Molly Fox's Birthday (8 page)

I realised immediately that this would be every bit as painful and unpleasant for Molly as it was for me. It gave, and then it took away. Our friendship and our close artistic collaboration on many of my plays were common knowledge. It was as if she was being used to humiliate me. Even Molly has had bad notices in her day, and if a performance of hers had been rubbished in the same breath as my work was being praised, it would have killed off any pleasure I might have felt; it would have enraged me. But I couldn't find the words to say all this to Molly.

All this had happened at the start of the year, and now it was midsummer. Now I was sitting in a spare bedroom in Molly's house, gazing down into her garden and trying to write a new play. Now I was beginning to realise how severely damaged my confidence had been by all of this. As I sat at the desk, struggling with the idea of the man and the hare, I couldn't help wondering if I was unconsciously trying to close down my own imagination, so
that I wouldn't be able to write another play, and as a result would never have to go through such a grisly experience again. My computer screen had gone black yet again, as coloured geometric shapes morphed languidly across it. I moved the mouse just for the sake of it, to cancel the screen saver and bring up what little text was there, to give myself the illusion of actually doing something. As one does in such circumstances I tried to find an excuse, and decided it was to do with the room in which I was working.

It had been Molly's idea that I sleep in her bed and set up my computer in the de facto spare room. There were white gauze curtains figured with daisies. When I stayed with her in winter, Molly always lit a fire for me in the tiny fireplace. The bed had a pink quilt and was piled with small lacy pillows. There was the desk and chair at which I was working and a comfortable chintzy armchair. It was soft and bright and restful.

Once, many years ago, not long after I first met Molly and a short while after she'd bought the house, I came at her invitation to spend a day with her. When she met me at the door she looked thoughtful and concerned. ‘Fergus, my brother, is staying here with me,' she said. ‘He's had a kind of breakdown.' She didn't elaborate and I didn't pursue the matter. I had never met Fergus. He was closed away in the spare room and he didn't appear at all for the duration of my visit, but there wasn't a moment throughout that day that we weren't aware of him.

Sometimes, on stage, not showing something can be more powerful than showing it. The idea that murder or torture is taking place behind a closed door is more disturbing than watching actors grapple with each other,
ineffectually mimicking horrors. And so it was that day in Molly's house. She went up a few times to see Fergus; I could hear soft voices and then the sound of the solid bedroom door closing behind her before she reappeared, looking worried and upset, but she said nothing about him and I knew better than to ask. At one point I went upstairs to the bathroom and from behind the shut door of the spare room I could hear the sound of someone crying, although to say that doesn't begin to do justice to it. It was the most heartbreaking sound I think I've ever heard, such suffering there was in it, such terrible abandonment and grief.

Thereafter, I always associated the spare room with Fergus, and I didn't like it. It was as if his sorrow was so intense it had infiltrated the curtains and the carpets, the very walls, and could never be eradicated. No matter how softly pretty its furnishings it had for me always an air of melancholy; I even fancied it was always a couple of degrees cooler than the other rooms in the house at any given time. This was nonsense, of course, as was the image that I conceived of Fergus. I could never forget that terrible weeping I had heard, and he became in my mind some kind of monster of grief, the embodiment of human misery. ‘Unhappy.' That was as much as Molly would say about him for a long time.
Poor Fergus, he's so unhappy
. She was vague about what was actually wrong with him, vaguer still about the cause of it. But one thing soon became apparent to me: Fergus was the most important person in her life. She had a deep, almost fierce attachment to him that has, if anything, grown stronger with the passing of time.

The passing of time … the clock at the head of the
stairs chimed for noon. My computer screen had gone dark again, and with a mixture of resignation and relief I decided to give up for the day.

There were a few things I needed to buy before lunch – milk, bread, the newspapers – but I'd have gone out anyway, just to get away from the house, to distance myself from the dead end that had been the morning's work. I felt better as soon as the door closed behind me, and I stood there on the step for a moment, taking consolation from the glory of Molly's garden, its roses, its dog-daisies. The bright fresh morning had developed into a seriously hot day. As I closed the garden gate behind me, I thought of Andrew. A hot day in the city always made me think of his last days in Dublin, now so many years ago, when there had been weather such as this.

Andrew graduated from Trinity with a first-class honours degree, with prizes and a scholarship, in the same summer that I received the 2:2 that was far more than I deserved. Almost immediately he took himself off to England, to begin a PhD on Mantegna, at Cambridge. At that time I was living in a little redbrick terraced house in Dublin that was a smaller, more dowdy version of Molly's current home, and he stayed there with me just before he left Ireland. The two friends with whom I was sharing were both away for the week, and in the casual manner in which we then lived, I gave him his choice of the other girls' rooms for the two nights that he would be there. He arrived down from Belfast where he had been staying with his family, and I cautiously asked how things had been.

‘We sat there last night,' he answered ‘and I was trawling
my brain for something to say to them, to ask them, and I couldn't think of a thing. There was nothing there. And I thought – who are these people? What am I doing here? I felt like a stranger who'd wandered in off the street and they'd decided to humour him and let him stay instead of throwing him out. And then when I was leaving this afternoon my Da came over all portentous, which was weird; I hadn't expected that. He said to me, “Try to make something of yourself, for Billy's sake.” I thought, What's Billy got to do with it? Billy was never going to amount to anything; his life had been ruined when he was still a kid. He was always going to end up in jail or dead. I thought, I'm out of here, it's over.'

‘And were your parents not pleased about your results?'

‘My Da doesn't understand what it means, still doesn't know what I'm about. As for Ma, I just don't think she's ever really been interested in me. Billy was always the one she wanted, even when we were very small. He was always the joker, the funny one. I was too serious and dull, sitting with my nose in a book, while he'd be doing silly things and making her laugh. Because I knew she preferred him by far, that made me surly and then there was even less to like. I think she can't forgive me for not being Billy, or rather, she can't forgive me for being alive, and Billy being dead. He's still the one she wants, not me. When the train was going through Drogheda I looked down at the river, the timber yards, and I thought – if I never went back, never phoned, never wrote, would she care? Would she even notice?'

‘You know she would,' I protested, to which Andrew gave a sardonic laugh. As at the time of Billy's death, I
was struck by how he was more angry than grieved by the situation. Even that anger had dwindled with the passing of time; what he showed now was something closer to impatience and irritation.

All of this blighted the rest of that evening; but we didn't let it spoil the following day. The hot weather that tormented us all through our finals had, against our expectations, lingered on into the holidays, and Andrew's last day was glorious, perfect, a day such as today. We rose late and had breakfast in the overgrown, daisy-studded back garden, lingered until noon over peaches and orange juice and a few flabby croissants from the shop around the corner. It was unusual for Andrew not to have an exam for which to prepare, a seminar paper or an essay to write; and he was the better for it. The incredible pressure under which he'd put himself for the past four years had made him habitually edgy and tense, and it was good to see him begin to relax. Because his results had been so outstanding, he wouldn't have to prove himself to anybody when he went to Cambridge, he told me, ‘Least of all to myself.' He was looking forward to being there and was excited about his new area of study.

I think one of the reasons I always look back on that day with such fondness is that it was a day lived between two lives, and therefore it managed to slip through the constraints of time itself. We were young, we were confident, we were hugely, even arrogantly, ambitious. Andrew was going to become an internationally acclaimed art historian, I was going to be a renowned playwright, and that we later succeeded in all of this only makes the memory of that day and its simple pleasures all the sweeter.

In the afternoon we went swimming at Seapoint. In honour of the fine weather my housemates and I had clubbed together to buy a barbecue. Andrew thought this was hilariously at odds with the lax and slipshod fashion in which we generally ran our shabby home, but that evening I badgered him into helping me light it. He seemed willing enough, and we incinerated a few chops and sausages, ate them with salad and bread and cheap red wine; then sat outside drinking and talking and laughing until long after a radiant summer darkness had fallen over the city.

He left for England early the following morning, and I never saw him again. That is to say, the Andrew whom I met in a Victorian pub in London at the end of that year wasn't the Andrew whom I had known at college. He had disappeared, taking with him his trainers, his rank jumpers and his sports bag full of books; and in his place was the dandified scholar who has been my friend ever since. Certainly there would be further fine tuning of the image over the years – the clothes would become more elegant and well-cut, the attention to detail would become total – but broadly speaking, the whole persona was already in place.

‘It's great to see you again. What would you like to drink?' The Belfast accent had gone, and the pace and modulation of his voice had also changed. I watched him as he went up to the bar to order. He struck me as nervous, as well he might be, for he knew me to be both tactless and capable of cruelty.
Christ, what happened to
you?
Carefully carrying two glasses, he made his way back through the crowds of drinkers to where I was sitting beneath an etched window of frosted glass,
wines &
spirits
. ‘I've never seen you looking so well. England obviously suits you.'

‘Thanks,' he replied. ‘It does.' He relaxed a bit and started to tell me about how much he was enjoying his new life; that he had been down to Hampton Court recently to examine the
T
riumphs of Caesar
, and was planning a trip to Italy. I had no sense of him pretending to be something he wasn't. There was nothing fake about him, nothing false. It was instead as if he was at last becoming himself, becoming the kind of person he needed to be, the person he really was. It was the tense, prickly man I'd known at college who had been the fake. I'd always been aware that he hadn't enjoyed his time as an undergraduate. How could he have done so? He hadn't been studying so much as trying to save his own life, and to expect him to be having a good time would have been as strange and heartless as calling out to a drowning man as he struggled to the shore, asking him if he was enjoying the swim.

In remembering all of this I had made my way to the shop, through the labyrinth of little streets of redbrick houses. Some of these houses, like Molly's, were well maintained, but others were dowdy and neglected, with net curtains drooping at dusty windows and front gardens strewn with rubbish. The shop itself was dispiriting too, like all convenience stores, as if one had to be punished simply for being there, for not being well enough organised to have got one's shopping elsewhere in the first place. Battered and fried things being kept warm under glass, tinned pies – how far gone did you have to be to eat a tinned pie? – exhausted fruit and a cart-load of lurid magazines. Molly has never been recognised here, not
once, she told me proudly. She was just another local who had run out of coffee, sloping in mid-morning in a grey marl tracksuit and no make-up. I walked to the back of the shop. The milk was kept there, no doubt in the hope that customers might be tempted by something they saw on the way to the chill cabinet, a tin of strawberries, perhaps, or even one of those pies. I chose a loaf, then two newspapers from the stacks on the floor, paid at the till and left.

As I walked back I remembered again that I had had a wonderful dream just before waking that morning, but still I couldn't recall what it had been about. Only the atmosphere of it remained. The house itself seemed unnaturally dark after the brightness of the day, and was pleasantly cool. I dropped my shopping on the kitchen table. Lunch would be simple: bread, ham, fruit, coffee; I couldn't be bothered to prepare anything more elaborate. The table was a solid affair, large, rectangular, the wood scrubbed almost white.

The first time she raised the subject of birthdays, we'd been sitting here. I'd known Molly for about a couple of years by then. The subject must never have come up before, or if it did, she must have skilfully dismissed it, with so little ceremony that it didn't register with me. I saw her do this later with other people when I knew the significance of the subject to her, and although I was sympathetic – hugely sympathetic – to her position, I always found it slightly chilling to see the ease with which she could manipulate the direction of a conversation. ‘
Birthday? What do you want to know about my birthday
for? Birthdays are for little children. Is it jelly you're
after? Jelly and cake? Oh that reminds me, tell me now
before I forget
…' And a new subject would be introduced; there would be no getting back to birthdays. There was nothing dishonest in it, yet still it felt like watching someone tell lies.