The Year I Met You (34 page)

You are struggling to find a job, in fact it’s proving impossible. Your gardening leave is up, you are officially unemployed. Once hot property, you are now far from a desired commodity. You have been blacklisted. Nobody seems to want to hire a loose cannon like you with the potential for such notoriety, and those who do show interest want you for the wrong reasons, want you to amp up your dark side, turn you into a cartoon version of yourself. But this will not get Amy back, and that is a side of you even you are not comfortable with. You have had endless meetings with your agent, who doesn’t return your calls as much as he once did, who is spending more time with a new TV personality rising star who has whiter teeth, and thicker hair, better skin and politically correct banter. Housewives love him, truck drivers can tolerate him. You threw a glass of water over him tonight and when no one was looking he took you outside, pretending he wanted to have a mature discussion, and instead boxed you across the chin, adjusted his Tom Ford tuxedo and went back inside with his plastic smile to present an award. Your words. You hope he’ll die of a venereal disease. You attempt to list them all.

Then you move on to the DJ who won your award, the award you’ve won every year for six years straight, a man who talks about birds and gardening on air. I also know that you’re trying to hurt me because of my new interests, but I don’t bite. I know your tricks now. When you are hurting you try to hurt other people. It won’t work with me.

Then you start on Corporate Man, who recently asked you and Amy to keep your voices down when the two of you were having a heavy-duty argument on the street one night and as a result has now become your main target of hate. You speculate that he loves to have meetings about meetings, loves the sound of his own voice and makes long-winded speeches about his love for butt-plugs and other such things that you make up on the spot.

I go into your house and come back with a roll of toilet paper.

‘I have an idea,’ I say, interrupting your Corporate Man rant.

‘I’m not crying,’ you say angrily, seeing the toilet roll. ‘And I already took a shit. On your roses.’

‘Come on, Matt.’

You follow me across the road. You finally smile when you see what I’m doing and you join in, eagerly. We spend ten minutes quietly draping toilet roll all over Corporate Man’s garden, laughing so hard we almost pee ourselves, and have to stop for breaks, clamping our hands over each other’s mouths so we don’t make too much noise and wake him. We weave it around the branches of his chestnut tree and leave pieces hanging down like it’s a weeping willow. We decorate the flower beds with it, we try to tie a great big bow around his BMW. We wrap it around the pillar on his front porch and then we break little bits up like confetti and sprinkle the grass. When we’re finished, we high-five each other and turn around to find Monday and Dr J watching us. Monday is barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, looking hot and slightly amused but trying not to. Dr Jameson is wearing his emergency go-to outfit – shell suit and shiny shoes – and looking genuinely concerned for our welfare.

‘He’s drunk, but I don’t know what your excuse is,’ Monday says, arms folded across his chest. ‘Seriously, you two really need to get jobs.’

‘I hope to start on Monday, Monday,’ you say, then chuckle at your wit. You look down at his bare feet. ‘Ah, so you’re into this too.’

‘Into what?’

‘Jasmine’s little trick. I saw her do it once. In the middle of the night. Crying. In winter, like the crazy bitch she is.’

Monday laughs.

‘I knew it!’ I exclaim. ‘I knew you were watching me. But I wasn’t crying that night.’

‘No, that was the night you made it look like your house had vomited grass on your garden.’

I can’t help it, I have to laugh, but we are too loud and so Monday and Dr J guide us away from Corporate Man’s house so he won’t wake up and see how we’ve decorated his garden.

Ignoring Dr Jameson’s advice to keep your shoes on, you walk ahead of us, kicking off your leather shoes and throwing your stinky socks in my direction. You decide to be rooted to the earth, grounding yourself, but doing an unusual hippy kind of dance which makes us all laugh whether we like it or not. It is quite amusing until you step on the piece of broken bottle that you fired across the road.

Dr Jameson goes running to help.

Autumn

The season between summer and winter, comprising in the Northern Hemisphere usually the months of September, October and November.

A period of maturity.

27

Monday, you and I sit in a row on a couch, eating Stroopwafels, in Dr J’s immaculately kept living room that smells like basil and lemons due to the row of basil plants lining the windowsill and the lemon tree in the corner catching the sun. The dog lies in the sun lazily looking at us with bored eyes. This is not the first time we have all been here, in fact it is the third Saturday in a row that we have been present in his interviews for companionship for Christmas Day.

We haven’t been so cruel as to not invite him ourselves. You were the first to ask him, albeit because you are trying to earn brownie points from Amy who is still holding out on you, waiting for a sign that you are making an effort, that you are a changed man, that you have indeed got your act together. This note she wrote, incidentally, instead of disheartening you as I thought it would do, actually gave you hope. Apparently it is a note that she’d written a few times before in stages of your life together, one being when you tried to propose to her three times but chickened out. You see her note as an intervention, a kind of a circle of support for your marriage. You read between the sparse lines that there’s a hidden clue meaning she will in fact come back to you, but it is August and there is still no great communication between you. You thought she would think of the Dr Jameson invitation as proof of how you have changed, instead she saw your kindness as thoughtlessness, the failure to put your family first as per usual, always thinking about your own needs, a sign that you didn’t want to be with her for Christmas Day. She had a fine list of things to say, I heard her shouting it at you one night, another night when Corporate Man knew better than to complain. I’m sure Dr Jameson heard too, which made your offer all the easier, and awkward, to turn down. For his closest friend and neighbour on the street not to be able to invite him to dinner on Christmas Day must have been a further blow to him and I see that he looks older all of a sudden, more tired, though he is trying to appear as though he is enjoying it all.

‘At least she’s talking to him,’ Monday had said as we’d both lain awake in bed listening to you argue outside at the garden table, thinking in our new early relationship smugness that we could never possibly speak to each other like that.

But it was bad timing when you’d broached the subject, your antics at the radio awards had hit the news again and you had scuppered any chance for a big job that you’d been hoping for on the few rival stations that would consider you. You are too much of a risk. Instead of what you’d been hoping for, you’d been offered a job on a lesser known local radio station, transmitting in Dublin only, but at least it’s your own show,
The Matt Marshall Show
noon to three p.m. talking about issues of the day. You will have to be on your best behaviour. You started two weeks ago, and you have kindly arranged for Heather to work in your office one day every week, something we discussed when you attended Heather’s circle of support. The new show means you have taken an enormous pay cut and don’t have the same team around you that you once had, so you’ve gone back to basics and Amy is going back to work, but I think despite being pushed into it, the change will be good for both of you. I would know.

I have tuned right out of what the young woman before me is saying. To say she is a New Age hippy would be rude and dismissive, but she is currently living in a tree trying to stop developers demolishing it because it’s the habitat of a rare breed of snail. I admire her strong beliefs: the snails need people like her to protect them from people like me, but in doing so she’s preventing the developers from getting on with a badly needed new children’s hospital. I wish people would fight as hard for the children as they would the snails. I don’t think Dr Jameson is as empathetic about the snails as she hopes he’d be: they ate the lettuce on his garden plot. This is not why I can’t concentrate, it is Monday next to me, so close I can feel the heat through his T-shirt which is soft and thin and almost see-through. I glance down and to the left and spy nipple. He catches me and gives me a look that I know well now, full of longing, and I think what a waste to waste it. He rubs the palm of my hand with his thumb, just once, then back again and that’s enough. I want him. He looks at me, as if he wants me now, here. I almost would if I didn’t think you’d commentate throughout the entire event.

It’s September and it’s muggy outside, heavy, as though we’re about to have a thunderstorm; headache-inducing weather, the kind that drives animals – and you – crazy. I hope it rains because my garden needs watering. Across the road, Mr Malone sits alone in the garden chair, a cup of tea in his hands that’s been there for the past hour. If he didn’t occasionally blink I would think that he’s dead, but he’s like that most days since Mrs Malone died, a second stroke taking her life three weeks ago. I picture her weeding in the garden, on her hands and knees in her tweed skirt, then I picture her how she was after the stroke, sitting in the garden with Mr Malone reading to her, and now I see nothing, just him alone and it makes my eyes fill.

Monday looks at me again, concerned, and gives my hand a squeeze and my desire for him is increased even more. He hasn’t officially moved in with me, but he may as well, he stays with me most nights, even has his own section of the wardrobe and his toothbrush and shaving tools sitting beside mine. On the nights he doesn’t stay with me – when we tell each other we should slow down, see our friends, spend nights apart – it’s torture, I look at these things and wish he was with me. He has a dog, Madra, a blond Labrador who acts like he owns the place, who has taken over my favourite armchair, which is fine with me now that I lie with Monday on the couch, and he even stays with me the nights Monday doesn’t, which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise. Sometimes you still need me at night, but nothing like before. Some nights I look out the window and hope to hear the sound of your jeep racing down the street with Guns N’ Roses blaring, but nothing like before.

I asked Dr Jameson to join me for Christmas Day, though if he could take my place while I stay home he would be most welcome, as Christmas Day is to be spent with Monday’s eccentric mother in Connemara and Stephen’s Day in Dublin with my family. We had a meeting this week to discuss how Heather would like to cook the Christmas dinner as it will be the first time Jonathan will join us. We are both going to attend a cooking course together to learn how to make the perfect Christmas dinner. Neither Monday nor I are particularly looking forward to any part of Christmas. If I could have Heather all to myself, that of course would be a dream, but I can’t. Dr Jameson has reminded us that family hassle is better than being alone. Seeing what he is going through just for a bit of company on a day so many people claim to want to be alone, I tend to agree.

‘Okay,’ you clap your hands once, loudly, while she is mid-sentence, unable to take any more of her chatter. Monday and I jump, we were so much in our own worlds. ‘I think that’s enough of that,’ you say, and Monday laughs.

The lady looks at you, horrified and insulted, and I soften the blow by being polite as I show her to the door.

‘Well, what do you think?’ I ask, when I return.

Dr Jameson looks at me. ‘I think … she smelled of moss.’

Monday laughs again. He does that a lot and doesn’t think we notice, like we’re a bunch of weirdos on TV and he’s observing us and comes along for the ride. He forgets that we can actually see him.

‘Well, there’s one more to go,’ I say, trying to perk everyone up. Dr Jameson seems more down today than ever.

‘No. That’s enough,’ he says softly, to himself. ‘That’s enough.’ He stands and makes his way to the phone in the kitchen. The house isn’t open-plan like yours or mine, it is in its original seventies state, with the original tiles and what looks like the original wallpaper.

‘Don’t cancel,’ I say, as he picks up the receiver and searches a little notepad for the number.

‘What’s her name?’ he asks, searching through the names and numbers. ‘Rita? No, Renagh. Or is it Elaine? I can’t remember.’ He flicks through the pages. ‘There’s been so many.’

‘It’s almost three, Dr J, she’ll be here soon. She’ll have already left, you can’t cancel.’

‘Car’s here,’ Monday says from the other room.

Dr Jameson sighs wearily and closes the notepad. I can tell he’s given up and it breaks my heart. He takes his glasses off and lets them hang on the chain around his neck. We all go to the living-room window as we have done for all of his visitors and we watch. A small yellow Mini Cooper is parked outside. An elderly lady in a pale lilac cashmere hat and cardigan stares ahead. She’s big and cuddly and looks like a teddy bear.

‘Olive,’ he says suddenly, the weariness gone from his voice and a lightness in its place. ‘That’s her name.’

I look at him, trying to hide my smile.

Olive looks at the house, then she starts up the engine.

‘She’s leaving,’ Monday says.

‘No she’s not,’ you say after a few seconds when she hasn’t moved.

‘She’s just sitting there,’ I say.

‘Looks like she’s getting cold feet. If we leave her for a moment, she’ll probably get scared and drive away,’ you say. ‘That will sort it for you.’

Dr Jameson watches her for a moment, then without a word he leaves us. We watch him walk down his garden path and approach the car.

‘He’s going to tell her to fuck off,’ you say. ‘Watch.’