This Is How It Ends (18 page)

When Iowa was called, she opened one eye. Bruno was perched on the edge of the couch. Like a guy watching a football match, he had the remote control in his hands, and he was leaning out over his knees as if he could throw his weight behind what was happening.

Addie was feeling shivery. She felt like she’d been taking drugs and they’d worn off and the hangover was setting in. She swung herself round and sat up straight. Bruno looked over at her as if he’d never seen her before. Then he looked back at the TV.

South Dakota, Nebraska, they were both called for McCain. More big red squares appeared on the map, cutting a swath across the bottom of the country. The blue states looked small and higgledy-piggledy. They were all bunched together. It looked to Addie like the reds were going to win, but everyone on the telly was saying the opposite. There’s a realization in the McCain camp, they were saying. It’s only a matter of time.

Bruno’s phone started going like a pot of popcorn, hopping with dozens of incoming texts. Until now it hadn’t occurred to Addie that he had friends. She knew he had sisters, and if she’d thought about it at all she would have realized that he must have had other people in his life apart from his family. She had never given it any thought, but here they were now. With every beep, with every shudder of his phone on the coffee table, they were making their presence felt. They wanted to share this moment with Bruno. He was one of the people they felt they had to share it with. It made Addie feel like she had lost him already.

At four in the morning, the networks called it for Obama.

Immediately the screen switched to Chicago and you could see the crowd going wild. Everyone was crying and hugging each other and they were waving these little American flags against the night sky. It was the most beautiful sight.

Bruno sat on the couch with his eyes fixed on the screen, oblivious to anything else. He just sat there and watched with the tears pouring down his face.

Addie had her arm around his waist and she was hugging him to her, her face squashed up against his shoulder. You couldn’t help but be caught up in the emotion of it, you’d have had to have a heart of stone not to rejoice in it. She had tears in her own eyes, a gaspy feeling in her throat. But in her head, there was confusion. She didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.

She felt like an executioner hearing that the death penalty had been abolished. She knew it was a good thing, she just wasn’t sure it was a good thing for her.

IT WAS SIX IN THE
morning before they finally slept.

After the celebrations. After they’d watched the Obamas come out onto the stage to the roar of the crowd, their four shadows falling long and dark behind them. After they’d watched the speeches and then the highlights over and over again. After Bruno had called everybody he knew, after everybody he knew had called him. Only then did they go to bed.

Exhausted and exhilarated, they had slow, careful sex. Neither of them said a word. Addie kept wondering if this was good-bye. She was still wondering that as she fell asleep.

She woke before he did. She tried to work out what time it was from the light coming into the bedroom, from the sounds outside. She reckoned it must be midmorning.

She knew she had to wake him. She lay there thinking about it. She started practicing the words silently in her head.

Wake up, lazybones, she would say, in her most cheerful voice. Even in her head it sounded flippant. There was a defensive tone to it. Isn’t it time you were up, she would say, you’ve got a plane waiting for you. She was still lying there rehearsing it when an alarm went off in the room.

The sound shocked her. It was a sound she didn’t recognize. An unfamiliar tone, she’d never heard it before. She realized it must be the alarm on his phone. She couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. She couldn’t see it anywhere. There was nothing on the bedside table, just a glass of water she’d brought to bed with her.

The noise seemed to be getting louder. Bruno was lying with his back to her, curled towards the wall. There was no sign he’d heard the alarm. But then his shoulders moved, and his head jerked back.

“Shit,” he said, “is that the time?” And he scrambled out of the bed, climbing up and over her, like a soldier tumbling out of the trenches.

Addie turned over onto her side and lay there watching him. She was aware of the seconds passing. There was nothing she could do to stop this.

Bruno was bent over the chair where he’d dumped his clothes, fumbling in the pockets of his jeans. At last he found the phone, took it out, and started stabbing at the keypad. Eventually, the noise stopped.

He looked up at Addie and saw that she was awake. She smiled at him, the very bravest smile she could muster. She tried to make sure that her eyes were smiling along with her face. He stared at her for what seemed like a long time. Then, without ever saying a word, he came back round to the bottom of the bed. He climbed up on top of it, scrambling over the covers and settling into the space he’d just left. Turning over on his side to face Addie’s back, he pulled her in close to him.

Within moments they were both asleep again.

H
UGH’S CASTS CAME OFF
towards the middle of November.

His hands emerged all pink and flabby, like big ugly slabs of offal. The skin on them was dry and flaky, the hair thick and matted. Staring down at them in horror, Hugh was reminded of some ghastly fish that roams the seabed, a horrible thing with pink eyes and clammy scales. He removed his hands from his eye line, tucking them in under his thighs. He couldn’t stomach the sight of them.

He had always been so proud of his hands.

“DOCTOR’S HANDS,”
Helen used to say reverently, and she would bend down to kiss them, one by one.

The girls were all mad for a doctor in those days. It gave you a great head start, being a medical student, you were never short of a date. And it wasn’t just the nurses, all the girls went mad for a medical student.

Of course the engineers used to try to get in on the act. At the dances, they used to put TCP behind their ears. By the time they were caught out, they might have made some headway. They might already have a foot in the door.

Hugh sniggered at the memory.

“You’re a medic,” Helen’s father had said, gesturing towards an armchair by the fire in his study. A delicious aroma of roast beef filled the house, a velvety smell of pan juices. You could smell all the different elements of it, the seared surface of the meat and the red blood trickling out into the hot, oily gravy. Hugh’s stomach was rumbling, he had to shift noisily in his seat to disguise the sound, afraid Helen’s father would hear it.

To this day, he can remember every detail of that first meeting.

In the car, on the way to New Ross, they had passed through places Hugh had never seen before. Tidy towns with humpbacked bridges, redbrick houses with carefully tended gardens. They didn’t look Irish to Hugh, some of these places, they had a look of England to him. Not that he’d ever been to England, but this was what he imagined England might look like.

He remembers now how young and poor he felt beside her. But he felt deserving too. He felt almost greedy.

She had a car of her own, that was most unusual. Some of the lads had the use of their parents’ car, but for a girl to have her own car was unheard of. The only child of a country solicitor, she was doted on by her parents. She’d been to Paris and Vienna. She spoke a little Italian.

Her parents were both in their forties when she was born, and they’d long ago given up any hope of having a child. Her mother didn’t even realize she was pregnant until she was six months gone. When she did finally go to the doctor, it was because she thought she was dying. A tumor, that’s what she thought it was, her belly all swollen up with it. But the doctor began to smile as he examined her. You could have knocked her over with a feather when he told her. She ran up the street to Eddie’s office and he took the rest of the day off. First time in his life he’d left the office early, he treated her to a slap-up lunch in the hotel in Wexford.

Hugh had heard Helen tell that story so many times. Her face shining with the knowledge of a happy ending. That guileless certainty she had, the security of an adored child. She had brought such joy into their lives. She knew that and she accepted it without question. As long as they both lived, they only had to look at her and they were happy.

Gentle people. Genteel and kind, they welcomed Hugh into their home like he was one of their own. The son they never had. Helen’s mother clucked over him and mothered him. Her father spoke to him man to man.

Amazing how clear that memory still was. Among all the things he’d forgotten. He could still remember his awkwardness in the face of their gracious hospitality. The luxury of the house after his student digs. The rich smell of furniture wax in the dark hall, the unfamiliar taste of expensive whiskey. The sharp edges of the cut glass in his hand. The silence when you set the glass down on the leather-topped side table.

He had decided then and there, sitting in front of that roaring fire with Helen’s father sitting opposite him. The whiskey burning its way down his throat, he had decided, this is what I want for myself.

Never again would he go back to that dank farmhouse in Navan. Never again would he breathe in that stale air. The endless cups of tea and the snide questions they asked him, the barbed responses they made out of their slack mouths. He was tired of it all. He wanted nothing more to do with it.

This was the life he wanted. The quiet assumption that this was the way things were meant to be.

THE MEMORY ENDED
abruptly and he looked around the room.

It was as if he were at the cinema. The film was over and the lights had come up again. He found himself sitting there surveying his surroundings. He was blinking away the memories, slowly coming back to the present.

A fine room.

That’s what he was thinking as he looked around him. It had everything in it that he had set out to acquire. The mahogany furniture and the antique gilt mirrors, the worn Oriental rugs. The bed jarred with him, it was time to get the bed out of here. High time we got things back to normal. His eyes wandered around to the far corner of the room. The sideboard and on top of it a silver tray, set with a crystal decanter of whiskey and a clutch of crystal glasses.

I got what I wanted, he thought. I got everything I wanted. Now it’s me who’s the old fart sitting in my study drinking whiskey out of a cut glass.

And yet.

There were shadows forming in his mind, a nebulous presence lurking around the edges of his consciousness. Something that was stopping him from taking any satisfaction in his achievements. A brooding thing, like a bad spirit. He had the sense it wanted to say something to him.

He was just about to grapple with it. He was sitting there with his head cocked to one side, his eyes watery with questions, when he was distracted by a noise from outside.

It was Addie coming back in from the beach. The noise he’d heard was the gate clanging shut after her. She came bounding up the steps, taking them two at a time. Her dark coat was flying open, her legs taking great lunging leaps at the steps. The little dog was scrambling awkwardly after her. Climbing steps was a different affair with four legs.

Hugh felt his heart surge, just watching them. He was aware of an abrupt change in his mood. In an instant, the shadows were gone. She always had this effect on him. Every time he set eyes on her his troubles vanished.

He could hear her turning the key in the lock, then there was a gasp as the door fell open. The scattery sound of the dog’s toenails on the tiled floor of the hall.

Hugh sat up straight and turned to face the door. Shoulders back, he settled his face into an expression of bonhomie, a mask of defensive humor. Without even realizing what he was doing, he was drawing a veil over his love.

“YOUR CASTS ARE OFF!”

He was sitting at his desk in the window, clenching and unclenching his fists. He had the fingers splayed out. He looked like he was counting something up in tens.

“Oh yes, they took them off this morning. Did I not tell you?”

She shook her head. But already she was wondering, maybe he had told her. Maybe she hadn’t been listening, maybe she’d heard him and forgotten.

He was rotating his hands on his wrists now, drawing circles with them in the air. As he did so he kept turning his head from side to side to watch what his hands were doing. As if he were watching a tennis match. As if the rotations his hands were performing had nothing to do with him.

“Surprisingly hard to do, these exercises they gave me. Like standing on one leg and putting your finger on your nose.”

He kept having to start the exercise over again. His hands kept going out of kilter with each other. One would be going faster than the other, or he would notice that one had started to go in the opposite direction. He was determined to coordinate them. Good exercise for the brain.

“Let me see,” she said, throwing herself into the chair beside his desk. She held her own hands out, palms up, to receive his.

Reluctantly he placed his hands on hers.

She studied them for a moment, stroking them with her thumbs. Then she bent down to kiss them.

“Poor hands,” she said, her voice full of tenderness.

He had to resist the urge to snatch them back.

“So,” she said, still holding on. “When can you go back to work?”

She was looking up at him, her face open and bright. He noticed, for the hundredth time, how beautiful her eyes were. The whites were perfectly white, the irises a deep gray, like the sea on a stormy day. He loved her eyes, not that he’d ever dream of telling her that.

Gently, he pulled his hands away from her and placed them on his thighs. He rubbed them up and down a bit on the front of his trousers, savoring the feeling of repossession.

“Oh, I think it will be some time yet,” he said lightly. “I’m only just starting on the physio.”

He began shunting some papers around on his desk, pretending to look for something.

“How long do you reckon?”

“For the physio?”

He still didn’t look at her.

“No. Until you go back to work.”

He assumed a distracted tone as he answered.

“Oh, I should think it will only be a matter of weeks. It’s entirely up to me to decide.”

And he started to hum a little tune to himself, anything to fill the silence. He was like a little boy when he lied.