‘My First Marina’ by Niamh Mulvey

When I was young, a man more than twice my age fell in love with me. I was already in love with a man – boy – of my own age and he was in love with drinking, chess and certain factions of left wing politics. The younger one was not not in love with me, but also he didn’t seem that bothered about the lengthy agonized emails the older man was sending me, lauding my beauty and brilliance. The younger man was treating me far less well than I deserved but on the other hand the older man’s fervent admirations were far more than I merited and made me very nervous. It was, admittedly, pretty interesting to hear (or read, he mostly wrote to me) all about how amazing I was, and if I could have taken it all seriously then I’m sure I would have been utterly smitten. Falling in love with this older man would have involved falling in love with a superior version of myself which unfortunately I was unable to do, my real self having far too intimate a knowledge of the many ways I failed to resemble the gorgeous and impossible creature of his (the older man’s) desire.

He was also married, this older man, which made the whole thing with him ridiculous – how could I possibly be having a relationship with a married man, I wasn’t in a soap or a book. My life thus far had felt nothing at all like any soap, film or book and so when something that would have been quite mundane in a work of fiction happened to me, I had real trouble believing in it. Like death, for example: when my friend had died the previous summer, separating the performance of my grief from its reality proved completely impossible, and so I just stopped going back to my home town entirely and threw myself into life in college which meant I suddenly had excellent grades and this complicated love situation.

It was late spring and exams were coming. It was my final year and I had no idea what I was going to do next in my life. I spent most days in a formless, hungover state, working in the library until around six, then going home to my cramped flat before either going out again with friends or going to the older man’s house, where he would feed me delicious meals and talk to me about beautiful things like the book he was writing (he was a lecturer at the university I attended, that’s how we met) or his decadent long-ago youth. I responded with some stories of my own: the older man wanted to understand me, and enjoyed hearing tales of my adolescent love complications. Many things had happened to me as a teenager but I still did not understand their significance and talking to the older man helped me figure them out a little, but he seemed to be interested in things I considered less relevant, so I often left these conversations feeling both flattered (by his keen attention) and confused (by the specific things he paid attention to).

*

One evening after dinner, the older man tried to kiss me and I declined, and I went over to the boy’s house. It was damp and smelly but I felt full of a sexual thrill when I walked in the door. The boy was in the kitchen putting a frozen pizza in the oven and talking to his housemates – all peaceable sorts who often seemed more interested in talking to me than the boy himself did. I enjoyed their attention but feared things might get out of control again, so I tried to maintain a bit of reserve, which was hard for me. The boy gave me a slice of the pizza while he wolfed down the rest of it in a few hungry mouthfuls. Then we went up to his room and had sex.

*

The next day I had dinner with the older man again, and I told him about the boy. He was very hurt, he said. He thought there was something special between us, he said.

‘There is,’ I said. ‘But I don’t feel about you in that way.’

‘What way?’

‘You know what way.’

‘Is it because of my age?’

I told him it wasn’t. He looked crushed.

The older man then said that he couldn’t be around me for a while – not to call, he’d be in touch. I never called him anyway. I felt kind of guilty about the whole situation, but it was impossible for me to see myself as the scarlet woman in this context. His wife and kids lived in a different town; he stayed in our college town during the week, spent the weekends with them. I didn’t really believe they existed. Not that I thought he was lying. I just couldn’t really believe reality was this – scripted.

*

The way the boy made me feel, on the other hand, was so weird and perverse as to be completely believable. I was addicted to sleeping with him. I was also enthralled by how badly he could treat me. He wasn’t wilfully cruel or anything, he was just laughably thoughtless. He dropped me and picked me up like a stone and I let him. I really didn’t mind.

*

One night, a few days after the older man told me he was swearing off me for a while, I got a text from Jim. He was a boy of my own age from my hometown. He was going to be in my college town in a few days and asked if I wanted to go drinking with him. I absolutely did.

I had been with Jim once, but there was nothing really between us. The boy who had caused all the bother (in our hometown) was his best friend however, and this was part of the attraction in spending time with Jim. I met him off the bus. It was a bright early summer day. I felt like I had lived for a hundred years already. Jim and I started drinking in an old pub near the water. We talked about our respective classes and people from home. We avoided the central issue.

Hours later, we sat on the edge of the quay. It was a rare still night. The town was busy with summer drinkers. Jim was acting like he thought something was going to happen between us. All I wanted was him to ask me – what had happened? Why had she done it?

Jim was leaning in to kiss me when the boy I was sleeping with loomed up out of nowhere.

‘Hey,’ he said. His pale skin shone in the moonlight. His fingernails were dirty. I introduced him to Jim.

I went home with the boy of course. Jim came with us. We all stayed up late listening to music and smoking. Me and the boy went to bed together as a pale dawn was breaking. I felt unbearably happy.

The next day, the older man called. I was sitting at the kitchen table in the boy’s house, drinking coffee and thinking I should go into the library. Jim was packing his things in the living room. He was talking about how when he got home he was going to out shooting with his brother. Shooting what, I’d asked him. Whatever’s there, he said.

The older man wanted me to see him after his classes. I was looking forward to it because I wanted to tell him all about Jim, and how he (Jim) had never once mentioned Marina the whole day long, still less his best friend, the boy I’d betrayed her with, the boy she’d killed herself over, the boy who made it impossible for me to go home.

The older man was in a very bad mood when I got to his place. I was unspeakably cruel, he said. I shrugged and looked out the window. He calmed down and poured me some wine. I tried to tell him about the night before.

‘Wait, wait, wait,’ he said. ‘So there’s two guys? The guy who goes here’ – that’s how we referred to my current guy, I didn’t want the lecturer to know his name – ‘and this guy from home, this Jim?’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘And Jim and Marina –’

‘No. Jim’s friend and Marina.’

‘Another guy.’

‘Yes.’

‘You slut,’ the older man said.

I nodded.

‘You are going to destroy me,’ he said.

I looked around the living room. It was very comfortable and full of books. The food he was feeding me with was delicious. I’d never eaten so well in my life. The wine he’d given me made my cheeks burn. I was very tired and wondered if I could go upstairs and sleep, but I knew that would be cruel when I had no intention of sleeping with this man. I wondered in that moment who I was and what on earth was wrong with me. I had never intended to hurt anyone. I had just gone around with a big hungry appetite but didn’t everyone do that? I felt a whoosh of huge sadness and I doubled over. The older man asked me if I thought I was going to be sick.

In the bathroom, I stood on the closed toilet lid and stuck my head out the window. It was a Velux window built into the roof. I could smell the sea in the distance. I pulled myself out onto the roof and sat there looking up at the stars. I imagined Marina sitting beside me. She wouldn’t have liked this situation. She would have thought this older man weird and mean. We had been friends since we were nine and a half. When we turned sixteen and I suddenly went crazy for boys she got very intimidated. I hated that. It didn’t matter to me that she had never kissed anyone. I just wanted us to be friends as we had always been.

I heard the older man moving in the bathroom beneath me. He must have been wondering where I’d got to. Suddenly his head poked out the window. He looked really annoyed. ‘Get down from there,’ he said. He sounded like he was talking to a child.

Marina’s dad had ignored me at the funeral. He knew a bit about what had happened. I don’t think he was angry with me, it was more like I was a ghost and he looked through me. His face was purple. Other girls from school went and hugged him and her mother.

The edge of the roof didn’t seem so far from the ground. I edged down the slope of the roof. It was a dry night and the bumpy texture of the surface felt solid. I wasn’t afraid.

‘You’re going to break my soffit,’ the older man yelled out the window at me. I swung my legs over the edge and looked down. It was a lot higher than I had thought.

I realized I was shaking and I thought, oh I wonder if this is something like what Marina had felt before she had done what she had done. It wasn’t like her to kill herself. She would have hated the attention of a funeral. Girls who didn’t even know her wept like their houses were on fire. She would have hated that. She hated hypocrisy and bullshit. She was the very best person in my life.

The older man was crawling out of the window now and edging his way gingerly down the roof, sort of crouched down on his bottom. He was wiry and youthful seeming but the concentration in his face made the veins in his neck stand out and suddenly he looked old and absurd. He put his hand over my hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to escape me?’

I considered this. I wasn’t, not really. I was just doing one thing and then another thing. This situation had nothing much to do with him.

Marina would never get herself into this kind of situation and that used to make me so frustrated. She didn’t want to do things to see what would happen. She had too much integrity. She wanted to be rooted in something. She hated sex. She told me that she wished it didn’t exist, that it ruined everything. Jim’s friend had liked her sense of humour. He made her laugh. I was jealous. I was the only one who could make Marina laugh like that. Their thing, whatever it was, had nothing to do with sex; it had been pure in a way that made me feel filthy.

And so I had done what I had done with him.

*

‘This is romantic,’ the older man said gently. ‘I’ve never climbed up here before. You make me see things I’ve never seen before.’

I knew then that I had to jump off the roof. I heard Marina telling me to do it. Not because I was in danger – ha! As if. But because jumping off the roof would have meant I would probably break my ankle, forcing me to stay at home for a few weeks and get away from all these men and boys. I would also probably break the older guy’s soffit, another plus. I started laughing to myself at these things Marina was saying to me.

‘Why are you mocking me?’ the older guy asked. ‘Stop sniggering.’

I laughed longer and louder. Tears started to stream from my eyeballs. And then I jumped.

*

Marina was right. I did break my ankle but she had failed to mention that breaking an ankle was not like twisting one. I was in agony and had to have an operation. I missed my exams and spent most of the rest of the summer alone. My parents came to see me a few times but didn’t stay very long. My siblings were busy with their own lives. I realized I had no real friends anymore. My flatmates had all sublet their rooms for the summer and my flat was full of people I didn’t really know. I watched lots of TV and read lots of books and tried to study for my repeat exams. I felt so alone some days that it was as if someone was sitting on my chest making it hard to breathe.

*

As autumn came, I realized that I was slowly starting to lose my mind. I called the younger guy – the one I’d been kind of in love with at the beginning of the summer. He had been away for most of the summer travelling around Europe going to music festivals etcetera. We slept together and I felt better. I wondered if it was really dreadful of me to be doing this again. Surely I had to learn how to be alone. Surely that was what Marina was trying to tell me. Surely that would be the meaning of this story.

But the younger guy kept coming back to see me. He didn’t make me feel as if I were bad and/or disgusting. I didn’t want the end of this story to be me falling in love and having a real relationship, but that is what happened. I did not deserve that and so during the night, almost every night, for many years, I woke up tormented with guilt and darkness. I saw Marina everywhere. I called my baby daughter after her wondering if that would make her go away, if I even wanted her to go away. It did not. I did not.

Now my daughter is getting to the age at which Marina and I first became friends, and she has a best friend of her own. I watch them both carefully. I am friends with my daughter’s friend’s mother. One day I’ll tell her about my first Marina and we’ll come up with a plan.

From issue #10: autumn/winter 2020

About the Author
Niamh Mulvey is a writer and editor. She has previously published work in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, The Pool and various other places. She is co-founder and director of a new personalised children’s books publisher, In the History Books.