‘All Things Possible’ by Niamh Boyce
We were so filthy with love we became immune to it. That’s what I’ve decided. That as the years passed, being at odds with each other just became our daily practice, you know – the way some people salute the sun, pray or do 5Ks? Do you remember us? Me, yapping on and on about the ins and outs of who was right and who was wrong. You, lifting the newspaper in front of your face and sighing from behind it. But then the illness came and you stopped holding things up between us, and I stopped having so much to say. We were on the internet together, read every book; knew the disease inside out before it took you, inside out.
You printed out a Final Test. I was to sit by your bed, and talk about (you typed them out, bullet point) the important moments in your life –
The first time you had sex, with some girl when you were seventeen. Julie, down by the river, and washed your mickey raw afterwards because Tony told you she was a goer. (Thanks for that one.) And the first day you climbed Carrauntoohil, and it was so misty you didn’t even come out in the photograph. And your first date with me, and the spearmint taste of my mouth, and the car we necked in, your first, a red Fiat. And the day Adam was born, and the way his legs jigged like he was gearing up to jump back in and we looked at each other and bawled like babies. And the day your father was buried, they way you knocked pints back all evening and wept as I linked you home. And when the last of the children had left and it was Easter and we got into bed like middle-aged teenagers with chocolate eggs and gorged till we felt queasy watching Bette Davis be a bitch on the telly.
And (how could I forget and leave this till last?), the day your first poem was accepted. A sonnet about our winter honeymoon. Our parents were flabbergasted by what they called ‘those unnecessary intimate details’. We decided there and then to never ever care what other people thought. It stood us in good stead. So we believed. You placed that magazine under our pillow and made easy love to me. I remember that night so well. It could’ve been yesterday. I wish it were yesterday. I’d do so many things differently. Not the big things like houses and careers. No, not them, but the small things. I’d accept with ease your every caress, your every irritating habit. I regret more than anything else (and this is true, and not something I ever anticipated) all those nights I said ‘no, leave me alone, I’m tired.’ And now it’s too late to say yes. All my yeses are piling up inside, growing cold and solid like stones.
So I was to tell you all these things, and I did. And if there came a time, and it did come, when you made no response at all, down to facial tics, then I was to give you six weeks, and I was given permission (thanks for nothing) to try all things possible to get a response, and if I got none, I was to let you go.
Wrong words, husband. Husband of all the right words in the right order. Letting go is passive. And you knew and I knew, exactly what you meant me to do. Again and again you reminded me. ‘Don’t let me lie here for years, an empty receptacle. I can’t live if I’m not a knowing person. If I do not know, I am not.’
But you were; you breathed, you dreamt. You dreamt an awful lot, made sounds that weren’t like words, or like moaning, but the two twisted together.
I love you.
I danced for you. A last-ditch attempt at the end of your sterile bed. Performed the belly dance I’d learnt while trying to get my figure back after Danny. That dance, you know the one, it made you laugh till you choked, and then made you kneel, and grasp my hips in both your hands and tell me they were quote, unquote ‘wondrous things’. Bless the lord for the times I said yes.
How stupid I felt in that silent yellow room draped in an assortment of sheer lonely scarves. Maintaining eye contact with you, whose eyes told me nothing, less than nothing. A fierce blank reproach after all our years sparking off each other. Swivelling my hips in the figure of eight, my arms creating snakes, dipping and swaying. And crying. Not that I knew I was crying, till the tears wet my mouth. But you were beyond being amused, or aroused, or sad even. After my dance was done, after I kissed your dry dead palms, tried to tease some warmth from your eyes, your lips … after all that had failed and I placed the pillow … I don’t want to say this. You lifted your hand, you lifted your hand but I pressed on because you had told me to, and because I love you, and because we were once so filthy with love.
From issue #8: spring/summer 2019
About the Author
Niamh Boyce was Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year in 2012. Her novel The Herbalist won Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Her poetry collection Inside the Wolf was published in 2018. Her second novel Her Kind, inspired by the Kilkenny Witchcraft Trial, was published by Penguin Ireland in the spring.
