Hand in the Fire. Hugo Hamilton

       8

      It would take a good nine months or more for the court case to come up, so there was lots of time to sit around and agonise over the situation. Better to go out and have a good time while I was waiting, Kevin advised me. What helped to take my mind off things was that I found a girlfriend. Her name was Liuda and she was from Moldova, working here as a beautician on a temporary visa. I got talking to her at the pharmacy where she was promoting some skin-care products and we started going out.

      I felt badly not telling her that I was charged with assault, but she was better off not knowing anything about that.

      We got on very well together and maybe immigrants were better off sticking together, I thought, because we might have more in common. Put it this way, we both knew what it was like to live away from home and what a comfort it was to float around in each other’s arms. When it came to sex, you could say that we spoke the same language. Some of the things she did with her body gave me such a rush of blood to the head that I forgot everything. She was so full of stagecraft and imagination that I could never think of anything else but the act of making love itself. Her legs. Her mouth. Her breasts pointed slightly upwards at the tops of trees somewhere. Everything about her in bed demanded such full attention that I could not concentrate on anything other than the specific details of her body. The incredibly soft areas on the inside of her thighs. The brush of her nipple against the side of my face. All those breathy voicemail sounds in my ears. The encounter with her seemed to prohibit all memory. For instance, I could not remember any old people. I could not get myself to remember any dead people either. She distracted me from thinking about the news, about war and climate change, disasters of any sort, like famine and poverty and people dying of AIDS. She produced such a powerful urge in me, pulling me so vigorously inside herself that I became truly blank. In other words, we were fucking to forget. We created this little enclave of love and sex which inhibited us from getting a proper foothold in the real world.

      Yes. You could say it was love, but there was no future in it. Under the circumstances, with my court case coming up and her being here on a temporary visa, it seemed pointless for us to accumulate too many memories together.

      We did all the right things. We went for picnics in the Phoenix Park. We spent time at the Zoo. We went walking along the pier together. We took photos of each other with all the local landmarks in the background. Her eyes caught the sunlight – glossy, hazel-brown pebbles at the bottom of a stream. She came from a place where they still had bears and wolves and numberless trees, where nature might still make a big comeback some day. We heard the sound of the accordion coming and going on the breeze. We passed by the man from Romania playing a gypsy waltz and wondered why we had left home in the first place. We remembered the same kind of things, the sight of villages and church spires and headscarves and open shirts and unshaven smiles in the fields. We felt close to each other – same nostalgia, same tug of self-loathing, same shock of familiar tastes and images from which we had walked away.

      In the long run, we were only preventing each other from integrating and moving ahead. It was there in our eyes, in the kind of choices we made, the places we went to, the kind of things we purchased that didn’t cost too much, like ice-cream cones.

      For instance, one day I brought her to a place called Howth. It’s meant to be beautiful out there. Famous too, because this was the location where the writer James Joyce first made love to his future wife Nora, something which is commemorated publicly on the sixteenth of June every year in a national celebration of sex and literature and first love. People told me that Ireland used to be sexually repressed, but you’d never think it now, would you?

      Howth was just another hill, basically, with a big golf course and some wealthy villas and gates and planes landing nearby at the airport. It didn’t really mean anything to us. When I gave Liuda the relevant tourist information, she shrugged as though I was talking about a past lover. We walked around and sat on a bench. We felt the dampness in the air, rising up into our shoulders. We gazed at the clouds moving fast overhead, which made us want to hold on to the bench with our hands. We kissed and touched, but we couldn’t really connect to the place. It was a mistake to bring her out there because it already belonged to somebody else. We were the latecomers. She looked lonely and pale, so we didn’t stay very long.

      ‘Come on, Vid. I’m cold,’ she said.

      There was quite a breeze blowing and she started rubbing her arms. As we got up and walked back, I spotted a used condom hanging like a pink piece of stripped fruit in the gorse bushes. I deflected her attention, pointing eagerly like a child at the lighthouse, but I think she had seen the condom before me and didn’t mention it out of courtesy.

      We were both dragging our feet. When you come from somewhere else, you develop all these prejudices about the people of this country being superior, more funny, more gifted with language and jokes. She said Irish women were strong and very independent. She wanted to learn that. Every time we stared into each other’s eyes, we were reminded only of our own inadequacies. We had to be realistic, I suppose. We were both on the lookout for something better. There was something missing, something preventing us from committing fully to this love in a damp climate.

      We stuck it out together for about six months, but there was never any mention of us moving in together permanently. And the idea of setting up a family seemed completely out of the question. Think of it. We would remain strangers to our own children. We would be like two homesick parents, living in a fantasy. Lacking essential local knowledge. Routine stuff that everybody knows around here. Our children laughing at us and correcting our mistakes. Talking to us like we were deaf and blind and had no idea what was going on in the real world outside. We would speak to them in a foreign language and they would never get used to what we sounded like in our own mother tongue. It would remain a life of confusion and contradiction and naturally occurring blasphemies.

      I tried to integrate her as much as possible into my life, but it never worked out. One night, I brought Liuda with me to meet Kevin and Helen, but that was a bit of a disaster. Nobody knew what to say except Kevin. He couldn’t take his eyes off Liuda all night. Kept talking only to her as though myself and Helen were not even present.

      Liuda was very shy in his presence and hardly said a word. Helen was even more silent, almost aloof. The only thing she said all night was to mention Dursey Island.

      ‘I believe the cable car is down,’ she said, and Kevin looked up with great surprise, wondering where this thought had slipped out from. ‘They have a new one ordered from Germany,’ she added. ‘So I read in the paper.’

      We had more fun on our own, Liuda and myself. At least we had love and sex, like living on our own island. We could also talk about our observations as outsiders, without offending anyone. We spoke about some of the funny things, the contradictions we experienced here. I loved listening to her talking about her clients and how envious they were of her complexion. She told me how Irish women often hated their own skin. They wanted the make-up lashed on thick. ‘Does my face look like a plate of chips?’ they sometimes joked. And how could you answer that? Beauty therapy was not about being honest but about making the customers feel good.

      We agreed that people here didn’t want the straight answer all the time. They needed lots of praise. They loved exaggeration. They used compliments like mind-altering substances. She was on commission for skin-care products, so she got used to telling people that they looked gorgeous, cool, brilliant, absolutely amazing – out of this world.

      She told me the story of how she came here.