The Weight of Him
Ethel Rohan
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out;
and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, A Room of One’s Own
One
Billy Brennan overdid it again with the fast food. After, he hurried as best he could along the street, fighting the need to stop and recover—he didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself. Strangers looked twice at his massive bulk. He pretended not to notice. Those he knew seemed inclined to stop and chat, but he issued only passing hellos and pressed on. He was in no mood to suffer further condolences and awkward exchanges, all of which set his heart racing.
A woman overtook him on the footpath, walking fast and with force. She must have just come off a foreign holiday or a session of sun beds. Maybe she had slathered herself in that fake lotion. More noticeable than skin the color of mahogany, though, she was sickly thin. Billy had never seen a woman so skinny; her arms and calves could snap like sugar sticks. It seemed impossible she could move that fast, could have the strength to even stand up.
She marched ahead, her arms swinging back and forth with alarming range, her body jerking in a way that didn’t make sense. It was as if different parts of her insides were struggling to get out. Billy felt eyes on him, a group of gawking schoolgirls. They looked from him to the woman and back again, a mix of humor and disgust on their faces. He walked faster, still hunched forward with the full, too-tight feeling in his stomach.
As he neared his car, he spotted Kitty Moore coming at him like a bullet in slow motion. He planted himself in front of a shop window, his reflection a thick column of flesh beneath a head of dark curls. His heart squeezed and released in time to, Please don’t see me. Kitty neared in his periphery. Billy braced himself. Keep going, that’s it. Don’t look this way. Don’t—
“Billy.” Her sad tone pressed on his chest.
He swung around, faking surprise. “Ah, Kitty! How are you?”
Her eyes moistened. The gray-black of her loose, knotted bun made him think of a little heap of ashes. He couldn’t hold her watery gaze. Felt as though he was trying to breathe through a pillow. Kitty’s chapped lips moved, but he couldn’t make out her words above the ringing in his ears.
She glanced at the shop’s colorful window display and back at him. “I’ll let you get along, Billy. You mind yourself, now.”
“You, too, Kitty.”
Her pale mouth remained open, as if she intended to say more, but she moved off. It was Kitty, of all people, who had found Michael that chill morning back in January. In the five weeks since, Billy had managed to mostly avoid her, even though they both lived in the neighboring village and just a couple of miles apart.
In her wake, his attention fell on the snow globe in the window’s center display. The ornament contained a blond girl in a red dress, a black dog by her spindle legs, and a cottage with a navy door and straw roof. Two yellow birds completed the scene, perched on the skeleton of an ice-blue tree. Billy wanted to shake the globe and bring it to life.
Behind him, a tour bus whooshed past, its red and white reflection streaking the shop glass. He tried to remember back to a time when he was small and thin, and able to feel the undertow from passing traffic. His hand pressed the side of his head, as though trying to keep the egg of himself together.
*
Billy sped over the twelve miles from town in his black Corolla, sucking traces of grease and hamburger from his teeth. As he entered the village, he told himself to slow down and get it together before he arrived home. The car cruised past the pub, shop, church, and graveyard. He pushed away the image of the dark earth heaped over the fresh grave.
Twenty-two houses dotted the village, a mix of gray stone, red brick, and whitewash all listing to the left. The entire scene dappled with weak, wintry sunshine. Its background colored in various greens courtesy of the trees and rolling fields. Another tour bus approached, a silver-haired driver in front and a load of schoolchildren in back. They were likely returning from Newgrange, centuries-old testimony to a time when the country was supposedly heroic and great. The Land of Saints, Scholars, and High Kings. Billy didn’t want to think about the sad state of the country now after the end of the Celtic Tiger, with so much snatched from so many.
Home. Theirs was a redbrick dormer bungalow on a landscaped acre lot. His parents had given him and Tricia the site twenty-one years ago. The wedding present yet another thing his father liked to hold over him. Billy tried not to look, but his eyes went straight to the trees behind the football pitch—those trees, all trees, ruined for him now.
He entered the kitchen. The radio was tuned to that country music station Tricia liked so much, some lament with an American twang playing. Not so long ago, he might have pulled her by the hand into the middle of the kitchen and twirled her around beneath his fingers. She would likely have pushed him away, laughing, and called him daft. Or on another day, in a sharper mood, she might tell him, “Stop, you’ll give yourself a heart attack.” Either scenario was better than how they tiptoed around each other now.
She stood at the sink peeling potatoes, all five-foot-nothing of her. He was six-foot. She glanced over her shoulder, a strip of potato skin hanging from the peeler like a diseased tongue. “You weren’t long. Town must be quiet?”
“Very quiet, I was in and out.” He didn’t say he’d done little more than stuff himself. Didn’t mention Kitty Moore.