Our Kind of Cruelty(38)

I heard words come out of my mouth even as I felt the chairman’s stare willing me to stop. The man stopped crying, staring at me open-mouthed. You’re not even an animal, he said, getting up and leaving. We sat in silence for a while after he had gone, my heart thudding in my ears. In the end the chairman stood up and sucked in his breath. I’m going to make an appointment for you with the company doctor, he said, before leaving.

I had forgotten that other people do not necessarily live in a world of bad words.

One of Mum’s boyfriends, I think his name was Logan, used to put his face very close to mine when he shouted. So close I had to screw my mouth shut against his spittle, You useless fucking cunt, he’d scream at me for knocking over his beer, or You fucking pansy twat, for sneezing when the football was on, or You cheeky fucking gobshite, for when I pretended not to hear him. My mother looked out of the window when he spoke, her neat profile blurred by the skyline, as if she couldn’t hear. Naturally he spoke to her in the same way and we both tiptoed round him as if we were visitors in his life and not he in ours. He wasn’t one of the thwackers though; Logan was cleverer than that, his violence more insidious. Logan knew that the threat of his temper hung like a cloud of poisonous fumes over the flat and that it was enough to exterminate the life we knew.

I don’t know why Logan left. I don’t know why any of the men left. All I do know is that they left my mum in ever-worsening states, which always seemed bizarre to me. Most people would celebrate their passing, but my mother clearly didn’t feel she ever deserved anything more than the lowest form of existence. I would watch her snivel on the sofa after another Logan exited our lives, a full ashtray balanced on her legs, beer cans littered by her feet, her eyes losing their focus, and I would want to jump up and down in front of her. I am here, I used to want to shout, but I’m not sure she’d have noticed me even then.

You are not like her, V said to me time and time again, when the fear used to overtake me. But I was never honest with my reply. Because, before V, I was like my mother. I didn’t care, I found it easy to shut down, I turned away and found it too easy to be cruel to others. I think the truth is that V made me a better person and without her I could easily slip into the person my mother became.

V taught me not just what it felt like to really care about someone else, but also what it felt like to care about myself. She didn’t just sculpt my body, but my mind as well. When we met I ate crap and got out of breath walking up the stairs. I was skinny as a whippet and my unwashed hair hung long over my ears. I only asked her once why she had spoken to me at the party. I was too scared to jolt her into the realisation that she had been mad to do so. We were in bed at the time, her head on my chest, which had already started to change shape and fill.

‘Your eyes,’ she said, her hand resting on my lower belly. ‘I genuinely did just want a light, but when I looked at you to say thanks, you looked so lost, so vulnerable, I couldn’t just walk away.’

‘But why did you agree to go on a date?’ I asked into the blackness surrounding us.

‘Because I liked you by then. I could see your potential.’

V wasn’t my first girlfriend, but she was the first one who meant anything to me. And when I say anything, I mean that word literally. Before V I couldn’t understand anything about women and how they worked. I had no idea what they meant when they spoke, no desire to see them after we’d had sex, no comprehension of why they sometimes got angry and cried. It was like my heart hadn’t been used before I met V, like I’d never really noticed it or felt it beat. I mean, I know I care for Elaine and Barry, and I must have loved my mum at some point, but when I think about them it doesn’t feel like a real connection. When I think about V it is like there is a thread reaching from my heart to hers, tautening and relaxing with both our breaths.

I could look at V when she came in from wherever she’d been and know instantly how she was feeling. Every time she rang I knew it was her without looking at the screen. When we watched a film or listened to music I knew what her reaction would be without speaking. I knew how to make her scream and moan and thrash, every inch of her body mapped indelibly on my mind. Connections like that cannot be broken, however much they are separated.

I was unsteady on my feet when I finally gave up on seeing V that evening and left the bar. I stumbled on the pavement and had to lean against a wall to right myself. My head felt dislocated and nothing seemed real. People walked past me into the night and I forgot where I was going or where I had been. Nausea rose upwards and into my throat, squeezing my heart and constricting my breathing.



The next day at work felt like torture, a steady stream of needles driving into my skull, my body hot and shaky. I hadn’t run in the morning and I didn’t go to the gym at lunchtime, instead eating a bowl of pasta at a cheap restaurant filled with tourists round the corner. The food landed on the acid of my stomach making me want to retch, but I forced it down and then drank two strong coffees.

During the afternoon the company doctor rang and said he had an appointment for the next day at 3 p.m. and I was too befuddled to think of an excuse. I laid my head on my arms on my desk and looked sideways out of the window at the birds riding the wind currents outside. I’ve always known that if I had to kill myself it would be by jumping from a great height because that way you would at least have a few seconds of knowing what it felt like to fly.