The Other Side of Now, page 20
On the bottom of the bookshelf, I see the spine for She Comes First. I arch an eyebrow at the discovery, then grab it to see if there’s an inscription in that one too. There isn’t, and it makes me think he may have bought it for himself. It’s weirdly hot.
I put it back and keep looking.
There are framed photos of his family, Maureen the dog, and even one old photo of the bar itself.
I am struck by this sudden vision—a fantasy, a scene as if my life were a movie, or an interdimensional memory, I’m not sure—of Cillian and me here on the couch using chopsticks to eat out of paper Chinese food containers, listening to John Coltrane while snow falls outside. Him in a soft white cotton T-shirt and me in an oversized green sweatshirt. I can almost make out the words on the front.
I walk over to one of the windows and look outside. The sky has already darkened a bit, and I get the feeling it’s going to rain.
“Here you go,” says Cillian. He has come out holding something folded, forest green. I stare at it for a second too long, then take it. Avalon Rugby Club. It’s the one from the … daydream. Whatever you want to call what just happened. Where I saw myself from outside my own body, and I was wearing this very thing.
“It’s the one you usually borrow when you’re cold.”
I take it. “How did you know I was cold?”
He gives me a look like it was so obvious. “Ready?”
I nod, and then say, “Actually, let me run to the bathroom again really quick before we go. All that cider.”
He gestures in its direction.
It’s as clean as the rest of the house, which is nice, I manage to think as I lean on the sink and puzzle over what just happened.
Some things about this life, I seem to know. Deeply.
I put on the sweatshirt, and then look at myself in the mirror. I may not have my expensive new nose or lineless skin, but my reflection looks a lot happier here. Even now, when I’m so deeply confused.
On the way out of the bathroom, as I pass the closet, I catch a glimpse of another framed photo.
I flip on the closet light and go over to the dresser in the walk-in to see that it’s that picture of him and me that I had favorited on my phone. The one of us at the golden hour, me in that dress, him looking at me like he sort of, probably loves me.
I pick up the frame and stare at it, feeling almost sick with melancholy for a life that isn’t even really mine.
“Christ, you’re nosy,” he says from the doorway, startling me.
“Shit, sorry.” I laugh nervously and set down the photo. “It looks like maybe you do still like me,” I say, then regret my nervy comment immediately.
“Like you? I don’t even know you.”
His response embarrasses me at first, and then I see there’s a playfulness in his stern expression as he gestures for me to get out of the closet. I go, feeling a little giddy and silly.
He shuts off the light as a clap of thunder crashes outside. The combination of the light turning off and the unexpected sound makes me jump. I don’t exactly leap into his arms, but I do lay a hand on his chest in surprise. It’s warm and hard and I don’t want to take my hand back. But of course, since I’m not a psycho, I do.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s okay,” he says. He looks past me toward the wall of windows and says, “Ah, fuck.”
“What is it?”
“The hape’ll be storming the place any minute now. They’ll expect me to open up.”
“The—who?”
“The partygoers. They’ll be coming here now, to the pub, because it’s raining out there. It’s going to be a mess. It always is when I’m working alone and everyone shows up at once. My mam is out in Limerick at her sister’s.”
“I could help,” I say.
“Not this again.”
“What! I can!”
“You’ve never properly worked behind a bar a day in your life.”
“Maybe not in this life. But I spent like five years working in the service industry in LA in my other life.”
He gives me a look that says he has no choice but to give me a shot.
We go downstairs and he shows me the basics of where everything is. It’s the same as any bar, really, so almost immediately I shrug and say, “I think I got it. Three-compartment sink, wonky ice well, kegs in the back but you’re gonna get those … seems like the usual.”
“I can’t be up here the whole time if we’re doing food. And if we don’t do food, they’ll get rowdier,” he says, looking at me warily. “You sure you’ll be all right?”
I wave off his worry and say, “I’ll be great.”
When the place doesn’t immediately fill up, I wonder if his assumption that the party might relocate was wrong. But after only a few more minutes of cursory training, the place suddenly becomes alive with the sound of tipsy party guests cheerfully announcing their arrival with jovial hollers and laughter.
A circle of musicians have gathered at the big table and started playing traditional music, which adds an immediate festive air to the place. Some of them are the guys from the stage earlier, but some others have joined in too.
“You sure you got this?” Cillian asks me worriedly.
“You can trust me.” I give him a small smile and then shoo him off. “I wouldn’t say I could do it if I couldn’t.”
His eyes hold mine for a moment before he nods and goes.
It’s pouring rain outside, and the entire crowd is sopping. Everyone hangs jackets on the racks by the entry and seems to be congratulating each other on surviving the trek from Aimee’s to the pub.
Kiera and Nial are quickly entwined in a corner, his arms around her waist, her arms around his neck.
Aimee is nowhere to be seen. I have to assume she had to put the kids to bed, or at least start to wind them down. But I do see Theo laughing with a group of guys, dealing out a few hands of cards at one of the big round tables in the corner.
People come up to the bar and start ordering pitchers and pints of beer, glasses of whiskey. Thankfully, I’m not in the land of mojitos and Miami Vices, and it’s easy for me to be fast, even out of practice. I roll up my sleeves and get started. Well, technically, they’re Cillian’s sleeves.
I’m surprised by how efficiently my old bartending skills come back to me. Within ten minutes, I’ve folded Cillian’s sweatshirt under the bar and have a rag slung through the rope of my dress at my waist, a beer key tucked into my bra for easy access. I’m leaning over the counter and catching orders for beer, whiskey, and even food, managing to remember all of it and fulfill every order without a misstep. I always thought memorizing tens of orders at once was good practice for line memorization. In this case, all my line memorization has helped me stay sharp for order memorization.
We move around each other with the choreography of Olympic figure skaters to the pizzicato score of the fiddle player, Cillian taking orders out of the kitchen and me swiping them from his hands and replacing them seamlessly with dirty dishes. When I call to the back quickly to tell him we need one of the Guinness kegs changed, he doesn’t miss a beat or require more polite words before he says, “Got it.” The only hesitation comes a few moments later when he emerges from the back with the keg in his arms and I find myself overfilling a glass from one of the other taps, distracted by the sinewy muscles in his arms.
“Shit,” I say, then, “Here you go,” wiping down the sides of the glass then handing the cider off to Kiera, who saw me watching Cillian.
“You two, I swear it,” she says. It warms me to see the look she gives us.
“Hush!” I say anyway, laughing and blushing, “I have guests!”
After the first big wave of food and drink orders, the place settles into a happy hum of contented revelers. The air smells like the fire burning in the hearth and the sweet, warm scent of fried fish and chips. Cillian brings me a small plate for myself and I take bites between customers. How did I ever go without good food? And how is Cillian’s this good?
Around nine, two men approach the bar. They’re each pink in the face from drinking, both smelling of pipe tobacco.
“Oy, isn’t you that big famous actress?”
My peaceful mind ratchets into high-intensity mode as my heart falls. Is it over? Is the hallucination fading?
“What?”
They both burst into laughter, patting each other on the back, and then one of them says, “Two Guinness, Ms. Hepburn.” They crack up again, reminding me of the old guys on The Muppets. He raps on the counter and then gets back into conversation with his friend, and I realize they were teasing me. They heard the gossip. It’s as Kiera anticipated.
“Arseholes,” says Cillian, who clearly overheard, after I give them their beer and they thank me. “That’s Danny and Eoin though. Always a pair of eejits.”
“They’re fine,” I say. “They’re teasing. They probably think the whole thing is a lark.” He nods and then stares at me. “What?”
“You know, you’ve helped me out behind the bar before.”
“I have? Then why didn’t you think I could do it?”
He laughs. “Because you were a disaster all the other many times you’ve insisted on trying to do this.”
“What? How!”
“Well, one time you did okay, but after the rush, it turned out you’d forgotten to charge anyone.”
I slap a hand over my mouth and stare at him with wide eyes. “Oh, shit. Oh, no … Cillian, was I supposed to charge people tonight?”
“You didn’t…” he says, face falling.
I take my hand away from my mouth and reveal my smile. “Kidding.”
“Christ, you almost gave me a heart attack. Took well over a week chasing the apes down to pay last time.”
“Nope, everything’s good. It’s in the cash drawer. Big cash town.”
“They know that’s what we prefer.”
“Doesn’t every business?” I ask.
“They’re an understanding bunch, them.” He nods at the throng. “During particularly hard times, my mam will come in and charge everyone double, and if they don’t like it they can leave.”
“What happens?”
“Well, she’s a bit of a force to be reckoned with, so they pay triple.”
I laugh.
He looks unsettled and I feel sorry that I don’t know anything about our life together or the details about him the way he knows them about me.
“Anyway,” he goes on, changing the subject back. “You were a complete tornado every other time. It would have been easier to do it all myself.”
“Wow. Rude!”
“I’m not trying to be an arsehole,” he says. “You were just that bad.”
“Ice cold, Cillian.”
“And yet, tonight, you’re perfect. You didn’t feck anything up. How exactly is that?”
“I spilled a lot of beer. I always do. My mats were always full by the end of the night. It would be embarrassing if I wasn’t also really quite good at the rest of it.”
He squints. “You did the work of two good bartenders here tonight, and as far as I’ve ever known, you’ve been about as useful as a T. rex with a broken cocktail shaker in the past.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, unable to hide my amusement at the mental image. “I get it, I—oh, wait. Are you saying you believe what I’ve told you, then?”
“I’m saying that you were so shite at bartending last time that I can think of only one explanation for how you’re that much more competent. It’s literally easier to believe in magic than to believe you improved that much overnight.”
I gnaw on the inside of my cheek as I watch him. He’s kidding, I know that, and it makes me want to kiss him.
I can’t understand how, in any world, I could ever dump this guy.
“Can I get a whiskey, darlin’?”
I turn to see a man standing at the bar. Bernard, I remember. He’s the one with the big dog.
“Hi, Bernard, of course. The house?” I ask.
“That’ll do.”
I take the bottle out of the well, and without looking at Cillian, I do the one and only bar trick I know how to do, which is to flip the bottle and catch it on the back of my hand. It hurts like a motherfucker, I can only do it with nearly empty bottles, and I only manage it one out of every five attempts, but the stars align for me to show off, and I do it perfectly.
Magic truly is afoot.
There’s an eruption of appreciation from the customers who saw me. I can hear snippets of people asking, “Since when can Meg do that?”
After pouring the whiskey and taking the money, I slide past Cillian to get to the register, as if I didn’t do anything at all.
“Excuse me,” I say as I pass, my entire backside making brief contact with his entire front as I move past him in the narrow bar.
“You think you lost your mind,” he says into my hair as I go by. “I think I’m losing mine.”
* * *
Cillian shuts the doors and says, “Thank God they wanted to leave, I didn’t have a lock-in in me tonight.”
“Okay, you said those words earlier and I didn’t know what they meant then either.”
He furrows his brow and then says, “Oh, a lock-in. It’s basically when the bar is shut but no one leaves. The good’ns stay on a bit.”
I nod. “We kind of have that in America. But not in an official sense.”
He smiles and I get the feeling that anything that might occur to me to tell him I may have already said to him. Not in a bad way. In a cute way, actually. Like, in every world, I would want to tell him every stupid corner of my mind. And he’s nice enough to not look tired of me.
I am filled with a sense of satisfied well-being I never once felt at the bars I worked in LA. I was always counting the minutes until it was time to leave, hinting heavily to managers that I wanted to be cut early, or even sometimes feigning an illness to get out of the slowest shifts when I could see they were overstaffed. Working with Cillian tonight was totally different. It was fun. Now it’s quiet, and we’re listening to The Rhythm of the Saints album by Paul Simon on the speakers. I’m running the mats through hot sanitized water, and he’s picking up all the glasses from the dining room and putting them on the counter. I can’t hear him but I can see that he’s singing along with the lyrics to “She Moves On.”
The last customers tonight were Kiera and Nial. She had barely disconnected from him all evening, except for the half hour she took to go walk Maureen for me. The two of them made out and played darts all night, beating all the old guys. They’d all celebrated every win and loss with a new drink order, and at the end, Kiera went off with Nial, arms around each other’s shoulders, her singing Meg and Cillian sitting in a tree.
Soon all the work is done, our beers are almost empty, and I would give anything for another floor to mop if it meant being with Cillian a little longer. That must be love.
A morose, melancholy voice in my head says it can’t last forever. I retool everything I learned in meditation about allowing thoughts to pass unthinked.
I can’t think about home, or the fact that this might end. It’s hard being away from Aimee all night, knowing she’s nearby. It’ll be hard to be away from Cillian when we lock up. I’m even sad to see Kiera leave with Nial, feeling certain she won’t be having a sleepover with me tonight.
How will I live the rest of my life if I can’t be near them at all? If they do not exist?
That sounds dramatic, but … it is dramatic. I mean, if this isn’t high drama, what is?
If this were just the trip I thought it would be, and I had met all these people—except for Aimee and her subsequent family—I could have made the wild, impulsive decision to simply stay. I could have said, These people seem nice, the town seems nice, I’ll have a life here. But if this ends, then I’ll have no way of finding my way back to them. They’ll be gone, as irretrievable as Aimee had been. There one day, gone the next.
Cillian flips off most of the lights, and I’m sure we’re about to leave when he says, “Can I convince you to stay for one more?”
My skin flushes at the relief that we both want the same thing.
He holds up my pint glass and I nod, trying not to look too eager.
Without needing to ask what I want, he pours me a red ale, and then brings it over to the armchair in front of the fireplace. He tosses another log on the fire and it catches quickly, reigniting the enthusiasm of the licking flames.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Go ahead.” He sits in the chair beside me.
“Why did we ever break up? I know I don’t know you, but I can’t—I mean I know myself, and you seem like … well—”
“It’s always because you want to leave.”
“Kiera said that. But … really? That’s it? I thought maybe she didn’t have the whole story.”
He nods. “We are, or were, that mystical couple who never fights. We bicker constantly, don’t get me wrong, but never fight, really. We’re always happy when we’re together.”
The silence that follows is punctuated by the sharp crackling of the burning wood.
“And then, what, I decide this isn’t the right life for me, and I break up with you?”
“You get unhappy. Start getting restless. It’s like you’re embarrassed about your own life. You once told me that you feel like there’s an audience watching somewhere, and your ratings are dipping. Suddenly you’ll do anything to save the show.”
I’ve used that analogy before.
My gaze locks on to the flames. “So, I try to burn it all down.”
“I want you to be happy, Meggie. But I want to be happy too, is the thing. And you’re what makes me happy. So we’re constantly pushing and pulling in opposite directions. I’ve offered to come with you, wherever you want to go. But you always end up saying it would never work, even though sometimes you seem like you do want me to come. I guess the part that’s most upsetting is that you always end things with me, but you never actually end up leaving. So it feels more like you actually don’t want a life with me. Like I’m the thing you want to escape.”
