Touchy Subjects (21 page)

After that I smiled at her in Mass once when I was home in Shanbally for the weekend. Sylvia nodded back, very minimally.

Maybe she wasn't sure where she knew me from. Maybe she was praying. Maybe she was a bitch.

Of course I had heard of Lee Maloney in Shanbally. The whole town had heard of her, the year the girl appeared at Mass with a Sinead O'Connor head shave. I listened in on a euphemistic conversation about her in the post office queue but contributed nothing to it. My reputation was a clean slate in Shanbally, and none of my poems had gendered pronouns.

When I was introduced to the girl in Cork she was barely civil. But her chin had a curve you needed to fit your hand to, and her hair looked seven days old.

On one of my rare weekends at home, who should I see on the way down from Communion but Lee Maloney, full of nods and smiles. Without turning my head I could sense my mother stiffen. In the car park afterwards she asked, "How do you come to know that Maloney girl?"

I considered denying it, claiming it was a case of mistaken identity, then I said, "I think she might have been at a reading I gave once."

"She's a worry to her mother," said mine.

It must have been after I saw Sylvia Dwyer's name on a flyer under the title
DHA THEANGA/TWO TONGUES: A CONFERENCE ON BILINGUALISM IN IRELAND TODAY
that my subconscious developed a passionate nostalgia for the language my forebears got whipped for. So I skived off my Saturday lecture to get the bus to Galway. But only when I saw her walk into that lecture theatre in her long brown leather coat, with a new streak of white across her black fringe, did I realize why I'd sat four hours on a bus to get there.

Some days I have more nerve than others. I flirted with Sylvia
all that day, in the quarter hours between papers and forums and plenary sessions that meant equally little to me whether they were in Irish or English. I asked her questions and nodded before the answers had started. I told her about Deirdre, just so she wouldn't think I was a virgin. "She left me for a boy with no earlobes," I said carelessly.

"
Been there," said Sylvia.

Mostly, though, I kept my mouth shut and my head down and my eyes shiny. I suspected I was being embarrassingly obvious, but a one-day conference didn't leave enough time for subtlety.

Sylvia made me guess how old she was, and I said, "Thirty?" though I knew from the program note that she was thirty-four. She said if by any miracle she had saved enough money by the age of forty, she was going to get plastic surgery on the bags under her eyes.

I played the cheeky young thing and the baby dyke and the strong silent type who had drunk too much wine. And till halfway through the evening I didn't think I was getting anywhere. What would a woman like Sylvia Dwyer want with a blank page like me?

For a second in that Galway lecture hall I didn't recognize Lee Maloney, because she was so out of context among the bearded journalists and wool-skirted teachers. Then my memory claimed her face. The girl was looking at me like the sun had just risen, and then she stared at her feet, which was even more of a giveaway. I stood up straighter and shifted my briefcase to my other hand.

The conference, which I had expected to be about broadening my education and licking up to small Irish publishers, began to take on a momentum of its own. It was nothing I had planned, nothing I could stop. I watched the side of Lee's jaw right through a lecture called "Scottish Loan-Words in Donegal Fishing Communities." She was so cute I felt sick.

What was most unsettling was that I couldn't tell who was chatting up whom. It was a battle made up of feints and retreats. As we sipped our coffee, for instance, I murmured something faintly suggestive about hot liquids, then panicked and changed the subject. As we crowded back into the hall, I thought it was Lee's hand that guided my elbow for a few seconds, but she was staring forward so blankly I decided it must have been somebody else.

Over dinner—a noisy affair in the cafeteria—Lee sat across the table from me and burnt her tongue on the apple crumble. I poured her a glass of water and didn't give her a chance to talk to anyone but me. At this point we were an island of English in a sea of Irish.

The conversation happened to turn (as it does) to relationships and how neither of us could see the point in casual sex, because not only was it unlikely to be much good but it fucked up friendships or broke hearts. Sleeping with someone you hardly knew, I heard myself pronouncing in my world-weariest voice, was like singing a song without knowing the words. I told her that when she was my age she would feel the same way, and she said, Oh, she did already.

My eyes dwelt on the apple crumble disappearing, spoon by spoon, between Lee's absentminded lips. I listened to the opinions spilling out of my mouth and wondered who I was kidding.

By the time it came to the poetry reading that was meant to bring the conference to a lyrical climax, I was too tired to waste time. I reached into my folder for the only way I know to say what I really mean.

Now, the word in Cork had been that Sylvia Dwyer was deep in the closet, which I'd thought was a bit pathetic but only to be expected. However.

At the end of her reading, after she'd done a few about nature and a few about politics and a few I couldn't follow, she rummaged round in her folder. "This poem gave its name to this conference," she said, "but that's not why I've chosen it." She read it through in Irish first; I let the familiar vowels caress my ears. Her voice was even better live than on the CD from the library. And then she turned slightly in her seat, and, after muttering, "Hope it translates," she read it straight at me.

your tongue and my tongue
have much to say to each other
there's a lot between them
there are pleasures yours has over mine
and mine over yours
we get on each other's nerves sometimes
and under each other's skin
but the best of it is when
your mouth opens to let my tongue in
it's then I come to know you
when I hear my tongue
blossom in your kiss
and your strange hard tongue
speaks between my lips

The reason I was going to go ahead and do what I'd bored all my friends with saying I'd never do again was that poem.

I was watching the girl as I read "Dha Theanga" straight to her, aiming over the weary heads of the crowd of conference goers. I didn't look at anyone else but Lee Maloney, not at a single one of the jealous poets or Gaelgoir purists or smirking gossips, in case I might lose my nerve. After the first line, when her eyes fell for a second, Lee looked right back at me. She was leaning her cheek on her hand. It was a smooth hand, blunt at the lips. I knew the poem off by heart, but tonight I had to look down for safety every few lines.

And then she glanced away, out the darkening window, and I suddenly doubted that I was getting anywhere. What would Lee Maloney, seventeen last May, want with a scribbled jotter like me?

I sat in that smoky hall with my face half hidden behind my hand, excitement and embarrassment spiraling up my spine. I reminded myself that Sylvia Dwyer must have written that poem years ago, for some other woman in some other town. Not counting how many other women she might have read it to. It was probably an old trick of hers.

But all this couldn't explain away the fact that it was me Sylvia was reading it to tonight in Galway. In front of all these people, not caring who saw or what they might think when they followed the line of her eyes. I dug my jaw into my palm for anchorage, and my eyes locked back onto Sylvia's. I decided that every poem was made new in the reading.

If this was going to happen, I thought, as I folded the papers away in my briefcase during the brief rainfall of applause, it was happening because we were not in Dublin surrounded by my friends and work life, nor in Cork cluttered up with Lee's, nor above all in Shanbally where she was born in the year I left for college. Neither of us knew anything at all about Galway.

If this was going to happen, I thought, many hours later as the cleaners urged Sylvia and me out of the hall, it was happening because of some moment that had pushed us over an invisible line. But which moment? It could have been when we were shivering on the floor waiting for the end-of-conference
ceili
band to start up, and Sylvia draped her leather coat round her shoulders and tucked

me under it for a minute, the sheepskin lining soft against my cheek, the weight of her elbow on my shoulder. Or later when I was dancing like a berserker in my vest, and she drew the back of her hand down my arm and said, "Aren't you the damp thing." Or maybe the deciding moment was when the fan had stopped working and we stood at the bar waiting for drinks, my smoking hips armouring hers, and I blew behind her hot ear until the curtain of hair lifted up and I could see the dark of her neck.

Blame it on the heat. We swung so long in the
ceili
that the whole line went askew. Lee took off all her layers except one black vest that clung to her small breasts. We shared a glass of iced water and I offered Lee the last splash from my mouth, but she danced around me and laughed and wouldn't take it. Up on the balcony over the dance floor, I sat on the edge and leaned out to see the whirling scene. Lee fitted her hand around my thigh, weighing it down. "You protecting me from falling?" I asked. My voice was meant to be sardonic, but it came out more like breathless.

"That's right," she said.

Held in that position, my leg very soon began to tremble, but I willed it to stay still, hoping Lee would not feel the spasm, praying she would not move her hand away.

Blame it on the dancing. They must have got a late license for the bar, or maybe Galway people always danced half the night. The music made our bones move in tandem and our legs shake. I tried to take the last bit of water from Sylvia's mouth, but I was so giddy I couldn't aim right and kept lurching against her collarbone and laughing at my own helplessness.

"
Thought you were meant to be in the closet," I shouted in her ear at one point, and Sylvia smiled with her eyes shut and said something I couldn't hear, and I said, "What?" and she said, "Not tonight.
"

So at the end of the evening we had no place to go and it didn't matter. We had written our phone numbers on sodden beermats and exchanged them. We agreed that we'd go for a drive. When we got into her white van on the curb littered with weak-kneed
ceili
dancers, something came on the radio, an old song by Clannad or one of that crowd. Sylvia started up the engine and began to sing along with the chorus, her hoarse whisper catching every second or third word. She leaned over to fasten her seat belt and crooned a phrase into my ear. I didn't understand it—something about
"bothar,"
or was it
"mathar"?—
but it made my face go hot anyway.

"
Where are we heading?" I said at last, as the hedges began to narrow to either side of the white van.

Sylvia frowned into the darkness. "Cashelagen, was that the name of it? Quiet spot, I seem to remember, beside a castle.
"

After another ten minutes, during which we didn't meet a single other car, I realized that we were lost, completely tangled in the little roads leading into Connemara. And half of me didn't care. Half of me was quite content to bump along these lanes to the strains of late-night easy listening, watching Sylvia Dwyer's sculpted profile out the corner of my right eye. But the other half of me wanted to stretch my boot across and stamp on the brake, then climb over the gear stick to get at her.

Lee didn't comment on how quickly I was getting us lost. Cradle snatcher, I commented to myself, and not even a suave one at that. As we hovered at an unmarked fork, a man walked into the glare of the headlights. I stared at him to make sure he was real, then rolled down the window with a flurry of elbows. "Cashelagen?" I asked. Lee had turned off the radio, so my voice sounded indecently loud. "Could you tell us are we anywhere near Cashelagen?"

The man fingered his sideburns and stepped closer, beaming in past me at Lee. What in god's name was this fellow doing wandering round in the middle of the night anyway? He didn't even have our excuse. I was just starting to roll the window up again when "Ah," he said, "ah, if it's Cashelagen you're wanting you'd have to go a fair few miles back through Ballyalla and then take the coast road."

"Thanks," I told him shortly, and revved up the engine. Lee would think I was the most hopeless incompetent she had ever got into a van for immoral purposes with. As soon as he had walked out of range of the headlights, I let off the hand brake and shot forward. I glanced over at Lee's bent head. The frightening thought occurred to me:
I could love this girl.

The lines above Sylvia's eyebrow were beginning to swoop like gulls. If she was going to get cross, we might as well turn the radio back on and drive all night. I rehearsed the words in my head, then said them. "Sure who needs a castle in the dark?
"

Her grin was quick as a fish.

"
Everywhere's quiet at this time of night," I said rather squeakily. "Here's quiet. We could stop here.
"

"
What, right here?
"

Sylvia peered back at the road and suddenly wheeled round into the entrance to a field. We stopped with the bumper a foot away from a five-barred gate. When the headlights went off, the field stretched out dark in front of us, and there was a sprinkle of light that had to be Galway.

"
What time did you say you had to be in Dublin?" I asked suddenly.

"
Nine. Better start back round five in case I hit traffic," said Sylvia. She bent over to rummage in the glove compartment. She pulled out a strapless watch, looked at it, brought it closer to her eyes, then let out a puff of laughter.