sister’s is a world she cannot imagine ever inhabiting.
* * *
—
Róise’s granny gets the greatest hits out when Róise tells her she’s still single. She kicks off with ‘Do you have to be so picky?’ followed by ‘You need to learn to give people a chance,’ and the timeless classic: ‘Who do you think you are, Taylor Swift?’ This last one has become an idiom embedded in their family lexicon. Granny is obsessed with Taylor Swift. She has a Twitter account that she uses solely to keep up with Taylor Swift news; sometimes she comes across posts from trolls saying things like Taylor Swift should be tortured by starving alligators and she replies earnestly with I think that’s unfair, Kevin. She seems like a lovely girl, and so hardworking. When Granny asks Róise, ‘Who do you think you are, Taylor Swift?’ it means she thinks her granddaughter must have notions of being able to take her pick of Hollywood actors and famous musicians.
‘You want to get a move on, our Róise; the only ones left are going to be middle-aged divorcés looking for a second chance at youth, or struggling musicians who never grew up in the first place.’ Granny gives her a pointed eyebrow-raise as the bell clangs at the back of the church and the organ starts wheezing.
Granny sprained her ankle after Christmas and should still be taking it easy, but it’s Molly McElhinney’s memorial service and she wanted to attend in person instead of watching online. (Róise, Ciara and their mum bought Granny a smart TV for her birthday last year. It has dozens of channels and on-demand platforms and the only things she ever streams on it are Midsomer Murders and Mass.) Granny has started doing soft mutters and harrumphs during the homily, which makes Róise think she has perhaps got used to heckling the celebrant from her armchair at home. She gives Róise a pound to put in the collection basket, and another to light a candle at the end. When Róise was young she had a very unrealistic notion of how long the votives in church lasted once she lit them, watching a little bowl of liquefied wax form on the surface and imagining it burning determinedly for days. While she and Adam were in the restaurant last night one of the waiters came round putting tea lights in amber-coloured holders on each of the tables. The candle was freshly lit when it was set down between them, but several drinks later, she watched the flame give way to spiralling smoke-ribbons.
She blows out the taper after lighting her candle. ‘What did you wish for?’ Granny whispers impishly, coming up behind her. It’s an old joke; the flames ruffle from the breath of their laughter.
hunt the hare and turn her down
One week before Valentine’s Day, Maggie’s therapist breaks up with her. Astrid sends an email beginning ‘Hi all!’ like a chirpy maid of honour circulating plans for an upcoming hen weekend. She then says that due to personal circumstances, she will be stepping away from her practice for the foreseeable future. Despite this explanation, Maggie cannot help wondering if this ‘Hi all!’ has been sent to her, solely and personally, because Maggie’s troubles have become too tedious to tolerate, even at a rate of forty pounds an hour. Astrid writes that she will be available for concluding sessions until the end of the month and that she is more than happy to recommend alternative sources of counselling. Maggie has never thought ahead to a time when she would not be seeing Astrid on Mondays, although she always had a vague notion that she would one day walk away with a certificate (real or implied) to confirm that she had Finished Therapy. Restarting with someone new seems like an exhausting prospect. Perhaps Astrid could send her notes to any future therapist of Maggie’s, so she doesn’t have to rehash the various deaths and disruptions that have led to her having regular panic attacks and shared custody of a turtle.
* * *
—
Maggie has returned, alone, to running. The half-hour silence from one end of the park to the other is now filled with twelve repeat plays of ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’. She keeps pace with its rhythm, picking up speed in the latter verses, almost able to imagine that she is bouncing around at a céilí.
Maggie did her first solo run accompanied by an audiobook memoir by a social media personality who claimed she used to start the day with a double shot of vodka and three lines of cocaine until she discovered long-distance running. The opening chapters were a bleak inventory of the woman’s alcoholic blackouts, the descriptions so harrowing they made Maggie feel nauseous and wrong-footed, as though she herself might stumble mid-jog and be stranded paralytic on the ground until a passer-by called an ambulance. Maggie retired the audiobook three chapters in and switched to podcasts, but found her thoughts were too scattered to engage with anything vaguely informative. She tried a few episodes from the broad genre of ‘two pals shooting the breeze as if at the pub’, but it only made her want to be at the pub shooting similar breeze with her own pals, which she found was not a productive mindset for seven a.m. on a Tuesday.
After her Saturday run, instead of a quick blitz in the shower, Maggie decides to take a bath. Frankie sent someone round last week to treat the mould, and the chemical smell has finally left the bathroom. On the wall, however, there is still a shadowy frogspawn of damp patches that suggests the problem has not been fully banished. Maggie sits with her back to it, drinks the cooling dregs of her coffee, and picks up the book she hasn’t touched in two weeks. She and Tess have been engaged in pleasant discourse over text about all the books Tess has read, and all the books Maggie owns and means to read, one day.
I’ve got very basic tastes, Tess says. I love a One Woman’s Journey memoir.
They talk about Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert and Maggie improvises opinions based on the films with Reese Witherspoon and Julia Roberts. They talk about self-indulgent party-girl memoirs by women their age and admit they don’t know if they’re cringing at the authors or at themselves. Tess tells her that she always stops reading a few chapters before the end of these books.
Why? asks Maggie.
Tess responds with a voice note. ‘There’s always this smug sense of clarity and healing at the end. It’s unrelatable and it’s fucking annoying. I don’t want to hear that someone’s cured their depression through learning square-dancing and now only drinks one night a week. I want to read a memoir that someone wrote between seshes – no, during seshes – something that ends with uncertainty. That’s life.’
Maggie looks with ambivalence at the book she planned to continue reading in the bath, a recent memoir by a woman being touted as ‘the millennial Nora Ephron’. She has around eighty pages left and wonders whether she should sack it off now, to be on the safe side.
* * *
—
‘Let me guess: “It’s not you, it’s me”,’ Maggie jokes during her last session with Astrid.
Astrid laughs. ‘It is me,’ she insists. ‘I’m being deported!’ Maggie blanches. ‘It’s fine,’ Astrid insists with a cavalier flick of her colourfully manicured hand. ‘How have you been?’
Maggie mentally scraps everything she planned to talk about during the hour. She parrots a few platitudes from the audiobook she abandoned, pretending to have found therapeutic solace in running again. She claims to be reconciled with the notion of moving house, with the unspoken acknowledgement that things could be worse (well, at least I’m not being deported!). She tells Astrid about her date with Tess, outlining all the positives without disclosing that she bailed on said date to chase after Cate. She spins things so positively that she almost convinces herself; perhaps this is it, the graduation certificate for finishing therapy. Perhaps, she thinks, Astrid is leaving her life at exactly the right time, like a sort of Australian Mary Poppins. Afterwards, Maggie thinks she may (in a desperate attempt at sincerity) have actually blurted the phrase ‘Australian Mary Poppins’ at the end of the session when she was saying goodbye, but the last hour already seems a blur, and she cannot be sure. In the street, litter waltzes around her on a chill wind. Maggie realizes too late that she never did ask Astrid where she gets her nails done.
party politics
Róise is running out of reasons not to go out for dinner in south Belfast. Adam has suggested a number of possible venues since they started spending Friday nights together, but all of them have been closer to her home than his, and she has no wish to be faced with the shall we just go back to yours? that will surely follow. The only person she has ever entertained romantically at home is Brendan, and she feels nauseated at the idea of Adam creeping to their mouldy bathroom in his pants, coming downstairs in the morning and introducing himself to Harley or Maggie, using the neglected kitchen utensils to make breakfast for her.
She has turned down one south Belfast restaurant claiming the staff are rude, another citing food poisoning that she never had, and several other bougie bars with a vague dismissal of they’ve got wile notions. She proposes alternatives in the city centre, claiming I’ve always wanted to try their steak, and then when they arrive and consult the menu she sees something she would actually prefer to the steak, and she wonders if ordering something else would undermine her subterfuge, and then she remembers that it hardly matters since whatever she eats will likely end up in the toilet bowl.
The sickness was never something she planned to make a habit of. She nursed envy for the people who lost their appetite when they were grieving and heartbroken. When Brendan left her and Lydia died, Róise could do nothing but eat – enormous takeaway pizzas orbited by sides of fried chicken and garlic bread, Tayto sharing packets the size of military sandbags, paper sacks of sweets from the supermarket pick-and-mix. She ate until she was full, and kept going until she was sick, and if she wasn’t sick she thrust a hand into her gullet until it came up in an acid slop. She binges less often than a year ago, but the sickness has become a habit, an automatic digestif after a large meal. Róise imagines it will reach a natural end one day, in the way that she had one bad night drinking vodka martinis when she was twenty-five and her body concluded that she could simply never have them again. She remembers when her sister Ciara had a proper eating disorder at university, and the sheer amount of admin involved: food diaries and calorie counts and exercise targets and weigh-ins. Ciara shrank until her shoulders looked as though they were hung on a wire coat hanger; her breasts deflated against her toast-rack ribcage. Róise, however, has seen no measurable change in her body at all.
‘Have you lost weight?’ Adam asks carefully in bed. She is staying at his flat again. He offered to cook for her, but she volunteered a place in town that she pretended to be keen on. She hoovered up a mountain of meat and potatoes and was neatly sick in the restaurant toilet.
‘No?’ says Róise. She wonders if he says this semi-rhetorically, thinking she will take it as a compliment.
‘Sorry, I don’t mean to be – you know, personal.’
‘It’s grand. I’ve not lost weight; certainly not after that dinner, anyway.’ The red wine and chunks of meat in her vomit looked visceral, as though she had been feasting on a blood sacrifice – a starved fox set loose in a sheep-pen.
‘Sweet. I just wanted to check you weren’t – you know. Work-related stress, or anything.’
‘Jesus, I thought you were going to say you were checking I wasn’t pregnant.’
‘Considering we’re riding and work in the same office, that could also fall under the heading of “work-related stress”.’
‘No, I’m not stressed. Or pregnant. You can tell HR.’
Adam smiles at her. She likes the creases beneath his eyes when he smiles, like folds in a lifted theatre curtain. He props himself on one elbow and asks what she’s doing tomorrow – there is a film at the QFT he’s interested in seeing. Róise finds herself respecting him for disclosing the proposed activity before she confirms her availability. When she was still seeing Brendan, he would ask, ‘Are you free tomorrow?’ and she would ask why, and he would insist, ‘Are you free?’ and it would turn out he wanted her to come to a pub she hated, with friends or family members she hated just as much. When she hesitated he would launch a defence of why his mother meant well and his mildly bigoted childhood friend Finbar was really a sound lad who was misunderstood, and she would have to pretend the chosen venue was the main issue, that the drinks were too expensive or that she was barred after she and her friends had tried to smuggle a dachshund past the door staff. After ten minutes of sulking, Brendan would look at one of his group chats and tell her, good news! They were actually going to a different pub now, and she would have little choice but to get steaming drunk and pretend to be interested in the match on television while Brendan and his friends reminisced about their school-day capers.
‘I’m not actually free tomorrow,’ she says truthfully. ‘We’re having a party for my housemate’s thirtieth.’ Róise regularly tells stories about her two best friends when she is with Adam, but was a little nauseated last week when he referred to Maggie by name in conversation as though he knew her. She now makes an effort to anonymize them, somewhat shaken by the idea of Adam talking about them with the easy familiarity of household names.
‘Ah, nice. Is that at yours?’
‘Yes.’ Róise already regrets saying the word party. She should have told him they were having a girls’ night, or going for dinner. In her mind, ‘party’ has invoked an image of a Gatsby-style carnival with a fireworks display and a guestlist of hundreds. She wonders if he wants to be asked, wonders if casually inviting him to drop by will downplay or intensify whatever is happening between them. She considers that inviting him now would at least eliminate the chance of her texting him slightly buzzed at midnight tomorrow, suddenly thirsty for his hand on her lower back. There are many reasons she does not want him to come to her house, but one that crosses her mind now is that she left his flat early one Saturday with the excuse that she was expecting the delivery of a bookshelf she had bought online and needed to sign for. This was already a risky fabrication considering Adam knew she was planning to move house (why would she be ordering bulky furniture at such a time?) and Róise is concerned that he may note the absence of a bookshelf in her bedroom upon visiting and wonder why she lied to him.
‘Do you need a hand with anything?’ he asks. ‘I can drive you to the supermarket if you want to do a big wine shop.’ He seems sincere. Róise does not get the impression he is hinting he wants to be invited. She concedes quietly to herself that being transported to and from the supermarket would be much more practical than heaving overpriced crisps and cava back down the road from the off-licence, but the idea of meandering around Tesco on a Saturday with Adam seems like another intimacy to which she is not prepared to commit.
‘No, that’s nice of you to say, but we’re all sorted.’ The impulse to offer a concession in return for his kindness overwhelms her better judgement. ‘If you want to drop in for a bit tomorrow night, feel free. You won’t know anyone there, but if you fancy swinging by, you can. If you want.’
‘Yeah, all right. Sounds good.’ His response does not suggest he thinks this a landmark of any great moment. He changes the subject. ‘I meant to say to you earlier – there’s a job that’s come up in the Dublin Road office. One of the team managers is leaving.’
‘You thinking of going for it?’
‘Not me. I was thinking you might.’
Róise bursts out laughing. ‘Team manager? Away on. I can barely manage my own laundry schedule.’
Adam shrugs. ‘I did your job, back in the day, and I didn’t think I’d be good for anything more senior either. But honestly, most of it’s just emails.’
‘Am I that bad at my job that you want rid of me?’
He looks uncomfortable. ‘You don’t think it’s going to start getting strange, working together while we’re…doing this?’ For this he flicks a hand vaguely towards their naked bodies.
‘We can stop, if you feel compromised.’
‘To be quite honest, I’d rather lose you as my admin and keep you as…this.’
Róise is doubtful. Over the years, the idea of moving jobs has begun to feel like needing the loo in the middle of the night when she cannot be bothered to get out of bed. She knows something will need to be done about it eventually, but her get-up-and-go has got up and gone.
