Under My Skin Read online

  Now he tells me that I am amazing. That I am inspirational. That I am an incredible girl, and I look back at him and each compliment floats back over my head and I am happy to let them just fade away. I do not know if he likes my dress or why we are meeting or what he really thinks about anything, especially me.

  Then he pays me a compliment and it is in Irish.

  He says each word out slowly as if this will help and then translates carefully.

  ‘Quiet but guilty,’ he says and he is much more pleased about this than I could ever be. Then he explains the English version as well.

  ‘Quiet but a lot going on inside,’ but I already know that about myself.

  I imagine what it would be like to do a two-hand reel with him.

  ‘I didn’t speak English until I was eight,’ he says.

  I want to tell him that he is still not speaking English but I no longer have the heart.

  When he spoke in Irish I imagined how he would herd sheep and hurry them around a crawling Japanese car and how ‘Hup hup’ is the same in any language and anyway sheep don’t really care.

  ‘I have a very high sex drive,’ the bull says then and this comes from nowhere of course.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘what did you say?’ I had heard him very well but I would also like the other people in the bar to hear.

  ‘I have a very high sex drive,’ he says again. He has folded his arms which I know now is a sign he is handing over a hidden part of himself.

  ‘I’ve tried celibacy but that’s just repressing your needs,’ and now I look at him and try not to laugh.

  ‘I am a man with needs… cravings,’ he says.

  I smile at him and think he is a small man in a sports jacket.

  ‘I was in Cannes recently,’ he says, then, ‘I got out of the helicopter and I was surrounded by girls. Beautiful girls. I have cravings. Such cravings. I have written poetry about the cravings I’ve had.’

  When he comes back from the bathroom I am wearing my coat.

  He says, ‘Yes, I have to go too.’

  ‘Come on,’ I think as I pick up my bag. ‘At least give me this, at least let me be the one to say goodbye first.’ I walk ahead of him. I breeze along and feel careless and slightly drunk. I do not care if he is behind me or not. I do not care if I see him again. I do not care that he is going to his girlfriend’s flat now, after me, where they will have a bad dinner followed by unusual sex.

  He hugs me as my taxi pulls up to the kerb and I feel like an ironing board in his arms. He would not know that I made a face over his shoulder. He would not know that I had pinned some fine hopes to this meeting and to him.

  He does not need to know that.

  ‘So let’s keep the communication going,’ he says and he is being warm and friendly now.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ I say and I kiss him on the cheek. He is chewing spearmint gum and he looks older under the streetlights.

  He would like to see me again but he does not know how to express this or what we are supposed to be when we meet.

  ‘Don’t think too much about anything that was said tonight,’ he says, and I do not understand this but I do understand that for the first time tonight he is trying now too. In the taxi he sends me a text and pays me that Irish compliment again. ‘Oh fuck off,’ I whisper quietly to my phone.

  Claddagh ring n. An elaborate ring originally given in Ireland as a token of affection. Symbol: Love, loyalty and friendship.

  At home I sit on the floor of the flat and pick small flecks of wool from the carpet and I light three white candles instead of the light. The bull said he was romantic but I could see no evidence of that. I would not have met him if I’d known he had a girlfriend and I preferred the young bull anyway. He seemed more honest or something. I stretch out on the floor and think about nothing. I feel alone and so alone that I am conscious of my own edges inside this room. I do not want to feel like this any more. For once I would like to wake up feeling happy and warm and with fuck-knots in my hair.

  ‘I need to change my life,’ I say out loud and into the dark to no one at all.

  At 4 a.m. I look for my vibrator. The batteries are dead so I take two from the remote control and use these instead. I make myself come just to forget about him and about me and after coming I think about Larry and I cry.

  ‘Look, a rainbow,’ Doreen says. She is sitting inside the kitchen window in her favourite white dressing gown and looking out across the overgrown grass. When we both watch, it seems to dissolve and then run away in different colours with the fresh drops of rain. She puts her chin in her hands and rests her forehead on the glass.

  Mr Costello taps once on the door and waits until Doreen calls out to him. He brings us our post in the morning and stands in our kitchen with his braces hanging down. Two weeks ago his wife died. She was watching EastEnders in her favourite chair and now we can both see that her death has left a new kind of mark.

  ‘Come in, Mr Costello,’ Doreen says and she gets up and pulls back a chair. We take turns at cooking. On Mondays I roast a chicken. I make homemade gravy with sage and thyme stuffing and Doreen waits quietly at her place. She always sits at the end of the table with her back to the window and I always sit at the side.

  Last week a down-and-out lady moved into the garden. So far no one has had the heart to ask her to leave. ‘It seems rude,’ Doreen says and Mr Costello says nothing in response to this. It is another thing in life that seems pointless to him now.

  Without his wife he has become a shadow man. Someone who stands behind other people, looking out – there and not there – at the same time.

  On Tuesdays Doreen will make the exact same dinner as me. Roast chicken again. On Wednesdays I make spaghetti and on Thursdays she makes spaghetti too. When I ask her to stop doing this she says, ‘Stop doing what?’ and the next night for dinner she gives me toast and scrambled eggs.

  Last night Mr Costello sat on the stairs and cried. No matter what we did, we couldn’t make him stop. Eventually Doreen put her hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr Costello, but you need to get a grip.’ At night he sits in our sitting room and within minutes he falls asleep. His chin rests on his chest and the corners of his mouth turn down and then one leg kicks out suddenly and his foot shoots into the air.

  ‘That’s restless leg syndrome,’ Doreen says calmly. The last tenant was a doctor and now she reads his monthly copy of Medical Review. When I am having my breakfast she tries to make me look at a picture of an ingrown toenail.

  ‘Look,’ she says, ‘please look at it.’ We go through this almost every day.

  The first flatmate lasted a week but we only liked her because of her microwave and her little radio that you could hang in the shower. The second one worked in another ad agency and she left a trail of false nails behind her and used the breadbasket for her contraceptive pills. Then there was Liz, who left long black hairs on the sofa and smelt of TCP.

  ‘I miss Larry,’ Doreen says suddenly out through the window and then, ‘Sorry’ as if the words had come flying out by themselves.

  The bull has golden hair. It is cut neatly into his head and when he runs his hand back over it he makes a little quiff. We take deep breaths before we speak and try hard not to look too deeply at ourselves. It is our third date and we’re tired of each other already. The wine bar is almost empty and he steers me towards a wide table meant for four under the archway and I know now that he has some more secrets to tell me about himself.

  He is still wearing the Claddagh ring too except now his heart is pointing out.

  ‘So what’s been happening?’ I ask and my voice is easy and light.

  ‘What’s been happening?’ he asks back and then waits.

  ‘Let’s see… when did I see you last? I’ve had a lot of new work on. I’ve probably been in and out of a relationship…’ and here he stops and I know that I am here to talk about men and women again.

  ‘Oh,’ I say and then, ‘Did she dump you?’ and my voice is v
ery gentle but there is a little laugh behind it.

  He smiles up at me for a second.

  ‘Things were going really well,’ he says calmly. ‘We got on well together. My family loved her. We went away for weekends. We just got on well, you know, but she was planning for next year…’ and he trails off and looks at the menu. Somehow when I think about his girl I see her in a hard hat on the building site of their lives. But he’s not finished yet.

  ‘She said she loved me – and this became everything to her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t say it back.’

  The waitress comes over. She is a tall girl with brown eyes and a soft easy smile. She stands with folded arms and he orders bangers and mash ‘with mustard’ and he adds this as if it is of great importance.

  ‘I’ll have the salmon,’ I say.

  ‘With mustard,’ he says again and when he looks into the waitress’s eyes she seems to say, ‘OK. I love you too.’

  ‘Once I did tell her I loved her,’ he says. ‘You know, I love ya, kind of thing, one night… and she held on to it.’

  And I know this happened right after they made love. It had just come out and his girl had held on to him and it and she had told her friends that he had said ‘I love you’ and her friends had smiled and said, ‘This is it.’

  He tells me that they argued and then she ended it.

  ‘She wanted children and I didn’t,’ he says. ‘But I did tell her that at the start,’ and here his grey-blue eyes are pleading for forgiveness and he would like me to see that even if he didn’t love her at least he had been honest about the children part.

  ‘So anyway,’ he adds and he sounds very tired now, ‘it’s over.’

  ‘What age was she?’ I ask and I know that his girl was six years older than me.

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘Ah,’ I say wisely and the sound comes out quiet and soft as if to comfort him. ‘Twenty-nine-year-old girls want husbands.’

  I know that he has slept with Twenty-nine. I know that from the first drunken night at her flat when the air was fumy with alcohol and his raggy whisper said something about ‘a condom’ there was always a question mark getting bogged down in the duvet and lost in the dark.

  I understand how Twenty-nine had woken up with the strange warm smell of a man in her bed. And how she had listened in wonder to the noises he could make – breathing in deeply and quickly before he finally woke and how he had probably snored her awake before that. And how she lay there listening to him knock bottles over in her bathroom, and then lift the toilet seat up. She had heard all the scratching and grunting and grinding as the newly evolved man took his first long wee into her toilet, and the tight little fart that escaped and how he gave a long yawn as she waited for the toilet to flush and then she waited for the seat to come back down, and waited.

  And she knew then that for happily ever after – the toilet-seat business would be annoying and even with his funny little habits – she was already growing fond of him from the start.

  On that first morning together they were like two children who had discovered a new toy to play with. She was happy when she made real coffee and carried it into the bedroom. She was happy when she handed him fresh towels for his shower. She was happy to hear him wash. Just the noise of a new man, getting clean inside her house.

  I want to tell him that it is not about ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too’ and that it is nothing to do with what women want when they’re twenty or twenty-three or twenty-nine or thirty-two. It is about every time he had slept with her, speared her, flattened her and rolled her out and how in time she had learned to come underneath him without even thinking about it. And every time he did it, she came and gave herself back to him, over and over and over, piece by piece, she opened herself up to him and said, ‘Take me’ and then ‘Have me’ and then ‘Of course you love me… please.’

  He eats hungrily, cutting the sausages and then blotting them into the mustard, and I feel for the older woman and in equal measures for the newly evolved man. I would like to take his hand and so far it is just his simple confusion and ignorance that are touching.

  ‘We fought over it,’ he said, swallowing. ‘She rang me. I could hear her anger,’ and he is still surprised by it all. He is intelligent and can’t see the damage he has caused.

  I know that Twenty-nine was probably crying on the phone to her friends and then on the stairs when she went to bed. That she cried under the sheets, the same sheets she had slept in with him, and then at her desk at work and then in bed again and really anywhere she could.

  I wait before I ask my question because it seems important now and I would like to tell my friends about what he has done and what his answer is.

  ‘Are you upset about it?’ I ask quietly. ‘Are you hurt? You know, do you feel bad about it?’

  ‘No,’ he says calmly and his voice is light in the same way mine was at the start. He sees that I am staring at him and waiting for something so he adds more words –

  ‘No,’ he says again and this time he shrugs his shoulders, ‘I’m not – to be honest.’

  And I can see that he is perplexed by it too. That Twenty-nine loved him and that he really didn’t care at all. He is just as baffled as she is. All that sex. All that… love? Really. Honestly. It’s time to find another word.

  ‘Men and women,’ I say and I even sigh about it and here our eyes meet and now his eyes give me the soft burn. I will tell Doreen everything tomorrow and she can tell someone else. We all need to know how little men can care – and how kind and honest they are about it – but – just how little they can care.

  ‘That’s a very pretty dress you’re wearing,’ he says, then, ‘the colours…’ and here his words just trail off.

  ‘Men and women.’ His voice is soft and he shakes his head.

  ‘I am in wonderment,’ he says.

  I call Doreen and say, ‘There is a Claddagh engagement ring in the window of Rhinestones.’

  ‘The bull should be alerted immediately,’ she replies.

  The man from the TV Production Department slides into the taxi beside me and tonight we are both very drunk.

  ‘Do you or do you not,’ he asks and he is speaking in a highly confidential voice, ‘find me attractive?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I tell him and I have an urgent need to laugh.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whisper then to soften the blow. There is a new CD player from the raffle under my arm and so far this is the best thing about my night.

  Pixilated adj. – 1. Behaving in a strange or whimsical way. 2. Feeling bewildered because unable to understand what is happening. 3. Drunk (slang).

  ‘I’m a twenty-nine-year-old man,’ the bull says. ‘Of course I’ve cheated. I’ve slept with women, used them, fallen for them and left quietly in the dark without saying goodbye.’

  He tells me about his boat and how it feels to glide over deep water. I want to tell him that the worst sound in the world is the sound of your bedroom door closing too quietly. And yet, there is something about him that makes me feel free. He does not want to get married. He does not want to have children. He does not want to – keep me and there is something wonderful in this.

  He tells me that he loves his boat. That he has never had a rat or a mink on board but that he has seen slugs. He has woken up in the early morning sunlight and smiled up at their silver trail.

  ‘What?’ he asks and he is laughing. ‘Would you have a problem with that?’ and then, ‘Slugs have to live somewhere too.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried that you will stand on them? Up on deck?’

  ‘What deck?’ he says. ‘They’re inside.’

  He talks about his boat in the feminine and I know once again that it is a slug-out between her and me.

  ‘She was a big old lump,’ he says sadly, ‘and I wanted to make her better. It wasn’t that I wanted to give myself a better place to live. I would sleep on that…’ and here he holds up a butter knife a
nd runs one finger along the blade.

  ‘I wanted to do it for her. I wanted her to feel better… to be better in herself.’

  He describes her carefully, like an older woman he is in love with – where he was when he first met her, how he cared for her, how he loved her and brought her back to life. He chose each piece of furniture carefully – a red armchair, an art-deco couch, and a perfect kind of bed.

  ‘So how big is your bed?’ I venture for no good reason and I know in the split second that follows we will both see our bodies entwined in it. He gives me the slightest smile and then moves on to tell me how she is as long as Dante’s restaurant. I keep trying to catch his eye. I wonder if he notices my figure in this black dress, how my breasts rise and fall and the angles of my collarbones.

  Instead he says, ‘She’s an old hulk,’ and there is pure love in his voice and I know I am down one point to her again.

  He tells me about sailing her down the Shannon and how he wanted to give her some of what she had given to him.

  ‘There was mist and swans, you know… early grey morning light… 6 a.m.,’ and his eyes are becoming wet.

  ‘I leaned down and kissed her,’ he says. ‘Can you believe that? I kissed her iron back,’ and then he starts to blush and laugh. ‘I’m kissing my fucking boat.’

  And once again the great old dame in all her ugliness moves between us, cutting us apart and taking him away to another place, and I know I can’t compete with that. The old bat gives him freedom in a way I cannot.

  After dinner we walk to an old-fashioned bar. It’s the kind of place where old ladies and gentlemen line up against the wall and we are no different except that when he speaks he turns one knee towards me and I do the same – and so we touch, at last. I don’t love him but I want his warmth. The sensation of his corduroy moving against my dress. That is all. I want him to want me and no part of me can see that he just might not. He asks me about Doreen and Jack and other mutual friends and the little bells dotted behind us are there if we need to call for help.