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 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright

April 2012: Dublin

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

November 2012
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7

Christmas 2012: Waterford

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

January 2013: Dublin

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9

April 2013
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

October 2013
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14

January 2014
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

May 2014
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

August 2014
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

September 2014
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9

May 2015: Athens

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
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April 2012
Dublin
 1

The first time I saw him, I pitied him terribly.

I looked around to see where the drinks were, I was thirsty, and that’s
when it began.
He was standing in the gallery by a sculpture, a grotesque thing. It was
pink and seemed to approximate some version of a mutated human ear.
He was deep in conversation with someone and gestured towards it
vehemently as he spoke. I realised that it wasn’t the first time I’d seen him.
I’d sat across from him once in the Rathmines Library and had been
struck, then as now, by him being the most beautiful man I had ever seen. We
had exchanged a long glance.
I had been with someone else then, and even if I hadn’t, I had never
approached a man in my life, not like that. I thought about him afterwards,
and assumed he must have been passing through. Nobody who was like that,
who looked like that, lived in Dublin, or Ireland, I thought. Nobody so
beautiful could live with us.
Now he stood not ten feet away from me and I took him in again.
Ciaran was that downy, darkening blond of a baby just leaving its infancy.
He had large grey eyes, a crooked Roman nose, and a perfect cherubic
mouth burning neatly beneath. The mouth was implausibly rosy and twisted a
little, as though petulant, or always about to laugh. He was very tall and had
the bad posture of someone who became so tall early and tried to hide it.
His hands were fine and disproportionately large, even taking into account
the long limbs they were attached to. His bones seemed somehow more
delicate than anyone else’s. The features of his face were lovely too, but it
was the way he was structured that made you lose your bearings first. The
way his cheekbones were so high that they made his eyes cruel, the way his
long fingers grasped purposefully at the air as he spoke, as though arranging
decorations.
 The thing to understand about Ciaran is not only that he was exceptionally
beautiful, but that there was an immense stillness radiating from his body.
The stillness was beneath every gesture, his glances, his laughs. He sought
nothing from his surroundings.
In that kind of room, around art, where the person you are talking to is
always looking over your shoulder for a curator, it was especially striking.
Although he didn’t seem particularly happy, he seemed undeniably whole, as
though his world was contained within himself.
 2

Is it possible to love someone without knowing them, by sight?

How can I describe what happened to me without the word love?
I stood in that gallery and felt not only sexual attraction (which I was
aware of, dimly, as background noise) but what I can only describe as grave
and troubling pity.
By this I don’t mean that I felt myself to be above him. For almost our
entire life together I would consider Ciaran to be better than me in both
essential and superficial ways.
By pity, what I mean is that just by looking at him I felt an acute
tenderness for his condition: his being human. In that moment the basic
affection and sorrow I feel for any human person was intensified to such a
degree I could not breathe.
Even now, even after all that took place between us, I still can feel how
moved I am by him.
Ciaran was not the first beautiful man I slept with, or the first man I had
obsessive feelings for, but he was the first man I worshipped. His body would
become a site of prayer for me, a place where I could forget about my own
living flesh and be only with his. It was a thing of total pleasure, total beauty.
Do you think I am unaware of calling his body a place, a thing? Do you
think I am unaware of what it is to be a woman speaking this way about a
man’s body? What do I know about the body of a man – and can any single
one of them deserve or need a moment more of praise?
What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you
choose to be? To be a beautiful man?
 3

Ciaran caught my eye, smiled slightly and widened his – in remembrance, I

hoped, of our prior meeting. I walked towards him and he broke off from his
conversation and turned to me.
‘Ah, it’s you,’ he said, as though we had arranged to meet each other.
‘The very same,’ I said stupidly, and flushed with shame as I heard my
voice as though from outside my head. It sounded very Irish and thick with
forced joviality. Ciaran had an accent I couldn’t place.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Ciaran,’ he said, and then, as though having read my mind, ‘though it’s
only my father who’s Irish – I’m Danish.’
I met his eyes then and my shame was overcome by the pleasure I could
feel between us.
We smiled at each other shyly.
‘What do you make of the show?’
‘Oh, well,’ I said, trying to answer as quickly and glibly as possible, ‘it’s
just a bunch of things in a certain room, isn’t it? It doesn’t mean much to me.
I come for the drinks.’
He ignored the last part of what I had said, which was intended to lead us
out of where we were to some place more comfortable for me.
‘Isn’t it our job to try to understand: why these objects, in this particular
room?’ he asked.
I scanned his question for mockery, but he seemed to mean it innocently.
‘It’s just that with art I never feel on a sure footing. With other things, I
have some knowledge I can discuss them in terms of. With this sort of thing,
I could say anything at all about it. I have no frame of reference.’
He smiled at me again. There was something definitely sexual, almost
gloating, in his eyes now.
‘Well, that’s just what I’ve always liked most about art.’ ‘Should we get a
drink?’ I asked.
‘I’m leaving, and they’re out anyway – here, have mine.’ And he handed
me his nearly full beer and picked up his bag. ‘Would you like to come for a
walk with me tomorrow?’
Taking my dopey gaze as agreement, he wrote his phone number on a
napkin and gave it to me.
‘Good,’ he said, and was gone.
 4

At that time I lived in a bedsit in Ranelagh on street level, where I left the
window open at night so I could climb back in if I had lost my keys, which I
often had. The first night I moved in, I sat in my bed after unpacking and
looked around at the ephemera and trinkets. They were drawings and notes
from old lovers and friends, postcards, photographs, porcelain figures,
antique ashtrays. I needed these things, fixed them as soon as I arrived
somewhere new, but now I was alone they seemed foolish. They looked like
props for a bad theatre production, trying to summon up a personality where
there was none.
Living alone, I began to split apart from myself in a deeper and more
grotesque way than ever before.
There was my public life, where I worked and went out dancing and
drinking and was amusing and energetic in company; where I made eyes at
men in bars and sometimes went home with them; where I told people that I
loved living alone, and they believed it because of how happy I was.
I really was happy when I seemed happy. I am incapable of lying about
my feelings, it’s only that the feelings have no coherence, are not continuous
from one hour to the next.
And then there was the life I spent in my apartment trying to torture
myself into submission and stillness. I could not be alone happily, and
because I knew this was a sign of weakness, I forced myself to endure it for
as long as I could before breaking, although I sometimes thought I would go
mad.
Being with other people was, to me, the feeling of being realised. This
was why I wanted to be in love. In love, you don’t need the minute-to-minute
physical presence of the beloved to realise you. Love itself sustains and
validates the rotten moments you would otherwise be wasting while you
practise being a person, pacing back and forth in your shitty apartment,
holding off till seven to open the wine.
Being in love blesses you with a sort of grace. A friend once told me he
imagined his father or God watching him while he works, to help force
productivity. Being in love was like that to me, a shield, a higher purpose, a
promise to something outside of yourself.
That night I first met Ciaran I got as drunk as I’d ever been. There were
two kinds of drunk I could get. The first was generally solitary and born not
of a desire to be drunk but to pass time less miserably. It was slow, perhaps a
glass of wine every half an hour or so, not too immoderate, although never
less than a bottle, and characterised by a maudlin self-pity that would
sometimes sour into violence.
The other kind of drunk I got was far more excessive and characterised by
exuberant good spirits and a communal edge of mania; on these nights I
would spend a huge amount of money I did not have, because – even more so
than usual – time beyond the present seemed absolutely unreal, and the needs
of the present were urgent.
The excess of these nights was never depressing as it was happening, it
was a part of being young and having no commitments and no stability. You
could tell these nights before they had started usually, some air of mischief in
the room when we began to drink. We threw back the first drinks, greedily
anticipating the coming looseness and hysteria. There were things we had
expected to have by now that we did not have.
Sometimes on nights like these I would meet people different to me,
people who came from money and lived in flats their parents had given to
them as casually as the rest of us were given charm bracelets and book tokens
for birthdays. One such guy, Rogers, a small, wiry person with a great
Brideshead Revisited pouffe of teased blond hair quivering above his
porcelain face, dropped out of university about the same time as I had. I
bumped into him at a party a few months later and asked what he was doing.
I was surprised to learn he was in a middleweight role at a big PR firm,
seeing as we were both only nineteen and without qualifications. I was still
scrabbling around for miserably paid retail and bar work.
When I asked him, in all innocence, how he had pulled off such a thing,
he winked at me and said, ‘The Rogers name carries a lot of weight in this
town!’ This was a repellent enough statement to hear by itself, but became
enjoyably absurd when a mutual friend disclosed that the firm was in fact
owned by his parents. The Rogers name carries a lot of weight in the Rogers
family, I thought to myself with moreish resentment each time I saw him
from then on.
I, like most of my friends, was a good drunk, by which I mean I could
drink a lot, liked to drink, and wasn’t disagreeable once drunk.
My life was blighted by hangovers. I was hungover most mornings to
some degree, and badly maybe twice a week. During bad ones, I missed
whole days huddling in my bed, scrolling through my phone without pleasure
or intent, locked into its repetition as a safeguard. I peered through the
curtains at the 4 p.m. sun and thought it better to stay in until it got dark. I
was badly afraid.
There was a questionnaire I took once to define one’s level of alcohol
dependence. The final question, in the section that was supposed to mark out
‘final-stage alcoholics near to death’, was: ‘Do you often wake up terribly
frightened after a drinking binge?’ And when I read that I thought, Terribly
frightened is exactly how I would put it.
Terribly frightened. It summed up the somehow elderly sense of fear I had
when I woke up in the mornings. It reminded me of cinematic depictions of
old women teetering on the edge of dementia, whose husbands had died, and
who couldn’t remember the details of their home; an aimless but total distress
and bewilderment. I woke up terribly frightened all the time.
William Faulkner, in the end stages of his alcoholism, travelled to New
York to visit friends and see some plays. After ten days of heavy drinking he
disappeared. A friend went to his hotel to check on him and, after banging on
the door and yelling out his name to no avail, insisted that hotel staff let him
in. Bursting into the room, they found Faulkner, semi-conscious and moaning
thickly on the bathroom floor.
A curious, fetid odour hung in the air. The windows were all open despite
the sub-zero temperatures. In the night, Faulkner had got up to be sick and
had fallen against a radiator pipe. He immediately lost consciousness and did
not feel the pipe burn through the flesh of his back over the course of many
hours. By the time he was discovered the burn had become third degree.
In the hospital, his physician, Dr Joe, was called, and asked him, ‘Why do
you do it?’
Faulkner apparently jutted out his jaw and responded, ‘Because I like to!’
His publisher Bennett went to be with him.
 ‘Bill,’ he said, and I imagine him looking down at his hands, head shaking
slightly, unable to meet his friend’s eyes, ‘why would you do this on your
vacation?’
Faulkner bristled at this, pulled himself up in the bed to his full height.
‘Bennett,’ he said, ‘it was my vacation, after all.’
Why do you do it? Because I like to.
Meaning, not so much that I take pleasure in it, but: I choose it.

I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do,
but instead do what I hate. What an unhappy man I am. Who will
rescue me from this body that is taking me to death?
–Romans 7:15–25

That night after meeting Ciaran I drank until I vomited and blood vessels
beneath and above my eyes burst, and I traced them gently in the mirror,
knowing they would be markers of a beginning.
 5

Events that were objectively worse than what was to follow with Ciaran had
taken place in my earlier adulthood, sordid checkpoints of the wounded
woman. I cannot speak about these things too soon because their names alone
summon like a charm the disinterest of an enlightened reader. Female
suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking
only for attention – and of all our cardinal sins, seeking attention must surely
be up there.
All the suffering I had so far endured before I met Ciaran, I had endured
like a child. This is not to say the suffering was not severe, which it was, or
that I did not understand it, which I did. But before Ciaran I still
contemplated suffering as something with meaning. I understood even the
most inexplicable of tragedies as being imbued with some as yet unknown
purpose.
It was my feeling that there were lucky people and unlucky people, and I
was a lucky person. Even in my worst depressions, I had always known this.
My misery seemed to come from knowing I was not good enough to warrant
the objectively lucky life I had been given.
I would not have thought so literally, or so religiously, as to say,
‘Everything happens for a reason’ or ‘God doesn’t give us more than we can
bear’, but the feeling was not so different. It was the feeling that each human
life has a narrative and a destiny. It was the feeling that misfortune, no matter
how great, would eventually serve to lead each of us to our own particular
and inevitable conclusion.
My understanding was that every action would lead me to where I ought
to be ultimately, and where I ought to be was in love.
Love was the great consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in
one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as the great leveller, as a force
which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it. There was
no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what
I had cultivated instead.
Oh, don’t laugh at me for this, for being a woman who says this to you. I
hear myself speak.
 6

I texted him in the morning and we agreed to meet at 2 p.m. outside the
Natural History Museum. I showered in near-boiling water and spat blood
into the sink when I brushed my teeth. I was badly hungover, but not ill, in
the sweet spot before returning to full sobriety. I was glad to be so. Going
through life hungover is an ordeal, but being without one is no picnic either.
The fuzz and numbness of a hangover can carry you through a day without
you noticing it too much; you’re too busy tending to aches and thirsts to pay
much attention to anything else that might trouble you.
I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before and was jittery as I walked. I
tried to remember his face, and found that the intensity of my crush would
not allow me to. I could recall individual parts but when I tried to assemble
them they floated in a shimmering mess. I laughed at this nervously and
shook my head, filled with affection for myself. I love myself in love. I find
my feelings fascinating and human, for once can sympathise with my own
actions.
When I arrived, he was drifting about the lawns looking at hedges sheared
into animal shapes. I went to him and put my hand on his elbow, felt it warm
in the worn old rust-coloured cardigan he wore. I had noticed this at the
opening, too – he dressed in clothes that, although elegant on his body,
looked on the point of collapse. They weren’t merely distressed in a
fashionable way but looked as though they had well and truly reached the end
point of functioning as clothing. Instinctively I respected this:
resourcefulness. My father told me once the trait he admires most in the
world is resourcefulness, and since then I’ve looked out for it.
We hugged hello and I felt how slender he was beneath his soft worn
layers. I sensed something slightly different from him than I had the night
before. He was still powerfully calm, but there was a tension in his face. I
wondered if he was nervous. My own nerves had mainly to do with the
sobriety of what we were doing. All of my romantic affairs until then had
begun while drunk, and most of them accidentally.
It was a bad location for a first date. We had to move around and focus
our attention on things other than each other. We made observations about
the exhibits between bouts of silence. We chatted enough to swap basic
information in murmurs. I learned that he had moved permanently to Dublin
a year ago, to spend time with his father who had become ill, but was doing
better now. He had come from outside Copenhagen, where he wrote art
criticism. Here he was trying to write his own essays, but his waged work
was doing copy and reviews for a magazine.
The silences were making me unbearably anxious and I feared I would
burst into laughter at any moment. Being in the museum wasn’t helping; it
was a shabby, dark and beautiful old place where the exhibits were
sometimes unintentionally hilarious. My friends and I would go there
hungover sometimes and become pleasantly hysterical at the old and
incompetent taxidermy. But Ciaran was walking between them all in apparent
seriousness, and I felt foolish for being amused.
I looked over at him for as long as I could get away with while he
inspected the butterflies. I wanted to be nearer. I approached and held his
worn elbow and asked if he’d like to go and get something to eat.
Outside, after walking down the staircase in more silence, he turned to me
and said, ‘Well. That was a very bad museum.’ And his seriousness made me
laugh then, and he laughed with me.
We spent the rest of the day together and spoke more about our lives. He
described the town he was from and said he hadn’t been sad to leave it. I told
him about dropping out of university and the many odd jobs I had worked
since then. I told him I wrote, too, in the way I always told people this: with
the lowered pious eyes of a saint, looking away, worried and secretly a little
hopeful they would want to ask me about it. This was not a justified worry
when it came to most men and Ciaran was no different. He nodded briskly
and moved the conversation on.
In the evening we walked along the quays and he left me to go and work
in his studio. He kissed me, and then held my head in his hands, studying my
face with fond satisfaction, and said we would see each other soon.
As we walked in opposite directions, I turned back to look at him over my
shoulder and he did the same to me and I was filled with a soaring levity. We
were both laughing, and I turned away from him and started to run – had to,
the feeling was so strong. I ran and ran and I couldn’t stop laughing in
amazement, thinking of how he kissed me, thinking that there was nobody
else I wanted to kiss now.
When I look back, what I find most odd was how sedate the day with him
had been. We had got along fine, had found each other agreeable, were
obviously attracted to one another, but there was no moment of breakthrough
in the conversation. The moment I had shared with others before him, when
you feel all the pieces lining up as a rhythm takes hold, had not occurred.
I think even then in that first flush, running up the quays alongside the
April sunset, I was aware of that. It didn’t matter to me how funny he was, or
what he thought of me, or what books we had both read.
I was in love with him from the beginning, and there wasn’t a thing he or
anybody else could do to change it.
 7

Before Ciaran I tried some other men on for size. I was trying a lot of things.
I had become a strange age. I was no longer the barely-legal-but-knowing
teenager who had wielded such power over men. Nor was I anything like a
self-possessed adult woman who might attract them by way of her autonomy.
People enjoyed me, because while I was attractive enough I was not
intimidating. I was buoyant and good-natured and occasionally a little bit
mean in an amusing way. I looked and fucked like a woman but could drink
and take drugs and talk like a lad. I would bring some effete longlimbed DJ
home with me and in the morning we could knock about town together
without the awkward suggestion of romance or obligation.
We could have coffee, in our farcical fur coats, or a conspiratorial too-
early beer, before going our separate ways, and then I would see them that
same night at another club, with one of the girls who was more like a real girl
to them, girls who were tall and willowy and part-time modelling while they
studied fine art. I think that I wanted more than anything to be real like those
girls, but I didn’t know how to be, didn’t know any other way to be close to
these boys except for partying with them. I was not without value, but the
value I held was not the kind I wanted to hold, and I did not know how to
exchange it.
My life as a party girl dwindled away. I slept with too many people’s
boyfriends, got sick in too many front rooms. I stopped being enjoyably fun
and became only frantically fun, and then felt too old for it all anyway.
I fell into the habit of being only with much older men. Not knowing what
to do with myself, it was simple to stumble into their lives. Whether I was
truly beautiful, exceptional, interesting mattered less with them. I was still
very young in the grand scheme of things, if not young enough to be a
nightlife novelty any longer. I was young enough to be compelling to them
by virtue only of my youth, standing in as a monument to whatever things
they felt they no longer had access to.
I met one such man at a book launch not long before I would meet Ciaran.
He was an editor at a small independent poetry press, American. He wore
funny thick glasses and sweater vests and had a honking, obliviously loud
speaking voice, which was what made me notice him first. He was talking to
a friend throughout the book launch’s tedious speeches, with so little care for
his surroundings that it made me laugh. His friend replied in whispers and
tried to shush him but the editor didn’t seem to notice and went on
broadcasting his flat Californian drawl. He caught my eye and grinned at me,
and we drank together for the rest of the night.
It was sort of amazing seeing men who weren’t particularly attractive but
who believed, more or less correctly, that they could have and do whatever
they wanted. I was always calculating with scientific precision the relative
beauty of the people I wanted to be with, and would steer clear of the ones
who exceeded me too greatly. But then you’d see guys like this one trundling
around the world, reaching out, cheerily thoughtless, for whatever shiny thing
passed. They didn’t feel the need to strike an equitable bargain, they just
advanced towards you, grinning a little sheepishly maybe, and their
entitlement was so alien and enviable that it was something like charming.
‘I have a sort of girlfriend,’ he gasped into my mouth after he had pushed
me against a wall.
‘Okay,’ I said in response, then rolled my eyes and kissed him again.
When he took me to his house for the first time some weeks later I
immediately lost the upper hand it had felt as though I had. He was rich. It
was a huge two-bedroom apartment in Merrion Square, everything in soft-
brushed fabrics and beige tones. A small sleepy corgi named Dots blinked up
at us from the sofa. Being young and beautiful felt like a lot sometimes, felt
like it translated to real-world power, but money shat all over it every time.
He took me to bed, where I was uncharacteristically shy. The grandeur of
the house felt oppressive, my cheap high-street lingerie crude. Eventually he
undressed me fully and laid me out on the bed, kneeling over me and
patiently removing my hands each time they returned to protect my most
embarrassing parts. He did this until I stopped trying to cover myself and lay
there still beneath his gaze. He looked so happy, taking me in. He touched
each part of me, and kissed my forehead gently.
‘I’ve wanted this for a long time,’ he said. ‘Since I first saw you.’
 ‘Me too,’ I said back, but I knew that I didn’t mean it. I hadn’t wanted to
sleep with him. I had wanted never to sleep with him, had wanted us to keep
talking, to wake up to his messages, to be amused by one another. I wanted
our chaste coffee dates to go on and on, for there to be no end to these things,
and this, the sex, was the end, I knew.
It felt good in a way, because he was so excited and I was pleased to make
him so, but I was filled with sadness at each new thing he did to me. Every
thing he did was another ending. When we had done all the things there were
to do, he passed out and I clung to his reassuringly solid, soft stomach –
paternal, so different to the indie waifs – and cried.
In the morning I woke up before him and went to the kitchen for water. I
walked around and noticed things I had been too drunk to the night before.
One room was wall-to-wall books, so comforting and stable to stand beneath.
There were armchairs in different corners, where two people could sit reading
in happy silence all day long before reintroducing themselves when evening
came and it was time to be together again. I petted Dots, who panted happily,
and looked out the window into the square and imagined what it would be
like to walk her there every morning and every night, a routine so regular as
that, a life where you knew what to do when you woke up.
I went back into the bedroom and noticed a pair of high heels and a bottle
of perfume and some Avène moisturiser in a corner on the side of bed I had
been sleeping in. His girlfriend, I thought, could be my mother’s age. Here
was an actual life, a real life, which I had walked into, dragging the mud of
myself with me. I had never felt so unlike a human being, so disposable and
flimsy and built purely for function. He called me a cab to go home and I
knew I would never hear from him again and I never did.
 8

I was waitressing in a hipster burger restaurant then, skittish from the running
around and the bumps of coke we did in the toilets on double shifts. My
friend Lisa and I lived together in a house we called the Ski Cabin for its
weird low wooden ceilings and the feeling you got that they were going to
slowly envelop you. Lisa and I met our very first week in Dublin, both
sulking anxiously at the fringes of some nightmarish freshers’ week event,
locking eyes in anguished relief. She was from a town considered even more
small-time and hokey than my own by the confident Dublin people, who
considered everyone from outside of their own hopelessly provincial suburbs
to be ‘culchies’, farmers, inbred and unsophisticated.
We were close straight away and remained so even after I dropped out of
college abruptly. When she said she wanted to go out dancing, I was
surprised to find that she meant it literally and not as a euphemism for getting
drunk. Though I drank much more than she did, I appreciated that she never
made me feel self-conscious about it, or even gave the sense that she would
notice such a thing. She was wide eyed and gregarious and rarely alone.
There seemed to be no part of her that wished for anonymity or the privacy of
solitude. I admired this in her, the ease of it and the goodness, knowing as I
did the different texture of my own solicitation of company, which was
conditional and explosive when not satisfied.
We moved in together when she had graduated and were both waitressing
full time or as near to it as the whims of our managers allowed. We spent our
days off huddled in blankets and fleeces on our awful bony couch, listening
to the radio and writing in our notebooks or sending emails or ‘doing
research’, which for me meant reading the Wikipedias of lesser-known serial
killers and jotting down the details that struck me: ‘While holding the girl
hostage, he gave his victim the book Treasure Island to read and watched the
movie Hook with her.’ Or, ‘The killer could achieve sexual release as an
adolescent only when he cut holes in photographs of women.’
We drank strong tea with the teabags left in and chain-smoked roll-up
cigarettes, and sometimes when the day had passed we would work on a
crossword together. We cooked meals of tinned pulses and wilted greens with
lots of garlic, chopped tomatoes and anchovies. We cracked an egg into more
or less everything and let it cook and set off the stove, mopping it all up with
leftover bread one of us had taken home from the restaurants we worked in.
Though I was restless in a way Lisa never was, waiting anxiously for what
was to come next, I felt soothed by our domestic union. I admired the way
she had of making any place into a home – within days of our arriving, even
the appalling damp toilet had wall hangings and figurines and felt ours.
She was so wholesome that I sometimes didn’t know how to react to her
except by rolling my eyes, as though her picnics and sober dinner parties with
edible flowers and whole roasted fish and adventures on trains were an
affront to me. In fact, I wanted to want them, would have loved to live a life
like that. Or rather I would have loved to appear to live a life like that. All
the things that Lisa did for her own genuine pleasure were things I thought
looked good, things I didn’t want for their own sake. I thought a life that
looked that way – clean and gentle and high-minded – would get me what I
truly wanted, which was to do with having as much of people as possible,
their attention, their desire, their curiosity.
Sometimes I thought about people like Lisa – people who never lost
control of themselves, who never had too much of anything, who were never
awake after one a.m. – with something like disdain. I valued what I thought
of as my free nature, my willingness to do whatever I wanted at all times, my
ability to be led by whatever base physical urge was singing to me in each
moment. Wasn’t there some truth to the way I existed that those safer people
were too timid to follow in their own lives? It didn’t occur to me that maybe
Lisa was doing exactly what she wanted to do, that what she wanted was to
live in the calm and benevolent way that she did. I didn’t think so because it
was incomprehensible to me that someone could drink and lack the desire to
keep on drinking, I didn’t understand that some people didn’t have that want
inside them.
She sat down some evenings and opened a bottle of red one of us had
stolen from our restaurants, and took a little sip, and then a bigger one, and
exhaled with pleasure and set it down and drank it over the course of an hour
or two as she read or busied herself in the kitchen. Enjoying the first glass of
wine was an alien idea to me, I who drained them within a quick grimace,
alcohol tasting foul and acidic on top of the permanent hangover until the
first two took effect.
On my twenty-first birthday I had a party in our house. Lisa and her new
girlfriend Hen baked me a cake in the kitchen. I heard their excitable fresh-
romance conversation thrumming sweetly below as I got ready in my room,
and they cooed as I descended the Ski Cabin’s spiral staircase in my
sweeping red dress.
Lisa had done the thing that seemed as impossible as moderate drinking to
me: she had remained single – actually single rather than single-and-dating –
until she found someone right for her. She had barely kissed anyone in the
time I had known her and I wondered privately how she wasn’t bored or
lonely, but I knew too that this was the better way to live. You earned the
eventual love story with your restraint.
So it happened for Lisa, she made her own life, one that was happy and
fully formed. Then Hen arrived into it and that was that. They were in love
and there was nothing torturous or humiliating about it. It was as they said it
would be, and I knew that it could never happen that way for me because I
couldn’t spend a day, much less a series of years, without looking around me
for someone to feel things about.
I remember that a lot of people complimented the drama of my birthday
dress, and invited me to twirl around so they could see it splay out around me
in its red cloud, and that I felt beautiful and funny. I remember everyone
leaving to go to a bar at some point, and that I had an altercation with a
neighbour of ours after we trundled out and lingered on the pavement
smoking and waiting for the others. I remember Lisa’s arm on mine as I was
rude to the neighbour, defiant in my birthday glamour. Then I remember
nothing at all until I awoke the next afternoon, inexplicably in Lisa’s bed
rather than my own.
I climbed carefully down the stairs, depth perception shot, and saw Lisa
cleaning up pizza boxes and cans overflowing with ash.
‘Agh, what happened last night?’ I said, trying to sound casual, a laugh in
my voice, stomach tense with fright. ‘Why was I in your bed?’
‘You bled in yours last night and wandered out, so I put you in my bed
after I cleaned up.’
 She was tidying and wouldn’t look up and meet my eye.
‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry, Lisa. I must have taken out my tampon when I
was drunk or something. Jesus, I’m really sorry.’
‘You were in there with Peter,’ she said, frowning at this having been the
case and at her having to tell me so.
Peter was the on/off boyfriend of a good mutual friend of Lisa’s and mine,
a sweet girl called Greta who was looked upon with patronising compassion
by everyone who knew her for being unaware of Peter’s philandering.
I didn’t know what to say, so instead I laughed shrilly and said, again, ‘Oh
my God!’, as though what she had said was just an ordinary embarrassment
like spilling a drink. Then she did look up at me and what destroyed me was
that, overriding her disdain for what I had done, there was such troubled
concern. In that moment I knew that Lisa, and only Lisa, was able to see me
as I really was. She alone could see the reservoirs of need that existed in me
and would never stop spilling out, ruining all they touched, and she didn’t
hate me for them, but felt sorry for me. This appalling and instant knowledge
cut into me and I recoiled, turning from her and returning upstairs until I
heard her leave the house.
It wasn’t long after the party that Lisa told me she was moving to Berlin
with Hen. A part of me was relieved. I couldn’t stand to live with her any
longer after the way she had looked at me that morning, but nor could I bear
for her to drop me. I didn’t want her near me, because she was the only one
able to see me for what I was, but I couldn’t lose her for the very same
reason.
I made sure to spend the months before she left being a faithful and
devoted friend. I was trying to say without words that I needed her, of all the
things I needed, she was the only one that was good, and I would need her
even more after she left me. She promised that she would not stop being my
friend just because she was moving, and was mostly as good as her word.
 9

Ciaran and I saw each other a few times a week after our first date. Most
often I would finish a late shift in the restaurant and walk or get a taxi to go
and stay in his apartment. He lived in a ground-floor flat near the jail in
Kilmainham. He didn’t mind the hours I kept. He never slept well and would
only ever pass out fitfully between 4 and 8 or so. I arrived still gently
sweating and smelling of the kitchen. He ran me a bath and I lay in it for a
while, listening to him hum and make us tea or hot chocolate and put some
stale biscuits on a saucer.
He didn’t drink much and didn’t care at all about food. He had lost his
sense of smell and most of his taste in a car accident in infancy, and never
had anything but what he needed to fuel himself – great reserves of bland
muesli, tins of chickpeas, white rice. After I drained the bath he passed me a
T-shirt and old waffle fabric long johns of his, which were soft from age and
filled with holes. Although I slept over frequently I never brought my own
things to sleep in. I liked the feeling of his clothes close to my skin and
smelling his Pears soap smell.
Then we would sit on his couch hugging and touching each other slowly,
speaking quietly about our days. We were so kind those evenings. Laughing
softly, indulgently, at the other’s little observations. We touched each other
with such care and delicacy, as though afraid to break the new thing we were
to one another.
When we had sex for the first time I felt out of my mind with happiness,
with the obvious rightness of what was happening between us. Around his
mouth there was some perfect smell that I could almost taste – I knew
whatever made up that indefinable smell was also in the chemicals that drove
our bodies together.
(A few weeks later in work, one of the chefs made a truffle-essence. He
passed it to me, saying, ‘Smell that!’ I waved it under my nose and thought
instantly, It’s Ciaran.)
We listened to records most evenings. He liked Bob Dylan and Hank
Williams and so I did, too. Sometimes we would rent films and watch them
in his bed. He was so big I could sit cradled in his lap without causing him
discomfort. We watched schlocky 50s B-movies, which we both liked but he
found especially hilarious. I was always curious to see what he would find
funny or what would make him happy. He was so solemn.
In the beginning it seemed like the solemnity of a toddler learning their
surroundings; an innocent or even admirable one, a necessary impulse caused
by new information. Perhaps he was like this because of being new to Dublin,
I thought. But as we came to know each other better I began to see the other
side of this solemnity.
He was angry at a great many things, disgusted by more. He didn’t
understand events which seemed completely normal, if not ideal, to me.
When we took walks in Merrion Square or in Phoenix Park on Sundays,
children on the street sometimes shouted insults after him because of his
glasses or his shabby clothes. He grew incandescent with rage. ‘Why are they
like this?’ he demanded of me, looking back over his shoulder as though
wanting to start an argument with them. I would try to steer him on as gently
as I could, sympathising and agreeing.
Our conversations in his apartment could veer into thirty-minute rants
about a homeless person on the street who had offended him in some way, or
an artist he had run into who was rude to him. He would eventually stand up,
furiously rolling his cigarette, then pace around smoking as he recounted the
perceived slight. His anger was always contained enough that it didn’t alarm
me, and in fact there was something invigorating about him venting his
grievances to me, something unifying and bonding.
I would offer comically exaggerated sympathy, tug at his tattered sleeve
as he walked to and fro and pull him towards me on the couch. ‘Oh, poor
baby,’ I’d crow, and cradle his head to my chest and cover his face in a flood
of kisses until I succeeded in making him laugh.
 10

At the end of May I asked Ciaran to come with me to a reading at a gallery

some friends of mine were doing. He had met some of them before, in
passing, or had known them slightly from openings. This was the first time
we were arriving together to an event and behaving as a couple publicly. To
my mind, we spent so much time together already that we functionally were a
couple, whether or not we were named as such.
Ciaran was tetchy and stony-faced from the beginning. He hadn’t wanted
to come, but had already arranged to see me that evening, and had no good
reason to cancel. As we stood around chatting to people, he said nothing, and
gazed over our heads as though disturbed by some presence invisible to the
rest of us.
I caught several people exchanging quick glances that seemed to note his
strange behaviour. I had seen him be quiet in company before, but never
completely rude. I was embarrassed, and talked louder and faster to
compensate. I held his hand gently, and when the conversation arrived at a
publication he sometimes worked for, I turned and directed a question to him.
He nodded very slightly and continued to look away, dropping his hand out
of mine and putting it in his pocket.
During the readings his face was fixed in an almost comically extreme
expression of disdain. I kept my eyes forward and hoped nobody else would
notice. Once it was over I took him by the sleeve and dragged him outside so
we wouldn’t get trapped talking to anyone else.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, shaking me off.
‘Why are you being so rude?’
I hated myself for being near tears, but I was. I had been looking forward
to going there with him, introducing him to people, being seen with my
beautiful, interesting boyfriend.
‘That reading was shit.’
 He shook his head, fumbling for tobacco in his bag. Glancing up at me, he
saw that I was going to cry. He clocked the tears and caught my eye, jutting
his jaw and pursing his mouth in an exaggerated gesture of disgust that I
would come to know very well and hate completely.
‘Of course it was shit!’ I said. ‘It’s just a stupid reading. It’s what you do,
you go to things your friends do to be supportive, and you pretend they’re
good even if they’re not.’
‘These people aren’t my friends. Just because you and I sleep together, it
doesn’t make them my friends.’
I didn’t know how to respond to this. ‘Sleeping together’ was the least
generous reading of what had been going on between us and could only have
been intended to hurt me. I lowered my head and let myself cry, aware of
people I knew looking at me from the gallery porch and whispering to each
other.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Did you want me to say I’m falling in love with you?
Because I’m not.’
‘No,’ I said, and feeling that I had no more energy to do whatever we
were doing, I turned and walked towards home.
 11

It was the first time he had been cold in this way to me, although I had
glimpsed his coldness before.
One evening in his kitchen we had been talking about the performance
artist Chris Burden, who I knew of for having allowed himself to be shot in
the shoulder for a film. Ciaran’s eyes lit up, and he said I ought to read about
TV Hijack. He grabbed his phone and showed me a picture of a man standing
behind a woman in a chair with his hand pressed to her throat. The backdrop
was bright blue. She seemed to be struggling to escape the man’s grip.
Ciaran explained. This was one of Burden’s earlier works, born from his
interest in television, more famously illustrated in his later work, TV Ads. The
circumstances that led to Hijack were this: an art critic named Phyllis
Lutjeans had asked Burden to do a piece on an arts and culture show she
presented on local television. Several proposals Burden made were rejected
by the station or Lutjeans, and he agreed instead to do an interview. He
insisted that the interview be broadcast live.
When he arrived, Lutjeans began by asking him to talk about some of the
actions he had proposed which were ultimately shut down. At this point,
Burden stood behind her and held a knife to her throat. He threatened to kill
her if the station stopped broadcasting. He then went on to detail what he had
wanted to do, which was to force her to perform obscene acts live on air.
Lutjeans was unaware of Burden’s plans. Her alarm and humiliation were
real.
I listened as Ciaran talked, and stared at the picture with growing unease.
‘She didn’t know?’ I asked. ‘He just pulled a knife on her?’
‘That’s beside the point,’ he said. ‘Anyway, she didn’t mind. She said so
later.’
Reading about her afterwards, I found interviews in which she confirmed
she was not complicit, was shocked and frightened, but defended the piece –
it was simply Burden’s style.
I thought about this, about what the alternative was. I thought about
Lutjeans being released from Burden’s grip and spinning to face him,
searching his face, the second in which she had to decide whether to cry and
scream at him, or to wink.
What would you choose? Either you can be famous for being a shrill prop
in a great man’s work, a victim sacrificed to the gods of art, or you can nod
along and applaud. You can have a seat at the big boys’ table for being such a
good sport. So, go ahead: ha ha ha.
2019, Athens

Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or

denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once. Being a victim is
boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through
experiences which are instrumentalised constantly as narrative devices in
soap operas and tabloids.
Is this why I am so ashamed of talking about certain events, or of finding
them interesting? This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your
experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an
interesting way.
If I want to say something about my hurt, I hear my voice enter the canon
of Women Who’ve Been Hurt, becoming unknown, not-mine.
I can’t, and don’t much want, to make myself understood. Why should I
make my experience particular, and what would be the point? Should I tell
you about rape?
I was angry at having been made real in that way against my will. There is
good reason for not living inside your body all the time, and this event
trapped me back in it for a long while, until I could struggle back outside
again.
The functionality of it depressed me, that I was so prosaic. My body was
not glorious or miraculous or alive, it was just a thing of use. This did not
sadden or surprise, so much as bore me: I looked at myself, lumpen and
inelegant and abused, and thought: So what?
The act of unwanted sex was not what angered me most, but rather the
tedious reminder that men can often do whatever they want and that some of
them will. I know it is unfashionable to describe rape as sex (the implication
being that rape is a violent, rather than a sexual act; can’t it be both? And
sometimes more one than the other?) but it felt very much like sex to me.
From a purely physical point of view it didn’t even feel very different to
some of the worse consensual sex I had had, those times where I had realised
immediately that I would rather not continue, but did so to be polite, feigning
enjoyment to make it end quicker.
 It would be easier if I could paint a line down the middle of the house, and
have rape on one side and sex on the other. I have had sex without wanting to
many times in my life. It was only once that I protested and was
overpowered.
I feel no common understanding grow between myself and other women
who have been hurt in the same ways that I have, no thread of sisterhood
connecting our experiences. The inherent tenderness of the person (me) who
is raped, their assumed softness, pliancy disgusts me – the femaleness of that
disgusts me.
Am I ashamed of myself for this? Of course; somewhat; a little.
 12

A few days after our fight at the reading, Ciaran called and asked to come
over. Convinced he was going to break up with me, I sat up waiting for his
knock. When he arrived he was wet-eyed and soft like I’d never seen him.
We sat side by side, not touching, for a long time. I was bursting to say I
had been an idiot, that I wanted him to forget the whole evening, couldn’t we
just go back to how we had been, whatever that was? Couldn’t we – please,
please, please?
Before I could launch into this he began to speak. As always when he
spoke about anything personal he seemed physically strained and could not
look up, but he struggled through what he had prepared.
He was sorry.
He needed me to understand that what had happened between him and
Freja, his ex, had scarred him. She had been unfaithful to him, not just with
one man, but with many men, not in isolated instances but constantly
throughout their long relationship. She had been the first woman he loved,
and when he found out about her betrayals they had entered into a long
period of vicious arguments, followed by tearful reunions, late-night
screaming followed by going out and drinking and vengefully fucking
strangers.
They had been bound up in each other so inextricably he didn’t think they
could ever get away from each other. It was only when his father became ill
and he decided to move to Ireland that he realised they had a chance to make
a clean break.
‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘the best times of my life were with
Freja. She is not a bad person.’
I narrowed my eyes.
‘She did terrible things,’ he said, ‘but they were really because she was
unhappy. It hurt her that she did them to me. I hate her, but I also love her.
Can you understand?’
My mind was working double-time to selectively absorb and reject the
various things he was telling me. He was sorry: good. He was opening up
about his past: good. He loved her: bad.
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to be mature.
‘It hurt me so much that, since then, I haven’t wanted to be close to
anyone. I was exhausted. I don’t want to be hurt any more, or hurt anyone
else. But I want to try. I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said, and in that moment I
remember thinking, clear as a bell, that I could never hurt him. I remember
the fierceness in my chest. I promised myself I would make him trust me. I
would rebuild what she had taken away from him.
He pressed his burning forehead to mine and we closed our eyes and were
together.
November 2012
 1

I separated my life with Ciaran from my life with my friends. I would still
bring him to things occasionally, but only big public events which would not
require us to stay too long or to talk to people. Although he was rarely again
so rude as he had been at the reading where we had our first argument, he
was not good at faking enjoyment.
Eventually it seemed easiest to let him do what pleased him, and see my
friends on my own time. That he and they disliked each other was sometimes
inconvenient, but no more than that. I preferred to be with Ciaran on my own
anyway.
He was sullen and angry less frequently now. When he complained, he
did so with some self-deprecation and conceded that he was behaving like a
cantankerous old man. It had become cold and he wore a battered old pea
coat and fingerless gloves and a thin ineffectual tartan scarf. I don’t
remember a single argument in that part of the year. I was moving through
our relationship with concentrated determination. With every week that
passed, I felt safer and more at ease with him; the passing time legitimised
the relationship and I was especially happy every time a new month began.
We met in April, I thought, and now it’s November. We had passed two
whole seasons together and were making good headway on the next.
 2

It was two a.m. one weekend evening. We had just finished having sex and I
had gone to his kitchen to get us some water, and as I settled back into bed he
asked, ‘How many people have you slept with?’
‘Why?’ I replied, keeping my voice neutral and low.
‘I was talking about it with someone at work recently and it became an
interesting conversation. I just wondered.’
I thought of Freja cheating on him with multiple men. I did some quick
calculations: how many boyfriends I had mentioned to him, who else I might
have alluded to, what was a reasonable lie.
‘Nine,’ I said.
‘You see?’ he said, very quickly, sitting up and turning to me like he was
expecting it. ‘I’ve slept with nine people too, and you’re years younger than
me. Everyone I know has slept with more people than me. What is it with
people? Do they just do it with anyone?’
I didn’t know how many people I’d slept with. It was probably something
like thirty then, maybe more. I had lost substantial chunks of time to drink
when I first left home, couldn’t and didn’t want to remember exactly what
had happened.
It wasn’t the lie that disturbed me, but how quickly I knew how to do it.
 3

During this time I drank less, and only seriously with my friends. Ciaran was
grossed out by drunk people and said that he didn’t like to do it much
himself, but on weekends sometimes we’d stand outside The Stag’s Head and
he would get tipsy after two or three pints.
I loved him to be drunk. I loved us drunk together. He was not a good
drunk in the sense that I was, tipping along more or less the same as ever – he
was a great drunk. His seriousness evaporated, and he was excitable and
funny. His eyes glazed over with bleary fondness and he was as sloppily
affectionate as a kid, grabbing me and whirling me round and dipping me and
covering me with kisses. He was happy, which he never was for very long
when sober. Of course, it was a false happiness, but when it was so easily and
frequently accessed who could blame me for believing in it?
On a Saturday night we might, at my demand, have White Russians and
watch horror films and listen to records until dawn. That was even better –
when it was just us he would sometimes let go, drink until he was really
drunk, and we would dance around the living room, laughing and laughing.
I pinned him down on the couch and tickled him and pressed my mouth to
that amazing place between belly button and belt buckle and he would shriek
and squirm. We fell together on to the ground, tactile and giddy. We fucked
there on the ratty old carpet on nights like these, flushed and breathless from
our wrestling. In the morning I would get a fright from some violent inflamed
bruises on my knees or back and then realise with a smile it was from this.
It was the beginning of one such evening that the incident about his poems
for Freja took place.
We were drinking at a bar near his place, a sort of fauxdive with neon
lettering and sawdust on the floor. We were sitting at the bar on swivel stools,
facing in towards each other, hands on the other’s legs, or idling at the neck,
or brushing the lips, always touching somewhere.
 We were talking about Ciaran’s writing. He was now in a comfortable
enough position he could take an extra day off a week to focus on his own
creative work. He had never allowed me to read anything he had written
except reviews and academic writing, most of which was meaningless to me.
He was talking about a series of poems he had started on. I was nodding
along, feeling proud and supportive, when something slipped through the veil
of drunkenness.
‘… and that chapter will include the poems I’ve been writing about
Freja…’
Freja’s name had rarely come up since our conversation about her six
months previously. This had been fine with me. I was so determined and sure
that things were going to be perfect between Ciaran and me that I didn’t have
room for her.
‘What poems?’ I asked, heart pounding.
‘I must have mentioned it before,’ he said, taking a slug of his beer. ‘No?
I’ve been writing a series about her and our relationship, especially the early
part when we lived in Oslo together.’
I nodded slowly, taking this in, sized it up as quick as I could.
Don’t make a big deal of this, I told myself. I was pragmatic, entering
panic mode already, trying to recover my composure.
(What could people be expected to tolerate of me? How much of what I
needed could I reasonably demand?)
(Nothing, nothing, nothing.)
I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the sink and wept bitterly,
immediately, without thought. I knew it was childish, behaving this way, but
it was painful to be reminded so casually that everything I cared about was
subject to the whims of others.
I walked back out and sat on the stool, touched his face, squeezed his
knee, smiled as best I could. He looked bashful, but was grinning dopily too.
I thought to myself, with the smallest hint of distaste, that he wouldn’t have
told me if he wasn’t drunk. For all his performative distaste towards sloppy
drunks, he could be one too.
‘You’re not upset, are you?’
‘No, of course not. Just surprised.’
‘Good, good.’ He was still smiling that vague, idiotic smile, not really
looking at me directly.
 ‘Because I think, actually, they’re quite good. Freja was impressed.’
My face crumpled involuntarily, as it had privately at the sink a few
moments before.
‘You sent them to her? You sent Freja poems you wrote for her?’
‘To get her opinion, yes. And I thought she’d like to see them. We’re just
friends, you know.’
I stared at him, disbelieving, overcome. I didn’t cry really, only there was
some physical breakdown, which I could feel and which must have been
visible.
I hadn’t known until that moment how delicately I had been keeping
everything inside me together those last few months. My body felt as though
it had been holding its breath for a very long time and had just realised it
couldn’t do so for ever.
What I was feeling was the failure of superstition and charms – the
unreliability of prayer.
 4

When I was a child and my cat was hit by a speeding car that didn’t stop, he
lay out in the shed that night waiting to be buried.
I crept out into the damp mossy darkness after everyone was asleep and
drew back the blanket he was beneath. I put my hand on his familiar ginger
stomach but of course it was wrong in every conceivable way: freezing where
it should have been warm, stiff as new cardboard where it should have been
soft.
Feeling this wrongness I knew it was true at last, and couldn’t believe it. I
kept on stroking and stroking him, making deals with God. Thinking, If I
stand here all night; thinking maybe if I stroked the awful, dead-thing
stomach one thousand times exactly, thinking, Please, please, God, send him
back to me, give him back to me, I won’t stop asking.
 5

I had been living in a constant bargain with Ciaran for months. Every day that
passed in which I was easy to be with, and accommodating, and a good
girlfriend, was a ritual offered up. My body expected the perseverance to
mean something. And suddenly it was clear that my intentions were
meaningless, and I could no more magic him into loving me than I could an
animal back to life.
When I looked back at him from my collapse, he had hardened.
‘For God’s sake. Don’t be a child.’
There was a scrape as he pushed his stool back and moved past me.
‘Wait,’ my mouth was saying instinctively.
I wish I could step inside this memory and steady myself, put a cool
reassuring hand on my own and convince myself to wait. Have another drink,
calm down, go home. But my body was moving without thought, scurrying
under the bar to gather my belongings, running outside on to the tram tracks,
peering in both directions. I saw him walking quickly down past the National
Museum. He was moving steadily, betraying no sign of the drunkenness from
a moment before. I ran after him, feebly calling wait, wait, and grasped for
his shoulder when I caught up to him.
He shook me off so violently that I stumbled backwards, and then I was
crying and saying please over and over again.
Ciaran found crying repulsive. Whatever distaste he already felt for me
during arguments, the sight of tears sharpened it. His eyes would narrow and
lose any residual warmth or compassion. He would turn away from me,
refuse to witness.
Was he right to be disgusted? Was it all a show, a ploy to get sympathy? I
can only say if it was one, it was both unconscious and misguided. It never
succeeded in eliciting any good or compassionate feeling, and yet I kept
doing it. I never wanted to. It seemed as impossible to restrain as vomit, and
its ability to repel him only made me do it harder.
It was, I think, that loss of control he hated above all. To see an adult
really cry is a perverse experience. The wailing adult is both childlike and
pathetically defeated in a way that is alien to childhood (cursed by the
breadth of their experience, lacking the single-minded purity of a child’s
grief).
Some part of me had already decided to live for him and let him take over
the great weight of myself. I was also so frightened of him and what he did to
me that I could never admit this decision, inwardly or to him.
And so in moments like this one when I was unexpectedly confronted by
my own need, my reaction was to deny – to hysterically deny – that it existed.
Hence the wailing of sorrys and pleases, the desire to make him forget at
once I had ever demanded anything of him.
In these moments – for this was only the first of what amounted
eventually to hundreds, whole months, years, of prostrating – I pleaded with
him to see how small I really was.
I said through my huddling and hiding that I was nothing, and I was happy
to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best. If nothing was the least
trouble, then I would be it, and gladly. I would be completely blank and still
if that was what worked, or as loud as he needed me to be to take up his
silences. I would be energetic and lively if he was bored, and when he tired of
that, I would become as prosaic and dully useful as cutlery.
I didn’t ask love of him. I didn’t want him to look in my direction and see
me; for there was no thing I could say, with confidence, was me. I panicked
when my need shone through because it was real.
The need was a true and human part of me, but I could feel nothing else of
myself to be true or human, and so the need seemed ungodly, an aberration.
He walked home and did not actively discourage me from following him.
He ignored me, which I could tolerate, in that moment even enjoyed, the
better to demonstrate how quiet and good I could be. When we reached his
house he stopped outside and turned to me.
‘You can come in, and you can stay, but I do not want to talk about this
tonight or ever again. Freja and I are adults. We’re older than you. We have a
complicated relationship, but it has nothing to do with you and it does not
affect you. Understand?’
I nodded eagerly. I didn’t speak again that evening, brushing my teeth and
undressing in silence. I allowed him to turn away from me in the bed, as I
knew he would, without protest.
I woke at dawn. Outside, the sky was a bright and sterile grey. Christmas
wasn’t long away.
I looked down at Ciaran, frowning in his sleep. He seemed so young when
he slept, his skinniness more apparent in the tight old T-shirt he wore. The
damp heat he radiated was that of a child sweating out a fever. It is still
especially easy for me to love him when I think of him this way. He seemed
somehow pre-historic, still-becoming, an animal not yet ready to exist, with
whom there is no point in being disappointed.
I crawled out of bed carefully, my stomach a pit of nausea and dread. I
walked out into the front room and stared out the window, stretching and
reaching towards the ceiling.
I glanced around and thought about eating some muesli when I saw
Ciaran’s phone lying on the table. The sums were done in seconds. He was in
the deeper part of his sleep; I would hear him getting up; his phone didn’t
have a lock key.
I knew I was entering new territory from which I couldn’t return. I was
invading him and his privacy, just as I had tried so hard to imply that I
wouldn’t with my submission.
I opened his email account. Almost all of the emails were to and from
Freja. I scrolled down. They had spoken nearly every day for months, the
entire time I had known him.
I opened the most recent one she had sent, shortly before I had met him in
the bar the day before. I skimmed it quickly, not daring to take enough time
to read it all. It was long, a few thousand words. The first few paragraphs
were a critical response to the poems he had sent, and then she began to talk
about me.
‘… Now, having read your poems, it’s my turn to impose on you. I try to
talk to you about us and you stop me by mentioning her. We both know you
use her to get at me and make me jealous. There is no need. You’ve
succeeded. I am jealous. I’m miserable. I’m angry. I think about the two of
you all the time, idle away hours in the office finding pictures of her online,
trying to imagine what you see in her.
‘She’s cute I can see, but a little chubby for you, no? You used to like that
I was long and thin, not at all like her. Is that it? That she is so unlike me?
Am I so terrible that you are cursed to seek my opposite? Doesn’t it feel
strange to be in bed with her and not me, after all these years?
‘Do people ever tell you and her that you make a beautiful couple, like
they used to with us? We looked right together because we are right together.
Do you remember the first night in the new house in Oslo after we moved
everything in and unpacked? Once we were done we sat on the porch
drinking whiskies and looking around us at our new home, and an old lady
walked past and stopped. She looked at us and said, “Aren’t you two the most
beautiful couple I’ve ever seen,” and we laughed and she said, “Be good to
one another” as she walked off. She could see how in love we were even at
that distance, because everyone could.
‘When we met, we were both lost and hopeless. That’s part of why we
love each other. I saw it in you from the beginning. There was a broken part
in us both that only the other could mend, that’s why we had to be together. I
woke up every day back then with you staring down at me, stroking my hair,
as though you couldn’t believe I was real. You can’t take back or deny what
exists between us.
‘Remember those days we would walk for hours in Nordmarka until we
could barely take another step, then go home and take a bath together. You
read your poems to me or we talked about what I was reading in school, and
we dried each other off and fell asleep on the couch in front of the fire.
‘Do you expect me to believe you have what we had with her? I know
you. I know what’s inside of you, and how little you can show it to people.
‘If only you would give us another chance, I could prove it to you.
Besides, what I did was only ever sex. It meant nothing. I never did what you
are doing now. I never played house with anyone else, went on dates or any
of that shit.
‘You left here because of your father, but he’s fine now. You say yourself
you never see him. Come back to me. Or I’ll come there – I don’t care. I
would go anywhere.
‘I don’t exist without you. When I come home after work I put on your
old sweater and put it to my face, trying to gather any remaining scent. I think
about kissing your collarbone, your ribs, your eyelids. I close my eyes and
imagine the feeling of you coming back to me, of us disappearing together.
‘You know me, Ciaran. I don’t have boyfriends. Before you there were
only people I had slept with. I’ve never loved anyone but you, and I have
loved you for so long now. Seven years. This isn’t like other relationships.
I’m not going to get over it and move on to the next one. It’s only you.
‘It will only ever be you.’
Crazy bitch, crazy bitch, I thought. Horrified jealousy was pulsing through
my body like poison. Crazy bitch, crazy bitch.
I was sickened by her over-familiarity, her wheedling self-pity, the
linguistic melodrama, but mostly by the smug portrayal of what they’d been
like as a couple. Reading poems in the bath, chuckling about what a beautiful
pair they were, some mutual understanding that they were more troubled than
anyone else.
I heard a rustling in the bedroom and quickly exited his email and shut the
phone back off. I ran the tap and filled a glass with water and went back to
the bedroom. I slid in beside Ciaran, my chin on his shoulder, hugging him
from behind. He cast his arm backwards and held me to him.
2019, Athens

Being in love feels like nothing so much as hope; a distilled, clear hope
which would be impossible to manufacture on your own.
One of the saddest things to feel is that nothing in the world is new, that
you have exhausted all your interactions with it. When I feel that way I wake
each day into the already-dusky afternoon with deep regret that nothing has
happened overnight to change me. I wake so late because although I can’t
stand to be conscious, I can’t stand to try to sleep either. To lie down in the
dark and think, for even a moment, seems an unspeakable prospect, so I drink
until I pass out, or stare at the television until my eyes physically can’t stay
open any longer.
If I try to travel my way out of this feeling, cities blur into one another. I
waste money feeling bad in a piazza by myself, twelve-euro bland pasta, too
much wine, some dull man always trying to speak with me.
When I go home to Waterford to try to even out and reconnect with
myself and my past, people seem to be dying all the time all around me, and I
argue with my parents about my reluctance to engage with them. I don’t want
to hear about the illnesses and tragedies, and am amazed by their ability to
keep attending funeral after funeral. It feels as though all I can do each day is
eat and sleep and trudge through the hours and start again – and, in fact, it is
all I can do. Anti-depressants come and go, making little difference either
way to the fact that my reaction to all of life, all of God’s green earth, all of
mankind, is often: So?
And then, whenever I fall in love, everything is made new, including
myself. My body, my brain, the way I see the simplest things. And the best
part is it doesn’t even have to be the first time to work. If I fuck it up once,
the next time works just as well.
Looking out windows on public transport becomes unbearably
stimulating, fields of rapeseed bringing tears to my eyes, the jagged coastline
taking my breath away. My mind, which had seemed so stagnant and grey,
feels suddenly like a baby’s, absorbent and crackling with new information.
The new person not only makes a depressing and boring life feel interesting,
but makes it into an entirely different kind of life. Afternoons, which I might
otherwise spend cowering alone in bed hiding from errant sunlight coming
through the curtain, I now might spend feeding ducks and reading poetry by
the canal. A transformation which is the nearest to actual magic I have ever
come.
When you fall in love with someone and your life is remade, you know
instinctively that you must take great care of this delicate new world the two
of you are building. There is infrastructure to be dealt with, dams and bridges
and town halls to be planned. The high-stakes precarity of what you are doing
will frequently bring tears to your eyes, both from fright and from exquisite
pleasure. One wrong move and the whole thing could collapse before you
have even finished construction. Couples will often disappear together for
months in their beginning stages, which is not just about lust but also about
building.
 6

When Ciaran and I went to the cinema in our first few weeks I remember
wishing I could watch a film of him, even while he sat there beside me
holding my hand. I remember wanting a screen so big that I could see nothing
outside of it. I wanted to be totally saturated by him, for there to be no room
for anything else to leak in. I knew I was about to begin the most difficult and
important building of my life. I felt on the cusp of a grand project, my best
work yet. I would build a great sturdy red barn which could stand for
centuries. I would build a magnificent golden cathedral. I would build the
eighth wonder of the world.
When I read Freja’s email to him, my mind could not understand it in
terms of my project, and so I couldn’t fully absorb it. The idea of our newly
built world not continuing to exist was literally inconceivable to me. It was
easy to deny because trouble receded when I could be with him physically,
all potential intrusions rendered laughably unreal.
I had sex with him that dawn and was totally free of disquiet. To feel his
long, strong fingers wrapped lightly around my throat. The smell around his
mouth, the sweetness, hovering over mine. I arched my back up to get closer,
tried to inhale that breath. I raised my hand to his jaw and held it still so that
he was looking right into my eyes as he moved, and doing that made each
individual second sacred.
Just as, in my younger days, my partying had seemed somehow important
– seemed somehow to be getting at something bigger than other people were
able to get at by doing the same thing – sex with Ciaran seemed important. It
seemed each time to be driving towards a conclusion, and the conclusion
would teach us something profound, if we ever arrived to it.
 7

Things were good between us for the next few weeks, better than before, as
though something foul had been released. I thought about the email, but with
disgusted anger towards her only, nothing towards him.
I was shocked by the totality of the world she had described in her letter.
The particular intimacy of her tone in addressing him, the details I would
never have had cause to know if I hadn’t read it.
I tried to imagine the sweater of his she had kept, the porch they sat on,
what view they had from it. It was disturbing, as it always was to be made
aware that people with their own internal lives and individual perspectives
existed all around you.
The idea of her having a long-held perception of who Ciaran was, which
predated mine by years, was awful, but its otherness was also erotic. For the
first time I googled her, to see what she looked like. At night sometimes
when I couldn’t sleep my mind would force me to imagine them fucking.
Ciaran was gentler with me than before, and sweeter. He bought me little
things and surprised me with flowers and took me out for dinner.
These things seemed especially significant to me since he was mean with
money. He didn’t make a lot, but nor did I, nor did anyone I knew. If I didn’t
have change on me to get a coffee he would pay for it but would always,
always ask for it back. I found this bizarre and uncomfortable.
It wasn’t just with me. I’d seen him claim back drinks owed to him by
friends who had no idea what he was talking about. When they’d turn their
heads quizzically he’d recite the exact scene:
‘Don’t you remember, Harry, it was in the Duke after the second-to-last
IMMA party? It was the week before your payday so I got you a beer.’
And everyone would laugh and roll their eyes about his stinginess. I found
it harder to laugh, found it more genuinely embarrassing, because I was his
girlfriend. I feared vaguely that this meanness implied other things to people,
that they were embarrassed on my behalf.
Once, after a bunch of us had gone to dinner in a sushi place after an
opening on Talbot Street, he had almost pushed a girl to tears. She was an
intern at a gallery in town, new to Dublin, just moved over from Krakow and
she clearly had a huge crush on Ciaran. She was younger than me, nineteen
or so, with a lot of clean shiny hair and big solicitous eyes. She stared at him
all night.
This happened all the time. Usually I didn’t mind much because he never
noticed. It was a strange experience for me to be going out with someone so
objectively attractive. In public, I was split between taking childish pleasure
in it and feeling terrified that people looked at us and were puzzled by the
discrepancy.
At the end of the dinner, Ciaran was settling up the bill and telling
everyone what they owed. The intern was a few euro short.
‘It’s fifteen,’ he kept repeating. ‘That’s what you spent, with the beer.’
‘I’m sorry, I… I…’
He laughed, as though in disbelief. ‘I just don’t understand why you
would order fifteen euros’ worth of food and beer if you don’t have it.’
Our end of the table had turned to look.
‘Here, I’ve got it,’ said her boss at the gallery, leaning across to toss a
note in and giving Ciaran a funny glance.
He took me out on the last night I was in town before Christmas. We went
to a French restaurant and ate rare steak and drank expensive red wine. He
was nice to the waiter and ordered for us both in a way that made me feel
small and contained and happy. We talked about bad shows we had seen and
laughed about the artists and their ladder-climbing desperation, their sad
trucker caps and hip tracksuits they were too old to pull off.
His lips were a little stained from the wine and he seemed incredibly sexy
to me as we spoke, completely open and alive, none of his usual reserve or
irritation interrupted us. When we were leaving, I pushed my chair back from
the table and he stepped behind to help me put on my coat and dipped down
to kiss me. I thought of everyone in the restaurant seeing us like this, as we
truly were, as we would be from now on – two young, interesting, beautiful
people at the beginning of life together. I glanced around as we left, at the
other couples – and I was right, people really were looking.
A pair of older women smiled indulgently at us as we passed them. The
female half of an expensively dressed and meticulously groomed couple
stared at us with an expression I couldn’t identify. I was flushed, head
swimming with pride. We were something real, whatever problems we had
were unimportant, were only a consequence of how intense it was to really
live.
He walked me down to Eden Quay, and we stood in the shadow of the
bank buildings which lined that side of the river. He held my hands in his and
kissed my ears and blew warm breath on them. As the bus pulled up, he took
a small, pale blue box out of his bag and handed it to me.
‘There’s your present,’ he said, and bent down, rubbing the side of his soft
cheek against mine like a cat, kissing my forehead. ‘I love you.’
A profound calm swept over my body, affirmation that I was not crazy.
We looked at one another, kissed again, laughed at our serious faces, and
hugged a last time.
I climbed on to the bus and found a seat as far as possible from anyone
else. I wanted to be alone and catalogue all the feelings I was experiencing,
examine them one by one. I couldn’t help myself from opening the box.
Inside was a folded-over scrap of paper on which he had written:

Happy Christmas. You are a beautiful woman and I love you.

Beneath the note was a delicate antique amber brooch. I held the stone in my
hand and squeezed my eyes shut. It seemed to radiate heat, to throb, like a
living thing. I was still holding it when we reached Waterford three hours
later and the approaching lights of my home city made me cry as they did
every time I arrived upon them.
2019, Athens

I was sitting in a café last week, reading my book and drinking a coffee
before catching a train. It was a clear evening, the sun had just set, when an
enormous electrical storm descended without warning. The waiters moved us
all further inside the patio under a larger awning to avoid being splashed. Me,
a businesswoman in her fifties and a couple of indifferent old men sat there
looking out at it. The businesswoman was wearing a lot of very red lipstick
and kept raising her hand to her mouth in fright when the lightning appeared.
I was watching her and it with half-interest when a young couple with a baby
in a pram ran in.
They were very beautiful and very wet and they were laughing. The
woman was doubled up, clutching her stomach, howling with it, and her
husband put his hand on her shoulder and rubbed her back affectionately.
They looked around at the rest of us, with these big incredulous smiles on
their faces. Look, their smiles seemed to say, at the rain! Look how wet we
have become! Even after they had settled at a table and lifted their baby on to
their laps, they kept breaking down into shuddering laughter every few
moments.
I felt so lonely when I looked at them, remembering (but not quite clearly;
through a veil) what they were experiencing; that part of being in love that
makes inane experiences valuable. Laughing at getting rained on instead of it
just being a minor pain on your way somewhere else. And even after, when
they were just sitting eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, their
contentment was amazing to see. I had forgotten that love has the power to do
that. I envied them, felt glad for them, and frightened for myself. Having a
sandwich and a cup of coffee in the rain was nothing I could render magical
by myself.
It reminded me of when Ciaran would wake me in the mornings
sometimes and ask what we should do that day. I would say, ‘Mm, I don’t
know, we could see a film in the evening, or go to a gallery.’ And he would
say, ‘Or, let’s just get apples and walk around.’
And this became a thing we did together, a thing I would get excited to
get out of bed to do. We would walk into town and go to the fancy
supermarket café on George’s Street and drink a couple of glasses of their tap
water by the counter as the waiter looked on annoyed. Then we would buy
(or sometimes shoplift if we were after an illicit thrill) two apples. We’d
spend a few minutes picking them out, comparing them, weighing up size
relative to flavour. Then we’d leave and for four or five hours we would walk
around the city, just talking to each other and seeing what was going on. We
certainly could stop into a gallery, or a charity shop, or to get a coffee
somewhere along the way, but it wasn’t the point.
Getting apples and walking around was the point, just that, that was the
whole point. That was more than enough.
Christmas 2012
Waterford
 1

When the bus pulled in it was almost three a.m. and I was a few miles from
my mother’s house.
She had lived in the suburb, Ballinakill Downs, since she and my father
separated when I was small. Her second husband, Stíofán, moved in eight
years later as I was turning fourteen. Mam’s name was Keelin until she met
Stíofán, who was a school teacher and gaelgóir, and then she abandoned the
anglicised version for the properly Irish ‘Caoilfhaoinn’, and snapped at you if
you pronounced it the old way.
An objective outsider would think Mam had been the winner in the
contest of their divorce, her tall rugged new husband, the kayaking trips and
weekends away, but privately I thought that Dad was the happier of the two. I
worried over his loneliness, but he was an easily pleased man, in need of not
much more than a degree of casual company, reading material, and a bit of
land. All of these he had in his small village a few miles outside the city,
where he worked in their hokey library and drank with the same three pals a
few times a week.
Mam seemed always to be anticipating disaster in a way that seemed
unnatural and pointless for a person in their later life, and still anxiously
dieted with the vehemence and optimism of a teenager.
‘How’s Stephen?’ my dad would ask her whenever she dropped me off to
his house, where I spent most of my weekends, throwing me a wink.
‘It’s Stíofán, as you well know, Tomás,’ she’d say back to Dad, who had
only ever been called Thomas.
Usually when I came home from Dublin at that hour I would have called a
taxi, too lazy and afraid to walk to Ballinakill, but now I could think of
nothing more wonderful. I listened to music that reminded me of him on my
way, and felt a quiet dreaminess I hadn’t since I was a teenager. When I got
home I let myself in and Mam was sleeping on the couch with a crime drama
on TV.
‘Hi, child,’ she said, one eye opening.
‘Hi, mother,’ I replied, going over to squeeze her hand hello, before going
up to bed.
I slept for twelve hours straight, as I often did when I first came home, as
though recovering from having to be alive on my own all year round. When I
woke, although it was only 19 December, my bedroom had the feeling of
Christmas already. I reached down for my bag and took out the amber brooch
and held it in my hand, feeling it warm.
That day and the next I sat in our living room and read fat silly novels of
the sort I didn’t allow myself normally, helped to wrap presents, cooked. I
drank wine with my mother and gossiped about people we knew and watched
bad television. On the night of the 21st, I called Ciaran, not having heard
from him since I left. I wasn’t alarmed – he was useless with his phone and
rarely had credit unless I bought it for him. After three tries, he hadn’t
answered. I was tipsy and eager to talk with him, but didn’t think much of it.
I topped up his phone online and sent him a message saying to call me when
he was free and that I missed and loved him. It felt cheering to write it down.
On the 23rd I went for drinks with two old friends of mine. On my walk to
meet them I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window and had to stop
and steady myself against a post. I was so disgusting. I was so big. When I
got to the pub, people would talk about it, would stare and whisper about how
much bigger and uglier I was than when I was younger.
I felt my stomach against the elastic of my underwear, spilling over it,
both me and monstrously not-me. That I wasn’t thin was not the only thing
about me, a fact which seemed obvious everywhere else in the world. But
when I returned to Waterford it seemed again my defining trait, my
characteristic failure. Every time I came back it was a reminder that, at least
there, at least home, at least where it counted, I would always be wrong. I
would always look like a misshapen version of my True Self, a hastily
sketched approximation of a human being.
2019, Athens

I’ve never understood how people can love their bodies, nor really
understood how they can hate them either. I’ve always seen my body as
nothing so much as deeply disturbing in its constant variance, a fluctuating,
unmanageable thing that has basically nothing to do with me, is not really
any of my business at all.
How am I supposed to accept or like or hate or be neutral about a thing
that will not stay the same? How can I maintain consistent feelings towards a
changing thing like that? Should I concede instead that I can’t, that it’s
necessary instead to cleave my body – in all its hideous wilful growth and
recession and blooming and withering – from myself, from me?
I am told this is impossible. I am told this most often by men. They have
studied philosophers I haven’t, but the things they say in dressed-up terms are
just like the florid self-help slogans by women they think are stupid. The
things they say are: You are your body. There is no divide. When it changes,
that’s you changing. You are not just a witness to your body’s vagaries, you
are the architect.
People are scared of teenagers having sex but we might think sometimes
about the misery of having a teenage body, a teenage girl’s body especially,
how tedious and painful and punitive, and remember that sex might be the
first time she realises that bodies can be made to feel good. That the million
sensitive places which cause you to feel pain can also be sensitive to
pleasure. That when you want to cry it will not always be from sadness.
My body disgusted me when I was that age, but at the same time I was
learning to love it – love it too much. I hated it but also worshipped it with an
obscene devotion, because I knew what it was capable of inciting in myself
and in others. In the mirror, I wanted to cry out with distress one moment,
wanted to break the glass and cut great chunks of it away. The next I was on
my knees staring in dizzy adoration, grazing my hands over the gentle
shelving of my ribs, looking down at it from the same angle a boy would. I
was on my back in bed with a camera, I was reflecting on how lucky anyone
would be to see a sight like this.
 There is no truce to be made with my body; if I make one, I know it will
only be negated by a new enemy in time. What is the point?
When I go back home I am angrier than ever. I am all at once submerged
in every body I ever was, all the failed attempts at being a certain kind of
person. My old scales are there, my old photographs, the skin across my face
taut with hunger, my eyes bright and wild with it, very beautiful, nobody
could deny.
And at home there is my mother. Around her I am ever more nauseated by
myself. There are the usual itemised wrongs in my head, the ones I might trot
out to a therapist, throwaway comments she made when I was at formative
ages. She was always somewhat mad about her own body, but especially
when she was young and single and probably driven to distraction with a
whiny child and little idea of what the rest of her life might look like, if it
would be any good.
She said these things without any meanness or vitriol, said them in the
same chipper conversational way she said most everything, but of course I
remember them. So unfair – I’m sure I don’t remember hundreds, thousands
of other things she said, telling me I was fine as I was. It seems likely. But
nevertheless, I don’t remember them, they don’t exist for me.
Instead, what exists are the moments like this one: I was eleven and the
usual routine was for my mother to collect me after school, and on the drive
home we would stop and get me a snack from the shop, a packet of crisps or
a cereal bar. This particular afternoon I had decided I was going to become
skinny and virtuous like the healthy trim little girls in my class who ate rice
cakes and whose socks did not strain against their calves in the least.
‘What do you want to eat?’ my mother asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I’m just going to have chewing gum after school from
now on.’
‘Good girl,’ she said, and I remember feeling a sad, deep worry that she
had been hating me all along for the eating I was doing before, that she had
been waiting for me to give it up.
When I come home now, still, I am self-conscious and defensive before
her. I hate that she can see what weight I have gained. I hate to listen to what
she is or isn’t eating any more, what she is doing at the gym. I hate that
hearing those things feels like a dare to me, or an invitation to raise the
stakes. I hate that I have never found an appropriate response, that all I can do
is defensively eat nothing, in a rage, or eat everything, showing her that I am
past that, I have transcended her petty concerns, I am mind, not body, I am
better than her. I stop wearing the kinds of clothes I wear in my normal life,
fun and pretty ones, and recede into sullen, voluminous sweatshirts.
Even if my mother had never uttered a word about her body or mine, I
think I would still feel this way when I come home, the same claustrophobic
fury under that shared roof, the two of us so close together. I came from her,
she made this body-thing I hate and love so much. I resent her for producing
it; I’m mortified I have made such poor use of it. How dare you? I want to
scream at her, on the one hand; I love you so much! I’m sorry, on the other.
 2

By the morning of the 24th, Ciaran still hadn’t called and I was veering into
dread. I tried to comfort myself – maybe he had lost his phone. Then why
was it still on? Maybe he was just busy. Too busy to send a text in four days?
We hadn’t spent so long without talking in months. I began to genuinely
worry – he didn’t have close friends who would be checking in on him, he
wasn’t due to see anyone until Christmas Day. He refused to spend any of the
holiday with his father in Wicklow, claiming that the usual mutual
grumpiness which existed between them soured into outright aggression
whenever he had tried to, that there were resentments from childhood
Christmases which would not stop resurfacing no matter how much time
passed. Instead, he had dinner with friends on the day itself and visited his
father in January, when the worst of the feeling had passed.
Maybe he had had an accident? He could have fallen while cycling, or just
slipped coming out of the shower and hit his head, or – or anything.
A few hours before I was to meet my dad for a walk, I called Ciaran’s
office. I knew he wouldn’t be there: his holidays began the day before. His
boss Michael, who I knew socially from openings, answered the phone.
‘Hi, Michael,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘Sorry to bother you – I’m
just wondering if Ciaran was in yesterday.
I’ve broken my phone and I don’t know his number off so I haven’t been
able to get hold of him.’
‘Happy Christmas! Lucky you, you’ve been down the country all week,
haven’t you? I’m nearly finished now but I’m the only one left here who can
do layout for January so… anyway! Yeah, Ciaran, he was here until
lunchtime or so, I told him to go home then. He was fidgeting so much all he
was doing was annoying me, ha. I’ve got his mobile here somewhere; I can
give it to you if that’s any use?’
‘Ah!’ I heard myself say with a forced laugh. ‘That would be great.’
 He read out the number, and I repeated it back as though
I was writing it down, as though I didn’t already know.
I called him constantly for the rest of the morning, knowing there would
be no answer, but unable to stop myself. The frenzied certainty that a terrible
thing had taken place was stronger now, but no longer was the terrible thing a
cracked skull or a blocked windpipe. The terrible thing was a mystery now. I
could focus only on the immediate. I needed with every part of my body for
him to pick up the phone. That was the only thing I could think of; the sound
of his voice saying hello. Everything after that would be dealt with.
My dad picked me up at lunchtime and we went for coffee and a walk. I
struggled to appear relaxed and happy. I answered his questions about Ciaran
as brightly and truthfully as possible. Because of our closeness he knew I was
lying about something, and having ascertained I wouldn’t be telling him what
it was, became brisk with worry and frustration.
I wished I could unburden myself but I couldn’t verbalise what was
happening because doing so would bring it into existence. So far, it was all
taking place in my head with no verification from an outside party, and so
long as I kept it that way I could suppress it. That urge you have with an
envelope of results, delaying the future in which you are unwillingly privy to
terrible news.
I knew also that if I began to describe more or less anything about Ciaran
and what our relationship was like I would upset my dad. The split in me was
so wide that these two states could coexist:

1. I knew that my relationship was strange and uneven and not

reciprocal and that speaking about its reality would confuse and upset
people who loved me.
2. I didn’t feel it to be those things.

That is, I could understand that a truthful account of it, according to actual
events, would sound disturbing, but I did not feel disturbed by it. It was only
that other people would be incapable of understanding the way in which
objective reality did not account for its essential truth.
I could not withhold from my dad as easily as I could with others. When I
obscured or omitted important things, I couldn’t then behave normally.
Usually when I did this it was to avoid upsetting him, when the problem was
something he could not help with and I could therefore see no point in
burdening him.
It had been like this when I was a teenager. My depressions were without
source or resolution, and so I had no real answer to the question ‘What’s
wrong?’ My relationship with Ciaran had the same feeling of inevitability. It
just was. I just was in love with him, and any of the problems that came with
it were simply to be borne. There was no point in describing them.
The denial of information to Dad made me feel weak and depressed at the
irreconcilable distance between us, which was so much smaller than between
most people, but still existed and always would.
Sometimes this distance between everyone comforted and pleased me. I
would die knowing things about myself that nobody else on earth did. There
were experiences that lived only in me and could never be replicated or
recounted. And sometimes, like now, the distance seemed too sad to live
with.
In the car on the way home we were chatting idly about his eldest brother
leaving home when he was a kid, and I asked if his parents had minded him
going away.
‘Same as me with you, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I’d prefer if you were here for
my own sake but I wouldn’t wish it on you. The thing that gets at me
sometimes, like now getting to spend a relatively long time, more than a day,
is thinking about how little this will happen again.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I mean, if you count the times we’ll spend a significant amount of time
together from now on, more than a day at a time… those stints are limited.
They’re very limited, really.’
He was driving, frowning slightly out the windscreen at the winter sun,
and didn’t seem distressed by what he was saying, had said it matter-of-
factly.
I turned my face to the side and stared out my window. I was filled not
only with misery about what he was saying, and his awareness of it, but also
with shame at how squalidly I was wasting my short life. I was sitting in a car
with someone who loved me more than life itself, and yet all I could think
about was Ciaran. How impoverished my internal life had become, the
scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.
 3

On Christmas morning I woke up at seven and sent a message to him:

Happy Christmas. I love you very much. Please call me.

I irritated myself as I wrote it, the ‘very much’ shrill and manipulative.
I ate breakfast nervously and exchanged gifts with my mam and Stíofán
and then Dad collected me. We drove to meet my grandmother and uncles at
the church we always went to for Christmas. We looked for them when we
got in, but the service was beginning so we slipped into the nearest pew. In
front of us an elderly woman was crying silently into her hands, an adult son
sat beside her with his arm firmly around her shoulder. Her husband must
have died, I thought, imagining it, and this is the first Christmas without him.
Then I was off too – the combination of witnessing her grief, standing
there with my father, being in the church I had come to in my school days. I
hardly let up for the next thirty minutes, breaking down utterly hearing my
dad’s strong tuneless voice join in with ‘Silent Night’.
I said sorry to my dad afterwards, but he understood. He suffers too.
We went to the graveyard to do our traditional walk to see his own
father’s stone, and that of my mother’s mother. In the car we avoided each
other’s eyes and spoke with wobbling voices, and as we arrived back at
Mam’s house he put his hand on my wrist and said, ‘It’ll be OK,’ and I was
sad for him that he had had a child at all if it meant his happiness was tied to
mine always. I was sad I wasn’t able to learn to be happier, more regular and
peaceful, because it meant he would never have that peace for himself, which
he of all people deserved and had waited for.
It was painful that he loved me so much and wanted things for me I knew
I would never have and never deserve. I owed him so much and I would
never repay it. I wished I could somehow make him understand this so he
could give up on me. I kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘I know, Dad. Love
you, I’ll ring you from Dublin,’ and left the car quickly before we could hurt
each other any more.
The rest of the day was easier. I drank wine on the couch and read and
smiled listening to my aunties teasing Mam as she cooked the dinner and felt
happy in the complete containment of the house, and wished I could stay in it
for ever, wished I could erase all the other parts of my life and give up on the
idea of progress. We ate and played board games and drank and smoked and
watched films and at the end of the night I went on to my mam’s couch and
curled up next to her and cried and cried and she petted my hair and didn’t
make me say what was wrong. The next morning I left before anyone was
awake and got the bus back to Dublin.
 4

The city was still quiet and empty when we pulled into it just after nine. I
walked home, crossing over O’Connell Bridge slowly so as not to slip on the
ice. I went up Grafton Street where people were gathering for the sales,
stopped for a coffee at the top and went around the edge of Stephen’s Green,
where I often walked with Ciaran after work. I was putting off the moment of
unlocking my door and stepping in to the emptiness and having whatever was
happening happen to me.
I was often like this on evenings when I wasn’t seeing Ciaran after work.
I’d begin the walk up and be filled with lurching dread at the thought of all
the steps yet to take, the familiar corners to turn, the nothing, the nobody,
waiting for me when I got there. I’d stop into a pub on the way, buy a
magazine, anxiously smoke and sip two glasses of red wine and pick at my
hands until I forced myself to leave.
It was like that now but worse. It took me an hour and a half to do the
forty-minute walk, wandering in wrong directions and stopping to look at
shop window displays. I unlocked the door and sat on my bed, unpacking the
few things from home. I took out the note: You are a beautiful woman and I
love you. Looking at it agitated me further. How could he have written it if –
he can’t have written this and then –
I put it away and took out my phone and messaged him that I was home
and I was going to come to his house. He replied immediately: Stay there I’ll
be there in an hour.
I clung to the phone, flooding with relief.
There had to be some explanation for what was taking place. His dad
could be ill – could be in the house with him, for all I knew.
I made coffee and smoked and tapped the kitchen table, looked at the
note. Stroked my hands, soothing myself, trying not to bite them or hurt
myself.
 He knocked on the door exactly an hour later. When I opened it, he had
changed entirely. The momentary hardness that crossed his face during
arguments was total now, and occupied every part of him.
‘Come in,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘What?’ And losing it already, all of the pent-up energy of useless hope
draining in a moment, my body sagging, I grabbed the doorframe to stay
upright.
‘I’m not coming in.’ I looked again at his face, it cut into me. ‘I came here
to tell you it’s over. I’m leaving now.’
And he really did turn to leave.
How did he do it? It was amazing, remarkable to me even through the
sickening shock of it; how could a person be the way he was?
‘Wait, please, come back,’ I heard myself say, hating the sound of my
craziness, and calculating quickly what would make him come back. ‘Five
minutes, I swear, just five minutes.’
He turned back and stood as he had before, with one hand on his backpack
strap and one on his hip. A stance of parental irritation, one you might take
with a child who won’t stop asking why they can’t have ice cream for dinner.
And indeed, he was narrowing his eyes, shaking his head, as though I was
asking an impossibly grandiose favour of him. His expression suggested that
whatever was taking place was a usual thing that I was failing to understand
because I was stupid, or unwilling, or delusional.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Please come in and talk to me. You have to talk to me.
Talk to me.’
My voice was raising with each sentence as he shook his head at me.
I searched, trying to push through like there was some telekinesis fuelled
by desperation and love I could use to penetrate him.
‘I’m not coming in,’ he said again, and in the madness of the moment I
was in, this was the only thing to overcome. It was like my feeling that
hearing him pick up the phone would resolve everything when he had
disappeared. If I could just get him over the threshold, get him to step into my
normal, same old room – if I could get him to sit on the bed we had slept and
loved each other in, he would surely relent.
He would have to break his surreal character, would be forced to
remember and soften.
 ‘Please come in and talk to me,’ I begged, and with a petulant sigh he
came through the door and threw down his bag.
‘What?’ he said.
I didn’t know where to start, how to describe the lunacy of what was
taking place between us, what to demand of him first. The nearest thing I had
to evidence was the proximity of our last meeting. I grabbed my bag and
scrabbled for the blue box. I held out the amber to him as though it was a
talisman, as though it could summon something from within him.
‘You gave me this, you told me you loved me, a week ago!’ I was
screaming now and along with everything else I hated him for making me
into this.
I felt crushed with the sudden certainty that I was the crazy one. What I
thought had happened could not have happened.
‘Look, the reason I didn’t want to come in is that there’s nothing to
discuss. There’s no point in sitting down and talking about it. It’s just over. I
have nothing to say to you now that you know.’
‘Why didn’t you want me to come to your house? Why didn’t you answer
my calls?’
Silence, still glowering, as though I was being impolite, crossing some
boundary of propriety.
‘She’s here?’ I asked, voicing aloud what I had felt dirtying me for days.
‘That’s the only reason you came here, so I wouldn’t turn up and see her.’
‘It’s not your business any more – any of that. It never was your business,
in fact.’
I was weeping, and said, ‘Just say goodbye to me then, if it’s over. Can’t
you behave like a human being? Don’t you owe me that?’
I didn’t mean this, of course. I didn’t want a goodbye, had no interest in a
respectful parting. I only thought if I could make him concede, treat me like a
person, touch me, the spell would be broken and he would love me again.
‘Fine,’ he said, his eyes still accusing, mocking. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Hug me goodbye,’ I begged. I don’t want to remember saying it.
He rolled his eyes and stepped towards me, patting my back twice,
briskly, like a colleague might.
I grabbed him, clung to him, jammed my face to his chest, smelled him,
gasping.
He brushed me off as easily as an insect and blew angry air and spit
through his lips, swiftly scooping up his bag and opening the door, walking
down the road at speed, not looking back to see me doubled over in the
doorway.
He was gone. I dragged myself back inside and lay on the bed. He
dawdled through the earth, fooling people into thinking he was alive. What
had happened? I sat myself up and put my hand on the cool wall trying to
stop the dizziness.
For the rest of the day I sat there and wept and muttered to myself the
sequence of events that had led to this moment. I leafed through my diary to
find the dates and then recited what had taken place, the day we met, the first
time we kissed, the arguments, the reconciliations, the dinners. I said them
out loud, again and again, start to finish.
 5

My friend took his own life some years ago. A string of phone calls went
around us all. I was working in a theatre at the time and ignored the call when
it came through. A few hours later at a lunch with some colleagues in a pub, I
got a text. It was from someone I barely knew, who didn’t know my friend
well either. I read it quickly, holding the phone in one hand as the food was
being served and I was still half-talking to the others.
… sorry to be the one to… died at home…
I read it twice in quick succession, staring at the screen blankly. Then I
put my phone away and ate my lunch. For an hour his death didn’t exist in
any meaningful sense. I can’t remember a single conscious thought that
passed through my head until we were all leaving and outside my knees gave
out from under me and I stumbled against a wall, repeating: ‘I think my
friend is dead.’
A few days later, we gathered in his living room to drink and cry and talk
about the funeral. We kept recounting events from the past few months,
saying, ‘… and that was the last time I saw him,’ to each other, insisting on
describing the exact barstool we had seen him on, or gig we’d bought tickets
to and why; as if to say to each other: It happened; I was there; did it happen?
January 2013
Dublin
 1

When he left me, I went to the same faux-dive bar where we had argued
about the poems written for Freja.
I wanted to be as fucked up as humanly possible, to obliterate the memory
of his disgusted face on my doorstep. I kept seeing his bored and mocking
expression. You thought I loved you, it said. Ha!
A succession of my girlfriends told me how much they had always hated
him, how he was not good enough for me. I threw my head back and laughed,
agreed. A friend of mine slid his hand on to my ass, pulled me towards him. I
was nauseated by his wet whiskey lips slipping against mine. I pushed him
away. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all this time. I went home.
When I got in I collapsed into the armchair in which we had sometimes
fucked. There was a night not long before Christmas when we had come
home late after a house party, giddy and aroused. I put on a record and he had
barely been able to wait as I did. He pushed me back on the armchair, threw
my dress up over my face and put his mouth on the small childish bit of fat I
was so afraid of, escaping over the band my underwear.
‘Get down,’ he said.
And I slid out of the chair on to the floor in front of him.
I bit my lip, my underwear around my ankles, feeling him stalking above
me. He liked to walk around with me like that – liked to smoke a cigarette
and open a beer.
He pulled up a chair and sat behind me, watching me wait for him.
Later, I was filled with ecstatic confusion at how good it felt that he
smoked as I went down on him. My entire body filled with incensed heat,
making me work harder, be more fuckable, open my eyes wider, mouth
wider.
There was something intoxicating about being insulted that way, the total
lack of respect, the lack of acknowledgement that I was there with him. It was
the feeling that I could have been anyone, or no one, that I was something to
be emptied into or out, the feeling of existing only to receive what he had to
give. When he came his hands flew backwards to grab the chair, his head
flung back, eyes at the ceiling. Mine never left him.
I liked when it had been a day or two since he had last showered, this
small act of sharing. When he had been cycling he would be covered in a thin
film of soot from the traffic and the dirt and oil from his bicycle would rub
off on me. I inhaled the warm, damp smell of his hair and put my face against
his soft flannel shirt, to where I could smell the stale, sour, but somehow not-
bad after-work smell of him.
Once he had finished complaining about whatever had irritated him that
day or on his journey home, he would turn to me as though seeing me for the
first time. He would still be wearing the ratty fingerless gloves and would put
his hands on either side of my face, covering my ears, so I couldn’t hear
anything, and nor did I want to.
Once, he had asked me what sex smelled like, as I spent many minutes
nudging different parts of him with my nose. ‘It smells like a greenhouse,’ I
said, thinking of how it felt when we had finished and were lying beneath the
blanket and the smell travelled up and was close and dense in that way, and
gave the same feeling of infinite capacity.
 2

Every moment of my day was saturated by his absence, each second made
damp and collapsing and airless beneath it. I sat staring into space for hours
at a time, unable to move beneath the weight. I enjoyed my pain because it
made me less than ever. I was nothing but living nerves, a petri dish of
matter. I had no characteristics outside of it.
Ciaran had hated that I was indecisive. He had hated when he would ask
where I wanted to go to dinner and I would shrug and say I didn’t mind and
he should just choose. He hated when I wanted him to tell me what outfit
looked best. He wanted me to grow up, to know what things I wanted and be
able to say them out loud. He wanted me to not be the negative space which
would fit in around his positive presence, and because I knew this, knew he
might be able to truly love me if only I could be a real person, I failed even
harder. I panicked and beamed great big bland incurious smiles beneath the
frightening totality of his demanding gaze. I smiled and smiled until I cried,
but still could not produce a single decision or statement to please him, to be
convincingly myself.
And now he had left me and I was even less than that again – so much
less. Now there was no thought that did not have to do with him and I did not
want anything that wasn’t him. I squeezed my eyes shut and thought of the
things I would give for him to return. I could not identify a single thing in my
life I would not sacrifice in an instant for him, any place I would not go. I
could renounce every last person I knew, leave them to their lives which
seemed only grey negatives of the real life I would be able to live with
Ciaran. I would move with him anywhere on earth and need nothing.
I spent my time searching for everything I could find of him online. I
made a folder where I deposited the most important items. All photographs of
him made me cry, to come across one I hadn’t seen before was so sad and
beautiful that it made life seem almost good again. That there were angles of
him I’d never seen, ways he was in the world I hadn’t been around long
enough to witness. It was so lovely and painful that I found it impossible to
believe I wouldn’t see them myself some day.
(‘When did you know that you and Freja would break up?’ I had asked
him once in our few discussions about her.
‘I never did really,’ he had told me. ‘I still don’t think of her that way. We
had to leave each other, but you never know what’s going to happen later.
Life is long.’
Life is long. I refracted his words and bent them back to mean something
good for me. You never knew.)
The best things I found were pictures of us together which I had never
known existed. I was searching his friends’ pages for news of him and came
across a photoset from a launch in Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar. In one
photo I’m wearing a thin grey T-shirt with a scoop neck and am pretty and
flushed as I look up at him and laugh at something he says, his beautiful face
cracked wide with glee. His hand is on my shoulder and I thrilled to see it
there in public record, normally so strange about being physical in front of
others.
There’s something about a beautiful boy’s face – not handsome, or
attractive, or cute, but beautiful. Why are they so moving, when I see so
many beautiful girls every day? It isn’t fair, I know. A boy who is beautiful
seems to have pushed through the mud and cement of his gender. His
beautiful face seems carved out of the rawest materials.
There was something about such a face, in any case, which made me
believe intuitively that the boy was good. If not on the surface, then in some
other place you may have to dig down to find. I, who would have laughed at
such a sentiment about a beautiful girl, who knew how fleeting and unreliable
and meaningless our beauty was – I, still, was taken in by the beautiful faces
of boys.
I looked for him online every day and murmured with feeling when I saw
him in some particularly revealing pose; gnawing on his fingernails in the
corner of a reading, looking flushed and uncomfortable at an opening speech
during Dublin City Culture Night. I went back years and harvested what I
could. I was friends with enough friends of his to have a good sense of where
he would be most weeks, which openings he would go to and screenings he
might attend. I didn’t go to them, aware I would probably see her there.
 Once I walked into a pub to meet a friend after work and thought I saw
the top of his downy head peeking out of a snug in the corner. I swung
around and messaged my friend to go somewhere else and ran down an alley
that smelled of piss and had to press my temples with my knuckles until the
pain blacked everything else out and my heart drifted back to normal speed.
 3

The loss of someone you love can make you go mad in the best of
circumstances. I did not just love Ciaran but loved him darkly, wrongly.
Losing someone you love in those ways can turn you not only mad but
wicked too.
When he left me, I dreamed of the two of them sometimes, woke up
sweating.
I thought of going to his house and hammering on the window until they
let me in. I dreamed that March of killing her and woke oddly calm, thinking
repetitively: Well, stranger things have happened; well, stranger things have
happened.
I had slipped into his room as they slept and stood looking at them from
the doorway. Moonlight was on their faces and made them look beautiful and
already dead. I wrapped her beautiful dark hair around my fist and cracked
her skull against the wall – one, two – and because it was a dream I was
strong enough to move her entire body in a violent wave with one hand.
Her mouth was opening and dribbling and bubbling and there was a black
stain on the headboard behind, and her long thin arm was twitching and
grasping uselessly until it wasn’t.
Beside her, Ciaran watched calmly, his eyes raising to meet mine once she
had stopped breathing, and then turned back towards the wall in the same
position he always slept, dragging the blanket tight around him.
 4

At night sometimes I called Lisa, the only person I could say the truth to, the
truth that was so basic and so large.
‘I need him. I need him,’ I sobbed to her. ‘I can’t do it. I’m not able to do
it.’ Meaning to live, to go on living without him.
And I loved her for not bothering to contradict me or to tell me that I
didn’t need anybody, that I would get over it. She knew intuitively, knew
always, that she herself did not need anybody to live, but this difference
between the two of us didn’t make my experience any less real than her own.
She had seen how actual the need was with her own eyes.
When once I gasped, ‘I’m alone, I’m so alone, I’m scared,’ she didn’t
pretend that I wasn’t.
‘I know you are,’ she agreed. ‘You are.’
 5

I looked for other people who had felt like me, hoping for comfort or clues.
My search terms were things like ‘Obsessive love’, ‘Famous cases of
unrequited love’, ‘Incidents of obsession’. I read about a story I had heard
first on a podcast years before, about a man named Carl Tanzler, a medical
professional – though not a doctor – in Florida who had fallen in love with
his patient, a Cuban– American woman named Maria Elena Milagro de
Hoyos in the 1920s. She had suffered from tuberculosis, which had also
killed one of her sisters. Tanzler was instantly obsessed with her, offering her
his dubious medical expertise and radiology equipment, going to her family
home to administer additional treatments. He showered her with gifts and
jewellery and declared her the love of his life, the realisation of a series of
visions he had seen of a mysterious dark-haired angel.
She offered no reciprocation. Her family undoubtedly must have found
him an oppressive and disturbing presence, but allowed his advances so long
as they had some potential to help cure her. But it all came to nothing and she
died in 1931. Tanzler paid for the funeral and constructed a mausoleum.
In 1933 he visited the site of her burial at night and used a cart to remove
her decomposing corpse, putting it in his car and taking it home. There he
used pins and wires and ham-fisted cage-like constructions to keep her
disintegrating bones together, and wrapped them with gauze and muslins
heavily coated in fragrance to try to drown out the persistent stink of her
decay. He made a mask, blank and smooth, supposed to replicate her real
features but naturally terrible in its inadequacy. Neighbours saw him through
his windows dancing with the figure of a woman.
He was brought to trial but never sentenced, and Maria Elena’s body –
such as it was, still dolled up with his horrifying artifice and inadequate
mummification – was put on show in a funeral home where thousands of
curious members of the public would go to view the spectacle. No peace for
her, no dignity, even when finally released from her captor.
The first time I heard the story I felt angry. To demand ownership of a
woman who doesn’t love you, even when she is dead. To take that dead body
and make it yours through hideous force, hideous care, hideous attention. It
seemed to sum up all the ways in which men could take you without your
permission and turn you into something you had never been, which had
nothing to do with you.
Now, as I read it again, through my bewildered grief, I wondered if I was
any better than him. I wondered if I ever had been. Perhaps I had just never
loved someone madly until now. Perhaps I had always been as violent as a
man. Wouldn’t I do anything to reverse my loss, the absence of him?
Wouldn’t I sacrifice not just myself but himself to get it? Wouldn’t I make
him everything he wasn’t, make him soft and tender and domesticated and
weak, so long as it meant I could convince him to be mine again?
I read a case study of a woman, Patient M, who suffered from erotomania,
or De Clerambault syndrome, in upstate New York in the 1970s. The woman
was the child of first-generation Chinese immigrant parents, and a diligent
student at a Christian college. She had a strict but normal upbringing,
supportive parents, friends, a handful of supervised dates with boys who were
her cultural peers. In her sophomore year of college, she began to take
tutorials from a Caucasian man – Professor X – in his early forties. The man
was a professor of theology, and married with two children, all involved in
the local church and community of which Patient M was also a part.
Patient M began sending letters of a personal nature to Professor X, telling
him about her difficulties with her schooling, her family and other
relationships. At first he replied, trying to offer her comfort and spiritual
guidance, but quickly her correspondence increased up to ten letters a day,
and he began to be alarmed by their overly familiar tone and strange
references to affection and a shared bond he had no part in.
Though her family, her college authorities and eventually the police
would warn her to leave Professor X alone, Patient M continued and in fact
increased her campaign, perceiving their attempts to be proof of her theory
that the professor’s wife was determined to keep them apart. She began to
stalk him at his office and his home, until she was expelled permanently. Her
letters continued to show that she believed Professor X loved her and was
kept from her only by the constraints of their Christian culture.
 One July morning, professional acquaintances and friends of the professor
were shocked to receive wedding invitations to the marriage of him and
Patient M. The more distant of them presumed that he had been divorced and
was planning a shotgun wedding to his rebound lover, before he got hold of
them and explained the strange situation. It was at this point that Patient M
was taken into institutional custody, after which her fate is unknown. Several
weeks after her detainment as a mental patient, her parents received a phone
call from a local Chinese restaurant, wondering where the wedding party was,
for she had booked a sit-down meal for thirty to celebrate the union.
 6

When Ciaran left me, I felt a comfort in how unendurable the pain was. If it
couldn’t be endured, it would not be. It would end soon, one way or another.
I went on living, going to work mostly (two days had been lost to the
magnificent hangover which followed the night it had happened). Somehow
my body knew instinctively to preserve itself for its future work. I ate well
and minimally, and when I was inclined to cut myself I was overcome by
lethargic refusal and never followed through with it. I was usually too tired to
go out and drink, and too ashamed to do it alone. I had the feeling that by
some obscure set of living rules I could graft my way out of the pain.
I talked to Lisa most evenings when the pain and boredom were
overwhelming – it was good for there to be someone who didn’t know or
dislike him but who could nonetheless hear my loss. She posted me a care
package filled with benign films and TV shows, and most nights I would fall
asleep in the chair watching them, smoking a few cigarettes and nursing
green tea. That sort of watching is almost as good as being drunk if you do it
enough, the jokes mild, the story always much the same, the ending always
coming good.
Every so often I would let myself become upset, would sit in bed with my
back to the wall and head cradled in my knees. When the pain reached its
pitch I would bang my head behind me twice in quick succession, hard
enough to manufacture the feeling that my brain was being physically
dislodged and to scare and then calm me. But those evenings were rare, and
mostly I was too shocked to feel anything too intensely, for which I was
grateful.
I listened to sad songs in the shower and cried along. Sometimes I would
stop and see myself as from the outside and even laugh at such trite
performances of heartbreak. I took the train to the south coast of Dublin once
or twice a week to swim and walk around the brambly masses on the
outskirts of Shankill. When I tried one day to stand at the pier on Dun
Laoghaire and look out to the sea and reflect on my misfortune, I lasted only
a few minutes before becoming self-conscious and retreating.
The feelings were real, but they could find no natural expression. I felt in
Dun Laoghaire comically cinematic, swaying there in the grey mist. Was I
feeling something true from within myself, or was I living out a fantasy I had
assembled?
 7

When I was fifteen years old I stopped eating and I became popular. Popular
for me, anyway. The shockingly thin girls in my group at school – the ones
who had Uggs and hundred-euro make-up palettes – had suddenly accepted
me. It felt incredible. I would never be rich, but I could be with them, which
was almost as good. Once we had a ‘school dance’, an expression of our
desperate need to be American, and it was at the peak of my looking as much
like a character in The O.C. as I would ever look. I planned my outfit for
weeks, something that showed off my skeletal frame but also made me look
Quirky, meaning only that there was a tutu on my dress.
I arrived to the dance and it was terrible. The boys were as boring, as
childish, as ever. They did not resemble the boys in films, all played by
twenty-five-year-olds, I had wanted to impress. The picture I had made in my
head of me showing up and everyone turning to applaud my newfound
beauty had not been realised. I went home. I had made myself an image and it
had not worked.
My great-grandmother died in a nursing home. My father went to visit her
there several times a week for years during my childhood and adolescence
and occasionally I went with him. The place was as repulsive and frightening
as you can imagine for a child, smelling of disinfectant or worse, and I
always left feeling like I had gone there to be good, to do something good,
but had failed to achieve that.
Once I went outside ahead of my father and looked at the garden, and
there was a rose there in the spring time which was so powerfully pink, with
drops of dew clinging to it, that tears came to my eyes and all I could feel for
one brief moment was the pure potential of life, and then I remembered
where I was and who I had just seen, and knew again that the image I so
longed to perceive meant nothing, was nothing.
 8

When he left me, I didn’t contact him, partly because I knew there was no
point and partly because I was convinced that she would see any message I
sent. I could not bear to think of them laughing at me, or worse, shaking their
heads in sympathy. I knew that being quiet was the right approach – though
what I was approaching, I was not yet sure; the correction of things, a return
to earth.
I would not allow him to be gone from me for ever. That was why I was
unable to mourn authentically, how I could keep from abandoning myself.
In April one evening I sat in my flat, restless as I used to be in the old
days, spoiling for a big, messy night out. I couldn’t let myself go, was too
afraid and fragile still. I didn’t enjoy seeing my friends, around whom I was
forced to pretend that I was not in love with Ciaran and that I was angry at
him for what he’d done. As a concession I let myself get drunk alone, and
was opening the second bottle of red wine when the Bob Dylan song ‘Don’t
Think Twice’ started, a song he played often. A sadness that felt pleasurable
in its fullness came into me and settled on my chest. Without thinking too
much or anticipating a response, I grabbed my phone and messaged him:

Listening to Bob Dylan, thinking of you. I miss you.

His reply came a few hours later, by which time I had drunk everything in the
house and was lying on my bed blindly watching television, saying only:

I miss you too

I held the phone to my breast and cradled it there like an infant. I clung to the
heat of suggestion, I throbbed. A blissful patience swam through me, the
certainty that I could wait for ever.
 9

I would not have to. Three days later, days I filled with exquisite silence and
restraint, he called me. He asked me to meet him outside the Natural History
Museum the next day at two p.m.
I made excuses to go home sick from work and walked over to Kildare
Street. When I turned the corner he was standing there, nervously pulling at
the unravelled thread of his cardigan sleeve, by the same animal hedges
where we had begun our first date.
When he saw me his face opened up and was full of light and my heart
sang brightly in my chest. I had been right to wait, to be careful, to stay
inside.
The spell had been broken and whatever he had been on my doorstep he
was no longer.
I stood in front of him, my eyes soft with love, a smile of infinite
tolerance and adoration. There was so much inside me that I wanted to give
to him.
In that moment I was as happy as I have ever been, sure that the
abundance and purity of love I felt was obvious in every way, through my
waiting and my tininess, my forgiveness and willingness to be pathetic.
I was the woman. I had suffered. I was there.
‘I thought we could sort of start again,’ he said, and then kissed me.
I had won. And how did I win? Oh, in its way, it was easy – it was
nothing; I was nothing.
Two weeks later, we moved in together.
April 2013
 1

I filled our new apartment up with a slow, lazy satisfaction. We unpacked our
belongings and arranged them together just so. Our books lived alongside
each other, but did not mix, a mutual invasion too far even for me. He had
three ornaments he set on the window sill alongside mine, a small stone
figure of a mouse, a thimble and a pocket watch, all beautiful and delicate
and precise.
I drew my finger over them and asked, ‘Where did these come from?’
without thinking.
A long time passed while he went on unpacking a suitcase, before
eventually responding, ‘A friend gave them to me.’
I knew what this meant and spun briskly away from the objects as though
burned by them.
I never knew if he referred to Freja as ‘a friend’ in this way because he
thought I was too dense to understand who he meant, or whether it came from
a reluctance to say her name aloud, as if by doing so he would give her a way
into our home.
Since we had reconciled, we had spoken barely at all of our separation,
except in vague and soft ways about having missed one another. We behaved,
both of us, as though an inevitable war had come between us and fate had
intervened to bring us back together.
I had cleared up the most absolutely basic questions necessary on that first
afternoon outside the museum: Is it over? Is she gone? Do you love me? Yes,
yes, yes.
He opened his mouth to go on, and I kissed him again and would continue
to do so when any malign words threatened to escape him.
We bought a blue flannel duvet cover, a casserole dish, a rug. At the flea
market on a Sunday we acquired two amateur paintings of dogs which
beamed back at us from where they hung in the bathroom, the charming
incompetency suggesting some shared joke or history that we didn’t, in fact,
share. I shuddered with a thrill that could only be described as erotic while
choosing a vacuum cleaner and bin. I felt proud and tearful every time I
opened the wardrobe door, where his few pieces of clothing hung
monastically next to my own bulk of old party dresses and garish sequinned
sweatshirts.
 2

It was the first time I had ever lived with a man, or shared a bedroom. It
seems odd that there was no plan set out, no structure agreed to, about what
we would do for one another and what we wouldn’t. How did we expect to
know how often the other would wish to have sex? How were we to decide
who slept on the window side of the bed? And how did it come to be, for
instance, that I was the person who cooked for us, without it ever being
discussed? That something as vast and daily and necessary as eating became
a responsibility that I willingly took on for him, and he willingly gave up to
me?
It was the logical outcome. I was a good cook and he was not. I had to
worry about my weight and he did not. I could taste, and he could not – not
quite, not really. In any case, being dependent on another person’s cooking
always made me bristle. The idea of eating according to another person’s
whims, eating what doesn’t necessarily accord with the other choices of my
day, frightens me. He had no such reservations, food being a necessity which,
so long as it was not overtly unpleasant, meant very little.
a) To me a food could be understood:
b) through whether I enjoyed it, and through whether it made my body
fatter.
Ciaran was concerned with neither. His judgements were derived on a
purely moral basis. He was inclined towards singularity in all things. He
would have preferred to eat a large bowl of steamed green leaves for dinner
each day, if his big man’s body hadn’t demanded more.
For me, food was messier, more complex. It was stressful, yes, but could
be joyful too, something to binge on, and then shy away from; something to
wrestle with, and offer up, and bury.
When, as a pious starving teenager, I learned to cook, it was an almost
holy process. Until then I could only deny or destroy what was given to me
by others – the balled-up sandwiches at the bottom of schoolbags, missed
breakfasts, puked-up spaghetti, chicken thighs mummified in toilet paper and
hidden in my bedroom drawers until the stench escaped.
I learned to cook and everything changed. I was no longer merely a
petulant schoolgirl who wouldn’t open wide and take it like a good girl. I
chose what I cooked and because I chose it and knew it intimately, I was able
to eat it. I chopped peppers and carrots and green beans julienne and fried
them in a little olive oil, I steamed sugar snap peas until their leathery pods
split at the sides and ate them in front of the TV like popcorn.
When we moved in together, it had been a long time since I had pored
over food in that way for myself. Something had broken in me when, as an
adult, I had allowed myself to eat normally again and to gain weight. The
betrayal of my thin self was too painful to confront fully, and so I refused to
look food directly in the eye at all. To survive, I had to stop cherishing the
individual slices of a polished pink apple divided up on a plate, had to stop
finding them beautiful, or else I would never have stopped staring. I had to
stop believing that the act of eating food could do anything at all to my body,
because if I didn’t then I would never have been able to eat again.
I began to cook for Ciaran, and a measure of the sanctity returned, and
because it was for someone else and not myself, I allowed it.
Living with him forced me to treat myself like a person in a way I was not
able to alone.
At work, now doing entry-level admin in a dental hospital, I would spend
lunches at my desk reading recipes, noting them down, eventually settling on
one.
When I finished for the day, I would walk home and call into the good
grocery place, the same place we bought apples to walk around with, and
choose the ingredients. I trailed around the nicely lit aisles, which were
overcrowded in a homely and pleasing way, brushing my hands against the
overpriced olive oil, the dried seaweed, the rare kinds of honey.
I glided by the fish counter, mouthing the names of creatures I didn’t
know. The butcher sold me venison and when he handed over the package,
bound nostalgically with brown string, the price made me swallow. I selected
each part of the meal with tenderness and pride, to think of him eating it.
I had never shopped there before, would never have thought to. I had lived
previously on what was discounted in Lidl combined with whatever tins I had
in the cupboard, but my life was to be new now, and I shopped for it beneath
the high ceilings amidst the other things I coveted.
It took a very long time for me to resent this part of our life. It was almost
the last thing to go.
Along with sex, cooking was what I did to make it up to him – whatever
‘it’ happened to be that day.
He didn’t demand or expect these reparations. I knew instinctively to use
them. The ritual of the meal was offered up, something more intricate than
usual on days I had offended him.
And afterwards, if I was able to have sex with him too, things were OK.
When we had sex he forgave me, even when he didn’t want to.
 3

I remember the last meal I ever made for him, before everything changed for
good, because it looked so pretty that I took a picture – crawfish and crab,
arranged in neat pink scoops on top of lettuce leaves, lime juice and chilli, a
spoonful of avocado, a sprinkling of black sesame seeds, and as I took the
photograph, my phone lit up with a call from another man.
 4

There was a time – which I realise now was such a brief time, almost nothing
– when it felt to me we had triumphed over all the squalor that preceded our
living together.
Before the real fighting began, and the worst he would say to me was,
‘Why do you leave the sponge in the basin after you use it? Do you want it to
get mouldy?’ – mock-scolding me, wagging his finger, tossing the dripping
thing at me across the room.
And I would squeal and shout ‘YES!’ and throw it back, and run shrieking
down the hall, laughing in the bedroom as I heard him advance, stomping like
a cartoon villain, and when he eventually threw open the door and rounded
on me, he picked me up as easily as a pillow and threw me down on the bed
and tickled me and we lay there squirming together until there was no breath
left in us and we touched our noses together and fell asleep like that.
We napped together all the time, collapsing frequently among piles of
sweaters in our freezing bed. The apartment was old, the ceilings high, and
the heating whispered thinly out of the radiators to no effect. Droplets of
water ran down the walls, and a dark stain crept threateningly across the
bathroom ceiling.
Once we had eaten and Ciaran had put away any remaining work he had
taken home, we would often go straight to bed. There we dressed in
ridiculous sundry layers of thermals and pyjamas and old sweatpants,
laughing at ourselves, and would hide beneath the covers watching crime
procedurals and horror films.
I lived for this part of the day, both of us shivering still and kicking our
limbs around to warm up faster, holding on to each other so tightly. That
moment of dipping out of the freezing air and leaving the day behind, getting
into our soft little palace, only us left in the whole world.
I kissed his fluttering eyelids where the veins showed and warmed the tip
of his nose with my lips, and then he bent forward a little until even our
foreheads met and felt sacred in their union.
I think, even now, if it was possible for me to have lived just like that, no
other life coming in at the edges, no friends, no family, no work – if I had
been successful in my attempt to boil my whole universe down just to us,
burning bodies welded together in a cold bed – I could be happy there, still.
 5

Then it was May and weak golden light filled our new home on weekend
mornings. We woke up late, and yawned around together drinking coffee and
chatting until lunchtime, when we would get newspapers and pastries and sit
entangled on the couch, mindlessly petting one another as we read.
I saw my friends a little, for a glass of wine after work or occasionally for
a film on Sundays, but none of them had been to our flat. I loved them in an
abstract way, but was happy for our relationships to be remotely maintained
with the odd message, a brief appearance at birthday parties. I was
embarrassed in front of them, and they shy with me. I knew what they
thought of Ciaran, could sympathise with their reasons. I didn’t feel like
suffering the further humiliation of trying to convince them he wasn’t what
they thought.
The truth was I didn’t care what they thought of him, and Ciaran’s own
lack of caring strengthened my resolve.
‘I saw your little friend Christina,’ he’d say, after coming in from work,
chuckling. ‘I guess she doesn’t like me, huh?’
And I would laugh along and roll my eyes, say something vague and
conciliatory: ‘Oh, you know what she’s like,’ and would enjoy the safe
feeling of us both being against the same enemy.
It was the same feeling I had when he ranted about a rude colleague or
someone cutting him off in traffic. At first I was inclined to soothe, to
mitigate, because of how pointless it was to rail against them. Why get so
incensed by these petty infringements when they were as inevitable as
weather? But then I saw that siding with him was the safer thing to do. If I
agreed with his outrage, and complained about the same things he did, we
were by default teammates. He would begin to see me as not of the world that
so angered him, but of his own world, the small one that we could build in
our home together.
 I was competent and efficient in my workplace, but only because I
required a decent job to maintain the sort of life I wanted with Ciaran, not
because I suffered from any ambition. I got through my days with a minimum
of exertion, and was constantly shocked by how little actual work was
accomplished in offices.
It was possible for me to spend only an hour or two a day doing my
assigned work, and still finish the week with my assignments under control.
After I had been there a while I realised the superhuman time-wasting skills I
thought unique to me were in fact universal, and everyone was reading
recipes or emailing friends or going for hour-long coffee breaks and calling
them meetings.
When I unlocked our door each evening, my real life began, coming into
technicolour focus. It rendered everything outside dull and irrelevant just like
I knew it would, like I had counted on it doing.
Making a good meal at the end of a bad day can redeem the whole thing.
No matter what else has taken place, if you have the time to do this one thing
for yourself, it all falls away. It’s not unlike the moment you sit down with a
bottle of something strong if you’re a drunk. You know there is a window
approaching where the reality you inhabit will stop mattering, stop hurting.
My whole relationship with Ciaran was like that – a refuge, a singularity
which obliterated other concerns. It was the best meal, the finest bottle of
wine. As long as I could keep things going, as long as we could get along, the
rest fell away.
 6

I wonder now at my desperation to perform domestic acts for him. I wanted

more than anything to present him with the products of my labour, for him to
see how invested I was in maintaining our life – and how joyfully invested. I
was even happy when I baked him a cake or cooked a meal, which he would
then ignore or eat without thanks. I was happy when I washed a jacket of his
which stank, unbeknownst to him, of cigarettes and weed. I was happy – I
smiled, I sang! – when I scrubbed the toilet on my knees. The bleach smelled
strong and delicious and burned the bloody creases I had bitten into my
fingers and thumbs.
I wrote out meal plans and stuck them to the fridge with hearts and smiley
faces and stars doodled around each neat entry, stretching weeks into the
future – comforting to know already that we would eat a lamb kofte salad a
month in advance, sweet to determine our faraway actions so precisely.
I wanted, I suppose, for him to need me, without knowing that it was me
that he needed at all. I wanted him to live in a world where each need he
might have had been preemptively filled. No button left unsewn, no white
collar still ringed with browning sweat when he needed it clean. That’s why I
didn’t need thanks. I didn’t curse the absence of praise for my efforts. There
was to be a whole functioning ecosystem surrounding him and he would have
no cause to worry, or try, no cause to question anything at all.
It’s easy to disappear beneath the incessant cycle of chores necessary to
keep a pleasant and clean home. Women who once were individuals despair
of being made into nothing more than wife, housekeeper, mother – a person
whose identity is secondary to their ability to make things easier for everyone
else. But I was not a mother. Doing everything for one other person, one man
– in the heated flush of those first months we lived together, it felt sexy and
intimate and even profound.
And after all, what individual had I been before? What identity was there
to erase with my newfound house-pride? I had never found one resilient
enough to live on in my memory once it had gone. There had never been one
real enough to miss. I disappeared with perfect peace.
Was there even some feeling of mine that the whole dynamic was coated
in a dusting of irony? Did that make it easier to love? The ludicrous idea of
myself as a person who fetched slippers and roasted pork and made cold
drinks for the big tall man in his overcoat smelling of outside evening, of real
life that I was not a part of, it was so absurdly at odds with the way I had
lived before.
If I thought that times had changed so much, that we were a modern
couple after all, if I thought that my subservience could be ironised and
eroticised out of reality – oh, I feel sorry for myself.
But I wanted it then – I remember the wanting, the greed for it, leaving
work early so I would have time to prepare great midweek multi-course
feasts, making his life into a production, a lively play of domesticity too loud
to hear anything over. And when I was tired from it all and wanted to cry
because I had got something wrong, a soufflé had collapsed, I had broken a
bowl – or when he offered to help me – those were the few times I would
become really angry with him. No, I would tell him, you just stay there and
I’ll take care of it. Meaning: you just stay there. I’ll take care of you.
If he got something out of me, I was taking something from him, too. I
was taking away his ability to live without me easily. I subbed his rent, I
cooked his food, I cleaned his clothes, so that one day soon there would come
a time when he could no longer remember how he had ever done without me,
and could not imagine doing so ever again.
 7

In June, when we had lived together for almost three months and the weather
was warm, I noticed that I had begun to look at women as he would, as
though I was inhabiting him. When we walked around Dublin together on
weekends and the weak sun caused us to wear less, I began to see them
through his eyes.
I had never been attracted to women in anything more than a passing way,
but now I registered some of them in the same way I registered a handsome
man. First it was only when I was with him – we would pass a pretty girl, I
would notice her first, and my eyes would dart to his to see him clock her.
Every time he did, I experienced it as a betrayal, but I also gloated inwardly
that I had learned who would attract his attention in this way. What use I
thought this knowledge might be I can’t imagine now.
Soon it happened when I was alone, too. On my walk to work in the
morning, down through Portobello and crossing over the canal where I
passed other office girls and wealthy joggers, my eyes instinctively scanned
for the ones he (now he-and-I) would like. There was no strict type in terms
of ethnicity or colouring, but if I was to identify common threads I would say
– delicate small features, maybe skewed towards the fashionably plain, large
dreamy eyes, a suggestion of frailty and sensuality. Long hair, prominent
collarbones.
I noted and stored them, regarding them with a twinge of prurient lust and
the same helplessness I felt towards everyone he found attractive who was
not me. There was nobody who was safe from this panic of mine. He referred
once to his losing his virginity, fifteen years prior, to a beautiful girl named
Jessica. For weeks after, I boiled. Jessica. Jessica. I wondered if I could find
her through this forename alone, to stare at her, compare, rank.
When I gathered these women I saw on the street, filing them away
internally, I was trying to protect myself as best I could. I was trying to build
a registry of every threat in our vicinity, the better to prepare myself against
them. But my mind had bled into his so that I wanted these women as he
would have wanted them. So that the desire I regarded them with was
lethargic and self-assured, as his would have been, and my mind wandered
towards them in the invasive and probing manner I associate with the
masculine thrusting of penetrative sex.
My gaze fell over them generally for a time, and then returned to its
original target.
 8

It was a Saturday in July when a far-right terrorist shot three people in

Malmö. The gunman was dressed as a Catholic priest and had walked on to
the grounds of Sankt Petri Church where office workers sat to eat their
lunches on sunny days among the tourists and opened fire.
One of the three fatalities was a seven-year-old Japanese boy holidaying
with his parents, the other two local women who worked in the vicinity.
Ciaran and I had come back from getting the papers and coffee when he
saw the news online. The colour drained from his face and he stood up,
muttering something inaudible at me, fumbling with his phone. He hurried
out of the apartment into the hallway, where I heard him pace and then the
low sound of his voice. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I stayed
exactly still, staring into my coffee and down at my bare legs with the breath
caught in my chest. I forced my eyes to stay open, unblinking and dry, until
tears gathered in them. Freja lived in Malmö now, I knew.
It was insane for sexual jealousy to have entered my head even
momentarily at such a time, let alone paralyse my entire body, but I was in
love and so I was insane, and I can only feel glad I am at least no longer
insane in that particular way, no matter what else I have lost alongside it.
He came back into the room, cheeks flushed slightly but otherwise
normal, so that I knew no harm had come to her. He sat down without
looking at me and opened the paper with a brisk shake like a father in a film
at the breakfast table. I tore open the bag of pastries and put them on a plate,
knowing already I would not be eating that day. I felt within me something I
had not in many years, which was the desire to punish someone by not eating.
This was a regular inclination when I was young, an ineffectual but
unignorable urge in the direction of someone who had wronged me. Most
often it was towards boys who did not love me back or who did not love me
in the right way, but it could also be towards parents, teachers, anyone, really,
who failed to validate me in the way I required. It was never intended as a
rational response; I knew, of course, that they would never know that I was
not eating, and even if they did, they would not know it was they who had
caused it.
That the pain was private made it better – I made them torture me, without
their consent.
I took off the lids of our coffees and poured milk into them both
unthinkingly – Ciaran took it black. ‘Hey,’ he murmured in protest, and,
realising, I gripped the cardboard cup too tightly and spilled the scalding
liquid across the table where it drizzled on to his lap and shoes. Horror filled
my body and my throat swelled with it. He screamed – ‘Oh what the fuck?’ –
and leapt backwards off his chair, brushing his trousers down.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I said over and over, and, ‘Here,’ as I grabbed a tea
towel and tried to help. He kicked his leg to the side – not with violent intent,
not to hurt me, but to get me away from him efficiently, as you might a dog.
‘Just fuck off, can you?’ he said and walked to the bathroom and locked
the door.
I cleaned the spilt coffee off the floor on my knees and wrung out the rag
in the sink. I boiled a kettle to fill a bucket so I could mop too. As it whistled
I heard him let himself out of the apartment.
I walked over to the window and looked down at the street and saw him
emerge, the sunlight glaring on his blond hair giving the impression briefly
that it had caught fire, and he stalked towards the canal at a pace, no
hesitation, as he always walked. I watched until I couldn’t see him any more,
and then I went into our bedroom, opened my computer and looked for Freja.
 9

Freja has long fingers which arch through her dark shaggy bob in one picture.
She looks right at the camera, or maybe the photographer, with a haunted
intensity. She is leaning back against a chair splaying her legs like a man
would, a pose which could only look beautiful on the elegant and thin. A
man’s white vest falls over her sharp bones and small perfect breasts.
Click.
In the next she is sitting in sand at sunset, drawing her hands through it to
make shapes, squinting up at the photographer and shading her eyes. She
wears a red paisley dress, which falls off one shoulder, and a pair of cowboy
boots. She is smiling and her teeth are very white.
Click.
In another she dances in the corner of a bar, lit by the glow of a jukebox
and a cigarette machine. Her head is thrown back, eyes closed, and she is
wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, hard classic clothes for a cowboy,
which perfectly fit her hard girl’s body. A cigarette dangles from her mouth –
she looks like Patti Smith or a particularly pretty Manson girl.
Click, click, click.
 10

I looked up Freja’s accounts every day – in the morning on my way to the

office, or sitting in the park with a coffee on my lunch break. I checked her
Facebook and her Instagram and if I had time would trawl through her
Google results and follow where they led me, hunt for clues.
I searched her friends, the ones who tagged her in pictures, to see if they
had posted any others of her (they had), and to see what kinds of bars and
restaurants they went to together.
The best was when Ciaran would go out on a Friday evening and I had the
house to myself. He only ever went out alone on a Friday, when friends of his
from galleries would meet after work to drink and eat pizza and gossip about
shows and each other.
When we first lived together I would sometimes go with him but they
were unbearably male evenings. I was often the only woman and got used to
being ignored and spoken over. Occasionally, one of them would remember
to be polite and turn to me with practised determination and say, ‘And what
do you think?’ as though this was what conversation was. Once someone
inclined towards me after I hadn’t said anything for an hour as they chatted
about a Hal Foster essay and asked if I’d read him.
‘No, who’s that?’
‘A theorist,’ he said kindly.
‘I don’t really like theory, I just do things instead,’ I said, trying to make
them laugh, which some of them did, slowly.
The part of me that enjoyed being an accessory to him felt gratified by the
calm and stillness of sitting beside him in silence, no demands made of me
except to be attractive and pleasant and friendly, but soon the boredom
became too much and I stayed home instead.
Despite the vague dread of his being unfaithful to me, I came to look
forward to these Friday nights. It was the only part of the week I was alone.
Before, the idea of even an hour or two alone disturbed me, but now I was
with Ciaran at nearly all times outside of work, and my Friday nights alone
gave me space to look at Freja and to drink.
I got in at five or six, with a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes,
opened my computer and put something mindless on to watch, something
soapy with a lot of intrigue and sexual shenanigans, or reality TV starring a
hoard of blonde teens looking at their phones.
I put on my pyjamas, which were still Ciaran’s old threadbare long johns
and a T-shirt, and curled up in the corner of the couch. I poured a glass and lit
my first cigarette and inhaled it and exhaled it and felt in that moment
completely at peace. Then I would start looking at Freja on my phone.
A lot of the time it was going back over old ground. She didn’t update
very often and I had worked my way back through the four years of existing
material. But I could never exhaust this bloody desire to examine her, to work
my way inside her, to perceive her as he perceived her. I swiped through old
albums which had pictures of Ciaran and her together.
My mind bent trying to look at these as an outsider would. I looked at
them and then, as quickly as I could, clicked on to a picture of him and me
together, trying to compare them to one another. Were we as well matched as
they had been? Did we look as good? Did he appear to be in love with her, in
a way he did not with me?
Because I knew that Freja looked at me too, I also looked at myself. I
reviewed photos going back years and years. I tried to see myself as she saw
me. I deleted the unflattering ones as I went, hot with the knowledge she had
probably seen them already. As I looked at myself I pushed myself into her
mind, the same way I pushed myself into Ciaran’s when we passed girls on
the street I thought he wanted to fuck.
By eight or nine p.m. I would be drunk, the TV show mumbling on in the
background, chain-smoking, and knowing Ciaran would not be home for four
hours or more I would go out to get another bottle of wine. Bleary eyed, I
pulled on clothes and on my way down the street would toss the empty bottle
away. He could find one the next day – he would expect this, and tolerated
me being a drunk for one night a week. But two bottles would alarm and
confuse him, would lead to a conversation, so I smashed it merrily into a
skip, buzzed and lit with the comforting foreknowledge of the second one on
its way.
2019, Athens

Before I had ever kissed a boy, I once walked for miles and miles with my
most treasured childhood friend, Bea, reading her love poetry, from a book I
had saved up a lot of pocket money to buy. She was cleanly beautiful like
Freja. She was naturally tanned and naturally skeletal, like Freja. She had
wide blue eyes set far apart, she had long limbs, she was so soft and good.
Even then, when we were thirteen, she was much kinder than me. There were
reasons for that – a person so beautiful has no reason to be cruel. How
jealously I regarded her beauty, her cleanliness and smell of fresh clothes and
the way that boys loved her and the way she was appropriately removed from
them. I was always down in the dirt.
I envy women who are removed. I never really had that luxury.
 11

I noticed after some months had passed that I now ignored the pointless spite
he padded out stories with, instead of encouraging it as I had once, to prove I
was on his side. The stories made me feel bored and hopeless.
Still, I responded to him with manic cheer. Sometimes I really was happy
and untroubled and sometimes I pretended to be, and it grew harder and
harder to tell the difference. It was as though he had vacuumed up all the
available negativity in the apartment and I was afraid to let any seep out of
me, lest it disrupt the balance.
After dinner we sat on the sticky leather couch and I listened to him
noodle on his guitar, or watched him write in his notebooks out of the corner
of my eye, anxiously, as I pretended to read, wondering if they were poems
about her.
When he looked at his phone my heart went faster, I felt the blood moving
through my terrible weak body, was completely unable to think of anything
else. My eyes stayed fixed at a blank spot on the top of my page and then
slowly leaked over into his space and I tried to peer sideways so hard my
temples throbbed, to see if it was her he was speaking to.
I raised my hands to my mouth and began to gnaw on my fingers and
thumbs, tearing thin strips of flesh systemically, grating them between my
grinding teeth, swallowing.
Then we went to bed, where I wished we could be always, where he felt
finally and truly mine, the friendliness of a body’s smell and softness
overpowering all the sour rest of him.
I greedily anticipated the luxury of whole undefined weekend afternoons
of fucking and talking sprawling into evening, the shutting of the front door
on Friday evening keeping trouble out and letting us become ourselves in
private.
In my head, we woke late and lazily explored the limits of the bed and
whispered and took care of each other until lunchtime. We read on the couch
with our limbs intertwined and ordered in for dinner and drank wine and were
back in bed by dusk.
There had been something like that once, something that made it feel
possible.
There had been weekends when the containment of our apartment meant
what it was supposed to mean – that we were good together when left alone.
There had been those times to prove to me that it wasn’t my fault or his
that he made me feel so degraded and sad, but the fault of the whole rest of
the world.
If there wasn’t a time like that (and I think just one would have done),
how could I have believed in it so much, for so long, week after week, for
months?
 12

My father met Ciaran only once, when visiting Dublin for a funeral. He was
always going to funerals, despite being significantly shy of sixty. He went to
funerals for every person in his parents’ peer group as well as his own, to
those of old colleagues he hadn’t spoken to in decades.
He went not out of the grim compulsion you sometimes see in people with
not enough going on in their own lives, and not with any reluctant sense of
duty. He went instead with a willing generosity of observance, a genuine
desire to bear witness. He has always been good at seeing people, my father,
which I think is why he has always been so well liked. He makes people feel
that their lives are unique and worthy of interest, which, although true, is
something rarely felt by ordinary people.
He had a few pints after the funeral – this one for a schoolmate he had
been close with as a boy – and then met us in Neary’s off Grafton Street. He
was slightly drunk, which I could tell only from a fond mistiness in his eyes.
He was warm and effusive with Ciaran, who was, I was relieved to notice,
passably convivial. He was making an effort, and any of his natural coldness
could be seen as mere deference to my father and me catching up.
We were mainly happy that day, Ciaran and I, and held hands and leaned
close to one another when my father went to the bar to get us drinks. I noticed
that his clear handsome face was in a state of constant and unusual
gregariousness while we all chatted. Dad asked him about his work and he
made self-deprecating jokes about his silly reviews while also subtly making
it clear that he held some importance.
‘My editor asked me recently to make my review of a show a little more
glowing – old friends, you know? – but once you start down that path who
knows where it ends, right, Thomas?’ And my dad agreed, chuckling, as
though he did know.
I was so happy that my father could see him this way. Towards the end of
the evening I absent-mindedly chewed on a thumb hangnail and Ciaran took
my wrist and withdrew it from my face without breaking his conversation
with Dad. It was a thing I wouldn’t have noticed or would have been even
slightly pleased with, a cosy action, if we were not in company, but I met my
father’s eyes as he did it and dropped my hands to my lap, and then sat on
them.
Afterwards, as he went to get a bus back to Waterford, my father hugged
me and said he was delighted to have met Ciaran.
‘And… are you always like that, so nice to each other?’ he asked, and I
was elated that this was the impression we had given off, that we were
capable of such a thing, but then saw that there was something else in his
expression, the gentle urgency of his face when I was a teenager and he
wanted me to explain myself without wanting to force me to.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Always.’ And he gave me a warm dry kiss, landing
awkwardly between my eye and my mouth, and I turned away to go back
inside to Ciaran.
October 2013
 1

We went to a film together in the old Screen cinema on Hawkins Street one
Saturday night. I had looked forward all week to having a date with him, to
dressing up and drinking afterwards. As we walked there Ciaran was relaxed
and talkative and shrugged his overcoat off one arm and draped it around me,
containing us both inside, so that we were clinging tightly to one another as if
in a three-legged race. We irritated others on the pavement and smirked about
it.
The film was a rowdy drug thriller with Brad Pitt, and behind us a group
of teenage boys shrieked sporadically and exploded with laughter when
shushed. I felt the good mood evaporate from Ciaran and his body tense,
sinewy and bristling. I searched out his hand to stroke reassuringly and he let
it lie warm, dry, inert beneath my probing.
Each time the boys made a new noise my stomach lurched and I couldn’t
stop myself from sneaking looks at Ciaran until he whispered sharply, ‘Stop
looking at me,’ and withdrew his arm from my lap. I stared ahead, panicked,
wondering if I should suggest that we leave, but then the noise would lull and
I’d think perhaps things were OK and could be salvaged, before they’d start
up again hooting at an actress’s breasts or a pile of cocaine.
‘Should we move?’ I whispered to him, which he ignored.
For an hour I sat still, dreadfully aware of each second passing, waiting
for the next shout. When eventually the boys began to climb over their seats
and rows and throw food at one another, Ciaran twisted around and said,
‘Can you shut the fuck up please?’ I squeezed my eyes shut as they jeered at
him, repeating what he had said, exaggerating his accent and laughing
uncontrollably. As ever, to be laughed at was the most galling experience for
Ciaran, intolerable, and he stood up and left, exiting the opposite direction
from me so that he did not have to involve me, take my hand to bring me
with him or climb over me. I followed him, flinching from the triumphant
crowing of the boys.
Outside he was lighting a cigarette.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘What are you sorry for?’
I didn’t know.
‘Let’s just go get a drink?’ I asked, pushing my arm beneath his coat and
around his waist.
‘Fuck that, it’s Saturday night – everywhere’s going to be full of idiots by
now.’
I didn’t say that it was the same Saturday night it had been before the
film, a Saturday night in which he had been happy to go for a drink, had
discussed with me which bar it might be earlier that afternoon.
‘We could get some food and wine or whatever and bring it home, then?
Watch something there or play some records?’ I was getting desperate now
and could hear it in my voice.
‘What are you talking about? We had dinner before we left, why do you
want to eat again?’
I didn’t want to eat, or even very badly to drink, but only for there to be
some thing that we were doing together that might bring us back to his good
mood, an activity to give the night some shape and which might allow it to
end with us having sex, resetting everything and making it bearable. We
walked home in silence. I took his arm, which he allowed.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked after a few minutes.
‘I’m fine,’ he said and continued to look away from me. ‘OK! Just
checking,’ I said.
Back at home he got changed into his soft clothes and took out a book and
began rolling a joint.
‘Will I make some tea?’ I asked.
‘Whatever you want,’ he said, amiable enough now he was back inside.
‘Do you want some, though?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘I’ll only make it if you’re having some.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked again.
‘I’m fucking fine! Jesus!’
I turned away and made the tea.
 ‘Did I do something?’ I asked a few minutes later, after he had begun to
read.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You seem upset with me.’
‘I’m not upset with you.’ He kept his eyes on the book. ‘I’m not anything
with you.’
‘Why aren’t you talking to me?’
‘Why do I have to be talking to you? I don’t have to be talking to you to
not be upset with you. Do I have to talk to you all fucking day and night? We
live together, I’m here all the time, I can’t talk for all of it just to keep you
amused. Christ, it’s like living with a toddler sometimes.’
I nodded, knowing that it was. I started to cry.
‘I’m sorry, Ciaran. I’m really sorry.’
‘What are you crying about? This is insane, you know that, right? You’re
making yourself cry right now, about absolutely nothing. You’re crying about
the absence of me being upset with you.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know. Just – please, can you please, please—’
And because I didn’t know what the end of the sentence was, what I was
pleading for, it just kept going, I kept asking, and asking, and asking.
 2

My mother called to check when I’d be coming back for my birthday in

November. Every year I went back home and had dinner with both my
parents, a ritual they’d maintained since splitting up and during which they
would harmlessly snipe at one another in a way I had grown to enjoy and be
comforted by. It was nice to remember that they had existed together once
and weren’t always these now permanent versions of themselves, settled in
middle age.
It was nice, too, to indulge the part of me which thought longingly of the
three of us being united – this wasn’t a scenario I wanted in any material
sense, but one I thought of in the same abstracted terms as I thought of God
and heaven, unreal but sacred. I didn’t want my mother to leave Stíofán and
beg my father to take her back and for them to be living in the same house; I
just wanted a wishy-washy platonic ideal of us as a family. It was something
I thought of when I thought about death, that if I had to die, I would want to
sit with the two of them one more time together, to eat as our original, own
family, that if I could do so one last time I would be able to feel peaceful and
whole.
I told my mother I wasn’t sure when I could come. I had gotten it into my
head that Ciaran and I should go away on a trip, something we had never
done before.
‘What do you think about going away somewhere?’ I asked in bed one
night. I’d been looking at him fondly as he flipped through a magazine,
shirtless, glasses on, hair damp, delicious.
‘No money,’ he said cheerfully. Sometimes it seemed to me that he took
pleasure in the fact he earned so little, that his ability to live without comforts
and luxuries so exceeded everyone else’s.
‘Well, we don’t have to go abroad,’ I said, winding a curl at the base of
his neck around my finger and releasing it gently, again and again. The
hollow gap in his sternum – I bent down and pressed my nose into it. ‘We
could just go for a weekend somewhere in Ireland.’
He stopped reading and smiled at my fidgeting around his body.
‘You know, I actually do think I should see more of Ireland. It’s dumb to
move to a different country and stay in the same place all the time, right? I’ve
only been here and to my father’s.’
‘Right!’ I said, excited now and feeling the flush of intoxicating adulthood
that a weekend away implied.
Maybe there would be a flask on the train, maybe I would wear something
special – could it be that I was the sort of person who wore a hat?
In work the next day I looked at discount websites and hotel offers and
finally booked a voucher for two nights at a bed and breakfast in Galway for
the weekend of my birthday. I packed swimming things – I was proud of the
fact that I could go in the ocean all year round – and a new black dress with a
deep neckline and pearl buttons at the waist. On the train there my heart hurt
at the sight of Ciaran’s happiness.
‘I love trains,’ he kept murmuring, gripping the window excitedly as he
watched the scenery, and sliding his other hand over to me, squeezing my
knee. I stared at him and when he looked back he crossed his eyes and
grinned wider, mocking the fact of his own merriment. We did a crossword
together and drank coffee and ate chocolate bars and he said, ‘Why does
coffee taste so good with sweet things?’
In Galway it was freezing and clear skied and gorgeous. I said we should
go to the beach while it was still bright out and as we walked to Salthill along
the promenade I saw that he was happier still. I remembered that he really
hadn’t seen much of what makes Ireland itself. He spent all his time being
irritated by the mundane city things of Dublin, things that were generically
urban and had not much to do with specific location.
‘We should go places more often,’ he said.
At the end of the prom on the Blackrock diving board I took off my
backpack and coat and he laughed.
‘You’re not seriously going in there, are you?’
I raised my eyebrows and kept undressing to the bikini I had under my
clothes and he joked around trying to bundle me into his jacket. It really was
too cold and if I had been alone I would have left it, but his disbelief was
inspiring a hysterical bravado and there was no turning back. An elderly
couple strolling were looking as well and I laughed with the attention and the
shock of the wind on my bare body, and then I ran and jumped.
When I surfaced I gasped for air that didn’t seem to come and waded until
my heart slowed back down a little, then thrashed perfunctorily for a few
minutes. I looked up and he was smiling down at me and shouted, ‘Brava!
Brava!’
When I climbed out he was waiting to surround me with a towel and my
coat and he licked the salty water from my ears and said, ‘You’re beautiful.’
Afterwards we got a taxi to the hotel, which was further from town than I
had thought it would be, but perfectly nice once we arrived. We showered
and wore the fluffy robes for the novelty for a few minutes, before we started
to kiss and shrugged them away to grab on to each other. He stopped me
when I trailed my hand downwards and said, ‘No. I want to save it for later. I
want you to want it all night.’
And my head was light. I bit my lip and breathed in sharply.
He had packed nice clothes and I felt touched watching him dress, a
beautiful soft pale blue shirt and a white tie, and he looked so handsome, so
sharp and manly but heartbreakingly delicate that I wanted to photograph
him, or paint him, make him model for me all night instead of going outside.
He looked like an illustration of superiority, like propaganda for the idea of a
man.
I had chosen to take him to a restaurant run by a friend of Lisa’s, a woman
whose whimsical charm was so eyewateringly acute I could barely speak to
her. She was the kind of person who ran dinner events full of the best looking
people you’d ever seen in your life, in bogs and old vacant military barracks,
using only what she had foraged in a 50-foot radius to cook with. I told him
about her on the walk and he said, ‘Oh wait, I’ve heard of her; she does
collaborations with an artist we interviewed in the magazine last month.’
I felt clever and proud to have done something related to his interests
without even meaning to. At dinner he admired the sparse room with its
handful of tables. It was like restaurants in Copenhagen, he said, and happily
if thoughtlessly ate everything on the tasting menu. If Ciaran couldn’t taste
food with as much enthusiasm as I could, I had reasoned when choosing the
place, he could at least enjoy the aesthetics of her plates, artful piles of
tweaked sprigs and things you would not expect could be pickled, but it
turned out could, and minuscule sea life I had never heard of before.
 On the street after, tipsy from some strong seaweed-flavoured cocktails, I
asked, ‘What now?’
‘Let’s go for a drink. I want to go to one of the real old-man pubs with the
nooks in them,’ he said.
I took him up to Tigh Chóilí and he stood behind me as we waited to be
served, one arm around my waist and one hand brushing my thighs under my
dress so that I was flushing giddily, and that’s when I saw him. A man from
Waterford I had dated a little bit in my late teens and then slept with on and
off during the odd Christmas holiday or summer festival was serving behind
the bar. Michael, a little older than me, a sweet person who played drums and
didn’t have a huge amount going on but liked to drink and was friends with
my friends from home and was nice to me.
‘Michael!’ I said and jerked reflexively to remove Ciaran’s hand from
beneath my dress.
We caught up for no more than thirty seconds – he had moved to Galway,
yeah, it was very busy in here, time goes faster that way anyway, though: can
I get two pints of Guinness? – and I turned back around, smiling broadly,
heart thudding. I was afraid to find what I knew I would find, which was that
things had been ruined in the space of that minute, that I would spend the rest
of the night trying to claw my way back to the good feeling, and that I would
fail. We stood in silence, being jostled by the crowd, waiting for our drinks
and then moved out to lean against a wall.
‘Who was that?’ he asked.
‘He’s a friend from Waterford.’
‘Why did you move away from me when you saw him?’
‘I didn’t – I…’
‘You did, yes. You moved away from me as soon as you saw him. He’s a
boyfriend?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’
‘Someone you fucked, then?’
I said nothing, grew hot.
‘You’re blushing,’ he said, mocking. ‘You fucked him?’
‘It’s nothing, he’s nobody important.’
‘What’s nothing? It was nothing when you fucked him?’ I looked up at
him, agreeing miserably in silence.
‘Unbelievable.’
 ‘It’s not a big deal, Ciaran; you’ve slept with other people too, haven’t
you?’
‘Yes and yet we don’t bump into them in totally random places, there
aren’t so many that they pop up from behind bars in different cities.’
‘Please.’
‘Please what?’
We drank in strangled silence for a few minutes.
‘I’m sorry. Please can we just forget it and have a nice night?’
‘Fine,’ he said, but wouldn’t speak to me or look at me, and when we
were done said he wanted to go back to the hotel. We couldn’t find a taxi and
the walk seemed to take for ever, cutting through pitch-black mucky fields.
‘Why is this place so fucking far away? We couldn’t have just stayed in
town?’ he asked, and I tried not to apologise again, knowing it would make
things worse.
When we got there and went to our room he undressed and shut off the
light as I was still doing so, and I got into bed gingerly, facing his turned
back, and reached out to touch him. I worked the knots of his shoulders and
stroked his neck and then moved closer to him, putting an arm around his
waist and touching beneath his T-shirt.
‘Stop it,’ he said, not moving. ‘Just go to sleep.’
‘I can’t go to sleep with you angry at me.’
‘I’m not angry with you.’
‘If you aren’t angry with me why can’t I touch you?’
‘I don’t want you to touch me. Not wanting you to is reason enough, isn’t
it?’
‘Of course, just, let’s talk about it and we’ll figure it out.’
He made no response, his breathing even and deep.
‘Just tell me what you’re thinking and it will be OK,’ I said, but there was
nothing.
The insult of his ignoring me struck me suddenly and made me recoil,
taking my hands from him and returning to my side of the bed. I started to
cry, filled with self-recrimination and grief for our lost trip, silently at first
and, as I went on, wetly, snivelling.
I could feel that he was awake and feared or hoped he would reprimand
me for crying and making noise but he remained that way, turned away from
me, long and still tense and blank.
 3

Many nights I spent doubled up on the bathroom floor. I didn’t lock myself in
to protect myself from him. I did it when I had begged him to forgive me,
answer me, acknowledge me, and he would not. Sometimes this lasted for
hours, and to punish us both for that humiliation I locked in and began to cut
myself.
‘What are you doing in there?’ I imagined him saying, knocking on the
door. ‘Please, don’t hurt yourself.’
I wished he would do as an old long-ago boyfriend once had – had
grabbed my scarred and crusting forearms together, which were then as
rickety and pale as ossified twigs, and looked me urgently in the eye and said,
‘I want you to promise me you will never do this again.’
 4

Or even to do what a man working in a department store had once done,

which was to turn away from me in disgust.
I was fifteen or so, shopping with friends, and the most manically able to
endure pain as I ever would be. Nothing seemed to touch me, no matter how I
tried.
When the man floated past, offering samples of a Marc Jacobs perfume
(which I remember as also being embedded in the nightmarish beauty of that
time in my life, the long-legged anorexic icons of my youth, who decorated
my walls, the flowery vaguely sickly glamour of it infecting everything it
touched, Mischa Barton, Nicole Richie, size zero and enormous It bags), the
girlfriends I was shopping with accepted wordlessly, only half paying
attention, still idly browsing with their free hand.
I did the same, thoughtlessly proffering my wrist while looking away at
some feathered dress I coveted, and when the man went to spray the scent, he
gently pushed up my sleeve and sprayed automatically, too late to stop by the
time he registered the open wounds he was spraying into.
He gasped and looked at me with curious revulsion, and I yanked my arm
back and pulled the sleeve over the cuts, which were now burning
alarmingly. I kept shopping, but was sullied by the judgement.
 5

But nothing came from Ciaran. Nothing came, and it had become impossible
to hurt myself with the convincing rage I once had. I had grown reflexively
weak and self-protective, not able, as I was back then, to harm myself
without thought, without fear of the pain that would follow whenever I
showered or dressed in the days to come.
Inside me things were boiling and rupturing and sprouting, and twenty
feet away he sat looking out the window, calmly smoking, with a book
resting on his lap, an indefinite horizon of stillness, silence. A great fear
swelled in my chest as I crouched there holding my body, my body, which
felt to me so much to blame for everything that happened to me. In these
moments I knew that if I could be smaller, smaller, less and less, if I could be
tidied, then he would love me fully and properly; and that anybody – oh,
everybody – would.
That knowledge, which felt as clear and undeniable as laws of science, as
nature, as the fact I had a body at all, drove me mad. It fizzed in my brain,
frustrating me with its nearness and impossibility – because I knew from
experience that although I could approach it practically, with calories and
carbs and sit-ups, there would never be a bone sharp enough, a size small
enough to let me reach the place I wished to get to.
 6

It wasn’t that, on balance, there were more good times with Ciaran than bad,
and that’s why I stuck around.
There is no better feeling to me than to wake up in the middle of the night
and thrust my hand out and say, half in a dream still, ‘I love you so much,’
and for a person to turn towards me from muscle memory and say through
their own sleep, ‘I love you too.’
There’s never been a drug or a friend or a food that’s even come close.
 7

People at work thought me odd and treated me with friendly suspicion, but I
was unfailingly pleasant and even almost well liked, smiling and willing to
nod and chat about someone’s kids, or take on extra tasks for people who
wanted to leave early.
When I refused the endless boxes of chocolates and biscuits that were
passed around, they lauded my amazing self-control, and chided themselves
for their greed. I grinned and rolled my eyes in a self-deprecating way and
turned back to my computer screen (where I copied and pasted long articles
into documents and emails so that I could spend all day reading, while
looking at a glance as though I was busy).
I didn’t know what to say – how to explain that I would rather shit in front
of them than eat chocolate in front of them. How could I explain such a thing,
the shame it would bring me to participate in the office food chat?
Or that I would prefer that none of them knew much more about me than
my name and the area I lived in and that I more or less adequately performed
my job?
I didn’t want them, their sticky over-familiar comments, on me. I dreaded
for them to see what I ate, to know what went inside me, because the more
they knew the more I would be forced to sincerely inhabit the role I was
playing, the harder it would become to tell the difference between the me in
there and the me at home.
 8

My friend Christina would sometimes call. I saw her and a handful of the
others maybe once, twice a month, always straight after work and for no
more than two hours. When I left I didn’t say why I had to go, or where, and
they didn’t ask.
Once she called on a Friday night when we had nothing planned, when I
had just got in and was readying my bottle of wine and pack of cigarettes and
laptop and phone to curl up and drink and look at Freja and watch shitty
television.
‘Come on, it’s just a small thing but everyone will be there and you
should come. When was the last time you came out properly?’
We both knew that it had been a year or more now since I had spent a full
evening with anyone but Ciaran.
‘Come over now,’ she said, ‘and we can get ready and have drinks here
and go together. Anyway, you have to come, Lisa’s home from Berlin.’
It gave me a funny dreamy pain in my chest to hear this and to think of
Lisa.
It seemed a different lifetime in which we had lived together. I thought of
her goofy face and the earthy smell of her leather jacket and the endearing
swagger of her walk, so incongruous with her small self. I thought of the way
we had lived together. We were autonomous, could happily go whole days
without speaking to each other, me reading on the couch and her drawing at
the table, passing cigarettes back and forth. And yet there was such pleasing
self-containment, too. The combined force of ourselves made the silence rich,
made the rooms we shared into a home. We had done together what I had
never managed to do with Ciaran.
But still. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t be absent when Ciaran arrived in or,
worse still, couldn’t be here and pissed when he did.
‘N – no,’ I replied to Christina shakily, and heard her impatient sigh
blown out the other end.
‘But tell me what you’ll do. I want to know what you’re going to do.’
And I closed my eyes and breathed slowly and let her tell me how exactly
the night would happen, although I knew it already.
They would drink wine and prosecco in Christina’s flat, put on make-up.
They would go to the pub at ten and smoke Marlboro Menthols and drink
rum and coke or G and Ts or more white wine. They would go around the
corner to the Workman’s Club and stay there till closing as long as it wasn’t
full of arseholes and as long as nobody’s ex was there with someone new.
They would spend lots of money on poorly mixed cocktails.
They would go to DiFontaine’s for a pizza slice on the way home. The
staff would turn the music up and let people treat it as a little post-club party
so long as nobody got carried away.
And then, if everyone was up for it and not too tired, they would head
back to someone’s house and take pills or lines of coke and drink more wine
and listen to music and smoke a million more cigs and fall all into each other
on the couch, laughing and dancing and maybe some people kissing, and
they’d stay up till six or seven at least and if it was a particularly good buzz
someone would pop down to the shop then and get more booze and they’d go
all day, but otherwise they’d all get a few hours’ kip and then drag
themselves up at midday to go for food, all bedraggled and smeary-eyed, and
laugh about what idiots they’d all been the night before.
She finished and then a soft click as she hung up.
 9

One Monday night I peeled potatoes over the sink, ready to mandolin them
into thin slices and bake on top of a pie I had read a recipe for in the
newspaper on Saturday. It had been an unusually calm weekend for us.
When, at a certain point, Ciaran had stopped speaking or responding to me
for no reason I could work out, I felt less agitated than I often did, and went
to our bedroom to read. The next morning he was pleasant and affectionate
and I thought with disinterest how little I could comprehend the movement of
his moods.
I was tired from working, that Monday evening – it was a day with more
meetings and compulsory speaking than most – and my back ached from the
way I was always hunched tightly over my screen, not realising I was doing it
until it was time to leave and I felt that all my muscles had cemented together
and had to be prised apart.
A dull ache spread in the base of my spine as I stood at the sink, and I was
suddenly livid. I didn’t want to be standing there, on my own, preparing food
for another person. I craved with visceral, addict thirst the experience of
buying a frozen pizza and a bottle of wine and not thinking remotely of
anyone else.
I wanted with a frightening violence the blankness of that evening, which
I had wasted so many of in the past, not appreciating their luxury.
It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to
do. And it’s a peculiarly impotent sort of anger that domestic labour brings
about. It was building up in me, a feeling like the blood of my body slowly
becoming dirty as it coursed through.
With every strip shorn off the potato I cursed him and the apartment, even
though as I did so I knew it was I who had begged – quite literally at times,
had begged on my knees – for the privilege of living in this place with him, in
this exact manner. It was I who had been so anxious for domesticity, for the
reassuring sameness of our shared routine, for the comfort of knowing that it
was me he slept with every night.
I had begged to be standing there over that sink, had begged for that very
potato, slimy in my grasping hand.
I heard him come in, speaking on the phone. Heard him shrug off his
backpack and hang his coat and walk into the bedroom. I halted my peeling
for a moment and strained to hear his voice. The words were unclear but I
could make out from a particular tone that he was speaking to Freja.
What was this tone? It was not quite flirtatious. If it was, I would have
been more emboldened to object to their semi-regular conversations.
It was, if anything, a cautious tone, careful and reticent. But,
unmistakably, there was a softness underneath it which I only ever otherwise
heard directed to me, a surrendering shyness absent from his usual ready-to-
go spiels that could be fired out at gallerists or artists or journalists or friends
at will.
And it hurt me and fascinated me because it was so beautiful to hear.
It was so much clearer to hear when it wasn’t for me, because when I
heard it I couldn’t help but dissect and worry over it, prodding it to mean
more than it did, or investigating it for sarcasm. Separate from me I could
hear its reality and that there were other parts in Ciaran than the cold and
forbidding ones. This reality saddened me because it meant I wasn’t myself
able to bring them out; or worse, it meant they were as far out with me as
they ever could be.
He was careful not to speak of her too much or to behave as though she
held much importance. She was forcefully relegated to the same status as
several other friends in Denmark he spoke to every few months. The only
thing that could goad him out of this neutrality was news of her promiscuity.
She would drop into conversation that she had slept with some mutual
acquaintance of theirs, or a friend of Ciaran’s would laughingly inform him
of her alluringly seedy exploits – the club she was thrown out of for being
found on her knees in the men’s bathroom, the time she fucked a guy in a
park before wiping herself off and going to meet another date.
He fumed about these to me, wondered aloud why she couldn’t get herself
together, why she didn’t respect herself. I never knew what to say, torn
between wanting to encourage his disgust and the awful feeling of his still-
present connection to her. And, too, it amazed me to conceive of her out there
in the world living luridly but still the object of his love and fascination. I
was here, in the home, safe and useful as a sink.
I stood suspended as they talked and when he began to softly laugh at
something she said I pressed the sharp blade into my thumb for as long as I
could and then quickly tore it downwards. I bled into the wet colander of
peeled potatoes, until Ciaran emerged from our bedroom and I showed him
that I had ruined dinner.
‘That’s OK,’ he said, sitting down with a book. ‘Let’s just order
something.’ And I turned back to my mess, furious, boiling, wanting so badly
for him to be angry with me.
 10

Ciaran didn’t like me to be drunk, a fact I had always known and accepted in
the same way I accepted that he didn’t like eggs, or modern fiction – just one
of those things. It didn’t much matter until later, in any case. For the
beginning of our relationship and the beginning of our living together, my
primary desire was to please and be loved by him. It wasn’t my only desire
but it shadowed all the others, so that when I wanted to drink and Ciaran
didn’t it was filed away neatly, not causing me any worry.
We were grocery shopping in the Lidl near our place one evening that
November. He didn’t like to come with me and he annoyed me when he did –
someone who doesn’t like food will not respond convincingly when asked to
evaluate different kinds of lettuce – but I had taken to insisting that he did.
‘I’ll be bored otherwise,’ I would say, but what I meant was, ‘I want you
to be bored too.’
I didn’t see why he should get away with so much.
(I must remember, keep remembering, that he never wanted it, never
wanted it, never wanted it – I begged him.)
I had my meal plan for the week noted down and was checking off
ingredients when we passed the wine aisle and I felt an itch.
‘I want to have some wine with dinner,’ I said to him. ‘Do you want a
beer or anything?’
I kept my eyes away from his, scanning the shelves, so that he wouldn’t
be able to silence me just by looking.
I was trying something out.
I wanted him to have to explain it, out loud.
‘No,’ he said, with a little surprised disquiet – it wasn’t a weekend, when I
might be expected to say such a thing. ‘Don’t get wine, it’s a Wednesday.’
‘Why not?’ I asked, still facing away, brushing the labels of the Rioja with
a testing finger.
 ‘Because… it’s not good for you,’ he said, and he was trying something
out himself.
This was a kind of victory for me.
He had never had to say aloud why he didn’t like it before.
Now he had been forced to come out with something concrete, a thing that
could be reasoned and argued with.
I turned back to face him, innocently.
‘But you don’t mind that I smoke?’
Ciaran smoked. Ciaran was what my mother would call a ‘real smoker’,
as in, a couldn’t-go-a-day-without smoker, a smoker who got antsy on
aeroplanes.
I smoked endlessly when drunk, it was true, but wasn’t bothered with
cigarettes in between. They were the same as drinking to me, a kind of full
stop to thinking and daily life, an end-of-the-day excess.
‘Why doesn’t it matter that I smoke, if it matters that I drink?’ I went on
blankly, enjoying his discomfort.
‘It’s… smoking is bad for you, yes, but drinking interferes with things,
stops you functioning as well.’
‘I won’t be hungover from half a bottle of wine, or even a bottle of wine,’
I said. ‘I’ll be fine. You know my job is easy.’
‘Do what you want,’ he finished irritably and stalked towards the tills. I
had won something from him, I knew, even though I would pay for it in
silence.
At home I poured myself a glass while I cooked and drank it slowly,
smugly, as he ignored me.
When we had finished dinner, I went on drinking as I read my book until
it was time to sleep and I rinsed the empty bottle carefully and put it in the
recycling bin as he watched me from the couch.
I thought this event would weaken his position, the hypocrisy of it coming
from someone who smoked all day long, but in the end it bolstered him. He
decided to double down, that health concerns made his distaste
unimpeachably legitimate.
He emailed me studies about young professional women developing
cirrhosis, and charts with the number of calories in each drink. When I
lingered over some fine line around my eyes in the mirror he would lean over
my shoulder and explain that drinking would age me faster, finishing with a
cheerful kiss to the top of my head.
Before long it had spread to other parts of our life, too. He chided me on
the mornings I got a bus rather than walk to work. If I complained that an
item of clothing didn’t fit me any more, or wept with sadness at the state of
my body when in the middle of a depression, he would patiently explain that
I would lose weight if I went vegan – Freja was a vegan, after all.
Once he went to see his dentist to get some fillings done and came home
extolling the virtues of flossing.
‘I don’t want to,’ I would say as he tried to force it on me in the mornings,
wriggling out of his grip and trying to get out the door to work before he got
his shoes on and caught up with me.
‘I don’t CARE if you do it or not,’ he screamed at me once, ‘I just want
you to understand this, understand what I’m telling you: one day your teeth
are going to fall out of your fucking head, and it will be your fault, not mine.’
One cold Sunday morning, getting ready to go for a walk into town, eat
lunch, and go to the cinema, we stood next to each other, him shaving, me
brushing my teeth. We were in good moods, him winking at me in the
bathroom mirror when we caught eyes.
I spat into the sink and went to rinse the foam away but he seized my
wrist and held it still on the tap.
‘Do you see that?’ he asked.
‘Wh-what?’ I cried, alarmed.
He peered down into the spit and then took a finger and dispersed it,
combed through it. A thin, bright red strand ran through.
‘Blood,’ he said. ‘That’s blood. That’s disease. That’s what happens when
you don’t floss. Do you see now?’ And he cupped the back of my neck, not
unkindly, and slowly forced my head down close to the spit, so I could see it
clearly; it was an inch from my nose; I felt my throat rise.
See?
 11

I drank more in front of him from then on, a beer or two before dinner most
nights, wine towards the weekend.
I was rarely drunk, and that was a part of it. If I crossed over into
sloppiness as he sat there sober, I would lose the game entirely. His unspoken
point would be proven. But if I could drink and maintain composure, he
would have no basis for his evident disgust.
There were things about me he could legitimately criticise. I never
exercised, was as sullenly unfit as I had been in PE as a child. When he
chided me for this (he who cycled everywhere and could run for miles), all I
could do was lower my eyes and say, ‘I know, I know.’
But the drinking was different. If I forced him to become angry about it, it
would make him look ridiculous. I was acting comically poised, after all. I
was sitting reading the Sunday supplements, having cooked him a nutritious
and inventive meal, holding a civilised glass of fairly good wine, the only
untoward or slatternly thing about me the blush which arrived from the
alcohol and the faintly sexual thrill of inciting his irritation.
Then I came home to him pouring bottles of wine down the sink one
evening, and was quietly delighted.
When I asked what he thought he was doing, he answered that he wanted
to make new rules for the house.
He wanted us to cut down on smoking, he said, for our health and because
it made the apartment smell bad. And since I only ever smoked when I drank,
we would simply make it a rule that smoking – and therefore drinking – was
permitted only on one night.
Just one – I could choose which.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, me too,’ he replied, and I almost laughed aloud that he was willing
to do this to himself.
 ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good idea, baby.’ And I kissed his soft unshaven cheek,
rubbing my nose along it.
Usually I got home an hour or two before Ciaran did and it occurred to me
that it was possible for me to drink before he arrived and to continue once he
had.
If it was a night when drinking was allowed, I could, for instance, be
home with two bottles of wine by five thirty, drink the first, dispose of it, and
be sitting waiting for him with the first glass poured and a cigarette lit when
he arrived home.
The almost-full bottle would be waiting there alongside me to prove
everything was in order. I could easily suppress my drunkenness in front of a
comparative amateur like Ciaran.
And so that is what I did. Sometimes if I was running late it was a
struggle. I remember draining the end of a bottle of rosé prosecco in one
burpy rush, my eye on the clock, and running down to the dumpster with only
minutes to go.
But at night, when we had finished watching films or television, and he
had had his beers and I had finished my second bottle, when we were going
to sleep – it was all worth it then. I closed my eyes and felt the blissful wooze
of being secretly, silently pissed, and of getting away with it, of being one
person, and also another.
And then it was Saturday afternoons. I began to invent a social life for
myself.
‘Christina wants to have coffee with me today,’ I’d say, or, ‘Lisa is back
from Berlin so we’re going to see a film and have dinner,’ and he’d barely
look up from what he was writing or drawing or the application he was filling
in.
It occurred to me uncomfortably that he hadn’t stopped me seeing my
friends, as I sometimes posited in the privacy of my own head. He didn’t care
about them. I had stopped myself.
I would get ready, get really quite dressed up, in flippy dresses and soft
cardigans and little boots, would pull on my hat, put on red lipstick. I did my
make-up perfectly, as I rarely bothered to do any more, and walked to a little
bistro named Chez Max at the foot of Dublin Castle.
Lisa and I had come here a lot when she lived in Dublin to drink their
house red and share onion soup and fries, smoke too many cigarettes.
 On my walk there I would buy two newspapers, fat with supplements, and
arrange them in front of me on the table, would sit down beneath the heat
lamp, take off my coat and lay my cigarettes next to the papers. I nodded to
the waiters, who knew my order. I sat there all afternoon slowly drinking
wine and smoking and reading.
They treated me like a celebrity because I came so often, on my own, and
had visibly made an effort to look pretty. I couldn’t tell if they admired or
pitied this but I didn’t mind. It became the part of my week I most looked
forward to.
Why didn’t I actually meet the friends I said I was going to? I could have,
they were still around, were still willing to see me when I asked.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them. It was that I wanted it to be not
true, where I was. I wanted there to be a thing he could not know.
 12

Sex with him began, slowly, to fail to excite me.

His body was still as remarkable, as porelessly beautiful, as it had ever
been. I could still spend hours exploring it, marvelling at its effortless grace,
its movie-star glow. And yes, it was true, I could still forget everything
momentarily when he lay there dormant or near sleep and let me burrow
down and run my face against the insanely soft fuzz of his strong, long
thighs. He felt the same, tasted right, smelled as good.
But there was something unreal to him, doll-like almost. I struggled to
feel his touch. Things he used to do which would render me a quivering
strand of pure feeling barely registered now. It was a strange thing to have his
long beautiful fingers brush circles on my nipples and remember quite clearly
how it once would have made me senseless with need, but feel nothing much
at all.
I was able to perform my passion, having learned the movements so long
ago, but it shocked me that he couldn’t tell the difference when I shuddered
and gasped my way through a faked orgasm. I might have been doing it all
this time, I thought, for all he knew, and felt both proud and frightened of my
aloneness, of the impossibility of being known.
I could only get wet when I went down on him, placing his hands behind
my head, encouraging him to use me like that. I looked up at him and then
could gather some of what I’d once felt; the power of that male sneer, that old
faithful angle.
He was a little rough at times, but I could sense he did it out of kindness,
knowing it was something I liked.
When I had once told him that I liked men to be rough with me, I had
stopped short of describing exactly what it was I liked, or why, and what
about it turned me on. But because I had said it once, he believed he knew all
there was to know about me, and I was too embarrassed to bring it up again. I
was too embarrassed to say: No, it’s not enough.
To say, I see you try, but in fact it’s worse than nothing to see you make a
plan to hold me in a certain way, to see you make a decision and execute
what you think will work best for me.
I want you to want to do it. That’s the only way. I want it to all be as fluid
and natural as the movement of you swatting a fly, as baked into your
physiology as a thing like that.
You hate me, I thought sometimes, when you see me drink or cry or cut
myself, but you don’t hate me in the right way.
Your disgust is domesticated. I fear that your distaste is that of your
average husband – not the glittering and sexual kind you used to show me
when you looked down at me, before I won you.
2019, Athens

Maybe the thing I fear most of all is losing sex. Sex is so wonderful because
it is one of the few things in adult life which can completely take you out of
yourself. There is a pure singularity to it which leaves no room for your
ordinary mind. All the things I love most – sex, romance, drinking – are like
that.
I know what I want should count. What I desire ought to be as important
as what you think when you look at me, but all the things which excite me,
which make me as physical and voracious and forceful as a man, are to do
with things being done to me. Always things are being done to me. Rarely do
I do things myself.
When I was younger and still believed myself to be hideous, I used to
think of my body as one that men liked to sleep with, but not to look at. I
willed this into truth by never letting them look at me. I made love in the dark
and covered myself afterwards, clumsy and childlike, so that they really did
never look at me.
Once I told this theory of mine to a man named Luca when I was
seventeen on a trip to Berlin. He was older, in his mid twenties, and part of
the group I was holidaying with. I didn’t know him as well as I did the others
and was attracted by his arrogant smirk and casual dismissals of things not to
his taste, whether that was a book or a person or a food. We were drunk and
sitting on a kerb in Kreuzberg after a bar shut and I told him my feelings in a
foolish gush of earnestness. He seemed sympathetic and said mild,
comforting things in response.
Even later, when we had all been ejected from another club, our friend
Sophie was talking about her yoga practice and how fit and strong she had
become, when Luca turned to me and said, ‘Perhaps you should take that up
too,’ and smiled slowly and the casual cruelty stunned me so much that I
cried into my paper cup of vodka.
I walked shakily away from the group, wandering until I found a patch of
grass to collapse down on and wallow in my absurd misery. An old
weathered woman wearing several coats in the warm July dawn came and sat
with me and offered to share her booze. ‘Is it a man?’ she asked, and I
nodded, although it wasn’t the kind of trouble she must have thought it was.
The next night, predictably, Luca and I slept together.
I made mistakes like that all the time, seeking affirmation from the very
worst people, so that what I must have been after deep down was
confirmation of the fears instead of their dismissals. Luca and others
confirmed for me that I truly was a thing built for use and base pleasure – but
not to be looked at with pleasure, not to be beautiful or pristine. And so sex
was what I could count on, a definite expression of my purpose. I learned to
like that well enough to make up for the lack of beauty – learned to love it,
rely on it enough to make my navigation of the places I went and lived in feel
safe and fun.
Sometimes that skill slipped away from me without warning. I gained a
lot of weight very quickly while in the middle of some crisis, maybe, so that
none of my clothes fit and I walked around hunched over and frightened. Not
infrequently I suffered inexplicable allergy flare-ups, which would make the
skin on my face explode into strange and unsightly red welts around my eyes
and mouth. They made me look diseased and haggard, twenty years older
than I was. Walking around Dublin when that happened was a kind of hell,
all my reliable tricks undone in an instant. A man would begin to size up my
body and then recoil when he arrived to the face. It cut into me so much I
could barely function and sometimes didn’t, taking to my bed until I could
pass for more or less good-looking again.
I don’t know who to be without sex. I don’t know how to access the ways
of being which bring me relief and joy. Everything which does is bound up in
sex somehow. The songs I listen to, all attached to someone I’ve been
obsessed with. The films which break my heart, huge gorgeous eyes flooding
the screen, showing impossible dynamics, passion which goes on and on and
never ends because it can always be rewound.
And most of all, the feeling of walking around a foreign city: off an airbus
in a short dress and sunglasses, a hopeful prayer for adventure pranging in
my chest, feeling seen, made real anew by all the people who look with
admiration or curiosity; those exchanges making it seem as though I could be
anyone at all, begin new stories, live a thousand lives.
 13

Once, when I was a child of eight or nine, I came downstairs in the night,
confused from dreaming and looking for water. When I opened the kitchen
door, lit up in the hallway half-light was a girlfriend of my father’s who had
fallen asleep there at the table with a cigarette in her hand. Her dressing gown
had fallen open and I could see her small breasts slack against her chest and
was frightened by the sight.
I thought of her at strange times over the years – there were a dozen or so
childhood images like that one, of partners of one or other of my parents,
moments I was too young to understand or contextualise and so they stuck
with me (the French pastry chef who emerged grinning from the bathroom
with his dick flopping out of his boxers, whispering something I can’t
remember).
The girlfriend hadn’t been ugly or old, she didn’t disturb me because she
was decrepit. She was attractive and slim and buoyant in waking life, and this
night remained with me only because it was a sight which taught me that a
woman’s nudity was not always erotic, not even always pleasant, was,
indeed, at times pathetic to behold.
 14

One evening near Christmas, having left his computer at work, Ciaran asked
to use mine to send some emails. I realised afterwards he had not logged out,
and then remembered standing in his kitchen at dawn in that time which felt
so long ago, reading the endless, desperate, adoring message from Freja.
I felt sick with the sudden surge of power and possibility I had before me.
There was no time limit. I could look at every single thing he had ever said
about me, or ever said to her. I could see, finally, how their Christmas
reconciliation and subsequent split came about, what he was thinking when
he came back to me, whether he truly wanted to.
For days afterwards I pored through them at any spare moment I could
find in work. My nausea rose. I felt myself filling up with his minutiae. I was
engorged with him like an insect fat with blood.
But it was all so much nothing, so much nothing I did not already know.
This invasion was filthier than my first because of its sheer mundanity. At
least then there had been something to be legitimately scandalised by.
Now, I was bored. There were cruel parts, certainly, parts hard to
stomach: her cloying attempts to undermine me and my looks; his feverish
need to keep reassuring her that I was only temporary, nothing real, nothing
like her.
So what? I thought, scrolling.
I needed more, to be hurt more. I wanted to see that they continued to
cheat, that they were planning to run away together, that they wanted to kill
me.
I wanted lists of every flaw in my body, every way in which I was
laughable and the object of their amused pity.
It was all so ordinary and underwhelming. They were just two idiots in a
mess, who kept convincing and then un-convincing one another of things.
They weren’t star-crossed, just dithering, dependent people who couldn’t stay
away from each other because they hadn’t worked out how to imagine
anything different.
I had given up so much to be a part of this drama and I saw now how bad
the part, how shoddy the script.
I kept looking, to find something, to justify the looking, until I arrived all
the way back to years earlier, before I had met him. He had sent her a
photograph he had taken of the two of them in bed, him kneeling over her
and holding his dick above her plump, bare vagina. I looked, horribly
compelled, and then logged out quickly and deleted his account from my
computer.
That night I dreamed that I was him fucking Freja. I had dreamed of
sleeping with her before, or of watching him do it, but in the dream I was
him, full of him, full up with him, it was my dick stiff and purple brushing
against her.
From then on I would never be really jealous of her again. The feelings
would still be there somewhere, when he talked about her or I saw her online,
but just as reflex. They were at a remove, not a part of my real self any more.
It was as though I had been struck with a belt for years, and suddenly my
flesh was replaced with something else, something inanimate. The pain was
still going on, but it was no longer happening to me, it was happening to a
statue.
January 2014
 1

Once a year after Christmas Ciaran visited his father Peter where he lived
near the Wicklow Mountains.
He had left his small family in Denmark when Ciaran was seven years
old. Every few years after that he would reappear in Copenhagen, wild-
haired, weathered, spiteful, drunk, and take his son to dinner.
The older he became, the more Ciaran grew to hate the emptiness of this
occasional gesture and to hate Peter himself. And perhaps sensing the
growing animosity from the beautiful brittle teenage boy sitting opposite him,
Peter in turn grew hard and jeering.
I went with Ciaran to visit in the January of 2014, leaving Waterford
where I had spent Christmas. We took a train and then a bus and then a cab to
where he lived, a barely inhabitable rented cottage, freezing and mucky and
mouldy. He had been there a number of years by the time I visited, so his
routine was embedded in the dirt of the place. He had his cafetière and his
stove kept clean, and a desk where he wrote endless unpublished letters to
newspapers about unacceptable failures in local roads and services.
Everything else he ignored.
It was something to see the old man come up against Ciaran. His features
were handsome still, though brutally boiled looking, all of him purple and
mottled. It seemed to me as though he must have waited all year, conserving
energy in his little cave, so that he would have the strength to destroy his son.
There was no action so meaningless that it could not be mocked with the
manic acceleration of an insane stand-up comedian. I watched him do
impressions of the sissy way Ciaran smoked a cigarette for so long that veins
sprang dangerously from his temples, livid patches spreading on his cheeks.
He served us dinner, mashed potatoes and supermarket chicken Kiev, and
we ate it off our knees gathered round the fireplace. Ciaran told some banal
anecdote about work, about a gallery running out of wine and bringing out
instead some elderly cans of Druid Cider from a back room, and while he told
it he was animated, his wrists rolled slightly in the somewhat camp manner
that he had when excited. Peter set his plate down on the dirty floor and
leaned forward from his seat by the fire, rotating his wrists and bowing his
head down near his knees, let his tongue loll out of his mouth grotesquely –
and then sprang back upright and laughed, catching my eye.
But still Ciaran smiled and dragged a fork through his mashed potatoes.
Still he would not break. This was a bargain they had struck – his father
could let all of his poison and madness out on him, but Ciaran would not cry,
would not raise his voice, would not storm out. He would bear it, and by
bearing it could punish him. He was so superhumanly able to be still that
there would never be any release for his father, no conclusion to the pain.
This was how they came to know each other in adulthood.
They were not similar men in superficial ways. Ciaran was disgusted by
Peter: that his old clothes and half-rotten boots smelled of mildew, that his
meals came largely from tins or ready-meal packages, that empty bottles were
strewn about his house with no humility, no shame. But I looked at them
sitting there that evening, enduring each other in the flickering light, and was
startled by their identical expressions.
Decades of resentment and things unsaid had calcified and left them
paralysed in matching sneers. There was no way, now, that they could ever
say that they loved one another, having never said it to begin with, but they
were incapable too of naming their hatred. There may have been a time once
when Ciaran was capable of saying, ‘I hate you for leaving me, for leaving
me alone when I was a child,’ but if such a time had existed it had long since
passed.
And if Peter had ever been inclined to look his boy straight in the eye and
say that he was sorry, that he had been young himself then and unsure,
unstable – if he had ever wanted to reach out and steady Ciaran’s hand, the
one that constantly worried the threads of his sleeve when he was with his
father, if he had ever wanted to take that hand and say, ‘When I left you it
didn’t make me happy. There was no pleasure in my life after I left. It was
only that I didn’t know how to take care of you, but I wish I did know. I wish
I’d known then, and I wish I knew now.’
If he had ever wanted to slip his arms under Ciaran’s and hold him close,
and say, ‘I am your father. Nothing will ever change that. I didn’t just help
make you – there is a part of me which you made when you were born, and
which will always be yours.’
If he had wanted to do any of that – well, it was too late.
When my own dad was a small child, he had a schoolmate whose father
died, and he became convinced that his own father would shortly go the same
way. He would sit at the bottom of their road at the end of the day, a newly
built estate for a newly ascending working class, waiting for his father to
come home from work. He gnawed on his little hands and pulled at the sleeve
of his prickly school jumper, praying anxiously for the moment the big man
would round the corner and smile his big devastating grin and hoist him up
back home.
When I was a similar age as Dad was then, I sang in a church choir,
treasuring my occasional solos and shutting my eyes piously during the best
hymns, still a believer. One evening I was expecting my dad to be there, I had
a whole verse to myself, and grew increasingly panicked as the mass went on
and I could not see him. Soon I began to cry silently up there in the choir,
keeping my eyes as wide open as I could so that the people down there
wouldn’t see. My tears streamed throughout my solo and then the mass was
over and I cried properly, balling up my fists and digging them into my
sockets and doubling over, certain – but certain – he had died.
Then he ran to me, having been there all that time, having only been
delayed by traffic, he took me in his arms as he told me over and over again
he had been there all that time, even though I couldn’t see him.
How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of
what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely, as Ciaran did.
 2

The annual staff party came around in March and I wanted to drink. I had
kept my drinking more or less moderate, to a degree that prevented Ciaran
from doing anything but irritably glancing at me.
I had been good for a long time. Now, the feeling I used to regularly have
before I met him, the restless and soaring need for a big messy night, was
back and it seemed to have been growing privately all that time.
In the days leading up to the party I bought a new dress made of a clingy
grey material which knotted in the middle and had cut-outs which framed the
soft neat curve where my waist became my hips. I bought new make-up and
experimented with it alone before he arrived back in the evenings. I cut down
on food so I would feel light and powerful.
In a big anonymous club on Harcourt Street, forty of us assembled after
work. I had got ready in the bathrooms with some of the other younger
women, and they all gawked and whooped at my outfit, halfway between
admiration and mockery. I was overdressed. I was dressed as I would have
been in the before days, when I was going to the party of a well-known DJ, or
the gig of someone I was trying to sleep with. My body spilt out of its dress
generously and sexually, my heels were high, my make-up polished and
harsh. I soaked up their attention, hoping they envied me, wanting to eat that
up, the brief thrill of feeling better than them.
In the club I drank glasses of frosty Pinot Grigio in no time at all,
pounding them back and then wandering idly to another counter, another
group of people, to get my next. I talked to people I never usually talked to,
surprised myself and them by being funny and personable and interested in
what they had to say. Nothing works like drinking does.
By the time it was ten and all the bosses had left I was entering the stage
of pure hunger, pure need. My heart rate quick and joyful, my conversation
unthinking and unending. I smoked constantly and moved on to spirits,
moved into that place where what you want is clear and foul-tasting things,
want bitter powder that burns the back of your throat like bleach, where you
are total want.
A man I’d never spoken to before who worked in the IT department sidled
behind me as I danced and put his hands on my waist where the cut-outs
were. I jumped and turned to face him and laughed and shook him off. He
was short and pink and sweaty, twenty years older than me. His hair shone
with gel.
‘Don’t you have a boyfriend?’ he asked me.
‘Yes,’ I replied, startled.
He leaned in and whispered in my ear, ‘Well, how the fuck did he let you
out like this?’ And then he trailed his awful hand down my backside and
roughly squeezed me and then let go and glided away quickly before I could
shriek or push him off.
I walked home later, the fifteen minutes up Rathmines Road, which took
me much longer because of my shoes. As I went I thought, over and over
again, How the fuck did he let you out like this? How the fuck did he let you
out like this? How the fuck did he let you out like this? Trying to puzzle it
apart, find its meaning and why it had stopped me cold.
When I arrived home I was much later than I said I would be, and Ciaran
was up, and I must have been acting strangely because he screamed at me and
demanded that I account for my time and accused me of having been with
another man, which he had never done before.
I laughed and he grabbed my wrist and banged it against our kitchen table
and I thought, Break it, why don’t you? Do something. How the fuck did you
let me out like this?
Then he recovered and remembered that the way to hurt me is to ignore
me. He left and went to our bedroom, and I locked myself in the bathroom
and lifted up the sexy new dress and masturbated, quickly and shamefully,
thinking about the ugly man who had touched me at the party, the way he had
confirmed that Ciaran owned me. And then, just at the end as I was starting to
come, I thought of Ciaran accusing me of being with another man.
It was the first time I had conceived of being with anyone but him since
we met. I gasped, grabbed the sink.
2019, Athens

For someone I love to prefer another woman to me, to choose her body over
mine even in the abstract, was once the most vile experience I could imagine.
I could not bear to watch a film with Ciaran sometimes – wasn’t able to relax
for the two hours in which he was seeing a person who was better to look at
than me. I clawed my thighs slowly and deeply beneath the duvet. In my head
I swore off sugar, milk, bread, anything that might nourish me. I vowed to
wake at five a.m. and do sit-ups until I couldn’t breathe.
I think that my easy offering of myself to others is a way to dispute this
pain, to fight with myself. Who cared what anyone did, if I could do this? If I
could disregard myself first, then what did it matter if he did too?
I hate to write that, to put my facts in the hands of people who will sneer
and feel annoyed by their tawdry debasement.
Those who have been betrayed themselves, who cannot imagine cheating,
who think of it as a crime that should be punishable by law, as some friends
of mine do, will find it a self-serving and pathetic excuse for my infidelities.
There are those of you, the enlightened readers, who will find my willing
debasement embarrassing. You will say that my choices are my own and
should not be refracted through the lens of my need for men and their
approval. They believe that any sexual greed is only my right and should be
embraced, that I should simply extricate myself from monogamy, from stern
boyfriends and their paternal domination, that I should wallow in my
incontinent sexuality and enjoy it without shame.
But both things can be true.
True, yes, that I love to have sex, and that my love of it is not only about
the act but about the multitude. I love the sex of knowing someone very well
for years and just what will make them crumble and break open, but I also
love to have sex with new people for not much more than their newness. I
wish, when I leave them, that I could stay and sleep with them a hundred
more times until I’ve exhausted all their strangeness, but I know too that the
fact I can’t is what makes the meeting so sacred.
Those moments have been the rawest, most tender flaying of myself, a
return to the simplicity of what I know to be more or less the point of life, of
coming together with another person without care for what the next day will
bring, unexpected connection without fear.
True also, though, that despite my often sincerely shameless enjoyment of
sexual greed, my promiscuity has sometimes been compelled by self-
loathing. By a sudden and desperate need to have my beauty confirmed,
because I missed a man and wanted to take revenge on him and on myself for
losing him, because I wanted to throw away a good boyfriend I didn’t feel I
deserved.
Tedious, I know, to say such things. People talk more and more about
female desire nowadays, which we all agree is good, is a step forward. But I
am amazed to hear critics upset at any hint that woman’s desire may still be
authored in some way by men.
We should, after all, have our own desires, free of men!
Of course we should. I can only imagine; I would love to feel it. I would
love to have one moment of want in my life when I am sure what I’m feeling
is all my own and nothing to do with men, with what has happened with men
in the past, with what they have said about me and my body, what thoughts
they have put in my head without me even knowing.
It doesn’t mean that I blame them very much, or excuse myself from
blame. Why do I have to call them bad, and myself good, to simply observe
what takes place in the world? What power men have had over me seems
more like a neutral fact than a reason for me to hate them. And who would I
be to hate them anyway? Couldn’t I have made myself immune to them with
will and education and pride, in this late century, couldn’t I have had some
other great love in my life than for them?
Of course I could, but I did not, and this, my story, is the story of that
failure.
 3

Ciaran flew to Copenhagen to visit his mother in April. I unravelled in the

apartment, alone at last. I mixed tequila with soda and lime and sat on the
couch drinking and smoking from six until midnight.
I leafed furiously through glossy women’s magazines, always with one
hand on the internet, checking, scrolling, refreshing. There was not a single
night I did not go to bed shitfaced.
My mind was a flapping, beating thing, never still. I realised in his
absence that I had become used to killing this feeling with whatever Ciaran
was doing at the time, whether that was fucking me or ignoring me or
sneering at me. The hysteria, the upset was bad, but its absence was – was. It
was absence. It was the great nothing of my heart, my own boundless greed
and inability to be sated reflected back at me.
It was a stroke of luck that I had chosen someone so aloof, so in love with
another woman.
Maybe I had even chosen him because of it, because he so resisted loving
me.
But it wouldn’t have mattered in the end.
Whatever he offered me would never have sufficed. I had chosen
someone who was by nature indifferent, and made it my project to make him
love me.
It had seemed impossible, but I had made it happen in the end.
I realised this when he was gone. He called me and told me he missed me.
‘I want to be in bed with you,’ he said, and I could hear the smile in his
voice and was startled by its fondness and lack of guile.
How had I done it, broken down this man who seemed so like a statue, so
unmoving and perfect? I marvelled at my own power.
People said that you had to be yourself, and be strong and independent to
be in love.
 They said that meekness and submission would only drive men away, that
confidence was attractive. But I had done it, had worn him down with
weakness.
He did not love me – couldn’t, for what Me was there to love? What Me
had he ever known? – but he had become attached to me, dependent on me.
I had carefully created a circumstance in which a kind of love could be
bred in him, like a scientist manipulating lab conditions.
I had exhausted his reserves, eroded his natural resistance, and now I was
finished.
May 2014
 1

At first I wrote my frustrations only to myself. I allowed myself to say to my

diary, cautiously, that it was difficult to be with Ciaran, with a person so
negative and lacking in affection.
Then, every few weeks, there would be some man who caught my eye in a
particular way, made me feel vibrantly, visibly sexual. I had not felt bold this
way in so long, and it came back to me how much I loved the brazen public
nature of it.
I stood on a tram gripping a handrail and looked up to see an attractively
wealthy-looking man in an olive overcoat staring at me and I looked back just
as boldly and for the rest of the journey we caught eyes again and again.
When not looking directly at him I still presented myself to him, moving
my lips, wetting them in a way that could just about be plausibly natural. My
whole body was flush with the heat of it, between my legs bright with
feeling.
I wrote these incidents down. I wrote, timidly at first, and then with
growing abandon, the kinds of things I would have liked the men to do to me.
My diary became a valve. I got home from work and still I cooked our meals
and asked how his day was, but would be looking forward already to when
that was over and I could be alone with my thoughts. I wondered if he
noticed that I no longer persisted when he ignored me or was spiteful, that I
did not cry or panic or lock myself in the bathroom any more.
We slept together less and less, but gradually enough that it was only
cause for him to occasionally grumble, could be put down to the natural
waning of long-term desire. He seemed not to notice that anything was really
different in me.
I still believed that I loved him. The love was so real to me. I wrote in my
diaries about it. I blamed myself for what was wrong between us, my sexual
wantonness and greed. I loved him, I wrote, but he wasn’t satisfying me
sexually. I loved him, I wrote, but he just didn’t like the same things as I did.
I needed to explore. I needed to experiment – but that didn’t mean I didn’t
love him!
I still so believed in love, even then. I needed to cast myself as a slut with
unshakeable proclivities to make any sense of the thing.
I thought often of how I had felt once, so strongly and clearly, that I
would never hurt him. I was determined then to be nothing like Freja.
(I tried not to think, reproachfully, that perhaps his girlfriends cheated on
him because of his penetrating coldness; but think it I did, and with balmy
relief.)
‘He can never find out,’ I wrote, ‘beautiful Ciaran, the most beautiful man
in the world. I can’t confirm his suspicions that everyone – but especially
women – that everyone is essentially bad. Although I suppose I am proving
him right by what I’m doing.’
My mind was splitting once more.
 2

In June, a phone call from my father: he was in hospital in Waterford. There

was a swelling in his throat, which was affecting his swallowing and
breathing. They had taken him to do a biopsy of the tissue obstructing, but
had become so concerned by his breathing that they had kept him in.
We hadn’t spoken in a few weeks. His beloved aunt had died the previous
year and I had made an excuse not to go to the funeral. Things had been
cordially frosty between us since then. I remember that the funeral took place
during a week when my relationship with Ciaran was especially bad and I did
not feel that I could leave in the middle of that. I needed to stay to keep watch
over the badness, keep its embers tidy and undangerous. I preferred to stay
and fight with Ciaran than to go home and be with my family.
My father couldn’t understand why. I blamed it on work, but he knew my
job was perfunctory, a place to turn up late and watch the clock. The journey
was so short, was the thing. The journey would only have been two hours in
the car; he would have come for me.
It was difficult to lie to my father. He knew when I was lying but couldn’t
bring himself to say so outright. He knew that I lied to convince myself that
my messes could be overwritten. And this must have made the lies all the
more jarring for him to hear, covering up things he could have no grasp on.
 3

After my father’s call I arranged to take time off work to go and visit him. I
sat at my desk, emailing my manager and booking tickets. I let Ciaran know
that I was going, not asking him to come with me.
I felt sure that Dad was going to die. A punishment, I thought.
A punishment for ignoring my family; a punishment for needing only
someone who could not see me, instead of needing the people who could.
I had loved my father so fiercely for my entire life.
Through all the squalid mess of my teenage years and beyond, during the
very worst things, we had always stayed close, I had always needed him. It
was only with Ciaran that I had changed, and now the punishment for that
would come, the thing I had feared most all my life.
I was gripped by a sudden awareness of how terribly alone I was. My
father was one of the few anchors I had to myself. When I didn’t know who I
was at a given moment I could think of him and count the years back to the
start. When I didn’t know who I was I could at least think of him and say, I
am his. Without him, would I be forced to be this new person, this Ciaran’s-
person for the rest of my life? What would hold me down any more, what
would make me real? I felt that I would simply float away, that there would
be nothing left of the thing I called Me before Ciaran.
I tapped my limbs and hummed tunelessly the whole journey down,
buzzing with anxiety; I needed to see my father. If I saw him before anything
happened then things would be OK. Just as when, years ago, Ciaran had left
me I had been consumed by the feeling that things would turn out all right if I
could only make him answer his phone or look me in the eye. My huge,
ridiculous ego – the belief that I could stop and start the world with my
presence.
When I found his room, he smiled at me and I burst into tears and ran to
kneel beside him and grasp his hand saying, ‘Dad, Dad, Dad.’ He didn’t look
ill, but he looked old. His eyes were as warm and bright as ever but there
were new lines. His hair was all white now, and soft and thin like a baby’s.
So much time had passed. So much time had passed since I had thought
clearly about anything but Ciaran.
He laughed at my histrionics and patted my back in the same tender
awkward way we had always showed physical affection to each other.
‘Everything’s OK,’ he said. ‘And if it’s not, we’ll take care of it and then
it will be.’ He spoke slowly, painfully.
I cried, not because I didn’t believe him, but because I did.
I had so missed listening to him say this thing, this thing he had always
said to me throughout my life, in a million different ways. He had always
said it, and I had always listened, always believed it, no matter how terrible
the thing I was enduring. But I hadn’t heard it in years now, had not cared to
listen for it, and I cried because I was ashamed and for all the other things I
had been deaf to, the sounds like this I would never get back. My dad was
always able to save me from anything, no matter how reckless or
inexplicable, he was always able to save me from anything but myself.
 4

That evening, having been assured by my father and his doctor that nothing
bad had actually happened yet, and that nothing at all would change
overnight, I was restless and fidgety, unable to sit still or to be alone with my
mind. I needed to see somebody, and went into the city to find my ex-
boyfriend Reuben.
Reuben was my first love. We had met when I was fifteen and he was
seventeen, fallen in a helpless, unfairly incomparable love. Until I met
Ciaran, every boy and man I knew was measured against him and left badly
wanting. Physically, he was the only real precursor to Ciaran.
We met at a techno night – an inordinately popular genre of music in
Waterford – and were a couple a week later. He was long and angular and
thin like Ciaran, but golden and dark instead of pale and blond. His eyes were
a soft and clear light brown, like a cartoon woodland animal’s. He was only
seventeen but seemed much older than me. He had three tattoos and was
already in university, having skipped two years.
When we met I was a virgin, and nervous of sex. I had briefly dated boys
before him, boys I had liked very much but who had shoved their hands down
my pants or into my shirts with no warning or finesse. I had pushed them
away and they had left me because of it.
Reuben and I wrote letters to each other when he was in university in
Dublin and I was home, during the week. We wrote five pages of A4 refill
pad, back and forth, every week. They were filled with lyrics, bits of poems,
little drawings, as well as everything we were doing and feeling. It was the
first time I was open in this way, outside of my diary.
I wrote poetry at the time, and won some prizes. The poems were good,
sometimes because of a genuine candour, and often because I was not yet
worldly enough to know to avoid plagiarism of theme and style. One poem I
wrote about Reuben won a prize, and I flushed reading it aloud in a children’s
library, because it was so intimate and bodily. His was the first body I knew
and I loved it deeply. It was the first time I loved a man’s body, and the only
time that love was not somehow dark or convoluted or ruined. We never had
sex.
He was shy, reluctant or unable to name what we had together. That didn’t
matter – it was as true and obvious as the fact of our bodies. On Valentine’s
Day he gave me a card, in the square where we met with our friends most
weekends to stand and smoke and drink coffee and swap CDs.
‘Don’t read it now,’ he said, and kissed me. I tore the envelope as soon as
he was out of sight and read it hurriedly.
‘I’m excited we will both be on holidays soon,’ he wrote, ‘so that I can
see you all the time. I love you.’
It was the first time a boy had said those words to me. I remember them
clearly because I did something so cartoonish when I read them: I literally
jumped for joy, right there in the street, in the middle of Waterford, with
everyone watching.
We broke up six months later because of me. I was unhappy even then,
even when I was blissfully happy with him. I was already deeply into my
cutting and starving. I knew enough to keep that hidden from him at first, and
then I slowly forgot. I began to confide in him how I felt, my inability to
function, what I was driven to do to myself.
It upset him. He was harsh with me – harsh for him, anyway.
‘You can’t complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you
aren’t trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself.’
I found this outrageous. I was shocked that he was not impressed and
cowed by my delicacy, as other boys had been. Why did he not find my frail,
picturesque sadness alluring? I think now this was my first and most serious
mistake – not listening to that advice. He was just a teenager, wasn’t right
about everything or even most things, but he was right about that.
I was wallowing in the glamour of my sadness. I read an article in Vogue
around that time which said something like: ‘This season’s looks lean
towards Gothic drapery, knee socks and heavy eyeliner, showing something
that every teenage girl knows: that sadness can be a kind of beauty.’
We kept on, for a while, after that, but it was over for me. I broke up with
him almost a year to the day that we had got together. We saw each other a
handful of times after that, after he’d moved to England, around Christmas or
in summer.
There was never bad blood. We never once met up without crying and
kissing. He became a sort of touchstone for me, as the rest of my life spiralled
out of control. Once when I was nineteen we met and kissed and cried as
usual and told each other that we loved each other.
‘Let’s stop messing around,’ I said. ‘We love each other. I made a mistake
before. Let’s just be together properly.’
He agreed, and then I got the bus back to Dublin and we never spoke of it
again. But it was enough, or almost, to know that he was alive and that he
loved me.
 5

We met in the square as it was becoming evening. He looked good, a little

broader in the shoulders, had a swimmer’s body now, had joined a team when
he moved to Montreal to do his fellowship.
He was tanned and had more tattoos than before, looked like somebody I
would have seen and coveted in a magazine, in NME or Vice, when I was
younger. He looked like someone I would have chosen as an example of the
future I wanted for myself. His lean bicycle and lean self and the earring and
the ease in his body.
He smiled up at me from the bench and I was amazed, as I always was
when I saw him again, to feel no differently towards him than when we first
met. It always felt like a sleight of hand, a bit of magic, that we both still
liked each other so much, that nothing had ever ruined things for us
definitively. I felt so much myself with Reuben, so rooted still.
Was it the lack of sex that did it? It was hard not to think that, like the
girls in Halloween, it was only the sex that doomed me; hard not to think that
I might have got on all right without it. I could have been the Final Girl.
We went to a pub and huddled in a corner, sitting close together to hear
one another over the noise of the ceilidh band playing. I told him about my
father, about Ciaran, told him more about the reality of Ciaran than I had
anyone but my diary.
I heard myself speeding through the whole story, making a meal of all the
ways that Ciaran had wronged me, skimming over my own transgressions,
my willing compliance. I didn’t mention more recent developments, my
thwarted rages, the sexual adventuring I was doing in my head more and
more now.
I tried to point him towards how healthy I was, how I ate so well and even
tried to exercise a little. I told him how I always slept a full night, not
mentioning that the teenage insomnia he had known had mutated into a kind
of sleeping sickness, that I could sleep for twelve or more hours now, and
would if left alone.
It was late and we were drunk, holding hands.
‘This is so you,’ Reuben said.
‘What is?’
‘You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it’s
uniquely awful.’
I stared back at him mutely (even then aware of how my face became
prettier in vacancy, even then parting my lips and sweetly widening my eyes
in surprise).
He laughed. ‘It’s fine. I’m not giving out. I know you; I know this is what
you’re like. It’s just – you’ve barely asked about me. You have no idea
what’s going on in my life. You never really have.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, face moving closer.
‘No! I’m not going to list all the things wrong with my life so you can
take them in and then compare them to yourself.’
It was bad, what he was saying, and true, but he was smiling as well.
‘I don’t know how you get away with it,’ he said, still smiling and shaking
his head, and then I kissed him.
2019, Athens

I see beautiful teenage boys now and my heart bends at their broad shoulders
and neat torsos, the golden triangle, at their tanned long calves and
miraculous forearms. I hunger in their direction just like the men I disdain for
doing the same to girls. I can’t help viewing these boys in the same way I did
when I was a teenager, I see the ones who would have obsessed me, and
guess at which ones would have felt the same about me.
Strange to know you’ll never again be with the kind of person who made
you love first, their imprint inescapable. There are just a few portals
backward, if you don’t plan to become predatory – the boys you loved back
then, grown now, but the teenager still visible within, to you at least. With
them and only them, you can feel yourself as rapt and opened up and simple
as you once were, both of you as beautiful as children to each other.
Nobody who loves me from now on will ever know, really know, really
believe, that I was a beautiful child once.
 6

I stayed at home for three more nights after the biopsy had been taken. I
googled my father’s symptoms relentlessly, and found a million people
saying it was nothing and another million saying it was terminal.
When I slept with Reuben in his old room it was like sleeping with a
wonderful ghost. I touched him in places I had forgotten and then
remembered them in an instant. I touched new parts of him, places I hadn’t
when we were young but which still felt familiar.
At first I froze when he touched me, afraid I wasn’t as lithe and slight as I
had been when we’d known each other, but under his hands my body felt
reversed, pliable and unused again. I felt virginal, felt that we could correct a
decade of wrongs together.
He trailed his hands over my ribs and stomach and I didn’t breathe in, as I
instinctively did still with Ciaran to make myself thinner.
Nothing was dramatic. It was soft and easy. It was almost funny: we both
laughed. It was like the feeling of talking late at night after the light had been
turned off and trying not to let your laughter run away with you.
It was amazing how different it was to sleeping with Ciaran. Part of what
had made me addicted to Ciaran’s body and to having sex with him was the
quality of my need. It was acute, desperate, anguished. It was trying to win an
argument.
It wanted him to surrender to me, either to become totally loving, totally
mine, or to play dominant in an overt and quantifiable way. But he just
existed, passive and removed, fucking me in a way that reminded me of
necessary tasks, of the way he ate – not without any pleasure, but even so,
with a heavy sense of function. I could never get any closer to him, could
never satisfy myself. And that made me want him more for years, had made
me wild with violent need.
Now, without it, I could feel the silliness of sex for the first time in
forever. It wasn’t cinematic or beautiful. I could feel my body once more and
it did not feel unfinished, as it always did with Ciaran. It did not feel like
something that had been forgotten about in the middle of creation, did not
feel like a hasty sketch without the proper lines put in. It didn’t feel in wait.
I felt it slide, slick and friendly, against Reuben’s and the flesh didn’t
seem spare but instead put to good use. I filled his hands, made him happy. I
was surprised by my voracity, surprised at all the things I wanted to do to him
and the shamelessness with which I asked for his permission to do them. He
was beautiful, and he was my friend, and I wanted him so much, and he was
not Ciaran.
I felt no guilt that night.
We woke the next morning, his breath was sweet and milky, even first
thing, like a kid’s. We grinned at one another sheepishly and kissed and
stretched about yawning in bed, hoping his parents had left the house. I didn’t
try to say this time that we were in love and should be together.
We didn’t need to talk about anything. It was perfect – he was going back
to Montreal, and I had my own foreign land to return to. I was keeping the
secret of Ciaran from myself, storing him with demented precision just
outside my active thoughts. I could feel him there, waiting to erupt and ruin
the calm glow of my morning with Reuben, but I kept him at bay.
 7

When I left Reuben’s house, walking to the hospital to say goodbye to my

father, a surge of adrenalin crested through me.
I walked faster and harder and concentrated on my father, what I wanted
to ask his doctor, trying to use all the panic up on that. Near the Ardkeen
Road I broke into a ragged jog – how Ciaran would have rolled his eyes to
see me gasp, my slobby technique! – and began to shake my head violently
from side to side when an intrusive thought came, the idea of me putting my
key in the door, of him looking at me, the idea of him knowing what I had
done, him smelling it on me even without a sense of smell, knowing in an
instant that I was disgusting, that he had been right all along to think me
unworthy of him.
I shook my head, rattling my brain, blurring my vision, and when that
didn’t work I bent down on the side of the motorway and closed my eyes and
pressed my thumbs into the recesses of the sockets, and drove my knuckles
into my temples hard, letting me see only flashing blobs of white and dark,
flooding my vision, saturating me entirely.
In the hospital my dad was listlessly eating and it moved me to see his
boredom. I sat with him for a few hours, watching news programmes and
quiz shows and chatting about this and that. He asked what I was reading and
I could not remember the last book I had read so instead recounted an opinion
of a novel I had gathered from a Sunday supplement. His voice sounded
clearer than it had the day before. I wanted to be touching him, to have my
arms around him or to lie in the bed beside him but there was no way to do
these things.
On the bus back to Dublin I travelled in a state of prayer. I bargained and
pleaded. I would give up drinking, food, pleasure. I would stop daydreaming
about sex with strangers, stop writing sordid thoughts in my diary. I would
relent, go back to being whatever had made him capitulate in the first place.
 And then my father couldn’t die and Ciaran couldn’t leave me.
Ciaran would never have to suffer through finding out what I was really
like – so desperate to be filled up, to be of use, to please.
I would be small and safe and dry and quiet. I would learn humility and
true meekness, not just the performance of them.
 8

When I got in that evening I greeted him and curled up beside him on the
sofa where he sat typing in pyjamas and glasses. His hair was a little long and
the loose curls smelled like sour sweat and I breathed them in. I threw my
bag and coat on the ground, as though completely exhausted, and pulled a
blanket over me.
He asked how my dad was and I told him we wouldn’t know for a while. I
rested my head on his shoulder as my heart hammered in my chest,
wondering if my voice sounded different, if there was some hair or mark of
Reuben’s on me somewhere which could give me away.
Later in the bathroom I saw that a small bruise dappled my thigh, and
though it could have come from anywhere, I cut right through it with a small
kitchen knife, filled briefly with the mad and pure decisiveness of a teenager
once more. I would have carved his name all over me if I could have, if I
thought it would make him happy.
I was home, and every mitigating thought had vanished. In Waterford I
had tried to rationalise what I had done, telling myself that Reuben and I were
such old news that it barely counted as infidelity, telling myself I was upset
and needed comfort, I was drunk.
But back in Dublin – back in my familiar position, slumped on the tiles,
head against the cistern, muffling sobs into my lap to avoid a fight – I knew
the truth. I had done it because I wanted to do it. I had done it because I
wanted someone who wasn’t Ciaran, wanted someone whose affection and
attention was straightforward. I wanted something easy to understand, and I
understood Reuben and I understood fucking and I got what I wanted. Ciaran
was going to lie in bed beside me, touch me, maybe even want to fuck me
himself, not knowing that I was dirty, and a liar.
I didn’t understand how I had lied about so many things when they all felt
true at the time. I loved him so much, no other love had ever felt as stingingly
clean as the one I felt for him. I had meant it when I said that I wanted more
than anything never to hurt him, to help him be able to trust people again.
Even that, I supposed, had been a lie – I hadn’t wanted him to trust
people, I’d wanted him to trust me, only me. I wanted to be the one who
could shatter his outside and get to the good parts, wanted to be the saint who
made him see it wasn’t all women who were sluts and liars; or maybe to
make him see that it was all of them, except for me, only me, and I was the
only one he needed.
But now I’d done it, now I’d fucked it up. No matter how sweet Reuben
and I were, and how innocent the quality of our ancient romance, the physical
facts were plain. I had let another man kiss and touch and bend and fuck me,
and were Ciaran to know these facts he would despise and leave me. I cried
harder, biting down on my wrist to shut myself up, my brain a livid and
impotent blaze.
After calming myself down I went to our bedroom and took out my
computer. I blocked Reuben on every available platform and then on my
phone too. My desperation had made me clear headed and cool. There was no
strand between the two men except me. Nobody could ever tell him but me.
He wouldn’t find out. I just had to deal with it, put it away, and be good.
 9

For one more month I did live this way, I pretended it had never happened,
that it was a thing that could be ignored. I cooked dinner and stayed in and
stopped drinking. I read books and stopped watching garbage TV. On Friday
nights when he went out, I waited for him to come back, and did nothing
except wait. He seemed happy, as happy as he had ever been. Having sex
with him made me feel ill and psychotic with splitting but I forced myself to
do it anyway, put it down as one more duty to make things safe again.
Then my father called in July, telling me he had got the all-clear.
He would not only live, he hadn’t been very sick at all. Everything was
fine.
That night I called Ciaran to tell him I would be home late, and I went to a
bar.
I drank wine on my own until I was drunk, and then I went to a party,
where I met a man I had known briefly many years before. We kissed against
the wall and then left to find a hotel and fucked there all night, him pulling
my hair and slapping my face and grabbing my throat, me urging him to keep
doing it, asking him for more, more, more.
 10

In the morning Noah left to find his band and get back on the road, a ferry to
catch and a gig in Liverpool that evening. He grinned his lopsided grin and
told me he would be back in a few weeks and would call me then, ruffling my
fringe and kissing my forehead as he went.
I showered in boiling water. My hair was a long matted mass from being
tossed around with such casual abandon and I tore it into manageable
segments, to soap it through and make it normal again. I scrubbed myself
everywhere, especially inside. I was raw from the sex and made myself rawer
with the cleaning. I had no idea what I would say to Ciaran when I returned
home. My phone had died early the evening before.
I left, walking down Fitzwilliam Square.
I had been at a party in Portobello with Christina, already completely
totalled, and had recognised Noah. He looked like an irresistibly attractive
mess, handsome and chubby in a way that suggested pleasurable excess and
partying, a chipped front tooth, mismatched clothes. He was something like a
surfer gone wrong, with that long hair and the crinkled smile, and the
laughing, knowing eyes. I saw him staring at me.
‘Don’t I know you?’ I walked over and said.
He told me I was right, and I remembered then: we had met at a gig years
before when he had played in a line-up with an ex-lover of mine.
‘Are you still with that guy?’ he asked, and I told him that I was not.
I kept trying to figure out what the exact moment was, the moment where
I went from being convinced that I loved Ciaran and would do whatever it
took to be with him, to standing swaying at a hotel reception at five a.m. with
a near-stranger, giving it all up again, and again, and again.
 11

I saw on my way home, checking my balance, that I had paid for the hotel –
the whole lot of it, a week’s wages for me, another little indignity to store
away for later.
I had tried to do myself up as convincingly as possible, normal, pretty
make-up, but I could feel myself sweating through it.
I had never been as afraid as I was that morning standing outside our
apartment looking up at the window, seeing his books and cigarettes resting
on the sill, knowing he was in there.
The moment I walked in I could see that everything had changed for us,
for ever, already. Gone was the blank Ciaran, the cold Ciaran, the one who
made me second-guess myself. He was frantic and red-eyed and shaking. He
was shouting in a way that was almost crying.
I had been so worried about what I had done – the sex, the hotel – I had
forgotten all about the fact that I had simply failed to come home.
‘Where were you? Where the fuck were you?’ he shouted in rising waves
of indignation, grabbing my coat lapel and yanking on it.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I kept repeating, waiting for him to calm down, waiting to
lie. I tried to touch his wrist soothingly and he pushed me away. I half fell,
half sat on a kitchen chair.
‘Are you still drunk?’ he demanded, and I went to deny that I was before
thinking better of it. I told him that I was. I told him that I was so relieved
about my dad’s news that I wanted to drink, that I had met Christina and we
had had too much and gone back to her place and I’d just fallen asleep on the
sofa.
He believed me. It was incredible the way he believed me. He was still so
angry, but he was angry about the drinking and about the not coming home,
about having worried him. He simply believed me, thought it was true just
because I said it was. I marvelled that he who had lied to me for so long,
about Freja and all of it, could assume I was telling the truth.
I got undressed and showered again, left him alone to come down from
the shouting a little, and to clean myself more. When I finished and came
back to the bedroom, he grabbed me and discarded my towel, lay me down
on the bed.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again and again as he kissed my neck and my hollow
chest.
‘I know,’ he said, and kept going, insistent, although I was still and did
not respond. His hands moved over me, touched me in the way he did when
he wanted to have sex. I said nothing but did not move away. He put his
fingers inside me, although I was not wet.
‘I’m really tired,’ I whispered, wriggling away. I didn’t like to turn him
down, but the alternative was worse. My body felt radioactive.
He smiled at me and lay my head down on the mound of pillows, arranged
them, fanned my hair out so that I felt like a doll, or a corpse in repose. He
knelt over me and kissed me gently on the forehead and, so slightly, in a way
that could usually make me shiver, on the lips.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, and he shushed me. The way he was treating me
would have made me so happy not long ago, the tenderness, the attention. It
reminded me of a doctor’s attention, firm and sure in that way. A few times a
year I would go on my lunch break to give blood, just because I liked how
careful they had to be with you, and that they’d touch you with such practised
ease.
It was hurting me now, the attention. I wanted him to forgive me but to
leave me alone, let me get some sleep, wake up and start again as though
none of it had happened. I closed my eyes but he didn’t stop. He kissed and
stroked my neck again and began to move downwards.
‘Please,’ I said, and then, ‘I don’t want to’ – a thing I’d never had to say
before.
In the past he had turned away huffily at the merest hint of reluctance.
He knows, I thought, on some level he must know that I’ve done
something.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, still smiling down at me gently. ‘You don’t have to do
anything. I’ll do it. I’ll make you feel better.’
And he went on kissing me, my breasts and my ribs. I prayed that the
bruises that would surely appear had not appeared yet.
 I tried one more time to stop it, turning to my side and huddling that way,
saying, ‘I – I –’ Not able to construct a sentence that accounted for my
distaste.
‘It’s OK.’ He smiled again, as though I was just denying myself pleasure
to be self-punitive, as though I needed to be reassured that I was allowed to
enjoy this. He gently hooked an arm beneath my knee and prised my legs
apart, and then he went down on me.
He held my hands down by my sides as he did so.
I rolled my eyes back in my skull as far as they would go, trying to get at
the white light to block things out. I wanted to cry with repulsion, the idea of
his mouth being where Noah’s dick had been hours before. And yet I could
not make him stop without telling him the truth, without making him hate me.
I could not bear the idea of him hating me. I was afraid of him, but I was
selfish, too.
I counted in my head and when I thought I could, I faked an orgasm,
stiffening the sinews in the softest part of my upper inner thigh, gasping and
grabbing at his hand. I thrust myself towards him one, two, three times and
then collapsed.
‘Thank you,’ I said, and had to hug him close to me for one more moment
before I could turn over and pretend to sleep.
 12

That was when it should have ended. It seems insane to me now that I
somehow went on, but I believed still that I loved him and that the cheating
was a symptom of my innate foulness. I didn’t deserve love but I needed it.
The idea of telling him was simply beyond my imagination. The idea of
willingly severing our domestic, daily devotions; the idea of having to get up
in the morning without him. I could not picture it. It wasn’t just that I dreaded
it, I was genuinely unable to conceive of a world in which these things would
take place.
I was in great pain, the lies and suppression, the smiles and fucking I had
to fake. But I had lived with pain before. It would recede, I knew. A person
can get used to anything.
Something else, too: I could not imagine reversing the narrative of us. I
knew that I was bad, but nobody else did. With the telling, there would be a
rewrite.
The way all of my friends secretly or not-so-secretly hated him, and
thought he was bad for me. The fact that he had loved Freja, left me for her.
His incredible coldness, the way his whole body could act as a refusal, facing
away from me as I cried. The way he spoke to me, which left me feeling that
I must be insane. All of these things would be different, re-cast. It would
change everything, the telling, the badness inside me coming real.
August 2014
 1

Noah and I messaged every day. I sent him pictures of my body and he made
me laugh in a way I hadn’t in for ever. One day in the office as we were
chatting he told me to go to the bathroom and lock myself in a cubicle and
masturbate thinking about what we had done in the hotel. I tucked my phone
into my bra so my boss wouldn’t see me carrying it out, and did as he told
me. I came explosively, the thought of his lopsided grin looming over me, his
dick in my mouth. I sent him a picture of my flushed face afterwards so he
would know.
It felt almost like a safe game, a reasonable distraction because he didn’t
live in Dublin and was far away touring America.
I thought about him all the time, to get me through the nights at home. I
thought about him when I cooked and when I bathed and when Ciaran had
sex with me.
Then, he was headed back in our direction. He had gigs in Scotland and
England, finishing with one in London, and asked me to come and see him.
I had been intentionally vague about what my situation was, saying only
that I lived with my boyfriend but that things were complicated, implying
perhaps that we were open, or had broken up already. I shouldn’t have
worried that he would care in any case. Part of what was between us was a
conspiratorial acknowledgement that we were gross, that we were perverts,
that it was nastiness bonding us together. He himself had some kind of long-
term, on-again / off-again situation, which he would allude to occasionally
without explanation or worry.
I knew as soon as he asked that I would go to see him, I could not imagine
not doing it. There was money in my bank account and nothing to stop me. I
foresaw in an instant the bus to the airport and the bad coffee on the plane
and how excited I would feel pulling into the station. I booked a flight
quickly before I could change my mind.
 I told Ciaran that Lisa and Christina were going to see a gig and I was
going to go with them. He was a little unhappy but not in any unmanageable
sense, was trying to be cute about it.
‘But I’ll miss you,’ he pouted. ‘It’s a long weekend; I thought we could
hang out.’
I smiled and kissed him and booked a hotel.
It was the first time I had planned to cheat and the planning was almost as
good as the doing, every boring bit of journey made potent. My alarm went
off at five a.m. and I looked at his beautiful sleeping face and felt a pain so
tender and engulfing it could hardly be called pain at all. I left and closed the
door with the prickly knowledge that I was changing things.
I was doing something. I was finally doing something.
On the bus to the airport I did my make-up in exquisite, slow detail until I
was completely beautiful.
When we arrived, two elderly women who had been sitting beside me
grabbed my shoulder to tell me they’d been watching the whole time, amazed
that I hadn’t let my eyeliner or mascara slip, afraid I was going to poke my
eye out! I was gorgeous, they said, and I was to enjoy my holidays. I smiled
sweetly and went to find a bathroom to check my outfit.
On the train from Stansted to London I re-did my make-up and drank a
quarter bottle of wine and brushed out my hair and took pictures of myself. I
put one on Instagram and sent the same one to Ciaran.
Cute, he replied.
As the train pulled into Liverpool Street Station, light flooding down from
the glass roof, I felt the incautious excitement I had as an eighteen-year-old
moving to Dublin. That feeling of being young in a city, letting it do things to
you, wanting to become something different in it.
It was lunchtime when I arrived at the hotel, a cheap one near London
Bridge, and I took a long bath and removed all my make-up.
Noah and I messaged about how excited we were to see one another. My
heart was pounding already, I couldn’t stop smiling. I reminded myself not to
start drinking until it was evening. We weren’t meeting until eight p.m., at the
bar in Brixton his band was playing.
At six I reapplied all my make-up and got dressed in a short blue dress I
had bought specially, then went to the hotel bar and drank two gin and tonics
on the patio.
 A group of drunk German football fans were there too and cooed and
shouted at me and I glared back with icy indifference. I looked so good. The
discrepancy between what was going on inside me and how good I looked
made this power of mine seem infinite.
The way that I looked lent all of the inward mess a saving grace, a chaotic
glamour.
I will be glad for this when I’m old, I thought to myself, stubbing out
another cigarette. I will want to remember this exact feeling, of sitting on a
hotel patio waiting to go and have sex with a man I want so much I could
faint.
I’ll want to remember what it was like to have a body that couldn’t be
denied or regarded with ambivalence. I’ll miss all of it, even the secrets, even
the lies.
 2

When I arrived at the bar he was standing smoking in the yard with the other
guys from his band. He introduced me and they all smiled and said hello and
didn’t make me feel weird or smirk, although I imagine they all knew what I
was there to do, that there could be no other reason for my presence.
They wandered back into the venue and he turned to me and framed my
face with his rough hands and touched my hair, looking at me like he
couldn’t believe me – but not with seriousness, not in any earnest or
embarrassing way, just like he was looking at a particularly interesting plant
or animal or toy, something fun and pleasurable. He was simple and easy and
so was the pleasure he took in me and the way I looked.
He led me over to his van, littered with guitars and empty fast-food
containers, and we climbed into the front seat. We faced the shadow of an
ivy-covered wall, but were exposed enough for it to feel absurd and
dangerous. I sat straddling him and bent my neck to kiss him so that his head
was submerged in the sweep of my hair. I thought distantly how clean I was
compared to him. I smelled the hotel-fresh lavender shampoo on myself, and
the weeks-old tobacco sweat of him.
I looked down at myself. I was white and pink and in a thin blue dress
which squarely framed the tops of my breasts and ended halfway down my
thighs. I was strawberry ice cream, blue sky. I smelled so good it was crazy.
He was sun-beaten, handsomely haggard from living out of a suitcase and
off booze and burgers, his skin tawny and tough like a farmer’s. He fumbled
with his zip and his dick sprang loose; a stale, faintly urinary smell escaped
with it and the distaste I felt made me more excited.
As in my dreams of fucking Freja, I could let myself feel pleasure from
imagining it was me and not him who was doing the fucking.
I pushed myself into his head, tried to feel how it feels to crack
something, someone, wide open.
 I looked down at my body and was hysterical with the heat of invasion,
mine and his.
He fucked me quickly and I let him come inside me, and walked back into
the bar behind him, holding his hand, with the warm drool unfurling between
my legs.
It felt like other men in the bar were looking at me appreciatively. I
wondered if they could sense it somehow, if it was like being in heat, if they
could smell his on me and wanted to cover it with their own.
Why does it take this to make me feel myself?
I was so myself, thinking of nobody but myself, I was nobody at all but
myself in those moments.
2019, Athens

Sometimes, nowadays, when I am bored and alone, I try to speak to people. I

talk to other lonely people in bars, I try to make them shocked enough to say
something interesting, or to walk away from me.
If you saw me you would think I was very cruel, often laughing in the sad,
soft faces of the kind of men who drink alone in this country, where drinking
alone is not very normal, as they shrink away from me. They are grey-
skinned, balding, spectacle-wearing. They are just the wrong side of gawky,
wearing T-shirts of black metal bands and bad shorts, flirting hopelessly with
the beautiful waitresses. They don’t notice me so much any more. I am no
longer a girl.
When I talk to them I ask, ‘Do you think you are lovable?’ And while
they’re thinking about it, or trying to turn away, I say quickly, ‘Do you think
it would be possible for anyone to love you if they could see every single
thing you do?’ And I watch them cringe as though I’ve reached out and
struck them.
‘I’m serious,’ I say. ‘Imagine that everyone could see everything. Every
secret, every base physical ejection, every category of porn you’ve ever
looked at in a kind of coma when you’re numb to the normal stuff. Think
about it all. Every moment of shame, of desperation – do you really think
anyone could love you still? Anyone at all?’
 3

I remember what it was like when I first loved Ciaran, before he left me that
first time at Christmas, when I’d miss him so much when he went anywhere.
He went to Limerick one long weekend to a conference and I had nothing to
do with myself, nor did I want anything to do, I only wanted to be busy
missing him.
I remember lying down in that lonely bedsit and thinking about him and
crying. I wasn’t crying because I was sad or worried, because I wasn’t those
things yet. And I wasn’t crying because of the pain of missing him exactly. I
was crying with a kind of enjoyment at the very fact that I was missing him,
at that modest pain in me whenever I was missing a man.
It felt like a correct pain, a baseline state, and that was what was making
me cry – how right and comforting. I could never be happy without him, but
it was a nice pain, for it could be solved, I knew how to cure it.
And that’s something to recommend love: that it has clear rules like a
game, and it has speeches and sayings you’ll have heard in films and in
songs. There are patterns and there are steps to be taken. If you lose the game
that’s one thing, and that has to be dealt with, but at least there is a game to
be played at all.
I remember when we were broken up I used to wake up crying, having
dreamed all night that he was saying he loved me.
In the dream he was saying it and I was crying because I knew that he
meant it.
I could feel it, I could almost taste the words, they were cool and delicious
like a drink, but I knew that when I woke up it would stop being true.
I remember sitting watching him once when we were having a fight, or I
was having one anyway.
He had kept commenting on what I was making us to eat, commenting on
how much and what I was eating, until finally I asked him to stop, asked him
why he did that all the time.
Immediately the shutter had gone down and his face closed up and he
replied that my insecurities were my own problem and he couldn’t be
expected to rearrange everything for them. He couldn’t watch what he said all
the time just because I felt a certain way.
I cried when his face did that and said sorry and sorry and sorry but he
was gone and moved away from me and sat by the window looking out and
ignoring me.
He was lit up by the street lamps and the lights from the chipper across the
road and even in my growing hysteria it still took me by surprise how
beautiful he was in his absence, how like a painting or a statue sitting there
like that. He could move so far away from me in a moment. I envied him his
ability to remove himself.
He eked out his coldness a little at a time, for as long as we had known
each other, while I saved all of mine for the end.
 4

I remember that I read about Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper seller who died in
the G20 protests in London in 2009 after being struck by a policeman. I was
flipping through a newspaper and saw that he had died and found it sad. The
next day there were more details, that he lived in a hostel, that he was an
alcoholic, and that he had apparently said, ‘I’m just trying to go home, I’m
just trying to go home,’ as he was dying. Reading that, I burst into tears in the
passenger seat of my father’s car. I imagined his life, his alcoholism, his life
in that hostel, his just trying to go home. I cried for days.
When I was a young teenager I heard a story that, long before my time, in
a rural village near Waterford, there was a woman who was poor and she sold
sex to some of the village men, and that the wives of the village had made a
plan and they had murdered her. They may not have meant to, but they did.
They attacked her and put her on the ground and eventually she was dead.
Another story in a newspaper. A young church warden manipulated a
decent, good man in his middle age who was a Christian. The Christian man
was gay, and had never known how to reconcile his Christianity with that
fact. The young church warden made the middle-aged man believe that they
were in love, with a view to taking advantage of him and changing his will.
He staged a ceremony to celebrate their relationship, after which he slowly
poisoned the man until he believed that he was developing dementia. But not
before making him think he had finally found love. ‘At last I do not fear the
prospect of dying alone,’ the dying man wrote. You have to hope that he died
before realising how alone he really was. You have to hope that he died still
thinking that somebody loved him in the way he had wanted to be loved.
In our local paper when I was twelve: there was an elderly woman who
would let some local kids hang around her house and she would make them
cups of tea and give them biscuits, and of course that turned into some older
kids bringing cans and smoking weed, and she didn’t know how to make it
stop and one day one of the older ones hurt her. When you hurt an old person
their skin is paper thin – they made her whole face explode with blue and
purple, and the look on her face was, Why would they? And why would they?
These stories hurt me so badly, but I’ve learned to react to that hurt by
thinking of them again and again, forcing myself to replay the details over
and over and over, until they are meaningless.
You grow cold, or you die yourself.
September 2014
 1

Then there were others, in quick manic succession: first a friend, then a
colleague, and finally an artist.
I was drinking more and more and Ciaran knew that I had changed. I was
grovellingly sweet to him at certain high points, but then would disappear for
whole nights and not apologise, just stumble in pissed and collapse on the
bed.
I started to see my old friends again, and because years had passed and we
were older now it was the really dedicated drunks who maintained the pace I
had known before. There were only a few who could afford to keep it up,
financially and physically. They were carefree and chronically depressed,
artists and musicians with social capital who would be signing on the dole for
the rest of their lives. They were the funniest people in Dublin, as long as you
were drunk too.
They were still DJs and nightclub promoters, some of them, and the ones
who had done well at that were able to justify their continued nightly excess.
The rest of us justified it through them as a proxy – if we were going out, it
was just to see our friends, and it so happened that our friends worked in bars
that didn’t open until eleven p.m. and necessitated great gulps of the cheap
spirit-mixer on offer that week, and a not-inconsiderable number of trips to
the bathroom to snort something or other off a key they held under your nose
for you, politely.
I slept with the next man in this way, high and blind with drink, against
the wall of a disabled toilet in a club on Harcourt Street. It was an old friend
of mine called Mark who sold pills and played in four bands and who used to
take me on hungover chaste dates to McDonald’s when we knew each other
years before.
I didn’t remember the sex afterwards, not really, only the sniggering
friends of his looking over at us from behind the DJ booth after we left the
toilet, and me stumbling home along the canal by myself afterwards.
 2

I was talking to Noah all this time. He was unreal – or what he meant to me
was unreal – but he seemed like a miracle, bursting off my screen whenever
he contacted me, his cleverness and weird hilarity. I would walk around all
day and not look up at all. He took pictures of what he was eating and what
he was seeing and told me what he was thinking without me asking him to.
After the freeze of Ciaran, Noah’s warmth was stunning, a sensory
overload, a person without barrier. The idea that one could live that way was
so wonderful, I didn’t know whether to believe it or not. Was it just a choice?
What was good about him was that he wasn’t even the most important
part of what made him good. He made the world itself seem good and ripe
and ready to be run towards, he made me feel funny and new and fizzing, and
like he wouldn’t even need to be there for that to be true.
 3

I received an email from Lisa, still happy in Berlin with her girlfriend and
new unknowable life.
Though we hardly knew the business of each other’s lives any more, I
knew we still loved each other. She told me in her email that she was
finishing the first draft of her book.
I swallowed, throat prickly with pride and envy – my one dream in
childhood was to make a book.
When I was small, before drinking and men and the rest, books were the
thing that could absorb me entirely and let me forget myself.
I had liked the idea of making something for someone else to do that in. It
seemed like the only thing I might have a real desire to do.
That was a long time ago, of course, and now it seemed borderline
incomprehensible to me that someone could dedicate so much time and effort
to a thing without a known outcome.
Life was so pointless, so opaque and shifting, that I could only think about
immediate feelings.
Immediacy was all I had.
 4

Then it was the same ugly obnoxious colleague who had groped me at the
office party, on another night out – the one who had affected me so deeply by
asking how Ciaran could have let me out like that.
Another blurred, weeping memory of him, of my initial drunken and
reluctant compliance.
Then eventually something like enjoyment or at least need, a need to have
his repellent hands all over me, I remember crying with his hands on my
throat, the awful smell of his rotten inside self, the way he made me feel more
Ciaran’s and more myself all at once, how powerful that was, how terrible.
 5

And finally, there was an artist Ciaran shared a studio with, a sickly-looking
pretty young student with a fashionably horrible haircut.
I turned up there one Saturday night, their fourth-floor room on the quays,
after having been out drinking and dancing until two. I went to see if Ciaran
was around, my phone, as ever, having died in the early evening. I had
forgotten about this boy, who was young and shy and unmemorable.
When I knocked on the door he opened it with his pained, timid
expression and told me that Ciaran had left hours before. He offered me a
beer and we sat on the desks where I’d seen Ciaran work, and we talked and
drank until he was drunk too, and then we kissed and then we had sex.
He alternated between seeming frightened and being erratically violent,
hitting me and pinching me in the softest places and then shrinking back into
himself.
I felt sorry afterwards, not just for myself this time, but for the boy too,
for making him a part of anything.
I felt sorry for whatever was wrong inside him, whatever made him lash
out and withdraw, lash out and withdraw.
 6

I woke up in the morning on my own, the light from the long studio windows
burning all over me and my dry mouth gasping.
I was naked and covered with a piece of tarpaulin. I gathered it to my
body and propped myself up, shading my eyes and squinting out at that grand
grey light over the Liffey you get on cold early mornings.
It was the first day of November in Dublin and it was my birthday. I was
twenty-five years old.
My stomach was roiling, awash with acid. My lip was cut and swollen
from being hit. My knees and the insides of my thighs were bruised, between
my legs bloody, and inside of me there was semen eking out.
I was alone.
I crawled along the floor with one hand on my throbbing head to find my
bag and fumble for my phone, plugged it in and lay heavily down beside it.
I pressed my hot bruised face against the wall, which smelled of paint and
reminded me of school.
(And I thought then of how it had been once there, in school, how much I
loved Bea and how we swapped notes all day long. We struggled not to
convulse with laughter, vibrating and becoming purple with it, sometimes
exploding helplessly at the doodles and nicknames and nonsense and getting
hauled out by a teacher. Remembered going home one midterm and literally
praying to God that we wouldn’t be moved from sitting next to each other in
the classroom, as had been threatened many times, because I loved her so
much.)
The wall felt cold and soothing against the parts of my face that were
swollen and tender, places the strange, sad boy had struck me without
warning.
I wondered how they always knew that I was someone to be hurt.
Even when I didn’t tell them to, they knew somehow that there was a part
of me that accepted or desired it.
But how was it that they knew?
Why was it that nobody ever thought to ask me in which way I wanted to
be hurt, or for how long, or how hard?
And if they had asked, would I have known what to tell them?
I turned on my phone.
There were dozens of missed calls from Ciaran which I scrolled through
blankly, and there were messages from Noah, messages teasing and being
rude and telling me what he was up to, and saying he missed me.
Noah.
To think of him was fortifying in the wreckage of that morning. He was
sturdy and strong and happy. He made me laugh and feel it was possible for
things to start over.
He was smart without being boring, he talked in such a way as to make
me think of new things, things I’d never thought of on my own.
He knew what he wanted to do in the world, and he made himself happy
by enjoying it. I wanted to be near him, to absorb his surety.
I wanted him to touch me gently sometimes and harshly at others, and for
us both always to know, without asking, which one was right in that moment.
I thought of his sleepy eyes fondly regarding me, like I was a thing of
value he coveted and knew that he deserved, his lazy smile and the
irreducible him-ness of him. To know him even a little bit was to sense the
fullness of his character, how it burst through his every joke and kiss and
exclamation.
There was so much him to grapple with, what was in him was so crowded
and chaotic and vibrant that it felt like I would never get bored of sorting
through it. With him it felt that there was no shortage of world to discuss, that
there were no blank spaces or full stops.
The thought of him filled me up comfortingly, reduced the scratchiness in
my worn-out smoky throat and the tenderness of the bruising. Lessened the
adrenalin and fear from the terrible hangover. If I could just stay in a single
moment with him, talking to him and making him smile down at his phone as
I was doing now.
In his messages he said that he was going to move to London for at least a
few months in January, recording with a band there and seeing how things
went, and did I want to come and stay for a while?
 Did I?
I saw it, felt it, straight away.
The journey to the airport, having hastily packed up my things in the
apartment while Ciaran shouted at me.
The unbeatable feeling of being young and alone and on your way to the
next thing.
The cold clear air, moving fast on the icy tarmac towards the terminals,
the sheer pleasure of meeting Noah there and being so free of everything I
had done to myself.
The pleasure of simply seeing what would happen.
We could talk about it all, and about Ciaran, how wrong I had been to
choose a person like that, how painful it was to try to love someone for so
long. He would reassure me that things would be better now and let me cry
sometimes and then we would fuck and be happy and live together in this
new place, brand new to each other.
On Sundays we would go to Deptford and New Cross where his friends
lived and roast chickens and drink the five-pound fizz from Sainsbury’s.
I would work in cafés or pubs and write in the daytimes while Noah was
busy, and in the mornings take long walks around the Rye in Peckham or all
the way to London Bridge and then go along the river.
I would go to Broadway Market with him and eat samples of all the best
things and buy some stinky olives to walk around with. We wouldn’t have
anything to do. The walking around would be the point.
And when he played gigs I would go to some of them – not all, because I
would have my own life, too – and look at him performing and feel proud
and turned on by the privacy of the public act, his face contorting and
breaking into curious ecstatic smiles at high points.
It wouldn’t be just us in the world because he wasn’t that sort of person,
couldn’t be contained even if I wanted to do that to him. I would love him
because of his expansiveness, his open heart and greedy appetites. I wouldn’t
want to contain him.
Some weekends we would get the train to Kent and take day-long walks,
stomping over the coastline for fifteen miles.
(But that wouldn’t be like you, Ciaran would say if he heard. Hiking? And
that would be the point – it wouldn’t be me at all any more.)
Or maybe it would be different to that. Maybe it would be a kind of life I
couldn’t even imagine. Something I had no grounding in, something without
precedent.
I let myself think of all this for a few moments and feel the relief it would
bring.
To let an entirely new thing take me over, which was the only way I
would escape Ciaran alive, that woozy joy of being able to leave a whole life,
my whole self, behind me in an instant.
But I didn’t know him.
But he was just another image.
But I wouldn’t be young and alone – I would be young and on my way to
someone else.
Noah was as different to Ciaran as could be, it was true, but I hadn’t
changed.
I would still be the same, I knew, no matter how badly I would have liked
to believe otherwise.
It might feel at first like I was leaving, swept up in a new, never-felt-
before euphoria, but one day soon that theory would crumble (and probably
not very long afterwards – Noah’s drinking problem mirroring my own, his
rarely spoken-of possible-girlfriend, his natural need to flirt with everyone he
met).
I would be leaving in desperation, not joy, would be bolting away from
something as much as towards another.
No, there would be no end to it that way. There would be no end to it
unless I made one myself.
 7

I got straight into a taxi from the studio, not wanting to leave time enough to
tidy myself up and have the chance to change my mind. I can’t remember
ever having adrenalin like that, every last inch of me jittering and bumping
off the other parts and my heart moving frighteningly from the alcohol and
the knowledge of what I was going to do.
Two parts of me were panicking for different reasons.
The standard part, the one that depended on the dailyness of Ciaran and
the promise of never being left alone, was trying to stop me, trying to tell me
how to cover for this one, to clean myself up and lie.
And now there was another part, and it was so strong and fast it seemed to
be powering the speeding taxi through force of will, a part telling me to run,
run, run. To get out as quickly and as completely as I could. To burn down
the house, to lock him inside, to forget it all as rapidly as reality would allow.
The daily part tried to soothe me, tried running a quick show reel of the
good times Ciaran and I had shared, the ones which mitigated all the rest.
And I did see them, the relief of getting into a quiet bed with him of an
evening, the relief of his occasional dazzling good moods and the way he
could be amusing then, the relief of him taking care of me when I was ill.
I thought then that that was all those times were: relief. They were always
relief from the absence of what I feared, the ordinary, truly daily things: the
coldness, and the ignorance, and the disdain, and the hatred.
The chiding and the shaping of me, the backhanded compliments and
barbed advice. The constant knowledge that I would never, ever be what he
wanted. The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain. It was
binding yourself and feeling good when the bandages came off, it was cutting
a hole in your leg so you could feel it heal.
I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could
consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.
 8

I stumbled out of the taxi, on to Rathmines Road, and it was early enough
that a gang of thirty-somethings laughed at me in my state, perhaps amiably
recognising their past selves in me.
I put my key in the door of our flat but before I could turn it, it swung
open.
He looked at me, up and down, and then turned away and took the stairs
two at a time. I followed behind, heart going like anything in my throat. I
walked into our living room. I put my bag and my things down on the table,
and collapsed heavily on to our couch.
‘I want to break up,’ I said.
My head was still swimmingly drunk.
‘Oh, really?’ he said mockingly.
He wasn’t surprised. I felt a sudden relief. Maybe it would be so easy.
Maybe he had known it was coming. Maybe he felt the same way!
‘Why do you want to break up?’ he asked, eyes still doing the cold
sarcastic dance.
I didn’t know how to respond. I had expected the statement to be its own
event, had expected him to be angry and shocked and shouting.
He turned then, towards our bedroom, and indicated with a brief wave that
I should follow him.
He moved swiftly and smoothly as ever.
I stumbled along the corridor grasping at the walls, head now starting to
really thump.
I turned into our room, where he sat on the edge of the bed.
All around him were my diaries.
He had arranged them so that they fanned extravagantly, taking up the
entire space.
The words were all there. What I had done. Who I had fucked.
 The things I felt about Noah.
My frustration and eventual boredom with him, Ciaran. He sat in the
middle of it all, grinning a terrible slow, hot grin and turned to one of the
notebooks and read it aloud to me.
‘I don’t know why I am the way that I am. I don’t know why I need to be
knocked around and hurt and humiliated in the way that I do. I have no
insight into my reasons. But it simply is true that I do want those things and
that Ciaran does not seem to have any interest in giving them to me.’
He looked up at me again with that awful smile leaking into his usually
beautiful face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and it was almost comic because it was so inadequate.
I was shaking. I needed sugar, cold water, a shower. I needed to leave.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
And it sounded so thin even I didn’t believe it, but then I began to cry. I
sat down in the corner and put my head in my lap and wept and wept. With
one hand I hid my face, and with the other I grasped for him. I touched his
hand and then he stood up.
‘You didn’t tell me you wanted that,’ he said.
I was crying still, not registering what he was saying, or what he was
doing.
He was unbuckling his belt. He was undoing his button and his zip. I was
curled into the furthest reach of the bedroom, hiding myself from what was
going on, from my shame. I was holding a T-shirt of his to my face to catch
the tears and to breathe into.
He was undressed then.
He kneeled where I was and kissed me and the feeling of him not hating
me was so good and so unexpected. I kissed him back, ecstatic with relief.
Then he pushed his hands up my dress quickly and roughly. I made a
noise of surprise.
He kissed me more, gently. I felt absolved for a moment. He was
forgiving me.
He grabbed at my underwear violently, dragging it off me and up-ending
me in the process.
‘Hey!’ I murmured, surprised out of my crying, upset, for the first time,
by the strangeness of the situation and by his behaviour.
He pressed his hand down on my lower abdomen just above my crotch, to
keep me still. My heart was beating so fast. His touching me was making me
feel so sick but it felt necessary. I thought to myself, If it’s just this, and then
I can go, I can do that.
He started fucking me and I closed my eyes and rolled them backward,
trying to get the white light and sparks. Then he hit me.
He slapped me first, and when I didn’t open my eyes, he hit me with his
fist. I looked up at him, mouth open, shocked.
‘I thought this is what you like?’ he said.
I began to cry, and to squirm.
When I squirmed enough that he couldn’t comfortably fuck me any more,
he dragged me up by my hair. He put his dick in my mouth while he forced
me from behind my neck, and fucked me that way.
I began to cry, really cry.
‘Stop crying, you bitch,’ he said, and I looked up at him then, through my
tears, and I saw that he hated me. He hated me entirely and completely.
‘I thought you liked this,’ he said again as he fucked my throat. And when
I cried more, he sneered down at me.
‘This is what you like,’ he kept saying.
 9

When he had finished he walked straight into the shower.

I packed a bag quickly and left.
I stayed in a hotel that night, soaking in a scalding bath.
Two weeks later I left the country.
May 2015
Athens
 1

After Ciaran and I broke up, and I had been in Greece for six months, my
friend Mark asked to visit. I had been alone a long time by then and my
loneliness was of a different nature to what it had been both before and
during my relationship with Ciaran. It existed in a more permanent and
peaceful way, felt like a thing that could reasonably be expected to be
endured for ever. I could not tell yet whether this feeling was one I should
resist.
My new aversion to company felt perverse and dangerous somehow,
implied ensuing decades of strange behaviour, suggested a finality I was not
sure I wanted.
One day I realised I had not spoken to any person for a week. On the
metro a man with a moustache and strong tan arms wrapped his hand around
the pole I was leaning on, and I had to stop myself leaning forward just an
inch to brush my cheek against its smooth brown back.
 2

Mark arrived. It felt wrong to be speaking with another person, and one I
could barely remember knowing. My words were hesitant, and getting drunk,
which I had not done in weeks, did not help. When I told him how I was
spending time – working, walking, reading, writing – it sounded lethargic and
relaxing instead of how it felt, which was constantly charged with the
newness of loss, the shock of chaos.
He kept saying how amazing I was, how brilliant my work must be, how
great I looked, how special a person I was.
When, in conversation, I referred to having a bad day and not being able
to work well, he immediately denied that such a thing was possible.
I hate now for men to dote in this way, the ones who don’t know me.
Their praise lands uncertainly in the air somewhere between the two of us,
because it doesn’t belong to me. I hate to hear them tell me what I am, even
or especially when what they think I am is kind or brilliant or beautiful. I hate
when they insist that I have no faults, that my laziness or violence or cruelty
simply don’t exist.
When they speak this way I am even less in my body than usual, feeling
the sickness of a stranger look me in the eye and describe what is not there.
What I am feeling is their disregard for my reality. I am being made to wear
whatever particular fantasy they wish to project.
Each time it happens I have to restrain myself from screaming in their
faces to prove I am not what they believe me to be. In these moments I am
happy with my ugliness and want them to see it. Whatever badness I am I
want to be it, to be as much like whatever my self is as possible; as far from
the stranger’s projection as possible.
‘I think it’s just great,’ he kept saying, in response to any inanity I told
him about what I had been up to. ‘Coming here all alone, it’s so brave.’
I restrained myself from snapping in disagreement. What was brave about
it? I was where I was because I was too stupid and weak to be with other
people. I had needed them too much and had been destroyed by it. Now I was
too afraid to try such a thing again, having got the whole idea so
catastrophically wrong, and so instead I was here.
I was also here because I could be. I was lucky enough to be able to run. I
had no money, but also no dependents. I was young and agile and had no
responsibilities that could not be shed in a matter of weeks.
There was nothing brave about it. I had been braver every night I spent
locked in the bathroom after a fight with Ciaran. I was braver every day I got
up the next morning and went to work. Who would ever understand this, that
the weakness was also steely and pure? In a way I myself could no longer
understand.
I hate my weakness, what I severed of myself and gave to him, but love it
too, love it still. I do not take it back. I love the girl who did those things. I
love the girl because I feel sorry for her, and understand her.
Is it brave to be alone? Maybe, in a way. But it was also brave to ask
someone to be with me, even though it was the wrong person, and in the
wrong way. How could I have asked him to love me, day after day, when the
answer kept on being no? What desperation made me live that way?
I mourn for that braveness, which is gone; whether it’s gone for ever or
not, I don’t yet know.
That night Mark kissed me and I let him. It was the easy thing to do, the
only thing to do. The idea of telling him not to and the ensuing conversation
filled me with weariness. I wondered how many times in my life I had made
this calculation, how the men would feel if they knew, if they would care.
In my bedroom, his fawning was irritating me so much that at first kissing
was a relief. Then he kept stopping to draw back and look at my face and do
this move of slightly shaking his head in – what? – wonder? And then
smiling and returning to kiss again. Every time he did it I felt worse and
worse, more and more desperate for it to end. Sometimes he would laugh a
little, as though in disbelief at his good fortune. It all felt rehearsed.
After it had gone on a while, I pushed away and said I was going to brush
my teeth and get into my pyjamas. I hoped this would be enough to neutralise
the intimation that sex was to follow. I hoped that we could just go to sleep.
When I returned, I shut off the light and climbed into bed with my back to
him, with an overly cheery and definitive, ‘Goodnight!’ Behind me, shirtless,
he inched nearer and then pressed his body into mine and thrust his arm
around my front. He started to slowly stroke my ribs, his mouth was moving
through my hair towards my neck. He kissed me there, my ears, was
whispering some endearment. I stayed still and hoped this would be enough,
that he would give up. He took my jaw in his hand and jerked it back to face
him, began to kiss me. I kissed him back.
After his hands had run over my breasts and he was edging underneath my
T-shirt I put my hand on his wrist.
‘I’m tired, I don’t feel like it. I’m sorry,’ I said. He lay on his back. I
looked at him: his eyes were wide and pleading. I turned back around and put
my arm over my head, gathering the blanket to me.
A few minutes later his body had moved back to cradle mine. I ignored it.
I can sleep like this, I thought, I can deal with this. His dick got hard and he
began, gently at first and then less so, to push it into me. His face was again
rustling in my hair and softly kissing me.
‘I don’t want to,’ I forced myself to say, instead of doing what I was
inclined to – rolling over, giving in. I wondered if he knew how unbearable it
was for me to say this to him, if he knew how every cell in my body was
inclined to yield.
‘Aw, why not?’ he replied in the tone of a kid told he was no longer
allowed to play video games.
How could I answer this?
Why not you now, Mark, when there have been so many others, and
indeed you yourself have been one?
Why did I want it before and not now?
Why do your little laughs and smiles nauseate me?
It’s not that my body means any more to me now than it once did, it’s
only that I hate you more.
I resent the fact that you can take pleasure from me.
The comedian John Belushi once said, ‘I give so much pleasure to so
many people. Why can’t I get some pleasure for myself?’
I don’t think you deserve it. Don’t think you deserve me.
I think your little pantomime of friendship and desire is weak and pallid.
He kept on kissing my neck, tenderly stroking my body. I kept myself
turned stiffly away. My eyes were wide open and staring blankly ahead.
‘Why not?’ he said again, and as I turned towards him I saw he was
grinning at me. He was actually grinning, sheepish and happy. He kept
touching me and eventually I did what I had to do to stop him from wanting
to have sex with me, which was to have sex with him.
I made loud low noises which only an idiot would mistake for noises of
animalistic pleasure. I focused on making these noises, which were letting out
some of the hatred and revulsion inside me. As he went faster and started to
hurt me I leaned backwards and scratched his thighs as hard as I could.
Again, an idiot might mistake this for a sign of abandonment, enjoyment.
His little whimpers disgusted me.
I looked at the ceiling, willing him to finish, hot frustrated tears gathering
in my eyes. I moved my body up and down faster and faster, begging him in
my head to finish, finish, finish. When he did I rolled away from him and
thought to myself never again never again never again.
I give so much pleasure to so many people. Why can’t I get some pleasure
for myself?
I thought, not for the first time, that wheedling of the sort he had
employed should be forbidden in men. It was already so near to impossible to
say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked
or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you
have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.
Once you’ve said no, a man wheedling feels unbearable. Even if he does it
politely, or gently, it overrides the clearly expressed intention. It says: Your
choice does not really matter. What I desire matters, and I don’t want to feel
bad for forcing you into it. So perhaps you ought to reconsider?
Wheedling is cowardly, and violent. When you change someone’s no to
yes by wheedling, you have stolen from them what does not belong to you.
It was the last thing I wanted to do, and I did it.
I sat up beside him in bed, looking at my thighs. As usual my body looked
different to me after somebody had fucked it, more coherent than before. He
put his arm around me and chattered about his job, his bands, telling stories,
staff gossip. He was easier to listen to now, less grating. I was able to laugh
along without it hurting too much.
 3

When I sleep with men I don’t like, men who irritate or scare or disgust me,
because it is easier to do so, I make myself as bad as they are. I drag myself
down to their level by allowing them to have what they want.
Having sex with them degrades me, my reluctance and eventual
capitulation degrade me. Once I have been degraded I am really no better
than they are. The men themselves are rendered more bearable to me.
I hate them less afterwards, because I’ve made myself as pathetic as they
are.
 4

I woke early on Sunday morning and went to the balcony to check my emails
and smoke. It was a beautiful day. The very beginning of the cold was
coming in amidst the sunshine and clear sky.
Athens had already given me this gift: I appreciated every day that I
existed there. It made me more happy to be alive than not. The idea of not
living was absurd. You would be mad to not live as long as you can in
Greece.
I’d like to swim today, I thought.
When Mark woke up I hustled him out of the apartment quick as I could
so we wouldn’t miss the warmer part of the afternoon. The nearest beach was
an hour away and I made sure to check he had brought a book before we left.
We sat in companionable silence on the tram journey, I felt sorry for him
that I hated him so much.
As I undressed on the beach he told me he couldn’t really swim very well;
he was fine to a certain point but didn’t like to go in very far.
‘Fine, that’s OK, don’t worry,’ I said brusquely, not caring what he was or
wasn’t able to do.
I walked and then swam into the cold ocean, turned on my back and
looked at the sky, stretched out my limbs a bit below the surface before going
too far.
I was happy, as I always am in the sea, the only place I have ever found
where my body feels natural and mine and being used according to its intent.
I am weightless but not insubstantial. I am always sure of what my body
should be doing there. I feel seal-like, the fat I normally hate becomes sleek
and normal in water, my inelegant body can be strong there.
Mark waded in, gasping and wincing at the cold. He grinned at me, teeth
chattering, edging his way towards me. It took him a minute to work himself
up to submersion. Then he paddled towards me and grabbed me by the waist,
manoeuvring my body to try to have my legs wrapped around his torso. I
submitted to the pose for a few moments and let him kiss me, then bent
backwards and kicked away.
After I got a little further out I glanced back at him.
Seeing him there, squirming in the tide, unsure and uncomfortable, I
understood fully that certain weaknesses in others are intolerable – at least
they are when you don’t love them.
I remembered how Ciaran would want me to do certain things that I
couldn’t or was not willing to, physical things like cycling or running. I
would decline and apologise for my shortcomings, shortcomings that were as
certainly and definitively me as my own face was.
You don’t mind, do you? I would say, an ironic pout, trying to be playful,
acknowledging my own limitations; I fully expected him to love me in spite
of them.
Of course I don’t mind, he would say, and I would mostly believe him.
But there was always a hint of the unsaid in these conversations, a harsh word
he didn’t let out, a bit of distaste.
I understood it, looking at Mark. Someone who needs you, even just a
little – who needs you to like or love them – seeing their weakness is
disturbing and repellent. It’s ugly but it’s true.
It isn’t fair, but there it is. When you love a person these things are
nothing, or even lovable in and of themselves. But when you don’t love a
person, they niggle at you. The person’s humanity is revealed too soon,
before you can come to forgive it with love.
I knew then that Ciaran had not loved me. At least he didn’t love me in a
right way, a way that had to do with who I was.
It didn’t make it good, what I had done to him, what we had done to each
other. But it made it OK. It made it something I could live with.
I swam as far out as I could without stopping to breathe, and then came
up, far from shore, so far I could not see the expression on anyone’s face, so
far that I could not be kept track of. I was happy he couldn’t follow me, and
kept going. I swam until I was exhausted, my arms and legs getting so jellied
that I struggled to return, the hotels and umbrellas and people all blurring
happily.
When I got back to the shore, Mark was sitting up on the towel, reading a
book, ill-concealed annoyance on his face.
 ‘I couldn’t see you any more… I was worried,’ he said.
I collapsed down into the sand, stretching myself into it and wriggling
around, letting it get into all the awkward parts of myself.
‘That’s OK,’ I said to him. ‘There’s no need.’
 5

He left then, taking the keys to the apartment.

Near me two elderly twin brothers were sunbathing and moving in sync
on their towels to tan evenly. They stood up together and faced the last bit of
afternoon light with their eyes closed and holding hands, not speaking.
It made me happy, how funny and touching they were, and how
comfortable with one another.
It made me happy too to look around me at the hot dog stand and at my
beer set down in the sand, and my sour Greek cigarettes, and the books I had
bought earlier that week from a woman’s porch.
It made me so happy that soon I was crying at the luck I’d had in getting
here, how lucky I was to be on my own at last, even when it hurt.
There were things happening inside me which there were no words for, or
too many words – things that were so simple that they seemed infantile to
even think of but which I hadn’t been able to think of for so long. Things like
the creamy orange sky which was making my heart feel split and open and
free as it had when I was a teenager.
I remembered how much I had once loved to learn things. I could see
myself back in the library in Waterford surrounded by reference books and
encyclopedias, where I would sit all day, learning things because I wanted to
know them, not to tell them to anybody else or to become someone different
than I really was.
I thought of Mark’s annoyed face and his worry for me when he could no
longer keep track of me snaking off into the ocean, where I floated on my
back and enjoyed the smell of my perfume coming off the water.
I thought of all the worry I had solicited in one way or another from
Ciaran and from other men, with the food and the cutting and the crying and
the sex, the whole great presentation of my rage and hurt, anger like a
performance, anger at everything they’d done to me or hadn’t bothered doing
to me.
I thought how full my life and my head had been for ever with these
things, with the desperation to be loved by a man, with the idea that a man’s
adoration or need to fuck me would make all the bad parts of myself be quiet
for ever.
I’d thought that a man’s love would make me so full up I’d never need to
drink or eat or cut or do anything at all to my body ever again. I’d thought
they’d take it over for me.
But now here I was, right inside it, with nobody to say what happened
next.
What would I think about, now that I wasn’t thinking about love or sex?
That would be the next thing, trying to figure out what to fill up all that space
with.
But that was all right. That would follow.
 Acknowledgments

To my remarkable, brilliant and beloved agent and friend Harriet Moore: I

wouldn’t have written this book without you and will forever be grateful for
your unflagging faith in this awkward, changeable work in all its various
forms. You are so loved and so admired by me and many others.
I am very grateful for the incredible guidance and unswerving vision
given to me so generously and kindly by Jonathan Cape, especially Michal
Shavit and Ana Fletcher, and at Little Brown from the inimitable Jean
Garnett.
Thank you to the friends who supported me while I wrote this book,
whether through lent fifty quids, roast dinners or just the relief of their
entertainment and company. Thanks to my beloved Taddyheads: Stan Cross,
Francisco Garcia, Josh Baines and Charles Olafare, to my Pink IPA gals
Lolly Adefope, Heather McIntosh and Thea Everett for chatting to me all day
every day and making me crease constantly. To Crispin Best, Mat Riviere
and Rachel Benson for being such good friends when I first arrived to
London and forever more: I love you all and treasure each time we’re
together.
Thanks to everyone who provided me with short term house and cat
sitting opportunities where I got chunks of writing done in often very
delightful surroundings, especially Tommy and Kate Farrell and Sophie Jung.
Thank you to Jesse Darling for being a brief but excellent and formative
London housemate and providing a much needed idea of what a positive
rather than sacrificial domesticity might be like.
Joseph Noonan Ganley, Fiona Byrne, Chris Timms, Frank Wasser and
Alice Rekab for hospitality and invitations when I first arrived to London and
baked potatoes and Christmas parties in Camberwell, and willingness to
discuss work when it was in embryonic embarrassing stages.
Lovely Linda Stupart and Tom, I admire both of you kind, brilliant people
so much and am inspired by your love for each other. Let’s go back to Ischia.
Thanks to Roy Claire Potter my favourite chain-smoking, chain-
everything pal and one of the best writers and artists I’ve ever come across.
Thanks to my former housemate and wonderful friend Isadora Epstein for
our years in Dublin laughing and discussing and for all your support when I
was there and since I left- you’re the absolute tops lady. Thanks to Oisin
Murphy Hall and Liz Ni Mhairtin for the years of friendship, for putting me
up when I’m back in Dublin and for making me laugh like nobody else can.
Thanks to my dear friend Fiona Hallinan for thirteen years of friendship, fish,
swims – you are a wonder. To Shane Morrissey, my most cherished bully.
To Sean Goucher, forever my favourite former colleague. Thank you to
my fantastic brothers Gavan and Luke Flinter for your support and love and
the always entertaining and often whiskey-soaked Christmastime rumbles.
To Simon Childs: thank you for your easy and generous love which made
the writing of this opposite kind of love much more bearable. You will
always be close to my heart and I hope we will know each other for the rest
of our lives.
To my best friend Doireann Larkin: I love you so much and can’t say how
forever grateful I will be for all your help when I came to London – giving
me Oyster cards and dinners in Tupperware and wine when I was hard up,
and all the silly never ending nights on your couch telling each other the
same stories as we have been for fifteen years and enjoying them just as
much as ever.
Thank you to my wonderful step parents, Ger Kenny and Trudi Hartley.
Most of all thank you to my parents Jim Nolan and Sue Larkin for
sticking by me while I blew my life into bits over and over and while I put it
back together again. Without your patience, love and encouragement I
wouldn’t have made it out the other side. Thank you so much, I love you so
much.
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 About the Author

Megan Nolan lives in London and was born in Waterford, Ireland. Her
essays, fiction, and reviews have been published in the New York Times, the
White Review, the Sunday Times, the Village Voice, The Guardian, and in the
literary anthology Winter Papers. Nolan writes a fortnightly column for the
New Statesman. This is her first novel.